Victorian Afterlives: Club Culture and Homosociality
by Staff Writer Owen Ayers ‘19
CLUB, n. An association of men for purposes of drunkenness, gluttony, unholy hilarity, murder, sacrilege, and the slandering of mothers, sisters, and wives.
For this definition I am indebted to several estimable ladies who have the best means of information, their husbands being members of several clubs.
The Devil’s Dictionary, Ambrose Bierce
Walking down Pall Mall in the St. James’s neighborhood of central London could only feel so different today than it did several generations ago. In many ways, Pall Mall’s modern incarnation is a facsimile of the social cachet that it enjoyed in Victorian London during a period of very conscious class stratification, a phenomenon that helped to produce the prudish and staid atmosphere generally ascribed to Victorianism. 19th-century England saw an extraordinary corseting of its social affect, which was designed to see and be seen. Different social classes found their own outlets for the behaviors repressed by the moralizing imposed from above. While it is easy to see why the poor and disadvantaged were swept up by London’s underground drug culture, high society was forced to resort to more structured and veiled redirections of desires that were at odds with the puritanism of the times. Whereas the hard-up had opium dens, the high-up channeled their own dissolute impulses to a new institution: the social club.
Across the Atlantic Ocean, wealthy Princeton undergraduates were developing their own Pall Mall on Prospect Avenue to accommodate the eating clubs that remain the foundation of Princeton’s social life. Though these selective clubs are separated from their historical predecessors by an ocean and a century, they show remarkable similarity to them in both motivation and in practice, casting contemporary American social politics as the heir to repressive Victorian moral ideals. The club essentially was and remains the stage of a clandestine social order curated among men.
Clubs in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray
On the surface, social clubs embody orthodoxy perfectly, which is the key to their success as acceptable fronts for profligacy. For those who need a reminder, The Picture of Dorian Gray is set in late-nineteenth-century London. Its eponymous character is an attractive young bachelor seduced by the hedonism of an aristocrat, Lord Henry. Basil Hallward, a conventional artist who nonetheless entertains the company of the dandy Lord Henry, paints the latter’s beautiful protégé Dorian. Early in the novel, we are introduced to Sibyl Vane, a talented and attractive stage actress whom Dorian makes the object of a glib romantic interlude. Her acting ability is diminished in proportion to her growing infatuation with Dorian, who could be no less interested in her. Bemoaning her limp portrayal of Juliet, Lord Henry entreats Dorian: “‘Come to the club with Basil and myself. We will smoke cigarettes and drink to the beauty of Sibyl Vane. She is beautiful. What more can you want?’”¹
This invitation introduces the club to the reader as a space for personal freedom. Other social spaces, such as cafés, cabarets, and cigar lounges, would have provided similar liberties, thus the salient provision of a club is that of a private and male space. Of course, social clubs were open only to men, which readily ensured the conditions for an inequitable social discourse. The outer pretense of high Victorian society was seldom lewd, so we may imagine that whatever decline may have occurred in the decency of these men’s conversation was legitimized by and compensated for by the private, restricted company among which such comments would have been exchanged. This setup went beyond the exclusion of women: it constituted the active discussion and fetishization of women in an environment where they could neither contribute nor defend themselves.
Although the evening at the theatre may have ended in a male tête-à-tête at the expense of a depersonalized female character, this should not be taken to mean that club culture was “about” women. Indeed, it was very much about male relationships denied an expressive conduit by the unambiguous moral constructs of the time. This peculiar type of relationship — covert yet nonsexual male bonding — is the phenomenon with which the rest of this essay, and indeed the rest of the Dorian Gray, is concerned. Late in the novel, for example, another invitation — again extended from Lord Henry to Dorian — emphasizes the kind of activity appropriate to the club milieu: “‘Let us go to the club, then. It has been a charming evening, and we must end it charmingly. There is some one [sic] at the club who wants immensely to know you […] He has already copied your neckties, and has begged me to introduce him to you. He is quite delightful […].’”² Though restricted laterally to a young man’s contemporaries, admiration of other males was a notable and quite indispensable feature of a culture heavily invested in conformity and adherence to the material vogue. This impulse was understandably hamstrung by the impropriety that a direct, unfiltered, or otherwise overeager approach would constitute. The club provided a formalized system with a standard of etiquette, a code of dress, and a threshold of social standing. By restricting and homogenizing the club population, flattering another member was simultaneously a safe form of acquiescence to social hierarchy and a roundabout self-affirmation. In this case, the young man’s infatuation with Dorian manifests sartorially and dispositionally. These two varieties of male self-expression — respectively dandyism and effeminacy, which we might today combine in the concept of the metrosexual — would not have been welcome in everyday interaction. Only the club, its inhabitation delimited by space and time, allowed the voicing and embodiment of suppressed inner feelings.
