CHAPTER NINE

Homophobia, Misogyny, and Capital: The Example of Our Mutual Friend

EIGHT years ago, writing a narrative poem about a musicologist with a writing block, I included a little literary joke: a fictional psychoanalyst in the poem was writing a fictional essay for Thalassa: A (fictional) Journal of Genitality, on the then-fictional topic,

 

“Sustained Homosexual

Panic and Literary Productiveness” (which includes

close readings from Our Mutual Friend).…¹

 

It didn’t amount to much as a joke, but at any rate it does record the slightly incredulous beginnings of my thinking about this present project, and their inextricability from a reading of late Dickens. At that time I probably imagined a reading couched in more biographical terms than it now seems to me feasible to do well, or interesting to do speculatively. In a more historical and political framework, though, it still seems important to delineate the force of Dickens’ contribution to the “Gothic” project: the psychologization and political naturalization of homophobia about men.

In chapter 5, on the Romantic Gothic, we sketched a fragmentary, mythical phylogeny of the English novel, which Dickens’ career seems to recapitulate at the level of ontogeny. The Pickwick Papers at any rate, although written after almost all the Gothic novels mentioned in chapter 5, has much in common with the pre-Gothic Sentimental Journey: constitutive elements of its picaresque include the hypercharged and hyperarticulated paternalism of the bond between male servant and male employer; the apparent affective sunniness and unproblematicality of its (far more open, less psychological) gynephobia; and most importantly, the structuring, “explanatory,” and coercive authority, for gender as well as class relations, of an image of the family that is in fact appropriate to none of the affectional or cohabitant groupings in the novel.

Also as in A Sentimental Journey, the profound and insistent bonds of love between men do not seem to engage with any intimate prohibition. (They also do not seem to engage with any form of genitality; but, as we have already seen, the at any rate literary portrayal of homophobic prohibition seems far more readily triggered than the portrayal of homosexual genitality in any event.) “Homosexual panic”—the modern, intrapsychic, potentially almost universal extension of the secularization of homosexual anathema—seems not to have touched these men or these bonds. They might still be in the England of the sixteenth century, when sodomy was a capital crime, but men found it almost impossible to recognize it in their own or their neighbors’ behavior, even in bed.²

By the time of Great Expectations, Our Mutual Friend, and Edwin Drood, however, Dickens’ writing had incorporated the concerns and thematics of the paranoid Gothic as a central preoccupation. Specifically, each of these novels sites an important plot in triangular, heterosexual romance—in the Romance tradition—and then changes its focus as if by compulsion from the heterosexual bonds of the triangle to the male-homosocial one, here called “erotic rivalry.” In these male homosocial bonds are concentrated the fantasy energies of compulsion, prohibition, and explosive violence; all are fully structured by the logic of paranoia. At the same time, however, these fantasy energies are mapped along the axes of social and political power; so that the revelation of intrapsychic structures is inextricable from the revelation of the mechanisms of class domination.

In the half-century or so between the classic Gothic and Dickens, the terms of engagement between homophobia and class structure had become ever more differentiated. The normative status of the rural gentry in Hogg had to a large extent devolved onto (some version of) the English middle class—mediated by genealogical narratives like Henry Esmond and The Princess. And an anxious self-definition of that class, in male-homo-social terms, as against those both above and below on the social ladder, was effected, as well as critiqued, by neo-Gothic writers such as Dickens. In this chapter and the next, I am going to be focusing on these political strains in Dickens’ use of the paranoid Gothic. This chapter will make primary use of Our Mutual Friend, with some additional reference to other nineteenth-century English fiction, to explore the uses of homophobia in the domestic political terms of mid-Victorian England. In the next chapter, I will use The Mystery of Edwin Drood as the focus of a discussion of homophobia and the literature of British imperialism.

Our Mutual Friend has had an emboldening effect on at any rate the thematic project of Between Men, because it is so thick with themes associated with male homophobia and homosexuality. After all, Our Mutual Friend is the English novel that everyone knows is about anality. The inheritance at the center of the plot is immensely valuable real estate that contains a cluster of what Dickens calls “dust heaps.” Layers of scholarly controversy have been devoted to the contents of Victorian dust heaps; and, led by Humphry House’s The Dickens World, many critics have agreed that human excrement was an important (and financially valuable) component of the mounds. Such critics as Earle Davis, Monroe Engel, J. Hillis Miller, and Sylvia Bank Manning have given this thematic element a good deal of play, often, as F. S. Schwarzbach says, “with the intention of establishing whether Dickens did or did not understand Freud’s later formulation of the psychic relation between human waste and money.”³ But although many of those who write about Dickens’ conjunction of excrement and money refer to Freud, sometimes by way of Norman O. Brown, most of the substance of Freud’s (and Brown’s) argument is missing from their accounts. Their point is most often far simpler and essentially moralistic: that money and excrement are alike because (more or less) they are worthless, bad. Thus Earle Davis writes,

 

Economically speaking, [Dickens’] world could see no difference between unearned increment and diffused excrement…. [I]n every part of London he saw mankind straining and struggling over a dung heap…. His pen became an excretory organ spouting out a sizzling cover for all the organic corruption which lay festering in the values that money set, the awful offal of Victorian standards.

