Abstract

Just like how queer humans have existed for as long as the human race has, queer identities have been reflected in literature for as long as literature has been written. Beyond the mere inclusion of queer characters, however, in the past 150 years, the literary canon has seen the emergence of a kind of novel that emphasizes the discussion of queerness, covertly or otherwise. We might consider such novels to be examples of the (capital Q, capital N) Queer Novel– a novel that was (1) written by a queer individual and (2) written to explore the personal and/or social implications of queer identity and/or queer relationships. The Queer Novels that will be explored in this paper are some of the earliest examples of the genre, starting with Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, then Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, and E. M. Forster’s Maurice. This paper seeks not only to explore the origins and development of the Queer Novel as an emerging genre of literature, but also to analyze the forms of censorship that were imposed upon these works as a result of the prejudices inherent to the time periods in which they were conceived.

An Era of Censorship: Case Studies and the Origin of the Queer Novel

Part 1: The Queer Novel

Just as queer humans have existed for as long as the human race has, queer identities have been reflected in literature for as long as literature has been written. In terms of Western literature, this means looking as far back as the Ancient Greeks and their depictions of homosexual (or at least homosocial) relationships such as between Achilles and Patroclus in Homer’s Iliad or even Nisus and Euryalus in Vergil’s Aeneid. Beyond the mere inclusion of queer characters, however, in the past one hundred and fifty years, the literary canon has seen the emergence of a new kind of novel– one that emphasizes the discussion of queerness, covertly or otherwise. We might consider such novels to be examples of the “Queer Novel” (capital Q, capital N). For the purpose of this paper, we will consider the Queer Novel to be a novel that was (1) written by a queer individual and (2) written to explore the personal and/or social implications of queer identity and/or queer relationships.

The Queer Novels that will be explored in this paper are some of the earliest examples of the genre, beginning with Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, which is potentially the earliest well-known example in English literature and was immediately controversial despite undergoing significant professional censorship and editing prior to publication. Two more significant examples of the Queer Novel come to us out of the early Modernist period, Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and E. M. Forster’s Maurice, both of which underwent their own unique modes of personal censorship prior to their ultimate publications. This paper seeks not only to explore the origins and development of the Queer Novel as an emerging genre of literature, but also to analyze the forms of censorship that were imposed upon these works as a result of the prejudices inherent to the time periods in which they were conceived.

Part 2: The Censored Picture of Dorian Gray

Originally published in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine in 1890 and later republished in its novel form in 1891, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray scandalized its contemporary audience despite having been heavily edited and censored by Lippincott’s editor, J. M. Stoddart. It wasn’t until 2011 when Harvard University Press released The Uncensored Picture of Dorian Gray, based on the typescript Wilde had originally sent to Stoddart, that readers could finally experience the story the way Oscar Wilde originally intended (Frankel ix). A careful reading of both the published The Picture of Dorian Gray and then The Uncensored Picture of Dorian Gray reveals much about both Stoddart’s motives and techniques used when editing the novel in an attempt to excise it of its queer themes and character dynamics, as well as the changes and additions made by Oscar Wilde himself in preparation for the novelized version of the story. Considering the specifics of the edits made to the original typescript, it becomes increasingly clear that both the editor (and later the author himself) had two main goals in mind when conducting the censorship of The Picture of Dorian Gray: the first was to undermine the affections and intimacy between the three main characters, and the second was to further the vilification of Dorian Gray in order to “bring the story to a more appropriate moral conclusion” (Frankel 42-3).

For those unfamiliar with the story, all versions of Dorian Gray are principally about a handsome young man called Dorian who receives a portrait of himself from his friend, an artist. Dorian is so overwhelmed by the realization of his own beauty in the portrait that he is overcome by preemptive grief for the loss of vitality that will come with his aging. He wishes, rashly, that the painting would absorb and reflect his decline over time so that his physical body might remain young and beautiful. This wish comes true, and the rest of the story follows Dorian’s growing obsession with the magic of the portrait and his subsequent deterioration into wickedness, crime, and cruelty that eventually leads to his tragic end.

There are three main characters in the story: Dorian, the naive and beautiful youth; Basil Hallward, the artist who paints the portrait; and Lord Henry Wotton, an older aristocratic man who first incites Dorian to vanity and Aestheticism. Interestingly, Wilde admits to having put much of himself into these characters. He is quoted as saying “Basil Hallward is what I think I am: Lord Henry is what the world thinks me: Dorian what I would like to be– in other ages, perhaps,” telling the reader much about the authenticity he is able to lend to these characters and their motivations (Frankel 14). Dorian, Basil, and Lord Henry make up the relationships at the crux of the story, and their affections for one another and the resulting homoerotic nature of the dynamics between them are what is so desperately excised or otherwise downplayed in the published version of the novel. For clarity’s sake, the originally published 1891 version of Dorian Gray will be henceforth referred to as the “censored version” while the original typescript will be referred to as the “uncensored version.”

In order of increasing egregiousness and quantity, we might first look at the edits made to the interactions between Basil and Lord Henry:

The line from the uncensored version “‘I am all expectation, Basil,’ murmured his companion, looking at him,” (Frankel 61) becomes in the censored version “‘I am all expectation, Basil,’ continued his companion, glancing at him” (Wilde 13).

These changes, from murmured to continued, from looking to glancing, may seem incredibly minor– and they are, grammatically speaking– but they shift the mood of the interaction from being playful and intimate, perhaps even flirtatious, to something more neutral and brief. Verbiage is a subtle indicator of intimacy in a scene, and as such, it is heavily targeted by who we might assume to be Stoddart during his initial cleansing of Wilde’s typescript.

The next relationship that is heavily altered from one version to the next is between Dorian and Lord Henry. In many ways, Lord Henry and Dorian have the most timely relationship in the story, that between an older upper-class gentleman and a younger man whom he takes in as his protégé. This dynamic has its roots in Ancient Greece, and it is no coincidence that this type of relationship is sometimes referred to as “Dorian love” (Frankel 9). Although the Dorian love dynamic is predicated on a significant power imbalance, and the influence of that imbalance is present in the relationship between Dorian and Lord Henry, the two men have a much more complex entanglement in Wilde’s original typescript than what appears in the censored version, as can be seen and felt in certain selections from the novel.

One example comes from a line in the uncensored version: “Of all his friends, or so-called friends, Lord Henry Wotton was the only one who remained loyal to him” (Frankel 173). This line, entirely excised in the censored version, says more in its absence than perhaps it does in its existence in the original typescript. It is a simple line that directly conveys a certain level of commitment on Lord Henry’s part to Dorian even as Dorian’s reputation becomes tainted as the story progresses. This paints the two’s relationship, and Lord Henry in particular, in a more sympathetic and compassionate light that is extinguished entirely in the censored version. The censored version’s goal is to limit Dorian and Lord Henry’s relationship to the parameters of corruptor and corrupted, leaving no room for complexities such as genuine affection or intimacy.

Lastly, the most egregiously sanitized relationship in the censored version of Dorian Gray is undoubtedly that of Dorian and Basil. This is unquestionably due to the fact that their relationship and feelings for one another– especially Basil’s feelings for Dorian– are the most explicitly homosexual. They are not only openly affectionate, but romantic, and it took significantly more work on Stoddart’s end to cover up their homosexual tendencies. One major recurring tactic used by Stoddart when censoring Basil and Dorian’s relationship was to undermine Basil’s affection for Dorian by tying that affection directly to Dorian’s role as Basil’s artistic muse. The censored version tries to send the message that Basil’s love for Dorian only exists in direct relation to Dorian’s influence on Basil’s art. The editor’s hand is felt strongly within scenes between these two characters.

The uncensored version’s “Because I have put into it all the extraordinary romance of which, of course, I have never dared to speak to him” (Frankel 67), becomes “Because, without intending it, I have put into it some expression of all this curious artistic idolatry, of which, of course, I have never cared to speak to him” (Wilde 18). Substituting extraordinary romance with curious artistic idolatry is a blatant erasure of Basil’s self-aware romantic inclinations towards Dorian. At the beginning of Dorian’s spiritual decline, the uncensored Basil says, “I want the Dorian Gray I used to know” (Frankel 139) while the censored Basil says, “I want the Dorian Gray I used to paint” (Wilde 111).