Club members, however, could hardly undertake such elaborate and manufactured male-male interactions while feigning ignorance of each other’s complicity, so some system of discipline was necessary to correct those who would overstep in their candor. Lord Henry’s uncle relates to him the story of one such reprimand when Lord Henry tells him that Dorian is the last grandson of a certain Lord Kelso. Rumor had it that Lord Kelso paid someone to publically accost Dorian’s father, a poor soldier of whom he disapproved, in an effort to disabuse his daughter of her feelings for him. This situation differs obviously in many respects from the type of relationship encouraged between Dorian and his imitator: Lord Kelso does not directly interact with another man; the relationship is disparaging rather than complimentary; there is no homosexual undertone whatsoever. However, both scenes reflect social situations with markedly Victorian character. Both Dorian’s admirer and Lord Kelso’s son-in-law represent threats to the broader concept of sexual normalcy that are related to club culture.
In this latter instance, Lord Kelso exercises the power accorded to him by his status to try to thwart what he saw as an inappropriate relationship, this in defense of the social status quo, typifying both the indirect moralizing and the cultural hierarchy of Victorianism. As for the other social pretenses described thus far, the consequences play out in the club: “‘The thing was hushed up, but, egad, Kelso ate his chop alone at the club for some time afterwards.’”³ Importantly, the rebuke comes not in the form of confrontation, but in a temporary withdrawal of cordiality. Like the rules of conduct, those of discipline are — literally — unspoken. It is worth noting that this ending to his uncle’s story does not surprise Lord Henry at all, who continues the conversation by remarking on Dorian’s great beauty — inherited from his mother — and his status as a wealthy, desirable bachelor. The entire exchange was removed from the original edition, released serially in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine the year before its collated publication, as part of an editorial sanitization of any content deemed too overtly sexual, especially homosexual.
Such chastisements could only be transient, lest they deter men from participating in club culture at all. The social indemnity of the club depended on toleration of departures from accepted behavior that would have been denounced outside its walls, even though open acknowledgement of this pretense would have certainly led to ostracization. Club life is centered around this duality, the two halves of which constitute a hallmark phoniness or fakeness. Take, for example, fellow elites’ cautious acceptance of Dorian:
Even those who had heard the most evil things against him, and from time to time strange rumours about his mode of life crept through London and became the chatter of the clubs, could not believe anything to his dishonor when they saw him. He had always the look of one who had kept himself unspotted from the world. Men who talked grossly became silent when Dorian Gray entered the room. There was something in the purity of his face that rebuked them. His mere presence seemed to recall to them the memory of the innocence that they had tarnished. They wondered how one so charming and graceful as he was could have escaped the stain of an age that was at once sordid and sensual.⁴
Dorian’s peculiarity appears widely understood within his social circles, and implicit in his unusual “mode of life” is a certain homosexual tendency. Yet shallow physical beauty, taken as an imprimatur of more substantive quality, suffices for the men: it perfectly replicates the æsthetic front of the club itself in that it conceals an internal salacity assumed from the outside to be definitionally unfeasible. The use of the word “unspotted” is particularly clever, as it neatly conveys two distinct qualities: that of being unblemished and that of being unseen. The convergence of these two states — irreproachability and privacy — defines the self-contradiction of the club. Its members see themselves reflected in Dorian, and in him the dueling inclinations of sin (the stain) and purity (its detergent) that came to typify the Victorian moral struggle.
