Comparative Decadence? Male Queerness in Late Nineteenth- and Late Twentieth-Century Fiction

Emig, Rainer

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-96770-7_10

Rainer Emig³

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture ((PNWC))

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Abstract

Emig’s chapter compares Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray and Alan Hollinghurst’s The Swimming-Pool Library. After outlining the different historical contexts of queer masculinity in the novels, it points out parallels, such as its legal repression in late Victorianism and at the time of the AIDS crisis under Thatcher. Wilde’s novel provokes with homoerotic longing, Hollinghurst’s with pornographic depictions of gay sex. Both texts are decadent fantasies, yet also criticise double standards of hegemonic masculinity and heteronormativity. Hollinghurst’s novel further exposes its Wildean subtext as class-ridden and colonial. In addition, the scandalous male as narcissistic consumer of Wilde’s time has become the norm in postmodernity. The greatest provocation of Hollinghurst’s novel is that its liberated queer lifestyle rests on privilege acquired by oppression, also of homosexuals.

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Notes

1.
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Random House, 1980), 42.
2.
Richard Dellamora, “Sexual Scandal and Compulsory Heterosexuality in the 1890s,” in Reading Fin de Siècle Fictions, ed. Lyn Pykett, Longman Critical Readers (London: Longman, 1996), 94.
3.
“Sex? I’d rather have a cup of tea!” was a famous statement he made in an interview. See Boy George [George Alan O’Dowd], with Spencer Bright, Take It Like A Man (London: Macmillan, 1995), 213.
4.
Compare the timeline compiled by The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/politics/homeaffairs/page/0,11026,875944,00.html (accessed February 18, 2017).
5.
Hugh David, On Queer Street: A Social History of British Homosexuality, 1895–1995 (London: HarperCollins, 1997), 17. Morris B. Kaplan, Sodom on the Thames: Sex, Love, and Scandal in Wilde Times (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), 175.
6.
Amanda Vickery, “Golden Age to Separate Spheres? A Review of the Categories and Chronology of English Women’s History,” The Historical Journal 36, no. 2 (1993): 383–414.
7.
Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (London: Virago, 1977), 25, first published in 1970.
8.
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 1–2.
9.
Joseph Bristow, introduction to The Picture of Dorian Gray, by Oscar Wilde, new edition, ed. by Joseph Bristow (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), x. All references to the 1891 book version published by Ward, Lock & Co. are to this edition.
10.
Nicholas Frankel, “Textual Introduction,” in The Picture of Dorian Gray: An Annotated, Uncensored Edition, by Oscar Wilde (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2011), 38–64.
11.
Laurel Brake and Marysa Demoor, eds, Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism in Great Britain and Ireland (Gent: Academia Press, 2009), 663.
12.
Andrew Anthony, “Alan Hollinghurst: The Slow-Motion Novelist Delivers,” The Observer, June 12, 2011, https://www.theguardian.com/theobserver/2011/jun/12/observer-profile-alan-hollinghurst (accessed February 18, 2017).
13.
See Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (New York: Vintage Books, 1987), 3–52, first published in 1984.
14.
Anne Varty, A Preface to Oscar Wilde, Preface Books (London: Longman, 1998), 122.
15.
Literary scholars sometimes regard it as homage to the silver-spoon novelist Benjamin Disraeli (who also became British Prime Minister twice and whom Wilde identified as a fellow dandy) and his first novel Vivian Grey (1826); see Diego Saglia, “Touching Byron: Masculinity and the Celebrity Body in the Romantic Period,” in Performing Masculinity, ed. Rainer Emig and Antony Rowland (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 26.
16.
Sedgwick, Between Men, 21 (see note 8).
17.
Thaïs E. Morgan, “Victorian Effeminacies,” in Victorian Sexual Dissidence, ed. Richard Dellamora (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 109–26.
18.
Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine, July 1890, 10. All references to the 1890 magazine edition are to this one. It has been made available electronically by the University of Victoria, Canada, via the following link: http://contentdm.library.uvic.ca/cdm/singleitem/collection/Literary/id/2527 (accessed February 18, 2017).
19.
Ibid., 12.
20.
Sue Morgan, “‘Writing the Male Body’: Sexual Purity and Masculinity in The Vanguard, 1884–94,” in Masculinity and Spirituality in Victorian Culture, ed. Andrew Bradstock, Sean Gill, Anne Hogan and Sue Morgan (Houndmills: Macmillan, 2000), 179–93.
21.
Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine, 14 (see note 18).
