Unhealthy Environments: Decadence and Disease in the 1890s

This paper will use the concept of environment to engage the debates over degeneration in the late nineteenth century as they related to the cultural and literary health of the nation. Specifically, it will use the American... [ view full abstract ]

This paper will use the concept of environment to engage the debates over degeneration in the late nineteenth century as they related to the cultural and literary health of the nation. Specifically, it will use the American phenomena of Decadence present in the works of Ralph Adams Cram and the little magazine M’lle New York. The Americans who claimed to be Decadents deliberately inverted popular understandings of healthy and unhealthy environments, creating and promoting “unhealthy” and “diseased” environments. Cram and the editors of M'lle New York provide examples of such deliberately cultivated unhealthy environments in the country and city respectively. Commentators and critics understood Decadence as a direct threat to the cultural and literary health of America. This was not a vague threat because of the slippage between the health of the mind and the health of the body. Thus, Decadence and its promoters were attacking the national consensus that America should be healthy in both body and mind. Decadence partially undermined the nineteenth century hegemonic discourse of health that underlay racial, gender, and sexual codes and oppressions. American intellectuals, writers, and cultural critics used the discourses of Decadence to critique this emphasis on healthy environments held by both progressives and their opponents alike. Considering environment and Decadence together provides a way to deepen and complicate our understanding of the late nineteenth century discourses of health, disease, culture and environment that have persisted to this day. Instead of viewing degeneration as a hegemonic discourse that oppressed the Victorian "Others" in America, I suggest that we understand the discourses of healthy and unhealthy environments as parts of a more complex play of power in which both health and disease could be marks of cultural power.