Celibacies: American Modernism and Sexual Life - Hardcover

Kahan, Benjamin

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 082235554X ISBN 13: 9780822355540

Publisher: Duke University Press Books, 2013

Synopsis

In this innovative study, Benjamin Kahan traces the elusive history of modern celibacy. Arguing that celibacy is a distinct sexuality with its own practices and pleasures, Kahan shows it to be much more than the renunciation of sex or a cover for homosexuality. Celibacies focuses on a diverse group of authors, social activists, and artists, spanning from the suffragettes to Henry James, and from the Harlem Renaissance's Father Divine to Andy Warhol. This array of figures reveals the many varieties of celibacy that have until now escaped scholars of literary modernism and sexuality. Ultimately, this book wrests the discussion of celibacy and sexual restraint away from social and religious conservatism, resituating celibacy within a history of political protest and artistic experimentation. Celibacies offers an entirely new perspective on this little-understood sexual identity and initiates a profound reconsideration of the nature and constitution of sexuality.

About this title

About the Author

Benjamin Kahan is Assistant Professor of English and Women's and Gender Studies at Louisiana State University.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Celibacies

American Modernism & Sexual Life

By BENJAMIN KAHAN

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2013 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8223-5554-0

Contents

Acknowledgments............................................................
xi
INTRODUCTION The Expressive Hypothesis....................................
1
1 The Longue Durée of Celibacy: Boston Marriage, Female Friendship, and 
the Invention of Homosexuality.............................................
33
2 Celibate Time............................................................
56
3 The Other Harlem Renaissance: Father Divine, Celibate Economics, and the 
Making of Black Sexuality..................................................
81
4 The Celibate American: Closetedness, Emigration, and Queer Citizenship 
before Stonewall...........................................................
99
5 Philosophical Bachelorhood, Philosophical Spinsterhood, and Celibate 
Modernity..................................................................
121
CONCLUSION Asexuality / Neutrality / Relationality........................
142
Notes......................................................................
155
Bibliography...............................................................
199
Index......................................................................
223

CHAPTER 1

The Longue Durée of Celibacy

Boston Marriage, Female Friendship, andthe Invention of Homosexuality

In the introduction I sought to make a double gesture: carving out celibacy'sparticular history separate from that of homosexuality and markingcelibacy's imbrication with homosexuality. By clarifying the nature of thespecific entwinement between celibacy and homosexuality across a longuedurée, this chapter attempts to alleviate the busyness of the sex / no sexdebate that plagues sexuality studies. The title chapter of David Halperin'sHow to Do the History of Homosexuality (2002) lays out an ambitious projectthat will help us to achieve this goal: "I shall try to describe very tentatively,very speculatively, some important pre-homosexual discourses, practices,categories, patterns, or models (I am really not sure what to call them)and to sketch their similarities with and differences from what goes by thename of homosexuality nowadays." Halperin explores four prehomosexualdiscourses—effeminacy, "active" sodomy, friendship, and inversion—in orderto construct a genealogy of homosexuality that contains transhistoricalelements and accounts for its current historical shape and functions. Oneof the strengths of Halperin's approach is the way it disarticulates thesediscourses from homosexuality at the same time that it binds them to homosexuality.This chapter takes Halperin's incitement to "correct and complete"his project as an occasion to build on his work, arguing that we mustunderstand celibacy as an additional pattern or model that striates the longhistory of homosexuality before its emergence as such. Celibacy, then, doesnot just paper over homosexuality but is woven into its very fabric. LikeHalperin, I hope to describe this new prehomosexual discourse with asmuch "positivity and ... specificity as possible," while confessing that myexamples are more theoretical and historiographical than properly historicalor narrating a history of celibacy over the longue durée. My chartingof celibacy seeks to clarify the relationship between Halperin's practicesof homosexuality and friendship, as well as allowing us to speculate abouthow homosexuality develops into an "orientation." In particular, this latterhypothesis will surmise that celibacy's long association with vocation endowshomosexuality with its vocabulary of "career," suggesting that "career"provides an inchoate language of "sexual orientation."

