Material and Visual Cultures Beyond Male Bonding, 1870–1914: Bodies, Boundaries and Intimacy (review)

In the acknowledgments to this thorough, well-researched, and beautifully illustrated book, John Potvin reflects on the nature of intimacy. It is, he writes, "an integral part of our lives, and yet it goes unnoticed and unappreciated most of the time." It is "governed by rules, notions of propriety and taboos, but it is also the locus of much desire, pleasure and enjoyment. I have come to admire," he writes, "those who push the boundaries a little bit further and allow someone, like me, closer in" (ix). In what follows, Potvin interrogates the limits of and potential for intimacy between men in the late Victorian and Edwardian periods through an examination of the theoretical and artistic work of Walter Crane; the romantic socialism and Arts-and-Crafts ethos espoused by C. R. Ashbee; the health, hygiene, and eroticism associated with David Urquhart's Jermyn Street hammam in London; and the touching photographic portraits of male couples (however conceived) from the period. Potvin excels in carefully detailing historical and cultural contexts; in identifying tensions, points of contradiction, and fractures in the various discourses he examines; and in elucidating those boundaries that curtailed intimacy between men but also prompted a desire for more. Potvin highlights beautifully, for example, Ashbee's socialist idealism, the erotics he found in the class divide, and his deeply embedded and class-based authoritarianism. In the next chapter he draws out the imperatives that lay behind Urquhart's project via a careful description of the design of the hammam. He is throughout a skilled critic of visual cultures—in particular of Crane's drawings and of photographic portraits.

What disappoints is that the promise of the acknowledgments is not met, and some well-articulated and highly pertinent questions posed in the first chapter are insufficiently answered. Potvin's careful theoretical discussions and analysis produce a distance and level of abstraction that places the intimacy under discussion oddly out of reach. In some astutely chosen quotations we get tantalising glimpses of the ardour some men felt, but, given the theme of the book, these are relatively few. I wanted to read—to feel—much more about how the theorised boundaries, tensions, and frames related to the lived experiences of men during this period. I understood more by the end of the book about how men might, theoretically and abstractly, have related to each other, but their thoughts and feelings are insufficiently broached. Only in the chapter on Ashbee do we get extensive discussion of the way that one maps onto the other; here the theory and analysis do abut more directly discussion of Ashbee's hopes, desires, and behaviour (and—for once and impressively—those of his wife, Janet). My disappointment is partly inevitable: accessing emotional and intimate lives of the past is notoriously difficult. There is, though, more testimony that could have been deployed, and more doubt could certainly have been expressed about the fit between discourse and subjective experience.

If I wanted more contact with the figures under discussion here, I also wanted to be more seduced by the text. The prose is sometimes overly academic and alienating: paradoxically Potvin distances his readers in a book which I'd hoped would "allow someone, like me, closer in." At times the style is close to a parody of academese, making even the simplest of assertions slightly opaque—as when he describes how "to proximate Ashbee's labour and desire nexus, I investigate the much-neglected corporeal archive (visual and lexical)" (52).

The struggle—at times—to read this book doesn't help the case studies hang together or allow them to build to the final (interesting) reflections on the creative possibilities of the closet. More careful sign-posting would carry us through and between the chapters and allow us to be fully with Potvin and his argument in the conclusion. Moreover, the close and detailed analysis of discourse and...