Going Back

On my last day in Princeton in January, before a frantic dash through a foot of snow to finish packing, move a sofa to my friend’s room, and make the train in time for my red-eye to Heathrow, I invited all my friends to lunch in my favorite place in Princeton, the Rocky dining hall. It was the day after Dean’s Date, the day that all written work for the semester was due, and so the vast majority of my undergrad friends were running on one or maybe two nights without sleep. Some of them showed up only to say goodbye before crashing into bed (by which I was touched); others stayed, and our party spread over tables as I flitted about, chattering manically and making sure to see everyone. One of my friends asked me if I was sad to be leaving. I reflected for a minute, but gave a simple answer: “No.” I assured my friend I’d miss the people, but the place? Not so much. Princeton is a small campus, a small town, and after two and a half years in that little world I felt like I had it figured out. I was ready to move on to pastures new.

And so we slogged back and forth through the snow that day, my friends all performing small acts of heroism at one of the busiest times of the year to get me on my way, and a small party went down to the station to see me off on the 6:09 train. Until one brief visit to campus when I was in the New York/New Jersey area the other week, my last sight of Princeton was two of my best friends waving me goodbye from the platform, as the train chugged its familiar, ponderous way past parking lots and graduate-student apartments and the lake and the canal. No more than twelve hours later, in those startling shifts of time and place that long-distance flights thrust upon one, I was dragging three suitcases up Oxford High Street in the early-morning light, having gotten off the bus one stop too early and not knowing where to turn for Trinity College.

From here we have the pattern of quickly alternating comfort and alienation that regular readers of this blog in the past several months will have come to recognize: the reassuring sight of my exchange partner there to meet me at the porter’s lodge; the seeming crowds of otherworldly students talking about their drinking exploits and using the word “banter” one out of every five; the comforting consistency of tutors’ rooms and library reading rooms and the HQ shelves of the History Faculty Library; the terror of what I had gotten myself into that surfaced in the midst of tipsy disorientation when I was handed a glass of port after my first Trinity Guest Night, my first big Oxford dinner.

At the end of that first week, the port was the last straw: throwing away my resolution not to go on the identity parade at my new university, I begged a friend from America to go with me to the LGBTQ Society’s weekly drinks/social. A series of overtures of friendship, chance meetings, and kindred spirits later, I found myself in different mental spaces entirely: ready to work 8-10 hours a day on my JP over the Easter vacation; and ready to live a life of decadence the whirlwind last few weeks of Trinity term. The middle of June found me not only with a group of close friends whom I ate and drank and danced and laughed and talked about dead languages with, but with whom I also dined once on Trinity high table, passing the port afterwards in the SCR as if six months ago I hadn’t almost cried at the thought of a world where port is drunk. On one occasion, a friend and I dashed through the center of Oxford in a downpour from a lecture to a black-tie dinner, literally tying bow-tie and changing to heels en route. On another occasion, three of us went punting, and it was only when we were halfway up the High Street from Magdalen Bridge, giggling madly, our plastic cups of Pimms still in hand, that we realized how ridiculous we must have looked. On more than one occasion, I walked home to college late enough that a rosy-golden glow just starting to cast its aura over the gray sky. Those last weeks of Oxford were nothing like my life has ever been. And they were some of the happiest weeks of my life.

I left Oxford for the first time on the last day of Trinity term, my emotions and my sleep schedule frazzled after a good three weeks of burning always with this hard, gem-like flame, and when I got off the Eurostar and met a Princeton friend in Paris, I resolved to her my intention to hereafter live a godly, righteous, and sober life (or, you know, appropriately Hebraic words to that effect). I easily shocked my Princeton friends with stories of how much everyone drank in Oxford, and how I had spent my last few weeks there. It was a good reminder of how at odds I had felt with the culture when I first arrived, and how much had changed that the things I had been scared of in January were things I enjoyed doing with some really good friends in June. And I did reset my equilibrium by living more abstemiously for much of the summer: spending my life working and living for my work, seeing friends where I saw them, and relishing life as a grown-up historian, spending the summer steeped in research as grown-up historians do.

But Oxford is a Siren, and all summer she kept calling me. She called me as I read Symonds documents and thought, as I always do, about the Oxford of his day; she called me as I sought out pleasure reading like Maurice and Jude the Obscure and Alan Hollinghurst’s new novel, The Stranger’s Child, that reminded me of her; and she called me most especially the two times I went back to visit, when my friends were happy to indulge me with all the things I love most in Oxford, and I could be excused—just as I was in the last three weeks of term—for thinking I had stepped into the Paradise of any one of a number of Oxford novels, the Paradise that in novels generally comes before the Fall.

But I forestalled the Fall by leaving, and my last full day in Oxford—either three weeks ago or a lifetime, I’m not so sure—we basked in the sun on the Trinity lawns, visited the Greek gallery of the Ashmolean with its pottery inscribed to beautiful boys, heard my last Christ Church evensong, and wound up at night on my friend’s sofa, watching the TV adaptation of one of the most deeply unsettling—and truest—Oxford stories of a Fall from Paradise, The Line of Beauty. I started reading The Line of Beauty last October, in Princeton, and put it aside because I wasn’t so into it. But I brought it along to Oxford, and I finished it over the Easter vacation, filled with passionate unease for a world of politics and poses and aestheticism that by that point I recognized. The protagonist of The Line of Beauty is a would-be academic seduced by a world of surfaces, and well: which of us isn’t? The novel reminds me how easily young love for a place, for an idea, for sun-drunk excursions on slow-moving rivers and the “delicate satisfaction” of “a most subtle and exquisite curve” (Symonds, not Hollinghurst!), can consume one. Though an unhappy note, it was not an unfitting one on which to end my sojourn.

But all seemed brighter and clearer and less bleak on the afternoon that I left Oxford for the last time (for now), and when I retraced my steps of seven months before from Trinity to the bus station, I had my friends to help me with my bags, to convince me that it was a good idea to stop at the pub on the way, and to toast my speedy return. The image of my friends waving me goodbye as the bus pulled out of the station was an uncanny doubling of the last time I’d left, really left, a university I loved. And just like before I bridged time and space and found myself with alarming speed back in New Jersey, jet-lagged and dazed, my body still burning with that ecstasy that my love affair with Oxford had caused me to maintain.

But I saw in New Jersey the friends who were there to wave goodbye in January, and we made one of our regular madcap road trips (Rhode trips!) to Rhode Island, and I came out here, to my parents in the wilds of British Columbia, far enough away that those weeks and those weekends of decadence seem like a hallucination. And yet I am hatching plans, and dreaming rose-colored dreams. The Fall from Paradise may loom, “et in Arcadia ego,” but I keep thinking of that ecstasy—and wanting it back.

And yet. The thing is, Princeton was home for years, and it is still home now. Today I sat down with my email inbox and my diary and wrote in my class schedule, my work schedule, my appointments, and all the events for freshmen I will have to attend in my new capacity as what we call a Residential College Adviser. Today I became involved in a few conversations on Facebook about a recent change in University policy, and reminded myself that Princeton policy is something I have a stake in, care about, and have helped to shape over the past few years. I remembered how, after a spate of culture shock and alienation in my first semester at Princeton, I found a niche, and I found some wonderful friends, and I made my mark on a school I once worried would swallow me whole. It seems, perhaps, that I was all-too-willing to submit to Oxford and let it have its way with me, let it swallow all it liked, and Line of Beauty-style consequences be damned.

After all, I think that what happened in Oxford is that I fell in love: an intensity of emotion and disregard for rationality that I have never experienced for an individual or indeed for any other place. And it is good, I think, for someone to be 21 and to know what it is like to fall in love, as well as good to know that moderation in all things is important and that self-bettering and the ability to do good come through many kinds of feelings and emotions.

