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We're thinking of going to see Dorian Gray (is it any good, those of you who've seen it?), and it's got me pondering the phenomenon of excessively dull opposite-sex love interests in screamingly gay, but rather closety, novels. Sybil Vane is really terribly dull, and while she starts out as completely uninteresting to the reader, by the time Dorian has done with her, she's completely uninteresting to everybody in the novel as well. Another example is, erm, let me go to the bookcase since I can't remember her name, right, Esther in Ben Hur. Not only is she good, passive and unspeakably boring, but the hero keeps comparing her to his little sister, which is downright creepy. She's more obviously contrasted to the Sexy Bad Woman in the book, whom Ben Hur flirts with but ultimately rejects. His most intense relationships in the novel are with men, including a solid page of being ogled at one point by the guy ("he was a conoisseur of men physically") who ends up as his adoptive father, and the big relationship of course is with the Roman Messala. Apparently, in the film the actor playing Messala was intentionally playing him as a rejected lover, but Charlton Heston was homophobic and so wasn't told, and didn't notice, that he was playing the other half of a gay love scene.
Back to the "they're straight! they're straight! really, they're straight!" love interests. The Lord of the Rings is not a novel that to my view encompasses eroticism, but it does contain extremely strong bonding between men. In some cases, such as Frodo and Sam, I'd call it love, but even apart from that, it's noticeable how all the men pair off. It's a novel about a male world, of course, but still, the way Rose is introduced right at the end, after an entire novel's worth of Sam's fervent devotion to Frodo, is rather odd. As for the courtship of Arwen and Aragorn, it's relegated to an appendix, she just turns up and marries him in the novel almost out of nowhere.
Though nothing quite beats Defoe's lesser-known novel Captain Singleton, in which two men spend the entire novel thoroughly coupled up together being Gay Quaker Pirates (once misheard by a friend as Gay Quaker Parrots), sailing the high seas and then sharing a room when they retire. The sister of GQP A is introduced vaguely near the end, I think she's just mentioned in passing as their landlady, and then suddenly GQP B marries her without warning in the last paragraph.
I think these are a slightly different thing, though. It wasn't so much the idea of shoving an emergency woman into the plot to straighten things up and not being interested enough to flesh her out, it's when the character does get a reasonable amount of stage time and still comes up about as charismatic as a dishtowel. You could, at a stretch, even argue this about Ashley in Gone With The Wind, a novel I firmly believe to be a fine example of repressed lesbianism. Scarlett spends the whole novel in love with him, or at least with her idea of him, and he pops in and out, getting far less time and attention than his wife, Scarlett's sister-in-law, whom she claims to hate and with whom she is clearly rather obsessed. He's not bad as a character, he's certainly not as dull as Esther, but he's still rather, well, wet. Mind you, Melanie is a bit strange as well, she's portrayed as nauseatingly good although she's actually fairly human once you stop taking Scarlett's word for it.
Any thoughts on all of this, and does anyone feel like analysing the characters/novels/phenomenon further?
Back to the "they're straight! they're straight! really, they're straight!" love interests. The Lord of the Rings is not a novel that to my view encompasses eroticism, but it does contain extremely strong bonding between men. In some cases, such as Frodo and Sam, I'd call it love, but even apart from that, it's noticeable how all the men pair off. It's a novel about a male world, of course, but still, the way Rose is introduced right at the end, after an entire novel's worth of Sam's fervent devotion to Frodo, is rather odd. As for the courtship of Arwen and Aragorn, it's relegated to an appendix, she just turns up and marries him in the novel almost out of nowhere.
Though nothing quite beats Defoe's lesser-known novel Captain Singleton, in which two men spend the entire novel thoroughly coupled up together being Gay Quaker Pirates (once misheard by a friend as Gay Quaker Parrots), sailing the high seas and then sharing a room when they retire. The sister of GQP A is introduced vaguely near the end, I think she's just mentioned in passing as their landlady, and then suddenly GQP B marries her without warning in the last paragraph.
I think these are a slightly different thing, though. It wasn't so much the idea of shoving an emergency woman into the plot to straighten things up and not being interested enough to flesh her out, it's when the character does get a reasonable amount of stage time and still comes up about as charismatic as a dishtowel. You could, at a stretch, even argue this about Ashley in Gone With The Wind, a novel I firmly believe to be a fine example of repressed lesbianism. Scarlett spends the whole novel in love with him, or at least with her idea of him, and he pops in and out, getting far less time and attention than his wife, Scarlett's sister-in-law, whom she claims to hate and with whom she is clearly rather obsessed. He's not bad as a character, he's certainly not as dull as Esther, but he's still rather, well, wet. Mind you, Melanie is a bit strange as well, she's portrayed as nauseatingly good although she's actually fairly human once you stop taking Scarlett's word for it.
Any thoughts on all of this, and does anyone feel like analysing the characters/novels/phenomenon further?
