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THE OSCHOLARS: Special Teleny issue |
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Dangerous
desires: the uses of women in Teleny |
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Christopher
Wellings |
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Teleny[1] (1893) enjoys a reputation as a groundbreaking account of sex and
love between men. Less has been said, however, about the novel’s many female characters. As contemporary readers, we might feel some
surprise that women feature so prominently in what is ostensibly the story of
a homosexual love affair. The broad purpose of this essay is to account for
that prominence. Through analysis of key characters and scenes, I will argue
that the novel uses women in a number of complex and problematic ways.
In preparation for my reading, I want to say something about Teleny as a historical document. The
late nineteenth-century is a significant moment for theorists of
homosexuality. Foucault argues that ’the homosexual’, as sexual category and identity, crystallised during the period,
through a proliferation of discourses on the subject[2]. Teleny is one such
discourse. It participates in the social construction of homosexuality, by
proposing a particular model of sex between men. John McRae has described Teleny as a voyage of discovery,
which: ‘takes narrator and reader through a series of sexual episodes, all
presented in a negative way, until the final celebration of homosexual love’[3]. The novel represents Camille Des Grieux’s search for an ideal of
expression of his love for men, in which he navigates and rejects a range of
erotic possibilities. I will therefore also be interested in the resulting
model of homosexuality, particularly as this relates to women and, as my title
suggests, to the novel’s critique of dangerous desire. |
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It is also important to find a way of reading Teleny as a work of pornography. While
the novel is certainly pornographic, it is not a work of pure sexual fantasy.
Steven Marcus’s concept of pornotopia is useful in explaining what I mean by this: |
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Pornotopia is literally a world
of grace abounding to the chief of sinners. All men in it are always and
infinitely potent; all women fecundate with lust and flow inexorably with sap
or juice or both…It is always summer time in pornotopia, and it is a
summertime of the emotions as well – no one is ever jealous, possessive, or
really angry[4]. |
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Teleny absolutely does not fit this model. Rather,
an intense atmosphere of anxiety and intrigue pervades the text. In this
respect, Teleny is comparable to
another icon of nineteenth-century pornography. My Secret Life is the eleven volume diary of an anonymous
Victorian gentleman. Marcus discusses My Secret Life
at length[5], basing his
observations on the premise that the diary is authentic in several ways.
There is, Marcus notes, a certain realism in the diarist’s voice, as he
worries about the size of his penis and his relationships with women. The
same is true of Teleny, where sex
is frequently mitigated by feelings of guilt and jealousy, as well as by fear
of discovery. There is a further similarity between the two texts in respect
of their responses to aberrant sexuality. When the diarist in My Secret Life witnesses a prostitute
flogging a man in a brothel, he describes the scene not with the alluring
gloss of pornography, but with the aloof detachment of someone who is turned
off by what he sees. As I will show, Teleny
also adopts a strangely equivocal attitude to sex, frequently displaying a
decidedly unpornographic disgust with it.
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The issue
of pornography has caused some anxiety for critics of Teleny. Brian Reade suggests the novel is ‘redeemed from being
pornography by being the only English novel until…[its publication]…where the
main story is concerned with homosexuality’[6]. For me, Teleny is not problematic because
it is pornographic. But the novel does present some serious difficulties when
we read pornography in a particular way. Judith Butler has described
pornography as ‘social text‘ - a literature we may read for information on
the social organisation of sexuality[7]. Read in this
way, Teleny raises several
questions which it will be my purpose to address. What is the significance of
the particular sexual fantasies about women that the novel articulates? What
uses are made of female subjectivity and the female body? Can we celebrate
the novel’s vision of homosexuality as egalitarian and healthy, or does it
actually emphasise apology, elitism and fear of sex? |
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I |
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Marguerite,
the old maid and the cantinière |
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Having
situated Teleny within a
Foucauldian history of sexuality, we might imagine that the novel reflects a
moment when sexuality was more flexible than our rigidly-imposed labels of
gay and straight allow. Jonathan Dollimore has noted that gay identity ‘far
from being the direct counterpart of our desires, may in part be a protection
against their complexity[8].’ Is it
possible, then, that Teleny is a
brave acknowledgement of this complexity? Is the novel’s recognition of a
role for women in the sexual lives of men who have sex with men a good thing?
