Interesting. I remain unconvinced that Tolkien's intent was to portray a queer relationship, but before reading this article I would have considered it wishful thinking and after it, I'm convinced...
Interesting. I remain unconvinced that Tolkien's intent was to portray a queer relationship, but before reading this article I would have considered it wishful thinking and after it, I'm convinced it's at least one legitimate reading. So props to the author for that, even though I don't agree with her conclusions.
I will say that Sam and Frodo's relationship pretty well fits the mold for what modern scholars call romantic friendship. A kind of intense and physically affectionate, but non-sexual relationship that was socially acceptable in the early 19th century, but by the late 19th and early 20th century had come to be considered non-straight and therefore bad. This type of relationship would probably be seen as "queer" if not "homosexual" today (but not always, c.f. the term "bromance"), but was not at the time (which, recall, was one or two generations before Tolkien), and it can be problematic to slot it into a modern framework. Especially when you're trying to suss out authorial intent.
Somewhat ironically in writing about queer issues, the writer seems to apply a very rigid modern-day norm as to what male friendship should look like, and anything outside of that very narrow window is seen as gay or queer. But Tolkien himself, who had been in the trenches in WWI and who was born at the tail end of the Victorian era, likely did not share this narrow view. Or at least we can't just assume he did.
I very much get the writer's desire to see her experience represented in great works of fiction. I don't begrudge her that at all. But I prefer to see LotR as an ode to friendship, elevating deep non-romantic bonds to a kind of place literature usually reserves for romance. That, too, has value. Some people do not, for whatever reason, ever get into a long-term romantic companionship, and yet they can still have just as deep and valuable interpersonal relationships. Most people, even if they are in a romantic relationship, also maintain (or at least desire) deep platonic relationships. And it's nice to see that repped in a classic of literature too.
A quick search of an online version of the LotR text gives 178 hits for "friend" or "friendship", but only 3 for "lover", only one of which refers to a romantic relationship (the two others refer to love for trees and forests). Even the explicitly romantic relationships like Arwen and Aragorn are very chaste and not really a major focus. Even if you accept the author's reading of the text, it's pretty clear that the many-faceted experience of friendship, especially male friendship and male bonding, is the major interpersonal theme in Lord of the Rings.
I'll applaud the writer for giving good citations and arguments for her reading, and not resorting to the kind of reaching and wishful thinking that sometimes accompanies revisionist readings of major classics. But I'll quibble a little with one thing:
Bilbo and Frodo’s home of Bag End is described by other hobbits as “a queer place, and its folk are queerer” — an adjective which had a strong connotation of homosexuality by the late 1800s.
This is the one example where I think she is reaching. According to Etymonline, the sense of "homosexual" is attested from 1922. Dictionary.com says more vaguely, early 20th century. But that is only the first appearance of that meaning, not a sudden and instant change in the primary understanding of the word. As late as 1977, the philosopher J.L. Mackie presented a major philosophical argument called the "argument from queerness", where the sense is the old one of unusual or odd. I do not think when Tolkien was writing in the 1930s and 40s, gay was the automatic assumption. Is it possible that this was an allusion to homosexuality from Tolkien's side? It's not impossible, but highly unlikely. Tolkien was very fond of old and archaic language. He was a philologist by trade and not only knew, but actively employed old-timey vocabulary. His characters do not bring news, they bring tidings. They wear raiments. They do not endure slavery but thraldom. Knowing what we know of Tolkien, it's far more likely that he simply employed an old word with its original meaning, with no particular allusion in mind. A word that at the time he was writing still was commonly used in that sense.
In general, I think she makes a good case for a queer reading of LotR as interesting and valid, but the speculation about authorial intent is, well, highly speculative. I subscribe to the idea that if you can make a reasonable case for it within the text itself, you can read a book any way you want, but the burden of proof is much higher when you're trying to prove a secret, unspoken authorial intent.
