'A Pleasing Rape': John Dennis, Music and the Queer Sublime

TY - CHAP

T1 - 'A Pleasing Rape'

T2 - John Dennis, Music and the Queer Sublime

AU - Head, Matthew

PY - 2020

Y1 - 2020

N2 - John Dennis, a founding father of the Longinian sublime in English literary culture around 1700, also wrote against male-male sodomy, then subject to moral panic, prosecution and hangings in London. This was more than coincidence: Dennis imagined the effects of the sublime on a (normatively) male reader in terms of sexual violence, ravishment and penetration. This chapter suggests a dialectical relationship between sodomy and the sublime. Rooting its argument in the critic’s homosocial literary context, classical pedigree, defence of the morality of the stage, and highly sensual theories of literary creation and reception, it unsettles the place of the sublime on the continuum of virtue and vice. Similarly, Dennis’s ambivalence towards music is explored in terms of sexual politics. A disunified and queer term in his writing, music lent penetrative force when in service to sublime literature (helping to ensure patrilinear continuity) but threatened to undo the male subject when taking the lead in Italian opera (through the performances of women and castrati). Such entertainments, Dennis warned, would lead to male-male marriages should their popularity continue. The prospects for a musical sublime in England in the lead up to Handel’s arrival were mixed.

AB - John Dennis, a founding father of the Longinian sublime in English literary culture around 1700, also wrote against male-male sodomy, then subject to moral panic, prosecution and hangings in London. This was more than coincidence: Dennis imagined the effects of the sublime on a (normatively) male reader in terms of sexual violence, ravishment and penetration. This chapter suggests a dialectical relationship between sodomy and the sublime. Rooting its argument in the critic’s homosocial literary context, classical pedigree, defence of the morality of the stage, and highly sensual theories of literary creation and reception, it unsettles the place of the sublime on the continuum of virtue and vice. Similarly, Dennis’s ambivalence towards music is explored in terms of sexual politics. A disunified and queer term in his writing, music lent penetrative force when in service to sublime literature (helping to ensure patrilinear continuity) but threatened to undo the male subject when taking the lead in Italian opera (through the performances of women and castrati). Such entertainments, Dennis warned, would lead to male-male marriages should their popularity continue. The prospects for a musical sublime in England in the lead up to Handel’s arrival were mixed.

KW - gender

KW - queer theory

KW - John Dennis

KW - John Dryden

KW - G. F. Handel

KW - music

U2 - 10.1017/9781108761253.003

DO - 10.1017/9781108761253.003

M3 - Chapter

SP - 44

EP - 62

BT - Music and the Sonorous Sublime in European Culture, 1600-1880

A2 - Hibberd, Sarah

A2 - Stanyon, Miranda

PB - Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

CY - Cambridge

ER -