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Uranisme et Unisexualité: A Late Victorian View of Homosexuality
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 April 2024
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Between November 1927 and January 1929 there appeared in the pages of the then Blackfriars a series of articles under the name of Alexander Michaelson. They were mostly biographical vignettes in which the author recalled famous friends and acquaintances of the ‘eighties and ‘nineties: Browning, Burne-Jones, Swinburne, Pater, Leslie Stephen, Wilde, Beardsley. Alexander Michaelson was the pseudonym of Mark Andre Raffalovich, a wealthy man of letters and benefactor of the Church and, in particular, of the Dominican Order. Five years after the appearance of the last Blackfriars essay he died at the age of seventy-four. His family were Russian emigre Jews who had settled in Paris the year before his birth in 1864. There he had been brought up in the world of the salon; Claude Bernard, Henri Bergson, Ernest Renan, Sarah Bernhardt were among the visitors to the Raffalovich’s house.
In 1882 he was despatched to England, with his former governess as housekeeper, to complete his education. Instead of going up to university, the young man sought introductions to the literary and artistic men of the day. He would write articles on authors he admired, publish them in the Journal de Saint-Pétersbourg, and send copies to their unsuspecting subjects. Thus he met R. L. Stevenson, Swinburne and Meredith. Others he met more conventionally; but almost always his friendships were marked by precociousness on his part.
His acquaintance with Wilde turned sour. Wilde reviewed a book of Raffalovich’s verse; it was not so much a bad review as a mocking one, and in the published correspondence which ensued Raffalovich was made to look more of a fool. And, of course, there was Wilde’s stinging wit which so aptly showed up pretension. The story went about of how Wilde and some friends, having been invited to lunch, arrived at Raffalovich’s front door and asked the butler for a table for six.
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- Copyright © 1978 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers
References
1 Uranisme: from the German, Uranismus, a term first used by Ulrichs in 1860. It derived from the surname of Aphrodite, Urania, ‘the heavenly’, and signified male homosexuality. The epithet was applied to Aphrodite in her role of goddess of pure and spiritual love.
2 There is, however, a copy in the John Rylands University of Manchester Library.
3 Feasting with Panthers (1967), p. 219
4 ‘Sexual Inversion’ in Studies in the Psychology of Sex, 3rd edition, New York, (1942) pp. 72–3.
5 Here and elsewhere my own translation.
6 ‘In view of the possible hereditary nature of epilepsy medical men were apt to advise those with a family history of the disease not to marry. But it is now believed that direct transmission of the disease is uncommon, and medical prohibition of marriage and child‐bearing is less dogmatically applied.’Black's Medical Dictionary, 27th edition, (1967), ‘Epilepsy’, p. 323.
7 ‘Au lieu de s'insurger, de se révolter contre la sexualité inhéente, elle, a voulu démontrer que l'héroisme, la Constance, la tempérance, la justice, la vertu mâle en un mot, n'étaient pas en tous points contraires à la nature humaine, que l'idéal de la chasteté n'était pas contraire à l'ideal de la continence, et que l'idéal de la continence pouvait être atteint par l'homme sensuel ou du moins purifier et atténuer sa sensualité jusqu'à ce qu'il devînt capable de se perfectionner ou de perfectionner un autre.’
8 Brocard Sewell (ed), Two Friends: John Bray and Andre Ruffalovich (1963). p. 191
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