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“The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name”: Homosexual Love in Tom Stoppard’s The Invention of Love

  • Journal of Modern English Drama
  • Abbr : JMBARD
  • 2014, 27(3), pp.5-34
  • Publisher : 한국현대영미드라마학회
  • Research Area : Humanities > English Language and Literature > English Literature > Contemporary English Drama

Hye-Gyong Kwon 1

1동서대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

In Stoppard’s The Invention of Love, the key word, love—more concretely, homosexual love—exists in different contexts. Denounced by late Victorians as “the love that dare not speak its name,” it was also lauded by the ancient Greeks as an ideal relationship between males, and it is this classical aesthetic to which the Victorian poet and scholar A. E. Housman appeals in the play. Although his dear friend Moses Jackson, who was not homosexual, felt some discomfort in his relationship with Housman, Housman himself compared their friendship with the idealized male-male type found in Greek classics and attempted to persuade Jackson that their relationship was “the pattern of comradeship, the chivalric ideal of virtue in the ancient world.”In ancient Greece, the male-male relationship was considered to be the ideal, superior to that between a man and a woman. The Greek conception of idealized male partnerships also allowed loving relations between mature men and adolescent boys. While Socrates saw virtue in the admiration of beautiful youths, his acceptance did not extend to sexual contact between males. Housman, in order to circumvent negative late Victorian views of homosexuality, found in the Socratic Eros a way to justify his love for Jackson, recasting it as the pinnacle of male relations. Yet no amount of confession and effort by Housman could induce Jackson to return his feelings, and Housman was doomed to a lonely life of concealed homosexuality, unable to free himself from that first flame of passion. In spite of the social persecution of homosexuals, Oxford University was seized by a homosexual craze in the late 19th century, and at the center of this was Oscar Wilde. Wilde’s relationship with Alfred Douglas led to a trial which scandalized London and resulted in his being sentenced to two years’ hard labor. In the play, Housman meets with Wilde, who suggests that Housman has allowed himself to become a victim of Victorian-era repression. Housman felt only the pain of love unrequited; to his death, he clung to the idealized invention of love and condemned himself to “an emotional imprisonment.” In contrast, Wilde experienced his love and invented himself through the act of loving.

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