Butter yellow may be trending in 2026, but in vogue colors aren’t a new phenomenon. I recently read The King in Yellow, by Robert W. Chambers, a collection of weird, genre-defying short stories first published in 1895. It got me thinking again about the importance of the color yellow in literature published near the end of the nineteenth century.
The collection’s title refers to a fictional play that drives several characters mad in the course of the short stories. In the opening story, “The Repairer of Reputations,” we are told, “It is well known how the book [The King in Yellow] spread like an infectious disease, from city to city, from continent to continent, barred out here, confiscated there, denounced by press and pulpit, censured even by the most advanced of literary anarchists.”
Other nineteenth-century literature fans may recall another corrupting yellow book—in Oscar Wilde’s 1890 novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray. “His eye fell on the yellow book that Lord Henry had sent him. What was it, he wondered…After a few minutes he became absorbed. It was the strangest book that he had ever read. It seemed to him that in exquisite raiment, and to the delicate sound of flutes, the sins of the world were passing in dumb show before him. Things that he had dimly dreamed of were suddenly made real to him. Things of which he had never dreamed were gradually revealed.” In fact, there are 22 references to “yellow” in Wilde’s most famous novel. It’s used to describe everything from gloves, wine, roses, Chinese hangings, and silk damask, to hands, faces, and a skull.
You might also think of the maddening yellow wallpaper in Charlotte Gilman Perkins’s 1892 feminist short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper:” “I never saw a worse paper in my life. One of those sprawling flamboyant patterns committing every artistic sin.”
So, what’s up with all this yellow?!
In the latter half of the nineteenth-century, books containing lascivious and scandalous content, often imported from France, were wrapped in yellow paper to act as a warning (or an advertisement, depending on your tastes) to readers.
Yellow was understood to be the color of aestheticism and decadence. There was even a British journal, The Yellow Book, dedicated to works that referenced these movements. Aubrey Beardsley, illustrator of Oscar Wilde’s play Salome, was its first art director. The specific yellow book Wilde includes in The Picture of Dorian Gray is Joris-Karl Huysmans’s 1884 À Rebours (Against Nature), which I reviewed back in 2013. This seminal work of decadent literature charts the life and mind of a protagonist whose desire to live aesthetically has fatal consequences.
Yellow journalism was also a term for early tabloid journalism, as the so-called yellow press sensationalized news stories to turn a profit (sound familiar?).
For the writers and artists I’ve mentioned in this blog post, yellow was the color of modernity, but that meant it was also the color of danger, corruption, sensation, sickness, and contagion. In the story “The Yellow Sign,” the protagonist says of the fictional play, The King in Yellow, “Oh the sin of writing such words—words which are clear as crystal, limpid and musical as bubbling springs, words which sparkle and glow like the poisoned diamonds of the Medicis!” The message? Pick up a “yellow” book, including the one you’re reading now, at your peril.
Thanks for reading and stay in touch—on Facebook, Instagram, or X. Want to get more updates from my blog? Sign up for my monthly email newsletter here.
No comments:
Post a Comment