I’ve noticed a trend in people making these revisionist arguments in the past few years. I have no idea why this is the case. I’ve seen people call Dante’s Inferno a piece of fan fiction....
and not resorting to the kind of reaching and wishful thinking that sometimes accompanies revisionist readings of major classics
I’ve noticed a trend in people making these revisionist arguments in the past few years. I have no idea why this is the case.
I’ve seen people call Dante’s Inferno a piece of fan fiction. Unsurprisingly, this comment is made by people who almost exclusively write and/or read fan fiction.
I’ve also seen this done with media from the late 90s and early 2000s, where people make hour long videos about how Space Jam has a socialist message or how Robots is about trans people.
I wonder if this has always been the case, people making far reaching revisionist analyses, and I’m just now noticing. Or if it’s just a new fad among left-leaning people to project onto art even when it doesn’t make sense.
This is not a new phenomenon in academics, a professor of mine used to complain about the dozens of analisys dedicated to prove Batman was gay 15 years ago. My guess is that we're going through a...
This is not a new phenomenon in academics, a professor of mine used to complain about the dozens of analisys dedicated to prove Batman was gay 15 years ago. My guess is that we're going through a transitional time regarding many aspects of social life, mainly race and sexuality, and the reassessment of cultural icons in this new context is something deeply meaningful and even necessary for some. By understanding and reframing culture, we understand and reframe ourselves.
Some analysis do so by interpreting the actual texts, while others (of lower quality IMHO) employ "creative" procedures that often go beyond anything the material allows.
There's a place for subjectivity in interpretation, but some interpretations are definitely better than others...
Queering texts is a genuine practice in academic circles as a product of queer theory. It's possible your professor might have been speaking from that lens -- though, as you acknowledged, it's...
Queering texts is a genuine practice in academic circles as a product of queer theory. It's possible your professor might have been speaking from that lens -- though, as you acknowledged, it's possible for it to be done poorly as much as it is possible for it to be done well.
I do think that even "reaches", where the theorist might be doing little more than clumsily grasping at straws, can still be valuable. Representation looks different now, but roll the clock back only a few years and even I was having to read deep into subtexts to find characters I could identify with and experiences that matched mine. The author of the linked article talks about this -- Frodo and Sam kissing was novel and noteworthy for them. It's easy for us to say, "no, that's platonic", but if that kissing occurs on a widespread backdrop of an absence of male-male affection (as it did), then it's also easy for someone to latch onto that as indicative of more than it might be intending.
Also keep in mind that before widespread support, many queer people identified themselves not to the wider world openly but through quiet or more calculated "tells" that would be known by other queer people but would not necessarily out them to wider society. As such, the idea that this principle might be enacted by authors in their works or that characters themselves might also exhibit similar behaviors was not exactly foreign to us. A queer character didn't have to be openly queer to be seen as one of us -- they simply had to have a significant enough clue or enough connect-the-dots moments for us to find resonance.
I also think it's worth keeping in mind that it's easy to focus on examples of "queering run amok" as an overreach or a bad implementation of the theory, but those too occur on a backdrop of the complete opposite. I had professors who would fully reject any sort of queer reading or interpretation as non-canon when it wasn't explicitly supported in the text.
I remember when the professor for one of my literature classes went on a lengthy, pearl-clutching rant against homosexuality when one of the students in my class asked an honest question about whether Willa Cather might have been gay or bi because she lived with another woman for 40 years.
The rant wasn't a sort of careful and nuanced "we should be careful about assigning identities to others, especially modern identities to a historical context" -- it was more of a "lesbians don't exist; radical gays are forcing their agenda everywhere" sort of thing. Of course it wasn't about the text but the author itself, but it does follow that if we entertain the notion that Cather might have been queer, then we could read her books as potentially informed by that perspective as well. Unfortunately, even the implication of that was not going to fly in this particular class, as the professor made it clear that any queer interpretation of Cather's life or her works was verboten in his context.
Queering came about as a response to the sort of forceful hegemony displayed by my professor, where straightness was held up as an unquestionable ideal.