I can’t wait to see what happens when, in one week’s time, I come back to Princeton after having done so much and learned so much and grown so much and felt so much. I can’t wait to write a thesis about places I have been and documents I have seen and mentalités I have known. I can’t wait to feed my advisees tea and cake and talk to them about ideas and maybe, if I’m lucky, light a spark of wanderlust in them that wasn’t there before. And most of all, I can’t wait to have my first meal in the place in Princeton where I had my last: the Rockefeller College dining hall, the only place in the world into which I have ever waltzed as if I owned it. Love affairs aside, the Rocky dining hall was where I gained my first sense of self-worth, purpose, and belonging. For that, it’s worth “going back to Old Nassau.”

Gay Greats: Questions of Canonicity; or, In Which I Am a Fuddy-Duddy

As an undergraduate in the heady atmosphere of mid-19th-century Oxford, John Addington Symonds studied something called “Literae humaniores,” or “Greats.” It was a curriculum of what we might today call western civ (indeed, Columbia still calls its western civ core curriculum “Lit. Hum.”): mostly classics, Greek and Latin literature and history, with some modern philosophy and ethics thrown in. It was the first secular course introduced to Oxford, a curriculum that, especially in Benjamin Jowett’s Balliol, hoped to prepare successful graduates to govern the empire. It prepared Symonds, recipient of one of the highest Firsts in his year and a variety of very prestigious university prizes, to write a sweepingly comprehensive cultural history of the Italian Renaissance, and then to formulate what I argue was the first academic theory of homosexual identity. It was a rigorous curriculum, and a curriculum that defined the education of individuals from Symonds (and Pater, Swinburne, Wilde, etc.) right down to some of my friends in Oxford today. Greats has changed from its 19th-century incarnation: a lot of knowledge has been added to classics and philosophy in the past 150 years; Oxford no longer (universally) wants its graduates to govern the empire or enter the clergy; and its students are no longer (universally) public-schoolboys who have been drilled relentlessly in Greek and Latin grammar from the age of seven onwards. But one of the facts that bowled me over when I was at Oxford—and that did much to sum up what was strange and otherworldly about that city of dreaming spires—is that I actually hung out with people who studied the same stuff Symonds did. Time moves slowly in Oxford. It’s conservative. It cares about canon.

Anyone with an inkling of a 21st-century liberal-arts education will have been trained to read that preceding paragraph for all the old-boyism, all the white male upper-class privilege, Greats enshrines. It’s the old wrinkled center of what Oxford is: academic conservatism all the way down. And yet, puzzlingly, I was well and truly seduced by that strange fairy city. Like Sue says in Jude the Obscure, Jude, and indeed, I, think “it is a great centre of high and fearless thought, instead of what it is, a nest of commonplace schoolmasters whose characteristic is timid obsequiousness to tradition.” And thus I sit here in my annual August exile far away in rural British Columbia: organizing my Symonds research, listening to my Oxford playlist, and throbbing with a dull ache of love for a city that is about nothing so much as it is about canon, about doing things because that is the way they have always been done.

The thing is, I grew up with canon. I was raised in the western humanist tradition, with Great Books and dead languages. I come from a family who decided it would be a fun bonding activity one Thanksgiving to read Paradise Lost out loud together, and my parents feared for my safety when I climbed on top of the toy car to recite monologues from Macbeth. Growing up, my favorite page in the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language was the one that illustrated the Indo-European language family by listing the Lord’s Prayer in a variety of Indo-European languages. Growing up, I had a favorite page in the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language. I read Victorian novels because as a Victorianist, it’s my job, but also because, if you were raised in the western humanist tradition, that’s what you do. I was raised to think—despite everything that I know about the privilege the western civ narrative enjoys, and how problematic that is—that someone needs to study these books, to remember them, to cherish them (I keep telling people I’m really quite conservative, and no one believes me… well, guys, here’s the proof). And I was raised to follow my intellectual passions, so I have guiltily burrowed my way deep inside some American child’s version of Arnoldian Culture, and wormed my way out the other end only to find myself an adult writing a thesis about John Addington Symonds.

What I’m doing with Symonds doesn’t necessarily bespeak “Greats” on the face of it. I’m writing about the construction of male homosexuality, engaged enough with the world of queer theory to know that I am making an intercession into the scholarly literature by challenging the Foucauldian presumption that only regulating entities were interested in defining homosexuality, rather than just going with the flow. I know that this is something professional historians are interested in these days. I’m happy to get bogged down in deconstructive wordplay as much as the next person with a smattering of lit-crit background. But at the same time, this isn’t a project in gender studies or queer theory, as much as I respect those fields and the people who work in them. It’s a project for which I’ve started to learn Greek and dusted off my Latin. It’s a project that’s involved teaching myself Greek literature, Renaissance art, Victorian politics and culture, Anglo-American utopian socialist literature, and generally trying to get inside the mind of an Oxford-educated Victorian man of letters and to see the world through his eyes. I am trying to figure out why Symonds was as a young man unable to find words to express “l’amour de l’impossible,” and why later in his life he found those words and set out on a crusade to spread them, by understanding what he thought was important—and why his narrative of what homosexual identity is encompassed Plato and Michelangelo and Walt Whitman.

I’m doing this in part because I was already at least halfway there myself. I work easily within this kind of cultural narrative. Recently, I realized that although in my academic work I try to be distanced and critical and deconstruct my own narratives, what I call “the homoerotic literary tradition” is really just “gay Greats.” This idea that stretches throughout the late 19th, 20th, and now the 21st centuries of privileged white gay men finding out who they are through reading is nothing more than a recasting of the western canon, looking at the same core curriculum through, er, lavender-colored glasses. And if you like, the Wizard of Oz allusion there is even deliberate: now the gay canon extends on its own path from the gay liberation era onwards, encompassing modern literary figures reclaimed and the new phenomenon of cultural figures who are openly gay from the start of their careers; a musical narrative in which Lady Gaga is the heir to ’70s disco; gay places and gay spaces; and increased points of contact between the stereotypical gay male culture and the other multivalent queer cultures that now challenge and undermine its hegemony.

I have been wondering more or less since I became involved in queer politics, culture, and history about issues of canon and hegemonic cultural narratives: does it matter that many young queer people have never heard of or read anything by Oscar Wilde? do gay people have to support same-sex marriage? are allies allowed into gay parties? to what extent is Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way” a problematic song? Making the queer-theoretical move of disengaging a homosexual sexual orientation that is in some sense intrinsic to one’s biology and/or psychology from a gay culture that treats these very specific cultural flashpoints as shibboleths solves some of the problems but not all of them. For me, my recourse to the gay canon as a woman—even as a woman scholar—is a fraught issue; that isn’t even the tip of the iceberg of identity-politics questions about who has access to this narrative and whom it speaks to.

But I think it can help us if we treat this canon like we do the old Greats curriculum, or American western civ à la the Columbia or Chicago core curricula. Greats is one path of study among many at Oxford; Columbia and Chicago are two universities among many with different approaches to the idea of liberal-arts education. (C.f. Princeton, which offers an optional rigorous first-year western civ sequence, an option availed of by only a few freshmen exceptionally passionate about the concept.) And so is gay Greats only one route among many to a sense of self-worth and self-understanding. We all make our own cultural compasses.

