Camp Sites: Forster and the Biographies of Queer Bloomsbury

Members of the Bloomsbury Group wrote biographical texts influenced by the camp style of Lytton Strachey in Eminent Victorians and Queen Victoria. The most noticeable effect of this style is the subversion of Victorian biographical conventions. Stracheyesque qualities can be found in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and Flush, John Maynard Keynes’ The Economic Consequences of the Peace, Clive Bell’s Old Friends, and E.M. Forster’s early nonfiction sketches and his biographies of Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson and Marianne Thornton. Especially in their biographical writings these figures felt free to emphasize exaggeration, even silliness, in contrast to the psychological realism prevalent in their own and others’ fictional literary experiments. The Stracheyesque note in Bloomsbury biography provides a common quality and arguably queers readers’ expectations of modernist literary practices. As with the pervasive irregularity of their sexual practices, such textual play might be understood as liberatory and subversive.

Nailed: Lytton Strachey’s Jesus Camp

Avery explores Lytton Strachey’s engagement with Christian ethical discourse and iconography to promote a queer ethical ideal of friendship and intimacy unfettered by moral convention. In his famous biographies and in a series of essays, short stories, and dialogues, it is clear he was perennially interested in religious questions and themes. Despite his atheism and disapproval of religious faith, he believed that the achievement of sexual and ethical autonomy, the legitimation of alternative sexualities and a new sexual ethic, demanded a serious critique of Christian moralism. In a sado-masochistic crucifixion experiment in the late 1920s, he allowed himself to be affixed to a cross and pierced in the side by his lover Roger Senhouse, providing a striking example from the modernist period and from the Bloomsbury milieu of how an iconically normative object may be used to express a queer ethical, sexual, and social vision.

The Bloomsbury Group

Heilbrun’s influential analysis of the sexual dissidence characteristic of the Bloomsbury Group first appeared in Midway in 1968, years before queer studies or even gay and lesbian studies gained momentum and legitimacy as scholarly fields. Heilbrun counters the ‘profound hostility’ directed towards Bloomsbury, arguing that this hostility stems from discomfort with members of the Bloomsbury Group’s acceptance, even flaunting, of homosexuality and disruption of normative expectations for masculine and feminine behaviour. For Heilbrun, the group combined the best attributes of stereotypes of masculinity and femininity, to embrace reason and rationality, and to eschew violence, but not passion. But their greatest legacy was their conversation, which was light and fun and serious at the same time. Ideas debated in those conversations inform their immense accomplishments in fields as various as economics and the fine arts, and leads Heilbrun to feel that conversation is ‘the apotheosis of human communication’.

Introduction to Carolyn Heilbrun’s ‘The Bloomsbury Group’, 1968

Brenda Silver, a noted scholar of modernism, cultural studies, and of Virginia Woolf in particular, was a friend and colleague of Carolyn Heilbrun. In this essay, Silver describes the importance of Heilbrun’s work in general and the significance of her 1968 essay, ‘The Bloomsbury Group’, a courageous and ground-breaking consideration of the role of sexuality in the work and reception of the group. For several decades, until the 1991 publication of Christopher Reed’s ‘Bloomsbury Bashing’, critical work on Bloomsbury largely ignored (at best) or deprecated Bloomsbury’s queer sensibility. Silver explains that Heilbrun’s essay was an important contribution to later scholars’ understanding of Bloomsbury because it validates sexual dissidence as an important source of Bloomsbury’s creative and intellectual energy and ethos.

Clive Bell, ‘a fathead and a voluptuary’: Conscientious Objection and British Masculinity

Hussey shows that Clive Bell was a lifelong rebel. His tireless championing of individual liberty as the paramount value of political and social organisation, and of subjective experience as the proper basis for aesthetics pervades his writings on art, society, history and politics. He proselytized for the radically new art of the early twentieth century and for pacifism before and during the First World War. He excoriated the puritanical strictures of post-war England and its appeasement and adherence to untenable ideals in the late 1930s and Second World War. In his close identification with the conscientious objector issue, Bell, though heterosexual, is representative of queer Bloomsbury’s challenge to heteronormativity and the patriarchal family. As nationalist and homophobic rhetoric converged at war’s end, Bell’s writings deplored the lasting effects on British society of the government’s suppression of thought and expression during the war, including queer thought and homosexual expression.

