Trending: Fin de Siècle Yellow

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.

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The Top 10 Blog Posts from the Secret Victorianist

I can hardly believe it, but I’ve now been running this blog on nineteenth-century literature and culture for over a decade! The blog has changed a lot over the years as I’ve made the move from London to New York City, my interests have evolved, and I’ve become a published author myself. 

So, in a belated anniversary celebration, I decided to look back through the archives to revisit my top 10 performing posts of all time. 

1. Are YOU an Elizabeth Bennet?

I started my blog with a bang and a LOT of enthusiasm, publishing 13 posts in the first month alone (nowadays my goal of two a month is more achievable). This post, a tongue-in-cheek look at whether I would cut it as an Austen heroine, was one of them. Pride and Prejudice (1813) remains such a cultural touchstone I’m not surprised this article still sees traffic every day—I mean, the 1995 BBC adaptation even got a shout-out in the recent Barbie movie!

2. Tennyson’s ‘To Virgil’: An Exercise in Analyzing Poetry

You’ll see a lot of poetry-focused posts in this top 10 list, which was initially surprising to me. When I write about poetry my promotional posts don’t gain a lot of traction on social media, but when it comes to search engine traffic, those articles rise to the top. My hypothesis is that students are stumbling across my blog when looking for homework help analyzing poems like Tennyson’s ‘To Virgil.’ I can only hope they’re enjoying my write ups, and not just plagiarizing my analysis!

3. Introducing Victorian Poetry to Children

More poetry, but this time with a #KidLit twist. In this blog post I share some more accessible Victorian poems to get children excited about reading verse from the period. 

4. The Best and Worst Tropes in Historical Fiction

This 2018 post is focused on my personal opinions about what works and what doesn’t when it comes to historical fiction tropes (and spoiler alert: I’ve already changed my stance on a few of these issues!). I’d be fascinated in hearing other readers’ views on this topic and what makes a historical novel great to them. 

5. ‘This Genealogical Passion’: Hardy, Incest and Degeneration

The high bounce rates I see from this page suggest that maybe an academic blog on nineteenth-century literature and culture isn’t quite what people are looking for when they Googled “incest” (!), but despite this I selfishly wish more people would read Thomas Hardy’s The Well-Beloved (serialized 1892), one of the strangest Victorian novels out there.

6. Review: Against Nature (À Rebours), Joris-Karl Huysmans (1884)

I’ve written quite a lot about nineteenth-century French literature over the years, but this review of the premier text of the French Decadent movement is far and away the best performing.

7. A Victorian Alphabet: W is for Witchcraft

In 2013-2015 I published a series of posts making a nineteenth-century connection to every single letter of the alphabet (yes, some were easier to think up than others!). While the Victorian period isn’t the one we most associate with witchcraft, this post has been a perennial top performer, especially as we approach Halloween. Here, I focus on the accusations of witchcraft leveled against the character of Eustacia Vye in Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native (1878). I also link to my review of Elizabeth Gaskell’s novella, Lois the Witch (1861).

8. A Victorian Alphabet: K is for ‘The Kraken’ (Tennyson, 1830)

More poetry and more Tennyson! In this post I take apart every line of this short and powerful poem about a creature from the deeps. 

9. Misconceptions about Victorian Literature

As a blogger focused on nineteenth-century literature and culture, I often have to contend with people’s preconceptions and misconceptions about what Victorians were like. In this early blog post I tackle the misinformation.

10. A Dickensian Masterclass in Repetition

This is the only writing craft post to make the top 10 and I’m not surprised it’s about lessons we can learn from the master of Victorian literature himself—Charles Dickens. While I do references Dickens’s most famously repetitious passages—the openings of Bleak House (serialized 1852-1853) and A Tale of Two Cities (1859)—it’s his lesser-read 1848 novella The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain that I do a close reading of here.

What would you like to see me write about next as the blog goes into its second decade? Let me know—here, on Facebook, on Instagram, or by tweeting @SVictorianist. Interested in getting regular updates from my blog and on my fiction? Sign up to my monthly email newsletter here.

