PATER'S MOUTH

2010 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-64
Author(s):  
Matthew Kaiser
Keyword(s):  
Oscar Wilde ◽  
Walter Pater ◽  
The Sun ◽  
Same Sex ◽  
Falling In Love

At New College, Oxford, Lionel Johnsonhad a reputation for sleeping past noon. On Monday, April 15, 1889, the sun was high overhead when he boasted in a letter to his friend Campbell Dodgson of his intimacy with the elusive Walter Pater, at whose London house he had spent the weekend: “I lunched with Pater, dined with Pater, smoked with Pater, went to Mass with Pater and fell in love with Pater” (Roseliep 148). That all of these friendly activities – lunching, dining, smoking, taking Communion, and perhaps even falling in love – entail opening one's mouth, or at least loosening one's lips, suggests a connection, in Johnson's eyes, between Pater's well-documented powers to charm his audience and the oral susceptibility of that audience. Getting to know thetruePater, Johnson implies, is an oral affair. His conversations with Pater, their meals, his very sense of Pater, linger on his lips. Teachers open our eyes. But Pater opens Johnson's mouth. One is tempted to dismiss the letter to Dodgson, who, like Johnson, was same-sex oriented, as youthful homoerotic banter: a campy projection of Johnson's own ambivalent and mercurial appetites. A year later, after all, in a letter to his friend Arthur Galton, Johnson recounts a “mid-day” visit he received at Oxford – whilst “lying half asleep in bed” – from Oscar Wilde, who “laughed at Pater” and “consumed all my cigarettes” (Holland and Hart-Davis 423). “I am in love with him,” Johnson declares.

“BALLADS IN PROSE”: GENRE CROSSING IN LATE-VICTORIAN WOMEN'S WRITING

2006 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 619-629 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret D. Stetz
Keyword(s):  
Visual Arts ◽  
Oscar Wilde ◽  
Double Standard ◽  
Same Sex ◽  
Independent Contribution ◽  
New Women ◽  
Fictional Narratives ◽  
Production And Consumption ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Periodical Publishing

“Oh, it is indeed a burning shame that there would be one law for men and another law for women. I think that there should be no law for anybody” (Beckson, I Can Resist 100). So said Oscar Wilde to a journalist interviewing him in January 1895. And for the first five years of the 1890s, it looked as though the British literary and publishing worlds, at least, were increasingly in accord with this Wildean perspective. Texts challenging the double standard of heterosexual conduct proliferated, even as bold articulations of same-sex desire appeared. At the same time, laws of all sorts that governed the production and consumption of literature seemed to be struck down daily. The three-volume novel declined and, with it, the circulating libraries' law of conforming to Mudie's definition of the reading public's tastes. New Women and other new realists gleefully violated the laws that required fictional narratives to end with marriage or, indeed, to provide some version of closure. In the sphere of periodical publishing, the law demanding that the visual arts be subordinate to words vanished in April 1894 with the first issue of the Yellow Book. The Bodley Head's new quarterly proudly stated that “The pictures will in no case serve as illustrations to the letter-press, but each will stand by itself as an independent contribution” (Stetz and Lasner 8).

The Response of the Late Victorian Feminist Press to Same-Sex Desire Controversies

2019 ◽  
pp. 542-554
Author(s):  
Molly Youngkin
Keyword(s):  
Oscar Wilde ◽  
The Other ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Sexual Practices ◽  
Same Sex ◽  
Editorial Bias ◽  
Heterosexual Women ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Race And Sexuality ◽  
Amy Levy

Molly Youngkin’s essay investigates the heterosexism of a fin de siècle feminist newspaper, the Women’s Penny Paper (1894–99, later retitled the Women’s Herald and the Woman’s Signal), highlighting its treatment of three controversies: the Oscar Wilde trials, the death of poet Amy Levy, and the emergence of Sappho as a model of lesbian new womanhood. When the paper did address these controversies it ‘reshaped narratives about this [same-sex] desire to fit its own heterosexist agenda,’ responded in a disapproving way, or avoided a discussion of sexuality entirely (p. 543). The overall effect of this editorial bias was to pursue an ‘overarching agenda of advocating for heterosexual women’ and to reinforce social purity debates about ‘the effects of men’s sexual practices on heterosexual women and their families’ (p. 544). These feminist papers thus constructed the ‘other’ in ways that upheld restrictive conventions of race and sexuality while claiming to be vehicles of progressive thought.

