Love At Love's Brightest

Jason Roush reviews David Plante’s The Pure Lover,
a “cumulative portrait of a long-term gay relationship
that’s as valid a marriage as any other.”

In the latest issue of the always worthwhile Gay and Lesbian Review, Jason Roush reviews David Plante’s The Pure Lover: A Memoir of Grief, which Publisher’s Weekly describes as “a series of disjointed memories” about Plante’s partner of 40 years, the poet Nikos Stangos, who died in 2004.

Does it sound like a downer? Well, not according to Michael Dirda of The Washington Post, who writes:

Grief memoirs have become all too common, largely because of the widespread devastation caused by cancer and complications of AIDS, and further encouraged by our relentlessly confessional culture. But, despite the subtitle . . . The Pure Lover leaves one exalted rather than depressed.

. . . Throughout Stangos’ poetry and Plante’s memoir, the word “pure” gradually comes to designate a fundamental quality of life and of their relationship. What do they mean by it? “You used the word ‘purity,’ but would you have tried to define the idea of purity? No, and certainly not as dogma, which you saw as tyrannical. You used the word this way: he is pure, animals are pure, the scent of lemon blossoms is pure, the taste of lemon is pure, the sunlight is pure, music is pure, and kisses, too, are pure. And this, the most undefined proposition: love at love’s brightest is pure.” It would be going too far to call this evocation of a beloved companion now lost a pure pleasure to read. But out of the fragments, Proustian moments and sharply felt memories of a happy and painful past, David Plante has made a lovely book, joyful, plangent and true.

David Plante (pictured at right) is a renowned author whose novels often examine homosexuality in a variety of contexts, most notably in the milieu of large, working-class, Catholic families of French Canadian background.

Writing in the Encyclopedia of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Culture, Thomas Dukes notes:

Plante is most noted for The Family (1978), The Country (1981), and The Woods (1982), his highly acclaimed Francoeur “trilogy.” (The Foreigner and The Catholic have rather specific links to the trilogy but are set “away” from the family of the novels.) While these novels vary in their presentation of overtly gay characters or sex scenes, they do suggest other coming-of-age works by gay writers such as Tennessee Williams, Carson McCullers, and Truman Capote. However, Plante’s novels lack the gothic extravagances often associated with those other writers.

Plante’s low-key approach allows the other family members and characters to emerge as clearly as his narrator, Daniel, who seems sexually ambiguous in the trilogy. Such ambiguity as found in life is a hallmark of Plante’s writing, sexuality included.

. . . Plante focuses not only on the varieties of love and sexuality but on the different expressions love and sexuality may take. For example, some characters engage enthusiastically in a variety of sexual practices, some seem to be bisexual or inclined that way, and some appear to be determining their sexuality or sexualities. Thus, his novels . . . may be said to examine a variety of homosexualities as well as heterosexual ones.

Interesting.

I actually picked up a used copy of The Catholic some time ago, started reading it, but lost interest. Perhaps I should revisit it.

Anyway, the point is I was somewhat familiar with Plante when I spied Roush’s review in the GLR, and so was eager to read it. Plante’s memoir, The Pure Lover, sounds utterly compelling, and Roush’s review is a beautiful piece of writing in and of itself – informative and engaging. It’s reprinted in its entirety below, with added pictures and links.

But first, here is how the Calamus Bookstore Newsletter describes The Pure Lover: A Memoir of Grief.

David Plante met Nikos Stangos in London in 1965. Plante was a young American, an aspiring writer, half in love with the fantasy of Greece, Greeks and their culture. Nikos was Greek, a poet, an aesthete and an intellectual. He was also a leftist, a survivor of the Nazi occupation of his homeland and a man of few pretensions. David and Nikos spent over forty years together. A few years ago, Nikos died of brain cancer. Plante’s The Pure Lover: A Memoir of Grief is a book of fragments, a mosaic of memories of their lives together. It is also a meditation on the nature of grief, how grief has its own passion, its vanity, its willfulness and can be an overwhelming force.

____________________

Now That You’ve Gone

A Review of David Plante’s
The Pure Lover: A Memoir of Grief

By Jason Roush

The Gay and Lesbian Review
March-April 2010

Author David Plante has made a career out of writing critically praised novels that center on family dramas and sexually ambiguous main characters. His latest book, an innovative and incantatory memoir about the family that he formed with his partner of forty years, the poet and publisher Nikos Stangos [pictured at right], couldn’t be any less ambiguous in its portrayal of the couple’s life together, and in its bracingly poignant meditations on Stangos’ death from brain cancer in 2004. In an era when the debate over same-sex marriage seems to be at the very heart of our public discourse, this book offers a cumulative portrait, taken in snapshots, of a long-term gay relationship that’s as valid a marriage as any other.

The most striking and significant aspect of Plante’s memoir is its form. Composed solely of a series of fragments, each no longer than a paragraph, The Pure Lover takes on a pensive and elliptical tone that works well with Plante’s themes and content on several levels. First and foremost, the fragments convey the random spontaneity of memory itself, as Plante sifts through four decades of remembrances from his relationship, and even further back in the book’s earliest fragments, which reconstruct Stangos’ boyhood years in German-occupied Athens, Greece, during the height of World War II. These evocative fragments are similar in effect to those collected in Joe Brainard’s I Remember (1975). Each entry possesses a luminous, self-contained quality of its own, yet as much as these moments stand separately from one another in time, they also combine to create a cohesive and seamless whole.

