Of Women and Decadence

Travel, Pleasure and Waste in Ella D'Arcy's 'The Pleasure-Pilgrim'

Abstract

This paper reads Ella D’Arcy’s short story “The Pleasure-Pilgrim” as a text engaging with late-nineteenth century discourses of femininity and decadence as they are enacted in the realm of travelling, on one hand, and of decadent aestheticism, on the other. The particular narrative construction of the main heroine, Lulie, is seen here as problematising the gendering of the consumption/production dichotomy and as challenging the masculinist bias of the aesthetic transgressions of decadence. Given this, D’Arcy’s story emerges here as a text that reveals how and why certain assumptions of late-Victorian aestheticism only made room for women as objects but never as subjects of decadent aesthetics.