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A Queer Chivalry: The Homoerotic Asceticism of Gerard Manley Hopkins (review)
- Victorian Studies
- Indiana University Press
- Volume 45, Number 4, Summer 2003
- pp. 773-775
- 10.1353/vic.2004.0036
- Review
- Additional Information
Victorian Studies 45.4 (2003) 773-775
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A Queer Chivalry: The Homoerotic Asceticism of Gerard Manley Hopkins, by Julia F. Saville; pp. xii + 240. Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 2000, $37.50, £28.95.
In his much-anthologized sonnet "Pied Beauty" (1877), Gerard Manley Hopkins crowns his catalogue of "dappled things" with a jubilant compendium of "[a]ll things counter, [End Page 773] original, spare, strange; / Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)" (qtd. 123). And many readers, I suspect, are tempted to lump the entirety of Hopkins's poetry in with these sublime oddities, puzzling over its strangeness and spareness, freckles and fickleness, sighing their own "Who knows?" at the conundrums it raises. It is one of the many strengths of Julia Saville's rich and provocative A Queer Chivalry that it neither simplifies the complexity of Hopkins's poetics nor turns his verse into an arid linguistic field, devoid of beauty or passion. Whereas many studies of Hopkins tend to split apart cultural and rhetorical analysis—focusing solely on the theological or spiritual dimensions of his verse, for example, or looking exclusively at his metrical innovations—Saville couples them, seeing in his poetics "a path for multifarious desire" (6), a way to articulate and accommodate a homoeroticism that was deeply felt but socially (and often personally) suspect. Drawing on recent studies of masculinity and framing her thesis with reference to Jacques Lacan's discussion of sublimation and ascesis, she presents Hopkins as a strategic craftsman, a poet whose disciplined versification becomes both tether and outlet. Through his scrupulous poetic construction, he is able to marshal homoerotic expression "in a mode associated with the rigorous self-restraint on which a Victorian sense of manliness was predicated" (3); at the same time, he allows himself to enjoy—if only to renounce—the pleasures that expression affords.
Saville moves through Hopkins's verse chronologically, beginning with his youthful output at Oxford, through the Wreck of the Deutschland (1875) and the poems of his Welsh residency, and ending with the so-called Terrible Sonnets (1885) and other later poems. Since her goal is "to present a map of Hopkins's poetic career not as a steady linear progression but as a continuous process of negotiating desire through self-discipline, self-denial, and even at times self-hatred" (7), she resists charting a pat evolution in Hopkins's poetics or, more crucially, positing a resolution, a comfortable transcendence, of the anxieties that he faced. If this method stymies a certain desire on the part of the reader—we all love a narrative arc—it is surprisingly useful in showing subtle permutations in Hopkins's approach. Thus, the courtly address used in the Wreck to fix and eroticize Christ returns, with related but more sapping energy, in many of the Terrible Sonnets. Ventriloquizing the shipwrecked nun enables Hopkins to acknowledge and deflect "a desire that manifests itself multifariously as an impulse to self-silencing, accompanied by ruthless self-castigation and a yearning after same-sex tenderness" (83)— impulses and effects that he darkly revisits in the more openly masochistic dynamics of the sonnets. The disadvantage of dividing the texts chronologically rather than thematically is a slight aura of recapitulation, a sense that the upshot of each section is going to be rather the same: in representing homoerotic desire (however figured), Hopkins is simultaneously intent on containing that desire through the rigors of his craft. But while this circularity can be distracting at times, it is also intellectually inviting: it forces the reader to see Hopkins's verse in terms of its fugue-like artistry, to attend to nuance and gradation, convolution and reprisal.
Although Saville's chief concern is with the way Hopkins wrote rather than what he wrote, she diligently contextualizes the poetry with biographical and archival material. Her opening discussion of discipline and castigation, for example, is ranged against Hopkins's confession journals; the lengthy analysis of the Wreck of the Deutschland is prefaced by a savvy reading of newspaper accounts of the tragedy which make apparent Hopkins...