Also present in the format of Plante’s book is the ancient Greek lesbian poet Sappho, whose works were gradually excavated as incomplete fragments on broken reeds of papyrus. This allusion is no coincidence; in a memory from the early days of his relationship with Stangoes, Plante writes, “The first Greek poem you taught me was one of Sappho’s, in which she sleeps alone.” Many bits of Greek language punctuate the memoir and inform the book’s overarching structure, arranged sequentially in chapters by the letters of the Greek alphabet. While describing the subject of Stangos’ master’s thesis in philosophy, Plante also captures the reiterative, prayer-like, and continually evolving structure of his own book: “Nietzsche’s ‘form’ was cyclical, was repetition revolving on repetition, each repetition an elaboration.”

Throughout the book’s first half, Plante delicately renders the love story that’s at the core of his memoir. From the couple’s initial meeting as twenty-somethings in 1965 in London, where, thereafter, they permanently resided, their relationship has all the alluring, almost legendary qualities of high romance: “Our Saturday afternoon naps, all chores, including shopping, done, we shut off the telephone, closed the curtains of our room, undressed, and got into bed, our arms held out to each other.” And years later: “The time we climbed up to the Acropolis, visitors were allowed to walk among the pillars of the Parthenon in moonlight . . . and there you kissed me, as if all your life in Athens you had wanted to do that.”

But Plante is honest about the realities of longtime companionship as well, chronicling the disagreements, youthful infidelities, and occasional rages that any such relationship must eventually endure. Of the orderly domestic life that the couple shared, Plante recalls, “I tried to be amused by your fastidiousness, but, complaining against your complaints, shouted that I would not have our lives reduced to minutia. You shouted back, ‘I will not live in bedlam.’” This straightforward style becomes most effective in the book’s final chapters, as Plante unflinchingly documents his partner’s last months. Plante’s spare yet moving descriptions of that time are reminiscent of Don Bachardy’s powerful deathbed sketches and line drawings of his lover Christopher Isherwood, who also died of complications from cancer.

In the prologue to his book, Plante mentions how the memories that make up The Pure Lover originally came back to him with no sense of order or chronology, and that much effort went into sequencing the fragments to give the memoir its structural integrity and narrative continuity. The result, as Plante hopes, is something like a Greek amphora, a vessel to contain the memory of his lover and put it on display for posterity.

Jason Roush, author of After Hours, Breezeway, and Crosstown, teaches at Emerson College.


See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• Don Gorton on the Significance of Maurice
• At Swim, Two Boys - A Beautiful Novel
• Dew[y]-Kissed
• Conversing and Arguing with the Theology of Philip Pullman
• My Travels with Doris
• Doris Lessing Awarded Nobel Prize for Literature
• Song of Songs: The Bible’s Gay Love Song

Opening Image: Hiroko Sakai.

Don Gorton on the Significance of Maurice (Part 2)

Following is Part 2 of Don Gorton’s excellent article, “Maurice and Gay Liberation,” from the November -December 2009 issue of The Gay and Lesbian Review. It’s accompanied by images from the 1987 film adaptation of E.M. Forster’s landmark novel, starring James Wilby as Maurice and Rupert Graves as Alec. (For Part 1, click here.)

___________________

[T]he positive impact of [E. M. Forster’s] revolutionary portrayal of gay love was withheld for 57 years due to Forster’s decision to publish [Maurice] only posthumously. Forster has been chided by gay commentators for failing to publish Maurice during his lifetime, though his fears of censorship, defamation, and even prosecution were not unwarranted. Consider the experience of the less gay-affirming portrayal of lesbianism in The Well of Loneliness, published in 1928, which was censored and used to stigmatize its author, Radclyffe Hall.

It should also be noted that the happy endings in Maurice are limited to the pair of lovers, Maurice and Alec. Clive is tormented in old age after a lifetime wasted in a loveless marriage. Dr. Steven Centola, a Jungian psychologist, argues that Maurice fails to complete the final stage of the developmental process of “individuation.” Instead of re-emerging into the world and engaging society as a fully self-aware person, Maurice disappears with Alec into the greenwood. They save each other by hiding in darkness where their love will be left alone.

For Forster, it was enough that
“when two are gathered together
majorities shall not triumph.”

The focus of the happy ending on Maurice and Alec suggests that Forster’s artistic purpose was carried through with the completion of their relationship. Associated with the free-spirited Bloomsbury Group, Forster was a disciple of philosopher G. E. Moore, who assigned transcendent value to “the pleasures of human intercourse.” In Howards End, with its famous epigram “only connect,” Forster seems to say that the right personal relationships can sort out larger social tensions, namely in the Schlegel–Wilcox alliance. The resolution in Maurice comports with the Bloomsbury Group’s emphasis on personal feelings and defiance of repressive social conventions as the path to fulfillment in life, unaccompanied by a program of wider social and political change. For Forster, it was enough that “when two are gathered together majorities shall not triumph.”



It is safe to assume that the author had no concept of how larger society could be transformed to free GLBT people from repression. Parliament appears in the novel only as another setting where Clive’s drift into heterosexual conformity will play itself out. Of course, there was no plausible model of political agitation for the atomized gay population of Forster’s time to draw upon. While a nascent gay rights movement was emerging in Germany in the early 20th century (snuffed out by the Nazis in the 1930’s), there was no correlate in the English-speaking countries until much later.

It is only when the modern GLBT civil rights movement adopted a strategy of community organizing that larger social and political transformation became conceivable. Coalescence gave rise to “gay power,” which in myriad iterations succeeded in redirecting the course of history. Theoreticians in New York articulated and disseminated an ideology of gay pride that GLBT people could incorporate in individual and collective acts of radical self-definition. Soon a new and potent discourse had developed that equipped gay men and lesbians everywhere to accept themselves, to demand respect, and to fight for fairness and equality.

