The ethics of indecency: censorship, sexuality, and the voice of the academy in the narration of 'Jacob's Room.'

Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 1997 by Susan C. Harris

As Eve Sedgwick demonstrates in her reading of Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, the "Victorian cult of Greece" (136) that informs Jacob's Cambridge education simultaneously promotes, requires, and denies homosexual desire within the academy. The academy's fetishization of a classical culture that was often "[s]ynecdochically represented . . . by statues of nude young men" ultimately "positioned male flesh and muscle as the indicative instances of 'the' body, of a body whose surfaces, features, or abilities might be the subject of unphobic enjoyment" (136). The academy's treatment of the female body and its sexuality (of which the academic narrator's depiction of Florinda is a prime example) thus coincides with a "new gendering" of the "enjoyed body" as "indicatively male" (136); the sexual desire that is dangerous when directed at Florinda becomes safe and sanctioned when sublimated into the "intimacy between friends" that "intellectual conversation" (Little 113) about their shared culture makes possible between Jacob and his Cambridge classmates.

Evidence of this Cambridge-induced redirection of sexual desire is introduced into the novel even before Jacob gets to Greece. Little observes that intellectual debate is "enjoyed as a sensuous event - by Jacob and by the narrator" (113); for both the product and the defender of the academy, this kind of exchange, which thanks to Oxford's and Cambridge's admission policies can take place only between men, produces a sexualized pleasure. This pleasure does not remain purely cerebral; at one point early in the novel Jacob and Bonamy's "educated joust for words spills over into a very physical wrestling match" (Dobie 206). Mrs. Papworth obligingly confirms the theory that Cambridge is the ultimate cause of this eruption into physicality: "Book learning does it" (Dobie 206).

But while the academy's "Hellenic ideal" redirects sexual desire so that it is kept among its (exclusively male) members and under its control, and thus apparently sanctions male homosexual desire, the academy also, at the same time, "necessarily has [homosexual] panic so deeply at the heart" of its value system that the academy "becomes not only inextricable from but even a propellant of the cognitive and ethical compartmentalizations of homophobic prohibition" (Sedgwick 138). The homophobia that Jeremy Tambling identifies in the London of Mrs. Dalloway (144) also operates in Jacob's Room, both within and outside the academy. To protect itself, the academy must conceal from itself and from outsiders the redirection of sexual desire on which its continued dominance depends. It must create Bonamy and his desire, and it must censor that desire just as it censors Florinda and Clara.

But as Jacob goes to Greece and becomes more and more "immersed" in his chosen culture, the erotic element of Bonamy's relationship with him irresistibly approaches the foreground. And for all its finesse in handling Florinda and Clara, the academic narrator proves impotent when it comes to silencing Bonamy. Part of the difficulty is that Bonamy is not only a man, but a man even more fully initiated into academic culture than Jacob is. He cannot be silenced, as Florinda and Clara are, by an ironic disquisition on his ignorance or blindness. Descriptions of Bonamy, even disparaging ones, somehow cannot help taking on a more reverent tone than those of Jacob's female attachments: