Coding Victorian Homosexuality in Literary Style” by Benjamin Papsun

Coding Victorian Homosexuality in Literary Style

Benjamin Papsun, Vassar College

Before the open expression of homosexuality was socially acceptable, artists interested in representing

themes of non-hegemonic romance had to disguise them by adopting various stylistic lenses. One tool that

these artists had at their disposal in the Victorian era was the ability to capitalize on the popular trend of ap-

propriating the thematic and stylistic devices of older artistic schools for the modern day. Prominent social and

literary critics such as Matthew Arnold and Walter Pater advocated a return to the Hellenic ideal of “spontaneity

of consciousness” (Arnold 128), and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood asserted the importance of capturing na-

ture via mimesis as Renaissance artists had done in the 15th century prior to Raphael (“[seeing] the object as in

itself it really is” (Arnold 29)). 2Adopting styles existing outside of the contemporary vocabulary offered artists

a liminal space where exotic sensualities could exist, and which allowed them (to some extent) to deflect the

suspicions and provocations of moral panic that would result from such works.2

Two literary works which exemplify this subversive adoption of previous genres are Christina Rosset-

ti’s 1862 poem “Goblin Market” and Oscar Wilde’s 1890 novel The Picture of Dorian Gray. In both works, the

author creates a representation of homosexuality in the guise of reverence towards a particular era of art and

the values espoused by it—for Rossetti, the genre is Gothic; for Wilde, Hellenic. The effect that both create is

a depiction of lecherous behavior which is nonetheless made acceptable because it exists within an accepted

genre (and thereby moral) convention. That being said, what makes these two works particularly interesting in

their representations of temptation are the subtextual attitudes they seem to have towards their subject matter.

While both establish a dichotomy of purity versus obscenity, they use this dichotomy to subvert moral expecta-

tions rather than reinforce them.

In “Goblin Market,” Lizzie represents the Victorian ideal of the “lady.” She is responsible for keeping

her sister’s desires in check by warning her of the dangers of the goblin men, thereby ensuring that they can

both continue to serve their circumscribed domestic roles. Ostensibly a tale of sisterly love, the poem shows

how Laura, the “fallen woman,” succumbs to the temptation of the fruit, and this capitulation brings her sis-

ter down with her, only for Laura to be saved in the end by Lizzie’s love for her. When Laura first goes to the

goblin market to buy the exotic fruits they sell, she has no money to purchase the fruit, so she pays with a curl

of her golden hair—a symbolic sacrifice of her beauty and physical integrity. By acting on her prurient impuls-

es, she degrades herself. So far, so good—this is a standard Victorian morality tale. A key difference between

“Goblin Market” and Dorian Gray is they approach subversion differently within their genre modes: “Goblin

Market” subverts heterosexuality from within a traditional moral framework (the parable, or morality tale),

whereas Dorian Gray provides a new framework from without.

The two works still have symbolic elements in common—for instance, light-colored hair as a symbol of

innocence in Dorian Gray. Lord Henry remarks to Dorian, “Never marry a woman with straw-coloured hair,”

referring to his wife, Lady Henry. When prompted for the reason why, Lord Henry answers: “Because they are

so sentimental” (Wilde 47). The golden hair is a symbol of oblivious innocence, of the pure and passionless

Victorian woman who knows

nothing of the “real,” visceral pleasures which Lord Henry revels in and which Dorian acquires a taste for. Al-

though the golden-haired sisters and Lady Henry are both stand-ins for the innocent Victorian lady figure, there

is a key difference in how they are portrayed in context. Laura is degraded when she gives in to her desires and

must suffer before she can return to her domestic sphere and become a wife with children of her own (Rossetti

25). Conversely, Lord Henry views his wife as degraded because she has no knowledge of vice.

This realignment of the ethics of desire in Dorian Gray stems from its endorsement of hedonism (or “a

new Hedonism,” as Lord Henry terms it), which “Goblin Market” is less willing to embrace. Lord Henry wants

to upend the puritan values of upper English society and establish a new value system, “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” (Wilde

13).3 Of particular importance to this school of new hedonism is the idea that denying oneself the experience of

worldly pleasures is more degrading than succumbing to them (Wilde 126), a reversal of the values presented

in “Goblin Market.” It is not difficult to imagine that someone who had spent a lifetime denying his own sexual

impulses out of fear of social impropriety might use a similar logic to justify his indulgence in these impulses.

