-
In Volume I of The History of Sexuality,
Foucault argues that sex should be treated not as a
matter of individual choice but as part of "the regime
of power-knowledge-pleasure":
The central issue . . . is not to determine whether
one says yes or no to sex, whether one formulates
prohibitions or permissions, whether one asserts its
importance or denies its effects, or whether one
refines the words one uses to designate it; but to
account for the fact that it is spoken about, to
discover who does the speaking, the positions and
viewpoints from which they speak, the institutions
which prompt people to speak about it and which store
and distribute the things that are said. What is at
issue, briefly, is the over-all "discursive fact,"
the way in which sex is "put into discourse." (11)
The "central issue" here has nothing to do with how
anyone had sex. Foucault agrees with the most startling
statement in Percy Shelley's "Discourse on the Manners
of the Ancient Greeks Relative to the Subject of Love":
"The act itself is nothing" (221). This is an odd
dismissal. One might counter that the act is rather
important, and deserves careful historical attention.
Foucault, however, claims that "sex" is merely "an
imaginary point determined by the deployment of
sexuality" (155). His larger point is to avoid the
perceived trap of elevating sex to "the side of
reality," while demoting sexuality merely to "confused
ideas and illusions" (15).
-
Since Foucault sees little purpose in writing a
history of sex acts, he is more concerned to counter
the assumption that he will present a victorious
history of sexual repression (bad) and sexual
liberation (good). Such a history would beg the
question he wishes to ask, which is how sex came to be
understood as repressing or liberating at all. The
important history of sexuality for Foucault lies not in
the discourse itself so much as in the conditions that
enabled it. What counts is not approving or
disapproving of particular statements, but grasping the
larger system that allowed sex to enter language at
all: why sex was worth talking about, who talked about
it, what institutions undergirded them, and how
language about sex was recorded and disseminated.
Foucault's position requires understanding language
about sexuality only in relational terms, insofar as
any given piece of discourse takes its place within a
larger web of statements about sexuality.[1]
-
For literary critics, this is hardly news:
Foucault's arguments are nothing if not familiar. Yet
the familiarity of his arguments at a theoretical level
masks the difficulty that literary critics have had in
actually carrying forward Foucault's project. For the
most part, the essays in Historicizing Romantic
Sexuality manifest a somewhat oblique relation to
Foucault, despite the citation of his work. In part, as
Jonathan Loesberg argues in his essay, this may have
occurred because a rather minor part of The History
of Sexuality, the supposed "invention" of the
homosexual, has bulked so large in the reception of
Foucault that it has come to stand for the whole.
Engaging Foucault may not seem very interesting when,
too often, it has come down to nothing more than
agreeing or disagreeing with his dates.[2]
Furthermore, for all of Foucault's supposed
omnipresence, much of the historical spadework required
to place literary works in relation to a larger
discursive network about sexuality remains unfinished.
Decades after the publication of Foucault's work,
scholars of British studies have nothing like even a
fragmentary account of factors that he suggests are
central to a history of sexuality. We do have some
pieces, such as examinations of developments in science
and medicine, political rhetoric, and
literature.[3]
But other areas of potentially equal interest remain
relatively untouched, such as the discourse of religion
(sermons, tracts, biblical commentaries) or the codes
of military conduct (the role of sexual humiliation in
wartime, as at the siege of Badajoz during the
Peninsular campaign). Nor has anyone put the pieces
together to create even a tentative map of the
deployment of sexuality across institutions,
knowledges, and practices. The citation of Foucault's
text has substituted for the realization of his
project.
-
Beyond the daunting range of knowledge that would be
required for a full Foucauldian analysis, disciplinary
practices within literary criticism preserve many
categories that Foucault wished to question. In
particular, the genre of literary critical essay still
bases itself primarily around the reading of individual
texts, typically understood as the product of an
intending author who has expressed himself or herself
in them. It has proven much easier to criticize the
assumptions of this mode than to provide workable
alternatives to it. Essays or books that draw on
historicist, materialist, or psychoanalytic theories
designed to unsettle the sovereignty of the intending
author often do less to unsettle it than to find ways
of coexisting uneasily and oxymoronically beside
it.
