Decadence (3)

I was doing some prepping and I came upon this very simple explanation for the trouble with "decadence" critiques. It's from Judith Halberstam's book on the Gothic, Skin Shows, but I think it applies to "decadence" as well:

"Gothic reveals the ideological stakes of bourgeois realism – namely, there is no one generic form that resembles “life” and another debased form that deviates from the natural order of things. There are only less or more fantastic costumes, less or more Gothic interpretations of reality." (62)