Celibacies: American Modernism & Sexual Life by Benjamin Kahan (review)

The conventional narrative of modernism’s relation to sexuality concerns a generation of writers who led a “modernist rebellion against sexual censorship” (Boone 2014: 281) through overlapping acts of formal and sexual experimentation. This narrative, which has survived a number of challenges throughout the last decades,¹ traces a linear development from the proliferation and centering of sexual discourses in the “new sexology” of Krafft-Ebing, Ellis, and Freud, through Mina Loy’s “Feminist Manifesto” (1914) to the transformations in feminist politics that took place in 1969.² This was also the year in which “The Storm,” Kate Chopin’s 1898 story of discreet sexual transgression, pleasure, and autonomy, was finally published — an appropriate co-occurrence given that this history turns to modernist writing for many of its most crucial anchoring points: from explorations of the fulfillment of desires outside of the confines of marriage in Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928) to the gender reversals of Woolf’s Orlando (1928) and the interweaving of formal experimentation and sexual politics of Barnes’s Nightwood (1936). As modernist liberation from the cultural norms of the Victorian age was increasingly cast in sex-positive terms, celibacy came to be positioned as freedom’s opposite: a paralytic remnant of prudish values and oppressive religious discourses that stood as an obstacle to modernity. This rhetoric, in turn, has long informed and ordered modernist criticism. Thus Richard Brown, in his authoritative James Joyce and Sexuality (1985) writes, representatively, that “Joyce’s portraits of … ‘celibate’ Dubliners” were directed towards the “identification of the sexual problem of celibacy” (128; emphasis added).³

In his ambitious study Celibacies: American Modernism & Sexual Life, Benjamin Kahan reinvigorates the field by turning this narrative on its head, charting a daring alternative genealogy of American modernism by foregrounding celibacy as its significant political, social, artistic, and sexual identity. Celibacies declines Loy’s sex-positive feminism as its point of departure in favor of the leaders of the nineteenth-century suffrage movement who advocated celibacy as a tool of women’s independence. Through this refocused lens, Kahan rediscovers celibacy as a now forgotten tool of the political Left and thematic crux of modernist writing. Beyond the significance of retrieving modernism’s hesitations about a revolutionary politics of sexual liberation as the sole basis for securing equality or fulfillment, Kahan persuasively historicizes celibacy as a discrete identity — or “organization of pleasure” (4) — with sexual, political, and artistic content. The project ranges from “the demographic emergence of a celibate identity” in the 1880s (13) through First-Wave Feminism and Black reform movements to the Stonewall riots. With Foucault and Sedgwick as his guiding theoretical lights, Kahan builds a compelling case for reconceiving celibacy and, in the process, a number of other sexual categories, away from inherited wisdoms by applying pressure to certain critical standards about what constitutes sexual experience and identity in American modernism.

With these historical and theoretical co-ordinates established, Kahan rereads prominent and overlooked literary works, modernist figures, and cultural ephemera in five chapters under the rubrics of “celibate artistry,” “celibate temporality,” “celibate economics,” “queer citizenship,” and “philosophical bachelorhood.” Pursuing the origins of modern celibate politics, narratives, and aesthetics, ch. 1 attempts to “break the deadlock debate about whether or not the institution of Boston marriage is sexual” (27). While this “long-term partnership between two women who live together and share their lives with each other” (38) is usually conceived as a financial necessity or proto-closeted lesbian relationship on the verge of “the invention of homosexuality,” Kahan’s careful examination of nineteenth-century press coverage and personal correspondence rediscovers its political potential to create a more independent life for women of the period. Applying this insight to the genre of the Boston marriage novel, Kahan profitably sidelines the commonplace of the marriage plot in Henry James’s The Bostonians (1886) to reread Olive’s romantic rejection by Verena Tarrant as the culmination of a celibacy plot that avails Olive the opportunity “to deploy her celibate independence to become a...