Book Review: Despised and Rejected
Aug. 22nd, 2023 04:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerA. T. Fitzroy’s Despised and Rejected is one of many books described as “the first gay novel ever published,” although as noted in the preface, it was at least thirty years too late to claim that honor. Always dangerous to claim that anything is the first X! There’s always some obscure tome waiting in the wings to prove you wrong!
However, Despised and Rejected was published in 1918, so it’s certainly an early contender to the gay novel sweepstakes. Soon after its publication it was prosecuted, technically for its pacifist themes rather than its homosexual ones, although the latter kept coming up at trial till the judge complained testily that the book wasn’t up on obscenity charges.
So what’s it about? We start with Antoinette, who has bopped through her life cheerfully getting crushes on women, with nary a thought that this might be odd in any way. Away on a visit, she meets Dennis, who soon after starts writing her passionate letters, because she has sparked something in his soul and he is hoping desperately that he can blow this spark up into a rousing flame and burn away his fearful certainty that he’s homosexual.
But instead, one night by the light of a blacksmith forge, he falls in love with a young man named Alan. Terrified of his feelings, he runs away, and also stops writing to Antoinette, because he’s terrified he might let something slip and also is simply too discombobulated to put pen to paper.
Meanwhile, the war starts, Dennis becomes a pacifist, there are many long speeches about pacifism (this is a book with a Message, and large portions of it involve sitting in coffeeshops pontificating), until months later Dennis and Antoinette meet again. Dennis starts taking Antoinette out in a desperate last-ditch effort to fall in love with her. Antoinette, desperately bored at home, goes along with it because at least this is interesting. But then one day, he kisses her passionately in a boat, and roused by his passion, Antoinette falls in love… only for him to disappear the next day!
(I realize that Dennis has a lot of inner turmoil and so forth, but he is also a bit of a cad. Antoinette will never say so, but I will.)
More months pass! More speeches in coffee shops! At last Dennis reappears in Antoinette’s life and Confesses All. “Then you came along, and I spotted you at once,” he explains. “And seeing that the taint was in you too, I thought it must make you as lonely and miserable as it made me, and I imagined that the two of us could fight the loneliness better together.”
Antoinette is enthralled. At last he’s explaining himself! But she’s also distressed: “I haven’t suffered,” she has to confess, for “she had been happy, blissfully happy during her brief passion for Hester. She had not fought nor watched nor taken care, for she had never realized the need of doing either. She felt as if she had not been justified in being happy, as if it were unfair to him that she should have escaped paying the penalty. But in future she would not escape. Suffering must inevitably accompany realisation…”
But Antoinette is just a bit puzzled, too: after all, doesn’t her passion for Dennis suggest that maybe she doesn’t share his “taint”? “It’s only another proof of your abnormality, my poor child,” says Dennis. “No normal woman could care for me, I’m sure… It’s ‘like to like,’ as I said.”
“Then I’m glad I’m like that,” declares the irrepressible Antoinette, who would be “Glad of anything that enabled her to love him so well.”
“You mustn’t be glad: it’s a curse, a terrible curse. You’ll know some day!” insists Dennis, who is clearly the worst person with whom to have a gay awakening. If Antoinette won’t be properly miserable on her own, then by god he will let her know that she should be suffering!
And it is Antoinette who ends up suffering most - but because of her unrequited passion for Dennis, not her feelings for women. Dennis himself reunites with Alan, right before they’re both carted off to prison for refusing to help the war effort in any way, with the suggestion that perhaps after the war they will meet again and live happily ever after… while Antoinette ends the book alone in the coffee shop, with nothing and no one.
Rose Allatini, the writer behind the pseudonym, spent most of World War I passionately in love with a gay actor. In the 1920s, she married Cyril Scott, with whom she had two children; and then in 1941 she left him, and went to live in Rye with Melanie Mills. Perhaps Antoinette someday followed in her creator’s footsteps.
