The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

234 chapter 19around 1900 and accelerating thereafter was sometimes said to have happenedbecause modern life for the bourgeois man allowed too little scopefor his physical courage. That is, the men just had to land violent hands onwomen and gay men because the women and their gay brothers had takenaway the other opportunities for manly play, such as gunplay. In any eventthat’s what real American men like Owen Wister and Zane Grey and JackLondon and Teddy Roosevelt seemed to be hinting in their gun-happy,feminine-excluding fictions.In Europe between the wars, Richard Vinen notes, “political stylesbecome more aggressively masculine.” “In spite of, or perhaps because of,the enfranchisement of women . . . uniforms and clenched fists dominateddemonstrations, and speeches were about ‘struggle,’‘battle,’ and ‘the enemy.’” 8Dating the gender crisis as late as the 1930s, George Chauncey links it to theDepression: “As many men lost their jobs, their status as breadwinners andtheir sense of mastery over their own futures, the central tenets undergirdingtheir gender status, were threatened.” 9 But in some advanced male imaginations,as I’ve said, homophobia or gynophobia constituting the darkmatter to courage appears a good deal earlier. Before 1914 one can seealready, for example, in Roosevelt the elder and in the strange death of LiberalEngland the masculinization of political rhetoric and the appeal to militarymetaphors of struggle—that is, to Kampf.Wilde’s conviction and jailing for gross indecency in 1895, I say, was aturning point among educated English speakers in the matter of homosexuality,a model application of the Labouchère amendment. The very word“homosexuality” was just becoming known. It appears to date from 1869;though the first quotation in the Oxford English Dictionary is 1897. Onlywith Wilde, argues Alan Sinfield, were effeminacy, arty tastes, love of othermen, and those acts of gross indecency bundled together in the bourgeoismind and viewed by straights as horribly dishonorable. For decades afterwardin England the euphemism for sodomy was “unspeakables of theOscar Wilde sort.” That was the phrase for example, in E. M. Forster’sposthumously published coming-out novel, Maurice, written in 1914. 10 “Allthese years [since the trials of 1895],” Wilde’s eldest son Cyril, once wrote tohis brother Vyvyan, “my great incentive has been to wipe that stain away; toretrieve, if may be, by some action of mine, a name no longer honored inthe land....The more I thought of this, the more convinced I became that,first and foremost, I must be a man. There was to be no cry of decadent