Victorian Literature: Pre-Raphaelites, Aesthetes and Decadents:
Gender and Sexuality in the late 19th Century

Late in The Cantos, Ezra Pound recalls the impression Henry James would make in mixed company:

Which being the case, her holding dear H. J.
(Mr. James, Henry) literally by the button-hole. . . .
in those so consecrated surroundings
(a garden in the Temple, no less)
and saying, for once, the right thing
namely: "Cher maître"
to his checqued waistcoat. . . .(79/488)

So, too, did James Joyce call upon "Henry dernier cri James" (Ulysses, 10:1216). Clearly, both advert here to James as aesthete, and to his stature for that transitional moment between the literatures of the late Edwardian and early modern period. And it is worth recalling that the formative influence upon the great modernists--Yeats, Pound, Joyce-- or the world in which they first found themselves was exactly those last impulses of the 19th century towards the aesthetic in literature and art. But what was contained in that ambiguous and complicated figure of James? And what might remain of what Pound clearly saw as a failed project in "Hugh Selwyn Maulberley" (1919):

Don't kick against the pricks,
Accept opinion. The "Nineties" tried your game
And died, there's nothing in it."

More importantly, what might survive such failure? What might have been elided--educed but effaced--in that turn towards the aesthetic? Or what might have value for us, so removed from that particular moment in a cultural history no longer our own, as Pound discovered in his own displacement, "born in a half-savage country, out of date. . . .

This course will look at those movements in the late 19th century which were deliberately subversive of what might seem transparent Victorian cultural practice in the matter of women and men. In refuting a bourgeois politics, these also expose the more complicated and enmeshed practice of both a poetic and erotic economy of desire in which the aesthetic recalibrates issues of gender and sexuality. In other words, aesthetic dicta become a lens through which structures of desire are interrogated, subverted, denied and reinvented; identity is open to play in this nexus of contested meaning, an “underground” or reservoir of illicit and contravened desire with the potential to break, rupture and spill; and such emergent terms as the “New Man” (effeminate, “aesthetic” and clearly homosexual), curiously complimented by a “New Woman” (masculinized, dominant, and heterosexual), subvert restrictive categories of identity and desire in both sociopolitical, moral, religious, and passional or affective discourse.

We will begin with the several instancings of an Aesthetic Movement in Britain in the latter part of the century: Pre-Raphaelite painting and poetry, most especially the work of William Morris, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Edward Burne-Jones; then turning to the formative and definitive aestheticism introduced in the work of Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley, using as a supplement to our study The Yellow Book (the original edition of which forms part of the Rare Book collection in the Magill Library). This is not, however, to suggest that our attention to the aesthetic will be exclusively British: we will also look at the “nervous”, eccentric and sexualized line of Art Nouveau design, both graphic and architectural, in the work of Victor Horta, Hector Guimard, Josef Hoffmann, and Joseph Olbrich, as well as the putative “origin” of the aesthetic and decadent in Huysman’s Á Rebours. We will also read several novels as a literature which pursues the sensational, the erotic, and the “uncanny”--Wilkie Collins’ Woman in White; Bram Stoker’s Dracula; Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray --and one novel, Henry James’ The Ambassadors, which, though it might seem assiduously unlike these, is subtly engaged in just such revisions of sexual and gendered identity, and in the ambiguous and charged declaration to “Live, live all you can!” leads us to ask “Now how exactly?”

Texts
Christopher Wood, The Pre-Raphaelites
D. G. Rossetti, Poems (1870, 1881)
Christina Rossetti, Goblin Market (1862)
Walter Pater, The Renaissance (1873)
J. K. Huysman, Á Rebours/Against the Grain ((1884)
Paul Greenhalgh, Art Nouveau, 1890-1914
Karl Beckson, Aesthetes and Decadents of the 1890's [poetry of Symons, Johnson,
Dowson, Beardsley, Wilde]
Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White (1859)
Bram Stoker, Dracula (1897)
Oscar Wilde, Picture of Dorian Gray 1891), Intentions(1891)
Henry James, The Ambassadors(1903)
Ezra Pound, Personae (1926)

Critical and theoretical essays from Nietzsche, Freud, Foucault, Sedgwick, Butler, etc.