The eroticism of artificial flesh in Villiers de L'Isle Adam's L'Eve Future

Villiers de L'Isle Adam's 'L'Eve Future' published in 1886 features a fictional version of the inventor Thomas Edison who constructs a complex, custom-made android for Englishman Lord Ewald as a substitute for his unsatisfactory lover. Hadaly, the android, has a number of literary and cultural precursors and successors. Her most commonly accepted ancestor is Olympia in E. T. A. Hoffmann's 'The Sandman' (1816) and among her fascinating descendants are Oskar Kokoschka's 'Silent Woman'; Model Borghild, a sex doll designed by German technicians during World War II;‘Caracas' in Tommaso Landolfi's short story ‘Gogol's Wife' (1954); a variety of gynoids and golems from the realms of science fiction, including Ira Levin's 'Stepford Wives' (1972); and, most recently, that silicon masterpiece - the Real Doll. All, arguably, have their genesis in the classical myth of Pygmalion. This essay considers the tension between animation and stasis in relation to this myth, and explores the necrophiliac aesthetic implicit in Villiers's novel

Occultism and the homme fatal in Robert Smythe Hichens’s Flames: A London Phantasy

Decadent literature is often characterized by lives lived at the fringes of convention. While the intersections between Victorian literature and the supernatural in its various forms have been the topic of considerable discussion, the presence and function of occultism in Decadent literature remain relatively underexplored. In contrast, occultism’s contribution to modernist literature and culture has received continued attention, most recently in John Bramble’s Modernism and the Occult(2015) and in Tessel M. Baudin and Henrik Johnsson’s collection, The Occult in Modernist Art, Literature, and Cinema(2018). The existing lacuna in Decadence Studies is particularly surprising given that Decadent literature, with its noted focus on the strange and the curious, lends itself to such critical scrutiny. This essay is the first to examine how the homme fatal– a key Decadent trope notoriously explored in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray(1890-91) – sits at the intersections between Decadence, occultism, and homoerotic desire in Robert Smythe Hichens’s Flames: A London Phantasy(1897). Here I argue that, though Hichens is best known for The Green Carnation(1894), the homosocial and homoerotic triangulations of desire in Hichens’s Flamesimply that Wilde’s novel had a far more serious impact on Hichens’s writing than his scandalous parody might suggest.

Orientalist Aestheticism: Vernon Lee, Carlo Gozzi, and the Venetian Fairy Comedy

Vernon Lee’s relationship with Venice might be described as troublesome yet productive. It informed a variety of her works including Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy (1880), her erudite history of Italian culture which includes chapters on Venetian theatre that focus on Carlo Goldoni and Carlo Gozzi; A Wicked Voice’, a disturbing story of musical possession that appears in her 1890 collection, Hauntings: Fantastic Stories, in which a nineteenth-century composer becomes obsessed with the voice of an eighteenth-century singer; her novella Lady Tal (1892), a light-hearted satire in the realist mode; and The Prince of the Hundred Soups (1883), a children’s story that uses stock characters from the commedia dell’arte to tell the tale of  an opera singer, Signora Olimpia Fantastici, and her adventures in ‘Bobbio’, a watery city that can only be Venice

Grown-up toys: aesthetic forms and transitional objects in Vernon Lee's supernatural tales.

PhDThis thesis examines the fantastic tales of the marginalized writer Vernon Lee (Violet Paget 1856-1935), focusing on such confections as Hauntings: Fantastic Stories (1890), Pope Jacynth and Other Fantastic Stories (1904), and For Maurice: Five Unlikely Stories (1927). It traces the influence of European Romantics such as Hoffmann and Heine on her writings and juxtaposes Lee's work with that of fin-de-siecle contemporaries such as Walter Pater, Henry James, and Oscar Wilde. Her stories often depend on the supernatural properties of art objects for their uncanny effect, and this study traces the contradiction between Lee's concern with form in her aesthetic treatises, and the 'formless' and metamorphic qualities of the 'ghostly' objects that come to fife in her works. The resultant conflict is explored in the context of D. W. Winnicott's 'transitional object' theory which suggests that a child's subjectivity is formed in a 'potential space', a space existing in a developmental 'limbo' in which the child plays with items or toys while negotiating its separation from the mother, and recognizing its individuality. According to Winnicott, in adulthood, this childhood process is re-experienced in the illusory realm of art and cultural objects. With this premise in mind, this thesis argues that, in Lee's tales, the supernatural functions as a 'potential space" in which Lee 'plays' with the art object or 'toy' in order to explore alternative subjectivities that allow the expression of her lesbian subjectivity. Using an interdisciplinary approach which combines literature with psychology, aesthetics, mythology, religion, and social history, this thesis demonstrates the contemporary validity of Lee's tales, and its importance for the study of gender and sexuality in the nineteenth-century fin de siecle

