I would like to begin by pointing out the pun in the phrase “Reading Memoirs,” and then point you to Alyssa Rosenberg’s great take on the blogosphere’s recent “influential books” meme, in the new Atlantic culture section. Alyssa presents her titles not as a list but as a chronology, a life history, and I appreciate this: it demonstrates the organic way that texts influence us, and that the life—and not the texts—are the organizing factor here. We don’t live our lives in accordance with a literary canon; rather, we fixate on certain texts that seem to speak most directly to us at different points in our lives. Unlike some of my colleagues, I hesitated to compile a list, because I’m not sure if I’ve analyzed the past twenty years to a point where I could come up with a good understanding of which texts are the closest reflections of me at given, so to speak, historical moments. I would glance at my bookshelf, my eyes would light upon a text—like Ginsberg’s “Howl,” or Chauncey’s Gay New York, and I would subsequently realize what little the texts that form the core of my literary personality now have to do with the sort of prelapsarian state of my intensely literary, inward-looking, shy, antisocial, alternately self-proclaiming and self-doubting childhood.

One of the biggest themes this academic year in my self-psychoanalysis has been revisiting a world I very much feel as if I left behind when I entered high school. I’ve spoken on this blog before—particularly last fall—about seeking to reclaim that particular romanticized-childhood version of myself, and only now coming to understand my first decade or so as highly relevant to my second. Last fall, for a class on biography and autobiography, in which we read many memoirs, I wrote a reading memoir about my first decade, and the degree to which it was shaped (in ways both within and outside of my control) by books. This spring, I am taking a class on children’s literature, revisiting other books which I haven’t touched since my fall from childhood innocence. I’ve dealt a lot with Alice in Wonderland in both these classes and in my own cogitations—it was the book that, as I wrote in my memoir, provoked my first visit to a university library, but it wasn’t until I read it again in one of the many times I’ve done so this year that I realized that the fact that Alice is also the child of a professor gives me a kinship with her I’d never identified when I was her age. Likewise, my increasingly complex relationship to gender norms as I’ve grown up caused me to identify much more strongly with Little Women‘s Jo March when I read the novel for my children’s lit class. Back when I was Jo’s age, I thought she was cool, but not as cool as the talking rodents in Brian Jacques’ Redwall books, or even as cool the seductive beauties of the Celtic-inspired romance novels I read in middle school, who represented a fantastically unattainable state of perfection to a clumsy, nerdy, unattractive girl confronting the awkwardness of puberty and teenagerhood. And it is largely retrospectively that I have come to appreciate my childhood in the romantically innocent sense I ascribed to it in my reading memoir: when I was in Montessori school and knew nothing else, it would not have occurred to me to think that my parents had done something special by raising me in an academic bubble with books and no television, encouraging my overactive imagination, and supporting me in my first forays to imitate my favorite children’s (and adult) literature and begin to produce my own creative writing. And so it is only now with the proper context—and having run the gauntlet of high school—that I feel calmly reflective enough to come back, and to begin to understand the literary tradition in which I was raised and to which I feel that I in some sense belong.

The greatest discovery I made in this arena came when I was working on my reading memoir in the week between Christmas and New Year’s. Some of you may know that I was named Emily not because it was the most popular name for girls in 1990, but because one of the most influential texts in my mother’s girlhood and adolescence and young adulthood was a novel called Emily of New Moon, by L.M. Montgomery, who also wrote the Anne of Green Gables books. I was unimpressed by Emily of New Moon when my mother read it to me 13 years ago, and didn’t revisit it until it occurred to me that the novel which gave me my name (and the accompanying sense that I by my very existence belong to a literary tradition) deserved to be included in any discussion of the books important to my childhood. Talk about the word “memoir”: as I wrote in my memoir, when rereading the novel, I saw moi-même reflected back at me:

