Manly Love: Romantic Friendship in American Fiction 9780226586687

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Manly Love

Manly Love Romantic Friendship in American Fiction

AXEL

NISSEN

The University of Chicago Press  Chicago and London

A X E L N I S S E N is professor of American literature in the Department of Literature, Area Studies and European Languages at the University of Oslo. In addition to numerous articles in scholarly journals, he is the author of Bret Harte: Prince and Pauper; Homo/hetero; and Actresses of a Certain Character: Forty Familiar Hollywood Faces from the Thirties to the Fifties. He is also the editor of The Romantic Friendship Reader: Love Stories between Men in Victorian America. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2009 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2009 Printed in the United States of America 18  17  16  15  14  13  12  11  10  09   1  2  3  4  5 isbn -13:

978-0-226-58666-3 (cloth)

isbn -10:

0-226-58666-9 (cloth)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Nissen, Axel. Manly love : romantic friendship in American fiction / Axel Nissen. p.  cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn -13:

978-0-226-58666-3 (hardcover : alk. paper)

isbn -10:

0-226-58666-9 (hardcover : alk. paper)  1. American

fiction—19th century—History and criticism.  2. Male friendship in literature.  I. Title. PS377.N577  2009 813'.4093521—dc22 2008043759 a The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences— Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi Z39.48-1992.

To Liv Glad Nissen, Nils Axel Nissen, and Mark Hildebrandt

I am a rag-gatherer, searching after the valuable, or the new, or the curious, in the refuse the world leaves in its highway. I turn over and shake out what I find. One has a rent; another has proved valueless by wear; another is hopelessly tangled and snarled; a fourth is ragged; a fifth, shapeless and contemptible at the beginning, has been begrimed and fouled by long use, at the hands of demagogues and hypocrites. And these rags I amuse myself, by holding in various lights. How fantastic in form, capricious in color, preposterous in conception many of them are—and yet, not one but in the web and woof is woven some groundwork of truth—and but few that I cannot fling my imagination into the circumstances which created them, and think for a brief moment in that same way too. OLIVER BUNCE, A BACHELOR’S STORY (1859)

If we are to devise a complete and satisfactory genealogy of male homosexuality, we will have to find room in it for a history of male love. DAVID M. HALPERIN, HOW TO DO THE HISTORY OF HOMOSEXUALITY (2002)

Contents Acknowledgments  ix Introduction  1 1 What’s

the Story? The Fiction of Romantic Friendship, Part I  11

2 Odds

’n’ Ends: The Fiction of Romantic Friendship, Part II  39

3 Sex

and the City: Cecil Dreeme and the Antebellum Sex/Gender System  57

4 Compulsory

Domesticity: Roderick Hudson, Love, and Friendship in the Gilded Age  89

5 How

the Other Half Loved: A Saloonkeeper’s Daughter in the Company of Women  112

6 A

Tramp at Home: Huckleberry Finn, Romantic Friend­ ship, and the Homeless Man  132

7 The

Other Man: Homofiliation, Marriage, and A Hazard of New Fortunes  150 Abbreviations  165   Notes  167 Bibliography  203   Index  219

Acknowledgments The publication of a new book with my name on it is always a source of joy and pride. Yet the present work is special, as I have been working on it, albeit intermittently, for close to a decade. During this period, there is one person more than any other who has believed in the importance of this project and reminded me of the need to complete it. That person is my mother, Liv Glad Nissen. You and me against the world, Mom! Always. My father, Nils Axel Nissen Sr., at age eighty-nine remains a source of inspiration and love. I am grateful to have realized what a special man he is while there is time to tell him. Also part of my family is my former partner, Mark Hildebrandt, whose love has sustained me for more than ten years. Storm Lunde is simply beautiful—inside and out. My twoscore years on this planet have been filled with the love of family and friends. I want to recall two women who have meant so much to me: my maternal grandmother, Ingrid Glad (1910–1990), and my nanny and friend, Edith Halvorsen (1910–2005). Two extraordinary women who are very much alive, Sheila Coulson and Siân Phillips, make me happy and grateful to have them as friends. Lillian Faderman, Jonathan Ned Katz, Robert K. Martin, and Martha Vicinus gave me early encouragement at conferences in Lund, Sweden, in 1998 and in Oslo and Chicago in 2000. Orm Øverland read the entire manuscript and made several valuable suggestions. I am grateful for the support of two other colleagues I admire: Chris Looby and John W. Crowley. My editor at the University of Chicago Press, Doug Mitchell, has been interested in this project from the ix

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

beginning, which has meant a lot to me. My department chair, Per Winther, and head administrator Else Bjerke Westre and her capable staff have made my institutional home a place where I am more than happy to be. I would also like to thank the following friends, relatives, and colleagues: Ellen Abrahamsen, Paul Gregory, Ingrid Haug, Olav Lausund, Kari Lien, Alf Bernt Nissen, Ingjerd Nissen, Sara Lien Nissen, Anne Robberstad, Catherine Roberts, the late Chester P. Sadowy, Rebecca Scherr, and Pål N. Somdalen. The University of Oslo and the Research Council of Norway gave me generous travel grants that enabled me to do archival research and to study primary texts not available in Norway. In this regard, I must also thank the staff of the New York Public Library, the British Library, and the University of Oslo Library. I am grateful for permission to include in chapters 4, 5, and 6 of this book expanded and revised versions of essays. Portions of chapter 4 originally appeared in “ ‘Departments of human feeling’: Roderick Hudson, Love, and Friendship in the Gilded Age,” Prospects 28 (2004): 101–25; copyright © 2004 by Cambridge University Press; reprinted with permission. An earlier version of chapter 5 was published as “A Tramp at Home: Huckleberry Finn, Romantic Friendship, and the Homeless Man,” Nineteenth-Century Literature 60 (2005): 57–86; copyright © 2005 by the Regents of the University of California; reprinted with permission. An earlier version of chapter 6 was published as “A Saloonkeeper’s Daughter in the Company of Women,” in To Become the Self One Is: A Critical Companion to Drude Krog Janson’s “A Saloonkeeper’s Daughter,” edited by Asbjørn Grønstad and Lene Johannessen, pp. 115–29 (Oslo: Novus, 2005).



Introduction It is not by the direct method of a scrupulous narration that the explorer of the past can hope to depict that singular epoch. If he is wise, he will adopt a subtler strategy. He will attack his subject in unexpected places; he will fall upon the flank, or the rear; he will shoot a sudden revealing searchlight into obscure recesses, hitherto undivined. He will row out over that great ocean of material, and lower down into it, here and there, a little bucket, which will bring up to the light of day some characteristic specimen, from those far depths, to be examined with careful curiosity. LYTTON STRACHEY, EMINENT VICTORIANS (1918)

Let us begin with three exhibits from the queer archive of American history: [Mr. Farber took] it into his little black-curly pate to fall desperately in love with me, and he kisses and kisses upon my rough old face, as if I were a most beautiful young lady instead of a musty old man. The Lord sent him here to be my comfort. . . . He will have me sleep with him once in a while, and he says, that is almost as good as being married—the dear little innocent ignorant soul. Men love each other; so do women; and men and women are the best of friends. Thus it has been from the first, and will be to the last. Sex is not determined altogether by physiology; temperament more nearly settles it. Many men are masculine and feminine to each other; many women likewise. . . . Sex, as we know, enters into material as well as animated nature, and is, as we hold, independent of corporality. In friendship, not less than in love, sex has its part. Whether two men or two women be friends, one is masculine and the other feminine one to the other, as much as when man and woman are friends.



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They [ Joseph and Philip] took each other’s hands. The day was fading, the landscape was silent, and only the twitter of nesting birds was heard in the boughs above them. Each gave way to the impulse of his manly love, rarer, alas! but as tender and true as the love of woman, and they drew nearer and kissed each other. As they walked back and parted on the highway, each felt that life was not wholly unkind, and that happiness was not yet impossible.

When were these passages written, do you think? By whom? To whom? Do you think they are taken from published or unpublished sources? In the latter case, how were they published? Privately, in limited editions? In the “yellow press”? Or by large, prestigious, Boston- or New York–based magazines and publishers? I can reveal that the first passage is taken from a letter the theologian and college professor Calvin E. Stowe wrote to his wife, Harriet Beecher Stowe, in 1849.1 Professor Stowe was enjoying some time away from professional and family obligations at a water cure establishment in Brattleboro, Vermont. At the time he wrote this letter, he was forty-seven years old and had been married for thirteen years. He was ultimately the father of six children and was in every way an upstanding citizen and Christian gentleman. The Pulitzer Prize–winning Stowe biographer Joan D. Hedrick gives the following laconic commentary on Calvin Stowe’s letter: “For the Stowes, such same-sex physical intimacies allayed the deprivations of their voluntary celibacy and bore no hazards of reproduction.”2 The second extract is from an essay in the middle-class monthly Galaxy, written by the journalist Junius Henri Browne.3 Browne became famous during the Civil War for escaping from a Confederate prison and living to tell about it in Four Years in Secessia (1865). He lived from 1833 till 1902, and as far as I can tell was not widely read in poststructuralist gender theory. Yet here he sounds like a Judith Butler or Eve Sedgwick avant la lettre. The third and final passage is from a novel by the eminent travel writer, poet, and scholar of German, Bayard Taylor (1825–1878), one of the first American writer-celebrities.4 Joseph and His Friend (1870) was serialized in the eminently respectable and culturally central Atlantic Monthly all through 1870 and published in volume form by G. P. Putnam that same year. It raised no storm of protest, despite being one of the most blatantly homoerotic narratives among a flurry of such works published in the 1860s and ’70s. Our traditional understanding of the Victorian era on both sides of the Atlantic would seem to indicate that such open-hearted, passionate



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descriptions of both physical and spiritual attraction to members of the same sex as we have just read would be well nigh impossible. Yet here they are and they are not isolated occurrences. The object of this book is to understand better these and similar representations of love between men in the nineteenth-century United States. To do so it will be necessary to place these texts in a wider cultural and historical context that not only includes the various forms and understandings of male same-sex love and desire, but also considers cross-sex romantic relations inside and outside marriage. Manly Love: Romantic Friendship in American Literature is a literary study in that it takes as its primary source material a number of fictional narratives written in the United States in the second half of the nineteenth century. On the basis of these fictional narratives, and other genres of writing with which they are brought into contact from time to time, the book tries to say something about not just the literary texts themselves, but how these texts allow us to understand better the emotional lives of the human beings they were written by, about, and for. Thus, Manly Love is a historical study as well. In its attempt to treat literature as history and history as literature, this book joins an increasing number of new historicist studies that take literary texts as a starting point for explorations of broader cultural themes. These studies differ on the whole from an older historicism in their increased awareness of history as a narrative constructed along some of the same lines as purportedly more imaginative literature; in their understanding of history as a place of encounter with the past in the present; and in their vision of an expanded archive in which Literature with a large and small l may join the sources of traditional historical study on an equal footing.5 This fairly recent expansion of our view of what might constitute significant and admissible evidence in the process of historical understanding is particularly salient when the object of study is sexual ideology and the emotional life of human beings in past societies. Clearly the court records, medical texts, diaries, and letters that have so often constituted the chief source of information about the sexual and affective lives of people in the past have their limitations. Court records may tell us what happened, but seldom how the “perpetrators” felt about it. Diaries and letters tell us how individuals felt and acted in the moment, but their range is necessarily limited, fragmented, and particularistic. Books and articles by doctors, psychologists, and sexologists of the period often construct their arguments and understandings on the basis of arcane new



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theories and specialized, neologistic vocabularies that are both removed from and in advance of systems of thought, cultural myths, and sexual self-understandings in the population at large. It is these systems of thought, cultural myths, and self-understandings that I will try to grasp, with some important qualifications. To the extent that Manly Love is interested in human beings rather than in their ideas, it focuses primarily on the native-born, white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant, northeastern, middle- and upper-class segment of the American population. This was the group that the novels and short stories I examine were mainly written by, for, and about. The limitations of the study are thus a reflection of limitations in the sources themselves. In using literary source materials, one must accept that what Richard Brodhead has described as “access” to the literary marketplace has always been limited and restricted in various ways.6 This also goes for literary subject matter. As I will argue in my chapter on Huckleberry Finn, no matter how rustic, marginal, or underprivileged the characters portrayed, there is a sense in which bourgeois, nineteenth-century American fiction is always about bourgeois, nineteenth-century American people. I am mainly, though not exclusively, concerned with the literary products of authors born between 1825 and 1845, that is to say the generation or two that, however contradictorily, represent what we traditionally call realism in American literature. Some of these writers, such as Bayard Taylor and Bret Harte, bear more heavily the imprint of their transitional sta­ tus between romanticism and realism. Others, such as Henry James and William Dean Howells, are exponents of what Nancy Glazener calls “high realism.”7 The circumstances of the authors’ lives and their psychosexual development are considerably less important to me than the ways in which their works contribute to the ongoing cultural conversation about sex and gender in the period. To the extent that this book is a biography, then, it is a biography of an era and a culture. If we want to understand what it was like to be a man-loving man in the nineteenth century, we should turn to the fiction of the period. This is not for lack of more truthful, authentic, or reliable sources, but because the fictional laboratory is the place where many Victorian Americans, both as readers and writers, explored the gender-related questions that were most important to them. William Dean Howells refers in his major work, A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890), to “the novelists, who really have the charge of people’s thinking, nowadays.”8 Recently, Sharon Marcus has reminded us that “the nineteenth-century novel was one of the most important cultural sites for representing and shaping desire, affect, and ideas about gender and the family.”9 Novels like Cecil Dreeme, St. Elmo, 

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and Roderick Hudson, and stories like “Tennessee’s Partner” and “Marjorie Daw” were the texts American men and women were reading to discover what it meant to be a man and a woman in the second half of the nineteenth century. As David Halperin has reminded us, “The space of imaginative fantasy that the nineteenth century discovered in the library is not yet exhausted.”10 On the basis of wide-ranging textual evidence, where literary representations have pride of place, I hope to reconstruct an ongoing cultural debate that has been largely lost to us, and to restore a forgotten subgenre of fiction to our view. My approach is meant as a counterweight to the continued hegemony of traditional historical primary sources—letters, diaries, court records, statistics—in the study of the history of sexuality. Despite great gains in recent years, fictional literature is still an underused source of knowledge in sexuality studies, gender studies, and lesbian and gay studies. When I first embarked on this project in the late 1990s, I gave it the tentative title Unspeakable Desires. This was meant to indicate that my subject was taboo, forbidden, invisible, repressed, and would require Herculean efforts on my part to bring it forth into the light. I was soon to discover, though, that the expressions of men’s love for each other were all over the place in Victorian America. In fact, rather than uncover the scant, deeply submerged, miraculously surviving evidence of “the love that dares not speak its name,” one object of my study would be to explain the “speakability” of feelings that for roughly one hundred years now have all too frequently been a potent source of embarrassment, misunderstanding, discrimination, and danger. To the extent that this flood tide of nineteenth-century masculine emotion is still largely invisible to us, and I would claim that it is, it is the result of the more or less conscious “forgetting” of several generations of twentieth-century scholars rather than the reticence and self-censorship of the Victorian gentlemen themselves.11 The love is there in black and white for all the world to see. So why do we persist in believing that there is a dearth of evidence about same-sex love and desire in the nineteenth century? Why do even specialists in the history of sexuality continue to claim that “the difficulty of locating sources that document same-sex love and sexuality is legendary”?12 This study seeks actively to counter the myth of empirical deprivation by showing not only the number and variety of published sources available in the period, but also the extent to which we have been looking in the wrong places and asking the wrong questions. The nineteenth century is known as the period when it became incumbent on certain upstanding, middle-class, Christian men and women 

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to reflect on their sexual selves and their sexual conduct and try to bring it in line with certain abstract ideals and principles for their own good and the good of society. This said, there can be no doubt that we live in an era that places greater symbolic significance on genital sex than have most other times and cultures we know of, and that gives sexual acts and desires an identity-building power they have never had before. To expect the nineteenth century to reaffirm our own preoccupations is to go barking up the wrong tree or—to develop the arboreal metaphor—to risk not seeing the forest for the trees. If we fail to unearth lengthy disquisitions on same-sex lovers’ body-and-mind-expanding sexual encounters, if we simply cannot locate detailed descriptions of erotic exchanges and how the participants felt about them, their absence may not be due primarily to reticence, prudery, self-censorship, or the depredations of anxious relatives after the death of a confirmed bachelor or spinster. It is at least as likely that we don’t find this evidence, because there was no reason to create it in the first place. In a culture where the level of self-examination and self-consciousness in connection with the sexual life was much lower than our own, the need and the injunction to “put sex into words,”13 as Michel Foucault so neatly put it, was equally reduced. What purpose would a sexually explicit description serve in this culture? Are these descriptions scarce because Victorians repressed their sexual feelings or, rather, because sex had a smaller role to play in romantic relations and representations of them? Is it not possible that our current preoccupation with genital desire has blinded us to the valences and nuances of love between men in prehomosexual cultures? While sexual relations between couples were clearly less freighted with significance than they are today, Victorians loved to love and reflected at length on what love was and how it could be used as a force for good in human life. This love was not defined primarily by the gender of its object, but rather by its spiritual or “fleshly” nature. In brief (there will be time for nuances later): spiritual love was good (whomever the object), fleshly love was bad (except when used in moderation for procreation). Sex in Victorian America was all about control and inequality; love and friendship were all about surrender and mutuality. The question of the nature of true manhood and true womanhood and the relations between the sexes was the sexual question in a culture that did not subdivide human beings on the basis of sexual object-choice. For the great majority of Americans during most of the nineteenth century, what we today would call homosexuality was not yet constituted as a problem, a subjectivity, an identity, a discourse, or a field of knowledge, which is to say that homosexuality hardly existed at all in the way we 

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currently understand it. This is not to suggest, of course, that what we would identify as homosexual acts and emotions did not exist. Victorian attitudes that to our eyes have long seemed homophobic, though, are better described as nonspecifically “desiro-skeptical,” that is to say, stemming from an anxiety about sex in general.14 Henry James once made a pertinent observation in a review of William Rounseville Alger’s The Friendships of Women (1868): “These topics strike us as nearly akin to that class of subjects which one may call, in a literary sense, only half-legitimate—that is, they are in their essence so volatile and impalpable that, in order to arrest and fix them, and submit them to critical examination, one must run the risk of giving them an artificial rigidity, and robbing them of their natural grace and perfume.”15 Joseph Allen Boone writes: “Behind literature, indeed behind history itself, there always remains the irrecoverable story of actual people who have felt emotions and acted upon desires for which there has never been an adequate word or name.”16 Caleb Crain has observed in a similar vein that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Americans “dwelt in possibilities that we cannot help but reduce to prose.”17 Let it be some help and comfort, then, that the fiction writers of the period could not help but do the same. Terms such as love, desire, passion, eros, homoeroticism, homosociality, sexual inversion, homosexuality, and sodomy have all been used in recent years in scholarly writing about prehomosexual cultures and societies. We realize today that the use of these various terms can never be innocent, ahistorical, transhistorical, or simply synonymous, yet we cannot express our ideas without the use of one or more of them. I have chosen “romantic friendship” as the central conceptual paradigm of this study. The term romantic friendship has several advantages from a scholarly point of view. First, it is largely a forgotten concept today. Thus, it is not encrusted with modern meanings that might obstruct the nuanced view of the past I am trying to create. To the extent that it is in popular, current use, romantic friendship is usually taken to refer to pre–twentieth century relationships between women of a quasi-marital and proto­ lesbian nature.18 In a nineteenth-century American context, though, romantic friendship was equally, maybe even primarily, considered a male preserve; thus our historical understanding of the term needs to be expanded and qualified. Second, as I have just indicated, romantic friendship has the advantage that it is a period term. I agree wholeheartedly with David Halperin when he writes that historians of gender and sexuality should recover and use “the terms in which the experiences of individuals belonging to past societies were actually constituted.”19 We 

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have several examples, that I shall return to, of nineteenth-century writers using the term romantic friendship to refer to a strong emotional bond between two men. Expressions such as “intimate friendship,” “brotherly love,” and “manly love” were also used with a similar meaning. Third, the term romantic friendship indicates a shift of focus in this study away from the physical, sexual, and erotic aspects of human interaction toward a greater emphasis on the emotional, intellectual, and—dare I say it—spiritual aspects of interpersonal relations. As I will show, this is a bias intrinsic to the period and in contrast with our own. As I’ve already suggested, Victorian Americans simply did not invest the cultural and personal significance in sex (as in sexual relations) that many people do today. Realizing this is one key to understanding the cultural centrality of male romantic bonds of a kind that currently are marginal or subcultural. On the other hand, nineteenth-century Americans invested even greater significance than we do in sex as gender, that is to say questions of what it meant to be a man, what it meant to be a woman, and the proper relations between the sexes. Finally, unlike most of terms currently being used in gender studies and gay studies today, romantic friendship has the further advantage that it describes a relation at a time in American history when the self in relation is still the most important basis for selfunderstanding and individual identity. My major focus on one form of male same-sex affective tie is not, of course, meant to indicate that men’s relationships in the nineteenth century could not take many different forms, nor indeed that romantic friendship is exclusively and necessarily same-sex. Naturally, I will also need to use other terms in the course of this study, both familiar and of my own making, such as love, passion, desire, homoeroticism, homofiliation, and sodomy. Even when on more familiar terminological ground, though, it is important to realize that while the signifier may remain the same, the signified may shift or alter over time. At a given moment in history, a term may have multiple, even contradictory meanings. The word homosexuality, for example, has undergone several changes of meaning and emphasis during its hundred-year-plus history in the English language. Love, on the other hand, might be “romantic love” or “true love” in the Victorian period, two very different things. There can be no question that real, living, breathing human beings in the United States in the nineteenth century engaged in romantic friendships. We know quite a lot about the women involved in such friendships, and increasingly, we are learning about the romantic friendships of men as well.20 Most significant in the latter context are E. Anthony Rotundo’s American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to 

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the Modern Era (1993), Jonathan Ned Katz’s Love Stories: Sex between Men before Sexuality (2001), and Caleb Crain’s American Sympathy: Men, Friendship, and Literature in the New Nation (2001).21 The history of roman­tic friendship is also vividly recorded in David Deitcher’s collection of nineteenth-century photographs, Dear Friends: American Photographs of Men Together, 1840–1918 (2001).22 Yet there is no comprehensive, detailed study of the novels and short stories about love between men in the period, many of them written by widely popular authors to the tear-filled applause of readers and critics alike. In addition to its mainly literary focus, Manly Love differs from previous historical studies and more biographically oriented books in that it is chiefly concerned with male romantic friendship as an idea, an ideal, a discourse, a narrative pattern, and a pervasive cultural myth, rather than as the lived experience of specific historical individuals. Though romantic friendship was a historical reality in the lives of many American men during most of the nineteenth century, as documented by the studies mentioned above, romantic friendship in literature should be regarded primarily as a myth—a guiding myth that an author might use to structure a narrative and its reception. The time has come to move beyond the view of friendship literature as a passive mirror or an objective record of some external reality and concentrate on these texts as attempts to construct a world, to bring order to the chaos of experience, to give shape to hopes and ideals, and to make friends.

The first two chapters of Manly Love are devoted to anatomizing what I have identified as a subgenre of nineteenth-century American fictional narrative: the fiction of romantic friendship. Chapter 1 focuses on the types of characters who form romantic friendships, the constitutive elements of romantic friendship plots, and the element of homoeroticism in the texts, including the motif of the hand. Chapter 2 discusses the sister motif, the various types of narrative closure in romantic friendship fiction, and the relationship between art and reality in the genre. The past is thick, like molasses, and like molasses it is dark and sweet. To better savor the particular flavor of the various decades covered by this study, my five remaining chapters have a more specific starting point in individual works of fiction. The novels selected are in most cases widely popular works that captured the imagination of their times and their culture. Chapter 3 brings back into view a long-forgotten novel by the Civil War hero and largely posthumous author, Theodore Winthrop. His 

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urban exposé Cecil Dreeme (1861) provides a fascinating gateway into antebellum American social life and particularly the gothic “darks and shadows” of the mid-nineteenth-century sexual imagination. More familiar, though maybe no better understood on its own terms, is Henry James’s first acknowledged novel, Roderick Hudson (1878), a hitherto unrecognized classic of the romantic friendship genre and the focus of chapter 4. James’s text provides me with a means to conceptualize both the “straight closet” and what I will call “compulsory domesticity.” In chapter 5, I make a comparative detour by introducing the topic of female romantic friendship in nineteenth-century American literature. In an ex-centric approach, I take the Norwegian-American novel A Saloonkeeper’s Daughter (1889) as the starting point for an examination of the interconnections between this story of a young immigrant woman’s coming of age and similar stories by native-born American writers, such as Maria Cummins, Augusta Jane Evans, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Louisa May Alcott, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Henry James. In chapter 6, I consider competing understandings of male same-sex relations in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) and analyze how Mark Twain employs typical plot elements and motifs from romantic friendship fiction in tandem with more recent and competing, pseudoscientific discourses on the homeless man. In the concluding chapter on William Dean Howells’s A Hazard of New Fortunes (1889), I discuss the importance of “homofiliation” to the formation of male-female romantic bonds and to the absence or presence of narrative closure in marriage. Finally, I consider briefly how this study and future work might contribute to a “literary history of sexuality.”

10

n N ONE

What’s the Story? The Fiction of Romantic Friendship, Part I Men and women are not complementary, they are antagonistic. The great romances have always been between men.  PETER ACKROYD, THE LAST TESTAMENT OF OSCAR WILDE (1993)

“There’s something queer about this matter o’ love.” BAYARD TAYLOR, JOHN GODFREY’S FORTUNES (1864)

In July 1856 an anonymous article entitled “The Literature of Friendship” appeared in the prestigious North American Review. At first glance, it looked to be a review-essay on three new American editions of, respectively, Cicero’s De Amicitia, Francis Bacon’s Essays, and Tennyson’s In Memoriam. In fact, the twenty-eight-page essay was the most concise, erudite, and eloquent account of the Western tradition of male friendship written by an American to date. In the course of the essay, the author gave his readers not only an overview of legendary and historical male friends from ancient Greece and Rome up until the present, but a survey of all the major thinkers who had grappled with friendship in its real and ideal forms. They included Aristotle, Bacon, Boccaccio, Byron, Cicero, Dante, Emerson, Hunt, Macaulay, Monckton Milnes, Montaigne, Petrarch, Plato, Plutarch, Shakespeare, Shelley, Spenser, Tasso, Tennyson, Thoreau, Virgil, and Winckelmann. Even by modern scholarly standards, “The Literature of Friendship” is an impressive achievement. Readers of the North American Review had to wait till the last issue of the year to learn that the essay had been written 11

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by William Rounseville Alger (1822–1905), a Massachusetts clergyman. He was father of seven children and the older cousin of the more famous writer, Horatio Alger. William Alger’s researches into the nature and history of friendship resulted first in the essay in the North American Review, which focused on men’s friendships, and a dozen years later in the publication of a 416-page book, The Friendships of Women. Alger’s book, weighty in every way, concentrated on the friendships of women with each other and with men, the latter often referred to in the period as “friendship of the sexes.”1 In Alger’s essay from 1856, nostalgia for a glorious past is mingled with the hope for a return of friendship to American life and letters. He regrets what he sees as the decline of friendship in contemporary American life: “The instances in which friendship between men rises to the height of a controlling passion seem to be few, as we look around us. There have been times when such an experience was both more frequent and more prominent than now. There are still lands where it is far more common than with us.” According to Alger, “The endearing phrases, the meeting and parting kiss, the close embrace, the numerous spontaneous signs and endearments of manly affection, so natural and copious with the Italians, Germans, French, Persians, Arabs, Hindoos, are not cherished, are scarcely tolerated, here.” The cause of all this, he finds, is that “the commonplace routine of modern life, its cowardly pursuits, its mean rivalries, its vulgar ploddings, its artificial customs, perverting and suppressing nature, must be less favorable to the formation of heroic friendships than the exposed, adventurous, and dramatic cast of ancient and mediæval life.”2 After giving an account of an “altar to Friendship” in the Pantheon dedicated by the Roman Senate in recognition of the unique friendship between Emperor Tiberius and Ælius Sejanus, Alger suggests: “Let us rear, amidst the alluring shrines of ambition, labor, and vanity that throng the crowded avenues of secular life and absorb the worship of mankind, an altar to Friendship, and gather around it, hand in hand, our pulses striking as one.” “Let us not . . . live friendless in the world,” he continues, “but give the laws of attraction free scope, and cordially embrace our fellows.” He concludes his essay with an almost millennial vision, where “what ought to be can be, and shall be. And surely all men should be friends.”3 All this is not to suggest that Alger’s essay contains transcendental, universal truths about the nature of friendship that do not require historical contextualization. On the contrary, the chief interest of his piece is precisely its historical situatedness. It throws the door wide open on

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not just one learned nineteenth-century individual’s construction of the friendship tradition, but a variety of Victorian ideas, ideals, symbols, and legends in connection with what Walt Whitman famously called “the manly love of comrades.” Thus, we shall have cause to return to this essay as we now go on to consider what followed in its wake. The 1850s was a period of increased anxiety about masculinity in American society. For all we know, it may also have been a time when men like Alger felt increasingly friendless and alienated. What he and other like-minded men could not have predicted was that they were standing on the threshold of a renaissance: a renaissance of interest in friendship in American literature.4 Starting with the outbreak of the Civil War and for roughly the next three decades, the representation of “manly love” would be a major focus for fiction produced in the United States. While modern gay fiction exists mostly in a world apart from mainstream fiction and has its own authors, publishers, and readers, and the price for gaining a minority voice has been a concomitant cultural marginalization, the novels and short stories devoted to “brotherly love” in the second half of the nineteenth century were being written by the period’s most influential, respected, and popular authors. Some of these authors have become canonical, others have not; but it is safe to say that in their own day and age Bayard Taylor, Mark Twain, Bret Harte, William Dean Howells, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Henry James, and Charles Warren Stoddard were among the best and the brightest writers in America. They were published by the most prestigious Boston and New York publishing houses, they edited and wrote for the most influential magazines, and whether they were household names or not, they were being read by the cultural elite of their time. Thus, one can claim that what I will call the fiction of romantic friendship was one of the most culturally central subgenres of the novel during these decades. If friendship fiction was central to the culture and the literary marketplace during the second half of the nineteenth century, it was no less central to the public discourse on friendship in general. To put it another way: novels and stories were the chief means of reflecting on the nature of friendship, however implicitly, because there was little debate or essayistic writing on friendship or other types of bonds between men during this period. In the 1850s there had been a certain degree of public interest in men together or alone: dandies, bachelors, and other ambiguous types we shall consider more closely in chapter 3. This developed in the course of the century into a more exclusive emphasis on the relations between the sexes. With the exception of masturbation, which

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continued to be a focus of concern, men’s sexual and emotional interactions with other men were of little public concern in the nineteenthcentury United States. Michel Foucault has told us famously that this was the period when the homosexual became a species.5 We know that doctors and psychologists were formulating increasingly sophisticated theories about human “sexuality” at a rapidly increasing rate, but the rate of dissemination of these theories into the culture at large has been exaggerated. George Chauncey has claimed that the medical discourse on homosexuality had only a limited effect on most individuals up until the middle of the twentieth century.6 From our perspective, the most important historical truth to keep in mind is that the years from the Civil War till about 1890, often referred to as the Gilded Age, were the last period in American literature when it reflected and shaped a culture in which the continuity and integrity of male same-sex affective bonds had not been irrevocably sundered by the homosexual-heterosexual binary. To the familiar roll call of legendary male friends evoked by William Alger—David and Jonathan, Orestes and Pylades, Achilles and Patroclus, Alexander and Hephestion, Damon and Pythias—we can soon add more workaday nineteenth-century-American pairings: Robert Byng and Cecil Dreeme (Cecil Dreeme, 1861), John Brent and Richard Wade ( John Brent, 1862), John Godfrey and Bob Simmons ( John Godfrey’s Fortunes, 1864), Argus Gates and Sebastian Ford (Temple House, [1867] 1888), St. Elmo Murray and Murray Hammond (St. Elmo, 1867), Tennessee and his “Partner” (“Tennessee’s Partner,” 1869), Joseph Asten and Philip Held ( Joseph and His Friend, 1870), Wayne Easton and William Gibson (Private Theatricals, 1875–76), Roderick Hudson and Rowland Mallet (Roderick Hudson, 1876), George Lee and Ned Falkner (“Snow-Bound at Eagle’s,” 1885), Huckleberry Finn and Jim (Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 1885), Jack Hamlin and Gideon Deane (“An Apostle of the Tules,” 1885), James Nevil and Douglas Faulkner (The Shadow of a Dream, 1890), Martin Morse and Jack Despard (“In the Tules,” 1895)—the list goes on. The question now before us is how we can recognize romantic friendship fiction. What are its typical characters, plot elements, and recurring motifs?

The Boys in the Band I have elsewhere defined male romantic friendships in the nineteenthcentury United States as “noninstitutionalized, socially sanctioned, (often) temporally limited and premarital, (ostensibly) platonic, nonex14

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clusive yet primary emotional relationships, (usually) between young, coeval, coequal white men of the middle and upper classes.”7 But what manner of fictional men engage in romantic friendships? Do they have a special background? Are they of a certain age, race, or class? Do they have a certain personality type or profession? In considering more closely the demographics of the fictional world of romantic friendship, let us consider two men in their early twenties. Let us imagine that they are at college, at Harvard no less, where they share rooms and are generally inseparable. Let us picture the one “with soft curling brown hair, deep blue eyes, and dazzling complexion,” the other’s complexion “olive, the eyes brown, the lips strongly cut.”8 Both are middle class, white, and native born. One is an orphan. The other is the only child of devoted parents still living. In most respects, they are two very ordinary American young men on the threshold of what the period called manhood. Such are the heroes of a little-known short novel called Two College Friends, a classic exemplar of the form.9 It was written by an author roughly the same age as his protagonists, the twenty-two-year-old Frederick Wadsworth Loring, and published in 1871. Loring had himself attended Harvard, graduating in 1870, and dedicated his only novel to his Harvard classmate and close friend, William Wigglesworth Chamberlain. Like one of the heroes of Two College Friends, Loring would die young. In early November 1871, he was killed in an attack on a stagecoach in Arizona while traveling as a correspondent for Appleton’s Journal. Thus, Loring had the briefest life of any well-known author of his day. “What fond and generous friendships are often bred among youthful companions in the bright epoch of school-day life! . . . In the artlessness of that pure time our secret souls are transparent, and in the unflawed clearness of our communion we look through each other,” writes the ever-enthusiastic, thirty-four-year-old William Alger.10 Another pair of youthful romantic friends is to be found in the southern writer Augusta Jane Evans’s St. Elmo (1867), “one of the ten most popular novels ever published in the United States.”11 The hero of this vast, erudite tome is the Byronic St. Elmo Murray; his romantic friend is Murray Hammond, two years his senior, the son of St. Elmo’s tutor, and his constant companion from childhood. St. Elmo doted on him, he tells the heroine and his future wife, Edna Earle: “The hold which that boy took upon my affection was wonderful, inexplicable! He wound me around his finger as you wind the silken threads with which you embroider. We studied, read, played together. I was never contented out of his sight, never satisfied until I saw him liberally supplied with everything that gave me pleasure.”12 15

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Because Mr. Hammond has six children and limited means, St. Elmo pays for Murray’s education at Yale. “I could not bear that my Damon, my Jonathan, should be out of my sight; I must have my idol always with me,” he tells Edna in the church he had built at vast expense for his friend. “I looked forward with fond pride to the time when I should see my idol—Murray Hammond—standing in yonder shining pulpit. Ha! at this instant it is filled with a hideous spectre! I see him there! His form and features mocking me, daring me to forget! Handsome as Apollo! treacherous as Apollyon!”13 St. Elmo and Murray’s romantic friendship ends badly, as we shall see. Ultimately, the companion’s character is the decisive issue—not what he works at or owns, but what he is. According to Alger, “There can be no desirable union of hearts which is not based on virtuous and kindred qualities of being and disposition,—spiritual affinities, drawing the persons to each other. Friendship, in any special case, is not so much a matter of will and culture as it is of fitness and fatality.”14 As Henry David Thoreau wrote in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers: “Friendship takes place between those who have an affinity for one another.”15 We see the latter point illustrated by Thomas Bailey Aldrich’s “Marjorie Daw” (1873). As light, airy, and comic as St. Elmo is dark, brooding, and tragic, in his classic short story Aldrich depicts two friends slightly older than the pairs we have encountered so far, yet still belonging very much to the WASP segment of the population. John Flemming is twenty-four and separated from his “intimate friend, his fidus Achates,”16 Edward Delaney, a twenty-eight-year-old lawyer. Delaney’s broken leg keeps him confined to his couch through a sweltering New York summer and prevents him from joining his friend at the seaside as planned. In Henry James’s major romantic friendship novel, Roderick Hudson (1878), we encounter the same pairing of two unmarried white men in their twenties: Roderick Hudson is a gentleman-artist with mixed New England and Virginia roots and latent bohemian tendencies; Rowland Mallet is a model of Victorian manhood, which is to say a sexually selfcontrolled, fussy, and fairly cold fish. Wayne Easton and William Gilbert in William Dean Howells’s contemporaneous novel Private Theatricals (aka Mrs. Farrell; 1875–76) are Civil War comrades-in-arms and boon companions; the one intellectual and melancholy, the other energetic, practical, and worldly.17 These two attractive, honorable, and conventionally masculine men enter the woman’s world of a New England farm that takes in summer boarders, and

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both fall under the spell of a bewitching young widow named Belle Farrell. Gilbert is a lawyer in his early thirties who has come down to spend a few weeks of his summer holiday with his sister-in-law. The somewhat younger Easton, who lives on money inherited from a wealthy uncle and devotes his time to good works, has accompanied him, as Gilbert explains to Susan Gilbert, in fulfillment of “the ideal of friendship”: “I happened to say that I was feeling a little out of sorts and was coming up here, and he jumped at the chance to disarrange himself by coming with me.” Howells, one suspects, is having a bit of fun creating suggestive scenarios, as Gilbert is often seen carrying a trout rod and fishing basket, while Easton has a habit of thrusting his cane into the turf and, to Mrs. Farrell’s evident surprise, “does not know maidenhair.” The two men are first observed from Mrs. Farrell’s point of view emerging from a birch thicket: “One [Gilbert] was tall, with a firm, very dark mustache branching across a full beard. The other [Easton] was a fair man, with a delicate face; he was slight of frame, and of the middle stature; in his whole bearing there was an expression of tacit resolution.”18 Romantic friends were not uncommonly presented as such a study in physical and sometimes masculine contrasts. Such is the case with the pair of friends in Howells’s The Undiscovered Country (1880). The more feminine friend, Phillips, has “courageously resolved to be a man of leisure,” has a passion for bric-a-brac, is an avid conversationalist, and describes himself as “constitutionally timid.” The men Phillips consorts with are either “of the feminine temperament,” the narrator records, or else “of the intensely masculine sort.”19 Phillips’s friend Ford is of the latter category. Unlike Phillips, he is not originally from Boston, openly scorns bric-a-brac, rarely goes into society, and cares not a whit for the ladies Phillips likes to surround himself with. A part-time scientist, he barely makes ends meet by “that dark industry known as writing for the press.” One of Phillips’s lady friends describes Ford as “natural as the noble savage, and twice as handsome.” Phillips, we are told, “liked to have their queer intimacy noted, and to talk of it with the ladies of his circle, finding it as much of a mystery as he could”: At these times [Phillips] treated his friend as a bit of vertu,20 telling at what length his lovely listener would of how he had happened to pick Ford up. He bore much from him in the way of contemptuous sarcasm; it illustrated the strange fascination which such a man as Ford had for such a man as Phillips. . . . The tie that bound Ford, on his part, to Phillips was not tangible; it was hardly more than force of habit, or like an indifferent yielding to the advances made by the latter.21

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Clearly, this is a friendship of contrasts in which the romance, if not the devotion, is mostly on Phillips’s side, threatening the delicate balance of sentiments we shall see that romantic friendship requires. Are there no exceptions to the coeval, youthful, premarital, lily-white, middle-class aspect of these fictional romantic friends? The man chiefly responsible for bringing romantic friendship to new parts of the American literary and social landscape was the western writer and putative “father” of the local color short story, Bret Harte. Harte had rocketed to fame in 1868 with a tongue-in-cheek tale about one hundred rough-and-ready miners raising an orphan of mixed ethnic origin. “The Luck of Roaring Camp” (1868) ingeniously inverted the bourgeois gender ideals of the day and particularly the arguments of domestic ideologists that would make child-rearing entirely a female province.22 Harte’s many stories of romantic friendship during the forty years of his career were notable for their pioneer California setting and the lawlessness and rusticity of many of their characters. If Harte’s prostitutes could have hearts of gold, his gamblers, highway robbers, gold miners, and displaced Pike County Missourians could be tender-hearted comrades with a weakness for their own gender. “Tennessee’s Partner” (1869) set the pattern. In the manner of most of Harte’s stories published in the Overland Monthly, here sentiment and humor were intermingled in roughly equal parts. Harte’s later efforts would be more earnest, though the candidates for friendship were no less unconventional than the highwayman Tennessee and his devoted partner. In his relatively long-winded story “SnowBound at Eagle’s” from 1885, one of the many that did little to revive his lagging American reputation, Harte’s heroes are a gentleman-robber of distinguished ancestry, George Lee, and his partner in crime, Ned Falkner. In “An Apostle of the Tules,” also from 1885, the romantic friends are a young missionary, Gideon Deane, and Harte’s recurring antihero, the long-lashed, sweet-voiced church organist turned gambler, Jack Hamlin. An even later story, “In the Tules” (1895), set in the same part of California as “An Apostle,” pairs off a very rugged Pike County Missourian with yet another of Harte’s refined, civilized gamblers, Jack Despard. Even if Harte’s romantic friends were unconventional, they were at least on a roughly equal footing in the classless, lawless society of gold rush California. We have relatively few literary examples where the men engaging in a romantic friendship belong to different classes. One of these is Bayard Taylor’s second novel, John Godfrey’s Fortunes (1864). The eponymous young hero is modeled on Taylor himself, and the story replicates aspects of his childhood and youth in Pennsylvania as well as his early literary and journalistic career in New York City. The narrative con18

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tains not one but three intimate friendships. The one that needs concern us here is between John and his childhood friend, Bob Simmons: “my special crony, because I had found him to be the kindest-hearted of all the village boys.” Bob is a rougher diamond than his rarefied friend John, yet he is unfailing in his affection and the only one of John’s companions to whom he dares confide his “vague projects of life, with the certainty of being not only heard, but encouraged.” Bob plans to become a bricklayer and the friends part in chapter 4, only to be gloriously reunited in chapter 34, when John Godfrey’s fortunes are at their lowest ebb and the only future he can see is at the bottom of a bottle. Meeting by chance on a New York street at midnight, the now “vagabond” and homeless Godfrey begs Simmons to save him. Simmons takes him home to his modest bachelor lodgings, and the following scene ensues: Partly from shame and self-pity, partly also from the delayed effect of the wine I had drunk, I burst into tears. Poor Bob was inexpressibly grieved. He drew me to the little bed, sat me down beside him, put his arm around me, and tried to comfort me. . . . I laid my head upon his shoulder with the grateful sense of reliance and protecting strength which, I imagine, must be the bliss of a woman’s heart when she first feels herself clasped by the man she loves. . . . Bob poured some water on a towel and bathed my head, then helped me to undress and laid me in his bed. I remember only that, some time afterwards, he lay down beside me; that, thinking me asleep, he tenderly placed his hand on my brow and smoothed back my ruffled hair; that a feeling of gratitude struck, like a soft, sweet pang, through the sensation of my physical wretchedness,—and then a gray blank succeeded.23

With Bob’s support, John is able to get himself back on his feet. Like Walt Whitman, whom he knew and portrayed as Smithers in John Godfrey’s Fortunes, Taylor had a tendency to idealize working-class men.24 The relationship between John and Bob in the novel may owe something to Taylor’s own lifelong friendship with John B. Phillips, a physician. In 1842, when he was seventeen, Taylor referred to Phillips as “the only kindred spirit I have, and the only confidential and true friend. One, I verily believe, is enough.” Taylor wrote to Phillips six years later: “I have great need of your soul’s sympathy.”25 They remained friends till the end: Phillips was one of Taylor’s pallbearers at his funeral on March 15, 1879. On the whole, Bayard Taylor’s varied experience of romantic friendship in his own life challenges our current conceptions about this ostensibly youthful, coeval, and premarital bond.26 Taylor’s romantic friend for more than twenty years, the German merchant August Bufleb, was a 19

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married man nearly twenty-five years his senior. In his travel narrative A Journey to Central Africa (1854), which he dedicated to Bufleb, Taylor left a detailed record of their first idyllic time together, on the Nile in December 1851. To his mother he wrote, “It is a new phase of human affection, which I have never known before. As I said, he is a man of fifty, proud and self-willed, and accustomed all his life to wealth and authority. But he clung to me with a love like that of a woman,”27 indicating that the relationship was even more intense than the romantic friendships he had hitherto formed with American men his own age. In 1857 Taylor married Bufleb’s wife’s niece. Two years before, the merchant had built a house for his American friend in his garden in Gotha; the nineteenth-century equivalent, one is tempted to say, of “living over the garage.” Despite the unremitting pressures of providing for his wife and daughter and other dependents, and the ever-increasing expenses of his Pennsylvania estate, Cedarcroft, Taylor cultivated a number of romantic friendships throughout his life. One of the longest and most ardor filled of these was with the Philadelphia industrialist, playwright, and man of letters George Henry Boker. Boker and Taylor met in late 1848, when Taylor was twenty-three and Boker twenty-five, and soon became intimate. To Boker he wrote in 1851: So, George, you have found out my weakness, have you? Well, since we have it in common, there is no use in trying to conceal or suppress it. I confess to a most profound and abiding tenderness towards those I love, whether man or woman. There is much more than an intellectual sympathy between us. I trust my whole nature, good and bad, in your hands. The thought of your sympathy with me in my trials softens me as nothing else can.28

Taylor once told Boker, “I have loved women, dearly and tenderly, but I never loved anything human as I love you.”29 Several other well-known artistic and literary figures of the day were able to benefit from the overflow of Taylor’s heart, including Richard Henry Stoddard, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Edmund Clarence Stedman, and Jervis McEntee. To McEntee, he wrote in 1851: “I believe in a frank, hearty, trustful communication of one nature to another, even in reciprocal revelation of real weakness, as the very crowning and blessing of friendship. I never think of any of my few dear friends . . . without a sense of longing, a warm desire for the real, bodily presence.” At the start of his friendship with the southern poet Paul Hamilton Hayne, Taylor wrote: “You have opened your heart to me, and I feel free to write to you as

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frankly as if we were blowing a cloud together.” Later in life, Taylor also befriended younger men, such as Charles Melancthon Jones.30 Intergenerational romantic friendship of the kind Taylor had with Jones is portrayed in Elizabeth Stoddard’s cryptic novel, Temple House (1867). Chiefly known for The Morgesons (1862), Stoddard here lends her highly unconventional mind and Dickinsonian prose style to a story centering on the forty-something, retired sea captain and widower Abner Gates, and his offbeat household at Temple House in the declining coastal town of Kent. Gates’s more or less loopy relations include his sphinxlike, reclusive, widowed sister-in-law, Roxlana, the one woman he does not find a nuisance; and Roxlana’s daughter and Gates’s niece, the temperamental, dark-haired, beautiful child of nature, Tempe. Tempe, too, is a widow after an impulsive early marriage to the son of a local bigwig, her husband promptly dying in a train accident. Fourteen chapters into the narrative, Captain Gates rescues a young Spaniard, Sebastian Ford, from drowning in a shipwreck, and the pair become devoted to each other with a love “passing the love of women,” as it was common to describe it in the period. Gates, “a man to be let alone” and who “has forgotten his relation to human beings,” lets love into his heart once more after years of presenting an unfeeling, adamantine aspect to the world.31 Further examples of intergenerational romantic friendships are that between Huckleberry Finn and Jim, as we shall see more closely in chapter 6, and that between the dying Douglas Faulkner and his live-in friend, the minister James Nevil, in William Dean Howells’s The Shadow of a Dream (1890). Huck and Jim’s relationship is, of course, remarkable in being interracial as well as intergenerational, though Twain’s narrative is not unique in the literature of the period. His friend, protégé, and one-time secretary, Charles Warren Stoddard, is responsible for the most risqué depictions of interracial, homoerotic romance in the second half of the nineteenth century. Take for example Stoddard’s literary breakthrough, “A South-Sea Idyl” from 1869, “in which is related the history of the author’s romantic friendship with a Tahitan boy,” as William Dean Howells summarized it.32 The “boy” in the story was called Kana-ana, native Hawaiian (not Tahitian) and perhaps sixteen years of age. Stoddard isn’t exactly reticent in his account of his “experience with this young scion of a race of chiefs,” with whom he shares bed and board for an unspecified period in a lovely valley where “there were no temptations which might not be satisfied.” We are told of how Kana-ana “brought up his horse, got me on to it in some way or other, and mounted behind me to pilot the animal and sustain me in my first bareback act”;

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“monopolized me, growling in true savage fashion if anyone came near me”; “was hugging me like a young bear”; “never wearied me with his attentions, though they were incessant”; and “again and again . . . would come with a delicious banana to the bed where I was lying, and insist upon my gorging myself,” before he would “mesmerize me into a most refreshing sleep with a prolonged and pleasing manipulation.” The narrator reflects in retrospect that he “must have been excited”; that he “was growing to like the little heathen altogether too well”; and ejaculates: “How queer the whole atmosphere of the place was!”33 Yet this and Stoddard’s equally naughty stories, such as “Joe of Lahaina” (1873) and “In a Transport” (1873), caused not an eyebrow to be raised—a public eyebrow, at any rate—though it must have been plain to many readers that they were wide open to “alternative” interpretations. William Dean Howells, who reviewed South-Sea Idyls for the Atlantic Monthly, wrote suggestively, “It all strikes us as the drollery of a small number of good fellows who know each other familiarly, and feel that nothing they say will be lost or misunderstood in their circle.” He added: We are not sure but Mr. Stoddard gains a charm by holding to the traditional vagueness. Perhaps, indeed, the social conditions of Hawaii demand a certain degree of mystery from the tourist, and it is well for our souls that there should be kaleidoscopic arrangements of palms and surfs and coral reefs, and lomi-lomi and hula-hula rather than the honesties of realistic art in his record. At any rate it is only glimpses of the vie intime that you get from Mr. Stoddard.34

The only whiff of scandal was in connection with the illustrations for the first British edition of Stoddard’s sketches, which Howells found “vulgar and repulsive.”35 It is typical of the myriad interpersonal connections of the day that Stoddard was a protégé of Bret Harte’s before he was Twain’s, as in fact Twain himself had been in San Francisco in the 1860s. “A SouthSea Idyl” was written on Harte’s instigation and published in the Overland Monthly, which Harte edited for the first two and a half illustrious years of its history. Also worth mentioning in this connection is the belated romancer James Lane Allen’s long story “Two Gentlemen of Kentucky” (1888). A variation on the theme of the master and his devoted servant, the aging, patrician Kentucky landowner, Colonel Romulus Fields, and his lifelong devoted former slave, Peter Cotton, have a relationship that in its mutual attunement and harmony approaches the romantic friendship ideal, however unequal in status are the parties involved: “No one ever saw in 22

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their intercourse ought but the finest courtesy, the most delicate consideration. The very tones of their voices in addressing each other were as good as sermons on gentleness, their antiquated playfulness as melodious as the babble of distant water. To be near them was to be exorcised of evil passions.”36 Colonel Fields is an old bachelor with the possibility of a “lost love” in his past. Cotton is a widower. In characteristically poetic and sentimental imagery, Allen describes the aging men as “two gnarled old apple-trees, that stood with interlocked arms on the western slope of some quiet hillside.” Later he makes a less lyrical but no less telling analogy: “For just as two oxen—one white and one black—that have long toiled under the same yoke will, when turned out to graze at last in the widest pasture, come and put themselves horn to horn and flank to flank, so the colonel and Peter were never so happy as when ruminating side by side.”37 The story, which is not without a humorous aspect, ends in a highly charged scene at the colonel’s deathbed. Peter Cotton lingers a year before he, too, dies and is laid to rest beside Colonel Fields. Despite the significant exceptions I have briefly discussed, it would appear that in its age, race, and class dynamic, romantic friendship was more unitary, clearly delimited, and conventional as a historical idea in narrative form than as a lived relation. This was likely due to the limitations on access to the literary marketplace, and the nature of the bookbuying audience and its expectations. Historical research is beginning to show evidence of romantic friendships among a broad range of American men in a variety of socioeconomic and geographic settings.38 Romantic friendships in the literature of the period, though, captured as they are in the amber of print, remain largely limited to middle- and upper-class white men.

“Blowing a cloud together” Apart from the requisite pair of male characters, the most significant element in romantic friendship fiction is, of course, the detailed depiction of the intimate friendship that gives the genre its name. Romantic friendship fiction has formal parallels with contemporaneous novelistic genres such as the domestic novel, the sentimental novel, the novel of education, and the novel of manners. The chief difference is, plainly, that in the literature of romantic friendship, friendship is integral to the plot and forms one of the chief preoccupations of the main character(s), rather than being an incidental episode in a story taken up with other themes 23

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and plot structures. Even if the story ends in conventional marriage, as many examples of domestic or “woman’s fiction” also do, the same-sex relationship is the sustaining relationship throughout the narrative and, as we shall see, the determinant of any male-female involvement. The emplotment of romantic friendship in fiction tends to emphasize the following features: the uniqueness of the relationship; the sense of intimacy, the need to know each other deeply, and reveal oneself as to no one else; the idealization of the partner; the promise of faithfulness until death; the sense of intellectual and spiritual companionship; and, finally, an aesthetic admiration of the lover’s beauty of form and feature that may occasionally shade into the overtly homoerotic. This is in keeping with the friendship ideal in the culture at large. Alger writes: “The uses of this intimate league of hearts are to impart the joy and glory of itself; to stimulate to culture, growing nobleness, and worthy works; and to furnish protection, furtherance, and comfort in the hazardous, laborious, and weeping passages of life. It divides suffering and doubles enjoyment.”39 In one of the final stanzas of the commemorative poem “F.W.L.,” Frank Preston Stearns writes of his long-dead college friend, Frederick Wadsworth Loring: “Thus hide deep natures ever / From souls unlike their own: / Through love or friendship only / Their virtue can be known.”40 Besides being an early novel of the Civil War, Loring’s aforementioned Two College Friends is a paradigmatic example of the fiction of romantic friendship, exhibiting most of the elements outlined above. Ned, “a graceful boy of twenty” at the beginning of the narrative, and Tom, “a lovely boy” not quite two years his junior, are just the kind of upstanding young, middle-class white men the historian E. Anthony Rotundo has led us to expect to find engaging in a premarital project of mutual spiritual uplift, caring, and devotion.41 The two boys have met in college. Ned confides to his professor that “the moment I saw Tom, I felt drawn towards him.” Though they love each other deeply, they frequently quarrel over trifling differences. Ned tends to be “morbid” and self-doubting; Tom is spoiled, yet placid—“a sunbeam and volcano,” as their devoted professor describes them.42 While Tom has his parents, Ned has no one but Tom to care for in the world and fears that he will marry and forget him. Their peaceful, carefree lives are rudely interrupted by the outbreak of the Civil War during their junior year at college. Both decide to enlist, Ned as a captain and Tom as a second lieutenant in the same company. During an engagement with Confederate troops, Tom saves Ned’s life.

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Ned falls ill soon after and Tom decides to stay by his side, rather than using his leave to visit his beloved mother. When they are later captured by rebel troops, one of their captors asks Ned not unsympathetically: “You care for him about as you would for a gal, don’t you? . . . Well, he’s pootier than any gal I ever see anywhar.”43 Ned wonders if he will ever love a woman as much as he loves Tom. “I should sort of like to be in love myself;” he reflects, “but I am half afraid to think about it.”44 Ellen K. Rothman has told us how in the nineteenth century young American men waited impatiently to experience love in their own lives.45 What she does not tell us is that the object of this first love was not necessarily a woman. One young man, yearning for something he cannot quite put his finger on, is the gentleman-farmer Joseph Asten in Bayard Taylor’s Joseph and His Friend (1870). Joseph is a naïve, gentle, sensitive soul of twenty-two who has lost both parents and lives with his maiden aunt as sole owner of a two-hundred-acre Pennsylvania farm. According to his aunt, he is younger than his years and “innocent of the ways and wiles of men, and—and girls.” The narrator describes him as “shy and sensitive, but not merely from a habit of introversion.” “He felt the difference of others,” we are told, “and constantly probed the pain and embarrassment it gave him, but the sources wherefrom it grew were the last he would have guessed.” When this classic bildungsroman is through, Joseph describes himself as formerly “a dainty, effeminate soul . . . a moral and spiritual Sybarite.”46 Despite the presence of both male and female friends, including his more robust childhood chum, Elwood Withers, and the devoted Lucy Henderson, Joseph feels a void in his life. He reflects: “I am lonely, but I know not how to cry for companionship; my words would not be understood, or, if they were, would not be answered. Only one gate is free to me,—that leading to the love of woman.”47 Joseph meets and rapidly marries the city-bred, duplicitous, fast-fading beauty Julia Blessing, an inspired fictional creation and a precursor of both Scarlett O’Hara and Blanche DuBois. Their union soon proves disastrous. The saving grace of Joseph’s life is his friendship with the twenty-eight-year-old gentlemanadventurer turned ironworks manager, Philip Held, whom he meets shortly before the wedding. After meeting Philip, Joseph feels that “a new power, a new support, had come to his life. The face upon which he looked was no longer strange; the hand which had rested on his heart was warm with kindred blood.”48 This is an important aspect of the friendship ideal of the day: “Ever inexhausted and uncloying are the fruits of consoling kindness between men. Their endearments sweeten the souring

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cares of the world, alleviate the heaviest burdens of our days, and pour oblivion over the smarting wounds of neglect and of sin.”49 If the two romantic friends are not already friends at the onset of the narrative, their first meeting when depicted is sure to be cataclysmic. Taylor pulls out all the stops in his account. Joseph and Philip are literally thrown together when the train they are traveling on derails. Shortly before the accident, they exchanged a look full of meaning. Joseph has been observing the other passengers, when: All at once his eye was attracted by a new face, three or four seats from his own. . . . He was apparently a few years older than Joseph, but still bright with all the charm of early manhood. His fair complexion was bronzed from exposure, and his hands, graceful without being effeminate, were not those of the idle gentleman. His hair, golden in tint, thrust its short locks as it pleased about a smooth, frank forehead; the eyes were dark gray, and the mouth, partly hidden by a mustache, at once firm and full. He was moderately handsome, yet it was not of that which Joseph thought; he felt that there was more of developed character and a richer past history expressed in those features than in any other face there. He felt sure . . . that at least some of his own doubts and difficulties had found their solution in the stranger’s nature. . . . It was not long before the unknown felt his gaze, and, turning slowly in his seat, answered it. Joseph dropped his eyes in some confusion, but not until he had caught the full, warm, intense expression of those that met them. He fancied that he read in them, in that momentary flash, what he had never before found in the eyes of strangers,— a simple human interest, above curiosity and above mistrust. The usual reply to such a gaze is an unconscious defiance: the unknown nature is on its guard: but the look which seems to answer, “We are men, let us know each other!” is, alas! too rare in this world.50

This mutual recognition is one link with modern-day gay culture where, as Henning Bech has observed, “it is impossible to be homosexual without having a gaze.”51 Naturally, Joseph and Philip are not seeing another gay man when they look into each other’s eyes. What they are seeing is another man with a searching gaze who manifests an interest, however one might choose to describe it. William Alger reflects: “Comparatively overlooked, undervalued, and meager as the realization of friendship is in modern society, yet some degree of its union, some reflection of its glory, some effects of its blessed dominion, are perceptible wherever neighboring human eyes gaze and hearts beat.”52 Emerson writes in his famous essay “Friendship” from 1841: “Read the language of these wandering eye-beams. The heart knoweth.”53 I am reminded, too, of Whitman’s poem “Among the Multitude” in the “Calamus” section of Leaves of Grass:

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“Among the men and women the multitude, / I perceive one picking me out by secret and divine signs, / Acknowledging none else, not parent, wife, husband, brother, child, any nearer than I am.”54 Joseph and His Friend from 1870 is a good example of a distinctive quality of these narratives as compared to earlier, more mythical and romanticist stories of friendship. For the first time in the “literature of friendship,” American authors are situating their portrayals of romantic friendship in a detailed, densely populated, ostensibly realistic and recognizable social landscape. Their narratives feature protagonists of increasing psychological complexity. Bayard Taylor shows his awareness of the challenges of the protorealism he is embarking on when he writes in the dedication to John Godfrey’s Fortunes that some “sensitive readers [will] protest against any representation of ‘American Life,’ which is not an unmitigated glorification of the same.” Yet, he insists, “Not what ought to be, or might be, is the proper province of fiction, but what is.”55 Six years later, in the preface to his last novel, Joseph and His Friend, he partially dedicated his work “to those who prefer quiet pictures of life to startling incidents, the attempt to illustrate the development of character to the mysteries of an elaborate plot, and the presentation of men and women in their mixed strength and weakness to the painting of wholly virtuous ideals and wholly evil examples.” He also dedicated it to those “who believe in the truth and tenderness of man’s love for man, as of man’s love for woman.”56 Joseph and His Friend has seldom been received in the spirit in which it was intended. With the exception of Thomas Bailey Aldrich, who wrote Taylor abroad that it was “fresh and delightful,” his best novel so far and “getting to be a great favorite here,” critics have been unanimously negative. Symptomatically, Taylor’s biographer Albert H. Smyth thought there was “not a single pleasing situation or incident in the book”; Alexander Cowie found it “morbid and abnormal,” using two very Victorian words to indicate sexual or gender nonconformity. One of the few modern-day critics to consider the novel observes that “it is not his best novel, but it is certainly his most peculiar.”57 While all romantic friendship narratives are per definition “romantic” even when they are realistic, some are more romantic than others. Among the most romantic—or maybe romanticist would be closer to the mark—are a novel by Elizabeth Stoddard, a novel by Theodore Winthrop, and several stories by Bret Harte. In Temple House, Stoddard’s narrator reflects on “that curiosity between men,” Argus and Sebastian’s friendship, and what despite their

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disparities in age, class, and life experience nevertheless makes them well suited to each other: In all the relations which affect men, however, Argus and Sebastian were worthy of each other. They were both morally deficient; alike sincere, incapable of trifling; devoid of puerility; gifted with the faculty of making forcible and dignified all their acts, which in others might appear grotesque or weak; and capable of enduring solitude. They differed also. Where Sebastian was old, Argus was young . . .

