Nature Vs Naturalist: Paths Diverging and Converging in Edmund Gosse's Father and Son

Abstract

I examine the impulses that drove Edmund Gosse to follow the formal biography of his father with Father and Son. Before looking for ‘gay sensibility’ in the text, I consider how scientific discourse in the late 19th century opened an understanding of homosexuality to Gosse, and consider how Father and Son preceded societal acceptance of Freudian analysis. Gosse's father was a naturalist, and I consider how Gosse eroticised childhood memory as ‘natural’ and ‘intuitive’. I chart his attraction to a sub-culture of literature that expresses ‘manly love’, and track his expansion from the boyhood appreciation of Hero and Leander, which expelled him from the family home, to his devotional approaches to Whitman, the poet replacing the father as an eroticised father figure. Symonds presented himself as another older man, with explicit teachings about ‘Greek love’. Gosse then became the older figure to Andre Gide, ultimately disturbed by the younger man's sexual explicitness. Ending this substitute father theme, I document how Gosse's ‘true love’ the sculptor Thornycroft removed himself to a ‘father figure’ role. The writing of Father and Son delivered the child Edmund as the innocent companion the adult Edmund needed, and freed him from a disappointed paternal narrative.