Session 3: Erotic Bodies
Chair: Greg Tuck
Purity and Danger: Blurring the
Boundaries Between Death and Sex
Glennys Howarth and Una
MacConville
Department
of Social and Policy Sciences, University
of Bath, Bath, United Kingdon
No abstract is presently available
Decadent Desires: The Erotic in the Movement of
Decadence
Evangelos Roumeliotis
Greece
The proposed paper will examine the evolution of the
erotic and the eroticised body in the movement of Decadence in European
literature and art (ca. 1870-1910). Although this movement is not among
the most ‘famous’ ones
(compared e.g. to Naturalism), with its aestheticism and its tendency
to cultivate the beautiful and the exotic, it dramatically contributed
to a shift in the perception of desire in literature and art.
Throughout
Western history, desire has been regarded as a negative, catastrophic
force, which makes men lose control and which therefore leads them
to corporeal, moral and mental corruption. Especially Christianity
has stressed the negativity of desire, by condemning it as the source
of all sins ( St. Augustine ). And despite some differentiated philosophical
aspects (like Spinoza’s, for example), the perception of desire
and of the erotic as catastrophic has been predominant in Western culture.
The peculiarity of Decadence consists in the fact that desire is seen
as simultaneously catastrophic and creative:
a) catasrophic, because it destroys men by consuming all their powers. For that reason, desire is identified with blood-seeking women (the figures of the femme-fatale and the Vampire Woman are a literary topos in Decadent works), who, because of their supposed proximity to Nature and primitiveness, are uncontrollable and deadly. This aspect of Decadence has been highly criticised, especially by feminist criticism, but in this way is the other side of the coin ignored, which has to do with the
b) creative; for desire and the erotic are seen as the main, if not the only, forces which can lead to artistic creativity and to aesthetic excellence – a view crystallised in Nietzsche’s philosophy of the Dionysiac and expressed in Thomas Mann’s work, especially in The Death in Venice.
To conclude: my suggestion is that with the movement of Decadence (which – it must be said – further systematises and expresses views firstly met in Baudelaire), the erotic acquires its artistic dimension, a dimension it did not have until then.