-
For literary critics, the individualism of the
artistic self privileged by the conventions of
disciplinary analysis chimes with the individualism
that, according to Foucault, is the triumph of
sexuality's regime: "So it is that all the world's
enigmas appear frivolous to us compared to this secret,
minuscule in each of us, but of a density that makes it
more serious than any other" (156). One result is that
he cautions against thinking that "we are affirming the
rights of our sex against all power" when we actually
are only "fastened to the deployment of sexuality that
has lifted up from deep within us a sort of mirage in
which we think we see ourselves reflected" (157).
Although Foucault does not make the connection
explicitly, one result of this individualism is that
understanding ourselves in terms of a relational web of
power becomes extremely difficult: the deployment of
sexuality locates our identity entirely "in" us.
Literary critics appropriate this individualism when
they read texts as expressing, encoding, or repressing
a sexualized self that belongs either to the
biographical author or to the author as figure for a
cultural moment.
-
The result tends to reinstall as givens the
categories that Foucault unsettled. Close reading
alone, no matter how historically situated, cannot
describe just what kind of power literature qua
literature had within the larger network of discourses
that deployed sexuality during the Romantic
period.[4]
Unfortunately, Foucault's key concept for battling the
individualizing power of sexuality, "power," is so
all-encompassing that it offers only limited help.
Foucauldian power is a site of "multiple and mobile . .
. relations" (98) undergoing such constant
transformation that they virtually defy analysis. It
seems as if Foucault wants the sheer complexity of his
image of power to be a guarantee of its truth.[5]Reading
Foucault's description, it can feel as if his concept
of power is less a blueprint meant to be realized in a
concrete analysis than a point-by-point negation of an
older, inadequate model.
-
The great value of the essays in Historicizing
Romantic Sexuality is to provide some badly needed
specificity about the forms of agency that sexuality
might take during the Romantic period, as an
alternative to Foucault's all-devouring "power." Even
as Foucault insists on the omnipresence of power, he
looks to the most obvious sites for its deployment,
such as religious confession and the medicalization of
sexuality. The essays in Historicizing Romantic
Sexuality provide a much better guide to the
multiplication of sexualities by looking at such sites
as the preface, the novel, poetic form, an abolitionist
tract, women's clothes, and juvenilia. In what follows,
I treat the essays in Historicizing Romantic
Sexuality with an avowed bias: imagining how they
might fit into a larger Foucauldian project by
discussing the kinds of agency associated with each of
these sites.
-
Bradford Mudge's essay examines "how sexual bodies
are represented in romantic fiction" (8). After
describing voyeurism in Cleland's Fanny Hill, he
turns to Lewis's The Monk, in which voyeurism
reveals not the "real" body as described by Cleland but
the unobtainable body of male fantasy, and Austen's
Pride and Prejudice, in which bodily pleasure is
made subservient to "love, marriage, and family." In
linking his work to Foucault, Mudge notes that Pride
and Prejudiceforeshadows and encapsulates
Foucault's "entire argument," because Foucault
"insists" that sexuality "coheres in one central
purpose"; this purpose, according to Foucault, is that
of constituting "a sexuality that is economically
useful and politically conservative." Yet Mudge seems
more convinced of this point than Foucault does;
immediately after the passage that Mudge quotes,
Foucault writes, "I still do not know whether this is
the ultimate objective" (37). Indeed, what Mudge claims
to be Foucault's basic argument looks more like
Foucault's self-parody of his own repressive
hypothesis, which is why he quickly backtracks from it.
In the larger context of The History of
Sexuality, Foucault's argument is not that
sexuality is politically conservative; indeed, he
spends considerable time criticizing historiography
that imagines power in terms of a one-sided hierarchy
of oppression implied by a phrase like "politically
conservative." Instead, he explains how modern
discourses of sexuality work through "multiplication: a
dispersion of sexualities, a strengthening of their
disparate forms, a multiple implantation of
'perversities'" (37).
-
The relevance of Foucault for Mudge's argument is
less that The History of Sexuality recapitulates
Jane Austen but that Foucault specifies the question of
how literature acted as a vehicle of multiplication:
how did reading fictional stories about sex come to be
as important as doing it? It is tempting for literary
critics to conceive the answer chiefly in terms of
representation: because novels depicted sexualized
behavior, they were obviously an instrument shaping the
deployment of sexuality. Yet Foucault suggests that an
analysis of fiction's agency needs to do more, by
engaging the dynamics of reception in terms of "the
institutions which prompt people to speak about
[sexuality] and which store and distribute the things
that are said."
