Adaptive Audacity: Uncovering Queer Attachments and Re-evaluating Marriage Narratives in John William De Forest's Miss Ravenel's Conversion from Secession to Loyalty

Abstract

Henry James didn't much like John William De Forest's 1868 Civil War novel Miss Ravenel's Conversion from Secession to Loyalty. His distaste made him something of an outlier: after the novel's publication, critics generally praised De Forest's innovation in tackling a fraught period in the nation's history. Harper's Monthly, for example, declared it to be the “best American novel published for many a year” and W. D. Howells celebrated De Forest for his depiction of a romance plot between virtuous Northerners and reformed Southerners that could represent the prospects of North-South reconciliation.1 Yet, in an unsigned review for the Nation, James disagreed. Arguing that Miss Ravenel's Conversion sufficed when compared to the “numerous rivals for popular favor” at the time of its publishing, James overall derided it as a “poor novel with a deal of good in it.”2 In panning the novel, however, James found one unexpected virtue. His assessment grows uniquely appreciative when reviewing Colonel Carter, the philanderer, spendthrift, and bombastic Virginian officer in the Union Army who is in contention for marrying the titular character, Lillie Ravenel. Lingering on the “handsomeness” of Carter's enticing physique, James ultimately locates the novel's singular aesthetic success in a character defined by infidelity, alcoholism, and profligacy. Despite Carter's immorality, James focuses on the descriptive pleasures of his “ruddy-bronze complexion, audacious eye, his mighty mustachios, his easy assurance.”3 Indeed, James goes so far as to declare Carter to be “daguerreotyped from nature,” a notable success compared to the cast of the novel's schematic marriage plot who “seem puppets.”4 Amidst the novel's failures, James reserved a queerly appreciative and nearly eroticized interest in the novel's most transgressive, libidinous man.In this essay, I contend that that James’ fascination with Colonel Carter's embodiment unearths an as yet unexamined queer affiliation that subtends the novel's attempt to picture the conditions of postbellum national reunification. At the level of plot, Miss Ravenel's Conversion follows the drama surrounding Lillie Ravenel, a New Orleanian Southern partisan, as she is displaced to New England by her Union-supporting father. There she is wooed by and ultimately marries Carter, taking solace in his Southern roots, which she finds familiar. But after the discovery of Carter's infidelity and his subsequent death in battle, De Forest celebrates her symbolic remarriage to Carter's rival, Captain Colburne, a reserved, sexually inexperienced recruit from New England. In alignment with her remarriage to Colburne, Lillie fully “converts” her allegiance to the Union and Colburne develops beyond his initial sexual reserve as a Puritan New Englander. Depicting Colburne and Lillie's sexual and political evolution, the novel inaugurates what Nina Silber's has termed “romances of reunion”—that is, the postbellum genre of novels whose North-South marriage plots circulated a “culture of conciliation” that addressed sectional political conflict by metaphorizing a reunified social order through the stabilizing influences of marriage.5 What I focus on here, however, is the way that De Forest also circulates an erotic affinity between Carter and Colburn, one that James’ eroticized description of Carter mirrors, which illustrates how queer energies operate in tandem with the novel's normative plot. In other words, beside the drama of romance and reunion, De Forest develops queer attachment whose evolution in the novel belies the stability of its primary heterosexual trajectory.To date, these queer attachments have not received critical attention. Instead, extant criticism traces the realism of the novel's war depictions and the dynamics in which the romance between Union loyalists and a Southern Confederate sympathizer come to symbolize the hopes of national reconciliation in a country fractured by sectionalism, white supremacy, and war. Indeed, after Eric Sundquist declared it one of the most “impressive treatments of the Civil War,” Shirley Samuels, Phillip Barrish, and Scott Romaine position Miss Ravenel's Conversion as a point of inflection for significant aesthetic developments in the postbellum novel by observing the various ways in which its early iteration of reunion romance and its war realism combined to document the conditions of the national political fracture.6 Indeed, since Howells pronounced that the novel was the first example of “realism before realism was known by that name,” many critics argued that Miss Ravenel anticipates the dominant mode of the U.S. novel in the late nineteenth century.7 Marriage and domesticity played a role here as well; as Amy Kaplan explains, heterosexual domesticity “anchor[ed] the real” and catapulted the representational family