Including Inversion-Lesbianism-Homosexuality and Disambiguation. With Annotated Bibliography Time-Line & Psychological Treatment of Late-Victorian Sexual theory.
Hermaphroditism
The Greek myth of a union of the gods Hermes and Aphrodite to produce an anatomically perfect male child, Hermaphroditus, was widely current in literate-educated Victorian times, as was the more complete version whereby the love of the nymph Salmacis persuaded the gods to allow the two lovers to become united in the one (superficially male) body. Such a legend may readily be interpreted from the viewpoint of myths as cultural aids in the unravelling of human puzzles, leading to explanation or better ‘completion’. Thus, imagine a male child, feminised in dress and effeminate in behaviour from whatever combination of genetic factors and social parenting. Upon attending a public place for say athletics and/or bathing with disrobing - the individual might be seen by others as a lightly-muscled, long-haired girl endowed with a now more understandable male organ (in this case a penis).
Pseudo-hermaphroditism was even further beyond Greek science and understanding, and also of a Victorian Physiology still awaiting twentieth-century Endocrinology. Here the internal sex-organs or gonads are hidden within the body, with only indistinct and confusing external anatomical features present. Parental preference of gender choice for the child may have been misguided, and ultimately may risk being overthrown, since with the onset of puberty the true gender and anatomical future development of the maturing individual will be inexorably determined by a physiological flow of powerful sex-hormones from the hidden gonadic structures. (Such at least was the pubertal outcome before our own present availability of synthetic pharmaceuticals - “puberty blockers” - and their now controversial application.)
Available historical-medical publications were then largely written by clinicians of the period who were generally male, e.g. 1855. Halbertsma, H.J. On hermaphroditismus spurious femininus. (Or Über hermaphroditisimus in the female.) Amsterdam. C. G. van der Post. The author discusses the four types then recognised in women by anatomists. 1857. Godard, Ernest. Etudes sur la monorchidie et la cryptorchidie chez l’homme. (Studies on mono-orchid and crypto-orchid conditions in man.) Paris. Masson. Findings are presented on missing and inadequate testicular development in the male. The complex terminology, borrowed from Botany and Greek, became more widely acceptable in England at L19, SOED: e.g. orchidectomy = surgical removal of a testicle. 1859. Warren, J. Mason. Cases of Hermaphroditism & Supposed Encephaloid Testicle. Philadelphia. American Journal of Medical Sciences.
SOED offers Late Middle English LME for appearance of “hermaphrodite”, as an individual with mixed gender characteristics. A nautical usage also evolved, for vessels combining mixed styles. At L16 occurs rare usage to denote a homosexual man. Thereafter pre-eminence of usage passes to the cognate emerging fields of Zoology M17, and Botany E18. (Biology only appears at E19, first from France and Germany, from Greek roots bios = life, and logos = reasoned account/discourse.) The early zoologists had discerned mixed sexual-anatomical features in such lowly groups as snails (Molluscs L18) and earthworms (Annelids M19). Botanists meanwhile, led by Swede Carl Linnaeus. 1758. Systema Naturae, were able to announce widespread sexual-hermaphrodite characteristics throughout the flowering plants, E18. The use of Pseudo-hermaphrodite dates from L19, after the necessary surgical advances dependent upon (1) Early Victorian use of chloroform anaesthesia, and (2) the Mid-Victorian introduction of antisepsis by Joseph Lister. Thereafter, urologists SOED M18 and gynaecologists M19 were able to pursue relevant advances with greater patient safety. “True Hermaphroditism” also occurred, though presenting rarely. Freud (1900: I (1)) described it as “both kinds of sexual apparatus side by side and fully developed”.
Far more widely encountered, possibly in all historical epochs, and of correspondingly greater social interest/controversy in a largely rigid and gender-unconscious Victorian Period, were Sexual Inversion (Homosexuality) and Lesbianism, the latter having long been known as Sapphic Love. These are treated in roughly chronological order below, as off-shoots of the more comprehensive Bisexuality. The latter will then be essayed here as occurring in persons as opposed to certain lowly Animal Phyla and advanced Plant Phyla.
