Free The Fall of the House of Wilde by Emer O'Sullivan Page B
Authors: Emer O'Sullivan
an excess of evil and then out again into a Christian moral world of redemption as Sidonia is punished.
Meinholdâs novel was not the trashy sensationalism of mid-nineteenth-century fiction: it was written for an age distrustful of elevating humanity. It needs to be read alongside other mid-century works â such as the poetry of Baudelaire or Flaubertâs
Madame Bovary
 â for in its theme is discernible a change in direction: towards a spirit of harshness. Meinholdâs Sidonia is as cold and bloodless as an object, partly because he paints her with scientific detachment. More than one critic compared the reading of
Sidonia
to viewing pictures in a gallery, which explains why the book appealed to the imagination of visual artists. The Pre-Raphaelite painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti first read Janeâs translation of
Sidonia the Sorceress
in 1851 and pronounced it a masterpiece. Edmund Gosse, reviewing the 1926 edition for the
Sunday Times
, said Rossetti âhad a positive passion for âSidonia the Sorceress,â referring to it and quoting from it incessantly, until it inoculated the whole Pre-Raphaelite circle with something of his own enthusiasmâ. 3 Edward Burne-Jones painted Sidonia von Bork in 1860; Walter Pater dwelt upon the bookâs artistic merits; Charlotte Brontëâs heroine in
Villette
is familiar with its theme, while Swinburne read it at the same time as he discovered the Marquis de Sade.
The character of Sidonia marks a move towards the femme fatale figure, popular with the writers of the late nineteenth-century Decadent movement, whose cool demeanour drives a wedge between sex and emotion. Sidonia is an angel who wears boots, who uses beauty to wield power. The book influenced the late-century female archetype of woman as vampire, common in Decadent poetry and painting. Indeed, the heroine looks back to the Romantic cult of personality and forward to the Decadent habit of substituting art for nature, of making the person a beautiful thing, a fetishistic obsession, functioning outside the moral law in an artificial world of its own, with Dorian Gray as its apogee.
Jane kept her name off the translation in 1849 and still omitted it from the second edition, published by William Morrisâs Kelmscott Press in 1893. Possibly she felt the need to distance herself from a book that shows how evil humans can be, but despite this she read it to her two boys at a young age. Oscar said his âfavourite romantic reading when a boyâ was
Sidonia the Sorceress
and his great-uncleâs novel, Maturinâs
Melmoth the Wanderer
. 4
In 1850, at the age of twenty-eight, Jane received the news she half anticipated but still dreaded â Hilson was to get married. She responded as follows.
Who is the sublime Semiramis that has led you captive? I should think your heart more a tender than a loving nature . . . do forgive me if I am not very enthusiastic. I shall have to wait ten years now I suppose before your ardour is sufficiently cooled down to give a rational opinion on any point literary or psychological . . . The truth is I hate men in love, the heart holds but one at a time at least in that transition state between the ârippling friendshipâ as you call it and the authorised Version of the Rubric, and I do not care to have my image only an intrusive guest. One thing amused me in your eulogy. You said she has no ambition â so then this is the opposite of me with whom it is the strength of all feelings . . . 5
Was ambition in a woman distasteful to men in search of a suitable spouse? Jane once said to Hilson, âI always feel that there is something which I ought to be half ashamed of in the possession of a little more spiritualised nature than others. âOh, I hate clever ladies,â is a phrase which often kills all pride in me.â 6
The other dart Jane suffered was her motherâs death, in 1851, of which we
Meinholdâs novel was not the trashy sensationalism of mid-nineteenth-century fiction: it was written for an age distrustful of elevating humanity. It needs to be read alongside other mid-century works â such as the poetry of Baudelaire or Flaubertâs
Madame Bovary
 â for in its theme is discernible a change in direction: towards a spirit of harshness. Meinholdâs Sidonia is as cold and bloodless as an object, partly because he paints her with scientific detachment. More than one critic compared the reading of
Sidonia
to viewing pictures in a gallery, which explains why the book appealed to the imagination of visual artists. The Pre-Raphaelite painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti first read Janeâs translation of
Sidonia the Sorceress
in 1851 and pronounced it a masterpiece. Edmund Gosse, reviewing the 1926 edition for the
Sunday Times
, said Rossetti âhad a positive passion for âSidonia the Sorceress,â referring to it and quoting from it incessantly, until it inoculated the whole Pre-Raphaelite circle with something of his own enthusiasmâ. 3 Edward Burne-Jones painted Sidonia von Bork in 1860; Walter Pater dwelt upon the bookâs artistic merits; Charlotte Brontëâs heroine in
Villette
is familiar with its theme, while Swinburne read it at the same time as he discovered the Marquis de Sade.
The character of Sidonia marks a move towards the femme fatale figure, popular with the writers of the late nineteenth-century Decadent movement, whose cool demeanour drives a wedge between sex and emotion. Sidonia is an angel who wears boots, who uses beauty to wield power. The book influenced the late-century female archetype of woman as vampire, common in Decadent poetry and painting. Indeed, the heroine looks back to the Romantic cult of personality and forward to the Decadent habit of substituting art for nature, of making the person a beautiful thing, a fetishistic obsession, functioning outside the moral law in an artificial world of its own, with Dorian Gray as its apogee.
Jane kept her name off the translation in 1849 and still omitted it from the second edition, published by William Morrisâs Kelmscott Press in 1893. Possibly she felt the need to distance herself from a book that shows how evil humans can be, but despite this she read it to her two boys at a young age. Oscar said his âfavourite romantic reading when a boyâ was
Sidonia the Sorceress
and his great-uncleâs novel, Maturinâs
Melmoth the Wanderer
. 4
In 1850, at the age of twenty-eight, Jane received the news she half anticipated but still dreaded â Hilson was to get married. She responded as follows.
Who is the sublime Semiramis that has led you captive? I should think your heart more a tender than a loving nature . . . do forgive me if I am not very enthusiastic. I shall have to wait ten years now I suppose before your ardour is sufficiently cooled down to give a rational opinion on any point literary or psychological . . . The truth is I hate men in love, the heart holds but one at a time at least in that transition state between the ârippling friendshipâ as you call it and the authorised Version of the Rubric, and I do not care to have my image only an intrusive guest. One thing amused me in your eulogy. You said she has no ambition â so then this is the opposite of me with whom it is the strength of all feelings . . . 5
Was ambition in a woman distasteful to men in search of a suitable spouse? Jane once said to Hilson, âI always feel that there is something which I ought to be half ashamed of in the possession of a little more spiritualised nature than others. âOh, I hate clever ladies,â is a phrase which often kills all pride in me.â 6
The other dart Jane suffered was her motherâs death, in 1851, of which we