By the Edwardian period in England, “public school had become the defining initiation into manhood” (Richards, 1989, p. 7). Although school stories were written for young people, particularly boys, they were also “read at every level of society and provided the dominant image of manliness” (Tosh, 2005, p. 112). This article examines the ways in which three prominent public school novels – Horace Annesley Vachell’s The Hill (1905), E. F. Benson’s David Blaize (1916), and Alec Waugh’s The Loom of Youth (1917) – address the forbidden, transgressive, yet widely acknowledged issue of homosexuality at public school, particularly in the context of romantic friendships between boys. These novels, two of which centre on a friendship from which sexuality, if not eroticism, is more or less problematically excised, address the presence of sexuality in a profoundly homosocial environment with increasing tolerance and sympathy. The shift from Vachell’s moralistic condemnation of “beasts” and “demonaic” “things” (Vachell, 1905, pp. 120, 178, 173, 50) in The Hill, through Frank Maddox’s recognition and repudiation of his sexuality in David Blaize, to dismissal of homosexuality as “quite natural and ordinary”, “the fault of this rotten system under which we live” (Waugh, 1917, pp. 90, 127) in The Loom of Youth reflects developing discourses of masculinity in general and the public school system in particular, shifting away from Vachell’s Victorian orthodoxies towards more modern framings of gender and sexuality. The textual and subtextual codes used in these novels for sexuality simultaneously construct and reflect their cultural contexts, offering insight into the profound emotional consequences of constructing fundamental aspects of humanity as unspeakable.
Sasha Garwood (Fri,) studied this question.