Much recent analysis of Pater approaches his work as a legitimation of homoerotic desire. As this emphasis counters the subtle homophobia informing much modernist reception of Pater, it also entails renewed attention to Pater's original audiences, and thus to a neglected social dimension of his writing. In the early reception of Pater, however, sexuality is of less moment than gendered constructions of literary labor, within which Pater's pursuit of "pulsations" was attacked as a form of effeminacy. Pater's subsequent preoccupation with the "manliness" of art can be seen in this light less as a defensive response to homophobia than as an effort to reconstruct a traditionally feminized ethical stance as an eminently masculine self-discipline. **********
