On Peacocks: Feathered Re-encounters in the 1890s

On Peacocks: Feathered Re-encounters in the 1890s Mark Llewellyn (bio) Introduction: Devouring the Bird In January 1914, a group of modernists, including William Butler Yeats and Ezra Pound, ate a peacock at an honorary dinner for the Victorian poet Wilfred Scawen Blunt. As recounted in Lucy McDiarmid’s Poets & the Peacock Dinner (2014), this feast represented an important moment in poetic history on the cusp of the First World War, although, as McDiarmid explores, there was some confusion and miscommunication between the generations of poets at the feast.1 The peacock as an influence in need of killing off, either via eating or other forms of cultural consumption, also inflects a novel almost contemporaneous with the peacock dinner: D. H. Lawrence’s The White Peacock (1911). More explicitly than the dinner for Blunt, Lawrence’s novel utilizes imagery, poetics, and visual culture from the Victorian period, specifically the 1890s and the work of Aubrey Beardsley, to slay various traditional attitudes about the role of art and to argue for a more fluid interpretation of gender and sexuality. Despite the title of Lawrence’s novel, relatively little attention has been paid to its allusion to earlier authors. Nor has much attention been paid to the gendered ambiguity of the peacock, yet, as Kristin Morrison describes it, “[t]he problematic element” is “not the peacock itself— a traditional symbol of vanity— but its female association and its whiteness.”2 Although Morrison’s essay draws on Oscar Wilde’s Salome (1893) and Beardsley’s illustrations for the play (1894) to account for both the femininity and the whiteness in Lawrence’s title, there is no attempt to uncover the sources or motifs of Wilde’s own white peacock. Indeed, in the reliance on the Beardsley illustrations, one can overlook the significance of that white peacock in Wilde’s work and the decadent period more broadly. While Lawrence’s text is indebted to how Wilde and Beardsley “establish[ed] the white-peacock-woman as decadent, possessive, and deadly” and the “sexual ambiguity” in Wilde’s drama, this leads to a question about where Wilde himself encountered the figure of the white peacock, the role it plays in his own work, and what that source might tell us about Wilde’s own revisioning of an earlier poetic motif (Morrison, pp. 247, 242). [End Page 225] This essay is therefore concerned not with the legacy of a particular dinner in 1914 or Lawrence’s revisioning of the 1890s but rather with looking backward from that early twentieth-century moment of literal and meta phorical peacock slaying to the poetry and culture of the fin de siècle in order to understand a longer chain of re-encounter. Specifically, my concern is with the ways in which the decadent poets of the 1880s and 1890s used the peacock motif to re-envision Victorian poetic tropes of the midcentury. The approach here, then, stages multiple sites of re-encounter, tracing a lineage from the peacocks of the 1840s–1870s in the work of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Christina Rossetti, and Gerard Manley Hopkins, contextualizing this in contemporaneous scientific and aesthetic debates around the theories of Charles Darwin and John Ruskin, before focusing in on peacock texts of the fin de siècle by Wilde and Olive Custance. What connects these re-encounters, I argue, is an ambiguity about the peacock as a motif, including questions of gender and sexuality, the eroticism and exoticism of the depictions, and, most importantly, the meanings behind the recurrence and re-envisioning of the white peacock specifically. The re-encounters staged by Wilde in particular place his concern with the Tennysonian peacock into an aesthetic of artifice and excess for the 1890s. In the context of a recent shift in decadence studies to questions of the role of the natural and nature in decadent thinking, I suggest that looking at something as precise as the adaptive re-encounter with the peacock both offers a tangible consideration of a widespread motif and grounds this in forms of cultural homage and appropriation. In this respect, this essay contributes to a wider conversation about how the natural world might come under increasingly close examination in decadence...