We note the emphasis on being worthy of each other and the balance of temperamental similarities and differences as salient features of a friendship of this kind. Argus Gates, who has given away what little money he had to his reprobate brother, George, takes up a loan to help Sebastian tie up his affairs and return to Temple House as a permanent resident. Gates goes back to work until Sebastian asks him to “resume his idle habits.” Sebastian himself grows stronger: His vitality flowed in the current of friendship between himself and Argus,—a friendship of feeling, not of ideas,—not yet to be analyzed. Sebastian, under its moral influence, approached a repose which was better than an occupation; and Argus, strongly moved by it, felt an activity by which his mask of coldness and his selfish habits was lost.

Sebastian and Argus’s special friendship provokes the jealous ire of Argus’s niece, Tempe. Argus responds to her accusation that Sebastian “has always taken to himself whatever is sweet and good” with these words: “Had he walked in at my door like an ordinary comer . . . I might feel indifferent to him; but I saved his life, at some strange cost to myself. I have been strained ever since, there’s no denying it. Hoh, by God—I feel cordial toward him!”58 Theodore Winthrop’s John Brent was published posthumously by the noted Boston firm of Ticknor and Fields in 1862. In the story the white “noble savage,” John Brent, and his more conventional companion, Richard Wade, develop a classic romantic friendship out of their former college chumminess in the course of a hazardous journey on horseback across the American continent. The first-person narrator Wade recalls: In all this time I learned to love the man John Brent, as I had loved the boy; but as mature man loves man. I have known no more perfect union than that one friendship. Nothing so tender in any of my transitory loves for women. We were two who thought alike, but saw differently, and never quarrelled because the shield was to him gold and

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to me silver. Such a friendship justifies life. All bad faith is worth encountering for the sake of such good faith,—all cold shoulder for such warm heart.

We note here the sense of spiritual oneness and harmony. As the narrator looks back on their adventure: “One figure fills up to my mind this whole hiatus of the many-leagued skip. I see Brent every step and every moment. He was a model comrade.” The “completed brotherhood” between Brent and Wade does not prevent the former from falling in love with Ellen Clitheroe, a displaced English gentlewoman encountered with her aged father in the deserts of Utah. Richard Wade is left to wonder if he will ever encounter love. By the end of the narrative, we are forced to conclude that his most intense affair—aside from that with Brent—has been with his glorious black steed, Don Fulano. “I loved that horse as I have loved nothing else yet,” Wade writes, “except the other personages with whom and for whom he acted in this story.”59 Trials, tests, doubts and fears, forced separations and glorious reunions, and the willingness to die for each other are equally standard features of Bret Harte’s stories of “brotherly love.” His writings on this recurrent theme may have been partially inspired by reading Winthrop’s novels in 1861. That same year, Winthrop’s death in battle at Great Bethel, Virginia, made him one of the first Union officers to die in the Civil War; across the country, Harte, eight years his junior and his spiritual heir, was about to embark on a literary career whose reverberations would be felt throughout the world. “Captain Jim’s Friend” (1889) is in the mode of Harte’s more famous “Tennessee’s Partner,” though written twenty years later. The Captain Jim of the title is a warm-hearted, sentimental soul. Unfortunately, the object of his affection, his “partickler friend,” is no more worthy than Tennessee. Lacy Bassett is very much the “lazy bastard” his name suggests; a classic deadbeat, he sponges off Jim, makes a hash of the opportunities Jim affords him, and leaves his friend and benefactor to clean up the mess. He finally goes too far, though, when he engages the affections of the parson’s young daughter, Polly Baxter, and then abandons her for a certain Mrs. Sweeny, “a profusely ornamented but reputationless widow.” Jim pursues him and insists that he do right by Polly. By the time Jim dies at Lacy’s hands and uses his dying breath to insist that Lacy shot him in self-defense, the story has evolved into a more or less conscious parody of legendary romantic friendships with their “till death us do part” endings. Finally, we can only concur with Lacy’s assertion: “He’s a queer man—is Captain Jim.”60

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In some of his later stories of romantic friendship, Harte abandoned his famously detached, ironic style and wallowed in good old-fashioned man-loving sentimentality. “In the Tules” from 1895 depicts the twists and turns in the unlikely but no less heroic friendship of an ignorant, unwashed Pike County, Missouri, pioneer, Martin Morse, and the dashingly elegant gambler and—as it turns out—sheriff killer, Captain Jack Despard. Morse saves Despard’s life, Despard saves Morse’s life, and so it goes through accidents, floods, fevers, and lynch mobs until the two men are buried in the same grave. Three years later, Harte published a more upbeat story, “Uncle Jim and Uncle Billy.” The heroes of the title, James “Uncle Jim” Foster and William “Uncle Billy” Fall, partners in life and an unremunerative gold-mining claim, through a series of complications and misunderstandings that take them far afield from Cedar Camp (and defy summary), finally find their way back to each other and a “happily ever after” existence on the “Fall and Foster” ranch in Napa.

The Beauty of Men It is a remarkable yet unremarked characteristic of the American literary scene during this period that many of its leading male authors and men of letters were physically attractive. This was frequently noted at the time and in the memoirs of surviving associates, but in emphasizing mind over matter in our literary criticism, literary histories, and even literary biographies, we have tended to forget or ignore the significance of the authors’ embodied presence. Let it be one small attempt, then, to redress the balance when I point out that Bayard Taylor, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Bret Harte, George Henry Boker, George William Curtis, Frederick Wadsworth Loring, Theodore Winthrop, Charles Warren Stoddard, James Lane Allen, Mark Twain, Henry James—in fact, practically every male author treated in this study—were handsome men, and that other men and women felt the force of their beauty. According to his German bosom buddy, August Bufleb, Bayard Taylor’s face “expressed all that he sought in his youth and never found in women.” This Taylor proudly told his mother shortly after the two men had first met. Twenty-five years after Taylor’s death, his close friend Richard Henry Stoddard recalled their first meeting in 1848: “I have before me now a vision of him in his young manhood—tall, erect, active-looking, and manly, with an aquiline nose, bright, loving eyes, and the dark,

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ring­leted hair with which we endow, in ideal, the heads of poets.” The noted writer and editor Nathaniel Parker Willis, a dashing figure himself, called George Henry Boker “the handsomest man in America,” and that in print. William Winter recalled in 1909 how “very handsome” George William Curtis had been: “His features were regular and of exquisite refinement.” At about the same time, Mark Twain recalled his recently deceased friend, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, and commented that Aldrich would be brilliant even in hell and “look like a blond Venus backed against a pink sunset.” In reflecting on his subject’s unmarried state, James Lane Allen’s biographer observed that there was “abundant testimony” that “Allen could compel feminine glances.” He doesn’t say if the distinguished Kentuckian could also compel male glances. A final example: Ina Donna Coolbrith, who knew them all personally in San Francisco in the 1860s, observed in 1924 that the four leading California writers at the time—Bret Harte, Mark Twain, Charles Warren Stoddard, and Joaquin Miller—were all “extraordinarily good looking.”61 Physical beauty also had its role to play in romantic friendship, as a beautiful exterior was often thought to reflect a beautiful interior. “Love adorns itself,” writes William Alger, “that it may win its meed. One desires to appear beautiful, heroic, wise, divine, to his friend.”62 In Temple House, when Argus Gates asks his ever-faithful former first mate, Mat, if he thinks Sebastian is handsome, the salty old sea crab responds, “Yes: dead and alive, I never looked upon a handsomer boy.” Women are also quick to acknowledge Sebastian’s physical beauty. Mat’s wife, Mary, avers: “He is a man,—and as handsome as ever he can live; handsomest creature I ever laid eyes on. . . . Capen Gates would sell his soul and body for him.”63 In John Godfrey’s Fortunes, Bayard Taylor emphasizes beauty as a significant factor in the hero’s attraction, however ambivalent, to his schoolmate and dormitory bedmate, Alexander Penrose. This is John’s first impression: At the desk exactly opposite to me sat a boy of eighteen, whose face struck me as the most beautiful I had ever seen, yet the impression which it produced was not precisely agreeable. His head was nobly balanced and proudly carried, the hair black and crisply curling, the skin uniform as marble in its hue, which was a very pale olive, the lips full, short, and scornfully curved, and the eyes large and bright, but too defiant, for his years, in their expression.

Later, John thinks that among his schoolmates, he was “strongly attracted towards none, except, perhaps, him whose haughty coldness

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repelled me,” that is to say Penrose. Looking back on his youth from maturity, he reflects: I was at a loss, then, to comprehend this magnetism: now it has ceased to be obscure. I was impressed, far more powerfully than I suspected, by his physical beauty. Had those short, full, clearly-cut lips smiled upon me, I should not have questioned whether the words that came from them were good or evil. His influence over me might have been boundless, if he had so willed it—but he did not.64

When Penrose discovers that Godfrey’s recently deceased mother was his own mother’s cousin, John is finally able to break through his “air of haughty indifference.” Yet all is not as it should be: “The kinship of blood is not always that of the heart. ‘A friend is closer than a brother,’ says the Proverbs; I did not feel sure that he [Penrose] could be the friend I needed and craved.” As with Bob Simmons, the vagaries of life separate Godfrey from his friend, though they, too, are reunited in New York. This momentous meeting calls forth yet another rhapsodic description of Penrose’s external charms: His boyish beauty had ripened into an equally noble manhood. He was taller and stronger limbed without having lost any of his grace and symmetry. A soft, thick moustache, hid the sharp, scornful curve of his upper lip, and threw a shade over the corners of his mouth, and the fitful, passionate spirit which once shot from his eyes had given place to a full, steady ray of power.

Despite their continued contact in New York, John Godfrey must conclude that “his [Penrose’s] nature was so different from mine that the innermost chamber of my heart remained closed at his approach.”65 The prototype for this form of schoolboy crush is David Copperfield’s attraction to James Steerforth. We find a parallel to Godfrey’s initial feeling of unrequited love in a letter William James wrote to his friend Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. from Berlin in early 1868: “I have not succeeded in finding any companion yet, and I feel the want of some outward stimulus to my Soul. There is a man named Grimm here whom my soul loves, but in the way Emerson speaks of, i.e. like those people we meet on staircases, etc., and who always ignore our feelings towards them. I don’t think we shall ever be able to establish a straight line of communication between us.”66 John Godfrey describes “the sensuous love of Beauty” as his “strongest characteristic.” At a fashionable party in New York, he surprises a lady by

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“speak[ing] for the beauty of his sex’” and defends himself by saying that “it gives me pleasure to see beauty, Mrs. Deering, whether in woman or man, and I do not understand why custom requires that one sex should help it with all possible accessories and the other disguise it.”67 This is an instance of the author speaking through his character, as Taylor also had heightened aesthetic sensibilities, particularly with regard to the beauty of men. On his trip to Egypt in late 1851, for example, he found the men attractive, but the women failed to come up to his high standards. The Arab housewives were “astonishingly ugly and filthy,” and the dancer, Bemba, “almost the only really beautiful Egyptian woman” Taylor saw.68 One of the losses of our current outlook is the ability to separate aesthetic appreciation of beauty—be it male or female—from sexual attraction. The two have become so confounded in our way of thinking that we can hardly imagine one without the other. In a society that did not use “great sex” to lend legitimacy, depth, and status to love relationships, and that did not insist that liking someone’s looks was tantamount to lusting after them, it was possible to give expression to this aesthetic admiration publicly, even if the admired object was another man. Theodore Winthrop’s novel John Brent contains as vivid an example of this phenomenon as one could hope for. The first-person narrator, Richard Wade, is about to embark on a trek across the American continent from California when he encounters an old college friend, whom at first he does not recognize: “The Adonis of the copper-skins!” I said to myself. “This is the ‘Young Eagle,’ or the ‘Sucking Dove,’ or the ‘Maiden’s Bane,’ or some other great chief of the cleanest Indian tribe on the continent. A beautiful youth! O Fenimore, why are you dead! There are a dozen romances in one look of that young brave. One chapter might be written on his fringed buckskin shirt; one on his equally fringed leggings, with their stripe of porcupine quills; and one short chapter on his moccasons [sic], with their scarlet cloth instep-piece, and his cap of otter fur decked with eagle’s feather. What a poem the fellow is! I wish I was an Indian myself for such a companion; or, better, a squaw, to be made love to by him.” As he approached, I perceived that he was not copper, but bronze. A pale-face certainly! That is, a pale-face tinged by the brazen sun of a California summer. Not less handsome, however, as a Saxon, than an Indian brave.

This noble savage, then, turns out to be a white man “gone native,” the eponymous hero, John Brent, whom “Ten years of experience has taken

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all the girl out of.”69 Brent and Wade determine to set out together on the perilous journey that the narrative records. Even if, as we have just seen, there were apparently no limits on the descriptive ecstasies a beautiful man’s face and form could excite in the fiction of the period, we are accustomed to thinking of nineteenth-century literature as irrevocably marked by the moral fripperies of an age that famously quaked at an uncovered leg, even if it belonged to a piano. Research by social historians and historians of sexuality has given us a more nuanced view of nineteenth-century Americans and their attitudes toward their bodies,70 yet the impression remains that in their literature, at any rate, the limitations on expression were many and ponderous. It would be a misrepresentation, though, to claim that the absence of graphic sexual descriptions in Victorian fiction was solely the result of outside pressures and pruderies; that authors were languishing under an externally imposed prohibition on expressions of physical intimacy. Despite frequent blame being placed on the tyranny of the “young lady reader,” it is useful to recall that the authors of the day not only internalized but created the literary norms of the day. Most authors, however distanced they might be from the ruling domestic ideology, were dedicated to writing morally uplifting literature. Thus, one might claim that writers such as Henry James and William Dean Howells were “Iron Madonnas” themselves. William Rounseville Alger insists that friendship is “not of flesh, but of soul, and is endless, unless sinfully forfeited.”71 Depictions of physical intimacy beyond kissing, hugging, or holding hands had no place in fictional representations of romantic friendship or love for the simple reason that sex did not play a significant role in the ideology surrounding these relationships (whatever might have been the case in individual romantic friendships in real life). The sociologist Steven Seidman points out that at this time, “love is not an affair of the body and its desires, but a matter of the heart and its spiritual longings. Love is imagined as an overpowering spiritual affinity, an intermingling of souls that makes two individuals spiritually one.”72 Thus, in stories of men and women finding “true love” and pairs of men finding “brotherly love,” we have a mutual reinforcement of cultural ideals that understand the core of these relationships as being mutual moral uplift: “The substance that joins us is mutual affection, based on moral worth, with improving uses for its fruits.”73 A closer examination of romantic friendships as represented in both fiction and other textual sources from the period reveals some important parallels with male-female courtship practices, the companionate mar34

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riage ideal, and the cult of true love. These similarities can explain why romantic friendships were not only accepted but admired during much of the nineteenth century (but also why the companionate marriage ultimately became a threat to romantic friendship). In both same-sex and cross-sex love relationships, there was a de-emphasis on the erotic, while leaving room for aesthetic admiration of the lover’s beauty of form and feature. We here begin to discern the contours of a value system that celebrated spiritual relationships both between and within the sexes and denigrated erotic relationships regardless of the gender constellation of the couple involved. Thus, as a paradigm, romantic friendship stood in the same relation to sodomy as true love stood to what was called romantic or sensual love: the one was natural, pure, chaste, and noble; the other unnatural, carnal, destructive, and debased. In a manner of speaking, the “true love religion” and “the cult of domesticity,” which we shall look at more closely later, and the friendship tradition are the theories of which domestic fiction and romantic friendship fiction are the practice. As I suggested in the introduction: it may be us who are asking the wrong questions and reading the literature of the day with the wrong expectations. Rather than viewing these narratives as censored, inaccurate, or “repressed” accounts of some external reality or some elsewhere existing desires and acts, it is more important to ask what desires these narratives actively produce and circulate. Despite the irrelevance of the sexual life and sexual descriptions to the fictional representation of romantic friendship, we have already noted several cases of what we would consider physical intimacy or homoeroticism in the texts at hand. It would appear that there was no bar on physicality between men, as long as it was an expression of a “higher” attraction rather than a “lower” one. Thus, in an early scene between Sebastian Ford and his savior, Argus Gates, Elizabeth Stoddard describes how the still weak and woozy Sebastian “flung his arms round the neck of Argus, and kissed his cheek. Argus strained Sebastian to his breast.”74 In the nineteenth century, the primary physical symbol of male friend­ ship and communion was the hand and its encounters with other hands and bodies. Tennyson’s In Memoriam and the sperm-squeezing chapter 94 of Moby-Dick are only the two most famous examples of the use of this trope in nineteenth-century literature. Joseph and His Friend, for example, is suffused with hearty hand graspings and hand claspings, hands on shoulders, hands on knees, arms around necks, and friendly pats on the back. As Joseph regains consciousness after the train accident, he becomes aware of a “soft warmth . . . upon the region of his heart.” This turns out to be the hand of his soon-to-be boon companion, Philip Held. 35

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Hands also have an important role to play in the scene where Philip declares his love for Joseph on the eve of Joseph’s wedding: “This!” Philip exclaimed, laying his hands on Joseph’s shoulders,—“this, Joseph! I can be nearer than a brother. I know that I am in your heart as you are in mine. There is no faith between us that need be limited, there is no truth too secret to be veiled. A man’s perfect friendship is rarer than a woman’s love, and most hearts are content with one or the other: not so with yours and mine! I read it in your eyes, when you opened them on my knee: I see it in your face now. Don’t speak: let us clasp hands.” But Joseph could not speak.

In a later chapter, as Joseph contemplates suicide on the edge of a cliff, he turns to find “Philip, moving stealthily towards him, pale, with outstretched hand.” On the next page we read: “Philip took his hand, drew him nearer, and flinging his arms around him, held him to his heart.” After a long talk in which the two friends discuss what Joseph is to do about his disastrous marriage and decide that running away to the West together is not a defensible solution, the scene and the chapter end thus: They took each other’s hands. The day was fading, the landscape was silent, and only the twitter of nesting birds was heard in the boughs above them. Each gave way to the impulse of manly love, rarer, alas! but as tender and true as the love of woman, and they drew nearer and kissed each other. As they walked back and parted on the highway, each felt that life was not wholly unkind, and that happiness was not yet impossible.

We find another example of the intimacy and uniqueness of a male samesex bond being symbolized by hand-holding after Joseph has been acquitted of the murder of his wife (in large part due to the strenuous efforts of Philip to gather evidence of his innocence): “He drew his chair near to Philip’s, their hands closed upon each other, and they were entirely happy in the tender and perfect manly love which united them.”75 Yet, as at least one of the examples from Joseph and His Friend suggests, the hand could also carry a more erotic charge. This sensual undercurrent in the mainstream fiction of the eminently respectable Bayard Taylor is made explicit in a passage from Teleny, an erotic novel that, according to Ed Cohen, for the first time openly describes a romantic and sexual relationship between two men in recognizably modern terms.76 Teleny was published privately and anonymously in two hundred copies in 1893 and may have been coauthored by Oscar Wilde and some of his friends.77

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In the following passage, the hero, Camille Des Grieux, is describing his first meeting with his soon-to-be lover, René Teleny: “Who has not been sentient of the manifold feelings produced by the touch of the hand? . . . How can I express all that I felt from the contact of Teleny’s hand? It set me on fire; and, strange to say, it soothed me at the same time. How sweeter, softer, it was, than any woman’s kiss. I felt his grasp steal slowly over all my body, caressing my lips, my throat, my breast; my nerves quivered from head to foot, with delight, then it sank downwards into my reins, and Priapus, reawakened, uplifted his head. I actually felt I was being taken possession of, and I was happy to belong to him.”78

Thus Bret Harte, too, is using a multivalent code when in one of his late stories, “In the Tules” from 1895, he describes how the hero’s hand “felt yet warm and tingling from [Jack Despard’s] sudden soft but expressive grasp, as if it had been a woman’s.” In the “bright moonlight,” when Morse is telling Despard about himself, we hear how the sight of the gambler cleaning his nails with a penknife makes “the simple Morse wander vaguely in his narration.”79 In a less loaded encounter, when Ned Falkner wants to comfort his bedridden friend, George Lee, in Harte’s “Snow-Bound at Eagle’s,” he “without speaking, slid his hand along the coverlet.” In response, “Lee grasped it, and their hands remained clasped together for a few minutes in silence.”80 William A. Cohen gives a convincing explanation for the erotic significance of the hand in Victorian fiction. “Given the extent of Victorian self-regulation,” he writes, “both literary and sartorial,” the hand was “one of the few anatomical parts regularly available for attention” and “the only exposed site of sexual communication below the neck.”81 I am also convinced by Sharon Marcus’s argument about same-sex intimacy in nineteenth-century culture in general. Marcus contends in her landmark study Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England that “respectability required lovers and spouses to avoid public signs of a shared sexual life. Friends, by contrast, could openly exchange material tokens of their affection and exhibit themselves giving and receiving the caresses and kisses of friendship.”82 Marcus is writing of England, but I think this holds true for American bourgeois society as well. We need look no further than Howells’s signature marrieds, Basil and Isabel March, and their now classic wedding journey. Newlywed Isabel March’s “one horror in life is an evident bride.” When she sees couples sleeping with their heads on each others’ shoulders on the train, she declares this behavior “perfectly indecent”: “If it were merely rustic lovers, she

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should not care so much; but you saw people who ought to know better, well-dressed, stylish people, flaunting their devotion in the face of the world, and going to sleep on each other’s shoulders on every railroad train. It was outrageous, it was scandalous, it was really infamous.” All the more amusing, then, when she “awoke at the stopping of the train, to find her head resting tenderly upon her husband’s shoulder.” The subterfuges the Marches have to go through even to exchange the smallest sign of affection in public take on parodic proportions. For example, Isabel lets her mantle slip from her shoulder to give Basil a “chance of an unavowed caress.” So eminently discreet are they in their behavior, that they get taken for brother and sister!83 We have seen ample documentation of the extent to which writers felt empowered to describe even the physical intimacy of male friends. Even the notoriously reticent William Dean Howells’s same-sex couples, male or female, comport themselves with a greater degree of physical license than his cross-sex couples ever do. Just consider Private Theatricals, roughly contemporaneous with Their Wedding Journey (1871), in which Wayne Easton and William Gilbert have repeated lovers’ quarrels, necessitating lengthy reconciliations. At one point Easton dreams that “Gilbert took him in his arms in token of reconciliation.” Later, when awake, “Easton looked up, and there was his friend holding out his hand to him and gazing at him with shining eyes. He could not say anything, but he took the hand and pressed it as he had that day when they had pledged each other not to let harm come between them.” In the same scene, we are told that “Gilbert came and laid his arm across his shoulder—the nearest that an American can come to embracing a friend.” Belle Farrell is reconciled even more demonstratively with her romantic friend, Rachel Woodward, in the following way: “She fell upon her like a remorseful wolf and devoured her with kisses.”84 It is important not to take for granted that this fictional behavior necessarily reflects social behavior, but it is difficult to see which function these descriptions might have beyond the mimetic. I shall return to the discussion of the relative freedom of same-sex versus cross-sex couples in chapter 4.

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Odds ’n’ Ends: The Fiction of Romantic Friendship, Part II To those who believe in the truth and tenderness of man’s love for man, as of man’s love for woman, no explanation of this volume is necessary. bayard taylor, joseph and his friend (1870)

In treating such a theme as friendship, the worst dangers are hardness and levity on the one extreme, exaggeration and mawkishness on the other, and cowardice and squeamishness between. W I LL I A M RO U N S E V I LL E AL G E R , T HE FRIENDSHIPS OF W O M EN ( 1 8 6 8 )

Part of the fascination of nineteenth-century friendship literature is its depiction of romantic friendship as being negotiated, not primarily in fictional worlds of “men without women,” but in everyday urban or rural life, within mainstream society, and often in tandem with cross-sex emotional attachments. The range of women’s attitudes toward manly love detailed in these narratives may provide a clue to patterns of behavior and response in the broader culture. Clearly, the female characters in these stories respond differently to being sidelined by, or at least having to share their lover’s attentions with, his romantic friend. Some of these women placidly accept sharing their man with another man. I’m thinking here of the likes of Mary Garland in Roderick Hudson, who does not object to her fiancé heading off to Italy with his friend and mentor the day after their engagement; and Hermia Faulkner in The Shadow of 39

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a Dream, who raises no objection to her husband both taking his friend on their honeymoon to Europe and installing him in their home upon their return. In stark contrast are the female characters who see men’s intimate friendships as a threat to their sovereignty; who are determined to break up the friendship or use it to further their own ends. An example of the latter is Agnes Hunt in Augusta Jane Evans’s blockbuster domestic novel, St. Elmo. Agnes is the cousin and secret lover of St. Elmo’s idol, Murray Hammond, but mutual poverty prevents them from marrying. They concoct a plan whereby Agnes is to marry St. Elmo instead, securing his fortune for her own and Murray’s use. Unhappily for them, St. Elmo overhears their confidential talk in the garden and understands the extent of their perfidy. His righteous anger is so great that he challenges Murray to an impromptu duel that same night, killing him instantly with a shot to the heart. As a result of this betrayal, St. Elmo’s young life is blighted, leading to twenty years of misogyny, restlessness, and dissipation that are interrupted only by the arrival on the scene of the domestic heroine over all domestic heroines, Edna Earle. “The harshest draught in the cup of life is wrung from betrayed affections,” sighs William Alger. “When the guiding light of friendship is quenched in deception, the freezing gloom that surrounds our path grows palpable, and drooping faith and hope perish in its shade.”1 In a letter to a friend written in 1854, Edmund Clarence Stedman, who belonged to the same “coterie” as Bayard Taylor, Richard Henry Stoddard, and Elizabeth Stoddard in New York in the 1860s, observed that “nine times out of ten, if brothers, partners, or near friends quarrel, women are at the bottom of it.”2 The machinations of Belle Farrell, a beautiful widow in William Dean Howells’s early novel Private Theatricals, have less disastrous results than we saw in St. Elmo. Yet for a time the romantic friendship of Wayne Easton and William Gilbert is sorely tried. They both feel attracted to Belle at the New England farmhouse-cum-resort where they are summering, and she does her utmost to turn them against each other. Her more or less conscious strategy is to divide and conquer through a series of one-on-ones with Easton and Gilbert, which amount to an effective deconstruction of the men’s romantic friendship. By way of seemingly innocent questions, she pumps them for information and leads them on to betraying intimacies in a way that strikingly demonstrates the decorum for this type of relationship. After one of these encounters, Easton reflects: “A stifling recollection of the delicacy, passing the love of women, with which they had always treated each other smote upon him: what could Gilbert think of his delicacy now?” Belle adopts a stance of 40

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mock innocence and wonder when confronted with the two men’s bond, saying things like “Your men’s friendships are so much more tenderly brought up than women’s, that a woman can scarcely understand.” To Easton she finally owns up to the fact that “it piqued and irritated me to see you such friends, and . . . I could not rest till I had got a clew to your secret.”3 Belle Farrell has something in common with Henry James’s more famous siren, Christina Light, in Roderick Hudson, which ran concurrently with Private Theatricals in the Atlantic Monthly for the last two months of 1875. Christina Light, though, feels not so much threatened by as curious about Roderick and Rowland’s relationship. Several of these narratives suggest that women were often inquisitive about men and their close bonds. In Bret Harte’s long story “Snow-Bound at Eagle’s,” we find the following exchange between a transplanted Boston girl, Kate Scott, and her married sister, Josephine Hale, about the two gentleman-robbers they have unwittingly taken into their rural California mountain home, Eagle’s Court. Mrs. Hale has previously observed of George Lee, who has been wounded in the knee, and Ned Falkner that “they speak of themselves as ‘friends,’ as if it were a profession.” They [the two friends] were apparently absorbed in conversation, but the two women who observed them from the window could not help noticing the almost feminine tenderness of Falkner’s manner towards his wounded friend, and the thoughtful tenderness of his ministering care. “I wonder,” said Mrs. Hale, following them with softly appreciative eyes, “if women are capable of as disinterested friendships as men? I never saw anything like the devotion of these two creatures. Look! if Mr. Falkner hasn’t got his arm around Mr. Lee’s waist, and Lee, with his own arm over Falkner’s neck, is looking up in his eyes. I declare, Kate, it almost seems an indiscretion to look at them.” Kate, however, to Mrs. Hale’s indignation, threw her pretty head back and sniffed the air contemptuously. “I really don’t see anything but some absurd sentimentalism of their own, or some mannish wickedness they’re concocting by themselves. I am by no means certain, Josephine, that Lee’s influence over that young man is the best thing for him.” “On the contrary! Lee’s influence seems the only thing that checks his waywardness,” said Mrs. Hale quickly. “I’m sure, if anyone makes sacrifices, it is Lee; I shouldn’t wonder that even now he is making some concession to Falkner, and all those caressing ways of your friend are for a purpose. They’re not much different from us, dear.”

As it happens, Lee, a California Robin Hood “from one of the oldest families of the Eastern Shore of Maryland,” robbed a passenger on the 41

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stagecoach carrying money that Falkner had been swindled out of.4 Falkner, a mine manager in civilian life, is in his midthirties, while Lee is in his twenties. Kate’s suspicions about the men’s “mannish wickedness” are portentous when we consider that this story was published in En­ gland in 1885, the year Parliament passed the Criminal Law Amendment Act, a piece of legislation that criminalized all sexual relations between men. Sometimes it seems as if the woman in a love triangle is simply a means of forging an even stronger bond between the two men, be it of rivalry or desire or both.5 The classic example of this pattern is Harte’s “Tennessee’s Partner” (1869). For several decades now, critics have debated if the partner’s actions, especially his ridiculous attempt to bribe the jury at Tennessee’s trial, are motivated by hatred or by love for Tennessee. The genius of the story is that this can never be determined once and for all. The sentimental ending might indicate an ultimate earnestness in the depiction of the two men’s relationship, but the dominant tone is classic Hartean irony, where, as he writes of the gulches and barrooms of Sandy Bar, “all sentiment was modified by a strong sense of humor.”6 One of the pair of romantic friends themselves may respond more or less well to his partner taking an interest in the opposite sex. The mercurial Ned in Frederick Wadsworth Loring’s Two College Friends goes into a blue funk when he suspects that Tom, the apple of his eye, is in love with a girl and is carrying her picture about with him. The offending photograph turns out to be a picture of Tom dressed up as a little peasant girl for his role as “Marton, the Pride of the Market,” and is intended as a surprise for none other than Ned. Later Ned worries that Tom will marry when the war is over: “I never will go near his wife—I shall hate her. Now, that is a very silly thing for a lieutenant-colonel to write. I don’t care, it is true.”7 In Roderick Hudson, Rowland Mallet is more concerned about Roderick’s budding romance with Christina Light than he was with Roderick’s sudden engagement to Mary Garland, because he knows Christina will not accept sharing Roderick the way Mary does. In “SnowBound at Eagle’s,” George and Ned bicker over their respective flirtations with Mrs. Hale and her younger sister, Kate. George accuses Ned of being more interested in spending time with Kate than finding an escape route, while Ned counters that it’s a case of the pot calling the kettle black. The heavy sigh George releases after Ned leaves him makes Mrs. Hale observe, on entering the room unnoticed: “Dear me! How portentous! Really, I almost feel as if I were interrupting a tête-à-tête between yourself and some old flame.”8

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Go Sister, Soul Sister An aspect of the outlook of nineteenth-century middle-class Americans that is alien to us is their flexibility and adaptability within the confines of the “till death us do part” marriage bond and the interchangeability of the roles played by members of the same and the opposite sex in their emotional lives. In a society where for most men and women marriage was a lifelong career, a number of mutual adjustments and alternative arrangements were made to accommodate the changing needs of the couples. The Stowes, whom we met in the introduction, spent long periods apart trying to regain their health at various resorts. They both found solace and satisfaction in same-sex relationships in the absence of their spouse. Writing in 1847, after “almost 18 months since I have had a wife to sleep with me,” Calvin Stowe told Harriet: “When I get desperate, & cannot stand it any longer, I get dear, good kind hearted Br[other] Stagg to come and sleep with me, and he puts his arms round me & hugs me to my hearts’ content.”9 Other married couples spent lengthy time apart, though few took it to the extreme of Bret Harte. Harte left his wife and four children in America in 1878 and never returned in the twenty-four years that remained to him, choosing instead to spend a dozen years living in London with a dapper Belgian diplomat and his cosmopolitan wife. Even the most vociferous critic of Harte’s abandonment of his family, Mark Twain, had to get away from it all, returning briefly to “bachelor hall” after the death of his son. He spent the latter part of 1873 at a fashionable London hotel with Charles Warren Stoddard. William Dean Howells fantasized about moving in with Edmund Gosse and his family in 1882.10 Most remarkable of all, starting in 1874, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, married and the father of two, maintained a concurrent, twenty-two-year relationship with the millionaire industrialist, Boston mayor, and Massachusetts congressman Henry L. Pierce—a relationship of which his wife, the notoriously critical Lilian Woodman Aldrich, highly approved, writing warmly in her otherwise acidulous memoirs: The deep and unaffected friendship that existed between Mr. Aldrich and Mr. Pierce was most unusual. “Each by turn was guide to each.” They shared the mutual interest of two very distinct lives, and the varied interests of one were vital to the other. For the quarter of a century in which they were together, it was exceptional . . . if a day passed in which they did not meet; and after Mr. Pierce’s death the miserable feeling of loneliness changed for a long time Mr. Aldrich’s world.11

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Pierce was eleven years Aldrich’s senior and unmarried. He died at the Aldrich home in Boston in 1896, leaving the couple a substantial inheritance that enabled them to continue living in the manner to which they had grown accustomed.12 The tendency in both life and literature for men to marry the female relative of a beloved male friend is yet another manifestation of a type of emotional flexibility we no longer have. Marriage was expected of all adult males of sound body and checkbook. One could not legally marry another man even if one wanted to, and all-male households were relatively rare and probably impractical. Alger writes in The Friendships of Women apropos of women living together that “it is extremely rare for bachelor brothers to club together, and pass a wholly shared existence.”13 That is true of fiction, at least, with the notable exception of workingclass men in rural settings, such as in Harte’s stories of the California gold rush.14 The logical alternative was to marry your friend’s sister, cousin, or niece and become your friend’s relative at the same time. As we have already seen, Bayard Taylor married his romantic friend’s niece, Marie Hansen. The previous year, another noted man of letters of the day, George Williams Curtis, married Anna Shaw, the niece of Quincy Shaw, his traveling companion on the Nile, in a pattern identical to Taylor’s. In 1870, Mark Twain married Olivia Langdon, the sister of Charley Langdon, one of Twain’s best friends and his traveling companion on the cruise that resulted in The Innocents Abroad. This fascinating pattern in the emotional life of the times also occurs in romantic friendship literature. On meeting an attractive man, it would probably not occur to most of us—gay or straight—to wonder if he has a sister. Yet in Harte’s “The Poet of Sierra Flat” (1871), a story awash with gender-related surprises, the editor of the Sierra Flat Record reflects on first meeting the vaunted poet and potential contributor, Milton Chubbuck, “that his voice was so very sweet and musical that the editor wondered if he had a sister.”15 The sister motif was a convenient modern-day form of the deus ex machina device for narratives that had strayed so far from any manwoman love interest that a conventional ending in marriage seemed difficult to achieve. We shall examine this more closely in the chapter on Roderick Hudson. For the time being, no better example need be sought than Bayard Taylor’s Joseph and His Friend. Joseph, as previously mentioned, embarks on a disastrous marriage with the scheming, “petite bourgeoise” Julia Blessing that ends in her overdosing on the arsenic she takes to maintain her youthful complexion. After standing trial for his wife’s murder and taking an extended journey to the West, Joseph 44

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returns to marry Madeleine Held, who has been keeping house for her unmarried brother, Joseph’s bosom buddy Philip. This marriage has been given scant narrative preparation. In a related pattern, at the close of Elizabeth Stoddard’s Temple House, Sebastian is slated to marry Argus Gates’s tempestuous niece, Tempe, while Argus himself will wed Tempe’s childhood friend, Virginia Brande. Miss Brande has thrown herself at him to avoid a forced marriage with a detestable business partner of her father’s named Carfield. Carfield avenges himself by forcing his way into Virginia’s bedroom at night and having the maid, who has observed his entry, spread rumors about Miss Brande’s nocturnal activities all over town. This gives Sebastian a grateful opportunity to repay his friend Argus for saving his life. He threatens Carfield with a duel if he does not write a letter stating the facts and Virginia’s entire innocence in the affair. Both couples, Argus and Virginia and Sebastian and Tempe, intend to make their home at Temple House. The following coded conversation takes place between the two intimate friends toward the end of the narrative. Argus begins: “My pace has been slow towards this event [his forthcoming wedding]; partly for her sake, more for my own. It has been naturally retarded by my idiosyncrasies, as you must know.” “How will you dispose of them in the face of this change?” “You may help me to manage them, and divert them from her observation.” “Do you advise me to remain on that account?” “Remain for my sake, and make me happier.” “So I shall, and I shall marry Tempe.” “What for?” “The various reasons which induce men to experiment with themselves. How else could I bear to contemplate Virginia as your wife?” .... [Argus:] “In my late conclusions I have settled it that she should be surrounded by friendship. . . . I can bestow happiness on no woman; ought I not then to allow the existence of all other sentiments?” .... Sebastian extended his hand to Argus in extreme agitation, and Argus taking it, continued: “Something beyond me, as I said, urges me on with you. Once more, Sebastian, I love you, and the thought of parting with you is not to be borne.” “Things must be as I propose then, Argus. By my soul I love you also. Yes, by my faithless, lost soul, . . . I love you and recognize you as my master.” “Not as bad as that,” said Argus gently. “But let me hope I have conquered.”16 45

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The passage is rife with interpretative possibilities, which I for once will leave entirely to the reader’s imagination. Remember, though, that Elizabeth Stoddard was a fearless, unconventional woman on whom nothing was lost. For almost twenty years before writing Temple House, she was surrounded by the “manly love” of her husband, Richard Henry Stoddard, and his several intimate friends, including the poet, classicist, and critic Edmund Clarence Stedman, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, George Henry Boker, and Bayard Taylor. A shrewd observer of the infamous double standard of the society of her day, it was Stoddard who once described Boker as a man who “could weep with his victims, but . . . would have taken the Virgin Mary from the Ass, before Joseph, and helped her kindly into an adjoining hedge.” She could be equally sharp-tongued about women, comparing sister authors Anna and Susan Warner to grazing giraffes. Stedman said of her in 1861: “She is a woman of genius, and loves her friends, but is a good hater, also, and I wouldn’t offend her for a deal.”17 After Bayard Taylor, his new wife, and infant daughter returned to the United States from Europe in 1858, they set up house with the Stoddards on Thirteenth Street in Brooklyn. This arrangement lasted until the spring of 1861 and the completion of Taylor’s palatial new home in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania. The decade of the Civil War was for Taylor’s literary coterie a period of frequent conflicts, where Elizabeth Stoddard was often more or less fairly cast as the serpent in the garden. In a letter to Stedman from 1866, Taylor was determined that Mrs. Stoddard should not come between him and Stedman, as she had between Taylor and her husband. He concludes: “The power of a malicious woman is infinite.” Three years later, Taylor felt he could not stand to see more of the Stoddards; after reading Temple House, he decided that Elizabeth Stoddard’s case was “hopeless,” and he feared her husband’s was as well.18 It would have been interesting to hear what Taylor objected to in Temple House, but he does not elaborate.

Give Me Marriage or Give Me Death While romantic friendship may have a glorious beginning, it has no predetermined or logical ending. This makes for a formidable artistic challenge in creating romantic friendship fiction, which authors meet in different ways. For what is the proper, probable, or even possible conclusion to a love story between two men? Of the twenty-one narratives

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discussed in this and the previous chapter, six end in marriage, six end in death, and three end in death and marriage. Only six end otherwise. Harte’s “An Apostle of the Tules” (1885) is a representative example of the narrative ending in marriage for one or both of the friends. In this story romantic friendship appears as a temptation in the emotionally barren yet spiritually rich life of Harte’s idealistic young preacher, Gideon Deane. Choosing the thorniest path with masochistic zeal, Gideon has just entered into a marriage of convenience with the unattractive Widow Hiler when he is asked to come to the spiritual aid of a dying man. The man turns out to be a gambler accused of murder whom a gang of vigilantes is about to hang. Unheard by the others, Gideon offers to stand between the gambler and his captors while the latter makes his escape. This act of self-sacrifice is sufficient to “save” the man spiritually, if not physically. The gambler is shot in the chest by the vigilantes as they make their escape from the local sheriff’s posse. He expires on “the lacecanopied and snowy couch”19 in fellow gambler Jack Hamlin’s sumptuous apartments in nearby Martinez. It is in town that “the temptashun of Mammon and the flesh begins,” as Gideon has never before encountered such luxury and such charmingly disreputable people: “He was conscious of a growing fascination for the truthfulness and sincerity of that class; particularly of Mr. Jack Hamlin, whose conversion he felt he could never attempt, yet whose strange friendship alternately thrilled and frightened him.” Gideon’s powerful influence over the hardened criminal has given him the religious equivalent of overnight success in the community. Through their representative, Hamlin, they offer to build him a church of his own. The following scene ensues, as Hamlin tries to convince him to stay: “I needn’t tell you I like you—not only for what you did for George—but I like you for your style—for yourself. And I want you to accept. You could keep these rooms till they got a house ready for you. Together—you and me—we’d make the organ howl. . . .” Gideon replied by taking Hamlin’s hand. His face was perfectly pale, but his look collected. He had not expected this offer, and yet when it was made he felt as if he had known it before—as if he had been warned of it—as if it was the great temptation of his life. . . . Gideon still pale but calm, cast his eyes around the elegant room, at the magic organ, then upon the slight handsome figure before him. “I will think of it,” he said, in a low voice, as he pressed Jack’s hand. “And if I accept you will find me here tomorrow afternoon at this time; if I do not you will know that I keep with me wherever I go the kindness, the brotherly love, and the grace of God that prompts your offer, even

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though He withholds from me His blessed light, which alone can make me know His wish.” He stopped and hesitated. “If you love me, Jack, don’t ask me to stay, but pray for that light which alone can guide my feet back to you, or take me hence for ever.” He once more tightly pressed the hand of the embarrassed man before him and was gone.

Contrary to both his own career and his personal interests, Gideon returns to the narrow, thorny path in the form of the unprepossessing Widow Hiler and her three young children: “Whatever God has wrought for me since we parted,” Gideon tells the widow, “I know now He has called me to but one work. . . . To watch over the widow and the fatherless.”20 At this time, strong male attachments in real life were perceived as doomed. Alger writes: “These halcyon unions rarely survive a full entrance upon the common pursuits of life.”21 “An Apostle of the Tules” is only a balder, foreshortened, and more vivid version of a familiar storyline, where the intimacy, harmony, and sensuality of romantic friendship must be abandoned in the pursuit of marriage and parenthood, which are seen as all men’s rightful destiny. In this story Harte lays bare the ideology of what I will later call “compulsory domesticity,” a forerunner of Adrienne Rich’s “compulsory heterosexuality.”22 In the former the injunction is not to have a specific sexuality, to be something (that is, heterosexual), but rather to repeat a recurrent cultural pattern, to do something (that is, marry and have children). By the close of Bayard Taylor’s John Godfrey’s Fortunes, to give another example, the hero has secured a suitably folksy wife for his faithful friend Bob Simmons and, in rivalry with the other apple of his youthful eye, Penrose, won the hand and heart of an intellectual heiress, Isabel Haworth. Thus, John Godfrey finally possesses what, in addition to his friendships, has given his life direction: “that home of my own creation which my poor mother had foreseen upon her death-bed.”23 The other major denouement in romantic friendship fiction is death, as demonstrated in two short stories by Bret Harte and a novel by William Dean Howells. “Tennessee’s Partner,” whether we read it “straight” or not, relates the death by hanging of Tennessee and the death soon afterward of his partner, be it from grief or, as one critic has suggested, having no other reason to live after his revenge has been carried out.24 In a much later story by Harte, “In the Tules,” we find a considerably less enigmatic ending than in “Tennessee’s Partner.” Martin Morse gives his own life trying to save Jack Despard, but to no avail, as he is shot dead in the attempt and Despard hanged soon afterward by a lynch mob. Harte 48

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pulls out all the stops by having the two men buried in the same grave. Howells’s psychological novel The Shadow of a Dream leaves even more corpses on the stage, as husband, wife, and romantic friend all die at a relatively young age. Howells’s signature straight couple, Basil and Isabel March, passive witnesses to the unfolding drama, are left to contemplate the carnage. Augusta Jane Evans’s St. Elmo and Harte’s “Captain Jim’s Friend” are the only textual examples I have come across where one romantic friend dies at the hands of the other. Murray Hammond, the man St. Elmo Murray kills, is, of course, no longer his friend at all; and neither is Lacy Bassett a true friend to his longtime victim and admirer, Captain Jim. These stories seem to suggest that an unequal, exaggerated friendship built on false perceptions of the other may be the death of you. The heroic death at the close of many romantic friendship stories is often as conventional a means of closure as marriage is in domestic or sentimental novels. As David Halperin notes in his essay “Heroes and Their Pals”: “It is not too much to say that death is to friendship what marriage is to romance.”25 A remnant of older narrative forms, closure in death is meant to form a capstone to an ideal relationship that would otherwise likely be disrupted by the mundane marriage of one or both of the parties involved. As Alger points out: “A tame mediocrity, rendering them unworthy of the name, is the bane of our common friendships.”26 A story requires an ending in a way that life does not. The threat of death puts the friendship to the supreme test, and in most cases, the friends pass with flying colors. Too much symbolic meaning, then, should not be read into the linking of romantic friendship and death in the literature of the period. Naturally, death and marriage may be combined: marriage being the reward for one of the friends and death the fate of the other. The Harte story just mentioned is a case in point. Captain Jim is last seen stretched out dead at his friend’s feet in a San Francisco hotel room; then the faithless Lacy Bassett returns home, marries the woman Jim died trying to force him to do right by, and “probably on the strength of having ‘killed his man,’ was unopposed on the platform next year, and triumphantly elected to the legislature!”27 Two College Friends is a more genuinely tragic and earnest example of the death-and-marriage pattern. Ned and Tom, whom we have seen together through thick and thin battling the “Rebs” in Virginia, repeatedly test their mutual devotion through acts of heroism. Finally, Ned gets the opportunity to repay Tom for saving his life, when Tom becomes feverish and delirious during a mission to destroy a bridge. The heroic 49

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friends are captured by Confederate troops under the leadership of “Stonewall” Jackson, and breaking his word of honor to the general, Ned gets Tom safely back to Union lines at the cost of his own life. Having given his word as a gentleman, Ned feels duty bound to give himself up to the enemy, but not before he has delivered the following speech of farewell to the still-unconscious Tom. Even in this abridged version, it is one of the most impassioned expressions of manly love in nineteenthcentury American literature: “This is the last time—the very last time—God help me!—that we shall see each other, that I shall see you. O my darling, my darling, my darling! please hear me. The only one I have ever loved at all, the only one who has ever loved me. . . . If you knew how I love you, how I have loved you in all my jealous, morbid moods, in all my exacting selfishness,—O Tom! my darling, my darling! can’t you say one word, one little word before we part,—just one little word, if it were only my name? . . . You will see your mother Tom; and you will go home now, and marry, and be happy, and forget me. Oh, no, no, no, Tom! you won’t do that; you can’t do that. You won’t forget Ned, darling; he was something to you; and you were all the world to him.”28

Death, then, is the fate of the orphaned, troubled Ned, while Tom is last seen in the bosom of his young family with his wife, Nettie, and his baby named—naturally—Ned. Roderick Hudson is unusual in that one romantic friend dies, but the surviving friend does not marry the woman whom the story has shown to be temperamentally suited to him and who has the added attraction of being his dead comrade’s fiancée. There will be more about that in chapter 4. As already noted, only six of the twenty-one narratives I have discussed do not end in death and/or marriage. The narrator’s unspoken, sensuous friendship with Kana-ana on an Hawaiian island ends with his precipitous departure in Charles Warren Stoddard’s “A South-Sea Idyl.” He soon realizes that he is growing too attached to “the little heathen” and wonders: “What should I do when I was at last compelled to return out of my seclusion, and find no soul so faithful and loving in all the earth beside?”29 In Howells’s Private Theatricals, the considerably more conflicted idyll at the Woodwards’ farm in New England comes to an end with the end of summer. Belle Farrell never succeeds in snaring either of her two victims; maybe she never really intended to. They continue as before, while Mrs. Farrell finds a more appropriate sphere of activity for a woman of her histrionic talents: the stage. The future of the friendship in Thomas Bailey Aldrich’s “Marjorie Daw” is highly doubtful after Edward Delaney causes his incapacitated friend 50

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John Flemming to fall in love with a woman he has never seen and leads Flemming to believe that she feels the same way about him. The trouble is that Marjorie Daw is a phantom woman who has never existed, except in Delaney’s vivid imagination. At the end of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, we are equally doubtful about the future for both Huckleberry Finn and Jim, together or apart. Will Jim seek out his wife and children, as had been his original intention? Will Huck return to St. Petersburg? Harte’s “Snow-Bound at Eagle’s” is open-ended in that death and marriage are only alluded to as a possibility by Ned Falkner returning to Kate Scott at Eagle’s Nest and George Lee joining his cousin’s company during what is presumably the Civil War. As already noted, “Uncle Jim and Uncle Billy” stands out among the many stories Harte wrote about love relationships between men by virtue of having a happy ending—an ending that is not so different in spirit from the many conventional marriages we have seen. The male couple, in this case, lives happily ever after. Those romantic friendship stories that do not end in marriage or death have sometimes been criticized on aesthetic grounds. Readers’ and critics’ dissatisfaction with the final “Evasion Episode” in Huckleberry Finn is legendary. Private Theatricals was the only one of Howells’s forty novels that after serial publication was not produced as a book in his own lifetime.30 In other cases one suspects that the lack of closure afforded by cross-sex marriage or death is only possible because the narrative is a short rather than a long one. A happy ending such as we find in “Uncle Jim and Uncle Billy” is difficult to imagine in a full-length novel.31

Virtual Reality Clearly, the narratives we have considered in this and the preceding chapter stand in some significant relation to the intimate male same-sex friendships that flourished concurrently with their writing and dissemination. The question now is what relation the literary representations have to the real-life relationships. Several possibilities suggest themselves, and they are not mutually exclusive. The first possibility is that literature can be a more or less accurate record or reflection of persons and events in so-called real life. When the personal experience behind the account is its raison d’être, we are dealing with the genre of autobiography. Both Bayard Taylor’s account of his travels in Egypt in A Journey to Central Africa and Stoddard’s “A SouthSea Idyl” are varieties of autobiography, though the former is a hefty travel book and the latter only a light sketch. It is interesting that in the 51

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antebellum period, all accounts written in the first person were considered “autobiography.”32 For novels and short stories presented as fiction, though, the transposition from lived experience to literature is seldom as direct as we find in an early story by Bret Harte. In “Notes by Flood and Field” (1862), pub­lished the year Harte embarked on his ill-fated marriage to Anna Griswold, the first-person narrator, a U.S. surveyor, tells of his encounter with George Tryan, one of several sons of a Missouri-born, Bible-thumping old rancher. Harte may have had a romantic friendship with one of his pupils when he tutored a rancher’s four eldest sons in the San Ramon Valley in the fall of 1856.33 As it happens, Harte’s oldest pupil had been called George Bryan; his brothers were named Tom, Jonathan, and Wise, just as in the story. In “Notes by Flood and Field,” the narrator feels an instant rapport with and attraction to the gentle, sympathetic George Tryan, with his “very handsome bright blue eyes,” “broad chest,” and “well-knit figure.” George offers the stranger his bed, and the narrator records that he “went to bed with a pleasant impression of his handsome face and tranquil figure soothing me to sleep.” Three months later, during the great flood of 1861–62, the surveyor-narrator returns to the region, “obeying some indefinite yearning . . . half conscious of something more than curiosity as an impelling motive.”34 He has, of course, come to look for George Tryan. But George has died of exhaustion while trying to help other flood victims. “Notes by Flood and Field” includes one of the most intriguing samesex exchanges in Harte’s many titillating tales. When the narrator hears that one of Joseph Tryan’s sons has been saved from the flood, he inquires if it is George. “Don’t know; but he’s a sweet one, whoever he is,” the steamer engineer responds, and smiles “at some luscious remembrance.”35 It turns out to be George’s brother, Wise, but the question remains: what luscious remembrance? This story, suggestive as it is, illustrates some of the difficulties in making assumptions about an author’s life based on his works. The story itself, in addition to a letter Harte wrote home and a census indicating the names and ages of the Bryan household in 1860, are the only evidence in the case. Possibly, Harte’s feelings for George Bryan were unrequited—or he never had any feelings for him at all and made up the story based on only the thinnest veneer of lived experience. The several coincidences of character and setting, though, would seem to indicate something more. It is a sign of the pervasiveness of romantic friendship in nineteenthcentury America that nearly all the authors encountered in this study experienced “manly love” firsthand, in most cases before they came to 52

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write about it. Although we cannot pursue their fascinating permutations in any great detail here, let us look more closely at one man and his romantic friendships: Thomas Bailey Aldrich, who wrote the amusing epistolary short story about the imaginary Marjorie Daw, and who was described by the doyenne of the Boston literary scene, Annie Adams Fields, as “a queer, witty creature.”36 Aldrich was born in 1836 in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, lost his father at a young age, and moved to New York with his widowed mother in 1852. He formed several intimate friendships before his marriage to Lilian Woodman in 1865. One of these was with Bayard Taylor, eleven year his senior, and described by Aldrich’s biographer as “perhaps the closest of his early friendships.”37 Another romantic friendship was begun with the future theater critic and biographer William Winter in 1855, when they were both nineteen. Their relationship is interesting, because they became attached to each other before they had met in person. During the first few months of their friendship, their contact was solely epistolary. On July 25, 1855, Aldrich wrote to Winter: “There is such a heart of kindness in your paragraphs, so noble and strong, that I can feel it, unseen, throbbing against my own. I think we shall be even better friends now, when we meet. Our tastes, in very many things, are alike, for often, under the cloak of quaint words, I have found the pulses of your thought to agree with mine.”38 After they had finally met, Aldrich assured Winter that “my meeting with you has not broken the link of my love for you.”39 Aldrich’s friendships with Taylor and Winter lasted throughout their lives. Two years before Taylor’s sudden and untimely death at age fifty-three, Aldrich wrote to William Dean Howells: “The mail brings me a letter from dear old Taylor, so full of affection and unaffectedness that I am ashamed to love him with only all my heart. . . .”40 In some of our authors’ lives, romantic friendship was “just a phase”; in others it was a lifelong emotional engagement. Even in the nineteenth century—in many ways a century of friendship—only men possessing unusual resources and strong emotional needs could maintain their friendships throughout their lives, just as today many partnered couples find it difficult to maintain any kind of deep friendship outside their primary relationship. Bayard Taylor, described by Thomas Bailey Aldrich as “one mass of faithfulness and loyalty,”41 was one such man. He was able to sustain romantic friendships throughout his life while being, in Richard Cary’s words, “a solid family man” and “orthodoxy par excellence.”42 Henry James’s engagement in romantic friendships only increased with the years, inverting the conventional pattern; and his many relationships with younger men from the early 1890s onward are among the 53

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best documented we have.43 That has not prevented James’s “sexuality” from being the subject of vociferous critical debate, however. In contrast, Bret Harte’s adult emotional and sexual life is more enigmatic even than that of the “Master,” because we know less about it. He was married and fathered five children, but lived apart from his wife and four surviving children for the final twenty-four years of his life. His closest male friend during the years of his voluntary exile in Europe was a Gentleman Usher to Queen Victoria, Lieutenant-Colonel Arthur Collins, a bachelor, a very charming “Warrington sort of fellow” in Harte’s description, and “solicitous of the welfare of the District Messenger Boys” according to his obituary in the Times in 1911.44 Mark Twain and William Dean Howells, on the other hand, relegated their intense same-sex friendships to their carefree, and in Twain’s case rambunctious, Western youth, however regretfully. John Crowley notes apropos of Howells’s friendship with Charles Warren Stoddard: “For a man like Howells, ‘romantic friendship’ could be experienced only in parodic form, once he had become a man. It was different for the ‘childish’ Stoddard, who represented to Howells a forsaken part of his own emotional life.”45 Stoddard, another chronic bachelor, went through a development somewhat different from most of his peers. While he got older, his love interests—or as he called them, his “Kids”—got younger. A typical romantic friendship with the artist Frank Millet in Italy in the 1870s had become by the 1890s a series of live-in relationships with various more or less vagrant boys Stoddard took into his Washington, DC, home.46 Among the authors included in this study, Stoddard is the one we might most comfortably categorize as a homosexual, keeping in mind that this manner of categorization was alien to the culture in which he lived. Certainly, there is no easy generalizing from the lives of writers to the population at large. One might even argue that the high ideals of romantic friendship could only be fully realized by persons with an “artistic temperament.” Alger claimed that “men of the same professions and circumstances and motives—as artists, officers, physicians, authors, divines—would appear best adapted and most urged to friendship, because they can most closely sympathize in daily cares, labors, trials, and hopes, and can in various ways be of most assistance to each other.”47 Another commentator wrote in 1874, “To possess friends is a noble privilege, and a right withal, but a right of superior souls alone.”48 Yet the prevalence of these relationships would seem to indicate a broader cultural pattern, which has been confirmed by the research of social historians into the lives of less illustrious nineteenth-century American men. The difference 54

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between these men and the ones we encounter in this study is, of course, that men like Taylor, Harte, and Howells were not only experiencing friendship in their own lives but “creating” friendship for their own day and their own society. This leads me conveniently to the second type of relationship that may pertain between fiction and reality: fiction may project friendship by giving readers ideas, ideals, and patterns of behavior that they can try to emulate in their own lives. As Wolfgang Iser insists, “A literary work is not a documentary record of something that exists or has existed; it brings into the world something that hitherto did not exist and that at best can be qualified as a virtual reality.”49 If life imitates art, as Oscar Wilde has famously suggested, then these stories must have been as potent an influence on real-life friendships as the other way around. One imagines that the symbiosis between life and art, real and fictional friendship, must have been mutually reinforcing and empowering for some individuals. On the other hand, the idealized representations in fiction might have made others feel inadequate in their friendships or else feel the lack of them more vividly. As we have seen, the friendships represented in fiction have certain shared characteristics and developmental features that situate them historically and culturally and link them ideationally and situationally with what we know about friendships between similarly situated American men in the second half of the nineteenth century. This is closely linked to the development of American realism in both its aesthetic and its ideological underpinnings. Nevertheless, it is important to emphasize that even though these representations may seem more mimetic than previous, more romanticist narratives, the fiction of romantic friendship ultimately represents the dominant systems of thought of its bourgeois authors and readers. These narratives also come freighted with a cargo of legendary ideas, ideals, and motifs from the Western friendship tradition reaching back to Aristotle. Nina Baym observes in her book about critical responses to fiction in antebellum America that “the formal principle of the novel had little to do with verisimilitude and much to do with desire.”50 In a sense, then, we are simply dealing with a different kind of verisimilitude: a verisimilitude of the cultural imagination rather than fidelity to an objective, external reality. There is a third possibility, beyond reflecting existing friendships in the writer’s life and patterns in the culture at large, beyond recirculating specific friendship ideals and trying to influence behavior. Narratives of friendship may themselves enact friendship. In his book on male friendships in the early national period, Caleb Crain writes: 55

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In America as it democratized and industrialized, literature came forward as a way to exchange emotions between increasingly separate men. Meanwhile, men who were aware that they loved other men found it harder and harder to express their feelings to each other. They gravitated to literature as an outlet because of its license to express links between men.

