Gay and Lesbian Historical Fiction: Sexual Mystery and Post-Secular Narrative

231 Pages·2007·0.925 MB·English

by  Norman W. Jones (auth.)

Gay and Lesbian Historical Fiction
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Gay and Lesbian Historical
Fiction
Sexual Mystery and Post-Secular
Narrative
Norman W. Jones
GAYANDLESBIANHISTORICALFICTION
© Norman W. Jones, 2007.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2007978-1-4039-7655-0
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any
manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief
quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
First published in 2007 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™
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PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave
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Union and other countries.
ISBN 978-1-349-53724-2 ISBN 978-0-230-60485-8 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9780230604858
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Jones, Norman W.
Gay and lesbian historical fiction : sexual mystery and post-secular
narrative / Norman W. Jones.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1–4039–7 655.– 4(alk paper)
1. Gays’ writings, American—History and criticism—Theory, etc.
2. Gays’ writings, English—History and criticism—Theory, etc.
3. Homosexuality in literature. 4. Homosexuality and
literature—United States—History—20th century.
5. Homosexuality and literature—England—History—20th century.
6. American literature—20th century—History and criticism.
7. English literature—20th century—History and criticism.
8. Gay men in literature. 9. Lesbians in literature. I. Title.
PS153.G38J66 2007
823(cid:2).08109352664—dc22 2007060046
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.
First edition: June 2007
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
for my parents
Ann and Skip Jones
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C O N T E N T S
Preface viii
Introduction Spot the Homo: Definitions 1
One Mysterious Hauntings and Revisionist Histories 41
Two Romancing the Past: The Uses of Identification 72
Three Coming-Out Stories As Conversion Narratives 102
Four Familiar Stories from Strange Bedfellows:
Chosen Community 145
Afterword: Can We Talk? 185
Notes 187
Works Cited 195
Annotated Bibliography 205
Index 211
P R E F A C E
Perhaps in this neglected spot is laid
Some heart once pregnant with celestial fire.
—Thomas Gray, Elegy Written in a
Country Churchyard
This book’s genesis lies with the eighteenth-century poet, Thomas
Gray, and with a mysterious possibility similar to the one he articulates
in these lines in which the speaker muses on a neglected grave in a country
churchyard. Gray himself embodied this mysterious possibility for my
research at the time: in what ways should Gray’s erotic and emotional
attachments to men inform our interpretation of his poetry? Robert
Gleckner holds that Gray was homosexual and that this profoundly
influenced Gray’s writing. Yet many others object that the label homosexual
can only be anachronistic when applied to eighteenth-century figures.
Randolph Trumbach, for instance, argues that queen would be a more
appropriate term for the gender inversion that dominated conceptions of
men’s sexual desire for men in the period. George Haggerty proposes
another alternative: he offers men in loveas a starting point for articulating
what he insists were vastly different understandings of gender as well
assex from those of today. More recently, however, Christopher Hobson
counters Haggerty’s and Trumbach’s claims, favoring instead Gleckner’s
terminology. In these divergent arguments, Gray represents in microcosm
the larger debates surrounding gay and lesbian histories as a whole.
Most of my colleagues were shocked to find that my research into
these debates eventually led me to gay and lesbian historical fiction.
Scholars often look down on the genre, particularly for encouraging
identifications with the past that they feel are especially anachronistic
when it comes to the history of sex, which attests to so much change—
in terminology, in behavioral norms, and in symbolic connotations. Yet
preface ix
this is precisely why I was drawn to the genre: it dwells in the very center
of the debates about how much similarity or difference we find in the
history of sex. While many scholars fret about whether the terms of
the sexual past are at all translatable into those of the present, gay and
lesbian historical fictions are busy translating. It turns out they are generally
good at it.
This first full-length study of gay and lesbian historical fiction argues
in favor of the sense of historical continuity fostered by the genre, critiquing
the charge of anachronism commonly leveled against it. The sense of
historical continuity in these fictions typically derives from what the
anachronism charge ignores: gay and lesbian identifications with the past
constitute responses to sexual mystery asmystery. Such an understanding
of sex descends from a long history. This is especially clear from parallels
between gay and lesbian narratives and Christian ones.
As I elaborate in the introduction, much of the gay and lesbian history
debates revolve around definitions of systemic categories of analysis—
whether, for instance, we term Gray a homosexual, a queen, or a same-
sex-desiring man in love. What would scholarship look like if it recognized
the tendentious limitations of all these categorical definitions? How
would it retain analytical precision and rigor—could it claim to be ana-
lyzing anything at all, if it could not even categorically specify its topic?
Scholars such as Carolyn Dinshaw have been working to create such
antisystemic strategies of analysis without falling into an ultimately
untenable (and potentially reactionary) anti-intellectualism that would
oppose systemic analysis altogether. One can temper the excesses of
systemic analysis in sexuality studies without rejecting such analysis. It is
no surprise to me that Dinshaw is also one of very few scholars to
explore a work of historical fiction in her study of gay and lesbian histories.
Gay and lesbian historical fictions model ways of approaching sexual
mystery not as a threat to analysis but as its ground. As Gray’s Elegy
constructs itself on the “perhaps” of a mystery—the “neglected” grave
of a person unknown to history—so too do these fictions often comprise
insightful explorations of the unknown as unknown. In this underlying
reenvisioning of how we know, these fictions tend implicitly to undermine
the supposed dichotomy of secular versus sacred ways of knowing. Much
as the lines I quote from Gray symbolize desire as a commingling with
divinity (suggestive of various Zeus-and-Leda-type stories), many of these
narratives mingle characteristically sacred with sexual epistemologies in
ways that I term post-secular. By post-secular, I mean to denote not a rejection
of the secular but rather a reconstitution of the boundary between secular
and sacred—specifically by showing that boundary to be far more