-
For scholars of the Romantic novel, answering this
question might include examining the intersection
between the social institution of the family and the
economic apparatus of fiction marketing and production.
The point is not simply that novels represented
sexuality, but that the presence of novels changed in
important ways the sexual dynamics of the family:
novels invaded the household; defined, consolidated, or
challenged relations between family members; marked
living spaces as appropriate or inappropriate for
reading; were kept, returned, or junked; and became
subjects of conversation. The work of William St. Clair
in The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period
might provide a telling starting-place for a more
complete investigation of the novel as a particular
site for the multiplication of sexualities during this
period.
-
The essays of Susan Lanser and Daniel O'Quinn
foreground one of the most important forms of agency in
the history of sexuality, the code. Foucault describes
the code in terms of "the method of interpretation"
central to scientia sexualis, in which "the
revelation of confession had to be coupled with the
decipherment of what it said" (66). Sexuality is the
hidden truth that can be made visible only with the
help of the expert interpreter. With the right tools,
even seemingly innocent texts can be made to confess,
to yield up their secrets to decipherment.
-
In Lanser's essay, lesbianism is the mystery encoded
by poetic form; the skilled interpreter is able to
unwrap the mystery by close attention to "sapphic
tropes": "The transgressive potential of female
friendship . . . urged the inscription of female
intimacies into the ambiguities of figuration." This
essay's detailed foregrounding of figuration and
metrics demonstrates that poetic language has resources
available to it for encoding that are not available
anywhere else. Lanser's essay valuably helps to explain
some of literature's peculiar place in the deployment
of sexuality because of its ability to install
sexuality not only in semantic meaning but also in
extrasemantic aspects of language.
-
For O'Quinn, decoding involves interpreting the
competing pressures of abolitionist discourse between
Christian masochism and the history of British
imperialism. His essay looks closely at an odd scene of
prayer in Olaudah Equiano's Interesting
Narrative. The gap between what one might expect of
such a scene and what Equiano provides leads O'Quinn to
read the episode as a moment of Christianized
masochism, in which Equiano "is . . . acting his sexual
degradation." This abasement is "necessary for
Equiano's masochistic identification with the invisible
church," an identification that the essay develops by
examining Equiano's reference to the "Sons of Belial"
in terms of its Biblical source in Judges 19.
-
The major achievements of O'Quinn's essay lie in
foregrounding abolition and the slave trade as critical
sites for the deployment of sexuality during the
Romantic period, and in emphasizing the role of
Christian rhetoric in mediating this deployment.
Moreover, O'Quinn importantly underscores the value of
masochism in forging a nexus between Christianity,
imperialism, and the slave trade. Yet the status of
masochism fluctuates in the essay between a rhetoric of
eighteenth-century dissent strategically deployed by
Equiano and something closer to a psychological
neurosis, as described by Reik and Silverman. The more
that O'Quinn's essay moves toward decoding, the more
masochism becomes the essence of Equiano's being, what
Foucault describes as "a truth which the very form of
the confession holds out like a shimmering mirage"
(59).
-
For example, Equiano tells us that George "would get
up on purpose to go to prayer with [him], without any
other clothes than his shirt." O'Quinn's prioritization
of masochism leads him to read this scene in terms of
Equiano's sexual abasement, in which George serves as
Equiano's "necessary tormentor." Yet positing masochism
as the truth that must be extracted from this scene
leads O'Quinn to sidestep the fact that Equiano's
language does not obviously reveal masochistic torment.
