“If ever an age called for the kind of self-conscious maximalism pioneered by Wilde, Baudelaire and Huysmans, it is ours. Instead, we are beset with dreary naturalism.”
I’ve decided to do something a bit different with my Poisonous Books course next year. Traditionally, I’ve ever taught Decadent fin de siecle literature or followed the trail of evil books set by Max Nordau’s Degeneration, but this time around I will be addressing the notion of scandalous literary content in a more broad view.
The books I’m adopting are Rhoda Broughton’s Cometh Up a Flower (a sensation novel scandalous for its honest depiction of female sexual desire), H.G. Wells’s Island of Doctor Moreau (a nexus point for anxieties about racial degeneration, scientific advancement, and evolutionary theory), William Harris Ainsworth’s Jack Sheppard (decried as a celebration of criminality; “I love the romance of crime,” quips Morrissey), Michael Field’s Decadent and Sapphic poetry, and Thomas Love Peacocks’s Nightmare Abbery (a burlesque on the corrosive effects of the Gothic novel and the too-passionate Romantic worldview).
Image of an unused title piece for Les Fleurs du Mal by Felix Bracquemond.
The Two Good Sisters
Debauchery and Death are two lovable girls,
Lavish with their kisses and rich with health,
Whose ever-virgin loins, draped with tattered clothes and
Burdened with constant work, have never given birth.
To the sinister poet, foe of families,
Poorly paid courtier, favorite of hell,
Graves and brothels show beneath their bowers
A bed in which remorse has never slept.
The bier and the alcove, fertile in blasphemies
Like two good sisters, offer to us in turn
Terrible pleasures and frightful sweetness.
When will you bury me, Debauch with the filthy arms?
Death, her rival in charms, when will you come
To graft black cypress on her infected myrtle?
- Charles Baudelaire
I’m teaching selections from Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal today. Sometimes I really do have the best job.
I once taught Lautreamont’s Led Chants de Maldoror in a class on Decadent literature. I was told that this was hubris, pure folly, and the Maldoror was simply unteachable, but my students took to it fairly well and had some very provocative commentary on it!
Maldoror
Georges Antoine Rochegrosse, A Portrait of Sarah Bernhardt Reclining in a Chinois Interior.
(Source: thefindesiecle)
“The burlesque poetess is entirely me, including the gender performance, so she is capable of laughing at all those things growing up as an awkward queerish lady. I celebrate them and hopefully others feel a little freed too. I’m not a dainty flower when I perform; I feel like a little girl pulling her dress up over her head at church or temple. My priorities lie in hedonism and debauchery.”
Spiritual Front, “Darkroom Friendship”
Decadent, Eurotrashy, and perfect for the sticky nights of summer.
This is a darkroom friendship † A friendship made of flesh and lust
