Proust in the Tearoom

Abstract

In French, the words tasse ‘teacup’ and théière ‘teapot’ also denote a public rest room where men have sex—a “tearoom” in English—and prendre le thé ‘to have tea’ means “to have homosexual sex.” Most of the narrative of Marcel Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu is said to result from having tea with a madeleine. This essay examines the possibility that the passage in which Charlus engages in tearoom sex may imply that there are other such tea parties in the novel. More broadly, I consider the importance of coded or secret languages in the production of sexual knowledge. Revealing the tearoom's secret opens up a Trojan horse (to use Monique Wittig's term) of interpretive uncertainties in the novel, as well as a contagion of doubt concerning heterosexual masculinity and male subjectivity.

De-pathologizing perversion: Proust’s sexual discourses and their Chinese translations

“…Conversely, as Eells (2002, 190) remarks, Proust himself often "appropriates English words, encoding them with meaning and placing them almost systematically in a context relating to homosexuality". See also Hayes (1995). The kind of interpenetration between English and French with regards to homosexual characters' codified language in Proust's novel poses further challenges for Chinese translators.…”

Homo devient queer : histoire d'une mutation (genre, sexe, littérature)

“…-Ouais, et il y en a même qui essaient de pisser... intimes entre hommes. Proust n'a pas peur dans son oeuvre de toucher à des sujets scabreux 75 . La sexualité cachée, illicite, voire « sale » a sa place dans le roman proustien.…”