Naturalism, Realism, and Decadence

The development of Decadence

Alasdair MacIntyre has noted that “every moral philosophy has some particular sociology as its counterpart” (qtd. in Larson 21).

A number of influences informed the development of the Decadent philosophy; some seem mutually incompatible, but there is overall a sort of twisted coherency, which Charles Bernheimer manages to convey in a rather long introduction to Naturalism and Decadence in his study Decadent Subjects.  But we will get there later.

• Darwin (of course)
• Social Darwinism and the perception of the degeneration of society
• Neitzsche’s own rather twisted view of love, soul, and artistry
• French Naturalism
• American Realism

We have already talked about the social impact of Darwin’s theories during the 1860s and 70s.  I’d like to look a bit at the development of Decadence—don’t worry, we will still have a lot to say about Oscar Wilde!—in order to position the Suffragist movement within a greater artistic and social context.

The logical progression is—as I see it—as follows:

• Darwin created insecurity about mankind’s position vis-à-vis nature and God.
• This created a rift in society, one that can be seen as emblematic of John Stuart Mill’s “critical” society: “Mill, as early as the 1830s, came to see history as a series of periods that were either ‘organic’ (a Saint Simonion term that designates an age unified by a coherent set of religious or philosophical beliefs) or ‘critical’ (the group’s term for periods lacking any overarching authority)” (Larson 22).
• “Lacking any overarching authority,” not only racial and social categories were called into question, but gender categories (male–female as well as heterosexual–homosexual).
• This was compounded by an increasing disparity in numbers of women > to men, caused partially by the efflux of second sons and middle-class males to Empire.
• This increase in the number of women, coupled with an increase in legislated women’s rights (which we have talked about), led to a fear of the feminine described so articulately by Elaine Showalter in Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle:

“As the political historian Carole Pateman has observed, women have traditionally been perceived as figures of disorder, ‘potential disruptors of masculine boundary systems of all sorts.’ Women’s social or cultural marginality seems to place them on the borderlines of the symbolic order, both the ‘frontier between men and chaos,’ and dangerously part of chaos itself, inhabitants of a mysterious and frightening wild zone outside of patriarchal culture” (7-8).

• Showalter’s study, in full, is a convincing argument for the male response to the threat of the feminine at the fin-de-siècle.  Masculinity itself was threatened, not the individual male: as she points out,

“[i]t is important to keep in mind that masculinity is no more natural, transparent and unproblematic than ‘femininity.’ It, too, is a socially constructed role defined within particular cultural and historical circumstances” (8).

• This male insecurity led to an increased incidence of sexist behaviours, as well as a further decreased birthrate.
• Not only femininity, but homosexuality was socially problematic, but given the basic nature of homosexuality—as we understand it to be today, as it as then, although they didn’t believe it to be—Naturalists and Decadents adhered to such “sexual deviance” as an expression of their own, albeit conflicted, philosophical positions.
• So we have, at this point, then, homosexuals, New Women, Decadents, Naturalists, scientists, all constituents of social change away from Mill’s “organic” society towards the chaos of the “critical,” fin-de-siècle ethos that might well be a harbinger of the destruction of mankind… or at least British society.

Naturalism

French artistic and thus literary philosophy

A bit about the connections between Duncan and Naturalism:

James and Howells in turn agreed with the French realist creed that “literature should convey the truth … not how things are conventionally perceived or traditionally idealized” (Pearson x).  Duncan concurred, admitting that “life should be represented as it is and not as we would like it to be” (Star).  Unlike the French naturalism and materialist realism James favoured—much of which consists of “little more than unreadable accounts of the squalid and the mundane” (Pearson xv)—Duncan “included as part of that reality transcendent values often associated with romance” (Dean 41), writing in 1886 that the “modern school of fiction … [deals] too exclusively in the corporealities of life to the utter and scornful neglect of its idealities” (Week).  Dean argues that Duncan’s blending of idealism and realism is a particularly Canadian literary trait (influenced perhaps by Turgenev and the “Russian realists”) (42-45), and presents Duncan not only as an inheritor of European and American literary ideologies, but as “one of the first significant advocates of literary realism in Canada” (41).

Duncan’s response to James and Howells exemplifies her position regarding artistic representation, a position reflected in her later response to Kipling.  In 1879, Henry James wrote that “Zola’s naturalism is ugly and dirty—but at least he is doing something” (Pearson vii).  Duncan disagreed with the value of “doing something which necessitated the depiction of the “ugly and dirty.”  In Zola’s The Masterpiece, Claude Lantier asks, in support of realism and naturalism:

“Wasn’t a bunch of carrots, yes, a bunch of carrots, studied directly and painted simply, personally, as you see it yourself, as good as any of the run-of-the-mill, made-to-measure ƒcole des Beaux-Arts stuff, painted with tobacco-juice?  The day was not far off when one solitary, original carrot might be pregnant with revolution.”  (41)

In 1887, Duncan responds to Howell’s rejection of the ideal using an interestingly parallel metaphor:

“A cabbage is a very essential vegetable to certain salads, but we do not prostrate ourselves adoringly before the cabbage in everyday life, and it is a little puzzling to know why we should be required to do so in art galleries and book stores, however perfect the representations there of cabbages, vegetable or human.”  (“Bric-a-Brac” 2)

In contrast to Duncan’s articulated belief in a necessary conjunction of idealism and realism, Kipling was extolled in 1899 for the naturalism Duncan rejects:

“Here is an author that writes of things as they are—not as they might be; of men who do the world’s work, dirty work, hard work, unpoetic work much of it—not of those who delude themselves and others into believing that matters are as they would like to have them.  He is perhaps more entirely sincere, more thoroughly free from hypocritic cant or shadow of self-deception than any writer now prominently before the public.”  (Lanier 390)

(Huenemann, “Art” 21-22)

Realism

While some contend that Naturalism is an extension of Realism, some see it the other way around… I believe it was cyclical:  Realism à la George Eliot and Middlemarch were mid-Victorian; Naturalism à la Zola, Balzac, and Huysmans were slightly later and certainly more pointedly aimed at shocking bourgeois sensibilities; American Realism à la Howells and James were a direct result of French Naturalism; Sara Jeannette Duncan’s uniquely Canadian position on these philosophies developed within the transitional period (1890-1912).

Decadence

Neitzsche on sexual love: “When we love a woman [ein Weib, a derogatory term], we easily conceive a hatred for nature on account of all the repulsive natural functions to which every woman is subject.  We prefer not to think of all this; but when our soul touches on these matters for once, it shrugs [as it were] impatiently and looks contemptuously at nature; we feel insulted; nature seems to encroach on our possessions, an with the profanest hand at that.  Then we refuse to pay any heed to physiology and decree secretly: ‘I want to hear nothing about the fact that a human being is something more than soul and form.’ ‘The human being under the skin’ is for all lovers a horror and unthinkable [ein Greuel und Ungedanke], a blasphemy against God ad love.” (qtd. in Bernheimer 22)

And Bernheimer brings it all together, I think, in this passage (56-57).

Works consulted

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

Huenemann, Karyn. “Art and Photography: Sara Jeannette Duncan’s Response to Kipling.” Victorian Review 21.1 (1995): 17-35.  Print.

Huenemann, Karyn. “From Lispeth to The Woman of Shamlegh: Rudyard Kipling, India, and Indian Women.” ICFAI Journal of Commonwealth Literature 1.1 (2009): 22-45.

Larson, Jil.  Ethics and the Narrative in the English Novel, 1880-1914.  Cambridge, UK: 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.  1990. London: Bloomsbury, 1991. Print.