THE OSCHOLARS



THE OSCHOLARSTHE CRITIC AS CRITICMARCH 2016Men are from UranusReview by Melissa KnoxPhilip Healy with Frederick S. Roden (edd.): Marc-André Raffalovich’s Uranism and Unisexuality: A Study of Different Manifestations of the Sexual Instinct. Translated by Nancy Erber and William A. Peniston. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2016For the first time, and as part of the Genders and Sexualities in History series from Palgrave Macmillan, Marc-André Raffalovich’s major work has been translated as Uranism and Unisexuality: A Study of Different Manifestations of the Sexual Instinct. Nancy Erber and William A. Peniston as well as editors Philip Healy and Frederick S. Roden, have lucidly rendered Raffalovich’s 1896 treatise from the original French into English. A fascinating compilation of data from a Catholic gay man of late19th-century Europe, the book will serve as a reference in at least seven areas: (1) As an illustration of fin-de-siecle disputes about transgressive sexualities: rather than subscribing to the then-prevailing view that homosexuality meant ‘sexual inversion,’ in the sense that a man is gay because he has a female soul in a male body, Raffalovich argues that ‘unisexuality’ (his word for homosexuality) meant attraction to the same, or the one, sex. He was quite willing to stare down criminologists and sexologists who insisted that inversion was degeneracy. Like almost every writer of his period but Oscar Wilde, Raffalovich views his sexuality as an illness or as a condition to be transcended, in his case, with spirituality. For Raffalovich, only celibate homosexuals are normal and praiseworthy. These ‘superior inverts,’ as he terms them, may be considered morally neutral and useful to society, even deserving of its support because of their potential as artists, priests, musicians dedicated to their callings. Raffalovich deeply embraces the ‘born that way’ school of thought, even as he pathologizes homosexuality: ‘The education of born inverts has not yet been undertaken. It is odd that we ignore the signs of unisexuality in children. Unisexuality is increasing and will continue to do so. We cannot really cure inverts . . . .’ [my emphasis]. Instead, he favors encouraging sexual abstinence, chastity and seriousness, in order to create a ‘new kind of man, adapted to celibacy, hard work, and religion (since their desires will not be fulfilled in this world).’ (65) The reader should be aware that Raffalovich talks out of both sides of his mouth: on p. 50 he refers to ‘inverts and perverts’ as ‘the sources of infection,’ but on p. 179 in a section on the education of sexual inverts he writes that ‘the study of sexual inversion (I do not call it perversion) will be an important question in the future.’(2) As a radical alternative to the 19th century depiction of the homosexual as degenerate, deviant, debauchée, or seducer. Instead, Raffalovich’s homosexual may be ‘culture’s, indeed society’s, savior,’ as Roden puts it, adding, ‘a new saving victim, a new Christ . . . [Raffalovich] attempts . . . to suggest a world where an invert might play a moral good.’ (3) (3) As a commentary on the prosecution of homosexuals one year after Oscar Wilde was sentenced to two years of hard labor, technically for ‘indecent acts,’ (then a legal term conveying all forms of sexual contact except anal penetration) but actually for forcing the British public, which preferred not to know, to examine and acknowledge his same-sex loves and his sexual interests. As Frederick Roden observes in his excellent introduction, ‘Uranism and Unisexuality, as we have it from 1896 is a response to the Wilde trials . . . Raffalovich scripts Wilde as a failed Platonist.’ Wilde indicts himself for this in De Profundis, his lengthy letter from prison, Roden also points out. Wounded by Wilde’s contempt—Philip Healy’s Biographical Note sums up Wilde’s ridicule of Raffalovich’s poetry and dismissal of his salon as a restaurant—Raffalovich devotes an entire section to ‘The Oscar Wilde Affair.’ Pitying Wilde as ‘a victim of himself, his society, and his friends,’ Raffalovich nevertheless denigrates his ‘Negroid features’ and—wait for it—’hair styled in bad taste.’ (201). This sounds awfully playground, the worst insults Raffalovich could summon, and those of which he might have accused himself—as a Jew converting to Catholicism, a Russian trying to be French, and one whom the Russians never accepted as one of their own, as a gay man, he faced rejection for the same reasons, protected only by his relative discretion and his wealth. No wonder Wilde and Raffalovich disliked each other: both were poseurs, both pursued John Gray, whom Raffalovich won. As Roden remarks, ‘The Irish Wilde was determined to denigrate this foreign other.’ (3) For attempting to pose in similar ways, that is. Raffalovich writes that Wilde has ‘neither vitality nor much real talent,’ (204) and then protests this lack of talent for so many pages that the claim grows thin indeed. (4) As a gold mine of attitudes taken up and developed by a number of 20th and 21st century scholars and memoirists, among them Anne Fausto-Sterling. I can imagine Raffalovich’s work as the starting point in a course tracing the genealogy of contemporary beliefs about gay sexualities. Raffalovich—unlike the sexologists of his day—seems to approach the views of Ann-Fausto Sterling, who in her 1992 study, Sexing The Body, challenges the automatic dichotomies of sex/gender, nature/ nurture, real/constructed, and argues for at least five valences of human sexuality, not two. ‘The truth is,’ Raffalovich writes, ‘that there is no absolute distinction between the heterosexual man and the homosexual man. There are men who are, above all, sexual beings and men who do not consider sex such an important matter. ‘ (56) One might speculate on the influence Raffalovich’s work might have had on desperate American gay teenagers, including the historian Martin Duberman, whose 1992 memoir, Cures, begins with his question ‘Will I always be a homosexual?’— posed in 1948 to a fortune teller at a fairground—segues through his treatment by authoritarian psychotherapists who told him he was sick and tried to change him, and ends with resounding self-acceptance.(5) As a portrait of Raffalovich’s longing to fit in to his society and culture, to have, as Bruce Bawer put it, a place at the table. This reader senses a compulsive quality in Raffalovich’s anecdotes and miscellaneous observations: the love of categorization is evident from the first pages of his work, which begins with a two-and-a-half page Summary Table of Sexualities dividing uranists into ‘ultra-virile, virile, effeminate, and passive,’ and tabulating every form of ‘congenital’ sexuality that Raffalovich can imagine. (41-43) This systematizing is but a taste of the lust to categorize that remains, so to speak, to come! The present reader cannot help but speculate that, like the stereotype of the hausfrau whose repressed sexuality escapes into the energy expended in cleaning and folding towels corner-to-corner, Raffalovich achieved some pale echo of satisfaction from his tabulations. Since he saw himself as an outsider—believing that his God-given role in society involved relinquishing all fulfillment of homosexual desire—he felt deeply unsatisfied. Everyone else got to marry, enjoy conjugal relations, and produce babies. His lot, he believed, to be a good, celibate friend, to devote himself to art, music, and his Catholic religious beliefs, transcending most, if not all, erotic satisfactions, left him unhappy, a condition he declined to admit. But one can read between every line of this almost comically detailed attempt to parse every form of sexuality a frantic desire to find the category that would embrace him. Even if Raffalovich had been straight, the larger Victorian culture would have rejected him. A Russian Jew whose parents fled pogroms to settle in Paris and pass as French and Catholic, he was all his life a stranger to his origins and, one might argue, his true self. (6) As a reminder of just how backward 19th-century attitudes toward women could be, even or especially among educated, cultured men who might be presumed to feel oppressed for some of the same reasons: lack of freedom to express their sexuality, lack of social acceptance in many areas, a need to conceal their true selves in order to survive. In the mentions of Oscar Wilde, Raffalovich’s prejudice is particularly evident, for instance, when he writes of reproaching ‘many women at the present time—a reproach I myself have made—for reading all the details of a trial, like that of Oscar Wilde . . . It is so easy for a woman to become insanely suspicious, to see unisexual tendencies or acts everywhere, to malign.’ (63) In a footnote, he reminds himself that Diotima instructed Socrates, but then the next footnote reverts to worries about women who ‘have succumbed to the lure of notoriety.’ (7) As a case study in the kind of inconsistency you’d expect to find in a volume as comprehensive as, say, The King James Bible, or Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy. Just when I was really worried about the lifelong effects of celibacy on our intellectually superior invert, he reassured me by providing his own special version of ‘Platonic’ love. My Merriam-Webster continues to insist the term means ‘a close relationship between two persons in which sexual desire is nonexistent or has been suppressed or sublimated.’ Raffalovich adds some ravishing details. In a section titled ‘Unisexual satisfactions,’ he makes clear his disapproval of anal intercourse, but explains Platonism in terms worthy of Barbara Cartland: ‘virtuous exaltation; the clasping of hands; sentimental feelings; the draping of an arm around another’s neck or around another’s waist or shoulder; timid embraces; light touches; kisses, either fatherly or brotherly [long footnote here . . . ] or amorous; the kissing of clothing or outer garments with the same devotion as one does the inner recesses of the naked body; allowing kisses that one considers chaste; nights spent together, outdoors, at the window, or in a bedroom, chatting and almost touching; or nights spent together in bed [footnote here!]; two bodies touching; random touches; decentralized bodily sensuality as a stated goal of platonic love that distinguishes it from friendship; perineal intercourse between the thighs in front or behind; intercourse between the buttocks, which is very common but should not be attributed to sodomitic intentions; masturbation of one partner by the other or both together, either mutually or reciprocally, either successively or simultaneously, with all the foreplay and subtleties . . .’ Phew! Had to stop reading for a few minutes. This is the most fun I’ve ever had writing a book review. One of those footnotes, by the way, cautions against ‘prudery’; Raffalovich warns men not to ‘pretend to believe that they would rather sleep fully clothed on the floor than stretch out under the same coverlet with a lifelong friend.’ (120) You go, guy! (As the under-30 generation says, It’s not gay if you say ‘no homo.’)The passage rambles on, and the footnotes are even more fun. Gang way, Masters and Johnson! If those unhappy couples that came to you for instruction in foreplay had read Raffalovich, you’d have been out of business. The judicious graduate student might even consider Raffalovich’s text in a dissertation on the history of marriage manuals. When I think that back in the fifties, my parents’ generation was limited to Van de Velde, I could almost cry. If only Mom and Dad had had Raffalovich.Roden’s introduction develops the sense of Raffalovich as an outcast, and puts the armchair sexologist (or ‘gentleman scholar,’ as Roden calls him) into historic and cultural context for contemporary English language readers. As Roden observes, Raffalovich’s masterpiece is ‘in true Victorian fashion, an eccentric hodge-podge of history, ethical-moral argument, gossip, and perhaps most importantly, narrative authority about its subject.’ In other words, Raffalovich’s wide reading in literature, history, psychology, philosophy, religion, and sexology; his status as a minor poet and dramatist; and his willingness to interview every authority under the sun, gave him the right to claim a certain expertise, both in the life that chose him and in his knowledge of that life. Raffalovich dedicates the book to a French criminologist, Alexandre Lacassagne, who welcomed him and treated him as a colleague.I do have a few teeny bones to pick with Roden and Healy. Roden remarks that Raffalovich considers Walt Whitman a ‘utopian Platonic ideal of democracy by comradeship, an ideal far preferable to Wilde, in Raffalovich’s view.’ (17). I think Roden might have mentioned Raffalovich’s apparent lack of awareness of the more riotously erotic of Whitman’s Calamite poems. Raffalovich seems also to have remained unaware of Whitman’s and Wilde’s tryst under the influence of elderberry wine and milk punch. Wilde never forgot the kiss of Walt Whitman. Healy dismisses Sir Edmund Trelawny Backhouse as a ‘notorious fantasist,’ the source being Trevor-Roper, an historian not without controversy, though admittedly, many historians do claim that Backhouse made up quite a few stories. There are a few who defend some of his stories. Is Backhouse’s claim that he’d enjoyed sex with Raffalovich really so unlikely? But now I’m getting picayune. It’s a gift to finally have Raffalovich’s meanderingly intellectual, anecdote-crammed work available in English, to know that it was reviewed in Italian medical journals, and that Havelock Ellis respected his work, calling him a ‘thinker of distinction.’ (5) Melissa Knox is the author of Oscar Wilde: A Long and Lovely Suicide (Yale UP, 1994), Oscar Wilde in the 1990s (Camden House, 2001) and numerous essays on literary figures. Personal essays and poems have appeared in Brain, Child; NonBinary Review, Mom Egg Review, and Gravel. She lectures at the University of Duisburg-Essen.122872513335000To return to the Table of Contents of THE CRITIC AS CRITIC, please click hereTo return to our home page, please click hereTo return to THE OSCHOLARS former home page, please click here ................
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