Les monstres d’Aubrey Beardsley et le « grotesque darwinien

Difference and otherness are pervasive themes of the fin de siècle. The Paterian individual described in the conclusion of The Renaissance (1873) is someone who is traversed by intense but ephemeral sensations and emotions, and whose body and psyche are shaped by the Heraclitean experience of the perpetual flux constantly making and unmaking him (or her). The elusiveness and hybridity of fin-de-siècle identity are also captured in the various symbols late-Victorian artists created in order to represent themselves or their art : James Whistler’s signature butterfly, Odilon Redon’s foetuses and Aubrey Beardsley’s embryos are a few of the famous motifs which foreground the mutation and transformation processes which fascinated the imagination of Aesthetic and Decadent artists. Arguably, the teratological imaginary of this period owes much to Charles Darwin and his evolutionary theory. This seems especially true in the case of Aubrey Beardsley’s graphic artwork where grotesque monsters abound. In Beardsley’s art, as in Darwin’s writings, evolution is predicated on the apparition of randomly deviant and monstrous forms. This paper thus looks into some of Beardsley’s black and white work in order to explore the interactions between evolution and aberration.