Wild (E) Men and Savages

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Wild(e) Men and Savages: The Homosexual and the Primitive in Darwin,
Wilde and Freud.
Neville Wallace Hoad
Submitted in partial fulfillment of the

requirements for the degree
of Doctor of Philosophy
in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
1998
UMI Number: 9838943
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ABSTRACT
Wild(e) Men and Savages: The Homosexual and the Primitive in Darwin, Wilde and Freud.
My dissertation explores the surprising parallels between the figure of the

primitive and the figure of the homosexual in selected works of Charles Darwin, Oscar
Wilde, Victorian sexologists (and Uranian apologists) and Sigmund Freud. These
parallel depictions lead me to argue that turn of the century understandings of male
homosexuality (many of which persist, including the term itself) need to be situated in
relation to the theories of racial difference that attend white European imperial
expansion at the time. Darwins theory of evolution is strangely consonant with its
apparent antagonist Christianity in the underwriting of the British empire as a civilizing
mission to the heathen savages. The language of evolution is equally present in
writings concerned with homosexuality in that, at every turn, one encounters terms of
arrest, retardation, decadence and degeneration. While it is clearly counter
intuitive for us to think of Wilde (and it is only the disclosure of the 1895 trials that
render Wilde an emblematic homosexual) as a savage or a primitive, a series of
newspaper reports and cartoons (particularly, but not only, from his 1882 American
lecture tour) satirically liken the too too aesthete to a monkey, the wild man of Borneo,
a Negro, making precisely these imputations.
What permits such conflations is the application of evolutionary theories of

difference to contexts outside the realm of the biological. Evolutionary theory allowed
for spatial difference to be renarrated in temporal terms. People living in different parts
of the city or the globe are seen to be living in a different time. Darwins promulgation
of Heckels biogenetic law that ontogeny (the evolution of the individual) recapitulates
phylogeny (the evolution of the species) places questions of racial difference at the heart
of human psycho-sexual development for Freud. This is what allows Freud to
characterize homosexuality as arrested development in the Three Essays on the Theory
o f Sexuality and elsewhere. Just as primitives are seen to live in earlier phylogenetic
time, homosexuals are seen to live in earlier ontogenetic time, both figures stuck as
living fossils at an undeveloped stage.
Wilde is the joker in the pack, complicit and resistant to evolution as a masternarrative. He argues half-seriously that the real savages are the middle-class British
theater-going public, and Wildean hierarchies of taste do not replicate global power
relations in the same ways that social Darwinism does.
Methodologically, my work is indebted to Michel Foucaults History o f

Sexuality vol. I in the attempt to write the genealogy of the homosexual as species.
However, I wish to deepen the constitutive discourses of this emergent species
beyond the medico-juridical apparatus to include their undergirdings of evolutionary
racial theory. Critics, such as Anne McClintock. Ann Laura Stoler and Catherine Hall,
have pointed out the mutually reaffirming, if not constitutive, relations between race,
class and gender categories during the latter half of the nineteenth century, without
considering the impact on and of emergent sexual identities. A theorizing of this
necessarily overdetermined impact is envisaged as the major theoretico-historical
contribution of the dissertation. While excellent work has been done on the class
dynamics of the public representation of the homosexual as the dandy and on fantasies
of class-reconciliation in versions of late nineteenth-century anglo-homosexualities.
very little has been done on the race determinants of these representations.
I further hope to suggest that Wilde be taken more seriously as a political (and
ethical) thinker, reading his resolutely narcissistic gaze, with its self-aggrandizing
blurring of subject and object, as resistant to the gaze of evolutionary anthropology,
which always insists on the sharp division between the white, observing subject and
the native object.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
ii
Chapter 1:
Darwins Beard: Marking Imperial Time on the Human Body
15
Chapter 2:
The Evolution of the Homosexual: Or what could the inversion
of inversion have been?
56
Chapter 3:
The Paradox of an Anti-Imperialist Civilizing Mission (Oscar
Wilde on the Empire Question)
98
Chapter 4:
The Ontogeny/Phylogeny Recapitulation and Its Discontents:
The Homosexual and the Primitive in the Evolution of
Psychoanalysis
166
Works Cited List
211
Acknowledgements
There are many people whom I wish to thank. My advisor. Anne

McClintock encouraged and supported this project from the outset, knowing
when to leave me alone and when a judicious push was in order. Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak was scrupulously tough with me, never accepting
anything less than my best and for this I will always be grateful. Henry
Abelove read my work with customary care and was unstintingly generous
with his time and insights. They have my deep and sincere gratitude.
I was fortunate in having an exceptional peer group of graduate

students at Columbia who sustained and inspired me in often difficult
institutional and personal circumstances. My life and work were enriched
through conversations with Caleb Crain, Qadri Ismail, Sanjay Krishnan,
Amy Martin, Fenella Macfarlane, Mark Sanders, Martin Scherzmger, Peter
Susser, Milind Wakanker and Timothy Watson. Alys Eve Weinbaum and
Nikhil Pal Singh provided important initial impetus. I greatly benefited from
classes with Edward Said, Gauri Viswanathan and Jennifer Wicke.
My family in South Africa provided crucial emotional support and

came to my rescue on several occasions. My mother, step-father, sisters and
two formidable grannies believed in me, even when they did not necessarily
understand what I was doing, usually because I was not sufficiently clear in
explaining myself to them. My father in Australia provided financial support
at a critical moment. I could not have embarked on this adventure without
their love and support.
I would not have been able to come to Columbia at all without help
from my uncle, Les Daniel, and the Harold and Doris Tothill Bequest from
ii
the University of the Witwatersrand. A Presidents Fellowship from

Columbia University funded me for five years, and a grant from the Mellon
foundation allowed me to undertake important research at the William
Andrews Clarke Memorial Library in Los Angeles in the summer of 1995.
Nigel Gibson and Joy Hayton at the Columbia English Department were
always kind and helpful in assisting me with the bureaucratic scrapes I
frequently find myself in.
Sean Jacobs was a voice of reason from outside the academy and
Caleb Crain and Fenella Macfarlane were the best partners in crime, a boy
could hope to find. Johnny Golightly was a charming antidote to the rigors
of academe and Jeanne Newhouse kept me mostly sane.
Joseph Massad was the kindest of friends and the keenest of critics
throughout.
My debts to these people run deep and I thank them all for their
support over the six years of graduate school, which culminated in this
project.
Paul Rogers. Greg Biglione, Josh Machleder, Jeffrey Herbst, Rob

Harter, Craig Nealy, and Gregory Dietrich helped when they werent getting
in the way.
Neville Hoad
Chicago, IL
8 April, 1988
iii
1
Introduction
My central concern in this dissertation is to explore how Victorian

evolutionists managed questions of global human diversity through narratives of
development: particularly the differences of other cultures in the colonies and the
differences of emerging sexual subcultures in the metropole. I offer readings of
developmental evolutionary narratives in the work of a number of European
writers of the fin de siecle across several disciplines and genres. I argue that these
developmental narratives were essential for two social projects - the justification
of European imperialism and the theorizing of an ostensibly new figure in the
social landscape, the male homosexual. Moreover, I claim that evolutionary
narratives rhetorically connected these two projects for the central figures I
discuss - Charles Darwin, Oscar Wilde, the Victorian sexologists and Sigmund
Freud - engaged implicit and explicit analogies between the figure of the
homosexual and the figure of the primitive in imagining human evolution.
While ideas of development have a much longer and broader history than
I focus on here, I argue that they are used by Charles Darwin to inaugurate a
powerful and continuingly authoritative definition of the human as inextricably
part of the natural world and subject to the same laws of struggle and
competition. Differences between human beings on the grounds of race, gender,
culture (and implicitly sexuality) also came to be explained in terms of biological
evolutionary imperatives, frequently in hierarchical ways. Through a reading of
Darwins 1872 Descent o f Man, I explore evolutionary theories of racial and
gender difference. I argue that two key doctrines in this text - what is commonly
known as Haeckels biogenetic law and the doctrine of sexual selection - allowed
for late Victorian gender and racial ideologies to be naturalized.
Haeckels biogenetic law is that ontogeny (the development of the
individual over his1 lifespan) recapitulates phylogeny (the development of the

species over evolutionary time). This allows for three crucially related (and
deeply ideological) claims. Firstly, racial difference is understood as a function of
arrested moments in phylogenetic development, consequently the equation of
colonized people with children is given scientific credence. Secondly, since
Darwin claims that women are physiologically closer to children (of both sexes),
the difference between the sexes becomes a developmental one, and reading
phylogeny back into the picture, women can also be perceived as biologically
primitive. Finally, the discursive corollary of this - the feminization of peoples
deemed primitive - emerges as a staple of both evolutionary scientific dogma and
many imperialist representations.
The doctrine of sexual selection, which is a kind of hold-all explanation

for all biological and cultural features that cannot be explained by natural
selection, further interarticulates assessments of racial and gender difference.
Secondary sexual characteristics in human beings - most importantly the
presence or absence of facial and body hair and variations between the sexes in
vocal range - are seen as conferring no evolutionary advantage in terms of natural
selection and must therefore be explained in terms of alluring the members of the
other sex for successful heterosexual reproduction. In short, they have
significance in terms of processes of sexual selection. For Darwin, in civilized
cultures women are more ornamented, thus conferring agency in sexual selection
on men. In primitive cultures, the reverse obtains. This results in sexual agency
in women being configured as a mark of primitivity, and the ornamented man, by
invoking himself as the possible sexual object choice for women, and,
unthinkably for Darwin, as the possible sexual object choice for other men, risks
being aligned with the savage. I argue that it is through these developmentally
inflected biological theories of racial and gender difference that many formative
imaginings of Foucaults new species, the homosexual, are produced. In
1 And the individual is normatively male for all o f these writers.
3
reading Darwin, I try to stay aware that the progressivist teleological narrative
thrust of his arguments is complicated by a far more uncertain egalitarian set of
horizontal tropes. Species often operates as a taxonomic convenience rather
than as an ontological certainty, and evolutionary processes are also understood
as the proliferators of infinite variety and not only as upward developmental
movement.
These ideas of difference as a function of evolutionary development were

soon picked up by Victorian sexologists and homosexual apologists to delineate
the psychological and social content of homosexuality. The presence of
evolutionary ideas of the developmentally hierarchical nature of difference is most
easily detected in the mobilization of perceptions of the sexual practices of
peoples outside metropolitan Europe for opposing political ends. Writers like
Edward Carpenter, Havelock Ellis and Sigmund Freud all invoked the presence
of same-sex sexual acts among so-called primitive peoples as part of arguments
that homosexuality is a universal human possibility and should not therefore be
criminalized in civilized Europe. Opposing them were Figures like Max Nordau.
Richard Krafft-Ebing and Josephine Butler, who argued for the presence of
same-sex sex acts as signs of savagery and/or degeneration and that consequently
people who engage in such acts posed a civilizational threat.
Yet, there existed another set of tropes for understanding the emergent
homosexual, which posited difference as a function of inversion rather than as a
function of development. The idea of inversion cohabited uneasily with
evolutionary narratives in the work of some of the earlier theorists of
homosexuality. In my second chapter, I track the various appropriations of
evolutionary narratives by Edward Carpenter, John Addington Symonds and
Havelock Ellis, speculating on the nascent counter-narratives of race, sexuality
and gender that inversion may offer.
4
I then argue for Oscar Wildes aesthetic resistance to these developmental
narratives, and attempt to ascertain the political valences of this aesthetic
resistance. He argues half-seriously that the real savages are the upper and
middle-class British theater-going public. I hope to suggest that while Wildean
hierarchies of taste may continually risk exoticism, they do not replicate dominant
Victorian racial ideologies in the manner of social Darwinism. I also read Wildes
resolutely narcissistic gaze, with its self-aggrandizing blurring of subject and
object, as resistant to the gaze of evolutionary anthropology, which always insists
on the sharp division between the white observing subject and the native object.
In reading Wilde, I am anxious that I may be recasting his wanting to pass as
resistance2, but I still remain convinced that there might be something to leam
from the strange twists and reversals in Wildes simultaneous avoidance,
satirizing and embrace of his upward mobility. While it is clearly counter-intuitive
for us to think of Wilde (and it is only the disclosures of the 1895 trials that
render Wilde an emblematic homosexual) as a savage or a primitive, a series of
newspaper reports and cartoons (particularly, but not only, from his 1882
American lecture tour) satirically liken the too too aesthete to a monkey, the wild
man of Borneo, a Negro, making precisely these imputations. I argue that these
racialized representations are overdetermined by a combination of Wildes
Irishness, a nascent perception of his sexual ambiguity and aestheticisms partial
contestation of evolutionary narratives.
I conclude by considering the ways that Sigmund Freud speculates on

these ideas of difference as developmental in his attempt to account for human
psychological development, and the place of indicatively male homosexuality
within it. I argue that Freuds allegiance to the biogenetic law that ontogeny
recapitulates phylogeny may displace questions of racial difference into the
psyche and that racially inflected speculations on the nature of civilization may lie
at the heart of human psycho-sexual development for Freud. This is apparent in
2 The phrase is Gayatri Spivaks in the context of a conversation articulating the dilemmas posed by the
upwardly mobile trajectory faced by certain postcolonial intellectuals in the West.
Freuds characterization of homosexuality as arrested development in Three

Essays on the Theory o f Sexuality (1903) and elsewhere. Just as primitives are
seen to live in an earlier phylogenetic time, homosexuals are seen to live in an
earlier ontogenetic time, both figures stuck as living fossils at an undeveloped
stage. I am interested in locating Freuds account of homosexuality within the
broader developmental logics of psychoanalysis and in doing so postulate the idea
of the unconscious and the theorizing of the death drives as profound challenges
to the idea of developmental hierarchies evident in the Freudian account of adult
homosexual object-choice.
Since I maintain that evolutionary narratives were pervasive in the formative

figuring of the homosexual as a distinct species in the social landscape, it becomes
imperative to interrogate the philosophical moves that enable evolutionary thinking.
In defining an evolutionary narrative, I would isolate the following features: A
narrative of an ultimately unified subject, comprising a branching hierarchy in which
the manifold others of this subject are perceived as already incorporated into and
transcended by the subject. This incorporation and transcendence is achieved by the
temporalization of space. The narrative hierarchizes difference, doing violence, by a
priori incorporation, to the others in the constitution of the subject. The subject is
constituted by progress through its various others, which are then posited as
vestigial, arrested, anachronistic or degenerate.
While it would be more comfortable for me to bracket these theorizings to the

context of European imperialism at the turn of the century, the axiomatics of
evolutionary narratives show up in a variety of different contexts today: in the
contestation over the political status of gay men and lesbians as an ethnic minority in
the U. S., in the use of tribal metaphors in much gay cultural self-representation, in
the debates between the "social constructionists" and "biological essentialists" (on
both sides), in the international politics of homosexual identity, and most alarmingly
in the cultural representations of AIDS as a distinctively African and homosexual
6
disease.
Thus, I believe that tracking back through Freud and Wilde to Darwin,
looking for other possible narrations of racial and sexual difference in their writings,
is important for present day scholarship on sexuality. For the present increasing
globalization of the homo-hetero binary, possibly not at the level of sexual practices
but definitely at the level of transnational institutions and theory-making invites us
again to face the seductions of evolutionary narratives.
The replication of evolutionary narratives becomes particularly painful when it

plays out in ostensibly liberatory histories and theories of gay community. In this
dissertation, I claim that the application of key tropes of Darwinian evolutionary
theory permitted an imbrication of race, gender, nation and class categories in the
constitution of knowledge of the body of the invert and subsequent homosexual.
Moreover, these evolutionary tropes have persisted and can be located in a range of
work on homosexuality3 over the last century. They can also be shown to inform
work of decidedly diverging political interests. From Krafft-Ebing to Queer Theory,
the language and assumptions of evolutionary theory reverberate to create a
disturbing consonance between ideologies of liberation and ideologies of oppression.
The figuration of coming out as an evolutionary history is equally

subject to the set of problems I will elaborate. Historians of male homosexuality
in the west, however careful they may be about drawing connections between the
emergence of the modem homosexual and Empire, are not beyond a few
colonizing thrusts of their own. Jeffrey Weeks offers the following
characterization:
There were several drives against homosexuality in the 1780's, with
the discovery of homosexual groupings in London and Exeter. This
embryonic sub-culture was closely associated with transvestism and
3 These works are written in Europe or America but often take people from elsewhere in the world as their
subjects. For a comprehensive overview of these works see Rudi Bleyss The Geography o f Perversion: Male-tomale Sexual Behavior Outside the West and the Ethnographic Imagination (1995), 1-10 and 146-192.
7
stereotyped effeminate behaviour, in a mode which still characterizes
the relatively undeveloped sub-cultures of areas outside the major
cities of western Europe and North America. (1977, 36)
The rest of the world is understood as equivalent to the past of the now dominant
form of male homosexuality in the Western metropolis. Space is temporalized and
difference hierarchized with the modem male homosexual taking the place of the
normative white male heterosexual in an uninterrogated replication of the old
evolutionary narrative. It is also played out in the language of the body, with
culture implicitly biologized in the metaphor of the embryo.
The manner in which this passage treats gender is equally peculiar given
the sensitivity Weeks displays elsewhere. The embryonic, the primitive, the
undeveloped are equated with stereotyped femininity and transvestism in a
manner of thinking not that far removed from Spencers notion of the arrest of
embryonic female evolution, except here culture is used to carry the meanings a
more blatantly sexist and racist age could consign to biology.
Arguably, what permits the carelessness of such characterizations is an

allegiance to an empiricism which gestures towards the historicity and/or social
construction of its objects, but fails to subject its analytic categories to the same
procedures. Weeks in his prefaces is scrupulous in pointing out that sexuality is
always constructed, that it takes different forms in different places at different
times, that it is not an innate human attribute:
To put it bluntly, homosexuality, like all form s o f sexuality, has
different meanings in different cultures - so much that it becomes
difficult to find any common essence which links the different ways
it is lived, apart that is, from the pure sexual activity itself. Italics
mine. Foreword to Schmitt, A. and Sofer. J. Sexuality and
Eroticism Among Males in Moslem Societies (1992).
Ironically, then, in the name of a historical materialism, the category

sexuality floats through history and across the planet like one of Platos forms,
just making costume changes here and there. Sexuality remains blind to its own
8
historical staging and deployment.
In the foreword referred to above, Weeks concludes:

This book, like a photographic image, captures the sexual culture of
the Muslim societies at a crucial moment. Only time will tell
whether that culture will approximate more and more to the
secularized Western model, or come increasingly under the sway of a
new religious militancy. (Schmitt and Sofer 1992: xi).'*
Here, the evolutionary topos immediately forecloses options of dialogue,

scripting performances that are then heralded as empirical. Unpacking the
comparison to a snap-shot; what appears to be an appeal to the
incontrovertibility of the photographic image, can be read as a refusal to
interrogate the apparatus of the camera, the position of the photographer, the
selection of the moment, the laboratory in which the film is processed, the sites of
the consumption of the image. Consequently, such an empirically true picture can
only see the Other as accommodating itself to the Western present or, despite the
word new, being repressed by religion - the fate of male same-sex desire in the
Western past. We are left with only one possible progressive trajectory - the
transformation of actors in same-sex genital activity into political subjects.
A wealth of gay studies anthropology fails to consider what may be at

stake in its related figuration of certain acts as homosexual.5 In a cavalier
moment, one could be tempted to retitle Gil Herdts Ritualized Homosexuality in
Melanesia as Homosexualized Ritual in the Anthropological Gaze for the way the
various articles attribute sexual significance to what the participants may
understand in many other ways. David Greenbergs cataloging of the behavior of
other cultures in the chapter entitled Homosexuality in Kinship Societies in his
4 1 would like to thank Joseph Massad for bringing these remarks of Weeks to my attention
5 For an extensive discussion of many such studies, see Kath Weston's Lesbian/Gay Studies in the House of
Anthropology." (Annual Review o f Anthropology. Vol. 22, 1993, 339-67.) Weston claim s that "lesbian/gay
studies in anthropology has not been immune to the documentary impulse that brushes aside theory in the rush
for facts. (Weston 1993: 340) For a trenchant and, at times, brilliant critique of the gay, white missionary
impulses that underlie much gay studies anthropology, see Pedro Bustos Aguilars M ister D ont Touch the
Banana: Notes on the Popularity of the Ethnosexed Body South of the Border in Critique o f Anthropology. Vol.
15 No. 2 1995, 149-70.
9
The Construction o f Homosexuality (1988), relentlessly adheres to an
evolutionist narrative in discussing temple remains in the Ukraine:
In many contemporary primitive cultures, men worship goddesses,
and this could certainly have been true in Stone Age cultures as well.
In any event, the sculptures are not detailed enough to tell us
whether some o f these seemingly female figures are actually male
transvestites. (Greenberg 1988:64).
In a desire to locate the presence o f trans-gender shamans in Paleolithic Europe,

the category of sexuality is inserted in such a way that the evolutionist narrative is
not destabilized at all, suggesting its flexibility in accommodating apparently
innovative categories of social analysis to produce the same empirical findings. I
think similar points can, must and have been made about transcendental and
reifying uses of race, class and gender across temporal and cultural borders.
Michael Warner in Fear of a Queer Planet, attempts to invoke queer

sexuality as a tool for undoing the heteronormativity of class and gender analysis,
suggesting the ways in which such categories are embedded in a history of
sexuality. Discussing Andrew Parkers reading of homophobia in Marxs The
Eighteenth Brumaire o f Louis Bonaparte in the context of the collaboration of
Marx and Engels, he claims:
By calling our attention to the homosocial dynamics of that
collaboration. Parker suggests that marxist thought is embedded in a
history of sexuality, reproductivism, and homosociality in a way that
prevents it from grasping these problems as conditioning its own
project. . . . Core elements o f the marxist paradigm may have to be
seen as properly ideological moments in the history of reproductive
heterosexuality. (Warner 1993, 14).
While, clearly Warner is not deploying queemess in the same way that
Greenberg, Herdt, or Weeks, deploy sexuality (and I find Parkers reading of
Marx fascinating and useful), I suspect that he needs to follow through in trying
to grasp the problems in the historical and rhetorical conditioning of the project
of queemess, as defined by responses to morality discourses, bound up with
evolutionary ideas about modernity. Charmed as I am, by his use of Vidals Myra
10
Breckinridge as a messiah for global queemess, I cannot see the metaphor of a
queer planet as only a metaphor*, unrelated to the site of queer subjectivity in the
U. S. and innocent of its own colonizing fantasies.7 In as much as queer theory
insists on the underlying historical script of sexuality in the constitution of the
terms of class and gender analysis, it needs to be equally sensitive to the historical
conditions of the production of the category sexuality and to its contemporary
global deployments."
I do not wish naively to assume a range of speaking subalterns, hereby

subscribing to another assumption about the fullness of the agency of the Other in
an anthropological gaze, or pretend that the penetration of capital has left pure
cultures in tac t, untainted by the West, but instead, to insist on a recognition of
the risks of certain dangerous, if necessary interpretive impositions.
61 read the following metaphors of discovery and colonization from Weeks and Rubin in a sim ilar way:
From the mid nineteenth century the medical profession began to break down the
formerly universally execrated forms of non-procreative sex into a number of
perversions and deviations, so that, for the succeeding generations, the prime
task of theory seemed to be the classification of new forms, the listing of their
manifestations, the discussions of their causes. Most of the pioneering works,
such as Krafft-Ebings Psychopathia Sexualis, appear as tentative mappings of
new countries, recently discovered.(Weeks, 1977, 25).
I felt then, as I still do now, that too much feminist sexual analysis is derived a
priori from feminist First principles mixed with psychoanalysis. Such
topographies are a little like European maps before 1492. They suffer from
empirical deprivation. (Rubin, 1993, 16).
7 The crisis engendered in both U. S gay and left-wing circles by the position o f gay and lesbian Cubans
under the revolution reveals the overdetermination of gay and lesbian identity internationally - the term
queer, dependent on an understanding o f being stigmatized by Western heteronorm ativity within the
Anglophone West is consequently subject to the same problems. Looking at the changing situation of
emigre communities in the U. S., U. S anti-communism and the experiences of gay men and lesbians in
Cuba, Rich and Arguelles are able to explain the remarkable achievement of an anti-Castro campaign,
predicated on Cubas repression o f homosexual rights, within the virulent hom ophobia o f the Cuban
emigre enclaves and the U. S right - wing.
8 Warner has subsequently revised his position, acknowledging the American location o f queer : In the
New World Order, we should be more than usually cautious about global utopianisms that require American
slang. (1995, 361).
11
It is within this matrix that the representation of homosexuality as a form
of western imperialism needs to be understood. A clear distinction between acts
and identities needs to be made, and the very idea of sexuality as a registerable
transcultural category needs to be questioned. While it is clear that acts that look
homosexual to a contemporary Western gaze are by and large universal, the
emergence of a homosexual social identity gayness as we know it needs to be
carefully historically and geographically bracketed. Given the hypersexualization
of blackness in Western cultural representations and the assignation of Africa and
other parts of the non-Westem world as the site of the primitively
polymorphously perverse' in the ontogeny/phylogeny recapitulation, anti
imperialist attacks on homosexuality can be seen seen as refusals to carry the
imputation of primitiveness, and to counter-project the racist charge of retardation
and/or degeneration onto its Western source.
This is in addition to the often crassly material exploitation experienced

through the growth of homosexual sex tourism over the last century, which truly
deserves the designation imperialism. I wish to make it clear here that I do not
make a special case for sex-work, and that prostitution functions in many places
as one of many possible sweat-shops where Third World labor is exploited.
The shift in the last hundred years from the perception attested to in writers from
Edward Carpenter to William Burroughs that homosexuality was far freer in nonWestem societies to the contemporary situation in which the west is held up as the
place in which homosexual acts are most free from persecution can only be
accounted for by the particularly western, liberal capitalist articulation of the
person of the homosexual.10
9 Pedro Bustos Aguilar in Mister Dont Touch the Banana" reads the surplus of savage sexuality"
as a constitutive trope in U.S. representations of sex south o f the border. (1995, 151).
,0 For a compelling analysis of category trouble in international gay and lesbian organizing in relation to
the Philippines and Filipino gay men living in New York, but with much wider theoretical and political
implications, see Manalansan, M. F. IV. In the Shadows of Stonewall: Examining Gay Transnational
Politics and the Diasporic Dilemma. (1996, 425-438).
12
The discourse of development in the current moment informs the
perception o f the person of the homosexual as people outside of Euroamerica are
increasingly laying claim to such an identity. This creates a new set of
developmental contradictions in figuring homosexuality as an identity that travels.
I agree with John D Emilio when he argues that gay identity follows capitalism,
and that capitalism is profoundly double-edged for gay identity:
On the one hand, capitalism continually weakens the material
foundation o f family life, making it possible for individuals to live
outside the family, and for a lesbian and gay male identity to develop.
On the other, it needs to push men and women into families, at least
long enough to reproduce the next generation o f workers. The elevation
of the family to ideological preeminence guarantees that capitalist
society will reproduce not just children, but heterosexism and
homophobia. (1993. 474)
The emergence of small yet vocal and visible gay rights movements
predominantly among the urban classes in many Latin American, Asian and
African countries testifies to the effect of capitalist penetration on the
emergence o f lesbian and gay identity, even though these identities are
inflected by local traditions and gender and class variables. If Sedgwick is
right and that the homo/hetero binary is central to all epistemologies of
modernity, in a peculiar way, the presence of homosexuals in societies
outside the West can be read as a mark of development, while
simultaneously carrying the evolutionary connotations of primitivity and
biblical ones of bestiality. The understanding of homosexuality as the
marker of western decadence par excellence may also suggest ways in
which the person laying claim to homosexual identity in an era of global
capitalism can be made to carry the anxieties surrounding the social ruptures
produced by economic development. The word development is subject to
a huge range of problems, and I wish to use it here without any favorable
progressivist connotations, believing that developing the Third World in
many instances is the ideological heir to civilizing the natives.
13
The homophobia of anti-imperialist movements and regimes in such
diverse contexts as Cuba, Iran and more recently Zimbabwe" needs to be
accounted for in more complex ways than simply privileging the putative
freedom in the West. If I am trying to formulate the question of why antiimperialism articulates homophobia, I wish to insist that it is equally imperative to
frame the question of the international homosexual rights movements consistent
invocation of anti-third world racism. At an International Tribunal on Human
Rights violations held in October 1995 in New York under the auspices of
IGLHURC (International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission), in a
country where roughly half the states have anti-sodomy laws on their statutes,
with a single exception, the only violations investigated were those of third world
and Eastern European countries.
If the white middle class heterosexual male is the universal subject of the
earlier evolutionary narrative that I will sketch and criticize, I suggest that the
universalization of the homosexual as a transhistorical, trans-spatial subject as it
is articulated in human rights discourse reproduces the same ethical violence. By
attempting to transform participants in homosexual acts into homosexual persons,
do we not do a great disservice to the vast majority of participants in same sex
acts in other places. To insist on the universality of a specific historical agent can
and arguably is closing down spaces for these participants without replicating the
set of historical circumstances which allowed gayness to have historical agency in
the west. The universalism that promises liberation ends up oppressive.
Ironically this piece of work, never mind my own identity, rests on the
relatively successful evolution of the coming out project. It is that which permits
me some standing as an agent of knowledge in an emerging discipline, rather than
as the subject of a set of pathologizing medical and legal codes. If I am biting the
For a lucid discussion of the contemporary Southern African situation squarely within a Human Rights
paradigm see Dunton, C. and Palmberg, M. Human Rights and Homosexuality in Southern A frica. (1996.
7-18).
14
hand that feeds me. or hacking away at the ground under my feet, I do so in the
attempt of mounting a critique of the very conceptual tools that I cannot do
without,12 in order to try to begin to think a queer ethics that is not predicated on
the violence implied in the process of othering that an evolutionary narrative
necessarily entails.
12 Here, I am adapting Gayatri Spivaks definition o f deconstruction as the critique of a structure you cannot wish
not to inhabit. (Spivak 1996: 7)
15
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God,
and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with
God. All things were made by him, and without him was not
anything made that was made. In him was life, and the life was
the light of men. And the light shineth in darkness; and the
darkness comprehended it not. John I, 1-5
Chapter 1
Darwins Beard: Marking Imperial Time on the Human Body
My opening gambit is a reading of Darwin which teases out the

connections between Darwins evolutionary theory and the expansion of the
Briush Empire in the second half of the nineteenth century in terms of the
implications for fin-de-siecle theories of race, gender and sexuality. I write on
Darwin as a student of narrative, not as checker of facts or as an arbiter of
scientific truths, for I am most concerned with the stories that evolution tells and
the stories that evolution has been and can be made to tell: who gets to be
protagonists in the story, where the story takes place, how the narrative
organizes time, what are the ethical relations the narrative implies? I realize that I
run the risk of anthropomorphizing and/or mythologizing evolution, but these
are risks that Darwin too faced, and only partially resisted. I suggest that one of
the most crucial links between between evolutionary theories and imperial
ideologies tout cort lies in a shared figuration of biological and cultural
differences as developmental. In Darwins major texts and in innumerable
cultural representations of the imperial experience, time is restlessly spatialized
and hierarchized.1The civilized and the primitive, the human and the animal,
' This is what Anne McClintock in Imperial Leather (1995) calls the invention of anachronistic
s p ac e.. . Within this space, the agency of women, the colonized and the industrial working class are
disavowed and projected into anachronistic space: prehistoric, atavistic and irrational, inherently out of
place in the historical time of modernity. (40) I will argue that the figure of the homosexual is
partially understood in terms of this temporal trope but that ideas of decadence and degeneracy
complicate the developmental narrative and that anxieties around modernity can be projected forward as
much as displaced backwards.
16
male and female, implicitly homosexual2 and implicitly heterosexual, all
become binaries that are explained in developmental terms.
Evolutionary theory offers a particular way of positing the perceived

differences between races, cultures and genders which has important
implications for both the theorizing of male and female homosexual bodies and
for justifying the expansion of empire. I will argue that Darwins theory of
evolution and its uptake by a range of thinkers, some explicitly social Darwinist
and some not, share certain rhetorical strategies within a developmental
narrative of time in explaining the differences between savage and civilized,
male and female, heterosexual and homosexual.
For Darwin, difference is always potentially developmental. Although

each species has carefully adapted to its specific ecological niche, a hierarchy is
established from the simplest to the most complex, from the primitive to the
most advanced. Since Darwin is careful to establish the interconnections
between species and between species and the environment, life on earth is a
unified field, and the biological pinnacle of this field is man, who has
incorporated all the other stages of life into his being. Our white blood cells
behave like amoebae. When we were embryos we breathed like fish. In as
much as amoebae or fish represent a state of ongoing adaptation to their
respective environments, they also represent stages of life that have been
subsumed in the evolution of man, phylogenetically and/or ontogenetically.
Time, within the development of the individual and within the unified field of
life can become the measure of difference. The implications of this schema
when applied to the social field prove irresistible in an age of Empire. The
civilized have always and already been the primitive, masculinity subsumes and
transcends femininity, heterosexual desire needs to have passed through a
2 The term homosexual" is not coined until 1869 and does not enjoy wide currency until the
1890s at earliest. Heterosexuality" in its current normative meaning is a wholly twentieth-century
coinage. See Katz, J. N. The Invention o f Heterosexuality. (1995. 55).
17
homosexual phase in its development. This is clearly not the only strand in
Darwin and some slippage occurs between the Origin o f Species (1859) and the
Descent o f Man (1871), for in the first text it is clear that the temporal schema is
not reproducible - that all animals are not evolving towards becoming human,
whereas the Descent o f Man and its uptake by Social Darwinists contain the
hope/anxiety that other civilizations will adapt by becoming more European or
more commonly that Europeans will fall back into a putatively earlier and more
savage state of development.
I suggest that the lines of causality between evolution and empire run
in both directions. Firstly, irrespective of their scientific truth or validity,
Darwins ideas on the evolution of life function ideologically in the classic sense
of ideology i.e. they offer ideas to explain, justify and mask a set of material
practices. Both Marx and Engels recognize the naturalizing ideological work
performed by the theory of evolution, and giancingly touch on its implication in
and for imperial ideology. In a letter to Engels dated 18 June 1862, Marx writes:
It is remarkable how Darwin recognises amongst beasts and plants
his English society with its division of labour, competition,
opening up of new markets, inventions, and the Malthusian
struggle for existence. (Cited in Young, 1985, 275).
Engels in a letter to Lavrov is more trenchant:

The whole Darwinist teaching of the struggle for existence is
simply a transference from society to nature of Hobbess doctrine
of bellum omnium contra omnes, and of the bourgeois economic
doctrine o f competition, together with Malthus theory of
population. When this conjurers trick has been performed . . . the
same theories are transferred back again from organic nature to
history and it is now claimed that their validity as eternal laws of
human society has been proved. The puerility of this procedure is
so obvious that not a word need be said about it. (Cited in Young,
1985, 275).
Kipling gives us the ideology from the inside and is explicit about the import of
evolutionary ideas for the justification of Empire:
Nothing is gained by coddling weak and primitive men. The law of
survival applies to races as well as to the species o f animals. It is
pure sentimental bosh to say that Africa belongs to a lot of naked
18
blacks. It belongs to the race that can make the best use of it. I am
for the white man and the English race. (Cited in Orel. H, 1982,
256-7).
Evolutionary ideas can thus be read as superstructural to the penetration

o f much of the world by European capital during the epoch of European
imperialism. Between 1860 and 1920, (roughly the period of the major texts of
this dissertation) the British empire more than doubles in size, including at its
height in 1920 a quarter of the worlds population and close to a quarter of the
land surface of the earth. Nevertheless, evolutionary ideas cannot be reduced to
justifying colonial conquest, and contradictions abound in understanding
evolutionary theory as imperial ideology. Most obviously, European
imperialism is also underwritten by proselytizing Christianity - the site of a most
trenchant resistance to evolutionary ideas in the metropolis. Yet metropolitan
contradictions and antagonisms do not necessarily signify the same way in
relation to the colonies. Bringing the light of Jesus (and the beacon of
commerce) to the heathen masses and civilizing the evolutionarily backward
Stone-Age, Bronze-Age, Iron-Age peoples of the non-European world can
become consonant3 with each other with very little regard for the defining
difference between evolutions and Christianitys account of the origins of the
world. Similarly, the uptake of Christianity in the colonies could pose
ideological challenges to colonial enterprises. As Ann Laura Stoler and
3 Adam Sedgwick (Professor o f Geology at Cambridge and staunch Anglican critic of Darwin) in a
letter to Charles Lyell, following the anonymous 1844 publication of Chamber's Vestiges o f the
Natural History o f Creation, a crucial precursor to the Origin o f Species, sees evolutionary ideas as
potentially robbing the colonial enterprise of justification, and definitively undermining the
evangelical Christian concept of the men o f Africa as men and brothers." which was so central to the
abolitionist cause in the earlier half of the nineteenth century in Britain:
If this book be true, the labours of sober induction are in vain; religion is a lie; human law is a
m ass of folly, and a base injustice; morality is moonshine; our labours for the black people of Africa
were the works of madmen; and men and women are only better beasts." (Cited in Young. 1985. 6)
Nevertheless. Young makes a potent case for the fairly easy reconciliation of Anglicanism and
Evolutionary doctrines, due in no small part to the respectability of the proponents of evolutionary
theory. Darwin, after all, is buried in Westminster Abbey. He claims that the evolutionary debate
produced an adjustment within a basically theistic view of nature rather than a rejection of theism" and
that what evolution took away from mans spiritual hopes by separating science and theology, it gave
back in the doctrine of material and social and spiritual progress. (1985, 16).
19
Frederick Cooper argue:

In the Philippines as much as in Africa, people heard what
Christian missionaries had to say but scrambled the message sometimes finding in the mission community something valuable
and meaningful to them, sometimes using their mission education
to gain secular advantage, sometimes insisting that their
conversion should entitle them to run the religious organizations
themselves, and sometimes dismantling both doctrine and
organization to build a religious edifice or even a revolutionary
movement that was wholly new, neither the Christianity of Europe
nor a recognizable variant of local religious practices. (1997, 7).
Nevertheless, the development, dissemination and adaptation of

evolutionary ideas (like their apparently antagonistic Christian beliefs) were
dependent on European world ascendancy. European explorers from Columbus
on were often an uneasy mix of adventurer, scientist and visionary. Journeys of
discovery paved the way for Imperialism, just as Imperialism opened the world
as an object for European Science.4 Thus, Darwins famous voyage on the
Beagle - the round the world trip that would provide him with material for life
long speculations cannot be viewed as an innocent, scientific experience
devoid of political significance or determinants.5 However, the rootedness of
the germs of evolutionary theory in this imperial context would not necessarily
contaminate Darwins scientific findings, but the congruences (as well as the
contradictions) between evolutionary theory and European hegemony should
not pass unnoticed.
Focusing on the rhetorical tropes and maneuvers in Darwins theory of
* See Mary Louise Pratts Imperial Eyes for a discussion of how journeys of discovery impact on
metropolitan science and vice-versa. (1995, 15-37).
5 Nicholas Dirks in the introduction to Colonialism and Culture (1992) makes this argument:
Science flourished in the eighteenth century not merely because of
the intense curiosity of individuals working in Europe, but because
colonial expansion necessitated and facilitated the active exercise of
the scientific imagination. It was through discovery - the siting,
surveying, mapping, naming and ultimately possessing - of new
regions that science itself could open new territories of conquest:
cartography, geography, botany, and anthropology were all colonial
enterprises. (1992, 6)
20
evolution, it becomes clear that the dominant narrative thrusts move in diverging
directions. As Gillian Beer suggests, his theory can be extrapolated to suggest
a random and disordered play of forces or made to yield the assurance of
irreversible upward growth. (1982, 17). It is the teleological path that is most
compelling in the popular uptake of Darwin in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries, finding expression in social Darwinist projects like eugenics, theories
of racial inferiority and the like. In this chapter, I am interested in using the
shifting complexity of the play of differences in evolution to try and contest, if
not undo, the relentlessly progressivist telos of evolution. As much as evolution
reinscribes older racial hierarchies in using other cultures as stand-ins for
missing-links in accounting for the ascendance of white Europe, Darwins use
of the ontogeny/phylogeny connection and his now discredited idea of Sexual
Selection are too complex to perform the ideological labor of justifying conquest
in the name of the natural laws of evolutionary advancement. Darwins
understanding of evolution as a play of differences is often at odds with his
notion of evolution as a telos of progress. The persistence of lower forms of life
constantly works to contradict an allegiance to notions of an upward trajectory.
The principle of Natural Selection makes no allowances for the internal
physiological and mental complexities of an organism in assessing its place in
evolution; only its adaptive abilities count. In this logic, many insects are well
ahead of the game, reproducing in greater numbers and with greater efficiency
than human beings. Rats and pigeons can also make a play for global
ascendancy. By insisting on mans place in nature, evolution can obliterate
distinctions as much as it can produce a range of hierarchies of species and
races. Moreover, there is a way in which the term species functions as a
taxonomic convenience in the Origin o f Species, where identity is constituted by
the play of very carefully observed differences that are understood
comparatively rather than anchored in any immutable natural order.
I will begin with the later Darwin and work backwards, for a number
21
of reasons. The Descent o f Man is published decades after, but is worked up
from notebooks written well before The Origin o f Species. Out of fear of
controversy, Darwin largely absents man from the Origin. In Descent o f Man.
man is self-evidently the starting point. It is in this text that the ideological
underpinnings of evolution are more apparent. Moreover, the developmental
operations of evolutionary theory themselves encourage a kind of backwards
inquiry. Although the narrative produced is a forward moving story of
adaptation and evolution, the method of inquiry is frequently backwardlooking. For the story of evolution is necessarily a retrospective account; the
process of getting here is what evolution seeks to reconstruct. The narrativestructure of evolution is consequently inescapably teleological. the end is the
beginning. Darwin starts with the present state of life on earth and works
backwards to account for it. The time of the moment of inquiry writes the time
of the history, though since evolutionary theory understands itself as
universalist science (which is definitionally reproducible in any time period),
this is never self-consciously spelled out.
Chapter 7, On The Races of Man, in the Descent o f Man provides

many instances of Darwins use of his contemporary colonial situation as the
site for the theorizing of mans prehistory. The chapter is marked by an uneasy
tension between an assertion of the fundamental similarity between all races of
mankind, with an implicit debunking of the scientific usefulness of the concept
of race, and a simultaneous insistence on the developmental superiority of
Europeans.
The same remark holds good with equal or greater force with
respect to the numerous points o f mental similarity between
the most distinct races o f man. The American Aborigines,
Negroes and Europeans differ as much from each other in mind
as any three races that can be named; yet I was incessantly
struck, whilst living with the Fuegians on board the Beagle,
with the many little traits o f character, shewing how similar
their minds were to ours; and so it was with a full-blooded
negro with whom I happened once to be intimate. (1998. 185).
They are like us; they are entirely unlike us. The extract equivocates. They are
sufficiently like us for the Descent o f Man explicitly to refute the polygenists,
thinkers who believed that human beings inhabiting different parts of the world
are actually distinct species:
But the most weighty o f all the arguments against treating all the
races o f man as distinct species, is that they graduate into each
other, independently in many cases, as far as we can judge, of their
having intercrossed. Man has been studied more carefully than any
other organic being, and yet there is the greatest possible diversity
amongst capable judges whether he should be classed as a single
species or race, or as two (Virey), as three (Jacquinot), as four
(Kant), Five (Blumenach). six (Buffon), seven (Hunter), eight
(Agassiz), eleven (Pickering), fifteen (Bory St. Vincent), sixteen
(Desmoulins), twenty-two (Morton), sixty (Crawford), or as sixtythree, according to Burke. This diversity o f judgment does not
prove that the races ought not to be ranked as species, but it shows
that they graduate into each other, and that it is hardly possible to
discover clear distinctive characters between them. (1998, 181).
Species differentiation depends on constant biological characters. Skin-color,

highly variable within the so-called races, is hardly a constant biological
character. To use Darwins analogy - a whale might look like a fish, but it is
very foolhardy to attempt to base scientific classifications upon superficial
appearances. This is however quite far from Darwins first impression of the
Fuegians in his Beagle Diary:
I would not have believed how entire the difference between
savage and civilized man is. It is greater than that between a wild
and domesticated animal, in as much as in man there is great power
o f im provem ent. . . Their language does not deserve to be called
articulate: Capt. Cook says it is like a man clearing his throat: to
which may be added another very hoarse man trying to shout and a
third encouraging a horse with that peculiar noise which is made in
the side o f the mouth. Imagine these sounds and a few gutturals
mingled with them and there will be as near an approximation to
their language as any European may expect to obtain. (1988, 1234).
Even as he employs a set of denigrating metaphors to describe the Fuegians,

they are never rendered other than human. The frames of reference are
revealing in their recapitulation of prehistory. They sound as if they are clearing
23
their throats, an action undertaken just before one starts speaking. They speak
as if encouraging a horse, not quite ready for intelligible human communication
but advanced enough to engage with domesticated animals. Their language also
sounds like a very hoarse man trying to shout. This passage may also express
the European listeners frustration at not understanding the speech of the
Fuegians, only able to understand their speech as throat clearings, as attempts to
shout, filled with the promise of conversational preliminaries, but finally
outside his comprehension. The perceived aesthetic ugliness of the Fuegian
speech renders it preliminary and primitive to Darwin, but this is mitigated by
the pathos of his frustration at his failure to understand.
The Descent o f Man is clear throughout that ultimately skin color, hair
texture, variable cranial sizes, differences in culture, language and temperament
are entirely untenable grounds for species differentiation, and given their
graduating range both within and between the so-called races, suspect grounds
for racial differentiation as well. Darwins list of European observers seems to
suggest that race, like beauty, might lie in the eye of the beholder - that racial
claims are always epistemological constructs rather than facts on the ground.
Yet despite this, the Descent of Man insists on the reality of racial
differences both explicitly and subtly because contemporaneous Europeans are
seen to have evolved beyond all recognition from their antecedents. At a
moment in which racial hierarchies threaten to collapse because of the difficulty
of establishing distinguishing and constant biological characters, developmental
questions step in to save them. Darwin is unable to find sufficiently clear and
reliable constant biological characteristics to divide humanity into races let alone
species, so what cannot be written on the body with scientific certainty is
achieved by the positing of various developmental stages. Ultimately, evolution
understands racial difference as different moments in phylogeny. Other races are
posited as subsumed stages in the progression of European man; they represent
24
different moments in his evolutionary past.
By contrast, Europeans are always clearly the people of the present: In

