Innocence abandoned: Pre-Raphaelites to Aesthetes, 1850-1900

Abstract

In Victorian England there was a strong sense of the breakup of the old established social and religious order and a general lack of spiritual certainty. A sense of loss and guilt was pred ominant in the work of William Morris and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. An awareness of loneliness and fragmentation both within and between men had been expressed from the 1830s onwards in the work of Carlyle and Arnold and Ruskin. The thesis analyses the efforts mad e by Rossetti and Morris as Pre­ Raphaelites, and by the aesthetes - Swinburne, Pater, Whistler and Wilde - to break with conventional ways of looking at the world and the self, in order to find a new human wh oleness. Th e work of these post-R omantics in poetry, prose, painting and political writing ranges from the late 1840s to 1900. Wh at emerged h owever instead of illumination was a new set of problems concerned with the nature of identity in a world perceived to be in flux and offering no objective moral guidelines or 'truths'. Pater celebrated th e infinit e p ower of th e subje ctive imagination, bu t for other p ost­ Romantics the subjective mode of perception gave rise to idiosyncratic fears and preoccupa tions, especially with the idea of evil as a reaction to lost innocence and idealism. The aesthetes differed from Morris and Rossetti in th eir stress on art for art's sake and in their greater willingness to forgo the ideal of spiritual innocence in favour of a more subtle appreciation of mutability and the absence of absolutes. So concepts of beau ty and of the relation of substance and form were reappraised. The thesis traces how in the work of the more minor decad ent novelists and the writers of the Yellow Book and the Savoy of the 1890s, this reappraisal, combined with an interest in different forms of experience, turned into a fascination with strangeness as an aspect of beauty and in sin, eroticism and d eath. Fant asy, melancholy, nihilism and the ultimate solipsism of d espair r eplaced earlier attemp ts t o locate some spiritual significance behind the chaos of appearances. The thesis concludes with looking at Beardsley's sophisticated juxtaposition of innocence and evil as a response to despair of knowledge, at Symons's overview of aestheticism, and at Yeats's final transcendence, in his contributions to the Yellow Book , of the dangers and the delights of dreaming. He managed to overcome the creative and psych ological insecu rit ies which had opened up in the gap between surface and unknowable essences as well as within the indefinable self. Show more