I read Emily of New Moon when I was seven, but I may have been too young to appreciate it properly—at the time, Emily didn’t enter the inner circle of fictional girls whose worlds I recreated in backyard and playground. Rereading the book years later, though, I am bowled over by the similarities between her world and my own. Like Emily, whose father takes a Rousseauian approach to her education, and smiles to himself when she personifies the trees in front of her house, my parents encouraged me to construct a world constrained only by the limits of my imagination. Like Emily, I didn’t let less imaginative adults or children stop me, but I did recruit sympathetic peers to co-star in my fantasies. Like Emily, I wrote pseudo-Romantic poetry about the seasons; like Emily, I claimed to (or at least wished to) remember my own birth. Emily reads Alice in Wonderland and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, lines from which (in addition to Macbeth and Hamlet) I would habitually recite to my parents from a precarious perch atop a red-and-yellow toy car. Montgomery wrote Emily of New Moon in 1923, after the First World War had tarnished the Romantic glow of childhood, but Emily’s innocent youth—like mine, perhaps—is a throwback to an earlier time. Twelve years after I put Warriorism [a set of religious rites I based on the Redwall books] to rest, I read Emily of New Moon again. When Emily’s father’s housekeeper says, “You talk queer—and you act queer—and at times you look queer. And you’re too old for your age—though that ain’t your fault. It comes of never mixing with other children,” I felt as if she were talking to me.

Shortly before Emily’s father dies of consumption (another rather Victorian thing to do), he says to her, “Your mother thought Emily the prettiest name in the world,—it was quaint and arch and delightful, she said.” I can see, now, why my mother might have thought the same; why she might have wanted a child with the ability and the freedom to, like Emily, listen for the Wind Woman, feel “the flash,” and squint until she could see the wallpaper suspended in the air. Monastery Effect and all, my mother might just have wound up with an Emily to live up to the name.

I didn’t discuss this in my memoir, but one of the reasons I like the sentence I quote in that first paragraph is because of its use of the word “queer.” In high school and beyond, I began to make a professional persona out of what I like to facetiously call “saying ‘sodomy’ at the dinner table”—the academic study of sexuality and identities and communities which construct themselves on sexuality terms. In my life as 20-year-old Emily Rutherford, writer, activist, and proto-historian, “queer” means something supposedly so very removed from the sense that Montgomery ascribed to it in that sentence. There is little to tie together the work I am learning how to do now (a field, I should mention, which I first entered through the lens of Kinsey, Krafft-Ebing, and others with early scientific approaches to sexual practices and behavior, the most literal sense I’ve ever dealt with of actually “saying ‘sodomy’ at the dinner table”) with a childhood where “queer” meant any kind of misfit. But I like to think that, recently, as I’ve tried to synthesize a child who wore funny clothes and believed in fairies and had a penchant for historical romanticism with an adolescent who became practiced at bringing sex and sexuality out of furtive teenage internet forays and into the legitimate public discourse, I wind up with a young adult to whom “queer” can mean many things at once. I might even go so far as to say that my present academic passion, the emergence of homosexuality as a cultural identity, exists so very conveniently on the cusp of that change in meaning, when “queer” takes on such a specific sexual connotation that to subsequent generations it actually loses that original meaning of “aslant,” unidentifiably out of the ordinary. While I know that we are all much more than the work that we do, there is something appealing in the notion that my interest in a cultural moment in which “queer” could simultaneously contain both meanings mirrors my desire to revisit a time in my own life when I, like the girl who gave me my name, was “queer” without respect to my sexual identity or politics.

I have, I supposed, deviated (heheh, get it?) rather far from the initial germ of this post, but I’d like to end by noting that Alyssa’s post also ends on the cusp of sexual possibility, with an allusion to her first kiss. It is not wildly outlandish overreading, then, to suggest that our childhood ties to literary cultures prepare us for how we will engage with the world as adults, no matter whether that preparation lies in the physical first overtures of romance or in the intellectualized realm of semantics of identity.

I think that the first thing I ever read in which I recognized gay themes was Wilde’s “Ballad of Reading Gaol.” We read it in my Grade 10 English class, along with The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Importance of Being Earnest (one of the best pieces of amateur dramatics I was ever involved in, if I do say so myself), but very little attention was paid in our class to the double-life themes in the novel and the play that I would later regard as common sense. As far as I can recall, I learned the story of the trial and two years’ hard labor, and used the 10th-grade version of biographical criticism to discover the tragedy of “Reading Gaol” for myself, particularly in its final stanza:

Yet each man kills the thing he loves
By each let this be heard.
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word.
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword!

