Three useful books and one website
Jul. 19th, 2010 09:44 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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queering_holmesI have a bunch of books out of the library now so there's more where this came from...
Website: The Trials of Oscar Wilde
Includes some of Wilde's love letters, significant excerpts from his trials, and other resources.
A quote from his testimony in the first criminal trial:
Interesting to note that Holmes/Watson *doesn't* quite fit his definition...
Merlin Holland. The Real Trial of Oscar Wilde
Haven't read this yet but it's the full, uncensored transcript of the libel trial. Looks to be very useful.
Karl Beckson. London in the 1890s: A Cultural History.
Not an academic book but a good general guide to the major cultural and literary currents of the period. Includes chapters on socialism, prostitution, the New Woman, the cult of Wagner, the occult, and so on. Particularly relevant to this community's interests, there are also chapters on: Decadence, the Uranians, and Wilde's trials.
An interesting passage:
Oliver S. Buckton. Secret Selves: Confession and Same-Sex Desire in Victorian Autobiography
Really fascinating book on how the practice of secrecy in writing can reveal what seems to be concealed and conceal what seems to be revealed. Chapters on Newman, Wilde, Symonds, Carpenter and (in an epilogue) Forster. Writers of first person Holmes/Watson could find this very useful in terms of thinking about how Victorian authors conceptualized and wrote about same-sex desire.
Website: The Trials of Oscar Wilde
Includes some of Wilde's love letters, significant excerpts from his trials, and other resources.
A quote from his testimony in the first criminal trial:
G--What is the "Love that dare not speak its name"?
W--"The Love that dare not speak its name" in this century is such a great affection of an elder for a younger man as there was between David and Jonathan, such as Plato made the very basis of his philosophy, and such as you find in the sonnets of Michelangelo and Shakespeare. It is that deep, spiritual affection that is as pure as it is perfect. It dictates and pervades great works of art like those of Shakespeare and Michelangelo, and those two letters of mine, such as they are. It is in this century misunderstood, so much misunderstood that it may be described as the "Love that dare not speak its name," and on account of it I am placed where I am now. It is beautiful, it is fine, it is the noblest form of affection. There is nothing unnatural about it. It is intellectual, and it repeatedly exists between an elder and a younger man, when the elder man has intellect, and the younger man has all the joy, hope and glamour of life before him. That it should be so the world does not understand. The world mocks at it and sometimes puts one in the pillory for it.
Interesting to note that Holmes/Watson *doesn't* quite fit his definition...
Merlin Holland. The Real Trial of Oscar Wilde
Haven't read this yet but it's the full, uncensored transcript of the libel trial. Looks to be very useful.
Karl Beckson. London in the 1890s: A Cultural History.
Not an academic book but a good general guide to the major cultural and literary currents of the period. Includes chapters on socialism, prostitution, the New Woman, the cult of Wagner, the occult, and so on. Particularly relevant to this community's interests, there are also chapters on: Decadence, the Uranians, and Wilde's trials.
An interesting passage:
In the late 1880s and 1890s, there were many popular novels that, as one critic states, "featured male duos and trios acting as collective heroes," the response to an increasing sense among men that "their prowess [was] being threatened, rather than flattered, by women," who were increasingly asserting themselves. Such male companionships and solidarity were celebrated in King Solomon's Mines, Three Men in a Boat, A Study in Scarlet, Trilby and Dracula. Because of the Wilde trials, WT Stead feared that such emotional relationships between men would be suspected as homosexual. To Edward Carpenter [!], he wrote: "A few more cases like Oscar Wilde and we should find the freedom of comradeship now possible to men seriously impaired to the permanent detriment of the race."
Oliver S. Buckton. Secret Selves: Confession and Same-Sex Desire in Victorian Autobiography
Really fascinating book on how the practice of secrecy in writing can reveal what seems to be concealed and conceal what seems to be revealed. Chapters on Newman, Wilde, Symonds, Carpenter and (in an epilogue) Forster. Writers of first person Holmes/Watson could find this very useful in terms of thinking about how Victorian authors conceptualized and wrote about same-sex desire.
no subject
Date: 2010-07-19 06:43 pm (UTC)Also, the cover's damn pretty ;) Just saying.
no subject
Date: 2010-07-20 07:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-07-20 08:43 pm (UTC)http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51W7EHZMKPL._BO2,204,203,200_PIsitb-sticker-arrow-click,TopRight,35,-76_AA300_SH20_OU01_.jpg
no subject
Date: 2010-07-20 07:27 pm (UTC)I'm not sure I can articulate this correctly right now, but what I mean is, there is a need to define one's own position or actions in a narrow way in order to set it against that which may be deemed unacceptable. WT Stead needs those relationships to be absent of sex, while Wilde needs them to be "defined" in a particularly "Greek," intellectual, inter-generational fashion. He recognizes that it is misunderstood, but nevertheless wants to foreground the nonsexual elements, understandable at the very least given the time.
This is likely very obvious and/or incoherent, as I should not post after taking migraine drugs which make me fuzzy, but I think it's interesting that every view needs to set itself apart as a unique and valid one, not like those actual perverts (so to speak).
no subject
Date: 2010-07-20 07:56 pm (UTC)That's a very good point. It also ties in with the thesis of the Buckton book, which explores the idea that what you don't say speaks as powerfully as what you do. It's those things that live between the lines, between the pages and (sometimes) between the sheets.
Wilde's formulation would, I think, have had the benefit of being familiar, if not necessarily acceptable, to the educated British elite. Due to the culture's focus on the classics one might have had an idea of what "Greek love" meant, in its more abstract and idealized forms at least. Today of course such a formulation might almost be more risky, due to the dangers of running into the whole homophobes-equating-homosexuality-with-pedophilia thing.
As for Stead, I'm not sure whether he was actually advocating for non-sexual homosocial comradeship (call it "bromance") or whether he was more worried that sexual male/male love might no longer have the cover of being viewed in those terms. I'd guess the latter, given that he was writing to Carpenter, but I don't know anything about his own background.
no subject
Date: 2010-07-21 12:53 pm (UTC)And it was a fantastic play. Well worth the listening.