THE OSCHOLARS
___________

Vol. IV

No. 11

Issue no 43: December 2007

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THE CRITIC AS CRITIC

The Page of Reviews

All authors whose books are reviewed are invited to respond. Wilde theatre reviews appear here; Shaw reviews in Shavings; all others in .

Table of Contents Click  to go directly to each article
I.   BOOKS
Marie-Luise Kohlke on Oscar over coffee
Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin on Lord Alfred Douglas
Deirdre McMahon on the Salome dancers
Bart Moore-Gilbert on Departmental Ditties
Laurence Tailarach-Vielmas on Victorian Mysticism
II.   EXHIBITIONS
Joni Spigler on Moreau and Huysmans in Paris
Antoine Capet on Millais at The Tate in London
Link to Antoine Capet on Walter Sickert in Camden Town
Malcolm Hicks on Walter Crane in Manchester
III. THEATRE
Michelle Paull on Salome

I. books

Revenant in the Coffee House

Merlin Holland: Coffee with Oscar Wilde; with a foreword by Simon Callow. London: Duncan Baird, 2007. Hardback ISBN: 978-1-84483-520-1, £6.99

Review by Marie-Luise Kohlke

Merlin Holland’s Coffee with Oscar Wilde is an engaging pocket-sized volume, ideally suited for one’s own coffee house visit, where one can surreptitiously listen in on the conversation at the next table between Wilde and his only grandson. Holland adopts a highly appropriate format to introduce a writer who ‘systematically explored the oral dimension’[1] and proved himself ‘a past-master in the gentle art of making conversation’.[2] The Holland-Wilde colloquy is very much conducted in public though, and those readers expecting choice naughty titbits from the Victorian bête-noire, the ‘Baudelaire to the English middle-classes’ (64), will be disappointed. Unlike Little Red Riding Hood, Holland never strays from the well-trodden path, and in the process, the Big Bad Wolf cuts rather a tame figure – for all that Wilde epitomises the still persistent, though problematic notion of our Victorian Other, living a double life and secretly pursuing illicit pleasures, doubly attractive now since no longer transgressive. As John Fowles wrote ‘we have, in destroying so much of the mystery, the difficulty, the aura of the forbidden, destroyed also a great deal of the pleasure.’[3] In Coffee with Oscar Wilde, the reconstruction of the nineteenth century context that would enable us to relive the mystery and the forbidden, typical of neo-Victorian novels, never materialises fully due to the mundane twenty-first century café setting. The Victorian age is evoked verbally and virtually, rather than experienced vicariously and viscerally.

That is not to say that Holland’s offering is cynically soulless. Its pastiche embodies the nostalgic postmodernism that Christian Gutleben identifies as the motivating force of contemporary British fictions which ventriloquise the nineteenth century, with the figure of Echo rather than Narcissus becoming the ‘emblematic figure’ for metafiction[4] – though perhaps both of these collapse in Wilde as time-travelling revenant. Holland admits that recreating his grandfather’s style of speech ‘required almost the same level of hubris as Oscar Wilde himself taking on the Marquess of Queensberry for libel’, but defends himself as not presuming to ‘out-Oscar Oscar’ (10). Explicitly, Holland acknowledges Wilde’s ‘eminence and precedence’ via ‘the I-couldn’t-say-it-better implication’,[5] analogous to J.T. Grein’s refusal to quote Wildean epigrams outright, because he considered it ‘but a poor glory to feather one’s cap with another man’s cleverness.’[6] A certain degree of fairly mechanical repetition-with-variation thus becomes unavoidable, so that at times Wilde’s aphoristic (re-) formulation seems to apply equally to Holland himself: ‘I was living only on echoes and had little music of my own’ (127).

Such revivification of the dead for conversational purposes, with the writer playing quasi spiritualist medium to spirit-voices, constitutes one of the most recognisable tropes of neo-Victorian fiction. This fairly fluid category can easily be stretched to include Holland’s sprightly little tome in the subgenre of what Rosario Arias Doblas calls ‘spectral’ writing, with its aims of ‘resurrecting and materialising the Victorian dead in manifold forms,’ though without the common occult overtones.[7] Nor is it the first time that neo-Victorian fiction has reanimated nineteenth century writers as literal revenants rather than still-living characters. In Jane Urquhart’s Changing Heaven (1990), for instance, the ghost of Emily Brontë engages in long conversations on the moors about her life and work with the spirit of a newly dead, fin-de-siècle, female balloonist. Holland’s Oscar, likewise, is more life-like than truly coming alive, as his evocator seeks to recapture what is lost – the living voice – and simultaneously grants its irretrievability, implicitly agreeing with Robert Ross: ‘…you may think with others that his personality and conversation were far more wonderful than anything he wrote, or that his written works give only a pale reflexion [sic] of his power. Perhaps that is so, and of course it will be impossible to reproduce what [is] gone for ever’[8]. As such, Holland’s text persistently re-stages the death it undoes, as if, to cite Wilde’s own words from The Ballad of Reading Goal (1989), ‘[…] he who lives more lives than one / More deaths than one must die.’

Holland does not aim for novelty but the delights of familiarity and recognition. Deliberately, he does not provide a new take on the artist’s private life, psychological crises, and personal failings, or titillate with new revelations of hitherto unknown indiscretions and obsessions, as one finds vis-à-vis re-imagined literary greats in such works as Margaret Forster’s Lady’s Maid (1990), about the private life of Elizabeth Barrett Browning from the perspective of her personal maid, Lynne Truss’ comic Tennyson's Gift (1996), or Colm Toibin’s The Master (2004), about Henry James’ composition of The Turn of the Screw. In contrast, Holland adopts his companion’s preference, voiced in the opening exchange, for the French attitude of ‘nobody car[ing] much what goes on behind closed doors’ (31). Such circumspection, however, means that, unlike other self-consciously metafictional writers, Holland cannot exploit the full potentials of fiction to play with the enigma that was/is Wilde, providing his character with absolute liberty of self-expression, or benefit himself from the historical fiction writer’s freedom ‘to invent’ wherever ‘mere hints and outright gaps exist in the records’.[9] As a result, his offering lacks a little drama.

Holland attempts to convey the general ‘flavour of Oscar Wilde’ by ‘boil[ing] all the ingredients’ of his art and conversation ‘up together’ (11) – scintillating one-liners, oft-cited bon mots, barbed quips, paradoxes, tall tales, persiflage, self-publicising witticisms – into a lightly spiced, easily digestible dish suitable for most palates. While replicating Wilde’s own tendency to adapt and recycle, even plagiarise his own and others’ words, Holland’s method is not without risk, comparable to that which The Observer found at work in A Woman of No Importance, where ‘the quip and crank of the commonplace book are showered out upon the dialogue as from a pepper-pot, so that every dish in the banquet has precisely the same flavour.’[10] On the other hand, Holland’s derivative ‘originality’ emulates Wilde’s own, as defined by Lawrence Danson: ‘an originality founded on the already-made, a newness that flaunts belatedness.’[11] Holland’s strategy probably holds limited interest for Wilde scholars like himself, for whom the book will at best prove a pleasant diversion, to leaf through during their own coffee breaks. Indeed, some might choose to re-enact the part of the Oxford Union Library vis-à-vis Wilde’s first volume of poetry, ‘soliciting a copy’ for review ‘and then returning it as unwanted’ (18).

Yet Wilde himself clearly valued the entertainment factor, or as he put it ‘sincere and studied triviality’,[12] above dull fact and seriousness in and of themselves. And the strength of Holland’s text lies in bringing Wilde closer to the general public, who are more likely to know him from recent popular film adaptations of his plays than from having actually read his works or letters. Compared with his appearance in Peter Ackroyd’s The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde (1983), Holland’s Wilde lacks the intimate and confessional tone of self-unmasking vulnerability. Instead Holland’s writing resembles the easy listening format of breezy chat shows or celebrity interviews familiar from daytime television. Yet such a mode is peculiarly apt – perhaps even more realistic – to Wilde’s love of evasive self-performance, aesthetic posturing, contrived effect, and style above sincerity, ‘a mixture of charlatan and clown’.[13] Though Holland doesn’t quite manage to replicate Wilde’s comic method, reputed to have ‘often left his audience literally helpless with laughter’, as described by Simon Callow, his book still proves ‘tonic’ in effect (7), something to smile rather than howl over. Victoriana lite for the non-specialist reader, Coffee with Oscar Wilde gives us Wilde updated and re-packaged in sound bite lingo for our own condensed information age. Nevertheless, it may well tempt some readers to go back to Wilde’s primary texts, to read for the first time, or else re-read.

In a sense, Holland continues Wilde’s orchestrated ‘campaign of self-publicity’ (17) into the twenty-first century, so that the man who ‘awoke the imagination of [his] century so that it created myth and legend around [him]’ (86), might do the same again for ours. In his introduction, Holland recounts a story told him by the theatre critic Sheridan Morley. Asked by George Weidenfeld to produce a new biography of Wilde, Morley queried the necessity of such an undertaking, in view of another biography having been published some ten years previously, only to be told that ‘it’s such a good story that the public needs to be retold it every decade or so’ (13). Holland implicitly shares this view and engages in just such a re-telling.

Occasionally, Holland succumbs to the temptation of hindsight with hints of didacticism thrown in. Despite admitting a general lack of interest in active reform, his Wilde is imbued with a modicum of social conscience, commenting on the non-existent rehabilitation of prisoners, which ‘was one of the great failings of the system and, for all I know, probably still is’ (111). Holland’s pun on the homosexual closet is similarly heavy-handed. When he acquaints Wilde with his redeemed status of ‘almost […] becoming a national monument’ with his own dedicated memorial window in Poet’s Corner in Westminster Abbey, Wilde replies: ‘I suppose it’s quite appropriate that I should be neither in nor out, and looking both ways at the same time.’ (135) Holland also leaves himself open to the charge Wilde levies against Victorian England, namely to ‘turn wine into water’ (67) - or perhaps, more accurately, boiled-together mild curry. He does not quite manage to convey the full ‘firework display’ (14) of Wilde’s existence within the civilised watered-down format of the coffee house conversation, nor press ‘as many pulsations as possible’ out of his subject’s life (42). While Holland frustrates the reader’s own Wildean search for ever new and rarified sensations, however, he whets the appetite for more ‘original’ Oscar. If not quite ‘the perfect type of a perfect pleasure’, Coffee with Oscar Wilde nevertheless leaves its reader pleasantly ‘unsatisfied’ (32).

· Marie-Luise Kohlke teaches at Swansea University and is Founding Editor of the Neo-Victorian Studies e-Journal.

