judges, professors, elected o≈cials, and so on—to organize e√ective censorship and repression. Psychiatrists will also have a major role to play in this academy of right-thinking people whose job it will be to condemn ‘‘works trading on unchastity.’’ No quarter will be o√ered to the artist who makes the mistake of displeasing the small circle made up of those ‘‘men from the people who are the best fitted for this task.’’ Nordau gives fair warning: in such a case, ‘‘work and man would be annihilated.’’≥
Wilde referred to the analysis of his case by Nordau in 1895 when he made an appeal to be released from prison, pleading that his mental health was deteriorating.∂ But here it was simply a kind of tactical usage, at a moment when he was not being choosy about the source of his arguments. Funda-
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i n s u lt a n d t h e m a k i n g o f t h e g ay s e l f mentally, Wilde had only scorn for Dr. Nordau and for pseudo-science. Of course, what shocked him most in being studied as a pathological case was to see his genius reduced to this level of banality. He chafed at the very idea of being studied as part of a group of people, as a simple example of a general phenomenon. In the works of ‘‘German psychiatrists,’’ he comments, ‘‘I am tabulated, and come under the law of averages! ’’∑ Such comments belong of course to the longstanding tradition in which those who lay a claim to literary genius refuse any scientific analysis, any reduction of their ‘‘singularity’’
to an ‘‘average,’’ any reduction of an individual to ‘‘statistics.’’ But the dif-ferent phrases in which Wilde sometimes ironizes and sometimes waxes
indignant about being considered a psychopathological problem make it clear that he refused to grant doctors any right to evaluate his homosexuality.
When the journalist Chris Healey asked him what he thought of Nordau’s book, Wilde replied, ‘‘I quite agree with Dr. Nordau’s assertion that all men of genius are insane, but Dr Nordau forgets that all sane people are idiots.’’∏
In De Profundis, he writes bitterly to Alfred Douglas, who had planned to publish a defense of Wilde in the Mercure de France that would claim that
‘‘along with genius goes often a curious perversity of passion and desire.’’
Such a subject, Wilde objected, ‘‘belongs to Lombroso rather than to you.’’
(Lombroso was an Italian psychiatrist who had published a book called The Man of Genius. ) Moreover, Wilde pointed out, ‘‘the pathological phenomenon in question is found also amongst those who have not genius.’’π
Clearly then, homosexual literature is not born out of psychiatry. Rather psychiatry takes on that literature, and attempts, with its clinical gaze, to reduce it to the simple expression of perverted or sick minds. It worries about the ‘‘immorality’’ that spreads by means of literary and artistic works.
Psychiatric categories are not at the origin of Wilde’s writing. His sources are literary: Walter Pater, John Addington Symonds, Huysmans, even Baudelaire, and, of course, Verlaine. For Wilde, as for Pater or for Symonds, the invention of a ‘‘homosexual literature,’’ or, more exactly, the e√ort to express homosexuality in literature, is born of an inner drive. It arises from an irrepressible need to divulge what one is under circumstances that make it scarcely possible to do so, however much one su√ers in one’s enforced silence. For Symonds, or for Wilde, or for Pater, taking the floor to speak of masculine loves, to put them into discourse, is something that happens by way of literature and philosophy. Ancient Greece and the Renaissance pre-
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sent themselves as ideals from the past that seem worth recovering. But such speech acts are also enabled by an inner necessity to be able to express what is felt at the deepest levels of one’s personality. Once they discover that psychiatric discourse has no other ambition than to establish a way of controlling same-sex loves, Symonds and Wilde denounce as both incompetent and ignorant (of both the past and the present) the doctors that advance theories in this direction. Wilde insists that he is not what the doctors claim he is. Symonds insists on the need to study ancient Greece—that is, to follow the path that he had set out upon in earlier years.
In their ways of taking up these positions, Wilde and Symonds also
demonstrate that there is indeed a literary body of work that has had a decisive influence on them: that of Whitman.
