The Decadent Story

Defining the Colors of Decadence

What is a decadent story? Decadence is an elusive term. It is characterized, by turns, as artificial, decaying, and self-indulgent. In Decadence: A Very Short Introduction, David Weir describes the cities and their eras when decadence was in full flower, and the ways in which the term “decadence” chameleons itself—sometimes sybaritic, sometimes sadistic, sometimes goth, sometimes gay, sometimes pessimistic, sometimes perverse.

Weir thinks of decadence as an object seen through colored filters, with each color representing a different facet of decadence:

One filter darkens the object and makes decadence look like pessimism. Another gives it a luscious hue that makes it look like hedonism. A mottled, greenish filter turns the object rotten, suggesting degeneration. Still another imparts a lavender glow, and connotes, somehow, “the love that dare not speak its name” (the phrase Lord Alfred Douglas, Oscar Wilde’s lover, used to describe homosexuality). … We should not expect to find every aspect of decadence in the same work at the same time. Truly representative, comprehensive examples of decadence are hard to find.
—Decadence: A Very Short Introduction by David Weir

The decadent story, especially that which flourished during the decadent movement in nineteenth-century fin-de-siècle France, can be described in the same way: it comes in all different hues.

The Colors of the Decadent Story

Black Decadence

Many decadent stories reveal their writers’ Schopenhauerian pessimism. This is the black decadence of Joris-Karl Huysmans, as in his novelette A Dilemma (recently published by Wakefield Press), which reveals the classism and hypocrisy of the bourgeoisie—the story’s characters believe that money is more important than a working class woman’s life. This, at a time when the urban planner Baron Haussmann had been demolishing Parisian working-class neighborhoods and displacing their inhabitants to the outskirts of Paris, in his far-reaching urban-renewal project.

Auguste Villiers de l’Isle Adam perfected the conte cruel (cruel tale), stories that end with a “cynically ironic” twist, according to Brian Stableford. Stableford translated and collected some of the best examples in Villiers de l’Isle Adam’s The Scaffold and Other Cruel Tales.

Similarly, deliciously diabolical female characters illuminate Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly’s Les Diaboliques, in the final twists of stories such as “A Woman’s Revenge,” about a beautiful prostitute who chose her profession only because she wants to degrade her former husband’s aristocratic name.

Guy de Maupassant, the father of the short story in France, also wrote cruel tales. His most famous story, “Ball of Fat,” contains cynical elements, such as the descriptions of the fickleness and callousness of the bourgeoisie. This complicated story’s plot, set during the Franco-Prussian War, reveals how a group of “respectable” middle-class travelers treat a prostitute whose train they share.

In any survey of French decadent authors who excel at portraying revolting characters, Octave Mirbeau tops the list. His story “The Bath” describes an old bachelor who finally marries, but his wife barely notices when he drowns in his bath while she’s bathing him.

Purple Decadence

As Weir’s filters turn, decadence turns hedonistic. Many decadent stories describe all that is sybaritic and pleasurable. Rachilde’s “The Death of Antinous” (recently published in The Blood-Guzzler and Other Stories) is one example. Set in ancient Rome, the original decadent paradigm, it presents the lavish world of the ailing emperor Hadrian as he addresses his lover, Antinous. Hadrian becomes irate at a triviality and stabs Antinous. This story contains many of the colors of decadence: black, purple, and lavender the color that Weir uses to represent same-sex desire (described below).

It’s not uncommon for decadent characters to take inordinate amounts of pleasure in inanimate objects. These fetishists are darkly funny in their extreme passions. “The Dress” by Remy de Gourmont (which appears in his book The Angels of Perversity) is a good example. A man falls in love with a woman’s dress: “Oh! If only that dress would consent to let him love her!” When the prostitute wearing the dress realizes that the man wants to have sex with the dress alone, she struggles to get away from him, and he strangles her.

Greenish Decadence

And so, the lens turns to a new filter. The mottled, greenish filter of decadence turns the object rotten. Perhaps Jean Lorrain’s “The Man Who Loved Consumptives” (which appears in French Decadent Tales) would be a good representative of this diseased aspect of decadence. At the opera, a man is espied with his latest conquest, a pale, tubercular young woman who has the languor of illness. This man aestheticizes ill-health; he celebrates the grotesque.

Another darkly satirical story about death is “The Secret of the Scaffold” by Villiers de l’isle Adam (which appears in The Scaffold and Other Cruel Tales). In it, a doctor asks a criminal who is to be guillotined if he is willing to be a part of an experiment to see how long consciousness remains in the head of a decapitated man. The doctor unwittingly tortures the nervous criminal with a long and detailed description of the grisly experience of beheading. And yet there is very little gore in decadent literature; most decadent stories describe death, dying, and decay in the most delicate and sophisticated terms.

Lavender Decadence

Besides Rachilde’s story about Hadrian and Antinous above, another story that illustrates Lavender Decadence is Renée Vivien’s “Prince Charming” (which appears in Fairy Tales for the Disillusioned). It’s a story about a young woman who dresses as a man to marry the woman whom she loves. Indeed, Vivien wrote almost exclusively about same-sex female desire.

Neo-Decadence

Modern adherents of the decadent mode are members of Neo-Decadence. Several years ago, Snuggly Books published Drowning in Beauty: The Neo-Decadent Anthology edited by Justin Isis and Daniel Corrick. Authors featured in this edition include: Avalon Brantley, James Champagne, Brendan Connell, Quentin S. Crisp, Colin Insole, Damian Murphy, Yarrow Paisley, Ursula Pflug, Colby Smith, and D.P. Watt. A prolific Neo-Decadent author is Brendan Connell, whose Metrophilias is organized by cities and their inhabitants. The most memorable have unusual fetishes—one loves a decapitated head that he keeps in his refrigerator; another his sword, which he lovingly polishes.

Conclusion

Decadent literature, in its jewel-like splendor, offers never-ending exploration. What is your favorite color of decadence? Is there a side of decadence that Weir doesn’t cover? Is there a well-known decadent story that I missed? Are there any classic decadent stories that you can’t believe I didn’t include in this short introduction to the French decadent story? If so, please comment—I’d like to hear from you.

Decadent Story Anthologies

Boyiopoulos, ‌Kostas, Yoonjoung Choi, Matthew Brinton Tildesley, eds. The Decadent Short Story. Edinburgh University Press. 2014.

Hustvedt, Asti, ed. The Decadent Reader: Fiction, Fantasy, and Perversion from Fin-de-Siècle France. Zone Books. 1998.

Isis, Justin, and Daniel Corrick, eds. Drowning in Beauty: The Neo-Decadent Anthology. Snuggly Books. 2018.

Romer, Stephen, ed. French Decadent Tales. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2013.

‌Schultz, Gretchen, and Lewis Carl Seifert, eds. Fairy Tales for the Disillusioned: Enchanted Stories from the French Decadent Tradition. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 2017.

Showalter, Elaine, ed. Daughters of Decadence. Rutgers University Press. 1993.