"Wilde is on Mine": Morrissey, Gothic Literature and Queer Identity

8/15/2019 "Wilde is on Mine": Morrissey, Gothic Literature and Queer Identity

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“Wilde Is On Mine”:

Morrissey, Gothic Literature and Queer Identity

Brontë Schiltz


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Acknowledgements

I would like to offer my sincere thanks to several people without whom this dissertation would

not have been possible.

To my supervisor, Dr. Mark Mathuray, for his invaluable advice and support during the

research, planning and writing of this dissertation.

To the wonderful staff at Gay’s The Word for their fantastic resources and warm conversations.

To my parents, Louise Baddeley and Keir Schiltz, for supplying me with tea and accompanying

me on dog walks when completing this dissertation seemed impossible.

To Chloë Rebecca Scott, for loving Morrissey as much as I do.

Finally, to Morrissey, who was very wrong to think that he’d never be anybody’s hero now.


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Contents

Introduction ………………………...………………………………………………………… 4

Chapter 1 – Billy Budd , Wuthering Heights and Morrissey’s queer songwriting …................. 8

Chapter 2 – “a life force of a devil incarnate”: Monstrosity in List of the Lost ……………... 16

Chapter 3 – “the fact of fiction”: List of the Lost and Queer Gothic Autobiography ……..… 26

Conclusion ………………...…………………………………………………………..……. 33

Bibliography .……………………………………………………………………………….. 36

“I am hated for loving,

I am haunted for wanting”

– Morrissey, 1994


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Introduction

In one of numerous negative reviews of Morrissey’s debut novella, List of the Lost (2015), The

Guardian’s Michael Hann described it as ‘an unpolished turd of a book, the stale excrement of

Morrissey’s imagination.’1 This is far from the first time Morrissey has been poorly reviewed

by the press. In an interview in 1992, he said that ‘I think admiring me, shall we say, is quite a

task. Because if you say you like Morrissey, then you have to explain why.’2 This dissertation

attempts to challenge Hann’s assessment of List of the Lost by considering its Gothic

framework through the lens of queer theory. It also offers an examination of Morrissey’s

equivocal relationship with the Gothic as a means of expressing his sexuality in his lyrical

work. Further, it intends to dispute the supposition that queerness must be monstrous and that

monstrosity must be queer within the Gothic through an examination of Morrissey’s work in

and with the genre, considering the ways in which he utilises Gothicism to explore his queer

identity and to criticise heteronormativity and homophobia.

It is necessary to define the concept of the queer Gothic as it is utilised in this

dissertation. William Hughes and Andrew Smith begin the introduction to their essay

collection, Queering the Gothic, by stating that ‘Gothic has, in a sense, always been ‘queer’.’3

Delving into the how and why, in the introduction to his seminal text on the subject, Queer

Gothic, George E. Haggarty posits that

‘[i]t is no mere coincidence that the cult of gothic fiction reached its apex at the very

moment when gender and sexuality were beginning to be codified for modern culture.

[…] Gothic fiction offered the one semirespectable area of literary endeavour in which

1 Michael Hann, “Morrissey: what we learned about him from List of the Lost” in The Guardian

(2015) [Accessed 6 March 2017].2 Morrissey, “Home Alone 2” in Details (1992)

[Accessed 6 March 2017.]3 William Hughes and Andrew Smith, Queering the Gothic, eds. William Hughes and Andrew Smith

(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011), p. 1.


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modes of sexual and social transgression were discursively addressed on a regular basis.

It therefore makes sense to consider the ways in which gothic fiction itself helped shape

thinking about sexual matters – theories of sexuality, as it were – and create the darker

shadows of the dominant fiction, the darkness that enables culture to function as fiction

in the first place.’4

According to this theory, the Gothic and queerness, which is here used to refer primarily to

same sex attraction, are intrinsically linked due to their shared history with regard to shaping

Western culture. The adoption of the Gothic by a writer such as Morrissey becomes particularly

interesting when considered through this perspective in that he is deeply interested in the

history and culture of sexuality, as is demonstrated consistently throughout List of the Lost .

In considering his decision to explore personal and political issues of sexuality through

a Gothic narrative, it is also necessary to explore the extent to which queerness is positively

portrayed across the genre’s canon. Dale Townshend, who has written numerous texts on the

Gothic, argues that ‘[i]f contemporary popular culture is anything to go by, the Gothic is more

in need of a straightening out than a queering up.’5 His statement is somewhat problematised,

however, by the fact that he proceeds to refer to ‘queer monstrosities’, ‘cinema’s long -term

exploitation of the monstrous queer’, ‘queer terrors’ and ‘spine-chilling queerness’.6 He then

proposes that ‘the task of queering the Gothic has already been achieved. Either that, or it was

never necessary in the first place.’7

The suggestion that the Gothic is sufficiently queer due to

regular appearances of queer monstrosity – that is, the representation of queer characters as

monstrous figures who drive the violent and frightening narratives of Gothic texts – is

problematic, especially in light of Haggerty’s theory of the Gothic’s role in shaping cultural

4 George E. Haggarty, Queer Gothic (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2006), p. 2 – 3.5 Dale Townshend, “‘Love in a convent’: or, Gothic and the perverse father of queer enjoyment” in Queering

the Gothic, p. 11.6 Townshend, p. 12.7 Townshend, p. 12.


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perceptions of sexuality. Such perceptions are of considerable concern to Morrissey, who

addresses them regularly through songs spanning his career, such as ‘Hand In Glove’ (1983),

‘Whatever Happens, I Love You’ (1994) and ‘At Last I Am Born’ (2006).

Similarly, Ellis Hanson, who specialises in the intersection of literature and sexuality,

argues that ‘the Gothic often reproduces the conventional paranoid structure of homophobia

and other moral panics over sex, and yet it can also be a raucous site of sexual transgression

and excess that undermines its own narrative effor ts at erotic containment’ and that ‘queer

reading rescues us from homophobic paranoia by reading Gothic narratives against the grain.’8

This still, however, implies that the Gothic tradition is inherently hostile towards queerness and

that the reader must employ specific reading strategies in order to escape this hostility. Through

an analysis of List of the Lost , this dissertation examines the way in which Morrissey opposes

this theory by appropriating traditionally conservative elements of the genre in order to convey

a transgressive, even radical, perspective on sexuality and its perception, including in relation

to Catholicism, something of a Gothic trope in and of itself. It also examines Morrissey’s

artistic decision to utilise the Gothic to explore deeply personal areas of his own life by

considering the autobiographical elements of List of the Lost .

It is also necessary to justify the exploration of rock music in a literary dissertation.

Generally speaking, the close relationship between vocal music and literature is widely

acknowledged. In Music And Literature – A Comparison Of The Arts, for instance, Calvin S.

Brown describes vocal music as ‘a simultaneous presentation of a literary work and a musical

work’ and writes that ‘[f]rom earliest antiquity music and poetry have been referred to as sister

arts’, drawing a connection between poetry and song lyrics.9 More specifically, this relationship

8 Ellis Hanson, “Queer Gothic” in The Routledge Companion to Gothic, eds. Catherine Spooner and Emma

McEvoy (New York: Routledge, 2007), p. 176.9 Calvin S. Brown, Music And Literature – A Comparison Of The Arts (Milton Keynes: Lightning Source,

1948), p. 44.


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is particularly significant when considered in a queer context. Gay music critic John Gill writes

that ‘because they are pure pop, Pet Shop Boys albums do not come with lyrics on the sleeve.