Bosie and his Poetry

Caspar Wintermans: Alfred Douglas: A Poet’s Life and His Finest Work. Peter Owen, £19.95 in UK.

Review by Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin

Caspar Wintermans’s new life of Alfred Douglas has a cause to advance. The book’s project, not an especially hopeful one, one might speculate, among readers of THE OSCHOLARS, is to vindicate as far as possible the reputation of its subject. The subtitle, ‘A poet’s life and his finest work’ is defiant, insisting that its subject rates more than a footnote in literary history and that Douglas’s poetry is worth considering in its own right. The book is carefully annotated and there is a detailed bibliography as befits a serious reassessment of a writer. The author certainly achieves the ends he has set himself, though the questions, moral and aesthetic, about the life and work remain open. While it would be an overstatement to say that Douglas is his hero, Wintermans does pay him the kind of attention that enables him to be the central point of his own Life, and he does construct around him a sense of the period which allows us to adjust the verdict of history, if only slightly.

If there is no hero, there is certainly a villain. Robert Ross, referred to regularly as ‘Bobbie’, is presented throughout as a malignly jealous rival who revenged himself unjustly on Douglas after Wilde’s death; in particular, he is blamed for the publication of De Profundis in its bowdlerised version in 1905, and for having made the complete text available, as evidence in court, in the libel case Douglas took against Arthur Ransome (now best known as the author of the children’s series, Swallows and Amazons) in 1912. De Profundis was originally a letter addressed to Douglas, but was given to Robert Ross when Wilde left Reading gaol; and the fact that Ross treated it as a public text, printing the edited version in 1905 and circulating it among writers and editors with the intention of re-establishing Wilde’s reputation is here presented as a piece of treachery. Many readers will feel that if the author viewed it as a letter he had only to post it off as soon as he was at liberty.

However, the accusations in De Profundis have clung, perhaps unfairly, to the addressee, while conferring on him the gloomy glamour of a diabolical seducer. The confusion about Douglas’s ‘influence’ on Wilde is perhaps understandable given the often coded communication around sexual relations in their lifetimes. From the viewpoint of the twenty-first century, the fact that Wilde was thirty-six when he first met the twenty-one-year-old Douglas, that Robert Ross was then twenty-two, might lead one to ask whether the older man was not at least as well, or as little, able to take care of himself, as the two ephebes. Ross does seem to have been a nicer person than Douglas.

The latter’s life does indeed need to be extended in the popular imagination from the few years which it disastrously (for the other man) shared with Wilde’s. His background in a famously dysfunctional family is well known, as is his continental reunion with Wilde after he had been released from prison. His later career, including his marriage to Olive Custance, a bohemian writer with whom he ended up on good terms after quarrels and de facto separation, and the sad story of their son Raymond, is here traced to his death at the age of seventy-four in 1945. (Thomas Kilroy wrote a play on the same story, My Scandalous Life, for the centenary of Wilde’s death in 2000.)

Wintermans does us a service in insisting that Alfred Douglas was more than a juvenile nineties poet; his later literary activities included editing a journal, The Academy, from 1907-10, and another, Catholic-oriented periodical, Plain English (succeeded by Plain Speech), in which he accused Winston Churchill of conspiring with a Jewish cabal over the panic following the news of the battle of Jutland, and various autobiographical pieces which lead us towards the suspicion that his own life and reputation were his great subject. Less widely known than the court cases sparked by the liaison with Wilde, but in their day equally interesting to the public, is the later series of libel actions in which Douglas and several contemporaries continued the custom of using the courts for expensive cultural and familial wars. He was sued for libel by his father-in-law; he himself threatened a Cambridge student publication with the law; he sued the Reverend Robert Horton who had drawn attention to his editorship of The Academy as a threat to Protestant Britain, in 1910 – in fact he was received into the Catholic church only in 1911; the Hon. Freddie Manners-Sutton sued the co-editor of the same periodical for an article suggesting he published naughty novels; and the list goes on. Wintermans’s account avoids showing his subject in a ludicrous light (and glosses over some of the nastier attacks on Ross, as, in the 1916 Rossiad, on ‘The German and the Sodomite’) but admits a ‘taste for litigation’ and shows how it was only one aspect of a quarrelsome disposition which made him a failure in the business of publishing. He went to jail in the 1920s for libelling Churchill in a twopenny pamphlet, and that seems to have cured him of public battles (though he did print an abusive sonnet about the judge in 1926); he continued to write about his own past, reissued his poems, and addressed the Royal Society of Literature on the Principles of Poetry. He settled into a rather benign old age, and appears to have evoked affection in a wide variety of people.

This biography includes a selection of some fifty poems, the latest dated 1942, but the majority, including some translations of Baudelaire, from the 1890s. The author claims that Douglas’s best sonnets are comparable with those of ‘Platen, Hérédia, even those of Shakespeare’. I don’t know enough German to comment on August von Platen, but I cannot find in these poems more than an echo of Hérédia’s flaming energy or Shakespeare’s crammed life. Skill and a delicate ear are evident in the poems at large, and we are conscious sometimes of an expert control of metre where the lightening of a syllable is an event in itself, but the control is not consistent.

More importantly, the poems are unequal in the mental energy they communicate. A sonnet written in 1897 at Naples, where he was living with Wilde, is in a way typical, in that it has awkward rhymes (‘acolyte’ with ‘delight’ is merely predictable, but the word matching ‘demur’ is ‘barrier’) and a repeated ‘one’ that grates; and yet the last two lines show a deployment of monosyllables that expresses a furious determination as clearly as the violent image:

To ransom one lost moment with a rhyme

Of passionate protest or austere demur;

To clutch Life’s hair, and thrust one naked phrase

Like a lean knife between the ribs of Time.

As a writer Douglas has the disadvantage of being compared with Wilde, whose range and variety he never came near to equal; his verse belongs for the most part with Dowson’s and Lionel Johnson’s (which is not meant to be faint praise), the theme being as often as not a generalised, mythologised Love; while his prose writings will always be consulted for the light they throw on his personality and his famous friend’s. But the defiantly homoerotic poems of the 1890s have another claim on our attention; they become actually interesting in the aggression with which the poet asserts their forbidden subject. To have coined the phrase ‘the Love that dare not speak its name’, and the poem which it concludes, was not bad work for a twenty-two year old. The Naples sonnets too have a clarity and colour that engage a reader in spite of too many agonies and anguishes echoing in their phrases.

Caspar Wintermans has justified his declaration that Douglas needs to be seen as himself a poet. The bibliographical research in particular must be applauded, and, while the author’s agenda throughout the Life is clear, he is also balanced and scholarly. His writing (an English translation from his own Dutch original) is mostly excellent though sometimes more intimate and more knowing than one might wish; Wilde ‘reeled’ on receiving Queensberry’s card at the Albemarle, and Douglas is ‘Bosie’ throughout. He makes expert use of quotations from a very wide variety of sources, especially in the illuminating notes.

· Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin is Associate Professor of English and Fellow of Trinity College Dublin. She is editor of The Wilde Legacy (Dublin: Four Courts Press 2002) and has published six collections of poetry; her awards include the Patrick Kavanagh Prize.

Dancing Salome

Toni Bentley: Sisters of Salome. Lincoln and London. University of Nebraska Press, 2005.

Review by Deirdre McMahon

[Note. This was reviewed in THE OSCHOLARS when it was first published. The appearance of this paperback edition during our period of suspension has given us a second opportunity to look it – Editor, THE OSCHOLARS.]

Although Salome inspired writers and artists before Oscar Wilde, his erotic drama Salome, redolent of scents, jewels and the decadent East, was a supreme expression of the Zeitgeist. It both reflected and stimulated fin de siècle fears of the new woman, sexual, insatiable, predatory. He never saw the play performed in his lifetime but, as Toni Bentley writes in her entertaining study, Wilde created an icon with a personality and psychology all her own. He also gave her the Dance of the Seven Veils. He described it to Aubrey Beardsley as ‘that invisible dance’ and that’s just what it was, a dance that both concealed and revealed, especially the women who became identified with Salome and who are the subject of this book – Maud Allan, Mata Hari, Ida Rubinstein and Colette.

The highs, and lows, of Salomania were astonishing. Bentley explains that this was in part because Salome was not just a misogynist, male fantasy but a heterosexual, sadistic, female fantasy as well. Richard Strauss’s opera was banned in Vienna but was eventually premiered in Dresden in 1905. At the premiere the singer, Maria Wittich, refused to perform the Dance of the even Veils and a ballerina did it instead, thus making Salome a much more visual image. The Salome craze owed much to this innovation with dancers like Loie Fuller and Ruth St Denis staging their own spectacles. Spectacle was clear the mot juste for Fuller’s La tragédie de Salome in 1907; her costume had 4,500 feathers and used 650 lamps and fifteen projectors. Unsurprisingly, Salomania soon attracted skits. Ziegfeld’s Follies of 1907 had a Salome number performed by Mlle Dazié (aka Daisy Peterkin from Chicago) while impresario Oscar Hammerstein I sent the comedienne Gertrude Hoffmann to Europe to learn her act from Maud Allan, who was then the most successful European Salome. By 1909 every variety/vaudeville show had a Salome number but there was a counter-attack by assorted wives and matrons, among them the redoubtable Julia Ward Howe (author of that stirring anthem ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’) who described oriental dancing as ‘the most deforming movement of whole abdominal and lumbar region’.

So far, so weird and wonderful. The remainder of Bentley’s book consists of biographical chapters over whose subjects there hovers a rather darker aura. For Maud Allan, Mata Hari, Ida Rubinstein and Colette, Salome was a way to reinvent themselves and hide scandalous aspects of their past lives. For Maud Allan (née Durrant of San Francisco) it was her brother’s execution for the murders of young girls. Reinventing herself as Maud Allan in faraway Europe, she first performed Salome in Vienna in 1906. After complaints of lewdness, the director of the Staatsoper, Gustav Mahler, scheduled a second rehearsal to review her scanty costume. Her real success came when she performed for King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra in London, a city Bentley blithely terms ‘the home of teatime, charity matinees, and birch-in-the-boudoir sex’. With royal patronage, Allan’s two week run at the Palace Theatre (where Wilde’s Salome was to have been performed in 1892) was extended to eighteen months.

