Victorian homosexuality series: Havelock Ellis

Following up on Symonds' theory of homosexuality as being an inborn characteristic of a person, in 1897 Havelock Ellis published the second volume of his Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Sexual Inversion, in which he attempted to trace the origins of homosexuality back to childhood through the aid of individual case histories. The collaboration of Ellis with Symonds on Sexual Inversion makes the book the first anthropologically sound publication on homosexuality in British science.

Sexual Inversion was promoted in the offices of the Legitimation League, a society dedicated to sexual reform. This public display of a book on a controversial topic such as homosexuality led to the Secretary of the League, George Bedborough, to be prosecuted and fined in 1898 for selling the book. However, the intellectuals of the day, such as G.B. Shaw and W.T. Stead, agreed that the book was an important landmark in British writing, and that it served as a good example of pointing out exactly what was wrong with the current legislation regarding sodomy.

The attempt to suppress Sexual Inversion and the ideas and theories it dealt with backfired significantly. The trial served as excellent publicity for the book, and hundreds of homosexual men and women wrote to Ellis with their problems, their life histories, information and views , giving him more material for further study. Ellis' work was monumental in the sense that it paved the way for a queer discourse that was something other than negative, and opened up the gay community in Britain of the time, making people aware that they were not alone in their predicament, and that what they were experiencing was not something that could be written off and condemned as a debilitating vice.

Havelock Ellis (1859-1939), date unknown

Havelock Ellis himself was an incredibly interesting Victorian figure whose importance in sexology and gender studies is these days sometimes unjustly overlooked. His findings and his work were certainly as relevant as Freud's in their time. He was a radical thinker, joining The Fellowship of the New Life, an organisation of intellectuals dedicated to 'the cultivation of perfect character in each and all' and 'the subordination of material things to spiritual things' when he was only twenty-four years old. He was one of the founding members of the Fabian Society only a year after, and as such he was an advocate of advancing the principles of democratic socialism through debate rather than open conflict and revolution.

When it comes to sexuality, Ellis was what today would be described as queer – he had strong emotional relationships with two women, Olive Schreiner and Edith Lees, and he married the latter in 1891. Schreiner had left Ellis because of his lack of sexual desire, and his marriage to Edith Lees was highly unconventional – she openly pursued romantic friendships with women, which Ellis chose to interpret as a manifestation of her lesbian tendencies, and they maintained separate incomes and, for the better part of the year, separate dwellings.  In his autobiography, My Life, Ellis refers to their marriage: 

It was certainly not a union of unrestrainable passion; I, though I failed yet clearly to realise why, was conscious of no inevitably passionate sexual attraction to her, and she, also without yet clearly realising why, had never felt genuinely passionate sexual attraction for any man... Whatever passionate attractions she had experienced were for women. 

It could be argued that Ellis was mostly asexual: what few sexual desires he had were chiefly related to urolagnia.

With Sexual Inversion, Ellis had attempted to bring dignity and understanding back to homosexuals, and to explain that their 'condition' was not anything which should set them apart from the rest of society. This attempt was not exactly successful, since the study, as a matter of course, deliberately distinguished homosexuals from heterosexuals based on physical and psychological traits ranging from hereditary, neuropathic illnesses in the family to (not) being able to whistle and preferring the colour green. Here's an example of one of the case histories presented in Sexual Inversion:

HISTORY XII.—Aged 24. Father and mother both living; the latter is of a better social standing than the father. He is much attached to his mother, and she gives him some sympathy. He has a brother who is normally attracted to women. He himself has never been attracted to women, and takes no interest in them nor in their society.
 At the age of 4 he first became conscious of an attraction for older males. From the ages of 11 and 19, at a large grammar-school, he had relationships with about one hundred boys. Needless to add, he considers homosexuality extremely common in schools. It was, however, the Oscar Wilde case which first opened his eyes to the wide prevalence of homosexuality, and he considers that the publicity of that case has done much, if not to increase homosexuality, at all events to make it more conspicuous and outspoken.
 He is now attracted to youths about 5 or 6 years younger than himself; they must be good-looking. He has never perverted a boy not already inclined to homosexuality. In his relationship he does not feel exclusively like a male or a female: sometimes one, sometimes the other. He is often liked, he says, because of his masculine character.
 He is fully developed and healthy, well over middle height, inclined to be plump, with full face and small moustache. He smokes many cigarettes and cannot get on without them. Though his manners are very slightly if at all feminine, he acknowledges many feminine ways. He is fond of jewellery, until lately always wore a bangle, and likes women's rings; he is very particular about fine ties, and uses very delicate women's handkerchiefs. He has always had a taste for music, and sings. He has a special predilection for green; it is the predominant colour in the decoration of his room, and everything green appeals to him. He finds that the love of green (and also of violet and purple) is very widespread among his inverted friends.

