31 - ‘Mixed sex cases among goats’: The Modernist Sublime

Summary

MODERNISM AND SEXUALITY are such wide-ranging terms that putting them together produces too broad an avenue to explore without some means of focusing the discussion. This chapter addresses two traits that are not unique to cultural modernism, but which converge there in ways not yet fully articulated or understood: modernism’s association with the occult, and the noticeable tendency toward polyamory in modernist lives. The occult influenced many writers of this era, even those who were not themselves occultists; it is unnecessary to debate to what extent T. S. Eliot or James Joyce was interested in the occult, for example, so long as it is accepted that both of their major works dealt with occult themes. Polyamory we find much harder to think about, in part because it is a newer term which, like the term modernism, was not used by any modernists. Also, we can find very little written on it, at least within modernist studies, and so begin to address it here tentatively, cautiously.

We consider the occult revival that coincided with the modernist period to have its own historical ‘flavour’ distinct from the nineteenth-century occultism that preceded it and the New Age movement that followed it. In an effort to historicise our discussion of the occult and sexuality, in addition to literary figures we consider the work of two influential occultists of the period who published esoteric treatises on love and sexuality: Aleister Crowley and Dion Fortune. As for polyamory, while it is visible today (it has its own flag), what one might recognise as polyamory in other eras similarly takes on the historical flavour of that time; we associate polyamory before modernism with the Oneida Community and other Utopian communes; after modernism polyamory also carries political (the Weather Underground) and health (Wilhelm Reich) connotations. We have missed some, no doubt, and yet drilling down on modernism, the occult and polyamory takes us to that rare dimension where spirituality, sexuality and modernist identities speak directly to each other.

With all these qualifications, we still find ourselves with any number of starting points. We could assess the representation of an ethnically non-monogamous relationship in crisis in H.D.’s 1935 novella Nights, or begin with the image of Mary Butts making a quip to a friend coated in goat’s blood at a drug-fuelled sex magick ritual.