<i>Decadent Ecology in British Literature and Art, 1860–1910</i>, by Dennis Denisoff

The epilogue to Dennis Denisoff’s Decadent Ecology in British Literature and Art, 1860–1910 recalls the preface to Michael Field’s Sight and Song (1892) in its expression of a commitment to “a passive mode of scholarship” that operates at a “threshold of intimacy and submission” with a “willingness to be written upon” (224). Much as Michael Field hoped that their suppression of the habit of centering the self might engender a clearer vision of and greater intimacy with the artworks they describe in Sight and Song, Denisoff expresses the wish to hear what the works with which he is dealing might truly wish to do or be. As he makes clear in his discussion of both his methods and Michael Field’s, this is a critical methodology with a pagan ecological ethos. Michael Field hoped that their poems might express “not so much what these pictures are to the poet, but rather what poetry they objectively incarnate,” working toward what Denisoff describes as “an impressionistic erasure of any sense of agency,” calling for “a decentering of the human” that would result in a “more vital experience, one that extends beyond the ego to a collective intimacy” (85–86).1 These echoes between Michael Field’s preface and Denisoff’s epilogue reinforce the sense, evident within each chapter as well, that Decadent Ecology endeavors to hear what decadent texts “sing in themselves” about nature and the environment.2 This effort is visible in Denisoff’s attentiveness to the pagan elements and pagan spirit of decadent texts, which we have tended to neglect, and his sensitivity to the many ways in which a text might express its ecological commitments.Denisoff’s readings highlight not only the awe, reverence, and ecstasy these texts register in their representation of the natural world; he also apprehends the ways in which a pagan ecological vision is expressed in decadent literature at the level of style (in William Sharp’s meter or Arthur Machen’s disorienting prose) and structure (in the rhythms of rebellion and submission in George Egerton’s fiction), demonstrating how these works are not simply treatises on ecology but enactments of a pagan ethos that conceptualizes human subjectivities as intimate with, ruptured by, and entangled with their environments. These readings draw our eyes to the heaving and breathing landscapes within decadent fiction. They bring to light the ways decadent poems can sound like breath, move like breath, and make their readers breathe differently, bringing readers into connection with the poet’s intimacy with the landscape into which breath passes and from which it pulls. These insights are the happy result of the practice Denisoff describes in his epilogue that rhymes with the aesthetic practices he detects in his primary texts, and they make for a different decadence.The different decadence we see in Decadent Ecology is in part distinct because, as Denisoff emphasizes, it is more wide ranging in its understanding of the constitution of decadent networks at the end of the nineteenth century. When we move away from detecting decadence primarily in texts devoted to urban spaces, dandyism, and sexual anarchy and understand that a decadent ethos might be communicated in an essay about hiking or a manual for magic, we also alter the cast of decadence. We suddenly have Robert Louis Stevenson and Moina Mathers among us. But Denisoff’s insights into decadent ecology also make canonical decadence read differently. They make the languor and hedonism in the canonical decadence of London trysts and opium dens read as openness to impressions and the environment, to allowing oneself to be decentered by, immersed in, and entangled with forces and energies outside the self. They make the ennui we associate with the decadent stance emerge as a response to the “subordination of human agency to the forces of an indeterminate ecology” (33). These insights also deepen our revised understanding of decadence, our more recent sense of decadence as ethically and politically engaged, by recasting Walter Pater’s sense of relationality or Vernon Lee’s interest in empathy as, at their foundation, based in an ecological ethos.Decadent Ecology is at once coherent and ambitious. It opens with an extremely clear chapter on “Decadent Ecology and the Pagan Revival” that establishes the vocabulary (“pagan,” “decadent,” “ecology”) on which the text will rely. This chapter places an ecological ethos at the foundations of British decadence in the works of A. C. Swinburne and the Pre-Raphaelite painter Frederick Sandys (whose Medea [1868], described by Denisoff as a “pagan artefact” [31], graces the cover). Swinburne’s decadent ecology, we are told immediately, centers forms of disruption and excess that operate beyond human understanding and, like decadent ecological culture more generally, is fascinated with the concept of indeterminate relationships from which humans cannot extricate themselves but of which they are not the center. The second chapter works similarly to establish the foundations of the decadent ecological tradition, turning to Pater’s mode of representing individuals in texts such as Marius the Epicurean as submerged within deep time—part of collectives too vast to be conceived, not singular agents but interlacings of changing relationships—and positioning Pater as a catalyst for the pagan revival.The establishing chapters that center Swinburne and Pater lay the groundwork for chapters that move in slightly more startling directions, locating forms of the decadent ecological ethos in unexpected texts or figures. Denisoff reads Simeon Solomon’s paintings and Michael Field’s ekphrastic verse as expressing a queer investment in trans-species intimacy. Vernon Lee and Robert Louis Stevenson are placed together as an unlikely pair with shared investments in the concept of genius loci and a love for modes of travel and movement that bring the subject into closer intimacy with the landscape. A fantastic chapter on occult ecology delivers a very different decadent feminism, one that has tended to be overlooked in histories of decadent feminism and the New Woman at the fin de siècle. Denisoff argues that Moina Mathers and Florence Farr located their feminist practice in forms of Egyptian-inspired ritual and theatrical performance that positioned women as particularly adept mediums capable of accessing nature-based spirituality. The concluding chapter on William Sharp, Arthur Machen, and George Egerton offers lush readings of scenarios of re/decomposition that undercut the human sense of control of and separation from environments.Across Decadent Ecology, Denisoff demonstrates how ecological sensitivity and a pagan sensibility pervaded decadent thinking at the fin de siècle. In his attentiveness to style, form, and structure, he also models a mode of criticism sensitive to the multiple manners in which we might understand a text to be expressing an ecological ethos. In addition, the book is beautiful to read, as it is written with clarity and a sense of wonder and curiosity about the strange results of late nineteenth-century ecological thinking and the decadent ethics and intimacies engendered by opening up the self to the environment. Denisoff had already, prior to this new book, played a significant role in the revival of interest in decadence. With Decadent Ecology, he provides us with an entirely new set of places and ways to perceive the decadent sensibility and conceptualize its political and ethical implications, as well as a model of scholarship “less passive, more intimate,” that listens carefully to what texts wish to communicate.3