It was amid the rapidly evolving subculture of gay liberation in 1971 that Maurice finally appeared. Emancipation had not progressed so far that Maurice was welcomed without controversy. Even after Stonewall, the novel was ahead of its time. A forthright portrayal of gay love that ended rapturously for the protagonists was more than some critics could stomach. Typical of the initial negative reviews was that of Philip Toynbee, writing in The Observer, who pronounced Maurice to be “novelettish, ill-written, humourless and deeply embarrassing.” Toynbee maintained that Forster’s literary gift depended upon the sublimation of his homosexual feelings, evident in the novels he published during his lifetime. Other early commentators were even more bluntly homophobic. The flavor of Julian Mitchell’s scathing review in The Guardian was captured in its title: “Fairy Tale.” The convention that fictional gay relationships must end badly for the protagonists was still regnant at the time.

The fact that gay and lesbian couples
can love long and selflessly enough to unite for a lifetime,
a shocking idea when Forster conceived of it,
now enjoys wide currency.

In the 1980’s, Maurice was gaining some prestige among critics. Robert Martin undertook a reassessment in a 1983 article, the first significant reading of the novel by a gay reviewer, in which he emphasized the protagonist’s progress from a “false solution” to the challenge of being gay with Clive, to more authentic self-actualization in the consummated relationship with Alec. By 1990, Maurice was being hailed as the “first gay liberation masterpiece” by Claude Summers. Even as he criticized what he referred to as “Forster’s self-erasure”—assuming Clive was the character the author most resembled—commentator John Fletcher stated in 1992 that Maurice “should now be recognized as the one classic portrayal of ‘masculine love’ . . . and the one explicitly homosexual bildungsroman produced within the mainstream of English literary tradition by a canonical author.” Meanwhile, in 1987, Merchant and Ivory released a sumptuous feature film adaptation of Maurice, which brought the story to the rapt attention of gay and lesbian audiences worldwide.



Maurice has found perhaps its greatest resonance in the 21st century, when the cause of same-sex marriage is on the march, a cause that Alec and Maurice poignantly emblemize. The fact that gay and lesbian couples can love long and selflessly enough to unite for a lifetime, a shocking idea when Forster conceived of it, now enjoys wide currency.

By 1990, Maurice was being hailed
as the “first gay liberation masterpiece”

Perhaps there is something of what psychologist Jung termed “synchronicity” in the fact Maurice was published at a time, soon after Stonewall, when it could dovetail with events that Forster never imagined. By 1971, society had progressed far enough and GLBT people had entered mainstream discourse with (still-subversive) demands for equality, so that the novel was no longer in danger of censorship. Gay people were coming out in large numbers, hungry for a literature which would acknowledge and validate their existence. Maurice and Alec’s departure from the darkness of the greenwood and Forster’s own posthumous self-outing symbolized our collective emergence from history’s dark closet. Over the 38 years since its publication, Maurice has made significant contributions to gay self-actualization, not as a political treatise but as an inspiration for individual readers.


See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• Don Gorton on the Significance of Maurice (Part 1)
• Celebrating Two Pioneers

Recommended Off-site Link:
Merry Old England - Michael D. Klemm (CinemaQueer.com, April 2009).

Don Gorton on the Significance of Maurice

.

. . . and its relationship to the cause
of gay liberation

These tough economic times have meant a cut back on the number of magazines to which I subscribe. Two publications that I consider indispensable, however, are: The National Catholic Reporter and The Gay and Lesbian Review.

In the most recent issue of the latter is a well-written and illuminating piece by Don Gorton on E. M. Forster’s groundbreaking novel, Maurice. I’ve taken the liberty of reprinting Gorton’s article (in two installments) - accompanied by relevant links and by images from the novel’s 1987 film adaptation. (Maurice, described as “a rich filmgoing experience and one of the most beautiful films in all of queer cinema,” made the top ten in a recent poll conducted by AfterElton.com to ascertain the 50 Greatest Gay Movies of all time. These films are considered the most endearing and honest when it comes to celebrating and exploring lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender themes in cinema.)

So without further ado, here is Part 1 of Don Gorton’s excellent article, “Maurice and Gay Liberation.” Enjoy! (And, if you can, subscribe to the Gay and Lesbian Review! You won’t be disappointed).

______________________

Maurice and Gay Liberation

By Don Gorton

The Gay and Lesbian Review
November-December 2009

Written in a burst of inspiration in 1913 and ’14 and set in the England of the Edwardian Age, E. M. Forster’s Maurice was “dedicated to a happier year,” though the author had no conception of when that might be. Forster shared the manuscript with trusted friends, including D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, T. E. Lawrence, Lytton Strachey, and Paul Cadmus, but would not publish the novel during his lifetime. Only in 1971, a year after Forster’s death, would the novel appear in print.

A hybrid of the traditional marriage novel and the bildungsroman genre, Maurice was revolutionary for its presentation of same-sex love culminating in a “happily ever after” ending. Forster later declared that the “happy ending was imperative. I shouldn’t have bothered to write [it] otherwise.” In the Edwardian Age the suggestion that gay people were capable of forming loving unions to last a lifetime was blasphemous, subversive, and probably criminal.

The theme of Maurice can be described as
essentially the search for a compatible social construct
by which the protagonist can understand himself
and go on to self-actualization.

Even in 1971, it was the happy ending, dubbed the “greenwood idyll,” that came in for the severest criticism when the novel was finally published. Indeed, the notion of Maurice abandoning his family, friends, and career to build a life for himself and Alec in the primeval woods of England, like Robin Hood’s merry men sheltering in Sherwood Forest, stretched the imagination of even the newly arisen gay liberation movement. Although difficult to defend as plausible fiction set in the years leading up to World War I, Forster’s insistence on the triumph of same-sex love, reflected in his hopeful dedication to “a happier year,” forms the foundation of Maurice’s significance for the modern GLBT civil rights movement. On the occasion of the fortieth anniversary of the 1969 Stonewall Riots, which catalyzed that movement, and a century after the Edwardian Age, an examination of the novel’s relationship to the cause of gay liberation is timely.