This form of censorship, of hiding Basil behind his role as the artist and Dorian behind his role as the muse, is also seen in a particular moment in the uncensored version that can most accurately be described as Basil’s coming-out and direct confession to Dorian. Where the censored version reads, “You became to me the visible incarnation of that unseen ideal whose memory haunts us artists like an exquisite dream” (Wilde 116) it was originally written as “It is quite true that I have worshipped you with far more romance of feeling than a man should ever give to a friend. Somehow, I had never loved a woman. I suppose I never had time… I quite admit that I adored you madly, extravagantly, absurdly” (Frankel 144). Unlike some of the other, more subtle examples of censorship thus far, these two passages are clearly very different. It took more than a change in verbiage or the addition of a few extra words to mask the homosexual implications of this scene. Similarly, these passages are almost directly followed up with what was originally in the uncensored version: “And now, good-bye Dorian. You have been the one person in my life of whom I have been really fond” (Frankel 146) that became in the censored version: “And now good-bye, Dorian. You have been the one person in my life who has really influenced my art” (Wilde 118). This is another moment when the editor’s hand is felt heavily by the reader. Basil’s romantic feelings for Dorian are no secret– he’s aware of them, Lord Henry is aware of them, only Dorian seems to remain naive to them until Basil’s confession– but the word romance and the power it holds are often excised completely or at least undermined by what follows in the censored version.

In the uncensored version, Lord Henry says simply to Basil, “The worst of having a romance is that it leaves one so unromantic” (Frankel 69) while in the censored version, he says, “What you have told me is quite a romance, a romance of art one might call it, and the worst of having a romance of any kind is that it leaves one so unromantic” (Wilde 19). A romance of art, he says, as opposed to a romance of heart.

Furthermore, in the uncensored version, Lord Henry has the following exchange with Dorian:

“People are very fond of giving away what they need most themselves.”

“You don’t mean to say that Basil has got any passion or romance in him?”

“I don’t know whether he has any passion, but he certainly has romance,” said Lord Henry, with an amused look in his eyes. “Has he never let you know that?” (Frankel 99).

Needless to say, this cheeky exchange does not appear in the censored version.

While not an exhaustive list of the instances of censorship meant to mask and undermine the homosocial and/or homoerotic nature of the relationships between the three main characters of Dorian Gray, it should be sufficient evidence to that end. Furthermore, the alterations made to The Picture of Dorian Gray had another purpose as well, and that was to emphasize Dorian Gray’s decline into wickedness in order to give the story a more publicly and politically acceptable moral conclusion.

The moral of Dorian Gray before the alterations can be understood from a Wildean perspective given the context of Oscar Wilde’s devotion to the cult of “Aestheticism” or “art-for-art’s sake” (Frankel 2). According to the Aesthete, art is meant only to be beautiful, and it doesn’t have to mean anything more than that. Considering Wilde’s Aesthetic stance, Nicholas Frankel suggests that “Dorian has, in truth, misconstrued the nature of the portrait from the start… Had he understood the portrait from a more purely “Wildean” perspective, seeing it (like any artwork) not as a truth-telling entity so much as a purely imaginative one, he would never have come to be so haunted or possessed by it,” and he would have avoided the madness that came from his obsession with the painting’s power (Frankel 32). This, Frankel suggests, is the lesson Wilde intended to impart with his original typescript. Of course, Aestheticism was not the dominant philosophy of the time, and Stoddart (and eventually Wilde himself) knew this narrative would not be satisfying to contemporaries and their Victorian sensibilities.

In order to make Dorian’s death at the end of the novel less of a tragedy brought upon by Aesthetic naïveté and more the well-deserved end to a monstrous villain, the editor (in this case, most likely Wilde himself) did three main things: furthered the vilification of Lord Henry, Dorian’s main ‘bad influence’, added the secondary plotline of James Vane, Sybil Vane’s brother and then added scenes after Basil’s murder that paint Dorian in a more sinister light.

If we are to understand why Wilde and Stoddart may have felt compelled to make the changes that they did to Dorian Gray prior to publishing, we must first understand the historical and political contexts under which they were operating. Long before either of these two men, from the time of the Ancient Greeks through to the early seventeenth century, the topic of sex and sexuality carried none of the taboo it would come to reflect by the Victorian era, and it was acknowledged and discussed quite openly. As Michel Foucault puts it in The History of Sexuality, this was a time when “one had a tolerant familiarity with the illicit” (Foucault 3). By the time the nineteenth century rolled around, however, sexuality became something that could only exist behind closed doors and only in the context of reproduction. Foucault refers to this as the “Victorian bourgeois,” but it can also be understood as a kind of “Victorian era prudishness” that was a driving factor in the sociopolitical climate of Wilde’s career, and echoes of these sensibilities can be felt in the succeeding eras (Foucault 3).

