Art and Life in Aestheticism pp 79-95 | Cite as
Aesthetic Vampirism: Pater, Wilde, and the Concept of Irony
Abstract
This chapter considers the criticism and fiction of Pater and Wilde according to the decadent symbol of the vampire, in which aestheticism appears to literally embrace the inhuman. Its central argument is that during the evolution of nineteenth-century aestheticism the vampire came to embody the concept of irony: this was a paradoxical embodiment, since it is the very nature of irony to turn against the embodied figure and the nature of the ironist to perform his own detachment from expressive forms. My second and related argument is that the ironic condition of aesthetic vampirism is related to the status of the art-object in modernity—independent from devotional or instructional purposes, from fixed tradition or home and, for Baudelaire or Wilde, from morality and realist imitation. By insisting on this autonomy, aestheticism risked the identification of art as an aristocratic posture of irony, its detachment manifested as an icy reserve, a refusal to manifest itself in the public sphere comparable to the vampire’s refusal of daylight. The autonomy of art was both a freedom and danger, but taken to its extreme, the insistence on aesthetic independence might give birth to the inhuman. Articulating such an anxiety in the wake of modernism Ortega y Gasset described a “dehumanization of art” induced mutually by the idea of the autonomous object and the destructive attitude to traditional art, a tendency which left avant-gardists “doomed to irony” (Ortega y Gasset 46).
Keywords
Ironic Condition Modern Idea Negative Dialectic Autonomous Object Aesthetic EducationPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Works Cited
- Agacinski, Sylviane. Aparté: Conceptions and Deaths of Søren Kierkegaard. Trans. Kevin Newmark. Tallahassee: Florida State University Press, 1988.Google Scholar
- Baudelaire, Charles. The Flowers of Evil. Trans. James McGowan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993.Google Scholar
- Baudelaire, Charles. The Painter of Modern Life & Other Essays, ed. and trans. Jonathan Mayne. London, New York: Phaidon, 1964.Google Scholar
- Beckson, Karl. Oscar Wilde: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge, 1997.Google Scholar
- Brake, Laurel. “The Entangling Dance: Pater after Marius, 1885–1891.” Walter Pater: Transparencies of Desire. Brake, Williams, et al. University of North Carolina, Greensboro: ELT Press, 2002 (24–36).Google Scholar
- De Man, Paul. Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism. London: Methuen 1983.Google Scholar
- Dowling, Linda. The Vulgarization of Art: The Victorians and Aesthetic Democracy. Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1996.Google Scholar
- Gagnier, Regenia, “Evolution and Information, or Eroticism and Everyday Life, in Dracula and Late Victorian Aestheticism”, in Regina Barreca (ed.) Sex and Death in Victorian Literature. London: Macmillan, 1990.Google Scholar
- Gibson, Mathew, Dracula and the Eastern Question: British and French Vampire Narratives of the Nineteenth-Century Near East. Houndsmills: Palgrave, 2006.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
- Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Goethe’s Literary Essays, a Selection in English. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1921.Google Scholar
- Hegel, G.W.F. Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art. Trans. T.M. Knox, 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
- Kandola, Sondeep, Gothic Britain: Nation, Race; Culture and Criticism, 1707–1907. Manchester: Manchester U.P., 2008.Google Scholar
- Kierkegaard, Søren. The Concept of Irony, with continual reference to Socrates, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989.Google Scholar
- Moretti, Franco. Signs Taken for Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of Literary Forms. Trans. Susan Fischer, David Forgacs and David Miller. London: Verso, 2005.Google Scholar
- Nordau, Max. Degeneration. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993 [ 1895 ].Google Scholar
- O’Hara, Daniel T. The Romance of Interpretation: Visionary Criticism from Pater to de Man. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985.Google Scholar
- Ortega y Gasset, Jose. The Dehumanisation of Art and Notes on the Novel. Trans. Helene Weyl. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1948.Google Scholar
- Paglia, Camille. Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson. London: Penguin, 1992.Google Scholar
- Pater, Walter. Appreciations, with an Essay on Style. London: Macmillan, 1889.Google Scholar
- Pater, Walter. Miscellaneous Studies: A Series of Essays, ed. Charles L. Shadwell. London: Macmillan, 1895.Google Scholar
- Pater, Walter. The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, ed. Donald Hill. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1980.Google Scholar
- Pater, Walter. “Winckelmann.” The Westminster Review, January 1867, Volume 31, pp. 80–110.Google Scholar
- Schlegel, Friedrich von. Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde and the Fragments, trans. Peter Firchow. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1971.Google Scholar
- Wallen, Jeffrey. “Alive in the Grave: Walter Pater’s Renaissance.” ELH. 66.4 (Winter 1999): 1033–51.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
- Wilde, Oscar. “The Critic as Artist,” Collected Edition: Intentions and the Soul of Man under Socialism, ed. Robert Ross. London: Methuen, 1908 (97–224).Google Scholar
- Wilde, Oscar. “The Decay of Lying,” Collected Edition: Intentions and the soul of Man under Socialism, ed. Robert Ross. London: Methuen, 1908 (3–57).Google Scholar
- Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994.Google Scholar
- Williams, Carolyn. Transfigured World: Walter Pater’s Aesthetic Historicism. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1989.Google Scholar