On the contrary, when Equiano describes George's
enthusiasm for prayer, Equiano notes, in the passage
quoted by O'Quinn, "I was well pleased at this, and
took great delight in him, and used much supplication
to God for his conversion." One might argue that such a
statement is a reaction formation, a defense against
desire, but doing so reinscribes the sexualized essence
that Foucault wished to question. (O'Quinn argues for
something like such a reaction formation later in his
essay when he describes a "textual repression in which
physical and quasi-anthropological observations are
used to regulate the power of emotion elicited by
rememorative passages that are too volatile to
handle.") Yet Equiano's language focuses less on his
sense of threat and powerlessness than on his somewhat
condescending amusement at George's naivete and his
pleasure at his own power over George, his ability to
"make such progress with this youth." His ultimate
failure to convert George may point less to his own
need to sustain a masochistic fantasy than to his
opportunity to provide a negative example to his
audience; they should not be like the "sons of Belial"
who ultimately prevent George's conversion, but should
be among those who hear the word and bear a good
harvest by abolishing the traffic in slaves.
-
Through their investment in decoding, Lanser and
O'Quinn both raise questions about the temporality of
this mode of agency. Did these figurations have to wait
for twenty-first century critics to unlock their
ambiguities, or were they available to Georgian readers
as well? Both essays seem to assume that they were
indeed decipherable to their original readers. If so,
they might do more to explain the reading practices
whereby readers would have been acclimated to look for
sexualized codes, as in the reception of satire. More
generally, these essays develop in a way that Foucault
does not the effectiveness of the code as a site for
the proliferation of sexuality, since codes, like
allegories, have a tendency to overwhelm their
boundaries. If poetic form is sometimes a code for
irregular desires, is it all the time? Does this
irregularity apply only to sapphic representations, or
to ones between men as well? If Equiano is sometimes
occupying the position of Christian masochist, is he
doing so all the time? If not, how does one recognize
the presence or absence of coded moments? As D. A.
Miller has pondered, answering such questions is
particularly difficult. Ignoring coded meanings
condemns sexuality to invisibility, but searching for
them can at times come close to a hostile
interrogation, an outing of the text (17-18).
-
Whereas the essays by Lanser and O'Quinn focus on
uncovering what the text encodes, those by Fay and
Heydt-Stevenson examine more visible rebellions or
challenges to a repressive order. In so doing, they
seem to disagree strongly with Foucault, who claims
that "sexuality must not be described as a stubborn
drive, by nature alien and of necessity disobedient to
a power which exhausts itself trying to subdue it and
often fails to control it entirely" (103). Both Fay and
Heydt-Stevenson posit female sexuality as just such a
stubborn drive, looking for modes of independence and
self-expression in the face of restrictive social
conditions and hostile censorship. According to Fay,
Mary Robinson and Princess Caroline "felt empowered by
the radicalism or laxity of their times to tease the
borders of expected roles and rules engendering sexual
expression"; according to Heydt-Stevenson, "Austen's
representations of her heroines' fighting and drinking
and lovemaking and thieving . . . offer a language for
deciphering the robust, lusty female energy that social
rules encrypt or entomb." They both reaffirm the
rebellious woman of bourgeois feminist criticism, whose
inherent intelligence and dynamism struggle against an
oppressive, patriarchal environment.
-
Although these essays eschew Foucauldian positions,
they both nevertheless raise important points for a
Foucauldian analysis of the Romantic period, especially
in relation to women. The association traced by Fay
between clothes and female agency offers a telling
contrast to what Foucault describes as the interpretive
techniques of confession. Whereas some bodies need to
be forced to disclose their sexual truths, others, such
as those of Robinson and Princess Caroline, become all
too easily legible, being reproduced with dizzying
rapidity in written descriptions, prints, and satirical
drawings. Her essay suggests that the Foucauldian
category of scientia sexualis could be
provocatively juxtaposed with a very different system
of clothes and fashion as modes for producing the
sexualized body. Whereas Foucault imagines a body of
opinion generated by medical specialists, Fay describes
a system created not merely by the British fashion
industry, but also by pamphleteers, actors,
cartoonists, and society painters. As Fay demonstrates,
it is not enough to treat clothes simply as another
item within a burgeoning consumer society: clothes had
a privileged place within print capitalism's techniques
of training the eye. Literary historians should have a
particular interest in this use of clothes, given the
parallels that historians have noted between the
struggle to define literary property and the debates
over the ownership of dress design.[6]
-
Heydt-Stevenson's essay points to what Foucault
calls "the tactical polyvalence of discourses" (100):
the condescendingly repressive language of the late
eighteenth-century conduct books gives rise to the
"joyful lawlessness" of Austen's juvenilia. Moreover,
Heydt-Stevenson importantly insists that the "abandon"
of the juvenilia is not "entirely repressed" in
Austen's more mature work. Her essay points to the need
for further analysis of the work that the label
"juvenilia" performs simultaneously to sexualize and
desexualize the narrative of an authorial career. Since
the time of Virgil's Eclogues, juvenilia have
been associated both with displays of eroticism and
with an immature stage of life that the author,
thankfully, outgrows in order to engage more "serious"
issues. Heydt-Stevenson powerfully demonstrates that
the assumptions undergirding this developmental model
need serious reconsideration.