Sapphic Lesbianism
The lyrically intense Greek poetess Sappho, c.612-c.580 BC, leader of a school, or at least of a coterie, of young female followers on the Greek island of Mytilene (Lesbos), is known only from her surviving literary fragments. In her The Art of Loving Women and elsewhere she displays a consistent and elegantly restrained eroticism, tinged with not infrequent touches of her own “Bittersweet, sly, uncontrollable creature…”. Early in youthful adulthood she had begged her mother to release her from onerous household duties: “Mother, I can no longer weave. Slender Aphrodite has overcome me with longing for a girl…” Her creed was heartfelt, personal and truthful: “What cannot be said will be wept…May I write words more naked than flesh…”, and she called insistently upon the finer and more redeeming aspects of her culture and beliefs: “There is no place for grief in a house which serves the Muse…” Small wonder then that Sappho should continue to have been of note to the pre-Victorian and subsequent era of continuing English Romanticism. Lord Byron, to many Victorians the doyen of Romantic poets, had enshrined her fame in the opening lines to his The Isles of Greece, 1819-24, Don Juan, Canto III: “The isles of Greece, the isles of Greece! Where burning Sappho loved and sung…” Irish poet Thomas Moore, 1779-1852, had also considered the young woman’s amours: “Lesbia hath a beaming eye, But no one knows for whom it beameth”, Lesbia Hath a Beaming Eye Other aspects of her legendary fame, as with the suggestion of an unrequited love for Phaon the Boatman as having led to Sappho’s early suicide, appear less certain, and would also require a revision of her famed lesbianism as possibly vying with a broader bisexuality. Such outcomes are discussed further below, in a final section on Oscar Wilde.
SOED gives: Sapphic (Gk. Sapphikos) E16. Lesbic, Lesbian, Lesbianism (Gk. Lesbios from Lesbos). All L19. Recommended forms are Lesbian = inhabitant of Lesbos; lesbian = female homosexual. See also Meier (1993, p. 123).
Victorian Lesbianism
Only a brief overview can here be presented, along with some perhaps new approaches to what is already a well-trodden field of modern Gender Studies. One may reasonably suppose that productive and affect-laden female-female dyadic or multiple relationships have in fact been legion, whilst not the norm, throughout history. Pre-Neolithic lifestyles, with women (and children) closely interacting at “the home base” whilst the males were away for often extended periods on “the hunt”, would have been conducive to same-sex interactions of all kinds. After the Neolithic watershed of cultural development, women continued to congregate, now additionally at their new invention - the pottery hub - where modern archaeologists such as Kathleen Kenyon quickly recognised the telling uniformity (sharing and copying) of impressed designs on pots, often of a simple herring-bone style and maintained conservatively through many dump-sites, ritual interments and vertically-dated strata, e.g. at Jericho. Fast forward to the Victorian mill and factory age, and the absence of co-ed learning centres other than the earliest years of ‘cottage teaching’ and ‘home schooling’, and females continued to teach, train and care for other females. Emotional states and protracted involvements cannot be dismissed. Most have been lost to History, and only the more literary-minded and inclined occasionally now appear, recorded whether or not for posterity and fortunate with the passage of years.
1845. Eliza Cook. A Signed Autograph Letter. London. 9 Gloucester Buildings, Old Kent Road. Letter sent to the American writer Charlotte Cushman, with the author’s searching and conflicted impressions recorded on the death of a mother. 1853. Phebe Anne Hanaford. Lucretia the Quakeress or Principle Triumphant Boston. J. Buffum. American biographer of Lincoln, notable as a church minister and lesbian, and producer of tracts on anti-slavery. She lived with the woman Ellen Miles, known in congregation gossip as “the minister’s wife”. Her close friends included Sarah Barker and Sybil Jones. 1897. Jean-Luis Dubut de La Forest. Pathologique Sociale. Mademoiselle Tantale. Paris. Dupont. A frankly misogynist male writer who attempted to cover many alleged female sins, including the above and additionally monomania, nymphomania and susceptibility to hypnotism.
The prolific Victorian sexologist and author Henry Havelock Ellis, 1859-1939, was a much more thorough, accepting and accommodating researcher, arriving at a barely consummated marriage (though a lasting relationship) with the English lesbian and social writer Edith Lees. In the 3rd edition of his epochal study of Sexual Inversion - to which we return in more detail below - he not only continued his analysis of homosexual schoolboy behaviour at national Public Schools such as Eton, Harrow and Rugby (all decidedly not co-ed), but thoughtfully included a Supplemental Appendix B, on “The School Friendships of Girls”. His preferred methodology was that of intimate adult correspondence, over many years, with one contact often leading to others, and covering all phases of personal memories and sexual development. See Ellis (1897).
