Robust Body and Social Souls: Reassessing Ronald Firbank’s Effeminate Queer Men

Abstract

This article places Ronald Firbank into context with Edward Carpenter and Havelock Ellis, who promoted a form of muscular homoeroticism that they distinctly distanced from an allegedly degenerate effeminacy. Examining Firbank alongside Carpenter and Ellis provides a new angle from which to examine Firbank’s complex constructions of sex and gender in his novels. Reflecting yet implicitly critiquing Carpenter’s and Ellis’s work, Firbank offers a similar reorientation of queerness but does so by celebrating effeminate men. For Firbank, gender ambiguities do not bring about effeteness or social alienation. His same-sex desiring male characters are effeminate, but they are concurrently strong, productive, and capable of attracting admirers. He presents them as exhibiting robust bodies and social souls. Consequently, Firbank offers a rare, almost unique, positive relationship between effeminacy and a healthy male homoeroticism in the early-twentieth-century British novel, while revitalizing conventional feminine interests as a valuable element of a desirable homosexual identity.