HJ-Aestheticism and Decadence

chapter 9
Aestheticism and Decadence

Michèle Mendelssohn
James explored Aestheticism in his fiction as early as Roderick Hudson (1875)

and The Europeans (1878), where he analyzes it through the figures of the
dandy and the flâneur, who both play central roles in Aestheticism and
Decadence. In 1879–84, the height of the craze for depictions of aesthetic
young men and women, the idea of Aestheticism crystallized for James and
he developed sharp renditions of characters that could be recognized as
aesthetes analogous to those one might find in the pages of Pater or Punch
(Figure 1). These included ‘The Author of “Beltraffio”’ and The Portrait of
a Lady, as well as The Tragic Muse, where the disturbing Gabriel Nash
represents Wildean Aestheticism with a Jamesian shading.
By the mid 1890s Decadent Aestheticism had begun to choke the move-
ment’s milder, more innocent forms. By the end of the decade, a mouldy,
overpowering scent of depravity had irrevocably infused itself into
Aestheticism’s delicately perfumed pages. ‘The bad smell has, as it were,
to be accounted for’, James wrote in an essay of 1904 that grappled with
Aestheticism’s reputation for vulgarity. ‘And yet where, amid the roses and
lilies and pomegranates, the thousand essences and fragrances, can such a
thing possibly be?’ (LC-2, 935). Decadence and Aestheticism had grown up
alongside each other like plants sharing the same soil. Over time, decaden-
ce’s poor but hearty equivalent, immorality, began to encroach until, in the
mid 1890s, Aestheticism was choked by the tangle. The purpose of this
chapter is to situate James in the context of Aestheticism and Decadence
and the controversies surrounding these movements.
Aestheticism was an Anglo-American cultural movement that flourished
between 1870 and 1900. As we shall see, it overlaps with Decadence
in significant ways. Understood in an historically contingent sense,
Aestheticism and Decadence stand for a short-lived but heady period of
cultural innovation at the fin de siècle. Both movements are often repre-
sented as being either ‘a rarefied ivory-tower aesthetic or a merely parodic
hiatus before the inception of Modernism’.1 Like Decadence, Aestheticism
93
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94 michèle mendelssohn
Figure 1 ‘The Six-Mark Tea-Pot’ by George du Maurier, Punch, 30 October 1880.

advanced the idea that art was worthwhile for its own sake (i.e., art for art’s
sake), in opposition to the utilitarian doctrine of moral or practical useful-
ness. It claimed that art and culture ought to be liberated from ethical
considerations. Alluding to the movement’s comic association with George
Aestheticism and Decadence 95
du Maurier’s caricature Postlethwaite and Gilbert and Sullivan’s Bunthorne,
James defined Aestheticism as a ‘spectacle’ (LC-2, 908). But he saw its
potential as a ‘bulwark against ugliness’ (935), by which he meant excess
of moralism and utilitarianism. Underscoring its affiliation with sensuality
and esoteric experiences, he noted that its activating principle was ‘not
easily formulated, but [one] which we may conveniently speak of as that of
beauty at any price, beauty appealing alike to the senses and the mind’
(908). There could be ‘no esthetic [sic] beauty’ (940) where there was ‘no
process, no complexity, no suspense’; in short, where art was not inter-
twined with life. However, sensuality need not mean gratuitous sexuality:
‘zoological sociability’ (939), ‘erotic exercise’ (937), ‘the play closely
studied and frankly represented, of the sexual relation’ (936) could not
be the object of ‘detached pictures’ (942). Instead, James argued that it
ought to be connected through art to the scope of human experience.
