19TH-CENTURY MALE VISIONS OF QUEER FEMININITY
A Thesis
Presented to the
Faculty of
California State Polytechnic University, Pomona
In Partial Fulfillment
Of the Requirement for the Degree
Master of Arts
In
English
By
Dino Benjamin-Alexander Kladouris
2015
i
SIGNATURE PAGE
PROJECT: 19TH-CENTURY MALE VISIONS OF QUEER FEMININITY
AUTHOR: Dino Benjamin-Alexander Kladouris
DATE SUBMITTED: Spring 2015 English and Foreign Languages
Dr. Aaron DeRosa ______Thesis Committee Chair English and Foreign Languages
Lise-Hélène Smith ______English and Foreign Languages
Dr. Liliane Fucaloro ______English and Foreign Languages
ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Dr. Aaron DeRosa, thank you for challenging and supporting me. In the time I have known you, you have helped to completely reshape my scholarship and in my worst moments, you have always found a way to make me remember that as hopeless as I am feeling, I am still moving forward. I do not think that I would have grown as much in this year without your mentorship. Thank you for always making me feel that I am capable of doing far more than what I first thought. Dr. Lise-Hélène Smith, my writing skills have improved drastically thanks to your input and brilliant mind. Your commitment to student success is absolutely inspiring to me, and I will be forever grateful for the time you have taken to push me to make this project stronger as my second reader, and support me as a
TA. Dr. Liliane Fucaloro, you helped me switch my major to English Lit 6 years ago, and
I am honored that you were able to round out my defense. I’d also like to thank Dr. Liam
Corley who first introduced me to my three primary authors. Without your courses, I don’t think I would have found out how foundational of a genre 19th-Century American
Lit would be to my scholarship. Dr. Anne Simpson, your courses first gave me the opportunity to produce close readings of texts supplemented by queer theory, skills that have been fundamental to this project. Danielle Cofer, thank you for being delusionally optimistic about my thesis as I was in the dark and abysmal stages of completing it; you are the Nomi to my Cristal. Sapna Jethani, Robert Zavala, Kristin Tamayo, and Stephanie
Gibbons, your friendships mean so much to me, and your willingness to proofread portions of my work have helped me fill out so many “XYZ’s!” Ian Noonan, thank you for being my partner and best friend; I love you so much, and cannot imagine life without you. And finally, to my mother, who has always been a huge influence to me.
iii ABSTRACT
This thesis examines visions of queer female identity in nineteenth-century
American male-authored texts, specifically Bayard Taylor’s Hannah Thurston (1863) and
Joseph and His Friend (1870), Henry James’ The Bostonians (1886), and William Dean
Howells’ The Shadow of a Dream. Critics have predominantly explicated nineteenth- century depictions of queerness as same sex attraction between men. Throughout the nineteenth century, more authors committed same sex bonds to their literary productions.
These texts convey that socially constructed paradigms of gender restrict individuals that do not fit within social/temporal concerns that largely dictated the nineteenth century construction of gender, specifically accomplished through marriage and child rearing.
While male authors in particular have received an abundance of critical attention for their depictions of queer identity, their portrayals of females are oftentimes cast into a reductive framework, one that presupposes a predictability of female positionality that subordinates female bodies to masculine aims. But the texts I examine demonstrate that females experience queerness as lesbians, widows, and childless wives; these maneuvers often cast them into a precarious position against mainstream society. Allegedly pursuing their own narcissistic self-interests and forging unions with other women as a means of negotiating autonomy, they are perceived as nihilistic or fatalistic. As I argue, queer female bodies risk codification as transgressive, hysterical, and narcissistic, rhetoric exercised to disarm women of political agency and access to traditionally masculine spaces. While consideration of these female figures expands the scope of nineteenth- century queer identity, I find that male authors nonetheless used female queerness to cipher their anxieties over their own queerness and interpersonal relationships.
iv TABLE OF CONTENTS
Signature Page…………………………………………………………………………….ii
Acknowledgments………………………………………………………………………..iii
Abstract..………………………………………………………………………………….iv
Chapter One: Introduction: Women who Disrupted Spatial, Medical, and
Temporal Discourses of Gender………………………………………………..…1
Chapter Two: Women with “masculine aspirations”: Divisions and Distortions of
Gendered Space in the Works of Bayard Taylor….……………………………..12
Chapter Three: James On James: The Reinvention of Alice James’ Queer Identity.……42
Chapter Four: A Queer Shadow: Queer Femininity, Failings, and Futurity in
The Shadow of a Dream.………………………………………………………... 75
Chapter Five: Conclusion………………………………………………………………102
Works Cited…………………………………………………………………………….107
v
vi CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION: WOMEN WHO DISRUPTED SPATIAL,
MEDICAL, AND TEMPORAL DISCOURSES OF GENDER
This thesis examines visions of queer female identity in nineteenth-century
American male-authored texts and their socio-cultural implications, specifically Bayard
Taylor’s Hannah Thurston (1863) and Joseph and His Friend (1870), Henry James’ The
Bostonians (1886), and William Dean Howells’ The Shadow of a Dream. Initially, critics predominantly explicated nineteenth-century depictions of queerness as same sex attraction between men. Such depictions flourished in literature due to contemporary anxieties over genital sex that allowed a subversive privileging of same sex emotional intimacy in literature (Nissen, Manly 6). In other words, because fictionalized male-male relations negotiated desire through coded acts such as intense spiritual/emotional/intellectual connection and socioeconomic guidance, as opposed to through genital contact, these pairings could evade stigma. Throughout the nineteenth century, more authors committed same sex bonds to their literary productions. These texts convey that socially constructed paradigms of gender restrict individuals that do not fit within social/temporal concerns that largely dictated the nineteenth century construction of gender, specifically accomplished through marriage and child rearing.
While male authors in particular have received an abundance of critical attention for their depictions of queer identity, their portrayals of women are oftentimes cast into a reductive framework, one that presupposes a predictability of female positionality that subordinates female bodies to masculine aims. Critics such as Robert K. Martin and Eve
Sedgwick assume that females merely facilitate love triangles for queer male pairings or
1 are Mother/Muse figures, and may be removed from discussion. But the texts I examine demonstrate that females respond to the breakdown of rigid gender categories following the Civil War in diverse ways. These particular characters experience queerness as lesbians, widows, and childless wives; these maneuvers often cast them into a precarious position against mainstream society. Allegedly pursuing their own narcissistic self- interests or forging unions with other women as a means of negotiating autonomy, they are perceived as nihilistic or fatalistic. As I argue, queer female bodies risk codification as transgressive, hysterical, and narcissistic, rhetoric exercised to disarm women of political agency and access to traditionally masculine spaces. I argue that these texts articulate an alignment between queer male and female characters as both sexes subversively renegotiate socially constructed gender identities. While consideration of these female figures expands the scope of nineteenth-century queer identity, I find that male authors nonetheless used female queerness to cipher their anxieties over their own queerness and interpersonal relationships.
Scholarship has largely privileged male queer identity in the works of Taylor and
Howells. Criticism of Hannah Thurston, Joseph and His Friend, and The Shadow of a
Dream first emerged in the 1970s, decades that precede the advent of queer theory. When critics addressed queerness in these texts, they created a largely masculine discourse imbued with homophobic rhetoric. Arguably because these texts are not widely read as part of the canon, a very limited number of readings have emerged that go beyond outdated tensions underlying the hetero/homosexual binary. Critics often linked productions of male queerness in Taylor and Howells to their biographical venerations and denouncements of same sex friendship; their literary depictions of male sexuality
2 have since overshadowed the equally non-normative undercurrents of gender that intrinsically yet inadvertently propel their female characters. I amend this by studying the extent to which female queer identity is elusive, at times reengaging with readings of queer males to offer a backdrop by which to design a more comprehensive discourse of nineteenth-century queerness. I envision these maneuvers as means by which to recast the queer femininity in these texts to the center as opposed to the peripheries. Although female queer identity has warranted a greater deal of scholarly attention in Henry James’
The Bostonians due to the novel’s central lesbian pairing, critics have yet to fully expound the novel’s textual and biographical investment in queerness. The novel’s protagonist has a direct basis in James’ sister, whose own writings went unpublished in her lifetime. Critics have refrained from disentangling the problematic privileging of queer male voices over females that the novel’s composition and publication entailed. To amend this, I position my close readings of The Bostonians with close readings of Alice
James’ diary entries in order to trouble a canonical representation of queer identity with one that follows a less conventional trajectory.
Following Christopher Castiglia and Christopher Looby’s argument that nineteenth-century queer identity is not easily discernable, and thus cannot be restricted to a homogenized characterization, I will expand the multiplicities of queer identity by interrogating the depiction of queer females by male authors, while extrapolating the underlying gendered appropriation of female experiences to fulfill male agendas. After the introduction of queer theory in the early nineties, critics have primarily assessed
Taylor, James, and Howells through first-wave queer theory that privileged masculinity and binaries in gender and sexuality. Peter Coviello notes that nineteenth-century queer
3 texts were composed before a modern codification of (normative) gender/sexual roles; the texts I examine have often been assessed through outdated modes of categorization from which current schools of queer theory are currently moving away. Looby and
Christopher Reed have claimed that first-wave queer theory overlooked historicism and the spatial/temporal operations of queer identity, so my theoretical approach to this project will be primarily contemporary. These texts beg for a new kind of reading that takes account of these spatio-temporal operations and historical contexts; by employing second-wave queer theory, my project is invested in explicating the intersectionality of numerous mechanisms that underlie queer identity. I reengage first-wave theory terminology as a means of repurposing these previously male-centered terms to more inclusive close readings of canonical and non-canonical texts.
While first-wave queer theory was helpful in laying out the groundwork to study nineteenth-century queer texts, much of its terminology is outdated and misappropriated.
Eve Sedgwick defined homosocial desire as “men promoting the interests of men” in the historical construction of power dynamics, typically accomplished through business ventures (4). Because this terminology has often been limited to describing male-male queer pairings, I define homosocial desire as the capacity for intense emotional identification between women attempting to assert individual/political agency in contention to patriarchal power-dynamics, as a means of framing themselves outside of the socio-cultural regulation of female domesticity. These pairings, often platonic in nature, at times carry potential for eroticism between women. This repurposed definition of homosocial desire is aligned with current schools of queer theory, which posit that queer identity conveys gender/sexuality fluidity and ambiguity, and does not simply
4 privilege one particular mode of queer identity. I employ David Halperin’s claims that
“queer is by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant”
(qtd. in Sullivan 43). I interrogate the dynamic purposes of female queer identity in these texts. My own use of the terminology “queer” continually shifts as a reflection of its elusive signifiers. I explore queerness first in the peculiar blurring of traditionally gendered spaces, dynamics that suggest that these spaces are purposely constructed to regulate female bodies; by transgressing these suggested boundaries, females draw attention to the pre-fabricated nature of gender itself. I then trace the context of queerness as deeply rooted in medical and political discourses that equate gender deviations to disease indicative of intellectual sterility and emotional instability, maladies to which women are predisposed that may be exacerbated by same sex attraction. In addition, I argue that women are rendered queer by neglecting gender-based duties; by presenting themselves as detached from their husbands and children, queerness is then labeled narcissistic in that it negates the socially constructed good of marriage and child rearing that ensures the promise of a communal and national future.1 Because these figures subvert nineteenth-century paradigms of gender, they may be understood as historically queer. In their renegotiation of the performance of gender, females radically distance themselves from socially constructed expectations of femininity; in their subversive dismissal of these roles, they are as socially queer as individuals who enjoy transgressive same sex relations.
While Nissen states that nineteenth-century male romantic friendships
1 Jack (Judith) Halberstam has argued that “queer uses of time and space develop, in opposition to the institutions of family, heterosexuality, and reproduction” (In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives 1). In other words, queer temporality frames itself against constructs of futurity propagated through reproduction. As Lee Edelman has elsewhere suggested, such queer oppositions denote queerness as “narcissism, a narcissism unto death” (No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive 50).
5 emphasized emotional, intellectual, and spiritual aspects of interpersonal relations, he does not extensively demonstrate how same sex female friendships were similarly venerated through fiction. As I have found, the subject of female friendship has not received an abundance of literary criticism in contrast to male friendship. Sharon Marcus articulates that these friendships were fundamental to femininity, and Lillian Faderman states that these friendships provided the grounds for mutual identification and empathy, but were typically dissolved in lieu of marriage. As outlined by Segdwick and Nissen, male homosocial bonds were typically facilitated through business and economic relations and could coexist within marriage structures, whereas females did not have as much access to the socioeconomic market, and were cut off from female friends upon marriage. As with queer male bonds, female bonds were increasingly disbanded in literature as the twentieth century approached, due to medical/political discourses that codified same sex desire as indicative of mental imbalance.
Heather Love has proposed that late-nineteenth-century American queer texts convey authorial insights into the futurity of modern homosexuality; queer characters undergo behaviors that parallel twentieth-century behaviors that accompany “staying in the closet” or “coming out” as gay/lesbian, such as depression, self-hatred, pessimism, and isolation. These degrees of foreshadowing demonstrate an authorial awareness of the future modes of queer identity. As a result, nineteenth-century queer failures may be reevaluated in order to establish a more optimistic purpose; in these texts, alternative gendered and sexual identities are often disseminated in order to demonstrate that while such identities were often disregarded or compromised in nineteenth-century America,
6 queered genders would persist for future generations, in the hope that they would become more acceptable.
This project will comprise three chapters that explore the multiple modes of female queer identity in late nineteenth-century American novels. Chapter one foregrounds my discussion of queer femininity by situating queerness as the peculiar blurring in public/private delineations of gendered space in the works of Bayard Taylor.
Critics such as Liam Corley have noted that Bayard Taylor coyly flouted nineteenth- century conventions of gender and sexuality. Yet, Taylor’s depictions of transgressive women have been left out of the conversation, due to two somewhat paradoxical possibilities: Taylor espoused a conservatism that undermined nonconforming identities, but also published America’s first gay-themed novel. The latter codification has become the dominant discourse by which to frame gender and sexuality in his literary endeavors.
This chapter will specifically interrogate modes of female representation in Taylor’s first and final novels, Hannah Thurston and Joseph and His Friend. In both of these texts,
Taylor plays with the liminal spaces of the public lecture hall, the marketplace, and the home in order to destabilize the rigid public/private binarism in vogue at the time.
Removed from the corrupt public sphere, the private sphere is seen as a space of idealized domesticity, where female bodies are socially regulated to sublimate their political and socioeconomic aims for the betterment of society. Negotiating a sense of fluidity between the supposedly separate spheres, Taylor’s females gain access to the traditionally masculine realms of the political and the socioeconomic as a means of maximizing their own self-interests. Yet the public space, while easily infiltrated by women, is also a site portrayed as stigmatizing to female bodies and minds. As Taylor presents it, female
7 bodies must be removed from these spaces by choice or by force. If female bodies destabilize socially constructed paradigms of gender, they are ultimately relegated back to the private sphere. I follow Corley’s claims that Taylor’s depictions of gender illustrate his desire to give “maximum latitude to individual initiative in the private sphere” in the pursuit of “cultural rapprochement rather than revolution” (Corley 4). As a result, these characters come to renounce the politicized discourse of Post-Civil War America to resolve private desires in the site of the domestic. Yet, the upholding of private gendered desires is afforded exclusively to males, whereas transgressive women are either intellectually reformed or physically eviscerated. I come to envision these marital resolutions as enactments of female bodily subordination to propagate male desire and male-male attachment.
Chapter two explores the implications of Henry James’ textual and biographical agenda in his composition of The Bostonians. In their negotiation of female-female mentorship, political activists Olive Chancellor and Verena Tarrant foster a queer relationship that positions them against normative visions of femininity. Ironically, James envisions normative gender roles generating queer identity, by associating queer identity with motherhood. When mothers are emotionally detached, physically absent, or deceased, these dynamics influence the protagonists’ queer desires to construct relationships that recreate the lost maternal presence. As I argue, the association of queerness with mental disease ultimately cripples such queer relations. Due to their precarious psychosexual states, queer women risk bouts of hysteria, and inadvertently jeopardize their own feminist agendas. It is only through a renunciation of same sex relationships that individuals may achieve political agency. This renunciation was
8 mirrored after Henry James; a closeted homosexual, he envisioned his own celibacy as a fundamental aspect of his literary productions. Thus, a problematic equivalency between female queerness and intellectual sterility was inserted into the narrative framework of
The Bostonians. These biographical connotations are complicated by a critical consensus that has identified Alice James, Henry’s sister, as a one-dimensional model for Olive
Chancellor. A spinster who resided in New England and London, she has since been regarded as a feminist icon due to the posthumous publications of her diary and her private correspondences. Critical attention to these writings is nonexistent, perhaps due to a gender bias identified by Susan S. Williams, who posits that female diarists are often suppressed from the canon, due to their observational and myopic literary endeavors. The critical recovery of Alice’s diary is instructive because it reveals the positive impact of
Alice’s same sex friendship on her intellectual outpouring, and thus offers a counter- narrative to Henry James’ reinvention of her experiences. I argue that James crafted a voice for Alice, but undermined her capacity for self-expression, while Alice’s diary can be read as an effort to recover her voice from under his. Henry’s repudiation of Alice’s published diary reveals a chauvinistic conceptualization of female intellectuality and same sex bonds, a history that must be uncovered in order to amend the canonical representation of nineteenth-century queer identity with a female narrative previously withheld from inclusion due to the alleged unconventionality of its author.
In chapter three, I extend my explication of queer identity into visions of futurity by exploring the anxieties of queerness propagated by the encroachment of modernity at the close of the nineteenth century. I follow William Dean Howells’ construction of queered bodies in The Shadow of a Dream (1890). The novel explores the implications of
9 pervasive same sex desire by constructing a love triangle between Douglas and Hermia
Faulkner and John Nevil. The transgressive same sex attachment between the males allegedly causes Douglas, John, and Hermia to die in succession, as their actions are scrutinized by Isabel and Basil March, who denigrate the “three-cornered household” in order to bolster their own normative performance of marriage. Previously, the dominant critical discourse has framed the novel as signifying Howells’ aversion to full-fledged homosexuality. Following Love’s scholarship, I argue that the collapsed love triangle may instead reflect Howells’ anticipation of modern mechanisms of queer identity.
Another erasure perpetuated by critics has been the explicit privileging of queer male identifications in the novel, a privileging that effaces an additional vision of same sex intimacy that Howells offers, specifically female-female friendships. By gravitating towards each other, the novel’s female protagonists undermine a heteronormative construction of temporal productivity by neglecting their wifely “duties.” Because these characters are either childless or disinterested in their children, they frame themselves against the insurance of the future by pursuing their own self-interests as opposed to vigilantly advancing fabricated ideals of womanhood. Howells furthermore nuances these temporal concerns with preoccupations with mortality and mourning, junctures that have been situated as disruptive to temporality itself (Dana Luciano). Such oppositions may be seen in the text in that the deaths of queer characters further exemplify their lack of biological production, which presumably efface them from the future. Yet, I argue that
Howells’ juxtaposition of cultural preoccupations with mortality and his own personal investment in the temporality of queer identity evokes an alternative future of queer desire in America, one that resists erasure by nineteenth-century gendered social
10 conventions. This temporality suggests that sexuality is disruptive and discursive, and that in spite of its temporal and narratalogical erasure, it may be replicated and more fully realized elsewhere.
11 CHAPTER TWO
WOMEN WITH “MASCULINE ASPIRATIONS”:
DIVISIONS AND DISTORTIONS OF GENDERED SPACE
IN THE WORKS OF BAYARD TAYLOR
This chapter explores the degree to which Bayard Taylor created transgressive women within public/private delineations of gendered space. Producing four novels between 1863 and 1870, Bayard Taylor resisted nineteenth-century conventions of gender and sexuality. In Bayard Taylor: Determined Dreamer of America’s Rise, Liam
Corley argues that Taylor’s novels “contain a subtle pattern of transgressive sexuality and a campy awareness of how the manipulation of reputation and codes of social interpretation creates a space for individual expression and freedom” (10). While critics tend to explore one particular alternative gender relation in Taylor’s work—male homosocial desire—a parallel and perhaps equally transgressive relation left out of the conversation has been the extent to which Taylor establishes nonconforming females through the blurring of naturalized gendered spaces. Published “during some of the bloodiest days of the Civil War” (104), the titular character of Hannah Thurston espouses a feminist intellectualism and fluidity in the public sphere but relinquishes this position in lieu of conventional domestic life when she marries Maxwell Woodbury. In Joseph and
His Friend, the queer pairing between Joseph Andrews and Philip Held is triangulated by
Joseph’s marriage to Julia Blessing, who gains financial security through the public marketing of her body. After Julia dies, Joseph is swiftly married to Philip’s sister in order to construct a pastoral household, seemingly liberated of normative gender codes.
