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Chapter 6 - Hallowed Incest

Eric Gill, Indian Aesthetics, and Queer Catholicism

from Part III - Decadent Modernism and Eroticized Kinship

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 September 2022

Kristin Mahoney
Affiliation:
Michigan State University
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Summary

Chapter Six considers the modernist sculptor Eric Gill’s highly unconventional family life, his interest in Indian art, and his connections with Decadent queer Catholicism in relationship to his preoccupation with the family as a site of divine eroticism. While Gill is often thought of as a “distinctly heterosexual” figure with a highly provincial vision, during the 1910s he affiliated himself with a authors and artists, including Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper (“Michael Field”), whose nonnormative sexual identities were intertwined with their Catholic religious identity, and he exhibited a thirst for information about global artistic practices, writing frequently to the Ceylonese art historian Ananda Coomaraswamy and engaging extensively with Indian art. He found in Bradley and Cooper, who converted to Catholicism and wrote religious verse concerning their union, a model for conceiving of incestuous desire in divine terms. In his correspondence with Coomaraswamy concerning the treatment of eroticism in Hindu temple sculpture, he found models for the successful integration of faith and sensuality. This network of influences resulted in one of his most well-known works, They (or Ecstasy, 1910-11), an attempt to hallow incestuous desire and transform an extreme form of sexual dissidence into an expression of divine love.

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Queer Kinship after Wilde
Transnational Decadence and the Family
, pp. 186 - 216
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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  • Hallowed Incest
  • Kristin Mahoney, Michigan State University
  • Book: Queer Kinship after Wilde
  • Online publication: 15 September 2022
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009019682.010
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  • Hallowed Incest
  • Kristin Mahoney, Michigan State University
  • Book: Queer Kinship after Wilde
  • Online publication: 15 September 2022
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009019682.010
Available formats
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Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Hallowed Incest
  • Kristin Mahoney, Michigan State University
  • Book: Queer Kinship after Wilde
  • Online publication: 15 September 2022
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009019682.010
Available formats
×