However, the limits of Allan’s Salome act were soon apparent. There was a disastrous tour of Russia where critics saw her as a poor imitation of their beloved Isadora Duncan. There were further tours to America, the Far East and Australia after which she returned to London for the fateful private performances of Wilde’s Salome in early 1918. Just before the announcement of the performances, an opportunist Independent M.P., Noel Pemberton-Billing, made dramatic claims about a German ‘Black Book’ of 50,000 sexual and political degenerates at the heart of the English establishment. The Salome performances were manna to him and his supporters, including the novelist Marie Corelli, who declared that the subscribers to the play were among the alleged degenerates. Cannier people saw the trap that Pemberton-Billing was laying in order to garner publicity but poor Allan walked straight into it and sued for libel. There were many echoes from the Wilde trial in 1895. Lord Alfred Douglas was a witness, eager to vent his spleen against Wilde and his executor Robert Ross. Allan was represented by Travers Humphreys whose father had defended Wilde. Like Wilde, she emerged humiliated and ruined from the trial. Her brother’s crimes were exposed and and her innocent assent to the question whether she knew what clitoris meant damned her as immoral in the eyes of the jury who acquitted Pemberton-Billing. The trial was a disgraceful farce. The judge, Mr Justice Darling, who had recently presided over another trial with strong undertones of sexual degeneracy, Roger Casement’s in 1916, harrumphed about Wilde’s ‘filthy works’ and ‘filthy practices’. He was delighted that Wilde had been convicted, imprisoned and had suffered social disgrace and death. Allan returned to America in the 1930s and worked in the Douglas Aircraft factory in California during the Second World War. She died in penury in 1956.

The year 1918 was not a good one for Salomes. Several months after Allan’s humiliation, Mata Hari was executed in Paris for espionage. At her trial she was called the greatest woman spy of the century but this was ridiculous hyperbole. When the files on her case were eventually released in the 1980s, the evidence against her was seen to be flimsy in the extreme. The pathetic truth was that she was as ineffectual a spy as she was an oriental dancer. But because of her early marriage to a Dutch army officer and their departure for rhe Dutch East Indies, Mata Hari did at least have an authentic connection with the East. Her career followed a similar trajectory to Allan’s, successful exploitation of the vogue for eastern exotica, successful tours of European capitals followed by a decline as the paucity of her talent and material became evident. She and Allan were also unfortunate in their timing once the dazzling Ballets Russes arrived on the scene in 1909. Their fake orientalism could not compete with the superbly trained Russians. Poor Mata Hari hoped to get a contract from Diaghilev but was rejected contemptuously. Misia Sert, Diaghilev’s confidante, described her as a ‘trite night-club dancer’ whose act was ‘grim, miserable and rather nauseating’.

One of the ballets performed in that first legendary Ballets Russes season was Cléopâtre starring Ida Rubinstein who was adorned with no less than twelve veils. Salome, Bentley announces, ‘had arrived in the land of the toe shoe’. Well not quite. Oriental themes had a long provenance in Russian ballet, notably Marius Petipa’s Pharaoh’s Daughter (1862), which was recently revived by the Maryinsky (Kirov) Ballet, and his La Bayadère (1877). Rubinstein, like Allan and Mata Hari, was not a professionally trained dancer but there the resemblance ends because her career was infinitely richer and more successful than theirs. Born into a wealthy Russian Jewish family and trained at the Theatre Schools in Moscow and St Petersburg, Rubinstein had been obsessed with Wilde’s Salome and staged her own production in 1908, commissioning music from Glazunov, designs from Bakst, and choreography from Mikhail Fokine. The director was Meyerhold.

Rubinstein had a brief but triumphant career with the Ballets Russes, her greatest role was Zobeida in Scheherezade. She was painted by Serov, D’Annunzio was an admirer and wrote The Martyrdom of St Sebastian for her. She acquired a wealthy lover in Walter Guinness, later Lord Moyne, whom Bentley describes unaccountably as ‘an Englishman … heir to the British beer fortune’, a statement which would cause some puzzlement in Ireland. She also had a lesbian affair with Romaine Brooks. She left Diaghilev’s company in 1912 after withdrawing from Nijinsky’s L’aprés midi d’une faune which she detested. Over the next twenty years her various artistic enterprises became increasingly self-indulgent - Stravinsky called her ‘mysteriously stupid’. She became a devout Catholic in the 1930s and died in Vence in 1960. Bentley argues that Rubinstein, an erotic icon, bored bisexual, and female dandy in the guise of dancer, actress and orator, gave Salome a future beyond vaudeville. Unlike Allan and Mata Hari, she had money; she could decapitate through mercenary means.

Bentley’s last chapters deal with Colette who was the inspiration for the book but the Salome analogy becomes increasingly strained. That criticism apart, Bentley has written a fascinating and entertaining cultural history, exploring a fictional heroine and her real-life interpreters.

· Deirdre McMahon is a History lecturer at Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick

http://www.tonibentley.com/pages/salome.html

http://www.tonibentley.com/pages/salome_pages/salome_photogallery.html

Scrutinising Kipling

Roberta Baldi: Kipling’s “Departmental Ditties: A Closer Look.” Milano: Pubblicazioni dell’I.S.U. Università Cattolica 2007. ISBN 978-88-8311-488-5

Review by Bart Moore-Gilbert

In this text, Roberta Baldi provides an in-depth investigation of an often over-looked area of Kipling’s oeuvre, the volume of poems which established him both as the voice of the Anglo-India of his day and – a few years later - found him a new audience in Britain.

Baldi’s book is in three parts. Perhaps the least innovative, at least for Kipling scholars, is the first chapter, which rehearses the facts of the author’s life and emergence as an author in India. This is well-travelled terrain and Baldi has little to add to the recent accounts provided by Harry Ricketts, Andrew Lycett and David Gilmour – to name only three representatives of what has become a veritable industry.

In her second and third chapters, however, Baldi provides a valuable service by demonstrating, in rigorous detail, how Kipling modified each successive edition of Departmental Ditties (there were four in all), identifying most particularly the changes he deemed necessary to bring the text before a British audience in 1890. In doing so, Baldi attends not just to the textual, but paratextual alterations in each edition. In the final chapter, Baldi investigates the contribution which each of the fifteen poems in the 1890 edition of Departmental Ditties makes to the collection as a whole.

Baldi draws the methodological rationale for her investigation from the work of Neil Freistat, who has developed the concept of ‘contexture’ to explore the (effects of) the inter-relationships between poems in poetic sequences and collections. For Freistat, the critical focus lies in ‘the special qualities of the poetic collection as an aggregate: that is, the “contextuality” provided for each poem by the larger frame within which it is placed: the “intertextuality” between poems so placed; and the resultant “texture” of resonance and meanings.’ Such contexts and intertexts are identified by Baldi both at the level of thematic and genre.

Using this methodological approach, Baldi convincingly demonstrates how the changes in each edition - whether in terms of the place of a given poem within the sequence, the introduction or suppression of given verses or lines, or in the paratexts - alter the ‘perceptual field’ created by that version of Departmental Ditties. Such changes are tracked both at the level of the individual poems and in the collections as a whole. For example, she suggests that the changes in the first book-form edition are designed to establish that Kipling is no longer merely a journalist writing light verses for his contemporaries in India but a writer as such. The changes between the third Indian edition and the first English one are perhaps the most important. Baldi convincingly argues that these are designed to present Kipling as a writer whose ‘interests ranged beyond mere Anglo-India’ and who therefore might appeal to a wider audience than hitherto – and one which might not have an existential experience of Anglo-Indian life and preoccupations. Consequently, Kipling positions himself as artistic voice or persona in a different way to the earlier editions, taking up a potentially more ironic or critical perspective on his erstwhile community.

Baldi provides a valuable addition to the understanding of Kipling’s work in terms of book history and the evolution of his early poetic technique – as well as his rethinking of the audiences he was trying to reach. Further, she demonstrates a ready command of Kipling criticism as it bears on the work she has chosen to address. Nonetheless, it is regrettable that she does not show more of the interpretative ambition evident in her discussion of ‘Pink Dominoes,’ for example. Here she supplements existing analyses with new perspectives of her own, producing a genuinely new reading of important elements of the poem. Moreover, this reinterpretation does not emerge directly out of the application of the method of ‘contextural reading.’ It would also be desirable to see more evidence that this approach might offer the resources to modify existing accounts of the meanings of Departmental Ditties as a whole. Indeed, one wonders whether the application of Freistat’s methodology is actually necessary to decide whether Kipling’s volume provides ‘seminal’ evidence of the writer’s copyright on (Anglo-) India as a subject for literature – a claim with which the volume concludes.

· Bart Moore-Gilbert is Professor of Post-Colonial Studies in the Department of English at Goldsmiths College, University of London. A member of the Kipling Society, his Kipling and “Orientalism” was published in 1987.

Victorian Mysticism

Sarah A. Willburn: Possessed Victorians: Extra Spheres in Nineteenth-Century Mystical Writings. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006, 169 pages.

Review by Laurence Talairach-Vielmas

In her exploration of the construction of identity in the Victorian period, Sarah Willburn examines spiritual possession and how being possessed redefines models of civilization. Her fascinating claim is that being spiritually possessed by another often functions as a foil to possessing—hence subverting liberal economy whereby individual identity hinges upon the ownership of private property. Interestingly, Willburn argues, the rise of spiritualism, originating in New York in 1848 and rapidly spreading throughout the United States and Europe, may be paralleled with and opposed to Marx and Engels’s spectres, as defined in the Communist Manifesto, also published in 1848. The coincidence of these two phenomena, one focusing on the material economic conditions of life, the other on the invisible conditions of spiritual life, highlights the ambivalent meanings of the term ‘possession’, which may be read both from a liberal (what one owns) and a mystical (being possessed) viewpoint. For Willburn, ‘possessed individualism’—the mystical subjectivity—entails cultural power, just as money and property enable political power.

The first section of the study examines George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876) and contrasts the two main characters of the novel: Gwendolen Harleth, whose quest for identity is predicated upon material possessions, and Daniel Deronda who is increasingly possessed, as Mordecai spiritually incorporates his physical body, creating a Jewish community and turning the character into ‘a materialization of the ghostly history of Israel’ (23). Using Charles Bray’s Illusion and Delusion; Or, Modern Pantheism versus Spiritualism (1873), Willburn recalls Bray’s concept of civilization (relying on the increase of brain rather than on the increase of wealth), to illustrate how knowledge of cultural heritage becomes a capital which moves into Daniel Deronda’s body through the mind of Mordecai. The transformation of Daniel’s body into a territory ‘colonized’ by Mordecai (and Israel) is, of course, subversive, and Willburn points out the process of reverse colonization that Eliot brings forth. Eliot’s opposition between a possessive and a possessed character enables Willburn to underline Eliot’s construction of individualism as ‘a shared cultural/historical/political body’ (37) through mystical experience.

