Robert’s Homosexuality

“How difficult it is to believe sometimes that a man doesn’t like such and such a favorite dish!” (Volume III, Chapter II, “The Bearer of the Tidings”, by the end of the 22^nd paragraph)

In this all paragraph, Robert masculinity is at stake throughout the narrator’s metaphor of food. This is not the first time that in the novel, we might think at Robert as a misogynist, for example as Schorsch described in her post “Robert and his Contradictions”, Robert “describes women as a kind of tsunamic force behind men, driving them to conform to the image the wife has construed and forced upon them. Man is naked clay in the hands of manipulative, cunning, thoroughly unpitying women, who are above else never lazy, and never quiet. They force a man into the worst of possible circumstances against his will or inclinations, relentless in the pursuit of their own feminine ambitions.” However, she keeps going stating that Robert’s attitude is pretty contradictory: “his proclivity to have somewhat strong emotions almost immediately upon meeting two of the women in this story, would indicate an impulsive personality that does anything but hate women.” Thus far, we might be confused by reading about and understating his personality and the most common idea we come up with is that he is still a child when it comes to women, he’s not ready yet.

Then, we read this paragraph and everything changes. We start doubting Robert’s sexual desires thanks to the narrator’s point of view and Sir Michael Audley’s words. It might be weird, but what if this passage suggests that Robert is homosexual? In a very subtle way, the author, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, uses the metaphor of the food to explain such a complicated matter: a “respectable” man that doesn’t like women. It’s fascinating that the words used are so peculiarly placed so that the reader at first doesn’t even realize the connection between food and sexual differences. But because food is on everybody’s collective memory as keyword for sex (let’s think about the very first example: Adam and Eve in the Bible), we are not surprised when we actually realize what she is trying to imply through such an articulated but fluid word choice.

She concludes her metaphor by saying that “there are people who dislike salmon, and whitebait, and spring ducklings, and all manner of old-established delicacies, and there are other people who affect eccentric and despicable dishes generally stigmatized as nasty”. In this last sentence, it is so poetic the way she states that of course there can be men that don’t like some women because of their different beauties, and others that on the contrary like something which is not generally accepted as the norm. It’s peculiar that during those days there would be somebody writing about these delicate matters through a novel and we all must admit that the author Mary Elizabeth Braddon has an “avant-gardistic” point of view on that. She doesn’t condemn anybody, she is not saying that this behavior is to punish, instead she just says that of course it is “eccentric and despicable” but it is “generally stigmatized as nasty” which means that the society in which she lives knows about this “issue”.

To conclude, I have to admit that it shocks me to read about such things written more than 100 years ago because things didn’t change that much and actually in some countries it just got worse. Victorian Age has always been the time of sexual awakening both for women and for those who had “despicable” tastes and since then the “old-established delicacies” didn’t go through a process of modernization: they are still the same.