In both of these texts, Taylor plays with the liminal spaces of the lecture hall, the
12 marketplace, and the home in order to destabilize the rigid public/private binarism in vogue at the time. Closed off from the corruption of public spaces, the private sphere is seen as a space of idealized domesticity, whereby through performing the role of wife and mother, a woman may insure a future of familial, communal, and national stability.
In doing so, her own desires are sublimated, if not abandoned entirely. Negotiating a sense of fluidity between the supposedly separate spheres, Taylor’s females gain access to the traditionally masculine realms of the political and the socioeconomic as a means of resisting the marginalizing effects of marriage and motherhood. Yet the public space, while easily infiltrated by women, is also a site portrayed as stigmatizing to female bodies and minds. As Taylor presents it, these public spaces are morally bankrupting and destructive to women, female bodies must be removed from these spaces by choice or by force. If female bodies destabilize socially constructed paradigms of gender, they are ultimately relegated back to the private sphere in order to propagate male desire and male-male attachment.
Extending these claims, I argue that Taylor’s illustrations of gender resist the politicized discourse of the postwar period by protecting alternative desires within the private space of the domestic. Such protections are oftentimes extended at the expense of female agency. As noted by Christoph Irmscher, Taylor resisted the pressures and limitations of collective and national modes of identity (95), in favor of portraying Post-
Civil War America to be “ruled by an ideology that privileges the individual that imagines the private life as a protected zone of intimacy that is immune from politics […] and that grants a shield of abstraction in the public sphere” (Margolis 4). Taylor’s depiction of gender mirrors contemporary anxieties that sought to secure private matters
13 from the intrusion of the partisan politics that had divided the nation during the Civil War
(Neely viii). For Taylor, private matters may become platforms for local and national discourse. Such a division between public and private gender codes may have resulted from the Civil War, which Sarah Anne Rubin posits not only “shattered political and personal landscapes” but also caused the struggle between “men and women […] to reaccustom themselves to one another after years of being apart” (170). Extending
Rubin’s claims that “struggles engendered by Reconstruction” were inscribed onto gendered constructs, I argue that this increased attention to the destabilization of gender roles caused the space of the domestic to be viewed as an ideal site to resolve contentious factions, resulting from newly constituted gendered desires, suppressed from mainstream society (170). As Taylor demonstrates, this space was encroached upon by various gendered tensions, most notably stemming from the women’s suffrage movement and
“the continuity and integrity of male same-sex affective bonds” in the years preceding their sundering “by the homosexual-heterosexual binary” (Nissen, Manly 14). Corley has previously identified Taylor’s desire to give “maximum latitude to individual initiative in the private sphere” in the pursuit of “cultural rapprochement rather than revolution” (4), so it follows that his alternatively gendered characters would resist revolutionary aspirations. As opposed to gaining more egalitarian representation through public integration, these characters grow to be increasingly resistant to the politicized pressures of modernity, which prefigures their removals from mainstream society.
This chapter will more specifically interrogate modes of female representation in
Taylor’s first and final novels, Hannah Thurston (1863) and Joseph and His Friend
(1870), to probe the limitations Taylor envisioned for female political agency in the
14 period. Taylor comes to envision marriage as a platform to protect alternative gendered possibilities in the private sphere, a protection that only extends to queer males, while reforming or removing transgressive female figures. Many of Taylor’s female characters are portrayed as platonic sister figures to queer males with whom they could share emotional attachments. In turn, Taylor’s male characters use these women to protect their own same sex relationships. The subordination of females cipher male homosocial desire.
As a result, in the marital resolutions of Taylor’s novels, male reputability overshadows female intellectualism in their own reformation movement. At the core of these resolutions, Taylor ultimately retreats to marital resolutions that work backwards from the anxieties of contemporary national politics.
Since its publication, Hannah Thurston has received scant critical attention.
Although critics such as Leslie Petty, Dorri Beam, and Eleanor Hochman have discussed the novel in larger studies of nineteenth-century American literature, the narrative is oftentimes offered as an anecdote to further claims about more canonical works, including Henry James’ The Bostonians (1886). According to Corley, this may be due to the novel’s conservative author and genre; because characters of the Genteel Tradition were not “aggressively nonconformist,” they are not easily incorporated into a nineteenth-century literary canon that is “illustrative of individualism, revolutionary social change, and secular disenchantment” (3). Because critics have perceived Hannah
Thurston to be a relatively unremarkable novel on the basis that it did not fit within a critically accepted paradigm, it has been removed from discussion. Scholars have however reached a consensus that the novel contains a “patently antifeminist plot” in that
“Hannah is a self-proclaimed champion of the cause, [while] the hero’s efforts to correct
15 her errors allow for a clear exposition of the opposing points of view of what a woman is, might be, and should be” (Petty 183; Hochman 234). Hannah is ultimately excised from a narrative of feminist individualism, demonstrating that while Bayard Taylor was sympathetic to females, he did not envision an inclusive public space for their reformist endeavors. This figurative erasure resolves “questions of how private sentiments can or should have social existence” by demonstrating that Hannah’s political inclinations must be suppressed in order for her to lead an emotionally fulfilling, and socially productive life (Corley 104).
The titular character of Hannah Thurston demonstrates “masculine aspirations” and feminist leanings that frame her against more dominant social-spiritual discourses that regulate female bodies in her Quaker community. As Taylor viewed it, “Quakerism had come to stand for excessive propriety and emotional restraint” (Ryan 205). Hannah belongs to a Sewing-Union, which comprises of factions of various social reforms.
Corley has likened Taylor’s “satiric treatment” of the Sewing-Union to suggest that “the various groups of reformers suggests that, for the most part, he saw them as more alike in their tendency toward factionalism than divided by the sincerity of their convictions”
(102). In other words, Taylor depicts overtly political dialogues as fringing on the disingenuous, a means of masking boredom at best, mal-intent at worst, and does not envision them as productive vessels of social reform. A member of a relatively tight-knit
Quaker society, Hannah’s political aspirations place her at odds with her surrounding community. According to Ryan, “Quakers in fiction came to signify once again an ethos weighted with concerns about women's rights, domestic thrift, pious behavior, and virtuous citizenship, but an ethos that no longer required the commitments of
16 abolitionism” (206). Quakers retreated from highly divisive political issues, more concerned with the realm of domestic and private localities, but Hannah envisions an alternative narrative of female activism accomplished through the formation of a communal and national political voice. By working towards the collective wellbeing of women, Hannah counters the pressure of her community that views her ideas as socially unwarranted, though it is important to note, she is far from a liberal agent in her espousal of political ideology.
Hannah supplements the alleged radical repositioning of her body within political spaces with conservative language that ultimately nullifies her feminist agenda. Hannah first vocalizes her reformist ideology in the novel when she steps in for an absent female lecturer to give a speech on Women’s Rights during an assembly at Ptolemy’s town hall.
The absent Bessie Stryker, renowned as a captivating and well-trained orator, has
“travelled all over the country,” a point of contrast that may convey that Hannah will never gain the momentum to propel herself outside of the small community to which her body is limited (65). By extending the re-appropriation of a space previously understood as a masculine one, Hannah employs her body to enact a blurring of gendered spaces.
Alison Piepmeier has previously situated the female body as “the defining feature of the private sphere […] [yet] it is a site which is mobile and malleable, able to change in response to changing circumstances and able to be configured in terms of various spaces”
(8). The shifting subject-position of the female body may thus be read as a means of destabilizing naturalized boundaries of gender and sexuality. When she is called to the podium, “Hannah Thurston, who at first made a movement of hesitation, rose, quietly removed her bonnet, and walked forward to the table” (69). By removing her bonnet, she
17 undermines the ideal of Quaker domesticity signified by her performative embodiment of a modest costume. In doing so, Hannah uses her body to reject complacency with boundaries that have created a fiction of gendered space. As conventional society dictated, the domestic sphere ideally allocated restraints from society integral for women to fully assume the biological imperatives of her sex. In exercising mobility over her body through her acquisition of a platform to trouble such conventions, Hannah is figuratively walking toward a future of expansive and inclusive female politicism.
Although she promotes rhetoric of female solidarity, Hannah codes her speech specifically for male subjects, a maneuver that proffers her agenda for misogynist seizure.
While this tactic has the potential to subvert masculine visions of female positionality, it instead functions to derail the feminist movement as a predominantly male-oriented dialogue. Situating her impromptu speech as a plea “for millions who cannot speak for themselves,” Hannah envisions of herself as a mouthpiece for women who lack the self- awareness and social mobility that she enjoys as a schoolteacher and activist (70). She goes on to argue, “We are most concerned for those injuries which require an immediate remedy. When we have removed the social prejudices which keep our sex in a false position […] the chains of the laws will break of themselves. As a beginning to that end, woman must claim an equal right to education, to employment, and reward” (70)
Alluding to figurative chains of oppression, Hannah repurposes Abolitionist rhetoric that first allowed the feminist movement to flourish.2 Advocating for the infection of her community with an opposition to a disease of sexism that regulates female bodies/minds,
Hannah challenges regulatory social constructs that have been instituted as natural truths
2 For a more thorough discussion of the embedment of anti-slavery rhetoric in early suffrage see for instance Ellen Carol DuBois’ Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women’s Movement in America.
18 through the codification of gendered laws. By inspiring a platform for female unanimity at the communal level, Hannah envisions a critique of socially constructed gendered discourses that will trickle upward to the site of the national. Only by shifting communal values away from accepting these obligatory gender codes as innate may women come to occupy a site of intellectual political equality with men, thereby achieving suffrage. Yet, the language employed by Hannah rapidly shifts away from the preface of her speech, abandoning her promise of a shared female identity. Admitting that women presuppose themselves to be “weak and helpless,” Hannah unwittingly perpetuates stereotypes of a female subservience that speaks to its male auditors (70). Employing such coded language, Hannah fails to acknowledge that the audience is equally populated by men and women (67). While Hannah claims that Woman is “circumscribed in her spheres of action and thought for her false education permanently distorts her habits of mind” she also suggests that “with our more sensitive physical organization, might not all tasks requiring quickness, nicety of touch, and careful arrangement be confided to our hands”
(70, 73). Hannah paradoxically strips women of direct political viability by moderating her critique of social hierarchies of gender with anecdotal appeals that inflate and play up biological differences between the sexes. She posits that women possess innate traits that better suit them to domestic tasks, ones “‘naturally’ female as childbearing, and as little subject to deliberate social manipulation” (DuBois 38). Hannah ironically re-inscribes socio-cultural values that have constructed female bodies as socially inferior and politically silent to men. Claiming that women are instinctually sensitive and caring, she makes women incapable of forcefully demanding political action. Female hands cannot be repurposed to transgress social order at the expense of men’s welfare, so they must be
19 tasked instead to aiding male enterprises. This mitigated and gradual integration into socioeconomic spaces creates a vision of feminine docility that appeals to men as a means of countering contemporary anxieties that the feminist movement would subvert biological imperatives of the female sex, leading to deformed and deficient female bodies
(Marilley). By presenting her feminist leanings as contingent on permeating first through men, Hannah creates a platform that ultimately relegates females as secondary voices in their own reformist movement.
The community, however, pushes back against Hannah’s feminism in the form of
Maxwell Woodsbury. The marriage plot that Taylor constructs between them, and
Woodbury’s demeaning of Hannah to bolster his own social prominence, exacerbate pressures of silence and erasure that frame Hannah’s public voice. For Woodbury,
Hannah disrupts nineteenth-century conventions that advocated women’s independence as unnatural, due to “both the physical and the psychological differences between the sexes” (Hochman 231). This perceived transgression is countered by Woodbury’s language when he offers the aside that “it is not pleasant to think of a woman standing at a dissecting-table, with a scalpel in her hand” (63). Discomforted by Hannah’s political activism, Woodbury envisions that women infiltrating the field of medicine, a career wholly occupied by men. This statement furthermore draws attention to his own desire to wield a scalpel by intellectually scrutinizing Hannah, due to the “perverse fate” that attracts him to mentally dissect the rhetoric of feminist lecturers (62). This fate will eventually contribute to his desire to physically dissect Hannah’s public voice from her body by removing her from the public sphere through marriage. As a seasoned traveler,
Woodbury had spent much time abroad in India. In his wavering attraction to Hannah
20 “whose ideas were abhorrent” (355), Woodbury employs rhetoric that simultaneously idealizes and debases her. Charged with exoticism, Woodbury’s Othering of Hannah mirrors his own treatment of Indian culture, which he views as beautiful and beguiling, in spite of the spiritual bankruptcy of its people whom he is determined to see Christianized
(45). Similarly, he finds Hannah to be intelligent, though her feminist ideas are deficient.
Thus, Woodbury’s desire to know Hannah on his own terms and reform her character echoes his colonial exploits. In his courtship of Hannah, Woodbury entices her with ancient texts and prints of “far-off and unreal” eastern cultures that depict “fairy pictures of the Indian moonlight […] over jungle and pagoda, and the dance of maidens on the marble terraces” (95, 111). Woodbury has commodified these cultural artifacts to trinkets by plummeting them out of their countries of origin, reducing them to ornamental decorations. Much like the eastern texts and paintings that populate his private library, by eviscerating the qualities of Hannah’s character that threaten his construction of gender conventions, Woodbury may similarly objectify her. By projecting his desire onto her,
Woodbury conceives of Hannah as a somewhat exotic creature that he can admire from the privileged subject-position of his own household, having reclaimed her from a political future because she has threatened his hierarchical and self-centered view of the world. He may superimpose himself over her, removing her from public sight as a means of perpetuating his own gaze. When Woodbury interacts with Hannah shortly before the speech she is to give, she is immediately struck by his “mental self-possession” (64), developing an attraction that she resists throughout the novel “out of fear that he will interfere with her independences of thought and action” (Corley 105). Ironically,
Hannah’s acknowledgement of Woodbury’s immense self-possession prompts her own to
21 rapidly disintegrate. As she finds herself growing more introspective and self- questioning, the self-assured and autonomous Hannah Thurston first introduced in the novel rapidly dilapidates into subservience.
Hannah’s latent self-doubt may also be read as the displacement of her personal insecurities onto the Movement. Because she occupies a precarious position in society, the novel suggests that she fabricated her convictions on the predicate that she’d have increased self-assurance. In presenting her ideals as thoroughly misguided, the novel suggests that she has formed them simply because she has yet to be guided into a more suitable feminine role as a result of her sustained straddling between the separate spheres.
Such a reading of Hannah’s reformist agenda would seemingly confirm Woodbury’s opinion that “her first appearance had excited a singular feeling of compassion—partly for the trial which, he fancied, she must undergo, and partly for the mental delusion which was its cause” (74). Woodbury resolves to pity her, construing that her reformist agenda is merely a manifestation of her own emotional immaturity. He assumes that this performance of gender is contingent on self-deception, as opposed to an authentic portrayal of her own sentiments, which have instead been invented for her to assume by former reformists. Of course, Woodbury ironically hopes for Hannah to similarly adopt the convictions that he in turn vocalizes. A voyeur who views Hannah as a public spectacle rather than an active participant in the egalitarian dialogue between the two sexes, Woodbury reflects that “he felt no particular interest in the subject to be treated, except a curiosity to know how it could be rendered plausible to a semi-intelligent auditory” (65). The resonance of the speech itself, “a vibration of nerves tensely strung” gradually becomes more confident and purposeful, injected with a conversational and
22 humbled quality that transcends the limitations of its divided audience, causing Hannah to be heard despite the ridicule she may receive (69). Reflecting that her speech “touched the emotional nature of the hearer, and clouded his judgment for the time being,”
Woodbury reasons that because her voice has the capacity to possess others, she herself may be possessed (72). The temporal ephemerality suggested by the “time being” conveys that the speech’s salience will wane. Just as it has clouded Woodbury’s judgment, Hannah’s voice itself may be transposed and superimposed upon, rendering it disposable, its sentiments forgotten. Hannah’s appeal to pathos is merely a testament to her own feminine artifices. Supplemented with imploring statements such as “Young men! Think of your own mother and spare us this humiliation,” Hannah’s speech becomes overtly emotional and hyperbolic, grounded without masculine logic (72).
Disregarding Hannah’s impassioned stance, the subject of her speech is treated as frivolous not only by Woodbury, but by the author himself. Speaking through the omniscient narrator in a footnote that disrupts the narrative, Taylor himself censures
Hannah, offering the disclaimer that “Miss Thurston makes these statements of her own responsibility” thus establishing a clear distinction between himself as the author and
Hannah as the vessel of the speech, to further satirize the movement to which Hannah belongs (73). In his critique of Elizabeth Stoddard’s feminist novel The Morgesons,
Taylor had found that the novel’s titular Cassandra Morgeson “outrages conventionality to no purpose,” an observation that informed his characterization of Hannah as moderate and diffident (Corley 105). In spite of her nonconforming nature, Hannah adopts an extremely conservative persona in order to challenge the systems of oppression that she speaks against, which in turn renders her own beliefs malleable. While Hannah is able to
23 straddle both the public and private sphere, should she completely abandon normative domestic time by condoning the female right to reject the role marriage/motherhood, she will irreversibly remove herself from a framework of social productivity.
When Hannah is faced with radical modes of feminism that infringe upon her own dutiful sense of the social preservation promised by female domesticity, she must help reconstruct domestic spaces by guiding fellow reformists back into more suitable socially-prescribed roles. In one of the novel’s most pivotal scenes, Hannah emerges in order to resolve contentions between Mrs. Merryfield, an aspiring suffragette, and her conservative husband, a tense pairing that comes to represent the dangers of radical feminism to communal sanctity at large. Mrs. Merryfield has plotted to abandon her husband by running off with the impostor spiritualist Dyce, who has seduced her on the basis of his alleged ascription to reformist ideology. Like Dyce, Hannah Thurston is said to possess a “physical magnetism” that inevitably drew Merryfield away from naturalized conventions of marriage and domesticity (216). In her discussion of the genre of nineteenth-century feminist romances, Beam writes that authors often employed tropes of spiritualism, magnetism, and mesmerism to “feature male rescue of the clairvoyant girl from those who penetrate and violate her soul (99). In portraying Hannah as magnetic,
Taylor reverses the typical gender dynamics of this literary trope by utilizing Hannah’s subject-position to draw Merryfield’s deviant nature outward because she has been
“seduced by the sway of reform discourses and aberrant women who crave a feminine medium for their message” (Beam 99). When Hannah confronts her, Mrs. Merryfield stresses that she “want[s] nothing more than [her] rights” (225). Characterized in the novel as deluded, defiant and vain, Mrs. Merryfield fringes on the hysterical, a cautionary
24 tale for women who violate biological and social codes inherent to nineteenth-century womanhood (226). From witnessing Hannah’s political activism, Mrs. Merryfield has merely absorbed a sense of political fervor, although she has little knowledge of the specific rights that she is seeking, and is unable to articulate them herself. Instead, Taylor portrays her as a vessel of misappropriated ideals by Hannah’s activism, which in turn suggest that Hannah’s intellectual reasoning is destructive when engaged by other women. Hannah immediately finds Merryfield’s discretion to be “utterly abhorrent to all her womanly instincts and her virgin nature shrank from an approach to it” (212), going on to state, “I cannot understand it […] after so many years of married life—after having children born to them, and lost, uniting them in the more sacred bond of sorrow” (215).
By imbuing her rhetoric with ideals of morality, she immediately distinguishes herself from Merryfield, appearing appalled at the prospects of a broken household. This attitude mirrors Nissen’s reasoning that nineteenth-century gender identity was “largely determined by marital and family status” while marriage was perceived as “mutual moral self-improvement” (Romantic 5, 7). Hannah excises Merryfield’s experiences from her own reformist narrative, while the physical reduction of her body through shrinking suggests that her own convictions are not as substantiated as she previously understood.
Taylor suggests that while Hannah may be a respectable gendered outlier, Merryfield is a gendered deviant that has abandoned her “womanly instincts” in the pursuit of a selfhood undefined by marital status. This depiction privileges the rigid construction of gender identity as biologically inherent, as opposed to socially constituted, regulated, and naturalized. Hannah contradicts her own ideological beliefs; although she adamantly stresses that women are falsely educated in learning to consider themselves inferior and
25 dependent on men (225), the narrative suggests that Hannah’s biological instinct gravitates towards privileging motherhood as the ideal gratification of her gender.