What is the real cost of ‘beauty at any price’? How ‘good’ could art remain
when freed from corseting moral and practical concerns? Aestheticism,
James claims, was always on the verge of foundering and of sinking into a
morass of immorality and irrelevance. The ‘total beauty’ (LC-2, 908) of
Aestheticism’s productions ‘somehow extraordinarily fails’, James explains,
because ‘something is all the while at work undermining that bulwark against
ugliness which it is their own obvious theory of their office to throw up. The
disparity troubles and haunts us just in proportion as we admire’ (935). Amid
these morbid foundations, Decadence took hold. Its Latin root (de- down +
cadere to fall) suggests the way in which the movement moved away from
traditional values and fell away from Aestheticism. Decadence is morally
relaxed, sexual, violent, esoteric, morbid, perverse, artificial, hyper-refined
and exotic. It can be seen as a second generation (or degeneration) of
Aestheticism. As Ellis Hanson notes,
The decadents cultivated a fascination with all that was commonly perceived as
unnatural or degenerate, with sexual perversity, nervous illness, crime, and disease, all
presented in a highly aestheticized context calculated to subvert or, at any rate, to
shock conventional morality. Both stylistically and thematically, decadence is an
aesthetic in which failure and decay are regarded as seductive, mystical, or beautiful.2
The sunflower and lily were taken as the floral symbols of Aestheticism, and
their Decadent counterpart was the green carnation – rare, artificially enhanced
and patently unnatural. Decadence is rooted in the unusual and the deviant,
and is articulated through the ‘systematic cultivation of drugs, cosmetics,
Catholic ritual, supposedly “unnatural” sexual practices, and sterility and
artificiality in all things’.3 Anti-Decadents, such as the social critic Max
Nordau, diagnosed the movement as ‘the disposition of the mystically degen-
erate mind, with its shifting nebulous ideas, its fleeting formless shadowy
thought, its perversions and aberrations’.4 Arthur Symons spoke for
Decadence when he countered that the movement could not be called
‘healthy’, nor did it wish to be considered so.5
Aestheticism and Decadence share several characteristics. The first is a
tendency to see art and life as one, an ideal famously satirized by Punch’s
depiction of two aesthetes fretting about their ability to ‘live up to’ their
beautiful teapot. The harmful implications of this conflation are developed
in Madame Merle’s description of herself as a piece of porcelain ‘shockingly
chipped and cracked’ (N-2, 389) by Osmond’s reifying Aestheticism, as well
as in the fact that their daughter, Pansy, approximates ‘a consummate piece’
of china (N-1, 560). As we will see in relation to ‘The Author of “Beltraffio”’,
‘what perverse men do to women, perverse women do to their babies’.6 The
second shared characteristic is to live outside the moral realm, a position
taken up by Osmond and Mark Ambient. The third common feature – a
tendency towards insincerity and artificiality – stems from the first: it is
personified by the hypocritical and manipulative ‘modern aesthete, who
poses for artistic feelings, but is very hollow’ (HJL-2, 414). James’s early
figurations of the transatlantic aesthete (including Louis Leverett, Morris
Townsend and Osmond) and later characterizations of nice-but-naughty
children (Miles and Flora in ‘The Turn of the Screw’, Aggie in The
Awkward Age) reveal the close twining of Aestheticism and manipulation.
The issue of social manoeuvring is connected to the class concerns that
figure prominently in Aestheticism (taste as a means of social mobility) and
Decadence (taste as a means of enforcing social stasis and class hierarchies).
The fourth characteristic is a shared concern with time, be it in optimistic
terms (Aestheticism attempts to reclaim the medieval and Renaissance past
for the future) or pessimistic ones (Decadence revels in the present because
the future is sans issue). This last feature is central to modernity and explains
why these two movements are the hinges upon which the door of
Modernism opens out.
Aestheticism and Decadence have a similar genealogy, and both are
descendants of nineteenth-century art’s struggle to free itself from moral
constraints. Aestheticism is, metaphorically, the prepubescent child who
refuses to go to church in order to read Walter Pater and sneak a cigarette.
Decadence is the adolescent fully ensconced in his fuck-off phase, intrigued
by Baudelaire and the darker side of Catholic ritual, smoking something
stronger than cigarettes in the narthex. It is useful for us to think of these
movements in developmental terms, as earlier phases of what grew up to be
Modernism. If the child is father to the man, these two bad boys suggest
some of the growing pains inherent in the late nineteenth century’s spurt
towards modernity and they point to James’s particular contribution to it.
In his fiction and non-fiction, James often uses children as ciphers for his
engagement with aesthetic and decadent themes; in this set-up, the ‘inno-
cent’ child functions as a blank screen for the projection of adult panics.
