Male Sexuality, Religion and the Problem of Action: John Addington Symonds on Arthur Hugh Clough

Abstract

For Western subjects today a crisis is often experienced in terms of sexuality and relationships, and there are many well-established discourses that encourage, support and sustain us in seeing life in this way, as can be confirmed by a quick glance at the titles in newsagents and bookshops. Interestingly, though on reflection perhaps rather strangely, this language addressing success and happiness in ‘private life’ is often separated from achievement and fulfilment in terms of career. In the Britain of the period 1840–70, such distinctions had yet to emerge, and there was another place where such questions around fulfilment in a life were often asked in the society of this period, namely Christian texts on spiritual reflection and self-examination. Modern male sexual identities were only beginning to form and build towards their present-day importance, indeed the very notion that a person had a ’sexuality’ was new. To examine how male identity was seen in ways that stretched across religion, sexuality and work I shall explore the most significant crisis in the life of the critic, cultural historian and homosexual apologist John Addington Symonds (1840-93). Part of Symonds’ response to his situation in the 1860s was to think and write about the poet Arthur Hugh Clough, who had died in 1861, a Victorian male he saw as having faced similar questions to his own a generation earlier. Symonds’ interest in Clough as ‘the crux of criticism’ 1 shows the important role played by engaging with texts for individuals negotiating masculine identity at this time. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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