Queer Wales: The History, Culture and Politics of Queer Life in Wales
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Queer Wales: The History, Culture and Politics of Queer Life in Wales
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781783168651 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Wales Press |
| Publication date: | 06/20/2016 |
| Series: | Gender Studies in Wales |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 352 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
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Queer Wales
The History, Culture and Politics of Queer Life in Wales
By Huw Osborne
University of Wales Press
Copyright © 2016 The ContributorsAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78316-865-1
CHAPTER 1
Queer Loss: Felicia Hemans, (Trans)nationalisms and the Welsh Bard
DANIEL HANNAH
Born in Liverpool, of Irish, Italian and German descent, Felicia Dorothea Hemans 'spent all but the first and last years of her life' in Wales. Once read as an author engaged in 'chauvinistic, sentimental, and derivative' enshrining of decidedly English, Victorian ideologies, recent approaches to Hemans's poetry have produced a realization of her work as, in Susan Wolfson's words, 'spectacularly unresolved'. Wolfson finds in Hemans's verse 'a poetry more apt to be strained by rhetorical effects and thematic configurations that tap into and voice a cultural unconscious of fragmented, contradictory awareness'. Building on this suggestion, this chapter explores how an idea of Hemans and her work as queerly Welsh helps account for the awkward ambivalence that colours her seemingly eulogistic attentions to the 'Homes of England', to England's insistent ideological marrying of domesticity and national identity, in many of her best-known poems. Hemans's engagement with a Welsh bardic tradition in the early 1820s forms a crucial step in her works' emergent exploration of scenes that queerly and transnationally complicate the reproductive orientation of England's colonial imaginary.
Hemans's correspondence from her time in Wales documents her gradual, always uneasy acclimatization to her place in relationship to Welsh culture. For instance, an unpublished letter to Matthew Nicholson from her residence in Bronwhilfa on 23 June 1812 gives an early indication of both Hemans's attraction to Welsh history and her alienated distaste for contemporary Welsh culture:
I certainly cannot recommend Wales for any thing but its air and scenery, & I believe that you will allow from experience that they deserve the highest eulogiums the poet or the painter can bestow; but I fear the spirits of its celebrated Bards, are entirely fled, for its present inhabitants seem to inherit nothing from their poetic Ancestors but their long pedigrees, & rooted dislike to the Saxon intruders. – I have seen so much of their illiberality, lately, (the effects of which, in ill-natured observations, have travelled, I understand, even to your part of the world,) that I feel no tie of local attachment would be strong enough to cause me any regret if I were to bid Wales farewell without any prospect of ever returning.
Hemans, the 'Saxon intruder', remained in Wales, however, and ten years later she can be seen, in a letter from 19 December 1822, returning to her admiration of the Welsh scenery as a sign of her 'local attachment': 'Although not born in Wales, my longtime residence here has sufficiently naturalized me to make your admiration of our mountain scenery highly gratifying.' Nevertheless, her sense of naturalization remained always couched in liminal terms: in a later letter after a return from a trip to Liverpool, she describes herself as feeling 'as the Welsh countrypeople say in their griefs, "very heavy" just now. I had no idea I was growing by so many roots to this place, which – such is mortal inconsistency – I have wished to leave again and again.' 'My whole life has lain within the wild circle of these wild Welsh hills', she declared in a letter from the same period, 'and I know nobody'.
While, as Jane Aaron has noted, Hemans is best remembered for her 'constructive' English patriotism, her poetry also bears witness to her roaming identifications with peoples from varying locations and times, including Wales and the legacies of the Welsh bards. Hemans's mobile approach to national belonging – an approach William D. Brewer has identified as embodying 'an ancient Welsh or British cosmopolitanism' – and her often queer play with gendered roles and forms of desire are, I wish to suggest, intimately tied. While 'queer' might strike some as a surprising term for analysing what seems like an oeuvre predominantly concerned with romantic dramas and domestic exchanges between men and women, it is a particularly productive term for describing Hemans's 'undoing' of gender and desire in these transnational scenes (and her prescient representations of gender and desire as performatively formed through unstable acts). Queer – as, in Elizabeth Freeman's terms, 'an ongoing breach of selfhood' – concisely describes Hemans's returns to representations of desire as unseating and unsettling a gendered self. While this chapter will begin by mapping the queer interrelations specifically between desire and unsettling loss that mark out Hemans's general imagining of national belonging, my argument will move towards considering the resonance of that mapping for a reading of Hemans as a non-English, specifically, if contingently, Welsh writer. In Hemans's personal life, Wales offered something of a refuge from the loss of her marriage when her husband, Alfred, left her for Italy in 1818. In her poetry, her treatment of Wales and the Welsh bardic tradition need to be read in the context of her broader efforts to imagine national spaces in which alternative relations to normative matrimonial and domestic narratives might be forged. Wales, as an actual and imaginary space in her life and work, came to embody an experience of loss and desire that Hemans queerly positioned at the centre of (trans)national and domestic identities.
