Comparing Basil Hallward's Fragoletta And Homosexuality

The Victorian era, spanning from 1830 to 1901, saw a series of changes within society: England’s population grew as did the industry; its economy stabilized as it shifted towards free trade, and the culture itself evolved as a result. Relative domestic serenity and security allowed for intellectual minds to think critically and challenge conventions on artistic interpretation and sexual freedom, hence the formation of Aestheticism. However, the perceived advancements made by society, economic prosperity and a revolutionary iconoclastic philosophy, overshadowed widespread urban poverty and Victorians, lace bonnets and high collars, sought to conceal the uncelebrated with militancy. Homosexuality was condemned, and a dizzying proliferation of

Victorian society is entrenched with strict social etiquette, standard and code- all of which declare the sexual deviation from convention as unwarranted and worthy of anger and outrage from the community. Swinburne’s controversial immoralities come to fruition in his “beautification of images and themes relating to the sexually perverse and grotesque…” (Simmons). These directly subvert traditional Victorian morality and disregard any social taboos surrounding liberality of one’s sexuality or the mention of related acts by instead devoting “Fragoletta” to the latter. He furthers the subversion with the establishment of his own bisexuality and partner as a hermaphrodite: “O Love! What shall be said of thee? //Being sexless, wilt thou be/ Maiden or boy?” (Swinburne, 1, 4-5). His unabashed glorification plays deeper into an offense of decency and despite usage of natural imagery and the diction of typical love poetry, Swinburne continues to travesty Victorian ideals with a description of vivid eroticism: “I dare not kiss it, let my lip/ Press harder than an indrawn breathe,/And all the sweet life slip/ Forth, and the sweet leaves drip” (16-19). The homoeroticism in

In reaction to an “antiquated” artistic ideology, the Aestheticism movement, of which Wilde is a leading proponent of, was pushed to its feet. It ushers in a new school of thought emphasizing a belief that art is free from any obligation of didactic nailed onto it by Victorian traditionalists, those who ___ art to be a vehicle for social education and moral self-betterment, and instead advocated “art for art’s sake”. Art, in the eyes of an aesthete, had no morality attached to it and was “primarily about the elevation of taste and the pure pursuit of beauty” (Burdett). The defense of this point is made in “Fra Lippo Lippi” wherein the speaker is lamenting about criticism on his art he received who instructed he not make art “With homage to the perishable clay” but to rather “Make them [Men] forget there’s such a thing as flesh. Your business is to paint the souls of men” (“Fra Lippo Lippi” 180, 182-3). Lippo cries of his desire to paint mimesis; life how he sees it sans any moral or religiously educational