Kathryn Ringrose's study of Byzantine eunuchs provides evidence thatcelibacy as a prehomosexual discourse dates at least back to the first millennium.The involuntary celibacy of eunuchs enabled them to hold the officeof "perfect servants," as late antiquity Christianity increasingly valorizedcelibacy as a religious ideal. Byzantine culture ascribed to eunuchs whatRingrose calls a "third gender," seeing them as " 'unnatural' (in the sensethat they were artificially, culturally created); they existed outside of whatwas perceived to be the natural order of the biological world." When thisformulation of a third gender is placed alongside Ringrose's contention that"eunuchs by nature" is a phrase that connotes "castrated men who activelyseek out sexual relations with other men," we can begin to see how celibacyfunctions as a transhistorical prehomosexual discourse in the same manneras Halperin's four other patterns. The phrase "eunuchs by nature" impliesthat the Byzantine perception of the "natural" occurrence of homosexualityis embodied in the cultural process of surgical castration. Because thiscastration allegedly made one incapable of sex, the expression "eunuchs bynature" suggests that the language of celibacy (and of the eunuch in particular)was a language of homosexuality before its invention.

This network between celibacy and homosexuality is also evident in apoem titled "I Am Already Changing My Mind" (likely dating from thetwelfth century) in which one cleric tells his male lover that he will becomea monk if God will grant his beloved (who is ill) health again. Here,celibacy is figured as a performance of homosexual love. While similarexamples of this transhistorical relay between celibacy and homosexualitymight be found in figures like Leonardo da Vinci, Washington Irving,and Hans Christian Anderson, the eighteenth-century British poet ThomasGray provides a particularly rich example. While scholarship by GeorgeHaggerty, Robert Gleckner, and others has pointed out the erotic nature ofGray's friendships with Horace Walpole, Richard West, and later CharlesVictor de Bonstetten, the standard Gray biography describes these relationshipsin the context of Gray's celibacy: "We possess no evidence—noproof of overt behavior—to suggest that Gray ever (either as a child or as anadult) engaged in intimate, sexual relations of any kind." The simultaneityof homosexuality and celibacy (and career) comes through very clearly in aletter to Bonstetten. Gray quotes "another Greek writer" who describes oneof the qualifications for a career in philosophy as "be[ing] little inclined tosensual pleasures, and consequently temperate," but then takes issue withthis assertion, complicating it by saying that "extraordinary vices and extraordinaryvirtues are equally the produce of a vigorous mind: little soulsare alike incapable of the one and the other." The entwinement of homosexuality("extraordinary vices") and celibacy ("extraordinary virtues") inthe context of career is only enhanced by the fact that Gray quotes a Greekwriter (with its associations of homosexuality) to a man with whom heis in a "platonic" friendship, but one that is fueled (at least for Gray) by a"volatile erotic fire."

Turning back to the historical period on which this study centers, wefind similar examples of this configuration in four more modern figures:Baron Corvo, Ralph Werther, Henry Lehr, and Quentin Crisp. Like the of-fice of the eunuch, the vocation of the monk, and the calling of the philosopher,these figures triangulate celibacy, career, and homosexuality. A. J. A.Symons's experimental biography The Quest for Corvo (1934), for example,writes of its subject: "Set among those who had voluntarily embraced celibacy,his [Corvo's] abnormality [homosexuality] became, not a possible vice,but a sign of Vocation." Here, celibacy cloaks homosexuality but also celebrates,harnesses, and embraces it to open a career.

During this period, the practice of homosexuality was regularly understoodas a "career"; Ralph Werther uses the locution "my open career as afairie" or "my career as a fairie" more than a dozen times in his autobiography.While this association certainly arises partly out of the incompatibilityof homosexuality with any other career (what the queer Samuel Stewardlaments as the choice "between love and a career"), celibacy's history as acalling or vocation underwrites the trope of the homosexual career. Thisis nowhere clearer than in "King Lehr" and the Gilded Age (1935), where thequeer Lehr is described as "completely sexless"; he credits celibacy as "thesecret of [his] success": "Love affairs are fatal to ambition." This nexus isalso evident in Quentin Crisp's The Naked Civil Servant (1968), where the titleimagines Crisp's sex life through the language of occupation. Crisp's textdescribes him "living without sexual encounters at all" "for many years" in1920s England and nominates him "Miss Arc's only rival." Crisp teasinglysprinkles his celibacy with Eros by referring to his erotic "rivalry" with Joanof Arc. Moreover, we might take Crisp's cue that celibacy (and the trope ofJoan of Arc in particular) is part of a prelesbian as well as a prehomosexualdiscourse.

