SOURCE: "Dorianism," in Apocalyptic Overtures: Sexual Politics and the Sense of an Ending, Rutgers University Press, 1994, pp. 43-64.

[Dellamora, who also wrote Masculine Desire: The Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism, offers a more condensed version of his studies in the essay that follows. Looking at several of the major figures of the era—including Wilde, Walter Pater, and J. A. Symonds—Dellamora considers the shifting notions of masculinity and male-male desire that traversed the century, focusing specifically on efforts to maintain the Greek ideal.]

In this chapter I follow Neil Bartlett's example [Who Was That Man? A Present for Mr. Oscar Wilde, 1988] in looking back to the 1890s as a site at which key issues in relations between subjects of male-male desire become evident. As these subjects were increasingly specified as "homosexual," the old patterns that mobilized male-male libidinal energies in service of the nation-state or in the production of high culture came under severe pressure. I conclude this chapter with a discussion of works by male homosexuals in which are set in play reverse discourses that challenge the construction of desire in elite culture. Men like Pater, Wilde, and Carpenter were interested in drawing a distinction between emergent male homosexual culture and the male homosocial culture in which homosexual desire was regularly induced, then directed to hegemonic purposes. In order to be able to do so, such writers needed at some point to turn their attention to the critical analysis of the erotics of pedagogy in the public schools and at Oxford and Cambridge. Pater does so in one of his final works, "Emerald Uthwart" (1892). In this short fiction, he shows how two young Englishmen are drawn into love by the discipline of school life and the place in it of Greek studies. Subsequently, they place their devotion in service of Great Britain in the armed struggle against Napoleon, and both die. Similarly, in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), Wilde casts a skeptical eye on Basil Hallward's unsuccessful attempt to validate his attraction to a beautiful young aristocrat by placing it in the service of high art. In Wilde's novel too, both young men die.

The reverse discourses of Pater and Wilde pose a major question concerning sexual and emotional ties between men. If the traditional enlistment of these ties in cultural production of various sorts is to be challenged, what new rationales will be offered in its place? Or will writers, defending such ties on aesthetic grounds, argue that they are characterized—as Kant contends that art is characterized—by a "finalité sans fin, " a "finality without [moral, social, political or some other] end."¹ Late Victorian writers offer a variety of proposals. Pater, perhaps with Dorian and Basil in mind, deals with the question by arguing that desire between men needs to be translated from artistic commodification into existence, into the "real portrait of a real young" man. John Gray, a former friend and, probably, lover of Wilde, sees the idolization of young male beauty as leading inevitably first to sexual and gender inversion and then to death. Edward Carpenter attempts to validate homosexual desire by enlisting it in the service of the evolution of the race.

In order better to understand the argument in which these writers are involved, it is worthwhile to follow Bartlett's lead yet further in time to the very beginning of the century when apocalyptic anxieties and hopes were focused on the figure of Napoleon and his armies. In early nineteenth-century invocations of love between comrades-in-arms, three sorts of ends are invoked: the sacrifice of soldiers' lives, the moral purpose to which that sacrifice is devoted (that is, saving civilization from the enemy), and the catastrophic end that threatens if one's own party is defeated. The writers of the 1890s rejected this triple linkage of the ends of individual lives to the ethical and eschatological "ends" of humanity. During the Napoleonic period and afterward, sexual and emotional ties between men were mobilized in England, France, and Germany as a way to consolidate national brotherhood. Patriotic brothers were subject to a sacrificial logic in which their "collective casualties within war" validated the ideals—"freedom," "national sovereignty," and so on—in whose name the war was being fought.²

This set of factors was usually alluded to when what I call Dorianism was invoked in the nineteenth century. Dorianism refers to the institution of pederasty as it existed in the army of ancient Sparta. In Foucauldian terms, the idealization of love between soldiers might be described as yet another "technology of the self," "centering on the body as a machine: its disciplining, the optimization of its capabilities, the extortion of its forces, the parallel increase of its usefulness and its docility, its integration into systems of efficient and economic controls."³ Between the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815 and the early 1900s, writers in England frequently considered the subject of "Greek love," a phrase that David Halperin describes as a "coded phrase for the unmentionable term paederasty." In these discussions, pederasty, defined as "the sexual pursuit of adolescent males by adult males," usually means pederasty in the form of the educational, at times philosophic institution that existed at Athens.⁴ This institution, whose meaning hinges on the induction of young male citizens into the privileges and responsibilities of adult citizenship through friendship with an older male, I refer to as Athenian-model pederasty. In ancient Greece, there was another form of pederasty, namely, the practice at Sparta of friendship and love between an adult male citizen/soldier and a younger one preparing to achieve the same status.⁵ This relationship I refer to as Spartan-model pederasty.⁶ Because nineteenth-century philologists associate it with the Dorian invaders of Lacedaemon, I refer to its invocation in painting and writing as Dorianism.

Framing their representations in terms of the social uses of desire between men, the apologists of Dorianism raised questions of continuing interest in relation to ethical aspects of desire between men. On the one hand, nineteenth-century approaches demonstrate how desire can be constructed in terms of nationalist and ethnic ambitions. These ends are served by invoking apocalyptic narratives and by other aesthetic means, especially the exploitation of sublime affects. On the other hand, the attempt by Pater and Wilde to sever emergent homosexuality from service to the state prompted urgent questions about how modes of sociality among homosexuals could be developed and sustained.

In the nineteenth century the willingness of some writers to validate sexual and emotional ties between men when these bonds were exercised in military action in effect effaces these relations. Desire between men is praiseworthy only when merged in nationalist fraternity or even, as in the painting of Jacques-Louis David, in a model of father-son relationship. When, as occurred later in the century, sexual ties between males began to become evident, they fell outside the normalizing representation of masculinity in nineteenth-century middle-class culture that links respectability with purity and virility. Under these circumstances, such ties were construed as signs of a criminal conspiracy against the state.⁷

After one group of Dorian warriors gained ascendancy in ancient Lacedaemon, they found themselves surrounded by other Greeks. In order to guarantee the hegemony of this one group while suppressing conflict within it, the Spartan lawmaker Lycurgus followed the example of Crete by converting this group of Dorian fighting men into a permanent military corps.⁸ He inscribed pederasty within the constitution as a prime means of socializing young men into this organization. This account of the origin of Spartan-model pederasty associates Dorianism with military expansion as well as with the dominance of one ethnic and class group over others within the boundaries of a particular state. The Lycurgan constitution was installed in the face of imminent internal collapse. Similarly Dorianism in the nineteenth century was usually invoked in the face of fears of catastrophic apocalypse. This atmosphere is readily reinforced by assumptions about cultural and social decadence, especially in the fin de siècle, and by invocations of a sacrificial logic that make a seductive appeal to subjects of male-male desire. Such men are subliminally offered an exchange: their lives for validation of their desires for other men.⁹

When the French state under Napoleon was extending its dominion across Europe, the French painter David glorified Dorianism. In the context of the German nationalism provoked by French expansionism, the philologist C. O. Müller did too. At Oxford, where Müller's History and Antiquities of the Doric Race became a standard undergraduate text, sages like Ruskin, Arnold, and Benjamin Jowett endorsed prescriptions drawn from the Spartan constitution as refracted through Plato in The Republic. These endorsements of the disciplinary organization of male sociality were underwritten by the general principle within late eighteenth-century humanism that the structure of individual psychology should mirror the structure of the state and vice-versa. As Paul de Man says of the end of Friedrich Schiller's Letters on Aesthetic Education (1795): "The 'state' that is here being advocated is not just a state of mind or of soul, but a principle of political value and authority that has its own claims on the shape and the limits of our freedom."¹⁰ The metaphoric relationship between individual and corporate organization remained a potent one in nineteenth-century writing.

