Decadence and the Urban Sensibility

As a consequence of rapid industrialization and urbanization throughout the nineteenth century, urban cores became dominant in a way they had never been before. By the turn of the century, one in seven people in England and Wales lived in London alone, which housed six million inhabitants; by 1905, Berlin was five times larger than it had been in 1848. The decadent response to this increasingly industrialized, utilitarian, democratized, and urbanized society was one of resistance, a sense of defiance reflected throughout decadent writing. The intense experience of life in the modern city led to the development of new urban sensibilities, notably represented by the flâneur, the flâneuse, and the dandy. In this chapter, the variety of decadent negotiations with the city and urban modernity emerges through an examination of the works of Oscar Wilde, Amy Levy, and Arthur Symons, wherein we observe how each of these three sensibilities supported ambivalent decadent interactions with urban life.