Catholic Figures, Queer Narratives

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Catholic Figures, Queer Narratives Edited by

Lowell Gallagher, Frederick S. Roden and Patricia Juliana Smith

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromsoe - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-08

Catholic Figures, Queer Narratives

10.1057/9780230287778 - Catholic Figures, Queer Narratives, Edited by Lowell Gallagher, Frederick S. Roden and Patricia Juliana Smith

Also by

Medusa’s Gaze: Casuistry and Conscience in the Renaissance

Frederick S. Roden Same-Sex Desire in Victorian Religious Culture Ed., Palgrave Advances: Oscar Wilde Studies

Patricia Juliana Smith Lesbian Panic: Homoeroticism in Modern British Women’s Fictions Ed., En Travesti: Women, Gender Subversion, Opera Ed., The Book of Gay and Lesbian Quotations Ed., The Queer Sixties



Lowell Gallagher

Edited by

Lowell Gallagher University of California, Los Angeles

Frederick S. Roden University of Connecticut and

Patricia Juliana Smith Hofstra University




© Editorial matter & selection © Lowell Gallagher, Frederick S. Roden & Patricia Juliana Smith 2006 Introduction © Frederick S. Roden 2006 All remaining chapters © respective authors 2006

No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2006 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978-0-230-00831-1 hardback ISBN-10: 0-230-00831-3 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Catholic figures, queer narratives / edited by Lowell Gallagher, Frederick S. Roden, and Patricia Juliana Smith. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-230-00831-3 1. Homosexuality in literature. 2. English fiction–History and criticism. 3. American fiction–History and criticism. 4. Homosexuality–Religious aspects–Catholic Church. 5. Homophobia–Religious aspects–Catholicism. 6. Catholic gays. 7. Homosexuality and literature. 8. Gay authors–Religious life. I. Gallagher, Lowell, 1953– II. Roden, Frederick S., 1970– III. Smith, Patricia Juliana. PR830.H67C37 2006 823.009′353–dc22 2006045372 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne



All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission.



For our families, spiritual and otherwise . . . and in memory of Simone Leborgne, Dennis J. P. Lamb, Fr. Paul, and the mother of PJS



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List of Illustrations

ix

Acknowledgements

x

Notes on Contributors

xi

Introduction: the Catholic Modernist Crisis, Queer Modern Catholicisms Frederick S. Roden

1

1 Queer Converts: Peculiar Pleasures and Subtle Antinomianism Thomas Lawrence Long

19

2 The Horrors of Catholicism: Religion and Sexuality in Gothic Fiction George E. Haggerty

33

3 Michael Field, John Gray, and Marc-Andre Raffalovich: Reinventing Romantic Friendship in Modernity Frederick S. Roden

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4 Confessing Stephen: the Nostalgic Erotics of Catholicism in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man Patrick R. O’Malley

69

5 “Uncovenanted Joys”: Catholicism, Sapphism, and Cambridge Ritualist Theory in Hope Mirrlees’ Madeleine: One of Love’s Jansenists Ruth Vanita 6 The Feminized Priest and the Female Outsider: Catholicism and Sexuality in Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop Susan E. Hill 7 The Well of Loneliness and the Catholic Rhetoric of Sexual Dissidence Richard Dellamora

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Contents

viii Contents

9 “A Twitch Upon the Thread”: Revisiting Brideshead Revisited Francesca Coppa

129 149

10 The Altar of the Soul: Sexuality and Spirituality in the Works of Julien Green Thomas J. D. Armbrecht

163

Notes

184

Index

206



8 “The Woman That God Forgot”: Queerness, Camp, Lies, and Catholicism in Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood Patricia Juliana Smith

Leaf from a missal: frontispiece for the Canon of the Mass, The Crucifixion, French, thirteenth century, c.1270–90. (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Bequest of Thomas W. Lamont, by exchange, 1981 (1981.322). Photograph, all rights reserved, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.)

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List of Illustrations

We wish to thank Paula Kennedy, Helen Craine, Ruth Ireland, and Jo North at Palgrave Macmillan for their support in the publication of this volume. We also express our appreciation to our contributors for their excellent chapters, as well as for their patience and perseverance. Loren Blinde and Andrea F. Jones gave generously of their time in preparing the index. In Chapter 3, correspondence between John Gray, Marc-Andre Raffalovich, and Michael Field is reprinted here with the kind permission of Fr. Allan White, Prior Provincial of the English Dominicans, for materials held at the National Library of Scotland and the New York Public Library (Berg Collection of English and American Literature: Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations). Thanks to Mr. Kenneth Dunn at the National Library, Dr. Isaac Gewirtz and Mr. Wayne Furman at the New York Public Library for their assistance.

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Acknowledgements

Thomas J. D. Armbrecht is Assistant Professor of French at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He is the author of At the Periphery of the Center: Sexuality and Literary Genre in the Works of Yourcenar and Green (Rodopi, 2006) and has published a translated edition of Wicked Angels by Julien Green’s son (Haworth, 2006). He is currently working on Cocteau’s cinematic reinvigoration of drama and the interplay between conceptions of nationality and sexuality. Francesca Coppa is Associate Professor of English at Muhlenberg College, where she teaches twentieth-century dramatic literature, sexuality theory, and performance studies. She has written widely on playwrights Joe Orton and Oscar Wilde, and is the editor of Joe Orton: a Casebook (Routledge, 2003) and a three-volume collection of his early works. She is currently co-editing a book on the cultural performance of stage magic. She is the daughter of Vatican historian and papal biographer Frank J. Coppa. Richard Dellamora originally prepared for his essay in this volume as an altar and choir boy in Roman Catholic parishes and schools in the US Midwest. He teaches in the departments of English and Cultural Studies as well as the Centre for Theory, Culture, and Politics at Trent University in Ontario. In 2003, he received a fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada to undertake a full-length study entitled Radclyffe Hall: a Life in the Writing. He is the author of Masculine Desire: the Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism and Friendship’s Bonds: Democracy and the Novel in Victorian England, and the editor of Victorian Sexual Dissidence. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1998. Lowell Gallagher is Associate Professor and Vice Chair for Undergraduate Studies in the Department of English at UCLA. He is author of Medusa’s Gaze: Casuistry and Conscience in the Renaissance, as well as numerous articles examining the relation between religion, ethics, and literary figuration, principally in early modern English Catholic cultures but also in Shakespeare and in nineteenth- and twentieth-century opera. He is currently completing a book on the figural history of Lot’s wife in xi 10.1057/9780230287778 - Catholic Figures, Queer Narratives, Edited by Lowell Gallagher, Frederick S. Roden and Patricia Juliana Smith



xii


George E. Haggerty is Professor of English at the University of California, Riverside. His books include Gothic Fiction/Gothic Form (1989), Unnatural Affections: Women and Fiction in the Later Eighteenth Century (1998), Men in Love: Masculinity and Sexuality in the Eighteenth Century (1999), and Queer Gothic (2006). He edited Professions of Desire: Lesbian and Gay Studies in Literature (1995) and Gay Histories and Cultures: an Encyclopedia (2000). At present he is writing a book on Horace Walpole and editing, with Molly McGarry, The Blackwell Companion to LGBTI/Q Studies. Susan E. Hill received a PhD in Religion and Literature from the University of Chicago Divinity School and is Associate Professor of Religion at the University of Northern Iowa. She has published articles on sexuality and literature, women and translation, and pedagogy. Her current project traces the history of moral discourses about overindulgence, corpulence, and gluttony in Western culture. Thomas Lawrence Long is Professor of English and Chancellor’s Commonwealth Professor at Thomas Nelson Community College in Hampton, Virginia. A former Roman Catholic priest, he is the author of AIDS and American Apocalypticism: the Cultural Semiotics of an Epidemic and recently published “Apocalyptus Interruptus: Christian Fundamentalists, Sodomy, and The End” in Gender and Apocalyptic Desire (ed. Brenda Basher and Lee Quinby). He is editor-in-chief of Harrington Gay Men’s Literary Quarterly. Patrick R. O’Malley is Assistant Professor of English at Georgetown University. He is the author of Catholicism, Sexual Deviance, and Victorian Gothic Culture (Cambridge, 2006). He is working on a critical study of representation of cultural amnesia in nineteenth-century Anglo-Irish texts. Frederick S. Roden is Associate Professor of English at the University of Connecticut. He is the author of Same-Sex Desire in Victorian Religious Culture and the editor of Palgrave Advances: Oscar Wilde Studies. He is coediting and translating, with Philip Healy, Marc-Andre Raffalovich’s 1896 Uranisme et Unisexualité: Etude sur différentes manifestations de l’instinct sexuel. His other projects include a commentary on Julian of Norwich and a book tentatively entitled Jewish/Christian/Queer.



patristic and early modern texts, twentieth-century visual arts, and postHeideggerian philosophical interrogations of ethics.

xiii

Patricia Juliana Smith is Associate Professor of English at Hofstra University. She is the author of Lesbian Panic: Homoeroticism in Modern British Women’s Fictions and Britannia Waives the Rules: the Permissive Society in Postimperial British Literature and Cultures (forthcoming). She has edited En Travesti: Women, Gender Subversion, Opera, The Queer Sixties, and The Book of Gay and Lesbian Quotations. Ruth Vanita, formerly Reader at Delhi University, is now Professor at the University of Montana. She is the author of several books, including Sappho and the Virgin Mary: Same-Sex Love and the English Literary Imagination, Same-Sex Love in India: Readings from Literature and History, and, most recently, Love’s Rite: Same-Sex Marriage in India and the West and Gandhi’s Tiger and Sita’s Smile: Essays on Gender, Sexuality and Culture.






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Frederick S. Roden

On September 8, 1907, Pope Pius X issued an encyclical entitled Pascendi dominici gregis, condemning – and perhaps inventing – Catholic “Modernism.” The encyclical gave a name to a wide variety of “errors.” The scholars implicated were concerned with the freedom to pursue historical study of the Bible and take seriously those implications for theology. They argued for philosophical alternatives to neo-Scholasticism and were critical of authoritarian uses of the papacy. Neo-Scholasticism presumes that a perennial philosophy exists, as defined by Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century. It assumes that the world is basically static, not dynamic or developing: that historical changes do not affect the essential nature of persons or institutions and therefore should have little influence in the evolution of doctrine. Theological manuals of the time organized and disseminated conclusions rather than promoting inquiry. They maintained that natural knowledge came from unaided natural reason, and that supernatural knowledge was known when God decided to reveal it.1 The implications of this encyclical were considerable, for it brought about a renewed stress on the study of Scholastic philosophy, accompanied by a screening of students and teachers in seminaries and the supervision (one might say policing) of priests. The converse of neo-Scholasticism, whether or not one calls it Modernism, suggests that theology must always be determined by the lived faith of believers. Traditional teaching cannot contain the full mystery of the devotional life: theology must constantly be informed and corrected by devotion.2 Doctrine ought to be a guide to life, not the full definition of its possible trajectory. One of the most prominent Catholic Modernists in the English tradition was George Tyrrell. Born in Ireland in 1861, he became a Roman Catholic in 1879. He was dismissed from the Jesuits in 1905, and excommunicated in 1907 after publishing two 1 10.1057/9780230287778 - Catholic Figures, Queer Narratives, Edited by Lowell Gallagher, Frederick S. Roden and Patricia Juliana Smith


Introduction: the Catholic Modernist Crisis, Queer Modern Catholicisms


articles attacking Pascendi. When Tyrrell died in 1909, he was denied a Catholic burial. The French priest Henri Bremond was suspended for saying prayers over Tyrrell’s grave. However, Tyrrell never deviated from his belief that Catholicism is the only authentic version of Christianity and the best expression of the spiritual needs of human beings. In his 1909 Medievalism (which he opposed to “Modernism”), Tyrrell argues that neo-Scholasticism “supposes itself to be of apostolic antiquity” but “denies the work of synthesis is necessary and must endure as long as man’s intellectual, moral, and social evolution endures.”3 Catholic Modernism, like literary Modernism, is all about making it new. The past must be reconciled with the present. As Tyrrell writes, “the process of culture is unending.”4 “For, as it is belief in the living Christ that makes a Christian, and not any particular Christology, so what makes a Catholic is not this or that abstract theory of the Church, but a belief in the historical Apostolic mission.”5 To believe in the living historical Catholic community means to believe that by its corporate life and labour it is slowly realising the ideas and ends in whose service it was founded; that through many fluctuations and errors and deviations and recoveries and reactions it is gradually shaping itself into a more efficient institution for the spiritual and moral development of individuals and societies; that by its continuity and extension it is the collective subject of a vast experience of good and evil, of truth and fallacy, and of a slow but sure process of reflection on the same.6 “If [the Modernist] believes in the Church as Catholic, as man he believes in humanity; he believes in the world.”7 “He sees that in every generation some tare or another ripens and betrays its true character and needs to be uprooted; that there are epochs when a perfect harvest of such tares demands a revolution – a ruthless thrusting in of the sickle of criticism, a binding in bundles and burning of noxious weeds.”8 The goal of the theologian is to “separate the perishable from the imperishable elements in all such cases; to change as little, to preserve as much, as truth and truthfulness will permit.”9 Theology is “a movement or tendency guided by certain principles and methods” – not a finished product; it is “living and growing” – not dead; “truth is an unending process of adequation, not a finished result.”10 I begin this introduction to a volume on queer Catholic narratives with a brief sketch of the Modernist crisis for a variety of reasons. First, the majority of the writers considered in these essays fall under the



2

3

general rubric of “literary Modernism” – whether or not they would have identified as such. The kinds of questions, challenges, contradictions, and reconciliations they pose are in keeping with the philosophy posited by Tyrrell. I also raise the issue of the institutional Church for a number of purposes. On the one hand, the authors studied in the following chapters are preoccupied with Roman Catholicism in one way or another, but more often than not their focus is removed from the “organized religion” per se. It is my intention to thus re-locate their concerns as very much on the radar of theologians at work in their age. In addition, my interest in the Church and Modernism has resonance because of contemporary, twenty-first-century debates over homosexuality. As will become apparent here, I argue that many of the same problems are being debated. The Modernist crisis in the Church was not, and is not, far removed from the modern crisis over homosexuality. Thomas Michael Loome documents the friendship between Tyrrell and Marc-Andre Raffalovich, the wealthy Catholic convert who famously rescued John “Dorian” Gray after Wilde cast him off. Gray later became a Catholic priest while Raffalovich somewhat distanced himself from his 1896 magnum opus, Uranisme et Unisexualité, a sexological apologia for “inverted” orientation. Loome quotes from Tyrrell’s letters to Raffalovich, noting the freedom he takes to speak frankly and with ease. Ever a question in the clerical life, Tyrrell wonders in a correspondence dated September 27, 1908, “Are we not just trying to be gods and failing to be men?”11 In a lengthy letter of July 24, 1899, Tyrrell states that Raffalovich’s work on homosexuality “deals with problems which my mind has long worked at.”12 Moral theology scamps the whole question ludicrously. Quite independently, I think, I reached your conclusion very nearly, as you will see on p. 80 of a little brochure I wrote some time ago and, with great difficulty, got printed “for private circulation among ours.” I will tell the printer to send you a copy. As it did not excite such horror as I expected, I have half a mind to rewrite it and speak more decisively where I had before spoken tentatively propter metum judaeorum. The criminal folly of educators in this matter has been so much obtruded upon me in the last few years that I am determined to use any liberty I have in bringing it to light. I think the principles of sound views are thoroughly Catholic but their application is woefully defeated by the impetus that renaissance paganism gave to reactionary prudishness . . . Many of our Jesuits and a great number outside the SJ feel that another line must be taken and that speedily. The confusion of inno-



Introduction


cence with ignorance is of all confusions the most disastrous. Much of your terminology is new and I feel not so clear as I would wish. The very term “unisexual” as opposed to “heterosexual” does not seem happy. But of course I may be cloudy as to the precise sense. In my own case I have certainly recognized almost all the inclinations (at various times).13 Tyrrell goes on to categorize, in list form, “subject,” “passion,” “object,” and “attribute” by “male” or “female.” He teases out their meanings for him, speaking largely from personal experience. The text to which Tyrrell refers in the letter is his 1897 Notes on the Catholic Doctrine of Purity, printed at a Jesuit press “For Private Circulation.” It was accompanied by a letter from the Jesuit provincial at the time, Fr. Francis Scoles, addressed to Superiors: It is not to be communicated to others without leave of the Provincial in each case, but a Rector can give it to any one of his subjects if he judges that it will be useful to him, and all our Fathers and students of theology can read it at their discretion. It is considered to be of the greatest service to Confessors, Directors and Retreat-givers, and in that expectation I confidently commend it to Superiors.14 Tyrrell’s text is predictably mild, but as his letters to Raffalovich reveal, much is often contained within the understatement of Catholic rhetoric concerning sexuality. Tyrrell asserts that the Church “prizes . . . full passions and warm affections controlled and conquered by an overmastering passion of Divine love.”15 His ideas challenge: “We are sometimes told that our affections must be either spiritual or carnal in this exclusive sense, whereas we know that it is neither, or rather both.”16 Tyrrell’s comments on the conjugal state are decidedly modern, and in fact employ ideas similar to contemporary justifications for same-sex unions: the development of a theology of friendship rather than simple procreation-potential ties. Human marriage, since its normal end is not merely the reproduction of a body, but of a mind and moral character, the transmission of the accumulated experience of centuries to the soul of the offspring, requires a relation of friendship and union of mind and affection over and above the animal tie . . . It is the love, not of soul for soul, or of body for body, but of human being for a human being.17



4

Introduction

5

That an almost similar affection may exist between those of the same sex is obvious. Here again it may be spiritual, well-restrained, strong; or it may be passionate, effusive, selfish, and weak. Still, in its lowest form, it is not sexual or unnatural, though it may be an occasion, more or less proximate, of unnatural sexual desire. For it cannot be denied that such unnatural propensities are found in some degree latent in most of us, and may be developed by circumstances. It seems, according to recent theories, a necessary consequence of the process of embryonic development, that the instinct of each sex should be found in some degree in the other, and sometimes so abnormally as to make the irregular passion prevail over the regular.18 Before we are too quick to judge Tyrrell’s pathologization of sexual inversion, or his use of the late nineteenth-century rhetoric of a woman’s soul in a man’s body (and vice versa), we must remember that as it is published, this is an official Church document. While it may sound antiquated and repressive to the contemporary reader, Tyrrell’s instruction is more inclusive and welcoming than many current Roman Catholic documents. It is really quite radical for the age that produced it and scarcely more oppressive than the best sexology of the time. Tyrrell was acutely aware of his own humanity, as he writes in a letter to Raffalovich dated June 16, 1903. I cannot tell with my imperfect psychic “chemistry” what little element it is that added to or subtracted from the total suddenly changes us from loving to loveless states or conversely. Broadly it is, like the weather, in the hands of God and not in ours; something given to us or taken from us. From me it has departed for many years; and I hope for its return with all the costs and the inconvenience; for the easier way is the poorer and thinner; nor is one very effectual with other souls when speaking from remembered, as opposed to present, felt experiences.19 Tyrrell continues, making plain the subject of sexuality that is the subtext of his reflections on desire. I’ve been looking at your work on Unisexualité again – which I brought back from London; and I was wishing you could summarise



The continuation of this text, the passage to which Tyrrell refers in his letter to Raffalovich, fleshes out the implications of holy union.


your evidence in some publicly readable form and state and defend your main thesis. The Church is blind and deaf and dumb in this matter as in so many others not directly affecting the temporal power, but merely the salvation of souls. You have pen and ability and leisure and liberty and money and experience; and might do more for souls by a good work on the “selfmanagement” question than all the confessors of Christendom will do in centuries.20 Tyrrell recognizes Raffalovich’s privilege as a wealthy layman. The ultimate goal of the sex theology that he craves is pastoral advice for continence: the aim not simply for same-sex desiring individuals, but for all human beings. Tyrrell’s dissatisfaction with the Church’s handling of the matters continues to be found in a letter dated January 22, 1905. It is about time I thanked you for “Les Groupes Uranistes” and I only wish I had something intelligent or helpful to say on the problems it suggests; but I am afraid it only deepens my long-growing suspicion that the foundations of our traditional sex-morality are doomed, not through the superior force of the enemies of morality but through their own inherent unsoundness and implicit immorality. If this scandalizes you, remember it is exactly what you maintain when you say, so rightly, that inversion is a normal phenomenon and not the result of diabolical malice.21 Throughout Tyrrell’s writings we find this passion for making it new, this need to throw away the systems that are shown to have failed. His is also the struggle of contemporary debates regarding homosexuality and the Roman Catholic Church. A new understanding is required. Near the end of his life, Tyrrell speaks most honestly about his own experience of inversion. In a letter of August 15, 1907, he tells Raffalovich: As a matter of personal experience in your line it is a curious thing that my unisexual sympathies so almost entirely predominant during my long years of college life ceased so abruptly about thirteen years ago that I can no longer even imagine that propensity now. Such propensities as I have are entirely normal but sexual rather than amative. I have never been “in love” with a woman in my life and I find myself ever less in sympathy with them.22



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Tyrrell’s “thirteen years” coincide with his departure from Jesuit houses of formation in favor of engagement with active pastoral work. It is worth noting his distinction between sexual and affective desire; his homosocial experience still prefers the company of men, while he claims disdain for women. His self-styled norm seems more the absence of homosexual desire (or any desire, as he noted above) rather than the presence of any heterosexual desire. In spite of that fact, Tyrrell demonstrates little active homophobia per se – or why would he continue his correspondence with Raffalovich on this topic? Nicholas Sagovsky maintains that “There is no evidence to suggest that Tyrrell remained other than a virgin and a dedicated celibate in this period or any other, but his approach to sexuality was as undeceived as that of the sexually experienced coterie with which he now came into contact.”23 As Philip Healy observes, “to arrive at [Tyrrell’s] theological position of self-mastery through the crucifixion of morality, he has had to meet head on and jettison the scholastic philosophy which underpins the traditional Catholic position on sexual morality.”24 Healy points out that in this way, he shares a moral vision with Raffalovich, whose work “permitted the homosexual Catholic to see himself on equal moral footing with his neighbor”: “the cross of self-restraint was binding for everyone.”25 The theologian and sexologist both maintain that “the homosexual is no better and no worse than the heterosexual, and enjoys the love of God on exactly the same terms.”26 According to Raffalovich in the Uranisme, sexual inversion may exist not only as a moral neutral, but in fact as a moral good. Specifically, the invert may make the best priest. In practice or in theory, every doctrine can favor sexual inversion . . . it is not contrary to the sexual instinct nor to human intelligence. The Catholic Church has, of course, understood that inversion is often less scandalous than heterosexual sexuality; it has also always known the extent and ramifications; it must be the depository of good returns for the education of inverts, and it must even today choose as priests preferably superior inverts who are chaste, devout; then the heterosexuals who have broken with the world or who have the strength of character necessary; the coarse invert must naturally be one of the greatest dangers to a poor religious institution.27 While some critics have been rather harsh on Raffalovich for his distinctions between the “good” and “bad” homosexuals, this statement nevertheless underscores the positive force he finds in sexual inversion – particularly when used in the service of the Church.



Introduction


Raffalovich came from a Russian Jewish banking family; he left France as a teenager to study with Walter Pater, hoping to be groomed into the perfect English aesthete. He and John Gray were life-partners for over thirty years, during which time he financed the construction of a church where Gray served, and where Raffalovich himself received the eucharist at Gray’s daily mass. Their vision of the invert-priest is a far cry from contemporary anxieties over homosexuality in the Roman Catholic clergy. David Schultenover writes that the Pascendi encyclical established a secret vigilance committee in every diocese; in 1910 the enforcement against clerics was made more specific, as professors of theology and philosophy were required to take an oath against Modernism as a condition for ordination, employment, and advancement.28 Much the same thing is happening today, in the wake of Church documents requiring that dioceses police the Catholic universities in their locale. Seminary visits are already underway to ensure orthodoxy. With respect to homosexuality, much of this furor comes in the wake of the priest sexual abuse crisis. A conservative Church has managed to scapegoat homosexuals in the priesthood and religious life, simultaneously offering satisfaction/sacrifice to a laity who rightfully demand justice while furthering a reactionary, homophobic agenda. Pope Benedict XVI approved the Congregation for Catholic Education Instruction’s document “Concerning the Criteria of Vocational Discernment Regarding Persons with Homosexual Tendencies in View of Their Admission to Seminaries and Holy Orders.” It was released on November 4, 2005, the feast of St. Charles Borromeo, patron of seminaries. The document, which introduces itself as “made more urgent by the current situation,” attempts to deal with “deep seated homosexual tendencies.”29 On “affective maturity and spiritual fatherhood,” “the entire life of the sacred minister must be animated by the gift of his entire person to the Church and by authentic pastoral charity.” Regarding homosexuality and ordained ministry, homosexual acts are “intrinsically immoral and contrary to natural law”; “they can never be approved under any circumstance.” Those “deep seated homosexual tendencies” are “objectively disordered.” Neither the seminary nor Holy Orders can admit “those who are actively homosexual, have deep-seated homosexual tendencies, or support the so-called gay culture.” This propensity “seriously obstructs them from properly relating to men and women.” However, homosexual “tendencies” that are a “manifestation of a transitory problem, as, for example, delayed adolescence,” “must be clearly overcome at least three years before diaconal ordination.” This text demonstrates the strong similarity between the Modernist



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crisis and the contemporary one regarding homosexuality. The regulation of who might serve the Church is made dependent on an arbitrary use of contemporary understandings of the human person, and, in particular, a disregard for scientific knowledge and the need to accommodate Church teaching to developments in a wide variety of fields. The Modernist crisis endures in the construction over the past quartercentury of a Roman Catholic doctrinal war against modern homosexual identity; it is based on a pre-modern, Scholastic conception of the natural. Although Raffalovich’s and Tyrrell’s texts participate in the pathologization of homosexuality, they both also offer modern challenges to the rigidity of a system that refuses to admit new information into the understanding of a moral theology. The goal of the 2005 document is to assert that the “objectively disordered” homosexual orientation is a mark of affective immaturity incompatible with priesthood. It underscores the authority of the Church: The mere desire to become a priest is not sufficient and there is no right to receive sacred Ordination. It rests with the Church – in her responsibility to define the necessary requirements for reception of the Sacraments instituted by Christ – to discern the suitability of the one who wishes to enter the Seminary, to accompany him during the years of formation, and to call him to Holy Orders, if he is judged to possess the required qualities. In keeping with the pre-modern argument, the understanding concerns a clergy called not by the communal Body of Christ but by its guardsmen in the sacred priesthood and hierarchy. The document succeeds in institutionalizing deception, as the text notes that the spiritual director and/or confessor, in acting as a representative of the Church, has the duty to dissuade the candidate who is “actively homosexual or shows deep-seated homosexual tendencies” from proceeding towards ordination. Of course, “it would be gravely dishonest for a candidate to hide his own homosexuality.” Thus the closet as open secret is still available. To conclude the document with these kinds of loopholes emphasizes the distance between theory and practice, although the work itself challenges a prior understanding. As James Alison has observed, the closeted, celibate seminarians who previously were able to view their homosexuality as an objective disorder are clearly no longer welcome, if they are to be honest with themselves and the Church.30 This volume of essays that so strongly represents literary Modernism also includes the significant contribution of George Haggerty’s chapter



Introduction


on the Gothic. Since Modernism, as we see in the Catholic Modernist crisis, is always engaging with the past, it is appropriate to consider such literary heritage. Furthermore, as Andrew Smith and Jeff Wallace observe, the Gothic Modernist text demonstrates its own discourse of theories of degeneration: what they call the “shared knowledge between the late Victorian Gothic and the modernist text.”31 From the eighteenth-century Gothic to nineteenth-century sensation, from the hothouse of Paterian Aestheticism to fin-de-siècle Decadence, we find a broad spectrum of Catholicism and homosexuality.32 As Smith and Wallace observe, “In both modernist and popular discourses, the body can seem to promise authentic personal identity, yet it is ghosted by a sense of something potentially alien and strange. Anxieties about the physical health of the collective body – human species, race, nationstate, culture – become anxieties about the idea of the self.”33 Catholicism fits in particularly well with this other-worldliness. They continue: The emergence of psychoanalysis at the end of the nineteenth century was already foreshadowed in the Gothic’s own images of perversion, transgression and the forbidden. Nascent theories of desire to be found in the work of Freud were also being developed within the field of sexology within Britain at around the same time. The sense that the subject is not in possession of itself because riven with desire that motivated it in telling if obscure ways, was always a key element of the images of compulsion that were at the heart of Gothic transgressions.34 As we have already seen, the struggle of emergent discourses can be found in the conflict of Catholic Modernism, particularly in relation to the crisis of sexual inversion. In both discourses – the Catholic and the inverted – the threat to personal agency, the conflict with authority, and the ineffable (desire, love of God, the love that dare not speak its name) are brought into play. To move once again between past and present, Edward Ingebretsen employs theories of the Gothic to discuss contemporary Roman Catholic homosexual politics. He writes, “As the colonized person and Gothic object, par excellence, in Catholic discourse, the homosexual person (usually male, for a complex of historical and theological reasons) is, as noted, the presumptive exemplar of ‘the unnatural.’ ”35 Modernity, now post-modernity, has forced the articulation of the homosexual subject, a colonized Other who inhabits the space of the anti-Modernist neo-Scholastic definition of the unnatural. “The increas-



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ingly baroque rhetoric calls attention to itself; that which once ‘went without saying’ now takes such efforts to speak that the very enunciation undoes itself in the stridency of the Gothicized speaking: homosexuality is unnatural, disordered, inordinately or inherently disordered.”36 The Gothic, like the Modern, takes things apart linguistically – including the love that dare not speak its name. The Gothic, like the Modern, queers, and is always already queer – in breaking things down. The Modernist crisis over theology made things fall apart over the idea of change – simultaneous with developing ideas about sexuality. The contemporary crisis in Roman Catholicism experiences the queerness of homosexuality as the manifestation of dissent about what constitutes the natural and how doctrine is to be understood with respect to scientific knowledge. Le plus ça change . . . Ingebretsen discusses the famous October 1, 1986 “Letter to the Bishops of the Catholic Church on the Pastoral Care of Homosexual Persons,” Homosexualitatis Problema, that banned gay Catholic organizations from meeting on Church property. One of the best-known works of Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI), Ingebretsen notes how the document “situates homosexuality in its ‘traditional’ Gothic triad of the unnatural, the immoral, and the unspeakable.”37 As he argues, The Gothic discourse of fear and fright, and its opposing binary of sentimental altruism, reflects the inadequacy of language to deal with the crisis of authority. Failed language signals the larger failure of material authorities and practices. The use of Gothic trope and metaphor is, then, evidence of that failure. The Gothic offers itself as a substitute, rather than a response, for language, and the Gothicization of ecclesiastical discourse over the previous decade reflects just how important homosexuality is to the contemporary Church.38 He concludes: “Gothic rhetoric and the polarization of fear functions less as ‘representation’ than as a failure to represent; in its failure it exploits the fantasy of retributive coherence by which social orders arraign, and stigmatize, its deviants.”39 The essays in this collection demonstrate tremendous variety, while maintaining an organic (or is it unnatural?) unity with respect to homosexuality, or queerness, and Catholicism. Male and female writers are considered; works by British authors, Americans, and expatriates are included. Some of them are well known, central to the canon. Others



Introduction


are “minor,” yet provide tremendous insight into this particular literary trajectory. Some of the writers are Catholics, others would never have imagined being included in a volume on Catholicism. Similarly, while certain authors self-identified as homosexual or inverted, others show no evidence of same-sex desire. Although I turn from Modernist theology and its contemporary implications back to the question of literary history, I wish to stress that while the texts examined here may belong among, and be concerned with, the secular, academic study of literature, the theological issues that they raise have implications for broader institutional – and perhaps even devotional – practices. The volume opens with two chapters that set the tone for the rest of the collection in very different ways. Thomas Long’s piece on “Queer Converts” provides an introduction to many of the themes dealt with in the book, including the allure of the Roman Church for people of same-sex desire, the relationship between Counter-Reformation Catholicism and Protestantism in Anglo-American culture, moral theology, and the subject of confession. Long briefly discusses four male figures whose importance resonates with authors considered in greater depth elsewhere: the American Charles Warren Stoddard, the English expatriate Frederick Rolfe (better known as “Baron Corvo”), the continental Joris Karl Huysmans, and the American-in-France, Julien Green. These writers demonstrate the significance of national identification, which inflects their particular individual understandings of Catholic homosexuality. Corvo and Huysmans point towards many of the issues examined in the essays that follow. Corvo is best known for his passions for young men while living in Italy – and for his relentless desire to become a priest. Corvo was never ordained, any more than Rolfe ever became a baron. The question of the priesthood will dominate many of the chapters’ discussions, as it did in my preface above. Who serves, and who is called to serve? The allusion to Huysmans’ classic A Rebours, as a major text of Catholic homosexual decadence, inaugurates the risqué imagination of church excess – perhaps equaled only by Wilde and Pater in England. George Haggerty’s essay on homosexuality, Catholicism, and Gothic fiction begins with the question, “Why is Gothic fiction always already queer?” The chapter goes on to demonstrate “how Gothic fiction queers religion,” and “how Catholicism offered a license for sexological experimentation.” This contribution is crucial for the historical links and models of reading it provides. While some of the texts analyzed in the collection look back to medieval or baroque Catholicism for their homoerotic play, the site of the Gothic, emerging in eighteenth-century



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literature, must be claimed for its identification of Catholicism with same-sex desire. Haggerty points out the anxieties over sodomy, Catholicism, and Englishness – sexuality, religion, and nationality – that predominate in the literature of this period. Anti-Catholicism and homophobia worked together to formulate an articulation of Catholic homosexuality – however negative that image was. The chapter provides close readings of the place of the body and Catholic devotion in Gothic fiction, opening up a narrative for the later, more blatant explorations in Modernist literature of the exoticism of Catholicism and its more direct (if equally titillating) representations of homosexuality. If Long began the story, Haggerty fleshes out and colors in the association of the Catholic priest or religious with homosexuality. The perverse priest of Gothic literature – not far removed from contemporary anxieties over the body of the cleric – figures large in this discourse. There is a wide gulf between the Gothic literature read by Haggerty and the twentieth-century focus of the rest of the volume. However, in the period that intervenes – Victorianism – Catholicism and homosexuality, as an identifiable couple, go back into the closet. The Oxford Movement and Catholic revival in the middle of the nineteenth century demonstrate this point well. While there were anxieties over the gender of the religious, and certain Gothic fears about the corrupting influence of the Roman Church, much of the specifically homosexual Catholic rhetoric went underground, or perhaps was never quite realized.40 The late nineteenth-century articulation of homosexual identity brought a collapse of the ambiguity to be found in Victorian Catholic queerness. Homosexuals and Catholics, for the most part, went their separate ways. The extraordinary nature of the exceptions can be found in this volume: the self-aware, modern homosexual Catholics who sought to reconcile opposites. By the end of the nineteenth century, it was very difficult for a person of same-sex desire to find satisfaction in religious life without at least acknowledging to oneself one’s sexual inversion, whether or not it was ever acted upon. The emergence of late Victorian sexology outed the queer Victorian Catholic, at times bringing the narratives closer to what they were in the anxious, homophobic Gothic literature. Nevertheless, some texts claimed a place at the table for the Catholic invert, which could not have been found in the earlier homophobic (and Catholic-phobic) discourse. My essay, and later Richard Dellamora’s, points to this narrative challenge in late Victorian Catholic homosexual discourse. If Haggerty’s Gothic studies locate the place of the Catholic and homosexual, it is not until the age of Oscar Wilde that their co-habitation can be more



Introduction


fully articulated, and with less violence. My chapter on John Gray and Marc-Andre Raffalovich indicates the tension between Victorian Catholic friendship and Modern Catholic homosexuality. Gray, who had signed letters to Wilde as “Dorian,” had been one of the aesthete’s boys. He later became a Catholic priest and in modernity “re-invented,” I argue, with his partner Raffalovich, a chaste same-sex friendship. While there is no doubt as to their sincere devotion and dual vocations, the question remains as to how exactly one becomes a priest when one has been Dorian Gray. This anxiety of conversion and reconciliation between homosexual pasts (and presents, and perhaps futures) is found throughout the modern literature about which the chapters that follow are concerned. Patrick O’Malley takes up a similar issue in his essay on James Joyce, “Confessing Stephen: the Nostalgic Erotics of Catholicism.” The history of Oscar Wilde looms large for the straight Irish writer. As O’Malley argues, by the twentieth century the “free-floating play of mutual signification” between Catholicism and homosexuality found in the nineteenth century “has crystallized into more rigid categories.” Modernism inverts the structure of the confessional, making the private explicitly public. O’Malley calls the Roman Catholic confessional “the confessional that fails to confess,” in a “Catholicism that registers the secret of queer desire not because it confesses but because it does not.” For Joyce, recollection of Oscar Wilde brings about a new theory of the confessional: a nostalgia for an age when Catholicism and homosexuality could play off each other without explicit theorization. At that time, homoerotic desire and fascination with Catholic ritual existed as mirrors of one another. As we will continue to see, by the beginning of the twentieth century these strange bedfellows could no longer sleep quietly together. The “sexual aesthetic of necessary indirection,” as O’Malley phrases it, became much more direct. The next several essays demonstrate the importance of women writers in exploring the relationship between Catholicism and homosexuality for Modernism. Ruth Vanita’s chapter on Hope Mirrlees interrogates a category familiar to scholars of the history of homosexuality: the role of classicism in shaping modern identities. Mirrlees used both the Catholic and the ancient Greek to develop the “Sapphism” of her 1919 novel Madeleine: One of Love’s Jansenists. Her partner and teacher, Cambridge classicist Jane Harrison, mixed classical and Christian ideas of tragedy in theorizing the genre. Mirrlees’ title character likewise looks to medieval and Early Modern Catholicism as well as ancient Greek sources. Madeleine, like any good tragic Modernist, chooses earthly



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desire over spiritual fulfillment: she wants to be with, or just to be, her literary heroine – a seventeenth-century French writer who calls herself Sappho. Madeleine’s religion is superstition. Her tragedy, a thoroughly modern one, is madness when she is unable to attain her desired goal. Biographically, the connections between lesbian writers of the period are worth noting. Harrison studied at Newnham with Katharine Bradley, who collaborated with her niece and lover Edith Cooper to write under the pen-name Michael Field. Bradley and Cooper converted to Catholicism after the death of their dog. Mirrlees converted after Harrison’s death. Susan Hill’s chapter concerns a female author who wrote perceptively about Catholicism but did not herself convert. Willa Cather was raised a Baptist, but as an adult attended the Episcopal Church. Whereas Vanita’s essay demonstrates a British Modernist woman writer delving into the continental and classical literary past, Hill’s study of Cather shows the author’s desire to formulate an understanding of the role of Roman Catholicism in the New World, the colonized American landscape. In analyzing Death Comes for the Archbishop, Hill points out Cather’s sympathetic portrayal of the Church, noteworthy in turn-ofthe-century Protestant America, where immigrant Catholicism was demonized. Although the priests in the work are surely part of a homosocial system that oppresses women, they are also queer figures with ambivalent, ambiguous gender identification. Hill argues that the feminized priests exist in relation to the politics of nation, sexuality, and religion of the work and the age. While she refrains from stating that Cather’s priests are lesbian figures in drag, she uses their queerness to suggest that “just as Catholicism is characterized historically as the feminized outsider, so, too, is the lesbian.” Richard Dellamora’s study climaxes with a focus on a woman writer whose Catholicism and lesbianism are not in question. Radclyffe Hall’s 1928 The Well of Loneliness is the endpoint of his essay, but the argument begins with Cardinal Newman and continues with Wilde and John Francis Bloxam. Dellamora makes connections between nineteenth-century men’s and women’s writings and the Catholic writers of Modernism. From the sacramental blood of the crucifixion and eucharist, he engages theology to discuss artistic and literary representations of Catholic queerness. Underscoring the issue of the recent past in relation to the Modern, a real coming-out occurs in Bloxam’s 1894 short story “The Priest and the Acolyte.” It is sensational (to use the Victorian term), and perhaps indeed “Gothic” in its depiction of the love and ultimate deaths of the priest and acolyte. The Anglo-Catholic priest



Introduction


comes out in a stunning apologia for his sexual inversion – which is problematically expressed in this story with a youth, reminiscent of the later stereotype of the pedophile priest. The work appeared in an Oxford undergraduate magazine that also included Bosie Douglas’s famous “Love that dare not speak its name” poem. Bloxam became a highly regarded Anglo-Catholic clergyman known for his mission to innercity boys.41 As for Radclyffe Hall’s lesbian classic, while the biblical hermeneutics of the text have been subject to much critical analysis, less has been written on the specifically Catholic nature of The Well of Loneliness.42 Dellamora’s essay highlights the priest-focus of this volume – and the way in which that identity can take many forms: from Newman the clerical ideal (who loved, and was buried with, his friend Ambrose St. John43) to Wilde the High Priest of Aestheticism and Catholic convert, to Bloxam’s pederastic priest, to the “priests” of sexology who shape Hall’s novel about inversion. The term “doctor” can thus move between the title given to the great teachers of the Church and the sexologists who define the inverted person. Patricia Juliana Smith’s chapter on Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood concentrates on a “doctor” who is neither kind of doctor – but is perhaps another queer priest. Doctor Matthew Dante O’Connor is no more a doctor in the orthodox sense than pseudo-artistocrats such as Felix Volkbein (or Corvo, Frederick Rolfe) are barons. Smith interrogates the category of camp and its relationship to Catholicism. As she points out in the work of the expatriate woman writer, Barnes would be very surprised to find herself studied in a volume on Catholicism. This essay demonstrates how dichotomous categories such as the sacred/profane break down, and how a secular narrative can passionately encode sacramentalist Catholicism. In interpreting the “beautiful lies of Catholicism” in relation to the “true lies of camp,” Smith shows the decadence of Modernism as well as its desolation. Using materials as diverse as biblical texts, liturgical forms, catechism, and devotional literature, Smith suggests that our desire to distinguish the holy from the irreverent is limiting. To call Catholicism camp and to appreciate camp Catholicism is not to denigrate the place of the holy – in human life or in transcendence. Thus her study of Nightwood elucidates the spiritual quest of a quintessentially Catholic (if non-“religious”) figure: one existing on the margins of society and “truth.” As in Wilde studies, where calling his work – or his Catholicism – “aesthetic” can be either pejorative or laudatory, likewise here the recognition of Catholic “camp” can provide an opportunity to explore the richness, eccentricity, and excess of the Church.



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The difference of Catholicism is also evident in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, which Francesca Coppa discusses in her essay “ ‘A Twitch Upon the Thread.’ ” Her title alludes to G. K. Chesterton’s Father Brown stories, read by the matriarch of the novel’s Flyte family. Like Thompson’s “Hound of Heaven,” or the searching lover of John of the Cross’ Dark Night, Chesterton’s Catholic God can bring one back “ ‘with an unseen hook and an invisible line.’ ” Hence the argument that many Catholics make – that no matter how far one wanders, one is always a Catholic. Coppa demonstrates how Catholicism is presented to Charles Ryder as otherness, that which sets one apart, and which may or may not even be readily visible . . . yet it will come out one day. Catholicism circulates reciprocally with homosexuality here. In this close reading of the novel, Coppa articulates the network of Catholic intellectuals and Catholic thought as “totalizing discourse.” “All suffering becomes Catholic suffering, all joy becomes Catholic joy, everything that happens is a part of God’s plan, and there is no outside, no way to conceptualize oneself and one’s experience differently.” The subtle, covert, one might say “closeted” Catholicism, has the power – with a twitch – to make one return, or turn at last, to the Church. Coppa points out that if the twitch to God is presented as the trajectory to which all things lead in this Augustinian continuum of conversion from all the perversions of human desire, one might just as easily feel the twitch to return to the carnal – to the homoerotic love for a man such as Sebastian which began Charles’ journey in the novel. These issues lead to the conflicts found in the writings of Julien Green, the American author who was born in France in 1900 and died there in 1997. Green’s oeuvre is the subject of Thomas Armbrecht’s essay that appropriately concludes the volume. Green’s struggle between his acknowledged homosexual desire and his professed (and converted) Roman Catholicism shows the direction modern homosexuality takes. Green represents the full flowering of a homosexual Catholic sensibility – which finally chooses chastity. If the early twentieth-century classics of High Modernism elucidate the mutual explorations of the Catholic and the homosexual – more fully “out” than Victorian queerness with its ambiguities – Green’s amazingly prolific works demonstrate where, ultimately, such journeys may go. Although many of Green’s writings depict gay and lesbian characters, as Armbrecht observes, they do not send a positive message to homosexual Catholic people. Turnof-the-century Catholic homosexuals could perhaps confess their contradictory selves because there was little formal support for the sexually deviant person – and thus almost nothing from the institutional Church



Introduction


to condemn the world’s acceptance of homosexuality. But for the homosexual living into the second half of the twentieth century, and particularly the final third, the number of Roman Catholic condemnations of active homosexual life in the post-Stonewall, gay-liberated world force many to make a choice: orthodox Roman Catholicism or out gay life. Does the narrative of queer Catholicism have an ending? Must it always, finally, be one or the other – in a modern world where such identities are articulated as polar opposites? At the beginning of the twenty-first century we find ourselves considering the relationship between Catholicism and homosexuality – in literature, in the academy, and perhaps in church as well. While regulation of teaching at Catholic universities has become more noticeable in the past decade, and standards of clerical life and priestly sexuality more monitored, there has also emerged an exuberant, abundant production of theological work challenging the strained relationship between samesex desire and religious institutions. Of course, many secular (or “recovering Catholic”) homosexuals are no more interested in entertaining the “contradiction” (as they see it) of queer Catholicism than right-wing theologians are. In a keynote lecture delivered at the “Out There” conference organized by Linda Garber for gay/lesbian studies scholars and administrators from Catholic universities, the eminent thinker on matters Catholic and homosexual Mark Jordan concludes: How should I live my queer Catholicism? In discerning the ever-individual responses to that question, we must be willing to risk either going or staying. We should not risk narcotic winter dreams or chilly self-mutilation. And if we do find ourselves somehow trapped inside those temptations, we should certainly not recommend them to our young. If we cannot offer lived Catholicism as a queer hope, we should not offer it. We do not want that legacy on our consciences.44 Go, and do likewise.



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Queer Converts: Peculiar Pleasures and Subtle Antinomianism Thomas Lawrence Long

It was rumoured of him once that he was about to join the Roman Catholic communion; and certainly the Roman ritual had always a great attraction for him. The daily sacrifice, more awful really than all the sacrifices of the antique world, stirred him as much by its superb rejection of the evidence of the senses as by the primitive simplicity of its elements and the eternal pathos of the human tragedy that it sought to symbolize. . . . But he never fell into the error of arresting his intellectual development by any formal acceptance of creed or system, or of mistaking, for a house in which to live, an inn that is but suitable for the sojourn of a night, or for a few hours of a night in which there are no stars and the moon is in travail. Mysticism, with its marvellous power of making common things strange to us, and the subtle antinomianism that always seems to accompany it, moved him for a season . . .1 This catechumen manqué is, of course, Dorian Gray. Midway through his Gothic novel, Wilde anatomized in Augustinian fashion his young seeker’s degradation: not by a luridly minute inventory of sexual exploits (as Huysmans had done a few years previously in the character of Des Esseintes), but by a more mundane though not less material accumulation: Dorian’s collections of perfumes, exotic musical instruments, jewels, embroideries, and finally, ecclesiastical vestments. While it would likely have repulsed and horrified Victorian readers’ evangelical sensibilities, Dorian’s exploration of forms of “high church” Catholicism is a spiritual journey into a kind of transcendental hedonism: “For these treasures, and everything that he collected in his lovely house, were to be to him means of forgetfulness, modes by which he could 19 10.1057/9780230287778 - Catholic Figures, Queer Narratives, Edited by Lowell Gallagher, Frederick S. Roden and Patricia Juliana Smith


1


escape for a season, from the fear that seemed to him at times to be almost too great to be borne” (Wilde 140). Perhaps because I grew up in a post-immigrant Catholic culture that sought exemplars of cultural Catholicism – “famous Catholics” like Sinatra or the Kennedys – I still seek out analogous celebrity Catholics to solidify my queer identity. In particular, I am fascinated by the rolls of Queer Catechumens, the sexually outlandish who converted to Catholicism in its various forms, including Roman Catholicism, Anglicanism, and other purveyors of high church pleasures. William Beckford, Gerard Manley Hopkins, John Henry Newman, Joris Karl Huysmans, Frederick Rolfe, Charles Warren Stoddard, Renée Vivien, Ronald Firbank, Radclyffe Hall, W. H. Auden, Daryl Hine, and, of course, Dorian Gray, are among the icons in my imaginary chapel. The sheer numbers seem striking to me – or do I just see selectively? Ellis Hanson suggests that “By the 1920s, the notion of Anglo and Roman Catholicism as a magnet for homosexuals had passed from a running joke to a simple fact.”2 In any case, I have wondered what drew queer people to a religiosity often associated with a detailed and laborious scrutiny of sexual desires and practices, as in the discipline of the confessional, along with a systematic doctrinal repudiation of non-marital and nonreproductive sexualities. In this essay I will outline biographical research into queer conversion and speculate on the peculiar pleasures that forms of Catholicism might hold for the sexually queer, and I will follow two hunches. First, in Anglo-Protestant North America and England, membership in the Roman Catholic communion was always already perceived as anti-social and deviant and thus served as a “subtle antinomianism” for the sexual dissident. Similarly, in post-revolutionary and modernist continental Europe, Catholicism was intellectually suspect. Thus conversion to Catholicism provided an emblem or objective correlative of secret perversion. Second, Catholic theology and sacramental practices enabled a paradoxical maintenance of the contradictions in sexual dissidence and in a perverse way fostered sexual promiscuity. The anonymous confessional offered absolution for sexual sins, provided that one was not “living in sin” (and thus failing to demonstrate contrition). To follow these two hunches, I will situate these conversions along a continuum, at one end the flight from the material into a transcendental signifier, and, at the other end, transcendence by immersion in material signification. In particular, I will suggest that the materiality of Catholic sacramental practice after the Counter-Reformation Council of Trent (1545–63) and the Church’s valorizing of non-married exemplars – the



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martyrs and saints and priests and nuns who declared an everlasting “Nay” to heterosexual relations – merged with an emergent queerly decadent Aestheticism, as has been recently discussed by Ellis Hanson in Decadence and Catholicism. At the same time, Catholic moral manuals and penitential practice obliquely encouraged promiscuous sexual liaisons. Hanson recalls the commonplace “that gay people turn to the Church to hide from their desire,” but he counters instead “that they are searching for a suitable stage on which to perform it” (24). Between the late sixteenth century, after the Counter-Reformation Council of Trent, and the mid-twentieth, before the Second Vatican Council, Roman Catholic liturgical practices offered an external forum for the enactment of faux médiéval pageantry, a performance of spiritual devotions that subordinated the internal forum, the realm of Protestantism’s “born again” conversion, to the liturgical external forum. If Protestant moralism required a strict and abiding congruence of word and deed, Catholicism admitted incongruities. In distinguishing itself from the interiority of Reformation fideism, Counter-Reformation Catholicism lavished exteriority with even greater significance. As Paul Giles points out in a chapter on the Catholic aesthetic of queer artists Andy Warhol and Robert Mapplethorpe, “That romantic freedom and individual autonomy cherished by Protestant culture is trumped by a ‘Catholic’ system where ‘inner light’ is less significant than one’s assigned place within an overall structure of meaning.”3 While most nineteenth- and twentieth-century converts maintained a medievalist romance about the Church, the Church’s articulation of seven sacraments and its precisely measurable codification of religious practices, particularly the penitential, permitted those with an ambiguous interiority to compensate with carefully regulated material practices. The church that tolerated carnival excesses prior to Lenten austerities and offered daily sacramental confession after libertine nights could be understood as a psychic counterweight for some people. Moreover, Catholicism’s official clerical and regular social structures of celibate and sexually segregated priests, brothers, and nuns, and its exemplary narratives of unmarried saints and martyrs provided sanctioned roles for those disinclined towards heterosexual marriage. Christ’s own non-married state provided the prototype for countless “eunuchs for the sake of the Kingdom.” Thus evading pressures for social conformity, queer people could claim a venerable pedigree of unmarried, same-sex sociality. Indeed, as a cursory review of nineteenthand twentieth-century Catholic catechisms reveals, the Church pre-



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Fear and loathing: the Euro-American anti-Catholic impulse Intellectuals’ and artists’ anti-Catholic sentiments were culturally configured in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the cultural contexts of anti-Catholicism determined its meaning. In Anglo-American Protestant countries (chiefly England, Scotland, and the United States), Catholicism was equated with sexual perversion, authoritarian violence, and superstition. Examining nineteenth-century American attitudes toward Catholics, Masons, and Mormons, David Brion Davis describes the rhetoric used against these three groups by dominant Protestant nativists: While nativists affirmed their faith in Protestant monogamy, they obviously took pleasure in imagining the variety of sexual experience supposedly available to their enemies. By picturing themselves exposed to similar temptations, they assumed they could know how priests and Mormons actually sinned. . . . We should recall that this literature was written in a period of increasing anxiety and uncertainty over sexual values and the proper role of woman. As ministers and journalists pointed with alarm at the spread of prostitution, the incidence of divorce, and the lax and hypocritical morality of the growing cities, a discussion of licentious subversives offered a convenient means for the projection of guilt as well as desire. The sins of individuals, or of the nation as a whole, could be pushed off upon the shoulders of the enemy and there punished in righteous anger.4 The sexual segregation of Catholic clergy and religious, the requirement of celibacy for those in religious life, the sacramental practice of private auricular confession, and the Latin liturgy all contributed to this menacing mystique. In addition, the fact that most Catholics in America were immigrants added class and ethnic hatred to the dogmatic mix. The situation in England, where Catholicism had been a disempowered minority since the sixteenth century, was not much different. As Patrick Allitt notes in a study of English and American converts:



sented celibate clerical and religious life as a “higher” or better calling than marriage, whose primary charism was the reproduction of new Catholics. Moreover, Protestant polemics and sensationalist tracts viewed Catholic celibacy as not only aberrant in itself but tending towards a variety of (usually sexual) vices.

Quite apart from the religious wrench of conversion, becoming a Catholic in Britain or the United States often prompted accusations of disloyalty to the nation, its Protestant heritage, even its sense of common decency. When Thomas Arnold (Matthew Arnold’s brother) converted, his wife wrote a furious letter to Newman, accusing him of persuading her husband “to ignore every social duty and become a pervert.” She added, “From the bottom of my heart I curse you for it.”5 In his study of Victorian Protestant fiction, Michael Schiefelbein observes that, “These novels strikingly dramatize the many evils ascribed to Rome in nonfictional discourse: superstition, idolatry, deceit, sexual impotence or license, corruption, oppression, debauchery, and treason.”6 In continental Europe, intellectuals and artists associated the dominant Church with clerical authoritarianism and political oppression. The doctrines and rituals of the Church were less obnoxious than the intimacy between Church and state, the Church’s restraint of intellectual freedom through its Holy Office, the Index of Forbidden Books, and the power of excommunication, and the dissemination of this power down to the level of a local parish priest. It might be said that, whereas intellectuals of Protestant countries were anti-Catholic, intellectuals of Catholic countries were anti-clerical.