These panics attack in a multitude of ways – including (homo)sexual panic,
moral and religious terror, or nationalistic anxieties7 – and they are symp-
tomatic of James’s preferred method of tackling the insecurities of a transi-
tional (and therefore adolescent-like) age.
James’s engagement with Aestheticism and Decadence can fruitfully be
read in conjunction with his response to the paradox of childhood. James’s
ambivalent attitude to these movements is reflected in his portrayals of
children, either as the blameless casualties of grown-up games, or as cunning
little operators in these games. This ‘insistence on at once mobilizing and
undermining boundaries and differences’8 is characteristic of both move-
ments. The relevance of a reading such as the one I propose is revealed by
two dominant strands in Jamesian criticism, which are, more often than
not, discussed as if they were disparate when they are, in fact, intricately
linked. The first strand is an aesthetic criticism that sees James as the
architect of an art-based ‘structure of value and of belief to replace those
religious sanctions’9 that were increasingly unavailable in the late nineteenth
century. The second strand sees James’s use of the child topos as a means of
developing ‘the tradition of the sexual child as gothic conundrum’10 who
‘entraps viewers’11 as much as does James’s own text, ‘dream[ing] of horizons
beyond the moralizing climes of “erotic innocence”’,12 or ‘preserv[ing] a
shattered dream’.13 These strands can be more productively understood as
intertwined because James frustrates readers’ ‘effort[s] to decode . . . a
definitive statement about aestheticism’,14 and thereby offers his readers
the destabilizing experience prized by Aestheticism and Decadence. If we
pay too much attention to what James does not do in his tales and novels –
namely, give us a neat aesthetic credo – then we run the risk of missing what
he is doing, namely giving us a sense of the dangers of moralism of the
simple-minded sort that sees art as dangerous and would therefore suppress
it. As well, James questions the forced ethics deployed by adults in order to
justify their sometimes dubious child protection techniques. He is also alert
to the fact that so-called ‘children of light’15 may also be ‘creatures of prey’ –
which is to say that what appears to be moral may not always be good and
may, indeed, be far worse.
While James does not unequivocally advocate Aestheticism or Decadence,
he shows that its moralizing enemies pose the greatest threat of all. The rest of
this chapter will be taken up with examining how this is manifest in ‘The
Author of “Beltraffio”’ (1884), which represents in miniature the aesthetic and
decadent topoi that James deploys throughout his fiction.
‘Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself is the end’, Pater explained
in The Renaissance, which rapidly gained recognition as the British breviary to
Aestheticism. Articulating a carpe diem for aesthetes, he wrote: ‘a counted
number of pulses only is given us of a variegated, dramatic life . . . To burn
always with this hard, gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy is success in
life’.16 Pater’s influence is palpable in Roderick Hudson, The Portrait of a Lady,
The Ambassadors and The Wings of the Dove, but it is in ‘The Author of
“Beltraffio”’ that James articulates most succinctly and specifically the prob-
lematic nature of Aestheticism and its proto-Decadent tendencies.
‘The Author of “Beltraffio”’ is a riff on Paterian airs, but, paradoxically, it
is also an allegory against Aestheticism. The story is framed by late
nineteenth-century transatlantic Aestheticism: the narrator is a ‘young
American of an aesthetic turn’ (CS-2, 867), who would like to be an apostle
to Mark Ambient, the English author of an ‘aesthetic war-cry’ (865) for the
‘gospel’ of art for art’s sake. Ambient’s wife, Beatrice, considers these novels
corrupt and, in this respect, she represents what the Renaissance historian
John Addington Symonds called ‘the prejudices of the vulgar – to wit, that
aesthetics are inseparable from unhealthiness or inhumanity, & that interest
in art implies some corruption in its votaries’.17 This resonance is note-
worthy because James knew that Symonds’s Calvinist wife disapproved of
his work – an anecdote that sparked ‘The Author of “Beltraffio”’.