John Addington Symonds had contributed his own case history, anonymously, and it's numbered as History XX. in the book. The problematic thing about Sexual Inversion is that by being studied in a cold, analytical and strictly scientific way, the figure of the homosexual man becomes a passive object, unlike the figure of the heterosexual, which retains the active, progressive role. Instead of giving homosexuals a voice, Ellis reduces them to test subjects and does not try to suggest that, although congenital, homosexuality is not a disease – he even goes as far as to enumerate certain suggested 'cures', although he does write that he does not advocate their use.

Ellis echoes the same opinion on legislation concerning sexuality that Symonds expressed in A Problem in Modern Ethics. He writes:

If two persons of either or both sexes, having reached years of discretion, privately consent to practise some perverted mode of sexual relationship, the law cannot be called upon to interfere. It should be the function of the law in this matter to prevent violence, to protect the young, and to preserve public order and decency. Whatever laws are laid down beyond this must be left to the individuals themselves, to the moralists, and to social opinion.

In many ways, Sexual Inversion was a double-edged sword. It perpetuated what it attempted to deconstruct, but in spite of this it is still a monumental work in sexology and writing on homosexual behaviour and practices. 

Sherlock and The Woman: What on Earth Happened to Irene Adler?

SPOILER WARNING: This post discusses the plot of Sherlock: A Scandal in Belgravia.

I enjoy Sherlock as a show. It has many faults, but I have respect for what it is doing and how it is trying to modernise Conan Doyle's stories. Some of the modern translations of Victorian plot points, tropes and 'gadgets' have worked extremely well and have been done with the writers paying great respect to the canon they were using. My compliments in this respect especially go out to Mark Gatiss for the episode The Great Game in the first series and the way that the writers have so far treated the character of Moriarty.

However, no television show is flawless, or tries to be. Sherlock, for one, has always had problems with how it portrayed female characters, and these problems have only been accentuated with the first episode of the second series, A Scandal in Belgravia, aired last night.

Irene Adler in Sherlock Holmes, played by Rachel McAdams (source)

Holmes's treatment of and attitude to women is that of a rescuer, which perpetuates the idea that women require to be rescued by men, that women are passive when in peril, and the only way they can be removed from a threatening situation is by male interference. Men, the narrative of Sherlock shows us, are at their most manly when they are fighting side by side to rescue women. Sarah Sawyer, from The Blind Banker, is an independent person – she is a doctor and a working woman who knows what she wants, and she is independent. She fights off Chinese smuggler acrobats like it's her job, until the very end of the episode, when she is captured and tied, and almost shot through with a spear. All her previous strength and independence is obliterated in order to serve the purpose of furthering the narrative, and, more importantly, to show her being rescued by a more successful and more able male protagonist – in this case, Holmes. All merit as strong female characters that she has had up to this point is lost, as she serves to further assert that masculinity is more powerful than and superior to femininity.

The myriad of women from various occupations and walks of life makes Sherlock a very modern work when it comes to the treatment of femininity. At the same time, however, it is steeped in nineteenth-century misogyny and sexism in the way these women are treated, both in the construction of the narrative and by the characters within it. Unlike the men, who are all (mostly) well-rounded and complex, the women in Sherlock serve as one-dimensional character types. In fact, the female characters are a typical example of the Victorian idea of binary coding of female identity, the Whore and the Virgin, if you will.

Female characters are seen through and defined by a male perspective, and not in their own right. In the first series, Sally Donovan is a sergeant of Scotland Yard, a position which she would have attained through extremely hard work, being both a woman and a person of colour, the only example of both of these traits in the all-male, all-white team. However, she is shown only through her negative history with Holmes, which has turned her bitter and reduced her dialogue to almost exclusively calling him 'freak'. Moreover, she is shown through her subordinate relationship with men, be it personal or private: she is both 'guilty' of office romance, the alleged partner in an alleged affair, for which Holmes openly shames her in front of her colleagues. Molly Hooper is a pathologist at St Bart's Hospital – a position which would have taken her at least five years to qualify for – and yet she is characterised solely as being love struck and wide-eyed towards Holmes, even though he treats her with no respect.

The relationship that the Holmes we see in Sherlock has with its women is very much different to the kind of Holmes that Watson describes in The Adventure of the Dying Detective:  'He had a remarkable gentleness and courtesy in his dealings with women. He disliked and distrusted the sex, but he was always a chivalrous opponent.' In Sherlock, Holmes exploits women for being female, and he is far from courteous or gentle with them. He plays on the stereotypically 'female weaknesses' – emotions, vanity, and sexuality – in order to manipulate them into giving him what he wants. Women, as they are written in Sherlock, mainly through the pen of Steven Moffat, are body and nature, determined by and a slave to their emotions, hormones and instincts. Men, on the other hand, transcend their biological materiality and 'basic instincts' such as emotion or sexual desire: women are entrenched in their physicality. They can try to be like men, in the sense that they can try to conquer their emotions, but Steven Moffat teaches us, on the example of Irene Adler in A Scandal in Belgravia, that they can never succeed.