True confessions: Catholicism, sexual morality, and sacramental practice Firmly embedded in the popular imagination of Anglo-American nonCatholics even today are several images of Catholic life: clerical celibacy, prohibitions against contraception (and concomitant large families) as constitutive of marital chastity, and the confessional. Celibacy, contraception, chastity, and confession compose a set of topoi that continue to be employed in the popular culture media of television, movies, and jokes. However, like most cartoons, these clichés fail to convey the intellectual subtleties or the pastoral implications of Catholic moral theology, particularly its sexual ethics. Roman Catholic moral theology stands on three pillars: the Bible, Church tradition, and the assimilation of Classical philosophy (chiefly Platonic and Aristotelian) into a Natural Law theology. Like most Christian traditions, Catholicism views the Old Testament and the New Testament as the authoritative divine word. Unlike Protestantism with its injunction sola scriptura, Catholicism also refers to the record of early





Christian Greek and Latin writers (the so-called “Church Fathers” or Patristic writers), Church councils, and authorized theologians. Moreover, it also employs Classical philosophy in order to arrive at explanations of biblical and traditional texts, as seen in Augustine’s Neo-Platonism and Aquinas’ Aristotelianism. The result has been the formulation of a Natural Law theology, intended particularly to supplement the gaps in biblical texts. These traditions were later complemented in a synthesis of Catholic moral theology developed by Alphonsus Liguori in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Thus the Church is able to arrive at conclusions about modern ethical issues for which there is no clear biblical or even patristic, conciliar, or theological precedent.7 Natural Law theology is teleological, asking what are the natural purposes or ends of acts. In the Church’s sexual ethics, before its reform in the second half of the twentieth century, the sole end of sexual intercourse was procreation, and the end of procreation was engendering a family. Thus any sexual activities that fell outside of marital procreation were equally forbidden, or in the language of moral theology, a mortal sin. Adultery, fornication, masturbation, contraception, in addition to sodomy, all failed to adhere to the natural telos of sex. For example, the 1917 edition of The Catholic Encyclopedia8 asserted that “all sexual intercourse outside of married life is regarded equivalent to adultery in justifying complete separation, even the unnatural sins of sodomy and bestiality” (“Divorce [in Moral Theology]”) and reproduced Alphonsus Liguori’s conclusion that sodomy between husband and wife is an adultery (“Adultery”). Between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries, Catholic moral teaching achieved an astonishing uniformity and dissemination through the reproduction of manuals of moral theology, concise handbooks that were used in the training of parish priests and that priests then employed in local application, chiefly in the sacrament of confession. Since the Fourth Lateran Council (1215), Catholics had been obliged to make confession to a priest and to receive Holy Communion at least once each year, a practice confirmed by the Counter-Reformation Council of Trent, which added the provision that confession had to consist of a meticulous examination of conscience entailing an account of the species and number of the sins. In order to assist the penitent in confession in making a full confession (a tally of the precise species of the sins and the number of times each was committed), priests needed careful seminary training and a useful handbook for pastoral practice. Rooted in medieval penitentials (books listing sins and their



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appropriate penances), the manuals of moral theology provided uniformity across the national boundaries of Catholic countries, since they were written in the Church’s universal language, Latin. To us they seem legalistic and casuistic, attempting to account for nice distinctions without differences. In their time, however, manuals “prevented the priests of the day from arbitrarily imposing unreasonable demands on their people and instead protected a certain gentle and patient spirit in moral theology.”9 In addition, their acts-centered ethics maintained sodomy as a juridical object rather than creating the sodomite as a species. The confessor was only interested in what you had done, with whom, and how often. (Particularly with lust, “entertaining impure thoughts,” a willful fantasizing that produced a delectatio morosa, also counted as acts.) Acts of sodomy required the penitent’s contrition and confession and the priest’s penance and absolution, as did any sexual sin, or any other mortal sin for that matter. In one sense, nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Catholic moral manuals and penitential practice resisted modernism in a way that Foucault would have appreciated. In the early twentieth century one manualist achieved nearly canonical status: Adolphe Tanquerey (1854–1932), a French priest whose Sulpician order was dedicated to seminary instruction of French, English, Irish, and American clergy. His Theologia moralis fundamentalis: De virtutibus et praeceptis and Synopsis theologiae moralis et pastoralis became the vade-mecum of Catholic confessional practice.10 Their precepts were also contained in his more pastoral handbook of Christian sanctity, The Spiritual Life: a Treatise on Ascetical and Mystical Theology. Tanquerey situated sins that proceed from sensuality within the context of the concupiscence of the flesh (including gluttony and sloth, in addition to lust). Typical of the medico-moral discourses of the late nineteenth century, he attributed a variety of psychological and biological consequences of lust, including: [T]he mind becomes dull and weak because the vital forces are used up by the senses: taste for serious studies is lost; the imagination gravitates towards lower things; the heart gradually withers, hardens, and is attracted only by degrading pleasures. . . . In some cases the physical frame itself is deeply affected: the nervous system, over-excited by such abuses, becomes irritated, weakened, and “incapable of fulfilling its mission of regulation and defence;” . . . the various bodily organs function but imperfectly; nutrition is improperly accomplished, strength is undermined and the danger of consumption threatens.11





The discourses of degeneracy are evident here, although these symptoms might also be attributed to any neurasthenic Decadent artist. Despite what seems to us the extremity of that rhetoric, in representing lust in those terms Tanquerey acknowledged it as arising from the human condition: “This pleasure is permissible to married people, provided they use it for the purpose for which marriage was instituted; outside of this it is strictly forbidden. In spite of this prohibition, there is in us an unfortunate tendency, more or less violent, especially from the age of puberty or adolescence, to indulge in this pleasure even out of lawful wedlock” (415, para. 873). Thus sexual concupiscence was universalized, not simply the mark of the pervert. In guiding the priest who would in turn guide the penitent struggling with lust, Tanquerey recommended avoidance of the occasions of sin, maintenance of custody of the eyes and touch, and engagement in vigorous physical activity; but his strongest recommendation was that the penitent resort to frequent confession and reception of communion (419, para. 882). He universalized the struggle with lust, situated it in the human condition, and encouraged the penitent: The Council of Trent tells us that God does not command the impossible, but that He requires us to do what in our power lies and to pray in order to obtain the grace of accomplishing that which, of ourselves, we are incapable of performing. This injunction holds particularly in matters of chastity, with regard to which most persons, even those in the holy state of marriage, encounter special difficulties. (419, para. 882) Catholic converts, regardless of their sexualities, could find in the doctrines and practices of the Church antidotes to some of the dilemmas posed by Protestant Christianity. As Schiefelbein points out in his study of English Victorian fiction: . . . unlike nonfictional discourse of the day, these novels also explore the imaginatively rich possibilities of Catholic culture. . . . An attraction to Catholicism’s incarnational theology . . . was also shared by . . . novelists who longed to proclaim the sacredness of humanity in all its lusty materiality. In all these cases, the novelists exploit Catholicism for its ability to integrate what many expressions of Protestantism tended to polarize: sacred and secular, spirit and flesh, revelation and historicity.12



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Peculiar pleasures and subtle antinomianism What do queers want? When I read the nineteenth- and twentiethcentury discourses of queer consciousness, I interpret a significant condensation around two poles: normalizing discourses of assimilation (“We’re just like everybody else in every way but one”) and antinomian discourses of transgression (“We are your parents’ worst nightmare”). A galaxy of attitudes, desires, and styles clusters around those two poles. If today’s queer can choose between, on the one hand, a Rainbow MasterCard or, on the other, a shaved head, tattoos, and body piercings, were there analogous options for sexual dissidents at the turn of the previous century? My contention here is that conversion to Roman Catholicism or Anglo-Catholicism, more than a simple camping Arch Faggotry (the “smells and bells” of Catholic ritualism), was for some people a way to externalize their repudiation of mainstream erotic sensibilities. In other words, an English or North American queer’s converting to Roman Catholicism or a continental intellectual queer’s embracing the Catholic Church were socially beyond the pale, and thus served as a sacramental analogue or objective correlative of perversion. Every antinomianism is the suspension of one set of rules on the way towards the imposition of another, and Catholic doctrine and discipline were already widely regarded as perverse. For some Anglo-American queer converts, like the American writer Charles Warren Stoddard and the English Frederick Rolfe, Roman Catholicism’s celibate (if not always chaste) male priesthood provided an attractive homosocial environment. Reared as a Presbyterian, Stoddard was attracted to Catholicism in childhood. John Crowley suggests that: In Stoddard’s far sunnier Catholicism, which Rolfe would have considered self-deceiving, the spiritual and the carnal were happily wedded . . . No clear boundary existed between “homosociality” and “homosexuality” except within the ideology of Christian brotherhood, which Stoddard radically revised to suit his temperament.



At the same time, conversion to Catholicism could satisfy one’s desire for cultural resistance: “[Arnold] Lunn attributed Chesterton’s conversion to a sort of wilful perversity, a determination not to fall in with the conventional wisdom of his day.”13 This “wilful perversity” against social norms reflected the subtle antinomianism of some converts.

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His “temperament” in fact was precisely the reason for his conversion that Stoddard gave in a letter to the American writer James Whitcomb Riley: I couldn’t help it, you see; it was born in me and was the only thing that appealed to my temperament, I believe a man’s religion is nessessarily [sic] a matter of temperament. I couldn’t be anything else than a Catholic – except – except a downright savage, and I wish to God I were that!15 In place of his childhood Calvinism’s erotophobia, Stoddard may have found in sacramental Catholicism a détente, however unstable, between body and spirit, for as Austen points out, “the consolation of Catholic confession was especially important to Stoddard, who knew very well from childhood what the Calvinists had to say about Sodom and Gomorrah. What the Presbyterians had seemed to damn in selfrighteous fury the Catholics seemed to have the grace to forgive.”16 Homosocial Catholicism seems also to have attracted the English writer Frederick Rolfe. Born into an Anglican family, what we can know of his conversion (indeed what we can know of anything of his life is a problematic muddle of fact and the extensive fiction he made of it) indicates that it was a desire for priesthood that impelled Rolfe’s conversion. Cecil Woolf and Brocard Sewell suggested that “Rolfe loved Catholicism and everything about it – except the Catholics.”17 Convinced that the only legitimate priesthood resided in the apostolic succession in the line of St. Peter, Rolfe converted to Catholicism but spent the rest of his life thwarted in the aspiration for ordination, writing the fantastic novel Hadrian VII, the story of a sinned-against Englishman who is suddenly and mysteriously elected pope, ordained and crowned, surrounding himself with attractive young men. Symons attributed homosexual aestheticism as the motivation for Rolfe’s conversion: The attraction of the Catholic Faith for the artistic temperament is a phenomenon which has been the subject of many novels, and is one of the facts of psychology . . . [Y]et it is not surprising that one in whom nature had not implanted a love for women should embrace a celibate career.18



When he agreed to take a position at Notre Dame, in fact, he cited his devotion to young men as one of his strongest credentials.14

Rolfe’s modern biographer, Miriam J. Benkovitz, proposes that his fusion of romantic and erotic infatuation with older boys and young men, represented by his literary fascination with boy martyrs and priest martyrs, might be understood as a motive for conversion.19 Of course he might have had the company of young men, clerical ordination, and sacraments by remaining in high church Anglicanism, and the fact that he remained a Catholic long after his hopes of ordination had been definitively frustrated suggests that Rolfe was motivated by more than opportunistic pedophilia. Like Stoddard, Rolfe seems to have been drawn to the romance of Catholic homosociality and its social perverseness. Conversion to stigmatized Catholicism in Protestant cultures was one way of embracing an objective correlative of interior perversion. For continental queers like Joris Karl Huysmans and Julien Green, however, the motives for joining the Church would have to overcome anti-clericalism. In a preface to his novel A Rebours (Against the Grain), written twenty years after the book’s publication, Joris Karl Huysmans described the origins of the book and of his Catholic conversion. Of the first: “I pictured to myself a Monsieur Folantin, more cultured, more refined, more wealthy and who has discovered in artificiality a relief from the disgust inspired by the worries of life and the American habits of his time.”20 Huysmans’ project required extensive research that resulted in his “condensing into a ‘meat essence’ of precious stones, of perfumes, of flowers, of literature religious and lay, of profane music and plain song” (57), the prototype of Dorian Gray’s immersion in a transcendental hedonism. Interestingly, Huysmans revealed his medievalism, remarking “I was led by the very nature of my task to study the Church under many aspects. It was in fact impossible to go back to the only really characteristic eras humanity has ever known, the Middle Ages that is, without realizing that She embraced everything, that art existed only in Her and by Her” (57). “She,” of course, is the only woman with whom Huysmans could find himself infatuated: Ecclesia, Holy Mother Church, and Bride of Christ. He noted blandly: “ ‘Against the Grain’ appeared in 1884, and I set off to be converted at a Trappist House in 1892; nearly eight years had elapsed before the seeds of the book had germinated” (69). While claiming to be mystified by “grace” and conversion, he did acknowledge that: The Church offices, mysticism, art were the vehicle and the means; it occurred mostly in churches, at Saint Séverin in particular, where I used to go out of curiosity, for lack of other things to do. I experienced as I watched the services only an inward tremor, the




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Or, I would add, on falling into love or lust. In an English introduction to the novel, Havelock Ellis, serving as both art critic and sexologist, associated the novel’s “decadent style” with Byzantine architecture, St. Mark’s Cathedral in Venice, and later Gothic, paragons of Catholic ritualism (23), while characterizing Huysmans as . . . at once the ultra-modern child of a refined civilization and the victim of nostalgia for an ascetic mediaevalism; his originality lies in the fact that in him these two tendencies are not opposed but harmonious, although the second has only of late reached full development. (33–4) I suspect, rather, that Huysmans was less original in this regard and more akin to other queers who had found or would find their same way through the world. Ellis also cited Huysman’s Là-bas (Down There) in which the book’s central character, Durtal, proposes a “spiritualistic naturalism” that combines a connoisseur’s attention to the material world with the ascetic’s disposition to rapture. Ellis suggested that Grunewald’s famous Crucifixion painting provides a suitable analogue of this spiritual naturalism: “the Christ who was at once a putrid and unaureoled corpse and yet a manifest god bathed in invisible light, the union of outrageous realism and outrageous idealism” (37). This figurative discordia concors is a defining feature of Catholicism’s sacramental negotiation of the natural and supernatural, the capacity for ambiguity and contradiction. Writing forty years after Huysmans, French-American convert to Catholicism, Julian (or Julien) Green, would note in his diary entry of December 30, 1940: Does our body never weary of desiring the same things? For it always yearns after the same feast while our spirit continually demands something new. There are only two types of humanity that I have ever really understood: the mystic and the profligate, because both fly to extremes, searching, each in his own way, for the absolute; but of the two, the profligate is to my mind the most mysterious, for he never tires of the only dish served up to him by his appetite and on which he banquets each time as though he had never tasted it before.21



little shiver one feels on seeing, hearing or reading a fine work of art. (71)


The carnal man lives with the spiritual man. One tries to slit the other’s throat. To give up pleasure means throwing the carnal man into jail, but none the less, he goes on living, tied up, and gagged as tightly as you please; yet he is there, and what is strange, he changes, follows a completely personal evolution. (182) Yet for all his apparent dualism, Green frequently salvaged sexuality, more successfully in his diaries than in his fictional characters. An entry from 1943 remarked, “I have always dreamed of a life where sensuality would be absent, not by reason of ascetic discipline, but from the very nature of this ideal existence. However, doesn’t this mean dreaming over the happiness of childhood?” Nonetheless, five years later he would annotate this entry: “Yet who would wish for such questionable happiness? . . . [Sexuality] is also an element of essential activity that is to be found everywhere, in my opinion, as much in the field of intellect, in literary creation, as in spiritual life itself. . . . For the devout, enemy number one is the sexual instinct; the only thing he forgets is that this instinct comes from God” (131–2). What permitted Green to balance these oppositions – mystic and profligate, spiritual man and carnal man, spirituality and sexuality – was precisely the external Catholic observances that ordered his ambiguous interiority. In a diary entry from 1940, written in America after he had fled from the German occupation of France, Green asserted that, “True order is founded on prayer, all the rest is more or less disguised disorder. The Middle Ages were a huge edifice whose foundations were the Pater [the Our Father or Lord’s Prayer], the Ave [the Hail Mary], the Credo, and the Confiteor. All that is built on anything else can only collapse sooner or later into blood and mire” (101). Indeed, the typical Catholic devotional life in the first half of the twentieth century would have included a variety of rituals to organize one’s life, including daily mass, weekly confession, the Marian Angelus devotion three times daily, a daily examination of conscience, and prescribed prayers for morning, night and meals, not to mention feast days, holy days of obligation, and novenas. Derived from Catholic medieval practices, these rituals provided an attractive alternative to failed modernity, particularly, for Europeans, in light of the catastrophic Great War and the flawed peace that followed. As a result, by the middle of the twentieth century, important Anglo-American



These two extremes were thematic of both Green’s fiction and his selfreflection; later in 1947 he recorded:

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Catholicism was attracting some converts in the same way that communism attracted others. Both offered a complete philosophical system and a rich intellectual tradition. Each claimed to have an answer for every human dilemma and each stood in judgment over a world in crisis. Each possessed a set of venerated texts that, taken in the right spirit at the right time, had a transforming effect on readers, so that Gilson’s Spirit of Medieval Philosophy could act on Merton and Gilman in the way that the works of Marx and Lenin had acted on a generation of young Communists. . . . No wonder Catholic conversion narratives from these middle years of the twentieth century are sometimes reminiscent of Communist conversion narratives.22 Public conversion narratives are not simply an acknowledgement of intellectual assent but a ritual of self-identification. By the late twentieth century, this narrative for queer people would transform itself into the “coming out” narrative of homosexual identity. In figures like Anglo-Americans Stoddard and Rolfe and continentals Huysmans and Green we see how compelling religious symbols are, how effective in reconciling oppositions, and even how suavely they efface the tendentious particulars of Christianity’s doctrinal animus towards homosexuality. In many ways conversion to Catholicism could also be viewed as anti-social and thus an objective correlative signifying hidden perversion. Here, indeed, is the traditional catechism definition of a sacrament: a visible sign of an invisible reality. What makes forms of Catholicism particularly appealing to queer converts is that Catholic sacramentalism promises salvation through matter, the mater of us all.



intellectuals, such as Thomas Merton and Richard Gilman, had converted to Catholicism. As Allitt observes:

The Horrors of Catholicism: Religion and Sexuality in Gothic Fiction George E. Haggerty

Why is Gothic fiction always already queer? If the answer is as complex as I think it is – complex enough to warrant the larger project of which this essay is a part – it is also remarkably simple. Transgressive socialsexual relations are the most basic common denominator of Gothic, and from the moment in the early pages of Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) when Walpole’s anti-hero Manfred presses his suit on the fiancée of his deceased son (and she flees into the “long labyrinth of darkness” in the “subterraneous” regions of the castle), a Gothic trope is fixed. Terror is almost always sexual terror: fear, and flight, as well as incarceration and escape, are almost always colored by the exoticism of transgressive sexual aggression.1 It is no mere coincidence that the cult of Gothic fiction reached its apex at the very moment when gender and sexuality were beginning to be codified for modern culture. In fact, Gothic fiction offered a testing ground for many unauthorized genders and sexualities, including sodomy, tribadism, romantic friendship (male and female), incest, pedophilia, sadism, masochism, necrophilia, cannibalism, masculinized females, feminized males, miscegenation, and so on. In this sense, it offers an historical model of queer theory and politics: transgressive, sexually coded, and resistant to dominant ideology.2 My larger purpose is to examine Gothic fiction in order to relate it to the history of sexuality, as articulated by Michel Foucault and others, in order to rethink the assumptions behind a Foucauldian understanding of the history of sexuality itself. Joseph Bristow offers a useful summary of the emergence of the concept of sexuality in the later nineteenth century. From that perspective these works pre-date sexuality’s codification. But by pre-dating, they also prepare the ground, as I hope these pages will show, for later developments in sexological studies.3 Less obvious, and less richly discussed, has been the Gothic representa33 10.1057/9780230287778 - Catholic Figures, Queer Narratives, Edited by Lowell Gallagher, Frederick S. Roden and Patricia Juliana Smith


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tion of Catholicism and its relation to the complex notions of sexual behaviors and sexual obsessions that these works invoke. Catholicism emerges from the historical setting to play an active role in most Gothic novels. In Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), a Catholic chapel provides one of the key sites of the action, and the unassuming Father Jerome, the local cleric, himself holds a significant position in the denouement of the action. More to the point, however, is the mood of religious sentiment that suffuses the whole. When Manfred decides to divorce his wife Hippolita in favor of his dead son’s fiancée Isabella, the transgression is personal and sexual – the incestuous implications of such a bond are by no means ignored – but it is also a violation of the religious law that sanctifies marriage. Manfred asks the priest to persuade his wife “to consent to the dissolution of our marriage and retire into a monastery” (50). Hippolita’s continual prayers emphasize this connection and involve Matilda in her world of private devotion. When Matilda is murdered by her father, moreover, she has been meeting Theodore in the chapel of Otranto, and her stabbing has all the markings of martyrdom as well as of Manfred’s incestuous sexual aggression. To a certain extent, these two things are the same. Matilda’s blind belief in her father, her devotion to his power and wisdom, and her refusal to accept him as inherently evil, all lead to her demise, and as she dies she blesses him and prays for his forgiveness. Manfred reverses the trajectories of Freud’s Oedipal arrangement: murdering his son in order to marry his daughter; he destroys his (other) daughter in the violence of his lust. Manfred’s incestuous sexual violence becomes a nightmare of broken bodies and violated graves. This guilty patriarch’s attempts to force himself on the younger generation – Conrad, Isabella, Matilda, and Theodore – cause his dispossession. The heteronormativity of paternal power is itself the perversion here, and Walpole reminds us that the son and daughter must be sacrificed to the increasingly impotent and destructive sexual demands of the ageing father. At the same time, as Father Jerome reminds the hero, Manfred offends more than the family: “Profane prince! . . . is it at the altar that you choosest to insult the servants of the altar? – But, Manfred, thy impious schemes are known. Heaven . . . know[s] them” (93). By placing this violence in the chapel of Otranto and suffusing the scene with the air of a religious sacrifice, Walpole makes a subtle connection between the heteronormativity of sexual violence and the patriarchal law of the father that Catholicism insists upon. “The following work was found in the library of an ancient Catholic family,” Walpole tells us in the Preface to the first edition of the novel, and “the princi-



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pal incidents are such as were believed in the darkest ages of Christianity.”4 The Gothic terms of the work – the sexual hysterics and violently destructive abuse – have greater meaning because of the religious terms in which they are couched. Sexuality itself, that is, depends on its religious context to exert its full cultural significance. Sexuality and religion are not opposite poles from which to understand the action of the novel: they are inextricably bound in the cultural imagination. Walpole understands that clearly enough to couch his sexual excesses in religious terms. Later Gothic fiction makes this connection explicit by returning again and again to convent and monastery as a way to explore same-sex and otherwise transgressive desire. It is no accident that these repeated dramatizations of love between men and love between women take place in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. These dramatizations are not ancillary to the history of sexuality or a byproduct of a development in sexology. Because they anticipate sexological analysis at precisely the moment when these questions had begun to be explored, they themselves could serve as chapters in the history of sexuality. It is a commonplace to suggest that “homosexuality” emerged in the 1870s, when it was named and codified, at least tentatively.5 But an earlier and very necessary process of popularization exists right here: Catholic Gothic fiction and the history of sexuality, for this moment at least, overlap in countless ways.6 When in The Monk (1796), Matthew G. Lewis uses the details of conventual life to suggest lurid forms of sexual excess such as necromancy, incest, matricide, and same-sex love, he does not need to explain his choice of a Catholic setting, a Mediterranean country (Spain, not Italy in this case), or religious life itself.7 All these things, to the English imagination at least, make such easy, rational sense that Lewis could assume a general understanding of (and even assent to) his extravagant posturing. And while reviewers criticized Lewis’ excess, they never suggested that his portrayal of Catholic monastic life was inappropriate.8 If the novel can be considered sensational, that is not because anyone objected to the portrayal of the characters themselves: oversexed and violent Catholic priests, victimizing and vindictive nuns, devil worship and self-abuse. These and other lurid sexual possibilities were common popular perceptions of conventual life in Mediterranean countries. The Gordon Riots in 1780 revealed the depth and breadth of antiCatholic feeling in England in the later eighteenth century.9 The Catholic Relief Act passed by Parliament in 1778 was meant to alleviate the plight of Catholics in the smallest ways, but it was widely viewed



The Horrors of Catholicism: Religion and Sexuality in Gothic Fiction 35


as a threat to English independence. As Colin Haydon argues, “the Act seemed objectionable on a number of counts. It seemed to violate the Protestant constitution as established in 1689. . . . It formally suspended the old restrictions on Popish priests and it was felt that this new license might allow them to win converts. Above all, it aided a group which had long been represented by those in authority as dangerous and seditious.”10 The depth of this feeling is expressed in such popular publications as the Appeal from the Protestant Association to the People of Great Britain (1779): “To design the Advancement of POPERY, is to design the Ruin of the State, and the Destruction of the Church; it is to sacrifice the Nation to a double Slavery, to prepare Chains both for their Bodies and their Minds”: this was the kind of language that was used in popular pamphlets to inspire resistance to the Relief Act.11 With cries of “No Popery” rioters raided the homes of prominent Catholics and Catholic sympathizers in London and in other important centers. “At the chapel in Duke Street, a dead dog with a crucifix between its paws was hung up against a wall of the building,” and at other places chapels were smashed and altars were paraded through the streets.12 Some of the violence of the Gordon Riots, in other words, makes the excesses of Gothic fiction seem almost tame. Of course by the time that most Gothic novels were written, there were other reasons to fear Catholicism or at least to fear the political forces that emerged from Catholic countries. The anti-Jacobin feeling of the nineties, combined with a horror at the perceived barbarities of the French Revolution, exacerbated the mood that Haydon described and meant in short that villainous continentals were all the rage. The logic of anti-Catholicism is not exactly congruent with the political conservatism of the anti-Jacobin movement, but neither public sentiment at large, nor the bulk of popular Gothic novels, can be accused of being systematically political, thematically consistent, or even regularly coherent. The fear expressed in anti-Catholic writing of the nineties is as deeply rooted as it was in the eighties, as the rhetoric of both Jacobin and anti-Jacobin writing suggests.13 The barbarities reported from France, the excesses of the response to historical injustice, and the horror at public execution, are balanced by the seeming overthrow of the religion that had haunted English imaginations throughout the century.14 At the same time, and not coincidentally, attitudes about sexuality were similarly shaped by attitudes towards Catholics and Catholic countries. Throughout the eighteenth century, it was a commonplace that sodomy was imported from Italy and France, if not from more exotic



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This Fashion was brought over from Italy, (the Mother and Nurse of Sodomy); where the Master is oftener Intriguing with his Page, than a fair Lady. And not only in that Country, but in France, which copies from them, the Contagion is diversify’d, and the Ladies (in the Nunneries) are criminally amorous of each other, in a Method too gross for Expression. I must be so partial to my own Country-Women, to affirm, or, at least, hope they claim no Share of this Charge; but must confess, when I see two Ladies Kissing and Slopping each other, in a lascivious Manner, and frequently repeating it, I am shock’d to the last Degree.15 This passage is not unique in the eighteenth century, nor is it out of keeping with the other passages I have considered. Sodomy is a contagion that has spread from the continent, a disease that threatens the island nation like rabies or the plague. In almost the same breath, but parenthetically, it emerges from a convent. The Catholic connection here is subtle but insistent. Italy and Italians, the religion, politics, culture, all combine to represent sexual transgression. In a recent discussion of “The Import of Sodomy,” John C. Beynon cites several cases in which sodomy and Italy are connected in suggestive ways. Bernard Mandeville, in his A Modest Defense of the Public Stews (1724), for instance, names Pope Sixtus VI as the source of sodomy. Because he attempted to suppress female courtesans, the argument runs, men turned to one another for sexual solace. It is intriguing to think that a pope could be cited as the source of sodomy, but that is in keeping with the religio-political climate that I have described.16 In his discussion of attitudes earlier in the century, Cameron McFarlane says that “just as the representation of the sodomite is refracted through the social structures of the gender and class hierarchies, it also intersects with a discourse of xenophobia directed particularly toward the Catholic countries of France and Italy.” McFarlane makes it clear how politically (in the larger sense) useful the association “Italian/ Catholic/sodomite” became throughout the country and how it functioned in political satire as well as in broadsides such as Satan’s Harvest Home.17 Charles Churchill codifies these attitudes for the later century in his poem “The Times”:



locales, and often the monastery and convent were seen as the precise locale where same-sex desire could flourish. In one of the standard texts of the eighteenth century, this familiar quotation makes these relations explicit. The writer is complaining about the “fashion” of men kissing one another in public:


With our island vices not content, We rob our neighbours on the continent; Dance Europe round, and visit every court, To ape their follies and their crimes import. To diff’rent lands for diff’rent sins we roam, And richly freighted, bring our cargo home, Nobly adventurous to make vice appear In her full state, and perfect only here. . . . ITALIA, nurse of ev’ry softer art, Who, feigning to refine, unmans the heart.18 In one short passage, Churchill attacks the notion of the Grand Tour, the vice of Catholic countries, and the danger of foreign trade. He emphasizes the criminal and sinful aspects of sexual transgression, and suggests that Italy is a particular danger for young English travelers. Later in the poem, he makes the terms of his fear of the continent more specific. (“Women are kept for nothing but the breed;/ For pleasure, we must have a GANYMEDE,/ A fine, fresh, HYLAS, a delicious boy,/ To serve our purposes of beastly joy” [331–4]). In talking about how to educate a son: Give him no tutor – throw him to a punk, Rather than trust his morals to a monk; Monks we all know – we, who have lived, From fair report, and travelers, who roam, More feelingly. (639–50) Churchill is circumspect in his expressions, but the implications are clear. Monks transgress in ways that are threatening to English manhood. English travelers are physically threatened by priestly predators, the poem suggests; and by establishing a contrast between living and traveling, Churchill hints that even to leave England is to risk one’s life and reputation. At the same time, of course, as E. J. Clery reminds us, “throughout the eighteenth century, Italy formed the highlight of any European tour.”19 Endless eighteenth-century accounts – memoirs, letters, maps, paintings, and music – celebrate Italy as the fountain of art and culture for several generations. In addition to the possible experience of a deep cultural awakening, many adolescent British travelers used the tour as the opportunity for sexual experimentation, as well as other kinds of physical and emotional excess. Because classical culture offered so many



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models of same-sex love to the educated traveler, it is no wonder that certain activities and locations became associated in the British mind. If the prime exemplar of the intellectualization of the process happens to be German – “art historian, archaeologist, and chief librarian of the Vatican, the German scholar Johann Joachim Winckelmann infused his influential vision of Greek antiquity with all the telltale signs of homoerotic desire,” as one scholar puts it – that does not mean that English travelers throughout the century were not alive to the same enticing possibilities.20 As satiric comments by Smollett and others make clear, the Grand Tour was also infamous as a source of sexual adventure, and various accounts of continental travel emphasize the sexual excess that was implicit in the Italian adventure.21 The catalogue for a 1996 exhibit on “The Grand Tour,” for instance, states that Italy held the lure of various kinds of travelers: “outcasts of a more permanent kind, Jacobites, bankrupts, or homosexuals, seeking relief and some form of security.”22 This image of homosexuals “on the run” is surely a nineteenth-, rather than an eighteenth-century image, but the suggestion that homosexuality, or more properly sodomy, loomed above the image of Italy in the eighteenth century is surely correct. Of course, as the litany of “Jacobites, bankrupts, or homosexuals” suggests, it is not easy to separate the sexual and the political – or rather the religio-political – here. In talking about early modern England, Alan Bray makes the point that sodomy circulated as a political rather than a sexual signifier. In “Homosexuality and the Signs of Male Friendship in Elizabethan England,” Bray discusses the ways in which sodomy could be used as an accusation especially in cases of religio-political subversion, and vice-versa.23 He makes the case that in the Renaissance sodomy “was not only a sexual crime. It was also a political and a religious crime and it was this that explains most clearly why it was regarded with such dread.” He goes on to explain how “the ubiquitous association of sodomy with treason and heresy was put together and why one encounters it so commonly in the polemics of Reformation Europe.”24 Approaching the topic from a different direction, Mark D. Jordan shows how sexual activity between men was proscribed by the early Christian Church. His work demonstrates how the labels sodomy and sodomite were adopted to regulate various behaviors – sexual, political, religious, social – and indicates that their usefulness for early “fathers” of the church stemmed from their flexibility. This very flexibility suggests that sodomy has never been just one thing in the Western cultural imagination, any more than its use has promoted one sexual





practice to the exclusion of all others. Jordan also argues that “as elsewhere in Europe, English sodomy legislation seems to have been enforced infrequently. Where sodomy cases appear in the surviving historical sources, they typically involve some other factor – political scheming, racial or religious or class prejudice, personal enmity.”25 Before the eighteenth century in England, questions of sexual relations between men are extraordinarily complex. The label sodomite is flung at politicians, papists, and at people from Italy, France, Spain – from just about anywhere but England. By implication, the term is meant to regulate Englishness as much as any particular form of sexual behavior. This remains true throughout the eighteenth century, to be sure, and the difference before and after 1700 is not as vivid as some historians have suggested.26 Such associations do not end with the Age of Enlightenment: in some cases they even intensify. This is what some of the rhetoric of the Gordon Riots suggests, and it is what the more extreme language of the nineties articulates. Given this context, it is not surprising that Matthew G. Lewis can titillate with the possibility of same-sex desire in The Monk merely by invoking Catholicism, a monastery, and an emotional bond between a handsome priest and a blushing novice. In another essay I have explored the homoerotics of the scenes in the novel in which the novice gradually confesses his love for the older priest. In The Monk, Lewis attempts to outrage taste and scandalize propriety in as many sexually explicit ways as he can. He does this most effectively in the central plot – that of the seemingly virtuous Monk Ambrosio, who is seduced by the scheming Matilda, herself disguised as the young novice Rosario – is structured around uncontrollable sexual desire and “perverse” sexual transgression. The ambiguous sexuality of Rosario/Matilda insists on an especially titillating context for sexual experimentation, and when Matilda turns out herself to be an agent of Satan, desire itself comes to seem perverse and victimizing. Ambrosio’s “lusts” would in any case be difficult to categorize. That his excess of prideful devotion has led him to these lurid scenes of sexual perversity is a given in the novel. The connection between Catholicism and bodily lust is made explicit in various ways: confessional confidence leads to sexual abuse; lust is exercised by means of devil worship; and the monastery and convent both are scenes of violence, victimization, and death. Such familiar scenes help make clear the ways in which the easy relation between Catholicism and sexual perversity has a political as well as a social valence. After all, (almost) all the violence in the novel is answered in direct political terms with



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mob violence and the destruction of the convent and monastery, as well as the brutal physical destruction of the prioress and several of the more violent nuns. Sexual excess and political subversion seem to go hand in hand with religious fervor. This connection is not accidental: religious fervor is sexual in its expression, and if sexuality is always already political, so is religion. The politics of religion and sexuality in the experience of Gothic fiction, at least, have much in common. Ronald Paulson has explained how the French Revolution influenced Gothic writers and gave their work a currency that it might not otherwise enjoy.27 He explores the ways in which the fear and fascination inspired by events in France could affect a novel like The Monk: Lewis exploits the dramatic resonances of the Revolution and its anticlericalism, but simultaneously portrays the rioting mob as bloodthirsty, completely out of control, animal-like in its ferocity. The convent of St. Clare represents corruption, superstition, and repression, but its overthrowers, no more admirable than the tyrants, are capable of the same atrocities or worse. In the same way, many observers (conservative and otherwise) by 1793 saw the brutally oppressed masses of France usurping the tyrannical roles of their erstwhile oppressors.28 I have elsewhere argued that Lewis was afraid of the torrent of passion that could be released when repression was overthrown.29 This happens in the individual case of Ambrosio and in the general case of the mob that destroys the Prioress of St. Clare. But it is important to remember that Lewis seems to take an explicit interest in the violence and even to celebrate it. Otherwise the details of destruction would not be so vivid nor would the dramatization of excess be so extensive. Lewis invests such scenes with an almost erotic excitement precisely because he connects them with the thrill of sexual transgression and the fear of uncontrollable sexual excess. Ironically, this technique does not decrease the relation between religion and sexuality; rather, it increases it.30 At this moment the yet uncodified history of sexuality emerges at sites like these: the automatic association of Catholicism with political/sexual transgression makes it available for the exploration of sexual difference. Ambrosio and Rosario are pushing the envelope of sexual definition, as it were, precisely because they are always already transgressive, as monks, as Catholics, as Mediterranean, to the English imagination. Lewis uses this transgressive potential to confront his readers with the possibility of same-sex desire. The monastery is a precursor of





the sexual laboratory, and in a sense it functions as the controlled environment in which the habits of an unfamiliar species can be studied. The horror that such an examination generates is a built-in protection for the observer. Lewis may not have the dispassionate zeal of an investigator like the twentieth century’s Kinsey, but he does perform a similar function for the later eighteenth century. Male–male relations are being examined here, even if they are being held up as a sign of horror and disgust. Like Beckford’s exotic use of the East as an examination of pederasty, that is, Lewis uses his “exotic” locale to make the connections he is seeking both revelatory and automatic.31 He uses a Catholic setting and context in order to make these readings available to his age. They form a part of the sexuality itself; for the particular configuration of two men of different ages in a monastery occupies a different place in the eighteenth-century cultural imagination from any other configuration of two men. More is allowed, more is even assumed, than otherwise would be even possible. Ann Radcliffe’s less excessive Gothic is no less involved in establishing a context for same-sex desire. As an answer to the rigors of patriarchal law, Radcliffe offers the kindly maternal convent in which relations among women are celebrated and in which particular female–female bonds are valued, and even honored. In describing the situation in The Romance of the Forest (1791), for instance, Robert Miles argues: “Radcliffe’s heroine on a threshold looks both ways, inward toward ‘maternal’ sensibility with its delusive image of subjective wholeness (delusive, because the heroine is still caught within a patriarchal structure, the family ‘house’ or abbey), and outwards towards a patriarchal order of repression and deferral.”32 In The Italian (1797), as I have argued, Radcliffe creates a context in which this maternal fantasy is no longer delusive. Ellena, Radcliffe’s heroine, wanders through the novel in a state that could be described as melancholy. She experiences loss as fundamental and determining. As the novel develops, it seems that Ellena must re-experience a primal “homosexual” attachment in order to give any significance at all to her love for the hero Vivaldi. The attachment inevitably offers itself in a convent, the Santa della Piéta, where Ellena finds herself drawn to a single nun – “Among the voices of the choir, was one whose expression immediately fixed her attention; it seemed to speak a loftier sentiment of devotion than the others, and to be modulated by the melancholy of an heart, that had long since taken leave of this world.”33 This first attraction develops into a kindly friendship that quickly becomes the center of Ellena’s convent existence. Later, when this nun is revealed to be Ellena’s mother, the scene in which they



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express their love for one another is too powerful to admit anyone else into their circle. Vivaldi understands his exclusion, for the first feelings he has towards Olivia are those of jealousy. “ ‘Ah Ellena!’ said Vivaldi, as he gently disengaged her from the nun, ‘do I then hold only the second place in your heart?’ ” (135).34 E. J. Clery makes it clear that for writers like Radcliffe “the basis of the nightmare vision of Italy [is] the Roman Catholic Church. Whereas the classical heritage united Western Europe in the eighteenth century, religious difference led to alienation and antagonism, and Italy was in this respect regarded by Protestant nations as the epicentre of spiritual corruption.” Clery feels, however, that “Radcliffe and other gothic writers in fact participated in a gradual liberalizing of religious ideas.” The aestheticizing forces of Gothic fiction, Clery argues, meant that the convent itself is a fulcrum for change in this context. In Radcliffe, she claims, the convent is idealized “as a refuge for women, a place where they could escape crisis in the patriarchal family and secure some autonomy.” Of course in The Italian, the convent can also be a place of constriction and malevolence. What makes the difference, a distinction that Clery does not make but which seems to me essential, is the question of desire. Clery says that Radcliffe inspires “a curious empathy with the Catholic Other.”35 She does this, I would argue, precisely by means of this deep, erotic maternal motif, which is the legacy of Radcliffe as much as any interest in aggressive fathers. In each of the novels a grim paternal figure threatens the heroine emotionally and physically. But in each the subjective experience of maternal love, exoticized as ghostly or eroticized as religious, spiritual, conventual, offers a consoling alternative to the experience of solitude that a solitary female faces.36 Other Gothic writers, especially those actively pro-Catholic in their narrative agenda, do not cancel these resonances; they simply make them less immediately obvious. Regina Maria Roche’s The Children of the Abbey (1797), restrained in its use of wicked monks and nuns, nevertheless tells a tale that deeply intertwines religion and sexuality. The heirs of Dunheath Abbey, Amanda Fitzalan, the heroine of the tale, and her brother Oscar, are nefariously disinherited and forced to struggle separately for survival. Amanda is sent by her widowed father to live with friends, but she very quickly becomes the victim of jealous competitors. She is a beautiful and unassuming girl, and a rumor spreads that she is somehow dishonorable. Out of the welter of suspicion and disappointment, Amanda finds solace in the form of a Catholic nun. The nun does not accuse, threaten, or victimize in any way. But even in this novel, the consoling force of the convent is often suggestive.




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She was fifty . . . her skin was fair, and perfectly free from wrinkle, the bloom and down upon her cheeks as bright and soft as on a peach. . . . She wore the religious habit of the house which was a loose flannel dress, bound round the waist by a girdle, from which hung her beads and a cross, a veil of the same stuff descended to the ground, and a mob cap and forehead cloth quite concealed her hair.37 This fetishization of the nun’s downy skin, as well as the implied fascination with her aging virginity and her simple, coarse habit, give an erotic quality to scenes that transpire in the convent, scenes which in other ways represent a consoling escape from the exigencies of heteronormative desire. Later, when Amanda’s father has died, Amanda collapses and remains “a considerable time in a state of insensibility” (3.1.1). Her father’s death has overcome her, and in addition to knowing that she is friendless and unsupported, she is also trapped in her present circumstances. Sister Mary is determined to break into Amanda’s solitude and help her confront her future. As Amanda recovers, she “found herself in a bed laid upon the floor in the corner of the outside room. . . . She saw someone sitting by the bed, and perceived sister Mary” (3.1.1). The nun responds to her grief and makes it possible for Amanda to loosen the grip on her heart: “This is indeed a charitable visit,” cried [Amanda], extending her hand, and speaking in a low broken voice. The good-natured nun jumped from her seat on hearing her speak and embraced her most tenderly. Her caresses affected Amanda inexpressibly; she dropped her head upon her breast, and wept with a vehemence which relieved the oppression of her breast. (3.1.2–3) Sister Mary does not turn out to be Amanda’s lost mother, but she offers her the consolations of one. Her ability to caress and to press the girl to her brings a response that is more powerfully physical than practically anything else that has happened to her. As if to emphasize the intimacy of this scene, Amanda expresses concern that her clothes have been removed, and she “requested sister Mary to assist her in putting on her clothes” (3.1.3). Amanda finds that she can hardly be separated from the nun: “[Amanda] went to bed every morning, and was nursed



When Amanda first encounters Sister Mary, this is how Roche describes her:

with the most tender attention by sister Mary, who also insisted on being her companion at night” (3.1.5). Later, when the friendless Amanda moves into the convent, “a little room, inside the prioress’s chamber, was prepared for Amanda, into which she was now conveyed, and the good-natured sister Mary brought her own bed, and laid it beside hers” (3.1.21). Of course I am not arguing that these two women were having secret sexual encounters in this room, but I do think that the convent allows Roche to establish an intimacy between these two women that would otherwise be suspect. The climactic scene of maternal confrontation in this novel also takes place in a chapel. Amanda, wandering around the Dunreath Abbey, “sighed whenever she passed the Chapel which contained the picture of her mother” (3.12.231). Gothic elements and religio-erotic ones work together here to create the kind of primal scene that makes Gothic so elemental and so irresistible. (“The silent hour of twilight was now advanced, but the moon-beams that darted through the broken roof prevented the Chapel from being involved in total darkness. Already had the owls begun their strains of melancholy on its mouldering pillars, while the ravens croaked amongst the luxuriant trees that rustled around it” [3.12.238–9]). Like many Gothic heroines before her, Amanda wanders through the darkness in hopes of encountering some hint about her own mother, and through her, her own past. The expression “reverential awe” uses religious terminology to explain family relations. This results in an intensification of domestic relations. The loss that she feels at this moment of confrontation, other Gothic heroines have also felt. As I have argued above, Radcliffe’s heroine Ellena must re-experience a primal female–female attachment in order to give any significance at all to her love for Vivaldi. Something like that is going on here as well. Amanda experiences loss, deeply imbedded original loss, just as Ellena does. Her “agony of grief,” this passage suggests, concerns her own past and her own present as well. Her very subjectivity is encoded in this midnight confrontation, and this ghostly maternal figure makes its clear that Amanda’s subjectivity is grounded in loss. This powerful scene can hardly prepare her for the confrontation that awaits her when she returns the next night and pursues her object in her mother’s own chamber. The excitement is palpable here, and Amanda moves forward with a temerity that marks her as a Gothic ingénue. At the same time, the scene has all the quality of a dream: the darkness, the sudden moonlight, the room of indeterminate size, and finally the consoling portrait once again. But she finds that all is not what it seems:





Amanda . . . at last came to the door, it was closed, not fastened; she pushed it gently open, and could just discern a spacious room; this she supposed had been her mother’s dressing-room; the moon-beams . . . suddenly darted through the casements. . . . She advanced into the room; at the upper end of it something white attracted her notice: She concluded it to be the portrait of Lady Malvina’s mother. . . . She went up to examine it; but her horror may be better conceived than described, when she found herself not by a picture, but the real form of a woman, with a death-like countenance! She screamed wildly at the terrifying spectre, for such she believed it to be, and quick as lightening flew from the room. Again the moon was obscured by a cloud, and she involved in utter darkness. She ran with such violence, that, as she reached the door at the end of the gallery, she fell against it. Extremely hurt, she had not the power to move for a few minutes; but while she involuntarily paused, she heard footsteps. Wild with terror, she instantly recovered her faculties and attempted opening it . . . at that moment she felt an icy hand upon her’s! (3.13.243–4) This scene of horrified confrontation is a classic Gothic encounter. This ghostly presence – maternal and enabling, even if not her actual mother – shimmers with erotic feeling. After all, the girl who is prowling through the castle in the middle of the night has suffered emotional stress and personal disappointment of various kinds. But still she thinks that the dark, Gothic chamber will offer her some kind of satisfaction, some thrill of discovery. That the thrill becomes physical, that the cold white figure follows, chases her, places its hand on hers, gives the scene a peculiar power that earns it a place among the other Gothic novels I am discussing. Amanda was drawn to the chapel as a way of discovering something about her lost mother. Instead, she confronts a ghostly unknown presence that clasps her with an icy grip. An almost direct reversal of the kindly embraces that Amanda experiences with Sister Mary, this icy hand reminds her that the religious sublime can be anything but consoling. Here she must confront her deepest fears. This quasi-religious confrontation leads, after a number of imaginative complications, to the novel’s resolution. This woman, her own mother’s stepmother and enemy, has been the cause of Amada’s disinheritance, and she now pours out her guilt and apology to the appalled heroine. Like the Radcliffe resolution, that is, Roche insists on this confrontation with this maternal other before the past can be reclaimed. The terms of subjectivity here are based on a lost female–female bond. That it is recovered through the offices of a nun after prowling through a chapel in a mood of religious intensity now makes perfect sense.



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The most conspicuous figure was that of the Virgin, in massive silver, supporting on her left arm the Infant Redeemer, and, in her right hand, holding a small sphere of gold, said to contain three drops of her precious milk. Her head was encircled with a rich diadem of immense value, and her neck decorated with a string of diamonds, from which hung pendant a cross of gold, valuable only as containing a piece of the true Cross.38 The riches of the Catholic Church, the bad taste, and superstition are all encoded here in this “conspicuous” statue of the Virgin. It is inconceivable that a convent with such a presiding genius could offer the kinds of consolations that Radcliffe’s convent of the Piéta (in The Italian) almost automatically implies. Here, the Abbess herself has more in common with Lewis’ scheming Prioress than with any of Radcliffe’s maternal figures. The features of her personality are apparent in this first description, in which the Madre Vittoria Bracciano . . . wore indeed a religious habit, but was ill-calculated to adorn it, every worldly feeling predominating in her heart. Benignity, meekness, patience, and charity, such heavenkissing attributes, were not the inmates of her breast. No – pride, cruelty, malice, and revenge; such were the passions that feigned triumphant over her mind. Her desires were too licentious and with difficulty bridled, even by the situation she held. (1.1.6–7) This classic anti-religious tirade is conventional enough in its terms. The beautiful exterior hides a mean, even vicious, interior. The position of religious superior depends on the stature of the family, and spiritual commitment is not included in the description of the Abbess’ qualities. Licentiousness is the key here, of course, because the Abbess’ willingness to give in to her desires is what motivates much of the malevolent action of the text. The “religious habit,” then, is part of an elaborate disguise. Rather than prohibiting transgressive behavior, the habit allows her license to indulge her carnal appetites in ways that a nonreligious woman never could. The Abbess is not alone in her nefarious practices within the walls of the convent. When the young and handsome Conte Marcello Porta has



William Henry Ireland returns to the extremes of Lewis. In Ireland’s The Abbess (1799), for instance, the church relics of the convent of Santa-Maria del Nova, at Florence, already display an excess that borders on the disgusting:


found himself attracted to a young boarder, he is accosted by a monk, Padre Ubaldo, who promises to lead him to a private assignation with the girl. Ireland describes the midnight meeting of these two men and their progress through the gloomy vaults of the convent, and then, in an almost gratuitous aside, he mentions this simple scene of religious excess: They proceeded to the passage; at the entrance of which, within a niche, rested a stone figure of the Virgin. The Monk placed the lamp on the ground, and, having bared his left shoulder, knelt before the image and seemed to offer up a prayer; then, loosening the knotted rope that girded his loins, struck himself several times with violence – the Conte turned from the sight with disgust. The Monk arose, and, having replaced his vestment, proceeded up the passage. (1.1.23) This odd scene of religious masochism serves no purpose but to underline the villainy of the monk and to remind readers that religious devotion and sexual excess are often one and the same. This abuse of devotion, this exaggerated and almost histrionic posturing, disgusts Marcello because his devotion is pure and unsullied. It is unclear why the monk performs this self-abuse in front of Marcello, unless of course he is hoping to involve Marcello in some sado-masochistic fantasy; or rather, unless he is trying to involve him in a sado-masochistic fantasy with himself instead of the one he is supposed to be involving him in, with the Abbess. After all, in dark and secret convent passages like these, anything is possible. Same-sex transgressive behavior is as likely as (more likely than, really) the male–female encounter that awaits Marcello here. Besides, this novel makes it clear that desire is always compromised, always excessive, and that devotion by its very nature is excessive and disgusting. The young boarder, Maddalena Rosa, is the daughter of the Duca Bertocci, who put her in the convent when his wife died. She is the object of Marcello’s desire, and as a result she becomes the victim of the Abbess’ jealous rage, as her erotic dream conveniently predicts: As she slept, a vision floated before her fancy. She thought, that she again saw the amiable stranger in the church. His air was dignified, and he seemed more interesting, if possible, than when she had first beheld him. Suddenly, the grate which separated them mouldered away. He flew towards her, and knelt at her feet. At that instant, Maddalena imagined some one held her arm; turning, she thought the



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This dream, a short précis of action to come in the novel, is set in a church where grates moulder away before desire. The implicit suggestion of sexual attraction and its always already transgressive potential gives urgency to the dream. As Maddalena turns to the stranger who confronts her with his devotion to her person, the priest Ubaldo, “ghastly and forbidding,” grabs her and compels her to respond not to a less transgressive choice but to an even more illicit and demeaning one. In other words, the erotic embrace with Marcello immediately gives way to both monkish compulsion and abbessian domination. The easy substitution of the Abbess for the lover is certainly suggestive; and given the erotic context, as she raises the “naked poignard” to threaten Maddalena’s life, she could also be seen to be threatening the young boarder with rape. Gothic narrative depends on such easy associations, and here the context of the church and the threat of the religious figures make Maddalena a more exquisite victim than her social position would suggest. Ireland is using the freedom of dream narrative to suggest at once illicit desire, jealousy, and compulsion. His version of the convent, that is, spells out in detail an entire range of transgressive potential. As the dream continues, Ireland articulates the other, more familiar aspect of convent life, which Radcliffe and Roche have both emphasized: the nurturing of friendship and the possibility of intimacy between two girls who share the fate of convent life. Here again that possibility is written out as loss. It seems that Maddalena is forced to endure these hardships alone: The form of her friend Marietta, pale and emaciated, then glided before her. Casting on her a look of ineffable pity, she disappeared; and suddenly the scene faded before her. She found herself in a spacious apartment, the walls of which were hung with black velvet, and in the middle stood a bier. Maddalena thought she surveyed the chamber, but no one was present; and she then proceeded to view the face of the deceased. She advanced to the spot where the coffin rested; but, as she bent over, and raised the pall, the earth opened and received it. A female figure glided along, who, smiling, seemed to approach her. It was again the nun Marietta. Maddalena thought she flew to meet her; but the figure changed to that of a handsome



ghastly and forbidding figure of Padre Ubaldo stood at her side. The youth then vanished, and in his place stood the Madre Vittoria. Rage marked every feature: in her uplifted hand she grasped a naked poignard. (1.4.124–5)

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Maddalena dreams that she loses her friend Marietta in death. It may be that she understands that this tender intimacy will be sacrificed to heteronormative narrative, because when she flies to meet her friend, the handsome youth steps in her place. This begins to suggest an erotic intimacy between the two women, an intimacy that the convent setting encourages. In an odd reversal of the situation in the first part of the dream, where the Abbess replaces the lover, here the lover replaces the friend. Pointedly, almost insistently, Maddalena remains the subject of loss in this scene, and she can hardly remember the handsome Marcello. When he grabs her, she awakes. He breaks the spell of the dream – the spell of sisterly erotic love in a convent setting, that is – and pulls her back into the reality around her. The Abbess displaces Marcello in Maddalena’s arms because she has mistaken his interest in the girl for an attraction to herself. The scene in which Marcello makes love to the Abbess, Victoria Bracciano, is an embarrassment of sexually suggestive description: “At that moment, her beautiful hand pressed that of the Conte. What a delicious thrill ran through his feverish veins! Conceive the most delicate, small, and transparent hand, that ever nature formed, through which the branching streaks of blue were plainly visible. . . . Imagine fingers pulpy, round, and taper, each joint of which was an opening rose-bud; and, to complete the picture, add nails long and beautifully formed, at the extremity of which appeared a tinge of the carnation” (1.5.147). This description continues in painstaking physical detail, and each fetishized body part adds to the erotic and transgressive qualities of the scene. That this is a nun who is being physically described and erotically coded, of course, only adds to the narrative thrill. The scene builds to a crescendo, when she at last removes her veil and the Conte realizes that he has been caressing the wrong woman. The Abbess’ outrage at his obvious confusion (“a malignant fire darted from those eyes, which beamed before the languid rays of love” [1.5.157]) is only mollified when the Conte pretends to love her. His false expressions of love in turn lead to her extravagant expressions of love that redound on him and the boarder when they are discovered in one another’s arms (“You have wounded my pride . . . Every scheme that Hell can suggest to an injured and despised woman, shall be put in practice to destroy you” [1.8.238–9]).



youth. She eyed him with attention, but could not recollect him. He clasped her to his breast in transport, and, at that moment, Maddalena awoke. (1.4.125–6)

This violent response leads to misery upon misery for the heroine, and the Conte himself is consigned to endless searching and pleading for his now sequestered love. Later, when the Abbess’ wicked henchwoman Sister Beatrice tells the young Giancinta that in the convent they “live in sisterly friendship” (2.2.55), it is merely the prelude to deception, victimization, and violence. Ireland’s anti-Catholic interests seem like misogyny, and in this case as in other male Gothic it would be wrong to downplay situations that seem misogynous to modern readers. At the same time, though, because we are looking for ways that religion and sexuality are played out in terms of one another, a novel like this can be especially revealing. Women do find friendship in the convent, and they relate to one another with the intimacy of Radcliffe’s characters at times. Both Marietta and Giancinta share deeply personal moments with Maddalena. When Marietta is on her death-bed, she gives Maddalena “a small crucifix of gold, which,” she says, “I have ever worn within my bosom. It was the gift of my mother. . . . Keep it, Maddalena, in remembrance of me.” Then she adds this intimate promise: “And at the silent hour of midnight, when thou art wont to chant thy hymn of praise, look upon it; for, if departed spirits ever visit those they loved on earth, I will, at that solemn hour, be with thee” (1.6.177). This intimate promise, sealed soon after with a kiss on the lips, suggests that Marietta is willing to haunt Maddalena, and that she feels her love is strong enough to cross from the world of the dead to the world of the living. To make this promise she uses a crucifix that she has worn on her breast. This tiny, precious, fetishized religious object gives their love a kind of holiness, and this sacrilegious promise takes on the quality of a religious vow. For these two inhabitants of the convent, this language may be all that is available to them; but at the same time, they can use religion to justify even these muted expressions of same-sex love. If the convent offers a perversion of maternal love and the victimization of innocence, the prisons of the Inquisition, into which Marcello and Maddalena are ushered at the moment when her father seems ready to relent, offer a higher register of lurid sexual excess. To the English imagination, the Inquisition represents the perverse extreme to which religion and law can tend in the Catholic setting. The religiopolitical institutionalization of sado-masochistic pleasure within the prisons of the Inquisition is a regular feature in Gothic fiction from The Monk to Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), and beyond. Ireland takes pleasure in dilating on the fevered imaginings of his incarcerated hero and




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Now, [Marcello’s] fertile imagination paints the suffering Maddalena – the cords tearing her tender frame – her form pale, languid, and almost expiring – again the torture forces her back to hated life – her groans distract his soul – with anguish he awakes. Again he slumbers – the horrid scene continues – he strives in vain to render her assistance – now, he is habited as a criminal, in the Act of Faith, he approaches the faggot – Maddalena Rosa is already chained to the stake – now, the ardent flames consume her garments – her beauteous hair now blazes – her flesh is scorched – her limbs wreathe in anguish – she cries for mercy – he hears her shrieks – again he wakes – the piercing cry still vibrates in his ear. (3.1.6) This erotic fantasy brings various Gothic obsessions together. The Inquisition is a useful trope for religio-political violence, and when it is coupled with the excessively victimized female, as it is here, it begins to suggest the ways in which such dominant fictions work in private fantasy. Ireland uses these materials to write such an overheated passage, I would argue, because they are connected in the English imagination to sexual license and sado-masochistic pleasure. This religious torture, the auto-da-fé, reverberates with a special quality of suffering. As the heroine is consumed in Marcello’s imagination, readers are invited to fantasize about the sexually titillating details of the horrors of Catholicism. The erotics of religious torture emerge so readily from Marcello’s imagination because they are already available in the lurid projections of British culture. As the last volume of the novel develops, both characters are tormented by the sadistic inquisitors in quasi-pornographic terms. Marcello is tortured because he will not break his vow and explain what he was doing in the convent after hours. “ ‘Put him to the question, then,’ exclaimed the Judge”: The familiars, in an instant, tore off the Conte’s habiliments, when a loose gown was thrown over his body. Cords encircled his wrists, which were then passed through pullies. Again, the question was put; but the Conte refused to answer. . . . The officials drew the ropes, and the Conte was suspended by his hands to the ceiling. He was for some moments kept in this painful situation. . . . During this interval, a



heroine. He makes sure that the terms of these fantasies are not ignored. The Conte, for instance, wanders in his dreams through scenes of sadistic excess:

ponderous mass of lead was attached to his ankles; . . . every limb was stretched in the most dreadful manner, and he experienced unutterable agonies. . . . During this torture, the question was repeatedly posed; but the Conte maintained a resolute silence. In an instant, the rope was slackened, and he came with violence to the pavement. The sudden jerk dislocated every joint: the torment was too acute, and an agonized groan escaped his lips. (4.1.20–2) With this detailed description of physical torture, more elaborately detailed than similar scenes in The Monk or Melmoth the Wanderer, Ireland seems to take pleasure in the image of the stripped and suffering male. By taking such care with description, he eroticizes the broken male body, just as Radcliffe and Dacre do.39 But if Radcliffe and Dacre are interested in redefining masculinity, Ireland takes a lurid interest in the suffering figure himself. He pushes the familiar image of the wounded (castrated) Gothic hero to an extreme: stretching him on the rack and jerking him suddenly to earth. He torments him with physical torture and insists on outlining the details of that torture for the reader. Often such a fate is only imagined in Gothic fiction. Groans and muffled beatings are common, but in this case, the reader is forced to watch as the hero is tied and stretched and indeed almost dismembered. Like his contemporary the Marquis de Sade, in other words, Ireland takes pleasure in presenting the suffering male form.40 This ghoulish spectacle depends on the hallowed chambers of the Inquisition for its resonance, and its full effect as pornographic titillation depends on the quasi-religious valence of the scene. The notion of the Inquisition, in other words, enables Ireland to bring all these concerns together in this single image. When Maddalena is brought forward for similar treatment, the effect is strikingly different. She is told that her “agonizing shrieks shall pierce Marcello’s hardened bosom, and force the secret from his lips”: The command was immediately issued – the familiars quitted the Conte, and seized the delicate form of the statue-struck Maddalena – already, they began to tear the garments from her tender limbs – already, the barbarians had rent the veil, that had concealed her alabastrine bosom, from which her palpitating heart was bursting. – The big tears trickled down her pallid cheeks, like flaky snow, which the Sun’s heat dissolves upon the marble’s cold and polished surface. – Now, her long auburn hair escaped the fillet, which had negligently bound it – one hand was raised, to cover her naked breast – the other, uplifted, seemed to supplicate Heaven’s protection. (4.1.44–5)





Ireland uses this moment to present the reader with a stripped and supplicating female character, and once again the sado-masochistic intentions are palpable. The tenderness of Maddalena’s limbs is emphasized because that is what will be violated in the torture to follow. The hand covering her naked breast also suggests vulnerability and tenderness. But the other images here – the alabastrine bosom and the cold and polished surface of marble, with which her cheeks are compared – suggest cold rigidity and polished smoothness. For all the pain and supplication apparent in the pose, there is also a rock-like hardness to her stance that even the threat of torture cannot pierce. When, in response to the suffering she faces, Marcello gives in to his tormentors and offers to break his vow in order to save her, she chides him almost brutally, considering his situation, and insists that he not tarnish his honor: “ ‘Shame! Shame!’ cried Maddalena: ‘how I blush at your pusillanimity. Resume your wonted courage: be the man of honour; or live despised by her, whose life you thus basely seek to purchase’ ” (4.1.48). If he is weak and broken by the torture he has experienced, then she is strong, strong enough to preserve them both and their honor as well. In a classic Gothic reversal, he must take strength from her, and she must inspire the courage that she can alone respect. Maddalena becomes a slightly sadistic figure here herself, chiding her hero for his weakness and giving him an example of greater strength and greater ability to withstand suffering. Like the Abbess, in other words, Maddalena knows what it means to be a woman in this culture that fixates on the power and sensibility of the male. Later, their pain is rewarded. The suffering hero and heroine are vindicated, and the true villains of the piece are exposed. Padre Ubaldo and his accomplice are condemned to death at the stake, and the Abbess herself is condemned to a physically and emotionally degrading series of penances. She faces exposure and ridicule both in her convent and in the streets of Rome. In her private moments of reflection, the reader is told that “the pangs of death would have been bliss, compared to those torments which the Madre endured. Sometimes, she cursed herself for having yielded to the agonies of the moment, and divulged her crime. Now, she painted the degrading punition which she was doomed to suffer” (4.2.97). Her bold and transgressive defiance of laws both human and divine here redound on her head. This scene of reflection, this dramatization of inner torment, compares interestingly to the scenes of physical torture. The notion of an “avenging Deity” is calculated to implant fear in the soul of the Abbess. Because they are always already victims in this Gothic tale, Marcella and Maddalena suffer less



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at the hands of the Inquisitors than the proud and imperious Abbess does here. Her physical, sexual indulgences will come back to haunt her as she stands in shame before her fellow-nuns. The body that was so vividly eroticized earlier now becomes the sign of misery and selfcontempt. The novel turns uneasily to domestic arrangements and a hastily achieved union, which pale beside the scenes I have just discussed: “the Conte Marcello . . . proceeded to Bertocci palace; where he was received by the Duca with every mark of affection, while pleasure animated Maddalena’s tender bosom, on again beholding, after so many painful vicissitudes, the man she loved” (4.2.202). This is not nearly as powerful as the frantic outbursts quoted earlier. It is so muted as to be as meaningless as it is in narrative terms. The domestic arrangements have less power here than the excessive physical and emotional torment of the Inquisition. The religious valence of the scenes of torment – several of the tormentors turn out to be duplicitous monks seeking vengeance – renders them more thrillingly transgressive than anything that happens at the Bertocci palace. As in the other novels I have considered, the resolution is incapable of containing the power that the plot has generated in scenes of religious excess. If I conclude with the disappointments of the domestic resolutions of Gothic novels, I do so in part because the sanctioned union of a man and a woman is not the central concern of Gothic. Family does of course function importantly in Gothic fiction; just think of the centrality of incest and other dysfunctional family tropes in every Gothic novel. But remember, too, that family transgressions are often expressed in religious terms: Matilda is murdered by her father in a chapel; Ambrosio is a monk and confessor when he commits incestuous matricide; transgressing nuns and priests either turn out to be lost family members, as in The Romance of the Forest, or avenging family enemies, as in The Abbess. In general, the Mediterranean, Catholic setting allows narrative license that makes transgression the rule rather than the exception. I think that looking more closely at these works exposes an association between Catholicism and transgressive sexuality so deeply felt as to be almost invisible. By making it visible, I hope I have begun to explain what this association accomplished culturally. Rather than discussing sex in an open and possibly dangerous way, the possibilities of sexual experience could be coded into these exotic narratives, disguised by time and space into a culture that was understood to be transgressive by definition. The possibilities for expression were therefore endless. Catholicism is not a





vague feature of the background in most Gothic novels; it is, rather, an active element in the romance of personal relations. If I have hinted at how Gothic fiction queers religion in this essay, then I hope I have also showed ways in which Catholicism offered a license for sexological experimentation as well. The horrors of Catholicism, that is, play a more active role in the history of sexuality than has previously been acknowledged.



