BOOK REVIEWS

informative bibliography with selected texts for further reading. These

additions assist readers with the theoretical concepts of French Sym-
bolism and demonstrate Creasys claim that the journalistic origins of
The Symbolist Movement in Literature, then, are inseparable from its
status as a work that mediates both between French and English writ-
ings and between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They help to
connect the contents of Symons work with the historical and cultural
conditions under which it was produced. This new and welcome edi-
tion of The Symbolist Movement in Literature is a valuable contribu-
tion to our understanding of late-nineteenth-century literary criticism.
MARGARET J. GODBEY
Coker College

Patriarchy Through the Lens of the Negative Oedipus Complex

Helena Gurfinkel. Outlaw Fathers in Victorian and Modern British
Literature: Queering Patriarchy. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press,
2014. xii + 221 pp. $80.00

IN Outlaw Fathers in Victorian and Modern British Literature:

Queering Patriarchy, Helena Gurfinkel seeks to resist the limited view
of fatherhood and patriarchy as the loci of power and aggression, and
as straightforward expressions of normative masculinity, by offering
a theoretical investigation of alternative patriarchal narratives that
unsettle some of the core definitions of patriarchy coined by feminist
and gender theorists and introduce the possibilities of queer analy-
sis of (rather than, automatically, against) patriarchy. In setting out
to do this, Gurfinkel wisely devotes her introduction to defining the
terms and concepts she intends deliberately to unsettle, including
masculinity, manhood, fatherhood, queer and patriarchy. She
also carefully establishes her main theoretical foundation, which com-
bines Freuds theory of the negative Oedipus complex, as set out in his
case study of the Wolf Man and in A Child Is Being Beaten, with
Leo Bersanis critique thereof. Gurfinkels purpose is an ambitious one,
reaching beyond the scope of literary scholarship. She sets up what is
at stake in her study by hoping that it will join a larger conversation
about the changing roles of men in general, and fathers in particu-
lar, that is taking place outside of the field of literary studies; hav-
ing drawn connections between her work and more populist modes of
thought, she remarks that [d]istant as a project dealing with British
literature, the middle class, and the Freudian narrative of the negative

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Oedipus complex might appear from The Atlantic and Hollywood, it

may nonetheless provide an additional psychoanalytic framework for
thinking about contemporary masculinities.
Gurfinkel is clearly aware that she has a good deal to sort out before
she can offer any close readings of texts, and she devotes her first chap-
ter to continuing to lay out and expand her definitions of her terms,
and to offering a lucid and useful survey of her background research.
This chapter satisfactorily establishes that Gurfinkel has done thor-
ough research, strongly grounding her argument in the foundational
texts of psychoanalysis, queer studies, and masculinity studies. Her
psychoanalytic sources include Karen Horney and Jacques Lacan in
addition to Freud, as well as some of their more illustrious commenta-
tors; the critics whose work she references include foundational think-
ers such as Judith Butler and Jacques Derrida, and also more current
commentators in relevant schools of theory and criticism. In a bit of
wordplay on her own book title, she devotes a section to the Theoreti-
cal Mothers of queer masculinity, particularly Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
and Kaja Silverman. Her brief and clear survey of these theorists work
allows her to position her own contribution and her focus on male sub-
jectivities that reject power and violence by embracing maternal iden-
tification. Gurfinkels reading is impressive and wide reaching, and
her assemblage of it leads her to state that her main goal here is to
draw attention to the negative Oedipus complex and its potential for
resignifying patriarchy as a more flexible, inclusive term, reflective of
the many existing possibilities of masculinity, male homosociality, and
father-son relationships. This chapter will be useful to any reader of
Gurfinkels book: readers familiar with psychoanalytic discourse, queer
theory, and masculinity can treat it as a refresher course and also learn
what will be the books focus; readers unfamiliar with these discourses
are offered an understandable survey to assist them to grapple with the
rest of the book; and readers interested in learning more about these
discourses will find it an excellent reading list to get them started.
Gurfinkels chapter on queer patriarchy in Anthony Trollopes The
Prime Minister and Doctor Thorne is a valuable contribution both to
the growing body of work on Trollope and gender, and to the ongoing
task of defining the English gentleman. Focusing on father-son pairs
both among the gentry and among self-made men, Gurfinkel argues
that while the latter stand not only for the economic and political as-
pirations of the middle class, but also for a more rigidly dichotomized
bourgeois masculinity, the formation of which hinges upon the gen-

