Exquisite Materials: Episodes in the Queer History of Victorian Style

By Abigail Joseph

Exquisite Materials explores the connections between gay subjects, material objects, and the social and aesthetic landscapes in which they circulated. Each of the book’s four chapters takes up as a case study a figure or set of figures whose life and work dramatize different aspects of the unique queer relationship to materiality and style. These diverse episodes converge around the contention that paying attention to the multitudinous objects of the Victorian world-and to the social practices surrounding them-reveals the boundaries and influences of queer forms of identity and aesthetic sensibility that emerged in the mid-nineteenth century and have remained recognizable up to our own moment. In the cases that author Abigail Joseph examines, objects become unexpected sites of queer community and desire.

Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Delaware Press
• Release date: Nov 8, 2019
• ISBN: 9781644531709

Book preview

EXQUISITE

MATERIALS

EPISODES IN THE QUEER HISTORY

OF VICTORIAN STYLE

Abigail Joseph

UNIVERSITY OF DELAWARE PRESS

Newark

Distributed by the University of Virginia Press

University of Delaware Press

© 2019 by Abigail Joseph

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

First published 2019

ISBN 978-1-64453-168-6 (cloth)

ISBN 978-1-64453-169-3 (paper)

ISBN 978-1-64453-170-9 (e-book)

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available for this title.

Cover art: Fanny Park and Stella Boulton c. 1870.

(Reproduced by courtesy of the Essex Record Office)

For Robert and Esther

CONTENTS

List of Figures

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Victorian Objects and Queer Attachments

1 · Dress and Drag around 1870

2 · Jane Furneaux and the Social Lives of Fraud

3 · Charles Worth and the Queer Effects of Haute Couture

4 · Oscar Wilde and the Trials of Transmission

Coda: Material Memory

Notes

References

Index

FIGURES

1. Capture of Men in Women’s Clothes

2. Scene in the Private Box

3. Ball Toilets

4. Evening Toilets

5. Men in Women’s Clothes—The Dressing Room

6. The crinoline silhouette at its height

7. Modes de Paris fashion plate showing dresses with trains

8. Promenade Toilets featuring tournures and bunched skirts

9. Portrait of Ernest/Stella Boulton in walking costume, c. 1869

10. Photograph of Frederick/Fanny Park in walking costume, c. 1869

11. Fanny and Stella at the police station, depicted on the cover of a broadsheet

12. Fashion plate showing a Robe bouffante, gonflement, or with pouffs

13. Dress and the Lady

14. The bustle as a snail

15. Mr. Punch’s Designs After Nature: The bustle as a beetle

16. Photograph of Frederick/Fanny Park, Ernest/Stella Boulton, and Lord Arthur Clinton, c. 1869

17. Detail from Romance of the Champion Adventuress, showing Jane Furneaux in the Dock

18. Detail from Romance of the Champion Adventuress, showing Miss Fearneaux as Lord Arthur Clinton

19. A fitting at Maison Worth, as illustrated in George Sala’s Paris Herself Again in 1878–79

20. Portrait of Charles Worth in his artist’s costume.

21. Princess Pauline von Metternich

22. House of Worth ball gowns, c. 1892

23. The Rainbow Portrait of Queen Elizabeth I, attributed to Isaac Oliver, c. 1600–1602

24. J. P. Worth as the Shah of Persia, employing the famous stuff with eyes and ears

25. Letter from Oscar Wilde to Robert Ross, April or May 1892

26. The ninth folio sheet from the manuscript of De Profundis , including the history of that letter passage

27. Letter from Oscar Wilde to Lord Alfred Douglas, September 1897

28. Lord Alfred Douglas in 1894

29. Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas, May 1893

30. Letter from Oscar Wilde to Lord Alfred Douglas, June 1897

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I began this book in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. I am grateful for the lively, sympathetic, and rigorous support that I received from my mentors and colleagues there, especially Sharon Marcus, Nicholas Dames, Jenny Davidson, and members of the 19th Century Colloquium. I am also grateful for the financial support provided by the Marjorie Hope Nicolson Fellowship and several Mellon Summer Research Fellowships. Friendships with Christine Varnado, Armando Mastrogiovanni, Musa Gurnis, Atticus Zavaletta, and Alice Boone nourished this project in its early stages. Comments from Eileen Gillooly and David Kurnick were essential in guiding my revisions.