The Late-Nineteenth century French writer Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, 1873-1954, widely known simply as ‘Colette’ and for the later success of her novel Gigi (and the film version 1958), also offered semi-autobiographical and sensitive insight into the adolescent School Amours of girls under a non co-ed regime. In her first novel Claudine Goes to School of 1900, the authoress who herself attended just such a country school from the age of sixteen to seventeen, brings a sagacious eye to her own and her classmates’ various longings and interests, both for the rascally masculine Schools Inspector, and for the younger and newer Class Mistress. In the second book Claudine Goes to Paris of 1901, the heroine leaves her small rural world, and in the third outing Claudine en Menage 1902 she is married, having been allowed by her author to maintain an impeccable heterosexuality throughout. Colette herself had also married young, to the notorious Paris libertine “Willy”, fourteen years her senior and who strongly motivated Colette’s earliest writings; described her as “a second Sappho” while encouraging early lesbian tendencies, and who insisted that the books should go out under his name/alias for greater success (in a then uniformly masculine world and society).
Once Colette had freed herself from Willy’s legal clutches she chose an independent stage career; used the experience for novels such as La Vagabonde of 1910 which maintained a heterosexual prominence, whilst her real life had become entwined with the society lesbian Mathilde de Momy Maquise de Belbeuf, known as “Missy” in the theatre world. On 3rd January 1907 during a pantomime performance, an on-stage explicit kiss between the two women resulted in wide outrage. Thereafter the relationship continued for a further five years, though far more covertly and cautiously. Colette’s biography and opus are rich, sensitive and rewarding of study; widely available in English translation, and present a microcosm of most of the key sexual orientations pursued here. The final verdict here on Colette, must be that she was a bisexual and one of the world’s greatest, most resilient and productive. A recent biography is Thurman (2000).
Charlotte Mary Mew, 1869-1928, was a Late Victorian and Early Modernist poet and writer. The oldest of seven children to talented parents who were Bloomsbury and Hampstead architects, she found her life blighted by a sad succession of siblings who either died early or were deemed in need of asylum care/incarceration. Only her sister Anne remained with her, and the two apparently made a pact to never marry or have children. Biographers note an early passionate attachment to the headmistress of Gower Street School in London - where separate entrances for Girls and Boys led to separate classrooms, all typical of the period and much later. While such early experiences may well influence a sensitive nature, and work together with genetic endowment, any later perceived lesbian tendencies still require further analysis.
A life orientation - here lesbianism - may change over the years; may change its preferred object or partner choice, on grounds of age, education, culture and taste, even gender with lesbian becoming bisexual and vice-versa. Dominance may also change, especially from active to passive with advancing years. No single parameter, such as the individual’s own supposed gender preference, can fully and adequately describe that individual’s sexual orientation. The object-choice is required as a second axis. Alternatively, the second axis may be selected as Active-Passive. Sigmund Freud, with his generation’s in-built masculine prejudices, somewhere says that “in every relationship there must be a superior and a follower”, implying a passivity of one towards the other.
Charlotte Mew, despite her firm preference for other female company and her adored sister, also assumed an Active-Superior mode of her Times when she dressed accordingly. Charlotte not only dressed as a man, but as an ‘enhanced’ man or “dandy” (SOED L18, man of ostentatiously elegant or fashionable dress), if not quite a “masher” (L19, fashionable young man, who may make unwelcome sexual advances to women). Turning to Charlotte’s little-known sister Anne, it is clear that she shared with her sister one axis of Lesbianism, viz. object-preference, since she knew Charlotte was female no matter what the attire. On the Active-Passive axis, however, Anne was a very different lesbian, being the docile passive partner to her flamboyant sister’s trail-blazing Active. Both sister’s were chronically depressive - melancholic in the terminology of their day - and for Charlotte the male attire could have been a despairing but tangible contact with the departed father. [Dandies and Mashers were frequently depicted and gently ridiculed in Punch cartoons by the artist-illustrator George du Maurier during the period c.1870 to c.1890]
Mew in 1894 published in the Yellow Book, popular also with Oscar Wilde. Her poetry came slowly from c.1900. The major collection The Farmer’s Bride of 1916 - with a U.S. edition of 1921 entitled Saturday Market - was written from a strongly masculine stance, and gives a further suggestive clue to her true feelings for the lost father. After Europe’s terrible losses in the Great War,1914-1918, Charlotte produced a minor masterpiece - almost paternalistic - for the heartfelt nation’s first Cenotaph Remembrance Service in 1919 - “…Violets, roses and laurel, with the small sweet tinkling country things Speaking so wistfully of other Springs… In splendid sleep, with a thousand brothers, To lovers - to mothers, Here too lies he: Under the purple, the green the red It is all young life: it must break some women’s hearts to see Such a brave, gay coverlet to such a bed!…”, The Cenotaph. 1919. When Anne died of cancer eight years later, Charlotte arrived at her own end within a year. Perhaps in part with a passive-feminine act of acceptance, part to avoid the returning and feared anniversary, and in part with an acutely active-male aggression, she killed herself in a most fearful manner, by drinking the intensely corrosive household-cleaning fluid Lysol-phenol. She lies buried and much deserving of greater recognition, in Hampstead Cemetery, north London.