Review: The Marquise de Sade, Rachilde (1887)

I wasn’t sure what to expect when I started reading The Marquise de Sade, by Rachilde (first published in French in 1887). 

I’ve read books by other writers who were part of the late nineteenth-century Decadent Movement. I’ve blogged, for instance, about Joris-Karl Huysmans’s 1884 À Rebours (Against Nature), which is often held up as representative of the excesses of the artistic and literary movement. I’ve read Oscar Wilde, Max Beerbohm, and Algernon Charles Swinburne, some of the most famous Decadent writers in English. And I’ve enjoyed the illustrations of Aubrey Beardsley, probably the most famous British visual artist in this group.

However, I had no idea until recently that there was a woman writer amongst the leading French Decadent authors—Marguerite Vallette-Eymery, who published under the pen name Rachilde.

The Marquise de Sade, Rachilde (1887)

The novel of Rachilde’s I picked up was The Marquise de Sade (1887), though her 1884 Monsieur Venus is perhaps slightly better known. Flicking through its front pages, I discovered that it had taken more than a hundred years (!!) for The Marquise de Sade to be published in English, with this translation, by Liz Heron, appearing in 1994.

An intriguing writer, a racy title, and a recent translation? I was in, and flew through the novel within days. Now I’m blogging to tell you all about it. Warning: spoilers ahead, as this one’s a little off the beaten track…

CN: Sexual Violence, Animal Cruelty, Transphobia, Homophobia 

First up, the title is pretty misleading. The novel has nothing directly to do with the nobleman, philosopher, and sexual libertine who put the “S” in “BDSM.” Rather, the feminisation of the title (this is the Marquise de Sade, rather than the masculine Marquis) is a reference to the novel’s central theme. Rachilde’s book is a bildungsroman about how a girl grows into a woman with a perverse taste for cruelty.

Second, if you’re expecting sex on every page, you’re going to be disappointed. Mary Barbe, our protagonist, is seven years old in the opening chapter and the book mainly deals with her childhood. This, of course, includes references to her nascent sexuality, but it’s only in the last quarter of the novel, when Mary is an adult, that the content becomes overtly and consistently sexual.

What I was least prepared for was how (deliberately!) funny the book was in parts. Mary is the daughter of a colonel and Rachilde’s satirical depiction of the social life of officers in the French army is incredibly entertaining. 

As a writer, I was also impressed by Rachilde’s convincing use of a child’s point of view, while the narrative still winks at what’s really going on between the grown-up characters. Even as the book plays with the excessive and the absurd (e.g. a brawl between the officers’ children over live lambs, which have been given out as gifts at a kids’ party), I felt like the writer really knew and could empathise with children—something that’s pretty rare in nineteenth-century novels.

I’m no psychiatrist, but Rachilde’s psychological portrait of Mary reads as proto-Freudian and progressive. Mary is initially a sensitive and caring child. But neglected by her family, who would prefer her to be a boy, she is starved of affection and has several early experiences that lead to her associating love and pain. Her first (pretty innocent) fumblings with a boy in her tweenage years are also linked to power play, as she convinces him to steal a prized rose from his employer for her in return for a kiss.  

As the novel progresses, her development becomes less believable. She ends the novel fantasising about murder, having tasted every other excess. And, in a strange twist I didn’t see coming, it is a “transvestite man” that she considers killing. She talks of men who sleep with other men as “fallen” and “ill-equipped to defend [themselves] against women.” And says, “her conscience would be clear if the chosen victim were among that kind!” 

While the ending is a clear escalation in violence, there are also plenty of other moments readers will find problematic, distasteful and shocking throughout the book.

There are various instances of animal cruelty. The opening scene sees Mary faint as she watches an ox being butchered and its blood drained as a cure for her consumptive mother. As a small child, Mary’s beloved companion is a cat (even though it scratches her). I won’t go into details, but, predictably, the cat and her kittens meet unpleasant ends, further cementing Mary’s misandry and misogyny. 

