So how come 1890s Victorians were SHOCKED by the gay subtext in Dorian Gray but were oblivious to the gay subtext in Sherlock Holmes and Dracula?
Well, Dorian Gray was barely subtext. The editor censored the first edition without Wilde’s permission and even then there was such an uproar that the second edition (released the next year) was much more heavily edited–that’s the version most of us are familiar with. The original version contained such lines as, “It is quite true I have worshipped you with far more romance of feeling than a man should ever give to a friend. Somehow I have never loved a woman.” And everyone knew Wilde was queer.
Meanwhile, Dracula frames gayness in monstrous terms. This is a literary device that’s been used in many queer stories in homophobic times: make it tragic, horrifying, monstrous, and the cishet audience will feel comfortable in their removal from it, while the queer audience recognizes their otherness.
And unlike Wilde, Doyle was staid, and respectable, and not especially radical; and his characters’ queerness was framed in purely emotional terms. They are devoted, tender, adoring, intensely intimate, but never sexual. Doyle repeatedly makes Holmes seem to be removed from lust by nature; frames his queerness as an absence of feeling toward women, rather than a physical desire for men. And Victorians loved intimate friendships. They considered them to be quite separate from sexual passion. A man could promise his friend to love him forever, offer all his loyalty, share his rooms, and take his arm in the street. As long as there wasn’t a hint of carnality, no one minded. (Honestly, quite a number of Victorians didn’t mind if there was; but publishing a book about the subject brought out the cultural gatekeepers.)
@a-candle-for-sherlock I recommended for @brilliantorinsane ’s book list Richard Dellamora’s ‘Masculine Desire: the Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism’, a difficult but brilliant book on exactly this subject. You’ve just summed up its 223 pages in a paragraph.
Intensely homoerotic friendships, love, emotional passion, deep devotion between men were accepted - just - as long as they could be fitted into a paradigm where those men also were married, or were planning on marrying, or even had been previously married to a woman, and any sexual activity was male/female. Women were predicated as the gatekeepers of males’ sexual desires. And a large part of the discourse around what was acceptable between men was played out in those male spaces where women were absent: universities, the church, the army, political fora, clubs. It was there, in the absence of women, that men policed themselves and others most strongly to ensure that friendships remained acceptably pure. Reading the literature, it is quite clear that men who broke the rules - men such as Wilde, who were openly sexual with other men - posed a tremendous threat to all those who carefully constructed their lives to fit with the socially acceptable model. If Wilde could make it clear that sex and love went together, then what of those men who loved other men deeply, whose emotional lives were completely centred around other men, but who refrained from physical expression of their love? When society so strongly condemned genital expression of love, but allowed intense devotion, where does that leave men who felt their affections needed physical as well as emotional, expression?
(This is where my Watson in SFISYF is at the moment. He is deeply, intensely devoted to his Holmes. But where can he go with that love, when society applauds it as an essential aspect of male hegemony when it is chaste comradeship and soldierly devotion without sex, but condemns it as the most vile of sins if it is expressed sexually?
His is the dilemma faced by many. And Holmes’ dilemma is similar, in that he knows his own desires, but has been taught to consider carnality - the matters of the flesh - as incompatible with chaste comradeship and soldierly devotion.)
There was a lot of discourse centred on Greek concepts of love at this time. The Judaeo-Christian contempt for the body and its needs and wants, the neo-Platonist ideas of the ideal society, the Greco-Roman concepts of how men should achieve dominance through Empire, were in conflict with the actual evidence (written materials, art, ceramics) that, whatever Plato said about the best loves being pure, men in Greece and Rome engaged unashamed in genital activity with each other.
Judaeo-Christian tradition condemned sexual activity between males. Plato considered it to be a factor that detracted from the highest form of love. In Rome, sexual excesses and male/male activity were associated with the least praiseworthy emperors - Caligula, Nero, Heliogabalus. For upper and middle class Victorian men taught to propagate and support the societal paradigm of Empire, the need to integrate these two aspects of male/male interaction - the strong homosocial bonding needed to make Empire work, and the intense emotional ties it required - with a complete absence of physical expression of love produced a psychic conflict that many of them struggled in vain to resolve.
This is one reason why when men such as John Addington Symonds and Edward Carpenter did form happy homosexual partnerships, it was often with men of a lower social class - men unburdened by the neuroticism developed by education in public schools and its consequent mindset. It is why Maurice can be happy with Alec, but not with Clive. It is why the Dublin Castle Scandal, the Cleveland Street Affair and the Wilde trials happened: in all three of those ‘moments’ which tipped society into homophobic retreat, one of the things that was most strongly reprobated by judges, juries and public alike, was that there was a transgressive sexual relationship not just between men, but between men of different classes. These relationships between Gustavus Cornwall and the renter, Jack Saul, between Lord Arthur Somerset and the Earl of Euston and their telegraph boys, between Wilde, and his street lads, struck at the basic of the social compact: that homoerotic devotion in the chaste Greek mode was acceptable so long as compulsory heterosexuality was also forcing men to marry and breed to maintain society. If society allowed for men to be devoted to, to marry other men, England might fall, and worse, the hegemony of the monied upper classes might be broken.
(And don’t even get me started on what that meant for women. Nobody even considers the life of Gustavus Cornwall’s childless wife, to whom he’d probably transmitted the syphilis that eventually killed him. Una Troubridge, lesian lover of Radclyffe Hall was treated all her life for the syphilis her philandering husband gave her as a wedding present. Mary Benson, wife of the Archbishop of Canterbury, forced into a marriage with him at an age too young to say no, had lesbian affairs all through her married life. And there are other examples.)
It is impossible for us to consider the relationship of Holmes and Watson, and what it might have been without considering its social and political context. Doyle wrote as a man of his time, imbued with its ideas and ideals and subject to its neuroses. To understand what he writes, it’s also necessary to understand where he’s writing from.
Wow, thank you for this detailed write-up. I was vaguely aware of these social dynamics, but this added a lot. It is fascinating to read Doyle through this lens. I at least get the impression that he may well be struggling with the conflict you describe: trying to write (or at least appear to write; I suppose its hard to say which) an intense homosocial bond between men, but never quite able to reconcile it with the sexless, woman-mediated requirements of his day. It provides a compelling way to read the sense of tension and half-disguised sorrow that periodically appears in the Holmes stories.
That “tension and half-disguised sorrow” is so poignant. It would make perfect sense in that context.
In fact, Victorians may have overlooked the possibility of a physical love between Holmes and Watson, but I’ve heard stories that those reading just a little later did recognize it. A former fandom member (@welovethebeekeeper) mentioned that her fathers were part of a Holmesian shipping community mid-century, and that they’d heard rumors of Holmes/Watson shipping communities as far back as the twenties, if I remember right. The last stories were published in 1926 and ‘27, so if my memory of her statement is correct, that means some contemporaries already saw them as romantically linked, once queerness came more into the public spotlight through turn of the century activism.
Actually, I read some time ago that as The Strand was considered a men’s magazine, although everyone still read it, that people automatically ‘got’ that the Holmes stories were Queer. But because it was so subtle, it was accepted. I might have read that on @weeesi blog. Here is sherlock-holmes-and-victorian-homosexuality , and an excellent blog dedicated to the Homoerotic subtext in Sherlock Holmes. http://nekosmuse.com/sherlockholmes/subtext.htm
i remember welovethebeekeeper's posts about their dads, and i wish i had made a tumblr years ago to have reblogged so much good stuff that has been lost.