At the end of A Problem in Modern Ethics, Symonds devotes a chapter to Whitman. Here too one finds an exemplary instance of the battle between the disciplines that I referred to earlier. Symonds once again rejects psychiatric reasoning regarding sexual di√erence, supporting his position by reference to Whitman’s writings.
If Symonds chooses to support his e√orts by reference to Whitman, it is because he finds in the poet the expression of that particular masculine camaraderie that is for him the richest aspect of ancient Greek culture.
Indeed, Whitman would provide more than one English author with confirmation of their belief that it should be possible to give literary expression to relations between men. The first edition of Leaves of Grass, published in 1855, produced a notable emotional shock, one that was simultaneously literary, philosophical, and political. It also captured the avid attention of those men in England (and elsewhere) who were in urgent need of sources of legitimation for their e√ort to express what they were feeling. Whitman would prove to be an important reference not only for Symonds, but also, a bit later, for Wilde and then for Carpenter and many others, including André Gide.
In his Memoirs, Symonds returns several times to the subject of his discovery of Leaves of Grass, in particular of ‘‘Calamus,’’ the homoerotic section of the collection of poems. ‘‘I find it di≈cult to speak about Leaves of Grass without exaggeration,’’ he writes, recalling his excitement upon reading the poems that sang of the beauty of nature and the love between comrades. Very quickly, the book became for him ‘‘a sort of Bible.’’∫ In an 1892 letter to Horace Traubel, Whitman’s friend and confidant, Symonds wrote that Leaves
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i n s u lt a n d t h e m a k i n g o f t h e g ay s e l f of Grass revolutionized his ways of thinking and transformed him into ‘‘another man,’’ ‘‘a free man.’’Ω This was the moment at which Symonds began to try to write poems in a Whitmanesque vein. And there is more. He writes in his Memoirs in 1889 that ‘‘the immediate result of this study of Walt Whitman was the determination to write the history of paiderastia in Greece and to attempt a theoretical demonstration of the chivalrous enthusiasm which seemed to me implicit in comradeship.’’∞≠ Whitman thus seems to have provided the initial impetus for A Problem in Greek Ethics, written in 1873, and also for another never-published work, but one which most probably helped when it came to writing A Problem in Modern Ethics in 1891. The Memoirs also inform us that Symonds had not yet read the psychiatrists when he began (for what must have been therapeutic reasons) to draft an account of his own ‘‘singular’’ life, one that caused him so much su√ering. In a note he added several years after having finished this autobiography—an autobiography impossible to publish at the time it was written—he specifies clearly that at the time he was writing it, he had not read the works of Casper, Liman, Ulrichs, Kra√t-Ebing, the people who would later show him that his story, far from being ‘‘singular,’’ was ‘‘one out of a thousand’’ (281). Even if the psychiatrists did not explain to him who he was, it would seem that they did at least teach him he was not alone in being that way.
Symonds would never stop writing to Whitman, asking whether it was
legitimate to read ‘‘Calamus’’ as a set of homosexual poems. In the end, in 1890, Whitman would finally write to him categorically refusing any such interpretation. Symonds would reply in exasperation that he found it surprising that the American poet was not up-to-date on the fact that there existed a group of people ‘‘whose sexual instincts are what the Germans call
‘in
verted.’ ’’ Symonds goes on to explain, ‘‘During the last 25 years much attention, in France, Germany, Austria, & Italy, has been directed to the psychology & pathology of these abnormal persons.’’∞∞
This is not the place to wonder what caused Whitman to refuse Symonds’s
‘‘interpretations.’’ We might just remark that when Oscar Wilde, in the course of his tour of the United States, went to the small house in Camden and visited Whitman, whom he had venerated since his school days, Whitman did not attempt to hide his homosexuality. ‘‘The kiss of Walt Whitman is still on my lips,’’ Wilde would say later to his friend George Ives.∞≤ Yet we also know that Whitman ceaselessly reworked his poems, across a series of editions, slowly eliminating all the audacities concerning homosexuality that had been present in the earlier versions. So there is perfect justification for
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questioning the response he sent to Symonds, sent only after Symonds had insisted for twenty years on obtaining one. In any case, his work was undeniably read by his gay readers as, in Gary Schmidgall’s words, ‘‘a ‘coming out’
work and a manifesto for sane self-acceptance.’’∞≥ Moreover, it was not only Europeans who were writing to him to tell him the story of their lives, their problems, the liberation they experienced upon reading ‘‘Calamus.’’ Plenty of Americans wrote him as well.