Such an exploration is of vital importance both because the debate betweensex and no sex forces is most pronounced in relation to lesbian sexualityand because celibacy is even more closely tied to career for women.Understanding celibacy as a prelesbian pattern will clarify not only the historicalforces that enable and constitute the invention of homo sexuality(broadly conceived) but also the specific collision between friendshipand lesbianism. The imbrication between celibacy and lesbianism goes atleast back to Desiderius Erasmus's "The Girl with No Interest in Marriage"(1523). Here, Erasmus's representative, Eubulus, attempts to dissuade Catharinefrom entering a convent:

EUBULUS: What's more, not everything's virginal among those virginsin other respects, either.

CATHARINE: No? Why not, if you please?

EUBULUS: Because there are more who copy Sappho's behaviourthan share her talent.

Here, in the context of a discussion about the choice of vocation, Eubulusequates virgins and the virginal with Sapphic behavior, suggesting the importanceof reading practices that interpret celibacy as homosexuality.

Recent work by Valerie Traub, Theodora Jankowski, and Kathleen CoyneKelly and Marina Leslie also tells another story, positing a queer virginitythat looks less like the same-sex acts of the Erasmus text and more like adiscourse or pattern that is unexpectedly (to borrow Kelly and Leslie's term)"menacing." Traub, for example, not only asks whether Queen Elizabeth'schastity is queer or whether it stands "against heterosexuality or is ... analternative form of heterosexuality," but explores "the erotic license thatthe paradigm of chastity enables." Traub helps us to see "how the culturalfetishization of the hymen obscures the array of erotic activities open to,and deemed pleasurable by, women." Here, Traub argues that chastity isworking in concert with and laying out the conditions of possibility for homosexuality,even as it also queers patriarchy and heterosexuality. I wouldadd that while we must be careful not to assign Queen Elizabeth's sexualpractices to the realm of the sovereign exception, there can be little doubtthat celibacy is crucial to her role as queen. Therefore, we must mark thedeviance of celibacy (emphasized by Jankowski and Kelly and Leslie), aswell as its simultaneous normativity (emphasized by Traub), which enableslesbianism to go unnoticed. Thus, while celibacy is not an orientation anddoes not involve genital acts as homosexuality (usually) does, it does sharesome of homosexuality's relation to gender and sexual deviance. We mightsee these medieval and early modern queer virginities as connected to thecelibate deviance in the American and British nineteenth century that Idiscussed in the introduction.

This long tradition of deviance differs markedly from what Heather Lovedescribes as friendship's place "at the very top of the hierarchy of intimaterelations" "over the long course of Western history." Lillian Faderman'sSurpassing the Love of Men (1981), for example, argues for the absolute alteritybetween friendship and homosexuality. In a chapter tellingly entitled"The Last Breath of Innocence," Faderman sees sexology as "outing" idyllicfriendship, transmogrifying and demonizing it into a pernicious vice knownas lesbianism. Placing this narrative alongside the increasing eroticizationof the heterosexual couple that I charted in the introduction, we mightsee a larger narrative: namely, the increasing eroticization of all dyadic relationsat the historical moment when homosexuality is invented. Faderman'smuch-maligned account of what Love calls "the end of friendship"is not so much wrong as it overstates the rupture between friendship andhomosexuality. Charting the ways in which this break is overemphasized,Love reinstalls experimentalism and trouble into the heart of friendshipto forge continuities across the friendship-homosexuality divide. Similarly,Martha Vicinus and Alan Bray are interested in thinking about how Erosand carnality (Vicinus) and alliance and publicness (Bray) move across thisdivide. Following these thinkers, this chapter explores how celibacy organizesboth friendship and homosexuality to create continuities between thetwo, while exploring how celibacy narrates a separate history of vocationand authorship. In particular, I explore how vows of celibacy are ritualisticallydeployed to forge what Love calls "the relatively unstructured natureof friendship as a mode of intimacy." However, I am interested in howthe practice of celibacy is significantly more flexible and less structuredthan friendship or homosexuality when it does not overlap with, intersect,or provide the condition of possibility for either of these relations. I hopethat this longer view will enable us to understand the intersection betweencelibacy, homosexuality, and friendship at the moment of the invention ofhomosexuality in a new way. This is of the utmost importance because thisnexus of prelesbian (and to a lesser extent prehomosexual) discourses is themost contested site of sex in the history of sexuality. Or, to recast this inslightly different terms, this chapter will consider the most contested siteof celibacy in the history of homosexuality: Boston marriage.

