Same-Sex Desire in Victorian Religious Culture

Abstract

This study concerns the relationship between same-sex desire and religion in Victorian literature and culture. Concentrating on Anglo- and Roman Catholicism, this work analyzes the appropriation of medieval religion and Biblical/Christian typology as a complementary discourse to Hellenism in the articulation of homosexuality in the nineteenth century. It argues that various "queer religious spaces" existed during the period. Utilizing Sedgwickean notions of queerness, the study explores the place of desire in the devotional life. It examines same-sex desire in the relationship to the Divine. This work maintains that the emphasis on Divine embodiment in the incarnational and eucharistic theology of High Anglicanism and Roman Catholicism encouraged the eroticism of Victorian spirituality. The study begins with an analysis of the Oxford Movement through a consideration of John Henry Newman's early poetry and later Meditations and Devotions. That section also concerns a biography of Aelred of Rievaulx by John Dalgairns which suggests monastic friendship as a potentially homoerotic, if celibate, space. The poetry, fiction, and devotional prose of Christina Rossetti is further analyzed as a site of female same-sex desire, a subject also explored in Eliza Keary's "Christine and Mary." The sermons and poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins are read as demonstrative of anxious awareness of the possibility for consummation of same-sex desire. The final section of this study explores writers of the final third of the nineteenth century, when homosexual definition occurred. The works of Wilde are examined as homoerotic theology. The life and writings of John Gray and Andre Raffalovich are analyzed with particular attention to the former's translations of medieval mystics. The study concludes with a comparison of Anglo- and Roman Catholic homosexualities at the fin-de-siecle through consideration of John Bloxam, Frederick Rolfe, and others.