ABSTRACT
Chapter 6 examines E.F. Benson’s David Blaize books: David Blaize (1916) and David Blaize and the Blue Door (1918). Benson was a popular English author during the early decades of the twentieth century and privately homosexual, and his school story and fantasy novel about his David Blaize character represent his ambivalence about adult sexuality. Benson referred to his fictional boys as a “third sex,” so his boy books can be read in the context of nineteenth-century sexological writings that used the same language to posit homosexuals as a “third sex,” neither fully man nor woman, but an entirely different kind of person. Reading his work alongside Krafft-Ebing’s case studies of child sexuality, Chapter 6 argues that Benson presents the expressions of desire and pleasure of boyhood as distinct and even superior to the expressions of sexual desire that characterize adult sexuality. Moreover, not only does Benson represent David as heroic and self-sacrificial, like the other authors in this study do with their protagonists, but his depiction of boyhood sexuality also suggests the ways an appreciation of David Blaize might recuperate Benson himself from accusations of prudishness.
