Masturbation and Physiological Romance in Teleny

The pornographic novella Teleny: Or, The Reverse of the Medal. A Physiological Romance (1893), whose authors are controversially reputed to be Oscar Wilde and a group of his London friends, invokes the dangers— and, as I will explain, the promises—of masturbation as a practice that unsexes the male body.¹ In the novella's opening pages, Frenchman Camille des Grieux watches and listens to Hungarian René Teleny, the pianist who will become his lover, performing a charity concert at Queen's Hall in London. Enraptured by the "composition, the execution," and the "player himself," des Grieux suddenly notices changes in his own body: his lips turn "parched," he "gasp[s] for breath," and the rhythms of "a heavy hand" in time "with the song" begin to "move up and down, slowly at first, then fast and faster" "upon my lap."² The "heavy hand" becomes the sexual agent as the man, des Grieux, dissolves into a panoply of physiological sensations. This scene launches a sexuality oscillating between both receptive and active physiologies of touch, rhythm, and the body's predispositions to move, but—almost unimaginably—detached from biological sex.

This article explains the ways in which Teleny aestheticizes Victorian medical, evolutionary, and technological descriptions of the male body as an uncertain, protean form to narrate a sexuality in which biological sex recedes as its operating principle. The shared metaphors among these sciences for the body's active capacity to fall into inactivity and achieve altered form drive Teleny's reorganization of male sexual physiology along features of inactivity rather than sexual difference. I call this reorganization physio-sexuality to identify the body's non-genital sexual responses that include the respiratory, circulatory, and kinesthetic capacities to act, breathe, throb, pulse, and move in rhythm with its own or other bodies, to touch, kiss, rub, see, suck, probe, harden, and soften as primary features of the sexual. I link physio-sexuality to fears expressed in medical accounts that masturbation leads to inactive youths and the ruinous mutation of manhood into unspeakable perversions, the homosexual love (and behavior) that dare not speak its name prime among them. But I also link physio-sexuality to two less paranoid approaches to male physiology—one biological, the other technological—in the nineteenth century: Charles Darwin's account of evolution, which narrates inactivity and unstable bodies as constitutive of male physiology; and Etienne Jules Marey's and Eadweard Muybridge's chronophotography, images that display the body as fluid parts rather than fixed wholes. Teleny adopts and reworks these lexicons to introduce rich reorganizations of the body and its intimacies.

Teleny's reimagining of bodies as sexually active but unsexed seems unthinkable in current critical receptions of the novella. Critics have overwhelmingly taken for granted the sex and characters in Teleny as homosexual. They either regard the novella as a thematically bold and aesthetically beautiful affirmation of late Victorian homosexuality or, conversely, as a tired reproduction of bourgeois-privileged homosexuality. Whether critics believe Teleny explodes or preserves gender and sexuality norms, their accounts take Teleny for granted as a gay or homosexual novella, or they describe Teleny as depicting a sexuality emerging as homosexual, given that homosexuality was beginning to be but was not yet a legible identity for some communities in early 1890s Britain. Ed Cohen, for instance, celebrates Teleny as an affirmation of homosexuality in its "textual depictions of male same-sex experience."³ Similarly, Diane Mason in her study of Victorian "masturbation and same-sex desire" calls Teleny "the classic erotic novel of homosexual love."⁴ Pamela Thurschwell's work on Victorian occultism and telepathy brings attention to Teleny's "phantasmatic homosexual male sexuality based on narcissism and non-differentiation" among men.⁵ Cohen's, Mason's, and Thurschwell's readings illuminate Teleny as negotiating a range of discourses, but they constrain both the protagonists and the sex they have with one another to same-sex desire or homosexuality. Their studies thus constrain to a model of gender and sexual identity the more vast range of Victorian sexualities that Teleny narrates.

Although I do not reach the same conclusions as these...