Erotic Martyrdom: Kingsley's Sexuality beyond Sex
2002; Indiana University Press; Volume: 44; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.2979/vic.2002.44.3.465
ISSN1527-2052
Autores Tópico(s)Literature: history, themes, analysis
ResumoIn an 1843 letter, the Anglican clergyman Charles Kingsley declared, "Every man should be honoured as God's image, in the sense in which Novalis says—that we touch Heaven when we lay our hand on a human body!" (Letters 1: 106). This belief in the divinity of the human form was the rationale for the "Muscular Christian" (and often implicitly homoerotic) celebration of athletic physique famously promulgated by Kingsley's novels. 1 However, Kingsley's reverence for the human body also led him to treat sex with his wife, Frances (Fanny), as a sacramental conduit to God. Married in 1844, the couple called their bed an "altar," referred to intercourse as "communion," and accompanied it with prayers and thanksgiving (Chitty 80, 91; Maynard 95-96). Kingsley also claimed that in heaven he and Fanny would be "united [. . .] by some marriage bond, infinitely more perfect than any we can dream of on earth" (Yeast 100). Kingsley believed that the afterlife was the site of a sexuality beyond ordinary sex. Although prefigured by marital lovemaking, this sexuality was only fully realized in heaven, where spouses would enjoy a heightened mode of eroticism freed from the suspect physicality of earthly intercourse. Indeed, unless aligned with the superior eroticism of the afterlife, sex seemed unacceptably carnal to Kingsley. He wrote Fanny that "[t]he idea that communion with you is a mere temporary self-indulgence is so horrible to me that if you really believe it [that sex does not continue in heaven] I could never bring myself to touch your body" (qtd. in Chitty 81). 2
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