The "love that dare not speak its name" is not a line of "Wilde's,"
though it certainly applies to him. It was written by his
lover Lord Alfred Douglas ("Bosie"), a poet of some
accomplishment. Stephen's recollection of the phrase in Proteus
solidifies some of the homoerotic suggestions conveyed by his
thoughts about Mulligan in Telemachus. In Scylla
and Charybdis he applies it to Shakespeare, who wrote
most of his sonnets to the younger man with whom he was in
love.
The speaker of Two Loves envisions two young men
"walking on a shining plain / Of Golden light," one of them
happily singing of the loves of girls and boys, the other
sighing. He asks the sad one for his name and is told, "I am
Love." The happy one angrily cries, "'He lieth, for his name
is Shame, / But I am Love, and I was wont to be / Alone in
this fair garden, till he came / Unasked by night; I am true
Love, I fill / The hearts of boy and girl with mutual flame.'"
The sad lover acquiesces: "'Have thy will, / I am the love
that dare not speak its name.'"
That acquiescence was confirmed by the sad outcome of the
struggle with Douglas' father, the Marquess of Queensberry.
Both sides referred to the poem during the trial for libel
that Wilde initiated, the Marquess' lawyer as evidence of
criminal homosexual activity and Wilde as the expression of a
Platonic devotion. Thornton quotes what Wilde said about it:
"The 'Love that dare not speak its name' in this century is
such a great affection of an elder for a younger man as there
was between David and Jonathan. . . . It is that deep,
spiritual affection that is as pure as it is perfect. . . .
There is nothing unnatural about it. It is intellectual, and
it repeatedly exists between an elder and a younger man, when
the elder man has intellect, and the younger man has all the
joy, hope, and glamour of life before him." Wilde lost the
libel suit, and then was himself tried for "gross indecency."
He served two years in prison doing hard labor.
In Proteus Stephen thinks of the words as he
characterizes Mulligan more approvingly than he ever did in Telemachus:
"Staunch friend, a brother soul: Wilde's love that
dare not speak its name. He now will leave me. And
the blame? As I am. As I am. All or not at all."
Like the friendship with Cranly
in A Portrait of the Artist, Mulligan represents the
possibility of an intense same-sex involvement with a slightly
older man—a possibility that is in the process of dissolving.
The same features characterize Shakespeare's devotion to the
young man of the sonnets. In Scylla and Charybdis
Stephen talks about how the poet's female lover "spurned him
for a lord, his dearmylove." In interior monologue he thinks,
"Love that dare not speak its name."
Given the perils of same-sex love speaking its name it is
perhaps not surprising that A Portrait, Telemachus,
and Proteus, like Shakespeare's sonnets to the
young man, should avoid raising the question of sexual desire.
But Stephen does address this issue at least glancingly in Scylla
and Charybdis, and there he seems clearly uninterested
in a sexual relationship with Mulligan. Homosexual love is one
in a long line of non-standard sexual practices that he cites
as being less censured by taboo than father-son incest: "Sons
with mothers, sires with daughters, lesbic sisters, loves
that dare not speak their name, nephews with
grandmothers, jailbirds with keyholes, queens with prize
bulls." When Mulligan "amorously" recounts the answer that
Ernest Dowden made to "the charge of pederasty brought against
the bard" ("All we can say is that life ran very high in
those days"), Stephen thinks, "Catamite."
