Literature of transition: An introduction

Good morning.  For the few of you who don’t know, but can likely guess, I’m Karyn Huenemann, and I will be entertaining you this semester.

I have to admit I am nervous about this course.  Although it was my specialty, it has been a few years since I last immersed myself in it.  So today I have some notes prepared, but no slide show… those will come with the texts, though, I promise.

I want to—well, go through the course outline and other mundane topics—but mainly to determine what idea of this period lies in the popular collective imagination, in contrast to or support of what critics and historians opine is true.

When you introduce yourselves, could you please let me know which prerequisite course you have taken? Most specifically, whether or not you have taken English 330: Studies in Victorian Literature.

English 340 (early 20^th-century British), 347 (early American), and 354 (early Canadian) are less helpful as backgrounds for the course I have designed, and I would like to know the balance of student knowledge as I go on.

Before we begin the course material proper, I would like to walk you through the course online, so you know what you can find where.  I would also like to give you a couple of little Microsoft Word tips, which students in the past have asked for (and even more should have done!)

Fin de siècle literature

• The period
• The background
• The attitudes
• The literature

The period

The Second Coming, by W. B. Yeats (1919)

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Although written in 1919, Yeats’s poem speaks to the ethos of the fin de siècle as much as it does to the cultural despair following WWI.  It is perhaps exemplary of, not the fin de siècle so much as the culmination of the age of transition.

It is possible to assert that the fin de siècle was characterized by both a positivist belief in the upward progression of European (i.e., British) civilization and an artistic and ideological despair at the decline—the immanent destruction—of European culture as it was known.

But before we get into a discussion of the ethos of the age, I would like to discuss some terms: the first and foremost being fin de siècle itself.

Terms for this period:

Fin de siècle (1880s-1900)

Literally, “end of the century.”

But what are the connotations of the term for you?

La Belle Epoque

The period was similarly known as La Belle Epoque, which has, of course, a different nuance entirely.

The progress in scientific knowledge, colonial affairs—and thus national economics—as well as cultural and social institutions, gave rise to the illusion of wealth and glory of a Golden Age in European civilization.  It was this sense that supported the positivists in their beliefs.

Decadence (1885-97)

A number of critics also use the term Decadence (capitalized) to describe the fin de siècle.

To be more exact, Decadence was one of a number of cultural and artistic movements in Europe at the turn of the century.

The fin de siècle embraced such a wide variety of literary and artistic modes of expression, including Impressionism, Æstheticism, Decadence, Naturalism, and Symbolism, that reducing the late nineteenth century to one of them and branding it a “decadent” merely because it was anti-Establishment is to inflict simplicity on complexity. (Beckson xvii)

We will be looking at the artistic impact of these various movements more closely when we consider Wilde and Duncan.

The age of transition (1880-1920)

As Lorraine McMullen points out in her Introduction to the Æsthetic Movement in English Literature (1975),

“Whereas the 1890’s [sic] frequently have been called fin-de-siecle and primary attention has been paid to the decadent qualities of this decade, the nineties are now recognized as an important part of the age of transition, as a period of experimentation in which Decadence is only one of a number of areas of experimentation.” (13-14)

So what do you think of when you hear either term? What resonates from our collective cultural memory?

The fin de siècle, then, incorporated a myriad of changes in society as a whole, as well as the backlash against those changes, and extended in its colloquial use well into the twentieth century (rather like “the long nineteenth century”)… And the changes themselves were nonlinear: new discoveries in science impacted the philosophical and ideological attitudes of the time, which in turn had an effect on artistic theories and production.

Let’s look a bit more closely at what was going on.

The background

Fin de siècle, fin du globe

Most modern critics present the age of transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century within the context of the history of the Greek and Roman empires.  If you cannot immediately see the connections, you will by the end of the course… if not today.

R. K. R. Thornton, in The Decadent Dilemma (1983) couches his discussion in terms of the social perception of a cultural “climate of decline” (1-14).

Anyone who looks at the history of Decadence must soon be aware that an idea of decline is by no means confined to literature, and by no means confined to the nineteenth century.  Decline is, after all, a necessary part of at least three major and distinctive types of theory about the nature of the universe and its history: first, that the world was created perfect, and that subsequent variation is necessarily a decline; second, that the universe, or nation, or empire, or state (and so on) is an organism that has period of infancy, growth, maturity and decline; and third, that the universe progresses in cycles which repeat either the decline from a repeatedly-made [sic] perfection, or the organic cycle of growth and decay. (1)

He goes on to point to historical criticism of the rise and fall of empires: “Mesopotamian, Mayan, Aztec, Greek, Roman, Jewish, Christian medieval, Renaissance…” (1) and points out (rightly) that the “Greeks and Romans stood firmly behind any Victorian’s understanding of his [mainly, given the educational system, but also her] own society” (2).

So Thornton, like other critics, begins his discussion with a chapter or so on Greek and Roman history, which I am not going to bore you with.  [loud cheers?]

