Victorian Keats: Manliness, Sexuality, and Desire (review)

James Najarian is interested in the "literariness" of Victorian sexuality. His ambitious, wide-ranging book explores John Keats's importance to the sexual self-definition of Matthew Arnold, Gerard Manley Hopkins, John Addington Symonds, Alfred Tennyson, Walter Pater, and Wilfred Owen, as well as throwing fascinating light on less-familiar poets such as Digby Dolben (Robert Bridges's cousin), who died in 1867 at age nineteen. Oddly enough, Najarian points out, it was not Byron—who actually had sex with men (and boys, lest we forget)—who became the key "homosexual" for Victorians (7). Rather, it was the sexually "liminal"—for Najarian's subjects, at least—Keats. As Najarian is quick to note, though, at issue in Victorian Keats is less the "real" Keats—pugnacious, effeminate, political, transcendent, mature, contingently immature, depending on whose account we read—than a Keatsianism "opportunely understood through . . . biography and criticism" (2). Keats signals differently to different people at different times; for Hopkins, Symonds, and others, he was identified with "gender transgression" and the expression of "male-male affection" (2). In seven stimulating chapters, each focusing on a single literary figure or friendship, Najarian addresses the ways in which Keats enabled "homophilic" writers to mount a series of challenges to "normative" nineteenth-century masculinity and "conventional" masculine desire.

Perhaps the most successful chapter in Victorian Keats investigates the way that Tennyson "adapted" his Romantic precursor to a discourse of same-sex desire in In Memoriam (1850), as well as in slighter pieces such as "O Darling Room" (1833), a neophyte poem that Najarian characterises as not simply embarrassingly bad, but also crucially unembarrassed. An especially clear-eyed section reads "O Darling Room" alongside Keats's sonnet of self-discovery, "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer" (1817). (Tennyson's poem borrows Keats's "yet," "have I been," "never did I" structure.) According to Najarian, Tennyson "claims and revises" the sonnet in order to trope a study in the Tennyson house where he and Arthur Hallam liked to meet as "a space of male intimacy." This insight is pursued in a substantial section on In Memoriam, a text that "uses Keats's language to create spaces of ambivalently directed intimacy" (54). References to Keats are able to "do the work that truly cannot be said in Tennyson's poem" (68). Stopping (just) short of suggesting that allusions to Keats are employed self-consciously by Tennyson in codified acknowledgement of sexual experience with Hallam, Najarian proposes that "Keats's poetry enables the ways [Tennyson] is able to think about—not just depict—the relationship." Tennyson's "'actual' activity" with Hallam, Najarian reiterates, is not as important as "the way he lets himself imagine it" (68). This seems to me a judicious formulation, and particularly helpful when it comes to negotiating the vexed issue of whether Tennyson and Hallam engaged in physical love.

Other insightful chapters explore Arnold's famous ambivalence towards Keats, which Najarian views as a manifestation of masculine anxiety; address Keats's role in Hopkins's protracted attempt to negotiate his own "evil" (Hopkins's word) fascination with other men; examine Symonds's use of Keats in developing a vocabulary for his homoerotic verse; detail how wider nineteenth-century discussions concerning Keats's "effeminacy" allowed Pater to construct an "ambiguously gendered aesthetics" (136); and consider how Owen's reading of Keats helped him perceive a poetic and social role for erotic bonds between men that, by engendering human sympathy, would "prevent recurring violence" (165).

In one or two places, there is a coyness—or even disingenuousness—in Victorian Keats about the scope of its project. Najarian repeatedly emphasises his lack of concern with the "real" Keats and his "actual" sexual practice, addressing instead subsequent constructions or strategic interpretations of the poet. For instance, in a typically engaging discussion of Hopkins's ambivalent response to the lush physical description of Adonis in Endymion (1818), Najarian declares: "Whether Keats himself was attracted to the male body is irrelevant" (113...