While looking for a new book to read over the summer, I came across a title that immediately captured my interest, Richard Marsh’s The Beetle. Although the mention of insects and the beetle pattern all over the cover were the initial points of attraction (I judged a book by its cover I fear), as I read the blurb, a series of interesting facts around the text were revealed. The Beetle is a gothic mystery published in 1897, the same year as Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and although largely forgotten today, enjoyed greater popularity than the famous vampire novel upon its publication. I decided to make the purchase.
The more of the book I went through, the more similarities between the two novels and their monsters were revealed. The monstrous Beetle, much like Stoker’s vampire, encapsulates an array of anxieties that dominated Victorian society. It therefore comes to be a symbol of disease, a manifestation of the least subtle xenophobia/racism you’ll ever see, and a creature characterized by homosexual subtext (“sub” being used very liberally here). Of course, considering that this is the “Gay Saint” blog (slay) and not the “Least-Subtle-Xenophobia/Racism-you’ll-Ever-See Saint” blog, this article will focus on the latter. Beyond the presence of homosexual themes in both texts, the similarities in how these present themselves across the two were striking. Their number and proximity, together with the common year of publication, makes it easy to attribute these similarities to a common source of influence. Something that made homosexuality monstrous in both their imaginations.
When searching for factors that shaped the late 19th century British understanding of homosexuality, Stoker and Marsh included, the Oscar Wilde trials clearly stand out. In 1895, famous poet and dramatist Oscar Wilde, best known for his novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, was tried for homosexuality after being accused by the Lord Douglas, the Marquess of Queensberry and father of Wilde’s lover, Lord Alfred Douglas. After two trials, Wilde was convicted with the maximum penalty of two years imprisonment for gross indecency. Even though Wilde’s sexuality was essentially common knowledge preceding the trials, the whole affair became a major scandal. A combination of the atypically severe legal condemnation, excessive bashing from the press, and the resultant ostracization of Wilde gave way to a new climate of greater insecurity and heightened persecution towards male homosexuality.
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| ID: 1895 Newspaper front page featuring caricatures of Oscar Wilde |
Nowhere is that change in dominant cultural attitudes from reluctant toleration to excessive hostility clearer than in the case of Bram Stoker. Stoker, for many years, was as openly gay as conditions would allow, speaking of “his kind” in love letters to Whitman (very gay thing to do). Evidence of Stoker identifying with his homosexuality well into the 1880s is available. By 1912 however Stoker was sadly openly demanding the imprisonment of homosexual writers. So where do the vampires come in?
Beware: spoilers to 127-year-old books follow.
The vampire has been far from straight since its literary debut, with Lord Ruthven, the vampire in John William Polidory’s 1816 short story The Vampyr, being a very petty stand-in for famous bisexual and menace Lord Byron. An even more prominent example is LeFanu’s 1872 Carmilla, a short story in which the vampire is aggressively lesbian and from which Dracula is known to have been inspired.
So why are vampires so gay? I mean…look at them, but it may also have a lot to do with penetration being essential to their nature. The vampire’s bite is often written as a metaphorical act of sexual penetration and when you combine that with potential male victims, something very gay happens. It’s safe to assume that Stoker was well aware of this dimension of the monster’s heritage when he chose to write this novel.
Though no male characters are bitten in Dracula, the threat of penetration looms over and gains an even more explicitly sexual dimension when it is expressed through female vampires. The clearest example of this are the three “strange sisters”, the female vampires that reside in Dracula’s castle and attempt to drain Jonathan Harker’s blood while he sleeps. Harker doesn’t resist as he enters a form of trance, captivated by “their voluptuous lips”. The entire description of the attempted bite is so sensual that the decision to adapt it into a full-on sex scene in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) is very understandable. Though this is not an act committed between two men, the women still place Harker in the passive role of this metaphorical sexual encounter making it in the words of Christopher Craft a “ feminine form but a masculine penetration”. The emotions of “some longing and at the same time some deadly fear” also add homosexual undertones to the whole exchange, especially in the context of Stoker’s sexuality. The homoerotic tension between Harker and Dracula too becomes very explicit when the latter interrupts the scene in a fury: “How dare you touch him, any of you? How dare you cast eyes on him when I had forbidden it? Back, I tell you all! This man belongs to me!”. Dare I say, pretty gay. As if this wasn’t enough, the women respond with, “you yourself never loved” which the count denies, making his intentions towards Harker explicit.
