Not Feeling Right:Queer Encounters with American Women's Writing Sari Edelstein Queer theory arrived on the critical scene in part as an outgrowth of feminist critique, but how has its anti-identitarian approach to gender and sexuality advanced the study of US women's writing? First, the deconstructive project of queer criticism unseats binaristic understandings of gender, productively destabilizing the very category of female authorship on which this field has largely depended. Moreover, queer theory reveals gender and sex norms to be culturally produced and historically contingent, an especially vital perspective from which to read nineteenth-century women's writing, a body of work that offers a veritable index and pedagogy of normativity. After all, isn't Harriet Beecher Stowe's breathless plea that readers must "feel right" at the end of Uncle Tom's Cabin a reminder that there are wrong ways to feel, that failing to feel the sympathetic identification ideally produced by the novel's maternalist antislavery politics is deviant? Together, queer and feminist perspectives allow us to understand this famous injunction—and the tradition of women's writing itself—not only as the apotheosis of sentimentality and its cult of domesticity but also as an articulation of how sex norms script political affect, embodiment, and womanhood. What follows is not a comprehensive account of queer contributions to the study of women's writing, which would be far too prodigious a task (perhaps even an impossible one) for the space of this essay. This brief review of the rich work at this juncture will not touch on queer studies of childhood or the powerful incitements of queer disability studies, nor will it survey the prodigious queer critical archive generated by the work of Emily Dickinson alone. It offers instead a survey of some contours of the field over the last decade or so, focusing [End Page 145] loosely on region, affect, kinship, and consumption as organizational categories, even though they are necessarily artificial and porous. This essay asks how queer scholarship has challenged entrenched ways of reading women's writing, estranging us from texts we thought we knew. But it also considers how attention to the particular concerns of feminist literary criticism has in turn fed and expanded queer critique. Looking back to Deborah McDowell's 1986 introduction to Nella Larsen's Passing, it is clear that the study of women's writing has long understood both race and sexuality as slippery social constructions that cannot be treated in isolation. Thus, while it may be tempting for some to see queer theory as a dashing arriviste that might revive or even replace the long-standing critical tradition and political engagement that scholarship on women's writing represents, the works surveyed here reveal a far more complex and mutually constitutive interplay between these methods. Indeed, the intersection of queer theory with women's writing has opened up rich possibilities for reading the outmoded, obsolescent, and old as sites where normativity is challenged rather than policed. One particularly verdant nexus for queer approaches to women's writing has been regionalism, a genre preoccupied with aging and decline. While scholars such as Susan Koppelman and Lillian Faderman have long identified Sarah Orne Jewett as a lesbian, queer theory is less interested in reading erotic desire as indicative of a static identity than in the instability of desire and identity, the openness, fluidity, and unpredictability of gender and sexuality.1 In her short fiction, sketches, and novels, Jewett envisions a scene of sociality redolent with this sense of queer possibility. Heather Love's work on "spinster aesthetics" marked an important turn in Jewett scholarship in its move away from the celebrations of self-sufficiency and proud iconoclasm that dominated 1990s criticism in favor of attention to the negative affects at the core of queer experience. In the critical vein of queer antisociality, Love's work returns to the "loneliness, abjection, and social exclusion that have largely defined the modern experience of same-sex desires and relations" (309). In other words, Love sees in Jewett's letters and sketches—and later in Willa Cather's work—an articulation of a melancholic affect (what she calls "the ache of standing outside of...

