The Renaissance

Abstract

Freud’s excavations in the psyches of his patients generally took him back to buried incidents and desires of a sexual nature (the ‘secrets of the alcove’, his mentor Charcot called them). Partly as a result of Freud’s work, our contemporary mythologies about ourselves include the assumption that hidden sexual feelings or behaviour could, if brought to light, reveal some ultimate, definitive truth about a person: our identity is often thought to be, at root, our sexuality. When a tabloid newspaper drags someone out of the closet, the ‘truth’ about them is ‘revealed’. We might therefore expect the presence of homosexual feelings or anxieties in literary texts to be signalled through silences and secrecies, which may be uncovered through ingenious readings, much as buried trains of thought may be elucidated through the ‘Freudian slips’ mapped in his study The Psychopathology of Everyday Lif? (1901). These are not assumptions which apply readily to the culture of the English Renaissance. A man’s sense of himself, of his identity and his meaning, was derived principally from his religious belief and his social position, and there is no evidence that men defined themselves according to the gender of their sexual partners. Such classification would be at odds with the kinds of erotic pleasures which we meet in Renaissance literature, where there is often a variety of viewpoints and desires. Indeed, many works are open texts which invite the reader to engage in a range of imaginative erotic pleasures.

Ma: You mean Ed’s a friend-friend or a euphemism-friend? Arnol?: He used to be a euphemism, now he’s just a friend. Harvey Fierstein, Torch Song Trilog? (1984) p. 59