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

Most neoclassical works based on the discoveries at Herculaneum and Pompeii were imitations of an art thought to be formally and morally superior to that of the eighteenth century. Objects and paintings gathered from the sites that failed to meet this standard were stashed away in a "secret cabinet of obscene objects" in the Naples Museum, which, with some brief interludes, was locked up for two hundred years and only in 2000 put on public display. (1) Long before this, however, the repressed 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 on a fresco from Stabiae published in the Antichita di Ercolano. In the rather spare source engraving (see page 82), two women inspect amorini proffered by a vendor. Although Vien added sumptuous furnishings including an incense burner, increasing the sensory charge of the image, he removed the large amorino between the buyer's legs, with its hands mischievously lost in the dark folds of her skirt, and miniaturized the others, rendering them harmless infants (though the one held up by the kneeling salesgirl holds its forearm in a provocative manner). His title, The Seller of Loves, while referring to cupids, nevertheless also implies bought sexual pleasure. The erotic connotations of the painting did not go unnoticed and indeed accounted for some 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, cocks. Bringing the subtext of the antique painting and its copies to the fore, the artist has depicted women coming to a priapic fountain to buy winged, straining phalli from an old procuress. These horny buzzards are only too eager to oblige the ladies, whether the women are seated, standing, reclining, or bent over. Spent birds perch limply in trees 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 the sexually provocative artifacts unearthed, (3) it was only 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.

Even before August Mau discovered an ancient inscription reading SODOM GOMOR on 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 out the dangers of sexual decadence and perversion. The moralizing frame or lesson provided by the eruption, though, licensed all sorts of titillating description and became increasingly perfunctory as the nineteenth century wore on. (5) Furthermore, antiquity's freer sexualities came to be celebrated by artists, authors, and early homosexual-rights activists.

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

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The equation of burial and repression was taken up by 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 temps perdu, the gay brothels of the Parisian underworld are decorated with Pompeian paintings, and during an air raid, under the "lava" of the "German Vesuvius," the narrator is initiated into the world of S&M by 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] so numerous that we may apply to them that other verse of Genesis: 'If a man can number the dust of the earth, then shall thy seed also be numbered."' (9) Moreover, the threat of imminent death does not, in the novel's World War I Paris, provoke repentance and behavioral reform; on the contrary, during the air raids people on the street, "like the Pompeians upon whom the fire from heaven was already raining," descend into "the Metro, black as catacombs" because they will not "be alone there," and in the darkness "hands, lips, bodies may go into action at once." (10)