Victorian Sexual Dissidence. - Review - book review

Criticism, Wntr, 2000 by James Eli Adams

Victorian Sexual Dissidence edited by Richard Dellamora. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Pp. viii 329. $50.00 cloth; $20.00 paper.

Some of the most eloquent silences in Victorian Sexual Dissidence are those not of sexual transgression but of critical omission: the surprisingly muted presences of both Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Michel Foucault. The substantial attention that Richard Dellamora devotes to each critic in his introduction only underscores their surprisingly peripheral role in the vast bulk of the collection, with each figuring centrally in only one of the dozen essays--Foucault serving merely as one of Regenia Gagnier's exhibits of how not to analyze "the hedonics of modern consumer culture" (134). Of course this relative silence is in part testimony to the foundational presence of Sedgwick and Foucault in so much literary and cultural study of sexuality But it also signals an important shift of emphasis in that study, away from a preoccupation with homophobia and toward what Dellamora calls the "affirmative aspects of cultural dissidence" (10)--a mode of engagement signaled by the title of the volume, which echoes the influential work of Jonathan Dollimore. In Foucauldian terms, the volume moves away from Volume One of the History of Sexuality to take up the broad concerns of the later volumes: the coercive, disciplinary force of sexual taxonomies is less prominent than are varieties of sexual experience and self-understanding defined in resistance to that force. With this revision comes an emphasis on the fluidity of late-Victorian sexual categories and experience--an emphasis that helps to explain why this epoch has been so prominent in recent reflection on sexuality. The result is a collection of remarkably consistent quality and suggestive but unforced coherence, which offers rewarding examples of both historical recovery and critical method.

As an essay in method, the volume displays a provocative impatience with the familiar binaries of sexual transgression. Much recent criticism, for example, has been eager to believe that Victorian invocations of "effeminacy" are clear insinuations of homosexuality. But this association becomes clear only near the end of the century (as Alan Sinfield has pointedly argued) when it displaces a long-standing designation of insufficiently regulated desire (a usage ultimately derived, as Linda Dowling has shown, from classical republicanism). While Sinfield associates this conceptual and rhetorical shift with the trials of Wilde, Thais Morgan here suggests a potent indeterminacy in "effeminacy" as early as 1871, when the term figures centrally in Robert Buchanan's "fleshly school" attack on Rossetti and Swinburne. As the very fluidity of the term made it an especially versatile rhetorical weapon, it also accommodated a momentous shift from discourses of gender deviance to those of sexual dissidence. In a related essay on genius and sexuality in George Du Maurier's novels and caricatures, Dennis Denisoff notes how Du Maurier's representations of the dandy-aesthete situate "effeminacy" within the shifting economics of taste and artistic production, and thereby prompt attention to the complex but never comfortable distinctions between social marginality and sexual deviance. Initially stigmatizing a vulgarity associated with the commodification of art and connoisseurship, Du Maurier's aesthetes come to suggest a more unsettling realm of sexual possibility and threat, an eroticism that occasionally--as in Trilby--also becomes a marker of possible genius.

Eric Haralson takes up another crucial indeterminacy in Victorian sexuality in his essay "The Elusive Queerness of Henry James's `Queer Comrade'," which focuses on Gabriel Nash of The Tragic Muse. Haralson explores the late-Victorian pursuit of elusive sexuality alongside the sexualizing of elusiveness itself--a conjunction captured in his canny reading of James's "The Author of `Beltraffio.'" In this story--famously based on the marriage of John Addington Symonds but written (James insisted) without knowledge of Symonds's homosexuality--James's rendering of an unspecified transgression, and subsequent recognition of the significance attached to it by initiates, registers both "the elaborate epistemology of such men and the delicate folkways of Victorian homosociality" (195). What might seem an evasive discretion became an occasion for James (prodded by Edmund Gosse) to recognize--and in a sense, to confess--an open secret that he had not fully grasped. As the story suggests the elusiveness to late Victorians of even so "obvious" a queerness as Symonds's, it also suggests how a figure such as Gabriel Nash could incarnate sexual dissidence most suggestively through just such elusiveness, by a paradoxically ostentatious resistance to representation: "the best tactic for queer comrades was to keep the body of their text private by keeping it lively and elusive, `conspicuously ... draped' in the `amplitude of costume' that is style" (205).