That being said, it stands to reason that such explicit depictions of homosexual behavior as are found in Wilde’s original typescript of The Picture of Dorian Gray would not have been particularly well received by a Victorian audience, but there is even more to it than that. Oscar Wilde was writing Dorian Gray during a time in London’s history when law enforcement was particularly interested in prosecuting homosexuals for “gross indecency,” and it was specifically in the wake of two major events: the passing of the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885 which declared sexual activity between two men unlawful, and the Cleveland Street Scandal of 1889-1890 where police uncovered a ring of male prostitutes who worked out of a male brothel at 19 Cleveland Street (Frankel 7-8). It is important to note that homosexuality was not understood to be a sexual identity or orientation at this time, but rather a vice to be tamed or even an illness to be treated. It is likely that upon hearing about these developments, Wilde decided not to reverse the changes made to his story by Stoddart when he was novelizing Dorian Gray in 1891.

Dorian Gray was also being published in the midst of what Barabara Leckie refers to as the “print censorship debates” in the Oxford Handbook of the Victorian Novel (Leckie 168). As a response to a few major trials concerning the censorship of literature, some authors, including Wilde, chose to pitch in by way of the prefaces to their novels. In the preface to the novel version of The Picture of Dorian Gray, Wilde unsurprisingly espouses his Aesthetic perspective on art and literature, saying that “There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all” (Wilde 7). According to Leckie, Wilde “seeks to keep the focus on art and to mock the focus on the reader. In Wilde’s terms, it is neither the artist nor the book itself that produces an immoral work, it is the reader figured as the critic” (Leckie 173-4). In other words, Wilde is saying that if someone reads his novel and perceives a sense of immorality from their experience, then that reflects their own depravity, not that of the book’s and certainly not that of Wilde as the author.

This argument unfortunately did not hold up for Wilde when he was eventually taken to court in 1895. Using selections from The Picture of Dorian Gray as their evidence, the prosecution was able to convince the court to sentence Wilde to two years with hard labor for “gross indecency” under statute 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885. “That Dorian Gray was used as evidence in Wilde’s court trials,” suggests Frankel, “underscores again how incendiary the novel really was and how much Wilde risked in bringing it before the public” even in its heavily edited state (Frankel 19). Oscar Wilde died in November 1900 in his hotel room in Paris, regarded in death as “Aestheticism’s first martyr” as well as an icon of queer history (Frankel 34).

Part 3: The Power of Satire and the “Greater Heterosexual Good” in the Publication of Orlando

In the literary biography Woman of Letters: A Life of Virginia Woolf, Phyllis Rose says of Woolf that she is “the author of works written in passion which do not boast of their passion, and, indeed, often try to hide it” (Rose xv). This hiding of her passion is perhaps best exemplified by Woolf’s 1928 novel Orlando: A Biography, which is often considered a love-letter to her lover, Vita Sackville-West.

Orlando is a winding and twisting tale that, much like The Picture of Dorian Gray, follows a wealthy and handsome young nobleman with a zest for life and literature. Orlando becomes a favorite of Queen Elizabeth I and spends his youth in the midst of English royal politics. As such, he is later appointed Ambassador to Constantinople where he is stationed for many years. During his stay, an extraordinary change overcomes Orlando, and he is magically transformed into a woman. Orlando makes her way back to England and lives many more decades before eventually completing her transformation into a “real woman” by marrying a man and becoming an accomplished published poet.

From the perspective of a 21st century reader, it seems nearly inconceivable that Woolf could get away with the rather explicit themes of sexual and gender fluidity that are explored in Orlando, and indeed some passages make these ideas incredibly clear. For example, when Orlando is a young man, he encounters someone of indeterminable sex: “…a figure, which, whether boy’s or woman’s, for the loose tunic and trousers of the Russian fashion served to disguise the sex… But these details were obscured by the extraordinary seductiveness which issued from the whole person” (Woolf 22). Despite not knowing whether the figure is that of a man or a woman, Orlando is seduced by them anyhow, introducing an appreciation for androgyny and sexual fluidity in Orlando’s character that reappears several times throughout the story.