Mary’s own “cruelty” as an adult at first revolves around exercising her newfound power to deny men. She pretends she loves them, but refuses to have sex with them, or goads them into making sexual advances, but then blackmails them about what they have done. Eventually, one of the young men she’s been playing with rapes her, cuckolding his father in the process. The narrative suggests that he is the victim.

But it’s not only men who Mary can captivate and torture. In one of the most memorable scenes in the novel, Mary has a woman who wishes to sleep with her strip naked before her, and then, without warning, brands her with a red-hot poker. Reader, I gasped.

I’ve written before about the misconceptions people can have about the nineteenth century. This was certainly not a period when everyone was swooning at the sight of an ankle or an uncovered table leg. French Decadent literature may be more out there than the novels of British novelists in the time period, but you can be sure that many of our literary greats were reading books like this one. Overall, I’d recommend The Marquise de Sade to enthusiasts for the period with a strong constitution, and to adventurous readers with a taste for more than Fifty Shades of Grey…

Compared to The Marquise de Sade, my own novel, Bronte’s Mistress, seems almost wholesome, but, if you love the nineteenth century, please consider buying a copy for yourself or as Holiday gift this Christmas season! Want to get in touch? You can always message me on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter (no creepy DMs please), and you can also sign up for my monthly email below.

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A Victorian Alphabet: Y is for Why Yellow??

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper (1892) is a staple nineteenth-century text for students of literature in the English-speaking world, and especially the US. The 6,000-word short story is an account written in the first person of a woman, Jane, who has been confined to an upper room in a secluded house by her husband John as a result of a nervous disorder. There, having been prescribed a ‘rest cure’ for her hysteria, separated from her baby, and barred from writing, she goes slowly mad, convinced there is something living behind the room’s yellow wallpaper.

Even this straightforward summary raises lots of questions (and contains plenty of content for future blog posts!), but one central question stood out to me the first time I read the text (and seems to have occurred to multiple other students turning to Yahoo Answers for clarity!) – why is the wallpaper yellow, rather than any other shade?

The choice isn’t an accidental one, and is closely linked with contemporary ideas about the colour. Here’s how Jane introduces it first:

The colour is repellent, almost revolting; a smouldering unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight. It is a dull yet lurid orange in some places, a sickly sulphur tint in others.

Two important and recurrent associations with yellow are noticeable – yellow is the colour of putrification and also of a milder kind of fading, caused by the passage of time.

Earlier in the century, Dickens had used yellow in the same way, frequently linking the colour to particular characters who are older and somehow linked to decay. This is how Pip first describes the home of Miss Havisham, perhaps the character in the English canon most associated with physical deterioration and the passage of time, in Great Expectations (1860-1):

I saw that everything within my view which ought to be white, had been white long ago, and had lost its lustre and was faded and yellow. 

In The Yellow Wallpaper, Gilman is at pains to highlight that the paper is a yellow of these very associations of festering age, rather than say a sunny yellow:

It is the strangest yellow, that wall-paper! It makes me think of all the yellow things I ever saw—not beautiful ones like buttercups, but old foul, bad yellow things.

Jane even links the rotting smell she finds pervading her room with the yellow paper itself:

The only thing I can think of that it is like is the COLOUR of the paper! A yellow smell.

In doing so, she is not merely exhibiting an increasing monomania with the paper. ‘Jane’, isolated though she is, is acting just like many other writers of the 1890s! For many (especially European) writers of the Fin de Siècle, yellow was the defining colour of the period, with its associations with degeneracy, the wasting away of the age, a sickliness brought on by inbreeding, boredom or excess.

There was a practical link too. In the nineteenth-century, scandalous French novels were bound in yellow paper to warn browsers of their racy contents. It is one of these books which helps to corrupt the impressionable Dorian Gray in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, published the year before Gilman’s story.

Lord Henry gives Dorian a ‘book bound in yellow paper, the cover slightly torn and the edges soiled’. Note how its state of dilapidation is similar to Jane’s paper:

It is stripped off—the paper—in great patches all around the head of my bed, about as far as I can reach, and in a great place on the other side of the room low down.