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Michael Field, John Gray, and Marc-Andre Raffalovich: Reinventing Romantic Friendship in Modernity Frederick S. Roden

It has become a commonplace in doing the history of sexuality, particularly the history of homosexuality, to speak of “romantic friendship” as something out of the past, a phenomenon we associate with a more innocent age when same-sex passion was possible under the guise of “friendship.” A good deal of scholarship has idealized that golden time before the fall: prior to the classifications that forced a pathology upon human desire. Heteronormativity then purged the now-dissident longings from appropriate same-sex connections, making them the healthy foil to the deviance of sexual inversion. In writing this history, there is always the problem of agency. Are we to assume (or not?) that the men and women who enjoyed each other’s love in friendship were consciously aware in any way of how their bonds differed from “normal” relationships? Do we generalize that such “romantic friendship” was the rule rather than the exception? Does the phrase serve as a marker, a code word, or a substitute for how we really want to call the relationship homosexual, but Foucault says we can’t? In any case, there remains the problem of how we then treat the place of genital sexual acts within such unions. Does the kiss among lovers seal the diagnosis – of romantic friendship, or more deviant desires, even in a world before late Victorian sexology? Are we to conclude that samesex genital behavior should be treated as expected at a certain point in life for the normal male or female growing up in this Edenic, pre-lapsarian world “before” sexuality? Does the sexual act (however one defines it) serve as the ultimate indicator of difference – and isn’t difference what we’re really looking to identify? Most of the scholarly work on romantic friendship attempts to make one argument or another: either to put forth the claim that in the innocent state of nature before 57 10.1057/9780230287778 - Catholic Figures, Queer Narratives, Edited by Lowell Gallagher, Frederick S. Roden and Patricia Juliana Smith


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the community recognized sexual inversion/homosexuality, same-sex relationships were more possible for everyone, and/or to assert that even within this ambiguous milieu, distinct and particular primary same-sex unions were visible and more tolerated than at a later time. Several recent studies have challenged us to query the meaning of men’s and women’s friendships. The late Alan Bray’s iconoclastic book on same-sex burials and memorials, The Friend, reminds us that male friendship in the past (at least for his Early Modern through nineteenthcentury world) was fundamentally different from how it is understood today. As Bray writes regarding John Boswell’s much-debated 1994 SameSex Unions in Premodern Europe, “While he was engaged by the similarity that he believed he could detect between such a rite and modern marriage, I was struck by how different it was from modern friendship.”1 Katherine O’Donnell and Michael O’Rourke’s Love, Sex, Intimacy, and Friendship Between Men 1550–1800 presents a wide array of approaches to relationships, as does GLQ’s special issue on “The Work of Friendship.”2 Martha Vicinus’ extraordinary Intimate Friends: Women Who Loved Women, 1778–1928 offers phenomenal challenges to how we might view female relationships during that period. Vicinus stresses the importance of examining women’s bonds as erotic and argues that “Both women and men idealized their same-sex friendships, making them simultaneously more and less important.”3 She maintains that “women themselves did not think they had chosen a second-best alternative to heterosexual marriage. They were in love and had no difficulty distinguishing their intimate relationships from ordinary friendships” (xxvii). “Repeatedly individual women asserted that their intimate friendships were equal to, even better than, traditional social arrangements” (229). Here I wish to both challenge and appropriate the model of romantic friendship as a relic of an ideal past – one that, as Vicinus argues, was perhaps more self-conscious than we cautiously might have imagined. To what degree is “romantic friendship” possible in an age where the modern homosexual exists as a subject? Can a couple be both “romantic friends” and self-aware homosexual partners? Could a samesex relationship be transformed from active homosexuality into chaste, socially acceptable romantic friendship, inverting the expected (and feared) trajectory? I will consider two pairs of “romantic friends” and literary collaborators from the British fin-de-siècle. Michael Field – the pen-name of Edith Cooper and Katharine Bradley – were poets and lovers, aunt and niece, who composed plays and Sapphic lyrics. They maintained that they were more fully married than Robert and



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Elizabeth Browning because of their shared compositions. With Catholic conversion in 1907, it is likely that their physical love was sublimated in favor of Divine passion and holy marriage for eternity. Perhaps then chaste, their union nevertheless made them truly inseparable – as a Catholic priest (and one’s confessor) celebrated in his introduction to their final, posthumous volume of poems. This British “Boston Marriage” stands in relation to the poets’ friendships with male couples such as John Gray and Marc-Andre Raffalovich. Gray, who once signed a letter to his mentor Oscar Wilde as “Dorian,” was taken on by the wealthy Raffalovich when the older aesthete cast him off in the early 1890s. Both Catholic converts, having lived in the hothouse of Victorian Aestheticism, Raffalovich subsequently paid for Gray’s sister’s education – and John’s own, in his studies for the priesthood. Raffalovich eventually built Gray a church in Edinburgh and established a house for himself a few blocks away. When they died within months of each other (like Cooper and Bradley), Gray’s eulogist similarly celebrated how death could not divide the two friends. Gray and Raffalovich were remembered for their close friendship – but also for their restraint, and distance from the Decadent worlds of their youth. Did twentieth-century British homosexuals become romantic friends – at least to the world’s view – when living down their pasts? Was Catholicism’s devout face and theology of redemption a vehicle for publicly (and perhaps privately) sanitizing the homosexual lives they experienced before the Wilde trials? Did modern sexology effect a perception, or performance to the world, of a romantic friendship that concealed (if not revealed) a separate homosexual life that was never renounced? To what degree were such relationships more self-conscious than those enjoyed before the late Victorian “invention” of homosexuality? I began to address some of these questions in my book, SameSex Desire in Victorian Religious Culture.4 Here I will focus on archival information – diaries and correspondence between friends and sets of friends – in examining Catholicism’s role in the modern re-invention of romantic friendship. I share with Vicinus certain givens with respect to the study of religion and homosexuality in this period. “Women who loved women saw no division between their love of women and their love of God” (85). I apply her words to men as well. “The liberties and sanctions of [Anglicanism and Roman Catholicism] both enabled and constrained the expression of earthly same-sex love” (85). Vicinus writes, “Until churches actively condemned homosexuality, homosexuals were comfortable in organized religion” (85). Of course, this



Field, Gray, and Raffalovich: Reinventing Romantic Friendship 59


condemnation could only come with recognition of an identity rather than simply a sin. This distinction remains at the heart of contemporary church struggles over homosexuality. Vicinus writes: “Bradley had not freely chosen Cooper’s path into holy celibacy. However inspiring they each came to find this state, ‘unity’ without sex was hard on her and their poetry. Bradley’s recourse to Father John Gray might have had its roots in her admiration for his sexual self-control” (105). In a January 1907 letter to Michael, as Bradley was called, Gray writes: You cause me a start when you allude to my conversion; you make me remember the ecstacy [sic] of those days when I wrestled with the Father of the angels, how unity and concord invading the present unified even the past, made sure the future and hopeful. He came to me not to destroy but to fulfil [sic]. As I unrolled the book of my life, I saw the days when eyes had been peeping through the lattice unknown to me. I remember fits of shyness when the time came to pray.5 Gray’s letters to Michael contain much spiritual counsel and mystical theology. On New Year’s Eve 1907, the year of Field’s conversion, Gray writes: “We have lived, Michael, the wonderful year: we have nothing to look forward to but a wonderful life” (Berg). The tone here, as above, is about seeking the future, not the past. Gray later articulates conversion using amatory language. He refers to Christ as the bridegroom. Gray observes in a letter of November 24, 1908, “I have invincible love of St. John of the Cross because, I suppose, he made a hole in the covering which I had woven about myself to hide me from God” (Berg). That Spanish saint, about whom Raffalovich and Field write as well, is best known for his poem “The Living Flame of Love” and further works depicting God the Lover’s pursuit of the Beloved, the human soul. Gray makes clear to Michael that this true and rich love can only come through the Divine. On May 13, 1911, he states: Great is the Beloved who has chosen us. I feel much confusion under the sense of his goodness: and that I think produces the most quickening movements in my life. I ran about the world seeking the objects of my desires: and the longer they were unfulfilled increasing my demands. And when it was clearly of no use for me to continue kicking up the dust of the desert and there seemed nothing left but to hide myself and my failure without delay the heavens opened



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It is striking to note that with no other correspondent is Gray so frank. His intimacy with Raffalovich, as it was transformed into a religious friendship, prevented him from writing in this way. Only a fellow struggling convert – whose own union had similarly been transformed – could understand (and also need to hear) such words. Edith Cooper, known as “Henry,” was much more enthusiastic about her conversion than Katharine, and envisioned their relationship through that lens. She wrote Gray in a letter of February 7, 1912: “As for Michael – . . . I thought ‘What an exhilarating Rev. Mother she w[oul]d make!’ ”6 “Michael,” Katharine, also utilized a religious imagination in articulating the roles each played. In an undated letter to Gray, she writes, “Henry is the real Katharine [sic] of Alexandria and can talk with the doctors,” alluding to the female saint who defended Christianity when philosophers disputed the faith (Dep. 372/16). Field’s Catholicism was an intellectual, as well as deeply affective, endeavor. John Gray’s priestly diaries of 1903–8 confirm the importance of Field and Raffalovich in his world. His mass schedule is filled with references to “ASR” – Andre Sebastian Raffalovich, the baptism name (so significant in homosexual hagiography) taken in 1896 (372/46–51). That Gray so frequently celebrated mass for his friend highlights their relationship in his post-conversion, ordained life. Gray also offered masses for the intentions of Michael Field during this period. The masses demonstrate the commitment to a new “home” with Raffalovich, because he also prayed for St. Peter’s, the church they were building together. This space truly became their spiritual abode, as Raffalovich attended Gray’s services there for the rest of his days. The Gray–Raffalovich relationship has had the reputation of having been very formal – publicly, at least. To be sure, this was in no small part due to the fact that Gray was a Catholic clergyman. In a letter from Rome, October 21, 1898, where he was studying for the priesthood, Gray tells Raffalovich, “Dr. Fraser does not open letters. He may but he doesn’t. He insists upon the right to close all outgoing letters, but he says this is formal” (372/1). This point might help to explain a certain caution. In writing Raffalovich earlier from Cologne, Gray had addressed his friend as “Mon cher Enfant,” signing off as “Jacopone” (372/1). If Gray signed letters to Wilde as Dorian, he later called himself this name when writing Raffalovich. One name represented Hellenic



and the world revealed it so wonderful that it hardly surprised to meet Michael in the white robes of the redeemed. We never met in the desert. (Berg)


homosexuality; the other, wild passion for God. Jacopone da Todi was a thirteenth-century Italian saint who wrote ecstatic love poetry to Christ. His works are the subject of a short story called “Light” that Gray wrote a quarter of a century later, about a woman who is incapable of fulfilling her wifely duties, having fallen prey to the desire for God she had read about in a translation of Jacopone’s book. The juxtaposition of earthly versus Divine love is evident. On November 30, 1898 Gray writes Raffalovich to say, “You know we have often said it is your vocation we are struggling to get on foot. We are waiting to know what god [sic] will do with his Lamentable subject – and you are just as likely to hear as soon as I – or do you leave me to find out for myself?” (372/1). This note shows how Gray viewed his priestly vocation with respect to his friend. As in Michael Field’s conversion, where Bradley reluctantly followed Cooper into the Church, there was some expectation that whither went one, so too must the other go. This theme continues into 1899, as Gray observes on January 12 that he began a novena for “your feast,” St. Sebastian’s Day, January 20 (372/2). He had fussed in a prior letter that the day would have to be marked appropriately (January 7, 1899, 372/2). As time went on, Gray’s letters to Raffalovich turn less intimate. Perhaps he became more committed with respect to the duties of his vocation; or he regretted that his friend had not joined him in it. Raffalovich, however (like Michael Field), did become a third-order (lay) Dominican. Gray may also have been increasingly aware of the pressures of observation. In perhaps our last known affective reflection to Raffalovich – written in much the same manner as the later 1907 confession to Bradley – Gray recounts the role of faith in his life, in speaking of the anniversary of his baptism. It was a day of oblation and resolute resignation to the will of God. I suppose the longer I live the more tragic each anniversary of this day will become. I went through instruction blindly and indifferently as ever anyone did and immediately I began a course of sin compared with which my previous life was innocence. The sequence of miracles which has brought me where I now am is beyond my comprehension. To contemplate it means to realise as much dread as security. Now highly contrasted and alarming as this situation is, it has a queerly touching side if my supposition is a right one. (February 10, 1899, 372/2) Gray had converted to Catholicism during the fashionable Decadence of the 1890s. His religion then was aesthetic. He explains here that his



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new faith is true and distinct from that earlier experience. Gray attempts to distance himself from his Decadent Catholicism – and, perhaps, his active homosexuality as well. In contrast to Gray’s earnest epistles, Raffalovich’s long and lavish narratives could hardly be more gushing and affectionate. As a gentleman of leisure, his letters are mostly undated, and have been catalogued, at best, by year.7 In an early batch, 1898–1901, Raffalovich is heartily enthusiastic. He calls Gray “notre frère petit,” signs himself as “Your most loving brother, Sebastian,” and sends books and clothes (372/9). Raffalovich exhibits a certain child-like innocence: “only a few lines to our Jacopone in the hope of his getting them on Tuesday, before the retreat . . . , to assure him of our prayers and our love” (372/9). “In these wicked vain days of ours it is satisfactory to see a young saint overcoming all these [word unclear] traits” (372/9). While Gray’s fire and brimstone seem quite real, Raffalovich’s read as rather playful purification. Still, the author of the 1896 sexological apologia for homosexual orientation, Uranisme et Unisexualité, does not hesitate to offer a bit of intriguing biblical exegesis second-hand. Raffalovich recounts that “Fr. Humphrey’s last sermon was so eloquent that he managed the climax of saying the ‘unnatural sins of Sodom and Gomorrah’ were as ‘trifling misdemeanors’ to the spiritual sins of the English Church” (372/9). In this startling quotation, the priest (from a fashionable Catholic parish) indicts the Established Church of England in the very same way that Victorian Protestants had dismissed Catholicism, through comparison to deviance and perversion. Martha Vicinus has commented on women’s use of familial language to articulate their same-sex relationships. While Field didn’t need to invent such terms since they were in fact related, Raffalovich calls Gray “Mon fils et mon frère,” “Petit frère,” or simply “Petit” (372/9). He extravagantly tells “Our Jacopone” that “Of course my prayers for you will not fall off now, mon petit frère! May God bless you, May God bless you, May God bless you! May you hear Him during the retreat – at any rate, may you always respond to him” (372/9). Finally, and memorably – attesting to their love – “Ah! Mon frère, may you be happier and happier – May our Lady’s mantle be ever over you – You know all that is in my heart better than I can write it” (372/9). Perhaps in another context, such a proclamation might demonstrate a pure exalted friendship. But given the circumstances, their shared lives and shared homosexual past, the “romantic friendship” of Gray and Raffalovich can be summed up by that final line. Nowhere else in their writings does either so completely express unqualified love. Theirs is not unlike Divine love, depending on a knowledge of the self. It is this quality that defines the





spiritual friendship of Gray and Raffalovich, as it exists in an amatory trinity with their God. Raffalovich takes an interest in Gray’s spiritual as well as physical wellbeing. His letters indicate an obsession with health. “We were so afraid, pauv’ p’tit, that you were not well” (1901, 372/10). At times, Gray seems vaguely annoyed by Raffalovich’s excessive fussing: “I continue to take care of myself and shall still do so” (January 21, 1902, 372/5); “My bodily functions are holding on very well though very little I feel would derange them” (May 2, 1902, 372/5). Raffalovich regularly sent Gray money, not to mention treats such as claret and chocolate. He also expresses a decidedly nurturing role regarding his beloved’s religious life. “Your letter gives me great joy, and in nothing more than in your growth of courage about Graces. That is just what I wanted to hear” (372/9). On the day of Gray’s retreat, Raffalovich confirmed his desire to become a lay Dominican. He described this walk in sync with Gray as “two simultaneous steps” (372/9). “[H]e will clothe me with the scapular of the 3rd Order, and I shall be a Tertiary novice, to be professed within a year; so that your brother may after all be Sebastian of the Coronation” (372/9). In a later letter, he signs himself as “Brother Sebastian of the Coronation” (1901, 372/10). Raffalovich was wildly obsessed with the saint. Into 1902, at least, Gray was still signing letters as “Jacopone” (372/5). Raffalovich begins calling Gray “Milinki,” “Dearest” in Russian, “bon Milinki,” or “Mon Cher Vania,” “My Dear Johnny” (1901, 372/10). It is worth noting that a number of Raffalovich’s letters request “Tear it up.” While we cannot be sure what Gray did destroy, it is evident that he in fact kept many of his friend’s notes. Following Gray’s ordination, the forms of address become all the more familial, familiar, and yet uncertain. In a letter that opens “My dear Father,” Raffalovich also addresses Gray as “Dear child,” then continuing paternally: “if you run down in health, mind you run down here for 3 or 4 days, n’est-ce pas?” (1902, 372/11). While he further addresses Gray as “cher frère,” Raffalovich next declares, “We are as proud as you can imagine. Only do take care of yourself, Keep warm, drink!!” (1902, 372/11, emphasis in original). This ambivalence is apparent throughout the correspondence of this period. A letter that opens with “Milinki” closes to the “Best of Fathers” (November 3, 1902, 372/11). During the first years of the new century, Raffalovich seems to have been particularly distressed over Gray’s health as he was starting his new life as a Catholic priest in faraway Scotland, while his friend and Miss Gribbell, the émigré’s old nursemaid who lived with him, remained in England.



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In a letter of early 1903, Raffalovich refers to himself and Mrs. Gribbell as “Your afflicted Parents” of his “dear dear Child. (and Father)” (372/12). The restlessness led to Raffalovich’s eventual move to Edinburgh and his construction of their “spiritual home,” St. Peter’s Church, there. As Raffalovich addresses Gray as “Our dear child and Father,” he goes on to ask, “Do you feel very weak and weary? Have you the influenza lassitude? Do you cough? Do what the doctor says, n’est-ce pas” (1902, 372/11, emphasis in original). Raffalovich instructs, “do indulge yourself as much as possible in sleep, warmth, food” (1903, 372/12). “We do hope you are well, not tired, and golfing though it be Lent, or doing something else equally healthy” (1903, 372/12), followed by “We do hope you . . . are well, and not tired, and eating” (1903, 372/13, emphasis in original). Although earlier Gray seemed peeved by Raffalovich’s intervention, by 1903 Gray is writing Raffalovich quite personal details about his health, such as, “You asked me once to take the prescription of a specific [word missing] for itching at the rectum. I have a use for it now if it is available” (April 5, 372/6). Raffalovich’s obsession with Gray’s health and his own is clearly connected to his anxiety over their physical separation. He writes later in 1903, “The wrench is still very painful; and tears could return. They salted the mutton more than the salt. I know you don’t like these griefs at parting: but – but – but – If only we could see you looking rested, if we could only hope you had a chance of getting rested” (372/12). Raffalovich carries on to extremes. One letter gives the directions in list form: “Au revoir. Take care of yourself. Be well. Don’t overwork. Get air” (1903, 372/12). He also looks for sympathy. “Poor Sebastian fording his way to Death. Milinki how are you? Next month you must be weighed again for our consolation” (1903, 372/12). “How are you, how are you, how are you. Tell your friend here. Golf, golf. Rest. Sleep. Eat. Be weighed” (1903, 372/12). During the time he was pining away for Gray, Raffalovich did not abandon his own religious duties and interests. He supported a Dominican priory at Pendleton, where there was organized a Catholic Boys Brigade in honor of St. Sebastian. Raffalovich did not take himself too seriously, and it is clear that those who knew his predilections did not either. In a letter of January 29, 1903, he tells Gray, “I hear at the last committee meeting there was loud laughter which Fr Segesser could not understand because he had suggested that on St Sebastian’s Feast the boys should present – me – with – a bouquet. I said his Swiss origin explained his suggestion” (372/12). Seven years earlier, when he converted to Catholicism, Raffalovich had published his magnum opus,





Uranisme et Unisexualité, subtitled Etude sur différentes manifestations de l’instinct sexuel. His interest in sexology had not waned. Marked “Destroy it when read,” a letter of July 26, 1903 to Gray informs the reader, “I send you in another envelope some blood curdling documents – one about an inverti English curate (inverti superieur dangereux) and one about Italian life in Paris. Read them: they are worth reading though very sad and horrible” (372/13). Raffalovich employs the classificatory terms for different kinds of homosexuals that he had coined in Uranisme et Unisexualité. Impatient to see Gray again, Raffalovich’s 1903 Ash Wednesday letter to his friend observes, “Of course my Lent is for you” (372/13). This powerful statement underscores the true meaning of their friendship. Lent – the period of waiting for Easter, of trial and suffering with Christ in his humanity – comes to represent the relationship between Gray and Raffalovich. On one level, Raffalovich is simply waiting for a visit with Gray. On another level, both have sacrificed their earthly lives – the possibility for mundane union – in favor of the promise of eternal salvation. Elsewhere Raffalovich alludes to the friendship surpassing the love of women; both friends are fully aware of the implications of their love. He writes: “Have you in your memory the episode with the three arrows and Jonathan and David? If not, do read it over: Book of Kings I Chapter 20. All the David and Jonathan episodes are most alive” (1903, 372/13). Although Raffalovich erroneously cites I Kings rather than I Samuel, his reference is to a text that canonizes the friendship between David and Jonathan as greater than ties of kinship – the point of Alan Bray’s argument about modern English history. “Jonathan made David swear again by his love for him; for he loved him as he loved his own life” (I Samuel 20.17, NRSV). Years earlier, in the Decadent nineties, Gray had written a love poem about David and Jonathan. As with their use of Jacopone and Sebastian, symbols of same-sex love abound as signifiers of desire. In one of the last letters from the period of their separation, prior to their correspondence becoming more business-like as they jointly planned for the building and financing of St. Peter’s, Raffalovich writes Gray about a church experience. You were such a part of the service. I am much more heroic than [Miss Gribbell] is about such things; though I was over-moved when I told Joseph to pray for you and he said to me: I do. What matters most to me is our relation towards God, that you and I should do his will here, and be with Him for an eternity. That is the prize, the aim of all and everything, and our history, yours and mine, does



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Raffalovich’s wish is for them to be together in Heaven, and he believes that this is God’s will too. The letters that follow, in subsequent years, turn to the practical planning for the construction of St. Peter’s Church, Morningside. Although indulgent, Raffalovich was also a good businessman. He did not, however, spare any expense in the building and aesthetic decoration of the church. In a manner akin to modern samesex unions, Raffalovich arranged for Gray to legally be his heir: to receive two-thirds of his estate after his mother’s death and the remaining one-third after Miss Gribbell’s. That Raffalovich was thinking so far ahead – financial planning to materially covenant their union, as it were – testifies to how he saw this as a real marriage on earth – just as he speaks of his longing for its consummation in Heaven. The relationship between Gray and Raffalovich, as described here, is far afield from what we might define as “romantic friendship” in another age. For the next three decades, the two men saw each other daily at Gray’s mass and spent time together at Raffalovich’s home, thus splitting their domiciles between God’s house and man’s. The affection that the two men had for one another, their “friendship,” cannot be denied. Nor can one dispute that they inhabited a particular homosexual milieu prior to their conversions, and Gray’s re-commitment to his faith. But what did they share in the wake of these events? How did they create a life together once they had pledged that their sexual selves had essentially “gone before” to await physical union in a spiritual eternity? Similarly, what space did Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper inhabit after having shared a home, a bed, and a pen? Martha Vicinus observes that as Cooper was dying of cancer, Bradley ironically returned to a greater physical intimacy with her niece by simply caring for her bodily needs. Yet such union required ultimate loss of a body for that connection to become possible. The homosexual Catholic world of the fin de siècle was very tightlyknit. In one of his letters to Gray, Raffalovich mentions having heard “a beautiful sermon by Father Sebastian Bowden,” the famous London Oratory priest who almost succeeded in converting Wilde in 1878 and received Radclyffe Hall into the Church in 1912 (1903, 372/13). There is not much mystery here. Although Cooper had difficulty explaining her lesbianism to her confessor, there was nevertheless a much larger, Catholic homosexual community in England at this time who would have understood. As many of us have demonstrated, Roman



point to such a scheme, to such a condescension on God’s part. (1903, 372/13, emphasis in original)


Catholicism and Decadence, Anglo-Catholicism and homosexuality, were not disparate phenomena at the turn of the century.8 Within this space, a re-invented “romantic friendship” held pride of place. Theirs was the faith of the Augustinian convert – one who had experienced the world and was, indeed, ready to be made pure. I have argued elsewhere that communities of men and women, made possible in England with the revival of Roman Catholic orders and the creation of Anglican monasticism in the nineteenth century, offered people of homoerotic desire the potential for same-sex companionship. In any religious milieu, “particular friendships” are to be discouraged, following Benedict’s aims for community cohesion. Still, in secular life, and even among regular clergy like Gray, “friendship” provides a welcome foretaste of the Divine Friend, glimpsed at the altar before finally being fully received in spirit (as well as in body) for eternity. One wonders what Gerard Manley Hopkins’ life – and poetry – might have been like had he known such companionship. Bray has effectively shown the importance of the friendship between John Henry Newman and Ambrose St. John. I have argued that figures such as the twelfth-century Aelred of Rievaulx, author of a Ciceronian treatise on Christian friendship, were important models for Victorian men and women.9 So why not understand a particularly self-conscious re-creation of romantic friendship at this cultural moment? Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper, John Gray and Marc-Andre Sebastian Raffalovich, provide us with models for how spiritual friendship existed at the turn of the century in Britain. They also demonstrate that such relationships, in the Catholic milieu of the time, could function as respectable and appropriate romantic friendships. Their erotic component must be understood with respect to desire contained within the relationship, a kind of spiritual displacement. We know that Bradley and Cooper strove for celibacy; we can only imagine that Gray and Raffalovich did the same. But ultimately sexual acts do not determine unions, any more than unions necessarily presume genital behavior. The greater holy union, with the Divine Friend in the trinity of each of these friendships, offers a crucial paradigm for our understanding of the range of relationships that might – or might not – fall under the rubric of “romantic friendship” – in twenty-first as well as twentieth-century culture.



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Confessing Stephen: the Nostalgic Erotics of Catholicism in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man Patrick R. O’Malley

“And you made me confess to you, Stephen said, thrilled by his touch, as I have confessed to you so many other things, have I not?” James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) In considering Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray in a 1906 letter to his brother Stanislaus, James Joyce pointed to the apparent vagueness of Dorian’s transgressions: “It is not very difficult to read between the lines. Wilde seems to have had some good intentions in writing it – some wish to put himself before the world – but the book is rather crowded with lies and epigrams. If he had had the courage to develop the allusions in the book it might have been better. I suspect he has done this in some privately-printed book.”1 The inexplicit mood of corruption that Joyce detects in Dorian Gray has indeed provided much of the impetus behind the novel’s critical fascination, both at Wilde’s trial itself and in the twentieth century.2 What Joyce – like Edward Carson, Queensberry’s defense attorney at Wilde’s first trial3 – seems to want from Wilde is a kind of confession, imagined as the revelation of some version of the truth obscured behind the “lies and epigrams” of Wilde’s public persona. Joyce’s fantasy of the “privately-printed book” evokes the private confession, tantalizingly inaccessible to the public, its fascinating truth available only to the priest or the exclusive readership. Joyce’s desire to peer between the covers (real or imagined) of that book is also a desire to play-act the father confessor, to hear as explicit truth the facts of what is occurring under the covers (again, real or imagined) of Dorian’s – or Wilde’s – bed. It might not be “difficult to read between the lines” but it is somehow not as satisfying as hearing the language that constitutes as true what is going on between the sheets. 69 10.1057/9780230287778 - Catholic Figures, Queer Narratives, Edited by Lowell Gallagher, Frederick S. Roden and Patricia Juliana Smith


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But in fantasizing a usurpation of the confessor’s position – stripping away the lies and epigrams to render naked the confessant’s fascinatingly transgressive soul – Joyce simultaneously positions himself as Dorian, as the very character whose sins he seems to believe must be versions of his author’s own. For in Wilde’s novel it is Dorian who lurks at the margins of the confessional itself, trying to hear the essential truth of sin transfigured into narrative: As [Dorian] passed out [of the church], he used to look with wonder at the black confessionals, and long to sit in the dim shadow of one of them and listen to men and women whispering through the worn grating the true story of their lives.(106)4 Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man rewrites this scene from the similarly titled Picture of Dorian Gray by turning the confessional inside out and secularizing it, making the private public by staging the confessional moment that Joyce himself – like Dorian – has wished to overhear: –And you have made me confess to you, Stephen said, thrilled by his touch, as I have confessed to you so many other things, have I not? –Yes, my child, Cranly said, still gaily. –You made me confess the fears that I have. But I will tell you also what I do not fear. I do not fear to be alone or to be spurned for another or to leave whatever I have to leave. [. . .] Cranly, now grave again, slowed his pace and said: –Alone, quite alone. You have no fear of that. And you know what that word means? Not only to be separate from all others but to have not even one friend. –I will take the risk, said Stephen. –And not to have any one person, Cranly said, who would be more than a friend, more even than the noblest and truest friend a man ever had. His words seemed to have struck some deep chord in his own nature. Had he spoken of himself, of himself as he was or wished to be? Stephen watched his face for some moments in silence. A cold sadness was there. He had spoken of himself, of his own loneliness which he feared. –Of whom are you speaking? Stephen asked at length. Cranly did not answer. (269)5 The dialogue appears to be confession itself, translated – as Joyce imagines Wilde’s would be – into sex, what Michel Foucault has described as



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“the nearly infinite task of telling – telling oneself and another, as often as possible, everything that might concern the interplay of innumerable pleasures, sensations, and thoughts which, through the body and the soul, had some affinity with sex.”6 Indeed, as Jonathan Mulrooney has argued, throughout the entire novel, “Stephen’s poetic lyricism is a performative self-positioning, a ritual that takes its cue from the method of Catholic sacramental confession.”7 And the erotics of the exchange with Cranly, mirroring in miniature that larger confessional structure, turn on the erotics of revelation, incomplete revelation to be sure but revelation nonetheless. The structure of a furtive sexual encounter that seems to underpin this passage is dependent on the interplay of dominance and passivity in Stephen’s description of their relationship as confessional: “You have made me confess to you [. . .] as I have confessed to you so many other things[. . .]. You made me confess the fears that I have. But I will tell you also what I do not fear.” As intimate as the physical contact, the touch that thrills Stephen, may be, it is both produced and structured by the discursive context, by the intimacy of linguistic exchange that is the basis of the confessional.8 And yet what, in fact, is confessed? For all of his belated encouragement of explicitness to Wilde, Joyce hardly presents the overt version of Dorian’s deviances in Portrait, the novel on which he was working while reading The Picture of Dorian Gray. In inverting the structure of the confessional, in making the private explicitly public, Joyce seems to tell nothing more than Wilde did. In fact, as Joseph Valente has compellingly argued, it is Wilde’s text that is in some ways more explicit: “whereas Dorian Gray veils its specific erotic ‘truth’ in order to betray it selectively, enacting a classic economy of repression and desire, A Portrait announces but does not specify its erotic truth, entertaining a jouissance of suspension and volatility.”9 In this way, Stephen’s confession complicates Foucault’s paradigm, which insists that confession, like so many of the other “stories” that produce the web of our cultural narrative, is “sustained [. . .] by the obligation of truth.”10 Indeed, the public status of Stephen’s confession to Cranly lays bare not the truth of sin but the void at the center of the confessional performance itself. By enacting the confessional, Stephen (seemingly paradoxically) precludes the possibility (or averts the risk) of “actual” confession. That is, as Joyce re-narrates Wilde’s confession (which he had seemed to confess to Stanislaus a desire to hear), he substitutes an explicit epistemological rupture for Wilde’s implicit “truth.” This might indeed be read as a panicked repetition of Wilde’s own imagined lack of “courage,” and yet I believe that something more analytically significant is occurring here. Joyce’s Portrait realizes that it is precisely Dorian Gray’s



Confessing Stephen: the Nostalgic Erotics of Catholicism 71


failure to confess that allows it to express its erotic truth, an erotic truth that explodes the boundaries of stable knowledge. “What Dorian Gray’s sin was no one says and no one knows,” Joyce would note in a 1909 article, three years after the letter to Stanislaus; “Anyone who recognizes it has committed it.”11 This can only work as long as we – like Dorian – remain just out of earshot of the confessional, as long as the book of Wilde’s desires is “privately printed,” as long as we absolve ourselves of the sin of “good intentions,” for we all know where those lead. As long, that is, as we imagine a confessional that resists disclosure, a confessional that fails to confess. That confessional, as Dorian Gray itself points out, is the Roman Catholic confessional itself. And in the move away from the fantasy of the privately printed book of revelation to the fantasy of the confession just outside the possibility of recognition, Joyce returns to a notion of Catholicism that Wilde himself relied upon – a Catholicism that registers the secret of queer desire not because it confesses but because it does not. As Jean-Michel Rabaté has pointed out, by the time of the 1909 article, “Joyce has become more sophisticated, more wary of naming this ‘truth’ [. . .]; while treating him [Wilde] as a crypto-Catholic, Joyce seems indeed to be speaking about himself.”12 By 1909, however, Joyce does not appear to have thought of Wilde as a “crypto-Catholic,” given his familiarity with his death-bed conversion, a detail to which Joyce himself alludes in the article: “He died a Roman Catholic.”13 Wilde’s Catholicism makes Joyce’s identification with him still easier, and yet the ties of affiliation are not that simple; it is through Wilde’s Catholicism and his (sexual) distance from Catholic orthodoxy that Joyce finds a new theory of the confessional, not the “true” confession but the rupture in the very notion of specific sexual revelation. The proto-papist Wilde’s fantasy of the confessional void – here resurrected by the apostate Romanist Joyce – is in fact the nineteenth-century Protestant fantasy of the Catholic confessional itself. Far from setting the discourse of Catholicism against that of homoerotics, Joyce’s text produces an erotics of nostalgia for an age in which those discourses could play off each other’s resonances without an explicit theorization. This return to Wilde occurs in an article written (in Italian) for Il Piccolo della Sera in Trieste as a response to a production of Richard Strauss’ opera version of Salomé. Although it is entitled “Oscar Wilde: Il Poeta di ‘Salome,’” the article, seemingly strangely, never mentions Wilde’s Salomé directly and only once, at its very end, alludes to it. What it does, however, is analyze more carefully than in the letter to Stanislaus the relationship between Wilde’s work and sexual transgression.



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And the way that it does so is explicitly through the rhetoric of Catholicism: “Here we touch the pulse of Wilde’s art – sin. [. . .][A]t its very base is the truth inherent in the soul of Catholicism: that man cannot reach the divine heart except through that sense of separation and loss called sin.”14 Rather than focusing on Wilde’s play itself, the essay thus makes it the motive and the excuse for analyzing the relationship between Catholicism and erotic transgression. This vision of Catholicism is fundamentally backward-looking and recuperative, a gesture towards a past that can obscure present imperatives of disclosure. It sees in Wilde’s conversion a type of reborn antiquity: “In his last book, De Profundis, he kneels before a gnostic Christ, resurrected from the apocryphal pages of The House of Pomegranates, and then his true soul, trembling, timid, and saddened, shines through the mantle of Heliogabalus.”15 Joyce’s belated appeal to a kind of posthumous confession by Wilde – this “revelation of his own psyche”16 – thus finds its echo in the insistence of the rhetoric of the past in Stephen’s articulation of the confessional act (“you made me confess,” “as I have confessed”). And similarly, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man locates the erotic truth of queer desire in its own act of retrospection, in its remembrance of Catholicism past. Thus it is in the memory of Roman Catholicism that this novel finds the template onto which its fantasy of queerness attaches. There is, for example, the aestheticized detail of the liturgy itself (a detail reminiscent of Wilde’s decadent description of the mass in The Picture of Dorian Gray); and there is the erotically rich environment of the all-male and specifically Jesuit world of Clongowes, a world which, as Derek Attridge has pointed out, is filled with “sexual associations” that (like Joyce’s vision of Wilde’s Catholicism) “point backwards and forwards, functioning as links in a chain of related experiences and meditations.”17 It is a specifically and persistently Catholic world, and it is a lost world in which homosexual and sacramental practices can co-exist not as mutually exclusive options but as versions of aesthetic possibility that mutually evoke each other. If, as Katherine Mullin has claimed, “the regulation of sexuality in Joyce’s first novel is a self-evidently Catholic affair,”18 it is simultaneously true that the production of sexuality – and, in particular, queer sexualities – is as well. After Athy announces that five schoolboys have disappeared from Clongowes because “They were caught with Simon Moonan and Tusker Boyle in the square one night,” he clarifies this mysterious explanation with the still oblique revelation that the boys were “smugging” (42). But the suggestion of homoerotic or autoerotic caresses19 is only one in a series of fantasized transgres-




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Wells had said that they had drunk some of the altar wine out of the press in the sacristy and that it had been found out who had done it by the smell. Perhaps they had stolen a monstrance to run away with it and sell it somewhere. That must have been a terrible sin, to go in there quietly at night, to open the dark press and steal the flashing gold thing into which God was put on the altar in the middle of flowers and candles at benediction while the incense went up in clouds at both sides as the fellow swung the censer and Dominic Kelly sang the first part by himself in the choir. But God was not in it of course when they stole it. But still it was a strange and a great sin even to touch it. He thought of it with deep awe; a terrible and strange sin: it thrilled him to think of it in the silence when the pens scraped lightly. (46–7) The attention to the sensuousness of physical detail here, the conflicted relationship of desire and repulsion, even the “thrill” of sin that prefigures the “thrill” of Cranly’s touch, all evoke the repeated “shivers” of Stephen’s fantasy of the boys being whipped, a fantasy that returns to the almost obsessive imagination of the male body: A long thin cane would have a high whistling sound and he wondered what was that pain like. It made him shivery to think of it and cold: and what Athy said too. But what was there to laugh at in it? It made him shivery: but that was because you always felt like a shiver when you let down your trousers. It was the same in the bath when you undressed yourself. He wondered who had to let them down, the master or the boy himself. [. . .] And though he trembled with cold and fright to think of the cruel long nails and of the high whistling sound of the cane and of the chill you felt at the end of your shirt when you undressed yourself yet he felt a feeling of queer quiet pleasure inside him to think of the white fattish hands, clean and strong and gentle. (45–6) From “shiver” to “thrill,” from the fantasy of naked male bodies to the fantasy of the stolen monstrance, from “queer pleasure” to “terrible and strange sin,” these passages from Portrait write homoerotic desire and



sions of which the most influential on Stephen’s young mind is the possibility that the boys illicitly drank the wine of the Eucharist. In fact, Stephen’s obsession with the boys’ mysterious crime and their punishment conflates half-formed images simultaneously of sacramental and homosexual intimations, both tinged with a conflicted sense of desire:

the fascinations of Catholic ritual as mirrors of each other, as constructions literally dependent upon each other for their imaginative power and sensuous rhetoric. In fact, the confession to Cranly is itself a re-enactment of an earlier scene of confession at the Church Street Chapel. There, waiting to confess, Stephen imagines his body literally turned into the biblical city of Sodom, destroyed by fire for its sexual sins: “His blood began to murmur in his veins, murmuring like a sinful city summoned from its sleep to hear its doom. Little flakes of fire fell and powdery ashes fell softly, alighting on the houses of men” (153–4). The confession itself is transformed into a version of sexual intercourse, enacted this time not with the whores of the brothel district but with the priest himself: –I . . . committed sins of impurity, father. The priest did not turn his head. –With yourself, my child? –And . . . with others. –With women, my child? –Yes, father. –Were they married women, my child? He did not know. His sins trickled from his lips, one by one, trickled in shameful drops from his soul festering and oozing like a sore, a squalid stream of vice. The last sins oozed forth, sluggish, filthy. (156) On the one hand, Stephen’s soul here becomes a monstrous metaphor for the body of the crucified Christ, rotting with the sins of the world, his wounds emitting foul fluid instead of pure wine. On the other – and simultaneously – the linguistic exchange is here identical with the sexual one, the words dribbling from Stephen’s lips like semen until he finally pauses, in self-hatred, disgust, and exhaustion.20 It is telling that the encounter between Stephen and Cranly is itself framed by the transformation of the sensual details of the mass into male erotics: “The figure of woman as she appears in the liturgy of the church passed silently through the darkness: a whiterobed figure, small and slender as a boy and with a falling girdle. Her voice, frail and high as a boy’s, was heard intoning from a distant choir the first words of a woman which pierce the gloom and clamour of the first chanting of the passion” (265–6). The image of the female soloist here recalls that of the young Dominic Kelly, who “sang the first part by himself in the choir” (47) during Stephen’s days at Clongowes, an image implicated in





Stephen’s confused fantasy of the sacrilege and erotics of “smugging.” The Catholic mass thus becomes the space not only of erotic attention, the eye of the narrator pausing on the woman’s waist and falling girdle, but also of gender confusion; it is not merely that the narrative fantasy twice imagines the woman as a boy but also that the characteristics that the text chooses as most “boylike” – her slender build and high voice – are, seemingly paradoxically, the characteristics of a boy that are symbolically most “feminine.” The systematic epistemology of gender itself seems to fall apart in this vision simultaneously sacred and erotic.21 It is, further, no accident that this androgynous singer appears out of the “chanting of the passion,” since “passion” itself conjoins the rhetorics of the sacred and the erotic. One of the few Latin verbs that use a passive form to denote an active concept, patior, becomes the very root of the word “passive” and is cognate to the Greek root for pathos and pathic. Rendering useless the distinction between passivity and activity, it implies the kind of rhetorical slippage that Joyce would use in Finnegan’s Wake, suggesting queerness by the intimation that a man might be “more sinned against than sinning.”22 The descriptor of Christ’s suffering on the Cross, “passion” here also seems symbolically to introduce Stephen’s confession to Cranly, a passion that stands as a bridge between sexual and religious experience, between activity and passivity, between licit and illicit forms of attraction and specularity. The confessional is, in fact, but one of the images of Catholic ritual and iconography that structure Portrait’s oblique narrative of queer desire, but it centrally establishes a sexual aesthetic of necessary indirection that allows the play of homoerotics and Catholicism. In a memory of an English lecture, Stephen’s fantasy of Cranly’s body literally disintegrates into seemingly (and suggestively) incoherent dismembered parts that turn out – uncannily – to evoke the body of the father confessor himself: Why was it that when he thought of Cranly he could never raise before his mind the entire image of his body but only the image of the head and face? Even now against the grey curtain of the morning he saw it before him like the phantom of a dream, the face of a severed head or deathmask, crowned on the brows by its stiff black upright hair as by an iron crown. It was a priestlike face, priestlike in its pallor, in the widewinged nose, in the shadowings below the eyes and along the jaws, priestlike in the lips that were long and bloodless and faintly smiling: and Stephen [. . .] would have told



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Here, the erotic fascination of Cranly’s person, exemplified in the haunting cross-gendered suggestions of his “dark womanish eyes,” is refracted through the fantasy of the confessional, the construction of homoerotics through the ritual of penance. Joyce’s novel evacuates the confessional of the authentically sacred – after all, this is a priest who does not have “power to absolve” – but maintains it as a space of impossible erotics, the erotics both of homosexuality and of language itself. Late in the novel, Stephen returns to this image of Cranly’s decapitated head, and, “in bed,” realizes that it is the head of John the Baptist: Then he is the precursor. Item: he eats chiefly belly bacon and dried figs. Read locusts and wild honey. Also, when thinking of him, saw always a stern severed head or deathmask as if outlined on a grey curtain or veronica. Decollation they call it in the fold. Puzzled for the moment by saint John at the Latin gate. What do I see? A decollated precursor trying to pick the lock. (270) The imperative of nostalgic recuperation that structures Stephen’s conflation of the sacred and the sexual alights here on the image of the “precursor,” the prophet who is necessarily anachronistic. And Cranly’s eroticized body, in Stephen’s fantasy of origins, becomes the product of the explicit and the inexplicit, of the father who can be fixed in the imagination and the mother who escapes, whose “truth” the fantasizing mind fails to fully grasp: Tried to imagine his mother: cannot. Told me once, in a moment of thoughtlessness, his father was sixtyone when he was born. Can see him. Strong farmer type. Pepper and salt suit. Square feet. Unkempt grizzled beard [. . .]. But his mother? Very young or very old? Hardly the first. If so, Cranly would not have spoken as he did. Old then. Probably, and neglected. Hence Cranly’s despair of soul: the child of exhausted loins. (270) Those “exhausted loins,” Stephen realizes, “are those of Elisabeth and Zachary,” the parents of John. These ancestral figures thus become even further removed from “reality,” transfigured into metaphors for Christian pre-history itself, the presagers of the presager of Christ.



himself that it was the face of a guilty priest who heard confessions of those whom he had not power to absolve but that he felt again in memory the gaze of its dark womanish eyes. (192–3)


Yet in his musing, Stephen conflates two saints – John the Baptist and John the Evangelist – the one who was beheaded and the one who wrote the last of the Gospels, who stood before the Latin Gate. It is a telling confusion, for if John the Baptist is implicated in Wilde’s drama of perverse sexuality through Salomé’s erotic dance before her father, it is John the Evangelist who is the disciple “whom Jesus loved,” both the protagonist and the recorder of a relationship that, like Joyce’s own narrative, announces but fails to name its queerness.23 And the reach of that suggested queerness does not end, for Joyce, in the ranks of the Apostles but extends even to Christ. Cranly’s suspicion that “Jesus was not what he pretended to be” (263) may deal most specifically with the hypocrisy of claims of divinity, but John’s Gospel hints as well at the mutual erotics of discipleship. After all, it is not John the Baptist’s head that is etched, in the iconography and reliquaries of the Catholic Church, onto Veronica’s cloth (the “grey curtain or veronica” of Stephen’s fantasies of Cranly) but that of Christ himself. Thus, the possibility of desire between men is transubstantiated into Catholic hagiography and image, as the heads of John the Baptist, John the Evangelist, and Christ are merged in a vision of erotic dismemberment, the body parts imagined simultaneously as relic and fetish. This fantasized dismemberment of Cranly in Stephen’s imagination almost uncannily evokes an odd shift in Joyce’s letter to Stanislaus from a discussion of the vagueness of Wildean homoerotics immediately to that of murderous nightmares: “Can you tell me what is a cure for dreaming? I am troubled every night by horrible and terrifying dreams: death, corpses, assassinations in which I take an unpleasantly prominent part.”24 It is almost as though Wilde’s text evokes the sort of violent imagery that would become the context of the eroticized attachment of Stephen to Cranly. And, in fact, the relationship between Stephen and Cranly is, it turns out, overdetermined by the texts and legends surrounding Wilde himself. The 1934 Modern Library edition of the “Proteus” section of Ulysses moves without comment from heterosexual to homosexual attraction: “But you were delighted when Esther Osvalt’s shoe went on you: girl I knew in Paris. Tiens, quel petit pied! Staunch friend, a brother soul: Wilde’s love that dare not speak its name. He now will leave me.”25 But Hans Walter Gabler’s 1986 edition of Ulysses includes a bridge that explicitly links this odd evocation of Wilde to the encounter between Stephen and Cranly at the end of Portrait: “Wilde’s love that dare not speak its name. His arm: Cranly’s arm. He now will leave me.”26 The specific reference to Cranly in relationship to homosexual desire, apparently canceled by Joyce before the publication



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of Ulysses, continues the trope of dismemberment, reducing Cranly’s body into a weirdly individuated arm. As Valente has pointed out, “The habit of mind Stephen observes [that he cannot envision Cranly as a whole] would seem to locate Cranly, like the aestheticized image of Venus, exclusively ‘in a mental world,’ in this case by substantially blotting out his bodily existence.”27 But the synechdochical erotics at play here – indeed the fetishized preference for the sexualized part to the whole – is most explicitly a type of Catholic hagiography, the iconography of the body parts of the saints, depicted, like John the Baptist himself, as dismembered but miraculously resurrected martyrs. Like the fantasy of the confessional, these images of male dismemberment bring Joyce back to Wilde for a discursive system that can suggest (without making explicit) the relationship between male homoerotics and Roman Catholicism. For in Wilde’s Salomé – the text that in 1909 functions as pretext for Joyce’s explication of queer desire in Dorian Gray – it is Jokanaan himself (soon to be beheaded) who conflates the discourses of deviant sexuality and deviant religious practice. Repulsed by Salomé’s attempt to kiss him on the mouth, he exclaims, “Never! daughter of Babylon! Daughter of Sodom! Never!” (559). In conflating Babylon with Sodom (or, alternatively, imagining the intercourse between them which would produce Salomé), Wilde articulates a striking slippage between non-normative sexual and religious practice in the English Protestant imagination. Babylon figures most commonly in the Hebrew Scriptures as the great enemy of Israel, who is to have power over the Israelites for a time but is doomed to eventual failure. With the possible exception of Zechariah 2:7,28 the Hebrew Scriptural references to Babylon do not in general emphasize sexual deviance so much as military power and blasphemous pride. But the reference to Babylon that most seized the attention of Victorian polemicists is the allegory of Revelation 17: And there came one of the seven angels which had the seven vials, and talked with me, saying unto me, Come hither; I will shew unto thee the judgment of the great whore that sitteth upon many waters: With whom the kings of the earth have committed fornication, and the inhabitants of the earth have been made drunk with the wine of her fornication. So he carried me away in the spirit into the wilderness: and I saw a woman sit upon a scarlet coloured beast, full of names of blasphemy, having seven heads and ten horns. And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet colour, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a golden cup in her hand




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For English anti-Catholic polemicists, this image of the Whore of Babylon becomes the prototype of the Roman Catholic Church itself, both in the splendor of its external façades (whether of vestments or of churches) and in its sexual perversities. Thus the Tudor “Homily of the Peril of Idolatry,” enjoined for the Anglican faith by the thirty-fifth Article, alludes to the Babylon of Revelation for the deceptive nature of gorgeous Church ritual and clothing: For she [the “idolatrous Church” of Rome] being indeed not only an harlot (as the Scripture calleth her), but also a foul, filthy, old withered harlot (for she is indeed of ancient years) and understanding her lack of natural and true beauty, and great loathsomeness which of herself she hath, doth (after the custom of such harlots) paint herself, and deck and tire herself with gold, pearl, stone, and all kind of precious jewels, that she, shining with the outward beauty and glory of them, may please the foolish phantasy of fond lovers, and so entice them to spiritual fornication with her.29 As the Tudor “Homily” suggests, the imagination of the English Reformation produced a fantasy of Catholic sumptuousness as a thinly veiled cover for – indeed a version of – sexual deviance. And the late Victorian polemical language directed against Catholicism similarly takes Babylon as its explicit or implicit grounding, describing the Church of Rome as a harlot, as a sexually perverse and voracious corrupter of English morals. Thus taking this same passage from the “Homily Against the Peril of Idolatry” as his text, polemicist Walter Walsh, in his 1897 Secret History of the Oxford Movement, is explicit that the danger of Anglo-Catholicism lies not only in its potential for leading its adherents directly to Rome but also in the fact that its extravagant ritual and visual splendor attempt to conceal – but actually function as an outward sign for – its darkest secrets of sexual irregularity. To the Tudor “Homily,” Walsh appends the gloss, “Just like our modern Ritualistic priests, who ‘deck and tire’ themselves and their churches in a similar fashion.”30 As Walsh points out, the vestments are those of men, women’s religious habits tending to emphasize drabness rather



full of abominations and filthiness of her fornication: And upon her forehead was a name written, MYSTERY, BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH. And I saw the woman drunken with the blood of the saints, and with the blood of the martyrs of Jesus. (Revelation 17:1–6; King James Version)

than multicolored display. Yet in the “Homily,” those men – bishops and cardinals and priests – have been feminized into the Whore of Babylon, prostituting themselves to “fond lovers” presumably also male. Thus by the end of the century, and in the aftermath of the Wilde trial itself, sodomy itself – and not simple harlotry – lurks beneath the sexual implications of Catholic ritual and iconography. Indeed, what the end of Wilde’s play suggests is that the whole range of sexually transgressive desires refracted through the symbolism of Salomé’s kissing Jokanaan’s decapitated head is subsumed within the iconography of Catholicism.31 Salomé’s musing, just before she is killed by Herod’s soldiers, almost obsessively questions what the difference between the taste of love and the taste of blood might be: “I have kissed thy mouth, Jokanaan, I have kissed thy mouth. There was a bitter taste on my lips. Was it the taste of blood . . .? But perchance it is the taste of love. . . . They say that love hath a bitter taste. . . . But what of that? What of that? I have kissed thy mouth, Jokanaan” (575). Kissing Jokanaan’s dismembered head is itself evocative of the reverence demonstrated towards the dismembered bodily relics of the saints; Salomé’s actions thus point to a type of proto-Catholic idolatry encoded within Wilde’s description of this pre-Christian moment itself. And further, as I have argued elsewhere, the “bitter taste” suggestive of blood further evokes not only once again the Whore of Babylon, herself “drunk with their blood,” but also the Catholic theology of the Eucharist, the literal drinking of Christ’s blood.32 It would seem, then, that Wilde writes Salomé into the tradition of nineteenth-century Protestant attacks on Catholic deviance. But what Salomé does, however, is foreground the question of interpretive stability, thus both suggesting and denying any reliable understanding of the relationship between Catholic iconography and practice and sexual transgression. This instability of reference, related to the vagueness that Joyce detected in Dorian Gray, is, in Salomé, most explicitly symbolized by the moon with its ever varying significations, from virgin to naked woman hungry for lovers, from seeker after “dead things” to dancer; and, rejecting all of these, Herodias, the cynic who believes neither in prophets nor miracles interprets the moon as empty of any signification at all: “the moon is like the moon, that is all” (561). The moon, like Joyce’s description of the sin of Dorian Gray, only – and always – mirrors its interpreters. But the moon is also Wilde himself, at least in Aubrey Beardsley’s illustrations.33 And it, like Wilde, tells the truth precisely by refusing to confess.





