Decadence as Scientific Fulfillment

Abstract

This essay challenges two established critical assumptions about late Victorian literary decadence: first, that decadence represented a sterile and ultimately failed attempt to defy social and cultural norms and, second, that the movement was antithetical to the scientific culture of the nineteenth century. Decadence is instead shown to be the logical consequence of a scientific spirit that, by the end of the century, increasingly ignored the demands of utilitarianism and fixated on the pursuit of experimental knowledge for its own sake, regardless of the consequences. Thus, the “failures” of the subject that so frequently mark the end of accounts of decadence such as Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, Collins's Heart and Science, and Machen's The Great God Pan represent the triumph of a historically specific experimental ethos that valued the transcendence of conventional epistemology over the discovery of useful knowledge.

The production of medicoethical misconduct: medical ethics and vivisection in Wilkie Collins’sHeart and Science

“…Collins’s Heart and Science demonstrates not simply late-nineteenth-century perspectives on doctors and medicine but also what Ferguson (1854) calls ‘scientific decadence’: ‘If the ultimate objective of scientific decadence is the source and simultaneous antithesis of meaning and knowledge then the self-destruction that frequently accompanies decadent narratives must be seen as homage to rather than retreat from this object’ (476). As Ferguson acknowledges nineteenth-century scientists who desired pursuits of further knowledge regardless of morality and the subject’s well-being, à la Emanuel Klein, Claude Bernard and Morell Mackenzie, this analysis has taken into account the history of an emergent yet fleeting medical ethics in Great Britain.…”

Evolutionary Science and Aestheticism: a Survey and a Suggestion

“…Similarly, both skim over the possibility of mutual exchange or dialogue between British aesthetes and their scientific peers. Christine Ferguson, in her suggestive article “Decadence as Scientific Fulfillment” (), finds evidence of such a dialogue in the “ethic of uselessness” that both scientific practitioners and aesthetes eagerly espoused (470). As Ferguson argues, late nineteenth‐century experimental science and aestheticism depended on a similarly amoral, counter‐utilitarian, and thus “decadent” epistemology that stressed the pursuit of knowledge and experience for its own sake (470).…”

“…Christine Ferguson, in her suggestive article “Decadence as Scientific Fulfillment” (), finds evidence of such a dialogue in the “ethic of uselessness” that both scientific practitioners and aesthetes eagerly espoused (470). As Ferguson argues, late nineteenth‐century experimental science and aestheticism depended on a similarly amoral, counter‐utilitarian, and thus “decadent” epistemology that stressed the pursuit of knowledge and experience for its own sake (470). Jonathan Smith's Charles Darwin and Victorian Visual Culture () and Gowan Dawson's Darwin, Literature and Victorian Respectability () also help to fill these gaps in scholarship by situating British aestheticism within a series of interdisciplinary debates about the nature of beauty and the social ramifications of the new sciences.…”

“…in a short Victorian Review piece from 2009, also calls our attention to unexpected invocations of evolutionary biology, in this case in Wilde's essay “The Critic as Artist” (1890, revised 1891). To Ferguson, Wilde's “fascinating and counterintuitive insistence that hereditary determinism will automatically lead to aestheticist liberation” testifies to the diversity of Victorian approaches to biological essentialism: a concept that now brings to mind “the horrors of state‐sponsored eugenics and national socialism” served, for Wilde, as justification for the contemplative, aesthetic lifestyle (65–8). Elisha Cohn's article “‘One single ivory cell’: Oscar Wilde and the Brain” () similarly uncovers in Wilde's prose writings the surprising optimistic potential of Victorian evolutionary discourse.…”

“…In Darwin's Bards: British and American Poetry in the Age of Evolution (), John Holmes reads the later poetry of Swinburne, Blind and Meredith in the context of their varied engagements with post‐Darwinian thought (46). Furthermore, Holmes reminds us that these aesthetic poets represented evolution not as the cold, purposeless “Automaton” that Thomas Hardy feared (“Nature's Questioning” 9), but as a progressive and even teleological force – the animating principle behind the “great labour of growth” that Swinburne commemorates in his 1871 poem “Genesis” (141) Ferguson,. in a short Victorian Review piece from 2009, also calls our attention to unexpected invocations of evolutionary biology, in this case in Wilde's essay “The Critic as Artist” (1890, revised 1891).…”