Goldsmiths, University of London: Journals Online
Not a member yet
1742 research outputs found
Sort by
Anachronistic Decadence in an Antique Nineteenth-Century ‘Fairy Tale’: Walter Pater and Errol Le Cain’s Cupid and Psyche
Full text linkIn 1977, Errol Le Cain (1941-1989) illustrated Walter Pater’s retelling of the story of ‘Cupid and Psyche’.[i] Le Cain was a British animator and children’s book illustrator who was born in Singapore, where he spent most of his childhood, as well as in India. He is best known for his illustrations of numerous fairy tales, such as Cinderella and Beauty and the Beast, as well as Russian and Chinese folktales. In addition to these fairy tales, he also illustrated literary works such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798) and Pater’s version of Cupid and Psyche. The story originates as a frame narrative in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses or The Golden Ass (second century CE), but Pater recontextualized it through his own translation in his only completed novel Marius the Epicurean (1885). For Le Cain’s illustrated version, the text, as translated and altered by Pater, was again shortened and adapted to better suit the intended younger audience. Although Le Cain’s work is set in the twentieth century, a clear decadent influence is evident in his ‘Cupid and Psyche’, While Pater was not a decadent writer per say, his work reflects aesthetic and decadent ideas.
[i] I am grateful to Maximilian Le Cain for granting permission to reproduce Errol Le Cain’s illustrations for Cupid and Psyche
Unhappily Ever After: Surface, Queer Bachelorhood, and Occidental Desire in Jun’ichirō Tanizaki’s ‘The Siren’s Lament’ (1917)
Full text linkWhat becomes of the fairy tale when world-weary bachelors and aesthetic exiles enter its enchanted terrain? In the decadent tradition, the happy endings and moral certainties of the genre begin to dissolve. The arc of wish fulfilment gives way to ennui, longing, and the restless pursuit of unattainable beauty. This shift in tone and focus found an enduring embodiment in the figure of the eccentric dandy bachelor, first portrayed by Joris-Karl Huysmans in À rebours (1884) and later refined by Oscar Wilde in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). More than a stock character, he became a vehicle for transnational reworkings of the fairy tale within a decadent mode
‘Strangely at Home in Fairyland’: The Faun in Laurence Housman’s Garden
Full text linkIn his 1983 study of the illustrator and writer Laurence Housman (1865-1959), Rodney Engen affirms the centrality of fairy tales to his artistic and personal life on its first page. Housman, Engen writes, was ‘a true romantic with a childish love of fantasy’, one who ‘learned to turn his sensitive, private nature into an escapist world filled with fairies… [and later] recalled how essential those fantasies were to his struggles’.[i] To support this characterization, Engen quotes from Housman’s musings on the purpose of fairy tales and from critical reactions to his works. ‘The true end and object of a fairy tale is the expression of the joy of living’, Housman argues,
so for the true and unpolluted air of fairyland we have to go back to the old and artless tales of a day purer and simpler than our own; purer because so wholly unconcerned with any questions of morals, simpler because so wholly unconscious of its simplicity.[ii]
Despite its apparent remoteness, however, at least one critic – the writer and editor Charles Kains Jackson – found Housman’s work suggestive of the fact that he was ‘strangely at home in fairyland’.[iii]
[i] Rodney Engen, Laurence Housman (Catalpa Press, 1983), p. 11. Currently, this is the only biography of Housman (1865-1959).
[ii] Engen, Laurence Housman, p. 60.
[iii] Charles Kains Jackson, quoted in Engen, Laurence Housman, p. 60
Oscar, Nightingale, Rose
Full text linkFairy tales have always featured astonishing transformations. A girl in rags suddenly finds herself in evening dress, headed in a golden coach toward the ball at a palace; a prince becomes a Beast and, thanks to the love of a Beauty, resumes at last his original form; an entire kingdom falls into a deathlike trance, but is awakened when one sleeping maiden is kissed. Oscar Wilde’s own ‘The Nightingale and the Rose’, first published in The Happy Prince and Other Tales in 1888, contains an equally remarkable moment, when blood drained from the heart of a bird enters a white rosebush and turns to red the petals of a single blossom
Aubrey Beardsley’s The Story of Venus and Tannhäuser as a Decadent Fairy Tale
Full text linkIn the latter decades of the nineteenth century, fairy tales were in vogue. The painter John Anster Fitzgerald saw his piece The Fairy’s Lake shown at the Royal Academy of Arts in 1866, and contributed various works to the Christmas editions of The Illustrated London News; for the stage, James Robinson Planché adapted the fairy tales of Madame D’Aulnoy to great success, and, by the 1890s, Andrew Lang’s ‘coloured’ Fairy Books were a staple of the middle-class nursery. [i] Perhaps inevitably, however, much discussion ensued as to what the fairy tale should do or be, and what they might inculcate in the child reader.
