Queer Converts: Peculiar Pleasures and Subtle Antinomianism

  • Thomas Lawrence Long
Chapter

Abstract

This catechumen manqué is, of course, Dorian Gray. Midway through his Gothic novel, Wilde anatomized in Augustinian fashion his young seeker’s degradation: not by a luridly minute inventory of sexual exploits (as Huysmans had done a few years previously in the character of Des Esseintes), but by a more mundane though not less material accumulation: Dorian’s collections of perfumes, exotic musical instruments, jewels, embroideries, and finally, ecclesiastical vestments. While it would likely have repulsed and horrified Victorian readers’ evangelical sensibilities, Dorian’s exploration of forms of “high church” Catholicism is a spiritual journey into a kind of transcendental hedonism: “For these treasures, and everything that he collected in his lovely house, were to be to him means of forgetfulness, modes by which he could escape for a season, from the fear that seemed to him at times to be almost too great to be borne” (Wilde 140).

Keywords

Sexual Dissident Spiritual Journey Moral Theology Parish Priest Queer People 
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Notes

  1. 1.
    Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974, 1981), 132–3; hereafter cited in the text.Google Scholar
  2. 2.
    Ellis Hanson, Decadence and Catholicism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), 25; hereafter cited in text.Google Scholar
  3. 3.
    Paul Giles, American Catholic Arts and Fictions: Culture, Ideology, Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 293–4.Google Scholar
  4. 4.
    David Brion Davis, “Some Themes of Countersubversion: an Analysis of Anti-Masonic, Anti-Catholic, and Anti-Mormon Literature,” in David Brion Davis, ed., The Fear of Conspiracy: Images of Un-American Subversion from the Revolution to the Present (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1971), 9–22;Google Scholar
  5. rep. from David Brion Davis, “Some Themes of Countersubversion: an Analysis of Anti-Masonic, Anti-Catholic, and Anti-Mormon Literature,” The Mississippi Valley Historical Review, 47 (September 1960): 205–24; quotation from 18–19.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
  6. 5.
    Patrick Allitt, Catholic Converts: British and American Intellectuals Turn to Rome (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 5.Google Scholar
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    Michael E. Schiefelbein, The Lure of Babylon: Seven Protestant Novelists and Britain’s Roman Catholic Revival (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2001), 181.Google Scholar
  8. 7.
    For an introduction to Catholic moral theology, see Timothy E. O’Connell, Principles for a Catholic Morality (New York: Seabury, 1976, 1978) and Part Five, “Christian Existence: Ethical and Spiritual Dimensions,” of Richard P. McBrien’s, Catholicism, volume II (Minneapolis: Winston Press, 1980), 903–1166.Google Scholar
  9. For Catholic moral theology’s relationship to Protestant ethical thinking, see James Gustafson, Protestant and Roman Catholic Ethics: Prospects for Rapprochement (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978). Several historians have provided accounts for the theological history of sodomy. One of the earliest, and still respected, is Derrick Sherwin Bailey’s Homsexuality and the Western Christian Tradition (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1955), which covers biblical and Classical societies, the Patristic period, and the Middle Ages. Michael Goodich’s The Unmentionable Vice: Homosexuality in the Later Medieval Period (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-Clio, 1979), examines the High Middle Ages. John Boswell’s watershed Christiantiy, Social Tolerance, and Homo-sexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980) covers the same historical periods but examines social, literary, as well as theological per-spectives. Finally, Mark D. Jordan’s The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997) focuses exclusively on the development of the concept of sodomy in medieval Catholic moral theology.Google Scholar
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    Tanquerey, The Spiritual Life: a Treatise on Ascetical and Mystical Theology, Herman Branderis, trans. (Tournai: Desclée, 1951), 416, para. 875; hereafter cited in text.Google Scholar
  12. 11.
    Tanquerey, The Spiritual Life: a Treatise on Ascetical and Mystical Theology, Herman Branderis, trans. (Tournai: Desclée, 1951), 416, para. 875; hereafter cited in text.Google Scholar
  13. 17.
    Cecil Woolf and Brocard Sewell, “The Clerk Without a Benefice: a Study of Rolfe’s Conversion and Vocation,” in Cecil Woolf, and Brocard Sewell, eds, New Quests for Corvo (London: Icon Books, 1961), 11–45; quotation from 11.Google Scholar
  14. 18.
    A. J. A. Symons, The Quest for Corvo: an Experiment in Biography (New York: Penguin, 1934, 1955), 66.Google Scholar
  15. 19.
    Miriam J. Benkovitz, Frederick Rolfe: Baron Corvo (New York: Putnam, 1977), 10–16.Google Scholar
  16. 20.
    J. K. Huysmans, Against the Grain (A rebours), Introduction by Havelock Ellis (New York: Illustrated Editions, 1931), 57; hereafter cited in text.Google Scholar
  17. 21.
    Julian Green, Diary 1928–1957, trans. Anne Green (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1961, 1964), 104; hereafter cited in text.Google Scholar

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© Thomas Lawrence Long 2006

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  • Thomas Lawrence Long

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