That's unfortunate, because that topic-the complexities in interpreting same-sex cohabiting relationships of literary and scholarly women in the late 19th and early 20th century US-is something...
The rant wasn't a sort of careful and nuanced "we should be careful about assigning identities to others, especially modern identities to a historical context" -- it was more of a "lesbians don't exist; radical gays are forcing their agenda everywhere" sort of thing.
That's unfortunate, because that topic-the complexities in interpreting same-sex cohabiting relationships of literary and scholarly women in the late 19th and early 20th century US-is something that I learnt about from its impact on some of my partner's research (that is to say, it isn't something I have a very rigorous understanding of) and actually seems like a good illustration of the challenges and nuances involved in thinking about relationships in other eras. Because of the societal acceptability of "Boston marriage" arrangements, the advantages that they had for women academics over living as a single woman, and the unacceptability of being a married woman and having academic career, a startling percentage of academic women in that era lived in long-term relationships with other women: in some cases the vast majority of entire college faculties. These relationships seem to have ranged from extremes of couples who were clearly entirely straight in a modern perception, consciously had the arrangement as an entirely practical matter, and each had covert romantic relationships with men (likely themselves made safer and more equal by the overt relationship), to women who clearly identified privately as being lesbians and in romantic relationships with each other, and everything in between. In some cases, the couples seem to have had significant differences, even in private writing and correspondence, in the way they viewed their own relationships. In most cases, we probably can't know the private nature of the relationships. It's an interesting instance of the intersection of different societal prejudices combining to result in a diversity of complex situations.
While I understand the importance of such studies, I cannot ignore the fact that, from a methodology standpoint, this Can easily give rise to free for all pattern matching that would allow the...
While I understand the importance of such studies, I cannot ignore the fact that, from a methodology standpoint, this
Also keep in mind that before widespread support, many queer people identified themselves not to the wider world openly but through quiet or more calculated "tells" that would be known by other queer people but would not necessarily out them to wider society
Can easily give rise to free for all pattern matching that would allow the analysts to interpret anything about anything, and at that point I wonder if the interpretation would be of any value whatsoever.
Agreed, but again, it's important to note that the exact same "overfitting" was happening to identify and justify straight characters as well (and I'd argue this was far more common than the...
Agreed, but again, it's important to note that the exact same "overfitting" was happening to identify and justify straight characters as well (and I'd argue this was far more common than the opposite, given that it was supported by the prevailing norms and beliefs of wider society). Queering was partially about breaking the idea that people were assumed to be straight until definitively proven otherwise.
Also, especially early on, there was a deliberate edge to queering. It wanted people to confront, accentuate, and even relish uncertainty, doubt, and gray areas. It was also a sort of middle finger to a lack of explicit queer narratives. Queering was deliberately subversive -- a way of finding queer subtexts and applications even in explicitly non-queer things, almost as a sort of territorial claim.
I'm glad it's not a new phenomenon but I'm really on the fence about the meaningfulness of these pieces. Exposure, outrage and click bait seems to play a part here too.
I'm glad it's not a new phenomenon but I'm really on the fence about the meaningfulness of these pieces. Exposure, outrage and click bait seems to play a part here too.
I think when you study something in so much detail, you sometimes start to see things that either aren't there, or are so faint it could just be a coincidence. I took a film analysis class in...
I think when you study something in so much detail, you sometimes start to see things that either aren't there, or are so faint it could just be a coincidence.
I took a film analysis class in college and the teacher had a tendency to see everything as phallic. She would constantly point out random things on the set that happened to be taller than they were wide as "proof" that her theories were correct. One of the last films we watched was Polanski's Chinatown. In it, there is a theme of 2 objects (usually panes of glass), one broken and one intact. I have no idea whether the filmmaker intended that as a theme or it was a coincidence, but she and the teacher who taught the other section of the class had a contest for students to find all instances of this theme in the movie. (Spoilers ahead for this ~50 year old movie!) There are in fact several places where this shows up. One character is wearing glasses and gets punched in the face breaking only one of the panes. An old-fashioned car with a split windshield runs into a tree and branch falls on it breaking one pane of the windshield but not the other, etc. In the end, we discover that the patriarch of the family has been molesting his children. It's revealed that Fae Dunaway's character was molested by the patriarch (her character's father), and therefore her daughter is also her sister. At this point, given my teacher's propensity for making everything sexual, I pointed out that we had 2 women (mother and daughter/sister), and one was "intact" (i.e. still had her virginity) and the other wasn't. For some reason, the teacher thought this was ridiculous, even though every bottle in every scene of every film we watched before that was a penis. There's just no pleasing some people.
