Queer Spirituality and Utopia in Bayard Taylor's Joseph and His Friend

"STILL HAPPIER LANDSCAPES BEYOND:" QUEER SPIRITUALITY AND UTOPIA IN BAYARD TAYLOR'S JOSEPH AND HIS FRIEND

Adam J. Wagner

A Thesis

Submitted to the Graduate College of Bowling Green State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

MASTER OF ARTS

May 2019

Committee:

William Albertini, Advisor

Jolie Sheffer

© 2019

Adam J. Wagner

All Rights Reserved iii ABSTRACT

William Albertini, Advisor

Bayard Taylor’s 1870 novel Joseph and His Friend, which some scholars refer to as

America’s first gay novel, is a fascinating portrait of nineteenth-century American queerness.

Using historical research and theoretical analysis, this project uncovers the various models of sexuality and romance that Taylor depicts in the text. The novel portrays its two main characters,

Joseph and Philip, imagining future utopian spaces that resist heteronormative restrictions and allow for authentic expressions of queer affection. My work joins in conversation with scholars like Christopher Looby, Peter Coviello, and Axel Nissen and their research on nineteenth- century America, complicating our historical notions about queer relationships. Joseph and His

Friend presages popular early-twentieth-century notions of sexuality and identity that were still coalescing in the mid-nineteenth-century, offering an insightful glance at forgotten understandings of American queerness. By queering evangelical Quaker doctrine, the novel uses

Christian language and imagery to present its own version of theology that posits male-male intimacy as a path to spiritual communion with God. Joseph and His Friend also trades in visions of utopian spaces, positioning the American West as a site of homosocial connection and queer desire. By gazing at this forgotten queer novel, we can better understand the complexities of American sexuality as it developed in the mid- to late-nineteenth century, attending to the particularities of this historical moment and imagining the future queer utopias left for us to cultivate.

Keywords: nineteenth-century American literature; queer history; religious studies;

Quaker theology; queer theory; utopia; Bayard Taylor; Gilded Age; the West iv

For my mom, who taught me how to love;

my sister, who inspires me to look forward; and my dad, whom I hope to share all this with someday, in utopia. v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I owe so much to the wonderful people in my life for the successes of this thesis. First and foremost, I am pleased to thank Bill Albertini, who for over a year has generously poured his time and enthusiasm into this project. With insightful questions, thorough feedback, and patient encouragement, he has always pushed this work to be the best version it could be. Thank you for cultivating a space where I could thrive; I am indebted to your abounding kindness and so very thankful for your guidance in my scholarship. I am also very thankful for Jolie Sheffer and her continued support and eagerness as I researched and drafted this thesis. Thank you for motivating me to make my work specific, guiding me to helpful sources, and sharing in the many fun discoveries along the way.

None of this would be possible without my dear and indelible friend Theodora Hannan, who since the first week of graduate school has been an unfaltering source of encouragement, support, and kindness. As Oscar said of Walt, “there is no one in this wide great world of

America whom I love and honour so much.” A very special thanks to Blue Profitt for her uplifting friendship and for sharing with me the coolest office in the galaxy. A very special thanks as well to Micaela Tore for her warm companionship and comforting hugs. Thank you to my cohort—Madelaine Pope, Jessica Eylem, Heather Stephenson, Blake Altman, and Hammed

Adejare—for walking with me through the thick and thin of grad school.

I would like to thank Lee Nickoson and the BGSU English Department faculty and staff for creating such a safe and affirming space to learn and work. Thank you to J. Clevenger and my peers at The Learning Commons for sharing in laughter and inspiring me to help others at their point of need. I want to thank the undergraduate students I have known at BG for making all the work worthwhile. Thank you as well to my professors and peers at the Cedarville University vi Department of English, Literature, and Modern Languages for teaching me how to think critically, read well, and serve others.

I want to thank my loving friends Rebecca and Sarah Bundy for their loyalty and generosity through the years and for cheering me up through stress. Thank you to Hannah

Benefiel for figuring out life and academia with me and reminding me that there will always be better days. Thank you also to Alex Hixson, my dearest friend in the faith who traveled West with me and helped me discover our true freedom back home. I would like to thank the community at Sautter’s Food Center for their support, and thanks to Jared Bieber for giving respite to my brain with endless hilarity and entertainment in all things nerdy.

I want to give all my gratitude to my family, who have seen me through the joys and complexities of early adulthood. Thank you to Kaitlyn and Jordan, to Mike for his listening ear and impactful advice, to Uncle Daryl for his enthusiastic care, and to Grandma Farley for lending me strength through uncertainty and teaching me how to tend the garden. This project is written in loving memory of Grandpa Farley and Uncle Matt, role models in faith and art who helped shape my contentment and creativity.

Finally, all my love and thanks to my mom, Trish, my sister, Allyson, and my dad, Randy, to whom I dedicate this work. I wouldn’t be here without your boundless love, acceptance, and support. I love you and thank you for everything.

vii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

INTRODUCTION ...... 1

The Novel and My Argument ...... 11

Scholarly Context...... 15

CHAPTER ONE: “THE WAY TO GOD LIES THROUGH THE LOVE OF MAN:”

INHERENT NATURES AND QUEERED THEOLOGY ...... 22

Introduction: Romantic Friendships and Religion ...... 22

A Peculiar, Twofold Nature ...... 32

“That Curious Whirling, Falling Sensation” ...... 44

God in Jeans ...... 55

Conclusion: “God’s Wonderful System is Imperfect” ...... 67

CHAPTER TWO: “HOW FAIR THE VALLEY SHONE:” QUEER UTOPIAN

PATHWAYS IN THE GILDED AGE ...... 71

Introduction: The Incorporation of America...... 71

Travels and Transcendentalism...... 77

City Games...... 86

“The Freedom We Craved” ...... 95

Queer Escape ...... 97

Queer Domesticity ...... 107

Queer Transfiguration ...... 109

Conclusion: “Happiness Was Not Yet Impossible” ...... 115

CONCLUSION ...... 118 viii

Backward Glances, Future Visions ...... 118

Utopia, Wasteland, and the Work Left to Do ...... 121

WORKS CITED ...... 124

Wagner 1

INTRODUCTION

Somewhere over the rainbow Way up high There’s a land that I heard of Once in a lullaby

Somewhere over the rainbow Skies are blue And the dreams that you dare to dream Really do come true

On a sepia-toned screen depicting the dusty farmland of Kansas, the classic character

Dorothy wonders aloud: “Some place where there isn’t any trouble […] Do you suppose there is such a place, Toto? There must be. It’s not a place you can get to by a boat or a train. It’s far, far away—behind the moon—beyond the rain—” (The Wizard of Oz). Queer folk have often dreamed of such a place: a world where they are free to express themselves, a land that is friendly to their varied identities and desires, a place where they are free to cause trouble. Not the kind of trouble that Dorothy fears, of course, but the trouble that resists constricting laws, creates new social relationships, and charts new mappings of life. Somewhere, this dreamy, colorful world may exist: a paradise, an Eden, a utopia.

In the opening to his book Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, José

Esteban Muñoz eloquently posits a unique perspective on queerness: “Queerness is that thing that lets us feel that this world is not enough, that indeed something is missing […] queerness is essentially about the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world” (Muñoz 1). His ideas about a utopian queer futurity come in response to the anti-social thesis, a recent queer political stance that embraces a polemical reaction towards straight society.1 Like his anti-relational colleagues, Muñoz argues that the

1 The antisocial thesis in queer theory was first posited by Lee Edelman in his book No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004) and expanded upon during the 2005 MLA Annual Convention in a roundtable with Edelman, Muñoz, Jack Halberstam, Robert L. Caserio, and Tim Dean. Based on the idea of “queer unbelonging,” Wagner 2 present moment is “impoverished and toxic for queers,” “poisonous and insolvent” (27, 30). But instead of adopting a negative anti-relational platform, Muñoz believes there is something inherently queer about utopian thinking, and he poses the framework of queer utopia: “to live inside straight time and ask for, desire, and imagine another time and place is to represent and perform a desire that is both utopian and queer” (26). Scholars have debated the social implications of Muñoz’s thesis and the consequences of a future-looking political platform.

However, I find that his ideas are strikingly spiritual as well. Muñoz’s language carries religious connotations as much as it does political ones: “something is missing” in our present lives, and the solution to filling that absence is by looking and hoping for “another world” (1).

Just as spiritual thinking rests in tradition and envisions a future, Muñoz provides a similar model for queer utopias:

Queerness is not yet here. Queerness is an ideality. Put another way, we are not yet queer.

We may never touch queerness, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon

imbued with potentiality. We have never been queer, yet queerness exists for us as an

ideality that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine a future. The future is

queerness’s domain. Queerness is a structuring and educated mode of desiring that allows

us to see and feel beyond the quagmire of the present. (Muñoz 1)

For Muñoz, queerness is a forward-looking mode of thought that rests on a methodology of hope; like a distant rainbow, queerness is “the warm illumination of a horizon,” but that horizon is not yet here (1). Acting as a form of dissatisfaction with what is available, queerness embodies longing, a yearning for something better. “Imbued with potentiality,” queerness is an abstract

“ideality,” a utopic vision “distilled from the past and used to imagine a future” (1). Muñoz’s

the antisocial thesis stands against American values of the “cult of family” and instead posits that queer people remain “politically unacceptable” in a heteronormative society (Caserio 819, 820). Wagner 3 emphasis on temporality is key: queerness looks to the past and envisions a future in order to

“see and feel beyond the quagmire of the present” (1). In other words, Muñoz posits a model that encourages us to look back in order to see forward: “a backward glance that enacts a future vision” (4). By examining utopian thinking in a historical piece of literature, we learn how queer people of the past navigated the quagmire of their present and actively desired another, better world. Furthermore, uncovering queer utopian thinking and longing in literature illuminates older ways of looking at sexuality and gender, defamiliarizing our current models of queerness and identity.

Nineteenth-century American literature is a particularly curious site to glance towards and look for older ideas of queerness. Nineteenth-century America, especially from about 1830-

1880, was a time when, according to Heather Cox Richardson, “sectional animosities, racial tensions, industrialization, women’s activism, and westward expansion cut across party lines to create […] a new definition of what it meant to be an American” (Richardson). Amidst these major changes in American society, many voices posed new questions and models of sexual and gender identity, which the current scholarly field of a queer nineteenth-century America seeks to uncover. Christopher Looby, editor of the new series Q19: The Queer American Nineteenth

Century from University of Pennsylvania Press, defines this period as “a time when fixed itineraries of sexual desire and settled categories of sexual identity had not yet been fully constituted, and so the errant desires and feelings [that] stories portrayed would not necessarily correspond to what later became the standard types of erotic orientation (for example, straight, gay)” (Looby ix). This was a time before Freudian psychology, before the codification of specific sexual identities, before, as Michel Foucault famously declared, “the homosexual became a species” (Foucault 43). Besides the new Q19 series, other recent anthologies have Wagner 4 worked to recover and collect queer nineteenth-century literary works,2 providing scholars a chance to tap into the queer literature of America’s past.

An important explanation of terminology is needed before I continue. Throughout this thesis, I use the term queer mainly as an umbrella term for any sexual or gender identities, desires, or actions that do no align with normative heterosexuality. In this I follow Looby’s use of the term “to suggest a broad range of erotic tastes, inclinations, attachments, and desires that do not fall neatly into the binary categories the dominant culture still frequently deploys for the sake of distinguishing between the normal (heterosexual) and the abnormal (homosexual)”

(Looby x-xi). Although Looby does not specifically mention identities, the nature of sexual identity is also important to my conception of queer. I mainly use this term to reflect the current scholarly and cultural understanding of sexuality and gender; queer is a widely understood notion in literary and cultural scholarship and is starting to become accepted in mainstream discourse as well. I would thus label nineteenth-century non-normative relationships as queer, since they fall outside of a twentieth-century heteronormative framework for male-female marriage and sexual relationships. I also appreciate the term’s adaptability; Looby observes,

Queer is a good nineteenth-century American word, appearing almost everywhere in the

literature of the time. And, as often as not, the nineteenth-century use of it seems to

anticipate the sexually specific meanings the word would later accrue. Sometimes queer

could mean simply odd or strange or droll. But at other times it carried within itself a hint

of its semantic future […] in all its complex range of meanings. (Looby)

2 See Pages Passed from Hand to Hand: The Hidden Tradition of Homosexual Literature in English from 1748 to 1914, edited by David Leavitt and Mark Mitchell (1999); The Romantic Friendship Reader: Love Stories between Men in Victorian America, edited by Axel Nissen (2003); and Glances Backward: An Anthology of American Homosexual Writing, 1830-1920, edited by James Gifford (2007). In the Q19 series, see “The Man Who Thought Himself a Woman” and Other Queer Nineteenth-Century Short Stories, edited by Looby (2017). Wagner 5

I would like to emphasize that anticipation does not equate sameness; although I use the term queer throughout this thesis to describe sexual non-normativity, nineteenth-century implications of queer are naturally going to be different than twenty-first-century applications of the term. I also draw from the meaning of queer presented in the collection Queer Christianities: Lived

Religion in Transgressive Forms: “Sometimes ‘queer’ understands itself to be an open frontier, a radical hospitality, a hope and even expectation that whatever we take for granted as a map of human experience will need to be redrawn again and again” (Larrimore 3). I employ this definition of queer since it embodies Muñoz’s model of queer utopia, always hoping for and expecting new definitions.

While some queer nineteenth-century American authors are widely known—Emily

Dickinson, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman—many others have been forgotten by the nation’s literary canon, including Charles Warren Stoddard, Theodore Winthrop, and Frederic Loring, among others.3 The subject of this study focuses on Bayard Taylor and his novel Joseph and His

Friend: A Story of Pennsylvania. First published in 1870, Joseph and His Friend details the intimate friendship between its two main male characters, Joseph and Philip. John W.M. Hallock considers Joseph and His Friend “the first American gay novel,” and the adage has stuck with the recent 2017 publication of the novel from Lethe Press, annotated by L.A. Fields (Hallock

162). Little scholarly attention has been directed towards Taylor’s novel, reflected in the lack of critical editions of the book. Yet, throughout the decades, readers and critics have continued to see something queer in the novel, a tale that both adheres to context-specific genres and wanders off the beaten path. As a scholar, I am not interested in looking for America’s first gay novel; to

3 This is a very narrow, white male offering of queer nineteenth-century authors, due to my limited knowledge; as the field of queer nineteenth-century literature continues to grow, more work must be done to recover the voices of queer women and people of color in order to accurately reflect the varied experiences of queer Americans. Wagner 6 me, the search for a “first” gay novel feels forced and reductive, especially when placing that moniker on a novel published in a time before the codification of gay identity. However, I do believe Joseph and His Friend is a valuable piece of literature that provides a curious mind with great insight into one sphere of queer history of nineteenth-century America. The novel invites us, as Peter Coviello states of similar texts, “to look squarely at imaginings of erotic life […] in that intriguing in-between time, before they became stabilized under the now-familiar signs of modern sexuality (signs like ‘gay’ and ‘homosexuality’) but in which the gravitational pull of those ways of organizing and conceiving sex was, if not yet arrived, impending” (Coviello xii).

In this sense, I frequently refer to the novel as a queer novel (but not necessarily gay) and Joseph and Philip’s relationship as a queer friendship (but not necessarily homosexual). Following

Muñoz’s model in Cruising Utopia, I believe Joseph and His Friend allows us to glance backwards at American queer history and observe these “imaginings” of sexuality circulating in the mid-nineteenth century (xii).

The main thrust of my work in this project argues for the complexity of queerness in nineteenth-century America by looking specifically at Joseph and His Friend in its historical moment. Examining the particularities of Joseph and His Friend help us better understand life in nineteenth-century America, a period I argue is much more complicated than we surmise. Just as

Coviello discusses, the nineteenth century was a time when the emergence of sexual identity was still occurring, before the models offered by George Chauncey and Michel Foucault came to fruition. Yet, Joseph and His Friend also presents us with hints or foreshadows of the ideas and models of sexuality that began to rise at the end of the nineteenth century; the novel presages many sexological and Freudian ideas that gained popularity near the beginning of the twentieth century. The novel also engages in different kinds of utopian thinking about queer identity as its Wagner 7 two main characters—Joseph and his friend Philip—continually look back to the past in order to re-envision and re-structure their futures. Examining these specifics in a literary text illuminates the strangeness of the nineteenth century to us, its radical difference from how we understand queerness today. I encourage readers not to affix our current models about queerness on Joseph and His Friend. Akin to Looby’s and Coviello’s work on the nineteenth-century novel Cecil

Dreeme by Theodore Winthrop4, my textual analyses aim to help scholars better understand the historical particularities of queerness that this novel presents. This novel is just one example of many queer nineteenth-century American texts, but performing an in-depth reading of Joseph and His Friend expands our framework of sexuality as it was conceived and developed in the mid- to late-1800s. Looking at the past often defamiliarizes our present; Taylor’s novel posits ideas of queer life and thought that both align with and contradict our ideas of today.

As we sift through Taylor’s novel, the results are not always homogenous; in this distillation process, we may find ideas that surprise us, inspire us, trouble us, or challenge us. In the chapters that follow, I argue that Joseph and His Friend presents a picture of queer American life that is both fascinating and problematic, delightful and troublesome. But, using Muñoz’s methodology of utopian thinking provides scholars a way to disidentify from the text. In his book

Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics, Muñoz provides an example of this hermeneutic at work.5 Muñoz encourages readers not to “sanitize” works but to

“interrogate” them: “This maneuver resists an unproductive turn toward good dog/bad dog criticism and instead leads to an identification that is both mediated and immediate, a

4 In 2016, New York University Press published a scholarly edition of Cecil Dreeme with a critical introduction by Coviello, and University of Pennsylvania Press published a scholarly edition of the novel with a critical introduction by Looby. Theodore Winthrop’s Cecil Dreeme was originally published posthumously in 1861. 5 Muñoz’s Disidentifications specifically argues that queer people of color have long been engaging in disidentification, especially through performance, to contend with their marginalization in a white hegemonic society. Joseph and His Friend is very much a white text; despite its conspicuous absence of race, I see strands of the disidenficatory process in Taylor’s novel and aim to adopt Muñoz’s methodology in my own scholarship. Wagner 8 disidentification that enables politics” (Muñoz 9). This thesis uses Muñoz’s ideas of queer utopia and disidentification as a hermeneutic to examine Joseph and His Friend. Muñoz’s disidentifactory methodology also resembles Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s idea of reparative readings. Opposing a paranoid reading, which seeks to highlight problematic elements of texts and thus reject them, Sedgwick suggests that a reparative reading, which is “additive and accretive,” can help a reader engage in “a different range of affections, ambitions, and risks” and highlight the redemptive elements of a problematic literary text (Sedgwick 149, 150). Following

Sedgwick, I perform a reparative reading of Taylor’s novel in this project, looking to what we can gain and how we can take pleasure in a potentially problematic text.

Particularly, I use Joseph and His Friend to make important interventions in current conversations about queer spirituality and geography, offering readers unfamiliar models of identity, religion, and space that appear strange in our twenty-first-century outlook. Works like

John Boswell’s Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality and Foucault’s The History of

Sexuality have traced the lineages of Western religion and queer sexual expression, detailing

Christianity’s capacity to inhibit queerness while simultaneously providing the discourse and space for non-heterosexual acts and identities to flourish. The institution of American

Christianity embodies these dichotomous results: Michael Bronski’s A Queer History of the

United States and John D’Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman’s Intimate Matters: A History of

Sexuality in America reveal how many of America’s Puritan colonies rigidly outlawed acts of sodomy while also encouraging non-normative sexual expression. Despite this varied history, many Americans view religion as an institution that “has often oppressed sexually nonconforming people,” and “the harm it has done is vast and outgoing,” leading many to believe that queerness and Christianity are “mutually exclusive” (Larrimore 1). Additionally, Wagner 9 many of these religious forces lie in America’s “ruralized spaces,” characterized as red “hotbeds of hostility, cultural and socioeconomic poverty, religious fundamentalism, homophobia, racism, urbanoia, and social conservatism” (Herring 9). Undeniably, these broad characterizations are partly true; a glance at any recent political map of the United States shows the stark divide between liberal metropolis and conservative, largely religious rurality.

Yet, as you will tend to find in conversations about queerness, recent scholars have begun to trouble and interrogate these assumptions about the role of religion and geographical space for queer Americans. In Queer Christianities: Lived Religion in Transgressive Forms, the collection of authors offer visions of a Christianity that is not a toxic, oppressive force for queer people but also a “religion of liberation and a celebration of the richness of human experience”—for many,

“Christian traditions” are “not only hospitable to queer lives but in deep ways congruent with them” (Larrimore 3, 1). They encourage readers not to view religions “quintessentially as a system of beliefs and practices, anchored in sacred texts, maintained by trained elites and conducted in official houses of structured worship” but instead as “lived experience[s];” how do religions like Christianity actually manifest in the daily lives of creative and complex people? (6,

7). Their conclusion, the anthology contends, is that “queer Christians have for a long time been quietly constructing new identities, articulating new understandings of faith, and creating new religious communities” (1). Despite a present cultural moment of religious hostility toward queer folk, there exists a rich history of forgotten models of queer spirituality that may help us chart new paths for the future.

Furthermore, contemporary queer scholars are also starting to reexamine social and geographic mappings of queer communities in America. In his book Another Country: Queer

Anti-Urbanism, Scott Herring critiques the codification of “the metropolitan as the terminus of Wagner 10 queer world making as many have come to know it” (Herring 4). Drawing on Halberstam’s idea of metronormativity, Herring interrogates “the mythological plot that imagines urbanized queer identity as a one-way trip to sexual freedom, to communal visibility, and to a gay village (or at least a studio apartment) whose streets are paved with rainbow pride” (15). Consider texts such as Tony Kushner’s Angels in America or TV shows such as Queer as Folk, Glee, or Looking, which continually frame the city as liberating sites for queer individuals. In his study, Herring looks to “defamiliarize the master narratives of lesbian and gay U.S. urbanism” by offering

“variations” of queer existence, often located in the “rural,” the “town,” or the “country” (10, 7).

Similar to the goal of Queer Christianities, Scott Herring examines artifacts of rural queer life— many from the past—that defamiliarize readers to their present.6

In this study, I present Joseph and His Friend as a text that can speak to these conversations about queer spirituality and geography. Many facets of Joseph and His Friend feel unfamiliar to twenty-first-century readers. Joseph and Philip are not only deeply devoted to each other but also to God, relying on their spirituality to help them suffer through the restraints of heteronormative life. Additionally, the pair of friends view cities as abhorrent spaces of corrupt traditions and restricting laws; they uphold an agrarian vision of the nation and even imagine the

Western wilderness as a utopian space of freedom. The novel’s trajectory seems curiously strange: what are we to make of these nineteenth-century imaginings of queer spirituality and space? Joseph and His Friend touches on other important ideas as well: it presents readers with different models of queer identity, uses religious language to create space for queer relationships, and trades in troublesome misogynistic language to achieve its goals. But at the heart of this

6 Another recent work that reframes queer geographic spaces in America is E. Patrick Johnson’s Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South (2008). Although his model is specifically targeted towards a contemporary queer black male experience, Johnson’s aim resembles my own in that he “complicate[s] gay histories that suggest that gay subcultures flourished best in northern, secular, urban spaces” (3). Wagner 11 project lies the potential that Joseph and His Friend provides: its power to complicate our traditional notions of the nineteenth century and offer us different narratives of queerness. And when we attend to these specifics, we may find things we do not expect. My analysis of this novel works alongside similar scholarship by Looby and Coviello—authors who complicate our understanding of nineteenth-century male-male desire—and I add to this conversation by attending to the complexities of nineteenth-century queer life depicted in Joseph and His Friend, including identity, religion, geography, and utopia. Now that I have laid the conceptual groundwork for this study, I move to summarize the plot of this obscure novel, outline the textual arguments I make in my chapters, and place Joseph and His Friend in its specific scholarly context.

The Novel and My Argument

Serialized in The Atlantic Monthly throughout 1870 and published as a complete novel in

1871, Taylor’s Joseph and His Friend tells the story of its titular character Joseph Asten and his relationship with his friend Philip Held. Joseph, a 22-year-old farmer, has grown up in a rural

Pennsylvania community outside of Philadelphia in the late 1860s under the care of his late mother’s sister, Aunt Rachel. An unassuming and naïve young man, Joseph feels ostracized in his religious neighborhood and yearns for an intimate companionship. In the midst of his awkward social interactions and his quest to discover the meaning of love, Joseph catches the eye of Julia Blessing, a wealthy city girl visiting the area. Against the advice of his friends and his better judgment, Joseph rushes into a romance with Julia and the two become engaged. It is at this pivotal moment in the novel when Joseph meets Philip, a handsome man in his late 20s who runs a forge neighboring Joseph’s farm. After a harrowing introduction to each other via a train crash, an intimate romantic friendship builds between the two young men; meanwhile, Julia, now Wagner 12

Joseph’s wife, begins to cheat her new husband out of his savings with the assistance of her father. Julia and Mr. Blessing manipulate Joseph into investing on a piece of land called the

Amaranth, speculated to contain a substantial amount of oil. Two other subplots in the novel also emerge—a stunted romance arc between Joseph’s friends Elwood Withers and Lucy Henderson, and a story involving Philip’s own lingering romantic feelings for a Mrs. Hopeton, newly married. As marital tensions rise between Joseph and Julia, Joseph and Philip’s relationship grows in affection: Philip saves Joseph from suicide, encourages Joseph to run away to

California with him, and renounces his feelings for Mrs. Hopeton for Joseph’s sake. Joseph resolves to remain at home, but pressures come to a heading when Joseph discovers the deception of the Amaranth land and Julia, in a fit of rage, accidentally kills herself by swallowing arsenic. Although Philip is relieved for his friend, Joseph is soon accused of murder.

