From Oscar Wilde to Rider Haggard is a long journey, but worth making. In this chapter I want to delineate some of the continuities between the homoeroticism celebrated by Wilde and the kinds of conservative homosocial ties found in the works of late-Victorian “male romancers,” specifically those of Haggard. Between Wilde and Haggard I situate John Addington Symonds, who combined the former's sexual preferences with the latter's ideological leanings. In Symonds's writings the erotic bonding of man to man is figured as heroic and conservative rather than, as in Wilde's work, subversive. From Symonds's position it is but a short step to the fantasies of male adventure, at once homosocial and homophobic, characteristic of the late-Victorian romance genre.

As Eve Sedgwick has argued, the continuum linking the homoerotic and the homosocial is central to modern Western cultures, yet it is also invariably occluded. Making the links visible can help us better to see, among other things, the specific historical circumstances to which the differing forms of male bonding respond. The same issues involving identity, the body, sexuality, and writing that occupy Wilde occupy Haggard too; they provide the key coordinates for Symonds as well. All three men locate value within a structure of male relationships, though the values espoused could hardly be less alike. That each of these men would repudiate his connections with the other two does not alter the structural similarities among their positions.