SOURCE: "The Higher Sodomy," in Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford, Cornell University Press, 1994, pp. 117-54.

In the excerpt that follows, Dowling investigates the culture that prevailed at Oxford University in the late nineteenth century. She contends that a Greek or Hellenistic idea of aesthetics advocated by many of the school's leading scholars—most notably Benjamin Jowett—facilitated a more positive sense of homosexual desire among such prominent Oxford students as Wilde, Pater, and Symonds. She notes that other scholars, including Matthew Arnold, attempted to valorize the Greek aesthetics while purging them of sexuality.

As Wilde was to declare in De Profundis, one of the two great turning-points of his life occurred "when my father sent me to Oxford" (The Letters of Oscar Wilde). Everything he encountered there seems to have been charged with a palpitating vibrancy of signification—such that Wilde could not regard the Cumnor hills...