Decadence, Disorientation, Degeneration

Abstract

Between 1885 and 1920 in Europe, Gerald N. Izenberg (2000, 2) tell us, there was a “social and psychological crisis of masculinity.” Izenberg explains how this crisis helped shape both the thematic concerns and the formal innovations of the early-modernist revolution in the arts. The centrality of gender to an understanding of modernism has been documented by feminist scholarly analyses of modernism’s patriarchal “construction,” or deformation, of women’s identity, as well as modernist scholarship’s erasure of women writers and artists (Izenberg 2000). In an era when men still largely dominated cultural production, shifting representations of the feminine were, in part, reactions to shifts, including “disturbances” in masculine identity (Izenberg 2000, 3). Although making “provocative” contributions to our “understanding” of modernism, Izenberg (2000, 3) judges, this scholarship also raises important questions of substance and method. After discussing these questions, Izenberg—in what seems to me a book of unusual precision and beauty—will suggest a different relation between masculine identity and modernist innovation. He does so by examining in some detail the interrelationship between the works and lives of three leading early modernists: Frank Wedekind, Thomas Mann, and Wassily Kandinsky.

What is the boundary line between the diehard assertion of rugged white male individualism and its simultaneous feminization and spectacularization? (Fred Pfeil 1995, 29)

Another word for the phallus was deus, which is etymologically related to our word for deity, and to the Italian word for leader, duce. (Paul Hoch 1979, 146)

[F]or the nineteenth century was an ever more visually centered age, when attitudes toward society and the nation were often expressed in aesthetic terms. (George L. Mosse 1985, 10)

[W]hite masculinity is less a thing, an entity, or even a position, than it is a response or a function. (Thomas DiPiero 2002, 231)