Hyacinth at the End of the World: Queering William Burges, Eschatology, and Cardiff Castle
- Katrina-Eve Nasidlowski Manica
- 4 minutes ago
- 7 min read
Architect-designer William Burges (1827-1881) has a reputation as a Gothic Revivalist or “High Victorian Dream” icon. His designs are described by Jane Hawkes as representing purposeful superabundance because of his attention to historical detail and keen eye for harmonizing polychrome and textured surfaces. Despite the ways that Burges’s designs fit the mantle of dandy aesthetics, they have not been linked to queer or “camp” aesthetics—neither in his own time or through our own contemporary, queer gazes. A close look at Burges’s designs at Cardiff Castle, however, reveals the “camp,” even as they seem to signify “straight.” Drawing on Susan Sontag’s articulation of “camp,” and Eve Kosofosky Sedgwick’s theories of homosociality, this piece examines Burges’s designs of the Cardiff Castle summer smoking room as a homosocial and queered space that allows us to look for, and expect, a queer Cardiff.
At the heart of Cardiff are Burges’s designs at the castle, created for John Crichton-Stuart, third marquess of Bute. Because his designs function from the ground up to create a three-dimensional artwork that users inhabit, Burges’s scheme of the summer smoking room layers multiple iconographic schemes, metaphorically and literally (Figure 1). Together, the design facets produce a three-dimensional mappa mundi, that employs medieval design elements overlapped with elements invoking Christianity, Greek mythology, mineralogy, science, medieval trade networks, Aestheticism, and queered pleasure. The mappa mundi overlays Christian constructions of geography and history (end of times) with queer figures in Greek mythology to create, what I describe as, a queer eschatology.
The summer smoking room occupies the top two stories of the clock tower. To reconstruct Burges’s mappa mundi, let us work our way up. The ground is composed of a circular pattern of tiles that surround and radiate outwards from a Mercator projection map that is centered in Jerusalem, the site of Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection. The ringed tiles are uniform for each row, containing hedges, dogs, horses, men, deer, ravens, eagles, and whales. The designs calculate the limit of mortal existence by adding the life spans of the figures mentioned in the inscription together (the life span of a hedge plus a dog plus a horse, and so forth). According to Steven Wander, these add up to 19,683 years, the time when the Final Judgement will occur.
At four equidistant points, there are four alabaster columns with two human figures at the capital of each column, each figure’s upper body transforms into peacock feathers. These pairs are allegories for the winds; they are male-female couples, rather than represented as exclusively male as in the Greek and Roman traditions. Burges’s winds are paired, female and male respectively, Aquilo and Septentrio (North); Eurus and Subsolands (East); Africus and Auster (South); Corus and Zephyr (West). These columns hold up a balcony level above (Figure 2). The main level also includes a chimney mantle, upon which a carved, polychrome cupid sits holding parrots, a monomorphic species in which individuals of any sex look alike—tugging us towards same-sex and queer desire. Meanwhile, on the border of the chimney mantle, below cupid, heterosexual pairings of couples in courtship are carved in wood. Like something out of the fictional realm of Robin Hood, the medieval-styled male-female couples are paired off around themes of love: a young man offers a present to a woman (affection); a man has a falcon and his female partner has dogs (the hunt); and another couple is engaged in slaying an animal off stage (war). Love is, indeed, a battlefield. Whilst depicting heteronormative partnerships, Burges’s designs push against a “straight”-forward reading as the women are engaged in activities that defy gender norms and expectations. Women are as active as their male counterparts in the affection, hunt, and war that is love, and so, even within these straight conventions, queering happily emerges.
The center of the space contains a large chandelier, representing the sun god, Apollo, a significant iconographic choice. Beyond the central theme of time, I contend that Burges’s designs work spatially, with references to geography as well as the room’s own conceptualization of queer space and habitability. The room functions as a three-dimensional mappa mundi, which mixes Christian iconography with Greek myth. Mappae mundi are medieval religious maps of the material and spiritual world, and some incorporated Jesus’s body into the map itself alongside Final Judgement scenes. Burges’s designs make use of the eschatological and spatial elements of mappae mundi, and he cites the sacred and the profane, building from the Mercator projection upwards to the body of Apollo, who stands in for Jesus. Burges’s map is habitable; viewers may move around in the three-dimensional space of the map.
