OF LOVE & LIBERTY

Erica Wagner on Naomi Wolf ’s heartfelt manifesto for free speech and understanding

Naomi Wolf ’s new book Outrages marks the fulfilment of a very personal quest; the story of its writing is as inspiring as the stories it contains. Wolf is now renowned as a cultural commentator and one of the most powerful voices of third-wave feminism, but she encountered significant resistance at the beginning of her career. Her 1990 book The Beauty Myth, which sits comfortably alongside classic feminist texts such as Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch and Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, had its beginnings when the San Francisco-born writer won a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford in 1985. The thesis it presents – that pressures on women to look a certain way have only increased as feminism supposedly liberated them – was to be the subject of her DPhil at Oxford, but the idea was dismissed out of hand. ‘I was told by the dons that feminist theory would never be a discipline,’ she says, laughing a little ruefully over the phone from her West Village apartment in New York.

Wolf went on to write The Beauty Myth despite the dons; global bestsellerdom followed, and she has since remained at the forefront of sexual politics. Her book Vagina: A New Biography, published seven years ago, was one of the first to deal frankly with the subject in question. But all the success in the world couldn’t make up for the fact she’d never got that doctorate (‘I come from a family of professors,’ she says). So she reapplied to Oxford at the age of 49 – ‘and they let me come back!’

Now she is officially Dr Wolf – and Outrages: Sex, Censorship and the Criminalisation of Love is a development of her thesis. Don’t let that put you off: this is a heartbreaking, eye-opening book that centres on an extraordinary man, the English critic John Addington Symonds, who was – in a way he could never have known – in the vanguard of sexual liberation. Born in 1840, Symonds was a man who loved men; ‘gay’ is not a term he would have recognised. He had the misfortune to be born, however, at a time when sexual behaviour, in both Britain and the United States, was beginning to be codified – and criminalised.

The fulcrum of the book is a pair of acts passed in Britain in 1857: the Obscene Publications Act and the Matrimonial Causes Act. Wolf traces the way in which their passage transformed male

intimacy from something acceptable and unremarkable into a crime that could result in imprisonment – or worse. Her story crosses the Atlantic as she follows Symonds’ correspondence with the American poet Walt Whitman, whose book Leaves of Grass was to be censored and bowdlerised – on both sides of the water – thanks to this clampdown on sexual freedom. Oscar Wilde, a generation younger than Symonds, knew the older man’s work; at one point Wolf talks about holding in her hands Wilde’s copy of Symonds’ 1873 Studies of the Greek Poets – one of the first books, she writes, to transmit homosexual history from an older generation to a younger one. Classical literature and history provided a cloak for ideas that were otherwise impossible to convey.

Outrages is revelatory in the way it brings together sometimes unbearably painful personal narratives (Symonds married and had children, because he felt he had to) with political and literary history. Symonds and Whitman may be long gone, but their story has a particular resonance now. ‘The right of people to have a private life and to say whatever they want is actively under threat,’ Wolf says. ‘Ten years ago we would have thought that we had all decided freedom of speech was an essential part of the modern world, but now I see horrific attempts to restrict it on college campuses, on social media, all over.’

Wolf builds a powerful case for Symonds; and shows how his ideas – and the letters and memoirs he kept secret during his lifetime – survived into a future he could not have foreseen. ‘I still get very moved at the end of the book, when this generation of men are dying or in jail, and for all they know, that’s it,’ Wolf says. ‘Wilde died in exile; Whitman died paralysed and poor. They would not have any reason to believe that what they did in their lifetimes would carry forward and be the seed of a whole other world. It’s a moral fable about how you can’t give up. You can’t be sure that your work won’t bear fruit one day.’

The same might be said for Dr Naomi Wolf, whose long-ago attempt at a doctorate finally bore fruit and has resulted in this remarkable book.

‘Outrages: Sex, Censorship and the Criminalisation of Love’ (£20, Virago) is published on 20 May.