In conjoining the image of John the Baptist with Stephen’s fantasy of Cranly as father confessor, Joyce registers his reconsideration of the fantasized lost Wildean confession. It is, after all, in an article putatively about Salomé that Joyce articulates his theory that it is by inexplicitness that the queer potentialities of Dorian Gray manifest themselves, like a ghost hovering just beyond the frame of stable perception, or a confession just outside the range of the audible, or the frustratingly inexplicit nomenclature of “smugging.” Salomé, which Joyce was thinking about in 1909, allows this revisionary return to the matter of the 1906 letter to Stanislaus in two ways: it suggests that queerness arises not out of the explicitness of direct articulation but out of indeterminacy itself, and it proposes that that multiplicity of meaning finds its suggestive tropes in the slippage between sacramental Catholicism and deviant sexuality. Further, it apparently hints to Joyce that anachronism and displacement are the precondition for this understanding. Not only is Salomé a re-reading of the biblical text, but it seems also to be only the belated re-writing of Wilde’s play in Strauss’ opera that allows Dorian Gray (published before Salomé) to express to Joyce its queer meaning. Stephen’s “confession” to Cranly, like his fantasy of Cranly as the decapitated John the Baptist, evokes an age in which the very vagueness of the depictions of sexual transgression could ally them with the iconography and practice of Catholicism. This is, in fact, the metaphor lurking behind Stephen’s striking question to Cranly: “I am curious to know are you trying to make a convert of me or a pervert of yourself?” (264). Literally, “perversion” here refers most directly to apostasy, to the turning away from the true faith as conversion is the turning toward it. But it also, of course, simultaneously carries with it the implications of sexual transgression.34 The aftermath of the Wilde trial itself – and the rise of Freudian psychoanalysis – forces such ambiguity of reference into rigid categories. In particular, after Freud, “perversion” seems more and more to mean a specifically sexual deviance rather than religious transgression,35 and even Stephen’s sly invocation of the earlier signification ultimately suggests that the older play of religious and sexual deviance is largely at an end. Instead of making Wilde’s intimations explicit, what Portrait does is displace its queer erotics of Catholicism back into the late nineteenth century, into the Wildean era itself. In a way, Joyce’s novel, like Cranly (and like John the Baptist), is the “child of exhausted loins.” A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man thus writes the merging of Catholicism and sexual deviance as already archaic, as the last gasp of a formerly fertile relationship. It is not that Catholicism and homosexuality could no



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longer be mutually constitutive in twentieth-century texts – as works by Waugh, Genet, and others have made clear – but that their freefloating play of mutual signification has crystallized into more rigid categories, found articulation in more predictable confessions. History also necessarily impinges on this question. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man stages its opening in the years immediately surrounding the denunciation of Parnell by Church leaders in 1890. Parnell’s fall – for adultery – thus prefigures and frames the fall of another Protestant Irishman, Wilde himself. But whereas Stephen overhears his deeply Catholic aunt’s rejection of Parnell (“The bishops and priests of Ireland have spoken [. . .] and they must be obeyed” [31]), the Wilde trial remains firmly outside the scope of the narrative; that confession remains – as it must – both desired and unheard. At the same time, Parnell’s transgression marks the opportunity for the Catholic Church to move into more complete control of Irish politics. If Irish Catholic ritual and practice can still be constructed as the metaphoric underpinning of sexual deviance in Portrait, they are inflected by the increasing power of the Church in its role as the enforcer of sexual norms; as Jack Morgan has argued, “While Church fortunes had improved late in the century compared to a mid-century low. [. . .] 1903 was to mark the beginning of a spirited conservative counterattack against modernity and all that the term implied.”36 Joyce’s text thus diverges in an important way from Wilde’s; although both authors are expatriate Irishmen, Portrait constructs itself in the wake of Catholicism’s new hold on political and sexual orthodoxy in Ireland in a way that Salomé does not. And it is with the convergence of history and the aesthetic project that A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man ends. If leaving Ireland means leaving both the Catholic Church and Cranly’s suggestion of homoerotic friendship, it is a choice that Stephen makes. “When the soul of a man is born in this country,” he observes, “there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets” (220). Wildean homoerotics – “Wilde’s love that dare not speak its name” in the language of Ulysses – is ultimately constructed on the strands of each of those nets – on Irishness, on the eroticized rhetoric of sacramental confession, on Catholic ritual and theology itself. But if for Wilde’s Salomé, those are the very webs of artistic production, for Joyce’s Stephen they are nets to trap the artist, to hold him back in a sentimentalized past. Portrait’s retrospective, its fantasies of a Wildean erotics of religious iconography,





thus structures the invocation of Catholic liturgy, theology, and practice as both the expression and the displacement of queer desire because it provides a possible articulation of sexual deviance through reference to an earlier literary tradition, including Wilde, in which erotic and religious practice in England – or in Ireland – could mutually construct each other without the imposition of strict categories. Joyce does not, it turns out, rewrite Wilde’s Dorian Gray – or Salomé – with the new explicitness of Modernism but instead constructs his own exploration of Catholicism and homosexuality as a nostalgic trace of an earlier age.



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“Uncovenanted Joys”: Catholicism, Sapphism, and Cambridge Ritualist Theory in Hope Mirrlees’ Madeleine: One of Love’s Jansenists Ruth Vanita

This essay examines how Hope Mirrlees, in her 1919 novel Madeleine: One of Love’s Jansenists, constructs a lesbian ancestry by drawing on Catholic as well as ancient Greek paradigms. Her configuration of these paradigms is conducted under the aegis of the theory of tragedy developed by her partner, classicist Jane Harrison, in collaboration with fellow Cambridge Ritualist Gilbert Murray. By writing the story of her lesbian protagonist Madeleine as tragedy with a capital T, Mirrlees dignifies the then-emerging narrative of the doomed homosexual. Although she does not use the words “lesbian,” “invert,” or even “Sapphist,” Mirrlees inscribes Sappho into her narrative as a central and everproliferating trope, thus also reinscribing into the classical and Christian past the homoeroticism which Harrison’s scholarship determinedly ignores. For the epigraph to her 1925 novel The Counterplot, dedicated to Jane Harrison, Mirrlees quoted Miguel de Unamuno: “Every supposed restoration of the past is a creation of the future, and if the past which it is sought to restore is a dream, a thing but imperfectly known, so much the better.”1 As this indicates, Mirrlees, like her one-time teacher Harrison, was constantly engaged in imagining the past, and was highly aware of the constructionist nature of her project. Harrison was among the most eminent scholars of the time who imagined the archaic and classical Greek past. She came of age in the context of Aestheticist Hellenism, which was shaped by classicists like Pater, Wilde, Symonds, and Housman, who, as scholars like Dowling and Dellamora have shown, imagined that past as a site to explore homoerotic desire.2 85 10.1057/9780230287778 - Catholic Figures, Queer Narratives, Edited by Lowell Gallagher, Frederick S. Roden and Patricia Juliana Smith


5


Yet, Harrison, while discussing sixth-century and fifth-century Greece at length, mentions love between men only very occasionally in brief footnotes.3 She uses literary evidence in abundance, and quotes most major poets like Homer and Pindar, and prose writers like Plato, but never cites Sappho, not even when discussing the worship of Aphrodite. Harrison was an Aestheticist in her youth, as was her fellow-student at Newnham, Katherine Bradley.4 While Bradley, with her partner Edith Cooper, went on to write lesbian love poetry as well as imitations of Sappho under the pen-name Michael Field, Harrison, who counted most of the members of Bloomsbury among her friends, seems to go out of her way to avoid any mention of homoeroticism in her work. As a woman making her way in the male world of classical scholarship, she aligned herself with powerful men, all of them safely heterosexual. At one level, the plot of Mirrlees’ novel fits the formula of the stereotyped homosexual narrative – that of an unrequited love that ends in disaster. However, Mirrlees attempts to elevate this plot by investing it with the grandeur of tragedy. Writing in an era when tragedy was being redefined from different perspectives by scholars such as J. G. Frazer, Sigmund Freud, A. C. Bradley, and the Cambridge Ritualists, Mirrlees attempts a Sapphist take on the great question, What is Tragedy? The theory she primarily works with is that of Harrison and Murray, according to which tragedy originates in collective emotion and magical ritual.5 The emotion is a collective desire for union with or dominion over outside powers, and the ritual enacts the ensuing struggle, with the aim of inducing fresh life or new birth. In ancient Greece, both athletic contests such as the Olympics and dramatic contests such as the Dionysia arise from this spring rite. The elements of tragedy are: an agon (contest), a pathos (death or defeat), and a triumphant epiphany. The final peripety from grief to joy results from anagnorisis and theophany (recognition and apotheosis of the god). In her examination of ancient Greek rituals of sacrifice, sacrament, purification, and resurrection, Harrison strongly suggests, as did J. G. Frazer, that Christian rites also have similar primitive origins. Apart from this theory, Mirrlees also draws on Christian ideas of tragedy, such as the idea of the soul’s separation from God, and the idea of the martyr’s passion. While Harrison repeatedly stresses that tragedy originates in collective emotion, she often refers to the individual experience of this emotion, and acknowledges the influence of Freud on her work in this regard. The question then arises, what about the collective emotion of a group that is scattered over place and time, and that is groping towards



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awareness of its own collectivity? Can such emotion also result in tragedy? This is the question Mirrlees addresses in her novel, as her heroine Madeleine looks to medieval and early modern Catholic and ancient Greek sources to construct her sense of collectivity, while Mirrlees herself looks to Harrison’s theories to construct Madeleine’s story as Tragic. Mirrlees’ protagonist, a seventeenth-century French girl named Madeleine, is seven years old when she falls in love with a beautiful classmate Jeanne, who turns out to be disappointingly shallow. This love foreshadows Madeleine’s adult love for the novelist Madeleine de Scudery who writes under the pen-name Sappho.6 De Scudery is a historical figure (1607–1701); she never married and lived with her brother, Georges de Scudery, who also appears in Mirrlees’ novel. She was famous for her roman-à-clef novels. Madeleine reads one of them, Le Grand Cyrus, in which de Scudery figures as a character named Sappho. Madeleine’s passions are deeply embedded in her social ambitions – Jeanne’s attractiveness to her had much to do with her wealth which made her part of an elite coterie in the provincial convent, and de Scudery’s has much to do with her fame as a writer which makes her part of an elite intellectual coterie in Paris. Madeleine longs to be a follower and devotee but also to outshine her mentor and make her suffer. For example, she initially imagines herself filling the role of Phaon to Scudery’s Sappho. Her emotions towards her beloved are thus simultaneously amorous, awe-filled and murderous, precisely as are the emotions of devotees, in Harrison’s account, towards the daimon whom they invest with sanctity, identify with, sacrifice, and then resurrect. Madeleine fears that the Christian God, being opposed to idolatry, will thwart her love and ambition and will ravish her from the love of earthly things to the love of “invisible things.”7 When she first notices this phrase “in invisibilium amorem rapiamur,” during High Mass on the Feast of Corpus Christi, it moves her to a desire for true Christian penitence.8 But, soon after, her feelings become more ambivalent when she realizes that the love of the Christian God may be opposed to her love for her female beloved. When she visits a Carmelite convent, the mother superior advises her against spiritual pride, but Madeleine acknowledges that she would choose earthly over spiritual fulfillment. Such a choice is tragic in the Christian scheme of things, because it is Faustian and would lead to ultimate loss. Madeleine is what would today be called an obsessive compulsive, and her Catholicism is essentially magical, so she remains deeply unsure whether the divine powers are malevolent or benevolent. She attempts



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to propitiate Christ, the Virgin, and her patron saint, Mary Magdalene, by a number of devices. Among these are the more orthodox such as praying and promising them offerings if her wishes are fulfilled, and also idiosyncratic private behaviors such as dancing and leaping in her own room or deciding that if she repeats a formula a certain number of times in a given period, she will be successful, otherwise not. In this respect, Madeleine conforms to Harrison’s theory that religion and the gods themselves originate in magical ritual induced by fear. Harrison had emphasized that the dithyramb, from which ancient Greek tragedy originated, is a choric dance, based in the leaping dance of the kouretes or adolescent male initiates, in which the god is invoked to come and leap with his attendants. The dithyramb expresses collective, orgiastic emotion externalized and projected into the form of a god. Harrison writes: The awful, the uncanny, the unknown, is within man rather than without. In all exalted states, whatever be the stimulant, whether of sex or intoxication, or vehement motion as in dancing, man is conscious of a potency beyond himself, yet within himself, he feels himself possessed, not by a personal god . . . but by an exalted power . . . This fusion of internal will and energy with external power is of the very essence of sanctity.9 Madeleine’s adolescent female emotion is orgiastic and frequently leads her to feel that she is possessed by an exalted power. But is this emotion, in any sense, collective? Madeleine thinks so, although the novel leaves open the possibility that she may be deluded. She scans the past and the present to find women like herself and finds them everywhere – in the poems of the Greek Sappho, in paintings hung on convent walls, and in the literary circles of Paris. Everywhere she looks, she discovers or projects collective embodiments of her obsession with another woman. The Précieuses are the first objective correlative she finds for her emotion. The Précieuses were bluestockings frequenting the literary salons of Paris around 1650. Some male intellectuals, most famously, Molière, mocked their affectation of over-refinement in language and taste. Mirrlees does depict them as somewhat ridiculous, but she also shows how the salons offer women an equality with and even a preeminence over men unavailable to them elsewhere. Madeleine de Scudery was a Précieuse. It is understandable that an ambitious girl like Madeleine should be attracted to the Précieuses. The joys of marriage



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offered her by her confidant and cousin Jacques pale in comparison. Madeleine interprets the tenets of the Précieuses to suit her own emotions, and reaches the conclusion that “the perfect amitié tendre can exist only between two women.” Her conviction is strengthened when Jacques introduces her to the Grecian Sappho, of whom she has never before heard. Thereafter, Madeleine broods on Sappho’s “Ode to Venus,” which Jacques recites to her, and on the legend of Sappho’s suicide, which fills her with anxiety. She is thrilled by the double coincidences of her own first name with Mademoiselle de Scudery’s, and of Mademoiselle de Scudery’s penname with that of the ancient Sappho, as also by the coincidence that she, Madeleine, had, on her own, reached the same conclusion that the Greek Sappho had reached – that “the perfect amitié tendre can exist only between two women.”10 Madeleine later finds a parallel to these coincidences in her patron saint Mary Magdalene, whom she dubs “the Christian Venus,”11 after a nun tells her that Magdalene is the saint who loved much. Reading history typologically in the style developed by medieval Catholic writers, Madeleine sees a hopeful sign in the fact that both Sappho and Mary Magdalene are types of love. The bridge Madeleine attempts to construct between Catholicism and her beloved receives its finishing touch when she is standing on a bridge, the Pont Rouge, and overhears a conversation between two young men who say that Queen Christine of Sweden was told that the Précieuses are the Jansenists of love. Madeleine takes this as a divine revelation that Christianity and her love for Mademoiselle de Scudery can be reconciled, because love for her beloved will lead her to the love of the Christian God; in fact, it will be “the symbol of her love for Christ.”12 That Christine of Sweden, a well-known Sapphist, provides this bridge is significant, as is her name, which echoes that of Christ. Though Madeleine does not comment on this coincidence, the text suggests that Christine is a symbol of reconciliation between Christianity and Sapphism. The Précieuse–Jansenist equation is suggestive. Both groups could be seen as stigmatized minorities, and both, in Paris, were presided over by females. The Jansenist movement, which arose from the writings of Dutch Catholic theologian and bishop Cornelis Jansen (1585–1638), caused great controversy because of its advocacy of an extreme, almost Calvinist, form of predestination. It was attacked in papal bulls of 1705 and 1713. The nuns of the Cistercian convent of Port-Royal, near Paris, which was the main French center of Jansenist resistance to papal





authority, suffered extended persecution by both secular and religious authorities, including lengthy interrogations, and were twice excommunicated. The convent was finally shut down in 1710, the nuns were dispersed by military force, and even the dead were uprooted from the cemetery. Madeleine visits this convent at the Abbaye of Port-Royal and is greatly inspired by the pictures of women she sees hanging there. She imagines that she and her beloved will join the convent, and a picture of them will one day hang among the others on its walls. Both Précieuses and Jansenists are thus figured in the novel as potential sites of same-sex attachment, under attack by the male establishment (in one case, the religious establishment, in the other case, the secular literary establishment). Both Précieuses and Jansenists pride themselves on being specially chosen elites. They are not ashamed of their difference but flaunt it as a sign of superiority. A similar attitude to homosexuality as a sign of superior intelligence and refinement is evident in the writings of several contemporaries of Harrison and Mirrlees, from Wilde to Lytton Strachey to the women of the Left Bank with whom Mirrlees and Harrison socialized when they took up residence in Paris from 1922 to 1928. Woolf recounts with amusement the agnostic Harrison’s horror when mutual acquaintances converted to or even flirted with Catholicism. After Harrison’s death, Mirrlees demonstrated her independence of her mentor when she herself converted, thus joining an illustrious line of fin-de-siècle and modernist homosexual converts, from John Gray and possibly Oscar Wilde to “Michael Field,” Alice B. Toklas, and Radclyffe Hall. Yet Mirrlees remains Harrison’s fellow in her self-consciously intellectualized attitude to Catholicism. Both in The Counterplot and in her 1976 book of poems Moods and Tensions, she explores and even celebrates the relation between Catholicism’s cult of the saints and pagan polytheism. Like a good Catholic or a good pagan, Madeleine looks not to one but to several saints or deities. She not only sees no contradiction in invoking both the Virgin and Sappho when she prays for the fulfillment of her love for Madeleine de Scudery, but actually sees this as a safer strategy which can help insure her against failure. Towards the end of the novel, she tries to purify herself and propitiate the divine (which for her is not far from the demonic) by performing a sacrificial ritual. Jacques is her scapegoat. She had continued to flirt with him in the hope that her kindness to him would lead the divine powers to be kind to her. However, she subordinates this principle to that of purity when she



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gives him up. Her ideas here relate both to the sacrificial and purification rituals that Harrison had described as arising from fear, and to the Catholic practice of penance and purification before partaking of communion. As tragic protagonist, Madeleine must suffer defeat in the contest that ensues. The contest is both for her beloved’s attention and with her beloved for the attention of others, especially men. Her defeat can be read in Harrisonian terms as the necessary sacrifice or in Christian terms as the fall of a lost soul or the ordeal of an elect soul, but it also fits into the Aristotelian paradigm of tragedy as interpreted by A. C. Bradley in his 1904 lectures on Shakespeare’s tragedies. Madeleine’s ambition and vanity constitute her fatal flaw. As a child, she lied about her ancestry in order to be accepted into Jeanne’s coterie at school, and was disgraced when found out. As an adult, she tries to both dazzle and outshine Madeleine de Scudery with her wit, but succeeds only in alienating her completely and in arousing the unwanted sexual advances of a man, who sees her as easy prey. Madeleine flees him and returns home, to the realization that she has lost everything – her hope of winning de Scudery’s love, her ambition to join the literary elite, and also the friendship of Jacques. In his excursus on Tragedy contributed to Themis, Gilbert Murray had asked why it is that tragedies often do not end with the reversal from grief to joy, as they should according to the Ritualist theory. He suggests that even when the reversal does not occur at the end, it continues to “haunt the atmosphere” of tragedy.13 Mirrlees writes her novel’s ending as tragic in two senses – joyful from the protagonist’s point of view and sad from the points of view of others. In the Epilogue, Madeleine goes mad and imagines that she has become Sappho. She is placed in a mental institution where she becomes a tourist attraction, known as “the Pseudo-Sappho.”14 Thus she does achieve a kind of distinction and it is disputable how different this distinction is from the kind she had desired. She is viewed as mad and deluded, but so perhaps are Jansenists, Précieuses, and homosexuals, by the societies in which they live. She herself is quite happy and receives her visitors graciously, treating them as guests in her salon. Harrison had written about the Maenads, literally mad women, who are examples of worshipers being possessed by and then becoming the god, in this case, Dionysus. In Harrison’s view, the Maenads were not mythical but real women. She argues that it is a mistake to think that women in Periclean Athens would not have been allowed to “rave upon the mountains.”15 She sees Dionysian worship as a religiously





sanctioned space where women went mad, danced, and engaged in orgies and other excesses, which men may have disliked but were too frightened to disallow. Mirrlees seems to figure the mental institution as a similar place of limited and paradoxical freedom in modern society. Like the Maenads who are possessed by Dionysus and become one with him, Madeleine is possessed by Sappho and becomes a type of Sappho, thus in a sense consummating her love. A parallel in Catholicism would be the mystics who experience fusion with the saints, the Virgin, or even Christ, and the experience of communion wherein the body of Christ is ingested in the worshiper’s body. There are at least two types of Christian tragedy. One type is that of the lost soul such as Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus. From a secular point of view, this tragedy may demonstrate the triumph of the defiant human spirit. The other type of Christian tragedy is the passion of the saint or martyr, of which Christ is the ultimate exemplum, but of which there are many virgin female exempla. This type of tragedy is always subsumed in Divine Comedy, since the tragedy of being martyred as God’s fool or as mad for God leads to the epiphanic translation of the saint. Madeleine’s story can be read within either paradigm. That Madeleine does not end up dead, as the protagonist usually does in Renaissance tragedy, is important. Her transformation raises philosophical questions that have a special resonance for homosexuals. In Berkeleyan solipsistic fashion, she finds her enjoyment of things invisible to others – such as imagining that she becomes her beloved and thus possesses her forever – just as satisfying as material enjoyment of visible things could have been. She is termed the pseudo-Sappho but she herself feels she is really Sappho. Some wits who visit the institution underline the point when they say that just as in ancient religion the worshiper became the god, so the true ending of a romance should be the beloved becoming the lover. In other words, if you are happy being who you are or loving whom you want, does it matter that other people might think you diseased, insane, deluded, and pathetic? The question receives another twist when we take into account the fact that same-sex desire, from Pater’s time to Mirrlees’, was often experienced and sometimes even lived out as unrequited, in part because it could not be freely or openly expressed and also because, in the absence of a visible homosexual community, it was often mistakenly directed at a heterosexually inclined person whose friendship was initially misread as love. Many individuals lived with or conducted long-term relationships with beloveds, without the relationship ever being sexually consummated. Nevertheless, the lovers often felt the relationships were



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worthwhile.16 Examples include Geraldine Jewsbury and Jane Carlyle’s relationship, documented by Virginia Woolf; Forster’s seventeen-year relationship with Ross Masood and perhaps his forty-year relationship with Bob Buckingham as well; several of G. L. Dickinson’s relationships, and perhaps Mirrlees’ own attachment to Harrison, which was at least partially unrequited.17 While reading Madeleine in order to review it, Woolf remarked in a letter to Clive Bell: “It’s all sapphism so far as I’ve got – Jane and herself.”18 Jane Harrison’s latest biographer Sandra J. Peacock, is at pains to discount this remark, stating that “Woolf often made hasty and inaccurate judgments about even those people whom she liked.”19 Peacock bases her view that there was no Sapphism between Harrison and Mirrlees on the fact that “no evidence indicates that [they] had a sexual relationship.”20 But to Woolf “sapphism” meant many other things besides having a sexual relationship. One of those things was a primary and exclusive intimacy between two women. There is plenty of evidence that Harrison and Mirrlees had such an intimacy. No sexual relationships between women occur in Madeleine, but Woolf was right in reading it as a novel about Sapphism. Insofar as it is about the love of an ambitious but unknown young woman for a famous and successful woman much older than herself, she is also right in seeing in it elements of a roman-à-clef, the kind of novel Madame de Scudery herself specialized in writing. In her poem “A Skull,” Mirrlees addresses someone who is probably Harrison: Good God! Suppose the skull I owned was yours! . . . And in the past did I not often blame The coldness of the sculptured ivory, The living eyes that never said my name!21 That Harrison may not have reciprocated Mirrlees’ love as fully as Mirrlees would have liked is no indication, however, that there never was a sexual relationship between them. In another poem “The Copper Beech in St Giles’ Churchyard,” Mirrlees, walking through Cambridge where she first met and later lived with Harrison, almost certainly refers to their relationship when she writes: And And And And

wrapped in gold I thought about my past, all the dreams that life has blown away, of uncovenanted joys that cannot last, of the place that made me what I am –




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Mirrlees does not specify what “the uncovenanted joys” were, but she proceeds in the next stanza to talk of love. Her discretion was matched by Woolf’s, who, in her decorous review of Madeleine, did not mention that it was “all about sapphism.” It is the novel’s subtitle “One of Love’s Jansenists” that points the reader in the desired direction. Like Stein and Woolf, Mirrlees encodes her text for those readers who belong to the small elite, “love’s Jansenists,” those who see themselves both as mysteriously chosen to be different and as choosing to belong to a persecuted but defiant minority. In Protestant England, Catholicism could serve, as it did in the novels of Firbank, to encode that difference. Mirrlees embeds Catholic foreignness into the novel by setting it in Paris. Paris to Britishers was not just the capital of a country long perceived as Britain’s Catholic Other; it was also the hotbed of all sexualities seen as deviant, licentious, and exotic; it was, after all, the haven to which British homosexuals, including the most famous one, Oscar Wilde, fled, to escape British persecution. Mirrlees cloaks her dagger, however, with the obscurity of her references. Few readers would have had the temerity to wade through the pages of this novel, studded with terms drawn from Précieuse vocabulary and Jansenist theology, often in the original French. As in her modernist poem Paris, published by the Hogarth Press in 1919, that Woolf dubbed “obscure, indecent and brilliant,” Mirrlees’ obscurity crucially enables her indecency.23 In Paris, references to “girls of the nightclub – they love women” are buried in a daunting morass of French and English literary, theological, and historical allusions.24 It may seem to us that the homophobia that necessitated this kind of circumspection even by intellectuals like Mirrlees, Forster, and Woolf, who moved in the most advanced and liberal circles, and had connections with major universities, has disappeared today; that today a Madeleine in love with a female mentor would not be viewed as mad or deluded. I would like to demonstrate, through a reading of portions of Sandra J. Peacock’s psychoanalytic biography of Harrison, that this homophobia has not disappeared but has merely changed color. Jessie Stewart, another adoring student of Harrison’s and her first biographer, quoted Harrison’s remark in Themis as the epigraph to her book, Jane Ellen Harrison: a Portrait from Letters: “Man, say the wise Upanishads, is altogether desire. As is his desire, so is his insight. As is his insight, so is his deed.”25 This is a telling comment on the Nathaniel Hawthorne



“Ye fields of Cambridge, our dear Cambridge, say Have you not seen us walking every day?”22

quote that Peacock uses as epigraph for her biography of Harrison: “. . . what other dungeon is so dark as one’s own heart! What jailer so inexorable as one’s self!” If Woolf’s desires play some part in her assumption that Harrison and Mirrlees were Sapphists, as do mine in my reading of Mirrlees’ writings as Sapphic, so do Peacock’s when she refuses to consider the possibility that Harrison may have been bisexual. Peacock discounts Mirrlees’ comment that Jane Harrison was not insensible to the charms of women and flirted with both men and women. Instead, Peacock constructs Harrison both as “determinedly heterosexual” and as pathologically unable to act on this heterosexuality.26 According to Peacock, Harrison was selfimprisoned by her fear and anger at sexuality (read heterosexuality), because of her guilt at her mother’s death in childbirth. Examining the seventeen-year relationship between Harrison and Mirrlees, during which time they lived together both in Paris and London, collaborated on literary translations, and playfully imagined themselves the co-wives of an old bear who was a member of their menagerie of stuffed animals, Peacock decides this was a mother–daughter relationship and remarks condescendingly: “Frustrated in their dealings with the world at large, they turned to each other for emotional sustenance.”27 What the frustration consisted of in Mirrlees’ case is not clear, since Peacock continues: “Hope proved her fidelity early on when she broke off her engagement to a young man in 1910,” and notes that Jane approved of this conscious rejection of marriage by Mirrlees. Peacock decides that Mirrlees “lacked Jane’s charm and vitality,”28 but this was not the assessment of others who knew Mirrlees. Woolf commented more than once on her charm, and in his preface to her book of poems, Raymond Mortimer, describing her beauty and the charming acuteness of her talk, says, “never previously had I met so seductive a bluestocking.”29 Peacock writes: “Hope Mirrlees’ notes contain the most damning proof of Harrison’s enormous anger.”30 Quoting Mirrlees’ account of Harrison’s revulsion from the male body, Peacock mentions that Harrison decided not to marry because a doctor warned her childbirth would kill her, and concludes that Harrison “feared male sexuality but also . . . emphatically rejected all masculine power and authority as symbolized by the phallus. Since sexuality seemed such a dangerous force, she went one step further and denied her own sexuality.”31 Note the slippage here – from rejection of male sexuality to denial of “her own sexuality” – as if her own sexuality must necessarily be defined only in relation to either “male sexuality” or to childbirth.32





Peacock’s reading may be no less “inaccurate,” to use her word, and no less based in desire than Virginia Woolf’s. Woolf spent time with Harrison and Mirrlees in Paris; Mirrlees was a Hogarth author, and a friend of both Woolfs; she spent weekends with them and continued to see them for years after Harrison’s death. In 1925 Virginia Woolf remarks of herself and Leonard: “we like seeing her [Mirrlees] and Jane billing and cooing together.”33 In another letter, she writes that Hope “has a passion for Jane Harrison, the scholar; indeed, they practically live together.”34 When Jane died, Virginia described how she met Hope “who cried that Jane was just dead and would we come to the funeral: never have I seen anyone so mad, wild, frantic: and we kissed among the tombs.”35 Leonard wrote a condolence letter to Mirrlees, in which he expressed their distress and added, “We know what it must be to you.” Virginia added a one-line postscript: “Anyhow, what a comfort for you to have been all you were to her.”36 Perhaps that is the best comment on the “uncovenanted joys” they shared.



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The Feminized Priest and the Female Outsider: Catholicism and Sexuality in Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop1 Susan E. Hill

As American writer Willa Cather’s literary world expanded outward from the prairie in her later work, her fascination with the domestication of the New World took a decidedly religious turn. In Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927), Roman Catholicism becomes a major theme, and spiritual beliefs and values become important touchstones of cultural tension and transformation. Based on the lives of Frs. Machebeuf and Lamy, two of the first French missionary priests in New Mexico, Death Comes for the Archbishop presents vignettes from the lives of the fictional Frs. Latour and Vaillant as they struggle to infuse Catholic belief and ritual into the world of the indigenous peoples. A non-Catholic, Cather’s considerable attention to Catholicism in these texts is noteworthy, as is her noticeable lack of interest in the strong, mature, female characters typically found in many of her other novels. In what follows, I explore the connections between femininity, Catholicism, and sexuality in Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop, attempting to entangle two disparate foci of Cather criticism: her expression of religious ideas and values, and her articulation of a sexual aesthetic. I argue that Cather’s engagement of Catholicism gave her the opportunity to make a subtle cultural commentary on the historical perception of the lesbian in the 1920s through her exploration of the role of the feminized and female outsider in the domestication of the New World. Religion and sexuality become inextricably linked as Cather presents the paradoxical centrality of the feminized and female outsider through her feminized priests and the female characters with whom they come in contact. In this way, Death Comes for the Archbishop offers us a way of reading lesbian sexuality, a sexuality historically perceived as 97 10.1057/9780230287778 - Catholic Figures, Queer Narratives, Edited by Lowell Gallagher, Frederick S. Roden and Patricia Juliana Smith


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outside the heterosexual norm, as integral to the creation of American identity. In order to make the connection between religion and sexuality in this work, I first explore the historical religious context in which the narrative is written. Guy Reynolds echoes the sentiments of Cather’s critics and contemporaries when he labels her engagement of Catholicism “idiosyncratic,”2 but as I argue in the first section, Cather’s sympathetic portrayal of Catholicism suggests her attempt to undermine the tradition’s more usual negative historical reception as a feminized outsider in American history. Reading Death Comes for the Archbishop through the lens of Francis Parkman’s The Jesuits in North America suggests the extent to which Cather recognized and countered this perception, creating a narrative in which it is precisely the association of Catholicism with femininity that allows her to present the tradition sympathetically to her readers. Cather’s self-perception of her role as outsider and insider in the creation of her own narrative further suggests that engaging Catholicism gave Cather the opportunity to present the feminized and female outsider positively. Indeed, I argue that it is Cather’s use of Catholicism’s association with femininity that has encouraged recent readings of Cather’s priests as “queers-in-the-desert”3 or her text as the place where “her homosexual paradigm reaches its spiritual potential.”4 Such readings unfortunately tend to elide the lesbian in Cather’s narrative, focusing instead on the intimate relationship between the two priests as indicative of her sexual aesthetic. As I suggest in the second section, these readings fail to recognize that femininity or the figure of woman – here, the Virgin Mary and the Catholic Church itself – is crucial to any reading of the two priests as queer, homosexual, or intimate spiritual friends. Following Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Marilyn Farwell, I argue that the Virgin Mary, the Church, and other female characters closely associated with the Church consistently fill the female position in the male–female–male triangle that solidifies the homosocial bond between the two priests. Focusing on the female part of this triangle, I argue that Cather’s engagement of Catholicism allows her to create female characters who appear to be marginal, yet nonetheless play pivotal roles in shaping the narrative’s moral worldview. Easily overlooked and not to be ignored, Cather’s female characters haunt the margins of the text much as the 1920s lesbian haunts the margins of society. Indeed, Death Comes for the Archbishop reflects Cather’s interest in presenting the domestication of the New World as a process in which the feminized and female outsiders play a crucial and unrecognized role.



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The Feminized Priest and the Female Outsider 99

When Death Comes for the Archbishop was published in 1927, it caused quite a stir in Catholic circles. In his review of the novel, Michael Williams of Commonweal wrote that, “no Catholic American writer that I know of has ever written so many pages so steeped in spiritual knowledge and understanding of Catholic motives and so sympathetically illustrative of the wonder and beauty of Catholic mysteries, as she has done in this book.”5 Although Cather was raised Baptist in Red Cloud, Nebraska, and reaffirmed her Protestant roots in 1922 by becoming a member of the Episcopal Church, rumors of her conversion to Catholicism spread. Cather finally squelched the gossip in a letter to Commonweal in which she downplays the narrative’s religious aspects and talks instead about her text as an experiment in literary method, an attempt to correlate her sense of place with literary style, to capture the “legend” of the southwest.6 Yet, her claim that she did not “soak herself in Catholic lore” in order to write the novel is particularly odd, given the number of sources she cites as inspiration for her text.7 Indeed, according to her companion Edith Lewis, Cather “had read widely on the subject long before she came to write the Archbishop.”8 Cather was, in fact, an avid reader of Francis Parkman, and she found him “the most interesting of American historians.”9 Parkman’s influence on Cather’s work, especially with regard to historical detail in Shadows on the Rock has been well documented,10 and his significance for Death Comes for the Archbishop can be seen in Cather’s portrayal of Catholicism.11 Cather’s deference on matters Catholic thus seems quite intentional, as though she wishes to remain the amateur, the outsider, even though she has written an expert’s account. Cather’s self-presentation as an outsider in relation to her own narrative thus mimics the role of the outsiders in the narrative itself, pointing to the importance of the feminized and female outsiders that people her narrative. Catholicism: the feminized outsider On March 13, 1887, in Clinton, Iowa, the American Protective Association was established. A secret society, its oath bound members “at all times to endeavor to place the political position of this government in the hands of Protestants to the entire exclusion of Roman Catholics.”12 In 1891, one year after Willa Cather arrived in Lincoln, Nebraska to go to college, the APA endorsed the Republican ticket in Omaha and won the election by a large majority. By the end of the 1890s, membership in the APA rose to around half a million people, as APA spokesmen



Cather and Catholicism


spread the word to the unemployed that “their jobs had gone to a flood of immigrants unloosed on America by papal agents.”13 This flare-up of anti-Catholic sentiment in the Midwest in the 1890s reflects ongoing tensions in a country that was “militantly anti-Catholic from its Puritan beginnings.”14 Historical tensions between Protestantism and Catholicism in America had their conceptual roots in the Protestant Reformation, when Martin Luther’s challenges to papal authority split the Church. Traditional Catholic emphasis on authority and conformity seemed inimical in a country where ideals of individualism and democracy prevailed.15 Indeed, the waves of European Catholic immigrants who made their way to America in the 1850s brought with them a “European model of church that was not in harmony with the spirit of democracy.”16 As the Catholic Church grew to serve the immigrant populations, so, too, did tensions between the new immigrants and the more established inhabitants. Xenophobia and anti-Catholic sentiment animated Protestant paranoia about a Catholic plot to overthrow American institutions.17 Especially in the Midwest and northeastern United States – geographical locations Cather inhabited during this time – Catholicism was condemned for undermining American unity. New immigrants were blamed for economic problems; members of the APA, for instance, were instructed to avoid unions dominated by Catholics, who were portrayed as troublemakers intent on causing social unrest through labor strikes. Such conflicts helped to define the character of American identity. Throughout American history, depictions of Catholicism have helped to define American Protestantism. Associated with Europe, Catholicism was old, worn out, and frail; Protestantism was new, vital, and robust, up to the task of forming a new country. As Franchot suggests, “Roman Catholicism ironically attained a crucial place in defining New World Protestantism and maintaining that self-definition through the antebellum decades. It played the fiction to Protestantism’s truth, the failure to its progress, the weaker femininity to its masculine superiority.”18 The Catholic Church’s traditional association with the Virgin Mary and its status as Bride of Christ supported this notion, and gave rise to its symbolically evocative and unflattering nickname, the Whore of Babylon.19 This characterization of Catholicism as the feminized outsider to American Protestant masculinity is clearly rendered in Francis Parkman’s seven-volume France and England in North America. In volume 2, The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century, Parkman attempts to account for what he sees as the failure of the Jesuit mission in Canada and the northern United States. Although he finds fault with



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the Indians, it is the Jesuits, as representatives of a civilization infused with Catholic ideals, who bear the brunt of Parkman’s criticism. Ultimately, the Jesuits fail because Catholicism, unable to recover from the Reformation, took refuge in its past, and “the fervors of medieval Christianity were renewed in the sixteenth century.”20 Absolute in its authority, full of faith in miraculous happenings, the Catholicism taught to the Indians “may have been the only form of Christianity likely to take root in their crude and barbarous nature” ( JNA, 320), but it was not the rational religion of Protestantism. In the end, the savage Indians become a part of the divine plan to thwart Catholic Absolutism in North America, and to allow Protestant Liberty to flourish ( JNA, 448). To highlight Catholicism’s capriciousness and irrationality, Parkman’s Catholic Church is continually associated with the feminine. This mighty Church of Rome, in her imposing march along the high road of history, heralded as infallible and divine, astounds the gazing world with prodigies of contradiction: now the protector of the oppressed, now the right arm of tyrants; now breathing charity and love, now dark with the passions of hell; now beaming with celestial truth, now masked in hypocrisy and lies; now a virgin, now a harlot; an imperial queen, and a tinselled actress. ( JNA, 84) This is a fickle church whose inconsistency wreaks havoc on all whose lives she touches. At once pure and tainted, virgin and whore, consistently linked with “virgins, saints, and angels” ( JNA, 146) and with “the softening of manners” and obedience ( JNA, 320), Parkman’s Catholicism also violently emasculates its priestly adherents. When speaking of Brébeuf – “that masculine apostle of the Faith” – Parkman writes, “nature had given him all the passions of a vigorous manhood, and religion had crushed them, curbed them, or tamed them to do her work, – like a dammed-up torrent, sluiced and guided to grind and saw and weave for the good of man” ( JNA, 99). Parkman’s priests are mere shadows of their former masculine selves, domesticated and feminized by mother Church to do her bidding. In the end, Catholicism’s unsuccessful foray into New France stands in stark – and gendered – contrast to the success of Protestantism in the New England colonies, for within the Puritan spirit existed “an element manly, healthful and invigorating” while “those who shaped the character, and in great measure the destiny, of New France had always on their lips the nothingness and the vanity of life” ( JNA, 329). Thus, for Parkman, the historical success of manly Protestantism in the New





World is clarified by understanding its inferior, feminine competition, Catholicism. Portraying Catholicism as the feminized outsider, Parkman paints a picture of the New World in which masculinity, in its Protestant form, conquers all. The cultural rhetoric of the Catholic Church as feminized outsider in American culture is also apparent in Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop. In contrast to Parkman, however, Cather does not set up a dichotomy between Catholicism and Protestantism in her work, or portray Catholicism’s failure in New Mexico. Instead, Cather refuses to demonize Catholicism as she highlights the complexities of cultural interaction and presents the priests’ perspective in a sensitive and nuanced manner. In so doing, Cather transforms Parkman’s antiCatholic rhetoric into a sympathetic portrayal of the feminized outsider in American culture. Catholicism’s association with femininity begins on the first pages of the novel as the narrator describes the conversation that sends Latour and Vaillant to found the Vicarate of New Mexico. Beginning her narrative in Rome, Cather identifies the differences between Europe and New Mexico with gendered markers that render Europe refined, sensitive, and feminine, and New Mexico vulgar, callous, and masculine. While Rome is nestled among “soft and undulating” hills, New Mexico’s chaotic desert is full of “stony chasms” that threaten to swallow the unsuspecting traveler.21 In Europe, people drink Burgundy and champagne, while in America, whiskey and rum suffice (DFA, 9). An El Greco painting of that famous Catholic saint, St. Francis, a man of “almost feminine beauty,” is deemed inappropriate for the “scalp-takers” in the New World (DFA, 12). And, when we first meet Jean Marie Latour, the chosen missionary priest, Cather does not endow him with manly attributes; rather, he is “a man of gentle birth – brave, sensitive, courteous” (DFA, 19). While Europe is home to popes and cardinals, New Mexico only “pitifully calls itself a Catholic country,” for the Church there “has been allowed to drift for nearly three hundred years” (DFA, 6). From the beginning of the narrative, this new infusion of Catholicism is portrayed as the civilizing influence that tempers the desert wilderness with feminine grace. The Church’s association with femininity is due in no small part to its veneration of the Virgin Mary, who becomes the “leading lady” of Cather’s narrative.22 The Virgin plays a significant role in the faith life of both priests. In May, the month of Mary, Father Vaillant is ill, with ample time to devote to the contemplation of “his Gracious Patroness” (DFA, 202). As a boy, Vaillant had chosen May as his holy month, the



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one he devotes to Mary: “to Her he had consecrated his waking hours. At night, he sank to sleep with the sense of her protection. In the morning when he awoke, before he had opened his eyes, he was conscious of a special sweetness in the air, – Mary, and the month of May! Alma Mater redemptoris!” (DFA, 202). The most important events in his life happen during “the blessed month when this sinful and sullied world puts on white as if to commemorate the Annunciation, and becomes, for a little, lovely enough to be in truth the Bride of Christ” (DFA, 204). For Latour, the Virgin is “the Kind Woman in heaven,” the mediator who allows him to experience the holy mysteries (DFA, 217). During his prayer with the bond-woman, Sada, “the beautiful concept of Mary pierced the priest’s heart like a sword,” and Latour becomes a male St. Teresa, the Virgin Mary replacing the female mystic’s angel.23 Indeed, the Virgin surpasses Jesus as the narrative’s central religious figure. When Latour first gets lost in the desert, the people of the isolated Mexican settlement who find him thank the Blessed Virgin, “who must have led the Bishop from his path . . . to baptize the children and to sanctify marriages” (DFA, 25). Although Casey suggests that this scene highlights the novel’s implicit Christology by focusing on the necessity of the male priest – Christ’s representative – for the villagers’ “access to the fullness of their faith,”24 it is the Virgin who has made him available and the Virgin who resides over Latour’s mass (DFA, 30). Although little is said of Christ’s death and resurrection, the story of Our Lady of Guadalupe, “the one absolutely authenticated appearance of the Blessed Virgin in the New World, and a witness of Her affection for Her Church on this continent,” is lovingly told to Latour and Vaillant by a Mexican priest who has just returned from a pilgrimage to her shrine (DFA, 46–49). Anders claims that Cather “places a parallel emphasis on Christ,”25 yet he fails to note that even when Cather does mention Jesus, he is always attached to Mary. We first meet Latour and get a sense of his religious devotion when, lost in the desert, Latour dismounts from his mule and prays before a tree in the form of a cross. While Latour’s wanderings in the desert and devotions at the cruciform tree would initially seem to pave the way for the association of Catholicism with Jesus, and hence, masculinity, we find out soon after that Latour’s prayers were dedicated to “the Holy Mother” (DFA, 29). Moreover, the image of Jesus suffering on the cross is historically the most feminine image of Jesus, theologically associated with Mary as the suffering mother.26 When Latour feels the “sense of a Presence awaiting him” in his study (DFA, 253), he briefly reflects on the parallels between his solitary life and “his




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A life need not be cold, or devoid of grace in the worldly sense, if it were filled by Her who was all the graces; Virgin-daughter, Virginmother, girl of the people and Queen of Heaven: le rêve suprême de la chair. The nursery tale could not vie with Her in simplicity, the wisest theologians could not match Her in profundity. (DFA, 254) Indeed, throughout the text, Cather emphasizes the centrality of the Virgin in understanding Catholicism in all of its cultural manifestations. Although the priests’ Virgin is more refined and rather unlike the Virgin familiar to the people of New Mexico, she is, nonetheless, the most significant bridge between the cultures. She is, as Latour notes, the central figure in the faith of the Mexicans, as she is in his own. These poor Mexicans, he reflected, were not the first to pour out their love in this simple fashion. Raphael and Titian had made costumes for Her in their time, and the great masters had made music for Her, and the great architects had built cathedrals for Her. Long before Her years on earth, in the long twilight between the Fall and the Redemption, the pagan sculptors were always trying to achieve the image of a goddess who should yet be a woman. (DFA, 255) The Virgin Mary, the primordial feminine, becomes, for Cather, the key to representing Catholicism as a positive influence on the domestication of the New World. In characterizing Catholicism in this way, Cather reverses Parkman’s negative rhetoric and creates fertile ground for reading Cather’s priests sympathetically as feminized outsiders in the New Mexican desert. Cather’s interest in portraying Catholicism in a manner that goes against the grain of its historical reception in America underscores her attempt to interrogate and dismantle the negative image of the feminized Catholic outsider into a positive representation. Indeed, as I suggest in the second section, Cather’s positive understanding of Catholicism as the female outsider in American culture lays the groundwork for a new reading of Cather’s sexual aesthetic.