Apocalyptic narrative, decadence, ethnic prejudice, sacrificial logic, and the aesthetic ideology all figure in Immanuel Kant's representation of the sublime. In the immediate aftermath of the French Revolution, of which he was a partisan,¹¹ Kant includes in his analysis of the dynamic sublime the following paean to the military man:

Even where civilization has reached a high pitch there remains this special reverence for the soldier; only that there is then further required of him that he should also exhibit all the virtues of peace—gentleness, sympathy and even becoming thought for his own person; and for the reason that in this we recognize that his mind is above the threats of danger. And so, comparing the statesman and the general, men may argue as they please as to the pre-eminent respect which is due either above the other; but the verdict of the aesthetic judgement is for the latter. War itself, provided it is conducted with order and a sacred respect for the rights of civilians, has something sublime about it, and gives nations that carry it on in such a manner a stamp of mind only the more sublime the more numerous the dangers to which they are exposed, and which they are able to meet with fortitude. On the other hand, a prolonged peace favours the predominance of a mere commercial spirit, and with it a debasing self-interest, cowardice, and effeminacy, and tends to degrade the character of the nation.¹²

An interesting shift occurs in the course of this passage from "the soldier" (der Krieger), who is liable to die, and "the general" (der Feldherr), who will most likely survive. The experience of the sublime varies with one's position within a hierarchy. Kant endorses "civilization" as superior to the "mere commercial spirit," a phrase that alludes to the petty bourgeoisie and to Jews.¹³ To achieve something higher, in the name of the state, renders the immolation of individual soldiers sublime and saves "the character of the nation" [die Denkungsart des Volks] from contamination by "effeminacy."

David's painting Leonidas at Thermopylae provides a paradigmatic example of the aesthetic inscription of Spartan pederasty within the rhetoric of the nationstate in crisis. Referring to the sheer mass of nude male flesh in this unusually large painting, Robert Rosenblum terms the scene "the Davidian equivalent of a classical locker room," offering "the sexualized male counterpart" of contemporary academic paintings of nude females in Turkish baths.¹⁴ In David's painting, however, the male nude is enlisted against a racial Other. At the right center of the painting, David emphasizes the institutional role of pederasty within Spartan life by portraying a fully mature soldier tenderly embracing a male ephebe garbed in sword, scabbard, and garland. The only nude figure whose genitals are not partly or altogether concealed from view is another ephebe, tying his sandal in the left foreground. The suffusion of a wide range of male relations with desire and love is signaled by the young men who dance together to the left and right while the thoroughly masculinized body of Leonidas at center is the object of an admiring look from another male in full prime.¹⁵ In these representations, sexualized desire includes a wide range of relations of age and body type. According to Müller, in Crete and Sparta "the youth . . . wore the military dress which had been given him . . .; and fought in battle next his lover, inspired with double valour by the gods of war and love . . . ; and even in man's age he was distinguished by the first place and rank in the course, and certain insignia worn about the body."¹⁶

Although the Napoleonic Code of 1810 retained the decriminalization of sodomy included in the penal code of 1791, the evident homoeroticism of David's painting is not due to a relatively tolerant attitude toward sexual intimacy between men. Rather, the painting provides at once a demonstration and an analysis of the inscription of desire in the public order, in part through the dance, whose members are of one sex only, in part by the look of the soldier seated at right center. This look pertains to male homosocial culture, which by visual address fixes in place the idealized and idealizing figure of Leonidas, the king of Sparta killed by the Persians at Thermopylae in 480 B.C. If look and gesture inscribe male homosocial relations of power, the process of inscription is figured in literal fashion in the soldier at upper left who incises into the wall of the defile the epitaph: "Passerby, go tell Sparta that her children have died for her."¹⁷ This use of prosopopeia is particularly chilling when written by and for men who are still alive. In the dance, indeed, men offer themselves to this process of memorialization. Equally chilling is the attempt to construct individual and collective memory before the fact. In the cultural modernity of Charles Baudelaire and Marcel Proust, memory is represented as the most individual aspect of consciousness. But already at the beginning of the century, David regarded memory as to be written in stone before the birth of future children. David's painting is organized in accord with this operation, not only by virtue of the impact of its overwhelming size but also by how the viewer's attention is focused on the central figure. In this way, the viewer is positioned within a male homosocial system. If there is any space of resistance to these processes, it occurs in the exploitation of an aspect of the work which belongs to all painting; namely, its poignant silence.¹⁸ This limitation of the medium permits the viewer to enter into the mute world of those who will soon be dead and in this way remember aspects of existence that the memory excludes.

The inscription of male love within a statist project ennobles aesthetically and morally both male relations and the political aim. The implicit apocalyptic narrative of the painting, the setting at Thermopylae where this panoply of flesh is about to be sacrificed, endows devotion with the sublime value of dying for the sake of civilization itself. This raising of levels is signified in Leonidas's upward glance, which can be described as the sublimating operator of the painting, and by the open sky behind the defile as well as by "the fortified city" in the distance, "which is supposed to represent Athens."¹⁹ The Doric temple facade behind the king, which was to be favored for the facades of nineteenth-century institutions such as universities, museums, and banks, serves a like function, as do the movements of the dancing warriors, whose arabesque stance, invented in 1790 by Pierre Gardel, choreographer and ballet master of the Paris Opéra, was used in huge, outdoor pantomimes celebrating the Revolution. The arabesque, with its connotations of both flight and elevation, signified purity and transcendence in fin de sìecle French art and thought.²⁰

Although David began working on this subject as early as 1799, by 1814, the year of its completion, when he showed the painting in his studio, the parallel between Leonidas and Napoleon, in exile at Elba, was evident, even to Napoleon when he visited David's studio during his brief return to Paris. During the earlier phase in which David had worked on the painting, he portrayed a number of the more lyrical figures: the ephebe tying his sandal and the young boy with the warrior. Only a decade later did David fix the position of Leonidas and his admirer and add the soldier with spear and helmet to the far left. In this shift in looks and body types, David registers the experience of ten more years of war. Vulnerability could be portrayed when one could still hope that young soldiers might return, alive and uninjured from battle. Later, the nude wears its musculature as though it were armor. This masculinizing of the body signifies casualties already incurred. Similarly, in inception, the painting included among its addressees David's son, who was instructed thereby in exemplary virtue. David returned to the subject shortly after his son, now grown to adulthood, was feared to have been lost in action at Leipzig.²¹ The epitaph of the painting, then, is both prospective and retrospective: in 1800, David looks forward to victory, but by 1813 he was looking back on mass destruction and defeat.

