Aesthetic Debate in the Fin-de-Siècle Novel: A Canadian Perspective
Michelle Gadpaille
Department of English and American Studies
Faculty of Arts, University of Maribor
Art as it expresses itself in the nudity of
things . . .
(Duncan, A Daughter of Today, 242)
That fin-de-siècle fiction concerned itself with the nature of art is a fact not in doubt. Led by
Walter Pater, Henry James and Oscar Wilde, turn of the century writers of the English novel explored
representation and its implications for artist, muse and subject. Contemporaneous women writers also
engaged in the era's aesthetic debate, in particular those writers belonging to the early 1890s when the
New Woman created excitement on Fleet Street and on the city pavements outside. One such writer
was a Canadian, Sara Jeannette Duncan (1861-1922), whose breezy, cross-cultural travelogues placed
her in the vanguard of modern intellectual women: A Social Departure: How Orthodocia and I Went
around the World, 1890; An American Girl in London, 1891; and Cousin Cinderella: A Canadian Girl
in London, 1908. One of her more serious works, A Daughter of Today (1894) shows Duncan
exploring in greater depth the implications of gender, colonial status and aesthetic creed for an artist's
reception and career in London of the 90s. In creating a protagonist who begins with ambitions to
paint, and then converts to a career in journalism, Duncan positions her text at the center of aesthetic
debate and the emergence of new forms of both verbal and visual representation.
The central aesthetic issue was simple: what was the nature of the 'real' and how could it best be
captured in print or paint? This paper will establish Duncan's position on these questions, suggest an
additional source for the characters, aesthetic opinion and cultural information in the novel and posit
contradictions between its aesthetic stance and that of the main character.
It was another transatlantic novelist who pioneered both the culturally displaced American in
Europe and new techniques for bringing fictional representation closer to the truth of lived experience.
Henry James, in novels such as Portrait of A Lady (1881) and Daisy Miller (1878) explored the clash
of values and expectations that resulted when a New World woman encountered the subtlety of
Europeans and their culture. The supple interiority that James conferred upon his main characters set a
new standard for psychological verisimilitude in fiction. Affirming the novel to be “in its broadest
definition a personal, a direct impression of life” (James 859), James planted the flag of realism
around which other writers would rally. Moreover, for James, realism in fiction was closely allied with
realism in the visual arts: “the analogy between the art of the painter and the art of the novelist is, so
far as I am able to see, complete” (James 856). The younger writer, Duncan, would be among several
artists of the 1890s to explore this analogy in plot and theme. Though James never fully exploited
1
ekphrastic metaphors, ekphrasis (the verbal evocation of an item of visual or plastic art for the purpose
of creating character or theme) would become central to other novelists’ assault upon reality in
representation. And to bring characters into contact with the latest in the visual arts, it was necessary
to transport them to that hub of the 19th-century art world: Paris1.
In A Daughter of Today, however, Duncan opens with Miss Bell still firmly in the New World,
although already cherishing ambitions as a painter. At this early period, Elfrida's nascent aesthetics are
Pre-Raphaelite and her self-image more that of muse or model than artist. The narrator establishes that
“it was entirely preposterous that a young woman should kneel at an attic window in a flood of spring
moonlight, with the hair about the shoulders of her nightgown repeating Rossetti to the wakeful
budding garden, especially as it was for herself she did it, nobody else saw her” (16). The pose alludes
to both poetry and painting from the major Pre-Raphaelites and begins Duncan’s flirtation with the
technique of ekphrasis for character disclosure. Duncan makes it clear at the outset that her American
heroine is a self-conscious poseur, an Anglophile, who imagines herself as a Pre-Raphaelite goddess,
perhaps even as Elizabeth Siddal, who was a painter as well as a model for the male Pre-Raphaelites
such as Millais and Rossetti. Establishing character as well as artistic orientation, such a passage
initiates the book’s main issue of Elfrida’s place in the art world—will it be as painter, as model, as
muse?—or perhaps just as the distant imitation that she has been encouraged to make and, indeed, to
become at her Philadelphia art lessons?