Vernon Lee: Decadence, Morality, and Interart Aestheticism

This collection of essays ensued from ‘Vernon Lee 2019’, an international conference held to mark the centenary of Lee’s return to her Italian home, Villa Il Palmerino, after enforced exile during World War I. While Lee emerged as a significant writer in the heady atmosphere of late nineteenth-century Aestheticism and decadence, she continued to publish extensively throughout the first three decades of the twentieth century. Between 1900 and her death in 1935, she produced a wealth of new material in a variety of genres including travel writing, novels, philosophical and aesthetic treatises, and compilations of supernatural fiction. As the new century dawned, she also became politically active; in the years leading up to World War I, her polemical pacifist articles appeared in the periodical press and she wrote an important anti-war morality play, The Ballet of the Nations: A Present-Day Morality (1915). In Beauty and Ugliness (1912) and The Beautiful (1913), she took criticism in exciting new directions, focusing on the developing field of ‘psychological aesthetics’; experimented with literary analysis in The Handling of Words (1923); and consolidated a lifelong interest in musicology in Music and its Lovers (1932). &nbsp

Introduction

This volume marks the first sustained study to interrogate how and why issues of sexuality, desire, and economic processes intersect in the literature and culture of the Victorian fin de siècle. At the end of the nineteenth-century, the move towards new models of economic thought marked the transition from a marketplace centred around the fulfilment of ‘needs’ to one ministering to anything that might, potentially, be desired. This collection considers how the literature of the period meditates on the interaction between economy and desire, doing so with particular reference to the themes of fetishism, homoeroticism, the literary marketplace, social hierarchy, and consumer culture. Drawing on theoretical and conceptual approaches including queer theory, feminist theory, and gift theory, contributors offer original analyses of work by canonical and lesser-known writers, including Oscar Wilde, A.E. Housman, Baron Corvo, Vernon Lee, Michael Field, and Lucas Malet

Marmoreal sisterhoods:classical statuary in nineteenth-century women’s writing

This article examines the deployment of statuary in nineteenth-century women’s poetry. It considers the importance of classical sculpture in the work of the Romantic writer Felicia Hemans before proceeding to examine its significance in poems by later Irish and American poets including Frances Sargent Osgood, Emily Henrietta Hickey, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Eliza C. Hall, Henrietta Cordelia Ray, and Emma Lazarus. Focusing primarily on the Pygmalion myth and how it is overtly or covertly evoked in their works, it argues that their literary engagement with sculpture permits ways in which mythical women, in particular Pygmalion’s Galatea, may be reclaimed and reinvented for subversive and liberatory purposes

‘A Girl's Love’: Lord Alfred Douglas as Homoerotic Muse in the Poetry of Olive Custance

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Women: a Cultural Review on 15/09/2011, available online: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09574042.2011.585045.This article explores the relationship between the poet Olive Custance and her husband Lord Alfred Douglas, arguing that Custance constructed Douglas as a male muse figure in her poetry, particularly the sequence ‘Songs of a Fairy Princess’ (Rainbows 1902). The introduction sets out Custance's problematic historical positioning as a ‘decadent’ poet who published nothing following the Great War, but whose work came too late to fit into strictly ‘fin de siècle’ categories. I suggest, however, that Custance's oscillating constructions of gender and sexuality make her more relevant to the concerns of modernity than has previously been acknowledged and her work anticipates what is now termed ‘queer’. The first main section of the article traces the cultural background of the fin de siècle male muse, arguing that Custance's key influences—male homoerotic writers such as Wilde and Pater—meant it was logical that she should imagine the muse as male, despite the problems associated with gender-reversals of the muse-poet relationship which have been identified by several feminist critics. I then move on to focus specifically on how Shakespearean discourses of gender performance and cross-dressing played a key role in Custance and Douglas's courtship, as they exchanged the fluid roles of ‘Prince’, ‘Princess’ and ‘Page’. The penultimate section of the article focuses on discourses of fairy tale and fantasia in Custance's ‘Songs of a Fairy Princess’ sequence, in which these fantasy roles contribute to a construction of Douglas as a feminised object, and the relationship between the ‘Prince’ and ‘Princess’ is described in terms of narcissistic sameness. My paper concludes by tracing the demise of Custance and Douglas's relationship; as Douglas attempted to be more ‘manly’, he sought to escape the role of object, resulting in Custance losing her male muse. But her sexually-dissident constructions of the male muse remain important experiments worthy of critical attention