The seeming contradiction between the desire to be seen and the need to be unseen is frustrating, unless two things are kept in mind: first, that contradiction is the cornerstone of club life, and second, that being seen and unseen are goals on different scales. This dichotomy is the complement to “seeing and being seen,” which takes place out on the street, on the walk down Pall Mall — or Prospect Avenue — to one’s club. This pair of activities has behind it a pair of compulsions — the aforementioned desire and need — which are, stated in full, the desire to be seen by the club and the need to be unseen by the outside world. This selfish state seems curiously mirrored in Wilde’s description of Dorian’s fashion⁵:
And, certainly, to him Life itself was the first, the greatest, of the arts, and for it all the other arts seemed to be but a preparation. Fashion, by which what is really fantastic becomes for a moment universal, and Dandyism, which, in its own way, is an attempt to assert the absolute modernity of beauty, had, of course, their fascination for him. His mode of dressing, and the particular styles that from time to time he affected, had their marked influence on the young exquisites of the Mayfair balls and Pall Mall club windows, who copied him in everything that he did, and tried to reproduce the accidental charm of his graceful, though to him only half-serious, fopperies.⁶
Dorian takes his sartorial choices somewhat seriously, though certainly not as seriously as his admirers, the “young exquisites” who are clearly all male. Æsthetic excellence is understood to compensate for various moral or social shortcomings on the part of the wealthy man. Although Wilde presents this rather obviously, as the entire novel gainsays any relationship between morality and beauty, most instances that exemplify this point take place in clubs or in relation to club life. A new external image of the Victorian male made to be praised by exclusively male contemporaries, the club stands in for morality where there is none to be found.
Crucially, it is the relationship of morality and beauty as structured by the club that most roundly characterizes Wilde’s novel. Dorian’s beauty is paramount, for the plot hinges on his immoral and amoral use of it to his advantage, and this value placed on an outward æsthetic used to conceal an inner defect is corollary to the club life in which he indulges. Wilde makes this parallel most obvious through a question asked by Hallward, Dorian’s eventual victim:
But you, Dorian, with your pure, bright, innocent face, and your marvellous untroubled youth — I can’t believe anything against you. […] and when I am away from you, and I hear all these hideous things that people are whispering about you, I don’t know what to say. […] Why is it that so many gentlemen in London will neither go to your house or [sic] invite you to theirs? […A man] said that you might have the most artistic tastes, but that you were a man whom no pure-minded girl should be allowed to know, and whom no chaste woman should sit in the same room with. I reminded him that I was a friend of yours, and asked him what he meant. He told me. He told me right out before everybody. It was horrible! Why is your friendship so fatal to young men?⁷
As Hallward becomes more and more attuned to Dorian’s flaws, his response to them becomes increasingly pointed. This despairing soliloquy incorporates all of the elements that the novel has incubated in Dorian, but also in the club: beauty, presentational immaculacy, ugliness of character, and sociopolitical moralizing, all suffused with (homo)sexual overtones. Dorian is the perfect protagonist to personify all of these elements, particularly in versions before the purge of all objectionable — i.e., (homo)sexual — material. However, even the unedited version lacks any description or lewd acknowledgment of homosexual acts or behaviors. Any such allusion is either woven seamlessly into Wilde’s elegant prose or softened and obscured by its relation to the social discourse so vital to the novel’s context. We may insofar characterize this extrapolation of Dorian’s character to the institution of the club as a significant instance of homosociality.
Homosociality
Gender theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s mid-1980s critical text Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire precipitated a spate of works exploring queer theory through literary criticism. Sedgwick opens with an explanation that the phrase “homosocial desire” must further be qualified with “male” because the ambit of sexual socialization for men is disarticulated from asexual male-male bonding in a way completely antithetical to female-female interaction in the modern Occident. In other words, whereas mutually positive interactions between females are more ambiguously platonic or amorous and are less plagued by connotations of homosexuality, the same tenor of interaction between men can take forms that depend on, or conversely disavow, homophobia.⁸ To the degree that this differentiation is due to the inequitable availability of social capital in the forms of gender and class, the diglossia of male and female homosociality must be imputable to gradations in these social markers. For Sedgwick, male homosociality holds across relationships with power dynamics and emotional valences as variable as friendship, companionship, and mentorship, yet the indispensable characteristic persists: male homosociality, which is not explicitly homosexual, is only and always the result of routing frustrated or thwarted desires through women as unwanted proxies in elaborately performative social behavior.⁹
To be clear, Sedgwick did not select the cohort of mid-eighteenth-century to mid-nineteenth-century English novels as the analytic setting for her argument because it allowed her to create a “male-homosocial literary canon” — it already was one.¹⁰ It should thus come as no surprise that she provides a great deal of commentary on Oscar Wilde, both a homosexual and a writer. Like many of his main characters, Wilde himself embodied “wit and ‘sexualism’ as referentially volatile signifiers of aristocratic privilege” and acted as “an interpreter of aristocratic culture to the middle class […] with a loss of interest in the political fate of real women.”¹¹ Coetaneous with the first erosions of traditional aristocratic power were the development and recognition of the gay aristocrat, which no doubt contributed to Dorian Gray’s repute as “a handbook of gay style and behavior.”¹² Homosociality incorporates Dorian’s eschewal of all things non-æsthetic — whether moral, political, or otherwise — and further links this æstheticism to those other components of social station, namely gender and class.