Maurice is the prototypical gay-affirming coming-of-age novel. The title character, a conventional upper-middle-class Edwardian in every respect down to his class snobbery, confronts unconscious desires that begin to make themselves felt in adolescence. It is not until his second year at Cambridge University, when he meets Clive Durham, that Maurice begins his long, arduous climb to self-understanding. His realization that he’s attracted to other males, weeks after Clive confesses that he has fallen in love with him, comes only after vehement denials and a bout of “madness.”

Maurice is the prototypical
gay-affirming coming-of-age novel.

Maurice differs strikingly from post-Stonewall gay novels in that the protagonist from the beginning lacks access to any conventional discourse with which to frame his same-sex desire. In the aftermath of the highly publicized trials of Oscar Wilde in 1895, English society doubled down on the view that “the love that dare not speak its name” was something so vile that it couldn’t even be mentioned. Whether Maurice looked to education, law, medicine, or religion, homosexuality was spoken of only elliptically, in the merest “scraps of language,” which made the condemnation of it all the more baneful. An unreflective man ill-equipped to comprehend this challenge, Maurice spends most of his time in a “muddle.”

The theme of Maurice can be described as essentially the search for a compatible social construct by which the protagonist can understand himself and go on to self-actualization. At Cambridge, Maurice becomes acquainted with a character named Risley (based on Forster’s Bloomsbury friend Lytton Strachey), who challenges the compulsory silence imposed on unconventional subjects by insisting that people should “talk, talk, talk.” Risley stands as an antidote to the repression of authentic feelings, including those that are taboo, and it is through Risley that Maurice meets Clive.

Clive had found a model of homosexual affirmation in the culture of ancient Greece and the writings of Plato, and adhered to the stylized ideal of male bonding acclaimed in The Symposium and The Phaedrus. Clive assists Maurice’s self-discovery by giving him the referent he seizes upon when he says “I have always been like the Greeks and didn’t know it.”

Clive extols homosexuality as a higher form of love, a spiritual connection that must be left physically unconsummated to uphold its surpassing nobility. Yet a love so beaten down by over-intellectualization will starve for lack of sustenance. Maurice is left to burn, while Clive, according to the narrator, somehow becomes attracted to women. Commentators have labored to make sense of the cryptic and enigmatic report of Clive’s re-orientation, with the view that he is yielding to proscription and class pressure being the most favored. To give Clive’s sudden change context, Merchant and Ivory added a scene to their film version in which Risley is entrapped by a handsome police decoy and convicted of “gross indecency” in a case parallel to that of Oscar Wilde. The fear spawned by Risley’s ruination motivates Clive in the film version to recant his love for Maurice and seek a wife.

The loss of Clive devastates Maurice, who’s left to struggle with his homosexuality without his partner and mentor. Three sexual encounters with other men alarm him. In hope of changing, he confides to his doctor that he’s an “unspeakable of the Oscar Wilde sort,” but is told his situation is “rubbish” and must not be discussed. He turns to an American psychiatrist, who coolly labels his condition “congenital homosexuality,” which can be “cured” in half of the cases he sees. Hypnotic suggestion is this doctor’s methodology, but the treatment is doomed once Maurice has his first sexual liaison with Clive’s lusty young under-gamekeeper, Alec.



Alec energetically pursues Maurice as he continues to visit Clive’s country estate Penge, chasing after his carriage, grabbing him to get away from the local rector, and then watching the window of the room where Maurice is sleeping. Scarcely aware of what he’s doing, on two separate nights Maurice calls out his window: “Come!” On the second invitation, Alec climbs the conveniently available ladder and joins Maurice in bed.

To find their way to fulfillment, Maurice and Alec must get past the class difference. Alec thinks Maurice is treating him disrespectfully by not answering his letters, while Maurice grows fearful that he’s being set up for blackmail. The climactic encounter tellingly occurs in the Bloomsbury section of London, at the British Museum, where the two thrash out powerful and warring emotions flanked by Assyrian winged bulls. Spending the night together afterward, they progress toward understanding their love, with the “flesh educating the spirit,” as Forster describes it. Maurice formulates a plan, and the men make heroic sacrifices to be together. At last glimpsing self-realization, Maurice takes his leave of Clive, and he and Alec disappear into England’s “greenwood,” never again to separate. In a counterpoint to the happy ending, we catch a glimpse of a wistful Clive, toward the end of his life, haunted by a mystical vision of his lost lover beckoning him from an eternal Cambridge spring to “come.”

Maurice asserts the truth
that gays cannot become fully human,
fully alive, unless we embrace who we are.

When Maurice declares his love for Alec to Clive’s “thin sour disapproval,” he speaks with such an uncharacteristic clarity that Clive asks him, “Who taught you to talk like this?” Maurice’s reply, “You, if anyone,” begs the question, because Clive himself has never attained this kind of self-awareness. In fact, the unmentioned source of Forster’s idea for an enduring love “outside class, without relations or money” was the relationship of proto-gay-activist Edward Carpenter and his working-class partner George Merrill, who lived at Milthorpe in rural Derbyshire. Carpenter, in turn, took his inspiration from Walt Whitman and the ideal of a democratic “love of comrades.” We know this connection only from Forster’s “terminal note,” in which he described an affectionate touch on the backside by Merrill at Milthorpe as the spark for Maurice.

