The Bloomsbury Companion to Modernist Literature

Jana Funke

The emergence of modernism coincides historically with considerable shifts in social and cultural understandings of gender and sexuality. At the fin de siècle, the New Woman inspired debates about autonomous femininity, female sexuality (within and outside of marriage) and reproduction that continued to be rehearsed well into the twentieth century. Calls on behalf of some New Woman writers for the rise of a New Man were only one expression of ongoing and often anxiety-ridden negotiations of models of masculinity over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The First World War has been read as a caesural moment of crisis with regard to gender roles in which masculine ideals were debunked and emancipatory possibilities opened up for women; whatever freedoms were yielded in this historical moment, strict attempts to regulate and police gender styles and forms of sexual expression persisted over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. At the same time, developing fields of knowledge, particularly anthropology, psychoanalysis and sexology, offered new understandings of gender and sexuality that were perceived as both liberating and regulatory; the same ambiguities apply to emerging social and political debates that centred on sexual behaviour and gender roles, including eugenic concerns about the ‘health’ of the nation and race, the suffrage movement, birth control campaigns, and homophile activism.

Modernist writers and artists drew inspiration from and, in turn, contributed to wider debates about masculinity and femininity, gender relations, sexual desire and sexual identification. However, modernism did not simply inform or shape ideas about gender and sexuality; gender and sexuality are also categories that are crucial to the ways in which modernism has been defined and understood. Gender, as a structuring category, has been central to the continuing feminist project of moving beyond a narrowly ‘masculinist’ modernist canon by including women writers and artists and by shedding light on the critical engagement with gender roles within their works (e.g. Garrity, 2013; Gilbert and Gubart, 1989; Harrison and Peterson, 1997; Scott, 1990, 2006). Sexuality, too, has been employed as a category to define and redefine modernism, as is evident in articulations of ‘perverse’ or ‘queer modernisms’ characterized by an interest in homoerotic and homosexual desire and sexual deviance and perversion more generally (e.g. Boone, 1998; Schaffner, 2011a; Schaffner and Weller, 2012). The delineation of ‘Sapphic’ or ‘lesbian modernisms’, which centre on articulations of female same-sex desire or female sexual autonomy in the works of women writers and artists, depends on categories of both gender and sexuality (e.g. Benstock, 1990; Collecott, 1999; Hackett, 2004; Jay, 1995; Winning, 2000).

Such attempts to define modernism in terms of femininity, queerness or lesbianism raise the question of the extent to which modernist literary and artistic production was itself driven and inspired by the wish to articulate a range of gendered and sexual possibilities. In other words, how did an interest in gender and sexuality that is characteristic of modernity more generally inspire the search for self-consciously new means of expression, some of which we recognize as ‘modernist’? And how does our understanding and definition of modernism change once we begin to consider the constitutive role of gender and sexuality in producing new forms of knowledge and expression?

Modernism, in this view, forms part of a broader explosion of discourses about sexuality that has influentially been described by Michel Foucault in the first volume of The History of Sexuality (1976). Foucault’s account focuses specifically on the sciences of sexuality that emerge over the course of the nineteenth century and that include the intersecting fields of psychiatry, psychology, psychoanalysis and sexology. These fields jointly constructed modern understandings of ‘sexuality’, elevating it to a category that was fundamental to an understanding of the human subject. According to Arnold Davidson, this discursive instalment of sexuality at the very core of human life meant that ‘our existence became a sexistence, saturated with the promises and threats of sexuality’ (Davidson, 2004, xiii). The modern subject was a sexual subject through and through; every thought and action was, in one way or another, linked to sexuality, and the individual could even be defined, classified and labelled on the basis of his or her sexual desires.

