Edited by Moe Meyer - Get a Free Blog

24 THE POLITICS AND POETICS OF CAMP
Bulwer’s hypothesis that habitual behaviors indicated innate character was part
of the accumulating discourse that, by 1700, would produce the knowledge that a
man who had sex habitually with other men was innately different from a man
who had sex habitually with women. This corresponded with the politically
motivated disclosures of the molly subculture in the first two decades of the
eighteenth century. The mollies were an underground society of men who met in
taverns to have sex with other men and to parody in improvised performances
the increasingly normative concept of companionate heterosexual marriage
prevalent among the Puritan bourgeoisie. 4 The tendency to treat effeminacy as a
test case for the normative definition of the self suggests that the writers of these
documents understood the effeminate man as challenging the legitimacy of
bourgeois morality. That the bourgeoisie were meeting resistance to their
rhetoric of the self as open (self-evident) is suggested by the increasing precision
with which their readings of the body were produced.
In 1753 the English painter William Hogarth tackled the problem of the
relation of the self to self-presentation, proposing with. increased precision that
an individual’s character could be reduced to a simple line, all contradictions or
excesses smoothed away. Just as a sparkler leaves a trace of its movements in the
air, wrote Hogarth in The Analysis of Beauty, so one could imagine “a line
formed in the air by any supposed point at the end of a limb or part that is
moved” (140). The body that Hogarth envisioned had a coherent and immediate
presence such that each of its surfaces, rather than deferring to a complex history
of social negotiations, referred to an original subjectivity. Hogarth’s claim that
“the motions of one part of the body may serve to explain those of the whole”
(141) was more insidious than Bulwer’s because its reductiveness supported an
increased invasion and objectification of the body.
Hogarth’s ascription of the complex semiotics of difference to a mere
difference of types of lines enabled moral evaluations based on a reading of the
surfaces of the body as degrees of divergence from the “natural.” The less the
extent of deviance, or the less excessive the line, the more useful the body and,
for Hogarth, the more beautiful. It is highly indicative of the mystification of
bourgeois ideology that a method of reading the body that Bulwer had explicitly
declared necessary to the promotion of business was now, 109 years later, being
used to produce an identification of the moral and the beautiful.
But Hogarth’s attempt to see psychological difference in the difference of
lines foregrounds a paradox within bourgeois ideology: how to make
consciousness visible while at the same time denying the performability of the
body. On the one hand, the bourgeoisie had set themselves against upper-class
spectacularity; on the other, they recognized that interiority had to be made
visible if moral judgments made on the basis of character were to be legitimated.
This paradox may have been aggravated by the growing awareness that the new
molly identity developing after 1700 among lower- and lower-middle-class men
was not always immediately recognizable in the surfaces of their bodies. Half a
century after Hogarth’s Analysis, the author of The Phoenix of Sodom noted: