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Queering
the Marquis: Arguments on the Sexual Behavior and Identity
of Sade
William
F. Edmiston
University
of South Carolina
(Estados
Unidos)
The emphasis in the 1980s
of gay and lesbian studies on “homosexual literature”
as that produced by authors known to be homosexual came to
be at odds in later years with the critique of the notion
of the intending authorial subject in contemporary
literary and cultural studies. It would also come to be at
odds with queer theory, which, according to most
definitions, resists the conventional binary oppositions
such as male/female, masculine/feminine, and
heterosexual/homosexual. Well before gay and lesbian
studies was recognized as a legitimate discipline, however,
biographers and commentators of the Marquis de Sade sought
to adjudicate the author’s sexuality, deduced from his
own behavior and from that of his fictional characters.
Modern readers of these
critics are struck with what appears to be an obsession
with the author’s sexuality. This obsession centers on
the question boldly posed by Simone de Beauvoir as early
as 1951, using a term that was even then anachronistic:
Was Sade a sodomite? The question of Sade’s sexuality
has been incorporated into a polemic, used to exonerate
the author or to indict him. Much of this discussion has
centered upon and depended upon whether or not Sade could
be classified and categorized as a homosexual, which seems
to be crucial to many of his critics. In this paper I
would like to suggest some reasons for this critical
obsession and to look at the ways in which some of Sade’s
biographers and commentators have dealt with the issue of
his sexuality. There is, of course, historical evidence of
same-sex activity in Sade’s personal life.
Even in the absence of
biographical evidence of same-sex activity, the question
of Sade’s sexuality would probably have arisen,
primarily because of several distinctive features of his
fictional works. Sade’s biographers have tried to prove,
more or less tendentiously, that he was a homosexual or
that he was not, and these arguments are often linked to
projects of denunciation or exoneration. They are based on
certain historical details of Sade’s life, but more
often on the presence in his fiction of sodomy, of
bisexual conduct, and of what appear to be essentially
homosexual characters.
For those who wished to
rehabilitate Sade and for whom homosexuality was a
negative factor, an attempt was made to downplay the
homosexual evidence of Sade’s biography and to emphasize
his heterosexual relations, and to de-emphasize the
importance of homosexual activity in his fiction. For
those who sought to denigrate Sade and his works, the
homosexual episodes of his life are emphasized. In several
recent biographies, emphasizing queer theory and its
rejections of traditional binary oppositions, one finds an
appeal to a view of Sade as a man whose sexuality lies
outside of conventional categorizations. |