A contemporary of Charlotte Mew and another wearer of male attire was Matilda Alice Powles, 1864-1952, better known to music hall audiences as Vesta Tilley. Placed on the stage from the age of five, Tilley’s increasingly applauded career endured from 1869-1920, and familiarised generations with the then “naughty” subtleties of cross-dressing and gender transformation. She was however married, from 1890-1935, and does not immediately attract any crude label such as “butch lesbian”.
At most she could be termed bisexual, though without her own associations to the material it is not possible to conclude whether or not any masculine “conversion” was genuine and psycho-dynamically sought, or simply resulted from some accidental mix of factors in the struggle to earn a living for a family where she was second amongst thirteen siblings (and probably second amongst seven when her parents first put her on the stage). The first performer to appear as a women in male attire on the English theatre-stage was apparently Miss Ellington in 1852, in a piece entitled The Good Woman in the Wood, which we are told attracted some consternation from critics and reviews. A subsequent wide field has been indicated as blossoming, with “panto gender subversion”, as Prince Charming is a girl dressed as a boy, the Ugly Sisters are men dressed as women (the so-called “panto dames”), and a chaste Cinderella drifts through it all as a girl dressed as a girl in her classic and eponymous Pantomime. See Kaplan (1984).
Inversion and Sexual Inversion
In the century before Queen Victoria the uses of the technical term “inversion” were largely confined to fields such as Mathematics; Geology and the folding of rock strata; and to the clinical-medical description of a variety of complex anatomical abnormalities, which were especially well-researched by German medical men. This state of affairs continued to the 1880s, by which time psychological and specifically psychopathological and psycho-sexual studies had advanced sufficiently to bestow upon the term a new and dynamic meaning, albeit a controversial one. Development is here shown in a brief Time-Line. See also The Lingua-Franca of Nineteenth-Century Medical Psychology.
1868. Bartels, Maximilian Carl August. Ueber die Bauchblasengenitalspalte, einen bestimmten Grad der Soggenanten Inversion der Harnblase. (On the abdominal-bladder genital cleft, a certain degree of so-called Inversion of the bladder). Anatomy brochure, pp. 165-206. 1 lith. Tafel. Berlin.
1873. Drubinowitsch, B. Inversion d. Uterus durch Tumoren. (Inversion of the Uterus by Tumours).
1875. Dausman, H.L. Ueber die Inversion d. Uterus. (On the Inversion of the Uterus). German publ.
1879. Wing, Clifton. A Case of Complete Inversion of the Uterus. Suffolk District Medical Society.
The repressive state of much contemporary sexual hygiene of the period
The repressive state of much contemporary sexual hygiene of the period may also be briefly noted, and may give some indication of the degree of hostility possible against perpetrators. Whilst the edicts have value in all civilized societies - as with the protection of under-age groups, and of weaker persons unable to resist - the overall “blanket” approach also penalises even adult mutual consent. 1870. Fowler, O.S. Love and Parentage, and the Evil Licentiousness of Masturbation. New York. 1884. --------------- Amativeness: Or, Evils and Remedies of Excessive and Perverted Sexuality, Including Warning and Advice to the Married and Single. Manchester. John Heywood Publisher. 1891. Ribbing, Seved. Die Sexuelle Higiene und ihre ethiscen Konsequenzen. Drei Vorlesungen. (Sexual Hygiene and its Ethical Consequences. Three Essays). Leipzig. Hobbing. Subjects covered included some of those judged most morally infamous: pederasty [SOED E17, anal intercourse between a man and a passive youth or boy], onanism [E18, masturbation], and prostitution [M16]. 1893. Sinistrari Rev. Father. Peccatum Mutum (The Mute Sin alias Sodomy). Paris. Isidore Liseux. The official viewpoint of the Roman Catholic Church, from the original Latin.