Lyrics (or, heaven help us, lyric sheets!) equal meaning-of-life songs equal rockist brain death.

Lyrics might encourage unhealthy thinking among fans who, in any case, are far too busy

having a good time to sit down and contemplate a Pet Shop Boys lyric.’10 Given that, according

to Gill, Neil Tennant responded negatively to the fact that he wrote in a review of Please ‘that

it had a strong gay subtext’, the ‘unhealthy thinking’ in question presumably refers to (literally)

queer reading – treating a song as a text and analysing it, specifically with regard to its

commentary on sexuality.11 Sexual dissidence and pop culture expert, Alan Sinfield, also

observes a relationship between literature and music in terms of the history of queer cultural

consumption in Gay and After: Gender, Culture and Consumption, arguing that ‘from Plato,

through Shakespeare, Wilde, Proust and Tennessee Williams, to Donna Summer and Freddie

Mercury, we have learnt to insinuate our own readings, alongside and in violation of the

mainstream.’12 It is especially important, then, that Morrissey places such emphasis on the

relationship between the two art forms in his own work. In The Smiths’ “Cemetry Gates”

(1986) [sic] he sings ‘Keats and Yeats are on your side / while Wilde is on mine’, and from

then on he has maintained a relationship with queer literature in his career as a lyricist. 13 His

albums often come with the lyrics provided, allowing and encouraging his audience to read

into them and take note of their literary influences. It is therefore important to take this area of

his career into account in examining his contributions to the queer Gothic, as it provides further

insight into his attitudes towards the genre. I have selected two songs which I feel best

exemplify Morrissey’s use of Gothic literature within his musical work: “Billy Budd” (1994)

and “You Have Killed Me” (2006).

10 John Gill, Queer Noises: Male and Female Homosexuality in Twentieth-Century Music (London: Cassell, 1995), p. 5.11 Gill, p. 1.12 Alan Sinfield, Gay and After: Gender, Culture and Consumption (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1998), p. 5. 13 The Smiths, ‘Cemetry Gates’ in The Queen is Dead (London: Rough Trade, 1986).


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Billy Budd , Wuthering Heights and Morrissey’s queer songwriting

The concept of the literary canon – the works which are regarded as the most influential,

as belonging to a cultural tradition – is one with which many writers are concerned, but it is of

particular concern to writers belonging to groups which it tends to exclude – specifically, those

whose writing is regarded as ‘special to a locality, gender, sexual orientation [or] race.’14 In

response to this dilemma, Robert Drake published a book entitled The Gay Canon. In his

introduction, he argues that ‘[m]any gay men […] feel adrift, separated [from gay culture],

finding queer art muddled by straight culture’s co-opting of it. This dilutes our culture within

the mainstream and makes it harder to see its specific queer influence, its gay interdependence

on other works.’15 Morrissey, conversely, is often incredibly clear in demonstrating the reliance

of his work as queer writing on other (literary) work. Through a comparison of “Billy Budd”

and “You Have Killed Me”, his ambivalent relationship with the Gothic as a source of

inspiration is revealed.

“Billy Budd” takes its name from Herman Melville’s posthumously published novella

(and Benjamin Britten’s operatic adaptation) about the downfall of a handsome young sailor.

Although Melville’s Billy Budd is not traditionally Gothic in that it does not explicitly explore

themes of the supernatural, it does contain various elements of the genre, including sexual

repression and aggression as a source of horror. Billy Budd has often been read as a queer text,

though not necessarily a positive one. Robert Martin wrote that ‘Melville was not able to

imagine what it might have been like for two men to love each other and survive’, and it is

certainly easy to read Billy Budd as a queer tragedy.16 The antagonist, master-at-arms John

Claggart, is explicitly queer – the narrator informs the reader that ‘sometimes the melancholy

14 Sinfield, Gay And After: Gender, Culture and Consumption, p. 8115

Robert Drake, The Gay Canon (New York: Anchor Books, 1998), p. xx.16 Robert K. Martin, Hero, Captain, and Stranger: Male Friendship, Social Critique, and Literary Form in the

Sea Novels of Herman Melville (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), p. 7.


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expression would have in it a touch of soft yearning, as if Claggart could even have loved Billy

but for fate and ban.’17 Instead, however, he accuses Billy of conspiracy to mutiny, which in

turn leads to Billy killing Claggart in his panic and subsequently being sentenced to death,

breaking the hearts of the rest of the crew. As in Matthew Lewis’s famous Gothic text, The

Monk , ‘because same-sex love is impossible, everyone becomes a victim.’18 Significantly,

Melville deliberately draws attention to the similarities between Claggart’s antagonism of Billy

and the antagonism typically portrayed in Gothic texts. The narrator explains that

‘the cause […] is in its very realism as much charged with that prime element of

Radcliffian romance, the mysterious, as any that the ingenuity of the author of the

Mysteries of Udolpho could devise. For what can more partake of the mysterious than

an antipathy spontaneous and profound such as is evoked in certain exceptional mortals

by the mere aspect of some other mortal, however harmless he may be? – if not called

forth by that very harmlessness itself.’19

Melville then proceeds to characterise Claggart as possessing ‘a depravity according to

nature’.20 The implications of such a description are obvious. Queerness is equated with there

being something inherently wrong with somebody, with a predatory nature and, therefore, with

a distinctly Gothic form of monstrosity, the Gothic being the genre in which, according to Eve

Kosofsky Sedgwick, ‘homophobia found its most apt and ramified embodiment.’21

Despite the extent to which the queer undertones of Billy Budd may seem obvious, not

all critics are inclined to agree with this reading. Notably, it is opposed by Barbara Johnson in

her essay “Melville’s Fist: The Execution of Billy Budd”, in which, while acknowledging queer

17 Herman Melville, “Billy Budd, Foretopman” in Billy Budd & Other Stories (Hertfordshire: Wordsworth

Editions, 1998), p. 265.18 George E. Haggerty, Queer Gothic (Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 2006), p. 26.19

Melville, p. 253 – 254.20 Melville, p. 255.21 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), p. 186.


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readings, she does so using phrases such as ‘[a]ccording to this perspective’ in order to distance

it from her own.22 James Creech contests Johnson’s reading, arguing that ‘an implicit claim

that we are unable to know that homosexuality is central to Billy Budd too easily legitimises

those who for quite other reasons remain unwilling to know it’ and that it ‘effectively removes

the possibility of our ever owning this important piece of homosexual meaning in American

literature.’23 There is similar feeling among many queer people regarding Britten’s opera. In

Alan Hollinghurst’s 1988 novel The Swimming-Pool Library, for instance, the gay protagonist,

Will, goes to see a production of Billy Budd with his friend James, who is also gay, and his

conservative grandfather. After the show, Will contemplates that what James ‘would want to

talk about would be the suppressed or (in his usual term) deflected sexuality of the opera. We

must all have recognised it, though it would have had an importance, even an eloquence, to

James and me that would have been quite lost on my grandfather.’24 In using Billy Budd as the

basis for a song about a male couple, then, Morrissey reclaims its queer meaning for an

audience seeking to identify with it despite the fact that it depicts queerness as a source of

monstrosity and suffering. What is particularly interesting is that, in the process of doing so,

he removes its Gothic elements.

