The “New Person”:  radical desire in British literature, 1880–1930

Annie Burkhart

doi:10.25820/etd.007608

Scholars of 19th-century sexuality and gender have frequently spotlighted queer desire, identity, and expression within isolated works of the period, framing queerness as a phenomenon that appears episodically in Victorian literature. To date, however, no scholar has attended to the literary forms and approaches that unite these works within a broader social context under the distinct label of “queer.” The body of work around Victorian queerness is either situated squarely within a limited, sometimes monolithic, aspect of nonnormative expression across texts (Sedgwick 1985; Bristow 1995; Mesch 2020; Linton 2022), or the focus is on LGBT studies, broadly construed, within a single genre (Cohen 1996; Joyce 2022). In turn, scholars have failed to destabilize the notion that 19th-century queerness was active as well as identifiable only in small, isolated pockets of society, and this omission has obscured, or even prevented, a robust understanding of Victorian queerness at a scholarly level. In my dissertation, The “New Person”: Radical Desire in British Literature, 1880–1930,” I explore how nine fin de siècle authors built tacit queer coalitions with the aim of gradually disrupting normative matrices of desire. I call this the “New Person movement,” establishing how authors covertly expressed queer longing both radically and covertly throughout this 50- year period. My analysis of the era’s covertly queer literature frames New Personhood as a scholarly project needing to be undertaken, requiring a sense of social and literary curiosity as well as a commitment to uncovering queer expression. In my project, I examine poetry and prose written by and about women who love women and men who love men, as well as late Victorian gender “outlaws” (per queer activist Kate Bornstein) and I finish with a close reading of characters whose desires read as asexual, aromantic, and agender in a single novel. I situate my detail-oriented analysis within theoretical frameworks laid out by such theorists as Sara Ahmed, Sharon Marcus, Leo Bersani, David Getsy, Ilan Kapoor, and Niklas Luhmann. My methodology is, first and foremost, predicated on a playful analytical spirit and fueled by curiosity. New Personhood, as a theoretical practice, originates in open-mindedness about what could be and culminates in an embrace of what was. Reparative readings (per Talia Schaffer) create a bridge between these two points, approaching the past with kindness and care while reinvigorating its texts with the framework of an unapologetic queer spirit that simply could not be spoken in the fin de siècle. I begin with Sapphic desire, detailing three distinct modes in which New Women covertly communicate queer longing in their poetry and prose. I establish how poems by Amy Levy (“In a Minor Key”) and Michael Field (“The Mummy Invokes his Soul”) utilize race, aesthetics, and affect to communicate New Personhood. In Margaret Todd’s Mona Maclean, Medical Student, I grapple with adaptable female amity in the wake of both queering and straddling class. I emphasize the exigency of examining my primary texts via radical and intersectional frameworks, such as E. Patrick Johnson’s “quare studies,” Sharon Marcus’s “just reading,” and Jasmine Day’s “Egyptological orientalism.” The gay male passion I spotlight, while predominantly white, foregrounds real, lived fin de siècle fears of being outed as a sodomite, as well as the despair, self-loathing, and internalized homophobia it is wont to inspire. I demonstrate how Lionel Johnson’s “Mystic and Cavalier,” while principally a war poem, communicates a Freudian “death drive” within the distinct context of male-male desire. Edward Carpenter’s “To One Who Is Where the Eternal Are,” on the other hand, takes a reflective approach to its New Personhood—sometimes doubtful, sometimes joyous, but ultimately reconciling itself to queer necropolitics. In my final chapter, I outline a distinct, radical quality to gender variance in late Victorian literature. New Woman authors Sarah Grand and Victoria Cross, while apparently cisgender, explore the variably of gender presentation in their austere era. I demonstrate how ostensibly female characters in The Heavenly Twins and Six Chapters of a Man’s Life, as they contend with strict gender expectations resulting from class privilege and their social moment, exhibit a “transgender capacity,” per Brian Getsy. My analysis carefully distinguishes between fluid gender and transness, exploring how class—and, in Six Chapters, third-world queerness—sanctions and/or sabotages identity exploration. I set aside a moment for Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, questioning its reputation as the “first trans novel” in the context of queer temporality. In my coda, I look not at desire, but rather the absence of it. Olive Schreiner’s The Story of African Farm gives us our inaugural New Woman and New Man in Lyndall and Waldo, respectively. I establish their positions on the asexual spectrum, broadly construed, reading Lyndall as aromatic and Waldo as asexual. Once more, I invoke incisive perspective from Luhmann on desire, platonic love in particular, and give voice to emergent ace activists, establishing Lyndall and Waldo as Newer People in the context of my work. My dissertation’s contributions to queer and Victorian studies, as well as those of my peers, ideally provide jumping-off points, accessible methods for interpreting and engaging with those around us in meaningful ways. Grassroots activism—and home- and family-based engagement with (N)ew ideas—hinges on small-scale actions, discussions, and innovations. It is critical that we make space for discussions of Newness not just in scholarship, and not just in classrooms, but in bars, in coffee shops, on street corners, and, perhaps most important, in our homes and families, whatever those look like.

The “New Person”: radical desire in British literature, 1880–1930

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