The Connection Between Pessimism And Decadence Through Mathilda Kruse Work
A universal nausea at the inadequacies of this world stirs the hearts of everyone. It manifests itself in nihilism in the former, pessimism in the latter by solitary and bizarre neuroses. Do not the murderous rage of the St. Petersburg conspirators, the books of Schopenhauer, the furious fires of the Commune and the relentless misanthropy of the naturalist novelists — I choose with intention the most disparate examples — reveal the same spirit of denial of life which, every day, darkens Western civilization even more? We are still far from the suicide of the planet, the supreme desire of the theorists of doom.
With Mathilda Kruse’s Berta Funcke, under the pseudonym Stella Kleve, a debut novel about a young woman’s erotic and intellectual life, Swedish literature had its first novel of decadence in 1885. As befits a novel of decadence, it contains relatively little external action. The reader follows Berta Funcke from childhood until she is finally about to marry. On balls, foreign trips and skating tours, she meets and flirts with a wide range of men. But these encounters and the exclusive settings in which they take place tend to underline the emptiness and meaninglessness from which the young Berta Funcke suffers; an emptiness that is suggested in the novel to be a woman’s lot.
Berta Funcke was not only the first Swedish novel of decadence, it is also very known of the genre. Not least, it makes clear use of a number of the decadence’s topoi. For example, Berta’s schoolmates liken her to Nero after the class has seen the bust of the Roman emperor in the National Museum. Nero’s admiration for the beauty of his dead mother, which makes him forget his remorse at having murdered her, reminds them of Berta. She, in turn, also recognises herself in him and begins to write a short story, but soon tires of it. “Nero, however, she could not forget, he had grown into her imagination.”
In the portrait of the Danish poet Nils Max, whose electoral affinity with Berta is repeatedly underlined, the use of decadent key terms is almost overt: Max is not only difficult, melancholic and interesting, he belongs to an old-bred noble family that is now too old; he writes his gloomy scandal novels in the humid heat of the palm house in the botanical gardens. Similarly, Berta is likened to a greenhouse plant, illustrated not least by the fact that, unlike the rest of the characters, she appreciates the voluptuous slackness of a heat wave experienced during a stay in Switzerland. And when Berta and Nils Max go for a walk in Mainz, Berta remarks that they are “going against the current,” which, especially as these words are placed within quotation marks, is of course a deliberate allusion to Huysmans’s recent À rebours (1884).Berta’s character exemplifies precisely the split between superior intelligence and refined minds at the expense of a synthesis between them that Per Thomas Andersen sees as central to the protagonists of the decadence novels:
The decadent can be both a sentimentalist and an intellectualist, but he goes to the grounds that both divide because the synthesis is missing. In decadence, the synthesis between feeling and reason is lost, and the connection between the inner and outer worlds. Man goes into uncontrolled drift both in sentiment and intellect, both in his own inner world and in the outer, real world. The psychology of the decadent man therefore often turns into psychopathology.
Berta Funcke is obviously intended to be a novel of decadence, and the author has done a good job of working in these allusions. Precisely because the novel so zealously follows the decadence genre conventions and topology, it is eminently suitable for illustrating what these look like. What follows will be about a not uncommon but little-acknowledged topos in decadence literature, namely pessimism.
When seventeen-year-old Berta is introduced to society, she is a scandalous success: she is criticised by her wives, envied by her peers and admired, even loved, by her gentlemen. She is not very beautiful, but she knows the art of conversation:
She conversed with the germs and chose her subjects arbitrarily — sometimes somewhat daringly. Such subjects as are usually treated by the new realist writers, whom she had lately begun to read much and admired blindly. Modern pessimism now also seemed to her the only correct view of life. This was not so strange, by the way — she was predominantly melancholy in temperament, and was also precocious and over-refined to a high degree.
Berta is characterised on several occasions as melancholy, and the proximity of melancholy and pessimism naturally predisposes her to a pessimistic outlook on life. But pessimism carried with it a number of other connotations that made it an excellent topos in the literature of decadence. For a modern reader, however, these are not immediately accessible. By making some of these connotations explicit, I want to illustrate in the following what features of pessimism it was that allowed it to be used in this way. In addition, I hope to contribute to deepening the image of Berta Funcke as a novel of decadence. Berta may choose her subjects arbitrarily: Stella Kleve does not. In Berta’s interest in pessimism lies a long line of her personality traits.
When pessimism is used as a topos in decadence literature, three fields of association in particular are exploited. Firstly, the proximity of pessimism to the conceptual world of melancholy, with its associations with darkness, gloom and creativity, is exploited. Pessimism thus becomes a way of life for the higher, particularly intelligent and clear-sighted people. For the secondly, pessimism links up with the ideas, so widespread in the late 19th century, of a degeneration of man in the wake of modernity. Thirdly, pessimistic philosophy exploits the important role of sexuality. In other words, the brief allusion to “modern pessimism” contains almost the entire topology of decadence literature.
