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TWO BOOK REVIEWS

The first of the book’s three chronologically divided sections, “Romantic,” begins with Kevin Binfield’s examination of the strategic cross-dressing of members of the Luddite movement, a strategy he links to economic revolution rather than to an interrogation of gender roles and relations. Brewer examines the Platonic friendships between men in William Godwin’s novels to argue that, although always deeply emotional and sometimes erotically suggestive, such relationships afford their participants some sense of cultural stability that arises from their shared interpersonal, same-sex commitments. Two pieces focus on Lord Byron and draw heavily from the findings of Louis Crompton’s work on Bryon and “Greek Love”: Eric Daffron considers the three subject positions that mark Byron’s Oriental tales (“the Oriental scholar, the sentimental traveler, and the self-styled Oriental” [72]) to show how these sometimes-overlapping constructions denaturalize identity; and Jonathan Gross examines what he calls the “gay narrator” of Don Juan to reveal how the mock-epic “indicates Byron’s intention to subvert increasingly restrictive modes of speech in England while outwardly conforming to heterosexual conventions” (115). While Gross’s inclusion of a heretofore uncollected poem by Byron (“To the Memory of Charles Skinner Matthews, Esq.”) contributes much to the field of Byron studies, his essays persistent linking of misogyny and same-sex eroticism with trouble many feminists and queer theorists alike. Finally, Frederic Greene charts the erotics of Percy Shelley’s memorial to John Keats, finding in Adonais a “queer kind” of elegy (123) that responds to death positively by allowing one man’s imaginative identification with, and, finally, his carefully coded articulation of desire for, another.

The second section, “Victorian,” begins with Richard Dellamora’s examination of the aesthetic, erotic, and ideological connections that link Benjamin Disraeli and William Beckford, locating in Disraeli’s novels a significant debt to the homoeroticism that percolates throughout Beckford’s work. Donald E. Hall considers “The Private Pleasures of Silas Marner” and finds in George Eliot’s novel two sources of its eponymous hero’s ostracization—his anti-social nature and his (implied) propensity for masturbation, itself associated in the nineteenth-century imagination with anti-sociality, with a breakdown in one’s duty to the nation and, indeed, the Empire. André L. DeCuir argues that the two primary relationships in Sheridan Le Fanu’s “Green Tea”—the narrator’s to Dr. Hesselius, and Hesselius’s to Reverend Jennings—exhibit suggestively homosexual tendencies. Although I remain skeptical of DeCuir’s claims, I find his argument both provocative and well-written, nevertheless. Laura Fasick turns our attention to Charles Kingsley’s repudiation of Catholic celibacy, demonstrating how Kingsley’s reconfiguration of the terms of the debate that, for him, celibacy grew out of radical self-indulgence, a rejection of one’s duty to self, state, and belief, while profligacy manifested impulses both natural and, finally, holy.

In one of the collection’s strongest, most engaging, and best written pieces, Dennis Denisoff considers the “Dandy-Aesthete” in a variety of pieces by W.S. Gilbert to mine the representational and experimental possibilities that lie “between, on the one hand, comic condemnation of unconventional male sexuality and, on the other, an appreciation of erotic titillation that can be, and was, read as a sympathetic deflation of the image of such diversification as threatening” (234). In so doing, Denisoff examines how Gilbert carves out a cultural space for, and advocates something like a bemused respect for, his plays’ leading comic figures. Losey’s comparison of treatments of the self in the works of Walter Pater and Wilde returns our attention to the collection’s interest in split subjectivities, finding in Wilde and his intellectual mentor divergent yet complementary notions of masculinity and, more specifically, eroticism, Pater advocating temperance and, to some degree, a bowing to cultural norms, and Wilde insisting on increasingly radical modes of self-expression. I do find fault with Losey’s turning a deaf ear to the leading arguments in current Wilde scholarship, arguments with which he must be quite familiar since he cites one such voice, Jonathan Dollimore’s, in the first sentence of his introduction: Wilde rejected the concept of the “natural,” exposing the “normal” as the purely normative, the wholly constructed, but Losey’s own language obfuscates such an important distinction between the thinking of Wilde and that of his mentor: “Pater and Wilde attempt, with varying success, to employ . . . discourses, striving, among other concerns, to naturalize same-sex love” (253, emphasis added).

The third and final section, “Late Victorian,” begins with William A. Pannapacker’s examination of the influence of Walt Whitman’s robust, masculine same-sexuality on sexologist Edward Carpenter’s evolving theories and changing modes of self-representation, arguing that Carpenter finally eschewed his early English dandy style in favor of the hearty, American iconicism captured in the image of Whitman published with Leaves of Grass. Christopher Lane charts the dynamics of male friendship in two novels by Henry James and finds in both something of the triangulated relationships Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick describes, as male intimacy gets directed through, and deflected onto, female characters, whose eventual removals from the narrative scene allow for the more direct expression of same-sex affection. And Kathleen McDougall’s consideration of the four types of embodiment that mark Shaw’s writing in general and The Perfect Wagnerite in particular epitomize the range of the subject positions available to men experiencing a variety of desires in late-Victorian England.

