The Inverted City London and the Constitution of Homosexuality ...

149.
Chapter 5
The Decadent City:
London Paris, and 'the Orient'
The next two chapters primarily examine the nexus of homosexuality and London in
fiction and poetry. They show how work by Oscar Wilde, Edward Carpenter and
other less well-known writers constituted an imaginative exploration of what London
could offer in terms of the fulfilment of desire and the formation of sexual and
political identities. This chapter considers the significance of aestheticism, decadence,
'the Orient' and Paris in the exploration of homosexual desire in London, and
examines the recreation of the city in Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) and
the anonymous pornographic novel Teleny, or the Reverse of the Medal (1893). It
falls into three sections. The first outlines some key features of aestheticism and
decadence and considers the significance of Paris and Western conceptualisations of
'the Orient' to these movements and to wider understandings of homosexual
behaviour. The second section focuses on The Picture of Dorian Gray and Teleny,
looking at their particular engagement with the city, and showing how they drew on
these traditions and associations. The final part examines some of the parodies of
aestheticism and decadence and looks at the significance of these movements after
Wilde's prosecution.
1.
Aestheticism in the second half of the nineteenth century posited beauty as the
ultimate arbiter in the valuation of art and literature. The genesis of the movement is
complex: the critic R.V.Johnson aligns it with aspects of English Romanticism and
Renaissance theatre, as well as work in Germany by Goethe, Winckelmann and
HegeL 1 Johann Winckelmann, writing in the mid-eighteenth century, in turn
associated this validation of beauty with the ancient Greeks, a connection reiterated
by Walter Pater and John Addington Symonds in thinly veiled homoerotic terms in the
1 870s and 1 880s.2 Aestheticism also had strong links to a French literary tradition,
springing from Théophile Gautier's contention in the preface to his novel
Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835) that beauty in art could have no other end than itself.
It was here that the aesthetic slogan 'l'Art pour l'art' was coined. 3 In England the
1 R.V.Johnson, Aestheticism (London, 1969), p.!.
2 Walter Pater, 'Winckelmann' (1867), in The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Literature.. ed. Adam
Phillips (1873; Oxford, 1986); John Addington Symonds, Studies in the Greek Poets (London,
1879).
3 Ian Small, ed., The Aesthetes: a Sourcebook (London, 1979), p.xii.