Comparative Cultural Studies

James P. Wilper

• Publisher: Purdue University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781612494210
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

In Reconsidering the Emergence of the Gay Novel in English and German, James P. Wilper examines a key moment in the development of the modern gay novel by analyzing four novels by German, British, and American writers. Wilper studies how the texts are influenced by and respond and react to four schools of thought regarding male homosexuality in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The first is legal codes criminalizing sex acts between men and the religious doctrine that informs them. The second is the ancient Greek erotic philosophy, in which a revival of interest took place in the late nineteenth century. The third is sexual science (or "sexology"), which offered various medical and psychological explanations for same-sex desire and was employed variously to defend, as well as to attempt to cure, this "perversion." And fourth, in the wake of the scandal caused by his trials and conviction for "gross indecency, " Oscar Wilde became associated with a homosexual stereotype based on "unmanly" behavior. Wilper analyzes the four novels—Thomas Mann's Death in Venice, E. M. Forster's Maurice, Edward Prime-Stevenson's Imre: A Memorandum, and John Henry Mackay's The Hustler —in relation to these schools of thought, and focuses on the exchange and cross-cultural influence between linguistic and cultural contexts on the subject of love and desire between men.

Part 1
Religion and Law

Chapter 1
Sin and Crime

When, as a teenage boy during the First World War, the author Beverley Nichols (1898–1983) was found reading Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray by his father, it was as if he had been “caught in an illicit act”: his father “spat on the book and tore the pages with his teeth. ‘Oscar Wilde! To think that my son …’ Beverley protested that he did not know what Wilde had done” (Connon, Beverley Nichols 40). Nichols’s biographer questions whether this innocence was feigned, considering the fact that Nichols knew to hide the book and to read it in his bedroom with the door locked. Nonetheless, the admission abated his father’s rage. The next morning at breakfast, by way of explanation, he handed his son “a sheet of paper on which he had written, ‘ILLUM CRIMEN HORRIBILE QUOD NON NOMINANDUM EST,’ which Beverley translated as ‘The horrible crime which is not to be named.’ ‘That,’ said [his father], ‘is what the man did’” (Connon, Beverley Nichols 40). Nichols’s father’s (over)reaction to witnessing his son reading Dorian Gray is indicative of the currency Wilde held in Britain as a byword for homosexuality in the decades after his conviction for acts of “gross indecency” with other men in 1895 and his death in 1900. And yet this is an association of which young Nichols is seemingly unaware, and so his father must fall back on another naming structure, possibly the only other nomenclature that was available to him, that of religio-legal discourse. Wilde was guilty of the “crime” so horrible that it “is not to be named.” He could have also said “sin,” as for many at this time the two concepts were synonymous and interchangeable. In contrast to French fiction of the era that fictionalized male-male passions, for instance Rachilde’s Les hors nature (1897) or André Gide’s L’immoraliste (The Immoralist, 1901), which were written and published in a country where male same-sex acts had not been criminalized since the Revolution (Sibalis, “Male Homosexuality” 117–18), the four works of fiction under scrutiny in this study were produced in countries where such expressions of desire were both condemned by moral-religious authorities and persecuted by temporal ones.

This chapter is in a way an extension of the introduction in that it lays a foundation for the analyses of the literary texts which follow in the three subsequent sections. This chapter considers how same-sex acts came to be known as an “unnatural” crime/sin so horrible that it could not be named among Christians, scrutinizing the formation of what I describe as the societies’ “default” discourses: religious and legal conceptions of sin and crime. It first surveys research into the development of religious attitudes from ancient times to the Middle Ages, then contrasts the development of legal strictures as an outgrowth of these attitudes from the early modern period to the turn of the twentieth century in Britain, Germany, and the United States, and finally investigates the literary responses to religio-legal discourse, in the form of the guilt and shame internalized by the protagonists and in the form of the exile and travel motif which was common to much early gay literature. The exile motif was little more than a coping mechanism for dealing with this shame and guilt, whereas the means for challenging it, directly and indirectly, as well as overcoming it lies in the three counter-discourses, which are examined in chapters 2 through 7.

