Laurel BRAKE (Birkbeck College, London)
“Pater’s Face: the Physiognomy of the Work”
Henry James characterised Pater, disparagingly, as ‘the mask without the face’. In this paper I propose that although personally Pater came to cultivate the mask of privacy, as an aesthete his ‘face’ is embodied in his work. This binary, as James shows, is not confined to the theatre, but arises in the late 19C specifically out of cultural conditions in which the incidence of aestheticism, the homosocial, and the enhanced homophobia of the criminal law amendment act conjoin. A resort to the double life is characteristic two other contemporaries of Pater’s (Symonds and Wilde), with whose strategies I shall briefly compare Pater’s.
Part of this paper will treat specific moments in Pater’s management of his career and work when he attempts to ensure that the mask prevails. These include the withdrawal of the Conclusion to Studies in the History of the Renaissance; withdrawal from competition for the Professor of Poetry; suppression of a book on Dionysus and other Studies; the absence of his work in certain print locations, such as the Artist and Journal of Home Culture, under Charles Kains Jackson. The efforts of his family, friends and publisher to protect his posthumous reputation and writing after the Wilde trials is part of the mask narrative.
But most of the paper will treat what I allege is the visible ‘face’ of Pater, his published work.  Pater’s aesthetic and sexual narratives are unstintingly performed in his writing and publishing. This aspect of his performance is countenanced by both the periodicals and newspaper in which his work appeared, and his publisher who reprinted the pieces, largely unrevised, in signed volumes. So, if the mask narrative is contingent on the culture, so is the face narrative part of the tolerance and formats of print culture. Pater published articles, reviews, introductions, lectures, short stories, and fiction in serial format and in books, and in a period in which authors such as Hardy and George Moore suffered censorship, Pater apparently did not. Like Wilde in 1890, Pater was able to place one of his most violent and sexually explicit short stories in 1893 in an American periodical.

Melissa BURON (Curatorial Assistant, European Art Department, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco)
“Oscar Wilde in San Francisco”
In 1882 the English impresario Richard D’Oyly Carte sent the charming Oxford graduate, Oscar Wilde, to tour the United States on a four-month lecture circuit.  D’Oyly Carte’s publicity stunt primed audiences for American performances of Gilbert and Sullivan’s musical Patience (1881), which satirized aesthetes like Wilde and their flourishing zest for all things beautiful.  The tour proved immensely popular and was extended to a full year.  The tour also propelled Oscar Wilde’s reputation as one of the nineteenth-century’s most notorious personalities.  The movement—Aestheticism—profoundly affected successive generations of artists, designers and manufacturers, first in England and then beyond.  One hundred and thirty years later, examples of the beautiful objects Wilde championed will be featured when the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco presents the only American staging of the first major exhibition about the British Aesthetic Movement—The Cult of Beauty: The Victorian Avant-Garde, 1860-1900.
San Francisco was formally introduced to the mechanics of Aestheticism when Wilde arrived on March 26, 1882.  His lectures caused a sensation.  This paper will examine how Wilde’s lectures in San Francisco affected his development as an ambassador of Aestheticism.  I will also discuss how Wilde’s role as an apostle for the arts informed contemporary discussion about aesthetic issues in San Francisco.  The numerous descriptive reviews inspired by his visit demonstrate that Wilde left an indelible impression on San Francisco’s cultural fabric.  I will examine these relevant commentaries within the framework of Wilde’s self-fashioning as an “apostle of the beautiful.”
During the American tour, Wilde simultaneously enacted the persona of erudite Aesthetic prophet while crafting his public image as dandy and connoisseur.  At this time, crucial elements of Wilde’s physical appearance, which are also synonymous with the archetypal aesthete, took shape: flowing hair, cropped breaches and lily, sunflower, and carnation boutonnieres.  Wilde also wore sombreros as a nod to the California’s Spanish colonial past.  These outfits emulated costumes worn by the narcissistic Bunthorne in Patience, but were embellished with Wilde’s unique creative imprint.  A popular misconception holds that Bunthorne caricatured Wilde.  Although Wilde is arguably the most famous aesthete by twenty-first-century standards, in 1882 the movement was identified more with personalities like the artists Dante Gabriel Rossetti and James McNeill Whistler, and the poet Algernon Charles Swinburne.  Accordingly, it is more accurate that the American tour provided Wilde with the opportunity to fully embody Bunthorne’s persona on stage as life imitating art in living theater.  This paper will examine how San Francisco’s particular cultural climate provided a ripe context for Wilde’s translation of aesthetic precepts as performance.
Wilde arrived in New York on 2 January 1882 and his time in San Francisco marks an approximate midpoint in his American tour.  The reviews were colorful and opinions ranged from fawning to vitriolic.  This paper will identify how Wilde’s lectures and reception in the American west, the “Occidental uttermost of American civilization,” affected the fashioning of his identity as a consummate aesthete.