When Orlando is a woman back in England, she is reminded of her love for Sasha, and her passion is rekindled: “And as all Orlando’s loves had been women, now, through the culpable laggard of the human frame to adapt itself to convention, though she herself was a woman, it was still a woman that she loved; and if the consciousness of being of the same sex had any effect at all, it was to quicken and deepen those feelings which she had had as a man” (Woolf 104). Not only does her transformation into a woman not negate her attraction to other women, but this passage also claims that it has, if anything, strengthened those affections. This same sentiment is shared by the character of the Archduke who “was a man and had always been one” who “had seen a portrait of Orlando and fallen hopelessly in love with him” (Woolf 115). The Archduke, who was a man, had fallen in love with a portrait of Orlando when he himself was a man, offering an example of male same-sex attraction to complement the female same-sex attraction that Orlando experiences.

Virginia Woolf managed to publish the inherently queer narrative of Orlando by utilizing two major modes of self-censorship in the creation of her novel: that of literary satire and the employment of what we might call the “Greater Heterosexual Good” trope. These two tools working in tandem with one another allow Woolf the plausible deniability to bring about such a novel while still shielding herself from much of the backlash it would otherwise incite.

We know from Virginia Woolf’s nephew and biographer, Quentin Bell, that Orlando was Woolf’s love-letter to Vita Sackville-West, and it was being in love with Vita that “fueled Virginia Woolf’s imagination” during this era of her career (Rose 192). Woolf’s novel is dedicated to and inspired by her lover both in its forthright homosexuality and depictions of cross-dressing, two things Sackville-West is rather famous for (178). Rose calls Orlando a “fantastically developed and embellished portrait of someone Woolf loves” (180). It is important to understand, however, that Woolf’s other contemporaries did not see this side of Orlando, and that is in large part due to how Woolf herself pushed a particular impression of the novel onto her readership– that of a satire, of a joke. If Orlando is a love-letter at its core, it is a satire on its surface, and Woolf was happy to let others see only that. She pushes this narrative both in the prose of Orlando itself and in how she chose to discuss the novel after its publication. “Although it is spotted with such mini-manifestos on the subjects of sexuality and women’s condition,” suggests Rose, “Orlando presents so preeminently a mocking and satirical face that one feels foolish taking them too seriously” (184).

As for the particular way in which Woolf presents Orlando to her readers, what follows is a letter from Woolf to her publisher, C. P. Sanger, on the subject of the novel’s release as found in The Letters of Virginia Woolf Volume III: 1923-1928:

“It is very good of you to write– especially when I had taken such liberties with your venerated name (which I do seriously venerate).” –This is in reference to the preface of Orlando in which Woolf thanks Sanger for his work in the novel’s publication– “Orlando was meant as a joke; and I daresay it gives a view of life which is not at all my own– if it gives a view of life at all. But I was having a holiday, and I am very glad that it amused you, when I am sure you are always seeing thousands of things which are not amusing. I feel somehow that I ought to apologize to people like yourself for scribbling these books. They sometimes seem to me to have no bearing upon anything that is really happening” (Woolf 554).

It can be easily discerned that Woolf is pushing hard in this letter this perception of Orlando as nothing more than a trifling story she came up with on vacation. She is, in other words, laying it on rather thick, especially when compared to the first exchange between Woolf and Sackville-West upon the release of the novel. In The Letters of Vita Sackville-West to Virginia Woolf, we find this correspondence regarding Orlando:

From Sackville-West to Woolf:

…For the moment, I can’t say anything except that I am completely dazzled, bewitched, enchanted, under a spell. It seems to me the loveliest, wisest, richest book that I have ever read,– excelling even your own Lighthouse. Virginia, I really don’t know what to say,– am I right? am I wrong? am I prejudiced? am I in my senses or not? It seems to me that you have really shut up that “hard and rare thing” in a book; that you have had a complete vision; and yet when you came down to the sober labor of working it out, have never lost sight of it nor faltered in the execution… You will get letters, very reasoned and illuminating, from many people; I cannot write you that sort of letter now, I can only tell you that I am really shaken, which may seem to you useless and silly, but which is really a greater tribute than pages of calm appreciation,–  and then after all it does touch me so personally, and I don’t know what to say about that either, only that I feel like one of those wax figures in a shop window, on which you have hung a robe stitched with jewels. It is like being alone in a dark room with a treasure chest full of rubies and nuggets and brocades. Darling, I don’t know and scarcely even like to write, so overwhelmed am I, how you could have hung so splendid a garment on so poor a peg. Really this isn’t false humility; really it isn’t. I can’t write about that part of it, though, much less ever tell you verbally… Also, you have invented a new form of Narcissism,– I confess,– I am in love with Orlando– this is a complication I had not foreseen. Virginia, my dearest, I can only thank you for pouring out such riches. (Sackville-West 288-9)