German nationalism awoke in the resistance to French control of the German states in the opening years of the nineteenth century. Aryan "purity" was opposed to both English materialism and Jewish "effeminacy"—a construction that has survived well into this century.²² After Waterloo, philologists like Friedrich Gottlieb Welcker and his successor at the university of Göttingen, Carl Ottfried Müller, invoked the Spartan model for their own ends. The idealization of Hellenic culture in the writings of Schiller and Johann Winckelmann had already guaranteed that it "would play a privileged role in the creation of German national identity and values."²³ For Welcker and Müller, there was the additional favorable association of the Dorians, northern invaders of the Peloponnesus, with Germany. Martin Bernal has argued that "the university of Göttingen, founded in 1734 by George II, Elector of Hanover and King of England, and forming a cultural bridge between Britain and Germany," was the prime source of the "Aryan Model" of Greek ethnic purity. Müller, who was "extreme in his Romanticism and ahead of his time in the intensity of his racialism and anti-Semitism," made use of modern source criticism in order to disavow North African and Semitic elements in Greek culture.²⁴ The attraction to Sparta was especially appropriate since "it was the Greeks themselves who first drew a sharp contrast between Asia and Europe, between 'Us' in the democratic West and the 'Barbarians' in the royal, imperial East." It was, as well, the Greek victories over the Persians between 490 and 479 B.C. that prompted Athenians to dreams of imperial grandeur that were soon to result in disaster.²⁵

German responses to pederasty were both defensive and innovative. Welcker invoked the Greek poet Sappho as the model of a celibate male pederasty that provided one of "the foundations of Greek nationalism and the source of Greek artistic power."²⁶ In Welcker's desexualizing model, the attempt to achieve Deutschheit had homophobic, misogynistic, and erotophobic aspects.²⁷ Yet in his defense of Männerliebe, love of men, he extends his discussion to "the larger context of all homoerotic relations. Secondly, unlike many of his followers, Welcker refuses to deny completely the sensual content of 'love of men' by claiming that the phenomenon existed solely for pedagogical purposes." Müller seconded Welcker in "his history of the Dorians, in which he proposes this civilization as the model for the Greek genius and pederastia as the origin of that genius."²⁸ In this book, which in its English translation (1830, 1839) became a fixture of undergraduate education at Oxford, Müller expresses his intention to discuss pederasty "without examining it in a moral point of view, which does not fall within the scope of this work."²⁹ Müller considers pederasty without casting it in terms of a Christian antithesis between purity and "vice."³⁰ Instead he challenges his readers to discern the meaning of this institution within the terms of ancient Dorian existence or, in other words, to think Greek.³¹Thinking Greek in this sense becomes a permanent challenge (and problem) to latter-day Dorians. Although the tendency, as Müller himself in part exemplifies, is to relapse into a "Christian" view, through the remainder of the nineteenth century the problem of pederasty as Müller situates it remains central to Dorianism. The key questions are the ones that he implicitly poses: What is the Dorian understanding of pederasty? How do I as a modern man enter into that understanding? How does success in that effort change me and, potentially, my society? The questions have a Utopian aspect, since implicit in the representations of Müller and others I consider is a metaphoric apprehension of the Dorian/modern analogy.

In A Problem in Greek Ethics, written for the most part in 1873 but published only posthumously in 1897 and then only until its publisher "was convicted on a charge of obscenity,"³² Symonds associates pederasty with the Dorian invasions of the Peloponnesus: "To be loved was honourable, for it implied being worthy to be died for. To love was glorious, since it pledged the lover to self-sacrifice in case of need. In these conditions the paiderastic passion may have well combined manly virtue with carnal appetite, adding such romantic sentiment as some stern men reserve within their hearts for women. A motto might be chosen for a lover of this early Dorian type from the Aeolic poem ascribed to Theocritus: 'And made me tender from the iron man I used to be.'"³³ In Symonds's text, at least as later revised, Dorianism changes its character, since he speaks of utilizing "homosexual passions . . . for the benefit of society" with an eye not primarily to the needs of the nation but on behalf of himself and other homosexuals who sought to decriminalize sexual activities between men. Hence he addresses the text "to medical psychologists and jurists."³⁴ In contrast, Müller's discussion is compromised by the return of Christian moral conceptions. Still, Müller's final discussion does open a space for "this pure connexion": "In early times this proximity never would have been permitted, if any pollution had been apprehended from it."³⁵Thinking Greek means apprehending this space, which exists between celibacy and stuprum, the Ciceronian term that Symonds translates with the word "outrage."³⁶

Of course, for those less carefully decorous than Müller and Symonds, "pure connexion" could be basely parodied. The term "fellator," with which A. C. Swinburne peppers his correspondence, may be read as a transliteration of Müller's φίλήτωρ, the Cretan term for the male lover in pederasty.³⁷ Swinburne's point is not to specify which sexual practices were involved in Spartan-model pederasty. Rather, his abusive translation is designed to bring into view the general connection between intimate male bonding and sexual practices about which Müller is so discreet.

Müller's position, which Symonds draws on, is by no means the most daring one that exists in texts written in German. In Mother Right (1861), Johann Bachofen, a Swiss university professor and friend of Jakob Burckhardt and Friedrich Nietzsche, releases Sappho from the bonds of celibacy to which she had been relegated by Welcker and his successors. Declining to assess her "according to the ethical concepts of Christianity," Bachofen argues that "the love of women for their own sex was equivalent to the Orphic ενες ρωτες. Here again the sole purpose was to transcend the lower sensuality, to make physical beauty into a purified psychic beauty." Despite the sublimating rhetoric, purification in Bachofen's genuinely dialectical context means not celibacy but a fully embodied love in contrast to the "hetaerism" or profligacy that he associates with archaic or pre-Hellenic culture. Bachofen observes: "the madness of her heart . . . accomplished greater things than human reason." Sappho's eros, like Diotima's in the Symposium, is "not unitary and absolutely pure, but of twofold origin."³⁸ When Friedrich Engels drew on Bachofen's theory of mother right in his account of the genealogy of the family, he excluded this aspect of his thought. Instead, in an aside on Athenian pederasty, Engels condemns it as a corruption that issued from the reduced status of the wives of Athenian citizens: "This degradation of the women was avenged on the men and degraded them also till they fell into the abominable practice of sodomy."³⁹

