#imre

Outside of novels like Maurice, which had to be published many decades after it was written, I am far more used to novels from this time period and before having to code their characters as queer, dancing over the specificities. Eugenie Danglers, for example, from the Count of Monte Cristo (a mid 19th century text), is an excellent example of a character from a similar time period who is written in such a way that it would be impossible for readers from the time period to read as anything but queer, but still falls largely within coding (for those more interested in the way individuals from that time period would read Eugenie Danglars, Female Husbands: A Trans History by Jen Manion focuses on individuals who were assigned female at birth but married women and presented as men in a mixture of public and private life in the 18th and 19th centuries. It’s focused on the US and UK, but it’s an interesting and recent work of scholarship on individuals who would fall under a spectrum of identities, including trans men, lesbians, and transmasc identities, if they were alive in the present, the way they lived their own lives and their identities were understood by others in this time period).

Imre, however, through its incredibly limited print availability upon release (which I have heard to have been 500 copies?), has the incredibly opportunity of being incredibly explicit in its exploration of gay men’s identity in the very early 1900s. One of the most fascinating aspects to me what the ways it elucidates where queer men saw themselves in history. Here’s two snippets that were absolutely fascinating to me in this regard:

It’s especially interesting considering the way isolation is presented within this text. Both Oswald and Imre’s backstories and realizations of their homosexuality is accompanied by intense isolation. For Oswald, while he had another boy in his teenage years that he was in mutual love with, upon that boy’s death he was completely alone again. Imre held feelings for a man that he knew beyond a doubt would reject him. Seeing the way people in this period looked back to understand themselves as a part of a broader community was absolutely fascinating.

It’s also interesting, as in Maurice, to see the ways in which people understood sexuality in relation to the medicalization of it during this period. Both Oswald in Imre and Maurice in Maurice attempt to “cure” their homosexuality, an experience for both of them that is completely unsuccessful (which is a powerful narrative stance for the period these texts were written in). As a text, it’s incredibly interesting however to see the way this process was understood, felt, and responded to by those it impacted. So often with medical history we are limited to the texts written by the medical practitioners who write about these processes. Imre, however, though fictional, presents a gay man’s understanding and feelings towards these processes, which is just deeply interesting.

I also found it fascinating how it uses some of the same language that queer people today use to discuss the ways they must remain closeted. The use of the word “Mask,” which also famously appears in Mishima’s Confessions of a Mask, repeatedly is used. I definitely need to go looking for more academic texts on this trope’s relationship to queerness.

Reading about the author, as well, I definitely need to find time to read Psychopathia Sexualis by von Krafft-Ebing. The author references this text in other things he’s written, and I’ve also seen this text referenced in William Maxwell’s The Folded Leaf. I definitely want to do more research as well into the nuances of the different terms used, such as uranian v. similisexual v. homosexual v. dionian. There’s also a section in the novel that refers to Imre as an inborn homosexual by a psychologist v. the psychologist who decides Oswald has an obsession of a type (a distinction that the narrative itself largely dispels, arguing that both Oswald and Imre are gay in the same intrinsic way since birth), but I’d be fascinated to learn more about the way psychologists in the early 1900s distinguished these ideas.