Europe, the ancient races were all, according to Schaaffhaussen, lower in scale
than the rudest living savages; they must therefore have differed from any
existing race.(1998, 175). A clear break is posited between the fossil record of
Europe and contemporary Europeans. This is not at all the case with the
developmental account of either the Negroes or the Aboriginal peoples of South
America and that negroes, apparently identical with existing negroes had
lived at least 4000 years ago, and that according to an excellent observer. Dr.
Lund, that the human skulls found in the caves of Brazil, entombed with many
extinct animals, belonged to the same type as that now prevailing throughout the
American continent. (1998. 175). Despite the lack of sufficiently constant
biological characteristics between the individual members of a racial group,
Darwins monogenesis uses questions of time and pre/history to posit
significant evaluative differences between the putative races. Peoples outside of
Europe are invariably used to maintain continuity with the past, in varying
developmental positions. The rupture between the Neanderthal and the modem
European exempts the European from having to embody his own fossil record.
Chapter 7 of the Descent o f Man tells us that although humanity may be one,
different races live in different times if the story of the evolution of man is
mapped onto the contemporaneous globe.
Yet the organization of the nineteenth-century globe writes evolution as

much as it is written by it. Darwin is dependent on a range of colonial officials,
scientists, explorers and institutions for his raw material on racial differences
across the globe. This is revealed by careful attention to Darwins footnotes in
this chapter. The longest and most revealing footnote, no. 61 reads as follows:
In the Spring of 1862,1 obtained permission from the Director
General of the medical Department of the Army to transmit to the
surgeons of the various regiments on foreign service a blank table
25
with the following appended remarks, but I have received no
returns.
As several well-marked cases have been recorded with our domestic
animals o f a relation between the colour o f the dermal appendages
and the constitution; and it being notorious that there is some
limited degree of relation between the colour o f the races of man
and the climate inhabited by them; the following investigation
seems worth consideration. Namely whether there is any relation in
Europeans between the colour of their hair, and their liability to the
diseases of tropical countries. If the surgeons of the several
regiments when stationed in unhealthy tropical districts, would be
so good as first to count, as a standard of comparison, how many
men, in the force whence the sick are drawn, have dark and lightcoloured hair, and hair of intermediate and doubtful tints; and if a
similar account were kept by the same medical gentlemen, of all
the men who suffered from malarious and yellow fevers or from
dysentery, it would soon be apparent whether there exists any
relation between the colour of the hair and constitutional liability
to tropical diseases.. . In case any positive result were obtained, it
might be some practical use in selecting men for any particular
service. (1998, 202-3)
I quote this lengthy footnote almost in its entirety because of the close
relationship it reveals between the practitioners of evolutionary science and the
military functionaries of empire. Darwin is clear here that his research could
serve some practical purpose, but more importantly we see how the questions
that evolutionary science is encouraged to pose are inflected by their wider
social context. We also see how Darwin himself is a social Darwinist avant la
lettre. The eugenic implications are evident from the opening analogy to
domestic animals to the selecting of presumably darker-complexioned men for
colonial service. The begged question of why evolution was interested in
biologically accounting for racial difference at all can begin to be answered.
Although Darwin somewhat plaintively refers to the fact that he received no
returns, the mode and context of his inquiry is inextricably bound up with
empire-building. The difference of white men needs to be understood in order
that they may be more efficient colonial officials. The difference of the darker
races must be understood so they may be more effectively ruled. What is
equally noteworthy about the footnote is that white people are not excepted from
26
Darwins scientific gaze. Darwin takes all of life as his object, and in this
instance the question of ecological niche suggests that local people may be more
advanced in their particular geographic location. We even see Darwins
skepticism about this clearly interested mode of inquiry in that he acknowledges
that part of his initial hypothesis is notorious.
It is possible to locate several instances in the chapter where the

historical constraints under which evolutionary theory was produced are
patently visible in the scientific narratives it produces. Writing on the
extinction of races of man, Darwin uses examples from the fossil record and
examples drawn from contemporaneous anthropology, essentially without
distinguishing between these very different kinds of evidence. He offers the
following present day account as a transhistorical example of how races become
extinct now and became extinct in the past.
When civilised nations come into contact with barbarians the
struggle is short, except where a deadly climate gives its aid to the
native race. Of the causes which lead to the victory of civilized
nations, some are plain and some very obscure.We can see that the
cultivation of land will be fatal in many ways to savages, for they
cannot, or will not. change their habits. New diseases and vices are
highly destructive; and it appears that in every nation a new disease
causes much death, until those who are most susceptible to its
destructive influence are gradually weeded out; and so it may be
with the evil effects of spiritous liquors, as well as the
unconquerably strong taste for them shewn by so many savages. It
further appears, mysterious as is the fact, that the first meeting of
distinct and separated peoples generates disease. Mr. Sproat, who in
Vancouver Island closely attended to the subject of extinctionr
believes that changed habits of life, which always follow from the
advent o f Europeans, induces much ill-health. He lays, also great
stress on so trifling a cause as that the natives become bewildered
6 Both Darwin and Mr. Sproat appear oblivious to any ethical considerations in attending closely
to the subject of [human] extinction. I am reminded of an oft-quoted but fairly atypical injunction to
the artist by Ruskin:
Does a man die at your feet, your business is not to help him, but
to note the colour of his lips; does a woman embrace her
destruction before you, your business is not to save her, but to
watch how she bends her arms.(Cited in Williams, 1963, 143)
It would appear that a parallel between scientific and aesthetic detachment can be noted here.
27
and dull by the new life around them; they lose their motives for
exertion and get no new ones in their place.* (1998. 190).
In a polemical mode, it is possible to make the following kind of

dismissive argument: Working inductively and projecting back across human
time, Darwins text effectively naturalizes a fairly specific historical situation
and an even more idiosyncratic analysis of it - new life makes for bewildered
and dull natives. Robbed of any lines of political or historical rationality, we
are left with the timeless process of the weak being obliterated by the strong.
Classic imperial goals and strategies - the appropriation of land in the interests
of cultivating it, the creation of an indigenous labor-force in this process, the
use of liquor as a means of social control and source of personal profit
evaporate as issues worthy of discussion. The specificity of each historical
situation is lost. Although Darwin goes on to refer to how no Roman writer
ever wrote of the barbarians becoming dull and bewildered, the essential
lineaments of the account of the civilized and barbaric races remains
unchanged. Internecine tribal warfare, direct colonial rule, and the
appropriation of land can all be narrated in the same terms of the natural. The
Roman Empire of two thousand years ago, the Spanish Empire of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the British, French and American Empires
of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, become one and the same. In essence
for Darwin, they are equally no different from the Mongol Empire, the Moghul,
the Aztec, the Ottoman, the Holy Roman. The differences within each empire,
the difference between British rule in Africa and India, between settler colony
and colony, to list just a few possible important distinctions, all disappear
because when civilised nations come into contact with barbarians, the struggle
is short, except where a deadly climate gives its aid to the native race.
Historically, many of these struggles have not been short, they have been
protracted and reversible. Races have hybridized as much as they have become
extinct. Empires rise and fall. Historical fact is utterly sacrificed to natural
28
speculation. The only qualifying factor in questions of possible resistance is the
question of climate!
The doctrine of the survival of the fittest can thus pose no ethical or
political questions, just neatly collapse the social into the natural, and, despite
the wealth of empirical data Darwin likes to amass, produces the category
natural in this collapsing. In instances such as these, it is obvious why Social
Darwinism is easily co-opted by the proponents of laissez-faire capitalism and
becomes the justifying rationale for the robber-barons of the late nineteenthcentury United States7. One can also see how evolutionary theory squares quite
nicely with the older optimistic theism of proselytizing Christianity. There is
design and order in the world. What is is right. Retroactively, the very positing
of different races can be speculatively read as a function of conquest.
Nevertheless, Darwins synopsis of colonial devastation hardly tells a

comfortable story for a metropolitan Imperial audience. He gives the lie to the
civilizing mission. The agents of civilization are nothing less than harbingers of
death. They bring new diseases and vices. The changed habits of life they
instigate induce depression and stupor, rather than vigor and productivity.
Although notions of racial purity and attendant anxieties around the
consequences of racial mixing are present in Darwins observation that
mysterious as is the fact, . . . the first meeting of distinct and separated
peoples generates disease, he finds this mysterious rather than self-evident.
While the lines of Darwins argument might be to render these processes the
unfortunate but inevitable workings of Natural Selection and Survival of the
Fittest, the narrative details he uses unsettle the idea of progress and question
along ethical lines the hierarchy of races that the Descent o f Man can imply.
Moreover, since mankind has thrived under extremely hostile climactic

7 See Richard Hofstadters seminal Social Darwinism in American Thought (1955. 143-200).
29
conditions, processes of Natural Selection alone cannot account for the
emergence and extinction of races, processes which Darwin seems to suggest
are also social, political and historical.
The New Zealander seems conscious o f this parallelism, for he
compares his future fate with that of the native rat almost
exterminated by the European rat. The difficulty, though great to
our imagination, and really great if we wish to ascertain the precise
causes, ought not to be so to our reason, as long as we keep
steadily in mind that the increase of each species and each race is
constantly hindered by various checks; so that if any new check,
or cause o f destruction, even a slight one. be superadded, the race
will surely decrease .n number; and as it has everywhere been
observed that savages are much opposed to any change of habits,
by which means injurious checks could be counterbalanced,
decreasing numbers will sooner or later lead to extinction; the end,
in most cases, being promptly determined by the inroads of
increasing and conquering tribes. (1998, 199-200).
This passage is notable for the broaching of the interchangeable nature

of race and species in the account of extinction. (And analogically the similarities
between species following the dictates of Natural Selection, human beings
necessarily behave like rats.) Both species and races have their populations
hindered by various checks. Moreover, there is visible slippage between the
present and the past. We begin with the current (1872) situation in New
Zealand, where Darwin attributes the inevitability of the conquest by the British
to a Maori. The passage ends with the inroads of increasing and conquering
tribes. It is unlikely that Darwin is referring to the British by the term tribe.
The usual taxonomy for European collectivities of this sort is nation (see the
quotation prior to this one). So presumably, the term tribe alerts us to the fact
that what is being explained above is an earlier primeval struggle. Yet the
colonial reference at the opening remains, and a logical contradiction in the
ideological labor of justifying conquest as natural emerges. The passage
implicitly likens the British to every conquering tribe that has gone before them
in order to naturalize British ascendancy and the attendant extinction of
indigenous populations, i.e., make it a fact of nature rather than an event in
history, thus evading a range of uncomfortable moral and ethical questions.
30
However, in doing so, the civilizational distinction between tribe and nation
is lost. All are returned to a state of nature, and the niceties of racial distinction
that evolutionary theory likes to propound disappear. In this discussion there are
competing needs to assert that the social dominance of European men is innate,
biological and natural, and to assert the difference between the natural (and the
attendant animalistic and savage) and the civilized. A crisis in the ideological
labor of evolutionary theory is rendered visible. The figure of the European man
needs to be o f nature and beyond it simultaneously, part of the primal time of
nature and yet somehow transcendent of it.
Yet the racial hierarchies evolution insists upon are hardly new. Nancy
Stepan in The Idea o f Race in Science argues that:
By as early as the 1860s scientists embracing evolution found that
despite the novelty o f Darwins anti-creationism, evolutionary
thought was compatible with the idea of the fixity, antiquity and
hierarchy of human races. Far from dislodging old racial ideas,
evolution strengthened them, and provided them with a new
scientific vocabulary o f struggle and survival. (1982,49).
However, the idea of evolution clearly inflects the old racial ideas of the Great
Chain o f Being in new and dynamic ways, even though it replicates its
categories and their hierarchical relation to each other. As Stepan notes, Darwin
cannot be easily classified as a conventional racist given the range of opinions
available in his historical moment. He was raised a monogenist and an
abolitionist. In the litmus case of Governor Ayre of Jamaica, he was active in
the attempt to get Governor Ayre impeached for ordering the massacre of
several hundred black Jamaicans.8 Nevertheless, the force and direction of
Darwins evolutionary theory rarely problematize earlier ideas of European
superiority and tend to nuance and legitimate such ideas.
8 See Catherine Halls White, Male and Middle-Class for an extensive discussion of this case and
how it forced nearly all cultural players in England to declare their hand on the burning race questions
o f the day. Carlyle, Dickens and Arnold all sided with the position that Darwin opposed, i.e. they
argued that Governor Ayre had shown no brutality for the Jamaicans were brutal savages and the
Governor had taken the most appropriate steps in using maximum force to quell the uprising. (1992,
255-289).
31
Stepan argues that in 1871 when Darwin finally turns to the question of
man in the Descent o f Man, he is entering an arena in which many of the
implications of the Origin o f Species for man are already being drawn out. The
most important of these is the animal nature of man. He establishes this via a
double-pronged strategy. Darwin is at pains to point out the similarities of mans
physiological structure to those o f other mammals, and the similarity of the
human brain to the brain of higher primates. Secondly, he elevates the moral,
intellectual and emotional nature of animals. The difference between humanity
and animals becomes one of degree rather than kind. However, the difference
between technological Europe and the animals of nature appears too vast for his
European readers and the lower races and savages come to lengthen the
lines of development between the animals and European man. They fill in the
missing developmental time between animals and civilized Europeans.
The consequences of this is that the Great Chain o f Being, previously

static by virtue of the divine creation of immutable species, becomes dynamic.
Evolution gets the links moving into each other in the direction of the putative
pinnacle of white European middle-class masculinity. While the polygenists
were undoubtedly more racist than the monogenists, and species is a more rigid
and potentially vicious dividing line than race, Darwins faith in the
monogenetic nature of humanity within the frame of evolution is a mixed
blessing for the narration and evaluation of human culture - already nearly
reduced to nature in the story of evolution. The egalitarian impulse in
evolutionary theory that humanity is one as opposed to many is compromised
by the biologistic developmental schema in which differences that may be
economic or cultural are accounted for in biologistically developmental terms.
This temporalization of evolution - this setting into motion of the Great

Chain o f Being - creates enormous problems for questions of spatial
32
organization. Other races evolving in other parts of the world somehow come to
be antecedents of the nineteenth-century British. Evolutionary theory never
explicitly addresses this problem but attempts a resolution of it by two rhetorical
strategies. The first is the fiat of the spatialization of time. Other races or other
cultures do not live in the same time in other places; they live in the
developmental stages of Europes past. The second strategy for getting round
this logical problem is more subtle. It is the biogenetic law that ontogenesis
recapitulates phylogenesis, most commonly attributed to Haeckel but arguably
reinvigorated by Darwin before it is popularized by Haeckel.'' The evolution of
the individual human being (and who gets to be a fully-evolved individual
human being is always implicitly white and male) repeats in his developmental
progress all the stages of the evolution of his species.
This is established explicitly in the Descent o f Man: in the description of

the human embryo:
. ..it would be superfluous on my pan to give a number of
borrowed details, shewing that the embryo of man closely
resembles that o f other mammals. It may. however, be added that
the human embryo resembles various low forms when adult in
various points o f structure. For instance, the heart at first exits as a
simple pulsating vessel; the excreta are voided through a cloacal
passage; and the os coccyx projects like a true tail, extending
considerably beyond the rudimentary legs. In the embryos of all
breathing vertebrates, certain glands called the corpora Wolffiana,
correspond with and act like the kidneys of mature fishes. Even at a
later embryonic period, some striking resemblances between man
and the lower animals may be observed. Bischoff says that the
convolutions of the brain in a human foetus at the end o f the
seventh month reach about the same stage of development as in a
baboon when adult. The great toe, as Professor Owens remarks,
which forms the fulcrum when standing or walking, is perhaps the
most characteristic peculiarity in the human structure; but in the
embryo about an inch in length. Prof. Wyman found that the great
toe was shorter than the other and that instead of being parallel to
them, projected at an angle from the side of the foot, thus
corresponding with the permanent condition of this part in the
quadrumana. (1998, 9-11).
9 Stephen Jay Gould in Ontogeny and Phytogeny (1977) tracks the history of the doctrine of recapitulation.
33
The story of the development of the human embryo is narrated in
phylogenetic111 terms. The human embryo moves through nearly all of
vertebrate life before it leaves the womb. It has processed toxins like a fish,
voided its excreta through a cloaca like a bird, had a tail like a monkey, thought
like a baboon and stood like a member of the Quadrumana. These are all
undoubtedly empirically verifiable observations obtained by careful study of the
human embryo, but they also fit a much older ideological schema. Man is still
the pinnacle of life, yet now this is justified by incorporation and sublation
rather than by divine transcendence or the presence of a distinguishing unanimal
essence like soul, spirit or conscience. Man is the pinnacle of life on earth, not
because he has been created in the image of God, but because he has worked
his way up the evolutionary ladder, having had the experience of fishness,
birdness, monkeyness, apeness and so on. In another speculative moment, I
wonder about the class-determinants of the evolutionary movement. With the
emergence of a middle-class work ethic and the attendant notions of improving
ones station in life through working ones way up the social ladder, I suspect
that the evolutionary narrative may also be underpinned by middle-class
fantasies of class-mobility.11
While only species difference is recapitulated embryonically, the

implications for understanding racial difference are clear. Racial difference will
also be figured hierarchically, with different stages in the ontogeny of
whiteness recapitulating the imputed characteristics of other races.
Too good a biologist to write this on the human embryo itself, Darwin
,0 Gould notes that an important development in the idea of ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny is
when the process is shifted back in ontogenetic time into the embryo, rather than occurring over the
wider maturation span of a human individual. (1977, 74-6).
This is complicated by the role evolutionary ideology may play in the intra-ruling class powerstruggle occurring between the rising bourgeoisie and the landed aristocracy over the course of the
nineteenth century. Evolutionary theory may have offered a racial and nationalist check to the extension
o f the democratic implications for the colonies of domestic political reforms in Britain.
34
turns to culture to explain the problem of racial difference, which is bound up

with the question of gender difference in the theory of evolution, but figures
these differences in developmental and recapitulatory terms. In chapters XIX
and XX of Sexual Selection vol. II, first published in 1871 as part of the
Descent o f Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, Darwin outlines the
secondary sexual characters of man marshaling a wealth of anthropological,
zoological and anecdotal data to distinguish man from woman across the
slippery boundaries of race and culture. In this production of the gendered
human body, questions of gender and questions of race are imbricated. This is
apparent through two strategies, firstly through a incongruous application of
what comes to be known as Haeckels biogenetic law to matters of racial and
sexual difference and secondly by having sexual selection account for racial
difference in the descent of man.
Firstly Darwin, prefiguring Freud, has ontogeny recapitulate

phylogeny. The relationship between the development of an individual
(ontogenesis) and the evolution of a species (phylogenesis) is a central question
for nineteenth-century natural history/biology. The dominant understanding of
this relation is one of recapitulation. This is a vexed nexus for Darwin. For on
the one hand, he is a central figure in the emergence of the law and on the other
hand, much of the Origin is concerned with the porous and difficult boundaries
between species, so much so that a compelling case can be made that Darwin
sees species more as taxonomic conveniences than as ontological certainties. If
the phylum is relational both historically and currently, what is the ontogenesis
of an individual of that species to recapitulate?
In these two chapters, Darwin, however, implicitly uses the idea of

ontogenetic recapitulation of phylogeny in order to account partially for sexual
difference. Differing from biologists like von Baer, who argue that community
in embryonic structure reveals community of descent, Darwin aligns with
35
recapitulationists such as Haeckel who maintain that it is the adult condition of
the ancestor that is repeated. The potency of the recapitulatory metaphor of the
biogenetic law cannot be resisted even in accounts of intra-species development,
such as gender and race.
Darwin writes:
Male and female children resemble each other closely. . . ; they
likewise resemble the mature female much more closely than the
mature male. The female . . . is said to be the intermediate between
the child and the man. (1998,577).
Here the figure of woman represents some kind of retarded development within
the telos of manhood.12 Darwin, in noticing that the signs of masculinity, such
as the beard, only appear in the male near maturity, explicitly writes masculinity
in at the evolutionary pinnacle in the recapitulation of phylogenesis by the child.
It is a pinnacle a girl child can never reach. Tne agency the evolutionary account
grants to masculinity can be seen across the natural spectrum. It is a principle
for Darwin that The male [is] generally more modified than the female. (1998,
229). Not only is the male held to be more modified but also more variable.
Darwin claims:
During the Novara expedition a vast number of measurements was
made of various parts o f the body in different races and the men
were found in almost every case to present a greater range of
variation than the women. (1998, 231).
The question of variation is a crucial one for the story of Natural Selection. It is
variations which permit the adaptation to the changing conditions of life.
Evolutionary biology could arguably read this variability of men as greater
vulnerability to deformity. Darwin uses examples that could encourage this. He
12 In my reading of Wildes The Picture o f Dorian Gray in Chapter 3 , 1 will engage this idea again.
Within cross-gendered models o f homosexuality which are often cross-generational as well (See
Greenberg, D. The Construction o f Homosexuality, 1988, 26-65)), a kind of hetero-economy of desire
operates, it is the youthfulness o f the boy which feminizes him and thus allows him to be the object
o f a masculine desire. Age is gendered in fascinating ways in the novel which partially reproduce the
Darwinian account of the maturation process.
36
cites a study that shows that men are twice as likely to have supemumary digits
than women.13 Yet evolution introduces a slightly different norm. In terms of
evolutionary logic, should humanity ever find an adaptive advantage to having
six fingers, over the evolutionary long-term, those with six fingers would be
more successful in the struggle for life and thus more desirable reproductive
partners and would leave this initially rarer gene to their offspring and so on
until six fingers became the new species norm. This account of variability,
instead of indexing male frailty and vulnerability, is rewritten to suggest male
agency in the successful evolution of humanity.
Sexual selection adds to the the variability14 of the male:

Finally with quadrupeds the contest between individuals of the
same sex whether peaceful or bloody, has with the rarest exceptions
been confined to the males; so that these have been modified
through sexual selection, either for fighting with each other or for
alluring the opposite sex. far more commonly than the females.
(1998, 575).
The ontogenesis/phylogenesis recapitulation coupled with the greater

variability of the male produce the male as more evolved than the female. In
terms of racial difference, Darwin performs a parallel maneuver, even though he
simultaneously asserts that humanity is clearly monogenetic, and is scrupulous
in insisting on the shared humanity of different races.
Again as the young of closely allied though distinct species do not
differ nearly so much from each other as do the adults, so it is with
the children o f the different races of man. (1998, 557).
Implicitly here, the ontogeny of the individual member of a primitive

race can only recapitulate her primitive ancestors whereas the child of a civilized
race recapitulates the primitive as well as the ostensibly more developed
13 Darwin cites the study of Wilder on supemumary digits, as well as other studies on the greater
variability o f the form of the ear and body temperature o f men (1998, 232).
14 On the question of variability, evolutionary theory can be made to speak to the racist common
place that people o f other races all look alike. For Darwin, primitive races are less variable than
civilized ones, as are men more variable than women. See Descent o f Man (1988, 231).
37
civilized ancestors. The children may begin in the same place15 but through the
biogenetic law must end in different places, with the terms of difference written
on the body and relentlessly hierarchized in favor of white masculinity.
Transposing the biogenetic law onto questions of human cultural difference
produces the racist hierarchies that we associate with social Darwinism. This
transposition plays out in an ontogenetic register as well. The adult of the
missing link races is produced as the equivalent of the white child, who is
recapitulating such phylogenetic levels of development in his ontogeny. The
ontogenesis of the white male subject is recapitulated half-way for the racially
other. Evolutionary theory justifies and finds scientific rationales for a classic
trope of imperialist cultural and political discourse, namely the equivalence of
savages and children. Reversing the ontogeny/phylogeny recapitulation, the
savage is stuck in the childhood phase of the ontogeny of the white European.
Peter Fryer in Staying Power: The History o f Black People in Britain
(1984), provides a wealth of documentation on the imperial link between
savages and children. Lord Lugard in his classic defense of British Rule in
Africa offered the following characterization of a typical African:
A happy, thriftless, excitable person, lacking in self-control,
discipline and foresight, naturally courageous and naturally
15 Fascinatingly, the ontogeny of the child, posited as racially other, seems to experience some
kind o f reverse phylogenetic experience. Darwin claims that many such children are bom lighter than
their parents:
In regard to colour, the newborn negro-child is reddish nut-brown,
which soon becomes slaty-grey; the black colour being fully
developed within a year in the Soudan, but not until three years in
Egypt. The eyes of the negro are at first blue, and the hair chestnut
brown rather than black, being curled only at the ends. The children
of the Australians immediately after birth are yellowish brown, and
become dark at a later age. (557) e tc .. .
I struggle to account for this insistence on the whiteness o f dark children, especially since it
potentially upsets the ontogeny/phylogeny recapitulation. While these facts may be true, what stories
are they being used to tell? Apparently, all children are bom with blue eyes, so white people with gray,
green or brown eyes undergo a similar change in eye color to Darwin's Negro. I can only imagine
sentimental reasons for Darwins positing of these facts as somehow relevant. Colonial paternalism
finds it much easier to make a sentimental identification with the people it comes to dominate, when
such people are children. Arguably such people are always children in the colonizers gaze.
38
courteous and polite, full of personal vanity, with little sense of
veracity. . .He lacks the power of organization, and is
conspicuously deficient in the management and control alike of
men or o f business.. . He is very prone to imitate anything new in
dress or custom. In brief, the virtues and defects o f this race-type
are those of attractive children. (1984, 186).
Lord Lugard was a significant innovator in British colonial rule, most famous
for instituting the policy of indirect rule in northern Nigeria in the first years
of this century. Indirect rule favored the use of extant indigenous leaders and
authority structures in the administration of colonies, minimizing the
importation of British officials and institutions, which were argued to be too
alien and advanced for the people of West Africa. I cite him here as evidence of
the fact that official political administrators participated in the popular linking of
children and savages. The paternalistic affection apparent in the above quote the Africans are attractive children reveals the limits of British benevolence.
Phylogeny meets ontogeny in the savage as child.
Rudyard Kipling, the most significant poet of Empire, offers a

cautionary reworking of the same linkage in 1898:
Take up the White Man's Burden Send forth the best ye breed Go, bind your sons to exile To serve your captives need;
To wait in heavy harness.
On fluttered folk and wild Your new caught, sullen peoples.
Half devil and half-child. (Brooks, C and Faulkner, P., 1996, 307)
This verse is noteworthy in the sense that it captures Kiplings allegiance to the
pathos and sense of exploitation of the foot-soldiers of Empire, the displaced
British working class young men upon whom the White Mans Burden falls
most heavily. There is a notable sense of similarity between the troops (in the
colloquial sense, as well) of Empire and the colonized. The white servants of
Empire wait in heavy harness on new caught people. Both groups are seen
to be constrained, if not imprisoned by their experience of Empire. Yet there are
39
clear limits to the similarities between the white and black servants of Empire.
The new caught people are described as Half-devil and half-child, a
fascinating and potentially contradictory mix o f older Enlightenment/religious
and newer evolutionary figurations of racial difference. Black people are
understood as irredeemably corrupt and simultaneously innocent and in
desperate need of guidance.1'1 The metaphor of racial others as white children
can be seen as both a cause and a consequence o f the ontogeny/phylogeny
recapitulation.17 Send forth the best ye breed is a line that resonates with the
equally nationalist/imperialist and scientific evolutionary discourses of the body,
in that it points to the biological, almost eugenic questions around who is most
fit for colonial service alluded to in Darwins questionnaire for the medical
officers of the foreign branches of the British army.
Winwood Reade, a travel writer and proto-anthropologist reveals the
shift in nineteenth-century discourses about Africans from abolition to the
institution of colonial rule:
The typical Negro, unrestrained by moral laws spends his days in
sloth, his nights in debauchery. He smokes haschisch until he
stupefies his senses, or falls into convulsions; he drinks palm-wine
until he brings on a loathsome disease; he abuses children; stabs
the poor brute of a woman whose hands keep him from starvation;
and makes a trade of his own offspring . . . Such are the *men and
brothers for whom their friends claim not protection, but equality!
They do not merit to be called our brothers; but let us call them
our children. (Cited in Fryer, 1984. 555).
18 It would be interesting to speculate on how the figuration of racial difference in developmental

terms impacts upon post-Romantic metropolitan discourses of childhood and vice-versa. In many
ways, the nineteenth century in Europe inaugurates modem Western understandings of children as
something other than miniature adults. Earlier notions o f the noble savage can be made to dovetail
quite nicely with romantic notions of the enlightened innocence" of children in the poetry of Blake
and apparent in assertions such as Wordsworths The child is father of the man. Intellectual and
sentimental anti-modernization investments in the wisdom of the primitive and the sanctity of the
child were able to be mobilized in the fight against slavery in the first third of the nineteenth century.
The link between the primitive and the child remains but evolution makes it very difficult to mobilize
this link in any anti-racist struggle. Given its tendency to biologize the social, there can be no return
to nature if historical developments are naturalized.
17 O f course, Haeckels law cannot be understand as a sole causative factor. The idea of racial others
as white children serves an important role in the wider ideological edifice of imperial benevolence.
40
Like Kipling, Reade registers Africanness as Half-devil and Half-child,
though his remarks are more directed at black masculinity per se. Ignoring the
moral valence of his utterances, it is possible to perceive a committed
participation in evolutionarily inflected discourses of figuring difference as
arrested development and/or degeneracy. The African male is degenerate,
marked by convulsions and loathsome disease. Black masculinity must be
infantilized - let us call them our children or pathologized."1 This passage also
reveals the porous line between the domestic (in all senses of the term) and the
imperial spheres. Metaphors of home and family structure the perceptions of
racial difference. This attests to a number of ideological formations. The uppermiddle-class white Victorian family, itself a product of imperialist-capitalist
formations becomes the norm by which everything is to be judged. The fact
that the African woman works serves to emasculate the African man. The
metaphor of the Family of Man, a staple of monogenetic evolutionary
theory,19 shows how assertions of the unity of mankind can accommodate
hierarchical relations, and also how different forms of familial organization
along the lines of gender relations and the division of labor mark arrested
development and/or degeneracy. The passage is internally incoherent in its
demonization of black masculinity. The typical negro being described must be
a child, no longer a man and a brother, but the description of him reads more
like a renegade paterfamilias than a child. Drunk and decadent, abusive of his
wife and child, slothful, he stands as emblematic of all that normative Victorian
masculinity seeks to explicitly disavow.
G.A. Henty, the best-known and most widely read writer of boys
adventure stories in Britain before the First World War wrote the following in
' 8 1 discuss the similarities and apparent contradictions in slotting the same figure for the very
different places of arrested development and degeneracy in the evolutionary narrative in Chapter 2.
In Chapter 5 , 1 explore how these implicitly racialized categories are taken up by Freud in the
psychoanalytic theorizing of male homosexuality.
19 See McClintock on Mantegazzas Morphological Tree of the Human Races for a discussion on
how the family of man is hierarchized into races. (1995, 37-38)
41
By Sheer Pluck: a tale o f the Ashanti War (1884):

just like children . . . They are always either laughing or
quarrelling. They are good-natured and passionate, indolent but will
work hard for a time; clever up to a certain point, densely stupid
beyond. The intelligence o f the average Negro is about equal to that
of a European child o f ten years old. (1884, 118).
That this discursive linkage between other races and European children directly
justified the expansion of Empire is apparent in reports of Queen Victorias
Diamond Jubilee in 1897. The journalist George Steevens writes of the
procession through the streets of London in the following terms:
Up they came, more and more, new types, new realms at every
couple of yards, an anthropological museum a living gazeteer of
the British Empire. With them come their English officers, whom
they obey and follow like children. And you began to understand
like never before, what the Empire amounts to. Not only that we
possess all these remote outlandish places . . . but also that all
these people are working, not only under us but with us - that we
send out a boy here and a boy there, and a boy takes hold of the
savages of the part that he comes to, and teaches them to march and
shoot as he tells them, to obey him and believe in him and die for
him and the Queen . . . A plain, stupid, uninspired people, they
call us, yet we are doing this with every kind of savage man there
is. And each one of us --you and I. and that man in his shirt-sleeves
at the comer is a working part of this world-shaping force. How
small you must feel in the face of this stupendous whole, and yet
how great to be a unit in it! (Cited in Judd, 1996. 134)
This extract reveals how the spectacle of empire functioned as subjectinterpellating ideology211 in the metropolis. The ordinary British man on the
street - you and I and that man in his shirt-sleeves at the comer all have a
sense of national belonging and Imperial superiority inculcated in them by
watching the passing crowds of native servants of Empire following their
white superiors. The shift in tense from the past to the present in the second
sentence not only adds to the immediacy of the scene but points to its continuing
significance and allows for the perception that the events the parade symbolizes
20 Louis Althusser argues in his classic essay, On Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,"
that the primary function o f ideology is the formation of subjects. (1971, 127-188).
42
are happening at the same time as well. White British masculinity is shored up.
if not constituted by the experience of responsibility of a boy for his brown
and black children. White colonial officials are sent out as boys and in
teaching the natives their place how to shoot, how to march and how to die
for the queen become men. This figuration of Empire as a kind of family firm
upholds the same telos of development as the evolutionary narrative, and in
explicitly linking the savage and the child operates in the same discursive field
as the ontogeny/phylogeny recapitulation, which can clearly traverse the
domains of both biology and culture. While clearly only a strand in the panoply
of paternalistic ideologies justifying imperial expansion, evolutionary theory
provided scientific legitimation at a moment when the truth claims of science
were axiomatic and the newly discovered laws of Nature were considered to
have much to say about questions of social organization.
Darwins allegiance to the ontogeny/phylogeny recapitulation applied to

questions of racial difference necessarily posits savage people as children.
Evolutionary biology clearly does not have a monopoly on this notion. In the
above extracts, we find similar statements of such an equivalence in a very wide
variety of late nineteenth-century writings across genres and contexts. Darwins
science has resonances in adventure stories for boys (and arguably what allows
white boys to become men is their control over and responsibility for the
colonized races), poetry, the rationales of colonial administrators, the work of
travel-writers and anthropologists, and in the descriptions of metropolitan
journalists of the spectacle of Empire. This across-the-board ideological
cohesion finds its scientific justification in the ontogeny/phylogeny
recapitulation. For literary representations, colonial policy and scientific
biology, racial others live in the time of the civilized European past, both
phylogenetically and ontogenetically. It is the narration of time that produces
this cohesion because the darker savage, the white child, later too the white
metropolitan homosexual (and to a lesser extent women of all races) all have
43
their difference from the white, male, nascently heterosexual, patently civilized
person understood in developmental terms.
However, the developmental confusions produced by such

transpositions can provide some unexpected, if ultimately no less invidious
hierarchies. This is Havelock Ellis on apes:
The infant ape is much nearer to Man than is the adult ape.This
means that the infant ape is higher in the line of evolution than the
adult and the female ape by approximating to the infant type is
somewhat higher than the male. (1905, 32)
Ellis to a certain extent manages to rewrite the ontogeny /phylogeny link in such
a way that realigns the feminine with the civilized or advanced. Substituting
savage" for ape -- a move permitted by the evolutionary narrative, tends to
reinscribe racial others in an equally entrenched way in the evolutionary
hierarchy, and reflects an anxiety around the titillating and terrifying virility of
the darker races. In discussing pigmentation, Darwin too associates darker
color with maleness in mammals. This is strange given Darwins claim of the
relative paleness of the Negro child in relation to the adult, and the assertion that
maleness is both more modified and more variable. Pushing this claim may
allow one to claim paradoxically that darker skin color associated with hyper
virility represents evolutionary advancement rather than retardation or
degeneration. Arguably, these confusions arise because, against his better
judgment that skin color is a variable and inconsequential physical trait, Darwin
cannot help but use the currency of his received social categories to speculate on
the racial and gender differences within humanity. Havelock Ellis works gender
against race, making woman rather than man the hero of the evolutionary
irreversibly onward and upward narrative producing this bizarre moment of
prophecy:
The large headed delicate-faced, small-boned man of urban
civilization is much nearer to the typical woman than is the
savage, not only by his large brain but by his large pelvis, the
modem man is following a path first marked out by woman.
(1905, 34)
44
Regardless of this putative valorization of woman, her difference is

quickly sublated in the story of the evolution of man. She is just a precursor, a
failed prototype. Both Darwin and Ellis inflect the biogenetic law to inscribe the
normativity of the European male as the only true agent in the evolutionary
narrative. Darwin continues to align woman with the primitive and to posit her
as occupying some kind of sublated position in the white male's ontogenetic
recapitulation of phylogeny:
It is generally admitted that with women the powers of intuition,
of rapid perception and perhaps of imitation, are more strongly
marked than in man; but some, at least, of these faculties are
characteristic of the lower races, and therefore of a past and lower
state of civilisation (1998, 584).
Despite robbing Victorian men of the notion that they were created in the
image o f God, and were one degree removed from the angels, Darwins
evolutionary theory offered as much cause for comfort as for alarm. White,
middle-class men, although part of the animal kingdom, represented its
pinnacle. Men are smarter than women:
The chief distinction in the intellectual powers of the two sexes is
shewn by m ans attaining to a higher eminence, in whatever he
takes up. than can woman - whether requiring deep thought,
reason, or imagination, or merely the use of the senses and hands.
(1998, 584).
They are also stronger:

Man on an average is considerably taller, heavier and stronger than
woman, with squarer shoulders and more plainly pronounced
muscles. (1998, 576).
This is a point worthy of repetition for Darwin:

Man is more powerful in body and mind than woman, and in the
savage state keeps her in a far more abject state o f bondage than
does the male of any other animal. (1998, 619).
A characteristic defense of Darwin would argue that he suffers

from the prejudices of his age and that these blatantly ideological moments can
45
be bracketed and ignored. His racism and sexism must now be placed within
the sociocultural context of the nineteenth century.:i Yet can these issues be so
easily bracketed? A number of important questions arise. The first is the
problem of Darwins empirical methods when applied to the Human Sciences.
As a player in his social landscapes and with his conceptual categories defined
by his locations, where could the neutral site for the launching of his inquiry
be? Darwin clearly finds the received wisdom of his time useful as categories
with which to think. He uses racist and sexist notions to produce theories of
race and gender (and linking the two in remarkable ways) based on mostly very
careful observation. Darwin, himself, was extremely reluctant to write about
humanity, absenting the subject entirely from the Origin o f Species, except in
the last chapter where he promises that light will be shed on the subject of man.
Since the doctrine of sexual selection is largely epiphenomenal to natural
selection, can the Descent o f Man be simply ignored as a historic relic of
prejudice, an oblique warning against treating the social as if it were analogous
with the natural, if not coextensive with it? What other ways can we inhabit this
text? The following section is a playful, though hopefully illustrative, attempt to
use the developmental logics of the Descent o f Man in the service of a very
different set of interests and desires, to place it in sociocultural brackets that
Darwin would have a hard time in recognizing and thereby to push at the limits
of the absurdity o f trying to account for human sexuality in solely biological
evolutionary terms.
Darwins Beard as a Male Ornament in a Rather Queer Sexual Selection:
On the surface, the Descent o f Man asserts with real consistency

that white men are smarter and more evolved than men of other races, and that,
within races men are more advanced than women. However, Darwins schema
21 This is James H. Birx in his introduction to the Descent o f Man and is fairly typical of modem
neo-Darwinist defenses. (1998. xxii)
46
is ultimately too complex to perform this consoling ideological labor and the
delightfully overdetermined site of its undoing may be the undiscussed proud
whiskers and beard of the Victorian gentleman. By literally embodying the
previously unmarked subject of knowledge, Darwin, I now hope to analyze
Darwins own beard, treating it as an example of the biogenetic law and
theorizing it as an ornament in Sexual Selection. I do this in the interest of
producing a far more contorted, ambiguous and potentially self-imploding white
masculinity. Let us take the beard, the iconic marker par excellence of the body
of the Victorian gentleman and try to understand its developmental moment in
the evolutionary narrative.
This can be done in a number of ways. Along the axis of gender, facial
and body hair emblematically functions to distinguish man from woman and
child:
The absence of hair on the body is a secondary sexual character, for
in all parts of the world, women are less hairy than men. (1998,
622).
The boy only receives the markers of masculinity late in the recapitulatory
process suggesting that the markers of masculinity such as the beard are
acquired later in the phylogenetic story, and can therefore be read as a marker of
developmental superiority:
For those Quadrumana, in which the male has a larger beard than
that of the female, it is fully developed only at maturity, and the
later stages of development may have been exclusively transmitted
to mankind. (1998, 625).
The lateness of the appearance of the beard in the boy childs development can
be marshaled as evidence that the male is more modified, a mark of his
superiority in the evolutionary model. Within the phylogenetic recapitulation,
the beard is also a marker of advanced standing as only the later stages of
development have been transmitted to mankind. However, ontogenetically,
Darwin makes the contradictory claim:
47
We know that with mankind, the female as well as the male foetus
is furnished with much hair on the face, especially round the
mouth, and this indicates that we are descended from a progenitor of
which both sexes were bearded. (1998, 625).
The beard and the generally greater hirsuteness of men ironically may
further suggest that man rather than woman is closer to the animal kingdom in
the evolutionary descent, that the beard is as much a marker of base origins as it
is of advanced development. Darwins discussion of the similarities between
higher primates and men in the relation of hair color to beard color further
implicitly acknowledges that woman may indeed be further from ape. The beard
thus functions confusingly as an index of advanced modification and an index
of retrograde primitivity. Using Darwins body as the privileged site of
investigation, in evolutionary terms, his beard marks him ambivalently.
Looking now at the question of racial and sexual difference in

connection with Darwins notion of Sexual Selection, Darwins beard raises
some difficulties. His discussion of beards is framed by questions of differing
standards of beauty in the races of mankind. The beard can function as a mark
of racial differentiation (and a valorized one at that):
On the other hand, bearded races admire and greatly value their
beards; among the Anglo-Saxons every part of the body had a
recognised value; the loss of the beard being estimated at twenty
shillings, while the breaking of a thigh was fixed at only twelve."
(1998, 602)
The issue of race steps in here to revalorize the beard. Anglo-Saxons -white
people in the historical past - valued beards, not quite as fetishes as primitive
people might, but in financial terms immediately recognizable to a Victorian
audience. The Anglo-Saxon beard is expensive and expensive because it
functions as an ornament in sexual selection. Here is Darwin on the evolution of
the beard. Initially in relation to monkeys, Darwin professes:
The males endeavour to excite or allure the females by various
charms. Various crests, tufts and mantles of hair, which are either
confined to the male, or are more developed in this sex than in the
48
females, seem in most cases to be merely ornamental. (1998. 5734).
The case in humans is a close parallel:

Man in all probability owes his beard, and perhaps some other
characters, to inheritance from an ancient progenitor, who thus
gained his ornaments. But this form o f selection may have
occasionally acted in later times, for in utterly barbarous times,
women have more power in choosing, rejecting and tempting their
lovers or o f afterwards changing their husbands . . . (1998, 619-
20 ).
The beard, as much as it is a sign of advancement along the intra-species axis of

gender is a vestigial, if not a degenerate sign in racial terms, marking a
revisiting of the powers of Sexual Selection of utterly barbarous women.
Darwin goes on to repeat this point by asserting the beard as a male ornament:
As far as the extreme intricacy o f the subject permits us to judge,
it appears that our male ape-like progenitors acquired their beards as
an ornament to charm or excite the opposite sex, and transmitted
them to man as he now exists. <1998, 627).
But as an ornament or decoration of sorts, the beard peculiarly runs the

risk of feminization in the moment of Darwins writing. For ornamentation in
European humans is seen to belong to woman, not just culturally but
biologically. In the preceding chapter, Darwin has asserted: and with
Europeans, the women are perhaps the more brightly coloured of the two, as
may be seen when both sexes have been equally exposed to the weather (1998.
576).
Secondly and relatedly, ornamentation is the property of savages - Not

one great country can be named from the polar regions in the north to New
Zealand in the south, in which the aborigines do not tattoo themselves. (1998,
595). Darwin goes on to add that in most but not all parts of the world, the
men are more ornamented than the women. (1998, 598). And as with the
animal kingdom, more exotic plumage frequently gets assigned to the male.
49
Within the evolutionary hierarchy, male ornamentation aligns the bearded white
man with the animal kingdom and the savage. Focusing on the beard allows one
to see a certain faultline in the Descent o f Man's conception of the relation of
nature to culture. In many logics, ornament would appear to be outside of
nature, something added to it, redolent of artifice. To this line of thought, the
beard appears as a kind of anti-omament. It is natural for men not to shave. In a
state of nature, most men would be bearded. The smooth face is thus the
alluring ornament - artificially produced for normative sexual allure. However,
for Darwin, ornamentation is first and foremost a biological question, and since
Natural Selection cannot account for why men are bearded and women are not
(though arguably in a state of nature, the relative hirsuteness of men and women
would not be as polarized as it was in Darwins circles). Sexual Selection must.
Which gender gets assigned ornamentation is crucial for ascertaining the

agency of reproduction and the driving force of evolutionary advancement. In
the doctrine of Sexual Selection, the body that is allowed freedom from display
places itself in the position of power and choice. The ornamentation of men is
seen to contribute to women in savage tribes having some power to chose
their husbands.
By focusing on Darwins own rather impressive beard, we revisit the

sexual selection powers of woman. We insist on Darwins hairy face as a
secondary sexual character to enable womans agency in the story of evolution.
And in seeing his beard as a male ornament, we mark a kinship with those
tattooed savage men, those racial others that Darwin is prepared to
acknowledge in childhood but not in manhood. Finally, the contours of a desire
inexpressible in the Darwinian corpus may become fleetingly visible. There are
many homosocial moments in Darwin. He is clear that many male secondary
sexual characteristics are intended for the audience of other males in the
competition for females. Yet the male gaze on other males in a state of nature
50
remains competitive and hostile. If we understand human sexuality as
something more and other than a functionalist need to reproduce, a move that
evolutionary theory appears almost constitutionally unable to m aker Darwins
beard can be seen as an ornament with the power to do more than allure women
and intimidate and repel men.
Both the Origin o f the Species and the Descent o f Man are inexorably
heterocentric texts, which is somewhat surprising as there can be no doubt that
Darwin in his extensive studies of domesticated animals must have encountered
same sex sex-acts, which are reputedly common amongst such creatures.23 The
silence around any variation in the human sexual instinct becomes deafening.
Ignoring the easy cliche of Victorian reticence (fairly easy to do post-Foucault),
and which, given Darwins reluctant genius for controversy, seems a little
unlikely, how can we account for the absence of any discussion of what is
soon to be called homosexuality in a corpus profoundly concerned with the
22 Sociobiologist, Edward O. Wilson in On Human Nature argues that the persistence o f
homosexuality means that its presence in a society must confer some evolutionary advantage,
otherwise it would have been erased in the struggle for life. (1978. 142-147). Carpenter suggests that
people of intermediate type make better healers, soldiers and teachers, invoking a similar argument for
the sociobiological utility of homosexuality. (1978.9-12). Chapter 2 offers a more extended discussion
of Edward Carpenters evolutionism. Greenberg (1988) offers a survey and a rebuttal of assorted
attempts to account for homosexuality in evolutionary terms. (8-12)
23 Darwin observes that in some species the secondary sexual characteristics associated with male
and female are reversed:
A few exceptional cases occur in various classes of animals, in
which the females instead of the males have acquired pronounced
secondary sexual characters such as brighter colours, greater size,
strength or pugnacity. With birds there has sometimes been a
complete transposition of the ordinary characters proper to each
sex; the females having become more eager in courtship, the males
remaining comparatively passive, but apparently selecting the more
attractive females as we may infer from the results. Certain hen
birds have thus been rendered more highly coloured or otherwise
ornamented, as well as more powerful and pugnacious than the
cocks; these characters being transmitted to the female offspring
alone. (1988, 233)
Given the emergence of gender transitive theories o f homosexuality among the inversion theorists,
like Ulrichs and Carpenter who are near-contemporaries of Darwin, passages like this one could also
easily have opened up a question of non-normative sexual desires which are quite tightly united to nonnormative gender identities in the scientific and pseudo-scientific discourses of the period.
51
meaning of sex?
The issue of same-sex desire poses many problems for an evolutionary

narrative for glaringly obvious yet difficult to articulate reasons. For a start, sex
-- both animal and human is understood in inexorably functionalist terms.
Sex equals reproductive sex for the story of evolution. This is so because of
the expanded time-frame of evolution and because the major protagonist of the
story of evolution is a unit called species which has a multigenerational
character.24 Internal to this unit as a narrative agent is successful heterosexual
reproduction. Since definitionally acts deemed homosexual are nonreproductive, they can at best be incidental to the definition of species. This is
not just true of homosexual acts, impulses and identities, but is a consequence
of the subordination of all individual traits to the longer nature of species. In the
movement from nature to culture, Freud will posit an evolutionary place for
sublimated male homosexual desires.
This remains outside Darwins purview, for the movement of his texts is
largely from culture to nature, even though he claims to be moving in the
opposite direction. The impact of this movement on discourses of
homosexuality produces very little historical change. In fact, evolution
provides scientific ballast for the old prohibition on same-sex sex acts as contra
naturam. Even though same-sex sex acts are verifiable in almost all vertebrates
in nature,25 even should they offer an adaptive advantage, that advantage cannot
be passed on. I do not want to fall into the trap of superimposing the modem
Western homo-hetero binary by insisting on the exclusivity of homo and hetero
acts (or identities). I am sure that many people (and animals) who have had
24 As Freud points out, there is a paradox inherent in reproduction itself, as it represents a victory
of the species over the individual. The fact o f sexed reproduction marks the subject as subject to
death. (Rose, 1992, 35)
25 While, I remain suspicious of Simon LeVays attempts to locate a biological explanation for
homosexuality in humans, he offers a useful synopsis of research into same-sex sexual behavior in
mammals in Queer Science: The Use and Abuse o f Research into Homosexuality. (1996, 195-210).
52
same-sex sex experiences have also had children and, to stay within a
biologistic paradigm that I would normally dispute, could theoretically have
passed this down to their children.What I insist upon is the recognition that for
the constitution of the primary unit of the story of evolution, namely species,
the telos of reproduction2'' is axiomatic, which confers a deeply naturalizing
privilege on human heterosexual desire. Even though sociobiologists like E.O.
Wilson have tried to argue for homosexuals as the carriers of mankinds
altruistic impulses, the lack of inherent reproductive potential within same-sex
sex acts can be seen to jam rather than facilitate the evolutionary theory of
species.
Darwin is writing in the time of the emergence of the third sex and
inversion theorists - all of whom try to mobilize a a biological grounding for
inverted sexual desire.27 At this historical moment, same sex desire is
understood as gender transitive. Ulrichs classic Uming - the womans soul
trapped in a mans body - may be taken as an emblematic figuration. Notions of
gender confusion and indeterminacy are central to the contemporaneous
understanding of same-sex sexual desires. Within the story of the evolution of
life on earth, this kind of hermaphroditic model of same-sex sexual desire,
resonates in disturbing ways. A brief look at Herbert Spencers First Principles
should clarify the place of gender indeterminacy in human evolution.
Spencer defines evolution in the following terms:

