Christa Giles

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paintings at the Salon of 1889 evokes this self-enclosure,
this fascination with the past, this apotheosis of the
fantastic:
Spiritual onanism – a soul exhausted by secret
thoughts. Insidious appeals to sacrilege and
debauchery – goddesses riding hyppogriphs
and streaking their lapis lazuli wings . . .
exceptional individuals retrace their steps
down the century and out of disgust for the
promiscuities they have to suffer, hurl
themselves into the abysses of bygone ages,
into the tumultuous spaces of dreams and
nightmares. 63
Cerebral lechery is possible only in art, and as the
hermaphrodite is a creation of art, it answers the decadent’s
need to derive pleasure from the imaginary and the
artificial. Moreover, the evocation of past ages helps us to
leave the age in which we were born, and to
pass into other ages, and find ourselves not
exiled from their air. It can teach us how to
escape from our experience, and to realise the
experiences of those who are greater than we
are. 64
Wilde deliberately evokes a state of inertia or stasis in his
poem (by means of the repetition of images and ideas) in
order to create a kind of dream-like unreality whereby the