Date: Monday, February 20
Time: 7pm ET
Admission: $8

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In fin-de-siècle France, scientific progress coincided with widespread alarm about depravity and disease. Many of the obsessions of our own culture, such as crime, pollution, gender non-conformity and drug addiction, were topics of constant popular discussion. This illustrated talk will focus on writers who embraced the epithet “decadent” by celebrating perversity and aestheticizing decay. Decadents attacked materialism, with its assertion that the world is knowable, by reveling in esotericism and the occult. They poisoned the triumphs of medicine by plundering its new taxonomy of deviants where they found sadists, masochists, transvestites, fetishists, nymphomaniacs, hysterics and other lovely monsters to populate their fiction. Decadence completely upends bourgeois conventions of romance, making this topic a subversively appropriate one for the Valentine’s Day season. 

Asti Hustvedt, PhD, is the editor of The Decadent Reader: Fiction, Fantasy and Perversion from Fin-de-Siècle France and the author of Medical Muses: Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century Paris. She is currently working on a book about hysteria and the occult. 

Image: Idol of Perversity, Jean Delville, 1891