Punishing “unnatural” Desire

It is generally held as a truism that the Judeo-Christian prohibition against male same-sex passions finds its source in the Bible, but the history of these religious strictures is long and complex. Biblical scholars, especially of the past twenty years, have pointed out that references to sex between men in the Bible are few and far between. “The Bible hardly ever discusses homosexual behavior,” writes Richard Hays. “There are perhaps half a dozen brief references to it in all of the scripture. In terms of emphasis, it is a minor concern” (The Moral Vision 381). Instances of citations of such “wickedness,” occur in Genesis 19.1–9; Leviticus 18.22 and 20.13; Judges 19.1–30; Romans 1.24–27; 1 Corinthians 6.9; 1 Timothy 1.10; and Jude 7 (see Rogers, Jesus, the Bible, and Homosexuality 66). Of these, the tale of the men of Sodom (Genesis 19.1–9), the Levitical prohibitions, and the pronouncements of Saint Paul (Romans 1.24–27) seem to possess the greatest cultural resonance. In the King James Version, Leviticus 18.22 states: “Thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind: it is abomination.” Leviticus 20.13 adds: “If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them.” Paul warns against acts that are “against nature” (Romans 1.26): “the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompence of their error which was meet” (1.27). These sinners, concludes Paul, “are worthy of death” (1.32). The notion that intercourse between men warrants capital punishment derives chiefly from these passages. For Oscar Wilde in 1895, the death penalty was not an option as it had been abolished in England in 1861. Not able to invoke the Levitical mandate that he “be put to death,” Justice Alfred Wills handed down “the severest sentence that the law allows,” two years in prison with hard labor, which he considered to be “totally inadequate for a case such as this” (Hyde, The Trials of Oscar Wilde 272). But why had this abomination, over numerous others listed, become such a site of sexual anxiety? Robert Allen in The Classical Origins of Modern Homophobia (2006) and Theodore Jennings in Plato or Paul? (2009) suggest that Western opprobrium predates Christianity and actually has its origins in ancient Greek philosophy. David Greenberg and Marcia Bystryn argue that Christian attitudes towards love and sex between men were forged at two key historical moments: during late antiquity and in the High Middle Ages. First, “early Christian views of sexuality were formed in the context of a broad trend toward asceticism in the Hellenistic and late Roman empire” (Greenberg and Bystryn, “Christian Intolerance of Homosexuality” 517). Thus, Christian intolerance of homosexual acts “reflected a broader rejection of all sexual experiences not intended to lead to procreation within marriage” (Greenberg and Bystryn 526). The Levitical prohibitions gained widespread authority when Roman law adopted the biblical strictures after Christianity became the state religion (Crompton, Homosexuality & Civilisation 34). Yet, after the fall of the Roman Empire, most temporal authorities are mute on the subject of sex crimes, which was a domain left to a large extent exclusively to the medieval church (Greenberg and Bystryn 530). The second historical moment which shaped religious attitudes towards homosexuality, reestablishing the boundaries between sanctioned and unsanctioned sexuality, was the Gregorian reforms of the High Middle Ages. “Ecclesiastical denunciations of homosexuality began to reappear in the 11th century, with homosexuality among the clergy becoming a target of persistent criticism” (Greenberg and Bystryn 533). The theologian and reformer Peter Damian of Ravenna (ca. 1007–1072) first used the term “sodomia” in his Liber Gomorrhianus (Books of Gomorrah, ca. 1050) essentially inventing “sodomy” as a concept “for categorizing—that is, for uniting and reifying, for judging and punishing—genital acts between members of the same sex” (Jordan, The Invention of Sodomy 43). Damian defined sodomy as anal intercourse and identified this act as one that “surpasses all others in uncleanness,” which causes the “death of the body, the destruction of the soul,” and “opens the doors of hell and closes the gates of heaven” (qtd. in Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality 211). The definitive canonical statement on sodomy was made by Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274) in his Summa theologiae (ca. 1265): same-sex acts are associated with heresy and are construed as “against nature” because, like bestiality, oral sex, and masturbation, procreation is not the aim (Boswell 318). “By the end of the 13th century,” conclude Greenberg and Bystryn, “the major elements in the Christian response toward homosexuality had been created. Scholastic theology had reconstructed sodomy as a sin against nature, far worse than other sexual sins” (542). Ecclesiastical bodies were formed to prosecute persons suspected of this sin at the same time that secular authorities were keen to begin wielding their power in this domain (542). The transition of power in regard to punishing “unnatural” sexuality from church to state in Western Europe is a multifaceted history. The sections below outline key developments in this history in Great Britain, Germany, and the United States of America in order to highlight and offer explanations for the similarities and differences in terms of moral and legal standards between these countries during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Britain: From “sodomy” to “gross indecency”

