Between Languages: Queer Multilingualism in the British Belle Époque
Date of Award
Spring 2024
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
English Language and Literature
First Advisor
Yeazell, Ruth
Abstract
What did it mean for late-Victorian queer authors to read, write, and love across multiple languages? Why were these sexual dissidents drawn to non-Anglophone vernaculars and literary traditions? What did they do with those resources? This dissertation draws on archival materials written in four tongues and scattered across five countries to pose these questions of Henry James, Vernon Lee (Violet Paget), Michael Field (Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper), and a broader set of queer fairy tale fabulists. Across these cases, I argue that multilingualism—in giving access to supplementary lexicons, books, and interlocutors—actively shapes a writer’s sexuality, as well as the sexualities represented in their literary oeuvre. Belle Époque queerness was thus not a pre-linguistic identity spoken in a mother tongue. Rather, it was a lived and markedly literary experience, one that Victorians encountered, parsed, and communicated between languages. The project’s major theoretical intervention is to bring translation and queer studies into sharper dialogue. While these fields emerged in the same period, exchange remains surprisingly limited, even as translation studies has been energized by feminist and especially postcolonial theory. Of the few books situated at this scholarly intersection, most focus on the (un)translatability of LGBTQ+ identity labels. Almost none engage archives before World War II. “Between Languages” fills this gap in two ways: first by providing a theoretical apparatus for bringing queer methods to bear on translation history, and second by exhuming an archive that complements the presentist focus of existing work. The project makes a corresponding intervention in queer theory and history. It decenters libidinal desire and instead foregrounds language itself as a connective material that sutures interpersonal and societal bonds. To speak multiple tongues, I argue, is to access new counterpublics and imagined communities, as well as new lovers and new understandings of oneself. This claim builds on studies of nineteenth-century cosmopolitanism but also reveals an unexpected monolingual bias in existing work. By excavating the queer multilingualism of “professional” relations—specifically those with translators, editors, and co-writers—I show how these can be as or more emotionally charged than amatory relations centered on sex. This approach complicates one common historical narrative, in which the late nineteenth century saw the emergence of the homo/hetero binary that juxtaposed a firm norm against a deviant other. Instead, I reconstruct forms of what have been called the queer everyday and queer ordinary: multilingual worldmaking rather than closeted silence. Chapter 1—“Henry James’s Linguistic Infidelities”—argues that James’s performance of stereotypical Victorian prudishness coexists with a queer writing practice, one archived in his life writings, translations of and criticism on continental European writers, and own multilingual fictions. It first shows how the French language afforded both personal and textual intimacies with male writers such as Ivan Turgenev and Alphonse Daudet, then presents an extended reading of The Golden Bowl (1904) as a queer collaboration with the language and form of the Italian novel, and concludes by examining James’s wartime translation of the French irredentist Maurice Barrès. Chapter 2—“Vernon Lee’s Social Cells”—complicates the prevailing view of Lee as a transgressive misanthrope by unearthing and probing her non-English epistolary and publication record. It moves from her early Anglo-Italian essays through her mid-career Anglo-French fictions, and finally to her quad-lingual pacifist publications during the Anglo-Boer and World Wars. Giving particular attention to Lee’s self-translations, charged relationships with her female interlocutors, and anti-war closet drama Satan the Waster (1920), I reveal her pivots between languages and literary fields to be materially motivated, affectively entangled, and politically engaged. Chapter 3—“Michael Field’s Queer Readings”—tracks how Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper drew on their extensive knowledge of nineteenth-century continental literatures to configure their own collaborative artistic identity and projects. It engages their translations of German Romantics and French decadents, their verse dramatization of multilingual reading, and especially their co-written journal Works and Days (1888-1914). Situating Works and Days with respect to the 1880s publication of three French language journals—those of Henri-Frédéric Amiel, Marie Bashkirtseff, and the Goncourt brothers—I argue for both a marked shift in the journal’s trans-Channel genre history and for considering Bradley and Cooper queer readers avant la lettre. Chapter 4—“The Belle Époque Queer Fairy Tale”—takes genre itself as the point of departure. It shows how fairy tales’ protean, fantastical qualities afford both rapid and imaginative refashioning across languages by queer writers and explores how a trans-medial Belle Époque corpus develops a poignant vision of queer futurity. The chapter first recuperates Vladimir Propp’s syntagmatic formalism from a queer angle, then presents the reception of Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market” (1862) as a literary-historical turning point, and finally substantiates that claim through readings of tales and images by Laurence Housman, Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley, Lee, and Renée Vivien. The manuscript’s main chapters focus on the late Victorian and Edwardian period, widely regarded as a high-water mark for ethnolinguistic nationalism and a turning point in the history of sexuality. But my introduction takes up the language plots and “straight” multilingualism of earlier writers such as Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot. A coda takes us into the modernisms of Radclyffe Hall and Virginia Woolf. These bookends showcase how other scholars might benefit from taking multilingualism rather than cosmopolitanism as critical keyword, from bridging translation and queer studies, and, more broadly, from thinking of sexuality as something that emerges between languages.
Recommended Citation
Valentine, Colton, "Between Languages: Queer Multilingualism in the British Belle Époque" (2024). Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations. 1474.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/gsas_dissertations/1474