“Muddled” Maurice would have been unfamiliar with Carpenter or Whitman, so the four corners of the novel do not fully explain how he came to the insights that enabled him to plan a lifelong relationship with Alec. With an inspired push from the author, Maurice travels the last leg of his metaphoric journey from valley to mountaintop in an unseen leap. Through this brilliant authorial intrusion, Maurice foretells a post-Stonewall liberationist sensibility. Forster affirms gay self-acceptance and same-sex love that can thrive despite social reprobation. Maurice asserts the truth that gays cannot become fully human, fully alive, unless we embrace who we are. Forster bears witness to the centrality of coming to terms with one’s homosexuality in the formation of character for gay people. In the England of Forster’s construction, acceptance of being gay can take one outside of the dreary, suburban conventions that stifle authenticity. Homosexuality offers an escape from the suffocating English class system, anathematized as toxic to healthy relationships and human happiness.



Forster exposes the willful ignorance of his times when he has Clive announce that “[a]s long as they talk of the unspeakable vice of the Greeks they can’t expect fair play.” Elsewhere, he lays bare the scientific backwardness of earlier medical understandings of homosexuality and argues that it’s useless and pointless to try to change someone’s sexual orientation. With subtle irony Forster pillories the pretentiousness of established religion and deftly exposes the incongruities pervading society’s attitudes toward sex. His fiction provides a gay-positive discourse for individuals needing a framework to comprehend who they are, the idea of same-sex relationships, and a place for themselves in society.


NEXT: Part 2

See also the previous Wild Reed post:
• Celebrating Two Pioneers

Patrick Ryan on the “Defense of Traditional Marriage” Argument

.

The “consensual approach toward commitment,”
says Patrick J. Ryan, is the keystone of modern society
and the strongest justification for same-sex marriage.

In the November-December 2009 issue of The Gay and Lesbian Review, Patrick J. Ryan, an associate professor of childhood and social institutions at the University of Western Ontario, has an insightful article on how “traditional marriage”’s roots in property and commerce are ignored by conservatives (including, it should be noted, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops).

The general premise of Ryan’s piece is that what reactionary elements within various religious institutions and groups call “traditional” family values, including “traditional marriage,” have virtually no long-term history.

“Marriage,” writes Ryan, “is a human institution embedded in a political and economic history. If we allow the ‘defenders of traditional marriage’ to blind the public to this history under the false premise that changes to marriage are a threat to the natural order or a challenge to God’s law, we will have missed the opportunity to understand the full implications of the modern world we have created.”

The crucial questions concerning “consumerist families of market societies,” writes Ryan, “must be pursued, but they should not create any nostalgia for the marital and family relations of the traditional world” – relations marked by an understanding of the home as a “site of production” and a “framework for the master-servant order.”

I thought I’d do my bit to help folks understand the “full implications of the modern world we have created” by sharing highlights from Ryan’s excellent article. This seems especially timely given that in Maine today voters will be asked to vote either Yes or No to the following question: “Do you want to reject the new law that lets same-sex couples marry and allows individuals and religious groups to refuse to perform these marriages?” A Yes vote will take away the right of same-sex couples to marry, while a No vote will keep the right of same-sex couples to marry.

_________________

The “defense of marriage” argument rests upon a fundamental misunderstanding of marriage as an institution and as a word, and a deep confusion about what constitutes a “traditional” way of life. When marriage is redefined in terms of heterosexuality or even the capacity of two people to have children, it is not being reestablished in a “traditional” form but instead in a uniquely modern form, one that’s underpinned by a preoccupation with sexuality and a desire to police its forms of expression.

Traditional families hardly exist today in the United States or any other industrial society. This is not because we’ve lost our moral bearings but because we have rejected the ethics of a traditional master-servant world. Instead, we’ve constructed modern family ideals around consensual love, competent individualism, child development, and egalitarian companionship. Modern family ideals have a reciprocal relationship with a civil political order based on individual rights and a capitalist economy.


No simple definition

The first thing that one might say is that it’s nonsense to speak of marriage as if there was ever a golden age when it was a well-regulated, uniform, untroubled institution immune from political or economic conflict. Most marriage forms in the history of the world (approximately three-fourths) have been polygamous. This includes the patriarchs of the Hebrew scriptures. Until a few centuries ago, beginning in Europe, a multiplicity of forms among ordinary people were usually practiced without state or church regulation. Across the globe, marriage and sexual practices included persons we would call children or youths. It has been common in many places and times for sexual relations (including homosexual ones) to have been ritual parts of communal initiation. Thus sex has existed for most of humanity outside of a monogamous marital monopoly, or even the concept of consenting adulthood. This strange diversity troubles any simple definition of “traditional” marriage, but it makes one thing clear: what the religious Right calls “traditional” family values have virtually no long-term history.

What, they would ask in disbelief, haven’t heterosexual monogamy and protecting children from the outside world always been the central reason for marriage in Western civilization? The answer, in fact, is No. This concept of marriage wasn’t predominant until the Protestant Reformation ushered in a capitalist economy and the modern individual.

In English, the word “marriage” was derived from the French “marier” (to join) and the French suffix “–age” (denoting a condition or state of being). It referred to any joining with the connotation of permanence, whether one was marrying two bottles of wine or two people together. Against these deep and flexible etymological roots, our current sense of marriage is only a few centuries old.

The medieval church didn’t much concern itself with the regulation of the profane: sex, children, women, marriage, or family. Medieval marriage was one of the lesser oaths of master-servant fealty. In everyday life, if you lived as husband and wife, you were married. For many centuries in traditional Europe, what we call “common-law marriage” was how the vast majority of couples were bonded prior to the 16th century. Marriage banns, elaborate ceremonies for commoners, state licenses, family courts, the preoccupation with sexuality, and demands of romantic love, along with a sentimental approach to childbearing – all these accoutrements of modern marriage have conceptual origins in the Protestant Reformation, but they took centuries to develop and were irregularly practiced until the 19th century.


