Gender Protest and Same-Sex Desire in Antebellum American Literature: Margaret Fuller, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville

Abstract

Gender Protest and Same-Sex Desire in Antebellum American Literature: Margaret Fuller, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville. By David Greven. Burlington: Ashgate, 2014. 250 pp. $109.95 cloth. For over a decade, David Greven has contributed prolifically to the fields of queer, gender, and sexuality studies--taking up a range of media and genres from the nineteenth-century short story to film noir to contemporary teen comedy. In his provocative volume, Greven focuses on in order to address a persistently controversial question: how and sexuality related to one another in the antebellum United States. What he finds is a rhetorical pattern that links protest and desire--a network of suggestive instances in which mourning for one's own lost and sundered gendered possibilities, on the one and protesting against one's gendered curtailments, on the other hand, could also be indicative of a longing for or sexual intimacy, and perhaps sometimes both, with someone of the same gender (39). Sexual identity and identity are of course not synonymous, he is at pains to stress, and the one does not always emerge from the other, but many important link the two (6). Fuller, Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville command his attention because their works make particularly salient the politics of same-sex desire in the period (5). The connected discourses of and sexual disruption, he further discovers, are often imbricated with discourses of race and slavery: An extraordinarily intricate relationship exists between race/racism and gender/sexuality/queer sexuality in antebellum texts (71). Interconnectedness emerges as both organizing principle and overarching theme in the course of the book. The broad intellectual current in which Greven works is the ongoing debate about whether we can legitimately speak of homosexuality at all in our studies of antebellum American literature. The Foucauldian line of thought, which long carried the force of orthodoxy, holds that to do so is to slide into anachronism: could not register homosexuality, in this view, before taxonomies of sexuality--and therefore sexual identity itself--were invented later in the nineteenth century. Greven disagrees. Making common cause with such critics as Valerie Rohy who in recent years have challenged this still-influential historicist argument, he uncovers in literary an incipient queer desiring presence' (4) that was no less real in the first half of the nineteenth century than in the latter half, for all that it went unnamed. Queer sexual possibility can arise from struggle and show itself in unlikely places and characters--in, say, a or a Redburn or a Hester. We can see it, Greven maintains, if we take the trouble to look slant. Limited as resources for expressing same-sex desire were in early nineteenth-century America, imaginative literature is fertile ground to search for such expression because of its special capacity to g[i]ve voice to both repression and discursive incitement (47). Gender Protest chiefly concerns itself with the emotional and the aesthetic aspects of literary representation (4)--a coupling that makes its treatment of sexuality and all the more revelatory. From Greven's vantage point, readings in the new aesthetic, as in the material-historicist vein, leave aside human realities of affect, the messiness--uncertainty, frustration, pain, turmoil--that often attended same-sex desire in the antebellum United States. A return to psychoanalytic theory equips Greven to fill this absence. Extending recent criticism that finds value in some aspects of psychoanalysis, he draws creatively on Freud, Lacan, and such feminist re-visionaries as Judith Butler to bring close textual reading and affective insight together. Versions of narcissistic desire, shame, mourning, melancholia, phallic imagery, and sexual and identification turn out to be freshly relevant to key antebellum works, among them Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter, Poe's Ligeia and The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, Fuller's Woman in the Nineteenth Century and Summer on the Lakes, and Melville's Redburn. …