Queering the Soul: Sexuality and Self-Construction in Victorian Poetry

My proposed project will examine the 'queer soul' in Victorian poetry, investigating the ways in which a particular group of mid-nineteenth-century writers imagine in their works a self outside of themselves through the (dis)embodied soul. In doing so, they exhibit an attempt to comprehend and articulate nonheterosexual male identities prior to the emergence of a widespread cultural understanding of sexuality at the end of the nineteenth century.

I will engage with the following central questions in my research:
How is the motif of the (dis)embodied soul used as a means of conceptualising a queer self in the nineteenth century?
How does 'queering the soul' compare to other methods of self-construction in the literature of the period?
And finally, how does the use of the queer soul reflect an emerging cultural shift toward understanding sexuality as an integral part of one's being (where previously the notion of an explicit sexual identity did not exist)?

Though primarily concentrating on poetry, this research will also consider works of visual art in an interdisciplinary approach that traverses the boundaries between literature, art history, and the history of sexuality, which will enable an original and thorough investigation of queer self-exploration in the creative output of the period. The selection of writers and artists that I will principally consider is thus reflective of these overlapping disciplines: Simeon Solomon, John Addington Symonds, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Théophile Marzials, and Algernon Charles Swinburne.

The project will explore the ways in which these poets and artists imagine a process of self-division - such as that of a male speaker falling in love with his own (dis)embodied male soul or becoming separated from his female soul - to dissect what (non-normative) sexual identity means to themselves and to the world at large.