Abstract
Paul Verlaine uses the optical and opulent qualities of jewels as an image of literary decadence.2 Jewels appear in the work of a range of finde-siècle authors including Henry James, Arthur Symons, Oscar Wilde and Joris Karl Huysmans, where they represent luxury, strangeness and desire, often in relation to aspects of male subjectivity.3 Walter Pater’s exhortation ‘to burn always with this hard, gem-like flame’ also suggests the role of jewels in late nineteenth-century aestheticism.4 Critical attention to the symbolism of jewels in Victorian fiction has so far focused on women: Dorothea’s bracelets and cameos, Gwendolen Harleth’s necklace, and Lizzie Eustace’s diamonds.5 In contrast, this article foregrounds the relationship between men and jewels as represented in Huysmans’ Against Nature (1884) read alongside Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray (1890).6
I love this word decadent — all shimmering in purple and gold […] it throws off bursts of fire and the sparkle of precious stones.1
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Notes
J.K. Huysman, quoted in George A. Cevasco, Breviary of the Decadence: J.K. Huysmans’s A Rebours and English Literature (New York: AMS Press, 2001), p. 18.
See Joseph Bristow’s discussion of the terms ‘decadent’, ‘aesthetic’ and ‘symbolist’ in The Fin-de-Siècle Poem (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2005), pp. 7–12.
An interest in jewel-like writing was not confined to men. Olive Custance, wife of Lord Alfred Douglas and thus on the fringes of Wilde’s circle, wrote a book of poems entitled Opals: see Olive Custance, Opals (London and New York: John Lane, 1897).
See Jean Arnold, ‘Cameo Appearances: the Discourse of Jewellery in Middlemarch’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 30:1 (2002), 265–88;
Aviva Briefel, ‘Tautological Crimes: Why Women can’t Steal Jewels’, Novel, 37:1/2 (2003), 135–57.
Fabio Cleto, ed., Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject: A Reader (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1999), p. 1.
For its ability to generate meanings through technologies of duplication the mirror has long been privileged as the main site for visuality in The Picture ofDorian Gray: see Christopher Craft, ‘Come See About Me: Enchantment of the Double in The Picture of Dorian Gray’, Representations, 91 (2005), 109–36.
Yet Isobel Armstrong writes that ‘once the idea of the mirror is relinquished, glass is confounding’. The ‘reflecting and refracting powers of glass’ are optimised in the gem, particularly in the diamond. See Isobel Armstrong, ‘Transparency: Towards a Poetics of Glass in the Nineteenth Century’, in Francis Spufford and Jenny Uglow, eds, Cultural Babbage: Technology, Time and Invention (London: Faber and Faber, 1996), pp. 123–48. For its greater refractive index than both glass and the plane mirror, the gem is an ideal way into the visuality of Wilde’s novel.
Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 192.
Russsell W. Belk and Melanie Wallendorf, ‘Of Mice and Men: Gender ldentity in Collecting’, in Interpreting Objects and Collections, ed. by Susan M. Pearce (London, Routledge, 1994), p. 246.
Naomi Schor, ‘Collecting Paris’, in John Elsner and Roger Cardinal, eds, The Cultures of Collecting (London: Reaktion Books Ltd., 1994), p. 257.
See Richard Dellamora, Masculine Desire: the Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990),
Herbert Sussman, Victorian Masculinities: Manhood and Masculine Poetics in Early Victorian Literature and Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995),
James Eli Adams, Dandies and Desert Saints: Styles of Victorian Masculinity (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1995).
For an exception, see Neil Bartlett, Who Was That Man? A Present for Mr Oscar Wilde (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1988), pp. 173–89.
Whitney Davis, ‘Homoerotic Art Collection from 1750–1920’, Art History, 24 (2001), 247–77.
See also James M. Saslow, Pictures and Passions: a History of Homosexuality in the Visual Arts (New York and London: Viking Penguin, 1999).
Peter Home and Reina Lewis, eds, Outlooks: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities and Visual Cultures (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 1.
Judith Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York and London: New York University Press, 2005), pp. 1–2.
Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006), p. 162.
Joris Karl Huysmans, Against Nature, trans. Margaret Mauldon and ed. by Nicholas White (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 17; hereafter in text. Des Esseintes’ ‘ship cabin’ dining room also creates a sense of queer time in which ‘without ever leaving his home, he was able to enjoy the rapidly succeeding, indeed almost simultaneous, sensations of a long voyage’ (p. 18).
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray: the 1890 and 1891 Texts, ed. by Joseph Bristow (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 334; hereafter in text.
Georee Eliot, Middlemarch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 194.
Regenia Gagnier, Idylls of the Marketplace: Oscar Wilde and the Victorian Public (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986), p. 1. However, the dandy should not be denied the ability to collect in a scientific mode, if not to scientific ends. Des Esseintes, for instance, is quite systematic in his approach to collecting.
Such as those discussed in Edward Streeter, Precious Stones and Gems: Their Histoty and Distinguishing Characteristics (London, 1882).
John Ruskin, Praeterita (London: George Allen, 1907), II, 129–30.
Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2004), p. 2.
For ‘surface’ views of the dandy, see Jessica R. Feldman, Gender on the Divide: theDandy in ModernistLiterature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), p. 13
and Rita Felski, The Gender of Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), p. 91,
and Ellen Moers, The Dandy: Brummell to Beerbohm (London, Secker & Warburg, 1960), p. 13.
A.H. Church, Precious Stones (London: Chapman and Hall Ltd., 1883), pp. 4–5.
Oscar Wilde, The House of Pomegranates, Oscar Wilde: Complete Shorter Fiction, ed. by Isobel Murray (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 180.