The second section, dealing with extra spheres, first analyses the visual theories used by spiritualists, drawing on metaphysical treatises and séance accounts. The concept of vision, as defined in the seventeenth and eighteenth century, was questioned both by scientists and spiritualists throughout the nineteenth century. The fields of optics and physics provided scientists with new hypotheses concerning the workings of vision. Increasingly constructed as subjective, vision was redefined by scientists such as Johannes Müller, who studied the specialization of sensory nerves, positing that a given stimulus could generate different sensations according to the different types of sensory nerves to which it was applied. Electricity applied to the optic nerve could thus produce an experience of light, whilst when applied to the skin it would produce a sensation of touch. Because spiritualism distinguished between outer and inner vision, it drew upon and furthered the construction of vision as subjective. Willburn then gives examples of spiritualist views. She contrasts the work of George Gustavus Zerffi, a popular mesmerist, who claimed in 1871 that seeing spirits was technically impossible (Spiritualism and Animal Magnetism: A Treatise of Dreams, Second Sight, Somnambulism, Magnetic Sleep, Spiritual Manifestations, Hallucinations, and Spectral Visions), with Camilla Crosland’s 1857 description of spiritualist vision (Light in the Valley. My Experiences of Spiritualism) or with Sophia De Morgan’s 1863 theory (From Matter to Spirit. The Result of Ten Years; Experience in Spirit Manifestations. Intended as a Guide to Enquirers), increasingly foregrounding the significance of the ‘somatic technology of mediumship’ (56), which enabled practitioners to interpret what they saw according to their own minds. Willburn then moves toward spirit photography, which boomed in the 1870s, as another example of the Victorians’ obsession with seeing the invisible. Lois Waistbrooker’s conceptualization of extra spheres follows: Waistbrooker argued that sex acts enabled spiritual enlightenment, thereby revising Darwin’s evolutionary theory. The link between Waistbrooker’s spiritual beliefs and her activism, especially regarding women’s sexual and reproductive rights, enables Willburn to demonstrate how spiritualists’ mystical views purveyed political discourses and even led to political action. Willburn next shifts towards Harriet Martineau, who was also active in improving the condition of women, and who believed herself to have been cured of a long-term illness through mesmerism Calling her experience a ‘séance’, Martineau interestingly shows the links between mesmerism and spiritualism which Willburn develops in her last section. Finally, Willburn focuses on the prolific romance writer Florence Marryat, who was also a spiritualist close to certain mediums. By showing the links between these communities of women, Willburn illustrates their resistance to contemporary constructions of woman as ‘not fully entitled political individuals under the law’ (88).

Section three, focusing on séance tables and the issue of boundaries (between the public and the private, the visible and the invisible, or the subject and the object), is the most stimulating part of the study. Willburn relates séance tables to women through their constructions as commodities. Willburn does not focus on séance table accounts of the 1850s, but chooses instead to deal with an account published in 1863—an examination of the chronological evolution of the accounts might perhaps have been interesting, especially because of the choice of novels examined in section four. Unlike women, constantly objectified, tables could ‘throw a tantrum’ or ‘stomp across the room’ (94). Drawing on Marx’s ‘Commodity’, Willburn shows how tables, as sites of consumption, production and exchange, as well as personified and gendered as female, could serve as representations of the subjectivity of Victorian women. Because every commodity signifies through entering into relation with some other commodity, Willburn contends, the séance, implying ‘an equivalency and commensurability between commodities and persons’ (98), inverts the exchange value of commodities to value exchanges instead, thereby defying Marx. In doing so, the breaking of boundaries, the fluidity of identity as typified by séance tables, act as political critique. Willburn furthers her argument by examining Dr. Samuel Guppy and his wife’s table, Mary Jane. Dr Samuel Guppy was a hydropathist, his wife a well-known London medium. Identified as Mary Jane, their table illustrates the symbiotic relationship between the woman medium and the commodity, once again inverting commodity fetishism through valuing exchanges rather than exchange value. Then Willburn turns towards contemporary views of the average Victorian table, using Charles Eastlake’s argument in his Hints of Household Taste in Furniture, Upholstery, and Other Details (1872). Eastlake’s views on ‘telescope tables’, with mouldings looking like inverted cups and saucers, might perhaps have compared to Christina Rossetti’s use of ‘telescope tables’ in a fantasy manifestly aimed at criticizing commodity culture: published a few years later, Speaking Likenesses depicts a world of dangerous and unstable commodities transported into a fantastic realm—an extra sphere?—with saucers and plates floating in the air and telescope tables expanding and contracting themselves. Several women writers involved in spiritualism also wrote children’s stories, and Willburn only briefly mentions Rossetti’s religious views when she tackles Camilla Crosland’s explanation of the meaning of spirit manifestations.

The last section deals with what Willburn terms ‘trance novels’, that is, novels featuring characters endowed with beyond-physical vision. Willburn examines canonical novels alongside more popular works, from the 1850s to the 1890s, and uses the trance state as a common feature of both mesmerism and spiritualistic mediumship. Her analysis of Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853) and of the heroine’s unreal universe might perhaps have been related to Heather Glen’s study (Charlotte Brontë: The Imagination in History [Oxford University Press, 2002]). Indeed, Glen explores Brontë’s fascination with the new technologies of vision, the issue of perceptual experiences and the way in which commodities construct a world as if moved by ‘magic’ which is beyond the heroine’s understanding. Very little is said concerning consumer culture in Villette, which might have strengthened the links between the various sections of the study and reinforced the central idea concerning the several meanings of the word ‘possession’. The analyses of T. S. Arthur’s Agnes the Possessed: A Revelation of Mesmerism (1852), published a year before Brontë’s novel, Zillah the Child Medium: A Tale of Spiritualism (1857), and Maud Blount, Medium. A Story of Spiritualism (1876) follow. Willburn’s claim is that in these novels mediumship subverts and threatens the social order while in the later novels—such as Marie Corelli’s A Romance of Two Worlds (1886), Cora Linn Daniels’s The Bronze Buddha: A Mystery (1899), Emeric Hulme Beaman’s Ozmar the Mystic (1896), Julian Hawthorne’s The Spectre of the Camera of The Professor’s Sister (1888), S. A. Hillam’s Sheykh Hassan: The Spiritualist. A View of the Supernatural (1888) or Laurence Oliphant’s Masollam (1886)—which ‘do not follow gothic plotline’ (116), Willburn contends, the trances serve, on the contrary as aids in crime prevention. Perhaps George Du Maurier’s Trilby (1894) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) would have been nice additions to the list—though they might have added ambiguity to Willburn’s contention. In this last section, the merging of ‘high and ‘low’ literature, the jumping about from text to text, sometimes very unfamiliar, and the fact that the approach is not chronological may deter readers eager to follow the evolution of the literary/cultural construction of identity and subjectivity through spiritual experiences and trances .

Through her very different sections, Willburn offers an interesting vision of ‘extra spheres.’ Seen through the lens of consumer culture and the construction of women as commodities, Willburn’s examination of mystical writing is enlightening, and follows in the footsteps of studies such as Alex Owen’s The Darkened Room: Women, Power, and Spiritualism in Late Victorian England (University of Chicago Press, 2004), which argues likewise that spiritualism enabled women to use the Victorian ideology of femininity—such as female passivity, frailty and spiritual sensibility—to achieve positions of power and to undermine Victorian gender roles. Some aspects of Willburn’s study also echo Alison Winter’s Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain (University of Chicago Press, 1998), though more particularly focused on the 1840s and 1850s. However, some of Willburn’s arguments seem mystifying. For instance, her idea that narrative agency in Victorian fiction is often associated with characters who are ‘possessed’ more than characters who own property may need further justification. The given example of Jane Eyre’s extrasensory capacity, which, Willburn contends, replaces economic capital with spiritual capital, fails to take into account Jane Eyre’s ultimate coming into an inheritance—her transformation from the poor ‘light’ (immaterial?) governess (Jane ‘Air’) to an ‘heiress’ with economic weight. I also noted a few inaccuracies, such as M. Paul in Villette who is not Lucy’s husband, Charlotte Brontë refusing to provide her readers with the conventional happy ending, hence making the frame of the Victorian novel melt into air, just like her heroine realizing that ‘nothing about her … is solid’ (121).

· Laurence Talairach-Vielmas teaches at the University of Toulouse-Le Mirail. She is a regular reviewer for THE OSCHOLARS.

II. EXHIBITIONS

Gustave Moreau and J.-K. Huysmans at the Musée Moreau

Review by Joni Spigler

Today the Musée national Gustave Moreau at 14, rue de La Rochefoucauld, is just a short walk from the Trinité station of the Paris Métro. On your way, you will pass a café where people sip pastis and a magasin offering ‘aura photography’ with images posted in the window – faces with radiant manes of light. The museum itself is in a modest maison that was once Moreau’s own home and atelier and which he transformed into a museum in the years just before his death.

Through the heavy dark doors on the building’s façade, you will enter another world. The suite of rooms on the premier étage where Moreau once lived are preserved as if reliquaries or time-capsules; insulating and condensing the spirit of late nineteenth-century not-quite-bourgeois interiority from the rapidly changing world outside. Here Moreau kept alive his memories of his parents and his dearest friend Alexandrine Dureux. The artist carefully arranged objects and artworks according to his private inner logic and eclectic aesthetic sensibilité: delicate song-bird taxidermy trees; cloisonné bowls; branches of coral; Grecian urns; engravings based on works by Poussin, Titian, and Véronèse; ancient maps of Rome; decorative platters by Bernard Palissy; bronze bull figures based on those in the Vatican collection, and various Japanese objects find their balance in wallpapered rooms of dark wood furniture and muted sunlight.

Such eclectic arrangements and layerings found expression in Moreau’s paintings too, and thereby gained the notice of Joris-Karl Huysmans, the enigmatic and culturally gnostic French writer and critic, most famous for his 1884 novel À Rebours the most celebrated work of décadentisme in fin-de-siècle France. Although Moreau and Huysmans met only once (on the 6th of June, 1885, through a mutual friend, the dandy Jean Lorrain), the two men each had a profound impact upon the other’s life and work.

Thus, in parallel with a number of events and lectures organized to commemorate the one-hundredth anniversary of J. K. Huysmans’ death, the Musée nationale Gustave Moreau is paying homage to their relationship with the exposition Huysmans-Moreau: Féeriques visions. The specialness of this gesture is attested to by the fact that this is the very first temporary exhibit the Musée has ever hosted since it first opened its doors in 1896. The museum’s director, Marie-Cécile Forest, must be given due credit for undertaking such a project, assisted by André Guyaux, professor of literature at the Sorbonne, and the Société des amis de Huysmans.