Willa Cather’s sexual aesthetic Since 1984, when Sharon O’Brien first connected the “thing not named” in Cather’s essay on “The Novel Démeublé” to Oscar Wilde’s “Love that



Master’s.” Yet, Latour’s meditation on his solitude is not about Jesus, but rather about the Virgin:

dared not speak its name,”27 critics have creatively articulated various ways to understand the role of sexuality in Cather’s work. Because Cather never called herself a lesbian or wrote any explicitly lesbian novels with “out” lesbian characters, much attention has been given to whether and how Cather’s personal sexual preference is written into her novels. Impossible and unsuccessful heterosexual relationships, between Claude and Enid in One of Ours or Emil and Marie in O Pioneers!, suggest Cather’s critique of the heterosexual romance,28 and explain her turn to history.29 Cather’s attempts to conceal her lesbianism result in the displacement of sexuality onto the landscape30 or the elaborate play of the masquerade, as her male characters stand in for women.31 Or, Cather’s engagement of sexuality is read through her male characters, like the two priests in Death Comes for the Archbishop, whose intimacy lends itself to a homosexual reading that excludes femininity or lesbianism. In his book, Willa Cather’s Sexual Aesthetics and the Male Homosexual Literary Tradition, for instance, John P. Anders argues that Cather’s focus on spiritual friendship between men is her way of translating the “sensationalized focus on lesbianism” she admired in French literature into her own work, thereby suggesting that Cather’s expression of same-sex desire appears only in a male homosexual or homosocial context.32 And, even though Anders acknowledges that the text’s expression of religious feeling is feminine, he argues that, “rather than emasculating them, their religious feelings, however feminine, broaden their masculinity.”33 Religious feeling apparently softens masculinity, creating “compassionate,” “gentle,” and “tender-hearted” men.34 Thus, rather than acknowledge the presence of ideas of femininity in the characterization of these figures, Anders subsumes the text’s expressions of femininity into the masculine and Death Comes for the Archbishop becomes a prime example of Cather’s engagement of a male homosexual literary tradition. Even more common in recent criticism is the claim that Cather disrupts and disputes traditional categories of gender and sexuality, an approach that has come to be recognized as the “queering” of Cather.35 Such readings open up the possibility of broadening traditional categories of identity, of recognizing that whatever it means to call Cather a lesbian writer, she and her characters and her texts might not fit into any easily defined categories of identity. Describing Judith Butler’s reading of Cather, Jonathan Goldberg eloquently encapsulates this approach: “Some of the passion of Butler’s essay [in Bodies That Matter] comes from her sense that Cather is not to be judged as errant in her masculinity, that one should not assume that to be properly feminine





is a prerequisite for lesbian identity, or that masculinity is properly male.”36 Yet, in the context of Cather criticism, the queer seems too often to disrupt in favor of issues of masculinity to the exclusion of femininity. In Willa Cather: Queering America, Marilee Lindemann argues against the all too common reading of Cather’s priests as lesbians “trapped in men’s bodies.”37 Instead, Lindemann turns to the queer, arguing that the “priest-in-the-closet model is less productive than a queers-in-the-desert model as a way of reading Death Comes for the Archbishop because it obscures how fully and frankly the narrative is given over to telling the story of Latour’s love for Vaillant, how completely it is driven by the rhythms of ‘their life together.’ ”38 Lindemann focuses on the narrative’s representation of the romantic friendship between the two priests, suggesting that the priests in Death Comes for the Archbishop present a queerness that serves as Cather’s response to the shaping of the American literary canon as an “all-male pantheon of duplicitous swashbucklers.”39 Yet, despite Lindemann’s attempt to “ ‘queer’ the Archbishop rather than try to ‘lesbianize’ it,”40 it is difficult to see how Cather’s two priests stand as anything other than models of a celibate masculinity that, while it may challenge the traditional masculinization of the American literary canon, is, nonetheless, decidedly masculine. As Anders and Lindemann suggest, readings of sexuality in Death Comes for the Archbishop focus primarily on the dynamics of the relationship between the two priests, dynamics that lend themselves to a reading of the relationship as homosocial or homosexual. The homosexual or “queer” in this text is all about masculinity, while issues of femininity are avoided. It seems to me, however, that the reason we can read this relationship as homosexual or homosocial is precisely because of its association with femininity. For, in characterizing Catholicism positively as a feminine religion, Cather also creates a feminized context within which to read the relationship between her two priests. Indeed, it is difficult to disassociate their relationship from their mutual devotion to the Virgin. The Virgin becomes the figure through whom the priests’ differing perceptions on the nature of miracles are conveyed, as Latour muses on what his “dear Joseph” would say about his experience with the cruciform tree (DFA, 29). The two priests’ intimate Christmas dinner includes conversation about Father Vaillant’s desire to return to France and end his days “in devotion to the Holy Mother” (DFA, 41). And, it is the “fervor” of Vaillant’s faith, his dedication to “the service of the Divine Mother” that attracts Latour to Vaillant, that creates an “instantaneous” connection when they first meet (DFA, 224–5). The



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Virgin is she through whom the two men become bonded to one another; she facilitates their intimacy. Indeed, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s analysis of the erotic love triangle in Shakespeare’s sonnets could just as easily be applied to Cather’s priests: Death Comes for the Archbishop presents “a male–male love that, like the love of the Greeks, is set firmly within a structure of institutionalized social relations that are carried out via women.”41 Although Sedgwick argues that such relationships exclude homosexuality, claiming instead that “we are in the presence of male heterosexual desire, in the form of a desire to consolidate partnership with authoritative males in and through the bodies of females,”42 Marilyn Farwell cites a number of historical and literary examples that suggest that “women are also needed as the Other in order to secure male homosexual identity.”43 It seems to me that, regardless of whether one wants to read the relationship between Cather’s priests as homosocial, homosexual or queer, the figure of woman or femininity necessarily plays a defining role in its perception. Moreover, I would also argue that the figure of woman not only facilitates male bonding through her Otherness or exclusion, her femininity – and, specifically, her sexuality – also rubs off on them, a slippage that threatens to morph the heterosexual into the homosexual. It is precisely the threat of a feminized sexuality that precipitates its rejection in the context of male bonding. At least since biblical times, homosexuality – or the male same-sex sex act – has been associated with the rejection of a feminized sexuality. The prohibition in Leviticus which states that “You shall not lie with a male as with a woman” (18:22) implies that the problem with male–male sex acts is that one of the parties must act like a woman sexually, i.e. be submissive.44 Even the Greeks, who in many instances praised male same-sex sexual pleasure, expressed some cultural anxiety about the male desire to be penetrated by another male “for such a desire represents the voluntary abandonment of a ‘masculine’ [active] identity in favor of a ‘feminine’ [passive] one.”45 From this perspective, it is not merely the exclusion of that which is female, in general, that creates male bonding, it is the exclusion of a feminized sexuality that facilitates and defines the proper male–male relationship. In Death Comes for the Archbishop, the relationship between Cather’s priests is simultaneously defined through their devotion to the Holy Mother – the idealized, passive, feminine – and their rejection of active female sexuality. Latour’s repulsion at finding a “bunch of woman’s hair” fluttering across the floor of his room during his first visit with the unorthodox Padre Martínez suggests his repudiation of active female sexuality; that this incident occurs after





Latour has staunchly defended the notion that celibacy is “an essential condition of the priest’s vocation” (DFA, 145), further solidifies Latour’s alignment with the celibate femininity (and masculinity) represented by the mother church and explains his rejection of a feminized sexuality that would threaten the male bonding that occurs within the Church’s nurturing arms. Indeed, Cather’s priests are easily read as something other than heterosexual because their association with the Virgin, with the feminized Church, makes such an interpretation possible. In addition, Cather’s creation of kindly, even heroic, priests whose intimate connection to one another is nurtured by their relationship to the Church and through the figure of the Virgin creates a textual focus on the feminized outsider that provides a sympathetic context within which to view the few female characters in the narrative. Indeed, these women inhabit the conceptual edges of the narrative; so far out of bounds are they that the feminized priests appear as insiders in relation to them. There is, thus, a radical and sexualized female presence that haunts the margins of this narrative, much as the 1920s lesbian haunted the margins of heterosexual culture. That these characters also play a significant role in shaping the novel’s moral worldview suggests that Cather’s sexual aesthetic is also a moral aesthetic that is articulated through the role of the feminized and female outsider. The late nineteenth-century manifestation of the female outsider can be found in the image of the “mannish lesbian.”46 As the work of sexologists like Krafft-Ebing and Havelock Ellis were disseminated to the public in the early decades of the twentieth century, public interest in sexuality was piqued, and homosexuality became increasingly characterized as a social problem. Such attention to questions of sexuality created a public discourse for social deviance, as the connection between masculinity in women and lesbianism was given scientific confirmation.47 As Sherrie Inness points out, heterosexual attention to the lesbian “confirmed a representation of the lesbian that justified her status as an outcast from the community.”48 The rise of such public discourse could not have escaped the attention of Willa Cather, whose youthful masquerade as William Cather, Jr. would have placed her firmly in the role of social deviant. Yet, as Inness points out, it was not the image of the mannish lesbian who was responsible for the greatest heterosexual anxiety about lesbianism.49 The mannish lesbian, with her visible markers of men’s clothing, short hair, deep voice and masculine behavior, could be easily identified by the heterosexual community, and her visibility rendered



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the beautiful, feminine woman who is desired by men yet still persists in her lesbianism is an almost unbelievable creation to many; it is an image that has been selectively censored from the popular imagination because . . . the image presents a greater threat to the heterosexual order than does the mannish lesbian.51 The suppression of the feminine lesbian in favor of the mannish lesbian thus provides a crucial social function: “to legitimize an image of the lesbian as an easily excluded outsider.”52 Thus, just as Catholicism is characterized historically as the feminized outsider, so, too, is the lesbian. Indeed, I would like to suggest that while Cather’s turn to Catholicism allowed her to present a positive image of Catholicism as the female outsider, it also created narrative space within which she could explore more fully the cultural role and function of the female outsider. Like the lesbian, the female characters in Death Comes for the Archbishop are all positioned as outsiders in relation to their social circumstances. Señora Olivares is the Kentucky-born wife of a wealthy Mexican man, whose “delicate blonde complexion” (DFA, 176) and European education render her the subject of local gossip. Magdalena Scales is a Mexican woman who marries a degenerate American because everyone knows that “marriage with an American meant coming up in the world” (DFA, 72). Sada is the Mexican Catholic servant to an American Protestant family that was “very hostile to the Roman Church” (DFA, 212). Each of these women unintentionally threatens the comfortable world that Latour and Vaillant have carved out for themselves, and the priests work hard to justify their actions – or lack thereof – in relation to them. Nonetheless, these women, as outsiders, throw into stark relief the morally problematic aspects of the world presented as normative. In other words, Death Comes for the Archbishop evinces a narrative dynamic in which the female outsiders function to shape and critique the passivity of the priests in the face of social injustice. Much like her rewriting of the negatively perceived feminized Catholic Church, Cather reframes the female outsider – the lesbian – into a positive mechanism of social critique.



her a knowable, and therefore, a less threatening deviant. The frightening lesbian is the one who is hidden, who appears to be heterosexual, such as the character of Madame d’Aiguines in Edouard Bourdet’s play, The Captive, which ran for five months in New York in 1926.50 Indeed, as Inness argues,


Señora Olivares is a vain woman, who refuses to reveal her true age. When her husband dies, his estate is willed to his wife and daughter, Doña Inez, and then, after their deaths, to the Society for the Propagation of Faith. However, Señor Olivares’ brothers contest the will, arguing that Doña Inez is too old to be their brother’s daughter. Because her vanity is more important to her than the loss of her money, Señora Olivares refuses to give in, and Latour and Vaillant are called upon to convince her to tell the truth. Certainly, the priests wish to protect the two women, but Señora Olivares’ stubbornness brings out the worst in Father Vaillant, who can simply not believe that her vanity is more important than the Church. “ ‘And have you a right to defraud the Church of what is left to it in your trust?,’ ” Vaillant asks the distressed Señora, “ ‘Have you thought of the consequences to yourself of such a betrayal?’ ” (DFA, 191). Though Latour recognizes that their treatment of Señora Olivares is “cruel” (DFA, 192), he, too, is unwilling to give up the potential funds. The priests’ intervention in this matter would be of little consequence if their interest in worldly affairs were frequently demonstrated throughout the narrative. But, as Susan Rosowski points out, the priests “characteristically turn away from worldly matters.”53 Their intervention in this situation clearly reveals their monetary self-interest on behalf of the Church. This particular interest is especially surprising, given that the priests had earlier refused to intercede on behalf of the Church’s moral standing in the diocese by allowing Martínez’s corrupt ministry to continue. Although there is certainly nothing wrong with wanting their diocese to be financially secure, to be so invested in it that they are willing to risk emotional harm to one of their most beloved parishioners and to privilege money over morality places the priests’ actions in question. In attempting to contain Señora Olivares’ threat to the Church’s future financial well-being, the priests highlight a negative aspect of their ministry. The priests’ intervention in Señora Olivares’ affairs become even more disappointing when Magdalena reappears in the narrative. The priests first meet Magdalena when they are forced by bad weather to seek shelter. There they meet a woman whose blank stare and frightened demeanor leads the priests to the conclusion that her husband “had been abusing her in some way” (DFA, 67). Beyond her obvious fear, however, the priests have difficulty reading her, and conclude that she “was probably half-witted” (DFA, 67), an ambiguous statement that perhaps explains, if not justifies, her abuse. When her husband orders



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Instantly, that stupid face became intense, prophetic, full of awful meaning. With her finger she pointed them away, away! – two quick thrusts into the air. Then, with a look of horror beyond anything language could convey, she threw back her head and drew the edge of her palm quickly across her distended throat – and vanished. The doorway was empty, the two priests stood staring at it, speechless. (DFA, 68) Her warning sends the priests on their way, afraid for their lives, and worried for the woman. “Poor woman!” Latour exclaims, “He will suspect her and abuse her, I am afraid” (DFA, 70). This event is a rather shocking interruption in the calm course of the narrative, which up until now, has been devoid of female characters who interact with the priests. What is perhaps most disturbing about this scene is the priests’ inability to do more than save their own hides. Though they have up until this point in the narrative been presented as impeccably moral, theologically sensitive and sympathetic characters, their failure to help the abused woman serves, as Patrick Shaw suggests, to present an “altered and far less flattering view of Latour”54 – and Vaillant. Though the as yet unnamed woman has risked her own life to save the priests, the two men appear to have no regret at leaving her behind, even though they suspect that she will be further abused by her husband. This poor Mexican woman is their savior, and the priests are willing to sacrifice her to save their own lives. As events unfold, the woman becomes even further marginalized in the narrative. The priests’ help is mediated through others; they have virtually no direct contact with her. Her story, which details her husband’s murderous ways, needs to be confirmed by a man, a narrative detail that places the woman under suspicion of untrustworthiness, and places her further on the moral margins of the narrative. The priests’ distance from her is further marked by her indirect speech: only once does the woman speak. When Kit Carson agrees to take the woman home with him to be a companion to his own Mexican wife, she is asked if she would be afraid with Kit, and she replies, “ ‘No, no, Christóbal, I would not be afraid with you. I am not a wicked woman’ ” (DFA, 74). Though there is no reason to suspect that she is anything but a victim of her husband, her perceived need for self-defense high-



her to help him and then leaves the house, the woman turns to the perplexed priests.


lights her status as a potentially undesirable outsider, especially in relation to the two priests. The woman’s status as outsider is heightened when it is revealed that her name is Magdalena, a detail that evokes the biblical Mary Magdalene. Mary Magdalene is a deeply ambivalent figure in the history of Christianity, a woman portrayed either as Apostle to the Apostles or the penitent whore, depending on the cultural agenda of the Catholic Church at any given time.55 Paralleling the story of the penitent whore, whose uncontrolled sexuality is chastened by her devotion to Jesus, Magdalena’s active sexuality is transformed into celibacy through her interaction with the two priests, who send her to help out at the local girls’ school run by nuns. Her sexuality under control, Magdalena returns later in the narrative, now available for closer interaction with the priests, who, after a discussion of her future, call her over to them: “ ‘Magdalena, Magdalena, my child,’ calls Vaillant, ‘come here and talk to us for a little. Two men grow lonely when they see nobody but each other’ ” (DFA, 210). Once the threat of her active sexuality is gone, Magdalena functions as another female figure through whom the priests’ relationship is negotiated. Yet, Magdalena’s silent presence also functions as a critique of the priests’ fear of women and their sexuality. Although the priests claim that Magdalena is happy and content, she is given no voice with which to articulate her own desires. Instead, the priests are entirely in control of her future and express no regard for her wants or needs. Moreover, Vaillant claims that her contentment is the direct result of their intervention in her life: “ ‘Who would think to look at her now,’ he says, ‘that we took her from a place where every vileness of cruelty and lust was practised!’ ” (DFA, 210; my emphasis). Such a claim is an appalling rewrite of Magdalena’s history which further denies Magdalena’s autonomy in the very risky decision to leave her husband. Thus, although the priests are viewed sympathetically throughout the narrative as feminized outsiders, it is the female character who, like Cather the writer, like the lesbian outsider, provides the lens through which the priests can be appropriately viewed as well-intentioned, though flawed men, who refuse to acknowledge the autonomy and subjectivity of the women around them. Finally, there is the servant, Sada, whose story makes up the third and last of the vignettes which illustrate the priests’ interactions with women in the narrative. Sada has been in servitude to a Protestant family for over nineteen years. Although Latour has been repeatedly made aware of her situation, he is unwilling to help her because “at



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Never, as he afterward told Father Vaillant, had it been permitted him to behold such deep experience of the holy joy of religion as on that pale December night . . . Kneeling beside the much enduring bondwoman, he experienced those holy mysteries as he had done in his young manhood. He seemed able to feel all it meant to her to know that there was a Kind Woman in Heaven, though there were such cruel ones on earth. (DFA, 217) Struck by the authenticity and persistence of Sada’s faith, Latour rediscovers the depth of his own; he is nonetheless unwilling to help her. Sada’s situation thus further emphasizes the priest’s inability to work against social injustice, and she becomes yet another example of Cather’s attempt to highlight the crucial role of the female outsider in shaping and critiquing that which is considered culturally normative. Indeed, the cultural effects of these women are significant, for they highlight the fissures in the seemingly smooth moral façade of the Church and its two representatives in New Mexico. They also help to explain Cather’s focus on Catholicism and lack of female protagonists in Death Comes for the Archbishop. For, as Cather writes a counterdiscourse to the historical perception of Catholicism in the US by positively emphasizing its feminine associations, she also creates a counter-discourse to the cultural discussions of the dangerous lesbian by creating female characters who, as outsiders, throw into stark relief the moral shortcomings of the world around them. Cather does not write same-sex female desire into this narrative; nor does she create lesbian characters. But, in Death Comes for the Archbishop, she clearly articulates what it means to be the feminized or female outsider in American culture. And, by underscoring the paradoxical centrality of the female outsider in the creation of American identity, Death Comes for the Archbishop thus articulates in its narrative dynamic the difficulty of naming “the thing not named” in Cather’s work by marking femininity and female sexuality as that which is both culturally crucial and easily overlooked. Perhaps, for Cather, the lesbian is always the “thing not named” for the lesbian is, inevitably, unrecognized and unacknowledged as such by the culture around her.



present it was inexpedient to antagonize” the family (DFA, 215). When he meets her late one night outside the church, he takes her inside and prays with her. This experience touches Father Latour deeply:

The Well of Loneliness and the Catholic Rhetoric of Sexual Dissidence1 Richard Dellamora

For the past twenty years, sociologists, New Left historians, post-structuralist theorists, and literary critics have argued the overwhelming importance of sexology and jurisprudence in constituting minority sexual subjectivities. Today a number of young scholars are making a different claim: namely, that Catholic theology, iconography, ritual, and devotion have provided a space in which late Victorian and early Modernist sexual dissidents could imagine themselves, so to speak, into existence.2 This religious discourse of sexual difference stands in complex, ambivalent, often resistant relationship to sexological discourse. Chronologically, it can precede, parallel, dialogue with, and contest the truths of emergent sexology. In the following essay, it will be seen in all these relations. In De Profundis (1897), Oscar Wilde’s letter from prison, Catholic rhetoric exists within a composite discourse, at once religious, sexual, and aesthetic. Wilde celebrates the crucified Christ as the supreme example of the artist. Aesthetic framing likewise occurs in the Marian/Christic rhapsody with which my final text, Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness, ends and in my other example, contemporaneous with Wilde, John Bloxam’s short story, “The Priest and the Acolyte” (1894). These names span the years from late Victorian to High Modernist. The thirty-year span is chosen deliberately since all three of these individuals perceived their work to be self-consciously and complexly “modern.”3 The religious material is both Anglo- and Roman Catholic, in turn; in part Marian, in part focused on the Passion, Crucifixion, and death of Jesus Christ. The cup into which, in some illustrations, his blood is caught is also the chalice of the celebration of the Communion of the mass. In Catholicism, the sacrament of the Holy Eucharist depends on the paradoxical belief that matter can be transformed into 114 10.1057/9780230287778 - Catholic Figures, Queer Narratives, Edited by Lowell Gallagher, Frederick S. Roden and Patricia Juliana Smith


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something else while retaining its ordinary appearance. This paradox is central as well to romantic love: the notion that what is bodily, even insistently so, can signify transcendence. The claim that Catholic rhetoric has enabled sexual dissidence may seem surprising since moral and religious discourses are often negative in their assessment of same-sex love and desire.4 Many young queers have been driven from their places of worship. Nonetheless, and equally frequently, the very terms whereby individuals claim themselves as sexual subjects echo religious experience. “Coming out,” for example, can be a fervent and altogether serious parody of Christian conversion. It can also mean the call to a special vocation. Moreover, while the affirmation of sexual identity is often predicated upon the rejection of the religious affiliation of one’s childhood, the affirmation of sexual difference can also coexist with continuing religious belief and church membership.5 And in cases when, with a shrug or with whatever regret, anger or bitterness, a religious affiliation is relinquished, I am convinced that the experience of sexual conversion continues to be freighted with religious significance. In London in the late nineteenth century and among circles of Oxford graduates and undergraduates, the rejection of marriage as a prescribed duty and the affirmation of emotional and at times sexual relations between males often coexisted with religious devotion – with an attraction to the perverse gorgeousness that these men found in Roman Catholic display, manifest, for example, in the baroque modernity of the Brompton Oratory or in a number of High Anglican congregations in London.6 This correlation did not escape the attention of authorities within either Church. In addition to tension and conflict, however, this situation also called for a measure of tolerance, especially within AngloCatholicism. For example, Bloxam, who wrote a notorious apology for pederastic love while an undergraduate at Oxford, nonetheless was accepted into the Anglican priesthood.7 Hall herself was a devout albeit at times embattled Roman Catholic. And Wilde, who in youth was undecided as to whether to travel to Rome or to Greece, became a deathbed convert to Roman Catholicism. All three were particularly devoted to the figure of Christ in extremis. This absorption in the Passion of Christ suggests yet one more ground for the linkage between religion and sexual dissidence. The suffering of Christ provides a context for experiencing, troping, and narrativizing the negativities, psychic and social, that accompanied non-conformity for these three individuals. Bloxam, Wilde, and Hall were further linked in their heretical response to traditional moral and religious condemnations of sexual



The Well of Loneliness and the Catholic Rhetoric of Sexual Dissidence 115


and emotional ties between members of the same sex.8 In this context, the stance of John Henry Newman regarding what he referred to as “Nature” is likely to have had a significant impact. Recent writers on Newman such as Alan Bray, who fully credit the importance of samesex friendship in Newman’s life, are convinced that these relations remained both celibate and deeply religious.9 Nonetheless, in a late nineteenth-century context in which same-sex desire became a major topic of scientific inquiry, Newman’s recoil from unwarranted extensions of the authority of the Roman Catholic Church into the terrain of modern scientific knowledge had important implications for the position of subjects of same-sex desire. In response to the publication of the Syllabus of Errors and other anti-liberal, anti-modernist papal documents of the 1860s, Newman wrote: “The Pope, who comes of Revelation, has no jurisdiction over Nature.”10 Later in the century, the research of pioneering sexologists such as Richard von Krafft-Ebing caused them to call into question the traditional view that sexual and emotional ties between members of the same sex were unnatural.11 In other words, the very meaning of the terms nature and human nature were changing in scientific thought by 1890. Bloxam’s fidelity to Anglo-Catholicism and the conversions of Wilde and Hall to Roman Catholicism owe a great deal to the special character that Newman imparted to English Catholicism. In particular, in responding to William Gladstone’s contention in a pamphlet of 1874 that extensions of papal authority threatened to undermine British citizenship, Newman brought to bear an acknowledgedly Protestant conviction of the primacy of human conscience in ordinary matters. Newman conceptualizes conscience as “the voice of God in the nature and heart of man, as distinct from the voice of Revelation”; conscience functions as “the internal witness of both the existence and the law of God” (128). As for natural law, Newman defines it as the “ethical” relation of God to himself, i.e. the dynamic play of “the attributes of justice, truth, wisdom, sanctity, benevolence, and mercy” (127) in the divine mind. In a presentation of conscience that echoes Coleridge’s description of primary imagination in chapter thirteen of Biographia Literaria, Newman describes conscience as recognizing and practicing these relations within the human mind. In this way, Newman draws the experience of God into human interiority in complex, subtle, and intimate fashion. Drawing on the medieval theologian, St. Thomas Aquinas, Newman argues that judgements of conscience pertain to the here and now (hic et nunc), a sphere in which the Pope is not infallible (134). The citizen’s



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ultimate responsibility is neither to religious nor to secular authority but to individual conscience (129). One owes “obedience” (127) to one’s conscience even when doing so puts one at odds with papal teaching on particular matters: “Conscience being a practical dictate, a collision is possible between it and the Pope’s authority only when the Pope legislates, or gives particular orders, and the like. But a Pope is not infallible in his laws, nor in his commands, nor in his acts of state, nor in his administration, nor in his public policy” (134). Quoting another Catholic theologian, Newman argues that, even in specific reference to religion, a heretic is justified in maintaining his belief “as long as he judges his sect to be more or equally deserving of belief” (137) as the Church. Newman’s outspoken defense of conscience strengthened the wills of sexual heretics while persuading them that there might be room for them in the Church.12 In his recent book on same-sex desire in Victorian religious culture, Frederick S. Roden argues convincingly that renewed interest in Medieval Catholicism provided Victorian men and women with a bodycentered, gender-crossing rhetoric of ecstasis and conversion that moved far beyond conventional ideas of gender and sexual roles.13 Although I am particularly indebted to Roden’s studies of same-sex desire in writing by Anglican women, my focus is for the most part elsewhere, directed to a continually occurring shift in Victorian Aestheticism between a Classical cultural ideal and a Romantic one. Nowhere is the attraction to both clearer or more intense than in Wilde’s work. It is important to remember that at the end of his political essay, “The Soul of Man under Socialism,” Wilde argues that “the new Individualism, for whose service Socialism, whether it wills it or not, is working, will be perfect harmony. It will be what the Greeks sought for, but could not, except in Thought, realise completely, because they had slaves, and fed them; it will be what the Renaissance sought for, but could not realise completely except in Art, because they had slaves, and starved them. It will be complete, and through it each man will attain to his perfection. The new Individualism is the new Hellenism.”14 Wilde’s ideal combines individual self-harmony, a balance of physical, mental, and emotional needs, faculties, and expressions, with social harmony, based on economic justice. The ideal was articulated primarily in “Art,” the leading type being the idealized male nude of Greek sculpture, a form emphasizing physical beauty, organic life, and symmetrical form. While Wilde was at school and in university, an argument was waged between writers such as Matthew Arnold, Walter Pater, John Addington Symonds, and A. C. Swinburne as to the character of Greek aesthetics.





Pater and Swinburne, who celebrated both Apollo and Dionysus, were aware of the place of violence, pain, and sacrifice in Greek religion.15 Had Pater and Swinburne read Nietzsche, they would have agreed with him about the tragic character of Greek culture; and they would have agreed with his comment that “we are to regard the state of individuation as the origin and primal cause of all suffering, as something objectionable in itself.”16 Objectionable but also necessary. Wilde receives these points. At times, as in the early fairy tales, his Dionysuses are Christ-figures; at other times, as in The Picture of Dorian Gray, they remain more distinctly pagan. When Wilde speaks of “Hellenism,” however, he prefers to refer it to a modern Utopia, the regulating fiction of personal and political activity. In its realist aspect, it is always referred to as an unachieved, even failed, ideal. For example, in The Picture of Dorian Gray, when the painter Basil Hallward talks about the influence of young Dorian Gray on his art, he says: “The merely visible presence of this lad . . . unconsciously . . . defines for me the lines of a fresh school, a school that is to have in it all the passion of the romantic spirit, all the perfection of the spirit that is Greek. The harmony of soul and body – how much that is! We in our madness have separated the two, and have invented a realism that is vulgar, an ideality that is void.”17 In Greek sculpture, social and self-harmony is imaged in an intact bodily contour. In the Christian image of Christ’s passion and crucifixion, the body is violated by wounds and the loss of bodily fluids: blood, water, sweat, and tears. As Mary Douglas has argued, the emission of bodily fluids signifies impurity, pollution, a threat to personal and social integrity.18 The abjected body of Christ becomes the preferred trope of the romantic cultural ideal that Wilde presents in De Profundis. Wilde comments: “We can discern in Christ that close union of personality with perfection which forms the real distinction between the classical and romantic movement in life.”19 “Personality” is a technical term in Wilde that refers to the multiform possibilities of individual development. In other words, personality is the principle of individuation within human beings. It can also be described as the motivating force of speciation. The word “Perfection” refers to Christ’s divinity. The combination of the two refers to the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation, the belief that Christ incarnates in his body both a human being and God. “Before his time there had been gods and men, and, feeling through the mysticism of sympathy that in himself each had been made incarnate, he calls himself the Son of the one or the Son of the other, according to his mood” (166). Unlike the Greek ideal, however, the



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image of this composite human/divine being is dis-integral, the body dissolving into fluids in the sight of the devout. The unification of human with divine being in Christ combines the most humble and material aspects of existence with the most transcendent. The attempt to achieve such a union is bound to include disequilibrium, incongruity, possibly the grotesque, pain, suffering, and death. Another way of describing the difference between the two ideals is to say that one operates within the terms of beauty, the other within those of the sublime. There is no harmonious way of incorporating human with divine existence. Or, rather, although artists make such an attempt in images of the Resurrected Christ, these are not the images preferred by Wilde. Writing De Profundis, Wilde describes “the coronation ceremony of sorrow, one of the most wonderful things in the whole of recorded time: the crucifixion of the Innocent One before the eyes of his mother and of the disciple whom he loved” (167). The image of the Crucifixion appealed to sexual dissidents in part through the force of sublimation, in part through the resistance to sublimation afforded by this grisly subject. In February 1999, I visited an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of New York entitled Mirror of the Medieval World. In it appeared a remarkable illumination of the Crucifixion taken from a medieval Missal (Figure 1).20 This image suggested to me the existence of a bodily drama, at once sacred and profane, of significance to sexual dissidents. Originally the image appeared before the canon of the mass, the part of the service during which the priest, in words of Christ taken from the Gospel, consecrates bread and wine as the body and blood of Christ. Just as Wilde in De Profundis moves the discussion of Christ from religious into aesthetic terms, the medieval illustrator turns the Crucifixion into a triumph of style, at once aristocratic and artistic, with its cursive elegance and calligraphic elongation and emptying out of the human body. Christ is portrayed in a seemingly impossible position, arm and midriff lifting up in defiance of gravity and torso twisted sideways or back to front as though Christ were seated on a block hidden by drapery, the feet as if en point. Both Mary and John, in attendance, are androgynous, their biological difference suppressed, and the body decorporealized except for the wavy hair of all three figures and the bodily fluids draining from Christ. The tacit reference to maternal lactation in the blood spurting from the wound in his side cross-genders body and human relationship.21 These departures from a strict asymmetry of gender are one sign of the dissident appeal of the image. The trio of Mary, St. John the Evangelist, and Christ could not be more





Figure 1: The Crucifixion. Leaf from a missal: frontispiece for the canon of the mass. Thirteenth century, c.1270–90.

customary in sacred art. And yet all three are removed from the domestic ideology dominant in nineteenth-century England. All three are virgins, though the woman gave birth in the Spirit, an often femaleidentified figure in Medieval and Victorian devotional writing.22 And Christ and John are passionate albeit chaste lovers. The little book that John holds, sign of the Gospel and the book of Revelations that he will write, signifies the ability of the lover/artist to textualize this experience, converting it into word and image. Most significant about this image, however, is the relation between the wounded body that dominates the illustration and the minuscule male half-nude at the bottom, who lifts a chalice to receive the saving



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drops. This emaciated figure represents Adam, the old Adam that is. Risen from the dead, he sits in an open sarcophagus, his burial winding sheet fallen below his waist. Above him is the magnified body of Christ, whose saving blood, dripping into the chalice, promises to restore Adam to life and bodily vigor. In Catholic preaching, the large figure is Christ, the New Adam. The exchange of bodily fluids refers to Holy Communion, in which, according to the Anglo- and Roman Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, the communicant ingests the body and blood of Christ. In a sexualized discourse, this exchange signifies the dream that the exchange of bodily fluids in sexual communion can redeem the body. At the same time, the vulnerability of both bodies signifies the loss that accompanies desire. The image calls the viewer to a passionate transcendence while simultaneously insisting on the insufficiency of the human body and psyche. A similar polarity structures the most notorious tale of male–male desire in the 1890s in England, Bloxam’s anonymously published short story, “The Priest and the Acolyte.” Both chalice and crucifix figure importantly in this story. The crucifix that hangs in the cottage where the protagonist, a young Anglican priest, lives, represents, at once, the violence directed by the world towards subjects of same-sex desire; the priest’s continual fatigue, worn down as he is by efforts to quell his attraction to younger males; and, finally, the love that is prepared to empty itself completely in self-sacrifice. In the scandalous scene of pederastic desire at the heart of the story, the love of the priest and the acolyte is aptly called a “sweetly poisonous draught.”23 At the end, when condemnation by his superior leads the priest to commit suicide, he does so while celebrating mass. Immediately before saying Christ’s words at the consecration of the wine, he pours a “tiny phial” (359) into the wine of the Communion cup. After the boy receives the host and the consecrated wine, the priest does so as well; both die. “Their lips met in one last kiss of perfect love, and all was over” (360). Bloxam insists on both the saving efficacy of sacramental transubstantiation and on male bodily desire as a gift at once ecstatic, liberating, and mortal. Within Roman Catholic teaching, any adulteration of the bread or wine specially prepared for the mass invalidates the sacrament of the Eucharist. Bread and wine remain bread and wine; transubstantiation does not occur. In this context, the priest’s act is both idolatrous and blasphemous – purporting to effect Christ’s presence while ensuring that it does not occur. In this way, the story seconds the conventional view that the story is idolatrous. At the same time, by ignoring the scandal of adulteration, Bloxam displaces Eucharistic theology into the defense





of love between a man and a boy. The sacrament of the Holy Eucharist sanctifies the body of the recipient while effacing the body of the Giver. In the gift of Holy Communion, only the external signs of bread and wine remain. The body and blood that have taken their place are visible to the eyes of faith alone. Nonetheless physical Communion, receiving the host into one’s body, is necessary to complete the sacrifice of the mass. Receiving Communion corporealizes one’s relation to Christ. Likewise, the saving grace/poison of romantic lovers. Bloxam signifies this mutual participation in the continual exchange of kisses between the priest and the acolyte. The exchange of saliva, the “gift” (355) of each, sanctifies the gift of the other. In the related Catholic doctrine of the Incarnation, the gift of Christ’s body issues both in death and in renewed life. As a young adolescent, Radclyffe Hall was as enamored of Christ on the cross as were Bloxam and Wilde. Repelled by her mother’s divorce from her father and quick re-marriage to the sexually predatory Alberto Antonio Visetti,24 young Marguerite Radclyffe-Hall withdrew to an attic apartment of her parent’s London home. According to her most recent biographer, Hall “imbued this room with a mix of religiosity, artistic ambition and sexual desire . . . On a wall she hung a large wooden crucifix. The image of the martyr with the crown of thorns and driven nails, she felt, applied to herself” (Souhami, 22). A generation later, RadclyffeHall had become a commercially successful, prize-winning author. Exchanging notoriety for celebrity, she decided to write a novel in defense of what sexologists referred to as sexual inversion. After the resulting book, The Well of Loneliness, was judged to be legally obscene, Hall followed with another novel, whose original title was The Carpenter’s Son (Souhami, 261). In it, the male protagonist hallucinates the sight of a crucified man when he receives Communion. Later, in sympathetic identification with Christ on the cross, he begins to experience stigmata. Hall did so while writing the novel. “Red stains” appeared on her hands, which had to be bandaged (Souhami, 261). Young Hall’s identification with Christ on the cross was in place already in the early 1890s, at the same time that she began to imagine herself as an artistic genius as well as to flirt, fall in love with, and pursue some of the young female singers who studied voice with Visetti (Souhami, 22). At this time too, Visetti made what Hall later described to her partner, Una Troubridge, as “improper advances” (Souhami, 19). The public destruction of Wilde provided a clamorous off-stage accompaniment to this disorderly domestic scene. As the date of publication of the Well approached, Una read to Hall The Ballad of Reading Gaol, De



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Profundis, and Frank Harris’s biography of Wilde. Hall identified with the Wilde who had been publicly shamed as he stood on a railway platform to await transfer to Reading prison.25 In the words of her most recent biographer: “If God willed she too would be spat at on Clapham Junction station, imprisoned, vilified, crucified” (Souhami, 186). But Hall also identified with Mary, the virgin who in childbirth shed blood for human salvation. In the Romantic aesthetic of Wilde and Hall, human perfection, unachieved in pleasure, arrives through sorrow. In the words of a Wilde who praises impurity and adulteration, just as the body absorbs things of all kinds, things common and unclean no less than those that the priest or a vision has cleansed, and converts them into swiftness or strength, into the play of beautiful muscles and the moulding of fair flesh, into the curves and colours of the hair, the lids, the eye; so the soul in its turn has its nutritive functions also, and can transform into noble moods of thought and passions of high import what in itself is base, cruel, and degrading; nay, more, may find in these its most august modes of assertion, and can often reveal itself most perfectly through what was intended to desecrate or destroy. (156) Hall had an additional resource in the way in which Anglo-Catholic Victorian women likewise used the sacrament of the Eucharist and the passion of Christ to signify desire between women.26 One of these works, discussed by Roden, is Eliza Keary’s poem, “Christine and Mary,” whose two speakers’ names appear to refer to those of Christina Rossetti and her beloved sister, Maria, who made her final profession of vows as an Anglican nun in 1875. Published in 1874, one year after the high-water mark of Victorian Classicism in Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance, and in the same year as Newman’s defense of conscience, Christine’s final words describe a painting of Christ’s passion on the convent wall: “. . . the royal brow Weighted with anguish; th’absorbing eyes Hungry with selfless love.”27 In Rossetti’s poem, “Goblin Market,” Lizzie, who in the poem’s religious allegory partakes of the nature of both Mary and Christ, saves her fallen sister, Laura, by first permitting the goblin men to abuse her and then inviting her sister to suck their juices from her bruised body:




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Roden comments: “Laura’s redemptive eating, drinking, and loving of her sister merges sensual and spiritual gratification in a eucharistic meal” (44). He further observes that a spiritual female communitas, whether evoked between two women who literally were sisters or among the members of an Anglican sisterhood, provided a sanctioned but nonetheless telling alternative to the Victorian ideal of the middleclass married couple. Images of Christ’s crucifixion suggest that the body of the God-man, even as it saves, is not restored to wholeness. It remains the wounded, bleeding body of a dying man/woman, of a lover too.28 This sexual/religious/aesthetic image testifies to the inescapable temporality of human existence; to the vulnerability of the body, to the psychic incompleteness of human relationships29 as well as to the damaging constraints of heteronormative existence. In her fiction, Radclyffe Hall represents love between sexual dissidents as both absolutely necessary and a near impossibility, a paradox enacted, in a fashion distressing to generations of readers when, at the end of The Well of Loneliness, Stephen Gordon forces her lover, Mary Llewellyn, to leave her. In the Christological narrative of the novel, this abandonment is as necessary as was Christ’s abandonment by his disciples at Calvary. It has to occur so that the full devastation of the Passion can be experienced. Only then will recuperation be possible. The Well of Loneliness is a new Gospel, written by Hall, to affirm the saving power of love based in dissident desire.30 As such, it is a testament both of faith and doubt, like Ernest Renan’s Vie de Jésus, which Wilde admiringly referred to as “the gracious fifth gospel, the gospel according to St. Thomas, one might call it” (168). St. Thomas, of course, is the patron saint of doubters. The Well of Loneliness is also Hall’s Apocalypse, to use the Roman Catholic title of the final book of the Bible. The call for justice characteristic of the genre is in her case the demand of sexual inverts for what she refers to as the “right to our existence.”31 This call has been a source of scandal to some readers, who see in it a continuing subjection on the part of Stephen (and Hall) to an oppressive masculinist deity. Hall’s Trinity, however, is a bit unusual, includ-



“Eat me, drink me, love me; Laura, make much of me; For your sake I have braved the glen And had to do with goblin merchant men.” (ll. 471–4; quoted in Roden, 44)

ing as it does a queer Christ and Mary and a feminine Holy Spirit. The epiphany of a countless number of inverts, present, past, and future, experienced by Stephen is a phenomenon drawn from religiously heterodox, i.e. from psychic experience. Finally, more significant than the term “God” is the rhetorical space the word occupies in the genre of apocalypse as the name of the principle called upon in the name of justice. Equally apt is the writer’s reflexive sense of justice and other terms such as “life,” the term in whose name, according to Michel Foucault, the normalizing social order of modernity has been challenged in an ever proliferating series of demands for new rights. “The ‘right’ to life, to one’s body, to health, to happiness, to the satisfaction of needs, and beyond all the oppression or ‘alienations,’ the ‘right’ to rediscover what one is and all that one can be, this ‘right’ – which the classical juridical system was utterly incapable of comprehending – was the political response to all these new procedures of power which did not derive, either, from the traditional right of sovereignty.”32 According to this argument, sexology itself drives Stephen’s call for justice. After Mary’s departure, in the final paragraphs of the novel Stephen (the name is that of the first Christian martyr) experiences a vision of her unhappy friends, including the suicide, Jamie, “with a neat little hole in her side.” In words drawing on Gospel accounts of the Crucifixion, an infinity of sexual inverts demand that Stephen become the agent of their salvation. Accepting identification with both Mary and Christ, Stephen gives virgin birth to the communicants of this new Church, a moment whose coming had earlier been prophesied by Valérie Seymour, when she says that subjects of same-sex desire “must be a religion unto themselves” (413). They possessed her. Her barren womb became fruitful – it ached with its fearful and sterile burden. It ached with the fierce yet helpless children who would clamour in vain for their right to salvation. They would turn first to God, and then to the world, and then to her. They would cry out accusing: “We have asked for bread; will you give us a stone? Answer us: will you give us a stone? You, God, in Whom we, the outcast, believe; you, world, into which we are pitilessly born; you, Stephen, who drained our cup to the dregs – we have asked for bread; will you give us a stone?” (476) Here the Communion chalice reverts to the cup that Jesus prayed might pass from him in the Garden of Gethsemane (Matt. 26:39). The stone




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And now there was only one voice, one demand; her own voice into which those millions had entered. A voice like the awful, deep rolling of thunder; a demand like the gathering together of great waters. A terrifying voice that made her ears throb, that made her brain throb, that shook her very entrails, until she must stagger and all but fall beneath this appalling burden of sound that strangled her in its will to be uttered. (447)33 This moment refers to a particular sort of psychic experience – in which an individual with psychic powers may be seen by others to be accompanied by a host of spirits of the living, the dead, and the as yet unborn. Among this group are not only deceased female friends from Paris but also a host of male sexual inverts: Aye, and those lost and terrible brothers . . . they were here, and they also were calling: “Stephen, Stephen, speak with your God and ask Him why He has left us forsaken!” She could see their marred and reproachful faces with the haunted, melancholy eyes of the invert – eyes that had looked too long on a world that lacked all pity and all understanding: “Stephen, Stephen, speak with your God and ask Him why he has left us forsaken!” And these terrible ones started pointing at her with their shaking, white-skinned, effeminate fingers: “You and your kind have stolen our birthright; you have taken our strength and given us your weakness!” They were pointing at her with white shaking fingers. (446) At moments like these, readers are often repelled, seeing the text of the novel as altogether dominated by the rhetoric of late Victorian sexology. I see something else – namely, the return to Hall and to dissident culture of the moment in 1895 when Wilde became the very type of the modern pervert – homosexual and effeminate. Inscribed on the male homosexuals of Hall’s novel, in particular on the playwright, Jonathan Brockett, the type of the male sexual invert is, in part, a stereotype. In part, it refers to Hall’s friend, the playwright Noël Coward (Souhami, 173). It is also an avatar of Wilde. The attack of male inverts on Stephen



is very much like the one of which Bloxam twice says: “And whosoever shall fall on this stone shall be broken: but on whomever it shall fall, it will grind him to powder” (360). In the final paragraphs, the language becomes that of the Apocalypse. The words are intensely disturbing:

re-enacts the violent imposition of the identity of sexual invert upon Wilde at the time of the trials. The attack refers externally to the aggression of what both Wilde and Hall call “the world.” It refers as well to an aggression turned by inverts upon one another. And it refers to a psychic splitting of the subjects of sexual inversion: of Wilde, Stephen Gordon, and, implicitly, of Hall herself. In response, Hall becomes at once this collective voice and the voice of Christ on the Cross. She cries: “God . . . we believe; we have told You we believe . . . We have not denied You, then rise up and defend us. Acknowledge us, oh God, before the whole world. Give us also the right to our existence!” (447). At this point, God is a very different deity from the one who presides over the marriage of Stephen’s obnoxious childhood friend, Violet Antrim (190). The “you” is reflexive, referring both to dissident existence and to the existence of individual psyches. The violence borne home from outside originates also among and within subjects of sexual inversion. This recognition is, in a way, the most searing allegation lodged by Stephen against their tormentors. Their assailants have set in motion a continual series of destructive acts in the lives of those who are the objects of their violence. Escape from traumatic repetition depends not only on the cease of prosecution by “the world” but also from a transformation of individual and group life among sexual dissidents. Hall recognizes this transformation as a process both divinizing and profane. At the beginning of this essay, I spoke of how the “coming out” narrative of modern homosexual identity is in form a conversion narrative and a narrative of one’s calling to a special vocation. In this context, the ending of the novel is Gordon/Hall’s “coming out” and, as such, an affront both to respectable opinion and to the chic ambisexuality of Bloomsbury. Hall’s writing secularizes by sexualizing the Catholic discourse within which she writes. In this archetypal but charged and difficult moment in the history of modern sexualities, the ending of the novel does not simply, as I put it earlier, open imaginative spaces for sexual dissidence in the face of sexological definition. On the one hand, it insists that such spaces be habitable, an ethical demand that is at once utopian and practical and that participates in the variously apocalyptic writing of male and female sexual dissidents after 1860. The moment is likewise one of return to other discourses: to the anarchist rhetoric of Wilde’s essay on socialism and the letter from prison and to the rhetoric in which sexologists such as Havelock Ellis and Sigmund Freud naturalize and thereby tend to validate same-sex desire. By demanding that God conform his will to that of sexual inverts, Gordon’s call is hetero-





dox, blasphemous; and her presentation of herself and other sexual inverts as implicitly divine martyrs is idolatrous. The note of revolt leads outside Roman Catholicism. At the same time, blasphemy exists within the Church. Witness, for example, the Christ of Wilde, Renan, and the Gospels, who speaks as a Jew against the Judaic law and its official spokespersons. Blasphemous and idolatrous, Stephen Gordon and Radclyffe-Hall operate simultaneously inside and outside a Catholic rhetoric of sexual dissidence that continues today to shape queer subjectivities, both religious and secular. Commentators on Hall often talk about the conventional character of her writing. One may be confident that those who make this remark have heard it before since anyone coming with a fresh eye to Hall’s writing will see much in it that is neither traditional nor realist.34 The ending of The Well of Loneliness offers a case in point. Shifting into the genre of apocalypse, past, present, and future time become simultaneous. As well, the permeability of Stephen’s ego at the end undoes the stabilization of character that is one of the most important ideological effects of novelistic realism. At the same time, one finds correlatives for this ending in a number of modernist classics: James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, D. H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow, and E. M. Forster’s Maurice, whose male couple escapes into the greenwood at the end of the novel. Hall’s experimentalism differs from that of Joyce, Lawrence, and Forster insofar as apocalypse retains its linkage to the mystery of Christ’s saving passion. As I have argued, the restaging of this drama within the lives of sexual inverts challenges the moral dicta of the Church at the same time that it projects sexual dissidents onto a cosmic stage where the pursuit of justice requires that life be waged to and at the very edge of annihilation.



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“The Woman That God Forgot”: Queerness, Camp, Lies, and Catholicism in Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood1 Patricia Juliana Smith

“Well! we are all condamnés.” Walter Pater, The Renaissance It is highly unlikely that Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood (1936) would appear on any list of Catholic novels, nor would many choose to categorize it as such. Barnes was not herself a Roman Catholic – far from it – and her novel of social outsiders, most of them American exiles or emigrés in 1920s Paris is neither pietistic nor does it promulgate faith in any edifying way, at least not as any strict or devout Catholic would see it.2 Nightwood nonetheless is deeply inscribed with traditional Catholic doctrines of grace and virtue, even if these religious concepts are presented in a most irreligious manner by a most sacrilegious and, for all intents and purposes, sinful character. This inversion of values and positions – the distinction between sinner and saint, for example, is blurred to the point of illegibility – is also typical of a form of queer discourse, namely camp, that would, on the surface, seem a completely unlikely (if not inappropriate) vehicle for the sacred. Yet, through the medium of camp, the universal sorrows of humankind become, to some extent, more endurable if never actually acceptable. It is also to this end that many, including some of Barnes’ characters, seek the comfort of religious faith, if usually through unorthodox means. Within the narrative, the “invert’s” inversion of grace and virtue juxtapose camp and Catholicism as constructs coexisting and even abetting each other in conferring a perverse sort of comfort for souls in distress. The doomed faux aristocrat Felix Volkbein observes, “The unendurable is the beginning of the curve of joy.”3 For those whom a putatively polite society (and thus the 129 10.1057/9780230287778 - Catholic Figures, Queer Narratives, Edited by Lowell Gallagher, Frederick S. Roden and Patricia Juliana Smith


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organized variety of religion) would shun, that might well be as much comfort as one can find. Since the 1980s, the once obscure Nightwood has become permanently inscribed in the Modernist canon; as Marjorie Garber aptly observes, it “is probably as familiar to today’s students . . . as [T. S.] Eliot’s The Waste Land was to a previous generation of readers.”4 Consequently, the novel has become the object of considerable critical interest. That most critiques have focused primarily on the ill-fated lesbian relationship between the obsessively bereaved Nora Flood and the enigmatic Robin Vote – characters based, respectively, on Barnes and her lover Thelma Wood – is neither surprising nor undue. Nora’s relentless quest to comprehend the meaning of Robin’s deracinated life and her seemingly incongruous elopement with the wealthy if wretchedly abject American widow Jenny Petherbridge serves as an incitement for Nora to create a satisfactory narrative through which to justify the ways of herself to herself. Although this triangulated affair shapes the novel’s primary plot, the female characters involved in it are nonetheless inclined to a certain lack of depth, not through any shortcoming on the part of the author, but rather necessarily so in conveying the emotional transience of the quasi-surrealistic and neo-Gothic bois de nuit in which these socially ostracized individuals dwell. Because these female characters live outside the institutions that have traditionally tethered women within social institutions such as marriage and family – despite some vain efforts on Nora’s part to create a simulacrum of domesticity with Robin – some center of consciousness is necessary in order to differentiate the lovers’ story from the endlessly diffuse nightmare it so intensely resembles. This is the function of the fourth “woman” in the novel, the non-female “woman that God forgot” (143).5 Doctor Matthew-Mighty-grain-of-salt-Dante-O’Connor is the novel’s animus/anima mundi who, in the most extravagant and overblown rhetoric, exhorts, admonishes and explains the human condition, love, loss, suffering, decay, and death to any and all in his proximity. Within his habitual environment, a demi-monde of homosexuals, prostitutes, circus performers, and other social outcasts in late 1920s Paris, his various names are apt. The name Matthew recalls the tax collector turned apostle, one of the social pariahs with whom Christ, scandalizing the bourgeoisie of ancient Judea, kept company. Dante, of course, alludes to the author of La Divina Commedia, suggesting parallels with the doctor’s tales of the earthly Inferno that comprises the human tragicomedy. And if his surname only remotely hints at his picaresque qualities as a “con-artist,” the proverbial grain of salt with which his pronouncements must be taken is surely a mighty one.



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His numerous perversities and shortcomings notwithstanding, Matthew functions as a spiritual cynosure, however bizarre, outrageous, repugnant or heretical his pronouncements might seem on the surface. T. S. Eliot notes in his 1937 Introduction to the text that “together with his egotism and swagger . . . he has also a desperate disinterestedness and a deep humility,” qualities that coincide with what Catholic theology has traditionally deemed “moral virtues.”6 That moral virtues should exist if not thrive among those whom strict Catholics would consider immoral is a paradox that Matthew O’Connor embodies and personifies. It is, then, queerly apt that the rhetoric the doctor deploys in advising the afflicted is equally perverse and paradoxical and thus demonstrates a striking similitude to what is commonly known as “camp.”

Catholicism, camp and other true lies Matthew O’Connor is, in and of himself, a sign of contradiction: a “woman” who is not a woman, a “doctor” who is not really a doctor, and, by his own admission, a chronic if not pathological liar. He is also an alcoholic, a homosexual, a transvestite, a petty thief, and a social parasite; yet he is also, in his own words, “God’s other Son” and, as such, not only a Tiresias who has experienced the sexualities of both sexes but also an alter Christus who has absorbed the sins and suffering of all humankind.7 To embody such conflicting qualities and personae – arguably lies in and of themselves – is a function of the Catholicism that the doctor, “as good a Catholic as they make,” professes: “[B]y his own peculiar perversity God has made me a liar” (154, 73). In the inverted world of the social outcast, lies might well be the only effective means of relating the truth – or any reasonable facsimile thereof. Early in the novel, before either Nora or Robin is presented as an integral character, the doctor delivers a highly metaphorical and utterly convoluted disquisition on “the Lutheran or Protestant church versus the Catholic”: The Catholic is the girl that you love so much that she can lie to you, and the Protestant is the girl that loves you so much that you can lie to her, and pretend a lot that you do not feel. Luther . . . went wild and chattered like a monkey in a tree and started something he never thought to start . . . an obscene megalomania – and wild and wanton stranger that that is, it must come clear and cool and long or not at all. What do you listen to in the Protestant church? To the words of a man who has been chosen for his eloquence – and not



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Put more succinctly, the most significant differences distinguishing the two churches from one another, according to the doctor, reside not so much in their respective theologies and dogmas as they do in their discursive modes and aesthetics. Protestantism, in this view, requires a passive audience’s reception of the “eloquence” – or the monkey-like chattering – of its appointed functionaries. Therein lies the “obscene megalomania” that, in turn, allows for the pretense of “a lot that you do not feel.” Catholicism, by contrast, functions through narrative, the “story” of redemption, simultaneously intensely personal and utterly dispersonal, that informs its liturgy and remains constant, irrespective of its teller: But turn to the Catholic church, go into mass at any moment – what do you walk in upon? Something that’s already in your blood. You know the story the priest is telling as he moves from one side of the altar to the other, be he a cardinal, Leo X, or just some poor bastard from Sicily who has discovered that the peccata fortiter among his goats no longer masses his soul, and has, God knows, been God’s child from the start – it makes no difference. Why? Because you are sitting there with your own meditations and a legend . . . and mingling them both with the Holy Spoon, which is that story; or you can get yourself into the confessional, where, in sonorous prose, lacking contrition (if you must) you can speak of the condition of the knotty, tangled soul and be answered in Gothic echoes, mutual and instantaneous – one saying hail to your farewell. (20–1) Within an aesthetic environment that stimulates the imagination – Catholic churches have traditionally been ornate while Protestant ones, eschewing “graven images,” are noted for their asceticism – the individual believer’s opportunities for creating self-narrative, such as that of “your own meditations” or the confessional, are rife. Neither the factuality nor authenticity of these stories is of consequence. Rather, because they “speak of the condition of the knotty, tangled soul,” they will almost inevitably tell some sort of truth to the particular seeker thereof. If the doctor’s argument implies that one’s ability to “love” a religion is related to its aesthetics, his observations are historically congruent.



too eloquent either, mark you, or he gets the bum’s rush from the pulpit for fear he will use his golden tongue for political ends. For a golden tongue is never satisfied until it has wagged itself over the destiny of a nation, and this the church is wise enough to know. (20)

As Ellis Hanson records, several generations of homosexual decadents and aesthetes through the late nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries – and thus the doctor’s most immediate precursors – found Catholicism a particularly attractive locus for the “all too familiar cultural constellation of spirituality, aestheticism, effeminacy, and male homosexuality”: [The decadents] regarded the Church as, among other things, a theater for the articulation of homosexual desire and identity through faith and through ritual. With Wilde and the Oxford movement, aestheticism joined hands with Roman Catholic ritualism to create an atmosphere of homoerotic exuberance unprecedented in the history of Christianity. Anglo-Catholicism, with its attention to ritual and vestments, acquired a certain gender-bending extravagance and exoticism within the context of Victorian puritanism. . . . By the 1920s, the notion of Anglo and Roman Catholicism as a magnet for homosexuals had passed from a running joke to a simple fact.8 For Matthew O’Connor, this “theater” exists not only with the ritual he so elaborately describes but also extends itself through the mundane and often grotesque realities of the quotidian. That ritual and the grotesque merge in “Gothic echoes” is no accident. As George Haggerty observes elsewhere in this volume, “Catholic Gothic fiction and the history of sexuality . . . overlap in countless ways,” from the eighteenth century, through fin-de-siècle decadence and into Modernism and beyond: “Sexuality itself . . . depends on its religious context to exert its full cultural significance. Sexuality and religion are not opposite poles . . . they are inextricably bound in the cultural imagination.” This is certainly the case in Nightwood; the despised and rejected characters, comprehending the putative damnability of their sexuality, simultaneously culturally situate their religious aspirations and fears within a Gothic sensibility. As the narrative mode that most closely evokes a sense of sin and decay, the Gothic is indeed an apt vehicle for the representation of a world seen most clearly in the dark. So, too, does the Gothic register the aesthetic appeal of Catholicism to queer epistemology in this novel. Felix and Robin, seemingly unlikely converts, both in their respective ways seek something intangible that lies within the realm of the emotive or aesthetic rather than the doctrinal. It is little wonder, then, that their intellectually deficient child Guido is, in some sense, a perfect mystic, comprehending and appreciating Catholicism through purely synesthestic means.





The relationship between religious experience and the aesthetic manifestation of that which is to be believed is hardly accidental; indeed, the latter is vital, if not absolutely necessary, to the former. Hanson notes that “The Church is always at the mercy of language in the sense that the word is the paradoxical precursor of the Word, whose very transcendence is a symptom of its contamination”: “How, after all, is the transcendent nature of God made known? How does the Church make its fascination palpable? Inevitably, the answer is through language, through the symbol, through the brilliant lie that is great art.”9 That believing in a religious “truth” requires the medium of lies is a paradox that is certainly not unfamiliar in Catholic theology. John Henry, Cardinal Newman, made an explicit point of this in his Apologia Pro Vita Sua: “Almost all authors, Catholic and Protestant, admit, that when a just cause is present, there is some kind or other of verbal misleading, which is not a sin.”10 To this end, Newman cites a long theological tradition including Clement of Alexandria, Augustine of Hippo, and Alfonso Liguori – and, however ironically, John Milton. Doctor O’Connor’s skewed allusion to Luther’s dictum to “sin boldly” is in its own way a perverse echo of Newman’s own rather disingenuous evocation of the Protestant reformer: “For myself, I can fancy myself thinking it was allowable in extreme cases for me to lie, but never to equivocate. Luther said ‘Pecca fortiter.’ I anathemize his formal sentiment, but there is a truth in it, when spoken of material acts” (267).11 Matthew, like Newman, “anathemizes” much about Luther, yet for his own subversive (and self-justifying) ends, transforms the Protestant exhortation into an ironic Catholic one by means of a grammatically corrupt turn, rendering the imperative verb into a noun and thus creating (as far as the phrase can be translated), a bold if undefined “sin” (peccata) that is, he suggests, rife among the Catholic congregation. Though undoubtedly earnest in his sentiments, Newman, by refining too deeply upon moral implications, demonstrates through his own discourse the rhetorical instability that is almost inherent in any argument that attempts to distinguish the boundaries between truth and lies; even so, the extraordinary manipulations of language that Newman employs threaten to undermine his argument through reduction to absurdity. Matthew, on the other hand, boldly embraces the very ambiguity that Newman attempts to dispel, accepting that many lies are true and many truths are lies, for in admitting that he is a liar, the doctor pointedly illustrates the painful truth of the human condition that can never be certain of the divine.



