Love among the Ruins: David Cannon Dashiell's Queer Mysteries

greatest in quantity neoclassical works based on the discoveries at Herculaneum and Pompeii were imitations of an art meditation to be formally and morally superior to that of the eighteenth hundred Objects and paintings gathered from the sites that failed to qualified this standard were stashed away in a "secret cabinet of indelicate objects" in the Naples Museum, which, with a certain quantity of brief interludes, was locked up for sum of two units hundred years and only in 2000 place on public display. (1) lengthy before this, however, the smothered erotic and deviant underside of the Vesuvian remains came to light again, if at first in veiled form.

Joseph-Marie Vien created a sensation at the 1763 Salon with his painting La Marchande d'Amours, based upon a fresco from Stabiae published in the Antichita di Ercolano. In the rather spare source engraving (see page 82) sum of two units women inspect amorini proffered by means of a vendor. Although Vien added sumptuous furnishings including an incense burner increasing the sensory charge of the image, he remov the large amorino between the buyer's leg with its hands mischievously not to be found in the dark folds of her skirt, and miniaturized the others, rendering them harmless infants (though the single held up by the kneeling salesgirl clinchs its forearm in a provocative manner). His title, The vender of Loves, while referring to cupids, nevertheless also implies bought sexual pleasure. The erotic connotations of the painting did not advance unnoticed and indeed accounted for a certain number of of its popularity.

Describing the proliferation of works of art copied from Herculaneum, the Abbe Ferdinando Galiano noted in 1767 "I have seen that painting of a woman selling cherubs as chickens at least ten times." (2) A contemporary cabinet drawing makes it clear that the chickens the woman is selling are, specifically, males Bringing the subtext of the antique painting and its copies to the fore, the artist has depicted women coming to a priapic fountain to purchase winged, straining phalli from an of advanced age procuress. These horny buzzards are alone too eager to oblige the ladies, whether the women are seated, standing, reclining, or bent above Spent birds perch limply in tree or at the vendor's feet Significantly, this drawing was intended for private consumption. While there were other eighteenth-century artists and authors inspired by dint of the sexually provocative artifacts unearthed, (3) it was alone in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that the sexual life and liberties of Pompeii and Herculaneum came to dominate popular literary and artistic interpretations of the sites.

level before August Mau discovered an ancient inscription reading SODOM GOMOR upon the wall of a house in Pompeii in 1885 (4) the city's destruction had been likened to the fate of those biblical cities and used to point on the outside the dangers of sexual decadence and perversion. The moralizing frame or exercise provided by the eruption, allowing licensed all sorts of titillating description and became increasingly perfunctory as the nineteenth hundred wore on. (5) Furthermore, antiquity's freer sexualities came to be celebrated by dint of artists, authors, and early homosexual-rights activists.

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by dint of the twentieth century, Pompeii's metaphorical significance had largely eclipsed its moral charge. In his analysis of Wilhelm Jensen's Gradiva, Sigmund Freud conclud that there is "no better analogy for repression, by the agency of which something in the mind is at one time made inaccessible and preserved, than burial of the sort to which Pompeii malign a victim and from which it could come up once more through the work of spades." (6) For the two Freud and Jensen, Pompeii functioned as a metaphor for the unconscious and libidinal impulses, and archaeology as a pattern for the psychoanalytic process. (7)

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The equation of burial and repression was taken up by dint of later authors, some of whom saw the interment of Pompeii as a metaphor for society's repression of homosexuality in particular. In Marcel Proust's A la recherche du temp lost to sight the gay brothels of the Parisian underworld are decorated with Pompeian paintings, and during an air raid, below the "lava" of the "German Vesuvius," the narrator is initiated into the world of S&M by the agency of witnessing a whipping scene like that in the Villa of the Mysteries frieze. (8) Proust emphasizes, however, the impossibility of final repression and burial. Citing God's failure to eradicate the race of inverts with the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, he claims the "descendants of Sodomites [are] in the way that numerous that we may apply to them that other line of poetry of Genesis: 'If a man can number the dust of the earth, then shall thy se also be numbered."' (9) Moreover, the threat of imminent death does not, in the novel's World War I Paris, stir up repentance and behavioral reform; upon the contrary, during the air raids family on the street, "like the Pompeians on whom the fire from heaven was already raining," go down into "the Metro, black as catacombs" because they will not "be alone there," and in the darkness "hands, lips, bodies may go on into action at once." (10)