In Praise of Decadence: The Epideictic Mode from Baudelaire to Wilde

Abstract

It seems to go without saying that decadence is a movement defined by negation. The decadents are always against something that oth- ers value: reality, society femininity nature, morality, public life, and so forth. In his celebrated essay on Charles Baudelaire, Paul Bourget describes decadent style as a falling away from social cohesion. Healthy societies subordinate the individual ‘cells’ to the larger organism, but a decadent society puts the parts above the whole: ‘A style of decadence is one in which the unity of the book is decomposed to make way for the independence of the page, the page is decomposed to make way for the independence of the sentence, and the sentence makes way for the independence of the word.’¹ In Degeneration(1892), Max Nordau writes that while ‘The ordinary man always seeks to think, to feel, and to do exactly the same as the multitude; the decadent seeks to do exactly the contrary.’² Twentieth-century critics such as Jonathan Dollimore have revised this judgment, casting decadent deviation as a subver- sive counter-cultural strategy. Oscar Wilde’s epigrammatic inversions of received wisdom, for example, anticipate deconstructive rewritings of binary oppositions: ‘Wilde’s transgressive aesthetic subverted the dominant categories of subjectivity which kept desire in subjection, subverted the essentialist categories of identity which kept morality in place.’³