To which Virginia Woolf responds: “What an immense relief!… It struck me suddenly with horror that you’d be hurt or angry, and I didn’t dare open the post: Now let who will bark or bite; Angel that you are…” (189).

It is difficult to reconcile this exchange, from Sackville-West’s flowery praise to Woolf’s palpable relief at her endorsement, with that of Woolf’s letter to Sanger without accepting that Woolf intended to evoke different reactions from different readers. It stands to reason that someone so intimately familiar with the themes of the novel as the muse herself would be able to look beyond the carefully crafted satirical front in order to experience the earnestness between the lines.

Another reason why Orlando’s queer themes may have been so willingly overlooked by contemporary readers was likely due in part to how Woolf masterfully ended the novel in adherence to what we might consider to be the “Greater Heterosexual Good” trope. This trope, for the purposes of this paper, may be best understood as the employment of a homosexual character or event in media either as a source of comedic relief or as a plot device that invariably leads to a “more appropriate” heterosexual and/or heteronormative conclusion. That is to say, all references to queerness are nullified by the conclusion of the story because all characters ultimately conform to heteronormative conventions in the end.

The “Greater Heterosexual Good” trope is best exemplified by post-war Hollywood movies that were made in compliance with what was known as the Hays Code, a kind of self-imposed censorship guideline for “how certain topics should be shown on screen,” including topics such as sexual perversity and homosexuality (Rosenfeld). In order to push these guidelines to their limits, screenplay writers employed the “Greater Heterosexual Good” trope in order to get away with what were otherwise blatantly queer characters and scenarios. One of the most famous examples of this tactic (and one of the films whose success most directly led to the retirement of the Hays Code) was the 1959 American film Some Like It Hot starring Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis, and Jack Lemmon (Wilder). In this film, Curtis and Lemmon play two down-on-their-luck musicians who, in order to escape the mob, dress as women and join an all-girls band. Joe and Jerry become Josephine and Daphne, and both struggle to keep away from their attractive female bandmates lest they blow their cover whilst also struggling to skirt around their gathering male admirers. Some Like It Hot encapsulates queerness being used as comedic relief and as a plot device, but all is resolved by the end of the movie– Joe reveals himself to Sugar (Monroe), and they fall in heterosexual love, justifying all of the queerness that comes before it as a means to this “more appropriate” happy ending.

Orlando, despite being published years before the Hays Code and decades before Some Like It Hot, nevertheless conforms to this trope. By the end of the novel, Orlando, who has long been a woman, seems to have gotten past her infatuation with Sasha and has lost interest in roaming the city dressed as a man with another woman on her arm, finds a man whom she falls in love with and marries. It is at this point that Orlando thinks “I am a woman… a real woman, at last” (Woolf 161). Content in her marriage, Orlando goes on finally to publish the poem she has carried around with her throughout the novel early in the twentieth century, a whole three hundred years since she was a young nobleman. In the end, she is a successful woman in a happy heterosexual marriage, making all that came before simply the wild and magical (and not at all to be taken seriously) journey that brought her there.

If the majority of readers missed the underlying message of Orlando or failed to give credit to the passages and themes which were contrived genuinely, then that was by Woolf’s design. Vita Sackville-West saw Orlando for what it was, and the fact that the novel was more than just a private correspondence between the two was likely the greatest success Woolf could have wished for.

