Oscar Wilde's America: Counterculture in the Gilded Age [Hardcover]

Ms. Mary Warner Blanchard (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 10, 1998

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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The Wilde revival?or is it a craze??continues with Blanchard's study of the Apostle of Aestheticism and his influence on art and culture in America's Gilded Age, that blink in time between the "bronzed heroism" of the Civil War and Teddy Roosevelt's imperialist machismo. Like the recent film Wilde, Blanchard, an associate fellow at the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis, opens with Wilde's triumphant 1892 lecture tour of the U.S., when the writer was at the pinnacle of his success (in 1895 he would be convicted of "gross indecency"). Her first few chapters constitute a detailed, though familiar, exploration of "aesthetic style and the masculine self," which recalls many of the conclusions and propositions already advanced by such theorists as Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfeld, and historians such as Ann Douglas, George Chauncey and Jackson Lears (all of whom are cited). Fresher material follows in Blanchard's meticulous foray into the decorative arts, using nearly 200 lovely period illustrations of popular art and dress, outlining the role of women as tastemakers. Her discussion of largely unsung "female visionaries" (Candace Wheeler, Celia Thaxter, M. Louise McLaughlin and Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer), and of "the aesthetic parlor," "the female body" and "the catholic icon," adds new perspective on the period and serves to support her contention that in the U.S., "aestheticism was the story of the feminine and domestic world." Wilde's fall, Blanchard argues, was paralleled by an American "repressive reaction" largely because of the association between aesthetic style and the feminine. While the "counterculture" of the 1880s?by now a kind of Hundred Years War of sense and sensibility?remains at the cultural borders, work like Blanchard's has moved questions of aesthetics and gendered identity into the heart of the land.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

...[an] enlightening cultural history of the struggle between art and Victorian convention. -- The Boston Globe, Robert Taylor

Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Yale University Press; First Edition edition (September 10, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0300074603
• ISBN-13: 978-0300074604
• Product Dimensions: 10.2 x 7.2 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,141,618 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars All around this is a tour de force!, October 5, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Oscar Wilde's America: Counterculture in the Gilded Age (Hardcover)

Reading this book has been an astonishing experience . . . Never have I been so informed by the substantiality of the aesthetic ideas of Oscar Wilde in an American context I thought I knew. Who, after all, has ever connected Wilde with William Dean Howells and Henry Adams? Nor was I aware of the impact of aestheticism on the thoughts and innovative behavior of middle class women during the so-called Gilded Age. Henceforth that catch phrase will always betoken a deeper or at least a double meaning. Blanchard's subtle yet precise writing, drawn from an enormous range of fresh and original materials, exhibits the aestheticism Wilde so powerfully preached.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars well illustrated and written, November 20, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Oscar Wilde's America: Counterculture in the Gilded Age (Hardcover)

Ms. Blanchards book was meticulously reasearched and presented. It was an innovative approach to the years after the Civil War exposing a counter culture that I was astonished to discover.But she did discover it and unknown and unheralded women who make this worthy book even more fascinating.

2 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars comprehensive, January 12, 1999

By 

W. R. Everdell (Brooklyn, NY United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Oscar Wilde's America: Counterculture in the Gilded Age (Hardcover)

Blanchard's book is about a whole counterculture, not usually suspected of flourishing in the last decades of the 20th century in the America of Carnegie and Bryan. Blanchard not only proves beyond doubt that it was there, like the contemporary movements in England and France, but also that it was rich, embracing all the arts, both sexes, and every expression of gender, not to mention fashion, popular culture and arts usually labelled "domestic." Designed with an equally rich iconography, its text laid out together with contemporary pictures, "Oscar Wilde's America" is a model of cultural and intellectual history -- which might confuse poststructuralists and anti-poststructuralists alike.