Henceforth, any exploration of the ‘dark places of psychology’ (Woolf, 2003, 152), to quote Virginia Woolf, crucially involved close attention to sexual desires and longings. As a result, elaborate ‘fictions of interiority and sexuality’ emerged (Boone, 1998, 5). These included Leopold and Molly Bloom’s auto-erotic fantasies and dreams as well as Clarissa Dalloway’s erotic moment of being: ‘a match burning in a crocus; an inner meaning almost expressed’ (Woolf, 2000, 27). Such well-known examples are often considered as indicative of the modernist turn away from external or ‘material’ reality and towards interiority. This turn towards the inner sexual life can also be traced within the sciences of sexuality, which calls into question any rigid divide between the literary and scientific sphere. Indeed, following Paul Peppis, such scientific discourses can usefully be considered as part of modernism in that they ‘participate in the formation of modernism as a broad cultural movement encompassing a range of groups, practices, and disciplines and as a variety of linguistic, rhetorical, and stylistic innovations in response to modernity in its myriad manifestations’ (Peppis, 2014, 11). Since such innovation was driven, in particular, by the desire to find a new language for sexuality, it is necessary to develop a nuanced understanding of ‘sexual modernism’ that encompasses forms of exchange and collaboration across disciplinary boundaries and literary and non-literary fields of expression and that is alive to the multiple and intersecting languages of sexuality invented and circulated at this time.

Scholarship to date has paid particular attention to the resonances between psychoanalysis and literary culture, including the shared interest in bringing into consciousness and also into language allegedly repressed and unconscious sexual desires, wishes and longings. The ‘literary’ quality of Freud’s case studies has been widely noted, and scholars have also explored the influence of Freudian psychoanalysis on a wide range of writers including W. H. Auden, Samuel Beckett, André Breton, Bryher (Annie Winifred Ellerman), H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Lytton Strachey and Rebecca West. The reception of psychoanalysis among such authors was often critical or at least sceptical. Woolf claimed she had not read Freud until 1939, which is doubtful to say the least, given that her very own Hogarth Press had begun to publish English translations of Freud’s works in the early 1920s and was thus responsible for circulating Freudian ideas in the UK (Abel, 1989). Lawrence was introduced to (Freudian and Jungian) psychoanalytic ideas earlier and indirectly, particularly by his German wife Frieda Weekley, whom he had met in 1912, and by British psychoanalysts Barbara Low and David Eder. Lawrence would go on to denounce Freud as a ‘psychiatric quack’ (Lawrence, 1923, 9), and he vehemently rejected psychoanalytic attempts to rationalize sexuality by bringing it into the realm of the conscious mind. While Lawrence shared the psychoanalytic conviction that sexuality was at the heart of the human subject and that sexual desires needed to be expressed, he was also deeply suspicious of the regulatory force inherent in making sexual desire conscious in order to articulate it in and through language, of turning sexuality into an object of knowledge that could be submitted to rational analysis.

The encounter with psychoanalysis and other sexual sciences was also crucially gendered. H. D. was analysed by Freud himself over several months in Vienna in 1933 and, again, in 1934. She gave an account of her experiences in Tribute to Freud (written in 1942) and also in her posthumously published poem ‘The Master’ (written between 1934 and 1935). Such texts offer insights into the ways in which women writers struggled with and reworked psychoanalytic ideas about femininity. H. D. took issue with Freud’s view of the female body as castrated, lacking and deficient; to counter such arguments, she affirmed that ‘woman is perfect’ (H. D., 1981, 411; DuPlessis and Friedman, 1981). However, H. D., like other female writers, also experienced the engagement with psychoanalysis as empowering and revitalizing, in particular with regard to her sexuality – the fact that she desired men and women – and her self-perceived gender ambiguity. This indicates that it is imperative to move beyond antagonistic approaches that have pitted a ‘male’ sexual science against a ‘female’ form of literary expression (e.g. Jeffreys, 1985; Smith-Rosenberg, 1985), and to explore exchanges and communications across alleged binaries of literature, science and gender. It is important to question, for instance, to what extent female writers like H. D. and her partner, Bryher, and also authors such as Radclyffe Hall and Olive Schreiner felt they were themselves contributing to the ‘scientific’ project of writing about sexuality (Bauer, 2009).