In his introduction to The Republic, Benjamin Jowett writes: "The good man and the good citizen only coincide in the perfect State; and this perfection cannot be attained by legislation acting upon them from without, but, if at all, by education fashioning them from within."⁴⁰ The metaphoric relationship that Jowett draws between the structure of the state and the structure of the citizen is a commonplace of mid-Victorian social theory. John Ruskin makes use of it in Unto This Last (1860), as does Arnold in Culture and Anarchy (1869). All three writers draw on Plato's use of the metaphor in The Republic. Since Plato modeled his republic on Sparta, Victorian uses of the metaphor allude to Sparta. Given the importance that Plato and the Victorians both attach to "education," Dorianism, the special institution of Spartan pedagogy, is also implicated in these discussions. In "Emerald Uthwart," in which Pater analyzes the consciousness effects of Spartan-model pedagogy in nineteenth-century England, he comments at one point: "The social type [Plato] preferred, as we know, was conservative Sparta and its youth; whose unsparing discipline had doubtless something to do with the fact that it was the handsomest and best-formed in all Greece."⁴¹ The surprising direction that this sentence takes from "discipline" to male beauty draws attention to the unspecified connections that exist between these two terms. Does "discipline" produce the "best-formed" body? Does a "handsome" face inspire disciplinary energy? The relations of cause and effect remain unspecified in Pater's deliberately vague phrasing.

Like the Plato of The Republic, Arnold in Culture and Anarchy appeals to a metaphoric relation between the structure of the subject and the structure of the state in order to provide a bulwark against the "anarchy" that he apprehends from the extension of the vote in 1867 to previously unenfranchised members of the middle, lower-middle, and working classes. Given the warring factions of Barbarians, Philistines, and Populace, as Arnold terms them, the extension of suffrage poses major challenges to civilization. These challenges can be met only by developing the idea of the State as subsuming and transcending particular persons and interests. "What if we tried to rise above the idea of class to the idea of the whole community, the State, and to find our centre of light and authority there? Every one of us has the idea of country, as a sentiment; hardly any one of us has the idea of the State, as a working power." In this context, individual culture is important primarily because the organization of the self provides an internal model of the discipline necessary to convert the State into "a working power." Whereas Culture and Anarchy does promise to enhance individual freedom, it proposes to achieve that end by turning the individual into a good citizen. Arnold proposes the State as the "organ of our collective best self, of our national right reason." Though this "reason" is to be formulated in cultural terms, persisting from Plato's adaptation of the Spartan model is the emphasis on "the power to respect, the power to obey."⁴²

Arnold's reviews during the early 1870s of English translations of succeeding volumes of Ernst Curtius's History of Greece put national and imperial issues to the fore. Curtius was a proponent of Athenian democracy and a critic of Müller's claim of ethnic purity (and superiority) for the Dorians. In Arnold's reviews, democracy, which becomes synonymous with demagogy, accounts for the Sparta's ultimate triumph over Athens.⁴³ In his 1876 review of Curtius's fifth and final volume, Arnold asks "whether it is inevitable, then, that the faultier side of a national character should be always the one to prevail finally; and whether, therefore, since every national character has its faultier side, the greatness of no great nation can be permanent?" Faced with the prospect of decline, he concludes his review by urging his readers to "remain faithful to those moral ideas which, however they may be sometimes obscured or denied, are yet in the natural order of things the master-light for men of the Germanic race, for both Germans and Englishmen. And in our common, instinctive appreciation of those ideas lies the true, the indestructible ground of sympathy between Germany and England."⁴⁴ In the face of the rising tide of democracy, Arnold returns for comfort to the security of racial identity and recommends that England ally herself with the emergent Continental power of the 1870s.

Pater did not believe in such myths. In his account of ancient Sparta, he resists the validation of warfare that is fueled by the same beauty, love, and enthusiasm that it expends. In "Lacedaemon," published in the Contemporary Review in June 1892, he contrasts the operation of desire within Athenian- and Spartan-model pederasty by interpolating an interpretive figure, that of "some contemporary student of The Republic, a pupil, say! in the Athenian academy," who is "an admiring visitor" of Sparta and through whose eyes Lacedaemon is presented.⁴⁵ This figure opens the hermeneutic space known as "thinking Greek." In contrast are the "idle bystanders, . . . Platonic loungers after truth or what not," presumably practitioners or fantasists of what Cicero refers to as stuprum, whom the Spartans exclude from their gymnasia.⁴⁶ Pater insinuates his listeners into the subject-position of the young traveler, schooled in the institution of Athenian pederasty. But Pater also attempts to correct that position insofar as it participates in the regressive aspects of Dorianism. This correction is necessary historically since, as the Peloponnesian War devolved toward victory for Sparta, Athenians and in particular Plato in The Republic, had constructed Sparta as their imaginary (and superior) Other.⁴⁷ In Victorian terms, the correction is also necessary because, in the words of "Emerald Uthwart," "none" of the Greek models of pederasty "fits exactly."

"Emerald Uthwart" is a story of schoolboy friendship set at the time of Waterloo. In it, a pair of passionate but celibate friends embrace military service, are posted to the Continent, launch a raid of their own only to miss orders to advance, and are subsequently courtmartialed. One is executed; the other dies shortly thereafter. Despite or perhaps in part by means of these individual apocalypses, Pater, in Lesley Higgins's term, recodes Plato's dialogue and makes it the eloquent expression of adolescent male romance.⁴⁸ For the protagonist and "James Stokes, the prefect, his immediate superior", thinking Greek means attempting to find a model for their "antique friendship" in the Latin and Greek "books they read together." In the story, the Athenian model vies with the Spartan one. Though the latter appears to win out, Pater's point is that perfect translation from the Greek is not possible.

James and Emerald's friendship has strong overtones of Athenian-model pederasty. As the narrator remarks:

In every generation of schoolboys there are a few who find out, almost for themselves, the beauty and power of good literature, even in the literature they must read perforce; and this, in turn, is but the handsel of a beauty and power still active in the actual world, should they have the good fortune, or rather, acquire the skill, to deal with it properly. It has something of the stir and unction—the intellectual awaking with a leap—of the coming of love. So it was with Uthwart about his seventeenth year. He felt it, felt the intellectual passion, like the pressure outward of wings within him—ή πτερο όύναμις, says Plato, in the Phaedrus; but again, as some do with everyday love, withheld, restrained himself.

