Proust's Cup of Tea: Homoeroticism and Victorian Culture by Emily Eells (review)

Abstract

MLRy 98.4, 2003 999 divine privilege, substituting a false image of the world for the 'face cachee-face visible' of Christian tradition. Allegorizing the writing process (Charles Grivel), the photographic metaphor also informs Le Revelateur du globe, a work on Columbus overdue for scholarly attention, while Livio Belloi's observation that the 'grand ab? sent' from the technophobic charge sheet was cinematography (p. 81) emerges from Bloy's unpublished account of the catastrophic fireat the Bazar de la Charite in May 1897: by amalgamating the Papal Nuncio's opening benedictionand the fatal carelessness of the Russian projectionist, Bloy gave uniquely 'incendiary' expression to his pathological anti-modernism and the eschatological exasperation ('charite de bazar') which found 'la plus douce consolation' in the sinking of the Titanic (p. 154). Bloy half-expected and half-dreaded a Cossack invasion, and lived almost long enough to see the Bolshevik Revolution. Since his death in 1917, the communications media have been transformed beyond recognition and 'modernism' has receded, leaving him an undeconstructable, anachronistic presence, a powerful ifdistorting mirror ofthe 'Belle epoque' whose dark undercurrents he both relished and reviled. University of Stirling William Kidd Proust's Cup of Tea: Homoeroticism and Victorian Culture. By Emily Eells. (Studies in European Cultural Transition, 15) Aldershot: Ashgate. 2002. xii + 248 pp.; 16 pp. plates. ?45. ISBN 0-7546-0518-3. Emily Eells's study formulates and explores a sexual and aesthetic identity which she terms 'Anglosexuality'. The 'Anglosexual' is Proust's third or 'intersex', as repre? sented through British cultural (and scientific) intertexts. British culture, in Eells's reading of the novel, becomes a protective, mediating site which enabled Proust to portray a taboo subject and to construct an aesthetics of homosexuality. Anglosex? uality is thus more than a sexual orientation; drawing on Foucault's definition of inversion, Eells sees it also as an artistic sensitivity, an aesthetic stance, and a new mode of perception. Eells is meticulous in documenting both contemporary Parisian Anglophilia and Proust's exposure to British art and culture. Her scholarship and erudition in the British context are impressively wide-ranging, and while the study is written with a non-French-specialist readership in mind, it is equally illuminating to Proust schol? ars. Proust's debt to the Victorians, especially to Ruskin, is already familiar, but it is the microscopic dimension of Eells's work which sets it apart, uncovering as it does fine details of both well- and lesser-known British intertexts. Through close textual readings and painstaking detective work, Eells brings to light precise sources and ref? erences forkey facets of Proust's construction of homosexuality: androgyny in H. G Wells's The Time Machine, hermaphroditism in Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure; a homosocial and homoerotic universe in Robert Louis Stevenson's adventure stories, as well, of course, as a vision of inversion and duality (both of identity and narrative voice) injekyll and Hyde. The reader may occasionally feel that a coincidence of ideas is being posited as an influence of ideas, but the discussion is always informative and highly readable. Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde feature prominently as sources for Proust's (inter )aesthetic theories. From a suggestive reading which links floral hermaphroditism to literary creation via Darwin in Chapter 4, the book progresses to an analysis of sexual ambiguity in pre-Raphaelite art (Chapter 5), and to a new reading, drawing in such visual apparatus as mirrors and photography, of the well-established links between inversion, voyeurism, and artistic creation (Chapter 6). It concludes with a perceptive discussion of the importance of the interaesthetic nature of Proust's iooo Reviews work in the construction of Anglosexuality: the masculine 'word' is combined with the 'feminine' image to create an 'androgynous imagetext' (p. 172), and thus a new language in which to express homosexual desire. Unfortunately, the study contains a number of typographical errors, especially in quotations. Some surprising misreadings also intrude, as when Eells claims that 'the only sexual act Proust's narrator admits to indulging in is "le plaisir solitaire"' (p. 29). Occasionally, too, one detects a loss of tautness in the argument: the relevance ofa par? ticular intertext to the formation of an Anglosexuality is, at...