An intersecting branch of sexual science that also explored the nexus of gender, physical sex and sexuality was sexology, itself a loosely defined and often explicitly cross-disciplinary field of knowledge that combined a range of medical and non-medical forms of knowledge, including psychiatry and neurology, psychology, anthropology and history (Bland and Doan, 1998; Fisher and Funke, 2015; Waters, 2006). Like psychoanalysis, sexology should be understood as a strongly ‘literary’ discourse (Bauer, 2009; Peppis, 2014; Schaffner, 2011a, b). The most eminent English sexologist Havelock Ellis, for instance, reviewed Thomas Hardy’s work and wrote an introduction to J. K. Huysman’s À Rebours, was friends with Arthur Symons, Schreiner, H. D. and Bryher, edited a series of unexpurgated Elizabethan plays, and wrote a utopian novel and a fictionalized travel memoir. In addition, literary sources were regularly used as evidence in sexological publications – Austro-German psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing, for instance, drew on works by the Marquis de Sade, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Charles Baudelaire and Théophile Gautier among others in his influential Psychopathia Sexualis (Schaffner, 2011b).

In addition, the pervasive use of patient case studies or case histories in sexological publications placed introspective and subjective narrative accounts of individual sexual experiences and desires at the very heart of the sexological project (Oosterhuis, 2000; Peppis, 2014). Indeed, there was an awareness on behalf of sexologists like German-Jewish physician Magnus Hirschfeld that literary experimentation with narrative was crucial in order to facilitate the expression and representation of the wide range of genders and sexualities sexologists were keen to explore (Funke, 2011). Sexology, then, offered more than rigid explanatory models of the origins and causes of sexual desire or encyclopaedic lists of newly coined identity categories such as ‘the homosexual’, ‘the sexual invert’, ‘the transvestite’, ‘the sadist’ or ‘the masochist’. Moreover, the narratives of sexual formation and development presented in sexological publications did not always align neatly with the explanatory frameworks within which these narratives were presented (Crozier, 2000; Peppis, 2014). Instead, case histories often troubled any rigid or static notion of sexual identity or one-sided accounts of sexual desire as either inborn or acquired. Moreover, the case history emerged as an important tool that was used strategically by reform-oriented sexologists like Ellis or Hirschfeld to oppose pathologizing views of (particularly male) homosexuality that had been articulated in other sexological publications, and to affirm the health and social respectability of the male homosexual or sexual invert (Crozier, 2008). As such, sexology was a conflicted and multivalent discourse that created a rhetorical space within which complex narratives of the sexual self were constructed and circulated.

Literary writers occupied the same rhetorical space and were in direct dialogue with sexological attempts to write and narrate the sexual self. Novels like E. M. Forster’s Maurice (written in 1913–14, but published posthumously in 1971), Edward Prime Stevenson’s Imre: A Memorandum (published in a limited-edition imprint under the pseudonym Xavier Mayne in 1906) or Bryher’s autobiographical novels, Development (1920) and Two Selves (1923), rework the Bildungsroman to depict the formation of the sexual subject. Bryher, who knew Ellis personally and travelled to Greece with him and H. D. in 1920, drew on psychoanalytic and sexological accounts to understand her cross-gender identification (her desire to be a boy) and her same-sex desire. Her autobiographical fiction deploys narrative methods to delay the developmental process of maturation that would result in the establishment of fixed or stable categories of sexual and gender identity, and champions an ongoing process of sexual and gendered development instead. Even Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (1928), which famously drew on sexological terminology in labelling its female protagonist Stephen Gordon as a ‘sexual invert’, offers complicated and conflicted aetiologies of sexual identity and considers both congenital and hereditary factors as well as cultural and social influences (Dellamora, 2011; Green, 2003).