Evolution is an integration of matter and concomitant dissipation
of motion; during which the matter passes from an indefinite,
incoherent homogeneity to a definite coherent heterogeneity; and
during which the changed motion undergoes a parallel
26 Darwin is slightly less certain about the role of reproduction in the definition of species, though
clearly it plays a role. He writes:
From these several considerations, it may be justly urged that
the perfect fertility of the inter-crossed races of man, if established,
would not absolutely preclude us from ranking them as distinct
species. {Descent o f Man, 1998, 179).
27 See Chapter 2 for a discussion of the Inversion theorists.
53
transformation (1900. 407).
The movement of evolution is necessarily from the amorphous or

undifferentiated to the distinctive or differentiated. The primary division of
species is gender, or to use the less precise vocabulary of Darwin and Spencer,
sex. The first marker of the entry into difference for Spencer is sex. Asexual
reproduction is found only in the lower plants and animals. The use of the
prefixes homo and hetero in a very different context to the ways they are
beginning to be used in sexology reveals a similar bias. The lowest is
indefinite, incoherent homogeneity. The forward movement is towards
definite coherent heterogeneity. The differentiation of species into two distinct
sexes is a major step on that path.
Within Spencers definition of evolution, there is room for a valorization

of other sexual aims, acts and desires, for he can also be mis/read as calling for
more differentiation, more diversity as the telos of evolution. ( I will explore in
Chapter 3, how this idea of evolution is taken up by Wilde). Nevertheless, the
invocation of a gender blurring in the understanding of same-sex sexual desire
and in the people who experience it evokes ideas of backwardness, of some fall
back into the homogeneous mass of protoplasm - the primeval cosmic soup.
Amoebae are sexually undifferentiated, earthworms are hermaphroditic, not so
people.
Lack of sufficient sexual differentiation is also seen to be a mark of

primitive people. In the Descent o f Man, it is asserted that:
In the amount of hair, and in the general shape of the body, the
sexes of the American aborigines do not differ so much from each
other, as in most other races. This fact is analogous with what
occurs with some closely allied monkeys; thus the sexes of the
chimpanzee are not as different as the orang or gorilla. (1998, 581).
Darwin provides additional support for this from his great American opponent,
Aggasiz, in a footnote to this passage:
54
Prof. and Mrs. Agassiz. . . remark that the sexes of the American
Indians differ less than those of the negroes and the higher races.
(1998, 581).
Given the evolutionary narratives tendency to privilege variability and high

degrees of differentiation between the sexes as a mark of developmental
advancement, the invocation of gender-transitive same-sex sexual desire and the
psychic hermaphroditism of its protagonists by figures such as Ulrichs and
Carpenter are nascently racialized as primitive in an evolutionary climate.
Thus, while in his two major texts, Darwin does not mention the
possibility of same-sex sexual desire, he lays the ground for its subsequent
scientific formulation by setting the terms for human difference to be
understood in developmental terms. As much as evolutionary theory undoes a
religious world-view, it reinscribes old religious prohibitions against same-sex
desire onto the body of nature itself and it links race and gender in ways that
sexologists like Havelock Ellis are going to find impossible to resist.
Simultaneously, evolution provided a double-edged adaptive rationale

for whatever cultural and natural identities could be verified empirically, and
people who practiced same-sex sex acts and were beginning to understand such
practices as a crucial part of themselves certainly existed. Evolutionary theory
further allowed for the radical mutability of humanity by debunking the notion
of the fixity of species, encouraging utopian hopes and nightmares of
degeneracy. As much as evolutionary theory suggested that extant social
hierarchies were natural, it also implied that they were not necessarily stable. In
the Origin o f Species, Darwin describes the doctrine of Natural Selection in the
following terms: the common rule throughout nature is infinite diversity of
structure for gaining the same end; and this again naturally follows the same
great principle. (1970, 169). This tension between infinite diversity of
structure and same ends is what I hope to have explicated over the course of
55
this chapter; how questions of difference and sameness are mapped out over the
course of Darwins two major texts in ways that serve imperial ideologies and
are homophobically prescriptive, but also how the infinite diversity of
structure is not always easily channeled to the same ends.
56
Give me where to stand and I will turn your system
of persecution upside down. Numa Numantius
Chapter 2
The Evolution of the Homosexual: Or What Could the Inversion of Inversion
Have Been?
In this chapter, I argue that it should not be possible to understand the
initial theories of modem male homosexual identity in the west without looking at
the imperial and neo-imperial contexts of such theoretical production.2 1 claim that
key premises of Darwinian evolutionary theory, outlined in the preceding chapter,
permitted an imbrication of race, gender, nation and class categories in the
constitution of knowledge of the body of the invert and subsequent homosexual.
Exploring Kobena Mercers ciaim that the European construction of sexuality
coincides with the epoch of imperialism and the two interconnect (1988, 106), I
investigate the implications of evolutionary theory for questions of sexuality at the
turn of the century.
Firstly, I follow the Foucault of History o f Sexuality vol. I in the attempt

to write the production of the homosexual as species. However. I wish to deepen
the constitutive discourses of this emergent species beyond the medico-juridical
apparatus to include the undergirdings of evolutionary theory in the emergent
discipline of sexology. Secondly, I offer detailed readings of Havelock Elliss
Sexual Selection in Man, a text which almost hyperbolically illustrates the crucial
role of evolutionary theories of race in the understanding of male and female
same-sex desire and what embodied identities may be predicated on such desires.
In the third and final section, I narrate the transition from the invert to the
' This was the nom de guerre of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs.
2 Thus, this chapter emerges from a growing body of work, which attempts to understand the
relation between European imperial expansion and consolidation ani the theorization of sexuality
in the West. Rudi Bleys, in The Geography o f Perversion: Male-to-male Sexual Behaviour
outside the West and the Ethnographic Imagination, 1750-1918 (1995), provides a wealth of
documentation on travel writings about the sexual practices of the natives and how these inform
European understandings o f male same sex desire back home. See particularly 206-272.
57
homosexual, paying particular attention to the ways in which the use of inversion
as a concept-metaphor to understand same-sex desire offered a set of partial and
fragmented ideological resistances to the evolutionary rhetorics, I elaborate in the
first two sections. The three sections do not stand in any developmental relation to
each other and may be read in any order.
I. The Specter of Evolution (the discursive force-field):
Critics, such as Anne McClintock and Catherine Hall,3 have pointed out
the mutually reaffirming, if not constitutive, relations between race, class and
gender categories during the latter half of the nineteenth century, without
considering the impact on and of emergent sexual identities. Ann Laura Stoler has
attempted to deepen and glancingly contest1 Foucaults History o f Sexuality by
insisting on the significance of colonial relations and experiences in the
proliferation of metropolitan discourses of sexuality in nineteenth-century
Europe, but grants homosexuality little space in her discussion.5 Siobhan
Somerville, in Scientific Racism and the Emergence of the Homosexual Body
(1994), offers a brilliant tracing of how theories of scientific racism, themselves
deeply enmeshed in evolutionary arguments, are used in the production of
knowledge of the homosexual body. Since her focus on scientific racism draws
mainly from American examples, she does not explicitly address the specificity of
3 See C. Halls White, Male and Middle-Class: Explorations in Feminism and History for a
consideration of how class, race and gender categories need to be understood in relation to each
other (1992, 11-40) and A. McClintocks Imperial Leather. Race, Gender and Sexuality in the
Colonial Context. McClintock insists on the intersecting, mutually constituting nature of race,
class and sexuality as social and analytic categories. (1995, 1-9).
4 See Abdul JanMohammeds Sexuality on/of the Racial Border: Foucault, Wright and the
Articulation of a Racialized Sexuality," on Foucaults lack of a discussion on the impact of racial
discourses on discourses o f sexuality. (1992, 94-116).
5 See Stoler, A. L. Race and the Education o f Desire: Foucault's History o f Sexuality and the
Colonial Order o f Things, for a sustained argument that Europes eighteenth-century discourses on
sexuality can - indeed must - be traced along a more circuitous imperial route that leads to
nineteenth-century technologies of sex. (1995, 7) Stoler pays scant attention to how colonial
experiences and attendant racial discourses impact on metropolitan theories of homosexuality. Her
discussion o f homosexuality is framed in terns of how Dutch colonial officials justified inter-racial
heterosexual sexual activity for colonial troops - concubinage with native women was justified as
preferable to homosexual contacts and intimacies outside the states control. (1995, 180).
58
the British imperial context, and more concerned with the visual field - evident in
her interest in explicating the legacy of comparative anatomy for sexuality studies her concern is not directly with the set of developmental/temporal questions that I
maintain hold race, Empire and sexuality together.
I take Foucaulf's polemical assertion that the homosexual becomes a

specie/ circa 1870 (Foucault, 1980,43) as a foundational ruse, rather than as a
historical fact. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in Epistemology o f the Closet (1990)
argues that sexuality is a constitutive epistemological regime for modernity that many of the major nodes of thought and knowledge in twentieth-century
western culture as a whole are structured - indeed, fractured - by a chronic, now
endemic crisis of homo/heterosexual definition, indicatively male, dating from the
end of the nineteenth century. (1990, 1). Moreover, I wish to problematize a
range of questions around the claims to facticity of a category of social analysis
called "sexuality"; claiming that the discourse of facts, particularly as it manifests
in a certain Victorian anthropological gaze (of remarkable tenacity and
persistence),7 is in itself part of such an imperialist episteme; and that Empire and
empiricism can be connected by more cogent word-plays than punning.
Knowledges of the sexual practices of colonized people provided crucial evidence
for nearly all parties engaged in turn of the century debates around what
increasingly came to be called homosexuality. Before he can even utter the term
sexual inversion, John Addington Symonds, in A Problem in Modem Ethics
(1896), tells us:
It confronts us on the steppes of Asia, where hordes of nomads drink
the milk of mares; in the bivouac of Keltish warriors, lying wrapped
in wolves skins round their camp-fires; upon the sands of Arabia,
s Foucaults use of the term species cannot pass without comment. While Foucault is
notably silent on any imperial resonances to his history of sexuality, species" carries traces of the
Enlightenment project of categorizing all natural phenomena. It invokes Darwin and Linne before
him, in short the mastery of the planet by European science.
7 Henrika Kuklicks The Savage Within: The Social History o f British Anthropology 18851945 makes it clear that evolutionist assumptions remain in anthropology even after diffusionist
theory wins out. (1991, 18-26 and 75-118). See also George Stockings After Tylor: British
Social Anthropology 1888-1951, for a sustained account of the continuing complicity of
anthropology with imperialist enterprises. (1995, 1-172 and 367-426).
59
where the Bedaween raise desert dust in flying squadrons. We discern it

among the palm-groves of the South Sea Islands, in the card-houses
and temple-gardens o f Japan, under Esquimaux snow-huts, beneath the
sultry vegetation of Peru, beside the streams of Shiraz and the waters
of the Ganges, in the cold clear air of Scandinavian winters. It throbs
in our huge cities. The pulse of it can be felt in London, Paris,
Berlin, Vienna, no less than in Constantinople, Naples, Teheran and
Moscow. It finds a home in Alpine valleys, Albanian ravines,
Californian canyons, and gorges o f Caucasian mountains. (1896. 2)
The it, that Symonds is so slow to name, is found everywhere, and he is to

mobilize its geographic^ universality in an impassioned plea against its criminal
status in Britain. However, its presence among many of the subject people of
Empire could be and was used as evidence that it should be further criminalized
and/or pathologized.
Many of these narratives share certain rhetorical tropes and strategies,

which I hope to trace without necessarily engaging a kind of idealism, that claims
that these tropes always have determining power or bear the same social charge in
very different historical settings. I wish to isolate a major intellectual reorientation
- where these tropes were mobilized - what George Stocking in Victorian
Anthropology terms classical evolutionism. Its central feature comes to be a
figuring of human cultural difference in biological terms. Most crucially, living
savages come to fill the fossil gap, through a spatialization o f time written on the
human body. Johannes Fabian in his classic Time and the O ther: How
Anthropology M akes its Object (1983) argues that the social evolutionists
discarded Time altogether and that the temporal discourse of anthropology as it
was formed decisively under the paradigm of evolutionism rested on a conception
of Time that was not only secularized and naturalized but also thoroughly
spatialized. This is what allows Fabian to insist that anthropological praxis was
epistemologically (not just materially or morally) linked to colonialism and
imperialism. (1983, 15-17). In this chapter, I try to apply Fabians analysis of
temporal narratives to a figure outside of his purview, but still inflected by the
8 The language o f the extract insists on the iconicity of exoticism. Climate and landscape are
the idealized terms that Symonds uses to posit human difference in the claim o f homosexual"
sameness.
60
discourse of the primitive, namely the metropolitan male homosexual.
The insistence on the spatialization of time in order to construe racial

otherness is evident in many scientific and anthropological writings. Huxley in the
1860"s claims that "the difference in the volume of the cranial capacity of the
different races of mankind is far greater, absolutely than that between the lowest
man and the highest ape. Tylor settles on the Tasmanians as the living
representative of the Early Stone Age, and a range of hierarchies are produced
which serve to rank a variety of cultures through a study of their law, religion,
sexual practices and marriage institutions until they reach their full flower in
Europe. Lubbock offers the following developmental hierarchy: Australian,
Tahitian, Aztec, Chinese, Italian. (Stocking, 1987, 177). The interchangeability of
the ancient and contemporaneous in the establishment of categories of race,
nation, culture is neatly evidenced here, and it is easy to point to the difficulties in
such hierarchies: for example, where would the Roman fit in this schema? Rather
than only point to the racist incoherence of such formulations, I wish to stress
their productivity; how they are mobilized and inhabited by a range of social
actors.
For the paradigm of classical evolutionism offered a way of not only

thinking through questions of human difference in the more overtly
anthropological and imperial contexts, where the object of investigation is the
periphery, but also of thinking about social, sexual and gender differences at the
center. Stocking draws out two domestic primitive types in Britain at the time - the
Celtic fringe and the urban poor, citing policy makers who claim that "countrymen
of our own are living lives worse than those of savages," and that "the race
differentiated progress of the human species over the last hundred millennia is
comparable to the class differentiated progress of British civilization over the last
hundred years." (Stocking, 1987, 201). Furthermore, the theorizing of female
bodies and the creation of a male homosexual body as an object for theorizing can
61
be seen to operate in the same discursive field.
The teleological language of evolution is rife in the writings by, for and
about homosexuals: in the manifestos of people so self-identified, in the
sexological, psychoanalytic and anthropological documents about them, and in
artistic and literary representations. At every turn one encounters terms of "arrest,"
"retardation," "decadence" and "degeneration."
Within the set of medical discourses that come to define a homosexual

identity for the emerging set of European criminal codes,9 evolutionary theories
are widely deployed, drawing upon evolutionary theories of gender/ the female
body (the two are pretty much inseparable at this historical conjuncture), as well
as those in the anthropological field of culture. Herbert Spencer, a key figure in
the emergence of social Darwinism, argues that the evolution of the female fetus is
retarded in order to keep a reserve of energy for later reproduction. (Freuds
notion of the clitoris as a vestigial penis can be seen as part of this legacy)1" In
Geddes, an evolutionary hierarchy of genders is used to explain the difference
between the sexes right down to the level of cell metabolism, with male cell
organization understood as katabolic, i.e. dissipating or spending energy in a
persistent forward, expansive and adaptive drive, and female cells as anabolic,
inclining to retention, storing and inertia. The implications for subsequent
psychoanalytic theories of homosexuality as arrest are obvious, despite Freuds
explicit refutation of intermediate and Third Sex theories.11 which see the
homosexual as feminized. Somerville points out the racial underpinnings of these
gender continuum models of homosexuality. Carpenter uses the racial continuum
9 According to Hirschfeld, many of the thousand or so works produced or. the subject of
homosexuals are directed at the legal profession as is Symonds work of advocacy, A Problem in
M odem Ethics (1896).
10 This idea predates the era I am discussing. Stephen Greenblatt has approached the issue of
cross-dressed boy actors on the early modem stage via Renaissance theories that women are
unfinished men and that thus there are not two radically different sexual structures but only one outward and visible in the man, inverted and hidden in the woman. (Greenblatt, S. Shakespearian
Negotiations. Berkeley: University o f California Press, 1988, 77)
" See footnote 37.
62
and the idea of the mixed race body as an analog for the homosexual body:
Anatomically and mentally we find all shades existing from the pure genus man
to the pure genus woman . . . As we are continually meeting in cities women who
are one-quarter, or one-eighth male . . . so there are in the Inner Self, similar halfbreeds, all adapting themselves to circumstances with perfect ease.12 This use of
race and gender to delineate the homosexual body is mediated through the
language of evolution. Carpenter writes of the genus man and the genus
woman, who, along with all the stages between them and the rest of life on earth
in the Darwinian schema, are adapting themselves to circumstances.
However, evolutionary tropes are compounded and to some extent

confounded, by the representation of the homosexual as the extension of Tissots
Figure of the dissipated, exhausted masturbator - the homosexual as degenerate13
rather than retard. This trope is also frequently seen through a gendered lens - that
of effeminacy. Alan Sinfield has argued that the association between effeminacy
and homosexuality dates from the Wilde trials and suggests that the figure of the
dandy, at least in literary representations, can embody an excess of heterosexual
desire rather than its opposite prior to the Wilde scandal.14 Yet Sinfields reading
of the 1871 Boulton - Park trial makes it clear that, in certain sectors, homosexual
behavior was associated with effeminacy and transvestism, even if this is not quite
12 Cited in Somerville (1994, 259).
13 Richard Krafft- Ebing and Max Nordau are probably the two most prominent fm-de-siecle
figures to theorize inversion/homosexuality in terms of a variety of degenerative processes. KrafftEbings discussion of male antipathic sexual feeling always attributes same sex desire to
degeneration of mind, body and spirit: By the side of the functional signs o f degeneration
attending antipathic sexual feeling are found other functional, and in many cases anatomical,
evidences of degeneration. (Krafft-Ebing 1965: 360) Nordaus attacks on aestheticism suggest a
wider cultural climate of degeneration in which abnormal sexual behavior is implicated: [H]e
commits a serious error if, in the aesthetic schools of the last few years, he sees the heralds of a
new era. They do not direct us towards the future, but point backwards towards the p a st... and
what the ignorant hold to be outbursts of gushing youthful vigour and turbulent constructive
impulses are nothing but the convulsions and spasms o f exhaustion. (Cited in Cohen, 1993, 1516)
14 Here is the gist of Sinfields argument: Up to the time of Wildes trials - far later than is
widely supposed - it is unsafe to interpret effeminacy, as defining of, or as a signal of same-sex
passion. Mostly, it meant being emotional and spending too much time with women. Often it
involved excessive cross-sexual attachment. (1994, 27).
63
intelligible to the hegemonic culture at large. In the context of the American

metropolis, George Chauncey in Gay New York (1994) provides ample evidence
that the effeminate homosexual man (the fairy) is a recognizable figure on the
streets and in the bars of certain neighborhoods by the 1890s .
Figuring effeminacy as decadence may be inflected by a developmental

narrative of gender difference, where the female is defined reactively with
reference to a male subject. For Darwin, the male is always more modified and
thus more evolutionarily advanced. The dandy, as a highly ornamented man, was
always decadent, it takes an evolutionary ideology to make him degenerate, since
in the evolutionary schema, men are only highly ornamented in primitive
cultures.15 Decadence and degeneracy, two terms frequently associated with the
effeminate dandy are both developmental tropes; degeneracy implying a falling
back into an earlier time, an anxious space of the past in the future, and decadence
connoting a bringing into the present of some very late, perhaps never-to-be
reached state, an anxious space of premature death. What the decadent/degenerate
shares with the primitive is a position on the fringes of the normative evolutionary
narrative.16 Neither figure can exist in the present. These increasingly biologized
tropes of the homosexual as retard or as degenerate are refigured in the different
appropriations of savage and Greek/idealized homosexuality. Carpenter, Burton
and Freud all struggle to account for the presence of same-sex acts in cultures
15 See Chapter 1 for a discussion of how ornamentation feminizes savage men in Darwin's
Descent o f Man (1872). This lends the discourse of effeminacy an implicitly racialized dimension
in late nineteenth-century Britain.
16 The confinement o f homosexual behavior to either an effete Aristocracy or a lust-ridden
working -class conforms to this figuration. The reception of W ildes Picture o f Dorian Gray as a
novel fit only for 'outlawed noblemen and perverted telegraph boys (Cited in Gagnier. 1986. 59 )
evidences the perceived immunity o f the middle-classes from the seduction of homoerotic desires.
Only what Stocking terms the domestic primitives", namely the urban poor and what may be
termed a decadent aristocracy indulge in such behaviors. The mapping o f evolution back onto
domestic sexual matters is arguably not the only move that allows vice to be imputed to these
two groups. They are both notoriously resistant to a middle-class work ethic. To stay with Wilde:
Work is the curse o f the drinking classes. (Cited in Keyes. 1996. 137). Questions of a sexuality
that works, which is a reproductive sexuality, further attend this nexus and will be more
extensively explored in Chapter 3.
64
called backward and savage and in the valorized Greco/Roman past of Europe.
The place of male homosexuality in theories of cultural evolution is most unstable
and the perception of male homosexuality amongst the subjected peoples of
Empire is mobilized both by groups seeking to stigmatize homosexuality further
and by those wishing to depathologize and decriminalize17 it.
Sir Richard Francis Burton is decidedly clear that homosexuality is

definitively unBritish, even though he was reputed to be partial to young men
himself. In the Terminal Essay (1886) to his translation of A Thousand and
One Nights, wherein he undertakes to explain same-sex passion to a presumably
ignorant and potentially scandalized metropolitan audience, he makes it clear that it
is his experiences in the colonies that have prepared him for such explications:
The excrebalis familia pathicorum first came before me by chance of

earlier life. In 1845. when Sir Charles Napier had conquered and
annexed Sind, despite a fraction (mostly venal)which sought favour
with the now defunct Court o f Directors to the Honourable East India
Company, the veteran began to consider his conquest with a curious
eye. It was reported to him that Karachi, a townlet o f some two
thousand souls and distant than not more than a mile from camp,
supported no less than three Iupanars or bordels. in which not women,
but boys and eunuchs, the former demanding nearly a double price, lay
for hire. (1886, 205)
Burton goes on to recount how he visited all these places and obtained the
fullest details which were duly dispatched to Government House. (1886, 206).
Since these reports fall into the hands of his enemies within the colonial service he
is threatened with dismissal. I refer to this incident because it indicates that an
17 In an article which lies outside the time parameters, I have set, but useful in pointing to and
complicating the mobilizations of anthropology that I am discussing. Jonathan Goldberg reads the
English translation of Balboas feeding of forty apparently transgender sodomites" (some o f whom
were allegedly freely handed over to the Spaniards by the natives) to his dogs, following his defeat
of the leaders o f the Indians of Quarequa in present day Panama in 1511. Goldberg points to the
multivalenced significance of this act, revealing how the account allows for Balboa to be staged as
a proto-democratic hero, a fighter for native women, who must be degraded by the presence of
these people in their midst, as well as crusader for Christ in the New World. In his analysis, the
overdetermined nature of homosexuality in colonial encounters is suggested, with the
elimination of the preposterous vice serving for some kind of justification for conquest, but
never just that. (1993, 3-18).
65
emergent colonial government was interested in the same-sex sexual practices of
the people they were coming to rule, and because it reveals the endlessly
displaceable national and racial origins of homosexuality. '*
The presence of homosexuality amongst the savage races is engaged

by ideologies of Empire19 and the imputed national/racial otherness of it can be
hierarchized by the evolutionary narrative and will be speculatively posited by
Freud as a precondition for civilization. The idea that homosexual sex is
somehow more ritualized and primitive than its heterosexual counterpart in both
mainstream and subcultural representations bears witness to the persistence of
this figuration. Symonds in 1896 is already referring to sexual inverts as a tribe of
sorts. Writing of stereotypes of inverts as feminized, he asserts but it is a gross
mistake to suppose that all the tribe betray these attributes. (1896, 15). I can pick
contemporary examples almost at random. The headline of a Sunday Times article
describing the 1993 Gay Pride march in London read The Colourful Tribes of
the Gay Community; and an article in the now defunct Outlook in 1990 laments
the dearth of bathroom sex in the following terms:
Never will tribal rites be exercised so widely and so freely
as in the recent past. Here and there intrepid tribesmen continue to
seek anonymous gratification, but with less and less success as
caution conquers lust. Now that only a few fading Graffiti remain,
the history of quick sex seekers has become as inaccessible as that
of preliterate tribes. Just as the invading Catholic Spaniards
destroyed the pagan Mayan codices in the New World, the tribal
gay sex-seekers have destroyed their own literature and with it a
key to a significant cultural history.
Waite, D. J. "Lost Tribal Rites: A Lament."( Outlook No. 9
Summer 1990, 14).
Interestingly, the metaphor of tribalism is invoked in a discussion of promiscuity.

In late twentieth-century cultural stereotypes, promiscuity is one of the defining
18 For the French, it is the English vice. The English word bugger is derived from
Bulgarian. The word berdache is derived from a Turkish word and is then applied to crossgendered Native Americans.
10 Relatedly , cannibalism and homosexuality are connected as the two unspeakable acts in a
nineteenth Century Anglophone imaginary. See Caleb Crains Lovers o f Human Flesh:
Cannibalism and Homosexuality in Melville"(1994, 25-53).
66
characteristics of gay male sexuality. In a nineteenth-century cultural imaginary, it
was savages who were promiscuous, even though anthropologists such as Fison
and Howitt had a difficult time locating such promiscuous behavior in the field." In
matters deemed sexual, primitive promiscuity was understood by nineteenthcentury evolutionary anthropologists as the initial stage in human social
organization: From an initial state of promiscuous intercourse, there had arisen,
in sequence, the Communal Family (founded on the intermarriage of brothers and
sisters); the Barbarian family; . . . the Patriarchal family ( founded on the
marriage of one man to several wives); and the Civilized Family. . . (Stocking
1995, 18-19). Promiscuity remains a defining attribute of those deemed primitive,
whether primitive in the sphere of phylogeny - the savage - , or primitive in his
individual psychosexual development - the gay man. To speculate on a similar
matter: the worship of the Phallus is another defining attribute of the category of the
primitive in anthropological and derivative psychological literature from Richard
Knights 1786 Discourse on the Worship ofPriapus to Freuds Leonardo da Vmci:
A Study in Psychosexuality (1916), as well as a defining feature in psychoanalytic
and popular cultural representations of gay male desire*1
Thus while homosexuality can be sustainedly connected with the

primitive, evolutionary narratives come under some strain. Can the primitive and
the decadent occupy the same sequential position? Can socially sanctioned
homosexuality co-exist in the backward savages of the present and in the
advanced cultures of Europes past? What might the valence of this co-existence
be? Again, it is mobilized by both sides. Josephine Butler, in crusading for moral
purity argues:
Rome fell, other nations are falling and if England falls, it will be
20 See L.Fison and A.W. Howitts Kamilaroi andK um ai (originally published in 1878) for an
account of the difficulty of locating primitive promiscuity" amongst people deemed to embody
the early history of mankind. (1991, 25-30).
21 How may the stereotype of the "size queen be brought to bear on this? For contemporary
gay male complicity with this discursive linking, see the decidedly juicy anthropology o f Tobias
Schneebaum, where the deeper into the jungle you go, the more things start to look like a sex
club. His Keep the River on your Right (1969) offers disturbingly sexualized descriptions of
cannibalism (1969, 102-107 and 150).
67
this sin, and her unbelief in God, that will be her ruin.
(Cited in Weeks, 1977, 18).
The same developmentally fraught matrix is encountered in Carpenters

expressed difficulty in incorporating the Samurai of Japan and the Dorian Greeks,
alongside the Alaskan Inuit in his Intermediate Types Among Primitive Folk
(1911). This discovery and rediscovery," of different cultural organizations of
particularly male homosexuality, along the axes of history and geography, strain
the evolutionary narrative, yet never entirely escape it. Symonds invokes ancient
Greece:
Here alone in history have we the example o f a great and highly
developed race not only tolerating homosexual passions but
deeming them of spiritual value and attempting to utilize them
for the benefit of society. (Weeks, 1977, 51).
Carpenter spreads his net much wider:

Bearing this in mind it becomes possible to see that a great many
o f the customs we have mentioned, whether in Syria or
Babylonia, or in Greece, or in Africa, or in North and South
America, had a value quite other than that which appears at first
sight - a profound and human value - and that they represented
necessary contributions towards the evolution of mankind and the
expression of its latent powers. And as regards this present
volume, I think we may say that among primitive folk variations
of sex-temperament from the normal have not been negligible
freaks, but have played an important part in the evolution and
expansion of human society - that in a certain sense variations of
social activity have run parallel with and been provoked by
variations in same-sex temperament." (Carpenter, 1921, 170-1).
22 The persistence of this line of thinking is apparent in contemporary gay self-representation, with claims to
some political capital:
A little theory here or anti-theory. A debate is brawling these days among
the gender scholars between the "essentialists" and the "constructivists". The
essentialist argues that there is a genetic predisposition to being gay and
lesbian. Thus gay people have always existed, "different from the mainstream
but crucial to the health of the race. This separate kind has always been a class
of nurturers and teachers, healers and shamans - consciously so and cherished,
even, by tribes from Arizona to Tahiti. In the formulation of sociobiologist E.
O. Wilson, "Homosexuals may be the genetic carriers of mankind"s rare
altruistic impulses."
Monette, P. Becoming a Man: H alf a Life Story. 1992, 11. (winner of the
1992 National Book Award.)
68
Carpenter posits a gendered continuum of sexual desire, which he claims
to be central to the continuing evolution of the species. In this way, he manages
to mobilize cultural difference within a prevailing evolutionary paradigm to
challenge (albeit in a very circumscribed way) both the homophobia and racism13
of much evolutionist thought.
Richard Burtons Terminal Essay to his translation of the Arabian

Nights in 1886 attempts to preempt charges of obscenity by making a culturally
relativist argument based on the determinations of climate on same-sex passion.
Burton resists the contradictions of an explicitly evolutionary narrative, disavows
racial explanations and yet manages to produce male homosexuality as definitively
alien to northern European peoples. He tells us that he holds pederasty to be
geographical and climatic, not racial. (1896, 207).
I suspect a mixed physical temperament effected by the manifold
subtle influences massed together in the word climate. Something
of the kind is necessary to explain the fact of this pathological
love extending over the greater portion of the habitable world,
without any apparent connection of race or media, from the
polished Greek to the Cannibal Tupi of the Brazil. (1896, 208)
To get round the evolutionary configuration, Burton employs a topographical one,

constructing a Sotadic Zone, in which climate is seen to facilitate pathological
love. This, of course, becomes entirely untenable, because the Sodatic Zone ends
up including all of the Americas, Australasia, China, Japan, the Near and Middle
East and the Mediterranean basin - regions of the world in which climate varies
radically. As problematic as Burtons refutation of evolution is, it represents an
attempt to think the otherness of sexual norms in terms that do not subsume the
231 realize that I use these terms anachronistically. There was considerable slippage in late
nineteenth-century definitions of race. Race could mean nation as in British race." It could also
signify ancestry as in Anglo-Saxon race as well as refer to the more familiar groups of people
with varying skin tones and facial features. The modem understanding o f homosexuality is
emergent in this period, though homophobia is a much more recent coinage. I understand racism
and homophobia as discourses which stigmatize any deviations from whiteness and heterosexuality,
their respective norms, through a range o f strategies, an important one being the evolutionary
narrative of difference as developmental that I am working to elucidate in this chapter.
69
other into the self in the narrating of identity.
In significant ways, Burtons construction of a Sotadic Zone cannot

entirely be read as counter-evolutionary because it resonates with Lamarckian
notions of environment producing heritable traits - the precursor to Darwins
theory of evolution that he was at pains to refute in the Origin o f Species.
However, while the Sotadic Zone is clearly empirically useless, it offers an
explanation that is not subject to the ethical problems of the developmental
evolutionary narratives, I am discussing throughout this dissertation. Burton does
not spatialize time. Cultural difference is understood as a function of climactic
difference, not as developmental or temporal. In Fabians terms, Burton does not
confuse the category primitive for an object. He attempts to avoid a
developmental narrative altogether. Nevertheless Burtons reduction of the social
into the natural, evident in his privileging of climate as a causative factor of samesex passion, reinscribes this central reduction of social Darwinist thought, even
though he claims no adaptive function for homosexuality in this organicizing of
the historical.
The evolutionary narrative is one of the strands that can connect the
emergence of the homosexual with the consolidation of the late Victorian British
empire. The health of the imperializing national body and the purity of the
civilized individual male body are linked in the production of ideologies of
Empire and nation in George Mosses Nationalism and Sexuality (1985), and such
a connection can be read in both Josephine Butlers anxiety and Carpenters
careful removal of the sex24 in homosexuality.
Mosses exploration of the relation of sex and particularly sex between

men in the constitution of a national and (imperial) identity is useful in terms of
24 Carpenter in arguing for the material and spiritual value o f homoerotic bonds between men
tends to downplay the explicit sexual desires in such bonds. See his chapter on "The Homogenic
Attachment in The Intermediate Sex (1912, 37-47).
70
suggesting how limiting sex to reproductive heterosexuality within the family can
safeguard emotionally charged relations between men. He finds in Baden Powell.
founder of the Boy Scouts - the ideological apparatus par excellence for preparing
boys for colonial service - an idea of evolutionary sublimation25.
The energy that the primitive male animal puts almost
solely into sex, in the human is turned into all sorts of
other activities, such as art, science.. .
(Lord Baden Powell cited in Mosse. G. Nationalism and
Sexuality, 1989, 25)
The drive for Empire itself has been theorized as a kind of sublimation of
sex26, with a homoerotic component. Here is Dennis Judd on Cecil Rhodes:
It seems evident that Rhodes emotional and sexual needs were
unconventional, and in any event fulfilled by both his imperial
achievements and the company of a succession of young men.
Lacking the sexual orientation and drive that would have made him a
husband and a father, he proved his potency through the pursuit and
conquest not o f women but of territory, and at an even more exalted
level, of an ideal. On this analysis, if the two territories o f Northern
and Southern Rhodesia were two relatively homely and obedient
wives, the extravagant commitment to British global supremacy as set
out in his will o f 1877 represented love on an ethereal and sublime
plane far removed from the sordid lusts of the flesh. (1996, 122)
In this kind of rhetoric, which clearly has a long discursive life, sex itself
is turned into the property of animals, savages,27 and the drunken lower orders,
against whom assorted social crusades and civilizing missions are led. A critical
distinction emerges between sublimated homosexual desires which are conducive
to the project of civilization and enacted homosexual desires which are perceived
as rather threatening to the social fabric. It is from within this bestial, raced and
classed nexus, that the taxonomic category homosexual first raises its head.
25 See Chapter 5, especially sections on Freuds Civilization and Its Discontents for a
discussion on the relationship between developmental theories of male homosexuality and the idea
of sublimation.
26 Ronald Hyams idea of Empire as the arena for the displacement of prohibited metropolitan
sexual impulses - the idea o f the colonies as a libidinal free-zone - is a related notion. See Hyam
(1990, 135).
27 This sex negativity and the way it is played out in the stigmatization o f homosexual
and other sexual minorities in the U. S has been lucidly theorized and chronicled by Gayle Rubin
in Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality. (1993, 11). I would
argue that it had and still has a racialized element.
71
II. Havelock Ellis and the Race of Bodies of Desire (the hyperbolic example).
The most important figure to theorize homosexuality in strictly

evolutionary terms may be the sexologist, Havelock Ellis.2* In his six-volume
Studies in the Psychology o f Sex (1905), Ellis uses evolutionary tropes and
arguments in a sustained attempt to explain normative and deviant human
sexuality. Victorian sexologists, often responding to emergent homosexual rights
activists such as Ulrichs and Carpenter worked hard to ground their theories of
inversion in the body, using scientific rhetoric and procedures to try and
understand the complexities of human sexuality. No exception to this, Ellis,
asserting scientific impartiality claims:
I am not in the position o f one who is pleading pro domo, nor of the
police official, nor even o f the physician, for these persons have not
come to me for treatment. I approach the matter as a psychologist,
who has ascertained certain definite facts, and who is founding his
conclusions on those facts. (1975, 129).
The facts to which Ellis so confidently refers are his case studies, many of which
he received from Symonds and all of which are narratives requiring interpretation
rather than self-evident facts and some of these facts strike one as particularly
bizarre with the benefit of hindsight - only two of Elliss male inverts can whistle.
Sexology as a discipline with explicit empirical aspirations always runs into
trouble, because its subject sex cannot be impartially observed in a laboratory,
but can only disclose itself in the recounting of itself by its actors. The sexologist
as scientist is always at one interpretive remove, not able to watch his subjects
having sex, he is dependent on their accounts, which are invariably linguistically
and socially mediated. As much as Ellis insists on the facticity of his findings, his
production of the sexual body is frequently narrated in obviously ideological
28 This is so with the exception o f Freud, who although remains true to the temporal aspects
o f the evolutionary narrative, radically shifts the space of this narrative to the psyche. See Chapter
5 for an extended reading of Freuds application of the story of evolution and how it informs his
theorizing of homosexuality.
72
terms.
Ellis pushes the ontogeny/phylogeny connection to its limits in his account

of many forms of human sexual and social activity. Even his account of tickling in
Sexual Selection in Man bases itself upon this axiom of nineteenth-century
evolutionary thought:
ticklishness would be the survival of long-passed ancestral
tentacular experience, which, originally a stimulation producing
intense agitation and alarm, has now merely become a play
activity and a source of keen pleasure. (1927, 12).
By this reckoning, deep evolutionary memories lie embedded in our responses to

certain tactile sensations, whose meanings have shifted with our development over
the millennia. They can be understood scientifically as vestigial of forms of earlier
physiological (and implicitly psychical) forms of the organization of man.
Like most social Darwinist thinkers, Ellis is quick to collapse the social
into the biological. Other cultures can embody missing links in the evolutionary
story, whose main protagonist and point of reference is almost invariably, the
white, male, middle-class, about to be heterosexual European. (Arguably,
evolutionary theory is deeply imbricated in the production of these constitutive
social categories in the nineteenth century, so it is difficult to be certain which is
the condition and which is the effect.) The primitive steps in to bridge the passage
between ourselves (implicitly white and civilized) and our amoeboid ancestors:
The reality of the connection between the sexual embrace and
tickling is indicated by the fact that in some languages, as in that
of the Fuegians, the same word is applied to both. (1927, 15):''
At certain key points, Ellis employs imperial metaphors directly,

unmediated through the frequently ideological network of evolutionary
29 The colloquial English expression for sex - a slap and tickle springs to mind, suggesting
that the link Ellis claims as a property of the primitive can be seen as present in the civilized as
well. Freud will make potent arguments for the persistence of earlier configurations - phylogenetic
and ontogenetic - in the psychic life of the civilized adult, simultaneously reinscribing and undoing
the certainties of the developmental narrative of evolution that Ellis is intent on proving here.
73
metaphorics. The very terms through which he understands the sexual human
body are the terms of colonial trade and expansion. In describing the secondary
sexual centers, i.e. the nipples, the mouth and the anus, Ellis produces the body
as a map:
These secondary centers have in common the fact that they
always involve the entrances and the exits of the body - the
regions that is where skin merges into mucous membrane, and
where, in the course of evolution, tactile sensibility has become
highly refined. It may, indeed, be said generally of these frontier
regions o f the body that their contact with the same or a similar
frontier region in another person of opposite sex. under
conditions favorable to tumescence, will tend to produce a
minimum and even sometimes a maximum degree of sexual
excitation. Contact of these regions with each other or with the
sexual region itself so closely simulates the central sexual reflex
that channels are set up for the same nervous energy and
secondary sexual centers are constituted. (1927, 19)
The secondary sexual centers are frontier regions marking the borders of the body
with the outside world, but also marking the borders of the inside and the outside
of the body. Like sea-ports, they mark the exits and entrances, through which the
body may be penetrated and expel. These secondary sexual centers are
furthermore dangerously ungendered for Ellis. We all have them, and contact
between them can produce a maximum degree of sexual excitement. These frontier
regions are not easily regulated. The superiority of the primary male genitals in the
constitution of the sexual body is not so easily assured. The sexual human body is
here symbolized as an anxious colonial map, with center and periphery insisted
upon rather than proved. Alternative organizations of sexual pleasure channel
across the body just as alternative social modes of the organization of gender
identity and sexual pleasure exist across the globe. Just as Ellis needs to order this
empirical diversity on the ground into neat evolutionary hierarchies of civilized,
barbarian and primitive, he needs to order the organs of the body and the caresses
(sexual and otherwise) of which the body is capable.
For Ellis, the kiss performs the strange overlapping of these two tasks:
The Chinese regard the European kiss as odious, suggesting
74
voracious cannibals, and yellow mothers in the French colonies
still frighten children by threatening to give them the white
mans kiss... Among some of the hill-tribes of south-east India,
the olfactory kiss is found, the nose being applied to the cheek
during salutation with a strong inhalation; instead of saying
Kiss me, they here say Smell me".The Tamils, I am told by a
medical correspondent in Ceylon, do not kiss during coitus, but
rub noses and also lick each others mouth and tongue. Among
the Jekris of the Niger coast mothers rub their babies with their
cheeks or mouths, but they do not kiss them, nor do lovers kiss,
though they squeeze, cuddle and embrace. Among the Swahilis a
smell kiss exists and very young boys are taught to raise their
clothes before women visitors, who thereupon playfully smell
the penis; the child who does this is said to give tobacco.
Kissing of any kind appears to be unknown to the Indians
throughout a large part of America: Im Thim states that it is
unknown to the Indians of Guiana, and at the other end o f South
America, Hyades and Deniker state that it is unknown to the
Fuegians. (1927, 220-221).
Ellis begins this extract with a rare piece of self-exoticization. The European kiss
can be perceived as odious, suggesting voracious cannibals. Ellis briefly offers
an inversion of his usual white/other hierarchy, but this inversion neatly replicates
his own terms; namely, sexual practices are a prime indicator of ones level of
civilization. There are abundant reasons why Elliss mapping of the body may
find the kiss vestigial, degenerate, cannibalistic, animalistic, non-normative. For
the kiss represents a not necessarily gendered contact between secondary sexual
centers. Compounding this is the fact that the impulse to bite is also part of the
tactile element which lies at the origins of kissing:
There is, however, in biting a distinctly sexual origin to invoke,
for among many animals the teeth ( and among birds the bill) are
used by the male to grasp the female more firmly during
intercourse. (1927, 216).
Nevertheless, ideological considerations must trump the nascent logic of Ellis's

mapping of the body, because among nearly all of the black races of Africa lovers
never kiss nor do mothers usually kiss their babies. (1927, 218). Consequently,
the kiss is unlike cunnilingus and fellatio - confined to man and indeed, to a large
extent, to civilized man. (1927, 23).
In the realm of smell, Ellis is better able to mobilize evolutionary
75
anthropology in the assertion of the white mans biological superiority. Smell, for
Ellis, is the second sense in developmental terms after touch, the mother of all
senses. This particularly holds sway in terms of sexual selection:
It thus comes about that the grosser manifestations o f sexual
allurement by smell belong, so far as man is concerned, to a
remote animal past which we have outgrown, and which, on
account of the diminished acuity of our olfactory organs, we
could not completely recall even if we desired to. (1927, 110).
What Ellis makes clear is that not all humans have equally outgrown susceptibility
to the grosser manifestations of sexual allurement by smell. There remain
human bridges to that remote animal past.
With that reservation, there can be no doubt that odor has a
certain favorable or unfavorable influence in sexual relationships
in all human races from the highest to the lowest. The
Polynesian spoke with contempt of those women of European
race who have no smell, and in view of the pronounced
personal odor of so many savage people as well as o f the careful
attention which they so often pay to odors, we may certainly
assume, even in the absence of much definite evidence, that smell
counts for much in their sexual relationships. This is confirmed
by such practices as that found among some primitive peoples as, it is stated, in the Phillipines - of lovers exchanging their
garments to have the smell of the loved one about them. (1927,
86 ).
Not only are barbarians3" more affected by odors but so are Elliss local
equivalents- women:
On the whole, it would appear that, while women are not apt to
be seriously affected.in the absence of any preliminary excitation,
by crude body odors, they are by no means insensitive to the
sexual influence of olfactory impressions. It is probable, indeed,
that they are more affected, and more ffequendy affected, in this
way, than are men. (1927, 86).
Paradoxically, women do not only have to be more susceptible to this

primitive sense; they also need to embody it. The smell of women of certain races
30 This is an idea that Ellis inherits from Darwin: But the sense o f smell is of extremely
slight service, if any, even to the dark coloured races o f men, in whom it is much more highly
developed than in the white and civilised races." (Darwin 1998: 206). The dark colored races smell
better because in Darwinian terms, smell is a vestigial sense from our remote animal past, to
which dark coloured races are closer.
76
is particularly strong (and sexually potent). Ellis's discussion of musk makes this
clear
Musk is the odor which not only in the animals to which it has
given a name, but in many others, is a specifically sexual odor,
chiefly emitted during the sexual season. The sexual odors,
indeed, of most animals seem to be modifications of musk. The
Sphinx moth has a musky odor which is confined to the male and
is doubtless sexual. Some lizards have a musky odor which is
heightened at the sexual season; crocodiles during the paring
season emit from their submaxillary glands a musky odor which
pervades their haunts. In the same way, elephants emit a musky
odor from their facial glands during the rutting season. The odor
of the musk duck is chiefly confined to the breeding season. The
musky odor of the negress is said to be heightened during sexual
excitement. (1927, 97).
Here, perceptions of smell are theorized in order to produce the negress as

closest to the animals. Her race compounds her gender in reducing her to the
lowest rung on Elliss evolutionary ladder. She is rendered as both the object and
subject of the sense that the rest of humanity has transcended. However, her
vulnerability to the primitive sense is shared by two white metropolitan figures the female and the male invert.
The female invert is predictably masculinized in her relation to smell, but
paradoxically, her masculinization simply allows for the feminine susceptibility to
odors to be rendered visible:
The very marked sexual fascination with odor, associated with the
men they love, exerts on women has passed unperceived, since
women have not felt to proclaim it. In sexual inversion,
however, when the women takes a more active and outspoken
part than in normal love, it may very clearly be traced. Here,
indeed, it is often exaggerated, in consequence of the common
tendency for neurotic and neurasthenic people to be more than
normally susceptible to the influence of odors. In the majority of
inverted women, it may safely be said that the odor of the
beloved person plays a very considerable part....(1927, 88-9).
Male inverts are too characterized as having the female and primitive propensity to
swoon for scent. Ellis claims:
That the body odor of men may in a large number of cases be
highly agreeable and sexually attractive is shown by the
testimony of male sexual inverts. There is abundant evidence to
77
this effect. Raffalovich (LUranisme et lUnisexualite p. 126)
insists on the importance of body odors as a sexual attraction to
the male invert, and is inclined to think that the increased odor of
the m ans own body during sexual excitement may have an autoaphrodisiacal effect which is reflected on the body of the loved
person. (1927, 89).
Ellis understands that men too can be the objects of sexual selection by
other men, relying on his inverted informants understanding of the links between
smell and sexual desire. For the invert, rather than the sexologist, the relation is
played out in idealized class-terms rather than along the axes of gender and race.
The smell of male-male desire is scripted in terms of an arcadian aristocratic
decadence. For the male invert:
The odor of peasants, o f men who work in the open air, is specially
apt to be found attractive. Moll mentions the case o f an inverted man
who found the forest, mosslike odor of a school-fellow irresistibly
attractive. (1927, 89).
He then reproduces two communications that he has received, describing

the heady attractiveness of the odor of peasants, one written by an Italian marquis
and one from an unidentified source. The Italian marquis writes of a peasant
friend of his:
When he began to dress, I took up an old fascai, or girdle of netted
silk, which was lying under his breeches, and which still preserved
the warmth of his body. I buried my face in it, and was half inebriated
by its exquisite aroma o f young manhood and fresh hay. He told me
he had worn it for two years. No wonder it was redolent of him. I
asked him to let me keep it as a souvenir. (1927, 89).
Elliss other informant on this matter writes:

