Hellenism & Homosexuality

ELT 38:3 1995 affected ethnographic description by making it more sharply aware of, and consequently troubled in, its procedures. The literary commentaries are appreciative and informed but are not in themselves especially penetrating or significant. Often enough they are insufficiently contextualized and historicized so that Forster stands out as a solitary giant, unrelated to and seemingly unaffected by the novelistic practices of his time. Nonetheless, the current emphasis in literary criticism on overtly sociological considerations and in attempted reshapings of the canon sufficiently justifies the interest of, say, a student of contemporary discourse analysis in a work so hybrid as this. The more traditionally inclined critic will find grist for other mills since in the end, Forster's fictional characters emerge as more dynamic, enduring, and, put simply, more interesting and humanly rewarding than the cast of actually living individuals whose beliefs, activities, and personal and collective histories are assembled, displayed, and interpreted . While, then, anthropology may be a kind of fiction, a species of glorious gossip rather than a definitive or even tentative revelation of scientific laws, and the anthropologist in his and her narrative procedures and selectivity a novelist manqué, the writing of social science, at least on the basis of the evidence offered and the arguments proffered, appears altogether more earthbound, lacking egregiously the power of art to transform, to move, and to inspire. Old fashioned these last words might seem, but in them lies precisely the difference—and some would still argue it to be a fundamental one—between information and art, prose and passion. ). H. Stape ______________ Japan Women's University, Tokyo Hellenism & Homosexuality Linda Dowling. Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994. xvi + 173 pp. $24.95 LINDA DOWLING is already a recognized authority on late nineteenth-century cultural debates, for her annotated bibliography, Aestheticism and Decadence (1978), for Language and Decadence in the Victorian Fin de Siècle (1986), and for her numerous groundbreaking essays. And now, her Hellenism and Homosexuality arrives amidst a freshet of new studies on Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde, and on identity -formation and gender politics in late nineteenth-century England. This learned and critically penetrating study joins the best work in the 376 BOOK REVIEWS newly emergent field—such studies as Billie Andrew Inman's Walter Pater and His Reading, 1874-77 (1990), laden with facts awaiting further assimilation, and Richard Dellamora's Masculine Desire: The Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism (1990), controversial but already determinative in the debates. Dowling, though generally sober and responsible, and avoiding the mode of dense and uncontextualized "readings" practiced by Eve Sedgwick , can sometimes set the pitch pretty high. Even the anti-Catholic feelings rampant around 1850 don't merit, all on one page (45), the flaring melodrama of words like "savage," "volcanic," "frenzy," "virulent," "apocalyptic," and "fiery." The agendas and ideological warfare of the 1990s have inevitably framed the work of recovery—often of the "outing" variety—recently dominant in late-Victorian studies. Dowling positions herself just outside this double frame; the result is an avoidance of confession and polemic, as well as a certain deafness to the felt reality— the elation, the fear, and the confusion—inherent in "deviant" sexuality in that earlier period. What, then, is Dowling's argument in this largely historical but idea-driven work? Armed with wide reading in political theory, and with a now rare competence in classical literature and philosophy, she offers an account in Chapter I of the rise in the eighteenth century of a "republican" and martial discourse, offering a political and moral model resistant to the spreading threat of "French" anarchy and sexual promiscuity . This long overview is welcome in the rather confined hothouse of recent gender-talk. But it is also a curiously secular and "abstract" counterdiscourse that Dowling revealingly outlines from the 1730s through the late nineteenth century. What is left out (even to some extent in her useful treatment of the Tractarian tutorial system, in Chapter II) is precisely the play of Christian and biblical norms in the increasingly panicky response to the unfolding of new ranges of "sexuality " after about 1850. Virtually all the organs of English culture—the churches, the...