I’ve just finished reading Brett Easton Ellis’ “American Psycho”, which was, without any doubt, the most brutal and shocking novel I’ve ever read. I’ve read numerous novels, many of them outrageous, but none affected me quite as much as “American Psycho”. Although totally disgusting at times, it was one of the most interesting and thought-provoking novels I have had the (dis)pleasure of reading. Reading Ellis’ fiercely fantastic, satirical masterpiece, I was however somewhat struck by the fact many of the novel’s ideas and imagery were in fact not new at all: I felt that the text was, consciously or unconsciously on the part of Ellis as the author, very much rooted in literature of the late Victorian and “Decadent” periods. For such a “shocking” novel (the New York Times removed it from their best-sellers list, and in Australia the text comes with an 18 certificate), many of the novel’s narrative notions seemed to stem from literature written (at least) 100 years earlier.
Ellis’ protagonist, the devastatingly handsome Patrick Bateman, who is often mistaken for a male model, reminded me very much of Oscar Wilde’s eponymous character Dorian Gray, from his novel “The Picture of Dorian Gray” (1891). Bateman, like Gray, is young, beautiful, wealthy, narcissistic, and bored. Gray and Bateman are both so wealthy that they do not need to work (although Bateman chooses to work on Wall Street), and they consequently suffer from intense boredom, or to use the more fitting French term, ennui. To fill up their time, they live lives of mundane materialism, with both characters embracing darker temptations that see them indulging in drugs, and even murder. Ennui features as a central concern in Wilde’s novel, with one character uttering that “life is a great disappointment”, and this sentiment features similarly in “American Psycho”, where Bateman admits that he can never “be disappointed since I no longer find anything worth looking forward to”. Clearly then, Bateman, as the beautiful but bored killer, is no new narrative notion. Wilde’s novel also features the notion of male friendship in a way that Ellis can be seen to emulate: Bateman constantly socialises with a small group of professional men, who are all as shallow, dapper, and self-obsessed as he. The dynamic of this group’s relationship can be seen to reflect that intensity of the relationship between Dorian, Lord Henry Wotton, and Basil Hallward, which has unquestionable homosexual undertones. Furthermore, woman are essentially disposable for both the characters of Gray and Bateman (literally in Bateman's case), and just as Bateman’s boardroom and social life is massively male-centric, the absence of the female is similarly notable in “The Picture of Dorian Gray”. In many ways, I felt that Patrick Bateman, the Wall Street decadent dandy, was the Dorian Gray for the 21st Century.
Robert Louis Stevenson’s “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” (1886) can also be seen to parallel many of the ideas explored and expressed in “American Psycho”. Stevenson’s classic tale of double-life and double-identity is undeniably an influence upon Ellis’ seemingly paradoxical narrative notion of a Wall Street serial killer. As a professional man, Bateman, like Dr. Jekyll, hides his murderous double life by keeping up the appearances of apparent respectability and decency. Just as Bateman hides behind his “mask of sanity” and conceals his fingerprints by wearing his Emporio Armani calf-skin leather gloves, and carries his gun and knives in a Bottega Veneta briefcase, Jekyll too knows that such “appearances can be deceiving”. Both Jekyll when he is Hyde, and Bateman when he is killing, describe being taken over by the devil and by insane lust. Bateman also describes “depersonalisation” when he is killing, which Jekyll also identifies in his transition to Hyde as his consciously animalistic alter-ego. Furthermore, the New York that Ellis depicts as always dark, dirty, degenerative, and menacing, is strikingly like “the drowned city” of London that Stevenson describes. In addition, just as the “tincture” or potion features highly in Stevenson’s text, cocaine is a frequently used in Ellis’ narrative, with the narcotic functioning the highlight the notion of transformation. Therefore, there are many interesting parallels that can be drawn between Stevenson and Ellis’ two texts.
I also felt that the poetry of the French writer Charles Baudelaire was strikingly comparable to aspects of “American Psycho”. Baudelaire’s hugely controversial poetry collection, Les Fleurs du Mal (1857), featured many monstrous yet poetic portrayals of sexual violence, and was banned upon publication due to claims of “misogyny” and “immorality” (much like the reception that “American Psycho” received upon publication nearly 150 years later). One such Baudelairian parallel is when Bateman, after beheading a female during a night of sex and deathly torture, proudly displays her severed head in his apartment. This perverse act seemed strongly reminiscent of Baudelaire’s poem “A Martyr” from Les Fleurs du Mal, in which a “headless cadaver” and “the head” sit displayed in a sumptuous bedroom setting containing “marble sculptures, fine paintings, and perfumed peignoirs”. It would seem that Bateman’s luxury apartment (so lavish that Tom Cruise owns the penthouse apartment above) is the modern equivalent to Baudelaire’s excessively luxurious setting. Baudelaire’s poetry frequently dehumanised the female form, by often concentrating on individual body parts rather than the woman as a whole, and through Bateman's characterisation, Ellis seems to push this Baudelairian notion further, as Bateman literally dehumanises, and defeminises, his females by butchering their bodies to such an extreme extent. At the novel’s most graphically violent, it is arguable that “American Psycho” can be seen as homage, or at least an emulation, of the controversial Baudelairian poetic aesthetic.
Finally, “American Psycho” can be seen to respond to J.K.Huysmans novel “Against Nature” (1884), whose protagonist Des Esseintes is as much as a self-consciously self-obsessed aesthete as Bateman, and who also displays similar massively materialistic tendencies. Stylistically, the incredibly detailed descriptions that Ellis gives of all his characters clothing throughout the narrative - “the guy wearing a double-breasted wool cavalry twill suit, cotton shirt, and silk tie all by Givenchy, the girl wearing a silk taffeta dress with ostrich hem by Geoffrey Beene, vermeil earrings by Stephen Dweck Moderne and Chanel grosgrain dance shoes” – is a stylistic technique that can also be seen in “Against Nature”, in Husymans’ excessively intense, descriptive passages that hint at his narrative Naturalism. Furthermore, the wealthy Des Esseintes is bored, and like Bateman he turns to sinister acts, or experimentations, to fill up his time. One such example is when Des Esseintes drills jewels into a living turtle’s back, just for the hell of it. The perverse and bizarrely nonchalant attitude that Husyman's protagonist displays seems to parallel Bateman's alarmingly casual attitude, and his seemingly casual motivations, for his countless killings.
The multiplicity of parallels found between “American Psycho” and the texts by Wilde, Stevenson, Baudelaire and Husymans', illustrate that many of Ellis’ ideas are indeed not new. Ellis, writing in 1991, can thus be regarded as rewriting many key elements of key texts that were published during the fin de siècle epoch. The themes displayed in these novel's of the fin de siècle (ennui, violence, narcotics, narcissism, etc.) were meant to reflect what was know at the time as the "mal du siècle" - the sickness of the age - but it seems clear that this sickness was not just temporal but long lasting, as such themes are evidently echoed in Ellis' "American Psycho". Indeed, it is interesting to observe that such themes are still as relevant in literature today as they were 100 years ago, and perhaps it is even more interesting to realise that what the reading public found shocking in 1857, we readers still find shocking in 2009.
Copyright © 2009 Gillian Tasker
