Occultism and the homme fatal in Robert Smythe Hichens’s Flames: A London Phantasy

Abstract

Decadent literature is often characterized by lives lived at the fringes of convention. While the intersections between Victorian literature and the supernatural in its various forms have been the topic of considerable discussion, the presence and function of occultism in Decadent literature remain relatively underexplored. In contrast, occultism’s contribution to modernist literature and culture has received continued attention, most recently in John Bramble’s Modernism and the Occult(2015) and in Tessel M. Baudin and Henrik Johnsson’s collection, The Occult in Modernist Art, Literature, and Cinema(2018). The existing lacuna in Decadence Studies is particularly surprising given that Decadent literature, with its noted focus on the strange and the curious, lends itself to such critical scrutiny. This essay is the first to examine how the homme fatal– a key Decadent trope notoriously explored in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray(1890-91) – sits at the intersections between Decadence, occultism, and homoerotic desire in Robert Smythe Hichens’s Flames: A London Phantasy(1897). Here I argue that, though Hichens is best known for The Green Carnation(1894), the homosocial and homoerotic triangulations of desire in Hichens’s Flamesimply that Wilde’s novel had a far more serious impact on Hichens’s writing than his scandalous parody might suggest.