Reparative Pater: Retreat, Ecstasy, and Reparation in the Writings of Walter Pater

This article explores what I call Pater’s “retreat”: his withdrawal, after 1873, into a mode of bland, polite, and very private conventionalism and his many acts of self-effacement and self-concealment. I argue that while we can read this retreat as a response to social marginalization (Pater’s withdrawal was partly motivated by forms of homosexual scandal), in reading Pater we do not encounter an authentic subject panting for expression and freedom. Rather, we discover the culture of a complex, multi-layered subject formed in fundamental ways by its intimate and invested relationship with the very suppressions by which it is beset--a subject that sometimes relishes and relies upon the position of retreat, finding within it sources of comfort and sustenance. I suggest that Pater seems to move in a confusing and little-known territory that lies somewhere between abjection and subversion, and thus his life and writings demand that we, as critics, develop ways of speaking about the lived experience of marginalized subjects that neither turn that experience into a triumphant narrative of political resistance nor read it as a tragic narrative of political oppression. I argue that Pater’s complex and invested management of his position of retreat constitutes one event in a non-operatic strand of queer history, the history of those subjects that are neither heroic nor abject, but something in between, knee-deep in the tough and compelling work of survival, and drawing heavily on their resources of reparation and healing in order to continue to move through the world.