The show has been installed on the top two floors of the museum in a way that leaves the permanent collection mostly intact. On the third floor, two temporary walls of deep aubergine have been added, one on the window-side and the other on the wall opposite the spiral staircase, obscuring three paintings (Tyrtaeus Singing During Battle (nd); The Suitors (1860-1898); and Return of the Argonauts (1897)) from the permanent collection. On the top floor another long temporary wall in the same rich purple occludes the windowed wall. This configuration, along with a rainy season, unintentionally makes the galleries a bit darker than usual, but probably more evocative of the conditions of viewing when Huysmans and Moreau met; in an age just discovering gas – then electric – lighting. The galleries, like rooms from childhood, are larger in memory than in person – an effect due no doubt to the great number of Moreau’s works displayed, floor-to-ceiling as in nineteenth-century Salons.

Thus hanging on these purple walls are rarely-displayed treasures from the Musée’s vast collection. Each work renders visible an image or theme treated by Huysmans in his writings on Moreau, premiere among these, his Salon of 1880, and chapter V of À Rebours in 1884. Huysmans had written of the painter in 1880 that Moreau made ‘resplendent fairylike visions, the grisly apotheosis of other ages’ and four years later, ‘resplendent cruel visions, the fairylike apotheosis of other ages.’ The strange confabulated ‘history paintings’ – grisly and cruel and fairylike all the same – include Salome, first demanding, and consequently enduring the terrifying spectral Apparition of John the Baptist’s head; Hélène (Helen of Troy), caryatid-like against the eventide sky; various Sirens and Galatea shimmering like a porcelain aquarium figurines; the doomed beasts of the Fables of La Fontaine; and solemn scenes from the Old Testament Song of Songs, owing greatly to the influence of Delacroix. The exhibition provides a series of sketches, drawings in ink and pencil, gouaches, watercolors, and oil paintings for each subject which display the evolution of the image in the artist’s imaginary.

Elsewhere in the third floor gallery are glass vitrines containing signed letters and selected works by Huysmans, including the famed À Rebours manuscript, opened to a section from Chapter V complete with all the writer’s corrections in the form of strikings-through and marginalia.

The juxtaposition of these two species of objects in the gallery space reveals two modes of distinct yet parallel creation in the search for a final form – through drawings, gouaches, and watercolors, (even wax and wood maquettes in the case of Salome) for Moreau, and through the tedious process of word-choice, and refinement of syntax and narrative structure for Huysmans – reminding one of what we lose in this age of word-processing and digital imagery; namely, the visual record of the creative struggle involved in bringing a Salon painting or a novel to fruition.

Of course the key tangential moment of Moreau’s art and Huysmans’s writings is found in À Rebours. The protagonist Des Esseintes, cloistering himself away from the grating sensations of fin-de-siècle Paris and immersing himself in an artificial world of refined fantasy, leads the reader through the oil painting of Salome (now in the Armand Hammer Collection at UCLA), and the watercolor of The Apparition (now in the graphics collections at the Musée d’Orsay) after both of these works had been famously shown to much acclaim at the Salon of 1876.

Salome and The Apparition investigate contiguous moments in the story of Salome. The story was a favorite among fin-de-siècle writers and artists, many taking wide license with the bare-bones Biblical recounting. Moreau’s version of Salome seems to differ from other more academic interpretations of the time, focusing not so much on Salome’s fleshy sensuality as on the sheer force and awe of this woman-child’s power. Her posture displays the architectonic rigidity of ancient Egyptian figures in bas-relief; her outstretched arm, an iconographic hybrid of the ancient Egyptian summoning gesture and a travesty of the Horatii oath. En pointe, she seems to levitate, creating a dynamic tension between the weightless nature of her stance and the gravity of her material presence festooned in veils and jewels. Likewise, her softly feigned bowing demureness competes with the angularity of her limbs and limb-like veils that give her the silhouette of the many-armed Goddess Kālī. As Huysmans wrote of her,

She had become, as it were, the symbolic incarnation of undying Lust, the Goddess of immortal Hysteria, the accursed Beauty exalted above all other beauties, by the catalepsy that hardens her flesh and steels her muscles, the monstrous Beast, indifferent, irresponsible, insensible, poisoning, like the Helen of the ancient myth, everything that approaches her, everything that sees her, everything that she touches.[14]

Woman as Eternal feminine in late nineteenth-century art and literature had fallen from the heights attributed to her by Goethe. She is instead regarded as an accursed and lustful beast, an allegory for uncontrollable unconscious drives (even before Freud was to put names to them) and the somnambulant, unthinking vessel in which all the barbarity and coarseness of pre-history had been ferried through time into the current, unbearable moment.

But if the picturing of Salome’s dance creates the tense moment before the fatal request, The Apparition provides the horrific consequent of the request. The watercolor is a muted composition of submarine blues and greens tending towards grisaille. Says Huysmans,

With a gesture of horror, Salome tries to thrust away the terrifying vision which holds her nailed to the spot, balanced on the tips of her toes, her eyes dilated, her right hand convulsively at her throat...Under the brilliant rays emanating form the Precursor’s head, every facet of every jewel catches fire; the stones burn brightly, outlining the woman’s figure in flaming colours, indicating neck, legs and arms with points of light, red as burning coals, violet as jets of gas, blue as flaming alcohol, white as moonbeams. The dreadful head glows eerily, bleeding all the while, so that clots of dark red form at the ends of hair and beard. Visible to Salome alone, it embraces in its sinister neither Herodias...nor the Tetrarch...[15]

There are interesting moments in this passage, namely the reading of movement and duration in the static image; the right hand convulses and the blood continues to drip. It must be said that the image facilitates these uncanny readings. Moreover, there is the pronouncement that the head is visible to Salome alone, while forgetting the fact that we too can see the spectral head with its unflinching condemning eye. What does it mean that only she and we can see this apparition? Finally, what are we to make of the lush description of colors in such a muted work?

Despite Huysmans’s evocative description above, he had in fact never seen the famous watercolor version of The Apparition when he wrote À Rebours, relying instead on an etching by Eugène Gaujean published in L’Art in 1878. He owned a black and white proof of the image and only imagined the rich colors. Yet Huysmans alone rightly guessed that the architectural setting was based on Alhambra in Granada which Moreau had discovered through photographs.

I have waited this long to reveal the fact that you will not see the original watercolor of The Apparition either.[16] Nor will you see the painting of Salome which has not traveled from UCLA for this exhibition. And yet I must reveal that when I first visited the exhibition I did not immediately register their absence(s). The reason is that the works on displayed are equally as compelling as anything Huysmans saw or did not see. For instance we have the final painting of The Apparition which, while not as detailed as the watercolor, provides more color and insight into Moreau’s synthetic-accretive process by which he combined symbolism from a variety of world-cultures in an attempt to represent a Universal Ideal.

Yet as many authors have remarked Moreau didn’t travel outside of Europe. He ventured south as far as Naples and Vesuvius and, later in life, north to Belgium and Holland. His paintings nonetheless display a wealth of detail inspired by various cultures, especially those of ancient Persia, India, and Egypt, as well as the Merovingian and Carolingian periods to name only a few. With the Salome subjects he began his exploration of Mediaeval motifs. Salome’s executioner is based on the sculpture of Queen Clotilde in the portal of the Cathedral of Corbeil in Nicolas Xavier Willemin’s Momuments français inédits.[17] The headdress of the Jewish king Herod was based on that of a Tibetan priest that Moreau found in an illustration in the Magasin pittoresque in 1855.[18] Tracings made of Indian motifs from books in the Bibliothèque nationale and sketches from the Moghul miniatures in the Louvre, all played a part in Moreau’s fabrications.

Thus Huysmans and Moreau both instruct us, in their own ways, that access to primary sources, while certainly important, is not essential if the viewer is prepared to bring his or her own knowledge base and imagination to a project. And it is in this spirit that visitors should overlook what the exhibition fails to provide and appreciate the seventy-plus works on display that are rarely accessible to non-scholars. The written documents, as well as the sketches, drawings, studies and models – even a tapestry – are fascinating in their own right and offer an abundance of rich detail – line and color – which should satisfy any aficionado of Huysmans’s or Moreau’s works.

Aside from those works based on Salome’s legend, there are many other treasures to be found in this show. In the fourth floor galleries one finds paintings of Galatea and Hélène which were presented at the Salon of 1880, the last in which Moreau’s participated. In his Salon of 1880, Huysmans remarked that the paintings presented in this year were no less singular and exquisite than those shown in 1876. Of the Hélène he wrote,

...She is standing to the right, pasted upon a terrible horizon sprayed with phosphorous and streaked with blood, wearing a gown encrusted with jewels like a reliquary; holding in her hand, the same in which the Hearts are held in the game of cards, a grand flower; walking, her wide eyes open, fixed in a cataleptic pose. At her feet lie amassed cadavers pierced by arrows, and in all her ominous blonde beauty she towers over the carnage, majestically and superbly as Salammbô appearing to the mercenaries, like a malevolent divinity who unconsciously poisons everything that approaches her, everything that sees her, everything that she touches.[19]

Here is a repetition of his assessment of the Salome figure as quoted above. In an act of condensation, the captive prisoner and conduit between men of ancient myth is reread by Huysmans as agent of destruction. The painting of Hélène is accompanied by other painted sketches, delicate line drawings in pencil and ink, watercolors in pastel colors – all offering subtle variations on the theme.

The Galatea is an even more striking painting which also captured Huysmans’s imagination. In the myth, Polyphemus the Cyclops kills Acis, the beloved of the beautiful Nereid Galatea. Moreau owned an 1877 edition of Ovid’s Metamorphosis in which the story appears, but in Ovid’s version the story turns from one of murder into a saga of frustrated desire and thwarted adoration. Of this painting Huysmans said,

...Galatea, nude, in a cave, watched over by the enormous face of Polyphemus. It is here, above all, that one clearly sees the magical brush of this visionary artist. The cave is a vast jewelry box where, under light falling from a lapis lazuli sky, a strange mineral flora weaves its fantastic shoots, its delicate lace entangled with its improbable leaves. Branches of coral, silver foliage, starfishes, crocheted in filigree grayish-brown in color, spring forth in the same moment as green tendrils supporting chimerical and real flowers, in this illuminated cave of precious jewels, like a tabernacle, containing that one and inimitable radiant jewel, the white body of Galatea, her breasts and lips tinted with pink, asleep in her long pale hair! [20]

The Cyclops was a recurring motif in the art of Odilon Redon, another artist Huysmans greatly admired. Unlike Moreau who demanded of art the kind of spiritual guidance once ascribed to the Church, and who lamented the death of the Ideal in the current capitalistic-positivistic milieu of Paris post-Napoleon III’s Second Empire, Redon was much more willing to explore the themes of materialism and science. Redon’s conceit to Darwinian evolution is the Cyclops. The obsession with the single eye, comes out of Redon’s understanding of Etienne Hilaire’s idea of compensation – that when one part is taken away, other parts grow to compensate for its absence. In a number of paintings by Redon, an almost insipid looking Cyclops emerges from behind a mountain of abstract color in which is incased or in-caved, a woman’s body. The giant single eye, supposedly compensating with size for the lack of number, cannot yet see the woman who is positioned as if to be born, breech, out of a mass of Expressionistic color. Redon had spent much time in Cuvier’s cabinet of anatomical curiosities and read Hilaire’s works on monstrosities and teratology. And displays of cyclopic sheep and cows were prevalent at the time in Paris.