By using the figure of Apollo instead of Christ, Burges is able to play with the smoking room as a homosocial space which prescribed male-only usage to evoke queerness and queer pleasure, even as straight signifiers are present. The room was intended for frivolity, opium consumption, and gaiety; it would hardly do, after all, to have a literal representation of Christ above the proceedings. Smoking rooms excluded access to women and young children, which excluded the everyday realities of the wealthy male user’s duty to domestic, heteronormative and reproductive sex. As we saw with the allegorical winds, however, the room does not fully abandon straight couplings. Why then, does Burges incorporate heterosexual couplings, particularly when his original designs showed an all-male space? I argue that the male-female couplings work to partially convince viewers that they are not in danger of being in a space made exclusively for male-male desire and pleasure.
Eve Kosofosky Sedgwick defines homosocial relationships as relationships between men which are, perhaps, heightened to the point of sexual desire, but the valve of same-sex desire is released by triangulating that desire through a woman or women. Indeed, the male-female couplings of the winds are rather striking when compared to Axel Herman Hägg’s original drawing of Burges’s plan for the room. The winds were shown as exclusively male, cherubic, white, blond youths. In the illustration of the room, men are depicted enjoying themselves where allegorical young men (winds) are quite literally blowing—a not so subtle reference to oral sex and same-sex sex and pleasure. Additionally, the couplings on the mantlepiece are less legible as straight and open to a queered reading. Same-sex desire and sexuality was, in places, re-visioned in the actual designs of the room, likely with input from the staunchly Catholic third marquess, however, to represent male-female desire. This re-coupling worked because, as Sedgwick describes, a third term was placed between the male-male desire to legitimize same-sex sociability.
The queering of the designs and of pleasure culminates in the representation of Apollo within the three-dimensional mappa mundi. The torches that Apollo holds in his hands are in the shape of singular flower blooms in reference to Hyacinth, Apollo’s lover. In Andrew Calimach’s retelling, Hyacinth was the son of a Spartan king with whom Apollo and the winds Zephyr and Aquilo all fell in love. Hyacinth loved and chose Apollo—they were inseparable, and Hyacinth rode across the sky in Apollo’s swan-drawn chariot day by day. Zephyr, jealous that Hyacinth chose Apollo, throws a discus and hits him in the head, killing him. In Ovid’s telling, however, Hyacinth’s death happened by accident and by Apollo’s hand, when one afternoon, “[t]hey both stripped off their clothes and oiled their limbs” to play discus. In their fun, Hyacinth ran to seize the discus that Apollo threw, but it bounced off the earth and into his face. In Apollo’s mourning for his beloved, he cries “A new flower you shall be with letters marked/To imitate my sobs […].” As Apollo speaks these words, Hyacinth’s blood on the grass transforms into a beautiful flower, so that “You shall be with me always; you shall stay/For ever in remembrance on my lips.” According to Nonnus of Panopolis’s account from the fifth century CE, Apollo resurrects Hyacinth, making him immortal, a completion of the resurrection and a promise of a queer euphoric eschatology with much oil and many limbs.
Although it might be tempting to read a moralistic or “bury your gays” onto a queer eschatology, the overabundance, playfulness, and sumptuousness of Burges’s designs, however, call for different kind of reading. In Notes on “Camp,” Sontag argues that “the whole point of Camp is to dethrone the serious. Camp is playful, anti-serious. More precisely, Camp involves a new, more complex relationship to ‘the serious.’ One can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious.” As Burges layers erudite and serious citations throughout the summer smoking room—Christian iconography, Greek mythology, cartography, and more—he produces a playful, anti-serious three-dimensional space of queered pleasure. Although orientated around the end of the world, the designs in the room suggest that after la petit mort, or the end of times, viewers will be sublimated to a divinely queer and beautiful afterlife.
Dr. Manica is an Arts & Science postdoctoral fellow in the Department of History of Art at the University of Toronto. Her research reconsiders Aestheticism through Britain’s constellated imperial networks of trade and mobility. She is a settler who uses an interdisciplinary lens to decolonize British Aestheticism with queer theory, embodied histories, Black studies, and Indigenous ontologies. She is currently working on a book project called Embodied Beauty: Imperialism, Settler Colonialism, and Slavery in Nineteenth-Century British Aestheticism.
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