However, Despised and Rejected was published in 1918, so it’s certainly an early contender to the gay novel sweepstakes. Soon after its publication it was prosecuted, technically for its pacifist themes rather than its homosexual ones, although the latter kept coming up at trial till the judge complained testily that the book wasn’t up on obscenity charges.
So what’s it about? We start with Antoinette, who has bopped through her life cheerfully getting crushes on women, with nary a thought that this might be odd in any way. Away on a visit, she meets Dennis, who soon after starts writing her passionate letters, because she has sparked something in his soul and he is hoping desperately that he can blow this spark up into a rousing flame and burn away his fearful certainty that he’s homosexual.
But instead, one night by the light of a blacksmith forge, he falls in love with a young man named Alan. Terrified of his feelings, he runs away, and also stops writing to Antoinette, because he’s terrified he might let something slip and also is simply too discombobulated to put pen to paper.
Meanwhile, the war starts, Dennis becomes a pacifist, there are many long speeches about pacifism (this is a book with a Message, and large portions of it involve sitting in coffeeshops pontificating), until months later Dennis and Antoinette meet again. Dennis starts taking Antoinette out in a desperate last-ditch effort to fall in love with her. Antoinette, desperately bored at home, goes along with it because at least this is interesting. But then one day, he kisses her passionately in a boat, and roused by his passion, Antoinette falls in love… only for him to disappear the next day!
(I realize that Dennis has a lot of inner turmoil and so forth, but he is also a bit of a cad. Antoinette will never say so, but I will.)
More months pass! More speeches in coffee shops! At last Dennis reappears in Antoinette’s life and Confesses All. “Then you came along, and I spotted you at once,” he explains. “And seeing that the taint was in you too, I thought it must make you as lonely and miserable as it made me, and I imagined that the two of us could fight the loneliness better together.”
Antoinette is enthralled. At last he’s explaining himself! But she’s also distressed: “I haven’t suffered,” she has to confess, for “she had been happy, blissfully happy during her brief passion for Hester. She had not fought nor watched nor taken care, for she had never realized the need of doing either. She felt as if she had not been justified in being happy, as if it were unfair to him that she should have escaped paying the penalty. But in future she would not escape. Suffering must inevitably accompany realisation…”
But Antoinette is just a bit puzzled, too: after all, doesn’t her passion for Dennis suggest that maybe she doesn’t share his “taint”? “It’s only another proof of your abnormality, my poor child,” says Dennis. “No normal woman could care for me, I’m sure… It’s ‘like to like,’ as I said.”
“Then I’m glad I’m like that,” declares the irrepressible Antoinette, who would be “Glad of anything that enabled her to love him so well.”
“You mustn’t be glad: it’s a curse, a terrible curse. You’ll know some day!” insists Dennis, who is clearly the worst person with whom to have a gay awakening. If Antoinette won’t be properly miserable on her own, then by god he will let her know that she should be suffering!
And it is Antoinette who ends up suffering most - but because of her unrequited passion for Dennis, not her feelings for women. Dennis himself reunites with Alan, right before they’re both carted off to prison for refusing to help the war effort in any way, with the suggestion that perhaps after the war they will meet again and live happily ever after… while Antoinette ends the book alone in the coffee shop, with nothing and no one.
Rose Allatini, the writer behind the pseudonym, spent most of World War I passionately in love with a gay actor. In the 1920s, she married Cyril Scott, with whom she had two children; and then in 1941 she left him, and went to live in Rye with Melanie Mills. Perhaps Antoinette someday followed in her creator’s footsteps.
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Date: 2023-08-22 09:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-08-22 11:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-08-22 11:15 pm (UTC)....poor Antoinette.
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Date: 2023-08-22 11:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-08-23 05:24 pm (UTC)I like the coffee shop pontificating, really—there's so much interesting history in there...
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Date: 2023-08-23 06:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-08-25 03:04 am (UTC)SERIOUSLY. Sheesh!
Also, Antoinette needs to go and be happily bi elsewhere. What a rough ending!
no subject
Date: 2023-08-25 11:04 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-08-25 01:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2023-08-25 05:14 pm (UTC)