Homosexuality
- LAST REVIEWED: 24 April 2012
- LAST MODIFIED: 24 April 2012
- DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199799558-0055
- LAST REVIEWED: 24 April 2012
- LAST MODIFIED: 24 April 2012
- DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199799558-0055
Introduction
The 19th century crucially witnessed the genesis of homosexual identities, subcultures, and politics in forms that have endured to the present day. The word homosexual, with its attendant notion of sexual identity, was coined and disseminated in the last quarter of the 19th century. It was a period of enormous opportunities, challenges, and risks for homosexual women and men. The latter were subject to a barrage of infamously hostile legislation that threatened them with prosecution, imprisonment, and, until 1861, death. Explosive urbanization brought together people with nonnormative desires and identities, hastening the development of a recognizable “scene,” mainly for men. Wealth and class were key determinants with a fairly sequestered aristocratic milieu clustered around private clubs and houses, and a more hazardous subculture for nonelite groups dispersed across a range of publicly accessible but easily policed spaces such as pubs, streets, and parks. Lesbian relationships tended to occur within private, domestic spaces, thus reflecting the gender politics of “separate spheres.” Just as homosexuality maintained an ambiguous (and even paradoxical) position within Victorian culture—being simultaneously central and liminal—so, too, is its place within Victorian literature and its specifically Victorian textual encodings. Cultural and legal prohibitions mean that representations of explicitly homosexual desires and intimacies are rare within popular, mainstream fiction and poetry. However, they can be found in oblique, hidden, and even unconscious references within such texts and more unambiguously and openly in “underground” novels, memoirs, and pornography. Literary, historical, and classical studies, mainly written by men, represent another important mode of Victorian homosexual self-expression. Furthermore, increasingly disseminated and sometimes sympathetic discussions of homosexuality within legal, medical, and scientific circles contributed to nascent individual and collective self-definition and provided a language with which to argue against repressive legislation and mores. In the last quarter of the 20th century, the literary and historical analysis of same-sex desires, acts, and identities has been broadly legitimized as a branch of academic study. While earlier critical work celebrated closeted authors and identified and recuperated homosexual subjects and acts hidden within texts, more recent scholarly work emphasizes the historical contingency of “homosexuality” as a stable identity category and instead emphasizes a more labile queerness that resists normativity. While earlier critical work tended to cluster around the fin de siècle, scholarship in this field has broadened out across the whole of the century to consider many authors and texts from the early and mid-19th century. Victorian texts in all their heterogeneity—and novels in particular, with their multivalent emphasis on kinship, desire, matrimony, domesticity, and familial life—remain a rich and robust resource for analyses of same-sex desires, subjectivities, and experiences.
Primary Sources
Given the legal and sociocultural prohibitions against homosexuality in the 19th century, overt primary sources are relatively scarce. Two types of literature, however, offer more open accounts and representations: memoirs, diaries, and autobiographies, and pornography and erotica. In terms of nonliterary, historical sources, some extremely useful archives and special collections have been collated and catalogued in the United Kingdom, while Internet sites increasingly provide free, open access to a number of valuable primary and secondary resources.
Users without a subscription are not able to see the full content on this page. Please subscribe or login.
How to Subscribe
Oxford Bibliographies Online is available by subscription and perpetual access to institutions. For more information or to contact an Oxford Sales Representative click here.
Article
- Empire
- Actresses
- Adventure Literature
- Aestheticism
- Affect
- Allen, Grant
- Arnold, Matthew
- Arts and Crafts Movement
- Atheism and Secularization
- Australia
- Autobiography
- Barnes, William
- Barrett Browning, Elizabeth
- Blind, Mathilde
- Book Arts in the Victorian Era
- Boucicault, Dion
- Braddon, Mary Elizabeth
- Britain in Latin America
- Brontë, Anne
- Brontë, Charlotte
- Brontë, Emily
- Broughton, Rhoda
- Browning, Robert
- Burton, Richard Francis
- Butler, Samuel
- Caird, Mona
- Caribbean/West Indies
- Carlyle, Thomas
- Catholicism and Anti-Catholicism
- Chartism
- Childhood in Victorian Literature
- Children's Literature
- Christian Church, The
- City, The
- Class
- Classical Antiquity
- Clough, Arthur Hugh
- Cobbe, Frances Power
- Collins, Wilkie
- Conan Doyle, Sir Arthur
- Conrad, Joseph
- Contagion
- Copyright
- Corelli, Marie
- Crime and Punishment
- Crimean War, The
- Culture, Visual
- Dandy, The
- Darwinism
- Death
- Decadence
- Dickens, Charles
- Dictionaries
- Disraeli, Benjamin
- Domesticity
- Dowson, Ernest
- Du Maurier, George
- Ecology in Victorian Literature
- Education
- Eliot, George
- Emigration and Nineteenth-Century British Colonial Settler...
