Wilde, Zola, Dreyfus, Christ: Fin-de-siècle passions

Journal article

Oscar Wilde and Émile Zola are conventionally opposed as the figureheads of, respectively, the aestheticist and the naturalist literary trends that dominated the fin-de-siècle literary field. Yet they also exhibit a number of uncanny similarities—not least the turn both made in their last years towards religious themes and imagery, and especially those of martyrdom and the Passion. This article explores such images in the later life, work, and public persona of both writers, and sets them within the context of the proliferation of references to Christ and martyrdom in fin-de-siècle literary culture, particularly at the time of the Dreyfus Affair. From Ernest Renan’s sentimental account of Jesus’ life and death, via the Decadent obsession with images of abjection and suffering, to the nascent homoerotic tradition recognizing in the figure of the martyr a confluence of the abject and the sublime that seemed to allegorize queer desire, the article traces the competing and conflicting influences acting on Wilde’s and Zola’s writing about Christ and martyrdom. It examines the “entailments”—the unexpected consequences, meanings, and echoes—that these overdetermined themes brought in their train from the wider literary field. It also shows how those entailments were exacerbated by the massive politicization of “martyr” discourse around the time of the Dreyfus Affair, when the theme acquired its fullest significance—before dissolving into an incoherence symptomatic of a crisis of moral discourse at the turn of the century.

Authors: Counter, A

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Journal: Representations
• Volume: 149
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 103-133
• Publication date: 2020-01-28
• Acceptance date: 2019-07-31
• DOI: 10.1525/rep.2020.149.1.103
• EISSN: 1533-855X
• ISSN: 0734-6018
• Language: English