Parts of this book have been published in article form in Victorian Studies (Winter 2014) and the collection Crossings in Texts and Textile (University Press of New England, 2015), edited by Daneen Wardrop and Katherine Joslin. Feedback from Ivan Kreilkamp at Victorian Studies, as well as from a number of peer reviewers, helped bring nuance and clarity to parts of the manuscript. I owe a particular debt to Daneen and Katherine, who have been advocates of my work throughout the years it has taken to see this book to publication, as well as to Richard Pult at the University Press of New England, whose support helped it reach its home at Delaware. I have also presented sections of this work at several conferences, including meetings of the MLA GL/Q Caucus, the American Comparative Literature Association, Performance Studies International, the North American Victorian Studies Association (NAVSA), the Northeast Victorian Studies Association (NVSA), and a conference on Oscar Wilde at the Centre Culturel Irlandais in Paris. I am grateful for the generous reception and helpful questions and comments that my work received at these events, and I have especially treasured the camaraderie and intellectual spirit of NVSA gatherings.

Julia Oestreich at the University of Delaware Press has been a wonderfully attentive editor. I am grateful to her and the rest of the editorial and production staff at Delaware and at the University of Virginia Press, especially Tim Roberts, as well as the Board of Editors. I owe great thanks to Jenn Backer for her exceptional work as copy editor, and to Mary Newberry and Lisa Fedorak for creating an excellent index. Several peer reviewers were tremendously helpful in revising and refining the manuscript. Particular thanks are owed to Adrienne Munich for her invaluable comments, support, and encouragement.

I benefited greatly from six weeks in the summer of 2012 spent in the company of other Victorianist and queer scholars at the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library in Los Angeles, taking part in a National Endowment for the Humanities seminar on Oscar Wilde. Friendships with the colleagues I met there continue to bring me personal and intellectual joy. The seminar was led by Joseph Bristow, whose knowledge of Wilde is as unparalleled as his generosity as a mentor, and I am grateful for his ongoing support of and interest in my work. I was also fortunate to return to the Clark as a fellow in the summer of 2014, when I completed my research on Wilde’s letters and editorial work. I’m grateful for the assistance of the staff there, especially Scott Jacobs.

I am fortunate to be part of a lively community of scholars, writers, and teachers in the Expository Writing Program (EWP) at New York University. Conversations with colleagues as well as students there have been a source of inspiration and stimulation over the past several years. I’m especially grateful for close friendships with Doug Dibbern, Jacqueline Reitzes, Katherine Carlson, Tania Friedel, Richard Larson, and Leeore Schnairsohn. Parts of this project received generous reception and feedback from the Scholarly Writing Group at EWP as well as at several Faculty Readings.

This project has gone through many rounds of writing and revision, and in various stages it has been with me for more than a decade. Much has changed in that time. Some things have remained constant: my gratitude for the teachers who inspired my interest in Victorian literature and queer theory, especially Leah Price and Heather Love; the love and support of my parents, Bill Joseph and Sigrid Bergenstein, and my sisters, Hannah and Rebecca; the delights of long relationships with dear friends, especially Naomi Straus, Michael Murphy, and Christine Varnado, who has also been an invaluable interlocutor, reader, and editor throughout the time I have worked on this book. I would never have begun this project were it not for my admiration of and affection for the queer people and communities I’ve been privileged to know; my hope is that this book adds in its way to the preservation and the appreciation of queer culture and history. Finally, I am grateful above all for the love, companionship, intellectual exchange, and passionate adventures I share with Robert Huddleston. Our fantastic life together has been made even better by our daughter, Esther Iris Katherine, who arrived as this work came to its final stages. She will not remember the efforts that I put into this book, but I hope one day she will find it and investigate it—a queer thing, in which she can recognize something close, and learn something new.

Introduction

Victorian Objects and Queer Attachments

… and as I read through the various descriptions given of him, I saw that the love that Shakespeare bore him was as the love of a musician for some delicate instrument on which he delights to play, as a sculptor’s love for some rare and exquisite material that suggests a new form of plastic beauty, a new mode of plastic expression.