Part 4: “Dedicated to a Happier Year”: the Posthumous Publication of Maurice

Many readers who are familiar with Virginia Woolf may also know her for her involvement in the group of intellectuals known as the Bloomsbury Group. Hanging “on the fringes of Bloomsbury” as David Dowling says in Bloomsbury Aesthetics and the Novels of Forster and Woolf, was E. M. Forster, known by his friends and by Woolf as Morgan (Dowling 11). Due to the publication of his five major novels in relatively rapid succession in the early twentieth century, Forster became one of the most promising young writers in England rather early in his career (Chee). However, his long retirement from fiction writing that followed the publication of A Passage to India left his fans wanting and his colleagues scratching their heads. It wasn’t until 1971, nearly a year after Forster’s death, that the world would see Forster’s sixth and final work of fiction, Maurice: A Novel.

Maurice is a somber yet hopeful tale of a young, handsome, middle-class man who struggles with the social and cultural pressures of Edwardian England whilst being a homosexual and in love with another man. Maurice experiences his first great heartbreak and has to learn to heal independently and find his place within (or outside of) society. When he is given a second chance at love, this time fully requited and enthusiastic, he chooses to forego society totally in favor of living life openly as himself, a gay man in the early twentieth century.

What makes Maurice so different from its contemporary Orlando, and what made it simply impossible to have been published when it was originally written in 1913 and 1914, was the directness and explicitness with which Forster interacts with the topic of homosexuality. There is no trace of the coyness or plausible deniability that allowed Woolf to put Orlando out to the public; Maurice is unambiguously queer. Even from the perspective of a reader of 21st century literature that is no stranger to queer narratives in fiction, the introspective revelations in Maurice are incredibly poignant, and downright revolutionary when fitted into the historical context in which it was being written. When Maurice is finally able to admit to himself his own homosexuality, the reader is able to sympathize with both the hopefulness and grief that emanates from the passage:

“He would not– and this was the test– pretend to care about women when the only sex that attracted him was his own. He loved men and had always loved them. He longed to embrace them and mingle his being with theirs. Now that the man who had returned his love had been lost, he admitted this” (Forster 62).

We cannot help but be slightly taken aback by such straightforwardness in relation to the topic of same-sex attraction and the setting of hostility inherent to the time period. Nevertheless, Forster puts it all out there. What is more, in Maurice, two men kiss (74), two men express their love for each other verbally (“I think you’re beautiful, the only beautiful person I’ve ever seen. I love your voice and everything to do with you, down to your clothes or the room you are sitting in. I adore you” (92)), and it is even made clear that two men have sex between scenes (243). And, more than all of that– what is likely the most important point that Forster could have made– two men live happily ever after together, an ending that even Woolf could not have pulled off in her time.

How Maurice came about is in itself a fascinating story, as it was written by someone who was intimately aware that he would likely never see the day that it could be published, and that is enough to make one wonder what could have inspired and motivated Forster to go through with writing it. As for inspiration, Forster found just that in 1913 when he visited the shared home of Edward Carpenter and George Merrill, an event which is explored by Wendy Moffat in A Great Unrecorded History: A New Life of E. M. Forster. Carpenter and Merrill were two gay lovers who lived off the grid with one another and frequently hosted other queer personalities of the day (Moffat 112-3). The visit was enlightening to Forster as he had never before “seen even an inkling of the domestic life for gay men… that he believed in and desired,” and the sight inspired him to hope and to write (114). However, one moment in particular really ignited Forster’s imagination; at some point in his visit, Merrill, the much younger of the couple, touched Forster’s lower back, inciting a sort of sexual awakening that, according to Forster, “was as much psychological as physical. It seemed to go straight through the small of my back into my ideas, without involving my thoughts” (113-4). When he returned to his own home, Forster set to writing Maurice with a fervor, imagining a “happy gay love story” about two men who “[defied] society in two significant ways: by being unregenerately and openly homosexual, and by loving as equal partners despite their class differences” (114).

‘Happy’ was the key word for Forster when writing Maurice, and as such, the novel “shows more clearly than any other Forster novel his apparent disregard for art in favour of human happiness” (Dowling 67). When writing Maurice, Forster deliberately made the character of Maurice entirely unlike himself, as opposed to how Oscar Wilde fashioned his characters after different aspects of his own person. Forster “wanted to make clear that the novel was wish fulfillment rather than autobiography” though we know that this account of the Edwardian gay experience is an authentic one, as Forster admits to being himself a homosexual in the novel’s terminal note (Moffat 114, Forster 249). Maurice is not the story of Morgan Forster’s life as a gay man in Edwardian England, nor is it a love-letter to a significant other (though some characters in the novel take clear inspiration from some of Forster’s colleagues and friends), it is a representation of Forster’s hope for a future where readers might find his novel in the window of a bookstore, read its pages, and sympathize with the bravery of queer men from the past; a future where gay people might love their partners equally and openly as Maurice and Alec do at the end of the novel, as Edward Carpenter and George Merrill did in their secluded paradise, and as Forster himself never quite got the opportunity to. He dedicates the book “to a happier year” where this fantasy of his might be the reality (Forster 5).