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Two early
female figures appear in an anecdote Camille tells about his first romantic
attachment during adolescence - to a girl of his own age named Marguerite.
When he encounters her whilst travelling in Europe, his attempts to pursue
his suit are frustrated by the presence of a ‘wandering English old maid.’
(52). The old maid continually harries and harangues the bumbling and naïve
Camille, having him thrown out of the ladies’ carriage on the train, then
bumping into him at a series of inopportune moments. The episode culminates
with Camille chancing upon Marguerite in a garden, where she is squatting to
urinate in the belief that she is alone. The old maid simultaneously appears,
mistakenly concludes that Camille is spying on the young girl, and is duly
outraged. |
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In one
sense, this farcical vignette underlines how Camille is innately unsuited for
the perils and pitfalls of heterosexual courtship. Yet, in another, the
episode establishes the principle by which women are treated throughout the
text. Marguerite and the old maid are not individuals, but archetypes of the
female, defined solely in relation to male perceptions of their sexualities,
or lack thereof. Marguerite, Camille
concludes, is ‘just what an ideal Dulcinea ought to be’ (52), in other words
the type of young and virtuous woman that he ought to have. The spectacle of
her urinating undermines this appeal, and is an early instance of the kind of
disgust with the female body that characterises subsequent portrayals of
women. In contrast to Marguerite’s sexual potential, we find in the old maid
a stark warning of what all women become, an aged and sexless harridan who
dampens the male’s ardour and chases away his erection. |
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If
Marguerite and the old maid suggest the official Victorian woman, we find
next in Camille’s formative years a figure who equally preoccupied nineteenth-century
society – the prostitute. Camille is persuaded by a group of University
friends to visit a brothel, which he depicts as a nightmare realm populated
by women who exist as mythological monsters, ‘harpies’ and ‘painted-up
Jezebels’ (62). The portrayal of the prostitute known as the cantinière
is particularly misogynistic. She is described as: ‘old, short, squat and
obese; quite a bladder of fat’ (62). Her smell is of: ‘musk, patchouli, stale
fish and perspiration,’ but as Camille comes into closer contact with her
vagina ‘the smell of stale fish’ (63) predominates. Camille reflects that her
clitoris: ‘in its erection was of such a size, that in my ignorance I
concluded this woman to be an hermaphrodite’ (66). The problem with the cantinière,
then, is her lack of femininity, expressed in the grotesqueness of her body
and the proportions of her clitoris. Further, as she engages in a series of
sex acts with the other prostitutes, we see the cantinière
aggressively demanding pleasure. The horrible culmination of the brothel
scene comes when the cantinière is having sex with a consumptive prostitute,
who dies at the point of climax so that: ‘the death-rattle of the one mixed
itself up with the panting and gurgling of the other’. (67) |
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Any attempt
to claim that women play a radical role in Teleny is immediately frustrated by these more or less horrifying
warnings against women and female sexuality. Marguerite and the cantinière
are nothing more sophisticated than the familiar tropes of the good woman and
the bad, which some Victorian social commentators used in an attempt to
specify the parameters of correct womanhood. Yopie Prins has noted that some
commentators in the 1890s warned of the dangerous and wanton wild woman who
‘embodies too much sexuality, undomesticated and dangerously out of control’[9]. The wild woman
in Teleny is surely the cantinière,
so sexually dangerous that she pursues her orgasm even as her lover dies
beneath her. Finally, these early female figures are
significant because they highlight a problem we encounter repeatedly in Teleny. Instead of attempting a
critique of dominant ways of thinking about gender and sex, the novel
reinforces them. |
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II |
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The
Countess and Catherine |
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Perhaps
Marguerite and the cantinière appear where we would expect to find
them in the kind of narrative that Teleny
is. The novel is analogous with the coming out story. Camille moves from a
position of isolation and a perception of difference, towards the discovery
of a subculture that embraces and negates that difference. We might expect
narratives of this kind to include failed, socially-motivated attempts at
heterosexuality in early life. Yet both Camille and René Teleny are much more
deeply involved with women than this. Both engage in, and derive pleasure
from, sex with women, well before they have sex with each other. We have to
ask whether this is simply because of the linear form of the narrative, or
whether there is in fact something about women that needs to be got out of
the way before the main business of the novel can proceed. Alan Sinfield
suggests that Teleny ‘anticipates a
reader interested equally in cross-sex activity[10].’ With