But as something of an expert about this canon, I do have a couple caveats. At risk of sounding like the conservative elite that I am, I think we should respect this tradition, even if at a distance, for the breathtaking goodness it has done for those to whom it speaks. We need to destabilize its hegemony, yes, but that doesn’t mean disavowing the fact that a litany of lives have been saved by Plato’s Symposium. (And people repurpose the canon in unconventional ways: the avant-garde musical Hedwig and the Angry Inch, whose protagonist exhibits an ambivalent and complicated relationship to gender and to privilege, borrows the creation myth that Aristophanes relates in the Symposium, of two-person people cut in half by Zeus, as the show’s central motif.) I also think that the need to respect this tradition for what it is means that if you are going to do it, you should do it right. You don’t have to speak about Oscar Wilde as one of your heroes to be a member of the club. But if you are going to plant your lipsticked lips on his tomb in Père Lachaise, you should learn a little about his life and read Dorian Gray and some of his plays and essays. If you are going to play gay anthems in your bar, you should know what the lyrics are, and what meanings lie behind the messages-of-self-empowerment-set-to-disco-beats of the moment (or of yesteryear). We are fortunate today that there are many ways to be queer, and that many people don’t even feel the need to label their sexual identities at all. But while getting a degree in non-western area studies and shaking free of the expectation to care about dead white men is totally awesome, that doesn’t mean it’s right to actually misquote Shakespeare.

Canons are constructs. Symonds, who didn’t think his feelings for men were precisely sexual until he was in middle age, and who struggled in his later work theorizing about homosexual identities and communities to pinpoint a difference between “congenital” and “acquired sexual inversion,” could certainly have told you that “Born This Way” we aren’t. But I, for one, am still in guilty shamefaced love with Oxford, “timid obsequiousness to tradition” and all. After all (and here’s where the conservatism comes in again) you know what doesn’t crumble into dust at the slight prod of a deconstructive finger? “The best moments in reading are when you come across something—a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things—that you’d thought special, particular, to you; and here it is, set down by someone else, a person you’ve never met—maybe even someone long-dead. And it’s as if a hand has come out and taken yours.”

Saying Au Revoir to the City of Dreaming Spires

It is just gone 6pm on an uncharacteristically beautiful summer day, and I have been distracting myself from the discombobulation of leaving by leaning out my window and watching the people hustle and bustle up and down Broad Street. There are tourists in big hats and sunglasses, and there are students in subfusc or dressed for formal halls and Schools dinners, and there is everyone in between, town and gown alike. The sun casts shadows across the storefronts and Exeter College across the road, and I have spent much of today pacing this room, thinking about how much has changed since I first leaned out this window six months ago, jetlagged and disoriented, when the sun set at 4:30 and I was newly arrived, just another American abroad.

The past six months for me have been in all respects about the seductive power of this city. As the days have lengthened, I have felt its hold grow on me, even as my emotions towards it become ever more complicated. In the past six months I have wrestled with eye-to-eye confrontations with privilege and elitism, and as I have become inured to formal dinners so have I spent many hours trying to teach, pushing gently against the current of classism, sexism, and homophobia that has characterized too many of my interactions here. I have spent hours sitting in the Upper Reading Room, hours walking in the Parks or in Christ Church Meadow, hours in this room on Broad Street, hours in the Ashmolean, hours in the chapels of my own and other colleges, constantly feeling past and present collide in uncanny ways. I wrote a 45-page essay about one Oxford-educated Victorian historian who had some things to say about sexual identity, and I got to know people in this city whose secondary education and Oxford degree course mirrored his, who lived where he did and walked the routes he did and felt the things he did. And I spent hours writing essays about the latest developments in historiography; and I spent hours, particularly those of the early morning, drinking and dancing in the ways that I thought people only did in books, before I came to this city.

Oxford is a small world, a tiny enclosed space where you run into in the reading room people with whom you went to secondary school (or who know people with whom you went to secondary school) and people whom you met when you were out dancing the previous weekend. It is a tiny enclosed space in which, you have to think, those who have never left it cannot be blamed for not always remembering that there is a world outside it. For a bona fide city, some number of times the size of the Princeton campus, it can sometimes feel smaller, more insular, more suction-y. Princeton may be its own little world—the Orange Bubble—but for me Princeton has never seduced the way Oxford does. I miss my friends at Princeton, and I miss the Rocky dining hall. But I have never felt its buildings call to me. I have never felt lucky that it is a place whose streets it is my habit to walk. I have never felt it stir the promise of transhistorical connection deep within me that, before I came to Oxford, I had never felt from a place—only from books.

I finished my last Oxford academic obligation a week ago, and since then I have lounged desultorily through my daily routine, going to the library and eating in hall and spending time with my friends. I have floated disorientatedly through my life, not ready to realize that come this Sunday morning, I will have folded my life back up into two suitcases and I will be on a train away from here. I do not do change well, and I do not do leavings and losings well. I have never found it easy to leave Princeton. I am finding it harder to leave here, in a bizarre way that is new, and difficult for me to understand quite yet. When I moved across the Atlantic, I took one step closer to living a transient academic life, and the number of transatlantic connections I have made since then have reminded me that this is what academia is. Thanks to Facebook and the vagaries of academic nomadism, I know that when I say goodbye to my Oxford friends this weekend, I will do so completely confident that I will see them again. I am a historian of Anglo-American intellect and culture, and therefore there is no question that I will be back to England—and to Oxford—by necessity time and again for the next several decades. And yet. There is something about this city—just being in it, knowing it, working with and against its strange customs—that inverts your expectations of what is normal, making it so challenging to return to the real world. This is not like when you leave Princeton and mourn the loss of the embarrassment of riches that is its constant offerings of free food and t-shirts. This is something like how when you leave what Evelyn Waugh called the “city of aquatint,” the rest of the world seems drained of color by comparison.

And so rather than readjusting your sensibilities, being the better person and realizing Oxford’s flaws, knowing that this city’s life is no healthy thing to accustom oneself to, you find yourself drawn inexorably back. What I think I have learned more than anything in the last six months is why Oxford carries the power of image that drew me to it in the first place. It seduces you with the promise that you can still do good things even when you’ve placed style over substance. It is only in this city of strange ways of teaching, learning, and living that “burn[ing] always with this hard, gem-like flame” can be made truly to seem like the only way to achieve “success in life.” I have worked hard, here. But I have also every day averted my eyes from the homeless people whom this city does so little to help, have in the absence of classroom settings neglected to pay my dues at teaching others, have lived for the sake of pleasure as much as, if not more than, for the sake of bettering. All my life I have worked hard. But I have never until this term played hard as well. Oxford has wormed into my consciousness until it has given me permission to do so. And while this may be cathartic, it is not necessarily healthy.

And so when I get on a train early Sunday morning, and I leave the only place I have ever lived where on Sunday morning I wake up to church bells, I wonder if I will cease to hear the siren song that seduces me into a world of surfaces I once only knew through the written word. But somehow—and particularly as my thinking and writing about Symonds evolves over the course of this next summer, year, and academic lifetime—I suspect that I will continue to detect its echo, even a continent away. And I know in my soul, just as I know that I have fallen in love with this otherworldly place, that I will be coming back. The only question that remains is when—and what sort of person I will have become when next I set foot to pavement in the shadow of the dreaming spires.