For the most part, Mapping Male Sexuality offers provocative and densely researched arguments about the emergence of the split subjectivity the book’s essays collectively describe. One might find fault with the book’s scope, for even given its impressive purview of matters aesthetic, economic, political, scientific, and rhetorical, only one of the essays—Hall’s “The Private Pleasures of Silas Marner”—examines representations of masculinity by women writers, whose authorial voices surely have much more to reveal about their culture’s deeply phallocentric (not to mention phallogocentric) attitudes toward men and their embodiments. Elsewhere, two essays fail at quite obvious points to draw on, and even to acknowledge, important scholarship clearly germane to their claims and, though recent, surely so well established that these writers should be chided for overlooking them (Fasick’s “The Seduction of Celibacy: Threats to Male Sexual Identity in Charles Kingsley’s Writings” could quite usefully draw from John Maynard’s Victorian Discourses on Sexuality and Religion [New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993], and Christopher Lane’s “The Impossibility of Seduction in James’s Roderick Hudson and The Tragic Muse,” a 1996 article reprinted here apparently without update, would profit from Martha Vicinus’s “The Adolescent Boy: Fin-de-siècle Femme Fatale?” [Journal of the History of Sexuality, 1994]). More broadly, the collection suffers from a sometimes-inconsistent treatment of cultural context, so that essays overflowing with such frameworks (two among them Binfield’s and Denisoff’s) seem intellectually to dwarf the otherwise smart and cogently written pieces with a much more narrow focus and, in the case of a few, one not quite so deeply invested in a New Historicist approach. One might also quibble with the collection’s title, its singular “masculinity” flying in the face of the book’s demonstration of the vast plurality of such political, aesthetic, economic, rhetorical, and scientific positions.

Nevertheless, Losey and Brewer’s Mapping Male Sexuality offers its readers much to consider, and the collection with surely speak to its upper-level undergraduates and graduate students in seminars with a similar focus on gender and cultural conditions. Scholars of nineteenth-century literature, history, rhetoric, science, psychology, and economics will also find much here to ponder and much to inform their own work on the intriguing possibilities this volume brings to bear.

—Samuel Lyndon Gladden, South Central Review

There can be few cultural critics who may lay claim to the kind of ubiquitous influence exerted by Michael Foucault upon recent studies in nineteenth-century sexuality. While doffing their caps in Foucault’s direction, the editors hope that this collection of essays will ‘complicate’ and ‘contest’ existing work in the field by ‘adapting and challenging some of the previously proposed theories’ (p.9). The significant contribution of Mapping Male Sexuality lies not in any paradigm shift in gender theory—there are too many reverent references to the ‘F-word’ for that—but in a change of historical perspective. For although essays are grouped in somewhat crude chorological sections (‘Romantic’, ‘Victorian’, ‘Late Victorian’), there nevertheless emerges a rich and invaluable charting of masculinities across the continuum of the nineteenth century.

These masculinities tend to be skewed toward the high end of the cultural spectrum, although the ‘Romantic’ section begins with Kevin Binfield’s article on cross-dressing in the Luddite movement. Binfield notably coins the phrase ‘homoindustrial’ for the kind of same-sex bonding, marked by commonality and the free traffic of male workers, which existed prior to the alienating effects of competitive capitalism. Second-generation Romantic poetry looms large in three lively essays. Eric Daffron shows how Byron articulates his multiple male selves through Orientalism; Jonathan Gross analyses the homoeroticism of Don Juan’s digressive narrative as it seeks to ‘connect ways of reading with sexual acts’ (p. 102); and Frederick Greene examines the ‘queer work of mourning’ (p. 132) in Shelley’s Adonais. Early nineteenth-century fiction (one thinks of relevant genres such as the ‘silver-fork school’) is by comparison left unexplored, despite William D. Brewers cogent analysis of male rivalry, friendship, and paternalism in the novels of William Godwin.

Conversely, while Victorian poetry slips by all but unmentioned, the fiction is handsomely represented. Richard Dellamora shows how Disraeli’s ‘embodification’ of cultural difference combines the desire for Jewish emancipation with a ‘delight in young men’ (p. 163). Donald E. Hall’s splendid discussion of Silas Marner argues that Silas’s socialization should be read against the grain as the violent penetration of a private world by the social body, where the harmless fondling of coins signifies a self-abusive hoarding of libidinal energy. Other articles of Le Fanu and Kingsley examine strategies of closeting and celibacy, while Dennis Denisoff illustrates how W.S. Gilbert’s parodies of the dandy-aesthete opened up spaces for writers such as Wilde to construct ‘sympathetic identities defined by marginalized sexual desire’ (p. 234). Jay Losey’s examination of the disguised self in Pater and Wilde deftly juggles much critical thinking and would make an excellent starting point for further detailed investigation into the two authors. However, this crystallization of material threatens to be over-reductive when Losey is drawn mesmerically to the idea that Pater’s prose is ‘coded’, as though ‘his confession on same-sex passion’ will yield up its fascinating secret once the reader has cracked the ‘finicky, repressive language’ (pp. 254-60). The collection is brought to a useful if inevitably truncated conclusion with essays on Edward Carpenter’s transgression of class boundaries, the dangers of homosexual seduction in Henry James, and Shaw’s rigorous sublimation of the male self in his life and art.

This entertaining study suggest some important questions, albeit in a slightly dilatory way—was Byron in any sense freer, legally and linguistically, than a Victorian figure such as Pater? Was the shift from ‘sodomite’ to legally categorized and criminalized ‘homosexual’ gradual or violent? Ideally, one might have wished for more directly comparative work across the chronological sections (bringing Byron near to Tennyson, perhaps, or Pater near to Hazlitt). That said, Mapping Male Sexualityplots some solid and inviting terrain, promising much for the further exploration of masculinities in the longer nineteenth century.

—Nick Kneale, MLR, 98.3, 2003

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Photograph courtesy of Louise Dell-Bene Stahl © 2001