A Problem in Modern Ethics: Studies in Sexual Inversion by John Addington Symonds

A Problem in Modern Ethics: Studies in Sexual Inversion Reviews

• 
  Sandi

  I read this as part of my current research into Oscar Wilde's influences, though I'm not entirely certain if he directly read this pamphlet since it was printed only in a limited way before Wilde went to prison. Wilde was a big fan of Symonds's other work, though, and, published in 1891, it speaks directly to the law and social conditions that led to Wilde's imprisonment.
  
  Of course, this long essay has great import outside Wilde studies (so I'm surprised not to see other reviews here!), but my review/notes are focused on its overlaps with Wilde's life/works.
  
  Symonds begins with an appeal to how widespread homosexuality is:
  
  "...It finds a home in Alpine valleys, Albanian ravines, Californian canyons, and gorges of Caucasian mountains. It once sat, clothed in Imperial purple, on the throne of the Roman Caesars, crowned with the tiara on the chair of St. Peter. It has flaunted, emblazoned with the heraldries of France and England, in coronation ceremonies at Rheims and Westminster. The royal palaces of Madrid and Aranjuez tell their tales of it. So do the ruined courtyards of Granada and the castle-keep of Avignon. It shone with clear radiance in the gymnasium of Hellas, and nerved the dying heroes of Greek freedom for their last forlorn hope upon the plains of Chæronea...."
  
  This rhetorical technique of listing (is there a name for this? A type of anaphora? Ad populum?) seems very reminiscent to me of Wilde’s trials:
  
  "'The Love that dare not speak its name' in this century is such a great affection of an elder for a younger man as there was between David and Jonathan, such as Plato made the very basis of his philosophy, and such as you find in the sonnets of Michelangelo and Shakespeare."
  
  Of course, in his trial, Wilde does not appeal to the geographic diversity of homosexuality, but its historical connection to Western canonical works held in high esteem—no doubt if he started talking about Albanian ravines, it would have been taken as irrelevant. Besides the listing, Symonds also makes great note of the fact that what Wilde would address as “The Love that dare not speak its name” (from a line of Bosie’s poetry) has no proper terminology. The terms that describe what we now call homosexuality were all pejorative or euphemistic, so Symonds gives it the term “inverted sexuality,” which was very forward-thinking at the time, but seems awkwardly allusive and slightly negative now—like calling someone “backwards.” So, I suppose it’s a good thing the label didn’t catch on.
  
  In the majority of the text, Symonds combats contemporary medical explanations of homosexuality as:
  *The result of abuse or exposure at a young age
  *The result of mental disorders
  *The result of masturbation
  *The result of physical disorders or hermaphroditism
  *The result of negative social conditions (poverty, stress)
  *More prone to diseases or mental disorders
  *The same thing as effeminacy
  *Contributing to social degradation
  *Contributing to a waning population
  
  Symonds wades through a good deal of misinformation--medical, social, and legal—to flat out say that these assumptions aren’t true. He entertains some authors and claims more than others, and it seems to me that he assumes that he’s speaking to a fairly friendly, scholarly audience who will take his accounts at face value and be able to recognize scientific conjecture and quackery for what it is.
  
  Most of the way he combats these claims is by providing short accounts written by homosexual men describing their own experiences. Throughout, Symonds attempts not to repeat the mistakes of those he criticizes and avoids painting with a broad brush—he never claims that all homosexual men are this and such a way. He admits that some homosexual men (and he deals nearly exclusively with men, not women) do have mental disorders, but that these are likely the result of other factors or the additional stress of having to be a social pariah. He also admits that some homosexual men have started (and here I think of Wilde) as married, or married women later. He doesn’t name these men as bisexual, but it seems obvious that he admits the possibility of more fluid or variations on sexuality. He also at a few points seems to make a distinction between transgender and homosexuality, but it’s a fuzzy line. All and all, Symonds (using the research of a few somewhat misguided medical categories from researchers like Krafft-Ebing) makes the point that there are nuances in sexual identity (paraphrasing here) but that homosexuality itself is not the result of nor does it do harm to either the individual or society.
  
  Bold stuff at the time. Tame beans now.
  
  Well, sort of. While reading, I couldn’t help thinking how much of this seemingly reasonable, matter-of-fact, academically-minded position is still radical to many today. I’ve spoken with those who hold the absolute truth of just about all of the myths listed above Symonds attempts to dispel.
  
  But moving on. I know why Symonds included the medical stuff, but gosh-darn-it, it was dry. The essay took a turn for the fun stuff when it got into Walt Whitman. Citing many instances of Whitman’s poetry where men display close (what we’d today term “homosocial”) relationships, he shows an ideal of contemporary male love to his audience that is lofty and admirable rather than cloaked in shame. Basically, Symonds has a ton of Greek examples, but his detractors could come back at him saying, “that was then, this is now.” So, he makes the claim that if we can find Whitman palatable, it’s not such a big leap to homosexual relationships, and in the same way that love between men and women can be elevated and ennobling, love between men can be as well.
  