Bettering as Daily Struggle: A Case Study

It is quarter till 10 on Monday night, and I am curled up in an armchair exhausted. My nerves are frayed; I spent most of today burning with anger. It began before lunch, when, while banging out a mediocre essay for a tutorial on the question “To what extent did nationalism become a mass right-wing movement after 1870?” I realized that not a single book on my reading list was published after 1993, and not a single one was written by a woman. Of course, the first thing I did was look back at the footnotes of the essays I’ve written so far this term: in three essays, each with about 15 footnotes, I’d cited two women, neither of whom was a historian. My essay topics in both General History 1856-1914 and Disciplines, the Oxford history methods class, seem to assume that evolution in historical methods stopped around the mid-90s; General History, in particular, some chronological segment of which all history students have to take, seems preoccupied with dead white men. Of the six essay topics I’ve been given, none lends itself easily to the discussion of anything other than high-political history, and institutions to which women in the years 1856-1914 were denied access. Though I suppose this history is as orthodox as they come, it’s not what I’ve grown accustomed to understanding as the kind of history expected of me on the other side of the Atlantic, with its premium on originality, on primary-source research, on the significance of race, class, and gender, and on giving undergraduates a sense of what it is like to do history professionally today. Granted, this is probably more about Princeton, with its emphasis on independent work, than it is about the U.S.—but General History seems like a powerful step backwards in time. It’s nice to know what it would have been like to read modern history back when the subject was first introduced to this university, I suppose; but at the same time reading history in Oxford in 2011 should not be a time machine in itself. I am sure the whole café heard me at 4:30 this afternoon as, unable to get anything done for the past five hours out of stupefaction at the fact that not one of the seventeen books and articles on my reading list this week was written by a woman or in the past fifteen years, I ranted to my friends about how behind this university is, what a poor sense of what academic history is it is sending to its students, what it must be like to be a female Oxford undergrad for whom unbalanced reading lists like these are normal. I said unequivocally for I think the first time ever that I am glad I am getting my B.A. in the U.S.—that if I were doing it here, I would assuredly not only not be ready for grad school, I might not even think that it was possible for someone like me to be a historian.

And so anger fueled me back to the library from the café, anger made me stare at the computer screen and not be able to focus on the words or the ideas, and anger propelled me swiftly back and forth on my errands, through dinner, through more fierce unfocused staring. The tension didn’t dissipate until just now, when I read a pair of companion pieces in this week’s Princeton Alumni Weekly that respond to the findings of the Princeton Committee on Undergraduate Women’s Leadership about gender inequality on my home campus. Now, as Tony Grafton pointed out in his must-read Prince column today, the situation for women in Princeton, both students and faculty/staff, has gotten only better since 1969; in many ways, it is miles ahead of what I have encountered in the academic conservatism of Oxford. But in the PAW, Christine Stansell, one of the earliest Princeton alumnae, later a faculty member in the Princeton history department, and now a very eminent women’s history scholar at Chicago, reminds us with striking eloquency of the continuities as much as the changes—shoring up the accuracy with which the report from the CUWL pinpointed issues of persistent gender inequality on campus. And my colleague Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux, winner of this year’s Pyne Prize (Princeton’s highest undergraduate honor) for her work advancing the cause of feminism on campus, tells an inspiring story of her own hard work to make Princeton a better place, and her belief that as an institution it can become better. Reading the testimonies of Amelia and Prof. Stansell, I felt my anger at my reading list and the essay I spent much of today not writing melt away. Prof. Stansell, who got through Princeton at a time when it was not good to be a woman there and went on to have the kind of professional life that serves as a role model for aspiring historians like me, and Amelia, who has refused to believe that our work is done just because Princeton is a better place for women than it was when Prof. Stansell was an undergrad, reminded me something absolutely critical: that we convince by our presence.

And so if I want not only to be better, but to make things better, I need not to wallow in anger. Instead, I need to collect my thoughts, and I need to write a good, interesting, historically rigorous essay about nationalism. And then I need to walk into my tutorial on Wednesday and inquire of my tutor why my reading list is giving the impression that there are no women historians. And then I need to remember that when I have worked as hard as I can to be the best historian I can possibly be, and am still not satisfied with that, then I will be in a position to be a woman historian who stands before lecture halls of undergraduates, who mentors young women and young men who may or may not want to be historians themselves, whose books break up the monotony of male names on reading lists, who writes into the Princeton Alumni Weekly 40 years from now to remind the readers that our work is not yet done. From each according to her ability, to each according to her needs: I know what I can contribute to changing the culture of academic institutions. Sometimes there is a place in the world for teleologies—such as when day by day, step by step, slowly but surely, I can do my part to bend the arc of progress forward.

Culture Shock, Class Consciousness, and the Weather Girls

The week after I arrived in Oxford, months ago now (gosh, that’s strange to say!) I attended the first formal dinner of this whole strange experience, and a couple weeks afterward I found myself writing a long post that attempted to puzzle through and come to terms with the culture shock that dinner occasioned. As your average American academic brat, I grew up attending dinner parties and reading the kinds of books and watching the kinds of movies where the etiquettes of attire, successive courses, and too many forks are deployed. When I came to Princeton, I attended the odd awards dinner or some such thing where I put what I’d learned into practice, making small talk, using my forks and knives correctly, and agonizing too much over the ambiguities of gender-specific dress codes. But as much as I thought I knew how to navigate academic dinners, I found myself stupefied by the performance of pretentious formality that gets carried out every Friday night in Trinity’s dining hall, by sparkly dresses and port and being waited on at table by young women my own age who I felt certain loathed the posh-accented people getting drunk around them. As I processed the experience of that first “Guest Night,” as this production is known, I felt ashamed, ashamed of the fact that I had been complicit in the perpetration of the remnants of the English class system.

Time went on—a term passed—and I got to know more people in Trinity who felt the way I did, left-wingers who greeted these productions with an embarrassed ironic distance and yet managed to take them for what they were and have a good time. I went to another formal dinner, for all the history students hosted by the college history fellows; and when my father came to visit I took him to my second Guest Night. I paced myself, feat-of-endurance-like, through four-course meals; I learned to do the same for massive, by my standards, quantities of red and white and port and sherry. And I went several times a week to normal formal halls, wearing my gown and standing for the Latin grace and turning the alienating thing into something I could value, something that put me closer to understanding Symonds’ Oxford and something that got me out of the library and talking to the people sitting near me for at least an hour a day. I’d look at the portrait of John Henry Newman in Trinity hall and think about another time, another Oxford, and wonder where I as a woman academic stand in relation to it—like Guest Night itself, wanting to understand and yet feeling an irreconcilable distance all the same.

Last week, my friend told me she had an extra ticket for the MCR Gala, Trinity’s annual black-tie banquet for the graduate student body, and would I like to go? I leapt at the chance, and in the days leading up to the event, which was yesterday, I could hardly contain my excitement. I’ve been working hard; I was longing for a celebration; and parties with good friends are always fun. I went out and bought a dress, the first dress I have bought since my high-school prom—ready to play the black-tie game properly, to act the role (with appropriate sense of irony, of course) of one of those Bright Young Things in the costume dramas I’ve always salivated over. I bought my “Big Issue” magazine from the homeless man in front of Blackwell’s on Friday afternoon, and on Friday evening I dressed for dinner. The epithet “champagne socialist” couldn’t possibly have been more apt, I realized, as I started the evening by drinking a glass of champagne and spent the third course bonding with my friend over the large-looming role of the socialist musical and cultural tradition in our upbringings. We talked about how it had made us feel a bit nostalgic, a bit homesick, to see a little May Day trade-unions rally in front of the Bodleian last weekend, and we shared in a sense of outrage about how much sexism there still is in academia. But the ugly juxtaposition of this political sentiment with what we were doing while we said it didn’t really strike home until the President of our college made a rambling after-dinner speech that made several bad jokes at the grad students’ expense, but no reference to the idea that what they do is intellectually important and worth doing; and which in an instance of tastelessness that frankly fills me with disgust and I think is absolutely inexcusable in a retired senior British diplomat, made not only a joke about the death of Osama bin Laden, but a joke whose apparent humor rested on said retired senior British diplomat “accidentally” confusing the names “Obama” and “Osama.” I gaped, speechless and outraged, at my friends while the room erupted into laughter around us. A few minutes later, when someone in the room was, honest to God, “sconced” for supposed “offenses” including speaking in a foreign language, the compartments I’d built in my mind to rationalize my enjoyment of the idea of a black-tie dinner came crashing down. I could see, clearly, why events like these are a big part of the access and equality problems Oxford and Cambridge continue to have. I was embarrassed at myself for being complicit in this sort of nonsense, and embarrassed on behalf of a college and to some extent (though less so) a university that should really, in this day and age, know better.

