Before Queer Theory: Victorian Aestheticism and the Self. Dustin Friedman. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019. Pp. xii+234.

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Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewBefore Queer Theory: Victorian Aestheticism and the Self. Dustin Friedman. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019. Pp. xii+234.Victoria WietVictoria WietDePauw University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreWhat if you had read The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) before you had read Lee Edelman’s No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004)? According to Dustin Friedman, your understanding of the possibilities for human freedom might be much different—and no less intellectually sophisticated. In this exceptionally learned and compellingly argued book, Friedman turns the impact of German idealism on Victorian thought into an occasion for demonstrating how the aesthetes theorized the relation between self, society, and culture in ways that powerfully unsettle several of queer theory’s most familiar orthodoxies. Finely attuned to the intellectual histories that traverse both aestheticism and queer theory, Friedman uses the influence of Hegel on Walter Pater and Pater’s influence on Oscar Wilde, Vernon Lee, and Michael Field to show how dialectical thought enabled the aesthetes to proclaim art as a site where queer subjects could achieve self-determination and cultural innovation. Yet Before Queer Theory does more than show how Hegel’s importance to aestheticism and marginalization within queer theory led the former to a stronger investment in the possibility of autonomous subjectivity. Friedman uses the priorities of aestheticism to redirect attention toward an alternative genealogy of queer theoretical thought, from Michel Foucault’s late turn to German idealism to José Esteban Muñoz’s queer utopianism, that seeks to envision new ways of conceptualizing the self’s relation to external social conditions. Aestheticism is thus “before queer theory” in the sense of not having been constrained by its long-standing premises but also in the sense of anticipating several of its most exciting manifestations.To encapsulate aestheticism’s complex relation to contemporary queer thought, Friedman coins a term that will resonate with Hegelians and queer theorists alike: “erotic negativity.” With this term, Friedman reconceptualizes negativity’s pertinence to queer subjects by deriving his definition from Hegel rather than the Lacanian framework favored by theorists of “queer negativity.” There are significant differences among the scholars associated with the latter term,1 but in Friedman’s book, it refers to work that embraces subjects who refuse social belonging by failing to attain the coherence and intelligibility of selfhood required by social regulation. Practitioners of Friedman’s “erotic negativity” similarly repudiate existing practices of social coercion, especially the message that homosexual desires must be disavowed, but this repudiation partakes in a larger dialectical process in which figures like Pater and Wilde transform antagonism into innovation. Friedman’s rethinking of negativity is especially compelling because of his rigorous explanation of why art can facilitate this liberatory process. For the aesthetes, art could foster self-determination among queer subjects because, in the realm of the aesthetic, “the commonsense logic that limits everyday thought is relaxed” and behavioral rules lose their potency (6). By giving due consideration to queer aesthetes’ engagement with Hegelian dialectics and post-Enlightenment aesthetic theory, Friedman cogently illuminates how they were positioned to embrace not the death drive but the “hard, gemlike” vitalism Pater memorably articulated in The Renaissance (1873).The structure of Before Queer Theory is fittingly genealogical. While Pater looms large in this study, chapters on Wilde, Lee, and the poets Michael Field probe how these post-Paterian aesthetes revised the Oxford don’s paradigms for new purposes. Friedman develops an account of these revisions largely through philosophically informed close readings, but he also synthesizes an impressive range of historical and scholarly material in order to construct the lineaments of the intellectual genealogies which his readings flesh out. With sources ranging from Wilde’s university commonplace book to Lee’s dedication of her scholarly works to Pater, Friedman firmly establishes the writers’ engagement with Pater’s ideas. This material leads Friedman to be admirably precise about which strands of Hegelian-Paterian thought each writer can be interpreted as reworking, such as Wilde’s evocation of Hegel’s claim that lyric poetry is the aesthetic form most conducive to self-expression and Lee’s engagement with Pater’s dialectical approach to art history.Friedman begins his study with two chapters on Pater in order to establish the dynamics of erotic negativity. Chapter 1 reconsiders queer theory’s valorization of subjects who fail to comply with social discipline by examining Pater’s treatment of two figures who transcend this failure in important ways: the recessive beings described in “Diaphaneitè” (1864) and the eighteenth-century art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann, the subject of the longest chapter in The Renaissance. Friedman reads Winckelmann as one of Pater’s “diaphanous beings,” anachronisms whose