Suffering, as in Melville’s Billy Budd , is also portrayed as an element of queer existence

in Morrissey’s song. In his biography, Morrissey: Scandal & Passion, David Bret writes that

‘Morrissey’s all-too-brief song draws an ingenious parallel not just between the

Beautiful Sailor’s demise and his own wished-for demise by some sections of the

22 Barbara Johnson, “Melville’s Fist: The Execution of Billy Budd” in The Critical Difference: Essays in theContemporary Rhetoric of Reading (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), p. 89.23

James Creech, Closet Writing/Gay Reading: The Case of Melville’s Pierre (Chicago: University of ChicagoPress, 1993), p. 10.24 Alan Hollinghurst, The Swimming-Pool Library (London: Vintage, 1998), p. 120


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media, but in the prejudice experienced by gay couples who, thwarted by homophobes,

are unable to find work.’25

The parallel to which Bret refers occurs in the lines ‘I took my job application into town, / did

you hear? They turned me down, / yes, and it’s all because of us’, prior to which Billy’s lover,

the persona through which Morrissey sings, also laments that ‘everyone’s laughing / since I

took up with you.’26 These are experiences with which many of Morrissey’s queer audience

can doubtlessly relate. The closing lyrics are ‘say, Billy Budd, / I would happily lose both of

my legs, / I would lose both of my legs, / oh, if it meant you could be free, / oh, if it meant you

could be free.’27 Unlike Melville’s novella, however, in which the author saw ‘his villain

Claggart as a repressed homosexual whose desires for Billy can only be translated into a false

accusation against him’, the speaker in Morrissey’s “Billy Budd” exhibits his desires for ‘Billy’

in the form of enthusiastic self-sacrifice.28 In making this alteration, Morrissey divorces

Melville’s work from its original Gothic context. The implication, then, is that he feels that the

Gothic is too hostile an environment for the exploration of queer identity.

However, his vacillating relationship with the Gothic is demonstrated by his interaction

with the genre in a song released twelve years later, “You Have Killed Me”. Taking its title

and final refrain, ‘I forgive you’, from chapter fifteen of Wuthering Heights, it follows in the

track listing of his eighth solo studio album, Ringleader of the Tormentors, after “Dear God,

Please Help Me”.29

Ten years prior to the album’s release, Nadine Hubbs wrote that

‘Morrissey has steadfastly refused to declare (or confirm) a gay subject position. But

still he chooses to explore queer themes, in the most knowledgably “inside” of queer-

25 David Brett, Morrissey: Scandal & Passion (London: Robson Books, 2007), p. 207.26 Morrissey, ‘Billy Budd’ in Vauxhall and I (London: Parlophone, 1994).27 Morrissey, ‘Billy Budd’. 28 Robert K. Martin, “Melville, Herman” in The Gay and Lesbian Literary Heritage: A Reader’s Companion to

the Writers and their Works, from Antiquity to the Present , ed. Claude J. Summers (New York: Henry Holt,1995), p. 475.29 Morrissey, ‘You Have Killed Me’ in Ringleader of the Tormentors (Rome: Sanctuary Records, 2006).


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insider language. This sign is abundantly meaningful to other insiders: for queer

listeners, Morrissey’s work is about queer erotics and experience. I know of no queer

fan who perceives Morrissey’s work or persona in terms at all straight. […] I also know

of straight fans who harbour no notion that Morrissey or his work has anything to do

with queerness.’30

In “Dear God, Please Help Me”, however, Morrissey entirely abandons this ambiguity. The

song is explicitly about his sexual relationship with another man, containing lyrics such as

‘there are explosive kegs / between my legs’ followed by ‘then he motions to me / with his

hand on my knee’.31 As well as through the arrangement of the album, Morrissey encourages

association between this song and “You Have Killed Me” by opening “Dear God, Please Help

Me” with the words ‘I am walking through Rome.’32 He also refers to Italian figures, films and

locations in lines such as ‘Pasolini is me, Accatone you’ll be’ and ‘Piazza Cavour, what’s my

life for?’ in “You Have Killed Me”.33 In doing so, as well as through the fact of Pier Paolo

Pasolini’s homosexuality, and through the sexually suggestive refrain ‘I entered nothing and

nothing entered me / ‘til you came with the key,’ he suggests that the subject of “You Have

Killed Me” is a man, and thereby reworks Emily Brontë’s novel about relationships between

men and women in a queer context by situating excerpts within a narrative about a relationship

between men.34 Significantly, he does so while retaining the Gothic elements of Brontë’s work

– lines such as ‘as I live and breathe, you have killed me’ and ‘yes I walk around, somehow,

but you have killed me’ produce a similar sense of ghostliness to Wuthering Heights.35

30 Nadine Hubbs, “Music of the ‘Fourth Gender’: Morrissey and the Sexual Politics of Melodic Contour” in

Genders 23 (1996), p. 285.31 Morrissey, ‘Dear God, Please Help Me’ in Ringleader of the Tormentors.32 Morrissey, ‘Dear God, Please Help Me’. 33

Morrissey, ‘You Have Killed Me’. 34 Morrissey, ‘You Have Killed Me’. 35 Morrissey, ‘You Have Killed Me’.


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He is certainly not the first to derive queer meaning from the novel. In “Lesbianism and

the Censoring of "Wuthering Heights"”, Jean E. Kennard hypothesises that Emily Brontë

might, with modern understanding and terminology, have identified as a lesbian, and reads

Wuthering Heights in accordance with that perspective:

‘It would clearly be possible to argue that Wuthering Heights is a lesbian text simply

by discussing the characters, reading Catherine Earnshaw as the Emily Brontë figure

who encodes her sexual inversion in Heathcliff. Heathcliff, unacceptable, alien in race

and social standing, emotionally powerful, an inseparable part of herself, is an

appropriate embodiment of Brontë’s sexual identity. When Catherine and Heathcliff

are separated, the violence that ensues suggests the intense pain of losing a part of

oneself. The violence Heathcliff demonstrates after his return is the power of emotion

denied, of taboo violated, what Boone calls “the welling up of the forbidden” (160).’36

Wuthering Heights also lends itself to queer appropriation without a reading as complex as

Kennard’s. Sue Chaplin refers to the ‘use of different narrative voices to exclude and demonise

Heathcliff’ who is ‘referred to repeatedly as demonic or monstrous; he is an ‘evil beast’, an

‘imp of satan’ and ‘a goblin’; his eyes are ‘black fiends’, his teeth ‘sharp, white’; and Nelly

Dean […] asks the loaded question, ‘Is he a ghoul or a vampire?’’37 Recounting her first

impression of Heathcliff, Nelly describes him as ‘a dirty, ragged, black -haired child; big

enough both to walk and talk […] yet, when it was set on its feet, it only stared round, and

repeated over and over some gibberish that nobody could understand.’38 This othering and

dehumanising of Heathcliff is incredibly similar to that typically associated with queer Gothic

characters. Kelly Hur ley, for example, explores the theme of ‘abhumanness’ in Gothic fiction

36 Jean E. Kennard, “Lesbianism and the Censoring of “Wuthering Heights”” in NWSA Journal Vol. 8, No. 2

(Summer, 1996), p. 24.37 Sue Chaplin, Gothic Literature (London: York Press, 2011), p. 83.38 Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (London: Penguin, 2011), p. 42.