 

Davis concludes his “post-Freudian” reading with the ancient favorite text of Chaucer’s Pardoner:

 

At the bottom of all is money, the love of money at the cost of everything else. It is the overweening desire for money which lands most people in the filth of Hell.⁴

 

Perhaps it would be more precise, then, to say that Our Mutual Friend is the only English novel that everyone says is about excrement in order that they may forget that it is about anality. For the Freudian insights, elided in the critics’ moralistic yoking of filth and lucre, are erotic ones. They are insights into the pleasures, desires, bonds, and forms of eros that have to do with the anus. And it is precisely the repression of these pleasures and desires that, in Freud, turns feces into filth and filth into gold. A novel about the whole issue of anal eroticism, and not merely a sanitized invective against money or “filthy lucre” or what critics have come to call “the dust-money equation,” would have to concern itself with other elements in the chain Freud describes: love between man and man, for instance; the sphincter, its control, and the relation of these to sadism; the relations among bodily images, material accumulation, and economic status. It would also offer some intimations, at least, of adult genital desire, and repression, in relation to the anus. Furthermore a novel that treated these issues would necessarily cast them in the mold of a particular, historical vision of society, class, power, money, and gender.

One curious thematic marker in Our Mutual Friend that has gone critically unnoticed, and that the novel itself tends to muffle, is a name. An important character in the novel chooses to call herself Jenny Wren, but we are told—just once—that that is not the name she was born with. Her real name is Fanny Cleaver. Unlike the later, funny, almost childishly deflationary name, Fanny Assingham, in The Golden Bowl, Fanny Cleaver is a name that hints at aggression—specifically, at rape, and perhaps at homosexual rape.⁵ The pun would seem a trivial accident, were it not a small pointer to something much more striking: that there are two scenes in Our Mutual Friend whose language does indeed strongly suggest male rape.⁶ These are Bradley Headstone’s attack on Rogue Riderhood (discussed below), and the attack on John Harmon in chapter 13 (discussed in the next chapter). Another thematic “clue” functions at a different level to solicit the twentieth-century reader’s attention to the male homosocial components in the book. One of the male protagonists lives in domestic happiness with another man, and at moments of particular intensity he says things like, “I love you, Mortimer.”⁷

In some simple sense, therefore, this must be a novel that delineates something close to the whole extent of the male homosocial spectrum, including elements of homosexual genitality. Just what version of male homosociality most concerns it, however? The sweet avowal, “I love you, Mortimer,” almost promises the sunny, Pickwickian innocence of encompassing homosocial love rendered in the absence of homophobia. At the same time, to give a woman a name like Fanny Cleaver may suggest something almost opposite: homophobia, in the absence of homosexuality. And those golden dust heaps are the emblem of a wholly abstracted anality: they do not refer us to any individual or sentient anus. To understand the very excess, the supervisibility of the homosocial/homophobic/homosexual thematics in this novel requires us to see that for Dickens the erotic fate of every female or male is also cast in the terms and propelled by the forces of class and economic accumulation.

Let me begin by tracing a chain of Girardian triangles within one of the novel’s plots, a chain reaching from the lowest class up to the professional class. It begins with the three members of the Hexam family: Gaffer Hexam, the father, an illiterate scavenger who makes his living by fishing corpses from the Thames and robbing them; Lizzie Hexam, his beautiful, good, and loyal daughter; and Charley Hexam, his son, whom Lizzie protects from their father’s violent resentment until Charley is old enough to run away and go to school. These three comprise the first triangle.

Charley is determined and industrious enough to go from a Ragged School to a National School, where he becomes a pupil-teacher under the sponsorship of a young schoolmaster, Bradley Headstone. Bradley, like Charley, began as a pauper, and Dickens says, “regarding that origin of his, he was proud, moody, and sullen, desiring it to be forgotten.” Yet an intense bond soon develops between the schoolmaster and young Charley. After the father’s death, Bradley advises Charley to have no more to do with his impoverished, illiterate sister. Charley begs Bradley to come meet Lizzie first, however, and Bradley finds himself, as if by compulsion, violently in love with her.

The triangles of the Hexam family and of Charley, Lizzie, and Bradley are complicated by another triangle. Eugene Wrayburn, a young barrister and one of the heroes of the novel, also falls in love with Lizzie. He, like Bradley, has an intense encounter with Charley before meeting Lizzie, although in this case the intensity takes the form of instant, almost allergic dislike on both sides. And Eugene has another, apparently non-triangular, love relationship—it is he who says, “I love you, Mortimer.” Mortimer Lightwood is an old friend and protégé of Eugene’s from public school, and the two, while making languid efforts to succeed in the law, make a household together.