“Buggery” was first brought under the scope of temporal jurisdiction by the Buggery Act of 1533 after England’s break from the Roman Catholic Church during the reign of Henry VIII. “Forasmuch as there is not yet sufficient and condigne punishment appointed and limited by the due course of the laws of the Realm for the detestable and abominable vice of buggery committed with mankind or beast; … it may be enacted … that the same offence be from henceforth adjudged felony, and such order and form of process therein to be used against the offenders as in cases of felony at the common law” (qtd. in Moran, The Homosexual(ity) of Law 22). The new law indicates a shift in power, but not a radical reconceptualization of the offence. Jeffrey Weeks writes that the act adopted the same criteria as the church: “all acts of sodomy were equally condemned as being ‘against nature,’ whether between man and woman, man and beast, or man and man” (Coming Out 12). Byrne Fone notes that “The 1533 law secularized both the crime and the punishment”; as for felons, the punishment for sodomites was hanging and the seizure of their property (Homophobia 216). Early modern “sodomy” though, writes Alan Bray, differed to modern homosexuality in that it “covered more hazily a whole range of sexual acts, of which sexual acts between people of the same sex were only a part” (“Homosexuality and the Signs of Male Friendship” 41). He points out, moreover, that “it was not only a sexual crime” but “also a political and a religious crime” (41), which explains “the ubiquitous association of sodomy with treason and heresy” in Renaissance sources (42). Seventeenth-century records of arrest and conviction for “sodomy” and “buggery” highlight this fact. The Old Bailey, London’s central criminal court, has recently digitized its court proceedings from 1674 to 1913, and a search of the archives for “Sodomy” from the list of “Sexual Offences” between 1674 and 1700 will bring up four cases. Only one of these, though, involves intercourse between men: “Mustapha Pochowachett a Turk, was Tried for committing the most Unnatural and Horrid Sin of Buggery, which is so detestable, and not fit to be named among Christians; which he did on the 11th of this Instant May, upon the Body of one Anthony Bassa, Dutch Boy, of the age of 14 years” (“Mustapha Pochowachett”). The others involve a woman who “did commit Buggery with a certain Mungril Dog,” a man who was arrested “for Buggery of a Mare,” and Thomas Davis who was indicted for an act of “Assault upon one Charity Parrot, Spinster” (“Mungril Dog”; “Buggery of a Mare”; “Thomas Davis”).

Same-sex desire was, like all sins, a potential for any individual. John Dennis’s The Usefulness of the Stage (1698) identifies sodomy as one of the “four reigning vices” in England along with “the love of women,” drinking, and gambling (qtd. in Naphy, Born to Be Gay 151). William Naphy notes that it was believed that “some people had ‘appetites’ that incline them to one sex or another,” yet “‘giving oneself over’ to these appetites was largely a matter of the will and habit” (Naphy 149). Despite the fierce legal and religious condemnation directed at sexual acts between men during this period, many historians agree that a certain degree of tolerance toward same-sex love and the sexual act existed. Randolph Trumbach considers this tolerance more or less universal during the early modern period, citing the scant occurrences of charges being brought against perpetrators (Trumbach, “Renaissance Sodomy” 45). When Mary I ascended the throne, she repealed her father’s buggery act, but Elizabeth I reenacted the law in 1563. Most of the few cases that were brought to court in the century and a half after this seem to have been cases of rape against prepubescent boys (Trumbach 50). Rictor Norton concurs, stating that “Laws against homosexuality have never been enforced with full vigour systematically in any country: prosecution always proceeds by fits and starts” (Norton, The Myth of the Modern Homosexual 140).