Philip works tirelessly to prove his fellow’s innocence, and eventually the court clears Joseph’s name. Following this courtroom drama, Joseph embarks on a journey West, traveling with a prospector and experiencing the wilderness of the American frontier, before eventually returning home to Pennsylvania. In the final paragraph of the novel, Taylor leaves the reader with the unexpected suggestion that Joseph will soon marry Philip’s sister, Madeline, and Philip expresses his own cry for companionship.

I have divided my thesis into two distinct chapters, each analyzing a different question that Joseph and His Friend suggestively (not literally) raises or asks its reader. Chapter One examines the question, What characterizes a queer person in the nineteenth century? This chapter primarily analyzes the religious themes of Joseph and His Friend and teases out the novel’s approach to queer identity. I argue that the novel presents a model of inherent difference that suggests a nascent version of innate queer identity, before the advent of twentieth-century Wagner 13 sexology models of congenital homosexuality. Furthermore, the novel contends that these queer natures are inherently spiritual and that such individuals are spiritually closer to God than their surrounding normative communities. By queering evangelical Quaker theology, the novel claims that for queer men, specifically, closeness to God is achieved through male-male intimacy and affection; although queer natures are inherent, they require a generative queer presence to awaken and achieve spiritual intimacy. In this sense, the model of identity that Joseph and His

Friend posits negotiates the binary between essentialism and constructivism, offering an understanding of sexual identity unfamiliar to our present frameworks. Throughout the novel,

Taylor gives queerness a voice in a time before the strict categorization of sexual and gender identities, and the text uses religious imagery and language to do so. Chapter One argues that novel presents Joseph and Philip’s identities as inherent, reliant on each other, and different from their normative environment. Defamiliarizing nineteenth-century ideas of queer life, Joseph and

His Friend posits Christian spirituality as a supportive, empowering force for non-normative

Americans.

In Chapter Two, I add a geographical dimension to my analysis and examine a second question raised by the novel: How and where does a queer person live in America? Situated in a

Gilded Age context, Joseph and His Friend argues that Joseph and Philip’s present moment in

Eastern Pennsylvania is not enough for queer people; the novel posits urban environments as corrupt and constricting, representative of reproductive heterosexuality. The novel vilifies women in its critique of heterosexuality, and Taylor’s attack of the city rides on the shoulders of misogyny. Influenced by Taylor’s global travels and beliefs in Emersonian Transcendentalism,

Joseph and His Friend trades in visions of utopia; if Eastern Pennsylvania is not enough, then

Joseph and Philip must dream of better worlds. The novel presents various queer utopian Wagner 14 pathways, or ways for a queer person to live in America. Philip’s path, which I term queer escape, encourages a Westward migration to America’s frontier in order to create a utopian community away from the restricting influence of women and urbanity; this vision relies on hegemonic white male privilege and ignores the racial realities of the nineteenth-century

American West. Joseph’s utopian pathway, what I am calling queer domesticity, rejects

Westward movement in favor of a dependence on God to suffer through the pains of normative society. The novel resolves the tensions between these two pathways by offering a third route, what I term queer transfiguration, which depends on escape in order to fully transform domesticity—that is, the novel argues that Joseph and Philip must make a Westward utopian migration in order to discover their inner light and freedom and return to the East with a refigured identity, cultivating a queer space in which to live and thrive. Overall, Chapter Two examines the intriguing dynamics of travel and space as the novel presents varying portraits on how and where a queer person can live in the American nation.

Chapters One and Two provide cohesive yet distinct analyses of Joseph and His Friend and the complicated results of examining Muñoz’s model of queer utopia in a literary text.

Glancing backwards in history, we find in Joseph and His Friend many strange manifestations of queerness that are unfamiliar to our contemporary moment. In this novel, queer individuals are inherently spiritual; their love and reliance on God frames them as superior to their legalistic religious communities. Taylor’s text also offers readers an original model of sexual identity different from traditional essentialist versus constructivist types. Finally, the novel offers inspiring possibilities for queer utopia and sometimes relies on misogyny and white privilege to realize those very fantasies. Distilling the past is a messy process—the results that Joseph and

His Friend reveal are as complicated and queer as the novel itself. But, using Muñoz as a Wagner 15 scholarly lens emphasizes that such complication is the point. My interrogation of Joseph and

His Friend helps us have a clearer conception of this nineteenth-century iteration of American queerness. My scholarship works alongside thinkers like Looby and Coviello and contributes to a growing critical conversation about a queer American nineteenth century. While Chapters One and Two attend to the novel’s specific textual mappings of queerness in nineteenth-century

America, my conclusion moves to offer possibilities about how the pictures in Joseph and His

Friend can help us draw new portraits of queerness in our future. The novel offers fascinating queer potentialities through religion and geography while also revealing the limits to those approaches. Joseph and His Friend is an intriguing nineteenth-century queer American literary text that compels us to, like its own characters, hope and dream of better, queerer utopian worlds that we can cultivate.

Scholarly Context

Bayard Taylor, although mostly unknown to many literary scholars today, was one of the most popular and admired writers in mid-nineteenth-century America. Although Joseph and His

Friend might appear a strange patchwork of genres to readers today, it is a novel that fits into well-known writing conventions of Taylor’s time. Taylor was born on January 11, 1825, at

Kennett Square in Chester County, Pennsylvania, and he grew up in a Quaker family and community. After an education in Unionville, Taylor moved to West Chester and became an apprentice to a local printer. Influenced by the writings of Charles Dickens and Ralph Waldo

Emerson, Taylor began writing poetry; Rufus Griswold, a literary critic in Philadelphia, prodded

Taylor to collect and publish some of his work. This first volume of poetry, titled Ximena, or The

Battle of the Sierra Morena, was released in February 1844. With money earned from the collection, Taylor began traveling, first on a European walking tour and then to California and Wagner 16

Mexico (Beatty). Taylor rose to prominence on the lecture circuit during the late 1840s and throughout the 1850s, concurrent with the publication of his many travelogues: Views Afoot, or

Europe seen with Knapsack and Staff (1846), Eldorado; or, Adventures in the Path of Empire

(1851), A Journey to Central Africa; or, Life and Landscapes from Egypt to the Negro Kingdoms of the While Nile (1854), A visit to India, China, and Japan in the year 1853 (1855), and The

Lands of the Saracen; or, Pictures of Palestine, Asia Minor, Sicily and Spain (1855) (Wright

119). Before traveling, Taylor became romantically involved with a woman named Mary

Agnew, whom he knew from childhood; after a six-year, long distance engagement, the two were married in 1849, but Agnew died of tuberculosis two months into their marriage (Fields

24). In the 1850s, Taylor had an intimate friendship with a Mr. August Bufleb, a fellow traveler from Germany, and began giving lectures and publishing about his further travels East (25).

During these global journeys, Taylor married a woman named Marie Hansen in Gotha, Germany in 1857, whom he remained with until his death. In the 1860s, Taylor worked for the New York

Herald Tribune, at that time led by Horace Greeley, and switched from writing travel literature to fictional novels (Ridinger). Taylor published a total of four novels: Hannah Thurston in 1863,

John Godfrey’s Fortunes Related by Himself: A story of American Life in 1864, The Story of

Kennett in 1866, and, of course, Joseph and His Friend in 1870. Taylor was also the first person to compose an English translation of Goethe’s Faust, which he also published in 1870. In 1878,

President Rutherford B. Hayes named Taylor the Minister to Germany. A few months after arriving in Berlin, Taylor fell ill, died, and was buried back in Kennett Square (Beatty). To commemorate Taylor’s memory, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote a poem in his honor, referring to Taylor as a “Traveller,” “Poet,” and “Friend” (Longfellow). Wagner 17

Joseph and His Friend is a quintessentially queer American novel—not only in its textual content, as I analyze in Chapters One and Two, but in its own composition and genres. Taylor’s novel finds itself in the liminal space between Romanticism and Realism, a sentimental, genteel text that does not always quite do what traditional genre expectations delineate. Few critics have studied Taylor since the turn of the twentieth century, although two significant biographers have kept Taylor’s name in conversation throughout the decades.7 Richmond Croom Beatty’s 1936 biography of Taylor defines him as the “Laureate of the Gilded Age”—although Taylor was never the official laureate of any specific group of people, Beatty chooses the label to emphasize that Taylor’s values reflected the “dominant attitudes [of] the Gilded Age,” namely a strong admiration towards modernity, labor, and ambition (x-xi). Forty years later, another scholar decided to tackle Taylor’s life and literary output; Paul C. Wermuth’s 1973 biography of Taylor closely examines his work and places his writing in the Genteel Tradition. Coined in the early twentieth century by George Santayana, the Genteel Tradition is a lineage of literary works which “referred to the habits of educated, middle- and upper- class Americans who came to substitute art and learning for the stringent moral vision of American Protestantism” (Dawidoff x). In the Genteel Tradition, Santayana saw a trend in American philosophy and literature that moved away from a traditional Puritan worldview and “replaced piety with moralism and a God- centered vision with one oriented toward the requirements of human community” (x). Most importantly, works in the Genteel Tradition were not meant to be transgressive but normative:

“Art was not supposed to challenge the orthodoxies and especially the conventions of society but to decorate fortunate individuals with it” (x). Richard Cary also places Joseph and His Friend in

7 Although not as frequently cited as Beatty and Wermuth, see these two other late-nineteenth-century biographies about Taylor for more information on his life: Life and Letters of Bayard Taylor, edited by Marie Hansen-Taylor and Horace E. Scudder (1884) and Bayard Taylor by Albert H. Smyth (1896), part of the American Men of Letters series. Wagner 18 the Genteel Tradition in his 1952 study The Genteel Circle: Bayard Taylor and His New York

Friends.

The Genteel Tradition acts as the bridge between Romanticism and Realism in American literature. Wermuth argues that “a major feature of the Genteel Tradition and of most nineteenth- century fiction” was the duality that “combines Realism in the lesser material with an ‘idealistic’ or Romantic quality in the love relations” (Wermuth 197). M.H. Abrams defines the genre differences as such: “The romance is said to present life as we would have it be—more picturesque, fantastic, adventurous, or heroic than actuality; realism, on the other hand, is said to represent life as it really is” (Abrams 174). Although some scholarship divides these writing practices into distinct literary periods, “the work of many writers continued to exhibit a romantic strain throughout much of [the Realist] period” (Murfin and Ray 400). Aspects of Romanticism and Realism both appear in Joseph and His Friend; although Taylor intentionally wrote about the daily lives of common Pennsylvania farmers, some of the novel’s events are wildly dramatic.

The novel has strains of Sentimentalism as well. Sentimentalism is “frequently characterized by a focus on sympathy and an ethic of human connectedness and by affiliation with a domestic ideology that locates these values in the home […] The home is imagined as a haven hedged off from the values of the marketplace and the state” (Howard). The novel’s emphasis on home, marriage, and domesticity is apparent—yet, the message it offers of such ideas is not common for its time period. Instead of supporting traditional, sentimental ideas of marriage and home,

Joseph and His Friend twists these usual tropes and queers them; I suggest that the novel critiques white, middle-class notions of heteronormative domesticity and instead offers queer models of life. In this sense, Joseph and His Friend is hardly normative; although it depicts a community that is becoming increasingly normative (in terms of religious, heterosexual Wagner 19 domesticity), the novel makes an argument in favor of non-normative (queer) possibilities.

Therefore, I suggest that future scholars should reconsider the classification of the novel in the literary Genteel Tradition.

Both Beatty and Wermuth briefly mention Joseph and His Friend in their biographies, and their commentary is telling for their own contexts and how scholars have perceived the novel’s sexual queerness throughout the past century. Beatty discusses Taylor’s short story

“Twin Love,” originally published in 1871, which tells the story of two twin brothers who share an intimate and telepathic connection—in Beatty’s words, “rather suspicious in its implications”

(Beatty 288). While hinting at the homosexual nature of “Twin Love” and Joseph and His

Friend (Beatty describes passages from both as “savory”), Beatty argues that a homosexual,

Freudian outlook on Taylor is “distorted,” “somewhat tedious,” and “not a little disgusting”—for

(indeed!), Taylor was “quite healthy, quite safe, and for his day quite normal,” especially considering his “gusty, cheerful athleticism” (289, 290). Strongly indicative of his 1930s context,

Beatty makes the case that a Freudian outlook on Joseph and His Friend and “Twin Love” would be unwarranted, yet he provides strong evidence for a homosexual interpretation, even while refusing to mention Taylor’s supposed homosexuality by name. Beatty emphasizes the potential social consequences of Taylor’s sexual proclivities: “Had he dared, he might have become the Oscar Wilde of America!” (290). Beatty’s commentary exposes the knowledge, and the fear, that Taylor’s novel speaks to more than just travel and the modern values of the Gilded

Age.

Flash forward to the 1970s, when homosexuality was spoken by name and Wermuth more concretely examines the sexual queerness in Taylor’s writing. Briefly discussing Jonathan and David’s odd, brotherly incestuous romance in “Twin Love,” Wermuth suggests that the short Wagner 20 story is “a trying-out of the material of Joseph and His Friend, for it constantly skirts the edges of suggestive sexuality” (100). Wermuth claims Joseph and His Friend is Taylor’s “most peculiar” novel and states that “the suggestions of homosexuality in the book can hardly be overlooked. Certainly, the relationship between Joseph and his friend has such overtones. Scenes of their embracing and kissing each other make the reader somewhat uncomfortable. Yet it is by no means certain that the book should be interpreted this way” (97). Wermuth links Taylor’s novel to Whitman’s emphasis on “manly love,” suggesting that perhaps Taylor “derived the idea, or the encouragement to write about it, from Whitman” (98). But the most intriguing part about

Wermuth’s brief entry on Joseph and His Friend is a quotation from Taylor about his authorial intentions of the novel. Taylor states,

what I attempted to do was to throw some indirect light on the great questions which

underlie civilized life, and the existence of which is only dimly felt, not intelligently

perceived, by most Americans. I allowed the plot to be directed by these cryptic forces;

hence, a reader who does not feel them will hardly be interested in the external movement

of the story. (95)

It seems that Taylor was intentionally writing to a specific audience, an audience who was educated on “great questions” and who felt “cryptic forces;” unfortunately, Taylor laments that

“the blessed half-educated public sees nothing in the book but dulness [sic]” (95).

Joseph and His Friend and its author have also been discussed by a few other literary scholars throughout the years. Robert Martin has looked at the novel in two locations: an entry about nineteenth-century American literature in The Gay and Lesbian Literary Heritage and his article “Bayard Taylor’s Valley of Bliss: The Pastoral and the Search for Form.” Rob Ridinger has also written a review for Joseph and His Friend for GLBT Reviews. Most recently, L.A. Wagner 21

Fields has published an annotated version of the novel from Lethe Press; her valuable work provides thorough research on Taylor’s inspirations for the novel and the larger queer context of nineteenth-century American literary circles.8 With this project, I add to ongoing scholarly conversations about Bayard Taylor, Joseph and His Friend, a queer nineteenth-century America, and theoretical explorations of queer utopia. I offer this fascinating, sometimes infuriating, strange and altogether queer novel as a text that portrays utopian thinking, presents unfamiliar models of nineteenth-century American queerness, and inspires us to imagine our own utopian futures.

8 Although not within the confines of my own research, Taylor’s inspiration for Joseph and His Friend is a fascinating story. According to Fields, “The inspiration for Joseph and His Friend came from poet Fitz-Greene Halleck and his passionate friendship with Joseph Rodman Drake” (Fields 44). For more, see John W.M. Hallock’s book The American Byron: Homosexuality and the Fall of Fitz-Greene Halleck (2000) and The Annotated Joseph and His Friend: The Story of America’s First Gay Novel (2017). Wagner 22

CHAPTER ONE: “THE WAY TO GOD LIES THROUGH THE LOVE OF MAN:” INHERENT NATURES AND QUEERED THEOLOGY

It doesn’t matter if you love him Or capital H-I-M… ‘cuz you were born this way, baby. -Lady Gaga

Introduction: Romantic Friendships and Religion

Joseph and His Friend reveals quirks and particularities about queer history that appear unfamiliar to our contemporary frameworks but help us better understand nineteenth-century

America and the literature it produced. In this first chapter, I answer a central question that the novel suggests or raises: What characterizes a queer person in the nineteenth century? I argue that Joseph and His Friend is an identitarian novel that puts forth a complex model queer identity, positing that individuals are born with an inherent queer nature but require an interrupting queer connection in order to bring out that difference. By “interrupting” I mean a queer individual or companion who enters or intervenes in one’s life and provides a channel to resist heteronormativity and express intimacy. Taylor’s novel includes portraits of sexual identity and desire that resemble proto- sexological and Freudian models. In other words, the novel trades in these early-twentieth-century ideas while they were still in the air and coalescing at the end of the nineteenth century. Furthermore, the novel contends that these inherent natures are intrinsically spiritual and that queer individuals are more spiritually attuned than their surrounding heteronormative communities. Specifically, the novel suggests that, for men, this closeness to God is achieved through male-male affection; although queer natures are inherent, they require an interrupting queer presence to awaken and achieve spiritual intimacy.

Throughout the novel, Taylor gives voice and language to American male queerness in a time before the codification of sexual identity, and like his larger culture, uses religious imagery and dialogue to do so. Rejecting evangelical Quaker Christianity, Joseph and His Friend presents its Wagner 23 own queer Christian theology that prizes male-male intimacy and hopes in a forward-looking, queer-inclusive divine government. In this chapter, I argue that the novel depicts Joseph as an individual with an inherent nature who resists the evangelical hegemony of his heteronormative community; Philip, on the other hand, is an interrupting presence who awakens Joseph’s desires and provides an outlet of intimacy for Joseph’s nature. Through their affectionate relationship, the novel insists that queer men are spiritually superior to non-queer individuals and ends the novel with a disguised critique of heterosexual marriage.

As a literary product of the mid-nineteenth century, Joseph and His Friend represents a unique moment in the history of American sexuality and gender, unfamiliar to our contemporary understandings of queer identity; contextualizing this novel in its historical era is necessary to accurately interpret its depiction of an intimate male-male friendship. Broadly, the American nineteenth century was a transitional moment for the developing nation and its approach to sexuality. In the 1800s, white America was moving away from an early colonial, Puritan model of heterosexual marriage and reproduction, but this century was still a time before the modern categorization of sexual identity that began in the early twentieth century. John D’Emilio and

Estelle B. Freedman discuss this period of undefined sexuality in their book Intimate Matters: A

History of Sexuality in America. They position the nineteenth century as a moment in American history when middle-class families drifted from a strict reproductive ethic in marriage and began to explore new meanings of love and intimacy. As white middle-class Americans “began to loosen the tight link between reproduction and sexuality,” courtship and marriage rose as institutions that valued “love and intimacy,” and “sexuality came to be more deeply associated with the emotion of love and the quest for interpersonal intimacy” (D’Emilio and Freedman 56). Wagner 24

Similar to Foucault’s argument in The History of Sexuality, D’Emilio and Freedman maintain that nineteenth-century media (medical advice literature and romance novels) “did not necessarily seek to ‘repress’ sexual desire” but rather “shift sexual control from traditional external community pressures to individual will, or self-control” (D’Emilio and Freedman 72).

As long as sexual desires were “properly channeled,” nineteenth-century medical advice claimed, then sexuality could “contribute to individual health, marital intimacy, and even spiritual joy” (72). As many white middle-class Americans began to view “sexuality as a personal choice and not simply a reproductive responsibility,” D’Emilio and Freedman argue,

“sexual desires had become increasingly fused with a romantic quest for emotional intimacy and even spiritual union” (84). D’Emilio and Freedman contend that these new sexual channels moved marital relations away from a reproductive ethic. My work argues that Joseph and His

Friend is a novel that marries such nineteenth-century sexual discourse with a queer relationship in order to present an example of non-normative, non-reproductive sexuality in America.

Nineteenth-century romantic relationships in America increasingly relied on religious language to frame love and intimacy; that is, in the mid-1800s, romance was getting more religious, and Americans were using religious language to define their romantic affections for each other. In her book Searching the Heart: Women, Men, and Romantic Love in Nineteenth-

Century America, Karen Lystra expands on these ideas:

Americans used religious language in talking about love. Infusing new romantic

meanings into older Christian symbols and structures, they saw love as rebirth—

mysterious, uncontrollable. Older Judeo-Christian thought gave their romance form and

substance. For example, Victorians believed that sexual expression should be a sacred act

of worship, even more specifically a sacrament of love. Being in love was analogized Wagner 25

repeatedly as being reborn. American romanticism and the ethos of romantic love gained

power and popularity, ironically, through traditional religious thinking. Secular romantic

love, strongly influenced by religious metaphors, contributed to an emotional and

intellectual shift in world view towards the individual self. (8)

As Lystra explains, marriage and sexuality became highly spiritualized acts akin to sacraments as

Americans employed religious language to discuss romantic love. Using Christian metaphors to understand romantic desire, nineteenth-century men and women distanced sexuality away from procreation and elevated it as a spiritual mode of feeling. Lystra claims, “traditional religious influences were still strong, but nineteenth-century middle-class Americans were finding, sometimes against their own wishes, that their romantic relationships had become more powerful and meaningful than their institutional religious loyalties” (Lystra 8). As men and women

“[made] deities of each other in the new theology of romantic love,” the spiritualization of sexuality removed some of the older restraints on romance and desire and “gradually gave way to a new constellation of meanings” (Lystra 8, D’Emilio and Freedman 56).

One of these new constellations of affectionate relationships for nineteenth-century

Americans was the institution of romantic friendships. Well catalogued in sources like Carroll

Smith-Rosenberg’s “The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations between Women in

Nineteenth-Century America” and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire, romantic friendships were a unique institution. Smith-Rosenberg distinguishes the nineteenth century as a unique moment of sexual understanding and argues that our “twentieth-century tendency to view human love and sexuality within a dichotomized universe of deviance and normality, genitality and platonic love, is alien to the emotions and attitudes of the nineteenth-century” (Smith-Rosenberg 8). Along these lines, Sedgwick theorizes Wagner 26 homosocial desire in English male-male friendships. She posits “the potential unbrokenness of a continuum between homosocial and homosexual” but argues how such a continuum is stunted or

“discontinuous” for men due to patriarchal, structural homophobia, absent in the homosocial- homosexual continuum of female-female friendships (Sedgwick 1, 5). Romantic friendships between pairs of men and women allowed them to express “passionate longings for emotional, spiritual, and physical intimacy, without the traditional association of sexuality and reproduction” (D’Emilio and Freedman 121). It is unknown if many of these friendships were sexual in nature, but one thing is for certain—these relationships do not accord with twentieth- century categorizations of homosexuality. Jonathan Ned Katz, in his book Love Stories: Sex

Between Men Before Homosexuality, strongly encourages contemporary readers to view romantic friendships between men in nineteenth-century America not in the light of our current framework of sexual identity but with their own words and language. Adopting a Foucauldian view that sexuality is “always under production,” Katz encourages readers to “take into account men’s particular historical ways of identifying and structuring their sexualities” (Katz ix, 332).

As human beings “continually reconfigure their affectionate and erotic feelings and acts,” it is the duty of scholars to look at certain historical moments and ask:

First, what words did they use back then about those relationships and what sort of

relationships did those words help to create? Second, how did they think about those past

relationships, and how did those ideas function in that past social world? Third, how were

those relationships evaluated? And, fourth, how were those relationships socially

structured? How were they integrated with other socially and historically specific

relationships? (337) Wagner 27

Katz’s questions challenge us to be historically precise when researching older models of sexual or romantic relationships, and his book details story after story of the varied ways that men in the nineteenth century “struggle[d] to create new and affirmative ways of naming their erotic relationships with men. Inventing a new language of love, they struggle to rethink, reevaluate, and rearrange those intimacies” (ix).

As I explain in the Introduction, my use of the word queer in this project pays attention to these intricacies and denotes non-normativity in nineteenth-century relationships, with respect to

Taylor’s literary presentation of non-heterosexual sexuality and romance in Joseph and His

Friend. Additionally, Joseph and His Friend occupies a liminal space in American sexual history: reflective of its greater historical moment, the novel depicts a same-sex romantic friendship at the same moment that normative heterosexuality was becoming more codified. I argue that this seeming contradiction points to the complexities of nineteenth-century queer sexuality and marks Joseph and His Friend as a unique text that adds to our expanding vision of a queer nineteenth-century America.

Just as D’Emilio, Freedman, and Lystra demonstrate, Katz concludes that one of the primary ways that nineteenth-century American white men framed their affectionate relationships with one another was through religious and spiritualized language. Providing examples such as Walt Whitman and Charles Warren Stoddard, Katz argues that the nineteenth- century “dominant, genteel ideal” of “romantic, spiritual love” and language created a space for men to understand, frame, speak of, and negotiate their intimate and perhaps erotic desires for one another (Katz 335). Katz’s Love Stories reveals various stories of men finding the words to express their male-male affections in a time before the categorization of gay identity (and sometimes using religious language to do so). Whereas Katz traces these ideas in the actual lives Wagner 28 of historical people, I am interested in exploring such affectionate male-male religious language in literary works from nineteenth-century America. Compared to works like Whitman’s poetry or

Stoddard’s travelogues, how were fiction writers finding ways to express romantic and potentially sexual male-male desire, and, like their larger society’s marriage culture, were they using religious and spiritual language to do so? The answer I present in this chapter argues that

Joseph and His Friend utilizes Christian language in order to queer romantic and religious discourse and validate male-male relationships.

Nineteenth-century American novels were indeed telling stories about male-male romantic friendships. In his book Manly Love: Romantic Friendship in American Fiction, Axel

Nissen explores nineteenth-century male-male friendships in fiction novels, tracing their similarities, themes, and literary motifs. Some of these authors are more widely known, such as

Herman Melville, while many have been ignored by the American literary canon. Nissen includes Taylor’s Joseph and His Friend as a novel that meets the form of romantic friendship fiction—it details the story of two young men with a passionate friendship and also features other common motifs, such as a homoerotic emphasis on hands and the motif of the sister

(Nissen 9). Nissen’s categorization of the novel as romantic friendship fiction enlarges our understanding of which genres Taylor’s work accords with, as I suggest in the Introduction.