At Emerald's school, the influence of texts like Phaedrus is overmastered by a "monastic" ("Hebraic" in Arnold's term) discipline that is repeatedly figured in the schoolboys' singing in choir. This singing, in turn, is both Christian and Greek, achieving the aesthetic effect of individual subordination within a larger unit that had earlier been produced in Lacedaemon. Athenian-model pederasty is subordinated to the Spartan model—so that, as the narrator observes—"It is of military glory that [the schoolboys] are really thinking." Indeed, the relation between the two models, the potentialities of each, and the process whereby one is subordinated to the other are central concerns of Pater's study. The result is a portrait of the construction of male-male desire within English schooling that is framed in silent irony by the ongoing discussion within late Victorian sexology of homosexuality as a perversion. The categorization of attraction between men as abnormal gives Pater reason for setting the events of the story two generations earlier during the romantic period, when the intensification of sentiment between men was celebrated in aesthetic discourses in England and Germany.⁴⁹ Yet for a polemicist on behalf of sexual and emotional ties between men such as Pater, the same pressure impels a latter-day effort to frame new relations between masculine desire and cultural and social formations.

Attempting to think Greek, the narrator of "Emerald Uthwart" chooses two Greek words to indicate the powerful effects of the Spartan model. In contrast to the love between two young men that dawns over shared schoolbooks and which leads to self-reflection on Emerald's part, the narrator stresses that σκησις, the beauty associated with "discipline," exerts its determining power over the young man unconsciously: "It would misrepresent Uthwart's wholly unconscious humility to say that he felt the beauty of the σκησις (we need that Greek word) to which he not merely finds himself subject, but as under a fascination submissively yields himself, although another might have been aware of the charm of it, half ethic, half physical, as visibly effective in him." "Another" here might be the narrator, who describes himself earlier as "the careful aesthetic observer." Or it might be his friend James, whose wish to pursue a military career encourages Emerald's similar wish. Or it might be a schoolmaster who consciously manipulates the blend of physical and moral charm, perhaps the same schoolmaster who helps seal Emerald's fate by "frankly" recommending that he relinquish his dawning intellectual ambitions. Or it might be "others" whom Emerald meets during his brief stay at Oxford and who likewise "tell him, as if weighing him, his very self, against his merely scholastic capacity and effects, that he would 'do for the army.'"

During their first year at Oxford, the two young men take "advantage of a sudden outbreak of war to join the army at once." Pater sets the period of their service in Europe immediately before Waterloo.⁵⁰ He does so in order to put in question the social utility of Spartan-model pederasty as well as the use of military service as a model of social organization generally in the opening chapter of Ruskin's Unto This Last. By setting the climax of the story in 1815, Pater concedes the maximum to his antagonists, since the final struggle against Napoleon can be construed as a supremely fitting moment of sacrifice. Yet even in this context he undercuts male sublimation. The narrator chooses a second Greek word to mark Uthwart's seemingly inevitable path, "a special word the Greeks had for the Fate which accompanied one who would come to a violent end. . . . Κήρ, the extraordinary Destiny, one's Doom, had a scent for distant blood-shedding; and, to be in at a sanguinary death, one of their number came forth to the very cradle, followed persistently all the way, over the waves, through powder and shot, through the rose-gardens;—where not? Looking back, one might trace the red footsteps all along, side by side." Although the mythic presentation of this fate poses it as individual, it is socially constructed, incised in the ideal of male self-sacrifice. Given how Uthwart's pedigree combines Anglo-Saxon antiquity, Norman supersession, and Druid prehistory, the shadowed cradle may well be that of English manhood itself and specifically of the aristocratic caste to which Emerald belongs.⁵¹

The suggestion of class catastrophe signals Pater's view that neither the Athenian nor the Spartan model are serviceable in the contemporary world. Rather, men like Emerald and James require space in which to live their relationship in a way that alters their social surround instead of making them vulnerable to destructive manipulation at the behest of national interest. The love that Emerald finds in Phaedrus "is but the handsel of a beauty and power still active in the actual world." The key words are "active" and "actual": desire between men can work to help transform everyday life. This passage introduces a second apocalyptic possibility in sharp contrast to the individual fates prescribed in the main line of the narrative. The second possibility is of a power between men capable of transforming the conditions of social existence. By 1892, when the story was published, this Utopian vision could be termed, properly speaking, homosexual. But to achieve the power and beauty suggested to the two students by Phaedrus requires an ethical knowledge and a shared experience that is not given but earned. In other words, unlike some other projections of Utopian existence in homosexual polemic, Pater's comes back to ordinary contingencies. The transformation is to be not just dreamt but accomplished.

In a number of later writings modeled on the myth of Dionysus, Pater repeatedly invokes the return of the idealized young male body from the grave. But in "Emerald Uthwart" he grows impatient with mortality and insists instead on the "skill" needed to think Greek. The narrator contends that the return of the "'Golden-haired, scholar Apollo'" is a delusion. One has to find something "better; . . . more like a real portrait of a real young Greek, like Tryphon, Son of Eutychos, for instance, (as friends remembered him with regret, as you may see him still on his tombstone in the British Museum) alive among the paler physical and intellectual lights of modern England." In this passage, Pater denies the possibility of the perfect "Englishing" of Greek. One is removed from the "real young Greek" by a series of figures: of a sculpture in relief, of an epitaph written by friends, and by the fact that England is not Greece, that in "modern England" the light is "paler."⁵² He also concedes a necessary mourning within what he takes to be the sculptural figure of desire. Loss is inseparable from memory and from apocalyptic hope. Together with this multiple resistance to metaphoric identification occurs Pater's insistence that one can find something "better" than the sublime figure of Apollo. One can find something or, rather, someone who is "alive" today.

Given Pater's critique of Dorianism, what is one to make of the proximity of Dorian style to the style that a public schooler might aspire to, including even "that expressive brevity of utterance" associated with the stiff upper lip? And, in a section of "Lacedaemon" in which Pater repeatedly refers to public schools, what is one to make of his emphasis on "youthful friendship, 'passing even the love of woman,' which, by system, . . . elaborated into a kind of art, became an elementary part of education?"⁵³ Partial answers to these questions may be found in The Picture of Dorian Gray, the novel by Oscar Wilde whose parodic critique of Pater's aestheticism helped impel Pater to the analysis of pedagogic eros that he makes in his writing of the early 1890s.

In its earlier, magazine version, the novel combines a moral fable that is intimately associated with pederastic idealization and a discussion of the good life reminiscent of the Platonic dialogues most closely associated with the Athenian model. The first key moment in Wilde's version of Platonic conversation combines both Athenian and Dorian elements. The painter Basil Hallward declares at once his faith in cultural renaissance and the central place in it of his devotion to Dorian Gray.