In Huysmans’s discussion of Redon he says his subjects seem,

...borrowed from the nightmares of science, to go back to prehistoric times: a monstrous flora spread over the rocks, and among the ubiquitous boulders and glacier mud-streams wandered bipeds whose apish features – the heavy jaws, the protruding brows, the receding forehead, the flattened top of the skull – recalled the head of our ancestors early in the Quaternary Period, when man was still fructivorous and speechless, a contemporary cave-bear.[21]

Redon is positioned in this discourse as the bracketing artist for Moreau’s history painting. Redon’s themes are outside of history – pre-historic, prior to speech, prior to evolution, or else beyond the present awful moment and a result of it – projected into an unpredictable future of evolutionary misfortune, a stream that Darwin had unceremoniously tossed humans into with the rest of the teratological forms becoming unknowable.

Thus, Moreau’s histories and history paintings were cruel and gruesome and fairylike, but also human. They sought to display a collective human struggle against the material, base, bestial aspects of human being and an attempt at mapping a collective Ideal mythos through the accumulation of signs from all cultures. They performed a narrative function and, like academic history painting, sought to say something about the human condition through an exploration of myth, and historical or Biblical themes. Moreau believed that art could provide a transcendent Ideal, yet ironically he did not search for this Ideal outside of material history, but rather, through a proto-Structuralist mapping of cultural tropes, motifs and symbols, one upon the other, as if something like eclectic accumulation could engender synthetic unity and oneness of meaning.

But lest it sound as though Galatea is but a hybrid comprised of book-learned cultural quotations – too literary – it is important to note that Moreau was very much a citizen of Paris in the nineteenth century. Although some scholars have posited that Moreau might have consulted a book in the Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle; the Actinologia Britannica by Philip Henry Gosse (London, 1860), before rendering the underwater flora and fauna in the grotto, it should be noted that, like many of Moreau’s paintings, it also evokes the grottos and strange geologic forms of the Parc des Buttes Chaumont, created by Baron Haussmann in 1867 and featuring a Corinthian style Temple of Sybil that sits atop the rocky island in the center of the park. Moreover, in 1875 a large public aquarium[22] containing various fishes and plants of French rivers had opened at the Palais du Trocadéro in anticipation of the 1878 World’s Fair. This brought with it a renewed interest in aquatic life and the small personal home aquarium. With its murky cubic fluid rather than gridded rationalised space, its slippery shimmering theatrical players, and later, its questionable miasmic humidity, the aquarium became a trope of decadent literature.

Indeed Des Esseintes equips his own new refuge with a large aquarium through which the daylight is filtered, and created a room within a room from which to view it, reversing the normal order of containment. Des Esseintes looks out at the aquarium from his own sort of cave becoming the soft, pale, vulnerable body seeking refuge from a monstrous world determined to penetrate his remote bejeweled sanctuary.

Works relating to the Fables of La Fontaine are also on display. The 17th century French poet took his inspiration from Aesop, Horace, and ancient Indian literature such as the Panchatantra, thus seeming a kindred intellect to Moreau’s explorations of the Song of Songs, owe greatly to the influence of Delacroix for their choreography and vibrant line-quality.

If the exhibition has a flaw, it is perhaps that outside of the French-language exhibition catalogue there is not much to provide context for the works displayed. If the visitor is the type who is not content to look at images without knowing where they fit in a larger context, s/he should come prepared with a little foreknowledge of the relationship between Moreau and Huysmans, and probably should have read À Rebours, at least Chapter V. The wall texts and signage give very little expository information aside from dates and circumstances, and the texts by Huysmans are displayed as artifacts of a life rather than for pedagogical purposes. In any case, a trip to the Musée national Gustave Moreau has its own rewards and with any support, we might be able to look forward to other temporary exhibitions in the future.

· Joni Spigler is a Ph.D. candidate in the History of Art at the University of California, Berkeley. She has written on paintings by Paul Cézanne and is currently writing a dissertation on Rosa Bonheur and the changing representation of animals in nineteenth-century France and England. She lives in Paris.

Musée national Gustave Moreau, 14, rue de La Rochefoucauld, F-75009 PARIS. Métro : Trinité.

Phone : + 0033 1 48 74 38 50 ; Fax : + 0033 1 48 74 18 71

Website : www.musee-moreau.fr; E-mail : info@musee-moreau.fr

Open Wednesday – Monday from 10:00 am to 12:45 pm and from 2:00 pm to 5:15 pm; Closed on Tuesday

6 Euros.

MILLAIS

Tate Britain, London 26th September 2007-13th January 2008

Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam 15th February-18th May 2008

Municipal Museum of Art, Kitakyushu 7th June-17th August 2008

Bunkamura Museum of Art, Tokyo 30th August-26th October 2008

Review by Antoine Capet

This review first appeared on the website H-MUSEUM on 2nd December 2007, and is republished by kind permission of Dr Capet and of Dr Stephanie Marra. H-MUSEUM H-Net Network for Museums and Museum Studies E-Mail: h-museum@h-net.msu.edu web: http://www.h-museum.net

Past visitors of the Tate Gallery, as it was then known, will be familiar with the archetypal Millais which seems to be on permanent display, ‘Ophelia’, ‘the most popular painting at Tate Britain’. Indeed, such is the association between Millais, ‘Ophelia’ and the Tate that this painting provides the cover photograph for the useful booklet given to visitors, for the Press pack and also for the accompanying catalogue [1]--besides forming the background to the Exhibition poster. Naturally, there is more to Sir John Everett Millais (1829-1896) than ‘Ophelia’ (1851), and Tate Britain has organized a long-awaited retrospective, the first since 1967 (at the Royal Academy) and, the Press release indicates, ‘the first exhibition since 1898 to examine the entirety of the artist's career’--notably because it includes a large group of his late Scottish landscapes. It is naturally impossible to discuss here all the 140 paintings and works on paper which are featured, but the exemplary website pages devoted to the Exhibition give illustrations of all the major works displayed, with excellent explanatory notes.[2]

Not unexpectedly, the first room concentrates on Pre-Raphaelitism, since the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was founded in John Millais's parents’ house in 1848. Among the other future celebrities present were William Holman Hunt and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. If Pre-Raphaelitism can best be described in opposition to Academicism or, as the Minneapolis Institute of Arts defines it on its website, a ‘style which advocated a return to serious subjects and naturalistic representation, and emphasized accuracy of detail and color’, then the precocious work of Millais did not adumbrate his future Pre-Raphaelite militancy. The Exhibition has a magnificently Academic ‘Pizarro seizing the Inca of Peru’ (1846)--admittedly painted when he was only sixteen. Technically, the first painting to be explicitly presented in the context of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was ‘Isabella’ (1848–9). Together with ‘Christ in the House of His Parents (The Carpenter’s Shop)’ (1849-50), these paintings established Millais's reputation as a ‘provocateur’, the former because of its overt rejection of Academicism, the latter for reasons which ring all sorts of familiar bells today. The more bigoted Protestants saw the scene as having inacceptable Roman Catholic tendencies and the general religiosity of the time was averse to realistic depiction of Jesus Christ. With ‘The Eve of St Agnes’ (1850) and ‘Mariana’ (1850-1), Millais deliberately infringed the conventions of the time by associating erotic desire with ‘respectable women’. The superb contemporary portraits shown (‘Portrait of a Gentleman and his Grandchild (James Wyatt and his Granddaughter, Mary Wyatt)’, 1849; ‘Mrs James Wyatt Jr and her Daughter Sarah’, 1850; ‘Thomas Combe’, 1850) apparently did little to compensate for the scandalous nature of his other works--and yet, paradoxically, the Royal Academy never refused to exhibit them.

Room 2, on ‘Romance and Modern Genre’ is largely devoted to his next field of exploration, that of figure painting with a historical dimension, often depicting the conflict between love and patriotic or religious duty. We thus have ‘A Huguenot, on St. Bartholomew's Day, refusing to shield himself from Danger by wearing the Roman Catholic Badge’ (1851-2, on the massacre of French Protestants by Roman Catholic mobs on 24 August 1572); ‘ The Order of Release, 1746’ (1852-3, on the last Jacobite Rebellion); ‘The Proscribed Royalist, 1651’ (1852-3, on the English Civil War); ‘ Peace Concluded, 1856’ (1856, on the ending of the Crimean War); ‘The Escape of a Heretic, 1559’ (1857, on the Spanish Holy Inquisition); ‘The Black Brunswicker’ (1859-60, on the Battle of Waterloo). Only six years separate ‘ The Order of Release, 1746’ from ‘Pizarro seizing the Inca of Peru’, and yet these two ‘historical scenes’ are light-years apart--or so they appear to be to the non-specialist of the Pre-Raphaelite movement. Room 2 also contains the well known picture of ‘The Blind Girl’ (1854-6), in all its glorious colour (the girl’s red hair!), impossible to render even with the best modern techniques of reproduction.

Then the visitor moves on to the smaller Room 3, whose central theme is Aestheticism. The curators (Alison Smith, Curator at Tate Britain, and Jason Rosenfeld, Associate Professor at Marymount Manhattan College, New York) explain their choice of this term in a very convincing wall text. Millais’s evolution is perfectly encapsulated in the difference which one perceives between ‘Spring’ (1856-9), with its arguably archetypal characteristics of Pre-Raphaelitism, and ‘The Vale of Rest (Where the weary find repose)’ (1858). We are therefore not surprised to see the continuation of this evolution towards ‘The Grand Tradition’ in the next room, with classical Biblical subjects (and also with a tendency to classical treatment?) like ‘Esther’ (1863-5) or ‘Jephthah’ (1867). Fortunately, the curators provide their modern de-Christianised visitors with the essential information on these Old Testament subjects--but few members of the public seemed to be interested. In contrast, the two assassinated sons of Edward IV in ‘The Princes in the Tower’ (1878) continue to speak to the crowds (it was hardly possible to approach some of the pictures, let alone the captions, when I was there--this is of course the ambivalent ransom of success for all museum authorities). The patriotic scenes, ‘ The Boyhood of Raleigh’ (1869-70) and ‘ The North-West Passage’ (1874), do not arouse the same enthusiasm as when they were first exhibited. We must bear the Imperial context in mind: Victoria was proclaimed Empress of India in 1877 as the culmination of Disraeli’s efforts to revive interest in the Empire, largely neglected by his Liberal rivals. Few visitors today will look at these pictures with the Imperial pride which they both assumed and enhanced. That the former young rebels of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood now appeared as supporters of the Conservative Imperial dream was of course highly ironical.