Nissen’s work confidently places Joseph and His Friend in conversation with nineteenth-century fiction concerning male-male romantic friendships, but he does not perform an in-depth analysis of Joseph and His Friend, allowing for other scholarly analyses. The above context better helps us view Joseph and His Friend from an accurate historical viewpoint and places the novel in a unique grouping of American fiction, but leaves important questions unanswered. Wagner 29

What words and language do the male characters in Joseph and His Friend use to express their affections for one another? How is the relationship between romantic desire and spirituality treated throughout the novel? In this first chapter, I seek to explore and provide answers for these central questions. Embedded in these inquiries are the conceptual problems in which Joseph and

His Friend intervenes. The first interpretive dilemma that the novel presents contemporary readers with is its unique depiction of an early model of sexual identity. As I discuss in the

Introduction, 1870s America did not trade in fixed sexual or gender identities; like Christopher

Looby writes, they were not yet “firmly conceived, securely denoted, or publicly recognized…

Sexual personhood […] had not yet coalesced into a defined sexual identity, did not yet have a label, had not yet become a description under which people could act and could understand themselves and others to exist” (Looby ix). As such, it is inaccurate to declare Joseph and His

Friend is America’s “first gay novel” (Hallock 162). Yet, just as Katz encourages us to do, we can examine the novel and the language it employs to observe what, if any, models of sexual identity Taylor puts forth in his fiction. In this sense, we can use Joseph and His Friend in conversation with the classic queer theory debate of essentialism versus constructivism, or, in the helpful terminology of Sedgwick, between the “universalizing” view and the “minoritizing” view

(Sedgwick 40). That is, does Joseph and His Friend insist that there is a “cause” to queer desires, or that “the meaning and experience of sexual activity and identity [are] contingent on their mutual structuring with other, historically and culturally variable aspects of a given society,” or does it posit something entirely different (40)? The answer I offer in this chapter straddles the line between both essentialism and constructivism, nature and nurture; the text presents readers with a unique model of inherent and interruptive queer sexual identity. Wagner 30

The second conceptual problem that Joseph and His Friend raises in regards to the novel’s main male-male relationship is the connection between sexual queerness and American spirituality, specifically Christianity. We tend to view the Christian tradition as adamantly opposed to non-heterosexual expressions of romance and desire, but, as gay historians such as

John Boswell have argued, early church interpretations of the Christian scriptures did not condemn homosexuality; these were later adopted through political pressures and prejudices

(Boswell 333). As Queer Christianities demonstrates, the church “has from the start been a site of radical queerness” (Larrimore 2). In Joseph and His Friend, Taylor presents readers with a portrait of American Christian spirituality that is tied directly to the novel’s presentation of queer identity, a connection that may seem strange and unexpected to twenty-first-century readers. I use Joseph and His Friend to intervene in current conversations about queerness and spirituality, arguing that this novel can defamiliarize our traditional framework of American history and reveal a nuanced portrait of nineteenth-century queer religious expression.

Before jumping into the text, I would also like to provide specific context for how the novel understands religion and spirituality. Although Joseph and His Friend continually mentions religion, church, and theology throughout its chapters, Taylor is never specific as to what religious framework he invokes. Based on his own upbringing and the content of his previous fiction novels, I argue that Taylor is envisioning a Quaker context when he writes about religion in Joseph and His Friend. The Quakers, also called The Society of Friends, is a

Protestant Christian denomination “that arose in mid-17th-century England, dedicated to living in accordance with the ‘Inward Light,’ or direct inward apprehension of God, without creeds, clergy, or other ecclesiastical forms (Fields 338). Taylor himself was raised in a Quaker family, though not a self-identifying Quaker himself, and his native Pennsylvania was also rooted in Wagner 31

Quaker traditions. Although scholars typically see Quakers as a more progressive sect of the

Christian religion, Taylor rejected the Quaker path and deemed it too restricting and conservative. In Imaginary Friends: Representing Quakers in American Culture, 1650-1950,

James Emmett Ryan states that “In Taylor’s view, Quakerism had come to stand for excessive propriety and emotional restraint, which in turn led to Quaker families marked by a lack of intimacy and affection” (Ryan 177). Taylor’s earlier 1860s novels Hannah Thurston and The

Story of Kennett both explicitly critique “the strictures of Quaker self-control,” yet by the time he wrote Joseph and His Friend, Taylor refrained from explicitly identifying Quakerism (177).

The absence of a specific religious framework in Joseph and His Friend (though presumed to be Quaker) leaves room for Taylor to construct his own Christian theology; Joseph and His Friend effectively queers evangelical Quaker theology in favor of more progressive doctrines. Despite its liberal leanings toward pacificism and the inclusion of women in ministry, nineteenth-century Quaker communities faced the growing influence of religious evangelicalism.

According to Cambridge’s An Introduction to Quakerism by Quaker scholar Pink Dandelion,

“Evangelicalism espouses experiential faith in Christ guided by scripturally based doctrines, and is committed to [a] mission rooted in love to convert those who have not yet found that path”

(Dandelion 82-83). With an emphasis on conversion and uniformity, evangelical influence in nineteenth-century Quakerism brought a conservative shift to the Society of Friends; in the

1800s, a denial of certain doctrinal beliefs, such as questioning “the divinity of Jesus or the inerrancy of Scripture,” was a “disownable offence” (85). Evangelical Quakers “gave a higher authority to Scripture” than traditional Friends, moving away from the original Quaker goal of following the inward, individual calling of the Holy Spirit rather than any ecclesiological Wagner 32 institutions (93). I argue that Taylor, weary of “pious Quaker repression,” depicts a conservative, evangelical community of Quakers in Joseph and His Friend (Fields 338).

As I spell out in my analysis below, Taylor positions Joseph as a character who resists the evangelical and heteronormative traits of Quakerism and moves toward his own queer Christian theology. Ryan argues that Taylor places “his characters on a trajectory moving away from

Quakerism, a religious spirit which he associates with a no-longer-relevant American past”

(Ryan 178). I argue that Taylor, rather than rejecting religion all together, queers evangelical

Quaker belief and constructs a version of Christian theology that embraces male-male affection and a queer individual’s inherent nature. The vagueness of Taylor’s undefined, conservative religion in Joseph and His Friend broadens the novel’s message beyond a Quaker context and positions the novel’s version of queer Christian theology as new and original. In my analysis, I identify where possible instances when the novel is vague about its religious context and build my own argument for Taylor’s rejection of evangelical Quakerism in favor of a queer Christian theology, modeled through Joseph and Philip’s relationship.

A Peculiar, Twofold Nature

As the titular character of Joseph and His Friend, Joseph is the main protagonist of the novel; Taylor traces his interior thoughts and feelings across the novel as readers come to know and understand Joseph’s complex characterization. Joseph’s story traces the familiar beats of a bildungsroman plot—a genre which “depicts a youth who struggles toward maturity, forming a worldview or philosophy of life” (Kennedy and Gioia 2061). Despite this familiar trope, Joseph is a complex individual, and as the novel progresses, Taylor reveals the disjunction between his personhood and the community around him. By focusing on Joseph’s life and his neighborhood, the novel contends that some individuals possess inherent queer natures that distinguish them Wagner 33 from their surrounding heteronormative communities. These communities are religiously prejudiced and entrench patterns of conformity through heterosexual marriage and biological reproduction, repressing and shaming queer individuals who do not align with such likeness.

Joseph and His Friend characterizes Joseph as a unique individual: although outwardly he displays a rural American masculinity, inwardly he possesses inherent traits of femininity. As a Pennsylvania farmer, Joseph boasts a strong, rough, masculine physicality that reflects idealizations of so-called masculine American independence. When Julia visits Joseph and his

Aunt Rachel on their farm, Taylor paints an attractive picture of Joseph’s manliness as he loads hay into the barn: “The hay overhung and concealed the wheels, as well as the hind quarters of the oxen, and on the summit stood Joseph, in his shirt-sleeves and leaning on a pitch-fork. He bent forward as he saw them, answering their greetings with an eager, surprised face” (Taylor

41). Despite the naivety of his “eager, surprised face,” Joseph’s physical body mirrors other nineteenth-century depictions of physical manliness; consider Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s

“The Village Blacksmith,” with his “large and sinewy hands; / And the muscles of his brawny arms / […] strong as iron bands” (Longfellow). Julia’s aside to her friend Anna reinforces the image of Joseph’s attractiveness: “How much better a man looks in shirt-sleeves than in a dress coat!” (Taylor 41). Joseph’s athletic physicality, which also idealizes his class status as an agrarian worker, stands in opposition to his characterization as an innocent and immature boy, qualities that are more stereotypically feminine than masculine. Taylor gives the reader explicit descriptions of Joseph’s innocence: his eyes are “large, shy, and utterly innocent;” when Julia first sees Joseph, she exclaims, “He looks almost like a boy” (12, 19). Joseph’s mind is “smooth” and “pure,” and he is a young man of “virtuous ignorance” (10, 17). Additionally, the novel later states that Joseph has “an inability to use course and strong phrases, and a shrinking from all Wagner 34 display of rude manners” (30). Transgressing nineteenth-century gender boundaries, Joseph possesses a sense of virtuous femininity, and his actions align with feminine, “angel in the house” notions of purity and delicacy.

Taylor’s depiction of Joseph presages early Western models of homosexual identity, such as Edward Prime Stevenson’s Uranian types. As early sexology emerged from German thinkers in the late-1800s, various models of sexual identity passed from hand to hand in scholarly circles, and Taylor’s own academic German background may have influenced his depiction of

Joseph. In his 1908 book The Intersexes: a History of Simisexualism, Stevenson posits two types of Uranians: “One is the physically delicate youth, graceful, spiritual, and dreamy, highly impressionable. To this type also belong often detail of uncertain health, of shunning the ruder sports of lads, of indifference or dislike to the society of noise male playmates” (Stevenson 158).

This model resembles Joseph, who also “shun[s] the ruder sports of lads” and, according to his friend Elwood Withers, is “innocent of the ways and wiles of men, and—and girls” (158, Taylor

11). Yet, although Joseph’s “bringing up has been fitter for a girl than a boy,” the novel does not completely adhere to this later Uranian model of sexuality due to Joseph’s gruff, masculine physicality (Taylor 51). Joseph and His Friend was still published some decades before

Stevenson’s The Intersexes; as such, the novel both resists an easy twentieth-century categorization of sexual identity and suggests a type that later came into a prevailing form in the twentieth century, all the while presenting readers with a unique mixture of masculine and feminine characteristics that queer typical notions of gender in the nineteenth century.

Because of his lack of romantic experiences with women, Joseph is considered immature compared to other men his age, and this masculine immaturity is partly ascribed to the strong maternal presences in his life. Elwood blames Joseph’s upbringing for his feminine Wagner 35 characteristics, a childhood “fitter for a girl than a boy” (Taylor 51). As a young boy, Joseph was shaped by the “rigid piety” of his mother, so much so that his “nature instinctively took the imprint of hers,” and his “innocent young heart” was “so clear a reflection of herself” (29). The strong presence of Joseph’s mother “prolonged his childhood, perhaps without intending it, into the years when the unrest of approaching manhood should have led him to severer studies and lustier sports;” instead of following the normal trajectory of boys his age (more intense schooling and involvement in athletics), Joseph built his skills as a farmer (29). Taylor’s portrait of an overbearing mother and a sensitive son anticipates early sexological and psychoanalytic models that blamed homosexuality on heavy maternal influences; as sexologist William Lee Howard wrote, “the attenuate, weak-voiced neuter, the effeminate male: pity him, but blame his mother for the false training” (Gifford 327). At some point in his youth, Joseph’s mother died (cause unknown) and Joseph went into the care of his Aunt Rachel, who we find Joseph living with at the beginning of the novel. Joseph and His Friend never once mentions the presence or the existence of Joseph’s father, reinforcing for readers the dearth of manliness in Joseph’s upbringing.

This lack of masculine maturity contributes to Joseph’s naivety when it comes to romance and courtship. From the very first chapter of the novel—aptly titled “Joseph”—readers begin to see the insecurity of Joseph’s romantic life. On his way to the first social gathering of the book, he asks Elwood: “were you ever in love? […] how did you first begin to find it out?

What is the difference between that and the feeling you have towards any pleasant girl whom you like to be with?” (Taylor 12). The novel positions Elwood’s masculinity against Joseph’s; whereas Joseph is feminized, the text emphasizes Elwood’s “strong, friendly face” and a

“rougher bringing up” than his friend (Taylor 12, 13). Unlike Elwood, who has experienced Wagner 36 feelings of heteroromantic love, Joseph’s naivety prevents him from having a confident grasp on intimate feelings toward women and social encounters in general. At the novel’s first neighborhood party, Joseph expresses his insecurity to his friend Lucy:

“Do you enjoy these meetings, Joseph?” she asked.

“I think I should enjoy everything,” he answered, “if I were a little older, or—or—”

“Or more accustomed to society? Is not that what you meant? It is only another kind of

schooling, which we must all have. You and I are in the lowest class, as we once were, —

do you remember?”

“I don’t know why,” said he, “—but I must be a poor scholar. See Elwood, for instance!”

“Elwood!” Lucy slowly repeated; “he is another kind of nature, altogether.” (20)

Joseph, who considers himself “a poor scholar” in society and romance, also has a different

“kind of nature” than his friend Elwood, an important point for this novel (20). This conversation brings up a critical question when thinking about Joseph’s personhood: is his queer individuality—his combination of physical masculinity and inner femininity, his inexperience and immaturity with women and romance—due to his feminized upbringing, or is it because of something inherent in his nature? I argue that the text presents both nurture and nature as factors in Joseph’s sexual development but favors the inherent difference of nature more than his effeminate nurturing.

The definition of nature throughout Joseph and His Friend is undefined and up to the reader’s interpretation; I argue that the novel presents a model of inherent queer nature, instinctual from birth, but that may be influenced (or nurtured), positively or negatively, by outside forces. As I detail in this section and the next, Joseph and His Friend mixes Wagner 37 constructivist and essentialist models of sexual identity. Joseph’s adolescence is clearly molded by the maternal presences in his life, resulting in what the book labels a lack of manliness:

A boy’s life may be weakened for growth, in all its fibres, by the watchfulness of a too

anxious love, and the guidance of a too exquisitely nurtured conscience. He may be so

trained in the habits of goodness, and purity, and duty, that every contact with the world

is like all abrasion upon the delicate surface of his soul. Every wind visits him too

roughly, and he shrinks from the encounters which brace true manliness, and strengthen it

for the exercise of good. (29)

With an emphasis on how Joseph was “trained” and raised as a child under maternal

“watchfulness,” the novel makes clear that Joseph’s mother and aunt have stunted his growth;

Taylor sets a precedent for male maturity, claiming that “a boy’s life” can be “weakened” by nurturing, controlling forces and thus prevent a boy from facing the rough encounters of life and embracing “true manliness” (29). Yet, despite this admittance that people are shaped by their context, the novel also makes a strong case that human nature is in large part inherent.

Discussing Joseph’s difference from his community, the novel contends that a “mysterious element had been infused […] into” Joseph “before his birth;” this element was “the basis of new sensations, desires, and powers” (31). The emphasis on birth here is striking, as it posits a natural identity in Joseph before the influence of his maternal presences. Later on in the novel, Philip mirrors this narratorial claim and exclaims that there are “men—and […] women—who cannot shape themselves according to the common-place pattern of society, —who were born with instincts, needs, knowledge, and rights—ay, rights!—of their own!” (219). Towards the end of the novel, Philip summarizes the distinction between social construction and essentialist identity with an arboreal metaphor in a letter to Joseph: “We don’t change the bases of our lives, after all: Wagner 38 the forces are differently combined, otherwise developed, but they hang, I fancy, to the same roots” (344). With an emphasis on “roots,” the novel contends that one’s nature can be

“differently combined” and “developed” by outside influences, but ultimately traces back “to the same roots,” an inherent identity instilled before birth (344). Joseph and His Friend complexly negotiates the essentialist versus constructivist debate of queer identity and posits that, even though social forces do shape people, one’s inherent nature is ultimately the basis for an individual’s personhood.

We see Joseph’s inherent nature, and its queerness, more clearly in comparison to his community; the novel depicts heteronormative communities as prejudiced, religious neighborhoods that affix patterns of conformity on heterosexual marriage and biological reproduction. In Chapter III, “The Place and the People,” Taylor discusses the wide swath of differences between Joseph’s inherent nature and his Pennsylvania community. Taylor writes,

Joseph Asten’s nature was shy and sensitive, but not merely from a habit of introversion.

He saw no deeper into himself, in fact, than his moods and sensations, and thus quite

failed to recognized what it was that kept him apart from the society in which he should

have freely moved. He felt the difference of others, and constantly probed the pain and

embarrassment it gave him, but the sources wherefrom it grew were the last which he

would have guessed. (29)

Taylor is unclear what the “sources” of Joseph’s “difference” are but emphasizes that his “nature

[…] kept him apart from the society” around him (29). In a further paragraph, Taylor accentuates the rift these natural differences create between Joseph and his neighborhood:

Furthermore, he had by this time discovered that certain tastes which he possessed were

so many weaknesses—if not, indeed, matters of reproach—in the eyes of his neighbors. Wagner 39

The delight and the torture of finer nerves—an inability to use course and strong phrases,

and a shrinking from all display of rude manners—were peculiarities which he could not

overcome, and must endeavor to conceal. There were men of sturdy intelligence in the

community; but none of refined culture, through whom he might have measured and

understood himself; and the very qualities, therefore, which should have been his pride,

gave him only a sense of shame. (30)

Here is one of the few passages where the novel describes specific details about the differing

“certain tastes” Joseph has apart from the rest of his Pennsylvania community (30). The fact that

Joseph cannot use “coarse and strong” language and resists “rude manners”—traits that come from his natural “finer nerves”—sets Joseph strikingly apart from his neighbors, to the point where these differences are viewed as “weaknesses,” if not “matters of reproach” (30). Although the qualities of his inherent nature “should have been his pride,” the differences between himself and his community leave Joseph “only a sense of shame” (30).

The shame that Joseph feels because of his peculiar, inherent nature is built on community prejudice and intolerance to difference, with a specific focus on normative traditions of marriage and sexuality. The novel describes the people in Joseph’s community as “orderly, moral, and generally honest, and their own types were so constantly reproduced and fixed, both by intermarriage and intercourse, that any variation therein was a thing to be suppressed if possible” (Taylor 31). Joseph’s Pennsylvania community looks down upon individuals who both think and act differently than the social norm. This passage specifically mentions how

“intermarriage and intercourse” were some of the specific methods in which uniformity is

“reproduced and fixed” in the community, emphasizing its heteronormativity (31). For a normal man of the community—“one whose twofold nature conformed to the common mould”—“the Wagner 40 probable map of his life was drawn: he could behold himself as a young man, as husband, father, and comfortable old man, by simply looking upon these various stages in others” (31). In this type of hegemonic, heteronormative society, a young man’s path in life was set as a husband and father, destined to marry and reproduce with a woman—but only if this young man “conformed to the common mould” and “into whom, before his birth, no mysterious element had been infused, to be the basis of new sensations, desires, and powers” (31). Here, the distinction between Joseph and the other young men of his community is clear: Joseph’s peculiar nature, which contains a “mysterious element” present since birth, is the basis of “new sensations, desires, and powers” that other men of his community lack (31). Later in the novel, Philip critiques society’s uniformity when it comes to heterosexual marriage, rebuking “the holiest of bonds” (marriage between a man and a woman) as “monstrously” held together out of “habit and prejudice” (219).

Along with the community’s intolerant attitudes and focus on traditional heterosexual marriage, Joseph and His Friend also highlights the conservative, panoptic religious nature of this Pennsylvania neighborhood. Taylor emphasizes the religious difference between nonconforming individuals like Joseph and the community around them: “Any sign of unusual taste, or a different view of life, excited their suspicion, and the most of them were incapable of discriminating between independent thought on moral and social questions, and ‘free-thinking’ in the religious significance which they attached to the word” (Taylor 31). Here, readers see that a large part of the community’s intolerance comes from “the mechanical faith of passive minds” who are opposed to “free-thinking” and “independent thought” (31). This religious conservatism, presumably evangelical Quakerism, is embodied most effectively in Reverend Chaffinch, who constantly prods Joseph on matters of his religious faith and even presides over the neighborhood Wagner 41 parties to keep the young adults’ morality in check: “so long as their conversation is modest and becoming. It is easy for the vanities of the world to slip in, but we must watch, —we must watch” (59). Religion plays a panoptic role in the novel, a Foucauldian tool of social control that keeps the community tightly uniform and represses and shames Joseph’s own nature.

A fascinating, key passage in Joseph and His Friend, which I deem Joseph’s spiritual coming-out moment, details Joseph’s personal confession of his inherent queer nature, hints at his queer longings, and exposes his deep loneliness, forces which all combine and pressure him to pursue a heterosexual marriage. In Chapter V, Joseph leaves a regular community get-together with Julia, Elwood, Lucy Henderson, and other friends, and departs home alone on his horse.

Thunderously riding across the Pennsylvania landscape, the “secret passages” and “completed chambers” of Joseph’s thoughts begin to expose themselves, resembling our contemporary image of a closet (Taylor 51). As he rides, “all possibilities of action and pleasure and emotion swam before his sight,” and Joseph begins to break free from the restraints that bind his queer inherent nature:

Hitherto, a conscience not born of his own nature, —a very fair and saintly-visaged jailer

of thought, but a jailer none the less, —had kept strict guard over every outward

movement of his mind, gently touching hope and desire and conjecture when they

reached a certain line, and saying, “No; no farther. It is prohibited.” But now, with one

strong involuntary throb, he found himself beyond the line, with all the ranges ever

trodden by man stretching forward to a limitless horizon. He rose in his stirrups, threw

out his arms, lifted his face towards the sky, and cried, “God! I see what I am!” (52)

In almost orgasmic description, here Joseph experiences a divine revelation of his self-identity, a clear distinction between his inward nature and the restraining forces that have thus far guided Wagner 42 his life. “It was only a glimpse,” the novel tells us, but Joseph begins to question the oppressive forces, especially of religion, that surround him: “Who built a wall of imaginary law around these needs, which are in themselves inexorable laws? The World, the Flesh, and the Devil, they say in warning […] And this body they tell me to despise, —this perishing house of clay, which is so intimately myself that its comfort and delight cheer me to the inmost soul: it is a dwelling fit for an angel to inhabit!” (52). Reflecting on the traditional Protestant teaching that positions the intangible soul as superior to the lusts and “passions” of the “mortal body,” Joseph begins to question the “imaginary laws” and limits that surround his physical “needs” (52, English

Standard Version9, Romans 6:12).

Joseph explicitly relates these restrictive doubts to his twofold nature as well, the struggle between one’s inherent instincts and social pressures. Joseph considers: “Why do men so carefully conceal what is deepest and strongest in their natures? Why is so little of spiritual struggle and experience ever imparted? […] Love is hidden as if it were a reproach; friendship watched, lest it express its warmth too frankly; joy and grief and doubt and anxiety repressed as much as possible” (52). As Joseph’s mind battles between his deepest nature and the restrictions around him, the novel gives us the clearest picture of what Taylor’s term “twofold nature” might mean: “Such as the vague substances of his thoughts. It was the old struggle between primitive, untamed life, as the first man may have felt it—and its many masters: assertion and resistance, all the more fierce because so many influences laid their hands upon its forces” (52). In this context, Joseph’s twofold nature consists of his instinctual, inherent desires, rooted in him since birth, versus the capacity to repress these desires due to outside “masters,” the “influences” of

“assertion and resistance” (52). Similar to how Joseph and His Friend foreshadows inchoate

9 All additional Bible references throughout this thesis are taken from the English Standard Version translation. Wagner 43 ideas about sexual identity that were coalescing in the late-nineteenth century, Taylor’s language here is quite proto-Freudian as well. Joseph’s instinctual desires may as well stand for the id, “a striving to bring about the satisfaction of instinctive needs subject to the observance of the pleasure principle” (qtd. in Storr 61). Likewise, his community’s outside influences pre-date

Freud’s articulation of the superego, a “force which institute[s] repression” (60). The twofold nature of Joseph and His Friend consists of the major binary that the beginning of the novel establishes: the tension between Joseph’s inherent queer identity, rooted in an essentialist notion of that nature (his unconscious mind), and the controlling forces of his religious and heteronormative community (his conscious mind).

Although Joseph realizes his inherent queer nature in this spiritual coming-out moment, he lacks the language to express his deep longings and believes that heterosexual marriage is the only path forward. In the above lines, Joseph links “love” and “friendship” as emotions that are

“deepest and strongest” in one’s nature and are inherently part of the “spiritual struggle and experience” of life (52). Considering the novel’s focus on a male-male romantic friendship, these inherent desires are queer compared to his normative society. Yet, a few sentences later, Joseph cries, “I am lonely, but I know not how to cry for companionship; my words would not be understood, or, if they were, would not be answered” (52). Inexperienced in romance and longing for intimate companionship, Joseph’s queer nature craves the affection of love and friendship, but he lacks the words to adequately express his desires for love and friendship— towards whom, the novel is not clear. At the end of this revelatory moment, with his limited experience and insular community, Joseph sees only one possible path to move forward: heterosexual marriage. He thinks to himself, “Only one gate is free to me, —that leading to the love of woman. There, at least, must be such an intense, intimate sympathy as shall make the Wagner 44 reciprocal revelation of the lives possible!” (52). In this moment, Joseph truly believes with a

“single certainty” that marriage to a woman will finally lead him to a fulfilling companionship, meeting the desires for love and friendship that he craves (52). Later in the text, Taylor emphasizes Joseph’s misrecognition in this moment, the misdirection of his desires and their proper outlet. The journey of this novel, then, is to prove this moment wrong.