Whitman’s reply did not stop Symonds from devoting a chapter to him in his A Problem in Modern Ethics in 1891. The chapter in question is the final one in the book. After having harshly criticized the psychiatric approach to sexual inversion, Symonds o√ers in opposition to it the healthy exaltation of friendship between men as it can be found in the works of the American poet.∞∂ In the epilogue, Symonds returns to Whitman and writes, ‘‘Walt Whitman, in America, regards what he calls ‘manly love’ as destined to be a leading virtue of democratic nations, and the source of a new chivalry.’’ Yet, adds Symonds with some regret, ‘‘he does not define what he means by
‘manly love.’ And he emphatically disavows any ‘morbid inferences’ from his doctrine as ‘damnable’ ’’ (130).
Despite the restraining order placed on the development of gay culture by the condemnation of Oscar Wilde in 1895, its flourishing in the 1880s and early 1890s would not entirely fade away, and a new vigor would shortly appear. Symonds’s correspondent Edward Carpenter, mentioned earlier,
would himself soon become a guiding light for all those who were trying to a≈rm and to write about their homosexuality. A visit to Carpenter would become a sort of ritual pilgrimage for any cultivated gay man ( just as a visit to Gide would be in France from the 1920s until his death in 1951).∞∑ It was after a visit to Carpenter that Forster would come up with the idea and the desire to write Maurice, a fact he recounts in a note added to the end of the novel in 1960: ‘‘In its original form, which it still almost retains, Maurice dates from 1913. It was the direct result of a visit to Edward Carpenter at Milthorpe. Carpenter had a prestige which cannot be understood today.’’
After having described Carpenter from a number of angles—as a rebel, a socialist, an advocate for simple living, and a poet in the vein of Whitman—
Forster adds, ‘‘He was a believer in the Love of Comrades, whom he sometimes called Uranians. It was this last aspect of him that attracted me in my loneliness.’’∞∏
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i n s u lt a n d t h e m a k i n g o f t h e g ay s e l f In the case of Carpenter, being a Whitmanian poet and a preacher of love between men seems intimately related to being a committed social democrat. Indeed, it is this Whitmanian tradition that finds itself perpetuated through Carpenter, one which a≈rmed the possibility of a cultural tradition in which the love of men was linked to the ideas of democracy and of social-ism. In 1874, Carpenter had in fact written a long letter to Whitman telling him how important the reading of ‘‘Calamus’’ had been to him, for it permitted men ‘‘to be not ashamed of the noblest instinct of their nature.’’ He added, linking his personal liberation to his political aspirations, ‘‘Between the splendid dawn of Greek civilisation and the high universal noon of Democracy there is a strange horror of darkness on us (but) slowly I think the fetters are falling from men’s feet, the cramps and crazes of the old supersti-tions are relaxing, the idiotic ignorance of class contempt is dissipating.’’∞π
Personal liberation, an exaltation of the body and of nature, male homoeroticism, the greatness of the common man: Leaves of Grass sent a new wind blowing over an entire generation of intellectuals. Whitman declares: One’s-Self I sing, a simple separate person,
Yet utter the word Democratic, the word En-Masse.∞∫
A bit further on, he announces that he will ‘‘sing the song of companionship’’ and then goes on to explain what that means:
I will therefore let flame from me the burning fires that were
threatening to consume me,
I will lift what has too long kept down those smouldering fires,
I will give them complete abandonment,
I will write the evangel-poem of comrades and love.∞Ω
Soon, the ‘‘love of comrades’’ and democratic passion will unite, and the poem ‘‘For You O Democracy,’’ from the ‘‘Calamus’’ section, will declare: Come, I will make the continent indissoluble,
I will make the most splendid race the sun ever shone upon,
I will make the divine magnetic lands,
With the love of comrades,
With the life-long love of comrades,
I will plant companionship thick as trees along the rivers of America, and along the shores of the great lakes, and all over the prairies,
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I will make inseparable cities with their arms about each other’s
necks,
By the love of comrades,
By the manly love of comrades.
