Decadence as Scientific Fulfillment

Abstract

This essay challenges two established critical assumptions about late Victorian literary decadence: first, that decadence represented a sterile and ultimately failed attempt to defy social and cultural norms and, second, that the movement was antithetical to the scientific culture of the nineteenth century. Decadence is instead shown to be the logical consequence of a scientific spirit that, by the end of the century, increasingly ignored the demands of utilitarianism and fixated on the pursuit of experimental knowledge for its own sake, regardless of the consequences. Thus, the “failures” of the subject that so frequently mark the end of accounts of decadence such as Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, Collins's Heart and Science, and Machen's The Great God Pan represent the triumph of a historically specific experimental ethos that valued the transcendence of conventional epistemology over the discovery of useful knowledge.