Hellenic transgressions, homosexual politics: Wilde, Symonds and Sicily

Abstract

This essay explores a lesser known aspect of the construction of Italy in late Victorian culture: the way in which Sicily, with its ancient Greek associations, functioned as a code for the expression of dissident desire and provided a powerful ideological support in the emergence of modern male homosexual identity in Britain. Symonds and Wilde, who both visited Sicily twice, are intellectual travellers whose motivations are not limited to those of the Victorian crowds flocking to Italy in the wake of the ‘Mediterranean passion’: they are actively engaged, at home, in the unfolding of a homosexual counterdiscourse. In this cultural context, which includes the poetry of the ‘Uranians’ and Wilhelm von Gloeden's photographs of nude Sicilian boys posing as ancient Greeks, Sicily is represented through the codes of aesthetic Hellenism as a homoerotic pastoral and sensual utopia. Homosexual literati projected their sexual fantasies on the Sicilian ‘other’ and looked for the reincarnation of the Hellenic ideal in the bodies of contemporary youths. Sicily is a space for Hellenic transgressions in more than one sense: as a travel destination for the actualisation of illicit desires, and as a strategic cultural space from which to invoke the legitimisation of the ancient ‘Greek love’ tradition.