Before Queer Theory: Victorian Aestheticism and the Self, by Dustin Friedman

Abstract

Reviewed by: Before Queer Theory: Victorian Aestheticism and the Self by Dustin Friedman Dennis Denisoff (bio) Before Queer Theory: Victorian Aestheticism and the Self, by Dustin Friedman; pp. xii + 234. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019, $34.95. In Before Queer Theory: Victorian Aestheticism and the Self, Dustin Friedman asks us to consider aestheticism not so much as a cultural movement or an aesthetic philosophy but as a theory—a theory of sexuality preceding the institutionalized discourses of desire. As such, the book proposes a conceptual pivot to existing scholarship on the articulation of Victorian notions of sexual identity through discourses of aesthetics, particularly Paterian aestheticism. Dozens of scholars have addressed aestheticism as a crucial concept through which some non-normative identities attained conceptual cohesion and cultural recognition. Early works such as Richard Dellamora's Masculine Desire: The Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism (1990) and Linda Dowling's Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford (1994) reflect the heavy influence of poststructuralism on queer studies, and in particular that of Michel Foucault's models of biopower. With more than a third of Before Queer Theory focusing on Walter Pater and the rest on Oscar Wilde, Vernon Lee, and Michael Field, Friedman positions his study squarely within the context of aestheticism studies. He differentiates his contribution in two key ways. First, he places particular emphasis on the influence of Hegelian dialectics on Pater's queer aesthetics and the aestheticism that developed under its influence. Second, his study is not a reading of the history and works of aestheticism through recent queer theory but a recognition of aestheticism as, in part, a queer theory in itself. When Friedman says, "Aestheticism is one of queer theory's unacknowledged ancestors," he is not denying the decades of groundbreaking scholarship that has explored the queerness of aestheticism (5). Rather, he is emphasizing a Victorian, politicized, theoretical paradigm that arose before sexology, criminology, and related discourses attained cultural coherence and, eventually, became foundational to much of what is now recognized as modern queer theory, principally under the influence of poststructuralism and psychoanalysis. Avoiding anachronism, Friedman defines the term "queer" rather loosely, allowing it to address a range of attractions, including what we might today read as gay and lesbian desire while also remaining open to forms of aesthetic desire that do not adhere to particular subject/object relations. Friedman argues that contributors to the aesthetic movement "consciously departed from the essentialist understandings of sexual identity promoted by the sexologists. They realized that the aesthetic, as a space located within the social yet not strictly bound by its rules, was a realm where sexual difference could be embraced without being pathologized" (15). It is worth noting that the field of sexology was itself inchoate when Pater began writing. It is true that Heinrich Kaan's Psychopathia Sexualis (recognized by Foucault and others as the first work using psychology to articulate sexual regimes) had appeared in Latin in 1844, but it still situated non-normative practices—which included tribadism, necrophilia, and agalmatophilia (sex with statues)—in an ambiguous notion of general excess rooted in the non-procreative act of masturbation. Pater, Simeon Solomon, Algernon Charles Swinburne, and other key contributors to early aestheticism would have been open to configurations of sexuality that were less constricted than Foucault's technology of power might imply. Aestheticism, that is, explored desires that preceded the historical moment when sexological identity [End Page 154] formation and institutionalization became dominant fixtures, maneuvering within a more ambiguous sexual "chaos," as Kaan called it (Psychopathia Sexualis, edited by Benjamin Kahan, [Cornell University Press, 2016], 44). One of Friedman's most useful insights arises from his focus on the influence of Hegelian dialectics on aestheticist notions of sexuality specifically. Hegel was perhaps the most influential German philosopher at later Victorian Oxford, although Kate Hext, Billie Andrew Inman, and William Shuter have demonstrated the importance of recognizing the various German philosophers who influenced Pater's aesthetic views. Other scholars have also richly analyzed Hegel's influence on Pater, including Giles Whiteley, whose Aestheticism and the Philosophy of Death: Walter Pater and Post-Hegelianism (2010) addresses Pater's oeuvre with particular attention to what Pater calls a Hegelian "radical dualism...