Hannah rationalizes her opposition to Merryfield’s recklessness by adopting normative value systems. Admitting that she is humiliated for giving the impression that her desire for “the natural justice for women” might equate to an anti-domestic stance, Hannah is
“radiant with a tranquil light” (228, 230). Taylor suggests that Hannah is closer to personal and spiritual fulfillment by finding fault with the convictions she previously held. As Ryan suggests, such a resolution achieves the reconstruction and re-codification of “the idealized qualities of Quaker domesticity and ethical identity” (205). Although she is torn between asserting her selfhood and adopting a self-critical nature in order to best benefit the community in which she resides, she is far more inclined to pursue the latter. She works towards reasserting dynamics of female subjectivity, suggesting that while Taylor’s novel accommodates faculties for females to redefine their subject- positionality, they should ultimately be consigned back to upholding domestic order.
Hannah’s divided sense of loyalties stem from her relationship with her mother: by coming to mimic her mother’s generational views and attitudes on marriage, Hannah replicates her mother’s past in order to create a more socially reputable future. Hochman has previously argued that Hannah’s devotion to her mother is one of the primary qualities that endear her to members of her Quaker community because it reveals her intense moral fiber (232). In her discussion of nineteenth-century motherhood, Nancy
Theriot writes that “daughters wrote of their tremendous need of their mother and of their fear of being left without maternal counsel” (64), while daughters were encouraged to transition “from girlhood into a womanhood like [their] mother[s],” modeling themselves
26 after these attentive and self-effacing examples (101). The novel presents Hannah as having hitherto abstained from marriage in order to care for the sickly Widow Thurston,
“beyond whose rapidly shortening span of life she could see no aim in her own, unless it were devoted to righting the wrongs of her sex” (59). By channeling her anxious energies into the feminist cause, Hannah has prevented herself from envisioning a future in which her mother is no longer actively present, demonstrating that she has relatively few aspirations and personal affiliations outside of this intimate bond. While her mother represents an even more conservative set of gender values in having abstained from discussions of politics altogether, she tolerates Hannah’s faculties for activism, out of veneration for her daughter’s independence. In a scene following Hannah’s dismissal of a marriage proposal from a hopeful suitor, the Widow Thurston confesses, “I have agreed with thee in most of thy views about the rights of our sex, but thee never can be entirely wise on this subject as long as thee remains single” thus encouraging her daughter to marry (161). Revealing that she failed to fully revere the institution of marriage until her husband’s death, she states, “I shall not be much longer with thee, my daughter, and if I tell thee how I failed in my duty it may help thee to perform thine, if—if my prayers for thy sake should be fulfilled” (161). As opposed to viewing her daughter’s marital stance as a personal choice of abstinence, the Widow presents it as a socio-cultural imperative, one that is absolute and inscribed into human nature itself. She instills in her daughter a strong sense of filial duty that is contingent on a commemoration to the past. Troubled by her own lingering mortality, the Widow exemplifies her complicity with the assumed social productivity of marriage. She becomes determined to vicariously repair her past failures as a wife through the intergenerational bond between herself and Hannah, one
27 deeply rooted in a communal and personal history. As Patricia Murphy has previously argued, “late-century novels responding to the cultural and literary figure of the New
Woman import temporal discourses, in subtle but revelatory ways, to illuminate the heightened gender anxieties wrought by this rebellious anomaly” (2). Thus, Hannah’s relationship with the Widow draws attention to the burden of time that she has inherited so that Hannah might reshape her own future in a manner that honors the desires of her mother. By working against her own social and temporal clock in abstaining from marriage, Hannah upsets the balance of gendered time. Developing a heightened awareness of the mortality she shares with her mother, Hannah’s “heart [becomes] full of pity and self-reproach,” and “her own fruitless dream” of social reform is humbled (166).
She concludes that her dream of reform will ultimately be a fruitless one. On the one hand, her political aspirations are somewhat misguided ideals; on the other hand, her revelation gestures her towards the fruitlessness of her own body and womb. By refusing the possibility of marriage, she will never be able to conceive a child. She apprehends that if she loses her mother without abandoning her ideals, she will be even further divided from their shared past. In his construction of the sickly mother, Taylor thus explores Hannah’s devotion to her mother in order to advocate for the reconstruction of a privately localized past in order to resist a more politicized future.
In de-politicizing Hannah’s narrative, the novel’s concluding scenes create a radical literary departure from the highly politicized state of American national identity that resulted from the Civil War. This resolution presumably effaces the viability of gender politics from further continuation. Resolving to marry Woodbury, Hannah finds
“with dismay, that instead of seeking, as formerly, for weapons to combat his views, her
28 mind rather inclined to the discovery of reasons for agreeing with them” (363). Her language imbued with war-like imagery, Hannah reconsiders a subordinate position to repair the civil war that has erupted between herself and Woodbury. Yet, this union invariably sets back the feminist movement by silencing Hannah within the social movement to which she previously belonged. Rather morbidly, Hannah and Woodbury are married at the Widow Thurston’s deathbed, as it was her dying wish (411). Hannah ciphers her anxieties over losing her mother into her union with Woodbury, and assumes her wifely duties by withdrawing from public activism, finding that “all remaining power of resistance was taken away from [her] […] she had yielded so far that she could no longer retreat with honor” (415). The novel’s battle of the sexes is resolved when Hannah subordinates herself to her husband, and uncovers faculties to be submissive, attentive, and modest. Hannah’s resolution of self-effacing femininity suppresses her former political convictions from the realm of her own imagination, before they are abandoned altogether. When she is called upon to make another political speech, she confesses that
“the very thought of standing where I once stood makes me grow faint. I have no courage to do it again” (449). Hannah is unable to behave in a manner that might threaten
Woodbury’s esteem in her loyalties to him. Wary that the prospects of producing another speech may result in yet another faction between them, she sublimates her desires in order to propagate his, no longer comforted by creating and occupying spaces outside of the domestic sphere. However, this abandoned political narrative has allowed “a part of the power he had drawn from her seemed [to be] absorbed into his own being” (410).
Although Taylor presents the union to be wholly consensual and loving, the power is disproportionate in favor to Woodbury, who mentally controls Hannah’s anxieties over
29 the words she may utter, and the spaces she may occupy. According to Catherine Clinton,
“the war pushed women into spaces previously considered exclusively masculine preserves” and such preserves are re-appropriated by Maxwell when he volunteers to make the speech on Hannah’s behalf (5). Woodbury reifies male/female binarism by arguing that “the position which woman holds in the State—always supposing that it does not transcend the destiny of her sex—is the unerring index on the dial of civilization”
(452). Taylor ultimately disbands the history of reformism, in favor of a return to conventions that relentlessly harken back to idyllic domestic tranquility, a literary endeavor that he would further expound seven years later upon the publication of his final novel, Joseph and His Friend.
Unlike Hannah Thurston, Joseph and His Friend is a work wholly unconcerned with the changing political climate of post-Civil War America. As an extension of the novel’s pastoral Pennsylvanian setting, Taylor removes his characters from divisive politics altogether and in the scant mention, we find that “political excitements, it is true, sometimes swept over the neighborhood, but in a mitigated form,” due to the town’s desire for amiable relations and privacy (26). By retreating from the possibility for political representation explored in his earlier novel, Taylor privileges constructions of individuality that resist “a world increasingly perceived to be chaotic” in order to avoid limitations imposed on individual freedom, with the most predominant individual freedom characterized as queer identity (Margolis 6). The novel’s central same sex bond between Joseph and Philip is largely negotiated through Taylor’s deliberate blurring of public and private space, the latter used to shield transgressive homosocial/erotic desires from the reductive gaze of society. Robert K. Martin argues that Taylor based his earlier
30 homoerotic works in eastern localities as “pleasure between men, could only be found in another land,” while the east provided a “cipher” (“Valley” 14, 15). Because such emotional and physical encounters would only temporarily assuage or channel aspirations for same sex intimacy and prove fleeting, Taylor revised this earlier position by drawing attention to the fabricated nature of social/private gendered codes in order to theoretically construct “another land” in the distortion intrinsic to bodily movements between public and private space. In perhaps the most significant instance of this coding, Joseph and
Philip make each other’s acquaintance on a train that is headed back into the countryside from the city, in which “the city melted gradually into the country” (89). In addition to the mechanical mobility indicated by the train, it is also emblematic of a type of bodily fluidity wherein the body becomes a site of transgressing constructs between the domestic ideal of private lives and the “public world of commerce and politics, competition and corruption” (Richter 1). Taylor draws attention to the social construction of binaries including public/private and urban/rural, by blurring these naturalized boundaries in order to signify the extent to which private transgressive sexual desires may be veiled (and even made normative) through public interactions.
Joseph and Philip’s identification with each other is first signified with an intense gaze, which has been identified by Nissen as “a searching gaze who manifests an interest” (Manly 27). Such a gaze simultaneously codes a desire for mirroring and penetration, the desire for Philip to replicate himself in Joseph, and the desire for a familiarity that fringes on bodily merging. This gaze conveys Joseph’s yet-unspoken desire to be guided more directly into “the usual destiny of men” (91). Joseph is drawn to
Philip to re-channel his anxieties regarding his lack of insights into the world of
31 (masculine) business enterprises signified by the city. While his body may fluidly navigate liminal public spaces, these spaces simultaneously represent the anxieties that accompany his individuality versus the homogenized city. This complicates the private preservation of his sublimated sexual desires. When Philip answers Joseph’s gaze, Joseph reads it to propose, “We are men, let us know each other!” (91). The level of intimacy indicated by the gaze allows “his own troubled individuality [to grow] fainter, […] merg[ing] in the common experience of men” (91). The desire for metaphysical intermingling immediately suggests an intense spiritual connection associated with nineteenth-century same sex desire, but the desire to know another man is a desire that also coyly straddles the continuum between homosocial and homoerotic (Nissen, Manly
6). This eroticization is more directly accomplished by the train’s derailing, which in turn causes Joseph to lose consciousness, from which he is awakened by Philip whose “warm drops” of blood from a head wound drip onto Joseph’s cheek (Taylor 92). According to
Corley, “by substituting blood for semen, Taylor both accentuates and normalizes the intimate connection between the two men” (129). Unable to couple his desire for emotional guidance with sexual fulfillment, Joseph’s bond with Philip is highly eroticized through nuanced, seditious acts, such as hand clasping and a scene in which Joseph spends the night before his wedding with Philip, as if he is consummating his marriage.
Philip’s socioeconomic guidance of Joseph reflects Eve Sedgwick’s assertion that homosocial bonds were often achieved through men promoting the interests of other men in the public sphere. These dynamics thus opened spaces for intense emotional and intellectual—at times erotic— same sex unions.
32 In Joseph and His Friend, Taylor further mirrors the correlation between blurrings of spatial/gendered constructs and the facilitation of transgressive gender dynamics through (de)constructions of female-occupied space. While nonconforming males have been extensively discussed, the novel’s females have yet to be identified as alternatively gendered. The lack of attention to females in the text may be attributed to
Martin’s assertion that “women of the [Genteel] tradition are bloodless and unreal; they exist only as Mother or as Muse” and are thus either idealized as models of virtue, or perceived as substitute mother figures (Homosexual 90). Yet, Taylor’s portrayal of women in the novel is more complicated in that he creates several secondary female characters with increased psychological complexity, conflicting ideals of morality, and dissatisfying social stations. For instance, Joseph’s spinster aunt Rachel is limited to the domestic sphere because she has raised her nephew since the death of his mother. In a moment of introspection, she reveals, “she could recall but little difference between the girl of eighteen and the woman of thirty. There was the same place in her home, the same duties, the same subjection to the will of her parents—no exercise of independence or self-reliance anywhere” (32). Aunt Rachel subversively reveals her disappointment with her position in society, and the limited amount of agency she can gain outside of the household. Conscientious of the mobility she lacks, she resents her lack of development as an individual, recognizing a blatant stagnation in the development of her self. It would appear that as opposed to simply portraying Aunt Rachel as passive and unassuming,
Taylor uses her to provide a cautionary tale that warns against the social value embedded in marital status. Throughout the novel, Aunt Rachel remains relegated to the domestic sphere, performing the role of substitute mother for Joseph. In spite of his at times
33 sympathetic portrayal of women, Taylor nonetheless utilizes them as ciphers through which to promote the interests of men. Like the marital solution of Hannah Thurston, he establishes domestic tranquility through performances of self-effacing personas of womanhood. While Taylor creates modes of female self-awareness that draw attention to the inauthenticity of social constructs of gender, he favors female complicity towards them in order to maintain unity in the domestic sphere. This allegedly ideal pursuit of womanhood is contrasted to the novel’s most transgressive female, Julia. Because her prospects are so tightly interconnected to how others perceive her gendered transgressions, Taylor sacrifices her. Although transgressive same sex attachment between men thrives through concealment and subversion, females are eviscerated when their performances of gender coyly mimic and repurpose these dynamics.
Perhaps the novel’s most fundamental female figure, Julia Blessing forges a disastrous courtship with Joseph, a union contingent on deception, miscommunication, and intimate disconnect. Due to her intensely transgressive nature, she may best illustrate
Taylor’s literary attention to “crafting a public persona that preserves an indeterminate private identity” (Corley 113). By manipulating codes of gender and spatial constructs,
Julia’s indeterminate private identity flourishes. She thereby combats the subject-position of her bodily marginality by embodying multiple personas that enable her to subversively gain socioeconomic prosperity and upward mobility. Categorized as a “scheming, vain gold-digger” by Martin, and an “effective picture of the selfish, self-centered woman” by
Wermuth, critics have yet to further problematize Taylor’s portrayal of Julia (“Valley”
16; Bayard Taylor 96). Critics have predominantly refrained from offering more substantial insights into the gendered social codes that mold Julia’s predominantly
34 duplicitous, at times amoral, mechanisms for survival. They have instead opted to situate her within rhetoric of demonized womanhood using coded language that suggests because she is a woman, her motivations range from frivolous to egotistical. This mode of discourse has largely lent itself to Julia’s dismissal from critical consideration.
Unlike Joseph, Julia hails from the city, which immediately becomes a subject of anxiety for inhabitants of the community. As a result, Julia’s invasion of the pastoral community immediately distorts the divisions between the wholesome country that she has infiltrated, and the corrupted city from which she originates. Modern anxieties over
Julia, “dreaded as an unknown and scrutinizing element” represents “the encroachment of vast, external spaces,” (Taylor 28; Hsu 1). These anxieties are clearly vocalized within the novel, and create a blatant paradox within Taylor’s careful (de)construction of gendered space. Unlike the blurring of spatial constructs privileged by Taylor to enable homosocial/erotic desire between men to flourish, Julia’s manipulation of space renders her lurid. Prior to their first acquaintance, Joseph theorizes that it is doubtful whether
Julia “will ever interfere with our harvesting or milking” (5). Through Joseph’s anti- epiphany, Taylor indicates that Julia’s disparaging occupation of country and domestic spaces will prevent any relationship between her and Joseph from securing stability through the production of a biological heir. Julia will inadvertently prevent harvesting and milking, not because she hails from a different social sphere than Joseph, but because her masquerade of feminine performance re-appropriates the dynamics of gendered space that permit his own transgressive queer identity.
Yet, Joseph’s initial attraction is ironically contingent on Julia’s disclosing her desire to establish a sense of selfhood liberated from social codes. While John W.M.
35 Hallock argues that “Julia is masculine and squeezes ‘maiden secrets of his own’ out of
Joseph who is unprepared to resist her wiles” and goes on to suggest that Joseph identifies Julia as masculine in order to displace his own homosexual desires (163),
Hallock refrains from identifying just what Joseph identifies as “masculine” regarding his prospective wife. Apart from Julia’s desire for social mobility, there is not much textual evidence to suggest her mannerisms should be construed as traditionally masculine.
Joseph resolves to marry her not because she is masculine enough to satisfy his homosexual desires, but because he is unconsciously drawn to the self-possession and self-reliance she maintains and which he lacks. Joseph’s desire “to [be] set at ease with himself” is answered in Julia’s resolution to “be one’s true self” by removing herself from city-life (14, 59). It is plausible that Joseph first aligns himself with Julia in order to be molded into a mode of maleness more conducive to his position in society, which functions as a displacement of his own lack of self-awareness. Because he cannot comprehend the means by which to sustain an intimate male friendship in the domestic sphere and provide similar guidance, he resolves to use Julia as a substitute. Having convincingly flouted social conventions to promote her own interests, Julia appears to have reconciled competing dynamics of social codes and private desire. Yet, this simultaneously reveals that the notion of a “true self” is fictitious, because the creation of a private self is contingent on the extent to which the social conditioning of gender codes may be destabilized, unlearned, and abandoned.
Julia’s allegedly corrupt nature most notably stems from her determination to vicariously gain socioeconomic clout through her subversive orchestration of business ventures from within the domestic space she occupies. Julia encourages Joseph to invest
36 in oil stock and borrow against interest/credit to furnish their home and become more socially prominent within their community. The misappropriated funds nearly lead to
Joseph’s ruin when he discovers that he has invested in rattlesnake and skunk oil, a rather heavy-handed metaphor that makes apparent Julia’s venomous and abhorrent pollution of
Joseph’s household. Her immersion into the unethical realm of business exemplifies her corrupt nature, arguably because females who entered workforces traditionally dominated by men “ran the risk of being stigmatized as morally suspect […] [and] such informal mechanisms of control served to discourage women from pushing into a predominantly male labor force” (Spain 196). Yet, Julia’s negotiation of the oil market may also be read as a means by which Julia enacts a subversion of the patriarchal control previously inscribed onto her body. Following the announcement of her engagement, Mr. Blessing confides in his wife “Julia has done well, and I’ll trust her to improve her opportunities.
Besides, this will help Clementina’s chances; where there is one marriage in a family, there is generally another. Poor girl! She has waited a long while. At thirty-three, the market gets v-e-r-y flat” (85). Interpreting the match as a success, Mr. Blessing merely reflects on his daughter’s vanishing prospects. Although Julia seeks out approval from her parents, it is evident that her parents are only concerned with using their daughters as pawns—and pitting them against each other in the process—to procure their daughters husbands, and use their daughters’ positions to rise socially and economically. Because
Julia has been so cruelly debased by her parents, reduced to an object that may be bought and sold, she is arguably wary of growing attached to another human being out of fear that she will be exploited again. Julia in turn reverses the dynamics of her commodification onto the marriage market by performing the role of attentive and self-
37 effacing womanhood, while continuing to secure her own prospects. While Julia aims to better acclimate herself in order to assume a role of domesticity better suited to Joseph’s status as a farm-owner, she also demands the construction of an egalitarian household in which they maintain financial equality (178, 187). In operating from the margins, Julia rejects dynamics that would allow “the space inside the home [to] become that in which social relations are reproduced” (Spain 7). In other words, Julia acquires awareness of the traditional construction of gendered space that would typically prohibit her from taking advantage of the unethical oil industry. Relegated to Joseph’s household in exchange for the bartering of her body through a corrupted marriage, Julia transforms the domestic space into a public market. This is mirrored in her realization following Joseph’s discovery of the scheme: “the loss of the money was, in reality, much less important to her than the loss of her power over Joseph” (249). By reversing the power-dynamics that contributed to her own marginalization, Julia temporarily enacts a subversion of patriarchal order, revealing the indeterminacy and inauthenticity of gendered space itself, disrupted by the (im)mobility of her own bodily autonomy.