I sometimes think, Harry, that there are only two eras of any importance in the history of the world. The first is the appearance of a new medium for art, and the second is the appearance of a new personality for art also. What the invention of oil-painting was to the Venetians, the face of Antinoüs was to late Greek sculpture, and the face of Dorian Gray will some day be to me. . . . His personality has suggested to me an entirely new manner in art, an entirely new mode of style. I see things differently, I think of them differently. I can now re-create life in a way that was hidden from me before. . . . Unconsciously he defines for me the lines of a fresh school, a school that is to have in itself all the passion of the romantic spirit, all the perfection of the spirit that is Greek. The harmony of soul and body—how much that is! We in our madness have separated the two, and have invented a realism that is vulgar, an ideality that is void. Harry! Harry! if you only knew what Dorian Gray is to me!⁵⁴

Hallward's representation of Dorian recalls the homoerotic aesthetic culture of the essays on Leonardo and Winckelmann produced by Pater at Oxford in the 1860s. In these essays, desire works to desublimate what Hallward calls a false "ideality." Pater validates bodily existence, masturbation, and sexual and emotional ties between men both as valuable in themselves and as contributing to democratic change. In addition, in the years around 1867, Pater and other liberals hoped for legislative reform that would decriminalize sexual activities between men.⁵⁵ The loss of these hopes is a necessary precondition of the outcomes of pederasty in Wilde's novel. Following passage of the antihomosexual Labouchère amendment in 1885, Hallward's evocation is most remarkable for what is left unsaid: he dissociates masculine desire and the art it prompts from hope for social transformation.

Although the relation between culture and the state remains tacit, Basil reports that he has already painted Dorian in the guise of Antinoüs: "Crowned with heavy lotus-blossoms, he has sat on the prow of Adrian's barge, looking into the green, turbid Nile." Antinoüs was the beloved of the emperor Hadrian, who purportedly arranged the young man's death in the Nile before having him declared a god.⁵⁶ Represented in Hallward's portraiture as an object of the male homosocial gaze, Dorian's beauty connotes subjection, sacrifice, and idealization. These suggestions render Basil's cultural ideal ominous, a tone that echoes in Wilde's suggestion that Dorian sits for his portrait "with the air of a young Greek martyr." A "martyr" of and to what?⁵⁷

In Basil's statement, absence of confidence in the civic meaning of Dorianism is matched by excessive attention to a renovating "passion." But Basil's will to celebrate "the harmony of soul and body" lacks a location in personal or social life. A process of aesthetic abstraction overtakes his relation with Dorian: "Dorian Gray," he says defensively to Sir Henry, "is merely to me a motive in art. . . . He is simply a suggestion, as I have said, of a new manner. I see him in the curves of certain lines, in the loveliness and the subtleties of certain colors. That is all." As to why Basil does not wish to exhibit the painting that reveals "the secret of my soul," in the manuscript he says, "Where there is merely love, [the world] . . . would see something evil. Where there is spiritual passion, they would suggest something vile." In these passages, the anxious sublimation of homosexual desire in aesthetic form becomes consciously closeting. Dorian's portrait must be kept secret lest its meaning be mediated by the "vile" representation of the Cleveland Street scandal of 1889-1890 in the popular press and by the emerging picture of homosexuality within sexology and criminology.⁵⁸ Under these pressures, Basil, contrary to his affirmations, loses the ability to think Greek that had been prompted by discussions earlier in the century. The loss is evident in the turn to aesthetic abstraction and, later, to the antinomies of "Christian" morality. This inability negates Hallward's advocacy of "the spirit that is Greek." Congruent with this emptying as well is his double existence, which combines idealization of a young man, socially his superior, plus the undivulged details of Basil's stays in Paris. So much for "the harmony of soul and body."

In The Picture of Dorian Gray, masculine desire is presented in the context of Wilde's satire of male culture, especially as it existed at Oxford. Dorian himself is presented as representing an Oxford ideal: "Very young men . . . saw, or fancied that they saw, in Dorian Gray the true realization of a type of which they had often dreamed in Eton or Oxford days, a type that was to combine something of the real culture of the scholar with all the grace and distinction and perfect manner of a citizen of the world. To them he seemed to belong to those whom Dante describes as having sought to 'make themselves perfect by the worship of beauty.'" Dorian is also identified with an athletic Greek ideal: after discovering changes in the portrait, he exults that he himself will remain "like the gods of the Greeks strong, and fleet, and joyous. What did it matter what happened to the colored image on the canvas? He would be safe. That was everything." In a parody of Platonic love, Dorian has fallen for his peers' idolization of his beauty and privilege.⁵⁹ Like the young Spartan aristocrats of Pater's essay of two years later, Dorian turns himself into "a perfect work of art" functioning in a world of spectacle.⁶⁰ "This position has its counterpart in the power that men like Dorian have to abuse others but likewise in the power of other men over them, which makes Dorian paranoid: late in the novel, he becomes "sick with a wild terror of dying. . . . The consciousness of being hunted, snared, tracked down, had begun to dominate him."

Dorian is, in fact, anything but "safe." His danger, including the growing fin de siècle danger of exposure as a homosexual, is one that he shares with his namesake, John Gray, the beautiful, gifted young man of working-class background, whom Wilde befriended after 1889 and probably took, for a time, as his lover.⁶¹ In order to protect his position at the Foreign Office, early in 1892 Gray issued a writ for libel against a newspaper that had reported that he was "said to be the original Dorian of the same name."⁶² Gray's career included conversion to Roman Catholicism; a correct but devoted relationship with Mark André Raffalovich, a writer who polemicized on behalf of celibate male homosexuality; and service as a pastor in Edinburgh.

After a long period of silence, in 1922 John Gray published Vivis, a little book of poems in an edition of fifty copies. Inserted in the volume on a separate sheet of paper is a vignette, "a drawing of what appears to be a female head, with a mask (a girl's face) tied over the lower half; but when it is turned upside down the picture shows a skull, with the mask, now in reverse, tied over the upper part of the skull. Below the skull is a scroll bearing the words Non omnia novi" (literally, "I do not know everything"). Gray's biographer remarks: "Possibly the idea that the drawing is meant to convey is that of careless youth heedless of the four last things—a notion apposite to Gray's own former life."⁶³ The dual aspect of the image lends it an affinity with the ending of Wilde's novel, which offsets the "exquisite youth and beauty" of the portrait with the "withered, wrinkled, and loathsome . . . visage" of the corpse on the floor. In the context of Dorianism, the image suggests the collapse of the sublime association of idealized male flesh with death on behalf of civilization. Here is no flesh, no masculinity, only a travesty of the feminine.

