The Pre-Raphaelites Meet Homoeroticism

In this podcast episode, Riley and Grace discuss the Pre-Raphaelite movement and its impact on queer expression in the Victorian era. They explore how society's binary understanding of sexuality and gender complicates our understanding of different sexual identities. They also highlight Eve Sedgwick's work on gender and sexuality, emphasizing that sexuality should not be viewed as a binary. The hosts discuss the concept of homosocial behavior and its role in the Victorian gaze, where men formed close bonds with each other but used women to alleviate any perceived homoerotic tension. They also mention the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a group of artists who aimed to reform the rigid standards of art in the Victorian era. The hosts note the presence of women in encouraging this artistic reform, such as Christina Rossetti. Overall, the discussion sheds light on the complexities of gender, sexuality, and artistic expression during the Victorian era. Did you know the Victorian era was full of ridiculous things, such as an authorial aunt marrying her niece? I'm Riley. And I'm Grace. On today's podcast, we will be talking about the Pre-Raphaelite movement and how it sparked the development of queer expression within the Victorian era. Let's start off by talking about homosexuality and then what it meant in the Victorian era. First, we need to talk about Eve Sedgwick's Epistemology of the Closet, which will lay down a foundation for our conversation. Sedgwick was a queer and gender theorist and is sometimes known as one of the originators of queer theory. But her book focuses on defining gender and sexuality and the dichotomy that we place them in. Sedgwick notes that she doesn't offer an explanation for the newly occurring subcategories of human sexuality, but rather explores them in a depth that is not expressed enough within society. However, while there are newly occurring sexualities, there's still this binary that confuses society's views on sexuality. And what this means is that we want to make heterosexuality an opposite of homosexuality when that's just not the case. Sedgwick also suggests that the binaries that society uses to bind sexuality do not actually make them complete parallels. Instead, Sedgwick suggests that they instead make them more chaotic and convoluted. Doesn't that make it more difficult to implement into society? Not necessarily. By placing homo and heterosexuality into a binary, it's forced our culture to place several other definitions into binaries, which Sedgwick views as self-corrosive. For instance, we need to note key differences in sex, gender, and sexuality, which are terms that are more often than not confused in their definitions, much like our other terms of homo and heterosexuality. So sex is what you are biologically born as. For humans, this is dictated by our chromosomal pairings, which while we notice XX and XY, there are more than just that. But as well, these will be seen in our physical characteristics of the human body, as in our genitalia, our hair, fat distribution, etc. For sex, Sedgwick states that it's the foundation for what we perceive as gender. Gender then is the social production of male and female identities that remain in a dichotomized structure. It's how we behave and how we act within society. Sexuality should then be perceived as the expression of certain actions and behaviors that will often revolve around physiological responses. Okay, okay, I think I'm getting it. So sex is your biological gender at birth, male or female. Gender identity, biological or not, is the gender a person identifies with, like male, female, non-binary, things like that. And sexuality is the who that one is, or in some cases, is not sexually attracted to. It sounds for the most part like they're mutually exclusive then. Sort of, but Sedgwick's main point of her article is that sexuality cannot be perceived within the lens of a binary, as the varying forms of sexuality cannot be viewed as exact opposites. On the contrary, with the plethora of sexualities, they differ very minimally, especially compared to the very act of sexual intercourse. And much of what is deemed queer in that aspect is the very same action done during heterosexual intercourse. To clarify, the way heterosexual and homosexual people have sex are not entirely different. Queer, as well, does not have to mean gay or lesbian, but rather is just something that doesn't usually fit the norm, and this can be especially seen in the Victorian era. I'm trying to keep this PG-13 and all, but for sure, especially in that this distinctive terminology assumes heterosexuality is the normal or default, it doesn't make anything else, quote, queer, a term that our beloved friend the Oxford English Dictionary proves was used throughout history to mean strange, suspicious, eccentric, basically anything deemed not normal. Yes, now, Sedgwick also wrote a book titled Between Men, which highlighted the idea of male homosocial desire to not only point out discrimination, but also the paradoxes in homo-relationships, so male-on-male relationships. So this term homosocial is used in psychology and sociology as a way to describe social bonds between two people of the same sex while being distinguished from the word homosexual. Sedgwick's main argument for this is that the desire that men feel for one another is what provides the structure for their homosociality. She does not mean this in the genetic or genital nature, but rather that homosociality is just the desire of one person of a sex to seek the presence of another of the same sex. Okay, loving the enthusiasm, but what does this have to do with the Victorian gaze? So for the Victorian gaze, homosocial behavior, whether it be friendship, mentorship, or even rivalry, needs to, one, be understood by taking women and the gender system into context. Men need to form close bonds with one another, yet there's this triangle where they need to have this close bond, but they need to use women to alleviate what I guess could be seen as the gay tension of sorts. For example, men