Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford

Linda C. Dowling

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780801468735
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In April 1895, Oscar Wilde stood in the prisoner's dock of the Old Bailey, charged with "acts of gross indecency with another male person. These filthy practices, the prosecutor declared, posed a deadly threat to English society, "a sore which cannot fail in time to corrupt and taint it all." Wilde responded with a speech of legendary eloquence, defending love between men as a love "such as Plato made the very basis of his philosophy, and such as you find in the sonnets of Michelangelo and Shakespeare." Electrified, the spectators in the courtroom burst into applause.Although Wilde was ultimately imprisoned, the courtroom response to his speech signaled a revolutionary moment—the emergence into the public sphere of a kind of love that had always been proscribed in English culture. In this luminous work of intellectual history, Linda Dowling offers the first detailed account of Oxford Hellenism, the Victorian philosophical and literary movement that made possible Wilde's brief triumph and anticipated the modern possibility of homosexuality as a positive social identity.A homosocial culture and a language of moral legitimacy for homosexuality emerged, Dowling argues, as unforeseen consequences of Oxford University reform. Through their search in Plato and Greek literature for a transcendental value that might substitute for a lost Christian theology, such liberal reformers as Benjamin Jowett unintentionally created a cultural context in which male love—the "spiritual procreancy" celebrated in Plato's Symposium —might be both experienced and justified in ideal terms. Dowling traces the institutional career of Hellenism from its roots in Oxford reform through its blossoming in an approach to Greek studies that came to operate as a code for homosexuality. Recreating the incidents, controversies, and scandals that heralded the growth of Hellenism, Dowling provides a new cultural and theoretical context within which to read writers as diverse as Wilde, Jowett, John Addington Symonds, Walter Pater, Lord Alfred Douglas, Robert Buchanan, and W. H. Mallock.

CHAPTER ONE

AESTHETE AND EFFEMINATUS

Amphibious thing! that acting either part,

The trifling head, or the corrupted heart,

Fop at the toilet, flatterer at the board,

Now trips a lady, and now struts a lord.

—Alexander Pope, Epistle to Arbuthnot, 1735

In the final week of April 1895 Oscar Wilde stood in the prisoner’s dock of the Old Bailey, charged, in the dry words of the indictment, with “acts of gross indecency with another male person” committed “against the peace of our said Lady the Queen her Crown and dignity” (Hyde, Trials 179). The prosecutor for the Crown explained to the jury in more vivid terms just what this meant: Wilde and his co-defendant had joined in an “abominable traffic” in which young men were induced to engage in “giving their bodies, or selling them, to other men for the purpose of sodomy” (190). These same filthy practices, the prosecutor darkly proclaimed in his final summation, posed a deadly threat to English society, a moral infection, “a sore which cannot fail in time to corrupt and taint it all” (253). Wilde answered these charges, as is well known, in a speech of sudden and eloquent energy. Passionately defend-ing male love as the noblest of attachments, a love “such as Plato made the very basis of his philosophy, and such as you find in the sonnets of Michelangelo and Shakespeare,” Wilde called it “pure” and “perfect” and “intellectual” (236), his superb self-possession and ringing peroration so electrifying that the courtroom listeners burst into spontaneous applause.¹

To those familiar with Wilde’s career as a writer and public personality, his eloquent composure would have come as no surprise. For Wilde had long since grown accustomed to facing large and hostile audiences as a dramatist, and some four years before at the Crabbet Club he had already rehearsed this very defense of male love in virtually the same words. The extraordinary element in the Old Bailey scene is thus his listeners” sudden storm of applause. With it this audience of courtroom spectators would signal a wholly unanticipated assent, momentary and emotional as it may have been, to a view of love between men that had always before been proscribed with all the rigor commanded by English social and religious prohibitions. The applause of Wilde’s listeners marks the sudden emergence into the public sphere of a modem discourse of male love formulated in the late Victorian period by such writers as Walter Pater and John Addington Symonds and Wilde himself, a new language of moral legitimacy pointing forward to Anglo-American decriminalization and, ultimately, a fully developed assertion of homosexual rights.

