Overview

"In 1882 Oscar Wilde toured America as the ""Apostle of Aestheticism"", his wit and brilliance and deliberate outrageousness creating controversy among audiences across the continent. The America visited by Wilde was a nation still badly shaken by the trauma of the Civil War and Reconstruction. In this atmosphere Wilde's message of regeneration through art and beauty seemed to many Americans to open new horizons of social possibility. In this book, a cultural history of the aesthetic movement in the United States, Mary W. Blanchard provides an account of a neglected dimension of American history. Blanchard shows that the aestheticism was a wide-ranging popular movement, implemented by an array of tastemakers, resisted by the moral guardians of Victorianism. She constructs the lives of the female visionaries who used the decorative arts to assault the conventions of middle-class milieu and to advance in the social and business worlds of the Gilded Age. She also shows how the movement allowed new forms of identity for men - in particular feminized or homosexual roles that were profoundly at odds with Victorian notions of manliness. Drawing on evidence from material culture, popular media, and history and literature, Blanchard reveals aestheticism as an oppositional movement in the American Gilded Age."

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Wilde appears as less of a touchstone than an excuse in this bric-a-brac analysis of assorted marginal artistic fashions in 19th-century America. Whatever the long-term results were on the aesthetic movement of Wilde's American lectures, which he delivered across the length and breadth of the country in 1882, they brought him a lot of mocking press and a great deal of money in the short run. Blanchard (Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis) notes that Wilde found a receptive audience that was ready to hear him on The English Renaissance, The House Beautiful, and The Decorative Arts, but she herself seems more interested in Wilde's press clippings - in Wilde the human objet d'art - than in the substance of his popular lectures or, still less, in the ideas of Ruskin, Pater, and Morris which they embody. Though Wilde was hardly averse to publicity, contemporary press caricatures of his outlandish costume and affected manner provide little more than contemporary attitudes to masculinity and interior decoration, and they give to Blanchard's discussion of the aesthetic movement's influence in America and the counter-culture that embraced it very little beyond gauzy (and obvious) generalities. Looking at the aesthetic movement from the perspective of women, Blanchard portrays the disparate lives and careers of the designer Candace Wheeler, the poet Celia Thaxter, and the critic Mariana Van Rensselaer, who all worked within the wider spectrum of the decorative arts that flourished in the Gilded Age. The gaping gender fault lines in American attitudes toward art and artists that Blanchard analyzes unfortunately reduce themselves in her argument to hostile dialectics. The influential Arts & Crafts movement, for instance, is dismissed as merely a vogue largely controlled and directed by men. A tendentious and diffuse approach to Wilde's dictum that one should either be a work of art, or wear a work of art. (Kirkus Reviews)

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