Duncan has not created a heroine bereft of intellectual skills, despite the posing and selfcongratulation. Elfrida crosses the Atlantic with a developing artistic creed, which “embraced Arnold
and Aristotle and did not exclude Mr. Whistler” (127). Between Matthew Arnold and Whistler, an
Englishman and an American, a poet and a painter in oils, stands half the nineteenth century. Duncan
allows the heroine’s youth to excuse the heterogeneity; it is, as the narrator admits “a composite creed,
making wide, ineffectual and presumptuous grasps to include all beauty and all faith” (127). Beyond
the fairly conservative Arnold, however, Elfrida has more avant-garde tendencies, visible in her
echoes of Walter Pater’s gem-like flame: “My egotism is like a little flame within me. All the best
things feed it, and it is so clear that I see everything in its light. . . If there’s anything of me left when I
die, it will be that little fierce flame” (126-127). Combining painterly and writerly theory, Elfrida
shows her consciousness of being more advanced than the philistine world of her American birthplace.
Nevertheless, Duncan has this character echo the debates current in her decade. For Elfrida has
borrowed all her aesthetic ideas, from Pater in particular, but also from W. D. Howells and Henry
James.2 This borrowing is undertaken in the same spirit with which she borrows pre-Raphaelite habits
1
Duncan was neither the first nor the only Canadian author to transport an artist protagonist to Europe. See
Carrie MacMillan's essay in Studies in Canadian Literature, for two other examples of novels where artistic
training and validation are sought in Europe.
2
Howells would later assert in “Novel Writing and Novel Reading” the equivalence of beauty with truth, and the
“aesthetical” nature of the work of fiction (Howells 267-268).
2
of dress and décor. Duncan wants the reader to know that Elfrida is a construct, built upon the trends
of the age.
Transported to Paris and to the atelier Lucien, Duncan’s heroine is given the chance to put into
practice her theories of beauty and art. A mediocre art student, Elfrida seems to put more effort into
her attire, which rapidly becomes an expression of her aesthetic aspirations:
She found it easy, in Paris, to invest her striking personality in a distinctive costume,
sufficiently becoming and sufficiently odd, of which a broad soft felt hat, which made a
delightful brigand of her, and a Hungarian cloak formed important features (26)
Paris and the Quartier Latin make the young American feels that she has “entered into her inheritance”
(24). The atmosphere productive of this identification is sketched by Duncan with a few street-names
and Bohemian details:
. . . she had taken her tiny apartment in the Rue Porte Royale, and bought her colours and
sketching-block from a dwarf-like little dealer in the next street, who assured her proudly
that he supplied Henner and Dagnan-Bouveret, and moreover knew precisely what she
wanted from experience. (24)
It is at this juncture that I seek to revise the consensus about Duncan’s model for Elfrida. It has
been generally accepted that Lily Lewis--Duncan’s companion on the world tour and the “Orthodocia”
of the resulting book—may have inspired Duncan to create this thwarted woman artist (see Martin, 18
ff.). Like Elfrida, Lewis lived in Paris for a time, wrote for the London papers, aspired to serious art
criticism and struggled emotionally and financially in the European art world. While not dismissing
Lewis as one model for A Daughter of Today, I am proposing to widen the source base, since a more
literary model was available, one especially suited to the depiction of the artistic consciousness: Marie
Bashkirtseff’s Journal of a Young Artist.3 I will argue that Bashkirtseff provided Duncan with more
than merely the names of streets and the Bohemian atmosphere of the Latin Quarter. Bashkirtseff
furnished Duncan with a model for representing interiority for a woman artist.
The real Randolph Julien Academie attended by the Russian4 Bashkirtseff in 1880s Paris
becomes the fictional atelier Lucien, which Duncan furnished with the live models and lively
3
Journal de Marie Bashkirtseff was first published by Fasquelle in Paris as early as 1877 and again by
Charpentier in Paris in 1890. There were also three English translations: The Journal of Marie Bashkirtseff,
translated by A. D. Hall and G. B. Hecker from Rand McNally in Chicago in 1890,; Marie Bashkirtseff; the
Journal of a Young Artist, 1860-1884, translated by Mary J. Serrano in 1889 from Cassell & Co. in New York;
and The Journal of Marie Bashkirtseff Translated and with an Introduction by Mathilde Blind, Cassell, 1891.
