Читать книгу Side-Stepping Normativity in Selected Short Stories by Sylvia Townsend Warner - Rebecca K. Hahn - Страница 15

“Bruno” was published four years after “The Sexual Offences Act of 1967” which “decriminalised male homosexuality between consenting adults above the age of twenty-one” (“Wolfenden Report”). Up until then, homosexual acts were considered a criminal offence and punishable by law. The law was changed on account of the Wolfenden Report (“Report of the Departmental Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution”) of 1957 which recommended that “homosexual behaviour between consenting adults in private be no longer a criminal offence” and that “questions relating to ‘consent’ and ‘in private’ be decided by the same criteria as apply in the case of heterosexual acts between adults” (“Wolfenden Report on Male Homosexuality”). As Eustace Chesser recalls, the Wolfenden Report caused much controversy:

The hysterical attacks of the opponents of the [Wolfenden] Report undoubtedly echoed the indignation of a substantial part of the community. The dissidents did not merely disagree, they were infuriated. In the shrillest tones they declared that family life was in danger, and that a great barrier against depravity was being swept away. The Report was held up to scorn as the ‘Pansies’ Charter’. (14)

Despite the foreseeable backlash, the law regarding homosexuality was eventually changed and homosexual acts between “consenting adults above the age of twenty-one” were decriminalised (“Wolfenden Report”). In “Bruno” mention of the Wolfenden Report is made when Gibbie and Bruno are driving home together in the car. Warner’s treatment of this contentious report is notable in as far as she makes no attempt to polarise it. Unlike Chesser, who wrote Live and Let Live: The Moral of the Wolfenden Report (1958), from which the above quote was taken, “[…] in the hope that it will help perplexed and uncommitted members of the public to keep their heads in the storm and reach a balanced decision”, Warner shows little interest in taking a stance on the question of male homosexuality or in joining in on any cultural politics (9). Although “Bruno” deals with homoeroticism and lovers of different age groups, these two aspects do not dominate the plot. Set against this background, Warner’s story shows that the law fails to grasp the intricacies of desire, intricacies that cannot be put into straightforward language.

Bruno, who is bored and fed up with the relationship, is looking for an excuse to leave Gibbie. For this reason, he tells Gibbie that one of the domestic servants is spying on them and that their relationship is in danger of becoming exposed. To Bruno’s surprise, Gibbie remains completely unperturbed by this revelation and tells him, “‘You’re out of date. If you ever troubled to read a paper or listen to the news you’d know that all that is over and done with – small thanks to layabouts like you’” (76). Gibbie refers to the Wolfenden Report and the Sexual Offences Act of 1967 to silence Bruno and give legitimacy to their relationship. He succeeds in doing so even though in fact the 1967 Sexual Offences Act was only applicable to homosexual men over 21. This is the only instance in which the nature of their relationship is brought up in the story – not by other people in their surroundings, but by the two men themselves. Henryson’s niece, Deidre, had not been assigned to spy on Gibbie and Bruno; she had simply taken a liking to the younger man and had hoped to attract his attention by busying herself with housework in his vicinity. Bruno only uses her as an excuse to scare Gibbie.

On the one hand, the 1967 Sexual Offences Act makes homosexual acts lawful, but on the other, it creates a homosexual subject with a clearly recognisable political identity. As a result, it essentially aligns all non-heterosexual male subjects to a norm, and, by default, creates new permissible and non-permissible desires. This is one of Matt Houlbrook’s main criticisms of the 1967 Sexual Offences Act. Houlbrook notes that “[…] the ‘homosexual’ was constituted through and within broader matrices of sexual differences, defined through his distance from places, practices, and people repudiated as abject, immoral, and dangerous” (Houlbrook 243, my emphasis). Houlbrook also points out that the Sexual Offences Act excludes men whose desires deviate from the new norm. He mentions “the effeminate quean, the man driven by uncontrollable lust into the city’s abject public spaces, the workingman moving between male and female partners, the pedophile” and insists that “[…] the victory of 1957 and 1967 was achieved precisely because it deliberately excluded those unable to fulfil the requirements of respectability” (243, emphasis in the original). That is, the 1967 Sexual Offences Act effectively creates the “normal” homosexual man with “normal” desires.

At first glance, it may seem as if Warner was alluding to the Sexual Offences Act to sanction Gibbie and Bruno’s relationship. However, in an almost comical way, “Bruno” presents the 1967 Sexual Offences Act as an unwanted intrusion into people’s private lives: “After putting the car in the garage, Bruno sat with his head in his hands, thinking about luncheons at the Eblis Hotel and cursing the Wolfenden Committee as a gang of interfering old busybodies” (76). Here it transpires that “Bruno” does not celebrate the new juridical developments as a step towards equality, but considers them a further means of regulating people’s behaviour.