Walter Pater, Circe, And the Paths of Darkness.

By Nineteenth-Century Prose

Release Date: 1997-09-22
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines

Description

Although Homer's Circe traditionally has epitomized the sensual femme fatale, when Pater in his late novel, Gaston de Latour, compares Queen Marguerite to this goddess, he is drawing upon a little-known allegorizing of Circe by Giordano Bruno. In the Platonic tradition of the stilnovisti, Bruno finds the imperfect and the fallen to be an avenue to the ideal. The key to Gaston's prolonged dalliance in decadent Parisian society is the Platonic "law" enunciated in the Phaedrus that the carnal cannot obliterate the spiritual. Circe's spell is neither permanent nor fatal; like Ulysses, Gaston possesses a counter-charm, a youthful consecration that cannot be wholly expunged and that transforms his perception of fallen beauty into an aesthetic and spiritual vision. Indebted to Oxford idealism, Paterian aesthetics avoids John Ruskin's exaggerated moralizing yet posits a relationship between the good and the beautiful that Oscar Wilde had denied. **********

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