—Oscar Wilde, The Portrait of Mr. W. H. (1889)

—Glaze and shimmer,

luster and gleam,

can’t he think of anything?

But all that sheen?

—No such thing,

the queen said,

as too many sequins.

—Mark Doty, Concerning Some Recent Criticism of His Work (1998)

Near the middle of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, the title character embarks on a collecting-and-decorating spree that is perhaps Victorian literature’s most iconic account of the encounter between a queer man and material things. Influenced by the poisonous book bestowed on him by Lord Henry Wotton, which seemed to him to contain the story of his life, written before he had lived it,¹ Dorian Gray sets out on an aesthetic education. At once emboldened and unsettled by the eternal youth granted him by the portrait that ages in his place, he seeks to construct for himself a world that had been refashioned anew for our pleasure, a world in which things would have fresh shapes and colours, and be changed, or have other secrets.² He devotes himself first to the study of systems of belief (Catholicism, Mysticism), but soon, believing that the senses, no less than the soul, have their spiritual mysteries to reveal, he moves to a series of obsessions with the sensuous and decorative arts: perfumes, then music and musical instruments, then jewels, then embroideries.³ Each new field of attention brings with it paragraphs of increasingly rapturous description. Dorian collects objects, but he also collects histories of objects, and it is there, in these wonderful stories—miniature narratives of romance and violence, fusing fact and myth—that the most fantastic moments arise: "A sea-monster had been enamored of the pearl that the diver brought to King Perseus, and had slain the thief, and mourned for seven moons over its loss. … The favourites of James I. wore earrings of emeralds set in gold filigree. Edward II. gave to Piers Galveston a suit of red-gold armour studded with jacinths, a collar of gold roses set with turquoise-stones, and a skull-cap parsemé with pearls."⁴

The objects and their stories open up for Dorian the vista of an awakened and reimagined past, grippingly alive despite its inherent loss: How exquisite life had once been! How gorgeous in its pomp and decoration! Even to read of the luxury of the dead was wonderful.⁵ Placed by his occult portrait outside of the normal passage of time, Dorian seems aware of both his closeness to and distance from these luxuries of the dead, and he revels in the paradox of conjuring up the presence of objects through lamentations of their absence. This dynamic emerges most fervently in the passage on embroideries:

As he investigated the subject … he was almost saddened by the reflection of the ruin that Time brought on beautiful and wonderful things. … No winter marred his face or stained his flower-like bloom. How different it was with material things! Where had they passed to? Where was the great crocus-coloured robe, on which the gods fought against the giants, that had been worked by brown girls for the pleasure of Athena? Where, the huge valerian that Nero had stretched across the Colosseum at Rome, that Titan sail of purple on which was represented the starry sky, and Apollo driving a chariot drawn by white gilt-reined steeds? He longed to see the curious table-napkins wrought for the Priest of the Sun, on which were displayed all the dainties and viands that could be wanted for a feast.⁶

Readers and critics have longed sensed that there is something queer—something that seems imbued with the energy of dissident sexual desire, even though it does not speak of it directly—about passages like this one. Eve Sedgwick refers, memorably, to "the prodigally extravagant guide to lifestyle, interior decoration, and textiles offered in Dorian Gray’s … Chapter 11. She traces the chapter’s overabundance of loaded adjectives like curious and subtle and secret, suggesting that both the excess of material detail and the evocative language in which it is conjured participate in the novel’s performative work of enabling a European community of gay mutual recognition and self-constitution."⁷ Wayne Koestenbaum, meanwhile, uses the figure of Dorian Gray to ruminate on the association between homosexuality and a particularly intense relation to the accumulation of objects: An old stereotype: the collector, who, like the libertine, has no family, no social ties, no loyalties, no interior. It’s not clear whether Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray obsessively collects exotic musical instruments, jewels, perfumes, embroideries, and ecclesiastical vestments because he’s gay, or whether Wilde tells us about collections because he can’t mention homosexuality. Collecting is a code for homosexual activity and identity.⁸