The social affect of male homosociality differed substantially according to class. Sedgwick notes that aristocrats exercised this attribute by involving “bohemians and prostitutes” in a hierarchical context with strong connotations of “effeminacy, transvestitism, promiscuity, prostitution, continental European culture, and the arts” — all elements of club culture as portrayed or intimated in Dorian Gray, the social space created for “dissolution, at the very time when dissolution was itself becoming the (wishful?) bourgeois-ideological name for aristocracy itself.”¹³ Sedgwick doubles down on this view when she claims that the complex relationship between the novel’s three male protagonists can only be rationalized with an image of the upper-class homosexual in mind.¹⁴ Wilde and his novel serve are unusually useful in illustrating the modulatory effect of class stratification on the social aspect of homosociality in Victorian England. According to this association of the elite and the homosocial, many features of male same-sex interactions prove irrelevant to the female members of the same social class.
To this point, gender studies and anglophone literature scholar Allison Pease correctly conceives of the gentleman’s club, in Dorian’s world and in Wilde’s, as an inescapably gendered space. At once inoculated with male privilege and frequented by “morally ambiguous dandies,” the club setting distills the many incongruities inherent to the Victorian idea of masculinity.¹⁵ At a time when educated gentlemen of social repute were expected to be paragons of morality, masculinity became a social commodity in the way that purity and chastity had for women. Social clubs were the forums for the exhibition of this supposed superiority, though the exclusivity of the clubs almost always depended on a wealthy membership who very likely shaped the club around their own predilections. Elite clubs encouraged libertinism while stridently ostracizing members who were caught indulging in taboo behavior recklessly — that is, outside of the club.¹⁶ Commonness was anathema to these men because it displayed without shame the same comportment that they conspired so elaborately to conceal.
It follows that Wilde’s life, like the lives of many of his male characters, was so deeply troubling to the Victorian social establishment. Pease tidily concludes that,
If the clubs were a bastion of male camaraderie and power where sincere gentlemen congregated to enjoy their masculine privilege, infusing a shady character such as Dorian Gray into that atmosphere decentered the notion of the club as a place for honest, morally upright, heterosexual men to socialize.¹⁷
This portrait of such scandals is accurate inasmuch as we assume that to “decenter” the façade of the club is simply to vocalize the open secret that such behavior was entirely the point of the club in the first place. Characterizations of men like Dorian constitute the homosociality that the club institutionalizes, though they are not strictly reducible to it. Indeed, clubs define themselves against an element external to them. They serve as points of arrival for the homosocial male’s flight from imprisonment in the unambiguously heterosexual, family-oriented relationship that was expected of them.
The homosocial male’s obligatory dealings with females necessitated the club, and women were the social force against which the club identity was fashioned. The creation by elite men of this class-linked homosocial theatre was most important to those who were tethered to conspicuous expressions of heterosexuality, much like the young men who were forming almost identical social organizations in lockstep on the other side of the Atlantic.
