Durham E-Theses Music and the Queer Body in Fin-de-Siècle Literature RIDDELL, FRASER,IAN How to cite: RIDDELL, FRASER,IAN (2018) Music and the Queer Body in Fin-de-Siècle Literature, Durham theses, Durham University. Available at Durham E-Theses Online: http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/12622/ Use policy The full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that: • a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in Durham E-Theses • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders. Please consult the full Durham E-Theses policy for further details. Academic Support Oce, Durham University, University Oce, Old Elvet, Durham DH1 3HP e-mail: [email protected] Tel: +44 0191 334 6107 http://etheses.dur.ac.uk Music and the Queer Body in Fin-de-Siècle Literature Fraser Ian Riddell This thesis examines the significance of the body in queer fin-de-siècle representations of music. It offers important new ways of thinking about how music challenges foundational accounts of identity, how music is recruited to psychic fantasies of masochistic self-divestiture, and how music acts to position queer bodies in both time and space. It draws attention to modes of queer musical consumption that are often unsettling or problematic, in order to move beyond critical accounts that focus solely on heroic queer self-assertion or the emancipatory potential of music. By charting ways in which marginalized subjects experience music in terms of shame and loss, it prompts enquiry into a broader range of embodied responses to music. Chapter 1 investigates the significance of music, the body and emotionalism in fin-de-siècle sexological writings and in debates in Victorian musical aesthetics. Drawing upon the work of Leo Bersani, Chapter 2 examines the association between music and masochism in texts by Vernon Lee, Walter Pater, and Arthur Symons. Chapter 3 focusses on the writings of John Addington Symonds, examining representations of the voice of the chorister in late-Victorian literature. Chapter 4 considers the significance of embodied tactile encounters between musicians, listeners, and musical instruments in texts by E. M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, Vernon Lee and others. It demonstrates how interactions between instruments and bodies allow for the emergence of new queer experiences of space. Chapter 5 investigates texts by Robert Browning, E. F. Benson, and others, in which music subjects bodies to temporal flux or dislocation. By reading such texts in the light of both Victorian evolutionary thought and contemporary theory’s concern with ‘queer temporalities’, the chapter demonstrates the significance of those tropes of retrogression that attach to embodied experiences of music. Music and the Queer Body in Fin-de-Siècle Literature Fraser Ian Riddell Doctor of Philosophy Department of English Studies Durham University 2017 CONTENTS Acknowledgements iii Introduction 1 Chapter 1 Contexts: Music, Emotion and the Homosexual Subject 25 Chapter 2 Music, Masochism and the Queer Body 67 Chapter 3 Disembodied Voices: The Victorian Chorister and 129 Pederastic Listening Chapter 4 Music, Touch and Queer Embodiments 177 Chapter 5 The Queer Body in Time: Backwards Listening 224 Conclusion 256 Bibliography 262 STATEMENT OF COPYRIGHT The copyright of this thesis rests with the author. No quotation from it should be published without the author's prior written consent and information derived from it should be acknowledged. i ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The project was generously funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (Northern Bridge Research Consortium), with other financial support for research activities provided by the Department of English Studies, Durham University and the Leverhulme Trust. I would like to express my heartfelt thanks to the many people who made the completion of this thesis possible, and without whose help the process would have been much more arduous and much less enjoyable. Firstly, I would like to thank Professor Simon James for his guidance and encouragement throughout the project, and Dr David Ashurst for many stimulating conversations that assisted me in developing my ideas. I would particularly like to acknowledge the vibrant scholarly community fostered at Durham University by the Centre for Nineteenth- Century Studies and the Centre for Medical Humanities, both of which provided opportunities to consider my work from new perspectives. I also owe a particular debt of gratitude to Professor David Fuller and Professor Corinne Saunders for their continual friendship, mentorship and support over many years. This thesis would not have been possible without the assistance of a number of helpful and knowledgeable librarians and archivists. I would like to thank, in particular, Alyson Price of the British Institute in Florence, and the staff of Durham