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The doctor’s lies, while couched in the language of religiosity, frequently exhibit the histrionic and sardonic qualities of camp, the subversive rhetorical and performative mode associated, more frequently than not, with queer discourse and subculture. Even as the doctor’s explanation of the affective differences between Protestantism and Catholicism contains certain elements of truth, it is, at the same time, in great part egregious if inspired nonsense, designed to give the impression of authoritative truth through its aphoristic quality. Through carefully deployed hyperbole and by inverting the serious and the trivial as well as the sacred and the profane, camp creates a double discourse whereby its statements can be either dismissed as the supercilious “ravings” of the marginalized or read as a dangerously subversive if nonetheless absurdly amusing commentary on social values. As is the case in the doctor’s explanation of Catholicism (or, one might argue, in the Catholic practice itself), the literal truth of the matter at hand is not particularly significant, as the symbolic value of the “stories” that camp tells are what ultimately matter. Camp, as so many critics have demonstrated, is a discursive mode so replete with slippage that its definitions remain elusive.12 Certain characteristics, however, can be observed, as demonstrated in Philip Core’s self-consciously campy litany (à la the provocative Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray) of “Camp Rules”: CAMP is a disguise that fails. . . . CAMP is moral anarchy which makes room for the self without altering the attitudes of society. . . . CAMP is a lie which tells the truth. CAMP is behaving illegally with impunity. . . . CAMP is embarrassment without cowardice. CAMP is gender without genitals.13 These attributes of camp all amply apply to the character of Doctor O’Connor, who, in his religious maunderings, realizes that what is purely spiritual, although lacking a physical body and thus lacking genitals, is ferociously genderized by those who create God in their own image and likeness, a practice to which he is himself no stranger. Moreover, certain aspects of pre-Vatican II Catholic devotionalism, particularly its rituals, vestiments, symbols and sensory stimuli, were sufficiently excessive so as to be campy (albeit perhaps unwittingly) and to appeal historically to any number of queer aesthetes. Eve Kosofsky





Sedgwick observes that “Catholicism . . . is famous for giving countless gay and proto-gay children the shock of the possibility of adults who don’t marry, of men in dresses, of passionate theatre, of introspective investment, of lives filled with what could, ideally without diminution, be called the work of the fetish.”14 All of these “possibilities,” rife with excessiveness as they are, provide a more than ample supply of grist for the camp mill, even as they offer queer individuals a haven from the strictures of the compulsory heterosexuality enforced by Protestantism. It follows, then, that Matthew O’Connor, acutely aware of his queerness and Catholic sinfulness and thus in need of a means of self-justification, would find camp a most efficacious means for telling his “stories.” Even though his “stories” are, more often than not, elaborate falsehoods, they rarely fail to illuminate some truth about the human condition. The same could be said for his version of Catholicism. Early in the novel, the doctor tells two droll and grotesque stories about socially marginalized individuals, a black circus performer and a physically deformed woman, respectively. Matthew first describes Nikka, “who used to fight the bear in the Cirque de Paris,” “tattooed from head to heel with all the ameublement of depravity” (16). The multitudinous inscriptions on his body run the gamut from the sacred to the obscene, comprising a literally embodied metanarrative of Christian theology, European history, high culture, cabbalistic magic, and scatology inextricably entwined. Although his condition is, in the sight of respectable society, irremedially abject, Nikka’s perspective argues otherwise: “I asked him why all this barbarity; he answered that he loved beauty and would have it about him” (17). The doctor’s second story concerns Mademoiselle Basquette, “who was damned from the waist down, a girl without legs, built like a medieval abuse” (26). Despite her physical limitations, the young woman “wheeled herself through the Pyrenees on a board,” even after being abducted, raped and abandoned by a sailor. The doctor is moved by her sorry plight and, in a gesture that foreshadows his consoling the bereft Nora Flood, he wishes “to give her a present for what of her was missing” and asks what she would most desire: “[S]he said, ‘Pearls – they go with everything!’ ” (26). On the surface, these stories seem absurd and incredible at best, cruel and demeaning jokes at worst. On a deeper level, however, they become parables, anecdotes for teaching concepts that would be rejected by a literal-minded audience if told outright. That Christ himself used parables to instruct his followers is hardly coincidental, even if Matthew’s didactic tales add a significant camp twist in their deployment. What



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both stories illustrate is a basic human desire for beauty amidst squalor and abjection, an aesthetic truth that finds a theological analogue in the concept of grace. The Baltimore Catechism, the primary pedagogical text for American Catholic children between 1885 and the mid-1960s, concisely defines grace, a matter of elaborate dogmatic debate for Catholics and Protestants alike, as “a supernatural gift of God bestowed on us, through the merits of Jesus Christ, for our salvation. . . . Grace is necessary to salvation, because without grace we can do nothing to merit heaven.”15 For the subjects of Matthew’s narratives – indeed, for virtually all of the characters in Barnes’ novel – salvation, at least in the traditional Christian sense, is a doctrinal impossibility. But if Beauty is the highest good for the aesthete – as Oscar Wilde argues, “Even a colour-sense is more important, in the development of the individual, than a sense of right and wrong” – then having beauty about one contributes to a sense of salvation against the hell in which those whom society despises and rejects dwell on this mortal coil.16 Camp functions in a similar manner. David Bergman notes that camp “has helped gay men and women to survive in a homophobic society and to reinforce their feelings of a gay community,” even if “it has also reconciled them to their oppression and made them feel that such oppression is ‘natural’ or at least ‘unavoidable’ ” (135). While Matthew does not suggest that the forces that exclude himself and others – Nora and Robin as well as Nikka and Mademoiselle Basquette – are “natural,” in the historical setting of interbellum Europe they are perhaps as unavoidable as they are inevitable. Ellis Hanson, however, posits an even more profound and spiritual relationship between camp, marginalization and theological virtues such as faith and hope: Camp is . . . extremely valuable as a specifically queer mode of expression, a potentially subversive form of humor but also a backhanded mode of worship. Even Susan Sontag, in her famous essay on the subject, recognized in camp a paradoxically genuine devotion for the institution that is ostensibly ridiculed. Just as drag queens adore the tragic divas that they travesty, so ecclesiastical camp springs to the defense of the . . . Church. (354–5) Accordingly, Matthew’s camp preachments and tirades, even at their most seemingly mocking and derisive, can be read as a manifestation of yet another “moral virtue,” that of compassion. This is most readily evinced, as I shall subsequently argue, in his confessor-like exchanges with Nora.





Sontag has argued a now-familiar connection between homosexuals and Jews in relation to the cultural phenomenon of camp: “Jews and homosexuals are the outstanding creative minorities in contemporary urban culture. Creative, that is, in the truest sense: they are creators of sensibilities. The two pioneering forces of modern sensibility are Jewish moral seriousness and homosexual aestheticism and irony.”17 Nightwood not only affirms this argument but, however paradoxically, challenges it to the utmost extreme, most notably in the character of “Baron” Felix Volkbein, Robin Vote’s erstwhile husband, who is an audience of one to the doctor’s comparison of denominations. Felix is the son of a bourgeois Viennese (ergo Catholic) “woman of great strength and military beauty,” who died in giving birth to him. Though his maternity would, at least technically, render him a gentile, he nonetheless bares the social stigma of his father Guido, “a Jew of Italian descent . . . a gourmet and a dandy, never appearing in public without the ribbon of some quite unknown distinction tinging his buttonhole with a faint thread” (1). Guido, already dead half a year by the time of his son’s birth, had so internalized the anti-Semitism endemic in Viennese society that he would walk about the city, “carrying in a conspicuously clenched fist the exquisite handkerchief of yellow and black linen that cried aloud of the ordinance of 1468, issued by one Pietro Barbo, demanding that, with a rope about its neck, Guido’s race should run in the Corso for the amusement of the Christian populace” (2). Yet even while clinging – both literally and symbolically – to this relic of a racial memory of ostracism, he effectively erased his racial heritage through the “saddest and most futile gesture of all . . . his pretence to a barony,” augmented by a conversion to Catholicism and the “most amazing and inaccurate proofs,” including a false pedigree, an appropriated coat of arms, and obscure paintings obtained through trade that he claims as those of his parents (3). Guido’s pretense is carried on by a son “fashioned by [Guido’s] own preoccupation, the remorseless homage to nobility, the genuflexion the hunted body makes from muscular contraction, going down before the impending and the inaccessible” (2–3). Felix’s pretensions are thus far greater, both qualitatively and quantitatively, than those of his companion Matthew O’Connor, the Catholic Irish-American expatriate and faux physician. The doctor is well aware that Felix’s condition is, ultimately, one of lack; his impressions of Felix give rise to the story about Mademoiselle Basquet. Matthew explains to Frau Mann, a circus aerialiste who performs as the Duchess of Broadback (thus attracting the titleobsessed “baron”): “There’s something missing and whole about the



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Baron Felix – damned from the waist up” (26). The doctor’s implication is that Felix is, in effect, more lacking and more to be pitied than a legless young woman who, in spite of her unfortuante state, is nonetheless able to approach life with humility and dignity and to appreciate simplicity and beauty. There is, however, little of the connection between Jews and homosexuals that Sontag describes evident in juxtaposition between Felix and Matthew. One explanation for this lack might well be that while Felix takes himself (and the continuation of European tradition) seriously – indeed, to the point of self-annihilating absurdity – he has inherited his father’s forfeiture of the “moral seriousness” that Sontag notes. Felix is, moreover, the only unambiguously heterosexual character in the novel, and his spiritual and psychic heaviness, as well as his concern for perpetuating a race and a culture that excludes him, are symptomatic of heterosexual privilege. In effect, his connections to the twilight world the other characters inhabit is, like his socializing with circus performers, a sort of “slumming” that allows him an outsider’s sense of superiority over those who exist at society’s furthest extremes.18 It is little wonder, then, that most of the doctor’s camp rhetoric is lost upon Felix, because to engage in any sort of probing beneath the surface would inevitably require self-confrontation and thus self-knowledge. The doctor’s lies are elaborate fabulations that inevitably contain a kernel of truth; Felix’s lies, concerned as they are with obscuring historical fact, are simply falsehoods. In Nightwood, then, the “pioneering forces of modern [camp] sensibility” are, pace Sontag, “homosexual aestheticism and irony” and Catholic moral obsessiveness – ever acutely aware of sinfulness and damnation – if not moral seriousness.

The watchman and the all-night confessional The main plot of Nightwood, that is, the history of the romantic relationship between Robin Vote and Nora Flood, comprises slightly less than the first half of the novel; the greater part of the text is devoted to Nora’s mourning the loss of Robin, a virtually static state in which the doctor’s counsels provide the sole narrative dynamic. While the long dialogues between two characters – which often more closely resemble parallel monologues – can be (and generally are) read as Nora’s confessions of grief, they are nonetheless undergirded by a camp apparatus that prevents this longest portion of the plot from descending into pure self-indulgent bathos. This is in evidence from the beginning of the




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The uninvited guest is taken aback to find herself in a transvestite’s secret closet: On a maple dresser . . . lay a rusty pair of forceps, a broken scalpel, half a dozen odd instruments that she could not place, a catheter, some twenty perfume bottles, almost empty, pomades, creams, rouges, powder boxes and puffs. From the halfopen drawers of this chiffonier hung laces, ribands, stockings, ladies’ underclothing and an abdominal brace, which gave the impression that the feminine finery had suffered venery. A swill-pail stood at the head of the bed, brimming with abominations. . . . In the narrow iron bed, with its heavy and dirty linen sheets, lay the doctor in a woman’s flannel nightgown. The doctor’s head, with its over-large black eyes, its full gun-metal cheeks and chin, was framed in the golden semi-circle of a wig with long pendent curls that touched his shoulders. . . . (78–9) The spectacle is as campy as it is grotesque. Gender difference has run amok in one individual, beauty mixes perversely with squalor, and the real and the imagined collide and entangle. Nora quickly surmises the situation with a fairy-tale analogy: “God, children know something they can’t tell; they like Red Riding Hood and the wolf in bed!” (79). Matthew, in this instance, would seem the amalgam of the girl and the beast if not the offspring of such an unlikely union. Nora, however, is so single-minded in her emotional misery that she fails either to register any outward sign of embarrassment, to apologize for her intrusion, or to extend any ordinary social greeting. Rather, she simply blurts out: “Doctor, I have come to ask you to tell me everything you know about the night” (79). The doctor readily obliges, telling her far more about the subject than most individuals would ever wish to know. If Nora’s expectation were that Matthew’s knowledge of the night would ease the pain of her loss, she is shortly and sadly disabused of it. Her difficulty, she believes, lies in thinking about the night, “but thinking about something you know nothing about does not help” (80). Not having been trained to see things through a Catholic perspective, which requires the acceptance that much must remain a “mystery” to mortal beings, she imagines that it is somehow possible to grasp the ineffable, whether it is something so inchoate as the night or so vast as human



novel’s pivotal chapter, “Watchman, What of the Night?” when Nora awakens the doctor in the pre-dawn hours to seek a cure for her heartache.

suffering. The doctor, however, would be well acquainted with the Baltimore Catechism, which taught Catholic children to accept, unquestioningly and without exception, that “A mystery is a truth which we cannot fully understand” (31), a “truth” that, for all intents and purposes, appears absurdly false to anyone who does not willingly suspend all disbelief. He therefore comprehends the impossibility of explaining the inexplicable and thus responds with advice that is impossible to carry out. In the course of his circuitous discussion of “the night, now, in other times, in foreign countries” (81), comprising such diverse topics as “late kings letting water into plush cans and fine woodwork” (82), filthiness of the French versus the American “fear of indignities” (85), monks who bow down and “revolve around the Great Enigma” (83), the quality of sleep for various animal species, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah and the burning of Rome, the nature of dreams, the symbolic significance of bodily excretions, and much more, he exhorts her to “think of the night the day long, and of the day the night through,” a task which she is neither willing nor able to perform. The situation and the topics are serious to the point of bleakness; yet there is also an element to the rhetoric and comportment of the characters that is comic to the point of absurdity. To every observation Matthew makes, Nora responds with either a question about Robin or an expression of acute distress, often both simultaneously. Much of what Matthew tells her, moreover, straddles a fine line between profundity and nonsense, and thus the pathos of their interactions frequently teeters on the verge of high camp tragicomedy. This is evident when Nora attempts to interrupt Matthew’s stream of consciousness by asking about her lost love object: “. . . . You thought you knew, and you hadn’t even shuffled the cards – now the nights of one period are not the nights of another. Neither are the nights of one city the nights of another. Let us take Paris for an instance, and France for a fact. Ah, mon dieu! La nuit effroyable! La nuit, qui est une immense plaine, et le cœur qui est une petite extrémité! Ah, good Mother mine, Notre Dame-de-bonne-Garde! Intercede for me now, while yet I explain what I’m coming to! French nights are those which all nations seek the world over – and have you noticed that? Ask Dr. Mighty O’Connor; the reason the doctor knows everything is because he’s been everywhere at the wrong time and has now become anonymous.” “But,” Nora said, “I never thought of the night as a life at all – I’ve never lived it – why did she?”




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Matthew’s elaborations, in truth, shed little light on anything and leave Robin’s actions as inexplicable as ever. Still, he will not be interrupted. Later, when Nora approaches hysteria, overwhelmed by so much that is so incomprehensible, the conversation threatens to become a competition between drama queens: “And what of the sleep of animals? The great sleep of the elephant, and the fine thin sleep of the bird?” Nora said: “I can’t stand it, I don’t know how – I am frightened. What is it? What is it in her that is doing this?” “Oh, for God’s sake!” the doctor said, “give me the smelling salts.” She got up, looking among the debris on the stand. Inhaling, he pushed his head back into the pillow; then he said: “Take history at night: have you ever thought of that now? . . .” (85–6) A scene of a doctor “slapping sense” into a hysterical patient (usually female) or dowsing her with a glass of water to “snap her out of it” (as Matthew does to the fainted Robin earlier in the novel) is familiar to the point of cliché, as is calling for smelling salts for a “lady” about to swoon. Here, though, the cliché is inverted into a camp scenario and narrative expectation is disrupted: the patient screams out and the doctor takes the smelling salts himself, turning himself into the damsel in distress, fainting because the patient is screaming. Still, once recovered, he goes on in the same vein as before. Camp can often appear cruel. Some critics have seen Matthew’s actions as bullying, even “patriarchal.” Karen Kaivola, for example, sees the foregoing scene as “Nora’s struggle to articulate her own version of her identity and experience and to speak of these things to Matthew O’Connor, a male whose compulsive need to speak is overwhelming and often threatens to drown Nora’s voice entirely.”19 This is, of course, an ironic analysis of a woman trapped in a male body, one who, as he subsequently explains, “never asked better than to boil some good man’s potatoes and toss up a child for him every nine months by the fire” (91). Such an argument also fails to take into account that Nora does not, in fact, seek out the doctor “to articulate her own version



“I’m telling you of French nights at the moment,” the doctor went on, “and why we all go into them. The night and the day are two travels, and the French – gut-greedy and fist-tight though they often are – alone leave testimony of the two in the dawn; we tear up one for the sake of the other; not so the French.” (82)

of her identity,” but rather she does so in hopes that he can tell her what it is about Robin’s psychology – identity is precisely what Robin seems to lack – that causes her to behave as she does. To see Matthew in this light is also to forget that Nora has asked him to perform a task that is humanly impossible: to explain to her satisfaction the perverse workings of the human heart and will. T. S. Eliot perceives as much: His monologues, brilliant and witty in themselves as they are, are not dictated by an indifference to other human beings, but on the contrary by a hypersensitive awareness of them. When Nora comes to visit him at night . . . he perceives at once that the only thing he can do for her . . . is to talk torrentially, even though she hardly takes in anything he says. . . . But most of the time he is talking to drown the still small wailing and whining of humanity, to make more supportable its shame and less ignoble its misery. (xiii–xiv) What seems cruelty is often kindness, then, just as what seems “sinful” can often be virtuous. That the outward appearance of a person, a word or an action can be the polar opposite of its reality is a familiar concept in both camp and Catholicism; in effect, what one sees is not necessarily what one gets. After his prolonged “torrent” of words about the meaning of the night, Matthew relents a bit and tells Nora what she really wants to hear, not about the night but rather a gossipy report of what he knows about Robin’s elopement with Jenny. Just before relating this information, however, the confessor makes a confession by telling Nora of his own erotic life and its sorrows – his transgendered psyche that compels him to seek (but never find) what might pass for love among the “Sodomites” who frequent the pissoirs of Paris. The significance of this confession might well be lost on Nora, who makes little response to Matthew’s revelations, but his point, as he repeatedly attempts to impress upon her, is that human suffering is universal, that no one person has a monopoly on grief. If Nora never learns to accept this, the concept is nonetheless deeply inscribed in Catholicism and its devotions. In the words of the Salve Regina, a traditional prayer to the Virgin Mary, the condition of the “poor banished children of Eve” in the mortal realm is one of “mourning and weeping in this vale of tears.”20 Camp, too, not only intuits this but exists because of it; indeed, camp exaggerates our sufferings, as much as or even more than does this hyperemotive prayer, so that we might laugh at our pain to keep ourselves from being overwhelmed by our tears.





With the more philosophical Felix, who, like Nora, has been left bereft and bewildered by Robin’s earlier desertion, Matthew is more direct in discussing the vast and inescapable realm of human suffering. In discussing Guido, the son feeble in both body and mind that Robin bore Felix, the doctor admonishes him to “Seek no further for calamity . . . After all, calamity is what we are all seeking” (119). The attraction of calamity is the grand scale on which it exists, as if its very vastness confers upon it a nobility that ordinary sorrows cannot attain. Matthew repeats the rhetoric of inversion – but now without double discourse of camp – when he dismisses cultural biases that would deem the “maladjusted” Guido – or his mother – ”damned”: “Guido is not damned . . . [He] is blessed – he is peace of mind – he is what you have always been looking for – Aristocracy . . . is a condition in the mind of the people when they try to think of something else and better – funny . . . that a man never knows when he has found what he has always been looking for” (121) The ambiguity of the final fragment is significant; Felix has always sought a type of nobility that was not legitimately his, yet he has realized a more profound grace, the doctor suggests, through the calamity that he claims we all seek. This inversion of expectations recalls the Catholic teaching that there are no unanswered prayers, but rather that the answers to our prayers are not always what we imagine them to be. In the course of the same conversation, Matthew also inverts – or subverts – common understandings of purported virtues, particularly pity. Pity, he observes, “is an intrusion when in the presence of a person who is a new position in an old account.” While the reference is to Guido, it could just as well be to Nora. He continues by saying that “You can only pity those limited to their generation. Pity is timely and dies with the person; a pitiable man is his own last tie” (117). For this reason, he constantly goads Nora to think about matters outside herself, to see her sorrow as part of the common human condition. In this sense, he distinguishes the true virtue, compassion, from pity, its vulgar simulacrum. Left to her own devices and obsessions, however, Nora becomes pitiable. This, he suggests, is true morbidity. It is on precisely this point that he begins his outburst when he next sees Nora, after his unexplained absence of “a million years” (124).

Consummatum est In his final appearance in the novel, Matthew, for the most part, drops the artifice of camp and presents Nora with the cold reality of univer-



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sal human suffering that she seems incapable of comprehending. He enters to find Nora still obsessively writing to Robin; time, absence, and his counsel have had little effect on her single-minded grief: “Can’t you be quiet now? . . . Can’t you be done now, can’t you give up? Now be still, now that you know what the world is about, knowing it’s about nothing?” He urges her to break the endless cycle in which she is trapped by suggesting that she herself should learn to practice the virtue of compassion: “Isn’t it bitter enough for Robin that she is lost somewhere without receiving mail?” (124). Nora, though, seeks self-justification in her pain and claims priority for her own feelings: “If I don’t write to her, what am I to do? I can’t sit here for ever – thinking!” (125). As his anger and frustration increase, the camp that informed his earlier conversations gives way to sarcasm, as in his advice to “Make birds’ nests with your teeth” (27), suggesting that such an absurd and pointless exercise would be of greater purpose than her continually seeking answers from Robin, or in thinking he would like to “instigate Meat-Axe Day, and out of the goodness of my heart I would whack off your head with a couple of others” in order to put her out of her misery and relieve his own (129). Just as camp has failed him in his attempts to connect with Nora, so, it would seem, does Catholicism. Only when Matthew tells of his own crisis of faith does Nora momentarily cease her writing and her lamentations: And once Father Lucas said to me, “Be simple, Matthew, life is a simple book, and an open book, read and be simple as the beasts in the field; just being miserable isn’t enough – you have got to know how.” So I got to thinking and I said to myself, “This is a terrible thing that Father Lucas has put on me – be simple like the beasts and yet think and harm nobody.” (131) This apparently contradictory advice illuminates for Matthew the moral impossibilities that Catholicism often imposes on believers. Father Lucas suggests that he must become as “simple as the beasts in the field” (a perverse twist, perhaps, on Christ’s injunction to his disciples to “consider the lilies of the field”) and therefore avoid anxiety by trusting in God’s providence.21 To be a beast in the field, however, is a different matter altogether, as Catholic doctrine holds animals to be without souls and without intellect and therefore unable to think. To emulate them would be to forsake these divine gifts to humankind. Possibly lurking in the priest’s advice is one of the loopholes with which Catholic





moral doctrine is rife. What might otherwise be a “mortal” sin (i.e. one deserving eternal damnation) is only a venial sin (i.e. one that does not merit hell and can be easily remitted by means of an act of contrition) if it is not premeditated. In other words, God-given intellect, complicated by the Fall of Adam and Eve and the knowledge of Good and Evil, is what gives humans free will and obliges them to use their minds. At the same time, if an individual does not think about sin but nonetheless falls into it “accidentally,” it is not as sinful as if it were planned. This is undoubtedly the condition under which many sexual acts occur, an impulse on the spur of the moment. A beast in a field with other beasts is likely to encounter various sexual opportunities upon which it acts without rationalization. One such as Matthew might, for example, enter a pissoir to relieve the “natural” demands of his bladder without intending aught else, but a sudden temptation to “unnatural” passion might appear and be acted upon without premeditation. Thus, not to think would be not to risk damnation, even if the entire concept is at odds with the intellect. Seeking some resolution to the conundrum with which the priest has burdened him, Matthew takes refuge in a dark abandoned church, where he confronts the physical body whose sex is not that of his mind by exposing his flaccid penis as an offering to the God responsible for the “permanent mistake” that has rendered him so: I spoke to Tiny O’Toole because it was his turn; I had tried everything else. There was nothing for it this time but to make him face the mystery so it could see him clear as it saw me. So then I whispered, “What is this thing, Lord?” And I began to cry. . . . I said, “It is I, my Lord, who know there’s beauty in any permanent mistake like me. . . . But . . . I’m not able to stay permanent unless you help me, O Book of Concealment! . . . So tell me, what is permanent of me, me or him?” (132) Matthew’s prayer aptly demonstrates the Catholic sensibility Nora lacks; he realizes “the mystery” that there is much that cannot be understood in human terms, that the ways of God often cannot be justified to man – or woman – much less to a woman mistakenly assigned male genitalia. He realizes that he must live with his inherent contradiction, unlike Nora, who endlessly contemplates and tortures herself by querying the enigmas that Robin embodies. The shift in tone from Matthew’s usual camp banter to this wrenching forthrightness demonstrates quite effectively how camp functions as a ludic mask to disguise – or simply



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make tolerable – the tragedy that lurks behind it. Yet even this bleak honesty fails to shake Nora from her obsessions; her only response is condescension: “Sometimes I don’t know why I talk to you. You’re so like a child” (133). With his compassion strained to its limits, Matthew reveals the truth about lies, not only his own, but, in some part, those of Catholicism – and camp – as well: Do you know what has made me the greatest liar this side of the moon, telling my stories to people like you, to take the mortal agony out of their guts, and to stop them from rolling about, and drawing up their feet, and screaming with their eyes staring over their knuckles with misery that they are trying to keep off saying, “Say something, Doctor, for the love of God!” And me talking away like mad. Well, that, and nothing else, has made me the liar I am. (135) Matthew’s explanation of the origin of his lying curiously recalls one of Newman’s examples of a “just cause” for “untruth”: Another ground of certain authors for saying that an untruth is not a lie where there is just cause, is, that veracity is a kind of justice, and therefore, when we have no duty of justice to tell truth to another, it is no sin not to do so. Hence we may say the thing that is not, to children, to madmen, to men who ask impertinent questions, to those whom we hope to benefit by misleading. (Newman, 260) Matthew, however, does not seek “justification” of his state as a “liar,” and, in doing so, might be said to tell the truth about lies. The truth, though, has little effect as Nora grows even more hysterical and solipsistic before the doctor finally shouts his final lesson on the universal nature of human suffering: “Do you think, for Christ’s sweet sake . . . that I am so happy that you should cry down my neck? Do you think there is no lament in this world, but your own? Is there not a forebearing saint somewhere?” (154) Having failed in his ultimate attempt, Matthew leaves in silence. He seeks the refuge of alcohol in the neighborhood café, only to find himself engaged in a dispute over the nature of truth with a querulous defrocked priest, who taunts Matthew about a story told previously: “I’ve always wanted to know whether you were ever really married or not” (159). The priest assumes that truth and fact are synonymous, but





Matthew counters that the facts matter little, and that those who are angered by his fabulations merely “regret weeping for a myth, as if that were not practically the fate of all the tears in the world!” (159). Unlike Matthew, the defrocked priest is, perforce, a false confessor, one officially banned from priestly duties. The erstwhile cleric nonetheless demands to “know what is what,” and Matthew posits the foolhardiness of those who require all mysteries resolved: “[T]hat’s why you are where you are now, right down in the mud without a feather to fly with” (160). Like Nora, the priest is immured by the need to know all, which, Catholicism has always held, is not within the reach of mortal beings. To strive for such knowledge is to seek a Faustian bargain. The scene in the café is, in a sense, a profane Passion According to Matthew. Having been placed in a Christ-like scenario in which he is required to suffer for the sins of others, his compassion is depleted. Drunk and stumbling, his final words oddly echo the dying words of Christ: “It is finished.”22 Matthew, who wanted to be “the unknown beloved second” son of the Mother of God, falls short of her well-known first son; he has no salvation to offer: “Now . . . the end – mark my words – now nothing, but wrath and weeping” (150, 166). It is easy enough to read Matthew’s final scenes as evidence of JeanPaul Sartre’s oft-quoted dictum that “Hell is other people.” Robin is Nora’s hell, Nora is Matthew’s, and virtually everyone in the novel afflicts and is afflicted by other characters. There is, moreover, little to suggest the possibility of any other outcome, as salvation – the hope of Heaven – is conspicuously absent in Matthew’s version of Catholicism. If this is indeed the truth of the matter, then lies – whether those told by Matthew or Catholicism itself – become a means for making life tolerable, a “just cause” that Cardinal Newman could not conceive. It is difficult to imagine that the characters of Nightwood will do anything other than continue to live and continue to lie until death removes them from this “vale of tears.” Yet, to recall Felix Volkbein’s perspective, “The unendurable is the beginning of the curve of joy” (117). Whatever hope this dire happiness can provide is, it seems, sufficient to keep humankind from self-extinction. For this reason, the beautiful lies of Catholicism and the true lies of camp will continue to exist, if for no other reason than the refuge and cold comfort they provide for many a soul in pain.



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“A Twitch Upon the Thread”: Revisiting Brideshead Revisited Francesca Coppa

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” John 1:1 “And he said to them, ‘Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.’” Matthew 4:19

The twitch “A Twitch Upon the Thread” is the title of Book II of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. The phrase comes from G. K. Chesterton’s Father Brown stories, and is first introduced near the end of Book I. Cordelia, the youngest sister of the Flyte family, explains to protagonist Charles Ryder that her family haven’t had a particularly good track record as Catholics; her father, her brother Sebastian, and her sister Julia have all left the faith: “But God won’t let them go for long, you know. I wonder if you remember the story Mummy read us the evening Sebastian first got drunk – I mean, the bad evening. Father Brown said something like ‘I caught him’ (the thief) ‘with an unseen hook and an invisible line which is long enough to let him wander to the ends of the world and still to bring him back with a twitch upon the thread.’ ”1 Cordelia is described by her brother Sebastian as “a fervent Catholic,” and “bird-happy in her religion” (89), possibly because, as Charles later cynically suggests, she doesn’t seem to know all that much about the 149 10.1057/9780230287778 - Catholic Figures, Queer Narratives, Edited by Lowell Gallagher, Frederick S. Roden and Patricia Juliana Smith


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details (330). In religious terms, Cordelia, the youngest child of the Flyte family, is the only one who approaches Catholicism “properly” – which is to say as a child, in a childlike mode of pure faith. Cordelia, unlike her eldest brother Bridey, seems interested in the spirit of the law and not the letter. Cordelia’s God can work miracles; he can do what mere human will cannot. Sebastian and Julia may seem lost, but God’s hooks are already buried deep within his prodigal children, and it will only take a twitch upon the thread to call them home. The fisherman imagery that Waugh adopts here comes from the New Testament by way of Chesterton. Chesterton was obsessed with the idea of the Apostles, the first Catholic priests, as “fishers of men” – not only does the image pervade the Father Brown stories, but he uses it to name his other famous detective, Horne Fischer in The Man Who Knew Too Much. Chesterton’s detectives are “fishers of men,” as are some of their worst adversaries. (For example, the symbolically named “Sir Isaac Hook” in Chesterton’s “The Fad of the Fisherman” is a blackmailer who entraps and snags his victims in their “lines.” He is found dead and literally tied up with his own fishing line.) Chesterton’s metaphor makes the “unseen hook” of religious faith into a tangible thing, a physical force to be reckoned with, and he uses it to move his crime stories from the legal to the moral and spiritual levels. But Waugh adopts the fisherman imagery not straight from the Bible itself but from Chesterton’s literature – that is to say, it appears in Brideshead Revisited already pre-codified as a literary reference. “A twitch upon the thread” is the key phrase through which we are asked to interpret the rest of the novel; a twitch of the thread brings Charles back to the Flyte family and thereafter brings almost all of its characters back to God through Catholicism. But this key phrase is most specifically literary, and we are reminded that it comes from “the story that Mummy read us.” If Chesterton presents characters struggling with the humble hooks and lines that represent God’s great unseen power, Waugh’s characters are enmeshed in something far, far more powerful – the web of language and discourse.

The hook In Brideshead Revisited, the power of Catholicism is the power of a totalizing discourse which organizes all experience according to its terms. All suffering becomes Catholic suffering, all joy becomes Catholic joy, everything that happens is a part of God’s plan, and there is no outside, no way to conceptualize oneself and one’s experience differently.



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“And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” In Catholicism, the power of the Word is not to be underestimated, and the characters in Brideshead, who are literarily and linguistically sophisticated, generally recognize this power. Lady Julia, for example, describes her father’s fatal illness thus: “His heart: some long word at the heart. He is dying of a long word” (318). Similarly, Julia breaks down when her brother Bridey describes her as “living in sin”: she describes “sin” as “one little, flat, deadly word that covers a lifetime” (286), and falls into a hysteria of close reading: “ ‘Living in sin’; not just doing wrong, as I did when I went to America; doing wrong, knowing it is wrong, stopping doing it, forgetting. That’s not what they mean. That’s not Bridey’s pennyworth. He means just what it says in black and white. “Living in sin, with sin, by sin, for sin, every hour, every day, year in, year out. Waking up with sin in the morning, seeing the curtains drawn on sin, bathing it, dressing it, clipping diamonds to it, feeding it, showing it round, giving it a good time, putting it to sleep at night with a tablet of Dial if it’s fretful. “Always the same, like an idiot child carefully nursed, guarded from the world. ‘Poor Julia,’ they say, ‘she can’t go out. She’s got to take care of her little sin. A pity it ever lived,’ they say, ‘but it’s so strong. Children like that always are. Julia’s so good to her little, mad sin.’ ” (287) Here, sin is the word made flesh; for Julia, who will, at the novel’s climax, reject sin and return to Catholicism, words literally have life and are embodied in this terrifying way. The novel shows each of the major characters – Sebastian, Lord Marchmain, Julia and finally even Charles – grappling with the discourses of Catholicism. Like dominoes, they all eventually fall into faith in their turn. Sebastian’s story, including his struggle with religion, dominates Book I of the novel, subtitled “Et In Arcadia Ego.” Initially, Charles is surprised that religion is even an issue for Sebastian: “Does it make much difference to you?” “Of course. All the time.” “Well, I can’t say I’ve noticed it. Are you struggling against temptation? You don’t seem much more virtuous than me.” “I’m very, very much wickeder,” said Sebastian indignantly.



Revisiting Brideshead Revisited 151

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But religion is an issue for Sebastian; among other things, it conflicts with his homosexual desires. Lord Marchmain’s mistress, Cara, perhaps because she is herself a socially problematic person, is the only one to speak explicitly of Sebastian and Charles’s homosexual relationship; she is also the first person to warn Charles about Sebastian’s drinking. Alcoholism and homosexuality are mirrored in the novel: both are apparently acceptable vices in moderation, or as brief adolescent obsessions that express youthful high spirits, but Sebastian may be in danger of taking things too far, becoming not only a confirmed drunkard but, implicitly, a confirmed homosexual. Cara explains to Charles that she approves of, “these romantic friendships of the English and the Germans” provided “they do not go on too long” (101). Cara defines “romantic friendship” as: “a kind of love that comes to children before they know its meaning. In England it comes when you are almost men: I think I like that. It is better to have that kind of love for another boy than for a girl.” (102) Cara’s notion of homosexuality, which appears to be reflected in the events and structure of the larger novel, is that, like excessive drinking, it is a phase to be grown out of; it is the teleological precursor to an inevitable heterosexuality, which, in itself, is only a pale reflection of one’s ultimate relationship with God. But Sebastian’s very problem, in fact, is his resistance to that progression. Cara notes that: “Sebastian is in love with his own childhood. That will make him very unhappy. His Teddy-bear, his Nanny . . . and he is nineteen years old . . .” (103) There seems rather a lot we could read into the ellipses: “His Teddy-bear, his Nanny . . .” and what else, exactly? Sebastian, at nineteen, may be clinging a little too strongly to childhood, to alcohol, and to the “romantic love” for boys that both of these can be seen to symbolize.



“Well then?” “Who was it who used to pray, ‘Oh God, make me good, but not yet’?” “I don’t know. You, I should think.” “Why, yes, I do, every day. But it isn’t that.” (86)

But, like everything else, childhood has a place in Catholic discourse too; as noted earlier, to be like a child is a good thing. In fact, Cordelia thinks that Sebastian had a vocation to be a priest that he hated and thus resisted (222) – so that for her, Sebastian’s childishness can be read as a sign of his nearness to God. Of course, Sebastian’s resistance is ultimately futile. Despite the fierce struggle he puts up – the outlandish high jinks at Oxford; his attempts to escape both literally, by running away, and figuratively, by drinking himself into oblivion; his later queer relationship with a wounded German soldier – Sebastian is eventually reinscribed into Catholic discourse as a lovable drunken underporter at a monastery in the sexually loaded locale of Northern Africa. Sebastian’s very suffering, it is argued, has made him holy. Part of Sebastian’s difficulty is that while he resists his Catholic destiny he is simultaneously entranced and seduced by its narrative aesthetics, which he finds both constricting and beautiful. Sebastian repeatedly tries to explain this dilemma to Charles, who has a hard time understanding the power of art even though he himself is an artist: “I suppose they try and make you believe an awful lot of nonsense?” “Is it nonsense? I wish it were. It sometimes sounds terribly sensible to me.” “But, my dear Sebastian, you can’t seriously believe it all.” “Can’t I?” “I mean about Christmas and the star and the three kings and the ox and the ass.” “Oh yes, I believe that. It’s a lovely idea.” “But you can’t believe things because they’re a lovely idea.” “But I do. That’s how I believe.” (86–7) Sebastian cannot make how he wants to live square up with what he believes. He has trouble actually practicing his Catholicism, but he has a deep appreciation for the beauty of its narratives, for what his mother, Lady Marchmain, calls, “the poetry, the Alice-in-Wonderland side of religion” (127). Lady Marchmain is the primary representative of both the literature and the totalizing rhetoric of Catholicism. She is the person most associated with books, whether it be those she reads to the family in the evenings (including Chesterton’s Father Brown) or the copies of her brother’s book that she gives to people to attempt to cement her connection to them. When Charles tries to question her




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“But of course,” she said, “it’s very unexpected for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, but the gospel is simply a catalogue of unexpected things. It’s not to be expected that an ox and an ass should worship at the crib. Animals are always doing the oddest things in the lives of the saints.” (127) Faced with a mother possessing this kind of rhetorical skill, Sebastian attempts both flight and fight. The flight, as noted above, includes both literal attempts at running away and increased alcohol consumption. But Sebastian’s mode of fighting is primarily rhetorical in nature – he meets the challenge of Catholicism’s totalizing language by creating a totalizing language of his own. Sebastian’s life was governed by a code of . . . imperatives. “I must have pillar box red pajamas,” “I have to stay in bed until the sun works round to the windows,” “I’ve absolutely got to drink champagne tonight!” (39) Ultimately, however, this strategy fails – Sebastian instead becomes trapped in a universe of linguistic absolutes from which he cannot escape. Sebastian merely substitutes a series of personal imperatives for the imperatives of Catholicism, inverting the paradigm. But this language of individual will becomes self-destructive as he succumbs to alcoholism (“I’ve absolutely got to drink champagne tonight!”), and his self-destruction is re-read as suffering, which in this system leads to the very holiness he was resisting. Despite his best efforts, Sebastian ultimately cannot avoid his vocation. A twitch upon the thread brings him back where he belongs, “very near and very dear to God” (308). As Sebastian’s story settles, the narrative turns its attention to Julia. One of the apparent oddities of Brideshead Revisited is the way in which its key character vanishes. Book I is so utterly dominated by Sebastian Flyte that the reader can hardly comprehend the extent to which he disappears in Book II, which is dedicated to Charles’s relationship with Julia. The switch of focus is so startling that even Julia comments upon it: “ ‘It’s frightening,’ Julia once said, ‘to think how completely you have forgotten Sebastian’ ” (302). Charles, as narrator, insists that he hasn’t forgotten Sebastian: “He was with me every day in Julia” (303). And



matriarchal, religious, and aristocratic authority by muttering something “about a camel and the eye of a needle,” Lady Marchmain shows her ability to incorporate any and all dissension with ease:

indeed, Book II replays Book I’s conversion narrative with Julia replacing Sebastian in the lead role. The structure of Brideshead therefore plays out the teleology that Cara describes: Charles moves from a “childish” homosexual relationship with Sebastian to a “mature” heterosexual relationship with Julia to a “perfect” relationship with God after his conversion to Catholicism. These relationships mirror each other even as they represent a “progression” for Charles – he essentially has to play Book I all over again with Julia. As Charles fell in love with Sebastian, so he now falls in love with Julia; in both cases, the love relationship must be sacrificed to the conversion narrative. While Sebastian terminates the relationship only defensively, Julia specifically terminates her relationship as an offering to God. At the end of the novel, Julia breaks her engagement to Charles as “a private bargain between me and God, that if I give up this one thing I want so much, however bad I am, He won’t quite despair of me in the end” (340). Julia, always sensitive to the power of language, finally succumbs to the Catholic discourse in which she was raised, in which her desire not to be Catholic is read as QED proof of the fact she ought to be. “I’ve always been bad. Probably I shall be bad again. But the worse I am, the more I need God” (340). Many things conspire to bring Julia back to her faith: her mother’s death, her brother Bridey’s priggish disapproval of her sexual relationship with Charles, and, perhaps most importantly, her father’s climactic death-bed conversion near the end of the novel. And just as Lord Marchmain’s conversion precipitates Julia’s, Julia’s conversion precipitates Charles’s. After losing both Sebastian and Julia, Charles’s conversion is all but inevitable: he has moved through the cycles of childhood and adulthood towards what the novel presents as the ultimate maturity of religious faith. Throughout the narrative, we see Charles trying to keep the language and discourse of Catholicism at bay by aestheticizing it and arguing that it is “only” or “mere” discourse. This is an exceedingly ironic position for Charles to take – as the only professional artist in the story, one would expect him to have more respect for the power of language. Of course, it is also suggested that Charles is not a particularly good artist, despite his worldly success at it – his distance from art keeps him from being really good. Both Sebastian and Julia seem to take art much more seriously than Charles does – it affects them, it causes them to change their lives. Sebastian repeatedly explains to Charles that he can “believe things because they’re a lovely idea”; similarly, Julia can’t look at Catholic art aesthetically:





“Mummy dying with my sin eating at her, more cruelly than her own deadly illness. Mummy dying with it; Christ dying with it, nailed hand and foot; hanging over the bed in the night-nursery, hanging year after year in the dark little study at Farm Street with the shining oilcloth; hanging in the dark church where only the old char-woman raises the dust and one candle burns; hanging at noon, high among the crowds and the soldiers; no comfort except a sponge of vinegar and the kind words of a thief; hanging for ever.” (288) For Julia, art is reality – Christ is literally hanging “over the bed”, “in the study,” and “in the church” just as surely as he was hung “high among the crowds and the soldiers.” There’s no sense of a distanced artistic representation, here. The representation of Christ both in words and in images is real, or perhaps even more than real. Artistic and linguistic truths are more real than the everyday life that people perceive as reality. The truths of art and literature elude Charles-the-artist until almost the very end of the novel. Charles reacts to Julia’s religious crisis by comparing her to “a picture of Holman Hunt’s called ‘The Awakened Conscience’ ” and reading her Ruskin’s description of the painting (290). Later, he further aestheticizes and distances himself from the day’s emotional events by comparing life to a play, which infuriates Julia: “It’s like the setting of a comedy,” I said. “Scene: a baroque fountain in a nobleman’s grounds. Act One, Sunset; Act Two, Dusk. Act three, Moonlight. The characters keep assembling at the fountain for no very clear reason.” “Comedy?” “Drama. Tragedy. Farce. What you will. This is the reconciliation scene.” “Was there a quarrel?” “Estrangement and misunderstanding in Act Two.” “Oh, don’t talk in that dammed bounderish way. Why must you see everything secondhand? Why must this be a play? Why must my conscience be a Pre-Raphaelite picture?” “It’s a way I have.” “I hate it.” (291) Julia punctuates her statement by slapping Charles twice, as hard as she can manage. “Now do you see how I hate it?”(292). But Charles doesn’t see until the very end – and then it is not the poetic biblical narratives



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that entrance Sebastian nor the visual narratives that seduce Julia but the very narrative of Brideshead Revisited itself, which is to say his own narrative, that finally hooks him. In the novel’s prologue, Captain Charles Ryder arrives at his new camp and inquires, “What’s this place called?” The answer – one word – has the power to stop time: He told me and, on the instant, it was as though someone had switched off the wireless, and a voice that had been bawling in my ears, incessantly, fatuously, for days beyond number, had been suddenly cut short; an immense silence followed, empty at first, but generally, as my outraged sense regained authority, full of a multitude of sweet and natural and long-forgotten sounds – for he had spoken a name that was so familiar to me, a conjuror’s name of such ancient power, that, at its mere sound, the phantoms of those haunted late years began to take flight. (15) Charles has finally found the word that makes the world stop turning and the celestial choir sing – Brideshead. The word – at long last – confuses Charles’s prosaic sense of reality; he stands “awed and bemused between two realities and two dreams” (15). The tangible Brideshead is nearby, but there is another Brideshead in his mind, one built from words and memories – the words and memories, in fact, that comprise the actual novel which is to follow. For the first time, Charles is captivated by a reality and truth beyond that of the day-to-day. In Book I, Sebastian tries to explain to the younger Charles that Catholics are not like other people: “They seem just like other people.” “My dear Charles, that’s exactly what they’re not – particularly in this country where they’re so few . . . they’ve got an entirely different outlook on life; everything they think important is different from other people. They try and hide it as much as they can, but it comes out all the time.” (89) The Charles Ryder who we meet in the opening pages of the prologue is already Catholic in Sebastian’s terms – he has an “entirely different outlook on life,” and the novel that follows is proof of his differing value system. Here, in the midst of the Second World War, Charles is stopped cold by the historical and artistic narrative that the word “Brideshead” triggers in his mind. This narrative itself is his Bible, his invisible truth,




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The queer fish However, if Sebastian, Julia and Charles are all hooked into the novel’s conversion narrative, there is someone who does escape, almost unnoticed, from the universe of Brideshead. That someone is Anthony Blanche, who succeeds in controlling his persona and his language, even down to his self-created stutter. Blanche, the only real “pansy” the book openly identifies (274), as well as the only real art critic, maintains his delightful (or, from a certain point of view, crippled) diction long after Sebastian has fallen into despair and disappeared from the novel, and he keeps control of events and their interpretations primarily through a sophisticated and performative use of language. Blanche’s linguistic strategy is illustrated early on, when he describes how a group of undergraduates arrived at his rooms, planning to humiliate him for his “unnatural vices.” Blanche appears to have diffused the situation through language alone: “I said, pacifically, ‘Dear sweet clodhoppers, if you knew anything of sexual psychology you would know that nothing could give me keener pleasures than to be manhandled by you meaty boys. It would be an ecstasy of the very naughtiest kind. So if any of you wishes to be my partner in joy come and seize me.’ ” (50) Rather than submitting to the psychological language of his attackers (“unnatural vices”), Blanche turns the discourse against them, and is not “manhandled.” The undergraduates had planned to throw him into a fountain; instead, Blanche leads the way, and tells us that he jumped into the water and “sported there a little, and struck some attitudes, until they turned about and walked sulkily home” (50). One could argue that Blanche ends up in the fountain either way, but he has clearly taken the pleasure out of it, and avoids being beaten and having his property damaged. Blanche manipulates the discourse at every turn, expressing multiple and often contrary meanings with élan and dignity:



the unseen hook that pulls him back from the edge of the world. The Brideshead that Charles revisits is simultaneously a holy place, a work of art, a religious parable, the story of his two great loves, and the story of their two conversions. It is the very history of himself. The artist – here, a novelist – has finally learned the true power of narrative art.


“You wouldn’t believe it, but in those days people used to say he was a little bitch; just a few unkind boys who knew him well.” (51)

“No, I have not brought a card of invitation. I do not even know whether I received one. I have not come to a social function; I do not seek to scrape acquaintance with Lady Celia; I do not want my photograph in the Tatler; I have not come to exhibit myself. I have come to see the pictures. Perhaps you are unaware that there are any pictures here. I happen to have a personal interest in the artist – if that word has any meaning for you.” (269) Blanche takes over the words he uses – unkind, cloud, exhibit, artist – and forces them to carry his meanings. Rather than simply positing an alternate language system, as Sebastian does, Blanche destabilizes the one which he is given by putting his words into italics. Blanche among all the characters is also uniquely alive and thriving within his homosexual milieu at the end of the novel. Furthermore, Blanche is the voice not only of homosexuality but of art criticism; in fact, the two appear to be related. Blanche tells Charles, and us, that his paintings really aren’t very good. After seeing Charles’s major exhibition in Book II, Blanche simply sighs and says, “But they tell me, my dear, you are happy in love” (269–70). The art is described as “t-t-terrible t-t-tripe” (270). Blanche is initially excited because Charles’s new pictures are described as “unhealthy,” which Blanche is savvy enough to read as a metaphor for passion and (homo)sexuality: “My dear, I could hardly keep still in my chair. I wanted to dash out of the house and leap in a taxi and say, ‘Take me to Charles’s unhealthy pictures.’. . . ; and what did I find? I found, my dear, a very naughty and very successful practical joke. It reminded me of dear Sebastian when he liked so much to dress up in false whiskers. It was charm again, my dear simple, creamy English charm, playing tigers.” (272) The criticism of the paintings as too correct, too English, too passionless, too gentlemanly, are critiques of Charles himself, and slide easily into a implied critique of Sebastian and his false whiskers – one of his



“I left under what is called a ‘cloud,’ you know – I can’t think why it is called that; it seemed to me a glare of unwelcome light.” (51–2)

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Blanche instantly moves from talking about Sebastian to talking about Sebastian’s family: “I was right years ago – more years, I am happy to say, than either of us shows – when I warned you. I took you out to dinner to warn you of charm. I warned you expressly and in great detail of the Flyte family. Charm is the great English blight. It does not exist outside these damp islands. It spots and kills anything it touches. It kills love; it kills art; I greatly fear, my dear Charles, it has killed you.” (273) Whether or not “charm” is the problem, certainly Blanche is correct when he says that exposure to the Flyte family inculcates a value system that diminishes the importance of love and art and even the self – or rather that the Flyte family sees these things as pale reflections of religion, the only thing that matters. Everything is absorbed into the totalizing system of the Flyte family’s version of Catholicism – though not Blanche himself, possibly because he is not English, possibly because he is the novel’s only committed and unashamed homosexual, possibly because he is such a sophisticated critic. Blanche’s escape from the totalizing Catholic discourse which takes over Brideshead Revisited is significant because it provides the thin wedge for a reinterpretation of the novel. Readers who wish to read against Waugh’s reimposition of Catholicism usually take Blanche as their starting point; Blanche’s queer manipulation of language gives us an alternative model for reinterpreting the “twitch upon the thread.”

The thread To the extent to which we take the “twitch upon the thread” as Waugh seems to have intended it, we must read it firstly as a metaphor for the religious faith that ultimately pulls all the characters into conversion; that is to say, as Chesterton initially used it. Secondly, however, the phrase is a metaphor for Charles Ryder’s narrative memory – it represents literary reference, history, language, discourse. In this sense, the thread of the narrative is, as I noted above in section two, what ultimately hooks Charles into his own religious conversion.



futile and failed attempts at resistance and escape. Charles is trying to perform passion with his jungle paintings, just as Sebastian tried to escape behind false whiskers – both are childish and transparent attempts to Blanche’s critical eye.

More prosaically, the “twitch upon the thread” is also what jumpstarts the narrative of Brideshead Revisited after the conclusion of Book I. The phrase titles Book II, which opens with Charles’s rather blunt statement: “My theme is memory” (225). Book I ends with Charles losing Sebastian and severing his relationship with the Flyte family – but Charles picks up the thread of his narrative (and of his life) again when he meets Julia accidentally and fortuitously, ten years later. During that ten-year interval, Charles tells us that he did not “come alive as I had been during the time of my friendship with Sebastian” (226); rather, he is trapped in what appears to be a loveless marriage, and is the rather indifferent father to a daughter and a son. It takes his meeting with Julia to bring him alive again – she twitches the thread that connects him to Brideshead and to his own past. To the extent to which the “thread” represents religious faith, it stretches either far backward or far forward through time and space. In other words, depending on how you see it, the thread stretches either all the way back to God (to the extent to which religious faith pre-dates, or underlies, everything else – “in the beginning was the Word”), or in some other way forward to God (to the extent to which religious faith in the novel signals some kind of personal growth and maturity for the characters, the end of a natural teleology) – or, even more accurately, both ways. In fact, the thread of Catholicism stretches towards infinity in both directions – from the beginning of the world to the end of it, from baptism to last rites, from the alpha to the omega – and it is in fact totally unsurprising that it does so: these are in fact Catholicism’s totalizing terms. Catholic discourse asks us to set events within infinite space and eternal time: within the chronology of the divine, in a manner of speaking. However: to the extent to which we limit the stretch of time specifically to the chronology of the novel, a very different meaning emerges. Within the novel, we can only revisit its earliest events, the beginning of the narrative, the pagan Arcadia of Book I – which is to say the character who dominates that book: Sebastian Flyte. The “twitch upon the thread” occurs at the point in the novel when Charles meets and begins an affair with Sebastian’s sister Julia, whom Charles overtly admits to be a female version of her brother. Julia is thus literally Sebastian revisited: within the time of the novel the thread stretches from Julia back to Sebastian, and it is difficult not to see Charles revisiting his male love in a socially acceptable female form. Charles feebly protests that it is the other way around: “[Sebastian] was with me daily in Julia; or rather it was Julia I had known in him in





those distant, Arcadian days” (302). The word he repeatedly uses in this second part of the novel is “forerunner”; Sebastian, we are repeatedly told, was the “forerunner to Julia.” But even Julia knows that this is bosh. “That’s cold comfort for a girl,” she objects sensibly. “How do I know I shan’t turn out to be somebody else?” (303). And indeed, the Catholic trajectory of the novel suggests that she is, herself, only a forerunner as well: it is through her awakened conscience and return to the faith that Charles gains knowledge and eventual understanding of the great Catholic Divine. But this is again the forward trajectory of the novel, which specifically asks us in its title to look backwards. And from the perspective of looking back, of revisiting, one can look back only to the forerunner, to Sebastian. As Anthony Blanche shifts the discourse of violent “manhandling” to (homo) sexual “man-handling”, so we can read the liminal place of Julia within the novel as a look forward to a Divine God or backwards to a Pagan Man. (Indeed, the two are elided in our last glimpse of the suffering Sebastian, who has become a Christ figure, growing a beard and living on the fringes of a monastery.) The woman Julia lies sandwiched between these two much more compelling entities: Man and the Son of Man. Once subjected to a Blanche-esque reading, the Catholic discourse starts to slip: Charles himself notes that “perhaps all our loves are merely hints and symbols” (303), and while the novel seems to want us to read that as prefiguring the desire for the divine, certainly the language of “hints and symbols” equally suggests the backward-glimpse towards homosexual desire, the desire for a man. Charles Ryder may indeed be inclined to be “a fisher of men” in Blanche’s terms, not Catholic ones. So that despite the novel’s attempt to impose a rhetoric of forwardlooking growth, progress, and religious maturity upon its central character, Brideshead Revisited can also be read as a look back towards a lost pagan Arcadia and the famous lost character associated with it: Sebastian Flyte. Having dominated Book I, he all but vanishes in Book II, and he leaves a hole behind him, leaving the reader all too conscious of his absence. So while the novel attempts to imply that Julia and Charles’s earthly, heterosexual love is only a symbol of some future, larger love like God’s love, one can also read the twitch upon the thread as a tug backwards to Sebastian, who thus remains at the heart of the novel notwithstanding his disappearance from it, for he is repeatedly brought back to us, as to Charles, by the “twitch upon the thread” that the novel itself represents.