Caroline DAKERS (Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, University of Arts London)
“Secret Spaces: The Private Life of Frederic Leighton”
In Henry James’ short story ‘The Private Life’ (1892), Frederic Leighton is transformed, rather unkindly, into the ‘extraordinarily first’ Lord Mellifont. Both are successful artists, both ‘the top of the list and head of the table’. However Mellifont exists only when in company and disappears completely when alone (Kermode); he is ‘all public and had no corresponding private life’.
For the public who visited Leighton in London, the experience of entering his ‘palace of art’ was unforgettable. The ‘house beautiful’ was a triumphant ‘public relations exercise’ (Campbell & Stephenson), both framing and reflecting its owner’s celebrity status in the late Victorian art world. But Leighton’s private life, pursued within this ‘8th wonder of the world’ (Vernon Lee), in the company of only models and servants, remains a mystery. James was a frequent visitor but wrote of Leighton, ‘I have never known a man so long and so little’.
Leighton and his architect George Aitchison planned, embellished and extended the house over three decades, though it remained essentially a bachelor pad with no accommodation for visitors. This paper will explore the contrast between the experience of the house for the public and Leighton’s use of the house for work and leisure. How far was it planned, room by room, to protect and conceal, even while offering visitors the illusion of access and understanding? The musical parties and Show Sundays which attracted hundreds of guests were infrequent annual occasions; Leighton was mostly ‘at home’ by himself, working in silence. No wonder Henry James imagined he might simply disappear. But if Leighton had a relationship with one of his models who bore him a son (financial records suggest this is a real possibility) the privacy afforded by his house becomes both tantalising and tangible; its aesthetic interior also a location of well-kept secrets.

Jessica DeCOUX (City University of New York Graduate Center)
“Oscar Wilde, Dorian Gray, and Pater’s ‘Many Currents’”
Oscar Wilde was one of a community of fin-de-siècle artists who confronted a new, post-Paterian model of existence.  Pater had written in his conclusion to The Renaissance  that “physical life” was “but a combination of natural elements” and had explained that, “Far out on every side of us those elements are broadcast, driven in many currents; and birth and gesture and death and the springing of violets from the grave are but a few out of ten thousand resultant combinations.”  The implications of Pater’s words are many, but among them is the idea of simultaneity, of numerous entities existing concurrently, each enacting similar but not identical processes of transformation through life and death.
Pater’s influence on Wilde has been richly explored, and certainly we may easily recognize certain threads from the above statements in Wilde’s work: his investment in a selfhood that allows for transformation, renewal and refashioning; his reckoning with the dangers of outside influence; and his interest in death, decay and dissolution.  Yet rarely do we consider Wilde, and particularly his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, in terms of simultaneity or multiplicity.  In fact, it is common to read Dorian Gray in the traditional terms of Decadence as a novel of dichotomies: transgression versus moral rectitude, beauty versus decay, or art versus life.  It is certainly easy to take this binary approach if the focus of our reading is the title character himself. However, it proves illuminating to read Wilde’s novel as a work whose “elements are broadcast…in many currents,” that is, to read Dorian as only one among many equally important characters in the novel.  Lord Henry, Basil Hallward, Sybil Vane, and even very minor characters are all transformed (and to varying degrees destroyed) over the novel’s course, and reading Dorian’s unnatural and fatal end not as a deviation from another single, ideal path but as one among many paths, each of which is marked by its particular failures, offers us numerous metaphorical implications.
Perhaps most significantly, this reading allows us to rethink the idea of Dorian Gray as a novel that expresses literary Decadence as a mode of rebellion against the normative, and to instead frame it as a novel in which the normative exists only as multiple variations of the Decadent.  Wilde offers his readers a new way of understanding the self as a subject in society, one in which individuality exists within a multitude of possibilities as embodied by other individuals.  In this way, Wilde creates a model of selfhood in which each individual enacts, through the communal and dialogical process of living, multiple selves, each of which gives way to the other and which all exist collectively.
Just as the whole of the novel allows its various failed and incomplete characters to synthesize into harmonious completion, so does the self, through its multiple iterations and transformations, amount to a whole which cumulatively achieves aesthetic apotheosis even in its inevitable decline.  Through his novel, Wilde takes up Pater’s call to conceptualize life as an accumulation of “ten thousand resultant combinations,” and in doing so frees the subjectified self from the oppressiveness of its singular failures and from the oppression of a monolithically normative society.

Emily EELLS (Université de Paris Ouest Nanterre La Défense)
Oscar oscarisé : Wilde’s use of French in self-fashioning
This paper will examine how Wilde’s use of French in a social context is not just a fashion statement, but an aesthetic encoding. It will analyze why Wilde inscribes French in his correspondence and emblazons some of his works with French titles, and how French enables him to pose as an homme de lettres  in Parisian salons. The paper will focus on Wilde’s ‘social texts’ (his letters, reports of his performances as a raconteur, etc.) and will study how French functions both as a language of ostentation on the literary scene and as a means of subterfuge in a homoerotic context.

