Ed Cohen begins his article by identifying that in the Victoria Era there are sexual desires for both women and men such as “eccentrics” in he defines to be the “putative oppositions for sex and gender” to what we call in modernity as homosexuals (p.354). Cohen uses John Addington Symonds memoirs to investigate an eccentric man living in the nineteenth century and the obstacles faced by gender and class since they tried to reproduce middle class masculinity it is a dilemma for Symonds to fulfil his desires to be with men. Symonds solution to the representational crisis is a “double life” (p.363).
Cohen goes on to argue that Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis uses an “imaginary splitting of the male self”, that transforms the dilemma to