The Beginnings of Boston Marriage

The term "Boston marriage" describes a long-term partnership betweentwo women who live together and share their lives with one another. Evenas Boston marriage is considered to be a historical precursor to contemporarylesbian relationships, many scholars question whether the women inthese relationships engaged in what we would today recognize as lesbiansexual acts. While there is scholarly consensus that the institution datesfrom the late nineteenth century, the earliest textual instantiation was discoveredby Lillian Faderman to date from the early twentieth century. Thestatus of Henry James's The Bostonians (1886) as by far the most famousdepiction of Boston marriage in American literature and its description byJames as "a study of one of those friendships between women which are socommon in New England" bestow upon the text a prominent place in thehistory of Boston marriage. This chapter traces a new origin of the term"Boston marriage," which significantly recasts the history of the institutionand James's text, and which will enable us to remap the terrain betweencelibacy and homosexuality. Additionally, this chapter reconfigures therelationship between Boston marriage and literary production posited byFaderman. While Faderman's posited origin of the term has been the earliestknown citation for nearly thirty years, I have found a usage that appearsapproximately fifteen years earlier, at the beginning of 1893.

The marriage of Boston's most eligible bachelor, Nathan Appleton, to themuch younger Jeanette Ovington was hailed in 1887 as the social event ofthe season. Two years later the couple separated, and after the split, Mrs.Appleton lived with her former maid of honor before moving in with MissCatherine Parsons in June 1891. Six months later, Miss Parsons's father, theesteemed Colonel Parsons, hired a lawyer and appealed to a local official tohelp him recover his daughter from Mrs. Appleton. In the press coverage ofthe scandal, there are strong implications of lesbianism. It was reported, forexample, that the women were asked to leave the boardinghouse in whichthey were staying because "they established a reputation for singularityof behavior." The word "singular," as Susan Lanser has pointed out, hasbeen "used frequently [since the late eighteenth century] ... to describewomen suspected of homoerotic desires." The suspicions of lesbianismare heightened by repeated accusation that Mrs. Appleton hypnotized MissParsons. As Pamela Thurschwell has argued in another context, hypnotismand other alternate states function as a "trope and ground" for sexuality.Hypnotism implies not just an unnatural state of mind but also a state ofmind counter to Miss Parsons's volition (as if coercion were the only basisfor lesbianism). Mrs. Appleton's intimate life provides the basis for whatmay be the first time that the term "Boston marriage" comes into print.

The earliest usage of the term that I have been able to find relatesdirectly to this social scandal. It appears at the beginning of 1893 in aletter to the editor of Open Court protesting Colonel Parsons's intrusionon his daughter and Mrs. Appleton (though it does not refer to themby name). The letter was written by Ednah Dow Littlehale Cheney—anow largely forgotten feminist author, reformer, and biographer. In thescant scholarship on Cheney, she is remembered primarily as the firstbiographer of Louisa May Alcott and the object of Bronson Alcott's illicitdesires and likely unconsummated affections. Her letter to the editoris of tremendous interest not only because it moves the dating of Bostonmarriage earlier—the text itself refers to even earlier usages—but alsobecause it is a document that prescribes usage, providing insight into howat least one prominent feminist understood the relationship that we callBoston marriage. The most valuable feature of the letter, however, is theway in which it foregrounds the "old maid" as crucial to the productionof Boston marriage.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 082235554X
• ISBN 13: 9780822355540
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 232