ESC: English Studies in Canada

R E V O L T A N D T H E I D E A L I N B L O O M S B U R Y * LINDA HUTCHEON McMaster University O n e good justification for a study of revolt and the ideal in the sex and art of Bloomsbury— at a time when feminism and homosexuality are current issues— can be found in the public response to members of the Bloomsbury group1 during their own lifetimes. Although the aim of their contemporaries’ criticism ran the gamut from class to personality, from financial status to ideology, the major emphasis seems to have rested upon their art and their sexual mores. At first the relationship between these two points of attack seems rather startling, given the relative lack of explicit sex in the published works of E. M. Forster, Lytton Strachey, and Virginia Woolf— the three major writers of the group. Their books were never banned, as were those of D. H. Lawrence or Radclyffe Hall, yet critics such as Roy Campbell attacked them as both artists and as “sexless folk whose sexes intersect.” In The Georgiad, Campbell set out, among other things, to parody Vir­ ginia Woolf’s Orlando with his own Androgyno, a “joint Hermaphrodite-ofletters ,” complete with long blue stockings and a sexual metamorphosis. His multi-directional satire seems to be directed against Vita Sackville-West and also Woolf’s androgynous literary creation, since he specifically calls his crea­ ture a “new Orlando” speaking with a “Bloomsbury accent.” However, the homosexuality of Bloomsbury in general also comes under attack: Both sexes rampantly dispute the field And at alternate moments gain or yield. This was no neuter of a doubtful gender, But both in him attained their fullest splendour, Unlike our modem homos who are neither He could be homosexual with either. Taking his pleasure in and out of season, He gave for his perversity no reason.2 L. H. Myers took a similar stand against the homosexual artist in the “Pleasance of Art” section of Prince Jali. His Daniyal, who would seem to be E n g l ish Stu d ies in C anada, v, i , Spring 1979 a satirical portrait of Lytton Strachey, spends his day squeezing young boys and writing savagely ironic portraits of “famous characters in religious his­ tory” (a la Eminent Victorians)— portraits which only serve to reveal the mocker’s own inadequacies. To Myers’s hero, Jali, such efforts are “spiteful, tasteless and pretentious.” The homosexuality together with the art were seen by Myers as deliberate attempts to outrage moral and literary conven­ tions: “the pleasure which the Camp took in regarding itself as scandalous was actually the chief source of its inspiration, its principal well-spring of energy.” 3 Was Bloomsbury compulsively exhibitionistic or consciously revolutionary? Myers raises questions that had already come to the fore during the trial of Oscar Wilde, with “the love that dare not speak its name.” What are the motives of those who are unconventional in their art or in their sexual pro­ clivities? Was Wilde a social rebel? How closely linked are art and sex? To E. M. Forster they were intricately connected because of the inhibiting Eng­ lish social code. Citing the “ridiculous cases” of the suppression of The Well of Loneliness, The Rainbow, Ulysses, and Boy, he wrote: “ I want greater freedom for writers, both as creators and as critics. In England, more than elsewhere, their creative work is hampered because they can’t write freely about sex, and I want it recognized that sex is a subject for serious treatment and also for comic treatment.”4 Yet the enemies of Bloomsbury remained deaf and blind, but not at all dumb. In his 1954 introduction to The Apes of God, Wyndham Lewis de­ plored the “wave of male perversion among the young” in the 1920s. He saw that it was revolutionary in intensity but, characteristically, failed to under­ stand that it was against people like himself that the revolt was directed. Strachey and Forster— both homosexuals— would certainly have resented their sexual tendency being labeled a “nasty pathological oddity.” They prob­ ably would have resented as well Lewis’s condescending...