The eternal youth or the fatal beauty? A comparative study on a decadent theme in British, German and Austrian Fin de Siècle literature (original) (raw)
Wilde's Picture of Dorian Gray, with its contrasting structure, is of iconographic significance not only for the decadent 1890s in British literature but also for his successors in Austria and Germany around 1900. Especially the remarkable ending, where the wonderful portrait of eternal youth and beauty stands against an aged, ugly, dead male body, was variously repeated by Hugo von Hofmannsthal in his novel das Märchen der 672. Nacht and by Thomas Mann in his der Tod in Venedig. The desired youth and beauty as a phantasma in the enclave of aestheticism on the one hand, the threatening disease and final death as a signal of the failure of such an aesthetic ideal on the other hand, show the ambivalent attitude represented in decadent poetics, both of which are related to the crisis of masculinity present in the protagonist. In this regard, the two German-language novelists distinguish their construction of the decadent types from Wilde by emphasizing the protagonists' timidness of their own hetero- and homoerotic desire. Instead of pursuing hedonic sexual enjoyment as a libertine, they only ever live out their disire for the female or male body as a voyeurist. This passivity marks the dubiousness of the contemporaneous male identity as well as the decline of decadent heroism itself. This presentaion attempts to outline the relationship between the yearning for eternal youth, the instability of the contemporaneous male identity and ultimately the punishing death that ensues in the novels of Oscar Wilde, Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Thomas Mann, all the while rethinking decadent poetics as pertaining to the imagination of an idealized, yet problematic male sexuality and its problems. I also argue that the adoption of an image of the ugly death appearing in Wilde's decadent work in Hofmannsthal and Mann's œuvre signifies in a way the concluding phase of decadent poetics.
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