THAIS E. MORGANIseult." Victorian critics objected to Arnold's "The Scholar-Gipsy" (1853)
because its main figure rejects the manliness of work, preferring an
aesthetically contemplative life. A tacit homoeroticism emerges when "The
Scholar-Gipsy" and the elegy to Arthur Hugh Clough, "Thyrsis" (1866) are
considered alongside In Memoriam. Arnold represents Victorian masculi-
nity otherwise than according to the hegemonic model: Is his poetry
compromised like Tennyson's or defiant like Swinburne's?
In the first series of Poems and Ballads, Swinburne defiantly explores the
possibility of same-sex orientation. "Hermaphroditus" parodies the tradi-
tional portrait of a beautiful lady, deconstructing its dominant premise of
sexual difference: "Choose of two loves and cleave to the best; / Two loves
at either blossom of thy breast / Strive" (ACS I, 79). The statue of
Hermaphroditus presents a troubling paradox: the male viewer sees one
body but may feel two competing modes of desire, heteroerotic for its
female contours and homoerotic for its male aspects. Swinburne's poem
invites an indeterminate or undecidable response to an overdetermined or
ambiguous situation. "Sex to sweet sex with lips and limbs is wed": the
hermaphrodite evokes pleasure between an older and a younger man - "all
thy boy's breath softened into sighs" (I, 81). The speaker remarks ironically
on the limited perspective inscribed in standard love poetry which presup-
poses strictly male-female intimacies: "Love being blind [heterosexual],
how should he know of this [male-male desire]?" The intertextual presence
of Shakespeare's sonnets in both In Memoriam and "Hermaphroditus"
points to an emergence of homoeroticism in Victorian poetry by mid-
century. But in the former case proscribed relations between men are
ultimately reoriented to support patriarchal hegemony, while in the latter
case the transgressiveness of male-male desire remains, as Richard Della-
mora suggests, "caught within the terms of its negation of an antithetically
posed moral point of view." 29
The gender identification of the male Victorian poet remained a critical
issue for decades after Tennyson's "Mariana" appeared. The Fleshly School
Controversy, initiated by the poet-critic Robert Buchanan in 1871, and
involving primarily Swinburne and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, was one of the
most contentious and influential of these debates. 30 "Fleshliness," ac-
cording to Buchanan, consists in an "unwholesome" focus on the female
body and passions; an insistence "that the body is greater than the soul" as
a worthwhile theme for poetry; and a claim "that the poet, properly to
develop his poetic faculty, must be an intellectual hermaphrodite." 31
Significantly, Buchanan blames Tennyson for providing a model of poetic
aberrations in "Vivien" (1859), in which he "has concentrated all the
epicene force" which the Fleshly School "wearisomely expanded," and
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