That said, I think it can be a fun and useful exercise to recast things in a different light, even if it's not what the author intended.
It's because in the past people were educated through a literary canon with a specific didactic approach that went step-by-step and educated them about relevant context. Nowadays lots of people...
I’ve noticed a trend in people making these revisionist arguments in the past few years. I have no idea why this is the case.
It's because in the past people were educated through a literary canon with a specific didactic approach that went step-by-step and educated them about relevant context. Nowadays lots of people coming up are skipping straight to contemporary narratives without building them up from first-principles based on an ersatz worldview cobbled together via Wikipedia articles. It leads to a lot of novel takes on things since the eyes are fresher, but also a lot of really reductive and unfortunate misinterpretations (e.g. "Baby it's Cold Outside").
This video kind of goes into it. It's specifically on its impact on History but I think it's generally applicable to a broad range of disciplines. There is also an element of social media in it. Traditionally literary criticism and theory posits specific readings or lenses you can take when you read something, each of which offers a valid or interesting frame that you can get something out of the work by applying. But certain groups (Marxists and Nationalists in particular but not exclusively) have a tendency to argue that THEIR narrative is THE narrative and all others are a kind of false consciousness that needs to be browbeaten and corrected. I think the histrionic nature of online discourse has really normalized that way of engaging with basically everything and generalized it into a lot of other communities (e.g. LGBTQ+, Feminists, New Atheists, Evangelicals).
Not totally convinced by the argument that gay relations were too taboo in literature; Proust opens his Sodom and Gomorrah in 1922 with an explicit gay sex scene. Maybe the French society was more...
Not totally convinced by the argument that gay relations were too taboo in literature; Proust opens his Sodom and Gomorrah in 1922 with an explicit gay sex scene. Maybe the French society was more opened but it still seems if Tolkien wanted to write an explicitly homosexual story he could have done so. Maybe in another context he would have done it but that's just wild speculation at this point (and also I don't think that's the kind of book for it).
Take a look at the story of Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness. It's a 1928 lesbian novel that went on trial for obscenity in both the UK and the US. It's a pretty good indicator at how...
Take a look at the story of Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness. It's a 1928 lesbian novel that went on trial for obscenity in both the UK and the US. It's a pretty good indicator at how controversial the topic was at the time, at least in those two countries.
Yikes. I searched a bit but it seems Proust got mostly praised by critics at the time, maybe a cultural difference, but the really explicit parts also comes only in volume 4 I think, so probably...
Yikes. I searched a bit but it seems Proust got mostly praised by critics at the time, maybe a cultural difference, but the really explicit parts also comes only in volume 4 I think, so probably not everybody read it until then...
Interesting. I remain unconvinced that Tolkien's intent was to portray a queer relationship, but before reading this article I would have considered it wishful thinking and after it, I'm convinced it's at least one legitimate reading. So props to the author for that, even though I don't agree with her conclusions.
I will say that Sam and Frodo's relationship pretty well fits the mold for what modern scholars call romantic friendship. A kind of intense and physically affectionate, but non-sexual relationship that was socially acceptable in the early 19th century, but by the late 19th and early 20th century had come to be considered non-straight and therefore bad. This type of relationship would probably be seen as "queer" if not "homosexual" today (but not always, c.f. the term "bromance"), but was not at the time (which, recall, was one or two generations before Tolkien), and it can be problematic to slot it into a modern framework. Especially when you're trying to suss out authorial intent.
