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Chapter 3 - An Extraordinary Marriage

The Mackenzies and the Queer Cosmopolitanism of Capri

from Part II - Queer Retreat and Cosmopolitan Community

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 September 2022

Kristin Mahoney
Affiliation:
Michigan State University
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Summary

Chapter Three focuses on Faith and Compton Mackenzie’s choice to rethink their marriage in highly unconventional terms, allowing one another to conduct affairs with other partners, spending a great deal of time apart while at the same time remaining committed to an ideal of loving friendship with one another. They came to this agreement while living abroad on the Italian island of Capri and mingling with the queer expatriate community of Decadent aesthetes on the island. This chapter relies on analysis of the Mackenzies’ life writing and fiction as well as extensive work with their diaries, notebooks, and correspondence to develop an understanding of the rhythms of their alternative form of affiliation and the manner in which their porous bond was influenced by their time on Capri. Throughout the chapter, I consider the role of place in the Mackenzies’ experiences, the manner in which the islandness of Capri enabled and sheltered queer experiments in connection, while at the same time attending to the manner in which visitors to Capri extracted pleasure from the island and its inhabitants, approaching the site according to an ethos of “Mediterraneanism” that structurally resembles Orientalism.

Type
Chapter
Information
Queer Kinship after Wilde
Transnational Decadence and the Family
, pp. 95 - 125
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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