Seduction rhetoric, masculinity, and homoeroticism in Wilde, Gide, Stoker, and Forster

[摘要] This dissertation employs the psychoanalytic theories of Jacques Lacan and Jean Laplanche in order to analyze the role of the ;;rhetoric of seduction;; in masculine self-identifications and in transformations of the meaning of masculinity between 1890 and 1918. Seduction is understood as simultaneously a process of disrupting the subject's illusion of a stable masculine identity and a process through which that illusion is regained and sustained. Chapter 1 discusses the competing discourses of corruption and the Platonic model of male bonding in the Oscar Wilde trials and the unstable boundary between self-development and influence in The Picture of Dorian Gray. Chapter 2 focuses on Andre Gide's construction of an ;;authentic,;; masculine homosexual identity in his memoirIf It Die and in The Immoralist, arguing that such an identity necessarily contains the impulse of its own internal disintegration. Chapter 3 argues that the vampire in Bram Stoker's Dracula resembles the psychoanalyst in facilitating the subject's access to his unconscious but also serving the subject's retreat within the boundaries of a stable ego formation. Finally, Chapter 4 explores E. M. Forster's Maurice as an account of the development of a masculinity appropriate for a ;;liberal individualist,;; through an emphasis on the role of sexuality and personal relationships in Forster's political vision.

[发布机构] Rice University

[效力级别] literature