Mark Ambient is the embodiment of a Paterian ethos whereby existence
is a ‘strange, perpetual, weaving and unweaving of ourselves’.18 Our life’s
and its purpose is to be found in experience and the collection of ‘impres-
sions’. The same year that James was developing this Paterian ostinato, he
was also extending his own theory of the novel to include something very like
Pater’s ‘impression’ in ‘The Art of Fiction’. In that essay, James shuttles
between realism and literary impressionism, and successfully meshes two
divergent literary tendencies in late nineteenth-century art: the urge to repre-
sent life as it really is, and the desire to represent it as it seems to be, or even, as
Oscar Wilde would put it, as it is not. James concludes this essay by attemp-
ting to reconcile both in a bivalent definition of the impression that deploys
Pater’s most famous theme, and its complementary surface/depth and stasis/
flux models.19 Ambient embodies the Paterian paradigm. He is ‘grave and gay
at once and the same moment . . . both young and old, both anxious and
indifferent’ (CS-2, 868) – he represents an essential ‘in-betweenness’,20 a
fusion of the intellectual and the sensual. Just as Ambient strives ‘to give
an impression of life itself’ (CS-2, 890), so ‘The Art of Fiction’ fines itself
down to conveying the air of reality rather than reality itself.
The story’s purview is transnational, and it succeeds in creating a miniature
panorama of late nineteenth-century attitudes to art and ethics. James
rehearses the fin-de-siècle context in allusions to aesthetic dress and decora-
tion: from its effect on ‘the cut of their sleeves and the shape of their
sideboards’ (CS-2, 865), to Ambient’s addiction ‘to velvet jackets, to ciga-
rettes, to loose shirt-collars, to looking a little disheveled’ (867), as well as the
emphasis on flowers, medievalism and ‘the spirit of the Renaissance’ (866).
Reading these allusions through a sociohistorical lens, Ambient’s affinities
also mark him out as part of a social set deemed unsafe by the self-appointed
moral guardians of the time. One such figure, Max Nordau, claimed that
literary impressionists such as Ambient displayed ‘that atavism which we have
noticed as the most distinctive feature in the mental life of degenerates’.21
Although the tale presents itself as a caveat against Aestheticism, it is also
about the pitfalls of intransigent principles of right and wrong. ‘The Author of
“Beltraffio”’ reveals the repressive, suffocating and ultimately crucifying power
of the righteous. This lesson is encapsulated in the opening scene’s deployment
of fruit symbolism. While in the familial garden, Beatrice Ambient declares
that she is ‘very much afraid about the fruit this year’ (CS-2, 874), which
prompts the narrator to turn to ‘the mossy mottled garden-walls, where plum-
trees and pears, flattened and fastened upon the rusty bricks, looked like
crucified figures with many arms’. The sweet fruit is anthropomorphized the
better to show that it is growing into death. The parallels between Beatrice’s
concern about the fruit and her sweet son are reinforced by the similarity
between the pear and puer (the Latinate boy), as well as an oblique reference to
Saint Augustine’s boyhood career as a pear-tree vandal (‘I loved destroying
myself’).22 This walled-in Eden symbolizes the murderous maternal force
Beatrice will unleash in the name of protecting her son, who is quite literally
the fruit of her union with her husband. From her point of view, the
Aestheticism-inflamed narrator is, like her own husband, a snake in her garden.
Yet she is also a participant in this lapsarian scene: in a gender-inverted version
of the biblical moment, her Adam-like sin is to love too much, and her
unhappy love-object is explicitly figured as ‘an apple of discord’ (877).
We must read the Ambients’ struggle in the context of art for art’s sake’s
struggle to liberate literature from obligation, and thus from the responsibility
of providing both didactic content and delightful enjoyment. While
Dolcino’s name evokes his sweet (dolce) nature, it also serves as a powerful
reminder of the Horatian recommendation that art should be sweet and
useful (dulce et utile), a dictum with which James’s tale is in explicit tension.