One predominant attraction of these men is that they are pure and
clean; their bodies in a state of normal healthy function . . . . This
natural fair perfume of the flesh is a peculiar attribute of young men
who live in the open air and deal with natural objects. Even their
perspiration has an odor very different from that of girls in ball
rooms: more refined, ethereal, delicate and difficult to seize. When
they have handled hay - in the time of hay- harvest, or in winter,
when they bring hay down from mountain huts -the youthful peasants
carry about with them the smell of a field the Lord hath
blessed.Their bodies and their clothes exhale an indefinable fragrance
of purity and sex combined. Every gland of the robust frame seems to
have accumulated scent from herbs and grasses, which slowly exudes
78
from the cool, fresh skin o f the lad. . . . No sensual impression on
the nerves o f smell is more poignantly impregnated with spiritual
poetry - the poetry of adolescence, and early hours upon the hills, and
labor cheerfully accomplished, and the harvest of Gods gifts to man
brought home by human industry. It is worth mentioning that
Aristophanes, in his description o f the perfect Athenian Ephebus,
dwells upon his being redolent of natural perfumes. (1927, 89-90)
The writer here attempts to inhabit the tropes of a distinctly normative

sexuality, and turn such tropes against themselves. In language infused with
pastoral images, he stresses how natural it is that these boys should be objects of
desire. The appeal to the sense of smell attempts further to heighten this
naturalness. Implicitly contrasted to the artifice and refinement of girls in
ballrooms, the boys are clean and pure. Even more boldly, he appeals to the
sanctity of agricultural labor - a field the lord hath blessed and the harvest of
G ods gift to man. Thus sexual desire between men can be articulated as a retreat
from modernity, a return to an Arcadian England.31 Its potential political spin is
double valenced: strictly speaking, the passage evinces a reactionary wish to evade
the realities of industrialization, but with the hint (most strongly found in
Carpenter) that homosexual desire can be a metaphor for class-reconciliation. and
embodies the manly love of comrades,33 but ultimately it is peasants that are
sexy, not workers, and the Greek references in the passage only serve to enhance
the nostalgia for a purer, simpler world. This invocation of the pastoral can be
seen as an attempt to deny class antagonisms within an aristocratic homosexual
milieu.
3' For an extended fictional exploration of this motif, see E.M. Forsters 1913 Maurice, where
our Cambridge educated solidly middle-class banker finds true bliss with a gamekeeper, wryly
escaping their class-contradictions in a pastoral nostalgia o f England as a green and pleasant land.
In his terminal note to the novel, Forster writes: I was determined that in fiction anyway two men
should fall in love and remain in it for the ever and ever that fiction allows, and in this sense
Maurice and Alec still roam the greenwood. (1971, 237). Not surprisingly, Forster wrote the
novel after a visit to Edward Carpenter, who renounced the class o f his birth, the Anglican church,
the metropole and set up house in the north of England as a sandalmaker and small-scale farmer
with George Merrill, a young man in Carpenters own words bred in the slums quite below
civilization. (Cited in Sedgwick, 1985, 212)
Here, I am citing Whitman from For you, O Democracy from the notorious Calamus
section of Leaves o f Grass. (Whitman, 1993, 45). Sedgwick acutely recognizes how the rigidity
o f English class structures allows for a productive, if problematic English reading of Whitman for
assertions of socially transformative homosexuality (Sedgwick, 1985, 201-217)
79
Increased sensitivity to sexual allurement by smell is located by Ellis in

women and primitive people generally, naturally compounded in primitive women
who both have smell and do the smelling, and in European inverts33 of both
genders. What facilitates these characterizations, all of improbable empirical
veracity, is the phylogeny/ontogeny lens through which Ellis filters his sources. A
strong sense of smell renders primitive and feminizes an individual, because
phylogenetically smell has been transcended in sexual selection:
But the latent possibilities of sexual allurement by olfaction,

which are inevitably embodied in the nervous structure we have
inherited from our animal ancestors, still remain ready to be
called into play. They emerge prominently from time to time in
exceptional and abnormal persons. They tend to play an
unusually larger part in the psychic lives o f neurasthenic persons,
with their sensitive and comparatively unbalanced nervous
systems, and this is doubtless the reason why poets and men of
letters have insisted on olfactory impressions so frequently and to
so notable degree; for the same reason sexual inverts are
peculiarly susceptible to odors. (1927, 109-110).
Evert though Ellis shares a taxonomy with those he terms inverts, those
who name themselves thus often use the term to convey very different
understandings. As I will demonstrate in the following section, fully committed to
the notion of gender non-conformity, they feminize and masculinize themselves in
ways that may resist the hierarchical structuring of Elliss evolutionary theory.
IE. What was sexual inversion (a possible counter-narrative)?
Inversion, as the conceptual tool used to understand the experience of

same-gender sexual activity, occupies a key moment in a European history of
sexuality. Easily dismissed as biologically essentialist and empirically unprovable,
this term is mostly understood as the simple forerunner of homosexuality.
33 Revealingly, Ellis, in the first edition of Sexual Inversion in 1898. calls homosexuality a
barbarously hybrid term, (1898, 3) expliciUy referring to the compound Greek and Latin
elements in its etymology, but perhaps unconsciously exposing his racialized grid for the
understanding of same-sex sexual desire.
80
In the sexological realm, inversion enjoyed popular and scientific

currency from the mid nineteenth century to the early twentieth century. The origin
of the term inversion is unclear. In 1898, Havelock Ellis and John Addington
Symonds stated that, a few years before, sexual inversion was scarcely even a
name (1975, 35). They claimed that the term first appeared in the work of several
Italian writers, and then passed into general European currency in the last half of
the nineteenth-century. Karl Heinrich Ulrichs used the term contrare
Sexualempfindung14 in Memnon: Die Geschlechtsnatur des mannliebenden
Umings Eine naturwissenschaftliche Darstellung (1868) (Ulrichs, 1994, 289333). Jean Charcot and Valentin Magnan introduced the term inversion in an
1882 article in the Archives de Neurologie. The term was also used by Karl
Friedrich Otto Westphal in his article, Die Sexualempfindung, in Archiv fu r
Psychaitrie and Nervenkrankheiten ( 1869)'5, as well as by J. Chevalier in his
1893 study entitled L inversion Sexuelle. The meaning of the term broadly
involved a description of a sexual desire that was projected in an opposite
direction to the norm and additionally identified such a desire as a medical
condition. In its fully developed form, sexual inversion was a condition whereby
sexual desire thus found expression towards not the opposite sex but the same sex
and suggested that a desire whose orientation had been inverted could be an
essential component of a persons biological and social identity. This
understanding of same sex desire as innate and essential marked a radical break
with understandings of a related phenomenon, sodomy, which was understood as
contingent, circumstantial, aberrant behavior in early modem Europe.
To rehearse Michel Foucaults almost axiomatic genealogy: the sodomite, a

temporary aberration, became the homosexual, a species, through the
medicalization of discourses around sexuality (1980,43). Discourses regulating
M The German word contrare contains in it the idea of opposition and upside-downess that I
maintain is so crucial to the resistant possibilities in the term inversion."
35 See J.N. Katz. 1995, 55 and also G. Chauncey, 1982, 114-86.
81
sexual behavior were increasingly no longer the exclusive concern of priests and
the state but came under the purview of doctors, scientists and lawyers.
Participants in same-sex sexual acts were to be pathologized in addition to being
condemned as sinners and risking prosecution. Yet the term inversion, as a liminal
concept, between sodomy and homosexuality, is not entirely interchangeable with
homosexuality. Without contesting Foucaults genealogy in its broad outlines, a
question nevertheless arises: is the invert simply a forerunner of the homosexual,
the homosexual avant la lettre, or does the term imply a different configuration, no
matter how slight of same-sex sexual desire?
In Sexual Inversion (1898), Ellis and John Addington Symonds, in their

uneven collaboration between scientist and invert, reveal the social terrain in
which the meaning of the term is contested. For a start, there was not just one
kind of invert or one kind of inversion. In 1898, Ellis, claiming the mantle of
science, asked:
What is Sexual Inversion: Is it an abominable acquired vice, to be
stamped out by the prison, a beneficial variety o f human emotion,
which should be tolerated or even fostered? Is it a diseased condition
that qualifies its subject for the lunatic asylum or is it a natural
monstrosity, a human sport, the manifestations o f which must
be regulated when they become anti-social? (1975, 128).
For Ellis and Symonds, while not all inversion was congenital, all inverts were
bom with a congenital disposition towards inversion. Although the term was
disputed on legal, humanitarian, psychological and evolutionary-scientific
grounds, Ellis identified inversion as congenital at bottom. In his summary
Theory of Sexual Inversion, he concluded that we must regard sexual
inversion as largely a congenital phenomenon, or to speak more accurately as a
phenomenon that is based on congenital conditions. This . . . lies at the root of the
right comprehension of the matter. (1975, 129). Keeping this empirical fact in
mind, Ellis continued the chapter with an argument against regarding inversion as
a disease.
82
What is new and significant is the claim for a natural basis for same-sex
sexual desire. Ulrichs attempts to create a counter-discourse of the Natural. Given
the increasing privileging of science as a moral and social barometer in Europe in
the latter half of the nineteenth century, he proclaims:
The fundamental proposition upon which I base my entire
system is the following: it is Nature which gives the feminine
sexual love drive and a body built as a male to a large class of
people. (1994, 51).
The late nineteenth-century invert is seen as a part of nature. Inversion, in these

accounts was a congenital anomaly or abnormality given by a peculiarity in
the sperm or oval elements in their mingling that could be likened to the
dissimilarities [such as] between brothers and sisters. (Ellis, 1975, 135).
Inversion, in this scheme was thus grounded, even bom, in a natural site.
Addressing the sexual desires of inverts, Karl Heinrich Ulrichs explained that
Umings and Umingens - Ulrichss versions of the male and female invert
respectively - were naturally attracted to members of their own sex and were not
acting contrary to nature. (1994. 36). Resisting the view that inversion was
eccentric, melancholic, or perverse (or decadent or degenerate or retarded),
Ulrichs argued that inversion is deeply rooted in human nature. (1994, 77-78).
The Uming, he claimed act[s] according to his own nature . . . following not
only his nature, but the nature of his own kind. (1994, 37). While arguably
conflating the social and the natural like social Darwinists, the inversion theorists
use the ground of nature to challenge, rather than reinforce, existing social
hierarchies.
Inversion theory thus functioned as a challenge to the unnatural basis of

same-sex sexual desire, claiming it as a natural inheritance, worthy of equal status
to the sexual norm. I argue that inversion theory offered a more ethical narration
of difference than that implied in the evolutionary narrative even though they both
ground their claims in the natural world. But before I do this, I must distinguish
this focus on inversion from, or finesse its relation to, Foucaults broad
83
genealogy, whose lineaments have become widespread in the literature.
In describing the invention of the homosexual as species, Wayne

Koestenbaum claims that the concept of inversion poses homosexuality [as] the
inferior and derivative mirror image of a sound and uninverted normality. (1989,
43). One could possibly substitute homosexuality for sexual inversion, in the
above quote from Ellis, without radically transforming the sense of it. in a way
that could not be done with sodomy. However, the specificities of the meanings of
inversion are lost in this substitution. As the term has been historically filled in in
the west, Koestenbaums homosexual anachronistically subsumes the invert
for he uses homosexuality to explain inversion. In other words, by backprojecting homosexuality, and thereby also heterosexuality, he names what has not
yet been named. Paradoxically, the invert can be shown to be prior to the
uninverted norm, and the norm ends up having to carry the derivative status of
the inverted. What looks like reinforcement may be the seeds of the norms
undoing.
In Jeffrey Weekss Sexuality and its Discontents (1985), inversion appears

in its own right, but it is defined primarily as a sexological definition . . . ,
embodied in medical interventions, creating] the homosexual, a label, or a
social category whose fundamental aim and effect was regulation and control.
(1985, 93). Weeks distrusts the inversion theorists attempts to ground abnormal
sexual behavior in nature in scientific positivist terms because
the call upon science . . . becomes little more than a gesture to
legitimise interventions governed largely by specific relations of
power. The production of sexological discourse o f a body of
knowledge that is apparently scientifically neutral (about women,
about sexual delinquents or offenders) can become a resource for
utilisation in the production of normative definitions that limit and
demarcate erotic behaviour. (1985, 79).
Weeks argues that the scientific enterprise is thus suspect in and of itself,
particularly when it is applied to the imprecise domain of sex, (1985, 72), and I
84
would agree with him. He argues that sexuality is thoroughly social and that
scientific positivist claims to truth should be understood as dangerously repressive
and implicated in normative social control. It is the scientific seeking for truth
itself, Weeks suggests, that is the problem. (1985, 62).
But the more seriously we take Weekss claim that this form of scientific
power was spreading its tentacles of regulation and control ever-more thoroughly
to the nooks and crannies of social life, (1985,74) the more obviously are we
presented with the terms of power that any counter-normative theorizings of
sexuality would have had to engage. Instead of ruling out claims based in nature
and scientific positivism altogether, an investigation into the resistant possibilities
of inversion demands a serious look at precisely such positivist modes of thought
- in this case, the naturalizing scientific positivist habit o f mind of inversion
theorists such as Ulrichs, Carpenter and Ellis.
Given the predominance of positivist and evolutionary modes of thinking

and their attendant claims to authority at this moment in history, there is a danger
in anachronistically projecting onto the inversion theorists current terms of the
debate around sexuality - sexuality is a social construction, as a phrase would
have it - and thus misreading the defining terms with which these nineteenthcentury theorists were struggling. Problematic as it was (and remains), the
positivist ethos suffused these writers.
In other words, if there was resistance at the time, then it would have been
specific and contingent upon the cultural field upon which it operated. And, in this
case, if resistance was to carry any persuasive power, the terms were set by
positivist and evolutionary procedures. To dismiss such scientific claims as
necessarily in the service of coercive social control -which in many ways, they
undoubtedly were - would be to overlook such a possibility. The point is not to
regard scientific findings as fact - or to grant a dichotomy between science and
85
politics - but to examine the conceptual forms that guided scientific narration, to
heighten the tension between these forms and facts, and finally to gauge, even
rediscover, their positive and occasionally resistant explanatory power and
significance.
What then is different about the narration of same-sex sexual desire and
gender identity under the rubric of inversion? How did sexual inversion work as
an explanatory model, what were its internal arrangements and what, exactly, got
inverted? One type of inversion theory depended on the idea of a biologically
grounded sexual instinct, whose direction got inverted. In other theories gender
identity was inverted. Elliss Sexual Inversion embodied the oppositely projected
instinct, whereas Ulrichss Umings, whereby a womans soul inhabited a mans
body, inverted gender, resulting in a third sex. Similarly, Edward Carpenter
explained inversion in terms of an intermediate type between opposite genders.
For all the variations in these conceptions, the inversion theorists shared a
resistance to the binary structuring of gender. Carpenter and Ulrichs using the
poles of masculine and feminine identity and desire to call for, at least, a third
category.
Arguably, there may be something in the internal arrangements of the term

that contributes to this undoing in ways that are closed down in the consolidation
of the term homosexuality. For a start, the term inversion, by retaining a
greater degree of abstraction, brings the entire sex/gender system explicitly into
play. As much as inversion theory may reify gender by insisting on masculine
and feminine poles of identification and desire, it can be used to de-essentialize
gender by infusing one with the other and by refusing to ground it in biologicallysexed bodies. Ulrichs explains that the inverted Uming is not a man, but rather a
kind of feminine being when it concerns not only his entire organism, but also his
sexual feelings of love, his entire natural temperaments and his talents and
simultaneously that Umings are not fully . . . women [and] that they are similar
86
to men because [they] assume the masculine role in society and because [their]
capacity for work is the same. (1994, 36). The invert emerges as either both man
and woman or as neither woman nor man. Instead the male body coexists with the
female soul and vice-versa.
Ellis repeats this kind of gender reversal and indeterminacy, claiming, on

the one hand, that in behavior the male invert frequently resembles the normal
woman (1975, 108) and, on the other, that the chief characteristic of the
inverted woman is a certain degree of masculinity. (1975, 94). Furthermore, the
question of gender origins is posed in explosive ways when Ellis disputes
Ulrichss claims. Attacking Ulrichs, he says to assert dogmatically that a female
soul, or even a female brain, is expressing itself through a male body . . . is
simply unintelligible. I say nothing of the fact that in male inverts the feminine
psychic tendencies may be little if at all marked. (1975, 132). The invert both
does and does not resemble the opposite sex at different times in Elliss text, while
s/he finally emerges as the person who was incapable of killing out those [germs]
of the other sex as they appear at conception in all organisms. Elliss organism at
conception contained for all human beings about 50 % of male germs and about
50 % of female germs. (1975, 132-3). The inverts germs, whose male or female
components failed to assume the upper hand, remained by implication divided in
later life. Empirically speaking, then, the point of origin, or conception, is
paradoxically split in equal halves and the conceptual inversion relation was
channeled into a symmetry that cut across the gender binary.
Many commentators have remarked on the constitutive force that the terms
homosexuality and heterosexuality have for one another. For example, Eve
Kosofsky Sedgwick, in Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial
Desire, writes:
The importance - an importance - o f the category homosexual
comes not necessarily from its regulatory relation to a nascent or
already constituted minority of homosexual people or desires, but
from its potential for giving whoever wields it a structuring
87
definitional leverage over the whole range of male bonds that shape
the social constitution, (1985, 86).
while Judith Butler in Imitation and Gender Insubordination argues for an

understanding of gender and heterosexuality as imitations which lack originals:
The origin requires its derivations in order to affirm itself as an
origin, for origins only make sense to the extent that they are
differentiated from that which they produce as derivatives. Hence, if it
were not for the notion of homosexuality as copy, there would be no
construct for heterosexuality as origin." (1993, 313).
Without denying the potential for this kind of deconstructive moment, it is

significant that, in Elliss understanding of the organisms structure at conception,
a symmetrical relation lay not only conceptually, but also empirically at the origin.
Thus the question of deconstructively marking the constituent derivative term in
the opposition may not even arise; a gender symmetry is posited at the core. Also,
in its yet unformed state. Ellis did not specify which of the organisms gendered
germs killed the other. To be normal required only that either were so killed. In
effect, the female body in this empirical schema was thus figured less in terms of
the male person than in terms of a process of self-emergence.36 Each gender
emerged through the killing off of its opposite components, with neither gender
necessarily assuming precedence.
I conclude this section with two speculations: First, perhaps the

empirically given mirror relation was more readily accommodated in theories of
inversion and their promise of symmetry than in the later theories of
homosexuality; and second, the shortness of the life-span of inversion as the
36 I do not want to overlook the fact that the inversion theorists I discuss were all male and are
generally more interested in male inverts, nor the fact that the project of obliterating gender
certainty can be recuperated in a patriarchal project, since the universal, or the failure to distinguish
between male and female, historically may have served the interests of men. Luce Irigarays call for
sexuate culture in sexual difference feminism is an example o f a very different kind of utopic
project in relation to gender than the one I am reading in the inversion theorists. (See Irigaray,
1993, 11-14 and 45-50). I argue that they are trying to imagine a world without gender, or with
radical gender parity, or a world with a plethora of gender identities, tracking different routes to a
similar place. Also, instead of underscoring the scope and authority of the patriarchal order, I have
tried to read the gender reversals and confusions within these theorists as negatively constituent of,
or in deconstructive supplement to, this order.
88
concept figuring same-sex desire may have had something to do with this
potential. Not surprisingly, later sexological and psychoanalytic theorizing
discredited theories of inversion on putatively scientific grounds, claiming that
inverts lacked empirical proof for their assertions which were made more in their
political interests than in the service of science.37 The emergence of the
homosexual in this later body of literature should be considered against this
background.
In this regard, it should be noted that sexual inversion was, from its
inception, explicitly concerned with giving public voice to increasingly
criminalized and pathologized groups of people, with trying to render same-sex
desires heard. Ulrichs and Carpenters writings are as much manifesto as theory.
Ulrichs proclaims:
I wish to grieve or offend no-one in the following. I forgive all
those who have trespassed against me, everyone who was hard
and unloving to me. I forgive my traitors. However, I will speak
candidly. (1994, 33).
He defines his role in the following terms:

I am an insurgent. I decline to accept what exists if I believe it is
unjust. I am fighting for a life free from persecution and scorn. I urge
the general public and the state to recognize Uranian love as equal to
congenital Dionian love. (1994, 109).
-3 7
In 1910, Sigmund Freud rebutted the claims of inversion and third sex theorists:
Homosexual men who have started in our times an energetic action against the legal restrictions
of their sexual activity are fond of representing themselves through theoretical spokesmen as
evincing a sexual variation, which may be distinguished from the very beginning, as an
intermediate stage o f sex or as 'a third sex. In other words, they maintain that they are men who
are forced by organic determinants originating in the germ to find that pleasure in the man which
they cannot feel in the woman. As much as one would wish to subscribe to their demands out of
humane consideradons. one must nevertheless exercise reserve regarding their theories which were
formulated without regard for the psychogenesis of homosexuality. Psychoanalysis offers the
means to fill this gap and to put to test the assertions of the homosexuals (1947 (1), 60).
Inversion could be characterized as a discourse of self-naming - the invert declared himself as
such - while psychoanalysis is the discourse of the expen. One effect o f this is that the subject
invert (in the manifestly political writings of Ulrichs and Carpenter) is rendered the object
homosexual (in the scientific, and frequently pathologizing, writings o f Freud, and also, more
virulently, in later psychoanalysis). Even Elliss objectifying stance in Sexual Inversion is
mediated by the authorial presence o f the invert Symonds. It should be noted that Ellis works
hard to erase Symonds as co-author in subsequent editions of the work (See Koestenbaum, 1989,
43-67). This begins to approach the subsuming of the experience of the analysand in the
production of psychoanalytic knowledge. Dora could never be a co-author, even in an appendix.
89
The discourse of sexual inversion gave an insistent voice to the love that dare not
speak its name decades before Lord Alfred Douglas coined the phrase.
As a discourse of self-naming, inversion theory worked hard to initiate a debate in
a period in which public debate was often effectively silenced. Weeks, for
example claims how the question of same-sex desire between women remained
silent because unthinkable (1985,93) for much of the Victorian era. In England
in 1889, just three years after the Labouchere Amendment, the Director of Public
Prosecutions expressed reservations about bringing charges under the new
amendment, noting the expediency of not giving unnecessary publicity and
therefore allowing private persons - being full grown men - to indulge their
unnatural tastes in private. (Cited in Duberman et al, 1988, 201). Inversion
theorists were also concerned with publicity. Symondss reticence prevented the
publication of A Problem in M odem Ethics (1896) and A Problem in Greek
Ethics (1901) and Sexual Inversion was only published in 1898, five years after
his death in 1893. Ulrichs published under the pseudonym Numa Numantius for
years, yet nevertheless inversion theorists were profoundly concerned with
breaking social silences and giving a public and liberating taxonomy to their
desires, practices and identities.
I do not wish to rehabilitate the repressive hypothesis, and I agree with

Foucault that the late nineteenth century sees a proliferation of discourses around
sexuality, but I do think that his notion of homosexuality as a reverse discourse
needs to be nuanced. The scientists and doctors who created the pathological
person of the homosexual almost without exception relied on the testimony and
explicit theorizings of those naming themselves inverts. Symonds (1896, 26) is
clear that the medical and forensic experts he references had all read Ulrichs and
were partially responding to his claims. Ellis could not have written Sexual
Inversion without Symonds. The relation between expert and object of study in
inversion theory was frequently unclear, and inversion did not begin its career as
90
an oppressive, yet productive, category of sexological thought. Homosexuality
may well be a reverse discourse, though whether this is true for sexual inversion
is less certain.
IV. Conclusion: Reading evolutionary inversion against evolution:
In the subsequent sexology of figures like Ellis, the idea of inversion has a
more convoluted history. As I hope to have shown in Section II of this chapter, its
connections to questions of nature were mediated through evolutionary concepts;
for the movement from vice to scientific discourse mobilized many evolutionary
tropes, such as congenitality, retardation and degeneration. These, however,
tended to work against each other in ways that rendered the model largely
incoherent, and this fact, along with inversion s utopian positing of gender
symmetry and risking of an attendant proliferation of gendered sexual identities,
may account for why hegemonic sexological science increasingly found the term
of little use.
In relation to ideas of evolutionary progress at the fin-de-siecle, inversion

was explained in many contradictory ways. Ellis invoked Dessoir, who claimed
that an undifferentiated sexual feeling is normal, on the average during the first
years of puberty - that is, from 13-15 in boys and 12-14 in girls - while in later
years it must be regarded as pathological. (1975, 37). Consequently, Ellis was
able to assert that if the sexual instinct is comparatively undifferentiated in early
life, then we must regard the inversion of later life, if it persists, as largely due to
arrested development. (1975, 39). On the other hand, he later defined morbid
inversion as when old men with failing sexual powers, or younger men
exhausted by heterosexual debauchery are attracted to boys (1975,41). Inversion
paradoxically occupied the position of both the under-developed and the over-
91
developed.
Relatedly, Ellis claimed of inverts that some of them are probably
individuals of somewhat undeveloped sexual instincts (1975. 39). This is
juxtaposed with Lydstons categorizing sexual inversion as a consequence of
over-stimulation of the nerves of sexual sensibility and the receptive sexual
centers, incidental to sexual excess and masturbation (1975, 330). Inversion is
thus figured as both lack and excess.
Within the evolutionary narrative, it appears that the invert could be placed
in any position except that of the normative subject. However, this understanding
of the invert as necessarily outside the norm, produces precarious relations to the
surrounding sexual culture and to the very evolutionary narrative that engenders it.
For lack or underdevelopment were also narrated in different terms

within Victorian ideologies of sex, particularly in relation to the social uses of sex
drives. Late Victorian thinkers from Freud to Baden-Powell see civilization itself
as a product of sublimation.3* Under this rubric, undeveloped sexual instincts,
such as those inverts are reputed to have, are more easily sublimated. Inverted
desire, as lack, is therefore less likely to spill over into sexual anarchy, and its
energies more easily yoked to the project of civilization. Inversion here can be
paradoxically normatively productive. As less sexually developed than desire for
the opposite sex, inversion is consequently nobler than heterosex and unrelated
to sexual vice. Here the abnormal trumps the normal as more civilized than the
norm in the paradoxical value of sexual desire as the less, the better.
There are not only paradoxically normative moments in the theorizing of

inversion but evolutionary theories of inversion can be read against evolution.
For the claim of congenitality (made by Ellis, Symonds, Carpenter and Ulrichs)
can be opposed to the externalizing thrust of natural selection, which implies that
38 See Section I of this chapter.
92
the drives and instincts must always respond to the environment, to what lies
outside the self, to what is different and other to it. Furthermore, what if one
inverts the value of the inbomess of the invert? On the one hand, the inbomess of
inversion naturalizes deviance, on the other hand it reinscribes the deviance in
terms of the pathologization of the deviance by insisting on its narcissism, its
inability to respond to proper objects, its denial of the valorized adaptive impulses
of natural selection and the related importance of social conformity.
Yet inversion was also seen as a variant or sport of nature, a natural

monstrosity. Ellis following Virchow distinguished abnormality from disease,
pathology from nosology, the anomaly from the deviant, and was occasionally
inclined to view inversion as akin to color-blindness or colored-hearing. Yet the
position of the anomaly in the evolutionary narrative is a privileged one, as the
genetic mutation that permits evolution to proceed. That is, in the event of
evolutionary change, it is the (anomalous) invert not the (normative) non-invert
that could represent this mutation.
Many (but not all) of these contradictions in theories of inversion are
maintained in later theories of homosexuality. Inversion indicates a multiplicity of
directional drives, it is a turning inwards, a turning upside down, a turning
backwards (degeneration) and a holding still (a Fixation or arrest). The turning
inwards is reworked in Freuds linking of homosexuality and narcissism.
Psychoanalysis will treat homosexuality as arrested development and the idea of
the homosexual as a degenerate will have a long life in a wide range of scientific
and popular discourses.39
However, it is the idea of turning upside down that recedes in explicit

39 Max Nordaus Degeneration (1893) is the classic late nineteenth-century example. More generally, the
decadence o f fin-de-siecle poetry is often attributed to its invocation of a sexually suspect milieu.
While the naming o f same-sex sexual desire fills Nordau with a silencing revulsion (See the
discussion o f Paul Verlaine, 120-128), the emrgent homosexual is clearly imagined as a subset of
the the broader category of the degenerate, sharing an eroticism that is understood as nonprocreative, onanistic" and perverse. (18-32).
93
theorizing of homosexuality. We find it in the inversion theorists notion of an
oppositely projected sexual instinct, in Elliss gender symmetry at conception, in
Ulrichss interchangeability of male and female body and soul, in Carpenters
intermediate types. A similar interest in inversion as a concept-metaphor for
artistic creation can be found in the wider culture; in the anti-mimeticism of certain
explicitly anti-positivistic Victorian aesthetic positions, and most clearly in the
musical theories and compositional practices of contemporaneous German
modernist composers like Arnold Schonberg, Anton Webem and Alban Berg,
where the idea of symmetrical inversions was used to undo the gendered
hierarchies of earlier tonal music.40 How does the discourse of sexual inversion
tie in with a proto-modemist anti-mimetic aesthetic? Paters famous dictum that all
art should constantly aspire to the condition of music, that is, to be without
referent, to be a series of reversible and formal pleasure-conferring patterns, can
be invoked here along with almost all of Wildes critical praxis. Combining
Wildes notion of life imitating art and Paters idea of music as the least
referential art form, art comes to feed on itself. Its dynamics of creation become
necessarily internal. Art replicates itself in an almost cannibalistic, parthenogenetic
mode rather than reproduces through representation. Inversion, too, is an internal
function, amoeboid and narcissistic and fascinatingly self-contained, like a
symbolist poem.
The relation of inversion to masturbation is relevant here, given religious
prohibitions of onanism on grounds of repudiating pleasure in sterility. A strand
of Victorian thinking emphasized this alignment of inversion with masturbation41,
and the strength of prohibitions against masturbation can be partially explained by
this. If single vice (masturbation) could be eliminated, it was hoped that the
demise of dual vice (inversion) would be imminent. This link between
40 See Martin Scherzinger and Neville Hoads Asymmetrical Reading of Inversion in fin de siecle
M usic, Musicology and Sexology." (1998. forthcoming).
4' Richard von Krafft-Ebing in his widely circulated and influential Psychopathia Sexualis is the
most significant figure to make this connection. For Krafft-Ebing, sexual inversion arises from a
latent hereditary taint that is brought out by excessive masturbation in adolescence. He outlines
several case histories as proof o f this claim (1965, 115-172).
94
masturbation and inversion revealed a similar anxiety around the self-generation of

pleasure, the potential of auto-eroticism as a metaphor for productive activity
rather than connoting futility and waste.4*
Definitionally, inversion has certain aesthetic and logical implications. To

invert literally means to turn something upside down, to stand it on its head. It
thus produces a positional or relational change rather than necessarily one of
content as it must already contain all its component elements. What implications
does this have for the inverse of inversion? The structuring binary of
homosexuality and heterosexuality is emergent but not yet dominant. At this
point, the norm can only be defined negatively. Same sex sexual desire can be
defined as inversion, perversion, reversion, excess and lack . Etymologically,
heterosexualitys initial definition is one of excess and perversion. (A heterosexual
is someone who has been diagnosed as having too much desire for members of
the opposite sex, or as someone who has desire for both s e x e s . T h e norm
cannot yet be named or defined, only assumed, as the inversion of inversion, the
deviant term irresistibly ends up grounding the norm that it ostensibly inverts.
Some aphorisms of Oscar Wilde, a master of inversion (and arguably sexual and
textual inversion are more than coincidentally related in Wilde), may helpfully
clarify and complicate matters:
If one tells the truth, one is sooner or later sure to be found out.
(.Phrases and Philosophies for the Very Young, 1960, 1205)
42 This can be linked to fin-de-siecle resistances to the imperatives of utilitarian political economy
and its attendant work ethic, for example, Wilde's insistence on the uselessness of art. Pater too
reassesses value as lying in not the fruit of experience, but experience itself.(1928, 249). Such a
reassessment is crucially imbricated in a changing economic order. At the dawn of the age of
mechanical reproduction, mass-consumption and assembly-line production, earlier sexualized
metaphors o f production and reproduction come under strain. See Andrew Parker Unthinking Sex:
Marx, Engels and the Scene of Writing (1993, 19-41), and Anne McClintock: Imperial Leather:
Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Context (1995, 207-231) for different attempts to track
the sexualized (and racialized) metaphors of economic production around this time.
43 See J.N. Katzs The Invention o f Heterosexuality (1995, 20-32).
95
At the risk of tedium, because there is always something splendidly

obvious about inversions, lets unpack this. Wilde takes a cliche, a received
wisdom: One should never lie because sooner or later one will be caught in the lie,
and asserts that its opposite is equally true. He is working with a simple
opposition: truth and lie. In his aphorism, he effectively substitutes the one for the
other, thus inverting them. But by inverting the relation of truth and lie in the
aphorism, Wilde still manages to reinscribe something about the nature of truth
that is present in the originary cliche, namely that truth grounds things, it is the
basis which cannot really be masked, and that truth reveals, however not always
in the safe comfortable way of the I should not tell a lie parent of Wildes
aphorism. Wilde, almost in passing, further suggests some unsettling things about
the nature of selfhood, that one may reveal more of oneself that one knows, that
truth may reside more in the unconscious than in the conscious mind. Wilde
suggests that the conditions for truth and the conditions for narration might be
mutually exclusive, that the truth is too dangerous to be told, that the truth
simultaneously explodes as it secures. The way this phrase structures questions of
knowledge - the being found out part - is equally fascinating. Wildes aphorism
neatly enacts what Sedgwick calls the epistemology of the closet. In an era of
legal prohibition and social opprobrium, the truth homosexuality must not be
told, otherwise one will be found out - the lie must pass as truth and the truth as
lie. (Alternately, the truth of inversion can be known, but not spoken).44
To abstract a little, the useful thing about inversion is that the terms do not
change, but the meaning does. If the terms within an inversion are reversible and
substitutable, then it becomes impossible to say which is prior, which is more
developed. Secondly, turning things upside down does not permit one to make
something from nothing, but it does allow one to make something else from the
same thing. And Wilde uses inversion incredibly productively and creatively and
44 One could perform sim ilar maneuvers on "the object of criticism is to see the object as it is
not (Wilde. 1966, 1030) or Only the shallow know themselves. (Wilde. 1966, 1205).
96
theorized it as such. To claim that Wilde and the sexologists have a similar
understanding of the conceptual strategy of inversion would be misleading, but
they both use inversion to make something else of the same things, in a way that
also may avoid and resists the concept-metaphor of heterosexual reproduction for
theorizing and artistic production.
Most critically, what is lost in the transition from the invert to the
homosexual is the idea of upside-downess and the promise of a certain gender
symmetry and reversibility. The political implications of radical gender disturbance
in inversion theories may have encouraged their revisions into homosexuality. For
Freud, the aspects of inversion theory which were formulated without regard for
the psychogenesis of homosexuality were precisely the intermediate stage o r ..
. the third sex ( 1947, 60) imagined as the mans soul in the womens body or
vice-versa, or in Elliss terms the woman or man who has not killed off the given
50 % of his or her gender germs. Still today, even though homosexuality has been
removed from the American Psychiatric Association s Diagnostic and Statistical
Manual (DSM HI), gender non-conformity is still considered an illness, and is a
designated pathology - Gender Identity Disorder.45 Thus homosexuality has been
more easily normalized than a proliferation of genders in a broader patriarchal
gendered hierarchy. Seeing inversion theory only as the forerunner to
homosexuality, as a medical discourse of control, as biologically essentialist or
empirically untrue loses sight of the utopic political horizon of embodied gender
symmetry.
The term sexual inversion covered a more contorted and chaotic terrain
than the increasingly ontological certainty of the homo/hetero binary. This new
binary shifted rather than displaced the masculine/feminine polarity and unevenly
45 The DSMIII diagnoses three Gender Identity Disorders: 302.60 - Gender Identity Disorder of
Childhood; 302.50 - Transsexualism; 302.85 - Gender Identity Disorder of Adolescence or
Adulthood Non Transsexual type. (1987, 71-77). The DSM IV diagnoses two Gender Identity
Disorders: 302.6 - Gender Identity Disorder in Children; 302.85 - gender Identity Disorder in
Adolescents or Adults. (1994, 532-8).
97
doubled the telos of sexual subjectivity, losing inversion's potential for
interrogating teleological theories of sexuality, re-imagining gender categories and
inhabiting the evolutionary paradigm in subversive and contradictory ways.
98
It is vain to dream of a wildness distant from ourselves.

There is none such. It is the bog in our brains and bowels,
the primitive vigor of Nature in us, that inspires that
dream. I will never find in the wilds of Labrador any
greater wildness than in some recess of Concord, i.e. than
I import into it. Henry David Thoreau. Journal, August
30, 1856. (1927. 50).
Chapter 3
The Paradox of an Anti-Imperialist Civilizing Mission (Oscar Wilde on the

Empire Question)
In this chapter, I situate the literary and critical works of Oscar Wilde
in the broader context of the British empire, paying close attention to the ways
they inflect the evolutionary narratives I have been discussing in the previous
chapters. In the second section, I look at a series of popular cultural
representations of Wildes body and social persona in the attempt to trace how
he comes to embody a certain racial, gendered and sexualized otherness.
Riffing on The Picture o f Dorian Gray (1890), a novel par excellence about
the unrepresentability of male same-sex sexual desire, I offer The Picture of
Oscar Wilde, as a site where the evolutionary discourses of degeneracy,
decadence, effeminacy, ornamentation, arrested development, primitivity,
productivity and reproductivity coalesce to form the phantasm of the definitive
Victorian male homosexual body, all before the revelations of the 1895 trials.
In Culture and Imperialism (1993), Edward Said makes the argument

that we are at a point in our work where we can no longer ignore empires
and imperial contexts in our [literaryjstudies and that we need to show the
involvements of culture with expanding empires, to make observations about
art that preserve its unique endowments and at the same time map its
affiliations . . . and set the art in the global earthly context. (6-7). Gayatri
Spivak phrases a similar argument:
99
It should not be possible to read nineteenth-century British Literature
without remembering that imperialism, understood as Englands social
mission, was a crucial part of the cultural representation of England to
the English. The role o f literature in the production of cultural
representations should not be ignored. These two obvious facts
continue to be disregarded in the reading of nineteenth-century British
literature. This itself attests to the continuing success of the imperialist
project displaced and dispersed into more modem forms. (1991, 243).
Spivak proceeds to implicate feminist criticism in the continuing imperialist

project:
It seems particularly unfortunate when feminist criticism reproduces the
axioms o f Imperialism. A basically isolationist admiration for the
literature of the female subject in Europe and Anglo-America
establishes the high feminist norm. It is supported and operated by an
information retrieval approach to the Third World which often
employs a deliberately nontheoretical methodology with selfconscious rectitude. (1991, 243).
In the words of Kobena Mercer: the European construction of

sexuality coincides with the epoch of Imperialism and the two inter-connect.1
In recent years, a strand of lesbian and gay studies literary criticism has taken
up Spivaks challenge to feminist literary studies in trying to think through the
relationship of questions of sexuality, as they are represented in literary
works, to the imperial context that does not employ a deliberately
nontheoretical methodology, and there has been a proliferation of work that
attempts to engage the interconnection Mercer points towards, taking a variety
of theoretical approaches.2 While some literary scholars of gay male
representation at the turn of the century, such as Alan Sinfield, Ed Cohen,
1 Kobena Mercer and Isaac Julien, Race, Sexual Politics and Black Masculinity: A Dossier"
in Chapman, R. and Rutherford, J. (eds). Male Order. Unwrapping Masculinity. London: Lawrence
and Wishart, 1988, 106. There have been subsequent attempts to theorize the impact of colonial
encounters on metropolitan sexuality, most notably A.L. Stolers Race and the Education o f
Desire (1995, 3-16) and R. Bleyss The Geography o f Perversion (1995, 3-16 and 185-206).
2 The theorizing of lesbian desire has been equally sensitive to questions of the imperial
context. Jamie Hovey in Kissing a Negress in the Dark reveals how Orlandos deviant sexuality
is framed in terms of race and nation variables in Woolfs novel. (1997, 393-404). Diana Fuss in
Identification Papers makes the connection between the homosexual and the racialized primitive
as both evidencing arrested development in Freudian psychoanalysis in an interesting reading of
Fanons views on homosexuality by placing such views in their particular colonial history. (1995,
157-165).
100
Richard Dellamora and Lee Edelman are mostly silent on questions of
imperialism, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwicks remarkable reading of The Picture o f
Dorian Gray zn Epistemology o f the Closet (1990, 160-181) illuminates the
imperial nuances of this apparently metropolitan novel, in ways that are
suggestive for the further articulation of questions of male homosexuality and
imperialism in literary texts. Joseph Bristows Empire Boys (1991, 80-89,
141-6)) and Effeminate England (1995, 55-99) both raise questions about
how homoerotic desire is figured in relation to British imperialism and viceversa. The most sustained attempt to read the relationship between colonialism
and homosexual desires is Christopher Lanes The Ruling Passion: British
Colonial Allegory and the Paradox o f Homosexual Desire (1995). Lane
focuses on questions of desire and subjectivity - By interpreting how
homosexuality acquired and distinct - and often unreliable - legibility in
British literature, I ask what that desire came to signify in colonial mythology,
and what meanings and fantasies it brought to the fore. (1995, 5). While
Lanes inquiry is of interest and use to me, I am more concerned to unpack the
shared rhetorical tropes of discourses of colonialism and homosexuality at the
level of ideology and identity. While acknowledging the shattering effect
homosexual desires may have on colonial allegory, I also maintain a strange
set of congruences between the figuring of the metropolitan homosexual (as
the individual and social embodiment of a form of desire) and representations
of the colonized.
Wilde is an emblematic figure for gay studies literary criticism, and is

at first glance a figure who could escape an interpretive grid sensitive to the
imperial context in which he writes. Relentlessly urbane, restlessly
counterfactual, his writings appear far removed from the world of Conrad and
Kipling, yet Wildes work too bears traces of the script of imperialism at
every turn, sometimes complicitly, sometimes resistantly.
101
Said suggests that imperialism and colonialism cannot be understood
as simple acts of accumulation and acquisition but are underwritten, if not
propelled by significant ideological formations. As Patrick Brantlinger argues,
evolutionary thought seems almost calculated to legitimize imperialism*
(1985, 184), and I argue that the mediating ideology between the world of the
colonies and Wildes literary production is frequently the social appropriations
of Darwinian evolutionary theory. The social Darwinist tropes of
degeneration and arrested development (consistently applied to members
of non-white races and white homosexuals) reveal how perceived sexual
and racial differences are managed by the hierarchizing and developmental
narratives of evolution.4 Wildes resistance to narrative perse, his privileging
of epigrammatic expression, his sustained anti-empiricism, his investment in
textual inversion, his disavowal of labor in artistic production, his immorality,
his racialization of the British public as barbarians - many of the tropes and
effects we understand as definitively Wildean reveal a deep and serious
intellectual engagement with evolutionary theory and the imperial project that
it came to underwrite. I have argued earlier that evolutionary theory provided
an important ideological component for many justifications of Empire, as well
as playing a critical role in the theorizing of the emergent male homosexual
body, and now by paying careful attention to Wildes engagement with
evolutionary ideas, narratives and tropes, we may begin to explore his place
in the imperial representational field.
In their preface to Oscar Wildes Oxford Notebooks, Phillip E. Smith

3 Brantlinger cites a range of nineteenth-century evolutionary anthropologists in support o f his claim that
scientific evolutionary ideas support the claims of explorers and missionaries that Africans need imperial
tutelage. (1985, 166-203). In John Lubbocks The Origin o f Civilisation (1870). Lubbock argues that
\contemporary savages are below the starting point of social evolution, and George Romanes in
Mental Evolution in Man (1889) claims the savage as a intermediary stage in the distance which separates
the gorilla from the gentleman. (Cited in Brantlinger, 1985, 186).
4 My article, Arrested Development or the Queemess of Savages: The Imperial and Neo-Imperial Uses o f
Male Homosexuality (forthcoming from Genders. 1998), shows how these evolutionist tropes
still inform much scholarship on sexuality today.
102
II and Michael S. Helfand claim to describe and present a far different Oscar
Wilde, than the dandy, aesthete and homosexual who has become a myth for
modernist sensibilities. (1989, vi). They suggest that Wilde was far more
engaged in the mainstream intellectual debates of his time than subsequent
criticism would have us believe, and offer an alternative genealogy of Wildes
aestheticism. For them, Wildes aestheticism owes as much, if not more, to a
synthesis of Hegelian idealism and Spencerian evolutionary theory (and they
are intertwined for Wilde, for in the Oxford Notebooks, he writes Hegelian
dialectics is the natural selection problem and struggle for existence in the
world of thought (1989, 214)) than to an engagement with Pater, Arnold,
Ruskin and the French decadent poets. They read the Wilde of the Oxford
Notebooks as a precocious Victorian humanist, deeply enmeshed in the
evolutionary debates of the last decades of the nineteenth century.
While I am entirely sympathetic with the attempt to rescue Wilde from

the art for arts sake camp, to which he is frequently confined, a thinker as
profoundly antinomian in his positions (and poses) as Wilde cannot be quite
so comfortably confined to the role of writing evolutionary ideas into the
realm of the aesthetic: In this chapter, I posit Wilde as deeply suspicious of
and perversely resistant to the evolutionary ideas of Spencer as he uses them
5 The young Wilde in Oxford in 1871 does precisely that:

Just as the human embryo passes through all the
Stages of Evolution from the lowest to the highest
organism during the progress of its perfection, so the
human mind must pass through all the stages which have
already been taken in the progress of the intellectual
world: neither in the world of thought, or in that of matter
is the past ever annihilated: progress in both must be
made by slowly graduated stages from simple sensations,
and formless protoplasms to the highest differentiated
organism and the purest abstractions of thought. (Helfand
and Smith. 1989, 83).
One could not hope for a more explicit application of Haeckels biogenetic law that
ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny to the world of philosophy than this. However nowhere else in
his critical praxis, will Wilde display such unqualified allegiance to evolutionary ideas, as much as
they will continue to inform this thinking.
103
to construct and explode what Curtis Marez has called the empire of
Aestheticism.6
Since Wilde is resolutely explicit about his disdain for the real and for
realist modes of representation, unpacking his positions on questions of
Empire poses a number of challenges. In an age of evolutionary
anthropology, Wilde, like his anthropologist near contemporaries Lubbock,
Tylor, and McLennan, is deeply interested in the cultural practices and
artifacts of the peoples subject to British rule. Like them, he is interested in
questions of cultural difference in terms of costume, gender role, artistic
production, social stratification and implicitly sexuality. Yet aestheticisms
interest in colonized peoples is not entirely coterminous with anthropology's.
What is the relationship between Wildes aestheticism, which also takes the
world as its object, and colonialism? How is Wildes thought embedded in
dominant modes of perceiving the subject peoples of empire? If he may be
resistant, what are the political valences and implications o f his resistances?
How does his own position as a scion of Anglo-Irish gentility and sexual
deviant (given the nineteenth-century racialization of the Irish as not quite
white and the twentieth-century model of homosexuals as an ethnic minority
of sorts) holding court at the social heart of the Imperial metropolis, inflect the
way he perceives and presents the colonizers and the colonized, and the ways
he is perceived? Through readings of selections from the critical essays. The
Picture o f Dorian Gray (1890), and The Soul o f Man Under Socialism
(1890), I will attempt to address these questions.
I hold that Wildes narcissism, along with his utopic doctrine of

