The Romantic Sexology of John Addington Symonds

Abstract

This paper examines a radical text by the English Classicist and homosexual, John Addington Symonds (1840-1893). Through a close study of an unpublished and long concealed manuscript, “A Problem in Modern Ethics”(1891), Symonds's political vision and the odd form of writing it takes is revealed as romantic in character. Symonds polemicizes against the pathologization of homosexuals in the legal-medical discourses of the time and advocates on behalf of a latent homosexual ethics, shunned from modern Western society, but continuing to hold forth a promise for the civic and moral renewal of Western countries. Against the positions of Krafft-Ebing and others, Symonds argues for the acceptance of “manly love,” in the spirit of the ancients, as a source of moral inspiration for a declining Europe. Where Symonds is often read by historians of homosexual radicalism as a precursor to the radical tradition of the 20th century, romantic acceptance of the untimeliness of his moral vision, indicates less a politically progressive than a romantically fatalistic enterprise.