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THE ART OF LOOKING DANGEROUSLY: VICTORIAN IMAGES OF MARTYRDOM
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 September 2004
Extract
BETWEEN 1863 AND 1865 Gerard Manley Hopkins maintained a “little bk. for sins” as a record arising from his daily examination of conscience (6). Many of the failings seem sexually oriented: “Looking with terrible temptation at Maitland” and “Looking at temptations esp. at Geldart naked” (191, 174). The poet's guilty annotations of the illicit homoerotic pleasures of spectatorship are even more striking when the devout Hopkins associates perverse desire with the contemplation of bodies tortured for a religious cause: “Evil thought slightly in drawing made worse by drawing a crucified arm on same page,” or, even more directly blasphemous, “The evil thought in writing on our Lord's passion” (167, 157).
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- EDITORS' TOPIC: VICTORIAN BOUNDARIES
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- © 2004 Cambridge University Press
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