Already contrasts of class are appearing under the guise of contrasts of personality and sexuality. One great evidence of class and control divides this little world in two as absolutely as gender does, though less permanently: the division of the literate from the illiterate. And after Gaffer’s early death, only one of these people—Lizzie, the desired woman—remains illiterate. The quarrel between the schoolmaster and Eugene is over who will teach her to read. But even within the masculine world of literacy, the gradations of class are unforgiving. Charley’s and Bradley’s relation to knowledge is always marked by the anxious, compulsive circumstances of its acquisition. Dickens says of the schoolmaster,

 

From his early childhood up, his mind had been a place of mechanical stowage…. There was a kind of settled trouble in the face. It was the face belonging to a normally slow or inattentive intellect that had toiled hard to get what it had won, and that had to hold it now that it was gotten. (II,1)

 

Bradley seems always to be in pain, “like … one who was being physically hurt, and was unwilling to cry out” (II,11); his infliction of pain on others seems to come from even greater spasms of it within himself; talking to Lizzie about his desire to teach her to read, for example, he seems to be hemorrhaging internally:

 

He looked at Lizzie again, and held the look. And his face turned from burning red to white, and from white back to burning red, and so for the time to lasting deadly white. (II,11)

 

In fact, to borrow an image from a patient of Freud’s, the schoolmaster behaves socially like a man with a hungry rat in his bowels. And for him, the rat represents not money but more specifically his small private capital of knowledge. Or rather it represents the alienation from himself of the profit of his knowledge. For the knowledge never makes him wiser; it is quite worthless outside the schoolroom; it merely places him, more decisively even than illiteracy would, in a particular, low position in the line of production of labor for a capitalism whose needs now included a literate, rather than merely a massive, workforce. Bradley’s one effort to invest his nest egg for his own profit—to teach Lizzie to read, as part of that triangular transaction with Charley—is imperiously overruled by Eugene, who wants to pay for his own person to do the teaching. “Are you her schoolmaster as well as her brothers?” asks Eugene scornfully, and instead of using his name, will only call him, “Schoolmaster.” Bradley, as usual, loses control of his composure and complexion—for he is merely “used to the little audience of a school, and unused to the larger ways of men” (II,6).

Eugene, on the other hand, though not wealthy, is a gentleman and a public-school boy. His relation to his own store of knowledge is the confident one of inconspicuous consumption: he can afford to be funny and silly. He likes to say things like “But then I mean so much that I—that I don’t mean” (II,6). Or

 

“You know that when I became enough of a man to find myself an embodied conundrum, I bored myself to the last degree by trying to find out what I meant. You know that at length I gave it up, and declined to guess any more.” (II,6)

 

Mortimer sees him affectionately as “this utterly careless Eugene.” He has no consciousness of knowledge, or even of power, as something to be struggled for, although his unconscious wielding of them makes him not only more loveable and relaxed than Bradley but also much more destructive. The moral ugliness of Eugene’s taunts against the schoolmaster is always less striking, in the novel’s presentation, then the unloveliness of the schoolmaster’s anxiety and frustration. Bradley the pauper, thinking to make himself independent by his learning, finds that he has struggled himself into a powerless, alienating position in an impervious hierarchical economy. Eugene Wrayburn, like Yorick imagining himself as marginal, passive, and unempowered in his relation to the economy, nevertheless speaks with the full-throated authority of a man near its very center.

Bradley’s relation with Charley and Eugene’s with Mortimer differ on the basis of class, and the position of Lizzie in each relationship is accordingly different. Charley’s offer of Lizzie to his schoolmaster represents the purest form of the male traffic in women. Charley explains it to Lizzie this way:

 

“Then I come in. Mr. Headstone has always got me on, and he has a good deal in his power, and of course if he was my brother-in-law he wouldn’t get me on less, but would get me on more. Mr. Headstone comes and confides in me, in a very delicate way, and says, ‘I hope my marrying your sister would be agreeable to you, Hexam, and useful to you?’ I say, There’s nothing in the world, Mr. Headstone, that I could be better pleased with.’ Mr. Headstone says, Then I may rely upon your intimate knowledge of me for your good word with your sister, Hexam?’ And I say, “Certainly, Mr. Headstone, and naturally I have a good deal of influence with her.’ So I have; haven’t I, Liz?”

“Yes, Charley.”

“Well said! Now you see, we begin to get on, the moment we begin to be really talking it over, like brother and sister.” (II,15)

 

To Bradley, his triangle with Charley and Lizzie represents not access to power within the society but a dire sliding away from it; and this is true whether one takes his desire for Lizzie or for Charley to represent the main erotic bond. No wonder he says to Lizzie, in an example of his resentful style of courtship:

 

“You are the ruin—the ruin—the ruin—of me. … I have never been quit of you since I first saw you. Oh, that was a wretched day for me! That was a wretched, miserable day!” (II, 15)

 

No; the closest relation to patriarchal power for Bradley in this tangle comes in the link of rivalry between himself and Eugene Wrayburn. And it soon emerges that this is, indeed, for him, the focus of the whole affair. In the painful scene with Lizzie I have been quoting, Bradley makes a threat against Eugene, and when she responds, indignantly, “He is nothing to you, I think,” he insists, “Oh yes he is. There you mistake. He is much to me.” What? she asks.

