Hostname: page-component-77c89778f8-n9wrp Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-18T09:49:21.588Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

SEX IN UTOPIA: THE EVOLUTIONARY HEDONISM OF GRANT ALLEN AND OSCAR WILDE

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 May 2018

Lindsay Wilhelm
Lindsay Wilhelm*
Affiliation:
University of California, Los Angeles
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

In his provocative polemic “The New Hedonism,” Grant Allen mounts a passionate defense of fin-de-siècle aestheticism by proposing a modern ethic – the titular “new hedonism,” which he borrows from Oscar Wilde's novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890, rev. 1891) – that fully synthesizes aestheticism's insights with up-to-date scientific knowledge. At first glance, Allen seems an unexpected ally for Wilde, in part because few literary historians have explored the link between the two contemporaries. Many modern-day scholars of Allen's work (including Peter Morton, Bernard Lightman, William Greenslade, and Terence Rodgers) have tended to focus on his popular science writing, his elaborations on Herbert Spencer's evolutionary theories, and his controversial “New Woman” novels The Woman Who Did (1895) and The Type-Writer Girl (1897). Those who do connect Allen and Wilde, such as Nick Freeman, often draw the relationship into focus through the two writers’ shared interest in libertarian socialism rather than their overlapping philosophical and aesthetic concerns (111–28). Yet, as we can begin to see in the epigraphs, the association that Allen made between evolutionary progress and the “beautifying of life” echoes one of the most significant claims of Wilde's earlier, dialogic essay, “The Critic as Artist.” “Aesthetics,” Wilde's speaker, Gilbert, enthuses, “like sexual selection, make life lovely and wonderful, fill it with new forms, and give it progress, and variety and change” (“The Critic as Artist” 204). Allen's survey of human evolutionary history reminds him, too, that our cultural and artistic achievements are all that lift us “above the beasts that perish” (382). For both writers, then, aestheticism's commitment to beauty, “self-development,” and the emancipated pursuit of pleasure entails potentially sweeping consequences for the future evolution of humankind. Allen's vocal support for Wilde – which Allen expressed privately in letters as well as publicly in his 1891 article “The Celt in English Art” – was not simply a convenient political alliance, but an integral part of Allen's complete program for sociocultural improvement.

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 46 , Issue 2 , June 2018 , pp. 403 - 424
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