The child is symbolic of Aestheticism’s desire to free the dulce from its bond
to the utile, and this is borne out by the tale’s insistence that Dolcino is ‘like a
little work of art’ (CS-2, 877). His conspicuous beauty makes him an
incarnation of the aesthetic gospel of Beauty, and his death transforms him
into a martyr to the movement. Like the aesthetes Nordau excoriated,
Dolcino is ‘stamped with some social stigma’ (CS-2, 871) and ‘a kind of
charm which is like a death-warrant’. James wrote that Aestheticism’s ‘total
beauty’ (LC-2, 908) was subject to a nefarious ‘undermining’ force. Similarly,
there was something ‘alarming, in [Dolcino’s] beauty, which seemed to be
composed of elements too fine and pure for the breath of this world’
(CS-2, 878). Just as the dulce in art must also be utile, ‘Beatrice thinks a
work of art ought to have a “purpose”’ (887), Ambient’s sister explains,
limning the artistic allegory the mother–son relationship represents. While
Beatrice fears that her husband’s aesthetic influence will sever her bond with
her son (and, by extension, the bond of dulce et utile), this worry fans
Ambient’s aesthetic flame: his duty as an artist is to ignore the shallow
Philistines (such as his wife) and the ‘bonnes gens rolling up their eyes’ (890)
at his artistic efforts. ‘As for my little boy, you know, we shall probably kill
him between us’ (877), he earnestly tells the narrator.
While this dysfunctional family dynamic mirrors the debates from which
Aestheticism and Decadence emerged, the tale can also be read as a general-
ized indictment of moral panic. As Jonathan Freedman judiciously observes,
the story
rigorously indicts that fanatical adherent of morality, his wife, for her even more
fanatical pursuit of her principles. Indeed, the novel [sic] brings about a reversal of the
positions held by these two. Ambient may believe in a number of immoral doctrines,
but in his life he is an absolute bourgeois . . . His wife, by contrast, grants a potency and
a power to art that even the aesthete does not claim for it . . . To Mrs Ambient, and
Mrs Ambient alone, art possesses the power utterly to shape the consciousness of its
audience – an irony that at once inculpates and exculpates James’s aesthete author and
simultaneously shadows and clears James himself of the same charge.23
Mark Ambient may be the aesthete of aesthetes, but, paradoxically,
Beatrice Ambient’s actions make her a proto-Decadent. Her behaviour
defies explanation through ethics or nature, while enacting a decadent
topos of destruction that privileges the non-reproductive over the gener-
ative. Beatrice may be pretty as a picture, but she is also a Medusa-figure
who ‘shone with a certain coldness and practised in intercourse a certain
bland detachment’.24 As such, she modifies the decadent tendency and
Baudelairean ‘legacy of representing women as split into two sharply
contrasting types: on the one hand, idealized woman-beauty as artifice
and artifact; on the other hand, organic, embodied woman’.25 She isn’t ‘a
woman [who] misbehaves herself’ (CS-2, 887), but her terrible actions are
ominously anticipated by her ‘slowly rubb[ing] her white hands’ (880) as
she listens to her husband.
As well as embodying a proto-Decadent femininity, her corrupt religion
can be read as an enactment of the divine in a Baudelaireian sense ‘as a
corrupt trope, an obvious lie, one that does its most profound damage
through frequent repetition’.26 ‘The spirit of decadence is deceptive’, as
Matei Calinescu points out, ‘that is, tries to pursue its destructive work
under the most reassuring and healthy appearances . . . [It] masquerades as
admiration of a higher life’,27 but it is ultimately ‘a form of psychological,
moral, or aesthetic self-deception’.28 Beatrice’s version of Christianity is
scandalous. She is ‘so religious, and so tremendously moral’ (CS-2, 888) that
her beliefs have corrupted her: she is a Jamesian enactment of Nietzsche’s
view that Christianity is a form of decadence. Beatrice’s life-denying power
makes her an agent ‘for mobilizing a herd morality [Philistinism in art and
Christianity in morals] that wars against exceptional individuals’.29 In The
Antichrist, Nietzsche explains that ‘the preponderance of feelings of dis-
pleasure over feelings of pleasure is the cause of this fictitious morality and
religion; but such a preponderance provides the very formula of deca-
dence’.30 In The Case of Wagner, ‘good and evil’ are merely variations on
the theme of decadence. Nietzsche’s framework provides a compelling basis
for reading Beatrice’s moralism as decadence: ‘Once one has developed a
keen eye for the symptoms of decline, one understands morality, too – one
understands what is hiding under its most sacred names and value formulas:
impoverished life, the will to the end, the great wariness. Morality negates
life.’31 James constructs Beatrice as a proto-Decadent whose morality, like
her conception of art, ‘is a thing so hollow, so dishonest, so lying, in which
life is so blinked and blinded, so dodged and disfigured’ (CS-2, 893). This is
all the more insidious because neither her husband nor the narrator ever
expects to find ‘those evil passions’ (894) in her.
