Oscar Wilde's America: The Aesthetic Movement and the hidden life of the Gilded Age, 1876-1893

To see Victorianism (or even Gilded Age America) as a monolithic, static category can be misleading. The Aesthetic Movement of the 1870's and 1880's, a popular art movement, was an episode in a larger dialectical process, a process toward modernity which pitted aesthetic and bohemian strains against other tendencies from the 1870's onward. Not an elite movement, Aestheticism contested middle-class domesticity, as women championed an artistic individuality over a maternal role and created alternate mind-worlds through opiates. For men, the emergence of the homosexual aesthete Oscar Wilde created latitude for some Victorian men to experiment with new gender identities.; This dissertation examines material culture as well as traditional texts. Artifacts in the aesthetic parlor, the artistic costume of aesthetic women, images in the popular media, as well as specific individuals involved with the Aesthetic Movement (Candace Wheeler, a textile designer, and Oscar Wilde), frame the argument. In a wider context, the analysis looks at the effect of two periods of militarization upon the Aesthetic Movement (the Civil War and the rise of imperialism in the 1890's), as well as the cultural battle between models of "manly" (and "soldierly") labor and the individual aesthetic ideal popularized by Wilde.; In conclusion, the quasi-sacramental dimension of popular art, the alternative realities, and the critique of utilitarianism so pronounced in the Aesthetic ideology suggest a counter agenda for the Gilded Age. For identities were fluid and shifting as were perceptions of objects and spaces. Americans saw aesthetic artifacts, not always as consumer items or as emblems of wealth and status (the conventional vision of Gilded Age society), but as part of a "hidden" aesthetic environment. The male aesthetic sensibility, so prominent in the Aesthetic decades, prompted a homosexual awareness that was apparent (and at times approved) in American popular culture during the 1870's and 1880's.