Vernon Lee: Decadent Woman?

Abstract

Over the last twenty years or so, much energy and ink have been devoted to attempts to define the female writer’s relationship to various literary movements and practices. There is already available, for example, a large body of material examining gender and Victorian literature, and gender and Modernism.¹ It is the issue of the relationship of gender to literary genres, movements and terminologies with which this essay is concerned. ‘Decadence’ is the movement which will be examined in respect of gender. The literary Decadence of the nineteenth-century fin de siècle might seem to be a strange choice: it is, after all, easy to see why feminists would wish to recuperate for their own use a term such as Modernism with all its implications of a radical, dynamic, forward-looking new art. Decadence raises rather different questions which are, nonetheless, instructive and can aid the literary critic’s understanding of how labelling processes operate, how they exclude or marginalise certain types of writing and writer, even when the label already — like Decadence — confers itself a marginal status on that to which it is applied.