IPSHITA MITRA || THE TIMES OF INDIA || NOVEMBER 2011

Surviving the crests and troughs of the bygone decades of confined notions and rigidity, homosexuality in literature has definitely come a long way from an uneven terrain of condemnation and ridicule to a road of acceptability and inclusion.

Let us revisit those chapters on homosexuality and consequently arrive to the pages of the current literary scenario to see and understand the changed perception on the subject.

Going back in History: Was it homophobia?

A man in hue, all ‘hues’ in his controlling,

Much steals men’s eyes and women’s souls amazeth.

…But since she prick’d thee out for women’s pleasure,

Mine be thy love and thy love’s use their treasure. (Sonnet 20)

Shakespeare’s Sonnet 20 was considered as one of the sonnets that explicitly fore-grounded same-sex desire of the poet. There are 154 sonnets written in the period of 1592-1598, an era conservative in accepting homosexual love with ease and comfort. It so happened that while defending Shakespeare’s sonnets against a homosexual reading, Samuel Taylor Coleridge in the year 1803 defined male-male love as “that very worst of all possible vices”.

John Lauritsen, author of ‘The Man who wrote Frankenstein‘ analyses Mary Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein‘ (1823) as a gay love story where Victor Frankenstein’s creation of a ‘monster’ stems from his desire to give birth to a “being like myself”. Once created, he realises it to be a catastrophe that could not be corrected. The ‘monster’ represented the clash between homosexual desires and social condemnation according to John.

Captain Walton who rescues Victor Frankenstein and nurses him back to health is shown to have found a “friend” in him.

Amid a homophobic sociology of the 18th century, the term “friend” was a coded term to refer to the ‘lover of another man.’ The blanket of ‘friendship’ was also employed by Lord Byron in his poems that conveyed same-sex romantic bonds in camouflaged phrases and disguised expressions. Poems like ‘The Death of Calmar and Orla‘ (about the relationship of two warriors, one of whom dies and the other resolves to live alone), (1807) and ‘The Cornelian‘ (1806) are some examples.  >> READ MORE

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