Abstract

This dissertation examines how figures and practices of mourning in selected works of Walter Pater constitute a latent form of resistance to social domination. Although the force of mourning is analyzed most fully in Pater's later works, its political dimension emerges out of his earlier, apparently opposed, celebration of sensual delight. Theodor W. Adorno's analysis of an internalized social domination is used to reveal the immanent social protest in Pater's narrow focus on individual pleasure in The Renaissance . Close readings of Pater's first extant essay "Diaphaneite" and The Renaissance reveal, furthermore, that Pater, like Adorno, recognized a paradoxical element of compulsion even, and especially, in such efforts to assert individual spontaneity. Following Adorno's insight that freedom finds its last refuge in the recognition of unfreedom, Pater's later texts are read as acts of mourning for that lost spontaneity. The call to mourn through renunciation becomes then the necessary preservation of Pater's earlier call to celebrate the senses. ;Throughout the dissertation, the common legacy of classical German philosophy serves as a unique mediation between Pater and Adorno. In the first chapter, Schiller's Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man is used to set up the dialectic of freedom and unfreedom. In the following chapters on "Demeter and Persephone," Imaginary Portraits, and Plato and Platonism, Adorno's critiques of Hegel and Kant illuminate Pater's struggle to articulate, and mourn, the often willing sublation of the individual by an oppressive totality. In the spirit of Adorno's own work, however, the attention to how this struggle emerges from within Pater's writings eclipses any attempt to methodically apply philosophical or sociological categories. The last chapter explores how the reading of Pater through Adorno developed here can bring us to a new understanding of Adorno and Proust.