Somewhat ironically in writing about queer issues, the writer seems to apply a very rigid modern-day norm as to what male friendship should look like, and anything outside of that very narrow window is seen as gay or queer. But Tolkien himself, who had been in the trenches in WWI and who was born at the tail end of the Victorian era, likely did not share this narrow view. Or at least we can't just assume he did.
I very much get the writer's desire to see her experience represented in great works of fiction. I don't begrudge her that at all. But I prefer to see LotR as an ode to friendship, elevating deep non-romantic bonds to a kind of place literature usually reserves for romance. That, too, has value. Some people do not, for whatever reason, ever get into a long-term romantic companionship, and yet they can still have just as deep and valuable interpersonal relationships. Most people, even if they are in a romantic relationship, also maintain (or at least desire) deep platonic relationships. And it's nice to see that repped in a classic of literature too.
A quick search of an online version of the LotR text gives 178 hits for "friend" or "friendship", but only 3 for "lover", only one of which refers to a romantic relationship (the two others refer to love for trees and forests). Even the explicitly romantic relationships like Arwen and Aragorn are very chaste and not really a major focus. Even if you accept the author's reading of the text, it's pretty clear that the many-faceted experience of friendship, especially male friendship and male bonding, is the major interpersonal theme in Lord of the Rings.
I'll applaud the writer for giving good citations and arguments for her reading, and not resorting to the kind of reaching and wishful thinking that sometimes accompanies revisionist readings of major classics. But I'll quibble a little with one thing:
This is the one example where I think she is reaching. According to Etymonline, the sense of "homosexual" is attested from 1922. Dictionary.com says more vaguely, early 20th century. But that is only the first appearance of that meaning, not a sudden and instant change in the primary understanding of the word. As late as 1977, the philosopher J.L. Mackie presented a major philosophical argument called the "argument from queerness", where the sense is the old one of unusual or odd. I do not think when Tolkien was writing in the 1930s and 40s, gay was the automatic assumption. Is it possible that this was an allusion to homosexuality from Tolkien's side? It's not impossible, but highly unlikely. Tolkien was very fond of old and archaic language. He was a philologist by trade and not only knew, but actively employed old-timey vocabulary. His characters do not bring news, they bring tidings. They wear raiments. They do not endure slavery but thraldom. Knowing what we know of Tolkien, it's far more likely that he simply employed an old word with its original meaning, with no particular allusion in mind. A word that at the time he was writing still was commonly used in that sense.
In general, I think she makes a good case for a queer reading of LotR as interesting and valid, but the speculation about authorial intent is, well, highly speculative. I subscribe to the idea that if you can make a reasonable case for it within the text itself, you can read a book any way you want, but the burden of proof is much higher when you're trying to prove a secret, unspoken authorial intent.
I’ve noticed a trend in people making these revisionist arguments in the past few years. I have no idea why this is the case.
I’ve seen people call Dante’s Inferno a piece of fan fiction. Unsurprisingly, this comment is made by people who almost exclusively write and/or read fan fiction.
I’ve also seen this done with media from the late 90s and early 2000s, where people make hour long videos about how Space Jam has a socialist message or how Robots is about trans people.
I wonder if this has always been the case, people making far reaching revisionist analyses, and I’m just now noticing. Or if it’s just a new fad among left-leaning people to project onto art even when it doesn’t make sense.
This is not a new phenomenon in academics, a professor of mine used to complain about the dozens of analisys dedicated to prove Batman was gay 15 years ago. My guess is that we're going through a transitional time regarding many aspects of social life, mainly race and sexuality, and the reassessment of cultural icons in this new context is something deeply meaningful and even necessary for some. By understanding and reframing culture, we understand and reframe ourselves.
Some analysis do so by interpreting the actual texts, while others (of lower quality IMHO) employ "creative" procedures that often go beyond anything the material allows.
There's a place for subjectivity in interpretation, but some interpretations are definitely better than others...
