Making Love: Sentiment and Sexuality in Eighteenth-Century British Literature by Paul Kelleher (review)

Among the hallmarks of heterosexual hegemony is its perceived timelessness. Heterosexual erotic sentiment, much like heterosexual desire, is sustained as dominant, normal, and natural via its taken-forgranted or axiomatic status, to borrow from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Leaving hetero-erotic passion and culture unquestioned makes it challenging to see both small and large changes in heterosexual culture (or to recognize heterosexuality as cultural in the first place); it also conceals systemic oppression under the pretext of the natural and the normal. As a result, the literary history of heterosexuality can be incredibly difficult to see, document, and theorize. And yet, the history of sexuality tells us that heterosexuality, and our modern understanding of sexual identity more broadly, has a rather short history, emerging as a new conceptual framework around the end of the nineteenth century. Reading with this chronology in mind, the literary history of sexuality before the nineteenth century—or the literary history of sexuality before sexuality—presents readers with a tremendously different orientation towards what looks like heterosexuality in early texts. More directly, the history of heterosexuality brings into view subtle yet critical distinctions between developing ideas and already circulating beliefs; in particular, what we read as emblematic of heterosexuality is transformed from tried-and-true hetero logic to a fledgling and unstable symbol or idea. The expert theorist and historian of sexuality moves readers to see heterosexuality with a broader critical and historical clarity, not just when reading texts that technically predate heteronormativity. Readers are newly able to see what was there all along—the massive amount of labour performed to create and to uphold hetero hegemony—especially in the present.

Examining the literary history of heterosexuality in eighteenth-century literature presents at least two predictable challenges. First, heteronormative ideologies mask the prescriptive as natural (even, or especially, when challenged), preventing us from seeing what we might call the scaffolding of heterosexual hegemony. And second, the very process of reading for heterosexuality—looking for a developing idea that has more recently crystallized into a structure of power—can inadvertently harden an idea into accepted fact when it might be better judged as a provisional, variable, or entirely new way of thinking. Paul Kelleher presents a forceful and rich road map for unearthing the hidden history of heterosexual sentiment in eighteenth-century literature and philosophy. Making Love provides a literary history of heterosexual desire and sentiment by exploring how heterosexuality became a qualification for "moral goodness and ethical sociability" in the first place (2).

In asking this question, Kelleher engages with a broad set of thinkers in sexuality studies who have asked equally compelling questions about abstractions, including the presumed goodness of heterosexual desire, and structures of feeling, such as the assumption that sexual desire is linked to social and historical "goods" (be they moral or material). Historians of heterosexuality, including Jonathan Ned Katz, have argued that hetero-erotic desire is not universally or transhistorically good (or acceptable, or even possible); consider, as an example, Katz's assertion in The Invention of Heterosexuality (2007) that early twentieth-century U.S. heterosexuals had to "come out," an act of solidarity in defense of an emergent hetero-erotic culture, one characterized by pleasure and the freedom to choose how to do human sexual contact. I am also reminded of Alan Bray's The Friend (2006), another ground-breaking text that historicizes the shifting meanings of friendship in the early-modern period; Kelleher, like Bray, is masterful in his capacity to enable readers to re-see something immensely familiar, and to locate a set of texts in a newly transparent history, the history of hetero-erotic sentiment.

I note the contributions of Making Love to the history of sexuality at length because, as invested as Kelleher is in eighteenth-century literature and philosophy, this project fills a set of theoretical and methodological gaps in existing scholarship on...