Wilde also refers to other museum handbooks such as Daniel Rock, Textile Fabrics (London: South Kensington Museum, 1876).
See Dollimore , Sexual Dissidence (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), p. 52.
Georg Lukâcs, ‘Narrate or Describe?’, in Writer and Critic and Other Essays, trans. and ed. by Arthur Kahn (London: Merlin Press, 1970), pp. 110–48. In Against Nature, cataloguing acts bring the reader out of dream-like memory sequences and drive the narrative forward.
For further discussion of the catalogue form in French literature see Janell Watson, Literature and Material Culture from Balzac to Proust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
Bartlett, Who was that Man?, p. 182. See also Herod’s listing of his jewel collection in Wilde’s Salome: ‘I have topazes yellow as are the eyes of tigers’, see Oscar Wilde: The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays, ed. by Peter Raby (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 88.
‘Inventory is never a neutral idea; to catalogue is not merely to ascertain … but also to appropriate’, see Roland Barthes, ‘The Plates of the Encyclopaedia’, in Susan Sontag, ed., A Barthes Reader (London: Cape, 1982), pp. 218–35: 222.
Wilde’s canon-forming project gives a voice to a homosexual experience that did not emerge solely in response to pressure from what Foucault identifies as regulatory apparatus. See Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality: 1 (London: Penguin, 1998)
and Michael F. Davis, ‘Walter Pater’s “Latent Intelligence” and the Conception of Queer “Theory”’, in Laurel Brake, Lesley Higgins and Carolyn Williams, eds, Walter Pater: Transparencies of Desire (Greensboro, NC: ELT Press, 2002), pp. 261–85.
William Jones, History and Mystery of Precious Stones (London: Richard Bentley and Son, 1880), pp. 325, 359, 343.
Susan Sontag, ‘Notes on “Camp”’, Against Interpretation (New York, Picador, 2001), pp. 275–93: 280.
For further discussion of the concept of an artwork as object or ‘thing’ see Esther Pasztory, Thinking with Things: Towards a New Vision of Art (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005), pp. 7–15.
See Françoise Meltzer, Salome and the Dance of Writing: Portraits of Mimesis in Literature (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1987). The chain continues as Flaubert views the paintings and is then inspired to write his Herodias.
See W.J.T. Mitchell, Picture Theory, p. 164 and Bryan Wolf, ‘Confessions of a Closet Ekphrastic: Literature, Painting and other Unnatural Relations’, Yale Journal of Criticism, 3 (1990), 181–203.
See Grant F. Scott, The Sculpted Word: Keats, Ekphrasis and the Visual Arts (Hanover, NH, and London: University Press of New England, 1994), pp. 31–2.
See Judith Halberstam, Female Masculinity (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1998).
See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), pp. 21–8. A similar triangulation occurs in Henry James’ revamped version of Roderick Hudson (1905) in which Christina Light’s links to the tradition of Salomé are clearly inspired by the representations of Moreau, Huysmans and Wilde.
J.K. Huysmans, ‘Modern Art’, in Rosemary Lloyd, ed., Revolutions in Writing: Readings in Nineteenth-Century French Prose (Indiana University Press, 1996), p. 33.
For the link between the art of painting and the goldsmith, see also Mary Haweis, ‘Jewels and Dress, or the Philosophy of Jewels’, Contemporary Review, 56 (July–December 1889), 95–6.
On the difficulties inherent in the symbolism of gems Huysmans later wrote: ‘the hermeneutics of gems are uncertain’, see J.K. Huysmans, The Cathedral (New York: Dedalus, 1989), p. 136.
J.K. Huysmans, quoted in Christopher Lloyd, J.K. Huysmans and the Finde-Siècle Novel (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1990), p. 23 (my translation).
Théophile Gautier, ‘Progress of French Poetry since 1830’, The Works of Théophile Gautier, ed. by F.C. de Sumichrast, 24 vols (London: George Harrap, 1900–3), XVI, 267 and 243.
For further discussion of the ‘stand off’ between essentialism and antiessentialism see The Essential Difference, ed. Naomi Schor and Elizabeth Weed (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994).
Thomas Carlyle, ‘The Dandiacal Body’, Sartor Resartus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 207.
Georg Simmel, ‘Adornment’, The Sociology of Georg Simmel, trans. and ed. by Kurt H. Wolf (New York: Free Press, 1950), pp. 338–44: 342.
Pater, The Renaissance, p. xi; Walter Pater, ‘Diaphaneitè’, Miscellaneous Studies (1895; London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd., 1910), p. 253. Composed in 1864, the essay was published posthumously in Miscellaneous Studies (1895).
Walter Pater, Plato and Platonism (1893; London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd., 1910), p. 135.
Harold Bloom dubs Pater ‘The Crystal Man’ in his introduction to the Selected Writings of Walter Pater (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974), p. vii.
See Whitney Davis, ‘The Image in the Middle: John Addington Symonds and Homoerotic Art Criticism’, in Elizabeth Prettejohn, ed., After the Pre-Raphaelites: Art and Aestheticism in Victorian England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), pp. 188–217: 207.
See Ann Varty, ‘The Crystal Man’ in Laurel Brake and Ian Small, eds, Pater in the ’90s (Greensboro, NC: ELT Press, University of North Carolina, 1991), pp. 205–15: 208.
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Mills, V. (2010). Dandyism, Visuality and the ‘Camp Gem’: Collections of Jewels in Huysmans and Wilde. In: Calè, L., Di Bello, P. (eds) Illustrations, Optics and Objects in Nineteenth-Century Literary and Visual Cultures. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230297395_8
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