Lovesick: Modernist Plays of Same-Sex Love, 1894-1925 by Laurence Senelick (review)

Reviews LAURENCE SENELlCK. Lovesick: Modemisl Plays of Same-Sex Love. 1894-1925. London: Routledge, t999. Pp. xii + 199, illuslraled. $75.00 (Hb); $23.99 (Pb). Reviewed by Thomas A. King. Brandeis University Some readers may be disappointed by the quality or interest of the six plays that Laurence Senelick has collected in Lovesick: Modernist Plays of SameSex Love, 1894-1925, but historians of late-nineteenth- and early-twentiethcentury sexuality will find evidence here of the confrontation and negotiation by writers, performers, and audiences of the medical model of homosexuality developed by sexologists and activists in the period. Continuing his larger project of documenting representations of homosexuality in Western drama and theatre, Senelick has translated for the present volume plays from Germany (Herbert Hirschberg's three-act Ibsenite drama Mistakes, 1906, and Klaus Mann's Chekhovian Ania and Esther, 1925, the best play in the collection and the only one to stage love between women), Russia (Mikhail Kuzmin's pastoral musical The Dangerous Precaution, 1907), and France (Armory's comedy of manners The Gentleman of the Chrysanthemums, 190B), as well as one London drama (John Gray and Marc-Andre Raffalovich 's social melodrama The Blackmailers, IB94) and a short symbolist play by Chicago author Henry Blake Fuller (At Saint Judas's, IB96). Including such documentation as photographs, reviews, and excerpts from the sexologists , Senelick expands our historical understanding of the discursive construction of homosexual subjectivity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Because of this focus, however, Senelick's collection raises a number of questions. How should we understand the term "modernist" in relation to these plays? Apart from a brief statement that naturalist and symbolist plays Modem Drama, 43 (Winter 2000) 633 REVIEWS were unlikely to deal with homosexuality, while melodramatic techniques and plot devices (e.g., blackmail) were more readily available for introducing unfamiliar material (2, 3), Senelick generally uses the term to indicate the period rather than the form of these plays. He is most interested, that is, in sketching the parallels between the emergence of sexology and the recognition and acceptance by individuals of a homosexual identity. Like Ibsen's dramas, the plays center on the revelation of a secret, disclosing not only (what the plays generally present as) the 'crime, perversion, or disease of homosexuality but the consequences for society of the repression of homosexual desire (blackmail, but also failed marriages, violence, and suicide). But these formal choices have the effect of confirming the medical construction of homosexuality as an innate "content" underlying behaviors or styles, typically secret and therefore in the interests of society to bring to light. This formal reliance on social realism and narrative suspense reproduces what Michel Foucault called "the repressive hypothesis" in The History ofSexuality . By equating personal liberation with increased knowledge about and visibility of homosexuality, these plays not only document but also participate in the modem European construction of homosexual subjectivities as confessional texts. The plays might, for this reason, provide an archive for scholars interested in the relations among the theatre, narrative fonn, and modem sexual subjectivities, and they would be usefully read against other modernists texts rejecting narrative in order to complicate questions of personal identity and history. Unlike feminist scholars of the theatre or queer scholars of the novel, historians of male-male sexuality in the drama and theatre have been far too uninterested in the relationship between aesthetic form and the politics of subjectivity. In his choice of plays, introductions, and documentation, Senelick positions sexology as providing the terms in which homosexual individuals recognized themselves: "Literature ratified, perpetrated and coarsened the clinical and legal models with which it had been supplied [... j" (2). Thus he has chosen for the volume plays from 1894 to 1925, a period "when, it can be argued, a distinctive vision of the 'homosexual' was promulgated in the public consciousness " (xi). This runs the risk of presenting homosexuals as outside the "society" that constructs and imposes on them the meanings of their mannerisms , codes, and other behaviors. Thus Senelick's historiography privileges the melodramatic situation of the plays - the homosexual as outsider, as criminal , as sick - without pondering whether the plays themselves simply reproduce those terms. At Saint Judas's...