Queer Kinship After Wilde: Transnational Decadence and the Family, by Kristin Mahoney

Abstract

Much ink has been spilled on the subject of the Decadents and Bloomsbury, both in academia and in popular culture. In Queer Kinship after Wilde: Transnational Decadence and the Family, Kristin Mahoney uses published works as well as personal archival material to “disinter” another artistic circle, one made of “queer and Decadent modernists who operated alongside and often in conversation with high modernism, but who thought, wrote, and made community in a slightly different fashion” (11). Mahoney’s unnamed circle is looser than those two well-established ones but traces a clear web of shared concerns among the early twentieth-century British and American artists it encompasses. In six chapters, each one devoted to an individual or couple, Mahoney explores the distinct ways in which her subjects drew on Decadence and cosmopolitanism as they theorized new forms of kinship. Her work participates in a larger movement, taken up by scholars like Jessica Feldman, Kate Hext, and Alex Murray, to challenge the disciplinary boundaries of Victorian and Modernist studies, calling us to see these periods as more porous and to recognize the continued influence of the Victorian period “long after the century turned” (8).Even as she makes this intervention in the field, Mahoney is careful to recognize that her radical subjects also remain in many ways “attached to and delimited by traditional structures of feeling,” embodying both “radical desires and conventional tendencies” (12). She retains an admirable commitment to seek out rather than to write over the many tensions embedded in the projects of transnational decadence. Such tensions emerge when artists seek out the cosmopolitan to liberate themselves from one set of oppressive power structures, and, in the process, reify another set of power structures through their interactions with other individuals, groups, or cultures. This is manifest in Oscar Wilde’s own predilection for sex with underage boys, often from the working class. It is also apparent in his Orientalist tendencies, both in the artistic realm and in the concrete realm as a sex tourist in Algeria. Mahoney explicitly acknowledges the “political and ethical shortcomings of the Decadent model” and seeks to at least name the places where her artists play out these shortcomings in their quest for liberated kinship (148). In doing so, she is responding explicitly to Kadji Amin’s recent call to “deidealize” queer studies with his reminder that “queer possibility” is also “inextricable from relations of power” (13).Our first entry point into the queering of kinship is Wilde’s son, Vyvyan Holland. The choice to begin here is a testament to the scope and function of the word “queer” in Mahoney’s project. As she notes, there is no evidence that Holland himself ever experienced or acted on same-sex attraction. “Queer” is an expansive and fluid term for Mahoney, one that in its broadest sense designates a nonnormative practice inflected with something “purposefully outrageous, taunting, rebellious” (14). This flavor of taunting rebelliousness is, she argues, a direct legacy of late Victorian Decadence. The adult Holland formed intimate social and working relationships with a circle of queer cosmopolitan artists who were close to his father, a process by which he “textually reconstructed his severed kinship bond with his father” (35). Holland’s translation work is a particularly queer practice, in part because he chose to translate a number of avant-garde, sexually provocative works from French to English over the course of his career. But Mahoney sees something queer in the work of translation itself and makes the claim that cosmopolitanism is a form of translation between cultures. She gestures here to Esperança Bielsa, who has argued that the “violence” of translation “works in both directions,” concluding that Holland’s work embodies the complexity of meetings between cultures (51).Mahoney takes on the political more explicitly in her second chapter when she moves to discuss the close personal and working relationship between siblings Laurence and Clemence Housman. Their bond was rooted in “an ethics of collaboration and equality,” and Mahoney argues that their queer kinship in turn impacted the way that the siblings interacted with the world around them (58). A writer, illustrator, and activist working through the turn of the century and up until the 1950s, Laurence held a utopian belief in “the true self of man, the social self with no hard and fast limits” (57). For those steeped in the early stages of queer criticism, this idea of an expansive desire, one that challenges the boundaries of the discrete Western individual, may call to mind Guy Hocquenghem’s work on homosexual desire in which he claims that homosexuality is a “scattering of love energy” that subverts the concept of selfhood under capitalism.1 But Mahoney does not pursue this more abstract (and arguably utopian) avenue. Instead, her work is grounded in the biographies and personal traces of the artists she writes about. She tracks a development in Laurence’s thought, positing that his unconventionally close bond with his sister led Laurence to become politically involved first with women’s suffrage and then with the movement for Indian independence from England. In other words, “queer kinship practices engendered political activism” (59).Cosmopolitan practices take on a new form in the second section of Queer Kinship after Wilde, where Mahoney examines two cases of British artists going abroad in order to rethink their aesthetic and kinship practices. Her first case study is the married couple Compton and Faith Mackenzie, whose years on Capri she highlights as central to remaking their kinship and their practice of cosmopolitan decadence. At the same time, she does justice to the wider community of Europeans