Beneath the idea of the artificial, the Decadent artist concealed his fantasies as well as his fears. The lesbian enabled him to express them both – both his fascination and his impotence. This is the reason the lesbian interior was so significant for the artist. It focused his voyeuristic tendencies on the site where sapphic love takes place. As a place dedicated to unnatural and sophisticated pleasure, the lesbian interior is also the site for an aesthetic emotion that Decadent artists sought to capture. When a writer attaches so much importance to the lesbian’s boudoir and bedroom where she indulges in her “vice,” he is, in fact, wondering what goes on there. He often expresses a desire to join the female lovers, to be the man in the middle. The omnipresence of men is a paradoxical situation that the Decadent movement tried to resolve. For many writers, Lesbos did not exist outside the male gaze that legitimized women’s same-sex love. But a man’s presence puts the validity – even the reality – of sapphism in question.

The Decadent movement’s fascination with the lesbian was based on the fact that lesbians pushed the experience of the unsayable to the limit by constructing their pleasure on an absence – the absence of the male. Its experimentation with words enabled authors to explore “new sensations” and to cultivate a sophisticated form of writing. Thus, the lesbian was significant for the aesthetic and literary value of artificiality at the heart of the Decadent project, with which she could be associated by virtue of her “unnaturalness.”