Outraged Beauty: The Dionysian Retinue and the Lineages of British Aestheticism, 1918-1930

Since the writing of Walter Pater’s essays ‘A Study of Dionysus: The Spiritual Form of Fire and Dew’ and ‘The Bacchanals of Euripides’, the god Dionysus and his retinue of fauns, nymphs, and maenads occupied a conspicuous place within British aestheticism’s engagements with classical antiquity. Owing to Pater’s approving invocation of the recently disgraced painter Simeon Solomon’s Bacchus canvases in the former essay, these engagements have often been understood to navigate the clandestine territory of aestheticism’s queer sexual politics. Beginning with Pater’s foundational writings, this thesis explores how these sexual politics proliferated in depictions of the Dionysian retinue executed by artists whose work is legible through, and engaged profoundly with, the lineages of late nineteenth century aestheticism. It argues that, in contrast to conventional narratives which consider the downfall of Oscar Wilde in 1895 to represent the terminal implosion of the movement, aestheticist iconographies, sentiment, and thought persisted significantly beyond this point and retained their transgressive associations between the Dionysian retinue and queer male identity and desire. First examining Dionysus and his male followers, the fauns, it argues that aestheticist productions encouraged desire for or identification with these figures amongst aesthetes. It then examines the fauns’ female counterparts, the divine nymphs and mortal maenads, to argue that these figures and the realms they inhabited became spaces for imagining retributive violence against, or the negation of, male heterosexual authority.