Due to the misogynist and ageist conditioning projected onto her, Julia’s prospects are consequently reduced to her outward appearance; she routinely takes arsenic because it conceals her age, which in turn draws attention to the fabricated mode of femininity that she must perform in order to survive. This gestures towards the theoretical assertions of Judith Butler, who argues that gender may be envisioned as an embodiment of performative and imitative acts (192-193). After Joseph confronts Julia about the funds they have misplaced, he confesses, “I am sick of masks; we all wear them” (253). This statement most directly demonstrates a suppressed knowledge of his
38 queer identity and alludes to the social masquerade of entering a marital union while continuing to subversively explore same sex desire. Yet, his assertion also ironically draws attention to the mask that Julia must wear to embody a mode of femininity suited to commodification by the male gaze. When her own mask is stripped from her, Julia’s penchant for manipulating codes and conventions in order to maintain bodily autonomy becomes ephemeral, and is similarly undone. Retreating to her private chamber, she meets her gaze in a mirror: “I look pinched; a little more, and I shall look old […] I must bring on the crisis at once, and then see if I can’t fill out these hollows” (250). Having shattered the image of domestic femininity that she had carefully constructed, Julia reasons that by smoothing away the natural blemishes on her skin, she may thereby smooth away the visibility of her gendered indiscretions to better embody a performance of domestic subservience. Yet, the inscription of brokenness onto her body itself more finitely accentuates her broken performance of gender: “her dress was torn, her arms scratched and bleeding. She had played her stake and failed, -- miserably, hopelessly failed” (259). Julia reasons that it is not her transgressive manipulation of codes, but the trappings of unsightly clothing and a disheveled appearance, that signal her failure to negotiate the formation of a feminine persona. In turn, the narrative strips her façade of beauty from her when she dies of arsenic poisoning. She is reduced to an ashen and skeletal face following Joseph’s anxieties that “the tempting vision of Philip’s valley […]
[was] fad[ing] away” (262, 261). Yet, it is Julia who physically fades away, which suggests that she is eschewed from the narrative in order to propagate male-male attachment between Joseph and his friend.
39 In the novel’s conclusion, following a trial in which he is mistakenly indicted and consequently pardoned for murdering Julia, Joseph is swiftly paired off with a final female figure. While it is unclear whether this relationship will prove successful, it theoretically lays out the groundwork for future unions between queer men and females.
Philip encourages Joseph to negotiate a romantic relationship with his sister Madeline
(340). Joseph himself conceives of Madeline as a sister, a literary motif that was “a convenient modern-day form of the deus ex machine device for narratives that had strayed so far from any man-woman love interest that a conventional ending in marriage seemed difficult to achieve” (Nissen, Manly 44). The platonic Joseph-Madeline attachment enables grounds for male-male intimacy within the relationship, with homosocial qualities carried over into the traditional marriage prototype. By positioning himself with a woman who operates solely within the margins of the domestic, Joseph has repurposed marriage in order to shield his own transgressive gender identity from social visibility and scrutiny. However, Philip questions whether “Joseph [will continue] to give me the precious intimacy of a man’s love, so different from woman’s, yet so pure and perfect” (361-2). Going on to envision the mingling of their blood through
Madeline’s future children (362), Philip confirms that spaces for homosocial/erotic desire will presumably extend beyond the events depicted in the novel, because “this form of
[sisterly] substitution might also function in a cross-sex way” (Nissen, Manly 94).
Because male-male attachments threaten social constructs of gender and cannot be directly manifested within social conventions, “transgressive sexuality is one of those
‘detached fragments’ […] of identity treated as both ‘quietly understood’ and subject to concealment” (Corley 115). Through the construction of the alternative household,
40 Joseph and Philip figuratively remove themselves from normative gendered conventions, retreating into “pastoral seclusion” (358) which, as Martin suggests, may convey an
“expression of a flight from civilization, from the encumbrances of a social world where
[homosocial desire] can have no place” (Homosexual 174). Yet, Taylor’s privileging of one transgressive gender identity (homosocial desire) compromises any and all incarnations of transgressive visions of femininity. Consequently, Madeline’s participation in the enabling of the union is absent from the narrative altogether, demonstrating Taylor’s rejection of Julia’s earlier radical negotiation of bodily autonomy.
Instead, Taylor’s marital resolution re-inscribes the reduction of female bodies to commodities that are routinely used in order to proliferate male desires.
While discussions of gender in Bayard Taylor have been predominantly cast into a framework of homosocial/erotic desire between men, Taylor’s portrayal of nonconforming females is equally instructive to disentangle Taylor’s portrayals of competing social and private identities. In both Hannah Thurston and Joseph and His
Friend, Taylor explores the extent to which transgressive women may destabilize, reject, and repurpose delineations of space and gender through deliberate blurrings of the public/private sphere. In spite of his sympathy to the inauthenticity of socially constructed binaries in gender and space, Taylor undermines his own portrayal of women by portraying the social sphere as morally destructive to women, resolving to remove them by choice or by force, in order to propagate male desire.
41 CHAPTER THREE
JAMES ON JAMES: THE REINVENTION OF
ALICE JAMES’ QUEER IDENTITY
Published in 1886 to poor critical reception, Henry James’ The Bostonians was envisioned by the author as his attempt “to show that” he could “write an American story,” following a series of literary endeavors set largely abroad (Complete 19). The novel is his most politically invested, particularly in the gender politics of an era wherein sexuality was “not a pregiven quantity, a thing whose shape, form, and extent we know in advance,” but writers demonstrated foresights into the medical/psychological discourses that would lead to the codification of homo/heterosexuality at the turn of the century
(Coviello 12). As a result, writers ingested their depictions of same sex affinities with simultaneous nostalgia for a past in which strong emotional same sex bonds had been tolerated and ambivalence for a future from which these relations were being erased.
James is considered a closeted homosexual, and contemporary critics often link his suppressed homosexuality with his literary productions. But The Bostonians arguably contains the author’s most explicit depiction of female queer identity. The novel’s ambiguous genre that conflates Victorian wedding plots and the bildungsroman indicates
James’ attention to feminist activism and queer relations. The Bostonians follows the feminist activism of Olive Chancellor and her would-be protégé and lover, Verena
Tarrant, as Verena negotiates her romantic relationship with Basil Ransom. Basil exerts a conservative persuasion that pressures Verena to marry and abandon her bourgeoning career as a political lecturer. A love triangle forms when the Basil-Verena relationship threatens the Olive-Verena homosocial bond. Eve Sedgwick first defined homosocial
42 desire as “men promoting the interests of men” in the historical construction of power dynamics, typically accomplished through business ventures (4). Such a codification, in privileging masculine relations, overlooks parallel relations between women that proliferated throughout the nineteenth century.3 To amend Sedgwick’s terminology, I define homosocial desire as the capacity for intense emotional identification between women attempting to assert individual/political agency in contention to patriarchal power-dynamics, as a means of framing themselves outside of the socio-cultural regulation of female domesticity. As James’ assessment of the feminist movement in The
Bostonians suggests, such agency is difficult within a system that privileges motherhood and biological reproduction as a personal and cultural duty for females. Throughout the novel, James associates issues about motherhood with generating same sex desire: Olive and Verena’s homosocial attraction is attributed to the absence of Olive’s dead mother and the emotional detachment of Verena’s. Because mothers are the first models of homosocial desire for the novel’s protagonists and fail to promote the interests of their own daughters, they influence later incarnations of homosocial desire. Olive’s relationship with Verena, then, recreates the lost maternal presence; when her bond to
Verena risks termination, she re-experiences the emotional distress of losing her mother, endures bouts of hysteria, and jeopardizes her reformist agenda. It is only when she relinquishes her desire for same sex relationships that she becomes an active political agent.
The link between motherhood and female queer identity elucidates not only
3 See, for instance Lillian Faderman’s Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship & Love Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present, pp. 145-292. In these chapters, Faderman extensively explicates nineteenth-century historical and textual depictions of female-female bonds.
43 James’ textual investment, but a deeply biographical investment as well. Critics have noted Alice James, Henry’s sister, as a one-dimensional model for Olive. A spinster who resided in New England and London, Alice’s lifetime was relatively conventional. Unlike her brothers, she did not belong to contemporary intellectual circles, yet she has posthumously been regarded as a feminist icon due to the publication of her diary. The diary reveals the positive influence of same sex friendship on her intellectual outpouring, her battle with hysteria, and proto-feminist advocacy, though she was virtually uninvolved in the reformist movement. Although several projects examine the intellectual discourse fostered between Henry and William James, critics have yet to produce an extensive cross-comparative analysis of Alice’s writings and the work of her siblings, but her diary productively contributes to our understanding of Henry James’ rationale in depicting queer identity. Reading The Bostonians in conjunction with Alice’s writings demonstrates that James crafted a voice for Alice, but undermined her capacity for self- expression. In his portrayal of Olive, James appropriates Alice’s experiences to vocalize his own gendered anxieties. I argue that the novel’s central pairing between Olive and
Verena is informed by maternal absence in the public sphere; their tenuous emotional wellbeing is influenced by their desire to recreate maternal bonds. James thus explores the extent to which normative gender roles regulate and disrupt queer female identity to express his own ambivalence towards his mother. In addition, this reading reveals James’ own anxieties about his queer identity through a projected discomfort with his sister’s long-term companionship with another female. Because Henry appropriated her experiences before she wrote them, Alice’s diary can be read as an effort to recover her voice from under his. While Alice’s writings reveal she was psychologically adjusted to
44 her queer identity, Henry’s novel re-inscribes nineteenth-century conventions that identified same sex bonds as indicative of unbalanced emotional health and intellectual sterility. Thus, in spite of Henry’s favorable intentions towards Alice, his portrayal of same sex bonds is ultimately reductive, propagating stigmas against queer identity, as opposed to rectifying them. Following Alice’s death, Henry’s 1894 repudiation of her diary reveals a chauvinistic conceptualization of female intellectuality and same sex bonds, a history that must be uncovered in order to enhance the canonical representation of nineteenth-century queer identity with female narratives previously withheld from inclusion due to the alleged unconventionality of their authors and genres.
After outlining his forthcoming novel in 1883, Henry James wrote The Bostonians between 1884-85. At the time of the novel’s conception, Henry lived in a house in Boston with his sister Alice and Katharine P. Loring (Jean Strouse 244). Alice and Katharine would go on to share a household for the remainder of Alice’s life. Due to their exclusivity, James biographers understand this union to be Alice’s closest to romance
(273). As Alice’s diary entries and letters demonstrate, her spinsterhood could be a source of both self-deprecation and pride, but she identified Katharine as her “better half”
(Diary 151). Although her relationship with Katharine was not lesbian, it was nonetheless socio-historically queer. The two shared a “Boston marriage,” which may be categorized as a “long-term relationship between two otherwise unmarried women, who were usually financially independent of men” (Ledger 60). Although this type of relationship had been common in New England, the Boston marriage was increasingly vilified as a source of deficient femininity. Paraphrasing Nancy Stahli, Wendy Graham notes that such romantic friendships “were no longer sanctioned as preparation for heterosexual courtship or as
45 evidence of woman’s affectionate nature” (151). Graham argues that as a celibate homosexual himself, James was well versed in the “contemporary medical discourse” surrounding homosexuality due to his relationship with his brother, the psychiatrist
William James (4). While Henry flouted heterosexual conventions throughout his literary endeavors, his portrayals of queer same sex unions are never successful by the novels’ conclusion.4 Likely in response to his own unspoken homosexuality, James vocalized ambivalence to Katharine as demonstrated through his attitude in private letters, and his portrayal of Olive and Verena’s codependent and toxic relationship in the novel. Yet, in response to what he viewed as the social stigma against women like his sister, James wrote The Bostonians partly to address “the disease of a language and culture that prevents women from speaking” (Sensibar 60). It is ironic that The Bostonians, a novel so concerned with an egalitarian mode of female self-expression and representation, preceded and displaced the mode of expression that Alice would ultimately find in keeping a diary.
Unbeknownst to Henry, his sister would begin keeping a diary in the summer of
1889 (Strouse 273). This followed the publication of The Bostonians in 1886. While both siblings struggled to explicate their gendered anxieties through writing, Henry chose to employ a cipher in The Bostonians, whereas Alice utilized introspection to document her anxieties firsthand. Alice identified herself as a “spinster,” an “invalid,” and a “flaccid virgin,” but never as an “artist” (Strouse 178; Diary 139, 31, 36). In one diary entry, after criticizing herself for behaving “like a lunatic” and sobbing uncontrollably, Alice reflects,
4 For more on Henry’s literary resistance of heteronormative conventions, see for instance Daniel J. Murtaugh’s “An Emotional Reflection: Sexual Realization in Henry James's Revisions to Roderick Hudson,” pp. 182-203, Sean O’Toole’s “Queer Properties: Passion and Possession in The Spoils of Poynton,” pp. 30-52, and “Invalid Relations: Queer Kinship in Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady,” pp. 196-217.
46 “I should like to be an artist—imagine the joy and despair of doing it! the joy of seeing with the trained eye and the despair of doing it” (Diary 31). She expresses the desire to channel her visceral reactions (regarding her perceived failures) into artistic endeavors.
Yet, convinced that she is artistically impotent because she lacks a trained eye to create,
Alice determines that she lacks the integral disciplinary regulation of body and mind.
Consequently, these inadequacies limit the range of her observations. Her own despair is inconsequential to artistic production because this signifies the alleged unproductivity of her female psyche. Because she does not fit within the conventional framework of masculine control in artistry, she expunges herself from it. According to Strouse,
“although eager to express her thoughts […] Alice was acutely conscious of […]
[lacking] the genius to speak directly to the world through creative work” (272). Apart from the aforementioned diary, the small amount of written work that Alice would produce over her lifetime included a number of letters, many of which were destroyed.
Until her mid-forties, the overwhelming anxiety of lacking both education and notoriety prevented her from crafting a permanent and authoritative voice through writing. Henry sublimated Alice’s voice in The Bostonians before she had the chance to express her personal experiences, and as a result of this reinvention, critics have overlooked her writings. This may be due in part to a gender bias identified by Susan S. Williams; she argues that scholars privilege the literary merit and range of male authors, but categorize female writers as observational and myopic. As a diarist, Alice James has been reduced to the latter category. In her first diary entry, Alice writes, “I think that if I get into the habit of writing a bit about what happens, or rather doesn’t happen, I may lose a little of the sense of loneliness and desolation which abides with me. My circumstances allowing of
47 nothing but the ejaculation of one-syllabled reflections, a written monologue by that most interesting being, myself, may have its yet to be discovered consolations” before confiding that the diary might provide an outlet for her “geyser of emotions” (Diary 25).
In spite of her self-deprecations, this passage reveals that Alice was determined to uncover a private sense of self. By recovering her memories through the written medium, she could moderate her anxieties, and establish an identity unmitigated by contemporary gender constructs, or the unrelenting diagnoses of neurasthenia and hysteria that followed her throughout her life.
As her surviving writings demonstrate, Alice established a conscious awareness of the various roles she was expected to perform and envisioned that these social codes had contributed to a division within her self. She conceived of her status as an invalid to be a well-rehearsed “rôle,” and envisioned others as her active audience (129). Alice created a significant diary entry as a response to “The Hidden Self,” in which her brother
William argued that the “nervous victim ‘abandons’ certain portions of his consciousness” (148). Explicitly borrowing language from “Hidden Self,” Alice states that reading the piece allowed her to look back on her 1868 nervous breakdown.
Differentiating herself from patients in insane asylums, Alice imagined that she had the
“duties of doctor, nurse, and strait-jacket imposed upon” her (Diary 148). Now that she was older, she was expected to be self-sufficient due to her financial inheritance, yet she was largely confined to her home due to her illnesses and lack of an occupation.
Borrowing William’s terminology, she envisions her nervous breakdowns as “conscious abandonments” of her bodily inclinations because her hysterical symptoms were beyond comprehension (Diary 149). This division in self is similarly illustrated in The
48 Bostonians, wherein Olive Tarrant refuses to meet her own gaze in the mirror during her hysterical episodes and “might give any version of her[self] she chose” (9-10). The divisions in self, identified by the biographer Alice, the psychiatrist William, and the humanist Henry, create a collision in which each James sibling interrogates whether it is possible to create and express an independent self in spite of, and in response to, socially constructed dynamics, including gender roles, sexuality, and mental health. Although
Strouse argues that Henry’s literary depictions of Alice convey an intense desire for “a shared identity across the boundaries of gender” (251), Alice herself was wary of this mode of conflation, writing that “there are two views taken of me that rather neutralize each other, unfortunately, one ‘so subtle, just like your brother,’ the other ‘& above all so original” (Death 119). Because she was continually compared to her brothers, she was denied an expression of self independent of their association. As a result, she desired to recover her voice from these alternative representations. While Henry would not learn of the diary’s existence until two years after her death, it is Alice’s desire for self-expression and selfhood that is clearly evident in the novel that Henry generated during her lifetime.
Unlike his sister, James portrays the female struggle to construct an individual voice through public speech as an integral component of queer identity formation.
Conversely, he also suggests that this path towards vocal self-actualization is fraught with the peril of misappropriation and erasure. Due to the prejudice against females in the political sphere, women risk the suppression of their voice by others. As discussed by
Suzzane M. Marilley, male opponents to the suffrage movement were anxious that female suffragettes would compromise normative female roles as wives and mothers. As Graham argues, opting out of marriage was perceived as a threat against the alleged reproductive
49 biological function of female bodies. The novel stages this in the form of a rivalry between Basil and Olive over Verena. Olive, who is described as a “morbid old maid”
(307), seeks out Verena’s companionship due to a desire “to know intimately some very poor girl” (29). She intends to redirect her gendered anxieties and moderate her immense loneliness. Verena is drawn to Olive because Olive may provide emotional and financial assistance in order to refine her talent as a public speaker. Verena vows to abstain from marriage having “lent herself, given herself, utterly” to Olive and the feminist cause
(301). This queer bildungsroman plot is complicated by Basil Ransom who jeopardizes the central lesbian relationship. He is suspicious of any gender identity that deviates from the naturalized ideology of heteronormative femininity. Yet, he speaks with a Southern
“curious feminine softness” (8), and is constantly seen brandishing a walking stick and smoking cigars profusely (14, 259, 271, 279, 314, 321). Because he has internalized anxieties against the femininity he recognizes in himself, he is determined to reassert his own biological maleness by employing artificial phalluses, suppressing female affinities in the process.
Basil’s scrutinizing masculine gaze, in distorting queer kinships as perverse, reveals James’ interrogation of contemporary anxieties pertaining to the suffrage movement and its facilitation of alternative modes of gender identity. Prior to Verena’s culminating speech in the Boston Music Hall for the feminist movement that is supposed to represent her complete association with the feminist and queer identities she’s been seeking, Basil proposes to marry Verena and give her voice “another direction” (303).
The public sphere’s infiltration by the female voice is queer because, as Basil fears, “the whole generation is womanized. The masculine tone is passing out of the world. It's a
50 feminine, nervous, hysterical, chattering canting age” (260). Basil espouses socio- medical rhetoric that falsely codified female hysteria as indicative of the “instability of the female nervous and reproductive systems” (Showalter 72). In other words, because medical discourses stipulated that women were naturally predisposed to emotional volatility due to the fragility of their anatomical makeup, successful female integration into intellectual communities was stifled because this would only result in intellectual unproductiveness and sterility. By relegating what Barbara Straumann categorizes as
“woman’s wandering voice” back to the private sphere through marriage (646), Basil intends to efface Verena’s queer appropriation of political space in order to reassert his masculine superiority. He believes that Verena’s gender identity is obscene and that he can suppress it by inviting her to perform a normative gender construct. Yet, this would be performative nonetheless, a desire to mask rather than reform her nature.
Because Verena herself is identified to be “of many pieces,” her voice is regarded throughout the novel as a detached, dismembered organ (114). According to Lynn
Wardley, “now embodied, once disembodied, voices […] are all too easily altered” (639).
As a result of these alterations, Verena’s voice is often referenced without use of a personal pronoun such as “her,” as though it were a separate entity from Verena altogether. She is referred to as “the voice” (45) or a “pure voice to be hushed” (75). In both cases, the voice is never identified as “hers” or “Verena’s,” suggesting that it does not belong to her at all. James thus demonstrates that the voice may not authentically correspond to the identity or selfhood of its speaker. This dismemberment of the human voice oddly parallels the separateness of Alice’s body parts that she committed to writing in an entry depicting her nervous breakdown: “you abandon the pit of yr. stomach the
51 palms of yr. hands the soles of yr. feet & refuse to keep them sane” (Diary 150). At the time of this 1890 composition, Alice had read The Bostonians and The Princess
Cassamassima (1886).5 Alice offered enthusiastic praise of the two novels, yet she refrained from commenting on the characters that paralleled her (Strouse 282). While
Strouse argues that Alice “read no hidden messages in these novels,” Alice’s writings may suggest the opposite, in that she adopted some of Henry’s language to reconstruct her own narrative (284). Her marked silence about Henry’s literary reinventions reveals a determination to refine her own identity as a separate entity from these fictive renderings.
In her compartmentalization of her body parts, Alice suggests that they acted of their own volition, without her consent. If Olive serves as an incarnation of Alice, she too recognizes the deficiency of voice.
