Turning Toward the World: Aestheticism, Christianity, and the Ends of Art in Modernist Literature

As religious belief gradually lost cultural influence and became a less and less contested category of thought and value in the 19th and early 20th centuries, modern men and women turned elsewhere for justification for life and salvation from its failures and vicissitudes, and many of these found hope and promise in the elevating power of art. In a prominent strand of late 19th and early 20th century thought, these Romantic Aesthetes despairingly encounter what they believe to be a flawed world. Their critique is that the world is meaningless, incoherent, vulgar, and ugly. To solve this problem, they seek a flight from the ugliness of the world into the purpose, beauty, and perfection of the artistic Imagination, deliberately turning away from the world to aesthetic fantasy and seeking an escape from mundane existence through the heightened sensory experience offered by art. Art becomes for them its own justification and end, their highest goal to live an unending series of perfect aesthetic experiences.;A generation later, and reacting to this Romantic movement, Christian Modernists also encounter a flawed world that they see as vulgar, broken, and ugly, but they have an additional term and concept for it as well: fallen. Thus, to solve this problem, they argue for a different approach, envisioning the redemption of the fallen world through the theological category of Incarnation, in which the world is redeemed by divine participation in and restoration of its fractured beauty. They pursue a reconciliation of art and life, deliberately turning toward the world in all its ugliness and seeking to participate in mundane existence in order to recognize the beauty and perfection---what they call the divine---within and through this brokenness. Art for them is thus not an escape from the world and an end in itself, but rather the means by which the world's reconciled purpose, coherence, beauty, and perfection may be revealed when viewed through the lens of Incarnation.;I examine this Christian modernist movement in detail in this dissertation, beginning with a framing discussion of Joris-Karl Huysmans' A Rebours and Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray as representatives of the aestheticist mode, and then selecting from among the Christian modernists three major figures that capture various facets of the Christian critique and alternative aesthetics offered in distinction to this Romantic vision: Evelyn Waugh, T.S. Eliot, and Flannery O'Connor, each of whom I discuss in a subsequent chapter, focusing on Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, Eliot's Four Quartets, and three short stories by O'Connor.;Waugh operates primarily in a negative mode, developing a critique of the aesthete-hero as presented by the Romantic authors Huysmans and Wilde as that figure encounters the stumbling blocks of mortality and the ethical responsibilities of friendship and love. While Waugh attempts to offer a positive alternative religious vision at the close of the novel, many readers find that this portrayal falls flat and fails to rouse the interest of a neutral or skeptical reader. T.S. Eliot thus advances this positive presentation of the argument for a Christian aesthetics further in his responses to Matthew Arnold and the cultural Unitarianism of New England by developing and portraying a more robust aesthetic philosophy rooted in the Christian understanding of Incarnation, which seeks to offer an alternative site for meaning and order in a bleak world. In the Four Quartets, he provides a narrative of pilgrimage, both religious and aesthetic, that turns toward the mundane and the seemingly superficial to observe within and through prosaic experiences glimpses of the divine economy that, seen through an Incarnational lens, suffuses them all. Finally, in reframing the concept of the Romantic symbol in orthodox Christian terms of neo-Thomist analogy, Flannery O'Connor expresses most forcefully and perhaps even jarringly, in her tightly-constructed short stories, the alternative aesthetics of Incarnation that sees beauty, redemption, and justification in the detritus of a broken world. In so doing, she insists that she is a comic writer---that all of her stories have happy endings---even as they typically conclude in scenes of alienation, violence, and death, and are often read, seemingly much more naturally, as tragedies. Her works may thus be seen as the measure and test of this alternative aesthetic vision, as they heighten the contrast between the aesthetic judgement of the Romantic and the aesthetic judgement of the Christian.