 

“He can be a rival to me among other things. … I knew all this about Mr. Eugene Wrayburn, all the while you were drawing me to you…. With Mr. Eugene Wrayburn in my mind, I went on. With Mr. Eugene Wrayburn in my mind, I spoke to you just now. With Mr. Eugene Wrayburn in my mind, I have been set aside and I have been cast out.” (II, 15; emphasis added)

 

After Lizzie has refused Bradley and left London, the desiring relation between Bradley and Eugene, far from dissipating, becomes hotter and more reciprocal. The schoolmaster decides—wrongly—that he can find Lizzie by following Eugene everywhere he goes, and, Eugene says,

 

“I goad the schoolmaster to madness. … I tempt him on, all over London…. Sometimes, I walk; sometimes, I proceed in cabs, draining the pocket of the schoolmaster, who then follows in cabs. I study and get up abstruse No Thoroughfares in the course of the day [while Bradley is teaching]. With Venetian mystery I seek those No Thoroughfares at night, glide into them by means of dark courts, tempt the schoolmaster to follow, turn suddenly, and catch him before he can retreat. Then we face one another, and I pass him as unaware of his existence, and he undergoes grinding torments…. Thus I enjoy the pleasures of the chase…. just now I am a little excited by the glorious fact that a southerly wind and a cloudy sky proclaim a hunting evening.” (III,10)

 

In Surtees’s Handley Cross, Mr. Jorrocks declaims that “‘Unting” is “the image of war without its guilt, and only five-and-twenty per cent. of its danger,” but it is less lucky than that for the men who are caught up in this chase. One day on a towpath Bradley attacks Eugene from behind; the two men struggle in an embrace, and Eugene, both arms broken, nearly drowns. Soon after that, another man, a lockkeeper with the sinister and important name Rogue Riderhood, who has been dogging and blackmailing Bradley Headstone, finds himself, too, attacked from behind. This is one of the scenes whose language is that of male rape:

 

Bradley had caught him round the body. He seemed to be girdled with an iron ring…. Bradley got him round, with his back to the Lock, and still worked him backward…. “I’ll hold you living, and I’ll hold you dead! Come down!”

Riderhood went over into the smooth pit, backward, and Bradley Headstone upon him. When the two were found, lying under the ooze and scum behind one of the rotting gates, Riderhood’s hold had relaxed, probably in falling, and his eyes were staring upward. But, he was girdled still with Bradley’s iron ring, and the rivets of the iron ring held tight. (IV,15)

 

Sphincter domination is Bradley Headstone’s only mode of grappling for the power that is continually flowing away from him. Unfortunately for him, sphincter control can’t give him any leverage at all with women—with Lizzie, who simply never engages with him, who eludes him from the start. It only succeeds in grappling more closely to him men who have already been drawn into a fascinated mirroring relation to him—Eugene, with whom he has been engaged in that reversible hunt, and Rogue Riderhood, in whose clothing he had disguised himself for the assault on Eugene. His initial, hating terror of Lizzie was a terror of, as he kept putting it, being “drawn” from himself, having his accumulated value sucked from him down the great void of her illiteracy and powerlessness. But, classically, he is the Pinchwife-like man who, fearing to entrust his relations with patriarchy to a powerless counter, a woman, can himself only be used as a woman, and valued as a woman, by the men with whom he comes into narcissistic relation.

In the novel’s social mapping of the body, Bradley, like some other figures at the lower end of the respectable classes, powerfully represents the repressive divorce of the private thematics of the anus from the social forces of desire and pleasure. Dickens does precede Freud, Ferenczi, Norman O. Brown, and Deleuze/Guattari, among others, in seeing digestion and the control of the anus as the crucial images for the illusion of economic individualism: cross-culturally, Brown remarks, “the category of ‘possession,’ and power based on possession, is apparently indigenous to the magic-dirt complex.”⁸ One thematic portrayal of this exclusion is a splitting of the body between twin images of a distended gut and a distended disembodied head. Bradley Headstone (and note his name), the most wrackingly anal of the characters, also appears repeatedly as a floating “haggard head in the air” (III,10; III,11); Mr. Venus, a taxidermist and articulator of skeletons, with his shop full of hydrocephalic babies in jars, is himself given to “floating his powerful mind in tea” (III,7); illiterate “Noddy” Boffin dandles the head of his walking stick at his ear like the head of a floating “familiar spirit” or baby, and himself seems to turn into a great heavyheaded puppet at the end of the novel (IV,3; IV,13); and so on. The unanxious version of homo digestivus is the “hideous solidity” that the firmly bourgeois Podsnaps and their circle share with their “corpulent straddling” tableware:

 

Everything said boastfully, “Here you have as much of me in my ugliness as if I were only lead; but I am so many ounces of precious metal worth so much an ounce; wouldn’t you like to melt me down?” …All the big silver spoons and forks widened the mouths of the company expressly for the purpose of thrusting the sentiment down their throats with every morsel they ate. The majority of the guests were like the plate…. (I,11)

 

This strain of imagery, of course, culminates in the monstrous dust-heaps themselves. In short, one thing that goes on when the human body is taken as a capitalist emblem is that the relation of parts to wholes becomes problematic; there is no intelligible form of circulation; the parts swell up with accumulated value, they take on an autonomous life of their own, and eventually power comes to be expressed as power over reified doubles fashioned in one’s own image from the waste of one’s own body. Power is over dolls, puppets, and articulated skeletons, over the narcissistic, singular, nondesiring phantoms of individuality.

For Bradley Headstone, dissociation, anxiety, toil, and a crippling somatic self-consciousness mark the transition into respectability, and make heavy and humiliating work of his heterosexual involvement. How differently they manage these things in the upper classes. While Bradley’s intentions toward Lizzie, however uneasy, had been strictly honorable, Eugene Wrayburn has no intentions toward her at all. Mortimer asks him,

 

“Eugene, do you design to capture and desert this girl?”

“My dear fellow, no.”

“Do you design to marry her?”

“My dear fellow, no.”

“Do you design to pursue her?”

“My dear fellow, I don’t design anything. I have no design whatsoever. I am incapable of designs. If I conceived a design, I should speedily abandon it, exhausted by the operation.” (II,6)

 

This is the opposite of Bradley’s compulsive, grasping relation to power. Eugene sees himself as a little leaf borne upon a stream; and an image that is often associated with him is the pretty river that supplies power to the papermill where Lizzie finally gets work. But Eugene’s lack of will is enormously more potent than Bradley’s clenched, entrapping will, simply because the powerful, “natural” trajectory of this stream is eternally toward swelling the exploitive power of ruling-class men over working-class women. Resolute and independent as Lizzie is, weak and passive as he is, Eugene barely has to make a decision, much less form a design, in order to ruin her.

 

The rippling of the river seemed to cause a correspondent stir in his uneasy reflections. He would have laid them asleep if he could, but they were in movement, like the stream, and all tending one way with a strong current…. “Out of the question to marry her,” said Eugene, “and out of the question to leave her.” (IV, 6)

 

It is traditional, in criticism of Our Mutual Friend, to distinguish two groups of thematic imagery, that surrounding the river and that surrounding the dust-heaps. If, as I have suggested, the dust-heaps can be said to represent an anthropomorphization of capital that is most closely responsive to the anxieties of the petit-bourgeoisie, then the river, in a sense, offers a critique of that in terms of a more collectively scaled capitalism, organized around alienation and the flow of currency. Its gender implications are pointed and odd: all the men in this waterside novel are strikingly incompetent about the water; there are seven drownings or near-drownings, all of males; men are always dragging each other into the river; and only one person, Lizzie, has the skill to navigate a rescue. At the same time, women are in control only in correctly understanding the current of power as always flowing away from themselves. Gazing into the river, both Lizzie and Eugene read in it the image of Lizzie’s inability to resist ruin.

Just as Eugene’s higher status enables his heterosexual relationship to be at once more exploitive and less guilty than Bradley’s, so his desiring relationship with a man can be at once much more open and much less embroiled in repressive conflict than any of Bradley’s. Interestingly, though it is more open, it also seems much less tinged with the sexual. Imagery of the sphincter, the girdle, the embrace, the “iron ring” of the male grasp, was salient in those murderous attacks on men by Bradley Headstone. By contrast it is utterly absent from the tenderer love between Eugene and Mortimer. They live together like Bert and Ernie on Sesame Street—and who ever wonders what Muppets do in bed? This thematic reticence, if it is reticence, in contrast to the hypersaturation with anal thematics of Bradley’s part of the story, can perhaps best be accounted for not by some vague invocation of “Victorian prudery,” but by thinking about how the libidinal careers of Victorian gentlemen were distinguished, in fiction and in ideology at any rate, from those of males of higher and lower class.

The obstacles to mapping this territory have been suggested before. The historical research on primary sources that would add texture and specificity to generalizations is only beginning to be done, or at any rate published; at the same time, the paradigms available for understanding the history of sexuality are in rapid and productive flux. The best that I can attempt here is perhaps to lay out in a useful codified form what the “common sense” or “common knowledge” of the (essentially middle-class) Victorian reader of novels might be likely to have been, buttressed by some evidence from biographies. I wish to make clear how tentative and how thoroughly filtered through the ideological lens of middle-class literature these generalizations are, but still to make them available for revision by other scholars.