As a total contrast to his ‘Imperialist’ pictures, Millais produced the ‘Fancy Pictures’ of Room 5. A wall text conveniently explains what the phrase means in art history: ‘The 'fancy picture' first came into existence during the eighteenth century and can be described as genre painting where the sentiment takes precedence over evolved narrative’. The archetypal work in this category is the celebrated ‘Bubbles’ (1886). The original was not often seen until recently, but it is now on long loan to the Lady Lever Art Gallery, whose website usefully retraces the history of the painting, indirectly explaining why Millais was blamed for his commercialism (one more inexcusable sin for the idealists of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood of his young days):

‘Bubbles’ will be forever linked with washing and cleanliness because it was used to advertise Pears' soap. Owners of the painting Unilever has granted the Lady Lever a long-term loan. In many people’s minds the painting is also associated with the song ‘I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles’, anthem of Cup Finalists West Ham FC since the 1920s when the song was a hit. Painted by Pre-Raphaelite artist Sir John Everett Millais in 1886 and his best-known work, ‘Bubbles’ was originally called ‘A Child’s World’. It shows the artist’s grandson William James dressed in a Little Lord Fauntleroy-style velvet costume with a ruffled collar. The painting was bought by A & F Pears and the managing director, Thomas Barrett, turned it into an advertisement by adding a bar of soap in the foreground. It was a brilliant masterstroke and the painting is today still associated with the product. Lever Brothers acquired A & F Pears in 1914 and subsequently the company became part of the Unilever Group. Pears was retained as a separate brand and Unilever kept ‘Bubbles’ at its global headquarters on the banks of the Thames.[3]

Entering the impressively large Room 6, one is immediately fascinated by the reconstruction of Millais’s studio, including the actual 18th c. arm chair used by his wealthy sitters and his large studio easel (his palette, brushes and oils are also on display). This is the room devoted to the ‘Portraits’ which made him a very rich man--and one understands why when one sees that it features two Prime Ministers (‘The Right Hon. W. E. Gladstone, MP’, 1878-9 and ‘ Benjamin Disraeli, The Earl of Beaconsfield, KG’, 1881), a banker's daughter and marchioness (‘The Marchioness of Huntly’, 1870), a banker’s wife (‘Mrs. Bischoffsheim’, 1872-3), a fashionable actor (‘Henry Irving, Esq’, 1883), a future successful actress (‘A Jersey Lily’ [Lillie Langtry], 1877-8) and two famous authors (‘Thomas Carlyle’, 1877 and ‘ Alfred Tennyson’, 1881) besides his self-portrait (‘Portrait of the Painter’, 1880, commissioned by the Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence, to be hung in its Collezione degli Autoritratti next to Velázquez, Bernini and Dürer) and those of his wife and some of his children.

Few people must have seen the originals of the twelve paintings of the Highlands of Perthshire which form the theme of the final room, ‘The Late Landscapes’, because they are widely dispersed. If ‘Scotch Firs: “The silence that is in the lonely woods”’ (1873, a quotation from Wordsworth) arguably reminds the viewer of Millais's Pre-Raphaelite manner, the caption of ‘Blow, blow, thou winter wind’ (1892, a quotation from ‘As You Like It’) informs us that it is ‘one of the artist's rare paintings dealing with contemporary social ills’ (a man abandoning his family). And when the caption of the stupendously gorgeous large painting, ‘The Sound of Many Waters’ (1876) tells us that ‘in this mature work he effectively conveyed the features of volcanic rock without the meticulousness of Pre-Raphaelitism’, we wonder what the result would have been if he had displayed ‘the meticulousness of Pre-Raphaelitism’. The free visitor's booklet has a map of the locations (near the River Tay) where these landscapes were painted--an excellent idea.

Subscribers who can visit the Exhibition in London, Amsterdam, Kitakyushu or Tokyo are unreservedly encouraged to do so. Those who cannot should not fail to go to the dedicated website. A symposium supported by the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art on ‘Millais, Hunt and Modern Life’ took place on Friday 30th November (10.00-19.00), with a private view with drinks for participants on Thursday 29th November (19.00-21.30).[4]

· Professor Antoine Capet, FRHistS is Head of British Studies at the University of Rouen

NOTES:

[1] Rosenfeld, Jason & Smith, Alison. ‘Millais’. London : Tate, 2007. 272 pp. ISBN: 1854376675 (pbk.); 1854377469 (hbk.).

[2] http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/exhibitions/millais/default.shtm

[3] National Museums Liverpool, Lady Lever Art Gallery website : http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/mediacentre/displayrelease.aspx?id=544

[4] Details at : http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/eventseducation/symposia/11234.htm

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Tate Britain Millbank London SW1P 4RG E-mail: visiting.britain@tate.org.uk

Switchboard : 020 7887 8000 (international +44 20 7887 8000) Recorded information : 020 7887 8008 (international +44 20 7887 8008) Millais tickets : 020 7887 8888 (international +44 20 7887 8888)

Exhibition Hours : Daily, 10.00-17.50 (last admission 17.00); Admission £11 (£10 seniors, £9 concessions) www.tate.org.uk

Walter Sickert: the Camden Town Nudes

We also flag here a review in La Tribune d’Art by Professor Antoine Capet of ‘Walter Sickert : The Camden Town Nudes’ (London, Courtauld Institute of Art Gallery, 25th October 2007 – 20th January 2008): http://www.latribunedelart.com/Expositions/Expositions_2007/Sickert_626.htm (French); http://www.thearttribune.com/Walter-Sickert-The-Camden-Town.html (English).

Walter Crane

Sleeping Beauties: Walter Crane and the Illustrated Book, 26^th May 2007 – 25th February 2008,

The Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester

Review by Malcolm Hicks.

It was entirely appropriate on the Friday afternoon of my visit to the Walter Crane and the Illustrated Book exhibition at the Whitworth that the only other visitors should be a group of young schoolchildren and their teachers, the exuberant children deriving inspiration for their own designs from Crane’s illustrations. For what is on show comprises a selection from a highly significant archive of Crane material acquired by the Whitworth and the John Rylands University Library, a large proportion of the exhibits being devoted to Crane’s illustrations for children’s books. The archive of some five thousand items includes drawings, original designs, book illustrations, paintings, correspondence and diaries, and has been fully accessible to scholars and the general public since September, 2007. The exhibition is arranged chronologically, beginning with Crane’s apprentice work for Walter James Linton, for whose workshop the promising young Crane was singled out at the age of fourteen in the late 1850s, and concluding with a small sample of his late work of the early twentieth century representing his socialist and his moral principles. This latter includes a magnificent black and white poster of 1911 for a temperance campaign of Dutch provenance, depicting a ferocious and determined Saint George slaying an equally ferocious and determined dragon. A formative influence on Crane was the work of Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528), and the energy of the line here, the attention to detail, the ‘Gothic’ subject matter, perhaps demonstrates its continuance. Closer to home one is reminded of Gustave Doré’s illustrations. Caught up in the energy of this piece, however it is by no means clear that its raison d’être is to publicise poor working conditions and the abuse of alcohol.

From the start the exhibition draws attention to Crane’s meticulous attention to detail and his penchant for figures of fantasy. It was his illustrations for Tennyson’s ‘Lady of Shalott’, that quintessential subject for Pre-Raphaelite representation, that first brought him to Linton’s notice. With Holman Hunt’s and Rossetti’s illustrations of the poem for Moxon’s 1857 compilation of Tennyson’s work at the back of one’s mind, one has forcefully brought to the fore of it the Pre-Raphaelite influence on much of Crane’s artistry, particularly in the fantasy figures and the wealth of foliage in which they are embowered. His subject matter however, even judging from this modest exhibition of his achievements, is so extensive as almost to defy description. An illustration taken from a wood engraving of ‘London Society’ figures of the early 1860s exists alongside fantastical black and white images, which call to mind the work of his tormented contemporary, Richard Dadd. Of interest is the change of style to simple outline and bold poster-box colouration of the wood engravings and water colour illustrations that Crane created for his ‘Toy Book’ series of the 1870’s, clearly and artfully designed to appeal to the ‘artless’ sensibilities of their intended audience. Strong colour, well-defined pastel shades and, curiously, cartoon-like characterisation against the familiar backdrop of elaborate detail is sustained in Crane’s children’s work of the next decade, and the fantastical maintains its presence in the pantomime subjects of the sixties and seventies. The aesthetic component of his work is readily apparent in the late 1890s emphasis on pastel shades and the moderation of the hyper-intensity of earlier detail, where languid form and line seems to echo the work of Beardsley (or Beardsley himself could well have learned something from, for example, the ink and watercolour illustration for ‘Beauty and the Beast’ of 1874). If this were not all, fittingly for someone involved in the Arts and Crafts movement there remain the wallpaper designs for the Sleeping Beauty (1879) with their exquisite mix of exotic Pre-Raphaelite figures draped within floral motifs, designed to appeal, it seems, both to child and parent in charge of the purse strings, and the luscious cobalt, green, orange and yellow of the ‘Macaw’ designs of 1908. The display cabinets include letters, book material, and photographs to complement the wall hangings, and I particularly relished the sepia-tinted aesthetic charm of a photograph of the well-heeled Bohemian Crane got up as Cimabue, the ‘medieval artist’, with Mary Crane decked out in flower costume.

Crane’s associations with Wilde are represented by one exhibit only, the frontispiece illustration to a 1908 edition of The Happy Prince and Other Tales, drawn from the special collections of the Manchester Metropolitan University, where a richly detailed black and white engraving has an armoured Prince with great sword hanging between his lower limbs set off by the androgynous grace of a curve of the left leg. But Wilde enthusiasts should not be deterred from making the short detour from the City centre to visit the exhibition. The Crane material on display is of much interest in its own right, giving but a glimpse of the riches of a collection which contains the illustrated text of Crane’s young daughter, Beatrice’s poem ‘The Blush Roses’, which Crane illustrated and Wilde published in Woman’s World, and Crane’s proofs for his illustrations of his Little Folks,

designed for his son which Wilde edited.

