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"I spoke horticulturally." Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest England in the 1880s saw a brief flowering of homosexual subcultures in literary London and Oxford, a flowering marked by the publication of numerous volumes of homoerotic poetry, but cut short by the consolidation and criminalization of homosexual identity in the Oscar Wilde trial of 1895. During the 1880s, when sexologists were attempting to name and medicalize homosexuality, and when politicians were attempting to criminalize and codify homosexual activity, a number of writers were attempting to define, encode, explain, or justify same-sex sexualities through the various languages available to them. In this essay I examine one particular volume of homoerotic poetry, Tuberose and Meadowsweet by MarcAndre Raffalovich, published in 1885. While other writers of the 1880s and 1890s were attempting to "write" homosexuality through the cultural languages of sexology, decadent aestheticism, or classical literature, Raffalovich turned to the Victorian "language of flowers" -a language of romance and courtship codified in the floral dictionaries and gilt-bound gift books of the period-and he used this sentimental, heterosexual, and usually feminized language to portray homosexual love. Tuberose and Meadowsweet marks a noteworthy albeit marginal moment in the larger literary exploration of homosexual identity, and a transitional moment in floral iconography: that cultural moment when Raffalovich coded homosexuality in the cliches of heterosexual courtship, queering the language of flowers.
By queer I do not mean simply homosexual, though that is part of the difference I read at work in Raffalovich's poetry. In reading the poetry as a queer project, I mean to signify both its semiotic strangeness and its sexual difference, of which must both be situated in a particular cultural context. I also want to suggest, in the term queer, what Earl Jackson, Jr. has called a "double articulation" (17). When Raffalovich uses the heteronormative cultural code to articulate homosexual desire, he writes a doubled text, a queered one, in which are represented "both a representational practice and a subject of that representation whose articulation in that text also represents a rupture from the traditions that this act of representation and its subject reinhabit" (Jackson 52). Although Jackson concentrates on "masculinist" discourse, I read Raffalovich's poetic use of feminine code also as a double articulation, in that his...