4
Her family came from the region around Poltava, now in Ukraine, but they thought and spoke of themselves as
Russian.
3
international clientele that Bashkirteff’s account also contains. The young Russian, who has spent
much of her life in exile, found, like Elfrida, a new home in artistic Paris:
Talk to me now of the Latin Quarter if you will that is what reconciles me to Paris; one
might fancy one's-self in another country almost in Italy; it is another sort of life altogether,
something that I cannot describe. (Bashkirtseff 150)
Bashkirtseff herself may be partly the model for the exotic female art student, Nádie Palicsky,
who is more successful than Elfrida at both the aesthetic lifestyle and the business of realistic art. Like
the real Bashkirtseff, Palicsky lacks social skill and is found to be “difficult, variable, unreasonable”
(29) by the rest of the art students.
Moreover, both the Journal and the Parisian chapters of Daughter of Today revolve around
painterly rivalry: Bashkirtseff reveals herself as ruthlessly ambitious, insecure and almost insanely
jealous of the artistic achievement of others, in particular of fellow-student Louise Breslau, while
Elfrida in contrast readily, though ruefully, concedes that painting will not be her métier but Nádie’s.
Thus, Bashkirtseff’s exotic origins and success in painting reappear in one character (Nádie), while her
self-absorption and artistic creed are echoed in Duncan’s heroine. A few passages from the Journal
will help to establish the narcissistic tone and brittle self-confidence of the original diary:
If I should not live long enough to become famous, this journal will be interesting to the
psychologist. The record of a woman's life, written down day by day, without any attempt at
concealment, as if no one in the world were ever to read it, yet with the purpose of being
read, is always interesting (Bashkirtseff, Preface viii)
Am I, or am I not to believe in my future as an artist ? . . . What I want is to be famous !
I will be famous ! (155)
I am jealous of Breslau; she does not draw at all like a woman. Next week I will work so
hard! you shall see. The afternoons shall be devoted to the Exhibition, and the Salon. But the
week after I am resolved to be a great artist, and I will be one. (164)
In Baskirtseff's voluble self-analysis, Duncan would also have found the strange vein of
self-awareness coexisting with manic ambition as well as depressive moods. Bashkirtseff, like Elfrida,
was a student of her own consciousness, and the record of its changeability fills pages of the Journal:
Julian met Robert-Fleury at the cafe yesterday, and the latter said I was a truly remarkable
and interesting pupil, and that he expected great things of me. It is such words as these
4
that I must constantly bear in mind, especially when my spirit is invaded by a species of
inexplicable terror, and I feel myself sinking in an abyss of doubt and of torturing thoughts
of all kinds, for none of which are there any real grounds. (159)
I am resolved on being famous, whether it be as an artist or in any other way. Do not
think, however, that I am studying art only through vanity. Perhaps there are not many
persons more completely artistic in their natures than I a fact which you, who are the
intelligent part of my readers, must have already perceived. As for the others, I regard
them with contempt. They will find me only fantastic, because, without desiring to be so, I
am peculiar in everything. (170)
Duncan's heroine shares this artistic insecurity, together with a sense of her own destiny and
even Bashkirtseff's propensity to pose herself for a mental picture based on an approved visual icon (cf
Elfrida doing Rossetti at the window):
My hair, fastened in a Pysche knot, is redder than ever. In a woolen gown of a peculiar
white, well-fitting and graceful, and a lace handkerchief around my neck, I look like one
of the portraits of the First Empire; in order to make the picture complete I should be
seated under a tree, holding a book in my hand. I love to be alone before a looking-glass,
and admire my hands, so fine and white, and faintly rosy in the palms. (25)
The precise personality traits that sat ill with reviewers of A Daughter of Today in the 1890s5 find their
validation in the real journal of this strikingly modern woman artist. If Duncan is indebted to
Bashkirtseff (and evidence is circumstantial, though telling6), then she displaces the serious aesthetic
theorizing and artistic rivalry from painting to writing and defers it until Elfrida arrives in London and
tries to become a journalist. It is as a writer that Elfrida begins to demonstrate the obsessive,
narcissistic qualities that Bashkirtseff reveals in her journal.
