Plural Loves

Designs for Bi and Poly Living

Serena Anderlini-D'Onofrio

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317953548
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

When limitations are removed from loving (and from lovemaking), new worlds of possibility are opened. This book presents insiders' viewpoints on bisexual/polyamorous living!

With historical and theoretical perspectives, testimonials, reports from the field, and creative writing, Plural Loves: Designs for Bi and Poly Living examines group marriage, polyfidelity, cheating, solo-sex (and group solo-sex), utopian communities, tantric expression and sacred eroticism, transculturalization, and much more. This book explores the common ground shared by the bisexual and polyamorist movements, and addresses the ways bisexual polyamory has been portrayed in films and literature in the United States and Europe. Editor Serena Anderlini-D'Onofrio even includes a candid chapter recounting her erotic experiences with a Catholic priest from Africaand their meaning in the context of bisexual polyamory.

Plural Loves: Designs for Bi and Poly Living presents:

• insider perspectives from members of polygamous groups, including the polyamorous circle Komaja and the Trent Polyamory Society
  
• insights into the benefits of self-sex for singles/couples/poly people
  
• a look at poly living as tantric expression
  
• an examination of the way polyamory is addressed in three modern texts: Love Without Limits, Loving More: The Polyfidelity Primer, and The Ethical Slutand in the work of two nineteenth-century novelists, J. K. Huysmans and Leopoldo Alas, and of three twentieth century dramatists, Noel Coward, Joe Orton, and Shelagh Delaney
  
• an analysis of portrayals of polyamorous people in American and foreign films, including When Two Won't Do, Y tu mama también, Teorema, Something for Everyone, Sunday Bloody Sunday, Straight to the Heart, Henry and June, Threesome, Dallas Doll, Friend of the Family, French Twist, and Go Fish.
  
• a contribution from Deborah Taj Anapol about poly practices indigenous to Hawaii
  
• plus a fascinating chapter by well-known feminist/sex activist Betty Dodson that places masturbation in the context of homosexual activity (it is a same-sex activity, after all)
  

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Part One: Perspectives

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Sweet Dreams:

Sexual Fantasies in J. K. Huysmans’s Against the Grain and Leopoldo Alas’s La Regenta

Hasan Al-Zubi

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Summary. Stranded in a tradition that was only beginning to acknowledge their existence, writers in the nineteenth century had little but the established forms of heterosexual romance with which to build their works. Sexual practices (homosexuality, bisexuality, fetishism) were commonly understood by nineteenth-century novelists, yet since they were not addressed by the established cultural mechanisms, many European writers came to dramatize these sexual practices implicitly in their narratives. This article examines the ways in which two nineteenth-century novelists, J. K. Huysmans and Leopoldo Alas, employ narrative metaphors and descriptions of homoerotic, bisexual, and fetishistic behavior in order to afford their characters sexual identities opposed to the heteronormative cultural ideal. The article concludes that it is only through immersion in the worlds of artifice and other “deviant” sexual practices that the main characters in Huysmans’s Against the Grain and Alas’s La Regenta synthesize the material and philosophical dimensions of their environment and transcend the level of caricature imposed upon them by society. [Article copies available for a fee from The Haworth Document Delivery Service: 1-800-HAWORTH. E-mail address: <[email protected]> Website: <http://www.HaworthPress.com> © 2004 by The Haworth Press, Inc. All rights reserved.]

Keywords. Fetishism, sexual inversion, Against the Grain, La Regenta, homosexuality, sodomy, Freud, sexual fantasy, bisexuality

Introduction

Until the end of the nineteenth century, as several recent studies have pointed out, there existed neither the words nor the established traditions to provide a conceptual framework for bisexuality, fetishism, homosexuality, or lesbian love. “Before the end of the nineteenth-century,” writes Catharine R. Stimpson, “homosexuality might have been subsumed under such a term as ‘masturbation’” (365); in medical lexicon, George Chauncey explains, “sexual inversion, the term used most commonly in the nineteenth-century, did not denote the same conceptual phenomenon as homosexuality” (116). Henry Havelock Ellis, on the other hand, in Studies in the Psychology of Sexual Inversion, volume I, “firmly believed in the biological basis of all forms of sexual behavior, and argued that ‘true’ sexual inversion was always innate” (qtd. in Storr, 15). Ellis followed the earlier example of the German sexologist Krafft-Ebing in categorizing “cases of women and men who sexually desire both male and female partners … as ‘psychosexual hermaphroditism’” (qtd. in Storr 15). By the time Ellis published the third edition of his Studies in the Psychology of Sex in 1915 (which discusses cases of women and men who sexually desire male and female partners), he abandoned “the term of ‘psycho-sexual hermaphroditism,’” and extended “the meaning of ‘bisexuality’ to cover not just sexual dimorphism, but also the sexual desire for both women and men experienced by some of his subjects” (qtd. in Storr 15–6).