University Library, the British Library, the Bodleian Library and the National Library of Scotland. I would like to offer special thanks to all those family, friends and colleagues whose kindness, enthusiasm and wisdom proved a constant inspiration. Finally, thanks to Tom, for enduring a hundred indecisions. iii iv INTRODUCTION On 18 June 1864, John Addington Symonds was at a concert at the St James’s Hall in London. The New Philharmonic Society, conducted by Dr Henry Wylde, performed a programme that included Carl Maria von Weber’s Konzertstück in F minor for Piano and Orchestra, Op. 79, Ludwig Spohr’s ‘Dramatic’ Concerto No. 8 in A minor for Violin and Orchestra, Op. 47, and Overtures by Mendelssohn and Rossini.1 The concert culminated with a rendition of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 in C minor, Op. 67. Symonds recounted his experience of Beethoven’s music to a friend the following day: Every nerve seems as if it had been stripped of its integument & opened to the world […] It is no exaggeration when I say that every note found a place here—in my heart. I was so weak and sensitive that he played upon me as an instrument. I never so heard music before & I was obliged to leave the concert.2 Three days earlier, Symonds had attended the home of the noted genito-urinary surgeon, William Acton. As Symonds was to recall some years later in his Memoirs (1893), he was at this time suffering from a debilitating ‘nervous malady’, which was ‘expressed by a terrible disturbance of the reproductive organs’. 3 Acton performed upon Symonds a procedure that he prescribed for all those suffering from what he called ‘spermatorrhea’ — the involuntary emission of semen: cauterization through the urethra. As described in detail in Acton’s The Functions and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs (1857), the procedure involved inserting a syringe ‘down to the veru-montanum’ and injecting into it a solution of ‘nitrate of silver’. This ‘caustic’, Acton suggests, acts to ‘modify the local condition’ of the ejaculatory duct and allows the ‘patient [to] succeed in obtaining a control over the will which he never had before’: ‘the morbid irritability of the 1 The Musical World, 42 (18 June 1864), 386. 2 John Addington Symonds, Letter to Henry Graham Dakyns, in The Letters of John Addington Symonds, ed. by Herbert M. Schueller and Robert L. Peters, 3 vols (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1967–69), I, 481 (19 June 1864). 3 John Addington Symonds, The Memoirs of John Addington Symonds: A Critical Edition, ed. by Amber K. Regis (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), p. 256. 1 canal disappears — the emissions cease, and the health improves’. 4 Perhaps unsurprisingly, this did little to improve Symonds’s fragile health. Writing many years later, it is clear to Symonds that his ‘malady’ was the result of his inability to ‘indulge [his] sexual instincts’. In seeking out such treatment, Symonds reflects, he ‘did everything, in short, except what nature prompted’. 5 Following the procedure, Symonds felt both humiliated and acutely embarrassed. On the day he attended Acton’s surgery, he wrote to his closest friend, Henry Graham Dakyns, referring allusively to the treatment he had just endured, but insisting that Dakyns should ‘please be kind enough not to mention this even to my most intimate friends’. 6 Symonds’s account of listening to Beethoven is notable in the extent to which it emphasizes the impact of this music on the material body. It is doubly fascinating for the way in which his sense of bodily vulnerability is so closely entangled with the embarrassment and shame that attaches to his pathologized same-sex desire. He appeals to the language of physiology — ‘nerves’, ‘integuments’ — to evoke the extent to which the force of this music has rendered his body passive, exposed and vulnerable. The notes of Beethoven’s music are figured as the aggressively piercing and intrusive arrows of Cupid’s bow, hitting their target in the depths of Symonds’s desiring heart. This ‘weak and sensitive’ body, painfully receptive to the emotional force of Beethoven’s music, has been rendered so by a humiliating medical procedure designed to eliminate his queer sexual desires. In English literary texts of the fin de siècle, music is endowed by writers with a queer agency that acts to make and unmake the material body. Music brings some queer bodies into contact, whilst placing others out of reach. Music indulges queer fantasies of disembodiment, whilst leaving other bodies burning with shame. Music places some queer bodies out of temporal sequence, whilst drawing others into an affirmative future. This thesis explores these trends through stimulating new readings of texts by authors who have been central to 4 William Acton, The Functions and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs (London: Churchill, 1875), p.