Later, in Wilde’s novella, Dorian pins the blame for his moral decline squarely on this book:

"Yet you poisoned me with a book once. I should not forgive that. Harry, promise me that you will never lend that book to any one. It does harm."

This suggestion – that a book, even a yellow book, can really poison a mind – is one which Wilde rejects firmly:

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

But it is interesting to note that Dorian’s book is not generic. It has a particular model as Wilde’s description of it makes clear. It is À Rebours (1884), by Joris-Karl Huysmans (which I reviewed on this blog in September 2013), a novel which is the quintessential story of the degenerate (French) life.

Here’s the effect the novel has on Dorian:

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.

Dorian’s feelings of discovery and revelation here before a later fall match perfectly with the early stages of Jane’s fixation with the yellow wallpaper. The novel and the paper feel incomplete, raiments, something torn, but they inspire what could be described as creativity – Jane’s writing, Dorian’s beautiful life – but could also be identified as self-destructive madness.

When it came to naming a quarterly literary journal in London in 1894, its founders were in no doubt what to name it – The Yellow Book was the perfect descriptor of the age although it (fittingly!) died out before the end of the century (1897). With contributors including Aubrey Beardsley, Max Beerbohm, H.G. Wells and Henry James, The Yellow Book shows just how much yellowness meant to writers of this period.

It is within this context too then that The Yellow Wallpaper should be read. The question is not ‘why is the paper yellow?’. It might rather be ‘how do these ideas of degeneracy, and this link to the Aestheticism of the period, play into to Gilman’s other concerns, with gender, motherhood and madness?’

We’re nearly there! What should be 'Z' in my Victorian Alphabet?? It’s a tricky one so send me your suggestions – here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist!

Review: The Immoralist, André Gide (1902)

André Gide

I’m cheating a little bit here, as The Immoralist takes us two years into the twentieth century and is by a writer who, while born in 1869, lived well into the next century, being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1947. Yet reading and writing about Gide seemed a natural next step after reviewing some Flaubert and Huysmans recently, and, in terms of literary interest and personal life (including a relationship with Oscar Wilde), Gide has a foot firmly in each century. 

The Immoralist is the story of Michel (an erstwhile scholar of History), his life subsequent to his father’s death, his marriage to Marceline and his travels around Europe and Africa. The novel charts the development of Michel’s moral philosophy, his increasing prioritisation of sensation and pleasure and his exploration of his own sexuality – from admiring the ‘health’ of an Arab boy’s ‘little body’ which ‘was a beautiful thing’ (the first stirrings of his pederastic impulses) to apparently enjoying an MMF threesome, as his devoted wife lies dying in the novel’s final pages. 

For general readers: The Immoralist isn’t a novel which makes it easy for you to know what to think or how to judge its protagonist. Michel’s worst crimes – potential paedophilia and disregard for his wife – are difficult to pin down precisely. His apparently candid narrative stops short of telling us the exact nature of his relationships with the many boys and young men he comes into contact with (including the Arab boy Bachir, his steward’s son Charles and the child Ali he lives with at the end), although what he does admit to is increasingly physical and suggestive of sexual consummation. And Marceline’s consumptive illness cannot be blamed on Michel, even if his own tuberculosis and insistence on continual travel are certainly contributory factors in her ill health.

The lack of narrative certainty and conclusion can be unsettling. This is deliberate and reflected in the frame narrative, where Michel’s friend, who has listened to the ‘confession’, says: 

We did not speak either, for we each of us had a strange feeling of uneasiness. We felt, alas, that by telling us his story, Michel had made his action more legitimate. Our not having known at what point to condemn it in the course of his long explanation seemed almost to make us his accomplices. We felt, as it were, involved. 

The use of Michel’s voice makes this feeling of involvement inevitable. Without the guiding light of a third person narrator we feel closer to Michel than any of the other characters – even Marceline – and so sympathetic towards his selfishness. This means this is a novel which makes you think and allows you to judge for yourself at which point, if any, Michel crosses a line, and to make a call about the value of conventional morality. 