unit to the forefront of the political and literary imagination, where, according to Leslie Harris, it more broadly acted as a “synecdoche for the moral conditions of the nation” writ large and came to act as a metaphor for the national health.8 In these analogies, as Nancy Cott argues, marriage not only represented a reconstituting political body but “presumed to create the kind of citizen” needed to repopulate the nation in its recovery.9 In this light, Miss Ravenel's Conversion stands at this inflection point, when marriage took an intensifying role across emerging genres of U.S. fiction in figuring the idea of the nation and good citizenship alike.Rather than adjudicating generic boundaries in this essay, however, I focus on the way that Miss Ravenel's Conversion's generic duality enables the encoding of queer sentiments in ways that both register and resist the rising multi-genre importance of marital ideology in postbellum fiction. Following Ian Finseth's observation that Miss Ravenel's Conversion is a “transitional text” and a “strange amalgam” of realist and romantic elements, I suggest that its generic dualism opens a space for queer attachments that became increasingly untenable with the rise of the modern heterosexual binary and the concurrent U.S. literary interest in figuring the nation itself through symbolic marriages.10 More broadly, focusing on the queerness of the novel's generic dualism allows us to draw a counter-genealogy of postbellum fiction: instead of figuring its placement alongside realist or reunion romance modes, we might align De Forest's text with Louisa May Alcott's Little Women (1868) and James’ The Bostonians, both of which dramatize the importance of marriage in symbolizing postbellum normalcy, while also showing how queer attachments were being erased from the political order.11 In such a genealogy, De Forest also joins novels like Frederick Loring's Two College Friends, which, as Travis Foster explains, pits marriage and reconciliation against intimate attachments between men who have served in war. As Forster posits, though marriage resolves homoerotic energy, “homosexual passion lingers on as a ghostly resource” that endures regardless.12Miss Ravenel's Conversion conceals a similar queer haunting. In this vein, the novel can be understood alongside a genealogy of Civil War era texts that explore how queerness adapted to the political fictions of marriage and bourgeois heterosexual domesticity. Put another way, the novel both traces the rise of marriage as a political and literary form, but also demonstrates how non-normative identity formations and homoerotic attachments were endangered in the process.In what follows, I trace how homoerotic affiliations parallel and contour Miss Ravenel's Conversion's heterosexual romantic drama. My discussion examines three modes of queer expression as they evolve across the plot: queer cruising, male sentimentality, and loss. First, I discuss the beginning of the novel through the frame of queer cruising to show how De Forest builds an erotic affinity between Colburne and Carter before stabilizing their relation around their competition for Lillie Ravenel. Second, I trace how this initial eroticism transitions into a form of sentimental attachment that binds Colburne and Carter together even after Carter successfully woos and marries Lillie. I describe how Colburne's bachelordom allows him to remain a source of comfort for Carter, converting their initial erotic attachment into a permissible form of emotional intimacy. Finally, I discuss how the mourning of Carter's eventual death converts the illicit attachment he and Colburne shared into the normative strictures of heterosexual marriage and citizenship. In closing, I trace how the novel's heterosexual ending assimilates queer feelings into a marital norm without erasing them outright. Tracing how Colburne and Carter's attachment evolves across the novel, I suggest that De Forest reinscribes queer feelings within the very reunion romance that was meant to certify marriage as a stabilizing hierarchy. Most importantly, Miss Ravenel's Conversion demonstrates how the aesthetic slipperiness of queer attachments evades the rigidity of heterosexual marital ideology that rose alongside the modern sexual binary.Queer aesthetic practices are often predicated on evasions that mask attachments.13 But such practices also function as a site of recognition amongst the queer, forming networks of affinity in a hostile world.14 Unearthing Miss Ravenel's story of queer visibility begins with such a feeling of queer familiarity. When Henry James describes Carter's “audacious eye, his mighty mustachios, his easy assurance” in a review of the novel, he expresses more than a personal assessment; in fact, he mimics the way the narrator of Miss Ravenel's Conversion evaluates the aesthetic characteristics of the novel's primary men. On its own, James’ assessment of Carter might pass as an innocent appreciation. However, since it in fact