LGBT Victorians by Simon Joyce

Author:Simon Joyce [Joyce, Simon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780192674203
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2022-07-18T00:00:00+00:00

This reciprocated touch is equally crucial to Whitman’s vision of democratic reconstruction of the United States after the Civil War, as seen in the vision of “a new friendship” that

Shall circulate throughout The States, indifferent of place,

It shall twist and intertwist them through and around each other—Compact shall they be, showing new signs,

Affection shall solve every one of the problems of freedom,

Those who love each other shall be invincible.83

These highly physicalized and intimate visions of homosocial comradeship were a central part of Whitman’s appeal to Symonds, who was very much aware of the differences between them and his own tendency toward disembodied abstraction. As early as 1872, he had written to Whitman in praise of “Calamus” and the celebration of adhesiveness in Democratic Vistas, admitting as he did so “how hard I found it—brought up in English feudalism, educated at an aristocratic public School (Harrow) and an over refined University (Oxford)—to winnow from my own emotions and from my conception of the ideal friend, all husks of affectations and aberrations and to be a simple human being.” The same letter enacts exactly the difficulty he is describing as he insistently links Whitman’s present with an ancient Greece that he has only come to know through academic study. “I have pored for continuous hours over the pages of Calamus (as I used to pore over the pages of Plato),” Symonds writes, and the effect of this close reading was to place the texts in a form of dialog that was reminiscent of the providentialist model of history that he would have encountered at Oxford: “What the love of man for man has been in the Past I think I know. What it is here now, I know also—alas! What you say it can & shall be I dimly discern in your Poems.”84

In constructing this tripartite model of a despised present bracketed by a noble past and a Utopian future, part of Symonds’ difficulty was that he was too quick to make that future identical to the past, which is one reason why he was unable to fully engage with the issue of slavery in Greece. “For a student of ancient literature,” he would tell Whitman nearly two decades after their correspondence had begun, “Calamus” presented “a singular analogue to the early Greek enthusiasm of comradeship in arms—as that appeared among the Dorian tribes, and made a chivalry for prehistoric Hellas.”85 As Rutherford suggests, at moments like this Symonds was seeking agreement that the analogy holds, that “classical Athens should matter in modern America,” in order to indicate “a way out of the inconceivability of ethical male-male sexual relationships in the modern world,” but it is not clear that the autodidactic Whitman—who did not know the Classical tradition—knew or cared enough to consider the question.86 As we have seen, for Symonds the key ethical problem of modernity increasingly revolved around the issue of whether idealized comradeship could at the same time place a positive value on physical relations, a question for which his reading of Plato and the Greeks had provided little comfort.

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