Vernon Lee and the Gender of Aestheticism

Abstract

In recent years critics have eloquently documented the connection between aestheticism and an emergent male homosexual subculture.1 The central figures in the aesthetic canon — Walter Pater, John Addington Symonds, Oscar Wilde, Henry James — are now seen to have explored the ways in which the desire of men for other men influenced the artistic and literary production of the past, and to have tried to create cultural spaces in which the discussion and practice of male homosexuality might be made acceptable in their own time. Today the aesthetes are retrospectively seen as having made a shaping contribution to the formation of a twentieth-century ‘gay’ identity, and their received critical reputation has subsequently shifted from that of art historians and moralists to sexual radicals. Liberal critics see this highly sexualized version of aestheticism as a positive energy; problematizing current notions of masculinity, aestheticism emerges as a counter-cultural movement that defines itself in opposition to the values of Victorian patriarchy. Inasmuch as these values are questioned or downright rejected, gender roles become more fluid and so, it is implied, women as much as homosexual, effeminate or simply progressive men enjoy the benefits of aestheticism’s sexual dissidence.