The project of this book is to explore the histories and pathways of the coded, complicated relationship between homosexuality and material culture, seeking to move beyond the language of stereotype in which it is often ensnared. Each of the book’s four chapters takes up as a case study a figure (or set of figures) whose life and work exemplify a particular version of this relationship: the drag performers Ernest/Stella Boulton and Frederick/Fanny Park; the swindler Jane Furneaux; the fashion designer Charles Frederick Worth; and, finally, Oscar Wilde. Each one of these episodes in the history of Victorian style illustrates some of the rich and peculiar dynamics of interaction between queer individuals, material objects, and the larger landscapes in which they circulated. The stories are distinct and sometimes idiosyncratic in the kinds of text and objects they involve, and in the analytic approaches I take to them. However, they converge around the contention that paying attention to the multitudinous things of the Victorian world, and to the social practices surrounding them, reveals the shapes and influences of queer forms of identity, and their accompanying aesthetic sensibilities, that emerged in the mid-nineteenth century and have remained recognizable up to our own moment.

Dorian in the Woman’s World

It was obvious to early readers and reviewers of Wilde’s novel that Dorian Gray’s poisonous book, and in turn the descriptively overloaded chapter that follows from it, was based at least in part on J. K. Huysman’s A Rebours, the 1884 novel that catalogues the decadent obsessions of the French nobleman Des Esseintes. In Wilde’s 1895 trial this association would lead to a long line of questioning about the influence of this allegedly sodomitical book.⁹ But Joseph Bristow has thoroughly outlined the limits of the degree to which Wilde took Huysman’s novel as the template for his novel. Bristow points out that although "the long Huysmanian description of jewels whose beauty intrigues [Dorian] certainly takes its lead from chapter 4 of A Rebours, Wilde’s actual description of Dorian’s jewelry collection, and the historical-mythological narratives that embellish it, derives, sometimes verbatim, from two other sources: A. H. Church, Precious Stones Considered in their Scientific and Artistic Relations (1886), and William Jones, History and Mystery of Precious Stones (1880)."¹⁰ These handbooks by British historians of the decorative arts are quite far in genre from the avant-garde novel of a French Decadent. Moreover, the passage on Dorian Gray’s collection of embroideries and tapestries, quoted at length above, is heavily indebted to Alan S. Cole’s 1888 English translation of Ernest Lefébure’s History of Embroidery and Lace, with which Wilde was intimately familiar: he had reviewed it in the magazine he edited for two years, the Woman’s World. But Wilde not only referenced and quoted Lefébure’s book, as he did Church’s and Jones’s: he referenced and quoted himself as well. The paragraph in which Dorian recounts the glamours of historical textiles and laments their material demise is in fact lifted almost directly from Wilde’s own review of Embroidery and Lace, which appeared in the December 1888 issue under the title A Fascinating Book.

This was one of many reports on the history of fashion that were published in the Woman’s World throughout Wilde’s term as editor. He had agreed to take over as editor of what was then called the Lady’s World: A Magazine of Fashion and Society with high ambitions for to some extent reconstructing the journal, which he found at present … too feminine, and not sufficiently womanly.¹¹ By this he meant that the focus of the publication was too much on what, adopting a tone of dismissal common in Victorian writing on fashion, he called "the mundus muliebris, the field of mere millinery and trimmings. His journal would take a wider range, as well as a high standpoint, and deal not merely with what women wear, but with what they think, and what they feel.¹² The reconstructed" and retitled publication did indeed stand out from its many competitors in format, range, quality, and depth. Issues featured fiction, poetry, reviews of books and plays, and substantial articles by prominent authors on an array of topics: women’s suffrage, education, and employment; celebrated actresses, singers, and writers; history, travel, politics, folklore, and art history.¹³

Nonetheless, that "mundus muliebris of mere fashion remained at the heart of the journal, but in a unique way that reveals the diverse range of interests and approaches folded within that allegedly frivolous field. The monthly illustrated fashion columns, by Mrs. Johnstone and Violette" reporting from Paris, were still plentifully illustrated and detailed (though now in the back of the magazine rather than the front). But this more conventional mode of coverage now coexisted with a different one: fashion considered not simply as current trends but as a field of real historical and social import. The pages of the Woman’s World are crowded with features on what might be called the politics of fashion—the rational dress movement, fair wages for garment workers—and on its history. Sometimes the historical pieces also take an activist bent: A Treatise on Hoops, Women Wearers of Men’s Clothes.¹⁴ More often, they take the form of elaborately illustrated accounts of the development of a very particular object: Muffs (by Wilde’s wife, Constance), Fans, Scent and Scent-Bottles, Gloves: Old and New, The Umbrella, Head-Dressing, and so forth.¹⁵