  What’s weird is that he includes a letter from Whitman explicitly disavowing homosexual relationships and even expressing disgust in them. Now, Symonds includes this for, I suppose, “straight ethos” to basically say “See? He’s not gay, and even he can see merit in homosocial relationships” (again, paraphrasing), but to anyone who has looked at Whitman’s poetry/biography, this disavowal comes off as disingenuous, and seems likely to have been written out of self-protection rather than actual disapproval. Whitman is thought to have been homosexual or bisexual (though this is not conclusive). And Oscar Wilde claimed to have kissed the poet when he visited him in Camden, NJ.
  
  Symonds ends with a call to decriminalize homosexuality, just as France and Italy did under Napoleonic law (a reason Wilde fled to France after getting out of prison). All in all, if used as advocacy for homosexuality today, this Victorian pamphlet comes off (to me) as conservative, even apologetic at times, as Symonds recognizes heterosexual relationships as the norm and as “natural”—as opposed to “inverted”—and takes care to assure his audience of the lack of threat that homosexual men pose (less, he believes, than heterosexual men who are more likely to rape women and girls). He also enjoins the audience to see these men as pitiable—commonly excluded from society, living in fear, prone to getting blackmailed, and possibly being thrown in jail. On these last points, Symonds ends with a footnote on the punishment in the English courts that “gross indecency” carries with it the punishment of 2 years hard labor, the exact punishment that Wilde would suffer four years after having been blackmailed.
  
  This is a prescient text, not only for Wilde’s life, but for the way the acceptance of homosexuality would be argued for in years to come. Lady Gaga’s “Born this Way” is basically the medical section of Symond’s pamphlet (though he doesn’t bring God into it). Culture is still working on ways to portray “manly love” as noble and normal, and, personally, I think Whitman did it better than many do today. And laws are still catching up to Symond’s proposals, as Wilde was pardoned only as recently as 2017—126 years after Symond’s writing.
  
• 
  Steven H

  AN EARLY SEX RESEARCHER LOOKS AT SAME-SEX ORIENTATION
  
  The General Preface to this 1897 book states, "As a youth... A resolve slowly grew up within me: one main part of my life-work should be to make clear the problems of sex... As a youth, I hoped to settle problems for those who came after; now I am quietly content if I do little more than state them. For even that, I now think, is much... We want to get into possession of the actual facts, and from the investigation of the facts we want to ascertain what is normal and what is abnormal, from the point of view of physiology and of psychology... I regard sex as the central problem of life... [it] stands before the coming generations as the chief problem for solution. Sex lies at the root of life, and we can never learn to reverence life until we know how to understand sex."
  
  He added in the Preface to this book, "It cannot be positively affirmed of all these persons that they were born inverted, but in most the inverted tendency seems to be instinctive, and appears at a somewhat early age. In any case, however, it must be realized that in this volume we ... are concerned with individuals who live in freedom, some of them suffering intensely from their abnormal organization, but otherwise ordinary members of society. In a few cases, we are concerned with individuals whose moral or artistic ideals have widely influenced their fellows who know nothing of the peculiar organization which has largely moulded these ideals."
  
  He begins by noting, "Congenital sexual inversion---that is to say, sexual instinct turned by inborn constitutional abnormality towards persons of the same sex---is a comparatively rare phenomenon, so far as our knowledge at present extends. Sexual attraction between persons of the same sex, due merely to the accidental absence of the natural objects of sexual attraction, is, on the other hand, of universal occurrence among all human races and among most of the higher animals. It is only during recent years that sexual inversion has been recognized..." (Pg. 1)
  
  He says, "An examination of my cases reveals the interesting fact that ... 66 per cent, possess artistic aptitude in varying degree... the artistic aptitudes are of high order. A taste for music is widespread among them... On the other hand, a decided taste for physical science is scarcely once to be found amongst them, though three happen to be medical men." (Pg. 123)
  
  He asserts, "we must regard sexual inversion as largely a congenital phenomenon, or, to speak more accurately, as a phenomenon which is based on congenital conditions." (Pg. 129) He suggests, "We can seldom, therefore, safely congratulate ourselves on the success of any `cure' of inversion. The success is unlikely to be either permanent or complete, in the case of a decided invert; and in the most successful cases we have simply put into the invert's hands a power of reproduction which it is undesirable he should possess... The invert is not only the victim of his own abnormal obsession; he is the victim of social hostility." (Pg. 146)
  
  He concludes, "We are bound to protect the helpless members of society against the invert. If we go further, and seek to destroy the invert himself before he has sinned against society, we exceed the warrant of reason..." (Pg. 158) He adds, "One thing has been made perfectly clear: whether congenital or acquired, homosexuality is not in itself a mark of mental deficiency or of moral degradation." (Pg. 292)
  
  This work is one of the "classics" in the history of studies of human sexuality; though now superseded, for its time, it was somewhat 'progressive.'