Frederick Rolfe’s Christmas cards: Popular culture and the construction of queerness in late Victorian Britain

Abstract

This article explores how the British writer and artist Frederick Rolfe (1860–1913) made use of images derived from popular visual culture to construct and express a queer identity that attempted to combine cultural, religious and sexual deviance. He made particular use of practices of bricolage of images and artefacts, as can be seen from both his photographs and novels. The Christmas cards that he posted into a scrapbook in the early 1880s can be analysed as evidencing his development of a particular form of queer aesthetic self-expression. This article argues that satires – one of these cards was a satire on clerical effeminacy – have increasingly been seen in a positive light as being implicated in the very practices of deviance that they appear to denounce. However, in relation to aestheticism such arguments may have been taken too far, because of the inherently anti-aesthetic drive of visual satire towards the grotesque. It is suggested that it was only in Rolfe’s final years, when he emerged from the quasi-ecclesiastical closet and developed an intense sex life in Venice, that he found a new confidence to depict himself in ways that were less reliant on stereotypes derived from popular culture and which relied on appropriation of the signs of manly normativity rather than on the suggestive juxtaposition of attributes of deviance.