On Decadence

Gabriele D’Annunzio’s Pleasures (1889)

Gabriele D’Annunzio’s Pleasures (1889) concerns and advocates for an extreme aestheticization of life. The book obsesses over the ideas of living one’s life as art, and worshipping at the altar of beauty. The hero, if he can be called that, Andrea Sperelli, is born into wealth and to a cultured father. He’s the “last of the great race”¹, a gentleman of the higher class, with money and without a formal career, with leisure to refine and pursue his aesthetic tastes. The plot is insubstantial, instead relying on description to espouse the aforementioned philosophy. Andrea indulges in a series of highly sexual affairs, buys dozens of roses for his first lover, goes to the best parties, meets princesses and foreigners, overbids on art at auctions, and once, injuries himself by participating (and losing) a dual. He floats about through life, anxiously analyzing every flutter of eyelash, every word and gesture of the woman he falls in love with, and merely having loveless sex with the women h…