Hellenism and homosexuality in Victorian Oxford

Abstract

Linda Dowling. Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1994. xvi + 173. $25.95 cloth. During Oscar Wilde's prosecution for acts of gross indecency with another male, the evidence brought against him included several of his own letters, among them a sensuously figured encomium to Lord Alfred Douglas and his rose-leaf lips: I know Hyacinthus, whom Apollo loved so madly, was you in Greek days (Letters 326). In that florid conjunction of red lips and Greek days, we tend to see but another late-Victorian instance of a desire seeking expression under the aegis of Ancient Greece, with all its cultural prestige. But as the interpretation of desire itself becomes ever more complex in our time, is well to note that Wilde would later recall with dismay the judicial and popular interpretations of that letter, protesting that every construction but the one is put on it (Letters 441). It is at least as problematic today as ever before, what a right construction might after all be in such a case. Linda Dowling provides some compelling suggestions with her Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford, an engaging and elegantly presented discussion of the rise of Oxonian discourse. As the first scholarly book to focus entirely on the Victorian intrication of things Greek with things homosexual, Dowling's study advances a welcome convergence of contemporary historical and New Historical procedures. Following studies by Richard Jenkyns and Frank Turner in the early 1980s, a growing body of historical scholarship has clarified the privileged role that Ancient Greece played in the imaginations of many Victorians. And in a largely independent critical vein over the last decade or so, appropriations of Michel Foucault's ideas into English-language scholarship have profoundly enriched and complicated our awareness of the construction of male subjectivity in the late Victorian era. Dowling draws from both these critical directions in tracing the development of Oxford Greek studies into what she calls a homosexual code. Dowling begins by arguing that crises in English political and religious consciousness made Greece appear appealing on grounds quite other than an incipiently sympathy. When comes to diagnosing the anxieties of the Victorians, cultural flux is of course the usual suspect, and Dowling ably details the manifold political and religious transformations that were to prepare the way for Victorians to find in Ancient Greece a saving alternative. At a time when a worrisomely scientistic and materialistic culture was rendering theological orthodoxies increasingly untenable, the Greek philosophers (Plato, at least) seemed to provide an alternative ground for transcendental value. And in an England made anxious by French Jacobinism and creeping political fragmentation, the sane vitalism of Greece seemed to offer a salutary vehicle for negotiation between the Scylla of anarchic radicalism and the Charybdis of entropic political stagnation. Tenets of this sort are in fact common to most recent studies of Greece and the Victorians, so Dowling's distinctive achievement here emerges in the particular range and quality of reference she vitalizes relative to these topics, and in the suggestive force with which she charts the translation of this Greek investment into a specifically homosocial/homosexual apologetic. Like Alan Sinfield in his recent The Wilde Century, Dowling takes up the concept of and charts the term's use in a seventeenth- and eighteenth-century republican discourse that would continue to show its influence into the Victorian period. In this classical republicanism, effeminacy signified, not a failure of male heterosexual inclination, but rather a failure of martial propensity and valor, a failure of the civic virtus. In such a civic discourse, claims Dowling, male posed a threat to the precarious sense of security available to a polis worried about military invasion. …

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