ENL 6256 WILDE, BEARDSLEY, & THE AESTHETICIZATION OF LATE-VICTORIAN SEXUAL POLITICS

This course will have two central focuses: (1) to investigate how some of the key myths, movements, and figurations in late-Victorian culture — particularly various narratives of Degeneration, Aestheticism, the Religion of Art, and the rhetoric of the grotesque — transfigured concepts of “masculine” and “feminine” (and of heterosocial and homosocial relationships); and (2) to investigate the ways in which texts in two different media (written language and visual art) — created by figures of ostensibly similar ideologies — nonetheless varied in representing those transfigurations (beyond the different formal properties of the media).  It is by now a commonplace that traditional Victorian gender definitions — such as the presumed  natural transition of males from Public-School athleticism to roles as managers of Empire and exemplars of nationhood; and the “proper” role of females as “Angels of the House” and exemplars of the Feminine Ideal — were problematized by, on the one hand, equally traditional homosexual “dalliances,” Gentleman’s-Club refuges, and the institution of prostitution, and, on the other hand, the increasing focus on the New Woman and the Woman Question. 

Since it is generally agreed that Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley were the two most iconic figures of the Victorian fin de siècle, Wilde’s texts and Beardsley’s images will constitute the core sources for text-image comparisons, although we will also examine the works of many other figures.  The reading includes Victorian articles about the pressing social and cultural issues of the time, contemporary (Victorian) aesthetic criticism on art and aesthetics, influential paintings, short fiction by Victoria Cross, George Egerton [Mary Chavelita Dunne], and Ella D’Arcy, Beardsley’s pictures, Beardsley’s unfinished semi-pornographic novella, Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray and his major plays (Salome, Lady Windermere’s Fan, A Woman of No Importance, An Ideal Husband, and The Importance of Being Earnest), as well as some twentieth-century scholarship.
 

Program Status:  This course can be applied toward fulfilling part of the requirements for several possible program “tracks,” including but not limited to the Victorian Studies and Cultural Studies program tracks.