Ambivalent Ambitions: The fin-de-siècle Bohemian's Self-Division

This thesis examines the character of the bohemian artist in late-Victorian culture, with special focus on three fictional texts and one non-fictional account: George Moore's A Modern Lover (1883), George Gissing's The Emancipated (1890), George Du Maurier's Trilby (1894), and Arthur Ransome's Bohemia in London (1907). These texts frame countercultural painters and illustrators as possible saviours of modern art at the turn of the century. In each text, bohemian artists take the British art world by storm, infiltrating the bastion of middle-class aesthetics, the Royal Academy. In challenging the establishment's artistic conventions (particularly its preference for classical works) and its commercial marketplace, bohemian characters like Moore's Thompson, Gissing's Mallard, and Du Maurier's Little Billee produce offhand sketches and unfinished or careless paintings, working without working, or making art that remains in a liminal state between complete and incomplete. Their ambivalence towards artistic production reveals their suspension between a reluctance to participate in the commercial art market, and their need to do so to survive. In parallel with this conflict, all four texts end inconclusively, suggesting the potential of an avant-garde movement while remaining wary of its sustainability. Jed Esty's study of bildungsromans, Unseasonable Youth: Modernism, Colonialism, and the Fiction of Development (2012), argues that late-century novels of arrested development compromise the health of the British Empire. In a similar vein, I argue that these four künstlerroman critique the health of English art. My first chapter examines the bohemian collective in Moore's A Modern Lover, showing how this group rises and falls through its novel approach to artistic labour. My second chapter focuses on Gissing's solitary bohemian Mallard in The Emancipated who prizes his hallucinatory dreams over the paintings that he submits for exhibition. In my third chapter, I study Du Maurier's Trilby, analyzing how the on-the-spot illustrations of its protagonist Little Billee skewer bourgeois concepts of creative production. My fourth chapter on Ransome's Bohemia in London explores the bohemian painter's social escapes and the way they both invigorate and doom his artistic practices. A brief conclusion considers my texts in the context of other treatments of nineteenth-century creative labour, such as James Eli Adams' Dandies and Desert Saints (1995) and Andrew Dowling's Manliness and the Male Novelist in Victorian Literature (2001). Despite vital work from Mary Gluck, Elizabeth Wilson and Jerrold Seigel on bohemianism, the fin-de-siècle bohemian in English literature remains understudied, a neglect which this thesis corrects.

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