The Decadent Dilemma

Decadence is a short-lived literary movement in fin de siecle Europe, especially in France and England. Just as its name implies, it is always associated with some negative meanings, such as decline, depravation, corruption, and so on. In fact, Decadence constitutes the common denominator of all literary and artistic trends with decadent characters that emerged during the last two decades of the nineteenth century. Although this movement had no leader, nor real spokesman, and no definite program, it got full developed at the end of 19th century because some passionate writers, like Charles Baudelaire and Oscar Wilde, did make great contribution to this literary cult and to art as a whole, devoting not only their talent and ardor to it but also their fame and even their whole artistic career.As the original purpose of the Decadents was to etaper le bourgeois (surprise the bourgeois), they suffered a lot from the society. And the reason why they were treated in an abominable way later is that:Externally, their disgust with the vulgarity of the society; internally, the absolute separation of art from life or even the try to substitute life with art does not work at all. When the artists were disgust of the vulgar materialism and busy making their art eternal, they realized that where there was no death, there was no life. Thus their experiments and researches in both art and life failed. This is their dilemma, a hard problem with no solution.Both Huysmans and Wilde offered us good works to show how this dilemma forms and how it works in different fields, one against nature and the other against life. Although maybe Wilde took A Rebours(Against the Grain) as his "sinister Yellow Book" in The Picture of Dorian Gray, his implicit plot of homosexuality made both him and his work make a more fierce confrontation with the society.All in all, Decadence as a special literary movement made great contribution to art, not only for it stroke heavily the bourgeois, but also for it left us numerous good works that were of great value.