Stefano Maria EVANGELISTA (Trinity College, Oxford)
“Passion Flowers and Potatoes: Ouida’s Self-Fashioning as Aesthetic Critic”
‘Ouida’ is a familiar name to scholars of English literature, even though few read her work today and she still awaits a thorough critical revaluation. But Ouida enjoyed an enormous readership in her day: her 1867 novel Under Two Flags, written when she was only 28, went into 63 editions in England alone and, in her early days, a rumour had spread in the press that ‘Ouida’ was in fact George Eliot, who had started to write naughty novels hiding behind a pen name. The reason for Ouida’s marginalisation from the Victorian canon is that her work doesn’t quite fit any one of the major, stable genre categories through which we now understand the literature of the time: realism, sensation fiction, naturalism, aestheticism, Decadence. Ouida is all of these and none of these at the same time, as well as being a critic who published in influential highbrow journals such as the Nineteenth Century and the Westminster Review.
In this paper I will examine Ouida’s construction of artistic selfhood and literary authority by reading her work in relation to aestheticism. In the last three decades of the nineteenth century aestheticism reconfigured the relationship between intellectual authority and private morality, and, in this process, it opened a new cultural space in which writers were encouraged to take on transgressive public identities (such are the cases of Swinburne and Oscar Wilde) as well as creating new forms of authority available to women, as is reflected in the careers of Vernon Lee, A. Mary F. Robinson, Michael Field and, of course, Ouida among others.
In her private and public writings Ouida used the language of aestheticism, calling herself ‘the last Greek’ and launching a fierce critique of Victorian realism, especially in evidence in her critical essays. The focus of my paper will be on these essays, collected in Frescoes and Other Stories (1883) and Critical Studies (1900), which engage in a complex and hitherto overlooked negotiation with the ideas and strategies of public self-construction adopted by prominent aesthetic critics such as Swinburne, Pater and Oscar Wilde. Ouida’s attack on realism as propagating a narrow world view based on middle-class values and her championing of an ideal of literature that extended the emotional and social register of bourgeois lifestyle were mirrored in a fascinating, tireless practice of public self-fashioning, through which she created a carefully crafted form of theatricality and dramatisation of herself as artist and cosmopolitan female intellectual. I will assess the gains and the limits of Ouida’s adoption of the aesthetic life as an ambiguous double path towards cultural authority and marginalisation.

Anne-Florence GILLARD-ESTRADA (University of Rouen-ERIAC)
“ ‘To the end that I myself may be a perfect work of art, issuing thus into the eyes of all Greece’ (Walter Pater, Plato and Platonism): the troubled politics of Pater’s aesthetic self-fashioning”
As part of his political discourse on the liberation of the self, Walter Pater in, “Winckelmann” takes up Hegel’s words in order to evoke the Greeks who “have grown up on the soil of their own individuality, creating themselves out of themselves, and moulding themselves to what they were, and willed to be.” More precisely, Pater posits a social and individual model of self-fashioning in which he envisions the young man as subjected to ascêsis, which turns him into a “spectacle”: his only aim is to be beautiful to others. In his essays on Plato, Pater dwells at length again on the central role of ascesis in Greece, which is a discipline, both mental and physical, which fashions men’s bodies and partakes of a musical but also military discipline. However, this discipline allows eros to seep through. Self-fashioning means being beautiful, and Pater refers to an aesthetic asceticism which entails the beauty of the homoerotic body. This paper aims at examining what it means for Pater to be beautiful both socially and individually. What were the consequences of such that ideal — just being beautiful — in a Victorian, utilitarian society of manly action and “doing”? Pater calls the force that aspires to control and discipline “manliness”. So what is the link with this ideal of “manliness” and the Carlylean ideal of “muscular Christianity”?
But Pater is also aware of the paradoxical attraction of that ideal. The beautiful male body is an object to be seen and touched; the consummate athlete is a body to be consummated visually and physically (one touches the marble statues of young athletes). And in his vision of Sparta, the young men create themselves as beautiful objects to be seen, which leads to their objectification. They are “instruments” and Pater seems to be seduced by the temptation to order and submissiveness entailed by the social aesthetic. Oscar Wilde later reflected on this idea of individual and aesthetic self-fashioning turned to social consumption in his character Dorian, who is often described as a beautiful object to be contemplated by others, and who is also played upon like an instrument, fashioning himself according to what the others make of him. Both Pater and Wilde, in their fictional characters Dorian, Emerald, or Apollo, recorded the “obstacles and aporiae” encountered by those characters who self-fashioned themselves.

