Autonomy from Labor
Autonomy from Labor
In Service to Art for Art's Sake from Wilde to Proust
From the earliest phase of modernism, writers’ practices of autonomy have probed the relationships that link them to the very domains from which they seek independence. This book opens its account of these practices in the late ninetenth century, arguing that aestheticist fiction uses servant characters to stage a subtle reflection on the connection between artistic autonomy and domestic labor. Oscar Wilde writes of a butler in one his plays: “He represents the dominance of form.” The aestheticist novel uses servants to keep the social world at bay even as it recognizes servants as representatives of that same world. Aestheticist writing, far from excluding the world of labor, avows its dependence on it, dialectically incorporating that avowal into its formal effects. This chapter analyzes this dialectical pattern in aestheticist and decadent novels—Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s Axël, Huysmans’s À rebours—and James’s protomodernist The Ambassadors; then it shows a similar but more elaborate incorporation of service into aesthetic form in one of modernism’s great autonomy fictions, Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu.
Keywords: Oscar Wilde, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Philippe Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Henry James, Marcel Proust, servants, aesthesticism in fiction, labor, form
Oxford Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us .