The nineteenth century was an era during which persecution dramatically increased. There was a “widespread conservative reaction across Europe,” writes Naphy, which he identifies as a response to the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars (Naphy 235–36). Especially sexual vice was targeted by moral crusaders, as H. G. Cocks argues, never “before in the history of Britain had so many men been arrested, convicted, imprisoned, pilloried, and even executed for homosexual offences” (Cocks, “Secrets, Crimes, and Diseases” 107). Charles Upchurch writes that the early decades of the nineteenth century saw a rise in surveillance and a “new uniformity of the police presence,” which brought with it a “greater frequency of arrests” and inspired “self-policing” on the part of homosexual men (Upchurch, Before Wilde 15). Searching the digital records of the Old Bailey attests to this. From 1674 to 1913 there were 1072 total cases involving sodomy and 96 involving “assault with sodomitical intent.” There were, as stated above, four cases of sodomy from 1674 to 1700 with no cases of sodomitical assault. This rose markedly in the eighteenth century to 56 cases of sodomy and 30 cases of sodomitical assault. And the numbers surged between 1801 and 1900, with 668 cases of sodomy and 61 cases of assault with sodomitical intent tried at the Old Bailey alone. The dramatic upswing in uses of the anti-sodomy law is contrasted to the abolition of the death penalty in England for this crime in 1861, but it still carried with it fines, prison sentences, and the pillory.

The prohibition against same-sex acts between men was reinscribed in English law with Section XI of the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885. The amendment originally had nothing to do with sex between men but was intended to control brothels by increasing the age of consent for girls from thirteen to sixteen. A section was introduced by Henry Labouchère which reads: “Any male person who, in public or private, commits, or is a party to the commission of, or procures, or attempts to procure the commission by any male person of, any act of gross indecency shall be guilty of a misdemeanour, and being convicted shall be liable at the discretion of the Court to be imprisoned for any term not exceeding two years, with or without hard labour” (“The Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885” 335). The origins and intention of this piece of legislation, known as the Labouchère Amendment, writes Lesley Hall, “are profoundly obscure and have resisted the attempts of historians to elucidate” (Hall, “Sexual Cultures in Britain” 41). The MP’s “aim in proposing the amendment remains unclear,” argues Morris Kaplan, who cites Frank Harris, a contemporary journalist, who later suggested that “it was an effort to sabotage the entire bill.” Nevertheless, the amendment was added to the act without debate and became law (Kaplan, Sodom on the Thames 175). Jeffrey Weeks asserts that the result of the new law was a sharpening of the division between legitimate and illegitimate forms of sexual relations. “Homosexuality was seen as posing a threat to stable sexual relations within the bourgeois family, which was increasingly regarded as an essential buttress to social stability” (Weeks, Making Sexual History 25). His interpretation, though, rests upon the assumption that this law made all homosexual acts illegal for the first time, whereas before this was the case only for instances where proof of anal intercourse could be established. Norton refutes this oft repeated assertion on the part of some historians. “Before 1885 most of the men prosecuted under the antigay law were convicted of ‘attempted sodomy,’ a misdemeanour covering behaviour such as oral intercourse, mutual masturbation, frottage, groping, and soliciting” (Norton 141). The phrase “in public or in private” contained in the amendment, argues Norton, did not dramatically expand the remit of the law. On the contrary, “it was always the case that sex between men in private was a criminal offence.” The only change, he asserts, is the amendment’s term “gross indecency,” which is merely a nineteenth-century reworking of the phrase “attempted sodomy” (141). Matt Cook, as well, suggests that the new amendment was in fact a less decisive shift in anti-sodomy laws than Weeks and Ed Cohen suggest in their respective studies (Cook, London and the Culture of Homosexuality 42–43; Cohen, Talk on the Wilde Side 91–93, 118–19).