The crucial point that Elfrida takes from her exposure to the Paris atelier is the conjunction of
nudity and realism. Elfrida’s phrase “the nudity of things” expresses the desire of French painters from
Gustave Courbet on, to grasp an essence that began with the material but went beyond it, and to
represent human beings in their social and sexual complexity. The art historian, Linda Nochlin,
emphasizes that Courbet’s realism steered away from “finicky verisimilitude” and embodied instead a
“courageous confrontation with reality” that allied him and his painter successors with those leaders in
fictional realism, Stendhal, Flaubert and Zola (Nochlin 53-54). Sometimes this meant painting “low”
See Gadpaille, “Psyche’s Daughters of Today,” for further details of early reviews.
One interesting point of similarity is the repeated reference to Psyche. This mythical figure forms a ruling motif
in the life of Elfrida (see Gadpaille “Psyche’s Daughter of Today.” ELOPE IV, 1-2:59-68). Curiously, it crops up
often in the Bashkirtseff diary, too, as Marie records wearing her hair “à la Psyche” (Bashkirtseff 403).
5
6
5
subjects and sometimes rendering complete bodily nudity. Bashkirtseff praised her idol BastienLepage7 for his version of representational reality:
He possesses the secret of rendering flesh with perfection: they talk of realism, but the
realists do not know what reality is; they are coarse, and think they are natural. Realism
does not consist in copying a vulgar thing, but in making the copy of whatever be
represented an exact one” (351).
This tangle of ideas about copying, exactitude and vulgarity will inform the artistic world that Duncan
creates in London.
In seeking to contribute to the London papers, the newly-minted journalist begins by writing
“the graphic naked truth” only to find that this will not do in London and from a woman writer. “The
paper doesn’t want a female Zola,” she is rebuked: “no theories, no fine writing, no compositions.
Describe what you’ve seen and know, and give it a tang—an individuality” (76). The heroine’s
Parisian ideas meet editorial resistance. As she shops her stories around the Consul, the Decade and
the Illustrated Age, the text suggests that Elfrida, who believes in her own modernity, has nevertheless
mistaken the tone demanded by mass journalism of the fin-de-siècle—at least in London. These may
be fictional papers, modeled by Duncan on those for which she and Lily Lewis wrote, but their call for
“no fine writing” foreshadows one strand of the approaching literary modernism, while signaling the
commercial spirit that is the reverse of Elfrida’s severe aesthetic creed.8
Duncan herself wrote for papers on both sides of the Atlantic, the Toronto Globe, the
Washington Post, the Montreal Star, the New York World and the Ladies’ Pictorial. Her more
journalistic monograph titles seem made to measure for this tangy brand of writing that eschews the
high and the fine: A Social Departure, An American Girl in London and Two Girls on a Barge (1891)
epitomize the mobile, ironic voice and stance of the New Woman, and focus on a clash between
American freedom and English orthodoxy, but without the tragedy or aesthetic theorizing of Daughter
of Today. The voice of the American girl in London is clear, confident and completely untroubled by
dark dreams of pre-Raphaelite possession or artistic ambition on the scale of Russian prodigies.
Duncan, in other words, sometimes wrote to order what the age demanded, but retained a vision of a
more esthetically engaged text, a vision which she explores and tragically renounces in the course of A
Daughter of Today.
7
Jules Bastien-Lepage, 1848-1884, French painter, friend of Bashkirtseff, and important exponent of painterly
realism.
8 Compare Bashkirtseff on her brand of realism: “Stupid people may fancy that I want to be another Balzac. I
have no such intention; but do you know why he is so great? It is because he describes with naturalness, without
fear, and without affectation all that he has felt” (175).
6
As a young female journalist from the colonies (her birthplace was the town of Brantford,
Ontario), Duncan herself experienced a triple disadvantage in London, as does her protagonist, Elfrida.
