Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford , livre ebook

HELLENISM AND HOMOSEXUALITY
IN V ICTORIAN O XFORD
LINDA DOWLING
Cornell University Press
Ithaca and London
F OR WCD
καὶ π ς ἂν δέξαιτο ἑαυτ τοιούτους πα δας μ λλον γεγονέναι ἢ τοὺς ἀνθρωπίνους καὶ εἰς Ὅμηρον ἀποβλέψας καὶ Ἡσίοδον καὶ τοὺς ἄλλους ποιητὰς τοὺς ἀγαθοὺς ζηλ ν, ο α ἔκγονα ἑαυτ ν καταλείπουσιν, ἃ ἐκείνοις ἀθάνατον κλέος καὶ μνήμην παρέχεται αὐτὰ τοια τα ὄντα.
CONTENTS I LLUSTRATIONS P REFACE 1. A ESTHETE AND E FFEMINATUS 2. V ICTORIAN M ANHOOD AND THE W ARRIOR I DEAL 3. T HE S OCRATIC E ROS 4. T HE H IGHER S ODOMY W ORKS C ITED
ILLUSTRATIONS
J OHN A DDINGTON S YMONDS , 1864
B ENJAMIN J OWETT
W ALTER P ATER , 1872
W. H. M ALLOCK
O SCAR W ILDE IN G REECE , 1877
O SCAR W ILDE IN AESTHETIC COSTUME , 1882
R OBERT R OSS
J OHN G RAY , 1893
O SCAR W ILDE AND L ORD A LFRED D OUGLAS , 1892
PREFACE
“In political thought and analysis,” declares Michel Foucault in The History of Sexuality , the charter for so much current writing about homosexuality, “we still have not cut off the head of the king.” His point, that a certain rudimentary conception of power continues in unrecognized ways to dominate modem cultural theory, bears with a special urgency on this last great project of Foucault’s career. For The History of Sexuality is precisely an attempt to develop a theory of human sexual identity in terms that become available only when one has broken free of what Foucault calls the model of law and sovereignty, the errors and illusions involved in imagining sexuality merely as some realm of free or natural desire reduced to silence by an oppression imposed from above. In relation to sexuality, and in particular, today, to homosexuality, the law and sovereignty model yields what Foucault famously denominates the repressive hypothesis, the history of sexuality as successive scenes in a single drama in which sexual desire struggles to liberate itself from the oppressive weight of law and prohibition and taboo.
There are a number of reasons why Foucault goes to such lengths to dissociate himself from the repressive hypothesis, but the most important, I think, concerns the enormous loss of explanatory power that occurs when the various transmutations of sexual desire are conceived according to the law and sovereignty model—the monarch, the state, the police as agencies of repression and intolerance, the body and its desires as the realm of nature and freedom. Against this impoverishment Foucault then counterposes his own immensely more complex vision of pouvoir-savoir, of “discourse” and “law” and “desire” and “sexuality” as belonging to a simultaneous set of relations sustained by power as a ceaseless flow of social energy, as well as those impedances to its flow, built into the system and its operations, to which Foucault gives the name “resistance.” This is resistance as envisioned throughout The History of Sexuality, as a ruse or strategy through which power expands its operations, ceaselessly generating new “forbidden” or “illegitimate” categories of experience that are then reabsorbed into the larger social structure through their equally ceaseless struggle for legitimation.
If nothing else, such an analysis serves brilliantly to explain why so much writing on homosexuality that today purports to honor Foucault’s work nonetheless persists in ignoring his rejection of the repressive hypothesis. For the way in which power silently expands its circumference is always on Foucault’s account through the promise of an everretreating freedom lying just beyond its reach. Even when one is convinced that this is a sham freedom, its temptations are, one sees, overwhelming:
If sex is repressed, that is, condemned to prohibition, nonexistence, and silence, then the mere fact that one is speaking about it has the appearance of a deliberate transgression. A person who holds forth in such language places himself to a certain extent outside the reach of power…. Something that smacks of revolt, of promised freedom, of the coming age of a different law, slips easily into this discourse on sexual oppression…. What sustains our eagerness to speak of sex in terms of repression is doubtless this opportunity to speak out against the powers that be, to utter truths and promise bliss…to pronounce a discourse that combines the fervor of knowledge, the determination to change the laws, and the longing for the garden of earthly delights. (1:6–7)
This is, above all, the perspective I have sought to avoid in the following chapters, in favor of Foucault’s own alternative conception of power as the name given to a complex strategical situation in a particular society (1:93), together with his injunction that one must never “imagine a world of discourse divided between accepted discourse and excluded discourse…but as a multiplicity of discursive elements…the things said and those concealed, the enunciations required and those forbidden” (1:100). For though the particular society 1 examine is Victorian England, and though the specific strategical situation I analyze is the Oxford university reform movement, my larger point is always that “homosexuality” eventually emerged as a positive social identity only through a slow process of cultural transformation taking place over centuries, one having as much to do with English classical republican thought in the eighteenth century or the concept of virtue in sixteenth-century Florence as with events during the reign of Victoria. This is the level of deep structural transformation, it seems to me, with regard to which Foucault’s theory of pouvoir-savoir remains wholly indispensable.
