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Studies in the 19Th Century (450-1-20)

Topic

'Just Friends?' Understanding Same-Sex Sexuality B

Instructors

Tyler Lee Blakeney

Meeting Info

Locy Hall 305: Wed 3:00PM - 5:50PM

Overview of class

"Just Friends?" Understanding Same-Sex Sexuality Before the Invention of Homosexuality

Since Victor Hugo published his 1834 novella Claude Gueux, there has been much debate about the exact nature of the relationship between the two main characters, whether it was sexual and romantic or the two were just friends. Contemporary critics have tended either to project modern homosexual identity back onto the text or categorically deny that Hugo could have spoken about same-sex sexuality in the supposedly repressive atmosphere of the 19th century. In this course, we will take Claude Gueux as a case study and ask how we might reconstruct how a reader in 1834 might have understood what Hugo meant when he said that two prisoners were "friends," and reconfigure the sexual categories that were operative before the invention of homosexuality. We will read a range of literary and other published texts from the July Monarchy that discuss criminal and prisoner intimacies. We will also analyze how 19th-century criminal and prisoner intimacy has been understood over time through its representations in the 20th and 21st centuries. Students will learn both the particularities of this particular case and be trained in a methodology for reconstructing the discursive field of a historical utterance that they may apply to their own areas of research.