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Modern European Intellectual History

Modern European Intellectual History. Lecture 4 Dangerous (Female) Sexuality February 4, 2008. outline. intro: from decadence to fin-de-si è cle towards Oscar Wilde’s Salome : sources Wilde’s aestheticism Salome as fin-de-si è cle heroine “fantasies of feminine evil”

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Modern European Intellectual History

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  1. Modern EuropeanIntellectual History Lecture 4 Dangerous (Female) Sexuality February 4, 2008

  2. outline • intro: from decadence to fin-de-siècle • towards Oscar Wilde’s Salome: sources • Wilde’s aestheticism • Salome as fin-de-siècle heroine • “fantasies of feminine evil” • conclusion: sisters of Salome?

  3. from decadence to fin-de-siècle • Maurice Barrès (1862-1923) • Gabriele d’Annunzio (1863-1938) • Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1874-1929) • Arthur Schnitzler (1862-1931), La Ronde (Reigen) (The Round) (1900) • secession; die Jungen (the Young Ones), art nouveau (new art) • Gustav Klimt (1862-1918)

  4. Gustave Moreau (1826-98) Salome Dancing Before Herod (1876)

  5. another Moreau Salome piece

  6. Moreau, L’Apparition (1874-76)

  7. the good book Mark 6: 16 But when Herod heard thereof, he said, It is John, whom I beheaded: he is risen from the dead. 17 For Herod himself had sent forth and laid hold upon John, and bound him in prison for Herodias' sake, his brother Philip's wife: for he had married her. 18 For John had said unto Herod, It is not lawful for thee to have thy brother's wife. 19 Therefore Herodias had a quarrel against him, and would have killed him; but she could not: 20 For Herod feared John, knowing that he was a just man and an holy, and observed him; and when he heard him, he did many things, and heard him gladly. 21 And when a convenient day was come, that Herod on his birthday made a supper to his lords, high captains, and chief estates of Galilee; 22 And when the daughter of the said Herodias came in, and danced, and pleased Herod and them that sat with him, the king said unto the damsel, Ask of me whatsoever thou wilt, and I will give it thee. 23 And he sware unto her, Whatsoever thou shalt ask of me, I will give it thee, unto the half of my kingdom. 24 And she went forth, and said unto her mother, What shall I ask? And she said, The head of John the Baptist. 25 And she came in straightway with haste unto the king, and asked, saying, I will that thou give me by and by in a charger the head of John the Baptist. 26 And the king was exceeding sorry; yet for his oath's sake, and for their sakes which sat with him, he would not reject her. 27 And immediately the king sent an executioner, and commanded his head to be brought: and he went and beheaded him in the prison, 28 And brought his head in a charger, and gave it to the damsel: and the damsel gave it to her mother.

  8. Huysmans on Salome (50-56) Neither St. Matthew, nor St. Mark, nor St. Luke, nor any other of the Sacred Writers had enlarged on the maddening charms and the active allurements of the dancer. She had always remained a dim, obliterated figure, lost with her mysterious fascination in the far-off mist of the centuries. … a symbolic incarnation of world-old Vice, the goddess of immortal Hysteria, the Curse of Beauty supreme above all other beauties by the cataleptic spasm that stirs her flesh and steels her muscles … poisoning … all who see her, all who touch her…. altogether feminine, obedient to her temperament of a passionate, cruel women,… awakening … the sleeping passions of man; bewitching, subjugating more surely his will, with her unholy charm as of a great flower of concupiscence, born of a sacrilegious birth, reared in a hot-house of impiety…. Like the Old King, Des Esseintes was overwhelmed, overmastered, dizzied before this figure of the dancing-girl… Cf. Gustave Flaubert, Hérodias; Stéphane Mallarmé, La Hérodiade(cf. Huysmans, pp. 182-4)

  9. Oscar Wilde • 1854-1900 • aestheticism

  10. art as a way of life • Q: What is civilization, Mr. Wilde? • A: The love of the beautiful. • Q: What is the beautiful? • A: What the bourgeois call the ugly. • Q: And what the bourgeois call the beautiful? • A: That does not exist! 

  11. cont’d • Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation. •  The first duty in life is to assume a pose; what the second duty is no one yet has found out. • The true perfection of man lies, not in what man has, but in what man is. Nothing should be able to harm a man but himself. Nothing should be able to rob a man at all. What a man really has is what is in him. What is outside of him should be a matter of no importance.

  12. cont’d • One should either be a work of art, or wear a work of art. • To become a work of art is the object of the living. • There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. • Literature always anticipates life. It does not copy it, but moulds it to its purpose.The nineteenth century, as we know it, is largely an invention of Balzac. • This unfortunate aphorism about Art holding the mirror up to Nature is deliberately said by Hamlet in order to convince the bystanders of his absolute insanity in all art-matters. Life is the mirror, and art the reality. • Nothing succeeds like excess.

  13. Wilde’s “socialism” • “The Soul of Man Under Socialism” (1891) • The chief advantage that would result from the establishment of Socialism is, undoubtedly, the fact that Socialism would relieve us from that sordid necessity of living for others which, in the present condition of things, presses so hardly upon almost everybody. In fact, scarcely anyone at all escapes. • Private property has crushed true Individualism, and set up an Individualism that is false. It has debarred one part of the community from being individual by starving them. It has debarred the other part of the community from being individual by putting them on the wrong road, and encumbering them. Indeed, so completely has man's personality been absorbed by his possessions that the English law has always treated offences against a man's property with far more severity than offences against his person, and property is still the test of complete citizenship. • With the abolition of private property, then, we shall have true, beautiful, healthy Individualism. Nobody will waste his life in accumulating things, and the symbols for things. One will live. To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all. • It is a question whether we have ever seen the full expression of a personality, except on the imaginative plane of art.

  14. “Know thyself”? • “Know thyself” was written over the portal of the antique world. Over the portal of the new world, “Be thyself” shall be written.

  15. Wilde, Salome (1891-92) • Wilde’s additions and interpretations

  16. some adaptations • Aubrey Beardsley (1872-98) • Salome drawings (1892), The Yellow Book (mid-1890s) • Richard Strauss (1864-1949), Salome (1905)

  17. “fantasies of feminine evil” • Bram Dijksra, Idols of Perversity • Judith • Delilah • the “new woman” • how to explain this meme?

  18. Gustav Klimt,“Liebe” (Love)

  19. Klimt, “Judith” (1901)

  20. Klimt, “Salome (Judith II)”

  21. conclusion • the “male gaze”? • “sisters of Salome” (Toni Bentley)? • sexuality as (also) a metaphor for individuality; art a testing ground for liberation

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