In this sense Wilde’s peroration on male love signals a moment of cultural discontinuity or rupture. For in speaking about Wilde’s criminal activities the Crown prosecutor had been compelled to employ a legal language conceiving sodomy in what Alan Bray has called “directly physical” terms (17), that is, as belonging to a forbidden range of merely genital practices having no essential connection to personal identity. Against this older discourse of the English common law, so visibly bearing the sedimented traces of an immemorial village or agrarian past, Wilde deploys a new and powerful vocabulary of personal identity, a language of mind, sensibility, and emotion, of inward and intellectual relations. These are the relations of which male love, as the “noblest form of affection,” represents the most exalted type, with “that deep, spiritual affection” between an elder and a younger man seen as so global in its reference to the full individuality of each as to involve the underlying and invariable substratum of personality traditionally regarded as constituting identity. Wilde’s triumph in the war of discourses symbolized by his exchanges with the Crown prosecutor was to have equated this thoroughly modem notion of personal identity with the ideal of male love surviving in the writings of ancient Greece.

In Wilde’s invocation of Plato and Greek philosophy we thus glimpse the momentary opening up of an epistemological space that would soon enough, and then not least because of Wilde’s own tragic imprisonment as a sexual criminal, be reconquered in the name of new clinical or psychiatric languages of sexual pathology. This is the temporary space always implied, though never mentioned as such, in Foucault’s influential analysis of nineteenth-century sexuality, a space produced by the strain or rupture that occurs during the period when “homosexuality” as a psychiatric perversion is being dissociated from sodomy as a criminal act. The power and originality of Wilde’s appeal to a Hellenic ideal lie in the way it exploits this space, outlining in irresistible terms an idea of male love as a mode of inward erotic orientation and sensibility wholly distinct from mere genital activity, and yet also a mode so far unreduced to the newer pathological models of medical and psychiatric science.

It is this originality that wins the spontaneous applause of the Old Bailey spectators. In all his previous successes, one of those spectators would later say, in all the acclaim earned during the unclouded years of his earlier career, Wilde had “never had so great a triumph.”² Yet for all his strategic brilliance in seizing momentarily unoccupied ideological ground, Wilde’s triumph must at a deeper level also be seen as the triumph of a Victorian Hellenism that had been gradually developing throughout the nineteenth century, ancient Greek life and thought as they had been reinterpreted by Victorian liberals seeking alternatives to older categories of civic discourse. This is Victorian Hellenism as so ably studied in recent years by such scholars as Richard Jenkyns and Frank Turner, in short; it both provides the context of Wilde’s courtroom speech and then plays a central role in the modern emergence of homosexuality as a social identity.

To proclaim Wilde’s apology for male love a modem discourse, how-ever, is to do little more than invoke a nowTamiliar story of repression and freedom, outmoded and benighted prejudices giving way, at last and after much pain and turmoil, to progress and enlightened rationality. The great objection to this story is not, as is now sometimes said, that it too is merely ideological, a way of not seeing certain repressive impulses lurking in our own ideas of modernity and progress, but that it renders invisible as well the complex genealogy of Wilde’s language of nobility and purity in male love. For Wilde’s invocation of Plato and Greek philosophy signals not some unproblematic triumph of modernity over the dead past but, in just the way Foucault’s work on sexuality so complexly insists, a moment in those ceaseless recombinations of cub tural materials in which the new or contemporary or modern most often comes to birth through some transmutation, under the pressures of history and ideology, of the old or ancient or even the archaic.