Individualism, frequently posited as his refusal to engage the world
(contingent on the privileges of his class -position), holds the key to these
8 Race, Drugs and fin de siecle formations o f European Culture (1993, 82)
104
questions. Wildes self-cannibalizing, self-aggrandizing (and always selfserving) gaze can be read as a self-conscious refusal of a will to knowledge
that has other political implications than evasion, quietism and complicity
during the final, brutal thrusts of British imperial expansion.
Metaphors of discovery, travel and colonialism pepper W ildes critical

essays. Some of Wildes explicit utterances on evolutionary theory re-write
Darwinian orthodoxy in the realm of the aesthetic, in ways that replicate the
hierarchizing, ethical violence inherent in evolutionary narratives. In The
Critic as Artist, Wilde writes:
Aesthetics are higher than ethics. They belong to a more
spiritual sphere. To discern the beauty o f a thing is the
finest point to which we can arrive. Even a colour-sense
in the individual is more important, in the development of
the individual, than a sense o f right and wrong.
Aesthetics, in fact, are to Ethics in the sphere of
conscious civilization, what, in the sphere of the natural
world, sexual is to natural selection. Ethics, like natural
selection, make existence possible. Aesthetics, like sexual
selection, make life lovely and wonderful, fill it with new
forms, and give it progress and variety and change. (The
Critic as Artist 1058.)
Wilde begins with an expected inversion of the values usually assigned to

ethics and aesthetics. Trumping the Romantic equation of truth and beauty,
Wilde asserts that beauty is higher than truth. What follows is a tricky
analogy between aesthetics and ethics in the sphere of conscious civilization,
and natural and sexual selection, in the sphere of the natural world. Having
the base term of the analogy as the natural world is inconsistent with Wildes
frequent privileging of artifice over nature elsewhere. In fact, given the deeply
ideological underpinnings of the doctrine of sexual selection, and its
congruence with imperial ideas about the inferiority of other races, and
subordinate rank of women, if we invert Wilde writing Darwin, in a way
other parts of Wildes critical praxis permit, we may get a frank
acknowledgement of the interested historical (as opposed to the putatively
105
objective and scientific) determinants of evolutionary thought. In short,

conscious civilization comes to determine how we understand the natural
world and not vice-versa, and natural and sexual selection are analogous
to ethics and aesthetics and not vice-versa. For elsewhere, Wilde insists on
the primacy of conscious civilization in determining how we see the world.
In The Decay o f Lying, he tells us of nature that people only discover in her
what they bring to her (1966, 977), and that as for the infinite variety of
Nature, that is pure myth. It is not to be found in Nature herself. It resides in
the Imagination, or fancy or cultivated blindness of the man who looks at
her. (1966, 970). Objective knowledge, for Wilde, is relentlessly situated.
He tells us: He is fact, occupied as fact usually is, with trying to reproduce
Fiction. (1966, 1021). Wilde makes it clear that the epistemology of the gaze
determines the range of what can be seen.
However, in the extract quoted above, Wilde inverts ethics and

aesthetics within the biologically determinist and empiricist paradigm of
Darwinian evolutionary thought. Yet elsewhere he suggests possibilities for
aestheticism to transcend and resist the racism inherent in the biologically
driven telos of evolution. There are many such moments in Wilde when he
clearly adheres to Victorian racial hierarchies (Do you think that it is the
imagination that enables us to live these countless lives? Yes; it is the
imagination and the imagination is the result of heredity. It is simply
concentrated race-experience. Critic As Artist 1966, 1041), and in these
moments, I entirely agree with Curtis Marezs claim of aestheticisms
complicity with Empire: The autonomy of the artist-critic, far from being
socially and politically innocent, instead reinforces colonial hierarchies.
(1993,91)7
7 Marez is particularly compelling in outlining this complicity in terms o f the emerging
institution o f the nineteenth-century museum, and its appropriation of objects from the colonies.
He points out how Wildes exoticism fosters the taste for such objects. Nevertheless, I believe that
there can be a crucial dissonance between Wilde's epistemological assumptions about the relation
between art and life, and the way these get institutionalized. (1993, 81-100).
106
However, there is a strand in Darwin and in Wildes uptake of Darwin

that does not reinforce colonial hierarchies so neatly. It is also possible to
locate an egalitarian, horizontal series of tropes in Darwinian evolution, one
which decenters the idea of a single subject, and is the theory of random,
chaotic differentiation. This is the strand that particularly unnerved Victorians,
and Wilde is quick to pick up on it.
Evolution is the law o f life, and there is no evolution
except towards Individualism. Where this tendency is not
expressed, it is a case of artificially arrested growth, or a
disease, or of DEATH.. . Individualism will always be
unselfish or unaffected.. . Selfishness always aims at
creating around it an absolute uniformity of type.
Unselfishness recognizes infinite variety of type as
delightful thing, accepts it, acquiesces in it, enjoys it.
(The Soul o f Man Under Socialism 1966, 1101)
Here, evolution is seen as the proliferator of difference, rather than the

consolidator of hierarchies. As Gillian Beer argues, Darwin substitutes
process for initiation, place or person.. . . It would be going too far to
describe Darwins project as free play without origins as Derrida describes
the nature of poetry, but it is a significant move away from the idea of history
and of natural history as a tracking back to a recoverable origin. (1983, 20).
It is this idea of increasing individuation, of endless process that grips Wildes
imagination as much as the racially inflected progressivist telos* of the social
Darwinists and eugenicists.
Two famous axioms from the preface to The Picture o f Dorian Gray
8 Patrick Brantlinger makes it clear that imperialist ideology and evolutionary theory are
epistemically and not simply expediently or coincidentally linked:
For middle-and upper-class Victorians, dominant over a vast
working-class majority at home and over increasing millions
of uncivilized" peoples of inferior races abroad, power was
self-validating. There might be many stages of social
evolution and many seemingly bizarre customs and
superstitions" in the world, but there was only one
civilization, one path of progress, one "true religion.
(1985, 166).
107
capture the complexity of Wildes uneasy relation to the expansion of the
British Empire and its impact on questions of aesthetic representation:
The nineteenth-century dislike of Realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his

own face in a glass. The nineteenth-century dislike of Romanticism is the rage
of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass. (1985, 21).
What is initially so striking about these statements is that they clearly

set the stage of representational questions as a colonial, racialized stage.
Realism and Romanticism must be discussed with reference to representations
of other cultures, living in other places, and in other times. Moreover, the
two aphorisms enact a spectacular series of reversals along the axes of
primitive/modem, art/life, progression/regression. If the nineteenth century
(the present for Wilde) is Caliban, the hierarchy of primitive/civilized is
upturned. Yet Caliban is the literary product of a valorized artist, Shakespeare,
rather than an historically verifiable, embodied primitive. This reveals a
resistance to the idea o f an Other out there rather than an Other created by the
self, i.e. Caliban is not a real primitive but a product of Shakespeares
imagination. Cultural representations are a function of imagination; they
cannot simply reflect actuality. This is reinforced by the conceit of the mirror.
Wilde implies that the primitive is a category of nineteenth-century thought
rather than an object of it. Barbarism, for Wilde, begins at home; the real
savages are the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie. It is bourgeois morality that is
savage. Lord Henry in The Picture o f Dorian Gray tells us that the mutilation
of the savage has its tragic survival in the self-denial that mars our lives.
(1985, 41). In The Soul o f Man Under Socialism, Wilde further asserts: And
authority by bribing us to conform produces a very gross kind of over-fed
barbarism amongst us. (1966, 1087).
Compounding this inversion of the civilized and the barbaric is the
108
delightfully slippery inversion of the meanings of Realism and
Romanticism in the above quotes from the preface. Realism is supposed
to show one the world, rather than oneself, yet Wilde has the outward gaze of
Realism reflecting back the nineteenth-century subject and this subject
absent in the inward gaze of Romanticism. The stereotype of the racially
other Caliban is reinforced in the depiction of Caliban as a raging child, yet
Caliban is nineteenth-century England, so the crucial defining difference
between the supposedly civilized, modem, superior white man and the
backward, inferior savage is missing. Yet somehow, Wilde himself manages
to exit this endlessly reversing circuit. He can play Prospero and offer us a
vantage point from which to scorn his paradoxically primitive nineteenthcentury peers. Or can he? If this is so, does he not become subject to the
critique of Realism that the aphorisms offer? If the aphorisms are read as a
truthful statement about the malaise of nineteenth-century realist and romantic
aesthetics, is Wilde himself not busy enacting Realism and thus performing
Caliban raging at his face in the glass, becoming his fantasmatic projected
other at the very moment he tries to assert his distance from it?
To recapitulate these paradoxical questions: Wilde is complicit with

colonial racism in his invocation of the stereotype of Caliban as savage,
childish and angry, resistant to nineteenth-century evolutionary ideas by
insisting that modem white Europe is no different from Caliban, with the
notable exception of Wilde himself, who as the artist, assumes the lost mantle
of all seeing, civilized whiteness, and can thus give us a realistic picture of
nineteenth-century aesthetics. Yet in this very moment of representational
authority, he traps himself back into his fraught representational fieid,
becoming raging Caliban himself by offering us the real.
These aphorisms are not an isolated instance in Wilde. Wilde is utterly

committed to the idea of civilization, but his idea of civilization is not the same
109
as that espoused by evolutionary theory. Evolutions primitives often have
more civilization - aesthetically speaking - than the white, middle-class,
about-to-be-heterosexual men, whom social Darwinists would posit as the
pinnacle of human development. For Wilde, even a passing glance at the
cultures of those peoples evolution would posit as primitive or barbarian,
reveals their superiority in certain aesthetic matters. This, of course,
occasionally leads Wilde into the trap of exoticism. Here is Wilde on drinking
tea in San Franciscos Chinatown during the 1882 American tour:
At the hotel, I was obliged to drink my chocolate or
coffee out of a cup an inch thick, and I enjoyed
getting down into the Chinese quarters and sitting in
a pretty latticed balcony and drinking my tea out of a
cup so dainty and delicate that a lady would handle it
with care. Yet this was not an expensive place for
wealthy people to go to. It was for the common
people. The laborers on the railroad came here, with
pick and shovel and drank their refreshing beverage
out of a pretty cup of two beautiful colors, blue and
white, while I was thought unworthy of anything
better than a cup so thick that it suggested the idea
that it was intended as a weapon. (Cited in Lewis,
1936. 249).
In the way that Wilde reads otherness, I am inclined to view him as

deeply concerned with ethical questions. I think the narcissism of his anti
empiricism in The Decay of Lying can be potently inserted as pointing
toward a different ethical narration of both the culturally and sexually other:
The actual people who live in Japan are not unlike the
general run of English people; that is to say that they are
extremely common-place, and have nothing curious or
extraordinary about them. In fact, the whole of Japan is a
pure invention. There is no such country, there are no
such people. One of our most charming painters went
recently to the Land of the Chrysanthemums in the
foolish hope of seeing the Japanese. All he saw, all he had
the chance of painting, were a few lanterns and some fans.
He was quite unable to discover the inhabitants, as his
delightful exhibition at the Messr. Dowdeswells Gallery
showed only too well. He did not know that the Japanese
people are, as I have said, simply a mode of style, an
exquisite fancy of art. And so, if you desire to see a
Japanese effect, you will not behave like a tourist and go
to Tokio. On the contrary, you will stay at home and steep
110
yourself in the work of certain Japanese artists and then,
when you have absorbed the spirit of their style, and
caught their imaginative manner of vision, you will go
some afternoon and sit in the Park or stroll down
Piccadilly, and if you cannot see an absolutely Japanese
effect there, you will not see it anywhere. (1966, 988).
In this fascinating passage, Wilde gleefully plays havoc with

Orientalist and imperialist optics. The culturally other - the Japanese - are
seen as merely the same as the gazing colonizing subject - the actual
people who live in Japan are not unlike the general run of English
people. The tone is aristocratically dismissive, yet banality makes for
common humanity for Wilde. Secondly, the role of imagination in
determining perception is taken as axiomatic - the whole of Japan is pure
invention. The passage is inexorably anti-empiricist; objects of Japanese
culture cannot render their difference visible themselves. Fantasmatic
constructions in the eye of the beholder are constitutive of Japaneseness.
Here, he blithely dismisses the exotically marked fetishes of cultural
difference: All he had the chance of painting were a few lanterns and
some fans.
The critique of this missed encounter with the other is conveyed in

terms of the effect on the gazing subject and his geography rather than the
gazed upon object and his/her geography. Tokio and Piccadilly are
bizarrely conflatecf and it is Piccadilly which is to learn how to appear
9 The identity/alterity binary is continually shaken up in W ildes thought, arguably as a result

of his fascination with inversion as a creative hermeneutic strategy: to know anything about
oneself one must know all about others, (1966, 1040) knaves nowadays do look so honest that
honest folks are forced to look like knaves so as to be different," (1966, 662) "Nothing looks so
like innocence as an indiscretion. (1966, 168). One could argue that the very success of the
Wildean aphorism is produced by the inversion of mutually defining opposites in ways that
obliterate any sense o f certainty o f either pole of the binary.
Ill
Japanese rather than Japan10 which is to be civilized in order to appear
more British. Wilde also clearly transacts the questions of cultural
difference in terms of space rather than time. However, this mode of
perception is complicit with colonial ideology in other ways.The utterance
there is no such people can be mis/read as an endorsement of the
colonizing fantasy of the emptiness of colonial lands. Nevertheless, Wilde
is implicitly attacking a central premise of colonial anthropology. For him,
there are no natives to be discovered, let alone educated, converted or
civilized.
If we read this extract in conjunction with Wildes earlier remarks

on San Franciscos Chinatown, we see that Wilde is not above playing
tourist himself, and the relation between tourism11 and imperialism has a
long and continuing history that I cannot engage here. Roland Barthes in
Empire o f Signs, while making like a tourist and going to Tokio reveals
an affinity with Wildes narcissistic gaze:
If I want to imagine a ftctive nation, I can give it an
invented name, treat it declaratively as a novelistic object,
create a new Garabagne, so as to compromise no real
country by my fantasy (though it is then that fantasy that
I compromise by the signs of literature). I can also though in no way claiming to represent or analyze reality
itself (these being the major gestures of Western
discourse) isolate somewhere in the world (faraway) a
10 Japan, itself, is a particular kind of other culture, one frequently granted privileged otherness
in the West and never subjected to direct colonial rule as was all of Africa and vast sections of Asia
and the Americas. The European fin de siecle also witnesses a vogue for all things Japanese,
evident in the presence of Japanese settings, techniques and motifs in much of the high and popular
culture of the period - from Puccinis Madame Butterfly to Gauguin and Van Goghs appropriation
of the heavy black outline of Japanese prints to Ezra Pounds fascination with haiku. Nevertheless,
this putative civilizadonal parity will still be rendered sufficiently racially other for Japan to be the
only nation in the history of the world to be subjected to nuclear attack.
11 Granted that tourism, in many ways, is materially dependent on the networks established by
imperialism, a crucial distinction can be drawn between the objectives o f the two experiences.
Cross-cultural tourism claims as its purpose the transformation (no matter how trivial) of the
tourist - travel broadening the mind etc. Imperialism takes as its purpose the civilizing of the
native. In Dreams o f Adventure, Deeds o f Empire . Martin Green points out that the underlying
motivations for many British men to become involved in the colonial enterprise were wanderlust,
the desire for adventure, exoticism, a wish to be free of conventional constraints at home; in short,
precisely the psychological motivations of many tourists. (1989, 1-36.)
112
certain number o f features (a term employed in
linguistics), and out o f these features deliberately form a
system. It is this system which I shall call: Japan. (1982,
3)
A delightful and possibly apocryphal anecdote has Julia Kristeva

imploring Barthes to leave the bus and investigate the locals at closer
quarters while they are traveling in China. Barthes replies: I can see
China perfectly well from here. Barthes makes himself a parody of the
tourist. In Empire o f Signs, Barthes maneuvers around these issues of
cultural difference with an enviable skill, treating his desire for the other
as an absent theme that structures the book, and though a gay identity
politics (perhaps invoking Barthess biography) would read this in terms
of the necessary encoding of the closet, I think Barthes is attempting
something far more complex in his staging of a hermetic semiotics as a
hidden guide to cruising in Tokyo.
The hidden presence of desire in the evasions and inclusions of the

traces of the maps, the leading phrases of the calligraphy, the photographs
of the Kabuki actors and Sumo wrestlers, inscribe an overdetermined gay
male identity and desire, which acknowledges the play of difference in its
constitution. Barthes blurs the distinction between subject and object, the
inner and the outer, in his construction of himself as Japan and vice-versa,
and thus precludes his inscription of the othemess of Japan in an
evolutionary narrative. The culturally other- the object of his desire - is
allowed its othemess, yet is never entirely objectified, for the desire is
present in the text only as a pointed and poignant absence. The real
pleasure lies in having the map drawn, rather than making it to or at the
bar. This results in the foregrounding of the circulation of desire, rather
than its accomplishment in the conquest or colonizing of the other. This
play of absences requires that one does not so much read between the
113
lines as slip, and perhaps permits Barthes both perfect solipsism and
momentary self-transcendance in the missing encounter with the other, in
being the empty emperor of his Empire o f Signs. The Empire escapes
imperialism in the emperor becoming his new clothes.
Barthes concludes his book with the classically Wildean trope of

inversion:
Uncentered, space is also reversible: you can turn the Shidikai
gallery upside down and nothing would happen, except an
inconsequential inversion of top and bottom, of right and left:
the content is irretrievably dismissed: whether we pass by,
cross it, or sit down on the floor (or the ceiling, if you reverse
the image), there is nothing to grasp. (1982, 110).
As in Wilde, space is reversible, othemess is always positional, the gazing

subject is resolutely implicated in his vision. Difference and sameness
collapse into and out of each other. The verb grasp is not insignificant in
that the seer self-consciously gives as much as he takes. Said defines
imperialist representation in the following terms: When it came to what lay
beyond metropolitan Europe, the arts and the disciplines of representation - on the one hand, fiction, history and travel writing, painting: on the other,
sociology, administrative or bureaucratic writing, philology, racial theory
depended on the powers of Europe to bring the non-European world into
representations, the better to be able to see it, to master it, and above all, to
hold it. (1993, 99). With nothing to grasp, Barthes gaze, which like
Wildes, marks a certain refusal to bring the culturally other into
representation, can hardly be said to be a colonizing gaze.
Narcissism, as a strategy for using the self as the other^ in the
12 While it would suit my purposes to claim that this is reversible, that narcissism also
allows the use of the other as the self, since I am interested in Wildean inversion as an ethical
strategy, and inversions are by definition reversible, the Freudian schema by positing the
concept of primary narcissism as essential to the formation of the ego does not allow me to do
this. See Chapter 4 for a more considered investigation of narcissism.
114
reaction-13 formation of the self, resists an evolutionary narrative by

attempting to fully incorporate the other, rather than hierarchize its
difference through a developmental narrative, enacting a different kind of
violence, which may have useful implications for a queer ethics. Wilde
performs a similar double maneuver by calling for a simultaneous
evacuation and consummation of the self in the encounter with the other:
To know anything about oneself, one must know all about others.
{Critic as Artist, 1966, 1040) and If you wish to understand others then
you must intensify your own individualism. (Critic as A rtist, 1966,
1033). The shifting slipperiness of the identity/alterity polarity in Wilde
consistently resists the clear divisions between subject and object,
obser/er and observed, self and other, which anchor an imperialist optics.
Wilde extends this beyond the realm of the individual subject,

calling for a kind of cosmopolitanism when he says: It is only by contact
with the art of foreign nations, that the art of a country gains that
individual and separate life, we call nationality. {Critic as Artist, 1966,
1033). Comparative difference rather than essence is constitutive of
131 use narcissism and reaction-formation in a rhetorical rather than clinical sense. Both
terms in Freud have applications in the understanding of specific neuroses and pathologies but
are also generalizable in the course of normal psychosexual development. In On Narcissism
(1910), Freud begins with a definition of the narcissist as someone who treats his own body
in the same way in which the body of a sexual object is ordinarily treated - who looks at it,
that is to say, strokes it and fondles it, till he obtains complete satisfaction through these
activities." (1957, 73) In the case of Wilde, I am speculating on how such a looking may be
generative in the context of Imperial optics. If narcissism is the necessary failure to
distinguish between the self and the normative sexual object and we generalize this into the
sphere of social identities, I argue for some subversive capacity against a visual field that
needs to maintain rigorous racial and cultural divisions. The generalizability of reactionformation is trickier and simpler. I use it here as mechanism for rendering visible a false
dichotomy between sameness and difference in the constitution of the subject, for it may allow
us to glimpse a crucial way in which the ego, or conscious self defines itself reactively against
a set of repressed wishes. In the realm of social identities, the idea of reaction-formation
reminds us that any positive term of identity requires an other, which may be be repressed,
disavowed, or in the case of evolutionary ideas of identity, subsumed or sublated. I am trying
to adapt the expanded rhetorical field that psychoanalysis generates to read ideologies and
discourses in the abstract, not only in the ways they are internalized/produced by individual
subjects.
115
nationality for Wilde, and although civilizational comparisons cannot help

but function hierarchically in an age of empire, it is possible to assert
some resistance to basing nationality on the naturalized bases of blood,
race and language.
Furthermore, unlike like classic writers of Empire.14 who

understood travel across cultures as travels back in time,15 Wilde allows
cross-cultural exchange to take place not only within the same time but
also in the geographic space of the metropolis. Even at his most Orientalist
in the opium den scene16 in The Picture o f Dorian Gray, othemess is
never transacted temporally. Fascinatingly, this novels journey into its
own Heart of Darkness - the place where Dorian faces his full depravity
and encounters the brother of Sybil Vane - is a journey into the heart of
London rather than up the Congo river. It is the civilized metropolis that is
bizarre and threatening17:
The moon hung low in the sky like a yellow skull. From
time to time a huge misshapen cloud stretched a long arm
across and hid it. The gas lamps grew fewer and the streets
more narrow and gloomy. Once the man lost his way, and
had to drive back half a mile. A steam rose from the horse
as it splashed up the puddles. The side windows o f the
hansom were clogged with a gray flannel mist. (1985,
220 )
14 Stanleys best-selling account o f his explorations. In Darkest Africa, is published in
1890 - the same year that W ildes The Picture o f Dorian Gray is serialized in Lippincotts
magazine. Although mostly an exhaustively detailed account o f the rescue of a former British
ally in southern Sudan, it is saturated with descriptions of the sublime beauty and terror of the
jungle as both a timeless place and the space of primeval time. (See particularly 138-210)
Conrads Heart o f Darkness, the literary Ur-text of the late Victorian colonial journey, is
equally saturated with transactions of cultural difference in developmental terms, which in the
case of Kurtz prove dangerously reversible. (See particularly 121-125).
15 Johannes Fabians classic Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object (1983)
theorizes this process. See particularly 13-23.
16 For a survey of nineteenth-century fictional and anthropological renderings o f the opium-den" and how
Wildes account is both congruent with and diverging from the rules of the genre, see Timothy Carens'
Restyling the Secret of the Opium Den" (1995, 65-76).
17 George Stocking in Victorian Anthropology (1988, 62-63) points out how even before
classical evolutionism, the Celtic fringe and the urban poor were aligned with the racial others
in the colonies. I discuss this in greater detail in chapter 2.
116
The underworld o f the opium dens is rendered in terms consonant

with much Imperialist fiction - like Conrads Marlow or Haggards Alan
Quartermain, Dorian (albeit in a taxi-cab) makes a perilous journey
through encroaching physical and spiritual darkness. The inhabitants of
both the imperial wilderness and the inner city are demonic, bestial and
racially other. Wilde is as capable of relentless dehumanization as the best
of them. The opium addicts Dorian encounters are objects of lurid
fascination - repulsive yet compelling:
Dorian winced and looked round at the grotesque things
that lay in such fantastic postures on the ragged
mattresses. The twisted limbs, the gaping mouths, the
staring lustreless eyes, fascinated him. (1985. 224)
Wilde employs precisely the same tropes Conrad is to use ten years later
to describe the emaciated laborers in the Belgian Congo in Heart o f
Darkness. Bodies have no cohesion and are multiply fragmented: limbs,
mouths, eyes merge and multiply in a hallucinatory vision of
fragmentation: Black shapes crouched, lay, sat between the trees, leaning
against the trunks, clinging to the earth, half coming out, half effaced
within the dim light, in all the attitudes of pain, abandonment and
despair. (Conrad, 1963, 82).
What is equally striking here is the rendition of the consequences

of extreme labor (Conrad) and extreme dissipation (Wilde) in similar
terms. Racial and class others, pushed into extremity by work or drugs
appear to their white observers as bizarrely unindividuated, as monstrous
marionettes, collections of right angles in landscapes redolent of an
exotic Hell, as anything except individual human beings. In the perception
of their fragmentary and hallucinatory nature, they can also be read
117
psychoanalytically as part-objects18 of desire in a dystopian reactionformation.
Yet Wildes metaphoric vocabulary offers another more explicitly

metropolitan register. As much as he uses the exotic to describe the
strange heaven/hell of the opium den, he also employs images of
mundane, metropolitan, respectable masculine life. The mist that obscures
Dorians vision is likened to gray flannel. The slimy pavement looked
like a wet mackintosh. (1985, 222) Wilde offers (and eventually comes
to embody) a disturbing and in the final analysis, intolerable conflation of
savage depravity and white upper-middle class metropolitan normative
masculinity. While Conrad has Marlow remind us: And this also has
been one of the dark places of the Earth, (1963, 67) and England in
Heart o f Darkness is in perpetual danger of returning to darkness: Light
came out of this river since.. . Yes: but it is like a running blaze on a
plain; a flash of lightning in the clouds. We live in the flicker - may it last
as long as the old earth keeps rolling! But darkness was here
yesterday( 1963, 68); for Wilde, England still is a dark place, and
retroactively reading his biography into the picture, it will prove darker
still.
Dorian encounters Malays . . . crouching by a little charcoal stove

playing with bone counters, and showing their white teeth as they
chattered. (1985, 223). Rendered bestial by their crouching and
" Laplanche and Pontalis (1973) define a part-object as follows:

Type of object towards which the component instincts are
directed without this implying that a person as a whole is
taken as love-object. In the main part-objects are parts o f the
body, real or phantasied (breast, faeces, penis) and their
symbolic equivalents. Even a person can identify himself or be
identified with a part-object. (1973, 301)
Understanding these fragmented bodies as part-objects allows one to understand the lurid and
sexualized overtones of these descriptions in Wilde and Conrad.
118
chattering, they show their white teeth and play with bones, invoicing
stereotypical descriptions of savages.'9 Yet we are in England as Dorians
encounter with Adrian Singleton makes clear. Dorian says to Adrian in the
opium den: I thought you had left England. (1985, 223).
The narrator panders to notions of the unenglishness2" of the

scene, by having Dorian pose such a question, but Adrian is clear that the
pleasures and depravities that the colonies may be seen to offer are here.
By finding barbarism at the heart of the metropolis and explicitly racialized
white people in the midst of it - the scene stresses the yellow hair of both
Dorian and Adrian, Wilde refuses an easy distinction between self and
other, home and abroad, savage vice and civilized virtue. You dont have
to travel far to go native, and the depravity and degeneracy attributed to
savages abroad are as easily located in the civilized at home. The apparent
oppositions are relentlessly complicit. Ultimately, the identity/alterity
opposition cannot hold in much of Wildes writing, and this failure can
further be increasingly imputed to his person. Herein lies the reason for
the extreme virulence of the attacks on Wilde from all quarters of English
society after the revelations of the trials. Wildes plays invoke complete
insidemess - the milieu of the comedies is inexorably that o f the country-
19 Wildes racial others, though present in metropolitan space, are represented in very similar
terms to those used by Conrad. They are denied human speech, chattering insensibly and
grinning hideously. Chinua Achebe attacks Conrad along these lines in An Image of Africa:
Racism in Conrads Heart o f Darkness, when he notes that the only lines Africans speak in
the novella are Mistah Kurtz, he dead. and Catch im, give im to us . . . eat im. (1989,
6 ).
20 The popular discourse of particularly British imperialism is not confined to the more
obviously nationalist arenas of law and geography, but is arguably also a discourse of
individuation and embodiments. An Englishman is very far from being defined by his passport
alone. Honesty, fair-play, a love of cricket, a sense of racial superiority, a resistance to
intellectual abstraction, a brand o f muscular Protestant Christianity, an ability to follow orders
all underwrite the terms of allegiance to Queen, Country and Empire. Tennyson in his
jingoistic moments, in poems like The Charge of the Light Brigade (1903, 82-4) directly
suggests the internal, subjective characteristics of the English man in national fantasy and
Kipling in a poem like Gunga-Din does this more obliquely through comparison and
displacement. (1925, 462-4).
119
house and drawing room; they are saturated to the point of parody with
the icons of upper-middle-class late nineteenth-century English life. Many
of these icons - butlers and cucumber sandwiches, to name two of the
most obvious, still connote Englishness in popular representations a
hundred years later. The enormous commercial success of these plays
point to what comfortable objects of cultural consumption they were. Yet
Wilde, in the course of the trials, emerges as a dangerous outsider, a man
just as likely to go feasting with panthers, to use his own expression, as
to enjoy cucumber sandwiches at the Savoy.
The Picture o f Dorian Gray, void as it is of any representations of

sex acts between men, is infused and driven by the attempt to figure out
the lineaments of sexual desire between males. As Alan Sinfield asserts,
the book should not be viewed as the cunning mask of an already-known
queemess, but as reaching out towards formulations of same-sex
experience that were . . . as yet nameless. (1994, 102-3). It is further an
attempt to think through such desire in fairly obvious evolutionary tropes,
and anchors such explorations in the context of British imperial
expansion. As many critics21 have shown, the novel dramatizes the
unrepresentability of the consummation of sexual desire between men.
The problematic of representation is at the core of the central narrative
conceit - the reversal of the usual relationship between portrait and person.
The relationship between the real and the represented is inverted and
moreover this inversion has meaning in developmental terms. The portrait
which in the normal course of events would stand unchanging outside
time, will grow, change and die, and the represented, Dorian, will instead
These include Lee Edelman inHomographesis (1989, 189-207), Ed Cohen in Writing Gone Wilde:
Homo-eroticism in the Closet of Representation(1987, 801-803) and Richard Dellamora in
Masculine Desire. (1990. 195-212). Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, in a brilliant reading of The
Picture o f Dorian Gray, reads the problem of representing male-male sexual desire in the novel
through the lens o f a paranoid-associated homophobic alibi T do not love him; I am him .'
(1990, 164).
120
remain unchanging outside time. Yet clearly there remains a strong faith in
a realist epistemology, despite the inversion. The portrait will render on
the outside by the signs of physical decay what is on the inside - Dorians
corrupting soul. This itself is a trope of nineteenth-century racial science faith in the legibility of the surface of the body as an accurate visual
marker of internal attributes such as intelligence and morality."
As in the drama of evolution, the passage of time is inevitably

marked on the body, in this case, the displaced individual body at one
remove in the form of the portrait. The narrative of the novel enacts many
of Wildes famous aphorisms: To love oneself is the start of a life-long
romance; To be premature is to be perfect. The novel further reveals
Wildes sustained resistance to teleological understandings of progress.
Like the protagonists of the classic nineteenth-century bildungsroman,
Dorian is a young man coming to self-awareness, yet without access to
the classic narrative motors of marriage or inheritance, Dorian has
nowhere to go. With the severing of sexual desire from questions of
reproduction and class-consolidation and its affiliation with the pleasures
of consumption, both material and sexual, the novel abandons the telos of
bildung and becomes a picaresque - a series of misadventures.
At the same time as it confounds the dominant narrative modes of

novel writing, The Picture o f Dorian Gray reveals a profound
consideration of evolutionary tropes and motifs. Denied and resistant to
normative regimes, Dorian, as a character can only exhibit arrested
development, and Dorian as a portrait can only embody degeneration.
These are the two emerging hegemonic codes for the understanding of
male homosexual identity under the medical model (as well as the tropes
22 Stepan (1989, 83-110), Gould (1996, 142-176) and Somerville (1994. 243-66) all note how
the measuring o f the body is used to make disparaging civilizational claims.
121
for figuring racial difference in the colonies), coming into prominence at
this historical moment. The earlier religious discourse of same-sex sexual
desire as vice and sin provide an important overlay, as does the
romanticized Hellenism of Basil Hallward.23 The novel is constructed
around trying to name a love and identity which cannot yet speak its
name, using the full range of contradictory discourses used to discuss
what we now call homosexuality in fin de siecle Britain.
The relationship between the portrait and character of Dorian also

engages, on an allegorical level, the inversion theorists such as Ulrichs
and Carpenter. The novel speculates on the claims of such inversion
theorists in two ways, both via the central conceit of the novel. Firstly, the
relationship between the real and the represented is inverted, and the
normal developmental course is inverted - the picture is subject to the
ravages of time and the protagonist is not. Inversion as a generative
concept-metaphor4 is necessarily imbued with imputations of deviant
sexuality at this historical moment. Secondly, it engages in the
bifurcations of soul and body, typical of a thinker such as Ulrichs. Ulrichs
classic explanation of Umings as women trapped in mens bodies is
obliquely engaged by Wilde in the narrative imperative of rendering the
soul visible. Of course, the portrait of Dorian is not female. Dorian is a
polymorphously perverse figure - the subject and object of homo and
hetero-erotic desires. However, both his youth and his position as the
object of a desiring male gaze can be argued to feminize him in the novel.
Obsessed with the passage of time, the narrative, through the figure of
23 Linda Dowlings Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford provides a careful overview of
the invocations of Greek homosexuality in a Victorian literary milieu. (1994, 105-54).
24 For a discussion of how inversion functions as a conceptual strategy for understanding a
wide range of nineteenth-century scientific and artistic phenomena, see Martin Scherzinger and
Neville Hoad: Asymmetrical Reading of Inversion in late Nineteenth-Century Sexology and
Musicology. (1998, forthcoming).
122
Dorian provisionally constructs age as gender.25 Youthfulness and
femininity converge in the insistence on Dorians beauty. Physical beauty
as a normative signifying system is deeply invested in developmental
questions, and the portrait is literally ripped asunder between impossible
allegiances to neo-platonic notions of the beautiful body (it expresses a
beautiful soul) and to newer evolutionary configurations of the body
beautiful as race-pride, as dangerously degenerate, as indicative of an
arrested development.
Lord Henrys meditation on Dorians beauty is revealing:

And Beauty is a form o f Genius - is higher indeed than Genius,
as it needs no explanation. It is of the great facts of the world,
like sunlight or spring-time, or the reflection in dark waters of
that silver shell we call the moon. It cannot be questioned. It
has its divine right of sovereignty. It makes princes of those
who have it. (1985. 45).
Yet Dorians beauty can be questioned. The novel is clear that beauty is a
function primarily of youth. It is no less clear, though it is never expressly
articulated as such, that Dorians beauty is also a function of race, and to a
lesser extent, nation. It is Dorians whiteness that continually renders him
beautiful: his finely curved scarlet lips, his frank blue eyes, his crisp gold
hair (1985, 39). He has rose-red youth and rose-white boyhood
(1985,42). He is often likened to lilies, ivory and roses - red and white.2'1
25 Both Charles Darwin (1998, 577) and Havelock Ellis (1905, 32) after him insist that
masculinity is biologically more evolved in that children physically resemble women more
closely, largely by privileging hair growth on the body and the face as markers o f
differentiating evolutionary advancement. For more extensive discussion of this in relation to
Darwin, see Chapter 1 and in relation to other scientists like Geddes see Chapter 2.
2 Sedgwick is acute in recognizing the difference of Wildes own body to the ideal English
type represented by Dorian (and Bosie) in her theorizing of the sameness in same-sex desire:
Wildes alienizing physical heritage of unboundable bulk
from his Irish nationalist mother, of a louche swarthiness from
his Celticizing father . . . it dramatized the uncouth non
equivalence of an English national body with a British with an
Irish, as domestic grounds from which to launch a stable
understanding of national/imperial relations. (1990, 176)
I discuss the social meanings given to Wildes body in the second section of this chapter.
123
Standards of beauty need standards of ugliness, in order for beauty to

render itself visible, and the criteria of ugliness are insidiously racialized
in The Picture o f Dorian Gray. Dorian is told by Lord Henry, that he will
become sallow and hollow-cheeked and dull-eyed.* Lord Henry,
employing an evolutionary vocabulary racializes the aging process: Our
limbs fail, our senses rot. We degenerate into hideous puppets. (1985,
46). These hideous puppets are like the hideous half-castes and Malays of
the opium-den, who moved like monstrous marionettes and made
gestures like live-things. (1985, 221). The deep terror around human
aging in the novel is inflected by anxieties of racial degeneration:7 Both
Gillian Beer and Stephen Jay Gould argue that Haeckels biogenetic law
that ontogenesis (the evolution of the individual) recapitulates
phylogenesis (the evolution of the species) - taken up explicitly by both
Darwin and Freud is a powerful new metaphor for the nineteenth century.
The ugliness of Dorians aging can be read as simply wish-fulfillment for
the visible registering of his sinfulness, but can also be seen to mark
anxieties around phylogenetic degeneration projected back onto the
individual male body. Dorian is hardly fit to go off and serve the Empire.
This role is left to James Vane, Sybils hapless younger brother in the
novel, who tells us I go on board tonight for India. (1985. 177). James
Vane never reaches India. He is shot in a hunting accident, while
presumably tracking Dorian. The narrative here almost overplays its hand.
A young Empire-bound sailor is shot in the service of aristocratic sport.
27 This is Nordau on aestheticism in general:

Their word is no ecstatic prophecy, but the senseless
stammering and babbling of deranged minds, and what the
ignorant hold to be outbursts of gushing youthful vigor and
turbulent constructive impulses are nothing but the
convulsions and spasms of exhaustion, (cited in Cohen, 1993.
15-6)
124
Aristocratic decadence is clearly not in the national or imperial interest2* .
The central conceit of the novel, the trajectories of its narrative,

and repeated utterances of its characters all point to deep resistances to
normative narrations of white, middle-class English masculinity. The
horrified reception of the novel, as well as its repeated invocation in the
first trial as proof of W ildes immorality, further point to its contestation
of Victorian social norms. Ironically, the narrative key to this contestation
- the fetishization of youth and beauty - is deeply implicated in the very
norms that the novel contests. As Lord Henry says:
Look at the successful men in any of the learned
professions. How perfectly hideous they are! Except, of
course, in the Church. But then in the Church they dont
think. A bishop keeps on saying at the age o f eighty what
he was told to say at eighteen, and as a natural
consequence he always looks absolutely delightful. (1985.
25).
For Wilde, physical beauty always depends on a notion of arrested

development. Lord Henry observes of Dorian that the life that was to
make his soul would mar his body. Progress through the various stages of
life is to be avoided rather than embraced. Hence the novels refusal to
become a bildungsroman. The life-paths of the three major male
protagonists all resist the telos of development. Lord Henry is, at the end
of the novel as he is at the beginning, reclining on a divan smoking
numerous cigarettes - his soul untouched by the passage of time,
unforgiving, unforgiven, irredeemable. As Wilde is to say in another
28 Judith Walkowitz, in City o f Dreadful Delight: Narratives o f Sexual Danger in Late

Victorian London suggests another context for reading Dorians transgressions: As political
actors, female moral reformers who drew on traditions of radical political culture aimed at
producing and consolidating public opinion against a privileged class of sexually dangerous
men who prayed on the innocent. (1992. 7). In certain crucial ways, Dorian is a Jack the
Ripper type character - he is able to traverse the class-divides o f London from East-End to
West-End with ease. His eternal youth renders him essentially invisible and unaccountable. He
preys on young women. It is possible to read The Picture o f Dorian Gray as the
aestheticization of precisely the narratives of sexual danger that Walkowitz dissects.
125
context: Any preoccupation with ideas of what is right or wrong in

conduct shows an arrested intellectual development. (1966. 1205).
Similarly for Wilde, the artist does not progress, only mediocrities
progress. An artist revolves in a cycle of masterpieces, the first of which
is no less perfect than the last. ( Hart-Davis, 1962, 372).In his own
way, Lord Henry is as ageless as Dorian. Basil Hallward is obliterated
without a trace, without social or religious rituals that promise continuity,
he is exploded by the miracles of modem science into thin air. Dorian dies
accidentally by his own hand. Alan Campbell, the young scientist
blackmailed into destroying Hallward, commits suicide, as does Sybil
Vane. Denied recourse to the traditional narrative motors of the nineteenthcentury novel, like marriage, inheritance, reunion, emigration, Wildes
characters must enter the timeless hothouse world of art and epigram
((Lord Henry and the restored portrait) or must be removed altogether
(Basil and the aged Dorian).
Wilde is arguably able to achieve narrative closure only with the

annihilation of his two incipiently homosexual protagonists - three if one
speculates on the blackmailable secret of Alan Campbell. The knife that kills
Basil kills Dorian as well. Lord Henry is spared because he never enters the
realm of action in the novel. He never says a moral thing but never does a
wrong thing. Thus Lord Henry remains aloof from the real, and through
him, it may be possible to perceive how Wilde is able to give a different
valence to realist representation. Rachel Bowlby argues persuasively that the
aesthete in Wildes novel far from being different from the new consumer
of the period, turns out to be none other than his or her perfect type.
(1992, 147) The intersection of the strategies of advertising and the rhetoric
of aestheticism are visible in Lord Henrys aphorism: A cigarette is the
perfect type of the perfect pleasure. It is exquisite and it leaves one
unsatisfied. (1985, 107). Advertising must produce needs even as it
126
fulfills them, and it does so through representation. Calling a cigarette a

cigarette would be as dull, in this regard as calling a spade a spade, and
Wildes novel demonstrates the untenability of a fixed identity for things and
people once they have been situated within any order of representation.
(Bowlby, 1992, 148) In Lord Henry, Wilde connects his understanding of
aesthetic representation with consumption rather than with production, and
the consumption not of goods but of sensations, and consumption like
production is played out in sexed and gendered terms. Bowlby suggests that
consumption19 is a female gendered act by the 1890s and that much of the
contemporaneous shock over the novel is a response to the presentation of
the casual pleasure seeker as male.
Sedgwick, in Epistemology o f the Closet ( 1990), argues that opium

(more than cigarettes) defines the codings of consumption in The
Picture o f Dorian Gray. Writing of Wilde's novel and Stevensons Dr.
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, she asserts that
drug addiction is both a camouflage and expression for the
dynamics of same sex desire and its prohibition . . . The two
new taxonomies of the addict and the homosexual condense
many of the same issues for nineteenth-century culture: the old
anti-sodomitic opposition between something called nature and
that which is contra naturum blends with a treacherous
apparent seamlessness between substances that are natural (eg.
food) and substances that are artificial (eg. drugs). (1990, 172)
Moreover, Sedgwick is explicit that this new configuration of desire and

consumption is one attenuated by imperialist economics and policies; that
anxieties around the introjection of foreign substances are used to figure
29 The relation o f questions of sexual identity to the pleasures of consumption under a

capitalist economy continue to concern current queer theorists. Michael Warner in Fear o f a
Queer Planet writes: [There is a [close connection between consumer culture and the most
visible spaces of gay culture: bars, discos, advertising, fashion, brand-name identification,
mass-cultural camp, promiscuity. Gay culture in this most visible mode is anything but
external to advanced capitalism . . . Post-Stonewall urban gay men reek of the commodity. We
give off the smell of capitalism in rut, and therefore demand of theory a more dialectical view
of capitalism than many people have imagination for. (1993, xxxi)
127
desire for the same sex. It is possible to read Wilde's aestheticism itself into
the equation. All art is quite useless. Like drugs and unlike food, art
should perform no socially productive or reproductive labor.
The novels focus on desire and consumption as the defining

activities of the aesthete and artist can account for its avoidance of sites and
scenes of labor. Lord Henry, who, in Wildes own words, is what the
world thinks of me, is conspicuous for doing nothing. In W ildes own
critical praxis, the leisured aristocrat is the ideal mode of embodiment for the
artist. Wildes refusal to acknowledge his own labor is legendary: I spent
all morning putting in a comma. I spent all afternoon taking it out.
(Gardiner, 1995, 61). Obviously, this cannot be taken at face-value. In an
era where literary production is increasingly professionalized (and
commodified), the pose of the artist as a man of leisure is a deeply
deceptive, if useful one. George Gissing in New Grub Street, a novel
roughly contemporaneous with The Picture o f Dorian Gray offers a bleaker
and more realistic picture of the life of a working writer/editor, a life Wilde
knew well from his days as editor of Woman's World (1887-1889). Rather
than asserting that artistic production offers solace from the vicious vagaries
of business, Gissing pointedly insists on literatures dependence on the
alienating demands o f the market-place. Marian Yule, the daughter of a New
Grub Street hack, who actually does most of the work that is then published
in her fathers name, has a revealing fantasy:
A few days ago her startled eye had caught an
advertisement in the newspaper, headed literary machine;
had it then been invented at last, some automaton to
supply the place o f poor creatures such as herself, to turn
out books and articles? Alas! the machine was only one
for holding volumes conveniently, that the work of
literary manufacture might be physically lightened. But
surely before long some Edison would make the true
automaton, the problem must be comparatively such a
simple one. Only to throw in a given number of old
books, and have them reduced, blended, modernised into a
single one for todays consumption. (1980, 111).
128
For all Wildes protestations around the importance of selfexpression for the artist, and art as authenticating and sanctifying labor,
his creative modus operandi is not that far from Marians imagined
machine. The scandal around Wildes first volume of poetry makes this
patently clear. The Oxford Union refuses to accept Wildes Poems 18 8 1
into its library. Oliver Elton and Henry Newbolt argued for its rejection on
these terms:
It is not that these poems are thin - and they are thin; it is
not that these poems are immoral - and they are im moral.
..: it is that they are for the most part not by their
putative father at all, but by a number of better known and
more deservedly reputed authors. They are in fact by
William Shakespeare, by Philip Sidney, by John Donne,
by Lord Byron, by William Morris, by Algernon
Swinburne, and by sixty more, whose works have
furnished the list of passages which I hold in my hand at
this moment. The Union Library already contains better
and fuller editions of all these poets; the volume which we
are offered is theirs, not Mr. Wildes: and I move that it be
not accepted, (cited in Ellmann. 1987. 140).
Problems of originality and ownership, of blending, reducing

and modernizing plague Wilde throughout his career. There is a grain of
truth to Whistlers famous rejoinder to Wilde. According to the legend,
Wilde says to Whistler after one of Whistlers bon mots: I wish that I had
said that. Whistler replies: You will, Oscar, you will. Wilde is also
relentlessly self-cannibalizing. Certain key epigrams do the rounds and
can be found in The Picture o f Dorian Gray, the critical essays and the
plays.3" Much of chapter 11 in The Picture o f Dorian Gray, where
Dorians acquisitions are listed as proof of his connoisseurship has been
lifted directly from auction catalogues. The aristocratic pose of leisure in
both the character of Lord Henry and Wildes persona as artist attempts to
30 Neil Bartlett in. Who was that M an? A Present fo r Mr. Oscar Wilde , traces the repetition of key
phrases and epigrams in Wilde's ouevre, as well as Wildes debts to art museum and auction catalogues.
(1988, 173-87).
129
render invisible the reducing, blending, modernizing labor of the modem

artist. This attempt to render artistic labor as aristocratic leisure is not
without a material register. As Gissing has Jaspar Milvain shrewdly point
out in New Grub Street, Men wont succeed in literature that they may
get into society, but will get into society that they may succeed in
literature. (1980, 33). Wilde works endlessly to transform his social
acumen into commercial success. Attuned to the commercial possibilities
of the New Woman, he changes the title of Ladys World to
Womans World in 1887 and solicits leading London socialites to write for
him. Wildes final years, ostracized and impoverished in exile, make the
connection between literary success and social position tragically poignant
from the other side, and the artists utter dependence on the market-place,
with the attendant confirmation that literary labor can be as alienated as the
manual labor Wilde so scorns is pathetically clear in any number of the
begging letters Wilde writes from Italy and France to his friends and
former publishers.31
Literature, and art more generally, for Wilde offered the fantasy of
unalienated labor, the strange oxymoron of aristocratic work. His lectures
on The House Beautiful partake in the legacy of William Morris (they
were also accused of plagiarizing him), inheriting all the contradictions of
attempting to create an aristocracy of taste rather than one of blood or
wealth. In The Soul o f Man Under Socialism, Wilde argues passionately
for a humanism, which he sees as under threat from capitalist divisions of
labor. Although Wilde was part of Ruskins road-building crew at Oxford
31 The following 1899 note to Frank Harris is fairly typical:

My dear Frank, I don't know if you have any money going, or if the Transvaal belongs to
you now or not. I am in a great mess over things and if you have L15 that you would like to
throw to the poets, do send me a cheque for it. I am dreadfully worried by hotel-patrons - only
one , but a tiger from the Hotel Marsollier - coming down and making life horrible, and I have
no money. Ever yours OSCAR (1962, 807).
130
in the 1870s, his views on manual labor*2 are trenchant.

