Author Topic: Victorian era men  (Read 3657 times)

Offline delalluvia

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Victorian era men
« on: November 14, 2006, 11:54:55 pm »
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?
« Last Edit: November 15, 2006, 08:58:37 am by delalluvia »

Offline Andrew

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Re: Victorian era men
« Reply #1 on: November 15, 2006, 01:34:29 am »
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.
« Last Edit: November 15, 2006, 08:20:12 am by Andrew »

Offline Jeff Wrangler

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Re: Victorian era men
« Reply #2 on: November 15, 2006, 12:36:39 pm »
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.
"It is required of every man that the spirit within him should walk abroad among his fellow-men, and travel far and wide."--Charles Dickens.

Offline ednbarby

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Re: Victorian era men
« Reply #3 on: November 15, 2006, 01:23:53 pm »
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?
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Offline Kd5000

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Re: Victorian era men
« Reply #4 on: November 15, 2006, 01:50:29 pm »
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.

Offline Jeff Wrangler

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Re: Victorian era men
« Reply #5 on: November 15, 2006, 02:28:27 pm »
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?


It probably shouldn't matter, but the reason that it does matter is political, broadly speaking. The motive for wanting to claim that a Civil War military hero like Robert Gould Shaw and one of the most prominent poets of the nineteenth century like Alfred, Lord Tennyson were gay is that the more Great Men (or Women) from the past who can be claimed to have been gay, the more ammunition the gay rights movement has against the forces of homophobia.
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Offline ednbarby

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Re: Victorian era men
« Reply #6 on: November 15, 2006, 02:36:21 pm »
Good point there, Jeff.  I'll just do my best Emily Litella "Never mind" and slink quietly away...  ;)
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Offline Jeff Wrangler

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Re: Victorian era men
« Reply #7 on: November 15, 2006, 03:15:48 pm »
Good point there, Jeff.  I'll just do my best Emily Litella "Never mind" and slink quietly away...  ;)

I see no need for you to "slink quietly away," Little Darlin', because you're right, it shouldn't matter.

Moreover, I guess since I had my academic training in history before I came to my self-knowledge of my sexuality, it actually makes me uncomfortable to try to "claim" for support of a contemporary political agenda people who lived their lives in a time and place and culture very different from today.

Was Robert Gould Shaw erotically stimulated by sight of the men he thought were beautiful? We don't know and we can't know. We have only his words, and we don't know what those words meant to him when he wrote them.
"It is required of every man that the spirit within him should walk abroad among his fellow-men, and travel far and wide."--Charles Dickens.

Offline delalluvia

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Re: Victorian era men
« Reply #8 on: November 23, 2006, 01:03:02 am »
Thanks for all the replies, fellow brokies

Kd's links gave me enough reading material for a week and then some.

Andrew really startled me with his comment on the better to have loved and lost factoid.  Never crossed my mind that it was from one man to another.  It'll be quite the ice-breaker at parties for me from now on.  8)

I actually have a book of poems by Tennyson and promptly went over to my bookshelf and yanked it down to re-read with a new eye.

It does bring up some thoughts.  These men were writing personal things - letters to close family members, elegiatic poems.  Did these private thoughts also extend to the public world?  Did they say such things aloud to their men friends if they had the chance or shared these thoughts and opinions at social gatherings?

I'm a frustrated writer and I write mostly sci-fi and fantasy.  When I'm writing about men, which is somewhat difficult for me being a woman, I find that in order that the male characters be seen as realistic whether they're a nobleman or a monk on a plague ship in some vastly distant future or part of the governing body of a pansexual colony on a much closer planet, the men have to be stereotypical of Western men today so as to be recognizable.  What we might see on some modern show like CSI or some detective series.  Men of action, men of little words, men of little emoting.

I write some historical stories as well - but I get hung up on the history part.  Right now, I'm a 3rd of the way through my Jack/Ennis slash story of them being marooned on a Micronesian island after the volcanic catastrophe of Krakaota in 1883.  They have a female passenger marooned with them - the story is one of healing - and she has just realized what the Jack character has done in the past.

The woman character is South African by way of New Dehli.

I'm stuck because I'm looking for the 19th century South African or Indian equivalient of 'rentboy'.

Anyway, the Jack and Ennis characters as I'm wriitng them are very similar to BBM's models.  But now, having read R.G. Shaw's letters and all the info you guys have given me about Victorian era men, I wonder if they might not have been more emotive than I'm currently writing them.
« Last Edit: November 23, 2006, 01:09:31 am by delalluvia »

Offline Andrew

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Re: Victorian era men
« Reply #9 on: November 24, 2006, 11:45:08 am »
Andrew really startled me with his comment on the better to have loved and lost factoid.  Never crossed my mind that it was from one man to another.  It'll be quite the ice-breaker at parties for me from now on.  8)
Well, accuracy is not in much demand at parties.  But of course the truth is more complicated.  The section from which that quote comes, #27, is a general reflection on human experience.  The whole quatrain goes,

I hold it true, whate'er befall;
I feel it, when I sorrow most,
'Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.


Yes, he is talking about his sorrow, and therefore presumably his own love.  But he also says, in his Memoir, 'this is a poem, not an actual biography...I is not always the author speaking of himself, but the voice of the human race speaking through him.'  The Victorians lived out their lives in a protected world of social expectation.  You didn't have to worry about the unthinkable because the unthinkable and the unspeakable could not be.  Men did not experience physical attraction to each other, certainly, who had heard of such a bizarre thing?  But they might care about each other deeply, might be emotionally devoted for life, might write 'sentimental' things.  Because physical sex was in a hermetically sealed compartment of impossibility, there was vast freedom in other areas to say and write exactly what you felt without fear of condemnation.  Especially if you did a little careful clarification like Tennyson's in the Memoir to prevent the slightest chance of misunderstanding.

Did they say such things aloud to their men friends if they had the chance or shared these thoughts and opinions at social gatherings?

Somewhere in the Memoir or elsewhere I remember Tennyson saying, with much dignity, that he never called Hallam 'dear' during his life or to his face.  Letters and poetry made it easier to let down the guard.

I find that in order that the male characters be seen as realistic whether they're a nobleman or a monk on a plague ship in some vastly distant future or part of the governing body of a pansexual colony on a much closer planet, the men have to be stereotypical of Western men today so as to be recognizable.  What we might see on some modern show like CSI or some detective series.  Men of action, men of little words, men of little emoting.

If you have an idea for a male character who is not stereotypical, why not try to put him in?  If it seems like a genre is forcing you to do things by rote...rebel!  Think of the most interesting men you have encountered and try to imagine how some of their characteristics would show up in your story if they were in it.  Or see what other authors have done who are simply writing novels of contemporary life.  Anthony Trollope put a huge variety of male characters into his work because he wanted to draw a very broad portrait of his society.  One thing I find interesting about a novelist like Jane Austen is that even though there is an element of formula in her basic story line - there is always a man who is right for the heroine and a man who is wrong for her - her heroines themselves are so unlike one another, and her novels are so character-driven, that the formula is completely overwhelmed by her originality.  And then...the formula itself is largely of her own creation.

\
I'm stuck because I'm looking for the 19th century South African or Indian equivalient of 'rentboy'.

I did see the part of The Jewel and the Crown which had the nasty colonialist who physically and sexually abused his young male Indian servant.  What would happen if that boy couldn't go back to his family and had to support himself?  I didn't read the books, and you probably need a different character.  But the more you read about the period you are writing about, the more ideas you get and the better the results always are.
« Last Edit: November 24, 2006, 11:58:20 am by Andrew »