[i] See John Anster Fitzgerald, The Fairy’s Lake, oil on board, exhibited 1866, Tate, London; Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy and James Robinson Planché, Fairy Tales / by the Countess D’Aulnoy; Translated by J. R. Planché (George Routledge and Sons, 1855; reissued 1888); and Lang’s series of ‘coloured’ fairy tales, starting with The Blue Fairy Book (1888), which were originally published by Longmans, Green & Co
The Peculiar Case of the Jewelled Tortoise, or: Thoughts Towards a Jewellery of the Decadent Woman
Full text linkA hunger for refinement, originality, and the will to bend nature to the artistic imagination: the transformation of a tortoise into a living jewel, as detailed in the fifth chapter of Joris-Karl Huysmans’s À rebours, has become an iconic image of the decadent sensibility. That this living jewel became a reality, however – that life, quite literally, imitated art – is a fact barely known today; indeed, decadence itself seems to be a chapter curiously absent from jewellery history. Yet during the winter of 1897-98, tiny jewelled tortoises, harnessed in gold and glistening with precious stones, trod the corsages of daring Parisiennes and were readily recognised as a ‘joaillerie décadente’.[i]
[i] Tiburge, ‘Causerie’, Les Veillées des Chaumières, 12 February 1898, pp. 237-38 (p. 238)
‘[I]n the midst of fierce forces’: Orientalizing Decadence in A. S. Byatt’s The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye (1994)
Full text linkThe closing and titular novella in A. S. Byatt’s collection of five fairy stories, The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye (1994), introduces an unlikely decadent heroine, the narratologist Gillian Perholt, ‘an unprecedented being, a woman with porcelain-crowned teeth, laser-corrected vision, her own store of money, her own life and field of power’.[i] The fairy tale plays with the tropes of the 1001 Nights (also referred to as The Arabian Nights), and wish-fulfilling lamps (found in associated tales such as ‘Aladdin’), as Gillian finds a glass bottle containing a djinn in an Istanbul market. The world in Byatt’s novella is one she understood and constructed through a variety of sources, by reading The Arabian Nights and undertaking academic research related to the tales, and through dialogue with fellow writers, notably the Turkish poet Cevat Çapan (pp. 279-80). Gillian’s encounter with the ‘Oriental Daimon’, largely staged in her hotel room, involves the granting of three wishes: one for Gillian’s body to be restored to a younger version of herself; another, that the djinn might fall in love with her; and a third, gifted back to djinn for his freedom (p. 206).
[i] A. S. Byatt, The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye: Five Fairy Stories (Vintage, 1995), pp. 104-05. Subsequent references to the novel are given inline
Oscar Wilde’s Fairy Tales: The Aesthetically and Socially Engaged Child
Full text link‘Oscar Wilde and fairy tales? Putting the two in the same sentence has a jarring effect’ suggests fairy tale scholar Maria Tatar.[i] This has to do, in large part, with Wilde’s fame as a decadent author and an aesthete. While some have found Wilde’s choice of writing children’s literature, in the form of his fairy tales, a strange one, this interest in childhood is less surprising than one might think. Conceptualizations of childhood at the fin de siècle were influenced by lingering Romantic ideas of childhood built upon the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and William Wordsworth[ii], as well as the budding psychological field of Child Study spearheaded in Britain by James Sully.[iii] Scholars in this field perceived the child as both evolutionarily ‘savage’ or animalistic and, also, Romantically imaginative, rebellious, and visionary. While older models of Romantic childhood, both savage and sweet, defined the child by simplicity, Wilde addressed child readers as an audience capable of understanding complex ironies, multilayered moral messages, and even open-ended problems in the world. Wilde uses fairy tales as pathways to engage the child reader with his critiques of the world as it is and his vision for the world as it could be.
