O Lachrymarum Fons: Tears, Poetry, and Desire in Gray

Here rests his head upon the lap of earth A youth to fortune and to fame unknown. Fair Science frowned not on his humble birth, And Melancholy marked him for her own.

Large was his bounty and his soul sincere, Heaven did a recompence as largely send: He gave to Misery all he had, a tear, He gained from Heaven (’twas all he wished) a friend.

(Elegy, ll. 117–24) ¹

These epitaphic lines from Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” hint at a series of issues that, I will claim, Gray repeatedly explores in his letters and poetry in his attempt to define his relation to his self, his sexuality, and his relation to the world around him. Any discussion of Gray’s sexuality, of course, faces insurmountable problems: although a wide range of biographers and critics have long assumed that Gray’s attraction to friends such as Walpole and West and his later infatuation with other young men were erotically charged, there is no keyhole testimony to prove that Gray participated in any transgressive sexual activity. ² Recent arguments concerning Gray’s homosexuality often use “readings” of his work to prove the repression of his sexual desire and turn on the question of whether or not his anger and frustration are revealed in his writing. ³ Even though such readings may be irresistibly persuasive, they also raise serious doubts about how the notion of homosexuality is being used and what is being assumed about sexual identities in the eighteenth century. For late twentieth-century assumptions about “sexuality”—that it defines an individual, that it can or should be hidden, that its repression breeds anger, that it creates a subculture—hinder the clarity of many attempts to talk about eighteenth-century figures and their emotions and desires. If same-sex desire is palpable in Gray’s writing, as I argue that it is, what needs to be explained is not how this reclusive eighteenth-century figure kept his sexuality hidden, but rather how he could write it so large as to make it indistinguishable from values that were celebrated in the culture at large. ⁴

“He gained from Heaven (’twas all he wished) a friend”: the melancholy pose that the poet adopts at the close of the elegy, the answer to the poetic dilemma that had baffled earlier attempts to finish the poem, completes the cultural transaction that Gray begins much earlier in his poems and his letters to his friends. This elegiac solution, as it were, is to constitute identity at the moment of loss and to articulate desire in the very terms of its utter inaccessibility, which in this case is represented as the poet’s own gravestone. ⁵

The term sexuality itself had no currency in the eighteenth century; ⁶ and most historians of sexuality now accept Foucault’s much discussed observation that:

the psychological, psychiatric, medical category of homosexuality was constituted from the moment it was categorized—Westphal’s famous article of 1870 on “contrary sexual sensations” can stand as its date of birth—less by a type of sensations than by a certain quality of sexual sensibility, a certain way of inverting the masculine and feminine in oneself. Homosexuality appeared as one of the forms of sexuality when it was transposed from the practice of sodomy onto a kind of interior androgyny, a hermaphrodism of the soul. The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species. ⁷

Foucault claims that homosexuality was a late-nineteenth century invention that only a particular intersection of sensibility, sexology, and popular culture could have made possible. In the eighteenth century, however, the scene is not as clear as Foucault’s account suggests. Sodomy was, to be sure, a practice rather than an identity, and the sodomite was by no means a fixed species. Still, as cultural historians such as Alan Bray, David Halperin, G. S. Rousseau, and Randolph Trumbach have made clear, male relations were by no means merely as practice-oriented as Foucault’s comments suggest, nor did sodomy itself clearly imply any details...