Irene Adler in A Scandal in Belgravia, played by Lara Pulver (source)

In adapting A Scandal in Bohemia or just involving Adler in other stories, most writers seem to forget (whether by accident or by design) that 'the woman' was the only person in the canon to ever outsmart Holmes and leave him on her own terms. They also seem to forget that Adler had no romantic interest in Holmes – in fact, she was trying to marry Godfrey Norton, who is rarely even alluded to, or more often completely omitted from adaptations. The most recent unjust treatment that Adler received was in the 2009 Sherlock Holmes by Guy Ritchie, and you can read about that in more detail in Renee Cohn's excellent blog post, A Defense of Irene Adler, in two parts.

I had hopes for this modernised Irene Adler, and despite Moffat's notorious history of failed female characters, most recently seen in the Doctor Who Christmas special, I went into the episode with an open mind. The modern Adler is a sex worker and a dominatrix, a profession which is treated with an unexpected and welcome lack of prejudice by both the writer and the characters. She uses her intellect and her sensuality in an equal degree to achieve her goals: again, a welcome change to female characters (and previous Irene Adlers) who are shown as using sexuality as their only weapon. She is clever, capable, resourceful, and follows faithfully the Adler that Conan Doyle envisioned in A Scandal in Bohemia in 1891, a time when New Women started redefining the meaning of femininity, and the strict rules that had up to then governed gender and sexual identity were starting to break down. Although femininity and masculinity are safe within their traditional frames in most of Conan Doyle's stories, Adler is one character that challenges them, and in the end outwits the super sleuth.

This refreshingly well-done portrayal of Adler is pulled off in A Scandal in Belgravia in the first 90% of the episode. Adler plays a game of cat-and-mouse with Holmes and she is seen as always having the upper hand: at one point, she drugs Holmes and escapes, leaving him passed out on the floor. When she first meets Holmes, she is completely naked, not because she wants to present herself as an object to be lusted after, but because she knows that Holmes reads people based on their clothing, and that way she remains an enigma to him. Her clients are both male and female - the primary plot of the show is that she has some compromising photographs of herself with a female member of the Royal Family - and she identifies herself as gay in an exchange with Watson. A positive portrayal of a queer sex worker on prime-time television? It's almost too good to be true, since queer women in mainstream media are almost always erased or fetishised.

Unfortunately, Adler's self-identifying as gay is completely forgotten when Holmes enters her life. 'Brainy is the new sexy', she declares, and Holmes is able to beat her based on the fact that he deduces she is 'in love' with him because her heart rate increased when their hands touched and her pupils dilated when they were close. The issue here is not so much that lust and love are confused in a blatant display of ignoring basic biology, but rather that a presumably lesbian character has fallen in love with a man. Of course, I am not denying the fact that sexuality works very differently for each person and that it is fluid and subject to change: the problem with Adler falling head over heels for Holmes is the fact that she, as a queer woman, falls prey to erasure like so many before her. Up to this point, her sexuality was not the primary defining point of her character.

It goes further downhill from there: the viewer finds out that Adler's intellect and resourcefulness are not her own. She was helped by Jim Moriarty all along, and the narrative once again becomes the traditional Moffat story of women not being able to succeed independently. The point is rammed home at the end of the episode - a weeping, bound Adler (reminiscent of the one in Sherlock Holmes) is saved from death by the heroic Holmes.

The message is clear: women cannot fight their own battles. They will always need a man to save them in the end, either from an outward threat, or from their own misguided sexuality. Adler in A Scandal in Belgravia had a lot of potential to be the best Irene Adler since 1891. She was independent, her sexuality was not her sole defining feature or primary weapon, and she outsmarted Holmes. And then, with a penstroke and a camera tilt, she was lying in Holmes's bed, a crying mess, she had let her emotions play her for a fool (the password to her phone was made to read 'I am Sherlocked', which, all previous things considered, could not be meant in an ironic manner), she was the pawn of Moriarty, and she had to be rescued by a strong, brainy masculine presence.

This starts out as a kind of Irene Adler that Conan Doyle wrote, and ends a twisted caricature of the fantastic, clever person from A Scandal in Bohemia. Has Steven Moffat finally succumbed to a bad case of George Lucas syndrome? And can female characters, queer or otherwise, hope for a good portrayal on the BBC if one of their most prominent writers has them put in the place he wants them, subordinate to men?