[i] Maria Tatar, ‘The Aesthetics of Altruism in Oscar Wilde’s Fairy Tales’, in Oscar Wilde and the Cultures of Childhood, ed. by Joseph Bristow (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), pp. 145-57 (p. 145).
[ii] See, for example, Eric Tribunella and Carrie Hintz, Reading Children’s Literature: A Critical Introduction (Broadview, 2019); Sally Shuttleworth, The Mind of the Child: Childhood Development in Literature, Science, and Medicine, 1840 – 1900 (Oxford University Press, 2010); James R. Kincaid, Child Loving: The Erotic Child in Victorian Culture (Routledge, 1992); Steven Bruhm and Natasha Hurley, eds, Curiouser: On the Queerness of Children (University of Minnesota Press, 2004); Marah Gubar, Artful Dodgers: Reconceiving the Golden Age of Children’s Literature (Oxford University Press, 2009); and Victoria Ford Smith, Between Generations: Collaborative Authorship in the Golden Age of Children’s Literature (University Press of Mississippi, 2017).
[iii] James Sully. Studies of Childhood (Aberdeen University Press, 1896), Internet Archive, https://archive.org/details/cu31924055378305 [accessed 5 January 2026]
Georges Eekhoud, Escal-Vigor (1899): A New Translation
Full text linkGeorges Eekhoud’s Escal-Vigor, first serialised in 1898 in the Mercure de France as ‘Le Comte de la Digue’ and published in full the following year, is a homoerotic and decadent novel that has only been translated into English once in the century since its publication.[i] The fairy-tale-like story follows Henry de Kehlmark, a young aristocrat who returns to his ancestral home of Escal-Vigor on the mythical island of Smaragdis, somewhere off the coast of the Low Countries. There he falls in love with the shepherd Guidon Govaertz, provoking the wrath of the villagers: in the novel’s dénouement, Guidon is murdered by a mob of local women, and Kehlmark dies of a broken heart alongside his beloved.
My thanks to friends and colleagues Ms Marie Hervieu (professeur agrégé) and Ms Veronica Szafranski, as well as the anonymous reviewer and the editors for their comments and feedback on this translation.
[i] Michael Rosenfeld, ‘Escal Vigor – A Novel from the French of George Eekhoud. Comment traduire l’innomable’, in Traduire la littérature belge francophone. Itinéraires des œuvres et des personnes, ed. by Béatrice Costa and Catherine Grevet (Éditions UMONS, 2016), pp. 25–40. Rosenfeld notes that two English editions of Escal-Vigor have been published, although both are essentially identical. The first appeared in 1909, published by Charles Carrington as Escal Vigor – A Novel from the French of George Eekhoud (Brussels: The Gutemberg Press); the full text is available online here: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Escal_Vigor [last accessed 17/08/2025]. The second edition, published in the United States in the 1930s as A Strange Love. A Novel of Abnormal Passion (New York: Panurge Press, 1930), does not differ significantly in translation
The Decadent Fairy Tale: An Introduction by the Guest Editors
Full text linkHow can a fairy tale be ‘decadent’? The question itself highlights the seemingly oppositional nature of the fairy tale tradition and decadence. On first reading, the former appears to be organized around principles of conservatism, moralism and narrative resolution; the classic ‘happily ever after’ now synonymous with the numerous cinematic fairy tale adaptations led by Walt Disney. In literary fairy tales such as ‘La belle au bois dormant’ [‘Sleeping Beauty in the Wood’] (1697) by Charles Perrault, the union of the prince and princess and their establishment of a domestic family life stands as a symbolic means to reinscribe a heteronormative social order threatened by an ogress. In ‘La Belle et la Bête’ [‘Beauty and the Beast’] (1740) by Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve, the Beast’s human transformation is catalysed by the love and compassion evinced by Beauty, highlighting the importance of her moral virtue. Nor is this drive towards upholding the heteronormative as a moral and social ideal solely confirmed to the French tradition of contes des fées. In the Grimms’ ‘Schneeweißchen und Rosenrot’ [‘Snow White and Rose Red’] (1815), the titular Snow White helps a bear who later magically transforms into a prince bridegroom, while her sister agrees to marry the prince’s brother. In contrast, decadence is concerned with concepts of sexual dissidence, sexual contagion, and social degeneracy, with ideas and forms that result in visual and literary imagery of transgressive queer couplings, poisoned lineages, and families in states of decline.