The history of “husband,” “wife,” and “family”

We can get a glimpse into family life prior to modern marriage by more closely examining the history of the relevant words. While it is true that “husbands” have always been male, this is because all owners of property were male. “Husband” comes from combining two words, “house” and “bounde” (ownership). To be a husband was to own, work, and improve the land – this is why we still speak of “husbandry.” Prior to industrial capitalism, a propertyless man was not only an undesirable spouse, he had no right to “espouse” (claim) a wife and had to accept a life as a servant in another man’s house. This makes perfect sense when we know that the term “family” originated, not as a reference to children or sexual procreation, but through the Latin word “famulus,” which meant servant, and its immediate forerunner “familia,” which meant household. A man who had no property had no way to establish a family. As a result, most men lived in a position of servitude within their master’s household. Even sons of propertied fathers, who could hope to become masters and husbands, usually had to await their inheritance before establishing an independent household. This traditional pattern of paternal control over property did not begin to erode in the Anglo-American world until the 18th-century.

The chief point of all this for the current marriage debate is that prior to the era of the American Revolution, property ownership, not individual sexual behavior or companionate preferences, defined both the terms of marital choice and what husbands did.

It is telling that the history of the term “wife” does not correspond to the term “husband.” Wife is directly linked to the word “woman,” but it is entangled with terms for women who traded things or provided valued services: “alewif,” “fishwife,” “midwife,” or “housewife.” The “housewife” legally and economically belonged to a husband (a house owner). This legal status (called “coverture”) is well represented by the practice of the dowry. Studies of colonial America have calculated that the dowry (tools and materials for household production) given at marriage with the bride were typically valued at about one-third of the property coming from the groom’s family. This property exchange at marriage ensured a competent household, which was the late medieval and early modern meaning of having a “family.”


The traditional household

Thus the words for familial and spousal relations in English did not draw boundaries around sex, reproduction, love, or children, but were far more concerned with relations of labor, ownership, and economic exchange. The pre-capitalist, pre-modern household was not a private “home,” a closed space for child rearing and romantic love of the domesticated kind. It was a site of production – a shop, a farm, a manor, a great trading House – where the distinction between public and private space was not at issue.

The traditional household was not about individual sexuality; it was a framework for the master-servant order. Just as the term “husband” was tied to the land and “wife” to trade, the terms related to childhood and youth – such as garçon, boy, bride, groom, and many others in English, German, and French – referred to the hierarchy of master-servant relations.

. . . Only in the past two centuries have the terms for childhood taken on the modern concerns with internal development and socialization. Placing the development of children at the center of traditional marriage misconstrues Old World marriage and family practice – and obscures the revolutionary implications of modern childhood development. Modern childhood aspires to create hardworking, competent individuals equipped to survive in a complex, market-based society. Starting in the 18th century, child rearing practice has overturned not only any particular tradition but traditionalism in general, favoring in its place a notion of the sovereignty of the individual and an ethic of progress.


A human institution

This brings us to the central flaw in the claim that constitutionally redefining marriage in terms of sexual identity will protect “traditional” family life, much less some imagined “natural order . . . enshrined since the beginning of time” [phrases used by the US Conference of Catholic Bishops] . Marriage is a human institution embedded in a political and economic history. If we allow the ‘defenders of traditional marriage’ to blind the public to this history under the false premise that changes to marriage are a threat to the natural order or a challenge to God’s law, we will have missed the opportunity to understand the full implications of the modern world we have created.

Modern marriage has helped to redefine legitimate family relations according to new ideals of consensual love, companionate gender and inter-generational relations, the rearing of children, and the warmth of domestic life as a shield from the competitive world. Its origins coincide with the era captured in the novels of Jane Austen, the Brontës, and Louisa May Alcott – works that rebelled against the enslavement of women in traditional marriage and insisted that the desires of the heart be included in the pursuit of happiness. The accompanying shift in family life helped shatter traditional patriarchal systems. American women sought divorces in vastly increasing numbers beginning in the late 18th century. By 1830, a Connecticut law articulated the modern definition of marriage that was coming into practice. Divorce was to be granted on the grounds of anything that “Permanently Destroys the Happiness of the petitioner and defeats the purposes of the marriage relation.” Alexis de Tocqueville observed at this time that “in America the family, if one takes the word in its Roman and aristocratic sense, no longer exists.”


A new order

In a very real way, the American Declaration of Independence was a writ of divorce from the traditional world, and with it the master-servant family started to give way to a new order. In 1848, the feminists of Seneca Falls, New York, sought to move the process along, taking Jefferson’s document as the model for their “Declaration of Sentiments.” There are factors that contributed to the development of secular society and its family relations, but if you need a scapegoat for the death of tradition, you can’t blame the gays; you have to go back to the American Revolution and to the rise of capitalism.

As family law was transformed into modern terms throughout the 19th century, market societies consolidated wealth through the rise of corporations, factories, and mills, and this progressively put the small householder out of business, transforming members of peasant, yeoman, merchant, and craft households into either laborers or professionals. Servants and slaves were replaced by employees, masters by employers. Apprenticeships became compulsory public schooling. Women gained rights to property; dowry and coverture were abandoned. No longer were all mothers, children, and laborers the property of a master. In line with the new economy, marriage emerged as a contractual state between consenting adults. Same-sex unions are the logical extension of this transition, because they rest on the strongest source of modern authority, the authentic wishes of the individuals engaged in the relationship.

