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  • The Topography of Gay Identity:Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty
  • Myron Yeager (bio)

In a 2011 Paris Review interview with Peter Terzian, Alan Hollinghurst said of The Line of Beauty,

I wanted to do something about a fallible individual and the implosion of the Tory world of power and money which seduces him at the start. The whole idea, when I look back on it, seems coupled in my mind with an image of Kensington Park Gardens, which is a longish, wide, treeless street. When I first came to London I lived at a friend’s flat in Notting Hill, and I used to walk along that grand street. … [I]t was dingier in those days and rather different from the gleaming millionaire’s row it is now. But I used to wonder what sorts of lives were led in those tall houses.

(“Alan Hollinghurst, The Art of Fiction No. 214”)

Without doubt, Gerald Fedden’s house, 48 Kensington Park Gardens, offers Nick Guest, from the geographically and socially remote Barwick, Northamptonshire, an entrée into the political power and intrigue of Thatcherite Britain; however, more significantly, it offers Nick something yet undefined and telling about himself. Existentially situated between his native Barwick and his “tiny room in the roof” in Gerald Fedden’s fashionable townhouse, Nick sets out to develop a sexual identity that can navigate the distance from Leo Charles’s ground floor flat in the ethnically diverse working class Willesden to Wani Ouradi’s Lowndes Square mansion in affluent Knightsbridge. Yet like Nick’s reception at the dinner with Leo’s West Indian mother and sister or the Sunday lunch with Wani’s Lebanese family, Nick remains to each family equally alien by ethnicity and class as well as by sexual orientation. Just as Wani’s legacy to Nick, the garish Clerkenwell office building which offers a lifetime income, projects the tension of two cultures antique and modern, so Nick’s London experience is the record of his learning the realities of the culture of class, power, and sexuality. With Wani’s eminent death and Gerald Fedden’s scandal, Hollinghurst positions Nick outside of the class and family with whom Nick had come to identify himself and with a gay identity destructively defined by the public press. Hollinghurst’s use of place, especially the city, objectifies Nick’s acceptance of his sexual orientation by situating him spatially in terms of such sources of identity as class and family. The London of The Line of Beauty offers Hollinghurst’s reader a topography of gay identity [End Page 310] that objectifies the fragility of the integration between modern queer experience and established social, political, and familial institutions.

Borrowing from Henri Lefebvre’s The Production of Space, James Donald projects how imagined and lived experiences blur together in the life and spatial signifiers of the city. As Donald notes, Lefebvre identifies three moments in the creation and experience of social space: the city offers a space that can be perceived (spatial practice), conceptualized (representations of space), and lived (representational spaces). Through this process individuals assign their own meanings to spatial markers as those meanings serve the formation or validation of identity, achieved through representational space (Lefebvre 38–39). Consequently, the city offers the individual a means to navigate between the public and private selves, a process by which one can find a community that affords an objectification of the private self (Donald 264–65). Public space, the realm of law, affords order and decency; in the private space, with its absence of surveillance, there is absence of law (Houlbrook 109–10). Building on the work of Max Weber, Lawrence Manley argues that in the city the individual can forge a shared state of mind, customs, and traditions that afford conditions for stability, freedoms, and opportunities for a communal life which can then blur the distinction between the public and private (2). In the transformation of the geographical into cultural and personal spaces, the city teaches individuals how to understand and manage the self as subjective human beings by laying bare the character traits which are ordinarily obscured and suppressed in smaller communities (Donald 272). For the gay individual...

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