With respect to homosocial/homosexual style, it seems to be possible to divide Victorian men among three rough categories according to class. The first includes aristocratic men and small groups of their friends and dependents, including bohemians and prostitutes; for these people, by 1865, a distinct homosexual role and culture seem already to have been in existence in England for several centuries. This seems to have been a milieu, at once courtly and in touch with the criminal, related to those in which the usages of the term “gay” recorded by John Boswell occurred.⁹ It seems to have constituted a genuine subculture, facilitated in the face of an ideologically hostile dominant culture by money, privilege, internationalism, and, for the most part, the ability to command secrecy. Pope’s lines on Sporus in “Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot” do, however, presuppose his audience’s knowledge that such a role and culture exist. This role is closely related to—is in fact, through Oscar Wilde, the antecedent of—the particular stereotype that at least until recently has characterized American middle-class gay homosexuality; its strongest associations, as we have noted, are with effeminacy, transvestitism, promiscuity, prostitution, continental European culture, and the arts.

For classes below the nobility, however, there seems in the nineteenth century not to have been an association of a particular personal style with the genital activities now thought of as “homosexual.” The class of men about which we know most—the educated middle class, the men who produced the novels and journalism and are the subjects of the biographies—operated sexually in what seems to have been startlingly close to a cognitive vacuum. A gentleman (I will use the word “gentleman” to distinguish the educated bourgeois from the aristocrat as well as from the working-class man—a usage that accords, not with Victorian ideology, but with Victorian practice) had a good deal of objective sexual freedom, especially if he were single, having managed to evade the great cult of the family and, with it, much of the enforcing machinery of his class and time. At the same time, he seems not to have had easy access to the alternative subculture, the stylized discourse, or the sense of immunity of the aristocratic/bohemian sexual minority. So perhaps it is not surprising that the sexual histories of English gentlemen, unlike those of men above and below them socially, are so marked by a resourceful, makeshift, sui generis quality, in their denials, their rationalizations, their fears and guilts, their sublimations, and their quite various genital outlets alike. Biographies of English gentlemen of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are full of oddities, surprises, and apparent false starts; they seem to have no predetermined sexual trajectory. Good examples include Lewis Carroll, Charles Kingsley, John Ruskin, and a little later, T. E. Lawrence, James M. Barrie, T. H. White, Havelock Ellis, and J. R. Ackerley, who describes in an autobiography how he moved from a furtive promiscuous homosexuality to a fifteen-year-long affair of the heart with a female dog.¹⁰ The sexuality of a single gentleman was silent, tentative, protean, and relatively divorced from expectations of genre, though not of gender.

In fiction, a thematically tamer but structurally interesting and emotionally—very often—turbid and preoccupying relationship was common between single gentlemen: Pendennis and Warrington, Clive Newcome and J. J. Ridley, the two Armadales of Collins’ Armadale, the gentlemen of the Pickwick Club, resemble Eugene and Mortimer in the lack of remark surrounding their union and in the shadowy presence of a mysterious imperative (physical debility, hereditary curse, secret unhappy prior marriage, or simply extreme disinclination) that bars at least one of the partners in each union forever from marriage.

Of the sexuality of English people below the middle class, reliable accounts are difficult to assemble. Both aristocratic and (early twentieth-century) middle-class English male homosexuality seem to have been organized to a striking degree around the objectification of proletarian men, as we read in accounts by or of Forster, Isherwood, Ackerley, Edward Carpenter, Tom Driberg, and others; at the same time, there is no evidence (from these middle-class-oriented accounts) of a homosexual role or subculture indigenous to men of the working class, apart from their sexual value to more privileged men. It is possible that for the great balance of the non-public-school-educated classes, overt homosexual acts may have been recognized mainly as instances of violence: English law before the Labouchere amendment of 1885 did not codify or criminalize most of the spectrum of male bodily contacts, so that homosexual acts would more often have become legally visible for the violence that may have accompanied them than for their distinctively sexual content. In middle-class accounts of the working class, at any rate, and possibly within the working class itself, there seems to have been an association between male homosexual genitality and violence, as in Dickens’ treatment of Bradley Headstone’s anal eroticism in terms exclusively of murder and mutilation.