For you these from me, O Democracy, to serve you ma femme!
For you, for you I am trilling these songs.≤≠
We should not forget, after all, that Whitman is not only the poet of Leaves of Grass; he is also the author of the inflammatory proclamations of Democratic Vistas. ≤∞ The love of comrades, for Whitman, is simply one aspect—clearly a fundamental one—of his song of praise to the nation, to American democracy, just as, for Carpenter, the Love of Comrades (it is Forster who supplies the capital letters) is of a piece with a commitment to social democracy. We might also note that if the only role ‘‘ ma femme’’ seems to have in Whitman’s poem is as a personification of democracy, Carpenter (as close as you can come to a disciple of Whitman) would be one of the main political and theoretical supporters of the women’s emancipation movement at the end of the nineteenth and in the early twentieth centuries.
One does, of course, still need to call into question the deeply misogynistic aspect of this mythology of virility, of masculinity, of the accompanying cult of the young and beautiful athletic male body. Also, as I have already pointed out, it is impossible to ignore the way certain nationalist ideologies are woven into some of the discourses intended to legitimate homosexuality.
Yet the link that is often drawn between the exaltation of masculine friendship and an attraction to fascism is far from being present in every historical situation. Whitman, Carpenter, and even Symonds stand as examples of a homo-democratic tradition (a tradition that is simultaneously homosocial, if not homosexual, and democratic) that was able to coincide with a cult of virile friendship.
Clearly it is a somewhat odd and singular path that runs from Walter Pater and the elitist circles of Oxford to Edward Carpenter and his socialist and democratic engagements. The set of discourses one finds as one follows this twelve-year-long development shows extreme diversity—diversity both as regards representations of homosexuality and as regards political commitments. Yet if these attempts to make ro
om for gay identity and gay speech reveal multiple and contradictory interrelations, this is of course in large measure due to the obvious di√erences between the people involved. But the
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i n s u lt a n d t h e m a k i n g o f t h e g ay s e l f multiplicity also comes about because these attempts began as attempts to justify and defend, attempts to provide a ‘‘good image’’ to counteract the insulting and defamatory images being consistently o√ered up by the social order. It is noteworthy that contradictions are to be found not only between the works of various authors, but even within the work of a single person. So Wilde could, in The Portrait of Mr. W. H. , pen an apologia of the purely spiritual Platonic love of an older for a younger man, and then, in The Picture of Dorian Gray, exalt a new hedonism whose carnal and sexual meanings were scarcely hidden. And, of course, discourses would often find themselves in blatant contradiction with the behaviors of their authors. All this apparatus of legitimation—philosophical, literary, cultural, artistic—existed alongside a wide range of behaviors or ways of life, from the most provocative (the worship of androgyny, e√eminate manners, flowers in the button-hole) to the most discreet (Symonds publishing his works in ten copies). There were attempts to assert a sexual ‘‘di√erence’’ that ran against established norms, and there were attempts to claim that homosexuality in fact represented the most perfect realization of masculinity or of moral duty.
Insult and the Making of the Gay Self Page 29