Inspiring Older Readers

posted on 04 Jun 2018

Cultural Politics at the Fin de Siecle edited by Sally Ledger and Scott McCracken

Published by Cambridge University Press these collections of themed essays for an academic audience are always a bit of a hit and miss affair for the non-academic or lay reader. There’s an art to reading them which involves picking your way carefully through those essay titles that catch your fancy and being prepared to jettison those that are written in some kind of impenetrable jargonese.

The period at the end of the 19th century which is often referred to as the fin de siècle is a period which I find fascinating – it’s a time period that encompasses the Decadent and Aesthetic Movements as well as some extraordinary politics. Interestingly enough, the editors of this book decided to bring this collection together at the end of the 20th century with the specific intention of drawing out the similarities between the two ages.

In studies of the art, literature and politics of the fin de siècle there has been a tendency, noted here by the editors and in Terry Eagleton’s opening essay, 'The flight to the real', to see this era as essentially transient and insubstantial – a holding moment between ages. However, Eagleton’s scene-setting opening contribution makes the case for something much more interesting than that. In fact his argument is that what we might call the 1990s version of fin de siècle was in reality a far more anaemic entity than its 19th century counterpart:

"For what characterised that earlier era was an astonishing amalgam of spiritual and material ferment: the boisterous elegance of the new political forces, to be sure, but also a veritable transformation of subjectivity, as the high-rationalist subject of Mill or Middlemarch gradually imploded into Madam Blavatsky and Dorian Gray."

This was then a time for breaking free and for experimentation, of questioning moral codes and for political insurrection at the national and personal levels. Sally Ledger’s excellent essay 'The New Woman and the crisis of Victorianism' explores the ideas of female emancipation that got lumped under this prevalent idea of the emerging ‘new woman’ and she argues that "the recurrent theme of the cultural politics of the fin de siècle was instability, and gender was arguably the most destabilizing category."

I found Ledger’s analysis of the interface between the feminism espoused by those who took on the identity of The New Woman and women working for the emerging socialist causes that would consolidate around the trade union movement and the Labour Party, particularly fascinating and it opened my eyes to the inherent conflicts that characterised movements that history now tends to cast as inter-connected and symbiotic.

There’s a very good essay by Stephen Regan on the 1890s incarnation of W.B.Yeats and his relationship with the Celtic Twilight and the Decadents which, very usefully I think, draws out the importance of Yeats’ political identity and his role in the battle for national identity. Anne Janowitz provides the anthology with an essay on William Morris and his collection of poems called 'The Pilgrims of Hope' and, in another highly readable piece, the role of empire in fin de siècle England is teased out more in Carolyn Williams’ 'Utopia Limited' which explores the comic operas of Gilbert and Sullivan.

One of my favourite essays in this collection however was Alexandra Warwick’s 'Vampires and empire: fears and fictions of the 1890s'. Bram Stoker’s creation of Dracula has been hegemonic in setting the context for subsequent vampire tales and Warwick makes the point that:

"One of the most important discourses is that of gender: it is conspicuous that apart from the Count himself, all the other vampires in Stoker’s text are female."

Women, she notes become not just the victims but the carriers of infection:

"..the relationship between gender and infection becomes central to the narratives, as in the female body that is increasingly seen as the source of danger…"

Warwick goes on to argue that Stoker’s essential misogyny is added to by a morbid fear of race and deviant sexuality – lesbianism – that what he captures in the vampire story are the social concerns of a male ruling class of that time.

I wouldn’t pretend that this book in its totality is an easy read but if you are at all interested in the notion of the fin de siècle, not just historically as a 19th century phenomenon but as an end-of-century mind-set that repeats itself as the centuries slip by, you will probably find something here to detain and stimulate you.

 

Terry Potter

June 2018