In Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray, Dorian’s Faustian descent into aloof, self-absorbed hedonism begins, like the Biblical Genesis narrative, in a garden. Yet, unlike the “earthly paradise,” Wilde’s garden takes on a rather particular ethnic character. “[Now] and then,” he writes, “the fantastic shadows of birds in flight flitted across the long tussore-silk curtains that were stretched in front of the huge window, producing a kind of momentary Japanese effect, and making him think of those pallid jade-faced painters of Tokio who, through the medium of an art that is necessarily immobile, seek to convey the sense of swiftness and motion.”
Eugène Dété after Paul Thiriat, Frontispiece to Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray, 1908
Even in our modern context, Wilde’s vision is unmistakable. In this garden, tantalization and temptation seem to meet; the world, like “art that is necessarily immobile,” seeks to transcend its own boundaries – in this case, to satiate the spiritual with the material. By invoking “oriental” tussore-silk, an Indian textile, and Japanese paintings, he presents an enclosed, indulgent space, where the higher calls of potential virtues are muffled by the seductive pull of sensation. Such was the reputation of Japonisme in his time. And it is in this very garden that Dorian inadvertently curses himself, binding his soul to a portrait that bears the burden of aging for him. A true decadent, he dooms himself through his devotion to material excess.
It would be easy to write off this brief episode as a failure of global imagination on Wilde’s part – or at least as a dubiously ethical way of expressing the nature of his garden to his audience. Yet, though Wilde does present a romanticized view of Japanese aesthetics, his does not seem to be an effort to “appropriate” Eastern values. In fact, he treats Japanese artistic philosophy as an integral part of the story’s themes, especially those surrounding our reactions to mortality and the ability of art to imitate, and perhaps even inform, life.
Diego Velázquez, Portrait of a Lady, c. 1630
His remarks do, however, indicate a different, troubling aspect of Victorian Japonisme: its disorienting influence on the West itself. The Victorians rushed to marvel (and often gawk) at the artistic fruits of Japan’s nuanced aesthetic principles and philosophical values. But in a society wrought with political upheaval and building tension – indeed, one nearing the brink of the First World War – their often heedless interest in “Orientalism” may very well have added fuel to the fire of Western consumerism and secularization, already driven by industrialization and the French Revolution.
Japanese aesthetics, removed from their original cultural context, found a home away from home in the burgeoning hedonism of the Decadent movement. The decadent “aesthetes” were entranced by ukiyo-e’s frank celebration of material impermanence and pleasure, which had been so long rejected in the West in favor of the moral perfection and divine infinitude. Ukiyo-e fell in line with aesthetes’ unswerving belief in the centrality of an emotional experience of art and beauty above spiritual or ethical considerations.
How, then, did the decadents define art? As Ellis Hanson puts it in Decadence and Catholicism,
[decadent art is] characterized by an elaborate … often torturous style; it delights in strange and obscure words, sumptuous exoticism, exquisite sensations, and improbable juxtapositions; it is fraught with disruption, fragmentation, and paradox; it has a tendency to vague and mystical language, a longing to wring from words an enigmatic symbolism or a perverse irony. Decadent writing is also commonly defined by its thematic preoccupation with art.
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