How we cite our quotes: (Part.Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
There was something atavistic in Beatrice-Joanna: she instinctively shuddered now at the sight of two white-coated women radiographers who, leaving their department at the other end of the corridor, sauntered towards the lift, smiling fondly at each other, gazing into each other's eyes, fingers intertwined. (1.1.11)
Although it may seem at times as though Beatrice-Joanna's prejudices are hers alone, and not the narrative voice's, passages like this one present us with hard interpretive questions. For instance: if Beatrice-Joanna's homophobia was just her own, and not the narrative voice's too, would the words "instinctual" and "atavistic" appear here? Those words imply that heterosexuality is an earlier evolutionary trait: one that may be more "natural," even if it is considered primitive in Beatrice-Joanna's world.
Quote #2
[. . .] all over the country blared posters put out by the Ministry of Infertility, showing, in ironical nursery colours, an embracing pair of one sex or the other with the legend It's Sapiens to be Homo. The Homosex Institute even ran night-classes. (1.1.12)
In The Wanting Seed, homosexuality is encouraged by the State because same-sex couples can't reproduce. Deep down, is Beatrice-Joanna and Tristram's society truly inclusive toward homosexual love, or does it simply think it's convenient?
Quote #3
The female friends giggled at Beatrice-Joanna. 'To hell with you,' she said, wiping her eyes, 'to hell with the lot of you. You're unclean, that's what you are, unclean.' [. . .] The bullfrog lesbian held protective arms round her friend, hostile eyes on Beatrice-Joanna. 'I'll give her unclean,' she said hoarsely. 'I'll rub her face in the dirt, that's what I'll do.' 'Oh, Freda,' adored the other, 'you're so brave.' (1.1.13)
The narrative voice of The Wanting Seed spends a lot of time describing human characters in animalistic terms, and never in a complimentary way. What's the point of describing human characters as animals? Which kinds of characters get hit the hardest?
Quote #4
Then she saw, as she had thought she might at this precise hour, her brother-in-law Derek, her furtive lover Derek, brief-case under his arm, talking animatedly with a flash of rings to a foppish colleague, making point after point on unfolding flashing fingers. Seeing the superb mime of orthodox homosexual behaviour (secondary or social aspects) she could not quell entirely the spark of contempt that arose in her loins. (1.5.8)
References to loins are usually hilarious, but this one is just odd. Why should Beatrice-Joanna's lady parts react with "contempt" for Derek's performance? What does it say about Beatrice-Joanna—and about the narrative voice's representation of women more generally—that her body has so many "instinctive" reactions like this?
Quote #5
'A kind of aura of fertility surrounds you, Brother Foxe. Anyway, as far as this post of departmental head is concerned, it's pretty evident that, all things being equal, the Board will want to appoint a candidate with a cleaner family wreckerd.' [. . .] 'Let's see. Let's look at the other candidates. Joscelyne leaned forward, elbows on the desk, and began to tick them off on his fingers. 'Wiltshire's homo. Cruttenden's unmarried. Cowell's married with one kid, so he's out. Crum-Ewing's gone the whole hog, he's a castrato, a pretty strong candidate. Fiddian's just nothing. Ralph's homo—' (1.8.13)
Even today, more than fifty years after The Wanting Seed was first published, LGBTQ persons still experience this kind of discrimination in their workplaces. Is there any way in which The Wanting Seed could be read as a satirical critique of homophobic discrimination?
Quote #6
'Dearest one.'
'Darling, darling, darling.' They embraced hungrily, the door still open. 'Yumyumyumyumyum.' Derek disengaged himself and kicked it shut." (1.9.1-2)
Here, the novel's narrative voice seems to be having a laugh at heterosexual courtship behaviors—after all, when was the last time you ever heard people go "yumyumyumyumyum" while making out?
Quote #7
'Unnatural lot of bastards,' said the priest. Tristram admired the priestly language. 'The sin of Sodom. God ought to strike the lot of you dead.' (1.10.19)
In the biblical Book of Genesis, God destroys the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah to punish the sins of their people, and only one man and his two daughters are allowed to escape. Is The Wanting Seed telling the exact same story? Is the global food blight in the novel God's punishment for the State's promotion of homosexuality?
Quote #8
When they lay panting more slowly, detumescence magically synchronically achieved, his arm under her relaxed body, she wondered if perhaps after all she hadn't meant that to happen. (1.11.1)
There's nothing like fancy language to make a sex scene sound less dirty. This is another of those moments when the novel's narrative voice seems to be poking fun at Beatrice-Joanna's love affair with Derek. The fact that the two achieve orgasm "magically" at exactly the same time suggests that we're not meant to take the realism of this scene very seriously.
Quote #9
He chuckled. 'A surprising number of policemen are being eaten, I gather. God works in a mysterious way. Epicene flesh seems to have the greater succulence.' (3.8.24)
Whereas Father Ambrose is content to shout homophobic threats and slurs, Father Shackel seems to take a lot of pleasure in the fact that police officers with indeterminate genders (that's what the word 'epicene' means) are being cannibalized.
Quote #10
'It was when I was working at the Lichfield Housing Office,' bubbled the leader, 'that this thing happened. There was the question of a vacancy and me getting upgraded. I was senior, you see.' [. . .] 'Mr Consett, who was in charge, told me it was a toss-up between me and a man called Maugham, very much my junior Maugham was, but Maugham was homo. Well, I thought about that a good deal. I was never that way inclined myself but, of course, there was something I could do.' (4.4.8)
When one of the organizers of a fertility rite near Lichfield tells Tristram about his life, his experience sounds a lot like Tristram's. By this point in the novel, though, Tristram is convinced that the wheel of human social history spins pretty quickly, and so his words of wisdom to this guy are to sit tight and wait for things to come back around again. As he says: "One of these days we're bound to go back to liberalism and Pelagianism and sexual inversion and, and—well, your sort of thing" (4.4.13).