Adopting a similar disassociation, Olive is self-conscious that her own voice is a deficient means of communicating. Noting Henry’s female public speakers are not
“fluent mediums,” Wardley posits that female voices in the novel need channeling and nurturing in order to resound successfully (640). As a result, Olive is anxious that her voice would alert others to her hysterical nature and prevent her career as a reformist from gaining momentum. In response, Olive gains the ability to speak through Verena before Olive is able to speak directly for herself. Verena admits that the speeches are co- authored but that Olive “tells me what to say,” while Olive reflects that “success for
Verena was success for her” (175, 206). Olive recognizes that due to the malleability of
5 I mention The Princess Cassamassima here due to its biographical connection to Alice. In the novel, the protagonist’s sister is a sickly character with whom he shares a loving, though strained, relationship. Strouse goes on to describe this character as “confined to her sofa in a pink dressing gown, Rosy is presented as brilliant and bizarre, a ‘strange, bedizened little invalid,’ a ‘small, odd, sharp, crippled, chattering sister’ who makes ‘intensely individual little protests’” (282). This rather unflattering portrait of an Alice-like character demonstrates that “the double-edged nature of Henry’s feelings about Alice emerged more clearly in this discreet likeness than in the letters he wrote about and to her” (284).
52 Verena’s voice, it may be regulated and conflated with her own in order to perpetuate her reformist endeavors. Olive utilizes Verena’s voice as a means through which to cipher her own because she is too shy to speak publicly. According to Sensibar, “although Olive hates and fears Basil’s values, as a product of the same culture, she (presumably unconsciously) shares some of them” (66). The female voice is commodified and exploited in a manner that imitates the power-dynamics inherent in a culture that views female bodies as expendable. Olive’s mode of self-expression ironically mirrors Basil’s gendered imperialism: she bolsters her own pride and confidence by seizing control of
Verena’s voice, which inevitably strips Verena of individuality. Olive’s mentorship is thus little different than Basil’s. Shortly after Olive and Verena take up a residence together, Olive forcefully dictates the spaces that Verena may occupy, framing her within a domestic site to which she is crippled by threats of anguish and disappointment. The narrator notes, “the girl was now completely under her influence […] [and] wished to please her if only because she had such a dread of displeasing her,” and that Verena belongs to Olive (108, 110). Such an influence becomes one of physical asphyxiation as opposed to one of intellectual cultivation. Olive takes advantage of Verena’s emotional immaturity and lack of introspection. Verena is unable to develop her own feminist voice because she is too absorbed in carrying out Olive’s will. While this tactic of expression is made suspect by James, it nonetheless becomes an integral component of Olive’s path towards self-actualization, a dynamic that invariably supplants the self-actualization that she had promised to help Verena attain.
James seems unable to envision a mode of same sex relationship that did not emphasize and abuse power-dynamics. By contrast, Alice engaged in alternative modes
53 of imitation before she began keeping a diary. Between 1887 and 1888, she kept a commonplace book in which she recorded quotations and passages originally written by others. Conceptualizing this documentation as a type of ventriloquism, Strouse notes that
Alice felt safe to explore authorship by “us[ing] other people’s voices to express her own thoughts” (272). Alice was self-conscious regarding the prominence of her own thoughts so she wrote in the commonplace book before gaining an independent voice of her own.
Although she first used the voices of others in order to gain authority, her actions are far from destructive like Olive’s. Alice later came to rely on her best friend Katharine as an intellectual and emotional partner. When she was too sick to write, Alice dictated her ideas to Katharine, who would commit them to paper. Katharine and Alice viewed their relationship as an equal partnership. Katharine fully consented to devoting a great portion of her time to Alice’s caretaking and championed the publication of Alice’s diary after her death (Strouse 319). Such co-creative same sex relationships seem unimaginable to
James, who depicts female homosocial desire in terms of malevolent appropriation and usurpation. Same sex unions cast female participants into a state of precarity wherein through the construction of such bonds, they risk the unrealized potential of their intellectual developments. In the novel’s culminating scene, it is only through the act of renouncing homosocial desire entirely that Olive gains intellectual credence. This follows
James’ adoption of contemporary medical rhetoric, which insinuated that same sex relationships between women would only lead to hyper-femininity, fragility, and bodily/mental ruination. Silencing Verena so that she might herself be heard, Olive becomes corrupt by channeling her political schema through Verena. Such a rendition of homosocial desire gestures towards a hierarchy of female gender relations that propagates
54 suppression as a means of self-advancement, characteristics that are seemingly transmitted not only intra-generationally from reformist to reformist, but also inter- generationally, from mothers to daughters. James’ critique of tensions between normative and queer visions of femininity is thus primarily signified through his portrayal of motherhood.
In his depiction of the homosocial bond between Olive and Verena, James links their attraction to cultural and personal idealizations of mothers. According to Nancy M.
Theriot, the nineteenth-century had an intense “fear of being left without maternal counsel (64), and mother-daughter bonds were seen as both “personally satisfying and socially important” (25). James demonstrates that in spite of the cultural idealization of motherhood, “the history of feminine anguish” is contemporarily categorized by “the bullied wives, the stricken mothers” who are denied social mobility, yet expected to compromise their own emotional fulfillment for the wellbeing of their daughters (140,
141).6 While John Funchion notes that Olive and Verena “remain committed to critiquing the institution of marriage and the ideology of Republican motherhood as sites of oppression” in order to subvert heteronormative constructs of gender and sexuality, they unwittingly seek additional maternal figures for guidance and emotional nurturing (242).
As noted by Jack (Judith) Halberstam, queer individuals create alternative modes of space and temporality, yet may simultaneously long for normative constructs, including domestic spaces and productive mother-child bonds. In spite of Henry James’ intense
6 Many scholars identify the Post-Civil War environment as providing a platform for heightened interests in social and political reform, including suffrage. According to Catherine Clinton and Nina Silber, “following the celebratory glorification of the separation of spheres […] was the breakdown of rigid gender categories and sexual barriers brought about by wartime necessity” (243). Following this blurring of the traditional spheres, motherhood was highly regarded as capable of evoking social change, yet confined mothers to the private sphere. These paradoxical suggestions created a dichotomy in the nation’s view of motherhood, and this dichotomy is registered in The Bostonians.
55 bond with his own mother (Kaplan 16), he also perceived her to be “dominant and self- serving” (Strouse 27). While Jamesian mothers have been extensively discussed in other novels, such as The American, Daisy Miller, and The Portrait of a Lady, the mothers that populate The Bostonians have received no critical attention. According to Carol Holly,
Henry harbored resentment towards his mother, aware that she could be “unavailable or narcissistic” and could make “selfishly illegitimate demands” (155). Drawing from his personal life, Henry perhaps projected his feelings toward his mother into the book while using his sister as a basis for the reinvention. Like her brother, Alice was acutely conscious of the ambiguous and paradoxical nature of her mother, reflecting in a diary entry that her mother acted “as if she simply embodied the unconscious essence of wife and motherhood” (Diary 79). Alice’s language reveals that her mother convincingly imitated cultural tropes of motherhood, including self-sacrifice and filial devotion, but perhaps disingenuously. Alice acknowledges a falsity due to her own sense of femininity, possessing the emotional depth and introspection to carefully scrutinize and discard tropes of motherhood. Aware of the cultural and personal significance placed on maternity, Henry expounds intense ambivalence.
Verena’s mother, known exclusively as Mrs. Tarrant, is physically debilitated, which signifies her emotional inaccessibility to—and maligned mentorship of— her daughter. Mrs. Tarrant’s physical degradation stems from her desire to flout the fiction of domestic order culturally signified by her body itself. James’ references to her bouts of hunger and dietary reforms, as well as the narratological aside that “she had grown dreadfully limp,” portray her as physically reduced and most likely anorexic (57, 58). In their study of Victorian literature, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar argue that cases of
56 anorexia nervosa indicate active female attempts to subvert the patriarchal confines of the domestic sphere and create some sense of agency by seizing control of their bodies. Mrs.
Tarrant reacts to the confines of her husband’s home by growing emaciated. Mrs. Tarrant fails to provide a secure foundation for maternal attachment, and this first inadequate bond becomes the model for Verena’s future relationships. When Basil visits Verena in her parents’ home, Verena informs Basil of Mrs. Tarrant’s persistent illnesses, stating
“she lies down when she feels well and happy, and when she’s sick she walks about—she roams all round the house” (181). Verena frames domesticity as a benign yet crippling disease through the insinuation that her mother relinquishes household duties by feigning listlessness. In her negotiation of space, Mrs. Tarrant casts herself simultaneously at the center and the peripheries of the household as a means of drawing attention to the fabrication of womanhood that she embodies. James depicts the arbitrary construction of her domestic role to be just as arbitrary as the symptoms that ravage her frail body. Her diminished body furthermore emphasizes the precariousness of Verena’s own, in that
Basil encroaches upon the unhinged domestic space only when Mrs. Tarrant has surrendered maternal care of Verena’s politicized body. Mrs. Tarrant’s infirmity relegates her to a spectral figure in the home, pursuing her own interests and ignoring her daughter.
If Verena is cognizant of these dynamics, she employs language to dismiss them: “I suppose you think she has missed me, since I have been so absorbed. Well, so she has, but she knows it’s for my good. She would make any sacrifice for affection” (181).
Claiming to have absorbed a sense of political fervor in the wake of her bourgeoning career, Verena’s statement reveals that it is she herself who has been absorbed by others.
Because others siphon her talents, she has been rendered a hollow mouthpiece that
57 signifies the collapse of her individual desires into a politicized body to challenge the national disenfranchisement of women. Despite her chagrin, Verena portrays her mother’s exceedingly distanced disposition as a testament to her self-sacrificial nature, in that she has willingly sublimated their bond in order to advance Verena’s intellectual viability. Verena subsequently vows that she would make “any sacrifice for affection”
(181). This relates not only to her pursuit of a homosocial bond with Olive to cushion the burial of her bond to her mother, but also to her sublimated desire to become a mother in turn. When Basil later proposes to her, she reveals that “she adored children” (258), and voices anxieties when confronted by the notion that her political career has removed her from the “realm of family life” (263). Like Olive and Basil dismember Verena’s voice from her body, Verena chooses to compartmentalize portions of her mother in order to envision a fictitious ideal. In conceiving of herself as a future mother, Verena’s perception of her mother is embedded with a burden of domesticity she must simultaneously resist and emulate. In the interim, Olive becomes a substitute for the missing mother by providing financial security, emotional guidance, and ultimately a home.
In her own experience, Alice sought approval and emotional support from her mother, but the relationship was an imperfect one. Biographers have demonstrated that
Mary Robertson Walsh James was not as involved with Alice as she was with her sons.
Alice James wrote of her desire to gain a sense of selfhood from her mother, confessing in her diary that Mrs. James embodied “the essence of divine maternity from which I was to learn great things, give all, but ask nothing” (Diary 221). Yet Alice’s rhetorical choices are charged with a purposeful ambiguity. Writing that she “was to learn great things”
58 from her mother, Alice suggests that she learned little, if anything at all. Although her mother effectively performed the role of wife and mother, this was a role that Alice would never fully assume as a result of her spinsterhood. Her failure to inherit “the essence of divine maternity” suggests an unconscious division regarding the distinctions between herself and her mother. When Mary James died in 1882, Alice took over her maternal duties, including the care of the household and of her father. Accounts suggest that she temporarily thrived in the role; Henry writes that “Alice, I am happy to say, after many years of ill health has been better for the last few months than for a long time” (qtd. in Strouse 202). His optimism suggests that he may have localized the cause of his sister’s mental illness on the lingering presence of their mother, and was relieved to see
Alice effectively perform filial duties after her overbearing presence had been removed.
He ironically privileges a normative domestic role for his sister, as opposed to the politically active and autonomous one he created for her in The Bostonians. When Alice
James reflects on her newfound domestic responsibilities, she confesses that she “may not be equal to them […] I used to think that I loved my dear Mother & knew her burdens” and that “instead of having lost her it seems sometimes as if I had never known or loved her before” (Death 91; qtd. in Strouse 203). By confiding that she found herself inadequate to fully assume her mother’s role, Alice finds solace in recognizing that she had grown to be a distinctive woman from her. Her mother’s duties were more challenging, and Alice expresses both regret and admiration for the mother who was far more complex than she had appeared to be in life. By relinquishing any claim to her mother, and refuting her capacity to have understood or truly loved her in life, her writing conveys disillusionment with socially prescribed gender roles.
59 Failing to achieve the introspection that caused Alice to find solace in her mother’s death, Verena’s over-identification with Mrs. Tarrant prevents her self- actualization. Although Straumann argues that Verena’s father is accountable for the desirability of Verena to others (89), she does not identify Mrs. Tarrant as an agent in this commodification. After she performs her first public speech, Verena “turned away slowly towards her mother, smiling over her shoulder at the whole room, as if it had been a single person […] She had had immense success, and Mrs. Tarrant, as she took her into her arms and kissed her, was certainly able to feel that the audience was not disappointed” (50). Verena’s political endeavors are tightly bound to the approval of her mother; following her public debut, she only desires her mother’s comfort and affection.
Verena’s feminist endeavors—to promote the interests of females—are thus primarily conducted through this maternal bond. Yet, James portrays Mrs. Tarrant’s motivations as duplicitous. Unlike Olive and Basil who directly vie for Verena’s politicized body, the
Tarrant matriarch’s complicit position casts her the staunch advocate of “progressive” feminist ideology contingent upon her daughter becoming fully absorbed into the body politic. Ironically, Mrs. Tarrant herself has long been absorbed into the cult of domesticity, and should Verena ventriloquize the rhetoric of other progressive women, she too will be regulated through a new though equally false homogenization of womanhood. In Verena’s own assessment of Mrs. Tarrant, she finds her mother to be clinging to “‘society,’ and a position in the world which a secret whisper told her she had never had […] [that] she was in danger of losing” (56). As a result, she is determined to live vicariously through her daughter. Marginalized, the Tarrant matriarch internalizes patriarchal power-dynamics in order to ventriloquize herself through Verena. Having
60 been unable to enter society herself, Mrs. Tarrant presents herself as opportunistic and capricious in order to counteract her limited social mobility. She utilizes her daughter’s role in the feminist movement to bolster her own mobility and acquire additional social prowess, disinterested in any individual or collective female wellbeing. Such motivations prevent her from helping to advance Verena’s political operations or from enabling her daughter to engage in a fulfilling romantic union. Mrs. Tarrant legitimizes an environment of emotional turmoil for her daughter. The same sex relationship that
Verena forms with Olive exacerbates her fear of maternal abandonment because she has misplaced faith in her mother, the “core of her gender consciousness” (Theriot 77). As her intimacy with Olive grows, Verena stresses that “she couldn’t give up her mother” and eagerly departs Olive’s household only when “Mrs. Tarrant required her attention”
(129). But Mrs. Tarrant rarely seeks Verena out, and never inquires about her wellbeing.
Having arranged the same sex bond, Mrs. Tarrant recognizes that Olive can provide the
Tarrant household with upward mobility, yet she is virtually disinterested in Verena’s emotional security. She accepts financial assistance when Olive “buys off the Tarrants from year to year” (131), thereby presenting her daughter as nothing more than a commodity. Visiting Olive’s Bostonian residence after the death of Miss Birdseye, a former reformist, Mrs. Tarrant “rustled over the low tombstones at Marmion in garments of which […] the cost had been large” (318). Walking amongst tombstones of the dead, the Tarrant matriarch flaunts her luxurious lifestyle bartered for her own daughter, while the decay suggested by the cemetery implies that maternal presence may only enact itself as a disparaging force.
61 James contrasts this malevolent maternal presence with Olive’s mother who is absent from the novel; because Olive has failed to effectively mourn and work through her grief, she subconsciously gravitates toward Verena in order to recreate some of the dynamics supplanted by her mother’s death through a role reversal. In other words, because she cannot be mothered, Olive becomes a substitute mother for Verena in turn.
The death of Olive’s mother has significantly impacted her emotional wellbeing and comprehension of homosocial desire. Olive is portrayed to have lived alone in the Boston residence with her mother after the deaths of her brothers and father, and the marriage of her surviving sister: “Mrs. Chancellor had passed away; so it was for Olive, left alone in the little house […] to decide” how to manage her own affairs (13). Having reached socioeconomic independence and relative maturity without a maternal bond, Olive desires to project herself as an autonomous individual, yet simultaneously models several outlooks after what she believes her mother would promote, including her reformist endeavors and kinship, in order to reconnect with her mother in some way. After Olive has invited Basil to her Boston residence in the first scene of the novel in order to reverse the familial division resulting from the Civil War, she reflects that “she knew what her mother would have done, and that helped her decision; for her mother always chose the positive course. Olive had a fear of everything, but her greatest fear was of being afraid”
(9).7 Olive’s aforementioned fears may unconsciously stem from the absence of her biological mother and her inability to replicate a similar bond with another female. Denis
Flannery posits that Olive’s only surviving immediate family member—her sister Mrs.
Adeline Luna—is skeptical toward Olive’s union with Verena because Olive’s need for
7By “familial division,” I allude to the political climate of the Civil War that literally and figuratively divided Olive’s family from Basil’s. Basil had fought for the South, while Olive’s unnamed deceased brothers had been Northern soldiers. Introducing him to Luna…
62 Verena is only transitory (10). While Flannery indicates that the severing of the Olive-
Verena bond may reinforce Olive’s devastation over the loss of her entire family (10), it is the loss of Olive’s mother in particular that has shattered her intellectual and emotional welfare.
While Alice experienced loneliness and isolation with the loss of her mother, she was not visibly distressed by her death, and there is no evidence to suggest that she modeled her homosocial relationships—with Katharine or other female friends—after this particular female bond. Reflecting on her childhood, Alice wrote that “in the old days, when, month after month, and year after year, I used to get my ‘attacks,’ and
Mother and Father would watch by me through the long nights, I used to cry out to them to know what would become of me when I lost them; and here was the answer to my doubting heart, a little girl then toddling about a Gloucestershire village” (Diary 202).
Alice could not envision a life without them because she had been raised to depend on their caretaking. The “little girl” would of course turn out to be Katharine P. Loring. Over the course of their platonic relationship, Katharine would take over the parental and nursing duties that had been formerly performed by Alice’s mother and father, which allowed Alice to feel emotionally secure. In spite of her financial independence in later years, Alice feared isolation, and learned to value emotionally secure platonic companionships with other females. While there is no evidence in Alice’s diary to suggest that she came to view Katharine as a substitute mother, Henry nonetheless imbued the Olive-Verena relationship with these qualities as he wrote The Bostonians.
James casts Olive’s pursuit of Verena as motivated by the ghost of her mother and models their relationship after this spectral figure. In her discussion of the female
63 protagonist of Henry’s The Portrait of a Lady, Kristin Sanner argues, “the potential for maternal direction provides a hope throughout the novel that she will somehow learn to balance her freedom with a sense of responsibility” (159). To nuance Sanner’s claim,
Olive’s unarticulated desire for maternal (re)direction influences her motivations as she enters the political sphere. When Olive first invites Verena to her household, she reflects,
“‘You are so simple—so much like a child,’ […] That was the truth, and she wanted to say it because, quickly, without forms or circumlocutions, it made them familiar” (63).
By conceiving of Verena as childlike and stepping in as a surrogate mother, Olive reenacts maternal dynamics as a projection of her mother’s absence. As Verena’s caretaker and would-be lover, Olive enacts a familiarity that conflates familial and sensual intimacy, and thereby legitimizes an unconventional bond that fringes on the homoerotic. This elusive familiarity gestures to the “limits of the speakable” in that
“reformist feminism is the closest approximation of a language on which her passion for
Verena might” be articulated (Coviello 169, 171). Because Olive lacks the rhetoric to directly divulge her own homosocial desire, she re-appropriates normative language to signify her silent queer yearnings, casting herself into maternal substitute and mentor subject-positions. The home she shares with Verena is likened to “a nest” at several points by the author, who states, “Olive had taken her up, in the literal sense of the phrase, like a bird of the air” (62). While this passage immediately implies domestic shelter, it also suggests that by acting as a maternal caretaker, Olive has become a bird of prey. This antithetical vision of motherhood suggests that Olive has entrapped Verena in her Bostonian residence in order to devour her. By conditioning and grooming Verena,
Olive siphons not only Verena’s talents but unintentionally siphons her emotional
64 immaturity as well. For Olive, Verena’s body is constructed as a transitory site; when procured, it may allow Olive to resituate her own body within the body politic. The imminent brokenness of this bond may also serve to remind Olive of her deceased mother. Olive simultaneously confronts and represses the emotional barrenness and psychosexual stagnation signified by same sex bonds, growing extremely wary of the possibility that her monogamous union to Verena may eventually be terminated by
Basil’s encroaching presence.