An understanding of the indeterminacy of the causes and origins of sexual desire and the instability of sexual identity categories was thus very much part of literary and sexological discourse. Indeed, even Woolf’s Orlando (1928), which is often seen as a subversive and anti-sexological high modernist antidote to Hall’s overtly realist The Well of Loneliness, does not necessarily have to be read as a novel opposed to sexology. Woolf’s narrator decides to ‘let biologists and psychologists determine’ (Woolf, 1998, 134) the truth about Orlando’s sex, showing no interest in doing so him or herself. Yet, the scientific discourses that are evoked here were not invested in static understandings of physical sex, sexual desire or gender identification. Edward Carpenter, Ellis, Hirschfeld and Otto Weininger, for instance, were all interested in ‘sexual intermediacy’, that is to say, forms of experience and subjectivity that worked across gender and sexual binaries. Indeed, Vita Sackville-West – the subject of Woolf’s fictional biography – had herself studied the writings of Weininger and Carpenter and, on the basis of such reading, affirmed ‘that cases of dual personality do exist, in which the feminine and the masculine elements alternately preponderate’ (Sackville-West, 1973, 108). To be sure, Orlando can be read as a feminist critique of the problematic gendered assumptions underpinning sexological and psychoanalytic thought (Parkes, 1996, 144–79). At the same time, however, Woolf’s creative exploration of the intersections of gender, sex and sexuality and of the indeterminacy and instability of the sexual self can also be seen as part of a broader sexual modernism that includes sexology, psychoanalysis and other sciences of sexuality.

This sexual modernism was united in assuming that the creation of self-consciously new narratives of sexuality signalled a decisive and transformative break with an allegedly ‘repressed’ past. Speaking openly about sexual desires and behaviours that might be seen as ‘obscene’ was viewed as a radical gesture that served to constitute and authorize as ‘revolutionary’ and ‘new’ different scientific and literary discourses. There was thus a shared sense that the open discussion of sexual matters and the forging of a new language of sexual experience was, as Woolf humorously stated, ‘a great advance in civilisation’ (Woolf, 1985, 196).

Indeed, following Rachel Potter, ‘[o]ne could go so far as to suggest that modernist texts, in their more liberatory guises, became identified with radical and obscene transgression’ (Potter, 2013, 11). Certainly, literary writers joyfully depicted and celebrated ‘transgressive’ sexual acts, such as male and female masturbation in Joyce’s work, lesbian cunnilingus in Djuna Barnes’s Ladies Almanack (1928), or cross-class, extramarital and non-reproductive anal sex in Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928). This modernist fascination with transgression and obscenity was paradoxically facilitated by the fact that modernism emerged during a period of particularly strict regulation in the history of censorship. In Britain, it was only after the 1959 Obscene Publications Act that it became possible to defend literary works against charges of obscenity on the basis of their artistic merits and the author’s intention. The Act was famously put to the test when Penguin was unsuccessfully prosecuted in 1960 for publishing a full and unexpurgated edition of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which had previously been available only in bowdlerized form.

The publication of Radclyffe Hall’s lesbian novel, The Well of Loneliness, three decades earlier, in 1928, had brought about one of the most widely publicized obscenity trials in the history of British law. Hall’s novel was banned as ‘obscene’ in Britain despite the fact that it was published with a prefatory note by Ellis, attesting to its ‘notable psychological and sociological significance’ (Ellis, 2001, 35). Moreover, a large group of literary experts, including Arnold Bennett, Vera Brittain and Woolf, had appeared in court to defend the book. Many of these writers were less than convinced of the book’s literary merits, but came together to defend the right of authors like Hall to speak openly about sexual matters, including lesbianism. The Well of Loneliness trials and the support Hall received from the wider literary community indicate that the first decades of the twentieth century were a period in which literary and non-literary writers, editors and publishers were strongly aware of the very real possibility of state censorship and united in the struggle for free speech.

However, censorship was not only repressive. Hall’s novel, for instance, which was subsequently published in the United States (where a censorship trial had failed), France and other European countries, gained a large readership precisely because of the scandal created by the trials. Exploring further the productive potential of censorship and repression, recent scholarship, focusing primarily on Britain and the United States, has demonstrated the extent to which modernism itself was shaped, if not paradoxically enabled, by actual, anticipated or imagined censorship (Bradshaw and Potter, 2013; Marshik, 2006; Pease, 2009; Potter, 2013). To some degree, modernist experimentation can be seen as a product of this climate of repression in which writers and artists were forced to develop strategic means of encoding or obscuring the representation of sexual experiences, desires and bodily processes that might otherwise be deemed as ‘obscene’.

