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Queer Reproduction in Victorian Literature and Culture Mary Timothy Wilson Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College

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Queer Reproduction in Victorian Literature and Culture Mary Timothy Wilson Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College Louisiana State University LSU Digital Commons LSU Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 2015 "Superbly Sterile:" Queer Reproduction in Victorian Literature and Culture Mary Timothy Wilson Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Wilson, Mary Timothy, ""Superbly Sterile:" Queer Reproduction in Victorian Literature and Culture" (2015). LSU Doctoral Dissertations. 2521. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations/2521 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at LSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in LSU Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized graduate school editor of LSU Digital Commons. For more information, please [email protected]. “SUPERBLY STERILE:” QUEER REPRODUCTION IN VICTORIAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in The Department of English by Mary Timothy Wilson B.S., Eastern Michigan University, 2003 M.A., Eastern Michigan University, 2007 May 2016 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to express my sincere gratitude to the members of my committee for the guidance and support they have provided from this project’s inception through its completion. Daniel Novak has taught and advised me for throughout my career at LSU, and his instruction in research and writing has been deeply beneficial. Sharon Weltman advised and coached me, helping me to articulate this project’s overall direction as well as each chapter’s contribution to its arc. Elsie Michie has been an invaluable source of encouragement and insight. Early in this project, conversations with Benjamin Kahan helped me to conceptualize the relationship between queer theory and the literary texts considered in this dissertation. His work on the expressive hypothesis later provided complexity and depth to my readings. Each of you has been instrumental to this dissertation, and I am grateful for your support and influence. I would also like to thank my colleague June Pulliam for listening to my questions and anxieties about the dissertation process. Penelope Dane, I consider you a great friend. Thank you for meeting up with me to work on our smelly old dissertations, and for continuing to encourage and advise me though we no longer live in the same state. Thanks also to Charlie Mann and to Paul Hay for their essential support throughout this process. And thank you to my best friend, Rachel Mulwee. Finally, I would like to thank two of my former high-school students for setting me an inspiring example of academic perseverance in the face of daunting circumstances which were often hidden or invisible to others. Ivan Bradford and Whittani Bullock, you are capable of doing great things, and I would like to share my success with you in acknowledgment of that. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS...............................................................................................................ii ABSTRACT....................................................................................................................................iv CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION: QUEER REPRODUCTION IN VICTORIAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE......................................................................................................1 2. QUEER TEMPORALITY AND CHILD DEATH IN THE NOVELS OF THOMAS HARDY................................................................................................30 3. MATRILINEAL VAMPIRISM IN VICTORIAN FICTION AND POETRY................62 4. “SUPERBLY STERILE:” REPRODUCTION IN OSCAR WILDE...........................106 5. CONCLUSION............................................................................................................138 BIBLIOGRAPHY........................................................................................................................148 VITA............................................................................................................................................161 iii ABSTRACT Examining a broad range of texts,“‘Superbly Sterile:’ Queer Reproduction in Victorian Literature and Culture,” argues that Thomas Hardy’s final naturalist novels, popular nineteenth- century vampire narratives, and the fiction of Oscar Wilde queered the bildungsroman (or novel of development) through characters who failed or refused to progress along sexual and maturational timelines. Where these texts’ critics have tended to read them as cautionary tales about homosexuality or predatory female sexuality, this dissertation contends that they also presented alternate forms of kinship and reproduction. They do so through the use of recursive, inverted, or otherwise backward relationships to time. Where Victorian sexology and psychology consistently pathologized temporal backwardness,“‘Superbly Sterile:’ Queer Reproduction in Victorian Literature and Culture” argues that these texts recuperate non-linear, recursive temporality in order to consider the ways in which it might sustain new modes of kinship and reproduction. These include the consanguineous-sexual bonds of vampire fiction; the historical kinship espoused in Hardy’s novels; and art’s status as a lasting product of homoerotic attraction in Wilde’s fiction. Along with queer theory, this project also places these narratives in the context of Victorian sexology, situating them within the work of Havelock Ellis, Carl Vogt, Otto Weininger, Max Nordau and other theorists who described both queer and female sexuality in terms of temporal recursiveness, arguing that both Hardy’s and Wilde’s fiction adapts the terms of this rhetoric in order to resist its often pathologizing and limiting effects. The chapter on Oscar Wilde’s fiction relies on the concept of jouissance, a shattering disruption of the dichotomies separating pleasure from pain, self from other, and life from death, constituting a transformative experience that defines queer, death-driven sexuality, in order to contend that in Wilde’s fiction privileges a death-driven male-homoerotic form of aesthetic reproduction over the more banal, bodily kinship iv and procreative bonds offered by women. The third chapter focuses on maternal vampires, arguing that these characters espouse a form of single-gender kinship, one which blurs the lines between consanguineous and sexual relationships, and which offers eternal life through a perverse return to the pathologized female body. v 1. INTRODUCTION: QUEER REPRODUCTION IN VICTORIAN LITERATURE AND CULTURE He used to wonder at the shallow psychology of those who conceive the Ego in man as a thing simple, permanent, reliable, and of one essence. To him, man was a being with myriad lives and myriad sensations, a complex multiform creature that bore within itself strange legacies of passion, and whose very flesh was tainted with the monstrous maladies of the dead. He loved to stroll through the gaunt cold picture-gallery of his country-house and look at the various portraits of those whose blood flowed in his veins. Here was Philip Herbert, described by Francis Osborne, in his “Memoires on the Reigns of Queen Elizabeth and King James,” as one who was “caressed by the court for his handsome face, which kept him not long company.” Was it young Herbert’s life that he sometimes led? Had some strange poisonous germ crept from body to body til it had reached his own? Was it some dim sense of that ruined grace that had made him so suddenly, and utterly without cause, give utterance in Basil Hallward’s studio, to that mad prayer which had so changed his life? (The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde 122) This passage from The Picture of Dorian Gray contains, in brief, this novel’s philosophy of subjectivity, kinship, and reproduction. Dorian begins by pondering the falsity of models of selfhood construing identity as stable, unchanging, and singular, and goes on to suggest that identity is, instead, manifold. He cannot be limited to one life, one type of sensation, or even one physical form. This is partly an issue of inheritance, as this “multiform,” chameleonic quality is ascribed to “legacies of passion,” inherited dispositions or desires. It is at this moment, as these inherited passions are introduced, that the tone turns dark: The legacies are “strange,” Dorian’s flesh “tainted … monstrous” and sick. He identifies the source of this polluting illness in ancestral portraits of relatives who are deceased, but whose blood flows in his own body, so that portraiture becomes the link through which consanguinity is established or confirmed. Consanguinity is not, however, the only presumable biological link between Dorian and his ancestor, as Dorian also considers their relationship one of pathological contagion, via a creeping “germ” which moves from “body to body.” Finally, he wonders if this germ is responsible for the “mad prayer” which helps create his mystical relationship to the portrait which Basil Hallward paints of him. 1 Though they seem to defy the laws of nature and psychology, Dorian’s musings directly reflect and respond to the preoccupations, anxieties, and tenets of late-Victorian culture. As heir to a form of heredity-as-contagion which determines his desires, Dorian enacts the quandary of evolutionary devolution and its
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