March 2011
1 post
I should note
I’ve more or less migrated all thesis talk over to my proper blog. The QOTDs there are usually my way of saying what I have to say about Symonds, which is who the thing is really all about these days. We’re looking at three chapters, of which my JP will be the first, on: 1. Symonds in his Victorian intellectual context, addressing his preoccupation with ethics, his particular brand of...
October 2010
4 posts
Yet another chapter framework
Introduction: how shamefully the historiography ignores S.
1. Context leading up to Greek Ethics and Modern Ethics—how it’s possible for S. to write what he does
2. G.E. and M.E. themselves—what’s new, exciting about them
3. Impact: who read them, what they learned
One of the things I have to do with Symonds is to prove that a text with an 1883 private print run of 10 copies (i.e. Greek Ethics) still had a profound impact on the making of gay history even though “nobody” read it. I need to find out who those copies went to and how they were impacted by them.
Can I just say
My inbox is filled right now with emails from Tony Grafton with citation info for books about sodomy (in classical Greece, in the early modern period, in the Victorian era, etc.) I’m a lucky, lucky girl.
Digression
Major autumn research project might wind up being about this, if I can get it to relate to women’s suffrage in America. I never manage to get too far away from the queer stuff, do I?
September 2010
6 posts
“In some confused way I identified myself with Adonis; but at the same time I...”
– Symonds, Memoirs. Desire vs. identification, folks. Again and again and again.
The POINT right now:
There is an argument to be made for an intellectual history which places Symonds at the centre of a web of scholars/cultural thinkers (to whom he sent Greek Ethics and Modern Ethics) and therefore his INTELLECTUAL influence on the work of creating and defining homosexuality. Contra Grosskurth, perhaps, his importance is not in struggling over his own sexuality, it’s in defining the...
“but in 1869 Catherine and Symonds agreed to a platonic marriage, while he would...”
– Nicely ironic word choice, ODNB. Don’t you know what Platonic means?
More Problems in Greek Ethics, Legal Testimony...
[or, I found it!—in other news, hope you guys don’t mind that I’m totally posting manuscript. These are half-thought-through, oh-so-totally-off-the-record pensées.]
“More Problems in Greek Ethics,” after the title of a critical 1883 essay by John Addington Symonds on sexuality in ancient Greece, is thesislog’s recurring feature on questions of close-reading and...
Unbelievably irritated
That I seem to have deleted much of the first part of a “More Problems in Greek Ethics” post that I thought was actually quite good. Here’s the second part:
gay marriage: in religious-right politics/language, really just code for “sodomy”—note jonathan katz’s stuff, how what he describes as the anti-sodomy, anti-procreative sex rhetoric of the 19thC is...
Executing: Literary executors can make or break a... →
This is exactly true. Symonds’ executor, Horatio Brown, was so concerned about preserving his friend’s reputation as a scholar and about keeping gossip-minded people away from the fact that Brown himself was of the Greek persuasion that he buried pretty deeply Symonds’ work on homosexuality. The importance of that work, and the extent of Symonds’ contributions to developing...
August 2010
5 posts
Greek aestheticism
“The morality of the Greeks, as I have tried elsewhere to prove, was æsthetic. They regarded humanity as a part of a good and beautiful universe, nor did they shrink from any of their normal instincts. To find the law of human energy, the measure of man’s natural desires, the right moment for indulgence and for self-restraint, the balance which results in health, the proper limit for...
Symonds' modernity isn't necessarily consistent.
I have praised JA Symonds before for his (I believe under-recognized) really quite modern outlook on questions of same-sex love and eroticism, and the observations he makes in Section XVII of his A Problem in Greek Ethics are no exception. Symonds is constructing a theory about why paiderastia was an accepted part of the social fabric in many parts of classical Greece, and places a heavy emphasis...
the more I think about it...
The more it seems obvious, and imperative, even, that I write a thesis arguing that Symonds prefigured our modern idea of the homosexual and homosexual identity. Combining medical science and cultural history, highly influenced by a literature embracing S.O.C. not G.I., wavering between a radical identity politics and a thing which just is, and more importantly influencing SO MANY PEOPLE working...
J.A.S. QOTD
(crossposted from Worthless Drivel)
We normally think of J.A. Symonds as one of the pioneers of a modern theory of male homosexuality, and my thesis presently (that is, until I change my mind again next week) hopes to discuss how Symonds’ work and life prefigured the gay identities of the 20th and 21st centuries. He was in many ways an extraordinary pioneer, and I don’t believe the...
New, revised, current conceptual plan
About which I’m wildly enthusiastic:
Organizing the project into chapters centered on case studies which each illustrate a different facet or theme relating to my general thesis that class relations—and in particular an upper-class/intellectual/educated privilege—defined and shaped early understandings of a sexual-object-choice model of understanding male homosexuality, and...