“That Curious Whirling, Falling Sensation”

So far in this chapter, I have argued that Joseph and His Friend presents a type of essentialist, “born this way” model of inherent queer identity; as I assert in this section, the novel complicates this model by adding constructivist notions of identity in the form of an interrupting queer presence. Joseph, who possesses a masculine physicality and a feminized innocence, begins the novel isolated from his religious, heteronormative community. While his neighborhood fixes uniformity on heterosexual marriage and reproduction, absent of independent thought, Joseph’s inner nature resists “the mechanical faith of passive minds” and faces the

“miserable, ungrateful, inexplicable fact of discontent” in his life (Taylor 31, 30). In a revelatory, spiritual coming-out moment, Joseph begins to understand his inherent queer nature and the restraints that limit his cries for affection and intimacy, and—pressured by his insular society— he convinces himself that marriage to a woman will satisfy his longings. In the following paragraphs, I maintain that Taylor uses Joseph and Julia’s marriage to further critique the path of heterosexual marriage. By introducing a close male companion for Joseph, the novel positions

Philip as an interrupting queer presence who, via male-male attraction and affection, stirs

Joseph’s repressed queer nature, provides an intimate relational channel, and encourages his resistance to evangelical sameness. In other words, along with offering an inherent model of Wagner 45 queer nature, Joseph and His Friend also insists that an individual needs an interruptive queer presence to begin resisting heteronormativity and to embody one’s true, instinctual personhood.

Despite Joseph’s hopes that “the love of a woman” will grant him the “intense, intimate sympathy” he craves, the novel critiques the institution of heterosexual marriage, relegating it as a habit based on sameness and prejudice (Taylor 52). Joseph’s marriage to Julia, the villain of the novel, further interrogates the holiness and happiness of heterosexual marriage for a man with an inherent queer nature. When Joseph first meets Julia, he is intrigued by her “low, sweet, penetrating tone,” her “magnetism,” and her “winning frankness” (21, 22). After his spiritual coming-out moment, Joseph still views Julia as a “comparative stranger” but remains curiously attracted to her as they talk alone in his garden: “Joseph’s heart was beating fast and strong; he was conscious of a wild fear, so interfused with pleasure, that it was impossible to separate the sensations. Miss Blessing’s hand was on his arm, and he fancied that it trembled” (60). Quickly,

Joseph and Julia share a conversation (with romantic language typical of a nineteenth-century sentimental novel), and the two declare their love for one another. Yet, Julia warns Joseph: “I am dark beside a nature so pure and good as yours! If you must ever learn to hate me, begin now!”

(61). This confession foreshadows Julia’s future unfaithfulness and creates a distinction between

Joseph and Julia’s natures—Joseph’s good and pure, Julia’s “dark” and, as the novel reveals, villainous. Elwood doubts the genuineness of Joseph’s sudden affection for Julia: “a fellow can’t always tell a sudden fancy from a love that has the grip of death” (63). Pondering a marriage with “the grip of death,” Joseph begins to doubt his commitment: “There was a subtle chill in the heart of his happiness, which all the remembered glow of that tender scene in the garden could not thaw” (63). Wagner 46

As the rest of the novel reveals, Julia’s villainy causes Joseph to hate his wife, and as companions to Joseph’s interiority, readers are invited to dislike Julia as well. Unfortunately,

Taylor’s celebration of male-male love rides on the shoulders of misogyny; in order to praise queer affection between two men, the novel demonizes women, especially Julia, positioning some as devilish hindrances to a man’s self-identity. Additionally, just as Joseph’s character resembles a nascent picture of a male Uranian or invert, Julia shares similar qualities with a female invert. Per William Lee Howard’s sexological view, “The female possessed of masculine ideas of independence… When such a woman marries […] the husband is certain to be one she can rule, govern, and cause to follow her in voice and action” (Gifford 328). However, while the novel sides with Joseph, even if depicting him as an invert, the text continually frames Julia as a menacing force, or, like Howard claims of the female invert, “a menace to civilization” (328). I further analyze Julia’s role as villain and Taylor’s implicit, troublesome misogyny in Chapter

Two of this thesis; for now, it is important to know that, in the novel, Joseph’s failing marriage to Julia critiques the idea of a satisfying heterosexual marriage for a man who longs for male- male intimacy. After his marriage to Julia, Joseph ponders about himself: “You wanted independence and a chance of growth for your life; you fancied they would come in this form

[…] Whether you have been wise or rash, you can change nothing. You are limited, as before, though within a different circle” (Taylor 132). Slowly realizing the limitations that heterosexual marriage has placed on him, Joseph admits to the “past delusion” of his hasty engagement to

Julia, and still yearns to satisfy his queer longings: “but in spite of her, God helping me, I shall yet be a man” (177, 196).

Outside of his marriage to Julia, one of the key ways that Joseph expresses his “cry for companionship” is by gazing at groups of men in public, moments filled with ambiguous longing Wagner 47

(Taylor 52). The novel includes two specific moments of gazing that parallel one another: the first when Joseph enters the city (Philadelphia) to visit Julia and her family, and the second when he departs. Intending to meet Julia’s family after their recent engagement, Joseph takes a train from his farm to the city, “so near the point where his new life was to commence”—yet, in this moment, “a singular unrest took possession of him” (68). Joseph “distinctly felt the presence of two forces, acting against each other with nearly equal power, but without neutralizing their disturbing influence” (68). Here we see again the interior battle of Joseph’s twofold nature, his own inherent desires fighting against the pressures of his community, which manifests as the

“ignorant fancy” of his idea of “wedlock” (68). Taylor writes, “He was developing faster than he guessed, yet, to a nature like his, the last knowledge that comes is the knowledge of self” (68).

Setting up the trajectory of the rest of the novel—and especially the upcoming chapters—Taylor tells the reader that, for men with Joseph’s inherent queer nature, “knowledge of self” comes

“last,” or later in life (68). Although Joseph perceives his upcoming marriage to Julia as the culmination of his maturity and manliness, the reader is aware that these goals will not serve

Joseph as he envisions.

Joseph’s first gazing encounter reflects three major longings: his physical attraction toward men, his yearning for their companionship, and his desire to be like the men in their presentation of masculinity. As Joseph walks through the streets of the city and passes docks on the river,

The sight of water, the gliding sails, the lusty life and labor along the piers, suddenly

refreshed him. Men were tramping up and down the gangways of the clipper-ships […]

wherever he turned he saw a picture of strength, courage, reality, solid work. The men

that went and came took life simply as a succession of facts, and if these did not smoothly Wagner 48

fit into each other, they either gave themselves no trouble about the rough edges, or drove

them out of sight with a few sturdy blows […] Would any of those strapping forms

comprehend the disturbance of his mind? […] The longer he watched them, the more he

felt the contagion of their unimaginative, face-to-face grapple with life; the manly

element in him, checked so long, began to push a vigorous shoot towards the light.

(Taylor 68)

The “strapping forms” of these river men, pictures of “strength” and “solid work,” mirror

Joseph’s own agrarian, working-class masculinity and physical appearance; but as Joseph gazes at the men, Taylor’s writing presents complex meanings of longing (68). Phrases like “lusty life,” “strapping forms,” and “a vigorous shoot towards the light” communicate sexual tension and desire in Joseph’s gaze, the orgasmic language mirroring his previous horseback riding scene

(68). But readers also see Joseph’s longing for companionship and understanding in his gaze, questioning if the men would “comprehend the disturbance of his mind” (68). Finally, Joseph’s gaze also contains elements of a desire for union or association with these men, as Joseph’s own

“manly element in him, checked so long” begins to rise (68). Here, we see a type of

Whitmanesque masculinity, a picture of a “workingman” aesthetic embodied in the “adhesive” love between rough and tumble men (Levine 1295-1296). Joseph’s ambiguous queer longing as he gazes at men is one of the ways he instinctually expresses his inherent queer nature and cries for companionship, even if he lacks the language to adequately explain his desires.

Joseph’s second gazing encounter of men occurs when he departs the city, paralleling his first, and reverses Joseph’s interior struggle and insecurity to a position of superiority and false confidence. After visiting the Blessing family and arranging the details of his marriage to Julia,

Joseph rests in the assurance of his heterosexual conformity. The novel states that Joseph Wagner 49

leaned back in his seat and took note of his fellow-travelers. Since he began to approach

the usual destiny of men, they had a new interest for him. Hitherto he had looked upon

strange faces very much as on a strange language, without a thought of interpreting them

[,] but now their hieroglyphics seemed to suggest a meaning […] Most of them were

strangers to each other, and as reticent (in their railway conventionality) as himself; yet,

he reflected, the whole range of passion, pleasure, and suffering was probably illustrated

in that collection of existences. His own troublesome individuality grew fainter, so much

of it seemed to be merged in the common experience of men. (85)

Gazing at men in the train, Joseph no longer feels the “unrest” he did when he first entered the city; now, confident that he was to achieve “the usual destiny of men” (marriage, just like the

“probable map of life” for a man in Joseph’s neighborhood [31]), Joseph gazes at the men around him with commonality and brotherhood. Joseph’s connection to younger men in the train car, however, throws doubt onto his certainty:

The faces of the younger men, however, were not so easy to decipher. On them life was

only beginning its plastic task, and it required an older eye to detect the delicate touches

of awakening passions and hopes. But Joseph consoled himself with the thought that his

own secret was as little to be discovered as any they might have. If they were still

ignorant of the sweet experience of love, he was already their superior; if they were

sharers in it, though strangers, they were near to him. Had he not left the foot of the class,

after all? (86)

Joseph fears that the young men around him might discover “his own secret”—a phrase that

Taylor leaves unexplained, but that I interpret as his inherent queer nature, the cause of his fear and shame from others in the past—but he comforts himself with self-assurance. Now confident Wagner 50 that he has romantic experience and is no longer at “the foot of the class,” like he mentioned to

Lucy earlier, Joseph feels that his fellow men are “sharers” in his experience and thus “near to him” (86). Joseph’s experiences of gazing at men—one of insecurity, one of confidence—both reflect his lingering desires for men, despite his upcoming marriage to Julia. As Joseph still lacks the language to fully express his queer longings and desires, his gazings represent the non- normative outlets his instinctual nature takes, signaling that, even with his marriage to Julia, he has still not achieved intimate, reciprocal companionship. That is, until, the handsome Philip enters Joseph’s gaze.

Joseph and His Friend positions Philip as an interrupting presence in Joseph’s life, a fellow man who, via male-male attraction and affection, stirs Joseph’s repressed nature and provides an outlet for his longing for intimate companionship. When Joseph’s gaze first meets and introduces the reader to the face of Philip, Taylor’s language conveys the magnetic pull of this moment: “All at once his eye was attracted by a new face, three or four seats from his own”

(Taylor 86). Taylor goes on for sentences describing the striking physical attractiveness of

Philip: “His fair complexion was bronzed from exposure, and his hands, graceful without being effeminate, were not those of the idle gentleman. His hair, golden in tint, thrust its short locks as it pleased about a smooth, frank forehead; the eyes were dark gray, and the mouth, partly hidden by a mustache, at once firm and full” (86). Joseph fights the “irresistible temptation to look again” as Philip returns a “full, warm, intense expression” (86). In this moment, Joseph sees something of himself in Philip, a likeness “that at least some of his own doubts and difficulties had found their solution in the stranger’s nature. The more he studied the face, the more he was conscious of its attraction, and his instinct of reliance, though utterly without grounds, justified itself to his mind in some mysterious way” (86). Mirroring the “mysterious element” mentioned Wagner 51 in earlier discussions of Joseph’s nature, Joseph’s attraction to Philip satisfies some “instinct” and answers his own “doubts and difficulties” (31, 86). Taylor also makes clear that Joseph’s excitement about this glancing encounter is unique: “The usual reply to such a gaze is an unconscious defiance: the unknown nature is on its guard: but the look seems to answer, ‘We are men, let us know each other!’ is, alas! too rare in the world” (86). In normal situations of male attractions, Taylor claims that men would repress “the unknown nature” and force an

“unconscious defiance” on such a gaze; yet here, when Joseph first sees Philip, there is instantaneous understanding, closeness, and belonging as his heart opens to the eye of a stranger

(86).

Two interruptions occur in this scene: first, Joseph’s gazing at men is interrupted by the sight of Philip; second, Joseph’s gaze towards Philip is interrupted by a sudden train crash. The train crash during Joseph and Philip’s first meeting is symbolic of Joseph’s own repressed, inherent queer nature awakening and unleashing, stirred by an interrupting queer presence who will begin to provide the intimacy necessary for Joseph to resist his heteronormative community and arrive at a true self-understanding and maturation of manliness. In a flash, the novel surprises the reader with suspense and drama: with a “sudden thud of the car-wheels,” Joseph jolts and is thrown into the air; “there was a crash, a horrible grinding and splintering sound, and the end of all was a shock, in which his consciousness left him before he could guess its violence” (86). Train crashes were common in nineteenth-century America, and, beginning with

Freud’s writings, have been events packed with meaning. In the book The Railway Journey: The

Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century, Wolfgang Schivelbusch offers a psychoanalytic interpretation of train accidents: “If the normal functioning of the railroad was thus experienced as a natural and safe process, any sudden interruption of that functioning Wagner 52

(which had become second nature) immediately reawakened the memory of the forgotten danger and potential violence: the repressed material returned with a vengeance” (Schivelbusch 130).

Contrary to the relative safety that railway passengers began to expect in the nineteenth century,

Schivelbusch interprets the train crash as an immediate interruption, an awakening of repressed feelings, “destruction […] from the inside” (131).

Viewing Joseph and Philip’s train crash from a psychoanalytic lens, this dramatic event in the novel represents the sudden awakening of Joseph’s repressed queer nature—Philip, acting as an interrupting presence, further jolts Joseph’s life from its normal path, generating new opportunities and possibilities for Joseph’s future. After the accident, when Joseph wakes in

Philip’s arms (rescued from serious injury because of Philip’s quick reflexes), Taylor draws the reader’s attention back to Joseph’s nature and the spark Philip produces: “Joseph longed to open his heart to this man […] towards Philip his heart sprang with an instinct beyond his control”

(88, 89). Instinctually connected to Philip, Taylor frames Philip, like the train accident, as a traumatic but life-changing moment for Joseph: “It was impossible to imagine that [Philip] would not be shot, like a bright thread, through the web of his coming days” (89). In this sense,

Joseph’s traumatic impression is not a debilitating type of a trauma, but a life-changing, empowering change: Joseph feels “warm with kindred blood” and safe in the “silent assurance” of Philip’s “courageous eyes” (87). The novel’s train crash and its connection to Joseph’s sexual attraction for Philip once again anticipates future Freudian ideas about trauma and repressed sexual desires.

Although the novel foregoes discussion of Philip’s interiority or inherent queer nature, the tumbling image of the train crash and how it represents a stirring of new, profound emotions has a similar effect on Philip’s heart as it does Joseph’s. A few days after the crash, Joseph writes Wagner 53 to Philip and asks him to be a groomsman at his marriage to Julia; Philip replies with a letter

(foreshadowing the novel’s later epistolary chapter, which I examine in Chapter Two) and writes,

MY DEAR ASTEN:—Do you remember that curious whirling, falling sensation, when

the car pitched over the edge of the embankment? I felt a return of it on reading your

letter; for you have surprised me beyond measure. (Taylor 100)

In this romantic passage, Philip positions the train crash as a life-altering moment; indeed,

Philip’s life is literally derailed by the intrusion of Joseph’s love. Akin to the emotional highs of romance, Philip’s heart is “pitched over the edge,” literally falling in love with his new fellow

(100). Just thinking of this moment brings Philip to “a return” of that moment, “surprised […] beyond measure” at the intense affection he now feels for Joseph (100). Interestingly,

Schivelbusch details the medical accounts of train crash survivors who “immediately after the accident […] felt completely normal; [but] after one or two days […] became overwhelmed by the memory of the event” (Schivelbusch 137). Philip’s excited response to Joseph’s letter reads as much romantic as it does traumatic, as Taylor continues to use the event of the train crash as a symbolic moment of Joseph and Philip’s sudden, intimate connection.

Additionally, it is only after the train crash that elements of Joseph’s inherent queer nature begin to emerge; for example, after meeting Philip during the accident, Joseph begins to resist the hegemonic religious beliefs of his community. When Reverend Chaffinch visits a recovering Joseph after the train crash, he reveals that Joseph has never expressed “an open profession of faith” in his life (Taylor 90). Reflecting conservative Quaker theology, the

Reverend evokes fears of death and eternal punishment to prod Joseph’s conscience: Wagner 54

“It was a merciful preservation. I hope you feel that it is a solemn thing to look Death in

the face.”

“I am not afraid of death,” Joseph replied.

“You mean the physical pang. But death includes what comes after it, —judgment. That

is a very awful thought […] Have you found your Saviour?”

“I believe in him with all my soul!” Joseph exclaimed; “but you mean something else by

‘finding’ him.” (89-90)

For Joseph, Chaffinch’s religious rhetoric reflects the Reverend’s “habit of control” over his congregants (90). In 1805, Quaker theologian Henry Tuke published Principles of Religion, as professed by the Society of Christians, usually called Quakers; Rufus Jones claims that “there was a hardly a single Quaker home which did not own a copy [by the middle of the nineteenth century], and it became one of the greatest evangelical influences” (Dandelion 84). This important religious volume emphasizes the evangelical Quaker belief in “a future state of rewards and punishments in which the great distinction will be made between the righteous and the wicked,” and it is this very threat of eternal punishment with which Chaffinch tries to scare

Joseph (Tuke 2). Yet, Joseph insists that his belief “mean[s] something else” than Chaffinch’s outlook (90).

Chaffinch’s question “Have you found your Saviour?” is significantly placed here; for

Joseph, his most recent savior is Philip, who indeed saves him from death (89). And, according to Karen Lystra’s claim that nineteenth-century Americans “[made] deities of each other in the new theology of romantic love,” Joseph’s replies to Chaffinch have a double meaning; Joseph does “believe” in his savior “with all [his] soul,” but has a different (queer) interpretation of

“finding” the divine son of man than his Reverend does (Lystra 8, Taylor 90). Interestingly, the Wagner 55 novel directly connects this religious resistance to Joseph’s inherent nature: “a nature so seemingly open to the influences of the Spirit, yet inflexibly closed to certain points of doctrine, was something of a problem to [Rev. Chaffinch]” (90). Joseph’s queer nature is inextricably molded to his resistance of the community’s religious beliefs, including the aforementioned belief in eternal punishment and the belief in accessible absolute truth:

“There is but One Truth!” exclaimed Mr. Chaffinch, very severely.

“Yes,” Joseph answered, reverently, “and that is only perfectly known to God” (90).

Joseph resists an evangelical Quaker view that rests in “the truth and credibility” of the biblical scriptures, instead believing that only God can perfectly know truth (Tuke 9). The novel posits that, for Joseph, part of his inherent queer nature is to reject religious uniformity and adhere to his own personal understanding of God and spirituality. Now that Philip has arrived in his life as an interrupting presence, even a savior, Joseph begins to resist the religious bonds that once held him down. Although the novel offers a “born this way” model of inherent queer nature, it also insists that an individual needs an interrupting queer presence to begin resisting heteronormativity and to embody one’s true, instinctual personhood. These ideas will become clearer as I examine more of the religious imagery in Joseph and Philip’s relationship.

God in Jeans10

With a queer presence in his life, Joseph begins to find ways of expressing his inherent queer nature; even his wife Julia knows that Philip is Joseph’s “particular friend, your hero, for aught I know, your pattern of virtue and character, and all that is manly and noble” (Taylor 166).

Although he previously lacked the language to cry for companionship, his relationship with

Philip spurs the words to describe his male-male longings. Specifically, Taylor uses religious

10 See the song “God in Jeans” by Ryan Beatty, a contemporary example of male-male intimacy described with religious metaphors (Boy in Jeans, 2018). Wagner 56 language when depicting the affection between Joseph and Philip, mirroring the nineteenth- century context of highly spiritualized romantic relationships. Although D’Emilio, Freedman, and Lystra describe this romantic spirituality between men and women, Joseph and His Friend uses similar language to create space for male-male queer relationships. The novel uses Christian religious language, metaphors, and imagery to insist upon the inherent spirituality of queer natures, arguing that, for men who are inherently different, closeness to God is achieved through male-male affection; in doing so, Taylor queers nineteenth-century expectations of marriage and companionship for men and evangelical notions of Quaker Christianity. I maintain that, because the metaphors Joseph and His Friend employs are uniquely Christian, the theology the novel asserts is accordingly a (queered) Christian theology.

Even before Joseph and Philip meet, Taylor places romantic love in a religious framework, relating the experience of falling in love to a spiritual conversion. In Chapter I, when

Joseph asks Elwood what love is, Elwood makes a curious connection to religion: “A fellow must feel it himself, as they say of experiencing religion; he must get converted, or he’ll never know” (Taylor 13). According to this understanding of romantic desire, an individual has no control over the experience of falling in love; it is a subjective feeling, and one must be converted by an outside force, “or he’ll never know” what love truly is (13). Joseph’s didactic response also lays a foundation for Taylor’s literary model of love and friendship: “Yes! […] indeed, I think so. It’s only an increase of what we all feel towards some persons. I have been hoping, latterly, that it might come to me, but—but—” (13). Here, Taylor posits that romantic love is “only an increase of what we all feel towards some persons”—the same emotions of friendship but heightened (13). Taylor’s biographer Paul Wermuth reflects this idea when he argues that “Friendship and love are, after all, different degrees of the same feeling, not different Wagner 57 feelings” (Wermuth 99). Joseph and His Friend presents an intriguing model of a spectrum of friendship and romance. This understanding of romance differs from Taylor’s nineteenth-century context, which relegated rigid courtship rules and rituals that distinguished between friendship and romance (Lystra 1). In this sense, then, Taylor’s novel resists traditional male-female approaches to romance and creates room for male-male love guided by a spectrum of affection

(not unlike Sedgwick’s homosocial-homosexual continuum) rather than the nineteenth-century rituals of heterosexual courtship.

One of the central locations in the novel when Philip and Joseph discuss a theology of queer love is Chapter XX, “A Crisis;” unique to Taylor’s model of inherent identity, the novel emphasizes that spirituality is a central aspect of an inherently queer nature. Frustrated with his failing marriage to Julia, overcome with anger and grief, and tottering on the verge of hopelessness, Joseph stands at the bank of a cliff overlooking a river and considers suicide:

“What were his better impulses, if men persisted in finding them evil? What was life, yoked to such treachery and selfishness? Life had been to him a hope, an inspiration, a sound, enduring joy; now it might never be so again! Then what a release were death!” (Taylor 218). Joseph’s

“better impulses,” still considered “evil” by his insular community, remain repressed as Joseph is

“yoked to such treachery and selfishness” in his marriage to Julia, and he ponders death as the final solution. It is here where Philip, again framed as Joseph’s divine savior, comes to his rescue:

He was gazing down […] when a step came upon the dead leaves. He turned and saw

Philip, moving stealthily towards him, pale, with outstretched hand. They looked at each

other for a moment without speaking. Wagner 58

“I guess your thought, Philip,” Joseph said. “But the things that are easiest to do are

sometimes the most impossible.”

“The bravest man may allow a fancy to pass through his mind, Joseph, which only the

coward will carry into effect.”

“I am not a coward!” Joseph exclaimed.

Philip took his hand, drew him nearer, and flinging his arms around him, held him to his

heart.

Then they sat down, side by side. (218)

In Taylor’s touching prose, Philip pulls his friend close and, for the second time in this novel, saves him from an impending death. The way that Taylor depicts Philip with “outstretched hand” is reminiscent of the biblical scene of Jesus rescuing Peter from drowning, the picture of a savior who, like Philip, “immediately reached out his hand and took hold of him” (Matthew 14:31).

This image of the hand is also a featured motif in romantic friendship fiction. Nissen claims, “In the nineteenth century, the primary physical symbol of male friendship and communion was the hand and its encounters with other hands and bodies,” and suggests “the hand could carry a more erotic charge” (Nissen 35, 36). Taylor imbues the image of the hand with both spiritual and sexual meaning, and both come “outstretched” to Joseph’s rescue (218).

After framing Philip as Joseph’s Christlike savior, the novel includes an in-depth, philosophical conversation between Joseph and Philip that advocates for both the inherent spirituality of queer natures and the superiority of those natures compared to normative individuals. After critiquing the “monstrous” bonds of marriage that keep Joseph married to Julia and prevent his own relationship with Mrs. Hopeton, Philip explicitly makes a spiritual appeal about himself and Joseph: “I said that Faith, like Law, was fashioned for the average man: then Wagner 59 there must be a loftier faith, a juster law, for the men—and the women—who cannot shape themselves according to the common-place patterns of society, —who were born with instincts, needs, knowledge, and rights—ay, rights!—of their own!” (Taylor 219). Philip believes that faith, like the law, was created for the “average man”—the men who, like the novel describes earlier, possess a “mechanical faith” and follow the traditional manhood path of marriage and fatherhood (219, 31). Philip, however, argues that he and Joseph are not the “average man”— they are men with different natures, and he believes there “must be a loftier faith, a juster law” for them (219). Furthermore, Philip argues that normative community traditions are only

“common-place patterns of society,” not absolute, divine truths or rules (219). Reminiscent of the novel’s earlier comparison of Joseph’s difference from his community, Philip makes a case for people with a “nature beyond the ordinary necessities, [who] hungered for the taste of higher things” (31). By emphasizing a “higher” and “loftier” spiritual compass, the novel proposes that queer individuals are in fact spiritually superior to normative communities. Philip assigns an inherent nature to these spiritually superior individuals as well; some men and women do not— indeed, cannot—align themselves with normative communities, and Philip’s specific use of the word “cannot” points to an essentialist model of identity (219). By claiming that some people are

“born with instincts, needs, knowledge, and rights” that are different (and superior) from others,

Philip attaches a spiritual component to a model of inherent queer natures (219).11

Joseph’s response to Philip’s arguments continues the belief that people born with inherent queer natures are more spiritually connected to God than their surrounding evangelical

11 The use of the word “rights” here is also interesting; Robert Martin argues that Taylor is “quite explicit in [his] adoption of a political stance toward homosexuality” (Martin 25). While I believe it is a bit reductive to think that Taylor has a specific homosexual political agenda in a time before the categorization and political organization of the LGBTQ community, I do agree that Taylor is hinting at the inherent, self-evident political rights of queer people (as Taylor conceived of queer) in American society. Wagner 60 neighborhood; their conversation also positions God as a divine force who safeguards queer individuals, instead of working for their destruction. Toying with the idea of running away from

Pennsylvania to a Western utopia (I further analyze this idea in Chapter Two of this thesis),

Joseph gives his own appeal:

I have been trying, Philip, to discover a law superior to that under which we suffer, and I

think I have found it. If it be true that ignorance is equally punished with guilt; if causes

and consequences, in which there is neither pity nor justice, govern our lives, —then

what keeps our souls from despair but the infinite pity and perfect justice of God? Yes,

here is the difference between human law and divine law! This makes obedience safer

than rebellion. If you and I, Philip, stand above the level of common natures, feeling

higher needs and claiming other rights, let us shape them according to the law which is

above, not that which is below us! (220)

Joseph makes clear that he and Philip are currently “suffer[ing]”—that there are “causes and consequences,” forces that govern men’s lives but have “neither pity nor justice” (220). This belief reinforces Joseph’s rejection of his community’s conservative theological beliefs.