expatriates who frequented the island and saw it as a haven for their own queer practices. Compton and Faith were ultimately able to preserve their marriage by refashioning it in light of their exposure to queer kinship on Capri. Mahoney gestures to robust work by other scholars on the Mediterranean as a space in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century queer imagination, and as a physical location for escape and often sex tourism. It is rather startling to map some of the exchanges that the Mackenzies left in their wake. Broken hearts and even a death testify to their efforts at reimagining kinship. As Mahoney notes, “The use of the island as a liberatory tool . . . involved the exoticization and instrumentalization of an entire island and its people, the treatment of foreign space as a location from which pleasure might be mined and a tool to be put to expatriate ends” (99).Chapter 4 discusses the writer Harold Acton, with an emphasis on his experience in China from 1932 to 1939 and the lifelong impact of this sojourn. Acton sought to revitalize the Decadent movement while a student at Oxford in the 1920s and has the dubious distinction of being famously caricatured as the Aesthete Anthony Blanche in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. Acton articulates some of the strongest critiques of family in this monograph. According to Mahoney, he approached the world with the belief that “he must be mobile and detached, a rootless bachelor, if he is to enter freely and fully into communion with other places and traditions” (129). Lest we think that Mahoney is exaggerating Acton’s beliefs, she cites a letter in which he refers to “the vampire of family obligations” as a drain on the creative and productive life of the individual, a gothic metaphor ripe for analysis (137). She follows Acton on his journey to China, where he ultimately lived for seven years and where he would return spiritually in his writing for the rest of his life. Mahoney’s analysis of Acton’s novel Peonies and Ponies may well open up a debate about the nature of his relationship to Orientalism. As Mahoney demonstrates, cosmopolitanism is a slippery practice; the reader is left feeling that there is perhaps no conclusive way to “parse the distinction between Orientalism and cosmopolitan curiosity,” much as they might wish to (148).Here, Mahoney gives a tantalizing glimpse of the locals with whom Acton exchanged while in China. She recounts that he developed “real intimacies” with the students he worked with at Peking National University and that he “seems to have been electrified by the sense of aesthetic innovation prevalent in Beijing” (139). One recalls Joseph A. Boone’s aim to put his “primary European sources into dialogue, at appropriate moments, with examples selected from [a] Middle Eastern archive” of works chronicling same-sex desire.2 Perhaps Queer Kinship after Wilde would benefit from a similar attempt to displace its main subjects at various moments and privilege the voices of the non-Western subjects to which she alludes.Mahoney’s project is at its peak in her chapter on the American writer and visual artist Richard Bruce Nugent, which features a close analysis of Nugent’s various reinterpretations of the Decadent standard Salomé over the course of his career. Titled “Richard Bruce Nugent’s ‘Geisha Man’: Harlem Decadence, Multiraciality, and Incest Fantasy,” the chapter indeed tackles the intersections of race, gender, Orientalism, and sexuality with subtlety and deftness. Here, Mahoney moves beyond acknowledging the tension inherent in the cosmopolitan urge to argue that Nugent plays with Orientalist tropes in order to understand his own experience as the object of a racialized and exoticized gaze as a Black man in America. It is perhaps the most compelling example in the book of an artist resituating and working critically with the codes of late Victorian Decadence for their own distinct end.The most uncomfortable portion of the book is Mahoney’s last chapter, a disturbing piece about the sculptor Eric Gill. Where many scholars have preferred to gloss over the explicit sexual abuse that Gill enacted on his family, Mahoney tackles this abuse head-on. It is a testament to her insistence that we see the multiple facets of the queer kinship and to the project of deidealizing queerness. Mahoney is clearly disturbed by a number of Gill’s practices and takes a moral stance on the necessity of consent. At the same time, she uses this chapter to interrogate the disruption that an incestuous relationship between two consenting adults occasions. Gill was also invested in the intersection of the religious and the erotic. Mahoney details his rich engagement with queer visions of Catholicism as well as his interest in art from India that combines the spiritual and the sexual. Gill’s engagement with Indian art leads Mahoney to a brief discussion of the Ceylonese art historian Ananda Coomaraswamy, who was in many ways an artistic mentor for Gill.Certain concepts recur throughout the book as Mahoney charts the intersection of cosmopolitan tendencies and Decadent aesthetics. Many of these concepts have a long history of circulating within queer thought: the relationship between public and private, personal and political; the tendency to impose a utopian vision onto personal relationships or political engagement; the question of selfhood and the notion of building identity in relation to others; the engagement with religion and spirituality as part of queer practice; and the use of text and art to facilitate kinship. The scope of a book precludes Mahoney from engaging deeply with all of these themes, but her careful research opens a space for other critics to expand on what she uncovers. Queer Kinship after Wilde is at its most satisfying when Mahoney alludes to lively critical discussions around these themes in her footnotes, directing her readers toward active scholarship.