Catholic Figures, Queer Narratives

Also by

Lowell Gallagher

Medusa’s Gaze: Casuistry and Conscience in the Renaissance

Frederick S. Roden

Same-Sex Desire in Victorian Religious Culture

Ed., Palgrave Advances: Oscar Wilde Studies

Patricia Juliana Smith

Lesbian Panic: Homoeroticism in Modern British Women’s Fictions

Ed., En Travesti: Women, Gender Subversion, Opera

Ed., The Book of Gay and Lesbian Quotations

Ed., The Queer Sixties

Catholic Figures, Queer NarrativesEdited by

Lowell GallagherUniversity of California, Los Angeles

Frederick S. RodenUniversity of Connecticut

and

Patricia Juliana SmithHofstra University

© Editorial matter & selection © Lowell Gallagher, Frederick S. Roden &Patricia Juliana Smith 2006Introduction © Frederick S. Roden 2006All remaining chapters © respective authors 2006

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataCatholic figures, queer narratives / edited by Lowell Gallagher, Frederick S.

Roden, and Patricia Juliana Smith.p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Homosexuality in literature. 2. English fiction–History and criticism. 3. American fiction–History and criticism.4. Homosexuality–Religious aspects–Catholic Church.5. Homophobia–Religious aspects–Catholicism. 6. Catholic gays.7. Homosexuality and literature. 8. Gay authors–Religious life.I. Gallagher, Lowell, 1953– II. Roden, Frederick S., 1970– III. Smith,Patricia Juliana.PR830.H67C37 2006823.009′353–dc22

2006045372

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 115 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06

ISBN 978-1-349-28393-4 ISBN 978-0-230-28777-8 (eBook)DOI 10.1057/9780230287778

Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2006 978-0-230-00831-1

For our families, spiritual and otherwise . . . and in memory of Simone Leborgne, Dennis J. P. Lamb, Fr. Paul,

and the mother of PJS

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Contents

List of Illustrations ix

Acknowledgements x

Notes on Contributors xi

Introduction: the Catholic Modernist Crisis, Queer Modern Catholicisms 1Frederick S. Roden

1 Queer Converts: Peculiar Pleasures and Subtle Antinomianism 19Thomas Lawrence Long

2 The Horrors of Catholicism: Religion and Sexuality in Gothic Fiction 33George E. Haggerty

3 Michael Field, John Gray, and Marc-Andre Raffalovich: Reinventing Romantic Friendship in Modernity 57Frederick S. Roden

4 Confessing Stephen: the Nostalgic Erotics of Catholicism in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man 69Patrick R. O’Malley

5 “Uncovenanted Joys”: Catholicism, Sapphism, and Cambridge Ritualist Theory in Hope Mirrlees’ Madeleine: One of Love’s Jansenists 85Ruth Vanita

6 The Feminized Priest and the Female Outsider: Catholicism and Sexuality in Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop 97Susan E. Hill

7 The Well of Loneliness and the Catholic Rhetoric of Sexual Dissidence 114Richard Dellamora

vii

8 “The Woman That God Forgot”: Queerness, Camp, Lies, and Catholicism in Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood 129Patricia Juliana Smith

9 “A Twitch Upon the Thread”: Revisiting Brideshead Revisited 149Francesca Coppa

10 The Altar of the Soul: Sexuality and Spirituality in the Works of Julien Green 163Thomas J. D. Armbrecht

Notes 184

Index 206

viii Contents

List of Illustrations

Leaf from a missal: frontispiece for the Canon of the Mass, The Crucifixion, French, thirteenth century, c.1270–90. (TheMetropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Bequest of Thomas W. Lamont, by exchange, 1981 (1981.322). Photograph, all rights reserved, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.) 120

ix

Acknowledgements

We wish to thank Paula Kennedy, Helen Craine, Ruth Ireland, and JoNorth at Palgrave Macmillan for their support in the publication of thisvolume. We also express our appreciation to our contributors for theirexcellent chapters, as well as for their patience and perseverance. LorenBlinde and Andrea F. Jones gave generously of their time in preparingthe index.

In Chapter 3, correspondence between John Gray, Marc-Andre Raf-falovich, and Michael Field is reprinted here with the kind permissionof Fr. Allan White, Prior Provincial of the English Dominicans, for mate-rials held at the National Library of Scotland and the New York PublicLibrary (Berg Collection of English and American Literature: Astor,Lenox, and Tilden Foundations). Thanks to Mr. Kenneth Dunn at theNational Library, Dr. Isaac Gewirtz and Mr. Wayne Furman at the NewYork Public Library for their assistance.

x

Notes on Contributors

Thomas J. D. Armbrecht is Assistant Professor of French at the Uni-versity of Wisconsin, Madison. He is the author of At the Periphery of theCenter: Sexuality and Literary Genre in the Works of Yourcenar and Green(Rodopi, 2006) and has published a translated edition of Wicked Angelsby Julien Green’s son (Haworth, 2006). He is currently working onCocteau’s cinematic reinvigoration of drama and the interplay betweenconceptions of nationality and sexuality.

