Writing Against Decadence, 1890–97

Abstract

Moore’s prediction that the ‘new method’ he had employed in writing Mike Fletcher would be taken up by other writers and that he would not receive recognition for its development was realized within a year with the publication of Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine (1890). While Mike Fletcher received little attention, Dorian Gray created a controversy that gave a name and a face to Decadence for a broader public not attuned to the intellectual, philosophical, and artistic weight it was being given by those writers who were considering how Decadence might be used to expand the purview of British fiction. Wilde’s story garnered more attention than Moore’s novel due to its popular form. Where Moore’s book had appeared under the imprint of a small publishing house, Wilde’s was cheaper and more accessible and his Decadence was embodied in a more popular and feminized form. Thus, in addition to borrowing from high artistic sources such as Huysmans and Pater, Wilde also drew on the society novels of the Ouida type and on supernatural melodrama.¹ Moore’s novel, by contrast, was the highly masculinized Decadence of the coarse and brutally virile kind that, while deplored by many critics, did not rouse as much ire as the effeminacy that critics saw in Wilde’s story. Consequently, though Mike Fletcher was, as Adrian Frazier has described, a virtual ‘ABC of Decadence’,² it was Dorian Gray, with its combination of the effeminacy of Aestheticism and brutality of Naturalism that would become recognized as the Bible of British Decadence in the popular imagination.