English

A Marriage Below Zero

LibriVox recording of A Marriage Below Zero by Alan Dale. Read in English by Thomas A. Copeland. ABy 1889, when A Marriage below Zero appeared, very few English novels had been published that contained even a hint of homoeroticism. The Picture of Dorian Gray appeared the next year, in 1890. It is not, then, surprising that the secret at the heart of Alan Dale’s story dares not speak its name. Readers, on the other hand, would have been at least dimly aware of the nature of the husband’s secret because of the conventions of fiction, where only details strictly relevant to either texture or plot are mentioned. Real life, on the other hand, is nothing but texture; there is no plot, and therefore details that are later recognized as having been significant are not noticed when they occur. The fast friendship of two men need not be perceived by a naive young woman as the cause of their being shunned by their social peers, but with these matters spotlighted by an author, even before “closet,” “outing,” and “LGBT” had become part of daily speech, any reader must have seen a connection. The goal of the plot is to lay bare what was then considered an unmentionable, almost inconceivable vice

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