on a sports team, I don't know if you've ever seen men on a sports team, but they will sit there, they will grope each other, they'll spank one another, but since it's not explicitly gay, it's fine, but it is paradoxical in the same sense. To tie this back into the Victorian era, this same homosociality was more of a behavior rather than identity. Same with homosexuality. So the two were very convoluted. They were very confused. In fact, it was not until 1819 that the first recorded usage of homosexuality was used, and before that was just seen as sodomy, and was a crime punishable by death. Right, that certainly wasn't a good look. They're practically being demonized and treated like criminals, instead of really just people experimenting or coming to terms with their sexualities like anyone else. Yes, and on top of this, when we take gender into account, women who engage in homosexual relations were seen very differently. Their homosexual relationships were more seen as homosocial relationships, so they were really just seen as the close friends. It was more often than not overlooked when two women had sex, or even seen just as a temporary distraction. Yes, the genuine historical representation of, oh my god, they were roommates. Literally. On top of this, what we would now see as sexual identity was more just seen as a behavior, because it was really more expected that everyone had the same sexual identity in the Victorian era, and it was just a sodomite behavior. An example of an identity being seen as behavior, and just not existing at all, is the word bisexual didn't appear, or didn't even emerge, as a word until around the 20th century. Very true. So, moving forward with this idea of homosexuality in the Victorian era, we start to find a lot of cross-references between homoeroticism and the Pre-Raphaelite movement. And no, I don't mean the Raphael from the Ninja Turtles as much as I would love to dissect that for everyone. Well, now I've lost interest. I know, I know. Instead, we have a different kind of brotherhood, the Shredders of the Victorian era, if you will. The Pre-Raphaelites were a group of Englishmen in the mid-19th century who wanted to, believe it or not, go back to a style of art that predated the classical teachings of Raphael and other mannerist Italian artists of the time. So, England's Royal Academy of Art was especially prominent here at the time, as it was funded and supported by the English Crown, and had great prestige among all of England. As a result, anything outside of what they highlighted as classical was looked down upon in the snobbish upper-class art community. The Pre-Raphaelites hated this and wanted to have more freedom of expression through their art. Their primary purpose was to revert to a time before conventional art and literature to focus on natural elements and individualism. After all, the Italian Renaissance was a prime time for patronage that established a standard of artistic expression, so people would go to a specific artist looking for their type of art. And this kind of created a standard that, while being aesthetically pleasing, meant that there was very little freedom of expression that would allow for modernism in the world of art. And this continued from the Italian Renaissance into the Victorian era. This standard is what the Pre-Raphaelites aimed to reform, becoming iconoclasts, and that they did not think choosing one particular form of art over another would allow for the kind of expression that England needed to continue growing. So, where exactly do these quote-unquote shredders come in? I'm getting there. So, a group of guys studying at the Royal Academy of Arts got together, started shredding of these classics, and formed what would become the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. The men in association include William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Michael Rossetti, James Comminson, Frederick George Stevens, and Thomas Warner. The aforementioned Rossettis, however, are especially relevant in our discussion of literature here going forward, and we will be getting more into Dante Gabriel Rossetti here shortly. It seems really like a boys' club and kind of goes back to that concept of homosociality. Oh, for sure. They honestly give frat guy energy. If the frat was also exclusively full of artists and book lovers, the sign on the door saying no girls allowed. And I will say, there were women also encouraging this kind of reform. Christina Rossetti, for one, also helped in creating this individuality by serving as a model in some of her brother's paintings, who were official PRB members. She also went on to write works inspired by this free-thinking, individualized movement placed forth in part by her family. Other women were also associated with the Pre-Raphaelite movement, such as Joanna Mary Wells, who worked on many paintings of her own, and eventually married Henry Tamroth Wells, a PRB member. She interacted frequently with the likes of John Ruskin, and became an art critic who emphasized the approach of the Pre-Raphaelite movement in public articles, which helped tremendously in pushing the movement forward. Maria Tartagno-Sillman was also one of the models frequently used by the PRB, especially Dante Gabriel Rossetti. She would go on to become known as the, quote, second generation of the PRB, as she ended up taking up painting herself. There was also Elizabeth Siddall, who posed as a model in many paintings, most famously, in John Everett Millais' Ophelia, which is one of the most popular works of the Pre-Raphaelite movement. She went on to marry Dante Gabriel Rossetti, though, sadly, two years into their marriage, she died from a laudanum overdose. Perhaps that's not the happiest example to end on, but the point stands that each of these women, and numerous others that I did not list here, were involved with the Pre-Raphaelite movement in some way, shape, or form. At the same time, for the purpose of our definition, the actual founding fathers of the movement were indeed a brotherhood. What is most important to note, though, is the association between