It is in this context, as a slightly different entry in this series of highly focused articles on the histories of objects of dress and decoration, that Wilde’s review of Cole’s translation of Lefébure’s History of Embroidery and Lace appears.¹⁶ Wilde approves of Cole’s suggestion that the productions of embroidery should … be placed on the same level with those of painting, engraving, and sculpture, though he reminds readers that there must always be a great difference between those purely decorative arts that glorify their own material, and the more imaginative arts in which the material is, as it were, annihilated, and absorbed into the creation of a new form.¹⁷ A difference, that is, but not necessarily a distinction in worth; indeed, Wilde here seems attuned, as he often does, to the particular power of the arts that glorify their own material and thus engender in the viewer a sense of the living link between aesthetics and materiality, between beauty and embodiment. Summarizing Lefébure, the review outlines the history of embroidery, with repeated attention to its unique situation at the intersection of Western and Oriental, in terms of both design and trade. Halfway through comes the paragraph that will resurface in Dorian Gray: a sort of eulogy, rich in detail and completely unconcerned with the line between myth and history, for the marvellous works of embroidery that were fashioned in bygone ages.¹⁸

The relationship between the review published in a women’s magazine and the controversial novel that appeared (published, originally, in another magazine) two years later is significant not only because of what it tells us about Oscar Wilde’s intellectual influences, his writerly practices, and his much commented-upon habits of reusing his own words and those of others—whether this be considered playfully subversive appropriation or blatant plagiarism.¹⁹ It is also significant because it indicates a direct, literal connection between one of the foundational texts of gay style—not just Dorian Gray itself but, in particular, that eleventh chapter, the prodigally extravagant handbook of gay subcultural taste—and the respectable world of the Victorian women’s periodical. Wilde, as editor, brought to the magazine politically progressive, proto-feminist sensibilities; he also brought to it an investment in dress and decoration as serious fields of historical study and, moreover, as sites of passionately felt transhistorical identification. It is not only the facts of the history of embroidery that are transferred from Woman’s World to Dorian Gray, via Lefébure and Cole. It’s also the devotional attention to the details of production and the mythologies of circulation; the sense of embroidery as locus of exotic cross-cultural exchange, linking East and West; the ornate descriptive style; the tone of overwrought melancholia, of inflamed imagination, in which the lost, shining objects of the past are at once mourned and, in being mourned, reanimated.

Even to read of the marvelous works of embroidery that were fashioned in bygone ages is pleasant, subscribers, most of them women, would have read, in the paragraph that with minimal alterations will be inserted into Dorian Gray.

Time has kept a few fragments of Greek embroidery of the fourth century B.C. for us. … Now and then we find in the tomb of some dead Egyptian a piece of delicate work. … But where is the great crocus-coloured robe that was wrought for Athena, on which the gods fought against the giants? Where is the huge velarium that Nero stretched across the Colosseum at Rome, on which was represented the starry sky, and Apollo driving a chariot drawn by steeds? How one would like to see the curious table-napkins wrought for Heliogabulus.²⁰

Here, in the Woman’s World, these reveries are not filtered through the decadent imagination of a novel’s sexually suspect antihero. Rather, they come from the authorized voice of the magazine’s editor—whose flamboyant persona had, at this point, attracted much caricature but not (yet) sexual suspicion. What this suggests is that the Victorian periodical press, while predominantly a sphere in which the segregation of masculinity and femininity was enforced, was also one where cross-gender engagements could emerge, alongside modes of linguistic play and aesthetic investment that would circulate through gay culture for decades to come. This incident thus points to, and exemplifies, one of the major claims of this book: that the media and commodity landscapes of the nineteenth century were crucial locations not only for production and policing of sex/gender norms but also for the cultivation of the distinctive styles associated with homosexuality—and for the development of complex, unexpected points of contact between the dominant culture and the queer subcultures it contained.