I cannot help saying that a great deal of nonsense is being
written and talked nowadays about the dignity o f manual
labour. There is nothing necessarily dignified about
manual labour at all, and most of it is absolutely
degrading. It is mentally and morally injurious to man to
do anything in which he does not find pleasure, and many
forms of labor are quite pleasureless activities, and should
be regarded as such. To sweep a slushy crossing for eight
hours on a day when the east wind is blowing is a
disgusting occupation. To sweep it with mental, moral or
physical dignity seems to me to be impossible. To sweep
it with joy would be appalling. Man is made for
something better than disturbing dirt. All work o f that
kind should be done by a machine. (1966, 1088-9)
Yet unlike Morris, who looks back to medieval notions of craft

and tries to function within the constraints of the market-place, Wilde
argues that more mechanization, not less, is the answer. Unable to
compete in terms of price with mass-produced ornamentation and
furnishings, Morriss exquisitely crafted objects increasingly enact social
distinctions rather than embody the ideal of unalienated labor. Harris, one
of the founders of the Arts and Crafts movement of the 1880s and 90s
concludes that it became a narrow and tiresome little aristocracy working
with great skill for the very rich. (Cited in Dowling, 1996, 342)
In the Soul o f Man under Socialism, Wilde too invokes the notion
that art is the praxis for the healing of the wounds of the subjective
32 It cannot pass without comment that in an Age of Empire, manual labor is frequently
racialized. Africans, as Brantlinger points out. were often perceived as no different from beasts of
burden, as a natural laboring class, suitable only for performing the dirty work of civilization"
(181). While Wildes vision in the extract above of manual labor is resolutely English and
metropolitan - sweeping a slushy crossing, while an East wind blows - one is reminded of Jo in
Dickenss Bleak House. (1953, 137), his other pronouncements on the necessity of slavery for
civilization, and that in the future machines will be the new slaves imply that manual labor is
clearly unsuited to white people.
131
experience of capitalisms division of labor.33 Like Morris, Wilde hated

the wretched lop-sided creatures we are being made by the excess of the
division of labour in the modem occupations of life. (Works, 22, 338).
Unlike Morriss backward glance via Ruskins romanticization of
Medieval economic and artistic production, Wilde shifts his utopic horizon
forward:
Socialism, Communism, or whatever one chooses to call it,
by converting private property into public wealth, and
substituting co-operation for competition, will restore society
to its proper condition of a thoroughly healthy organism, and
ensure the material well-being of each member o f the
community. (1080).
What is fascinating about Wildes essay is his insistence on

socioeconomic transformation in order for his aesthetic project of
Individualism to take place. Unashamedly idealistic and yet not entirely
free of Wildean irony, this essay suffered years of critical neglect (for
obviously ideological reasons in the English speaking world) but was
widely read and translated in other parts of the world, and enjoyed several
Russian translations.
Wilde, unlike his predecessors Morris and Ruskin does not

envisage a world where labor can be experienced as an intrinsic rather
than extracted or extrinsic part of ones being, he tries to imagine a world
without labor at all. He writes:
The fact is, that civilization requires slaves. The Greeks were
quite right there. Unless there are slaves to do the ugly,
horrible, uninteresting work, culture and contemplation
become almost impossible. Human slavery is wrong, insecure
and demoralising. On mechanical slavery, the slavery o f the
machine, the future of the world depends. (1966, 1089).
33 Marx in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, offers the following
description of alienated labor; The fact simply applies that the object produced by labour, its
product, now stands opposed to it as an alien being, as a power independent of the producer. .
. The performance o f the work appears in the sphere o f political economy as a vitiation of the
worker, objectification as a loss and as servitude to the object, and appropriation as alienation.
(1964, 122).
132
Despite, Wildes avowal of revolutionary socialism, the essay

reveals a deep affinity with Christian notions of redemption, which will
later be expanded upon in De Profundis (1896-7). The notion that
socialism will restore society to a prelapsarian state of organic
wholeness and health rather than undergo a transformation gives the lie to
the forward-looking impetus of Wildes utopianism. In certain ways,
Wilde attempts the impossible task of owning his own labor under
capitalist relations of production, usually by denying or disavowing it.
Not, to my knowledge, having read Marx, Wilde can only read the effects
of capital subjectively, usually through a protective identification with the
abjection of the worker. Wilde does not attempt to imagine how his
aesthetic utopia could be instituted.
He also employs a set of colonizing metaphors in the articulation

of his utopian aspirations. England will never be civilized until she has
added Utopia to her dominions.34 (Critic as Artist, 1966, 1043). A map
of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at,
34 In this aphorism of Wildes, it is possible to perceive both echoes of, and an ironic rejoinder to
Ruskins famous inaugural lecture at Oxford in 1870:
There is a destiny now possible to us, the highest ever set
before a nation to be accepted or refused. Will you youths of
England make your country again a royal throne of kings, a
sceptered isle, for all the world a source of light, a centre of
peace and mistress of learning and of the Arts, faithful
guardian of time-tried principles? . . . This is what England
must do or perish: she must found colonies as fast and as far
as she is able, formed of her most energetic and worthiest
men; seizing every piece of fruitful wasteground she can set
her feet on, and there teaching these colonists that their chief
virtue is to be fidelity to their country, and their first aim is to
advance the power of England by land and sea. (Cited in Judd,
1996, 121)
Cecil Rhodes, Empire-builder extraordinaire overlapped with Wilde at Oxford, and although I
cannot establish if they ever met, both men were deeply impressed by Ruskin. taking from him
diverging, though not unrelated faiths in the sacred mission of civilization.
133
for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing.
And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing, a better
country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias. (Soul o f Man
Under Socialism, 1966, 1089). In their historical context, these
metaphors cannot be read innocently. Prevailing discourses about
colonizing parts of the world inhabited by people deemed racially other
were committedly civilizational. Civilizing the natives was at the heart of
the White Mans Burden. French colonialism understood itself as a
mission civilatrice.35
Despite these invocations, it is not only Wildes narcissistic gaze

that places him at odds with dominant modes of bringing other cultures
into the imperial representational Field. Throughout his life, he evinces a
deep distrust of what I will call discourses of benevolence, which in the
era of high British imperialism are frequently racialized. As a schoolboy,
Wilde joked with his mother about forming a Society for the Suppression
of Virtue. (Ellmann, 1987, 18). In The Soul of Man under Socialism,
he asserts:
Accordingly, with admirable, though misdirected notions,
they very seriously and very sentimentally set themselves to
the task of remedying the evils that they see. But their
remedies do not cure the disease: they merely prolong it.
Indeed their remedies are part of the disease... Charity
creates a multitude of sins. (1966, 1076)
This distrust of benevolence is a multifaceted phenomenon in Victorian

culture, useful to a range of political projects. Dickens satirizes white
benevolence in relation to the colonies in the figure of Mrs. Jellyby in
Bleak House (1953, 28-32), who is so busy raising money for the
missionaries in the upper Niger that she has no time to look after her own
disorderly house. She functions as a compound figure satirizing British
Said is careful to distinguish between the different imperial policies and styles of French and British
imperialism. (1993, 99).
134
colonialism (as a national/imperial emblem) - she should literally get her
own house in order first - and acting as an anti-feminist jab at womens
greater involvement in the public sphere. Wildes sustained distrust of
those who take it on themselves to speak for others is a recurring theme in
his corpus and may mark a refusal of much of the white m ans burden.
While never a social Darwinist, in the strict sense of the term

Wilde is too resistant to biologically essentialist explanations and
consistently privileges culture over nature epistemologically -- it is
possible to characterize The Soul o f Man Under Socialism as a kind of
idealist sociological Darwinist text:
Man will develop Individualism out of himself. Man is now
so developing Individualism. To ask whether Individualism is
practical is like asking whether Evolution is practical.
Evolution is the law o f Life, and there is no evolution except
towards Individualism. (1966, 1101)
For Wilde, Individualism is a doctrine of self-expression predicated on

ideas of self-completing, unalienated labor, and the pleasure of this. We
are to evolve from creatures of labor to creatures of leisure, from work to
art. This is a fairly common fin-de-siecle fantasy/nightmare. Despite, his
constitutive eurocentrism and his linkage of the project of civilization with
the project of colonialism, Wildes fantasy of a world free of unalienated
labor cannot be entirely accommodated within Victorian racial norms. Two
roughly contemporaneous dystopic novels by H.G. Wells and Bulwer
Lytton share the same utopic horizon of Wilde - worlds free of unalienated
labor, but provide interesting counterpoints to his thought in that they
return to the necessity, even desirability of racialized alienated labor fairly
explicitly. The connection between utopic horizons and colonial projects is
rendered explicit in Bulwer-Lyttons The Coming Race (1871). The
continued well-being of the community of the racially superior Vril-ya is
dependent on continuing expansion: as the child Tae explains to Tish, our
human narrator in the world beneath the surface of the earth:

O f course, we cannot settle in lands already occupied by the
Vril-ya, and if we take the cultivated lands o f other races o f
Ann, we must utterly destroy the previous inhabitants.
Sometimes, as it is, we take waste-spots. and find that a
troublesome, quarrelsome race of Ann . . . resents our vicinity
and picks a quarrel with us, thus, of course, as menacing our
welfare, we destroy it. (1871, 149).
The link between colonialism and utopia that Wilde expresses

metaphorically, Bulwer-Lytton enacts in a narrative.
H.G. Wellss The Time Machine (1888-1895) explores the Wildean

premise that evolution must be connected with the abolition of alienated
labor. Narratologically, The Time Machine is framed as carefully as
Conrads Heart o f Darkness. The milieu of the frame-tale is the
Gentlemans club with the musty gentility of science that is associated
with Alan Campbell in The Picture o f Dorian Gray. The double narrative
remove of the frametales in both Heart o f Darkness and The Time
Machine suggests affinities between the suspect reliability of stories of
colonial journeys and journeys into the future. Both spatial and temporal
alterity need to be handled with the circumspection accorded to hearsay. It
is not merely coincidental that the birth of science fiction writing is
coincidental with the golden age of imperial travel fiction. In terms of
genre, science fiction is frequently the heir to colonial travel yams. Not
for nothing does the subtitle of the television series. Star Trek, read
Space: the Final Frontier.36 The attempt to imagine otherness remains
seriously indebted to the narrative strategies of colonial encounters.
Like Wilde, Wells imagines the future, or at least the surface part
of it, as free from labor. The Eloi have evolved into creatures of perfect
36 This has a long discursive life. Alan Mooreheads The White Nile (1971, 1-9) is explicit
likening the great Victorian explorers to astronauts.
136
leisure. They live off the fruit of the land and seem unencumbered by the
need to work: They spent all their time in playing gently, in bathing in the
river, in making love in a half-playful fashion, in eating fruit and sleeping.
I could not see how things were kept going. (1987, 57). Yet what
becomes chillingly clear over the course of the narrative is that they are
simply fatted cattle for the carnivorous Morlocks who live and labor
underground. Wellss use of Darwinian evolutionary principles is striking.
Over the centuries, humanity has evolved into two distinct species along
class lines. The erstwhile social division of class has become a biological
one of species:
So as I see it, the Upper-world man had drifted towards his
feeble prettiness, and the Underworld to mere mechanical
industry . . . Apparently, as time went on, the feeding o f the
Underworld, however it was effected, had become disjointed.
Mother Necessity, who had been staved off for a few thousand
years, came back again, and she began below. The Underworld,
being in contact with machinery, which, however perfect, still
needs some little thought outside habit, had probably retained
perforce rather more initiative, if less of every other human
character, than the upper. And when other meat failed them,
they turned to what old habit had hitherto forbidden. (1987.
82).
The lines of evolution the novella draws are just as comforting as

threatening to a bourgeois Victorian order. For both Eloi and Morlocks
have degenerated, the former into a helpless effeteness, the latter into
cannibalistic barbarism. The work-ethic is implicitly validated in the sense
that for the ruling-classes to avert Wellss imagined scenario, they must
remain productive and not give themselves over to the pleasures of the
senses. The narrative, like the utopian thought of Wilde and Morris,
contains an implicit critique of capitalist divisions of labor, pushed
through Darwinian evolution to an extreme. For Wells, some eradication
of the class-split is necessary to avoid the dehumanizing triumph of the
lower orders.
137
Fascinatingly, what the two new human species share is a radical

gender indeterminacy and a possibly sexual polymorphous perversity. The
initial encounter with the Eloi is described in these terms:
And then looking more nearly into their features, I saw
some further peculiarities in their Dresden-china type of
prettiness. Their hair which was uniformly curly came to
a sharp end at the neck and cheek; there was not the
faintest suggestion of it on the face; and their ears were
singularly minute. Their mouths were small with bright
red rather thin lips and their little chins ran to a point.
(1987, 45).
I perceived that they all had the same form of costume, the
same soft hairless visage, and the same girlish rotundity
of limb . . .In costume, and in all the differences of
texture and bearing that now mark the sexes from each
other, these people of the future were alike. And the
children seemed to my eyes but the miniatures o f their
parents. (1987, 49).
Clearly, the dominant trope for figuring these more advanced (in that they
inhabit futurity) people is that of the lack of developmental differentiation,
both along the lines of age and gender. Men cannot easily be distinguished
from women. Moreover, they have the attributes of nineteenth-century
children and to bring that point home more forcefully cannot satisfactorily
be distinguished from their own children. Again, the collapse between
space and time that social Darwinism encourages is visible in the
rendering of alterity. The developmental difference (in this case,
degeneration) of the Eloi is figured precisely in the same terms as the
spatial difference of colonized cultures in Wellss own time. Although the
Eloi are white, as interestingly are the Morlocks (One wonders, if for
Wells, that blackness is so evolutionarily backward, that in the future even
the most retrograde elements will have to be white),37 they are understood
37 Retrograde whiteness was often experienced as somehow more distressing than

degenerate blackness. Here is Charles Kingsley, proponent of muscular Christianity" and
author of The Waier Babies on his 1860 trip to Sligo: I am haunted by the human
chimpanzees I saw along the hundred miles o f that horrible country . . . To see white
chimpanzees is dreadful; if they were black, one would not feel it so much." (Cited in Fryer.
1984, 182).
138
as children, a classic trope justifying the European conquest of other

spaces. To shore up the normative racial and sexual values of Victorian
England, even as he criticizes the excesses of the division of labor. Wells
is forced to argue the paradox that in the future there will be arrested
development.
While, the Eloi are, over the course of the narrative, allowed
gender differentiation, and in the character of the unfortunate Weena,
individuation, the cannibalistic Morlocks can be granted neither. Ape-like
and silent, male cannot easily be distinguished from female. The Morlocks
are a frightening composite of nineteenth-century stereotypes of the EastEnd working-class from whom they have descended and the fantasmatic
figure of the cannibalistic savage in desperate need of the light of
European civilization. (What saves the narrator from destruction at their
hands are four safety-matches - ironically termed Lucifers.)
In this dual world of shared gender indeterminacy and divided

effete, meaningless pleasure and voracious cannibalistic appetite, physical
contact is fraught for our Time-traveller. First contact with both human
species of the future provokes a strange mix of anxiety and pleasure, and
this similarity must be noted. With regard to the Eloi: He came a step
forward and then touched my hand. Then I felt other soft tentacles on my
back and shoulders. (45). In encountering the Morlocks:
I was roused by a soft hand touching my fa c e .. . and
while I stood in the dark a hand touched mine, lank
fingers came feeling over my face, and I was sensible of a
peculiar unpleasant odor. I fancied I heard the breathing of
a crowd of those dreadful little beings about me. I felt the
box of matches in my hand being gently disengaged, and
other hands behind me plucking at my clothing. (1987,
67).
In both instances, the movement from one hand to many hands is
139
speedy and invokes a kind of orgiastic thrill. The undifferentiated touch is

initially pleasurable. Even the touch of the Morlocks is soft and gentle, at
first. The touch of the Eloi is understood as unthreatening childish
curiosity: They wanted to make sure that I was real. The touch of the
Morlocks is much more foreboding, yet at this point in the narrative, the
narrator is unaware of their cannibalistic tendencies and his anxieties can
be read as sexual. The time-traveller experiences a moment of panic: The
sudden realization of my ignorance of their ways of thinking and doing
came home to me very vividly in the darkness. (1987, 67). There is a
momentary confusion as to what appetite of the Morlocks he will be used
to satisfy. It is not as if the Morlocks fall on him like beasts of prey
devouring him limb from limb. Elements of a mass-seduction are present:
the touch is gentle and exploratory, clothing is coyly plucked at. Arguably,
both initial tactile encounters with the Eloi and the Morlocks can be seen to
contain an unconscious anxiety of anal penetration. The time-traveller is in
both instances groped from behind. Fortunately, the lust the amorphously
gendered Morlocks have for his body is driven by hunger not sexual
desire, but the two appetites are dangerously converging in this scene. In
a world of gender confusion, the time-traveller can only experience the
desire for his male flesh as childish curiosity, cannibalistic hunger or
nascent homosexual panic.
The future, like the colonies, represents a space of alterity in both

gender and sexual norms for the white, male, about-to-be heterosexual
exploring Victorian subject. Bulwer-Lyttons,38 The Coming Race, set in
the same time of his narrator but in another place - the depths of the earth plays with different gender norms in the same evolutionary paradigm.
38 Lytton, when he was colonial secretary in 1858 told M Ps to fulfill the mission of the
Anglo-Saxon race, in spreading intelligence, freedom and Christian faith, wherever Providence
gives us the dominion of the soil. (Fryer, 1984, 182). The colonial exploits of the Vfil-ya
follow precisely such instructions - if one substitutes Vril-ya for Anglo-Saxon and Vril for
Christian, yet Lytton has some anxieties about their colonial enterprises.
140
Rather than enacting a world of gender indeterminacy, the world of the
Vril-ya is a world of gender inversion. Women are stronger, more
intelligent and only just contained by a patriarchal order. Although women
occupy most positions of intellectual leadership, the ultimate authority of
the Vril-ya is still a man. Most importantly, in matters of sexual desire,
women take the initiative. In the Darwinian schema, they have agency in
sexual selection. The narrator is acutely uncomfortable, being the object of
Zees affections, experiencing being actively wooed by a woman as
repellently emasculating.
In The Coming Race, The Time-Machine, and The Soul o f Man

under Socialism, imaginings of worlds free of alienated labor are thought
through in the terms of evolution and informed by the context (and
metaphors) of British colonialism.Tellingly, only Wilde, perhaps because
it is too close to home, fails to pose the question of how a world without
economic divisions of labor can sustain gender differentiation and the
attendant normativity of what anachronistically can be called heterosexual
desire. What import, if any, may W ildes understanding of art and labor
have upon questions of sexuality? Or to phrase it more revealingly, how
may questions of sexuality underlie Wildes aesthetic and political project?
If the capacity for pleasure rather than the capacity for labor is the defining
essence of humanity, sexuality is easily and dangerously severed from
reproduction. If Paters dictum that value resides in the experience itself
rather than the fruit of experience (1928, 249) is applied to questions of
sexual desire, reproductive heterosexuality loses its social usefulness.
Both Wells and Lytton reassert the imperative of the realm of

necessity for civilization in ways that run counter to Wilde, though all
three ultimately measure civilization in aesthetic terms. The Eloi cannot
produce anything of aesthetic value. Being too enfeebled by centuries of
141
ease, they cannot even defend themselves against the ravenous Morlocks.
Similarly, the invincibility and material comfort the Vril-ya possess by
virtue of their technological advancement and their related possession of
the magical power of the Vril - which renders the idea of alienated labor
redundant -, ensure for Lytton that they have produced no great literature.
painting or music for centuries. Darwinian in a different way from Wilde.
they both assert the importance of struggle aesthetically. Here is Tish
speaking to Aph-Lin in The Coming Race:
I could not help expressing to Aph-Lin my surprise that a
community in which mechanical science had made so
marvelous a progress, and in which intellectual
civilisation had exhibited itself in realising those objects
for the happiness of the people . . . should nevertheless,
be so wholly without a contemporaneous literature (133).
Aph-Lin replies in no uncertain terms that without passion, want and

struggle, literature cannot survive. In The Time-Machine, the Eloi make
nothing, let alone art.
All three texts valorize (with a few qualifications) the evolutionary

advantages of technology in radically different ways. The Time Machine
can be read as representing deep terror as to what may happen if the
leisured classes lose control of the means of production to the working
classes over the evolutionary long-term. Familiarity with machinery is
ultimately what gives the Morlocks the edge in the struggle for life. Wells
obliquely, yet deeply, insists on the dignity of manual labor. In The
Coming Race, Lyttons vision of a world without alienated labor is a
world civilizationally impoverished, a world without poverty, dependent
on brutal force and colonial expansion and frighteningly emasculating.
Both Wells and Lytton can only imagine futurity as degeneration, for the
future races are civilizationally inferior to their own.
For Wilde, a future without alienated labor or a future without
142
labor at all, is hoped for, without reservation. His notions of what

constitutes civilization, dependent, like Lytton and Wells on European
aesthetic canons and standards, remain in most instances, normatively
white and male. Nevertheless, his vision of a future aristocracy for all is
unencumbered by warnings of the dire consequences of transforming
nineteenth-century class, racial and gender divisions.
II. The Picture of Oscar Wilde in America in 1882
One must go to Asia or Africa for picturesqueness in human

costume and habits. In America. I have found it only in the
Indians and the Negro, and I am surprised that painters and
poets have paid so little attention to them, particularly to the
Negro, as a subject of Art. Oscar Wilde. Interview in The
Daily Picayune. June 16, 1882.
In this section I will investigate how W ildes own body gets

represented in this vexed nexus of race, class, sexuality and gender
variables, how he is contradictorily placed in shifting positions in the social
appropriations of the developmental evolutionary schema, how in popular
cultural representations of his body we see these discursive homologies and
discontinuities quite literally fleshed out. Many of the images I discuss,
though not all, come from Wildes 1882 American lecture tour, and are
consequently inflected by the national, racial landscape of anti-immigration
discourses and the legacies of reconstruction.
An 1882 Cartoon published by Currier and Ives, entitled THE

AESTHETIC CRAZE shows how easily the image of Wilde can be
appropriated by a racist popular imagination. A black mammy washing
clothes outside a shack confronts a young black man in full aesthetic regalia.
He has a peacock feather in his cap, his hair is long, his undershirt has a
long white pointed collar, his shoes are pointy and he carries a sunflower in
143
his right hand. His pose is languorous, his wrist limp. Another woman,
presumably a neighbor, resting her elbow on a retaining wooden wall, looks
on. The caption reads Whats de matter wid de Nigga? Why Oscar yous
gone wild!
The cartoon establishes a series of explicit contrasts. Firstly, the pun

on Wildes name permits, as it did throughout the American tour, the
contrast between the civilized and the barbaric. The hard-working black
washerwoman, who knows her place is contrasted with the foppish young
man, who does not know his. Initially, it appears that the mock sartorial
splendor of Oscar contrasts with the shabbiness of his surroundings, but
there is a certain consonance between the makeshift attire of the young man
and the peri-urban squalor of the yard or street. Both Wilde and the young
man are satirized as trumped up, improvised cheap gimmicks, whose thin
veneer of style cannot mask their lack of manly substance. Wilde is seen to
offer some of the least substantial trappings of whiteness and civilization to
the Negro, the implication being that his version of civilization is so patently
insincere that even a Negro would have sufficient wit to parody it. Yet
Wildes attribution of culture to the Negro is not only satirically registered.
Moonshine upbraids Wilde in terms of the failure of the aesthetic apostles
aesthetics: He is better pleased with a Negro melody than with the musical
thunder of Niagara.
By situating the compound Negro-Aesthete, Oscar, in the company
3S Clearly lurking beneath this kind of allegation is the imputation of unnaturalness to

Wilde. With his privileging of artifice over nature, it is easy to see how ietroactively with the
disclosure o f his homosexuality, all of Wildes aesthetics can be seen to contain unnatural
vice.
144
o f black women, who are engaged in womens work" presumably in a

domestic space, the cartoon suggests that the proper space for Wilde and his
aesthetic doctrines is not the masculine, public sphere at all. Many of the
diatribes against Wilde attempt similar strategies of relegation and
belittlement:
A perfect specimen o f man, the little, a woman kissing a
poodle comes nearer expressing the unmanliness of this
peacockism. He is a peddler of childish jimcracks, and his
domain is not the world but a man whose intellectual
height and depth are best expressed by the tailor and the
laundress. (David Swing, cited in Lewis, 1936. 213-4)
This hostile newspaper account of Wilde recognizes his

estrangement from realms of real power and seriousness. The pose of the
aristocratic fop41 is seen through, and Wilde is aligned with the world of the
tailor and the laundress. Given the shift of class markings from the sphere
of production to the sphere of consumption at the turn of the last century,42
the passage also marks an anxiety around a possible split between class
position and class performance. For Wilde in the United States is making
his fortune. He is not a man of property. He remains an Irish interloper
trying to mime (often hyperbolically) English aristocratic mores and poses.
He is, as he has been called, a mick on the make. As one
contemporaneous observer put it: He is a shrewd man of the world and
D Oyly Carte is running him as a speculation. (Lewis, 1936,45).
40 Womens work was variegated by class and race throughout the nineteenth century on
both sides o f the Atlantic. Nevertheless, tasks associated with housework were invariably
associated with the female sphere. For an astute discussion of divisions of labor amongst
American women at the tum of the century, see E. C. DuBois. "Working Women, ClassRelations and Suffrage Militance: Harriet Stanton Black and the New York Women Suffrage
Movement 1894-1909 in DuBois, E. C. and Ruiz, V. L. (eds.) Unequal Sisters, New York:
Routledge, 1990. Catherine Hall in White, Male and Middle- Class traces the strongly class
inflected history of housework in Britain into the Victorian era. (1992, 61-67).
41 Arguably, the adoption of an aristocratic pose in a country with a tradition of antiAristocratic republican self-presentation can further account for the hostile reaction Wilde
frequently prompted.
42 This process is most lucidly chronicled and theorized in Thorsten Veblens Theory o f
the Leisure Class. (1927, 68-102).
145
It is possible to ascertain through many of these representations of

Wilde in the American media of the time and in certain public responses to
his lectures that Wilde was an ambivalent figure in Americas racial
landscape, and a site where the meanings and insecurities of whiteness
could be played out through contesting gender, class and sexuality
variables.
Wilde sins against many of the dictates of white, middle-class

respectability, and attendantly produces the need to deride his performance,
product and person. Wildes peculiar conflation of person, product and
performance, with its related transgressions of notions of the public and
private, complicated the set of social anxieties needing management. Given
the explicit and unconscious normativity of middle-class whiteness, Wildes
perceived violations of bourgeois norms and values simultaneously bring
his whiteness under scrutiny. The meanings of Wildes racial ambiguity in
these representations are clearly overdetermined, and I offer six
explanations, all to some extent mutually contingent:
1. The blatant mobilization of racism and sexism (Wildes dandyism is

consistently feminized in most newspaper accounts) as weapons of
derision.
2. His Irish heritage and the negotiations around the racial designation of the
Irish in late nineteenth-century America and Britain.
3. An anxiety over Wildes definitions of civilization and culture, partly
attendant on his blurring of the identity/alterity opposition of the colonial
gaze.
4. A resistance to considering Wildes lectures as work, the difficulty in
grappling with the self as product, and a recognition of the dangers of mass
consumption and the liberatory potential of the commodity form against an
146
embodied racial hierarchy.

5. The feminization of Wilde, and the difficulties the feminized white male
body poses for Darwinian evolutionary theory.
6. A recognition of the indeterminacy of Wildes sexuality and the attendant
difficulty of locating him within late nineteenth-century racializations of
desire.
Many attempts to satirize or undermine Wilde, like the cartoon

discussed above, invoke a racist blackness. All these incidents bear
discussion, but the most famous of these, the public disturbance at the
lecture in Rochester, may be taken as emblematic. A correspondent of the
New York Herald reported:
When the lecture had proceeded about a quarter of an hour,
an old darkey dressed in a swallow tail coat, one white kid
glove and a bouquet of flowers as big as a peck measure,
walked down the central aisle, with many antics and
grimaces a la Bunthome, and took a front seat. This was
the students' work, and entrance of the darkey was the
signal for a great burst of applause, which ended in
guffaws, catcalls and other species of collegiate
amusement. A great many people became disgusted and
left the hall.
Before the close of the lecture a policeman attempted to
eject one of the disturbers and a general melee ensued,
which was made more interesting by the turning off of the
gas. The manager of the house then sent for more
policemen, but before they arrived most of the students
had left, and Oscar finished his lecture before a few people
who had remained more to see the fun than to hear the
lecture (Lewis, 1936, 156).
A similar incident occurs at the New Haven lecture, where the Yale boys,
attempting to outdo their Rochester peers, arrive en masse, dressed in High
Aesthetic style, led by a Negro servant carrying a sunflower.
Both Wildes self-staging and the content of his talks can be seen to
invite such responses. Wilde arrives in America as the apostle of the
147
beautiful and the advocate for the refined and the civilized. When asked by
the Philadelphia Press whether his politics were liberal or conservative, he
replied: O, do you know, these matters are of no interest to me. I only
know two terms - civilization and barbarism: and I am on the side of
civilization. (quoted in Philadelphia Press, January 17, 1882, 2) He
lectured on the English Renaissance and The House Beautiful, pursued
his interest in dress reform, and made continual comparisons between the
civilization of England and the civilization of America.
The spectacle of the Negro parody of Wilde, produced by the

students at Yale and Rochester, marks both a recognition and a refutation of
Wildes claim to represent the civilized. By likening Wilde to the Negro and
the Negro to Wilde, the students assert a resistance to the idea of clothes
making the man, insisting on a biological essence to racialized selfhood,
while paradoxically recognizing the performativity of selfhood and culture.
Given the definitional imperative of the norm to naturalize itself, and remain
blind to its own artifices, the foregrounding of performance per se becomes
a mark of deviance. One Rochester paper reported subsequently that the
Negro who caused all the trouble was not a real Negro but a white man in
black-face, prefiguring eerily the Marquis of Queensberrys attack on Wilde
for posing as a so(m)domite and his remark in the first trial, I dont say
you are it, but you look it, which is worse. (Ellmann, 1987,412).
Arguably what the Rochester students are saying to Wilde is double-edged:
You are a white man, you are behaving like a black one.43
In itself, the double spectacle of Wilde and the Negro marks an

anxiety about blackness and whiteness. By suggesting that no aesthetic
paraphernalia will ever transform a nigger into a civilized person, the
43 Wildes triumph at the Cambridge lecture provides a revealing counterpoint. Having heard
that a mass of students were to arrive decked out as himself, he chooses to deliver his lecture in
conventional evening dress, effectively deflating the satire. See Lewis (1936, 125-9).
students uphold the security of their whiteness, but, by implying that

Wildes appearance likens him to the self-same Negro, they undermine the
apparent transparency of whiteness. The reactions to Wildes performances
suggest imputations of degeneration along racial lines which are later
confirmed along sexual ones.
Interestingly, the imputation of blackness to Wilde extends beyond

the event of his lectures. When Wilde proceeds to the Mid-West, the Saint
Louis Post-Dispatch invents a story that Oscars Negro valet44 now writes
nearly all of Mr. Wildes autographs, particularly those requested by mail.
(Lewis, 1936, 211). If we understand the autograph as the disembodied
representative of the person, it becomes clear how far the imputation of
racial taint has persisted. A black man is not just Wildes servant, he is also
his proxy.
Media images of Wilde enact the script of degeneration around his

person and his purpose in America. On January 22, 1882, early on in the
tour, The Washington Post publishes a cartoon comparing Oscar Wilde to
the Wild Man of Borneo.45 The text reads as follows:
We present in close juxtaposition the pictures of Mr.
Wilde of England and a citizen o f Borneo, who so far as
we have any record of him, is also wild, and judging from
the resemblance in feature, pose and occupation is
undoubtedly akin. If Mr. Darwin is right in his theory, has
not the climax o f evolution been reached and are we not
tending down the hill toward the aboriginal starting point
again? Certainly a more inane object than Mr. Wilde of
England, has never challenged our attention, whose picture
as given herewith is a scrupulously correct copy of a
photograph put out with his sanction and may be seen in
all public windows. Mr. Wild o f Borneo does not lecture
however, and that much should be remembered to his
44 Wildes valet during his American tour was W. M. Traquail.
45 The reference to the wild man of Borneo itself raises the specter of racial authenticity. For
the wild man of Borneo was a San Francisco sideshow act in the 1880s, and a minor
anthropological hoax. The person who appeared as the wildman was an unknown actor who
allowed himself to be covered in tar and horsehair. Unfortunately the tar coating prohibited
perspiration and his career was relatively short-lived.
149
credit.
Colonel Morse, Wildes agent, writes to the paper to object and receives a
published reply in a similar vein:
If we could be bought by Mr. Morse, or Mr. Cane, or Mr.
Wilde with an e. to believe that we had done Mr. Wilde an
injustice by publishing his picture in conjunction with
that of his relative from Borneo, who is Wild, without an
'e ', we would be quick to make reparation. But neither of
these gentleman have given us a living reason. The
picture we published of Mr. Wilde always with an e - is
confessed to be genuinely realistic and truthful. It is quite
possible however, that we may have done an injustice to
the Borneo chap. His friends have not yet been heard
fro m .. . Nature never makes a mistake . . . she never
puts the brains o f a man with mental brawn and vigor
into the cavity faced by such a physiognomy as that of
Oscar Wildes.
Aestheticisms resistance to the truth of nature, Wildes insistence

that Life imitates Art (1966, 983) necessarily get coded as an abdication
of the responsibility of white male superiority, and signs of degeneration,
which are then scripted on his body. The meaning of physiognomy is
always visible and accessible. There can be a direct correlation between
physical appearance and mental attributes, and the truth of Wildes vacuity
and depravity can therefore be read off his body.
Harpers Weekly - A Journal o f Civilization, has an engraving of

The Aesthetic Monkey on the cover of its January 28, 1882 issue.
Wilde had arrived in New York some three weeks earlier. The cartoon
shows a monkey in a velvet smoking jacket, white collar and cuffs showing
and wearing an elaborate neck tie, sitting at a table. Upon the table lie an
open book, upon which rests a horse-shoe, and next to the book lies a
single Arum lily. A large vase containing a sunflower also stands on the
46 A cover of the same magazine some six years earlier showed a black man and an Irishman
as the two counterweights of a scale. Harper's Weekly, 6 December, 1876. The representation of
Wilde as a monkey owes something to this discursive linkage.
150
table. The monkey sits, hands clasped together, elbows on the table, chin
resting on hands, while he stares pensively at the sunflower just above his
head. The attitude is one of prayerful languor. Again, Aestheticism is
registered as evolutionarily backward.
American national chauvinism, perhaps enacting a legacy of the

sense of settler colony inferiority in relation to the English metropole, uses
its armory of racism to compare Wilde, self-staged as the most civilized of
England (though it is interesting to note where and when he invokes his
Irishness and where and when he forgets it) to what it considered its most
retarded and retrograde element - the American Negro and the fantasmatic
aboriginal Borneo (chap). Wildes outlandish attire: his preference for knee
breeches and silk-stockings over conventional trousers, the flash of his fur
collared coat invoked the camivalesque in the service of the civilized against
the respectable, and paradoxically ended up being read as barbaric.'7
Not only explicitly in his mode of self-presentation, but in the very

content of his civilizing mission in America, Wilde could be read as
challenging ideas about appropriate classed and gendered racial behavior.
Wildes emerging doctrine of individualism, with its privileging of the artist
as the apotheosis of the civilized and its imperative of self-creation through
the development of the aesthetic values implicitly unnerves ideas of racial
hierarchy based on assumed biological grounds.4 If the only link
between art and nature is the well-made button-hole, (1966, 1205), if the
white male artist is constructed by his own performance, if taste rather than
blood is the determination of ones civilization, a black man appropriately
47 Bourgeois democratic discourse lends to figure the aristocracy as a vestigial, barbaric element.
48 The mid- nineteenth century sees the beginnings of a quasi-scientific discourse on race,
largely through the uptake of Darwinian evolutionary theories in the work of social Darwinists
such as Spencer and anthropologists, like Lubbock and Tylor. (See Stepan, 1982, 83-110).
151
dressed and schooled has as much claim to civilization as anyone/4
In addition to the potential Wildes aesthetic doctrines had for

severing race from civilization, his Irish heritage can be understood as
contributing to the perception of him as not quite white. In Love and TheftBlackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (1995), Eric Lott
claims certain material and representational connections between Irish and
Black:
Even before the vast waves of immigration (one came in
the late 1820s, another in the mid-1840s), Irish and black
tended to share the same class niche, resulting in class
conflicts of all kinds, but also in inter-racial friendships
and even marriages. Robert Cantwell observes that
smoked Irishman was nineteenth century rural slang for
Negro - a phrase that indicated the fundamental affinity
in the popular mind between these two groups . . . the
actress Fanny Kemble wrote in her diary of the remarkable
resemblance between the low Irish and southern slaves,
an equation exploited as Dale Knobel points out. in stage
productions such as William Macreadys Irishman in
London (1853), in which Murtoch Delaney finds his
perfect match in grinning Cuba, the African. More
sympathetically, however, Frederick Douglass once
remarked that the only songs that came close to the pathos
of slave songs were those he had heard in Ireland in 18456, during the famine. (Lott, 1995, 95).50
Wildes class-performance and anglicized identifications

attenuate these connections, but they remain. In the South, Wilde invoked
his Irishness as a point of affinity with the old South, arguing that the white
Souths relation to the North was parallel to the relation of Ireland to
England, a bizarre colonial analogy that effectively writes slavery out of the
49 Wildes public praise of San Franciscos Chinatown in aesthetic terms - the beauty of
Chinese porcelain, the celestial aspect o f their music, and refinement of their customs at the
height of the vitriolic build up to the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, marks another instance in
which Wilde's aestheticism threatened to dispute racial hierarchies along the axis of culture.
50 There is a wealth of recent scholarship on how the Irish and other immigrant populations
resist imputations of blackness and become white. Ironically, the adoption of blackface in
theatrical performance is an effective strategy for assimilation into white America. See N.
Ignatiev: How the Irish became White (1996, 1-59), M. Rogin: Blackface. White Noise (1996, 568 ) as well as E. Lotts Love and Theft (1995, 94-6).
152
picture. Interestingly, even the most racist renditions of Wilde portray him
as English. (See the Mr. Wilde of England in the Washington Post
Cartoon.) The July 14 1883 edition of The West Middlesex Advertiser
writes of Wilde: An Irishman by birth, his tongue hardly ever reveals the
fact, although according to Punch, he speaks with a strong, rich brogue.
Yet there is something in the concept of an aesthetic lecture tour that

reinvokes, albeit in a much altered context, the web of connections that Lott
establishes. Despite the ostensibly serious and pedagogical pretensions of
Wildes tour, the real draw card remained spectacular - a white Englishman
reading in public in knee-breeches. The lectures were primarily theatrical,
and the level of audience participation in the theatrics was frequently more in
accord with responses to Buffalo Bills Wild West show and P.T Bamums
circus, displaying the kind of visceral delight that Lott associates with
minstrelsy.
Wilde both colludes in and subverts a racialized construction of the

Irish in a Saint Patricks day speech that he makes in St. Paul.
But the generous response you have given to the mention
of the efforts of my mother in Irelands cause has filled me
with a pleasure and a pride that I cannot properly
acknowledge. It is also a pleasure to me that I am afforded
this opportunity during my visit to America to speak to
an audience of my countrymen, a race once the most
aristocratic in Europe.
There was a time before the time of Henry II, when Ireland
stood at the front of all the nations of Europe in the Arts,
the sciences and genuine intellectuality. The few books
saved from the general wreck are remarkable for their
literary excellence and beauty of illustration. There was a
time too when Ireland was the university of Europe when young monks educated in Ireland went forth as
educators to all other European countries , while at the
same time students from these same countries flocked to
Ireland to study . . . under the great masters of Ireland.
There was a time when Ireland led all other nations in
working in gold. In those times no nations built so
splendidly as did Ireland. The cathedrals, monasteries and
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other edifices of those days showed a higher style of

architecture than that o f any other n atio n .. . Those proud
monuments to the genius and intellectuality o f Ireland do
not exist today. When the English came they were burned.
But portions of these blackened, moldering walls still
remain to remind visitors of the beauty o f the work
wrought by Ireland, for the pleasure and enjoyment of
Ireland in the days of her greatness. But with the coming
o f the English, art in Ireland came to an end, and it has
had no existence for over seven hundred years . . . for art
could not live and flourish under a tyrant. Art was an
expression of the liberty loving sentiment of a people.
But the artistic sentiment of Ireland was not dead in the
hearts o f her sons and daughters, though allowed no
expression in their native country. It is this sentiment
which has induced you to meet here tonight to
commemorate our patron Saint. It finds expression in the
love you bear for every running brook of your native land.
It is shown in the esteem you bear for the names of the
great men whose deeds and works have shed such luster
upon Irish history. And when Ireland gains her
independence, its schools of art and other educational
branches will be revived and Ireland will regain the proud
position she once held among the nations of Europe.
(Lewis, 1936, 227)
Here, Wildes aestheticism shows itself capable of taking on a nationalist,

even an anti-colonial slant, as it writes the story of the destruction of
Irelands aesthetic greatness by the English. He goes onto posit a utopian
vision of Irelands future aesthetic achievements once the yoke of the
English has been thrown off.
However, the history that Wilde sketches simultaneously invokes a

colonial and racist historiography, one deeply indebted to evolutionary
anthropology. The Irish are a degenerate people, as well as a subject one.
Their achievements are in the past. Although they occupy the same space as
the English, they live in a different time. A caricature of Wildes father goes
some way towards explaining this ideological conflict in Wildes
nationalism.
A denigratingly racialized portrait of Dr. William Wilde depicts the

leading oculist and folklorist in blackface of sorts with decidedly simian
features51. The caption reads A Wilde (K)night in Irelands Eye." The
figure stands surrounded by a Celtic cross and the ruin of a round tower in
the foreground with the black smoke stacks of an industrialized city in the
background. The title of the manuscript he holds, A Wilde Essay on Patology speaks volumes. Sir William Wilde (the caption explicitly refers to
his knighthood) had cataloged the vast collection of antiquities, now in the
national Museum of Ireland, and had written a number of books on Irish
archaeology and folklore. Much of his research was posthumously
published in two volumes by his wife, and these were important works for
the Irish literary revival led by Yeats and Lady Gregory at the close of the
nineteenth century. The discovery of a glorious pre-colonial past is
invariably useful to an anti-colonial nationalism, as the younger Wildes
impassioned speech at St. Paul indicates. Yet by denigrating the work of Sir
William as patology, this cartoon, in the service of colonial ideology,
undermines the import of the excavation of Irelands past with the double
puns on Wild (e) and (K)night enacting the stereotypes of the lascivious and
drunken Irish. The pun in Pat-ology further renders the Irish insane,
marking their degeneracy in another register.
Oscars own formidable tolerance for liquor allowed him quite

famously to drink all-comers under the table and helped mitigate charges of
effeminacy, but resonated with the spirit of the caricature: An Irishman, like
a Negro, is degenerate, his body trapped in an earlier evolutionary time,
and, like Darwins savages, shows an unconquerable taste for spiritous
liquors.
51 L.P. Curtiss Apes and Angels (1971, 32-74) contains many similar nineteenth-century
caricatures of the Irish, in which they are portrayed as non-European racially.
with permission o f the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission
155
A series of colored lithographs produced by E. M. Duval in 1882

entitled National Aesthetics depicts Wilde as Negro or Negro as Wilde.
Here, a caricature of a young black man dressed up as a lily peers into a lily
as he wanders past a clump of sunflowers. The caption reads: Ise gwine
for to worship dat lily kase it sembles me. With its assertions of idiocy
and self-absorption, the caricature integrates stereotypes of the Negro and
the aesthete. The protagonist strolls without a care in the world confusing
himself with God, God with the lily, and the lily with himself. In terms of
pictorial composition and the caption, he quite literally cannot tell black from
white. The inversion of platitudes consistently associated with Wilde is
rendered absurd in this figure of the Lily(white) Nigger Narcissus.
The accusation of narcissism leveled here at the lily-worshipper was

one sustainedly leveled against Wilde:
Mr. Wilde is not a worshipper of universal Nature; he is
rather a worshipper of a very limited part of Nature himself. If he could only get a little way from himself,
think less of how he looks in ladies eyes, and what the
newspapers may say about him tomorrow, he might be
able to convey a useless message to many lotus-eating
folks who glide lazily on the stream of existence. (The
Echo, July 11 1883)
The Negro is so self-engrossed as to be unproductive. Like the aesthete, his

only real value is that of entertainment. Wilde himself subscribed to this
stereotype in his Personal Impressions of America lecture, where he
speaks of the laughing, dancing, lazy, happy Negroes. Yet what labor
does Wilde perform in America?
While the trope of laziness in the underclass, where it can be read as

having political content cannot be conflated with the aristocratic pose of
laziness assumed by Wilde, they share the capacity to violate the work-ethic
52 Here, one sees the serious limitations of resistance to racist hierarchies on aesthetic grounds.
156
of the middle-classes.
Political economy has historically struggled with understanding

cultural production as work, and its practitioners as productive laborers.
Adam Smith describes men of letters of all kinds as unproductive
laborers:
Like the declamation of the actor, the harangue of the
orator, or the tune of the musician, the work of all of
them perishes in the very instant o f its production. (Cited
in Parker, 1993, 33)
Wilde himself acknowledges the difficulty of defining cultural work, and the
peculiar gendering attendant on it:
Indeed it is only the women in America who have any
leisure at all; and as a result of this curious state of
things, there is no doubt but that, within a century from
now, the whole culture o f the New World will be in
petticoats. (Lewis, 1936, 152).
This feminization of culture, along with the association of culture with

leisure reveals Wildes participation in the very discourses that threaten to
marginalize himself and his work, and simultaneously mark his contestation
of social norms of evaluation. Given the doctrines and history of
aestheticism, as a movement, it is easy to see why Wilde is effeminized in
Britain and in America. To rehearse an old but useful set of cultural
generalizations: the industrial revolution, along with ideologies of political
economy and utilitarianism and the expansion of Empire shunts cultural
questions to the feminized margins, where arguably they refuse to stay, but
manly questions cluster around what is proper, what is profitable, but it is
not manly to ask what is beautiful.5 Culture may be feminized too for
Wilde, but that does not diminish its value or importance for him.
The relationship between culture - aesthetically defined - and mass-
53 See A. Sinfields Alfred Tennyson (1986, 136-42).
Reproduced with permission o f the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.
157
consumption is a fraught one for Wilde. He is decidedly ambivalent.

paradoxically so, given the dependence of the success of his lecture tour on
mass-circulated images of him (as in the series of lithographs mentioned
above) and his valorization of the mass production of household objects in
The Soul o f Man under Socialism. Nevertheless, Wilde holds true to an
aristocratic notion o f connoisseurship, which favors unique objects and
displays an allegiance to ideals of craftsmanship, not usually associated with
ideologies of consumerism:
There is a word now o f modem invention and in commonuse. which o f all words is the most uneuphonistic. that is
second hand. This means directly you have used a thing
it necessarily decreases in value. If a thing is made well
and equally well-designed, its value should increase."
( Decorative Arts Lecture. Reported in the Evening
Light, San Antonio Texas, June 22. 1882).
Yet if Wilde is essentially selling himself in America, he too is second-hand

or perhaps more importantly his appearances in America refute the
possibility of telling the difference between the copy and the original, the
first-hand and the second-hand. DOyly Carte brings Wilde to America to
help promote the official Gilbert and Sullivan production of Patience, their
satire on the British aesthetic movement. They wish to mount a production
of their satire in America to counteract a number of pirated productions
independently staged by moving American companies. Lewis notes that
American managers had bribed Cartes musicians, taken stenographic notes
during the London performances, memorized parts of the action, in their
effort to steal the play. (Lewis, 1936, 5) There is no international copyright
law at this time to protect Carte or Gilbert and Sullivan.
Wilde, as the original of the parody, is brought over to authenticate

the parody against other copies of the parody, which have preceded the
original parody in America. The first is thus the last to arrive, and
prefiguring the way scandal is increasingly open to being capitalized through
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being staged for public consumption, Wilde can, by traveling in the wake of
his copy, Bunthome in Patience, make some money. Just as Carte wishes to
cash in on his copies, so does Wilde, the original. The very circumstances
which bring Wilde to America stage in the flesh the crisis of the work of art
in an age of mechanical reproduction. Who is the authentic aesthete?
Wherever Wilde goes, he encounters people dressed as himself, he himself
parodies himself in having especially outrageous costumes made for the
American tour ( the knee breeches are never seen in England). Aestheticism
is clearly cultural property. Who can own it?
An 1882 cartoon by Thomas Nast in Harper's Weekly January 21,

1882 shows Mark Twain dressed up as Oscar Wilde is entitled Innocence
Abroad (In Search of a Copyright) and neatly dramatizes the difficulty of
understanding the artist as a worker and cultural artifacts as products and
property. Twain, in a too too aesthetic pose, holds up a posy in his one
hand while clutching a copy of his manuscript, T he Prince and the Pauper"
under his other arm. He stands in front of a farm stall called the Department
of Agriculture (truly rural culture) producing an explicit comparison
between the spheres of agriculture and culture. The materiality of food, with
its undisputed use-value is contrasted with the ephemerality of cultural
products, which have no immediate use-value, and which continue to
circulate after their consumption. If anything consumption facilitates their
circulation rather than terminates it. The products on sale are lily white
Flour, we Cabbage all we can from the Yankees, authors are small
potatoes and dead beets. Wilde exacerbates the dilemma Twain is satirized
as experiencing here. For he does not even have something as concrete as a
manuscript to peddle. Prefiguring modem notions of celebrity, and arguably
Wilde is just such a creature - someone who is famous for being famous Wilde is selling his personality as much as anything else. It is the image of
the aesthete which is being offered as a commodity. As much as Wilde
159
aesthetically abhors the proliferation of outdoor advertising in America, his

success is implicated in the same valorization of ideal images, the same
indeterminacy between original and copy, fantasy and labor, production and
consumption.
Wilde remains uneasily caught between a commitment to the values

of craft and aura in the Benjaminian sense on the one hand and an immense
excitement about the aesthetic possibilities in mass production on the other:
Cheap editions of great books are delightful, but cheap editions of great
men are detestable. (1966, 1092)
As The Soul o f Man Under Socialism is to suggest, there is a strong

thrust of egalitarianism to Wildes elitism. In certain ways, the access of the
masses to the great art and books of civilization resists racial and cultural
hierarchies o f value as much as such access popularizes and re-entrenches
dominant values.
We have seen how Wildes submerged Irishness; his potential

severance of race from civilization; and the profound uncertainty as to the
kind and value of the labor he performs all contribute to producing Wilde as
not quite white. In addition, the spectacle of producing culture, dangerously
close to what the happy, laughing, dancing Negroes do, is also feminized.
Contemporaneous accounts continuously locate effeminacy in the body of
Wilde (no mean feat because Wilde was six foot three and well over two
hundred pounds). On April, 13, 1882, The Denver Tribune offers this
characterization of Wilde:
He was conspicuous for his splendid physique, his long
hair and singular caste of features, which in repose would
be half of man and half of woman. In every movement of
the man. it was easy to detect something which gave an
effeminate shade to his masculinity bearing a striking
resemblance to the Scribner portrait of George E lio t.. .
When he touched his lips, it was with the delicacy, that a
160
lady puts the finishing touch upon a face cosmetic.
The Sioux City Journal reworks the same theme:

Mr. Wilde is kindly, much like a forgiving aunt. His
demeanour is lady-like. He occasionally moistened his
wrists in a preoccupied way with perfume from a tiny flat
vial. His large liquid eyes rolled upwards at times he
became interested, something as a schoolgirls when she
speaks to an intimate friend o f her latest love-affair.
(Lewis, 1936, 227).
In a culture which could only valorize white middle-class femininity (and in

the late nineteenth century, this is femininity par excellence) in the sanctity
of the home, the public spectacle of the effeminized man was bound to
draw disapproval. How Wildes effeminacy becomes imbued with racialized
and racist connotations requires a more circuitous explanation. Firstly, there
is the simple parallel: To impute blackness, as to impute femininity is to
attempt to degrade and diminish. However, in an increasingly scientific age,
and with the emergence of social Darwinism on both sides of the Atlantic,
the feminized white man (irrespective of his sexuality which is something
only thrown fully into public discussion through the Wilde trials in 1895)
presents a problem in racial terms.
In The Descent o f Man (1872). Darwin uses his now discredited

doctrine of sexual selection to account for racial difference. Darwin,
unburdened with a knowledge of Mendelian genetics, assumed that mothers
passed their attributes onto their daughters and fathers onto their sons.
Gender difference while never equaling species difference may approach it.
Which gender has agency in sexual selection is a crucial question for
Darwin as it is this gender which will lead in the further evolution of man.54
Working on the assumption that ornamentation is undertaken to allure the
** Here, I am indebted to Alys Weinbaum for pointing out to me the implications o f Darwin's
doctrine of sexual selection for a racialization o f white male effeminacy.
161
opposite gender for the sake of heterosexual reproduction, and blind to the
normative ornamentation of men in his own culture, Darwin distinguishes
between the civilized (the European) and the primitive (everyone else) on the
grounds that in the European, the woman is ornamented and is thus the one
to be chosen. This is scripted not only on the social level, but
physiologically as well.
For ornamentation in European humans is seen to belong to woman.

