In the hierarchy of books on spirituality, Reclaiming the Sacred: The Bible in Gay and Lesbian Culture, edited by Raymond-Jean Frontain is astounding. Frontain has collected ten essays whose authors have scrutinized their subjects to find the gay and lesbian aspects of both sacred and profane texts, ranging from a discourse on Sodom in Seventeenth Century Venice and Milton's “Paradise Regained,” works of Oscar Wilde, Radclyffe Hall andJane Rule. Each of these essays could stand on its own, and may have gone unnoticed. Not all of them are easy reading, but in this collection, they are all remarkable achievements.
For example, while Armando Maggie's article, “The Discourse of Sodom in a Seventeenth Century Venetian Text,” offers a rather farfetched view of women who evidently believed that the vagina was really a reversed penis and that babies in the womb could be sodomized. Its principle focus, a Mentor trying to seduce his student, explaining that the fluids of the brain and the penis were similar, and that tasting sperm could enrich our mental facultiesis, to put it lightly, amusing. Claude J. Summers covers the (Homo) Sexual Temptation in Milton's Paradise Regained,effectively, but it's Frontain's own essay, “Bakhtinian Grotesque Realism and the Subversion of Biblical Authority in Rochester's Sodom,” a review of John Wilmot Rochester's Restoration play, “The Farce of Sodom,” that is the centerpiece of this book. Rochester used theatre to comment on the politics of the British court. Just as one starts thinking they need a better working knowledge of this period to grasp what Frontain is getting at, his treatise offers a refreshing and entertaining viewpoint. We start wondering where a new version of this clearly dated chestnut is, one
that's been staged with a deliberately camp interpretation that literally exaggerates the silliness of the text.
Gayle M Seymour analyzes the imagery in Simeon Solomon's Victorian Biblical art, while Ellis Hanson's essay on Oscar Wilde shows us his long standing love/hate relationship with the Catholic Church, which he likened to a Scarlet Woman, specifically in his play, “Salome.” Passages and characters in both, “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” and “De Profundis,” also support this theory of Victorian hypocrisy. On a similar note, E. M. Forster's closeted writing is examined by Gregory W. Bredbeck in “Missionary Positions: Reading the Bible in Forster's, “The Life to Come.” Bredbeck takes E. M. Forster (Maurice, Howard's End) to task, using the story of a missionary who's had sex with the native chief in an unidentified country, and converted him to Christianity. A moral dilemna arises when the Chief attempts suicide because their sexual relationship remains unfulfilled. With much supporting material to expand on his ideas, Bredbeck analyzes Forster more thoroughly than ever before, with plenty of food for thought.
Radclyffe Hall's revolutionary book, “The Well of Loneliness” is considered the “Bible of Lesbian Literature.” Hall was a conflicted writer who tried to bridge the gap and redefine her sexual identity (and the place of all women), using the standardized text of the Bible as a basis. So significant a work is “The Well of Loneliness,” that it merits two essays: Ed Madden's, “The Well of Loneliness or The Gospel According to Radclyffe Hall” is the more academic; Margaret Soenser Breen's intentions are clearer as she contrasts it with Jane Rule's, “Desert of the Heart,” for her essay, “Narrative Inversions: The Biblical Heritage of The Well of Loneliness” and “Desert of the Heart.”
Hall's Victorian work, brimming with its Biblical references, even forced her into an obscenity trial. It may seem an unlikely comparison to Rule's book, but there are surprising similarities. Using the Nevada landscape as a background, Rule's novel disguises its Biblical references as it weaves the
tale of lovers, Ann and Evelyn, a modern day Adam and Eve. While both essays offer their insights, Breen's is the superior of the two.
“Reclaiming the Sacred: The Bible in Gay and Lesbian Culture,” is one of those books you may want to keep on hand for added insights when you're reading one of the authors cited by Raymond-Jean Frontain. It's quite an impressive achievement.
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