In specific terms, my focus in this book is on the way Greek studies operated as a “homosexual code” during the great age of English university reform, working invisibly to establish the grounds on which, after its shorter-term construction as a nineteenth-century sexual pathology (Krafft-Ebing, Havelock Ellis), “homosexuality” would subsequently emerge as the locus of sexual identity for which, today, such late-Victorian figures as Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde are so often claimed as symbolic precursors. As regards Victorian Oxford, my argument is that (i) such leading university reformers as Benjamin Jowett were seeking to establish in Hellenism, the systematic study of Greek history and literature and philosophy, a ground of transcendent value alternative to Christian theology—the metaphysical underpinning of Oxford from the Middle Ages through the Tractarian movement. But (2) once they had done so, Pater and Wilde and the Uranian poets could not be denied the means of developing out of this same Hellenism a homosexual counter-discourse able to justify male love in ideal or transcendental terms: the “spiritual procreancy” associated specifically with Plato’s Symposium and more generally with ancient Greece itself.
In the immediate background of the Oxford reform movement, I argue, there lies a specific and overwhelming cultural anxiety within Victorian liberalism, a fear of stagnation and paralysis threatening to leave England isolated within a system of dying or outmoded ideas even as other European nations were beginning to register the stirrings of new movements in scientific and historical thought. In this context England’s advances at the level of material progress not only provided no consolation to such liberals as J. S. Mill and Matthew Arnold, but, insofar as they led to commercialization and the complacencies of a mass society, the advances were a source of additional dismay. At Oxford such liberal reformers as Jowett and Arthur Stanley, Mark Pattison, and Goldwin Smith would thus seek in the study of Greek culture nothing less than a surety for England’s future life as a nation, a life that would be, as Arnold so insistently repeated, determined by the quality of its ideas rather than by the mere quantity of its railways or factories or people.
As we shall see in Chapter 2, a crucial strategy of such leading spirits as Jowett and Pattison was to commandeer for reform purposes certain institutional structures originally developed by the Tractarian genera-tion of J. H. Newman and Hurrell Froude in a specifically religious interest” the revival of the college tutorial as a pastoral and therefore intimate personal relationship, a recent Tractarian tradition of intense undergraduate male friendship—for the secular purpose of producing a new civic elite to lead Britain out of sociocultural stagnation and into a triumphal age of imperial responsibility: Britain as a world civilization, with Oxford as its intellectual center. In this context Jowett and others would call upon Greek studies, and in particular the philosophy of Plato—“the greatest uninspired writing,” Jowett called it “as an alternative source of transcendent value to replace the basis previously provided by Christianity. Thus would the course of classical studies known as Literae humaniores or “Greats,” with Plato’s works as the central object of study, undergo a crucial transformation at the curricular heart of Oxford.
The Plato of Jowett and the Oxford reformers, as scholars like Richard Jenkins and Frank Turner have so ably demonstrated, was in most important respects the Plato of George Grote’s History of Greece and J. S. Mill’s On Liberty , the philosopher of a healthy and productive skepticism and a fearless determination, in the phrase from On Liberty that was to prove so massively influential on two generations of Oxford men, “to follow one’s intellect to whatever conclusions it may lead.” Yet this same Plato could then at the same moment and by an identical logic be taken as the tutelary spirit of a movement never foreseen by Jowett or Stanley or Pattison, in which such writers as Walter Pater and John Addington Symonds would deduce from Plato’s own writings an apology for male love as something not only noble but infinitely more ennobling than an exploded Christianity and those sexual taboos and legal pro-scripti