Dangerous Discourse: Language and Sex Between

DANGEROUS DISCOURSE: LANGUAGE AND SEX BETWEEN MEN IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY LONDON by KENNETH W. MCGRAW Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements For the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Dissertation Adviser: Christopher Flint Department of English CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY August, 2009 CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF GRADUATE STUDIES We hereby approve the thesis/dissertation of ______________________________________________________ candidate for the ________________________________degree *. (signed)_______________________________________________ (chair of the committee) ________________________________________________ ________________________________________________ ________________________________________________ ________________________________________________ ________________________________________________ (date) _______________________ *We also certify that written approval has been obtained for any proprietary material contained therein. DEDICATION For my wife, Joyce, and for everyone on the fourth floor, I could not have done it without you. TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………. 2 Abstract………………………………………………………………………… 3 Introduction…………………………………………………………………….. 5 Chapter I: “An Indecent Posture”: Legal Discourse and the Sodomitical 30 Assault on Eighteenth-Century England……………………………….. Chapter II: Botanical Bodies, Unnatural Predilections: Nature and Sex 61 Between Men in the Eighteenth Century……………………………….. Chapter III: Mapping the Molly: (Re)Defining Homosexual Space at the 100 Metropolitan Margins…………………………………………………… Chapter IV: Peephole Politics: Keyholes and Liminal Sexuality in the 135 Eighteenth Century……………………………………………………… Conclusion………………………………………………………………………. 168 Bibliography..…………………………………………………………….……… 199 1 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am indebted to my dissertation committee, Heather Meakin, Kimberly Emmons, and Sandra Russ for their willingness to sit on my committee and their support throughout the process. I am particularly grateful to Chris Flint who, as an “ornery advisor,” never let me relax and always pushed me to improve my writing. His attention to detail and professional advice helped me become a better writer, a more succinct thinker, and a better teacher. I would also like to thank the entire English Department and Case Western Reserve University for their constant support and encouragement through the process. I am further grateful to Tom Bishop and Kurt Koenigsberger for their support, guidance, and professional example. An extended thanks to Heather Meakin without whom this would not have been possible. I am, of course, extremely grateful to the master’s and doctoral candidates I had the pleasure of knowing during my time at Case. A special thanks to Barbara Burgess- Van Aken for the encouragement and inspiration she provided throughout my time at Case Western Reserve University. I am particular grateful to Paul Neel, Daniel Anderson, and Wells Addington for the amusing diversions they provided throughout this process. I must also thank my family, especially my mother, Tina McGraw, who read portions of this project and asked particularly grueling questions. Thanks to my father, Ken McGraw, my sister, Kelly McGraw and my brother, Frank McGraw, for their unwavering belief in my ability to complete this project. To my wife, Joyce, there is little I can say to reflect my sincere love and gratitude. Thank you. 2 Dangerous Discourse: Language and Sex between Men In Eighteenth-Century London Abstract by KENNETH W. MCGRAW “Dangerous Discourse: Language and Sex between Men in Eighteenth-Century London” explores the intricate and often overlooked intersection of three distinct discourses on sodomy in early eighteenth-century London. For most authors of the period, whether Grub Street hacks or Neo-Classical practitioners, the “emerging” homosexual1 sub-culture (a term not used until the nineteenth-century) was a blight that infected both the metropole and the country. They shared with common culture a disgust with the sodomitical underground calling the practice a “disease,” a “plague,” an “unnatural vice,” and the “sin not to be named.” These, and a host of other monikers, clearly reflect the cultural homophobia of the early eighteenth century. Unlike other scholars interested in the sodomitical “problem,” my project is not predominantly sociological. Instead, I investigate the discourse used to condemn sodomites in the legal system, in the mass of botanical erotica in the early half of the century that responded to the sodomitical practices infecting the country, and in the language used to mark out the urban “space” assumed by the sodomite. In the above trio of loci I investigate, a discourse