Pleasure is therefore glorified; to gratify one’s desires is, to Lord Henry, the mark of a well-adjusted, dignified

37 pleasure, and no uncivilized man ever knows what a pleasure is” (Wilde 76). Mentions of civilized men and the

“spirit that is Greek” serve to link Dorian Gray to the ideals of ancient Greece, and to legitimize their seeming

radicality. The Hellenic roots of this philosophy do not only exist for the expression of Wilde’s

It is not surprising that some of these homages to the passions of the Greeks would raise a few Victori-

an eyebrows at the time of Dorian Gray’s publication. Wilde’s Greek allusions even extend into his battle with

British libel and obscenity law. In the three 1895 trials he was a part of, beginning on the side of the prosecution

and ending up as the defendant, Wilde cites the practices of the ancient Greeks as a defense of his own writ-

ing and as a cover for interpretations of Dorian Gray and other works of his as homoerotic works. In Wilde v.

Queensberry, when called upon to a defend the quote “pleasure is the only thing one should live for,” from his

play An Ideal Husband, Wilde appeals to the Greeks in his response:

WILDE: I think that to realise one’s self through pleasure is finer than to realise one’s self through

pain. That is the pagan ideal of man realising himself by happiness as opposed to the later and per-

haps grander idea of man realising himself by suffering. I was, on that subject, entirely on the side of

the ancients—the Greeks, I will say—the philosophers. (Holland 75)

In Regina v. Wilde, Wilde is cross-examined by prosecutor Charles Gill about the meaning of the poem “Two

Loves,” which Wilde admitted had been read to him by author of the poem (and his lover at the time), Lord Al-

fred Douglas. Gill wants to elicit an admission from Wilde that the poem describes “unnatural love”—in other

words, romantic love between men:

GILL: Is it not clear that the love described relates to natural love and unnatural love?

WILDE: No.

GILL: What is the “Love that dare not speak its name”?

WILDE: The “Love that dare not speak its name” in this century is such a great affection of an elder for

his philosophy, and such as in the sonnets of Michelangelo and Shakespeare… It is beautiful, it is

fine, it is the noblest form of affection. There is nothing unnatural about it. (Testimony of Oscar Wilde)

By invoking Plato, Michelangelo, and Shakespeare, Wilde is attempting to disguise a portrayal of

homosexuality through the values of canonical male artistry and philosophy. The same sort of defense is

employed, albeit to a different effect, by Victorian poet and cultural historian John Addington Symonds in his

essay “A Problem in Modern Ethics,” published in 1896, one of the earliest treatises written advocating for the

acceptance of male homosexuality. He writes in Chapter VII: “it is objected that inversed sexuality [homosex-

uality] is demoralising to the manhood of a nation, that it degrades the dignity of a man, and that it is incapable

of moral elevation. Each of these points may be taken separately. They are all of them at once and together con-

tradicted by the history of ancient Greece” (Symonds 109). The key difference between the way Symonds and

Wilde use this defense is that Symonds uses ancient Greece as a moral elevation of male homosexuality, while

Wilde uses Greek pederastic relationships as an aromantic deflection of the claims made against him.4

Just as Wilde steeps his homosexual representations in Hellenic ideals to make them less apparent, Ros-

setti uses the artistic style of Gothicism to create a distance between the content and the tenor of “Goblin Mar-

ket.” The same sort of “Desire” that creeps out of its hiding place and into Dorian Gray’s soul infects Laura’s

soul as well (Wilde 54). But this desire, which might otherwise offend a Victorian audience, is appropriate for

a Gothic tale, despite the wantonly orgasmic scenes it gives rise to. Eminent Victorian art critic John Ruskin’s

essay “The Nature of Gothic” provides some insight into how Gothicism operates: “we may expect that the first

two elements of good architecture5 should be expressive of some great truths commonly belonging to the whole

race and necessary to be understood or felt by them... [these two elements are] the confession of Imperfection,

and the confession of Desire of Change” (Ruskin 99). The confession of imperfection and the confession of

desire of change both prominently feature in Goblin Market, and in this way Rossetti encapsulates the Gothic

character in her work. Laura embodies both traits, because she must accept her own imperfection in desiring

the goblin men’s fruit, and she must confess her desire for change, namely a change from her domestic, puri-

tanical life.

In one passage from Dorian Gray, the narrator describes a scene which perfectly characterizes the

popular imagining of Gothicism: “phantoms more terrible than reality itself, and instinct with that vivid life

especially the art of those whose minds have been troubled with the malady of reverie” (Wilde 126-127). This

quote directly echoes Ruskin, who wrote: “It is that strange disquietude of the Gothic spirit that is its greatness;

that restlessness of the dreaming mind, that wanders hither and thither among the niches, and flickers feverishly

around the pinnacles” (Ruskin 99).6 This “malady of reverie” or “restlessness of thedreaming mind” is an afflic-

tion present in Laura (“Lizzie with an open heart, / Laura in an absent dream” (Rossetti 17)), and the fantastical

setting she occupies disguises the sexual undertones of its manifestation. Without the establishment of a Gothic

atmosphere, Lizzie’s plea to Laura to “Hug me, kiss me, suck my juices / Squeezed from goblin fruit for you…

Eat me, drink me, love me; / Laura, make much of me” (Rossetti 23) would be more obviously erotic. But with-

in a Gothic convention, which makes use of excessive desire and grotesquery as genre tropes, the homoerotic

imagery is less suspect.