July 2010
18 posts
I wonder if there’s anything to the notion that working-class men favored a G.I. model because they were more used to encountering women in their daily lives. They’d know how to dress and act like women, and know why dressing and acting like women would, e.g., get them into situations where they’d be able to have sex with men. Upper-class men would have been at boarding school...
More Problems in Greek Ethics
Wright, p. 204:
For his part, John Addington Symonds was appalled by the prevailing medical definition of homosexuality. He eschewed the scientific approach in favour of a historical and sociological exploration of the subject, believing that this would offer greater intellectual scope and provide him with far more powerful ammunition in his struggle against intolerance. Symonds waged that war...
thought
From the same article as below, quoting De Profundis:
“this new life… is, of course, no new life at all, but simply the continuance, by means of development, and evolution, of my former life.” “I am far more of an individualist than I ever was…. My nature is seeking a fresh mode of self-realisation. That is all I am concerned with.” Like Pater, Wilde employs...
Wilde argues that “the writer of dialogues ‘can both reveal and conceal himself’” (William Shuter, “Pater, Wilde, Douglas and the Impact of “Greats”,” English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920, Vol. 46, No.
3 (2003), p. 263): what do we think of the idea that the Platonic dialogue has a direct and necessary relationship to the concept of the...
I’m struck by how neatly pre-1900 queer historiography breaks down into 20th-century essentialist, hetero/homo binary readings and 21st-century, neo-Foucauldian, contextually-contingent readings. It’s as if suddenly around 1999 there was some convention where every queer historian and literary critic in America and Europe suddenly decided to apply an entirely new methodology to their...
The more I read, the more I feel as if I’m seriously onto something with my class-and-intellectual-privilege angle. Many people are almost-saying it, but no one seems to have really pulled all the threads together to say that homosexuality was created by the upper literate and literary classes. Which is wonderful and exciting and really empowering, and makes me feel like a real historian. It...
“So far as Wilde’s mature sexuality was concerned, what distinguished him,...”
– Wright, Built of Books, p. 94
More Problems in Greek Ethics
Wright, Built of Books, p. 334n4: “It is anachronistic to refer to love between men, both in Greek society and in the late Victorian period, as ‘homosexual’. I have, however, used the term throughout this book for the sake of convenience.”
NO NO NO NO NO there are so many easy workarounds for this! Don’t succumb! You’ll delude the reader!
More Katz
Responding to Sulzberger’s charge [of “licentiousness”], Whitman defended his man-love poems: “Calamus, is to me, for my intentions, indispensable… not there alone in that one series of poems, but in all…. It is one of the United States—it is the quality which makes the states whole—it is the thin thread—but, oh! the significant...
More Problems in Greek Ethics
Jonathan Katz is right and illuminating and incredible about so many things. Whitman’s relies to Symonds are not one of them. Katz, who does so much to debunk the notion of an essentialist, transepochal homosexual identity, really refuses to admit that Whitman could be anything but homosexual avant le lettre. He presents Whitman as this figure who has done everything but give a name to being...
The Woeful Victorian: A Biography of John... →
This is the most recent bio of Symonds, I think—and it’s from 1964. There’s a real market for a modern one which would take into account all the strides in 19th-century gay history plus changes in treatment of homosexuality in history in all those years. This critical figure of gay history deserves a post-Stonewall bio!
Now if only no one does this before I manage to…!
It does not really seem as if anyone is saying what I am saying. So: contra Chauncey, and this guy Valocchi, it seems that:
1. Signs of a modern sexual-object-choice model predate the Chauncey 1950s gender anxiety argument, and coexisted with a gender inversion model—it’s not that the one came along and replaced the other.
2. 19th-century middle-class MSMs have concerns about...
Quick housekeeping note
In case anyone actually reads this blog (Google Analytics tells me yes, but an awful lot of the hits are coming from my own house), the link I added to my Amazon wishlist is more of an easy way of keeping track of books I haven’t read yet than it is an actual list of things I want to acquire. Some of those books I might buy, but more often than not I’ll get them from the library. Once...
“Spencer, Wilson, and Ostrander are three of the four casual pickups that...”
– Katz, Love Stories, p. 149. Which brings me to a thought: it is entirely possible, within the confines of a pre-homosexual world, that Whitman had a greater erotic affinity for men. That does not suggest, however, that “Children of Adam” or any of his other stated expressions of...
My favorite title yet
“Classism and Classicism: Intellectual Privilege and the Foundations of American Homosexuality, 1880-1930”
I’m getting more specific. If I use this angle, not only am I much narrower (which is a good thing), I can talk about my literary men and their searches for validation in literature, Hellenism, the academy, and of course the transatlantic stuff and what comes over from...