-
Richard Sha's essay moves the ground of discussion
from particular case studies to the larger theoretical
underpinnings of the historiography of sexuality. His
essay makes an important intervention not only into
scholarship on the Romantic period but also into work
on the history of sexuality more generally in its
persistent querying of "alterity as the gold standard
of history." He pursues this theme through a potent
contrast between two thinkers, both "committed to the
otherness of Greek sex," but for different reasons.
David Halperin's discussion of the pseudo-Lucianic
Erotes values alterity as a way of making us
"think outside of our present concept of orientation";
Shelley's preface to his translation of The
Symposium, according to Sha, uses alterity more
conservatively to consign homoeroticism to the Greek
past and thereby clear the way for a universally
heterosexual modernity. Sha's criticism of the
fetishization of alterity is a familiar theme in the
history of hermeneutics; Paul Ricoeur, for example,
describes the "illusion . . . that puts an end to our
collusion with the past and creates a situation
comparable to the objectivity of the natural sciences,
on the grounds that a loss of familiarity is a break
with the contingent" (74). Sha is particularly
compelling in his demonstration of how the privileging
of alterity encourages a sort of "lite" objectivity, a
humanities-friendly version of the (supposed) factual
certainty of science.
-
In the service of this objectivity, according to
Sha, Halperin ends up portraying the Greeks as even
more "other" than they were, at least on the evidence
of the Erotes. The differences described by
Halperin turn out to be ones of degree rather than
kind, though, to be fair to Halperin, the crux of his
argument is that difference existed at all. A further
question about the Erotes might be not so much
about difference as about about generalizability. Both
Halperin and Sha suggest that the Erotes is a
highly self-conscious dialogue, with two opposing
points of view brought into exaggerated contrast. As
Halperin writes, it might be thought of as a
"passionate debate . . . between someone who eats
nothing but vegetables and someone who eats nothing but
meat" (99). Given this obvious rhetoricity, what kinds
of conclusions can be made about differences either of
degree or of kind in light of its questionable
generalizability?
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When Sha turns to Shelley, he reads the homophobia
of the "Discourse" somewhat as O'Quinn reads Equiano's
Interesting Narrative, partly as a deflection of
sexual threat: "Shelley's sense of the otherness of the
Greeks may well have deflected attention away from his
own homosocial desires." According to Sha, Shelley
blames the Greeks' homoeroticism on their degradation
of women; since Shelley believes that modernity has
improved women's condition, homosexuality should no
longer exist. Yet, as Sha notes, this othering quickly
breaks down, since Shelley both admits that "gender
inequality has not been abolished" and employs
essentializing rhetoric to suggest that homosexuality
cannot be safely confined to the past.
-
Yet the psychologizing of male sexual threat in this
essay, as in O'Quinn's essay, may sidestep some of the
text's performative work. The Discourse
introduces Shelley's translation of The
Symposium, with its gorgeous, rhapsodic account of
love between men. Shelley's concern in his preface
seems to me to be less to confine homosexuality to the
Greeks than to stave off his audience's potential
rejection of the whole of The Symposium because
of their assumed disgust with Greek homosexuality.
