“Un estado de la conciencia contemporánea”: género y moral en La sirena negra de Emilia Pardo Bazán

Despite Emilia Pardo Bazán’s prominent feminism, La sirena negra has been strangely overlooked by gender studies. When the novel was published in 1908, Gómez de Baquero judged it “non feminist” due to its superficial heroines and the centrality of its complex masculine characters. Academic studies of La sirena negra have not refuted this idea, since they have elided gender approaches to focus on its decadent aesthetics. This article argues, on the contrary, that the novel’s androcentrism can be read as a Pardo Bazan’s strategy to appropriate the patriarchal discourse and hold it responsible for national degeneration. Emilia Pardo Bazán was harshly affected by the fin-de-siècle crisis. In her opinion, Spanish decay came from a lack of solid morality. Thus, Catholic principles should be restored because they would provide the autoregulation mechanisms to regenerate and reassemble the country. Literature should show the new reality, and the French roman psychologique provided her with an appropriate model. La sirena negra sets out the problem of the moral anomie through its protagonist, Gaspar de Montenegro. The analysis of his sexuality and gender performance reveals the danger of this amoral behavior for the degeneration of society, attributed ultimately to the patriarchal order and the androcentric discourse.

An Ecocritical Perspective on the Vital Forces of Decay

The modern decadent tradition began to form around the same time that ecology emerged as a recognized scientific field. The essentialist biologism at the historical root of decadence meshed with the interest that cultural theorists and artists of the nineteenth century had in models of society as an organically coherent, self-regulating system. Turning to conceptions of decay in Charles Baudelaire’s poetry and Oscar Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890/1891), this article addresses the authors’ ecological understanding of themselves as humans and as artists, and of the place of decadent aesthetics within the biological world itself. This essay foregrounds not the scientific knowledge the authors had regarding decay, fungi, or rot, but the ontological perspective through which ecological models of engagement and influence permeate their decadent works.

Morbid Vitalism

This essay frames Djuna Barnes’s 1936 novel Nightwood as an attempt to overcome an impasse between the discourses of hope and the discourses of despair in an interwar period in many ways preoccupied with questions of mortality. Synthesizing Decadent aesthetics and elements of Spinoza’s vitalist philosophy, Barnes produces a “morbid vitalism,” exemplified by Dr. Matthew O’Connor, by which life and death are conceived as variant expressions of a single force, and the subject is modeled as an assemblage of affects, impersonal but inherently social, that can be understood primarily through its pursuit of what Jack Halberstam has called “generative models of failure.” In exploring this mode of subjectivity, Barnes seeks to undermine a host of ostensible oppositions (hope and fear, ascendence and decadence, success and failure, morbidity and vitality), opening up a conceptual and affective space for thinking through—if not necessarily beyond—the ubiquity of despair in twentieth-century modernity. Ultimately, morbid vitalism points a way toward a broader conversation between life-oriented modernist scholarship on vitalism and affect, on the one hand, and ongoing inquiries into the relationship among death, Decadence, and modernism, on the other.

Taking Wilde to Sri Lanka and Beardsley to Harlem: Decadent Practice, Race, and Orientalism

This article examines the reworking of decadence by writers of color in the early twentieth century, focusing on the uses to which the Harlem Renaissance writer Richard Bruce Nugent and the Sri Lankan writer Lionel de Fonseka put decadent style while engaging in anticolonial critique and contesting rigid categories of power and identity. I read the implementation of decadent aesthetics by Nugent and de Fonseka as a form of criticism that teases out the troubles and potentialities of thinking race and empire through the lens of decadence.

Alexey Remizov in the symbolist magazine “Vesy”: to the history of cooperation

The paper reveals the history of the relations of Alexey M. Remizov’s and the symbolists’ magazine “Vesy” (1903–1909) in the context of the periodical editorial policy and from the standpoint of the artist’s aesthetic values. The documentary basis of Remizov’s relationship with the magazine’s board can be considered his correspondence with Valery Bryusov, as well as fragments of the epistolary heritage of both a personal nature (letters to his wife Seraphima Remizova-Dovgello) and official correspondence with leading employees of St. Petersburg press. The contacts of the novice writer with Moscow and St. Petersburg symbolists, his gradual entry into the circle of modernist writers contributed to some extent to the formation of his artistic guidelines and poetics of his works in the framework of decadent aesthetics. Invited by Valery Bryusov, Remizov published the reviews of the cultural life in the provinces and in the capital for several years, most often anonymously, in the magazine’s sections “Chronicle,” “On Life,” and “Miscellaneous”. His literary works sent to the editorial board did not pass the censorship and were not accepted for publication because of the hostile attitude of the magazine’s owner S. A. Polyakov. Remizov’s attempts to become a permanent member of the “Vesy” staff for six years did not yield a positive outcome. However, they showed the independence of the author’s position from the editorial policy of the magazine in his choice of artistic priorities and contributed to the formation of the writer’s literary person-ality outside the ideological and aesthetic program of the symbolists.