Princeton University’s Eating Clubs
At the same time that gentlemen’s clubs came to dominate Victorian social life, Princeton University undergraduates were coalescing to create their own system of all-male private clubs in the mold of their English predecessors and contemporaries. The trends of social stratification and immense wealth accumulation were concentrated and amplified in Princeton’s heady social climate whose origins overlap with those of old guard, East Coast aristocracy.¹⁸ Anglophilia was and remains rampant at Princeton, which is partly a cause (and partly an effect) of its unusually high proportion of students from elite schools such as Eton and Harrow. These institutions, too, have their own aura of prestige, as well as a history of male privilege and homosocial and/or homosexual scandal, whether apocryphal or real.¹⁹ Just as many English boarding schools became colloquially known as hotbeds of sexual activity, so, too, did American ones, and both systems — which served the upper echelons of their respective societies — sent enormous numbers of students to continue their study at Ivy League universities. Princetonians founded their first six eating clubs between 1879 and 1895, all of which still operate with a desirability of reputation generally in accordance with their date of incorporation.²⁰
From the earliest days, opportunities for athletic engagement were popular features of club membership, yet they also functioned in opposition to fraternity culture. A combination of administrative disdain for fraternities and an undergraduate desire to establish formal social groups made the eating clubs a natural foil to fraternities, which, at the time, were secret societies at Princeton with small memberships.²¹ A central desire was again to see and be seen; as Princetoniana historiographer William Selden succinctly describes, clubs became increasingly interested in procuring as members “young men who were affable, gregarious, socially agreeable, involved in athletics and other extra-curricular activities; in other words, the well-rounded man who would bring luster to the club roster.”²² As competition intensified, eating clubs continually stratified the undergraduate community and created a “mysterious atmosphere” to which hopeful members aspired to be privy, a cloistered brotherhood very evocative of Victorian homosociality.²³ It did not take long for eating clubs to establish their own cachet, superseding all other associational opportunities on campus as the appropriate social center for affluent, connected men.
Princeton did not admit women as students until 1969. Eating clubs were immediately faced with the question of whether to admit women as well. Interestingly — or perhaps, as one might expect — the last three clubs to accept women were the first three clubs to be founded.²⁴ Though Selden eagerly comments that women were “readily integrated” in university and club life, he also dutifully notes that the presence of women also entailed “traumatic adjustments” to the androcentric life that had hitherto reigned.²⁵ It was 1990 before the oldest club agreed to admit women, and not by choice — twenty intervening years full of legal proceedings had kept Ivy Club stalwartly male.²⁶ The background social attitude of the 1970s and 1980s saw continued pressure on institutions of all kinds to accept, value, and protect women, so the fight to procure women membership in these social clubs was unavoidably related to women’s pursuit of personal freedom and safety. Though no allegations of impropriety were ever brought against the all-male clubs during this period, the relationship between these clubs and women was clearly implicated in changing views of women’s place in society. By the same token, clubs resist social change. A central argument in the clubs’ legal defense was a private institution’s right to choose its own membership, and the reason for not choosing women was to maintain eating clubs as male spaces free from the constraints that the presence of women would place on discourse and behavior. This view of women as oblique instruments of male homosocial bonding is in no way different than the Victorian attitude and indeed descends from it, unchanged over the century since these clubs’ inception.
Neither had the club’s function as a backstairs site for indecency evolved at all since the late nineteenth century. Selden mentions the pretense of rectitude as unironically as ever: “ […] reports of club life at Princeton [have] concentrated on aberrant activities which most alumni have abhorred, even those alumni who in their undergraduate days may have indulged in similar actions […].”²⁷ Needless to say, no formal or open approbation of inappropriate behavior could ever be offered. Like any private club or any group of young people who engage in unconventional (though perhaps not categorically immoral) behavior, everyone gladly participates while only those unlucky enough to get caught suffer the consequences. The club provides a forum for these choices, yet little protection for those whose rashness threatens the refuge that is the club.
The eating clubs are hardly radical among elite institutions in their provision of an internally consequence-free space for experimental behavior, most of which is encouraged by the presence of alcohol. While Selden paints a portrait of quotidian club life that consists chiefly of eating meals, quiet conversation, and studying, he also serviceably describes a litany of “excessive indulgences” that equally characterize the eating clubs, at least in their importance to club culture if not in their frequency.²⁸ Drinking, vandalism, and general troublemaking have historically been the chief complaints, though the presence of women in the club atmosphere saw the addition of sexual misconduct to the list. Selden then closes his dutiful section on the eating clubs’ perennial problems with a paragraph so bizarre it must be reproduced in full:
Lest the reader of this account of the upperclass eating clubs should construe that the conditions just described are singular at Princeton or that they prevail only among its upperclass club members, it should be sufficient to note that in June 1994 the Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University reported that 35 percent of the women whom it had polled on various campuses reported that they drank to get drunk, an increase from 10 percent in 1977. Regretfully the percentage is higher among college men regardless of whether they are members of clubs or fraternities; and Princeton now has both.²⁹
Why does Selden provide a statistic about women’s drinking behavior, and why would it be regretful that the men’s rate is higher? Are these bland, factual addenda to a section on collegiate behavior, or is he trying to justify or contextualize the reputation of the eating clubs — which he claims have no higher incidence of binge drinking? Certainly, Selden endeavors to remind the reader that Princeton is not unique in its students’ personal shortcomings, yet something more remains thinly veiled by this commentary. The specific reference to women and the detached tone of the writing clearly recall that, for all the progress that has been made by including women in club life, the club remains fundamentally hostile to women, occasionally physically but almost always culturally, hostile because they threaten to reshape the contours and dilute the mystique of male homosocial bonding.
