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cabinets of curiosities/wonder rooms were rooms in which several different kinds of objects were displayed in renaissance europe. the collections served many purposes: to indulge the collector’s curiosity, entertainment, to display wealth. it was as personal as it was performative, and reading about them made me remember dorian gray’s fascination with collecting all kinds of “knick knacks” (with his aesthetic concern, obviously) - jewels, tapestries, even brazilian instruments - and his preference for the exotic. additionally, these cabinets were influenced by the beautiful “age of exploitation exploration”, and the objects in them naturally included things of the New World, surely ethically sourced. 

i like the name wonder room because it gives a magical touch to it - if we ignore the elephant in the (wonder)Room (colonization and violence). wonder rooms were a place to display one’s interests, science, and the amazing things humans can do. paintings, clocks, telescopes, rare insects, every interesting artifact carefully curated to please the collector’s aesthetic concerns and scientific curiosity. and colonizer blood thirst and disrespect. these rooms were the precursors of museums, and many are still standing in this day and age.

now i am not a historian, just a curious person. and as a curious person, i feel like my mind is its own wonder room. full of things i enjoy, skills i can show off, stolen ideas. the things i like live in a system, mostly related to literature, language, music and art. journaling has made me deeply aware of what i like and dislike, and i can choose to either try entirely new things or stay in my comfort zone. i usually pick the latter because i have autism and restrict interests is literally diagnostic criteria, but i can pick the former when i feel like i am dumbing down and in need of a challenge.

i think literature in itself, despite being my comfort zone, is always challenging me. hans robert jauss (another guy with an elephant in the room to be addressed) in his 7th thesis proposes to consider literature in history for its social, psychological, and ethical effects caused in the public. i will not get too deeply into aesthetics of reception, but this thesis makes one think about how the self interacts with literature and how literature, in turn, interacts with the self.

it’s old hat, almost cliche to say that literature opens portals to new worlds. but if it has been extensively repeated, it’s because it’s true. literature does that to you - offers you new perspectives, new experiences, a glimpse into lives or/and worlds you would otherwise never have the chance to visit. and in my opinion, this is one of the most Wonderful things of all.

literature is also a cabinet of curiosities on its own. a museum. although it lives not still in time, but actively, always changing with its society. and i mean old books as well. the illiad was not received the same way it is received today - it was recited aloud. i can buy gregorio de matos’ bahia-hater poems today and read them only because people manually copied them down into collections, because colonial brazil did not have press at the time. that only shows how the works exist in the context in which they are now, constantly changing and coming into existence by our interaction with them. 

the price of salt by patricia highsmith ruptured the public’s expectations in the 50s not because of the queerness, but because of its lack of a tragic ending - no suicide, divorce, job joss, awful death to punish the moral sexual deviant. it possessed an open, and even hopeful ending for the time, something that was not usual for the literature of the moment. simultaneously, i have seen people nowadays complaining about open endings for queer histories, because producers can use them as a tool to avoid expliciting relationships and hide behind “subtext” and “subtlety” and bait audiences with promises of a representation that will never come. and both reactions are, in my opinion, completely valid for the era in which the works were/are existing.

the New World then was a curious place, exotic, a fresh new start for the matrix. cabinets of curiosities showcased carved coconut cups and african masks as means of exposing the wonderful of the far out world, like conjoined twins in freak shows, amusing the powerful and exploiting the weak. museums nowadays showcase the same coconut cups and african masks for… historical significance? 

i am not an anthropologist, or a historian, so my museum criticism is as deep as women’s jeans’ pockets. but i can speak of literature. and literature surely can be beautiful, romantic (in the vulgar sense of the word) and wonderful. but it is art, and all art exist in the political context in which it was made and it is read. literature does not exist on its own, and although the author may be dead1, the reader is not.

readers have the responsibility to question a book, or any work of art they engage with in this society. for this society was built through spilled blood and exploitation - a violence insurmountable and irreparable, and these works were born in its midst. 

oscar wilde writes in the picture of dorian gray:

“[...] He collected together from all parts of the world the strangest instruments that could be found, either in the tombs of dead nations or among the few savage tribes that have survived contact with Western civilizations, and loved to touch and try them [...]” 

and goes on to describe several different instruments ranging from mexico to brazil.

