Hopkins & Homoerotic Asceticism

BOOK REVIEWS tion to contemporary culture. Still, this is a solid work by Marsh that I predict will be useful to more scholars, perhaps, than will be willing to admit how much they learned from such fundamentally sound criticism. Surely this sumptuous third edition of A Bibliography of D. H. Lawrence , by Warren Roberts and Paul Poplawski, will only add to its reputation as the gold-standard of bibliographic reference for scholars, collectors, dealers, and other enthusiasts interested in an impeccable, exhaustive, and brilliantly formatted volume. This third edition initially was prepared by Roberts, author of the first two editions, before his death in 1998. The jacket for this edition offers a modest but accurate summary of the organization of this meticulous work, explaining that "it is organized into five main sections, providing full details of Lawrence's publishing career and critical reception; his first editions; first editions of all books containing previously unpublished contributions by him; his first periodical publications; translations of his own works around the world, and his known manuscripts with their current locations." In the years since the second edition in 1982, there have been abundant discoveries of Lawrence material, with much of the treasure chest attributable to the diligent work on the various Cambridge University Press projects over the last two decades; Roberts and Poplawski are generous in the acknowledgements in explaining how research for these Cambridge volumes led to significant findings and unrecorded information concerning the early publication of Lawrence's short fiction, as well as stimulating the well-publicized tracking-down of many previously unknown letters by him—and all this material creates fascinating and additional bibliographic entries in this edition. The last section offers an extensive and up-to-date listing of a wide variety of secondary books and pamphlets on Lawrence, happily reflecting the continued growth in Lawrence scholarship in countries all over the world. An added gift for book-lovers must be the twelve-colour reproductions of the dust jackets of early Lawrence editions, and the plates possess great clarity and include many jackets that are difficult to find in such excellent condition. Peter Balbert ______________ Trinity University Hopkins & Homoerotic Asceticism Julia F. Saville. A Queer Chivalry: The Homoerotic Asceticism of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000. xi + 240 pp. $37.50 249 ELT 45 : 2 2002 JULIA SAVILLE invokes the tradition of "queer chivalry" defined by Richard Dellamora in Masculine Desire (1990) which "treats Christ as the lover or bridegroom of the feminized human soul. This would suggest that Hopkins belongs to a constellation of writers, including . . . Swinburne,... Symonds,... Pater, and Charles Kains-Jackson," but she argues that "Hopkins developed his own queer brand of chivalry, addressed adoringly to a beloved of his own sex but in a mode associated with the rigorous self-restraint on which a Victorian sense of manliness was predicated" (3). Saville acknowledges her debt to Herbert Sussman (Victorian Masculinities , 1995) and James Eli Adams (Dandies and Desert Saints, 1995), but argues that their reliance on "Foucault's Hellenistic version of ascesis is in several ways inappropriate and inadequate to a study of Hopkins : Hopkins made a point in his poetics of distancing himself from the Germanic Hellenism prevalent at Oxford and practiced by the likes of Pater, Symonds, and later, Wilde (Dowling, Hellenisms and Homosexuality , 1994). Secondly, because his ascetic practices cover such a wide range from literal mortification of the flesh to ruthless metrical selfmastery in the rigors of sprung rhythm, the moderation of the Hellenistic self-training studied by Foucault is too restricted to account for the diverse psychosomatic effects produced by Hopkins's ascesis" (14). In other words, Hopkins's asceticism is too extreme to be studied in the context of the "moderation" of Hellenism. Indeed, her argument is that it is essentially masochism and that Freud, Lacan, et al are more appropriate guides to understanding it. Yet Swinburne's inclusion in the constellation of writers associated with "queer chivalry" reminds us that not all Victorian Hellenists were "moderate." Indeed, he was far more extreme in his masochism and sensuality than Hopkins or any of his other contemporaries . Hence it might be more accurate to describe Saville's...