A new era of liberal Sexual Hygiene and deeper psychological insight
A new era of liberal Sexual Hygiene and deeper psychological insight now opens, quite suddenly. 1885. Chevalier, Julien. De L’Inversion de L’Instinct Sexuel au Point de Vue Medico-Legal. Paris. 1886. Krafft-Ebing, Richard Freiherr von. ‘Psychopathia Sexualis, with Special Reference to the Antipathic Sexual |Instinct: A Medico-Forensic Study.’ Landmark of the new field. See Ellis (1897). Originally in German the work was translated often; appeared in constant revision, and made a 7th edition, 1893. Antipathy = Contrary = Inversion = Homosexuality by social change, 1886-1900. 1890. Schrenk-Notzing, Albert Freiherr von. Remarques sur le Traitement de L’Inversion Sexuelle par la Suggestion Hypnotique. (Remarks on Treatment of Sexual Inversion by Hypnotic Suggestion.) Paris. Revue de L’Hypnotisme. Charcot, Bernheim and Freud also now working with hypnotherapy. 1893. Moll, Albert. Les Perversions de L’instinct genital. Etude sur l’inversion sexuelle.(Perversions of the genital instinct. Study of sexual inversion). Paris. Carre. John Addington Symonds died 1893. 1896. Ellis, Henry Havelock and John Addington Symonds. Das Kontrare Geschlechtsgefuhl. Leipzig. Georg H. Wigand Verlag, pp.308. Original version of landmark study by Ellis & Symonds. Ellis (1897).
The last two authors above worked on sexual inversion collaborative material from June 1892 to April 1893 when Symonds died, though not before insisting that Ellis publish this planned Vol. 2 of the “Studies” first, before Vol. 1. Early British publication was suppressed by Symond’s literary executor, Horatio Brown. Ellis then succeeded in finalising the German edition, avoiding legal proceedings for obscenity in England, and turned to the U.S.A. and the publisher F. Davis Co. of Philadelphia. The English language 1st edition then appeared in 1901, reprinted 1902, 1904 and later in revised editions. Pirated editions appeared in England from the Watford University Press and elsewhere, some the project of Rowland de Villiers who was eventually duly arrested and prosecuted for obscenity. SOED gives Inversion M16, from Latin ‘invers’, invertere, v. To turn inside out. Listed are 22 uses and meanings of the term, 15 of which were available to the Victorians and from L16.
The term homosexual as an adjective barely comes into a strictly chronological Victorian Period, with the nounal usage E20 (SOED). Sigmund Freud (1905) continued to use the term ‘Inversion’ in his important “Three Essays”. In the first essay, Sexual Aberrations, he discussed ‘The Sexual Objects of Inverts’: “An inverted man…is like a woman in being subject to the charm that proceeds from masculine attributes both physical and mental”, though he cautions that this is not a full or accurate description for all male inverts. Under ‘The Sexual Aim of |Inverts’ he noted that “Among women too, the sexual aims of inverts are various…” Five years earlier Freud had worked on his famous and controversial case of “Dora”. The eighteen year-old Ida Bauer had entered analysis with him in October 1900, departing eleven weeks later. Freud wrote up the case in January 1901, but withheld publication until 1905. Not until well into the case report, nominally on hysteria, does he disclose his early language preference: in touching upon the therapist’s reactions to the intimate disclosures of the patient - whose sexual function “has extended its limits…(to)…the sexual perversions…(and the)…uncertainty in regard to boundaries of what is to be called normal sexual life”, Freud mentions by way of illustration “perversion which is most repellent to us, the sensual love of a man for a man”. He then reminds his readers that in Ancient Greece people “far our superiors in cultivation” were accustomed to bestow trusted social positions to such individuals [SOED homo-, from the Gk. “the same”. L19]; and he adds that the perversions need be “neither bestial nor degenerate” and that such personalities are often involved in “a great number of our cultural achievements”, (Freud, 1905, I).See also Kuppfer(1900), an anthology of homosexual writings by the author-artist, as a response to the imprisonment of Oscar Wilde.
