SOURCE: "The Counterdiscourse of the Feminine in Three Texts by Wilde, Huysmans, and Sacher-Masoch," in PULA, Vol. 106, No. 5, October, 1991, pp. 1094-1104.

In the following essay, Felski considers depictions of gender roles in novels by Huysmans, Oscar Wilde, and Leopoldvon Sacher-Masoch.

An imaginary identification with the feminine permeates much of the writing of the male European avant-garde in the late nineteenth century, a period in which gender norms were being protested and redefined from a variety of standpoints. This "feminization" of literature, exemplified in a destabilization of traditional models of male bourgeois identity, was linked to an emerging self-conscious aestheticism that set itself in opposition to realist and naturalist conventions. Seeking to expose the seemingly natural features of the dominant culture as simulacra, the male artist drew upon stylistic and thematic motifs codified as feminine, thereby challenging both sexual and textual norms. Thus a complex array of alignments and...