Nineteenth-century Quakerism advocated for the doctrine of God’s sovereignty, his complete control over everything that happens on earth: “who hath all power in his hands […] He knoweth our most secret actions, words, and thoughts” (Tuke 1). Joseph rejects this evangelical view of

God’s sovereignty, instead believing in a world with random and unjust “causes,” a belief which mirrors Philip’s spiritual worldview of a “power which controls our lives [and] is pitiless, unrelenting! (220). Yet, despite these “pitiless, unrelenting” forces, Joseph adheres to “the infinite pity and perfect justice of God,” believing they are the only thing that “keeps our souls Wagner 61 from despair” (220). To Joseph, God is not a random force who is working against them and causing them to suffer, but one who is actually safeguarding them from further suffering.

With God on their side, Joseph believes that he and Philip are spiritually superior than their evangelical community, and he pleads with Philip for them to claim their divine instincts, knowledge, and rights, in closer communion with God than normative individuals. Joseph,

Philip, and other men and women with queer natures ascribe to a “divine” sense of the world— they are not beholden to society’s traditions and prejudices but possess “higher needs” that heteronormativity, both in religion and marriage, cannot fulfill (Taylor 220). Hoping in the existence of “a Divine government,” a political system with laws that do not oppress with prejudice, Joseph advocates that they “lean” on God, standing “above” those with “common natures” (221). The difference between “human law” and “divine law,” Joseph believes, is the pity and justice of a divine government; although Joseph and Philip must currently suffer through an earthly system that perpetuates injustice to those with inherent queer natures, they are ultimately vindicated by their close connection to God: “Yes, I say again, the very wrong that has come upon us makes God necessary!” (221). Joseph queers an evangelical Quaker understanding of “Christ’s coming,” in which Christ will return to earth, punish sinful unbelievers, and establish a new theocratic government; Joseph’s queer Christian theology posits that God will

“pity” the so-called sinners like himself and bring “justice” (conceived as validation, not condemnation) to their suffering (Tuke 29, Taylor 221). In these paragraphs, Taylor presents a radical, bold model of inherent queer nature: queer individuals are spiritually superior to normative communities, and God is a force who works for and advocates for queer folk; his divine government, the novel argues, will ultimately provide “perfect justice” to those whom society is prejudiced against (220). Wagner 62

Along with presenting a case for spiritual inherent queer natures, Joseph and His Friend continues to use multiple religious metaphors and imagery in order to depict the spirituality of queer male-male affection; just like Joseph needed Philip, an interrupting queer presence, in order to resist religious hegemony, the novel posits that intimacy is needed between two men in order to create a queer spiritual superiority. Two Christian metaphors are key here in depicting the spirituality of male-male affection: baptism and the body of Christ. Taylor employs both images in Joseph and Philip’s relationship to claim that their queer love for one another is divine.

The baptism of the novel takes place in Chapter XXI, “Under the Water.” On a countryside picnic with Lucy, Julia, Philip’s sister Madeline, and Mr. and Mrs. Hopeton (Joseph is absent, scouting out the Amaranth piece of land), Mr. and Mrs. Hopeton’s boat tips over in the rushing river water, and Philip dives in to save his lost love. In a dramatic turn of events, Philip and Mrs.

Hopeton begin to drown: “His arm slackened, and they sank slowly together. Heart and brain were illuminated with blinding light, and the swift succession of his thoughts compressed and aged into the fragment of a second” (Taylor 234). Under the water, time freezes for Philip, and he fantasizes about his union with Mrs. Hopeton: “Yes, she was his now: clasping him as he clasped, their hearts beating against each other; with ever slower pulsations, until they should freeze into one” (234). But in the midst of this intensity, Philip thinks of his fellow Joseph and the manly love they share. The novel states,

But, even as his mind accepted [death], and with a sense of perfect peace, he heard

Joseph’s voice, saying, “We must shape our lives according to the law which is above,

not that which is below us.” Through the air and the water, on the very rock which now

overhung his head, he again saw Joseph bending, and himself creeping towards him with

outstretched hand. Ha! who was the coward now? And again Joseph spake, and his words Wagner 63

were: “The very wrong that has come upon us makes God necessary.” God? Then how

would God in his wisdom fashion their future life? Must they sweep eternally, locked in

an unsevering embrace, like Paolo and Francesca, around some dreary circle of Hell? Or

must the manner of entering that life together be the act to separate them eternally? […]

He pressed his lips to Mrs. Hopeton’s unconscious brow, his heart saying, “Never, never

again!” released himself by a sudden, powerful effort, seized her safely, as a practiced

swimmer, shot into light and air, and made for the shallower side of the stream. (235)

This passage represents a change of heart for Philip. Traditional Protestant theology frames the act of baptism as a rebirth into a new spiritual existence: “We were buried therefore with [Christ

Jesus] by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead […] we too might walk in newness of life” (Romans 6:4). Just as baptism is a metaphorical sacrament that signals a rebirth of spiritual life, Philip’s submersion in water represents his own baptism, dying to his old ways (loving Mrs. Hopeton) and reemerging to a new, better life (loving Joseph). In what he believes are the final seconds of his life, Philip fantasizes a moment of his past, the moment when, with outstretched hand, he saved Joseph from his near-death. In this scene, the novel uses Philip’s vision and reverses the moment; now, it is Joseph who is indirectly saving

Philip. The novel’s reference to Paola and Francesca in Dante’s Inferno (a religious and romantic piece of literature itself), “locked in an unsevering embrace,” parallels Philip’s own “clasping” with Mrs. Hopeton (235, 234). Yet, in his moment of submersion, Philip makes a conscious choice: “Never, never again!” (235). Instead of remaining eternally with Mrs. Hopeton, finally his, Philip shoots up to the surface, prodded to do so by the thought of his friend Joseph.

In exclaiming “Never, never again!” Philip resolves to move on from his lingering love with Mrs. Hopeton and fully embrace the new queer, spiritual intimacy he finds with Joseph Wagner 64

(Taylor 235). In this decision, Philip rejects the earlier logic of the novel epitomized in Joseph’s choice to move toward marriage with a woman. Philip’s decision to reject heterosexual marriage and channel his affections solely for Joseph is a transgressive act, denying the notion expressed earlier in the novel that a mature man must fall in love with a woman. Baptized into a new life,

Philip never again mentions his old love for Mrs. Hopeton in the rest of the novel; later, to

Joseph, he claims, “you have saved one friend from more than disgrace and sorrow! I do not know what might have come, but you called me back from the brink of an awful, doubtful eternity! You have given me an infinite loss and an infinite gain!” (287). Although he lost Mrs.

Hopeton forever, Philip achieved an “infinite gain” in his relationship with Joseph—a relationship which, as I shall soon analyze, leaves him intimate with God, as well (287).

Along with baptism, another traditionally Christian metaphor that the novel uses to insist upon the inherent spirituality of queer natures and male-male affection is the image of the body of Christ. As the novel progresses and the drama of Julia’s accidental suicide and Joseph’s false accusation of murder resides, Philip’s now-singular affection for Joseph grows, and Joseph reciprocates the love in their relationship. In Chapter XXXI, “Beginning Another Life,” Philip spends the evening with his friend after Joseph’s pronouncement of innocence: “He drew his chair near to Philip’s, their hands closed upon each other, and they were entirely happy in the tender and perfect manly love with united them (Taylor 334). Taylor continues loading their affectionate relationship with religious themes as well:

“I think,” said Philip, “the world needs a new code of ethics […] What if each of us were,

as I half suspect, as independent as a planet, yet all held together in one immune system?

Then the central force must be our close dependence on God, as I have learned to feel it

through you.” Wagner 65

“Through me!” Joseph exclaimed.

“Do you suppose we can be so near each other without giving and taking? Let us not try

to get upon a common ground of faith or action: it is a thousand times more delightful to

discover that we now and then reach the same point by different paths.” (Taylor 335)

In this passage, Taylor advances the queer Christian theology he articulated earlier in the novel and demonstrates how two queer men are closely connected to God. Earlier, the novel expressed the idea that those born with inherent difference are more spiritually attuned than evangelical communities, but here Taylor revises his earlier idea and posits that men can feel a close divine presence through another man’s love. In utopian language, Philip dreams of a world with “a new code of ethics,” mirroring Joseph’s earlier discussion of a divine government (335). He imagines

“each of us”—perhaps just himself and Joseph, perhaps all individuals with different queer natures—“all held together in one immune system,” “independent” of each other like planets yet connected by a “central force” (335).12 Taylor invokes scientific metaphors, like gravitational planetary orbits or the collective resistance of biological systems against viruses, to argue for the complex intimacy and naturalness of Joseph and Philip’s love. Here, Taylor also draws on New

Testament ecclesiology, specifically St. Paul’s doctrine that the church acts as the body of Christ:

“For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ […] Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it” (1 Corinthians 12:12, 27). Just like this image of the church, Joseph and Philip are two-in-one, individual members comprising a collective body. Philip declares that he has learned to feel “our close dependence on God” through Joseph—an idea that Joseph is initially

12 While not in the confines of this project, the connection between scientific and religious thinking in nineteenth- century America—another strong binary, like religion and queerness, present in the twenty-first century—is a worthy subject of future analysis for this novel. Wagner 66 taken aback at. Philip explains the “giving and taking” of their “near” relationship, a codependence that mirrors their dependence on God (335). Philip admits that even if he and

Joseph take different paths in life (foreshadowing Joseph’s upcoming journey out West), he trusts that they will “reach the same point,” united in their affection for one another (335).

Taylor expands on this image of Joseph and Philip as a singular body with the picture that the two men’s lives are expanding circles that intersect and interconnect. The novel reads,

[Joseph] stayed with Philip a day or two longer, and every evening the fire made a cheery

accompaniment to the deepest and sweetest confidences of their hearts, now pausing as if

to listen, now rapidly murmuring some happy, inarticulate secret of its own. As each

gradually acquired full possession of the other’s past, the circles of their lives, as Philip

said, were reciprocally widened; but as the horizon spread, it seemed to meet a clearer

sky. Their eyes were no longer fixed on the single point of time wherein they breathed.

Whatever pain remained, melted before them and behind them into atmospheres of

resignation and wiser patience. One gave his courage and experience, the other his pure

instinct, his faith and aspiration; and a new harmony came from the closer interfusion of

sweetness and strength. (337)

Philip and Joseph’s relationship is a clear portrait of self-sacrificial love and mutual encouragement; the two men are affectionately connected to each other in an almost symbiotic relationship. Their “closer interfusion” of patience, courage, instinct, faith, and other virtues create a “clearer sky” and “the deepest and sweetest confidences of their hearts” for the two friends (337). Depicting Joseph and Philip as widening circles which outwardly grow, Taylor reinforces the interconnection of the body of Christ image; indeed, the picture of two male bodies in one creates a sexual meaning as much as it does a spiritual one. Wagner 67

Taylor’s queer Christian theology relies on the intimate relationship between two men in order for spiritual communion to be achieved; even if spirituality is an essential part of inherent queer natures, it requires a relational channel in order to generate and create such intimacy. This idea is most clear when Philip writes to Joseph out West, and gives what may perhaps be one of the theses of the entire novel: “Then, parted as we are, I see our souls lie open to each other in equal light and warmth, and I feel that the way to God lies through the love of man” (345). Here,

Taylor provides his reader with a succinct statement that Joseph and Philip’s relationship has been depicting all along: “the way to God lies through the love of man” (345). Taylor’s double meaning here is clever: “man” could mean humanity in general, but in the novel’s context, it can also refer to “man” as a specific, gendered individual; not only is the “way to God” found through generally caring for all humans but also specifically through male-male intimacy (345).

For men with inherent queer natures like Joseph and Philip, intimacy with God—“the way” to

God, in fact—relies on the “love of man,” not, as the novel argues, a normative life of religious uniformity and heterosexual marriage (345). By the end of the novel, Joseph’s inherent queer nature finally achieves the “knowledge of self,” and he does so through the “equal light and warmth” of his friendship with Philip (68, 345). As each other’s intimate companions, Joseph and Philip end the novel with a love as fierce as religious devotion.

Conclusion: “God’s Wonderful System is Imperfect”

In Chapter One, I have argued that Joseph and His Friend presents a unique nineteenth- century model of queer identity; specifically, the novel posits an essentialist belief in inherent queer natures, instilled in an individual since birth. Those with inherent queer natures are distinct from their heteronormative communities, built on traditions of religious uniformity, heterosexual marriage, and biological reproduction. However, in order for someone with a queer nature to Wagner 68 fully live out their self-identity, a queer companion is needed, an interrupting presence who provides a channel for expression and intimacy. A curious particularity in Taylor’s model of inherent queer natures is spirituality; Joseph and His Friend depicts queer folk as spiritually superior to their normative, evangelical communities. However, this close spiritual communion with the divine relies on male-male affection; for men with inherent queer natures, “the way to

God lies through the love of men” (Taylor 345). Although Taylor’s queer Christian theology is bold for its time and arguably worthy of celebration, it rides on the shoulders of misogyny; the novel demonizes heterosexual women in order to elevate the “higher needs” and “loftier faith” of queer men (220). Furthermore, the novel cannot envision a world where queer men can achieve a satisfying marriage with a woman, making the text potentially biphobic as well. Taylor’s faults complicate the novel’s presentation of queer identity and reveal both an intriguing and troublesome depiction of nineteenth-century American queerness, a particularity unique for its cultural moment.

The end of the novel seems to set up a stereotypical happy ending—with Julia dead and

Joseph reunited with Philip in Pennsylvania, their love stronger than ever, a contemporary reader may expect a satisfying conclusion. Yet, even in the last paragraph of the novel, Joseph and His

Friend upends expectations and leaves the reader with questions. After Joseph returns from his

Westward travels, he moves back to his farm and Philip’s neighboring foundry; but, as Philip overlooks their quaint valley, he foresees the unexpected marriage of his younger sister,

Madeline, to Joseph. The novel’s final paragraph, a rare moment of Philip’s interiority, reads,

They are swiftly coming to the knowledge of each other; will it take Joseph further from

my heart, or bring him nearer? It ought to fill me with perfect joy, yet there is a little sting

of pain somewhere. My life had settled down so peacefully into what seemed a Wagner 69

permanent form; with Madeline to make a home and brighten it for me, and Joseph to

give me the precious intimacy of a man’s love, so different from woman’s, yet so pure

and perfect! They have destroyed my life, although they do not guess it. Well, I must be

vicariously happy, warmed in my lonely sphere by the far radiation of their nuptial bliss,

seeing a faint reflection of some parts of myself in their children, nay, claiming and

making them mine as well, if it is meant that my own blood should not beat in other

hearts. But will this be sufficient? No! either sex is incomplete alone, and a man’s full life

shall be mine! Ah, you unconscious lovers, you simple-souled children, that know not

what you are doing, I shall be even with you in the end! The world is a failure, God’s

wonderful system is imperfect, if there is not now living a noble woman to bless me with

her love, strengthen me with her self-sacrifice, purify me with her sweeter and clearer

faith! I will wait: but I shall find her! (357)

This passage seems a reversal of what Philip was feeling a few chapters prior; instead of perfect contentment and warmth, Philip claims that Joseph, his dear friend, and Madeline, his own sister,

“have destroyed my life” (357). Occupying a “lonely sphere,” Philip considers to himself that he could be “vicariously happy” in their marriage, helping parent their children, but deep inside

Philip knows this will not “be sufficient” (357). What are readers to make of this sudden ending?

Nissen observes that this “marriage has been given scant narrative preparation” throughout the novel; yet, he also argues that the tendency in romantic friendship literature “for men to marry the female relative of a beloved male friend is yet another manifestation of a type of emotional flexibility” unique to the nineteenth century (Nissen 45, 44). This sudden marriage also resembles the erotic triangles that Sedgwick discusses in Between Men. Much like a love triangle between two men and a woman wherein “the bond that links the two rivals is as intense and Wagner 70 potent as the bond that links either of the rivals to the beloved,” perhaps Joseph’s marriage to

Madeline is the only way acceptable in his culture to remain close to Philip, a sort of proxy marriage that channels Joseph and Philip’s affection for one another through a brotherly-in-law relationship. (Sedgwick 21). Yet, I believe this interpretation is too easy and inconsistent with the rest of the novel. In his final sentences, Philip yearns for a wife of his own: “I will wait: but I shall find her!” (357). Yet, readers have just finished a novel which thoroughly critiqued heterosexual marriage and advocated for the spiritual superiority of male-male affection. What is going on?

In this final paragraph, the novel turns unexpectedly pessimistic—but only for a moment.

Readers observe a lonely Philip faced with the same pressures Joseph once had during his spiritual coming-out moment when he also resolved to find a woman to marry. In a sense, the end of the book finds Philip restarting the cycle of men with inherent queer natures who enter unsatisfying heterosexual relationships. Yet, I also think Taylor is including a disguised critique in Philip’s words: “The world is a failure, God’s wonderful system is imperfect” (357). Although

Philip attaches an “if” statement to these claims, I believe we can interpret them as literal arguments—God’s wonderful system of heterosexual marriage, as the novel depicts, is imperfect; and the world, which throws constant injustice and prejudice towards queer people,

“is a failure” (357). Although the future may seem pessimistic for Philip, the novel has already presented a spiritual solution: a divine government, with laws and rights that accord with natural queer individuals. The reader, like Philip, is left longing for a better, kinder world—but what does this look like? This line of utopian thinking is the thread I now analyze in Chapter Two.

Wagner 71

CHAPTER TWO: “HOW FAIR THE VALLEY SHONE:” QUEER UTOPIAN PATHWAYS IN THE GILDED AGE

All is right in the meadow When I’m lying next to my fellow -Troye Sivan

Introduction: The Incorporation of America

In Chapter One, I examine Bayard Taylor’s 1870 novel Joseph and His Friend from a queer religious angle and argue that the book posits a complex model of queer identity.

Combining elements of both essentialism and constructivism, the novel insists that some individuals are born with an inherent nature of difference but require an interrupting queer presence in order to resist heteronormativity and express one’s true personhood. The novel includes curious particularities about what these inherent natures consist of. Specifically, it suggests that queer men are spiritually superior to their religious heteronormative communities; part of their queer nature is an inherent, close connection to the divine. Using Christian metaphors and religious imagery, Taylor modulates the romantic rhetoric of his time and uses spiritualized language about love to create space for male-male affections and desire. By contending that male-male affection directly leads to a closer spiritual communion with God,

Taylor queers both nineteenth-century notions of romance and evangelical Quaker theology and envisions a world where queer men and women are allowed to thrive, shielded from the world’s prejudice. But what does this queer world actually look like? In Chapter Two, I add a geographical dimension to my argument of Joseph and His Friend, examining how the novel envisions a space where queer individuals can flourish, expressing their spiritual and sexual desires with one another.

This chapter deals with the novel’s second implied question for its reader: How and where does a queer person live in America? Situated in a Gilded Age context, Joseph and His Wagner 72

Friend argues that Joseph and Philip’s present moment in Pennsylvania is not enough for them as queer individuals. Joseph and His Friend engages in utopian thinking—it looks back on the past, idealizing visions of Transcendentalism and a non-industrialized America, in order to imagine a future utopian world. Inspired by Taylor’s global travels and looking back at

Transcendental beliefs, Joseph and His Friend trades in ideal visions of Arcadia as Joseph and

Philip imagine better worlds for themselves. Presenting urban environments as crowded, constricting locations representative of reproductive heterosexuality, the novel vilifies women in its critique of heterosexuality and urbanity. Joseph and His Friend presents various queer utopian pathways to the reader—specific ways for a nineteenth-century queer person to live in

America. Philip’s path, which I term queer escape, encourages a Westward migration to

America’s frontier in order to create a utopian community away from the constricting influences of women and the city; this fantasy relies on white privilege and ignores the racial realities of the nineteenth-century American West. Joseph’s pathway, queer domesticity, rejects this Westward movement in favor of a dependence on God to suffer through the pains of normative society, choosing a conservative married life. The novel resolves the tensions between these two queer utopian pathways by offering a third route, which I term queer transfiguration: this path depends on escape in order to fully reclaim or transform domesticity—that is, the novel argues that men with an inherent queer difference must make a utopian migration in order to discover the freedom and light within themselves, thus completing a there-and-back-again journey that provides them with the realization and the power to cultivate a space for queer life in Eastern

America.

To situate the novel in its historical moment, I would like to begin this chapter by looking at an important passage from the text of Joseph and His Friend that highlights the spatial and Wagner 73 cultural forces at work in Taylor’s fiction. During Julia and Joseph’s wedding celebration, Mr.

Blessing gives a toast to his new son-in-law that reveals his outlook on his daughter’s marriage and its place in the growing Gilded Age American economy:

On this happy occasion […] the elements of national power and prosperity are

represented. My son-in-law, Mr. Asten, is a noble specimen of the agricultural

population,—the free American yeomanry; my daughter, if I may be allowed to say it in

the presence of so many bright eyes and blooming cheeks, is a representative child of the

city, which is the embodiment of the nation’s action and enterprise. The union of the two

is the movement of our life. The city gives to the country as the ocean gives the cloud to

the mountain-springs: the country gives to the city as the streams flow back to the ocean

[…] Then we have, as our highest honor, the representatives of the political system under

which city and country flourish alike. The wings of our eagle must be extended over this

fortunate house today, for here are the strong Claws which seize and guard its treasures!

(113)

Mr. Blessing’s wedding toast presents an idealized picture of mid-nineteenth-century America and its developing economy with a symbiotic relationship between city and country, enterprise and freedom, labor and yeomanry. Published five years after the end of the Civil War, Joseph and His Friend lies in a critical moment of national development and cultural changes; the novel acts as a reflection and response to the rapid nationwide changes occurring in mid-nineteenth- century America. Mr. Blessing’s speech in particular reveals the Gilded Age development of industry and its tense relationship with American agrarianism.

The 1870s was a vital period in the transformation of America, when the forces of race, gender, class, and labor began to shift into new forms for the burgeoning country. One of the Wagner 74 most significant of these historical trends is the increasing industrialization of American society, especially in Northern cities; as Mr. Blessing states, the “city” is the “embodiment of the nation’s action and enterprise” (Taylor 113). Alan Trachtenberg discusses the growth of the nineteenth- century city and its industries in his book The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age. Trachtenberg argues that nineteenth-century America featured “the expansion of an industrial capitalist system across the continent,” giving rise to “rapid mechanization” and the creation of the metropolis (Trachtenberg 3, 39). Cities like New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia

(key for Taylor’s novel) experienced “absolute increases in population,” and the American metropolis exploded due to the “thickening regional networks of transport and communication”

(113). As railroads connected urban centers of trade, big industries such as coal, oil, steel, and iron began to establish factories and cut through once peaceful landscapes (Richardson). The upsurge of mechanization, urbanization, and industrialization shifted the metaphorical landscape of American culture—and began to transform its natural landscape as well.

While some Americans celebrated the new industrial changes which, in their view, served

American progress, many citizens were equally as fearful and skeptical of the nation’s new machines. The “free American yeomanry,” as Mr. Blessing describes them, were the backbone of the nation’s agricultural economy; however, the “power and prosperity” of industrialized cities began to creep in on “the noble specimen of the agricultural population” (Taylor 113). Like

John Gast’s 1872 painting American Progress depicts, railroad tracks and telegraph lines began to emerge onto agrarian land (and out into the Western frontier, as I will discuss later in this chapter). Though Mr. Blessing heralds an American “political system under which city and country flourish alike,” Joseph and His Friend, I argue in this chapter, offers a scathing critique Wagner 75 on spreading industrialism and looks back to a pastoral ideal in order to imagine a queer, utopian future.

It is in the midst of these combatting social forces—between city and country— that

Taylor writes and publishes Joseph and His Friend. Labeled the Laureate of the Gilded Age by biographer Richmond Croom Beatty, Taylor comments on the above historical context in his novel, mirroring and modifying its ideas and consequences. Taylor’s novel is effectively a negotiation of these nationwide changes, navigating various routes about how a queer person will be able to live under these new visions of America. In this chapter, I first contend that Taylor was influenced by Emersonian Transcendentalism through his background as a travel writer.

Although it may seem unrelated to a discussion about the Gilded Age and the American West, I emphasize that this biographical context is important in that it gives Joseph and His Friend an ideology to look back on. Part of the novel’s utopian thinking is a backward glance at passing

American lifestyles and thoughts, an idealization of Transcendental experience and a natural, agrarian lifestyle. I then move on to analyze the novel’s critical portrait of the city in order to show, as Leo Marx describes, the interruption of the machine in the garden. Lastly, the third section of this chapter argues that the novel portrays the American West as a queer utopian space and offers different pathways or possibilities for men to live out their queer inherent natures in nineteenth-century America. Whereas I foregrounded historical context about romantic friendships at the beginning of Chapter One, in Chapter Two I intentionally weave historical context throughout my textual analysis in order to help walk the reader through the many facets of nineteenth-century America with which Joseph and His Friend engages.