Like so many things I have been part of since coming to Oxford, all this is not really unique to Oxford, Oxbridge, or England. Elite universities are elite universities wherever you go, and there are unquestionably people in Princeton who behave the way some of the people in Trinity did last night. I have often said that it may be better to be served at table rather than having the kitchen staff hidden away behind servery counters and kitchen walls as they are in the halls at Princeton, just as it may be better to have your bins emptied by someone who comes into your room, whom every morning you need to have a conversation with and whose name you need to know—in Princeton, where the bins are emptied at six in the morning, I have never been awake to ask the name of the person who empties mine. And just because at Trinity displays of wealth and privilege are events that anyone can attend does not mean that the ones that occur at Princeton behind the walls of eating clubs or in the rooms of fraternity, sorority, and certain student organization members are any less insidious. I have been fortunate in finding friends at Princeton who don’t buy into this nonsense, just as I have at Trinity, but the absurdities of last night’s dinner, and the culture shock of my first Guest Night, take me back to the inferiority I felt in my first semester at Princeton, when I was acutely aware that I was not as suave or as smooth-talking as my fellow members of certain student organizations who came from money and had been to prep school. Elite universities are elite universities wherever you go, and if on the one hand that means that once you’ve learned the rules of academia you’re set, it also means that you will find these ugly underbellies wherever you go too. The best thing I can say for the rest of the halls of privilege is that I have never in my life heard anyone who holds academic power say anything as tasteless while speaking in an official capacity as what the President of Trinity said last night, nor do I come from a university culture where faculty and administrators are so obviously complicit in and present at their students’ excesses.

But where does that leave us? Well, it leaves me having to make the awful confession that for all this, I still get a kick out of dressing up like a woman and drinking champagne, and that I would do it again, especially if it were in an environment where I could more readily forget about the ugliness of the display of wealth and privilege. And it also leaves me thinking back to a late, humid New Jersey night a year ago, at the end of the weekend of Reunions that is Princeton’s most grandiose display of money and privilege, when I sated the nausea produced by the parade of alumni classes and their mass consumption of the second-largest annual alcohol order in America by dancing to Madonna in a dark basement with my friends. After Reunions, I got my Princeton back by going to the LGBT alumni’s party, the last event of the weekend. And it wasn’t so much that it was teh gayz, as it was people I knew and loved, and songs that a cultural tradition I adore and respect has adopted as anthems of not-belonging, of survival, and of pride. I will never forget the glowing realization on the face of one of my friends, newly come out, as he realized that he was in a room full of people who, like him, knew all the words to “Like a Prayer”—that, for reasons greater than this, he wasn’t alone. Whether I myself ever participate in Reunions as an alumna, the Princeton that can do that is the Princeton I want to remember.

And so it was late last night, after the MCR gala, when my friends and I with a sense of escape betook ourselves to a gay bar and danced until after 3 in the morning. The air humid after the first rainfall in weeks, all of us dancing as if for our lives in a dimly-lit room permeated by flashing colored lights, gave me back my university experience, my sense of what it means to be a young person, my self-constructed, adopted cultural compass. The DJ played “It’s Raining Men” that night, a song that recalls for me the youthful glee of dance-party protests against the National Organization for Marriage, of road trips up and down I-95, of seeing Martha Wash perform it at Pride that fateful summer in Washington, DC. There are no gay bars in Princeton. There is no reason I would ever have to wear black tie there. But turning my face to the ceiling and laughing aloud while shouting the words to my favorite gay anthem, still in my ankle-length dress and my jewelry and my high-heeled pumps, I felt a powerful sense of continuity. We make our own worlds, our own communities, our own senses of ownership and control. We adopt our own anthems—whether the solidarity stems from the sentiments of the Internationale or those of “I Will Survive.” Like drag queens, like the great Harlem ball culture, we can, if we wish, all make opulence and glamor into something we can understand, own, and be part of.

And really, I suppose that’s the point: there is nothing evil in wearing a dress, in having a fancy meal, in playing game-like by the rules of a kind of class culture that shouldn’t properly have a place in modern-day Britain (or America). Because simply by doing and living we can all invert, subvert, and parody these conventions until they are something which we find ourselves capable of delighting and glorying in. I had my stereotypically Oxonian debauched formal evening. I played the game. But it is the sight of half a dozen of my friends, faces glowing, bowties undone and dresses askew, all of them shouting “Hallelujah, it’s raining men!”, that I hope to remember for years to come.

Autobiographical Interlude; or, In Which We Continue to Complicate the It Gets Better Narrative

I have been wanting to write a very academic post about the so-called “uncensored” Dorian Gray, an essay by Carlo Ginzburg from a 1980 issue of History Workshop Journal, Freud, postmodernism, the AIDS crisis, and the homoerotic literary tradition. There’s an outline sitting on my desktop, but I have been tired from churning out essays and painstakingly revising the present iteration of the Symonds project, and haven’t been able to marshal my resources. But I have, of course, as always, been thinking. I watched the new episode of Doctor Who tonight, and so I have been thinking about timelines, and my own timeline, and past and present and historical moments and change over time. Maybe I have been thinking about those things because I am a historian, too. Hey, maybe that’s why I feel so drawn to Doctor Who.

But I have been thinking about the strange colliding time-collapsing feeling I had when I saw Symphony in White, No. 1 in the V&A a couple weeks ago, and I have been thinking that term, officially, starts tomorrow, and I find myself realizing that two years ago, the last time I spent some number of weeks reading and writing and thinking on my own outside of an academic term, it was in Washington and I was learning how to believe in beauty. I grew so much that summer—I spent my days with myself, but I grew outside myself. So, too, do I find myself looking back on the past seven weeks spent mostly with my interior monologue (which has developed a disconcerting habit of impersonating Symonds), and being grateful for how I saw the daffodils and the crocuses bloom, and how I took long walks by the river, and how I came to love Oxford with a hurting feeling I know does not wrench my gut for just any love. In these seven weeks I went to Ireland and Scotland, and I went to London, and I made some awesome new friends, and spent time with some awesome old ones (academia: small place), and some of my favorite people in the world came to visit me from the other side of the Atlantic. Yet all the same, how have I grown? I have grown in eight- or nine-hour days in the Upper Reading Room, locked in passive-aggressive fights about whether to keep the window open with the English dons who sit near me in the southeast corner by the nineteenth-century literature reference collection, and reading my way into the mentalité of Oxford 150 years ago. I have grown in the heady enthusiasm of making discoveries, of cutting pages and discovering folios of manuscript material. I have grown in the meals of ever-increasing complexity and variety I have cooked for myself, and in the late nights when I ask the Symonds in my mind what it would mean to him to know that there are gay bars in Oxford today. (I still don’t know how he would react to this information, and I think that if I did I would have a much better JP than I do now.) I have grown because spending so much time alone is always an experiment: when I was in Washington, the interior monologue that led me to bookshops and to Pride and finally, pivotally, to the National Gallery shifted my sphere away from politics, and found for me the compass that guides my life today. I came back to Princeton and I picked a major. I came back to Princeton and I applied to Oxford. I came back to Princeton and I started to talk to my mentors about grad school. I wrote my Oxford application and I saw in it, with its personal statement and writing sample and recommendations, the echo of a grad school application. I went to the information sessions and talked to my friends who know from Oxford and heard how few class hours there are, how much of the work is my own. I learned I would have seven weeks between terms to put to good use on my own. I said to myself that I would cross the ocean, and then I would know whether it would be safe to leave me to my own anxieties, aspirations, and interior monologue for six to eight years, and perhaps the rest of my life.

