New Sensation (a tribute to INXS?) HUM 2212: British and American Literature I Fall 2012 Dr. Perdigao November 14-19, 2012.

New Sensation(a tribute to INXS?) HUM 2212: British and American

Literature IFall 2012

Dr. PerdigaoNovember 14-19, 2012

Re-envisioning Dorian Gray

Et tu, Angela Landsbury?

The supernatural

From Basil to Bella

“‘If it were I who was to be always young, and the picture that was to grow old! For that—for that—I would give everything! Yes, there is nothing in the whole world I would not give! I would give my soul for that!’” (Wilde 25).

Aesthetes and Decadents• Ian Fletcher, in 1961, called the 1890’s a “lost decade,” notion that the decade

evidences that the major aspects of the Victorian period—with “gas lamps blooming in a Whistlerian Thames, music halls, smokey-crocketed pub interiors, Sherlock Holmes’ deerstalker”—are “all safely dead” (Beckson vii).

• Yeats’s “Tragic Generation,” concentrating on “heroic failures,” giving “dignity to disaster” (vii)

• New studies of the period, establishment of the Eighteen Nineties Society in 1972, its journal

• Aestheticism, Impressionism, Symbolism, Naturalism as key “isms” during the period

Defining Decadence• Some say this period represents the origins of modernism

• Failure of Victorianism, modernism as response

• Two faces, Janus-like approach to the period, as pure decadence versus the other where the artist protests against a “spiritually bankrupt civilization, his imagination striving for the unattainable to restore his wholeness” (Beckson xi).

• Victorian respectability versus Decadence

• Decadence now not a pejorative term with negative connotations but during the period was a condemnation

• In 1893, Arthur Symons described Decadence as a “beautiful and interesting disease” (Beckson xii)

Redefining forms• 1880s term Aesthete (which Wilde embraced), with “concern over aesthetic

form and experience divorced from moral judgment” (Beckson xii).

• “art for art’s sake”—sensationalism extends to the arts, to be shocking with experiments in style, form, content

• “sensational novel” in 1860s, with “ripped from the headlines” approach, rejection of normative categories of sex and gender, class

• “The Romantic—emotional and flamboyant—pursued an ideal love rooted in the natural relations of the sexes; the Decadent—intellectual and austere—sought new sensations in forbidden love, for sexual depravity revealed a desire to transcend the normal and the natural” (Beckson xxx).

Reviews• London Daily Chronicle called The Picture of Dorian Gray “a tale spawned

from the leprous literature of the French Decadents, a poisonous book” (Beckson xxxvi).

• Legacy: “But the English Aesthetes and Decadents command our attention by their determination to transform their lives into works of art, to center the meaning of life in private vision in order to resist a civilization intent on debasing the imagination and thus making man less human” (Beckson xliv).

• Leads to the Imagist Movement (before World War I), work of James Joyce and T. S. Eliot, New criticism

Self-portraits• Oscar Wilde’s representation of himself in the work: “Basil Hallward is what

I think I am: Lord Henry what the world thinks me: Dorian what I would like to be—in other ages perhaps” (Gillepsie ix).

• Text reveals the “author’s conflicting feelings during the period” (Gillepsie x), fantasy and fact, his exploration of the “contradictory elements of human nature without falling back on conventional pieties” (xi)

• Evidences shift from the “nineteenth century’s fixation upon society to the twentieth century’s celebration of the individual” (x), as “first English Modernist novel”

• “The Picture of Dorian Gray articulates, without offering a clear resolution, the conflict that arises as a result of the struggle within an individual’s nature between the impulse toward self-gratification and the sense of guilt that is a consequence of acting upon that inclination” (Gillepsie ix).

Frames• The “relation of art to morality,” the “impact of hedonism,” and the

“inescapability of spiritual questions” (xi)

• Novella’s publication in Lippincott’s Magazine in 1889 (connection to Doyle and “The Sign of Four”), expanded in 1891 as novel

• Preface added: “There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.”

• “It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors.”

• “All art is quite useless.”

Frames• Basil: “‘I have put too much of myself into it’” (7).

• Lord Henry: “‘I have grown to love secrecy. It seems to be the one thing that can make modern life mysterious or marvellous to us’” (8).

• Lord Henry: “‘Being natural is simply a pose, and the most irritating pose I know’” (8).

• Lord Henry: “‘I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their good intellects’” (11).

• Emphasis on “new medium for art” and “new personality for art” (13)

• Emotions more delightful than ideas (15)

• Lord Henry: “‘Genius lasts longer than Beauty’” (14); “‘Beauty is a form of Genius—is higher, indeed, than Genius, as it needs no explanation’” (22)