22.
Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, ed. Bristow, 54–55 (see note 9).
23.
See Michael R. Booth, Theatre in the Victorian Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 164–67.
24.
Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, ed. Bristow, 55 (see note 9).
25.
Ibid., 162.
26.
Andrew D. Radford, Victorian Sensation Fiction: A Reader’s Guide to Essential Criticism, Readers’ Guides to Essential Criticism (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 111.
27.
Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, ed. Bristow, 176 (see note 9).
28.
Ibid.
29.
Edwin Ray Lankester, Degeneration: A Chapter in Darwinism (London: Macmillan, 1880); Max Nordau [Maximilian Simon Südfeld], Entartung, 2 vols (Berlin: Duncker 1892–93). The first English edition appeared as Degeneration (New York: Appleton, 1895).
30.
Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner, “Sex in Public,” Critical Inquiry 24 (Winter 1998): 548.
31.
“Hegemonic masculinity was distinguished from other masculinities, especially subordinated masculinities. Hegemonic masculinity was not assumed to be normal in the statistical sense; only a minority of men might enact it. But it was certainly normative. It embodied the currently most honored way of being a man, it required all other men to position themselves in relation to it, and it ideologically legitimated the global subordination of women to men.” See R. W. Connell and James W. Messerschmidt, “Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept,” Gender & Society 19, no. 6 (December 2005): 832.
32.
Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, ed. Bristow, 31 (see note 9).
33.
Ibid., 132.
34.
Rainer Emig, “Queering the Straights – Straightening Queers: Commodified Sexualities and Hegemonic Masculinity,” in Subverting Masculinity: Hegemonic and Alternative Versions of Masculinity in Contemporary Culture, ed. Frank Lay and Russell West, Genus: Gender in Modern Culture 1 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001), 207–26.
35.
Rachel Bowlby, “Promoting Dorian Gray,” Oxford Literary Review 9, nos 1–2 (1987): 147–64.
36.
Alan Hollinghurst, The Swimming-Pool Library (London: Penguin, 1988), 5. All references are to this edition.
37.
Gayle Rubin, “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality,” in Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality, ed. Carol S. Vance (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), 282–83.
38.
Hollinghurst, The Swimming-Pool Library, 3 (see note 36).
39.
Ibid., 1.
40.
Ibid., 6.
41.
Ibid., 15.
42.
Ibid., 48–54.
43.
Ibid., 54.
44.
Ibid., 15.
45.
James N. Brown and Patricia M. Sant, “Race, Class, and the Homoerotics of The Swimming-Pool Library,” in Postcolonial and Queer Theories: Intersections and Essays, ed. John C. Hawley (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2001), 113–27.
46.
Tammy Grimshaw, “Hollinghurst’s The Swimming-Pool Library,” Explicator 64, no. 4 (Summer 2006): 242–45.
47.
Stratford East is a part of the East End of London, exactly the region that Dorian Gray in Wilde’s novel visits for his entertainment. It is ironic, though, that in the context of the London Olympics of 2012, this was exactly the region that was massively gentrified.
48.
Hollinghurst, The Swimming-Pool Library, 2–3 (see note 36).
49.
Ibid., 2.
50.
Ibid., 61.
51.
Ibid., 117.
52.
Daniel Wickberg, “Homophobia: On the Cultural History of an Idea,” Critical Inquiry 27, no. 1 (Autumn 2000): 42–57.
53.
Jeremy Kaye, “Twenty-First Century Victorian Dandy: What Metrosexuality and the Heterosexual Matrix Reveal about Victorian Men,” Journal of Popular Culture 42, no. 1 (February 2009): 103–25.
54.
Hollinghurst, The Swimming-Pool Library, 118 (see note 36).
55.
Ibid.
56.
Ibid., 120.
57.
Ibid.
58.
Ibid., 121.
59.
Royal Opera House Collections Online, http://www.rohcollections.org.uk/performance.aspx?performance=11865&row=0 (accessed February 19, 2017).
60.
Hollinghurst, The Swimming-Pool Library, 170–74 (see note 36).
61.
Ibid., 260.
62.
Morris B. Kaplan, “Literature in the Dock: The Trials of Oscar Wilde,” in Law and Literature, ed. Patrick Hanafin, Adam Gearey and Joseph Brooker (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 113–30.

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Department of English and Linguistics, Johannes Gutenberg-Universitaet Mainz, Mainz, Germany
Rainer Emig

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Emig, R. (2018). Comparative Decadence? Male Queerness in Late Nineteenth- and Late Twentieth-Century Fiction. In: Leonardi, B. (eds) Intersections of Gender, Class, and Race in the Long Nineteenth Century and Beyond. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96770-7_10

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96770-7_10
Published: 30 December 2018
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