- Epic Tradition, The
- Eugene Lee-Hamilton
- Evangelicalism
- Fairy Tales and Folklore
- Feminism
- Fiction, Detective
- Fiction, Sensation
- Field, Michael
- Fin de Siècle
- FitzGerald, Edward
- Flora Annie Steel
- Food and Drink
- France
- Gardens
- Gaskell, Elizabeth
- Gender
- Geology
- Gosse, Edmund
- Great Exhibition, The, 1851
- Haggard, H. Rider
- Hardy, Thomas
- Historical Novel, The
- Homosexuality
- Hopkins, Gerard Manley
- Illustration
- Ireland
- James, Henry
- Journalism
- Keble, John
- Kingsley, Charles
- Kipling, Rudyard
- Lang, Andrew
- Le Fanu, Joseph Sheridan
- Lear, Edward
- Lee, Vernon
- Levy, Amy
- Life Writing
- Literacy
- Livingstone, David
- Macaulay, Thomas Babington
- Machines
- Maritime
- Marryat, Florence
- Martineau, Harriet
- Masculinity
- Material Culture
- Mayhew, Henry and the Mayhew Brothers
- Medicine
- Melodrama
- Meredith, George
- Mill, John Stuart
- Missions and the British and Irish Churches: 1701–c.1900
- Mobility
- Monologue, Dramatic
- Morris, William
- Museums
- Myth and Victorian Literature
- National Identity
- Neo-Victorianism
- New Woman, The
- Newgate Novel, The
- Newman, John Henry
- Oliphant, Margaret
- Orientalism
- Ouida
- Owen, Richard (Victorian Naturalist)
- Oxford Movement, The
- Pantomime
- Pastoral in Victorian Literature
- Pater, Walter Horatio
- Periodical Press, The
- Photography
- Pinero, Arthur Wing
- Psychology
- Publishing
- Race
- Raphaelitism, Pre-
- Reade, Charles
- Reading Practices
- Realism
- Reynolds, G. W. M.
- Rhymers' Club
- Robins, Elizabeth
- Rossetti, Christina
- Rossetti, Dante Gabriel
- Ruskin, John
- Rutherford, Mark (William Hale White)
- Rymer, James Malcolm
- Satire
- Schreiner, Olive
- Science
- Science Fiction
- Scotland and Scottish Literature
- Seacole, Mary
- Sentimentality
- Serialization
- Sexual Reproduction
- Sexual Violence
- Sexuality
- Silver Fork Novel (Fashionable Novel)
- Sincerity
- Slavery and Antislavery
- Slum Fiction
- Slumming
- Socialism and Labor
- Social-Problem Novel
- Sonnet
- Stephen, Leslie
- Stevenson, Robert Louis
- Stoker, Bram
- Supernatural, The
- Swinburne, A.C.
- Symonds, John Addington
- Technologies of Publishing
- Technology
- Tennyson, Alfred
- Thackeray, William Makepeace
- The Body
- The Ghost Story
- Thomson, James (B.V.)
- Tonna, Charlotte Elizabeth
- Travel Writing
- Trollope, Anthony
- Trollope, Frances
- Tyndall, John
- Unitarianism
- Verse, Devotional
- Victorian Literature and Translation
- Ward, Mary
- Webster, Julia Augusta
- Wells, H. G.
- Whiteness in Victorian Literature
- Wilde, Oscar
- Women's Education
- Wood, Ellen (Mrs. Henry Wood)
- Work, The Gospel of
- Writing Practices
- Yonge, Charlotte
- Zangwill, Israel