For students: Gide’s lack of narrative commentary and concentration on the development of an individual’s consciousness, where other characters are almost incidental, is very reminiscent of Flaubert and the two styles, particularly in passages where the protagonist elucidates their current ideological position in dialogue with other characters, are worthy of more detailed comparison.

Michel’s Nietzschean philosophy could also be of interest, as could Gide’s treatment of same sex desire, but there is most here perhaps for those investigating colonialism in the period and the novel’s African context is difficult to overlook. Sexual power is of course a large part of this – and Michel’s status as a white man in Africa is in some ways similar to the dominion he enjoys over workers on his country estate in Normandy – but it is Michel’s first trip to Africa, after the intense emotions surrounding his father’s death, and lack of emotion at his own wedding, which is the catalyst for the selfish, destructive and dominant behaviours he goes on to exhibit in all areas of his life: 

Tunis surprised me greatly. At the touch of new sensation, certain portions of me awoke – certain sleeping faculties, which, from not having as yet been used, had kept all their mysterious freshness. 

The Immoralist then is a wonderful study for those looking at the effects of colonialism on those who colonise and at Africa as shorthand for exoticism and permissiveness in the later nineteenth-/early twentieth-century novel.

Which novel should the Secret Victorianist review next? Let me know here, on Facebook or by tweeting @SVictorianist! And did you know you can also keep up-to-date with all things Victorian over on Pinterest?

Review: Against Nature (À Rebours), Joris-Karl Huysmans (1884)

Huysmans’ Against Nature is a novel about one man (the rich but jaded aristocrat Des Esseintes) and the isolated life he crafts for himself – a life governed by aesthetic considerations and the desire to subvert, and even supersede, nature. Like many English readers, my first exposure to the novel was in an editor’s note to Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) - À Rebours is widely believed to be the novel which ‘poisons’ Dorian’s mind. But the text is definitely worthy of attention in its own right (and not just in considering Decadence and the Fin de Siecle).

Joris-Karl Huysmans

For general readers: The opposite of a lot of the Victorian literature I like and write on, Against Nature is low on plot and deals with only one real character. This is a novel about the workings of someone’s mind – someone who probably isn’t that likable or relatable. I don’t find this a problem as such (though I know some might), but I did find that my natural inclination was towards episodes which did include other people, however faintly sketched – the Englishmen dining in a Paris eatery, the poor boy treated to a night in a high class brothel, the brutal but effective dentist. There are some episodes which are so arrestingly parabolic that they stand out when looking back at the text. Images like a jewel-encrusted tortoise perishing under its own weight have a mythic quality and chapters can seem like individual exercises, tied together by the Des Esseintes plot (such as it is), like the master narrative of the Arabian Nights or a collection of Dickensian short stories. Huysmans is at his strongest in passages of sensual description (rendered beautifully in the Robert Baldick translation I was using). The chapter on scents in which Des Esseintes fills his house with exotic plants brings this to a climax for reader as well as character – his collapse seems understandable given the density of sensation evoked by the text. There’s no getting around the fact that this is a hard read – flicking to the notes might give you some idea of the range of esoteric references –but it’s a rewarding one and the best bits don’t need a glossary to make them intelligible.

For students: For those students who’ve ever felt cheated as Dorian’s decadent lifestyle is quickly skimmed over by Wilde, this is the answer – this is a text about Des Esseintes’ aesthetic life choices. Yet, this is much more than a novel to read for background. The text can be especially appealing depending on the level of knowledge you possess surrounding the areas discussed. I found the chapters on classical literature and theological questioning a joy to read, as I got the ‘Des Esseintes’ view on topics I already knew about, whereas chapters on particular orthodox Catholic writers or visual artists I didn’t know left me a little cold. Beyond its treatment of decadence, the text is a good example of the relative freedom of French literature at the time, when compared to English writing (especially when it comes to sexual and scatological discussion), and of different approaches to narrative and the ‘novel’ as a form in the nineteenth century.

What would you like the Secret Victorianist to review next? Comment below, post on Facebook or tweet @SVictorianist!