Victorian Sages

Darwin and the Memory of the Human: Evolution, Savages, and South America by Cannon Schmitt. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Pp. 260, 5 illustrations.$90.00 cloth.

‘A Girl's Love’: Lord Alfred Douglas as Homoerotic Muse in the Poetry of Olive Custance

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Women: a Cultural Review on 15/09/2011, available online: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09574042.2011.585045.This article explores the relationship between the poet Olive Custance and her husband Lord Alfred Douglas, arguing that Custance constructed Douglas as a male muse figure in her poetry, particularly the sequence ‘Songs of a Fairy Princess’ (Rainbows 1902). The introduction sets out Custance's problematic historical positioning as a ‘decadent’ poet who published nothing following the Great War, but whose work came too late to fit into strictly ‘fin de siècle’ categories. I suggest, however, that Custance's oscillating constructions of gender and sexuality make her more relevant to the concerns of modernity than has previously been acknowledged and her work anticipates what is now termed ‘queer’. The first main section of the article traces the cultural background of the fin de siècle male muse, arguing that Custance's key influences—male homoerotic writers such as Wilde and Pater—meant it was logical that she should imagine the muse as male, despite the problems associated with gender-reversals of the muse-poet relationship which have been identified by several feminist critics. I then move on to focus specifically on how Shakespearean discourses of gender performance and cross-dressing played a key role in Custance and Douglas's courtship, as they exchanged the fluid roles of ‘Prince’, ‘Princess’ and ‘Page’. The penultimate section of the article focuses on discourses of fairy tale and fantasia in Custance's ‘Songs of a Fairy Princess’ sequence, in which these fantasy roles contribute to a construction of Douglas as a feminised object, and the relationship between the ‘Prince’ and ‘Princess’ is described in terms of narcissistic sameness. My paper concludes by tracing the demise of Custance and Douglas's relationship; as Douglas attempted to be more ‘manly’, he sought to escape the role of object, resulting in Custance losing her male muse. But her sexually-dissident constructions of the male muse remain important experiments worthy of critical attention

What Does It Mean To Periodize a Theory? Three Feminist Encounters with Theories of the Nineteenth Century

Victorian anthropology of marriage was both an object of twentieth- and twenty-first-century feminist scholarship and an antecedent of the feminist theories that informed that scholarship. This essay considers three different feminist approaches to nineteenth-century theories about sexual and social relations. Rosalind Coward (1983), Talia Schaffer (2017), and Elizabeth Grosz (2011) present us with three very different ways of thinking about the relationship between present and past theories about sexual and social relations. Their readings of Victorians like Henry Maine, John McLennan, Lewis Henry Morgan, and Charles Darwin complicate the question of what it means for a theory to be “from” or “about” the nineteenth century, and of what it means to historicize theory and theorize history

Hidden Meaning: Andrew Lang, H. Rider Haggard, Sigmund Freud, and Interpretation

This essay examines the role Andrew Lang played in the circulation of ideas within and among the fields of anthropology, literature, and psychoanalysis in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Lang popularized anthropologist Edward Tylor’s theories about myth, and championed them against those of the philologist Max Müller. He provided the occasion for novelist H. Rider Haggard’s engagement with these ideas in the novel She, which Haggard dedicated to him, and he drew upon these theories of myth in essays that explain the value of Haggard’s novels. Finally, both Haggard’s novel and Lang’s anthropological writing shaped the work of Sigmund Freud. Attention to Lang’s role as a transmitter of the ideas of others across genres and disciplines allows us to see how central the problem of interpretation was to the disciplinary formation of anthropology, literature, and psychoanalysis