The ideas I cover in this chapter are not only important from a historical literary perspective but from a contemporary queer perspective as well. As I discuss in the Introduction, Wagner 76 today’s American queer community is inundated with utopian images of the city; for many decades, literature and media have framed the metropolis as a safe haven for queer individuals, a utopian space away from the conservative restrictions of rural America. While this idea has become influential in our mindsets about queer American history, recent scholars have begun to question the metronormativity of queer discourses (see Halberstam and Herring). I present

Joseph and His Friend as a novel which can speak to these conversations about anti-urban queer spaces. Encountering a much different approach to the city and queer utopia, the novel radically upturns our contemporary expectations and gives us a glimpse of an unfamiliar, strange historical moment in America’s sexual past. This chapter examines the specific utopian thinking that

Joseph and Philip engage with in the text. The argument I develop reveals that the novel actively seeks better, future worlds of queer utopia, and the answers it gives can also provide us with inspiration in our contemporary moment to imagine unique possibilities for our own queer utopian futures.

A final quick note on terminology for this chapter: I frequently use the term ‘utopia,’ for which I would like to provide a succinct definition of how I conceive of this idea. First, I draw major inspiration from Muñoz’s book Cruising Utopia. Muñoz envisions utopia as “the hopes of a collective, an emergent group,” and he himself draws from the philosophies of Ernst Bloch of the Frankfurt School, who associates utopia with hope: “Not only hope’s affect (with its pendant, fear) but even more so, hope’s methodology (with its pendant, memory) dwells in the region of the not-yet, a place where entrance and, above all, final content are marked by an enduring indeterminacy” (Muñoz 3). Much of how I see utopia is rooted in these ideas of hope and longing, the yearning for a space—physical or incorporeal—where freedom of expression is celebrated and where past struggles disintegrate. I am also influenced by the literary idea of Wagner 77

Arcadia. A Classical term that has evolved from Greek antiquity and through the English

Renaissance, Arcadia is the vision of “rural serenity,” an “ideal way of pastoral life” (Cuddon

50). This idea promulgated into nineteenth-century America, especially through the Hudson

River School of painters (see Thomas Cole’s painting The Arcadian or Pastoral State). As I hope to argue in this chapter, Taylor’s vision of utopia is largely centered around a similar methodology of hope and an analogous idea of pastoral Arcadia.

Travels and Transcendentalism

A major reason why Joseph and His Friend reads so critically of the industrialized metropolis is due to Taylor’s youthful encounters with exciting, natural landscapes and

Transcendental philosophy, experiences and ideas that he would continue to look back on as his life progressed into the Gilded Age. As a nineteenth-century travel writer, Taylor was strongly influenced by the exoticization and homoeroticism of distant lands, including the American

West; Joseph and His Friend reflects Taylor’s fondness for landscape and space and exposes an

Emersonian Transcendentalist influence on his non-fiction and fiction writing. Trading in fantastical visions of Arcadia, Joseph and His Friend suggests that natural spaces are more accommodating for queer natures than urban spaces. Before he wrote Joseph and His Friend and his three previous fiction novels, Taylor built a literary career as a travel writer, and his worldwide explorations contributed to both his appreciation and exoticization of foreign lands. In his article “The results of locomotion: Bayard Taylor and the travel lecture in the mid- nineteenth-century United States,” Tom F. Wright describes the popular lecture circuit of 1800s

America, which, “alongside lectures on temperance and ethical conduct,” featured widely loved public talks given by “returning travelers delivering eyewitness accounts of exotic locations;” the travelling writer lecture circuit grew to become an “emerging mass entertainment culture” in the Wagner 78 nineteenth century (Wright 111). Blending “natural history, popular anthropology, comparative politics, autobiography, [and] landscape description,” travel lectures were at their height from

1840 to 1870, before “visual technologies diluted its essentially literary character” (113, 112).

James Todd Uhlman, in “Navigating necessity: professional authorship and travel writing in the career of Bayard Taylor,” argues that Taylor uses sentimental, romantic, and sensational elements in his writing to appeal to a popular audience (Uhlman 356). Taylor’s sensational travel writings reflected his own sentimental style and spiritual identity; Uhlman writes, “sentimental prose invoked a formulised repertoire of beautiful and spiritually elevated feelings that could wax romantic as the intensity of emotions grew into awe and raptures at an encounter with the sublime [and] these responses were elicited by picturesque landscapes” (360). Returning from distant lands inaccessible to “female and young male members of the emerging middle classes,” whom Wright claims were the traditional attendees of travel lectures, Taylor’s addresses were both celebratory of other nations and races and simultaneously orientalist in his approach to cross-cultural connection (Wright 113).

One major way that Taylor exoticized distant lands was his fascination with the unfamiliar homoeroticism of various cultures, trends that he highlighted and emphasized in his own travel writing. Robert K. Martin argues that Taylor’s travel lectures and writing “permitted the expression of ideas that were inconceivable at home […] Taylor’s travel narratives permitted him to describe Turkish baths, hashish smoking, dancing girls, drunken brawls, and pretty Arab boys without fear of censorship; he was merely reporting on exotic customs” (Martin 13).

Observing the customs of pleasure and desire different from America’s, Taylor was able to offer

“erotic titillation […] under the guise of science” (14). An often-studied example of this Wagner 79 homoerotic exoticization in Taylor’s writing is his 1851 poem “To a Persian Boy,” a sensual depiction of both the Smyrna landscape and a young male body:

When first, young Persian, I beheld thine eyes,

And felt the wonder of thy beauty grow

Within my brain, as some fair planet’s glow

Deepens, and fills the summer evening skies […]

The rich, voluptuous soul of Eastern land,

Impassioned, tender, calm, serenely sad,— (Taylor 370)

Akin to the travel writings of other queer male authors such as Herman Melville or Charles

Warren Stoddard (see Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life or “A South-Sea Idyl”), Taylor’s accounts of international exploration reveal a fascination with the beauty of foreign lands and the lure of non-white male bodies; Martin claims that “Taylor may have felt that true pleasure, particularly pleasure between men, could only be found in another land, where the burden of rigid moral codes was less heavy” (Martin 14).

I agree with Martin that Taylor exoticized Eastern countries and envisioned them as spaces of homoerotic expression, but I also believe that the ideal of “another land” that Taylor pined after may have included space in his own nation as well. Taylor’s 1851 publication of

Eldorado; or, Adventures in the Path of Empire details Taylor’s appreciation of American

Western geography and the potential it offered for queer community. Wright argues that, aside from the Far East, another attractive subject to popular mid-nineteenth-century audiences of travel lectures was “the developing American West;” at “the height of Gold Fever in 1849,”

Taylor himself journeyed West to California and Mexico, recording his adventures in a diary which he later published as Eldorado (Wright 114). Wagner 80

Since the nation’s founding, Westward expansion offered Americans new opportunities to consolidate their growing republic and conquer more and more lands; territories across the

Mississippi, into the Rocky Mountains, and all the way to the California coast seemed ripe for the taking and, initially, lacked the mechanized industry of the East. In his book Virgin Land:

The American West as Symbol and Myth, Henry Nash Smith discusses the historical tendency to see the West as a “virgin land,” the “garden of the world” promising the ultimate culmination of agrarian democracy based on the likes of Thomas Jefferson (128). The most well-known historian to espouse this view is Frederick Jackson Turner, whose “frontier thesis,” which is now rightfully criticized, was once widely popular in early twentieth-century historiographical thought. Writing at the end of the nineteenth-century and the beginning of the twentieth century,

Turner argues that “American history has been in a large degree the history of the colonization of the Great West. The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development” (Turner 1). The motivating worldview of Manifest Destiny, according to Turner, encouraged nineteenth-century Americans to journey westward and spread democracy to the empty frontier; “the supply of free land” and the Jeffersonian notion “that democracy should have an agricultural basis” served to idealize the

West as a place of freedom and opportunity (244, 250). Most historians now critique Turner’s thesis as mythic and racially privileged: “What had seemed ‘vacant,’ ‘unredeemed,’ ‘virgin’ land often disclosed places of habitation by societies with different but no less self-justifying practices of land ownership and sustenance,” a period of violent indigenous destruction (Trachtenberg 12).

Turner’s frontier thesis gives us a clear understanding of a dominant white nineteenth-century mindset of the American West; as Richardson argues, “In their romantic view, the West was a world where unlimited resources were free for the taking by unfettered individuals, a pristine Wagner 81 world untouched by the corrupt struggles of eastern government” (Richardson). As I argue later in this chapter, Taylor’s novel posits that the idealized garden of the West promised a lawless frontier of rural freedom and agrarian paradise, while the East was a place of industrialized cities and constricting traditions.

Taylor himself was caught up in this national vision of Manifest Destiny, and believed that California “was one more step in a westward expansion that extended beyond this shoreline

[…Taylor] saw an American empire that would reach much further than the continent’s outer edge: San Francisco Bay would be our gateway to the Pacific, ensuring access to the wealth of

Asian trade” (Houston xv). Taylor’s Eldorado captures his bold and assertive position as

American explorer of the West, providing first-person thoughts into his traveling mindset. Taylor accurately recognizes the “cosmopolitan cast of society in California, results from the commingling of so many races,” yet comments on their “primitive mode of life” and remarks: “I do not believe, however, that the majority of the native population rejoices at the national change which has come over the country. On the contrary, there is much jealousy and bitter feeling among the uneducated classes” (Taylor 117). Alongside a nativist attitude toward indigenous people and immigrants of color in California, Taylor includes a curious homoerotic depiction of

Western cowboys and prospectors, commenting on “a handsome young ranchero” and reflecting on “the fullness of hale and lusty manhood” (105, 167). But in the midst of these attitudes lies

Taylor’s central desire to explore: a hearty, emotive appreciation of the natural landscape. Like his travel writings in the global East, Taylor spends many paragraphs eloquently describing the beauties of California and the American landscape. In the following passage, Taylor recounts his muleback ride through a Californian valley: Wagner 82

I never felt a more thorough, exhilarating sense of freedom than when first fairly afloat

on these vast and beautiful plains. With the mule as my shallop, urged steadily onward

past the tranquil isles and long promontories of timber; drinking, with a delight that

almost made it a flavor on the palate, the soft, elastic, fragrant air; cut off, for the time,

from every irksome requirement of civilization, and cast loose, like a stray, unshackled

spirit, on the bosom of a new earth, I seemed to take a fresh and more perfect lease of

existence. The mind was in exquisite harmony with the outer world, and the same

sensuous thrill of Life vibrated through each. (54)

For Taylor, California embodied an experience of sublimity and freedom radically different from his life in Pennsylvania; the West promised national progress and wealth, homosocial community, and, most importantly, an escape from “civilization,” a chance to be in “exquisite harmony” with nature and experience the “sensuous thrill of Life” (54). Even after having traveled the world, Taylor believed that his nation’s own Pacific coast “might be a paradise”

(35).

This Arcadian appreciation for nature and an “unshackled” relation with the world around him translates into Taylor’s fiction writing; Joseph and His Friend revels in the beauties and virtuous qualities of nature and the American landscape, revealing a Transcendental influence on the author’s writing (Taylor 54). The novel’s subtitle, A Story of Pennsylvania, situates his writing in a rural geographic space in the state of Pennsylvania (also a space with roots in

Quaker Christianity) and represents Taylor’s shift from nonfiction travel writing to regionalist fiction. Resembling the above passage from Eldorado, Joseph and His Friend includes many passages with rich, detailed depictions of nature: Wagner 83

There are some days when the sun slowly comes up, filling the vapory air with diffused

light, in advance of his coming; when the earth grows luminous in the broad, breezeless

morning; when nearer objects shine and sparkle, and the distances melt into dim violet

and gold; when the van points to the southwest, and the blood of man feels neither heat

nor cold, but only the freshness of that perfect temperature wherein limits of the body are

lost; and the pulses of its life beat in all the life of the world. (127)

These sentences, filled with vibrant depictions of the Pennsylvania countryside, follow the style of Transcendental writers like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and Henry David

Thoreau, authors and thinkers who were essential to the American movement, which “grappled with […] the ability of the individual to apprehend the godhead directly, the capacity of language to achieve and convey knowledge, and the difficulties of making sense of a universe in which meaning derives from individual creative insights rather than received authority” (Levine 12-13).

Influenced by the writings of German philosopher Immanuel Kant, American Transcendentalism was a political, spiritual, and literary movement which would influence authors beyond the

1830s, such as Melville and Walt Whitman. Joseph and His Friend contains many passages that reflect Transcendental ideas, specifically in the brand of Emerson (whom Beatty claims Taylor specifically read). In Chapter XII, “Clouds,” Taylor relates the natural environment to the human experience of Joseph’s life:

But ere long the haze, instead of thinning into blue, gradually thickens into gray; the vane

creeps southward, swinging to southeast in brief, rising flaws of the air; the horizon

darkens; the enfranchised life of the spirit creeps back to its old isolation, shorn of all its

rash delight, and already foreboding despondency which comes with the east wind and

the chilly rains. Wagner 84

Some such variation of the atmospheric influenced attended Joseph Asten’s

wedding-travel. The mellow, magical glory of his new life diminished day by day; the

blue of his sky became colder and grayer. (Taylor 127)

As Joseph’s travels home from his wedding, the environment around him starts to reflect his own immediate doubt and gloom; this mirroring of nature and humanity is a key argument in

Emerson’s 1836 Nature. In Chapter IV, “Language,” Emerson argues a central tenet of

Transcendental philosophy: “Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact. Every appearance in nature corresponds to some state of the mind, and that state of the mind can only be described by presenting that natural appearance as its picture” (Emerson 190). Emerson believed that language and words are built on the human experience with nature; communication of human thoughts, emotions, and desires rests on the human connection to the outside world.

Assuming that “Nature is the symbol of spirit,” Emerson touted a metaphysical worldview which writers could implement into their own fiction; in the passage above, Taylor frames the world around Joseph as a perfect match to his interiority (Emerson 190). This parallel occurs often through Taylor’s novel, including Philip’s near-drowning; the “desperation of the struggle” under the water resembles his own inner turmoil about his feelings for Mrs. Hopeton (Taylor

234). Or, consider Taylor’s descriptions of the environment after Joseph’s trial and the start of his new, happy life: “How fair the valley shone, as they came into it out of the long glen between the hills! What cheer there was, even in the fading leaves; what happy promise in the mellow autumn sky!” (Taylor 333). Joseph and His Friend depicts a world where man is in communion with nature, both symbolizing the “particular spiritual facts” of life on earth (Emerson 189).

But there is more to Taylor’s bits of Emersonian Transcendentalism than simply pretty descriptions of the outdoors; just like his travel writing, Taylor’s Transcendental fiction begins to Wagner 85 plant the seeds for his argument that natural spaces are more accommodating for queer natures and communities than the constrictions of human civilization. To evidence these ideas, I would like to return to the scene of Joseph’s spiritual coming-out moment on horseback early in the novel; Joseph’s orgasmic revelation while riding through the Pennsylvania fields depicts an

Emersonian connection to Nature and the divine that directly accords with his queer inherent nature. As Joseph’s horse gallops across the hills, Taylor’s depiction of Joseph’s feelings mirrors his own amazement that he recorded in Eldorado:

The regular movements of the animal did not banish the unquiet motions of his mind, but

it relieved him by giving them a wider sweep and a more definite form. The man who

walks is subject to the power of his Antæus of a body, moving forwards only by means of

the weight which holds it to the earth. There is a clog upon all his thoughts, an ever-

present sense of restriction and impotence. But when he is lifted above the soil, with the

air under his foot-soles, swiftly moving without effort, his mind, a positing Mercury,

mounts on winged heels. He feels the liberation of new and nimble powers; wider

horizons stretch around his inward vision; obstacles are measured or overlooked; the

brute strength under him charges his whole nature with a more vigorous electricity.

(Taylor 51)

Riding atop his horse and flying through the wind, Joseph begins to feel an intimate connection to the world around him, which simultaneously produces a “liberation” of thought and an affirmative upsurge of the “strength” of his own electric “nature” (51). Joseph sees possibilities that were previously hidden to him, and, like his fellow white Americans consumed with a vision of Manifest Destiny, imagines the acquisition of new, free spaces: “all he had read or heard of individual careers in all ages, climates, and conditions of the race—dazzling pictures of the Wagner 86 myriad-sided earth, to be won by whosoever dared arbitrarily to seize the freedom waiting for his grasp—floated through his brain” (51). It is through this “temporary escape” that Joseph comes to admit his inherent queer nature: “God! I see what I am!” (52). This passage begins to show

Taylor’s readers his faith in nature and the beautiful experiences it affords; Taylor’s language mirrors Emerson’s own well-known declaration in Nature: “my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space,—all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God” (Emerson 183). With head in the wind and mind in the clouds, Taylor and

Emerson write about men in nature who can begin to see themselves more clearly, including their own inner divinity. Taylor, influenced by an Emersonian model of Transcendentalism, depicts his protagonist as a man who, through Nature, not only connects to the metaphysical environment around him but also his own inherent nature: “In the wilderness, I find something more dear and connate than in streets or villages. In the tranquil landscape, and especially in the distant line of the horizon, man beholds somewhat as beautiful as his own nature” (Emerson 183-

184). Furthermore, Taylor believes that a natural setting is ultimately more of an authentic space for individuals with inherent difference to thrive in, rather than cities. How Taylor elaborates on this argument and continues to praise “the wilderness” over “streets or villages,” I analyze in the following section (183-184).

City Games

Like many of his generation, Taylor was skeptical at “the incorporation of America,” and his writing exposes his biases towards tranquil agrarian spaces and escapist wildernesses over the confines of an Eastern American city (Trachtenberg 1). Rurality is key to Taylor’s depiction of

Joseph and Philip’s Pennsylvania community; the novel is explicit in presenting a country versus Wagner 87 city binary, favoring agrarian rural life over urban industrialism. Taylor ultimately praises

American rural spaces because they offer the potential for queer men to express their inherent natures in a more authentic way than in the city. In this section, I examine the villains of the novel—Julia Blessing and her father—to evidence Taylor’s critique of the Eastern metropolis and its heteronormative conventions. I argue that Taylor’s critique of the city as a site of reproductive heterosexuality rests on misogynistic depictions of women and presages elements of antimodernism, a late-nineteenth-century rejection of industrial modernity.

Mr. Benjamin Blessing—Julia’s father—represents the superiority of the country to the city; Mr. Blessing and his involvement in the novel’s Amaranth subplot represent the harmful effects of industry and capitalism on rural nineteenth-century America. When Joseph first meets

Mr. Blessing while visiting the city (based on Philadelphia) after his engagement to Julia,

Taylor’s descriptions immediately create a contrast to the picturesque “visions of pink and white” the novel previously described in the countryside (Taylor 30). Joseph feels uncomfortable in the city streets and “the air of cheap gentility which exhaled” from the “narrow three-storied dwellings, with crowded windows and flat roofs” (69). Here, Joseph’s discomfort in the city differs from his attraction to the men in the shipyards, a scene I analyze in Chapter One. The shipyard is an all-male world that encourages working-class masculinity and homosocial contact; it is also a site where the city comes into close contact with the wilderness (the sea). Without these two key factors, Joseph sees the city as cramped and artificial. Employed at the city’s

Custom Houses, Mr. Blessing frequently fraternizes with various businessmen, entrepreneurs, and local politicians in the quagmire of the city.13 As evidenced in his wedding toast that I quote earlier in this chapter, Mr. Blessing believes that his daughter’s marriage represents the two

13 Nineteenth-century Americans frequently regarded Custom Houses as sites of major corruption and political machinations; scholars see instances of a Custom House in literary texts as a marker for political corruption. Wagner 88 halves of the American workforce uniting together in perfect harmony—a literal and metaphorical marriage between city and country. Furthermore, Mr. Blessing’s toast implicitly links heterosexual marriage and capitalism, or, more precisely, the accumulation of property

(“power and prosperity”) (113). Maintaining very traditional ideas about marriage between a man and a woman, Mr. Blessing assumes that heterosexual marriage is instinctively and economically productive, or reproductive. However, the novel exposes Mr. Blessing’s idealized toast as inherently corrupt due to his greedy interference in Joseph’s new marriage.

A significant section of the novel’s mid-plot concerns the shady business practices of Mr.

Blessing and his daughter; while this subplot seems distant from the novel’s main story of romantic friendship, it communicates Taylor’s frustrations with capitalism, providing bloated, braggadocious images of Gilded Age businessmen and exposing the shallowness and corruption of a life based on industry. When Mr. Blessing first asks Joseph for a loan of one thousand dollars to pay off his debt, Joseph agrees to provide the funds out of kindness but makes clear he is uncomfortable with such banking practices: “In the country […] we only learn enough to pay off our debts and invest our earnings. We are in the habit of moving slowly and cautiously”

(Taylor 130). Mr. Blessing critiques these economic habits: “Inherited ideas! They belong to the community in which you live. Are you satisfied with your neighbors’ ways of living and thinking? I do not mean to disparage them, but have you no desire to rise above their level?”

(130). Notice the irony here: Mr. Blessing’s statement, by itself, reflects the same resistance that

Joseph feels against his neighborhood, yet the motive behind Mr. Blessing’s sentiments is monetary greed. Advocating a capitalist worldview of competition, Mr. Blessing gives a monologue representative of Gilded Age capitalists like himself: “Money,—as I said at a dinner given to a distinguished railroad man,—money is the engine which draws individuals up the Wagner 89 steeper grades of society; it is the lubricating oil which makes the truck of life run easy; it is the safety-break which renders collision and wreck impossible!” (130). Mr. Blessing’s boisterous personality and his association with other “distinguished” businessmen expose his shallowness and materialistic worldview (130). Indeed, the train crash in the novel disproves that “collision

[is] impossible,” foreshadowing how the novel depicts the “wreck” of the “engine [of] money”

(130). After Mr. Blessing introduces Joseph to a nearby track of land named the Amaranth, supposedly rich with oil, he encourages Joseph to invest in this upcoming fortune via land speculation: “There has been no more splendid opportunity since oil became a power!” (153). By

1870, oil was still a relatively new resource in industrial America, and Taylor’s inclusion of oil- rich land points to the capitalist excitement at this rising power. Yet, these riches of course do not pan out; Joseph discovers from a man named Kanuck that the Amaranth plot is fruitless, and

Mr. Blessing was only trying to weasel money from Joseph in order to pay his family’s debts.

Functionally, the loss of Joseph’s savings depicts Taylor’s critique of capital-driven, industrial business. As the representative site of capitalism, the Eastern American city is attacked in Joseph and His Friend, offering the country as a more natural, authentic space.

Furthermore, the antagonist of Julia Blessing, besides embodying the limitations of heterosexual marriage for some queer men as I discussed in Chapter One, represents the corrupt nature of metropolitan influence on an individual. Like her father, her development as a villain throughout the novel accords with Taylor’s increasing attacks on the immorality of the city.

From the very beginning of the novel, Joseph’s Aunt Rachel is immediately skeptical of Julia’s visit to the countryside and her growing influence on the neighborhood’s young adults: “Peace and quiet, peace and quiet, that’s been the token of the neighborhood; but town ways are the reverse” (Taylor 10). Aunt Rachel posits a vision of a crowded, rustling town as opposed to the Wagner 90 calm serenity of the countryside. Literary scholarship on the nineteenth-century crowd highlight how “increasing industrialization […] brought physical immobility and restraint, elements at odd with the forward movement of temporal narrative” (Bellis 75). Julia addresses such immobility and restraint during the first party at Anna Wariner’s house when she expresses astonishment at life in the country: “But you are all courageous, compared with us. We are really so restricted in the city, that it’s a wonder we have any independence at all” (18). Julia’s connection with the

“restricted” city highlights the very same restrictions that Joseph will enter into with his marriage to Julia—specifically, the constrictions of heterosexual marriage. Additionally, within Julia’s exaggerated compliments to her peers (Julia suggests that Joseph and Lucy are “courageous” simply for not living in a city) lies the very message Taylor advocates throughout his novel:

“when one has escaped from the tiresome conventionalities of city life, and comes back to nature, and delightful natural society, one feels so free to talk and think! Ah, you don’t know what a luxury it is, just to be one’s true self!” (21). Here, like the example of Mr. Blessing’s ironic statement I mention above, the novel includes another moment of irony in which the logic of the narrative is voiced by a character with deceptive motives. Julia’s comment here resembles

Transcendental ideas; in Nature, Emerson attacks “the artificial and curtailed life of cities” as opposed to “the advantage which the country-life possesses for a powerful mind” (Emerson 192).

Joseph and His Friend says that an individual has the freedom “to be one’s true self” in the country, as opposed to the “restricted” city (192, 18).

As I state earlier, we must pay attention to the fact that Taylor ironically voices these central thematic lines through the villain’s mouth. Aside from her tongue-in-cheek compliments to those around her, Julia is not depicted as an outright evil woman at the beginning of the novel.

This has a unique effect on the reader: Taylor simultaneously foregrounds the novel’s own main Wagner 91 ideas and lets us discover Julia’s surprise villainy during a first time read. By having Julia state these important ideas, Taylor is not removing credibility from the content of her speech; instead, the novel depicts that Julia is deceitful and does not truly uphold these rural values that she feigns at the beginning of the novel. The rest of the novel slowly exposes Julia’s villainous deceit. After their marriage, Julia begs Joseph to let her purchase new furniture for their farmhouse, remodeling the veranda to give their home “an air of elegant luxury” (188). This spark of materialism in Julia pre-dates fin-de-siècle literary depictions of women and decadence, which, according to Elaine Showalter, were depicted as “monsters of a degenerate age,” “bound

[…] to the material world” (Showalter x). Rumors begin to circulate around the neighborhood, accusing Joseph of “transforming his house into a castle” with all its newfound extravagance

(189). After Joseph unleashes an angry outburst at Julia’s greed, she reveals her true colors:

“What do I care for ‘the neighbors’? persons whose ideas and taste and habits of life are so different from mine? (190). Joseph and His Friend exposes Julia as a selfish city woman who in fact abhors the lifestyles and values of country folk, and readers are meant to hate her dishonest reactions towards our hero Joseph.

