Brigid Brophy's Ethical Aestheticism: Form, Empathy, Reciprocity

The twentieth-century writer Brigid Brophy (1929–1995) is seldom included in studies of literary aestheticism. However, this article proposes that Brophy developed a distinctive theory of ethical aestheticism that both aligns with and extends the politicized uses of aestheticism found in the work of her nineteenth-century forebears such as Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde. Through close analysis of Brophy's genre-defying plots, this article shows that Brophy's ethical aestheticism is expressed in her two early novels, The King of a Rainy Country (1956) and Flesh (1962). Within these narratives, the way that characters look at, touch, and respond to art reflects their political and affective stance toward other characters within the text and toward notions of otherness and identification in a broader sense. Although Brophy's engagement with the political dimensions of aestheticism is subtle and oblique, her novels ultimately use these encounters with art objects to reflect on the porous boundaries between subject and object, as a way of reimagining human relationships and power dynamics.