In England many scientists considered sex an inappropriate subject of study. In Dangerous Sexualities: Medico-Moral Politics in England Since 1830, for instance, Frank Mort discusses the limited attitude to, and representations of, sexuality. He suggests that “sex is not a fit subject for serious study” (5). Most Victorian scientists in England called for direct regulation of sexual conduct in the nineteenth century. The Victorian ideology also opposed the art for its own sake, and believed that art should work for the usefulness of society. As Michael Bronski put it, “the idea that art should–or even could–exist without a utilitarian function was an outright rejection of Victorian ideology which considered usefulness, not pleasure, to be the purpose of life.” Many rules of sodomy were enforced in England, and, since sodomy was considered a crime by the Court, many people were convicted. The homosexual critic and playwright Oscar Wilde, for instance, was considered a dangerous threat to the Victorian society not only because he was homosexual, but because of his social, political, and artistic views which opposed the Victorian standards about regulating pleasure and restricting the individual’s freedom. Wilde’s defense of pleasure and individual freedom and his being gay led the Victorian authorities to imprison him after several trials in 1895 for gross indecency.

Nineteenth-century England also witnessed the emergence of rigid, oppositional, and hierarchical gender identities. Women, Mort argues, were defined in terms of the norm of asexuality and the absence of sexual desire: “the majority of women … are not very much troubled with sexual feeling of any kind” (81). Mort adds that women who publicly showed signs of sexual desire were branded as prostitutes, nymphomaniacs, or lunatics (81). Moreover, women were considered inferior to men in a male-powered society. Robert Purks Maccubbin asserts in ’Tis Nature’s Fault: Unauthorized Sexuality During the Enlightenment that gender differences were seen as “founded on an incredible difference of experience” (118).

The legal system of the United States against sodomy and deviant sexuality followed the English lead, at least through the nineteenth century. Homosexuality was greatly opposed in the United States. Lawrence Murphy’s book Perverts by Official Order: The Campaign Against Homosexuals by the United States Navy (1988) is an account of the antigay crusade launched by the United States Navy. The book details the naval operation that led to the court-martial and imprisonment of a number of sailors and civilians accused of homosexuality. French and Spanish cultures were not an exception. The French and Spanish viewed pleasure with suspicion, and tried to make heterosexuality mainstream. Maccubbin reflects that in Paris male homosexuality implied a particular lifestyle. The police, he asserts, kept homosexuals under careful surveillance, and their sexual behaviors were considered a violation of public decency (180–85). In the second half of the eighteenth century, sodomy in France, Maccubbin states, became an entirely new evil, an “unnatural passion” (189). Sodomites (or pédérastes as, significantly, the French police called them) had sexual desire only for other men. Opinions of why this happened, Maccubbin writes, differ: “a stricter moral climate” (176), or “the reorganization of gender identity … as part of the emergence of a modern Western culture” (118).

Homoeroticism, bisexuality, and fetishism were commonly understood by novelists in the nineteenth century, and since they were not widely accepted in society, many European writers came to dramatize these sexual practices implicitly in their writings. In his pivotal study The History of Sexuality, volume I (1978) Michel Foucault traces the transformation of desire into discursive narratives of disclosure. He explains that transforming desire into discourse evolved into Victorian and later attitudes toward sexuality, cultural construction of sex as at once unspeakable and demanding to be put into words. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, he writes,

Sex became something to say, and to say exhaustively in accordance with deployments that were varied, but all, in their own way, compelling. Whether in the form of a subtle confession in confidence or an authoritarian interrogation, sex–be it refined or rustic–had to be put in words. (32)

For Foucault, in other words, sex, constructed as the secret and the essence of our inner selves, becomes the truth. Sex is that which we have hidden and must ultimately reveal in different ways, particularly in writing.

In this paper, I explain how sexual fantasies and fetishistic representational images are abundant in nineteenth-century fiction, including two distinguished European novels: La Regenta (The Judge’s Wife 1884–85) by the Spanish writer Leopoldo Alas, and J. K. Huysmans’s Against the Grain: A Rebours (1885). Both novels, I argue, provide a reflection of fetishistic images and other deviant sexual practices via use of socially accepted narratives. In Against the Grain, the hero Des Esseintes is portrayed by Huysmans as a character whose interests and desires are different from those of everyday people. He is deeply interested in things rather than people, and chooses to live isolated with artifice. In his world of things, Des Esseintes obtains sexual pleasure from objects and undergoes bisexual and homosexual reveries that render his sexual identity fragmented. By the same token, Ana Ozores in Alas’s La Regenta longs for a mystic identity and a utopian world in which the common herd of people do not fit. As a result, she isolates herself from people and gives up her heterosexual relationships with her husband, Don Víctor Quintanar, and her lover Don Alvaro. In denying her sexual desire for males, Ana undergoes bisexual reveries, and comes even to be a fetishist when she starts releasing her libidinal sexual energy via sexual objects.