Throughout the novel, Olive’s hysterical nature is related to her desire for same sex attachment. William James, writing that Alice’s nervousness “chained” her down, posited, “some infernality in the body prevents really existing parts of the mind from coming to their effective rites at all” (qtd. in Strouse 306). Such detached observations of his sister gesture toward a medical discourse that falsely homogenized several
(psycho)somatic symptoms in women. William espoused the fiction of female intellectual and biological unproductivity, a discourse extended by Henry in his embedding of same sex desire in the rhetoric of hysteria. As the intimacy between Verena and Basil grows,
Olive “had long periods of pale, intensely anxious, watchful silence, interrupted by passionate argument, entreaty, invocation” (295). By exhibiting symptoms associated with “deficient” psychological femininity, Olive acknowledges that her bond to Verena is ephemeral and has no future within dominant discourses of gender that regulate female bodies. By presenting herself as hysterical, her dependency is a tactic to prolong her relationship with Verena. The tactic works for a time, yet Verena’s attachment to Olive begins to fray because “of course [the attraction] had been on Olive’s side more than hers” (300). Olive’s hysterical outbreaks are partly rehearsed and echo her envy of Civil
65 War veterans, figuring into the psychosomatic “retreat” and “battle” to counteract Basil’s infiltration of her private residence and relationship (293, 294). Describing the love triangle with the rhetoric of war, Olive’s psychological battlefield fulfills her desire to
“be a martyr and die for something” (12). According to Graham, however, by “rebel[ling] against herself as well as against her tormentors,” she gets “further from her goal of self- determination” (164). This pattern of nervousness mirrors Alice’s own psychosomatic responses to her intense fear of female abandonment. According to Strouse, “she was undone” when female friends did not give her the attention she craved (169); she experienced one of her most severe nervous breakdowns after her brother William married Alice Gibbens in 1878. Although Alice never admitted to these correlations, the pattern was documented by some of her family members, most notably Henry. He believed that the relationship did “‘more harm than good,’ […] due to Alice’s absolute and tenacious dependence on Katharine” (Strouse 241). Concerned that the same sex union would only reinforce her hysterical nature and inversion from society, he projected his apprehensions into the novel. His ambivalence caused him to envision same sex unions as a comprehensible component of queer identity, but one that should ultimately be abandoned in the pursuit of intellectual independence, mental health, and self- actualization. This outlook mirrored his own lifelong celibacy, which he believed was integral to his artistic creativity (Graham 36).
Unlike her fictional counterpart, Alice James never identified a singular cause of her hysteria, nor did she view her affinity for same sex bonds as a symptom of her
“deficient” mental health. Alice endured treatments throughout her life, but never encountered one that would “cure” her. In one diary entry, she wrote, “these doctors tell
66 you that you will die, or recover! But you don’t recover. I have been at these alternations since I was nineteen and I am neither dead nor recovered—as I am now forty-two there has surely been time for either process. I suppose one has a greater sense of intellectual degradation after an interview with a doctor than from any human experience” (Diary
142). Alice knew from firsthand experience how contrived and obligatory the medical discourse framed around hysteria was; she was treated as a mere case study or statistic, and rarely seen by doctors as an individual. Her physicians, instead, were more concerned with providing temporary treatments for her various physical ailments, unable to assuage her mental ones. Because of their failure to understand the disease, physicians patronized her. Citing her “sense of intellectual degradation,” Alice alludes to the belittlement she endured from medical practitioners (Death 105). As a patient, she was rarely taken seriously. Often disappointed by “lack[s] of remedial suggestions,” she retained a distinct pleasure in baffling doctors with her various ailments, as noted by Strouse. This coy mocking may be envisioned as a way to empower herself in spite of the humiliation and frustration she expressed towards never being properly cared for.
Only Katharine was fully empathetic to Alice’s condition; she did not try to classify or disparage her companion. Alice’s writings reveal that she did not find her attachment to Katharine exacerbated her hysteria, unlike Henry’s portrayal. However,
Alice also confessed that she at times feared having burdened her companion, reflecting that should she be cremated upon death: “it would have greatly assuaged her grief to have such a palpable assurance that that portion of me hitherto susceptible to the dread thing was reduced to ashes” (Diary 88-9). Both companions strongly desired for Alice to be liberated from the mysterious illnesses that had tormented her for much of her life,
67 recognizing that her physical body was an inadequate vessel for her intellectuality.
Alice’s prose conveys that their bond surpassed physical limitations due to their intense emotional and intellectual connection and that the “dread thing” (hysteria) was part of what cemented their bond rather than what tore them apart. Although her own doctors never commented on Alice’s friendship to Katharine, her hysteria itself was viewed as a
“form of self-assertion” and a “‘refusal’ to have the bod[y] cured” (Strouse 237, 105).
One component of this self-assertion was her companionship with Katharine. The union endured in spite of cultural stigmas and aversions against it, including Henry’s and
William’s.
In James’ figuration, Olive ultimately overcomes the turmoil of the malevolent mother and remains politically vital while Verena duplicates the fate of Mrs. Tarrant through her relationship with Basil. Funchion aptly points out that “whatever satisfaction
Verena may derive from her betrothal is haunted by the loss of a political narrative that could have been” (283). This abandoned narrative resounds in Verena’s loss of both homosocial unions: to Olive and to her mother. Verena is incapable of producing the lecture, confessing that she is paralyzed, “too nervous to speak” (347). Mrs. Tarrant is more concerned with the financial loss to be incurred if her daughter does not perform and exclaims, “you don’t mean to say you are going to back down” (344). Verena has curtailed her political viability while her mother assesses the abandonment from the standpoint of an investor. Much like the commodified and reductive renderings of Verena represented through the advertisements, sketches, and photographs freely sold at the lecture hall, the public persona of Verena is only valuable if it is still lucrative (335).
While Wearn identifies “ideal maternity” as “a symbolic remedy for contentious
68 factions” (3), Mrs. Tarrant fails to rectify the oppositions between Verena’s self-interests in terms of a larger feminist cause, as she remains merely invested in her own social reputability. Furthermore, she does not recognize that Verena’s marriage will relegate her to the private sphere and consign her to a future of patriarchal subordination, leaving
Verena to replicate her mother’s narrative of diseased domesticity. As she threatens to slap her daughter (344), the promise to enact violence against Verena to control her subjectivity demonstrates that Mrs. Tarrant has internalized the same violent patriarchal power-dynamics that stripped Verena of agency. Thus, Mrs. Tarrant recreates Basil’s physical ownership of her, which suggests abuse and recalls an earlier scene in which
Basil forcibly grabbed Verena’s arm. Yet, Verena is resolute to break the emotional cycle of abuse, detachment, and disappointment at the hands of a mother she desperately seeks the approval and affection of, only to be exploited. She is unmoved by her mother’s superficial intervention. She exclaims, “‘Mother, dearest, it’s all for the best, I can’t help it, I love you just the same; let me go, let me go!’ […] [and Basil] saw now that she only wanted to get away, to leave everything behind her” (348). A large portion of what
Verena wishes to leave behind is her desire for maternal guidance and fulfillment. Yet, by calling her “my darling child” (347), Basil shows that their union is a deficient one at best and will only reinforce dynamics of emotional and physical control, first initiated by
Verena’s mother, then echoed in Olive’s maligned mentorship, now re-inscribed by her future husband. Ultimately, Mrs. Tarrant’s culpability prevents her from securing a more promising future for her daughter. As Verena is removed from the Lecture Hall, Mrs.
Tarrant’s “violent hysterics” are inverted in the form of her daughter’s “silent tears,” suggesting that her ventriloquism through her daughter has reduced Verena into a body
69 so broken that it has been stripped of faculties for language altogether (340, 350).
Olive’s reaction to Verena’s departure from her mother informs her final actions in the novel, the reversal of her hysteric nature, and her newfound ability to speak in public. As Verena begs her mother to let her go, James’ earlier descriptions from the chapter of Olive as “tragic” in her “sightless, soundless shame” are dissolved in favor of the author’s description of her as “straightened […] [and] upright” (342, 343, 348). Olive undergoes a physical transformation in stature and is free of hysterics. She gazes with
“her pale, glittering eyes straining forward, as if they were looking for death. […] if she could have met it there and then, bristling with steel or lurid with fire, she would have rushed on it without a tremor, like the heroine that she was” (348). Olive’s self-reliant alteration is heroically charged and corresponds to her final interpretation of homosocial desire. By virtually dissociating herself from failed mothers and female companionships,
Olive becomes autonomous: she hurries onto the platform, marking a clear and definitive distinction between herself and Verena. According to Sensibar, “though Olive loses
Verena, she retains the positive effects of Verena’s love—sufficient independence and self-assurance” (68). As a result, she is no longer dependent on channeling her own voice and desires through Verena, and is able to act of her own volition. By extending
Wardley’s assertion that “if a vocal female of a dangerous age threatens to wound the democracy a mature female body is solicited to heal it” (647), Olive assumes the ideals of mature femininity. Olive thus directly interrogates her place as a female in the realm of democratic ideals and the “respectful” silence that greets her ensures that her voice will be heard (349). Although Olive may not see her political endeavors successfully realized,
James privileges her capacity to publicly facilitate them through the use of her own voice.
70 Intimate same sex bonds have created a cyclical pattern of abandonment and isolation, reinforcing the distress of her maternal loss. Yet, Olive liberates herself from this configuration. Renouncing her homosocial desire as a decisive act to resonate with other political activists, Olive begins to promote her own self-interests in the political sphere to better confront “the inequities of the present” (Coviello 173). In doing so, she reverses the threat of intellectual unproductiveness that had tainted her barren and ill-fated union with Verena. By absorbing a promise for new visions of gender—previously signified by her aspirations for female companionship—into herself as an individual, Olive chaperones herself towards a future grounded in uncertainty, yet one that insures self- preservation.
Alice’s own resolution differs drastically from her fictional counterpart, perhaps more so than any other aspect of Henry’s appropriation of Alice’s personal history. Alice continued to endure periods of depression and physical inactivity for the remaining years of her life. In May of 1891, she was diagnosed with a fatal tumor in her breast; surprisingly so, she was relieved with the diagnosis. She wrote in her diary that “Ever since I have been ill, I have longed and longed for some palpable disease, no matter how conventionally dreadful a label it might have” (206) and that “it is decidedly indecent to catalougue oneself in this way, but I put it down in a scientific spirit, to show that though
I have no productive work, I have a certain value as an indestructible quantity” (207).
Having suffered several nervous and physical breakdowns from her teenage years onward, the tumor in her breast gave her concrete terminology to assess the significance of her life. Compartmentalizing the various illnesses as if they were awards she had won, her humorous tone suggests that the diagnosis of cancer provided the means to finally
71 make peace with her broken body and broken mind in the time leading up to her death ten months later. Ironically confessing that she has no productive work, Alice alludes yet again to the social stigmas against her own spinsterhood, as well as to the lack of any intellectual productivity overshadowed by the outpouring of her prolific brothers. In spite of these two marginalizing factors, her diary entry suggests that she was relieved at the prospects of cancer decimating her body: it would provide a finite resolution to an indefinite existence.
The disease would not be scrutinized by medical practitioners or her surviving family members, as her hysteria had been. She went on to confide that she experienced then a “calming of my nerves & a quiescent passive state, during which I fall asleep, without the sensations of terror which have accompanied that process for many years”
(Death 199). Ultimately, cancer liberated Alice from the various fears that had complicated her life, including her terror of abandonment. She later reflected in a diary entry, “the fact is, I have been dead so long and it has been simply such a grim shoving of the hours behind me as I faced a ceaseless possible horror, since that hideous summer of
‘78, when I went down to the deep sea, its waters closed over me and I knew neither hope nor peace; that now it’s only the shriveling of an empty pea pod that has to be completed”
(Diary 230). Alluding to her nervous breakdown that followed William’s marriage to
Alice Giddens, the confession demonstrates that Alice James had long since surrendered her body to a nervous disease she could never fully manage. Her mental state had been treacherous and unpredictable. Most of her life had hinged on uncertainty and ambivalence. Death, however, provided a solution that she had long ventured towards.
72 After contemplating an assisted suicide via morphine overdose, Alice died in March 1892 of natural causes. The recovery of her diary followed two years later.
In 1894, in response to Alice’s request for the diary to be published, Katharine P.
Loring had four copies made, two of which were given to William and Henry. While
William proved an unenthusiastic audience at best (Strouse 323), Henry’s response to the diary is far more intriguing. Although he had been immensely sympathetic to Alice’s physical and mental disposition, having ciphered these anxieties into the composition of
The Bostonians, the diary came as a “surprise and agitation” to the novelist (qtd. in
Strouse, 319). He went on to confide that he hoped the diary would contain “the extraordinary energy and personality of her intellectual and moral being” (qtd. in Strouse
320). Upon reading it, while he virtually praised it for solidifying his own memories of his sister, he also confessed that he was “terribly scared and disconcerted—I mean alarmed” by Alice’s freedom of expression, and observations that flouted several of the
James family’s esteemed acquaintances and social codes (qtd. in Strouse 320). He was
“intensely nervous and almost sick with terror about possible publicity,” and more concerned for his own wellbeing than the realization of his sister’s need for self- expression (320). Writing The Bostonians, he had fulfilled his own agenda by exploring his complicated relationship toward motherhood and homosexuality. Uncovering a female-authored text wholly independent of his authorship and input was humiliating. He tore his copy of the diary up, voicing a desire to have the remaining copies destroyed as well. He reversed his avocation for female self-expression explored extensively in The
Bostonians. His own attitude toward The Bostonians visibly changed as well; in 1906, he suppressed the novel, in addition to The Princess Casamassima—which contains a
73 character very much based on his sister—from future revision and publication in The
New York Edition of his novels. While he cited his reasoning for these omissions to be the poor critical reception of these novels, it is highly possible that the death of his sister and the recovery of her diary caused him to disavow the reinventions of her experiences that he had created. Yet, Alice James’ diary survived, first published in a heavily abridged form in 1934, before being restored to its original length in 1964. Its endurance is significant because it represents Alice’s creation of an independent text, and the successful recovery of her narrative from under Henry’s fictional one.
74 CHAPTER FOUR
A QUEER SHADOW: QUEER FEMININITY, FAILINGS,
AND FUTURITY IN THE SHADOW OF A DREAM
Upon its publication in 1890, contemporary readers quietly dismissed William
Dean Howells’ The Shadow of a Dream. Reviewer Edwin H. Cady, for instance, was specifically discomforted by “Howells’ impressions of our civilization,” choosing to doubt “their insight and sanity. They are too bad to be true, and have a certain malign, narcotic influence difficult to describe and ill to feel” (i-ii). Ironically, such a review undermines Howells’ agenda in writing a realist novel; his novel explores the implications of pervasive same sex desire, in an era during which a previous tolerance for
“strong same-sex emotional bonds [was] […] being replaced by the suspicious, disciplinary gaze of science” (Nissen, Romantic 266). Yet, readers viewed Howells’ psychological insights into human desire as occult (Goddman and Dawson 308). If we are to understand the novel as “occult” for its primary audience, surely part of what makes it occult is what contemporary reviewers failed to comment on: the novel’s facilitation of alternative gender identities. As Brant Torres has posited, nineteenth-century American authors employed the occult to explore relational possibilities between members of the same sex that could not be achieved through direct interpersonal contact. Thus, the novel’s investment in the bourgeoning field of psychoanalysis and same sex desire constructs The Shadow of a Dream as an evasive text in the sense that its alternative gender identities are not easily discernable or categorized. The novel follows the public and private consequences of a “three-cornered household,” the heterosexual marriage between Douglas and Hermia Faulkner, and the homosocial friendship between Douglas
75 and John Nevil. Each participant in the love triangle dies in succession, due both to the titular and prophetic dream of imminent death that haunts Douglas, in addition to the transgressive same sex attachment between Douglas and Nevil. In contrast to the central love triangle is the heteronormative couple, Basil and Isabel March, who scrutinize the
Faulkners and Nevil to bolster their own marriage. Previous critics have primarily viewed the collapsed love triangle in The Shadow of a Dream to signify Howells’ aversion to homosexuality because it compromised normative relationships. We may instead view marriage as a limiting institution contingent on assigned gender roles. Such normative gender roles espoused by characters like Basil and Isabel include self-effacing wives and mothers, and husbands who have no significant emotional attachments apart from their wives. Yet the persistent possibility of same sex friendship destabilizes the social construction of gender. We may view same sex bonds as facilitating empathy and identification that correspond to the fulfillment of individual desire, whereas marriage is performed and ultimately unfulfilling due to its inherent social construction.
While much attention has been paid to these queer male identifications, Howells offers another vision of same sex intimacy outside of marriage through female-female friendships. This critical oversight may be attributed to a blindness identified by Sharon
Marcus about the misogynist privileging of queer male voices in queer theory. Marriage relegates Isabel and Hermia to the private sphere where they develop tenuous bonds with their husbands and struggle to assert individual agency. By gravitating towards each other, these female subjects undermine a heteronormative construction of temporal productivity by neglecting their wifely “duties”: as Lee Edelman has elsewhere suggested, queerness may be viewed as narcissistic and antisocial because it negates the
76 future by neglecting the social good of child rearing. I would extend Edelman’s claims to suggest that because Hermia is childless, and Isabel is disinterested in her own children, they unwittingly compromise the insurance of the future by pursuing their self-interests as opposed to the wellbeing of society itself. Conscientious of the possible ramifications of revealing their private desires, both Isabel and Hermia grapple between suppression and expression. When gendered performances are openly transgressed, characters risk public retribution; each subject of the triangulation dies, while Basil and Isabel are left to ponder the significance of these deaths in terms of morality. I will explore the novel’s deaths in relation to nineteenth-century preoccupations with mortality and mourning.
These preoccupations more specifically convey concerns regarding the significance of transient human lives and relationships. According to Dana Luciano, mortality and mourning disrupt temporality itself, whereas Jack (Judith) Halberstam has argued that queer temporality creates “opposition to the institutions of family, heterosexuality, and reproduction” (1). Such oppositions may be seen in the text in that the deaths of queer characters further exemplified their lack of biological production, which presumably effaces and erases them from the future. Yet, I argue that Howells’ juxtaposition of cultural preoccupations with mortality and his own personal investment in the temporality of queer identity evokes an alternative future of homosocial desire in
America, one that resists erasure by nineteenth-century gendered social conventions. This temporality suggests that sexuality is disruptive and discursive, and that in spite of its temporal and narratalogical erasure, it may be replicated and more fully realized elsewhere. The novel’s same sex pairings are compromised not because Howells disdained them, but because they could not yet become social realities.
77 One binary opposition scrutinized in previous scholarship is the critical consensus that The Shadow of a Dream illustrates a consideration and dismissal of sentimental same sex desire by a realist author. According to Axel Nissen, in the early to mid- nineteenth century, “American men […] could feel and openly express an unashamed, unself- conscious, all-consuming love for members of their own sex […] [without being seen as] effeminate, unnatural, or perverse,” yet as the twentieth century dawned, such practices were increasingly compromised because they were viewed to threaten heteronormative constructs of biological reproduction and marriage (Romantic 4). Realist literature evoked feelings of disillusionment, and strove to portray individuals as realistically as possible, often through psychological examination. Randall K. Knoper attributes The
Shadow of a Dream’s realism to Howells’ attention to the emerging psychoanalytic field:
“he engages the matter of whether the mimetic representations of unconscious cerebration are effects of disease” (734). Such mimetic representations are most clearly illustrated by the novel’s titular dream: Douglas dreamed that Hermia and Nevil were
“attached, and were waiting for him to die, so that they could get married. Then he would see them getting married in church, and at the same time it would be his own funeral, and he would try to scream out that he was not dead; but Hermia would smile” (174).
Because Douglas has committed a gendered transgression by barring himself from a socially constructive marriage, time is inevitably working against him. Douglas psychologically conceives of himself as being buried by the death of his libidinal drive due to the biological unproductivity of same sex desire and a sterile marriage. Then, in
Hermia’s imagined smile, Douglas’ dream presents Hermia and Nevil as co-conspirators against him because they are grounded steadily in the future, whereas he is grounded
78 precariously in the past. George Spangler indicated that Douglas’ dream and premonition of the engagement between his wife and Nevil is a projection of his own illicit queer desire (115). Douglas tries to reclaim the validity of his own existence in both private and social localities, but goes unheard. Presumably because Douglas cannot vocalize his same sex desire due to the social and medical codification of same sex desire as disease, he
(and other transgressive characters) are removed from the narrative in the pursuit of a more productive future. Previously, this has been the dominant discourse on the novel.