In Beatrice, James combined decadent gynophobia with an image of a
corrupt Christian mater dolorosa who ‘gains voice – her ability to speak even
though she is a woman in a male-regulated hierarchy – through her absolute
identification with her child’.32 Like some of the women in Wagner and
Huysmans, she is ‘a woman of apparent oxymorons, at once beautiful and
demonic’,33 who combines moralism and ‘modern hysteria’. She is thus a
recognizable iteration of the late nineteenth-century correspondence between
the feminine and the degenerate mind. This trope reverberates throughout
‘The Author of “Beltraffio”’ and, in particular, in the male narrator’s distaste
for the novelist’s sister, whose ghostlike presence startles and scares him in
its suggestion of ‘a symbolic picture, something akin even to Dürer’s
Melancholia’.34 Haunting is a leitmotiv in James’s engagement with
Aestheticism and Decadence, both in terms of fiction (think of the haunted,
beauty-obsessed governess in ‘The Turn of the Screw’, or Strether’s suscept-
ibility to ‘the ghost of the lady of Woollett’35 in the midst of his seduction by
the Parisian Babylon) and non-fiction (reading Pater, James felt a ‘presence is
in the room with you – materially – stays there while you read’).36
It would be tempting to offer, as a conclusion, a categorical statement of
the sort proffered by the Atlantic Monthly in 1897. But unlike that august
publication, we cannot ‘place Mr James inextricably in the decadent ranks’.37
It has become a critical commonplace to talk about James’s ‘ambivalence’ and
‘ambiguity’, and nowhere are these qualifiers more apt than in a discussion of
James in aesthetic and decadent contexts. None the less, neither term fully
captures the sense of excitement, play and peril in James’s engagement;
indeed, ‘flirtation’ works far better as a qualifier and a theoretical framework
within which to understand James’s engagement.38 Flirtation complicates,
augments, suggests and allows for a layering of engagement, which, like
decadence itself, ‘exposes the self to the [potentially] corrosive forces of a
heightened ambivalence’.39 Flirtation is also the strategy that underpins
James’s personal response to Aestheticism and Decadence – from his lifelong
attraction to ‘the repulsive and fatuous Oscar Wilde’ (HJL-2, 372), to his
repeated association with The Yellow Book (though he ‘hate[d] too much the
horrid aspect & company of the whole publication’ [HJL-3, 482]) and his
willingness to act as a guide to ‘London aestheticism’ (HJL-3, 93) for the
French Decadent on whom À Rebours is modelled. As a dynamic framework,
Jamesian flirtation is worth taking seriously, not least because, when it comes
to Aestheticism and Decadence, James’s style and thematic choices are, in and
of themselves, extended flirtations with the reader.
notes
1. Liz Constable, Dennis Denisoff and Matthew Potolsky, eds., Perennial Decay: On
the Aesthetics and Politics of Decadence (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 1999), p. 1.
2. Ellis Hanson, Decadence and Catholicism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1997), p. 3.
3. Chris Baldick, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms (Oxford
University Press, 1990), p. 53.
4. Max Nordau, Degeneration, ed. George L. Mosse (Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 1993), p. 300.
5. Arthur Symons, ‘The Decadent Movement in Literature’, quoted in Karl
Beckson, ed., Aesthetes and Decadents of the 1890’s: An Anthology of British
Poetry and Prose (Chicago, IL: Academy Press, 1981), p. 136.