Xavier GIUDICELLI (Université de Reims)
“Polyglossia et vies esthétiques: les langues étrangères dans The Spirit Lamp (1892-1893)”
The Spirit Lamp, éphémère revue oxonienne publiée entre mai 1892 et mai 1893, d’abord dirigée par J. S. Phillmore et Sandys Wason (les six premiers mois), puis par Lord Alfred Douglas, contient, outre de nombreuses traductions, des textes écrits en langue étrangère. La présence des langues anciennes, et en particulier du grec est certes notable, correspondant en cela au lien déjà bien étudié entre Hellénisme et homosexualité à l’époque victorienne (cf. ouvrages de Linda Dowling, Richard Dellamora et, récemment, de Stefano Evangelista) : (libres) traductions de l’« anthologie grecque » (Méléagre, par exemple), ou de Catulle pour le domaine latin, voire textes écrits en grec ancien (traductions en grec de Herrick, volume 1, n°2, p. 21).
Toutefois, on peut également remarquer dans les différents numéros de cette revue la présence d’autres langues, de l’italien, par exemple (« T’Amo », de Lord Henry Somerset, volume IV, n°1, mai 1893, p. 28) ou de l’arabe (« From The Arabic », by John Addington Symonds, Volume IV, n°2, May 1893, p. 100), mais de façon plus flagrante, du français, que ce soit sous la forme de traductions (par exemple, une traduction du poème de Baudelaire « Harmonie du soir », par P. L. Osborne, volume IV, n°2, p. 69), mais aussi de textes directement écrits en français, le plus souvent par des Britanniques (« Les amertumes d’une douceur », vol. I, n°2, mai 1892, p. 24-25 ; « La cigarette », volume II, n°4, décembre 1892, p. 113 ; « Suicide triomphant », volume III, n°1 ; « Le moderne », volume III, n°2, février 1893), parfois par des Français (sonnet de Pierre Louÿs, volume IV, n°1, mai 1893).
Exercices scolaires ou blagues de potaches, dans le cadre d’une revue estudiantine (The Spirit Lamp publie essentiellement des textes rédigés par des « undergraduates » d’Oxford), certes. Mais ce travail a pour but de montrer que ce phénomène participe également de la translation et du codage de désirs autrement indicibles. Au-delà, cette esthétisation des désirs par le biais de la traduction, conduit à la construction d’une identité homosexuelle et contribue de ce fait à brouiller la frontière entre art et vie : le passage par la langue étrangère permet d’articuler et, partant, de faire exister ces désirs.
Prenant appui sur les textes écrits en français ou traduits du français, on s’intéressera ici aux échanges, aux passages et aux jeux avec les langues, les genres (genre/gender) et l’identité qui caractérisent le rapport de The Spirit Lamp à l’étranger et le brouillage des frontières entre art et vie que cette revue met en scène.

Evgenia Grammatikopoulou (Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Athens)
“De la banalité de la réception à l’originalité de l’(auto)création: le cas de Natalie Clifford Barney”
La richissime et bellissime intellectuelle américaine Natalie Clifford Barney (1876-1972), la légendaire Amazone, fut incontestablement une des expatriées volontaires et des féministes pionnières les plus notoires du début du XXe siècle. Grâce à son salon littéraire qui réunit l’élite artistique de l’époque pour plus d’un demi-siècle (Gide, Valéry, Claudel, Cocteau, d’Annunzio, France, Rodin, Joyce, Rilke, Duncan, Stein, Max Jacob e.tc.), la création réactionnaire de l’inédite Académie des femmes (inaugurée en 1927), l’amour platonicien que lui voua le très apprécié Remy de Gourmont ainsi que ses scandaleuses idylles saphiques avec nombre de femmes excentriques et éminentes de son ère (Eva Palmer-Sikelianos, Renée Vivien, Colette, Dolly Wilde, Romaine Brooks, etc.), elle ne tarda pas de séduire la fine fleur parisienne.
Or, la postérité –apparemment guère libérée de stéréotypes sociaux et d’ankyloses sexistes– n’a pas su briser la surface du côté scabreux de sa biographie ;  scandalisée par son esthétisme et ses bizarreries, elle défigura vite son profil. Plutôt que femme de lettres indomptable –palpant les principes d’une nouvelle philosophie ‘gynécocentrique’ et aspirant à l’instauration d’une religion originale purement amoureuse (selon l’approche de Karla Jay)–, Natalie Barney se consacra plutôt en tant que curiosité de son temps, espèce de femme à femmes hors pair. En somme, l’intérêt anecdotique l’emporta sur la valeur de ses écrits aphoristiques et surtout sur l’essence de sa vie, cette « œuvre d’art », d’après Marguerite Yourcenar, qui envia sa « chance de vivre à une époque où la notion de plaisir restait une notion civilisatrice […] d’avoir échappé aux grippes intellectuelles de ce demi-siècle […] d’être restée fidèle à l’évidence de [son] esprit, de [ses] sens ».
Calquant sa vie sur ses écrits et vice versa («My only books / were women’s looks »), bravant les frontières des sexes ainsi que les contraintes conformistes (« La vie n’est-elle pas faite pour être vécue –et bien vécue– et non pour être escamotée en faveur de n’importe quel mensonge, devoir ou sacrifice ? »), Natalie Barney fit de sa vie une preuve quotidienne de son originalité inimitable et savoura à son gré les privilèges de l’émancipation féminine bien avant la lettre et en tout enjeu théorique.