Much has been written to condemn, and rightly so, the vulnerability and dehumanization of workers under capitalism, and there are serious questions about whether the consumerist families of market societies are ecologically sustainable. These fruitful lines of thought must be pursued, but they should not create any nostalgia for the marital and family relations of the traditional world.

One example might suffice: in early modern English law the rape of a girl over ten years of age could only be prosecuted as a property crime against her father. If he could not work out a deal with the “seducer,” he might sue for damages to his household. During the Industrial Revolution, such violence was re-conceptualized in law as a crime against the personhood of the victim, and a whole new possibility for human dignity became conceivable. This legal shift highlights the stunning moral reorientation that has come with the decline of the traditional family grounded upon the paternal ownership of property.

The larger public appeal of the religious Right in America hangs on certain key mystifications. One of them is the difference between a traditional and a modern social order; another is confusion about the world-historical role that American families have played in undermining Old World traditionalism. Clarifying the two allows one to relate modern marriage to the rise of personal autonomy over traditional bondage. Once this is established, it becomes harder to escape the conclusion that the consensual orientation of modern values provides the ethical foundation for a right to same-sex marriage. It should be part of a conscious effort to reframe the discourse around the question of equal protection under the law. Obviously, much division will remain. It seems to me, however, that a consensual approach toward commitment remains the keystone of modern society and the strongest justification for same-sex marriage.

– Excerpted from “Here’s Your ‘Traditional Marriage’” by Patrick J. Ryan (The Gay and Lesbian Review, November-December, 2009).


See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• John Corvino on the “Always and Everywhere” Argument
• The Changing Face of “Traditional Marriage”
• Scandalous News from Maine
• The Same Premise
• Is Anyone In the Least Bit Surprised By This?
• The Real Gay Agenda
• Separate is Not Equal
• An Ironic Truth
• A Catholic Voice for Marriage Equality at the State Capitol
• A Surprising Finding Regarding Catholics and Gay Marriage
• A Catholic Presence at Gay Pride

Recommended Off-site Links:
Same-Sex Marriage Supporters Rally Outside Catholic Church – (WMTW, November 2, 2009).
Gay Marriage Supporter Removed from Ministries – Chuck Colbert (National Catholic Reporter, October 29, 2009).
Six Tests for Equality and Fairness – New York Times (November 1, 2009).
A NO Vote in Maine is Important for Uganda – Colleen Kochivar-Baker (Enlightened Catholicism, November 2, 2009).
Marriage Equality as a Religious Issue – Terence Weldon (Queering the Church, November 1, 2009).
In Maine, Same-Sex Marriage is a Catholic Issue – Chuck Colbert (National Catholic Reporter, October 29, 2009).
Beyond Comprehension – Thom Curnutte (Ad Dominum, October 23, 2009).

Two Interesting Pieces from the Latest GLR

The latest issue of the Gay and Lesbian Review has the following intriguing little news snippet:


British Men Are from Venus

New figures released in the UK show that after three years with civil unions, which give same-sex couples equivalent status with straight ones, some 60,000 Britons have entered into such a union – and 75 percent of them are male couples. What’s curious is that in the U.S., a very different pattern has emerged in states where civil unions are allowed. Take Vermont, the first state to offer same-sex civil unions, where about two-thirds of the couples signing up have been women. No explanation seems ready at hand. An article in The Economist proposed that perhaps Britain has more gay men than lesbians, but it scarcely seems plausible that such a vast demographic difference would exist between the two countries. Clearly, some cultural effect is at work here – perhaps a different attitude toward the institution of marriage itself. What’s interesting is that the U.S. pattern is often held up as evidence that “women are from Venus” and instinctively pair-bonding, while men are naturally promiscuous and reluctant to settle down. Either the theory is wrong or British women are from Mars.

____________________

Also in the March-April 2009 issue of the Gay and Lesbian Review is Matthew Hays’ review of Ross Higgins’ book, Peter Flinsch: The Body in Question. Now I must admit that, by and large, Flinsch’s artistic style really doesn’t appeal to me. However, I did find the following from Hay’s review quite interesting, and do appreciate Flinsch’s portrait, at right, of Gros Louis, a “wrestler at the ‘Y’.” (Mmm . . . maybe it’s the sideburns!?).

[Flinsch’s] life story is simply astonishing. During World War II, he was recruited (as all young German men were) into the Nazi military. During a Christmas party in 1942, he was spied planting a kiss on another officer. That led to his being interrogated by Nazi police, submitting to a confession, and being placed in a Nazi prison for over a year during the war. During his detention, Flinsch was forced to openly state, in front of all the other inmates, that he was being imprisoned due to his homosexuality. Every morning he would make this crushingly humiliating announcement. But ironically, Flinsch now credits that experience with his audacity as an artist. In a sense, since that time Flinsch felt he had nothing left to lose. As Higgins notes, “Peter’s wartime arrest made his sexual identity paradoxically less problematic for him than for [other] men . . . who never had to confront it so brutally.”

Homosexuality in the Middle Ages

Yesterday I found an old copy of the Gay and Lesbian Review from 2006 amongst a box of my things in my parents’ garage.

I remember bringing this particular issue of the magazine with me from the U.S. when I was last in Australia. Evidently I left it here, which actually works out fine as now I can share from its pages an insightful review by George Klawitter of Ruth Mazo Karras’ book Sexuality in Medieval Europe: Doing Unto Others. I must have planned to do just that back in 2006, as I’d bracketed in pen parts of Klawitter’s review.

So here, finally, are those excerpts from this review.

