The revolt of the soul: Catholic conversion among 1890s London aesthetes (England, Oscar Wilde, Ernest Dowson, John Gray, Michael Field, William Butler Yeats)

This dissertation explores the often critically neglected Roman Catholic conversion epidemic that swept through London's 1890s avant-garde—followers of the Aesthetic Movement who synthesized French Symbolism and Decadence with native English Pre-Raphaelitism and Celtic Twilight mythos. I examine the circumstances and writings (primarily poetry) of selected converts—Oscar Wilde, Ernest Dowson, John Gray, and the two writers (Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper) who shared the pseudonym Michael Field. To complement and contextualize this phenomenon, I also discuss the related contemporary quest for esoteric mysticism as embodied in William Butler Yeats, himself not a convert to Catholicism but an indefatigable spiritual quester and commentator on the religion in an apocalyptic short-story trilogy from The Secret Rose. As its title (taken from Yeats) suggests, this dissertation posits Catholic conversion in 1890s London as a subversive act; in exploring the seemingly paradoxical notion of subversive orthodoxy, however, the negative capability that permits the productive irreconciliation of Catholicism's own seeming paradoxes becomes of paramount importance.; Although all part of the same creative milieu, each figure converted for different reasons, yet the writers' often heterodox subject matter and personal behavior—expressed variously via feminism, homosexuality, pedophilic eroticism, incest, or substance abuse—would seem to clash with such an authoritative, orthodox institution. After an introduction that provides background on the status of Roman and Anglo-Catholicism in late Victorian society and popular imagination (which simultaneously equated Catholic conversion with an essential feminization and demonization), I include a prelude on Wilde's deathbed conversion and lifelong flirtation with Catholicism, and his ironic reinventions of Gospel narratives. My first chapter focuses on Dowson's “spiritually redeeming” attraction to female children, the second on the once-archetypal homoerotic dandy Gray's journey to the priesthood and his Decadent Pre-Raphaelitism. Bradley and Cooper's incestuous lesbian relationship influenced their Catholic mind-set, which valorized suffering and produced poems voicing and celebrating New Testament women's perspectives. The final chapter, on Yeats, aligns Freemasonry as a parallel yet socially sanctioned ritualistic operation, and contemporary interest in occult mysticism as a response to Catholicism's exoteric mysticism.