We had to do a final, capstone project at the end of the year, and my friend and I put on a skit making fun of everything we’d read. The only texts I couldn’t find it in myself to write jokes for were Elie Wiesel’s Night, and “Reading Gaol.” I don’t think I could have expressed then in so many words what I found particularly awful about Wilde’s two years’ hard labor, and how the relentless meter of the poem represents to me how jail stripped the life out of Wilde. In 10th grade, I certainly didn’t know that there is a school of thought which understands Wilde as a watershed figure in gay literary history; I don’t think I knew that the trial of Oscar Wilde brought homosexuality—or something like it—into the public consciousness. If I did know it then, I certainly wouldn’t have thought it as important or as relevant as I do now. But three years ago (it seems like a lifetime ago, now), I figured (though I probably wouldn’t have said it in this way, either) that the three dozen cucumber sandwiches I made for our staging of Importance of Being Earnest were some sort of Edenic precursor to the fallen world of post-trial Reading Gaol.

I know, I know, there are dangers in telling the Wilde story this way. And I’d be the first person to argue that things are always more complex than the Wilde-is-a-martyr-for-the-gay-cause reading. I guess you could even say that, as I have learned more and more about gay culture and the history of gay culture and the history of the history of gay culture, I have proceeded from not understanding Wilde at all to memorizing a famous story to being able to complicate that famous story. That’s something, I think, to be proud of; in this world we have so little opportunity to learn queer literature and queer history that it’s an accomplishment to have any understanding of the genre even at the most basic level. Now, however, I’m reading Richard Ellman’s landmark biography of Wilde, and finding it tempting to fall back upon that romanticized narrative of decline and fall. Ellman makes it easy, I think (though maybe I just know the old story too well by now, and am superimposing it upon Ellman’s rendering); his Bosie captures the giant Oscar and enthralls him and pulls him down; the prose, moreover, is as ebullient in the chapters telling of Wilde’s travels in America as it is dull during the prison sentence. It’s really quite an incredible piece of scholarship, all the same; I can see why it has been so successful. (Incidentally, I wonder why the person who created the Wikipedia entry on Ellman copy-pasted only the first half of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry. Seems an odd choice.) But I can see how the 1997 Wilde film (with Stephen Fry, who must have gotten such a kick out of getting to play Wilde) was based so heavily on Ellman’s work—both portray unquestionably gay Wildes. This is what, I suppose, I’m finding unexpected, coming back to Wilde after months or even years of reading about gay stuff and drumming into my head that it’s dangerous to impose modern notions of sexual orientation upon historical figures. Ellman’s portrait of Wilde is all aestheticism, but also all rentboys and also all petulant Oscar-Bosie quarrels. The interesting thing that is actually quite surprising me is that if Ellman is to be believed, this “aesthetic” version of homosexuality wasn’t all Platonic pederasty; in fact, the London life which eventually resulted in Wilde’s downfall as he became blackmailable by Queensberry and others seems to me to adhere pretty damn closely to modern patterns of sexual and romantic behavior, casual sex interspersed with long-term relationships, Robbie Ross and rentboys and back and forth to Bosie (yes, the alliteration was intentional).

Ellman devotes a great section to the famous meeting between Wilde and Whitman in the course of Wilde’s grand tour of America. Wilde paid a visit to Camden (I said to my friend a little while ago, “Could you imagine Oscar Wilde paying a visit to Camden today?), where Whitman was living with his brother and sister-in-law; the two men drank elderberry wine and uttered many now-famous lines, Wilde questioning Whitman as to his views on all manner of poetics and aesthetics. Ellman concludes the passage about Whitman with these lines:

Wilde would later tell George Ives, a proselytizer for sexual deviation in the nineties, that Whitman had made no effort to conceal his homosexuality from him, as he would do with John Addington Symonds. ‘The kiss of Walt Whitman,’ Wilde said, ‘is still on my lips.’ He would expand upon this theme a little later when signing John Boyle O’Reilly’s autograph book in Boston. Under an inscription by Whitman, Wilde wrote of him, ‘The spirit who living blamelessly but dared to kiss the smitten mouth of his own century.’