Rather than confining homosexuality to the Greek past,
Shelley makes an even more peculiar argument. He saves
The Symposium for his audience by arguing that
Greek homosexuality was not what his audience (at least
some of them) might think it was: "I am persuaded that
it was totally different from the ridiculous and
disgusting conceptions which the vulgar have formed on
the subject, at least except among the debased and
abandoned of mankind" (222). Class respectability
arrives to rescue the Greeks: nice Greek men really did
not have anal sex with boys at all; only vulgar ones
did, and only vulgar readers now would be crude enough
to think otherwise. According to Shelley, respectable
Greeks had such a ripe fantasy lives that they did not
need penetration at all:
If we consider the facility with which certain
phenomena connected with sleep, at the age of
puberty, associated themselves with those images
which are the objects of our waking desires; and even
that in some persons of an exalted state of
sensibility that a similar process may take place in
reverie, it will not be difficult to conceive the
almost involuntary consequences of a state of
abandonment in the society of a person of surpassing
attractions, when the sexual connection cannot exist,
to be such as to preclude the necessity of so operose
and diabolical a machination as that usually
described. (222)
-
Rather than having full-blown anal sex, which
Shelley regards not only as "diabolical" but also as
just too much trouble ("operose"), Greek men "of an
exalted state of sensibility" would ejaculate as one of
the "almost involuntary consequences" of being "in the
society of a person of surpassing attractions." One
might imagine that the sheer messiness of those
involuntary consequences could be just as inconvenient
as the "operose and diabolical . . . machination" that
Shelley deplores, but he seems to imagine that waking
wet dreams are essentially more pure because they are
involuntary.
-
The othering in Shelley's preface is not between the
Greeks and the moderns but between the exalted and the
vulgar in both periods; exalted Greeks had waking wet
dreams; debased ones had anal sex; exalted modern
readers of the Greeks understand the real purity of the
love praised in The Symposium; vulgar modern
readers insist on a "vulgar imputation" (222) of
sodomy. As Sha argues, Shelley's presentation of sexual
differences throughout is characterized by a slippage
between identity and difference. With regard to Greek
love, the slippage centers around the concept of
abandonment. On one hand, Shelley claims that if the
Greeks had anal sex at all, it was performed only by
the "abandoned of mankind." At the same time, he
describes the exalted wet dreamers in similar terms:
their ejaculations occur when the men are "in a state
of abandonment," rather like Heydt-Stevenson's
depiction of Austen's juvenilia. What differentiates
the abandon of the vulgar from the abandon of the
exalted? Shelley's essay reveals "abandon" to be a
vexed node in the discourse of sexuality,
simultaneously desired and feared.
-
Jonathan Loesberg's essay moves questions of
identity and difference to larger issues of gay
historiography, without particular reference to the
Romantic period. Loesberg spends considerable time in
his essay exploring what Ricoeur, after Gadamer, calls
the "horizon" of historical understanding (74-75). He
names his own variously as "inauthenticity" and
"hedgerow envy" and opposes it to those of gay
historians, as represented primarily by David Halperin.
The concept of the "hedgerow" enables a policing of
identity and difference: because Loesberg is not gay,
he can claim to have a "non-historical stake in the
meaning of a historical narrative." The product of this
"non-historical stake" is the conclusion that, even
though gay historians are almost guaranteed to get
their Foucault wrong, one should not criticize them too
much because realizing the "Enlightenment ideals" of
Foucault's philosophy "far exceed[s] any details of
historical inaccuracy or accidents of political
implication." Loesberg uses the aegis of inauthenticity
to criticize and not criticize gay historians at the
same time. Yet I'm not sure that the concept escapes
the condescension that Loesberg wishes to avoid, since
the "hedgerow" metaphor still positions gay historians
"over there," enmeshed in their naive political biases,
while Loesberg is "over here," enjoying the pleasures
not of truth but of aestheticized, paradoxical
self-consciousness.
-
At the same time, I think that Loesberg is exactly
right about oversimplifications of the Foucauldian
project, such as the reduction of Foucault either to
his biography or to certain quasi-historical positions
taken in The History of Sexuality. Yet the
alternative to seeing Foucault as a historian may not
be to treat him as a classic philosopher of the
Enlightenment, whose goals are "to think outside the
limits of one's own presumptions." We hardly need
Foucault to think outside the limits of our own
presumptions: Newtonian physics or Christian ethics,
among others, would serve equally well. Foucault's
interest lies less in neo-Kantian self-distantiation
than in a conceptual framework that allowed a
particular topic, the discourse of sexuality, to emerge
as fundamental for a knowledge of modernity.[7]
Given Foucault's own interest in the structures that
enable enunciations to gain power, the interest of this
framework may reveal less about a philosophical or
political project than an academic one: Foucault's work
moved sexuality from a minor, virtually unspeakable
subject within the humanities to a core concern.