Being female places her in an awkward position as an art critic, and being a colonial outsider closes
doors and renders cultural codes impenetrable. At Lucien’s atelier she met a young English painter,
John Kendal, whose friendship she cultivates in London, thinking that he and his circle might form an
entrée into the world of high culture. Through him, Elfrida meets another young woman, Janet Cardiff,
also a writer, and embarks on a friendship underscored by fierce rivalry. At once resenting and
despising Janet’s advantage as a cultured English insider, Elfrida sees no course but to out-do her
friend in journalism and finally in novel writing.
Here lies the kernel of the novel’s aesthetic debate. On the one side is the American--brash,
experimental, committed to Howells’s equation of falsity with immorality, and on the other, the tamer
English drawing-room writer, whose book receives good reviews and sells well despite skating over
the surface of truth as Elfrida conceives of it. Acting out the debate, Elfrida confronts Janet with an
artistic ultimatum: “Art has no ideal but truth, and to conventionalize truth is to damn it” (115).
Predictably, Janet defends a contrary position: “Pure unrelieved filth can’t be transmuted into
literature” (114). Elfrida is scathing about the timidity of her friend’s novel, which “belonged to the
class of Academy studies from the nude, which were always draped, just a little” (213). Reaching back
to her days at Lucien’s atelier in Paris, Elfrida conjures up the artistic hypocrisy and compromise that
ensured success as measured in conventional social terms: exhibition at the Academy. The debate
about fiction unfolds in painterly terminology—in parallel to the earlier question of nudity in nongenre painting that had animated the Parisian scenes. Certain key words such as nudity and filth cue
the reader to the nature of the undressing that Elfrida supports: a psychological realism that allows
sexuality and the body, specifically in their female guises, to be represented. Janet, Elfrida’s foil, calls
her novel John Cardwell, a title clearly inspired by or even based on John Kendal, the painter in whom
both young women are sexually interested. No one in the novel ever lifts this filmiest of draperies, or
attempts to read Janet’s novel as the roman-à-clef it clearly is. There is a conspiracy to keep life and
art strictly apart in the upper-class drawing room.
Duncan seals the fate of her New Woman heroine when the erstwhile painter agrees to become a
model. In sitting for John Kendal, Elfrida cedes control of the image that she had once fine-tuned in
daydreams before trial on the Parisian streets. That the portrait is “for the Academy” (233) deepens the
irony; the ambitious young woman will appear there after all, but as subject and not as artist. Kendal
feels keenly the personal and national victory he has achieved in thus reducing Elfrida to her place:
“Kendal felt an exulting mastery over it [the portrait] which was the most intoxicating sensation his
work had ever brought him. He had, as he painted, a silent brooding triumph in his manipulation, in
his control” (246-247). The resulting portrait takes the form of revenge against Elfrida and her various
social and aesthetic bombshells. The portrait reveals some essential quality in Elfrida that she has
sought to conceal behind the pose. Duncan never names this quality, but its unmasking leaves Elfrida
7
feeling un-clothed. This degree of realism is unpalatable when she finds herself the subject. The visual
representation must therefore be destroyed9.
There is no suggestion that Kendal’s painting is poor in quality. To the contrary, Duncan makes
it clear that his style is more suited to the Grosvenor Gallery, which was the London home of the
artistic avant-garde in the late 1880s. The visual arts are ahead of the verbal in attending to “the nudity
of things,” even in London, despite the age’s lingering prudery about physical nudity in non-classical
subject painting. Just as the French Impressionists led the way to new techniques of representing
reality as a photographic instant mediated by the artist’s subjective vision, Duncan makes Kendal’s
brush the leader in the artistic quest for truth in representation. Nevertheless, it is apparent that this
brand of truth-telling is not unconditionally condoned. Duncan positions the reader to dislike the
unctuous Kendal and to disapprove equally of his technique of baring his sitter’s naked soul and of his
fiancée’s contrasting technique of slightly draping all human objects in her novel. Genteel hypocritical
concealment of the truth, especially the bodily facts, stands condemned by protagonist and novel alike,
while the representational advances achieved by modernist art receive a scant degree more of
approval.