on sex between men emerges that, while consistently aggressive in its injunction and violent in its punishment, also 3 aligns the discourse on hetero- and homosexual activities. This discursive congruence positions the discourse on sodomy as one concerned with sex between men and the situation of the accused in the urban labor market, the family, and civic duty. We see in specific texts, coded discourse that is highly concerned with both the public and private spaces sodomites assumed in the period. The discursive and physical spaces occupied by sodomites of the period, whether explored or renounced, oftentimes demonstrate a distinct intersection between hetero- and homosexuality that places the sodomite on a sexual continuum instead of at the sexual margins. 4 INTRODUCTION In response to the October, 1707 convictions of numerous sodomites, Daniel Defoe was compelled by “a great number of newspaper reports” to respond to the open and public disciplining of sodomy. In his political periodical A Review of the State of the British Nation, Defoe hopes that Britain can “imitate the Dutch in one thing, who in such Cases make both the Trials and Punishments of such Sort of Criminals, to be done with all the Privacy possible that may consist with Justice.”2 While Defoe shares with his contemporaries an acute disapproval of sodomy, terming it a “Sort of Bestiality” and a “nauseous Subject,” he attends more precisely to the system of publicly disciplining convicted sodomites and the consequences of public association with sodomitical activity. For Defoe, the public disciplining of sodomites was itself an affront to nature and provided spectators the opportunity to indulge in “immodest and obscene expressions” and “gratifie the corrupted Appetites of the Vicious.” While the “modern Sodomites” were “hellish Creatures” it was their publication, their infiltration into public life that outraged Defoe. Defoe was not only concerned with “sodomitical space,” but was also discouraged by the sheer amount of text that was being produced about sodomites. Later in The Review, Defoe reflects on the publication of the trial against Captain Rigby and the types of cultural responses it elicited: And what was the End of such a Publication? I know not what might be the Design, but I know, the Consequences were two fold. 1. Good Men abominated it equally with the Fact, blushed for our Magistracy that suffer’d it, and loathed the Sight of it. 5 2. The vicious, debauch’d Youth made Sport at it, and glutted their vile Inclinations with a double Pleasure; 1st. That of reading it, and 2dly. seeing it – A publick thing, as if that justify’d the debauching their Tongues with the beastly Dialect. (The Review) For Defoe, sodomy was not only an individual and cultural illness, but also an ideological disease that infected any who came into contact with it—no matter how violently they opposed and attacked it. By publicly announcing the need for a private solution to a public disgrace, Defoe exposes the contradictory assumptions underlying the treatment of sexual crimes in the period between the Glorious Revolution and the mid-eighteenth century. Analyzing the kind of verbal strategies underlying Defoe’s language, this project addresses the formation of “sodomitical space” in the early part of the eighteenth century. I contend that in the first part of the long eighteenth century there erupted a distinct discourse on the sodomitical subculture and that this discourse, in its desire to punish and silence pre-emergent homosexuality unexpectedly produced a distinct discourse and created a new knowledge base for its readers. The sodomite existed prior to the early eighteenth century, but it was the proliferation of textual embodiments that made him visible to the reading public. This visibility, at the levels of both text and violent public punishment, made writing about the sodomite possible, but, more importantly, allowed the reading public to “know” the sodomite, categorize his actions and contribute to his swift and violent punishment. Although not centrally concerned with homosexual identity, i.e the individual’s awareness of both a gay sexual orientation and a group affiliation, this project interrogates the distinction between the sodomite and the molly—the common term for a transvestite—to argue that, while there was not a fortified homosexual identity in the early half of the century, the molly social type did constitute a sexual social type that was 6 quite different than the sodomite of the same period. The molly, while signaling no form of group solidarity or partisan politics, may have been a step in the construction of a homosexual identity in the nineteenth century. This project is not, however, about what men did in bed together, what they did in the cruising grounds, in the cottages or in the corners

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