-
By focusing on the aesthetic aspects of Foucault's
project, Loesberg avoids the institutional ones.
Questions of "hedgerow envy" or "inauthenticity" arise
in the realm less of aesthetics and politics than of
aesthetics and politics as realized in a particular
site: the academy. Although, in Saint Foucault,
Halperin argues for the importance of Foucault to
contemporary gay activism, the activist scene may have
shifted between the late 1980s AIDS activists mentioned
by Halperin and current GLBT activists (15-18). Today,
few GLBT books, articles, speeches, or websites
designed for a nonacademic audience make substantive
use of anything by Foucault. The meaningful site of
Foucault's success and influence is an academic one.
The relevant subject positions for Loesberg's analysis
may be as much English professor versus English
professor as gay versus straight. The important
questions opened up by Loesberg's essay involve the
convergence of Foucault's influence on the academy and
the growth of "GLBT Studies," a discipline that takes
Foucault's work as a founding text.The
(mis)understandings of Foucault traced by Loesberg have
less to do with the constraints of gay identity or
politics than with the adaptation of Foucault's work by
pre-existing disciplinary structures and practices in
the service of creating an academic foothold where none
had existed.
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The question haunting me after I read these essays
was whether or not the representation of the sexualized
human body should be the only or even inevitable
starting-point for a discussion of Romanticism and
sexuality. As numerous historians and critics have
suggested, the eighteenth century witnessed an
increasing consolidation of heterosexual norms in
literature, politics, social mores, conduct books,
medicine, and so forth, all accompanied by increasing
impatience with gender transgressions that could be
linked to same-sex eroticism. By the Romantic period,
those heterosexualizing energies had been
successful—indeed, possibly too successful.
Frederick Beaty's still valuable Light from
Heaven details the almost overwhelming heterosexism
in Romantic literature. Anna Clark's recent work, in
Scandal, has demonstrated the saturation of the
Georgian public sphere in heterosexuality; endless
idealization of heterosexuality went hand in hand with
a seemingly endless capacity to be scandalized. What
Foucault describes as a proliferation of sexualities
may have looked, at least for the Georgian period, more
like a monotonous repetition of one sexuality in every
nook and cranny of discourse.
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In the face of the heterosexual onslaught, Romantic
writers did not so much develop a counterdiscourse as
explore possibilities lurking within an older
discourse, one often overlooked by the historians of
sexuality, including Foucault. This was the discourse
of love.[8]
In the Romantic period, sexualities consolidate, but
loves proliferate:
Eternity is in love with the productions of time.
(Blake, plate 7, l. 10)
I love to be reminded of the past,
Edward—whether it be melancholy or gay, I love
to recall it—and you will never offend me by
talking of former times. (Austen 118).
I love a public road: few sights there are / That
please me more. (Wordsworth, The Prelude,
12.145-46)
Here a vain love to passing flowers / Thou gav'st.
(Hemans ll. 41-42)
I love the men with women's faces, and the women, if
possible, with still more womanish expressions. (Lamb
972)
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The Romantics, like earlier writers, continue to
direct love at the usual suspects, like God, man, and
nature; in addition, "love" could serve as a convenient
euphemism for sex in the period. But I am interested in
the other possibilities that love made available,
especially the Romantic knack for directing love at
more out of the way objects. Diedre Lynch, in "Wedded
to Books: Bibliomania and the Romantic Essayists," has
already provided an important discussion of perhaps the
most important of these: books. My interest is in just
what relations these loves have to the history of
sexuality as described by Foucault.
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When Blake claims that "Eternity is in love with the
productions of time," one might, with enough ingenuity,
imagine how this could be decoded as a moment in "the
will to knowledge regarding sex" (65).Yet Blake's use
of "love" here proves more cryptic than a Foucauldian
reading suggests it should be. Just what kind of love
does Eternity have for these productions, and what is
the difference between being in love with "the
productions" and being in love with "time" itself?