reference to the novel’s two key cross-sex scenes, I will now consider what
the nature of this interest in straight sex is. |
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Teleny’s
lover is the Countess, a beautiful married lady of ‘unblemished reputation’
(73), who has ‘hardly yet reached the bloom of ripe womanhood’ (78). The
narrative structure of her scenes provides a clue to her function in the
novel. At the time of the affair, Camille has taken to following Teleny about
in secret, after each of the pianist’s performances. One night he sees Teleny
entering his house with the Countess, and waits outside in a cab in a state
of erotic and obsessive intensity. Camille experiences a hallucinogenic
vision of the lovers which, Teleny later reveals, coincides precisely with
what takes place inside the house. In one way, this device relates to the
idea that runs throughout the novel, that the two men are somehow psychically
connected. But Camille’s position as mental voyeur also creates a complexity
of perception around Teleny and the Countess. Camille observes: |
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With lips pressed together, she
remained for sometime inhaling his breath, and – almost frightened at her
boldness – she touched his lips with the tip of her tongue…she was so
convulsed with lust by the kiss that she had to clasp herself to him not to
fall, for the blood was rushing to her head, and her knees were almost giving
way beneath her…the pleasure she felt was so great that she was swooning away
for joy. (74) |
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There are
three people involved here. Camille identifies with the Countess in that he
wants to be her and have sex with Teleny himself. He revels in his perception
of her swooning feminine joy at being ravished by her man. There is an
appropriation of the feminine as a means of experiencing desire for men. This
pattern is further developed as the scene continues. After the Countess and
Teleny have had sex twice, we get these reflections from him on her
slumbering body: |
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He looked at her with the scorn
which a man has for the woman who has just ministered to his pleasure, and
who has degraded herself and him. Moreover, as he felt unjust towards her, he
hated her, and not himself. (80) |
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Such is
Teleny’s revulsion with the Countess that it is only by penetrating her from
behind, and imagining that she is really Camille, that he is able to
accomplish sex for a third time. The appropriation of the Countess is now
complete. The two men use her body, and a perception of her subjectivity, as
a proxy for sex with each other. The above quotation is the kind of explicit
statement of hatred for sex and women that places Teleny firmly outside Marcus’s pornotopia model. The concept of
woman as whore and man as her victim is one of the most conventional weapons
of misogyny. These scenes therefore re-emphasise the novel’s complicity with
dominant and oppressive gender frameworks. And this problem is even more
pressing in Camille’s cross-sex scenes, which I will now consider. |
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Camille’s
lover is Catherine, a chambermaid in his mother’s service, a ‘country wench
of sixteen or thereabout’ (86). The portrait of Catherine is drawn upon lines
of class, with the idea of the maid as a rustic peasant expressed in her
animalistic quality; she is ‘as pert as a sparrow…as graceful as a
kitten…[and has]…the savage grace of a young roe standing under leafy boughs’
(87). From the outset, the affair is Camille’s attempt to rid himself of his
‘horrible infatuation’ (86) with Teleny. He points out that, while he is
completely indifferent to Catherine because she is a woman, he is pleased by
her ‘cat-like grace…which gave her the appearance of a Ganymede’ (87).
However, the main site of Catherine’s appeal is her virginity. Patrick
Kearney has noted that English erotica, and particularly Victorian erotica,
is characterised by a mania for deflowering virgins[11]. This is
Camille’s preoccupation with Catherine. For both partners, the taking of
Catherine’s virginity is equated with her ruin. Camille reflects: |
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‘And yet which was the greater
evil of the two, the one of seducing a poor girl to ruin her, and making her
the mother of a poor unhappy child, or that of yielding to the passion which
was shattering my body and my mind? |
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‘Our honourable society winks at
the first peccadillo, and shudders with horror at the second, and as our
society is composed of honourable men, I suppose the honourable men which
make up our virtuous society are right.’ (88) |
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Camille is
able to identify the parallel between the oppression of women and the
oppression of homosexuals. He knows that the position is doubly-degrading for
women because the perpetrators of crimes against them are not worth
punishing, only winking at. However, there is no attempt by Camille to break
out of this pattern of inequality. Instead, in his sex with Catherine and in
the scene’s shocking conclusion, he aligns himself with patriarchy, with the
‘honourable men‘. The sex scenes between Camille and Catherine are couched in
terms of a fight or rape, through a perception of the female as quarry.
