ABSTRACT
In the 1890s the Symbolists virilized art by reimposing a masculinist mode of possessing female nature upon the theory and criticism of avant-garde painting. The Symbolists scorned the Impressionists for their submissive attitude toward nature. They wished to eliminate nature as the prime agent in the creative process and to reinstate the artist's mind as the active and generating source of sensation that becomes the work of art. The driving forces behind Albert Aurier's Symbolist aesthetic, it may in fact be argued, were his deep contempt for external material reality and his equally vehement aversion to positivist science and its promotion of a materialist mentality. While the Symbolists expressed scorn for science, they nevertheless shared fully in its masculinist assumptions about the world of nature. In terms of the gender metaphor, then, Symbolism's scorn for science may be interpreted as an attempt to reverse the hierarchic positions that had been assigned by positivism to science and art in nineteenth-century France.