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| ID: Illustration from the original edition of Carmilla |
Even if sexuality between men is expressed through heterosexual pairings, the vampire in Dracula is a creature that embodies homosexual desire. Considering Stoker’s amplified internalized homophobia following the Wilde trials, we can understand how homosexual desire comes to be monstrous in his imagination. I think I’ll leave my discussion of Dracula here, considering how much discussion of this book there is out there already, and turn my attention to its strange cousin.
So now we can move on to a much more extensive section of this article on the much less subtle of the two texts, Richard Marsh’s The Beetle. The novel revolves around the revenge plot of the Beetle, a monster from Ancient Egypt (cue the Victorian racism) with mesmeric and shape-shifting powers. The Beetle seeks to take revenge on Paul Lessingham, an eminent politician that escaped its influence years ago.
The first point I need to address isn’t sexuality. It is however gender so don’t lose interest yet, we’re still on theme. Throughout the novel the gender of the monster remains a subject of dispute. We first encounter the Beetle through the character of Robert Holt, a homeless man who, seeking shelter, broke into the Beetle’s house thinking it was abandoned. When first faced with the monster he states “I could not at once decide if it was a man or a woman” though he does quickly decide on man because a woman couldn’t possibly be that ugly. Despite this shockingly sound argumentation, the ambiguity continues throughout the novel. The Beetle presents masculine, with people consistently identifying it as such from afar. Masculine pronouns are also used throughout the majority of the book.
This notably changes on two occasions. First when Sydney Atherton, famous inventor and all-around questionable guy, witnesses the Beetle’s transformation from insect to human. This transformation reveals that the monster has the body of a young woman and the face and voice of an old man. Similarly, when recounting his common past with the Beetle, Lessingham describes a very beautiful young woman. Ever the progressives however, both characters soon revert to masculine pronouns and the matter of the Beetle’s actual identity is never resolved. Considering that the form of address they settle on aligns with the monster’s presentation…let’s go, I guess.
The Beetle’s treatment of its own gender identity only serves to further complicate things. Though it fantasizes of being Lessingham’s wife (trust me we’ll get into that), it also states “if I were a woman would you not take me for your wife?” implying that it is not currently a woman. Ultimately, for this article’s purposes, I believe this ambiguity is best treated as another case of the surrogate female vampire, a strategy for the novel to get away with what it proceeds to do.
Fair warning, it gets weird from here.
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| ID: Illustration from the original edition of The Beetle |
Now a giant beetle is bad enough (be glad I spared you the slimy tendrils bit), but it gets so much worse. The Beetle takes human form and after being identified as male by the narrator, he instructs him to “Undress!”, which, under the Beetle’s influence, he does, in prose that I can only describe as “the writer’s barely disguised fetish”. Flash forward, we’re four chapters in and this happens: “Fingers were pressed into my cheeks, they were thrust into my mouth, they touched my staring eyes, shut my eyelids, opened them again, and-horror of horrors!-the blubber lips were pressed against mine”. Clearly, I was being very honest when I said that we weren’t doing subtlety anymore. A similar scene, though not under the explicit context of assault, also occurs later in the narrative when, where to resuscitate a male character, the Beetle “extended himself at full length upon his motionless form” and “Put his lips upon Percy’s”. If this were Dracula, the vampires would by this point have bitten Jonathan Harker many times over.
The character of Paul Lessingham is of course another element that deserves special attention in this conversation. For that to be best achieved some further context into the Wilde trials might be helpful.
Lord Queensberry had, years before the trial, written a series of letters where he accused Lord Rosebery, then prime minister, of a relationship with his eldest son. These letters were used by Wilde’s defense and read aloud to the jury. The aim was to discredit lord Queensberry by proving him prone to making baseless accusations of the sort. I think you can understand how this may have backfired. Even though the prime minister’s name was not included in newspapers, there wasn’t any scenario in which tea that hot wouldn’t spread like wildfire. This of course resulted in increasing speculation around the prime minister’s homosexuality and a series of conspiracy theories around the government’s perceived lenience to homosexuals. Ultimately, it was in part to save the prime minister’s name and the following elections that Oscar Wilde was persecuted so strictly.
Connections between that element of the scandal and Paul Lessingham, a politician with aspirations for office, wouldn’t be hard to draw for an 1897 audience. A common past between Lessingham and the Beetle is made clear on both ends, though until the final part of the book the specifics aren’t disclosed. I’d argue that up until the revelation of that past in the final section of the novel, the readers are intentionally led by the author to suspect some form of homosexual relationship between the two characters. I’ll present a few of the subtle hints offered and you can make up your own mind:
When the character of Lessingham is first mentioned, the Beetle who at this point is to our knowledge, entirely male, aggressively thirsts over him: “he is strong - do I not know that he is strong- how strong! Oh yes! Is there a better thing than to be his wife?”. I was lying, they are not that subtle.