Indeed, overtly experimental novels like Orlando or Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood (1936) did avoid censorship (although it has to be noted that Barnes’ editor, T. S. Eliot, did remove several more explicit references to homosexuality from the novel and that Woolf had the freedom of self-publication with the Hogarth Press). Ulysses, however, was banned as obscene in the United States in 1921 after the ‘Nausicaa’ episode had appeared in the Little Review, forcing Joyce to publish the first full edition of the novel in France. Publishing abroad or privately were strategies used by many authors to avoid censorship and to circulate sexually explicit materials, but other texts, such as Gertrude Stein’s autobiographical lesbian novel Q.E.D. (written in 1903) or Forster’s Maurice, remained unpublished during the authors’ lifetime due to self-censorship.

Concerns about the accessibility and potential impact of sexual material under state censorship were also debated in literature itself. Under the 1868 Hicklin Ruling, Lord Cockburn had defined obscenity as ‘the tendency […] to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to immoral influences and into whose hands the publication might fall’ (cited in Potter, 2013, 17). Such fears were based on gender-, age-, class-, race- and ethnicity-related assumptions about readership and audience: women, the young, the working classes and racial or ethnic ‘others’ were considered to be at particular danger of being ‘corrupted’. Literary works responded to such anxieties: in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), Dorian’s corruption is crucially linked to his reading of a ‘poisonous book’ – a thinly veiled reference to À Rebours (1998, 107). Similarly, Celia Marshik points out that Jean Rhys’s Voyage in the Dark (1934) places another French novel, Émile Zola’s controversial study of prostitution, Nana (1880), in the hands of eighteen-year-old Caribbean chorus girl, Anna, whose life soon enters a downward spiral (Marshik, 2006, 183). As such, these novels raised awareness of and also affirmed a potential link between the influence of literature and the moral corruption of ‘vulnerable’ readers.

Other authors reinforced the affirmative and liberating potential of sexual knowledge, particularly for women. In The Well of Loneliness, Stephen Gordon is able to understand herself as a ‘sexual invert’ when she discovers the sexological studies of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs and Krafft-Ebing in her father’s library. It was not just the self-identified sexual invert who lacked access to information about sexuality, however. Lawrence described as ‘monstrous’ women’s sexual ignorance in modern society: ‘they know nothing, they can’t think sexually at all, they are morons in this respect. It is better to give all young girls this book [Lady Chatterley’s Lover], at the age of seventeen’ (Lawrence, 1993, 309). Woolf also negotiated the question of how and when women learn about sexuality. Clarissa Dalloway remembers her sexual and political ignorance as a girl – ‘She knew nothing about sex – nothing about social problems’ – and it is Sally Seton who teaches Clarissa about sex and socialism by sharing the works of William Morris, which had to be ‘wrapped in brown paper’, and Plato and Shelley (Woolf, 2000, 28). Here and elsewhere, particularly in A Room of One’s Own (1929), Woolf linked the exchange of secret or unofficial knowledge between women to potential sexual and political subversion that is always at danger of being censored or repressed. Like other women writers, she presented the experience of censorship not only as gendered, but also as both disabling and enabling; there was a sense of the liberating and subversive potential stemming from the difficulties of knowing and articulating women’s experiences of sexuality and the body.

An awareness of the indeterminacy of sexual knowledges and languages and their dependence on factors of gender, class, economic status, age, race and ethnicity can also usefully inform the study of sexual modernism more broadly. Following Laura Doan, it is crucial to keep asking the question, ‘Who knew what when?’ (2001, 130). As we have already seen, scholarship has explored the ways in which sexological and psychoanalytic ideas and concepts were received and reworked by literary writers (although there has been a tendency to overlook the fact that the sexual sciences were more open-ended and conflicted in themselves and often offered indeterminate and fluid rather than rigid and static understandings of gender and sexuality). We know that writers like Barnes, Bryher, H. D., Eliot, William Faulkner, Forster, Langston Hughes, Christopher Isherwood, Joyce, Lawrence, Claude McKay, Radclyffe Hall, Dorothy Richardson, Vita Sackville-West and Woolf were familiar with sexology. Emerging scholarship on the transnational history and reception of Northern-European sexual science is also beginning to unveil important new sites of dialogue, such as Japanese writer Taruho’s engagement with Krafft-Ebing in the 1920s (Angles, 2011), thus globally expanding the scope of sexual modernism. Nonetheless, it is important not to assume writers’ and readers’ familiarity with sexological thought, especially given that sexology was also affected by tightly controlled censorship regulations, particularly in Britain (Brady, 2005). Ellis and John Addington Symonds’s Sexual Inversion, for instance, was itself banned as ‘obscene’ upon first publication in Britain in 1897, forcing Ellis to publish the remaining seven volumes of his Studies in the Psychology of Sex in the United States.

