There are many intersections between Irish literature and violence seemingly coupled with homosexuality. This coupling is specifically noteworthy in James Joyce’s play, Exiles. Exiles is a central work in Joyce’s oeuvre, quite literally between Dubliners and Portrait and Ulyyses and Finnegans Wake. The questions I had were, why a play? Why at this time? Why the title Exiles? And why are these two men, Richard and Robert, fighting over this woman, Bertha, when they so clearly desire each other? The ‘why’ questions turned into ‘how’ questions, and ultimately I settled on “What does exile do for Joyce?” Therefore, the purpose of this note is to expose the intimate relationship between Joyce’s characters, Richard Rowan and Robert Hand, in Exiles, and to place them in a less rigidly dichotomous sexual relationship, paying special attention to their struggle for Bertha who becomes nothing more than a messenger of secret desire. I hope to present the significance of reading Richard and Robert as potential lovers and to explain the implications of Robert’s exile. It is useful to mention that much work has been done to expose Oscar Wilde’s influence on Joyce, who looked to Wilde as a model of the genius rebel-artist. By aligning himself with Wilde, Joyce became Ireland’s twentieth-century rebel. I extend this comparison with Wilde to Exiles where homosexuality holds a central place rather than the liminal place it occupies in Dubliners, A Portrait, and Ulysses. David Norris writes in “‘The Unhappy Mania’ and Mr. Bloom’s Cigar: Homosexuality in the Works of James Joyce,” “…my personal belief is that homosexuality was a subject that scarcely engaged Joyce’s attention at all and of which he had little real knowledge. It is constantly presented in his works as an external threat, not fully understood, but troubled” (373). But it seems as though Joyce did think about same sex relationships quite often and with distinct purpose—and perhaps he wasn’t the only Revival writer to do so: Adrian Frazier suggests that Revival writers were influenced by and indeed styled themselves on the figure of Wilde, especially George Moore, Edward Martyn, Yeats, and Joyce (8). So why these differences of opinion? Because the work in which homosexuality is fully explored by the principal protagonists is Exiles, itself a liminal work in Joyce’s oeuvre. In the major works: Dubliners, Portrait, and Ulysses, homosexuality does seem to be a muffled echo, but through a reading of Exiles in which homosexuality is central, perhaps future scholarship will be able to look at other male-male relationships as significant strands of the Joycean web.
A look back at A Portrait might highlight the importance of homosexuality in Exiles and why Joyce would have employed homosexuality as a critique against Rome and Britain. Exiles can be read as a continuation of Portrait in which Stephen famously says, “You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets” (196). And later, “I will not serve that in which I no longer believe whether it call itself my home, my fatherland or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use, silence, exile and cunning” (238).
In A Portrait Stephen seeks to “fly by the nets” of British Imperialism and Irish Nationalism, yet finds them (and himself) entangled with Catholicism. His entire aesthetic is bound with Catholic definitions of beauty, which challenges the notion that Joyce rejected Catholicism outright and places him in association with revivalist aesthetics which are at once Catholic and national (among other affiliations).
Joyce gives Stephen Dedalus the desire to be the creator of himself and his nation, but—in the end—Stephen cannot escape from the nets of Imperialism or Catholicism that inform all his discourse. Joyce attempts to divorce individuality from the bonds of Rome, but fails. Everything he creates is informed by the authority of the church; he cannot reject Catholicism outright because it is so ingrained in him, and at the same time, he cannot completely reject the Revival or Irish nationalism because he is working within their rhetorical and aesthetic frameworks as well—frameworks that are themselves steeped in Catholic rhetoric.
What we see in A Portrait is not escape from Church authority, but submission to it. Stephen, as he examines his own conscience to prepare himself for absolution, only becomes more attracted to his sins (one of which, as has been suggested, is homoeroticism, albeit a muffled echo). Eventually the process of examination makes him more creative in his interpretation of sin and ultimately unable to avoid sin at all.
So how does Exiles succeed where Stephen presumably fails? Wilde’s influence as an individual, rebel-artist, seems to manifest itself in Joyce’s choice of Exiles for the title of his work—we are reminded of Wilde’s forced exile (and possibly Joyce’s own escape from Ireland). Using Wilde as a model for rebellion, Joyce employs a homosexual relationship between Richard and Robert to divorce himself from British imperialism and Roman rule simultaneously.