The female mask, face, or body that only partially conceals a death's head is familiar in the iconography of vanitas. Morris Meredith Williams, who provided Gray with the drawing, conceived it within a tradition whose erotophobia is specifically misogynistic. Nonetheless, the double image has an apt relation to Gray's disabused view of desire between men. Through Raffalovich's research into the theory of sexual inversion, Gray had access to "third-sex theories" of homosexuality, which "'regarded uranism, or homosexual love, as a congenital abnormality by which a female soul had become united with a male body—anima muliebris in corpore virili inclusa.'"⁶⁴ Gray provides a thoroughly ironic version of this metaphysical incongruity, in which the attractions of young male beauty, including his own seductive attractiveness when he was in his early twenties, are a feminine pretense covering moral and physical corruption. More pointed still, the double visage may represent a homosocial/homosexual gaze masked by the feminized mirror image that it proffers to attractive young men. In this reading, the image refers not to Gray's subjectivity (which remains unrepresented) but to the social construction of gender that proffers seductive lures to attractive young men.

Dorianism did not disappear in the new century. In Germany, its appeal continued in Der Eigene, a rightwing male homosexual periodical whose circulation reached 150,000 during the Weimar Republic. Promoting a masculinized model of desire between men in the service of Aryan ideals, Adolf Brand, the publisher of the journal, attacked the third-sex theory of homosexuality espoused by his Jewish socialist rival, Magnus Hirschfeld. Benedict Friedländer, a politically conservative, Jewish homosexual likewise argued that "attacks on homosexuals . . . were led by Jews determined to undermine Aryan virility and self-awareness."⁶⁵

In England at the end of the century, the bond between masculine desire and the salvation of the state became inverted. In L'Affaire Oscar Wilde (1895), Raffalovich blames Wilde's debacle on national decadence: "La societé anglaise est coupable également."⁶⁶ But homosexual polemicists continued to invoke Dorianism. Why? Because it provided a defense of sexual and emotional ties between men. It likewise offered a defense against feminizing representations of men who desired other men. It provided a resonant answer to the difficult question about what utility sexual and emotional ties between men might possess. It validated homosexuals as equal to other men and gave meaning to sacrifice, something that many homosexual men found that their attachments to other men necessitated. Edward Carpenter hated modern war, but he had his own vision of the value of Dorianism. In The Intermediate Sex (1908), he writes:

We have solid work waiting to be done in the patient and life-long building up of new forms of society, new orders of thought, and new institutions of human solidarity—all of which in their genesis must meet with opposition, ridicule, hatred, and even violence. Such campaigns as these—though different in kind from those of the Dorian mountaineers described above—will call for equal hardihood and courage, and will stand in need of a comradeship as true and valiant. And it may indeed be doubted whether the higher heroic and spiritual life of a nation is ever quite possible without the sanction of this attachment in its institutions, adding a new range and scope to the possibilities of love.⁶⁷

Both Carpenter's rhapsody and the panicky image of the masked skull are transformations of the Dorianism of David's splendid painting. The emergence by the early 1890s of male homosexual existence and its representation within contemporary sexology undercut Dorian friendship. The conceptual space, carefully opened for Dorianism within bourgeosis culture, narrowed. Despite the ascendancy in the public schools and the older universities of a humanism aligned with a national and imperial ethos, the sublime association of devotion between men with the interests of the state underwent a process of de-idealization that did not erase the connections between friendship and (military) service but which made them increasingly difficult to sustain. Nonetheless, as Carpenter's response shows, the revulsion expressed in the vignette from Gray's book is not the inevitable or the only end to which pederastic models could lead. Pater's mordant view in "Emerald Uthwart" of the social uses to which young male desire could be put and Wilde's satire of the attempt to validate pederastic desire by placing it in service of high culture and self-enclosure within a social elite both imply the need to complete the task of what John Addington Symonds had referred to as aesthesis in his Studies of the Greek Poets. The work of making desire and relationship between men a mode of ethical action, cultural reflection, and social existence was more important than ever.⁶⁸ This project has its own apocalyptic tenor in antagonistic relationship to Dorianism as it is memorialized in David's painting. Even Gray's turn to the priesthood may be interpreted not merely as a lapse into the conventional thinking that Müller had challenged long before but rather as an effort, within the very limited means available after the Wilde trials, to achieve a locus in which the work of aesthesis could continue.

¹ Quoted in Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, 68n.

² Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, 63. For studies of the ideological structure of nation-building, see Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, and Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism.

³ Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality. Volume I: An Introduction, 139.

⁴ David Halperin, One Hundred Years of Homosexuality and Other Essays on Greek Love, ix.

⁵ In contrast to the Spartan model, Halperin points out that in a number of early texts "pair-bonding" within a military or political context is not sexualized (One Hundred Years of Homosexuality, 75). He instances the relationships of Achilles and Patroclus in the Iliad, of David and Jonathan in the Books of Samuel in the Old Testament, and of Gilgamesh and Enkidu in the Gilgamesh epic.

⁶ See Paul Cartledge, "The Politics of Spartan Pederasty."

⁷ George Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality: Middle-Class Morality and Sexual Norms in Modern Europe, 88, chap. 2; Barry D. Adam, The Rise of a Gay and Lesbian Movement, 21-22.

⁸ Ernst Curtius, The History of Greece, 1: 190-197.

⁹ Hector Hugh Munro ("Saki"), a British writer who died in military action in World War I, was one such subject (Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality, 43).

¹⁰ Paul de Man, The Rhetoric of Romanticism, 264.

¹¹ Immanuel Kant, On History, xii.

¹² Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement, 112-113.

¹³ In his Anthropology (1798), Kant refers to Jews as "a nation of cheats, . . . a nation of traders" (Paul Lawrence Rose, Revolutionary Antisemitism in Germany: From Kant to Wagner, 94. See Rose's general discussion of Kant and Judaism, 91-97).

¹⁴ Robert Rosenblum, "Reconstructing David," 196.

¹⁵ In this sentence and in the remainder of the chapter, I observe the distinction that Kaja Silverman draws in Male Subjectivity at the Margins between the "look" or "eye" and the "gaze." She writes: "The relationship between eye and gaze is . . . analogous . . . to that which links penis and phallus; the former can stand in for the latter, but can never approximate it. Lacan makes this point with particular force when he situates the gaze outside the voyeuristic transaction, a transaction within which the eye would seem most to aspire to a transcendental status, and which has consequently provided the basis, within feminist film theory, for an equation of the male voyeur with the gaze" (130).

¹⁶ C. O. Müller, The History and Antiquities of the Doric Race, 2:303.

¹⁷ Luc de Nanteuil, Jacques-Louis David, 118.

¹⁸ Cf. the discussion in de Man, The Rhetoric of Romanticism, chap. 4, esp. 77-78.

¹⁹ De Nanteuil, Jacques-Louis David, 118.

²⁰ Stephanie Carroll, "Reciprocal Representations: David and Theater."

²¹ Jack Lindsay, Death of the Hero: French Painting from David to Delacroix, 131.