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The Altar of the Soul: Sexuality and Spirituality in the Works of Julien Green Thomas J. D. Armbrecht

“I was not like others. All of my difficulties can be summed up this way.”1 Julien Green (Fin de Jeunesse 6: 845)2 Although Julien Green was one of the most prolific and important authors in twentieth-century France, he remains relatively unknown in the United States to all but scholars of French literature. This is somewhat ironic, given that the themes he treated during his career, which spanned the entire twentieth century, are either universal (like religion and sexuality), or distinctly American (like the Civil War and the Southern United States). Although Green wrote almost his entire oeuvre in French and lived most of his life in Paris, both his nationality and, according to his own assertions, his heart were American.3 In fact, he rejected the idea of being French and the accolades that the French literary establishment wanted to accord him. This paradox is aptly symbolized in Green’s status as the first American to be elected to the prestigious Académie Française, and also as the first member to try to stop being one of “the Immortals of the French language,” which is what the group’s members are called. In 1996 Green tried to quit because, as he put it, he was “exclusively American” and thus had no need for French honors.4 The conflict between Green’s nationality and the language and culture in which he wrote is not the only contradiction that characterized his life. Much of Green’s oeuvre is inspired by psychomachia, the impossible reconciliation of the body and the soul, which he considered to be two opposing forces in his life. This interior quarrel manifests itself in Green’s soul’s desire to be a saint, which means devoting 163 10.1057/9780230287778 - Catholic Figures, Queer Narratives, Edited by Lowell Gallagher, Frederick S. Roden and Patricia Juliana Smith


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his life to God, and his body’s desire to sleep with men, which privileges the needs of the flesh. Although this conflict is also a recurrent preoccupation of Green’s characters, their main concern is not spiritual, but personal gnosis. Sexuality (usually homosexuality) often lies at the heart of their mystery. While similar struggles are not uncommon for many religious persons, Green’s psychomachia is the source of great artistic creation. His novels and life-writings are, in fact, a veritable record of his spiritual development. This essay traces the development of the relationship between Green’s spirituality and his work by separating his writing into three chronologically determined categories: juvenilia, novel, and essay, each of which represents not only a shift in narrative, but also a new period in his spiritual life. Ascertaining why psychomachia is so urgent for Green can be accomplished by beginning with his early history (mostly through his copious autobiographical writing), up until his first publication in 1924, the blasphemous Pamphlet contre les Catholiques de France. After Green’s youth, the next period of significance is the time during which he wrote his novels, when sexuality seemingly supplanted spirituality as his major concern. Profiling the protagonists from a series of his works written in his forties and fifties, including Adrienne Mesurat, Moïra, Le Malfaiteur, and Chaque homme dans sa nuit, allows the reader to understand the development of the struggle between the body and the soul. This contest ends in the apparent triumph of Green’s soul, which meant the subordination of physical desire, and his decision to conform to the ideals of the Catholic Church. Through his novels it becomes evident that the act of writing not only documented Green’s negation of desire, but actually enabled him to reject it. The non-fictional works that Green wrote towards the end of his life are a combination of reflections upon his youth and the documentation of his religious conviction. By accepting the dichotomy within himself, Green eventually embodied a sort of Catholic ideal; he was a homosexual who acknowledged and accepted his sin, but who refused to act upon it, because he believed that only through chastity could one be close to God. Through two pieces of writing, Ce qu’il faut d’amour à l’homme, an essay in which Green constructs a definitive religious persona for himself, and Frère François, a hagiography in which Green constructs a definitive religious persona for all time, Green leaves his readers with a clear idea of what it means for him to be a Catholic, as well as how firmly he lives his conviction.



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Sexuality and Spirituality in the Works of Julien Green 165

Mary (Green) Mother of God: the origins of Green’s religious beliefs

Julien Green has recounted his childhood many times, both in the form of autobiography and novel.6 His story has also been told quite often by critics and biographers who use his childhood to understand his work. Perhaps because of the frequency with which this period of his life has been described, and because the most authoritative version of the story comes from Green himself, a standardized narrative has developed. The amount of detail provided varies with the telling, but the basic story does not. No matter who is recounting Green’s childhood, or what his objective is in describing it, religion occupies a central position in this narrative. In his own view of his life, Green says that it was his primary concern as a young man and the catalyst for his development as an artist. Upon examining his history, however, the reader is forced to wonder if the relationship between religion and Green’s art is as direct as it is remembered. This isn’t to imply that Green has fabricated any part of his story; on the contrary, what makes his recounting of his life so compelling is the exactitude and frankness of the writing. As Green himself admits when writing an essay about his religious history, Ce qu’il faut d’amour à l’homme, his remembrances are colored by contemporary concerns: I hope that this text can convey the reactions of a contemporary Catholic in the presence of a century in which faith is dangerously evolving towards more and more confused beliefs. (6: 887) Green admits having a goal, whether evangelical or narrative, that influences the scripting of his past. The result is an autobiographical quasiBildungsroman, in which religion plays a role in the writer’s artistic development that is determined as much by the beliefs he holds while writing about the past, as it is by those held at the time of the events described. Green’s statement of narrative intent causes the reader to wonder what effect his adult perspective has on his interpretation of the past. Late in his life, Green was more overt about his spiritual goals for his



“The gift that I was given was to remember.” Julien Green (Ce qu’il faut d’amour à l’homme 6: 890)5


writing, and clearly stated his support for the Catholic Church. The aforementioned Ce qu’il faut d’amour à l’homme, for example, is essentially a eulogy for the Catholic Church and its role in his life. The openly Catholic writing from the end of Green’s life, which will be examined in the latter part of this essay, stands in contrast with his more secular, psychologically focused representations of his childhood, which will be analyzed here. As he sees it, Green’s mother is the source of his faith. She, or rather his memory of her, is also the principal force that shapes his story. Mary Green was a devout Protestant whose love of God (and of religion itself) was equaled only by her love of the southern United States (i.e. “The Deep South,” as it existed before the Civil War). According to Green’s account, she was the heart of his childhood – his source of love, knowledge, and discipline. Her role in Green’s life was crystallized (if not canonized) when she died when he was fourteen. Much of Green’s autobiographical writing is about her memory. It was she who taught him about God, for example, by reading the King James Bible to him in English, even though the young Francophone did not understand: When I was alone with someone who spoke to me quietly in a language that I didn’t understand, I knew that this was the person who loved me more than the others . . . Even though I barely knew how to put words together, she made me say the Our Father with her in English. My head on her shoulder, I repeated the words that she said seriously and slowly in the bedroom that was barely lighted by the light coming from the living room: “Our Father . . .” “Our Father . . .” The essence of what I believe today was given to me thus, in the shadowy darkness where the greatest love spoke. (Partir avant 5: 659)7 Green’s memory of his mother clearly shows that she is an inseparable part of his beliefs. As she once told him, she would prefer, “to see [him] die at [her] feet” than to see him commit a transgression, such as renouncing his faith (Ce qu’il faut 6: 899). These words left no doubt in Green’s mind that his mother’s love depended on his own love of (and obedience to) God. While his portrait of his mother is undoubtedly idealized, Green does not erase all negative memories of her. He views her as partially responsible for the antagonistic relationship that he has with his body and his sexuality. One particular episode in his infancy suggests that his mother condemned him as depraved at a very young age:



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One evening, my sister Mary suddenly happened to find herself next to my bed. I didn’t hear her come, but anyway, why would I have hidden myself, not feeling at all guilty? With an energetic gesture, she pulled back the covers all the way down to my feet, and with a loud cry, called my mother who came running, a candlestick in her hand. In the light, I appeared as I was, not understanding anything, smiling perhaps, my hands in the forbidden region. There was some shouting, and my mother, putting down her candlestick, left the room only to come back armed with a long knife in the form of a scythe that we used to cut bread . . . “I’ll cut it off!” my mother shouted while brandishing the bread knife. (Partir avant 5: 657) The violence of this incident practically assures that it would remain in the memory of most any person. In Green’s case, the episode was a defining event of his life that forever equated the body with sin. As he wrote in his autobiography, “With her knife, my mother associated that region down there with evil, once and for all” (Ce qu’il faut 6: 899). Given the fact that Green equates his mother with both goodness and religion, and that she pretended to view his innocent touching of himself as an offense worthy of castration, in the author’s mind, to deny her condemnation of the physical would be to reject her, as well. So indelible was the effect of the incident on Green’s conception of his own physicality that his mother’s words were transformed into a homonymic French mantra, “Alcotétof!,” which was used to threaten the young Green whenever he did anything wrong.8 In this way his body and its desires became permanently associated with transgression. Of course, no one (least of all a young person) can completely deny his physical needs. As Green matured, he began to realize that he was unable to repress his desires completely, even though he was convinced they were wrong. The Episcopalian Church, which was the religion of his mother and the church in which Green was raised, provided the young boy with little solace. He found the fact that man was essentially considered a predestined sinner with little control over his own salvation to be terrifying. His mother’s reassurances, “You believe, therefore you’re saved,” were of little comfort (Ce qu’il faut 6: 895). Green was convinced that she was not aware of the extent of his sinfulness, and therefore could not assure him of his salvation. The question of what would happen to Green in the afterlife was perhaps his principal motivation for converting to Catholicism in 1915, an event that was most certainly precipitated by the death of Green’s mother in December of 1914, as well. Unsurprisingly, her departure





profoundly disturbed the young boy. Although he never questioned whether his own mother was in heaven, Green began to worry about his own destiny. This anxiety was no doubt brought about in part by Green’s introduction to le mal (literally translated as “evil,” but also used by Green as a euphemism for “the facts of life”) by his schoolmates soon after his mother’s death: At Janson high school, in the springtime of 1915, some friends taught about what you call “le mal” . . . A new element entered my life this way, because evil is also a spiritual element. Up until that time, I had believed that I was different from others. The shock made me hate pleasure, and for a few weeks I succeeded in not thinking about it. How and why, I don’t know. Did I want to reshape the image that I had of myself? How many times had my mother said, “Remember that your body is the realm of the Holy Spirit.” These words didn’t inscribe themselves in me with blazing letters, but they did follow me like a whisper. (Ce qu’il faut 6: 910) Acquiring carnal knowledge while at the same time losing his principal religious advisor and role model traumatized Green to such an extent that he feared for his own spiritual future. The Protestant Church, which only had a minimal presence in France, and whose congregations, according to Green, tended to be cold and snobbish, did not provide him with the spiritual support he needed. Compounded by the incertitude of his salvation, Green was in desperate need of a new, more available religious resource. Around this time Green discovered The Faith of Our Fathers, a proselytizing Catholic book written for Protestants, under the shirts in his father’s armoire. It provided him with the answers for which he was searching. By the time he had finished reading it, he had already decided to convert to Catholicism: I read a page, then another, then I stayed with this book between my hands until evening . . . Like an avalanche, the complete Catholic doctrine pounced on me. I believed everything. The more incredible it seemed, the more I believed. The great mysteries suddenly seemed glaringly evident to me. (Ce qu’il faut 6: 913) Green was attracted to Catholicism because of its emphasis of mysticism. Whereas his mother’s world had essentially been quite literal, a world in which one was either right or wrong, damned or saved,



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Catholicism offered Green something beyond the here and now. He was attracted to an understanding of the world in which he could escape the pain caused by the death of his mother, and where he would be forgiven for the pressing desires of his body. It was no mistake that The Faith of Our Fathers was in Green’s father’s armoire; although he kept it a secret until Green told him of his own intentions to convert, his father had himself become a Catholic three months before Green’s own decision. Obviously he, too, felt lost without his wife’s spiritual guidance and out of place in the Protestant Church. Eventually, two out of Green’s three sisters became Catholics, all within a few years of their mother’s death. It is ironic that, despite the fact that she herself was a devout (if tolerant) Protestant, Mrs. Green’s death was indirectly responsible for the conversion of her family. Once Green converted to Catholicism, he became extremely devout. Perhaps in order to please Père Crété, the priest who taught him the catechism and other prayers necessary for his conversion, Green soon decided that he wanted to become a Benedictine monk, and to go to a monastery on the Isle of Wight. The cloistered life appealed to him, mostly because it seemed an opportunity to isolate himself from the temptations of the world, which were increasingly difficult to ignore: Far from the sin that dirties the heart, far from the cities where one loses oneself, at last to breathe the love of God night and day . . . [The priest] explained to me what a monastery was and after a minute asked me a question that would strangely orient my life: “My child, can you see yourself in a monk’s cell?” Yes, I saw myself there! I wanted to be there tomorrow and stay there until my death, to live in God. From the conversation that followed, I have only retained a few bits: “. . . There is, on the Isle of Wight, a monastery of Benedictine Monks where one can really sanctify oneself.” Sanctify myself, to be a saint, what prodigious resonance these words found in my whole person! (Ce qu’il faut 6: 919) Catholicism began to represent an escape to Green. By devoting oneself to God, a person could avoid temptation. Unable to accept his growing awareness of his physical desires, Green became increasingly convinced that he wanted to become a monk. In his autobiographical writings, he alternated between feeling as if he were a monk manqué,9 and acknowledging that a religious vocation would have prevented him from realizing himself as an artist – if, in fact, he had been able to abide by his vow of chastity at all. Even in his description of his religious education





with Père Crété, Green admits that his mentor was little aware of what was really troubling the boy’s spirit: “Poor Father! If he only knew that I was unhappy because of a school friend on whom I had a crush” (Ce qu’il faut 6: 922). It seems the priest was not as naïve as Green supposed, however, because he taught the young Green “Not to lean on the back of the [his] chair, for mortification’s sake” (Ce qu’il faut 6: 915) in order to get him used to denying the needs of the flesh. He also offered cryptic words of advice that made a lasting impression on the boy: Sensuality: how it made [Father Crété] tremble for my salvation . . . Ties with the flesh, were they so strong? He let slip words that were both obscure and unforgettable: “It is through feeling that girls are lost, men through the senses.” Sensuality, senses, sensitivity, this sibilant language was interspersed with sighs. What did he fear? What did he know? And if there was something fishy about me, why didn’t he speak to me openly about the carnal problem? Only once did he slip in a reflection, of which he didn’t see the imprudence, about consecrated souls that renounced “the world’s greatest pleasure.” “The world’s greatest pleasure,” Mephisto wouldn’t have said otherwise! The pleasure that I knew so poorly couldn’t have been made to appear more brightly before my eyes. (Ce qu’il faut 6: 918) Even Green’s religious education made him aware of the temptations of the world. Despite Père Crété’s occasional “wounds of the soul,” as Green called them, the boy became increasingly committed to the idea of joining the brotherhood, most likely because he was ever more aware of the opportunities to sin that surrounded him. Fortunately, Green’s father, who was doubtlessly both more worldly and more tolerant than Père Crété, intervened before Green became a monk. He refused to take his son from the “liberal” lycée at which he was enrolled in order to place him in a more conservative school, Saint Louis de Gonzague. Rather than forbid him to become a monk, his father suggested that his son enroll in the American Field Service. The First World War was being fought, although the United States had not yet entered into the war. Near the end of the war, Green was still interested in going to the Isle of Wight. Still diplomatic, Green’s father told him that he would permit him to go to the monastery when “[he] had seen a bit of the land” (Ce qu’il faut 6: 926). These few months of traveling made Green realize how much he enjoyed being part of the world. While he was careful to note that, “the carnal life didn’t have a voice in this chapter of interior transformation” he still was unable to



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master, “this crazy joy that circulated in [his] whole being” (Ce qu’il faut 6: 927). Little was he aware, however, what role this joy would take in his life in just a few years, and how far he would fall from his religious ideal. Before his “fall” Green became, as he put it, “crazy with religion” (Ce qu’il faut 6: 917). His most devout years were actually spent in the United States, at the University of Virginia. Although he was surrounded on all sides by young men whom he found attractive, Green was so strictly religious that he alienated himself from many of his classmates. Without a doubt, his religiousness was as much a product of his alienation, as his alienation was the result of his devotion. As one of the few Catholics at the university, Green’s beliefs became an integral part of his identity. Already different because he was a foreigner (even though, in point of fact, Green was an American citizen his whole life), Catholicism provided him with a raison d’être – that is, a reason for being both different and alone. Even though Green was doubtlessly chaste during his time at the university, he was not unaware of the men around him, and developed a close bond with a student named Mark. Green was in love with Mark, and although he has not discussed their relationship openly, it is possible that his feelings were reciprocated, as Green has occasionally alluded: “I should have talked to Mark, have taken him in my arms. Who could say that he would have resisted me?” (Fin de jeunesse 6: 839). Even though Green might have been able to find love, he was as yet unable to realize it, and instead alternated between periods of guilty desire and religious fervor. In 1922, he became so conflicted that he left the University of Virginia before finishing his degree. Not long after his return to France, and upon the invitation of a friend who published a small magazine, Revue des pamphlétaires, Green wrote a fifty-page essay, Pamphlet contre les catholiques de France (An Essay Against French Catholics). It contained 249 articles, criticizing not the Catholic Church, but rather its complaisant worshipers who, according to Green, “have fallen into the habit of their religion, to the point where they don’t worry anymore about knowing whether it is true or false, whether they believe or not” (1: 879).10 Although Green was judging complacent worshipers, as he later came to realize, his attack was actually directed towards himself, as he remarked in a postface included for the first time in the 1996 edition of the text: I was in search of my ideal self. Thus I wrote this clairvoyant note at the age of twenty-three: Pamphlet directed against myself as well as against others. (79, italics in original)





Perhaps because it was so personal, the pamphlet caused less of a scandal than its author and publisher may have hoped, despite its provocative dedication “to the six French Cardinals.” Its symbolic presence in the context of the author’s oeuvre cannot be underestimated, however. As Green himself wrote in his 1963 introduction to the republication of the book by Plon: I always thought that the whole oeuvre of a writer is contained completely within his first book, as the ear is in the seed . . . This seems to me to be true of the pamphlet where I recognize a little of that shade and that violence that form the climate of all the novels that I later wrote. (1: 1232) Although it represented an intensely religious expression on Green’s part, Pamphlet contre les Catholiques was also a rupture for Green, a sort of last effort to assure himself of his own faith. When Green wrote aphorisms such as, “. . . At least in blasphemy, there is passion. (Article #55)”, or “The ignominy of the flesh is not so dangerous. (Article #72),” he was unknowingly speaking to his future self, or perhaps it is more tempting to say, to his subconscious. Although Green would abandon evangelic writing after this effort until the end of his career, the same issues with which he was wrestling would be recycled in his novels, but from a distinctly less religious point of view. It was as though he found it more effective to analyze himself indirectly, through the lives of his characters.

A walk through dark places: Green’s years of desire “What to do about this monstrous hunger that gnaws at me?” Julien Green (Fin de jeunesse 6: 867) In Green’s autobiographical writings, he assesses his twenties and thirties either by making veiled allusions to his “nocturnal strolls” and the “tyrannical demands of pleasure” (Fin de jeunesse 6: 870) that consumed him, or more frequently, by omitting most of the details of his personal life during that period.11 The published versions of Green’s journals are heavily edited, and the originals were often destroyed by the author after the expurgated version appeared.12 Scholars studying Green’s works are therefore forced to turn to his novels in order to fill in the blanks. Although undoubtedly all Green’s works contain useful information about the development of his sexuality, a small group of novels and plays



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written towards the middle of his career deals most directly with these issues. As Katherine Eberle Wildgen has pointed out in her book, Julien Green: the Great Themes, there are very few practicing Catholics present in Green’s novels.13 Although some of them have vague religious impulses (they often wander into churches to rest or to take refuge, for example), as a whole, they are not religious. There are, on the other hand, numerous gay and lesbian characters. This representation is symbolic of Green’s own life during his twenties and thirties when sexuality became his principal concern. Aware that taking communion while “impure” was a sin, Green stopped going to church. At the same time, his characters’ sexuality became an important theme in his writing. Even though Green eventually began to write more overtly about matters of the heart (and body), his work shows that he was still suffering intensely from psychomachia. His recounting of his childhood has already made plain physical passion’s role as a dangerous and damning distraction that estranged him from God. Love is a similarly frightening endeavor for his characters, because it invariably causes them great sadness – particularly when their love is for someone of the same sex. This is not to say that heterosexual lovers are happy in Green’s novels while the homosexual ones are not. His vision of the fate of gay people is particularly bleak, however, even though he treats them with humanity. Green’s focus on homosexuality did not mean that he wrote of it in an overt way. In his early novels, the reader is forced to infer that some of the characters are gay. In Green’s first novel, Adrienne Mesurat, for example, Dr. Maurecourt alludes to aspects of his being that are “very displeasing” in order to discourage the protagonist’s love for him (1: 496).14 While the reader cannot be sure that the doctor’s “problem” is homosexuality, there is a notable similarity between this allusion and those made about Gaston in the Malfaiteur, the nature of whose “problem” is quite clear. As might be expected, even when Green wrote unambiguously about gay and lesbian people, he was never graphic. Instead, he developed a variety of textual strategies to represent homosexual desire and activity. Symbolism is prominent in Green’s novels; his characters frequently displace their longings into feelings about other objects. Many of Green’s young, male characters, for example are taken with Greek statues. Denis, in L’Autre sommeil, is aroused by the images of mythological figures in plaster that he sees in a store. Even though he is not sure why, he wishes that they would come to life, and feels that he needs to make contact with them physically:




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This choice of symbols is particularly significant because Green’s mother equated such art with paganism. As she once told the young Green after taking him to the Louvre, the sculptures that he saw (and which excited him) “[were] works of art, false gods, gods that have never existed” (Partir avant 5: 708). His mother’s pronouncement implied that being attracted to such gods would be a transgression not only against the Christian idea of God, but against her. This fear of artistic sensuality is also manifested by Joseph, the extremely religious protagonist of the novel Moïra, who is disturbed by the presence of images of the Greek “idols,” as he calls them, in the hall of one of the buildings of the University of Virginia (where, it will be remembered, Green was a student). They are pointed out to him by a fellow student, Simon, who is gay. Simon’s appreciation of the figures’ sensual lines and his comparison of one of the gods to Joseph makes the latter boy uncomfortable: “I don’t like [the plasters],” said Joseph firmly. – “What? But you haven’t looked at them!” cried Simon. “On the right, it’s Phidias’ Apollo. On the left, Praxitel’s Hermès. He’s splendid, this Hermès. Look at his curls, his neck, the line of his neck. He has a neck like yours, a little . . . And his shoulders . . .” “. . . – I hate idols,” said Joseph heading towards his English class. – “But they’re not idols for us,” explained Simon with a sort of shout . . . “They are simply very beautiful humans,” he added. Joseph glared at him. “Beautiful?” he gasped. “They’re naked!” (3: 38–9)16 Joseph is offended by the statues not only because they are “idols,” but also because he finds them ugly. His indirect equation of nudity with ugliness comes from Green’s own experiences. In accounts of his childhood, Green writes of his love of drawing naked people – albeit sans genitals – whom he showed being punished and tortured. These scenes were inspired by an illustrated version of Dante’s Divine Comedy, a copy of which Green encountered in his family’s library: [My drawing] represented naked people, men and women, whom a torturer chased before him with blows from a whip . . . There was in



“. . . in the wonder of desire, I became so bold as to touch these statues, to take them in my arms. Over these expressionless faces and these empty chests, I ran my trembling hands.” (1: 843)15


Even though the above passage describes something that happened very early in Green’s life, the naked human body remained perturbing for Green as an adult, as his reaction to even religious art demonstrates: One day, my sister Mary . . . sent me . . . a color postcard whose picture gave me an interior shock that I haven’t forgotten. With what bizarre inspiration had Mary chosen this image that represented the head of one of the ignudi of the Sistine Chapel a destra del profeta Isaia? And first of all what were these big, naked boys doing to the left and the right of the prophets? I’ve always asked myself this . . . – The glory of the human body singing the glory of God, just as the stars sing it? It’s possible. Anything is possible and I’m not denying it, but I do state with sadness that the effect of this fleshly magnificence is not necessarily good. (Partir avant 5: 764) Green’s embarrassment at his attraction to the ignudi shows to what extent he considers human physicality at odds with spirituality. Even when the representation is supposedly of divine bodies, he saw it as a titillating distraction. Green’s hatred of “the sexual instinct”17 is not limited to nude bodies, however. Another motif that frequently appears in Green’s novels is the neck, an example of which has already been seen in the above quote from Moïra. Green’s characters are often described as having beautiful necks, or as being attracted to other people’s necks. The recurrence of this symbol calls to mind Freud’s theory of fetishism, which invites interpretation of the neck as the representation of some repressed sexual urge. Indeed, Green’s descriptions of necks in his texts support this reading; the neck is often described as a very sensual area of the body. In Le Mauvais lieu, the lesbian character Bergère brushes Elizabeth’s neck while fawning over her. In Chaque homme dans sa nuit, Mr. Shoenhals (whose name means in German “beautiful neck”) has a crush on Wilfred, the protagonist. This is ironic, for the neck is Wilfred’s favorite part of the body, because it is the only part that is “unsullied” with sexual associations:



my head, I think, the bizarre idea that these people were being punished for their nudity. Their crime was not having clothing . . . Deep down, the whole explanation that I gave myself was that hell resolved the problem of nudity and, by inevitable consequence, the problem of purity. (Partir avant 5: 678)


Of all the parts of the body, in effect, none seems to have a more singular beauty than the neck. A straight neck, round and smooth that the hands softly imprison like a column. The chest, the thighs, the legs speak only of voluptuousness, the head even, the face above all . . . But the neck was pure . . . As for the organs of pleasure, men’s as well as women’s, you’d have to be out of your mind to find them beautiful. (3: 540)18 It is ironic that immediately after saying that the neck is beautiful because it is not sexual, Green includes a description of Wilfred’s neck that is erotic: “His was long and powerful, with a whiteness that resisted being sunburned, the neck of a barbarian, someone said to him once” (3: 540). As Jacques Petit notes in the Pléiade edition of the text, “It’s rare that in the portraits of his characters, Julien Green doesn’t describe this part of the body” (3: 1674, note 1). Consciously or not, Green equates the neck with sexual desire, as do his characters. This fetishization of the neck often has violent consequences. Many of Green’s characters often go to great lengths, including violence, to repress their sexuality because they are conflicted about it. In several works, this manifests itself by a character strangling the object of his desire. In the above quote, for example, there is a reference to the beauty of hands around a neck that is reminiscent of strangling. In Moïra, Joseph strangles two people to whom he is sexually attracted. The first is Bruce Praileau, whom Joseph strangles, but doesn’t kill, during a fight. The other is Moïra, about whose neck Joseph has fantasized while lying in her bed – the same bed in which he later suffocates her. Given Green’s association of the neck with sexuality, and his impulse to punish both others and himself for unholy feelings, it is hardly a surprise that several of his characters strangle the people with whom they are in love. From his first works of the 1920s to his novels of the 1950s, Green’s representations of homosexuality were not tightly bound with Catholic dogma or symbolism, even if they did reveal the pyschomachia so central to his spirituality. Although it could be argued that Green’s characters’ fixation on artistic representations of faux dieux was an antithetical reaction to Catholic iconography, sexual struggles seem to take privilege over spiritual ones. There are numerous other themes, however, which reveal similarities between Catholic ritual and symbolism and Green’s representation of homosexuality. Jacques Petit has written that “the man from elsewhere” is a figure present in most of Green’s novels.19 This foreigner usually acts as a catalyst that brings about change for other characters. As Green himself



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commented about this while writing about his plays in his journal, “In these three plays there is a man who comes from elsewhere, on behalf of destiny, and who is destiny in a way” (“Notes” 3: 1716). Parallels can be drawn between the figure of the outsider, whose arrival reveals some liberating truth to the other characters, and Christ, in the sense that Jesus (in the view of those who subscribe to Christian thought) changed the destiny of the world by revealing “the truth” (“I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me” (John 14: 6)). Although it is important not to carry this parallel too far – neither Eric Mac Clure in Sud, Pierre in L’Ennemi, nor any of Green’s other strangers die for the benefit of others – the significance of the symbolism should not be underestimated. Just as Christ is said to have shown the world the path to salvation, Green’s outsiders are responsible (albeit often indirectly) for the liberation of other characters from their own personal prisons. Jacques Petit has noted in Green’s plays, “[Green’s characters] are not aware of [their] incarceration until ‘the stranger’ arrives” (“Notes” 3: 1716). Even though Green was not actively engaged in Christian worship during this period of his writing career, the Christ-figure and its powers of enlightenment and liberation remained an important symbol to him. One of the most unusual aspects of Green’s Christ-like characters is that they are often the object of homosexual desire for the stories’ protagonists. In Sud, Lt. Wiczewski falls in love with Eric Mac Clure the moment he sees him. In Chaque homme dans sa nuit, both Angus and Max are taken with Wilfred, which reveals their homosexuality and ultimately causes their collective downfall. Although the arrival of the Christ-like figure often makes characters aware of “the truth,” or in other words, the nature of their sexuality, these characters often die while attempting to come to terms with it. Another way in which Green links his sexuality to his faith is to equate confession with “coming out.” In his earlier works it would be more accurate to write about the failed act of confession, otherwise known as the aveu manqué.20 Green’s gay characters often attempt to avow their desire to the object of their affection, but are ultimately unable to come out to them. In L’Autre Sommeil, for example, Denis wants, but is unable to admit his love for Claude. In Moïra, Simon leaves Joseph a magnolia flower with the note, “Less white than you” (3: 51) in an attempt to tell the other boy that he loves him. Joseph does not understand the meaning of this message, however, which makes Simon feels so rejected that he kills himself. Green often included this theme of wanting to confess, but of being unable to do so at the same time





that he himself felt unable to go to church, and therefore unable to confess. Obviously, Green was still attracted to the act of contrition, even though he felt unable to participate in it. This idea is reinforced by the frequency with which his characters enter Catholic churches, but once inside do not worship or pray. As Green continued to write during this period of spiritual crisis, his characters got closer and closer to actually “confessing” by admitting their homosexual desire. In Sud, Ian has a conversation with the man he loves in which he attempts to tell him this, albeit only by making allusions and double entendres. In the following lines, Ian goes so far as to say “I love you” to Mac Clure, who hears nothing because of his own ignorance: IAN: Can you imagine that a man lacks courage to the point that he cannot admit his love? That he stands before the person with whom he is taken and cannot say to [her/him]: “I love you . . .”? MAC CLURE:

Yes. One could be very courageous and still not have that kind of courage. (3: 1071–2)21

Even though Ian is fairly direct in his statement, homosexuality is so far from Mac Clure’s thoughts that he misses the point completely. He may understand how Ian’s heart suffers, but he is still unable to conceive of himself as the object of Ian’s affections, which leaves Ian unable to achieve his confession. In Chaque homme dans sa nuit, the work immediately following Sud, Green finally wrote a character, Angus, who was able to confess to his desires – to come out both to himself and to Wilfred, the person he loves. Interestingly, however, Angus is only able to do this by writing: I don’t feel very happy at this moment. It’s not your fault, but you shouldn’t have touched my hand when we were in the car that was taking us back to town, after the funeral. As unaffected by physical passion as you are, you should have been aware of the physical power that you exercise over others in spite of yourself. It is difficult to stay indifferent to your face. There – this is what I didn’t want to tell you, and I told you despite everything. Experience and simple self-love should impose silence on me, but why should I silence myself, because I will never see you again? This letter makes it impossible. (3: 527–8)



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This act of confession is also followed by an act of contrition; Angus decides that now that he has admitted his attraction to Wilfred, he can never see him again. Green followed a similar trajectory in his own life. After finally confessing by writing overtly about homosexuality in his novels, he returned to the Church and abandoned all “homosexual activity” – including not only physical contact with other men, but the hope of relationships with them, as well. The coupling of confession and penitence also appears in Le Malfaiteur, whose second section is actually titled, “La Confession de Jean.” Jean prefaces his letter with an explanation of what he is about to write, which actually claims that it is not a confession: My proposal is only to instruct you and for this it’s necessary to tell you what I think of myself. The text that you have in your hands is not a confession, because a confession supposes remorse, and I have no remorse. (3: 309)22 Green’s choice of a title for the section tells us otherwise, as do Jean’s actions. He writes this letter before leaving for Italy and leaves it in the bottom of an armoire to be found by his niece, Hedwige. She never receives it, however, because the letter is intercepted by the satanic Madame Paque, who reads it, but does not give it to her. The next mention of Jean is his death; he has committed suicide. His letter to Hedwige was an act of self-absolution before his demise. He was in essence admitting his sins, justifying his behavior, and most importantly doing good by informing Hedwige about the nature of the man with whom both of them were in love. As Le Malfaiteur makes clear, even though Green’s novels treated homosexuality in a remarkably open way, they ultimately do not send a positive message about the lives of gays and lesbians. While Green’s characters are able to come to terms with their own sexuality, and even to come out to other characters, the price of this is death – either of the relationship (as in the case of Chaque homme dans sa nuit) or of the character himself, as in Sud and Le Malfaiteur. Some Catholic scholars view this moment in Green’s writing as a victory for the Church, because Green “purified” himself (by confessing), and was then ready to return to the Catholic fold. As Louis-Henri Parias explains in his book, Julien Green, corps et âme, writing allowed Green to triumph over his sin by subjugating the body to the demands of the soul. Parias considers Green’s writings to be the act that allowed





him to liberate himself from the needs of the flesh: “Julien Green was able to make the definitive separation between body and soul in 1956. A long purification was necessary, a catharsis to which all his works bear witness.”23 Green seems to adopt this view himself in the later part of his life when homosexuality ceased to be a theme in his works, to the point that he resorts to euphemism when referring to the subject’s place his early writings. Catholic dogma went from being a theme that informed Green’s choice of symbols and literary figures, to actually determining the shape of his oeuvre by making his writing a vehicle for his spirituality.

“God’s fool”: Green’s return to the Church One of Green’s last novels, Frère François, contains a chapter entitled “God’s Fool,” which is also the title of the English translation of the book. It is a biography of Saint Francis of Assisi, and was first published in 1984. Along with Ce qu’il faut d’amour à l’homme, this book represents the final and most intensely spiritual movement in Green’s oeuvre, when he made the Catholic Church the subject, rather than simply an element, of his writing. It represents a second time in his life when he was, as he described himself in his youth, “crazy with religion” (cf. above, or Ce qu’il faut 6: 917). This time, however, his obsession manifested itself differently. Green was interested in Saint Francis since his childhood. Even his Protestant mother was familiar with the saint, as Green recalls in the section, “The Author Speaks” at the end of Frère François: “My mother, Protestant as she was, had an affection for [Saint Francis] that made me believe that she had known him” (6: 1265).24 For Green, Saint Francis was an example of a very human saint – a saint with whom Green could identify. Integral to his love of François was the fact that the saint had been tempted, but had been able to resist, much like the way Green viewed himself. The first section of Frère François, “Idle Youth,” is largely about Saint Francis’ unsaintly childhood. In it, Green recounts the privileged life the young boy had, and how his thoughts were generally far from God: We are going to see this exquisite boy battling the angel in the roughest of fights. He is sixteen years old, he has fought, he is a man. He forms a joyful band of revelers with the sons of the masters living in Assisi . . . Francis reassumes his predestined role: the ringleader, the boss, the dominus. It’s so easy for him. People like him, people are



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While Green was neither rich nor particularly well-liked by his classmates, he was nevertheless able to identify with Francis’ love of pleasure. Although the kind of pleasure by which Green was tempted was largely of a different kind, Green writes that Saint Francis was “swept up by the ardor of passions” (Frère François 6: 1037). Green makes no direct allusions to the possibility that Francis might have had homosexual tendencies. Quite present in the text, however, are references to “le mal” and “le vice” (Frère François 6: 1021–2), which suggest that the young man may also have had to come to terms with his sexual desire. This is perhaps Green’s way of making himself closer to Saint Francis. If the young saint knew the temptations of the flesh, but overcame them to become one of the most exemplary Christians of all time, then Green’s own transgressions as a young man must also be surmountable. He too could approach sanctity. There is much in Green’s writing to support the fact that his interest in Saint Francis is largely due to Green’s identification with the saint. A famous quote, often repeated in his autobiography, is how Green as a boy wanted to be a saint, and was terribly disillusioned when he realized that strong forces within him would most likely prevent this. In Frère François, Green says that not only did he want to be a saint, but that he actually wanted to be Saint Francis: I dreamed of becoming like Saint Francis of Assisi and when the director who was in charge of my religious education asked me what name I had chosen for my baptism, I told him without pause: “Saint Francis of Assisi” . . . To be like Saint Francis of Assisi, what glory! I was even more categorical in my religious élan. “I want to be Saint Francis of Assisi,” I told him one day. A long, serious look was his only response. (6: 1266) This childhood episode, recounted in the conclusion to Frère François, demonstrates to what point Green idolized the saint, and suggests Green’s motivations for writing the book. In reality, Frère François reads like a typical hagiography: Saint Francis could do no wrong. In Green’s opinion, even Saint Francis’ youthful transgressions were a necessary and wonderful part of his life, because they made the saint’s transformation in his early twenties all the more significant. Saint Francis’ story is, or at least Green would like it to be, perhaps not unlike Green’s



receptive to his charms, and moreover – even if this fact is disagreeable – he has the magic of money. (6: 1022)


account of his own religious transformation after a similar period of transgression. Despite the numerous books about non-religious subjects that constitute the bulk of his oeuvre, Green took care towards the end of his career to assure both his reader and himself about the solidity of his faith. Ce qu’il faut d’amour à l’homme, Green’s own summation of the development of his beliefs (cited at the beginning of this essay), carefully asserts Catholic doctrine throughout the whole book, and ends with a chapter titled unequivocally: “What I Believe.” In this twoparagraph conclusion, Green basically restates the major tenets of the Catholic Church – taking great care to include those that differentiate it from other religions, specifically Protestantism: At the evening of a life during which I have had to fight to keep my faith, a faith of which certain articles are so bitterly contested these days, what I believe I will sum up in terms familiar to all Catholics. I share with them faith in the Church that Christ founded, and in the infallibility of Peter’s successors, in the Communion of Saints; faith in the sacraments, in particular in Baptism, which snatches us from Satan’s grasp and in Penitence without which grace could not attain us. I believe in the Holy Trinity, in the Incarnation, in the Ascension and in the divinity of Christ, in his glorious resurrection, and in eternal life for all those who bear him witness. I believe in the Real Presence during the Eucharist and in the permanent reality of the sacrifice of mass. I believe in the Immaculate Conception of Mary, who is at the heart of all mysteries, in her Assumption, in her vigilant tenderness for each of us. (6: 960–1) After such a list, it would seem that Green’s Catholicism, as well as his status (and desire to be known) as a Catholic writer is indubitable. With this book, he puts his entire oeuvre in a particular context: that of the reformed sinner, who has carefully documented his transgressions, so as to make his salvation all the more apparent – a trajectory remarkably similar to that of Saint Francis, at least in Green’s hagiography. It is significant to note that in Ce qu’il faut d’amour, Green does not deny any of his past “sins.” He does, however, refuse to name them directly, instead referring to other books in which he has explained such things: “The flesh played an obsessive role [during my youth]. I’ve already spoken about all of this in my autobiography and in the prefaces to two or three of my novels” (Ce qu’il faut 6: 939). It is as though, now that



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Green’s final views of his own life and writing could be depressing to the contemporary gay or lesbian reader. Although Green’s religious voyage is undoubtedly a familiar one to many gay and lesbian Catholics, his lifelong inability to see the body and the soul other than opposed could be considered homophobic, and a source of self-admitted, torturous guilt for Green during his entire life. It is perhaps unfair to judge Green by today’s understanding of sexuality and identity. Born in 1900, his familial circumstances, in particular the death of his mother, shaped his entire life. What is ironic, however, is that Julien Green was among the most prolific and remarkable gay authors in the history of Western literature. Homosexuality is either a covert or an overt theme in the majority of his books. Although many of his characters are tortured people who meet unhappy ends, the fact remains that Green furnished these characters with voices. By allowing them perspectives of their own, Green enlarged society’s understanding of homosexuality, and documented what it was like to be gay in the early part of the last century. Green’s last works do suggest, however, that at the end of his life he underestimated the value of his earlier work by seeing it only as evidence of the battle between the body and the soul, a fight that (unsurprisingly since time is the natural extinguisher of physical desire) he claimed his soul had won.



he has truly rejected physical desire, he can no longer bear to mention it. This doesn’t imply any sort of denial, but rather that he is perhaps finally approaching his ideal: the humble believer who is able to devote himself to Divine will, as represented through the Catholic Church.

Introduction: the Catholic Modernist Crisis, Queer Modern Catholicisms 1. Marvin R. O’Connell, Critics on Trial: an Introduction to the Catholic Modernist Crisis (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1994), 8–9. 2. Darrell Jodock, ed., Catholicism Contending with Modernity: Roman Catholic Modernism and Anti-Modernism in Historical Context (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 22. 3. George Tyrrell, ed., James C. Livingston, Tradition and the Critical Spirit: Catholic Modernist Writings (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1991), 127. 4. Ibid., 128. 5. Ibid., 128. 6. Ibid., 128. 7. Ibid., 129 8. Ibid., 130. 9. Ibid., 130. 10. Ibid., 133, 134. 11. Thomas Michael Loome, “Tyrrell’s Letters to Andre Raffalovich,” The Month 229 (1970): 101. Philip Healy, who generously provided me with Loome’s articles as well as a copy of Tyrrell’s Catholic Doctrine of Purity, is at work on an edition of Tyrrell’s complete letters to Raffalovich. 12. Loome, “Tyrrell’s Letters to Andre Raffalovich II,” 140. 13. Ibid., 140, emphasis in original. 14. George Tyrrell, Notes on the Catholic Doctrine of Purity (Roehampton: Manresa Press, 1897). 15. Ibid., 19. 16. Ibid., 77. 17. Ibid., 79. On contemporary gay/lesbian theologies of friendship, see Elizabeth Stuart, Just Good Friends: Towards a Lesbian and Gay Theology of Relationships (London: Mowbray, 1995) and Michael Vasey, Strangers and Friends: a New Exploration of Homosexuality and the Bible (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1995), especially 233–7. 18. Ibid., 80 19. Loome, op. cit., 142, emphasis in original. 20. Ibid., 143. 21. Ibid., 144. 22. Ibid., 146, emphasis in original. 23. Nicholas Sagovsky, “On God’s Side”: a Life of George Tyrrell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 67. 24. Philip Healy, “ ‘Neither crime nor disease’: Raffalovich’s Uranisme et Unisexualité and the Ethics of Homosexuality.” “Defining and Refining: Male Homosexuality in Nineteenth Century Britain,” The V&A/RCA and University of Birmingham Research Seminar in Victorian Studies, November 22, 184 10.1057/9780230287778 - Catholic Figures, Queer Narratives, Edited by Lowell Gallagher, Frederick S. Roden and Patricia Juliana Smith


Notes

25. 26. 27.

28. 29.

30.

31. 32.

33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

41. 42.

1997, 11. As always, I am grateful for Philip Healy’s assistance in Raffalovich studies and as my collaborator in our forthcoming edition/translation of Rafflovich’s Uranisme et Unisexualité. Ibid., 12. Ibid., 13. Marc-Andre Raffalovich, Uranisme et Unisexualité: Etude sur différentes manifestations de l’instinct sexuel (Lyon: Storck, 1896), 32, my translation. See also my Same-Sex Desire in Victorian Religious Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003) for a more extensive discussion of Raffalovich, as well as further reflections on the relationship between past and present. David G. Schultenover, A View from Rome: On the Eve of the Modernist Crisis (New York: Fordham University Press, 1993), 1. “Concerning the Criteria of Vocational Discernment Regarding Persons with Homosexual Tendencies in View of Their Admission to Seminaries and Holy Orders,” Congregation for Catholic Education Instruction, November 5, 2005, translated by Robert Mickens. http://www.bishop-accountability.org/ resources/resource-files/churchdocs/2005_11_04_Grocholewski:_InstructiononHomosexuality.htm Accessed November 29, 2005. All further quotations from the document come from this site. James Alison, “Letter of response to friends in the aftermath of the Vatican Instruction of 29.xi.05.” http://www.jamesalison.co.uk/texts.eng23.html Accessed December 5, 2005. Andrew Smith and Jeff Wallace, eds, Gothic Modernisms (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), 3. See Ellis Hanson, Decadence and Catholicism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997); Patrick O’Malley, Catholicism, Sexual Deviance, and Victorian Gothic Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); and Frederick S. Roden, Same-Sex Desire in Victorian Religious Culture, op. cit. Smith and Wallace, op. cit., 3. Ibid., 3–4. Edward J. Ingebretsen, “Post-Colonial Gothic Dramas: Roman Catholicism and the Homosexual,” Political Theology 6.2 (2005): 245. Ibid., 246. Ibid., 248. Ibid., 255. Ibid., 255. See Roden, Same-Sex Desire, op. cit.; Patrick O’Malley, Catholicism, Sexual Deviance, and Victorian Gothic Culture, op. cit.; and Oliver Buckton’s chapter on Newman in Secret Selves: Confession and Same-Sex Desire in Victorian Autobiography (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998). See Roden, Same-Sex Desire, op. cit., 241–7. Compare Margaret Soenser Breen, “Narrative Inversion: the Biblical Heritage of The Well of Loneliness and Desert of the Heart,” Reclaiming the Sacred: the Bible in Gay and Lesbian Culture, ed. Raymond-Jean Frontain, 2nd edn (Binghamton, NY: Harrington Park Press, 2003), 187–208; Joanna Glasgow, “What’s a Nice Lesbian Like You Doing in the Church of Torquemada? Radclyffe Hall and Other Catholic Converts,” Lesbian Texts and Contexts: Radical Revisions, ed. Karla Jay, Joanne Glasgow, and Catharine R. Stimpson (New



Notes 185

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York: New York University Press, 1990), 241–54; and Ed Madden, “Gospels of Inversion: Literature, Scripture, Sexology,” Divine Aporia: Postmodern Conversations About the Other, ed. John C. Hawley (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2000), 123–52. 43. See Alan Bray, The Friend (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 290–305. 44. Mark D. Jordan, “Staying Power: Choices for Queer Catholics during a Long Winter,” “Out There” conference, Santa Clara University, California, October 28, 2005, 18, emphasis in original.

1. Queer Converts: Peculiar Pleasures and Subtle Antinomianism 1. Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974, 1981), 132–3; hereafter cited in the text. 2. Ellis Hanson, Decadence and Catholicism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), 25; hereafter cited in text. 3. Paul Giles, American Catholic Arts and Fictions: Culture, Ideology, Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 293–4. 4. David Brion Davis, “Some Themes of Countersubversion: an Analysis of Anti-Masonic, Anti-Catholic, and Anti-Mormon Literature,” in David Brion Davis, ed., The Fear of Conspiracy: Images of Un-American Subversion from the Revolution to the Present (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1971), 9–22; rep. from David Brion Davis, “Some Themes of Countersubversion: an Analysis of Anti-Masonic, Anti-Catholic, and Anti-Mormon Literature,” The Mississippi Valley Historical Review, 47 (September 1960): 205–24; quotation from 18–19. 5. Patrick Allitt, Catholic Converts: British and American Intellectuals Turn to Rome (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 5. 6. Michael E. Schiefelbein, The Lure of Babylon: Seven Protestant Novelists and Britain’s Roman Catholic Revival (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2001), 181. 7. For an introduction to Catholic moral theology, see Timothy E. O’Connell, Principles for a Catholic Morality (New York: Seabury, 1976, 1978) and Part Five, “Christian Existence: Ethical and Spiritual Dimensions,” of Richard P. McBrien’s, Catholicism, volume II (Minneapolis: Winston Press, 1980), 903–1166. For Catholic moral theology’s relationship to Protestant ethical thinking, see James Gustafson, Protestant and Roman Catholic Ethics: Prospects for Rapprochement (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978). Several historians have provided accounts for the theological history of sodomy. One of the earliest, and still respected, is Derrick Sherwin Bailey’s Homsexuality and the Western Christian Tradition (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1955), which covers biblical and Classical societies, the Patristic period, and the Middle Ages. Michael Goodich’s The Unmentionable Vice: Homosexuality in the Later Medieval Period (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-Clio, 1979), examines the High Middle Ages. John Boswell’s watershed Christiantiy, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980) covers the



186

8. 9. 10.

11.

12. 13. 14.

15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

same historical periods but examines social, literary, as well as theological perspectives. Finally, Mark D. Jordan’s The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997) focuses exclusively on the development of the concept of sodomy in medieval Catholic moral theology. The Catholic Encyclopedia (New York: The Encyclopedia Press, 1917). O’Connell, Principles for a Catholic Morality, 18. Adolphe Tanquerey, Synopsis theologiae moralis et pastoralis: ad mentem S. Thomae et S. Alphonsi hodiernis moribus accommodota (Tournai: Desclée, 1902–4); Theologia moralis fundamentalis: De virtutibus et praeceptis (Paris: Desclée, 1955). Tanquerey, The Spiritual Life: a Treatise on Ascetical and Mystical Theology, Herman Branderis, trans. (Tournai: Desclée, 1951), 416, para. 875; hereafter cited in text. Schiefelbein, The Lure of Babylon, 182. Allitt, Catholic Converts, 200. John W. Crowley, “Editor’s Introduction”; Roger Austen, Genteel Pagan: the Double Life of Charles Warren Stoddard, ed. John W. Crowley (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1991); xxv–xli; quotation from xxxiv–xxxv. Quoted in Austen, Genteel Pagan, 36. Austen, Genteel Pagan, 36. Cecil Woolf and Brocard Sewell, “The Clerk Without a Benefice: a Study of Rolfe’s Conversion and Vocation,” in Cecil Woolf, and Brocard Sewell, eds, New Quests for Corvo (London: Icon Books, 1961), 11–45; quotation from 11. A. J. A. Symons, The Quest for Corvo: an Experiment in Biography (New York: Penguin, 1934, 1955), 66. Miriam J. Benkovitz, Frederick Rolfe: Baron Corvo (New York: Putnam, 1977), 10–16. J. K. Huysmans, Against the Grain (A rebours), Introduction by Havelock Ellis (New York: Illustrated Editions, 1931), 57; hereafter cited in text. Julian Green, Diary 1928–1957, trans. Anne Green (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1961, 1964), 104; hereafter cited in text. Allitt, Catholic Converts, 323.

2. The Horrors of Catholicism: Religion and Sexuality in Gothic Fiction 1. Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto (1764), ed. W. S. Lewis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982, rpr. 1996), 27. 2. Linda Bater-Berenbaum puts it in different terms: “Gothic literature continued to portray all states of mind that intensify normal thought or perception. Dream states, drug states, and states of intoxication have always been prevalent in the Gothic novel because repressed thoughts can surface in them; under their influence inhibitions are minimized, and thus the scope of consciousness widened. Gothic novelists are particularly fond of hypnotic trances, telepathic communications, visionary experiences, and extrasensory perceptions, for these reveal the secret recesses of the mind or powers of increased mental transmission and reception” (The Gothic Imagination: Expansion in Gothic Literature and Art [East Brunswick, NJ: Associated University



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Presses, 1982, 25]). As I argue in the pages that follow, Gothic fiction also dramatizes the surfacing or repressed thoughts and repressed behaviors. 3. Joseph Bristow, Sexuality (London: Routledge, 1997), 1–11. 4. Horace Walpole, “Preface to the First Edition,” The Castle of Ortranto, A Story, 3. 5. David Halperin notes that the “word homosexuality appeared in print for the first time in German (as Homosexualität) in 1869.” David Halperin, “Homosexuality,” Gay Histories and Cultures: an Encyclopedia, ed. George E. Haggerty (New York: Garland, 2000), 450–2; Halperin explains further: The word homosexuality . . . was coined by an obscure Austro-Hungarian writer and translator, Karl Maria Kertbeny (1824–1882) . . . Kertbeny published in Leipzig, some months apart, two anonymous pamphlets which took the form of open letters to the Prussian minister of justice, and it was in these two texts that the word homosexuality made its historic debut. Kertbeny argued that a number of great men had been homosexual, that the condition was innate, not acquired, and that it was therefore pointless to criminalize it. His effort was unsuccessful. 6. This is not the last moment in the history of sexuality when such a connection is possible. See, for instance, Ellis Hanson, Decadence and Catholicism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997): “How, after all, is the transcendental nature of God made known? How does the Church make its fascination palpable? Inevitably, the answer is through language, through the symbol, through the brilliant lie that is great art. Sexuality, or more precisely the art of sexuality, is also part of the answer” (21). For a political account of this phenomenon, see Robert Miles, “Europhobia: the Catholic Other in Horace Walpole and Charles Maturin,” European Gothic: a Spirited Exchange (Manchester; Manchester University Press, 2002), 84–103. 7. I have discussed the details of this novel elsewhere. See “Literature and Homosexuality in the Eighteenth Century: Walpole, Beckford, and Lewis,” Studies in the Novel 18 (1986): 341–51. 8. See, for instance, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Review of The Monk: a Romance in The Critical Review, February 1797 (19): 194–200; rpr. Coleridge’s Miscellaneous Criticism, ed. Thomas Raysor (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1936), 370–8. For Coleridge, “the whole work is distinguished by the variety and impressiveness of its incidents; and the author everywhere discovers an imagination, rich, powerful, and fervid” (371). When he does criticize the work, and he finds a lot to criticize, he largely discusses novelistic technique; but when he does turn to the lurid sexual energy of the work, he says simply that “not without reluctance then, but in full conviction that we are performing a duty, we declare it to be our opinion, that the Monk is a romance, which if a parent saw in the hands of a son or daughter, he might reasonably turn pale” (374). He finds something to complain about in the handling of the Bible, but never mentions an injustice to monks, nuns, or Catholics in general. 9. See Colin Haydon, Anti-Catholicism in Eighteenth-Century England, c. 1714–1780 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), 204–44; for an opposing explanation of the riots, see George Rudé, “The Gordon Riots:



188

10. 11.

12. 13.

14. 15.

16.

17. 18.

19. 20.

21.

a Study of the Rioters and Their Victims,” T.R.H.S. 5th series, VI (1956): 93–114. Haydon, op. cit., 206. This quotation from Bishop Sherlock was used on the title page of the popular Appeal from the Protestant Association to the People of Great Britain (1779), 59; quoted in Haydon, op. cit., 210. Haydon, op. cit., 234. See, for instance, Gary Kelly, The English Jacobin Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), 7; Kelly discusses a group of novelists who “opposed tyranny and oppression, be it domestic, national, or international, spiritual or temporal” in the spirit of English Jacobinism (7). The classic statement of this horror is that expressed by Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). Satan’s Harvest Home (1749), in Hell Upon Earth: Or the Town in an Uproar and Satan’s Harvest Home, ed. Randolph Trumbach (New York: Garland, 1985), 51–2. This section of the work appeared earlier as Plain Reasons Against Sodomy (London, 1730). John C. Beynon, Men of Mode: Taste, Effeminacy, and Male Sexuality in Eighteenth-Century England, PhD Diss., University of California, Riverside, 2000; see Bernard de Mandeville, A Modest Defence of Public Stews (London, 1724), 7–8. Cameron McFarlane, The Sodomite in Fiction and Satire, 1660–1750 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 55, 80. Charles Churchill, The Times (1764); reprinted in The Poetical Works of Charles Churchill, ed. Douglas Grant (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), ll. 177–84; further references are included in the text; see also Secret Sexualities: a Sourcebook of 17th and 18th Centuries, ed. Ian McCormick (London: Routledge, 1997), 169. E. J. Clery, “Attitudes to Italy,” Introduction, The Italian (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), x. Simon Richter, “Winkelmann, Johann Joachim (1717–1768),” in Gay Histories and Cultures: an Encyclopedia, ed. George E. Haggerty (New York: Garland, 2000), 956; Richter also says that “Winckelmann’s major work, the History of the Art of Antiquity, was published in 1764. Showing the fruits of his sustained daily engagement with ancient artifacts and texts, History is a compendium of numerous individual artworks, placing them in the service of aesthetic, art-historical and cultural observation and theorization. Whereas Reflections featured Laocoön as its centerpiece, History more openly describes an eroticized ideal of male beauty” (957); see also, Simon Richter and Patrick McGrath, “Representing Homosexuality: Winckelmann and the Aesthetics of Friendship,” Monatshefte 86 (1994): 45–58. In his Travels Through France and Italy (1766), Tobias Smollett notes that young English travelers “are seized with the ambition of becoming connoisseurs in painting, music, statuary, and architecture.” He goes on: “I have seen in different parts of Italy, a number of raw boys, whom Britain seemed to have poured forth on purpose to bring her national character into contempt; ignorant, petulant, rash, and profligate, without any knowledge or experience of their own, without any director to improve their understanding, or superintend their conduct.” See Travels Through France and Italy, ed.



Notes 189

22. 23. 24. 25.

26.

27. 28. 29. 30.

31.

32. 33.

