Inspired by recent work on global decadence as well as Susan Sontag’s classic formulation of dandyism, this chapter focuses on the figure of the dandy as he appears in fiction and nonfiction writing from and about the Hawaiian islands. In the hands of Anglo-American travel writers such as Charles Warren Stoddard and Robert Louis Stevenson, the island dandy often embodies an alluring but dangerous decadence associated in particular with late nineteenth-century Polynesia; for Indigenous writers and practitioners, by contrast, the dandy’s subversive, nonnormative masculinity becomes a way of leveraging European style against encroaching colonial power. This chapter argues that the island dandy thus emblematizes the manifold anxieties surrounding cultural and political modernity that would emerge in the 1890s and give the decade its characteristic sense of jubilant expectation and pessimistic dread. Within the broader context of the volume, the chapter also considers what approaches and methods might better serve the field of Victorian studies as it reorients itself along increasingly global lines.

This chapter examines decadence in terms of the contemporary popular obsession with the practice of self-fashioning through dandyism, drag, or costume as a way of negotiating or overcoming social boundaries, often in a playfully transgressive manner. Glam rock stars of the 1970s represent a modern form of dandyism and camp self-expression, while the aesthetics of opulence and excess take on a more profound significance when considered in terms of social inequality in the drag ball culture of 1980s New York where the aspiration to be ‘real’ is enacted through costumes and cosmetics. Decadence in today’s celebrity culture is exemplified by Lady Gaga’s gender-bending pop performance art, and we can also observe a queer countercultural resistance to the mainstream using the same decadent paradoxes of beauty and decay, artifice and reality. The ‘cult of the self’ may seem superficial, but the process of self-fashioning through clothing and makeup is in fact a process of self-acceptance.

From its emergence in the mid-nineteenth century, decadence has been, fundamentally, a socio-cultural response to urban modernity. Indeed, decadence is all but unthinkable outside the borders of the modern metropolis. Hence this chapter treats literature less as a literary critic would and more as an urbanist thinker might. An urbanist reading of a decadent text must perforce pay attention not only to urban geography, including the plan of the city in which the work is set, its dominant architectural styles, socio-economic differences in neighborhoods, and so on, but also to the cultural, social, and psychological meanings that the urban setting produces in a particular decadent text. In this essay, the urbanist approach is brought to bear on three novels whose urban geography is especially significant to their respective narratives: Gabriele D’Annunzio’s Il Piacere [Pleasure] (1889), Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), and Thomas Mann’s Der Tod in Venedig [Death in Venice] (1912). These three works illustrate, respectively, the special relationship of the urban scene to cultural, social, and psychological issues germane to the decadent narrative of each novel.