Richard HAYES (Independent Scholar, New York)
“The Construction of Subjectivity in British Aestheticism”
In European Architecture 1750‐1890, architectural historian Barry Bergdoll argued that the most progressive architects of the late nineteenth century sought to create realms for individual realization in contradistinction to the public architecture of establishment culture. The design of interiors intended to foster individual subjectivity was especially characteristic of the Aesthetic Movement in England. In this paper, I look at how members of the Aesthetic
Movement approached the theme of individual subjectivity and analyze the degree to which architecture was viewed as an instrument to intensify subjective experience. I focus on three works, beginning with two texts—Walter Pater’s fictional narrative of 1878, “The Child in the House,” and architect E.W. Godwin’s series of articles entitled “My House ‘In’ London,” published in 1876 in the London architectural press. Themes from these writings contribute to
an analysis of an actual interior: Godwin’s designs of 1884‐5 for the London home of Oscar and Constance Wilde.
While acknowledging the autonomy of writing and architectural design, the shared interest in the domestic interior as realm for individual subjectivity suggests the value of an interdisciplinary approach. In “The Child in the House,” Pater traces “that process of brainbuilding” revealed in the bonds between material objects and felt experience. As literary critic Denis Donoghue observed, Pater’s narrative limns the significance of a house to a young boy as a token of the relationship between inner and outer experience. By contrast, architect Godwin’s account of the design of his own residence is more practical in intent. Nevertheless, it is his most complete explanation of his aesthetic credo, and an exemplary manifestation of the middle‐class, domestic interior conceived of as a laboratory for design reform. Finally, Wilde’s London home is studied to gauge the extent to which the concept of subjectivity may be achieved in actual construction. The tensions and discrepancies between this idea and its actualization form the subject of my analysis.

Miciah HUSSEY (City University of New York Graduate Center)
“Strange Affinities: Aesthetic Lives, Queer Relations in Henry James’s The Author of Beltraffio”
As noted by Jonathan Freedman and others, Henry James’s novella The Author of Beltraffio (1884) confronts James’s own vexed relationship with Aestheticism. Many find parallels between this story of a young American visiting his literary idol Mark Ambient and witnessing a harrowing picture of familial destruction and the author’s own troubled feelings regarding J.A. Symonds’s defense of homosexuality. While this association projects an aura of moralistic fear onto the narrative, many of the novella’s aesthetic dicta seem cribbed from James’s own theories of writing. In this paper I will argue that the obvious pressure point of James’s ambivalence sits squarely at a particular paranoid construction of the intersection between art and life. Assuming there is a direct correspondence, the narrator composes a vision of the Ambient family as “reproductions of something that existed primarily in art or literature” revising the family dynamics through aesthetic conventions that realign domestic scripts by way of Ambient’s own mysterious novel Beltraffio (James 33). Via the narrator’s imagined pedagogical connection with the author, the narrator’s construction of an aesthetic life smuggles a queer subject position with it, collapsing writerly aspirations with his desire for Mark. Simultaneously, the narrator’s authorial control disrupts the traditional circulation of domestic hetero-normative desires, aestheticizing kinship into queer relations.
Furthermore, I will argue that the narrator’s aesthetic subjectivity not only becomes a method of control over the Ambients as aesthetic figures, but also mobilizes the characters within a polemic set-piece vouchsafing the supremacy of Aestheticism over other literary styles. The question of how much influence artistic production has over the aestheticization of life parses the novella’s central conflict between the narrator’s aesthetic lens and Mrs. Ambient’s fear of aesthetic contagion. Thus, the narrator forces Mrs. Ambient’s panicked ethical quandary over the idea of an aesthetic life by reducing her into a stock character, a sort of melodramatic Medea in the Attic who “ lets her child die rather than grow up with a homosexual father” (Freedman 172).  It is from his position as narrator that he dictates aesthetic discourse as the sole means of the family’s expressions and actions within his recounting of events. In eventually hijacking the role of author, the narrator may enact his desire for Mark through literary discourse. Though James frames the conflict over aestheticized lives through competing literary styles, the conclusion remains erotically ambiguous both in terms of the narrator’s intent and James’s own position on Aestheticism.
This paper will question how the peculiar relationship between this first-person narrator and his story relates to the particularities of a specifically queer construction of the bachelor as an authorial subject able to rewrite hetero-normative relations as queer via aesthetic practice.  It will also visit and critique previous readings of the text by other scholars to examine how the young American’s narrative control manages and contains these aestheticized lives to secure his own desires.
Works Cited
Freedman, Jonathan. Professions of Taste: Henry James, British Aestheticism and Commodity Culture. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990.
James, Henry. Eight Tales from the Major Phase: “In the Cage” & Others. New York: Norton, 1958.

