ABSTRACT
With aestheticism came the aesthetic (or perhaps more accurately, antiaesthetic) novel, beginning with W.H. Mallock's satirical portrait of Oxford Hellenic culture, The New Republic (1877), and even the aesthetic operetta, Gilbert and Sullivan's Patience (1881), which pokes fun at those 'anxious for to shine in the high aesthetic line'.4 However, the two fin-de-siecle novels which most explicitly deal with the links between aestheticism and love between men are written not in the mode of social satire, but in what I will call, with some reservations, late Victorian gothic, this convergence of gothicism and aestheticism providing one possible gloss on the term decadence.5 Both Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) and John Meade Falkner's novel, The Lost Stradivarius (1895) explore the perils and pleasures of following Pater's aesthetic injunction in The Renaissance to 'grasp at any exquisite passion' in a world where 'all melts under out feet', and both use a distinctly gothic register to trace
2 Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in An and Poetry (London: Macmillan,
1873. This edition: New York and Oxford: OUP, 1986), p. 152. 3 Lawrence Birken in Consuming Desire: Sexual Science and the Emergence of
a Culture of Abundance, 1871-1914 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988) suggests another way of tracing the gender politics of aestheticism, by exploring the family resemblance among aestheticism, late Victorian neo-classical economics, and a new understanding of the polymorphous nature of desire. Birken illustrates how in the late nineteenth century the shift from a productivist to a consumerist tendency in economic theory parallels the rise of late Victorian sexology. The latter, he suggests, is drawn in two directions: toward a productivist, Foucauldian policing of sexuality, but also toward a more 'democratic' or consumerist deregulation of desire. Thus just as the economists were beginning to argue that idiosyncratic desire, not need, drove the economy - sometimes tulips might be more valuable than diamonds - the sexologists were, at least some of the time, beginning to theorize human desire as genderless and 'play-oriented' (Birken, Consuming Desire, p. 14). Aestheticism seems to form the bridge between the worlds of economics and sexual economy. The cult of beauty, of the unique hand-made object, is the flip side of the industrial mass market and the proliferation of indistinguishable factoryproduced consumer goods. But the cult of beauty also becomes a sexual discourse: Oscar Wilde, the man who was anxious to 'live up to [his] blue china', was also an enormously influential advocate and practitioner of self and sexual self-fashioning.