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with regard to its association with ‘homoerotic desire’, which, she argues, is ‘not unexpected,

given the sociomedical conflation of homosexuality, degeneration, and animality’ in the late

nineteenth century.39

In the final chapter of the novel, however, Cathy and Heathcliff are reunited in death,

‘a little boy’ reporting having seen ‘Heathcliff and a woman, yonder, under t’ Nab.’40 This

satisfies a wish which Heathcliff had expressed since chapter sixteen, in which he begs Cathy’s

corpse: ‘Be with me always – take any form – drive me mad! only do not leave me in this

abyss, where I cannot find you!’41 Whether Heathcliff is read, therefore, as an embodiment of

queer identity or more simply as a character with whose mistreatment queer readers can relate,

he receives, despite his suffering and monstrous characterisation throughout the text, a

satisfying narrative resolution. It is perhaps the case, then, that Morrissey also sees the Gothic

as a useful vehicle for expressing his queer desire in that it often explores ‘liminality and

border-crossing’ not unlike that experienced by queer people in their pursuit of happiness

within heteronormative society.42 Although “You Have Killed Me” is not a song about personal

happiness, Ringleader of the Tormentors expresses Morrissey’s increasing comfort with his

queer identity. It is a significant departure from “I Have Forgiven Jesus”, a song released two

years previously, in which he sings ‘I have forgiven Jesus for all the desire / he placed in me

when there’s nothing I can do with this desire’.43 In Ringleader of the Tormentors’ “At Last I

Am Born”, by contrast, he sings ‘I once was a mess / of guilt because of the flesh / it’s

remarkable what you can learn / once you are born, born, born,’ and Gothic literature plays an

important role in emphasising this departure.44

39 Kelly Hurley, “British Gothic fiction, 1885 – 1930” in The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction, ed.

Jerrold E. Hogle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), p. 202 – 203.40 Brontë, p. 393.41 Brontë, p. 199.42

Palmer, p. 66.43 Morrissey, ‘I Have Forgiven Jesus’ in You Are The Quarry (London: Attack Records, 2004).44 Morrissey, ‘At Last I Am Born’ in Ringleader of the Tormentors (Rome: Sanctuary Records, 2006).


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In Cultural Politics – Queer Reading, Alan Sinfield argues that ‘[t]he ostensible project

of literary criticism has been to seek the right answer to disputed reading, but in fact, we all

know, the essay that purports to settle such questions always provokes another’ because ‘there

is no disinterested reading.’45 Those who hold societal power have a vested interest in

preserving conservative interpretations of literary texts, and those who do not have a vested

interested in disrupting them. This is clearly true of Morrissey, who rarely takes literature as a

basis for his songwriting without producing a radical representation of the source material. As

his lyrical adaptations of Billy Budd and Wuthering Heights demonstrate, he has a complicated

relationship with the Gothic genre, apparently seeing it as potentially both limiting and

productive to the exploration of queer identity and experience. This ambivalence continues to

inform his writing in his debut as a novelist.

45 Alan Sinfield, Cultural Politics – Queer Reading (New York: Routledge, 2005), p. 4.


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“a life force of a devil incarnate”: Monstrosity in List of the Lost

On the novella’s cover, Morrissey describes List of the Lost as ‘an American tale where,

naturally, evil conquers good, and none live happily ever after, for the complicated pangs of

the empty experiences of flesh-and-blood human figures are the reasons why nothing can ever

be enough’ and warns his readers that ‘[t]o read a book is to let a root sink down. List of the

Lost is the reality of what is true battling against what is permitted to be true’. 46 The questions

this synopsis opens to the reader are integral to the novella, both as a Gothic text and as a queer

text. In particular, the question of monstrosity within List of the Lost – what is monstrous and

why – is one which illuminates its place in the Gothic tradition, in terms of both Morr issey’s

adherence to and defiance of conventions of the genre.

Describing List of the Lost prior to its publication, Morrissey explained that

‘[t]he theme is demonology […] It is about a sports relay team in 1970s America who

accidentally kill a wretch […] a discarnate entity in physical form. […] He is a life force

of a devil incarnate, yet in his astral shell he is one phase removed from life. The wretch

begins a banishing ritual of the four main characters, and therefore his own death at the

beginning of the book is illusory.’47

This summary is reasonably conclusive. What remains to be discussed, however, is the

meaning beyond this surface narrative and the extent to which demonology may be read as an

incarnation of a wretch of a socio-political nature: heteronormativity.

To a certain degree, List of the Lost does perpetuate the Gothic association between

queerness and monstrosity. The ‘wretch’ is a ‘hobo’ who the central characters encounter

46 Morrissey, List of the Lost (London: Penguin, 2015).47

Morrissey, “Morrissey's novel List of the Lost is published this Thursday by Penguin Books (UK)” on True-To-You: A Morrissey Zine (2015) [Accessed 6

March 2017.]


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‘[c]urled and hidden amongst the flora and fauna that run alongside a boundary-line bride

path.’48 He survives for only six pages before the protagonist, Ezra, hits and accidentally kills

him when ‘[t]rouble comes unexpectedly by a lightning-fast pinch between Ezra’s legs as the

wretch leaps over the psychological and physical line only to be met by a ferocious neat-as-a-

pin side-swipe to the right cheek bone.’49 This unleashes a curse on these characters, and Ezra

in particular – they all die before the end of the book except for him, who suffers a worse fate,

being left completely alone, ‘condemned to life.’50 In this sense, the ‘wretch’ is monstrous in

that he appears to be the primary source of suffering in the novella, and Ezra’s actions are

portrayed as the product of homosexual panic. The wretch’s orientation has already been

established by this point – immediately after meeting the relay team, he tells them how he’d

‘known a boy from over the back, and I’d stand on tip -toe to watch him every day at four

o’clock […] not knowing why at first. I’d wait to the point of excited tears.’51 It is important

to consider, however, that he appears not to signify queerness as monstrous, but is, rather, a

product of the monstrosity of societal repression of queerness. The revelation of his sexuality

is followed by the revelation of his suffering as a result of it:

‘but, ah, the demands of other people, other people, other people, other people, other

people … but what about me, and what I felt? […] They said my emotions were

unusual, but they weren’t unusual enough for there not to be laws against them, so they

must have been quite common, in fact, and not unusual at all.’52

He is described as ‘[a] pitiful vision of life’s loneliness […] trapped in his history – the history

that created him.’53 This neatly mirrors Butler’s concept of ‘heterosexual melancholy’ – that

48 Morrissey, List of the Lost , p. 21 – 22.49 Morrissey, List of the Lost , p. 28.50 Morrissey, List of the Lost , p. 113.51

Morrissey, List of the Lost , p. 25.52 Morrissey, List of the Lost , p. 25.53 Morrissey, List of the Lost , p. 22 – 23.


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the social prohibition of same sex desire produces a damaging – even a monstrous – effect on

human beings from childhood.54 He has become monstrous not because he is queer, but because

he has not been permitted to be so. As will be explored further later in this dissertation, Ezra’s

panic is not, therefore, indicative of homophobia, but of the impact that the repression of his

own sexuality has had on him, and his inability to reconcile that with encountering a character

who rebels against the societal constraints which necessitate that repression.

Morrissey also challenges the tradition of associating queerness with monstrosity by

rendering motherhood as one of the most disruptive and tragic elements of List of the Lost.

