Decadent Experience: Conservatism and Modernity

Abstract

At the core of literary decadence is a conflicted relationship with modernity. For some decadent writers, the onset of rapid social and technological change could usher in possibilities for living and loving in hitherto unimagined ways, yet for others of a more conservative hue, modernization was to be rejected, tradition embraced. This essay argues that experience can be used as a framework for articulating these very different forms of decadence. The essay begins with an exploration of aesthetic modernity as an attempt to articulate the shock of the new, whereby the experience (present) or sensation becomes the ground for the erosion of collective tradition (experience past). Decadent and aestheticist writers such as Walter Pater, Arthur Symons, and Oscar Wilde embraced these new experiences, rejecting the “fruits of experience” as a ground for knowledge. In contradistinction to this valorization of sensation, I examine the “conservative” decadent aesthetic of Lionel Johnson and Michael Field. These writers’ embrace of nostalgia and jingoistic nationalism, I argue, demands we expand our current critical frameworks to more fully encompass the politics of decadence.