Francesca Coppa is Associate Professor of English at MuhlenbergCollege, where she teaches twentieth-century dramatic literature, sexu-ality theory, and performance studies. She has written widely on play-wrights Joe Orton and Oscar Wilde, and is the editor of Joe Orton: aCasebook (Routledge, 2003) and a three-volume collection of his earlyworks. She is currently co-editing a book on the cultural performanceof stage magic. She is the daughter of Vatican historian and papal bio-grapher Frank J. Coppa.

Richard Dellamora originally prepared for his essay in this volume asan altar and choir boy in Roman Catholic parishes and schools in theUS Midwest. He teaches in the departments of English and CulturalStudies as well as the Centre for Theory, Culture, and Politics at TrentUniversity in Ontario. In 2003, he received a fellowship from the SocialSciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada to undertake afull-length study entitled Radclyffe Hall: a Life in the Writing. He is theauthor of Masculine Desire: the Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism andFriendship’s Bonds: Democracy and the Novel in Victorian England, and theeditor of Victorian Sexual Dissidence. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1998.

Lowell Gallagher is Associate Professor and Vice Chair for Undergrad-uate Studies in the Department of English at UCLA. He is author ofMedusa’s Gaze: Casuistry and Conscience in the Renaissance, as well asnumerous articles examining the relation between religion, ethics, andliterary figuration, principally in early modern English Catholic culturesbut also in Shakespeare and in nineteenth- and twentieth-century opera.He is currently completing a book on the figural history of Lot’s wife in

xi

patristic and early modern texts, twentieth-century visual arts, and post-Heideggerian philosophical interrogations of ethics.

George E. Haggerty is Professor of English at the University of Califor-nia, Riverside. His books include Gothic Fiction/Gothic Form (1989),Unnatural Affections: Women and Fiction in the Later Eighteenth Century(1998), Men in Love: Masculinity and Sexuality in the Eighteenth Century(1999), and Queer Gothic (2006). He edited Professions of Desire: Lesbianand Gay Studies in Literature (1995) and Gay Histories and Cultures: anEncyclopedia (2000). At present he is writing a book on Horace Walpoleand editing, with Molly McGarry, The Blackwell Companion to LGBTI/QStudies.

Susan E. Hill received a PhD in Religion and Literature from the Uni-versity of Chicago Divinity School and is Associate Professor of Religionat the University of Northern Iowa. She has published articles on sexu-ality and literature, women and translation, and pedagogy. Her currentproject traces the history of moral discourses about overindulgence, cor-pulence, and gluttony in Western culture.

Thomas Lawrence Long is Professor of English and Chancellor’s Com-monwealth Professor at Thomas Nelson Community College inHampton, Virginia. A former Roman Catholic priest, he is the authorof AIDS and American Apocalypticism: the Cultural Semiotics of an Epidemicand recently published “Apocalyptus Interruptus: Christian Fundamen-talists, Sodomy, and The End” in Gender and Apocalyptic Desire (ed.Brenda Basher and Lee Quinby). He is editor-in-chief of Harrington GayMen’s Literary Quarterly.

Patrick R. O’Malley is Assistant Professor of English at Georgetown Uni-versity. He is the author of Catholicism, Sexual Deviance, and VictorianGothic Culture (Cambridge, 2006). He is working on a critical study of rep-resentation of cultural amnesia in nineteenth-century Anglo-Irish texts.

Frederick S. Roden is Associate Professor of English at the Universityof Connecticut. He is the author of Same-Sex Desire in Victorian ReligiousCulture and the editor of Palgrave Advances: Oscar Wilde Studies. He is co-editing and translating, with Philip Healy, Marc-Andre Raffalovich’s1896 Uranisme et Unisexualité: Etude sur différentes manifestations de l’in-stinct sexuel. His other projects include a commentary on Julian ofNorwich and a book tentatively entitled Jewish/Christian/Queer.

xii Notes on Contributors

Patricia Juliana Smith is Associate Professor of English at Hofstra Uni-versity. She is the author of Lesbian Panic: Homoeroticism in Modern BritishWomen’s Fictions and Britannia Waives the Rules: the Permissive Society inPostimperial British Literature and Cultures (forthcoming). She has editedEn Travesti: Women, Gender Subversion, Opera, The Queer Sixties, and TheBook of Gay and Lesbian Quotations.

Ruth Vanita, formerly Reader at Delhi University, is now Professor atthe University of Montana. She is the author of several books, includ-ing Sappho and the Virgin Mary: Same-Sex Love and the English LiteraryImagination, Same-Sex Love in India: Readings from Literature and History,and, most recently, Love’s Rite: Same-Sex Marriage in India and the Westand Gandhi’s Tiger and Sita’s Smile: Essays on Gender, Sexuality and Culture.

Notes on Contributors xiii

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