Claire NALLY (University of Northumbria, UK)
“Oscar Wilde as Editor and Writer – Aesthetic Interventions in Fashion and Material Culture”
While Oscar Wilde is rightly held to be one of the pre-eminent figures of the Aesthetic movement, there is still much work to be done in terms of Wilde’s relationship to consumerism. Rachel Bowlby has theorized The Picture of Dorian Gray in terms of commodity culture, and indeed, Wilde’s engagement with popular materialism is equally as large-scale as his fellow countryman, James Joyce: for instance Wilde wrote for The Pall Mall Gazette on women’s fashion, and edited Woman’s World from 1887-1889.
The current paper will address Woman’s World in the context of Wilde’s engagement with aesthetic discussions of fashion and the gendered aspects of such a position. Despite the commonly vaunted notion of Pater’s influence in terms of ‘Art for Art’s Sake’, a critique of Wilde at this time may also account for his forays into consumer culture. Addressing Wilde through Adorno’s notion of the ‘culture industry’ suggests that any Aesthetic position may be co-opted by materialism and mass culture: as Fortunato has remarked, Wilde was in some measure ‘producing mass culture rather than attempting its critique’ (Paul L. Fortunato, ‘Wildean Philosophy with a Needle and Thread: Consumer Fashion at the Origins of Modernist Aesthetics’ College Literature 34.3, Summer 2007, 37-53, 39)  In situating Wilde in the context of gendered fashion and commodity culture, it is possible to identify the subtle nuances of his artistic and philosophical position.

Sally Newman (Monash University, Australia)
“Aestheticism and the Construction of the Modern Self”
Nineteenth-century cultural movements such as Decadence and Aestheticism and the history of sexual science have typically been considered as separate developments dealt with by literary scholars and historians respectively. Although emerging at the same time and sharing many of the same concerns (about same-sex desire, friendship and the possibility of living a ‘singular lifestyle’) there has been very little scholarly attention to the interconnections between these cultural and scientific developments in the late nineteenth century. The paper traces some of these interconnections through the overlapping friendship and social networks between intellectuals, artists, writers, historians such as John Addington Symonds, Havelock Ellis, Vernon Lee (Violet Paget), A. Mary F. Robinson, Edith Cooper, Katharine Bradley, Charles Ricketts, and Charles Shannon. The paper illuminates an alternative history to British aestheticism which has been conventionally viewed as highly gender-segregated and reveals the complex relational dynamics which traverse conventional binary categories of identity, and challenge current conceptual frames for interpreting male and female same-sex desire in this period.

Lene ØSTERMARK-JOHANSEN
‘Paterian Interiors’
Walter Pater’s late (ca.1893) unpublished manuscript ‘The Aesthetic Life’ (Houghton bMS1150(7)) is one of the few texts in which he speaks of the ugliness of the modern metropolis and its suburbs. As an antidote he argues for a life of the interior, through a careful progression from the aesthetic object to the aesthetic life. Through a process of selection, the aesthete constructs an existence of sobriety and austerity, turning the aesthetic life into the ascetic life. The carefully controlled life of the aesthete revolves around a Paterian dichotomy of surface and depth: concerned with decoration, with the mask as a way of maintaining a certain reserve on the one hand, Pater also searches the surface of the interior, of the portrait, of the face, for the depths of the soul.
My paper is concerned with the close correspondence between aesthetic ideals in Pater’s fiction and his carefully modulated private interiors. I am interested in Pater’s aesthetics of whiteness. His biographer, Thomas Wright spoke of Pater as the Alma-Tadema of literature because of his fondness for white. I wish to link the white interiors of Pater’s imaginary portraits – Whitenights in Marius, in ‘A Prince of Court Painters’, in ‘The Child in the House’- with descriptions of Pater’s own rooms, as carefully decorated Whistlerian symphonies in white. In ‘The Aesthetic Life’ he writes about the layered accumulation of beauty, centuries upon centuries, enjoyed by the modern aesthete through his eclecticism and historic sense. Similarly, he advocates his austere white interiors from Antonine Italy through the early 18th and 19th centuries. As the colour suggestive of anything from hard, cold tangible marble to dreams, death, immateriality, transcendence, and neoplatonism, white encompasses both the sensuous world and the realms beyond, the worlds of blanks and nothingness. It is this close interrelationship between the Paterian domestic interior and the soul of the aesthete, in real life and in fiction, I wish to explore.