homoeroticism, homo sociality, and the Pre-Raphaelite movement, with this emphasis on expression and individuality. Going back to this concept of binaries, Victorian society at the time was very concentrated on right versus wrong, in the sense that sticking to the norm was right, and everything else was inherently wrong. Looking back now, we can very clearly point out that adherence to societal expectations should not mean exclusion or persecution. The unfortunate reality was that individuals who engaged in the Pre-Raphaelite movement would be looked down upon as social outcasts or miscreants. Therefore, by not creating works that aligned with the classics such as Raphael in the art community, or Shakespeare in the literary sense, one was essentially failing to create. The Pre-Raphaelites wanted to foster a community that would therefore give space for individuality, and tearing down the binaries of classical versus non-classical, therefore trash. In the process, we're getting a movement that opens the gateway for repressed sexuality and homoeroticism to find home in the literary landscape. Before we get into Gabriel Rossetti, I just had a thought. It's really interesting that even though it was such a boys club, they still, especially with a lot of their paintings, focused on women, if that makes sense. If that makes sense. So it's going back, once again, into that concept of homosociality, where men really wanted to be around one another, but to make it not gay, they had to get women in there. You know what I mean? Yeah. No, that makes so much sense. It's so funny to me. But to even to focus down on this idea, we need to talk about Gabriel Rossetti's poem Jenny, as it really played into this idea of stepping out of the ordinary. How do you mean? Well, the poem is about a narrator that pays for the services of a sex worker named Jenny, and it really digs into these ideas of sensuality and saying what really isn't or wasn't socially accessible, even for straight men of the time period. In other words, the poem is expressing something that can be seen as queer for the time period. True. Any step in a new direction is kind of a step in the right direction. Opening up into this new territory of what would have been considered taboo, even in terms of heterosexuality, would make it a little bit more acceptable or normalized to engage in other sexual experimentation that delves more into the homosexuality side, if I'm getting that right. Yeah, exactly. Especially because in the Victorian era, sexuality was confined to the home, regardless of whether it was straight or gay. You just didn't openly talk about it. So what Rossetti does goes a little beyond experimentation. He sits there and humanizes someone who isn't normally treated humanely, and in fact, is doing something that people don't like to talk about. So in the first stanza, Jenny is described to be this beautiful woman. Lines are, eyes as blue as skies, hair is countless gold. And beyond this first stanza, the speaker begins to sympathize with someone who at the time, again, would have been seen as a fallen woman, rather than the angel of the house concept, the ideal woman in the Victorian era. And then for nearly eight stanzas, Rossetti focuses on the day-to-day life of Jenny, wondering what struggles she faces, while also attempting to understand what made her this way. We can see this in stanza 10, with nothing but passion rings a tear, except when there may rise an unsought happily at times a passing thought of the old days, which seem to be much older than any history that is written in any book, when she would lie in fields and look along the ground through the blown grass and wonder where the city was, far out of sight, whose broil and bale they told her then for a child's tale. What is more interesting to note about this poem is that stanza 14, there's a line that says, just as another woman sleeps. Now, this line suggests that there really lacks a difference between a woman like Jenny, who is a sex worker and seen as unvirtuous, and the average and ideal woman of the Victorian era. The speaker continues forward with a description of their cousin Nell in stanza 15, which describes Nell as a virtuous woman who follows the norms of a woman of the time period. After this in stanza 16, the speaker says, of the same lump, as it is said, for honor and dishonor made two sister vessels, here is one, which is meant to be translated as a type of scenario where Jenny and Nell are first compared in a type of binary and are made from the same exact source. The response to this idea, to this scenario is, it makes a goblin of the sun. In this, we can see what Cedric was talking about when we place aspects of human sexuality and behavior into binaries, it becomes something harmful rather than beneficial. By examining the lines above, we can notice that the two binaries of women with the Victorian era, Nell is meant to represent the behavior that was expected of a woman, while Jenny is the queer or weird or unnatural, whatever you want to call it, behavior. What we should take away from this poem is that even by placing something like heterosexuality or just heteronormative behavior into a binary, we begin to harm our perceptions of sexuality and behaviors as a whole. This starts to become a much bigger trend later on as we start to kind of focus on sexuality and its development, and then kind of focusing on homosexuality more prevalently as opposed to something that was kind of hidden. So getting more into homosexual authorship, I really don't think we could do this topic justice without mentioning the legendary Oscar Wilde. Though we do have to be careful when it comes to labeling because, you know, not everybody was actually out at the time and it was up to speculation. Wilde was for the most part openly gay and was even at one point tried for homosexuality under what was called growth indecency, which was basically England's big legal screw you to the LGBTQ plus community. Essentially, while sodomy was a term used to punish homosexual male intercourse that involved penetration, growth indecency was this weird