Beyond apparently being very strong, Lessingham is also “haunted” by that mystery past, constantly pursued by the Beetle. Holt, under the Beetle’s influence, is sent to steal something from Lessingham. That object is soon revealed to be letters. When Lessingham stumbles on the scene he tries to reason with the hypnotized man, “do not let us have a scandal, and a scene - be sensible! – give me those letters”. Letters that would cause a scandal, considering the wider context, seem to me a device meant to suggest evidence of some compromising relationship. The possibility of a homosexual relationship in Holt’s past between him and the monster is further reinforced by Lessingham’s immediate recognition of the name “The Beetle” and the language used in his attempt to defend himself: “I was in a condition, mentally and bodily in which pranks could have been played upon me by any trickster. Such pranks were played”. He also identifies the “trickster” as masculine though the story later denies it.
The emasculation of Lessingham by the Beetle when it receives the successfully stolen letters tied in a ribbon, further pushes us to such a conclusion “surely only a woman could have tied a knot like that – who knew yours were such agile fingers?” (I don’t know if it was meant to be an innuendo, but we all know how it sounds). The letters do ultimately turn out to be from Lessingham’s lover, Marjory Lindon. However, the jealous outrage which that prompts from the Beetle only serves to reinforce suspicion of some past relationship between the two.
Lessingham’s masculinity is also brought into question several times due to his reactions of horror to the creature pushing him to “feminine hysterics”. This trend reaches its peak with the revelation of his true past. To summarize, he was kidnapped by a group of women in Egypt, brought to their temple, mesmerized, and taken advantage of while in front of him women were being ceremonially tortured and burned. I did say it gets weird. Even though the Beetle takes female form this can be easily interpreted as a situation similar to the female vampires in Dracula, though this time the sexual element is no longer subtext. The Beetle, in Lessingham’s own words, “tricked him of his manhood”. As for the literal burning of Englishwomen taking place at the same time, it’s not hard to attribute some symbolic meaning there. The Beetle therefore comes to embody a version of homosexual desire which, warped by fear, takes on monstrous form.
Finally, I don’t know how to connect this to my overall point, but I felt like it’s my duty to mention that every single male character in this is very gay for Lessingham. Holt calls him a “fine specimen of masculinity” while Atherton, who supposedly hates him, goes with “he possesses physical qualities that please my eye” quickly followed by “speaking as a mere biologist” in the effect of “no homo”. Regret to say that his choice to call him “my Paul” in the next few pages makes it unlikely he’s beating the allegations.
To get back on track however we saw that in the aftermath of the Wilde trials, homosexuality gains a monstrous quality in Gothic fiction. Across the two texts, these depictions embody a fear of loss of control through hypnotism, and associate homosexuality with violation and emasculation. The fear of being somehow brainwashed into gayness and the following homophobic sentiments I’m sure we all have come across today.
So, is there any point to this beyond me getting to talk about Victorians being weird?
Hopefully! Though I’ll admit that the desire to rant came first and any attempt at valuable commentary after. For one I really hoped to introduce more people to The Beetle, strange as it might be it’s a very interesting read.
Other than that, it might be worth pointing out that the surge in homophobic cultural attitudes resulting from the Wilde trials imbued itself in the monsters of gothic narratives and in the case of Dracula, enduring cultural icons. Beyond being informed by their context, through their vast popularity (even if one of the two eventually lost it) these stories also fed into and subtly informed the fears of the readers. Though I’m not claiming that they started or were the main perpetuators of the homophobia found within them, I still believe it’s worth considering how a 19th century scandal gave birth to stories that informed and continue to inform our overall understanding of monstrosity. And hidden somewhere in that understanding there might be that monsters are a little bit gay.
So as a little takeaway, in light of all of this, the 2-year-old level argument of “homophobia is a nonsense word because I’m not afraid of gay people” seems even more silly. No one makes monsters out of something they’re not afraid of.
By Alexia (she/her)
References:
Craft, Christopher. “‘Kiss Me with Those Red Lips’: Gender and Inversion in Bram Stoker’s Dracula.” Representations, no. 8 (1984): 107–33. https://doi.org/10.2307/2928560.
Schaffer, Talia. “‘A Wilde Desire Took Me’: The Homoerotic History of Dracula.” ELH 61, no. 2 (1994): 381–425. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2873274.
Adut, Ari. “A Theory of Scandal: Victorians, Homosexuality, and the Fall of Oscar Wilde.” American Journal of Sociology 111, no. 1 (2005): 213–48. https://doi.org/10.1086/428816.