This novel, however, does not provide such linear conclusions. Howell approached literature as “nothing more and nothing less than the truthful treatment of material,” a claim that renders a strict divide between sentimentalism and realism
(Criticism 77). But this division is not so self-evident. Although Howells portrays overt sentimentality as suspect, he nonetheless immortalizes a previously predominant coding of sentimentalism for homosocial desire. In his first description of Douglas, Basil narrates, “Douglas Faulkner was of a type once commoner in the West than now, I fancy.
In fact, many of the circumstances that tended to shape such a character, […] have changed so vastly that they may almost be said not to exist any longer” (1). We can read
Douglas’s “western” style as Basil’s coded reference to homosociality. As Robert K.
Martin suggests, the west and wilderness convey an “expression of a flight from civilization, from the encumbrances of a social world where [homosocial desire] can have no place” (Homosexual 174). Douglas’ association with the past suggests that he is ill- suited to cope with the social codes inherent to modernity. He is portrayed as physically decrepit by Basil: “I noticed his hands, long, nervous, with fingers that trembled, as he rested their tips, a little yellowed from his cigar, on a book” (4). Describing him with a
79 yellowed limpness, Howells feminizes Douglas’ attributes and physical movements.
Because his masculinity is made suspect by his affinity for same sex friendship, he overcompensates by ingesting cigars in order to appear more typically masculine. Yet, this consumption of artificial phalluses substitutes the act of fellatio. His performance of gender is further permeated by nervousness; this rhetoric draws on the medical discourse invented to codify female hysteria. The diagnosis of hysteria commonly suppressed females who had alternative gender identities that threatened to subvert naturalized constructs of gender and sexuality. As Caroll Smith-Rosenberg argues, nineteenth- century physicians believed that “hysterical women, fearful of their own sexual impulses—so the argument went—channeled that energy into psychosomatic illness”
(653). Accordingly, because he is unable to act on his own sexual impulses, Douglas is prone to violent outbreaks and seizures. Hysterical symptoms were often labeled as neurasthenia in men (King), and Douglas is continually in the company of Dr. Wingate, his nervous specialist. Basil’s description of one of Douglas’ seizures is sexually explicit:
“He stopped short, and rested heavily against me. I glanced round at his face: it was a lurid red, and, as it were, suffused with pain; his eyes seemed to stand full of tears; his lips were purple, and they quivered” (21). The seizure occurs upon close bodily contact between Douglas and Basil, while the “lurid red” of Douglas’ face stands in for a rush of blood to the penis, and the quivering of his lips allude to a desire for sexual release and orgasm that cannot come. The stagnation of Douglas’ psychosexual development, which prevents him from reconciling his desire for male intimacy through sexual fulfillment, is further mirrored in anxieties that engender him to anticipate a precarious future from which queer desire is being rapidly obliterated.
80 Ingunn Eriksen has noted that in addition to being perceived as effeminate, those who engaged in same sex bonds were viewed as childish (42). This immaturity is primarily signified through Douglas’ affinities for outdated Sentimental and Romantic literature, an affinity that persists well into his adulthood and marriage. Howells himself believed that masculine affinities for sentimental literature were “one of several youthful flaws that must be corrected and regretted” (Eriksen 65-6). To extend these claims, sentimental literature, like homosocial desire, is a pastime that should be abandoned in the pursuit of psychological and emotional maturity. In their discussion of sentimental masculinity, Mary Chapman and Glenn Hendler posit that early “twentieth century scholarly work on American sentimentality used overtly gendered rhetoric to dismiss sentimental culture, describing it as ‘escapis[t],’ ‘overly emotional,’ ‘sterile… anti- intellectual… [and] simple-minded” (4).While the novel predates the construction of such a literary canon, Howells is nonetheless conscious of these future biases. In her discussion of queer failings in nineteenth-century American literature, Heather Love argues that “part of the reason that […] feeling-states [such as sentimentality] continue to be denigrated is that they are associated with pleasures—even ecstasies—so internal that they distract attention from the external world” (187). Douglas’ internal drive for the emotional and physical pleasure of same sex companionships causes him to become increasingly displaced from his own external environment. Ironically, Basil first decides that Douglas is crudely sentimental after the two discuss their oppositional tastes in literature.8 Outdated literature functions as a thinly veiled euphemism for same sex
8 In this particular scene, Basil reflects that “he wanted to talk to me about Byron and Shelley, Scott and Cooper, Lamartine and Schiller, Irving and Goldsmith, when I was full of Tennyson and Heine, Emerson and Lowell, George Eliot and Hawthorne and Thackeray; and he rather bored me, showing me fine editions of his favorites” (3).
81 desire. This plays out when the pair share a moment of intellectual and emotional intimacy reading William Wordsworth’s “Intimations of Immortality”: “It was the youth in both of us […] pouring itself out in the modulations of that divine stop, as if it had been the rapture of one soul” (8). By identifying their explication as “the rapture of one soul,” Howells evokes imagery of a shared body and mind, which may indicate a capacity for men to explore sexual ecstasy and union through a conflation of homosocial desire and literature. Such a union, however, is one that is ultimately fragmented. Howells’ conflicted reverence for same sex desire suggests that queer identity in the text resists the twentieth century essentialized framework of queerness as disease that has been rather anachronistically inserted into the texts by critics. Although Howells favored a renunciation of homosocial friendship in lieu of marriage in his personal life, his attitudes are more expansive in the literary medium, indicative of an ambivalence and nostalgia that might signify the author’s’ “enmeshment in a moment of transformation, of uncompleted transition” in anticipation of forthcoming discourses that would come to define modern queerness (Coviello 12). As a result, The Shadow of a Dream explores some negotiation of same sex friendship with marriage as opposed to portraying the two types of relationships as mutually exclusive.
Prior critical analysis of the novel has disregarded females in order to concentrate on the queer male relationship; this preconceived dichotomy implies that female characters are superfluous to the narrative itself. Perhaps this is because the text’s female characters are secondary characters, or because a male character narrates the text. In either case, the dismissal of female identity in the novel follows a misconception first proposed by Martin who argued that females in male-authored queer texts lack interiority
82 and dimension (90). Howells scholars have primarily viewed females as threatening to male homosocial unions and (de)valued “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” (Nissen, Manly 152). Females are categorically commodified. In another instance, Nissen swiftly dismisses Shadow’s Isabel as an officious henpecker, and fails to mention the text’s other female players in any capacity
(Romantic 226). Such classifications cast the novel into a chauvinistic framework of female positionality that Howells largely strove to avoid. Accounting for female-female interpersonal bonds, nuanced interactions that lack eroticism, suggest degrees of oppositions in the female self to Victorian constructs of gender, and provide a means for reinterpreting failures of same sex friendships in Howells. Although female gendered ambivalence has been previously identified in Howells, in which “men pass into the feminine sphere, and vice-versa” (Duffy 26), it is typically mentioned briefly, while the value of female homosocial relationships in the private and public spheres has yet to be fully explored. Typically, queered male relationships emerge under the subtext of socioeconomic homosocial pairings, which remove females from the public sphere
(Thompson 10). In The Shadow of a Dream, queer relationships are focused primarily through the domestic sphere occupied, simultaneously, by men and women. Howells proposes same sex bonds as alternatives to, and supplements of, heterosexual marriage.
The importance of homosocial pairs between women thus correlates to Howells’ antipathy to typical gender paradigms.
In parallel to the central male-male bond between Nevil and Douglas, a homosocial union emerges and collapses between Isabel and Hermia; these females
83 struggle to identify with one another to cope with their dissatisfying marriages and they negotiate the relationship between their public and private identities. Sharon Marcus has articulated that same sex friendships—which she fully distinguishes from homosexual desire— were fundamental to female identity in that they “cultivated the feminine virtues of sympathy and altruism that made women into good helpmates,” (26) while Lillian
Faderman has posited that nineteenth-century female friends “inhabited a world of interests and sensibilities alien to men” (160). Friendship was thought to prepare young women for heterosexual marriage. Simultaneously, female homosocial bonds created the possibility of identification and empathy between individuals who shared similar experiences. Heterosexual marriage, conversely, was not necessarily associated with this second possibility, simply due to the gendered division between men and women resulting from the construction of separate spheres. Basil and Isabel are invited to visit the Faulkners’ household, and while Isabel agrees to accompany her husband, she vocalizes ambivalence towards interacting with Hermia because, as she puts it, she is resolute that intimate same sex friends should be given up in marriage as the only friend a woman should have is her husband (33). As the two women form a liking for each other’s company and develop a steady (private) correspondence, Isabel identifies same sex friendship as both a complement of, and an obstruction to, the social performance of her marriage.
Because Hermia’s marriage to Douglas is unusual in that they share their household with his intimate male friend, and because the Faulkners are childless, Isabel grows anxious that her association with Hermia may expose the queerness of her own marriage in the public sphere. Isabel is first driven to denigrating Hermia as a means of
84 appearing morally superior to this alternative female figure, and projecting a more confident and self-assured perspective on her normative gender role as a wife and mother.
When Isabel offers a first impression of Mrs. Faulkner, “she laughed at the name Hermia, and said it sounded made-up, and that she had no doubt the girl’s name was Hannah”
(10). By pretending that “Hermia” is a misnomer, Isabel’s mockery towards the name itself suggests an aversion to what Hermia represents as an individual. Because Hermia subverts typical gender paradigms, Isabel tries to efface Hermia’s unconventional identity by constructing a more conventional name for her to assume, in the process attempting to suppress Hermia’s problematic gender identity. When Isabel and Basil are invited to the
Faulkners’ residence later on, Isabel is tenacious that “she certainly [wanted] nothing to do with his wife. They would not like each other; it would look patronising” (16). This disquiet towards a same sex interaction suggests Isabel’s internalization of heteronormative views. She is primarily conflicted toward Hermia’s unconventional living arrangement, marriage, and gendered identity, expressing her disgust towards the
“three-cornered-household” because she “think[s] the man who can’t give up his intimate friends after he’s married is always a kind of weakling. It’s a tacit reflection on his wife’s heart and mind” (33). Isabel accuses Hermia of gender deviancy by association. Because she has not taken on a more active and monogamous role as Douglas’s marital companion, she must be partly accountable for his remaining same sex desire. Isabel suspects that Hermia lacks the self-respect and determination to pursue a more conservative marriage, and has instead chosen to condone the ongoing intimacy between
Douglas and Nevil because the burden of not being enough to emotionally fulfill her husband is too much for her to bear alone. Isabel construes Douglas’s queer desire as
85 deficient and degenerate. Yet, this coping mechanism merely distances Isabel from the transgressive qualities she recognizes in her own husband Basil, which she desperately wishes to conceal from others. Isabel is shown to be aware of Basil’s former male intimacies on numerous occasions, but she convinces others that he has outgrown these desires by insisting that he has no desire for another intimate friend apart from her (26,
33, 69). When Hermia witnesses Douglas and Basil exchange an affectionate embrace,
Basil narrates, “she [Hermia] gave me a look of surprise, which I could see hardening into the resolution not to betray herself at least into insincerities” (20). There is a conscious effort on the part of Isabel to ignore her husband’s own capacity for same sex desire by adopting a judgmental and condescending attitude towards others who are more openly nonconforming to normative modes of gender. Yet, this simultaneously prevents her from establishing a more egalitarian and mutually respectful relationship with her husband. Throughout the novel, Isabel is shown to be combative towards Basil, and routinely patronizes him, which may suggest that her marriage is far from the ideal she claims it to be. Isabel internalizes oppressive constructs to bolster her satisfaction with her own marriage, voicing the concern that “they have no children! […] That says it all.
They are really not a family” (34). Isabel adopts heteronormative values of reproduction as indicative of the Faulkners’ gendered failure, a suggestion that their marriage is alarmingly queer. According to Nikki Sullivan, even childless heterosexual couples are queer (44), because they have refrained from performing a normative sexual act.
According to Nissen, nineteenth-century gender identity was “largely determined by marital and family status” due to the “desexualization” of love, which led to the view of marriage as “mutual moral self-improvement” (Romantic 5, 7). To extend these claims,
86 queerness in the novel is not automatically characterized by same sex intimacy; instead, it is denoted by reproductive (in)activity, which follows David Halperin’s claims that
“queer is by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant”
(62). Isabel assumes that married females should be mothers or their marriages are invalidated, but the relationship between Isabel and her own children is ambiguous at best. Her children are never mentioned by name, and do not appear in person. The novel strongly suggests Hermia’s detachment from her own children; they are mere props and an extension of her ascription to gender performativity. Howells thus presents Isabel’s model of child rearing as inefficient, as Isabel displaces the queerness of her own marriage onto Hermia.
Yet, Isabel is inevitably drawn to Hermia because she recognizes that both simulate gender performances around their husbands that do not accurately reflect their identities and desires. The two main female protagonists in the novel routinely adopt personas that adhere to naturalized social conventions. After Isabel first spends time alone with Hermia, she informs Basil that “if a person's genuine, and not a poseuse
[poseur], she’s more interesting when you have her alone with another woman […] You don't have to say anything. You merely have to be” (34). Isabel reasons that it is only when Hermia is alone with another woman that she may be genuinely sincere. Isabel recognizes that she had previously misjudged Hermia because the projected public persona does not convey her “true” identity, as Isabel imagined it. Isabel goes on to comment, “They have no children; and that might be fatal to any woman that was less noble and heroic than she is. But she's simply made him her child, since his sickness, and devoted herself to him, and that’s been their salvation” (36). Although Isabel successfully
87 connects with Hermia emotionally, she re-appropriates Hermia’s experiences by relating them to nineteenth-century conventions that socially conditioned women to be attentive and self-effacing wives and mothers (Theriot 101). Isabel decides that the only explanation for Hermia’s alternative gender identity is that it is reliant on the social conditioning for women to have self-sacrificial natures. By conceiving of Hermia as
“noble and heroic,” Isabel not only tries to understand Hermia’s de-familiarized gender identity through familiar language, but also conceives of herself as like Hermia to charge her own experiences as a wife and mother with heroic qualities. Interestingly, the scenes in which Hermia and Isabel are alone are not disclosed directly by Howells; they are only alluded to, and reconstructed via dialogue. This is a limitation not only of the narrator, but perhaps of the author himself. Howells may have been conscientious that as a male writer, he could only suggest the importance of female homosocial desire as opposed to portraying it directly. Because both females are unable to enjoy emotionally fulfilling intimate bonds with their husbands, they forge a union together. Isabel’s sympathies towards the other female are heightened when Hermia prepares a luncheon for her houseguests. Basil narrates
I could see that my wife ate every morsel with triumph over me: I could
feel that without looking at her: and she rendered merit to Mrs. Faulkner
for it all, as much as if she had cooked it, created it. In fact I knew that my
wife had fallen in love with her: and when you have fallen in love with a
married woman you must of course hate her husband, especially if you are
another woman (39).
88 Studying nineteenth-century literary culinary practices, Monika Elbert and Marie Drews argue, “women’s identity formation is influenced by food practices” (12). The domestic performance of food preparation provides common ground for the two females to negotiate the implications of their interpersonal bond: Hermia’s physical nourishment of
Isabel also provides emotional nourishment. Isabel reacts to the luncheon as if both she and Hermia have co-created the meal because she aptly assumes that the two share a mutual understanding that transcends social codes and gendered divisions. By having
“fallen in love” with Hermia, Isabel realizes that their gendered differences are only superficial, not inherent. Instead, as female friends, they share the possibility to grapple towards “personal betterment in man’s sullied and insensitive world” (Faderman 160).
The relationship between Hermia and Isabel inevitably disintegrates when Isabel cannot advocate for Hermia’s autonomy outside of their private exchanges into the larger encompassing social sphere. After Douglas’ death, Isabel develops “an intimate friendship with [Hermia]” (82), and their exchange of letters “fevered to an abnormal activity” (114). Their friendship grows, because, as Marcus notes, nineteenth-century female letters and diaries suggest “a certain degree of physical distance was as necessary to friendship as emotional closeness” (69). Isabel becomes accustomed to conveying her unarticulated homosocial desire through writing because this particular expression of intimacy will not infringe upon her own normative marriage, and Hermia’s presence in her life is not a physical obstacle. Being that their correspondence is only privately disclosed, and is not scrutinized or misappropriated by an outside audience, Hermia and
Isabel are able to privately divulge anxieties that they would not admit to otherwise. As a result, Hermia admits to her discomfort towards her widowhood, and when she becomes
89 engaged to Nevil, she admits that she has become increasingly anxious about the dream that haunted Douglas. Knowing of the ambivalent dream but not of its specificities,
Hermia inevitably decides that she cannot go through with the marriage until she learns of the dream’s content from Douglas’ nervous specialist, Dr. Wingate. At Hermia’s request, Isabel arranges for the disclosure to take place at the March residence; recasting the intense intimacy they have privately shaped via letters within a site of domestic order,
Isabel promises a future of stability in opposition to the compulsory attachments they have constructed with their husbands. Yet, because the reductive and regulatory gaze of science that codifies non-normative affinities and nonconforming gender identities as deficient threatens this female friendship, Isabel is forced to confront the extent to which her homosocial friendship makes her own performance of gender suspect. When Dr.
Wingate decides that it would be better for Hermia to face the specifics of the dream alone, Hermia begs Isabel “Don't go, […] I wish you to stay. I was afraid, then, to face it alone, and now I wish to know what it was” (130). Hermia wants to maintain the shared identity that she and Isabel have generated through their exchange of letters over the past several months, because it will enable her to face the social isolation and uncertainty inevitable from the revelation of the dream. Yet, Isabel refuses, intent on distancing herself from Hermia in this transformative moment; her association with Hermia collapses as a signifier of diseased and broken femininity. When Dr. Wingate discloses that Douglas foresaw her engagement to Nevil, Isabel disassociates herself from Hermia.
As Basil reflects he and his wife’s departure from the scene, he narrates, “I was impatient of the mechanical effort Hermia made to detain my wife, to whose hand she clung, and whom I had to draw from her with me out of the room” (Howells 131). By curtailing this
90 intimate act, Isabel upholds her marriage’s normative performance. Although Isabel first resists, she allows Basil to pull her away from Hermia, deciding that homosocial friendship is “antiethical” to her marriage by obeying him (Marcus 29). In her failure to publicly align herself with Hermia, Isabel is unable to promote the interests of women outside of the private sphere. Hermia goes on to lament the loss, but abstains from trying to replicate it. Through the disintegration of this bond, highly engendered by the encroachment of modernity, Howells demonstrates that intense female-female companionships are just as barren in a society that regulates queer male bodies and biologically unproductive normative marriages as diseased. However, he offers a parallel, though equally instructive female same sex bond that more keenly disrupts temporal conventions by framing itself within future modes of queer identity that extend far beyond the ambivalent dawn of the twentieth century.
Alternatively, the Widow Faulkner’s emotional bond with her daughter-in-law
Hermia explores egalitarian female representation in the social sphere. Critics have previously undermined the Widow’s complex role in the novel. Indeed, Spangler asserts that “in his presentation of the mother's conspicuous role and the marked absence of the father, Howells anticipates a psychoanalytical insight—that [Douglas’] fixation on the mother is a crucial cause and symptom of homosexuality” (113). This evaluation is consistent with the discourse that renders queerness a disease. Spangler presents the
Widow’s presence as harmful and undesirable, while downplaying her most intriguing function in the text, which is the homosocial bond she forms with Hermia. This same sex bond echoes nineteenth-century constructs of motherhood and female friendship.