Crain may be overstating the difficulty men encountered in expressing their feelings to each other, but it is certainly true, as he also points out, that “writing does not just record a relationship, it is a relationship (a friend).”51 This Emersonian idea was shared by other male-orientated writers of his and a later day. Herman Melville admitted to Richard Henry Dana Jr., author of Two Years Before the Mast (1840), that in addition to pecuniary motives he wrote to obtain “affectionate sympathy.”52 Taylor, as we have seen, dedicated his major novel about friendship to believers in manly love. “Others,” he added presciently, “will not read it.”53 Dedications are, of course, only the most literal sense in which books enact friendship. Books themselves in their physical embodiment and promise of pleasure and meaning are tokens of friendship passed on from hand to hand, often inscribed with additional, extratextual messages of devotion.54 Ironically, many of the texts in this study, stories about friendship in its most exalted, highly developed, and idealistic form, have found few friends during the past one hundred years. Despite their initial popularity and public recognition, many of them have been completely ignored for most of the twentieth century, and if not ignored, then reviled. To make friends with these texts again we need, as in all true, good friendships, to realize their differences from and similarities to ourselves and our ideas about what friendship is and should be. As we have already seen, there is much to recognize and much to wonder at.

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Sex and the City: Cecil Dreeme and the Antebellum Sex/Gender System Let us regard every rational man in the world as two men. Every individual shall be divided into a master and a slave. . . . Let us listen to what our man in white and our man in black have to say to each other. JOSIAH GILBERT HOLLAND, “HIGH AND LOW LIFE,” IN PLAIN TALKS ON FAMILIAR SUBJECTS (1866)

Some nineteenth-century men worried about chastity as much as some twenty-first-century men worry about impotence. With the near total reversal of bourgeois values and the role of sex in life that has taken place during the last one hundred to one hundred and fifty years, it is hardly surprising that we do not always understand the Victorians in the way they would have understood themselves. In this context I want to introduce a handsome, dashing, heroic young nineteenth-century American. He was born in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1828 and educated at Yale University. For several years he was the black sheep of a proud family, until he redeemed himself by dying nobly in one of the first battles of the Civil War. Maybe it was another “long and lovely suicide,” as has been said of Oscar Wilde.1 At any rate, this young man left behind a drawer full of unpublished manuscripts: four complete novels, several travel narratives, and stories and poems. After his death, most of these literary remains were rushed into print by the prestigious Boston publishing firm of Ticknor and Fields. 57

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Theodore Winthrop, for that was his name, was one of those nineteenth-century American men who spent hours brooding on what best to do with their fallen nature. As his diaries show, Winthrop was troubled, melancholy, filled with self-doubt and self-consciousness, in contemporary terms morbid, indicating a persistent tendency to dwell on the unsmiling aspects of life.2 Among the published results of his soul’s probings, his novel Cecil Dreeme is the most revealing of the interaction between sexual ideology and individual consciousness. This novel is also a paradigmatic example of romantic friendship fiction: we find here the cataclysmic first meeting, the testing of the bond, the element of heroism, the mutuality and complementarity of the union, the intimacy and sympathy of the relationship, the mutual admiration and idealization, the element of physical (if not sexual) attraction, the disruptive role of women, the motif of the hand, and the sister motif. All told, it is difficult to imagine a text that demonstrates the workings of fraternal feeling on more levels and in a wider variety of ways than does Cecil Dreeme. In its publishing history, in the biographical sketch that precedes the main text, in its specific historical references and autobiographical germs, and not least of all in its characters, plot, and symbolism, Cecil Dreeme is the ultimate fiction of romantic friendship. To begin at the beginning: in the manner of its publication and the form in which it first made its appearance, Cecil Dreeme was just such an enactment of friendship as I discussed toward the end of chapter 2. An anonymous reviewer of one of Winthrop’s later works for the North American Review wrote in July 1863: “Major Winthrop’s friends could have raised no nobler monument to his memory than the four [sic] volumes of his writings which have been published since his death.”3 Without friendship, specifically Winthrop’s close friendship with the established writer and editor George William Curtis, it is unlikely that the novel would ever have seen the dark of print. By 1861, thirty-seven year-old Curtis was the author of such popular successes as Nile Notes of a Howadji (1851), The Potiphar Papers (1853), and Prue and I (1857), had been the sole occupant of the “Easy Chair” department at Harper’s Monthly for seven years, and was a famous orator. He had been instrumental in getting Melville’s short stories, including “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” into Putnam’s in the early 1850s. According to Willard Martin, Curtis had only seen Winthrop’s “Love and Skates” and knew nothing of the existence of his novels before his death.4 Winthrop had first met Curtis, who was four years his senior, in Geneva on Winthrop’s second trip to Europe in October 1851. During the late 1850s, the two men were neighbors in the exclusive New Brighton section of Staten Island, where Winthrop spent 58

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the final six years of his life living with his married sister, Laura Winthrop Johnson, and her family. These were the years Winthrop embarked on his serious if clandestine pursuit of authorship. There is some uncertainty about whether any of his longer works had been accepted for publication at the time of his sudden death. At any rate, “the Rupert Brooke and Alan Seeger of his time”5 had published only a pamphlet about a painting and a military sketch from the front before he died. He would have sunk rapidly into a war hero’s peremptory oblivion were it not for Curtis’s efforts on his behalf. Throughout his life, Winthrop had a knack for attracting the attention of powerful men, who invested time, money, and emotion in him, usually with scant return on their investment. Though at least two unhappy love affairs with women are on record, Winthrop was basically a man’s man. Men supported him, loved him, believed in him, memorialized and mythologized him. With the exception of Curtis, Winthrop’s nearest friends were professional rather than literary men; he seems to have had only the most tenuous of connections with other writers. He was a friend to artists, though, such as the landscape painter Frederick Church and the architect Richard Morris Hunt. The character of Henry Stillfleet in Cecil Dreeme was loosely based on Hunt, who had a studio in the New York University building on Washington Square that inspired Winthrop’s depiction of Chrysalis College.6 It is the chief irony of Winthrop’s largely aimless life that the event which finally garnered him fame and public recognition was his death. From a career standpoint, his best move was to jump onto a log at Great Bethel, Virginia, on June 10, 1861, allowing a North Carolina drummer boy to mortally wound him with a shot to the head. The process of mythologization began the moment his death was reported—a process that in the course of 1861 would construct a national hero from the unlikeliest of materials. The challenges of his transformation will become apparent to anyone who compares the public statements about Winthrop with what is known of his personal life. Nowhere is this contrast more heroically overcome than in the biographical sketch Curtis wrote about his intimate friend. It was first published in the Atlantic Monthly in August 1861 and later included as a preface to Cecil Dreeme, the first of Winthrop’s five posthumous works to be published between 1861 and 1863. As a text about a friend, Curtis’s sketch provides a highly suitable overture to a novel about friendship. Replete with the fabulously phallic imagery of a more innocent, pre-Freudian age, Winthrop is described as being “veined with genius”; during the early days of the conflict, he was “thoroughly aroused,” Curtis writes, and his last letters home “gush and 59

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throb with the fullness of his activity.” Curtis’s encomium concludes in a similar vein: “Young, brave, beautiful, for one moment erect and glowing in the wild whirl of battle, the next falling forward toward the foe, dead, but triumphant.”7 Curtis’s determination to assert Winthrop’s manhood is a fitting prelude to a novel so centrally concerned with what manhood is and how it might best be attained and maintained. Throughout the Civil War and beyond, Cecil Dreeme reflected, projected, and enacted friendship for a large and appreciative audience. It proved the most popular of Winthrop’s works, going into nineteen editions during its first five years in print.8 According to a writer for the Atlantic, “Everybody reads ‘Cecil Dreeme’ and ‘John Brent.’ ”9 Alexander Cowie attributed the novel’s popularity partly to the fact that New York had up to this time received little attention from novelists.10 In one of the first reviews of Cecil Dreeme, E. P. Whipple observed of its author: The utmost sensitiveness and delicacy of moral sense were combined in him with a rough delight in all the manifestations of manly strength; and these two tendencies of his nature are fitly embodied and exquisitely harmonized in the characters of Cecil Dreeme and Robert Byng. They are opposites which by their very nature are necessarily attracted to each other. The obstacle to their mental and moral union is found in a third person, Densdeth, in whom manly strength and genius have been corrupted by selfishness and sensuality into the worst form of spiritual evil.11

Here we see a tendency to confound author and characters in a way typical of the criticism of the period. This general tendency was no doubt heightened in Winthrop’s case by the desire to celebrate both the dead hero and his living legacy. Undoubtedly, too, it is possible to perceive similarities between Winthrop and his epicene hero, Cecil Dreeme. Curtis describes how in Winthrop “the womanly grace of temperament merely enhanced the unusual manliness of his character and impression. It was like the delicate carnation upon the cheek of a robust man.” He continues, “There was no franker or more sympathetic companion for young men of his own age than he; but his conversation fell from his lips as unsullied as his soul.”12 According to his biographer, Willard E. Martin Jr., “The general estimate of [Winthrop’s] character by his contemporaries was that it was composed basically of manly strength and feminine delicacy marked by aesthetic sensitiveness.”13 One dissenting view is provided by George Templeton Strong, who recorded in his New York diary on May 11, 1868, that “Benjamin R. Winthrop told me not long ago that poor Theodore 60

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Winthrop of Big Bethel memory had converted his sister, Mrs. Laura and her husband, ‘to infidelity.’ ”14 Winthrop himself probably identified as much with the first-person narrator of Cecil Dreeme, Robert Byng, and his struggles between his “higher” and his “lower” nature, as he did with the eponymous hero. In Winthrop’s own estimate, written on his twentieth birthday: “I very early learnt sad lessons which it will take a whole life to unlearn, in body and mind.”15 His youthful diaries are full of tortured introspection and self-castigation, as in the following entry from October 22, 1848: “May I receive that help which alone is help to search thoroughly my heart, and knowing its evils to tear them out like a man; not to be as now I too often am just upon the edge of a particular sin.”16 The source of these guilty feelings is nowhere stated specifically, but gambling, drinking, womanizing, masturbating, and sodomy are all possibilities. By giving narrative form to his own struggles of body and mind, Winthrop contributed to an increasing focus on the sexual life and sexual problems across a broad range of texts in the second half of the nineteenth century. The message of his novel is that men must learn from each other’s mistakes and be guides to one another. By telling each other the stories of their lives, particularly their errors of judgment and bitter experiences, as the older Mr. Churm does to Robert Byng (for example, “You are the man to whom my story belongs”17), they may prevent others from experiencing the same pain or making the same mistakes. Any man who has been harmed—in Churm’s case, by loving an unworthy woman—owes it to his son or friend to pass on the story of his experience. This is a characteristic of the dominant homosociality of the period, when affective bonds between men had not yet been complicated by the homosexual-heterosexual binary. Two men, to the extent they recognized each other as equally men, or gentlemen in a more class-conscious sense, owed an automatic allegiance to each other that could bridge differences of age, experience, profession, religious and geographic background, and even socioeconomic standing. “I point a moral for you;” says Churm to Byng, and adds in a suitably phallic metaphor, “I have no right to impale others upon it.” Churm, who loved Byng’s dead father “like a brother,” becomes a surrogate father figure.18 What he learns from Churm, added to his own experience, Byng in turn passes on to the reader: I shrink from the task of opening an ancient wound. I shrink, but yet I force myself to the anguish. 61

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And time has changed that bygone grief into a lesson. I must write. No matter how dark, the story shall be told. Every man’s precious or costly experience belongs to every brother-man. . . . Perhaps by some warning I here utter I may persuade a young and hesitating soul to shudder back from the brink of sin.19

The narrator (and by implication, Winthrop himself ) hesitates to tell his story, as did the writers of “sex in life” literature of the period. When writing and reading of sex and sin, one courted the danger of contagion—a vicarious sinfulness—as does Byng in befriending the villain of the piece, Densdeth. Was ignorance or knowledge the best strategy in confronting evil and sin? Sylvester Graham, one of the first nineteenth-century Americans to problematize the sexual life, notes in the preface to the printed version of his famous A Lecture to Young Men (1834), “Through a fear of contaminating the minds of youth, it has long been considered the wisest measure to keep them in ignorance.” Graham did not agree with this practice. “I am fully convinced,” he writes, “that mankind have erred in judgment, and in practice, on this point. Truth, properly inculcated, can never be injurious.” Writing some years later, Henry C. Wright was of the opinion that “the only way to save human beings from solitary and social abuses of the sexual nature is, [sic] to instruct them as early and fully as possible, as soon as they are capable of learning any thing respecting their physical and social nature, what is the nature and true design of this distinction of sex.” William Rounseville Alger was of two minds, saying that prudery must not stop intellectuals from speaking out against the evils of the age, before adding: “There is an innocent ignorance, which, if dangerous in some cases, is, in many cases, the highest safety.” By 1874, the influential physician Dio Lewis would claim unequivocally that “those who would teach the ways of truth and right should learn to be direct and explicit.”20

Two Desires “home!” This exclamation is the very first word of Cecil Dreeme, which begins with the return to the United States of the protagonist-narrator, Robert Byng, after ten years in Europe. This is a significant opening, as the novel is characterized by its near total absence of representations of the “home circle” or anything resembling a typical, middle-class domestic environment. It would appear that Byng has no surviving family members, at least we never see or hear of any; and the home he is symbolically returning to is in conventional Victorian terms no home at all: 62

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it is whatever comfort and emotional sustenance he can obtain from his more or less suspect circle of unmarried male friends and acquaintances. The physical home he makes for himself, again, is not a home by conventional standards but rather a set of rooms he borrows from a friend in the cavernous, empty expanses of a building belonging to Chrysalis College. The rooms are sumptuously decorated, yet their lack of domestic warmth and suitability are suggested through the absence of that chief symbol of the ideal home: the fireplace. The narrator observes: “There was no chimney, and therefore none of the domestic cheerfulness of an open fire.”21 Byng lost his parents and the family their fortune when he was a boy. As the story opens, he is twenty-six and a chemist by profession, though we learn nothing about mundane, work-related activities. As he says of the relation between his life and his narrative of that life: “I had my daily life, like other men,—my real life, if you will, that handled substances, and did not deal in mysteries. This I am not describing. I am at pains to eliminate every fact and thought of mine which did not bear immediately upon the development of the story I here compel myself to write.”22 When asked by his friend Henry Stillfleet to give an account of himself, Byng answers: “Ripe, I hope. Not raw, as I went. Nor rotten, as some fellows return. Wild oats? I keep a few handfuls still in my bag, for home sowing.” Stillfleet describes Byng in the course of what amounts to a seriocomic mock interrogation as “a fine fellow, with a good complexion, not dishonest blue eyes, not spoilt in any way.” Yet Stillfleet wonders why at twenty-six Byng has not yet been “five years at the bar, or ten years at the desk?”: “Why are you not in command of clipper ship, or in Congress, or driving an omnibus, or clearing a farm? Where is your door-plate? Where is your wife? What school does your eldest son go to? Where is your mark on the nineteenth century?”23 What Stillfleet is really asking is what kind of man Byng has become— or rather, why he has not yet become more of one. Byng counters that he might ask Stillfleet the same question. Instead they go to breakfast, after agreeing that Byng will occupy Stillfleet’s rooms while Stillfleet is in Washington “trying to decorate the Representative Chamber so that it will shame blackguards to silence.”24 Byng, then, has no career, no wife, and no children. During his long absence there has been no one to keep the home fires burning. On his return, he must start building both a physical and a spiritual home from scratch and endeavor to become what the period considered a man. The challenges, difficulties, and dangers involved in that process are in large part what the novel is about. 63

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By means more or less subtle and indirect, Byng tries to reassure the reader of his basic goodness, purity, and manliness. He gives the following report of himself to his father’s old friend, the middle-aged businessman Mr. Churm: “My soul grows slow as a century-plant. You can hardly look for blossoms at the end of the first twenty-five years. I am a fellow of good intentions,—that is the top of my claim. But whether I am to be a pavior of hell or a promenador of heaven, is as hell or heaven pleases. It seems to me that my allotted method of forming myself is by passing out of myself into others. I am dramatic. I adopt the natures of my companions, and act as if I were they.”

“A guilty man could never live here a day,” Byng reassures himself, looking over the luxurious yet faintly sinister appointments of his rooms in “Rubbish Palace,” his pet name for Chrysalis. The janitor’s children seem to approve of him on sight, he tells us, and Locksley the janitor assures Byng (and us) that “I know you’re the right sort. We’ve made up our minds about that, big and little down to the Janitory.”25 The Chrysalis College janitor and his family in their “compact little snuggery” are significant for being the novel’s sole representatives of the domestic ideal. Byng is first introduced to Locksley by Stillfleet, as his new tenant. On a later visit we get the following description of the Locksley’s humble yet inviting home: Lighted up, it was even more cheerful than when I saw it with Stillfleet. The table was set for supper. The bright teapot, the bright plates, the bright knives and forks, had each its own bright reflection of the gas-light to contribute to the general illumination. Mrs. Locksley, the bright cause of all this brilliancy, was making the first cut into a pumpkin-pie of her own confection, as we entered. . . . What nose would not sniff away all remembrance of the mephitic odor it had inhaled, to entertain this fresh wholesome emanation? . . . The moral atmosphere, too, of this honest, cheerful, simple homescene acted as a moral disinfectant.

Locksley, a Dickensian character with a Tennysonian name, has “three junior Locksleys,” and Stillfleet jokingly wants them to require that Byng set them a good example: “Tell him young men generally go to bad without children to watch over them.”26 The narrator reflects in an Emersonian way on how children “seem to divine a sour heart, a stale heart, or a rotten heart, by unerring instinct.”27 This is a valuable instinct in a treacherous world, but one that most often

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does not survive the journey into adulthood. Innocence is an insufficient protection against evil. Cecil Dreeme continues to debate the relative value of ignorance of life’s darker and more dangerous sides against the temptations and equal dangers of knowledge. Byng describes himself as “being susceptible to every touch and every breath of influence.” As he moves into his new lodgings, he discovers, “I had no definite life before me. I was passive, and awaiting events.” As it turns out, this is a perilous passivity, for “a man at work resists emanations and miasms; a man at rest is infected.”28 Dio Lewis notes: “Idleness is the mother of concupiscence.”29 As the plot begins to unfold, Byng describes himself tellingly as “a dramatic personage, but with no rôle yet assigned.” Stillfleet leaves Byng in the care of the Locksleys, with a parting admonition to “protect his innocence in this strange city.” The narrator reflects, “With him [Stillfleet] I fear the merry element disappears from a sombre story.”30 Byng perceives his own loneliness and decides to look up a man named Densdeth. Densdeth is the antagonist in Cecil Dreeme. In this character, known by his surname only, the eighteenth-century English gothic villain meets the nineteenth-century American confidence man: “a devil such as tempts every person thrown into the vortex of our daily commonplace life.”31 Byng met Densdeth on shipboard and became intimate with him, yet he is counted as neither a friend nor an acquaintance in the reckoning Byng gives Stillfleet of the men he met aboard the Arago. Byng describes him to his skeptical artist friend as “the cleverest man I have ever met,” “handsome as Alcibiades,” and “the brilliant, the accomplished,—who fascinates old and young, who has been everywhere, who has seen everything, who knows the world de profundis.” Densdeth is further described as “a very Midas with the gold touch,” a “potent millionaire,” and, Byng thinks, “Hebrewish.” Densdeth’s physical charms are repeatedly stressed, much like those of the equally unsympathetic yet considerably less sinister Penrose are in John Godfrey’s Fortunes: Densdeth was a man of slight, elegant, active figure, and of clear, colorless, olive complexion. His hair was black and studiously arranged. He was shaved, except a long drooping moustache,—that he could not have spared; it served sometimes to conceal, sometimes to emphasize, a sneer. His nose was a delicate aquiline, and his other finecut features corresponded. His eyes were yellow, feline, and restless.

Densdeth’s otherness is stressed by the emphasis on his possible Jewishness and his “marked Orientalism of face.”32

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In a detailed account, Densdeth is compared to his disadvantage with the older, solider, yet plainer Mr. Churm: “sturdy and vigorous; well built, one would say, not well made; built for use, not made for show.” In contrast with Densdeth’s fine features, Churm’s are “strongly marked and finished somewhat in the rough, not weakened by chiseling and mending.” Unlike Densdeth’s feline, restless eyes, Churm’s are “his lanterns to search for an honest man and friend, not for a rogue and tool.” Their voices are also contrasted: “Churm’s voice was bold and sweet, with a sharp edge. . . . Densdeth spoke with a delicate lisp, or rather Spanish softness. There was a snarl, however, beneath these mild, measured notes.” And so the comparison goes on to include their laughter and their mode of dress. Byng concludes significantly, “They in some measure personified to me the two opposing forces that war for every soul. . . . My dual nature felt the dual attraction.”33 Robert Byng’s struggle—however much it is dramatized in the novel in the form of external personifications of good and evil—is an internal struggle. Dio Lewis tells a story in his book Chastity; or, Our Secret Sins (1874) that forms a parallel to Byng’s (and Winthrop’s) experience, though with a different outcome: “I have within me two desires,” said a young man endowed with the finest qualities of mind, but who ruined himself by yielding to the importunities of passion, “one which resists and the other which leads me on. The latter, in order to seduce me, makes use of the most adroit subterfuge, and always says to me, ‘This will be the last time.’ ” The unfortunate youth died of pulmonary disease.

The “passion” being alluded to was in this case the “solitary vice” of mas­ turbation.34 On meeting Densdeth in a New York eatery and being offered a glass of his choice wine, Byng reflects in a soliloquy that is typical of Winthrop’s heightened style: What does it mean . . . this man’s strange fascination? When his eyes are upon me, I feel something stir in my heart, saying “Be Densdeth’s! He knows the mystery of life.” I begin to dread him. Will he master my will? What is this potency of his? How has he got lodgment in my spirit? Is he one of those fabulous personages who only exist while they are preying upon another soul, who are torpid unless they are busy contriving a damnation? Why has he been trying to turn me inside out all the voyage? Why has he kept touching the raw spots and the rotten spots in my nature? I can be of no use to him. What does he want of me? Not to make me better and nobler,—that I am sure of. No; I will not touch his wine. I will keep clear of his attentions.35 66

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Here Densdeth is likened to a vampire. He is also frequently compared to the devil.36 Allusions to Densdeth trying to turn Byng “inside out” and touching the raw and rotten spots of his nature also suggest that Densdeth might symbolize another biblically inspired figure: the sodomite. Before leaving New York, Stillfleet suggests that Densdeth might have had personal motives for making Byng’s acquaintance, as Byng is an old friend of the Denmans. Densdeth was slated to marry one of the two Denman daughters, Clara, before her death by drowning three months before the novel’s opening. She sounds like a mixture of Margaret Fuller and Minnie Temple; “a genius,” in Stillfleet’s words: “Once in a century Nature sends such a brave, earnest, tender, indignant soul on this low earth.” Byng is appalled to hear of the death of a childhood friend, his “weird little playmate,” “a Sybylline soul.” The intimation is that Clara may have committed suicide rather than marry Densdeth, but Byng cannot believe that “such a healthy soul” could take her own life.37 As he goes on an inspection round in his new building, all Byng knows is that “I should be glad to have a fine fellow close at hand to serve me as a counterblast to Densdeth. I must have friends, and if I can find one in my neighbor, so much the better.”38 The stage is set for the entrance of the novel’s eponymous hero in chapter 11.

With One Look The entrance of the hero into the narrative is extensively prepared. Byng first encounters Cecil Dreeme as a name on a small door sign on the floor above his own in Chrysalis. “Cecil Dreeme—Painter,” it says, leading Byng to wonder what kind of a man and artist is to be found behind the name and the door: “Is he a man whose art is a trade, who paints a picture as he would daub the side of a house? Or is he the true Artist, a refined and spiritualized being, Raphael in look, Fra Angelico in life, a man in force, but with the feminine insight,—one whose labor is love, one whose every work is a poem and a prayer?” He longs to be acquainted with “this gentleman above me, this possible counterblast to Densdeth.”39 Thus, Byng begins to project an idealized friendship before he has even met the potential partner in it. We are told via Locksley that “women he don’t seem to want to have anything to do with,” leading Byng to suspect that Dreeme has suffered the fate of his friend Churm, that “some woman has wronged him.” After a three-chapter buildup and increasing suspense about Dreeme’s fate— he has not been seen or heard from for many days—Byng and Locksley 67

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finally break into the painter’s room, where they find him unconscious in an armchair. Byng asks himself “whether I was not committing the impertinence of trying to force a man to live who had wished to kill himself.” Yet there is no blood and no laudanum: “Here has been unhappiness, but no despair, no self-disgust. A pure life and a clear intellect,—so the face publishes. Such a youth might wear out with work or a wound; he would never abdicate his birthright to live and learn, to suffer and be strong.” Byng concludes: “Clearly no suicide.”40 Byng feels himself almost instantly warming to the young man, as reflected in his interior monologue: “I myself feel the need of you. Even with your eyes closed, the light gone, your countenance tells me of the presence of a character and an experience riper and deeper than my own.” Because Dreeme is unconscious, Byng does not feel it fair to “study the face more in detail” despite his curiosity: “I therefore stopped intentionally short of a thorough analysis of his countenance. Fair play and my anxiety both made me content with my general impression. It is error to waste the first look and the first few moments, if one wishes to comprehend a face,—to see into it. Not after observations are so sharp and so unprejudiced.”41 Dreeme recovers from what turns out to be malnutrition. Byng soon feels the good effect of befriending him: “Instantly the wound of Densdeth’s cynicism was healed. I was freshened again, and tuned anew to all sweet influences. . . . Each of us perceived new sympathy in the other.”42 Dreeme, on the other hand, who has stopped venturing outdoors now that Byng can run his errands and bring him news of the outer world, fears that Byng will tire of him. Byng responds that this he will never do, as long as Dreeme consents to be his “in-door man”: “You return me far more than I bring. I train my mental muscle with other people. You give me lessons in the gymnastics of finer forces. My worldling nature shrivels, the immortal Me expands under your artistic touch.”43 Cecil Dreeme has magnetism and Byng is struck “by the singular, refined beauty of the youth.” “His personal magnetism—that is, the touch of his soul on mine—” Byng reflects, “affected me more keenly than before. It was having cumulative influence. The mighty medicines for soul and body always do.” He adds: “And so do the poisons.”44 Magnet imagery was commonly used in describing men with a strong appeal to their own sex. In 1851 we find Melville writing to his idol Nathaniel Hawthorne: “The divine magnet is on you, and my magnet responds. Which is the biggest? A foolish question—they are One.”45 Yet, as the novel shows to the full, personal magnetism was not the preserve solely of the good and the pure, making it an ambiguous quality. 68

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According to Churm, Densdeth has “magnetized” Byng; “he does most young men.” Byng replies, “I don’t know yet whether I shall turn to him my positive or negative pole. He may repel, instead of attracting, as soon as I get within his sphere. I acknowledge that I am drawn to him.” For a second time Churm cuts off the discussion of Densdeth, saying, “Now, then, enough of such topics,” and suggesting they go and eat. They part after breakfast, with Byng saying ironically of Densdeth: “I will nibble at our friend. I’ll try not to bite, for fear of the poison you threaten.” Byng says to Dreeme: “Name and man are repulsive; but attractive also. Attractive by repulsion.”46 The significance of the look between men takes on a different and more sinister meaning here than we saw in chapter 1. Densdeth is described as having “chasing eyes.” One look can be enough for him to “[stamp] himself ineffaceably upon your mind.”47 Clearly this is a different manner of attraction than we witnessed between Joseph Asten and Phillip Held in the railway car, yet wherein lies the difference? How do you tell one manner of magnetic gaze from the other? We find a fascinating parallel to the Byng-Densdeth relationship in the friendship of Thomas Wentworth Higginson and William Henry Hurlbert. Higginson, best known as Emily Dickinson’s befuddled mentor and posthumous editor, was an unusual product of the Boston Brahmin caste. An ex-minister, he was an active abolitionist and supporter of John Brown, commanded the first regiment of freed slaves in the Union army, and helped form the American Woman Suffrage Association in 1870, the year he first met Dickinson in person. Born in 1823, Higginson outlived his whole generation, dying in 1911. In the mid-1840s, when he attended the Harvard Divinity School, Higginson had befriended a young Southerner and fellow student, William Henry Hurlbert, four years his junior. In his memoirs, Cheerful Yesterdays, Higginson devotes several pages to his lifelong infatuation with Hurlbert, a relationship “which was for me most memorable, and brought joy for a few years and sorrow for many.”48 Higginson recalls: Going through the doors of Divinity Hall I met a young man so handsome in his dark beauty that he seemed like a picturesque Oriental; slender, keen-eyed, raven-haired, he arrested the eye and the heart like some fascinating girl. This was William Hurlbert (originally Hurlbut), afterward the hero of successive novels,—Kingsley’s Two Years Ago, Winthrop’s Cecil Dreeme, and my own Malbone,—as well as of actual events stranger than any novels. He was the breaker, so report said, of many hearts, the disappointer of many high hopes,—and this in two continents; he was the most variously gifted and accomplished man I have ever known, acquiring knowledge as by magic. . . . 69

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I have known many gifted men on both sides of the Atlantic, but I still regard Hurlbert as unequaled among them all for brilliancy; even [James Russell] Lowell was not his peer.49

These words were originally published in the Atlantic Monthly for February 1897, when Higginson was seventy-three. At the time of writing, Hurlbert had been dead for a year and a half. William Henry Hurlbert spent his life as a journalist and editor and was the “prince of persifleurs,” according to an article in a series from 1869, “New York Journalists.”50 Despite showing poetic promise at a young age and being dubbed “the Heine of the American press,”51 the high point of Hurlbert’s short-lived literary career turned out to be his delivery of the Phi Beta Kappa poem at the 1855 Harvard Commencement. After resigning in 1883 as editor-in-chief of the New York World, with which he had been associated for twenty years, Hurlbert spent most of his remaining years in Europe. When he died in Italy in 1895, there was still a warrant out for his arrest for perjury in connection with a breach of promise suit he had won in England four years before. Alluding to the privations and disappointments of his life, Higginson said that “Hurlbut’s downfall is the hardest thing of all.”52 The Higginson biographer Anna Mary Wells attributes his “strange enthusiasm” for Hurlbert to the following cause: “The romantic ideal of friendship presented in the German novels they were all reading colored their ideas about themselves and each other.”53 This fictionally inspired friendship, then, in turn spawned new literary depictions of romantic friendship—an interesting example of the permutations of life and art. As Higginson tells us himself, the title character of his novel Malbone (1869) was inspired by Hurlbert.54 Not only that, apparently Theodore Winthrop also knew Hurlbert and transformed him into fiction in Cecil Dreeme. We know nothing about these two men’s relationship beyond this claim by Higginson, but it seems likely they met when they were both in New York in the late 1850s. From the clear parallels in appearance (for example, “an Asiatic under the garb of a European”55) and character (for example, “perilous personal fascination,” “moral deterioration,” “a wasted life”56) between Hurlbert and Densdeth, it is evident that Hurlbert lent himself to the devil of the piece rather than the hero.57

Boys to Men The central questions Cecil Dreeme deals with are how to become a man, how best to make the passage from innocent youth into adulthood, how 70

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to deal with the “temptations of the flesh,” and how to form your character so as to be able to resist them for the rest of your earthly existence. Moreover, what role were other men to play in the transformation of boys into men? These were serious and pressing questions not just for heroes of fiction but for readers as well. Among the many novels celebrating romantic friendship, Cecil Dreeme is rare in its attempt to balance the picture by detailing the perceived dangers men could pose to each other. It is true, as Michael Lynch has pointed out, that the only discourses specifically relating to affective and sexual relations between men in the nineteenth century were the phrenological concept of “adhesiveness,” the friendship tradition, and the ancient and nebulous concept of sodomy.58 This does not mean, however, that there were not other systems for dividing men into categories and for determining their quality qua men, and that these categories might not somehow impinge on men’s relations to each other and to women. Cecil Dreeme reveals anxieties about manhood and symbols of male “gender trouble” in the figures of the bachelor, the libertine, and the sodomite. These concepts referred to men alone, men beyond social control, men without women, and men with too many women. Winthrop is thought to have started work on Cecil Dreeme in late 1858 and completed it in the spring of 1860.59 The 1850s had been a period of increasing concern about bachelorhood. F. W. Shelton’s article “On Old Bachelors” from 1853 is typical of the critical attitude toward men who remained unmarried. He divides bachelors into four types: the involuntary, the sentimental, the misogynistic, and the stingy. According to Shelton, bachelors are an “unfortunate class who will be esteemed by many scarcely worth the labor of an essay. . . . They are not,” he concedes, “except as a solemn warning, a painful yet salutary lesson to others. They are, for the most part, mere fragments of humanity, scattered links of the golden chain which connects the family of man into one brotherhood by the tenderest earthly and heavenly affection.” Women, he claims, cannot be blamed for being single, but when men can marry at any time, why don’t they? “Whenever you hear a man talk much of the delights of married life, and envy others their possession, you may set him down as a confirmed bachelor.” Shelton goes on to make the more interesting claim that “it cannot be doubted that there are men particularly apathetic with respect to the fairer sex.” He groups “misogynists and woman haters” into three categories. First, “a small class whose existence is uncertain, and who from some natural distortion of mind, actually hate the sight of women.” Second, “bashful individuals who can never look any one directly in the face, and who are falsely reputed to have an aversion for 71

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female society.” And third, “those devoted to pure and good pursuits. Not haters of women, but lovers of the whole race.” In Shelton’s essay there is no suggestion that certain men’s aversion to women is the result of their attraction—emotional, physical, or otherwise—to their own sex.60 The author of “Single Life among Us” in Harper’s Monthly for March 1859 claims that “celibacy is a very conspicuous and an increasing fact among us.” “Some persons,” he writes, “by physical temperament or organization, are shut out of the marrying list.” He wants to examine the causes of this: “It may be that some of the intellectual and social traits that keep people single have a basis in physical temperament, and the prudes and coquettes of either sex may owe somewhat to a slow or quick pulse the coldness that shuts them up within themselves, or the volatility that prevents their fixing their flighty fancies upon a constant object.” Again we hear that “old bachelors are such because they were crossed in love, or else death nipped their hope before its bloom”; others are unmarried by conviction, so they can devote themselves to their work or faith. Yet, the writer feels, “Too many old bachelors abandon love and take to their bank-book and bill of fare—not to name baser indulgences—for their solace.” He concludes that “a single man outside of his home is not different from his married neighbor, while a woman’s whole career is changed by her celibacy.”61 Given the attacks on bachelors in popular essays of the kind I have just summarized and in the literature of domestic reform, as we shall see in chapter 4, it is interesting to be able to read a defense of bachelorhood in Harper’s Monthly for December 1855. The anonymous essay is entitled “Disinterested Friendship” and is written in the form of an abbreviated mock autobiography “By a Bachelor.” The first-person, bachelor narrator notes at the onset that “it is the fashion to marry” and “it is the fashion to abuse those who do not”: “the common destiny of the race seems to sweep all, or nearly all, into the hymneal vortex.” He continues, “It is commanded, ‘Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife,’ ” and he does not. “But do not they covet my no wife?” he asks provocatively. The narrator goes on to say: “They talk of the delights of mutual confidence. But can there be no mutual confidence unless one of the parties wears flowing drapery, and the other is encased in bifurcated continuations? Can not there be friendship—can not there be even love under broadcloth—love of a man for a man, I mean? To deny it is preposterous.” In a counterdiscourse to the competitive business ethos, the essayist describes his “disinterested friendship” with a certain James Hayden, where there is “none of the pounds-shilling-and-pence selfishness of housekeeping between us” and “none of the selfish management and jealousy of the loves of the 72

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sexes.” The narrator then states that “there is only one venture in which we have not shared”: Hayden took a wife. As a result, the narrator’s home has now become a “place of refuge” and he an uncle. “Poor fellow—it’s a pity he’s married! We might make a joint establishment of it; for I have satisfied myself that entire happiness can be secured without matrimonial chains.” The narrator confides that he “would have married James Hayden long ago had he been a woman,” and lo and behold, he ends up marrying Hayden’s niece in a classic example of what I referred to as the “sister motif” in chapter 2.62 These societal attitudes toward unmarried men are highly relevant to Cecil Dreeme, a novel positively teeming with bachelors: Robert Byng, Cecil Dreeme, Densdeth, Stillfleet, and Churm. All the main male characters, in fact, are unmarried and most remain so, quite unlike most novels of the period. Churm, for example, an upstanding citizen and businessman in his forties, is described as “a thoroughly lovable man,—the man of all others to be husband and father.” Yet he is a bachelor living “alone and weary; his life . . . all desolated by the shadow of a sin.”63 Churm, though, is no threat. His bachelorhood is easily explained by the “lost love” complex discussed by the author of “Single Life among Us.” Involuntary bachelorhood, as Shelton called it, is no threat to domestic ideology. Rather, it shores it up. The shock to poor Churm’s system of discovering that his “true love” was a passionate, sexual woman was enough to turn him off women for life. What a testament to the power of ideas! Densdeth, of course, is a bachelor of an entirely different stamp. His bachelorhood seems all too voluntary and far from chaste. Within the antebellum sex/gender system Vincent J. Bertolini observes, bachelorhood was negatively defined by “total lack of explicit sexual content.”64 In other words, there was no sanctioned sexual behavior for unmarried men, who were expected to be celibate until they married. The character of Densdeth is an amalgam of several literary and cultural stereotypes. Besides the gothic villain, his most direct literary forebear is the eighteenth-century libertine, still alive and well in the American literature of the 1840s and 1850s (and in American social life as well). The most familiar example of the libertine at large in nineteenth-century American literature is probably Gus Lorrimer in George Lippard’s The Quaker City (1845), also known as The Monks of Monk Hall.65 In Cecil Dreeme the novel of education is amalgamated with the gothic novel of the turn of the nineteenth century and the city mysteries novel of the mid-nineteenth century. Thus, despite its relatively humble literary status and lack of intellectual pretensions, The Quaker City is one of the most significant “pre-texts” for Winthrop’s novel. Their similarity 73

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is particularly marked in the two novels’ sexual ideology and in their hybrid generic structure. This commonality includes considering seduction as a hideous and nameless crime and seducers deserving of capital punishment; the wholesale importation of domestic ideology, including “the cult of true womanhood” and the “love religion”; the idea of man’s dual nature; reading character out of physiognomy; on a stylistic level, the use of asides and soliloquies; and conventional character types in addition to the libertine, such as the passionate woman, the true woman, and the foolish father. For nineteenth-century men, libertinism was not the basis for what we would call a sexual identity, yet the freewheeling, sexually aggressive lifestyles pursued by men like George Henry Boker and the British politician and man of letters, Lord Houghton, certainly qualify them as libertines in then current usage. Boker pursued a number of sexual affairs with women that he openly related to his friend Richard Henry Stoddard, but not to Bayard Taylor, with whom he was equally close. Richard Monckton Milnes, the 1st Baron Houghton, is known to have been sexually omnivorous in the “best” tradition of libertinism, symbolized by men such as Don Juan, the Marquis de Sade, and Lord Byron.66 As George E. Haggerty points out, libertinism is more about power than it is about desire. In his apt description, “libertinism is a sexuality of every man for himself.”67 Gregory Woods stresses the libertine’s indiscriminateness, the way he obtains satisfaction by cumulative means.68 This indiscriminateness extended to both genders. In addition to focusing on various types of bachelors and on libertinism, Cecil Dreeme also contains significant allusions to sodomy. In the nineteenth century, sodomy was so nonspecific and ambiguous a category that it could encompass both premarital and adulterous sex in addition to the now more specific connotations of anal sex and male same-sex intercourse. The gay historian Jonathan Ned Katz explains: “Nineteenthcentury acts of sodomy and buggery were . . . formed, named, understood, and judged primarily within that age’s judicial system, an institution that was completely separate from the era’s particular historical structuring of romance, in which love relationships and special friendships were constituted.” In brief: “Love and sodomy lived in separate spheres.”69 What Katz means is that they belonged to different discursive spheres; sodomy lived on in law and in theology, while love and romantic friendship were constituted chiefly by literary discourses and had no judicial significance. One might propose, though, that within the total realm of discourses surrounding relationships between men, sodomy and romantic friendship were polar opposites. Where sodomy in the popular conception was 74

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brutish, evil, sinful, loveless, erotic, unnatural, and unequal, romantic friendship was equal, mutual, tender, ideal, chaste, platonic, elevated, and natural. Alan Bray and George E. Haggerty have emphasized that sodomy might be distinguished from love and friendship between men by involving some form of transgression of significant boundaries, such as that of class.70 It will come as no surprise that the character most closely linked with sodomy in the novel is Densdeth. Throughout the narrative, the arch villain of the piece is more or less directly accused of having committed unspeakable crimes. Churm suspects that “some crushing infamy” of Densdeth’s was revealed to his fiancée, leading her to take her own life. On first examining his new apartments, Byng asks anxiously about the door at the back of Stillfleet’s storage room. The heavily bolted door, it turns out, leads to a room leased by Densdeth, ostensibly as a storeroom for books and furniture. Yet there is something suspect about the room: “None now is allowed to enter there except the owner’s own man, a horrid black creature.” Apparently willing to leave well enough alone, Byng comforts himself with the thought that the big bolt on the door will keep him “safe from a visit by that [back] entrance.”71 The latter phrase is illustrative of Winthrop’s penchant for puns and double entendres.72 The narrative itself focuses repeatedly on Densdeth as a man for whom there may not be a label or a name. When Byng asks Churm straight out, “What is he?” Churm only replies that they will speak of him another time.73 Sodomy was, of course, frequently referred to as a crime not to be named by the Latin preteritions nefandam libidinem or peccatum illud horrible, inter christianos non nominandum. Even after the death of Densdeth, Byng continues to wonder, “What was he? For what purpose enters such a disturbing force into the orderly world of God?”74 This last quotation is highly suggestive of a theologically inspired worldview that Alan Bray has described as being at work in Renaissance England. Bray was the first to emphasize that in a given society there may be an immense disparity between what people say and apparently believe about a phenomenon such as sodomy or homosexuality and how they actually behave.75 In the mid-nineteenth-century United States, sodomy was not the only or even the most significant sexual crime in popular consciousness. We need to ask if sodomy—understood here in a fairly narrow sense as sexual relations between men—was the biggest bugaboo in antebellum America, or if there were other sexual activities the period considered more serious due to their greater degree of visibility, pervasiveness, and specificity. After all, existing statutes forbidding sexual contact between men rarely resulted in prosecution. There are no recorded executions for 75

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homoerotic acts in the United States after 1780. Katz has identified only 105 sodomy cases during the entire nineteenth century, though how many refer to sex between men is impossible to determine.76 Timothy Gilfoyle claims that the New York police in the antebellum period were even less concerned with homosexuality than they were with prostitution.77 The strongest candidate for the Victorian “bête noir” prize is masturbation. According to the historian Charles E. Rosenberg, masturbation was the “master vice” of the period. G. M. Goshgarian calls it “Public Enemy Number One.”78 Dio Lewis observed in 1871, “No other licentious practice is so pernicious in its effects, both moral and physical, as that of solitary onanism.” The medical writer James C. Jackson, author of The Sexual Organism and Its Healthful Management, wrote in 1861, the year Cecil Dreeme was published, that masturbation “seems to be the sin against which Nature raises up her most solemn and indignant protestations, and for the commission of which she imposes her most fearful retributions.” He goes on to observe at the beginning of a chapter with the unintentionally comic title “Masturbation, How It Arises, How It is Kept Up”: “It is not . . . to be deplored, that boys who are in the habit of masturbating, perform the act in each other’s presence, but is rather to be considered a favourable symptom in their cases.” Jackson adds, “It is better that all vice should be social than that it should be solitary.”79 Thomas Laqueur explains, “Three things seem to have been regarded as the core horrors of sex with oneself: it was secret in a world in which transparency was of a premium; it was prone to excess as no other kind of venery was, the crack cocaine of sexuality; and it had no bounds in reality, because it was the creature of the imagination.”80 Clearly in the eyes of one representative doctor at least, mutual masturbation has no evident connection with sodomy, and what today would be considered a homosexual act is preferable to masturbating alone. It is examples like these that show how much our sexual ideas and scale of values have changed in the last one hundred and fifty years. Because the ideological landscape and rhetoric of Winthrop’s text are seemingly influenced more by Christian theology and domestic ideology than modern medicine, the image of the masturbator does not rear its ugly head to any great extent in those pages. Following Vincent Bertolini’s analysis of the semiotics of the fireside bachelor reverie, we might suspect Byng of a little manual labor when he tells us at one point, “I lighted a fresh cigar and fell into a revery.” Yet his deep thoughts do not have the luxurious or sensual feeling Bertolini tells us are typical, nor does Byng display any outward physical signs that would link him 76

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to the etiology of the masturbator. If there is a character we might identify with masturbation in Cecil Dreeme, it is Towner, the poor, pathetic, broken-down ally of Densdeth. Here is Winthrop’s description of Towner in chapter 25 of the novel: “By the stove, in a rocking-chair, sat, slinking, a miserable figure of a man. There sat Towner, a bloodless, unwholesome being, sick of himself,—that most tenacious and incurable of diseases. There he sat, sick with that chronic malady, himself,—a self all vice, all remorse, and all despair.” Towner describes himself as having been totally under Densdeth’s power: “The first time he saw me, he laid his finger on the bad spot in my nature, and it itched to spread. I’ve been his slave, soul and body, from that moment.” When Towner finally determines to tear himself away from Densdeth, we witness a sudden physical transformation in him; his recovered manhood symbolized by his new poise, “standing erect and vigorous.”81 It is Towner who finally kills Densdeth with a dagger to the heart. Densdeth’s nameless crime, then, may be any number and variety of sexual activities, none of them mutually exclusive, including masturbation, sodomy, seduction, and going to prostitutes. Toward the end of the novel, the decisive fact that turned Clara Denman against Densdeth is revealed to be her meeting with a woman he had “spoilt,” who subsequently took her own life and was mistaken for Clara. She calls what Densdeth has done “a crime, a treason, and a sin” and prays Byng and Churm not ask her to specify further, maintaining an aura of secrecy and unspeakability around this seduction.82 We never directly witness Densdeth doing anything worse than sneer, laugh his sinister laugh, and reveal his diabolical plan for Clara’s future to his accomplice, Towner. And how diabolical is it? It seems a particularly Victorian, domestic form of deviltry that involves marrying his victim first and only then making her life miserable.83 In contrast with his minion Towner, Densdeth is a fine physical specimen. He says that he keeps himself in perfect health “for perfect sensitiveness and perfect enjoyment.” Significantly, he is provided with an African American valet: “an Afreet creature, this servant, black, ugly, and brutal as the real Mumbo Jumbo.” Byng feels at times that there is a resemblance between servant and master, despite the marked difference in their physical appearance, as if “the Afreet’s repulsive physical appearance more fitly interpreted his master’s soul than the body by which it acted.”84 This is an example of the belief in a certain complementarity between the spiritual and the bodily state, such that one could always read inner qualities on the basis of outward bodily signs. A rottenness of the soul and sinfulness of human conduct would sooner or later leave 77

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their visible mark on the face and body of the sinner or the criminal. In this example, the evil and ugliness in Densdeth’s nature has been projected onto his African American servant in a striking literalization of the master-slave, black-white dichotomy described by Josiah Gilbert Holland in the epigraph to this chapter.85

Lady Friends Robert Byng, despite his vaunted struggles with the devilish pleasures symbolized by Densdeth, is primarily in the clutches of what we might variously call the cult of true love, the cult of domesticity, or the love religion. This mentality or ideology was in some respects more powerful than the temptations to engage in (so-called) vice, because it took hold of the individual’s entire being—body and soul—in the service of various abstract ideals, such as chastity, moderation, monogamy, modesty, and purity. As a mode of thought and being, nineteenth-century domestic ideology surrendered to the individual the right, but also the obligation, to police his or her own behavior, to be his or her own judge and jury in the court of moral rectitude. The strong belief in the powers of selfcontrol are nowhere more succinctly expressed than in Dio Lewis’s claim that “you can, if you are earnest, set such an alarm in your mind, that if a lascivious thought occurs to you when asleep, it will waken you.”86 In examining the power of such a way of thinking in the life of an individual, we need seek no further than the life of the author of Cecil Dreeme, who battled throughout his brief existence with the gap between his own behavior and the ideals to which he felt he owed allegiance. By labeling the characters and events “good” and “evil” as clearly as he does, the narrator reveals his allegiance to domestic ideology and foreshadows the outcome of his story: sin punished and virtue rewarded. It is difficult to see how this could be otherwise. Cecil Dreeme is a first-person narrative written in retrospect and with hindsight, as all narratives of this kind are that do not consist of letters or journal entries. Furthermore, Cecil Dreeme is bourgeois, mainstream fiction, which has been given the stamp of approval by the cultural elite of the period. If there is anything unconventional, risqué, or dangerous about this text, it is the extent to which it hints at an alternative lifestyle, where sensual pleasures and selfinterest reign. It is, of course, necessary to make Densdeth an attractive figure if the hero’s danger is to seem at all real, though the outcome is never really in doubt.

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Being to such an extent a monologic or single-voiced text, both in its narrative point of view and its ideological orientation, it is not possible from Cecil Dreeme alone to reconstruct an alternative set of ideas about the body and its potential pleasures and about the role of sex in life, particularly in the lives of men. This is admittedly a limitation of “highbrow” fiction as a source of historical ideas about gender and sexuality: it tends to give voice to the conventional, the acceptable, and the ideal. Based on other types of sources, particularly medical manuals and conduct books, historians have usefully reminded us that domestic ideology or the mores we tend to associate with the term Victorianism were not as hegemonic as we often tend to think. Individuals might actively espouse older and alternative ideas about sexuality, or they might more easily escape the dominance of sexual ideologies, which had not yet extended their ever-more iron grip into human consciousness. As Jonathan Ned Katz has pointed out: “From early-colonial New England through our own day, a value system that condemns hedonism and the joys of the flesh has contended with a pro-pleasure principle.”87 In a pioneering essay from the early 1970s, Charles Rosenberg notes the persistence of what he calls an “older, male-oriented antirepressive behavioral ethos” in nineteenth-century American thinking regarding the role of sex in life. He also notes the “tone of increasing repressiveness” characteristic of the texts written in the two generations after the 1830s, which “by the 1870s . . . had moved from the level of individual exhortation to that of organized effort to enforce chastity upon the unwilling.”88 Advice and reform writers’ increasing strenuousness might be taken as a sign that they were fighting an uphill battle. Ronald G. Walters, who has surveyed a vast amount of this literature, is of the opinion that while knowledge of orthodox moral codes was widespread, obedience to them was not absolute.89 This is probably true of the so called book-reading classes, while among the illiterate, semi-illiterate, and laboring classes, ignorance of middle-class mores is conceivable. Rosenberg writes, “Many Americans simply paid no attention to these pious injunctions.”90 However inevitable the outcome of the novel, by chapter 17 Byng finds himself being pulled between two opposing forces represented by Dreeme and Densdeth. He makes this explicit when he says to Dreeme: “With you I escape from the mean ambitions, the disloyal rivalries, the mercenary friendships of men,—from the coarseness, baseness, and foul­ ness of the world. You neutralize to me all the evil powers.” Of his relationship with Densdeth at this point, he says: “I have a scientific experiment with this terrible fellow. I let him bite, and clap on an antidote

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before the brain is benumbed. I play with Densdeth, who really seems to me like an avatar of the wise Old Serpent himself, and then, before he has quite conquered me with his fascination, I snatch myself away, and come to you, to be aroused and healed.” To Dreeme’s question as to whether he has “no fears of such baleful intercourse,” Byng responds that he has none. He feels that to become a man of the world, he must know all its aspects, and he finds Densdeth a “most valuable preceptor”: “I could no more do without him for that side of my education, than I could spare your dove-like teaching to make me harmless as a dove.” Byng asks Dreeme’s pardon for giving him “this unmasculine office.” Dreeme fears that Byng has not yet made up his mind whether to side with virtue or vice, but Byng assures him that he is absolutely committed to virtue.91 Dreeme is kept indoors and upstairs at Chrysalis because of some se­ cret fear, some “mysterious peril.” Begging him to take him into his con­ fidence, Byng offers to become his provider and knight in shining armor: “Here are my fists! they are yours. What ogre shall I hit? What dragon shall I choke?” By chapter 18 of the novel’s twenty-nine chapters, Dreeme and Byng’s relationship has developed into a full-fledged romantic friendship: “ ‘If it were not for Dreeme,’ I said aloud, ‘I should despair. Him I trust. Him I love with a love passing the love of women. If I should lose him, if he should abandon me, I might be ready to take the world as Densdeth wishes. What can a soul do without one near and comrade soul to love and trust?’ ” They go on nocturnal wanderings around the city; Byng is happy to abandon “club, parlor, and ball-room, and all the attractions of the brilliant world, to wander with Cecil Dreeme about the gas-lit city, and study the side it showed to night.” Dreeme has no curiosity about “the phenomena of vice and crime,” and Byng is “happy to know one solitary man whose mind the consciousness of evil could not make less virgin.” Byng dreads the time Dreeme will leave his forced seclusion and find other friends. In response to this, Dreeme takes his arm for the first time, leading to the following reflection: It was the first time he had given me this slight token of intimacy. We had been very distant in our personal intercourse. I am not a man to slap another on the back, shake him by the shoulder, punch him in the ribs, or indulge in any rude play or coarse liberties. Yet there is a certain familiarity among men, by which we, after our roughish and unbeautiful fashion, mean as much tenderness for our friends as women do by their sweet embraces and caresses. Nothing of this kind had ever passed between Dreeme and me. His reserve and self-dependence had made me feel that it would be an impertinence to offer even that kind of bodily protection which a bigger man holds ready for a lesser and slighter. 80

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Having received this physical encouragement, Byng declares his devotion by emphasizing that even though he has “had very close relations with many of the best and noblest,” Dreeme’s society charms him “most penetratingly”: These walks with you . . . have been the chief feature of my life. I count my hours with you as the pay for my scuffle with the world. A third party would spoil the whole! What would become of our confidence, our intimate exchange of thought on every possible subject, if there were another fellow by . . . ? . . . We form a capital exclusive pair, close as any of the historic ones,—Orestes and Pylades, for example.