Suffice it to say that the notion of despair at the end of an era, be it century or millennium, is an historically documented occurrence (even expectation at this point).  Remember the Y2K panic?  But wait, there’s more…

Once we get into the heart of the course, a number of parallels between the fin de siècle proper and the turn of the millennium will become apparent.  Especially to those who have taken my most recent 383 course… I have to admit that I became quite excited when I recognized the strength of the parallel between the popular psychic reaction to the fin de siècle—however manifested—and the issues we are dealing with now in terms of trans- and post-humanism.

But to back up… let’s look at the social and political events that led up to the fin de siècle.

The Long Nineteenth Century

This is where those who have 330 will be bored.  So I’ll keep it short.

The long nineteenth century is a term coined by the British Marxist historian, Eric Hobsbawm, as the period between 1789 (the French Revolution) and 1914 (the onset of WWI).  Hobsbawm wrote three books on the period:

• The Age of Revolution: Europe 1789-1848
• The Age of Capital: 1848-1875
• The Age of Empire: 1875-1914

You can see that the period we are concerned with begins well into the Age of Empire—which is not insignificant…

The Victorian Period (1837-1901) was of course central to the long nineteenth century, and the foundation upon which the fin de siècle was built.

So what of historical significance happened in the Victorian period? or the long nineteenth century, and a bit before, for that matter?

• Industrial Revolution
• Corn Laws and Repeal
• Opium Wars
• Sepoy Rebellion
• Irish Potato Famine
• Great Western Railway opens
• What else?
  • commercially viable steam engine (1769, James Watt)
  • electric telegraph (1774)
  • flush toilet (1775)
  • steamship (depending upon whose information: 1775, 1786, 1801)
  • submarine (1776)
  • bifocals (Benjamin Franklin 1780)
  • hot air balloons (the Montgolfier brothers, 1783)
  • gas turbine engine (1791)
  • gas lighting (1792)
  • smallpox vaccination (1796)
  • electric arc lamp (1809)
  • tin can (1810)
  • viable steam locomotive (1814)
  • spectroscope for chemical analysis (1814)
  • stethoscope (1819)
  • the difference engine (mechanical, steam-powered calculator, precursor to the computer; Thomas Babbage: designed in 1812; prototype in 1822; annexed by government 1823, never built)
  • electromagnet (1825)
  • sewing machine (1830)
  • stereoscope (1832)
  • propeller (1836)
  • telegraph (Samuel Morse, 1837)
  • postage stamp (1837)
  • Morse code (1838)
  • daguerrotype photography (1839)
  • hydrogen fuel cell (1839)
  • anesthesia first used in dentistry (1846)
  • anticeptics (1847)
  • safety pin (1849)
  • concept of fibre optics (1854)
  • pasteurization (1856)
  • rotary washing machine (1858)
  • internal combustion engine (1860)
  • machine (Gatling) gun (1862)
  • plastic (1862)
  • dynamite (Nobel, 1866)
  • telephone (1876)
  • practical, four-stroke engine (1876)
  • cylinder phonograph (1877)
  • moving pictures (Muybridge [the horse] 1877)
  • practical commercial lightbulb (1878)
  • seismograph (1880)
  • fountain pen (1884)
  • practical car powered by internal combustion engine (1885)
  • gas engined motorcycle (1885)
  • radar (1887)
  • contact lenses (1887)
  • cordite (smokeless gunpowder, 1889)
  • escalator (1891)
  • diesel-fuelled engine (1892)
  • portable movie camera and projector (Lumière brothers: now more than one person can see the movie! 1895)
  • roller coaster (1898)
  • radio receiver (1901)
  • lie detector (1902)
  • neon lights (1902)
  • teabags (1904)
  • theory of relativity (1905)
  • colour photography (1907)
  • first piloted helicopter (1907)
  • first Model-T sold (1908)
  • Geiger counter (1908)
  • instant coffee (1909)
  • first demo of talking motion picture (1910)
  • tanks (1912)
  • bras (1913)
  • chemical now known as Ecstacy patented by Merck (1913)
  • gas masks (1914)

What came of it

So what happened in terms of the standard of living and society during this period?

Standard of living rose for some (better sanitation, access to better medical information and practices, labour-saving devices, commercial prosperity supported by government policies at home and abroad), but absolutely not for others (workhouses opened in 1850, homelessness increased in urban areas, unemployment grew in both rural and urban areas).

With social problems and greater middle-class affluence came calls for reform, loud calls.

By the 1880s—about when the social attitudes of the fin de siècle can be seen to be emerging—society was rife with discord: rich – poor, moral – decadent, Christian – atheist, capitalist – socialist, idealist – realist: these dichotomies were beginning already to split society asunder.

The attitudes

Max Nordau—one of the heralds of fin de siècle doom—wrote in Degeneration (Entartung [1893]; English trans. 1895) that

“[o]ne epoch of history is unmistakably in its decline, and another is announcing its approach. There is a sound of rending in every tradition, and it is as though the morrow would not link itself with today.  Things as they are totter and plunge, and they are suffered to reel and fall, because man is weary, and there is no faith that it is worth a effort to uphold them.  Views that have hitherto governed minds are dead of driven hence like disenthroned kings, and for their inheritance they that hold the titles and they that would usurp are locked in struggle. Meanwhile interregnum in all its terrors prevails.” (qtd. in Tornton 10)

The fundamental essence of the age was that progress led to both positivism and pessimism.