Wendy PARKINS (University of Otago, New Zealand)
“Jane Morris and the Beauty of Life: A Case Study of Aesthetic Self-Formation”
In a letter written from Bordighera, during the winter of 1885, Jane Morris included the following anecdote:

I must tell you a story of a funny American who came to lunch with us the other day – directly after the meal he pulled out his watch and said “There is something in the town I must see; I have just half an hour to spare,” so he rushed off, and returned to the minute. “Well!”, he said, “I came over from Mentone to see three things, I have seen two of them and am going to see the third, I am quite happy now.” We knew that Mr Macdonald [the novelist] was one of the three but were mystified as to the other two, so we asked what they were, when he answered, “Mrs Morris, and Garnier’s house.” Villa Garnier I must tell you is a hideous construction by the same man who built the Paris Opera House, I am told there are some good paintings inside by Mésonnier [sic], but the American had not taken the trouble to go inside, only to gaze on the outside walls and chimney-pots. I was not much flattered, but immensely amused. (Faulkner 1986: 7)

As this letter suggests, Jane Morris – Pre-Raphaelite icon and muse of Dante Gabriel Rossetti – is typically seen as a product of Aestheticism rather than a self-fashioning or creative subject in her own right. Recent scholarship on women in Aestheticism has tended to concentrate on restoring women writers and artists to the cultural history of the movement as aesthetic producers (e.g. Psomiades 1997; Schaffer & Psomiades 1999; Schaffer 2000; Vadillo 2005) but this important work on the gendering of Aestheticism has yet to fully consider the women who appeared within the frame of Aestheticist art.
In this paper, I want to challenge orthodox understandings of Jane Morris and show how her life may be read as a narrative of self-fashioning. Her acquisition of creative skills and cultural capital, her insistence on artistic modeling as a collaborative creative process, and her domestic aesthetic practices may be seen as acts of self-formation through which Jane Morris claimed the right to fashion her own life within the context of Aestheticism. At the same time, however, the dissemination of Aestheticism through popular culture sought to commodify Jane Morris as the recognizable face of the movement, rendering her a spectacle in the way her letter humorously described. I will argue that Jane Morris’s correspondence reveals a conscious negotiation of her status as an aesthetic object – even in her most intimate relationships – through which she constructed a form of emotional, as well as creative, agency. Not simply a silent wife or passive muse, Jane Morris demonstrates that self-fashioning was not limited to the masculine creative practices of those aligned with Aestheticism.

References
Faulkner, P. (ed) (1986), Jane Morris to Wilfrid Scawen Blunt: The Letters of Jane Morris to Wilfrid Scawen Blunt together with Extracts from Blunt’s Diaries, Exeter: University of Exeter Press.
Psomiades, K. A. (1997), Beauty’s Body: Femininity and Representation in British Aestheticism, Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Schaffer, T. (2000), The Forgotten Female Aesthetes: Literary Culture in Late-Victorian England, Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.
— & K. Psomiades (eds) (1999), Women and British Aestheticism, Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia.
Vadillo, A. P. (2005), Women Poets and Urban Aestheticism: Passengers of Modernity, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Laura PFEFFER (Arizona State University)
“The Dionysus in Dorian: Wilde’s Critique of Pater’s Gods in The Picture of Dorian Gray”
Literary critics have persuasively argued that Oscar Wilde uses The Picture of Dorian Gray, published in 1890, to critique Walter Pater’s hesitance to acknowledge the Gothic implications of his early aesthetic theories. For instance, John Paul Riquelme argues that in the novel, the invocation of Echo and Narcissus functions as an early example of what T.S. Eliot called the “mythic method”: Wilde uses mythic narrative to “evoke, refuse, and transform” Pater’s aestheticism (617).  Given that Pater’s thinly veiled distaste for the novel is evident in his 1891 review of Dorian Gray, it seems both provocative and plausible to argue that Wilde’s novel works to satirize the older gentleman’s oeuvre, functioning as a critique of Pater’s fallible intellect while simultaneously working to acknowledge and lament the societal forces that were so swift to respond to the more controversial elements of Pater’s early work.  However, many critics, including Riquelme, have overlooked the two predominant figures of antiquity that Wilde uses to challenge Pater’s ideals: the gods Dionysus and Apollo.  Pater had an avid interest in Hellenistic revisionism; after Johann Winckelmann published The History of Ancient Art Among the Greeks in 1764, the Greek god Apollo served as the foremost mythical representation of Greek sanity for many British writers. As Robert Keefe argues, the god became “a sort of tutelary deity, imparting to ancient Greece and, potentially, to a harried Victorian England, the virtues necessary for greatness” (159-160).  While Pater’s resurrection of Dionysus in Studies in the History of the Renaissance, published in 1873, attempts to revise the early Victorian tendency to cast Apollo as a sort of pseudo-Christian, nationalistic deity, critics have noted that there is a shift in Pater’s own interest in and treatment of Apollo in his later work. After the critical reaction to the “immoral” implications of his “Conclusion” to The Renaissance, both Pater and his pantheon became increasingly conservative.  While the death of Dorian/Dionysus in The Picture of Dorian Gray could be read primarily as a satiric indictment of Pater’s growing conservativism, the novel also works to broadly criticize the implications of situating certain moral strictures within a the project of mythic revivalism.