As in the classical myth and the many other examples we have encountered of the sister motif, Byng hopes “Orestes” Dreeme, when his “tragic duty is over,” will find a sister for Byng, his “Pylades, the faithful”: “Your sister for me would make our brotherhood actual.”92 By this point, a fourth figure has added complexity to the triangulation of desire in the novel. In addition to Densdeth and Dreeme, Byng has now entered into a relationship with Emma Denman, sister of Densdeth’s former fiancée: “Densdeth, Cecil Dreeme, Emma Denman,—these three figures battled strangely in my dreams.” This relation complicates Byng’s feelings for Cecil Dreeme: “I loved him too much, and with too peculiar a tenderness, to tell him that I had fancied I loved even a woman better than him.”93 The verb fancied in this passage is significant. Byng is working hard at falling in love with Emma Denman, but the desired result is not forthcoming. He admits to Churm early on that he is, if not “eager,” then “willing” to love. He asks Dreeme for advice about Emma, whom he admires and “should love devotedly, if she were a little other than she is,—herself touched with a diviner delicacy,—her own sister self, a little angelized.” Dreeme responds that “love that admits questions is no love,” and puts forth the theory that Byng is seeking “a counterpart of [Densdeth] in the other sex.” Byng grows ill at ease under this “penetrating analysis” of his secret feelings. He feels that he ought to love Emma Denman, yet he does not. Two months after his “instalment in Chrysalis,” Byng sums up his situation as follows: “Churm away;/Densdeth my intimate;/Cecil Dreeme my friend of friends;/Emma Denman almost my love.”94 The major players are now in place. Robert Byng and Emma Denman’s relations “grow more and more intimate without check.” They name them “brotherly and sisterly,” and Emma claims a sister’s privilege of presiding over Byng’s social life. Having made up his mind to love Emma, Byng goes doggedly to work at it: 81

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“ignorant and rejecting the sure law of nature, I strove to create the uncreatable, to construct what should have come into being and grown strong without interference, even without consciousness of mine.” This self-appointed love work comes to a grinding halt one evening at the opera, when during the intermission Byng sees Emma with Densdeth. He recalls: “There is one memory which has power to burn away my earthly bliss with a single touch, and to throw such a ghastly coloring over all the world, that my neighbor seems a traitor and my Creator my foe. That memory is the look I saw Emma Denman give to Densdeth.” “I cannot describe this look of hers,” he says later, “I do not wish to. It is enough to say that it told me of a dishonorable secret between the two.”95 As Steven Seidman points out, it was believed in the period that a man or a woman with a serious flaw in their character could not be the object of true love.96 Emma Denman, it turns out, is the passionate woman in the text and as such automatically the fallen woman. Her death at the close of the narrative is as inevitable as that of her partner in crime, Densdeth, and serves to recreate a sense of harmony, equilibrium, and order. Again, the aspects of Victorian sexual ideology that trumpeted women’s passionlessness have often been emphasized to an extent that the period’s fundamental ambivalence about women’s sexual natures is obscured. While, ironically, the openly sensual woman would make her presence felt less and less in mainstream, “realist” literature (before recurring with naturalism), the antebellum period did not yet withdraw from the idea of women’s lusting natures, though these female characters usually paid a high price for their pleasure. Earlier and more lowbrow examples of the “city mysteries” genre, such as George Lippard’s The Quaker City (1845) and George Thompson’s Venus in Boston and City Crimes (both 1849), contain numerous examples of women with strong sexual appetites who often, though not always, come to a violent end.97 According to Churm, “the worst, the bitterest fate than can befall a true man” is “to marry a woman whose truth and purity he can allow himself to doubt.” There is a suspicion toward and critique of women in Cecil Dreeme to match anything directed at men, though women are not generally blamed for men’s wrongdoings. Women, of course, have a much more restricted sphere of socially sanctioned action and behavior than do men. We are told how “one single poisoned look” from Churm’s beloved, “one single phrase that proved a tainted nature,” was sufficient to kill his young love for her.98 This failed love story foreshadows the outcome of Byng’s affair with Emma Denman, and as it turns out, the Emma

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Page that Churm once loved was Emma Denman’s mother. The suggestion of an inherited disposition or “taint” is strong. According to James C. Jackson, a physician and author of The Sexual Organism and Its Healthful Management (1861), “the fact that moral qualities are transmissible, and are being transmitted, by parents to children, is inexpugnable.”99 The goal in the idiom of the day was to win the heart of a “true woman.” Based on his own experience, Byng claims that “we all must take our Bachelor of Arts at a flirt’s school, to become Master of the Arts to know and win a true woman.”100 The emphasis on the need for exercising connoisseurship also in dealings with women is symptomatic of the dangers of the new, complex urban society, where strangers must often be taken at face value and the risk of making mistaken judgments is considerably greater. Charles Nordhoff, of Mutiny on the Bounty fame, observed of Cecil Dreeme in an essay from 1863: “It is as though it drew away the curtain, for one slight moment, from the mysteries which ‘society’ decorously hides.”101 Winthrop’s novel may be viewed as a contribution to what John F. Kasson has called “the semiotics of everyday urban life.”102 It required ever-more expertise to avoid the many dangers, and ever-more self-discipline to avoid the many pleasures to be found in American cities. For the inhabitants of an increasingly complex and perilous urban environment, the city mysteries novel took on the function of an alternative form of conduct book.103 What Winthrop added to the hegemonic domestic ideology of the period is, of course, a celebration of friendship between men that is in every way romantic. This was not an integral part of the love religion, which concentrated on regulating the interactions of men and women. There are no male romantic friendships depicted in The Quaker City, Venus in Boston, or City Crimes. As I will discuss further in chapter 4, the period was little concerned with men’s relationships with each other. Any danger perceived was connected with men leading each other into temptation, not themselves constituting the temptation. The famous moralist and writer T. S. Arthur, writing in Advice to Young Men on Their Duties and Conduct in Life (1848), notes: “While there is a use in intimate friendships, there is also no little danger. An intimate friendship with a bad man will almost inevitably corrupt one of pure morals; for it is much easier to pervert than to restore good, because evil in man usually seeks more ardently for the attainment of its ends than good.” J. B. Waterbury shares Arthur’s anxiety: “Wherever circumstances throw a large number of young men into each other’s society, and where similar pursuits naturally lead to a homogeneous character, temptations are forcible, and

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often fatally successful.” Waterbury describes one man tempting another into vice as a “seduction,” though he is vague about what manner of vice he means.104 In a contemporary medical manual we find scientific support for the claim implicitly contained in the narrative of Cecil Dreeme that a person’s evil ways can infect their associates like a disease. James C. Jackson observes that “every person who has such relations to any other person as to bring the two habitually, frequently, and, as I say, intimately, into physical contact, has at command influences, for shaping the actions of such persons, more potent than is generally supposed.” If the “gender regulators” made any mention of male friendships in their texts, it was often to make claims for their inferiority vis-à-vis love between men and women. The same Dr. Jackson we have just encountered writes the following in a book published the same year as Cecil Dreeme: A man never can love one of his own sex as he can one of the opposite sex; nor can a woman ever love one of her own sex as she can one of the male sex; and the reason why neither can do this, is because love, in its very highest order, has no other medium of expressing itself than through a propensity. Love is not a passion: it is a sentiment. But the sentiment, for its expression in the highest degree, is dependent upon the passion, as a medium for its manifestations. Hence, as no man can have a natural sexual desire toward one of his own sex, nor a woman toward one of her sex; so love has no means of expressing itself in the highest possible fervor between persons of the same sex. But the instant that you have traversed the line of sameness, so far as gender is concerned, and have passed into the line of the converse quality, then the passion is the natural channel through which the sentiment flows.105

One of the most influential founders of the “marriage religion,” Henry C. Wright, attempts to give marriage a boost by emphasizing its superiority to male same-sex relations: Man needs refinement, purity, elevation. In vain he looks to man for this consummation. Whatever power man may have to beautify and ennoble woman, . . . he has little power over his own sex. Woman alone possesses the power to impart to man an influence, without which his nature must deteriorate, and his life be an unexplained mystery. Man has a record which woman alone can read. Manhood is a sealed book, which woman alone can open.

He writes in a later chapter that “man can always find wiser counsel, truer sympathy, in woman, than in man” and that “man cannot caress him84

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self; nor can man perform this delicate and beautiful mission to man.”106 In the writings of Jackson and Wright and, as we shall see later, of Junius Henri Browne, we recognize the roots of modern-day heterosexism.

“A Noble Woman Shames Base Desire” In the first chapter of his book Chastity; or, Our Secret Sins (1874), Dio Lewis tells the story of a meeting he once witnessed in his office between “an able young female advocate of social reforms” and a “gallant.” Rather than be overwhelmed by the man’s seductive approaches, the woman maintained her composure and convinced him of the need to enlist himself in the good cause. The next day the man admitted to Dr. Lewis that he had never met a woman he would be willing to marry, yet he was convinced that his recent female acquaintance was destined to be his salvation. The doctor then told him that the woman loathed him. He was suitably ashamed and humiliated, asking the doctor to intercede with her on his behalf. Her response was persistent refusal to see him: “ ‘I will send him books and papers,’ she said; ‘I will do all I can to convert him to purity, but I must be spared the pain and shame of coming near him again.’ ” The man’s response on hearing this was to say, “Well, she is only a woman, and in one year I will conquer all that nonsense; you see if I don’t.”107 This story from so-called real life is an interesting parallel to Theodore Winthrop’s fictional narrative, for Cecil Dreeme, too, tells the story of a chaste young woman’s encounter with a libertine and her willingness to go to any length to avoid further intercourse with him. As it is revealed in the penultimate chapter, Cecil Dreeme is in fact Clara Denman, who has donned men’s clothing and gone into hiding to avoid being coerced into marriage with Densdeth. The woman found drowned in the Hudson and thought to be Clara is a woman he successfully seduced and ultimately drove to suicide. The narrator records impassively: “There needed no further interpretation. Clara Denman and Cecil Dreeme were one. . . . Yes; this friend closer than a brother was a woman.”108 The rescue of Cecil Dreeme after he has been kidnapped by Densdeth and the revelation that he is really Clara Denman in disguise constitute the climax of the novel. Byng describes how, all at once, “covered with the hood and draped with the great cloak, she seemed a very woman.” Yet, he adds, “each of us felt the awkwardness of our position./‘We shall not be friends the less, Mr. Byng,’ said she./‘Friends, Cecil!’/I took the hand she offered, and kept it.” In very limited space, the narrative must 85

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effect the convincing transformation of a model of young, Christian manhood into a parallel model of womanhood. Not surprisingly, Clara feels she owes it to Byng “to describe at once how I came to be under false colors, unsexed.” Byng responds: “Never unsexed, Cecil! I could not explain to myself in what your society differed from every other. It was in this. In the guise of man, you were thorough woman still. I talked to you and thought of you, although I was not conscious of it, as man does to woman only. I opened my heart to you as one does to—a sister, a sweet sister.” Churm, who is a witness to this cataclysmic encounter, refers to Clara’s initiative and daring as “the triumph of womanhood over womanishness!” Clara further explains that in naming herself Cecil, “I did not quite give up my womanhood. . . . My danger must excuse the alias.”109 Clara’s problem is that, in the idiom of the period, her masculine behavior threatens to “unsex” her. She has shown initiative, daring, cunning, and resourcefulness, all masculine qualities that women are not supposed to have. Her experience has revealed that, contrary to popular belief, honesty, piety, and passivity are not sufficient to protect women from predatory men when male economic interests make a mockery of paternal protection, and marriage often functions to solidify bonds between men, rather than between the man and the woman entering into the union. From a modern theoretical perspective, Clara’s impersonation of a man reveals the constructedness of gender, of supposedly biologically based behaviors that in fact have a strong cultural component. Grace Farrell’s observation about Lillie Devereux Blake’s Fettered for Life (1874), which also contains a cross-dressing female character, albeit a more professionally active one, might well be used to describe the novel written by Blake’s male cousin almost fifteen years earlier: “The fact that the woman who cross-dresses and the man she pretends to be are the same person suggests that the profound differences between the sexes, which are used to create a hierarchy and to justify social inequities, are themselves not preordained essences, but mere products of social circumstances.”110 Byng continues to refer to Clara Denman as Cecil Dreeme till the end of the book. As Clara defends her “womanhood” to the men, the thought strikes him: Every moment it came to me more distinctly that Cecil Dreeme and I could never be Damon and Pythias again. Ignorantly I had loved my friend as one loves a woman only. This was love,—unforced, self-created, undoubting complete. And now that the friend proved a woman, a great gulf opened between us. . . . Thinking thus, I let fall Cecil’s hand, and drew apart a little. 86

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Yet, despite Byng’s initial doubts about the future of their relationship, after he and Clara return to his chambers “a quite domestic feeling seemed to grow up between us. I busied myself in reviving the fire from its ashes.”111 Now, it appears, Byng has a fireplace in what was described formerly as a luxurious yet unhomelike space. The basic symbolic constituents of bourgeois domesticity are now in place: a man, a woman, and a hearth. The novel ends with Densdeth dead by the hand of his former minion, Towner, and Emma Denman dead by her own hand in Densdeth’s secret room. Standing over the dead villain, Byng reflects: There was the man whom I should have loved if I had not hated, dead at last, with this vulgar death. Only a single stab from another, and my warfare with him was done. I felt a strange sense of indolence overcome me. Was my business in life over, now that I had no longer to struggle with him daily? Had he strengthened me? Had he weakened me? Should I have prevailed against him, or would he have finally mastered me, if this chance, this Providence, of death had not come between us?

The last line of the novel reads: “And so with clasped hands we [Byng and Dreeme] knelt beside our sister [Emma], and in silence prayed for strength in the great battle with sin and sorrow, through the solemn days of our life together.” Do they live happily ever after? We are vouchsafed only this brief glimpse into the narrator’s current life: “I am not without a share of happiness. I am at peace. God has given me much that is good and beautiful. The atmosphere of my existence is healthy.”112 What more could an upstanding Christian gentleman want? Through its several affective and erotic triangles, Cecil Dreeme provides a catalogue of models of intimate relations between men and between men and women in the nineteenth-century United States. Among men in the novel, sodomy is contrasted with romantic friendship. Among men and women, passionate love vies with true love for supremacy, while companionate marriage appears as a viable alternative to a marriage of convenience. The story traces a “natural” progression from romantic friendship to male-female, companionate marriage. In a marvelous system of checks and balances, it turns out that the forces of evil, sin, sensuality, and sodomy have been balanced all along by the forces of good, virtue, purity, and true love. As a true man Cecil Dreeme is a counterpoint to the beastly Densdeth—and as it turns out, as a true woman too, s/he is a counterpoint to the fallen Emma Denman. What a splendid support the novel seems to give to the assertions of medical men, reformers, and other writers who in the 1860s and 1870s 87

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wanted to promote “the friendship of the sexes.” With the revelation of Cecil Dreeme’s identity, the credit for keeping Byng out of Densdeth’s clutches, for his moral rearmament, may now be placed in the lap of a true woman. The novel seems splendidly to confirm claims that “man, as a human being of the male gender, in his individual and moral nature, cannot by any means receive the highest culture without daily association and intercourse with a human being of the opposite sex”; that “men degenerate in every particular, when left for a long time without the refining and elevating influence of females”; that “one of the most potent safeguards against lust is an intimate association with pure women”; and finally that “every young woman has it in her power to elevate the moral standard of the young men with whom she associates.”113 What the conclusion of the novel achieves, at least on the surface, is the domestication—which in modern terms might be considered the heterosexualization—of the villain, the narrator, and the eponymous hero. The villain turns out to be a conventional seducer of women rather than a sodomite, and the narrator turns out to have fallen in love with a woman rather than a man, while the eponymous hero turns out to be, indeed, the missing heroine. Yet Willard E. Martin Jr. is oversimplifying when he claims that “the rescue of Clara and the revelation of the young painter’s identity solve all the complications of the story” and that “Cecil’s identity is obvious from almost the beginning, and the mystery is a mystery to Byng only.”114 However obvious Cecil’s biological sex, and it is not necessarily so obvious, it does not change the fact that during most of the narrative of Cecil Dreeme we have been invited to partake in the narrator’s romantic affair with one man and his perilous infatuation with another. Clearly, the ending does not put to rest the ambiguities of the novelistic middle. Densdeth may well be a seducer of men as well as women. Robert Byng has fallen in love with what he thought was a man. Clara Denman has impersonated a man so well as to make another man fall in love with her as a man.

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Compulsory Domesticity: Roderick Hudson, Love, and Friendship in the Gilded Age He seems to have an especial fondness for certain outlying departments, as one may call them, of human feeling; and he treats them with a kind of lyrical enthusiasm and an exhaustive fullness of detail. HENRY JAMES, “WILLIAM ROUNSEVILLE ALGER” (1867)

Love, so called, has been the impulse of centuries; friendship justly named, is the form and favor of the time. JUNIUS HENRI BROWNE, “WOMEN AS FRIENDS” (1874)

My focus on romantic friendship is not meant to exhaust the possibilities of male interaction in the period; nor can this form of relationship be studied in isolation. A study of affective relations between men in Victorian America must concern itself also with relationships between men and women. It must seek to reconstruct not an isolated set of behaviors and understandings, but a whole complex of interrelated cross-sex and same-sex relationships and attitudes. To do so productively, it must conduct this examination within a limited temporal compass. In the following pages, I will examine three texts from the 1870s that bring into focus the relations both within and between the sexes. One is a novel, the second is a treatise of sorts, and the third is a magazine article. When brought into 89

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contact, these texts begin to recall a largely forgotten cultural conversation about manhood and womanhood and love and friendship in the Gilded Age. As Edith Wharton indicates in the title of her most famous novel, the 1870s constituted an “Age of Innocence.” It may well have been the last decade in which it was possible for a white, middle-class American man to have an unselfconscious and shameless, consuming passion for a member of his own sex. The passionate love of a man for another man in this period did not yet lead to a sense of abnormality or fundamental difference from other men; nor did it mean the exclusion of a concurrent sexual or romantic interest in one or more women. In other words, it was possible to have a strong emotional investment in another man without being considered effeminate, unnatural, or perverse. Despite the similarities, loving a man and loving a woman were seen as so fundamentally different so as not to pose a threat of one to the other. Let me hasten to add that I am writing here of the middle- to upper-class white, Protestant, northeastern American world to which someone like Henry James belonged. I take as my main point of departure James’s first acknowledged novel, Roderick Hudson. Roderick Hudson, serialized in the Atlantic Monthly all through 1875, published in volume form in the United States in 1876 and in England in 1878, was James’s first extended statement on the relations between men and would arguably remain his most important one. First published exactly ten years before the Labouchere Amendment and twenty years before Oscar Wilde’s trials, the novel may be seen as a significant attempt to represent same-sex love from a point of view that is neither homosexual nor heterosexual. By many, Roderick Hudson would have been read as yet another novel of cross-sex courtship and marriage. This response is illustrated by the unsigned review in the journal in which the novel first appeared, the At­ lantic Monthly. The reviewer, probably Nathaniel Hawthorne’s son-in-law G. P. Lathrop, devotes a long paragraph to how, in his view, James creates suspense as to who will finally “come out of the mêlée hand in hand.”1 Yet it is part and parcel of the author’s “perversity,” of course, that this is a novel in which the allusions to bad marriages abound, where the only new marriage bond to be formed among the major characters is a mercenary one, and where there is no representation of a marriage close to the companionate ideal. To the extent that Roderick Hudson is a marriage novel at all, it is a nonmarriage novel. Roderick Hudson is an important example of the fiction of romantic friendship. Even though romantic friendship between men was still flourishing in the 1870s, a longstanding cultural anxiety about bachelors 90

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during this period may be seen to be augmented by an anxiety about intimate friendships between men. To bring the normative and the nonnormative aspects of James’s characters and plot more clearly into focus, I want to bring his novel into dialogue with other contemporary texts and genres that try to say something about the ideal and the real in relations both within and between the sexes. James and his novel Roderick Hudson have largely been put in the company of high-literary, canonical male writers such as Balzac, Goethe, Hawthorne, Pater, Nietzsche, and Turgenev.2 What happens if we place him and his book in a room with the “strong-minded” feminist and tireless talker on unmentionable topics, Eliza B. Duffey? In 1876, Eliza Bisbee Duffey (d. 1898) published a treatise entitled The Relations of the Sexes, which was meant to address “the question of the most importance today”: “The true relation of the sexes one to the other, the duties and obligations which these relations impose, and the privileges which they confer; the existing relations which are at variance with the true ones, and how these wrong relations may be righted.”3 On the title page, which showed that the book was being published simultaneously in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and London, “Mrs. E. B. Duffey” was billed as the author of What Women Should Know and No Sex in Education.4 I am not, of course, suggesting that Henry James read or even heard of Duffey’s book (or vice versa, for that matter). What I would suggest is that James and Duffey, and our third speaker, who will appear toward the end of this chapter, are addressing similar issues in different discursive forms and may be regarded as participants in an ongoing debate about sex and gender in the period. In this view Duffey’s The Relations of the Sexes is the theory of which Roderick Hudson is the practice. Or put less simplistically, I view James’s novel and Duffey’s reform text as, respectively, a narrative and a discursive attempt to explore that perennial nineteenth-century topic: “the relations of the sexes.” Reading James through Duffey and Duffey through James is to transform our understanding of both their works and the historical period to which they belong.5

Creating Kin The romantic friendship between Roderick Hudson and Rowland Mallet is a paradigmatic case in most respects. That this has not been perceived is the result of the aforementioned “forgetting” of the male tradition of romantic friendship and our modern-day understanding of homosexuality, which has led to either active avoidance of the novel’s same-sex 91

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focus or a well-intentioned but anachronistic gay reading. Whether the relationship between Roderick and Rowland is ignored due to homophobia or misunderstood due to homophilia, the result is the same: a failure adequately to conceptualize this nineteenth-century structure of feeling. Thus, rather than view the relationship as quasi-pederastic, as Robert K. Martin did in 1978,6 I think it is best understood as a voluntary relation between equals based on not primarily self-interest or tutelage, but physical attraction and personal sympathy. The age difference between the men is very slight—they are referred to numerous times as “the two young men”7—and their initial difference in worldly experience soon shifts in Roderick’s favor. Both men are unmarried, though somewhat older than the college-age men who are thought by historians most often to have been involved in these liaisons. Though Rowland is by far the wealthier of the two, both men can be considered gentlemen. The two feel a sudden strong interest in each other and develop this interest through long, intimate conversations. Their attraction to each other is physical, but not what we would call sexual. Rowland rhapsodizes at length on Roderick’s beauty; Roderick, who “never made compliments,”8 finds Rowland’s head so good from an artistic standpoint he wants to model it. They touch each other, often walk arm in arm, and address each other by their Christian names.9 As Jeffrey Richards points out, up until quite recently “there existed a continuous tradition of spiritual love between coeval males, something which is different from the Platonic love of an older and younger man.”10 A historical understanding of romantic friendship in the period allows us to understand better both James’s plot construction and his later disavowal of that construction. It was Rowland’s and Roderick’s simulta­ neous romantic interest in one and the same woman (and the portrayal of that woman) that James was least satisfied with when he returned to Rod­ erick Hudson thirty years later to revise it for the New York edition. He felt that his conception remained happier than his execution of it; that the reader should have been “put into position to take more closely home the impression made by Mary Garland”; and that it was “not really worked-in that Roderick himself could have pledged his faith in such a quarter”; nor was James (and he thinks his readers) “truly convinced . . . that Rowland’s destiny, or say his nature, would have made him accessible at the same hour to two quite distinct commotions, each a very deep one, of his whole personal economy.” “Rigidly viewed,” James adds, “each of these upheavals of his sensibility must have been exclusive of other upheavals, yet the reader is asked to accept them as working together.” He concludes familiarly that “the damage to verisimilitude is deep.”11 92

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I say “familiarly,” because this part of James’s 1907 preface has become a locus classicus for critics of the novel, and most take James’s observations as the gospel truth.12 The question is: How deep is the damage to verisimilitude? Is it possible that James’s ideas and the ideas of his society about the nature of a character such as Rowland Mallet and relationships between men had changed so much in thirty years as to make it hard for James to recall his original conception? Is it not only when viewed through the homosexual-heterosexual binary that it seems unlikely that Rowland would be attracted to both Mary and Roderick at the same time? In opposition to James’s twentieth-century reading of his nineteenthcentury work, it might be objected that, strictly speaking, Rowland’s two “commotions” do not take place at exactly “the same hour” (Rowland falls in love with Roderick first and only comes to know and be interested in Mary later through Roderick), and that these commotions are, as James admits, “quite distinct,” and might be seen to complement rather than to contradict each other. Both points have a bearing on the question of cause and effect and character motivation. In this view, Rowland’s feelings for Mary would be seen as interconnected with his feelings for Roderick, and vice versa. It is Rowland and Roderick’s newfound love for each other that sets off the same reaction in them both. Roderick makes the connection explicit when he says to Rowland: “You came and put me into such a ridiculous good-humour that I felt an extraordinary desire to tell some woman that I adored her.”13 Rowland would have made a similar declaration given time and if Roderick had not beaten him to it. James’s verisimilitude might be better defended than the aging author was able to do himself by noting the not uncommon tendency for young men of the day to marry their close male friends’ female relatives. If you couldn’t marry your dearest friend, which you obviously couldn’t, then you could marry his sister, or cousin, or niece instead and be tied to your friend at the same time. As we have seen, the world-famous nineteenthcentury travel writer Bayard Taylor, who resembles Rowland Mallet in some significant respects, struck up an intense romantic friendship with a German landowner, August Bufleb, on a trip to Egypt in the early 1850s and ended up marrying his friend’s niece. Bufleb even built a house for Taylor and his bride in the garden of his own home at Gotha. Similarly, we might imagine that no small degree of Olivia Langdon’s initial attraction for Samuel Clemens lay in her being the sister of his friend and travel companion, Charley Langdon.14 This point is equally borne out by evidence from the fiction of the period. In Bret Harte’s story “The Poet of Sierra Flat” (1871), the editor of 93

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the local newspaper has the following response when meeting a man he finds attractive: “His voice was so very sweet and musical that the editor looked at him curiously, and wondered if he had a sister.”15 In Bayard Taylor’s Joseph and His Friend (1870), the eponymous hero begins to take an interest in his romantic friend’s sister in the final pages, after the two men have decided that they cannot shirk adult responsibility and “light out for the territory” together. This form of substitution might also work in a cross-sex way. In James’s The Portrait of a Lady (1881), Lord Warburton’s wooing of Pansy Osmond, the stepdaughter of his beloved Isabel Archer, is clearly motivated by his desire to remain close to Isabel. He abandons his plan to marry Pansy only when he discovers that her affections are otherwise engaged. As for Rowland Mallet, please observe that the only two women Rowland is interested in are both related by marriage or blood to a family member or beloved friend. Cecilia is his cousin’s wife, Mary is his friend’s cousin. Rowland is only interested in these women as long as their bond to that friend or relative effectively prevents them from becoming available to him. While James throws a number of suitable, available women Rowland’s way during the course of the narrative, including the fatally attractive Christina Light, he unerringly attaches himself to the only one he can’t get and the one who can tie him closer to his romantic friend. Love in the nineteenth century was about creating kin. For a man wanting to get in a family way with another man—consciously or not— marrying into the friend’s family was the way to go. This form of substitution may seem strange to our modern way of thinking, but there is ample evidence of the flexibility and interchangeability of various roles and relations in Victorian America. Ironically, within the confines of what we tend to view as a repressive sexual regime there could be room for greater freedom (or maybe rather a different kind of freedom) than under our current sexual dispensation.16 In a society where marriage was ubiquitous and permanent when first engaged in, it was inevitable that there should be a wide variety of arrangements within that institution to accommodate the different and developing emotional and sexual needs of the partners. As Rowland’s unhappily married mother discovers: “somehow or other one can always arrange one’s life.”17 Her solution is to invest all her affections in her son. For others, the arrangement was different. In William Dean Howells’s novel The Shadow of a Dream (1890), for instance, we have the depiction of a “three-cornered household”18 in which the protagonist keeps up his romantic friendship with unbroken intensity after his marriage.

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Such examples might be found in life as well. At the very time Howells wrote his novel, Bret Harte was living in London with a Belgian diplomat and his wife (despite having a wife of his own and four children in the States), an arrangement that would last for a dozen years. Harte’s friends Henry Adams and John Hay kept up their intense friendship with Clarence King after their respective marriages; and despite his marriage to Marie Hansen in 1857, Bayard Taylor continued to pour his passion into his romantic friendships with men, including the friend of his youth, John B. Phillips; fellow writers George Henry Boker and Richard Henry Stoddard; and his young admirer Charles Melancthon Jones. Even Mark Twain allowed himself a brief return to “bachelor hall” after the death of his infant son, escaping to Europe and spending the last part of 1873 in rooms at the Langham Hotel with Harte’s San Francisco protégé, Charles Warren Stoddard.19 Roderick Hudson allows us to see how romantic friendship might combine and interact with cross-sex romantic relations in a young Victorian man’s life, how they might indeed be seen to be “working together” and “walk[ing] hand in hand.”20 With a proud biblical precedent, Rowland’s love for Roderick is a love passing (but not excluding) the love of women. Rowland is not a woman-hater or someone who objects to the institution of marriage. Unlike the confirmed bachelor Warrington in William Thack­ eray’s Pendennis (1850) or the gold miners of Harte’s “Roaring Camp,” Rowland is far from being a “professed misogynist” or “fiercely sceptical in regard to [the female sex’s] general virtue and usefulness.”21 Rowland is too much in the grip of what I will term “compulsory domesticity” to ever consciously entertain the idea that he might spend his life with Roderick alone. Here we see the difference from a character such as Olive Chancellor in The Bostonians. Olive is “unmarried by every implication of her being.” As Hugh Stevens has observed in his acute reading of James’s 1886 novel: “The kind of friendship Olive wants is not compatible with marriage; in this sense, to the extent that we can call her a ‘lesbian,’ her lesbianism is distinctly modern, not to be enjoyed alongside the demands of marriage.”22 By the same token, Rowland’s love for Roderick is distinctly old-fashioned, as it does not constitute even a nascent sexual subjectivity or identity. The elegiac tone of the novel makes it clear from the start that there is no question of Rowland and Roderick living happily ever after. To Rowland, loving and marrying Mary would not have meant giving up Roderick. The “thumping blow in mid-chest”23 Rowland feels on hearing that Roderick and Mary are engaged is the fear of losing his friend to

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an all-absorbing domesticity, while himself being left to the “desert” of an eternal bachelorhood. From this point on, Rowland expects that the most important role he will be able to play is that of the avuncular friend of the family rather than that of husband and father. It is only as Rowland and Roderick’s relationship deteriorates, and that of Mary and Roderick as well, that Rowland begins to invest more and more of his hopes and feelings in Mary Garland. Rather than a complement, she becomes more and more a possible substitute for Roderick. This is made clear from a passage occurring in chapter 16, at the time of Rowland’s deepest trouble and disappointment over the deterioration of his relationship with Roderick and Roderick’s wayward ways: He felt . . . like a man who had been cruelly defrauded and who wishes to have his revenge. . . . In his melancholy meditations the idea of something better than all this, something that might softly, richly interpose, something that might reconcile him to the future, something that might make one’s tenure of life strong and zealous instead of mechanical and uncertain—the idea of concrete compensation in a word—shaped itself sooner or later into the image of Mary Garland.

That the narrator at this juncture feels some doubts about the justification for these feelings on Rowland’s part is revealed by the opening of the very next paragraph, where the narrator addresses the reader directly: “Very odd, you may say, that at this time of day Rowland should still be brooding over a girl of no brilliancy, of whom he had had but the lightest of glimpses two years before.” He adds, “We must admit the oddity, and remark simply in explanation that his sentiment apparently belonged to that species of emotion of which by the testimony of the poets the very name and essence are oddity.”24 Oddity seems an unusual word to describe the normative, socially sanctioned love of a man for a member of the opposite sex. The oddity, from our point of view, is that Rowland loves Mary because of, not in spite of, his love for Roderick. Far be it from me to defend Mary Garland against her numerous detractors in the novel, the reviews, and the criticism, but it is worth pointing out that in addition to being an emotional link to Roderick, there are other reasons for Rowland to fasten on Mary. In the scenes between Rowland and Mary we see demonstrated the “moral beauties, mental fitnesses, and harmony of taste and thought” that Eliza Duffey considers so essential to marriage.25 Mary is Rowland’s college of one. They enrich each other as a proper married couple should. If, as Duffey believes, marriage is ordained for comfort, companionship, and convenience, then obviously Mary Garland is good wife material. 96

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The Straight Closet Considering the extent to which it thematizes love between men, Rod­ erick Hudson is remarkable for its absence of self-consciousness, paranoia, or what Sedgwick has called “homosexual panic.”26 Focalized through Rowland, the narrative glories in descriptions of the beauty of the male form and the male face. Men are shown to attain a degree of intimacy and mutuality that none of the romantically involved, male-female couples attain. Indeed, the supreme irony of a novel whose dominant trope is inversion is that it is the characters that are conducting affairs with members of the opposite sex who are in the closet.27 While the same-sex relations in Roderick Hudson are publicly acknowledged and unquestioned, the cross-sex ones are illicit, unacknowledged, and closeted. In the novel, there is a continuous questioning of malefemale relationships, whether it is Rowland doubting the sincerity of Roderick’s love for Mary, the narrator finding Rowland’s love for Mary “odd,” or Madame Grandoni questioning Rowland about the nature of his feelings for the young lady from New England. The closest thing to a modern-day heterosexual romance—Roderick and Christina’s affair—is shown to be impossible. In fact, the novel is staged as a series of revelations and avowals, all related to what we today would call heterosexuality. Roderick is in the closet as an engaged man, and only “comes out” to his mother and his intimate friend Rowland, who subsequently “outs” him to Christina at a critical juncture. Mary shares her fiancé’s closet and receives no public recognition of her engagement. Rowland is closeted in his love for Mary and is interrogated about his feelings for her, not for Roderick. Mrs. Light and the Cavaliere are closeted by fear of the scandal that will arise if the true nature of their relationship were to be discovered. They only come out to their daughter to force her to marry Prince Casamassima. When Rowland finally comes out to Roderick, it is as the unrequited lover of Mary Garland! The closet in Roderick Hudson is a “straight” closet, because the culture James describes is primarily erotophobic rather than homophobic, or maybe Karma Lochrie’s expression “desiro-skeptical” is more apt28—it does not distinguish same-sex “perversity” as being fundamentally different from other forms of proscribed nonmarital sex. To this way of thinking, all nonprocreative, nonmarital, noncoital sexual acts are perverted and unnatural, regardless of whether the couple involved is cross-sex or same-sex. The dividing line between condoned and condemned, elicit and licit sexual and gender behavior is, metaphorically speaking, far to the right of where it is today. Sexual passion of any kind is to be under 97

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rigid control at every stage of the individual’s life, but particularly outside marriage. When everything is forbidden, then, in a sense, nothing is forbidden. Morality loses touch with the reality of people’s daily lives. It is in the space between the way in which individuals privately express their love and desire and the conventional public expression they give to their emotional lives that one finds the nineteenth-century closet. To our modern way of thinking, there is something decidedly queer about all the relations of the sexes in Victorian America. What we are looking at when we study the middle decades of the nineteenth century is a radically different sex/gender system. Though David Halperin has discussed the possibility of what we would call a “sexual identity” occurring in Western societies before the advent of the sexologists in the late nineteenth century,29 in the place and time I am concerned with the primary identity category is gender, not sexuality. Gender identity in turn is largely determined by marital and family status. Are you married or not? Do you have children or not? Are you a provider or not? Therein lies the answer to gender identity in the pe­riod, inflected, of course, by class and racial identity. This basis for identity is necessarily more transitive and unstable than an identity based on a homosexual-heterosexual binary has been perceived to be. A single person may get married tomorrow; a straight man does not expect to wake up gay tomorrow. It was this instability, coupled with the sweeping demographic, economic, and social shifts, that created cultural anxiety and the necessity for books such as Eliza Duffey’s to instruct men and women in the behavior appropriate to their sex. According to Ronald G. Walters, the genre of sexual advice literature that grew forth in the 1830s with the likes of Sylvester Graham and Robert Dale Owen and increased vastly in numbers and significance toward the latter part of the nineteenth century was “part of an effort by an emerging middle class to reproduce itself and to draw class and racial boundaries by defining its own respectability against the sins of the poor and the vices of the wealthy.”30 John and Robin Haller point out that “Victorian women used the purity literature of the late nineteenth century as a vehicle in their efforts to obtain greater freedom of person”; “the Victorian woman,” they write, “sought to achieve a sort of sexual freedom by denying her sexuality, by resorting to marital continence or abstinence in an effort to keep from being considered or treated as a sex object.”31 Such a woman was Eliza Duffey. As she appears in The Relations of the Sexes, she is a woman with a mission: to save married and unmarried women alike from the undesirable, even life-threatening sexual passions 98

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of husbands and bachelors. With a rock-solid belief in “the fundamental laws of Nature,” the “dual sexual nature” of human beings, and “the monogamous character of marriage, as divinely instituted,” Duffey makes a concerted attack on sexual passion both inside and outside the marriage bond.32 Her 320-page book is divided into fourteen chapters, with such telling titles as “Chastity,” “Marriage and Its Abuses,” “The Limitation of Offspring,” and “Enlightened Parentage.” However essentialist we may find Duffey’s sexual attitudes today, she nevertheless emerges as a penetrating analyst of the gender inequalities and sexual double standard of her own day. In a feminist tradition, we might picture her as an intermediate figure between Catharine Beecher and Margaret Sanger. Duffey gives a franker and more explicitly sexual emphasis to Beecher’s domestic ideology and devotes an entire chapter to the desirability of limiting offspring, yet she doesn’t quite dare give her readers specific information about modes of contraception (surely due to the Comstock Act of 187333). At a time when we know death in childbirth was common and we can imagine marital rape was as well, there can be no doubt that Duffey was addressing a difficult and serious problem for many women. In our context, the chief value of Duffey’s book is that it allows us to perceive the outlines of a sexual ideology that is not governed by the homosexual-heterosexual binary. According to this ideology, it is a Godgiven fact that men and women were created for each other. It is the highest duty of every man and woman to marry and, in most circumstances, to propagate the race. In Duffey’s words: “The first lesson that study presents to us is the duality of humanity—the two halves which go to make a perfect whole. And these two halves, the male and female man, are created in about equal proportion. . . . Each one shall have his or her true and proper mate of the other sex.” Marriage, even when childless, is a good in itself. Duffey utterly denies that “in the present state of the world, [marriage] is instituted solely for the perpetuation of the human race.” The sexual relation, on the other hand, has no value in itself other than as a means to procreation, and sexual passion should, for the better health of mind and body, be kept in check as much as possible. There are no sanctioned sexual relations outside marriage. Sex of any kind outside marriage constitutes perversity, and even within marriage too much sex is “unnatural.” Duffey recommends that married couples practice “on all but exceptional occasions, the lofty self-denial of the celibate.”34 One of the paradoxical results of the “desensualization of love,” as Steven Seidman has called it, was that only by not being too physically attracted to the opposite sex could men and women remain pro­ perly manly and womanly. Marriage became not primarily a sexual and 99

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romantic union, but rather a means of regulating and controlling the teeming and dangerous male passions.35 This is made clear in the following passage from Duffey’s book, which represents the apotheosis of the morally improving, companionate marriage ideal: A perfect marriage means perfect companionship; a blending of individual tastes, wishes and wills; a rounding off of angularities of disposition and character, and a forgetfulness of self in one another; a mutual incitement to greater moral development, and a mutual helping up the heights toward perfection. It means a union of all that is manly and womanly in a perfect whole, that shall be capable of quadruple happiness over that of the unmarried individual, since each shall see, hear and enjoy with his or her own faculties, and with those of the other also.36

The bourgeois sexual ideology Duffey represents revolves around several binary oppositions. Rather than homosexual versus heterosexual, some of the major binaries are man vs. brute husband vs. bachelor chastity vs. sensuality natural vs. unnatural

These opposing characteristics or two sides of an axis are, of course, closely linked and represent opposing sides of a value system. To be a man, husband, and/or chaste line up as the ideal and culturally valued terms, while being a brute, bachelor, and/or sensual is a culturally degraded position and may call down upon you society’s censure. The various traits reinforce and confirm each other. A real man is a man who is natural, and to be natural is to be married and chaste. An unmanly man does not recognize his obligation to marry, pursues his brute instincts in blatant disregard of the divine laws of nature, and hence is unnatural (or perverse).

Gender Trouble, Bachelor Trouble What are we to say, then, of a novel in which the characters that personify true womanhood and manhood are not irresistibly drawn to each other, choosing rather to attach themselves to the dissipated and the sensual? Where the women turn out to be manly and the men womanly? Where daughters do not necessarily love their mothers and men do not 100

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necessarily love the traits in other men that are most manly? Where four characters battle for the role of the heroine of the tale and only two of them are biologically female? Where none of the protagonists are finally united in anything remotely resembling Duffey’s ideal of marriage? It begins well enough, though. Rowland Mallet and Mary Garland incarnate the manly and womanly virtues Duffey catalogues in The Rela­ tions of the Sexes to an extent that verges on parody. Roderick brings this out in Mary’s case when he tells Rowland how he fell in love with the “rigid virtue in her person” and describes her patronizingly as a “grimly devoted little creature.” Rowland sees no reason for levity and takes it upon himself to defend Mary, doing so so earnestly that he, in Roderick’s opinion, shows himself “a better Catholic than the Pope.”37 One contemporary reviewer found Rowland “an impossible and not very attractive character” that is “altogether too perfect to live, and too consciously perfect to be endured.” The Chicago Tribune found Mary and Rowland both “tame and uninteresting in their undeviating goodness,” adding, “When they occupy the scene, as they do too much of the time, we are invariably wearied with their dull respectability.” The reviewer for Scribner’s Monthly found Rowland “exceedingly monotonous,” while Mary for once fared better, being described as “a reverent study which comes nearer to beauty than Mr. James’s studies commonly do.”38 Yet, despite her excellence of character, Mary Garland is a model of true womanhood who fails to keep or to save her man; turns out to be more manly than her man; and at no point has any romantic interest in the model of American manhood at her side. This model is, of course, Rowland Mallet. “Neither fish nor flesh nor good red herring,”39 Rowland is an eminently eligible bachelor who shows no strong inclination to marry. He is approaching thirty, physically attractive, vigorously healthy, economically independent, and well educated and cultured, and appears to be observing the laws of an eminently chaste bachelorhood. As the world knows, Rowland has never been romantically involved with a woman, despite there being several likely candidates. This is not to say that Rowland is not domestically inclined. He dreams about the perfect union, after all. Yet we suspect that by the end of the novel at least, Rowland might well have agreed with James’s pronouncement in the late 1870s: “I believe in matrimony for most other people as I believe in it little for myself—which is saying a good deal.”40 In addition to his apparent reluctance to marry, Rowland invites scrutiny for his lack of a profession, his passivity, and his indolence. He lives very much for others, as Mary Garland remarks,41 and in this he resembles a woman more than a man. As one contemporary reviewer pointed out, 101

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“In removing [Roderick] from the home influence of his mother and his betrothed,” Rowland takes on a heavy responsibility.42 Vividly aware of this, he is forced to take on Roderick’s moral education and to take over Mrs. Hudson’s mothering role. Rowland “takes every opportunity to ‘instruct’ his protégé on filial and familial duty.”43 This is not an entirely manly occupation. In Roderick Hudson it is chiefly the female characters who feel compelled and empowered to ask of Rowland various personal questions, which all come out to: what kind of man are you? The first of these questioners is his cousin by marriage, Cecilia, whom he lost romantic interest in after the death of her husband made her available. Cecilia is the one who first diagnoses Rowland’s condition, claiming that all he wants is to fall in love. Though offering to introduce him to some appropriate local women, she ends up introducing him to Roderick instead. Mary Garland plays an even more important role in relation to defining Rowland’s manhood or lack thereof. It is she who initially mistrusts him as a force for good in Roderick’s life, who states frankly that he is “unlike other men” she has seen by virtue of having “no duties, no profession, no home,” and who finally asks him point blank if he is ever going to marry. Rowland is, of course, stuck in an ironic bind in that the one factor that would make him a more natural man in the eyes of the women around him, including Mary, is the one thing he feels duty bound never to reveal. When Madame Grandoni, a matchmaker who wants to see him married to Augusta Blanchard, confronts him with her suspicion of his love for Mary, Rowland adamantly denies this, claiming that his “passion for Miss Garland was a figment of her fancy.” Even Mrs. Light makes Rowland’s duties clear to him. On visiting his Roman quarters for the first time, she remarks, “It’s really selfish to be living all alone in such a place as this.”44 The relational and relative character of manhood is also vividly demonstrated by Rowland’s counterpart Roderick. The eponymous hero of the novel is shown to be weak, childish, and at times bordering on effeminate. Initially, Roderick is feminized through his youth and immaturity, particularly in relation to his employer, Mr. Striker (the very model of the self-made man, as Michael Kimmel has described him45), but also in relation to Rowland, who continues to provide for him until his death. Roderick describes himself as a “mollycoddle”46 and clearly lacks both the self-control and the discipline that were such important constituents of manhood in the nineteenth century. What saves him and his reputation, at least for a time, is that he is a talented young artist who is expected to do great things and who must be granted a little more leeway than 102

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regular men. Mary, to whom Roderick’s lack of maturity and the other appurtenances of manliness must be more and more painfully apparent, remarks at one point to Rowland that she is glad he is a sculptor rather than a painter because “It is more manly!”47 Roderick’s impetuousness and egotism are contrasted with his fiancée’s somber, uncomplaining seriousness. This is done strikingly and metonymically through descriptions of their voices. Roderick’s voice is described as “a not altogether masculine organ,” “childish and unmodulated,” “confoundedly querulous,” and “not the voice of a conqueror,” but it is also said that “there was no possible music in the world so sweet as the sound of Roderick’s voice.” Thus, the quality of his voice symbolizes both his positive and his negative character traits, though none of them are particularly manly. Mary’s voice, by comparison, is described from the first as being “full” and “grave.”48 Roderick is also shown to be lacking in manliness in relation to Christina Light. This is apparent not only from the conversation Rowland overhears in the Coliseum, where Christina accuses Roderick of being weak, but from the fact that it is Christina who is considered dangerous for Roderick and not vice versa; it is she who is asked by Rowland to desist in her attentions to the young sculptor. Finally, of course, Roderick is feminized by suffering the fate of countless transgressive Victorian heroines: he falls. The basic trouble with Roderick and Rowland both is that they are bachelors. Their precarious and liminal position as men is primarily due to their being unmarried. To make matters worse, Rowland appears outwardly happy to remain so and Roderick behaves very much like an “irresponsible bachelor,”49 even though he is engaged. Both men seem to be enjoying “single blessedness,”50 and neither man appears to be working very actively to bring about that happy day when full wedded manhood will be his. Bachelors have, of course, been the object of cultural anxiety in America since its Puritan days, but there is evidence of a renewed intensification of concern toward the middle of the nineteenth century. Vincent J. Bertolini observes: By the middle of the nineteenth century, the bachelor in America had . . . fully entered the national consciousness. . . . To the northeastern writers of reform theory . . . the bachelor could be easily associated with the anarchic sexual possibilities of solo masculinity. He embodied the potential for deviance from the reformers’ strict domesticating and desensualizing regimes. In his solitary and unmonitorable status as an autonomous unmarried adult male, the bachelor represented the transgressive triple threat of masturbation, whoremongering, and that nameless horror—homosexual sex. 103

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As a member of the league of “educators, divines, and medical men,”51 Eliza Duffey wrote in 1876 that a man “cannot, except in exceptional cases, long delay marriage without injustice to himself and to society.” She effectively declares war on unmarried men with these resounding words: The man who shirks marriage is a traitor to the state, and to his race, because, for the sake of selfish considerations, he has disregarded the prudential reasons which should impel every man to marry. In nine cases out of ten, the repudiation of marriage is a direct recognition of the brothel—the greatest curse upon society, and the nest in which are conceived and brooded nine-tenths of the misery and wretchedness and crime, which, in their full-grown proportions, stalk abroad in the world.52

In her concerted attack on the nonmarrying man, Duffey emerges as a spokeswoman for what I have called “compulsory domesticity,” it being the attitude—prevalent in the period among both male and female writers of “sex-in-life” literature and broadly subscribed to—that the be-all and end-all of existence is marriage, that it is not possible to be fully a man or a woman without being married, and that there is no human condition superior to the married state. I call this aspect of Victorian sexual ideology compulsory domesticity to focus on both the similarities to and the differences from “compulsory heterosexuality,” as described famously by Adrienne Rich.53 As a code of normative gender relations, the former is clearly a precursor of the latter. An emphasis on the necessity of marriage and parenthood to the attainment of adult manhood and womanhood is to be found in nearly all the advice literature of the mid-nineteenth century, most of which was written by men. One of the pioneers of the genre, Sylvester Graham, wrote in his A Lecture to Young Men in 1834: “marriage—or a permanent and exclusive connexion of one man with one woman—is an institution founded in the constitutional nature of things, and inseparably connected with the highest welfare of man, as an individual and as a race!” Henry C. Wright, one of the founders of the “marriage religion,” writes in his 1855 book Marriage and Parentage: “Those who do not enter into the relations of marriage and parentage, cannot be said fully to answer the great end of being.” John Cowan gives us a succinct version of this ideology in his famous tome The Science of a New Life (1870): That marriage is a natural condition of adult life, and a requisite to every man and woman’s perfect happiness and success in this world, requires no argument, or needs

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none of the many divine and human authorities to attest the fact; and no man who fails to enter this condition at the proper period can be considered as compassing all the relations for which his Creator designed him—in other words, he is not a complete man. This also applies to woman.

He adds: “Men and women do not reach their true status in this world— do not fulfil their mission to populate—do not attain the full royalty of their natures, until they originate and rear a child; and in proportion to the number of children they rear is the royalty of their souls perfected.” According to the physician Dio Lewis, writing in 1874: “Married love is the fullest and richest source of happiness in this world,” and “it is the duty of the highest, noblest men and women to perpetuate themselves in children and improve the human stock.” To the promulgators of this doctrine, bachelorhood was a dangerous condition that required rigorous societal and self-control and that should be terminated as soon as possible by marriage.54 Yet the response to prolonged bachelorhood was not unanimously condemnatory in Victorian America. The older and more benign cultural response—still current throughout the nineteenth century—was infantilization, in which the confirmed bachelor was considered childish for wanting to prolong his freedom from responsibility and care.55 Thus, it may not be coincidental that Rowland at one point is being rocked to sleep like a baby by Cecilia’s young daughter.56 While most of the characters in Roderick Hudson, including Mrs. Hudson, Mary Garland, Rowland Mallet, Mr. Leavenworth, and even Mrs. Light, are in their various ways in the grip of the ideology of compulsory domesticity, Roderick Hudson and Christina Light rebel. In their combination of cynicism, jadedness, urbanity, and imperviousness to moral shocks, they appear as curiously modern and the voice of the future. In them, we discern the laus veneris, the “sexual religion,” beginning to rear its ugly head; what Eliza Duffey called in 1876 “the besetting sin of this generation.”57 She was speaking of a generation of men and women that would begin to identify love with sex and romantic passion with sexual passion, and that ultimately would bequeath to our century a new sex/ gender system and a sexual science more detailed and powerful than the world had ever seen. Christina Light is a type of the “new woman”: restless, knowing, passionate, independent. She “has seen so much of the world,” and “her talk is full of the strangest allusions!” As Christina cries at one point, “There’s nothing I can’t imagine! That’s my difficulty!” Among the women, only

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Christina has the experience and the imagination to question the nature of Rowland and Roderick’s relationship and to fathom the extent to which Rowland allows the course of his life to be influenced by Roderick’s wishes. She maliciously refers to Rowland as “Mr. Hudson’s sheep-dog,” who is “mounting guard to keep away the wolves”—that is, women (like her) who might threaten his relationship with Roderick. She also observes on chancing upon Rowland and Roderick asleep under a tree, “Is that the way you spend your time? . . . I never yet happened to learn what men were doing when they supposed women were not watching them but it was something vastly below their reputation.” Roderick responds tartly: “When pray . . . are women not watching them?”58 As Duffey remarks, “very few women know, or even guess the exact moral status of their male acquaintances.”59 Conversely, a male essayist writing in 1874 noted: “It is not consideration for women that induces us to keep them in the borderland of acquaintance with our real lives. It is consideration for ourselves; it is egotism. We shrink from the thought that the gentler and purer beings who love us and whom we love—when we have naught else to do—should have perfect understanding, a clear revelation of what we are.”60 In the course of his brief life, Roderick challenges the doctrine of compulsory domesticity head on. It is Roderick who participates in “licentious experiments,” who lets himself be led by what the period would have considered his lowest instincts, and who is strangely modern in his ever “clamouring for a keener sensation.” It is he who has “inexorable needs” and a “restless demon within” that carry him to Baden-Baden and Naples, places where angels, the narrator, and Rowland fear to tread. In Naples he “drown[s] his sorrow in debauchery.” At the German watering place, Roderick finds “several very pretty women” and “attached to these ladies . . . certain gentlemen who walked about in clouds of fragrance, rose at midday, and supped at midnight.” We are told further that “Roderick had found himself in the mood for thinking them very amusing fellows. He was surprised at his own taste, but he let it take its course.” In Rome, he befriends “a number of people outside Rowland’s well-ordered circle” and describes them to Rowland as “very queer fish.” In Florence, we are told that Roderick “mysteriously absented himself” from the Villa Pandolfini, but Rowland (and hence the reader) never learns what he does when he is away from home. As a result of these experiences, Roderick is the only character in the novel to undergo a decisive change. By novel’s end, he breaks with the doctrine of compulsory domesticity by declaring openly to Rowland that he is “not in the marrying way.”61 He comes out as a confirmed bachelor. 106

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The End of Roderick, the End of Romantic Friendship, the End We find a fascinating parallel to James’s brand of gender antiessentialism and a counterpoint to his interest in male friendship in an essay published in Galaxy in February 1874, as James was about to embark on Roderick Hudson. According to Richard Cary, Galaxy contained articles that “touched popular life of the time at more points and more directly than most other important magazines.”62 The author of the essay, Junius Henri Browne (1833–1902), was known as a war correspondent for the New York Tribune who had been captured by the Confederates at Vicksburg but managed to escape, and as the author of Four Years in Secessia (1865) and The Great Metropolis; a Mirror of New York (1869).63 In his essay “Women as Friends,” Browne begins by pointing out that “in ordinary apprehension, friendship is limited to men.” “We hear to weariness,” he adds, “of David and Jonathan, Achilles and Patroclus, Alexander and Hephestion, Nisus and Euryalus, Damon and Pythias.” Browne’s aim, on the other hand, is to prove that women are worthy and capable of friendship, not only with each other but with men. “Notwithstanding endless citation and general opinion,” Browne writes, “the highest and truest friendship must be sought for—can exist only—not between members of the same sex, but of different sex”: “It may be conceded that more and stronger friendships have been and are held by men than women, though the sincerest and most disinterested—the ideal friendship—will be found between men and women./Nobody believes that? It might be true, nevertheless. General belief and general error are closely connected.” Thus, Browne and Duffey have that in common—that they want men and women to be friends. Their chief difference is that, while Duffey wants them to be married friends, Browne wants them to be friends also outside the marriage bond, emphasizing, “Thousands of men and women have been doomed to woe, because society would not allow them any room to stand except before the altar.”64 Roderick Hudson would seem to confirm the difficulty young, marriageable men and women encountered in being “just friends.” Christina, for example, says she would rather have Roderick—for whom she feels “a great friendship”—as a brother than a lover.65 She ends up with neither. In the following central passage from the essay, Browne deconstructs the traditional distinction between same-sex friendship and cross-sex love and complicates current understandings of masculinity and femininity. “Friendship is ordinarily thought to be the strongest attachment between men,” he writes, “as love is between men and women.” And yet: 107

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Men love each other; so do women; and men and women are the best of friends. Thus it has been from the first, and will be to the last. Sex is not determined altogether by physiology; temperament more nearly settles it. Many men are masculine and feminine to each other; many women likewise. . . . But style them what you may, and notwithstanding their indistinction, love and friendship are very different, albeit not obedient to gender. Sex, as we know, enters into material as well as animated nature, and is, as we hold, independent of corporality. In friendship, not less than in love, sex has its part. Whether two men or two women be friends, one is masculine and the other feminine one to the other, as much as when man and woman are friends. Therefore friendship between the sexes is more natural, because physically comformable, than between members of the same sex.

Browne gives several examples to support his argument before continuing in a manner that would seem to presage current theories about the performativity of gender: “A man may be masculine to one man and feminine to another. A woman may be masculine to her husband and feminine to her lover. Sex varies with the nature it is brought in contact with. Feminine souls are constantly getting into masculine bodies, and feminine bodies growing about masculine souls.”66 The relative and relational aspect of gender that James suggests through character and action, Browne here makes explicit. In his attempt to promote male-female friendship—what he calls “friendship of the sexes”—Browne makes an interesting and, I think, novel rhetorical move. He not only records his weariness of the celebration of male friendships, but he takes the more radical step of denigrating and casting suspicion on the chastity of intimate, male, same-sex bonds. “Vices, oftener weaknesses, may serve as bonds of union between us;” Browne claims, “the greater the vice or weakness, the closer the bond”: The young soldiers and the hoary veterans of Rome, who died together against outnumbering Gauls, have been preserved, for their personal devotion, in the amber of ages. But the secret of their attachment paralyzes poetry, revolts the wholesome sense, represses utterance. The love of Hadrian for Antinous has become immortal; the statues of the Bithynian youth stand in every gallery; admiration of the favorite is on the lips of millions. Rhapsody hides the forbidding fact that would taint the temple the emperor reared in the name of affection; turns to gibe the tender myth of the celestial transmutation. Our apparent friendships, beautiful at distance, may not bear inspection, lest their roots be found imbedded in impurity.67

In alluding to the physical aspect of these ancient and legendary friendships, Browne is speaking with a frankness uncommon in the period. In 108

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contrast with Browne, Eliza Duffey, in describing the powerful forces she sees threatening the institution of marriage, does not so much as allude to same-sex love or eroticism of any kind. On the other hand, she devotes whole chapters to free love and polygamy, and writes no less than three chapters on the “monster evil,” prostitution.68 This is in keeping with the sociologist Steven Seidman’s findings that there was “virtually no reference to same-sex intimacy and love in . . . popular medical texts,” and Ronald G. Walters’s discovery when making up a collection of extracts from nineteenth-century advice literature that “most nineteenth-century authorities left nonprocreative sex scant room.”69 Curiously, in writing of prostitutes Duffey employs the rhetorical weapons and terms of denigration that would later be directed toward the newly identified “homosexuals” and “psychosexual hermaphrodites.” Women who actively seek out and enjoy this degraded form of life are “a sort of moral monstrosities, many of whom should be regarded as fit subjects for the physician’s care; and if that failed to effect a cure then they should be placed in restraint, both for their own good, and for the benefit of society.” The terms unnatural and perverse in Duffey have no specific reference to same-sex acts. When she refers to “prostitution and kindred crimes” or “prostitution and kindred immoralities,” it is clear from the context that she means other types of cross-sex liaisons, such as adultery, “handkerchief flirtations,” and the seduction of unmarried women. It is a fact for historians of sexuality to ponder that Duffey refers to female prostitutes and other “passionate” women as “the third sex.”70 In the use of this expression, we see a parallel semantic shift to that of the word gay, which was also first used about female prostitutes and then developed into a descriptive term for (primarily) male homosexuals. We need to bear in mind that the major social issues of our day are not necessarily the pressing issues of the past. Based on my study of a variety of sources that problematize sex and gender in the period, I would claim that affective and sexual relations between men are only to a minor degree an issue during the middle decades of the American nineteenth century. In addition to pressing social issues such as abolition, temperance, and women’s rights, the major sexual debates focused on relations to the self or between the sexes, that is to say, debates about masturbation, prostitution, free love, miscegenation, and polygamy. To the extent that friendships between men were perceived as a problem at all, it was because a man could so easily lead another man astray. This was not due to his own erotic attraction but to his own bad example, which could lead the innocent and the inexperienced into an underworld of drink, gambling, and womanizing. John Cowan writes in The Science of a New Life: 109

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The choice of companions is not lightly to be disregarded. A young man, leaving the pure associations of a happy home, and entering any of our large cities, can without much trouble form the acquaintance of a class of associates that will lead him very far from the pure, chaste, continent life he hitherto had led, and in this way the ability and genius of thousands of young men, who commence life with such bright hopes and good prospects, are fouled, blighted, and eventually destroyed in the mire of tobacco, women and wine.71

Thus, Rowland’s character is examined by Roderick’s family and friends not out of fear that he will seduce the impressionable young man, but rather to determine what manner of influence Rowland will have on Roderick’s personal and professional development. This being said, by the 1870s romantic friendship between men was beginning to be threatened—on the one hand by cross-sex friendships and companionate marriages, and on the other, as the extract from Browne also shows, by the increasing suspicion that passionate friendships between men might be less than platonic. While free from homophobia or homosexual panic, Roderick Hudson contains harbingers of both the death of its eponymous hero and the death of romantic friendship itself. The novel registers, however delicately, the new forces that were beginning to threaten intimate bonds between men and that, within a few decades, would make them carefree and unselfconscious no longer. Even if Roderick Hudson doesn’t depict any companionate marriages, it does show several positive male-female friendships. Some of these friendships survive, while the romantic friendship between the protagonists does not. Rowland Mallet has a number of friendships with women, including Mary Garland, Augusta Blanchard, Madame Grandoni, and Christina Light. Roderick is also friends with Cecilia, though she considers him a child. Christina and Roderick, in addition to whatever mutual physical attraction they might feel, are also friends. Paradoxically, Christina and Roderick’s relationship is a threat to Rowland and Roderick’s bond, not because it may very well have a sexual component, but because it certainly has a friendship component. Roderick and Christina are friends in a way Roderick and Mary are not. If they should get married, rather than Roderick and Mary, it would leave Rowland out in the cold. Given the way Roderick Hudson ends, we can only wonder if James would endorse Browne’s conclusion that “the positive and negative, the masculine and feminine elements, being essential to sterling and lasting friendship, its simplest and fittest form is between man and woman.”72 When read in historical context, the original version of Roderick Hud­ son shows the near total reversal of sexual values that has taken place 110

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in the century and a quarter since the novel was first published. The responses to the eponymous hero and his romantic friend from the other characters in the novel, contemporary reviewers, and modern-day literary critics alike can also tell us much about our changing ideas about what constitutes normative masculinity. While the novel’s original readers found Roderick the queer and unmanly one, there is no question that Rowland would be found so today. I have already given evidence of contemporary readers’ recognition of, if not always liking for, Rowland’s manly virtue. In the case of Roderick, the New York Times, for example, sympathized with Christina in her feeling that he was “not quite manly,” adding that “the virile force to which her feminine nature longs to render due submission, she does not find in his brilliant but unstable, untrustworthy nature.” Thomas Powell in the New York Herald found Roderick’s conduct “unmanly” and asked, “what woman could love such a weakling?”73 It is worth noting that Roderick, who possesses “an almost unlimited susceptibility to the influence of a beautiful woman,” but who may also have witnessed or even participated in what we would consider homosexual behavior, is the only man to attribute Rowland’s being “not inflammable” to some other possible cause than his desire to live a morally upright life or his lack of a congenial partner.74 As their parting scene shows, by being a model of bourgeois Victorian manhood Rowland has made himself suspect to Roderick, the man of the future. The same controlled behavior and celibate lifestyle that would have made Rowland appear so manly in Eliza Duffey’s eyes has made him appear less than manly to many modern-day readers, and it is only in our own homophobic day that Rowland’s lack of overtly sexual interest in women has led to him being described as, for example, “a half-man.”75 Whereas a confirmed bachelor in the 1870s would be suspected of being too susceptible to women, a bachelor now would be suspected of not being susceptible enough. Whereas Roderick’s passion for Christina and his “licentious experiments” would have been considered “perversion” by many of his contemporaries, today as many would consider his behavior “sowing his wild oats” and an example of “healthy heterosexuality.” Last but not least, Roderick Hudson and the two texts I have chosen to accompany my discussion of the novel show that it is only in our own day that passionate friendships between men have become an outlying department of human feeling.