Today was the last day before the start of the second, and last, term. Today the weather could not have been more perfect, and today I set out bright and early on a charity-shop crawl in search of a dress, because this is Oxford and I am going to a black-tie dinner next weekend, and if I am going to play the part of someone who goes to black-tie dinners, I am going to play by the rules. But before I found a great dress, some hours later, I happened by serendipitous accident into the best secondhand bookshop, and perhaps the most secret bookshop, in all of Oxford. It’s no Oxfam—you won’t find a book there for under £5. But you will find the third volume of Symonds’ Renaissance in Italy, the one on The Fine Arts. And you will find W.H. Mallock’s The New Republic, in lovely early-twentieth-century leather binding. And you will tell yourself that it is simply absurd to spend too much money on the collected works of Pater when the collected works of Pater will not fit in your suitcase. And you will ask for the first time in your life to please see that book behind the locked glass door, because you read the word “Ionica” on the binding and you know it’s one of of a very rare edition of William Johnson Cory’s “Uranian” verse, which was for Symonds a key pinpoint in the homoerotic literary tradition. And the shopkeeper will watch eagle-eyed as you flip through the gilt-edged pages and take in the details; and as your eyes widen when you realize that the label with the Eton crest identifying the Ionica as a prize book is inscribed to someone with the same name as the name on the flyleaf of the Symonds you’re anxiously clutching. And you will buy the Symonds and the Mallock and step out into the sunshine, wondering if you can justify charging the £65 Ionica to your research grant.

For after all, dear reader, it is the last day of seven weeks spent talking to Symonds. And (before finally going back to shopping just at the end of business hours and finding an ideal dress at the last possible minute) I spent hours trying to discover the identity of the man who wrote his name on the flyleaf of my new possession (no fruit has been borne yet, but I haven’t given up). And I spent the rest of the day in a café making my cappuccino last for hours and marking up a JP draft. In the long-shadowed, golden-glowing evening, I mixed fresh vegetables in with my pasta sauce out of a jar, and I watched the new Doctor Who, and wrote a blog post in which I, appropriately, sent tense consistency all to hell. And now I find myself called to reflect. What did I learn over my Easter vacation, dear reader? I learned that the world’s great college towns defy the expectations of minor nineteenth-century men of letters and grow up to have gay bars. And I learned that little girls defy their own self-sabotaging, anguished expectations and grow up to have research grants.

It Gets Better: brought to you by long, hard days of writing an 11,500-word essay in the sweet spring air of the city of dreaming spires. By dint of work and purpose, we make our lives into the very things we dream of inhabiting.

QOTD (2011-04-03)

Some Symonds well-suited to the fourth Sunday in Lent, from Walt Whitman: A Study:

Nor does the supreme doctrine of redemption and self-sacrifice lose in significance if we extend it from the One, imagined a pitiful and condescending God, to all who for a worthy cause have endured humiliation, pain, an agonizing death. Not to make Christ less, but to make him the chief of a multitude, the type and symbol of a triumphant heroism, do we think of the thousands who have died on battlefields, in torture chambers, at the stake, from lingering misery, as expiators and redeemers, in whom the lamp of the divine spirit shines clearly for those who have eyes to see.

In Oxford I see cross-topped spires from my bedroom window, I hear chapel bells sound the hour, and I could, if I wished, go to choral Evensong every day of the week. I do go once a week, though, and I go because it helps me to understand how Symonds could write sentences like these, how the straight and unyielding spires of Oxford could and can be bent to the needs of those who think better in layers of metaphor than they do in the uncompromising and unambiguous recitation of Anglican doctrine.

I have been thinking about it, and I don’t think I will go to Christian services when I’m back in the States. I’ve realized that to me Evensong is about the same things that my Symonds project is about: about the romance of Oxford’s “forsaken beliefs” and “impossible loyalties,” and about having it both ways, being simultaneously faithful and apostate, cheerfully Hellbound and yet making a slow Pilgrim’s Progress toward the Celestial City all the same.

In the Interests of Accountability; or, Lost Causes, the Good, and the Beautiful

Since I last wrote here, the first of my two Oxford terms came to an end. In the past two weeks, I’ve enjoyed visits from my father and from some friends from Princeton, I’ve made lots of new friends at Trinity, particularly among the graduate student body (or, as they say here, the MCR), and I’ve switched academic gears in a big way. From churning out one or two eight-page essays a week, I’ve gone to major big-picture conceptualizing of my senior thesis, and starting work on what will one day be the first chapter of it, my spring JP. In little moments snatched between languid walks across Port Meadow, harried sightseeing in London, and several pints of bitter, I wrote a five-page proposal for my thesis, which I’m submitting as a part of my applications for summer research funding. As I emailed drafts back and forth with my adviser, I became terrified by the enormity of the project I am taking on; as I walked miles through the green spaces of Oxford and rode miles underground across London, my mind drew scary blanks on how I would start to write my JP, which is not as far along as my fall JP was this time last semester. The last of my guests left this afternoon and college has emptied itself eerily out for the vacation. I went to Tesco this afternoon and bought £15 worth of ingredients I can make into meals with a single saucepan and a hob in the JCR kitchen. I dithered: uploading pictures to Facebook, catching up on magazines and iPlayer, writing letters to the editor. And it wasn’t until 10pm, after I’d submitted my first thesis funding application and dithered in front of the Victorian literature shelves in the college library, the dinner dishes glaring at me from the washbasin in my room, that I realized I needed a plan, and a method by which I can remain accountable to it, if I am to have a draft of my JP in to my adviser by May 1. (“A draft?!” I hear you say, Princeton juniors? Yes: because I am doing a JP on top of a full Oxford courseload, and because Oxford’s academic year goes well into June, I have a month-long extension.)

And so here, for the whole internet to read, it is: tomorrow I will return to the Upper Reading Room of the Bodleian for the first time in two weeks, write some deadlines and benchmarks for the next six weeks in my diary, and start to make a skeleton outline of my JP. A week from tomorrow, I am going on holiday to Ireland for a week, but by then I will have read all my primary sources, and a reasonable number of secondary ones. When I return, I will have just over three weeks to pull together 30 pages on three themes in the intellectual background and Victorian cultural context of John Addington Symonds’ writing on homosexuality—yes, that’s a week on Henry Sidgwick, T.H. Green, and ethics; a week on Benjamin Jowett, Matthew Arnold, and Hellenism; a week on Walt Whitman, democracy, and the British fantasy of America; and a few days in which to hash out my critical space with respect to the historiography and to draw some conclusions about what is innovative about Symonds’ theory of male homosexuality in his late-Victorian context. Frankly, dear reader, I am terrified.

But after eight weeks at Oxford, I can just about manage to write at least a draft of an intellectually interesting essay in a week, and I know how fortunate I am to have the vacation to focus on only this, and a month after next term starts to revise and make it good. I know how fortunate I am that when writer’s block strikes, I can leave the Bod and walk through the Parks and think, “Symonds would have known this path.” I know how fortunate I am that I can go in the same day to the University Museum and to hear Evensong sung in Christ Church Cathedral, and can think about how much Symonds and others like him struggled to reconcile the conflicting identities of those two very different Gothic buildings.

I have been in England ten weeks, now, and I am starting to miss Princeton—or, to be specific, Rocky College and my Princeton family—desperately. I am thinking daily about the friends who are growing and changing every day without me to see them do so, and the friends who will leave Princeton in June whom I worry I will never see again. Following the life of my home for three years on the Internet, I come across gems like this which make me proud to represent my university (and more particularly my own small community and university family) abroad, and which far outweigh the number of times I have had to explain to a new acquaintance here in Trinity College that Princeton makes admissions decisions based on academic merit as well as on athletic ability or legacy status. I did not think that I would find myself identifying with Princeton even in another academic institution. I have always thought of myself as someone who lives in and is defined by the culture of universities, but I did not realize that one University with a capital U would loom so large in a life with so much academic peregrination still ahead of it.

