Biofiction, Compulsory Sexuality, and Celibate Modernism in Colm Tóibín’s The Master and David Lodge’s Author, Author
- Autor(en)
- P. Fagan
- Abstrakt
This chapter interrogates the representation of male celibacy in two biofictions about Henry James, Colm Tóibín’s 'The Master' (2004) and David Lodge’s 'Author, Author' (2004). It is argued that each novel neglects to historicise adequately the function of celibacy in the early modernist period, a time of radically shifting gender codes in which the modern meanings of male homosexuality were still being formed. Consequently, Tóibín’s and Lodge’s depictions of James’s life are determined by presentist constructions of masculinity and compulsory sexuality. An alternative theorisation of Jamesian celibacy is presented through Benjamin Kahan’s writing on celibate modernism, which historicises celibacy as a political tool for negotiating normative sexual codes while allowing for slippage between gender roles. Through comparative close readings of Tóibín’s and Lodge’s representations of the Guy Domville premiere and James’s relationship with Constance Fenimore Woolson, it is shown that they both read James’s celibacy symptomatically as always either a perversion of or a mask for other sexual identities, not as a sexual, artistic, and political identity in its own right. A historicised queering of Jamesian celibacy beyond sexual binaries (heterosexual or homosexual, latent or patent, consummated or renounced) is proposed to complicate the biofictional attempt to disclose secrets and reveal truths about lives lived on the borders of desire.
- Organisation(en)
- Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik
- Externe Organisation(en)
- Paris-Lodron Universität Salzburg
- Seiten
- 213-246
- Anzahl der Seiten
- 34
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09019-6_8
- Publikationsdatum
- 2022
- Peer-reviewed
- Ja
- ÖFOS 2012
- 602008 Anglistik
- Schlagwörter
- ASJC Scopus Sachgebiete
- Life-span and Life-course Studies, Literature and Literary Theory
- Link zum Portal
- https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/de/publications/7562bd63-6fc4-43ce-99ed-ad1d33951f9e