Curiously Near Akin: The Queer Imperial Gothic Heroes of Bertram Mitford and Victoria Cross

Several were wrenched asunder ere he had selected half a dozen of the most serviceable bones—and these he hammered to the required size with his newly constructed mace—sharpening them on the rough face of the rock. Did ever mortal man go into close conflict armed in such a fashion—he wondered—with club and dagger manufactured out of the bones of men? (205) Where other, less enterprising men have died, Laurence survives on account of his willingness to break the most unspeakable taboos in the interests of self-preservation. By presenting Laurence Stanninghame as a new ideal of masculinity, the novel rejects Victorian convention in favor of a new standard that privileges the hybrid and the queer, the qualities most fitted to adapt to the changing ecosystem of imperial decline. The senses in which I use “queer” throughout this essay reflect Ardel Haefele-Thomas’s assertion that the term “supplies room for multiple, potentially polyvalent positions, conveying gender, sexuality, race, class and familial structures beyond heteronormative (and often bourgeois) social constructs” (Haefele-Thomas 4).