Jim Kepner: Jim Kepner was founder of the International Gay and Lesbian Archives, and co-founder of ONE Institute. A major pioneer of the Gay movement as well as a founder of Gay Studies, he died in 1997. His most recent book is ROUGH NEWS, DARING VIEWS: PIONEER GAY PRESS JOURNALISM IN THE 1950S, published by Haworth Press.
Ms. Dowling, author previously of Language and Decadence in the Victorian fin de Siecle, interestingly explains the growth of British attitudes which permitted the great ovation which Oscar Wilde's eloquent defense speach received during his first trial in the Old Bailey 102 years ago—followed by his tragic and overwhelming condemnation for homosexual acts a month later. She shows that Wilde's defense of the ideal of Hellenic Love was so much a central theme of public discourse of the day that a court audience which included few of the playwright's friends could applaud enthusiastically—until the third trial brought in taudry evidence of socially improper sex.
Dowling retraced ground which had been covered less theoretically by Brian Reade's 1970 anthology, Sexual Heretics: Male Homosexuality in English Literature from 1850 to 1900 (he'd shown a line of succession of Uranian, i.e., pedophile or homophile, poets from William Johnson's Ionica to the writings of Edward Carpenter, John Addington Symonds and Wilde) and the writings of H. Montgomery Hyde. Starting somewhat earlier, Dowling agrees with gay history philosoph Michel Foucault's rejection of the common view that sex, particularly homosex, was repressed by the state and public intolerance before those enlightened days. (Having struggled through five books by and about Foucault, I remain unclear on the metaphysics by which he denies yet seems to affirm the operation of repression and enlightenment.)
Dowling interestingly traces the development at Oxford of a “public discourse,” which, borrowing from earlier German advocates of the pedophilic and androphilic love ideal of ancient Greece, transformed thinking, not just about erotic feeling, but about the whole liberal concept of public morality and national virtue which many felt were threatened by the corrosive crudities of industry and mercantilism. The old fear of a decline of national virility which had associated homosexual activity with effeminacy and decadence led many 19th Century intellectuals to turn to the example of ancient Greece, which had already swept German intellectuals (and had great currency in the U.S. after the 1820 introduction of The Greek Revival.) The Greeks had proven that idealized male love, both in pedagogy and in battle, could be the fountainhead of national and personal virility, morality and creativity.
Liberals John Stuart Mill, Matthew Arnold and Benjamin Jowett led this change in public attitude, initially associated with the university reform movement, in rebellion against the cultural stagnation they saw resulting from bourgeois society, and were joined in such advocacy by Queen Victoria's favorite Prime Minister, William E. Gladstone, as well as by Cecil Rhodes, Lord Curzon and many other important Victorian figures.
Focussing on the Oxford University reform movement of the 1850s, Ms. Dowling describes the rejection of the stultified Church of England curriculum and teaching-by-rote style (as well as the opening of the universities to non-Anglicans), first through the homoerotic religiosity of the Tractarians around John Henry Newman, and the subsequent feeling of betrayal of such of his lover-followers as J.A. Froude, when Newman entered the Catholic Church, leading Froude to reject all religion. A series of inspirational teachers followed: Benjamin Jowett, Thomas and Matthew Arnold, Thomas Carlyle, Walter Pater, et al, whose idealized intimate (not necessarily sexual) relations with selected students were specifically modeled on Socrates' relations with the young men around him.
But Jowett's great translation of Plato's dialogues was both blessing and curse for many gay-inclined youth trying to get beyond the rosy glow and translate their erotic feelings into action. Jowett had reworked Plato, creating an etherialization of male love intended to serve a new patriotism and to replace the Christian world view of Newman's heady Tractarian reformists, as well as their dogmatic Anglican predecessors, whose educational aim had been to train Anglican clergymen. The Platonic idealization still reverberates today, but Jowett laundered most specific sexual passages, causing students like John Addington Symonds to go through great agonies seeking “ideal” but non-sexual love, before they could manage to reject the master and accept the explicitly sexual component of their love urges. (Cambridge was not free of similar Hellenistic-homoerotic elements, as the illustrious, long-lasting and largely gay history of the Apostles society there attests, but Dowling keeps her focus on Oxford.)
Symonds, Carpenter, Ellis and Wilde took the concept beyond pedagogy and made the sexuality in the Hellenic ideal specific, and Wilde was brutally punished for it, though as to his “offense against public morals,” Dowling seems to feel his punishment was incidental. Where she observes that some Uranians were shocked by Wilde's explicitness, I suspect they may have been less upset that the “ideal” had been besmirched, than that the closet (a recent term for conditions that are by no means new) had been exposed to the world's view.
Wilde's passionate defense of Hellenic love won applause from an apparently diverse audience, Dowling argues, because it was tapping into “ideals” that were then common currency—but in the third trial, the piling on of evidence that he had “tarnished” the ideal by “dirty” sex across class lines, destroyed him.
Dowling seems, like many “constructionist” historians, to take at face value literary denials that such feelings should be sexually expressed. Even today, many people who profess to keep their erotic urges on a “pure” plane express them quite otherwise in practice—often paying with acute guilt. Barring specific evidence, we can of course hardly know if Neuman, Jowett, Pater and many of the Uranian poets engaged in sexual activity with the objects of their affections, or if they pined away with longing and discretely feeble embraces, as many timid souls still do. Considering the mistaken notion that such matters were never mentioned in Victoria's day, they made the object of their eroticism remarkably clear, even if they were reticent about overt sexual activity. Many of them tried hard to separate homophile feeling from sexual acts. Foucault notwithstanding, it was a time when many were trapped in the prison of repression. The sources of that repression remain too complex for easy analysis, and Foucault does refute some of the simplistic answers.
Ms Dowling's work is highly informative, correcting many popular misconceptions about Victorian life, and is a valuable contribution to gay history, despite the over-ambitious theorizing—an overriding sin of many fine gay historians. Her theorizing is not too excessive however, and her writing is never pedantic. She ignores lesbian possibilities in her page 85 footnote about the 1879 founding of Lady Margaret and Somerville residence halls for women who were auditing Oxford lectures. Oxford undergraduates had long been expected to remain bachelors, so Dowling treats the arrival of women on the campus fringe as a hetero invasion of the homosocial sanctuary. No doubt some Oxford men looked at it that way….
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