WORKS CITED

Allen, Grant. “Aesthetic Evolution in Man.” Mind 20 (1880): 445–64.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Allen, Grant. The British Barbarians. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1895.Google Scholar
Allen, Grant. “The Celt in English Art.” Fortnightly Review 49 (1891): 267–77.Google Scholar
Allen, Grant. The Colour-Sense: Its Origin and Development. London: Trübner & Co., 1879.Google Scholar
Allen, Grant. “Falling in Love.” Fortnightly Review 46 (1886): 452–62.Google Scholar
Allen, Grant. “The New Hedonism.” Fortnightly Review 55 (1894): 377–92.Google Scholar
Allen, Grant. [Cecil Power]. Philistia. London: Chatto & Windus, 1884.Google Scholar
Allen, Grant. Physiological Aesthetics. New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1877.Google Scholar
Allen, Grant. “The Romance of the Clash of the Races.” Post-Prandial Philosophy. London: Chatto & Windus, 1894. 70–78.Google Scholar
Allen, Grant. “What is the Object of Life?” Forum 3 (1887): 466–72.Google Scholar
Anderson, Anne. “‘Fearful Consequences . . . of Living up to One's Teapot’: Men, Women and ‘Cultchah’ in the Aesthetic Movement.” Rethinking the Interior, c. 1867–1896: Aestheticism and Arts and Crafts. Ed. Edwards, Jason and Hart, Imogen. Surrey: Ashgate, 2010. 111–30.Google Scholar
Bain, Alexander. The Senses and the Intellect. London: John W. Parker and Son, 1855.Google Scholar
Beardsley, Aubrey, illus. Salomé: A Tragedy in One Act. By Wilde, Oscar. London: Elkin Mathews and John Lane, 1907.Google Scholar
Beaumont, Matthew. “Reinterpreting Oscar Wilde's Concept of Utopia: ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism.’” Utopian Studies 15 (2004): 13–29.Google Scholar
Bland, Lucy. Banishing the Beast: Feminism, Sex and Morality. London: Tauris Parke, 2001.Google Scholar
Bosanquet, Bernard. A History of Aesthetic. 2nd ed. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1966.Google Scholar
Brake, Laurel, and Demoor, Marysa. The Dictionary of Nineteenth Century Journalism in Great Britain and Ireland. Gent: Academia P, 2009.Google Scholar
Bristow, Joseph. “Introduction.” Wilde Writings: Contextual Conditions. Ed. Bristow, Joseph. Toronto: U of Toronto Press, 2003. 3–38.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Campbell, George. “Opening Address by Sir George Campbell, K. C. S. I., M. P., D. C. L., F. R. G. S., President of the Section.” Nature 34.880 (Sept. 1886): 454–57.Google Scholar
Clifford, David. “Wilde and Evolution.” Oscar Wilde in Context. Ed. Powell, Kerry and Raby, Peter. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2013. 211–19.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cohn, Elisha. “‘One single ivory cell’: Oscar Wilde and the Brain.” Journal of Victorian Culture 17 (2012): 183–205.Google Scholar
Darwin, Charles. The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. Ed. Moore, James and Desmond, Adrian. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2004.Google Scholar
Darwin, Charles. On the Origin of Species. Ed. Bynum, William. London: Penguin, 2009.Google Scholar
Davis, Whitney. Queer Beauty: Sexuality and Aesthetics from Winckelmann to Freud and Beyond. New York: Columbia UP, 2010.Google Scholar
Dawson, Gowan. Darwin, Literature, and Victorian Respectability. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007.Google Scholar
Dowling, Linda. The Vulgarization of Art: The Victorians and Aesthetic Democracy. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1996.Google Scholar
Maurier, Du, George. “The Six-Mark Tea-Pot.” Cartoon. Punch. 30 Oct. 1880. Freer and Sackler Galleries. Web. 30 May 2016. <http://www.asia.si.edu/exhibitions/current/chinamania/object.asp?id=six-mark-teapot>>Google Scholar
Ellmann, Richard. Oscar Wilde. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988.Google Scholar
Ferguson, Christine. “Decadence as Scientific Fulfillment.” PMLA 117.3 (2002): 465–78.Google Scholar
Foster, John Wilson. “Against Nature? Science and Oscar Wilde.” Wilde the Irishman. Ed. McCormack, Jerusha. New Haven: Yale UP, 1998. 113–24.Google Scholar
Francis, Mark. Herbert Spencer and the Invention of Modern Life. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2014.Google Scholar
Freeman, Nick. “‘Intentional Rudeness’?: The British Barbarians and the Cultural Politics of 1895.” Greenslade and Rodgers. 111–28.Google Scholar
Gagnier, Regenia. Individualism, Decadence and Globalization: On the Relationship of Part to Whole, 1859–1920. London: Palgrave, 2010.Google Scholar
Gagnier, Regenia. The Insatiability of Human Wants: Economics and Aesthetics in Market Society. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2000.Google Scholar
Gagnier, Regenia. “Production, Reproduction, and Pleasure in Victorian Aesthetics and Economics.” Victorian Sexual Dissidence. Ed. Dellamora, Richard. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999. 127–46.Google Scholar
Goldman, Laurence. Science, Reform and Politics in Victorian Britain: The Social Science Association 1857–1886. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004.Google Scholar
