The Decadent Imagination

Abstract

This chapter examines how aesthetes and decadents staked a competing claim to those Roman narratives of corruption and contagion outlined in Chapter 7. Beginning with a detailed analysis of Marius the Epicurean (1885), it shows how Walter Pater and his contemporaries sought to delink aestheticism from Gibbonian narratives of decline and fall, and to reclaim aesthetic masculinity from associations of moral and masculine deviance. The second part examines decadent authors such as Oscar Wilde, Villiers de L’Isle Adam, and George Moore, who adopted an equally recuperative, though more controversial approach to the ancient Roman past. Revelling in the more illicit and disturbing aspects of Roman history with a playfully self-parodic humour which is typical of the movement as a whole, and frequently voicing their affinity with the most notorious of Roman emperors—Nero—decadent writers appear be invested in a very genuine attempt to disassociate decadent ideologies from Gibbonian models of degeneration and decline.