mirrors a dynamic of shared masculine interest both by the narrator and between the novel's primary men, James’ assessment indexes a network of masculine desire encoded into Miss Ravenel's Conversion from the start. In fact, when the novel introduces the men who will compete for Lillie Ravenel's affections, it attends to their bodies with an aesthetic eye devoted to their muscularity. The narrator constructs this queer relation: he relishes in descriptions of men's bodies, often seeming to forget to attribute their origin to the women nearby who would stabilize his evaluations as heterosexual. To begin, the narrator describes how Colburne's “charming” and “sympathetic” manner are embodied by his “strongly built” person and the “vigor” of his exercise. The narrator continues, praising the “uncommonly fine figure” presented by Colburne's “firm white arms . . . set on broad shoulders and a full chest.”15 Isolating parts of his body, the narrator notes how Colburne had been “the best gymnast and oarsmen” and had “familiarity with swing bars” that made him “the finest and most agreeable young man in New Boston,” the fictional New England city where the novel opens (19). Introducing Colburne, the narrator takes pleasure not only in the appearance of his body but also in the athletic scenes that produced it.Perhaps not wanting to appear overly solicitous of male bodies, the narrator shifts the narrative to Lillie's point of view subsequently when introducing Colburne's rival Carter at a dinner party. Yet when migrating to Lillie's perspective, the description of Carter's “full chest, broad shoulders, and muscular arms” mirrors the narrator's appreciation of Colburne's physique, yoking their aesthetic attributes together (20). In this case, when Lillie mimics the narrator, De Forest subordinates her position to the narrator's initial assessment of pleasing male forms, evoking what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick calls an “asymmetry” in the depiction of male bonding that allows for the triangulation of male desire around a female object.16 After channeling Lillie's perspective, the narrative returns to Carter's merits, lingering on the characteristics James himself isolated: his “monstrous brown mustache,” his “audacious and mirthful” eyes, and his “dark rich complexion,” all of which give him an “insinuating suavity” that leaves Colburne “alarm[ed]” in the background (21). But more important is the aggregate effect produced when De Forest focuses attention on male bodies in parallel language: he creates a “sensory sympathy” that, as Cristina Richieri Griffin describes, connects unmaterialized narrators to the sensorium they describe.17 In the end, De Forest materializes the narrator rather than Lillie's attention to Carter and Colburne's comparative embodiment, thus minimizing the triangulatory concealment Lillie might otherwise offer.What's surprising is that De Forest does not constrain queer feeling to such indirect strategies. In fact, he allows eroticism between men to spill into the open and become a material phenomenon in itself. After De Forest encourages the reader to linger on male characters, he draws attention to the mutual bodily appreciation that Carter and Colburne share within the diegesis itself. After the two meet at Lillie's house, the narrator describes how Carter impacts Colburne's sensibility, noting how Carter's virility leaves Colburne attempting to “conceal his troubled condition by a smile of counterfeit interest” after Carter begins to talk with Lillie (21). The effect is twofold: in contrasting himself to Carter's masculinity, Colburne enters into a crisis of self-identification and at the same time withdraws some of his attention from the heterosexual intimacy Lillie offers. After the meeting, De Forest describes Colburne's mix of inadequacy and fascination: while walking with an inebriated Carter on the street after their first encounter, Colburne “feel[s] himself at a disadvantage in the company of men of fashion,” yet he nonetheless “was just sufficiently jealous of the Lieutenant-Colonel not to desire to fraternize with him” (28). After suggesting a coy mutual interest, the novel intensifies a specifically erotic relationality between the two in ways that anticipate queer cruising—the street-level practice of soliciting sex from men in public spaces. In the movement from disadvantage to desire, De Forest emphasizes how Colburne's unsettled social expectation also opens the possibility for further intimate contact.Though “cruising” first enters the recorded lexicon as a queer practice thirty years after this novel was published as a method for concealing illicit attractions between queer people in public view, the term helpfully highlights De Forest's narrative strategy of both implying and obscuring attraction between men.18 For my purposes, De Forest's narrative cruising of Carter and Colburne models this search for illicit pleasure, evoking what Michael Warner and Lauren Berlant call the “ephemeral” and “fugitive” characteristic of queer relationalities that evaded the hostility of a normative world.19 As part of cruising's fugitive nature, the mere search for illicit contact affords its own pleasures. Indeed, as Alex Espinoza writes, the “act of looking” and the “intent of action” that precondition scouting for sex in public spaces illustrates cruising's durability as a practice across time.20 That transgressive pleasure in the act of seeking is what we see here: much like James’ interest in Carter's mustache, complexion, and audacious eye, the narrator evaluates male bodies alongside a readerly public, limning the boundary between acceptable public consumption and a transgressive eroticism.Most telling, however, is the fact that De Forest materializes cruising's street-level practice when Colburne and Carter leave the dinner party where they first meet to walk city streets. Rather than leaving cruising as a strategy to suggest erotic interest at a narratorial level, De Forest doubles down on the erotic possibilities of sensed and shared transgression. Troubled by Carter in the social setting where they met Lillie, Colburn's discomfort converts into a desire for further contact with the very person who disturbs his sensibility in public. Walking next to one another in the New England night, the men brush shoulders, a physical encounter that causes Colburne a mix of pleasure and concern. At first, the narrator emphasizes Colburne's reserve. When a “strong suspicion troubled his mind” regarding Carter's “indiffere[nce] to New Boston opinions,” the narrator situates Colburne's disapproval of Carter in Carter's disregard for Puritan social conventions, positing a moral difference as an impediment to their proximity (28). Yet Colburne's complaint about Carter's moral indifference also masks a desire for further contact. When Carter invites Colburne to join him in Carter's apartment, De Forest writes: Why then did not Colburne decline the invitation? Because he was young, good-natured, modest, and wanting in that social tact and courage which most men only acquire by much intercourse with a great variety of their fellow creatures. The Lieutenant-Colonel's walk was the merest trifle unsteady, or at least careless, and his herculean arm, solid and knotted as an apple-tree limb, swayed repeatedly against Colburne, eliciting from him a stroke-oarsman's approbation. Proud of his own biceps, the young man had to acknowledge its comparative inferiority in volume and texture. (28)When Colburne assesses Carter's body in detail by referencing “volume and texture” of his arm, De Forest allows his gaze to linger on Carter's body even while emphasizing an awareness of a transgression. In this way, their contact in public space materializes the way that cruising, as George Chauncey describes the New York City street scene, disturbed the “proper boundaries between public and private space” by staging intimate acts in public.21 After this brief touch, Colburne asks: “are you a gymnast, Colonel? . . . Your arm feels like it,” to which Carter replies, bluntly and playfully: “sword exercise” (28). As if comparing their genitalia, the pride, and pleasure each take in their arms eroticizes their physical touch. In sharing glances and bodily evaluations as if a prelude to a sexual encounter, their mutual cruising is not only pleasurable for both men, it is mediated by a narrator who invites the questions as to why Colburne would continue associating with Carter unless he desired more intimate contact. This invitation is a source of trouble for Colburne because it forces him to examine the orientation of his attraction. Placed in a position of inadequacy, Colburne finds himself jealous of Carter's body, apprehensive about his character, and attracted to this illicit combination.From one perspective, Carter and Colburne's contact emphasizes the inadequate masculinity of the way Colburne “meekly” responds to the machismo of a military man (29). As Thomas Fick argues, De Forest contrasts Carter and Colburne in such detail in order to trace the process of Colburne's development into a symbol of postbellum masculinity: his evolution, in this articulation, represents a rejection of “Northern ambivalence about gender roles” by absorbing some of Carter's “aggressive masculinity.”22 However, in addition to the suggestion of Northern anxiety about inadequate masculinity, moments like these also emphasize the pleasure of Colburne and Carter's company and bodily contact. What's more remarkable is that their ephemeral closeness and eroticized desire is both naturalized and comfortable in its moment. After their encounter in the street, Carter invites Colburne to his rooms where “he became exceedingly open hearted” as they share cigars, again suggesting a phallic intimacy once sequestered from public view (30).23 Here Carter “stopped his walk and surveyed [Colburne], hands in his pockets, a smile on his lip, and a silent horse-laugh in his eye,” as if indicating the