The Fear Passing the Love of Women: Sodomy and Male Sentimental Citizenship in the Antebellum City

Abstract

MICHAEL MILLNER The Fear Passing the Love of Women: Sodomy and Male Sentimental Citizenship in the Antebellum City In new York city in ? 8 6 1 , a curious and now almost completely forgotten manuscript was discovered in the desk drawer of Captain Theodore Winthrop, who just weeks before had been killed at the age of thirty-two by a Confederate bullet at the battle of Great Bethel, Virginia . This novel, Ceci! Oréeme, published later that year and frequently reprinted to popular acclaim over the next half-decade, announces itself on the first page as speaking in the "mother tongue," the "vernacular " (21-22). Striking, however, is not only the novel's self-conscious relationship to "Young Americanism" (28) and nation-building, but its forthright treatment of what to today's readers might seem in fantastic opposition to any idea of U.S. national identity and belonging: a longingly romantic, emotionally charged love between men, spoken of in no uncertain terms.1 This is the "love passing the love of women" (275, 235), the love of "Orestas and Pylades" (242), and "Damon and Pythias" (33, 334, 348).2 These old phrases seem hopelessly stilted nearly one hundred and fifty years later, yet the characters who utter them feel an avid pounding of the heart that we can all at least recognize. Cecil Oréeme tells the story of a young man who falls into an elaborately expressed love with another young man in the New York City of the 1850s. What did it mean to be in love with another man in 1850s New York? What did it mean Arizona Quarterly Volume 58, Number 2, Summer 2002 Copyright © 2002 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004-16 1 o 20 Michael Miliner to fantasize about falling in love with another man in the antebellum city? Of course, even as Winthrop drafted his novel in the latter years of that decade, another New York writer—much better remembered today —turned to a similar idiom to express the most intense male intimacies . Although Walt Whitman avoided the classical and Biblical allusions , his "Calamus" poems (i860) often speak in a stock language that echoes through Winthrop, as well as others like John Greenleaf Whittier and Bayard Taylor, to describe male friendship. A love hypercharged and richly expressed, these friendships are far from the "austere , almost inarticulate" (192) love between men that Leslie Fiedler has famously considered. For both Whitman and Winthrop this friendship is deeply sentimentalized in that it is founded on an interconnection of like-feeling—an exchange of souls, the shared palpitation of hearts. Cecil Dreeme's narrator delights in "the touch of his soul to mine" (175), the "one near and comrade soul" (275) and "his soul . . . very close to me" (175). In the "Calamus" poems Whitman turns to similar expressions: "the love of comrades" (272), "the soul of man" (268), "throbs of your heart" (271), "the dear love of man for his comrade , the attraction of friend to friend" (275), "manly love" (280), and "brethren and lovers" (281). The "Calamus" collection in many senses is Whitman's friendship novel, hut one with important differences. Together Whitman and Winthrop help establish the structures, ambitions, and tensions of male sentimental culture at mid-century. Whitman scholarship has frequently recognized his debt to a male fraternity discourse which by the 1850s had become an identifiable convention.5 Whittier's abolitionist brotherhood and Melville's calling upon "Damon and Pythias" and "Orestas and Pylades" set the scene for Whitman. Thoreau in his journal asserts the more expansive social ideal that is always implicit in these fantasy friendships and which Whitman would make a foundation for his "Calamus" vision: "History tells of Orestas and Pylades, Damon and Pythias, but why should not we put to shame those old reserved worthies by a community of such" (1:1 1 5).4 Yet this scholarly work on Whitman's fraternal foregoers has not closely examined the ways he strategically re-envisioned and critiqued the principle tenets of the conventions, particularly their social ideal. I want to re-embed Whitman's "Calamus" poems into that discourse in order to reveal his relationship to it, but also his...