“The Hectic Beauty of Decay”: Positivist Decadence in Mathilde Blind's Late Poetry

Abstract

Wan mists enwrap the still-born day;The harebell withers on the heath,And all the moorland seems to breatheThe hectic beauty of decay.—Mathilde Blind, “The Evening of the Year,”Songs and SonnetsTo again invoke the organic metaphor at the root of decadence, what is crucial about the notion of decay is not so much the change from a greater to a lesser state, but the changing itself.—David Weir,Decadence and the Making of Modernism[T]he aim of decadence, whether in science or art, is to challenge the limits that mark some forms of knowledge as permissible and others as forbidden, regardless of the results.—Christine Ferguson, “Decadence as Scientific Fulfillment”

‘Life built herself a myriad forms’: epics of gestation and co-operation in late nineteenth-century women’s poetry

“…By having the personification of love grow from a destitute child into a potential bridegroom who ‘towered before me / Outgrowing my lost gods in stature and might’ (ll. 197–198), Blind again presents motherhood as the primordial and generative energy behind any earthly and even transcendental development, conferring secondary status to a potential matrimonial state, which, considering James Diedrick's observation that ‘it is significant that nowhere in The Ascent of Man does Blind propose marriage as a model of redemptive social relations’ (2016, 217), underlines the observation that in Blind's evolutionary epic the matriarchal always takes precedence over the matrimonial 6…”

“…I hope that even in this condensed reading of what is actually an endlessly fascinating and contradictory text, I have been able to illustrate that Blind's The Ascent of Man does more than merely aiming ‘to reshape Darwinism into an optimistic vision of human and universal development’, as Gregory Tate suggests (2017, 109). Even though the scientific ‘validity’ – by whichever standards this may be adjudicated – of her evolutionary fantasy may be questionable, and John Holmes's objection that ‘to hold out the promise that, through us, nature will transcend both itself and our own brutality is an act of bad faith’ (2009, 54) certainly needs to be taken into account, I would still propose that The Ascent of Man , as ‘Blind's attempt to weave a new, humanist mythology from the resistant threads of Darwinian theory’ (Diedrick 2016, 314), nevertheless represents a very substantial intervention both in the interpretation and projection of evolutionary thinking and in renegotiating the function of epic poetry. Blind's analysis of the detrimental effects of an understanding of evolution which is based on, and can be used to perpetuate, notions of struggle and the survival of the fittest and the necessity to overcome those, is not limited to her poetic works.…”

“…4 For more comprehensive and detailed analyses of Blind's poetry and The Ascent of Man , see among others LaPorte (2006), Holmes (2009), Birch (2013) and Diedrick (2016). …”

Retrieving Fin-de-Siècle Women Poets: The Transformative Myths, Fragments and Voices of Webster, Blind and Levy

“…According to James Diedrick, the decadent poems that Blind published in her latest collections (1891, 1893 and 1895) not only subvert the patriarchal assumptions of her male counterparts, but also radically reimagine identity, sexuality and cosmology. 30 If she indeed begins by exploring 'the dissolution of self that is a recurring theme within positivist decadence' (p. 639), she also seems to extend this project of acquisition of 'forbidden' knowledge and experience 'into the realm of sexuality and sexual identity', as necessary forms of 'rebirth and renewal' (p. 642). Diedrick chooses, in particular, some poems in Blind's "Songs of the Orient", part of her Birds of Passage collection which resulted from her travels in Egypt in 1892-93, to prove her 'revisionist cosmology'.…”