 “The fantastic character of these instruments fascinated him, and he felt a curious delight in the thought that Art, like Nature, has her monsters, things of bestial shape and with hideous voices.” 

oscar wilde took these descriptions from carl engel’s musical instruments, an account of many instruments he collected and were given to the victoria and albert museum in the uk. in its introduction, it is said

“Moreover, a collection of musical instruments deserves the attention of the ethnologist as much as of the musician. Indeed, this may be asserted of national music in general; for it gives us an insight into the heart of man, reveals to us the feelings and predilections of different races on the globe, and affords us a clue to the natural affinity which exists between different families of men. Again, a collection must prove interesting in a historical point of view.”

we can see in all three quotes the New World fascination, the people becoming literal instruments exoticized for personal amusement to fuel the colonizer’s thirst for novelty and the Wonder of the far out lands.

when i was 16 years old and first reading this book i thought this was a boring excerpt and i admit to skimming through it because i was not interested in giving it a second thought. at 19, rereading it, i did it carefully and identified these elements that can and must be problematized or at least reflected upon.

did the book change? no, i did. i read more books and i got into college. i was not reading it for the Yaoi like i was back then. i was not reading it to compare Dorian and Basil/Harry with Will Graham and Hannibal Lecter. i was reading as a college student, one interested in perhaps writing her course’s final work (brazilian TCC) on it. 

i want to add that i am not trying to cancel oscar wilde. i am merely addressing the elephant in the (wonder) room. oscar wilde has a cult following nowadays - seen as queer icon, worshipped as a diva. the picture of dorian gray is still widely discussed nowadays, and i am emphasizing this aspect in the discussion that seems to be conveniently swept under the rug, because it irks me that 16 year old me was so Woke and critically engaged but so blind. 19 year old me is the same. 40 year old me will be, too.

as a 16 year old, gothic literature was my hyperfixation because of queerness. queer horror was my #thing and i devoured books like dracula, jekyll and hyde, frankenstein, and carmilla for the homoerotic, . i watched “whatever happened to baby jane” to feel camp. and because i was a closeted lesbian in a religious school, these works were to me like a huge “you are not alone” in a sea of “you’re going to hell”.

i worshipped oscar as my diva and ignored the whole “young prostitutes” thing, and the fact homosexuality in TPODG stood in the same moral grounds as murder. i read carmilla as a romance story, and i did not want to think that perhaps sheridan le fanu was not an ahead-of-its-time queer ally writing vampire Yuri in the 19th century. because i was kissing girls for the first time and i wanted to feel seen. i know i was aware of it in the back of my head - i wasn’t a thoughtless dumbass. but i was cherrypicking what i wanted to think about, and maybe i still do similar things to this day.

i was going to write how my brain and literature were like cabinets of curiosities in the sense they were full of wonder and beauty. and they are. but they were also all born in this violence-structured world, and i cannot feel peace talking about them without acknowledging this. and remember the guy i mentioned, jauss? german intellectual, born in 1921. you do the thinking.

as i said before, and i literally copy and paste: readers have the responsibility to question a book, or any work of art they engage with in this society. for this society was built through spilled blood and exploitation - a violence insurmountable and irreparable, and these works were born in its midst. 

jauss was right when he said literature widens one’s world views and offers one new experiences. dorian gray delighted in art the same way i do. engel loved music and i do too. and i still think hannibal and will are Yaoi/yaoi-coded just like basil/harry and dorian are. but as a wise somebody whose identity is now escaping me once said, and i repeat: “some of you would rather top a twink than stop and think.”

let’s stop and think about all those people we read and the world we live in. let’s stop and think about ourselves. using literature or wonder rooms as means to access New Worlds must be done with discretion, and we cannot let ourselves fall victim to this individualist thinking in the engagement of that of which exists within the public’s reception and the society it lives in.

so after this woke reflection, i ask you, in a twitter and very sexy, condescending voice, preaching to you from my ivory tower of moralism: a sua literatura é do bem ou do mal?

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addendum: this is unedited. because i will never post it if i dont do it now. so there Will be dumbass mistakes and weird constructions. and i really did plan to just make a silly post but today is brazilian election day and i could not help but wokify this.

i also did not mention a thing i planned to mention - something about what is not on the work, and the shortcomings of brazil's enlightenment colonial literature, and tomas antonio gonzaga and other greek larpers just stroking each other's ego and making shit up. i mentioned gregorio de matos and baroque literature but i might write an entire entry just on this. because i fucking slayed on a test about this but the professor did not hand it back to me and i no longer have access to my answer to stroke my own ego. mulher minha prova mulheeeefjkwnfjlwkjflkajflk