In The Idea of Progress (1920), J. B. Bury observed that, in the nineteenth century, “the achievements of physical science did more than anything else to convert the imaginations of men to the general doctrine of progress.” At the same time, however, many expressed pessimism and doubt, particularly after the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859), which followed a series of scientific discoveries and evolutionary theories that undermined orthodox belief in creationism, unsettled religious faith, and ultimately resulted in emotional crisis for many Christians. (Beckson xii)

Not only a general sense of scientific progress, but individual discoveries influenced the development of this dichotomous ethos.

Discoveries in the physical sciences were extrapolated into other scientific as well as philosophical, sociological, and ethical realms, resulting in a web of cultural changes that is reflected in a similarly disparate array of media: art, literature, scientific endeavour, religious belief and dogma, social institutions, and political power.

• Faster railroad locomotives
• Ocean-going steam ships
• Photography (still then moving)
• Electric lighting
• Absolute zero (Lord Kelvin); “heat death”
• The rediscovery of Mendel’s biological work
• Discovery of the electron
• And of course Darwin’s biological evolution, which led to a cult of cultural (that is racial) and social evolutionism

In the optimists’ camp:

“We are on the threshold of a great time, even if our time is not great in itself.  In science, in religion, in social organization, we all know what great things are in the air. … It is not the age of money-bags and cant, soot, hubbub, and ugliness.  It is the age of great expectation and unwearied striving after better things. (Frederick Harrison, ‘positiveist philosopher and advocate for social and political reform,’” qtd. in Beckson xi)

“Certain old things are passing away; not only the old ideals only, but even the regret they leave behind is dead, and we are shaping instinctively our new ideals. … old cycles are for ever renewed, and it is not paradox that he who would advance can never cling too close to the past.” (Havelock Ellis, in The New Spirit (1890), qtd. in Beckson xi-xii)

On the other side of the equation lay the preponderance of artists and writers, such as William Morris, who welcomed a return to “barbarism” in lieu of the conflicted and self-contradictory ethos of the Victorian period:

“I have [no] faith than a grain of mustard seed in the future history of ‘civilization,’ which I know now is doomed to destruction, and probably before very long: what a joy it is to think of! and how often it consoles me to think of barbarism once more flooding the world, and real feelings and passions, however rudimentary, taking the place of our wretched hypocrisies.” (qtd. in Beckson xiii-xiv)

This attitude is reflected in some of the interpretations of the “decadence” of the fin de siècle: a disgust with society as distilled through the nineteenth century led to an appreciation (by some) of “l’arte pour l’arte,” or “art for art’s sake.

A great deal of artistic influence flowed over from France to Britain at this period, and the developing artistic theories were thus doubly suspect.

When we look at Wilde and Duncan, we will move more deeply into this debate, the essence of which is fundamental to our understanding of the fin de siècle.

The 1895 publication of Max Nordau’s Degeneration attacked a number of “Decadent” philosophers, artists and authors, “such figures as Ibsen, Wagner, Wilde, Nietzsche, and Tolstoy” (Beckson xiv), fuelling the social and artistic debate that raged throughout the period.  Artistic Decadence was equated with cultural and moral degeneration, which was seen as parallel to biological degeneration.

In response to Nordau, Shaw saw these figures as “regenerative,” in recognition of the cyclical nature of artistic and social attitudes.

Thus the increase in scientific understanding—especially biologically and evolutionarily—led to the development of new artistic theories and practices, both venerated and denigrated according to those same scientific ideas as expressed in philosophical and sociopolitical ideologies.

Fin de siècle = end of a period: Greek, Roman, Etruscan, other empires… equally pertinent to discussion of the turn of the 20^th century. (Showalter, Thornton, Beckson)

The literature: Order of operations

• H. G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau
• G. B. Shaw’s Mrs. Warren’s Profession
• Mary Chomondeley’s Votes for Women
• Sara Jeannette Duncan’s A Daughter of To-day
• Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray
• Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son
• Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness

Works Consulted

Beckson, Karl  London in the 1890s: A Cultural History.  New York: Norton, 1992. Print.

Bernheimer, Charles. Decadent Subjects: The Idea of Decadence in Art, Literature, Philosophy, and Culture of the Fin de Siècle in Europe. Ed. T. Jefferson Kline and Naomi Schor. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 2002. Print.

Daly, Nicholas. Modernism, Romance, and the Fin de Siècle: Popular Fiction and British Culture, 1880-1914. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 1999. Print.

Larson, Jil.  Ethics and Narrative in the English Novel, 1880-1914.  New York: Cambridge UP, 2001. Print.

McMullen, Lorraine.  An Introduction to the Æsthetic Movement in English Literature.  Ottawa, ON: Tecumseh, 1975. Print.

Showalter, Elaine.  Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle.  London: Bloomsbury, 1991.  Print.

Thornton, R. K. R. The Decadent Dilemma. London: Arnold, 1983. Print.

West, Shearer. Fin de Siècle: Art and Society in an Age of Uncertainty. London: Bloomsbury, 1993. Print.