increased proximity enabled by a night of shared masculine privacy (34). The next day, when Colburne encounters Carter and Lillie again he is psychologically overloaded, and De Forest describes this overload as indecision about the proper orientation of his attachments. Upon re-encounter, Colburne feels an “oppression” at the prospects of interacting with Carter and Lillie again; De Forest depicts his distraction with a pleasure at Carter's “indifference” to the young lady; but is this because Colburne is himself interested in Lillie or gratified that Carter's attentions to himself are undistracted (34)? De Forest continues, ambivalently, that Colburne's “soul was so occupied with this new train of thought that I doubt whether he heard understandingly the conversation of his interlocutor for the next few minutes” (35). We might ask: what is it exactly that displaces Colburne's attention that leaves him preoccupied?These are the kinds of indefiniteness that define cruising: their contact enables intimacy without defining its outcomes. And this play with intimacy's boundaries becomes a subtextual dynamic that shapes their interactions of the remainder of the novel, if in more opaque ways. Shortly after their nighttime meeting, Carter is wounded in battle, to which Colburne responds with “a mixture of emotions” when learning how Carter had been “taken prisoner while gallantly leading a charge” (61). While the narrator equivocates about the nature of Colburne's emotions, he leaves open the possibility that he conceals the exact nature of his feelings. Subsequently, in a chance encounter with Carter after he has returned to New England to convalesce after his capture, Colburne wonders at Carter's resilience. Lingering again on his body, Colburne wonders at the recovery of a man “as big chested and rich complexioned, as audacious in eye and haughty in air, as if no hurt nor hardship nor calamity had ever befallen him” (72). The two men reconnect in a bar and Carter cavalierly describes his wounding and captivity to Colburne's amazement, allowing an intimacy to linger in public company.Reflecting on Colburne's sentiments, De Forest writes: “Away he went, leaving Colburne in wonder over his contrasts of slanginess and gentility, his mingled audacity and insouciance of character, and all the picturesque ins and outs of his moral architecture, so different from the severe plainness of the spiritual temples common of New Boston” (77). Rather than dissipating, Colburne's confusion finds a clearer target: the mix of audacity and insouciance, the disruption of customary norms of behavior in his native New England, the disregard of social critique—these together with the focalized adoration of Carter's masculine body create a circuit in which the narrator's descriptions of Colburne's disturbed emotions open a space for maintaining queer feeling. Even though their closeness is later obscured by symbolic heterosexuality of the romantic intrigue concerning who Lillie might marry, the eroticism between Carter and Colburne establishes a model of intimacy between men that endures throughout the novel. And it is the endurance of their eroticized intimacy that is essential to understanding the forms of romantic relation that dominate the remainder of the novel's drama. Put another way, without these queer intimacies and erotic connections, the novel's heterosexual schematic would not be possible.Scenes of cruising are, by their nature, fleeting, and so they are in Miss Ravenel's Conversion. The feelings they raise, however, have longer afterlives. As such, the novel's remainder explores how cruising's eroticism perseveres in the more ubiquitous novelistic register of sentiment. The shift in register provides a strategy for De Forest to maintain proximity between the two men even as the novel's emplotment invests in the drama of the war and of Lillie's courtship. Even though De Forest writes that the two men compete for Lillie's affections, their fellowship suggests the possibility of a more intimate emotional tie—a tie that he specifically redirects toward the domain of shared feeling. De Forest writes: “In spite of these sentimental possibilities of disagreement between the Colonel and the Captain, their friendship daily grew stronger. The former was not in the least influenced by lovelorn jealousy, and set much store by Colburne as being the only officer in his regiment who was precisely to his taste” (81–82). As Susan Sontag, riffing on Oscar Wilde, would later observe in Notes on Camp, the “fugitive sensibility” by which sentiment separates taste and aesthetic judgment has provided a durable realm for queer expression.24 That slippage is at the core of Carter and Colburne's renegotiated relation: by redirecting their competing “sentimental possibilities” into a friendship based on undefined shared tastes, De Forest neutralizes the potential conflict of competition over Lillie, instead amplifying the sensibilities these otherwise quite different characters share. The