Bisexuality
Just as was the case with Inversion above, so it was with use of the term Bisexuality, first in the hands of general academic disciplines, before arriving for the purposes here under especial consideration: Biology - Human Physiology - Sexuality - Psychopathology. SOED gives E19 for adjectival use of bisexual; M19 for Bisexuality, and E20 for nounal use of bisexual.
Precedence once more largely lay with German-speaking researchers, and in particular Wilhelm Fliess, 1858-1928, Berlin nose and throat specialist, who Freud’s biographer Ernest Jones described, perhaps a little sarcastically owing to Fliess’s known excesses, as author of “the great theory of bisexuality”, (Jones, 1953, Bk.1, Chap. 13). Fliess had met Freud on a study-visit to Vienna in 1887, when physician Josef Breuer directed him to Freud’s university lecture on the anatomy and physiology of the nervous system. Sigmund Freud M.D. had been appointed University of Vienna Lecturer in Neuropathology in 1885, after years of laboratory-microscope work on nervous-systems and physiology, conducted in the department of the great Ernst Brucke, 1819-1892. Freud was already of some note as a neurologist, with technical papers appearing in the journal Neurologisches Centralblatt and elsewhere. He also had a further post in the neurological department of the Kassowitz Children’s Institute, and when the two men thus met there was an immediate and mutual rapport, followed by an extensive correspondence over the following decade and more. Between these two, Fliess and Freud, together with Krafft-Ebing, Havelock Ellis and a very few others, the present scientific founding of Bisexuality Theory was securely grounded.
Whilst Fliess regrettably clouded his surer conception, of a universal human biological bisexuality, with further complications of ‘periodicity’, and with the even more nebulous and forced application of ‘numerology’, Freud maintained closer ties to the psychosexual developments he was best able to describe in terms of bisexuality as the new parameter. Already in his 1901 case of “Dora” he had asserted “our predisposition to bisexuality”, whilst in the first of his “Three Essays” of 1905 he highlighted a whole sub-section on Bisexuality: “in every normal male or female…traces are found of the apparatus of the opposite sex.” One thinks immediately of the redundant male breast nipples, whilst from the plentiful data of modern endocrinology we may note that the important female hormones oestrogen and progesterone are also found, in much reduced concentration, in men, while the male hormone testosterone is similarly present in the adult female. Freud’s Late-Victorian position is thus amply confirmed, namely that “an originally bisexual physical disposition has, in the course of evolution, become modified into a unisexual one”, op. cit. He goes on to quote “a spokesman of the male inverts” who had described bisexuality as “a female brain in a masculine body”, and corrects that with the statement by the influential Krafft-Ebing ((1886)1893) that “every individual’s bisexual disposition endows…masculine and feminine brain centres as well as somatic organs of sex.” Freud the neurologist cannot help but correct this also, noting that the evidence was not yet available for the setting aside in the brain of specific “centres” for the function of sex. He himself had earlier been able to clarify and establish just such a brain centre, for speech and loss of speech function, in his elegant monograph On Aphasia in 1891.
In a field such as Gender Matters the construct of Bisexuality will thus provide a valuable analytical tool to help further clarify relations, transformations and confusions between differing though psych-sexually related individual states and their past, present and possible future choices of persons/object-choices, either as our social environment changes, or as ageing processes or an unseen (unconscious) combination of these continues to modify and influence our internal and/or external gender preferences and resultant behaviours. The example of Charlotte Mew was above given just such a (brief) treatment. The case of Oscar Wilde - nominally a notorious invert or homosexual in his day - has also in a recent article been questioned by Professor Landow, who correctly suggests that Wilde could be considered a bisexual.
Such a notion may be developed as follows. Wilde as a young man had already suffered tragic losses, of two female cousins burned to death, and of his adored younger sister Isola. His further heterosexual object-choices would always henceforth be deeply tinged with melancholy and pain. Once suitably married, however, he produced two adored sons and wrote and published two volumes of children’s fairy-stories for them. His increasing affairs with males/rent boys only gradually morph from apparent heterosexual to bisexual to homosexual as his married life deteriorates, and he is actively led by one long-standing young male-lover in particular. This latter, as noted by Wilde’s major biographer (Ellmann, 1987), introduced the married man to passive oral-sex or ‘fellatio’. We may here note that this would permit Wilde’s amorous anatomy to continue to furnish the essentially masculine intromittent-organ. Truly, a multi-complex bisexual reality, with the older struggling man now a passive/feminine male, and the younger partner providing an active/masculine ‘false female’ orifice. As with Charlotte Mew though now in reverse mirror-image, Wilde’s typical extravagances of blue china, button-hole flowers and attire may be seen as presenting a softer/effeminate man, in keeping with his internal and modified psychological state - a passive bisexual moving along a life-continuum, and adjusting his sexual orientation and gender-object-choices as part of his life changes.
