Fin de siécle Works for Millennial Audiences: Some Student-Friendly Recommendations

Dr. Marylu Hill
Assistant Director, Villanova Center for Liberal Education

Ponder for a moment some of the topics in the headlines of the nineties: deviant sex, murderous sex, blood-borne sexually-transmitted disease, serial murder, rampant capitalism, rampant nostalgia, women's rights, civil rights, multiculturalism, global warfare, germ warfare, fear of foreigners, fear of aliens (illegal, extra-terrestrial, and otherwise), pornography and art, the power of advertising, fear of technology, worship of technology, apocalypse, utopian visions, and mental illness just for starters!

The punchline of course is that these very modem headlines actually belong to another decade of "nineties"-the 1890s As the contemporary nature of the above topics indicates, the 1890s offer a treasure trove of thought-provoking, timely, and very student-friendly readings well-suited to our own fin-de-siécle.

As we stand on the cusp of the millennium, we can look back with great profit to another era facing the turmoil and excitement of not only a grand calendar change, but also a change in attitudes and perspectives, occasioned by revolutionary developments in technology, science, politics, gender roles, and economics. The 1890s saw any number of remarkable advances and events; telephones, phonographs, electric lights, automobiles, x-rays, and radium were just a few of the changes embraced by the decade, as well as civil unrest encouraged by labor unions and a burgeoning women's movement. Capitalism continued to find self-expression through imperialism as countries like the United States began stretching for their piece of the pie of empire, and the exploitation of third world countries was becoming the norm Artists and writers touted themselves as decadents, with a world-weary air of ennui, and, by mid-decade, everyone seemed to be feeling "fin-de-siécle, fin du monde"-at least, so it seemed to observers like Henry Adams. And certainly, both apocalyptic fears and utopian visions were in the air as popular, philosophic, and social thought all turned to questions of what the next hundred years would bring.

I would like to offer a short list of accessible and highly readable texts from the 1890s-many of which are today undervalued or neglected unjustly-which work well within the context of Core Humanities. All of the following are in print and generally available in paperback editions.

At the top of the list are three novels by H.G. Wells: The Time Machine (1895) The War of the Worlds (1897), and Tono Bungay (1909). The first two are too often unfairly relegated to children's reading, when in reality they both depict parables of out-of-control technology, foreign invasion, germ warfare, and class division. The Time Machine is perhaps the more intricate in its themes-Wells' chilling vision of societal development (or rather, regression) is a grim anti-utopian tale of an effete and useless race (the Eloi) preyed upon by the ape-like laboring class of Morlocks. The War of the Worlds plays on fears of alien invasion (human or otherwise) and explores the helplessness of humans in the face of superior (and uncaring) technology. The later use of The War of the Worlds by Orson Welles (193 8) on the brink of World War II and the its adaptation for the movies in the 1950s during the cold war era also highlight the continuing potency of Wells' fears of invasion and global warfare. The third novel mentioned, Tono Bungay, was actually written in the first decade of the twentieth century, but it depicts the same anticipation of the future, this time in the fields of advertising and medicine. Tono Bungay is a fraudulent miracle medicine, and Wells' story demonstrates the growing power of advertising and the attendant exploitation of natural and human resources within this developing area of capitalism.

Another blockbuster text of the 1890s is Brain Stoker's novel Dracula -one of those stories that everyone "knows" but few have read. The genius of Stoker's horror masterpiece lies not so much in its literary merits, but in its interweaving of so many critical concerns of the late Victorian era (and by extension, our own time as well). Stoker contrasts the world of thoroughly modem London, replete with the latest technology (phonographs, dictaphones, typewriters, etc.), with rural, superstition-laden Transylvania, thus setting up a tangled web of class differences, foreigners and natives, materialism and spirituality, traditional men and "new" women, sexuality and virtue, disease and health, and finally barbarism and civilization itself Dracula's invasion of London is presented in terms of infestation, reminiscent of late Victorian fears of syphilis, and his attacks clearly mirror the Jack the Ripper serial murders in the 1880s. The sexual violence of the text, perpetrated primarily on the female body, has any number of obvious parallels within late-twentieth century life, and raises several important issues for class discussion. I have found that Dracula works particularly well in conjunction with Conrad's Heart of Darkness (a staple of many Core classes), especially in the opposition of foreign "otherness" and the so-called normal self, and in a comparison between Dracula and Kurtz.

For another intriguing look at end of the century perceptions of sexual deviance, it is worth exploring Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). The Picture of Dorian Gray became one of the guidebooks to decadence in the 1890s, with its portrait of hedonistic excess and moral depravity derived from an aesthetic of art for art's sake. Wilde's take on Aestheticism challenged the recognized parameters for art and morality in his day-parameters which are still debated in our time. In addition, the homoerotic underpinnings of the story, combined with Wilde's own court-trial for homosexuality give the text a timely quality in terms of recent cultural and political discussions about sexuality.

For another side yet of Wilde, one might try the short stories ("The Lonely Giant," "The Happy Prince," etc.) which offer a surprisingly spiritual dimension to Wilde's decadent posturings. Many of his short stories, written in the fairy tale vernacular, are moving parables of Christianity and social action, and as such lend themselves to Augustinian interpretation.