The resulting difficulties in accessing sexological writings raise challenging questions about literary production, reception and readership. Historians of sexuality have begun to show that sexological ideas were, at times, transmitted and mediated through popular culture, but did not reach broader audiences in the first decades of the twentieth century, with potential exceptions like the Well of Loneliness trials, which catapulted into public consciousness the figure of the ‘sexual invert’ (Doan, 2001; Oram, 2007; Sigel, 2012). How relevant and influential sexology really was in shaping authors’ understanding of themselves and their desires, the manner in which they wrote about gender and sexuality, and the reception and understanding of their works thus remains an important field of investigation.

It is also crucial to move beyond sexology and psychoanalysis and to consider what other (sometimes overlapping) discourses and forms of knowledge were drawn upon to construct gender and sexuality in the modernist period. Decadence and aestheticism, for instance, need to be considered as constitutive languages of sexual modernism that continued to shape debates about gender and sexuality well into the twentieth century. In the nineteenth century, the decadent rejection of nature, reproduction and utilitarianism had found expression in the joint celebration both of art for art’s sake and of sexualities that were considered non-reproductive and unnatural. As such, decadence situated the sexually deviant or perverse at the very heart of aesthetic debate and thus created a powerful legacy that shaped modernist production. The lesbian woman (as a potentially reproductive yet effectively sterile figure) came to embody a decadent ideal, which early twentieth-century writers would inherit and revise. Barnes’s modernist manipulation of decadent aesthetics and radical subversion of the very distinction between natural and unnatural genders and sexualities offers one important example (Carlston, 1998; Caselli, 2009; Hardie, 2005). The figure of the dandy-aesthete was also reworked in the modernist period; in the 1920s, female artists and authors like Romaine Brooks, Claude Cahun and Radclyffe Hall reappropriated the figure of the dandy to challenge or, at least, renegotiate naturalized understandings of gender and sexuality (Blessing, 2001; Glick, 2009; Lucchesi, 2001). Recent work on black modernism and the Harlem Renaissance has also explored the queerness of the black dandy as a figure that disrupts conceptions of gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity and draws attention to the intersections and ultimate instability of such markers of identity (Miller, 2009).

Religion, spirituality and the occult offered additional ways of thinking about and articulating conceptions of gender and sexuality. The esoteric philosophy of theosophy imported allegedly Eastern concepts and arguments that became integral to Western feminist political culture and also intersected with sexological discourse (Dixon, 1997, 2001). The spiritualist movement, which experienced a surge of renewed interest in the climate of mourning created by the First World War, was closely intertwined with debates about eugenics and reproduction (Ferguson, 2012). The different ways in which such religious, spiritual and occult discourses allowed writers like H. D., May Sinclair, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Rebecca West and W. B. Yeats to reconceptualize masculinity, femininity and sexuality have not yet been fully explored. The possibility that the individual could survive beyond death, experience reincarnation (as in Forster’s ‘Albergo Empedocle’) or transcend telepathically the limitations of the individual subject located in time and space made it possible, for instance, to think of the self as possessing multiple sexes and genders and of experiencing different forms of relationality or seemingly incongruous forms of desire. Radclyffe Hall would combine in an unorthodox fashion Catholic, spiritualist and theosophical ideas to explore precisely these themes in texts like her comic reincarnation novel, A Saturday Life (1925), or the short story ‘Miss Ogilvy Finds Herself’ (1934) (Dellamora, 2011; Funke, 2016).