Maurice in manuscript became something of an “open secret,” as Alexander Chee puts it in “The Afterlives of E. M. Forster,” something he showed only to those he trusted not to use its contents against him (Chee, Moffat 115). Forster received mixed reviews from his friends and confidants, but rarely on the topic of its themes, only on its form and function (Moffat 115-9). Some readers, such as American novelist Christopher Isherwood, even felt that Forster should have been more explicit in the discussions of sexual activity between two men (Chee). Forster politely declined this advice.

Despite the mostly positive reception of his novel, likely out of a sense of self-preservation, Forster opted not to publish, even after the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885 (the law under which Oscar Wilde was sentenced) was repealed in 1956 (Frankel 7-8). Chee quotes literary critic Noel Annan as saying of Forster that he “had a novel that at first he could not, and then would not, publish in his lifetime” (Chee). This decision to not publish Maurice until after his death is in itself a form of self-censorship that Forster employed to protect himself and his career during his lifetime. He may have even been right to fear the ramifications of Maurice’s release, as the novel did, in fact, receive some contemptuous reviews in 1971. One reviewer, Cynthia Ozick, went so far as to call Forster’s posthumous coming-out an “audacious slap in the face,” perfectly exemplifying how some fans of Forster’s novels felt somehow betrayed by his kept secret, and were so distracted by this “betrayal” that they ended up saying very little to the actual merit of his novel (Chee).

Morgan Forster and Virginia Woolf, though they orbited the same circles, were not exceptionally close, but they did respect one another’s opinions as writers. One particularly enlightening exchange with Woolf left a rather significant impression on Forster and his motivation for writing. As Moffat says, “…she had helped him to make a discovery about the literary identity he would pursue for the rest of his life… His path would not be one of renunciation as one of literary bifurcation. He would continue to write… honestly and fiercely, but he would accept that much of his writing would forever– or at least until the ‘happier year’ he had imagined in Maurice– remain ‘unpublishable’” (Moffat 194-5). This was a reality that Forster was willing to accept, even if that meant stunting one of the most promising literary careers of the era, because it allowed him the freedom to write truthfully without worrying about the consequences of publication and public perception. Still, Forster was not above stewing in bitterness for his situation and its root cause, dreaded Society. He writes in one of his unpublished diaries, “When I am 85 how annoyed I am with Society for wasting my time by making homosexuality criminal. The subterfuges, the self-consciousness that might have been avoided” (Moffat 319).

Part 5: Conclusion

The Queer Novel, from its inception, has always been synonymous with censorship and scandal, and while progress has been made towards a significantly more inclusive and affirming literary scene, echoes of the prejudices of the past still inform queer narratives today. Stories like The Picture of Dorian Gray, Orlando, and Maurice, each existing in conversation with its predecessors, lay the groundwork for how we as readers and authors interact with and understand the experiences of queer individuals from bygone eras.

As readers of queer literature, it is important to recognize and appreciate classic Queer Novels in the context of the time periods in which they were written. The editorial choices made by Oscar Wilde and J. M. Stoddart in The Picture of Dorian Gray make sense considering the tangible danger Wilde faced with its publication that he was ultimately unable to defend himself against. Similarly, the narrative structure of Orlando and its intentionally satirical delivery are more justifiable when understood to be Virginia Woolf’s shield against the same fate as Wilde. The same goes for E. M. Forster, who decided instead to put off publishing Maurice altogether until his death in 1970.

In the decades since the publication of these three novels, the Queer Novel as a genre has evolved into something much more expansive and diverse than any of these three authors were likely to have ever imagined, but their influence is still felt. Whichever direction queer literature is heading from now onward, its origins remain in the pages of these revolutionary works of fiction, a testament to their continued survival in the literary canon regardless of the censorship that has been imposed upon them.