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How the Other Half Loved: A Saloonkeeper’s Daughter in the Company of Women Multitudes of women have too much self-respect to be desirous of being supported in idleness by men; too much genius and ambition to be content with spending their lives in trifles; and too much devotedness not to burn to be doing their share in the relief of humanity, the work and progress of the world. WILLIAM ROUNSEVILLE ALGER, THE FRIENDSHIPS OF WOMEN (1868)

Mrs. Butterwell: “There are women that love women, Mr. Yorke, care for ’em, grieve over ’em, worry about ’em, feel a fellow feeling and a kind of duty to ’em, and never forget they’re one of ’em, misery and all,—and nonsense too, may be, if they hadn’t better bread to set; and they lift up their strong arms far above our heads, sir, like statues I’ve read of that lift up temples, and carry our burdens for love of us, God bless ’em!” ELIZABETH STUART PHELPS, DOCTOR ZAY (1882)

I did not wish to write a book on romantic friendship in American literature and culture without at least a glance at romantic friendship between women. There is a longer history of research in this area, starting of course with Carroll Smith-Rosenberg’s landmark essay “The Female World of Love and Ritual” from 1975 and Lillian Faderman’s pioneering article “Female Same-Sex Relationships in Novels by Longfellow, Holmes, and James” from 1978.1 Apart from the intrinsic interest of the topic, this chapter is meant to counter the inherent and unavoidable bias that occurs when one takes a basically “one-gender” approach to a historical period. I said at the start of chapter 4 that a study of affective 112

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relations between men in Victorian America must concern itself also with relationships between men and women and must seek to reconstruct not an isolated set of behaviors and understandings, but a whole complex of interrelated cross-sex and same-sex relationships and attitudes. I think my readings hitherto have lived up to that theoretical ideal. I have been struck, though, by the fact that even if one studies male same-sex affective bonds in a narrative in careful conjunction with cross-sex relationships, it is all too easy to let any concurrent female same-sex relations slip through one’s fingers. In the present study, this is probably not as big a problem as it may sound for the simple reason that nineteenth-century American novels seldom place important emphasis on all three types of love stories at the same time. The presence of not only one but two male protagonists usually precludes any in-depth consideration of female characters and their same-sex bonds. When it happens, as in William Dean Howells’s Private Theatricals (1875–76) and The Undiscovered Country (1880), it is important to see how these “different vibrations,” to use an apt expression from Henry James’s preface to the New York edition of Roderick Hudson, “walk hand in hand.”2 I have chosen to take an “ex-centric” approach to the topic of female romantic friendship in nineteenth-century fiction, as my starting point in this chapter is a little-known Norwegian-American novel. This choice is not simply a nod to my own background as a Norwegian scholar of American literature, but primarily because Drude Krog Janson’s A Saloonkeeper’s Daughter is a fascinating narrative that deserves to be better known. The publication of an English translation of this work in 2002 marks the end of its more than century-long, monolingual existence in a parallel universe of American literary history. It suggests forcibly that it is time to consider the extent and the ways in which this short novel from 1889, in Orm Øverland’s words, “remains an American document.”3 This chapter, then, will explore the interconnections between Janson’s narrative of a young woman coming of age and similar stories by native-born American writers in the 1880s and the preceding decades. How does Janson’s novel compare in plot, characters, and motifs with the novels of writers like Maria Cummins, Augusta Jane Evans, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Louisa May Alcott, Sarah Orne Jewett, William Dean Howells, and Henry James, particularly with regard to the representation of the lives of women and the affective bonds between them? What, if anything, is different about A Saloonkeeper’s Daughter when compared with earlier woman-centered novels? My intention is not to determine possible direct influences on the creation of Janson’s text, but rather to examine the circulation and narrative shaping of nineteenth113

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century ideas about women and their relationships to each other, and to men, in a representative selection of American novels from the years leading up the publication of A Saloonkeeper’s Daughter. My plan is to put both the character Astrid Holm and the novel of which she is the heroine in the company of (primarily) native-born, American women writers and their female characters.

Absent Mothers, Present Friends The narrative of a young woman making her way in the world was an increasingly common one in American literature from the middle of the nineteenth century. Starting in 1850 with the publication of the bestselling novel The Wide, Wide World by Susan Warner and during the following two decades, novels by women about women for women flourished as a separate, readily identifiable subgenre that literary historian Nina Baym has labeled retrospectively “woman’s fiction.”4 It is natural to begin tracing the possible and productive antecedents of a narrative such as A Saloonkeeper’s Daughter with novels such as The Wide, Wide World and its “spin-off,” The Lamplighter by Maria Cummins.5 What these and other classics of the genre had in common was their concern with how women might best adapt themselves to the often difficult and limited circumstances of their lives, how they might find acceptance and attain harmony and, ultimately, come to fulfill their predestined roles as wives and mothers by learning to curb their “selfish” passions and desires. In a classic passage from The Lamplighter, the rebellious heroine’s saintly friend tells her that only those can be happy “who have learned submission; those who, in the severest afflictions, see the hand of a loving Father, and, obedient to his will, kiss the chastening rod.”6 Even though A Saloonkeeper’s Daughter is not framed in similarly Christian and innocently pre-Freudian terms, Janson’s narrative is equally concerned with the protagonist Astrid Holm’s pursuit of inner peace and a meaningful existence. Astrid, too, struggles with despair, anger, apathy, and disgust at the circumstances of her life. She, too, chafes at the ties that bind her to unfulfilling duties as an unpaid housekeeper in the unhomelike home of an unsympathetic, widowed father. As we shall see, the narrative records her alternating moods of rebellion and submission, but the conclusion is quite different from that of the typical woman’s fiction of the 1850s and ’60s. The loss of or forced separation from one or more of the parents of the young female protagonist is nearly always the first cause or instigating 114

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event of the woman’s-fiction plot. As Janet Todd notes, an orphan is “the most promising of heroines.”7 The cardinal event that A Saloonkeeper’s Daughter shares with many mid-nineteenth-century women’s novels is the loss of the mother. In the first landmark example of the genre, The Wide, Wide World (1850), Ellen Montgomery is taken away from her invalid mother in chapter 6, though the mother is not allowed to die until she has suffered and been more or less still through 348 pages. Before what proves to be a permanent separation, Mrs. Montgomery admonishes her daughter characteristically that “though we must sorrow we must not rebel.”8 We see here, albeit without the religious overtones, a parallel with the scene of the death of Astrid’s mother in chapter 4. Karen Holm’s concern is that Astrid should not pursue an acting career without her father’s permission. This final wish is somewhat paradoxical, given that Mrs. Holm has admitted that her years on the stage were the happiest of her life. While the memory of the dead mother in traditional woman’s fiction becomes a spiritual guide and disembodied comfort for the heroine during her trials, in the secularized world of A Saloonkeeper’s Daughter the mother’s exemplary power cannot be said to extend beyond the grave. Neither can the trusty domestic, Annie, who has accompanied Astrid from Norway, fill a mother’s place. She is as much at sea in a strange environment as Astrid is. Leaving home for the first time, the beginning of the quest narrative, be it male or female, often follows close upon the loss of one or both of the heroine’s parents. Ellen Montgomery in The Wide, Wide World still has her father living, as Astrid does, but like August Holm in A Saloonkeeper’s Daughter, Captain Montgomery is shown to be a shallow, selfish, and immature figure who makes his wife’s life a misery, hounding her into an early grave. He can be of no practical or emotional aid to his daughter in her growth into adulthood. In A Saloonkeeper’s Daughter it is even suggested that the father might actually be a directly harmful influence. His vision of his daughter as the hostess of his saloon is reminiscent of the carpenter Engstrand’s similarly dubious plans for his adopted daughter, Regine, in Ghosts (1881). Astrid herself accuses him in chapter 19 of killing her mother’s spirit and trying to kill hers as well. One of the losses symbolized and effected by the death of Astrid’s mother and the removal to a new country is the loss of the “female world of love and ritual.” Carroll Smith-Rosenberg identifies the network of mothers, grandmothers, sisters, cousins, female friends, and neighbors as an integral part of many middle-class American women’s lives. Very likely women played the same supporting roles in each other’s lives in Norway as well.9 Women linked together by ties of family and friendship 115

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taught each other household skills through an informal apprenticeship system and helped each other through the rites of passage of a woman’s life: courtship, marriage, childbirth, illness, and finally death. This social network, then, often centering on the mother, is doubly lost to Astrid through her mother’s death and the family’s immigration into the United States: “Oh, how helpless she was now that she didn’t have her mother to help her.” Parallel with Astrid’s growth as an individual, the novel traces a gradual, difficult, but ultimately triumphant reconstitution of her family circle and the network of female support integral to a nineteenth-century American woman’s life. In one of his more perceptive moments, August Holm observes: “It is precisely female companions that my daughter lacks. If she could only find some then everything will be all right, as the Americans say.”10 In A Saloonkeeper’s Daughter, as in many other women’s novels of the American nineteenth century, the central place held by the mother is taken over by a close female friend. American literature of the period is rife with representations of same-sex friendships both between women and between men. While male romantic friendship, obviously, received the most attention in male-centered novels and in the culture at large, female romantic friendship was an integral and pervasive though little remarked-on part of many woman-centered novels. In The Lamplighter (1854), for example, a classic of the woman’s fiction genre, the unkempt, unruly, and unpromising young heroine, Gertrude Flint, is transformed into a “true woman” through the love and guidance of her friend Emily Graham, who in addition to being the personification of female virtue is a blind heiress. For the love of her “particular friend,” Gerty is willing to change. In parts of the novel Emily and Gerty make a home together. We are told, “In the undisturbed enjoyment of each other’s society, and in their intercourse with a small but intelligent circle of friends, they passed a season of sweet tranquil­lity [sic].”11 In Beulah (1859) by Augusta Jane Evans, a major Southern exponent of woman’s fiction, the eponymous heroine, again predictably orphaned at the onset of the narrative, is electrified from the moment of first meeting her classmate, Clara Sanders, who, “though not a beauty in the ordinary acceptation of the term,” has a fascinating “expression of angelic sweetness and purity in her countenance.” “The touch of her fingers sent a thrill through Beulah’s frame,” we are told, “and she looked at her very earnestly.” The two friends must part when Clara takes a position as a governess on a distant plantation. She leaves Beulah with reassuring words: “We may meet no more on earth; but dear Beulah,

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there is a ‘peaceful shore, where billows never beat nor tempests roar,’ where assuredly we shall spend an eternity together, if we keep faith here.” As in The Lamplighter, the schoolteacher heroine Beulah Benton makes a home for a time with another woman, giving as her reason that she is tired of boarding: “I want a little home of my own, where, when the labours of school are over, I can feel at ease.”12 The motif of women making homes of their own together is one I shall return to. Moving beyond the realm of woman’s fiction and the heyday of the domestic novel, we find female romantic friendship in Lillie Devereux Blake’s Fettered for Life (1874), which has been called “the most comprehensive women’s rights novel of the nineteenth century.”13 Hardly surprising, then, that a narrative so centrally concerned with the situation for American women should depict this significant type of emotional bond. The heroine, Laura Stanley, is shown to depend on the female world of love and ritual to support her in her quest for autonomy and self-respect, but it is the impoverished ex-prostitutes Rhoda Dayton and Maggie Bertrand who most closely symbolize the elevating power of female romantic friendship. Both these stereotypically “fallen women” have been victims of male seducers and turn to each other for a platonic and transforming love before the end of their tragically brief and wasted lives. Rhoda is able to bring the consumptive Maggie home to die near her aged mother in Virginia, before Rhoda herself drowns in what is in both cases an all too conventional, literary ending to an unconventional woman’s career. “Her own agony over the loss of her friend was terrible,” we are told of Rhoda. “She had loved this young girl with the strength of a passionate nature.”14 Sarah Orne Jewett’s Deephaven (1877) is a considerably more placid, pastoral, and upbeat account of two female friends from the upper-middle class. Kate Lancaster and Helen “Nelly” Denis, both twenty-four, thoroughly enjoy summering in an old mansion belonging to Kate’s family in a coastal Maine village and exploring the surrounding countryside. Nelly is the first-person narrator of this “sketchy” novel and remarks, “I think I should be happy in any town if I were living there with Kate Lancaster.” As the summer draws to a close, she observes further: “We both grew so well and brown and strong, and Kate and I did not get tired of each other at all, which I think was wonderful, for few friendships would bear such a test. We were together always, and alone together a great deal; and we became wonderfully well acquainted.”15 With the onset of what Nancy Glazener has called “high realism”16 and the increase of male hegemony over the culturally valued novel

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form in the 1870s and ’80s, we continue to find representations of female romantic friendship, for example in the socially panoramic novels of William Dean Howells, the more rarified salon dramas of Henry James, and the fictionalized case studies of Oliver Wendell Holmes. An apposite example from Howells’s voluminous production is The Undiscovered Country, a novel from 1880 which unexpectedly combines an inquiry into mesmerism with a depiction of Shakerism. After being stranded in the middle of nowhere, tired, sick, and unwell, Egeria Boynton and her mesmerist father are taken in by a community of Shakers. Egeria attracts the particular attention of Sister Frances, an older woman who nurses her devotedly and becomes her guardian angel. After Egeria recovers and becomes an active part of the Shaker village, it is recognized that there is a special bond between the two women. Later Frances jealously resents the intrusion of Egeria’s beau, Ford, into their peaceful, harmonious life.17 This animosity on the part of the older partner in the relationship vis-à-vis her younger and more attractive romantic friend’s male suitor is even more vividly illustrated by James’s famous novel on the “woman question,” The Bostonians (1886). Here, you will recall, the socially prominent Boston Brahminess and spinster, Olive Chancellor, forms one part of a “Boston marriage” with the young, promising public speaker on women’s rights, Verena Tarrant. This intense, soulful, and idealistic bond is threatened by the presence of the fiery, reactionary Virginian hunk, Basil Ransome. The novel ends famously and ambiguously with the virtual kidnapping of Verena from the hall where she is to give an address before a large audience and the suggestion of a not unalloyed joy in married life to follow. This conclusion, if more dramatic than most, may be taken as symbolic and representative of the fate of female romantic friendship in most of the novels of the period. Sooner or later something crops up that disrupts, if not necessarily disbands, these harmonious female bonds. Nine times out of ten, this “something” is the courtship and marriage of one or both of the women.18 The idea of romantic friendship as a union of souls was a pervasive one in the period and a parallel to the concept of true love in male-female relationships. “To pour out her thoughts to Emily,” Gertrude feels in The Lamplighter, “was like whispering to her own heart, and the response to those thoughts was as sure and certain.”19 Holmes observes in A Mortal Antipathy (1885): “The friendships of young girls prefigure the closer relations which will one day come in and dissolve their earlier intimacies. The dependence of two young friends may be mutual, but one will always lean more heavily than the other; the masculine and feminine 118

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elements will be as sure to assert themselves as if the friends were of different sexes.”20 The friends in this case are the fancifully named Lurida Vincent and Euthymia Tower. They are described as “intimate friends” and “natural complements of each other”: Euthymia represented a complete, symmetrical womanhood. . . . She knew that she was called The Wonder by the schoolmates who were dazzled by her singular accomplishments, but she did not overvalue them. She rather tended to depreciate her own gifts, in comparison with those of her friend, Miss Lurida Vincent. The two agreed all the better for differing as they did. . . . Each admired the other with a heartiness which, if they had been less unlike, would have been impossible. It was a pleasant thing to observe their dependence on each other.21

The narrator reproduces a long letter from Lurida to Euthymia after Euthymia’s inevitable marriage and removal to another town, which in its tone, rhetoric, and themes very much resembles the real-life letters Carroll Smith-Rosenberg frequently cites in her essay on nineteenth-century female friendship: How I do miss you, dearest! I want you: I want you to listen to what I have written; I want you to hear all about my plans for the future; I want to look at you, and think how grand it must be to feel one’s self to be such a noble and beautiful creature; I want to wander in the woods with you, to float on the lake, to share your life and talk over every day’s doing with you. Alas! I feel that we have parted as two friends part at a port of embarkation. . . . Dear, dear, dearest Euthymia, my eyes are running over with tears when I think that we may never, never meet again.22

There will be more on the friends’ subsequent fate.

Astrid Finds a Friend The novels of female romantic friendship, then, from the decades leading up to the publication of A Saloonkeeper’s Daughter, are a significant backdrop for Drude Krog Janson’s exploration of the theme of love between women. The heroine’s primary relationship is with Helene Nielsen, her “mother, sister, friend,” but this most significant friendship is foreshadowed by two lesser bonds that both resemble and differ from the later, fuller fruition of friendly feeling further along in the novel. First out is the friendship Astrid forms with Marie Hanson, the sister of one of her father’s “handsome men,” Karl. Astrid likes Karl better than the other 119

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more or less eligible bachelors her father introduces her to, and before meeting Marie she wonders “Would she like her? Would she really find a girlfriend and not always have to go around alone?” Her first suitor, Adolf Meyer, claims, though, that Astrid is “much too superior” to have Marie as a friend. Marie, who works in a store, is sweet yet shallow. According to Astrid’s second suitor, Mr. Smith, “she has so damned little beauty.” Astrid is disappointed from the moment of first seeing her, and their relationship never progresses beyond the “little companionship” Meyer predicted, despite Astrid having few competing objects of affection at this point in her life. Marie herself is aware of Astrid’s innate difference from herself and most other women, saying repeatedly that Astrid is “strange” and “not like the others.” In her moments of greatest despair, it never occurs to Astrid to turn to Marie for help.23 We are first introduced to another woman who takes an interest in Astrid, the Swedish Mrs. Hammer, in an appropriate setting for a socially prominent immigrant woman, her drawing room. Astrid is given an entrée into Mrs. Hammer’s select circle through her engagement to Mr. Smith. Hanna Hammer, we are told, “appreciated everything beautiful and had already fallen in love with Astrid.” She finds her “really sweet” and “marvelously beautiful.” There is no indication that Astrid reciprocates this interest or admiration. Her unequal and ultimately unsatisfying relationships with Marie Hanson and Mrs. Hammer, then, function as foils to her later and more significant relationship with Helene Nielsen. They also allow us to see the difference between a more run-of-the-mill friendship and an unrequited “crush” on the one hand and a full-fledged romantic friendship on the other.24 Helene Nielsen first appears in chapter 11, unnoticed, through the back door at Mrs. Hammer’s. The description makes it evident that she is older and plainer than Astrid, yet “her large serious eyes were very attractive.” Her first actions are to cut through the gossip of Mrs. Hammer and her guests concerning a married woman who has left her husband, and to try to raise some money for an impoverished family. She leaves as unobtrusively as she came, when Meyer and Mr. Smith arrive, without taking leave of her hostess. Helene does not reappear in the narrative until the party for Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson in chapter 17. Though we do not witness their first meeting, we are told that Astrid has met Helene several times at the Hammers’ after her engagement to Mr. Smith. “She had felt attracted to her, and yet she had misgivings about her,” we are also told. Astrid senses that Helene has fathomed her unhappy situation by “something sorrowful in her look” whenever she looks at Astrid, and this makes her feel uncomfortable. When Astrid is about to break down at 120

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Mrs. Hammer’s reception, Helene calms her down. These brief meetings and mostly instinctive recognitions between the two women are a fairly precarious foundation for Astrid’s decision to leave her father’s house without an education, a job, or an income, yet she knows “where she would go”: “Two mild, intelligent eyes had greeted her in Minneapolis, and they had always looked at her sadly when she was on her way down. She would go to those eyes.” The instant attraction and connection between two people, particularly the emphasis on the eyes and a feeling of “love at first sight,” is typical of nineteenth-century accounts of romantic friendship, both male and female.25 On Astrid’s arrival unexpectedly on Helene’s doorstep, valise in hand, “with no one in the world to go to but you,” she finds the hoped-for sympathy, understanding, and practical assistance. Helene is overjoyed that Astrid has had the courage to sever all ties: “Then I haven’t lived in vain when the unfortunate and forlorn turn to me.” Helene adds a declaration of love that, had it come from a man, would have been tantamount to a marriage proposal: “This is the happiest moment of my life. It makes up for many, many disappointments. . . . You have no idea how I have been drawn to you ever since the first time I saw you. Oh, how it cut my heart when I saw you being destroyed. . . . But now all will be well.” Astrid in turn thinks: “After all the suffering, all those sleepless nights, all the sorrow, and all the tension—to feel a warm, soft hand take hers and see two mild eyes look lovingly and sympathetically into hers was all to wonderful, almost too much.” The next morning, Astrid insists on telling Helene everything, the way plighted lovers should open their hearts to each other during their courtship. The chapter ends with the two women, “who had both left their places in society,” making “a pact for life.”26

Doctor, Doctor Janson’s choice of profession for Helene is significant, as several important woman-centered novels of the 1880s have main or supporting female characters who are physicians. Before discussing these, though, mention must be made again of Lillie Devereux Blake’s Fettered for Life from 1874, which features prominently the physician and women’s rights activist Cornelia D’Arcy. D’Arcy is not only a doctor, but equally a wife and mother. Admittedly her husband is dead and her children grown, but there is no intimation that her domestic and professional careers have ever been incompatible, and she is the most authoritative and powerful woman in the novel. Fettered for Life is what Susan K. Harris has called an 121

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“exploratory novel,” “a structural watershed between two kinds of didactic texts: the early ones emphasizing women’s dependence and valuing self-abnegation, the later ones emphasizing women’s independence and self-realization.”27 Compared to Fettered for Life, several of the novels of the 1880s seem timid in their claims for women and relatively conservative in their view­ point. The least progressive, though not uninteresting portrayal is also the first of the “woman doctor” novels of the decade: William Dean How­ ells’s Doctor Breen’s Practice (1881). The physician of the title seems the living incarnation of contemporary prejudices against female doctors— “If her motives are stereotyped, so is her behavior: she seems a lady pretending to be a doctor.”28 The novel ends, too, in the withdrawal of Grace Breen from her chosen profession. Incidentally, Doctor Breen’s Practice also emerges as a parody of female romantic friends, as it materializes that the two pretenders to that august title, Grace and her married friend Louise Maynard, do not really like each other. Out of pity rather than love, Grace puts her professional skills and part of her income at the disposal of the hapless and hypochondriac Louise, who is estranged from her husband. In return, she receives Louise’s undying ingratitude. Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s Doctor Zay (1882) was published hard on the heels of Howells’s novel and had a very similar motif: an attractive, wealthy, fatherless young woman who doggedly pursues a medical career, only to reach a point of crisis and doubt when her heart is belatedly affected by a member of the opposite sex. Contrary to Howells, though, Phelps does not suggest that marriage and a career for women are incompatible. The protagonist, Dr. Zaidee Atalanta Lloyd, tells her suitor, Waldo Yorke, that “you have been so unfortunate as to become interested in a new kind of woman. The trouble is that a happy marriage with such a woman demands a new type of man.”29 As the novel closes with the ill-matched union of Dr. Zay and her upper-class paramour and former patient, we are assured that she will be able to continue practicing medicine even after her nuptials. According to Michael Sartisky, “It is about as ambivalent an embrace of matrimony as one can find.”30 As in many of the exploratory novels of the late 1860s and 1870s, the conclusion is not logical. In the exploratory novel, the middle rather than the conventional ending is the site of ideological disruption and the place where the author examines alternative possibilities for women.31 Unlike the many female protagonists we have encountered, Dr. Zay has no close, coeval female friend, false or true, in the Maine village where she lives and practices medicine. She tells Waldo Yorke, “I should like somebody myself to come home to, to be always there to purr about 122

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me; it is very natural to me to accept the devotion of such women. There was one who wanted to come down here and stay with me. I wouldn’t let her; but I wanted her.”32 The same isolation from her female contemporaries is increasingly experienced by the protagonist of Sarah Orne Jewett’s A Country Doctor (1884), particularly after she enters “Society” in her father’s native town of Dunport. Nan Prince has had an unconventionally free upbringing at the hands of her guardian, the country doctor John Leslie, which has allowed her to follow her own interests and develop her unique talents. Jewett’s novel goes further than her predecessors in considering all sides of the case for and against woman physicians, yet she permits herself a certain degree of “preachiness” on the part of the narrator regarding the rightness of the heroine’s chosen path in life. Despite the courage of Nan’s convictions and her determination to forego the pleasures of married life and motherhood to pursue a career, the novel’s ultimate message is nevertheless the relatively conservative one that for women, a job and family life cannot be combined. Nan and the narrator make common cause against convention, tradition, and prejudices against woman physicians, arguing that women are individuals like men with a right to develop their God-given natures to their appropriate ends. Despite having a physically attractive, eligible young man thrown in her way, Nan never seriously doubts her destiny. She has felt instinctively from an early age that she will never marry, just as Astrid would rather be an actress than get engaged. The sympathetic narrator’s and Nan’s own arguments in support of her continued husbandless state echo one of the few respectable excuses for remaining unmarried in the period, beyond having an “obscure hurt” of the Henry James variety: one had genius or at least particular talents that should be wholeheartedly devoted to the betterment of mankind. The essay “Single Life among Us,” for example, which notes that “celibacy is a very conspicuous and an increasing fact among us,” allows that some individuals remain “unmarried by conviction, so they can devote themselves to their work or faith.” The anonymous author of the essay also observes that “some persons, by physical temperament or organization, are shut out of the marrying list.”33 Nan has no female romantic friend to alleviate her loneliness, but she does have Dr. Leslie, an asexual mixture of father, uncle, brother, and husband. Lurida Vincent of A Mortal Antipathy also entertains thoughts of becoming a doctor like her creator, Oliver Wendell Holmes. Unlike the Grace Breens, Zaidee Lloyds, and Nan Princes, though, Lurida does not persevere in her plan to devote herself to medicine. When she faints after witnessing her friend Euthymia rescue the hero and her future 123

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husband from a house fire, Lurida realizes that doctoring is probably not for her and considers the possibility of marrying a doctor instead. She remains unmarried nearly till the end of the novel, by which time she abandons her new plan to become a professional lecturer or headmistress of a school in favor of a marriage of convenience to “a clergyman with a mathematical turn.” It is, we are told, “an intellectual rather than a sen­ timental courtship.”34 The Bostonians provides us with a final, fascinating example of a female physician from the American 1880s. Dr. Prance is a marginal observerfigure in the larger narrative, but she is all the more central to the autho­rial stand James seems to take on the “woman question,” where the practical, energetic, “take-charge” kind of unsentimental woman who is content to succeed on male terms is applauded, while idealistic, impractical, upperclass reformers like Olive Chancellor and faded relics like Miss Birdseye are ridiculed, however lovingly or condescendingly. Dr. Prance, again, is a spinster and likely to remain so. She and Miss Birdseye, though, form an unconventional couple that bears comparison with the legendary “Boston marriage” of the publisher’s widow and noted “salon-keeper,” Annie Adams Fields, and her longtime companion, Sarah Orne Jewett, not to mention several pioneering American feminists and educators.35 Again, the novels discussed provide a rich source of comparison and contrast with A Saloonkeeper’s Daughter, in this case with Drude Krog Janson’s treatment of her “woman doctor” character Helene Nielsen. We are told by Mrs. Hammer that Helene is “very kind” yet “so strange,” and that she harbors “such peculiar notions.” One of Mrs. Hammer’s female friends, the reactionary Mrs. Falanger, wonders that Helene is received in her home and snorts contemptuously at her being a physician. Yet Helene’s profession is presented as a matter of course rather than as a topic for polite discussion or heated debate. Astrid meets with hecklers and rowdies when she ascends the podium, but Helene Nielsen is not openly harassed. We are told little about her undoubtedly weary way to professional status and some means of financial security, yet the narrator relates, “Her practice was not large since, as a woman doctor, she was usually regarded by her countrymen as a charlatan. Her main practice was among the poor who could pay nothing.”36 This dearth of information is of course partly because Helene is only a secondary character in the narrative, which very much focuses on the Bildung of Astrid Holm. This focus on Astrid is so exclusive in the first nine chapters as to be almost claustrophobic. Things pick up notably in chapter 10, with the introduction of a different, male point of view, and in the delicious social satire of chapter 11, which depicts Mrs. Hammer “at home.” 124

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What sets Astrid apart from most of the other female characters is her desire to dedicate her life to some larger purpose, some higher aim than the mundane domestic duties within the family circle that was the fate of most women of her class and background. While still in Norway after her mother’s death, waiting for her father to send for her, she feels estranged from her aunt, “who could never speak with Astrid about anything but practical and domestic things.” Her aunt’s friends and their tea parties interest her little, and she is “very slow-witted about anything that had to do with kitchen work.” After seeing a famous Swedish actress as Hjørdis in The Vikings at Helgeland, Astrid resolves to become an actress like her mother. She understands for the first time “the joy that came from feeling the call from within.” Later, she often wonders if she will ever amount to anything in the world and what will become of her. Periods of apathy and ennui are interrupted by briefer moments of joie de vivre and a reawakened interest in life. At one point she hopes her participation in amateur plays in the local community might show her countrymen “something beautiful” and help them to “understand what true art is.” These hopes are shattered in the pivotal chapter 9, when the play and ensuing dance develop into a drunken brawl, with Astrid’s own father profiting from the ostensibly cultured and elevating occasion by selling beer both during and after the performance. The crisis and illness precipitated by this disastrous evening leave Astrid “determined to live life in all its dreadful reality, taking things as they came.” For a time she is reconciled to the fact that “she was a saloonkeeper’s daughter, neither more nor less, and would never be anything else.”37 It takes no less an authority and quasipaternal figure than the Norwegian cultural hero Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson to reawaken her interest in life and her faith in herself and the future. He must undertake in one intense conversation what a similarly nonauthoritarian authority figure, Dr. Leslie in A Country Doctor, takes years to do in his nurturance of the orphaned Nan Prince. Unlike Nan Prince, Dr. Zay, or Dr. Prance, Astrid Holm does not appear to have any special talents or abilities that would justify the pursuit of a career or an unmarried existence. Added to that is the fact that she is beautiful, as much a curse as a blessing for a woman with no desire to be the belle of the ball or play for the highest stakes in the marriage game. Like Sarah Orne Jewett in and through the narrative of A Country Doctor, Bjørnson insists that “an individual is not first a woman or a man but a human being. And as a human being one has to take one’s place.” He approves of her “breaking off a disgusting relationship” with Mr. Smith, disgusting because the marriage is motivated primarily by the desire for possession on the part of the man and the force of convention on the 125

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part of the woman. It is Bjørnson who suggests that Astrid become a minister—somewhat quixotically, one might add, considering that the religious impulse has not been pronounced in her hitherto. She admits in retrospect that she had never been able to grasp the significance of Jesus: “She had previously paid not attention to him.” Rather than marry Mr. Smith, Astrid witnesses the sudden death from diphtheria of her younger brother, August, and determines to pursue “a life dedicated to others in serious work and self-sacrifice.”38

Body and Soul The culmination of Astrid’s journey of self-discovery and self-fulfillment is her ordination as a minister, which Orm Øverland has pointed out takes the structural place of marriage in the more traditional novel.39 Her life experience has taught her that “no happiness on earth is equal to that which comes from finding a mission that can fill me completely.”40 All told, the denouement of A Saloonkeeper’s Daughter constitutes its most original feature in relation to other novels of the 1880s and the preceding decades. In A Saloonkeeper’s Daughter none of the main female characters die. None of the main female characters marry. And the two romantic friends, the novel strongly suggests, will live happily ever after. By way of comparison, let us survey the field up until the late 1880s. In The Wide, Wide World, Ellen Montgomery gains mastery over herself, loses her friend and womanly ideal, Alice Humphreys, who dies young, and marries Alice’s authoritarian, chauvinistic brother, John. In The Lamplighter, both Gertrude and Emily marry. In Beulah, as we have seen, the heroine is separated from her romantic friend, Clara, and the home she creates with another woman is disbanded. She later marries one of Evans’s typically enigmatic, brooding, and Byronic heroes, Dr. Hartwell, who according to Beulah “wants to rule me with a rod of iron.”41 Rhoda and Maggie in Fettered for Life both die young, as does the heroine’s landlady and confidante, Agnes Moulder, yet another victim of an insensitive husband’s emotional abuse. The heroine Laura Stanley herself marries at the end of Fettered, albeit a male supporter of female suffrage who will, she hopes, permit her to “follow out [her] own career in life.”42 Kate and Nelly’s idyllic summer in Deephaven comes to an inevitable end. Nelly recalls that “Kate laughingly proposed one evening, as we sat talking by the fire and were particularly contented, that we should copy the Ladies of Llangollen, and remove ourselves from society and its distractions.”43 At the time of Nelly’s retrospective narrative, these plans for continued 126

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cohabitation have not yet materialized. Sister Frances’s worst fears are realized in The Undiscovered Country when Egeria Boynton marries Ford. Ford’s male romantic friend, Phillips, is equally left out in the cold. As we have seen, Euthymia marries the man she saves from the fire and Lurida follows her down the aisle at the close of A Moral Antipathy. In The Bostonians, Verena Tarrant, too, opts for a traditional marriage over a Boston marriage and a career, despite her evident love for Olive Chancellor and her gifts as a public speaker. In Doctor Breen’s Practice, Grace Breen abandons her medical practice and marries a young industrialist she meets at a summer resort. In Doctor Zay, Zaidee Atalanta Lloyd, despite being his superior in natural intelligence and worldly success, finally succumbs to the blandishments of the “poor little rich boy,” Waldo Yorke. Only Nan Prince remains staunchly unmarried, confronting the possibility of a lonely personal life after the death of her closest and most understanding friends, Dr. Leslie and Mrs. Graham. Compared to these novelistic predecessors, we can see that Janson is making a radical and original choice in giving her heroine both a career and a family, albeit an alternative one. The nineteenth-century nuclear family was, of course, defined as father, mother, and children, as it has been well into the twentieth century. What the novel’s ending constructs for Astrid Holm is a “sororal family,”44 consisting of a female couple, their faithful female “servant-cum-adopted grandmother,” Annie, and their adopted child, Astrid’s brother Harald. By the last chapter, then, A Saloonkeeper’s Daughter has come full circle. The original nuclear family of the opening has been sundered by the deaths of the mother and brother and the estrangement of the father and daughter. Michael Sartisky observes that “in virtually all nineteenth-century novels in which women pursue careers they do so only in absence of or upon the death of a father.”45 A Saloonkeeper’s Daughter is an exception to this rule. Astrid’s growth and development is hindered, though not ultimately stopped, by her father’s patriarchal presence. To make matters worse, she must rebel against him in direct opposition to her beloved mother’s dying wish. By this point in the narrative, of course, August Holm’s authority and power over his daughter have been considerably reduced by his lack of financial success and his evident failings of character. He realizes this himself: “Lately Holm had felt that he no longer had any power over Astrid. Hearing the contempt in her laughter and seeing the hate in her eyes, his cowardly nature began to fear her.”46 Thus, in Astrid’s plans for the future, the family is radically refigured on the basis not of patriarchy, tradition, and reproductive biology, but of voluntary affinities, sympathy, and equality. While highly original, 127

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the resolution of A Saloonkeeper’s Daughter is not entirely unprecedented in nineteenth-century American literature. The two closest parallels and precursors occur in the early 1870s, at the time of the publication of the equally progressive Fettered for Life, suggesting perhaps that this was a period of narrative experiment relative to the more conservative 1880s (at least with regard to what was considered an appropriate ending for a novel). Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s third novel, The Silent Partner (1871), is unusual in its refusal to marry off either of its two heroines at the close. The factory worker, Priscilla “Sip” Garth, receives a proposal of marriage from a dependable, sympathetic fellow worker, but refuses on the grounds that she does not want her children to be born into poverty and perpetuate the cycle of need, despair, and ignorance she sees all around her: “I’ll never marry anybody, Dirk. I’ll never bring a child into the world to work in the mills.” Sip’s close friend and confidante, Perley Kelso, is differently situated, being the part owner of the leading factory in town (hence the title) and an independently wealthy heiress. She, too, opts to remain unmarried despite being engaged at the beginning of the novel to the son of her dead father’s business partner and later receiving an offer of marriage from the self-made manager of the factory. Her fiancé, Maverick Hayle, is described as being “as necessary to Perley Kelso as her Axminster carpets.” In refusing the hand of the factory manager, she says simply: “I have no time to think of love and marriage, Mr. Garrick. That is a business, a trade, by itself to women. I have much else to do.” The narrator adds the comment that “all the glamour that draws men and women together had escaped her somehow.”47 Like Astrid, though with an even less promising starting point, Sip Garth becomes a preacher, while Perley also dedicates her life (and her fortune) to the betterment of her fellow (wo)man. Again, their choice to remain single can be defended in contemporary terms by their determination to serve the greater good, the human family rather than a specific family of their own. The authors of an afterword to The Silent Partner, Mari Jo Buhle and Florence Howe, observe: “As a woman-centered work, the novel is extraordinary, since its focus is not domestic life and romance, but rather industry and women’s vocations.”48 The same might be said of A Saloonkeeper’s Daughter. Another parallel to the conclusion of A Saloonkeeper’s Daughter is to be found in a novel published in 1873 by the vastly popular author of Little Women, Louisa May Alcott. Work, subtitled A Story of Experience, is an interesting anomaly in Alcott’s socially conservative, domestic canon and a challenge to the popular view of her, then and now, as “a writer of bright and sunny women’s and children’s fiction.”49 Work sees the 128

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heroine happily married to the Quaker David Sterling, but unlike most domestic novels, the story does not end there. After being left a widow with a small child by the Civil War, Christie Devon becomes part of a female extended family, encompassing women of different ages from different class, racial, and religious backgrounds, “a loving league of sisters, old and young, black and white, rich and poor, each ready to do her part to hasten the coming of the happy end.”50 Overall, Work is probably the nineteenth-century American female Bildungsroman most closely resembling A Saloonkeeper’s Daughter in its plot and themes. Both Christie and Astrid begin by dreaming of worldly success as an actress, only to replace those self-centered dreams with selfless realities in the form of work for the greater good as a women’s rights activist and a minister, respectively. Like Christie, Astrid must “cast all the old evil, wickedness, and self-love away” before she can find “a life dedicated to others in serious work and self-sacrifice.”51 Both women must leave home and a routine existence as an unpaid domestic worker to find meaningful work elsewhere. Both novels emphasize that work can be a source of pride, contentment, and fulfillment also for women. Both heroines consider drowning themselves when their fortunes are at their lowest ebb. Both are tempted to marry for convenience and economic security and both resist the temptation, though Christie is briefly married to a man she truly loves and has a child by him. Both novels have an element of secular deus ex machina in their happy endings: in the form of an inheritance for Christie and a scholarship for Astrid. Finally, both novels emphasize that the heroine’s survival and attainment of her goals is due to the support and edifying example of one or more good women, while both books dissect with steely satire the lack of solidarity that is also to be found, particularly among middle-class, so-called respectable women. In addition to these many thematic and structural parallels, Work contains one of the most passionate romantic friendships in American literature before the appearance of A Saloonkeeper’s Daughter. While working as a seamstress in one of the novel’s early chapters, Christie befriends a quiet, retiring fellow worker, Rachel, whom she recognizes is “different from the others.” Rachel’s eyes are “strangely haunting . . . [and] seemed to appeal to her with a mute eloquence she could not resist.” Christie’s heart is “very solitary” at this point in the story, and “she wooed this shy, cold girl as patiently and as gently as a lover might.” The pair become close friends, and Christie finds “it gave life the zest which it had lacked before.” She wants to share everything with Rachel: “There was nothing in her possession that she did not offer Rachel, from the whole of her 129

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heart to the larger half of her little room.” Christie’s happiness with her “bosom friend” does not last, however. The malicious forewoman of the seamstresses’ workroom, Miss Cotton, discovers that Rachel has previously committed one or more sexual indiscretions and summarily dismisses her. Christie stands by Rachel to the point of quitting her job and offering again to share her lodgings with her. Rachel insists on leaving her side, assuring her that she will not go back to her old, “sinful” life: “I never can go back; you have saved me, Christie, for you love me, you have faith in me, and that will keep me strong and safe when you are gone.”52 Rachel returns to save her savior in the following chapter as, at her wits’ end, Christie contemplates suicide by the river. Having found Christie a temporary home under the roof of a poor but kindhearted washerwoman and having assured her that she is sticking close to the path of righteousness, Rachel disappears again to continue her work helping other “fallen women.” There is no other primary, exclusive, and romantic bond between women in the remaining thirteen chapters of Work. By the end of the novel, Christie’s intense feelings for one woman have been transformed into a more generalized love of her entire sex. Thus, the novel’s conclusion figures a female home circle of several women rather than the twosomeness of A Saloonkeeper’s Daughter. Compared with the other nineteenth-century American novelistic portrayals of female friendship, then, Drude Krog Janson’s novel is unique in its conclusive insistence on the lasting value of one woman’s spiritual and sensuous love for another woman and their life together as fully the equal of marriage between a man and a woman. The novel even goes so far as to imply that for some women a same-sex relationship will prove more congenial and satisfying than marriage. I say spiritual and sensuous love, because Janson ventures beyond any previous writer I know of in the period in the explicitness of her description of the two women’s physical attraction to each other. This is particularly evident in the narration of the first night they spend together, after Astrid has burned all her bridges and shows up unannounced on Helene’s doorstep: Several hours later when Helene came in with the lamp to go to bed, the light fell right on Astrid’s face. Helene held up the lamp and looked at her a long time. Astrid’s nightgown had slid up and her strong, plump arm lay thrown over her head. Her hands were buried in her black curls. She had not put up her hair for the night, and it lay around her in a disheveled mass, forming a strange frame around the pale, young face. Her long eyelashes lay on her cheeks, giving her a child-like appearance, but her 130

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lips would sometimes twitch as if in pain. . . . Astrid did not move when Helene lay down beside her.53

The next morning, the two women seal their pact with a kiss. Clearly, Astrid finds emotional sustenance and physical attraction in Helene in a way she has found in no man to come her way. The uncustomarily frank portrayals of sensuality and eroticism are characteristic of the novel as a whole, illustrated equally, if differently, by the scenes between Astrid and her male suitors, Meyer and Smith, and by the scene between Smith and a prostitute. These scenes serve a contrapuntal function, to highlight both Astrid’s disgust at the onslaught of male “animal” desire and her very different response to Helene’s more gentle physical overtures. That Astrid’s loathing and fear of men’s bodies are beyond inexperience and insulted virginity, more general than an aversion to these two specific men, and not solely or primarily reflections of current theories about women’s lack of a sexual drive is vividly illustrated by the encounter between Mr. Smith and the prostitute in chapter 18. This chapter subtly suggests that Mr. Smith is not physically repulsive to women in general and that women in general are not frigid, unsensual, nonerotic beings. The concluding letter Astrid writes to Helene makes it clear that they are henceforward to share everything: “You will come to me, won’t you, when I have my own home, and then we shall work together, each in her own calling.” Astrid recalls her lonely despair: “It was dreadful. God help everyone who experiences that same emptiness of soul. May they be saved, as I was, by the caress of a lovely woman’s hands and by sharp, brilliant eyes that told me that it is better to die than to surrender your human dignity.”54

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A Tramp at Home: Huckleberry Finn, Romantic Friendship, and the Homeless Man What we can say is that Twain portrayed a loving interracial male same-sex bond in all of its dense affectional complexity, with all of its social inscrutability, and portrayed it within the ambiguous and tragic historical circumstances that made it so hard to understand and represent. C H R I S T O P H E R L O O B Y , “  ‘ I N N O C E N T H O M O S E X U A L I T Y ’  ” ( 1 9 9 5 )

The central chapters of Mark Twain’s episodic, meandering narrative entitled Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) revolve around the experiences and relationships of four American males: a white male about fourteen years old called Huckleberry Finn; an African American, middle-aged male called Jim; a white male about thirty years old known as the “duke”; and a white male of about seventy, known variously as the “dauphin” or the “king.” In legal terms Jim is at first a slave, owned by an unmarried white woman named Miss Watson, and later a freedman; the duke and the dauphin are citizens of the United States; and Huckleberry Finn is a minor and later an orphan. None of these individuals has a fixed, permanent abode, and none has steady employment. Jim has a wife and two children, though a marriage between slaves is not legally binding, and before his escape he lived apart from his family. The duke and the dauphin, whatever

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their marital status, are currently not cohabitating with their families either. Despite their differences in age, race, and social background, the four characters have one thing in common beyond being men without women: they are all on the run. Jim is on the run from his owner, Miss Watson; Huck is fleeing his father, Pap Finn, and his guardian, the Widow Douglas; and the duke and the dauphin are on the run from the law, the outraged citizenry of several towns and villages along the Mississippi River, and, for all we know, the forces of compulsory domesticity. If we move from the legal and demographic realm into the more nebulous field of personal relations, we observe that Jim’s primary relationship throughout the narrative is with Huck, while the primary relationship of the duke and the dauphin is with each other. What is interesting about these men and their relationships is that they are hard to define, be it in nineteenth-century or twentieth-century terms. The men are in a liminal state, a kind of identitarian limbo. Their status as individuals is in flux—undefined and, maybe, undefinable. Are Huck and Jim best described as friends or, symbolically, as brothers? Are they like a father and son, as several critics have claimed, or maybe even a mother and son, as Gregg Camfield suggests in noting Jim’s role as moral instructor, his use of “terms of endearment,” and “his self-sacrificing behavior”?1 Is Huck and Jim’s relationship better captured by terms like master and slave, or is Jim most of all like a “mammy . . . clucking over her surrogate child”?2 Or does Jim play Becky Thatcher to Huck’s Tom Sawyer, as Leslie A. Fiedler once scandalously suggested?3 Similar questions may be asked about the identities of the duke and the dauphin, as well as their relationship. Are they primarily confidence men, journeymen printers, or just plain tramps? Are they friends, business partners, lovers? All three, or none of the above? Twain himself described Huck and Jim as “close friends, bosom friends, drawn together by community of misfortune.”4 In 1960, Franklin R. Rogers called their relationship “a curiously complex matter,” while Henry Nash Smith in his famous study of the novel from 1962 described it as a “strange comradeship.”5 Neil Schmitz observed in the early 1970s that “Huck and Jim do that appalling thing—loaf on their raft with perfect equanimity, eat, drink and sleep together, enjoying . . . a horizontal as well as a vertical relationship.”6 In 1994, Laura Skandera-Trombley wrote: “Huck and Jim form a bond that proves stronger than any other relationship in the novel, including Huck’s friendship with Tom.”7 To complete this brief survey of responses to Huck and Jim’s bond: Christopher Looby

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observes, “The interesting thing about Huck and Jim is that their relationship can’t be mapped onto our late-twentieth-century system of affectional relationships.”8 This much is clear: Huck and Jim’s relationship is unlike any other they engage in throughout the course of the novel. Indeed, it is unlike any relationship between an African American and a white American that we know of in any other story of the period. Huckleberry Finn contains the materials for a wide-ranging analysis of the different and competing understandings of nineteenth-century American manhood and the ways in which men might interact with and love each other. In order to understand better the sexual and emotional dynamics of the novel, we must understand the other kinds of writings about men alone and together that Twain was responding to. In this chapter, I will place Twain’s classic novel in two nineteenth-century discursive contexts that have been obscured in the existing criticism: the fiction of romantic friendship and the public debate on the homeless man. Huckleberry Finn may be seen as the reverse of the medal of normative, middle-class masculinity in Victorian America and as a counterpoint to the more conventional, idealized accounts of romantic friendship in the works of several of Twain’s contemporaries and rivals. I will suggest that while Huck and Jim negotiate an uncommon type of romantic friendship across barriers of race and generation, the duke and the dauphin appear as a grotesque parody of high-minded “brotherly love.” By co-opting some of the conventions of romantic friendship fiction, Twain decreased the distance between his underclass characters and middle-class readers. At the same time, by writing and publishing the first novel about tramps during a period of heightened national concern about homeless men, he increased the topicality and popular appeal of what was, in its initial American publication in 1885, a subscription book that needed an element of sensationalism in order to sell.

Huckleberry Finn in History and the History in Huckleberry Finn Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is fertile ground for examining nineteenthcentury ideas about masculinity and male same-sex relations. This is partly due to the fact that Twain ventures into new regions of the American social landscape: in both geographic and racial terms, he goes where no author has gone before. Twain’s narrative representation of several strong male same-sex bonds raises many questions: in a family-bound, marriage-oriented, capitalist society, can there be such a thing as a non134

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instrumental, devoted, intimate friendship between two men? Do these men have to have the same ethnic or racial background, belong to the same class, or be the same age? Do they have to be equally masculine or, indeed, does one part necessarily “feminize” in relation to the other? What does it mean to have an equal friendship, and how long can the relationship last? These are questions that literature can only explore in a partial, tentative, and indirect way; yet fictional narrative remains a vital source of specific historical knowledge when read in tandem with other sources and discourses from the period. Another reason for the importance of Huckleberry Finn to an analysis of nineteenth-century gender and sexual attitudes is that it was written at a time when it was still possible for an American man or boy to have an unselfconscious and shameless crush on a member of his own sex. The novel was first published in England in late 1884, after a gestation period of more than seven years. Twain completed it at a time when fallen, sinful humanity had not yet become fragmented into discrete categories on the basis of their scientifically defined sexual nature—what we now call “sexuality.” In Huckleberry Finn Twain blazed new trails in the representation of male affective relations in the nineteenth-century United States. He achieved this on the basis of a fundamental ambivalence toward the innate goodness of human beings and men’s ability to act honestly, selflessly, and devotedly toward each other. Based on his personal experiences in his native Missouri, on the Mississippi, and in the roughand-tumble pioneer world of Nevada and California, Twain had mixed feelings about men and their relationships. This ambivalence is part and parcel of the whole narrative of Huckleberry Finn, but it is perhaps most clearly seen in the Grangerford-Shepherdson episode, in which the members of two feuding families listen to a sermon on “brotherly love” one day and go on to murder each other the next.9 The symbol of the snake that recurs throughout the narrative is a fitting emblem of the author’s conflicted attitude toward men and their relationships. The snake resonates in Western culture as a symbol of fidelity, but also as a symbol of dangerous knowledge, loss of innocence, poison, betrayal, and the male organ of generation. Like quite a few nineteenth-century American men, Twain dreamed of a world in which relations between males would not always be governed and structured by competitiveness and self-interest. Michael Kimmel observes: “The widening chasm between men produced a deep yearning for the intimacies that had earlier marked men’s lives. . . . Such tenderness and intimacy were now tainted by fears of dependency.”10 According to 135

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Walter Blair: “[Twain] was pulled by the fervent wish that his picture of Huck and Jim represented a way some individuals at least might live. As a result, contrasts and incongruities between Huck and Jim on the raft and the society on the shore . . . embody a theme of great personal significance to the author.”11 Unlike some of his literary contemporaries, though, Twain doubted the vaunted purity of men’s romantic relationships with each other. He was also pessimistic about the future of intimate, committed, noninstrumental male relationships of the kind he had known in his youth. This may be one reason why his stories of manly love are cast in the nostalgic mode of the boy book and the historical novel. Kenneth Lynn noted as far back as 1959: “Evidently, Mark Twain was only capable of imagining Huck and Jim’s relationship as existing in the condition of slavery and under the aspect of flight—as an ‘underground’ affair—although he tried very hard to imagine it otherwise.”12 Huck and Jim, along with the duke and the dauphin, are representative of types of American males who left few records of their lives and loves, which makes it tempting to generalize based on the novel’s characters and action. As mentioned in chapter 1, research based on other types of historical sources is beginning to show that intense same-sex friendships were not the exclusive reserve of men from the middle and upper classes. Yet I do not primarily want to claim that Huckleberry Finn is a sociological or ethnographic case study of the emotional lives of members of subaltern and underrepresented groups in American society, be they African American slaves, poor whites, tramps, or, for that matter, boys. Huckleberry Finn is not a documentary or realistic novel; it does not attempt to give a statistically or demographically representative account of how tramps and interracial couples behaved toward each other in so-called real life or what is now history. As a fictional representation, Twain’s novel makes claims about truth and plausibility that are governed as much by the ideal as by the real, and that are determined as much by the standards of good storytelling and the expectations of its audience as by any determination to give an insider’s account of the emotional lives of slaves, tramps, and pubescent boys. Ultimately, then, Huckleberry Finn tells us more about the people it was written for than about the possible historical counterparts of its fictional characters. During the past thirty years, critics such as Neil Schmitz, Robert Shulman, Steven Mailloux, and Stacey Margolis have focused on the extent to which the action of the novel, though set in the mid- to late 1840s, may be seen primarily as a commentary on the time of its writing and initial reception—that is to say, the mid-1870s to mid-1880s.13 It has often been the case with romantic and historical fiction—be it by Brockden Browne, 136

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Cooper, Hawthorne, Harte, or Twain—that it can tell us more of the time it was written in and for than the time it was written about. However picaresque and outlandish its characters, plot, and setting, Huckleberry Finn is ultimately a bourgeois novel about the hopes and fears of the American middle class in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.