The Decadent Imagination

2018 ◽  
pp. 189-220
Author(s):  
Laura Eastlake
Keyword(s):  
Detailed Analysis ◽  
Oscar Wilde ◽  
Roman History ◽  
Walter Pater ◽  
George Moore

This chapter examines how aesthetes and decadents staked a competing claim to those Roman narratives of corruption and contagion outlined in Chapter 7. Beginning with a detailed analysis of Marius the Epicurean (1885), it shows how Walter Pater and his contemporaries sought to delink aestheticism from Gibbonian narratives of decline and fall, and to reclaim aesthetic masculinity from associations of moral and masculine deviance. The second part examines decadent authors such as Oscar Wilde, Villiers de L’Isle Adam, and George Moore, who adopted an equally recuperative, though more controversial approach to the ancient Roman past. Revelling in the more illicit and disturbing aspects of Roman history with a playfully self-parodic humour which is typical of the movement as a whole, and frequently voicing their affinity with the most notorious of Roman emperors—Nero—decadent writers appear be invested in a very genuine attempt to disassociate decadent ideologies from Gibbonian models of degeneration and decline.

Decadence

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raphaël Ingelbien
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
French Literature ◽  
Oscar Wilde ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Walter Pater ◽  
Late 19Th Century ◽  
Art Historians ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
Art For Art's Sake

Decadence was a word used to refer, often disparagingly, to late-19th-century European writers and artists whose credo of ‘‘art for art’s sake’’ (Dictionary of Art Historians) went hand in hand with an open disdain for morality and for the values of their own societies. Often associated with modern French literature and its influence, decadent tendencies were observed in many different countries. In England, its main representatives were Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) and various figures who were inspired by French examples and by the aestheticism of Walter Pater (1839–1894). Its main features were a cult of beauty, refinement and artificiality; a fascination for the paradoxical, the bizarre, the exotic and the perverse; and an iconoclastic attitude towards dominant values. While manifestations of decadence did earn a place in fin-de-siècle London culture, the phenomenon did not survive the spectacular fall of Oscar Wilde in 1895, but some of its ideas and attitudes point forward to modernism.

Art and the Literary

2014 ◽  
pp. 636-656 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hilary Fraser
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Oscar Wilde ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
Walter Pater ◽  
John Ruskin ◽  
Periodical Press ◽  
Dante Gabriel Rossetti ◽  
Illustrated Books ◽  
Word And Image ◽  
Victorian Period

This essay explores the creative dialogue between practices of writing, reading, and viewing in the Victorian period evident from the proliferation of new or greatly enhanced intermedial forms: illustrated books and magazines; narrative and genre paintings; pictures with accompanying texts; the portrait as an experimental literary form; fiction about art; ekphrastic poetry; and the new genre of art literature. It asks, what were the historical conditions for this extraordinary syncopation of word and image, writing and seeing? How do we understand the dynamically transformative contexts (a vastly expanding periodical press, new and diversified exhibition cultures, widening opportunities for travel) within which such visual/textual hybrids and doublings were produced and consumed, and in what ways were they constitutive of modernity? The chapter reflects upon ‘visuality’ as a nineteenth-century coinage, and the concept of ‘translation’ between media, discussing work by Frederic Leighton, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Ruskin, Walter Pater, and Oscar Wilde.

Parodies of the Pre-Raphaelite Ballad Refrain

2016 ◽  
Vol 71 (2) ◽  
pp. 227-255 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carolyn Williams
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
Meaning Making ◽  
Gradual Increase ◽  
Oscar Wilde ◽  
Walter Pater ◽  
Making Meaning ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries ◽  
Narrative Progression

Carolyn Williams, “Parodies of the Pre-Raphaelite Ballad Refrain” (pp. 227–255) Parodies of literary ballads changed over the course of the nineteenth century, as did their implicit commentaries on practices of poetic revival in general. In the 1870s and 1880s a focused reaction against the Pre-Raphaelite ballad refrain has much to show us about the function of the refrain, which operates as a timing device yet also guides a gradual increase in the ballad’s incrementally modulated sense of pain, making meaning by turning away from narrative progression and meaning-making. Debates about the poetics of revival, a subject across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, culminate in the great theorizations of Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde, who both comment on the ballad refrain. The dynamics of literary history may also be illuminated by this attention to parodies of the ballad refrain, for the role of the refrain within any given ballad may be seen as homologous to the role of parody within literary history—simultaneously interrupting, turning away, and binding a sense of continuity. This essay glances at the ballads of “Bon Gaultier” (1845) and demonstrates the general parodic interest in—and defenses of—the Pre-Raphaelite ballad refrain later in the century, before attending to parodies of D. G. Rossetti’s “Sister Helen” (1870, 1881) by Robert Buchanan in 1871 and Henry Duff Traill in 1882.

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