Contingent homes: domesticity, desire and loss in Hemans's poetry of the 1820s
In his veiled reading of the 'once so celebrated' poem, 'The Homes of England', Jerome McGann argues that while Hemans's 'bland[ness]' might seem to indicate 'sentimental attachment to' the poem's 'subjects', its style, 'so rich and so empty', its 'superficial superficiality' in fact suggests her commitment to the perpetual slippage of 'the images and forms that ideology requires for its sustenance', to its 'buildings of loss'. Conscious of its own entry into a future of recitation, Hemans's poem, according to McGann, imagines both the nation and the text as sites of 'quotation', as a fulcrum for 'various inherited and signifying signs'. While McGann acknowledges such a reading is 'not merely perverse but utterly resolute in its perversity', I want to argue that Hemans's project might be even more resolutely perverse than McGann's essay suggests. 'The Homes of England' begins, in its eventual book publication, with an epigraph from the fourth canto of Walter Scott's Marmion, lines spoken by the youthful squire Fitz-Eustace: 'Where's the coward that would not dare / To fight for such a land?' Fitz-Eustace's 'rapture' is, however, not, as one might expect from an epigraph to Hemans's poem, for the contested Northumbrian moor, the eventually English land of Flodden Field at the centre of the poem's battle; it is, rather, for the sight of Edinburgh and the gathering Scottish forces of James IV, viewed from atop Blackford Hill. Rather than opening out the poem's paean to English 'homes', the epigraph immediately evokes the colonial history by which the English have both viewed their homes as under threat and expanded their home in the isles of Great Britain. When, in the final stanza of the poem, the speaker of Hemans's poem calls for 'hearts of native proof' to be 'rear'd / To guard each hallowed wall' (35–6) of every 'hut and hall' (34), she produces an image of the English home, the domestic scene, as a site constituted by its own defence. Love of country and love of enclosure become the means by which England, in Hemans's poem, ensures a feminized domestic bliss – in which 'woman's voice flows forth in song, / Or childhood's tale is told' (13–14) – in its 'free, fair Homes' (33).
What 'The Homes of England' lays bare is Hemans's attentiveness to the home as the site of contingent imaginings of national belonging and contained domesticity. Throughout her career, Hemans's elegiac tone places pressure on the gendered norms of English national identity, even as it plays out a commitment to those norms. Indeed, in many of her well-known works, Hemans centres her refusal of both narrowly nationalist and domestic configurations around a 'queer art' of 'losing'. In Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History, Heather Love seeks to re-direct critical attention to 'the association between homosexual love and loss – a link that, historically, has given queers special insight into love's failures and impossibilities (as well as, of course, wild hopes for its future)'. Her work, here, on '[b]roken intimacies' seeks to build on Leo Bersani's and Lee Edelman's suggestions that queerness's critical value lies in its attentiveness to the losses that structure desire itself – Bersani, for instance, calls for a 'theory of love ... grounded in the very contradictions, impossibilities, and antagonisms brought to light by any serious genealogy of desire'; Edelman advocates an acceptance of queerness's 'figural status as resistance to the viability of the social while insisting on the inextricability of that resistance from every social structure'. Loss – loss of the loved, loss of one's country, loss of one's home, loss of one's dead – is everywhere in Hemans's poetry and animates her poetry's explorations of the 'contradictions, impossibilities, and antagonisms' that structure desire. While it has become commonplace to ascribe this attentiveness to loss to the biographical facts of Hemans's father's and, later, her husband's abandonments of their families (her father relocated to Canada in 1810), such narratives have often sedimented an understanding of Hemans as a domestic writer, one whose status as housewife was unjustly hedged by irresponsible men and whose writing career served to mourn her loss of that status. But many of Hemans's poems queerly refuse such a trajectory, suggesting instead that loss and impossibility – an impossibility sometimes traced by the regulated impossibility of same-sex desire – work, from the start, to constitute desire; such a structure is always already in play, her poems suggest, before desire makes its home at the seat of the normative. Crucially, in ways that further complicate Hemans's domestic reputation, her conjoined imaginings of loss and desire mark out not only her structuring of romantic, marital and erotic relations but also infuse her treatment of national and transnational belonging and estrangement.
