19세기 ‘퇴폐적’ 댄디를 통해 본 모더니티 연구

Abstract

Dandyism represents self-poetry and adoration, playfulness and resistance. Decadence can be seen as the antithesis of Dandyism, where the decadent artist, unlike the Dandy, who strives for elegance and restrained aesthetics, is more inclined to sensuality based on morbid sensitivity, giving himself over to his weaknesses. Whereas the dandy represents a calculated mind armed with outward elegance, the decadent artist is preoccupied with sensuality rather than intellect, chaos rather than order, and beauty through sin rather than morality. Thus, Dandyism, an aesthetic current of the early 19th century, and Decadence, a trend in art of the late 19th century, can be summarized as two distinct phenomena that span a century. However, Charles Baudelaire, Artur Langbeau, Paul Verlaine, Oscar Wilde, and Jean Laurent, who are often referred to as decadent artists, were actually dandies. This study aims to identify the seemingly impossible identity of the 'decadent dandy' and prove that it is a mediator of the social, cultural and artistic causality between dandyism and decadence. Modernity is not a value function of what has already “passed,” but a concept of behavior that changes with the times. It is a “futuristic” concept that is closely linked to ideas of emancipation, growth, development, evolution, and reform, and at the same time opposes ideas of immobility and stagnation, as well as tradition and conservatism. Although the Dandies seem to have gone against the grain to form their own aristocracy, it was a 'resistance' to the shallow age of industrialization and an aesthetic challenge to conformity and uniformity. Decadent artists also have the value of modernity in terms of the decline of 'blood aristocracy' and the emergence of a 'republican spirit'. It reflects the end-of-the-century sensibility that linked symbolism and aesthetic movements together, while also signaling a break from social conventions inherited from the theory of original sin. Thus, Dandyism and Decadence, which are opposed to each other in terms of their aesthetic qualities, leave room to see them as one aesthetic current that runs through the 19th century, as they share the same desire for the 'future', or modernity. In particular, the tantalizing dandies of Baudelaire, Wismans, and Wilde reinforce this phenomenon by presenting themselves as 'paradoxical' as dandies, or 'decadent'. In conclusion, the overly romanticized, overly loose, and overly decadent 'decadent dandy' reveals its value as a figure that expresses modern thought and sensibility in the period from the mid-to-late 19th century to the Belle Époque, as well as a sign of what modernity really is.