“The Viper’s Traffic-Knot”: Celibacy and Queerness in the “Late” Marianne Moore

The Expressive Hypothesis

In a 1927 letter to fellow poet Allen Tate, Hart Crane complains about his prospects for publication: “I’ve had to submit it [‘The Dance’] to Marianne Moore recently, as my only present hope of a little cash. But she probably will object to the word ‘breasts,’ or some other such detail. It’s really ghastly. I wonder how much longer our markets will be in the grip of two such hysterical virgins as The Dial and Poetry!”¹ Here, the magazines are personified by their editors: the censoring celibates Marianne Moore and Harriet Monroe, respectively. Crane’s letter flattens all distinction between celibacy and censorship. His reading of censorship as a hysterical symptom of celibacy is proximate to queer theory’s own reading of celibacy as self-censorship. By this I mean that queer theory reads “celibacy” (when it reads it at all) as repression — referring to the celibate as a “latent,” “closeted,” or “reluctant” homosexual who has detrimentally internalized homophobia. In this essay, I argue that this inability to read celibacy outside the framework of failed homosexuality points to a much larger problem at the center of queer reading practices. Examining this problem promises to reconfigure key concepts in sexuality studies like “expression,” “performance,” and “silence.” Taking the modernist poet Marianne Moore as a case study, I argue that Moore’s reconceptualization of the temporal underpinnings of celibacy enables her to forge a celibacy that is not rooted in lack or repression. This essay reads celibacy as a sexuality, as an identity, rather than as a “closeting” screen for another identity; I substantiate celibacy’s “nothing” in order to rethink the epistemology of the closet.

Typifying the conflation of celibacy with homosexuality, Thomas Yingling’s chapter “The Unmarried Epic” reads Crane’s lines — “The ancient men — wifeless or runaway / Hobo-trekkers” — as positing not merely “an affinity between these ‘wifeless’ men and the homosexual,” both “unmoored from social structures such as family,” but an identity. He finds these “wifeless” vagabonds to be one of homosexuality’s “actual sites in culture.”² I use the term celibacy both to mean “abstinence,” as it is more commonly used now, and to mean “unmarried,” as it was commonly used throughout the nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, in order to disarticulate celibacy and queerness. Because of the taboo on premarital sex during this period — for white middle- and upper-class men and especially for women — celibacy, as the state of being unmarried, culturally registered as abstinence.³ Yingling exemplifies a practice of queer reading that writes celibacy under the sign of censorship in another register: as an alibi or “beard” for the “obscenity” of homosexuality. Similarly, the important work of scholars like Martha Vicinus and Sheila Jeffreys effaces the spinster qua spinster by charting only her figuration in the history of lesbianism. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s and George Chauncey’s work has the same effect for bachelors and the history of homosexuality. This scholarship on singleness has up until now misrecognized the proximity of the history of representations of same-sex eroticism and the history of representations of celibacy as identity.

“There is not one but many silences,” declares Michel Foucault in The History of Sexuality.⁴ Despite its frequent citation, this pronouncement usually remains unheeded, as queer studies reads silence in only one way: reading the “absence” of sex as itself a sign of homosexuality. Queer readings tend to interpret “absence” (preterition, silence, the closet, the love that dare not speak its name, the “impossibility” of lesbian sex) as “evidence” of same-sex eroticism, covering over our ability to see actual absences of sex. Despite Foucault’s pervasive influence, we still have not fully grappled with the immense challenge that the repressive hypothesis poses — namely, how can sexuality studies avoid positioning itself opposite silence, repression, and power? Foucault describes this problem as that of the “speaker’s benefit”: “What sustains our eagerness to speak of sex in terms of repression is doubtless this opportunity to speak out against the powers that be, to utter truths and promise bliss, to...