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here, that line is made excessive, and we are to read that excess as giving way to
a content. Hogarth’s sketch seems to ask us to see the difference between a
“fitting” serpentine line and the illustrated example, and to register that
difference as homosexuality.
PRIDE AND NOTHINGNESS
PERFORMING “AKIMBO” 27
Until the end of the seventeenth century, sodomy was taken to be a symptom of
the excessive pride of the aristocrats. As the author of the Preface to the
published proceedings of the trial of Mervyn Touchet, Second Earl of
Castlehaven, claimed in 1699, “Pride, Luxury, and Irreligion, were the Infernal
Parents of Sodomy” (A5). Likewise, in his Institutes, Sir Edward Coke had
noted, “The sodomites came to the abomination by four means, viz. by pride,
excesse of diet, idlenesse, and contempt of the poor” (qtd in Smith 166). Pride
underlay all the other excessive behaviors of the aristocrats and the upwardly
mobile gentry who imitated them.
At least since John Cassian’s De institutis coenobiorum (c. 420), the capital
sin of pride had been described as the originary sin, the cause of all other sins:
“How great is the evil of pride, that it rightly has no angel, nor other virtues
opposed to it, but God himself as its adversary” (qtd in Bloomfield 69). Pride
was the misuse or perversion of free will, the opposition of the self to God
(Bloomfield 75; Dollimore 136–137). In turning away from God, the proud man
perversely abandoned his proper self; pride was therefore the origin and epitome
of the Augustine concept of sin as privation. The proud man’s excessive concern
with himself actually recreated him as lacking being:
And I asked what wickedness was, and I found that it was no substance, but
a perversity of will, which turns aside from Thee, O God, the supreme
substance, to desire the lowest, flinging away its inner treasure and
boasting itself an outcast.
(qtd in Dollimore 133).
According to Augustine, to turn from God to oneself “is to come nearer to
nothingness” (qtd in Dollimore 136). The sin of pride was the refusal of divine
plan (which interpellated individuals into their proper selves) and the occupation
of a stance outside God’s order, a place which was nowhere. It is this rhetoric of
pride as the tendency toward a place that was nowhere, this description of sin as
appearance rather than substance, that found its most perfect expression in the
concept of sodomy as the sin that could not be named. 8
As a symptom of pride, sodomy, too, was a misuse or excess of the will: for the
aristocrat, as Coke had noted, sodomy was a perverse willfulness toward
pleasure. But by the eighteenth century, these traditional representations of the
proud aristocrat as homosexual were reversed, and the newly visible sodomite
was described in the theological terms of pride, as a self against (his)self. With