While motherhood frequently features in Gothic fiction, it often functions as a restorative

power. The works of Ann Radcliffe, for instance, ‘all begin by sketching the pastoral Eden of

safe family life […] and end back in the haven of a new family which duplicates the virtues of

the initial one.’55 In some cases, in fact, order is not restored through the discovery of a new

family, but the rediscovery of the original – ‘[i]n The Italian and A Sicilian Romance, the

supposedly dead mother comes back to life.’56 In List of the Lost, however, motherhood is

stripped of the healing properties it traditionally carries in Gothic fiction, and, associated with

heterosexuality, instead becomes monstrous.

In No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, Lee Edelman explores the concept

of ‘reproductive futurism’.57 He argues that, particularly in America, where List of the Lost is

set, politicians ‘recurrently frame their political struggle […] as a “fight for our children – for

our daughters and our sons,” and thus as a fight for the future’ and ‘that queerness names the

side of those not “fighting for the children,” the side outside the consensus by which all politics

54 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 2011), p. 95.55 David Durant, “Ann Radcliffe and the Conservative Gothic” in Studies in English Literature, 1500 – 1900,

Vol. 22, No. 3, Restoration and Eighteenth Century (Texas: Rice University, 1982), p. 520.56

Durant, p. 526.57 Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (North Carolina: Duke University Press, 2004),

p. 2.


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confirms the absolute value of reproductive futurism.’58 This places queerness outside of the

traditional understanding of history and its making. Carla Freccero makes a comparison

between this theory and the Gothic, arguing that ‘heteroreproductive futurity’ produces ‘the

illusion of a choice between “life” and “death”’ and proposes ‘haunting – a mode of “precarious

life” – as an alternative model for how queer history might proceed.’ 59 That is, to exist as a

queer person is to adopt the position of a ghost, at a remove from the social binary of “life”

(reproduction) and “death” (childlessness), in the narrative of reproductive futurism. This

school of thought in fact makes regular appearances in Gothic fiction. Haggerty, for instance,

argues that ‘apocalyptic thinking places male-male desire at the fulcrum of cultural collapse’,

potentially because of ‘the desire for the escape from heteronormativity that male love offers,’

and that ‘[m]ale love, properly articulated and fully identified, can only mean the end of

history.’60 It is this doomed representation of queer desire which Morrissey challenges by

appropriating it for his representation of motherhood.

The most explicitly supernatural figure of the novella, and one of the most tragic, is

Elizabeth Barbelo, ‘a shrunken and concave visualization that looked as if released f rom her

own grave,’ who is also characterised almost entirely through her role as a mother. 61 She tells

the protagonist, Ezra, that her son is ‘the one and only thing I have ever loved’.62 She even goes

as far as to say that ‘he is me.’63 The only other mother in the text is fellow runner Harri’s, and

she appears only upon his realisation that ‘[i]mmortal, indestructible mother is dead,’ a

discovery which leads him to take his own life.64 Motherhood, then, is associated with both

58 Edelman, p. 3.59 Carla Freccero, “Queer Spectrality: Haunting the Past” in The Spectralities Reader: Ghosts and Haunting in

Contemporary Cultural Theory, eds. María del Pilar Blanco and Esther Peeren (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), p.

337.60 Haggerty, p. 128.61 Morrissey, List of the Lost , p. 63.62

Morrissey, List of the Lost , p. 64.63 Morrissey, List of the Lost , p. 66.64 Morrissey, List of the Lost , p. 48.


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literal death and death of individual identity. Queerness, meanwhile, is portrayed as a socially

forbidden opportunity to fully realise the self:

‘Heatedly the four gather daily, minus boos and taboos, free of the prohibitions that

dishonour us all should we dare remark upon each other ’s physical good fortune (and

lucky are those who might be remarked upon). We simply are not allowed to say. We

employ sexual indifference as we gather in groups, schooled, as we are, against

eroticisms, and any sudden desire registers as tension should our over-trained

prejudices nap whilst our constitutional fragility catches us looking – or, even worse,

allowing ourselves to be looked at. Did you ever compliment a friend, a mere friend,

on the directed desire of their eyes? Of course you didn’t. Or on their sexually agreeable

smile? Of course you wouldn’t. Or on their hands – whose touch certainly does

something as the waft of their passing being triggers unsuspecting impulses within

unsuspecting you? The will to find all of these motions in others runs strong in our

being, yet we must only ever observe without acting, and even the very words that are

in themselves a form of action … must never be said. Day after day, year after year, we

observe without operating, whilst the fact that we are only allowed to observe makes

the will to run and r ise all the stronger.’65

This is a central element of the novella – the suggestion that the protagonists would not only

be more fully happy but more fully true to themselves were they able to express their

suppressed sexual interests in one another. Meanwhile, heterosexual unions, marked by

motherhood, invariably end in misery and loss of life and self, and drive the violence and horror

of the novella in much the same way as queer monstrosity has traditionally.

65 Morrissey, List of the Lost , p. 3 – 4.


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Maternity also assumes a spectral narrative role. Near the beginning of the novella,

Ezra’s girlfriend, Eliza, tells him that she is ‘definitely having a baby.’66 She then clarifies that

‘the baby was not currently within, but that the wish would one day certainly be fulfilled.’ 67

This wish for a union sealed by parenthood haunts the narrative – despite the fact that ‘[b]eyond

each other and their will to run, [the team] seek no other distraction,’ Ezra remains with Eliza

until her death five pages before the end of the novella. 68 By this point, his teammates, Nails,

Harri and Justy, are already dead, and it is too late for Ezra to seek the sexual or emotional

fulfilment with them which he obviously desired. After Eliza’s death, half -unconscious in

hospital, Ezra is visited by Harri as a ghost-like figure of his memory. In his mind, he ‘leaned

into a rolling and groaning Harri’ and

‘kissed him softly on the head and Harri looked up with eyes that shed a gentle

melancholy at an affection so unexpected and one that moves different people in

different ways. […] “May we never be apart,” Ezra sensitively murmured to Harri,

knowing that love could never be experienced without risk, or without a voice with a

certain sound.’69

During this imagined exchange, Eliza is ‘chewing on a pencil in Ezra’s memory’, no longer

the primary recipient of his affection.70 In this sense, too, motherhood is presented as bound to

produce tragedy in much the same way as queerness has frequently been portrayed. The

montage of violent on-screen deaths of queer characters in The Celluloid Closet , a documentary

based on Vito Russo’s groundbreaking book, is brought to mind. The overlaid narration

declares that ‘by now, the pattern was clear: characters of questionable sexuality would meet

66 Morrissey, List of the Lost , p. 15.67 Morrissey, List of the Lost , p. 16.68



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with a nasty end by the last reel.’71 It is surely not purely coincidental that several of those films

– The Bride of Frankenstein, Dracula’s Daughter and Rebecca – are explicitly Gothic. By

transferring this narrative to motherhood and, by implication, heterosexuality, Morrissey

boldly opposes the Gothic’s traditional condemnation of queerness and reclaims the genre on

his own terms.

Correspondingly, traditional Gothic texts frequently conclude with marriage.

