Female Decadence

Abstract

There is no question that by the mid-1890s one word had come to define avant-garde art and literature in Britain. ‘Decadence, decadence, you are all decadent nowadays’, announced the twenty-four-year-old Hubert Crackanthorpe in the second issue of audacious editor Henry Harland’s The Yellow Book: the somewhat expensive and finely illustrated quarterly that instantly became most closely associated with this controversial term, one whose literary origins lay in 1880s France. Crackanthorpe observed that this ‘weird word’ explained a cultural phenomenon that manifested itself in several notorious places: ‘Ibsen, Degas and the New English Art Club, Zola, Oscar Wilde, and the Second Mrs. Tanqueray’. Noticeably, nothing in this list relates to female writers or artists. Yet it is also conspicuous that these figures seemed decadent because they often represented outspoken or immoral forms of femininity. In June 1889, Norwegian dramatist Henrik Ibsen had become disreputable when his play, A Doll’s House, presented a horrified London audience with a woman who abandons her doting husband and newborn child. Members of the New English Art Club, formed in 1886, included Walter Sickert, who gained attention for his striking portrayals of uncouth music-hall performers such as Ada Lundberg. In 1888, English publisher Henry Vizetelly spent the first of two jail terms for publishing an unexpurgated translation of French naturalist Emile Zola’s obscene fiction, La terre, in which a woman character serves as an accomplice in the rape of a pregnant sexual rival. In 1893, Arthur Wing Pinero’s play The Second Mrs. Tanqueray featured a scandalous ‘woman with a past’ who discovers that her stepdaughter’s fiancé is the man who originally brought ruin upon her. Sexualized femininity lies at the heart of late nineteenth-century artworks where cultural decay, if not degradation, characterizes all things reprehensibly modern. Crackanthorpe, however, fails to observe that several women writers were linked prominently with decadence. As I show here, the female authors who appeared in The Yellow Book at the same time helped make this journal look as if it were the quintessential organ of these ubiquitously decadent times.

My thanks go to Grace Ballor for much-appreciated research assistance sponsored through the Center for Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Studies, University of California, Los Angeles. Ellen Truxaw alerted me to the significance of literary quotations in Charlotte Mew’s ‘Passed’. I am grateful to Holly Laird for making several welcome editorial interventions.