A final word/guess at the orientations of Freud and Ellis, who never met but who read each others relevant studies, and maintained a lifetime correspondence. Freud was on the surface more strongly masculine-heterosexual and traditional of his time and culture, though forced by family into a more flamboyant Jewish wedding ritual, when he himself preferred a quiet affair. Ellis as noted was a far less dominant marriage partner, closely allied to J.A.Symonds who, though married and a father, was a strong and controversial advocate of bisexuality and homosexuality. Both these latter men emphasised the ‘Sexual Inversion’ corpus of their work, and like Freud would leave “no stone unturned” in the field of psychosexual pathology. In his early and controversial study of sexual development in childhood Freud (1905, II, ‘Infantile Sexuality’) had pointed to the amorphous, wide-spread nature of the child’s early biology, and coined the phrase “polymorphously perverse” as involving all bodily orifices and skin surfaces. Children in development then, were seen not merely as residually bisexual, but as potentially ‘poly-sexual’. Adults, Freud wryly noted, became heterosexual and ‘normal’ via these developmental processes, whereas neurotics and perverts did not “become” perverse, but rather “remained” polymorphous and perverse, (ibid, I, (7), “Intimations of the Infantile Character of Sexuality”).
Bibliography
Angelides, Steven.History of Bisexuality. Chicago. Chicago University Press. 2001.
Ellmann, Richard.Oscar Wilde. London. Hamish Hamilton. 1987.
Ellis, Henry Havelock.Studies in the Psychology of Sex. Philadelphia. F. A. Davis Co. 1901.
Original publication in German, Leipzig 1897. Vol. 2 of an eventual six-volume set published in English before World War 1.
Ellis, H. H.Man and Woman. A Study of Human Secondary Sexual Characters. London. Walter Scott Ltd., 1894.
Freud, Sigmund.Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria. (1901)1905.
Original publication in neurological journal; later in Freud’s collected works. See “Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud”, edited by James Strachey, Anna Freud et al. in 24 vols. Vol. VII. London. Hogarth Press & Institute of Psychoanalysis. New York: I.U.P. 1953-75.
Freud, S.Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality.
Original German edition at Vienna by Deuticke. 1905. For definitive English edition see above entry, Vol. VII.
Jones, Ernest.The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud. Vol. 1. London & New York. Hogarth Press & Basic Books. 1953.
Kaplan, Charles.The Only Native British Art Form The Antioch Review. 42 (3): 266-276. 1984.
|Krafft-Ebing, Richard von.Psychopathia Sexualis, with special reference to Contrary Sexual Instinct. A Medico-Legal Study.Philadelphia. F. A. Davis Co. 1893.
Translated by C. G. Chaddock, from German 7th edition.
Kuppfer, Elisarion von.Lieblingminne und Freundsliebe in der Weltlitteratur.Berlin. Berlin-Neurahnsdorf A. Brand. 1900.
(Darling and Friend Love in World Literature). An anthology of critical texts. Dismissed the opinion of Hirschfeld and others, of inversion-homosexuality being classified as a “third sex”.
Meier, Christian.Athens. A Portrait of the City in Its Golden Age.New York. Henry Holt. 1998.
Symonds, John Addington.A Problem in Modern Ethics: being an inquiry into the phenomenon of sexual inversion.London. Privately printed. 1896.
Later editions, 1900-1901, bore the title “A Problem in Greek Ethics”.
Tarnowsky, Benjamin.L’Instinct Sexuelle et ses Manifestations Morbides. Au double point de vue de la Jurisprudence et de la Psychiatrie. Traitant de l’Inversion Sexuelle. Paris. Carrington. 1904.
(The Sexual Instinct and Its Morbid Manifestations. From the double viewpoint of Jurisprudence and Psychiatry. Treating of Sexual Inversion.) By a Professor of the Imperial Academy. St. Petersburg.
Thurman, Judith.Secrets of the Flesh. A Life of Colette. U.K. Ballantine Books. 2000.
Last Modified 30 January 2021