Townshend posits that ‘in by far the majority of cases, heterosexual marriage, in which hero

and heroine are united to one another in a monogamous […] emotional bond, appears to be the

teleological goal to which most Gothic fictions aspired.’72 Ardel Haefele-Thomas extends this

theory further, arguing that ‘[t]hrough a Gothic framework, Wilkie Collins explores a crisis in

the heterosexual marriage plot in his two most famous novels’ and that ‘the solution to the

crisis d oes not rest with the usual socially acceptable authorities […] but rather with the

ingenuity of a queer character’:

‘Through their marginalized positions, [Marian Halcombe and Ezra Jennings] are given

special insight into the facades of ‘normal’ and ‘reality’, and through their abilities […]

come to facilitate the ritual of heterosexual marriage and the resolution of the marriage

plot.’73

In List of the Lost , Morrissey also subverts this tradition – rather than queerness serving a

satisfying heterosexual conclusion, a satisfying queer conclusion is possible only in dreams

due to the looming spectre of heterosexuality. His queer characters do not exist to serve a

heterosexual narrative, but rather to weave a narrative which demonstrates the extent to which

71 The Celluloid Closet , dir. by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman (Sony Pictures Classics, 1996) [on DVD].72

Townshend, p. 13.73 Ardel Haefele-Thomas, Queer Others in Victorian Gothic: Transgressing Monstrosity (Cardiff: University of

Wales Press, 2012), p. 5.


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queer people throughout history, including very recent history, have been prevented from living

authentic and fulfilling lives due to the restrictions of society.

Morrissey is also careful to avoid an association between paedophilic monstrosity and

queerness in List of the Lost , although this appears to have been strangely misunderstood by

some critics. Hann writes that ‘his attitude towards sex […] seems to be predatory: older men

feed upon the young.’74 His implication that the actions of Morrissey’s characters are reflective

of his own proclivities is bizarre and borders on libel given Morrissey’s condemnation of his

predatory characters (some of which are heterosexual), as well as the existence of characters

whose same sex attraction is by no means predatory.

As Haggerty states, ‘[v]ictimization of the young is […] a Gothic staple, and concern

for the safety of children has been there from the first.’75 Morrissey carries this theme into List

of the Lost , in which the most obviously evil character is Dean Isaac, who ‘molested and

butchered’ Elizabeth Barbelo’s son, Noah.76 Dean Isaac is also gay, and tells Ezra, Nails and

Justy that ‘I look at young men such as yourselves, and that really is enough for me.’77 Despite

this potentially problematic choice of characterisation, however, Dean Isaac’s sexuality is not

established until page 103 of 118 (the gender of victims of sexual assault is not, after all,

necessarily indicative of sexual orientation). Meanwhile, the relationship between Ezra, Nails,

Harri and Justy is charged with eroticism from the very beginning, when the reader is informed

that they ‘performed marital duties as joined by strengths, but not weaknesses, and this crowned

their lives. They each saw the desirable object within each other, and combined, they had no

cause to justify one second of their contract.’78 Morrissey also encourages the reader to regard

74 Hann.75 Haggerty, p. 131.76



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them favourably, referring to them on the first page of the novella as ‘[o]ur four boys’. 79 He

makes similar references to them throughout, including ‘our heroes’.80 In doing so, he ensures

that relationships between men are portrayed positively in and of themselves before the reader

has the opportunity to make the association between male attraction to other men and adult

abuse of children. Inappropriate desire is also attributed to a heterosexual character prior to the

appearance of Elizabeth Barbelo. The team’s coach, Rims, is also portrayed as predatory –

‘[h]e sees teenage girls as he saw them when he too were a teenager, and he cannot bear that

they no longer see him – as they once had.’81 Queerness and pedophilia are at no point portrayed

as synonymous.

Morrissey also reworks the association of queerness and paedophilia through a critique

of the representation of childhood sexual assault crimes in the media:

‘Noah Barbelo’s name had slipped from print as an embarrassingly timed discovery

that had been inefficiently investigated and then flicked away with easy conscience.

Had Noah been Naomi, perhaps the hot-pants turn-on might have sweet-toothed the

press into a more aroused cruise mode, but it was rarely admitted that such off-base sex

attacks could possibly befall boys such as Noah, and thus the media struggled with the

language required to describe what they could have outlined with such impressive

oomph and glitz had Noah been a fluffy girl.’82

The suggestion that the media fetishises young girls and almost celebrates sexual attacks

against them while ignoring the suffering of male victims of childhood sexual assault because

they do not arouse journalists is daring, and addresses another Gothic fundamental in a

refreshingly modern way. Mair Rigby argues that ‘[i]n putting into play signs and codes such

79 Morrissey, List of the Lost , p. 1.80



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as forbidden knowledge, recognition, paranoia, the unspeakable, madness, monstrosity, death,

disease, social ostracism and strange symbolic space,’ Gothic texts ‘can be read as mobilising

conventions which have come to double as both Gothic tropes and tropes within the language

of sexual ‘deviance’.’83 That is, the indirect and, as Haggerty implied, historically unique nature

of discussions of homosexuality throughout the Gothic canon has produced language and

symbols which represent both Gothic monstrosity and queer sexuality. In List of the Lost ,

however, unspeakability is portrayed as a product of institutional heteropatriarchy and is

condemned as such. According to Morrissey’s narrator, society as a whole suffers as a result

of the reluctance to put anything sexual into language other than when it appeals to male desire

for women – and young girls.

While there is an overlap between queerness and monstrosity in List of the Lost ,

therefore, Morrissey prevents his novel from producing a traditionally Gothic condemnation of

homosexuality by ensuring that the most monstrous forces within the novella are instead

products of the societal enforcement of heterosexuality.

83 Mair Rigby, “‘Do you share my madness?’: Frankenstein’s queer Gothic” in Queering the Gothic, p. 38.


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“the fact of fiction”: List of the Lost and Queer Gothic Autobiography

Although Morrissey published an autobiography in 2013, List of the Lost has been

widely interpreted by critics as his second work of that nature, so much so that Hann entitled

his article “Morrissey: what we learned about him from List of the Lost”.84 What he and others

have not explored, however, is the extent to which the autobiographical elements of the novella

contribute to its queer Gothicism.

In “Speaking Silence: The Structures and Strategies of Queer Autobiography”, Brian

Loftus argues that ‘“queer autobiography” […] expresses both the problem of the

homosexual’s entry into representation and the (im)possibilities of the claim to an “I” that

autobiography demands.’85 That is, autobiography is almost impossible for queer people due

to the shortage of predecessors whose example may be followed, and the complexity of

condensing queer experience into a straightforward narrative. Interestingly, a similar theory

which is not specific to sexuality is outlined by William C. Spengemann in The Forms of

Autobiography. One such form, he argues, is ‘poetic autobiography’ – that is, autobiographical

fiction.86 Taking David Copperfield to exemplify his definition of the subgenre, he argues that

‘Dickens saw in his past experiences not the tangled root-system of a single self but the seeds

of many separate selves, all of whom had some ineffable kinship with each other but could be

brought together only upon a fictive stage.’87 This, like Loftus’ theory, implies a difficulty in

condensing personal experience into the narrative of a singular, continuous and linear

subjectivity. This concept is also essential to the Gothic, which typically ‘fragments stable

84 Hann.85 Brian Loftus, “Speaking Silence: The Structures and Strategies of Queer Autobiography” in College

Literature Vol. 24, No. 1, Queer Utilities: Textual Studies, Theory, Pedagogy, Praxis (Febuary 1997), p. 2886

William C. Spengemann, The Forms of Autobiography: Episodes in the History of a Literary Genre (NewHaven: Yale University Press, 1980), p. 110.87 Spengemann, p. 130.


