Literary Representations of Male Same-Sex Relationships

GEORGE HAGGERTY'S Queer Friendship is a wide-ranging book, covering English literary representations of male same-sex relationships from the eighteenth century to the mid-1960s. It builds on Haggerty's earlier work on queerness and the eighteenth century and extends it at least partially into the era in which readers of ELT are most likely to be interested. Since it is so temporally ambitious, in the review that follows I am going to spend a bit more time with the late nineteenth and early twentieth century sections, specifically those on Woolf, Wilde, and Forster; on the other hand, it would be unfair to Haggerty's work to ignore the historical context into which he places these readings, so I will attempt to account for all of it.

The introduction immediately puts friendship in the context of Platonism, especially Lysis, in addition to the more expected Symposium. In contrast to the cultural insistence that the love between friends be differentiated from that between lovers, Haggerty wants, if not to eliminate the distinction, at least to make it more difficult. He builds on the foundational work of Alan Bray, but tries to correct what he sees as Bray's overemphasis on the public and political nature of early modern friendship. Haggerty does not want to deny the political element to these friendships, but to "reintroduce private meaning into the public displays." The introduction also introduces some potentially contestable assumptions. Friends, for instance, are defined as those who "love and are loved in ways that culture at large has always preserved for cross-gender relations." This "always" in a chapter on classical Greek love seems overly broad; moreover, it strikes me that "culture at large" is as likely to deny friendship to cross-sex relationships as part of its effort to separate the love of lovers from the love of friends. What Haggerty means by friendship becomes clear fairly quickly, but the exclusion of cross-sex relationships from the study, though perhaps necessary, to me required some justification.

Chapter One takes up elegiac friendship as Haggerty addresses the elegy in psychoanalytic terms, drawing heavily on Peter M. Sacks's work on the genre. The elegy becomes a sexualized form when it must turn the absent object of desire into a trope and thus both continue itself as desire and lose itself to frustration and/or castration. Haggerty explicitly claims that the desire's status of cross-sex or same-sex does not matter: "the process remains the same." English poetry, moreover, is full of same-sex elegies such as "Lycidas," "Adonais," and In Memoriam that fit seamlessly into the discourse of friendship. With the exception of Tennyson's elegy, however, Haggerty turns from poetry to prose, dedicating sections of this chapter to Tristram Shandy, Waverly, In Memoriam, and Jacob's Room. The first two of these sections offer intriguing interpretations of the novels, the former turning on Sterne's famous black page as the unavoidable trope of loss and the latter focusing on the rivalries that underlie friendships in Scott's historical novel. The next section does an admirable job of setting up the stakes of reading In Memoriam in the context of same-sex love, arguing that the late-twentieth century tendency to out writers has led to a distortion of the very love they seek to elucidate. For Haggerty, this love is Platonic, not in the popular sense as completely non-sexual, but in the classical sense of illustrating the ideas expressed in the Symposium and Phaedrus. Furthermore, Platonic love proves more powerful than Freudian castration in this poem, as Haggerty sees it as transcending the usual mechanisms of substitution for the beloved by moving from the beloved to love itself.

The final section of this chapter takes up Jacob's Room, Woolf's first fully modernist novel. Haggerty portrays the novel as her attempt to take death seriously and to inscribe the title character as always already absent...