Bucke, Whitman, and the Cross-Border Homosocial

Abstract

I. In 1854 Henry David Thoreau wrote in Walden a visit paid him by a wandering French-Canadian woodchopper. So taken was Thoreau with this rugged laborer--a true Homeric or Paphlagonian (144), as he put it in his journal--and so eager was he fasten [him]self like a bloodsucker ... to any full-blooded man that [came his] way (140), that he indulged in a moment Homerotic fantasy: he asked the woodsman to read to him from the Iliad, and in particular Achilles reproof to Patroclus for his sad countenance (144). This passage, in Henry Abelove's view, mirrors Thoreau's relation to the readers Walden.... Just as he hands the wood-chopper a book, so he does to his readers, and as his readers we are therefore all positioned, regardless our gender or sexual taste, as the objects a homosexual (22-23). Our argument extends Abelove's reading by proposing that this seduction is paradigmatic what we are calling the homosocial. (1) In developing this term, we are building on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's notion desire. Sedgwick writes in Between Men that Homosocial is a word occasionally used in history and the social sciences, where it describes social bonds between persons the same sex; it is a neologism, obviously formed by analogy with homosexual, and just as obviously meant to be distinguished from homosexual. In fact, it is applied to such activities as bonding, which may, as in our society, be characterized by intense homophobia, fear and hatred homosexuality. To draw the homosocial back into the orbit the potentially erotic, then, is to hypothesize the potential unbrokenness a continuum between and homosexual--a continuum whose visibility, for men, in our society, is radically disrupted.... I do not mean to discuss genital homosexual as at the root of other forms male homosociality--but rather [as] a strategy for making generalizations about, and marking historical differences in, the structure men's relations with other men. (1-2) Sedgwick goes on to situate this continuum the structural context triangular, heterosexual desire (16). Drawing primarily on Rene Girard's schematization erotic triangles in the male-centred novelistic tradition Europe, she outlines a basic paradigm whereby active male is refracted/triangulated asymetrically through the passive positioning women as displaced objects nominal/patrimonial heterosexual (21-27). However, by adding to homosocial, we are extending Sedgwick's argument spatially, along a geography desire, in order to explore the question whether sexuality is further triangulated across and through national and geographical borderlines, an aspect Canada-U.S. relations which has been ignored in recent literary critical and historical discussions the cross-border phenomenon (as we discuss in section VII below). In other words, do sexualities and genders construct themselves differently according to differences in nation and geography? In this regard, we are working within the framework outlined by George Mosse's Nationalism and Sexuality: Middle-Class Morality and Sexual Norms in Modern Europe, in which Mosse argues that the histories nationalism and sexuality are enmeshed (10), as well as within the broader frame reference articulated by Nationalisms and Sexualities, whose chapters (according to its editors) interrogate the (hetero) normative assumption that 'nation' and 'sexuality' are themselves trans-historical, supra-national, or self-identical categories (2). II. In the concluding chapter Between Men, Sedgwick outlines a classic instance trans-Atlantic homosociality involving Walt Whitman's literary reception in England. …