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Victorian era men

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delalluvia:
As I said in a post over in the 'Book Thread', I’ve been reading Blue-eyed Child of Fortune, the Civil War letters of Robert Gould Shaw.

I’ve just finished the book and something in his letters piqued my curiosity.  I’m not sure if I’m just influenced by our modern day society of openly gay people and metrosexuality, but I was getting a bit of a Hmmmmm feeling in reading some of Shaw’s comments.

But I’ve never before read any letters written by other men of the Victorian age who were supposedly ‘straight’.  I understand that in America at least, at the time, it was a very sentimental age and the upper classes were more expressive.

For example, Shaw writes comments about other men such as:

“…There are about 120 Midshipman at the School…all dressed in well-fitting jackets and trousers…[which] sets off their figures very well…I have seen some very handsome and fine faces…”

“…The first man I recognized was Cary.  He looked calm and peaceful…his face was beautiful and I could have stood and looked at it a long while…his was the only body that I have seen that it was pleasant to look at, and it was beautiful…”

“…the expression of his face was as sweet and happy as an angel’s and my first feeling was, that I wanted to stoop down & kiss him…”

“…he is full of providence…[has a] glare in his eye (which by the by is very extraordinary)…strikes me as being…pleased at any little attention…You will see that he is very attractive to me and indeed I have taken a great fancy to him…”

“As a general thing, the men seem to me to have better faces than the women…”

He talked about his ‘love’ for his fellow soldiers and friends, he gushed about the beauty of an older man’s profile.  One friend married Shaw’s sister and another mutual friend commented “One might have almost forseen that Charley [friend] from liking Bob (Robert G. Shaw), so much, would inevitably fall in love with his sister who so resembled him.”

He spoke of women as well, but they were almost invariably described as ‘very pretty’ or at most ‘handsome’.  The word ‘beauty’ he reserved for men. 

I’m not sure if all this affection for his fellow man is simply because he was surrounded by men constantly while he was in the Army and when he was younger, at school.  He grew up with 4 older sisters and had a very strong mother with whom he was very close.  He was not a mama’s boy though and did not hesitate to disagree and defy her when it suited him and even married against her wishes.

So Shaw was married and it appears he had a chaste romantic relationship with an African American teacher while in South Carolina.

Shaw was privileged, from a wealthy family and sheltered.

Is this sort of effusion for men simply his affectionate character, typical of Victorian men of his class or something more?

Anyone else know something about men of the era?

Andrew:
You have just stumbled on a goldmine, delalluvia.

One of the most famous Victorian poems is Tennyson's In Memoriam, written for Arthur Hallam.  "In 1833 Tennyson was profoundly shocked by the death of Arthur Hallam, his intimate friend during his Cambridge days and his sister Emily's fiance" (yes, the men who were in love often married each others' sisters!). 

The poem covers his intense grief and reflections over the next five-year period; he worked on it for seventeen years.  It contains famous lines like "Tis better to have loved and lost Than never to have loved at all."  Not many people know that those lines originally referred to the love of one man for another.  And he does refer to love throughout the poem.  

I have to put in a few extracts.  The first describes his reading letters from Hallam one night after everyone else had gone to bed:

So word by word, and line by line,
The dead man touched me from the past,
And all at once it seemed at last
The living soul was flashed on mine,

And mine in his was wound, and whirled
About empyreal heights of thought,
And came on that which is, and caught
The deep pulsations of the world  (#95)

...And from #130, near the end, when he is thinking of Hallam after almost twenty years,

Thy voice is on the rolling air;
I hear thee where the waters run;
Thou standest in the rising sun,
And in the setting thou art fair.

What art thou then? I cannot guess,
But though I seem in star and flower
To feel thee some diffusive power,
I do not therefore love thee less.

My love involves the love before;
My love is vaster passion now;
Though mixed with God and Nature thou,
I seem to love thee more and more.