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identity and social order.’88 Similarly, Haefele-Thomas argues that ‘many of the Gothic

monsters cause fear and panic because of their uncanny ability to simultaneously embody

multiple subject positions.’89 This sense of uncanniness and fragmented identity is integral to

List of the Lost , arguably a work of poetic autobiography and, given Morrissey’s sexuality,

therefore also queer autobiography, and exemplifies the necessity of the Gothic for Morrissey’s

exploration of his sexuality. Notably, however, his characters do not frighten others because of

their existence outside of a single stable subject position, except where they force them to

confront the effects of their own repression. More often, they are made miserable by their

inability to embody a stable subjectivity due to the prohibitions placed upon them by the society

in which they live.

Independent critic Adam Sherwin argues that ‘[l]iterary critics may have missed an

elaborate metaphor at the heart of the book. For its four young heroes – Ezra, Nails, Harri, Justy

– read Morrissey, Johnny Marr, Andy Rourke and Mike Joyce of The Smiths.’90 In doing so,

he overlooks an essential feature of List of the Lost – that Morrissey’s own subjectivity is

present in many of his characters, including his monsters. Dean Isaac makes similar complaints

regarding heteronormativity to the ‘wretch’, complaining that

‘[w]hen I was a child my uncle asked me what I’d like to b e when I grew up, and I

didn’t say to him ‘Well, I’d like very much to be a sexual deviant, hounded for my

thoughts alone, not having actually done anything yet hounded for having entertained

the thought … which is apparently just as bad as action.’’91

88 Cindy Hendershot, The Animal Within: Masculinity and the Gothic (Michigan: University of Michican Press,

1998), p. 1.89 Haefele-Thomas, p. 4.90 Adam Sherwin, “List of the Lost by Morrissey, first read: Debut novel is a leaden festival of self - pity” in The

Independent (2015) [Accessed 6 March 2017.]91 Morrissey, List of the Lost , p. 105.


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This bears a striking resemblance to Morrissey’s first reference to his sexual identity in his

non-fictional autobiography, when he recalls the homophobia he experienced from a childhood

friend at the age of fourteen or fifteen: ‘‘You like all those queers, don’t you?’ he bites. By this

he means my merging musical obsessions, and my heart sinks down into a new darkness. There

is nothing I can salvage from this accusation, and the tears pool, and I lose.’92 The ‘wretch’, as

Morrissey once was, is wounded by his inability to live simply as his authentic self, and he

frightens the relay team because he acknowledges their shared suppression in a way which

they, at this stage, cannot imagine doing. His openness threatens them because they guard their

private proclivities through outward illusions of being ‘heterosexually resolved’.93

Morrissey weaves his queer identity into every corner of his novella, and goes so far as

to deliberately draw attention to this scattering of subjectivities. Following Harri’s death, one

of the runners complains to another that ‘[y]our leg is touching my leg, which is all very nice,

but I think of you more as a friend,’ and the addressee replies ‘Ah yes! Sorry! God forbid a leg

touch another leg and the entire foundation of rigid sexual mores crash to shuddering, shamed

failure!’94 The third surviving runner then recalls how Harri would

‘walk across the field … towards me … with that strong stride and stupid with smiles,

and I’d be happy just to hear whatever the hell would stream out of him on that day, on

any day … that open face, that knowing grin … that grin I’d known all of my life …

before we’d even met. I grew up on tales of his exploits, I knew his body like I knew

my own.’95

92 Morrissey, Autobiography (London: Penguin, 2013), p. 13.93



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This dialogue is untagged, and the narrator then remarks that ‘[a]t this stage it hardly mattered

who was saying what.’96 The Gothic provides, therefore, the ideal genre for Morrissey’s

exploration of the struggle of containing identity within a single subjectivity while

simultaneously dealing with queer desire, internalised homophobia and heteronormative

expectations, given that it has been home to explorations of both fragmented identity and

transgressive sexuality since its conception. In reconfiguring the way in which those elements

interact with one another, List of the Lost is a desperately needed addition to the Gothic

tradition, truly rescuing the queer reader from the homophobia which is arguably inherent in

many earlier Gothic texts.

Spengemann also argues that poetic autobiography is further exemplified by David

Copperfield in that ‘[t]he concern with self that permeates autobiography is evident […] in

Dickens’s apparent need to write about a period of his life that was so distasteful, even

shameful; to confess himself publicly, as it were, and to redeem his past’.97 This appears to also

be the case for Morrissey in List of the Lost ,

although it is society, and not the self, with which

Morrissey seems to be ashamed. It is set in the ‘year of 1975, so lavish with promise, so sadistic

in demand.’98 Born in 1959, that was the year in which Morrissey, who describes himself as

‘humasexual’, turned sixteen, and thus his sexual desire for women became legally acceptable

while his sexual desire for men was to remain legally prohibited for another five years. 99 This

setting creates the impression that Morrissey, in a manner which Spengemann argues is central

to the poetic autobiography, is preoccupied with the homophobic constraints of his own past,

particularly since early internalisation of homophobia is a frequently recurring theme. As early

as eleven pages in, the narrator remarks that ‘the grand assumption that all children are

96 Morrissey, List of the Lost , p. 58.97 Spengemann, p. 123.98

Morrissey, List of the Lost , p. 7.99 Morrissey, “Statement” on True-To-You: A Morrissey Zine (2013) [Accessed 6 March 2017.]


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extensively heterosexually resolved at birth whipped a demented torment across the many who

were not,’ and Morrissey frequently returns to this preoccupation throughout the novella.100

Again, then, the use of the Gothic is appropriate – no other genre could be as suited to an

exploration of being haunted by one’s past, particularly in relation to queer identity.

List of the Lost also offers a radical reworking of the traditional use of Catholicism to

signify queerness in Gothic literature. Haggerty devotes an entire chapter of Queer Gothic to

‘The Horrors of Catholicism’, which he begins by stating that ‘Catholicism emerges from the

historical setting to play an active role in most gothic novels’. 101 He goes on to explain the

association of Catholicism with perversion in the cultural imagination of the late 18 th century:

‘When, in The Monk (1796) Matthew G. Lewis uses the details of conventual life to

suggest lurid forms of sexual excess such as necromancy, incest, matricide, and same-

sex love, he does not need to explain his choice of a Catholic setting […] Although

reviewers criticized Lewis’s excess, they never suggested that his portrayal of Catholic

monastic life was inappropriate.’102

A similar connection is made by Townshend in “‘Love in a convent’: or, Gothic and the

perverse father of queer enjoyment”, in which he writes that ‘queer desire in The Monk and

Melmoth the Wanderer figures as an exclusively Catholic phenomenon, a form of perversion

that, for all its unproductivity, breeds wildly and profusely within the confines of the all-male

Abbey or monastery.’103 Catholicism, then, appears as one of the aforementioned unspoken

symbols of queerness, due to its association with excess and depravity, in many early Gothic

texts. Morrissey utilises this trope in his novella, but to an entirely different effect.

100 Morrissey, List of the Lost , p. 11.101

Haggerty, p. 63.102 Haggerty, p. 64 – 65.103 Townshend, p. 24.


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The Christian condemnation of homosexuality is a significant theme in List of the Lost .