Finally, Selden’s subsequent section on fraternities and sororities is a short but adequate description of the reintroduction of Greek life to Princeton. These groups were banned in the late nineteenth century but a century later enjoyed a policy of non-recognition by the university. It is no coincidence that the rise of eating clubs and their establishment as the social grounding of the undergraduate student body were coeval with the absence of fraternities from Princeton’s campus, nor is it happenstance that fraternities and sororities made a reappearance shortly after women were admitted to Princeton and its eating clubs. The late twentieth century proponents of this reinstatement were very sure to underscore that — in apparent contrast to the eating clubs — membership would not be restricted based on graduation year, nationality, socioeconomic standing, and so on, though they conveniently did not advertise that these new clubs were definitionally sex-exclusive.³⁰ Though more egalitarian than the clubs, they shared many of the key characteristics that made clubs elite arenas for homosocial experimentation: to list a few, they were same-sex, they were exclusive, and everyone from members to observers to the administration afforded them privacy. It is no surprise that in short order, there was almost complete overlap between fraternity/sorority membership and club membership (the latter completely encompassing the former), even though the number of discrete Greek organizations was greater than the number of clubs.³¹
Today at Princeton, affluent white undergraduates remain the poster children of the eating club population. While there has been an undeniable increase in racial diversity and every club seems to have roughly equal numbers of men and women, the financial barrier to membership — in other words, class selection — is still quite visible. Perhaps not as blatant but even more dominant are the holds that varsity athletics and fraternities/sororities have over club life. Even clubs that profess ambivalence regarding applicants’ campus affiliations are controlled by members and officers whose status as athletes and participants in Greek life provides them with built-in support to help them “earn” admittance. However, networking is a fairly standard method of upward mobility in modern American society; associational nepotism is openly touted as an advantage of going to an elite university. Varsity teams’ and Greek chapters’ de facto control of eating club memberships would consequently be rather uninteresting were it not for the homosocial aspects of both associational cultures that receive little public or scholarly attention but are quite well accepted colloquially. Locker room talk and grabass are ubiquitous in collegiate sports culture; athletic competition is arguably the most widespread instance of conspicuous heterosexuality; fraternities regularly engage in pseudo-homosexual hazing rituals; sororities often implement rules for rushing or date functions that moderate and modulate interactions with fraternities in ways that are actively heteronormative. The male behaviors are often rationalized by the men who engage in them as attempts to ironize or mock homosexuality, just as the complementary female behaviors are presented as voluntary adherence to a traditional system of gender politics. Though accounts of these actions are often hearsay and probably demonstrably inaccurate in some cases, these performative behaviors are unmistakable indicators of a sexual culture that discourages open male bonding while encouraging women to act in ways that facilitate the redirection of these frustrated impulses. The two most homosocially charged associations on a college campus — sports and Greek life — are the puppet masters behind eating club membership and culture. The eating clubs do not attempt to displace or complement athletics and Greek life but have instead established themselves as the apogee of Princeton’s social continuum at which the other dominant forms of homosociality converge.
***
Princeton’s established system of eating clubs is simply the most representative collegiate instance of club culture and its paraphernalia. Other universities have similar social structures (Yale’s secret societies and Harvard’s final clubs come to mind) that fill the chronological gap between boarding schools — training grounds for elite universities where elite refers to wealth as much as it does academic rigor — and country clubs, the adult zenith of American associational culture. Every one of these social institutions has been beset with rumors and accusations of misconduct as wide-ranging as misogyny, racism, classism, and corruption, yet they all maintain steady orbits in an arcane constellation of social politics — they are unspotted. Their only chance of preserving this privileged status is to unconditionally exclude those who either criticize their follies or conversely engage in them too publicly. Such was the fate of Dorian Gray, “For, while he fascinated many, there were not a few who distrusted him. He was blackballed at a West End club of which his birth and social position fully entitled him to become a member,” not unlike many wealthy and cultured Princeton undergraduates who bicker³² unsuccessfully due to their lack of affiliations on campus.³³ Dorian’s failure to adopt the masculine attributes of his era and class, most notably his lack of marriage to a beautiful wealthy woman, was cause for suspicion; the stage was set for rumors of effeminacy to complete his undoing. The behavioral analogues that today’s society expects of attractive young men are the hypermasculine affects of team athletics and fraternity membership, both of which are associational outlets that demand conformity, create socio-sexual hierarchies, and reinforce heteronormativity. The most important feature that all of these social groups have in common is their use of these strictures to mask the homosocial curiosity that binds their members, making their existence a kind of social performance art.