Further to homosexuality being upper-class
Inspired by a discussion yesterday with Sophie in which she raised some really good points about class context:
Here’s a paragraph from Jonathan Ned Katz’s book, in the context of an 1836 story about a man who was robbed by a prostitute whom, he later discovered, was in fact a man dressed as and passing as a woman:
“Bowyer also discovered,” said the Sun, that the...
a thought
I have been immersed in bibliographies for much of the afternoon/evening. It is astonishing—simply astonishing—how much more work has been done in British homosexuality in my period than in American homosexuality. It’s borderline weird, actually. I refuse to believe that the material just isn’t there. Everything I’m looking at seems to suggest that there’s about a 30-40...
Another concept
Further to a putative thesis advisor’s book, which of course has now skyrocketed towards the top of my reading list, I wonder if it would be a legitimate and supportable claim to suggest that it was the established transatlantic intellectual network (through the academy, or through wherever) that was already trading int/cult trends, that enabled the importation of homosexuality to America....
June 2010
11 posts
Concepts
I’ve been falling down on the job on this, as I’m both on vacation and have taken a lot of my notetaking offline. But just in case anyone’s reading, some conceptual statements I formulated in the throes of insomnia a couple nights ago:
The role that American intellectuals played in importing (keyword) homosexuality from Britain/Europe
- through the university culture and...
“The New York Times, not given to praising Wilde, announced next day,...”
– Ellmann 431, on Earnest. There’s the American reception for you!
Acknowledgements
To the Alternative Food Co-op in Wakefield, RI, under the auspices of whose free wi-fi it appears likely to turn out that reasonable amounts of research for this thesis will have been conducted.
Less critical review of same →
“In this study, Hatheway searches for modern concepts of homophobia and gay identity in the Gilded Age. Rather than a recent concept born of changing sexual and psychological norms in the late twentieth century, “homophobia” here describes virtually any derogatory opinions of same-sex sexuality, as he argues that the modern concept is rooted in neurologists’ concerns and...
Critical review of same →
The Gilded Age Construction of Modern American... →
This is a book that I MUST order and read post-haste, as it is likely to have CRITICAL thesis implications.
A paragraph
Historians such as Chauncey, et al. tend to date the formation of gay communities in America from the early 20th century—often after WWI—when population drift and the growth of urban population centers, shifting cultural attitudes, changes in the state of women’s roles in society, etc. caused people who understood themselves to have something in common by virtue of their sexual object choice...
“At an age when [Englishmen] are still boys at Eton, or lads at Oxford, they are...”
– Oscar Wilde, “The American Man,” Court and Society Review IV, 142 (23 March 1887), 270-1. I wonder (if true) what relevance this has to the apparently greater coagulation of women’s intellectual, homosexual community at the period.
'The Real Critter' →
Sophisticated English readers suspected that the revelation had something to do with those phallic processions, though Whitman fended off their invitations to be more explicit about what he called “the love of comrades,” or about what precisely transpired in his “Calamus” sequence, in which he wrote of “a youth who loves me and whom I love, silently approaching and seating himself near, that he...
General thoughts halfway through Jeb & Dash
Jeb and Dash very clearly, to me, sits between the aesthetic era of fin-de-siècle Britain and what’s recognizable as American gay identity from the mid-century onwards. It’s obvious that by the 1920s aestheticism as gay has permeated America; Jeb is reading all these guys like Pater or Swinburne or things and has his own understandings of beauty and aestheticism. His description of...
"The Role of Intellectual Communities in Inventing...
Perhaps, after all, [homosexuality] never has been discovered. I myself would say that it had merely been [invented. As a social construct. Round about the fin-de-siècle. By writers and intellectuals].
- Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, with some emendations by E.M. Rutherford.
May 2010
10 posts
More organizational thoughts
Building on an earlier post about chapters, I do like the three directions I’ve already established, but want to tweak them a bit and add an introduction and conclusion:
1. Brief introduction which situates the reader in a historical context before the invention of homosexuality, and gives her the tools necessary to understand why I keep using constructions like...
Notes from conversation with mother, 25 May
Possible title/way of describing the project: “The Invention of American Homosexuality”
- how in America homosexuality gets displaced because other forms of identity politics pose greater threats or relevance to democratic ideals (c.f. race, gender)
- C.f. people in Britain like Symonds and Carpenter who start to construct a kind of proto-homosexual identity politics—it seems like...
Historiography
In conversation with Nat, Rajiv, and Maddy at lunch today, I found myself wondering if contemporary understanding of what Americans were saying about homosexuality in the fin-de-siècle has anything to do with history’s tendency to privilege men’s experiences, writing, correspondence, etc. over women’s, or with men’s ability to occupy, say, positions in the academy at this...
Title
Alan Sinfield, The Wilde Century: Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde and the Queer Moment (New York: Columbia UP, 1994).
Also, for more on the Richardson book, see my commonplace blog here.
Key quotes from Whitman Disciples book
“Symonds’s statements were the closest anyone had yet come to linking Whitman with “sexual anomalies.” Symonds’s tone was so discreet and his suggestions so hedged with double negatives that most readers seem to have been oblivious to his implications. However, the American disciples were outraged. William Sloane Kennedy, the Boston journalist and Whitman disciple,...