René Gerard suggests that “rivalry may be the strongest form of intimacy.” And Adrian Frazier comments, “The sexological terms ‘heterosexual,’ ‘homosexual,’ and ‘bisexual’ are,…deceptively exhaustive: the significant varieties of masculinity within and across these categories remain for the most part unnamed” (33). If this is indeed the case then bisexual tension between Richard and Robert is apparent throughout the play via Bertha who is introduced as a prize for the competition between the two seemingly intimate men:
Later in the conversation the competition continues, but not for Bertha—this time Robert is fighting for Richard:
According to the OED, In 1825, C.M. Westmacott used the word ‘gay’ to refer to a woman leading an immoral life, living by prostitution. I would assert that Joyce uses the term in a similar way, but transfers its meaning to men leading immoral lives. As I have stated earlier, for Joyce, homosexuality is central in Exiles, rather than liminal, which allows us to read into this command more than we would if it were given in a different context. But Exiles is about breaking conventions—expecially those of British and Roman origin, thus “be gay” might be Robert’s plea to Richard to make their affair public. And he does. Richard tells Bertha:
These references to Robert and Richard’s wild(e) nights together set the framwork for the intimate rivalry that will take place not so much over Bertha, but through her. Indeed she is a part of yet another Joycean love triangle. I am not, then, suggesting that Richard and Robert are explicitly homosexual, but have a sort of bisexual relationship as Richard Brown suggests, “Joyce is most keen to present his central characters with a variety of shades of sexual taste as if to suggest that such varieties are intrinsic to human psychology,” (83) and it would be unnatural to outlaw such urges. Brown’s observation is clearly seen in Exiles when Richard makes a surprise visit to the cottage to inform Robert that he knows about the attempted affair with Bertha; they begin arguing over her which leads Robert to let his feelings for Richard slip out:
Robert is attracted to Bertha because she belongs to Richard. And legally Robert can only allow his love for Richard to become physical through Bertha. This places the two men in an unnatural situation, and Robert goes so far as to try to rewrite God’s law to encompass his own desires:
This is Joyce’s explicit attack on legalized homophobia. Through the use of homosexuality Joyce successfully disentangles himself from the nets of nation and religion––one act frees him from two empires. Like Wilde and Joyce, Robert is forced into exile. Within the context of the play he must leave because he has lost the battle for Richard via Bertha, but Joyce seems to be suggesting that this is an exile from social norms—one that chooses individualism over nationalism.
Richard Bown states in James Joyce and Sexuality, “…individuals are shown as profoundly isolated in their interests and in their moral choices—isolated inasmuch as they can never depend or rely upon each others’ actions or on traditional institutions or formulae for their relationships” (33-4). In Joyce’s view, government and religion have failed the individuals that these institutions were meant to represent, protect, and lead. His disappointment can be seen most clearly in his response to the troubles of Oscar Wilde. Brown has pointed out that Joyce’s most prominent reading on the subject of homosexuality “is the case of Oscar Wilde, to whom he responded strongly in letters, reviews, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Joyce’s interest in Wilde was apparently not so much an interest in the work as in the Wilde phenomenon…Any interstes Joyce may have had in Wilde’s style are passed over and the attention directed to his work as an expression of his sexuality” (80). Joyce even went as far as “explicitly condemning the puritanical public outrage against Wilde and offer[ed] a provocatively tolerant explanation of his homosexuality…Joyce evidently identified with Wilde in the same kind of way that he identified with Parnell: both, for him, were Irishmen condemned for sexual crimes by an unjust, hypocritical morality” (Brown, 81). We would do well to remind ourselves at this point that homosexuality is a sin against the moral law of the Roman Catholic Church, and The Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, section 11, which reads: Outrages on decency: Any male person who, in public or private, commits, or is a party to the commission of, or procures or attempts to procure the commission by any male person, any act of gross indecency with another male person, shall be guilty of a misdemeanor, and being convicted thereof shall be liable at the discretion of the court to be imprisoned for any term not exceeding two years.”
The far-reaching consequence was that it criminalized male homosexual acts, whether consensual or otherwise and was given the broadest possible interpretation, far from what Labouchere intended. It was the violation of this law which convicted Oscar Wilde to two years in prison in 1895. And it was only in 1967 that private homosexual acts between men were decriminalized under the Sexual Offences Act 1967.
In Quare Joyce Joseph Valente suggests, “[Joyce] grew to equate popular prejudices in general, and particularly those of English stamp, with arrant hypocrisy, and his essay on the similarly minded Oscar Wilde shows that Britain’s officail legalized homophobia was no exception in this regard” (7). Indeed, Joyce writes in “Oscar Wilde: The Poet of ‘Salomé’,” “Whether innocent or guilty of the charges brought against him, [Wilde] was undoubtedly a scapegoat” (150). Richard and Robert would have undoubtedly been scapegoats as well. Thus exile was the only means of escaping British Criminal Law and Roman Moral Law. And homosexuality seems to be the only sin that would simultaneously offend both Church and State allowing the individual to divorce himself completely from these institutions.
WORKS CITED
Brown, Richard. James Joyce and Sexuality. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985.
Frazier, Adrian. “Queering the Irish Renaissance: Masculinities of Moore, Martyn, and Yeats.” Gender and Sexuality in Modern Ireland. Ed. Bradley, Anthony and Maryann Gialanella Valliulis. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1997.
Gerard, René. Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure. Baltimore: John’s Hopkins UP, 1976.
Joyce, James, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. New York: Vintage, 1993.
------. Exiles. New York: Penguin, 1973.
------. “Oscar Wilde: The Poet of ‘Salomé.” James Joyce Occasional, Critical, and Political Writing. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000.
Norris, David. “The Unhappy Mania and Mr. Bloom’s Cigar: Homosexuality in the Works of James Joyce.” James Joyce Quarterly. Spring 94, vol. 31.3, p. 357, 17p.
Valente, Joseph. Quare Joyce. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2000.
Wrigley Clayden, “Criminal Law Amendment Act, 1885.” 3 January 2006. Swarb.co.uk. Accessed 13 June 2008.<http://www.swarb.co.uk/acts/1885 Criminal_Law_AmendmentAct.shtml>.