Kristin Mahoney’s Queer Kinship after Wilde opens in the archive by perusing a family photo album now housed in the Beinecke Library. Rather than the heteronormative artifact one might expect, it is a memento of Faith and Compton Mackenzie’s years on Capri in the second decade of the twentieth century, when that small Italian island became a haven for expatriates searching for relief from the relatively strict sexual mores and laws of Britain. Yet Mahoney insists that it is still a family album; it chronicles distinctly queer negotiations with family structures in a search for an alternative kinship that would provide support and relationality for those discontented with traditional families. It thus offers a model for Mahoney’s project: the construction of queer families in the early twentieth century. But in addition to simply tracing examples, Mahoney also subjects them to ethical critique by pointing out how they often participate in exoticizing sexual and cultural others. Moreover, by beginning with Vyvyan Holland tying together the ruins of his relationship with his father, Oscar Wilde, and ending with Eric Gill’s outright abusive sexual relationships with his in-laws, children, and even pets, Mahoney implies quite a bit about how wide a deviance she’s considering and how carefully a scholar needs to reconsider merely celebrating the queer as its own ethical justification.
Mahoney is also taking up the long life of Decadence. I am tempted to refer to this as the afterlife of Wilde, but more than Wilde is at stake here. While many modernist writers consciously distanced themselves from the 1890s, this book concerns those who maintained a continuity with fin-de-siècle writers. It thus works against a hard break between the Victorian and the modern. Certainly Mahoney is not alone in this project, but it is worth comment that late Victorian cultural Decadence was a positive inspiration for many intellectuals of the modernist period, especially those who sought to create space for sexually dissident ways of living and working. Along with specifically sexual liberation, however, came the associated values of cosmopolitanism: Wilde’s extended forays in France and Italy, even before his prison sentence and practical banishment from the U.K., stand as a precedent here. Yet just as often as cosmopolitanism can lead to wider cultural horizons, it can also result in Orientalizing fetishization.
Following the introduction, Mahoney divides her book into three parts of two chapters each. Chapter 1 traces the literary career of Vyvyan Holland, Oscar Wilde’s younger son, through his early enforced estrangement from his father to his later reclamation of a family through his father’s literary circle. Mahoney portrays this as a trajectory from the loneliness imposed by his biological family to a much more welcoming and fulfilling family consisting of literarily minded men for whom same-sex desire was a central tenet. Although Holland himself seems never to have participated in queer sexual relationships, he nonetheless found an alternate kinship with his father’s queer circle. Holland became a bibliophile and translator, focusing on bringing the works of queer French novelists into English, Julien Green being a special favorite. Mahoney presents Holland as cultivating a sexually tolerant cosmopolitanism in these efforts and thus of establishing kinship with his father’s similar efforts.
Chapter 2 considers Laurence and Clemence Housman, the younger brother and sister of the poet A. E. Housman. Laurence and Clemence formed a life-long partnership dedicated to sexual reform toward homosexual, feminist, and pacifist ends. Inspired by the spirit of the 1890s, Laurence’s literary creations included both nonfiction essays that posited a theory of sexual feeling as a basis for all social cohesion and a series of fairy tales working out similar themes and clearly indebted to Wilde’s earlier efforts in this genre. The siblings’ close relationship replicated the traditional matrimonial household but without the specter of reproduction. Mahoney nonetheless allows for difference between the siblings, despite the apparent unanimity of their partnership, as Laurence’s work seems much more open to alternative roles of the feminine while Clemence’s often features an anti-sexual streak in which female sexual desire needs to be corralled back into sibling relationships. Eventually, Laurence’s feminist work led him to the cause of Indian political independence. The chapter ends with Laurence becoming his older brother’s literary executor and carefully guiding Alfred’s conservative and thoroughly closeted persona into the siblings’ much more activist narrative.
Chapter 3 returns to the Capri of the book’s introduction. Mahoney traces the careers of Faith and Compton Mackenzie, a married couple who experimented with a bi-sexually open marriage on the famously bohemian Italian island. Capri is constructed as a uniquely liminal space with roots in the 1890s that offers a vision of a future free from British morality and sexual legislation. And it is also here where Mahoney’s ethical critique of early-twentieth century queer cosmopolitanism begins to make itself felt. In addition to the rather obvious fact that the freedom of Capri was open only to those with the money and leisure to make their homes there, the expatriate community largely indulged in fetishizing and exoticizing the landscape and its people, resulting in an Orientalization of its culture. Mahoney offers careful readings of Compton’s novels and Faith’s diaries from the period, and the latter testify to a change in the island’s culture around the end of the First World War when an unapologetic lesbian contingent began to take over from the lingering fin-de-siècle male dandies. Faith became romantically involved with several women, and Mahoney interprets these relationships as evidence both of growing sexual tolerance and of a cosmopolitanism that valued stereotypes of “native” Mediterranean culture, especially its putative expressiveness and over-emotionality. Compton’s most popular writing, however, was written after the couple had left Capri: Vestal Fire and Extraordinary Women are profoundly ambivalent about the queer culture they represent by constantly fluctuating between celebration and satire. Mahoney also offers illustrations from Faith’s “improved copy” of Vestal Fire, which included photographs explicitly identifying the various characters and their non-fiction counterparts. Mahoney portrays Extraordinary Women as overall more satire than celebration, indicating a soured final note on the Capri experience, while Faith was far more consistent in her continued fond memories of her time there.
Chapter 4 considers Harold Acton’s career, culminating in his immersion in Chinese culture. Acton’s construction of the Modern Chinese Poetry anthology and his relationship with co-editor Chen Shixiang strive to avoid the pitfalls of an Orientalizing cosmopolitanism. Acton’s self-criticism reaches its peak with his novel Peonies and Ponies, a searching interrogation of his own cultural motives and limitations in his attempts at transnationalism.
The fifth chapter takes up Richard Bruce Nugent’s unpublished “Geisha Man,” a product of the late Harlem Renaissance that Mahoney reads as a revision of Wilde’s Salome in which Nugent could explore resonances of Orientalist Decadence in U.S. constructions and consumptions of Blackness. Nugent’s text indulges in a kind of free-form racial alterity wherein cross-generational incest fantasies function as figures for a deep, and deeply conflicted, queer desire for kin. Incest is much less figural in the final chapter, which confronts how Eric Gill’s queer Catholicism and Orientalist Decadence began in sexual and communal experimentation and ended with outright abuse. Rather than a queer artistic utopia in which such binaries as East and West and the sacred and the erotic were juxtaposed and reconciled, Gill’s artistic colony became the patriarchal family redux, ruled by a central male artist for his own gratification.
Mahoney covers a lot of cultural ground here and does it remarkably well. The archival work is thorough, yet the book never reads as simply a collection of quotations from letters and diaries. She offers adept readings of literary texts, visual arts, and nonfiction accounts. She expands the reach and importance of late nineteenth-century Decadence by reading its trace as something more than a mere cultural hangover; in her selections we discover a vibrant, if sometimes exploitative, tradition that echoes well past the death of Wilde. Moreover, her emphasis on the formation of non-standard families registers the cultural possibilities of opening up traditional kinship formations to queer reconstruction and reappropriation. The combination of these two elements results in an insightful and telling account of early twentieth-century cultures.
University of California Press