Closeted Writing and Lesbian and Gay Literature: Classical, Early Modern, Eighteenth-Century (review)

To people unfamiliar with the term, 'LGBT Studies' may sound as mysterious as 'BLT' on the café blackboard. However, it denotes the academic field from within which David Robinson writes, namely Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Studies, or as he phrases it more broadly, 'LGBT Studies and the History of Sexuality' (p. 25). This book revives a practice which Robinson describes as 'supposedly retrograde' (p. viii), seeking out closeted homosexual writing from past eras. As he explains in his Preface, from the vantage-point of 'differentist' scholarship, itself founded on the Foucauldian premise that homosexuality was an 'invention' of the nineteenth century, such a focus may seem 'naively anachronistic' (p. vii). But Robinson argues bravely for the validity of 'continuist' approaches (p. x), re-engaging the once discredited notion of authorial intention, along with historical contextualisation and close reading, to illuminate poetry, fiction and drama from his clustered classical, Early Modern and eighteenth-century periods. His central contention is that 'if we remain open to similarity … instead of only identity and difference, we can more productively explore the longstanding Western awareness that people often selectively conceal and disclose same-sex love and desire' (p. 10).

The three parts of the book are entitled: (1) Intentionality: Closeted Homosexual Writing; (2) Intentionality: Closeted Homophobic Writing; and (3) Continuity. In his strong third chapter, 'The Closeting of Closeting: Cleland, Smollett, Sodomy, and the Critics' Robinson juxtaposes an astonishingly animated and, he argues, realistic, depiction of sodomy between 'two young sparks' in John Cleland's Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure with examples of 'Gay Bashing Eighteenth-Century Style' (p. 51) drawn from Smollett's Peregrine Pickle and Charlotte Charke's Henry Dumont. The last two texts form a prelude to Robinson's analysis of 'Smollett's textual homophobia' in Roderick Ransom (p. 58), where he shows convincingly that Smollett 'condemns sex between men, in order to present what matters most to him: love between men' (p. 77). The writing here displays Robinson's lively engagement with other criticism attentive to homosexuality as it impacts on these writers' texts and identities, whereas, when arguing for the satirical anti-lesbian thrust of Delarivier Manley's New Atlantis in Chapter 5, his differences from the pro-lesbian readings of feminist critics produces less supple prose and some unwieldy footnotes. In criticism too, similarity more often produces interesting textual possibilities than absolute difference.

After a chapter on metamorphosis and homosexuality in Ovid's 'Iphis and Ianthe' and related tales, Part III culminates in a chapter exploring variations on this myth in six Early Modern dramas ranging from the well-known – John Lyly's Gallathea (1592) – to the obscure – Charles Hopkins' Friendship Improv'd; Or, The Female Warriour (1700). Curiously, Shakespeare and Fletcher's The Two Noble Kinsmen, with Emilia's narrative of her twin-like love for her girlhood friend Flavina, rates not even a passing mention. The discussion gains coherence from the Ovidian myth the plays hold in common, and Robinson's tracking of the plays' varying processes of 'rejecting or unknowing' (p. 250) female and male homosexuality (excepting Gallathea) is at once persistent and playful, responsive to theatrical context as it might determine meaning. It is a fine, close to an impressive, provocative study.