The exhibition clearly shows the facility and versatility of an artist who had a flare for commerce, and who could adapt his work and market it to suit his various, comfortably-off consumers. The curator drops a clear hint that this involved some compromise of his socialist principles. Emblazoned on the wall we find the following: ‘This middle-class ideology, however, was far removed from the realities of life for most working class families, whose average wage in the 1880s was less than thirty shillings per week.’ Quite so, but how Crane was supposed to tailor his art to relieve the impoverished is, perhaps understandably, not spelt out. Crane is alleged to have lent his name to a letter pleading for mitigation of the harsh terms of Wilde’s imprisonment in 1895 – Holman Hunt pointedly refused to do so – and it is in the Soul of Man Under Socialism that Wilde argues for a socialism that will liberate all from the harsh necessities of life so that they may be free to develop their ‘individualism’. Artists of comfortable means, he points out, already enjoy this privilege. The exhibition draws attention to Crane’s insistence on an ‘aesthetic beauty’ for all through ‘shared visual pleasure’; and it is not difficult to see how two men of socialist sympathies, who earned their prosperity, could be seen to be in sympathy with one another. An awkward attempt to apologise for Crane by suggesting the uniformity of his work appears in the final, rather disappointingly small section devoted to his ‘Political Aesthetics’: ‘The dream worlds of his illustrations were fertile ground for a language of shared political motivation, whilst also providing an image of gentle landscape that could be enjoyed by the middle classes familiar with his books.’ It was Ford Maddox Brown’s ‘Work’ (seen in a Piccadilly gallery) which first inspired the young Crane because it showed how working class people could be seen to be worthy of representation. Working-class realism is not on display here, but the richness and variety of this manageable, clearly and usefully annotated exhibition is worth the visit to a gallery that perhaps suffers a little by being a twenty minutes’ brisk walk from the City centre. The archivist informs me that a children’s web page is up and running and that all material will be on line in the New Year, digitised and illustrated. The actual exhibition, however, is not helped by the total absence of any advertisement of its presence, either externally or internally. But do persevere. I had to ask, and discovered something of the richness of the archive in Gallery eight upstairs at the rear of the building.

· Malcolm Hicks is a senior lecturer in the Department of English and American Studies at the University of Manchester. His publications include an edition of the Selected Poems of Oscar Wilde (1992) for the Fyfield series published by Carcanet.

III. PLAYS

Salome

Bridewell Theatre, London

20th November 2007

Review by Michelle C. Paull

C Company’s production of Salome for the Lunchbox Theatre slot at the Bridewell Theatre fitted the bill perfectly as a thought-provoking alternative to a sandwich amidst the clamour of London’s Fleet Street outside. Director Mark Leipacher’s gave this young company’s third play in their Wilde series an imaginative production, fully informed by both physical theatre and traditional theatrical practice.

The spare set, featuring a lush turquoise silk chair and cushions set against a black curtain, carefully linked the play’s fin de siecle origins with the sensual excesses of Herod’s kingdom. Only a long straw-coloured rush mat lay across half of the stage width to further denote the palace interior. This production was focused on the mind rather than the eye.

As the audience entered, their first sight was a man seated in a Buddha pose with his back to them already positioned stage left. He was stripped to the waist, wearing a white loin cloth and carried out slow exercises as the audience filtered into the space. Gradually the sound of breathing was heard and amplified – the pulse of this man’s life echoing around the auditorium in an eerie ironic prolepsis of the moment that Iokanaan’s breath would be abruptly stopped later. The play could commence only when the actor’s were summoned into this scene to perform by the blowing of a ram’s horn.

As Herod sat on a gantry with Herodias above stage right, Narraboth and Manasseh directed their opening dialogue not towards each other, but towards the audience - delivering most of their lines facing front. This often declamatory and Brechtian- influenced style was as disconcerting as it was designed to be, here the audience escaped nothing, we were involved and complicit in all that went on in front us. We watched yes, as Herod leered at Salome, and sat horrified as Iokanaan was strangled, but like those at Herod’s palace, we were there, witnessing events unfolding, foreseeing the outcome and yet completely powerless to stop it. It was a chilling experience indeed.

Realism in the play was constantly questioned and disrupted by the company’s decision to reject a completely representational production in this way. On the whole this worked very well, for it made the moments of actual engagement between the actors all the more significant – Narraboth and Manasseh exchange their first look in the performance with the line ‘The Jew’s worship a God they cannot see’ allowing the irony of the statement greater resonance. When Iokanaan’s intoned lyrical speeches from the left of the stage cut through the tense atmosphere of paranoia in these exchanges between the captain and the executioner, their surreal poetry is heard more distinctly because of that very juxtaposition and the words seem yet more inspired. Jonathan de Mallet Morgan also captured Iokanaan’s wildness and his religious zeal bordering on the possessed, especially in his scenes with Salome.

This rejection of realism is also maintained during the dance of the seven veils – when each dance was suggested by a different coloured veil –and Natalie Bromley danced facing the audience rather than Herod for each of her stylised dances as Salome. Each dance featured a specific element of seduction – one dramatised shielding the eyes, for example, another hip movements, while the most cheekily seductive was the simple revelation of Salome’s ankle protruding from beneath her clasped veil with an arch smile. Only for the last veil did Salome face Herod and symbolically drop the material completely on the floor in front of her as the music ended.

While Staten Eliot as Herod had seemed initially more benign paternalist than lascivious seducer, at this moment his transfixed gaze left us in no doubt of his sensual focus. When Salome declared her price for this dance, Eliot transformed his Herod into a grovelling and abased man in the face of her unremitting demands for Iokanaan’s head. His vibrant enumeration of the many treasures of his kingdom that he would exchange for her request was pitiful in its futility.

Poppy Roe as Herodias had just the right tone of sarcasm blended with disgust in response to her husband’s pursuit of her daughter. Her delight in the phrase ‘My daughter has chosen well’ when she heard Salome’s request for Iokanaan’s head, vividly conveyed the relief that her daughter was not out to steal her husband after all, and her glee that the irritation of Iokanaan’s rhetoric would now be removed forever thanks to her daughter’s canny reckoning.

This production also emphasised relentless nature of Salome’s repeated determination to have her way - ‘I will kiss thy mouth Iokanaan’ – accentuating her child-like focus alongside her artfulness. Her self-obsession found its echo in Iokanaan’s repetition of his religious rhetoric and the audience were left to question, what, if anything, was the difference between these apparent polar opposites.

In a period of religious anxiety and the increasingly controversial public profile of the religious zealot in particular, the choice of this play from the Wilde canon was timely. Salome continues to resonate strongly for contemporary audiences and, as ever, Wilde’s modernity rings out.

Dr Michelle C. Paull teaches in the Department of Theatre and Performance Studies, St Mary’s University College, Twickenham, London. She is an Associate Editor of the

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NOTES TO KOHLKE

[1] Peter Raby (ed.), ‘Preface’ to The Cambridge Companion to Oscar Wilde. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, pp. xv-xvi, p. xv.

[2] Archibald Henderson, extracts from ‘The Theatre of Oscar Wilde’, Overland Monthly, L, 1907, pp. 9-18. Reprinted in William Tydeman (ed.), Wilde: Comedies, Casebook Series. Houndmills and London: Macmillan, 1993, pp. 78-80. p. 79.

[3] John Fowles. The French Lieutenant’s Woman. Bungay, Suffolk: Triad, 1977 (originally published 1969), p. 234.

[4] Christian Gutleben. Nostalgic Postmodernism: The Victorian Tradition and the Contemporary British Novel. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2001, p. 16.

[5] Ibid., p. 18.

[6] J.T. Grein. Article [on The Importance of Being Earnest], Sunday Special, 8 December 1901, p. 6. Reprinted in William Tydeman (ed.), Wilde: Comedies, Casebook Series. Houndmills and London: Macmillan, 1993, pp. 74-75, p. 75.

[7] Rosario Arias Doblas, ‘Talking with the Dead: Revisiting the Victorian Past and Occult in Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace and Sarah Waters’ Affinity’, Estudios Ingleses de la Universidas Complutense, 13 (2005), pp. 85-105, p. 88, http://www.ucm.es/BUCM/revistas/fll/11330392/articulos/EIUC0505110085A.PDF. At one point Holland’s text also evokes a comparison with spirit photography, when he has Wilde comment on the persistent afterlife of photographs taken at the start of his American tour, which have come to dominate his popular image, like a version of the ever youthful Dorian Gray (57).

[8] Robert Ross to Adela Schuster, 23 December 1900, in Maragert Ross (ed.), Robert Ross, Friend of Friends. London, 1952, p. 68. Reprinted in William Tydeman (ed.), Wilde: Comedies, Casebook Series. Houndmills and London: Macmillan, 1993, pp. 38-39, p. 38.

[9] Margaret Atwood. ‘Author’s Afterword’, Alias Grace. London: QPD, 1996, p. 467.

[10] Unsigned review, Observer, 23 April 1983, p. 6. Reprinted in William Tydeman (ed.), Wilde: Comedies, Casebook Series. Houndmills and London: Macmillan, 1993, pp. 52-3, p. 53.

[11] Lawrence Danson, ‘Wilde as critic and theorist’, in Peter Raby (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Oscar Wilde. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, pp. 80-95, p. 89.

[12] Wilde in dialogue with Robert Ross, in unsigned article, ‘Mr Oscar Wilde on Mr Oscar Wilde’, St James Gazette, 18 January 1895, pp. 4-5. Reprinted in William Tydeman (ed.), Wilde: Comedies, Casebook Series. Houndmills & London: Macmillan, 1993, p. 41.

[13] William Tydeman (ed.), ‘Introduction’ to Wilde: Comedies, Casebook Series. Houndmills and London: Macmillan, 1993, pp. 10-25, p. 11.

NOTES TO SPIGLER

[14] Huysmans, Karl-Joris. Against Nature (À Rebours), Trans. Robert Baldick, (London: Penguin, 1956), p. 53.

[15] Ibid., 55.

[16] Although it is included in the exhibition catalogue, Huysmans-Moreau: Féeriques Visions, (Paris: Musée Gustave Moreau, 2007), p. 81.

[17] Published in Paris in 1839, featuring 300 engraved plates representing various motifs dating from the 6th to 17th centuries. Cited in Contenson, Marie-Laure de. The Middle Ages as Reinvented by Gustave Moreau. Gustave Moreau: Between Epic and Dream, (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1999), p. 24.

[18] 15 Lacambre,Geneviève. Gustave Moreau and Exoticism. Gustave Moreau: Between Epic and Dream, (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1999), p. 15.

[19] Huysmans, Karl-Joris. Le salon officiel de 1880, Huysmans-Moreau: Féeriques Visions, Self-translated. (Paris: Musée Gustave Moreau, 2007), p. 81.

[20] Ibid.

[21] À Rebours, p.60.

[21] The second after London’s in 1871.

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