6. Adam Phillips, On Flirtation (London: Faber & Faber, 1994), p. 107.
7. Consider, for instance, Daisy Miller’s patriotic little brother in the novella’s
opening, who is as fanatical about American supremacy as he is about
candy.
8. Constable, Denisoff, and Potolsky, eds., Perennial Decay, p. 21.
9. Alwyn Berland, ‘Henry James and the Aesthetic Tradition’, Journal of the
History of Ideas 23.3 (1962): 408.
10. Ellis Hanson, ‘Screwing with Children in Henry James’, GLQ: A Journal of
Lesbian and Gay Studies 9.3 (2003): 367.
11. Kevin Ohi, Innocence and Rapture: The Erotic Child in Pater, Wilde, James and
Nabokov (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p. 147.
12. Kevin Ohi, ‘The Author of “Beltraffio”: The Exquisite Boy and Henry James’s
Equivocal Aestheticism’, ELH 72.3 (2005): 762.
13. Maeve Pearson, ‘Re-Exposing the Jamesian Child: The Paradox of Children’s
Privacy’, HJR 28.2 (2007): 116.
14. Ohi, ‘Author of “Beltraffio”’, 748.
15. Theodora Bosanquet, Henry James at Work, ed. Lyall H. Powers (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 2006), p. 57.
16. Walter Pater, The Renaissance, ed. Adam Phillips (Oxford University Press,
1986), p. 152.
17. Quoted in Leland Monk, ‘A Terrible Beauty is Born: Henry James,
Aestheticism, and Homosexual Panic’, Genders 23 (1996): 263.
18. Pater, Renaissance, p. 152.
19. Michèle Mendelssohn, Henry James, Oscar Wilde and Aesthetic Culture (Edinburgh
University Press, 2007), pp. 129–36.
20. Jesse Matz, Literary Impressionism and Modernist Aesthetics (Cambridge
21. Nordau, Degeneration, p. 485.
22. Augustine, The Confessions of St Augustine, ed. Rex Warner (New York: Signet,
2001), p. 31.
23. Jonathan Freedman, Professions of Taste: Henry James, British Aestheticism, and
Commodity Culture (Stanford University Press, 1990), pp. 144–5.
24. Henry James, ‘The Author of “Beltraffio”’, in The Figure in the Carpet and
Other Stories, ed. Frank Kermode (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), p. 63.
25. Rachilde, Monsieur Vénus: Roman Matérialiste, ed. Melanie Hawthorne and Liz
Constable (New York: MLA, 2004), p. xiv.
26. Hanson, Decadence and Catholicism, p. 52.
27. Matei Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence,
Kitsch, Postmodernism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1987), p. 180.
28. Ibid., p. 183.
29. Peter H. Van Ness, Spirituality, Diversion, and Decadence: The Contemporary
Predicament (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), p. 219.
30. Quoted in Alexander Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1985), p. 124.
31. Quoted in Calinescu, Five Faces of Modernity, p. 179.
32. Margaret Bruzelius, ‘Mother’s Pain, Mother’s Voice: Gabriela Mistral, Julia
Kristeva, and the Mater Dolorosa’, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 18.2
(1999): 215.
33. Hanson, Decadence and Catholicism, p. 43.
34. James, ‘The Author of “Beltraffio”’, in Kermode, ed., Figure in the Carpet and
Other Stories, p. 73.
35. Henry James, The Ambassadors, ed. S. P. Rosenbaum (New York: W. W. Norton,
1964), p. 197.
36. Henry James, Selected Letters of Henry James to Edmund Gosse, 1882–1915: A
Literary Friendship, ed. Rayburn S. Moore (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
37. Quoted in Freedman, Professions of Taste, p. 177.
38. I have developed this argument in Henry James, Oscar Wilde and Aesthetic
Culture (see pp. 12–13, 243–64).
39. Anna Kventsel, Decadence in the Late Novels of Henry James (Houndmills:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 2.

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chapter 9

Aestheticism and Decadence

James explored Aestheticism in his ﬁction as early as Roderick Hudson (1875)

Figure 1 ‘The Six-Mark Tea-Pot’ by George du Maurier, Punch, 30 October 1880.

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