Having decided upon Catherine as a suitable way of getting rid of his
feelings for Teleny, Camille immediately pounces upon her because, he tells
us: ‘a nature like hers had to be mastered all of a sudden rather than tamed
by degrees.’(88). When Catherine cries out for Camille to stop, which she
does repeatedly, he does not heed her, but rather concludes that the struggle
‘excited her as much as it did me.’ (89). |
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When
Catherine finally submits to Camille’s violent advances she says: |
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‘I am in your power. You can do
with me what you like. I can’t help myself any longer. Only remember, if you
ruin me, I shall kill myself.’ (91) |
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Camille
then attempts to penetrate her but finds that his ‘battering ram’ (92) is
arrested in its progress by her hymen. He then ejaculates prematurely and
falls senseless at her side, after which she escapes. The whole struggle is
repeated the next time they meet. This time, on the point of penetration,
Camille asks Catherine if he may have her. She replies that he can if he
loves her, but repeats her threat to kill herself if he ruins her. In order
to absolve himself of all responsibility for raping and ruining her, Camille
now ceases and lets her go. But Catherine is not to be allowed to get away so
easily. Camille’s coachman ‘a young, stalwart, broad-shouldered and brawny
fellow’ (95), who desires Catherine, has heard about her liaison with Camille
and is maddened with jealousy. The coachman hides in her room one night, then
assaults her: |
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It was hardly a question with him
now of pleasure given or received, it was the wild overpowering eagerness
which the male brute displays in possessing the female, for you might have
killed him, but he would not have left go his hold. He thrust at her with all
the mighty heaviness of a bull; with another effort, the glans was lodged
between the lips…it was stopped by the as yet unperforated but highly dilated
vaginal membrane. Feeling himself thus stopped at the outer orifice of the
vagina he felt a moment of exaltation. |
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He kissed her head with rapture. |
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‘You are mine,’ he cried with
joy; ‘mine for life and death, mine for ever and ever.’ (98) |
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Following
the rape, Catherine, true to her word, commits suicide by jumping out of the
window. |
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How should
we interpret these violent cross-sex scenes in a narrative about sex between
men? Andrea Dworkin’s discussion of the uses of women in pornography is
useful here. Dworkin expresses the relation between women and homosexuality
in these uncompromising terms: |
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Mother, whore, beauty,
abomination, nature or ornament, she is the thing in contradistinction to
which the male is human. Without her as fetish – the charmed object – the
male, including the homosexual male, would be unable to experience his own
selfhood, his own power, his own penile presence and sexual superiority. Male
homosexual culture consistently uses the symbolic female…as a touchstone
against which masculinity can be experienced as meaningful and sublime[12]. |
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It is
absolutely apparent that the Countess and Catherine function to signify
masculinity in this way. Teleny may not want to have sex with the Countess,
the point is that he is man enough to do it. When she bears him a child,
which she passes off as her husband’s, this is a further assertion of
Teleny’s virility. And, in the case of that stalwart and brawny fellow the
coachman, perfect masculinity - the animal power of the male - consists
precisely in brutality against women. The rape and destruction of Catherine
is served up as erotic spectacle for all men to enjoy, as a celebration of
masculinity. When Camille conspires with the Coachman to keep the death
quiet, this only underlines the idea that she somehow deserved it anyway. The
reason for these straight sex scenes can now be summarised. The Countess and
Catherine are there to demonstrate that – even though Camille and Teleny love
each other - they are still ‘real’ men. |
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Catherine’s
death can be read as a rejection of women and of effeminacy. However, as we
have already seen in relation to the Countess, this disavowal is entirely
duplicitous. The novel continually draws on the notion of the feminine to
describe homosexual desire. When Camille and Teleny finally have sex, for
example, Camille observes that it is much easier for him to penetrate Teleny
than the other way around because Teleny has ‘already lost his maidenhood
long ago’ (126). Teleny says ‘Sit down there…I’ll ride on you whilst you
impale me as if I were a woman.’ (126). Finally, Camille gleefully
appropriates a sexual pleasure that he perceives as properly belonging to
women, reflecting: ‘I seemed to be a man in front, a woman behind, for the
pleasure I felt either way’ (118). Of course, it is problematic to think of
any sexual position as being properly ‘feminine’ or ‘masculine’. But
nonetheless, Teleny conceives of
gender and sex in precisely these problematic terms. This severely limits the
potential for a radical model of homosexuality that challenges the status
quo. Finally, Teleny offers women a
double insult. It feigns to disavow them, sanctioning their destruction to
establish the desirability of the male, then proceeds to construct a
homosexuality that relies on the ‘feminine’ for its articulation. |
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III |
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Dangerous
desires |
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The man who dies at the symposium is the Spahi. Teleny describes
him to Camille as: |
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…a young man who having spent his
fortune in the most unbridled debauchery without any damage to his
constitution, has enlisted in the Spahis to see what new pleasures Algiers
could afford him. That man is indeed a volcano. (146) |
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So, like
Camille, the Spahi is looking for a particular model of sex between men.