“Brotherly love, and such-like tiresomeness” Though romantic friendship was a historical reality in the lives of many American men during most of the nineteenth century, as amply documented by historians such as E. Anthony Rotundo, John W. Crowley, Karen V. Hansen, and Jonathan Ned Katz, I have suggested that romantic friendship in literature should be regarded primarily as a myth—a guiding myth that authors might use to structure both a narrative and its reception. As a literary topos, romantic friendship has been found in American fiction from its beginnings in the eighteenth century.14 Leslie Fiedler is correct in pointing to works by James Fenimore Cooper, Richard Henry Dana Jr., and Herman Melville as significant precursors for Huckleberry Finn, particularly in their interracial component.15 Yet in 1876, as an intensely competitive, ambitious, and still largely unproved writer when he started on what he hoped would be the great American novel, Mark Twain was surely more concerned with what the other up-and-coming writers were doing than the works of dead, or as good as dead, writers. As we have seen, the 1870s was the decade when “everyone” was writing about manly love. Throughout the decade Twain could read his friends’ and rivals’ paeans to romantic friendship in the pages of the illustrious Atlantic Monthly and elsewhere. In the mid-1870s his closest literary ally, William Dean Howells, had published Private Theatricals (in the Atlantic, which Howells edited), a novel in which the relationship of two young gentlemen summering in New England is threatened by the machinations of a femme fatale figure. Howells’s novel ran partly parallel in the Atlantic with Henry James’s most famous romantic friendship fiction, Roderick Hudson. Twain’s San Francisco friend and short-term secretary, Charles Warren Stoddard, collected a number of racy travel sketches in a volume entitled South-Sea Idyls in 1873, the most famous being “Chumming with a Savage” (originally published in a shorter version in 1869 as “A South-Sea Idyl”), a story about his romantic friendship with a native Hawaiian. Twain’s most important precursor in the romantic friendship field was no doubt his former mentor and lifelong bête noir, Bret Harte, who had 137

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been writing about strong male bonds in pioneer California since the early 1860s. Harte published his most famous story of brotherly love, “Tennessee’s Partner,” in the Overland Monthly in 1869. In this story the partnership of two gold miners survives the temporary absconding of the one with the other’s wife, only to be permanently sundered by the hanging of the least law-abiding of the two. In adopting the literary conventions of romantic friendship fiction to a setting in the West and laboring, rural characters, “Tennessee’s Partner” is an important pretext for Huckleberry Finn. The duke and the dauphin—known only by their nicknames, as are Harte’s male couple—may be seen as a parodic response to what we know Twain considered an overidealized and unrealistic account of male same-sex love in Harte’s story.16 Twain contributed to the romantic friendship fiction of the period not by taking romantic friendship as a given and an end in itself, but rather by testing the limits of its conventions and boundaries. At first glance, a middle-aged, married, African American slave on the run and a homeless boy of Irish extraction would not seem qualified to wear the laurels of romantic friendship.17 Yet for all its novelty of plot, setting, and character, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn contains several features typical of romantic friendship fiction. As in other accounts of this kind, the novel traces the trials and tribulations of a male couple: their disputes, tests of friendship, forced separations, and glorious reunions. The storyline contains further standard features in the delineation of the great sacrifices that Huck and Jim are willing to make for each other, their increasing sense of intimacy, the uniqueness of their bond compared to their dealings with other characters in the story, and their willingness to open their hearts to each other as to no one else. From differing starting points, theirs becomes a joint journey, a common project: “We judged that three nights more would fetch us to Cairo, . . . and that was what we was after”; “We said there warn’t no home like a raft, after all.”18 If we compare Huck and Jim’s relationship to that of Huck and Tom Sawyer, we see how much more equal a friendship the former is than the latter. Huck has what one may describe as an adolescent crush on Tom that mingles hero worship with emotional neediness, similar to David Copperfield’s feelings for James Steerforth in David Copperfield or John Godfrey’s for Alexander Penrose in John Godfrey’s Fortunes. In his loneliness at the beginning of his journey, Huck thinks only of Tom and wishes he were with him.19 Yet, as Michael Davitt Bell points out, it does not take long before Jim replaces Tom in Huck’s thoughts and affections.20 Before Huck encounters Jim on Jackson’s Island, his fondest wish is to be with Tom, be it in heaven or hell; by the time we get to chapter 31, 138

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however, it is Jim whom Huck is willing to go to hell for.21 In the interval, Huck and Jim have been involved in what Kenneth Lynn calls “the most memorable idyll in American literature.”22 Lynn is referring, of course, to chapter 19; but the neglected chapter 9 is almost equally idyllic, as Jim and Huck make a first home for themselves in a cave high up on Jackson’s Island: “ ‘Jim this is nice,’ I says, ‘I wouldn’t want to be nowhere else but here.’ ” Here Jim begins to call Huck “honey” and “chile,” and here Huck first uses the term home, as in “We got home all safe.”23 In a famous essay first published in 1953, Leo Marx observes: “Only on the island, and the raft do they [Huck and Jim] have a chance to practice that idea of brotherhood to which they are devoted.”24 Even in so episodic, adventurous, and picaresque a work as Huckleberry Finn, there is no place like home. Since the early 1970s, a critical tradition has developed that interprets Huck and Jim’s relationship in instrumental rather than idealistic or romantic terms. Critics such as Harold Beaver, James M. Cox, Thomas Weaver and Merline A. Williams, and Forrest G. Robinson see Jim as a trickster figure who is only out to save his own skin. While Robinson’s view of Jim, in particular, is both stimulating and convincing on its own, largely ahistorical terms, he and other like-minded critics cannot adequately explain why Jim loses his temper with Huck after the episode in the fog and have little or nothing to say about the idyllic passages in chapters 9 and 19.25 Beaver, in a quixotic essay from 1974 that appears to have originated the “school of suspicion” approach to Jim, claims that in berating Huck for lying to him “[ Jim] had overreached himself in his nervous tension; and his overheated reaction almost proves his undoing.”26 Yet Beaver cannot or will not venture an explanation of why Jim should risk alienating Huck’s affections at this point. Similarly, in his lengthy discussion of this episode from chapter 15 of the novel, Robinson concludes that “this surrender to authenticity is a grave mistake,” but he does not analyze why Jim “is too stung by the revelation of Huck’s betrayal, his own blindness, and the cruelty of fate, to check the overflow of pain and anger.”27 It is difficult to see how Jim’s violent reaction can be read otherwise than as a genuine feeling of hurt and betrayal based on genuine feelings of affection for Huck. An entire essay might be written about how the reception of the character of Jim reflects the gender ideals of Twain’s critics and their various and widely differing strategies for “making a man” of him. The question is: do we make Jim more fully human and manly by ennobling him, celebrating his selflessness, courage, and sympathy, or by intellectualizing him and showing him to be a shrewd and cunning con man? How do these varying reading strategies reflect the gender ideals and sexual 139

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ideology of their time and place? The heavily freighted history of paternalistic and stereotypical representations of African Americans notwithstanding, we are looking at a highly curious reversal of values when a devious, self-serving, and manipulative individual with “an active impulse to chicanery”28 is considered more complex and fully human than a devoted, selfless, and giving individual. There is no small degree of modern-day heterosexism in the claim that Jim would betray any trust or run any risk to be reunited with his family. If we cannot trust Jim in his avowals of affection and gratitude toward Huck, then his devotion to his family may be false as well, and only an effective means to evoke sympathy for self-serving ends. How can we be sure his wife and children actually exist? If Jim is a lying and conniving character, then how do we determine where truth ends and untruth begins? Due to the novel’s narrative structure, where we have no direct access to Jim’s thoughts, the question of his reliability is a genuine interpretative impasse. Ultimately, Jim’s equivocal status and enigmatic character may be seen to tie in directly with Twain’s basic ambivalence about men’s friendships. In other words, Jim’s friendship with Huck need not be entirely idealistic or purely instrumental. When James Cox points out that “the possibility that Huck will abandon or betray Jim is . . . at the very center of the whole journey,”29 he is indicating an aspect of all true friendships: where there is trust, there is always the danger of betrayal of that trust. Critics have seen chapter 19, in which Huck and Jim find peace and contentment floating down the river on a raft while they wear nothing but their birthday suits, as something unique in American literature. Yet certain aspects of this account are not without precedent. In addition to the representations of interracial male coupling on the high seas in Richard Henry Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast (1840), Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851), and Charles Warren Stoddard’s 1873 short story “In a Transport” (which Roger Austen calls “one of the most lavender pieces of prose published in the nineteenth century”30), we find a partial parallel in Bayard Taylor’s widely read travel narrative A Journey to Central Africa (1854).31 Like the two chapters in Huckleberry Finn, chapter 7 of Central Africa is a peaceful, pastoral interlude in an otherwise hectic, actionpacked book. By the time of his death in 1878, Bayard Taylor was the most famous travel writer in America and a legendary figure. His trip to Egypt in late 1851—particularly the journey down the Nile with his romantic friend, August Bufleb—marked a turning point in his life. Chapter 7 of Central Africa is entitled “Life on the Nile,” and its contents and basic structure

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are revealed by its subheadings: “Independence of Nile Life—The Dahabiyeh—Our Servants—Our Residence—Our Manner of Living—The Climate—The Natives—Costume—Our Sunset Repose—My Friend—A Sensuous Life Defended.”32 Like Twain, Taylor describes the establishment and mode of life of a utopian, all-male domestic household: in his case, the “floating Castle of Indolence”33 is a traditional Egyptian dahabiyeh, ten feet wide by seventy feet long. Taylor describes his and Bufleb’s daily routine of hunting, sketching, sightseeing, reading, dining well, writing letters, and watching the sunsets and passing scenery while smoking a Turkish shebook and enjoying a finjan of coffee. He writes: We are cut off from all communication with the great world of politics, merchandise and usury, and remember it only through the heart, not through the brain. We go ashore in the delicious mornings, breathe the elastic air, and wander through the palm-groves, as happy and care-free as two Adams in a paradise without Eves. It is an episode which will flow forward in the under-currents of our natures through the rest of our lives, soothing and refreshing us whenever it rises to the surface. I do not reproach myself for this passive and sensuous existence. I give myself up to it unreservedly.34

The parallels with Huck Finn’s account in chapter 19 are evident on the level of both structure and content. As Huck succinctly puts it, “It’s lovely to live on a raft.”35 Still, the differences between generic romantic friendship narratives and Huckleberry Finn are as marked as the similarities. Unlike the roving, cruising protagonists of romantic friendship fiction by Dana, Melville, Taylor, Harte, and Stoddard, Huck and Jim are escaping not from marriage and so-called adult responsibility, but from the twin institutions of slavery and patriarchy. This makes their situation fundamentally different from those of the white, middle-class men we encounter in the more typical literature of romantic friendship, with their pipedreams of escaping to a hidden valley or their brief flirtations with irresponsibility in exotic places. In the end, these bourgeois male characters mostly marry, go home, or both. They have a home to go home to. Huck and Jim do not. Huck and Jim are excluded from the cozy warmth of American bourgeois domesticity, and this fact places them in a more precarious but in some respects freer position. The differences also become clear if we compare the style of Huckleberry Finn and the rhetoric of mainstream romantic friendship fiction. This rhetoric is aptly illustrated by the following passage from Bret Harte’s “In the Tules”:

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The advent of the man himself [Captain Jack] was greater to him [Martin Morse] than the causes which brought him there. He [Morse] was as yet quite unconscious of the complete fascination this mysterious stranger held over him, but he found himself shyly pleased with even the slight interest he had displayed in his affairs, and his hand felt yet warm and tingling from his sudden soft but expressive grasp, as if it had been a woman’s. There is a simple intuition of friendship in some lonely, self-abstracted natures that is nearly akin to love at first sight. Even the audaciousness and insolence of this stranger affected Morse as he might have been touched and captivated by the coquetries or imperiousness of some bucolic virgin. And this reserved and shy frontiersman found himself that night sleepless, and hovering with an abashed timidity and consciousness around the wagon that sheltered his guest, as if he had been a very Corydon watching the moonlit couch of some slumbering Amaryllis.36

Here we can identify several important tropes of romantic friendship fiction: the emphasis on the erotics of the hand, the allusion to ancient Greece, and the feminization and infantilization of the men involved in a homoerotic relationship. If some of the sentimental rhetoric and symbolism of typical romantic friendship fiction is missing in Huckleberry Finn, then this is no doubt because Twain’s narrator is an unreliable, unschooled, slangy boy speaking in his own voice, rather than the high-toned, omniscient narrator of most friendship fiction. Through his unique combination of narrative voice and perspective, Twain creates both a paean to and a parody of the romantic friendship tradition.

“Travelling Gentlemen” The homeless man had first been targeted as a social problem with the panic of 1873 and the ensuing “tramp scare” of the late 1870s.37 During this decade there were an estimated six thousand homeless men in the United States,38 which gave rise to a chorus of disapproval from politicians and concerned citizens. In one symptomatic utterance from the New Englander and Yale Review of July 1878, Professor William H. Brewer asked in his title, “What Shall We Do With Our Tramps?” He responded that homeless men were “a dangerous element in our society” and continued in the racist rhetoric of the age: “[Their] attitude towards the thriving and wealthy is one of hostility, very analogous to that of a hardy, prolific, warlike tribe of Indian savages towards a neighboring settlement of peaceful, industrious, civilized whites.” He concluded melodramatically: “This tribe must be throttled, or—it will throttle us!”39 The Honorable 142

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Horatio Seymour was no less hysterical in his article in the December 1878 issue of Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, where he traced the origins of “a class of men known as ‘tramps’ ” to the jails, “those pest-houses of vice.”40 “In the 1880s,” writes Kenneth L. Kusmer, “public fear of tramps was only slightly less intense than it had been during the crisis-ridden seventies.”41 The homeless man would recur as a subject of public debate and inquiry for the remainder of the century, with a new peak of interest in the mid-1890s. By that time, the tramp had become a powerful symbol of both crime and vice, including potentially “perverse” sexual behavior. He also became yet another personification of bourgeois society’s fear of untrammeled male sexuality, joining company with the powerful nineteenth-century symbols of male gender trouble: the sodomite, the masturbator, and the bachelor. “By refusing to domesticate their sexuality,” writes Todd DePastino, “hoboes justified middle-class fears about homeless men’s lack of sexual restraint, fears that had emerged with the tramp crisis of the 1870s.”42 Huckleberry Finn is the first major novel about tramps in the United States. The interest in tramps as a subject for fiction arose roughly parallel with the public debate on the homeless man in the 1870s. Initially, tramps only made their appearance in shorter narrative forms, such as Anna Hoyt’s short story “My Tramp” (1873) and Bret Harte’s sketch “My Friend the Tramp” (1877).43 The first longer narratives about tramps were Lee O. Harris’s The Man Who Tramps and Frank Bellew’s The Tramp Exposed (both 1878).44 There is no suggestion of romantic friendship or sodomy in Bellew’s thirty-two-page, oversize pamphlet. In the full-length novel The Man Who Tramps, on the other hand, there are several significant samesex dynamics, including the idealized bond between the foster father, John Shannon, and the tramp in spe hero, Harry Lawson; and Lawson and the villain of the piece, Jesse “Black” Flynn. Shannon’s wife cannot understand why Shannon favors “that lazy rascal” Harry and attributes his affection to “some reason that you will not tell me.” Harry is picked up by Black Flynn on the road. Flynn wants them to “sleep and stay together” and see how they like each other. His explanation for wanting to join forces with Harry is that he is “young and handsome” and they can help each other,” adding, “I have taken a fancy to you, and do not care to part with you.” Harry reflects that Flynn is putting on a pretense of friendship “for the purpose of winning his confidence in order to bind him to himself by some act which would make him an outlaw. Why Flynn was so anxious to secure him as a follower he could not fully understand.” Flynn has a plan “to get him [Harry] into his power, and bend him to his 143

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will.” Harry frequently rejects Flynn’s offers of friendship and accuses the tramp of ruining him. He ends up hitting Flynn in the face with a rock and making his escape. While Flynn dies in a fire, Harry’s innate virtue and nobility are rewarded in the form of an inheritance and an appropriate partner of the opposite sex, the daughter of his friend and mentor, Dr. Blair. To make the homosocial atmosphere even thicker, his foster father Shannon joins the household. While the narrator assures us that “it is not the province of this story to depict the darker and more damnable deeds of these fiends,” he does a fair job of alluding to them.45 In the nineteenth chapter of Huckleberry Finn, the harmony of Huck and Jim’s idyllic existence on the river is ruptured by the intrusion of a boisterous male couple, the duke and the dauphin. The two tramps’ sudden arrival on the scene engenders a fall, as the artificiality and conventionality of racialized social intercourse and class deference again make their presence felt. In addition to their significant plot function, the duke and the dauphin emerge in the course of Huckleberry Finn as a cunning parody of the myth of romantic friendship and a subtle critique of the idealized representations of it that Twain had been reading throughout the 1860s and 1870s.46 Dirty, dastardly, and derelict, the two characters embody the opposite of brotherly love, and they may also be seen to symbolize the budding anxieties surrounding passionate male samesex bonds. How selfless were these bonds, Twain seems to ask, and how chaste? He seems to be purifying Huck and Jim’s ambiguous relationship by projecting the possible negative associations onto the duke and dauphin, yet the dichotomy between romantic friendship and sexual deviance is not clear cut. If the duke and the dauphin are potential deviants, why not Huck and Jim? What is to prevent us from seeing them as, in tramp lingo, a “jocker” and his “prushun”? One suspects that in the case of the duke and the dauphin their theatrical vows of devotion, their fervent tears, hugs, and hand-claspings are mostly for show. Yet despite the men’s many squabbles, Huck vividly describes how “the tighter they got the lovinger they got” and how they sleep together in the wigwam “a-snoring in each other’s arms.”47 Nearly fifty years later, when the old-time tramp was a dying breed, Nels Anderson wrote in his classic sociological study: “Homosexual practices among homeless men are widespread. They are especially prevalent among men on the road among whom there is a tendency to idealize and justify the practice.” Anderson writes further that among tramps, “homosexual attachments are generally short lived, but they are real while they last.”48

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The earliest explicit linking of homeless men with the emerging discourse on homosexuality that I have located is “Homosexuality among Tramps,” which appears as an appendix to Havelock Ellis and John Addington Symonds’s Sexual Inversion (1897). The author of the article is “Josiah Flynt” Willard (1869–1907), who after spending extended periods of time on the road and in tramp “jungles” emerged toward the end of the nineteenth century, according to DePastino, as “the nation’s premier expert on tramps.”49 Flynt’s series of articles for Harper’s New Monthly and the Century, with titles such as “The Tramp at Home” (1894), “Club Life among Outcasts” (1895), “How Men Become Tramps” (1895), and “The Children of the Road” (1896), were the first ethnographic studies of tramp life. They were collected and published as a book entitled Tramping with Tramps: Studies and Sketches of Vagabond Life in 1899.50 Flynt identifies what he calls “three distinct classes” of “low life”: the “Kids,” the “Natives,” and the “Old Bucks”—that is to say, children between ten and fifteen years of age, middle-aged men, and elderly men.51 In his article “The Children of the Road,” he points out that “the main reason why hungry boys and girls are found upon the road is drunken fathers.” He continues: “In Hoboland the boy’s life may be likened to that of a voluntary slave. He is forced to do exactly what his ‘jocker’ commands, and disobedience, willful or innocent, brings down upon him a most cruel wrath.”52 In September 1895 Flynt published a thinly veiled autobiographical sketch entitled “Jamie the Kid,” where in one dramatic episode in a railway car a “big burly negro” tries to abduct the “Kid” of the title. The first-person narrator writes of his relationship with Jamie: “It was not, however, an entirely one-sided affair, for I was in his service also. I had to protect him from all the hoboes we met, and sometimes it was not so easy as one might think. He was so handsome and clever that it was a temptation to any tramp to ‘snare’ him if he could, and several wanted to buy him outright.”53 In this story, we find the African American male as a sexual threat not to a (white) woman, but to a boy. In his Sexual Inversion essay, Flynt estimated that every tenth homeless man practiced “unnatural intercourse” in the form of intercrural or anal sex.54 Though the association of the tramp with same-sex sexual deviancy appears not to have been part of the printed public discourse on homeless men in the 1880s, that is not to say there was no awareness of the sexual proclivities of certain “men without women.” Whatever his own personal experience of sex with men, Twain would have had ample opportunity to acquaint himself secondhand with the phenomenon that would soon be known as “homosexuality.”55

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In addition to his descriptions of physical intimacy between the duke and the dauphin, it is significant that Twain has the two men put on a strange play called “The Royal Nonesuch,” which women and children are not allowed to watch. Walter Blair suggests that what the dauphin performs with his nude body—painted in something we might anachronistically describe as resembling a gay pride flag—may have been “a burlesque phallic dance.”56 In this episode Twain comes closest to suggesting the erotic dimension of the southwestern tradition, a subject he customarily eschewed in his public writings.57 Wallace Graves has shown that the episode of “The Royal Nonesuch” was called “The Burning Shame” in the manuscript of the novel, and only altered shortly before publication. The story on which the episode was based, which Twain first heard in Jim Gillis and Dick Stoker’s cabin in 1865, may have involved a naked man coming onstage on all fours with his partner sticking a candle in his posterior and lighting it.58 As with the symbol of the snake, there is ambiguity in the symbolic significance of nudity in Huckleberry Finn. What is idyllic and natural for Jim and Huck alone on the raft is rendered grotesque and unnatural when put onstage before an all-male audience.59

For the Boys? As we have seen, Twain was topical in hitherto unrecognized ways in focusing on both romantic friendship and homeless men in his great American novel. Hamlin Hill noted in a 1963 essay that Twain, in choosing to publish Huckleberry Finn as a subscription book, faced the challenge of “enticing the common man, the masses, the rural, semiliterate, usually Midwestern customer who had rarely bought a book before.” Twain’s solution, Hill claims, was to include topical material, to alternate humorous and informative writing, to structure the narrative in an anecdotal and picaresque pattern, and to throw in generous dollops of the macabre, the grotesque, and the morbid. Yet he notes that in addition to popular success, Twain also yearned for the approval of his peers—men like James, Howells, Harte, and Thomas Bailey Aldrich.60 By both incorporating the conventions of romantic friendship fiction and alluding to the sensational topic of the homeless man, Twain might well hope to appeal to low-, middle-, and high-brow readers. Gregg Camfield writes: “For sentimental literature to promote moral change it must re-create in the reader’s mind a sense of psychic reality. Such responses depend on shared association and sympathy.”61 One structural means to obtain such an association and sympathy for Twain’s 146

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lower-class characters from his middle-class readers would be through incorporating elements of the cultural script of male romantic friendship. To some of the more genteel and literate members of the novel’s original audience, Jim and Huck’s romantic friendship would have rendered them heroic in itself and would have justified their representation—despite their many disqualifying characteristics—as the heroes of a major American epic. From this point of view, their friendship ennobles them. It is as if their race, class, and ethnicity, as well as their poverty, ignorance, cunning, and mendacity, all fall away, allowing them to shine forth in the edifying light of their common humanity and devotion to the highest ideals of male same-sex bonding. Yet, according to Camfield, this was a precarious strategy, as “such sentimental reactions are easily upset by conflicting associations and by anything that might impede sympathy.”62 Obviously not all readers (including most famously the Concord Library Committee) responded equally well to Twain’s double-edged representation of strong same-sex bonds. The Springfield Daily Republican accused Twain of “gross trifling with every fine feeling,” which surely also included his unconventional depictions of male friendship. And among the “subjects dignified by age” that, according to the Boston Daily Advertiser Twain and his followers apparently had “cast the slimy trail of the vulgar humorist” over, we may surely count the biblically inspired love “passing the love of women.”63 Paradoxical though it might seem today, Twain’s overt focus on brotherly love was a way to broaden the appeal of this androcentric narrative to include female readers.64 There is ample evidence that many nineteenthcentury middle-class women approved of men’s love for each other and were not threatened by it in life or literature. Emily Sellwood, for example, resumed her engagement with Alfred Tennyson after having read his In Memoriam (1850).65 The American actress Clara Morris related in her autobiography that in order to cry on cue when performing in the mid-1870s, she had thought of “poor old Tennessee’s partner as he buried his worthless dead.”66 Lilian Woodman Aldrich spent more than twenty years of her married life in a “three-cornered marriage” with her husband, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, and the Massachusetts state senator and industrialist Henry L. Pierce. In Prue and I (1856), George William Curtis’s popular collection of sketches on the mundane charms of bourgeois married life, the narrator relates how his wife, Prue, likes nothing better than to hear her husband tell of his “always beautiful” male cousin the curate.67 As I have noted, female writers as different as Augusta Evans and Elizabeth Stoddard wrote novels where male romantic friendship figured conspicuously. 147

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The End of Something Twain concluded The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) with these words: “When one writes a novel about grown people, he knows exactly where to stop—that is, with a marriage; but when he writes of juveniles, he must stop where he best can.”68 The problems that Twain would encounter in concluding Huckleberry Finn were even more serious than they had been in Tom Sawyer. Discussions of the ending constitute the locus classicus of criticism of Huckleberry Finn and critics have found fault with the “Evasion” episode, which concludes the story. At the risk of his life, Jim plays along with Tom Sawyer’s outrageous schemes, and Huck reverts to the role of a more or less willing accomplice to Tom’s shenanigans. Twain’s dilemma in resolving his plot is at least partly due to the lack of a cross-sex romantic interest in the story. As we saw in chapter 2, in romantic friendship fiction two men seldom live happily ever after (at least not together). Harte’s story “Uncle Jim and Uncle Billy” (1897) is a rare exception, but it is set in pioneer California, where male partnerships in both the home and the workplace had been known since the gold rush days. Huckleberry Finn is one of the relatively few major American novels of the nineteenth century that does not end with the marriage or death of any of the main characters.69 The ending is conventional enough, though, in that vice is punished and virtue rewarded. The duke and the dauphin are not only ridden on a rail, but tarred and feathered to boot. We know they have been guilty of theft, forgery, and quackery of various kinds, yet the punishment they receive was also used for persons convicted of sexual misconduct. In his celebrated jeremiad in chapter 22 of Huckleberry Finn, Colonel Sherburn mocks the crowd for tarring and feathering “poor friendless cast-out women.”70 Christopher Looby notes that in 1865 a Confederate soldier was ridden on a rail for sleeping with a black man.71 Maybe the duke and the dauphin have been found guilty of “crimes against nature,” too, in addition to their pecuniary infractions. Although Jim has a vaguely formulated plan to buy back his wife and children after escaping successfully to the North, the actual narrative takes a different direction both geographically and plotwise. Jim is sidetracked from his goal of securing freedom for himself and his family by the responsibility he feels toward another person close to his heart— namely Huck. While some critics have suggested that Jim keeps Pap’s death a secret from Huck purely in the spirit of self-preservation,72 Jim’s action may equally be explained by his fear of losing Huck’s companionship and affection: with Pap dead, Huck might be tempted to return to 148

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St. Petersburg. Huck’s collaboration in Tom’s outlandish schemes might in turn be explained by Huck’s fear that Jim’s successful escape will mean their permanent separation, as Kenneth Lynn has suggested.73 Jim may well have opted to try to save Tom’s life not out of any particular love for Tom, but rather out of his love for Huck, whom he knows dotes on Tom. Laurence B. Holland noted in 1979 that Jim and Huck have reached a new level in their relationship by the end of the story. They reinforce their bond in making the mutual decision to go for a doctor, knowing all the while what dire consequences this decision may have for their future.74 Thus, within the conventions of romantic friendship fiction, the ending is rendered cohesive with what has gone before through Huck and Jim’s increasing devotion to each other. This devotion culminates, on the one hand, with Huck’s determination to risk going to hell for Jim’s sake and, on the other hand, with Jim’s determination to stay with Huck and the wounded Tom Sawyer at the risk of being captured. In accordance with the myth of romantic friendship, Huck and Jim must see things through together until the day they can stand face to face, freed of their mental and physical shackles. Ironically, that is also the day they likely must part. The only way in which Huck and Jim might remain together would be by remaining what they have already unwittingly become: tramps.

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The Other Man: Homofiliation, Marriage, and A Hazard of New Fortunes We must not look for the expression of statistical truth about desire in a novelistic work. RENÉ GIRARD, DECEIT, DESIRE, AND THE NOVEL (1976)

Howells seems to recognize that the sexual currents in his love triangles may flow in any direction. JOHN W. CROWLEY, THE BLACK HEART’S TRUTH (1985)

If we want to understand the history of what during the course of the nineteenth century came to be known as sexuality, we should turn to the fiction of the period. This is not as a last resort or for lack of other, more traditional historical sources, but because the fictional laboratory is the place where many Victorian Americans, both as readers and as writers, explored the gender- and sex-related questions that were most important to them. Novels and stories were the types of texts many American men and women were reading to discover what it meant to be a man and a woman at this time. As Basil March says, novelists “have the charge of people’s thinking, nowadays.”1 Throughout this work, I have asked what the history of gender and sexuality in the nineteenth-century United States would look like if based primarily, or even exclusively, 150

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on literary sources. What unique and particular insights does literature provide into the realm of ideas about gender, sex(uality), and the affective life? Is it a question primarily of recovering in fictional form the patterns of ideas from other discursive realms or the conventions, behaviors, and norms from so-called real life, as they are mirrored more or less faithfully in fiction? Or, rather, is it necessary to approach the literary work with as few preconceived ideas about the historical realities of the period as possible, so as better to perceive the shaping of reality in the individual texts themselves? What, indeed, does it mean to seek the truth about sex through the medium of a lie? In trying to respond to these questions one last time, I have decided to pay a more extended visit to the fictional world of the “Dean of American Letters,” William Dean Howells. Howells’s novels and the attitudes and actions of his narrators and characters may be legitimately related to various aspects of nineteenth-century sexual ideology.2 One might well want to discuss the connection between Howells’s explicit literary program, his novels, and Victorian sexual ideology, what one might call the “sexuality of realism,” as a parallel to and development of the work by Michael Davitt Bell, Alfred Habegger, and others on the gender of realism.3 Briefly, it might be argued not only that Howells’s quasi aesthetics are geared to making a man of him, as Bell has convincingly argued, but that his literary project in its entirety is aimed at proving itself what Henry Adams hoped for in his review of Their Wedding Journey in 1872: “a valuable assistant to American civilization.”4 Clearly, the American realist novel, as written by Howells and others, was part of an ongoing, bourgeois project of moral self-improvement. Howells’s literary project was a normative, regulative, civilizing one, yet tinged with self-doubt, disillusionment, and internal contradictions.5 However true it may be that Howells was “an extraordinarily faithful reflector of America’s sexual arrangements,”6 he was equally, if not even more so, a forceful creator of his own sexual ideology in and through fictional narrative. What I want to attempt, once again, is a queer reading of a Victorian American novel. Throughout this study, I’ve been trying to develop an approach that does not seek primarily to assimilate the characters and story lines into recognizable nineteenth-century sexual ideologies or cultural self-understandings—or, for that matter, twentiethcentury ones. Rather, I’ve sought to defamiliarize the ostensibly natural, logical, and familiar rituals and codes of behavior between and within the sexes as they are represented in fictional narrative. Leaving aside Howells’s psychosexual nature and life history, then, his conscious and unconscious motivations, his artistic credo—in sum, his biography and 151

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theory—let us ask: what internal logics, patterns, dynamics, structures make themselves felt in Howells’s narratives?

Homofiliation and the Other Man The primary relationship in the novels of William Dean Howells is fre­quently a relationship between two men rather than a relationship be­­tween a man and a woman. This bond may be one of friendship, partnership, mentorship, mutual admiration, or even unrequited love. It may include an erotic or, for that matter, instrumental element, but it is always mutual, intimate, and committed. It shapes both character and behavior. I will refer to this type of personal relationship, as it forms and develops in the course of a narrative, as homofiliation. In Howells’s fictional world, two men’s emotional bond, particularly if one or both of them are unmarried, impinges on, influences, in fact mediates their relations with women. Men invest in and give value to other men, and that in turn gives them value in the eyes of women. Women are valued or devalued in the eyes of suitors and potential husbands primarily not through what they are in themselves, but through what they are to others, particularly other men in their lives. Howells himself makes this explicit when he observes in Their Wedding Journey that “once secure of a woman’s love,” a man “is ordinarily more affected by her compassion and tenderness for other objects than by her feelings towards himself. He likes well enough to think, ‘She loves,’ but still better, ‘How kind and good she is!’ ”7 Howells’s many love triangles seldom conform to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s well-known, Girardian-inspired scheme, where “the bond that links the two rivals is as intense and potent as the bond that links either of the rivals to the beloved.”8 Typically in Howells, the men are not rivals, as only one of them is a suitor or lover. The second man—whom I will refer to as the “other man”—is either the first man’s friend, with no romantic interest in the woman in question, or the woman’s father, brother, or other male relation. The chief limitation of Sedgwick’s theoretical model is, ironically, its heterocentricity: its assumption that the male-female relationship is always at the base, as it were, of the triangle. In Howells, the bond between the two men is primary and usually predates any romantic ties with a woman. The men’s love for each other is generative of their love of the third party—be it male or female—rather than a byproduct of their initial, mutual love for the same woman. In at least one case of homofiliation in Howells’s fiction, the “other man” is 152

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dead before the narrative opens. Walter Libby in Doctor Breen’s Practice (1881) observes that his love interest, Grace Breen, has the same eyes as his dead friend.9 In analyzing the mediation of love and desire in Howells’s novels, we need also to account for how the woman’s feelings for one or both of the men in the triangle are influenced by the men’s relationship to each other. In the Howells novel, the heroine stakes both her future happiness and her economic security—indeed the entire development of her personality, if we are to believe Sidney Bremer10—on her choice of husband. In such a context, the quality of her suitor’s relationships with one or more other men often proves a significant index of his character and a better criterion for selecting a spouse than physical attractiveness or socioeconomic status. Homofiliation between two men, then, is a basic structural dynamic in Howells’s fiction and may even be said in many cases to be a prerequisite for or constitutive of love and marriage. Homofiliation is like a circle in the water. To focus my inquiry and to demonstrate more specifically how literary texts can modify and augment our understanding of sexual ideology, behaviors, and attitudes, I will concentrate on one significant example. The text I have chosen is A Hazard of New Fortunes from 1890, Howells’s magnum opus and his best stab at writing the great American novel. While Howells wrote nearly all his novels about romance and family life in the American middle class, Hazard was to be the exception to the rule: the novel where he was finally able to move on, as he said himself, to “issues nobler and larger than those of the love-affairs common to fiction.”11 What indeed, we may ask, are those “nobler and larger” issues? Might one of them be friendship between men? That seems likely. In the most important statement of his artistic credo, Criticism and Fiction (1891), Howells included the “passion of friendship” among the “several other passions” he thought “have a greater part in the drama of life than the passion of love.”12 Ironically, Howells’s loose and baggy monster about the big city, social upheaval, and capitalist economics is also arguably his most wide-ranging and innovative analysis of the link between friendship and marriage in the late nineteenth-century United States.

A Business Romance With A Hazard of New Fortunes, Howells goes some way toward writing the “dis-engaging” novel that his recurring antihero, Basil March, can only dream of.13 Significant both in the Howells canon and among 153

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nineteenth-century novels in general for its near absence of traditional closure in marriage, Hazard contains numerous and varied examples of homofiliation. Both of the triangular patterns I have briefly outlined— where the man’s love for a woman is mediated by another man and where the woman’s love for a man is mediated by another man—have a significant function in the novel’s plot. Before we can examine the relations between men and women, though, we need to consider some of the relationships between men in A Hazard of New Fortunes. In support of my opening claim about the significance of men’s samesex relationships in the Howells novel compared to men’s relationships with women, I would present as Exhibit A Fulkerson and Basil March. The March-Fulkerson relationship is the most passionate, dramatic, and fulfilling one in A Hazard of New Fortunes. Certainly, Basil is still very much married to the excellent Isabel, but as far as the plot is concerned, his relationship with Fulkerson generates far more narrative incident and interest than does his relationship with Isabel. You will recall that Fulkerson and Basil March met on the Marches’ wedding journey in 1870.14 Back then, it was discovered that Fulkerson carried Basil’s poems around in his pocket. The narrator records that the poems “formed an immediate bond of union between the men . . . , and this gave a pretty color of romance to their acquaintance.”15 Seventeen fictional years later, Fulkerson reappears in Basil March’s life in A Hazard of New Fortunes.16 In the trials and tribulations, the twists and turns of their renewed relationship, there is a striking analogy with cross-sex courtship and marriage. March is wooed and won in the initial chapters of the novel—the consummation of the March-Fulkerson liaison being, of course, their partnership in the journal Every Other Week, which Fulkerson says he won’t launch without March taking hold of it as editor. We are invited to view their relationship in domestic terms. Fulkerson, for example, says he felt “at home” with Basil, “thoroughly domesticated,” before a word had passed between them. He emphasizes how comfortable they will be in their New York editorial offices, which are on the floor below his own “bachelor’s hall,” and where he hopes March will spend a lot of time. The two men’s business part­ nership leads to a number of quasi-domestic squabbles that constitute one major strand of the action. Basil wonders whether he has formed an alliance with a man who is worthy of him and whether Fulkerson is being faithful. As in a marriage, Basil makes himself economically dependent on Fulkerson, and his possibilities for “divorce” will depend on what other potential partners he can find in the business world. De­

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spite their differences and conflicts, by the end of the novel Basil feels “bound to Mr. Fulkerson in every way,” which is fittingly symbolized by the waltz they perform on taking over Every Other Week from Mr. Dryfoos.17 A Hazard of New Fortunes is the first full-scale novel in which Basil and Isabel March appear. It is also the one among the ten March narratives in which Howells gives Basil the most active role in the plot, so much so that he is arguably the protagonist of the novel. Customarily, in the third-person narratives with Basil and Isabel as the chief focalizers of the action, they take over some of the narrative functions of the traditional Victorian omniscient narrator, particularly his power to judge and describe the characters and generalize about the events in the story. As “wise and sometimes cynical choric moralists,”18 Howells interposes the Marches between the reader and the other characters. In Hazard, though, Basil is too involved to be able to maintain his customary stance of quasi-objective observer. Isabel, on the other hand, is again cast in the role of his confidante and is, in this case, the chief witness to his business romance with Fulkerson. Thus, if Basil seems considerably more conflicted about Fulkerson than vice versa—he even calls him a charlatan at one point—this is because we only get his side of the story.19 We do not have access to Fulkerson’s nonverbalized thoughts about Basil, nor can we ever fully know what motivates his actions. Fulkerson’s friendship with March puts him in tandem, too, with Isabel March. As we shall see more examples of later, the relationship between the two men substantially affects the relationship between one of the men and the woman with whom he is also emotionally involved. In this case, the Marches’ marriage bond is reinforced not only by Fulkerson’s evident admiration for Basil, but also by his seeming betrayals of his faith in his partner. At one critical juncture, Isabel concludes: “Now I’m with you, Basil, every time, as that horrid little Fulkerson says. . . . It’s the end of Mr. Fulkerson, as far as I’m concerned.”20 Of course, it isn’t. In fact, the narrative insists repeatedly that Fulkerson is Isabel’s favorite and shows how much she admires him for admiring her husband: “Mrs. March . . . welcomed Fulkerson with a grateful sense of his admiration for her husband.” Later she tells her husband that “his attitude toward you, Basil, is so beautiful always—so respectful,” and she finds it “very sweet to see how really fond of you he is.”21 In fact, one might claim that Isabel is conducting a romance with Fulkerson at one remove, recognizing of course that the use of the term romance here, as elsewhere in this chapter, is mainly metaphorical.

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A Small Family Business Basil describes the group Fulkerson has brought together to create Every Other Week as follows: “We’re a queer lot, down there, Isabel—perfect menagerie. If it hadn’t been that Fulkerson got us together, and really seems to know what he did it for, I should say he was the oddest stick among us.”22 Fulkerson, as one reviewer noted, “the ‘organizer,’ the life and soul of the enterprise, and the life, though not the soul, of the story,”23 is, not surprisingly, also the most intensely homofiliated character. His strong feelings for other men are frequently described. He “cottons to” March for being a western man and warms toward him for being broad in his sympathies; he calls him a brother and a spiritual twin; he says he has liked March and wanted him ever since their first meeting. Another man Fulkerson wants is the artist and soon-to-be art director of Every Other Week, Angus Beaton. Fulkerson has strong but mixed feelings about this hedonist and aesthete, wanting both to kick him and to “flatter him up.” Furthermore, Basil March feels that Fulkerson has made a “fetich” of old Mr. Dryfoos, their investor. Fulkerson’s relationship with the German translator and Every Other Week contributor, Lindau, must also be mentioned here. In a reconciliation scene that sounds like a parody of romantic friendship, Fulkerson and Lindau literally kiss and make up. “We wept on each other’s necks,” Fulkerson tells Basil: “Dogged if he didn’t kiss me before I knew what he was up to.”24 Ironically, this is the only kiss in the novel. In A Hazard of New Fortunes, business relations are always threatening to become romantic and personal, while romance, at least in its married guise, takes on the aspect of a business. When Basil has broken with Fulkerson over the Lindau affair, he realizes on his way homeward that “as every hireling must, no matter how skillfully or gracefully the tie is contrived for his wearing . . . he belongs to another, whose will is his law.”25 This is as apt a description of Basil’s tie to Isabel as to Dryfoos. Howells has a passage in Their Wedding Journey that symbolizes the intermingling of the private and the public sphere, which is such a pronounced aspect of Hazard. He writes in connection with the character Clara Williams, a reformer and precursor of Clara Kingsbury: “She little knows what we poor fellows have to suffer, and how often we break down in business hours, and sob upon one another’s necks.”26 It is not just a case, though, of young male lovers emoting in the workplace. In relation to The Rise of Silas Lapham, Graham Thompson has noted, “The language of business is a coded language in which men talk to one another about their most intimate feelings.”27 In A Hazard of New Fortunes, relations be156

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tween male business partners and coworkers take on a distinctly domestic cast. We have already observed the marital parallels in Fulkerson and Basil March’s relationship. In a similar vein, Mr. Dryfoos plays the role of pater familias not only in his own family, but in relation to Fulkerson and to his symbolic son-in-law, Basil, who chafes under the restrictions of the relationship. Isabel March, in turn, has as much a quasi-maternal as a romantic relationship to her husband. At this stage in their married life, they “get along without kissing” and have separate bedrooms.28 Dryfoos’s son Conrad, then, becomes a sort of adopted brother to Basil and Fulkerson. Dryfoos is himself given to homofiliation, as we are told that he “took a fancy to” a land agent, who became his confidant. By the end of the novel, in yet another homofilial turn of events, Fulkerson says to March of Dryfoos, “I believe you’re his fancy! . . . He seemed to take a kind of shine to you from the day you wouldn’t turn off old Lindau; he did indeed.”29 We observe here a somewhat different dynamic from what we’ve seen thus far, in which one man’s friendship with and loyalty to another makes a friend and admirer of a third man. Lindau, as Fulkerson points out, is the friend of Basil’s youth.30 Their relationship is what I would call a residual romantic friendship. It illustrates perfectly Howells’s belief, described by John W. Crowley, that “ ‘romantic friendship’ could be experienced only in parodic form, once he had become a man.”31 After Lindau’s death, March reflects that “the man with whom his youth had been associated in a poetic friendship had not actually re-entered the region of his affection to the same degree, or in any like degree. The changed conditions forbade that.”32 Yet Basil is willing to risk his family’s financial security to defend his own and Lindau’s honor. Isabel has “the natural misgiving concerning the friends of her husband’s youth that all wives have,” and warns Basil several times not to “get mixed up with him too much,” as Basil is “so apt to be carried away by [his] impulses.”33 Basil’s loyalty to his old friend is an even more serious source of conflict in his relationship with his new friend, Fulkerson. In a scene between them, reminiscent of a lovers’ quarrel and ensuing from Dryfoos’s insistence that Lindau be let go, March offers his resignation and storms out of the editorial offices in high dudgeon with the parting words: “I don’t think we’ve understood each other exactly, Mr. Fulkerson, . . . perhaps we never can; but I’ll leave you to think it out.”34 At the climax of the novel, when Lindau is wounded in the riot, the narrator relates: “March would have liked to run; he thought how his wife had implored him to keep away from the rioting; but he could not have left Lindau lying there if he would. Something stronger than his will 157

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drew him to the spot.” Until Lindau dies, Basil goes to visit him every day at the hospital: “He knew that if he were in Lindau’s place Lindau would never have left his side if he could have helped it.”35 In yet another example of the permutations of homofiliation, we find a young doctor at the hospital “who had come to feel a personal interest in March’s interest in Lindau.”36 Thus, manly love not only draws women to men, as we shall soon see, but also attracts other men.37 All the same-sex relationships I have outlined may in turn be seen as symbolic of an ideology in the period stressing the “brotherhood of man,” whether it be Christian-, socialist-, or Christian-socialist-inspired. The many homofiliated men in Hazard are obviously meant, too, as a demonstration of Howells’s particular and familiar doctrine of complicity.38 The novel as a whole illustrates his belief that art should “make [men] know one another better, that they may be all humbled and strengthened with a sense of their fraternity.”39 The concept of homofiliation may, indeed, be seen to extend beyond the fictional diegesis to the author himself, who has explicitly avowed his “tenderness” and “kindness” for two of the male characters in particular, Lindau and Fulkerson. “I suffered,” he admits, “more things than I commonly allow myself to suffer in the adverse fate of my characters.”40 Finally, the relationship of homofiliation also extends to the author’s male-identified readers. Price McMurray has recently made the intriguing suggestion that “Howells tended to imagine his vocation in terms of Romantic friendship.”41 We know several of Howells’s friends and contemporaries responded to the call. James Russell Lowell called Fulkerson “my darling” in a letter to Howells. Henry James waxed eloquently over several pages, writing, “The life, the truth, the light, the heat, the breadth & depth & thickness of the Hazard, are absolutely admirable.”42 This being said, I will limit the remainder of my discussion to text-internal dynamics.

His Heart Belongs to Daddy One man I have not yet mentioned is Colonel Woodburn, a southern contributor to Every Other Week, who becomes “very companionable with the young fellows”43 at Mr. Dryfoos’s infamous dinner party. He interests me as a good example of the other man, in this case in a triangular relationship with his daughter Madison and with the ubiquitous Fulkerson. According to George N. Bennett, the colonel has “no significant dramatic

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function.” Bennett adds that “the romance and ultimate marriage of his daughter to Fulkerson . . . is an irrelevance.”44 To modern-day readers, at least, the courtship seems impromptu when viewed from both the bride’s and the groom’s point of view. Beyond Fulkerson noting that Woodburn’s daughter is “an awfully pretty girl,” we get little narrative preparation for the proposal a hundred pages later.45 If, as Basil March points out, Fulkerson is “such an impartial admirer of the whole sex that you can’t think of his liking one more than another,” we may well ask what makes him choose Madison Woodburn over any other woman, including Mrs. Mandel, say, or Alma Leighton. Despite seeming a confirmed bachelor, why does he ultimately prove Basil right in his feeling that Fulkerson is “domesticable, conjugable at heart”? Basil says to Isabel that he “has waited for him to speak,” as if he is putting himself in Madison’s place. Speak to whom, one wonders—to Basil? From the opposite angle, what makes Miss Woodburn so convinced that “the pure advertising essence” Fulkerson is good husband material? How do we explain what even Fulkerson considers the “incredible accident of her preference of him over other men”?46 Here my theory of the mediation of what we would call heterosexual relationships via men’s relationships with each other can serve to demonstrate that a male-female romantic bond—however unmotivated and unexpected it may appear to the modern reader—is in fact in keeping with the internal logic of the Howells novel. For the Fulkerson–Madison Woodburn connection must be seen in tandem with two cases of homofiliation in the novel, which ultimately precipitate the man and woman into each other’s arms: on the one hand, the relationship of admiration between Fulkerson and Colonel Woodburn; on the other, the significant friendship of Fulkerson and Basil March. In an essay on The Rise of Silas Lapham, Graham Thompson has suggested that “romance plots need to be considered in the context of wider social relationships.” He follows up on this assertion with a striking analysis of the triangulation of desire between Tom Corey, Penelope Lapham, and Silas Lapham, in which he suggests that “far from wanting him for his daughters, Lapham wants Tom for himself.” Furthermore, Thompson shows that “far from being drawn to Lapham’s daughters—Penelope and Irene—it is Lapham who attracts Tom, and this is evident in the way the romantic plot between Tom and Penelope develops”: Until this moment when he declares his love for Penelope there is nothing in the text which in any way positions Tom’s desire in relation to her. It is only in retrospect that

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incidents can be read to produce this positioning of desire. This retrospective reading is one which not only assumes but actually produces as it assumes the naturalness and predictability of the heterosexual romance.47

This type of dynamic between father, daughter, and a younger man has a similar role to play in the subplot of Fulkerson’s unexpected courtship of Madison Woodburn, what Amy Kaplan has described as a marriage without a history or a context.48 In a recent article, Andrew Rennick observes that “as Madison mediates the relationship between her father and Fulkerson, we also find the colonel and his work mediating the marriage plot between Fulkerson and Madison.”49 When Fulkerson evokes the homey atmosphere at the Leightons’ for Basil, the colonel, “splendid old fellow,” is right at the heart of it smoking his cigar. Madison is not even mentioned by name. By marrying her, though, Fulkerson will be able to make a home not just with a young attractive woman, but with her fascinating father as well. To make sure we get the point, Howells has Basil remark to Fulkerson that he is “more father-in-lawed” than engaged.50 The Fulkerson-Woodburn romance is sealed not just by the connection between Fulkerson and the colonel, but by Fulkerson’s friendship with Basil March. It is the moment of truth in their relationship, when Fulkerson must decide whether to side with Basil or with Dryfoos, that proves him a worthy suitor with son-in-law potential. By being, in Madison’s words, “a pofect Bahyard in friendship,” by being “for March, every time”51 and taking his side in the conflict with Dryfoos over Lindau, Fulkerson goes from bachelor to fiancé in one brief, climactic afternoon. Fulkerson’s marriage to Madison Woodburn makes it possible for him and Basil to continue their relationship on a more equal footing. This is symbolized by the fact that the Fulkersons go on the same wedding journey as the Marches once did, where March and Fulkerson first met. We are told in the epilogue that “they have continued very good friends, and their wives are almost without the rivalry that usually embitters the wives of partners.”52 This is hardly surprising, considering that the bond between the two men has strengthened one marriage and created a basis for the other. Furthermore, in the opening chapter of Their Silver Wedding Journey, we learn that Fulkerson and March’s son, Tom, who has joined the “family firm,” “liked each other, and worked into each other’s hands as cordially and aptly as Fulkerson and March had ever done.”53 In this example of intergenerational, hereditary homofiliation, two men are disposed to like each other through the relationship to a third man, who in this case is the old friend of one and the father of the other.

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THE OTHER MAN

Beatin’ Beaton In analyzing the interlocking dynamics of homofiliation and what we would call heterosexual love in A Hazard of New Fortunes, we find interesting parallels and contrasts to the Fulkerson-Woodburn romance and, for that matter, the Fulkerson-March triangle, in Angus Beaton’s various relationships with men and with women. First it must be noted that Hazard contains no good examples of a love triangle in which two men’s competition for the same woman creates a love-hate relationship between the men that is as strong as either of their bonds with the woman. Beaton has no rival or, more precisely, perceives of no rival for the affections of Alma Leighton, Christine Dryfoos, or Margaret Vance. Indeed, the lack of a happy consummation to these more or less explicit love affairs may be at least partly put down to the absence of a competing interest from another man. Even more than that, though, the affairs fail to lead to marriage because of the absence of homofiliation—that is, a relationship of sympathy, affection, or love between Beaton and one or more of these women’s male family members. While Alma’s lack of male “friends” makes her attainment of independence easier, it means that she has no male family members to mediate Beaton’s love. Neither does Miss Vance. Christine, of course, has both a father and a brother, but Beaton’s failing “to find any ground of sympathy”54 with Mr. Dryfoos will ultimately rule her out as good wife material, however much Beaton likes to fantasize about marrying her and compelling her father to support them.55 Beaton can’t love Christine’s brother either, because Conrad paradoxically has no room for the love of an individual man in his all-encompassing love of mankind. The blatantly erotic attraction between the pagan, Greek, heathenish and hedonist Beaton and “that wild animal” Christine56 does not develop into what the Victorians called “true love,” because there is no man to invest Christine with (more than erotic) interest in Beaton’s eyes; nor is there any man to invest Beaton with (more than erotic) interest in Christine’s eyes. In other words, had Beaton been able to love Christine’s father or brother, he might also have loved her. Had another man been able to love Beaton or he another man, even women like Alma Leighton and Margaret Vance might have loved him. Women like him, by all means, but that does not mean they regard him as husband material. Symptomatically, Alma Leighton would rather be his friend than his spouse.57 In this connection, Fulkerson’s “sneaking fondness” for Beaton, which only Madison Woodburn among the women is

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aware of, cannot work to his advantage. Fulkerson’s “ideal of friendship” is first suggested by Beaton in conversation with Madison, though his words may be ironic. He thus contributes indirectly to the development of the Fulkerson-Woodburn romance.58 Beaton himself longs for sympathy from women, but is largely disqualified from getting it on a lasting basis due to his lack of sympathy with and from men. As he says himself early on: “I haven’t any luck with men; I don’t get on with them; I’m not popular.”59 In fact, several of the other male characters feel downright aggressive toward him. According to Fulkerson, “The impulse to destroy Beaton is something that everybody has to struggle against, at the start”; he claims to be “about the only man of my sex who doesn’t thirst for Beaton’s blood most of the time.”60 In the homosocial society Howells describes, where men are often dependent on each other for professional advancement, marrying such an unpopular man would be a risky business indeed.61 The lack of homofiliative relations surrounding a male-female couple may explain why in Howells’s fiction “the ring does not always follow the kiss.”62 Kenneth Eble observes that “with one exception (April Hopes), in the thirty-four novels he wrote, a certain sign that a love affair will not lead to a happy marriage is the pre-marital kiss which the suitor forces or entreats from the pursued.”63 Thus, the premarital kiss is not itself the cause of the rupture, but rather symbolic of a lack of the necessary social support for the relationship to develop into a marital union. Howells is not punishing his characters for giving way to a physical impulse, but subtly suggesting that a solid marriage is not built primarily on physical attrac­ tion. In the case of Hazard, where there are no kisses between male and female lovers, the ring doesn’t follow the passionate clawing either.64 Ultimately, the unpacking of the mediated nature of romantic love in Howells explains why, as Delmar Gross Cooke observed many years ago, “Howells’ heroes and heroines have remarkable difficulties in deciding whether or not they are in love.”65 Rather than being concerned with innate qualities of body or mind, both the male and the female lover’s perception of their beloved is dynamic, developing, and ultimately dependent on both the lover’s and the beloved’s relationship with one or more other men.

Toward a Literary History of Sexuality Naturally, an approach to the history of gender and sexuality of the kind I have tried to develop has its limitations. The novels and stories I have 162

THE OTHER MAN

discussed do contain a range of character types, geographical settings, and class and racial backgrounds. Yet I do not think that the narratives I have considered ultimately represent or reveal anything beyond the perceptions and understandings of the segment of the American population that wrote, published, and consumed them, that is to say the domesticated, educated, white, middle and upper classes. I say domesticated, because there are no voices speaking or readers addressed in the textual base for this study that one might call subaltern, deviant, or perverse. What we are hearing are the voices, albeit varied and individualized, of the ruling literary and cultural elite. On the other hand, that is what makes these findings so unexpected: the mainstream, conventional, natural, and idealized nature of these representations of manly love. Like Sharon Marcus in her work on female friendship and women’s same-sex eroticism in British Victorian culture, I have had to abandon “symptomatic reading,” which “proposes a surface/depth model of interpretation in which the true meaning of the text must lie in what it does not say, which becomes a clue to what it cannot say.” Like her, I have been “just reading,” which “strives to be adequate to a text conceived as complex and ample rather than as diminished by, or reduced to, what it has had to repress.” Like medievalist Karma Lochrie, I have come to realize that I’m writing about a culture and a time “when normal wasn’t.” Like Valerie Traub, I have discovered that “there is nothing simple or pregiven about the erotic arrangements of any historical period.” Like James A. Schultz writing on courtly love, I have ended up writing “the history of sexualities that were not peripheral.”66 Paradoxically, as scholars of gender and sexuality with a literary bent, I think we are being most historical when we are being least historical. The only way literary studies of gender and sexuality can avoid being merely derivative and imitative of theories and models of explanation from other disciplines, including history, is by recognizing that the unique period, narrative, generic, formal, stylistic, and epistemological features of the fictional narrative text are exactly those features that will contribute to new, literary-based understandings and approaches, which in turn can be applied to nonfictional texts and other types of traditional historical primary sources. Neologisms such as “compulsory domesticity,” “the straight closet,” and “homofiliation” define fundamental organizing principles that are vividly present in the novels in question, but which I venture would not have been identifiable if the texts had been viewed merely as reflections of known historical patterns of behavior and attitudes. Naturally, we can ask what is the scope and validity of these concepts. Are they limited to 163

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the individual works in which they have been identified? Are they limited to the oeuvre of James and Howells, respectively, or do they have carryover value to other fictional works from the period? Ultimately, we need to ask if they can serve to organize and explain other types of historical evidence. I do not want to suggest that it is not legitimate to continue looking for meaningful connections between literary and other, contemporaneous discourses about gender and sexuality in a period and nation. After all, that is what I do in my reinterpretation of Huckleberry Finn and for the most part in my analysis of Cecil Dreeme. It is significant, though, that in taking a more traditionally historicist approach in these two chapters, I do not generate any new concepts or identify any text-specific character dynamics. Bachelorhood, libertinism, sodomy, masturbation, vagrancy are not primarily literary constructs. These readings are primarily attempts to (re)contextualize two different novels from the romantic friendship tradition: the paradigmatic, conventional Cecil Dreeme and the exploratory, unconventional Huckleberry Finn. That task is important enough when an entire literary tradition of American nineteenth-century fiction writing has been completely forgotten. My analyses of Roderick Hudson and A Hazard of New Fortunes, though, go beyond mimesis and historical contextualization to see what we find if we primarily concentrate on the internal logics of the novels’ plotting and characterization.67 It would be fruitful to explore whether or not the emotional and structural dynamics I have discerned are primarily or purely literary and how they may correspond to broader cultural and historical patterns. It is my belief that the patterns of affect and relation that I have identified might well be employed in the interpretation of nonliterary source materials. Another historical question is why elements from a long Western friendship tradition are being revived and recirculated at this particular point in American history and what function they serve in a nineteenth-century American context. William Dean Howells was “never quite sure of life” unless he found literature in it,68 but then he created both life and literature. While we can agree that novels are chiefly governed by novelistic laws, it remains to be seen if so-called real life may at times follow the truth of fiction.

164

Abbreviations CD HF

HNF JF JGF LF PT

RFR

RH RS SKD

Theodore Winthrop, Cecil Dreeme. New York: Dodd, Mead, n.d. [1861]. Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Orig. pub. 1885. Reprint, ed. Victor Fischer and Lin Salamo, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001. William Dean Howells, A Hazard of New Fortunes. Orig. pub. 1890. Reprint, New York: Modern Library, 2002. Bayard Taylor, Joseph and His Friend. Orig. pub. 1879. Reprint, New York: G. P. Putnam, 1879. Bayard Taylor, John Godfrey’s Fortunes. Orig. pub. 1864. Reprint, New York: G. P. Putnam, 1865. William Rounseville Alger, “The Literature of Friend­ ship.” North American Review 83 ( July 1856): 104–32. William Dean Howells, Private Theatricals. Atlantic Monthly 36–37 (November 1875–May 1876). Reprinted as Mrs. Farrell (New York: Harper, 1921). Axel Nissen, ed., The Romantic Friendship Reader: Love Stories between Men in Victorian America. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2003. Henry James, Roderick Hudson. Orig. pub. 1878. Reprint, Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1986. Eliza Bisbee Duffey, The Relations of the Sexes. New York: Arno, 1974. Drude Krog Janson, A Saloonkeeper’s Daughter. Orig. pub. 1889. Reprint, ed. Orm Øverland and trans. Gerald Thorson, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002.

165

Notes I N T R O d u c tion

1.

2. 3. 4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

Calvin E. Stowe to Harriet Beecher Stowe, quoted in Joan D. Hedrick, Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 180–81. Ellipsis and italics in original. The letter, dated July 31, 1849, is in the Stowe-Day Library, Hartford, Connecticut. Hedrick, Harriet Beecher Stowe, p. 181. Junius Henri Browne, “Women as Friends,” Galaxy 17 (February 1874), 237–38. Bayard Taylor, Joseph and His Friend (orig. pub. 1879; reprint, New York: G. P. Putnam, 1879), p. 217. Subsequent references to this novel will be abbreviated JF. The most convincing case I have come across for the signifi­ cance of literary sources in the study of sexuality has been made by the Renaissance scholar Bruce R. Smith in the intro­ duction to his book Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare’s En­ gland: A Cultural Poetics, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). Richard H. Brodhead, Cultures of Letters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 115. Nancy Glazener, Reading for Realism: The History of a U.S. Lit­ erary Institution, 1850–1910 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), p. 43. William Dean Howells, A Hazard of New Fortunes (orig. pub. 1890; reprint, New York: Modern Library, 2002), p. 485. Subsequent references to this novel will be abbreviated HNF. Sharon Marcus, Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Mar­ riage in Victorian England (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), p. 8.

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10. David M. Halperin, “Forgetting Foucault: Acts, Identities, and the History of Sexuality,” Representations 63 (1998): 112. 11. Sharon Marcus makes a related observation in her study of women’s friend­ ships and female marriages in nineteenth-century British literature: “It is only twentieth-century critics who made those bonds unspeakable, either by ignoring what Victorian texts transparently represented, or by project­ ing contemporary sexual structures onto the past” (Marcus, Between Women, p. 75). 12. Leila J. Rupp, A Desired Past: A Short History of Same-Sex Love in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), p. 5. 13. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1990), p. 32. 14. I take the delightful term “desiro-skeptical” from Karma Lochrie, Hetero­ syncracies: Female Sexuality When Normal Wasn’t (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), p. xxii. Gayle Rubin has proposed the term “sex negativity” (Gayle Rubin, “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality,” in The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, ed. Henry Abelove, Michèle Aina Barale, and David M. Halperin [New York: Routledge, 1993], p. 11). 15. Henry James, “William Rounseville Alger,” in Literary Criticism, vol. 1, Essays on Literature, American Writers, English Writers, ed. Leon Edel (New York: Library of America, 1984), p. 198. 16. Joseph Allen Boone, Tradition Counter Tradition: Love and the Form of Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 32. 17. Caleb Crain, American Sympathy: Men, Friendship, and Literature in the New Nation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), p. 33. 18. Cassell’s Queer Companion, for example, defines romantic friendship as “a close relationship between two women” (William Stewart, ed., Cassell’s Queer Companion: A Dictionary of Lesbian and Gay Life and Culture [London: Cassell, 1995], p. 216). 19. David M. Halperin, One Hundred Years of Homosexuality and Other Essays in Greek Love (New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 29. 20. On female romantic friendships, see Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, “The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women in Nineteenth- Century America,” Signs 1 (1975): 1–29; Lillian Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love between Women from the Renais­ sance to the Present (London: Women’s Press, 1985); Lillian Faderman, To Believe in Women: What Lesbian Have Done for America—A History (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999); Martha Vicinus, Intimate Friends: Women Who Loved Women, 1778–1928 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); and Marcus, Between Women. In Scandinavia we have two valuable studies that, unfortunately, have not yet been translated into English: Karin Lützen, Hvad hjertet begærer: Kvinders kærlighed til kvinder 1825–1985 (Copenhagen:

168

not e s to p a g e s 9 – 1 5

Tiderne Skrifter, 1986); and Tone Hellesund, Kapitler fra singellivets historie (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 2003). 21. E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: Basic Books, 1993); Jonathan Ned Katz, Love Stories: Sex between Men before Homosexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); Crain, American Sympathy. 22.` David Deitcher, Dear Friends: American Photographs of Men Together, 1840– 1918 (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2001). C H AP T E R on e

1.