If one is searching for Augustinian connections in the modem context, an accessible text is Francis Thompson's The Hound of Heaven (1893). It is perhaps the most significant poem on spirituality in late Victorian England (with the exception of the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins), and it coincides nicely with any number of Augustinian themes. Particularly apropos is its record of spiritual suffering and its primary image of Christ hunting down the recalcitrant soul of the narrator-a theme caught in its striking opening lines of "I fled Him, down the nights and down the days; / I Red Him, down the arches of the years; / I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways / Of my own mind. . .

Spirituality and its loss in the modem world is just one of several important themes for American historian and author Henry Adams in The Education of Henry Adams (1907). While The Education ranges from 1838 to 1905, Adams details at length the angst, both personal and cultural, which marked Europe and America at century's end. While I would not recommend doing the entire Education with a freshman Core class, judicious use of chapters like "The Dynamo and the Virgin (1900), " "The Abyss of Ignorance (1902), " and "The Grammar of Science (1903), " can help raise critical questions about spirituality, sexuality, technology and science. In addition, Adams is concerned with the value of reconciling such disparate concepts of energy and power, if indeed reconciliation is at all possible.

Adams' ambivalence towards technology is reflected in a pair of utopian romances from the fin de siécle - one American, one English. The first is Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward 2000-1887 (1888), an excited and optimistic look at progress in the next century. Bellamy's tale of a male "sleeper" who awakes to find himself in the year 2000 depicts a fascinating amalgam of a mechanized society combined with recognizably turn-of-the-century American values of progress and comfort. The vision for the future coincides curiously in some ways with the current Disney-fication of both corporate and cultural America, particularly when Bellamy suggests labor questions will be solved by a sort of state capitalism where larger and larger conglomerates eventually swallow up each other until only one is left.

The second work is William Morris' News from Nowhere, or An Epoch of Rest (1890), written as a counter-utopia in direct response to Looking Backward, a book which appalled Morns' Socialist and artistic sensibilities. News from Nowhere draws on Socialist principles but also on Morris' own background as a craftsman and medievalist, and, as a result, it creates a utopia where capital and profit are abolished, and work-meaning hand craftsmanship-is revered for its own sake. Morris' text is both thought-provoking with its twin evocations of Marx and Ruskin and beautifully written in its own right.

Another reaction yet to the capitalist urges of the nineteenth century (with obvious parallels to our own time) can be found in George Gissing's New Grub Street (1891). This novel offers a biting portrait of the publishing industry of the late Victorian period, particularly as it was transformed into a corporate megalith pitting hacks against serious writers. Once again, it is the modem dimensions of the publishers and writers described which make this novel so timely-bookselling is not concerned with what's good, but, rather, with what sells. Those students interested in advertising and media will be amused to discover the prototype of magazines like People and scandal sheets like The National Enquirer as one characters promotes "newspapers which address the 'quarter-educated.... Everything must be very short, two inches at the utmost; their attention cannot sustain itself beyond two inches."

The end of the century also saw significant upheavals in terms of the social order. Two groups in particular, British and American women and African Americans were becoming more visible and articulate in their public quest for equality. The 1890s witnessed a phenomenon called "The New Woman" which launched a flurry of debates about women's roles in the private and public spheres. Two of the most accessible works from this period are both by American authors, Kate Chopin's The Awakening (1899) and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's short story "The Yellow Wallpaper" (1892). A controversial book when it first appeared, The Awakening remains a disturbing picture of a woman's "awakening" to the possibility of autonomy within a context of societal strictures. The protagonist, Edna Pontellier, is neither an easy or likable heroine in many ways, yet her desire for freedom is strongly compelling-a combination which provides a rich and challenging subject for debate. My Villanova Seminar classes particularly find Chopin's depiction of motherhood and wifehood troubling and worth discussing. I have taught it most successfully in tandem with the 1993 film The Piano by Jane Campion.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" is another landmark text of women's literature with its dramatic and startling portrait of the standard Victorian "rest cure" for cases of suspected "female hysteria". Like Chopin's The Awakening, "The Yellow Wallpaper" shows a woman "waking up" to the reality of late-Victorian confines for women's creativity. Gilman's depiction of madness is both terrifying and shrewdly comic as the narrator shocks her well-meaning but still dictatorial husband with her struggle to free herself. Finally, the narrator's descent into madness becomes paradoxically the only way out for a woman trapped behind the "wallpaper" of societal norms.

The American civil rights movement also has its roots in the turn of the century era, as demonstrated by W.E.B. DuBois's The Souls of Black Folk (1903) DuBois' treatise on black culture in America resonates dramatically with modem concerns, as well as being a beautifully written work in its own right. As with Adams' Education, I would use selected chapters, rather than the whole book, particularly the chapter "Of Our Spiritual Strivings" and the chapters on African American music. DuBois' prophecy that the color line will be the defining issue of the twentieth century has proved to be overwhelmingly accurate, and in The Souls of Black Folk, he addresses poignantly the "unreconcilable duality" of being black in America, with all its overtones of double-consciousness and divided allegiances. He also offers a moving description of the relationship between African Americans and the growth of America, culturally and economically.