Feeling Backward: Loss and Politics of Queer History
by Heather Love
Harvard University Press
163 pages, $39.95
Feeling Backward is a scholarly treatment of queer theory that assumes some knowledge of conventional literary theory. In it, Heather Love makes the argument that we have feelings in common with those who came before us, but early practitioners of queer theory have ignored the effects of oppression on our literature.
Establishing her thesis in a thirty-page introduction, she attacks the issue from several angles in exhaustive detail. She then moves on to investigate the period of the late 19th and early 20th centuries and the lives and writings of four authors: Walter Pater, Willa Cather, Radclyffe Hall, and Sylvia Townsend Warner. Love uses myriad sources to support her argument and does not shrink from opposing views. With careful attention to detail and a focus on the history of inquiry, she offers a backward-looking analysis of homosexual writing in the social context of oppression, mining literary works and contemporary criticism of these works to explore the effects of powerlessness, isolation, and loneliness. Then she offers readers new insights into the lives and legacies of the four authors.
Walter Pater was an English critic and Renaissance scholar who has long been recognized as a pivotal figure in 19th-century culture. From his Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873), critics have explored the relation between his æsthetic theories and his status as a sexual outsider. Pater’s position at Oxford’s Brasenose College was threatened when rumors began to spread—rumors that recent evidence has tended to validate—of an affair with a nineteen-year-old student. What’s more, much of Pater’s work focused on homoerotic themes in ancient Greece and elsewhere, which—along with his outspoken æstheticism—attracted disapproval from his colleagues and even a satirical treatment from a detractor. Having witnessed firsthand the price of sexual nonconformity during the trials of Oscar Wilde, Pater’s response was not to rail against Wilde’s imprisonment or related inequities but, in Love’s estimation, to offer only a “weak refusal.”
Willa Cather was an anti-modernist who had an abiding fascination with loneliness and death and who vehemently denied her lesbianism, even while, in Love’s words, “dressing as a man in her teenage years, writing love letters to her female friends in college and living with her companion Edith Lewis for more than thirty years.” But in her writings she was consistently hostile toward expressions of “inversion,” and publicly condemned Oscar Wilde after the trials. Love examines two books by Cather: Not Under Forty (1936), a collection of essays that includes one titled “148 Charles Street” about her friendship with Sarah Orne Jewette and Annie Fields; and The Professor’s House (1925), a novel about Godfrey St. Peter’s isolation and his imagined companionship with the ghost of a male student, Tom Outland, and about his wife’s jealous response to this fantasy.
Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (1928) is in Love’s words “the most famous and most widely read of lesbian novels, [and]also the most hated by lesbians themselves.” Stephen Gordon is born into perfect surroundings that contrast to her imperfections: she is a masculine-looking and -acting female. At the time the novel was written, as with other queer writing of the past, the language to describe her condition scarcely existed. Today we might call her a butch lesbian or a transgendered person, and having words to describe Stephen’s circumstances might give us a new understanding of her character. Stephen experiences emotions, in Love’s words, that “swing widely between shame, vulnerability, exaltation, bitterness, arrogance, pain, the sense of failure, resentment, self-hatred and self-pity … [she takes]up the burden of representing larger social losses for those around her.” Today, we want to deny this suffering despite the fact that many of us still feel the effects of homophobia. In fact, we have lost our perspective when we condemn Hall for the book’s sad ending. Here we are some eighty years later, living in a more progressive age, and we have yet to get a happy ending from Leslie Feinberg (and she is not alone in this).
Finally, we turn to Sylvia Townsend Warner, whose Summer Will Show (1936) is a book about two women who become emotionally attached during the French Revolution. In Warner’s world, as in other literary landscapes, sexual liberation is connected to terror. In an allegory about the physical landscape, a little girl named Minna witnesses the spring thaw from the banks of a river as the ice, “rearing up above the water like opened jaws” breaks up, crashing and flipping over. The sound is likened to “harsh screams” as fragments are swept downstream. Later, viewing a second thaw, Minna witnesses the consequences of war in its natural setting, as “parts of dead men, horses, and spilled blood” are frozen into the ice as it’s swept along. This second thaw symbolizes the losses connected to victory: our shameful past becomes the bloodied ice we turn away from as we’re carried toward our triumphant future.
Feeling Backward is a brilliant work whose only flaw is its propensity toward overkill. Love looks fearlessly at literature from the past in which circumstances related to gender tend to produce victims rather than heroines. She establishes that our literature has been affected by homophobia and demands that we consider the implications of this fact. Love contends that we need to look at history and social politics less like Lot’s wife, who’s destroyed by looking back, and more like Odysseus, who listens to the past but isn’t destroyed by it. The past haunts us whether we acknowledge it or not; we may be “looking forward,” as we like to assure ourselves, even as we’re “feeling backward.”
Martha Miller is a Midwestern writer of plays, short fiction, reviews, articles, and novels. Her latest book is Tales from The Levee.