According to Sharon Marcus, “courtship and marriage promoted close ties between
91 women when wives developed affectionate relationships with their husbands’ mothers” because females desired a replicate mother figure through “an object of affection who would be both an intimate and an ideal” (70). Upon marrying Douglas, Hermia is physically cut off from her mother and father and expresses anxieties after being removed from her childhood household. She is inevitably drawn to the Widow as a substitute mother figure in order to negotiate her marriage with Douglas through the facilitation of a more familiar familial bond. This may be due in part to Nancy M. Theriot’s claims that young nineteenth-century women were apprehensive of “being left without maternal counsel” (64). As a result, the Widow’s continual presence in Hermia’s life is a source of comfort and guidance. Hermia seeks her approval and companionship because, upon
Douglas’s death, she is cut off from any other immediate bond apart from the homosocial bond she facilitates with Isabel via letters. In his own account, Basil notes that the bond conveys “romantic insubstantiality” and “though she [the Widow] always spoke to her
[Hermia] as ‘child,’ it was evidently with no wish to depose or minify her. On her part
Hermia, without seeming to do so, showed herself watchful of Mrs. Faulkner's comfort and pleasure at every moment, and evidently returned her liking in all its cordiality”
(158-9). Howells suggests that while it would have been likely for the Widow to resent her daughter-in-law after Douglas’ death, she is instead sympathetic and compassionate towards her. Instead of viewing Hermia as a rival for the ghost of her son’s memory, she puts Hermia’s self-interests ahead of her own. Hermia and the Widow parallel and identify with one another; both have lost their respective husbands at an early age and are denied upward social mobility due to their sex. Although each possesses relative socioeconomic independence, they do not have the means to become properly integrated
92 into the social sphere through a profession. After Douglas’ death, Hermia gravitates back to the Widow because, according to Basil, “the old lady is romantic, I believe, like
Faulkner; and probably she's in love with her daughter-in-law” (87). In this instance “a long-term, forthright, loyal, and intense female same-sex relationship is positively emphasized” (Eriksen 52). Hermia continues to live with the Widow because this companionship is the single stable and life-affirming interpersonal bond that physically remains. This infatuation suggests a dynamic that transcends the social limitations of nineteenth-century female identity.
Furthermore, through this instance of female homosocial desire in the text, the
Widow reveals her own operations of queerness. Because the Widow occupies a mode of gender that subverts typical paradigms and Hermia models herself after her example, the
Widow inadvertently influences Hermia to pursue an independence that flouts gender conventions. According to Halberstam, “[queer identity] has the potential to open up new life narratives and alternative relations to time and space […] [and produce] alternative temporalities by allowing their participants to believe that their futures can be imagined according to logic that lie outside of those paradigmatic markers of life experience— namely, birth, marriage, reproduction, and death” (2). The Widow invites Hermia to construct a life narrative that subverts naturalized constructs of mortality and futurity by encouraging Hermia to pursue her own self-interests, as opposed to adhering to the conventions that would facilitate a self-effacing nature and in turn diminish her future prospects, or social mobility. Because alternative gender identities contradict the logic that has constructed "paradigmatic markers of life experience," Hermia may construct an alternative narrative and future. According to Theriot, nineteenth-century daughters were
93 often encouraged to transition “from girlhood into a womanhood like her mother’s,” modeling themselves after this attentive example (101). In her resolution to remain unmarried (Howells 166), the Widow Faulkner enters a mode of spinsterhood, which inexplicably queers her gender performance. In her discussion of spinsters, Sarah Ensor posits that they are “figure[s] for the openness of the future—and of the present that was once understood as the future of another past […] [by] challeng[ing] the notion of the future as a readily reachable and readily identifiable realm out there, as an entity that can straightforwardly appear or arrive” (414) and can present “positive and even ‘productive’ alternative[s] to the traditional trappings of female domesticity” (420). Because the
Widow recognizes that modern women may have more agency than she did in the past, she is determined to provide a clear investment in the future that will negotiate for heightened openness towards nonconforming genders. As a result, the Widow negotiates
Hermia’s future by publicly facilitating her engagement to Nevil. She attempts to resolve her own limited agency through constructing a more satisfying resolution for Hermia, an attempt that ultimately fails. Marcus argues that daughters-in-law were often as preoccupied with disappointing their mothers-in-law as they were with disappointing their prospective husbands (70). Hermia is similarly apprehensive of disappointing her mother-in-law because she does not want to debase Douglas’ memory by marrying another man. In one lengthy passage, the Widow Faulkner explains her own position to
Basil: “I had learned the truth when my son died, and I tried to make my daughter accept it […] He had been her whole life so long that she did not wish to live any other. No woman ever devoted herself more utterly than she did to him. She could not realize that as long as she remained in the world she could not devote herself to him any more” (168).
94 The Widow flouts the selfless devotion that has become a socially constructed norm of marriage for females, instead advocating for female agency and autonomy. Her speech challenges the prevailing norm of selfless female devotion to male partners, arguing that this type of relationship compromises the integrity of female selfhood and emotional fulfillment. Hermia’s anxieties over abandoning her husband’s memory stem from her devotion to an idealized past, the burden of which prevents the promise of a fulfilling future. Having learned from her own experiences, the Widow recognizes an intergenerational dissatisfaction with gendered identity and ignores the possibility of social scrutiny should her daughter’s nonconforming gender be exposed. However, unlike other transgressive characters like Hermia, Douglas, and Nevil, the Widow lives
(Howells 215). Her survival represents the possibility of reinterpreting gender constructs in the pursuit of less constricting conventions, which may be fully realized for future generations. In identifying the novel’s portrayal of homosocial desire, we can reassess the significance of the novel’s treatment of alternative gendered identities.
While previous critics have attributed the novel’s portrayal of death to Howells’ aversion to queer identities, the novel’s deaths have yet to be discussed in relation to nineteenth-century preoccupations with mortality and mourning. These anxieties posit the transience of human relationships grounded against an ambivalent future. According to
Dana Luciano, in nineteenth-century America, grief became a fundamental component of coping with death and the human construction of time: “the pronounced nineteenth- century attention to grief and mourning […] responds to anxiety over the new shape of time by insisting that emotional attachment had its own place […] the time of grief […] could be experienced (and thus embraced, as personal, human, intimate” (2). Death itself
95 disrupts temporality. Because human lives and relationships are only transitory, they may be commemorated through mourning and working through death in order to better understand modernity. Yet, the novel’s three deaths are violent, senseless, and nearly incomprehensible. Douglas dies of a violent seizure, Nevil is killed by an oncoming train, and Hermia dies of an undisclosed illness the following year. The three deaths are heavily coded through gendered terms. Douglas’ seizure is attributed to his nervousness, which was then perceived to be feminized/feminizing disease. In being crushed between a train and a platform, Nevil’s death is imbued with phallic imagery. Lastly, having “died of a broken heart,” Hermia’s sentimental nature is conflated with the horrors of feminine modernity (215). Because these deaths seemingly defy logic and reason, the surviving characters identify them as punishment for transgressive deviations from gendered expectations, in addition to preconceived conditions of fate and destiny. Yet, there is a desire for the novel’s surviving protagonists to make sense of the deaths that have confounded them in order to move forward with their own lives and to reevaluate their own interpersonal relationships and gendered identities. In his narration, Basil reflects that “the death of Faulkner precipitated in the same compassion all the doubts and reserves of its witnesses. […] sickness and death […] humanize through the sympathies the nature that health and life imbrute. They […] unite us in the consciousness of a common doom, if not the hope of a common redemption” (78). Because death is perceived as one of the fundamental unifying human experiences, Basil recovers a unifying event between himself, the other witnesses to Douglas' death, and Douglas himself. Upon dying, Douglas is briefly absconded from the characteristics that made his life dubious, leaving those who survived to commemorate him silently, and become more
96 conscientious of their own mortality. The "consciousness of a common doom" not only alludes to death itself, but to Douglas’ transgressive nature that caused his declining health and violent death. Because each of the surviving characters possess alternative gender identities, they are faced with the decision of whether or not to suppress or fully explore them through some sense of futurity. In spite of Luciano’s claims that “the preservation of sorrow permitted the subject to maintain a constant connection to these profoundly humanizing moments in time” (9), and Basil’s own observation that “Death won’t let us escape them, even if life will” (81), Basil fails to adequately recodify his own outlook on gender. Instead, he and his wife re-appropriate the deaths of transgressive characters in order to cipher their own gendered anxieties regarding gender, mortality, and temporality.
Ultimately, instead of reacting to the deaths in a productive manner that would allow them to reinterpret their own gender roles, question their lack of empathy for others marginalized on the basis of gender, and reevaluate the limitations of their own marriage, the Marches re-inscribe the social constructs that ostracized Douglas, Hermia, and Nevil.
They do so by utilizing a heteronormative value system and further distancing themselves from the previous same sex attachments they had formed. Luciano argues that “grief, [an] effect and sign of a human nature that was to be respected, even venerated, for its capacity to form deep bonds to others, was additionally depicted as an element of a divine plan that, when read and engaged properly, would turn the subject toward redemption”
(8). Yet the Marches’ only concern is their own personal redemption and a desire to emotionally distance themselves from the events that have transpired. Parker has identified the Marches’ culpability in taking on impersonal attitudes that influenced the
97 isolation and death of the Faulkners and Nevil (65), yet the Marches are arguably equally accountable for re-appropriating the deaths to fulfill their own agendas. Isabel speculates that “what is probably true is that she [Hermia] sank under the strain of experiences that wrung the finest and most sensitive principles of her being […] [she] died of a broken heart” (215). In this instance, Isabel fails to recognize her own culpability in Hermia’s death. She does not realize that because she physically abandoned Hermia in her own household and stopped communicating with her; thuss, Hermia was completely debased following the death of Nevil. Because she lacked the resources to work through her grief effectively, which may very well have been facilitated through interactions with Isabel,
Hermia succumbed to death simply because she could not evade the social constructs that had oppressed her through a sense of collective identity with another woman. Basil goes on to confess that “as they are both dead, we have dealt with them as arbitrarily as with the personages in a fiction, and have placed and replaced them at our pleasure in the game, which they played so disastrously, so that we could bring it to a fortunate close for them” (215). By imagining these individuals as abstract and one-dimensional characters, the Marches justify their visions of these individuals as expendable bodies. Their scrutinizing outlooks on morality allow them to imagine the deceased as pawns through their preconceived notions of fate. While Luciano characterizes grief as “repetitive rather than linear, reflective rather than forward-moving” (6), and the Marches’ temporal memory of the event is disrupted by their intense desire to revisit, reconstruct, and reimagine, the deaths nonetheless ground them forever in past memories and convictions, as opposed to envisioning a more fulfilling futurity.
The gender model presented in the novel is most directly signified in Douglas’
98 garden, a landscape of great interest for the novel’s characters. Despite its deterioration, the garden provides a (meta)physical removal from social codes and the temporal limitations that have naturalized mainstream gender identities. Eriksen emphasizes that
“the themes of decay, moral, mental, and physical […] the death of male romantic friendship, and the sexual unease – all come together in the novel’s one substantial metaphor, the image of a wild garden” (57). Because the garden is remote, self-contained and desolate, it is understood to be generating its own destruction. According to previous critics of the text, this wilderness conveys gendered deviations as similarly effaced due to their suppression within mainstream society. Yet, this disparaging portrayal overlooks
Howells’ investment in futurity. According to Jordan Alexander Stein’s discussion of queer temporality, “sexuality affects not just literary scenes from the past […] but also how such scenes may be taken up—unpredictably, unintentionally, or, indeed, extemporaneously—in the future” (867). To extend these claims, it may be instructive to view the garden as a platform that evokes futurity through ambiguity. As Howells demonstrates throughout the novel, gender identities are multitudinous and resist categorization; likewise, the garden subverts linear and sequential understandings of time and history. Upon entering the garden, Douglas becomes paranoid and panicked, reflecting, “How horribly […] those old flower beds look like graves!” (51). Reminded of his own sterility by the garden’s deteriorating vegetation, he cannot conceive of history as “cyclical, circular, recursive, or reincarnated” (Stein 867). The finality of his imminent death makes Douglas unable to envision circumstances in which his alternative gender identity—now viewed as outdated and immoral— might become a recursive narrative that is more fully realized in the future. Instead, he registers same sex friendship as an
99 abandoned narrative. According to Love, however, same sex failings “register these authors’ painful negotiation of the coming of modern homosexuality […] [and contain] feelings such as nostalgia, regret, shame, despair, resentment, passivity, escapism, self- hatred, withdrawal, bitterness, defeatism, and loneliness” (4). In spite of the same sex failings that take place throughout the novel, I argue that Howells’ portrayal of the garden provides a safe space for envisioning alternative gendered identities. In other words,
Howells’ investment in futurity suggests a meta-awareness of future modes of queer identity.
Isabel’s assertion that “Nothing could possibly be better. You can’t believe you’re in America here!” demonstrates that the garden temporarily removes characters from the socially constructed paradigms in gender and sexuality that they combat, to varying degrees, while providing an alternative sense of temporality (Howells 49). The decayed vegetation and remoteness correspond to the psychological impact of nonnegotiable gender roles in the public sphere. Such gender constructs undermine the full capacity of human existence. The garden, spatially removed from society, contains “fertility gone to waste” (Spanger 114), but also the possibility that it “must have once flourished in delicious luxuriance” (Howells 47). According to Stein, “the constantly diminishing future creates a new emphasis on the here, the present, and the now, and while the threat of no future hovers overhead like a storm cloud, the urgency of being also expands the potential of the moment, […] and squeezes new possibilities out of the time at hand” (2).
Realizing that he has diminishing prospects in the future, Douglas uses the space of the garden to dissolve gender constructs, prior to his disillusionment and death. His “urgency of being”— which is utterly dependent on same sex desire— allows him to disrupt
100 temporality by reflecting that “it’s all as unreal, as unsubstantial historically, as the shadow of a dream” (Howells 51). Thus, his model of sexuality is discursive in nature.
Although the garden is barren and represents the dubious future of the novel’s queer generation, the gender alternatives—“the primitive and undisciplined instincts that subvert [civilization]” (Parker 65)— envisioned there might come to fruition again.
Douglas’ death takes place within the garden because he cannot successfully extend knowledge of the garden outside of its boundaries. The novel’s alternative genders are inexplicably sacrificed because Howells did not yet envision a society without gender constructs, but he was conscientious of the possibility, and utilized it as a recurring theme throughout his works.
The Shadow of a Dream proposes an enlightened—yet unrealized—model for understanding gender and sexuality. Yet, this model effectively effaces the majority of characters who deviate from socially constructed paradigms. By redefining the function of homosocial desire in the text and expanding it to the feminine experience, we may reinterpret the deaths of the novel’s transgressive characters to explore a more productive interrogation of Howells’ attention to futurity and temporality. The compromise of alternative genders and same sex friendship signifies nineteenth-century suppression against nonconformity to assumed gender roles, while also corresponding to Howells’ continual interest in reinterpreting gender in the pursuit of life-affirming companionships that subvert these constrictive binaries.
101 CHAPTER FIVE
CONCLUSION
While nineteenth-century American literary queerness was initially shaped into a framework dominated by visions of masculine affiliations, each of the authors in this study imagines queer and nonconforming female characters, to varying effects. These characters grapple with expanding the representational possibilities of nineteenth-century womanhood, which contributes to the framing of these women against more dominant gendered (heteronormative) discourses, a primary focus in contemporary dialogues regarding the naturalization of the binary opposition between homo/heterosexuality.
Because the homo/heterosexual binary is deeply embedded in nineteenth-century discourses of gender and sexuality, it is imperative for us to consider the broad array of nonconforming gender/sexual identities effaced at the expense of such a codification. In other words, just because the women in these texts do not necessarily lend themselves to readings of tensions that underlie the homo/hetero binary, it does not mean that they do not contribute to a productive discussion of nineteenth-century gender and queer politics.
I have found that contemporary gendered rhetoric regulated female bodies, a conversation that is paralleled in modern homophobia and transphobia resulting from the naturalization of binaries in gender and sexuality. These individual chapters, separately and as a whole, thus lend themselves to broader historicized scholarly discourses.
As a whole, this project challenges traditional assumptions that female characters in male-authored queer texts should not be afforded critical attention on the basis that they lack interiority or dimension. It is my belief that as scholars, we should be hesitant to make such disavowals because this enables a perpetuation of the canon as sexist and
102 exclusionary, as opposed to offering a critical assessment in disentangling various contexts that enabled male authors to craft voices for females, construct female bodies as ciphers, and privilege their own political/intellectual leanings regarding early feminism.
When I first set out to write this project, I carried preconceived notions that these male writers juxtaposed queer male characters against female characters in order to create parallel narratives of gendered-sexual marginalization. I thought that I might be able to posit that in addition to themselves resisting constructs of normative masculinity by enjoying intensely intimate same sex friendships in the case of Howells and Taylor and by identifying as a celibate homosexual in the case of James, these subversive male authors possessed insights into the obligatory nature of naturalized gender roles, making them proto-feminists. Aware that such gendered dynamics still carried problematic connotations of censoring and erasing female voices, I found that this issue was far more complex than I originally envisioned.
As I have demonstrated in the preceding chapters, while these masculine constructions of queer bodies critique heteronormative ideology, carrying the potential for political activism, intellectual expression, and same sex attachment/eroticism, they are oftentimes reduced to bodies that propagate male appropriation and male-male attachment. Additionally, these females often recreate normative visions of gender.
Whether unwittingly or purposely, these male authors envisage women who either disingenuously perform or innately reproduce domestic order as a means of survival and diminished visibility. As opposed to presenting themselves as individual women with exceptional identities, women at times collapse into a single homogenized gender. Their distinctions as individual women are often what make their bodies vulnerable to scrutiny,
103 violence, and regulation. Each of the three authors present women who are oftentimes relegated back to the domestic space; these maneuvers may critique— but ultimately recreate— the fiction of a separate sphere for women, as opposed to dismantling it. For
Taylor and Howells, some of the most transgressive women are either reformed of their alleged deviancy, or eviscerated from the text. For James, women can only lead a life of socio-political self-preservation if they sublimate same sex desire and mask their queerness, a mirroring of his own sexual abstinence and intellectual productions. Aware of socio-medical discourses that codified female queerness as disease, James re-inscribed some of the same rhetoric used to disarm women of diffidence to socially constructed gender-sexual roles. This vision of queerness is countered by the writings of Alice James, who serves as an unconventional author yet to be recovered to the canon.
Of course, the aim of my project is restricted in the sense that writings of females are not equally juxtaposed against writings of males, a gendered imbalance that speaks to the limited scope of this project, the specific types of writers who explored queer identity in the nineteenth century, and the texts that I have been drawn to in my own academic pursuits. However, analyzing each of these texts individually has led me to the conclusion that queerness in these texts not only expands far beyond Eve Sedgwick’s codification of homosocial desire, but also that queerness is ever evolving to reflect the means by which it is framed against more dominant discourse of gender identity and relations. Queerness arises in the destabilization of naturalized gendered spaces for
Taylor, in medical and political discourses that led to the codification of female hysteria for James, and in the allegedly narcissistic aims of queer bodies framed against social productivity and biological reproduction for Howells.
104 While male authors are capable of envisioning queer female characters as a means of empathizing and carving out spaces of representation they may not necessarily have been afforded, male authors are simultaneously capable of disarming women of the ability to speak to fulfill their own agenda, dynamics that I find mirrored in current
LGBTQAI discourses, in which gay white males continue to occupy a privileged subject- position that enables them to dismiss lesbian, transgender, and racial narratives that do not fit within their own narrative frameworks of queerness. As opposed to simply espousing a rhetoric that abstractly acknowledges these dynamics at face value, we should continue to interrogate the social and historical contexts that led to the privileging of such narratives in the interest of enabling spaces for more inclusive narratives to grow outward.
I have found that these nineteenth-century American male authors’ literary productions of women cannot simply be dismissed as chauvinistic conceptions of femininity, regardless of the problematic implications that each of the aforementioned texts transmit. As flawed as these male-crafted characters are, I would like to posit that they speak to the construction and recovery of a queer canon that continues to grow more expansive and inclusive. This canon continues to absorb the works of authors who crafted alternative visions of gender and sexuality that critique and subvert more dominant discourses. When Sedgwick first popularized queer theory in Between Men, she privileged male writers due to historical discourses that enabled queered relations between men to flourish in fictionalized and firsthand accounts. In the twentieth century, female authors more increasingly asserted their own visions of queer femininity. Writers such as Sarah Orne Jewitt, Gertrude Stein, and Adrienne Rich have widely been regarded
105 as queer writers, and have been integrated into canonical understandings of American feminism, sexuality, and queer identity.
It may be proposed that nineteenth-century masculine constructions of queer femininity provide a somewhat necessary though unsubstantiated foundation by which to contrast more fully articulated and authenticated visions of queerness produced by twentieth and twenty-first century American women. These female writers perhaps belong to a queer tradition previously the subject of male spectatorship, and have theoretically recast themselves as the proponents of contemporary and future modes of queer femininity, perhaps leading to a reversal of a male gaze that had previously framed their bodies for literary consumption. Should such a project come to fruition, it may be further articulated that male authors produce visions of female queerness that promote intersectionality with these later progressions in queer representation, as opposed to propagating texts that must be perceived diametrically in opposition with each other.
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