Demimonde

The term demimonde is usually associated with women of questionable morals. It gained currency in the late nineteenth century as a subset of the world of bohemia, the realm wherein, for example, young artists struggled against poverty to establish their vocations. This "half-world" had a definite but tenuous relationship with the conventional world; most of its famous animus towards this world was, alas, only an inverted envy. Nevertheless, the demimonde was a real, and largely separate, society, with values that either openly scorned or simply ignored those of conventional society. The demimonde is intimately associated with the Night (The Great Procuress, as Von Stroheim calls it); that part of the day in which those who populated conventional society did not move in with much aplomb. The demimonde perhaps reached its apex within the context of the French Symbolist movement, which flourished between 1880 and 1900, that offshoot of Romanticism which embraced more that was dark than merely the night. This is the realm of J.K. Huysmans' _Against the Grain_ and Arnold Bocklin's _Isle of the Dead_, and can be viewed as the immediate precursor to Surrealism. We are speaking here of the intensification of a shift in consciousness which rejected Rationalism, which trusted the passions above logic. This French Symbolist demimonde was the imperfectly realized result of the then-nascent theories involving the implementation of radical subjectivity. It seems justifiable to me that this term might apply to any social grouping which generally corresponds to this scheme.