But even as I nearly cried putting my friends from Princeton on a bus to Heathrow this afternoon, I knew it was right for me to come to Oxford. Reasons of cultural diversity and realizing that Princeton really is, as someone once said to me, the Disney version of Oxford aside, I could not have written as good a JP as I am now writing if I had never seen the place where Symonds’ intellectual and cultural compass was formed. I am discovering (with thanks due to some key observations from my adviser and from my Victorian history tutor this term) that the primary problem I have with much of the existing work on Symonds is that it does not invest itself fully in what it meant to be and to think like a Victorian, Oxford-educated intellectual. It does not adjust its outlook to a very narrow circle of men (and the very occasional women) preoccupied with large-looming questions about how to live a good life in a modernizing, industrializing, capitalizing, secularizing age—questions which we oh so (too?) rarely consider as vital as someone like Symonds must have done. We in the 21st century can’t really know what it was like to think like a Victorian, I suppose, but we can get flashes of realization when the Magdalen choir sings the Magnificat or when we see Ruskin’s watercolors up close in the Ashmolean Print Room or when we walk out along the Isis into countryside that is literally the stuff of poetry. When one lives in Oxford one sees how someone like Symonds, or someone like Arnold, or someone like Ruskin, or someone like Pater, or someone like Wilde (for they were all such different individuals and thinkers), built an aesthetic compass, and rendered it so central to their cosmologies that the pursuit of happiness or of knowledge or of beauty, as well as the building of a better world, seemed possible. In Oxford, where dreaming spires reached to Heaven and no dark Satanic mills could pour coal dust into the sky, the search for “sweetness and light,” the quest “to burn always with [a] hard, gem-like flame,” the mission “to live with steady purpose in the whole, the Good, the Beautiful,” the possibility that one might be able—as Wilde wrote in “The Soul of Man Under Socialism”—”to live,” seemed realizable. To Symonds, who died before the Wilde trials sounded out loud and clear all sorts of appellations for the love that dare not speak its name, it was worth dedicating one’s life to a particular strain of humanistic inquiry whose overarching purpose was to develop a cultural and literary history and a set of ethical precepts governing what he was the very first person to call male homosexuality. And would he have done so had he not learned to think in the “home of lost causes”? Back here in the present in a room on Broad Street, the Trinity bells are sounding midnight, and I can’t help but think that without Oxford so many things—from Symonds’ first forays into academia to mine—would have been quite impossible.

Intellectual Curiosity, Hope, and Charity; or, The Humanist’s Progress

In my memories, my childhood of not-belonging is characterized, above all, by my atheism. Raised in a household which celebrated Christmas with Santa, Easter with the Easter Bunny, Hannukah with candles, and Passover with a heavily edited Haggadah that removed all mention of God, I had no qualms about announcing to a series of classmates and teachers in a series of schools in reasonably conservative and religious areas of America that I did not believe in God. I remember shocking and awing third-grade classmates who told me I was surely going to Hell, a sixth-grade English teacher who didn’t understand how anyone could be “just coldly rational,” and person after person after person who denied the possibility of my living a just and moral and good life without faith, who wondered why, although I sometimes stood and sometimes did not for the Pledge of Allegiance, I never, ever said the words “under God.” I was bullied for a variety of reasons at school—my cleverness, my unorthodox (read: weird) dress sense, as time went on my gender nonconformity. But above all I can remember having to put forth complex intellectual arguments to defend my atheism to all comers, long before I was in high school. As history tells us, there is seemingly nothing so threatening to many people as to tell them you deny their articles of faith—and I can attest to this from a life of being told I was going to Hell, not for my sexuality or my gender nonconformity, as the “It Gets Better” videos might suggest, but for my atheism.

Of course, though, I was raised an academic brat in an upstandingly, old-fashionedly humanist family which always, always educated. When I was a child I read the illustrated Children’s Bible along with D’Aulaire’s Greek Myths and illustrated versions of the creation myths of various non-western cultures; as I grew older, I came to cherish the intricacies of a Bach fugue or a stanza of Miltonic verse, to respect a tradition which seeks “to justify the ways of God to man” even if I felt as though I could never understand the intellectual position which might compel a Milton, or a Bach, to do so. I entered churches for concerts, played my violin and viola in a string quartet for weddings. I went to bar and bat mitzvahs. Once, I attended a Catholic funeral mass; another time, I stood at a graveside and heard a priest intone the Anglican funeral liturgy. Through the rituals of life in which people are born, reach adulthood, marry, die, I have come to have the familiarity we all have with the words of ceremonial religious services. I have phonetically memorized the Hebrew of some of the primary Jewish prayers; I can say the Our Father in English and in Latin. And because I am an intellectual historian, I have become conversant in the language of spirituality and spiritual doubt, and have come to have the greatest sympathy with those of my Victorians who sought to reach an understanding of God, the Church, and Jesus’ teachings that would allow them to integrate science and faith, or else to reach an understanding of virtue and morality and the call to live a good life that is both virtuous and moral without needing to use Jesus’ death and resurrection as a guiding light.

Because I am a visitor in Oxford, I have been going to many Christian services, to see inside the college chapels and the city churches and to hear the music, which is of an impressively high standard. Because I am studying more than anything else the intellectual history of this university community, and the time in which it became a secular rather than a faith-based place of intellectual inquiry, I have been paying close attention to aspects of the services beyond the architecture and the singing. I have been engaging intellectually with the language of the liturgy, and I have been mentally and spiritually joining in when the priest intones a prayer for peace, or for the continued health and good fortune of the university community. I have been noticing a combination that speaks to the recent history of religion in this university: the High-Churchiness of the pageantry, the vestments and the singing and, once in a while, the incense; but also the fact that every sermon on a text is a practice of close-reading, a search for unapparent meaning that takes as its guiding force the understanding that, as Benjamin Jowett once controversially contended, the Bible is a literary text, which speaks in the language of metaphor. One does not need to be a Christian to hope for peace, and one does not need to be a Christian to take lessons of individual self-development from the beautiful words of the King James Bible. One knows one is not a Christian when one stands quietly while those around one intone their belief in the Trinity, in Jesus’s death and resurrection and future return, in the promise of salvation, in Heaven and in Hell; one knows one is not a Christian when one sits quietly while those around one move to kneel before a priest who places a piece of wafer and a drop of wine in their mouths, which we are to understand, either literally or metaphorically, as the body and blood of the God-man who died to save us. One knows, full well, that one is not a Christian when one finds oneself unable to make this leap of faith.

But this is Oxford, this is one of the more liberal homes of the already-liberal Church of England, and these are no longer the days of primary school, when I had no choice but to take pride in being hellbound. No one here will shun me if I come for the words and the music but not for Communion, and if I take from Jesus’ teachings the call to better oneself but only the loosest, most absolutely metaphorical understanding of the promise of salvation. No one will cast me out if I choose to say the responses to some parts of the service but not to others, and there are always more besides me—as there must always have been, to a certain extent, in these churches and chapels—who are not believers. And it is in this context that I have found myself growing up, and growing more credulous of what religion can do to supplement—though not to supplant—the moral compass of those of us who were raised with no belief in God, but who have come to believe in the goodness in all of us, calling us to be better.

