Listening Queerly to Teleny and Trilby

Abstract

There is something queer about listening to music in late-nineteenthcentury literature. Scenes of public musical performance in two novels with very different publishing histories—one of the best-selling novels of the century, Trilby (George du Maurier, 1894), and the privately circulated erotic novel, Teleny (anonymous co-authorship, 1893)—have in common their identification of listening as a space of queer possibility. The ability of texts to disclose and enclose queerness gains particular resonance at this fin-de-siècle moment, with new understandings of identity producing the categories of heteroand homosexuality. Voicing homosexuality in the repressive legal atmosphere of late-nineteenth-century Britain required recourse to codes and circumlocutions: famously, it was “the love that dare not speak its name.”1 Authors turned to the expansive semiotic potentialities of music, then, to avoid naming in language desires, behaviours, or identities which might be suspect. Taking a sonic approach to texts revivifies these layers of meaning which were once muted. In thinking sonically about these novels, moreover, we can understand them as contemporary Listening Queerly to Teleny and Trilby