Far off thou art, but ever nigh,
I have thee still, and I rejoice;
I prosper, circled with thy voice;
I shall not lose thee though I die.

Jeff Wrangler:
A real conundrum.

My own academic background is in history, and it makes me very uncomfortable applying the labels "homosexual" or "heterosexual," and even more so "gay" or "straight," to people from eras before our own--unless the individual was caught more or less red-handed, like Oscar Wilde or King Edward II of England.

The concept of "sexuality" or "sexual orientation" as we have it today is a late-19th century development, I think even later than Shaw's letters and certainly later than Tennyson's poem. In a previous job where I actually wrote history for a living, I once came across a set of what appeared to be "love letters" from one young Quaker man to another dating back to the 1690s. I find myself wondering whether this sort of intense attachment, which has its precedents going back to ancient times, was more common, at least among the privileged and educated classes, but only became suspect and fell out of favor after the development of our present concepts of sexuality?

Maybe another way to put it would be, Was there anything suspect about the sort of attachment Tennyson felt for Arthur Hallam, or the sort of things Shaw said in his letters, when "sex" was just something you did, before the development of the concept of sexuality as part of your intrinsic make-up, before we had the concept of "gay" and "straight"?

Shaw's letters certainly look "gay" to me, but we now have the curtain of concepts of sexuality between us and Shaw, and we no longer have his cultural viewpoint either. I just don't know.

ednbarby:
I guess I am being awfully simple-minded, but I look at it this way:  If you have sex with members of your own sex exclusively, you're gay.  If you're a you have sex with members of the opposite sex exclusively, you're straight.  Where it gets complicated to me is in the notion of bisexuality.  If you're a man and having sex with women and men, but you really prefer sex with men, are you really bisexual?  Or just doing what society has branded into you is the thing you're "supposed" to do?  Same with women who prefer sex with women but do have sex with men.  We've talked many times about how there are probably very few to no true 3s on the Kinsey Scale.  So I think it boils down to which sex you find yourself physically attracted to/wanting.  So according to that theory, it seems to me both Shaw and Tennyson were gay.  The thing is, I don't see why that has to be a revelation.  Some men love other men.  Yes, in our emotionally and spiritually retarded society, that's a big hairy deal.  Really, the question shouldn't be were these guys gay but why does it matter?

Kd5000:
Well there was certainly a large homosexual underground in Victorian England. Every now and then some scandal would break that would make the public aware of this. One of the most famous was the Cleveland Street Scandal, the location of a male brother patronized by many members of the British upper class incuding rumors that Prince Albert, the heir presumptive (he died before ever becoming king) was a regular customer.  Here's the link.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleveland_Street_scandal

Gay bars in 18th and 19th century London were called Molly Houses. Men looking for sexual encounters with other men would go to these places. Don't know when the Unite States started having such places. Population density certainly wasn't here in the 18th century. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molly_houses

There are surviving vintage photographs of male nudes taken in Sicily and Corsica at that time period. ALot of Northern Eurpean male royalty would patronize those destinations looking for same sex encounters.  I don't how much actual written documentation would survive as many ppl didn't want to leave a paper trial.  Homosexuality was treated as a serious crime in the days. 

There has been discussion about the nature of very close same sex friendships in the 19th cenury and times beforehand.  Those friendships nowadays would be closely scrutinized. Abraham Lincoln sharing a bed with his good friend and fellow law partner for many years in Springfield has some ppl nowadays  saying the relationship must have been sexual. Others would say, beds were expensive back then and Lincoln was too cheap to buy his own bed. 

The so called Boston marriages written about by Henry James in THE BOSTONIANS, where two women would live together and be the closest and dearest of friends.. The general public viewed the relationships as platonic.  Women were viewed as being asexual so a very close and dear friendship between two women didn't cause scandal. By the early 20th century, the public eyes were opened to the realization that there was such a thing as  sex between women.

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