umbrella term used to cover any other basis related to homosexuality that did not involve penetration. As unspecific as that sounds, the term was left openly vague on purpose to punish any actions that other heterosexual people would look down upon as, well, gross and indecent. Despite this controversy in Wilde's life, he was still active in his writing and did not back down from expressing himself and his desires. One of Wilde's most popular works was his play The Importance of Being Earnest, which itself deals with the concept of heteronormative relationships in the form of satire. Essentially, this play was being performed under the guise of sincerity, while secretly mocking upper class heteronormative society that prided themselves upon ancestry and courtship. In the actual play, you have the two male friends who have an extremely homosocial relationship giving up on bachelorhood out of boredom, while also uncovering the identity of Ernest, who is sometimes Algernon, but was originally Czech, who was actually born as Ernest without knowing it until the end of the play. It's as confusing as it sounds on purpose, and truly cannot be given the justice it deserves in such a brief synopsis, but the real premise of the play is self-discovery. The whole idea of being Ernest is to authentically represent oneself, which is not often permitted in terms of homosexuality. It's also speculated that this was a way of Oscar Wilde being able to process his own sexuality through the dramatic lens in a way that aligns with the classist, heteronormative society that the play was presented for. He wasn't exactly trying to hide it, and in fact he was kind of using this piece to subliminally introduce the topic of individuality to others who hadn't really come across it at that point in time. But at the same time, he's doing it in a safe sort of format that would allow him to take cover and claim innocence should it become too big of a problem to others. In other words, by using this classical form of a marriage comedy, Wilde was able to manipulate it in a way that would encourage openness and expressivity, which is precisely what was encouraged by the Pre-Raphaelites. Down with classical conformity, and in with gays. And now, it's time to discuss what I'm sure you've all been waiting for, the grand finale to this entire topic. Let's get into... The Aunt-Niece Lesbian. We never get this on the same time, ever. It's perfectly fine. So, more specifically, we need to discuss Michael Field, which is the pen name for Catherine Harris Bradley and her niece, Edith Emma Cooper. Ugh, those are a mouthful. But Catherine had taken charge of Edith after Catherine's sister passed, and while there was a significant age gap between the two, they did eventually evolve to have a romantic relationship. This can be seen in a lot of their poems, and especially as they shared the pen name Michael Field, they ended up writing a lot of the same things, especially their diaries, and sometimes can't even tell who wrote what. Um, this romance can really be seen within their poem titled, A Girl. The poem represents a young girl and all of her innocent beauty. Much of this beauty, though, is conveyed through nature imagery, the natural world, such as her soul, a deep-flavored pearl, her brows, gray soft as seas, which is reminiscent of the Pre-Raphaelite qualities we had spoken of previously. As well, with the context that we have now of who Michael Field is, we now begin to see where the homoeroticism comes into play. To be more specific, the Pre-Raphaelites promoted a type of art that was meant to capture the realistic nature of the world. The poem above showcases the true, realistic, queer nature of the author, of their romance and their relationship. While the PRB did not necessarily influence queer culture directly or intentionally, it did have artistic movements stem from it that did. Specifically, the aesthetic and the decadent movements. The main point, though, of each of these movements was to create art for the sake of art and to capture the true nature of life, as opposed to creating for the sake of others, which would be disingenuous and especially not showcase the true, queer nature of people who need it. So, what have we learned from this, in total? From Dante Gabriel Rossetti's prostitutionary tale to Oscar Wilde's two bros trying to live their best lives to the aunt-niece-fake-writer-man couple themselves, homosexuality thrived at the threshold of the closet in the Victorian era. While many people may think of homosexuality as secret and taboo during this time, we've discussed how that is not entirely the case. The development of sexuality outside of heteronormative means is absolutely prevalent throughout the time period, spurred especially through the Pre-Raphaelite movement, and culminating, perhaps, with the late-century aesthetics and decadent movements. With individuality and rebellion against conformity finding praise by the Brotherhood and its supporters, we see this growth in new ideas and a transformation in literary sexuality. Though it was by no means perfect or as open to free expression as we think of in the modern sense, the movement did give room to express sexuality outside of the binary a lot more than it had been in the past. This means sexual relations outside of marriage, sex between same-sex individuals, experimentation in gender identity, the whole nine yards. We see this movement from the, quote, proper relationships between married male and females, transformed into a space that advocated for the kind of individuality and freedom that the Pre-Raphaelites indirectly fought for with removing the binaries between the two between approved classical works and disapproved non-classical works. In any case, guys, it was fun while it lasted. We hope you enjoyed this discussion on the definitely-not-ninja-turtles Pre-Raphaelite movement and its impact on homosexuality and literary eroticism. That's all from us for now. This is Grace. And this is Riley. Signing off. Stay safe, stay you, and stay away from your aunts. For legal reasons, that's New York. Goodbye, everyone.