Alex murray: I think its threateningness comes from sex, an sexuality. But i think we shouldn't over determine the role that queer sexuality played. Often a lot of the moral outrage was to do with the explicit exploration of hetero sexuality. It's also the foreignness of decadence. So it's often being dismissed as being french. And so this celebration of the individual who is going to do exactly what they want and is not going to be told by any one else how to live their lives. This, i think, is still deeply threatening,. A victorian culture that really wants, or craves, a certain sort of homogeneity ne sals.
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the British phase of a movement that spread across Europe in the mid-19th and early 20th centuries. Influenced by Charles Baudelaire and by Walter Pater, these Decadents rejected the mainstream Victorian view that art needed a moral purpose, and valued instead the intense sensations art provoked, celebrating art for art’s sake. Oscar Wilde was at its heart, Aubrey Beardsley adorned it with his illustrations and they, with others, provoked moral panic with their supposed degeneracy. After burning brightly, the movement soon lost its energy in Britain yet it has proved influential.
The illustration above, by Beardsley, is from the cover of the first edition of The Yellow Book in April 1894.
With
Neil Sammells
Professor of English and Irish Literature and Deputy Vice Chancellor at Bath Spa University
Kate Hext
Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Exeter
And
Alex Murray
Senior Lecturer in English at Queen’s University, Belfast
Producer: Simon Tillotson