Abstracts Philosophy, Religion, and Theology

The contagion of life : Rossetti, Pater, Wilde, and the aestheticist body

by Stephen Weninger

Many studies of the Aesthetic Movement still presume it was fundamentally an idealist over-evaluation of art. It has even been stated that the logical consummation of its premises is not only an unethical ahistoricism but fascism. This dissertation argues that these cultural productions, highly responsive to the new biologies, focused on the human body. As such, Aestheticism was no ivory-tower cult of art, but a gesture of ideological rebellion against the era's underlying myths of determinism and human perfectibility. Chapter one demonstrates how Rossetti's "Jenny," an interior monologue of a scholar before a sleeping prostitute, foregrounds the body as such and how it subverts the courtly love tradition Rossettian texts seemingly support. The next chapter argues that the painting Dantis Amor similarly dramatizes the lover's melancholy before the intransigent body. Chapter three, a broad reading of Pater's texts, contends that his numerous images of malady and his various grotesquerie are central to his material aesthetics. His short story, "Sebastian van Storck," studied in the following section, typically critiques all philosophies which would abstract corporeality. Chapter five discusses the early modernist turn towards a healthy, masculine aesthetic, against Aestheticism's "decadent" and "effeminate" art. This reactionary strain is discerned in the new Glaskultur , from avant-garde manifestoes to fictional texts like Herbert Read's The Green Child . The important issues of social ideology raised here are the subject of the remaining pages. First, I explore the neglected links between Victorian Hellenism, the ascendant theories of "Aryanism," and Prussian classicism. The Aestheticist body, I suggest, was an ignored counterweight to this fantasized affiliation, an imagined anatomy which would play a crucial role in the barbarity of the fascist biocracy. The final chapter contrasts the depth model of the body which structures nineteenth-century idealism, high modernism and fascist aesthetics with the palimpsest model favored by Rossetti, Pater and Wilde. Aestheticism attempted to work out a poetics (and by implication a politics) of the diseased, heterogeneous body as opposed to the "healthy" and "transparent" Victorian body which found new life in early modern thought and ultimately in the corporeal politics of fascism.