Bergamot and Cedar

Abstract

In the preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde declares that ‘No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are true can be proved’. His aestheticist credo, namely that art owes no fealty to truth, takes on the form of a decadent historicism in ‘The Portrait of Mr. W. H.’ (1889): Seeking to realise ‘an artistic desire for perfect representation’ is not new: queer decadents such as Wilde, Simeon Solomon, Vernon Lee, or Michael Field employed a ‘decadent historicism’ to excavate queer ancestors and create a ‘defiant homoerotic aesthetic’.[1] Their quest to unearth genderqueer people in history and see themselves mirrored and legitimised often entailed ‘faking and appropriating history in the face of contravening empirical facts’^[2] to represent what cannot be proved but is nonetheless ‘true’. Neo-Victorian fiction, and steampunk, with its playfully anachronistic retro-speculation may likewise reclaim and reimagine queer stories in the Victorian past, drawing inspiration from decadent queer aesthetics. In warping the nineteenth century, ‘the era in which the modern terminologies we use to structure the ways we think and talk about sexuality were invented’^[3] and the ‘homosexual became a personage, a past, a case history’, indeed emerged ‘as a species’^[4], steampunk may not only re-make the past meta-historically in its own (queer) image, but become, as one steampunk puts it, ‘more true because it’s not’.^[5]

This short story endeavours, in a creative-critical exercise, to ponder how steampunk may reimagine alternative genealogies in which Victorian LGBTQA+ identities are represented fully and positively in line with contemporary ideals of pride, rejecting the repressive ‘inversion’ pathology of fin de siècle sexology and queer fatalism alike. Whereas queer decadents’ historicism often codified a queer experience characterized by loneliness, pain, and tragedy, steampunk may rewrite a queer history of the closet and reframe queer experiences through its retro-speculative fantasy for today’s audiences. This story especially engages with Dustin Friedman’s thesis that aestheticism opened spaces between art and the queer aesthete that offered ‘partial freedom from preordained metaphysical, social, and biological orders’ in and through which queer decadents ‘could resist a hostile social world by developing an autonomous sense of self’, allowing them to ‘tarry at the very limits of what is thinkable in one’s culture’,^[6] and attempts to re-think queer decadent relationships with Orientalism and Japonisme to de-centre Euro-centric gendered hegemonies.

[1] Joseph Bristow, ‘Decadent Historicism’, Volupté: Interdisciplinary Journal of Decadence Studies, 3.1 (2020), 1–27, p. 8

^[2] Ibid., p. 10.

^[3] Holly Furneaux, ‘Victorian Sexualities’, Literature Compass 8/10 (2011): 767–775 p. 769.

^[4] Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality. Volume 1: An Introduction (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), p. 43.

^[5] James Carrott, ‘Vintage Tomorrows: James H. Carrott at TEDxSonomaCounty’, 2013. Online at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MT9WWyAFHpE, (Consulted 24.08.2023), 8:05-8:10.

^[6] Dustin Friedmann, Before Queer Theory. Victorian Aestheticism and the Self (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019), p. 5, 2, 4.