The Decadents promoted a deliberately provocative, scandalous international movement in art and literature that emphasized a cult of the aesthetic and the artificial, disparaged social and familial commitments and traditions, encouraged wide-ranging sexual practices, promoted drug use, celebrated the cultivation of the Self, and affirmed the right of the genius toward destructive and self-destructive acts.
The concept of “decadence” originated with the idea that all things, from nations to societies to family units to the arts, inevitably sicken, decay, and die from a natural aging process such as that of the human body. The decline and fall of the Roman and the Byzantine Empires provide striking examples of past decadence and they offered warnings for the future. Secondary influences for the Decadent movement include the gothic novel and the morbid stories of American writer Edgar Allan Poe
In France,
Charles Baudelaire.
After 1830, “frenetic” Romantics such as Pétrus Borel (1809-1859) and Théophile Gautier
The feast of sins in Flaubert’s Tentation de Saint Antoine (1874; The Temptation of Saint Anthony, 1895), and the sadistic and macabre scenes in both Gautier’s and Flaubert’s works, inspired a literature of morbidity in several countries. In 1857, the national government indicted both Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857) and Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal for their alleged offenses against religion and public morals. Seven of Baudelaire’s
Joris-Karl Huysmans’s
Wilde issued some of the most compelling theoretical statements of the movement in 1891, including that of the separation of art from life, in “The Decay of Lying” and The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891. In the intimate journal embedded within his novel Il piacere (1889; The Child of Pleasure, 1898), D’Annunzio
In feminist circles, Marie Bashkirtseff
Mercure de France (1890-1965), cofounded with her husband Alfred Vallette, became the dominant journal of the Decadent movement. As a novelist, Rachilde was an innovator who depicted a wide range of sexual behavior, more so than did her male counterparts. She turned fetishism (Monsieur Vénus, 1884), necrophilia (La tour d’amour, 1899), bestiality (L’animale, 1893), and cross-dressing into prominent literary subjects. The renowned Paris literary salon of Natalie Clifford Barney
During the belle époque, between 1880 and 1914, western Europe and the British Isles enjoyed a magnificent flowering of the arts and unprecedented peace, prosperity, and economic and technological progress. At the same time, the aesthetic movement of the midcentury, which had claimed that artistic creation should be an end in itself, independent of any moral mission and any moral restraint (art for art’s sake), later developed into the international Symbolist
The Decadents’ protagonists withdrew from society, cultivated their own personalities, and dismissed conventional morality regarding sex and sexuality, respect for the body, and the sanctity of life. They explored bestiality, sadomasochism, and necrophilia (although group sexual experience became an overt topic only in the twentieth century). They treated suicide and gratuitous murder without compunction. Prominent in works by precursors such as Poe
Contes Cruels (1885-1899), and Rachilde’s
La Marquise de Sade (1887).
From its beginning, the Decadent movement contained the seeds of its demise. Its foundational work, Huysmans’s
À rebours, depicts a wealthy aristocratic protagonist who cultivates artificiality in every aspect of his life. Boredom and ill health eventually drive him from his shelter. Sequels with a new protagonist, Durtal, become increasingly autobiographical and trace the author’s conversion to Roman Catholicism. Many other Decadent writers also converted, foreshadowing the Catholic Renaissance in France and the Anglican Renaissance in England during the first half of the twentieth century.
The salon of American expatriot Natalie Clifford Barney
After World War I, High Modernist authors such as T. S. Eliot
Decadence was seen once more in 1920’s Chicago, Illinois, popularized by the Chicago Tribune’s book reviews and led by the crime reporter Ben Hecht
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Bernheimer, Charles. Decadent Subjects: The Idea of Decadence in Art, Literature, Philosophy, and Culture of the Fin de Siècle in Europe. Edited by T. Jefferson Kline and Naomi Schor. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. A synthesis from the standpoint of poststructuralist criticism. -
Calinescu, Matei. Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism. Rev. ed. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987. A classic philosophical background to Decadence in Germany and Italy. -
Constable, Liz, et al., eds. Perennial Decay: On the Aesthetics and Politics of Decadence. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999. Treats many major international figures, including writers from Nicaragua, Belgium, Spain, and Sweden. -
Porter, Laurence M. “Decadence and the Fin-de-Siècle Novel.” In The French Novel from 1800 to the Present, edited by Timothy Unwin. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. An overview of the Decadent movement in France. -
_______. “Huysmans’ ’À rebours’: The Psychodynamics of Regression.” American Imago 44, no. 1 (Spring, 1987): 51-65. Discusses how an unconscious drive toward health eventually reintegrates Des Esseintes with society. -
_______. “Literary Structure and the Concept of Decadence: Huysmans, D’Annunzio, and Wilde.” Centennial Review 22, no. 2 (Spring, 1978): 188-200. Discusses how the greatest Decadent writers symbolize and dramatize the role of the unconscious in their protagonists. -
Weir, David. Decadence and the Makings of Modernism. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995. Examines the aftermath of the Decadent movement in the United States.
Bowdler Publishes The Family Shakespeare
Costumbrismo Movement
American Renaissance in Literature
Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood Begins
Morris Founds Design Firm
Naturalist Movement Begins
Aesthetic Movement Arises
New Guilds Promote the Arts and Crafts Movement
Rise of the Symbolist Movement
Dreiser Publishes Sister Carrie
Charles Baudelaire; Gustave Flaubert; Walter Pater; Edgar Allan Poe; John Ruskin; Oscar Wilde.