Darwin asserts: and with Europeans, the women are perhaps the more
brightly coloured of the two, as may be seen when both sexes have been
equally exposed to the weather. (1998, 316)
Secondly and relatedly, ornamentation is the property of savages Not one great country can be named from the Polar regions in the North to
New Zealand in the South, in which the aborigines do not tattoo
themselves. (1998, 339). And as with the animal kingdom, more exotic
plumage frequently gets assigned to the male. If historically, the feminized
male represented the apotheosis of aristocratic refinement and culture, with
his sumptuous costume indicative of his power, splendor and freedom from
labor, this emergent scientific discourse begins to contest this. While the
dandy has always been decadent, evolutionary ideology literally makes him
degenerate. Wilde registers potently in both discourses.
The Puck cartoon Coiffure of the Aesthete (January 25, 1882)

suggests that Darwins scientific ideas about ornamentation have acquired a
certain popular currency. The satirical advice given to Oscar as to what to
do with his hair contains three racialized representations. He can wear it a
la Cherokee, or braid it in little pigtails, or do the Circassian Girl in a
show. To wear ones hair as ornament is clearly the prerogative of women
and savages. The final piece of advice offered is to suggest that he shave it
162
off and sell it to a hair mattress factory. Blind or resistant to the capital of
Wildes hair as spectacle, the cartoon implies that the proper manly thing to
do would be to exchange ornament for some immediate (and lowly)
economic gain. Arguably the three racialized images are contained within a
homoerotic frame. The first piece of advice is that the aesthete comb it over
in front in order to present himself a posteriori to the world. The improper
presentation of the top section of the male body may mark a displaced
anxiety about an improper and inverted position of the unmentionable lower
parts of Oscars physique. The desire to have him shave it off and sell it to a
mattress factory hints at simultaneous fantasies of castration and an
inexpressible desire to sleep on the aesthetes hair, if not on the aesthete
himself.
Given that cross-gendered performances on the American stage in

the nineteenth century accounted for much of the titillating and heady
pleasure of blackface minstrelsy, the effeminized Wilde further becomes
racialized by association. Men looking like women evoked the sexualized
anxieties of white passing for black and the thrills and pleasures of
perceived degeneration.
Although Alan S infield argues cogently that the association of

effeminacy with homosexuality is something which follows on the scandal
of the Oscar Wilde trials, rather than produces it, and according to Ellmann,
Wilde was still a virgin as far as men were concerned at this time,
homosexual anxieties and pleasures around his presence are visible during
the American tour. In accordance with Sinfields claims around the shifting
significance of effeminacy, W ildes excessive concern with his personal
appearance, which is one of the things that feminize him in all the
newspaper accounts of his tour, is seen to result from too much desire to
please the ladies. A feminine identification is paradoxically an indication of
163
too much heterosexuality rather than indication of its lack and the presence
of its opposite. The Echo (July, 11, 1883) assumes that Wildes effeminacy
would disappear if he think less of how he looks in ladies eyes.
However, the recoding of effeminacy as indicative of homosexual
tendencies is already emergent, and in Darwinian terms may play out
racially. The public representation of possible male same sex desire is, like
in the minstrel shows, displaced onto the body of racial others.
Connections between unnatural unions and the question of race are

visible long before the homosexual body can be articulated as such, and in
contexts sharply divergent from minstrel shows and aesthetic lecture tours.
Carlyle in Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question (1849) has a
racialized homo-erotic fantasy/nightmare:
These two. Exeter-Hall Philanthropy and the Dismal
Science, led by any sacred cause of Black Emancipation, or
the like, to fall in love and make a wedding of it, - will
give birth to progenies and prodigies; dark extensive moon
calves. unnameable abortions, wide-coiled monstrosities,
such as the world has not seen hitherto. (Carlyle, 1906, 5).
In this extract, the coupling, albeit only metaphoric, of two masculinely

gendered and presumptively white protagonists - Exeter-Hall Philanthropy
and the Dismal Science produces dark extensive mooncalves. Carlyle too
offers the spectacle of the black male in effeminizing and sexualized terms:
I decidedly like poor Quashee, and find him a pretty kind of
man. With a pennyworth of oil, you can make a handsome
glossy thing of Quashee . . . A swift, supple fellow; a
merry-hearted, grinning, dancing, singing, affectionate kind
of creature, with a great deal of melody and amenability in
his composition. (Carlyle, 1906, 8).
It is noteworthy how the black man is to be ornamented, made handsome

and glossy by a pennyworth of oil, coming to occupy the objectified,
feminine position in Carlyles contemptuous, but perhaps unconsciously
desiring gaze.
164
Thirty years later, Wilde, in America, would invite the specter of

homoeroticism to play out over the bodies of racialized others. Reporters
would translate the footlight oration of the Sioux Chief, Wan-Kan-ChawNik-Kaw, who traveled with Buffalo Bills roadshow, asmeaning a desire
to be left alone in a forest for a few moments with Oscar Wilde. (Lewis,
1936, 37). What precisely he wished to do with Wilde was not explicitly
articulated, but here the kinship between the highly ornamented and jeweled
beaux savage and his equally exquisite aesthetic counterpart is open to erotic
implications. In Darwins terms, the ornamented man is always akin to the
savage, and the very act of ornamentation undermines masculinity, for to
produce oneself as an object for sexual selection, which is the purported aim
of ornamentation, is to relinquish the ostensibly masculine prerogatives of
choice, agency and leadership of the race. The ideological schema of
Darwins management of sexual and cultural difference is marvelously tight:
Ornamentation feminizes savage men. placing them under the yoke of their
women in the process of sexual selection, which is one of the reasons why
they are backward and savage. Effeminacy accounts for savagery, and
savagery accounts for effeminacy.
Under such a schema, the ornamented civilized man creates a

different dilemma. If, in civilization, men are the agents of sexual selection
and choose the most beautiful women in order to further the advancement of
the race, the ornamented man is implicitly producing himself as an object for
a desiring male gaze and the specter of male homosexual desire emerges.
Wildes attire in America induced much consternation, and he joked

that his legs invariably caused more of a stir than he did. The Greek frame
of reference from the following snippet of satire from Moonshine highlights
the homoerotic implications of Wildes display of male flesh, for the
165
unspeakable vice of the Greeks could not be very far away from Apollo
and Hercules apparent admiration of the curve of Wildes calf.
Legs Apollo might have sighed for
Or great Hercules have died for
His knee breeches now display.
(Lewis. 1936, 231)
The invocation of the Greeks in an evolutionary climate raises the

developmental problems in the representation of male homosexuality that I
have been trying to delineate, with a different inflection. The possibility of
male homosexuality can only exist in the past, in the putative historical past
of the ancients, or the past-in-the-present of the savage or the past-in-thefuture of the degenerate. These representations of Wilde, as an emergent,
embodied (and ultimately emblematic) homosexual man enact this
impossibility of his being in the present.
It is thus possible to read in the cultural representations of Wildes

body many of the ambivalences aestheticism engaged at the turn of the last
century. I hope I have shown that W ildes aestheticism offers us a strange
set of counter-normative discourses, at odd angles to his imperial context.
Within his body of work, he tends to privilege art over nature, leisure
over labor, pleasure over utility, youth over age, the exotic over the
parochial, the aristocrat over the bourgeois, incipient homosexuality over
emergent heterosexuality in ways that never cohere into a utopian
revolutionary praxis; but he offer us a useful and pleasurable set of
surprising and conflicting fault-lines for thinking about problems of
representation in an age of empire.
166
The past is another country, they do things differently there.

The Go-Between. L. P. Hartley
Chapter 4
The Ontogeny/Phylogeny Recapitulation and its Discontents: The
Homosexual and the Primitive in the Evolution of Psychoanalysis.
The preceding chapters have concerned themselves with some social

uses (literary, sexological, scientific) of a developmental narrative under the
sign of evolution. I have tried to focus on the import of this developmental
organization of human difference for the theorizing of social identities of race
and sexuality. Beginning with Darwins Descent o f Man, I argued for
developmental conceptions of gender and racial difference. With regard to the
Victorian sexologists and homosexual apologists, I tried to show how
evolutionary narratives were taken up in the invention of the homosexual
body, while being fleetingly, but importantly contested, by the concept of
inversion. I then attempted to recover moments of resistance to the idea of
difference as necessarily developmental in selected works of Oscar Wilde and to
understand how these resistances to developmental narratives, as well as the
narratives themselves, get projected onto the body of Wilde in many popular
cultural representations of him. In this chapter, I consider the intrapsychic
mapping of the same developmental narratives in Freuds theorizing of male
homosexuality in relation to race. How does Freuds account of the implicitly
white and male homosexual use evolutionary configurations of space and time
to produce such a subject?
167
Attempts to historicize Freud' have criticized his universalistic

assumptions by insisting that the conditions of individuation and individual
psychological development are necessarily social: that the centrality of castration
and Oedipus in the emerging psychic life of an individual human being is
dependent on the late nineteenth-century European (monotheistic), middleclass, nuclear family, which is far from a universal condition of human
community. Freuds insights must therefore be bracketed historically and
geographically.1 Such a critique would continue that Freud and the
psychoanalytic theories that he generates, by focusing on the intrapsychic and
by positing certain drives and instincts as universal, cannot account for the
social. He is, in essence, race-blind, class-blind, and in positing the phallus as
some kind of universal signifier, also, to many feminist psychoanalytic
' Historicizing Freud has taken place in a wide array of disciplines and has led to diverging
evaluations of the merits of psychoanalysis and the genius of its founder. Frank Sulloway in
Freud, Biologist o f the Mind, claims that Freud reinscribes many of the now-discredited
principles of nineteenth-century biology into psychoanalytic theory. (1979, 238-276). Jane
Gallop's The Daughter's Seduction: Feminism and Psychoanalysis offers a more critical
feminist contextualization. (1982. 1-5. 22-8 and 136-147). For more critical evaluations of the
role of race in Freuds psychoanalytic inquiry, see Curtis Marez's T h e Coquero in Freud:
Psychoanalysis, Race, and International Economies of Distinction, which suggests that the
movement from the early work on cocaine to Psychoanalysis proper translates an imperial map
into a psychic map and Marianna Torgovnicks Entering Freuds Study (1990, 194-209) which
suggests that the movement o f the analytic cure is staged as a movement from primitive to
civilized, with Freud staging the analyst as the embodiment of civilized male authority. This
list is by no means exhaustive, but is intended to pinpoint different tangents that the attempt to
historicize Freud has taken.
2 One of the most notorious geographical bracketings of psychoanalysis, interestingly in the
context of homosexuality, comes from Frantz Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks (1961): Let
me observe at once that I had no opportunity to establish the overt presence of homosexuality
in Martinique. This must be viewed as the result of the absence of the Oedipus complex in the
Antilles. The schema of homosexuality is well enough known. We should not overlook,
however, the existence of what are called there men dressed like women or "godmothers.
Generally they wear shirts and skirts. But I am convinced that they lead normal sex lives. They
can take a punch like any he-man and they are not impervious to the allures of women - fish
and vegetable merchants. In Europe, on the other hand, I have known several Martinicans who
became homosexuals, always passive, but this was by no means a neurotic homosexuality: for
them it was a means to a livelihood as pimping is for others. (1968, 180)
168
thinkers,3 gender-blind.
Both gender and sexuality occupy much space in the collected works of
Sigmund Freud. Since the Freudian subject is implicitly male, even though
many, if not the majority of his early patients were women, gender as a
category is often treated obliquely. Freud is clearly not sexuality-blind.
Homosexuality is a key component in the psychic life o f all men for Freud,
who does not understand sexuality in the more contemporary minoritizing
identity politics sense. Sexuality is a major explanatory category for Freud in
ways that contrast quite sharply with his evasion of theorizing questions of race
and class in the strictly psychoanalytic works. (In the so-called cultural works,
categories of race and class underpin the more general term civilization,
which is arguably deployed, precisely to obscure such underpinnings.) Freud
can clearly imagine taking homosexuals as patients, whereas working-class
people and people of color only really appear as sociological instances in
phylogenetic arguments. Psychoanalysis is a crucial, if not the crucial discourse
in the medical model of homosexuality, and if Foucaults periodizing is correct,
the birth of psychoanalysis and the emergence of the homosexual as social
identity/species are coincidental, in the strict sense, and maybe more than that.
Thus, I will argue that this kind of historicizing is frequently too quick
to take Freud at his word, that if we contextualize Freud only to note his blindspots, we miss the care and rigor with which Freud reveals the psychic as a
domain utterly saturated with the social. For the very terms Freud uses to
explain intrapsychic dynamics, instead of creating the hermeticism of the
3 See Juliet M itchells classic Feminism and Psychoanalysis (1974. 121-136 and 295-355) for
a thorough summary of early second wave feminist responses to Freud (overwhelmingly
negative) and for Mitchells case for the continued usefulness of psychoanalysis as a tool for
feminist inquiry.
169
individual mind the ultimate province of psychology , both consciously and
unconsciously reveal the deep implication of the social and the psychic in the
processes of individuation that he describes, analyzes, pathologizes and
attempts to cure. Biological instincts and psychic drives, while real for Freud,
have no meaning until brought into social systems of representation.
While the biological nature of humanity is never self-evident to Freud in

the way that it is to Darwin, Freuds use of certain evolutionary schema, topoi
and narratives, tentative and speculative as it may be, implicate him in the
imperial force-field. His tendency to understand gender, racial and sexual
differences largely in temporal developmental terms within individuals aligns
him with evolutionary anthropologists like Lubbock, Tylor, Fison and Howitt figures he cites with approval in his own quasi-anthropological texts.4 His
allegiance to the biogenetic law, which he transposes to the psyche, makes for a
clear echo of nineteenth-century racial science.
In key ways, displaced and consciously understood as constructed

evolutionary arguments about racial difference may lie at the very heart of
Freuds conception of the workings of the individual mind. Rather than being
race-blind, psychoanalysis is saturated with anxieties and speculations about
global racial difference (understood in civilizational terms) displaced and
endlessly reworked in the theater of the mind. The nineteenth century in Europe
marks a sustained, if ultimately futile effort to ground race biologically,5 and
4 See Totem and Taboo (1912-3), where Freud relies on these anthropologists to provide
evidence for the near universal horror of incest (1950, 1-14) and for the presence of animist
religious beliefs amongst primitive peoples (1950, 75-90).
5 This effort shows remarkable resilience and still plays a significant role in debates about racial
matters. See Richard Hermstein and Charles Murrays The Bell Curve (1995, 269-388) and the
revised edition of Stephen Jay Goulds The Mismeasure o f Man (1996, 367-390) for a
definitive rebuttal of these neo-social Darwinist arguments.
170
evolutionary theory was a crucial part of this attempt, often understanding

savage races as subsumed phylogenetic stages in the evolution of the
advanced European races. In this rhetoric, space is temporalized as
contemporaneous non-European cultures are understood as the representatives
of Europe's past. This move subsumes the possibility of cultural difference,
and, more importantly, cultural parity, because the model insistently implies that
"we," the "civilized, have already been the "primitive." Freuds repeated
invocation of Haeckels biogenetic law necessarily risks hierarchical
imputations and the ethical consequences.
The enormously useful and often disturbingly reversible segue for

Freud between questions of race and questions of individual psychic
development is Haeckels biogenetic law: ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny,
whose intinerary I have been at pains to trace in the writings of almost all the
Figures I discuss in this dissertation. Freud's repetition of this famous dictum in
Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) mutually implicates the psychic and
social in an evolutionary rhetoric. The dictum essentially asserts that the
development of the individual over his lifespan (or only embryonically)
recapitulates the development of the species over the time-span of human
evolution. Freud accepts that this is true biological!/ and speculates that it may
be equally applicable to the development of the individual psyche. However,
Freud is careful to divide the provinces of biology and psychoanalysis. In a
1935 letter to Carl Muller-Braunschweig, he writes:
I object to all of you (Homey, Jones, Rado, etc.,) to the extent
that you do not distinguish more clearly and cleanly between
what is psychic and what is biological, that you try to
establish a neat parallelism between the two and that you,
motivated by such an intent, unthinkingly construe psychic
6 Strict recapitulationists are rebutted in the early years of the twentieth century, but
recapitulationists who maintain that phylogenesis is recapitulated embryonically still abound.
See Sulloway (1979, 293-295) and Gould (1977, 221-225).
171
facts which are unprovable and that you, in the process of
doing so, must declare as reactive or regressive much that
without doubt is primary. . . I would only like to emphasize
that we must keep psychoanalysis separate from biology just
as we have kept it separate from anatomy and physiology.
(Cited in Mitchell and Rose, 1982, 1).
Yet the metaphors and arguments Freud uses are frequently drawn from
nineteenth-century biology, and although he rarely articulates what he feels to
be primary as regressive or reactive, he tends, at key moments, to argue that
what he claims as primary is recapitulatory.
Stephen Jay Gould in Ontogeny and Phytogeny (1977) asserts that:

Freud was a devout recapitulationist and he said so clearly and often. (1977,
156). He cites numerous instances in Freuds corpus: Each individual
somehow recapitulates in an abbreviated form the entire development of the
human race. (Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, 199). Ontogenesis
may be regarded as a recapitulation of phylogenesis . . . The phylogenetic
disposition can be seen at work behind the ontogenetic process. (Preface to
1914 Edition of the Three Essays on the Theory o f Sexuality). (Gould, 1977,
156).
Both Gould and Frank Sulloway establish that these are not isolated
instances in Freud but that the biogenetic law is central to his understanding of
human psychic processes. Freuds theory of neuroses depends upon an
evolutionarily-inflected reading of developmental narratives. Neuroses are the
abnormal Fixation on appropriate forms of sexuality for children, which have
somehow continued to exist in the adult. In General Theory of the Neuroses
(1916-7), Freud understands the second factor in the aetiology of the neuroses
as a developmental one:
We are now faced by the important consideration of how the
172
ego behaves if its libido leaves a strong fixation behind at

some point in its (the libidos) development. The ego may
accept this and consequently become to that extent perverse or.
what is the same thing, infantile. It may however adopt a noncompliant attitude to the libidos settling down in this
position, in which case the ego experiences a repression where
the libido has experienced a fixation. (1982, 397).
Hence: We were thus led to regard any established aberration from normal
sexuality as an instance of developmental inhibition and infantilism. (See
Gould, 1977, 158) The idea of neurosis as fixation is thus made
ontogenetically. It is also interesting to note the frequency of the occurrence of
words like archaic (archaische) and prehistoric (prahistorischen) in Three
Essays on the Theory o f Sexuality (1905). The full title of Totem and Taboo
reads Totem and Taboo: Some Points o f Agreement between the Mental Lives
o f Savages and Neurotics/ and indicates the way in which the same point
may be made phylogenetically. Neurotics, definitionally ontogenetically
inhibited, have points of agreement in their mental lives with savages, who, if
we follow evolutionary logic, are phylogenetically inhibited. Lucille B. Ritvo
provides many more instances of Freuds use of this recapitulation, claiming
that the Oedipus complex is the ontogenetic recapitulation of the phylogenetic
murder of the father by the brothers of the primal horde:
The resulting law of recapitulation that Darwin thus reinstated
Freud applied in Totem and Taboo to the parallelisms he saw
in mythology, ethnological material and the Oedipus complex
to reconstruct the actual killing of the father by Darwins
primal horde and the consequent guilt and repression o f incest.
(1990, 79)
As supporting evidence of this claim, she cites Freuds analysis of the Wolf
man, where Freud claims that phylogenesis trumps ontogenesis in producing
the father as the agent of castration, even though in the wolf mans life, it was
7 In German: Totem und Tabu: Einige Ubereinstimmungen in Seeleben Der Wilden und der
Neurotiker. (1978).
173
women who had posed the threat of castration:

At this point the boy had to fit into a phylogenetic pattern,
and he did so, although his personal experience may not have
agreed with it. Although the threats and hints o f castration that
had come his way had emanated from women, this could not
uphold the final result for long. In spite o f everything, it was
his father from whom in the end he came to fear castration. In
this respect, heredity triumphed over accidental experience; in
mans prehistory it was unquestionably the father who
practiced castration as a punishment and later softened it down
into circumcision. (1918, 277).*
This allegiance to Haeckels biogenetic law can thus be understood as a kind of

supplementary structuring device in the psychoanalytic account of neuroses.
When ontogenetic explanatory factors fail to elucidate a situation, phylogenetic
ones can be brought in. In the analysis quoted above, it is clear that the mental
development of the child had to recapitulate the transforming moment from
horde to society, a moment which is in some way genetically encoded
(heredity triumphed over accidental experience). Thus, speculations on the
social evolution of the species, which might be biologically encoded, structure
Freuds narration of the development of the individual psyche.
However, it is not only the phylogeny/ontogeny recapitulation and the
8 In German: D er Knabe hat hier ein phylogenetiesches Schema zu erfiillen und bringt es zu
stande, wenngleich seine persdnlichen Erlibnesse nicht dazu stimmen mogen. Die
Kastrationdrohungen oder Andeutungen, die ererfahren hatte, waren vielmehr von frauen
ausgegangen, aber das konnte das Endergebnis nicht fu r lange aufhalten. Am Ende wurde es
doch der voter, von dem erdie Kastration befiirchtete. In diesem Punkte siegte die Hereditat
iiber das akzidentelle Erleben; in der Vorgeschichte der menscheit ist es gewiss der Voter
gewesen, der die Kastration als Strafe iibte und sie dann zur Beschneidung ermasstigte. (1966,
Vol. 12, 119). The german muddies the waters a little. The castration threats had come more
(vielmehr) from women rather than just from women, allowing for the slight possibility that
there could still remain an ontogenetic explanation for the father being perceived as the agent of
castration. The causal primacy of the phylogenetic explanation remains, though it is implicitly
less than the only explanation. The translation of gewiss as unquestionably, rather than
surely or certainly, reveals a similar strengthening of the phylogenetic argument in the
translation.
174
narratives it engenders that bear an ideological mark in psychoanalysis, it is

arguably the very positing of difference as necessarily developmental itself. In
Civilization and its Discontents (1929), Freud outlines the developmental
dimensions of his mental theater with an extraordinary analogy between the
human mind and the city of Rome:
Now let us, by a flight of imagination, suppose that Rome*
is not a human habitation but a psychical entity with a long
and copious past an entity that is to say in which nothing
that has once come into existence will have passed away and
all the earlier phases of development continue to exist
alongside the latest one.This would mean that in Rome the
palaces o f the caesars and the Septizonium o f Septimus
Severus would still be rising to their old height on the
Palatine and that the castle o f S. Angelo would still be
carrying on its battlements the beautiful statues which graced
it until the siege by the Goths, and so on. But more than this.
In the place occupied by the Palazzo Caffarelli would once
more stand -- without the Palazzo having to be removed -- the
9 Henry Adams in a prescient fantasy o f Rome also constructs the city as a place for the
effective implosion of developmental certainties, and points to the ways in which the
complexities o f human history are ultimately irreducible to an evolutionary biological
law. I cite the following extract in some fullness, because it makes clearer the
implications o f Freuds Roman reconstruction and importantly suggests how the
experience o f sim ultaneity underm ines the developm ental certainties o f the
ontogeny/phylogeny commitment:
Rome was not a beetle to be dissected and dropped: not a
bad French novel to be read in a railway train and thrown
out of the window after other bad French novels, the
morals of which could never approach the immorality of
Roman history. Rome was actual: it was England: it was
going to be America. Rome could not be fitted into an
orderly, middle-class, Bostonian systematic scheme of
evolution. No law of progress applied to it. Not even time
sequences-- the last refuge of helpless historians -- had
value for it. The forum no more led to the Vatican than the
Vatican to the forum. Rienzi, Garibaldi, Tiberius Gracchus,
Aurelian might be mixed up in any relation of time, along
with a thousand more and never lead to a sequence. The
great word Evolution had not yet, in 1860, made a new
religion of histroy, but the old religion had preached the
same doctrine for a thousand years without finding in the
entire history of Rome anything but flat contradiction.
The Education o f Henry Adams (1964. 100).
175
Temple of Jupiter Capitolinus; and this not only in its latest

shape, as the Romans o f the Empire saw it. but also in its
earliest one, when it still showed Etruscan forms and was
ornamented with terra-cotta antefixes. Where the Coliseum
now stands we could at the same time admire Neros vanished
Golden House. On the piazza of the Pantheon we should find
not only the Pantheon o f to-day, as it was bequeathed to us by
Hadrian, but, on the same site, the original edifice erected by
Agrippa . . . And the observer would perhaps only have to
change the direction o f his glance or his position in order to
call up the one view or the other. (1961, 18)
This passage dramatizes a number of problems and solutions for Freud. He is

quick to realize the impossibility of conceiving the mind in pictorial terms, as he
disavows the analogy only a few sentences further on. Nevertheless, the
analogy of the psyche with this dizzyingly reconstructed Rome reveals Freuds
deep engagement with evolutionary and more particularly social Darwinist
tropes for managing questions of so-called developmental differences by
startling conflations of space and time. Time is dazzlingly spatialized here.
Buildings which have existed in the same space may now inhabit the same time
as well. If Lubbock or Tylor had the imagination to conceive of such a scenario,
we would have the gorilla, the australopethicus, the Neanderthal, the
Australian, Tahitian, Aztec, Chinese, Italian - all the portended phylogenetic
stages of human evolution present in plenitude as they gazed at the psyche of
the civilized northern European man. The Freudian overlay would have the
child in the oral and anal stage standing in the same position as the heterosexual
adult in full genitality. These scenes of developmental equivalence are unsettling
for any stable developmental hierarchy. The healthy psyche for Freud contains
multitudes, and it is only a hierarchizing linear mobilization of time that can
order them. This multifarious nature of the normative psyche is what is so
profoundly revolutionary in Freud, and can go much of the way in accounting
for the scandals around the reception of his work. The civilized contains the
176
savage, the heterosexual contains the homosexual (All human beings are
capable of making a homosexual object-choice and have in fact made one in
their unconscious. Three Essays, 1916, 145)." Only the assertion of an
evolutionary developmental narrative can make the necessary distinctions
between the defining polarities of sick and well, normal and abnormal, neurotic
misery and ordinary human unhappiness. Deviation for the Freud prior to
Beyond the Pleasure Principle is always developmental; neurosis is caused by
feelings that are archaic, repressed, fixated, arrested, prematurely developed.
Beyond Beyond the Pleasure Principle, the concept of (compulsive) repetition
complicates the temporalities of arrest, regression and prematurity.
Freud backs away from this analogy with Rome, partly because it
threatens the necessary developmental hierarchies along questions of aesthetic
value. What is lost to present day Rome - the beautiful statues, Neros golden
house - is dangerously equivalent to what stands there now. The analogy allows
for an unsettling aesthetic equivalence between past and present, upsetting the
upward progressive thrust of the phylogenesis/ontogenesis of the city. Able to
muster real respect for the past achievements of Western cultures in ways that
he can never register the value of the achievements of societies deemed racially
other, which remain essentially unreadable for Freud except in subsumed or, at
best, sublimated forms, he cannot posit the sublation of Neros Golden House
as necessary for the existence of the Pantheon. What is so striking about the
passage is the sense that the golden-house, the vanished statues are presented as
' In German: Die psychoanalytische Forschung widersetzt sich mit aller Entschiedenheit
dem Versuche, die Homosexuellen als ein besonders geartete Gntppe von den anderen
Menschen abzutrennen. Indem sie auch andere als die manifest kundgegeben
Sexualerregungen studiert, erfahrt sie, dass alle Menschen der gleichgeschlechtlichen
Objektwahlfdhig sind und dieselbe auch im Unbewussten vollzogen haben. (1961,Vol. 5,
44) Here Freud is explicit in disagreeing (widersetzt) with minoritizing theories of
homosexuality and in insisting that all people have made a homosexual object choice
(gleichgeschlichtlichen Objektwahl) in their unconscious.
177
worth preserving or going back to in ways that the putative animism of the
Primitive, the intensity of oral desire, or the lurking valorisation of GrecoRoman same-sex sexual desire cannot really be. Though within the economic
model of Freuds metapsychology in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, the energy
of these earlier ontogenetic and phylogenetic moments needs to be harnessed
for the projects of individual growth and civilization, respectively. We see here
a foreshadowing of the anxiety of Civilization and its Discontents (1929), that
civilization, as Freud understands it, requires too much loss, too much
destruction of what is valuable in the process of evolution. What should be
developmental stages come dangerously close to looking like valuable ends in
themselves. The analogy between the psyche and Rome allows for a
simultaneity of all the various stages of development, which are all present
virtually, and consequently threatens the idea of development perse.
To play in Freuds paleontological register, we need the dinosaurs to

become extinct (and to leave a fossil record) in order for the ascendance of
mammals and man. If we can imagine a phylogenetic neurosis, Freud by
refusing to distinguish in terms of time (and value)between the Coliseum and
Neros Golden House, the Palazzo Cafarelli and the temple of Jupiter
Capitolinus, is implicitly revalorizing the dinosaurs, or the savages or any other
sublated stage in his ontogeny/phylogeny recapitulation. His analogy threatens
developmental certainties on another front by suggesting the stage of the mind
as a stage in which phases of development can coexist simultaneously.
It is equally important to note Freuds resistance to teleological versions

of progress in the form of the emergence of the death instincts in Beyond the
Pleasure Principle (1920). The theorizing of the compulsion to repeat allows for
178
no necessary upward or forward trajectory and revealingly Freud accounts for it

in phylogenetic terms, claiming inter alia that the most impressive proofs of
their being an organic compulsion to repeat lie in the phenomena of heredity and
the facts of embryology (1920, 48):
Those instincts are therefore bound to give a deceptive
appearance of being forces towards change and progress, whilst
in fact they are merely seeking to reach an ancient goal by
paths alike old and new. Moreover it is possible to specify this
final goal of all organic striving.. .it must be an old state of
things, an initial state from which the entity has at one time
or another departed and to which it is striving to return by the
circuitous paths along which its development leads. If we are
to take it as a truth that knows no exception that everything
living dies for internal reasons - becomes inorganic once again
-- then we shall be compelled to say that the goal of all life is
death and, looking backwards, that what was inanimate
existed before what is living. (50)' .
In an illuminating way, the theorizing of the death instincts breaks the

ontogeny/phylogeny recapitulation because the drive of species life in
evolutionary theory is survival through successful reproduction. If, for Freud,
the drive of individual psychic life is to death, how may ontogenesis
recapitulate phylogenesis? In the above extract, problems that a strand of
"in German: Die konservativen organischen Triebe haben jede dieser aufgezwungenen
Abanderungen des Lebenslaufes aufgenommen und zur Widerholung aufbewahrt und
miissen so den tauschende Eindruck von Kraften machen, die nach Veranderung und
Fortchritt streben, wahrend sie bloss ein altes Ziel a u f alten und neuen Wegen zu
erreichen trachten. Auch dieses Endziel alles organischen Strebens liesse sich angeben.
Die konservativen Naturder Triebe widersprdche es, wenn das Ziel des lebens ein noch
nie zuvor erreichter Zustand ware. Es muss vielmehr ein alter, ein Ausgangszustand sein.
den das Lebende einmal verlassen hat, und zu dem es iiber all Umwege der Entwicklung
zuruckstrebt. Wenn wir es als ausnahmlose Erfahrung annehmen diirfen, dass alles
Lebende aus inneren Grunden stirbt, ins Anorganische zuriickkehrt, so konnen wir nur
sagen: Das Ziel alles lebens ist der Tod, und zuriickgreifend: Das Leblose warfriiher da
als das Lebende. (1966, Vol. 13, 40). The original allows one to grasp the paradox of the
death instincts more fully. The verb zuruckstreben - translated as striving to return literally means backwards striving. In the translation it is only the direction of the
striving that is reversed, in the German, the qualitative difference of the death instinct is
more potently registered. The injection of a latinate register in the translation of Leblose
as inanimate rather than the more literal lifeless undoes some of the intimacy of the
Lebende/Leblose connection.
179
modem physics has with theories of biological evolution appear emergent: How
does one square the law of the conservation of Energy and the law of Entropy
with the law of Natural Selection? How can Life be so busy adapting, when
the universe (like Oscar Wilde in Chapter 3) naturally inclines to inertia?
In an intriguing reading of the famous second chapter of Beyond the

Pleasure Principle, Jacques Derrida suggests ways in which Freuds attempt to
theorize the death drives as the beyond of the pleasure principle explodes the
possibility of progressive teleological development in Freuds thought.
Derridas reading is useful for me in that it can be made to suggest a radical
break between Darwin and Freud in their respective conceptions of time.
Simply put, there is no question of a compulsion to repeat in Darwin (Species
adapt, become extinct or, like the crocodile, stay the same). As much as
Psychoanalysis partakes in evolutionary schemas of time, the time/s of Life Darwins founding abstraction - are not just repeated by the time/s of the Psyche
- Freuds founding abstraction. There is no trace of radical alterity to the
survival of the fittest1* principle in evolution, no beyond. Derridas reading
implicates Freuds speculative mode (and it is a developmental one) in this
chapter with the very psychic processes Freud is attempting to describe:
Now, if one attempts to make oneself attentive to the original
modality of the speculative, and to the singular proceeding of
this writing, its p asde these which advances without
advancing, without advancing itself, without ever advancing
anything that it does not immediately take back, for the time
of a detour, without ever positing anything which remains in
its position, then one must recognize that the following
chapter repeats, in place and in another place, the immobile
emplacement of the pasde these. It repeats itself, it illustrates
only the repetition of that very thing (the absolute authority of
the PP) which finally will not let anything be done without it
(him), except repetition itself. In any event, despite several
marching orders and steps forward, not an inch of ground is
gained; not one decision, not the slightest advance in the
12 The term is Spencers, though it may as well be Darwins.
180
question that occupies the speculator, the question of the PP as

absolute master (1987, 293-4).
To call this a difficulty for Freud would be a mistake, as it is this

apparent impasse, the task of ascertaining a beyond before, which is the
speculative motor for Freuds inquiry in this chapter of Beyond the Pleasure
Principle. I will defer further discussion of Derridas insights into temporality in
Freud until my conclusion, but I wish for my reader to have them in mind as I
continue attempting to unpack the phylogeny and ontogeny (terms saturated
with assumptions about temporal development) of the homosexual in Freuds
corpus.
In Three Essays on the Theory o f Sexuality ( 1905),Freud goes some

way to denaturalizing questions of sexuality in that causation seems to operate
almost accidentally. In the preface to the third edition, he writes:
Throughout the entire work, the various factors are placed in a
particular order of precedence: preference is given to the
accidental factors, while disposition is left in the background,
and more weight is attached to ontogenesis than to
phylogenesis (1982, 131)."
Nevertheless, his benign but easily pathologized theorizing of male

homosexuality can still be seen as a reinscription of biological evolutionism into
the sphere of the psychic. In a now famous letter to an American mother of a
homosexual son, he writes:
13 In German: Uberall wird ein gewisser Instanzenzug eingehalten. werden die akzidentellen
Momente vorangestellt, die dispositionellen im Hintergrund gelassen und wird die
ontogenetische Entwicklung vor derphylogenetische beriicksichtigt. (1961, Vol. 5. 29) The
German captures the contingent nature of Freuds thought on sexuality more accurately. The set
of structuring relational concepts - accidental, dispositional, ontogenetic and phylogenetic - can
be maneuvered between foreground and background and are not necessarily always in the same
relation to each other. Stracheys insertion o f the ideas of preference and more weight gives
Freuds prose more certainty and undermines the possibility of reversal present in the explicit
spatial maneuvering in Freuds prose.
181
Homosexuality is assuredly no advantage, but it is nothing to

be ashamed of. no vice, no depredation, it cannot be classified
as an illness, we consider it to be a variation of the sexual
function produced by a certain arrest o f sexual development...
In a certain number of cases, we succeed in developing the
blighted germs of heterosexual tendencies which are present in
every homosexual, (cited in Abelove 1993, 381).
Freud moves from a figuration of homosexuality as a variant of the

sexual function to an inscription of it as an arrest" of sexual development. The
cure involves the recuperation of the blighted heterosexual germs. In the idea of
arrest and the metaphor of blight, illness, explicitly denounced earlier, returns
through the back-door. Earlier, Freud, in Three Essays on the Theory o f
Sexuality, writes in a language that denaturalizes homosexuality, but still
produces it as truncated development:
What we have thrown together, for reasons of convenience,
under the name homosexuality may derive from a diversity of
processes of psychosocial inhibition. (1982, 146). Italics
mine.
This theorizing of homosexual desire can be figured developmentally in ways

that are not interchangeable with ideas of arrest or inhibition. In Leonardo da
Vinci: A Study in Psychosexuality, Leonardos imputed homosexuality" is
explained in terms of a psychosexual precocity:
In the manner of all ungratified mothers she thus took her
little son in place of her husband and robbed him of part of his
virility by maturing too early his erotic life. (1947, 88).u
Most importantly, this insistence on figuring homosexuality in developmental

terms always robs the homosexual of any claim to parity in the homo/hetero
M In German: So nahm sie nach der Art aller unbefriedigten Mutter den kleinen Sohn an Stelle
ihres Mannes an und raubte ihm durch die allzu friihe Refung seiner Erotik ein Stuck seine
Mannlichkeit. (1964, Vol. 8, 187). I have no quibbles with the translation here. This is the
account of male homosexuality in Freud that gripped the twentieth century popular
imagination. Gay boys have too intense a relationship with the mothers, causing an
identification with the mother and consequent desire for men. My mother made me a
homosexual. If I gave her the wool, would she make me one too.
182
binary. It resists the issue of dispositional or constitutive difference in sexual

desire as well as removing questions of individual agency in the choice of sexobject and and sexual aim. As long as homosexuality is conceived of as a
developmental disorder, rather than as a congenital disposition, a choice, an
historical social species in the Foucauldian sense, there is always the possibility
of a psychoanalytic cure.15
Freud is however explicit in resisting the other evolutionary trope for

understanding homosexuality, namely degeneracy. He views degeneracy in
general as a term which is used too indiscriminately in explaining any symptom
which is not immediately explicable by trauma or infection.
If we disregard the patients we come across in our medical
practice, and cast our eyes round a wider horizon, we shall
come in two directions upon facts which make it impossible
to regard inversion as a sign of degeneracy:
a) Account must be taken of the fact that inversion was a
frequent phenomenon one might almost say an institution
charged with important functions - among the peoples of
antiquity at the height of their civilization.
b) it is remarkably widespread among many savage and
primitive races, whereas the concept of degeneracy is usually
restricted to states of high civilization (cf. Bloch); and, even
amongst the civilized peoples of Europe, climate and race
exercise the most powerful influence on the prevalence of
inversion and upon the attitude adopted towards it. (1982,
15 While Freud himself is not particularly concerned with curing homosexuals, the roots for this
subsequent fixation of psychoanalysis are present in the way in which he describes the
homosexual. See Abelove (1993. 381-386), for a historical analysis and critique of the impulse
to cure homosexuals in particularly U.S. psychoanalysis and Socarides (1978, 1989) for
rationalizations of the cure imperative. Richard Isay (1989, 1996) and Kenneth Lewes (1988)
offer sympathetic psychoanalytic accounts of homosexuality from the perspective of clinical
practice.
183
I39).1"
Although Freud has earlier in the essay claimed that the ontogenetic
factors are more critical in his theory of sexuality, the use of the axis of
civilized/ primitive points to lurking phylogenetic questions. If inversion is to
be found amongst the highest and lowest levels of human civilization, then it
becomes difficult to explain in terms of the recapitulation of phylogeny by
ontogeny. Ontogenetically, homosexuality is explainable by an arrest of the
development of the sexual instinct in terms of both sexual object and sexual
aim. Phylogenetically, it is difficult to explain at all. given the privileged place
of reproductive heterosexuality as the evolutionary motor of species-life.
Moreover, if we think back to the aesthetic valorization of certain lost stages in
the analogy of the psyche with Rome, normative homosexuality can be
registered as a loss, like the earlier pantheon or Neros golden house.
While Freud is clear that degeneracy cannot account for homosexuality

phylogenetically on account of the social presence of same-sex desire in all
16 In German: Wenn man von den Patienten seiner artzlichen Erfahrung absieht und einen
weiteren Gesichtskreis zu umfassen strebt, stosst man nach zwei Richtungen a u f Tatsachen,
welche die Inversion als Degenerationseichen aufzufassen verbieten.
a) Man muss Wert darauf legen. dass die Inversion einige Haufige Ercheinung, fast eine mil
wichtigen Funktionen betraute Institution bei den alten Volkem a u f der Hohe ihrer Kultur war:
b) man findet sie ungemein gebreitet bei vielen wilden und primitiven Volkem, wahrend man
den begriff der Degeneration a u f die hohe Zivilisation zu Beschranken ist (I. Bloch); selbst
untem den zivilisiertien Volkem Europas haben Klima und Rasse a u f die Verbreitung und die
Beurteiling der Inversion den machtigsten Einfluss. (1961. Vol. 5, 37-38).
Like Ellis, Symonds and Carpenter, Freud must struggle with the pervasive presence of samesex desires and acts across putatively civilizational divisions. Strachey softens Freuds borderline
polemic against degeneracy as an explanation of homosexuality. Verbieten (forbid) is rendered
as impossible to regard. What is strange about this passage is that climate and race (Klima
und Rasse) are brought back in as factors even though the thrust of the essay is on accidental,
ontogenetic factors.
184
developmental stages of civilization, the figuration of homosexuality and
savagery as arrested development, ontogenetically and phylogenetically has
possibilities for a crucial analogy. Freud is insistent that the the locus of
arrested development is not inhabited by the homosexual alone.
Prehistoric man . . . is still our contemporary. There are men
still living who, as we believe, stand very near to Primitive
man, far nearer than we do, and whom we therefore regard as
his direct heirs and representatives. Such is our view of those
whom we describe as savages or half-savages; and their mental
life must have a peculiar interest for us if we are right in
seeing in it a well-preserved picture of an early stage of our
own development. (Totem and Taboo. 1950, l).17
Although the passage distinguishes between prehistoric man and the

contemporary peoples who are regarded as his direct heirs and
representatives," here again, we have the temporalization of space, typical of
Social Darwinist explanations and so integral to evolutionary anthropology.
Savages who inhabit a different space but the same time, actually inhabit a
different time but the same space - they inhabit our past. Half-savages occupy a
time halfway between the savages and the civilized. Their mental life offers
Freud a well-preserved picture of an early stage of our own development,"
not only phylogenetically, but also ontogenetically.
The shared tropes of this psychoanalytic formulation and a classic

colonizing gaze are striking. They are both subjectifying gazes. In the case of
ontogenesis recapitulating phylogenesis, the civilized individual in his ontogeny
has literally incorporated his putatively developmentally retarded savage Other.
17 In German: Ausserdam aber ist er noch in gewissem Sinne unser Zeitgenosse; es leben
menschen, von denen wir glauben, doss sie den Primitiven noch sehr nahe stehen, viel ndher
als wir, in dener wir daher die direkten Abkommlinge und Vertreter derfriiheren Menschen
erblicken. Wir urteilen so iiber die sogenannten Wilden und halbwilden Volker, deren
Seelenleben ein besonderes Interesse fu r uns gewinnt, wenn wir in ihm eine gut erhaltene
Vorstufe unsere eigenen Entwicklung erkennen diirfen. (1978, Vol. 19. 5).
185
The European subject needs the savage Other to experience himself as civilized,
and he needs the Other inside himself as much as he needs the Other external to
himself. To borrow a few rhetorical strategies from Freud, it is possible to read
the nineteenth century fascination with the putative cannibalism of African,
American, and Polynesian peoples as a projection of the European mode of
psychic construction in the age of empire (having the Primitive other always
and already incorporated into them courtesy of the prevalence of evolutionary
understandings of racial difference can easily be Figured as having eaten
them) onto the other, transmuting the psychic violence and incorporation
performed in the constitution of the Self into physical violence and ingestion
performed by the Other, in classic paranoid disavowal and projection.'*
Eve Kosofsy Sedgwick, in a reading of the unthinkable nature of homo

erotic desire in the case of Dr. Schreber in relation to the evasions of homo
erotic representations in Wildes Picture o f Dorian Gray (Sedgwick, 1990,
163), suggests the ways in which narcissism may follow homosexuality. The
statement, I love him, must be disavowed and the projection, I am him,1'
substituted in its place. Adapting Sedgwicks reading of the paranoia produced
by the prohibition on homosexuality to cannibalism, it becomes possible to
assert that the other great unthinkable desire for human flesh can also function
paranoically. In this instance, racial difference under an evolutionary schema
18 In important ways, European fascination with cannibalism can also be argued to function as a
fetish, showing the signs o f the classic mechanisms of fetishism - disavowal and projection.
Their own incorporation o f the savage through the narrative of evolution is disavowed (as is the
castration of the mother in Fetishism) and then projected onto the savage other.
,9 Freuds formulation of narcissism as a paranoid defense against homosexual feelings is es ist
mich - that is me, rather than I am him," implying that the homosexual desire itself is part of
what is projected. This formulation does not necessarily undermine Sedgwicks argument
though it may nuance the dynamic of psychic identification and incorporation. The that is me
formulation is both less absolute and more suggestive of the aggrandizing movement of
narcissistic incorporation than the self-shattering that I am him may imply.
186
reading I have already incorporated the savage can be disavowed and

projected within the reversing logics of psychoanalytic repressions into the
savage really wants to eat me, or I am not eating them, they are eating each
other.
Patrick Brantlinger notes the lurking fascination with cannibalism by
many evolutionary writers and is worth quoting at length:
When an astute scientific observer such as Huxley indulges in
fantasies about cannibalism, something is at work on a level
deeper than mere caprice. As Dorothy Hammond and Alta
Jablow note, cannibalism was not an important theme in
British writing about Africa before mid-century. But in the
Imperial period writers were far more addicted to tales of
cannibalism than . . . Africans ever were to cannibalism.
Typical of the more sensational treatments of anthropophagy is
Win wood Reade. who in Savage Africa (1863) writes that the
mob o f Dahomey are maneaters, they have cannibal minds;
they have been accustomed to feed on m urder. . . The more
Europeans dominated Africans, the more savage Africans
came to seem; cannibalism represented the nadir of savagery,
more extreme even than slavery (which, o f course, a number of
civilized nations practiced through much of the nineteenth
century). (1985, 184).
A psychoanalytic theorizing of a collective paranoia about evolutionary racial

differences can supplement the more instrumental and ideological investments
in the savagery of Africa, such as justification for conquest and rationales for
civilizing missions. If we understand the constitution of white European racial
identity in the terms offered by the spatialization of time of the evolutionary
narrative, European investments in African cannibalism can be understood as an
unconscious disavowal and projection of their own psychically constitutive
cannibalism at this historical conjuncture? .
20 There is a growing body of recent literature that reads cannibalism in a similar way including
M. Kilgours From Communion to Cannibalism: An Anatomy o f Metaphors o f Incorporation
(1990, 3-19), and sections of C. Herberts Culture and Anomie: Ethnographic Imagination in
the Nineteenth Century (1991, 160-183).
187
European fascination with cannibalism - the attribute par excellence of

primitive peoples - represents a set of disavowed and displaced anxieties around
European subject-formation. Homosexuality, in the Freudian phylogenetic
schema plays a similarly strange role. In Totem and Taboo, the very crucible of
the social, the foundational moment for the possibility of human civilization,
may be predicated on the successful passage through a developmentally
homosexual phase phylogenetically:
Sexual desires do not unite men but divide them. Though the
brothers had banded together in order to overcome their father,
they were all one anothers rivals in regard to the women. Each
of them would have wished, like their father, to have all the
women to himself. The new organization would have collapsed
in this struggle o f all against all, for none o f them was of such
overmastering strength to be able to take on his fathers part
with success. Thus, the brothers had no alternative if they were
to live together, but not perhaps, until they had passed
through many dangerous crises - to institute the law against
incest, by which they all alike renounced the women they
desired and who had been their chief motive in despatching
their father. In this way, they rescued the organization that had
made them strong - and which may have been based on
homosexual feelings and acts, originating perhaps during the
period of their expulsion from the horde. (1950, 144f'
21 Das sexuelle Bediirftiis einigt die Manner nicht, sondem entzweit sie. Hatten sich die Briider
verbiindet, um den Vaterzu uberwaltigen, so war jeder des anderen Nebenbuhler, bei den
Frauen. Jeder hatte sie wie der Voter alle fiir sich haben wollen, und in dem Kampfe alter gegen
alle wcire die neue Organisation zugrunde gegangen. Es war kein Oberstarker mehr da. der die
Rolle des voters mit Erfolg hatte aufnehemn konnen. Somiet blien den Briidem, wenn sie mit
einander leben wollten, nichts iibrig, als vielleicht nach Uberwindung schwerer
Zwischenfdlle das Inzestverbot aufzurichten, mit welchem sie alle zugleich a u f die von ihnen
begehrten Frauem verzichteten, um deren wegen sie doch in erster Linie den Vater beseitigt
hatten. Sie retteten so die Organisation, welche sie stark gemacht hatte, und die a u f
homosexuellen Gefiihlen und Betatigungen ruhen konnte, welche sich in der Zeit der
vertreibung bei ihnen eingestellt haben mochten. (1978, Vol. 19, 174) Interestingly, the section
on homosexual feelings and acts, which is rendered parenthetical by Strachey is not
grammatically subordinated in the same way in the original German. What is equally clear in
the original and the translation is that the real interest in these homosexual feelings and acts"
is the way in which they may have been necessary in the constitution of the social. They are
understood as instrumental rather than as ends in themselves. They are represented as feelings
and acts, not as Triebe or Instinkte - the terms with explanatory force in Freuds lexicon.
188
The precursor to the founding moment of human culture - the beginning of the
incest taboo, which is what separates us from the animals for Freud, may be
speculatively predicated on the movement from the homosexual to what
Sedgwick terms the homosocial. The organization that made the brothers strong
may have been tentatively based on homosexual feelings and acts.
Phylogenetically, before savages can even be savages they have to have been
and transcended being homosexuals. Interestingly the words used here to
describe homosexual sexual desires are weak words for Freud - Gefiihlens and
Betatigungen - literally feelings and acts. In speaking of the sexual drive in
general, the term Freud uses is Geschlechtstrieb, which in and o f itself does not
necessarily imply a gendered object, but there is no instance in any of the texts I
consider of Geschlectstrieb being used to suggest a homosexual drive, desire or
object. This lead me to conclude that the Geschlechtstrieb is normatively. if not
explicitly heterosexual, particularly in the phylogenetic sphere.
Further evidence of this can be found in the recently recovered A