See, I’ll confess I did something of a double-take on reading the word “homosexuality” there. I have spent a reasonable amout of time in my life advancing my belief that it’s erroneous to call Whitman a gay or even a homosexual poet, since I’m not persuaded that’s how Whitman would have understood his own sexuality, nor how his poetry suggests that he understood it. I’m of the opinion that it’s unwise to attribute labels to people posthumously that they wouldn’t have used or understood themselves, and moreover I think it’s important to recognize that Whitman really does extol the virtues of all humanity in his writing. People who read this post will know better than I do, certainly, but I’m disinclined to think that the countless times Whitman writes about the beauty and sexual allure of women are just a front to distract readers from the times he writes about the beauty and sexual allure of men. That seems a bit too contrived, and while apparently I lack the vocabulary to write about this issue properly, it just doesn’t seem right to talk about Whitman in terms of sexual object choice.

But what, I suppose, Ellman’s biography is making me question is whether maybe we can talk about Wilde in terms of sexual object choice. He certainly seems to want to. Is that a product of 1895 (the year of Wilde’s trial) versus 1882 (the year of Wilde’s trip to America)? Is it a product of the 19th century versus the 20th, and of 1987 (the year Ellman’s biography was published) in particular? 1987 seems like a not-unexpected year, zeitgeist-wise, to talk up the homosexuality of famous people. Or is it a reading which we can ever resolve as objectively accurate, whatever the historical context?

I have to confess that this idea that things might not be objective is really quite alarming to me. I’m used to being able to trust things that authors say when I’m not in possession of all the facts, and the idea (as obvious as it may seem) that even different people who have quite a lot of facts could arrive at different interpretations of historical events and characters is sort of earth-shattering. I’m still trying to figure out what that means—and, at the bottom line, whether I should trust what Ellman is saying. He cites an impressive array of sources, to be sure, but can I and should I take that as an indication that it is reasonable to think of Wilde as homosexual in modern sexual-object-choice terms? And then what about Whitman? If Ellman is right about Wilde, is he right about Whitman too? Or can anyone ever be right? What is objectivity, anyway?

Okay, okay, so I’m working myself up into a frenzy, and I know perfectly well that there are no answers to these questions. I also know that to a certain extent it is pointless to reconstruct the lives and motivations and desires of people whose social contexts could not have given us a clear picture of what those might have been (i.e. if we can’t prove homosexuality in Whitman’s case, we can’t rule it out, either). These are things you don’t get answers to, no matter how much more learned in Literary Gay Men Studies you become, no matter how many years of school you have. I suppose all I can really say is that I’ve known Wilde’s writing for years, but that—as with so many other cultural stalwarts I’ve rediscovered more recently—interpretations change so much with knowledge (for example, instead of writing 1,800 words ranting about Wilde and Whitman, I should really be writing 1,800 words analyzing Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass for a paper which has caused me to learn more about Victorian intellectuals than I’d thought possible).

I know, at some level, I should be able to accept the enormity of my new world after the provincialism of high school. I know that, just as I swallow and accept the bizarre-seeming premises on which Kant bases his metaphysics of morals, or just as I skim over the names of Victorian intellectuals with whom I know I’m supposed to be familiar (if only my secondary education hadn’t been a bit thin on Victorian intellectuals) and wait for context to make all clear, I should be able to accept the premise that knowledge and the universe which it touches upon are infinite, and wait for the context to slowly illuminate the ever-widening edges of the sphere of enlightenment. (That may have been a mixed metaphor.) But more often than not I find myself standing back, agape, dumbstruck, unable to believe how far the mental journey from high school has taken me, back from that first reading of “Reading Gaol” a lifetime ago.