2.

3. 4.

5. 6. 7.

William Rounseville Alger, The Friendships of Women (Boston: Roberts Bros., 1868). With a frank chauvinism one seldom encounters in academic writing these days, Alger’s biographer Gary Scharnhorst dismisses the book as “a treatise on various outré aspects of female association” and calls it “one of the first points on the downward spiral of Alger’s career.” He appears to be unaware of Alger’s essay “The Literature of Friendship” when he claims that The Friendships of Women was all he would ever publish of an “aborted project” on the “History of Friendship.” See Gary Scharnhorst, A Literary Biography of William Rounseville Alger (1822–1905): A Neglected Member of the Concord Circle (Lewiston, NY: E. Mellen Press, 1990), p. 102. William Rounseville Alger, “The Literature of Friendship,” North American Review 83 ( July 1856), p. 105. Subsequent references to this essay will be abbreviated LF. LF, pp. 104, 117, 132. Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in his essay “Friendship” (1841) that “when a man becomes dear to me I have touched the goal of fortune. I find very little written directly to the heart of this matter in books” (Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Brooks Atkinson [New York: Modern Library, 2000], p. 208). Foucault, History of Sexuality, p. 43. George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994), p. 125. Axel Nissen, ed., The Romantic Friendship Reader: Love Stories between Men in Victorian America (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2003), p. 4. Subsequent references to this anthology will be abbreviated RFR. I based this definition on the following: John W. Crowley, “Howells, Stoddard, and Male Homosocial Attachment in Victorian America,” in The Making of Masculinities: The New Men’s Studies, ed. Harry Brod (Boston: Allen Unwin, 1987), pp. 301–24; John D’Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America (New York: Harper and Row, 1988), pp. 109–38; Karen V. Hansen, “ ‘Our Eyes Behold Each Other’: Masculinity and Intimate Friendship in Antebellum New England,” in Men’s Friendships, ed.

169

not e s to p a g e s 1 5 – 1 9

8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24.

25. 26.

170

Peter M. Nardi (Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications, 1992), pp. 35–58; Katz, Love Stories; Robert K. Martin, “Knights-Errant and Gothic Seducers: The Representation of Male Friendship in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America,” in Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, ed. Martin Bauml Duberman, Martha Vicinus, and George Chauncey Jr. (orig. pub. 1989; reprint, Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1991), pp. 169–82; Jeffrey Richards, “ ‘Passing the love of women’: Manly Love in Victorian Society,” in Manliness and Morality: Middle-Class Masculinity in Britain and America, 1800–1940, ed. J. A. Mangan and James Walvin (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987), pp. 92–122; and Rotundo, American Manhood. RFR, p. 90. Frederick W. Loring, “Two College Friends”; reprinted in RFR, pp. 87–126. All subsequent references will be to the anthology. LF, p. 117. Helen Waite Papashvily, All the Happy Endings (New York: Harper, 1956), p. 156. Augusta Jane Evans (Wilson), St. Elmo (orig. pub. 1867; reprint, Laurel, NY: Lightyear Press, 1984), pp. 266–67; RFR, p. 46. Evans, St. Elmo, p. 267; RFR, pp. 46, 47. LF, p. 127. Eudora Welty and Ronald A. Sharp, eds., The Norton Book of Friendship (New York: Norton, 1991), p. 516. RFR, p. 131. William Dean Howells, Private Theatricals, Atlantic Monthly 36–37 (November 1875–May 1876); reprinted as Mrs. Farrell (New York: Harper, 1921). Subsequent references to this novel are to the Harper edition and will be abbreviated PT. PT, pp. 23, 27, 68, 87. William Dean Howells, The Undiscovered Country (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1880), pp. 35, 37, 45. The same as virtu; an antique or curio. W. D. Howells, Undiscovered Country, pp. 37, 38, 47. See Axel Nissen, “The Feminization of Roaring Camp: Bret Harte and The American Woman’s Home,” Studies in Short Fiction 34 (1997): 379–88. Bayard Taylor, John Godfrey’s Fortunes (orig. pub. 1864; reprint, New York: G. P. Putnam, 1865), pp. 9, 440–41. Subsequent references to this novel will be abbreviated JGF. See, for example, his letter of August 18, 1853, to George Henry Boker in Bayard Taylor, Life and Letters of Bayard Taylor, ed. Marie Hansen-Taylor and Horace E. Scudder (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1885), pp. 258–59. Bayard Taylor, Selected Letters of Bayard Taylor, ed. Paul C. Wermuth (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1997), pp. 44, 130. Italics in original. E. Anthony Rotundo is chiefly responsible for leaving us with the impression that “among males, romantic friendship was largely a product of

not e s to p a g e s 2 0 – 2 1

27. 28. 29. 30.

31. 32.

a distinct phase in the life cycle—youth.” He writes further in American Manhood, in a style of argument that seems analogous to the Freudian heterosexual development narrative: “Although these intense attachments of male youth did not last into manhood, they did leave a legacy in men’s adult lives and provided a rehearsal for the marriage on which nearly every man embarked” (Rotundo, American Manhood, pp. 76, 90). B. Taylor, Selected Letters, p. 97. B. Taylor, Life and Letters, pp. 202–3. Bayard Taylor, quoted in Richmond Croom Beatty, Bayard Taylor: Laureate of the Gilded Age (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1936), p. 184. B. Taylor, Life and Letters, p. 560; Bayard Taylor, The Unpublished Letters of Bayard Taylor in the Huntington Library, ed. John Richie Schultz (San Marino, CA: n.p., 1937), p. 207. On Taylor’s mainly epistolary friendship with Jones, see Paul C. Wermuth, “ ‘My Full, Unreserved Self’: Bayard Taylor’s Letters to Charles Melancthon Jones,” Resources for American Literary Study 17 (1991): 220–38. Elizabeth Stoddard, Temple House, rev. ed. (New York: Cassell, 1888), pp. 13, 43. The original version of the novel was published in 1867. William Dean Howells, “Recent Literature: Stoddard’s South-Sea Idyls,” Atlantic Monthly 32 (December 1873), p. 743. This, incidentally, is an example of nineteenth-century American usage of the term romantic friend­ ship. Some other examples from the period are as follows: “Lady Allerton observed that this was quite a romantic friendship, and took her leave” (about two women in Hanworth, a novel serialized in The Living Age 59 [November 1858], p. 601); “We must digress a few moments, to give the little episode of Vietinghoff and Friesen’s romantic friendship” (about two men in the story “A Strange Life,” The Living Age 62 [July 2, 1859], p. 34); “With the other members of the Buonaparte family she contracted a close and romantic friendship” (about Madame Recamier in an essay in The Liv­ ing Age 93 [June 15, 1867], p. 734); “The early history of Basil and Gregory at the school of Athens, as it is described in these letters, their romantic friendship and singular quarrels, are a pleasing episode in the midst of the stern struggles and bitter polemics of the Eastern church” (from a review of Migne, The Letters of St. Jerome: The Last Days of Paganism at Rome in The Living Age 94 [July 27, 1867], p. 224); “This turnkey, a gaunt, powerful man, was a corporal on half-pay, a good honest fellow as ever breathed, and he entertained quite a romantic friendship for the lady who, as he expressed it, ‘took such a wonderful deal of trouble with this precious lot of blackguards’” (from the story “A Released Prisoner” in The Living Age 96 [January 4, 1868], p. 44); “At Mrs. Lane’s I did not form any of the romantic friendships which are popularly supposed to make a necessary part of a schoolgirl’s experience” (from Frances Trollope’s novel Anne Furness in Harper’s New Monthly 41 [September 1870], p. 590); “what remains is the story of how Lillie . . . forces into the retirement of a small cottage his sister

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33. 34. 35.

36. 37. 38.

39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49.

172

Grace, with whom he has always live in a tender, almost romantic friendship” (from a review of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Pink and White Tyranny in Atlantic Monthly 28 [September 1871], p. 378); “The undisputed facts are briefly these: . . . that he directed the girl’s studies; that a romantic friendship sprang up between them” (from an essay on Jonathan Swift in The Living Age 157 [April 21, 1883], p. 139); “It is certain that Godolphin would never have taken so prominent a position in politics had it not been for the active talents of Marlborough, and for the romantic friendship which existed between the duchess and the queen” (from the essay “Sidney, Earl of Godolphin” in The Living Age 182 [July 27, 1889], p. 202). RFR, pp. 66, 67, 69, 71, 73. W. D. Howells, “Recent Literature,” pp. 741, 742. See Roger Austen, Genteel Pagan: The Double Life of Charles Warren Stoddard, ed. John W. Crowley (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1991), p. 68. RFR, p. 215. RFR, pp. 209, 216. In addition to Katz, Love Stories, and Deitcher, Dear Friends, see D’Emilio and Freedman, Intimate Matters, chap. 6; Donald Yacovone, “Abolitionists and the ‘Language of Fraternal Love,’” in Meanings for Manhood: Construc­ tions of Masculinity in Victorian America, ed. Mark C. Carnes and Clyde Griffen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), pp. 85–95; Richard B. Stott, Workers in the Metropolis: Class, Ethnicity, and Youth in Antebellum New York City (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), pp. 254–56; Hansen, “ ‘Our Eyes Behold Each Other,’” pp. 35–58; D. Michael Quinn, Same-Sex Dynamics among Nineteenth-Century Americans: A Mormon Example (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996); and William Benemann, Male-Male Inti­ macy in Early America: Beyond Romantic Friendships (New York: Harrington Park Press, 2006). LF, p. 121. Frank Preston Stearns, The Real and the Ideal in Literature (orig. pub. 1892; reprint, New York: G. P. Putnam, 1896), p. 87. RFR, pp. 87, 91; Rotundo, American Manhood. RFR, p. 93. RFR, p. 115. RFR, p. 98. Ellen K. Rothman, Hands and Hearts: A History of Courtship in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), p. 105. JF, pp. 4, 22, 343. JF, p. 51. JF, p. 93. LF, p. 121.

not e s to p a g e s 2 6 – 3 1

50. JF, p. 91. 51. Henning Bech, When Men Meet: Homosexuality and Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), p. 108. 52. LF, p. 120. 53. Emerson, The Essential Writings, p. 201. 54. Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass: The Deathbed Edition (orig. pub. 1892; reprint, New York: Book-of-the-Month Club, 1992), p. 101. There has been some previous scholarly work on the significance of the male same-sex gaze in nineteenth-century literature and culture. Jonathan Ned Katz discusses it in connection with Walt Whitman in Love Stories, p. 109, and he discusses Ralph Waldo Emerson’s romantic friendship with Martin Gay in Gay American History: Lesbians and Gay Men in the U.S.A., rev. ed. (New York: Meridian, 1992), pp. 456–60, as well as in Love Stories, p. 128; Caleb Crain likewise discusses Emerson and Gay in American Sympathy, p. 155. In her book Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), pp. 103–4, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick reflects briefly on the significance of eye contact in connection with a passage from James Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner. 55. JGF, pp. iii, iv. 56. JF, n.p. 57. See Richard Cary, “The Genteel Tradition in America, 1850–1875: With Selections from Unpublished Letters of Bayard Taylor, Richard Henry Stoddard, Edmund Clarence Stedman, and Thomas Bailey Aldrich” (Ph.D. diss., Cornell University, 1952), p. 249; Albert H. Smyth, Bayard Taylor (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1896), p. 177; Alexander Cowie, The Rise of the American Novel (New York: American Book Company, 1948), p. 482; and Paul C. Wermuth, Bayard Taylor (New York: Twayne, 1973), p. 97. 58. E. Stoddard, Temple House, pp. 117–18, 124, 192, 215. 59. Theodore Winthrop, John Brent (orig. pub. 1862; reprint, New York: Henry Holt, 1876), pp. 34, 53, 57–58, 186. 60. Bret Harte, “Captain Jim’s Friend,” in The Works of Bret Harte (New York: P. F. Collier, 1906), 3:211, 249, 235. 61. John Tomsich, A Genteel Endeavor: American Culture and Politics in the Gilded Age (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1971), p. 162; Richard Henry Stoddard, Recollections Personal and Literary, ed. Ripley Hitchcock (New York: A. S. Barnes, 1903), p. 53; Edward Sculley Bradley, George Henry Boker: Poet and Patriot (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1927), p. 35; William Winter, Old Friends: Being Literary Recollections of Other Days (New York: Moffat, Yard, 1909), p. 224; Mark Twain, The Autobiography of Mark Twain, ed. Charles Neider (New York: Harper, 1959), p. 315; Grant C. Knight, James Lane Allen and the Genteel Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1935), p. 38; and Ina Donna Coolbrith, introduction to Plain Language from Truthful James, by Bret Harte (San Francisco:

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62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68.

69. 70.

71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76.

77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84.

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John Nash for His Friends, 1924), n.p. When Mrs. Aldrich quoted Twain’s description in her memoirs, she replaced “blond Venus” with “transfigured Adonis.” See Mrs. Thomas Bailey Aldrich [Lilian Woodman Aldrich], Crowding Memories (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1922), p. 146. LF, p. 121. E. Stoddard, Temple House, pp. 115, 216. JGF, pp. 28, 33. JGF, pp. 46–47, 82, 292, 306. William James to Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., early 1868; quoted in Welty and Sharp, Norton Book of Friendship, p. 388. JGF, pp. 191, 337. Bayard Taylor, A Journey to Central Africa; or, Life and Landscapes from Egypt to the Negro Kingdoms of the White Nile (orig. pub. 1854; reprint, New York: G. P. Putnam, 1870), pp. 106, 134. Winthrop, John Brent, pp. 38, 39. See, for example, Charles E. Rosenberg, “Sexuality, Class and Role in 19thCentury America,” American Quarterly 25 (1973): 131–53; Karen Lystra, Searching the Heart: Women, Men, and Romantic Love in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); and Timothy J. Gilfoyle, City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and the Commercialization of Sex, 1790–1920 (New York: Norton, 1994). LF, p. 123. Steven Seidman, Romantic Longings: Love in America, 1830–1980 (New York: Routledge, 1991), p. 44. LF, p. 129. E. Stoddard, Temple House, p. 113. JF, pp. 92, 112, 212, 213, 217, 340. Ed Cohen, “Are We (Not) What We Are Becoming? ‘Gay’ ‘Identity,’ ‘Gay Studies,’ and the Disciplining of Knowledge,” in Engendering Men: The Ques­ tion of Male Feminist Criticism, ed. Joseph A. Boone and Michael Cadden (New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 170. John MacRae, introduction to Teleny by Oscar Wilde et al., ed. John McRae (London: GMP, 1986 [1893]), pp. 13–16. Oscar Wilde et al., Teleny (orig. pub. 1893; reprint, ed. John MacRae, London: GMP, 1986), pp. 33–34. RFR, pp. 268, 269. Harte, “Snow-Bound at Eagle’s,” in Works, 2:449. William A. Cohen, Sex Scandal: The Private Parts of Victorian Fiction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), pp. 33, 35. Marcus, Between Women, p. 58. William Dean Howells, Their Wedding Journey (orig. pub. 1871; reprint, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1895), pp. 111, 113, 213, 222–23. PT, pp. 141, 154, 155, 158.

not e s to p a g e s 3 9 – 4 9 C H AP T E R t w o

1. 2.

3. 4. 5.

6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

LF, p. 125. Edmund Clarence Stedman, Life and Letters of Edmund Clarence Stedman, ed. Laura Stedman and George M. Gould (New York: Moffat, Yard, 1910), 1:104. PT, pp. 68, 99, 138. Harte, “Snow-Bound at Eagle’s,” in Works, 2:396, 454, 468. Inspired by René Girard and Gayle Rubin, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has given a classic account of this dynamic at work in British literature in her book Between Men. RFR, p. 54. RFR, p. 106. Harte, “Snow-Bound at Eagle’s,” 2:449. Calvin Stowe to Harriet Stowe, 1847; quoted in Hedrick, Harriet Beecher Stowe, p. 180. See John W. Crowley, The Black Heart’s Truth: The Early Career of W. D. Howells (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), p. 133. Aldrich, Crowding Memories, pp. 278–79. On Henry Pierce, see T. T. Munger, “An American Citizen: The Late Henry L. Pierce,” Century 54 ( July 1897), pp. 463–64. Alger, Friendships of Women, p. 28. While middle- and upper-class men may not have “clubbed together” often in fact or fiction, they certainly spent a lot of time at the club together. See Howard P. Chudacoff, The Age of the Bachelor: Creating an American Subcul­ ture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999). Harte, “The Poet of Sierra Flat,” in Works, 17:157. E. Stoddard, Temple House, pp. 305–8. Tomsich, A Genteel Endeavor, p. 160; Elizabeth Stoddard, quoted in Marie Hansen Taylor with Lilian Bayard Taylor Kiliani, On Two Continents: Memories of Half a Century (New York: Doubleday, Page, 1905), p. 78; and Stedman, Life and Letters, 1:247. Cary, “The Genteel Tradition,” pp. 191, 199. Harte, “An Apostle of the Tules,” in Works, 1:302. Ibid., 1:288, 305, 308–9. LF, p. 118. See Adrienne Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Experience,” Signs 5 (1980): 631–60. JGF, p. 216. Gary Scharnhorst, Bret Harte (New York: Twayne, 1992), p. 31. Halperin, One Hundred Years, p. 79. LF, p. 118. Harte, “Captain Jim’s Friend,” in Works, 3:259.

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28. RFR, pp. 117–18. 29. RFR, p. 71. 30. This may have been because of threatened litigation from a couple who felt they had been negatively portrayed in the novel, but more likely stemmed from Howells’s dissatisfaction with the work and his never finding the time or energy to revise it. 31. For a discussion of the short story as a site for the exploration of alternative sexualities and domesticities, see Axel Nissen, “The Queer Short Story,” in The Art of Brevity: Excursions in Short Fiction Theory and Analysis, ed. Per Winther et al. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2004), pp. 181–90. 32. See Nina Baym, Novels, Readers, and Reviewers: Responses to Fiction in Antebel­ lum America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984), p. 146. 33. See Axel Nissen, Bret Harte: Prince and Pauper ( Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2000), pp. 41–43. 34. Harte, “Notes by Flood and Field,” in Works, 7:204, 208, 209, 210, 217, 218. 35. Ibid., 7:226. 36. Annie A. Fields, Annie Adams Fields: Memoirs of a Hostess—A Chronicle of Eminent Friendships, ed. M. A. DeWolfe Howe (Boston: Atlantic Monthly, 1922), p. 229. 37. Ferris Greenslet, The Life of Thomas Bailey Aldrich (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1908), p. 32. 38. Thomas Bailey Aldrich to William Winter, quoted in Winter, Old Friends, p. 359. 39. Thomas Bailey Aldrich to William Winter, quoted in Paulo Warth Gick, “An Annotated, Critical Edition of Unpublished Letters by Thomas Bailey Aldrich” (Ph.D. diss., Pennsylvania State University, 1982), p. 71. 40. Thomas Bailey Aldrich to William Dean Howells, quoted in Greenslet, Thomas Bailey Aldrich, p. 129. The remainder of the sentence has been elided in Greenslet’s biography. 41. Cary, “The Genteel Tradition,” p. 226. 42. Ibid., pp. 78, 235. 43. See, for example, the collection of letters Dearly Beloved Friends: Henry James’s Letters to Younger Men, ed. Susan E. Gunter and Steven H. Jobe (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001). 44. See Nissen, Bret Harte, pp. 240–42. 45. John W. Crowley, The Mask of Fiction: Essays on W. D. Howells (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1989), p. 72. 46. See Austen, Genteel Pagan. 47. LF, p. 130. 48. Browne, “Women as Friends,” p. 234. 49. Wolfgang Iser, “Do I Write for an Audience?” PMLA 115 (2000): 311. 50. Baym, Novels, Readers, and Reviewers, p. 75.

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51. Crain, American Sympathy, pp. 152, 173. 52. Herman Melville to Richard Henry Dana Jr., quoted in Tara Penry, “Sentimental and Romantic Masculinities in Moby-Dick and Pierre,” in Sentimen­ tal Men: Masculinity and the Politics of Affect in American Culture, ed. Mary Chapman and Glenn Hendler (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999), p. 240. 53. JF, n.p. 54. Wayne Booth based his ethics of fiction on the idea of books as friends. See Wayne C. Booth, The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988). C H AP T E R thr e e

1.

Oscar Wilde suggested in a letter to a friend in 1886 that “the artistic life is a long and lovely suicide,” and Melissa Knox took this phrase for the title and epigraph of her study Oscar Wilde: A Long and Lovely Suicide (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994). 2. Theodore Winthrop’s sister writes that “his conscience [was] often a morbid one.” Willard Martin repeatedly notes Winthrop’s “tendency toward morbid introspection.” According to Elbridge Colby, his writings are “rich in personal morbidity.” An exploration of the significance of the word mor­ bid in the period cannot be pursued at this point. See Theodore Winthrop, The Life and Poems of Theodore Winthrop, ed. Laura Winthrop Johnson (New York: Henry Holt, 1884), p. 21; Willard E. Martin Jr., “The Life and Works of Theodore Winthrop” (Ph.D. diss., Duke University, 1944), pp. 5, 31, 37, 49, 53, 132, 145; and Elbridge Colby, Theodore Winthrop (New York: Twayne, 1965), p. 7. 3. “Winthrop’s Life in the Open Air,” North American Review 97 (1863): 280. There had, indeed, been five volumes of Winthrop’s works published at this point. 4. W. E. Martin, “Life and Works,” p. 257. 5. Colby, Theodore Winthrop, p. 6. 6. Regarding this connection, see in particular the account of his relationship with the shipping magnate William H. Aspinwall in W. E. Martin, “Life and Works.” See also Martin, “Life and Works,” p. 266n33; and Paul R. Baker, Richard Morris Hunt (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1980), p. 65. 7. George William Curtis, “Biographical Sketch,” in Cecil Dreeme, by Theodore Winthrop (New York: Dodd, Mead, n.d. [1861]), pp. 6, 14, 17, 19. 8. W. E. Martin, “Life and Works,” p. 277. On the popularity of Cecil Dreeme, see also Colby, Theodore Winthrop, p. 133. 9. “John Brent,” Atlantic Monthly 9 (April 1862), p. 521. John Brent, which we looked at in chapter 2, was the second of Winthrop’s posthumous works to be published, in February 1862. 10. Cowie, The American Novel, p. 489.

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11. E. P. Whipple, “Review and Literary Notices: Cecil Dreeme,” Atlantic Monthly 8 (December 1861), pp. 773–74. 12. Curtis, “Biographical Sketch,” pp. 9, 11. 13. W. E. Martin, “Life and Works,” p. 47. 14. George Templeton Strong, The Diary of George Templeton Strong, ed. Allan Nevins and Milton Halsey Thomas (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1988), p. 370. 15. Theodore Winthrop, quoted in W. E. Martin, “Life and Works,” p. 12. 16. Ibid., p. 54. 17. Theodore Winthrop, Cecil Dreeme (New York: Dodd, Mead, n.d. [1861]), p. 88. Subsequent references to this novel will be abbreviated CD. 18. CD, pp. 87, 88. 19. CD, pp. 233–34. 20. Alger, Friendships of Women, p. 116; Sylvester Graham, A Lecture to Young Men (New York: Arno, 1974), p. iii; Henry C. Wright, Marriage and Parent­ age; or, The Reproductive Element in Man, as a Means to His Elevation and Happiness (New York: Arno, 1974), p. 123; Dio Lewis, Chastity; or, Our Secret Sins (orig. pub. 1874; reprint, New York: Arno, 1974), p. 12. 21. CD, pp. 21, 49. 22. CD, p. 230. 23. CD, pp. 27, 28, 29. 24. CD, p. 33. 25. CD, pp. 53, 86–87, 115–16. 26. CD, pp. 45, 46, 81–82. 27. CD, p. 45. 28. CD, pp. 50, 52. 29. Lewis, Chastity, p. 253. 30. CD, pp. 47, 52. 31. Whipple, “Cecil Dreeme,” p. 774. 32. CD, pp. 23, 73, 75. 33. CD, pp. 73, 74, 76. 34. Lewis, Chastity, p. 250. 35. CD, p. 65. 36. E.g. CD, pp. 68, 179, 249, 300. 37. CD, pp. 25, 26. 38. CD, p. 55. 39. CD, p. 58. 40. CD, pp. 121, 136. 41. CD, pp. 137–38. 42. CD, pp. 161–62. 43. CD, p. 208. 44. CD, p. 175. 45. Herman Melville to Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1851; quoted in Welty and Sharp, Norton Book of Friendship, p. 262.

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46. CD, pp. 74, 168, 178. 47. CD, pp. 90, 219. 48. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, “Cheerful Yesterdays,” Atlantic Monthly 79 (February 1897), p. 243. 49. Ibid., 243, 244. 50. Eugene Benson, “New York Journalists: W. H. Hurlbut,” Galaxy 7 ( January 1869), pp. 31, 33. 51. Ibid., 31. 52. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, quoted in Mary Thacher Higginson, Thomas Wentworth Higginson: The Story of His Life (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1914), p. 127. 53. Anna Mary Wells, Dear Preceptor: The Life and Times of Thomas Wentworth Higginson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1963), p. 49. “Strange enthusiasm” is the title of another biography of Higginson. 54. T. W. Higginson, “Cheerful,” p. 243. See also M. T. Higginson, Thomas Went­worth Higginson, p. 280. Thomas Wentworth Higginson writes of Malbone, “this charming Alcibiades,” that “he had a personal beauty, which, strange to say, was recognized by both sexes.” See Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Malbone (orig. pub. 1869; reprint, McLean, VA: IndyPublish.com, n.d.), pp. 26, 55. 55. Benson, “W. H. Hurlbut,” p. 32. 56. T. W. Higginson, “Cheerful,” 244. 57. Wells supports this assumption (Wells, Dear Preceptor, p. 49), while Robert K. Martin assumes Hurlbert inspired the character of Cecil Dreeme (Martin, “Knights-Errant and Gothic Seducers,” p. 179). 58. Michael Lynch, “ ‘Here is Adhesiveness’: From Friendship to Homosexuality,” Victorian Studies 29 (1985–86): 68. 59. The novel survives in manuscript in two complete versions. The first and longer MS version is found in the Yale University Library. The second version, on which the published book was based, is housed in the New York Public Library. See W. E. Martin, “Life and Works,” p. 258. 60. F. W. Shelton, “On Old Bachelors,” Southern Literary Messenger 19 (1853): 223, 224, 226, 227. 61. “Single Life among Us,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 18 (March 1859), pp. 500, 501, 502, 504. 62. “Disinterested Friendship: By a Bachelor,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 12 (December 1855), pp. 41, 43, 44. 63. CD, p. 110. 64. Vincent J. Bertolini, “Fireside Chastity: The Erotics of Sentimental Bachelorhood in the 1850s,” in Sentimental Men: Masculinity and the Politics of Affect in American Culture, ed. Mary Chapman and Glenn Hendler (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999), p. 21. 65. See George Lippard, The Quaker City; or, The Monks of Monk Hall: A Romance of Philadelphia Life, Mystery, and Crime (orig. pub. 1845; reprint, ed. David S.

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66.

67. 68. 69. 70.

71. 72.

73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78.

180

Reynolds, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995). We also find a number of libertines in George Thompson’s Venus in Boston (1849) and City Crimes (1849). See George Thompson, “Venus in Boston” and Other Tales of Nineteenth-Century City Life, ed. David S. Reynolds and Kimberly R. Gladman (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002). The libertine continued to be a feature of American novels into the 1870s. One late example is Judge Silas Swinton in Fettered for Life. See Lillie Dev­ ereux Blake, Fettered for Life, or Lord and Master: A Story of To-day (orig. pub. 1874; reprint, New York: Feminist Press, 1996). The distinguished women’s rights activist Lillie Devereux Blake (1833–1913) was Winthrop’s cousin on his mother’s side, as they were both descended from Jonathan Edwards. They grew up together in New Haven, Connecticut, and saw much of each other later in life when they were both living in St. Louis. Blake’s mother, Sarah Johnson Devereux, had a “salon” in New Haven in the 1840s and was an early spiritual guide to Winthrop. See W. E. Martin, “Life and Works,” p. 41; and Grace Farrell, Lillie Devereux Blake: Retracing a Life Erased (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002), p. 19. On Monckton Milnes, see Richard Dellamora, Masculine Desire: The Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), p. 20. George E. Haggerty, Men in Love: Masculinity and Sexuality in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), p. 8. Gregory Woods, A History of Gay Literature: The Male Tradition (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), p. 124. Katz, Love Stories, pp. 9, 40. See Alan Bray, “Homosexuality and the Signs of Male Friendship in Elizabethan England,” History Workshop 29 (1990): 1–19; and Haggerty, Men in Love, p. 33. CD, pp. 42, 54, 109. See W. E. Martin, “Life and Works,” pp. 252, 287; and Eugene T. Woolf, Theodore Winthrop: Portrait of an American Author (Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1981), p. 245. CD, p. 104. CD, pp. 331–32. Alan Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), pp. 9, 67. Katz, Love Stories, pp. 61–62. Gilfoyle, City of Eros, p. 136. Rosenberg, “Sexuality, Class and Role,” p. 136; G. M. Goshgarian, To Kiss the Chastening Rod: Domestic Fiction and Sexual Ideology in the American Renaissance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), p. 46; see also Seidman, Romantic Longings, p. 23.

not e s to p a g e s 7 6 – 7 9

79. Lewis, Chastity, p. 250; James C. Jackson, The Sexual Organism and Its Healthful Management (orig. pub. 1861; reprint, New York: Arno, 1974), pp. 60, 71. 80. Thomas W. Laqueur, Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation (New York: Zone Books, 2003), p. 21. 81. CD, pp. 111, 289, 302, 320. 82. CD, p. 240. 83. Winthrop’s relative reticence is in contrast with his precursor George Thompson’s City Crimes (1849), in which one character, a Spanish ambassador, is explicitly identified as a sodomite. To the heroine Josephine, whom he has tried to seduce while she is pretending to be a boy, he declares: “you may pronounce my passion strange, unaccountable, and absurd, if you will—but ’tis none the less violent and sincere. I am a native of Spain, a country whose ardent souls confine not their affections to the fairest portion of the human race alone, but—.” We are not told what he whispers in her ear, but can read that she “drew back in horror and disgust” (pp. 169–70). Josephine refers to his “unnatural iniquity” (p. 170), and upon his return in chapter 21, the narrator describes him as “one of those beasts in human shape whose perverted appetites prompts them to the commission of a crime against nature” (p. 246). He adds: “It is an extremely delicate task for a writer to touch on a subject so revolting; yet the crime actually exists, beyond the shadow of a doubt, and therefore we are compelled to give it place in our list of crimes” (ibid.). Nevertheless, while the other malefactors in Thompson’s novels die all manner of gruesome deaths, “the miserable sodomite” is punished only by being “set ashore at a place destitute of everything but rocks, and over ten miles from any house,” and the narrator feels he “should have been more harshly dealt with” (p. 247). City Crimes confirms our impression from Lippard’s The Quaker City that a man’s seduction of an innocent woman is the most serious of crimes during this period and most deserving of rigorous personal and societal retribution. 84. CD, pp. 63, 64. 85. On the mid-nineteenth-century “faith in the power of physiognomy, the science of reading temperament and character from the appearance of the body and particularly the face,” see John F. Kasson, Rudeness and Civility: Manners in Nineteenth-Century Urban America (New York: Hill and Wang, 1999), pp. 96–99. Incidentally, this device is a brilliant illustration of what Toni Morrison has identified as the “Africanist presence” in white nineteenth-century American literature. See Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (London: Picador, 1993). 86. Lewis, Chastity, p. 30. 87. Jonathan Ned Katz, The Invention of Heterosexuality (New York: Penguin, 1995), p. 41.

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88. Rosenberg, “Sexuality, Class and Role,” p. 134. 89. Ronald G. Walters, Primers for Prudery: Sexual Advice to Victorian America, 2nd ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), p. 12. 90. Rosenberg, “Sexuality, Class and Role,” p. 149. A rare glimpse of men’s hands-on experience with each other is vouchsafed us through the diaries of Philip C. Van Buskirk (b. 1834), who entered the Marine Corps in 1846 and was discharged in 1869. In Van Buskirk’s informal estimation, in a diary entry for August 1855, “Certainly ninety percent of the white boys in the Navy of this day . . . are, to an extent that would make you shudder, blasphemers and sodomites” (B. R. Burg, An American Seafarer in the Age of Sail: The Erotic Diaries of Philip C. Van Buskirk, 1851–1870 [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994], p. xi). The editor of the diaries relates how Van Buskirk’s style mirrors that of the medical authorities he read, an indication that he had a more genteel background than many of his fellow sailors. They had “none of his notions of decency, decorum, morality, or health” and did not share his qualms about mutual masturbation and anal sex (p. 26). No harm was seen in sexual contact among men aboard ship, known in sailor lingo as the “boom cover trade.” Some sailors even claimed that there were health benefits involved in having sex with each other. It is worth recalling, too, that such an “eminent Victorian” as Mark Twain appears to have had a casual attitude toward both sodomy and masturbation, as revealed by “Some Thoughts on the Science of Onanism,” a comic speech he gave in 1879 at an all-male dinner. There he pointed out that there were times when he preferred masturbation to sodomy, though he felt that “of all the various kinds of sexual intercourse, it [masturbation] has least to recommend it” (Mark Twain, “Some Thoughts on the Science of Onanism,” in Mark Twain: Collected Tales, Sketches, Speeches, & Essays, 1852–1890 [New York: Library of America, 1992], p. 723). 91. CD, p. 210. 92. CD, pp. 221, 239–40, 241, 242, 243–44, 275. 93. CD, pp. 252, 281. 94. CD, pp. 89, 226, 227, 229. 95. CD, pp. 236, 237, 238, 263, 264. 96. Seidman, Romantic Longings, p. 48. 97. Bret Harte was one of the few mainstream authors to continue to depict women with strong sexual urges throughout his career, leading Henry Adams to write in his Education: “Adams began to ponder, asking himself whether he knew of any American artist who had ever insisted on the power of sex, as every classic had always done; but he could think only of Walt Whitman; Bret Harte, as far as the magazines would let him venture; and one or two painters for the flesh-tones” (Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams: An Autobiography, ed. Henry Cabot Lodge [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1918], p. 385). In this frequently quoted passage, the mention of Harte is often elided and Whitman is allowed to stand alone.

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98. CD, pp. 90, 92. 99. Jackson, The Sexual Organism, p. 16. 100. CD, pp. 122. 101. Charles Nordhoff, “Theodore Winthrop’s Writings,” Atlantic Monthly 70 (August 1863), p. 159. 102. Kasson, Rudeness and Civility, p. 5. 103. See David S. Reynolds, Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988), p. 82. 104. T. S. Arthur, Advice to Young Men on Their Duties and Conduct in Life (Boston: Elias Howe, 1848), p. 90; J. B. Waterbury, Considerations for Young Men (New York: American Tract Society, 1851), pp. 102, 103–5. 105. Jackson, The Sexual Organism, pp. 23, 38–39. 106. Wright, Marriage and Parentage, pp. 144–45, 292, 296. 107. Lewis, Chastity, pp. 43–47. 108. CD, p. 335. 109. CD, pp. 337, 344, 347. 110. Grace Farrell, afterword in Fettered for Life, by Lillie Devereux Blake (New York: Feminist Press, 1996), p. 394. 111. CD, pp. 348, 353. 112. CD, pp. 262, 331, 360. 113. Jackson, The Sexual Organism, p. 257; Wright, Marriage and Parentage, p. 26; Lewis, Chastity, p. 42; Eliza B. Duffey, The Relations of the Sexes (New York: Arno, 1974), p. 190. Subsequent references to Duffey’s book will be abbreviated RS. 114. W. E. Martin, “Life and Works,” pp. 277, 278. C H AP T E R f o u r

1. 2.

Quoted in Roger Gard, ed., Henry James: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1976), p. 36. E.g. Paul A. Newlin, “The Development of Roderick Hudson: An Evaluation,” Arizona Quarterly 27 (1971): 101–23; Robert K. Martin, “The Sorrows of Young Roderick: Wertherism in Roderick Hudson,” English Studies in Canada 12 (1986): 387–95; Richard Ellmann, “Henry James among the Aesthetes,” in A long the riverrun: Selected Essays (New York: Knopf, 1989), pp. 132–49; Jonathan Freedman, Professions of Taste: Henry James, British Aestheticism, and Commodity Culture (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990); and Wendy Graham, Henry James’s Thwarted Love (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999). Rather than examine the range or development of James’s personal and/or novelistic attitudes toward women, women’s writing, or “the feminine,” as Veeder, Habegger, and Walton have done, I am interested specifically in what Roderick Hudson can tell us about gender norms, gender identity, sexual ideology, and affective structures in the

183

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3. 4.

5.

6. 7.

8. 9.

184

post–Civil War era. See William Veeder, Henry James: The Lessons of the Master, Popular Fiction and Personal Style in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975); Alfred Habegger, Gender, Fantasy, and Realism in American Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982); and Priscilla L. Walton, The Disruption of the Feminine in Henry James (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992). As Hugh Stevens has noted, “The full extent to which James’s work responds to nineteenth-century discourses on reproductive sexuality is only beginning to be realized” (Hugh Stevens, Henry James and Sexuality [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998], p. 183n14). RS, p. 21. I have come across passing references to Duffey’s books in several places, but have not been able to find any biographical information about her. See Habegger, Gender, Fantasy, and Realism, p. 310n19; John S. Haller Jr. and Robin M. Haller, The Physician and Sexuality in Victorian America (New York: Norton, 1977), pp. 100–101, 131; Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (orig. pub. 1990; reprint, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. 299n103; Lystra, Searching the Heart, pp. 103, 114, 118; Seidman, Romantic Longings, pp. 22, 32, 209n6; and Walters, Primers for Prudery, pp. xii, 170–76. Unlike several previous critics of Roderick Hudson, I have deliberately chosen not to take a biographical angle. One might well continue to ask about the relationship between this early novel and James’s experience of romantic friendship both before and after its publication, as Ellmann, Graham, Murtaugh, and others have done. See Ellmann, A long the riverrun; W. Graham, Thwarted Love; and Daniel J. Murtaugh, “An Emotional Reflection: Sexual Realization in Henry James’s Revisions to Roderick Hudson,” Henry James Review 17 (1996): 182–203. Inspired by the methodology of Caleb Crain’s recent book, American Sympathy, we might also want to ask if Roderick Hudson was written not just about but for a specific male friend, whether it was written for a prospective friend (i.e., that James was projecting a desired form of friendship that he would soon come to experience with Paul Joukowsky and later with Hendrik Andersen), or whether it is an example of what Crain calls hierotymy: “separating one’s feelings for a man from the man himself, in order to free them for literary use” (p. 14). Robert K. Martin, “The ‘High Felicity’ of Comradeship: A New Reading of Roderick Hudson,” American Literary Realism 11 (1978): 100–108. Henry James, Roderick Hudson (orig. pub. 1878; reprint, Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1986), pp. 78, 101, 107, 115, 130, 139, 188, 347, 358 passim. Subsequent references to this novel will be abbreviated RH. RH, p. 149. Hugh Stevens comes closest to making the connection between Roderick Hudson and romantic friendship (Stevens, Henry James and Sexuality, p. 67),

not e s to p a g e s 9 2 – 9 4

10.

11. 12.

13. 14.

15. 16.

17. 18.

but chooses instead to place his emphasis on homoeroticism and mas­ ochism in the novel. Richards, “Manly Love in Victorian Society,” p. 99. David Halperin also discusses this tradition in How to Do the History of Homosexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), pp. 118–21. RH, pp. 46, 47. Stevens is the latest critic to place a heavy emphasis on the New York edition preface (though his reading of the novel is based on the 1878 English ed.; Stevens, Henry James and Sexuality, pp. 84–89). Naomi Z. Sofer, on the other hand, is not willing to give James the last word, attempting, as I soon will do, to make his plot construction seem plausible. In her analysis, “Mary Garland is actually an integral part of the relationship between the two men and . . . James’s decision to depict two such ‘different vibrations’ as though they could ‘walk hand in hand’ stems from the fact that he is writing within a specific social and literary tradition in which, whether he is conscious of it or not, homosocial bonds between men always ‘walk hand in hand’ with the heterosexual relationships on which patriarchal structures are based” (Naomi Z. Sofer, “Why ‘different vibrations . . . walk hand in hand’: Homosocial Bonds in Roderick Hudson,” Henry James Review 20 [1999]: 187). I agree with the spirit of Sofer’s analysis, but not with her terms, as she consistently and anachronistically analyzes the gender politics of Roderick Hudson on the basis of modern-day concepts of homosexuality and heterosexuality. RH, p. 102. On Twain’s romantic friendships in Nevada in the early 1860s, see Andrew J. Hoffman, Inventing Mark Twain: The Lives of Samuel Langhorne Clemens (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1997). Apropos of Twain’s first seeing Livy Langdon’s portrait when her brother showed it to him aboard the Quaker City, Laura E. Skandera-Trombley suggests, “Obviously, it was the portrait that caught Clemens’s eye, but Charles Langdon’s upbringing and social status must have served as a strong reinforcement of its subject’s charms” (Laura E. Skandera-Trombley, Mark Twain in the Company of Women [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994], p. xxi). Skandera-Trombley does not entertain the idea that Livy’s attractiveness may have been enhanced by her brother’s physical charms. Bret Harte, The Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Writings, ed. Gary Scharnhorst (New York: Penguin, 2001), p. 100. This is what Sharon Marcus refers to as “the play of the system”: “A degree of give built into social rules, offering those who lived by them flexibility, if not utter freedom” (Marcus, Between Women, p. 27). RH, p. 57. William Dean Howells, The Shadow of a Dream (New York: Harper, 1890), p. 33.

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19. On Harte, see Nissen, Bret Harte; on Adams, Hay, and King, see Patricia O’Toole, The Five of Hearts: An Intimate Portrait of Henry Adams and His Friends, 1880–1918 (New York: C. N. Potter, 1990); on Taylor, see B. Taylor, Life and Letters and Selected Letters, and Robert K. Martin, The Homosexual Tradition in American Poetry (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1979), pp. 97–109; on Twain and Stoddard, see Hoffman, Inventing, pp. 213–16, and Austen, Genteel Pagan, pp. 65–67. 20. RH, p. 47. 21. William Thackeray, The History of Pendennis (orig. pub. 1850; reprint, London: Smith, Elder, 1878), 2:71; Harte, Luck of Roaring Camp, p. 25. 22. Stevens, Henry James and Sexuality, p. 101, including quotation from James’s The Bostonians. 23. RH, p. 102. 24. RH, p. 250. 25. RS, p. 211. 26. Sedgwick, Between Men. 27. In my thinking about the “straight closet,” I have been inspired by Eric Savoy’s trenchant analysis of James’s late story “In the Cage.” See Eric Savoy, “ ‘In the Cage’ and the Queer Effects of Gay History,” Novel 28 (1995): 284–307. 28. Lochrie, Heterosyncracies, p. xxii. 29. Halperin, “Forgetting Foucault.” 30. Walters, Primers for Prudery, p. xiii. 31. Haller and Haller, The Physician and Sexuality, pp. xii, 102. 32. RS, pp. 13, 20, 69. 33. See Haller and Haller, The Physician and Sexuality, pp. 124–25; and Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, “Victoria Woodhull, Anthony Comstock, and Conflict over Sex in the United States in the 1870s,” Journal of American History 87 (2000): 403–34. 34. RS, pp. 68, 194, 229. 35. Seidman, Romantic Longings, p. 7; see also Goshgarian, To Kiss the Chasten­ ing Rod. 36. RS, p. 249. 37. RH, pp. 104, 105. 38. Kevin Hayes, ed., Henry James: The Contemporary Reviews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 6, 8, 11. 39. RH, p. 58. 40. Henry James, quoted in Fred Kaplan, Henry James: The Imagination of Genius (New York: William Morrow, 1992), p. 212. 41. RH, p. 275. 42. Hayes, Henry James, p. 12. 43. Stevens, Henry James and Sexuality, p. 66. 44. RH, pp. 98–99, 155, 274, 283–84.

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45. Michael Kimmel, Manhood in America: A Cultural History (New York: Free Press, 1996). 46. RH, p. 75. 47. RH, p. 271. 48. RH, pp. 63, 82, 114, 144, 215, 383. 49. RH, p. 55. 50. “Single Life,” p. 501. 51. Bertolini, “Fireside Chastity,” 20. 52. RS, pp. 197, 289. 53. Rich, “Compulsory Heterosexuality,” 631–60. 54. S. Graham, Lecture to Young Men, p. 34; Wright, Marriage and Parentage, p. 226; John Cowan, The Science of a New Life (New York: Cowan, 1870), pp. 26, 133; Lewis, Chastity, pp. 81, 320. 55. See Sedgwick, Between Men, p. 177; and Crowley, “Howells, Stoddard, and Male Homosocial Attachment,” pp. 301–24. In addition to the studies cited, I have benefited from the discussion of nineteenth-century bachelorhood in Katherine V. Snyder, Bachelors, Manhood, and the Novel, 1850–1925 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 18–63; and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990), pp. 188–212. 56. RH, p. 62. 57. RS, p. 212. 58. RH, pp. 169, 175, 199, 231, 364. 59. RS, p. 175. 60. Junius Henri Browne, “Women as Companions,” Galaxy 15 (February 1873), 207. 61. RH, pp. 106, 137, 192, 222, 239, 334, 358–59, 374. 62. Cary, “The Genteel Tradition,” p. 285. 63. Harold Howland, “Browne, Junius Henri,” in Dictionary of American Biog­ raphy (London: Oxford University Press, 1929), 3:168. 64. Browne, “Women as Friends,” pp. 234, 237, 239, 311. 65. RH, p. 311. Two other novels from the period confirm the topicality of writings on “the friendship of the sexes”: Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Friends: A Duet (London: Sampson Low, 1881); and William Dean Howells’s Private Theatricals (1875–76). 66. Browne, “Women as Friends,” pp. 237–38. 67. Ibid., pp. 235, 243. 68. RS, pp. 142–43. 69. Seidman, Romantic Longings, p. 22; Walters, Primers for Prudery, p. 129. 70. RS, pp. 120, 129, 167, 169–70, 254. 71. Cowan, Science, p. 126. 72. Browne, “Women as Friends,” p. 238. 73. Quoted in Hayes, Henry James, pp. 5, 10.

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74. RH, pp. 53, 139. 75. Paul Surgi Speck, “A Structural Analysis of Henry James’s Roderick Hudson,” Studies in the Novel 2 (1970): 296. C H AP T E R f i v e

1.

Smith-Rosenberg, “The Female World of Love and Ritual”; Lillian Faderman, “Female Same-Sex Relationships in Novels by Longfellow, Holmes, and James,” The New England Quarterly 51 (1978): 309–32. 2. RH, p. 47. 3. Orm Øverland, introduction to A Saloonkeeper’s Daughter, by Drude Krog Janson, ed. Orm Øverland and trans. Gerald Thorson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), p. xxiv. 4. See Nina Baym, Woman’s Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and about Women in America, 1820–70, 2nd ed. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993). 5. Orm Øverland briefly discusses possible connections between The Wide, Wide World, The Lamplighter, and A Saloonkeeper’s Daughter in his introduction to the English edition (pp. xxvii–xxviii). He also mentions A Country Doctor (p. xxviii) and Fettered for Life (p. xxx, n. 39), which I shall return to. I have also benefited from reading Øverland’s essay “Recovering an Unrecognized Novel—Discovering American Literature,” in Intercultural America, ed. Alfred Hornung (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2007), pp. 187–207. Practically all the scholarship on this novel, including a shorter version of this chapter, is contained in Asbjørn Grønstad and Lene Johannessen, eds., To Become the Self One Is: A Critical Companion to Drude Krog Janson’s “A Saloonkeeper’s Daughter” (Oslo: Novus, 2005). 6. Maria Susanna Cummins, The Lamplighter (orig. pub. 1854; reprint, ed. Nina Baym, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995), p. 104. 7. Janet Todd, Women’s Friendship in Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980). 8. Susan Warner, The Wide, Wide World (orig. pub. 1850; reprint, New York: Feminist Press, 1987), p. 12. 9. A recent book by Tone Hellesund gives vivid and convincing evidence of the significance of same-sex ties in the lives of unmarried Norwegian women between 1870 and 1940. See Hellesund, Kapitler. 10. Drude Krog Janson, A Saloonkeeper’s Daughter, ed. Orm Øverland and trans. Gerald Thorson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), pp. 20, 42. Subsequent references to this novel will be abbreviated SKD. 11. Cummins, The Lamplighter, pp. 290, 253. 12. Augusta Jane Evans, Beulah (orig. pub. 1859; reprint, ed. Elizabeth FoxGenovese, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992), pp. 72, 293, 300.

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13. Reynolds, Beneath the American Renaissance, p. 357. 14. Blake, Fettered for Life, p. 271. 15. Sarah Orne Jewett, Deephaven (orig. pub. 1877; reprint, New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1905), pp. 41, 251. 16. Glazener, Reading for Realism. 17. W. D. Howells, The Undiscovered Country. 18. I can recall only one example of a narrative of female romantic friendship among married women: Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899). 19. Cummins, The Lamplighter, p. 265. 20. Oliver Wendell Holmes, A Mortal Antipathy (orig. pub. 1885; reprint, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1895), p. 142. 21. Ibid., pp. 122–23. 22. Ibid., p. 295. Italics in original. 23. SKD, pp. 36, 43, 44, 85, 76, 100, 146. 24. SKD, pp. 89, 92, 107. 25. SKD, pp. 65, 108, 128, 134, 136. 26. SKD, pp. 134, 136. 27. Susan K. Harris, Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Novels: Interpretive Strategies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 33. 28. Jean Carwile Masteller, “The Women Doctors of Howells, Phelps, and Jewett: The Conflict of Marriage and Career,” in Critical Essays on Sarah Orne Jewett, ed. Gwen L. Nagel (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1984), p. 136. See also Michael Sartisky, afterword in Doctor Zay, by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (New York: Feminist Press, 1987 [1882]), p. 300. 29. Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Doctor Zay (orig. pub. 1882; reprint, New York: Feminist Press, 1987), p. 244. 30. Sartisky, afterword, p. 293. 31. S. K. Harris, Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Novels, p. 21. 32. Phelps, Doctor Zay, p. 244. 33. “Single Life,” pp. 500, 501. 34. Holmes, A Mortal Antipathy, p. 301. 35. For a discussion of Fields and Jewett’s relationship, see Judith Roman, “A Closer Look at the Jewett-Fields Relationship,” in Nagel, Critical Essays on Sarah Orne Jewett, pp. 119–34. For an account of several nineteenth- and early twentieth-century women’s long-term relationships, see Faderman, To Believe In Women. For a discussion of Norwegian female couples, see Hellesund, Kapitler, chap. 4. 36. SKD, pp. 71, 133. 37. SKD, pp. 22, 7, 43, 73. 38. SKD, pp. 119, 121, 140, 123. 39. Øverland, introduction, p. xxviii. 40. SKD, p. 147. 41. Evans, Beulah, p. 174.

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42. Blake, Fettered for Life, p. 379. 43. Jewett, Deephaven, p. 243. The Ladies of Llangollen were a famous female couple, Eleanor Butler (1739–1829) and Sarah Ponsonby (1755–1831), who spent a lifetime together in a cottage in Wales. 44. I take this term from Nicole Tonkovich, Domesticity with a Difference: The Nonfiction of Catharine Beecher, Sarah J. Hale, Fanny Fern, and Margaret Fuller ( Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997), p. 183. 45. Sartisky, afterword, p. 300. 46. SKD, p. 80. 47. Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, The Silent Partner (orig. pub. 1871; reprint, New York: Feminist Press, 1983), pp. 38, 260, 261, 287. 48. Mari Jo Buhle and Florence Howe, afterword in The Silent Partner, by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps (New York: Feminist Press, 1983 [1871]), pp. 381–82. 49. Joy S. Kasson, introduction to Work: A Story of Experience, by Louisa May Alcott (London: Penguin, 1994 [1873]), p. xxx. 50. Louisa May Alcott, Work: A Story of Experience (orig. pub. 1873; reprint, London: Penguin, 1994), p. 343. 51. SKD, p. 123. 52. Alcott, Work, pp. 103, 103–4, 104, 105, 107, 112. 53. SKD, pp. 134–35. 54. SKD, pp. 149–50. C H AP T E R s i x

1.

2.

190

Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination: Essays On Literature and Society (London: Secker and Warburg, 1951), p. 108; Kenneth Lynn, Mark Twain and Southwestern Humor (Boston: Little, Brown, 1959), pp. 214–15; Robert Shulman, “Fathers, Brothers, and ‘the Diseased’: The Family, Individualism, and American Society in Huck Finn,” in One Hundred Years of Huckleberry Finn: The Boy, His Book, and American Culture, ed. Robert Sattelmeyer and J. Donald Crowley (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1985), p. 331; James M. Cox, “A Hard Book to Take,” in Sattelmeyer and Crowley, One Hundred Years of Huckleberry Finn, p. 390; Peaches Henry, “The Struggle for Tolerance: Race and Censorship in Huckleberry Finn,” in Mark Twain: “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”; A Case Study in Critical Controversy, ed. Gerald Graff and James Phelan (New York: Bedford Books, 1995), p. 373; Hugh J. Dawson, “The Ethnicity of Huck Finn—and the Difference It Makes,” American Literary Realism 30 (1998): 13; and Gregg Camfield, “Sentimental Liberalism and the Problem of Race in Huckleberry Finn,” Nineteenth-Century Literature 46 (1991): 109. Fredrick Woodard and Donnarae MacCann, “Minstrel Shackles and Nineteenth-Century ‘Liberality,’” in Satire or Evasion? Black Perspectives on Huckleberry Finn, ed. James S. Leonard et al. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992), p. 146.

not e s to p a g e s 1 3 3 – 1 3 8

3. 4. 5.

6. 7. 8.

9.

10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16.

Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel, 2nd ed. (London: Paladin, 1970), p. 263. Mark Twain, quoted in Camfield, “Sentimental Liberalism,” p. 108n8. Franklin R. Rogers, Mark Twain’s Burlesque Patterns (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1960), p. 139; Henry Nash Smith, Mark Twain: The Development of a Writer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962), p. 119. Neil Schmitz, “Twain, Huckleberry Finn, and the Reconstruction,” American Studies 12–13 (1971–72): 60. Skandera-Trombley, Company of Women, p. 33. Christopher Looby, “ ‘Innocent Homosexuality’: The Fiedler Thesis in Retrospect,” in Mark Twain: “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”; A Case Study in Critical Controversy, ed. Gerald Graff and James Phelan (New York: Bedford Books, 1995), p. 538. Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (orig. pub. 1885; reprint, ed. Victor Fischer and Lin Salamo, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001), chap. 18, p. 147. Subsequent references to the novel will be abbreviated HF. As Huckleberry Finn is available in a number of different editions, I provide the chapter number in addition to the page number from the edition produced by the University of California Press as part of its Mark Twain Library series. Kimmel, Manhood in America, p. 56. Walter Blair, Mark Twain & Huck Finn (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1960), p. 344. Lynn, Southwestern Humor, pp. 243–44. See Schmitz, “Twain, Huckleberry Finn, and the Reconstruction”; Shulman, “Fathers, Brothers, and ‘the Diseased’”; Steven Mailloux, Rhetorical Power (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), pp. 102–28; and Stacey Margolis, “Huckleberry Finn; or, Consequences,” PMLA 116 (2001): 329–43. See Crain, American Sympathy. Leslie A. Fiedler, “Come Back to the Raft Ag’in, Huck Honey!” in Graff and Phelan, Mark Twain, pp. 528–34. For Twain’s comments on reading “Tennessee’s Partner,” see Bradford A. Booth, “Mark Twain’s Comments on Bret Harte’s Stories,” American Literature 25 (1954): 494–95. Walter Blair appears to have been the first modern-day Twain scholar to recognize the significance of Harte’s trailblazing literary activity when he observed in 1960 that Twain would not have made Huck his hero “if the trail had not been broken by Harte” (Mark Twain & Huck Finn, p. 113). For a discussion of Harte and Twain’s infamous love-hate relationship, see Hamlin Hill, “Mark Twain and His Enemies,” Southern Review 4 (1968): 520–29; Margaret Duckett, Mark Twain and Bret Harte (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1964); Peter Stoneley, “Rewriting the Gold Rush: Twain, Harte, and Homosociality,” Journal of Ameri­ can Studies 30 (1996): 189–209; and Nissen, Bret Harte, pp. 139–61 passim.

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17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22. 23. 24.

25. 26. 27. 28.

29. 30. 31.

32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

38.

39.