Unlike Camille, however, he privileges pleasure above all else. A Spahi was
an Algerian horseman serving under the French government and, though the race
of the Spahi in Teleny is not
specified, he nonetheless becomes the proponent of an eroticism that
emphasises racial otherness, and also a very specific mode of sex between
men. This is expressed in the concept of sodomy the Spahi recommends to the
other men at the orgy: |
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…what pleasures can be compared
with those of the Cities of the Plain? The Arabs are right. They are our
masters in this art; for there, if every man is not passive in his manhood,
he is always so in early youth and old age, when he cannot be active any longer.’ (153) |
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The Spahi
has travelled to Algiers in search of new pleasures, but it is clear that
what he has found there is an older model of homosexuality. The Spahi’s view
of sodomy recalls the pederastic model David Halperin draws attention to in
an essay on the history of sexuality[13].
Halperin notes that, in ancient Greek society, patterns of sex between men
mirrored the organisation of the state. A male citizen was free to approach
and penetrate his inferiors, whether these were woman, or men who were
inferior in age or social status. Discussing a piece of technical writing by
the ancient Roman physician Soranus, Halperin also notes how such a view of
sodomy might also see position during sex as a function of male sexual
potency. This is also the case in the Spahi’s view, where men are always
passive in youth and old age. It is also possible to situate the Spahi’s
model of sodomy within the ars erotica tradition Foucault has
identified. According to Foucault, the ars erotica establishes
pleasure as a secret knowledge about sex, which is transmitted back into
erotic practice via a master / disciple relationship[14].
It is in this position of master that the Spahi functions in Teleny, as he guides the other men
through a series of exotic sex acts. |
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Foucault
draws an opposition between the ars erotica and the constitution in
Western civilisation of a science of sex. With this in mind, we can see how Teleny very explicitly participates in
the construction of sexuality Foucault describes. If the Spahi represents ars
erotica, then it is also possible to identify Camille, with his need to
contain sex within certain terms, with a science of sex. The novel’s
rejection of the Spahi’s view of sex between men becomes the reason for his
death. The Spahi’s final act of erotic excess provides the novel’s infamous
‘bottlery’ scene (153). The Spahi’s boasts that he can achieve pleasure from
having a broad, glass bottle inserted into his anus. At the point of the
Spahi’s ejaculation, the bottle breaks inside him. He later shoots himself to
avoid the shame of attending hospital. When he dies, so does the dangerous
sexuality he represents. Just as the Countess and Catherine were bound up
with a rejection of effeminacy, so the death of the Spahi represents a
disavowal of older cultural forms of homosexuality, and of the unchecked
pursuit of sexual pleasure. |
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And none of
this is a good thing. Homosexuality in Teleny
ends up looking rather like heterosexuality. The monogamous, romantic union
of Camille and Teleny is privileged as the only acceptable context for sex
between men. These are not politically-sound lines along which to defend
proscribed sexuality. Inevitably, responding to a dominant and oppressive
framework by mimicking it, only reinforces its power. And indeed, as I will
now show in my conclusion, Camille and Teleny ultimately become victims of
the very normality they aspire to. |
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Conclusion |
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Madame
Des Grieux |
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No account
of the role of women in Teleny
could be complete without a discussion of Camille’s mother. Madame Des Grieux
is the only woman whose reach spans the entire narrative (she appears on the
novel’s first page and on its last). I have reserved my discussion of her
until this point because of her role in the novel’s conclusion, and because
the character is useful in drawing together the strands of my discussion.