Hemans's entangled treatment of the erotic, the domestic and the (trans) national, cuts through many of her best-known works. In probably her best longer work, her two-part lyric narrative poem of 1825, The Forest Sanctuary, the story of the feminized Protestant Spanish narrator's flight from the Spanish Inquisition to America cannot be divorced from his stifled mourning after the execution of his 'heart's first friend' (I.xxii.198), Alvar, and the wedge this drives between himself and his wife, Leonor, who dies mid-Atlantic. The narrator's difficulties in mourning the loss of his intimate male friend become inextricably tied to the poem's insistence on exile as a loss of the quite-literal grounds for mourning – the figure that encapsulates this sentiment in the poem is that of the absent grave, tying Alvar's obliteration by fire to the graves of his ancestors in Spain and the gap represented by his wife's watery burial. And estranged male intimacy and death at sea are, of course, also the key plot points of Hemans's most famous poem, 'Casabianca', which was first published in the New Monthly Magazine in August 1826 and later became Victorian England's most popular performance piece. The seeming simplicity of this poem's attentions to the ideally selfsacrificing patriotic subject plays out alongside a somewhat submerged querying of the forms by which patriotism becomes recognizable and reiterative. The poem famously centres on the 'boy ... on the burning deck' (1), whose absent grave (on account of his soon-to-be blasted body) figures forth the poem's reflection on its own strange ease in the presence of the boy's doomed commitment to his father (whose own unknown death off-stage is the absence that holds the boy in place). While it is a poem whose ostensible commitment to the boy's patriotic and patriarchal commitments gainsaid its anthologizing in recitation collections, it could just as well be remembered as a poem that performs the potentiality of such commitment to empty itself out as pure form (and in the process give itself up to recitations that seem to repeat the boy's own repetitions of commitment to himself and his absent father). That the poem perversely animates the fatal flames as a kind of ornamental compensation – the 'wreathing fires' (28) wrap 'the ship in splendour wild' (29) – might suggest, instead, that Hemans's poem revels in a feminized engulfment of masculinist nationalism, even as that fiery engulfment enshrines such attachment as heroic, if masochistic, heroism.