incompatibility with extant norms makes them uniquely fitted to “regenerat[ing] the world” (38). Friedman’s claim that queerness can be an advantage finds its most cogent demonstration in his reading of Winckelmann, whose paradigm-shifting account of Greek culture was, Pater implies, the outcome of his recognition of his homoerotic desires in ancient art. Chapter 2 showcases Friedman at his arguable best, analyzing how literary form models the very processes of aesthetic engagement which the aesthetes depicted. Friedman uses Pater’s later writings, specifically “A Study of Dionysus” (1876) and Marius the Epicurean (1885), to make the case that his famously elusive prose style should be understood not as a strategy of self-concealment but rather as a mechanism for initiating his reader into the process of erotic negativity.In chapter 3, Friedman considers why the queer subjects in Wilde’s short story “The Portrait of Mr. W.H.” (1889) do not succeed in harnessing the transformative potential of aesthetic engagement. Friedman derives his answer from a surprising yet compelling source: Hegel’s Aesthetics (1835), which characterizes lyric poetry as exceptionally conducive to self-expression yet vulnerable to becoming self-referential and detached from reality. Because the characters in “Mr. W.H.” demand that language index empirical truth, their inability to satisfactorily support their claim that Shakespeare’s sonnets bespeak the bard’s desire for a beautiful boy actor lead them to self-destruction. Chapters 4 and 5 see Friedman taking an important turn: examining the unique problems and opportunities that German idealist frameworks pose for female aesthetes. In his most elegant integration of aesthetic thought and queer theory, Friedman presents Vernon Lee’s ghost stories as posing a solution to the problem formulated by female theorists of queer historiography: the resistance of positivist methods to furnishing unambiguous evidence that lesbian desire has a history. Beginning with Lee’s critique that art cannot fully transcend the limitations that post-Enlightenment empiricism places on the imagination, Friedman reads “Oke of Okehurst” and “Prince Alberic and the Snake Lady” as illustrating how the supernatural can foster contact between modern subjects and premodern figures of female homoeroticism. Chapter 5 advances the claim that the ekphrastic poetry of Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper (Michael Field) unleashes the queer potential of following another German idealist, Immanuel Kant, in developing a normative judgment of an artwork. In Friedman’s reading, their poetry illuminates how the disinterested apprehension of a painting can counterintuitively require one to inhabit the range of nonnormative sexual and gendered positions that the two women embodied in their own lives.Friedman’s book excels as an examination of how intellectual history and literary production intersect, but historians of sexuality might be skeptical of his use of sexology as a contextualizing frame. In Before Queer Theory, sexology plays an important role in establishing that queer aesthetes were reacting to a “hostile” cultural environment, yet German sexual science hadn’t fully arrived on British shores until Havelock Ellis’s Studies in the Psychology of Sex (1896). Ellis did have contemporaries in Vernon Lee and Michael Field, but as Friedman himself notes, they were also friends—a fact that will remind some readers of Ellis’s commitment to depathologizing the sexual radicals with whom he openly socialized.2 Friedman astutely notes that the aesthetes that he studies did not understand themselves through sexological vocabulary, an observation that could have led him to decentralize rather than recentralize sexology in literary criticism on late Victorian sexuality. Friedman’s inheritance of preexisting critical paradigms also manifests in his frequent use of phrases like “social norms” and “social critique” to formulate the target of erotic negativity. These terms help to connect his take on aestheticism to ongoing conversations in queer theory, yet “social norms” does not fully encompass the range of intellectual habits and cultural assumptions that Friedman shows the aesthetes as addressing. Perhaps “hegemony” would better capture the capaciousness of Friedman’s insights. Though some readers might wish Friedman to alter the framing of his argument on occasion, there is much in this book that will interest a wide variety of readers, from scholars of aestheticism who wish Wilde, Lee, and Michael Field to be treated with the intellectual seriousness usually reserved to Pater; to scholars of British literature who do not study aestheticism but do engage with intellectual history; and, of course, to anyone interested in a fresh take on the questions that have motivated queer theory since the 1980s.Notes1. On the differences among arguments associated with queer negativity and the “anti-social thesis,” see Robyn Wiegman, “Sex and Negativity; or, What Queer Theory Has for You,” Cultural Critique, no. 95 (Winter 2017): 220–21.2. On Ellis’s role in the development of English sexology, see Heike Bauer, English Literary Sexology: Translations of Inversion, 1860–1930 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), chap. 2. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 118, Number 2November 2020 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/711160HistoryPublished online August 27, 2020 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.