Degeneration
Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: In a witty conversation in The Picture of Dorian Gray Lord Henry and Lady Narborough describe the social and sexual mores of their times with the phrases ‘fin de siècle’ and ‘fin du globe’. Their cynicism and pessimism resonate with a certain late Victorian disillusionment with the sense of moral progress, and suggest the readiness of a decaying aristocracy to surrender to a sense of cultural pessimism. A year later, in his two-volume work Degeneration, the medically-trained journalist Max Nordau railed at the silliness of the buzzword fin de siècle, fulminated against the egotism and emotionalism of the cultivated classes, and described Oscar Wilde as an antisocial egotist, disposed to a ‘tortuously disdainful prattling’ which showed his ‘malevolent mania for contradiction’ (Nordau 320, 319). Nordau’s European bestseller, published in German in 1892‒93 and translated into French in 1894 and English in 1895, had a profound influence on the spirit of the time. Few intellectuals rose to condemn his ranting, but George Bernard Shaw called the book a ‘stale and putrescent mess’ (Shaw 63) and Israel Zangwill objected that Nordau had ‘proved far too much, and laden his vessel with a profitless cargo of irrelevant propositions and superfluous theorems’ (Zangwill 346). Today Nordau’s diatribe is constantly quoted in studies of late-Victorian culture because it is symptomatic of the cultural anxieties of the time, his approach, ironically, the very illustration of the excesses he condemned.
DOI: 10.4000/132r2
Author: Nathalie Saudo-Welby
Language: French
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W4406314940