Blake uses the metaphor of "love" more to deflect
knowledge than to enhance or proliferate it.Rather than
permitting "eternity" and the "productions of time" to
enter omnipresent regimes of power and knowledge, the
love between them seems to shelter them from those
regimes, or at least locate them in a place in which
those regimes are not especially relevant. Romantic
writers are interested in exploring the possibility
that love for the productions of time or for being
reminded of the past or for old china may have nothing
to do with sexuality because it belongs to an entirely
different place within the human psyche. They reveal
desires that are not so much asexual as extra-sexual,
existing next to but not necessarily in cooperation
with the networks of power so vividly described by
Foucault.
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These loves, which may have rebelled against the
consolidation of heterosexuality, later became a
template for the quirky, "abnormal" loves pathologized
by the sexologists, in the activity that Foucault calls
"a psychiatrization of perverse pleasure" (105).
Designating such loves as "perverse" pulls them away
from their own discursive context into the orbit of
sexuality. At best, in a psychoanalytic scheme, they
could be read as sublimation, which, according to
Freud, "consists in the sexual trend abandoning its aim
of obtaining a component or a reproductive pleasure and
taking on another which is related genetically to the
abandoned one but is itself no longer sexual and must
be described as social" (345). Yet there is a fine line
between sublimation and neurosis for Freud, especially
in relation to artists: "It is well known, indeed, how
often artists in particular suffer from a partial
inhibition of their efficiency owing to neuroses. Their
constitutions probably include a strong capacity for
sublimation and a certain degree of laxity in the
repressions which are decisive for a conflict"
(376).
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In this Freudian light, Wordsworth's praise of
"little, nameless, unremembered, acts / Of kindness and
of love" appears merely as another episode in the
vicissitudes of the libido ("Tintern Abbey" ll. 34-35).
Useful as such a decoding might be to later readers, it
seems important for Wordsworth in his historical moment
to imagine his "acts . . . of love" as something else.
At a moment when the public sphere was packed with big,
loudly named, embarrassingly trumpeted acts of sexual
love on the part of the Prince Regent and others,
Wordsworth's poetry seems interested in continuing an
entirely different sense of what love might look like.
This moment is hardly politically neutral; one might
wish to connect it, for example, to the Burkean
politics of domesticity as described by Claudia Johnson
(198-199). It is, however, a representation of desire
that does not mesh obviously with the regimes traced by
Foucault, and it is one that Romanticists might want to
engage more systematically.
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Sexuality in Romantic writers can often become
formulaic, while love, especially love not directed at
people, more fully retains the aura of what Kenneth
Burke calls the "concealed offense" (51-60). Foucault's
project of tracing the network of knowledge and power
around sexuality remains incomplete for the Romantic
period. But it may be equally important to acknowledge
histories of desire that never quite became part of
sexuality during the period. In light of the importance
of love, it might be worth asking about the link
between bibliomania, as described by Lynch, and the
history of pornography, as described by Mudge, so as to
examine how the allure of graphic sexual representation
interweaves with love for the medium (suspicious books,
hidden magazines, exclusive websites). If Sapphic love
lurks in eroticized irregularities, as Lanser
demonstrates, I am also struck by the association
between sapphism during the period and certain marked
enthusiasms, as in the gardening of the Ladies of
Llangollen and the sculpture of Anne Damer. The erotics
of Equiano's relations with others on his ship meshes
with his love for the intricacies of navigation, both
the literal navigation of the ship and the figurative
navigation of the British commercial system. In the
cases described by Fay, a love for clothes may not only
heighten the sexual allure of bodies, but compete with
it, and Heydt-Stevenson suggests that the appetites
indulged in Austen's juvenilia may or may not be pure
displacements of erotic energy. The presence of love
further complicates the play of identity and difference
described by Sha by underscoring the potential
inadequacy of a history of sexuality that focuses too
exclusively on what Shelley calls "the act." It also
adds another facet to Loesberg's analysis by inviting
us to consider the relationship between aesthetic
self-distantiation and love for a particular thinker
like Foucault, of the kind that Halperin champions in
Saint Foucault. If we imagine love as something
other than sexuality by other means, it may offer
scholars the chance to return to a seemingly old topic
with a new perspective on its agency.
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