Perverse

I've been putting off writing this post for a bit now. When I started this blog, I explained that I hoped to use the exercise of writing about George Moore and Confessions of a Young Man to jumpstart a project that had been delayed by COVID. The aim was to write up some of the ideas that I'm going to use for a general introduction to a critical edition of Confessions. And so far that has worked fine (for me) - Moore is a fascinating and interesting person and Confessions is a complex and provocative text: all kinds of influences run through it. But one of the problems holding me back has been the crafting of a logical hook upon which to hang all the different ideas and topics that I'd like to fit into the introduction.

The solution that I have in mind is to use the following passage from chapter four of Confessions:

Many are the reasons for love, but I confess I only love woman or book, when it is as a voice of conscience, never heard before, heard suddenly, a voice I am at once endearingly intimate with. This announces feminine depravities in my affections. I am feminine, morbid, perverse. But above all perverse, almost everything perverse interests, fascinates me.

The difficulty lies in articulating why or how I think this passage can provide a framework upon which to base what I want to say. I have things to say about the particular context of this passage and its general resonance within Moore's novel. And the points I want to make revolve around his use of the words 'morbid' and 'perverse'. So a bit of a linguistic excursus follows. I'll split this material into two posts. 

Walter Sickert, 'George Moore'
c. 1891 (c) Tate Galleries

One of the things that is important about those two terms is that they both acquire new meanings or nuances towards the end of the nineteenth century. I don't think that they are particular complex words, with lots of different meanings, but there is enough complexity to make them interesting. In this post, I'll discuss the word 'perverse'. In my next and final post, I'll discuss the word 'morbid' and hope that it provides a fitting place to end this series.

A major tool here is the Oxford English Dictionary, which lists five main senses for the word 'perverse': firstly 'going or disposed to go against what is reasonable, logical, expected'. This also shades into 'contrary, fickle, irrational'. A subsidiary meaning of this sense is 'adverse / untimely / unexpected', which OED illustrates by citing Charlotte Brontë's reference to 'the perverse course of events' in her novel,  Shirley (1849)).

The second meaning of perverse listed in the OED is 'Contrary to what is morally right or good; wicked, evil, debased', but this can also encompass ''contrary to an accepted standard or practice; incorrect, mistaken, wrong'. And this is where the complexity of 'perverse' comes in. The word tends to bring it with a feeling of moral or personal judgement. So, for example, when Samuel Johnson refers to 'Perverse interpretations, and..improbable conjectures' in his Preface to Shakespeare's Plays (1765), there's a sense that these judgements are not just wrong or mistaken, but somehow wilfully so - the critics are more than merely inaccurate.  

This is compounded by the third sense of 'perverse': 'obstinate, stubborn, or persistent in what is unreasonable, foolish, or wrong'. I think this confirms a sense of individual culpability that underlies the previous senses. It also reflects the roots of this word in the Latin verb 'pervertere' meaning 'to turn round / turn the wrong way' but also 'distort or misrepresent' and even 'to corrupt, lead astray, overturn, upset, subvert, ruin and destroy'.

These three senses of the word (in English) are central to what Moore is doing in Confessions and important to the narrator's description of himself as 'feminine, morbid, perverse'. As part of his self-presentation, Moore's narrator draws our attention to and, at the same times, enacts a deliberate kind of wrongheadedness. He is flaunting a refusal of conventional moral codes, but there is an element of defiance here too. 

The fourth sense of 'perverse' listed in the OED has to do with specific legal uses of the word. But the fifth and final sense of 'perverse' is very suggestive in relation to Moore. And it is the most modern sense of the word: 'That is (regarded as) sexually perverted'. The narrator's description of himself as 'feminine' is clearly important here: he strongly alludes to his rejection of conventional Victorian codes of sexual conduct and sexual identity here. Within the novel this takes the form of hints about extra-marital relationships with women; but there are also very strong hints about his physical, even erotic attraction to other men. The narrator is particularly fascinated by a fellow art-student, Marshall. They share rooms together and, at one point, the narrator even sponsors Marshall's artistic career (he becomes a kept man, of sorts).

The example given in the OED suggest that this fifth and final sense of 'perverse' was a recent development in the word's meaning at the end of the nineteenth century. The first citation it provides to illustrate it is from an issue of the North American Review published in 1891: 'What is natural in one sex appears to be most perverse and unnatural in the other'. First published in 1887, Moore's novel suggests that this meaning of 'perverse' was circulating in more and less explicit forms before that. 

The example given in the OED to illustrate this meaning of perverse indicates that it is not just strongly linked to sexual identity - it suggests to me that these new, sexual nuances were linked to contemporary developments in psychology and the science of sexuality. In terms of Moore's novel and the narrator's sexual identity, I'm thinking here of Freud's categorisation of homosexuality as 'inversion' - his sense that same sex desire was a perversion or confusion of supposedly normal forms of desire. Moore's use of the word 'perverse' in this context seems to me a way of drawing on all these things - it links up the narrator's literary tastes, with  hints about his sexual preferences and a broader sense that he deliberately seeks to rub up against the grain of contemporary moral, sexual and artistic value.

When we take this linguistic information back to the passage I started with, it's striking how the narrator of Moore's Confessions conflates the textual and the sexual ('I only love a woman or a book, when ...'). The different meanings associated with 'perverse' contribute to this. Moore positions his narrator as 'perverse' in his sexual tastes, his literary tastes and his general disposition towards morals and ethics. In doing so, it is as though he dares the reader to conflate the narrator with the author - to understand this passage as an emphatic declaration of Moore's own 'perverted' nature. And this is part of its fascinating wrongheadedness. Moore flaunts and flouts conventional literary, sexual and ethical mores, challenging the reader to criticise him. The passage anticipates in this way, the conclusion to the book which confronts 'you, the hypocrite reader' (alluding to Charles Baudelaire's use of similar terms). 

The point I'm trying to formulate here has to do with the way that the linguistic history of perverse connects what Moore is doing to contemporary society, even as he seems to confront or reject it. And I think that is built into the very structure of Confessions overall too. 

Next up - 'morbid'.