Abstract:Fin-de-siècle writing, driven by gender wars, cosmic solitude, and derisory and sublime disenchantment, carried its own poison within it. In the form of poetic arabesques and prophetic metaphors, venin is diffused throughout powerful works by Gustave Moreau and Grünewald as represented in the writings of Joris-Karl Huysmans. The decadent language of the 1880s, symbolised by the image of the woman, is an intoxicated world in which evil and perverse eroticism come together in a poisonous embrace.