Phylogenetic Fantasy12 (1915), which Freud chose not to publish in his
lifetime. Freud is extremely wary of his speculations in this piece of writing in
which he uses his phylogenesis of the human species to account for the
transference and narcissistic neuroses. Here, the story of the brothers of the
primal horde of Totem and Taboo is renarrated through the ontogenetic lens of
22 The title in German of this piece, Ubersicht der Ubertragnungsneurosen," can be translated
as Overview of the Transference Neuroses. Thus the title does not mention phylogenesis at
all, even though the bulk of the first half of the paper is concerned with the renarration of the
story of Darwins primal horde. This text was only published in 1982, and is therefore not part
of the Collected Works o f Freud in English or German. I have not yet managed to locate the
German text, but working solely from the translation. I find it interesting that the homosexual
feelings and acts o f Totem and Taboo are in this account presented as homosexual sexual
satisfaction and the general tone of the extract is generally much less uncertain and speculative
than the earlier account of the same crucial story. I look forward to ascertaining if the original
too reveals these slight, but perhaps significant, changes.
189
paranoia:
The next change could only consist in the fact that the
threatened sons avoided castration by means of flight and,
allied with each other, learned to take upon themselves the
struggle for survival. This living together had to bring social
feelings to the fore and could have been built upon
homosexual sexual satisfaction. It is very possible that the
long-sought hereditary disposition o f homosexuality can be
glimpsed in the inheritance of this phase of the human
condition. The social feelings that originated here, sublimated
from homosexuality, became mankinds lasting possession,
however and the basis for every later society. This phase of the
condition, however, manifestly brings back paranoia; more
correctly paranoia defends itself against its return. In paranoia
secret alliances are not lacking, and the persecutor plays a
tremendous role. Paranoia tries to ward off homosexuality,
which was the basis for the organization of brothers, and in so
doing must drive the victim out of society and destroy his
social sublimations. (1915, 17-8)
Once again, the archaic nature of homosexual desire is implied. Only in this
moment of prehistory is homosexual desire necessary and desirable. The
moment is also short as the brothers must sublimate those feelings in order to
institute society as Freud understands it. Paradoxically, while positing the
sublimation of homosexual desires as the condition for the emergence of the
social, the narrative engine of this story is an a priori unaccounted for
heterosexual desire. Why is it that the brothers should compete with the father
for their mother and their sisters? Why should the brothers not compete with the
mother for the father, or the sisters compete with the mother for the brothers, or
the sisters compete with each other for each other? Working psychoanalytically,
one could produce Oedipus as an explanation until one remembers that this is
the story that is being produced to account for Oedipus phylogenetically.
Ontogeny and phylogeny become tautological in order to ensure that the agents
of desire are always male - father and brothers, the prime objects of desire are
women - the mother and sisters - the homosexual desire between the brothers is
190
substitutive; they will settle for each other provided the father has barred their
access to women. While Freud is elsewhere clear that ontogenetically
heterosexuality, as the norm, must be accounted for as much as the perversions,
that it is not self-evident23, phylogenetically, in this account, heterosexuality can
just be assumed. Phylogenetically, a brief period of homosexual sexual
satisfaction may be necessary to transform the competitive animalesque
heterosexuality24 of the father to the co-operative incest-tabooed heterosexuality
of the brothers. The taboo on incest implicitly contains a homosexual
proscription as well. If the brothers simply decided to settle for each other, the
story of phylogenesis gets stuck, but now it is important to ask the
phylogenesis of what?
This phylogenetic narrative neatly shores up the values of late

nineteenth-century bourgeois imperialist European society understood in
evolutionary terms. Complex social and historical forces can be reduced to
produce the following phylogenetic allegory: White men, having descended
23 Im Sinne der Psychoanalyse ist also auch das ausschtiessliche sexuelle Inleresse des Mannes
fu r das Weib ein der Aufklarung bediirftiges Problem und keine Selbstverstandlichkeit. der eine
im Grunde chemische Anziehung zu unterlegen ist. (1961, Vol. 5, 44)
24 The specter of the hypersexualization of black masculinity rears its head here. See Fanon. F.
Black Skin, White Masks. (1976) One wonders if the insistence of white lynch mobs in the
American south on castrating their victims can be understood in relation to an unconscious
cathecting of such phylogenetic fantasies. The claim o f homosexuality as a white mans disease
made by a range of black nationalisms can also be rendered more intelligible as a reaction
formation to the story of the primal horde as imperial allegory. The homo-erotics of
imperialism operate along the lines of feminizing as well as hyper-virilizing perceived racial
difference. In a persuasive reading o f E. M. Forsters Passage to India in The Rhetoric o f
English India (1992), Sara Suleri notes how the conquest of the colony feminizes the male
colonized, but this is not entirely borne out by her reading of the scene, in which Fielding asks
Aziz to insert his collar studs, as homosexual allegory. For it is Aziz, the feminized colonized,
who gets to do the inserting. (1992, 138-139). Nevertheless as both Fanon and Suleri make
clear, relations between men, both within and across racial lines, are often erotically inflected in
the discourse of imperialism and its counter-discourse anti-colonial nationalism.
191
from the apes via the savages, and having successful ly25 sublimated their
homosexual desire for each other (though a touch paranoid about its possible
return) co-operate with each other in the sharing of women, whose desire is
necessarily subordinated to the men. The men are also working hard to ensure
that the murdered savage father from whom they have descended does not
return. This can also be read as an imperial allegory. Freuds reworking of the
tale of the primal horde,26 despite its lurid subscript of incest, homosexuality
and parricide, could not be a neater allegory of European imperialism, if it tried.
Fascinatingly, ontogenesis and phylogenesis unite in agreement around the
primitivity o f homosexuality: It is very possible that the long-sought hereditary
disposition of homosexuality can be glimpsed in the inheritance of this phase of
25 How successfully is up for grabs considering the information on the sex lives of many o f the
leading lights of empire that has recently emerged. Gordon. Kitchener and Rhodes, three central
and very public figures in the expansion of the British Empire in Africa all shared a soft-spot
for handsome young men. Judd makes the argument that the isolation from racial" peers,
particularly women, the relative power and status of the colonizer over the colonized, could
prove attractive to young men whose sexual desires were taboo in the metropolis, and that a
career in the imperial service opened up opportunities for such men to explore their nonnormative desires with far greater impunity. (1996. 172-3).
26 What is rendered strikingly visible in this texts provisional and sketchy character is how
readily Freud makes use of geological and paleontological discoveries in trying to theorize the
characteristics and development of the individual psyche. To take a tangent here, I wonder how
Freud would use the recent studies on the bonobo - a relative of the chimpanzee, whose social
behavior has recently become a matter of much mainstream U.S media focus. The bonobo
enact a very different pattern of social organization to the primal horde of Freud and Darwin.
Female bonobos, who are much smaller than males, band together to protect themselves and
their young. The bonobo are entirely promiscuous. There is no question of an alpha male (The
Father in Freudian parlance) monopolizing the women (or the men for that matter). The bonobo
have male-male sex, female-female sex. child-adult sex. female-male sex, with noticeable
frequency. Clearly the bonobo are no use to us in searching for our phylogenetic forbears.
Without a dominant male, they cannot cannot be understood as a primal horde. Since the
females share themselves and each other, heterosexual competition for women does not drive the
formation o f the social. The simple point o f this brief digression into recent accounts of the
bonobo is that the ontogeny /phylogeny recapitulation works hard to justify the status quo with
the full force o f all evolutionary history, ensuring what is is because it has to be. The charming
contingency o f bonobo life is lost somewhere on the way. See F. de Waals. Bonobo: The
Forgotten Ape (1997).
192
the human condition. Freud suggests that homosexuality in a male adult could
be due to the inheritance of a phylogenetically transcended developmental
phase, which he fixates on in his ontogenetic recapitualtion of phylogeny.
The analogy between the primitive and the homosexual in the

developmental story of psychoanalysis in this moment in Freud becomes more
than an analogy. It becomes a conflation in the recapitulation of phylogeny by
ontogeny. Freuds debt to evolutionary anthropology is rendered visible. The
late nineteenth century saw the search by anthropologists for Primitive
Promiscuity amongst Australian Aborigines and other peoples deemed savage
and backward, with very little success. Sex itself comes to be seen as a
property of the low and homosexual sex too low even for discussion amongst
Victorian anthropologists. As Freud notes in Civilization and its Discontents,
Civilization behaves towards sexuality as a people or a stratum of its
population does which has subjected another one to its exploitation. (1961,
59).The search for an originary polymorphous sexual perversity, which is the
beginning of our ontogenesis for Freud, had already been undertaken
phylogenetically by anthropologists such as Fison and Howitt27 a generation
earlier. An uneasy ambivalence towards the disgusting but perhaps more
erotically satisfying sexual practices of natives and savages is a key component
in imperial discourses of racial difference. Freud displays his inheritance of this
legacy in Leonardo Da Vinci:
For a long series of generations we have been in the habit of
considering the genitals or pudenda as objects of shame, and in
the case of the more successful sexual repression as objects of
disgust. What exists among us of the other views of sexual
life has retreated to the coarse remnants of the lower social
strata . . . It was quite different in the primitive times o f the
human race. From the laborious collections of the students of
civilization one gains the conviction that the genitals were
originally the pride and hope of living beings; they enjoyed
27 See G. Stockings After Tylor: British Social Anthropology 1881-1951. (1995, 17-34).
193
divine worship, and the divine nature o f their functions was

transported to all newly acquired activities of mankind...........
By considering the indestructibility which is the nature of all
psychic impressions one need not wonder that even the most
primitive forms of genital worship could be demonstrated until
quite recent times, and that the language and superstitions of
present day humanity contain the remnants of all phases of
this course of development. (1947. 58]f"
It would indeed appear that there are two kinds of people: size queens
and liars. Yet if read ontogenetically and Freud almost invites us to do so,
Freuds developmental schema runs into some problems. The worship of the
genitals may be phylogenetically retarded but it is ontogenetically quite
advanced. The human infant must move through stages in which his mouth2'
and his anus are the primary erotic organs before cathecting his genitals as the
organs of sexual satisfaction. The thinking through of the etiology of sexuality
for Freud is thus undertaken frequently in the terms of the phylogeny/ontogeny
recapitulation, but in the case of primitive genital worship (penis fixation is also
frequently attributed to gay men, usually in the language of part-objects) the
recapitulation refuses to map. Moreover, the word indestructability
28 In German: Fiir uns sind die Genitalien schon seit einer langen Reihe von generationen die
Pudenda. Gegenstande der Scham, und bei weiter gediehener Sexual Verdrangung sogar des
Ekels. Wirst man einen umfassenden Blick a u f das Sexualleben unserer Zeit, besonders das der
die menschliche Kultur tragenden Schichten, so ist man versucht zu sagen: Widerwillig nur
fiigen sich die heute Lebenden in ihrer Mehrheit den Geboten der Fortpflanzung undfiihlen sich
dabei in ihrer menschlichen Wiirde gekrankt und herabgesetzt... Anders war es in den
Urzeiten des Menschengeschlechts. Aus den muhseligen Sammlungen der Kulturforscher kan
man sich die Uberzeugung holen, dass die genitalien urspriinglich der Stloz und der Hoffnung
der lebenden waren, gottliche Verehung genossen un die Gottlichkeit ihrer Funktionen a u f alle
neu erlemten Tatigkeiten der menschen ubertrugen
Aber bei der Unvertilgbarkeit, die in
die Natur alter seelischen Spuren liegt, darfm an sich nicht verwundem. dass selbst die
primitivsten Formen von Anbetng der Genitalien bis in ganz rezente Zeiten nachzuweisen
sind, und das Sprachgebrauch, Sitten und Aberglauben der heutigen menscheit die Oberlebsel
von alien Phasen dieses Entwicklungsganges enthalten. (1964, Vol. 8, 166-7)
29 The primitivity of the mouth as a sexual organ is accounted for ontogenetically - the adult is
still holding onto the infants sensual gratification in nutrition but also phylogenetically. In the
analysis of the Wolf man, the oral stage is associated with cannibalism- the imputed defining
desire o f the primitive.
194
(Unvertilgbarkeit) alerts us to a crucial way in which the Freudian schema
inflects the evolutionary narrative in an unsettling way. The primitive in
Freuds writing is never entirely sublated. In psychic life, primitive impulses
persist. In terms of evolutionary developments, the civilized not only has been
the primitive, but due to the persistence of all psychic impressions, some of
which are attributable to phylogeny, the civilized is still the primitive, and
reveals this in his language.30 By implication the heterosexual is also always
possibly still the homosexual.
Richard Krafft-Ebing, in Psychopathia Sexualis (1889). reveals the

prevalence of evolutionary ideas in attempting to account for inversion,
homosexuality, and gender difference itself in his account of the biological
body of someone with deviant desires:
Chevalier proceeds from the original bisexual life in the
animal kingdom, and the original bisexual predisposition in
the human fetus. According to him the difference in the gender,
with marked physical and psychical sexual character, is only
the result o f endless processes of evolution. The psycho
physical sexual difference runs parallel with the high level of
the evolving process. The individual being must itself pass
through these grades o f evolution; it is originally bisexual, but
in the struggle between the male and female elements either
one or the other is conquered, and a monosexual being is
evolved which corresponds with the type of the present stage
of evolution. But traces of the conquered sexuality remain.
Under certain circumstances, these latent sexual characteristics
may gain Darwins signification, i.e., they may provoke
manifestations o f inverted sexuality. Chevalier does not.
however, look upon such processes as a retrogression
(atavism), in the sense o f Lombroso's opinion and that of
others, but rather considers them with Lacassgane as
disturbances in the present state of evolution. (1965, 365-6)
Freud is clearly playing in the same discursive field as Krafft-Ebing.

30 Both Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious (1905)and The Psychopathology o f
Everyday Life (1901) are saturated with examples of the persistence of the infantile/primitive in
the language o f everyday life.
195
Not only are questions of sexuality inflected by developmental notions of

civilization, the very origin of the ego is accounted for within a racialized
evolutionary field. In his theorizing of the origin of the ego (and the libido that
cathects it into being is always normatively heterosexual and male for Freud) in
On Narcissism, Freud refers back to his analysis of animism in Totem and
Taboo, deeply implicating the formation of the ego with the evolution of cultural
organization:
The extension of the libido theory, in my opinion a
legitimate one - receives reinforcement from a third quarter,
namely from our observations and views on the mental life
of children and primitive peoples. In the latter, we find
characteristics which if they occurred singly, might be put
down to megalomania: an over-estimation of the power of
their wishes and mental acts, "the omnipotence of
thoughts", a belief in the thaumaturgic force of words, and
a technique for dealing with the external world "magic"
which appears to be a logical application of these grandiose
premises. In the children o f today, whose development is
much more obscure to u ^ 1 , we expect to find an exactly
analogous attitude towards the external world. Thus, we
form the idea of their being an original libidinal cathexis of
the ego, from which some is later given off to objects, but
which fundamentally persists and is related to object
cathexes much as the body of an amoeba is related to the
pseudopodia which it puts out. (1950, 75).':
31 Melanie Kleins focus on the psychic life of children does much to elucidate these obscurities
and arguably shatters the ontogeny/phylogeny recapitulation in the process. See The
Psychoanalysis o f Children. (1973, 142-163).
32 In German: Ein dritter Zufluss zu dieser, wie ich meine. legitimen Wieterbildung der
Libidotheorie ergibt sich aus unseren Beobachtungen und Auffasungen des Seelebens von
K indem und von primitiven Volkem. Wirfinden bei diesen letzteren Ziige. welche. wenn sie
verienzelt waren, dem Grossenwahn zugerechnet werden konnten, eine Uberschdtzung der
macht ihrer Wiinsche undpsychischen Akte, die Alleniacht der Gedanken, einen Glauben an
die Zauberkraft der Worte, eine Technik gegen die Aussenwelt, die Magie, welche als
konsequente Anwendung dieser grossensiichtigen Voraussetzungen erscheint. Wir erwarten eine
ganz analoge Einstellung zur Aussenwelt beim Kinder unsere zeit. dessen Entwicklung fiir uns
weit undurchsichtiger ist. Wir bilden so die Vorstellung einer urspriinglicher Libidobesetzung
des Ichs, von der spdter an die Objekte abgegen wird, die aber, im Grunde genommen, verbleibt
und sich zu den Objektbesetzung verhalt wie die Korper eines Protoplasmatierchens zu den von
ihm ausgeschickten Pseudopodien. (1967, Vol. 10, 141)
196
However, the subsuming of difference, be it along cultural, gender or sexual
orientation lines is never complete. Here, the hierarchizing of terms through a
temporizing narrative in the attempt to maintain norms that his theory threatens
to destabilize is fascinating, and this destabilizing gives the opening for later
"gay" psychoanalysts like Lewes paradoxically to renarrate the different as the
normative within an evolutionist narrative. Nevertheless, the movement of the
narrative is sustainedly evolutionist: the difference of the child, the primitive,
and, implicidy, the homosexual is negated in its a priori incorporation into the
body of the mature, the civilized and the heterosexual man. In such a maneuver,
there is a clear foreclosing of the possibility of alterity.
However, psychoanalysis itself, can be understood as an inverted kind

of animism, in terms of the projections onto the other in Totem and Taboo. The
similarity between the thaumaturgic power of words and the talking cure
needs to be noted. Freud posits three great epochs in the history of human
thought: The animist gives way to the religious (understood monotheistically)
which in turn gives way to the scientific. Psychoanalysis is initiated by Freud
as a new science or the first science of the mind. Yet there is a striking similarity
between the ways psychoanalysis and animism manage the basic concepts of
time and space. Here is Freud on animism:
Since distance is of no importance in thinking - since what
lies furthest apart both in time and space can without difficulty
be comprehended in a single act of consciousness - so, too, the
world of magic has a telepathic disregard for spatial distance,
and treats past situations as though they were present. In the
animistic epoch the reflection of the internal world is bound to
blot out the other picture o f the world - the one which we
33 Die Menscheit hat, wenn wir den Autoren folgen wollen, drei solcher Denksysteme. drei
grosse Weltanschauungen im Laufe der Zeiten hervorgebracht: Die animistische
(mythologische), die religiose und die wissenschaftliche. (1978, Vol. 19, 96) Strachey translates
hervorgebracht as developed, which implies a hierarchical relation of sorts. Hervorbrechen
means to break out or to produce. None of the implications of unfolding or moving towards
greater complexity are present.
197
seem to perceive. (1950, SS'f'
The allegiance of psychoanalysis to evolutionary configurations of space and

time in understanding savagery and homosexuality reveal an almost
identical disregard for spatial distance to that which characterizes animism.
Within the evolutionary narrative, spatial distance, the fact that other cultures
inhabit different geographical spaces on the earth, is ignored entirely. Instead,
other cultures are seen to represent the same space Europe , however
Europe at a point temporally distant, Europe in the Stone Age past.
Ontogenetically, they represent Europes childhood.
In likening non-Europeans to children, Freud participates in a central

discursive linkage of imperialism,35 one which arguably precedes evolutionary
theory, but one to which evolutionary theory lends scientific credibility. Freuds
spin on his likening of savages to children reveals the paradoxically anti-racist
moment in the subsuming of the primitive into the civilized, as well as revealing
the liberal limits of Freuds (anti) racism.
I am under no illusion that in putting forward these attempted
explanations I am laying m yself open to the charge of
endowing modem savages with a subtlety in their mental
activities which exceeds all probability. It seems to me quite
possible, however, that the same may be true of our attitude
towards the psychology o f those races that have remained at
the animistic level as is true of our attitude to the mental life
of children, which we adults no longer understand and whose
fullness and delicacy of feeling we have in consequence so
34 Da das Denken keine Entfemungen kennt. das raumlich Entlegenste wie das zeitlich
Verschiedenste mit Leichtigkeit in einen Bewusstseinsakt zusammenbribgt, wird auch die
magische Welt sich telepathisch iiber die raumliche Distant hinaussetzen und ehemaligen
Zusammenhang wie gegenwartigen behandeln. das Spiegelbild der Innenwelt muss in
animistischen Zeitalter jenes andere Weltbild, das wirzu erkennen glauben, unsichtbar machen.
(1978, Vol. 19, 105)
35 See Chapter 1 for a discussion of how colonized people are likened to children in both the
recapitulatory logics of evolutionary theory which Freud inherits and makes use of, and in wider
imperial culture.
198
greatly underestimated. (1950, 997*.
Since we can no longer (nicht mehr) understand, presumably we once could.

Difference needs to be domesticated, the project of learning about the Other
becomes a project of recovery of what we once had, but have now lost. Freud
here is assuming that humanity is ultimately one. Ontogentically, adults have
been children, and phylogenetically, civilized peoples have been savages.
Human experience is universalizable, yet some experiences are more universal
than others. Children and savages too have fullness and delicacy of feeling.
Yet their full and delicate feelings are somehow different to the feelings of
civilized white adult men, which are never named as the feelings of such
people, because the universal definitionally needs to be blind to its own
particulars. The story of evolution, which I have argued to be transposed by
Freud into the realm of the psyche, can be made to shore up universalism in a
crucial way. If difference is temporal, we can speak for the other, because we
have already been the other.
Irigaray's attack on the Lacanian model of the unconscious in "The

Poverty of Psychoanalysis" can be made to bear on this narrative movement
with some force. She addresses her polemic to "you" - the range of which is
unspecified but includes "gentlemen psychoanalysts." This direct address to an
other, inflected with hostility as it is, already marks a different conception of the
possibilities of dialogue. She asserts:
You would constantly reduce the yet-to be subjected to the

36 In German: Wir tuauschen uns wohl nicht daruber, dass wir unsdurch solche
Erklaringsversuche dem Vorwurfe aussetezen, dass w ir den heutigen Wilden eine Feinheit der
seelischen Tdtigkeiten zumuten. die weit iiber die Wahrscheinlichkeit hinausgeht. Allein ich
meine, es konnte uns mit der Psychologie dieser Volker, die a uf der animistische Stuefe stehen
geblieben sind, leicht so ergehen wie mit dem Seelenlehen des Kindes, das wir Erwachsene
nicht mehr verstehen, und dessen Reichhaltigkeit und Feinfuhligkeit wir darum so sehr
unterschatzt haben. (1978, Vol. 19, 121)
199
already subjected, the as -yet unspoken or unsaid o f

language[Iangage] to the already subjected to something that a
language has already struck dumb or kept silent. And so perhaps unwittingly?- aren't you the products and defendants of
an existing order, the agents and servants of repression and
censorship ensuring that this order subsists as though it were
the only possible order, that there can be no imaginable
speech, desire or language other than those which have
already taken place, no culture authorized by you other than the
monocratism of patriarchal discourse? (Irigaray, 1991, 82)
Italics mine
I read Irigaray as pointing to the foreclosing of other possible desires,

languages, cultures and positions in a critique of a set of evolutionary tropes.
This becomes apparent if one inserts the language of the child, the primitive,
the homosexual as the "yet-to be subjected" which has already been struck
dumb by the relegation of their present to the past of the "you. To stay within
Freud's revealing biological metaphor, the anaclitic pseudopodia have
incorporated the narcissistic other into its body before the body has made the
very pseudopodia.
Irigarays challenge can be read as not only directed against
psychoanalysis, but more pervasively at the master narrative of evolution itself.
An evolutionary narrative permits only one signifier - in classical evolutionism civilized man, in Freudian psychoanalysis - the phallus. Freud in a subsequent
addition to the Three Essays remarks that the assumption that all human beings
have the same form of genitalia is the First of the many remarkable and
momentous theories of children. (Freud 1982, 195). Irigarays positing of a
feminine imaginary, predicated on the two lips in This Sex which is Not Onex
goes some way to undoing the tyranny of the single subsuming Subject, which
has always and already incorporated and transcended its others in evolutionary
logics, though the feminine in psychoanalysis is not structurally related to the
200
masculine in the same way that the homosexual and the primitive are connected
to the heterosexual and the civilized respectively. Men have never been women
(though girls for Freud, in passing through a phallic stage have paradoxically
been boys) whereas the civilized have necessarily passed through a primitive
phase and the etiology of heterosexuality must include a homosexual stage.
Interestingly, there is a place for the re-theorizing of homosexuality as

normative within Freuds evolutionist paradigm, and the important work of
reclaiming moments in Freud against the homophobic virulence of certain of his
progeny has been undertaken by writers such as Henry Abelove and Kenneth
Lewes. Lewes in his book, The Psychoanalytic Theory o f Male
Homosexuality (1988, 77-94). scrupulously outlines twelve possible structural
resolutions of Oedipus, along the axes of instinctual aim, parental identification.
Object, mode of object choice, sexual orientation and social stance, only two of
which permit a heterosexual, masculine, active, anaclitic combination. The
Oedipus complex, as a regulative mechanism for male heterosexual objectrelatedness, is ineffective, as such, for it structurally permits other forms of
deviant heterosexuality and normal homosexuality along the alternative
normative axes of masculine/feminine identification and anaclitic/narcissistic
object choice. Consequently, within this schema, predicated on the
transforming moment of the boy's response to the mother as castrated, (the
impetus of Oedipus), Lewes outlines the possible normative positions of the
homosexual within the regime of the transcendentally signifying phallus.
This attempt to renarrate homosexuality from within normative

phallocentrism tends to characterize Irigaray as necessarily homophobic. In
Sexual Dissidence (1991), Dollimore claims:
201
In some instances sameness comes to signify the tyranny of
Western patriarchal metaphysics, and homosexuality its
practice, or, more vaguely its metaphor. Luce Irigaray speaks
of a dominant philosophic logos with a "power to reduce all
others to the economy of the Same'7 [and] eradicate the
difference between the sexes, exalting the metaphor of
homosexuality as a kind of anti-difference into nothing less
than a far-reaching theory of patriarchal society. (1991. 24950)
It seems to me that Dollimore is too quick to read homosexuality as the same,

taking too literally the definitional term homo. Arguably, Irigaray can just as
easily be read as pointing to heterosexuality as the same - the same
indicating an allegiance to normative heterosexual desire rather than denoting
the lack of difference in the sex/gender of the participants. Sameness and
difference split and complicate each other along lines of gender and sexuality. I
am reading Irigaray as an advocate for difference along both gender and
sexuality lines and her attack on sameness as directed at the universal (white)
male subject, who, if he participated in same-sex sex acts in much of
Euroamerica over the last century, ran the severe risk of being feminized,
pathologized, arrested, in short, of losing his ability to stand in for the
universal, becoming particular, rendered different rather than same.
37 Sedgwick offers an interesting mediating voice on this issue:

I do not, myself, believe that same-sex relationships are much
more likely to be based on similarity than are cross-sex
relationships. That is, I do not believe that identification and
desire are more closely linked in same-sex relationships than in
cross-sex relationships, or in gay than in non-gay persons. I
assume them to be closely linked in many, if not most,
relationships and persons, in fact. I certainly do not believe
that any given man must be assumed to have more in common
with any other given man than he can possibly have with any
given woman. Yet these are the assumptions that underlie, and
are in turn, underwritten by, the definitional invention o f
"homosexuality. (Epistemology o f the Closet, 1990, 159).
202
The attempt to figure the relation of sameness and difference is clearly
related to Freuds problem in distinguishing anaclitic and narcissistic object
cathexes in On Narcissism,of understanding narcissism as both a pathological
condition and the libidinal complement to the egoism of the instinct of self
preservation, which may be justifiably attributed to every living thing. (1957.
73-4). Narcissism as perversion is established as integral to the very normative
development it later comes to pervert. Dollimore locates this pharmaconic
figuration of perversion within a wider transgressive history going back to
Augustine. For Dollimore, if perversion subverts, it is not as a unitary, presocial libido, or an original plenitude, but as a transgressive agency inseparable
from a dynamic intrinsic to social process... The displacements which
constitute certain repressive discriminations are partly enabled by a proximity,
which though disavowed, remains to enable a perverse return, an undoing, a
transformation. (1991, 33). He also maintains that dissidence within sexuality
is not confined to sexuality and that psychosexual disorder effected by
perversion is always more than sexual. (1991, 33, 172). For the shattering
effect of perversion arises from the fact that it is integral to just those things it
threatens.
This reading o f perversion, somewhat brutally summarized here, is

acute in its sense of the contradictory moments in Freuds narrativizing of
homosexuality, displaying a similar awareness to Lewes that the successful
normative resolution o f Oedipus that permits male, active, anaclitic
heterosexuality, can be dependent on homosexual object cathexis onto the
father, and narcissistic cathexis onto the boys own penis to begin latency.
Similar points can and have been made about male homosexual object choice
arising from a refusal to give up the heterosexual object choice of the mother
203
and so on. Always, the normative contains a subsumed form of the perverse.
The relations within and between the binaries homosexuality/heterosexuality,
anaclitic/ narcissistic remain slippery. The terms are always and already
reversible and displaced within Freud, only hierarchized by a partially
interrogated sequential narrative. The difference between the perverse and the
normal can only be understood in terms of development. As Freud asserts in
On Narcissism: Not until there is an object cathexis is it possible to
discriminate a sexual energy - the libido - from an energy of the ego-instincts.
(1957, 76.). Only once the amoeba has grown its pseudopodia - literally, its
fake legs - can it march to embrace the other, only then to incorporate it into its
body, if one remembers why an amoeba grows pseudopodia.
Thus, a spatial rather than sequential take on the analysis of male samesex object choice is quite capable of producing such an object choice as
normative rather than pathological. Since the perverse (the homosexual) is
already and always present even if only in a subsumed or transcended or
perhaps even sublated form in the normal, its term of difference remains held
under the signifying regime of the phallus. Consequently Dollimore's attack on
Irigarays pointing to the phallocentric nature of male homosexuality as
necessarily homophobic overprivileges the transgressive social potential of this
brand of perversion, and fascinatingly his historical bracketing of his
discussion of sexual dissidence in the west to an originary point in Augustine
allows for an elision of a consideration of classical Greek male homosexual
desire, where male same-sex object choice can possibly be theorized as
normative, and consequently Dollimores claim that psychosexual disorder
effected by perversion is always more than just sexual becomes much more
difficult to sustain.
204
In Sedgwicks tantalizing phrasing: Are bonds between men the social

solvent or the social glue? If we think back to the passage quoted earlier about
the primal horde from Totem and Taboo, we see how Freuds theorizing of the
phylogenesis of homosexuality uses a developmental narrative to manage the
separation of the homosocial and the homosexual. To institute the homosocial,
the brothers need to have had and to have sublimated homosexual feelings. In a
rhetorical pattern deeply typical of Freud, a potentially normative homosexuality
is the repressed that continually threatens to return. By building homosexuality
into the foundations of the social, Freud is literally and figuratively able to
contain it.
This strategy of Freuds still can be brought to bear on contemporary

figurations of gay identity and community. Sedgwick makes a useful
distinction between universalizing and minoritizing models of
homosexuality, a distinction she hopes will come to supplant the
essentialist/constructionist split. The ethical and political imperative behind
these distinctions is to renarrate or reimagine the homo-hetero binary in
terms that are not hierarchical - perhaps, an impossible task or to explode
this constitutive binary of western modernity altogether. What is the
difference of the homosexual? Freud uses the nineteenth century masternarrative of evolution, transposing it from the phylogenetic sphere of racial
development to the ontogenetic sphere of sexual development to render
the difference of the homosexual internal and temporal. The primitive,
never an embodied individuated subject for psychoanalysis disappears. He
remains as a category of temporality, a marker of subsumed normative
deviance in the story of the evolution of the white heterosexual male subject.
2 05
a position he shares with the white male homosexual in the

ontogeny/phylogeny recapitulation.
To return to an evolutionary paradigm and a set of debates preceding my

foundational ruse (Foucaults claim of the emergence of the homosexual as
species circa 1870), I want to point to how the attempt to create difference is
deeply problematic. Ideas that mankind (sic) is polygenetic3* rather than
monogenetic were historically more reactionary, and simply reinscribed the
evolutionary narrative, and so any translation of Irigarays thoughts on sexual
difference into the arena of global cultures must be viewed with considerable
circumspection.
The insistence on the difference of the sexually and racially other can
take the shape of exoticism or, to remain in a psychoanalytic register, begin to
assume the character of the fetish. The transvaluation of the primitive from a
figure of transcended abjection to a site of originary plenitude has a long
history in European theories of racial difference going back, at least, as far as
Rousseau. Marianna Torgovnick in Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, M odem
Lives (1990) writes:
Those who study or write about the primitive usually begin by defining
it as different from (usually opposite to) the present. After that reactions
to the present take-over. Is the present too materialistic? Primitive life
is not --it is a precapitalist utopia where use value, never exchange
value. prevails.Is the present sexually repressed? Not primitive life -primitives live life whole, without fear of the body . . . The primitive
does what we ask it to do. Voiceless, it lets us speak for it. It is our
ventrilioquists dummy or so we like to think. (1990, 8).
While Torgovnick is astute in her insistence that the primitive is always a site of
38 See S.J. Goulds The Mismeasure o f Man (1996) for a discussion of the debates between the
monogenists who claimed that mankind was one species and the polygenists who claimed that
many different species were contained under the label man. (1996, 71-2 and 102-5).
206
projection for those in power of the present, I think she grants too much selfconsciousness to the discourse of primitivism here. We do not like to think of
the primitive as our ventriloquists dummy at all, we need to think of
him/her as real. It is imperative that the primitive has a full and authentic voice,
if it is to function in the way Torgovnick describes, as a convenient ground for
universal truth counterposed to the exigencies of the present. To riff on
Johannes Fabians axiom in Time and the Other: How Anthropology makes its
Object that the primitive is always a category in western thought, never an
object (1983, 16): the primitive, a category, needs to masquerade as an
original, authentic, natural subject in order to dissemble as the object of inquiry.
Evolution offers a particular inflection of the discourse of the primitive.

I would argue that the temporalities of a teleological evolution - which to be fair
to Darwin he fairly explicitly disavows - upset the lapsarian temporality of
noble savage discourse. In terms of evolution, we have evolved out of and
beyond the primitive. A return to primitivity can thus not be figured as a fall
back to an Edenic state of grace or nature - but as degeneracy of varying
degrees of seductive power. Nevertheless the primitive, whether it functions as
a nostalgic ideal or projected nightmare or transcended origin, remains the
definitional buttress to the term civilized.
This is why Irigarays attempt to contest the universality of the subject

in the evolutionary narrative remains more useful for me than the attempt to give
the primitives a voice or the insistence on the normative aspects of
homosexuality within the psychoanalytic schema. Although I am sympathetic
with this renarration, and recognize its political efficacy for certain gay
struggles, its reinscription of phallocentrism remains problematic, especially
207
when the above extract from On Narcissism and Freuds chapter on animism
in Totem and Taboo, reveal the explicitly colonizing thrust of such phallocentric
narrativization. In rereading Freud, do we39 simply want to claim our
"birthright" - the privileges of the phallus?
Why then do I still find a psychoanalytic line of inquiry so valuable, if

its core concepts are constituted by faulty nineteenth century biology, its use of
developmental schema to manage social and individual differences a mirror of
the evolutionary ideologies underpinning the European conquest of the rest of
the world, the ethics its narrative instantiates in relation to people deemed
primitive or homosexual disrespectful at best, genocidal at worst?
I wish to try and answer that question through a brief excursion into the
central idea of the unconscious in psychoanalysis. At first glance, and pursuing
the line of argument I have held through much of this chapter, the idea of the
unconscious could be made to be the carrier of a range of racist imperial
metaphorics. It is a place of darkness, a timeless place, full of lurking
inarticulable and taboo fantasies and desires, which the intrepid psychoanalyst,
like Burton, Speke or Livingstone, can explore, without as much danger to his
person, and return to the bright, white world of consciousness with a
transforming nugget or two. There is undoubtedly a grain of truth to my
caricature - the unconscious for Freud is like a dark, submerged continent,40 yet
there is one crucial way in which the idea of the unconscious cannot be
explained by the imperial context or analogy, and can actually be mobilized
3SI am not quite sure who this we can be: Anti-imperialist Fags for Psychoanalysis perhaps?
40 Freud never explicitly employs this metaphor to refer to the Unconscious. Femininity is
the true dark continent for Freud. See Helene Cixouss The Laugh of the Medusa (1981, 245264).
208
against it. The unconscious cannot be conflated with, or collapsed back into the
primitive. Its timelessness can never be perceived as always already
transcended and incorporated.
For there is another sense of time at play in the Freudian conception of

the unconscious, which is not reducible to the naturalized sequence of
teleological Lamarckian evolution. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud
writes of the timelessness of the unconscious in ways that do not simply equate
it with the primitive or reveal an underlying script of the timelessness of
primitive cultures. The unconscious is outside history, outside time in another
more radical way:
At this point. I shall venture to touch for a moment upon a
subject which would merit the most exhaustive treatm ent..
As a result o f certain psychoanalytic discoveries, we are today
in a position to embark on a discussion of the Kantian
theorem that time and space are necessary forms of
thought.*1 We have learnt that unconscious mental processes
are in themselves timeless. This means in the first place that
they are not ordered in time, that time does not change them
in any way and that the idea o f time cannot be applied to
them. (33).*:
Many things depend on an idea of time as a self-evident

condition of perception, including the ontogeny/phylogeny
recapitulation that I have been at pains to unpack in this chapter. If the
individual unconscious thought processes stand outside time, what part
4' Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak explains Derridas interest in Freud in the following terms:
Thus, within the Freudian thematics of the psyche, perception is an
originary inscription." And time, according to Kant the privileged and
necessary form of an intuition" becomes a mark of the economy of
writing on the mystic writing pad of the psyche. (Spivak. 1976, xl).
42 In German: Der Kcntsche satz, das Zeit und Raum notwendige Formen unseres Denkens
sind, kann heute infolge gewisser psychoanalytischer Erkenntnisse einer Diskussion
unterzogen werden. Wir haben erfahren, dass die Unbewussten Seelenvorgdnge an sich "zeitlos
sind. Das heist zunachst. dass sie nicht zeitlich geordnet werden, dass die Zeit an ihnen
verandert, dass man die Zeitvorstellung nicht an sie heranbringen kan. (1967, Vol. 13, 27-8).
209
of the phylogenetic process are they recapitulating? The unconscious is

inexhaustible and can never be fully colonized by consciousness for the
very act of rendering conscious creates new repressions, displacements,
disavowals. The unconscious is both internal and other, its contents
containing both socially banal proscriptives and idiosyncratic
contingencies.
Consciousness and unconsciousness are mutually interarticulated throughout in a dialogue of self and other within the self,
making and unmaking each other, undoing hierarchies, and if taken
seriously, exploding epistemological certainties, forcing Freud and his
readers to continually question our investments in difference and
sameness, self and other, heterosexual and homosexual, civilized and
primitive. As much as Freud mobilizes evolutionary, developmental
conceptions of time, using time to construct and subordinate otherness,
his text also offers us time as otherness, the site of projections,
disavowals, displacements and desires, resolutely implicating us
(readers and writers of our own and other places, times, identities and
desires) in the knowledges, we produce, consume, perform and desire.
Psychoanalysis facilitates modes of reading that undo teleological
certainties, as much as its narrative may reinscribe them.
What might be some of the implications of reading consciously

unconsciously? I can only end with a series of speculations: How can
we read for the unconscious of Psychoanalysis? I have suggested that it
may be global racial difference understood as ascending moments in
phylogeny under the material circumstances of European Empire. This
210
in no way discredits or invalidates Psychoanalysis for my very mode of
reading depends on psychoanalytic theories and strategies. How can we
take on Freuds philosophical methods in renarrating,43 or perhaps,
narrating for the first time, the psychic lives of those deemed
homosexual or primitive, reading the timeless time of the
unconscious against the developmental time of evolution,
acknowledging our own investments, unconscious and other, in
engaging these analogous categories?
43 This is arguably happening all the time. Consider for example the term homophobia. O f
relatively recent coinage ( early seventies), it still has not made it into the Oxford English
Dictionary, yet it is common parlance in many contemporary discussions of homosexuality."
The term inaugurates a reverse discourse of what Foucault calls the reverse discourse of
homosexuality. It claim s that anti-homosexual sentim ent, rather than being normative, is
pathological, that fear or dislike of homosexuals is irrational and brings into play unconscious
homosexual desires. In discussing the legal defense o f Homosexual panic" in cases o f fagbashing, Sedgwick m akes clear that homophobia is the site o f desire as well recognitions and
m isrecognitions, fear o f castration and a range o f other psychoanalytically registerable
phenomena and explanations. We renarrate largely within the Freudian schema to de- and repathologize.
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Neville Wallace Hoad

My dissertation explores the surprising parallels between the figure of the

What permits such conflations is the application of evolutionary theories of

Methodologically, my work is indebted to Michel Foucaults History o f

Works Cited List

There are many people whom I wish to thank. My advisor. Anne

I was fortunate in having an exceptional peer group of graduate

My family in South Africa provided crucial emotional support and

the University of the Witwatersrand. A Presidents Fellowship from

Paul Rogers. Greg Biglione, Josh Machleder, Jeffrey Herbst, Rob

My central concern in this dissertation is to explore how Victorian

Haeckels biogenetic law is that ontogeny (the development of the

individual over his1 lifespan) recapitulates phylogeny (the development of the

The doctrine of sexual selection, which is a kind of hold-all explanation

1 And the individual is normatively male for all o f these writers.

These ideas of difference as a function of evolutionary development were

I conclude by considering the ways that Sigmund Freud speculates on

Freuds characterization of homosexuality as arrested development in Three

Since I maintain that evolutionary narratives were pervasive in the formative

While it would be more comfortable for me to bracket these theorizings to the

The replication of evolutionary narratives becomes particularly painful when it

The figuration of coming out as an evolutionary history is equally

Arguably, what permits the carelessness of such characterizations is an

Ironically, then, in the name of a historical materialism, the category

In the foreword referred to above, Weeks concludes:

Here, the evolutionary topos immediately forecloses options of dialogue,

A wealth of gay studies anthropology fails to consider what may be at

In a desire to locate the presence o f trans-gender shamans in Paleolithic Europe,

Michael Warner in Fear of a Queer Planet, attempts to invoke queer

I do not wish naively to assume a range of speaking subalterns, hereby

This is in addition to the often crassly material exploitation experienced

Darwins Beard: Marking Imperial Time on the Human Body

My opening gambit is a reading of Darwin which teases out the

Evolutionary theory offers a particular way of positing the perceived

For Darwin, difference is always potentially developmental. Although

Engels in a letter to Lavrov is more trenchant:

Evolutionary ideas can thus be read as superstructural to the penetration

Frederick Cooper argue:

Nevertheless, the development, dissemination and adaptation of

Focusing on the rhetorical tropes and maneuvers in Darwins theory of

Chapter 7, On The Races of Man, in the Descent o f Man provides

Species differentiation depends on constant biological characters. Skin-color,

Even as he employs a set of denigrating metaphors to describe the Fuegians,

By contrast, Europeans are always clearly the people of the present: In

Yet the organization of the nineteenth-century globe writes evolution as

It is possible to locate several instances in the chapter where the

In a polemical mode, it is possible to make the following kind of

Nevertheless, Darwins synopsis of colonial devastation hardly tells a

Moreover, since mankind has thrived under extremely hostile climactic

This passage is notable for the broaching of the interchangeable nature

The consequences of this is that the Great Chain o f Being, previously

This temporalization of evolution - this setting into motion of the Great

This is established explicitly in the Descent o f Man: in the description of