Victorian homosexuality series: John Addington Symonds

Sexuality in nineteenth-century British society was heavily policed and strictly regulated. People's private lives were regulated by means of the public sphere, through legislation as well as discourse in newspapers, sermons, pamphlets and other ways of public address.

For a society steeped in moral panic about a vice supposedly so abominable it cannot be uttered, 'the love that dare not speak its name', as Lord Alfred 'Bosie' Douglas was to describe it in his poem Two Loves, the Victorians had a knack at finding ways to keep discussing it.

For example, in a medical text from 1873, 'unnatural offences' are dealt with, among them sodomy. It is interesting to note that although it was written by a medical doctor, The Principals and Practice of Medical Jurisprudence does not go any further to explain what sodomy actually is, other than the fact that it was an 'unnatural connection of a man with mankind'. (The full volume can be read at the Internet Archive here.) This kind of repressive, restrictive discourse birthed late nineteenth-century sexologists and homosexual apologists, who sought to prove that homosexuality and acts related to it (such as sodomy), was not 'unnatural' or an 'offence', but rather a valid sexual identity.

John Addington Symonds (1840-1893) in 1889

The first writer who spoke out in favour of homosexuality was John Addington Symonds in his work A Problem in Greek Ethics (written in 1873 but first published ten years later, in 1883). Symonds himself was openly homosexual, and for a greater part of his life lived in Switzerland, practising an open marriage with his wife Catherine (with whom he had several children), who did not seem to have objections to Symonds having sexual relationships with a number of young men. It is the first work to discuss the history of homosexuality, or as Symonds defined it, 'sexual inversion'. Later, Havelock Ellis would define sexual inversion as 'sexual instinct turned by inborn constitutional abnormality toward persons of the same sex'. It is important to remember that 'abnormality' here did not mean something repugnant or abhorrent, but simply something different from the norm: the norm in this case being heterosexuality.

In A Problem in Greek Ethics, Symonds writes of 'undiseased psychological complexity and noble emotionality in male love', showing examples of various cases of homosexuality and same-sex friendship in order to illustrate how the Greeks, 'a great and highly-developed race', were much more permissive of those kinds of relations than his Victorian contemporaries. It is significant that one of the first texts of homosexual apology treads the safe line of dealing with the distant rather than the immediate past, or, even riskier, the present. The Victorians considered Ancient Greece an ideal in many ways, so it was very clever of Symonds to use it as a backdrop for his attempt to destigmatize love between men.

It was only in 1891 that Symonds was ready to address contemporary problems, when he wrote A Problem in Modern Ethics. Before this, men who identified as 'inverts' in Britain had to rely solely on continental works of sexology by theorists such as Richard Von Krafft-Ebing and Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, and it is the continental tradition that inspired Symonds – and others after him – to write about this topic. Although Krafft-Ebing and Ulrichs were what we could call pioneers of LGBT rights, their works were not readily available in Britain, and no English translations existed. By writing A Problem in Modern Ethics, Symonds tried to remove negative prejudices attached to homosexuality:

It is the common belief that a male who loves his own sex must be despicable, degraded, depraved, vicious, and incapable of humane or generous sentiments. If Greek history did not contradict this supposition, a little patient enquiry into contemporary manners would suffice to remove it. But people will not take this trouble about a matter, which (...) they "touch with reluctance and despatch with impatience." Those who are obliged to do so find to their surprise that "among the men who are subject to this deplorable vice there are even quite intelligent, talented, and highly-placed persons, of excellent and even noble character."

The vulgar expect to discover the objects of their outraged animosity in the scum of humanity. But these may be met with every day in drawing-rooms, law-courts, banks, universities, mess-rooms; on the bench, the throne, the chair of the professor; under the blouse of the workman, the cassock of the priest, the epaulettes of the officer, the smock-frock of the ploughman, the wig of the barrister, the mantle of the peer, the costume of the actor, the tights of the athlete, the gown of the academician. (J.A. Symonds, A Problem in Modern Ethics, 1891)

What is important to note is the final chapter of the book, entitled Suggestions on the subject of sexual inversion in relation to law and education, where Symonds talks about 'the vulgar error that antiphysical desires are invariably voluntary, and the result either of inordinate lust or of satiated appetites'. He speaks out against this belief, and here is the true historical value of this text – in the hypothesis that homosexuality, as a sexual identity expressed through sexual practice or sentiment, is something one is born with, rather than anything one inherits, or adopts as result of a pernicious environment. This kind of hypothesis would pave the way for future works discussing with homosexuality and queer issues, and Symonds himself would with Havelock Ellis co-author one of the most important books on the subject, Sexual Inversion, published after his death in 1897.