One of the novel’s scenes heavily emphasizes Julia’s position as the stand-in for urbanity and mirrors Leo Marx’s own nineteenth-century cultural analysis in The Machine in the Garden; when Julia interrupts Joseph and Lucy in the garden, she functions as a mechanized monster threatening the tranquility of both individuals in nature and the nation overall. In his landmark book The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America, Marx examines the pastoral imagination in the American consciousness: “The sudden appearance of the machine in the garden is an arresting, endlessly evocative image. It causes the instantaneous clash of opposed states of mind: a strong urge to believe in the rural myth along with an Wagner 92 awareness of industrialization as counterforce to the myth” (Marx 229). The metaphors of the machine and the garden serve as quintessential images of spatial transformations in nineteenth- century America; “a machine (railroad or steamship) bursting on a peaceful natural setting represented a symbolic version of the trauma inflicted on American society by unexpectedly rapid mechanization (Trachtenberg 39). In response to the threat of encroaching industrialism,

Marx argues that “a new mode of feeling, a heightened responsiveness to the environment now developed” (Marx 96). This new mindset “generated […] an urge to withdraw from civilization’s growing power and complexity,” a “movement away from an ‘artificial’ world” (9).

In a similar vein as Marx, Taylor positions Julia as a machine—specifically, as a mechanized monster—who interrupts the tranquil garden of Joseph’s life. In Chapter XXIII,

“Julia’s Experiment,” after Joseph’s angry outburst toward his wife, Julia manipulatively invites

Lucy over to the farmhouse and inquires if she can talk to Joseph to calm his nerves. Lucy takes

Joseph to his garden, where he is free to express his true feelings: “Joseph started to his feet.

‘Love her!’ he exclaimed, with suppressed passion,— ‘love her! I hate her!’” (Taylor 257). At that moment, Taylor includes a dramatic reveal: “There was a hissing, rattling sound, like that of some fierce animal at bay. The thick foliage of two of the tall box-trees was violently parted. The branches snapped and gave way: Julia burst through, and stood before them” (257). Julia’s invasion perfectly represents Marx’s metaphor of “the interruption of the machine” into the idealized garden (Marx 15). Marx writes, “By placing the machine in opposition to the tranquility and order located in the landscape, he makes it an emblem of the artificial, of the unfeeling utilitarian spirit, and of the fragmented, industrial style of life” (18). Julia is the binary opposite of Arcadia—she is the “artificial” wife, “unfeeling” toward her husband’s pain (18).

Julia’s artifice and artificiality matches her association with the city; Taylor posits the idea that Wagner 93 the metropolis is an unforgiving environment intent on harming mankind. His depiction of Julia after her interruption in the garden is strikingly harsh:

The face that so suddenly glared upon them was that of a Gorgon. The ringlets were still

pushed behind her ears and the narrowness of the brow was entirely revealed; her eyes

were full of cold, steely light; the nostrils were violently drawn in, and the lips

contracted, as if in a spasm, so that the teeth were laid bare. Her hands were clenched,

and there was a movement in her throat as of imprisoned words or cries; but for a

moment no words came. (260)

These animalistic depictions of Julia—exposed teeth, flaring nostrils—read as entirely uncharacteristic, representative of her inhumanity. Depicting her as “a Gorgon,” the novel takes away Julia’s humanity and characterizes her as a literal monster (260). Here, Julia is depicted as an unchained beast of passion, a dangerous threat to Joseph’s well-being, not unlike Showalter’s claim that decadent women were depicted as degenerate “monsters” (x). Furthermore, the text combines mechanized elements with these monstrous depictions—Julia’s eyes are “full of cold, steely light,” and a few paragraphs later the novel judges her voice to be “unnatural” (260). Julia is simultaneously an animalistic monster and a machine, two unnatural, inhuman forces that suddenly clash with Joseph’s natural garden state. Amy Kaplan argues that late-nineteenth- century literature began to depict the city as a site of “the unreal” or “the alien,” a metaphorical

“threat […] for the elusive process of social change” (Kaplan 44). In Joseph and His Friend,

Julia’s position as a mechanized monster is the ultimate embodiment of the unreal, stemming from her connection with the restrictive metropolis. Julia’s interruption in the garden is the culmination of her treachery, deceitfulness, and villainy, amplifying Taylor’s message that the city is an artificial environment prone to corruption. Wagner 94

An important acknowledgment must be made here: as evidenced above, Taylor’s novel is not without a problematic depiction of women. Indeed, Taylor frames his critique of industrial capitalism in the character of the conniving woman, and misogyny serves his larger goal to critique Eastern urban industrialism. In the novel, Julia functions little more than an object of hate, both for Joseph and the reader—her and her father’s deceitful actions threaten the initial innocence of Joseph and bring him much pain and grief in marriage, not the full joy and companionship he envisioned. Although the novel does offer one positive depiction of a heterosexual marriage—the eventual union of Lucy and Elwood—Taylor’s writing largely lambasts the constraints that marriage to a woman may present to a man with an inherent queer nature. As readers, it is impossible to determine why Taylor was so harsh in his depiction of

Julia, so instead we consider: what effect does this have on the novel? First and foremost,

Taylor’s depiction of Julia is a misogynistic representation of women; misogyny is the main vehicle that drives the novel’s critique of urban industrialism. Julia’s villainy also provides a clear contrast to Philip’s heroism. Julia’s marriage should be a “Blessing” to Joseph, yet turns into a curse, and it is Philip Held, the hero of the novel (in German, “Held” translates to “Hero”

[Hallock 165]), who saves Joseph from his corrupt marriage. Additionally, both Julia and Philip are interrupting presences—while Julia’s interruption is an artificial, inhuman intervention that harms Joseph’s innocence, representative of Marx’s machine in the garden metaphor, Philip’s interruption is an intimate, relational outlet that allows him to express his queer inherent nature.

Joseph and His Friend is a novel in which a critique of the city (and heterosexual marriage) rides on the shoulders of misogyny, offering readers a complex portrait of gender relations in mid- nineteenth-century America. Wagner 95

Taylor’s critique of the city positions the novel as a precursor to antimodernist sentiments, setting up the path for his queer elevation of wilderness and agrarian spaces over urban environments. In the book No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of

American Culture, 1880-1920, T.J. Jackson Lears defines antimodernism as “the recoil from an

‘overcivilized’ modern existence to more intense forms of physical or spiritual experience”

(Lears xiii). This definition greatly resembles the spatial anxieties in Joseph and His Friend:

Joseph’s abhorrence to Julia acts as a “recoil” from industrial, “modern existence,” and, as I argue in the third section of this chapter, offers “intense forms of physical or spiritual experience” (in this case, various queer utopian pathways) as superior reactions to national development (xiii). Lears argues that antimodernists were “preoccupied with authentic experience as a means of revitalizing a fragmented personal identity,” and the novel’s main plot traces Joseph’s pursuit of natural identity and true self-expression (xvii). As evidenced by the shallowness, greed, and villainy of Julia and her father, the novel posits that the metropolis, confined by artificiality and capitalist corruption, is not the site where an individual can “be one’s true self” (Taylor 21). Joseph and His Friend thus provides a solution against artificiality—authenticity. Influenced by travel and Transcendentalism, Taylor attached authenticity to a specific site: nature. And it is in nature, in the idealized garden, where Taylor proposes queer attachments can flourish.

“The Freedom We Craved”

To summarize what I have argued so far in this chapter: Joseph and His Friend critiques the rise of American industrialism and depicts an Emersonian model of Transcendental philosophy, which praises the divine authenticity of rural and agrarian spaces. Making his critique of the city through misogynistic depictions of Julia, Taylor’s novel foreshadows late- Wagner 96 nineteenth-century antimodern sentiments and moves toward the position that natural environments allow for more authentic expression of inherent queer natures than do cities. In this section, I argue that the driving method in which Taylor models his Transcendental, antimodern ideas in Joseph and His Friend is through his vision of utopia. The novel suggests the promise of a utopian vision of queer life in America and offers two distinct pathways to achieve it: the route of queer escape, which I define as an abandonment of Eastern civilization and a migration to an idealistic wild Western frontier where overt queer desires can be achieved, and the path of queer domesticity, which I define as an acceptance of Eastern agrarianism and the subtle expression of queer affections under the confines of heteronormativity. The novel resolves the tension between these contradictory routes through the third pathway of what I call queer transfiguration, which insists on an escape in order to reclaim the domestic space as queer and discover the possibility of one’s inner light and freedom. Taylor’s visions of wild and agrarian queer utopian pathways are radically different from the more modern notion of urbanity as a safe haven for queer individuals, demonstrating the curious strangeness of this moment in nineteenth-century

American sexual history.

As tensions grow in the novel, both Joseph and Philip come to desire the same things: freedom from constraints and normativity, masculine maturity, spiritual flourishing, and intimate companionship. As I have explained in both of my chapters so far, the novel clearly frames heteronormative marriage as an obstacle to achieving these goals, especially for a man with an inherent queer difference like Joseph. But does the novel offer any solutions? Characteristic of

Taylor’s writing style, a single solution is hard to pin down; just as he offers a complicated model of queer identity, Taylor does not provide his reader with a singular resolution to Joseph and Philip’s troubles. Instead, the novel posits different routes to achieve queer freedom and Wagner 97 expression and, because of the Arcadian/Emersonian Transcendental influences in the novel,

Taylor positions these routes as utopic. As his characters suffer, they hold out on the hope of a utopian space that will ease their pain and help them attain the fullness of joy. However, both

Joseph and Philip adhere to different possibilities for these utopian pathways.

Queer Escape

The queer utopian pathway offered by Philip’s point of view is one of queer escape;

Taylor theorizes queer utopia as a distant place where queer men could escape restricting laws and conventions and be free to express their desires for one another. Additionally, Joseph and

His Friend places this idealization in the American landscape and posits that utopia may be in the American West. Although Joseph and His Friend favors the country over the city, the agrarian over the urban, the novel plays with this binary and features a second critical shift in space: wilderness versus the agrarian, or the American West over Pennsylvania agriculture. But, because of Taylor’s own racial privileges and biases as a travel writer, Philip’s vision of the wilderness is idealistic, ignoring Western Americans of color and adopting a nativist stance at a so-called virgin frontier.

The central trope that Taylor uses to communicate these ideas about Philip’s utopian pathway is the presence of the idealized California valley, a place of refuge for himself and

Joseph to express their queer affections for one another. I would like to return the critical dialogue present in Chapter XX, “A Crisis,” where Philip saves Joseph from a near-suicide.

Joseph expresses his desire to break free from restricting social conventions and yield to Philip’s philosophy about inherent queer difference:

There is something within me […] which accepts everything you say; and yet, it alarms

me. I feel a mighty temptation in your words: they could lead me to snap my chains, Wagner 98

break violently away from my past and present life, and surrender myself to will and

appetite. O Philip, if we could make our lives wholly our own! If we could find a spot—

(220)

It is here when Philip interrupts Joseph’s ruminations and offers the chance to travel to such a destination:

“I know such a spot! […] a great valley, bounded by a hundred miles of snowy peaks;

lakes in its bed; enormous hillsides, dotted with groves of ilex and pine; orchards of

orange and olive; a perfect climate, where it is bliss enough just to breathe, and freedom

from the distorted laws of men, for none are near enough to enforce them! If there is no

legal way of escape for you, here, at least, there is no force which can drag you back,

once you are there: I will go with you, and perhaps—perhaps—"

Philip’s face glowed, and the vague alarm in Joseph’s heart took a definite form.

He guessed what words had been left unspoken. (220)

Philip’s “great valley” represents a utopian pathway of queer escape: the movement to a distant place where queer men could escape restricting laws and “distorted” conventions and be free to express their desire for one another (220). But, instead of placing this space in a distant, foreign land, Taylor posits that this utopia may be in the American West.

Martin has previously examined the role of Taylor’s utopian valley in Joseph and His

Friend; while he emphasizes the pastoral conventions of this trope, I expand on his ideas and argue that Taylor’s vision of Philip’s valley was also influenced by significant historical trends in nineteenth-century America, including the homosocial vision of the American West and the radical sexual nature of many religious utopian movements in the mid-1800s. In his article

“Bayard Taylor’s Valley of Bliss: The Pastoral and the Search for Form,” Martin argues that the Wagner 99 trope of the utopian queer valley “is clearly drawn from pastoral conventions, which offered for the nineteenth-century homosexual artist one of the very few possible models for the literary expression of deep friendship and love between men” (Martin 13). Tracing his analysis through a historical survey of literary pastorals with homoerotic themes (beginning in Greece and moving through the English Renaissance), Martin contends that Taylor “liberated the literature of homosexuality from the pretense of Greek landscape,” since his characters instead “inhabit […]

America” (16-17). In this nineteenth-century American context, Joseph and His Friend maintains the dream of “an Edenic place of contentment and freedom where homosexual love might finally find expression” (16). While I agree with Martin that Taylor is modeling Philip’s valley on older homoerotic pastoral literature, I also think Taylor is drawing from specific queer and religious trends of Western movements in his own century, historical connections that

Martin does not analyze.

The American West of the mid-nineteenth century was a space full of potentiality for homosocial bonds and religious utopian experiments. Additionally, it was a space conveniently positioned as the binary opposite to Eastern industrialism: “the myth of the American West often locates civilizing forces in the teeming, conformist, urban East—the antithesis of the natural wilderness” (Bronski 44). We can see this exact binary at work in Philip’s comment about the valley, a place when one can achieve “freedom from the distorted laws of men,” “snap [his] chains,” and where no legal force can “drag [him] back” to the East (Taylor 220). Whereas the

Eastern city is an artificial, mechanized environment that constricts the expression and freedom of individuals with inherent difference, the American West is a place where these men can leave their chains behind and find liberating escape. Philip’s utopian pathway feels unfamiliar to contemporary readers living in an age where the metropolis has continually been framed as a Wagner 100 haven or paradise for queer folk; Joseph and His Friend disrupts our expectations and exposes a moment in American queer history where a pastoral wilderness provided the opportunities for authentic relationship expression more so than in a regulatory, industrial space.

Combatting the laws of a Puritanical East, the American West offered a potential space for homosocial and homoerotic expression; along with Philip’s central comment about the

California valley, readers get other historical glimpses of a queer American West in Joseph’s letters during his journey at the end of the novel. Urged by Philip to follow the request of a capitalist looking to hire a “private, confidential agent” to scout “the prospects and operations” of several mines in Arizona and Nevada, Joseph leaves his Pennsylvania community for over a year to migrate “to the Pacific Coast” on a “long and uncertain journey” (Taylor 337). I discuss the significance of Joseph’s solo move later in this chapter; for now, I intend to emphasize the homosocial picture that Joseph presents of the Western frontier. As he writes letters back to his close friend, Joseph leaves many hints and indications about the potential for homosocial and homoerotic contact in the American West.14 After joining a group of prospectors, Joseph writes to Philip, “as you know, we get acquainted in little time, and with no introduction in these parts”

(342). The immediate relations between men in the West provide Joseph the chance to relate to other men in an intimate way: “We learn men’s characters rapidly in this rough school, because we cannot get away from the close, rough, naked contact” (343). Joseph discusses how his close relations with men in the West are superior to his emotions in heterosexual marriage:

What surprises me is that the knowledge is not only good for present and future use, but

that I can take it with me into my past life. One weakness is left, and you understand it. I

blush to myself,—I am ashamed of my early innocence and ignorance. This is wrong;

14 Joseph and His Friend predicts popular twenty-first-century iterations of this theme as well, such as the 2005 film Brokeback Mountain. Wagner 101

yet, Philip, I seem to have been so unmanly,—at least so unmasculine! I looked for love,

and fidelity, and all the virtues, on the surface of life; believed that a gentle tongue was

the sign of a tender heart; felt a wound when some strong and positive, yet differently

moulded being approached me! Now, here are the fellows prickly as a cactus, with

something at the core as true and tender as you will find in a woman’s heart. They would

stake their lives for me sooner than some persons (whom we know) would lend me a

hundred dollars, without security! (343)

In this paragraph, Joseph’s experiences in the West demonstrate the very real possibility that queer men found community and the potential for affectionate expression in the American West, away from the Puritanical East.

Recently, scholars have begun investigating the queer history of the nineteenth-century

American West and the opportunities it presented for homosocial bonding, especially between men. D’Emilio and Freedman claim that some men “were drawn to the frontier because of their attractions to men” and the chances for “male-male intimacy” in spaces with the absence of women (D’Emilio and Freedman 124). In A Queer History of the United States, Michael Bronski examines the mythical image of the American cowboy and its subtle queerness: “the early and mid-nineteenth century promulgated the image of an independent man who did not need civilization, women, or even overt heterosexuality to define his manhood” (Bronski 42). As an

“isolated man,” the Western cowboy’s “intimate friendships” offered not only homosocial community but also the “potential for sexual interaction” (45, 44). The American West “offered imaginative alternatives to heterosexuality and some forms of same-sex friendship;” away from the regulations of urban life in the East (and the presence of women), many nineteenth-century men saw the West not only as a natural paradise but a sexual one as well (45). Wagner 102

Joseph’s epistolary reflections of his own experiences in the American West reveal the real homosocial potential that nineteenth-century queer men were privy to. Joseph reflects on his troubled marriage to Julia and admits that his actions were “unmanly” and “unmasculine,” despite following the normative societal precedent that a man should find a wife and marry; as the novel depicts through its misogyny, Julia’s “gentle tongue” is not an indication of a “tender heart” (343). Despite his feminine immaturity at the beginning of the novel, Joseph’s character growth—largely due to the “strong and positive” presence of Philip—reaches a level of greater maturity and masculinity by the novel’s end (343). Interestingly, Joseph hints that Philip’s initial interruption was a “wound” in his own life, evocative of the trauma he experienced via the train crash (343). Joseph indirectly connects the image of a “wound” with his unexpected, ironic discovery that, even though the “rough fellows” of the West are as “prickly as a cactus,” they possess “something at the core” that fulfills the same “true and tender” purpose as a woman’s love (343). Using the classic Whitmanesque term “fellows,” Joseph highlights the “core” difference that these men possess, even though relations with them are equal to—if not superior to—relationships with women. These lines directly relate to Taylor’s epigraph at the very beginning of the novel, a quotation from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 114: “The better angel is a man right fair; / The worser spirit a woman colour’d ill” (qtd. Taylor i). As I have discussed previously, the novel’s elevation of male-male relationships relies on the simultaneous devaluing of women and heterosexual marriage; while praising love between men, Taylor misogynistically criticizes women. Furthermore, it is this critique of women that instigates Joseph’s Western masculine maturity. Only when he is out of the confines of a toxic, heterosexual marriage and in a space free to express himself that Joseph feels himself transformed: “I have come out of my old skin and am a livelier snake than you ever knew me to be” (343). Joseph’s letter to Philip Wagner 103 maintains Taylor’s main thesis: the American West is a space that offers homosocial and potentially homoerotic community; men who migrate away from the restricting conventions of

Eastern industrialism (embodied in the character of a villainous woman) and move towards a utopian wilderness are granted with more opportunities to authentically express their inherent queer natures and mature into a full, Whitmanesque vision of masculinity.

A quick connection to Chapter One: for both Joseph and Taylor, inherent nature is an essential piece in this conversation about Western utopian space. Joseph’s letter reminds readers of the novel’s proto-essentialist model of queer identity. Expressing his own growth and maturity on his travels, Joseph writes, “In short, Philip, I am on very good terms with human nature; the other nature does not suit me so well” (343). Referring back to my interpretation of Joseph’s own peculiar, twofold nature, I contend these lines detail the tension between one’s inherent, instinctual desires and the pressures that society places on people to repress those longings; whereas Joseph’s “human nature”—his queer inherent difference—can fully express itself in the

West, his “other nature”—the immature side of him that was repressed due to communal normativity—“does not suit [him] so well” away from those exacting regulations (343). Philip’s response to Joseph substantiates this interpretation: “Yes, I will welcome the new man, although

I shall see more of the old one in him that you perhaps think,—nor would I have it otherwise. We don’t change the bases of our lives, after all: the forces are differently combined, otherwise developed, but they hang, I fancy, to the same roots” (344). Philip welcomes a more mature, masculine Joseph and still lovingly accepts the parts of him that reflect “the old [man];” although

Joseph has finally fallen into a space where “the forces” combine to promote the queerness of

Joseph’s inherent difference, Philip insists that his friend’s nature still hangs “to the same roots” Wagner 104

(344). Joseph and His Friend positions the West as a place where one’s inherent queer nature can flourish, not wither, find expression, not constriction.

Just as Joseph’s letters reveal historical notions of a homosocial American West, Taylor’s novel also mirrors the context of religious utopian experiments in nineteenth-century America.

More than mirroring a historical reality, however, Taylor defends and vindicates nineteenth- century radical religious movements by linking them to his virtuous protagonist, Joseph. In the aftermath of the Second Great Awakening, many religious groups “incorporated into American culture a millenarian theology that encouraged men and women to approximate spiritual perfection,” leading to the establishment of religious utopian communities (D’Emilio and

Freedman 112). In Religion and Sexuality: Three American Communal Experiments of the

Nineteenth Century, Lawrence Foster examines three radical religious groups—the Shakers, the

Oneidas, and the Mormons—and argues that each of these communities “explicitly rejected conventional monogamous marriage and instead established functioning communities based on alternative models ranging from celibacy to group marriage and polygamy” (Foster 4). Each of these faiths adhered to a theology based in Christianity, but they sought to revise it according to their notions of sexuality, much like Taylor seeks to revise and queer evangelical Quaker theology in his fiction. Influenced by “millennial revivalism,” these followers saw a world in flux—sectional war, rising industrialism—and “the very fluidity of this period caused many individuals to feel a sense of urgency that the seeds of future social and religious institutions be planted while society was still malleable, not yet hardened into rigid forms” (11). These groups purposefully established their own utopian communities (akin to earlier Transcendental communes), and some, especially the Mormons, saw the West as an idealized place to migrate and settle. Foster demonstrates how the Shakers, Oneidas, and Mormons all revised traditional Wagner 105

American Christianity on their own radical, sexual terms and made “an active attempt to create a new and more satisfying way of life and looking at the world” (10).

Joseph and His Friend draws on these historical realities to further craft its own vision of queer Christian theology. During Joseph’s trial for Julia’s supposed murder, conservative religious characters in Joseph’s Pennsylvania community accuse him of participating in such communal movements, particularly the free love movements of the Oneidas. Mr. Spenham, the prosecuting lawyer, makes this biting accusation against Joseph:

The growth of free love sentiments, among those who tear themselves loose from the

guidance of religious influences, naturally leads to crime; and the extent to which this

evil has been secretly developed is not suspected by the public. Testimony can be

adduced to show that the accused, Joseph Asten, has openly expressed his infidelity; that

he repelled with threats and defiance a worthy minister of the Gospel, whom his own

pious murdered wife had commissioned to lead him into the true path […] What but the

unrestrained freedom of the passion,—the very foundation upon which the free-lovers

build up their pernicious theories? The accused cannot complain if the law lifts the mask

from his countenance, and shows his nature in all its hideous deformity. (317)

In this passage, Mr. Spenham recalls Joseph’s constant rejection of his community’s traditional religious beliefs and claims such “infidelity” is evidence towards his association with “free love sentiments” (316). Mr. Spenham insists that these sentiments, which cultivate “the unrestrained freedom of the passion,” inevitably lead to “crime,” and he uses such manipulative religious rhetoric to condemn Joseph and accuse him of Julia’s murder (316). Taylor makes an intriguing literary move here: by drawing upon “the views of the so-called free lovers, in facile divorce and polygamy,” Taylor continues to situate his story in a realistic, historically-accurate context (316). Wagner 106

Just like the three major radical Christian movements of the nineteenth century that revised religion according to their own sexual terms, this passage suggests that an individual with an inherent queer nature could be associated with such religious radicalism. Taylor is making a subtle connection here: similar to the Shakers, Oneidas, and Mormons, queer men like Joseph— who are by nature spiritual and intimate with God, according to the novel’s theology—have the potential to separate themselves from normative society and establish a community on their own sexual terms. While the above groups used celibacy, free love, or polygamy to accomplish these goals, Joseph and His Friend offers the radical possibility that queer men could also create their own religious utopia on the basis of homoerotic desires. Despite the conservative critique that these radical movements faced, Taylor effectively defends groups like the Mormons and the

Oneidas by associating them with Joseph, the novel’s main protagonist. Joseph and His Friend affirms that these radical religious communal experiments are moral, legitimate expressions of spiritual and sexual desire; even though Mr. Spenham uses these accusations to condemn Joseph,

Joseph’s eventual innocence vindicates these comparisons to radical religious movements.

Furthermore, Taylor’s novel hints that queer men moving to the West possessed a spiritual side to their natures as well as a sexual one.

While the novel points to the potential for escapist utopian thinking, it does not explore the cultural limitations of such Western movement, prioritizing a white, male, queer utopian ideal over the lives of women and people of color. Philip’s vision of a queer, Western utopia relies on a mythical conception of the West rooted in white privilege and nativist American attitudes. Turner’s frontier thesis and popular media depictions of the nineteenth-century

Western frontier, such as in Western films or history textbooks, depict the land as a place of promise, democracy, and freedom. Events like the California Gold Rush and ideologies like Wagner 107

Manifest Destiny promote the idea that the trans-Mississippi American West was an open wilderness with few inhabitants, ready for white men to migrate, settle, and spread the values of democracy. However, we must be careful not to buy into this idealized depiction of the West, even if it holds out a promising potential for queer folk. The American West was filled with people of color, including Mexican Americans, Chinese immigrants, indigenous peoples, and many other groups who came to make America their home. Although history tends to whitewash their influence, it is critical to remember that the American West was not as free of a wilderness as many idealize it. With his own biases toward American expansionism and Manifest Destiny,

Taylor was not sensitive to these issues in his fiction. Joseph and His Friend is a novel completely absent of any racial discussion; Philip’s desire for a utopian Westward migration relies on his privilege as a white man with relative wealth. Even though the novel suggests a model for Westward, queer utopian thinking, that framework is inherently biased, and the novel is silent about its own racial privileges.

