Hopkins's "Bellbright Bodies": The Dialectics of Desire in His Writings

The question of Gerard Manley Hopkins's sexual tendencies and their influence upon his poetry is a vexing one. At the present moment, despite long and spirited debates, Hopkins critics are still divided into two major camps, and there is little understanding between them. In my view there are two reasons for this schism. First, the debates over Hopkins's homoerotic tendencies were often too passionate, and the analysis of biographical and textual evidence too fragmentary. As a result, this problem still awaits a balanced and systematic analysis. Second, the language chosen for the discussion of the homoerotic theme in Hopkins's writings does not fit the analyzed material. As will be shown below, the discussion of Hopkins in terms of "homosexual identity" is both a historical anachronism and unable to account for the complex dialectics of homoerotic attraction, its articulation and denial, that characterizes Hopkins's poetry. In order to account for this dialectics in a more precise manner, such concepts as "homosexual," "gay," and "identity" must give way to "homoerotic," "masculinist," "discourse," and "desire." This alternative set of concepts enables the critic to account for the complexity of the sexual dimension of Hopkins's poetry—and to do this without distorting Hopkins's texts or making them serve contemporary ideological needs.

The history of the debate over Hopkins's supposed homosexuality is long and complicated. Furthermore, it seems that for a long time this debate evolved behind the scenes of the official Hopkins scholarship and left only a few traces in books and articles. In 1936, in a review article, W. H. Auden mentioned Hopkins's "homosexual feelings" (500); ¹ in 1941 F. O. Matthiessen referred in passing to Hopkins's avoidance of the "latent strain" of homosexuality "in himself" (145); a little later Vincent Turner wrote with apparent disapproval about a conversation with "one of the finest of Hopkins's scholars," who "thought it necessary to bring 'homosexuality' into his explanation of Hopkins's mind" (138). In 1949, in his opus magnum, William H. Gardner, painstakingly avoiding any explicit mention of homosexuality, wrote that "there is nothing. . . to suggest, let alone prove, that Hopkins was tainted with any serious sexual abnormality" and accused "certain uninformed or misguided critics" of inventing the problem (2:84). Finally, in 1983 David Downes described a conversation he had with Theodore Roethke in the 1950s about Hopkins's homosexuality (25); but "in those days," wrote Downes, "homosexuality in Hopkins was barely mentionable" (24). Indeed, until the mid-1970s almost nothing had been written on the subject.

However, in the second half of the decade the situation underwent a radical change. In 1976 Wendell Stacy Johnson analyzed the representation of sexuality in Hopkins's writings in a brief essay, "Sexuality and Inscape"; he suggested that Hopkins's poetry "includes strong sexual feeling" (65) and addressed, among others, the question of homosexuality (59-62). As early as 1977, in his biography of Hopkins, Bernard Bergonzi treated Hopkins's homosexuality as a widespread critical assumption, and he even attempted to correct its radicalism (27-32, 148-50). A little later, in 1978, Paddy Kitchen published a new biography of Hopkins, in which she underscored all the details of his life that could be related to homosexuality. In the same year John Robinson addressed this problem from the literary, rather than biographical, point of view and singled out several poems devoted to men as indicating Hopkins's "homosexual feelings" (95-99). Finally, in 1979 in the essay "Recovering Hopkins, Recovering Ourselves" Michael Lynch suggested that Hopkins was a "fully gay poet" (112) and "a homoerotic preacher" (107); this paper was earlier delivered as an address to the New York Gay Academic Union and aroused negative responses from most Hopkins scholars. ²

It is partly because of these responses that in the 1980s the pendulum swung back, and the question of Hopkins's sexual orientation...