This is why, for instance, the language of the Crown prosecutor in Wilde’s trial signals, quite as much as does Wilde’s own vocabulary of purity and noble aspiration, a crucial moment in the modem emergence of homosexuality as a positive social identity. For as Wilde’s language belongs to a strategically revived idiom of Greek ideality, the prosecutors belongs to an ancient tradition of classical republican thought which had come to dominate civic discourse in England through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, that language of “corruption” and “effeminacy” and “virtue” so richly elucidated in recent years by J. G. A. Pocock and those writing under his influence. It is only the dying echoes of classical republicanism, to be sure, which we hear in the prosecutor’s dark warning that Wilde’s sodomitical practices threaten the corruption of English society, but even in those echoes may be felt the presence of a discourse retaining a great measure of ideological potency. The applause greeting Wilde’s impassioned defense of male love thus demands to be heard not merely as some unproblematic victory of modem views over outmoded prejudices, but as the victory of a new ideal of Greek civilization over an alternative vision of the ancient world which had governed public discourse in England for over two centuries.

The great monument of classical republican anxiety over England’s fate as a nation, a tract nearly forgotten for over two hundred years and only recently restored to its true significance by the work of Pocock and his school, is John Brown’s Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times (1757), an angry and urgent warning that English society is being ruined by luxury and corruption, that like Athens and Sparta and Rome before her England has entered the last stage of an all but irreversible historical decline, that the English people are, as Brown vehemently puts it, “rolling to the brink of a precipice that must destroy us” (15).³ One major achievement of Pocock’s Machiavellian Moment has been to recover for students of European political thought the lost meanings of the two central terms in the classical republican vocabulary of civic alarm—“luxury” and “corruption” as these entail an entire theory of cyclical history and the possibility, the Machiavellian ridurre ax principii, of the last-minute moral regeneration of a society otherwise rolling to the brink of destruction.

The master terms in Brown’s Eestimate, as in Pocock’s account of them, are indeed “luxury” and “corruption,” but along with them there also occurs another term, “effeminacy,” whose meaning in classical republican discourse we have only begun fully to grasp. For while the strangeness of “luxury” and “corruption” to modem ears is that they entail a theory of history in which no one any longer believes—indeed, which no one outside a small circle of intellectual historians even remembers to have existed “the strangeness of “effeminacy” is that it has nothing to do with maleness and femaleness in the modern sense, what Roland Barthes has called the “binary prison” of gender opposition as it has emerged in the two centuries since Brown’s Estimate. For when Brown inveighs, as he does throughout the Estimate, against “a vain, luxurious, and selfish EFFEMINACY” (67), he is not looking forward to modem gender categories but gazing backward to a vanished archaic past in which the survival of a community was sustained in an almost metaphysical as well as a wholly practical sense by the valor of its citizen soldiers.

The manner in which a metaphysics of community may always be seen to underlie the ancient ideal of martial valor is brilliantly caught by T. B. Macaulay, himself a lifelong and thoughtful student of ancient history, in an essay prompted by his rereading of Machiavelli’s Discourses. No better epigraph could be chosen, perhaps, for Pocock’s recent discussions of the neo-Harringtonian revival in Restoration England, or the militia question as it was endlessly debated in the eighteenth century by John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon and others in the “commonwealthman” tradition, or Brown as he thunders in the Estimate against an “effeminacy” ungraspable in modern terms, than Macaulay’s depiction of the ancient Greek city-states:

The state of society in the little commonwealths of Greece, the close connection and mutal dependence of the citizens, and the severity of the laws of war, tended to encourage an opinion which, under such circumstances, could hardly be called erroneous. The interests of every individual were inseparably bound up with those of the State…. When Pericles, in the Peloponnesian war, told the Athenians that, if their country triumphed, their private losses would speedily be repaired, but that, if their arms failed of success, every individual amongst them would probably be ruined, he spoke no more than the truth…. To be butchered on the smoking ruins of their city, to be dragged in chains to a slave-market, to see one child tom from them to dig in the quarries of Sicily, and another to guard the harems of Persepolis, these were the frequent and probable consequences of national calamities. (“Machiavelli” 311–12)