Decadence and aestheticism, Hellenism, and religion and spirituality are certainly not the only discourses that need to be taken into account (in addition to sexology and psychoanalysis) to renegotiate the scope and contours of sexual modernism. Indeed, one of the key characteristics of sexual modernism is its containment of multiple coinciding, intersecting and colliding forms of knowledge and expression that often work across the conventionally drawn boundaries of literature, science, religion and spirituality. Moreover, as we have seen, ignorance and silence need to be understood as integral components of sexual modernism that were indicative of forms of repression and inequality, which were themselves dependent on gender, class, race and age, but that could also offer enabling strategies of resistance. Thus, sexual modernism comprises a bewildering multiplicity of intersecting and overlapping means of conceptualizing sexuality and gender, but it is also made up of gaps and absences of knowledge and language. In addition to the self-conscious interest in transgression and subversion that many modernist writers shared, this fundamental indeterminacy of language and knowledge constitutes the fluid or queer conceptions of gender and sexuality that have come to be seen as a key marker of modernism itself.

Acknowledging the constitutive indeterminacy of sexual modernism also draws attention to the way in which categories and concepts of gender and sexuality have shaped scholarly interpretations of modernist texts. As Doan, who has posed this challenge to historians of sexuality, maintains: ‘Negotiating the past in relation to gender and sexuality forces us to raise our tolerance for conceptual messiness as we engage in the pleasures of conjecturing about what may in the end prove unknowable and irresolvable’ (2013, 104). The question of how literary modernist studies might contribute to the important project of exploring the ‘disordered, mutable, incoherent, and indeterminate’ experiences of the past without relying on overly rigid or static categories of gender and sexuality remains to be addressed (Doan, 2013).

One potential starting point is to consider critically the tendency (which is also, to some degree, expressed in this chapter) to understand sexuality primarily in terms of gender, that is, as attraction between two people of the same or opposite gender. In so doing, we are at risk of not fully theorizing how other categories of difference, such as class, age and race, crucially structured the experience of sexuality across any assumed divide between heterosexuality and homosexuality, which was not as prevalent during the modernist period as has been assumed (Brickell, 2006). To be sure, age, class and race played a crucial role in articulations of same-sex desire and opposite-sex desire in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries; it is also worth asking how our understanding of sexual modernism might shift if we focused, for instance, on the depiction of age and ageing in texts like Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes: Or the Loving Huntsman (1926) or on the erotics of age difference in Strachey’s Elizabeth and Essex (1928), without assuming that these texts necessarily encode same-sex desire or that they can be understood by drawing on models of sexuality that privilege gender.

Even more challenging is the question of whether it is possible (or desirable) to reconsider the very centrality of deviance and perversion itself to our understanding of sexual modernism. Of course, as we have seen, modernism itself has been defined in terms of transgression, deviance and perversion and this has led to productive synergies, in particular, with queer theory. Yet, as historians of sexuality are beginning to point out, the queer focus on the deviant or abnormal has also restricted and arguably skewed the scope of historical and possibly literary investigation (Doan, 2013; Houlbrook, 2005). Many of the discourses that have been discussed over the course of this chapter, including sexology, did not, as has often been assumed, focus specifically on the deviant or perverse, but were also interested in understanding forms of gender presentation and sexual desire that might easily be dismissed as ‘heteronormative’ by queer scholars. Reproductive and marital sexualities, pregnancy, maternity and paternity were part of a broader repertoire of gendered and sexual experiences that were investigated, for instance, in the marital advice, birth control or sex education literature of the 1910s and 1920s, but that have not yet been explored fully with regard to the literary writing produced in the same period.

Overall, the point of such historically informed challenges to established readings of modernist sexualities and genders is neither to insist on more rigidly ‘historicist’ readings of the experiences and desires of the past nor to disavow the potential for literary works to resonate with the feelings and desires of readers in the present. Rather, the point of expanding sexual modernism in the way this chapter proposes – across various literary and non-literary forms of knowledge and expression, and beyond familiar ways of categorizing gender and sexuality – is to show that it is even more complicated, indeterminate, and, in this sense, even more queer than the sexual modernism we have come to know.

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