The School of Pater: Register, Reception, and the Gay Phase

This essay argues that certain readers used Pater's work on an artistic period (the Renaissance) in order to periodize the phases of their own lives. Specifically, I suggest that they took up his “school of art” as a model for conditional group membership in a homoerotic culture. Throughout his career, Pater wrote about collectives who reinterpret the past—usually the Renaissance or Ancient Greece and Rome—in order to establish common orientations in the present. However, it is his school concept that comes closest to centering a group's self-conception in this mediation. Examining how Pater's reception realized this potential, I will make two claims. My conceptual claim is that a linguistic term, “register,” would strengthen how we study a particular function of group identity: style as a shared persona that can be put on and off in particular contexts. My historical claim is that a kind of Paterian register, in excess of Pater's personal style and occasionally in opposition to his intentions, enabled a particular sexual culture—the gay phase—at Eton and Oxford in subsequent generations.