I'm not sure if this would count as a birthday present, but my brain is obsessed with Nathaniel Hawthorne & Herman Melville at the moment. I keep having Thoughts about a queer reading of The Scarlet Letter and Moby Dick as two sides of a debate about desire, social constraint, internalised homophobia...
And then when I followed down the rabbit hole, I found out that Melville's biggest fanboy was E.M. Forster, which, OF COURSE. Of course the guy who wrote Maurice loved the drama of relentlessly pursuing your heart's desire, even if it destroyed you.
Tl;dr I would LOVE to talk to you some time about The House of the Seven Gables, and just in general how Gothic novels are infused with queerness that got overlooked/erased for obvious reasons
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
winterfish
no subject
Date: 2024-06-24 08:12 pm (UTC)And then when I followed down the rabbit hole, I found out that Melville's biggest fanboy was E.M. Forster, which, OF COURSE. Of course the guy who wrote Maurice loved the drama of relentlessly pursuing your heart's desire, even if it destroyed you.
And reading more about Forster led me to George Merill & Edward Carpenter, so here I am at 6AM reading Carpenter's thoughts on the prison system: https://archive.org/details/prisonspolicean00carpgoog/mode/1up
Tl;dr I would LOVE to talk to you some time about The House of the Seven Gables, and just in general how Gothic novels are infused with queerness that got overlooked/erased for obvious reasons