Madame Des Grieux is unique among the novel’s female characters because she
commands power. A young, rich widow, she is a patron of the arts and a woman
of taste: ‘a queen of drawing rooms’ (162) and the subject of ‘flattering
articles of the fashionable papers’ (162). On account of her many suitors,
she is explicitly likened to Penelope. Yet Madame Des Grieux is not waiting
for any man; rather she prefers ‘her liberty to the ties of matrimony.’
(163). And one reason why she prizes this freedom is that, beneath her veneer
of social respectability, Madame Des Grieux is passionately sexual. Camille
continually teases his interlocutor with hints about his mother’s sexual
adventures which are ‘well worth hearing’ (188). But, unlike any other woman
in the novel, Madame Des Grieux is not condemned as a whore on account of her
sexuality. Camille says ’To everybody she was like Juno, an irreproachable
woman who might have been either a volcano or an iceberg’ (162). In short,
Camille’s mother achieves what appeared impossible in light of earlier
portrayals of women in Teleny: she
is both completely sexual and completely in control. |
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Given the
problematic treatment of women in the Teleny,
what are we to make of the appearance of this radical female figure?
Certainly, Madame Des Grieux highlights that, as with so much of the text,
the treatment of women is incoherent. Camille is an unreliable, perhaps even
a self-deceiving narrator. Towards the end of the novel, he makes a statement
that he never likes to ‘treat any woman scornfully’ (161). In light of what
has gone before (the cantinière, the Countess, Catherine) this
statement seems astonishingly deluded. Perhaps the inconsistent treatment of
women also supports the theory that Teleny
is the work of several writers. However, for me, Madame Des Grieux makes most
sense if we read her as a continuation of the themes of fear and jealousy of
women, and of the irresistibility of heterosexuality. |
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In the
novel’s final chapter, Camille and Teleny discuss the possibility of a future
together. Both men perceive women as a threat to a long-term union. Teleny
says: ‘…you might get tired of this life. You might, like other men, marry
just to have a family (164). When Camille expresses his worry that Teleny may
have an affair, it is naturally assumed that his lover could just as easily
be a woman as another man; Camille says: ‘You would love him – or her, and
then my life would be blasted for ever’ (164). And of course these fears are
ultimately realised. The novel concludes with Camille discovering Teleny
having sex with Madame Des Grieux, who has achieved power over Teleny by
paying off his debts. Distraught at losing Camille, Teleny then commits
suicide. In one sense this is a suitably dramatic ending to the deliciously
scandalous story that Camille tells his interlocutor. Yet in another, it is
the dominance of heterosexuality, and a sense of the impossibility of
competing with women, that destroys Camille and Teleny’s relationship.
Throughout my discussion I have highlighted how Teleny reinforces normative frameworks of gender and sexuality.
In the novel’s conclusion, the two men are finally overwhelmed by them. |
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I feel that
I have not had very much good to say about Teleny. After all, what is so wrong with the model of
homosexuality the novel proposes? It holds out the possibility that sex
between men can be about more than sex: it can also be about art, beauty and
love. To an extent the novel is also very honest about sex. Edward Carpenter
and John Addington Symonds, for example, produced defences of homosexuality that
played down the importance of sex, and particularly of sodomy. In Teleny, by contrast, the love affair
is fully-realised emotionally and sexually. And there is undoubtedly a
poignancy about the novel’s conclusion. Surely it shows how prevailing
hostility to homosexuality must have pressed upon both actual experience, and
the literary imagination. But the fact remains that from a political
perspective Teleny is a deeply
suspect work. The novel is obsessed with conventional femininity and
masculinity, with heterosexuality and monogamy, and with disassociating
itself from sexual perversion. Teleny
never attempts to break free of these dominant frameworks. Instead it
emphasises an anxious desire to be normal – and that may be the most
dangerous desire of all. |
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Return
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