The Bloomsbury Love Triangle

In this essay, Marler shows how queer connections and fluid identities served to foster more lasting bonds among the Bloomsberries, making lifelong loving and working partnerships possible where by stricter definitions no such connection could have been made. While the young group of friends may have launched into love triangles experimentally, or as the expected outcome of romantic rivalries, the triangle would often prove to complicate but bolster the original dyads. At a time when sodomy was a felony, primary heterosexual relationships also nicely concealed homosexual relationships. Or the presence of a desirable woman in a triangle sometimes allowed a physical relationship to bloom between a homosexual man (Lytton Strachey or Duncan Grant, say) and a mostly-straight man, such as Ralph Partridge or David Garnett. The Bloomsbury triangle not only rejected Victorian sexual mores but, more radically, placed sexual and celibate love on equal footing.

Passionate Debates on ‘Odious Subjects’: Bisexuality and Woolf’s Opposition to Theories of Androgyny and Sexual Identity

Helt argues that Virginia Woolf’s literary depictions of bisexuality oppose theories of desire, eroticism, and identity in terms of sexual ‘types’, such as the lesbian. For Woolf, bisexuality and androgyny are common to most women. In A Room of One’s Own and Orlando, Woolf contradicts theories of the writer or artist as androgynous genius, or as member of the intermediate sex or third sex. Woolf refutes the idea that thinking ‘like a man’ and ‘like a woman’ intermittently is an identifying feature of a rare type; rather, everyone does it, so it is nobody’s distinguishing characteristic. Helt shows that Woolf takes up the consideration of the androgynous mind only to expose its misogynistic conceptual underpinnings and its material impossibility. For Woolf, it is not the possession of an androgynous mind that enables artistic creativity, but one’s ability to contemplate openly all desires and all pleasures, including those socially proscribed.

Introduction

This introduction explains how and why the essays of Queer Bloomsbury combine the Bloomsbury Group’s personal lives with aspects routinely elevated to a higher status – art, politics, philosophy – understanding these as inseparable aspects of the same phenomenon. Contributors to this volume neither shrink from nor capitalise on sexual details, but are primarily interested in how group members’ queer perspectives enabled their thinking and its results. Sexual intimacy between friends of either gender was not only accepted, but understood as a rich source of intellectual, artistic, and philosophical affinity. Contemporary philosophical and political theory has returned to the insights cultivated by the Bloomsbury Group, if that return is characterised as a holistic way of living sexually, intellectually, artistically, ethically, and intimately, rather than in parts. Considering Bloomsbury as an interdisciplinary field – inhabited by artists, authors, philosophers, economists, political activists, art critics, journalists, and biographers – enriches our understanding of early twentieth-century cultures.

Virginia Woolf’s Queer Time and Place: Wartime London and a World Aslant

Coates employs queer phenomenology proposed by Judith Halberstam and Sara Ahmed to explore the ways Virginia Woolf’s modernist aesthetic queers events, characters, affects, and the phenomenological experience of time and space. Examining queer angles of vision in Jacob’s Room, Mrs. Dalloway, The Waves, and The Years, Woolf depicts a London irrevocably queered by war or its anticipation. Rendering familiar temporal and spatial frames suddenly askew, Woolf’s queer analysis of wartime London calls us to heed the destructive consequences of a militancy facilitated by patriarchy and heteronormativity, while simultaneously inviting us to inhabit a city capable of offering radically alternative modes of social gathering.

‘I didn’t know there could be such writing’: The Aesthetic Intimacy of E. M. Forster and T. E. Lawrence

Medd examines the correspondence between E.M. Forster and T.E. Lawrence, in which new possibilities of both male intimacy and masculine self-understanding were achieved through an exchange of writing and reading. This epistolary literary exchange eschewed conventions of published literary circulation and reconfigured the traditional reader-writer dyad. As Forster and Lawrence forged a friendship through the exchange of literary materials – including Forster’s ‘unpublishable’ fiction – and a self-reflective dialogue over their experiences of reading one another’s literature and absorbing their interlocutor’s response to their own writing, they negotiated the tricky landscape of male intimacy heightened with homoerotic possibilities, while also discovering and re-imagining new possibilities of (homo)sexual and literary self-understanding. The correspondence constitutes an alternative queer circuit of literary exchange, in which scenes of reading and writing form bonds of male intimacy that re imagine both the terms of masculine identity and desire and the very terms of the literary itself.