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The Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins was a practitioner of
strict asceticism in its broadest definition--the refusal of
physical pleasure or comfort in the interests of moral or
spiritual gain. As a result, his commentators have felt
obliged to take a stand approving or disapproving of this
rigorous self-discipline: Many idealize his allegiance to
the Society of Jesus as motivated by his determination to
conquer his attraction to other men, and thus as the source
of the spiritual strength from which his eucharistic and
Christological verse derived. Others decry his monasticism
as the regrettably oppressive regimen from which he was able
to escape only occasionally through his sensuous, sometimes
overtly homoerotic verse.
Julia F. Saville uses Lacanian theories of sublimation
and courtly love to reconfigure this long-standing rift in
the field of Hopkins criticism. Her book displaces
hagiographic interpretations of the poet's life, arguing
that Hopkins's poetics of homoerotic asceticism shaped his
work in such a way that his career should be viewed not as a
steady linear progression but as an ongoing process of
negotiating his desire. It also constitutes a map tracing
the alternating practices of self-discipline and
self-indulgence, self-expression and self-silencing
performed by Hopkins's verse.
Saville presents a new reading of asceticism that does
not advocate or condemn its practice. What is needed, she
argues, is a reading that explains first the dialectical
capacity of asceticism both to constrain and to liberate, to
cause discomfort and to give satisfaction, and second, the
ethical value of recognizing and encouraging this
dialectical operation.
A Queer Chivalry highlights the strange blending
of sensual delight and strict self-denial in Hopkins's
courtly verse, initiating a new trend in criticism that
celebrates the poet's queer status as the Victorian
troubadour-priest.
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