"Sexual Perversities" Represented in Victorian Era Literature

Sodomy as a crime in Europe dates all the way back to 1533 when it was a civil and capital offense.  It remained a capital felony in England until 1851 when Europe started to experience a slight change in mentality.  Richard Von Kraft Ebbing's 1965 article, "Perversity and Perversion", attempts to tackle homosexual orientation from a (narrow) scientific perspective, ultimately finding no other way to describe it than “perversion”, a disease. Although not decriminalized in private places (not public) until 1967, sexual inversion, or same sex passion, became written about by famous authors of the time.  Examining The Immoralist by Andre Gide, A Death in Venice by Thomas Mann, The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde, the lives of their respective writers, and the social/psychological climate of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries provides a window into the sexual norms in Europe during this era, and how these writers conflated art with expression of their latent sexual desires. 

Because of the lack of acceptance of homosexuality in Europe and the repressed European environment of the time, their art is their release.  Much like the characters in their novels, Andre Gide, Thomas Mann and Oscar Wilde were better off keeping their homosexuality relatively under wraps, and so used their literary art as a platform of expression. They don’t overtly accept homosexuality but instead express how troublesome it is.  The urban world of this era created a male homosexual discourse that was not incredibly apparent, due to the social climate of the time, and so these authors stressed the fact that their writings were art above commentary.  However, there is a clear connection of each author to his respective protagonist and their inner struggle of sexuality.  The authors’ experiences within this sexually repressed time period are undoubtedly reflected in their art. Also, while their novels are without a doubt about the repressed homosexual desires that Andre Gide, Thomas Mann, and Oscar Wilde themselves were dealing with, these novels have a sexual ambiguity to them, achieved through not explicitly citing homosexuality and instead focusing on the inner struggle of a character (and author) with these “sexual inversions".  It is this ambiguity that allowed for these authors to achieve literary fame despite the descrimination that would come with their "sexual perversities".