Since most Victorians neither named nor recognized a syndrome of male homosexuality as our society thinks of it, the various classes probably grouped this range of sexual activities under various moral and psychological headings. I have suggested that the working class may have grouped it with violence. In aristocrats—or, again, in aristocrats as perceived by the middle class—it came under the heading of dissolution, at the very time when dissolution was itself becoming the (wishful?) bourgeois-ideological name for aristocracy itself. Profligate young lords in Victorian novels almost all share the traits of the Sporus-like aristocratic homosexual “type,” and it is impossible to predict from their feckless, “effeminate” behavior whether their final ruin will be the work of male favorites, female favorites, the racecourse, or the bottle; waste and wastage is the presiding category of scandal. (See chapter 8 for more on the femininine ascription of the aristocracy.) Fictional examples of this ambiguous style include Lord Frederick Verisopht (with his more “masculine,” less aristocratic sidekick, Sir Mulberry Hawk), in Nicholas Nickleby; Count Fosco, (with his more “masculine,” less aristocratic sidekick, Sir Percival Glyde) in The Woman in White; Lord Porlock, in The Small House at Allington and Doctor Thorne; in a more admiring version, Patrick, Earl of Desmond (with his more “masculine,” less aristocratic sidekick, Owen Fitzgerald) in Trollope’s Castle Richmond; and Lord Nidderdale (with Dolly Longstaffe) in The Way We Live Now. In each case there is explicit mention of only female erotic objects, if any; but in each case the allegedly vicious or dissolute drive seems more visibly to be directed at a man in more immediate proximity. Perhaps the most overtly sympathetic—at any rate the least grotesque, the closest to “normal”-seeming—of the men in this category is also one who is without a title, although within the context of the novel he represents the vitiated line of a rural aristocracy. That is Harold Transome, in Felix Holt. To his sexual history we receive three clues, each tantalizing in its own way: we hear—mentioned once, without elaboration—that the woman he had married in his Eastern travels was one whom he had bought as a slave;¹¹ we hear—mentioned once, without elaboration—that he has brought a (different) woman back with him from the East;¹² but the person of whom we hear incessantly in connection with Harold is his plangent, ubiquitous manservant-companion:

 

“I don’t know whether he’s most of a Jew, a Greek, an Italian, or a Spaniard. He speaks five or six languages, one as well as another. He’s cook, valet, major-domo, and secretary all in one; and what’s more, he’s an affectionate fellow…. That’s a sort of human specimen that doesn’t grow here in England, I fancy. I should have been badly off if I could not have brought Dominic.”¹³

 

Throughout a plot elaboration that depends heavily on the tergiversations of a slippery group of servants-who-are-not-quite-servants, who have unexplained bonds from the past with Dominic, one waits for the omniscient, serviceable, ingratiating character of Dominic to emerge into its full sinisterness or glamor or sexual insistence—in vain, since the exploitive “oriental” luxuries of his master can be perceived only in a sexually irresolute blur of “decadence.” (See chapter 10 for more on “orientalism” and sexual ascription.) Perhaps similarly, the lurid dissipations of the characters in The Picture of Dorian Gray are presented in heterosexual terms when detailed at all, even though (biographical hindsight aside) the triangular relationship of Basil, Dorian, and Lord Henry makes sense only in homosexual terms.

Between the extremes of upper-class male homosocial desire, grouped with dissipation, and working-class male homosocial desire, grouped perhaps with violence, the view of the gentleman, the public-school product, was different again. School itself was, of course, a crucial link in ruling-class male homosocial formation. Disraeli (who was not himself an Etonian) offers the flattering ideological version of Eton friendships in Coningsby:

 

At school, friendship is a passion. It entrances the being; it tears the soul. All loves of after life can never bring its rapture, or its wretchedness; no bliss so absorbing, no pangs of jealousy or despair so crushing and so keen! What tenderness and what devotion; what illimitable confidence; what infinite revelations of inmost thoughts; what ecstatic present and romantic future; what bitter estrangements and what melting reconciliations; what scenes of wild recrimination, agitating explanations, passionate correspondence; what insane sensitiveness, and what frantic sensibility; what earthquakes of the heart, and whirlwinds of the soul, are confined in that simple phrase—a school-boy’s friendship!¹⁴

 

Candid accounts agree that in most of the public schools, the whirlwinds of the soul were often acted out in the flesh. Like the young aristocrat, the young gentleman at those same public schools would have seen or engaged in a variety of sexual activities among males; but unlike the aristocrat, most gentlemen found neither a community nor a shared, distinctive sexual identity ready for adults who wanted more of the same. A twentieth-century writer, Michael Nelson, reports asking a school friend, “Have you ever had any homosexual inclinations since leaving Eton?” “I say, steady on,” his friend replied. “It’s all right for fellows to mess one another about a bit at school. But when we grow up we put aside childish things, don’t we?”¹⁵

David Copperfield, among other books, makes the same point. David’s infatuation with his friend Steerforth, who calls him “Daisy” and treats him like a girl, is simply part of David’s education—though another, later part is the painful learning of how to triangulate from Steerforth onto women, and finally, although incompletely, to hate Steerforth and grow at the expense of his death. In short, a gentleman will associate the erotic end of the homosocial spectrum, not with dissipation, not with vicious-ness or violence, but with childishness, as an infantile need, a mark of powerlessness, which, while it may be viewed with shame or scorn or denial, is unlikely to provoke the virulent, accusatory projection that characterizes twentieth-century homophobia.

This slow, distinctive two-stage progression from schoolboy desire to adult homophobia seems to take its structure from the distinctive anxieties that came with being educated for the relatively new class of middle-class “gentlemen.” Unlike title, wealth, or land, the terms that defined the gentleman were not clearly and simply hereditary but had somehow to be earned by being a particular kind of person who spent time and money in particular ways. But the early prerequisites for membership in this powerful but nebulous class—to speak with a certain accent, to spend years translating Latin and Greek, to leave family and the society of women—all made one unfit for any other form of work, long before they entitled one to chance one’s fortune actively in the ruling class.