Queer Theories/Thing Theories

The arguments I make in this book depend upon two interrelated assumptions that may also seem, in a sense, to be contradictory. The first is that there are distinctly recognizable forms of gay cultural production, certainly not universal but widely recognizable at least in Europe and America in the twentieth century, and that we can trace the origins or efflorescence of these styles back into the Victorian period. The second is that, in the Victorian period, the forms of interchange and interaction between queer individuals and groups and the culture at large were much more fluid, multidimensional, and widespread than is often recognized. These theses might appear contradictory because the first suggests a model of queerness as distinct from the culture that surrounds it, with its own unique and presumably counternormative shapes and stakes, while the second suggests a model of queerness that blends into and is not always distinguishable from that wider setting. However, through my readings of queer Victorian literary and cultural texts, I hope to show that there is not, in fact, a conflict between these two conceptions and that, moreover, their convergence reveals the complex dynamics that characterize the intersection of the queer and the normative. The relationship between queer individuals and groups and the dominant culture by which they were simultaneously excluded and encircled has usually been seen in terms of either invisibility or persecution. But alongside those forces flourish more complex strains of material, aesthetic, and relational interchange: influence and imitation, fascination and ambivalent admiration and unexpected affiliation, longing and desire, existing concurrently with prejudice, fear, and even violence.²¹ My inquiry into these dynamics is organized around material objects—primarily dress, domestic furnishing and decoration, and books and letters—because the production, circulation, and representations of these things is a site of such intense individual and collective investment in both the Victorian world as a whole and the queer worlds that formed within it.

One universally acknowledged truth about the Victorians is that they loved their things, opens John Plotz’s book Portable Property.²² Plotz’s is one of a number of books published within the last decade or so that aim to reframe our historical and conceptual understandings of those multitudinous objects that, to quote Elaine Freedgood’s The Ideas in Things, the Victorian novel describes, catalogs, quantifies, and in general showers us with but that we have learned to understand … as largely meaningless.²³ Freedgood contends that critical cultural archives have been preserved, unsuspected, in the things of realism that have been so little or so lightly read. She seeks to uncover these archives and restore their meanings through what she calls the protocols of the collector, who—in Walter Benjamin’s words—brings together what belongs together; by keeping in mind their affinities and their succession in time, he can eventually furnish information about his objects.²⁴ Like Victorian texts, accounts of gay, lesbian, and queer subcultures and subjectivities often swarm with things. Our collective cultural imagination is richly stocked with associations between homosexuality and certain kinds of material objects and practices: artifice … plumage … lampshades, sonnets, musical comedy, couture, syntax, religious ceremony, opera, lacquer, irony, is the essayist Richard Rodriguez’s evocative list.²⁵ But such darling affinities²⁶ are (as Rodriguez’s arch phrase itself might suggest) trickier to reframe than those of the nineteenth century. They are difficult to approach with any vocabulary other than that of stereotypes, long deployed as instruments of stigmatization and then, in response, disavowed as false or at best outdated symptoms of a homophobic social order. As David Halperin writes, If you suggest that there is such a thing as gay male culture; or if you imply that there must be a connection of some kind between a specific sexual orientation and a fondness for certain cultural forms, it is likely that people will immediately object, citing a thousand different reasons why such a thing is impossible, or ridiculous, or offensive … completely out of date, morally suspect, and politically irresponsible.²⁷ Against such objections, this book attempts to take these connections as richly endowed sites of queer history and cultural impact. It attempts, returning to Benjamin, to keep in mind the affinities of objects—affinities between different kinds of objects; affinities between objects and their queer users; queer affinities forged around the use of objects—and, thereby, to furnish information about both the objects themselves and the attachments, as well as the anxieties and hostilities, that they enable or intensify.