Queering texts is a genuine practice in academic circles as a product of queer theory. It's possible your professor might have been speaking from that lens -- though, as you acknowledged, it's possible for it to be done poorly as much as it is possible for it to be done well.
I do think that even "reaches", where the theorist might be doing little more than clumsily grasping at straws, can still be valuable. Representation looks different now, but roll the clock back only a few years and even I was having to read deep into subtexts to find characters I could identify with and experiences that matched mine. The author of the linked article talks about this -- Frodo and Sam kissing was novel and noteworthy for them. It's easy for us to say, "no, that's platonic", but if that kissing occurs on a widespread backdrop of an absence of male-male affection (as it did), then it's also easy for someone to latch onto that as indicative of more than it might be intending.
Also keep in mind that before widespread support, many queer people identified themselves not to the wider world openly but through quiet or more calculated "tells" that would be known by other queer people but would not necessarily out them to wider society. As such, the idea that this principle might be enacted by authors in their works or that characters themselves might also exhibit similar behaviors was not exactly foreign to us. A queer character didn't have to be openly queer to be seen as one of us -- they simply had to have a significant enough clue or enough connect-the-dots moments for us to find resonance.
I also think it's worth keeping in mind that it's easy to focus on examples of "queering run amok" as an overreach or a bad implementation of the theory, but those too occur on a backdrop of the complete opposite. I had professors who would fully reject any sort of queer reading or interpretation as non-canon when it wasn't explicitly supported in the text.
I remember when the professor for one of my literature classes went on a lengthy, pearl-clutching rant against homosexuality when one of the students in my class asked an honest question about whether Willa Cather might have been gay or bi because she lived with another woman for 40 years.
The rant wasn't a sort of careful and nuanced "we should be careful about assigning identities to others, especially modern identities to a historical context" -- it was more of a "lesbians don't exist; radical gays are forcing their agenda everywhere" sort of thing. Of course it wasn't about the text but the author itself, but it does follow that if we entertain the notion that Cather might have been queer, then we could read her books as potentially informed by that perspective as well. Unfortunately, even the implication of that was not going to fly in this particular class, as the professor made it clear that any queer interpretation of Cather's life or her works was verboten in his context.
Queering came about as a response to the sort of forceful hegemony displayed by my professor, where straightness was held up as an unquestionable ideal.
That's unfortunate, because that topic-the complexities in interpreting same-sex cohabiting relationships of literary and scholarly women in the late 19th and early 20th century US-is something that I learnt about from its impact on some of my partner's research (that is to say, it isn't something I have a very rigorous understanding of) and actually seems like a good illustration of the challenges and nuances involved in thinking about relationships in other eras. Because of the societal acceptability of "Boston marriage" arrangements, the advantages that they had for women academics over living as a single woman, and the unacceptability of being a married woman and having academic career, a startling percentage of academic women in that era lived in long-term relationships with other women: in some cases the vast majority of entire college faculties. These relationships seem to have ranged from extremes of couples who were clearly entirely straight in a modern perception, consciously had the arrangement as an entirely practical matter, and each had covert romantic relationships with men (likely themselves made safer and more equal by the overt relationship), to women who clearly identified privately as being lesbians and in romantic relationships with each other, and everything in between. In some cases, the couples seem to have had significant differences, even in private writing and correspondence, in the way they viewed their own relationships. In most cases, we probably can't know the private nature of the relationships. It's an interesting instance of the intersection of different societal prejudices combining to result in a diversity of complex situations.
While I understand the importance of such studies, I cannot ignore the fact that, from a methodology standpoint, this
Can easily give rise to free for all pattern matching that would allow the analysts to interpret anything about anything, and at that point I wonder if the interpretation would be of any value whatsoever.
At some point, you're just writing fiction.
Agreed, but again, it's important to note that the exact same "overfitting" was happening to identify and justify straight characters as well (and I'd argue this was far more common than the opposite, given that it was supported by the prevailing norms and beliefs of wider society). Queering was partially about breaking the idea that people were assumed to be straight until definitively proven otherwise.
