LOVE AMONG THE RUINS: THE CATACOMBS, THE CLOSET, AND THE VICTORIAN “EARLY CHRISTIAN” NOVEL

Abstract

Catacomb, n., a subterranean place for the burial of the dead, consisting of galleries or passageways with recesses excavated in their sides for tombs.The Oxford English DictionarySilence itself — the things one declines to say, or is forbidden to name, the discretion that is required between different speakers — is less the absolute limit of discourse, the other side from which it is separated by a strict boundary, than an element that functions alongside the things said, with them and in relation to them within over-all strategies.Michel Foucault, The History of SexualityWe often assume (rightly) that homosexuality must be hidden, that it has to be found.Neil Bartlett, Who Was That Man?I. Ruining the Religious NovelBY TITLING THIS ESSAY “Love Among the Ruins,” I mean at once to be literal, figurative, and allusive in the framing of my topic: literal, in that I will be examining the place of love — specifically, erotic love — within the Roman catacombs or equivalent sites of Christian sanctuary; figurative, in that the representations of love that I will be discussing occur within the context of “literary ruins” — that is, within a relatively obscure nineteenth-century English narrative sub-genre, the Victorian “Early Christian” novel1; and, finally, allusive, in that I deliberately invoke the first poem of Robert Browning’s 1855 collection of dramatic monologues, Men and Women, for more than mere rhetorical effect. In fact, “Love Among the Ruins” condenses a number of the key concerns that I want to address in this essay, for the poem offers an important critique of classical culture not only as a site of pagan aesthetic production and human vainglory, but, relatedly, of homosocial and, perhaps, homoerotic bonds and the sterility presumed to inhere therein — a critique highly visible in Victorian Early Christian fiction. Indeed, I would argue, Browning’s text implicitly participates in the discursive construction of an important, if ultimately unstable, dichotomy that Victorian novels set in the catacombs and written roughly around the same time as “Love Among the Ruins” powerfully reinforce: namely, the traditional opposition between classicism and Christianity, an opposition at least one facet of which is rooted in competing attitudes toward the erotic.