On Forgetting
Hayley O'Kell, Alma Prelec
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Languages of Desire in Botticelli and Dante: Paradiso 21
Rebecca Bowen
doi:10.59860/wph.a05613a

This essay explores the multifaceted language of desire in Dante’s Paradiso through a specific lens: Sandro Botticelli’s visualization of the contemplative souls in canto 21 as a crowd of winged infants. Exploring the connotations of the visual language evoked by these figures and the figural histories with which they interact, this essay considers the ways in which Botticelli’s artistic choice validates certain lexical strands in Dante’s poem, particularly those which convey an affective and eroticized charge. Interweaving secular resonance and Christian symbolism, Botticelli’s use of winged infants is ultimately seen to present a flexible visual language that reflects the semantic range of Dante’s text, offering a metaphor for its enduringly complex, and often ambiguous, engagement with desire.

Reading Between the Lines: Female Sexual Desire in the Late Eighteenth Century
Katherine Moore
doi:10.59860/wph.a165581

In eighteenth-century France, the rules of bienséance dictated that discussions of female sexuality were considered off-limits for polite society and fiction. While some male authors flouted these sensibilities openly with their libertine novels, female writers were much more cautious with how they pushed back against these rules. Authors such as Sophie Cottin and Marie-Jeanne Roland de la Platière (Madame Roland) wrote about female desire in the last decade of the eighteenth century and both were either censured or reprimanded, despite their careful attempts to discuss female sexuality in relation with virtue. In this paper, I examine the difficulty of reading female sexual desire in historical contexts where open discussion of female sexuality was discouraged. By examining Cottin’s Claire d’Albe and Madame Roland’s Mémoires, I argue that to obey the rules of bienséance, these female writers discuss female desire and the tension between desire and virtue in varying degrees of dissimulation. Both authors, in different ways, present the simultaneous existence of female virtue and female sexual desire. Through examination of the reception of these texts, I argue that we can see how French publishers and the French reading public accepted fictional female desire more willingly than the autobiographical desire presented by Roland.

‘Life is Real’: Sexual Freedom and Sex for Pleasure in La vida ‘era’ en serio (Mónica Borda, 2011)
Karol Valderrama-Burgos
doi:10.59860/wph.a2749c8

This working paper addresses Mónica Borda’s 2011 La vida ‘era’ en serio [Life ‘Was’ Real], one of the first contemporary Colombian films directed by a woman. The film brings to the fore how sexual freedom and sexual experiences can destroy a traditional feminine mask: that of the ideal, maternal, and sexually passive woman in patriarchy. Usually, this mask not only serves to hide the female sex drive, but also alludes to representations of heterosexual women who have sex exclusively within the sanctity of marriage. To investigate female sexuality and desire, Joan Rivière’s work on understanding womanliness as a masquerade will serve as a lens to analyse the selected film. The evaluation of heteronormative female behaviours within a (patriarchal) context reveals alternative ways in which women’s femininities are constituted, thereby challenging patriarchal expectations of womanhood. Accordingly, this working paper analyses how transgressive female desires trigger the redefinition of female subjectivity within patriarchy and the free expressions of sexual life through the representation of the film’s main female character. Ultimately, this work suggests how all this contributes to a nascent discourse of female visibility and ownership through early twenty-first century Colombian cinema.

The Camp and the Dandy: Class, Sexuality, and Desire in Gil de Biedma’s Diaries
Álvaro González Montero
doi:10.59860/wph.a383dab

This paper analyses how homosexual desire is represented in Jaime Gil de Biedma’s Diarios 1956–1985, the complete edition of his personal diaries, by exploring its connections to cultural, historical, and social notions about homosexuality in Spain. Gil de Biedma (1929–1990) was an influential Spanish poet whose diaries represent an example of the finest autobiographical literature. This is a rare case of a Spanish author who provides a complex picture of what it was to be a gay intellectual in Spain during Francoism through life-writing. By close reading a selection of fragments of the author’s diaries, this study exposes the connections between class, sexuality, and desire in the author’s autobiographical writing. This paper claims that in the nearly thirty years that his diaries span, Gil de Biedma’s strategies of representation of his sexuality undergo several changes, from a fascination with the lower classes to an ironic, camp detachment with life. These shifts of the object of desire are part of trends within the male, homosexual community in Spain throughout the twentieth century. I argue that although those strategies of representation were key for gay individuals to build their identity in Spain at the time, the freedom to change and experiment is linked to the author’s class privilege. This study shows that Gil de Biedma’s position in society allowed him to have the time to explore and perform different models of sexual resistance in his life and literary works.

Longing for Life and Death: Eve’s Desires in Klopstock’s Der Tod Adams and Ewald’s Adam og Ewa
Sarah Fengler
doi:10.59860/wph.a4931f2

In the Old Testament, Eve is Adam’s companion and seducer: a role which she is often reduced to in literary Bible reception. Nonetheless, some adaptations of Genesis do explore Eve’s inner life and her longings. This paper analyses the portrayal of Eve and her desires in the German tragedy Der Tod Adams (1757) by Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock and in the Danish tragedy Adam og Ewa (1769) by Johannes Ewald. Telling the story of Adam’s death long after the Fall, Klopstock ascribes a death wish to Eve rooted in her sense of belonging to Adam. The plot of Ewald’s tragedy, by contrast, takes place before the Fall and illustrates Eve’s longing for a life that cannot be satisfied by her present existence with Adam. That Klopstock and Ewald attribute contradictory desires to the Old Testament character is noteworthy, not least because Ewald was aware of Klopstock’s literary and theoretical works when writing Adam og Ewa and admired his biblical poetry in general. This paper argues that both Klopstock and Ewald, despite their differing portrayals of Eve, use the desires of the very first woman as a device to convey the Christian message of divine salvation. The varied literary interpretations of Eve shed light on the way biblical narratives were adapted for tragedy in the eighteenth century.