The 1885 law, since it did not actually increase the scope of anti-sodomy laws, seems to have actually reduced the penalty for sex between men. The draconian measure of capital punishment for this crime, which was in place at the beginning of the century, eventually gave way to a maximum sentence of two years with hard labor. But for the upswing in conviction, blackmail, and the threat of social ostracism, the Labouchère amendment would appear to be a modest liberalization of the law. In reality, this signals a shift in the practices of policing sex crimes, argues Charles Upchurch, “from a system reliant on relatively rare but brutal displays of punishment on the offender’s body to one that sought to reform behavior through a system of observation and regulation.” Critical to this shift is a movement away from the public use of the death penalty towards more frequent and consistent enforcement of lesser sentences (Upchurch 7). The first conviction of “gross indecency” at the Old Bailey was that of Edgar Miller on 3 May 1886, who received nine months’ hard labor. Between this first case and Oscar Wilde’s conviction on 20 May 1895, there were 94 convictions of gross indecency at the Old Bailey (“Edgar Miller”). Apart from the Wilde trials, the highest-profile early application of the law was the Cleveland Street Scandal (1889), with the conviction of two working-class male prostitutes who operated out of the brothel in Cleveland Street near London’s West End (Kaplan 168–70; see also Lewis et al., The Cleveland Street Affair; Hyde, The Cleveland Street Scandal).

Germany: Movements and Setbacks

Until Article 116 of the Constitutio Criminalis Carolina (the first criminal code of the Holy Roman Empire), the cities and states within the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation had no sodomy laws; however, in the late Middle Ages in the bustling and well-urbanized regions that now make up southern Germany and Switzerland, many law courts operated from the assumption that penal codes of the Roman Empire were still in effect (Puff, Sodomy in Reformation Germany and Switzerland 27). For the entire German Reich, Emperor Charles V brought sexual decency under temporal jurisdiction in 1532, one year before Henry VIII issued his decree. The Constitutio Criminalis Carolina criminalized sodomitical acts (“Sodomiterei”) as “against nature” (“wider die Natur”) which was punishable by death (Hull, Sexuality, State, and Civil Society in Germany 64). “If anyone commits impurity with a beast, or man with a man, or a woman with a woman, they have forfeited their lives and shall after the common custom, be sentenced to death by burning” (qtd. in Puff 29) (“so eyn mensch mit eynem vihe, mann mit mann, weib mit weib, vnkeusch treiben, die haben auch das leben verwürckt, vnd man soll sie der gemeynen gewonheyt nach mit dem fewer vom leben zum todt richten”; Kaufmann, Die peinliche Gerichtsordnung Kaiser Karls V. 81). Although this law persisted into the eighteenth century, the decentralized nature of the German Nation, until 1871 with the establishment of the Kaiserreich, meant that regional variations with regard to enforcement and the scope of the law varied greatly. Helmut Puff writes that as “Cohesion between regions different in language, economic output, and level of urbanization was low” (19) and because “the Constitutio Criminalis Carolina was subsidiary to customary and local law, it took many principalities and territories more than a century to implement the code” (30; see also Hull 58). The disparity between regions also had an effect on the understanding of what acts constituted sodomy. Maria Boes points out that the definition of “unchastity” or “impurity” (“vnkeusch”) could be elastic depending on the time period or location within the Holy Roman Empire. Sodomy could be as broadly conceptualized as to include all nonprocreative sexual acts or even sex between Christians and non-Christians (Boes, “On Trial in Early Modern Germany” 29).

The Enlightenment ideals which pushed for the decriminalization of religious offenses, such as witchcraft, blasphemy, heresy, and sodomy, became reality in France with the Revolutionary criminal code of 1791, which was then confirmed in the Napoleonic Penal Code of 1810 (Sibalis, “Male Homosexuality in the Age of Enlightenment and Revolution” 117–18). Those countries under France’s direct sway at this time followed suit by adopting similar penal reforms. The southern German kingdom of Bavaria abolished its anti-sodomy law in 1813, setting a prescient for the German states of Württemberg (in 1839), Braunschweig, and Hannover (both in 1840) to follow. Reform came to the hegemonic powers of Austria and Prus...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Note on Translations
• Introduction
• Part 1: Religion and Law
• Part 2: Greek Love
• Part 3: Science and Sex
• Part 4: Wild about Oscar Wilde?
• Afterword
• Works Cited
• Index