Importantly, the prefix of the word homosociality should not obfuscate what is fundamentally a platonic concept. The neologism is meant to simultaneously evoke and differentiate itself from homosexuality. Your interlocutor’s contention is not that social clubs are secretly gay sex societies or anything nearly so preposterous. This is mostly because if he thought as much, he would have said so, but also because the homosocial is not identical to the homosexual; indeed, any club member suspected of using the club, literally or institutionally, for homosexual exploits would surely be singled out and punished accordingly, if he had managed to get into the club in the first place. Instead, it is this very repression and the unspoken impulse against it that props up the club as a vent for inexpressible and unmentionable pursuits. The members’ thwarted desires manifest in a variety of immoderate behaviors, all of which lead back to the fundamental truth that the club tacitly endorses homosociality. Recall Ambrose Bierce’s tongue-in-cheek definition of “club” that still manages to caricature the two salient aspects of club life: male debauchery and the female role as conduits for the repercussions. His wit is less exaggerated than it reads, for all of the activities that he enumerates have doubtless transpired in or because of clubs, which breathlessly cover it all up.
Finally, the reader should note that his interlocutor is indeed a member of a fair number of social clubs, all private and surely guilty of many institutional sins (vide supra), though he has been kept out of one or two as well. He has noticed that the ease of his influence in these clubs has rather stunningly reflected his degree of conformity to the community that a given club serves. The instances in which he has been snubbed have invariably been ones where his personal expressions of masculinity or heteronormativity were not sufficiently compensatory for the nature and extent of homosocial behavior inherent to the club’s activities. The reader may thus rest assured that this correspondence seeks neither to defend nor to vilify club life, nor does it prevail upon him to renounce his club membership or seek one out. It isn’t even a criticism of elitism, which deserves a respected place in a society that theoretically judges its citizens on their merit. It merely serves to inventory the curious assortment of homosocial behaviors that invariably contour club life, yet in doing so draws upon features of class and gender theory that your interlocutor hopes will elucidate a few of the numerous ways in which modern American life — that unacknowledged Victorian afterlife — retains a much greater proportion of its ancestral priggishness than its current practitioners would concede.
References
[1] Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, ed. Michael Patrick Gillespie, 2nd ed. (W.W. Norton, 2007), 72.
[2] Ibid., 294.
[3] Ibid., 32.
[4] Ibid., 106.
[5] Wilde once quipped: “Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.”
[6] Wilde, 107.
[7] Wilde, 126.
[8] Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire, ed. Carolyn G. Heilbrun and Nancy K. Miller (Columbia University Press, 1985), 2.
[9] Ibid., 1–3, 11.
[10] Ibid., 17.
[11] Ibid., 217.
[12] Ibid., 94–5.
[13] Ibid., 172–4.
[14] Ibid., 176.
[15] Allison Pease, “Oscar Wilde Plays on Two Stages: The Club and the Home,” Reading Wilde: Querying Spaces (Fales Library, 1995), 54.
[16] Ibid., 56.
[17] Ibid., 62.
[18] William K. Selden, Club Life at Princeton: An Historical Account of the Eating Clubs at Princeton University(Princeton Prospect Foundation, 1994), 1.
[19] Pease, 55.
[20] Selden, 98.
[21] Ibid., 17.
[22] Ibid.
[23] Ibid.
[24] Ibid., 61.
[25] Ibid., 60–1.
[26] Ibid., 81, 83.
[27] Ibid., 83.
[28] Ibid., 85.
[29] Ibid., 87.
[30] Ibid., 88.
[31] Ibid.
[32] Bicker is the selection process for the competitive eating clubs; it generally entails conversations with and endorsements from current club members.
[33] Wilde, 118.
Works Cited
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