Sexual Fantasies: Against the Grain

In Against the Grain, Duke Jean Des Esseintes follows different sexual routes, a matter which renders his sexual identity ambiguous. Living with parents who, as a result of a “curious accident of heredity” are “nervous” and “anaemic” (2), Des Esseintes himself, subject to the same laws of genetics as his parents, in turn becomes a nervous product of his ancestry. “The Des Esseintes,” explains Huysmans, as a result of “intermarrying among themselves” wasted “the small remains of their original vigor and energy” (1). Des Esseintes’s mother, Huysmans explains, died of “general debility,” and his father “succumbed to a vague and mysterious malady,” and was “worn out with persistent attacks of fever” (2). In the novel, the son leads a distinctive life and proves to be different from the members of his family. Ellis explains in his “Introduction” to the novel that Huysmans abhorred “the society and … the average literary man” (vvi). Huysmans believed that a man of genius is a stranger and a “pilgrim on earth” who seeks universal knowledge. Des Esseintes is portrayed in the novel as a genius who is different from the common herd of people. When a student at the Jesuit College, Des Esseintes is recognized as an industrious, independent and restless student, who “devoted himself deeply to certain tasks” (3) in academic life while “his family pretty much washed their hands of him” (3). His mother, Huysmans states, hardly sees him, and neither does his father. Des Esseintes spends most of his time in reading or dreaming, drinking his fill of solitude till nightfall (3). As a consequence of “constantly brooding over the same thoughts,” his “mind gained concentration and his still undeveloped ideas ripened towards maturity” (3). His teachers, Huysmans reflects, were “aware of the qualities and limitations of this [Des Esseintes’s] alert but indocile intelligence” (4), and fearing the unknown, “they left him to himself to work at such studies [of the decadent ancient]” which “found no place in the curriculum of his classes” (4), but were prominent in the books of his own library.

In the novel, Des Esseintes seeks universal knowledge, and focuses on human nature and the soul. In carefully scanning the books about the ancient people in his own library, Des Esseintes “discovered the apostles of freedom, the wiseacres of the bourgeois, the thinkers who clamored for entire liberty–liberty to strangle the opinions of other people” (6). Comparing his reading of “liberty” to what he supposes it to be, Des Esseintes finds the bourgeois thinkers “to be a set of greedy, shameless hypocrites, whom as men of education he rated below the level of the village cobbler” (6). It is after he absorbs the content of the books that Des Esseintes forms his views of the world, modern and ancient, and his subtly drawn comparisons between the ancient and the modern. Freedom of the modern world, he contemplates, is “false” and the modern people follow a silly conventional way of living in life that makes it very mundane. The triviality of the real world which he finds in opposition to his studious ideals makes him sick and he suffers nervous disorders. Des Esseintes’s unhappiness and misery are further expressed when Huysmans asserts, “he [Des Esseintes] was growing to be like the men … who are unhappy every where” (6).

Finding himself “stranded,” “disappointed,” “lonely,” “disillusioned” and “utterly and abominably tired” (7), Des Esseintes seeks a “retreat” from the “stupid” world of people, alone and away from the scourge of humanity. His ideal world becomes his house in Fontenay, decorated and formulated in a way that suits his sensual needs and tastes–a house which, as he thinks, will beautify his soul and achieve his dream of the “ancient hope” (206). But by staying alone in that place, by struggling with his past memories, his disillusioned ideals and books, Des Esseintes exhausts his powers. He recalls “the miseries of a wretched and neglected childhood” (10), and longs for “revenge on dreary hours endured in former times” (10) among “humbug” people. Living like a ghost in that “exile,” his “laboratory” of the “artifice” and his house, then, Des Esseintes dehumanizes his existence. Bettina Knapp, a critic of French literature, describes this dehumanization as that which “revolve[s] around the acquisition of rave and exotic objects; furnishings, paintings, books, flowers, foods, [and] liqueurs” (203). Never having received love in childhood from his parents or his people, and never having given love; and living alone later on in an unnatural environment in Fontenay, Des Esseintes comes to fulfill his biological needs, particularly the sexual, via sexual objects. His “nervous disturbances,” “distress of mind” and “weary fancies” reach an extreme point. Living alone as he does, he comes to suppress his sexual desires–a matter which distresses him further and has a detrimental effect on his nerves. True, living in an artificial world, Des Esseintes seeks his sexual pleasure in the artifice. This point is affirmed by Knapp: “the duke’s approach to the world of things … had sexual implications; it was a means of sublimating his erotic impulse” (205). Knapp goes further, contending that “like fetishes, objects upon which certain values are projected, Des Esseintes endowed paintings, rugs, plants, or even a bejeweled turtle with dynamic energy, this energy in turn activated his s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• About the Contributors
• Introduction
• Part One: Perspectives
• Part Two: Testimonials and Reports from the Field
• Part Three: Narratives
• Bi Film-Video World
• Bi Books
• Index