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erally normative, positive Oedipal development, the former are read

in psychoanalytic terms as a masculinity that embraces symbolic
castration. Gurfinkels reading seems to build on the approaches de-
veloped by Margaret Markwick in New Men in Trollopes Novels (2007),
a work which challenges assumptions about Victorian fatherhood and
masculinity. By considering Trollopes aristocratic father-son pairs
through the Freudian lens she established early in the text, Gurfinkel
is able to reach certain surprising conclusions, such as that the gentle
sons duty is to provide restitution in the form of an advantageous
marriage, feces/child, or a literary work that expresses sympathy or
seeks to restore a reputation, and that male aristocrats are mere bod-
ies for sale and thus acquire, in the logic of the marriage plot, conven-
tionally feminine traits. Gurfinkels close readings of Trollopes novels
are bold, original, and cogently argued, and they may well open the
way for a range of searching new approaches to the Trollope canon.
As stated before, one of Gurfinkels strengths as a critic is her lucidity
in defining her terms, both by what she means and what she does not.
It continues to assist her in the third chapter, as Gurfinkel uses works
by Henry James, Samuel Butler, and J. R. Ackerley as examples of what
she calls the queer Knstlerroman. According to Gurfinkel, the texts
treated in this chapter delink bourgeois manhood from normative per-
formances of gender and sexuality and, by portraying the figures of
a queer self-made father and a mother-identified artist son, offer an
alternative trajectory of middle-class upward mobility. In this chap-
ter, Gurfinkel focuses on the sadistic aspect of these queer daddies
whom she reads as passing for heterosexual. Once again, Gurfinkel
has opened a way for new and provocative readings, in this case, most
notably, her reading of the queer Knstlerroman as a way of recasting
the idea of the domestic sphere as not necessarily heteronormative, so
that the Victorian and modern ages are not separated by the impact
of the Oedipal rebellion, but, rather, drawn together by the transgres-
sive mutual desire of fathers and sons. In keeping with her practice
of carefully positioning her discussion in a larger context than literary
studies alone, Gurfinkel offers a candid and sober acknowledgment of
the historical backdrop of real-life child abuse during the time period
represented by the fiction she analyzes, going on to state that it is the
narrative structures of the sadomasochistic fantasy, rather than the
moral or physical implications of the physical punishment, that are
pertinent to [her] analysis. This acknowledgment allows Gurfinkel to

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direct and focus her own discussion, while leaving an opening for fur-
ther interdisciplinary inquiry into the subject matter.
In her fourth and final chapter, Gurfinkel openly addresses a gap
she and other critics have noted in literary studiesthat is, the dearth
of discussion of gay fathers, despite the growing number of same-sex
families and the greater visibility of gay parenthood, both biological
and adoptive. To this end, Gurfinkel shifts her discussion of queer
patriarchy from the homoerotic queer bachelor arrangements of the
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to what can be more
explicitly termed gay male families in the second half of the twenti-
eth century. She does this through close readings of Little Imber by
E. M. Forster and The Spell by Alan Hollinghurst, describing them as
texts that reject middle-class gender dichotomies and allow for the
existence of male patriarchal subjectivities that embrace motherhood
and domesticity not by reversing the maternal and paternal subject
positions but instead, by exposing these positions as entirely arbi-
trary. In this chapter Gurfinkel offers some of her most engaging close
reading of primary texts, particularly in her reading of architecture
[t]he cultural implications of the cottage and the kitchen as material
entitiesin The Spell. As Gurfinkel puts it, the cottage becomes
the antidote to cottaging, a word that embraces all the ideas that the
novel rejects: sexual freedom, a mixture of classes and races that public
spaces afford to urban gay men. Despite its intensive focus on Holling-
hursts novel, Gurfinkels reading of the home in this chapter effective-
ly harks back to the books ongoing themes of domescticity, masculinity,
class, and Englishness.
In keeping with her hopes, stated early on, of expanding discus-
sion on the topic of queer patriarchy, Gurfinkel concludes her book by
opening up her Coda to include queer fathers of other sorts, such as
female-to-male transgender fathers, and sources outside of literature,
such as television series and documentaries. Her stated reason is that
[t]he analysis of these characters creates potential for applying the
queer patriarchy paradigm to contexts beyond the European canon.
The Coda serves as a fitting conclusion to this thought-provoking and
ambitious book, which scholars in the various disciplines it draws on
will find a useful contribution to their fields.

HYSON COOPER
Temple University

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permission.