Where The Forest Sanctuary and 'Casabianca' explore male acts of abandonment and their queer effects on other males and on a masculine discourse of nationalist belonging, Hemans's most popular collection of poems, Records of Woman, first published in 1828, focuses on female acts of dedication, constancy and memorialization (even in the face of male abandonment or romantic estrangement), and ties these acts to a maternal concept of the nation. Yet, while the collection appears to espouse the importance of marriage and the nation and the willingness of women to sacrifice themselves for the sake of these institutions, the energy of the poems attaches not to the institutions themselves but to the sometimes-perverse acts by which such institutions are evoked and codified. By juxtaposing a wide range of memorial acts, the collection invites the reader to draw destabilizing analogies between the various 'records' of feminine remembrance. In a number of the poems, woman's fidelity and compassion or her maternal vision provide solace to abandoned men and women, with the womanly space of the home offering up refuge from a world of intra- and inter-national violence. This is the world traced by poems such as 'Gertrude, or Fidelity Till Death' (in which the title character comforts her husband as he is tortured to death), 'Costanza' (in which the eponymous heroine holds onto her 'crushed affection' and returns to provide a refuge for the dying soldier who abandoned her) and 'Madeline: a Domestic Tale' (in which a mother comforts her newly widowed daughter and brings her home from a faraway land). In 'The Switzer's Wife', such feminine compassion becomes the force that drives masculine nationalism, and in 'The American Forest Girl' (in which the girl intercedes in the execution of a fair English youth by a band of dark-souled Indians) compassion, as Tim Fulford has noted, positions the Victorian woman as a force for 'emotional work on the behalf of the new, evangelical, justification of empire as a civilizing mission'. These poems, however, jar with various other poems that seem to call into question similar acts of feminine dedication. Gertrude's fidelity stands, in the collection, alongside Imelda's 'self-destructive sympathy' as she sucks the wound of her poisoned lover after he is killed by her brother, or Properzia Rossi's homoerotic investment in the statue of Ariadne that she hopes will turn the head of her neglectful lover, or, in a later poem, Juana's passionate attendance to the body of her neglectful husband, Philip the Handsome, as she madly hopes to awaken a love she never experienced while he lived. In 'The Bride of the Greek Isles' (in which Eudora, the title character, self-immolates on a ship after being abducted by pirates on her wedding night) and 'Indian Woman's Death Song' (in which the woman sings as she rows herself and her children over a waterfall after having been abandoned by her husband for a white woman), sacrifice which might seem to signify fidelity to the principles of marriage also circulates, uncertainly, as a protest against the constraints marriage places on female agency.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Queer Wales by Huw Osborne. Copyright © 2016 The Contributors. Excerpted by permission of University of Wales Press.
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Table of Contents
I. The Queer Past Before 1900 Queer Loss: Felicia Hemans, (trans)nationalism, and the Welsh Bard Daniel Hannah ‘Gender difference is nothing’: Cranogwen and Victorian Wales Jane Aaron ‘Please don’t whip me this time’: The Passions of George Powell of Nant-Eos Harry Heuser From Huw Arwystli to Siôn Eirian: Representitive Examples of Cadi/Queer Life from Medieval to Twentieth Century Welsh Literature Mihangel Morgan II. Placing Queer Wales after 1900 ‘A queer kind of fancy’: women, same-sex desire, and nation in Welsh literature Kirsti Bohata ‘Not friends / But fellows in a union that ends’: Associations of Welshness and Non-heteronormativity in Edward Thomas Andrew Webb Fairy Tale Drag and the Transgender Nation in Rhys Davies, Erica Wooff, and Jan Morris. Huw Osborne III. Building Queer Wales Post-Devolution Lesbian Motherhood in the South Wales Valleys: A Narrative Exploration Alys Einion Living in Fear: Homophobic Hate Crime in Wales Matthew Williams and Jasmin Tregidga Heb addysg, heb ddawn (Without education, without gift): LGBTQ Youth in Educational Settings in Wales John Sam Jones IV. Performing Contemporary Queer Wales Omnisexuality and the City: Exploring National and Sexual Identity through BBC Wales’ Torchwood Rebecca Williams and Ruth McElroy Queer/Welsh and Welsh/Queer: Performing Hybrid Wales Stephen GreerWhat People are Saying About This
“’Groundbreaking’ may be an overused term, but it is the most appropriate description of Queer Wales. Expertly edited and engagingly introduced by Huw Osbourne, this collection of essays is a major contribution to Welsh cultural studies. It constitutes an act of excavation in its tracing of a Welsh ‘queer history’, but the volume does not only construct a tradition of queer writing in Wales. It offers also a far-reaching analysis of that tradition by means of a series of stimulating chapters. Queer Wales is the most wide-ranging contribution that we have yet had to that tradition, which offers a magnificent foundation for further explorations of this rich and diverse field.”
“’Groundbreaking’ may be an overused term, but it is the most appropriate description of Queer Wales. Expertly edited and engagingly introduced by Huw Osbourne, this collection of essays is a major contribution to Welsh cultural studies. It constitutes an act of excavation in its tracing of a Welsh ‘queer history’, but the volume does not only construct a tradition of queer writing in Wales. It offers also a far-reaching analysis of that tradition by means of a series of stimulating chapters. Queer Wales is the most wide-ranging contribution that we have yet had to that tradition, which offers a magnificent foundation for further explorations of this rich and diverse field.”