192

See Dawson, “The Ethnicity of Huck Finn,” on Huck’s ethnic background. HF, chap. 15, p. 99; chap. 18, p. 155. HF, chap. 7, p. 41. Michael Davitt Bell, “Mark Twain, ‘Realism,’ and Huckleberry Finn,” in New Essays on “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” ed. Louis J. Budd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 51. HF, chap. 1, p. 4; chap. 31, p. 271. Lynn, Southwestern Humor, pp. 243–44. HF, chap. 9, pp. 60, 62. Leo Marx, “Mr. Eliot, Mr. Trilling, and Huckleberry Finn,” in TwentiethCentury Interpretations of Adventures of “Huckleberry Finn,” ed. Claude M. Simpson (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1968), p. 297. See Forrest G. Robinson, “The Characterization of Jim in Huckleberry Finn,” Nineteenth-Century Literature 43 (1988): 361–91. Harold Beaver, “Run, Nigger, Run: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as a Fugitive Slave Narrative,” Journal of American Studies 8 (1974): 345. Robinson, “The Characterization of Jim,” p. 382. Thomas Weaver and Merline A. Williams, “Mark Twain’s Jim: Identity as an Index to Cultural Attitudes,” American Literary Realism 13 (1980): 19. Cox, “A Hard Book to Take,” p. 391. Austen, Genteel Pagan, p. 61. Richard Henry Dana Jr., Two Years before the Mast (orig. pub. 1840; reprint, New York: Modern Library, 1936); Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (orig. pub. 1851; reprint, ed. Harrison Hayford and Hershel Parker, New York: W. W. Norton, 1967); Charles Warren Stoddard, “In a Transport,” reprinted in Cruising the South Seas: Stories by Charles Warren Stoddard, ed. Winston Leyland (San Francisco: Gay Sunshine Press, 1987), pp. 141–57. B. Taylor, Central Africa, p. 85. Ibid., p. 98. Ibid., p. 96. HF, chap. 19, p. 158. RFR, p. 269. On the tramp crisis of the 1870s, see Kenneth L. Kusmer, Down and Out, On the Road: The Homeless in American History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), chap. 3; and Todd DePastino, Citizen Hobo: How a Century of Homelessness Shaped America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), chap. 1. Mary W. Blanchard, “The Soldier and the Aesthete: Homosexuality and Popular Culture in Gilded Age America,” Journal of American Studies 30 (1996): 38–39. William H. Brewer, “What Shall We Do with Our Tramps?” New Englander and Yale Review 37 (1878): 521, 522, 532. Italics in original.

not e s to p a g e s 1 4 3 – 1 4 4

40. Horatio Seymour, “Crime and Tramps,” Harper’s New Monthly 58 (December 1878), pp. 106, 109. 41. Kusmer, Down and Out, p. 57. 42. DePastino, Citizen Hobo, p. 91. As early as 1877, Francis Wayland “led a chorus of opinion associating tramps with rape” (ibid., p. 27). 43. See Anna M. Hoyt, “My Tramp,” Harper’s New Monthly 46 (March 1873), pp. 562–70; and Bret Harte, “My Friend the Tramp,” in The Writings of Bret Harte (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1896), 10:96–110. 44. Frank Bellew, The Tramp Exposed (New York: Dick and Fitzgerald, 1878); Lee O. Harris, The Man Who Tramps (Indianapolis: Douglass and Carlton, 1878). 45. L. O. Harris, Man Who Tramps, pp. 8, 40, 49, 114, 153, 156. For a discussion of Harris’s and Bellew’s works, see Kusmer, Down and Out, pp. 48–49; and DePastino, Citizen Hobo, pp. 18, 23–28, 42–46. For an early treatment of American tramp literature, see John D. Seelye, “The American Tramp: A Version of Picaresque,” American Quarterly 15 (1963): 535–53. Seelye mentions Huckleberry Finn in passing, but does not discuss the duke and the dauphin. 46. Several critics have discussed the parodic aspects of the duke and the dauphin. Robert Shulman couches his analysis in domestic terms, seeing the tramps as “a parody of the positive family Huck and Jim create” (Shulman, “Fathers, Brothers, and ‘the Diseased,’” p. 336). Leland Krauth observes that “The duke and the king . . . embody the worst of both sexes. In their performances they are not only sentimental but also sadistic. Twain makes them parodies of the conflicting modes enacted by the raftsmen and Emmeline” (Leland Krauth, Proper Mark Twain [Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1999], p. 175). Focusing mainly on Roughing It (1871) and Twain’s portrayal of partnerships among gold miners, Peter Stoneley points out that “often [Twain] ironizes the literary conventions of manly love,” and concludes that Twain, like his precursor Bret Harte, was “endorsing and ironizing the myths of partnership.” He discusses Huckleberry Finn only in passing, due to his focus on California gold-mining partnerships and his dubious premise that “the most typical partnership in the novel is between Huck Finn and Buck Grangerford.” Stoneley claims that Jim and Huck’s “de facto inequality” creates an “imbalance . . . which denies the possibility of partnership” (Stoneley, “Rewriting the Gold Rush,” pp. 202, 203, 203n24). I would argue that Huck’s and Jim’s manifold differences and inequalities, not just in race but also in age, legal status, life experience, physical strength, and masculinity, ultimately even one another out. A shared linguistic repertoire and inferior social status serve to bring them closer together. See Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Was Huck Black? Mark Twain and African-American Voices (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). Irish Americans were considered “white Negroes.” See Dawson, “The Ethnicity of Huck Finn,” p. 12.

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47. HF, chap. 30, p. 264. 48. Nels Anderson, The Hobo: The Sociology of the Homeless Man (orig. pub. 1923; reprint, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), pp. 144, 148. For more recent discussions of homosexuality among tramps, see Kusmer, Down and Out, pp. 141–43, and DePastino, Citizen Hobo, pp. 85–91. 49. DePastino, Citizen Hobo, p. 49. 50. Josiah Flynt [Willard]: “Appendix B: Homosexuality among Tramps,” in Sexual Inversion, by Havelock Ellis and John Addington Symonds (orig. pub. 1897; reprint, n.p.: Ayer, 1994), pp. 252–57; “The Tramp at Home,” Century 47 (February 1894), pp. 517–26; “Club Life among Outcasts,” Harper’s New Monthly 90 (April 1895), pp. 712–22; “How Men Become Tramps: Conclusions from Personal Experience as an Amateur Tramp,” Century 50 (October 1895), pp. 941–45; “Jamie the Kid,” Harper’s New Monthly 91 (September 1895), pp. 776–83; “The Children of the Road,” Atlantic Monthly 77 ( January 1896), pp. 58–71; Tramping with Tramps: Studies and Sketches of Vaga­ bond Life (New York: Century, 1901). 51. Flynt, “Club Life,” p. 712. 52. Flynt, “Children,” pp. 64, 68. 53. Flynt, “Jamie,” p. 780. 54. Flynt, “Appendix B,” p. 253. 55. See Andrew J. Hoffman, “Mark Twain and Homosexuality,” American Litera­ ture 67 (1995): 23–49. 56. Blair, Mark Twain & Huck Finn, pp. 318–19. 57. See Leland Krauth, “Mark Twain: The Victorian of Southwestern Humor,” American Literature 54 (1982): 368–84. 58. Wallace Graves, “Mark Twain’s ‘Burning Shame,’” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 23 (1968): 95–98. On the use of illustrations to convert “the cruelty and sexuality of the story into a series of humorous boyish adventures,” see Beverly R. David, “The Pictorial Huck Finn: Mark Twain and His Illustrator, E. W. Kemble,” American Quarterly 26 (1974): 351. 59. Critics do not appear to have considered the possible sexual joke lurking between the lines in the passage where Jim is described striking an Uncle Remus–like pose, “with his head down betwixt his knees, moaning and mourning” (HF, chap. 23, p. 201; see also Joel Chandler Harris, Uncle Re­ mus: His Saying and His Songs [orig. pub. 1880; reprint, ed. Robert Hemenway, Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1982], p. 142). Similarly, Twain, as the author of such ribald pieces as “Some Thoughts on the Science of Onanism” (1879), might have wished to suggest something more than idleness in his description of villagers with their hands constantly in their britches pockets (HF, chap. 21, p. 182; see Twain, “Some Thoughts,” in Collected Tales, Sketches, Speeches, & Essays, pp. 722–24). 60. Hamlin Hill, “Mark Twain: Audience and Artistry,” American Quarterly 15 (1963): 26, 28–37, 39. 61. Camfield, “Sentimental Liberalism,” pp. 102–3.

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62. Ibid., p. 103. 63. Laurie Champion, ed., The Critical Response to Mark Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn” (New York: Greenwood Press, 1991), pp. 14, 17. 64. Skandera-Trombley gives a different account of how Twain appealed to female readers, one that does not so much contradict mine as needs to be modified in its interesting but somewhat exaggerated claims for the significance of “woman’s fiction” to the form and reception of Huckleberry Finn (Skandera-Trombley, Company of Women, pp. 30–34). Though SkanderaTrombley does not credit him, Leslie Fiedler was the first to suggest Huck’s “unsuspected affiliation to the female orphans of Susan Warner and Maria Cummins” (Fiedler, Love and Death, p. 260). 65. See Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s account of Tennyson’s courtship and marriage as related to him by his friend Hurlbert, in Letters and Journals of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 1846–1906, ed. Mary Thacher Higginson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1921), pp. 32–33; and Dellamora, Masculine De­ sire, p. 40. As it happens, Emily Sellwood Tennyson makes an appearance in the context of female friendship in Sharon Marcus’s Between Women, pp. 58, 64–65. 66. Clara Morris, Life on the Stage: My Personal Experiences and Recollections (London: McClure Phillips, 1901), pp. 316–17. Italics in original. 67. George William Curtis, Prue and I (New York: A. L. Burt, n.d. [1857]), pp. 251, 254. 68. Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (orig. pub. 1876; reprint, London: Penguin, 1994), p. 221. 69. We find an echo of the traditional romantic friendship plotline in the death of Huck’s erstwhile friend, Buck Grangerford. George C. Carrington is one of the few critics to claim that the duke and the dauphin die as a result of their ill treatment. See Carrington, The Dramatic Unity of Huckleberry Finn (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1976), p. 20. 70. HF, chap. 22, p. 190. 71. Looby, “The Fiedler Thesis,” p. 544. 72. See, for example, Robinson, “The Characterization of Jim,” p. 369. 73. Lynn, Southwestern Humor, p. 244. 74. Laurence B. Holland, “A ‘Raft of Trouble’: Work and Deed in Huckleberry Finn,” in American Realism: New Essays, ed. Eric J. Sundquist (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), p. 69. C H AP T E R s e v e n

1. 2.

HNF, p. 485. As far as I can see, this has never been done in any systematic or (new) historicist fashion, but Arthur Boardman makes a start in “Howellsian Sex,” Studies in the Novel 2 (1970): 52–60, as do Alfred Habegger in Gender, Fantasy, and Realism and Elizabeth Stevens Prioleau in The Circle of Eros:

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3.

4.

5.

6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

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Sexuality in the Work of William Dean Howells (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1983). Both Habegger and Prioleau have a tendency to reify rather than historicize and deconstruct Victorian domestic ideology. As a result, they end up sounding more like promoters of the companionate marriage ideal than analysts of it. See Michael Davitt Bell, “The Sin of Art and the Problem of American Realism: William Dean Howells,” Prospects 9 (1984): 115–42; Habegger, Gender, Fantasy, and Realism. Henry Adams, “Their Wedding Journey: A Review,” in Howells: A Century of Criticism, ed. Kenneth E. Eble (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1970), p. 12. On the limitations of Howells’s realism, see, for example, Edwin H. Cady, “The Neuroticism of William Dean Howells,” in Eble, Howells, pp. 138–50; John K. Reeves, “The Limited Realism of Howells’ Their Wedding Journey,” PMLA 77 (1962): 617–28; and the discussion of restrictions on American literary realism in general in Glazener, Reading for Realism. Crowley, Mask of Fiction, pp. 50–51. W. D. Howells, Their Wedding Journey, p. 20. Sedgwick, Between Men, p. 21. William Dean Howells, Doctor Breen’s Practice (orig. pub. 1881; reprint, Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1969), p. 146. Sidney H. Bremer, “William Dean Howells’ Ingenues and the Road to Marriage,” American Literary Realism 12 (1979): 147. In support of Bremer’s argument, we find the following generalization in Indian Summer: “You never can know what sort of nature a young girl has. Her nature depends so much upon that of the man whose fate she shares” (William Dean Howells, Indian Summer [Boston: Ticknor, 1886], p. 125). W. D. Howells, “Bibliographical,” in HNF, p. 4. William Dean Howells, My Literary Passions: Criticism and Fiction (New York: Harper, 1895), p. 267. HNF, p. 479. See Clara M. Kirk, “Reality and Actuality in the March Family Narratives of W. D. Howells,” PMLA 74 (1959): 137. HNF, pp. 26–27. Kirk, “Reality and Actuality,” p. 138. HNF, pp. 9, 11, 13, 81, 482, 484. Incidentally, we also find men dancing with each other in Howells’s Indian Summer, p. 137. Richard Foster, “The Contemporaneity of Howells,” New England Quarterly 32 (1959): 77. HNF, p. 181. HNF, pp. 357, 358. HNF, pp. 14, 44, 76. See also pp. 36, 51, 76, 323, 324, 381, 435, 494. HNF, p. 149.

not e s to p a g e s 1 5 6 – 1 5 8

23. Annie R. M. Logan, “Mr. Howells’s Latest Novel,” Nation ( June 5, 1890), p. 454; quoted in Irene C. Goldman-Price, “ ‘In this particular instance I want you’: The Booster as Mentor in A Hazard of New Fortunes,” in American Literary Mentors, ed. Irene C. Goldman-Price and Melissa McFarland Pennell (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1999), p. 47. 24. HNF, pp. 9, 10, 11, 121, 163, 214, 320. 25. HNF, p. 353. 26. W. D. Howells, Their Wedding Journey, p. 21. 27. Graham Thompson, “ ‘And that paint is a thing that will bear looking into’: The Business of Sexuality in The Rise of Silas Lapham,” American Literary Realism 33 (2000): 11. 28. HNF, pp. 17, 27; as, indeed, the author and his wife also had by 1890, see Gertrude Mead Howells, If Not Literature: Letters of Elinor Mead Howells, ed. Ginette de B. Merrill and George Arms (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1988), p. 266. Isabel subjects her husband to “an iron code” (HNF, p. 78). No better example need be sought of what Richard Brodhead calls “disciplinary intimacy” (Brodhead, Cultures of Letters, pp. 17–18). 29. HNF, pp. 88, 484. 30. HNF, p. 145. 31. Crowley, Mask of Fiction, p. 72. 32. HNF, p. 444. 33. HNF, p. 150; see also p. 294. Once a couple is married, then, the other man becomes a liability rather than an asset, at least in Isabel March’s opinion. This becomes even clearer in The Shadow of a Dream. When faced with the Faulkners’ “three-cornered household” with James Nevil, Isabel asserts that “a husband shouldn’t have any friend but his wife” (W. D. Howells, Shadow of a Dream, p. 139). A wife’s jealousy of her husband’s old friends is also thematized in The Landlord at Lion’s Head (William Dean Howells, The Landlord at Lion’s Head [New York: Harper, 1897], p. 437). 34. HNF, pp. 351–52. 35. HNF, pp. 422, 430, 442. 36. HNF, pp. 443, 444. 37. An androcentric bias is unavoidable and even necessary in a study of love between men, but no doubt this approach would be equally relevant if used to consider literary texts with affective triangles consisting of one man and two women or, indeed, three women. 38. See Arnold B. Fox, “Howells’ Doctrine of Complicity,” in Eble, Howells, pp. 196–202; Arthur Boardman, “Social Point of View in the Novels of William Dean Howells,” American Literature 39 (1967): 42–59; and Wai-Chee Dimock, “The Economy of Pain: Capitalism, Humanitarianism, and the Realistic Novel,” in New Essays on “The Rise of Silas Lapham,” ed. Donald E. Pease (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 67–90. 39. W. D. Howells, Criticism and Fiction, p. 282.

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40. See W. D. Howells, “Autobiographical,” in HNF, pp. 505, 508–9. I must leave to one side the role of friendship in Howells’s own life, not least of all his relationship with that quintessentially queer character, Ralph Keeler, Howells’s self-avowed model for Fulkerson (ibid., p. 505). It is worth noting, though, one characteristic gesture of Keeler’s that has made its way into the novel. In his sketch in the Atlantic Monthly after Keeler’s mysterious death by drowning in 1873, Howells relates how Keeler would tell a risqué story and “those best points that can never get into print” with “a hand gaily flirted in the air, a dramatic touch on the listener’s shoulder” (William Dean Howells, “Ralph Keeler,” Atlantic Monthly 33 [March 1874]: 366). Fulkerson, in turn, is described in the novel published seventeen years after Keeler’s death as “flirting an airy farewell to Beaton with his hand as he went” (HNF, p. 142; see also p. 346). Overall, John W. Crowley has contributed the most to our understanding of the role of friendship in Howells’s own life. See Crowley, Black Heart’s Truth; and Crowley, “Howells, Stoddard, and Male Homosocial Attachment” (the latter is included in Crowley, Mask of Fiction). 41. Price McMurray, “ ‘Take the thing at its worst!’ Realism and the Construction of Masculinity in Howells’s The Shadow of a Dream,” CCTE Studies 68 (2003): 26. 42. James Russell Lowell, quoted in George Arms, “Howells’ New York Novel: Comedy and Belief,” New England Quarterly 21 (1948): 314; Henry James, quoted in Michael Anesko, Letters, Fictions, Lives: Henry James and William Dean Howells (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 275. 43. HNF, p. 333. 44. George N. Bennett, William Dean Howells: The Development of a Novelist (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1959), p. 188. 45. It is worth noting that in Howells boys can be pretty and soldiers too. See William Dean Howells, Their Silver Wedding Journey (New York: Harper, 1899), 1:89, 317; 2:79. 46. Quotations from HNF, pp. 290, 311, 324, 378. 47. Graham Thompson, “The Business of Sexuality,” pp. 7, 13. Though Thompson does not cite him, Kermit Vanderbilt was the first to discuss, however briefly, the homoerotics of fathers and their daughter’s male friends in Howells’s fiction. See Kermit Vanderbilt, The Achievement of William Dean Howells (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968), p. 171. 48. Amy Kaplan, “ ‘The Knowledge of the Line’: Realism and the City in Howells’s A Hazard of New Fortunes,” PMLA 101 (1986): 79. 49. Andrew Rennick, “ ‘A Good War Story’: The Civil War, Substitution, and the Labor Crisis in Howells’ A Hazard of New Fortunes,” American Literary Realism 35 (2003): 258. 50. HNF, pp. 288, 408. 51. HNF, pp. 369, 373.

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52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61.

HNF, pp. 493–94. W. D. Howells, Their Silver Wedding Journey, 1:5. HNF, p. 466. HNF, p. 235. HNF, pp. 167, 470. HNF, p. 388. HNF, pp. 237, 478. HNF, pp. 123, 235, 466, 468. HNF, pp. 207, 210. This is a direct parallel to an observation Sharon Marcus has made about women protagonists in nineteenth-century British novels: “A heroine who lacks female friends almost always has an uneasy relationship to marriage.” She discusses Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853) as an example of a “nonmarriage novel” in which the heroine’s rejection of female friendships is a contributing factor to her continued unmarried state. Marcus explains: “In Victorian fiction, it is only the woman with no bosom friend who risks becoming, like Lucy Snowe, one whom no man will ever clasp to his heart in marriage, a friendless woman who remains perpetually outside the bosom of the family” (Marcus, Between Women, pp. 80, 108). 62. Everett Carter, Howells and the Age of Realism (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1954), p. 150. 63. Kenneth Eble, “Howells’ Kisses,” in Eble, Howells, p. 173. 64. In this chapter, I have consciously avoided the customary discussion of whether or not Howells was a prude and “impossibly neglectful of the physical involvements of love” (Carter, Age of Realism, pp. 140–41); a sissy (Habegger, Gender, Fantasy, and Realism); “had the code of a pious old maid whose greatest delight is to have tea at the vicarage” (Sinclair Lewis, quoted in Edwin H. Cady, The Realist at War: The Mature Years of William Dean Howells [Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1958], p. 153); “was a life-long slave to the young girl bugaboo in literature” (C. Hartley Grattan, “Howells: Ten Years After,” in Eble, Howells, p. 106); “displayed more than the conventional reticence” in his “attitude toward the conventions of courting” (Eble, “Howells’ Kisses,” p. 175); “remained reticent about sexuality” (Susan Goodman and Carl Dawson, William Dean Howells: A Writer’s Life [Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2005], p. 29); or, in a dissenting view, was “an amorist writer of the greatest sophistication” (Prioleau, Circle of Eros, p. 17). Ultimately, these commentaries say more about twentieth-century sexual ideology than they do about Howells’s nineteenth-century novels. As Nancy Armstrong argues: “Most all criticism of the novel capitulates at some point to the idea that sexual desire exists in some form prior to its representation and remains there as something for us to recover or liberate” (Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Do­ mestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel [New York: Oxford University Press, 1987], p. 7).

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65. Delmar Gross Cooke, William Dean Howells: A Critical Study (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1922), p. 162. Cooke puts down “the stupidity of his lovers . . . to no lack of passion on their part, but to an uncontrollable aversion on the part of their author to the notion of love at first sight” (ibid., p. 215). 66. Marcus, Between Women, pp. 74, 75; “When Normal Wasn’t” is part of the subtitle of Lochrie’s book Heterosyncracies; Valerie Traub, The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 361; James A. Schultz, Courtly Love, the Love of Courtliness, and the History of Sexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), p. xvii. 67. In recent years, there have been several interesting attempts to question the current imperative to “Always historicize!” in literary and gender studies, what Christopher Lane refers to as “turning contextual analysis into an ethical demand.” Lane concludes that “the Literary . . . presents new historicist, cultural materialist, and Foucauldian critics with an acute interpretive challenge, because for reasons exceeding politics and history it resists assimilation into their models of discourse.” He stresses the “poverty of context”: “not to champion neoformalism or to evade the burdens of history but to insist that the aesthetic compels us to adopt new, unorthodox approaches to all events, past and present.” Peter Coviello proposes a return to close reading as “a corrective to the reductive tendencies that any stridently contextualizing interpretation risks” and as “a way of doing history.” “Attending closely to the ground-level idiosyncrasies of idiom, syntax, and structure” seems, to him, “one strong way to resist the potentially flattening effects of contextualization.” Jonathan Goldberg and Madhavi Menon claim that “history as it is hegemonically understood today is inadequate to housing the project of queering.” They propose a “homohistory” that rather than being “the history of homos . . . would be invested in suspending determinate sexual and chronological differences while expanding the possibilities of the nonhetero.” Finally, borrowing a concept from Valerie Traub, Valerie Rohy discusses the implications of, even the need for, “strategic anachronism.” She calls for “a turn away from the discipline of straight time, away from the notions of historical propriety that, like notions of sexual propriety, function as regulatory fictions.” She observes, “As queer theory has turned back to the question of temporality, it has discovered in itself the ageless anachronism whose other name is literariness. . . . The perverse effects of the text [Poe’s story “Ligea”] appear when observed from the wrong time, through the specific obliquity of belatedness.” She concludes, “The anachronism named as ahistorical is not bound . . . to an essentially conservative work of identification and self-affirmation; it need not project cherished values backward or repeat what we already know.” Rather, it can “open our own queer moment to alterity.” See Christopher Lane, “The Poverty of Context: Historicism and Nonmimetic Fiction,” PMLA 118 (2003): 450, 466; Peter Coviello, Intimacy

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in America: Dreams of Affiliation in Antebellum Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), pp. 13, 14, 16; Jonathan Goldberg and Madhavi Menon, “Queering History,” PMLA 120 (2005): 1609; and Valerie Rohy, “Ahistorical,” GLQ 12 (2006): 65, 70, 71, 77. 68. W. D. Howells, Life and Literature, quoted in Cooke, William Dean Howells, p. 6.

201

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218

Index “access,” to the literary marketplace, 4, 23 Achilles and Patroclus, 14 Adams, Henry, 95, 151, 182n97 “adhesiveness,” phrenological concept of, 71 Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Twain), 4, 10, 14, 132–49, 164; “brotherly love” in, 135; ending of, 51, 148–49; “Evasion” episode in, 51, 148–49; homeless men, as novel about, 134, 142–46; homoeroticism in, 146; intergenerational and interracial friends in, 21; “In the Tules,” stylistic contrast with, 141–42; Journey to Central Africa, A, parallels with, 140–41; manhood in, 134; middle-class masculinity, counterpoint to, 134; mode of publication as subscription book, significance for form and content of, 146–47; negative response to, reasons for, 147; nudity, symbolic significance of, 146; popularity, causes of, 146–47; protagonists as men on the run, 133; protagonists’ “identitarian limbo” in, 133; protagonists, critics’ response to, 133–34, 139–40, 193n46; relationship to reality of, 136–37; romantic friendship, parody of, 134, 138, 144–46; romantic friendship, Twain’s testing of conventions

and limits of, 138–42; romantic friendship as a “guiding myth” in, 137; romantic friendship fiction, similarities to and differences from, 134, 137–42; romantic friendship in, 138–42; romantic friendship lending cohesion to ending of, 149; “Royal Nonesuch” episode in, 146; sexual jokes in, 194n59; snake as symbol in, 135; sympathy for characters, Twain’s strategy for gaining, 146–47; and tramp fiction, 143–44; and “tramp scare” of the 1870s, 134, 142–43; “Tennessee’s Partner” as precursor of, 138; topicality of, 134, 146 Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The (Twain), 138, 148 Advice to Young Men on Their Duties and Conduct in Life (Arthur), 83 Alcibiades, 179n54 Alcott, Louisa May, 10, 113, 128. See also Work Aldrich, Lilian Woodman, 53, 147, 174n61; attitude toward husband’s romantic friendship of, 43–44 Aldrich, Thomas Bailey, 13, 20, 46; Joseph and His Friend, response to, 27; Henry L. Pierce, romantic friendship with, 43–44, 147; physical attractiveness of, 31; Bayard Taylor, romantic friendship with, 53; William Winter, 219

index

Aldrich, Thomas Bailey (cont.) romantic friendship with, 53. See also “Marjorie Daw” Alexander and Hephestion, 14 Alger, William Rounseville, 7, 12–13, 62. See also “Literature of Friendship, The” Allen, James Lane, physical attractiveness of, 31. See also “Two Gentlemen of Kentucky” ancient Greece, allusions to in romantic friendship fiction, 142 Andersen, Hendrik, 184n5 Anderson, Nels, 144 Antinous, 108 “Apostle of the Tules, An” (Harte), 14; compulsory domesticity in, 48; ending in marriage of, 47–48; unconventional protagonists of, 18 April Hopes (Howells), 162 Armstrong, Nancy, 199n64 Arthur, T. S., 83 Aspinwall, William H., 177n6 Atlantic Monthly, The, 41, 59, 90, 137 Austen, Roger, 140 Awakening, The (Chopin), 189n18 bachelorhood, 13, 143, 164; attitudes toward, 71–73, 101–6. See also infantilization Balzac, 91 Baym, Nina, 55, 114. See also “woman’s fiction” beauty, male, 198n45; appreciation of vs. sexual attraction, 33; and Cecil Dreeme, 65; of nineteenth-century American authors, 30–31; and Roderick Hudson, 92; and romantic friendship fiction, 31–34 Beaver, Harold, 139 Bech, Henning, 26 Beecher, Catharine, 99 Bell, Michael Davitt, 138, 151 Bellew, Frank, 143 Bennett, George N., 158–59 Bertolini, Vincent J., 103 Beulah (Evans): ending of, 126; female household in, 117; female romantic friendship in, 116–17 Bjørnson, Bjørnstjerne, 120, 125–26 Blair, Walter, 136, 146, 191n16 Blake, Lillie Devereux, 86, 180n65. See also Fettered for Life 220

Boardman, Arthur, 195n2 Boker, George Henry: libertinism of, 46, 74; physical attractiveness of, 31; Bayard Taylor, romantic friendship with, 20, 74, 95 Boone, Joseph Allen, 7 Booth, Wayne, 177n54 Boston Daily Advertiser, The, 147 Bostonians, The ( James), 95, 125; “Boston marriage” in, 124; ending of, 127; female romantic friendship in, 118; jealousy between female friends in, 118; woman doctor in, 124 Bray, Alan, 75 Bremer, Sidney, 153, 196n10 Brewer, William H., 142 Brodhead, Richard, 4, 197n28 “brotherly love,” 29, 135; synonymous with romantic friendship, 8. See also “manly love”; romantic friendship Browne, Charles Brockden, 136 Browne, Junius Henri, 1, 2, 85, 106, 107. See also “Women as Friends” Bryan, George: Bret Harte, possible romantic friendship with, 52 Bufleb, August: Bayard Taylor, romantic friendship with, 19–20, 30, 93, 140–41 Buhle, Mari Jo, 128 Camfield, Gregg, 133, 146–47 “Captain Jim’s Friend” (Harte), 29; friendship ending in death in, 49 Carrington, George C., 195n69 Carter, Everett, 199n64 Cary, Richard, 53, 107 Cecil Dreeme (Winthrop), 4, 10, 14, 57–88, 164; “Africanist presence” in, 77–78, 181n85; antagonist, model for, 69–70, 179n57; antagonist, otherness of, 65; antagonist as confidence man, devil, gothic villain, libertine, sodomite, vampire in, 65, 67, 73, 77; bachelors in, 73; beauty, male in, 65; and “city mysteries” novels, 82–83; cross-dressing in, 85–86; didactic function of, 61–62, 83; domestic environment in, lack of, 62–64; domestic ideology in, 78–79, 83, 87–88; fireplace as domestic symbol in, 63, 87; gender, constructedness of, 86; “friendship of the sexes” in, 87–88; good vs. evil, internal struggle between, 66,

index

79–80; heroes, first meeting of, 67–68; heterosexualization in, 88; idleness, dangers of, 65; love, working to fall in, 81–82; magnetism, ambiguity of, 68–69; male bonding in, 61–62; manhood as theme in, 63, 70–71; manuscripts of, 179n59; masturbator in, 66, 76–77; passionate woman in, 82–83; passivity of narrator-protagonist in, 65; physical intimacy between men in, 80–81; physiognomy as sign of spiritual state in, 77–78, 181n85; popularity of, 60; publication of, 58; puns in, 75; The Quaker City as “pre-text” for, 73–74; romantic friendship fiction, paradigmatic example of, 58; romantic friendship in, 80–81; and “semiotics of everyday urban life,” 83; sister motif in, 81; sodomy in, 74–75, 87; source, limitations as historical, 79 Chamberlain, William Wigglesworth, 15 Chastity; or, Our Secret Sins (Lewis), 66, 85 Chauncey, George, 14 Cheerful Yesterdays (Higginson), 69–70 “Children of the Road, The” (Flynt), 145 Chopin, Kate, 189n18 “Chumming with a Savage” (C. W. Stoddard). See “South-Sea Idyl, A” Church, Frederick, 59 City Crimes (Thompson), 82, 83, 180n65, 181n83 Clemens, Olivia Langdon, 44, 93, 185n14 Clemens, Samuel Langhorne. See Twain, Mark Cohen, Ed, 36 Cohen, William A., 37 compulsory domesticity, 133, 163; defined, 48, 104; and Roderick Hudson, 102–6. See also domesticity; sex/gender system compulsory heterosexuality, 48, 104 Comstock Act, 99 Cooke, Delmar Gross, 162, 200n65 Coolbrith, Ina Donna, 31 Cooper, James Fenimore, 137 Corydon and Amaryllis, 142 Country Doctor, A ( Jewett), 125; female romantic friendship, absence of, 123; woman doctor in, 123 Coviello, Peter, 200n67 Cowan, John, 104–5 Cowie, Alexander, 27, 60 Cox, James M., 139, 140

Crain, Caleb, 7, 9, 55–56, 173n54, 184n5 Criminal Law Amendment Act (Labouchere Amendment), 42, 90 Criticism and Fiction (Howells), 153 cross-dressing, 85–86 Crowley, John W., 54, 137, 157, 198n40 cult of domesticity. See domesticity Cummins, Maria, 10, 113, 195n64. See also Lamplighter, The Curtis, Anna Shaw, 44 Curtis, George William, 147; biographical sketch of Theodore Winthrop written by, 59–60; marriage of, 44; physical attractiveness of, 31; Theodore Winthrop, friendship with, 58–59 Damon and Pythias, 14, 16, 86 Dana, Richard Henry, Jr., 56, 137, 140, 141 dandy, 13 David, Beverly R., 194n58 David and Jonathan, 14, 16 David Copperfield (Dickens), 32, 138 Dawson, Carl, 199n64 Deephaven ( Jewett): ending of, 126–27; female romantic friendship in, 117 Deitcher, David, 9 DePastino, Todd, 143, 145 desire, 7, 8. See also homoeroticism; homosexuality; love; “manly love”; romantic friendship Devereux, Sarah Johnson, 180n65 Dickinson, Emily, 69 “disciplinary intimacy,” 197n28 “Disinterested Friendship” (anon.), 72–73; sister motif in, 73 Doctor Breen’s Practice (Howells): ending of, 127; homofiliation in, 152–53; parody of female romantic friendship in, 122; woman doctor in, 122 Doctor Zay (Phelps), 125; ending of, 127; female romantic friendship, absence of, 122–23; woman doctor in, 122 domesticity, 18, 34; and Cecil Dreeme, 78–79, 83, 87–88; cult of, 35. See also compulsory domesticity; sex/gender system Duffey, Eliza B., 91, 98–99, 184n4. See also Relations of the Sexes, The Eble, Kenneth, 162, 199n64 Education of Henry Adams, The (Adams), 182n97 221

index

Edwards, Jonathan, 180n65 Ellmann, Richard, 184n5 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 26, 32, 56, 169n4 empirical deprivation, myth of, 5 eros, 7. See also homoeroticism; homosexuality; love; “manly love”; romantic friendship eroticism, female same-sex, 130–31 “exploratory novel,” 121–22 Evans, Augusta Jane (Wilson), 10, 113, 147. See also Beulah; St. Elmo Faderman, Lillian, 112, 189n35 Farrell, Grace, 86 feminization, of romantic friends, 102–3, 142 Fettered for Life (Blake), 86; ending of, 126; as exploratory novel, 121–22; female romantic friendship in, 117; libertin­ism in, 180n65; woman doctor in, 121–22 fiction of romantic friendship. See romantic friendship fiction fidus Achates, 16 Fiedler, Leslie A., 133, 137, 195n64 Fields, Annie Adams, 53, 124, 189n35 Flynt, Josiah, 145 Foucault, Michel, 6, 14 free love, 109 Friends: A Duet (Phelps), 187n65 friendship. See “manly love”; romantic friendship “Friendship” (Emerson), 169n4 “friendship of the sexes,” 12, 88, 107–8, 187n65. See also heterosexism Friendships of Women, The (Alger), 7, 12 friendship tradition, Western, 11, 55, 71, 92 Galaxy, 107 gay reading, anachronistic, 92 Ghosts (Ibsen), 115 Gilded Age, 14, 89–111 Gilfoyle, Timothy, 76 Gillis, Jim, 146 Glazener, Nancy, 4, 117 Goethe, 91 Goldberg, Jonathan, 200n67 Goodman, Susan, 199n64 Goshgarian, G. M., 76 Gosse, Edmund, 43 Graham, Sylvester, 62, 98, 104 Graham, Wendy, 184n5 222

Grattan, C. Hartley, 199n64 Graves, Wallace, 146 Habegger, Alfred, 151, 183n2, 195n2, 199n64 Hadrian, 108 Haggerty, George E., 74, 75 Haller, John, 98 Haller, Robin, 98 Halperin, David, 5, 7, 49 hand: eroticism of, 36–37, 142; motif of, 35–37 Hansen, Karen V., 137 Harris, Lee O., 143–44 Harris, Susan K., 121–22 Harte, Anna Griswold, 43, 52 Harte, Bret, 4, 13, 137, 193n46; George Bryan, possible romantic friendship with, 52; Arthur Collins, romantic friendship with, 54; marriage of, 43, 95; passionate women in fiction of, 182n97; physical attractiveness of, 31; Mark Twain, Harte as precursor of, 137–38, 141, 191n16; Mark Twain, love-hate relationship with, 191n16; Theodore Winthrop, possible inspiration from, 29. See also “Apostle of the Tules, An”; “Captain Jim’s Friend”; “In the Tules”; “Luck of Roaring Camp, The”; “Notes by Flood and Field”; “Poet of Sierra Flat, The”; “Snow-Bound at Eagle’s”; “Tennessee’s Partner”; “Uncle Jim and Uncle Billy” Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 68, 91, 137 Hay, John, 95 Hayne, Paul Hamilton, 20–21 Hazard of New Fortunes, A (Howells), 4, 10, 153–62, 164; business as romance in, 156–57; and “dis-engaging” novel, 153–54; homofiliation, absence of and consequences for cross-sex courtship and romance, 161–62; homofiliation, intergenerational in, 160; homofiliation and “brotherhood of man” in, 158; homofiliation and doctrine of complicity in, 158; homofiliation in, 154–62; marriage, absence of closure in, 153–54; men kissing in, 156; narrative structure of, 155; protagonists, quasi-marital relationship of, 154–55; residual romantic friendship in, 157–58

index

Hedrick, Joan D., 2 Hellesund, Tone, 169n20, 188n9 heterocentricity, 152 heterosexism, roots of modern-day, 84–85, 107–8 heterosexualization, 88 hierotymy, 184n5 Higginson, Thomas Wentworth, 195n65; William Henry Hurlbert, romantic friendship with, 69–70, 179n54 “high realism,” 4, 117 Hill, Hamlin, 146 history: limitations of traditional sources, 3–4; literature as, 3–5, 150–51, 200n67 Hoffman, Andrew J., 185n14 Holland, Josiah Gilbert, 78 Holland, Laurence B., 149 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, Jr., 32 Holmes, Oliver Wendell, Sr. See Mortal Antipathy, A homeless men. See tramps homoeroticism, 7, 8; and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 146; and “In the Tules,” 141–42; and Man Who Tramps, The, 143–44; and “Notes by Flood and Field,” 52; and romantic friendship fiction, 35–37; and “A South-Sea Idyl,” 21–22; and Temple House, 35, 45. See also homosexuality; love; “manly love”; romantic friendship homofiliation, 8, 152–62, 163; and “other man,” 152, 197n33. See also homo­ sexuality; homosociality; love; “manly love”; romantic friendship; sex/gender system homosexuality, 7; changes in meaning of word, 8; and tramps, 144–46, 194n48; lack of concern with in period, 6–7, 14, 76, 83–84, 109–10. See also homofiliation; homosociality; “manly love”; romantic friendship; sex/gender system “Homosexuality among Tramps” (Flynt), 145 homosocial triangle. See love triangle homosociality, 7; and Cecil Dreeme, 61–62; and Man Who Tramps, The, 143–44. See also homofiliation; homosexuality; love; “manly love”; romantic friendship; sex/gender system Houghton, Lord. See Milnes, Richard Monckton

Howe, Florence, 128 Howells, William Dean, 4, 10, 13, 43, 53, 113, 164; premarital kiss in fiction of, 162; realism, limitations of, 196n5; romantic friendships as youthful phase in life of, 54, 157, 198n40; sex, attitude toward, 199n64; sexual ideology of, 151; South-Sea Idyls, response to, 21–22. See also Doctor Breen’s Practice; Hazard of New Fortunes, A; Private Theatricals; Shadow of a Dream, The; Their Wedding Journey; Undiscovered Country, The Hoyt, Anna, 143 Hunt, Richard Morris, model for character in Cecil Dreeme, 59 Hurlbert, William Henry, 195n65; Thomas Wentworth Higginson, romantic friendship with, 69–70, 179n54; life of, 70; model for villain of Cecil Dreeme, 69–70, 179n57; and Theodore Winthrop, 70 “In a Transport” (C. W. Stoddard), 22, 140 Indian Summer (Howells), 196n10, 196n17 infantilization, of bachelors, 54, 105, 142. See also bachelorhood In Memoriam (Tennyson), 35, 147 Innocents Abroad, The (Twain), 44 “In the Tules” (Harte), 14, 30; Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, stylistic contrast with, 141–42; ending in death of, 48–49; eroticism of the hand in, 37, 142; unconventional heroes of, 18 “intimate friendship,” synonymous with romantic friendship, 8. See also “manly love”; romantic friendship “Iron Madonnas,” authors as, 34 Iser, Wolfgang, 55 Jackson, James C., 76, 83, 84 James, Henry, 4, 7, 10, 13, 30, 34, 113; Hazard of New Fortune, A, response to; marriage, attitude toward, 101; romantic friendships of, 53–54, 184n5. See also Bostonians, The; Roderick Hudson James, William, 32 “Jamie the Kid” (Flynt), 145 Janson, Drude Krog. See Saloonkeeper’s Daughter, A Jewett, Sarah Orne, 10, 113, 124, 189n35. See also Country Doctor, A; Deephaven 223

index

“Joe of Lahaina” (C. W. Stoddard), 22 John Brent (Winthrop), 14, 60, 177n9; beauty, male in, 33–34; plot of, 28–29 John Godfrey’s Fortunes (Taylor), 14, 27, 138; beauty, male in, 31–33, 65; class difference between romantic friends in, 18–19; compulsory domesticity in, 48; and David Copperfield, 32; ending in marriage of, 48 Johnson, Laura Winthrop, 59, 61 Jones, Charles Melancthon, 21, 95, 171n30 Joseph and His Friend (Taylor), 2, 14, 27; first meeting of friends in, 26; hand motif in, 35–36; plot of, 25–27; male gaze in, 26; reception of, 27; sister motif in, 44–45, 94 Joukowsky, Paul, 184n5 Journey to Central Africa, A (Taylor): Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, parallels with, 140–41; relationship to real life of, 51; and Taylor’s romantic friendship with August Bufleb, 20, 140–41 “just reading,” 163 Kaplan, Amy, 160 Kasson, John F., 83, 181n85 Katz, Jonathan Ned, 9, 74, 79, 137, 173n54 Keeler, Ralph, model for character in A Hazard of New Fortunes, 198n40 Kimmel, Michael, 135 King, Clarence, 95 Knox, Melissa, 177n1 Krauth, Leland, 193n46 Kusmer, Kenneth L., 143, 194n48 Labouchere Amendment (Criminal Law Amendment Act), 42, 90 Ladies of Llangollen, 190n43 Lamplighter, The (Cummins), 114; ending of, 126; female household in, 116; female romantic friendship in, 116, 117, 118 Landlord at Lion’s Head, The (Howells), 197n33 Lane, Christopher, 200n67 Langdon, Charles, 44, 93, 185n14 Laqueur, Thomas, 76 Lathrop, G. P., 90 Lecture to Young Men, A (Graham), 62, 104 Lewis, Dio, 62, 65, 66, 76, 78, 85, 105 Lewis, Sinclair, 199n64 libertinism, 71, 73–74, 85, 164, 180n65 224

Lippard, George, 73–74, 82. See also Quaker City, The literary history of sexuality, 162–64, 200n67 literature, as historical source, 3–5, 79, 150–51, 162–64, 200n67 “Literature of Friendship, The” (Alger), 11–13, 26; beauty, male, 31; friendship, betrayal of, 40; friendship, decline of in period, 12; friendship, end of, 48, 49; friendship, rearing altar to, 12; friendship, uses of, 24; friendship and youth, 15; men living together, rarity of, 44; spiritual affinity between friends, need for, 16, 34, 54 Little Women (Alcott), 128 Lochrie, Karma, 97, 163, 168n14 Looby, Christopher, 133–34, 148 Loring, Frederick Wadsworth, 15, 24, 30. See also Two College Friends love, 7, 8; impatience to experience, 25; role of sex in, 6, 34; “romantic” vs. “true,” 8, 34, 35, 81–83, 87, 161; spiritual vs. bodily, 6, 34. See also love triangle; “manly love”; marriage; romantic friendship; sex/gender system “Love and Skates” (Winthrop), 58 love triangle, 42, 87, 96, 152, 154, 161. See also homofiliation; homosociality Lowell, James Russell, 70, 158 “Luck of Roaring Camp, The” (Harte), 18, 95 Lützen, Karin, 168n20 Lynch, Michael 71 Lynn, Kenneth, 136, 139, 149 magnetism, 68 Mailloux, Steven, 136 Malbone (Higginson), 69, 70, 179n54 male beauty. See beauty, male manhood. See masculinity; sex/gender system “manly love”: ostensible lack of sources relating to, 5; scholarly neglect of, 5, 91–92; “speakability” of, 5, 90; synonymous with romantic friendship, 8. See also homosexuality; love; romantic friendship Man Who Tramps, The (Harris): homoeroticism in, 143–44; homosociality in, 143–44 Marcus, Sharon, 4, 37, 168n11, 195n65; “just reading,” 163; “non-marriage

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novel,” 199n61; “play of the system,” 185n16; symptomatic reading, 163 Margolis, Stacey, 136 “Marjorie Daw” (Aldrich), 5; ending of, 50–51; male protagonists of, 16 marriage, flexibility of nineteenth-century, 43, 94–95. See also love; sex/gender system Marriage and Parentage (Wright), 104 Martin, Robert K., 179n57 Martin, Willard E., Jr., 58, 60, 88 Marx, Leo, 139 masculinity, anxiety about in 1850s, 13. See also bachelorhood; sex/gender system masturbation, 13–14, 66, 143, 164; attitudes toward, 76–77; and bachelor reverie, 76; Mark Twain’s attitude toward, 182n90; mutual preferable to solitary, 76 McEntee, Jarvis, 20 McMurray, Price, 158 Melville, Herman, 56, 68, 137, 140, 141 Menon, Madhavi, 200n67 Miller, Joaquin, physical attractiveness of, 31 Millet, Frank: Charles Warren Stoddard, romantic friendship with, 54 Milnes, Richard Monckton, libertinism of, 74 Moby-Dick (Melville), 35, 140 morbidity. See Winthrop, Theodore Morgesons, The (E. Stoddard), 21 Morris, Clara, 147 Morrison, Toni, 181n85 Mortal Antipathy, A (Holmes): ending of, 127; female romantic friendship in, 118–19; woman doctor, character intending to become, 123–24 Mrs. Farrell. See Private Theatricals Murtaugh, Daniel J., 184n5 “My Friend the Tramp” (Harte), 143 “My Tramp” (Hoyt), 143 new historicism, 3 “new woman,” in Roderick Hudson, 105–6 New York University, 59 Nietzsche, 91 Nordhoff, Charles, 83 “Notes by Flood and Field” (Harte): homoeroticism in, 52; relationship to real life of, 52

onanism. See masturbation “On Old Bachelors” (Shelton), 71–72 Orestes and Pylades, 14, 81 “other man,” in homofiliation, 152, 197n33 Overland Monthly, The, 18, 22, 138 Øverland, Orm, 113, 126, 188n5 Owen, Robert Dale, 98 passion, 7, 8. See also homosexuality; love; “manly love”; romantic friendship “passion of friendship,” 153 Pater, Walter, 91 Pendennis (Thackeray), 95 Phelps, Elizabeth Stuart, 10, 113, 187n65. See also Doctor Zay; Silent Partner, The Phillips, John B.: Bayard Taylor, romantic friendship with, 19, 95 Pierce, Henry L.: Thomas Bailey Aldrich, romantic friendship with, 43–44, 147 “Poet of Sierra Flat, The” (Harte), sister motif in, 44, 93–94 polygamy, 109 Portrait of a Lady, The ( James), 94 Powell, Thomas, 111 Prioleau, Elizabeth Stevens, 195n2, 199n64 Private Theatricals (aka Mrs. Farrell) (Howells), 14, 113, 137, 187n65; betrayal of friendship and female character’s role in, 40–41; ending of, 50, 51; male protagonists of, 16–17; physical intimacy in, 38; sexually suggestive passages in, 17 prostitution, 109 Prue and I (Curtis), 147 Quaker City, The (aka The Monks of Monk Hall) (Lippard), 73–74, 82, 83, 181n83 queer reading, 151 queer short story, 176n31 Relations of the Sexes, The (Duffey), 91, 101; companionate marriage ideal defined, 100; compulsory domesticity, 104; duty to marry and procreate, 99; laus veneris (“sexual religion”), 105; prostitutes and “passionate” women as “third sex,” 109; prostitution as “monster evil,” 109; same-sex love or eroticism not mentioned or alluded to, 109; sex in moderation for procreation, 99; “Women as Friends” compared with, 107, 109; 225

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Relations of the Sexes, The (Duffey) (cont.) women’s ignorance about men’s sexual lives, 106 Rennick, Andrew, 160 “repressive hypothesis,” need to move beyond, 34–35 Rich, Adrienne, 48, 104 Richards, Jeffrey, 92 Rise of Silas Lapham, The (Howells), 156, 159–60 Robinson, Forrest G., 139 Roderick Hudson ( James), 5, 10, 14, 89–111, 113, 137, 164: bachelorhood in, 101–6; beauty, male in, 92, 97; compulsory domesticity, challenges to, 105–6; compulsory domesticity in, 95, 102–6; ending of, 50; female characters’ attitude toward romantic friends in, 39, 41; feminization of eponymous hero in, 102–3; friends’ attitude toward female love interest in, 42; “homosexual panic,” absence of, 97; interaction of romantic friendship with cross-sex romance in, 95–96; interpretive contexts of, traditional, 91; love triangle in, 95–96; male-female friendships in, 110; male protagonists of, 16; manhood in, 101–3; “new woman” in, 105–6; and New York edition preface, 92–93; nonmarriage, as novel of, 90; plot, verisimilitude of, 92–96; scholarly ignorance about romantic friendship in, 91–92; sister motif and “creating kin” in, 44, 93–96; “straight closet” in, 97–98, 186n27; womanhood in, 101 Rogers, Franklin R., 133 Rohy, Valerie, 200n67 romantic friendship: admiration for in society, 35, 147; attack on, 107–8; authors’ personal experience of, 52–55; conceptual advantages of term, 7–8; context of cross-sex and other same-sex relations, need to study in, 89, 113; cross-sex relationships, parallels with, 34–35; defined, 14–15; demographics in life vs. fiction of, 23, 54; female, 112–31; and feminization, 102–3, 142; “impurity” linked to, 108; introduction to concept, 8–9; men living together, rarity of, 44, 175n14; myth in fiction, as a guiding, 9; period term, 7–8, 171n32; sex, lack of

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significance in, 34–35; sodomy vs., 35; suspicion increasing toward, 108, 110; term referring to women, 7; threats to, 48, 110; women’s response to, 147. See also homosexuality; love; “manly love”; romantic friendship fiction; sex/gender system; and names of authors romantic friendship fiction: ancient Greece, allusions to, 142; beauty, male in, 31–34, 65, 92; class differences between friends in, 18–19; cultural centrality of, 13; death as conventional ending in, 49; demographics of, 15–23; enacting friendship, 55–56; ending, types of, 46– 51; eye contact in, 26–27, 69, 173n54; female, 112–31; female characters’ attitude toward friendship in, 28, 39–42, 197n33; friends as contrasts in, 17–18; hands as motif in, 35–37; homoeroticism in, 35–37, 52; intergenerational friends in, 21–22; male friends’ attitudes toward female love interest in, 42; plot elements in, 23–30; projecting friendship, 55; public discourse on friendship, centrality to 13; realism vs. romanticism in, 27–30; reflecting romantic friendship in real life, 51–55; relationship to reality of, 51–56; spiritual affinity between friends in, 16–18; sexual attraction, lack of function in, 34–35; sister motif in, 44–46, 81; typical protagonists of, 15–18; unconventional protagonists of, 18–19; upsurge of, 13. See also titles of works Rosenberg, Charles E., 76, 79 Rothman, Ellen K., 25 Rotundo, E. Anthony, 8, 24, 137, 170n26 Rubin, Gayle, 168n14 Saloonkeeper’s Daughter, A ( Janson), 10, 112–31; declaration of love in, 121; ending, originality of, 126, 130; ending compared with other nineteenthcentury novels about women, 126–31; and female romantic friendship fiction, 116–21; female same-sex eroticism in, 130–31; and “female world of love and ritual,” 115–16; first meeting of friends in, 120–21; friendships, failed in, 120; leaving home in, 115–16; loss of mother in, 114–15; love, spiritual and sensuous

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in, 130–31; novels about women doctors compared with, 121–24; plot of, 114–17, 125–26; “sororal family” in 127; woman doctor in, 124; and “woman’s fiction,” 114–17 Sanger, Margaret, 99 Sartisky, Michael, 122, 127 Savoy, Eric, 186n27 Scharnhorst, Gary, 169n1 Schmitz, Neil, 133, 136 Schultz, James A., 163 Science of New Life, The (Cowan), 104–5, 109–10 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 97, 173n54, 175n5; homosocial triangle structure, critique of, 152 Seelye, John D., 193n45 Seidman, Steven, 34, 99, 109 Sellwood (Tennyson), Emily, 147, 195n65 sex/gender system (nineteenth-century, white, middle-class, American), 34–35, 97–100; “desiro-skeptical” attitude of, 6–7, 97–98; erotophobia vs. homophobia of, 97; flexibility of roles and relations in, 43–44, 94–95; gender over sexuality, emphasis on, 8, 98; heterosexism, roots of, 84–85, 107–8; homosexuality, lack of modern concept of, 6–7, 90; influence, fear of bad male, 83–84, 109–10; love, significance of, 6; male-oriented antirepressive behavioral ethos as contrast to, 79; manhood in, 6, 101–3; physical intimacy, relative freedom of between cross-sex and same-sex couples, 37–38; physiognomy as sign of spiritual state, 31; 77–78, 181n85; sex, deemphasis on, 6, 8, 34, 99–100; sex, ignorance vs. knowledge of debated, 62; values, reversal of compared to today, 57, 76, 110–11; womanhood in, 6, 101; women’s ignorance about men’s sexual lives, 106; women’s sexuality, ambivalence about, 82. See also bachelorhood; compulsory domesticity; domesticity; homofiliation; homosexuality; homosociality; love; “manly love”; masturbation; Relations of the Sexes, The; romantic friendship; sodomy sexual advice literature, 62, 98; and compulsory domesticity, 104–5

sexual ideology. See sex/gender system sexual inversion, 7. See also homoeroticism; homosexuality; love; “manly love”; romantic friendship; sodomy Sexual Inversion (Ellis and Symonds), 145 sexuality, 135; medical theories of, 14; rate of dissemination of theories of, 14. See also homosexuality; love; “manly love”; sex/gender system sexuality, literary history of, 162–64, 200n67 Sexual Organism and Its Healthful Management, The ( Jackson), 76, 83 Seymour, Horatio, 143 Shadow of a Dream, The (Howells), 14, 21; ending in death of, 49; heroine’s attitude toward romantic friends in, 39–40; “three-cornered household” in, 94, 197n33 Shaw, Quincy, 44 Shelton, F. W., 71–72 short story, queer, 176n31 Shulman, Robert, 136, 193n46 Silent Partner, The (Phelps), ending, originality of, 128 “single blessedness.” See bachelorhood “Single Life among Us” (anon.), 72, 73, 123 sister motif, 73; in real life, 43–44; in romantic friendship fiction, 44–46 Skandera-Trombley, Laura, 133, 185n14, 195n64 Smith, Bruce R., 167n5 Smith, Henry Nash, 133 Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll, 112, 115–16, 119 Smyth, Albert H., 27 “Snow-Bound at Eagle’s” (Harte), 14; ending of, 51; female characters’ attitude toward romantic friends in, 41–42; friends’ attitudes toward female love interest in, 42; hand motif in, 37; unconventional protagonists of, 18 Snyder, Katherine V., 187n55 sodomy, 7, 8, 71, 143, 164; attitudes toward, 74–76; and City Crimes, 181n83; love vs., 74; Mark Twain’s attitude toward, 182n90; romantic friendship vs., 35, 87; and sailors, 182n90. See also homoeroticism; homosexuality; love; “manly love”; romantic friendship Sofer, Naomi Z., 185n12

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“Some Thoughts on the Science of Onanism” (Twain), 182n90, 194n59 “sororal family,” 127 “South-Sea Idyl, A” (C. W. Stoddard), 137; ending of, 50; homoeroticism in, 21–22; intergenerational and interracial friends in, 21–22; relationship to real life of, 51 South-Sea Idyls (C. W. Stoddard), 137; Howells’s response to, 21–22 Springfield Daily Republican, The, 147 Stearns, Frank Preston, 24 Stedman, Edmund Clarence, 20, 40, 46 St. Elmo (Evans), 4, 14; betrayal of friendship and female character’s role in, 40; friendship ending in death in, 49; male protagonists of, 15–16 Stevens, Hugh, 95, 184n2, 184n9, 185n12 Stoddard, Charles Warren, 13, 43, 95, 141; homoerotic and interracial depictions of, 21–22; homosexuality of, 54; physical attractiveness of, 31; protégé of Harte and Twain, 22; romantic friendships of, 54. See also “In a Transport”; “Joe of Lahaina”; “South-Sea Idyl, A”; South-Sea Idyls Stoddard, Elizabeth, 21, 40, 147; and husband’s homosocial circle, 46. See also Temple House Stoddard, Richard Henry, 20, 30, 40, 46, 74, 95 Stoker, Dick, 146 Stoneley, Peter, 193n46 Stowe, Calvin E., 1, 2, 43 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 2, 43 straight closet, 97–98, 163, 186n27 “symptomatic reading,” 163 Taylor, Bayard, 2, 4, 13, 40; beauty, attitudes toward male, 33; marriage of, 44, 95; physical attractiveness of, 30–31; proto­ realism of, 27; romantic friendships of, 19–21, 53, 74, 93, 140–41, 171n30; Elizabeth Stoddard, conflict with, 46; Temple House, Taylor’s opinion of, 46; working-class men, Taylor’s idealization of, 19. See also Journey to Central Africa, A; John Godfrey’s Fortunes; Joseph and His Friend Taylor, Marie Hansen, 44, 46, 95

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Teleny (anon.), homoeroticism and motif of hand in, 36–37 Temple House (E. Stoddard), 14; beauty, male in, 31; homoeroticism in, 35, 45; intergenerational friends in, 21; plot of, 27–28; sister motif in, 45–56; woman’s jealousy toward romantic friends in, 28 “Tennessee’s Partner” (Harte), 5, 14, 18; critical debate about, 42; ending in death of, 48; love triangle in, 42; precursor of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 138; woman reader’s response to, 147 Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, 147, 195n65 Tennyson, Emily Sellwood, 147, 195n65 Thackeray, William, 95 Their Silver Wedding Journey (Howells), 160 Their Wedding Journey (Howells), 37–38, 151, 152, 156 Thompson, George, 82. See also City Crimes; Venus in Boston Thompson, Graham, 156, 159–60, 198n47 Thoreau, Henry David, 16 Todd, Janet, 115 Tramp Exposed, The (Bellew), 143 tramp fiction, 143–44 tramps, 142–46; and homosexuality, 144–46, 194n48 “tramp scare,” of the 1870s, 142–43 Traub, Valerie, 163, 200n67 Turgenev, 91 Twain, Mark, 10, 13, 43, 133; ambivalence of, about men’s relationships, 135–36, 144–46; Bret Harte, love–hate relationship with, 191n16; Bret Harte as precursor of, 137–38, 191n16; marriage of, 44, 93, 95; masturbation, attitude toward, 182n90; physical attractiveness of, 31; romantic friendships as youthful phase in life of, 54, 184n14; sodomy, attitude toward, 182n90. See also Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Two College Friends (Loring): ending in death and marriage of, 49–50; jealousy toward friend’s female love interest in, 42; male protagonists of, 15; plot of, 24–25 “Two Gentlemen of Kentucky” (Allen), interracial friendship in, 22–23

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Two Years Ago (Kingsley), 69 Two Years Before the Mast (Dana), 56, 140 “Uncle Jim and Uncle Billy” (Harte), 30; happy ending in, 51, 148 Undiscovered Country, The (Howells) 113; ending of, 127; female romantic friendship in, 118; friends as contrasts in, 17–18; jealousy between female friends in, 118 Van Buskirk, Philip C., 182n90 Vanderbilt, Kermit, 198n47 Veeder, William, 183n2 Venus in Boston (Thompson), 82, 83, 180n65 Walters, Ronald, G., 79, 98, 109 Walton, Priscilla L., 183n2 Warner, Anna, 46 Warner, Susan, 46, 195n64. See also Wide, Wide World, The Waterbury, J. B., 83–84 Weaver, Thomas, 139 Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, A (Thoreau), 16 Wells, Anna Mary, 70, 179n57 Wharton, Edith, 90 Whipple, E. P., 60 Whitman, Walt, 13, 19, 26–27, 182n97 Wide, Wide World, The (Warner), 114; death of mother in, 115; ending of, 126 Wilde, Oscar, 36, 55, 57, 90, 177n1

Willard, “Josiah Flynt,” 145 Williams, Merline A., 139 Willis, Nathaniel Parker, 31 Winter, William, 31; Thomas Bailey Aldrich, romantic friendship with, 53 Winthrop, Benjamin R., 60 Winthrop, Theodore, 9, 29, 30, 180n65; and Frederick Church, 59; death of, 29, 59; and Richard Morris Hunt, 59; and William Henry Hurlbert, 70; life of, 57; morbidity of, 58, 177n2; myth vs. reality in descriptions of, 59–60; per­ sonality of, 58, 60–61; relationships of, with powerful men, 59, 177n6; religious views of, 60–61; struggles between “higher” and “lower” nature of, 61. See also Cecil Dreeme; John Brent womanhood. See sex/gender system “woman’s fiction,” 114–17, 195n64 “Women as Friends” (Browne), 1, 2; “friendship of the sexes,” promotion of, 107–8, 110; The Relations of the Sexes compared with, 107, 109; romantic friendship, attack on, 107–8 Woods, Gregory, 74 Work (Alcott), 128–30: ending of, 130; female extended family in, 129; female romantic friendship in, 129–30; A Saloonkeeper’s Daughter, resemblance to, 129 Wright, Henry C., 62

229