I draw here upon the refreshed paradigms for reading the material world offered over the last decade and a half by the critical approach known as thing theory. Thing theory looks beyond the long-dominant Marxist lexicon of production, consumption, alienation, and commodity fetishism in order to formulate, in Bill Brown’s words, new thoughts about how inanimate objects constitute human subjects, how they move them, how they threaten them, how they facilitate or threaten their relation to other subjects, about how they organize our private and public affection.²⁸ One of my interventions is to put the interpretive paradigm showcased by Brown and others into a conversation with queer theory, which is concerned not only with non-normative sexualities but with the intricate valences of desire and power that constitute social relations, and which also suggests that some of the most intense and important functions performed by things—by textual and cultural objects—may be some of the most unruly, oblique, and unexpected. In an essay on the television show Hoarders, Scott Herring proposes that merging a primary interest of material culture studies—the social status of objects—with a central concern of queer studies—the roles that deviance and normalization play in social management—can be beneficial for comprehending nonstandard productions of materiality.²⁹ He introduces the concept of material deviance, which he defines as the critical negotiation of how object usage, object choice, and material conduct pathologizes as well as normalizes individuals as having proper and improper social relations. Herring asserts, convincingly, that his approach is important not only for what we might call queering material studies but also for expanding queer studies into the realm of materiality: Placing material culture studies and queer studies together enables us to interrogate supposedly abnormal uses of material cultures which extend beyond the terms of explicitly sexual object choice.³⁰ Though my project aligns in many ways with Herring’s I am less interested in overtly abnormal uses of objects—ones widely deemed pathological or perverse, like hoarding or fetishism—and more in uses that might be called subtly subversive: characterized by extra intensities of attachment, heightened responsiveness, unexpected and potentially risky routes of circulation; modes of design, display, or preservation seen as excessive, gauche, dangerous, or unnecessary.

Discussing the contemporary prevalence of materiality within Victorian studies, Kate Flint has written: Much of this recent work has been preoccupied … with the meanings that inhere within things that derive from their social histories and contexts, and that can be exhumed in order to understand the development, embedding, and transmission of shared—but barely consciously recognized—cultural values.³¹ While seeing the merits of this approach (which lines up with Herring’s in its interest in social management), Flint also calls for the return [of] our attention to the conjunction of inanimate things and the individual consciousnesses that invest their emotions and feelings in them, the consideration of things as objects … that engage the heart at the same time as they engage the mind; that demand that we consider personal history at the same time as we consider the history of the social; and that stimulate, and deploy, both individual and shared memories.³² The study of sexuality in general, and homosexuality in particular, almost always has at stake the conjunction of personal history and history of the social, because on a basic level it is about how social forms and institutions, on scales both large and small, assert their influence upon (and in turn can be renovated by) the most personal, individual of locations: the body, desire, sex. Sexuality, as Foucault revealed, cannot really be said to exist outside of social histories and contexts, institutions, arrangements, and circulations of power. Yet, as Freud continues to remind us, sex and desire also contain something in excess of the social, operating along pathways convoluted and singular enough to evade or disrupt expected values and assigned meanings. Much work in queer theory has resided at this contradictory, fertile juncture: recognizing, to employ Flint’s language, that individual consciousnesses do not operate outside of cultural values, while at the same time cultural values are often insufficient to explain those individual investments (cathexes) of emotions and feelings in objects—whether by objects we mean other people, the objects of our desires, or material objects, things. As Leo Bersani writes, Questions of identity are inseparable from questions about how we relate to both the human and nonhuman world. … What we are is largely a function of how we connect to the world. The tracing of these connections—perceptual, psychic, communal—is inescapably the tracing of formal mobilities, of the ‘shape’ of how we position ourselves both physically and psychically in the world.³³

For Bersani, citing Foucault, art … becomes a crucial model or guide … in the invention of ‘new relational modes.’³⁴ But such new forms of identity and sociality—which, in Foucault’s argument, homosexuality has the capacity to envision and create³⁵—are frequently either unrecognized or pathologized by the dominant culture, and are often lost to history. Thus art—which we can expand outward, with Bersani, to consider not as a category restricted to works more or less officially designated as ‘works of art’³⁶ but encompassing all kinds of objects of aesthetic interest—is not only a guide in their invention but a resource in (to return to Flint’s language) their exhumation or recovery. In the context of queer histories, then, attention to the embedding and transmission of culture in works of art and other objects almost inevitably encompasses the study of emotions and feelings—both individual and collective. Queer history, stored in objects, is the history of queer selves: their desires, losses, forms of sociality, cultural investments, languages, silences.

