Closeted Writing and Lesbian and Gay Literature

Classical, Early Modern, Eighteenth-Century

David M. Robinson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351950954
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

Arguing for renewed attention to covert same-sex-oriented writing (and to authorial intention more generally), this study explores the representation of female and male homosexuality in late sixteenth- through mid-eighteenth-century British and French literature. The author also uncovers and analyzes long-term continuities in the representation of same-sex love, sex, and desire between the classical, early modern, eighteenth-century, and even modern periods. Among the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century authors and texts examined here are Mme de Murat, Les Memoires De Madame La Comtesse De M*** (1697); John Cleland, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1748-49); Tobias Smollett, The Adventures of Roderick Random (1748); Nicolas Chorier and Jean Nicolas, L'Academie des dames (1680); Delarivier Manley, The New Atalantis (1709); and Isaac de Benserade, Iphis et Iante (1637). Classical texts brought into the discussion include Juvenal's Satires, Lucian's Erotes, and, most importantly, Ovid's Metamorphoses. Casting its net broadly yet exploring deeply-poems, plays, novels, and more; from the serious to the satiric, the polite to the pornographic; well-known and little-known; written in English, French, and Latin; published in early modern and eighteenth-century Britain and France; plus key classical texts-this study engages with the historiography of sexuality as a whole.

PART 1

Intentionality:
Closeted Homosexual Writing

Chapter 1

Closeted Writing before “The Closet”

Narcissism, Naiveté, and Other Grounds for Dismissal

Discussing closeted gay writing, at least in academic forums, is a perilous undertaking. Nongay critics typically reject the notion as reading too much into texts. For them it constitutes a willful and perverse misreading, an inversion, even negation, of proper reading, a sort of anti-reading or un-writing.¹

But such charges are only one subset of a more comprehensive prohibition against reading for less-than-explicit gay content, the full range of which Eve Sedgwick enumerated, with characteristic brilliance, in a memorable list she might have entitled, “How to Suppress Gay Criticism in Eight Easy Steps” ([1990] 52–53). Her summation of these often contradictory but nonetheless popular rhetorical moves (e.g., “Passionate language of same-sex attraction was extremely common during whatever period is under discussion—and therefore must have been completely meaningless”; “Same-sex genital relations may have been perfectly common during the period under discussion—but since there was no language about them, they must have been completely meaningless”) is that, while they “reflect… some real questions of sexual definition and historicity[,]… they only reflect them and don’t reflect on them: the family resemblance among this group of extremely common responses comes from their closeness to the core grammar of Don’t ask; You shouldn’t know” (53). Such arguments, when successful, cordon off virtually the entire corpus of world literature from pro-gay analysis. As for unequivocally gay texts—most of them written in the last half-century or less—they are typically ignored, or dismissed as insufficiently universal to merit critical attention, by virtue of their explicitly gay focus.

Most of us working in LGBT Studies have grown adept at countering such dismissal and prohibition from without (thanks, in no small measure, to work such as Sedgwick’s and Sinfield’s). Yet we are, on the whole, much less skilled, and much less interested, in opposing such arguments when proffered from within our own ranks. Not that any of us intends to foreclose pro-gay or anti-homophobic textual inquiry. Quite the opposite. Yet for much of the past two decades, many among us have seemed intent on foreclosing certain varieties of such inquiry.

Using arguments disconcertingly similar to those Sedgwick targets, historians and critics studying pre- and early modern sex, gender, and sexuality have often proven themselves as quick to dismiss their colleagues’ work as have homophobic scholars to dismiss our collective intellectual endeavor. And by far the most common form such intra-group dismissal has taken has been the charge of anachronism, of failure to accept the supposed epistemic divide in Western history separating B.H. from A.H., “Before Homosexuality” from “After Homosexuality.” Our fields’ rise to prominence in the late 1980s and early 1990s was accompanied, and perhaps enabled, not only by an in-your-face, ACT UP–like defiance of scholarly and critical homophobia, but also by a down-your-nose disavowal of insufficiently “sophisticated,” insufficiently “rigorous” lesbian and gay work. The litmus test was acceptance of the modern “invention” of homosexuality.