exceptionality of their friendship stands out: because Colburne is the “only officer . . . precisely to [Carter's] taste,” he maintains their sense of connection akin to that which they enjoyed when together conversing in Carter's rooms. These renewed connections do not obviate their previous eroticism as much as change its mode of expression. In the change, De Forest suggests that their sentiments not only realign but intensify: at one point, he emphasizes how Colburne was “the officer to whom he unbusomed himself the most freely” (87), suggesting their deepening mutual reliance. Put another way, the novel's articulated shift towards sentiment converts erotic feelings towards forms of male sociality that covertly imply intimacy while circumventing its materiality.In a general way, by modulating direct eroticism into the protean realm of sentiment, De Forest evinces what Christopher Looby calls nineteenth-century linkage between “the stylization of literary language and the stylization of sexuality itself” by which literature of the period attuned itself to evolving sexual typologies.25 To put this stylization in more specific terms, De Forest's manner of converting romantic conflict into shared illicit feeling typifies a specific form of “bachelor sentimentalism” that as Vincent Bertolini argues positioned unmarried men in a sexually liminal space between “domestication and transgression.”26 For Bertolini, spaces of bachelor sentimentality promised the social expectation of marriage while holding it at bay; in that delay, bachelor sentiment quietly signified the “transgressive triple threat of masturbation, whoremongering, and that nameless horror—homosexual sex.”27 Differing from the operations of sentimental fiction in the mid- to late-nineteenth century, which by and large were associated with feminization and with instructing the public into shared modes of feeling that could lead to social action, sentimental attachments between men limned behaviors that do not clearly pinpoint a moment of desired public transformation.28 While bachelor sentimentalism could at times have reformist ambitions, it also cultivates an “erotic limbo” that, as Glenn Handler and Mary Chapman suggest, cultivates an “alternate erotic subjectivity” and circumvents the regulatory regime of the normative family.29 In these critical moments at the start of Miss Ravenel, then, De Forest raises and then transmutes Carter and Colburne's shared bodily sensorium into the more evasive realm of sentimental intimacy to guard against explicitly affirming non-normative sexuality.By intensifying their mutual reliance, Carter and Colburne's evolving relationality embodies Roland Barthes’ description of sentimentality as a “transgression of a transgression” in that it recognizes a rupture in orthodoxy and, in attempting to route it towards a legitimate source, preserves the rupture.30 The affective rupture of their sentimental ties in fact coincides with the novel's formal incongruity itself. As such, the novel's split between reunion romance narrative and war realism is in fact central to the novel's management of queer sentiments between men. At the level of plot, the transition from marriage plot to Civil War narrative intensifies Carter and Colburne's shared sentiment by granting the two a separate yet coequal space of character development. First, the transition to war narrative develops a shared affective domain between Carter from which Lillie often disappears. Even when returning from the war plot to the novel's domestic interludes, De Forest emphasizes the importance of their separate fraternity, recognizing its effusive nature. For example, when Colburne converses during a break from war with Lillie and Madame Larue, the New Orleanian with whom Carter eventually has an affair, the narrator reiterates that Colburne “look[s] up to him with that deference” and that “he never thought to outshine” Carter who was the “handsomer one.” When describing how Colburne and Lillie both exhibit a “worshipful appreciation of Colonel Carter,” the narrator observes that “the former, being a man, made no secret of his admiration,” while Lillie, “being a marriageable young lady, covered hers” (142). In this dynamic, De Forest gives the gambit away by suggesting that the two men already possess a demonstrable intimacy that Lillie lacks.Even when De Forest formalizes relations between Carter and Lillie, he emphasizes Colburne's states of feeling at the prospect of changing his and Carter's emotional economy. Learning of Carter's proposal to Lillie, Colburne fears that there will now be “an inner circle of confidences and sentiments into which he was not allowed to enter,” which “cast upon him a shadow of melancholy” (196, 197). On the one hand, Colburne's loss of intimacy follows a standard trope where soldiers worried about abandoning the families they had gained with their fellows when they returned from war, indicating that the wartime feelings of intimacy did not translate to civilian