The action of Our Mutual Friend brings to a close that long abeyance in Eugene’s life between, so to speak, being called and being chosen for the professional work of empire. (For instance, he has been called to the Bar, but no one has yet chosen to employ him.) His position is awash with patriarchal authority, the authority of the law itself, but none of it belongs to him yet. In just the same way, having been removed from his family as a child, he will soon be required to return—and in the enforcing position of paterfamilias, a position that will lend a retroactive meaning and heterosexual trajectory to his improvised, provisional relationship with Mortimer and his apparently aimless courtship of Lizzie. In the violence at the end of the novel, we see the implacability with which this heterosexual, homophobic meaning is impressed on Eugene’s narrative: Bradley, his rival, nearly kills him by drowning; Lizzie saves him; while he seems to be dying, Mortimer interprets his last wishes as being that he might marry Lizzie; and when he comes back to life, he is already a married man. “But would you believe,” Lizzie asks afterwards, “that on our wedding day he told me he almost thought the best thing he could do, was to die?” (IV,16)

There is one character to whom this homophobic reinscription of the bourgeois family is even more crippling than it is to Eugene, who already, by the end of the novel, looks almost “as though he had never been mutilated” (IV, 16). That person is, of course, Lizzie. The formal, ideological requirements for a fairytale “happy ending” for her are satisfied by the fact that she is not “ruined” by Eugene, not cast into the urban underclass of prostitution, but raised up into whatever class the wife of a Victorian barrister belongs to. Eugene is determined to fight for his right to have her regarded as a lady. But with all that good news, Dickens makes no attempt to disguise the terrible diminution in her personal stature as she moves from being the resentful, veiled, muscular, illiterate figure rowing a scavenger boat on the Thames, to being a factory worker in love, to being Mrs. Eugene Wrayburn tout court. Admittedly, Lizzie has been a reactionary all along. But she has been a blazing, courageous reactionary: she has defended and defied her violent father; she has sacrificed everything for her beastly brother; she gave up a chance to form an alliance with an older woman, a tavern-keeper, just because the woman would not accept her father; she took off for the countryside to save her honor from the man she loved; and she unhesitatingly risked her life to save his life. But all her reactionary courage meets with a stiflingly reactionary reward. Lizzie stops being Lizzie, once she is Mrs. Eugene Wrayburn.

As we see how unrelentingly Lizzie is diminished by her increasingly distinct gender assignment, it becomes clearer why “childishness,” rather than femininity, should at that moment have been the ideological way the ruling class categorized its own male homosexuality. As Jean Baker Miller points out in Toward a New Psychology of Women, an attribution of gender difference marks a structure of permanent inequality, while the relation between adult and child is the prototype of the temporary inequality that in principle—or in ideology—exists only in order to be overcome: children are supposed to grow up into parents, but wives are not supposed to grow up into husbands.¹⁶ Now, the newly significant class of “gentlemen,” the flagship class of English high capitalism, was to include a very wide range of status and economic position, from plutocrats down to impoverished functionaries. In order to maintain the illusion of equality, or at any rate of meritocratic pseudoequality, within the class of gentlemen, and at the same time justify the magnification of distinctions within the class, it clearly made sense to envision a long, complicated period of individual psychic testing and preparation, full of fallings-away, redefinitions, and crossings and recrossings of lines of identification. This protracted, baffling narrative of the self, a direct forerunner of the twentieth-century Oedipal narrative, enabled the process of social and vocational sorting to occur under the less invidious shape of different rates of individual maturation.

Not until this psychologistic, “developmental” way of thinking had been firmly established was the aristocratic link between male homosexuality and femininity allowed to become an article of wide public consumption—a change that was crystallized in the Wilde affair (see chapter 5 and Coda) and that coincided (in the 1890s) with the beginnings of a dissemination across classes of language about male homosexuality (e.g., the word “homosexual”), and with the medicalization of homosexuality through an array of scientific “third sex” and “intersex” theories.

But during all this time, for women, the immutability of gender inequality was being inscribed more and more firmly, moralistically, and descriptively in the structure of bourgeois institutions. As the contrasting bodily images in Our Mutual Friend suggest, woman’s deepening understanding, as she saw the current flowing away under her own image, came for the most part at the cost of renouncing individual ownership and accumulation. The division of cognitive labor that emerged with the bourgeois family was not a means of power for women, but another part of the edifice of master-slave subordination to men. Sentient middle-class women of this time perceive the triangular path of circulation that enforces patriarchal power as being routed through them, but never ending in them—while capitalist man, with his prehensile, precapitalist image of the body, is always deluded about what it is that he pursues, and in whose service. His delusion is, however, often indistinguishable from real empowerment; and indeed it is blindest, and closest to real empowerment, in his triangular transactions through women with other men.