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MLQ: Modern Language Quarterly 62.1 (2001) 81-82



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Book Review

Romantic Genius:
The Prehistory of a Homosexual Role


Romantic Genius: The Prehistory of a Homosexual Role. By Andrew Elfenbein. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. xii + 262 pp.

In this fascinating, provocative study Andrew Elfenbein studies the origins of the link between creative genius and homosexuality in the literature and popular culture of the Romantic era in England. Departing from Christine Battersby's argument, in Gender and Genius: Towards a Feminist Aesthetics (1989), that genius was culturally identified as male, Elfenbein attempts to show how and why it was further associated with homosexuality, so much so that an aspiring artist, male or female, was culturally identified with sexual deviance. Including novelists, poets, and sculptors, Elfenbein discusses the emergence of the "homosexualized genius" in the works and careers of William Beckford, William Cowper, Anne Bannerman, William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Anne Damer. Glaringly absent is Byron. Despite Elfenbein's explanation that he has discussed Byron elsewhere, one misses an analysis of his career in this context.

Elfenbein locates his identification of genius with male friendship (at the expense of heterosexual marriage) in an illuminating reading of Isaac d'Israeli's Essay on the Manners and Genius of the Literary Character (1795), which neatly aligns creative genius with outsider status, the sublime, loss of masculine empowerment, and hence, finally, femininity. Turning to Beckford's Vathek, Elfenbein first rehearses the familiar readings of this novel as a conflation of genius with deviant sexuality and excess. Effeminacy leads in turn--as a remarkably perceptive analysis shows--to luxury, to an obsession with collecting and consuming exotic goods, furnishings, jewels, and so on. Finally, Elfenbein discerns a link between consumption and pedophiliac necrophilism that makes Vathek a potent demystification of sublime desire.

Elfenbein's next chapter, on Cowper, turns in the opposite direction, to the ways in which a clearly domesticated, suburban bourgeois poet, once he had been identified as a genius, became associated in the public mind with deviance. Despite his probity and sincere evangelical Christianity, Cowper was increasingly seen after his death as "mad" and even, incredibly, hermaphroditic. As Elfenbein shrewdly concludes in his reading of the cultural reception of Cowper's self-portrayal as a "stricken deer" in The Task, the poet's very existence as a "suburban bachelor" unleashed the powerful cultural anxiety that every "celibate" bachelor might be a sexual deviant closeted in the homeland of middle-class propriety.

Next comes a female artist, the upper-class sculptor Anne Damer. When the widowed Lady Damer rejected remarriage in favor of the masculinized art of sculpturing, she was immediately construed in the public mind as a sapphist. Whether or not Damer was a lesbian is less important to Elfenbein's [End Page 81] argument than the public assumption that she was and the fact that she was allowed to flourish as an artist only because she had powerful aristocratic friends and her own income to protect her. The career of Anne Bannerman provides a telling contrast. As Elfenbein persuasively observes, the ill-educated, impoverished Bannerman could mount a convincing case for her "raw untutor'd genius" only by consciously rejecting an identification with heteroeroticism. Her poems either express a (so-called) male lover's desire for his female beloved, adopting the voice of Werther, Petrarch, or Abelard, or offer gothic fantasies in which any anticipated normative heterosexual consummation is frustrated.

Elfenbein's rereadings of Blake's Milton and Coleridge's Christabel are his most controversial. He argues for a queer reading of Blake's Ololon not as Milton's female emanation but as a bisexed authentic genius who defies all dominant ideological constructions of sexual identity, social organization, and rational poetic structure. "Their" (Ololon's) radical transformations and non sequiturs allow the real and the extrareal to blur in postmodernist fashion, in a constantly shifting, destabilized improvisation that visually concludes with Blake's image of Ololon as the "female Jesus."

In a brilliant relocation of Christabel in the context both of the bawdy Frisky Songster, a collection...

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