Stephen Spender's outlook on sexuality
Spender's seemingly changing attitudes towards homosexuality and heterosexuality have caused him to be labeled bisexual, repressed, latently homophobic, or simply someone so complex as to resist easy labeling.
Perhaps this discussion was foreseen by him, because he addresses this issue quite thoroughly in World Within World. However, even there he cannot fully decide on one explanation for what he does but prefers to give several ones, right after writing about his first, clearly homosexual, but also very one-sided relationship with a fellow student at Oxford:
- 1. Spender feels the assignment of labels to emotions to be limiting oneself's freedom, an act which was unnecessary until the 20th century:
- "Yet I have come to wonder whether many contemporaries in labelling themselves [homosexuals] do not also condemn themselves to a kind of doom of being that which they consider themselves in the psychological text-book. (...) As a result of this tendency to give themselves labels, people feel forced to make a choice which, in past times, was not made."
- In other words, labeling oneself a certain way may have a feedback on behavior, as he describes in another part of his autobiography, that when he learns he is part Jewish, he begins to "feel Jewish".
- 2. He feels homosexual relationships mostly coexisted with "normal", that is heterosexual, relationships throughout history, for example in Shakespeare's sonnets "what does Shakespeare say to his lover? Get married and have a child."
- 3. He somewhat questions the whole concept of a "third sex", that is, people who are exclusively homosexual, as put forth by 19th century science:
- "At no point is there an acceptance of the idea of the poet and his lover friend belonging to a world of a third sex, which is characteristic of much literature in the twentieth century."
- 4. Without further reasons, he asserts that one's goal in life should be to be "normal", which he defines as matching closely what society perceives as "normal" and what is "normal" for oneself, i.e. to "conform with" one's nature. This act is regarded by him as an overcoming of "limitations" in oneself, a word he uses repeatedly to suggest his attraction to other men.
- 5. Spender feels that an artist (and maybe specifically a poet) requires the interaction with "normal" people as an inspiration and may not place himself in a situation where he is "cut off from this warm flow of the normal general life".
- 6. Finally (and maybe this reason is somewhat more telling than the others, because it is less rational), Spender blames others for "guarding" him from intimacy with women, both at Oxford and before. At the same time, however, he admits that his expression of emotion towards an "attractive nurse" was "without consciousness of the implications" of what he was doing, which stands in marked contrast to his very conscious, painful feelings of attraction to his fellow student.