An interesting difference between the way Dorian Gray and “Goblin Market” depict homosexuality is

that Dorian Gray goes so far as to show homosexuality as at least partially natural, or “scientific,” rather than

acquired. Although both works show characters who are influenced and seduced by other characters (Lord Hen-

ry and the goblins, respectively), Rossetti illustrates Laura’s surrender to temptation as an explicitly immoral

act. Once Laura falls from grace, only her sister’s purity can redeem her. The overt message of “Goblin Market”

(discounting the tantalizing imagery) seems to be something along the lines of “anyone can resist temptation if

only their character is pure enough.”

Wilde, on the other hand, seems to want to steer his readers away from associating temptation with

impurity. In Dorian Gray, the titular character’s surrender has an added psychological dimension which

makes it far less clear that the temptation is being shown to the reader as a warning—it reads more like an

invitation. The only thing temptation can do to character, Wilde would argue, is enhance it, and any attempts

to resist this temptation are hindrances to one’s character. This is apparent in lines like the remark by Lord

Henry that “[g]ood resolutions are useless attempts to interfere with scientific laws” (Wilde 97), and the

description of the young Parisian in the “poisonous book” Lord Henry gives Dorian as having a deep love for

“those renunciations that men have unwisely called virtue, as much as those natural rebellions that wise men

still call sin” (Wilde 121). This young Parisian, the only character to appear in the corrupting book Dorian

reads, is also described as having a blend of “the romantic and the scientific temperaments” (Wilde 123). This

book opens Dorian’s eyes to the world of fully-realized male homosexuality and stokes a passion in him that

40 it” (Wilde 123), demonstrating that Lord Henry’s influence did not corrupt Dorian, it only awakened the latent

natural desires within him. The philosophy of new hedonism, based on what Dorian learns, is scientifical-

ly justified, and its adoption is not a moral act, as in “Goblin Market,” but an act of necessity. Through his

discussions with Lord Henry and his experience with the book Lord Henry gives him, it becomes increasingly

clear to Dorian, and to the reader, that submission to temptation is not only a natural achievement, but also a

desirable one.

Interestingly, the sexual imagery contained in “Goblin Market” is far more graphic and overtly bac-

chanalian than anything depicted in Dorian Gray; yet Wilde died in prison (due, in part, to his work), whereas

Rossetti’s poem was seen as appropriate reading for children. A possible explanation for this response is that

male homosexuality had a place in England’s popular imagination (though a demonized one), whereas female

homosexuality did not. This was largely due to the prevalence of clandestine male homoerotic relationships in

English public schools and the socially-constructed denial of female sexual autonomy. That being said, many a

Victorian reader could have read both The Picture of Dorian Gray and “Goblin Market” without intuiting that

either contained anything outside of traditional social norms, which is a testament to the effectiveness of genre

as a device to disguise content. Despite the differences in their levels of explicitness and the moral attitudes

they adopt towards their subject matter, both works are significant for their portrayals of any kind of homosex-

uality at a time when the open expression of male homosexuality gauranteed a prison sentence. The subtexts

through which Rossetti and Wilde depict homosexuality may be unmistakable to the modern reader, but given

their own historical contexts, both works mark significant achievements in queer literary representation. This

representation may not have been possible without the revival of the Renaissance and Gothic aesthetics and the

fertility of an artistic class hungry for a new, more visceral set of values from which to cultivate their art.

Works Cited

Arnold, Matthew. Culture and Anarchy and Other Writings. Ed. Stefan Collini, Cambridge University

Press, 1993.

Blom, 1971.

Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray. 1890. Penguin, 2003.

Rossetti, Christina. The Complete Poems of Christina Rossetti. Ed. R. W. Crump, vol. 1, Louisiana

State University Press, 1979.

Holland, Merlin. The Real Trial of Oscar Wilde.Harper Collins, 2003. “Testimony of Oscar

Wilde.” Ed. Douglas O. Linder, Famous Trials, University of

Missouri-Kansas School of Law, www.famous-trials.com/wilde/342-wildetestimony.

Symonds, John Addington. A Problem in Modern Ethics; Being an Inquiry into the Phenomenon

of Sexual Inversion, Addressed Especially to Medical Psychologists and Jurists.1896. B.

Ruskin, John. Unto This Last and Other Writings. Ed. Clive Wilmer, Penguin Books, 1997.

“ConSoul,” Sara Mitchell, University of Wisconsin-Madison