______________________

There are two schools of thought about same-sex sexuality in the Middle Ages: one says that people did it but didn’t like to label it, so we can’t call it “gay” sex; while the other says that it doesn’t matter what you call it, if in fact they did it. Ruth Mazo Karras is in the first group, and sets out in her new book, Sexuality in Medieval Europe, to show that gay sex as such did not exist because what men did to each other in those days was indifferent to gender and focused solely on active” versus “passive” roles.

This contrasts with the view of John Boswell – the original gay medievalist and author of the monumental book Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality – who had no qualms about referring to some medieval men as “gay.” It was actually Foucault who really started the debate in the 1970’s when he asserted that the concept of a “homosexual” person didn’t enter the Western vocabulary until the 19th century and thus cannot be applied to the 14th century. For Boswell, this is like saying that Hamlet can’t be called “Oedipal” because he lived before Freud had invented the concept.

. . . Karras’ most elaborate handling of same-sex relations comes in a chapter titled “Men Outside of Marriage.” After explaining medieval attitudes on masculine privilege and dominance, she turns her attention to “sodomy,” a term, she notes, that was often used by Christians to stigmatize Muslims and heretics, and often used to label any non-procreative sex, which was ipso facto sinful. Church polemics against sodomy began in the 11th century and were codified in the 12th by the Third Lateran Council. But despite this condemnation, sodomy was never considered the practice of a specific subgroup or sexual minority; anyone could be a sodomite. Consequently, its threat to procreative sex was general: it was feared as a pervasive temptation. Karras singles out one exception. Late medieval Florence had a thriving homosexual subculture that anticipated the social and sexual scene of today’s gay ghettos. Karras’ explanation for the “Office of the Night,” an attempt by Florentine city fathers to expose sodomites, is especially clear and concise.

For Karras, sex between men before that 19th-century sociological turning point was not “gay” in any modern sense. Such a usage presupposes the existence of a “gay lifestyle” to provide a legitimizing context for same-sex activities. And yet, it seems to me this view plays into the hands of the Vatican and fanatics of the religious Right who dreamed up the concept of a “gay lifestyle” in the first place only so they’d have something to demonize.

Karras’ position implies that by fulfilling the religious Right’s dream of wiping out this “lifestyle,” it would be possible to eliminate “gay” sexuality itself. What we call “gay” would presumably return to the realm of “sodomy,” that vague, catch-all term used to entrap and humiliate and criminalize anyone whose sexual behavior you don’t happen to like or approve of. So while the behavior in question might be objectively the same, what some people see as a latter-day “lifestyle” was once punishable by death.

George Klawitter teaches literature at St. Edward’s University, Austin TX.

- Excerpted from “De-Sexing the Middle Ages” - a review by George Klawitter of Sexuality in Medieval Europe: Doing Unto Others by Ruth Mazo Karras (The Gay and Lesbian Review, May-June 2006).


See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• What is a “Lifestyle”?
• The Blood-Soaked Thread

Progressives and Obama (Part 3)

The latest issue of The Gay and Lesbian Review has a number of articles about the upcoming U.S. presidential election. For instance, in an essay entitled “The Critical Moment”, Massachusetts Congressman Barney Frank proposes that from the standpoint of GLBT rights, 2008 may well be the year that “the political system caught up with the country.” Frank is adamant that “on the question of protecting people against discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity, the voters have been ahead of the politicians.”

Timothy Patrick McCarthy also has an interesting essay in the “Election 2008 Issue” of The Gay and Lesbian Review, one in which he asks: “Is Barack Obama the Real Deal?” Following are excerpts from this particular essay.

_________________________________

One of the many things I admire about Barack Obama is his willingness to admit his imperfections. “I am not a perfect candidate,” he is fond of saying, striking a chord of humility that makes him seem more human than most of our politicians. Obama wants us to know that he is fallible, yes, but not irreparably flawed.

After eight torturous years of a flawed administration that seems constitutionally incapable of admitting its own fallibility – even as it has presided over so many failures at home and abroad – it is refreshing to have a presidential candidate who can admit that he doesn’t have all the answers. So many of us are hungry to vote for a candidate who seems to understand that strong leadership requires an openness to new and different ideas, a willingness to grow and evolve, a capacity to learn from one’s mistakes. In light of the Bush Administration’s grotesque hubris, such humility seems almost revolutionary.

. . . When it comes to GLBT issues, Barack Obama is not a perfect candidate. His acrobatics on marriage equality suggest that he has a capacity for calculation just like any other politician. But we cannot withhold our support because of one issue, as important as it is to so many of us. Indeed, perhaps the “marriage issue” raises another important question: can we condemn Barack Obama – or any other candidate, for that matter – for failing to embrace all the positions we hold near and dear when we ourselves have not yet achieved a consensus about what we believe? Many of us want the right to marry, but not all of us by any means. And as we witnessed all too clearly in the recent ENDA vote in Congress, our community still has its own internal debates about the politics and priorities of GLBT civil rights. In other words, we too, are still struggling to form a more perfect union.

. . . Jesse Jackson was correct in saying that progressive change occurs whenever there is a combination of “an enlightened president and an energized electorate.” Together, we in the GLBT community, as with American voters in general, are as energized as we’ve been in recent memory. It remains to be seen whether Barack Obama will become the truly enlightened leader he seems to be. But if we continue to engage him in good faith, if we continue to press our demands on him, I am confident that he will become a more perfect candidate insofar as gay rights are concerned – a powerful straight ally who stands with us, rather than against us, in our ongoing struggle for freedom and equality. Together, Barack Obama and his queer supporters may just yet perfect the union.

- Excerpted from “Is Barack Obama the Real Deal?” by Timothy Patrick McCarthy (The Gay and Lesbian Review, September-October 2008).



NEXT: Part 4


See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• Progressives and Obama (Part 1)
• Progressives and Obama (Part 2)
• An American Prayer