But more damaging even than dismissing continuist work has been ignoring it. Continuists critiqued the dominant, Foucauldian paradigm (or pseudo-Foucauldian paradigm, as Halperin argues [1998/2002]) on a variety of grounds: contesting interpretations of particular texts; presenting overlooked evidence; disputing the conclusions of authoritative theorists and scholars (Foucault, Bray, Stone, Laqueur, Trumbach, Halperin, Butler). Yet in differentist scholarship of the late ’80s through late ’90s, citation of continuist work (let alone serious engagement with it) is rare. With the exception of differentists’ favorite foil, the supposedly essentialist, indisputably A-List John Boswell, as well as a B-List of hard-to-ignore but not-particularly-sought-after invitees (such as Bruce Smith, Amy Richlin, Bernadette Brooten, and Terry Castle), continuists taking issue with the discontinuist paradigm were relegated to a C-List or D-List of disciplinary nobodies. Until the recent crisis in academic publishing, and with the exception of female scholars conversant with lesbian-feminist debates on the history of sexuality (who tended to exhibit a less ideologically restricted pattern of citation), scholars published by Routledge, Duke, Zone, or (to a lesser extent) GLQ rarely cited those published by Haworth/Harrington Park, Cassell, or Journal of the History of Sexuality.²

As mentioned in my preface, leading differentist scholars have begun, at long last, to call for greater historiographic and critical pluralism, echoing (although often without acknowledgment) continuist writing of the past decade and more.³ Yet old disciplinary habits die a slow, lingering death, as a field’s classic texts continue to influence newcomers’ work, even while the eminences grises have moved on to newer perspectives. Take, for instance, Harriette Andreadis’s treatment, in Sappho in Early Modern England (2001), of Elizabeth Wahl’s Invisible Relations (1999). The two projects are remarkably congruent: both document an increasing, anxious cultural awareness of female homosexuality over the course of the seventeenth century (in England, for Andreadis; in England and France, for Wahl), paying particular attention to the ways in which female friendship writing enabled women to both express and conceal erotic desire for one another. Yet the extent of Andreadis’s engagement with Wahl is to (inaccurately) criticize her for “situat[ing Katherine] Philips in a historical context that assumes the binaries of hetero-/homo-sexuality, which were not culturally stable until much later,” and with “attribut[ing] to Philips a quite modern, twentieth-century subjectivity and self-consciousness about normative sexualities” (192, n.9).

Or consider Paula Loscocco’s even more recent treatment (2003) of virtually everyone else who’s written on the homoerotics of Philips’s verse. Contrasting her own discursively focused explication of the poems to predecessors’ supposedly biographical and ideological explications, Loscocco obscures the degree to which her work accords with, and grows out of, criticism that takes what she considers a less theoretically sophisticated approach. Inadvertently, she reveals precisely what Fradenburg and Freccero highlight in differentist writing: the unacknowledged pleasure its authors take in renouncing pleasure (figured in Loscocco’s case as resistance to “temptation” [83]), as well as its stance of dispassionate objectivity. In contrast, Fradenburg and Freccero urge us “to recognize and confront the pleasure we take in renouncing pleasure for the stern alterities of history,” arguing that “[t]he opposition between transhistoricist perspectives which seek, in the past, the allure of the mirror image, and historicist perspectives that ‘accept’ the difference of past from present, is itself highly ideological” (xix).

Perhaps most disturbing is Valerie Traub’s treatment—in her ambitious, exhilarating book, The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England (2002)—of precisely this aspect of the continuist/differentist debate, and of Fradenburg and Freccero’s essay in particular. For while Traub’s book displays a truly rare intellectual generosity, that generosity fails when she dramatically misrepresents Fradenburg and Freccero’s argument. Asking “how to postulate a continuism that is not naive” and “what… a sophisticated continuism [would] look like,” she faults Fradenburg and Freccero for erecting a binary opposition that, in fact, differentists insist upon, and that Fradenburg and Freccero explicitly critique. After quoting their assertion that “[t]he opposition between transhistoricist perspectives which seek, in the past, the allure of the mirror image, and historicist perspectives that ‘accept’ the difference of past from present, is itself highly ideological,” Traub sums up their argument as follows: “Correlating identification across time with pleasure, and resistance to identification with ascesis or a foreclosure of pleasure, they celebrate as particularly queer the pleasures of the mirror” (333). She then launches into a series of questions culminating in a declaration of her critical intent:

But is this pleasure genuinely queer, that is, resistant? Or is the pleasure of identification yet another emanation of the similitude that, since the Renaissance at least, has been a primary means of representing female homoeroticism? Why is it that identification is associated with pleasure, while forgoing identification in the name of historical alterity is correlated with an austere asceticism? Does opposition to collapsing the past into the present necessarily evacuate pleasure from the historical enterprise? Why is pleasure conceived only as the singular, ego-confirming gratification of the mirror? And what is it that would make the “allure of the mirror image” acceptable as a form of historicist practice? As these questions imply, I want to trouble Fradenburg and Freccero’s opposition between identification as pleasure, on the one hand, and alterity as ascesis, on the other. (334)

Fradenburg and Freccero’s point, however, was that differentists have erected this opposition, charging continuists with seeking mirror images in the past in a naive quest for the comforting pleasures of identification, while themselves claiming to have renounced pleasure in order to better apprehend historical truth, found solely in historical difference (the stance exemplified by Loscocco, above, and Masten, below). Fradenburg and Freccero urged differentists to abandon this opposition, to admit the pleasures they derive from their own approach and to value the different pleasures, and different insights, that continuist and discontinuist work can offer. For while it’s true that, as Traub argues, identificatory perspectives “can obscure the ways that historical difference can provide us with critical resources and understandings otherwise unavailable” (334), the reverse is also true: antiidentificatory perspectives can obscure the ways that historical similitude can provide us with critical resources and understandings otherwise unavailable. Fradenburg and Freccero thus advocated a both/and approach.

Among the many effects of differentism such as Traub’s has been the general abandonment, as irredeemably anachronistic, of the notions of the closet and closeted writing when discussing the pre- and early modern world. Thus Traub asks, “[W]as there, in fact, an early modern closet?” (344), and concludes by characterizing the early modern period as a time “prior to the regime of the closet” (345). And thus, in Textual Intercourse (1997), Jeffrey Masten characterizes his approach as “eschewing a historical methodology that finds only versions or expressions of itself in the past” and instead accepting “the impossibility of sleeping with the dead[,]… the impossibility, even as it figures as an intractable curiosity or desire, of searching the annals of the past for erotic subjects motivated by our desires and living our practices with the cultural and political meanings we associate with these desires and practices…. The point,” he concludes, “is not to bring the Renaissance out of the closet, but to bring the closet out of the Renaissance—to account for the abiding differences in the ways this period represented sexuality and its connections with modes of textual production” (6–7). Masten’s often brilliantly argued book is thus launched (as Traub’s is concluded) through caricature and repudiation of continuist work (“find[ing] only versions or expressions of itself in the past”), and through a display of supposedly mature self-denial and objectivity (resisting a seemingly “intractable curiosity or desire” and instead accepting “the impossibility of sleeping with the dead”).

Compare this approach to that taken in a work to which Masten acknowledges himself indebted (168, n.30), Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet:

Over and over I have felt in writing the book that, however my own identifications, intuitions, circumstances, limitations, and talents may have led its interpretations to privilege constructivist over essentialist, universalizing over minoritizing, and gender-transitive over gender-separatist understandings of sexual choice, nevertheless the space of permission for this work and the depth of the intellectual landscape in which it might have a contribution to make owe everything to the wealth of essentializing, minoritizing, and separatist gay thought and struggle also in progress. (13)

Sedgwick’s work has had an incalculable impact on subsequent gay and queer scholarship. Yet her respect for other approaches has too rarely been emulated.

With her example in mind, let me be clear: my aim is not to dismiss Masten, Traub, Loscocco, Andreadis, or others for having themselves dismissed continuist scholarship. While I sometimes disagree with their work, I also find it, like much differentist work, genuinely illuminating. My aim, instead, is to highlight and contest the persistent strain in differentist writing that “others” and dismisses so-called essentialist, minoritizing, separatist gay and lesbian scholarship; that ignores it; or that appropriates its i...