Elfrida, for example, may extol the ideal of “the nudity of things,” but this point is both socially
rebuked (the disapproval of Elfrida’s legs on the stage) and repudiated by the text itself. Take, for
example, Duncan’s one permitted glimpse of Elfrida’s sexual attraction to Kendal:
There was a moment when I would have let him take me in his arms and hold me close,
close to him. And I wish he had—I should have had it to remember. Bah! Why is my face
hot? I might as well be ashamed of wanting my dinner! (254).
Jealousy and ambitious rivalry have been openly acknowledged between these two artists, but when
Elfrida finally faces her attraction to the man, the point is made in a distinctly “draped” manner and
not to a live audience but to her small statue of Buddha. Though Elfrida knows shame to be irrational,
a betrayal of the truth of the body, she can voice her feelings no more clearly than with this veiled
reference to other appetites.
Moreover, Duncan strands her heroine in an unfinished negotiation over the boundaries between
literary commodification and her aesthetic ideals. Elfrida’s book about her stage experience is
published posthumously, but the novel’s ending withholds any suggestion that its artistic merit as a
realist document redeems its essential vulgarity. Confident, commercial and hedonistic it may be, but
it remains a commodity of the age, just one more of the bourgeois, material things Elfrida herself
despised. Though her chosen epitaph (Pas femme—artiste; 281) recalls Bashkirtseff and asserts her
Her rage recapitulates a similar mood in Bashkirtseff: “I could scarcely keep from cutting my painting to pieces
today. There is not an inch of it painted to please me” (409-10).
9
8
status as an artist in words, her one verbal monument, “An Adventure in Stageland” (280), marks a
final capitulation to the mass-market publishing industry10.
Duncan’s earlier journalism testifies to her distrust of some contemporary trends in literary
practice, especially those emanating from France. “Duncan was herself skeptical of realistic and
naturalistic authors who sought to exclude ideal or romantic elements,” asserts the critic Faye
Hammill, citing Duncan’s “Saunterings” columns from the periodical, The Week in 1887 (Hammill
55). The protagonist’s call for “nudity” in fiction, therefore, contradicts the textual practice of the
novel that created her. A Daughter of Today looks forward to modernist works such as those by Joyce
and Woolf but remains safely behind the drapery barrier in fiction. Were A Daughter of Today a
painting, it would be intended for a conventional Private Viewing at the Academy, not for display
among the avant-garde naturalist and realist works at the Grosvenor.
10
Note Bashkirtseff's equal insistence on her posthumous reputation:“It would be curious if this record of my
failures and of my obscure life should be the means of procuring for me the fame I long for, and shall always
long for” (311).
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Works Cited
Bashkirtseff, Marie. Marie Bashkirtseff The Journal of a Young Artist, 1860-1864. Trans. Mary J.
Serrano. New York: Cassell & Co, 1889.
Duncan, Sara Jeannette. An American Girl in London. Toronto: Williamson, 1891.
----------. A Daughter of Today. 1894. Ed. Misao Dean. Ottawa: Tecumseh Press, 1988.
Gadpaille, Michelle. “Psyche’s Daughter of Today.” ELOPE IV 1-2: 59-68.
Hammill, Faye. Literary Culture and Female Artistry in Canada 1760-2000. Amsterdam: Rodopi,
2003.
Howells, W. D. “Novel Writing and Novel Reading: An Impersonal Explanation.” The Norton
Anthology of American Literature. Eds. Nina Baym et al. New York: Norton, 1989: 266-282.
James, Henry. “The Art of Fiction.” 1884. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Eds. V. B.
Leitch et al. New York: Norton, 2001: 855-869.
MacMillan, Carrie, “The Figure of the Artist in Late Nineteenth-Century Canadian Fiction,” Studies in
Canadian Literature 5. 1 (1980): 63-82.
Martin, Margaret Kathleen. Lily Lewis: Sketches of a Canadian Journalist. Calgary: University of
Calgary Press, 2006.
Nochlin, Linda. Courbet. London: Thames & Hudson, 2007.
Richardson, Angelique, & Chris Willis. The New Woman In Fiction and Fact: Fin-de-siècle
Feminisms. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002.
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