Aurélie PETIOT (King’s College, Cambridge)
“Charles Robert Ashbee’s educational work”
My paper will focus on Charles Robert Ashbee’s fashioning of himself and of his whole community of craftsmen into a genuine work of art. I will argue that his social and educational enterprise is what constitutes his opus magnum.
Contrary to what has been stated in previous biographies and works about Ashbee, and whatever the aesthetic quality granted to his artistic and architectural realisations, I contend that what mattered for him most was to fashion and forge his workmen in London and the Cotswolds, later pupils in Egypt and his daughters, into his own work of art. My PhD thesis focuses on Ashbee’s pedagogical theories and practices, not solely artistic, but also moral and physical education, as a means of shaping his men into his own ideal.
By studying examples from the Guild of Handicraft, but also adopting a renewed gender-based approach through Ashbee’s education of his own daughters and – very rarely – craftswomen, I intend to unravel the construction of Ashbee into CRA, as he was known to his craftsmen, family and friends alike, as the head of his community, his guildsmen, somewhat like God amidst his creation. By doing so, I will also single out his individuality amidst the conglomerate of strong personalities and theories that formed the Arts and Crafts Movement.
This paper will first deconstruct Ashbee’s writings to cast a fresh and critical look at his theories, so as to once and for all adopt a distanced stance from the hagiographic studies hitherto made of his work. In a second time, I will use newly available primary sources to analyse Ashbee’s practical ‘forging’ of workers into the mould he had created for them, focusing also on his use of theatre and music. Material will be drawn from my PhD thesis, – in which Ashbee features prominently – which also uses other comparative case studies, and hopes to be the basis for a wider study on the Arts and Crafts Movement’s relationship to and understanding of education.

Gilbert PHAM-THANH (Université Paris 13, EA 452)
“The Truth of Maximilian Beerbohm’s Masks”
This paper focuses on Maximilian Beerbohm. A late Victorian dandy who caught the public attention with texts which resist easy grasp by the critique, and caricatures as well as self-caricatures which attest to his vision and distance, including to himself. At a time when the Wildean model reigned supreme, he found in Brummellian dandyism a source of inspiration to the composition of his public persona.
With him, self-fashioning went several directions, though, and sartorial statements helped him create a puzzling ethos, in which timeless references to a world of culture combine with a nostalgic streak in his personality, which made him dramatically reject some elements of modernity and contemporaneous Great Britain. His self-assertion tinged with financial pressure led him to emigrate to Rapallo in Italy, where he lived an isolated life in his immaculate white suit, ritualizing his existence in new forms with the old concern for idiosyncratic self-expression. It is significant that rumour had it that his first marriage was a sexless union, and that he might have been a repressed homosexual.
The main interest in his existential itinerary lies in his adherence to dandyism in all occasions, and his constant anachronistic preference for the aristocratic Brummellian model over the more plebeian Wildean pattern which results from the effort to be acknowledged by everyone and anyone.
The dandiacal discourse and the discursive dimension of the dandies’ existence will obviously constitute the background of the study.

Charlotte RIBEYROL (Université Paris IV)
“Topographies of the Self : W. Pater, J.A. Symonds and Pausanias’s Periegesis”
In 1878 Walter Pater delivered a series of lectures at Oxford University on Pausanias’s Periegesis or The Description of Greece, Books I, V, VI which he later reformulated into three of his essays in his Greek Studies. Contrary to his aesthetic Platonism, Pater’s personal interpretation of Pausanias (who was not part of the official classical canon at the time) has rarely been documented. I wish to argue in this paper that Pater’s reading of the 2ndcentury Greek author, living in a Roman world, reflected his own sense of spatial and temporal exile and belatedness (“opsimos”) in a dull Victorian world, an existential anachronism which he seemed to have shared with his mentor J.J. Wincklemann (another close reader of Pausanias) and with the contemporary Hellenist and aesthete, J.A. Symonds.
Moreover, Pausanias’ construct of an idealized Hellas perfectly responded to Pater’s desire to create his own itinerary through an imaginary Hellenic topography. Significantly, Pater was also drawn to Pausanias’ ekphrases of ancient Greek art works such as the Chest of Kypselos or the Amyclaen Apollo of Sparta which he used for his Greek Studies in order not only to ground his own word painting in a classical tradition but also to scatter in his texts more privately coded homosexual references, such as the tragic love of Apollo for Hyacinth which the Spartan statue supposedly celebrated.  J.A. Symonds, who visited Greece with Pausanias as his guide, was similarly drawn to a certain number of descriptions by the Greek author in particular that of Phidias’s statue of Zeus who inspired his homoerotic poem “Pantarkes” (1880).
This paper thus aims at articulating scholarly, aesthetic and sexual discourses, by revealing the complex processes of subjective reappropriation at work in Pater’s and Symonds’ travelling in the fantasized footsteps of the Periegete. Finally, I will try to show to what extent Pater’s and Symonds’ aesthetic reading of Pausanias may have shaped Jane Ellen Harrison’s and J.G. Frazer’s subversive ritualist interpretation of the Description of Greece in the 1880s and 1890s.