Wayne Koestenbaum both articulates and enacts this insight, describing himself, as a gay opera fan, hand[ling] with reverence the old sturdy scratched high-fidelity records.

No mere objects, they’re invested with a glow—certain gay men … before it was easy to say gay men, loved these records, and didn’t explain why: the love did the explaining, it was enough just to listen, the point was not to draw the connection between homosexuality and opera, but to pass into opera as into a safe silence. … As AIDS changed my sense of gay life-span, gay pleasure, and gay politics, it made me revere the objects that have given gay people pleasure, the relics that have created gay ambience, gay atmosphere—that have created, in the boy listening to Lohengrin in 1965, a resonance, even if the spark couldn’t yet be explained or excused.³⁷

As Koestenbaum implies, gay investment in an object, whether individual or collective—or, as is perhaps the case for the young opera listener, investment that is thought to be individual and later turns out to be collective—can transform that object’s potential, its value. José Esteban Muñoz, in his book Cruising Utopia, presents another eloquent articulation of this point. Reading Frank O’Hara’s poem Having a Coke with You and Andy Warhol’s prints of Coke bottles, he suggests that an object that in its everyday manifestations … would represent alienated production and consumption³⁸ is, through the force of the gay artist’s attention, transfigured by something like the glow of Koestenbaum’s records: The anticipatory illumination of certain objects is a kind of potentiality that is open, indeterminate, like the affective contours of hope itself. … [Q]ueer cultural workers are able to detect an opening and indeterminacy in what for many people is a locked-down dead commodity.³⁹

Queer attention, for both Koestenbaum and Muñoz, is one of the forces by which a banal object can become a precious thing: or by which, in Bill Brown’s phrasing, the thingness that inheres as a potentiality within any object can be activated.⁴⁰ For Brown, who traces a theoretical object-thing dialectic via Heidegger and Lacan, the thing is that which is in excess of any manifest object.⁴¹ Thingness names a kind of vital quality—a liveliness, a livingness, a singularity—that erupts from the more banal conditions of objecthood in those moments when the object-thing is not merely viewed or used but encountered. Unlike some philosophical accounts, Brown’s understanding of thingness refuses pure abstraction: "My concern is not with an object’s withdrawal from its properties, but with the adamant presence of a thingness that is fully (even exuberantly or aggressively) manifest in those very properties, so long as properties also names metaphysical characteristics."⁴²

For Brown, thingness also constitutes the outcome of an interaction (beyond their mutual constitution) between subject and object. The thing thus names a subject-object relation.⁴³ In my account, when the subject is a queer one, this relation is queered as well. And the thing itself, too, is queered. Queer consciousness—because of its positioning athwart social and psychological norms—has a different relation to objects and the thingness that they contain. It might encounter the thingness of the material world—what Wilde, as we will see, refers to as the very soul of things—more quickly, more insistently, more fully, more disruptively, more fondly. It might also (and here I signal a difference from Brown and other theorists of thingness) recognize a very special quality in objects as objects rather than only as things: objects, that is, that are fully entrenched in their functional, social, material, even technological or industrial, contexts. This book contends that the formation of queer psychic and social lives, throughout the Victorian period and beyond, is intertwined with this kind of inflamed responsiveness to the objects of the material world. In Brown’s terms, the thingness of queer things is the nexus of a relationship between queer subjects and material objects. Correlatively, along with critics like Muñoz and Koestenbaum, this book argues that these material objects, when produced or viewed through queer sensibilities, can become animated with contours and capacities—with a queer thingness—that are absent, invisible, or effaced in most structures of production and reception.

Standing alongside those contentions is my argument that queer cultural workers, forms of queer relationality, and queerness itself do not always operate at a distance from, or in antipathy to, the surrounding culture. Queer culture draws on and embraces, sometimes in a transformative way, the objects of mass culture. Meanwhile, of course, mass culture absorbs and embraces the productions of queer culture, even if it does not always acknowledge them as such. Sharon Marcus makes the claim that queer theory’s focus on the subversive dimensions of lesbian, gay, and transgender acts and identities and on secrecy, shame, oppression, and transgression has resulted in a critical tendency to "downplay or refuse the equally powerful