Greenslade, William and Rodgers, Terence, eds. Grant Allen: Literature and Cultural Politics at the Fin de Siècle. Surrey: Ashgate, 2005.Google Scholar
Huxley, T. H. Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature. New York: D. Appleton & Company, 1863.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kant, Immanuel. The Critique of the Power of Judgment. Ed. Guyer, Paul. Trans. Guyer, Paul and Matthews, Eric. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lee, Vernon [Violet Paget]. “Vivisection: An Evolutionist to Evolutionists.” Contemporary Review 41 (1882): 788–811.Google Scholar
Le Gallienne, Richard. “Grant Allen.” Fortnightly Review 66 (1899): 1005–25.Google Scholar
Lightman, Bernard. Victorian Popularizers of Science: Designing Nature for New Audiences. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2007.Google Scholar
Merrill, Linda. The Peacock Room: A Cultural Biography. Washington, D. C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1998.Google Scholar
Monsman, Gerald. Walter Pater. Boston: G. K. & Hall, 1977.Google Scholar
Morton, Peter. “The Busiest Man in England”: Grant Allen and the Writing Trade, 1875–1900. New York: Palgrave, 2005.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Morton, Peter. “Grant Allen: A Biographical Essay.” Greenslade and Rodgers. 23–44.Google Scholar
“Muscle-Reading by Mr. Stuart Cumberland.” Pall Mall Gazette. 24 May 1884.Google Scholar
Navarre, Joan. The Publishing History of Aubrey Beardsley's Compositions for Oscar Wilde's Salomé. Diss. Marquette U, 1995. Web. 8 June 2016.Google Scholar
“The ‘New Hedonism.’” Review of Richard Le Gallienne's Playgoer's Club lecture and Grant Allen's “The New Hedonism.” The Speaker: The Liberal Review 10 (1894): 654–55.Google Scholar
Nordau, Max. Degeneration. New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1895.Google Scholar
Pater, Walter. “Conclusion.” The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry. Ed. Hill, Donald L.. Berkeley: U of California P, 1980. xix–xxv.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pater, Walter. Marius the Epicurean. Ed. Monsman, Gerald. Kansas City: Valancourt Books, 2008.Google Scholar
Pater, Walter. “Preface.” The Renaissance. 186–90.Google Scholar
Richardson, Angelique. Love and Eugenics in the Late Nineteenth Century: Rational Reproduction & the New Woman. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003.Google Scholar
Seagroatt, Heather. “Hard Science, Soft Psychology, and Amorphous Art in The Picture of Dorian Gray.” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 38 (1998): 741–79.Google Scholar
Shafe, Laurence. “Why Is the Peacock's Tail So Beautiful?” Darwin and Theories of Aesthetics and Cultural History. Ed. Larson, Barbara and Flach, Sabine. Surrey: Ashgate, 2013. 37–52.Google Scholar
Small, Ian. Conditions for Criticism: Authority, Knowledge, and Literature in the Late Nineteenth Century. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1991.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Soper, Kate. “Alternative Hedonism, Cultural Theory, and the Role of Aesthetic Revisioning.” Cultural Studies 22 (2008): 567–87.Google Scholar
Spencer, Herbert. The Principles of Psychology. 2nd ed. Vol. 2. New York: Appleton and Company, 1873.Google Scholar
Symonds, John Addington. “On the Application of Evolutionary Principles to Art and Literature.” Essays Speculative and Suggestive. Vol. 1. London: Chapman and Hall, 1890. 42–83.Google Scholar
Symonds, John Addington. Renaissance in Italy: The Age of Despots. London: Smith, Elder, & Co., 1875.Google Scholar
Tennyson, Alfred. “LVI.” In Memoriam. Ed. Gray, Erik. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2004. 41–42.Google Scholar
Wilde, Oscar. “The Critic as Artist.” Criticism, Historical Criticism, Intentions, the Soul of Man. Ed. Guy, Josephine M.. The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007. 123–206.Google Scholar
Wilde, Oscar. The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde. Ed. Holland, Merlin and Hart-Davis, Rupert. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2000.Google Scholar
Wilde, Oscar. “The English Renaissance of Art.” Miscellanies. Vol. 6. The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde. New York: National Library Company, 1909. 241–78.Google Scholar
Wilde, Oscar. Oscar Wilde's Oxford Notebooks: A Portrait of Mind in the Making. Ed. Smith, Philip E. and Helfand, Michael S.. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1989.Google Scholar
Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray. The Picture of Dorian Gray: The 1890 and 1891 Texts. Ed. Bristow, Joseph. The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2005.Google Scholar
Wilde, Oscar. “The Soul of Man under Socialism.” Criticism, Historical Criticism, Intentions, the Soul of Man. 229–68.Google Scholar
Zatlin, Linda Gertner. Aubrey Beardsley and Victorian Sexual Politics. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1990.Google Scholar