| MLA
2000 SCE Program |
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| Economies of Writing I |
Private Circulation: Secrecy, Scarcity and the Endurance of Victorian Homoerotica
Elaine Freedgood
University of Pennsylvania
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What
did it mean, from the 1880s through the 1930s, in Britain and America, for
a text to circulate "privately," especially in editions that ran into the
hundreds and in some cases, thousands? An
infamous work of Victorian homoerotica, John Addington Symonds's A Problem
in Greek Ethics faced the numerous exigencies of closeted printing and
distribution: publishing houses had to be secretly and expensively engaged;
compositors had to be found who would be willing to set up the controversial
type; lists of subscribers had to be carefully drawn up, kept secret and
then destroyed; advertising had to proceed on an anxious word-of-mouth basis.
It would seem to be miraculous that numerous copies of this text have survived
both the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. Part of the reason
for the survival of Symonds's work is that the practices required by closeting
publishing actually combined very happily with the peculiar demands of the
rare book market as it developed in the late nineteenth and flourished in
the early twentieth centuries. Limited editions, numbered copies, the promise
that the type of a particular printing has been "distributed": these marks
of secrecy and the need to evade censure and arrest also worked to make
books like A Problem in Greek Ethics seem enticingly rare (even when
they weren't).
Given the nature of commodity culture, "private circulation" is necessarily
an oxymoron; paradoxically the very impossibility of the term makes the
textual closet open out into an expansive cultural space. The practice of
secrecy is abstracted from those homosexuals (or urnings or inverts or the
intermediately sexed) for whom it is a strategy of survival when a queer
text becomes a commodity. The impossibility of maintaining "private circulation,"
and the inescapability of the need to believe in its possibilities, will
be explored in the conclusion of this talk. {footer
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