{"id":196,"date":"2016-02-21T19:16:45","date_gmt":"2016-02-21T19:16:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/secretlives\/?p=196"},"modified":"2016-02-21T19:16:45","modified_gmt":"2016-02-21T19:16:45","slug":"roberts-homosexuality","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/secretlives\/2016\/02\/21\/roberts-homosexuality\/","title":{"rendered":"Robert’s Homosexuality"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cHow difficult it is to believe sometimes that a man doesn\u2019t like such and such a favorite dish!\u201d (Volume III, Chapter II, \u201cThe Bearer of the Tidings\u201d, by the end of the 22nd<\/sup> paragraph)<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

In this all paragraph, Robert masculinity is at stake throughout the narrator\u2019s 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<\/a> \u201cRobert and his Contradictions\u201d, Robert \u201cdescribes 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.\u201d However, she keeps going stating that Robert\u2019s attitude is pretty contradictory: \u201chis 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<\/em> women.\u201d 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\u2019s not ready yet.<\/p>\n

Then, we read this paragraph and everything changes. We start doubting Robert\u2019s sexual desires thanks to the narrator\u2019s point of view and Sir Michael Audley\u2019s 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 \u201crespectable\u201d man that doesn\u2019t like women. It\u2019s fascinating that the words used are so peculiarly placed so that the reader at first doesn\u2019t even realize the connection between food and sexual differences. But because food is on everybody\u2019s collective memory as keyword for sex (let\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

She concludes her metaphor by saying that \u201cthere 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\u201d. In this last sentence, it is so poetic the way she states that of course there can be men that don\u2019t 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\u2019s 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 \u201cavant-gardistic\u201d point of view on that. She doesn\u2019t condemn anybody, she is not saying that this behavior is to punish, instead she just says that of course it is \u201ceccentric and despicable\u201d but it is \u201cgenerally stigmatized as nasty\u201d which means that the society in which she lives knows about this \u201cissue\u201d.<\/p>\n

To conclude, I have to admit that it shocks me to read about such things written more than 100 years ago because things didn\u2019t 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 \u201cdespicable\u201d tastes and since then the \u201cold-established delicacies\u201d didn\u2019t go through a process of modernization: they are still the same.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cHow difficult it is to believe sometimes that a man doesn\u2019t like such and such a favorite dish!\u201d (Volume III, Chapter II, \u201cThe Bearer of the Tidings\u201d, by the end of the 22nd paragraph)   In this all paragraph, Robert masculinity is at stake throughout the narrator\u2019s metaphor of food. This is not the first … Continue reading Robert’s Homosexuality<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2737,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[123782],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-196","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2016-blog-post"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/secretlives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/196","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/secretlives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/secretlives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/secretlives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2737"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/secretlives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=196"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/secretlives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/196\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/secretlives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=196"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/secretlives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=196"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/secretlives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=196"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}