²² Sander Gilman, "Opera, Homosexuality, and Models of Disease: Richard Strauss's Salome in the Context of Images of Disease in the Fin de Siècle," in Disease and Representation: Images of Illness from Madness to AIDS, 155-181.

²³ Joan DeJean, Fictions of Sappho: 1546-1937, 206.

²⁴ Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, 1:27, 33.

²⁵ Emily Vermeule, "The World Turned Upside Down," 40, 41. Although Vermeule is highly critical of the arguments that Bernal puts forward in the second volume of his study to justify his belief "that [black] Egypt and the Levant inspired the culture of the Greeks," she acknowledges Bernai's "justifiable condemnation" in the first volume "of the narrow-minded teaching of the classics that assumed the cultural superiority of the Greeks without reference to Egypt and the East" (40).

²⁶ DeJean, Fictions of Sappho, 204.

²⁷ On Deutschheit and related terms in advanced thinking of the period, see Jacques Derrida, "Geschlecht II: Heidegger's Hand."

²⁸ DeJean, Fictions of Sappho, 209, 214.

²⁹ Müller, History and Antiquities of the Doric Race, 2:300. Linda Dowling discusses this claim in "Ruskin's Pied Beauty and the Constitution of a 'Homosexual' Code," 2, as does DeJean in Fictions of Sappho, 214-215.

³⁰ Müller, History and Antiquities of the Doric Race, 2:304.

³¹ This demand for a hermeneutic reading persists today. See the discussion in the afterword of my Masculine Desire: The Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism, as well as in Halperin, One Hundred Years of Homosexuality, 10-11 and chap. 3.

³² Halperin, One Hundred Years of Homosexuality, 154 n. 12; DeJean, Fictions of Sappho, 346 n. 16.

³³ John Addington Symonds, Male Love: A Problem in Greek Ethics and Other Writings, 17.

³⁴ Ibid., xxi.

³⁵ Müller, History and Antiquities of the Doric Race, 2:306.

³⁶ Symonds, Male Love, 14.

³⁷ Müller, History and Antiquities of the Doric Race, 2:302.

³⁸ Johann Jakob Bachofen, Myth, Religion, and Mother Right, 201, 204, 71, 205, 207. See DeJean's discussion in Fictions of Sappho, 220-222. For connections between Bachofen and anglophone writers, see Bachofen, li-lvi.

Friedrich Engels,

³⁹The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, 95.

⁴⁰ Benjamin Jowett, trans., The Dialogues of Plato, 2d rev. ed., 3:26.

⁴¹ Walter Pater, Miscellaneous Studies: A Series of Essays, 181-182. Subsequent page citations to this work will be given in the text.

⁴² Matthew Arnold, Complete Prose Works, 5:134, 136, 283.

⁴³ Ibid., 5:282.

⁴⁴ Ibid., 5:292, 294.

⁴⁵ Walter Pater, Plato and Platonism, 202, 198.

⁴⁶ Ibid., 220.

⁴⁷ William Shuter, "Walter Pater and the Academy's 'Dubious Name,'" 140.

⁴⁸ Used in conversation with the author, September 1990. Lesley Higgins has made clear to me the polemical relation between Pater's later writing about Phaedrus and Jowett's translation. In the introduction to his translation of Phaedrus, Jowett attempts to evade the emphasis on desire between males in Plato's text by substituting for male love a nearly asexual ideal of Victorian marriage (Benjamin Jowett, trans., The Dialogues of Plato, 3d rev. ed., 1:406-409).

⁴⁹ Pater refers to these discourses at the beginning of "Emerald Uthwart" when the narrator meditates on the epitaphs of "German students" who studied at Siena early in the eighteenth century. Pater links these men with the paintings of "Sodoma" (Miscellaneous Studies, 170; Rudolf Wittkower and Margot Wittkower, Born under Saturn: The Character and Conduct of Artists—A Documented History from Antiquity to the French Revolution, 173-175) in the same church and, allusively, with later German students—such as those who studied with Winckelmann in Rome or like the Nazarenes, Friedrich Overbeck, Peter Cornelius, and Franz Pforr, who made "friendship pictures" for each other early in the nineteenth century (German Masters of the Nineteenth Century: Paintings and Drawings from the Federal Republic of Germany, 176; Keith Andrews, The Nazarenes: A Brotherhood of German Painters in Rome, frontispiece; for an account of apologies for desire between men in late eighteenth-century German philosophy, see Gert Hekma, "Sodomites, Platonic Lovers, Contrary Lovers: The Backgrounds of the Modern Homosexual," 435-440).

⁵⁰ Gerald Monsman, Pater's Portraits: Mythic Pattern in the Fiction of Walter Pater, 178n. On 171-183 Monsman traces the connections between the portrait and Plato and Platonism.

⁵¹ For the post-1870 history of British aristocracy, see Noel Annan, "The Death of 'Society.'"

⁵² William Shuter discusses Pater's use of the Greek stele in a number of texts. See his "Arrested Narrative of 'Emerald Uthwart,'" 15-18.

⁵³ Pater, Plato and Platonism, 222, 231.

⁵⁴ Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 180. Henceforth cited in the text.

⁵⁵See Dellamora, Masculine Desire, 114.

⁵⁶ See Royston Lambert, Beloved and God: The Story of Hadrian and Antinous.

⁵⁷ Richard Kaye is studying the fin de siècle interest, heterosexual and homosexual, in Saint Sebastian.

⁵⁸ Dellamora, Masculine Desire, 202.

⁵⁹ Halperin argues that the Platonic lover falls in love with the love of beauty pouring forth from the eye of the beloved. The latter responds to the reflection of this love in the look of the lover (David Halperin, "Plato and Erotic Reciprocity," 62-63, 75 n. 49).

⁶⁰ Pater, Plato and Platonism, Til.

⁶¹ In Wilde's novel, Dorian appears to be attracted to both men and women. For Wilde's relationship with John Gray, see Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, 291.

⁶² Brocard Sewell, In the Dorian Mode: A Life of John Gray, 1866-1934, 18.

⁶³ Ibid., 138.

⁶⁴ Havelock Ellis, cited in Christopher Craft, "'Kiss Me with Those Red Lips': Gender and Inversion in Bram Stoker's Dracula," 113. For Raffalovich, see Timothy d'Arch Smith, Love in Earnest: Some Notes on the Lives and Writings of English 'Uranian' Poets from 1889 to 1930, 29-30, 34.

⁶⁵ Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality, 41, 42.

⁶⁶ Sewell, In the Dorian Mode, 79.

⁶⁷ Edward Carpenter, Selected Writings, Volume One: Sex, 217. Carpenter's Intermediate Types Among Primitive Folk: A Study in Social Evolution (1914) includes a chapter, "Military Comradeship Among the Dorian Greeks."

⁶⁸ Dellamora, Masculine Desire, 160-161.