The language of corruption as it dominates English political discourse in the eighteenth century will always invoke at a general or abstract level the metaphysics of community implied in Macaulay’s vision of ancient Greece, a view of citizenship in which the good of the citizen and that of the polity are always understood as wholly interdependent and reciprocal. The very meaning of “corruption” in such a context is the specter of genuine community dissolving into mere personal egoism or self-interest: “a neglect of all things that concern the public welfare,” as Henry Neville would put it in 1681, speaking as one of the first important voices in English classical republicanism, “and a setting up our own private interest against it” (196). Against this specter such writers as Neville will always summon an ideal of the citizen drawn from Aristotle and Cicero and Machiavelli, a zoon politikon who fulfills his moral nature by subordinating his private desires to the public good, and in so doing creates a sphere in which his fellow citizens may in turn realize their own natures as human beings.

This metaphysics of community is underwritten at a deeper level, however, by a metaphysics of being and nonbeing or life and death already archaic at the time Aristotle was writing the Politics, a submerged collective memory of the warrior ethos in which the survival of the polity as a whole, its art and its thought and its ordinary life of field and village, is reducible in an absolutely literal sense to the willingness of a relatively small number of males to die on behalf of those too young or old or weak to go forth to battle. This underlying martial ethos too is something Macaulay’s account of Greek antiquity brilliantly captures, the sense in which the life of the entire community is reduced in moments of dire extremity to the body of the single warrior as he is willing to have his throat cut by a sword or his chest pierced by a spear in the name of a community not present on the field of battle, and the manner in which certain rights of full citizenship derive directly from this willingness to die.

The enormous and now mystifying popularity of such eighteenth-century works as Joseph Addison’s Cato (1713), Richard Glover’s Leonidash (1737), and William Whitehead’s The Roman Father (1750) has directly to do with the way classical republican discourse draws subliminally on the warrior ethos as the very measure of civic virtue. The etymology of arete, the Greek word for “goodness” or “excellence,” Bernard de Mandeville would remind his eighteenth-century readers, derives from Ares, the Greek god of war (iii). This is why, during the years of Country ideology and Opposition polemic, the years of Alexander Pope’s anti-Walpole satires and Bolingbroke’s Craftsman, the great symbol of virtue or civic selflessness, the mighty opposite of “corruption” as described by such writers as Neville, will be the republican hero dying or offering to die for Rome or Sparta. “How dreadful,” says a character in The Roman Father, Whitehead’s blank-verse tragedy on the Horatii and the Curii, “yet how lovely, is his virtue” (1:76).

On one level, such invocations of the warrior ethos serve to explain why a work like Brown’s Estimate denounces, in its dire warnings about luxury and effeminacy, such apparent trivialities as the heated nurseries just coming into London fashion: children under five years, Aristotle had said in the Politics, “ought to be used to cold; to be thus habituated is most useful for future health and for the activities of warfare” (7:17). At a much more fundamental level, the metaphoric power of the warrior ideal, that willingness to die which could be taken as the symbolic essence of classical republican virtue, explains as well why “effeminacy” in such works as the Estimate has to do not with femaleness in any modem sense but with an absence or privation of value. The root of virtus in Latin is indeed vir, signifying “male” or “male person,” but its meaning in classical republican discourse will then always be defined by the entire sphere of social existence populated by the nonwarrior or not-warrior: boys, girls, slaves, eunuchs, hermaphrodites, and all others perceived as unsuitable to or incapable of discharging the martial obligation to the polis.

The effeminatus in classical republican theory is thus always a composite or protean figure, the empty or negative symbol at once of civic enfeeblement and of the monstrous self-absorption that becomes visible in a society at just the moment at which, as we have heard Neville say, private interest has begun to prevail against those things that concern the public welfare. The pro...

Table of contents

• ILLUSTRATIONS
• PREFACE
• 1. AESTHETE AND EFFEMINATUS
• 2. VICTORIAN MANHOOD AND THE WARRIOR IDEAL
• 3. THE SOCRATIC EROS
• 4. THE HIGHER SODOMY
• WORKS CITED