Literature and the Child: Romantic Continuations, Postmodern Contestations

Wordsworth, Lost Boys, and Romantic Hom(e)ophobia

130 James Holt McGavran WORDSWORTH, LOST BOYS, AND ROMANTIC HOM(E)OPHOBIA w his essay originates in my concern with the plight of homeless children in America today as it intersects with my work as a critic working in British Romanticism and gender studies. After noting what some psychologists, social workers, and educators have said about the gap between boys’ and girls’ experiences of homelessness, I turn to some fictions of homelessness written by contemporary writers for children and adolescents to see how they have dealt with this gap. What I find in these texts is disconcerting : first, a general adherence to rigidly stereotyped gender roles for both boys and girls; second, an antimale bias hiding under a veneer of sympathy for homeless boys; and third, a failure to provide a space, a home in the text, where young male heroes—and, to be sure, young male readers—could come to see and know themselves. One reason such exclusions occur, I will argue, lies in a largely unconscious homophobia originating in long-felt but poorly understood and rarely discussed tensions which continue to destabilize American manhood and to vitiate the efforts of those who try to write honestly about it. Homelessness as a concept, of course, has a history as old and complex as Western thought itself. To the degree that Americans today are still influenced by Judeo-Christian tradition, and regardless of whether the freedom our ancestors sought here was religious, cultural , or economic, we all exist in a spiritual diaspora, removed in time and space and sin from our banished garden home; slavery and its aftermath have created for African Americans another, more brutally materialistic condition of diaspora. In the classical tradition, the two Homeric epics provide directly conflicting commentaries on the issue, the Iliad glorifying the male impulse to band together, leave home, and fight to the death, and theOdyssey glorifying the desire of one clever man to return home to his wife and son. Our cultural experience of these tensions, however, is more immediately in- fluenced by the history of Western Europe in the late eighteenth century, when the popular demand for liberty, equality, and fraternity coincided with the beginnings of an industrial market economy to produce divisions of class, race, generation, nation, and gender whose strictures and effects we are still confronting today. Recent studies of children’s literature have historicized the development of the influential Romantic figure of the child, documenting associationist, organic, transcendental, Augustinian, and feminist versions of childhood (Richardson 123; Myers 133) and deconstructing the dichotomy between imaginative and moralistic children’s books that until recently has hung stultifyingly over study of this period (see also McGavran, “Introduction”). I wish to refocus these concerns to concentrate on the conflict between the ideology of the nuclear bourgeois family, which emerged in the late eighteenth century but is still alive and well today, and the Romantic vision of boyhood which that same ideology paradoxically brought into being. The concept of the highly structured but nurturing, protected but isolated home, dominated by the rich, proud, controlling capitalist father and supported by the domestic labors of the subservient, nurturing mother, clashed with, even as it helped to produce, an alluring but “bad” image of simultaneously idealized yet aberrant boyhood .1 This highly conflicted image offers boys an escape from the entrapping powers and responsibilities of patriarchy, but, tainted— however unconsciously—by its negative correlation with the concept of the nuclear family and by its positive association with loves that dare not speak their name, it can find no secure dwelling place in either the mind or the home of the bourgeois gentleman. Brave critics like Jacqueline Rose (xiii–xiv, 3) and, before her, Leslie Fiedler (3–6) have noted the paradox that our patriarchal, homophobic society retains a special but rarely voiced affection for texts likePeter Pan andHuckleberry Finn that give simultaneous narrative space—what I am calling a textual home—to the conflicting demands of homeless boyhood, with its autoerotic and homoerotic tendencies, and of “normal,” patriarchally controlled domesticity. This conflict, I will show, is discreetly but deeply inscribed in the poetry of the most influential poetic voice of canonical male Romanticism , the once-homeless orphan William Wordsworth; thus I will read Wordsworth not as a higher, purer antithesis to Barrie and Twain but simply as their precursor and as one to whom children’s writers today should pay more attention for both the psychological Wordsworth, Lost...