Vapour and Steam
The Victorian Turkish Bath, Homosocial Health, and Male Bodies on Display
This article glances into the exotic Oriental interior spaces David Urquhart created for his Jermyn Street Hammam (Turkish bath). Unlike most Victorian public baths, Urquhart's hammam figured prominently in the Victorian imaginary as a privatised public space erected for the cleaning, cleansing, detoxification, and relaxation of the male body. Located in the ultra fashionable West End, the Hammam offered its patrons a location distinct from the harried and polluted streets outside its exotic doors. As the sheath defining and protecting masculine bodily integrity and health, skin and architecture were equally implicated in the defining of an ideal, normative healthy male body. Finally, I highlight how as exotic, Oriental, and decidedly ambiguous the various modulated spaces of the Hammam furnished an ideal venue for a queer constituency to experience safely—at the levels of the visual and the corporeal—homoerotic desire. In this all-male environment, the performances enacted in the hammam centred on a scopic and somatic pleasure which enlivened a distinctly illicit homoerotic desiring gaze and subsequent queer appropriation of its space, despite its best attempts to keep things clean and pure.
Key Words: display • human body • identity • interior design • nineteenth century • sexuality
I would like to thank Christopher Breward for his helpful suggestions in the preparation of this manuscript. I would also like to acknowledge the generous support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada which made the research for this article possible.