In the New Yorker...

[Jeff Wrangler]

I just started Rebecca Mead on Pompeii. I was gratified to see her still refer to that incredibly venerable British institution of higher learning as Cambridge University and not, as I've seen recently, the University of Cambridge.

(I've also seen the University of Oxford. No.)

[serious crayons]

I just started Rebecca Mead on Pompeii. I was gratified to see her still refer to that incredibly venerable British institution of higher learning as Cambridge University and not, as I've seen recently, the University of Cambridge.

(I've also seen the University of Oxford. No.)

Well, she's British, so.

[serious crayons]

Did I say it was scandalous? I don't remember saying that. I know Jo March was thought to stand in for the author, Louisa May Alcott, and there were several things about Alcott that were scandalous at the time, according to this article.

I haven't read the article yet but I've long assumed LMA was a lesbian. Jo March is very much based on her (as the sisters and parents are based on her own sisters and parents). So that's why Jo March doesn't marry Christian Bale Laurie, her neighbor close friend and presumed love interest. And apparently her publishers made LMA have Jo marry someone, so she picked a not very sexy professor. (Although in the Greta Gerwig version, the guy Jo marries is actually attractive.)

I visited LMA's childhood home some years ago. Very interesting. Among other things, she pounded out Little Women in about a month, at the request of an editor who thought she should write a book for women. Then she wrote a sequel.

Her desk was a fold-out desktop about the size of a desktop in grade school. In LW, the character of her sister Amy is artistic. In their house, "Amy's" drawings are all over some of the walls.

[Jeff Wrangler]

Jo March is very much based on her (as the sisters and parents are based on her own sisters and parents).

That was just a question/answer on Jeopardy!

Maybe the scandal was that EStVM was apparently bisexual, even though she eventually married (as Jo eventually married). Also, when she was growing up, her father was not part of her family--much like Mr. March isn't much in LW.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edna_St._Vincent_Millay

[serious crayons]

Remember when somebody wrote a book about Abraham Lincoln suggesting he had a love affair with his (male) friend, but others objected saying that homosexuality wasn't even recognized as a thing back then? That can't be possible, can it? 

[Jeff Wrangler]

Remember when somebody wrote a book about Abraham Lincoln suggesting he had a love affair with his (male) friend, but others objected saying that homosexuality wasn't even recognized as a thing back then? That can't be possible, can it?

As a separate sexual orientation, yes. I think credit for "inventing" the term frequently goes to Krafft-Ebbing in the late 19th century.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_von_Krafft-Ebing

But of course there is dispute over that.

I think you could probably say that "homosexuality didn't exist" until the the whole concept of "sexual orientation" was developed--I haven't tried to find out when that was.

This isn't to say that men didn't fall in love with other men or didn't have sex together. Of course they did; there just wasn't a word for it, except sodomy, and I guess that was limited to sex.

[Front-Ranger]

The Greeks recognized homosexuality didn't they? It was called paiderastia (pederasty).

And what about Alexander?

[serious crayons]

Well, sodomy and pederasty have negative connotations (the latter at least partly because of age and gender).

So it's hard to imagine how they could recognize that yes, there are men and women who have sex or fall in love with people of their own gender -- even though doing that was widely seen as sinful or at least scandalous and in many cases was illegal -- without it stemming from some inner inherent drive or longing or whatever. How did they explain that in their own minds, I wonder?

Maybe they thought people were tempted in the way we think of people being tempted by things that aren't good for them -- drugs, excess gambling, etc.

[serious crayons]

By the way, if you haven't already read that Dec. 13 article about Greta Garbo, it considers the possibility that she was trans.


 

[Front-Ranger]

Yes, I read it on your recommendation and it was a good article.

There's a link to a Wikipedia article on paiderastia in ancient Greece and it did not have negative connotations. They say it was socially accepted and the many depictions on pottery and in literature back that up. The stigma came later.