The ‘wretch’ asks that, since his feelings are apparently ‘impossible to satisfy then … why are

they there … in God’s image!’104 Similarly, Dean Isaac declares that he is ‘God’s design just

as much as anyone else.’105 The narrator also remarks on the fact that ‘there would certainly be

no question of allowing the child time to choose its preferred religion’ while contemplating

‘sexual cremation for the young child.’106 Although Catholicism is not specified in these

passages, it is implied when Dean Isaac laments that ‘[t]he Church is obsessed with everlasting

punishment, or forgiveness, and I could never understand why. It’s not enough to commit

yourself to God – but you are quite unfairly obliged to commit yourself every single day, hour

after hour.’107 Catholicism, then, is associated with monstrosity not because it provides a space

in which queerness is perceived as being acceptable, but because it provides a space in which

‘[t]he natural order is the one that essentially suits them, and they consider execution far too

comfortable an end for people who don’t share their very private lusts.’ 108 This, too, reflects

Morrissey’s own experiences. In 1989, he described himself as ‘a seriously lapsed Catholic

[…] after being forced to go to church and never understanding why and never enjoying it,

seeing so many negative things, and realising it somehow wasn't for me.’109 This, as is implied

by the existence of songs like “I Have Forgiven Jesus”, is inseparable from his existence as

queer. The influence that Catholicism has had on his sense of self, particularly with regard to

his sexuality, has clearly remained with him long after forgoing his religious beliefs. In

appropriating the Gothic presence of Catholicism to signify homophobic rather than queer

104 Morrissey, List of the Lost , p. 25.105 Morrissey, List of the Lost , p. 105.106 Morrissey, List of the Lost , p. 11.107 Morrissey, List of the Lost , p. 104.108

Morrissey, List of the Lost , p. 104.109 Morrissey, “The Soft Touch” in Q Magazine

(1989) [Accessed 6 March 2017.]


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monstrosity, therefore, Morrissey creates a subversive space more suitable for exploring his

own experiences.

When Morrissey’s autobiography was first published in the USA, ‘three sentences

detailing his relationship with Jake Walters, a British photographer, were removed from the

book. Two other sentences were tweaked, and a picture of Walters was excised, too.’110 In List

of the Lost , he explicitly reclaims his queer identity, and it is through the utilisation and

reconfiguration of Gothic conventions and tropes that he is able to do so effectively.

110

Joe Lynch, “Morrissey's 'Autobiography': Censored Sentences on Intimate Relationship With Jake WaltersReinstated in U.S. Paperback” in Billboard (2014) [Accessed 6 March 2017.]


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Conclusion

Reflecting on its history, Haggerty argues that, despite the Gothic’s unique role as a site

for the discussion and exploration of non-normative sexuality prior to the twentieth century,

‘in gothic fiction especially, this unspeakable secret of heteronormative culture

[homosexuality] existed as a violence, a horror, a monstrous other that could threaten the entire

fabric of culture.’111 That being so, in appropriating the Gothic for an exploration of their own

queer sexuality, a writer must be particularly careful not to reproduce the elements of which

contributed to that pervasive hostility, not only within the genre, but also within wider culture.

This is a feat which Morrissey has clearly achieved.

Given that the autobiographical elements of List of the Lost are obvious enough to have

been noted by almost every critic to review the book, some of their conclusions regarding the

strength of the narrative are puzzling. Regardless of whether you find any validity in Hann’s

assertions that ‘Morrissey can’t write dialogue’ or that his apparent lack of research into relay

racing is ‘the least of List of the Lost’s problems’, his proclamation that the novella suffers

from an ‘inability to come to any sort of a point’ is clearly misguided. 112 From the first to the

last page, List of the Lost consistently utilises the Gothic to make bold statements on the

persecution of queer sexuality and the monstrous effects that has on both individuals and wider

society.

Also of The Guardian, Alex Clark writes that the novella

‘ranges over male friendship, rivalry and sacrifice (a track team of four, of course,

echoes a conventional four-piece band), American politics and culture, child abuse and

111 Haggerty, p. 112.112 Hann.


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murder, the body, and, of course, sex and its disappointments – but says little

illuminating or comprehensible about any of them’

and agrees that it has ‘no clear plot or, indeed, point.’

113

Perhaps the reason he and Michael

Hann remain so confused and unilluminated is that the novella speaks loudest and clearest to

those who share its concerns.

In an interview with Chilean news outlet Cooperativa, Morrissey responded to the

overwhelmingly negative reviews of his novelistic debut:

‘I strongly believe in freedom of expression and critics have to say what they have to

say. But often the criticisms are an attack against me as a human being and have nothing

to do with what they're reading. Neither can you give the moral high ground against a

book just because you don't like it. It wasn't written for you. You cannot try to work out

what you think the author should have written instead of what he actually wrote.’114

The statement at the centre of his response – ‘[i]t wasn’t written for you’ – is powerful, and

encapsulates the core of my argument for the reappraisal of List of the Lost as a queer novella.

In Gay and After , Alan Sinfield quotes Monique Wittig, who argues that ‘[a] text by a minority

writer is effective only if it succeeds in making the minority point of view universal, only if it

is an important literary text.’115 He responds by arguing that

‘Of course, Wittig is right: if you take ‘literature’ as your reference point, it will draw

you towards a ‘universal’, i.e. straightgeist (straight-mind), way of thinking. But why

should the lesbian or gay man be wanting ‘above all to create a literary work’? ‘Art’

113 Alex Clark, “List of the Lost by Morrissey review – 'verbose, tangential, unfocused'” in The Guardian

(2015) [Accessed 6

March 2017.]114 Morrissey, “Morrissey Bites Back At Book Critics” in Contactmusic

(2015)

[Accessed 6 March 2017.]115 Monique Wittig, “The Point of View: Universal or Particular?” in The Straight Mind and Other Essays

(Hemel Hempstead: Harvester, 1992), p. 62.


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and ‘literature’ are defined by the established gatekeepers as meaningful to

heterosexuals.’116

The lack of recognition of the queer themes of List of the Lost in virtually all of its reviews

proves Sinfield and Morrissey’s points perfectly: for heterosexual readers and reviewers,

established standards of technical competence takes precedence over meaning; for queer

readers and reviewers, the reverse is often true; and for both, opinion often comes down to a

question of the extent to which a text is relatable. Hann, for instance, perhaps resorts to accusing

Morrissey of being ‘still hugely hung up about sex’ on the basis of the content of List of the

Lost because he cannot access its deeper (and arguably actual) meaning.117 He perhaps feels

that ‘his attitudes towards sex remains odd’ because they do not, cannot, align with his own.118

Thirty years on, Morrissey’s proclamation that Wilde is on his side resonates with new

meaning.119 Wilde, a Gothic novelist and a gay icon, represents the side of literary history on

which Morrissey clearly wishes to situate himself. In “Contemporary Gothic: why we need it”,

Steven Bruhm argues that ‘[t]he Gothic’s basic investment in ravaging history and fragmenting

the past meshes with our own investments now as we attempt to reinvent history as a way of

healing the perpetual loss in modern existence.’120 That, surely, is the point of List of the Lost :

to take a genre in which queerness has, for centuries, been both visible and monstrous, and to

turn that visibility and monstrosity back onto homophobia. Homophobia is, after all, the cause

of many of ‘the complicated pangs of the empty experiences of flesh-and-blood human

figures.’121 It is the reason why, for some – and certainly, it would seem, for Morrissey –

‘nothing can ever be enough.’122

116 Sinfield, Gay and After: Gender, Culture and Consumption, p. 157.117 Hann.118 Hann.119 The Smiths, ‘Cemetry Gates’. 120

Bruhm, p. 274.121 Morrissey, List of the Lost .122 Morrissey, List of the Lost .


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"Wilde is on Mine": Morrissey, Gothic Literature and Queer Identity

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