Desiring Long-Term Intimacy in Victorian to Twenty-First Century British and American Homosexual Literature

Abstract

This PhD explores the long-term experience of male homosexual desire from the late-Victorian period to the twenty-first century. It demonstrates that John Addington Symonds (1840–1893), A. E. Housman (1859–1936), E. M. Forster (1879–1970), Christopher Isherwood (1904–1986) and Alan Hollinghurst (b. 1954) write poetry and prose about attractions and relationships between men spanning years and decades. Through their narratives, these writers portray a homosexual desire for long-term intimacy. The literary texts studied here challenge the prevailing critical idea that domesticated, monogamous, long-term forms of commitment are valued primarily due to Western heteronormative ideologies. These writers are not motivated by the “chrononormativity” of heteronormativity, a valuation of the home, family and marriage which, as Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner argue, “signifies belonging to culture in a deep and normal way”. Rather, each writer desires a long-term connection and commitment between sexually and romantically attracted partners who, with the passage of time, develop and deepen a feeling of being intimately, uniquely understood. They identify that the passage of time creates tensions between desire and anxiety, possession and loss, familiarity and idealisation, particularly in contexts of homosexual illegality. Long-term relationships are valued in these writers’ works as they present the possibility of sharing these tensions. This PhD demonstrates that the desire for intimacy is complicated by the emotional limitations imposed by the illegality of homosexuality. It analyses illicit fantasies of intimacy and memories of lost relationships and unrequited love that are shaped by anxieties surrounding criminality and exile from home. It also analyses clandestine sexual and romantic friendships and domestic partnerships which are both curtailed and ennobled by the need to hide same-sex love and to resist mainstream stereotypes. This thesis argues that each of these texts is motivated by the desire, the impossibility, or the chance of sharing one’s experience of illicit same-sex desire with another person. Queer theorists argue that the recent advent of marital equality threatens to normatively “sanitise” homoerotic experience. This thesis concludes that gay marriage can also be read as the result of a desire for long-term intimacy which is uniquely formed by a contemporary context of visibility, understanding and empathy. This study reads a homosexual literary tradition that values the long term as a narrative which can produce and share an intimate understanding of same-sex desire.