Notes Frank Felsenstein (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 241. In a novel like Peregrine Pickle (1751), Smollett is more specific about the dangers of Italian love. See my Men in Love: Masculinity and Sexuality in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 75–8. John Ingamells, “Discovering Italy,” Grand Tour: the Lure of Italy in the Eighteenth Century (London: Tate Gallery Publishing, 1996), 26. Alan Bray, “Homosexuality and the Signs of Male Friendship,” History Workshop: a Journal of Socialist and Feminist Historians 29 (1990): 1–19. Ibid., 3. Mark D. Jordan, “Sodomy,” in Gay Histories and Cultures: an Encyclopedia, ed. Haggerty, 830; Jordan also explains that “because sodomy is essentially a Christian term, it cannot function easily (if at all) in secular contexts. The history of the category will show how deeply embedded it is in religious speaking and thinking” (828–9). See also, The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). I am thinking particularly of Randolph Trumbach, whose Heterosexuality and the Third Gender in Enlightenment London, Volume 1 of Sex and the Gender Revolution, recently appeared (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); another account of this crucial period is Tim Hitchcock, English Sexualities, 1700–1800 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997); in an elegant chapter Hitchcock asks: “Is it surprising, after all, that the century which gave us the debating society and the chapel, in which clubs of all sorts were created, should also give us a homosexual subculture?” (75). If Hitchcock only begins to suggest an answer to this question, he also makes it clear that the question is not as simple as it sounds. See also my review essay, “Heteromachia,” GLQ 6.3 (2000): 435–50. Ronald Paulson, “Gothic Fiction and the French Revolution,” ELH 48 (1981): 532–54. Ibid., 536. Haggerty, “Literature and Homosexuality in the Late Eighteenth Century,” op. cit. After Ambrosio’s desire for Matilda cools, he turns his lascivious attentions on the young Antonia, daughter of the proud Elvira, his confidante. Having employed occult arts by means of which to enter Antonia’s bedchamber and render her defenseless against his lust, Ambrosio is interrupted by Elvira, who challenges and accuses him. He responds by murdering Elvira in one of the most brutal scenes of Gothic fiction: he grabs her, throws her on the bed, stifles her face with a pillow, kneels on her stomach, and struggles mercilessly as she wraps her arms around him in her final agony, until he realizes that she has become a “Corse, cold, senseless, and disgusting.” Matthew G. Lewis, The Monk: a Romance (1796), ed. Howard Anderson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 304; further references will be included in the text. See George E. Haggerty, “Beckford’s Paederasty,” in Illicit Sex: Identity Politics in Early Modern Culture, ed. Pat Gill and Tom DiPiero (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997), 123–42. Robert Miles, Ann Radcliffe: the Great Enchantress (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 107. Ann Radcliffe, The Italian; or, The Confessional of the Black Penitents, 1797, ed. Frederick Garber and E. J. Clery (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 86.



190

34. See my Queer Gothic, for an extended discussion of this novel. 35. Clery, “Roman Catholicism,” Introduction, The Italian, xiii, xv, xx, xxi; see also, Sister Mary Muriel Tarr, Catholicism in Gothic Fiction: a Study of the Nature and Function of Catholic Materials in Gothic Fiction in England (1762–1820), PhD thesis, Catholic University of America, 1946. Tarr remarks on “deistical attack on ‘monkish superstition’ ” in Gothic fiction and “melodramatic sentimentality that revels in ‘melancholy pleasure,’ ‘divine horror,’ and ‘religious awe’ ” (121). The latter description best fits the work under consideration here. 36. On this point, see my Unnatural Affections: Women and Fiction in the Later Eighteenth Century (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 158–65; Clery suggests that Schedoni is not as formulaic a character as some of his predecessors. I agree with this assessment but still feel that the emphasis is maternal rather than paternal in this and Radcliffe’s other novels. 37. Regina Maria Roche, The Children of the Abbey: a Tale, 4 vols, London: Printed for William Lane at Minerva Press, Leadenhall Street. 1797; vol. 1, chap. 17, p. 313; further references are included in the text. 38. William Henry Ireland, The Abbess: a Romance, 4 vols (London: Printed for Earle and Hemmet, no. 47 Albemarle Street, Piccadilly, 1799); Facsimile edition, ed. Devendra P. Varma, New Introduction, Benjamin Franklin Fisher IV (New York: Arno, 1974), vol. 1, chap. 1, p. 3. Further references to this edition are included in the text. 39. For a discussion of this feature of The Romance of the Forest (1791), see Unnatural Affections, op. cit., 158–70. 40. For a discussion of the importance of Donatien-Alphonse-François, Marquis de Sade (1740–1814), to the “history of erotic writing,” see Stephanie Hammer, q.v., Gay Histories and Cultures: an Encyclopedia, ed. Haggerty, 761–2.

3. Michael Field, John Gray, and Marc-Andre Raffalovich: Reinventing Romantic Friendship in Modernity 1. Alan Bray, The Friend (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 317, emphasis in original. 2. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003; GLQ 10.3 (2004). 3. Martha Vicinus, Intimate Friends: Women Who Loved Women, 1778–1928 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), xviii. Subsequent references will be provided parenthetically in the text. 4. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002 and New York, 2003. 5. John Gray to Michael Field, 26 January 1907. From the Berg Collection of English and American Literature, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations. Quoted with permission of Fr. Allan White, Prior Provincial of the English Dominicans. This and all subsequent quotations have received Dominican permission; dates and location will be indicated parenthetically in the text. Thanks to Dr. Isaac Gewirtz and Mr. Wayne Furman of The New York Public Library. Further Berg holdings will be indicated parenthetically. 6. Archives of the English Dominicans, Deposit 372/16 at the National Library of Scotland. Deposit numbers will be given parenthetically in the text. I



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express my gratitude to Mr. Kenneth Dunn of the National Library and Fr. Bede Bailey of the English Dominicans for their assistance. 7. Philip Healy continues work on the Gray letters; his advice is always appreciated. 8. See Frederick S. Roden, Same-Sex Desire in Victorian Religious Culture, op cit., as well as Ellis Hanson, Decadence and Catholicism (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1997), and David Hilliard, “ ‘UnEnglish and Unmanly’: Anglo-Catholicism and Homosexuality,” Victorian Studies 25 (1982): 181–210. 9. Same-Sex Desire, op. cit., Chapter 1.

4. Confessing Stephen: the Nostalgic Erotics of Catholicism in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man 1. James Joyce, Selected Letters, ed. Richard Ellmann (New York: Viking Press, 1975), 96. 2. See, for example, Ellis Hanson’s claim, in Decadence and Catholicism (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1997), that “the novel is darkened with the pervasive evidence of the unnameable and the inadmissible, the rumored and the secret” (285). 3. See H. Montgomery Hyde, The Trials of Oscar Wilde (New York: Dover Publications, 1962), 109–15. 4. Quotations from Wilde will be cited in the text as they appear in Oscar Wilde, The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, gen. ed. J. B. Foreman (New York: Harper & Row, 1989). 5. Quotations from Portrait will be cited in the text by page number as they appear in James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (New York and London: Penguin Books, 1993). 6. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume One, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990), 20. 7. Jonathan Mulrooney, “Stephen Dedalus and the Politics of Confession,” Studies in the Novel 33.2 (Summer 2001), 167. 8. For extended analyses of the relationship between homosexuality and linguistic deviance, see Derek Attridge, “Language, Sexuality and the Remainder in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” James Joyce and the Difference of Language, ed. Laurent Milesi (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 128–41; and Christy Burns, “In the Original Sinse: the Gay Cliché and Verbal Transgression in Finnegans Wake,” in Quare Joyce, ed. Joseph Valente (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), 201–22. 9. Joseph Valente, “Thrilled by His Touch: the Aestheticizing of Homosexual Panic in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,” in Quare Joyce, 51. 10. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume One, 71. 11. James Joyce, “Oscar Wilde: the Poet of ‘Salomé,’ ” The Critical Writings of James Joyce, ed. Ellsworth Mason and Richard Ellmann (London: Faber and Faber, 1959), 204. 12. Jean-Michel Rabaté, “On Joycean and Wildean Sodomy,” in Quare Joyce, 40–1. 13. Joyce, “Oscar Wilde,” op. cit., 203. 14. Ibid., 204–5.



192

15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

22. 23.

24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

29. 30. 31.

32. 33. 34.

35.

Ibid., 205. Ibid., 205. Attridge, op. cit., 130. Katherine Mullin, James Joyce, Sexuality, and Social Purity (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 83. For a quick overview of the indeterminacy of this term, see Mullin, op. cit., 93. See, for example, Mullin’s reading of this scene as a trope for masturbation, op. cit., 105. For an analysis of Joyce’s understanding of the erotic implications of Pope Pius X’s 1903 orders to ban women from church choirs, see Jack Morgan, “Queer Choirs: Sacred Music, Joyce’s ‘The Dead,’ and the Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism,” James Joyce Quarterly 37.1 and 2: 127–51. James Joyce, Finnegan’s Wake, 3rd edn (London: Faber and Faber, Ltd., 1964), 523. Compare E. M. Forster’s Maurice, which also turns to the Gospel of John for its attempt to reconcile homosexuality with Christian tradition: “He wished Christianity would compromise with him a little and searched the Scriptures for support. There was David and Jonathan; there was even the ‘disciple that Jesus loved.’ But the Church’s interpretation was against him” (E. M. Forster, Maurice [New York and London: W. W. Norton and Company, 1971], 70). Joyce, Selected Letters, op. cit., 96. James Joyce, Ulysses (New York: Vintage International, 1990), 49. Joyce, Ulysses, ed. Hans Walter Gabler (New York: Vintage, 1986), 41. Valente, op. cit., 65. Zechariah 2:7 reads “Deliver thyself, O Zion, that dwellest with the daughter of Babylon” (King James Version), a warning that certainly has relevance to Jokanaan’s resistance to Salomé’s advances. Quoted in Walter Walsh, The Secret History of the Oxford Movement, 3rd edn (London: Swan, Sonnenschein and Co., Ltd., 1898), 356. Ibid., 356. For an analysis of the spectacle of sexual deviance that surrounds Salomé’s kissing of John’s head, see Richard Dellamora, “Traversing the Feminine in Oscar Wilde’s Salomé,” in Victorian Sages and Cultural Discourse: Renegotiating Gender and Power, ed. Thaïs E. Morgan (New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press, 1990), esp. 249–56. Patrick R. O’Malley, “Religion,” in Palgrave Advances in Oscar Wilde Studies, ed. Frederick S. Roden (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 180. See Elliot L. Gilbert, “ ‘Tumult of Images’: Wilde, Beardsley, and Salome,” Victorian Studies 26.2 (Winter 1983), 145. I have traced elsewhere the late ninteenth-century shift in “perversion” ’s signification precisely from the sphere of religious to the sphere of sexual deviance. (See O’Malley, “ ‘The Church’s Closet’: Confessionals, Victorian Catholicism, and the Crisis of Identification,” Passing: Identity and Interpretation in Sexuality, Race, and Religion, ed. Linda Schlossberg and María Carla Sánchez [New York: New York University Press, 2001], 248.) See, for example, Freud’s own definition: “Perversions are sexual activities which either (a) extend, in an anatomical sense, beyond the regions of the body that are designed for sexual union, or (b) linger over the intermediate



Notes 193

194

Notes

5. “Uncovenanted Joys”: Catholicism, Sapphism, and Cambridge Ritualist Theory in Hope Mirrlees’ Madeleine: One of Love’s Jansenists 1. Hope Mirrlees, The Counterplot (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1925), title page. This novel is dedicated to Jane Harrison. 2. Linda Dowling, Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993); Richard Dellamora, Masculine Desire: the Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990). 3. For example, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (1903; Cleveland: Meridian, 1959, rep. 1966), 460 n1, three lines on the attribution to Orpheus of the introduction of paiderastia. 4. They were both members of the first batch of twenty students at Newnham Hall when it opened in 1875. 5. For an outline, see Jane Harrison, Themis: a Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion (1911; London: Merlin Press, 1963, rep. 1977), especially 331–63. 6. Madeleine considers her love spiritual but Mirrlees uses various devices to foreground its erotic dimensions. See my analysis in Sappho and the Virgin Mary: Same-Sex Love and the English Literary Imagination (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 159–62. 7. Hope Mirrlees, Madeleine: One of Love’s Jansenists (London: W. Collins Sons & Co., 1919), 136, 138, 164. Variations of this phrase recur throughout the novel. 8. Ibid., 131. 9. Themis, op. cit., 65. 10. Madeleine, op. cit., 76. 11. Ibid., 233. 12. Ibid., 139. 13. Themis, 345. 14. Madeleine, op. cit., 275. 15. Prolegomena, op. cit, 388–402, 397. 16. “Sublimation too was a strong current in the ethic and life-style of many homosexuals. A good many quietly anguished souls . . . followed an ethic of devotion, loyalty, romantic sentiment, and abstention from overt sexual acts.” Barbara Fassler, “Theories of Homosexuality as Sources of Bloomsbury’s Androgyny,” Signs 5 (1979), 249. See the case study of two women, reported by Havelock Ellis in Sexual Inversion: Studies in the Psychology of Sex (1897; Philadelphia: F. A. Davis, 1927). Vol. 2, 200, 221. 17. Martha Vicinus remarks on the ambiguity. See Independent Women: Work and Community for Single Women 1850–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago



relations to the sexual object which should normally be traversed rapidly on the path towards the final sexual aim” (Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality [1905], in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey, volume 7 [London: Hogarth Press, 1953], 150). 36. J. Morgan, op. cit., 130.

18.

19. 20. 21.

22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

33. 34. 35. 36.

Press, 1985), 331 n100: “Hope Mirrlees appears to have been sexually attracted to Harrison, but it is unclear to what extent Harrison reciprocated. She was clearly more emotionally tied to Mirrlees than her friends thought appropriate.” Letter to Margaret Llewelyn Davies, August 17, 1919, in The Letters of Virginia Woolf, ed. Nigel Nicolson, Vol. 2, 1912–22 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich), 385. Sandra J. Peacock, Jane Ellen Harrison: the Mask and the Self (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 111. Ibid., 111. Moods and Tensions: Poems by Hope Mirrlees (Oxford: Amate Press, 1976), 6. The poem goes on to describe the poet’s “not unfaithful heart” as “sick with an unearthly tenderness.” Ibid., 2. Letter to Clive Bell, September 24, 1919, in The Letters of Virginia Woolf, op. cit., 391. Hope Mirrlees, Paris: a Poem (London: Hogarth, 1919), 21. Jessie Stewart, Jane Ellen Harrison: a Portrait from Letters (London: Merlin Press, 1959), ii. Jane Ellen Harrison: The Mask and the Self, op. cit., 111. Ibid., 111. Ibid., 115. Moods and Tensions, op. cit., 5. Ibid., 206. Ibid., 206. The idea that revulsion from heterosexuality is a sign of abnormality requiring biographical explication can be traced back to Freud, cf. his reading of Leonardo da Vinci’s remark: “The act of procreation and everything that has any relation to it is so disgusting that human beings would soon die out if it were not a traditional custom, and if there were no pretty faces and sensuous dispositions.” (Sigmund Freud, Leonardo da Vinci: a Study in Psychosexuality, trans. A. A. Brill (New York: Random House, 1947), 37. See my account of Freud’s pathologizing reading of Leonardo versus Pater’s sympathetic reading; these are similar to Peacock’s pathologizing versus Woolf’s sympathetic reading of Harrison. Sappho and the Virgin Mary, op. cit., 165–74. Letter to Jacques Raverat, February 5, 1925. Letters, op. cit., 3: 164. Letter to Lady Cecil, September 1, 1925. Ibid., 200. Letter to Vanessa Bell, April 19, 1928. Ibid., 485. Letter to Hope Mirrlees, April 17, 1928. Ibid., 484.

6. The Feminized Priest and the Female Outsider: Catholicism and Sexuality in Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop 1. I would like to thank Betty DeBerg for her historical help and the University of Northern Iowa Graduate College for its financial support during the writing of this essay.



Notes 195

Notes

2. Guy Reynolds, Willa Cather in Context: Progress, Race, Empire (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 156. 3. See Marilee Lindemann, Willa Cather: Queering America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 123. 4. See John P. Anders, Willa Cather’s Sexual Aesthetics and the Male Homosexual Literary Tradition (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), 119. 5. Michael Williams, “Willa Cather’s Masterpiece,” Commonweal, September 28, 1927, 491. 6. Willa Cather, On Writing (New York: Knopf, 1949), 5, 7. 7. Ibid., 11. 8. Edith Lewis, Willa Cather Living (New York: Knopf, 1953), 147. 9. Ibid., 151. 10. See Gary Brienzo, “Making an Aristocratic Frontier: Selective History in Willa Cather’s Shadows on the Rock,” in Old West–New West: Centennial Essays, ed. Barbara Howard Meldrum (Moscow, ID: University of Idaho Press, 1993), 154–62; Wilbur R. Jacobs, “Willa Cather and Francis Parkman: Novelistic Portrayals of Colonial New France,” in Willa Cather: Family, Community, and History (The BYU Symposium), ed. John J. Murphy et al. (Provo: Brigham Young University Humanities Publication Center, 1990), 253–64; and Merrill Maguire Skaggs, “Cather’s Use of Parkman’s Histories in Shadows on the Rock,” in Cather Studies, Vol. 2, ed. Susan Rosowski (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993), 140–55. 11. John Jacobs has argued that Death Comes for the Archbishop also “displays many affinities in structure, motif and theme” with Parkman’s The Oregon Trail. See “Willa Cather, Francis Parkman, and the Idea of Progress,” Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial Newsletter 42.3 (Winter–Spring 1999), 64. 12. “The American Protective Association,” The Catholic Encyclopedia, Vol. 1 (New York: Robert Appleton Co., 1907), 426. 13. John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism 1860–1925 (1963; reprint Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1981), 81. 14. Jenny Franchot, Roads to Rome: the Antebellum Protestant Encounter with Catholicism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), xix. 15. Jay P. Dolan, “Catholicism and American Culture: Strategies for Survival,” in Minority Faiths and the American Protestant Mainstream, ed. Jonathan D. Sarna (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998), 66. 16. Ibid., 66. 17. Higham, op. cit., 6. 18. Franchot, op. cit., 14. 19. See Maria Warner, Alone of All Her Sex: the Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (New York: Vintage Books, 1976), 124, and Franchot, op. cit., xix. 20. Francis Parkman, The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1891), 207; hereafter cited parenthetically as JNA. 21. Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927; reprint New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 3, 7; all references are to this edition, hereafter cited parenthetically as DFA. 22. Thomas M. Casey, “Mariology and Christology in Death Comes for the Archbishop,” Willa Cather Pioneer Memorial Newsletter 35.3 (Fall 1991): 25.



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23. For an account of St. Teresa’s ecstasy, see The Life of St. Teresa of Avila by Herself, trans. J. M. Cohen (New York: Penguin Books, 1957), 210. 24. Casey, op. cit., 25. 25. Anders, op. cit., 127. 26. See Carolyn Walker Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1992), 82. 27. Sharon O’Brien, “ ‘The Thing Not Named’: Willa Cather as a Lesbian Writer,” Signs 9.4 (Summer 1984): 576–99. 28. Joanna Russ, “To Write ‘Like a Woman’: Transformations of Identity in the Work of Willa Cather,” in To Write Like a Woman: Essays in Feminism and Science Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 149–58. 29. See Julie Abraham, Are Girls Necessary? Lesbian Writing and Modern Histories (New York: Routledge, 1996). 30. See Susan E. Hill, “Landscapes of Excess: Sexuality and Spirituality in Willa Cather’s O Pioneers! and The Song of the Lark,” Theology and Sexuality 10 (March 1999): 103–17, and O’Brien, op. cit., 593. 31. See Judith Fetterley, “My Ántonia, Jim Burden and the Dilemma of the Lesbian Writer,” in Lesbian Texts and Contexts: Radical Revisions, ed. Karla Jay and Joanne Glasgow (New York: New York University Press, 1990), 145–63. 32. Anders, op. cit., 40–1. 33. Ibid., 126. 34. Ibid., 126. 35. See Judith Butler, “ ‘Dangerous Crossing’: Willa Cather’s Masculine Names,” in Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993), 143–66, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Across Gender, Across Sexuality: Willa Cather and Others,” The South Atlantic Quarterly 88.1 (Winter 1989): 53–71. 36. Jonathan Goldberg, Willa Cather and Others (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), xii. 37. Marilee Lindemann, Willa Cather: Queering America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 123. 38. Ibid., 123. 39. Ibid., 85. 40. Ibid., 124. 41. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 35. 42. Ibid., 38. 43. Marilyn Farwell, Heterosexual Plots and Lesbian Narratives (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 42. 44. See William L. Countryman, Dirt, Greed & Sex: Sexual Ethics in the New Testament and Their Implications for Today (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1988), especially Chapter 2. 45. David Halperin, One Hundred Years of Homosexuality and Other Essays on Greek Love (New York: Routledge, 1990), 23. 46. See Esther Newton, “The Mythic Mannish Lesbian: Radclyffe Hall and the New Woman,” Signs 9.4 (Summer 1984): 557–75, and Lillian Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men (New York: William Morrow, 1981) for extended accounts of the mannish lesbian.



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47. Sherrie Inness, The Lesbian Menace: Ideology, Identity, and the Representation of Lesbian Life (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997), 18. 48. Ibid., 18. 49. Ibid., 21. 50. Ibid., 14. 51. Ibid., 31. 52. Ibid., 32. 53. Susan Rosowski, The Voyage Perilous: Willa Cather’s Romanticism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), 163. 54. Patrick Shaw, “Women and the Father: Psychosexual Ambiguity in Death Comes for the Archbishop,” American Imago 46.1 (Spring 1989): 63. 55. See Susan Haskins, Mary Magdalene: Myth and Metaphor (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1993).

7. The Well of Loneliness and the Catholic Rhetoric of Sexual Dissidence 1. Under the title “The Catholic Rhetoric of Sexual Dissidence in The Well of Loneliness,” this essay was presented as the Presidential Lecture, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York, April 13, 2000. 2. I have in mind Stephen Arata, “Oscar Wilde and Jesus Christ,” The New Wilde Criticism: Aesthetics, Politics, Sexuality, William Andrews Clark Library, Los Angeles, California, April 10, 1999; Ellis Hanson, Decadence and Catholicism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997); Richard Kaye, “ ‘Determined Raptures’: St. Sebastian and the Victorian Discourse of Decadence,” Victorian Literature and Culture 27(1999): 269–303; Patrick O’Malley, Catholicism, Sexual Deviance, and Victorian Gothic Culture (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Richard Rambuss, Closet Devotions (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998); and Frederick S. Roden, Same-Sex Desire in Victorian Religious Culture (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). Douglas Shand-Tucci also speaks to this point in Boston Bohemia, 1881–1900: Ralph Adams Cram, Life and Architecture (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995). Patricia Juliana Smith has been an excellent collocutor in developing the argument of this essay. 3. Richard Dellamora, ed., Victorian Sexual Dissidence (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 9–12. 4. By sexual dissidence, I mean any positioning of the subject which puts them at odds with the definition of the subject in terms of the linkage of man and woman in marriage. In this context, celibate feminist heterosexuality is one form of sexual dissidence, and a woman such as St. Teresa of Avila would be classified as a sexual dissident. 5. The phrase “coming out” usually refers to the assertion of sexual identity. I am aware that the phrase is very different in meaning from the espousal of sexual difference in queer theory and that the terms imply different approaches to sexual politics. It is characteristic of the modern period, however, that sexual dissidents are involved in both sorts of politics. 6. David Hilliard, “ ‘UnEnglish and Unmanly’: Anglo-Catholicism and Homosexuality,” Victorian Studies 25 (1982): 181–210.



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7. Hanson, Decadence and Catholicism, op. cit., 310–11; Brian Reade, Sexual Heretics: Male Homosexuality in English Literature from 1850 to 1900 (New York: Coward-McGann, 1970), 47. 8. Neither Hall nor her partner, Una Troubridge, confessed their same-sex sexual preferences to their confessors. Wilde’s death-bed conversion came at a moment when sexual and emotional ties to other men were no longer possible. Bloxam may have chosen celibacy. 9. Alan Bray, The Friend (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 289–306. 10. John Henry Newman, “A Letter Addressed to His Grace, the Duke of Norfolk,” Newman and Gladstone: the Vatican Decrees, ed. Alvan S. Ryan (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1962), 133. The statement is quoted in an article by Gary Wills, “High Fidelity,” New York Review of Books, December 5, 2002, 40. Subsequent page references to Newman in the text refer to Ryan’s edition. 11. See Harry Oosterhuis, Stepchildren of Nature: Krafft-Ebing, Psychiatry, and the Making of Sexual Identity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). 12. In summer 1875, Wilde, traveling in Italy, sent Newman a copy of a new poem, “Rome Unvisited,” in which Wilde refers to the Pope as “the only God-appointed King.” On his first visit to Rome in 1877, Wilde was granted an audience with Pius IX, who hoped he would convert to Rome (Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde [New York: Penguin, 1987], 55, 70). 13. Roden, Same-Sex Desire, op. cit. 14. Oscar Wilde, The Artist as Critic: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde, ed. Richard Ellmann (New York: Vintage, 1969), 289. 15. Richard Dellamora, Masculine Desire: the Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), Chapters 5, 9, passim. 16. Cited in Herbert Muschamp, “The Dionysian Drama of Today’s Design,” The New York Times, March 26, 2000, Arts, 41. 17. Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (New York: Doubleday, n.d.), 19–20. 18. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (1966; rpr., Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970). 19. Oscar Wilde, De Profundis and Other Writings, ed. Hesketh Pearson (London: Penguin, 1986), 165. Subsequent page references to Wilde, unless otherwise cited, are to this work. On Wilde and Christ, see John Albert, “The Christ of Oscar Wilde,” Critical Essays on Oscar Wilde, ed. Regenia Gagnier (New York: G. K. Hall, 1991), 242–57; and Stephen Arata, “Oscar Wilde and Jesus Christ,” op. cit. 20. Manuscript. French, Paris. Thirteenth century, c. 1270–1290. The Crucifixion, from a missal. Tempera and gold leaf on parchment. H. 8-3/4, W. 5-7/8 in. (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Bequest of Thomas W. Lamont, by exchange, 1981. 1981.322). Mirror of the Medieval World. Catalogue of the Exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, March 9–July 18, 1999 (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1999). 21. Richard Rambuss, Closet Devotions, op. cit., 36–7; Karma Lochrie, “Mystical Acts, Queer Tendencies,” Constructing Medieval Sexuality, ed. Karma Lochrie, Peggy McCracken, and James A. Schultz (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 187–8.



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22. Thanks to Patricia Smith, in conversation in Los Angeles, July 1999. On the feminine gender identification of the Holy Spirit, see Frederick S. Roden, Same-Sex Desire, op. cit., especially Chapters 2, 3. 23. John Bloxam, “The Priest and the Acolyte,” Reade, Sexual Heretics, op. cit., 354. 24. Diana Souhami, The Trials of Radclyffe Hall (New York: Doubleday, 1999), 17, 19. 25. Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, op. cit., 465. 26. Roden, Same-Sex Desire, op. cit., Chapters 2, 3. 27. Ibid., 79. 28. A woman because, metaphorically, the body lactates; metaphorically too, a male lover, since semen is milky in color. 29. See Christopher Lane, The Burdens of Intimacy: Psychoanalysis and Victorian Masculinity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). 30. Ed Madden has also made this point in “The Well of Loneliness, or The Gospel According to Radclyffe Hall,” Reclaiming the Sacred: the Bible in Gay and Lesbian Culture, ed. Raymond-Jean Frontain (New York: Haworth Press, 1997), 164. 31. Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness (London: Virago Press, 1994), 447. I discuss the demand for justice as an aspect of the genre of the apocalypse in “Tony Kushner and the ‘Not Yet’ of Gay Existence,” Journal of American Drama and Theatre 9 (Fall 1997), 73–101. 32. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality. Volume I: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1980), 145. 33. I associate Hall’s rhetoric with the Anglo-Catholic male-homosexual apology of Bloxam and Wilde, the Roman Catholic convert who defends sexual dissidence in De Profundis. “Will” is one of Wilde’s central terms, the motor of his prime norm of “individualism” or “personality.” Anglo-Catholic women’s writing is another important point of reference. Christina Rossetti published The Face of the Deep: a Devotional Commentary on the Apocalypse (rpr., New York: E. & J. B. Young, 1895), her book on Revelations, in 1892. Radclyffe Hall is likely to have read it. 34. I discuss this aspect of Hall’s writing in “Engendering Modernism: the Vernacular Modernism of Radclyffe Hall,” Outside Modernism: In Pursuit of the English Novel, 1900–1930, ed. Lynne Hapgood and Nancy L. Paxton (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), 85–103.

8. “The Woman That God Forgot”: Queerness, Camp, Lies, and Catholicism in Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood 1. I would like to thank my colleague Robby Sulcer for his helpful insights and suggestions that have helped me in formulating certain facets of this argument. This essay is dedicated to María DeGuzmán, who invited me to collaborate as part of her “photo-crypto-narrative” staging of Nightwood, which subsequently inspired this paper. 2. Barnes’ own religious background was by all accounts an extraordinary one. She was the product of an eccentric extended family (made even more extensive through her father’s practice of bigamy) that comprised its own cult, a



200

3. 4. 5.

6.

7.

peculiarly nineteenth-century American admixture of elements derived from Spiritualism, Mormonism, Transcendentalism and Swedenborgianism, among other newly developed doctrines, as well as the Free-Love Movement. Most of its “tenets,” however, seem to be little more than the self-indulgent notions of Barnes’ paternal grandmother Zadel Barnes and her willfully delusional son Wald, Djuna’s father, who styled himself a prophet. Some biographers and critics have speculated that cult practices may have included incest and believe that Barnes was sexually abused by her grandmother and possibly her father. On this aspect of her early life, see Phillip Herring, Djuna: the Life and Work of Djuna Barnes (New York: Penguin, 1995), 24–74. Djuna Barnes, Nightwood (New York: New Directions, 1961), 117. Marjorie Garber, Vice-Versa: Bisexuality and the Eroticism of Everyday Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), 159. The doctor uses this curious phrase, with slight variation, twice in the novel. The first instance occurs during the carriage ride as the tension builds among the passengers, just prior to the physical altercation between Robin and Jenny: “With daring, incredible swiftness, [Jenny’s] eyes went from one girl to the other, while the doctor, wondering how he had managed to get himself into the carriage which held three women and a child, listened to the faint laughter from the carriages behind, feeling, as he listened, a twinge of occult misery. ‘Ah!’ he said under his breath. ‘Just the girl that God forgot’ ” (73). Although this passage would seem a simultaneously self-pitying and self-parodic (and therefore camp) description of the occultly miserable Matthew, which, as will be discussed subsequently, is in keeping with his characteristic rhetorical mode. The second use comes near the end of the novel when, psychically exhausted by Nora’s futile fascination with the longgone Robin, he archly cites his dual gendering as the reason Nora seeks his counsel: “Why is it that you want to talk to me? Because I’m the other woman that God forgot” (143). The unpredicated use of “other” in the second passage would suggest that the first passage refers most likely to Robin, the most obviously “God-forsaken” character in the text, if not to the pathetic Jenny or even the absent Nora, to whom he later relates this incident. In any case, the variations of this phrase emphasize that, as Matthew futilely attempts to convince Nora, she is not the only forsaken woman ever to have existed. T. S. Eliot, “Instroduction,” Nightwood, op. cit., xiii. Bishop Louis LaRavoire Morrow provides a thumbnail definition of “moral virtues” in Our Catholic Faith, an overview of Catholic dogma and practice as understood by American Catholics from the mid-nineteenth century through the 1960s, thus encompassing those of Matthew O’Connor’s generation: “Besides the theological virtues of faith hope, and charity, there are other virtues, called MORAL VIRTUES [sic] . . . These virtues are called moral virtues because they dispose us to lead moral, or good lives, by aiding us to treat persons and things in the right way, that is, according to the will of God,” rev. ed. (Kenosha: My Mission House, 1958), 96. Garber posits that Matthew O’Connor, by virtue of his “manifestly gay” sexuality, is unique among various Modernist Tiresias figures (e.g. Guillaume Apollinaire’s [and later Francis Poulenc’s] Thérèse/Tiresias, Bella/Bello Cohen in James Joyce’s Ulysses, “I, Tiresias” in The Waste Land). For her discussion



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8. 9.

10.

11.

12.

13. 14. 15.

Notes of these various manifestations of this mythical figure, see Vice-Versa, op. cit., 153–68. While it is tempting to draw analogies between the Tiresias of The Waste Land and Matthew O’Connor, particularly in light of Eliot’s role in editing and publishing Nightwood (a matter which I shall discuss subsequently), it is nonetheless outside the scope of this essay; however, for a concise yet highly insightful discussion of Eliot’s Tiresias (and the homosexual implications thereof) by a noted Barnes scholar, see Colleen Lamos, Deviant Modernism: Sexual and Textual Errancy in T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Marcel Proust (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 111–14. Ellis Hanson, Decadence and Catholicism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), 24. Hanson subsequently notes that “Above all, [Oscar Wilde] was tempted by Catholicism as the most beautiful lie ever told. Coming from the author of an essay called ‘The Decay of Lying’ (1889), this is no small praise” (ibid., 234). John Henry Cardinal Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Sua, ed. David DeLaura (New York: Norton, 1968), 259, italics original. Despite Newman’s assertion that this position was shared by authors “Catholic and Protestant,” Charles Kingsley, the Victorian novelist and Protestant apologist, emphatically – and invectively – disagreed with Newman on the moral appropriateness of lies. See pages 297–369 for the lengthy epistolary debate between them. Although often truncated to its two initial words, Luther’s full injunction renders the statement less morally ambiguous than its abbreviated version would suggest: Pecca fortiter sed fortius fide et gaude in Christo (Sin boldly but even more boldly believe and rejoice in Christ). For evidence of this elusiveness, see Fabio Cleto, ed., Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject: a Reader (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), 1–42. His lengthy introductory essay concludes, by implication, that it is virtually impossible to assigned a fixed meaning to “camp.” David Bergman, who basically agrees on this point, nevertheless provides what is possibly the best concise guide to understanding camp’s slippery rhetoric. See “Camp,” The Gay and Lesbian Literary Heritage: a Reader’s Companion to the Writers and Their Works, from Antiquity to the Present, ed. Claude J. Summers (New York: Henry Holt), 130–5. Philip Core, Camp: the Lie That Tells the Truth (London: Plexus, 1994), 7, ellipses added. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 140. Baltimore Plenary Council, The Baltimore Catechism (New York: Benziger Brothers, 1885), 103. Matthew O’Connor is described as being about fifty years of age. If this scene is set in 1928, the year in which Barnes and Thelma Wood separated, or soon thereafter, the doctor would have been born circa 1878 and thus of the first generation of Catholics indoctrinated by means of the Baltimore Catechism, which was first published in 1885. This tool of religious instruction, which privileged rote memorization of doctrine and thus sought to obviate any critical analysis thereof, was produced by the American bishops in the wake of the First Vatican Council of the Roman



202

16. 17. 18.

19.

20.

Catholic Church (1869–70), an event significant primarily for its adoption of the doctrine of papal infallibility. Called by Pope Pius XI to augment his Syllabus of Errors (1864), the Council was concerned with condemning such “errors” as rationalism, liberalism, and materialism, which the Church deemed the sins of “modernism.” This marked a decided shift towards a more authoritarian and unflexibly dogmatic Catholicism, much unlike the sort that Matthew O’Connor embodies, which is simultaneously traditional in a demotic sense and modernist in its perspective. Oscar Wilde, “The Critic as Artist,” The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (New York: Harper & Row, 1989), 1058. Susan Sontag, “Notes on ‘Camp,’ ” A Susan Sontag Reader (New York: Vintage, 1983), 117–18. There is significant critical controversy regarding the perceived “antiSemitism” of Barnes’ characterization of Felix Volkbein. While it is appropriate to acknowledge the issue within the context of this essay, to argue the point is, ultimately, beyond its scope. I would, however, posit that Felix is hardly a typical (or stereotypical) Jew nor, because of his maternity, is he a Halachic Jew. Illuminating discussions of the significance of Jews and Judaism in Nightwood can be found in Julie Abraham, Are Girls Necessary?: Lesbian Writing and Modern Histories (New York: Routledge, 1996), 124–32; Erin Carlston, Thinking Fascism: Sapphic Modernism and Fascist Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press), 73–85 passim; and Jane Marcus, “Laughing at Leviticus: Nightwood as Women’s Circus Epic,” Silence and Power: Djuna Barnes: a Re-evaluation, ed. Mary Lynn Broe (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991), 221–50. Karen Kaivola, All Contaries Confounded: the Lyrical Fiction of Virginia Woolf, Djuna Barnes, and Marguerite Duras (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1991), 62–3. The Salve Regina, which is traditionally said at the completion the rosary prayer cycle, was also recited in the vernacular by the congregation at the end of Latin (Tridentine) mass in the early twentieth century. An example of the often hyperbolic rhetoric and emotionality of Catholic devotionalism and Mariolatry of the period, it is in its entirety as follows: Hail, Holy Queen, Mother of mercy. Hail, our life, our sweetness, and our hope! To thee do we cry, poor banished children of Eve; to thee do we send up our sighs, mourning and weeping in this vale of tears. Turn then, most gracious advocate, thine eyes of mercy toward us. And after this our exile show unto us the blessed fruit of thy womb, Jesus. O clement, O loving, O sweet Virgin Mary. V. Pray for us, O holy Mother of God. R. That we may be made worthy of the promises of Christ.

The basic belief underlying these sentiments is, quite clearly, that human existence is one of misery that is only ended by death and, presumably, the reward of heaven. 21. Matthew 6:28. 22. John 19:30.



Notes 203

204

Notes

9. “A Twitch Upon the Thread”: Revisiting Brideshead Revisited

10. The Altar of the Soul: Sexuality and Spirituality in the Works of Julien Green 1. All translations are the author’s own, unless otherwise indicated. 2. A note on parenthetical citations: the titles of Green’s works are listed in abbreviated form, followed by the volume number of the Oeuvres Complètes, 8 vols, ed. Jacques Petit (Paris: Gallimard, 1972–98), with the page number of that volume. Date of original publication is provided in notes, e.g. here: Julien Green, Fin de jeunesse. 3. Green was born in 1900 and died in 1997 in Paris, France. Both his parents were American, and conferred this status to their son. Although he lived in Paris for most of his life, Green did serve in the American Field Service during the First World War, attend three years of college at the University of Virginia, and serve as a foreign correspondent in New York during the Second World War. 4. Josyane Savigneau, “Julien Green ne veut plus appartenir a l’Académie française; L’écrivain, âge de quatre-vingt-seize ans, écrit que les honneurs ne l’intéressent pas du tout,” Le Monde, November 16, 1996, “Dernière page.” 5. Julien Green, Ce qu’il faut d’amour à l’homme. 6. Green’s principal autobiographical work is called Jeunes années, which is composed of eight different sections, some of which were originally published independently. He has also kept a multi-volume journal, from 1919 until his death. While none of his novels is overtly autobiographical, many of them draw from his early life – Moïra and Le Malfaiteur, in particular. In an oftcited quote, Green remarks, “My real journal is contained in my novels” (cited by Jacques Petit in Julien Green: L’homme qui venait d’ailleurs [Brussels: Desclee de Brouwer, 1969], 19). 7. Julien Green, Partir avant le jour, 1963. 8. This phrase was actually developed by one of the Greens’ household servants, who would use it to tease the young Julien, or to threaten him into helping her with some task. Even though neither she nor Green apparently understood the literal significance of the words, their intent remained embedded in the boy’s memory: “I didn’t understand what [the maid] was saying, but I recognized the phrase and the gestures of my mother, and this is how I remembered them” (Partir avant 5: 658). 9. In fact, chapter XI of Ce qu’il faut d’amour is titled, “La Vocation Manquée,” which not only implies that Green missed his chance to become a monk, but may also imply that he felt like a “frustrated monk,” who should have joined the brotherhood. 10. Julien Green, Pamphlet contre les catholiques de France, 1924 (Paris: Gallimard, 1972–98; Paris: Fayard, 1996).



1. Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited: the Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1945), 220.

11. The only possible exception is the aforementioned, Fin de jeunesse, in which Green writes directly about his sexuality. This text remains quite chaste, however, and avoids any direct mention of sexual activity, or any details about the men with whom Green was involved. 12. As an example, in the chronology of Green’s life at the beginning of vol. 6 of his Ceuvres complètes, there is an entry for 1982 that states, “Décembre: Julien Green détruit son journal de 1919.” (XIII). The “censored” version of this text, On est si sérieux quand on a dix-neuf ans (1919–1924), was published in 1993. 13. Katherine Eberle Wildgen, Julien Green: the Great Themes (Birmingham, AL: Summa Publications), 26. 14. Julien Green, Adrienne Mesurat, 1927. 15. Julien Green, L’Autre sommeil, 1971. 16. Julien Green, Moïra, 1950. 17. In Moïra, Green’s self-avowedly most autobiographical novel, the protagonist Joseph says exactly this, “Je hais l’instinct sexuel” (cited in the preface to Green’s autobiographical writings, Oeuvres Complètes 6: 800). 18. Julien Green, Chaque homme dans sa nuit, 1960. 19. L’Homme qui venait d’ailleurs was the title that Green had originally imagined for his play, Sud (Oeuvres complètes 3: 1716). 20. This theme has been noted by many scholars of Green, including Katherine Eberle Wildgen in Julien Green: the Great Themes, op. cit. 21. Julien Green, Sud: Pièce en trois actes, 1953. 22. Julien Green, Le Malfaiteur, 1955 and 1973. 23. Louis-Henri Parias, Julien Green, corps et âme (Paris: Fayard, 1994), 16. 24. Julien Green, Frère François, 1983 and 1998.



Notes 205

Académie Française, 163 Adam see Fall of Adam and Eve, New Adam aestheticism, 10, 16, 21, 59, 62, 73, 85–6, 114, 117, 119, 123–4, 132–9 Greek aesthetics, 85–6, 117–18 alcoholism, 152–4 Alison, James, 9 Allitt, Patrick, 22–3, 32 American Protective Association, 99 Anders, John P., 103, 105, 106 Anglicanism, 115, 117, 121, 123–4 anti-Catholic sentiment, 13, 22–3, 100 anti-Jacobin sentiment, 36 Antinomianism, 27 Appeal from the Protestant Association to the People of Great Britain, 36 Apocalypse, 125–8 apostasy as perversion, 82 Aquinas, Thomas, 1 Aristotelian philosophy, 23–4 Armbrecht, Thomas J. D., 17–18, 163–83 Arnold, Matthew, 117 art, 155–6 art criticism, 158–60 Attridge, Derek, 73 Augustine of Hippo, Saint, 134 Babylon, 79–81 see also Whore of Babylon Baltimore Catechism, 137, 141 Barnes, Djuna, 16, 129–48 and doctrine of grace and virtue, 129, 137, 142–8 Nightwood, 129–48 relationship to Thelma Wood, 130 Beardsley, Aubrey, 81 Bell, Clive, 93

Benkovitz, Miriam J., 29 Bergman, David, 137 Beynon, John C., 37 blasphemy, 121–2, 128 Bloomsbury Group, 86 Bloxam, John, 15–16, 114–16, 121–2, 126 “The Priest and the Acolyte”, 114, 121–2 Bourdet, Edouard, 109 The Captive, 109 Bradley, A(ndrew) C(ecil), 86, 91 on tragedy, 91 Bradley, Katharine, 15, 58–62, 67, 68, 86 see also Edith Cooper and Michael Field Bray, Alan, 39, 58, 66, 68, 116 Bremond, Henri, 2 Buckingham, Bob, 93 relationship to E. M. Forster, 93 Cambridge Ritualism, 85–6, 91 see also Jane Harrison and Gilbert Murray camp, 16, 129, 131, 135–48 Carlyle, Jane, 93 relationship to Geraldine Jewsbury, 93 Cather, Willa, 15, 97–113 Death Comes for the Archbishop, 15, 97–113 and domesticization of the New World, 15, 98 and female characters, femininity, 98, 105–6 and male homoerotic relationships, 105–11 and Protestantism, 99 and the Virgin Mary, 98, 100, 102–4, 106, 107 Catholic Boys Brigade, 65 Catholic Encyclopedia, The, 24 206



Index

Catholic “Modernism”, 1–3, 8–10 compare literary Modernism Catholic Relief Act, 35–6 Catholic revival, 13 Catholic ritual and eroticism, 75–83 Catholicism and discourse, 17, 150–8, 160–2 see also queer discourse Catholicism and the female outsider, 109–13 Catholicism and femininity, 97–113 Catholicism and sexual dissidence, 114–28 Catholicism as memory, 73 celibacy, 21–3 chalice, 114, 120–3, 125 Chesterton, G. K., 17, 149, 150, 153 Father Brown stories, 149, 150, 153 Christine, Queen of Sweden, 89 Christological narrative, 124 Churchill, Charles, 37–8 Clement of Alexandria, 134 Clery, E. J., 38, 43 “collective emotion”, 86–8 “coming out”, 15, 115, 127 see also conversion confession, 12, 14, 24, 31, 69–70, 75–83, 132, 139, 143, 177–80 and camp, 139–42, 146–8 as exchange, 71–83 and indirection, 76–83 Congregation for Catholic Education Instruction, 8 contraception, prohibition of, 23 convent, 35, 37, 40–5, 47–51 of Port-Royal, 89–90 conversion, 115–17, 127, 155, 158, 160 Cooper, Edith, 15, 58–62, 67, 68 see also Katharine Bradley and Michael Field Coppa, Francesca, 17, 149–62 Core, Philip, 135 Counter-Reformation Council of Trent, 20, 24, 26 Coward, Noël, 126 Crowley, John, 27 Crucifixion, 15–16, 118–25

Dacre, 53 Dante, 130 La Divina Commedia, 130 Davis, David Brion, 22 Decadence, 10, 62–3, 66, 68, 133 Dellamora, Richard, 13–14, 15, 85, 114–28 Dickinson, G(oldsworthy) L(owes), 93 dismemberment, 76, 78–9, 81 Doctrine, 1, 11 Dowling, Linda, 85 ecstasy, 117 Eliot, T(homas) S(tearns), 130, 131, 143 introduction to Nightwood, 131, 143 The Waste Land, 130 Ellis, Havelock, 30, 108, 127 Episcopalianism, 99, 167 erotic nature of love for God, 4, 62–3 excommunication, 23 faith, 160–2 Faith of Our Fathers, The, 168 Fall of Adam and Eve, 146 Farwell, Marilyn, 98, 107 female-female bond, 42, 45, 46, 49 connection to subjectivity, 45, 46 fetishization, 44, 50, 51 Field, Michael, 15, 58–63, 86, 90 see also Edith Cooper and Katharine Bradley Firbank, Ronald, 94 Forster, E(dward) M(organ), 93, 128 Maurice, 128 relationship to Bob Buckingham, 93 relationship to Ross Masood, 93 Foucault, Michel, 25, 33, 57, 70, 71, 125 Franchot, Jenny, 100 Francis of Assisi, Saint, 180–2 Frazer, J(ames) G(eorge), 86 Freud, Sigmund, 10, 34, 82, 86, 127, 175 Oedipal triangle, 34 psychoanalysis, 82 theory of fetishism, 175



Index 207

Index

Garber, Linda, 18 Garber, Marjorie, 130 Giles, Paul, 21 Gilman, Richard, 32 Gladstone, William, 116 Goldberg, Jonathan, 105–6 Gordon Riots, 35–6, 40 Gothic fiction, 10–13, 15, 33–56, 133 on convents and monasteries, 35 and history of sexuality, 33, 41–2 Grand Tour, 38–9 Gray, John, 3, 8, 14, 59–68, 90 and conversion, 61 and priestly diaries, 61 and Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray, 3, 14 relationship to Marc-Andre Raffalovich, 59, 61–8 Green, Julien, 12, 17–18, 29, 30–1, 163–83 Adrienne Mesurat, 164, 173 L’Autre sommeil, 173 Ce qu’il fault d’amour à l’homme, 164–6, 180, 182 Chaque homme dans sa nuit, 164, 177–9 Frére François, 164, 180–2 Le Malfaiteur, 164, 173, 179 Moïra, 164, 174–7 Pamphlet contre les Catholiques de France, 171 juvenilia, 165–72 novels, 172–80 and confession, 177–80 and Episcopalianism, 167 and Mary Green, 165–72 and monasticism, 169–70 and University of Virginia, 171, 174 Haggerty, George, 9–10, 12–13, 33–56, 133 hagiography, 78–9, 164, 180–2 connection to homoerotic desire, 78 Hall, Marguerite Radclyffe, 15–16, 90, 114–16, 122–8 The Well of Loneliness, 114, 122–8 and Christ’s Crucifixion, 122–3, 127

Hanson, Ellis, 20, 21, 133, 134, 137 Harrison, Jane, 85–8, 90–6 on communion, 91, 92 on Maenads, 91–2 on tragedy, 85–8 relationship to Hope Mirrlees, 85, 90, 93–6 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 94–5 Haydon, Colin, 36 health, anxiety concerning, 10, 64–5 Healy, Philip, 7 heteronormativity, 34, 44, 57 Hill, Susan E., 15, 97–113 Holy Communion, 20, 91, 92, 121–2 see also sacrament Holy Office, 23 Holy Orders, 8, 9 Homer, 86 “Homily of the Peril of Idolatry”, 80–1 homophobia 7, 8, 94 homosexuality and ordained ministry, 8–9 homosociality, 7, 15, 27–9 Housman, A(lfred) E(dward), 85 Huysmans, Joris Karl, 12, 29–30 idolatry, 80, 121–2, 128 Incarnation, 118, 122 Index of Forbidden Books, 23 Ingebretsen, Edward, 10–11 Inness, Sherrie, 108–9 Inquisition, the, 51–5 see also sadomasochism interiority, 21 Ireland, William Henry, 47–54 The Abbess, 47–51 and the convent, 49–51 and sadomasochism, 51–4 Irish Catholicism, 83 and James Joyce, 83 and Oscar Wilde, 83 Jansen, Cornelis, 89 Jansenism, 89–91, 94 and the convent of Port-Royal, 89–90 as locus of same-sex attachment, 89–90



208

Jesuits, 1, 3–4, 7, 100–1 Jewsbury, Geraldine, 93 relationship to Jane Carlyle, 93 John the Baptist, 78–9, 82 and John the Evangelist, 78–9 Jordan, Mark D., 18, 39 Joyce, James, 14, 70–84 Finnegan’s Wake, 76 Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 70–84, 128 Kaivola, Karen, 142 Keary, Eliza, 123 “Christine and Mary”, 123 King James Bible, 166 Krafft-Ebing, Richard von, 108, 116 Lawrence, D. H., 128 The Rainbow, 128 Lent, 66 Lewis, Matthew G., 35, 40, 47 The Monk, 35, 40–1, 51 Liguori, Alphonsus, 24, 134 Lindemann, Marilee, 106 literary Modernism, 2–3, 9–11, 14–17 high modernism, 114–28 Long, Thomas Lawrence, 12, 19–32 Loome, Thomas Michael, 3 loss, 42, 45, 46, 49–50 lust, 34, 40 Luther, Martin, 100, 131, 134 Maenads, 91–2 Mandeville, Bernard, 37 “mannish lesbian”, 108–9 marriage, 4–5 martyrs, 89, 92 and tragedy, 89, 92 Mary Magdalene, 88–9 Masood, Ross, 93 relationship to E. M. Forster, 93 masochism, 47–8 McFarlane, Cameron, 37 Merton, Thomas, 32 Miles, Robert, 42 Mirrlees, Hope, 85–96 “The Copper Beech in St Giles’ Churchyard”, 93–4

The Counterplot, 85, 90 Madeleine: One of Love’s Jansenists, 85–96 Moods and Tensions, 90 “Paris”, 94 “A Skull”, 93 relationship to Jane Harrison, 85, 90, 93–6 and Jansenism, 89–91, 94 and tragedy, 85–8, 91–2 Milton, John, 134 Mortimer, Raymond, 95 Mullin, Katharine, 73 Mulrooney, Jonathan, 71 narrative, importance of, 132, 153, 155, 156–8, 160–1 Natural Law theology, 23–4, 116–17 neo-Scholasticism, 1–2, 10 New Adam, 120–1 Newman, John Henry, 15–16, 116–17, 123, 134, 147–8 definition of natural law, 116–17 relationship to Ambrose St. John, 16 nineteenth- and twentieth-century representations of Catholicism comparison to medieval representations, 21, 31 nostalgia, 69, 72, 84 O’Brien, Sharon, 104–5 O’Donnell, Katherine, 58 O’Malley, Patrick R., 14, 69–84 O’Rourke, Michael, 58 Oxford Movement, the, 13 parable, 136–7 Parias, Louis-Henri, 179 Paris, 87–90, 94–6 as Britain’s “Catholic Other”, 94 and Madeleine de Scudéry 87 Parkman, Francis, 98, 99, 100–2 Passion of Christ, 114–15, 118–19, 123–4, 128, 148 combination of bodiliness and transcendence, 118–19 Pater, Walter, 8, 10, 12, 85, 92, 117–18, 123



Index 209

Index

Patristic writers, 23–4 Paulson, Ronald, 41 Peacock, Sandra J., 93–6 penance, 77 Pendleton, 65 perversion, 10, 13, 17, 82, 126, 127, 131 Petit, Jacques, 176–7 Pindar, 86 pity, 144 Plato, 86 Platonic philosophy, 23–4 Pope Benedict XVI, 8 Pope Pius X, 1 Pascendi dominici gregis, 1–2, 8 Précieuses, 88–91 Protestant Reformation, 100 see also Martin Luther Protestantism, 100, 131–2, 136 comparison to Catholicism, 131–2 and masculinity, 100 psychomachia, 163, 173 punishment, 74 and desire, 74 queer conversion, 20–32 queer discourse, 158–60 Rabaté, Jean-Michel, 72 Radcliffe, Ann, 42–3, 45, 46, 47, 49, 53 The Italian, 42–3, 45 The Romance of the Forest, 42 importance of the convent, 42–3, 49 Raffalovich, Marc-Andre, 3–9, 14, 59, 61–8 Uranisme et Unisexualité, 3–7, 66 relationship to John Gray, 59, 61–8 religious habit, significance of, 47, 80–1 Reynolds, Guy, 98 Roche, Regina Maria, 43–6, 49 The Children of the Abbey, 43–6 importance of the convent, 43–4, 49 Roden, Frederick S., 1–18, 57–68, 117, 123, 124 Rolfe, Frederick, 12, 16, 27–9, 32

romantic friendship, 57–68, 152 Rosowski, Susan, 110 Rossetti, Christina, 123 “Goblin Market”, 123 sacrament, 9, 16, 20–4, 28–30, 32, 71, 73–4, 82–3, 121–3 see also Holy Communion sado-masochism, 48, 51–5 Sagovsky, Nicholas, 7 Salve Regina, 143 Sapphism, 89, 93–4 and Queen Christine of Sweden, 89 Virginia Woolf on, 93–4 Sappho, 85–92 as Madeleine de Scudéry’s pen name, 87 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 148 Satan’s Harvest Home, 37 Schiefelbein, Michael, 23, 26 Schultenover, David, 8 de Scudéry, Georges, 87 de Scudéry, Madeleine, 87–91 Le Grand Cyrus, 87 pen name (Sappho), 87 Second Vatican Council, 21 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 98, 107, 135–6 self-knowledge, 63 seminary training, 1, 8, 9, 24–5 sexology, 5, 10, 13, 16, 114, 125, 126–7 relationship to Catholic discourse, 114 sexual inversion, 5–6, 7, 10, 12, 13, 16, 124–5, 126–7, 129 sexual revelation, 72 see also confession sin, 134 Smith, Andrew, 10 Smith, Patricia Juliana, 16, 129–48 Sodom, 79 Sodomite, 143 sodomy, 13, 24–5, 39, 81 Sontag, Susan, 137, 138, 139 Souhami, Diana, 122, 123 stereotypes of European Catholicism, 36–42, 43



210

Index 211

Tanquerey, Adolphe, 25–6 theological manuals, 1, 24–5 Toklas, Alice B., 90 tragedy, 85–8, 91–2 and Cambridge Ritualism, 86 Classical and Christian, 96, 92 and the dithyramb, 88 see also A. C. Cawley, Jane Harrison, Hope Mirlees, and Gilbert Murray transgression, 10, 34, 37–8, 40–2, 48, 50, 55, 70, 72, 73–4, 81–3 Tyrell, George, 1–7, 9 Medievalism, 2 Notes on the Catholic Doctrine of Purity, 4 de Unamuno, Miguel, 85 unnatural, the, 10–11

Valente, Joseph, 71 Vanita, Ruth, 14–15, 85–96 Vicinus, Martha, 58, 63, 67 Victorian age, 13, 114–28 Volkbein Felix, 16, 129, 148 Wallace, Jeff, 10 Walpole, Horace The Castle of Otranto, 33–5 Walsh, Walter, 80 Secret History of the Oxford Movement, 80 Waugh, Evelyn, 17, 149–62 Brideshead Revisited, 17, 149–62 and Chesterton, 17, 149–51 and fishing imagery, 150 Whore of Babylon, 79–80, 100 Wilde, Oscar, 3, 12, 13–14, 15–16, 19–20, 69–73, 78–9, 81–4, 85, 90, 94, 104–5, 114, 115–21, 126–8, 137 De Profundis, 114, 118–23 Dorian Gray, 69–71 and Paris, 94 and “personality”, 118 Wildgen, Katherine Eberle, 173 Williams, Michael, 99 Winkelmann, Johann Joachim, 39 Woolf, Leonard, 96 Woolf, Virginia, 90, 93–6 and Sapphism 93–4 xenophobia, 100



Stewart, Jessie, 94 stigmata, 122 Stoddard, Charles Warren, 12, 27–8 St. John, Ambrose relationship to John Henry Newman, 16 St. Peter’s Church, 61, 65–7 superstition, 22, 23, 41, 46, 47 Swinburne, A(lgernon) C(harles), 117–18 Symonds, John Addington, 85, 117 Symons, A(lphonse) J(ames) A(lbert), 28

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