Also, especially early on, there was a deliberate edge to queering. It wanted people to confront, accentuate, and even relish uncertainty, doubt, and gray areas. It was also a sort of middle finger to a lack of explicit queer narratives. Queering was deliberately subversive -- a way of finding queer subtexts and applications even in explicitly non-queer things, almost as a sort of territorial claim.
I'm glad it's not a new phenomenon but I'm really on the fence about the meaningfulness of these pieces. Exposure, outrage and click bait seems to play a part here too.
I think when you study something in so much detail, you sometimes start to see things that either aren't there, or are so faint it could just be a coincidence.
I took a film analysis class in college and the teacher had a tendency to see everything as phallic. She would constantly point out random things on the set that happened to be taller than they were wide as "proof" that her theories were correct. One of the last films we watched was Polanski's Chinatown. In it, there is a theme of 2 objects (usually panes of glass), one broken and one intact. I have no idea whether the filmmaker intended that as a theme or it was a coincidence, but she and the teacher who taught the other section of the class had a contest for students to find all instances of this theme in the movie. (Spoilers ahead for this ~50 year old movie!) There are in fact several places where this shows up. One character is wearing glasses and gets punched in the face breaking only one of the panes. An old-fashioned car with a split windshield runs into a tree and branch falls on it breaking one pane of the windshield but not the other, etc. In the end, we discover that the patriarch of the family has been molesting his children. It's revealed that Fae Dunaway's character was molested by the patriarch (her character's father), and therefore her daughter is also her sister. At this point, given my teacher's propensity for making everything sexual, I pointed out that we had 2 women (mother and daughter/sister), and one was "intact" (i.e. still had her virginity) and the other wasn't. For some reason, the teacher thought this was ridiculous, even though every bottle in every scene of every film we watched before that was a penis. There's just no pleasing some people.
That said, I think it can be a fun and useful exercise to recast things in a different light, even if it's not what the author intended.
Ah, the perils of reductive and lazy readings of psychoanalysis...
Sounds like that teacher was down bad and couldn't hold it back anymore 👀
Lol! Could be. If I recall correctly, she did her master's thesis on The Devil in Ms. Jones.
It's because in the past people were educated through a literary canon with a specific didactic approach that went step-by-step and educated them about relevant context. Nowadays lots of people coming up are skipping straight to contemporary narratives without building them up from first-principles based on an ersatz worldview cobbled together via Wikipedia articles. It leads to a lot of novel takes on things since the eyes are fresher, but also a lot of really reductive and unfortunate misinterpretations (e.g. "Baby it's Cold Outside").
This video kind of goes into it. It's specifically on its impact on History but I think it's generally applicable to a broad range of disciplines. There is also an element of social media in it. Traditionally literary criticism and theory posits specific readings or lenses you can take when you read something, each of which offers a valid or interesting frame that you can get something out of the work by applying. But certain groups (Marxists and Nationalists in particular but not exclusively) have a tendency to argue that THEIR narrative is THE narrative and all others are a kind of false consciousness that needs to be browbeaten and corrected. I think the histrionic nature of online discourse has really normalized that way of engaging with basically everything and generalized it into a lot of other communities (e.g. LGBTQ+, Feminists, New Atheists, Evangelicals).
Not totally convinced by the argument that gay relations were too taboo in literature; Proust opens his Sodom and Gomorrah in 1922 with an explicit gay sex scene. Maybe the French society was more opened but it still seems if Tolkien wanted to write an explicitly homosexual story he could have done so. Maybe in another context he would have done it but that's just wild speculation at this point (and also I don't think that's the kind of book for it).
Take a look at the story of Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness. It's a 1928 lesbian novel that went on trial for obscenity in both the UK and the US. It's a pretty good indicator at how controversial the topic was at the time, at least in those two countries.
Yikes. I searched a bit but it seems Proust got mostly praised by critics at the time, maybe a cultural difference, but the really explicit parts also comes only in volume 4 I think, so probably not everybody read it until then...
I doubt very much that Proust was representative of the literary establishment of his time.