Christa Giles

111
The emphasis upon the withdrawal into the self, the
decadent’s narcissism in Salomé, is a product of the
decadent view that a thing is valuable not because it is
good, edifying, or useful, but because we find it pleasant or
desirable in itself. Art, according to Wilde and Huysmans,
is a process of discovering or inventing that value. Thus,
the most valuable things in nature, to an aesthetic thinker,
are those which have least to do with process, use, result –
the jewel, the sterile flower, the woman who like Salomé
refuses sexuality or motherhood simply to exist for her own
beauty’s sake. The emphasis on dream and fantasy in both
Wilde’s and Huysmans’ work can in part be traced to this.
The dreamer contemplates things outside the framework of
living reality: it is the operation of this dreamy faculty of
imagination, freed from reason or calculation of
consequences, which discovers the values which are truly
aesthetic. The corollary of this is that the decadent places
value on obsessions and fetishisms, in this way
foreshadowing the surrealists. The thing itself, the dream,
fills the mind with desire, quite apart from any virtue or
use it might have. The minute it is brought within the
realm of rational consideration – considered not as an end
in itself but as a means to something else – its value is lost.
Sibyl Vane as an actress is beautiful and desirable. When