Queer Domesticity

Joseph and His Friend purports that one route to achieve queer utopia is that of queer escape; Philip espouses this view and encourages Joseph to run away with him towards an

Edenic, California valley. Rooted in historical context, the novel insists that Western America contained the potential for homosocial and homoerotic community; in addition, queer men who rejected and moved away from conventions in the East mirrored radical religious movements in the mid-1800s, which Taylor defends as legitimate utopian experiments of spiritual and sexual expression. Despite his eventual participation in a movement out West, Joseph possesses a different pathway for achieving queer utopia. Although Philip’s queer utopia is located in a distant, idealized geographic location, Joseph initially advocates that utopia must be achieved in Wagner 108 the domestic sphere, relying on a queer spirituality in order to suffer through the constrictions of heterosexual marriage.

We see Joseph advocate for his view of queer domesticity in a few key locations across the novel. When Philip first addresses the California valley and his desire for escape, Joseph is skeptical: “If we could be sure!” (Taylor 220). After expressing his views about human law and divine law and how their natures stand above others and claim other rights (dialogue I analyze in

Chapter One), Philip “grew pale” and doubts that Joseph wants to escape with him out West:

“Then you mean to endure in patience, and expect me to do the same?” (220). Joseph takes a more conservative, rather than radical, path of action: “If I can. The old foundations upon which my life rested are broken up, and I am too bewildered to venture on a random path. Give me time; nay, let us both strive to wait a little. I see nothing clearly but this: there is a Divine government, on which I lean now as ever before. Yes, I say again, the very wrong that has come upon us makes God necessary!” (220-221). Favoring a stoic stance of perseverance rather than a radical escape, Joseph leans into his own spirituality, inherent to his queer nature, and encourages Philip to remain steadfast with him. It is here where Joseph evokes the hope of a

“Divine government” and expresses his view of a God who shows compassion towards queer individuals, not condemnation, emphasizing their own spiritual superiority.

Philip, although “agitated” and disappointed at Joseph’s denial, comes to understand his friend’s decision: “Both natures shared the desire, and were enticed by the daring of his dream; but out of Joseph’s deeper conscience came a whisper, against which the cry of passion was powerless” (221). Despite the attractive lure of a utopian “dream,” Joseph’s “deeper conscience” waylays their passion and hesitates the pursuit of a utopic valley; here, the novel clearly expresses Joseph’s view that Philip’s desire for queer escape is a “dream,” an Arcadian ideal that Wagner 109 may not be achievable (221). By the end of Chapter XX, the two men forego immediately pursuing a utopian pathway of queer escape and decide to wait out their suffering, relying on each other and God, for a bit longer; Joseph chooses to remain in a heterosexual marriage with the presence of his queer male companion rather than totally abandon the domestic space and escape out West.

Queer Transfiguration

It is only after Joseph’s life is completely upturned (due to Julia’s death, the murder trial, and his proclamation of innocence) that Joseph yields to Philip’s advice and takes a trip out

West. Yet, the novel does something unexpected—Joseph travels to the frontier alone, and not with Philip. Why is this so? The novel’s reasoning seems shallow: Philip’s Coventry Forge is succeeding in Pennsylvania and helping the community grow, and he desires to stay working there instead of traveling. Martin interprets Joseph’s solo journey differently, positing that

Taylor, stuck in his nineteenth-century American context, could not envision the fulfillment of a pastoral paradise with two men: “the convention of the time provided no form, no place for the love of two men” (Martin 16). Unlike Maurice and Alec’s escape into the English countryside at the end of E.M. Forster’s novel Maurice,15 Martin argues that Taylor cannot conceive of a world where two men could express their queer desires in an Arcadian environment. While Martin’s interpretation is valid, I argue that the novel does something different: for Joseph, his journey out

West is not about achieving queer utopia but about growing in his identity and maturity. I argue that Taylor can conceive of a place where two men can love each other—indeed, he has offered readers that possibility through Philip’s California valley and through his presentation of a homosocial American West. Joseph’s solo journey is not about Taylor’s own contextual

15 Forster’s Maurice was written between 1913 and 1914, revised in the following decades, but was published posthumously in 1971. Wagner 110 limitations but instead aims to offer a utopian pathway different from Philip’s model of queer escape and from Joseph’s earlier model of queer domesticity. The end of Joseph and His Friend resolves the tensions between queer escape and queer domesticity but poses a third utopian pathway, which I term queer transfiguration, a transfiguration that makes possible an insistence of one’s own inherent nature and inner, rightful freedom.

My use of a religious vocabulary for transformation is intentional: following the religious themes of Joseph and His Friend, the term transfiguration more specifically denotes the type of inward transformation that I argue Joseph discovers. According to the OED, the noun form transfiguration refers to the biblical story of Jesus revealing his divinity to his disciples (see

Matthew 17, Mark 9, and Luke 9). As I assert below, Joseph’s journey out West and back bears similarities with Jesus’ own transfiguration; I present a unique and playful use of the term by arguing that Joseph’s transfiguration contributes to the novel’s utopian visions of queer theology.

In a final epistolary chapter, the novel presents us with Joseph’s newfound belief that utopia is found within oneself, a pathway of queer transfiguration. While writing to Philip,

Joseph surprisingly reveals that he stumbled upon the exact valley that Phillip spoke of:

Philip, Philip, I have found your valley!

After my trip to Oregon, in March, I went southward, along the western base of

the Sierra Nevada, intending at first to cross the range; but falling in with an old friend of

yours, a man of the mountains and the seas, of books and men, I kept company with him,

on and on, until the great wedges of snow lay behind us, and only a long, low, winding

pass divided us from the sands of the Colorado Desert. From the mouth of this pass I

looked on a hundred miles of mountains; there were lakes glimmering below; there were

groves of ilex on the hillsides, and orchards of oranges, olives, and vines in the hollow, Wagner 111

millions of flowers hiding the earth, pure winds, fresh waters, and remoteness from all

conventional society. I have never seen a landscape so broad, so bright, so beautiful!

(346)

In lush, Transcendental language, Joseph depicts the natural beauty of the California valley near

San Francisco. Philip’s valley also evokes images of the biblical Garden of Eden, suggesting that perhaps Joseph and Phillip, isolated from civilization, could function as a queer mirror to Adam and Eve. Yet, even though he has actually reached a Western, Edenic utopia, Joseph preaches a different outlook on life:

Yes, but we will only go there on one of these idle epicurean journeys of which we

dream, and then to enjoy the wit and wisdom of our generous friend, not to seek a refuge

from the perversions of the world! For I have learned another thing, Philip: the freedom

we craved is not a thing to be found in this or that place. Unless we bring it with us, we

shall not find it. (346)

In these few sentences, the novel offers a new queer utopian pathway: true freedom is found in oneself, although it is earned through Western escape and necessary to queer and reclaim an

Eastern domestic space. On this path, an individual makes a pilgrimage out West to queer utopia, but instead of staying there, he realizes that his true “freedom,” which Joseph and Philip have

“craved” throughout the novel, is “not a thing to be found in this or that place” (346). Rather, true freedom is found within oneself. Although Philip dreams of “idle epicurean journeys” of travel, Joseph comes to find in his own experience that such “refuge” is achieved in one’s own heart and mind, not in an idealistic locale (346). Joseph’s own journey to the mountains and revelation of his inner freedom is indicative of the story of Jesus’ own transfiguration: going “up on a high mountain by themselves,” Jesus leaves the crowds and reveals his divine identity to a Wagner 112 select few of his disciples (Matthew 17:1). A sort of inner light emerges from Jesus’ body: “He was transfigured before them, and his face shone like the sun, and his clothes became white as light” (Matthew 17:2). Similarly, when Joseph returns from his Western journey and reunites with Philip, the text indicates that Joseph’s face was “fresh, and full of joyous life” (Taylor 355).

When Joseph returns to Pennsylvania, he returns transformed, transfigured.

Like Quaker theology denotes, here is a Joseph who has embraced the “inner light” within himself (Dandelion 204). According to Quaker theology, “the light within” or the “Divine light” within each human soul allows an individual “direct revelation” into spiritual truth, a revelation “available to all” (21). While conservative Quakers, like the ones Taylor critiques, check such individual experience against “the authority of Scripture,” Joseph’s transfiguration presents a queered and literal approach to the “pure experience” of the light within (Dandelion

204). Joseph, who now understands the inherent spirituality and divinity of his nature (an idea similar to Emersonian Transcendental spirituality as well), can return to formerly oppressive spaces and live out his new embodied freedom. Under this newly realized identity, Joseph is able to leave Western queer utopia and return to the place that once restricted him, now armed with an inner freedom that he can “bring” with him anywhere (355).

Joseph’s life after he returns to Pennsylvania provides glimpses of this inner utopia, a queer freedom reclaimed from the forces of normativity. Taylor makes clear to emphasize that

Joseph’s own farm house has been located in a valley the whole time: there is a “long hill behind

[Joseph’s] home [with] a noble pin-oak on the height, whence there was a lovely view of the valley for many miles southward” (97). Joseph and His Friend offers a sentimental affirmation of space: what Joseph and Philip have been longing for has been in front of them the whole time.

Joseph’s path of queer transfiguration is not simply one of transformation—rather than change Wagner 113 the surrounding landscape, Joseph only realizes the utopic potential it already possessed.

Furthermore, rather than a sole reclamation of the East into a spot he can thrive, Joseph is refiguring his own relation to the space around him, embracing Taylor’s notion of inner freedom.

When Joseph comes back from his journey, “there was a welcome through the valley when

Joseph’s arrival was known,” not unlike crowds flocking to see Jesus and his own miracles, and

Taylor paints a beautiful picture of Joseph’s agrarian valley: “Every evening […] Joseph took his saddle-horse and rode up the valley to Philip’s Forge. It was […] the inexpressible charm of the verdure to which he had so long been a stranger […] the richness of the sunset on the hills, the exquisite fragrance of the meadow-grasses in the cool air […] which drew him thither” (356-

357). Whereas Philip’s valley is a space in the wilderness of California, Joseph’s valley is a space in the rural hills of Pennsylvania: both are nature-centered spaces, opposed to urban industrialism, but both offer visions of queer utopia for nineteenth-century America. By the end of the novel, Joseph’s Pennsylvania community is no longer the restricting, confining, conservative place it used to be; his path of transfiguration, cultivated by his intimate relationship with Philip, leads Joseph to a higher level of maturity that allows him to assert his inherent nature and achieve freedom even in an Eastern agrarian environment.

By resolving Joseph and Philip’s tensions through the utopian pathway of queer transfiguration, Joseph and His Friend provides the reader with various possibilities for achieving freedom. Martin argues that Taylor, as an author, “seems to have recognized that the pastoral dream is in fact no solution for mid-nineteenth century America,” and believes that

Taylor “considered the Arcadian dream and rejected it, calling instead for social and personal change to alter the condition of the homosexual in America” (Martin 15). Tracing his writings through Taylor’s career, Martin contends that by the time Taylor wrote Joseph and His Friend he Wagner 114

“no longer believed” that such a utopian place existed and “recognized that homosexuals could only gain their freedom by creating a better world for themselves by daring to be free” (16).

Here, Martin argues that Taylor found utopia not in a place but in an action: “daring to be free”

(16). However, I do not agree that Taylor “no longer” believed in a physical, distant utopia; indeed, we see Taylor’s fantastical vision of a queer utopian space in the California valley

(Martin 16). Throughout the novel, Joseph and Philip are two opposing but intersecting voices; just like their relationship contained “the circles of their lives” that “reciprocally widened,” the ideologies and values they embody throughout the novel intertwine, complicating a singular authorial viewpoint (337). I argue that the novel insists queer utopia is not possible alone but requires the presence of another individual with inherent difference. The presence of a queer companion thus implies an insistence that utopia can be in a physical space, but that space does not have to be far away (in the West). Joseph, who travels West alone, glimpses but does not attain utopia; and his own pathway of transfiguration relies on plurality: “Unless we bring it with us, we shall not find it” (346). The text specifies the insistence on a collective “us;” and, following the Eden metaphor of Philip’s valley, the novel emphasizes “it is not good that the man should be alone” (Genesis 2:18). Joseph returns to an inner, agrarian utopia only because he still maintains the “dear companionship of Philip” (357). While the novel’s pathways offer different routes to achieve utopia, both rely on a bond of more than one individual. Joseph’s solo journey is a strange embodiment of both escape and domesticity at the same time, an escapist journey West that still maintains an Eastern domestic space through an inner reclamation of freedom. Just like Taylor’s complicated depiction of queer identity, the novel wants things both ways—essentialism and constructivism, queer escape and domesticity—and produces a liminal result unfamiliar to our contemporary frameworks. Wagner 115

Conclusion: “Happiness Was Not Yet Impossible”

In Chapter Two, I have argued that Joseph and His Friend offers various pathways to achieve queer utopia in Gilded Age America. Influenced by his own travels and the philosophies of Emersonian Transcendentalism, Taylor critiques rising urban industrialism and mechanization and praises the natural, spiritual, and authentic qualities of rural spaces, both wild and agrarian.

Taylor is not without flaw: his critique of the city rides on the shoulders of misogyny, and his depiction of the American West rests on an idealized myth reliant on white privilege and nativism. In this, Taylor advocates that rural spaces allow for more authentic expression of inherent queer natures, and the novel offers various potential pathways to achieve utopia.

Whereas Philip’s pathway of queer escape touts a Westward movement toward paradise, and

Joseph’s initial pathway of queer domesticity insists on relying on spirituality to suffer through heterosexual restrictions, the novel’s ultimate pathway of queer transfiguration relies on finding freedom within oneself, reclaiming an Eastern agrarian landscape. Ultimately, these pathways all rely on more than an individual; queer utopia must be achieved together, not separately. And indeed, by the end of the novel, with Philip and Joseph together and free at last, it seems the reader has truly reached a queer nineteenth-century American utopia.

This brings us again to the surprising and disjointed final paragraph of Joseph and His

Friend. Even though the final chapter of the novel is titled “All Are Happy,” as I analyzed at the end of Chapter One, readers encounter an anxious and disappointed Philip. Gazing down at

Joseph and his sister Madeline from, poignantly, the edge of the valley—“on the curving shoulder of the knoll”—Philip begins his mournful monologue, crushed at the imminent changes in his close friendship with Joseph (Taylor 357). Philip’s sadness mirrors a spatial pessimism he Wagner 116 emphasized in one of his letters to Philip, reflecting on the industrial changes that will soon occur in their ideal Pennsylvania valley:

The Neighborhood (I like to hover a while, before alighting) is still a land where all

things always seem the same. The trains run up and down our valley, carrying a little of

the world boxed up in shabby cars, but leaving no mark behind. In another year the

people will begin to visit the city more frequently; in still another, the city people will

find their way to us; in five years, population will increase and property will rise in value.

This is my estimate, based on plentiful experience. (344)

Here, Philip expresses grief at the loss of the ideal Pennsylvania pastoral setting; for Philip, even his valley at home, with his Forge and sister and intimate friend Joseph, is changing to his disappointment. The life that Philip envisioned is slowly fading out of possibility, mirroring

America’s own historical context. Although it was only 1870 when he published the novel,

Taylor was aware of industrialism’s influential rise on the country and its spread West, limiting natural landscapes of wild utopia. As represented in John Gast’s painting American Progress, the angelic Progress made her own Westward migration, intertwining the nation with technology and bringing mechanization and metropolises with her. Philip’s pessimism mirrors larger antimodern anxities about the transformation of the country and the inevitable closing of the West, the dying visions of a national utopian empire.

But, as I argued in the conclusion to Chapter One, I do not believe that Joseph and His

Friend’s ending is completely without hope. Take, for example, the very end of Chapter XX in the novel; after Joseph declines Philip’s offer to escape West, the novel features its most heartwarming description of the two friends, a bond that surpasses Philip’s initial disappointment: “As they walked back and parted on the highway, each felt that life was not Wagner 117 wholly unkind, and that happiness was not yet impossible” (221). Despite Joseph’s early denial of a queer escape, this chapter still flows with hope and the chance of future happiness—the novel continually dreams of a better life. For Philip at the end of the novel, I believe that same promise still holds true; though he cannot envision that at the moment, the totality of the novel gives the reader a future longing. Although Philip may not conclude the novel with a happy ending, Taylor gives his reader the pathways to pursue their own hope and freedom, positioning queer escape and queer transfiguration as potentialities for queer Americans in the nineteenth century. By the end of the novel, readers have encountered Taylor’s strange vision for queer relationships, spirituality, and the American landscape, hinting to his readers of “still happier landscapes beyond” (Taylor 272).

Wagner 118

CONCLUSION

But as it is, they desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one. -Hebrews 11:16

We’ll find a way to heaven, We’ll find a way -Janelle Monáe

Backward Glances, Future Visions

In this project, I have argued that Bayard Taylor’s novel Joseph and His Friend points to models and ideas about sexuality and queerness that pre-date a twentieth-century codification and labeling of sexual identity. My work aims to defamiliarize our conceptions of queer history and reveal unique nineteenth-century ways of conceiving a queer self. Joseph and His Friend trades in utopic language; Joseph and Philip, discontent with their present environment and longing for spaces that allow authentic expression, dream of better worlds—sites where they will be free from compulsory restrictions, spaces where they can be free to love one another. Taylor’s novel posits a kind of essentialist model of sexual identity, a notion of inherent difference that is, radically and at its core, spiritual. Additionally, the novel critiques the city as a site of normative, reproductive heterosexuality, offering various queer utopian pathways that present tangible possibilities for queer lifestyles in nineteenth century America. Ultimately, Taylor’s Joseph and

His Friend gives us a clear picture of an unfamiliar queer history, one that helps us better understand the particularities of nineteenth-century sexuality and can inspire us to dream of a future queer nation.

One reason Joseph and His Friend has been such an engaging text for me to study is its depiction of an older America and the unexpected surprises I encountered in its portrayal of life in the mid-1800s, surprises I hope my reader has enjoyed as well. Joseph and His Friend depicts a nineteenth century that I have never seen before, one with blatant expressions of male-male Wagner 119 affection and intimacy. One of the most beautiful passages of the novel is also its most explicit in depicting Joseph and Philip’s queer relationship. After their long discussion about the restrictive laws of men and the freedom of the California valley, the text reads:

They took each other’s hands. The day was fading, the landscape was silent, and only the

twitter of nesting birds was heard in the boughs above them. Each gave way to the

impulse of his manly love, rarer, alas! but as tender and true as the love of woman, and

they drew nearer and kissed each other. As they walked back and parted on the highway,

each felt that life was not wholly unkind, and that happiness was not yet impossible.

(Taylor 221)

I am astounded each time I encounter this passage, so bold in its portrayal of the physical and spiritual love between two men, yet published in the early 1870s, a time that we usually assume did not make space for explicit literary portrayals of male-male affection. Furthermore, in my research I did not find an instance in which this passage was challenged or even commented on by critics when the book was first published and reviewed—only later into the twentieth century, after the post-Wilde proliferation of queer sexual stigmatization, did critics like Beatty and

Wermuth critique the novel’s detailing of physical intimacy between men. How did such a text evade a public scandal about its homosexual overtones? The fact that this touching love scene between Joseph and Philip was not censored by authorities reveals that this book landed in

America at a different moment than we tend to presume about the mid-nineteenth century: less restrictive and oppressive towards queer expressions of sexuality and more normalized and accepting towards romantic friendship and intimacy between men.

The longer I gazed into Joseph and His Friend, the more I inhabited its historical moment, its bold assertions of ideas past, and its compelling foreshadows of ideas to come. One Wagner 120 of my favorite phrases from Muñoz is this description of his methodology: “a backward glance that enacts a future vision” (Muñoz 4). This is the same action I have hoped to enact with this project—but, perhaps, this study has been more of a gaze than a glance. While glancing (or glimpsing) is quick and sharp—a moment of recognition, or unfamiliarity, or both—gazing is long, focused, intent. My engagement with Joseph and His Friend has been more than a glance, more than a glimpse. I hope that this project delivers a meaningful, prolonged gaze for my reader—a gaze that, like Joseph catching sight of Philip for the first time, generates sustained thought and perhaps even change for the viewer.

Like Muñoz’s vision of queer utopia proposes, I suggest we can glance backwards at

Joseph and His Friend and use the novel to help us chart new mappings of queer worlds, imagine possible renderings of queer in the distant future, and engage in queer utopian world- making. In his book No Future, Lee Edelman urges queer people to “refuse the insistence of hope itself as affirmation, which is always affirmation of an order whose refusal will register as unthinkable, irresponsible, inhumane” (Edelman 4). Yet I maintain that hope is an essential methodology in which to contend with the difficulties of the present. Muñoz poses utopia as “an insistence in something else, something better, something dawning” (Muñoz 189). He calls us to

“think about our lives and times differently, to look beyond a narrow version of the here and now on which so many around us who are bent on the normative count” (189). Joseph and His Friend presents us with a clear model of such forward-thinking hope, even when the forces of

(hetero)normativity seem daunting and oppressive.

A distillation of Joseph and His Friend yields a reimagining of how religion can be a supportive force in queer discourses, a powerful defense of queer identity. Similarly, the novel inspires a reclaiming of rural spaces as safe havens for queer folk, reminding us about the Wagner 121 histories of queer anti-urbanism and helping us rethink its present forms. The novel is not assertive in its solutions; evidenced by the various utopian pathways and the unexpected ending,

I think that Joseph and His Friend is a work which is actively trying to look back on its past, contend with its present, and conceive of a future. At many points in the novel, the characters stumble or stutter over their words: consider Joseph’s “but—but—” when discussing romance with Elwood, or Philip’s “perhaps—perhaps—” when suggesting that he and Joseph escape to the California valley (Taylor 13, 220). These moments in Taylor’s writing style evoke a sense of unsurety, a stutter over the unsayable, instances when both the characters and the novel itself are figuring out how to put language to queer desire. Just as Katz and Looby emphasize about queer nineteenth-century American history writ large, these linguistic stumbles reflect a coalescing of ideas, gravitating toward a defined, expressible meaning, but not quite there yet—still in the air.

Joseph and His Friend gives us the opportunity, as well, to stutter over our words as we formulate queer desires and cultivate queer spaces. I hope this novel spurs readers to imagine future sexual landscapes and speculate on the untapped potential that religion and rurality may hold for America’s queer future.

Utopia, Wasteland, and the Work Left to Do

Perhaps another reason the ideas I have harvested from Joseph and His Friend resonate so deeply with me is because they are still in circulation today, channeling through our cultural spaces and continuing to raise conversations about the unexpected connections between sexuality, spirituality, and spatiality. Consider popular music in the twenty-first century, which I have highlighted in the epigraphs before each chapter of this project. Lady Gaga’s “Born This

Way,” an empowering queer anthem for my generation, relies on a framework of essentialist identity, insisting that all humans are born with God-given, inherent differences that are worth Wagner 122 celebrating. Or take Troye Sivan’s album Bloom, which uses natural images of bright flowers and delectable fruits to depict a lush landscape of queer sexual expression. Finally, there is

Janelle Monáe’s boundary-breaking project Dirty Computer, which grapples with a contentious and prejudiced American present and reaffirms the value of American identity, even as it imagines a better horizon for the nation. Just like Joseph and Philip, queer artists continue to find inspiration in the complicated intersections between American religion and rurality, providing us with sustenance to endure the present and stimulus to imagine the future.

Not all humans are instinctively drawn to hope. Like Edelman’s work and the anti-social thesis in queer theory proposes, sometimes an aggressive and polemical stance against utopic dreams of the future is a more suitable strategy to contend with the moment. So, what does our queer future look like? Is it a utopic horizon, or are we cruising toward impending, foreboding destruction? Singer-songwriter Hozier’s recent album Wasteland, Baby! pointedly resists any type of optimistic hope. Hozier’s lyrics insist that destruction, not perfection, lies in the future:

“There’s no plan / There’s no race to be run / […] There’s no kingdom to come / […] There will be darkness again” (Hozier). Waxing poetic about the burning out of the sun, Hozier imagines a future wasting away to coldness and darkness, evocative of the devastated Arcadia in Thomas

Cole’s Destruction and Desolation paintings. Yet, even in wasteland, Hozier’s work dabbles in hope:

When the stench of the sea and the absence of green

Are the death of all things that are seen and unseen

Are an end, but the start of all things that are left to do (Hozier)

Utopia will take work—there is much left to do as we create and institute queer possibilities, as we participate in queer world-making. Older queer literature provides us with fuel to imagine Wagner 123 those future utopias; from the past, we can distill forgotten ideas and models of queerness that inspire us to burn and build our way into the future.

The contested visions of queer utopia in Joseph and His Friend remind us that, sometimes, utopia is an unachievable fantasy—but it also reminds us that the pursuit of utopia, the enactment of hope, is just as necessary in configuring one’s identity and their relationships to others. The end to Joseph and His Friend in part reminds me of the conclusion to the 1939 film

The Wizard of Oz. Just as Joseph realizes that utopia must be achieved within oneself, so

Dorothy discovers that she has had the power to return home to Kansas throughout her entire journey down the yellow brick road. Both The Wizard of Oz and Joseph and His Friend encourage us to embrace the queer possibilities that lie in our own backyard, potentialities we must learn for ourselves. As my reader glances away from this project and as I gaze forward in my own life and scholarship, I encourage us to keep looking back at queer nineteenth-century literature as a source of possibility that inspires us to pursue the “still happier landscapes beyond.”

Wagner 124

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