Queering the Border: Walter Pater’s “Sebastian Van Storck” and the Apocalypse of the Self

This essay examines how Walter Pater’s work “Sebastian van Storck” (Imaginary Portraits) could provide for a new re-reading of Pater’s queerness from a de-constructivist viewpoint which investigates the borders of identity from an anti-social perspective. As a juxtaposition to 1970s theory of sexuality, the anti-social take involves a withdrawal of the homosexual from society, and a subsequent tendency to create a twofold separation: one from without, and one -more subtle- from within. The former entails a rupture between the homosexual Self and the heteronormative Other, the latter is an ontological division between the queer I and its internal culturally heteronormalised counterpart, to be viewed as yet another attempt of the fin-de-siècle complex Self to reach a compromise in a liminal time that could no longer be considered fully Victorian.