It was in this spirit today that I attended the first Sunday-morning church service of my life, which I did because Philip Pullman was giving the University Sermon at the University Church of St Mary the Virgin. The University Sermon is of longstanding tradition in this university which began life as a seminary; in the 1820s, Newman launched his theological career from the St Mary’s pulpit. It is thus remarkable that the leaders of the church and of the university had invited a noted atheist to preach to them, and it was worth attending this service only for that reason: to watch a secular-humanist sermon mingle with prayers of faith, and to watch the vicar come rather awkwardly to the lectern after Pullman’s sermon to say the prayers that the preacher is traditionally meant to, but in this case would not, say. But the thing is, Pullman’s sermon was only out of joint with the liturgy if you (as, I imagine, many do) consider the core of religious worship to be faith in God. No doubt that faith is the reason why many of the people who come to St Mary’s every Sunday do so—but when Pullman, in white tie and bands and academic gown, expressed his skepticism about the meaning of faith, it seemed right and proper and in the best traditions of the theological history of Oxford that he should do so. When he spoke about the cardinal virtues; about the greatness of Charity, or Love; about the faith in the laws of physics as a more sense-making, but no less inductive, humanist’s faith; about the necessity of a superstructure, like concert orchestras and institutions of learning and the National Health Service, which can help us to enshrine virtue in our society; and about, finally and gloriously, the proposal that Intellectual Curiosity replace Faith in the canon of virtues; I was in awe, grinning and nodding right along, even though I knew that no one around me was seeming quite so physically engaged, and I found myself wondering if it was all right to express such enthusiasm in church. Pullman began by stating his lack of belief in God, the incongruity of his appearance before the Oxford congregation; but by the end of his piece, in the course of which he’d cited as higher authority not only the Bible, but also William James and John Ruskin, he’d articulated a vision of morality, in adhering to which I think we all ought to consider ourselves good and Godly.

Though it seems as if St Mary’s posts the texts of past University Sermons on its website, it of course has not posted Pullman’s yet. So I hope you will take my word for it when I say that the shape of Pullman’s speech seemed to me to resemble so much my own trajectory of religious understanding, from up-front apostate to Ruskinian; from rhetorical rationalist to believer in the value of good works. Though this belief has been enhanced recently in light of all the Victorianism, all the Oxonianism, I have been absorbing, and all the Anglican services I’ve sat through and in my own funny way believed in, I think it was set in motion the day I matriculated at Princeton, just shy of two and a half years ago. That day in the middle of September the freshman class filled the University Chapel and heard a service which had all the form of a religious convocation (bespeaking the seminarian history of my home university, too!), but consisted of a mix of prayers, blessings, and songs of which as many were secular as were grounded in a religious tradition of a belief in God or gods. I shall never forget that, instead of the prayer to God which graces every Oxford service, asking Him to protect the university, its faculty and its students, the Princeton Dean of the College, Nancy Malkiel, offered up a prayer to Wisdom, asking that loosely pagan deity to grant to that university all the good that is done by the spirit of teaching and learning and (in the words of Pullman) intellectual curiosity. I think it was at that moment that I became interested in, and in a certain sense convinced by, the language and the form of a religious tradition to help us to understand the good, the true, and the beautiful—whether they inhere in God or in ourselves.

It is for this Platonic reason that, when Pullman said somewhere in the middle of his sermon that he considered himself something of a Greek or Roman pagan, I smiled as broadly as I did. For Pullman was drawing on a tradition I have known since I read D’Aulaire’s alongside the Children’s Bible; which I sensed I could consider myself a part of when I was moved for days, and for years, afterwards by Dean Malkiel’s prayer to Wisdom; which I have become conversant in since reading Matthew Arnold’s articulation of the relationship between Hellenism and Hebraism; and which (it must be said!) characterizes John Addington Symonds’ vision of an ethics given us by ancient Greece, with which we can live in accordance in our own times, adopting as our creed Goethe’s exhortation, Im Ganzen Guten Schönen/Resolut zu leben, “To live with steady purpose in the whole, the Good, the Beautiful.”

So Philip Pullman is a Hellenist, and so am I; if Pullman calls himself an unbeliever, then so am I. I still cannot, and have no desire to, make my leap of faith in the direction of the man in the sky. But to be honest, I don’t think either of us are unbelievers full-stop. The devout Christian organizes her devotion around her faith in God; Pullman and I have a creed which calls us to revere—if not to worship—intellectual curiosity, or Wisdom. What is this but another inductive precondition for an ethical and virtuous life, another belief (we needn’t call it a Faith) in something Better?

QOTD (2011-02-12); or, Past and Present

Today’s episode of History and Morality dawned on me on an absolutely glorious sunny Saturday morning in the Upper Reading Room, as I sat at my usual desk, U95, with the dreaming spires of All Souls pricking the beams of sunlight right in my field of vision, reading Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy:

Oxford, the Oxford of the past, has many faults; and she has heavily paid for them in defeat, in isolation, in want of hold upon the modern world. Yet we in Oxford, brought up amidst the beauty and sweetness of that beautiful place, have not failed to seize one truth, – the truth that beauty and sweetness are essential characters of a complete human perfection. When I insist on this, I am all in the faith and tradition of Oxford. I say boldly that this our sentiment for beauty and sweetness, our sentiment against hideousness and rawness, has been at the bottom of our attachment to so many beaten causes, of our opposition to so many triumphant movements. And the sentiment is true, and has never been wholly defeated, and has shown its power even in its defeat. We have not won our political battles, we have not carried our main points, we have not stopped our adversaries’ advance, we have not marched victoriously with the modern world; but we have told silently upon the mind of the country, we have prepared currents of feeling which sap our adversaries’ position when it seems gained, we have kept up our own communications with the future….

And who will estimate how much the currents of feeling created by Dr. Newman’s movement, the keen desire for beauty and sweetness which it nourished, the deep aversion it manifested to the hardness and vulgarity of middle-class liberalism, the strong light it turned on the hideous and grotesque illusions of middle-class Protestantism, – who will estimate how much all these contributed to swell the tide of secret dissatisfaction which has mined the ground under the self-confident liberalism of the last thirty years, and has prepared the way for its sudden collapse and supersession? It is in this manner that the sentiment of Oxford for beauty and sweetness conquers, and in this manner long may it continue to conquer!

My essay this week is on how criticism and the role of the critic were gendered in Victorian Britain, and it is this critical-of-the-critics attitude I had in the back of my mind as I read the passage in Arnold. I remembered a conversation I had a few days ago with a fellow history student who told me that she couldn’t get interested in Ruskin because of the strangeness, to us today, of his relationships with young women; that, as someone who studied women’s history, she didn’t approve. Sitting in the Upper Reading Room, I remembered that it is always difficult to reconcile romance with reality, the seductive allure of the city of aquatint with the knowledge that it seemingly only was so because so many women for so many centuries were denied a place in it. When Arnold sings his hymn to Oxford, and locates culture there and in the Church and in Hellenism and in the other great institutions of Victorian homosociality, it is important to remember that there are many who are and have been excluded from the promise of perfection through “sweetness and light.”

But there’s something about sunlight that encourages optimism, and the sweetness and light in the air of the Upper Reading Room this morning caused me to remember that our human impulse to perfect ourselves and our institutions and our culture has exceeded Arnold’s intentions, because here I am doing right by my academic ancestors, the early faculty wives who fought for their Bodleian readers’ tickets before there was even any such thing as an Oxbridge women’s college, and reading about culture in their time from the vantage point of my Upper Reading Room desk. Here I am, a woman in academia with a room of my own, and trying to live by a version of “sweetness and light” that I’ve learned by carefully paying my respects to my Victorians, men and women alike. My job right now, learning to be a critic of the critics, must entail goodwill and generosity: the moral character not to overlook the faults by our measures of writers like Arnold and Ruskin, but to forgive them; to take from them and their contemporaries what they give us as decriers of Mammon and Moloch, as believers in truth and beauty, but to retain enough critical distance to know that seeing them as they really are entails realizing that they are not the apogee of the perfection they promise.

I love my Victorians despite their faults because their utopianism can transcend their own time while still retaining the values that their time caused them to hold dear. I love my Victorians because they were not perfect, but they wanted to be. I love my Victorians because they gave those of us who labor in a world changed (but not so changed) the language to say that our lives must be guided by more than material concerns, and that the fight against evil—the fight for sweetness and light—can take many forms, and can be furthered by many kinds of people.