| This dissertation project investigates Shelley's closet as a room with a view, a philosophical view of homoromantic reform. The conceptual framework of this canonical English Romantic poet is particularly appropriate for analyzing the history of homosexuality, for despite the apparent anachronism of discussing "homosexuality" prior to its lexical emergence later in the nineteenth-century (circa 1864), Shelley was deeply committed to the amelioration of homophobia and an altogether different way of viewing same-sex bonds. Because it was highly dangerous and extremely unusual in nineteenth-century England for any writer to broach gay-related matters with any degree of explicitness, Percy Shelley's attempts, through the ministrations of poetry and political writings, to address the matter were striking, especially considering the personal and professional risks he took by doing so publicly.;Shelly manages his homoromantic project in at least four ways. Chapter 1 is an examination of the historicist practices P. B. Shelley employs to address and remedy homophobia in England in 1810. Two of Shelley's polemical works on sex and violence---his Discourse on the Manners of the Ancient Greeks Relative to the Subject of Love and earlier Essay on the Punishment of Death---offer a revealing set of juxtapositions meant to isolate and historicize the sexual "manners" of classical and modern societies alike. Second, in the domain of philosophy, Shelley's enthusiasm for Plato has long masked a more subversive, social strategy with which he appealed to the Hellenic ideal of male bonds as more cognitive than carnal, more spiritual than sexual. While historians of homosexuality generally credit Oscar Wilde with outing Plato as a signifier for male love later in the century, Shelley and special friend Thomas Jefferson Hogg combined forces as early as 1810 to make male love culturally intelligible in ways that anticipate Wilde's defense of Platonic love from the prisoner's dock in the Old Bailey some 80 years later.;In addition to Shelley's recuperations of these historical and philosophical forms, Shelley fictionalizes his own romantic friendships with the likes of Hogg, Byron, and Williams in poems like Julian and Maddalo and The Boat on the Serchio, in which the male protagonists appear closeted (or, as Julian "sees" it, "unseen and uninterrupted"). My investigations into these and other hiding spaces in Shelley's canon draw upon earliest prose-works by Godwin, Wollstonecraft, and Mary Shelley to better understand the earlier and extensive provenance of the term "closet." The final chapter of this dissertation project pertains to Percy Shelley as a dramatist, and more specifically, as a closet dramatist. Chapter 4 is appropriately focused on Act IV of Shelley's Prometheus Unbound ("A Lyrical Drama in Four Acts") because the scenery is both mental and erotic while the play's deeper objectives pursue the politics of queer futurity. By this, I mean, Act IV is a gender-bending and time-bending verse drama that imagines a future state founded upon free-love and social justice. Looked at in this light, Shelley's dramatic closet doesn't close the door to further advance. |
