Abstract
This chapter examines intersections of mobility and health as aesthetic effects in selected poems by Oscar Wilde, Arthur Symons, and Michael Field. It traces interconnections between the maladie fin de siècle—a metaphor evoked by opponents as well as advocates of literary Decadence—and poetic renditions of dance as erratic, anti-progressive forms of mobility. The first section discusses the pathological terminology employed by fin-de-siècle critics such as Max Nordau and Arthur Symons and introduces dance as a Decadent trope and form of mobility. In a second step, Stefanie John demonstrates how Wilde, Symons, and Field render Decadent mobilities into form. By combining strange modes of agitation, paralysis, and circularity, their dance poems flirt with medical understandings of fin-de-siècle culture and playfully subvert Victorian paradigms of acceleration, regularisation, and progress. The chapter provides fresh re-examinations of Wilde’s “The Harlot’s House” (1885), Symons’s “The Street-Singer” (1889), “Prologue” (1895), and “La Mélinite: Moulin Rouge” (1895) from the point of view of medicine and mobility, and it reveals previously unacknowledged intertextual links between these works and Field’s less canonical lyric “The Iris Was Yellow, the Moon Was Pale” (1893).
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Notes
- 1.
In 2019, a symposium at Birkbeck School of Arts in London, titled “La Maladie Fin de Siècle: Decadence and Disease”, critically investigated the medical dimensions of the Decadent movement.
- 2.
In Chap. 9 Catherine Cox and Hilary Marland discuss the cultural connotations of general paralysis of the insane (GPI) in more detail.
- 3.
- 4.
Turn-of-the-century sociologists followed similar lines of argumentation. In “The Metropolis and Mental Life”, first published in 1903, Georg Simmel observes: “The psychological basis of the metropolitan type of individuality consists in the intensification of nervous stimulation which results from the swift and uninterrupted change of outer and inner stimuli” (2004, 13; emphasis in original).
- 5.
In her essay on Symons’s and Stéphane Mallarmé’s dance poetry, Katharina Herold argues that these poets “consciously play with kinesthetics to actively engage their readers in a sensory experience” (2017, 141).
- 6.
For a detailed reading of “A Dance of Death”, see Richardson (2011).
- 7.
Following Thain and Vadillo (2009), who reprint a selection of poems from the first edition of Underneath the Bough (1893), and other modern commentators, I refer to first lines of the poems as titles.
- 8.
Wilde related the aesthetic interest in London’s fog to the rise of impressionism in the visual arts, an assessment which Nordau took all too literally: “[Wilde] asserts, however, that painters have changed the climate, that for the last ten years there have been fogs in London, because the Impressionists have painted fogs—a statement so silly as to require no refutation. It is sufficient to characterise it as artistic mysticism” (1895, 322). For a comprehensive account of the phenomenon of the “pea souper”, see Corton (2015).
- 9.
- 10.
The chapters by Sally Shuttleworth and Heidi Liedke in this collection explore similar modes of alternative nineteenth-century mobilities that counter this culture of mechanisation and acceleration.
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John, S. (2023). A “Feverish Restlessness”: Dance as Decadent Mobility in Late Victorian Poetry. In: Dinter, S., Schäfer-Althaus, S. (eds) Medicine and Mobility in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, History, and Culture. Studies in Mobilities, Literature, and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-17020-1_8
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