"A Queer Semblance of a Baby":Alice Dunbar-Nelson's Queer Futurity Brigitte Fielder In Alice Dunbar-Nelson's short story "His Heart's Desire," Andy is a five-year-old boy. The narrator explains that "boys don't tell their hearts out, and he would have died rather than confess his weakness for the world to laugh at and jibe and jeer. For Andy wanted a doll" (416). Because he will not ask for one, Andy makes a rag doll instead. We read that he "had gathered together material . . . had fashioned it into a queer semblance of a baby" (416). Dunbar-Nelson's short manuscript story (composed around 1900 and first published in a 2016 issue of Legacy) is a story about childhood, doll play, and racialized desire. Here we see a young boy who wants a doll but understands the cultural norms that would prevent the fulfillment of this desire. Using his younger sister, Sissy, as a cover for his own play, Andy creates a rag doll, imagines a future in which he will purchase a commercially manufactured doll, and ultimately receives the doll of his dreams, only to relegate this doll to his sister.1 Andy's successive relationships with real and imagined dolls illustrate the intersections between material culture and gendered play, as well as notions of childhood's queer temporal relations to speculative futures. This essay examines the object of Andy's desire—the baby doll—in both its material substance and its symbolic resonance, in light of the implied futurity of childhood play. The doll play Andy desires, I argue, projects a speculative future that defies normative trajectories and temporalities. Andy's desire for the doll is also a desire for his own queer performance of boyhood and masculinity more generally. But, framed as desire, this alternative is always unfulfilled, always yet-to-be-realized. Rather than the iconic Child destined for a reproductive future, Andy's queer orientation to the future is tempered by doll play that locates pleasure in the nowness of the material object and imagines [End Page 83] queer futures that do not project the reproduction of future children. Andy dwells in hope for a sustained relationship to childhood itself. Dunbar-Nelson's story frames its protagonist's desire for boyhood doll play against a backdrop of assumptions about dolls and desire. We see a key example of the dominant scripted relationship between childhood play and reproductive futurity when dolls are imagined as prosthetic substitutes for future children. My reading of this story follows queer scholarship on time that challenges both normative gender and normative temporality, particularly in critiques of reproductive futurity that intersect with childhood studies. Central to my discussion of dolls and futurity are Black queer theory's discourses of desire and Black feminist critiques of reproductive futurity. Toni Morrison's novel The Bluest Eye offers a foundational theorization of childhood doll play that imagines children's perceptions about and challenges to the normative scripts attached to these material objects. I take up this text in order to ground "His Heart's Desire" in a framework of intersectionality more closely associated with Black girlhood studies, in which childhood further complicates experiences of race and class. My discussion of doll play takes up dolls' material manifestations of class, gender, race, and sexuality. I here read the racialized resonances of dolls among Dunbar-Nelson's seemingly racially ambiguous characters and take up dolls' materiality via Afrofuturism's discourses of technology and the speculative. Attending to doll technology, production, and consumerism, I follow scholars including Roderick Ferguson, whose queer of color analysis extends women of color feminism's intersectional critical approach by situating itself within, though disidentifying with, historical materialist critique (5). I read doll materiality along these historicist lines, recognizing that dolls and doll ownership demand accounts of intersectional identification and relation, allowing us to understand race and gender as operating in the story even beyond Dunbar-Nelson's human characters. Addressing doll technology in the specificity of their materialism in Dunbar-Nelson's story, I also borrow from discourses of Afrofuturism to discuss dolls' prosthetic relationships to speculative futures. First, I briefly situate this story among some of Dunbar...

Dr. Annette Kolodny, 1941–2019 Randi Lynn Tanglen I was first inspired by Dr. Annette Kolodny upon reading her influential 1980 essay "Dancing through the Minefield: Some Observations on the Theory, Practice, and Politics of a Feminist Literary Criticism" as a first-year master's student in a feminist theory seminar. In preparation for writing this tribute to Annette, who would later co-direct my PhD dissertation, I reread the essay, again turning to its reprint appearance in the same well-worn edition of Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism we were assigned in that seminar and that I still reach for today when I teach feminist critical approaches. Seeing my annotations and marginalia from twenty years ago brought me back to my early journey as a feminist scholar, energized by Annette's bold statements that "[l]iterary history (and, with that, the historicity of literature) is a fiction" and "insofar as we are taught how to read, what we engage are not texts but paradigms" ("Dancing" 176). Even before I could imagine the shape my research might take, these words ensured that as a young scholar I would not have to justify a dissertation or a scholarly career based on the study and teaching of American women writers and feminist critical approaches. I did not have to dance through the minefield; I just got to dance! A few years later, in 2003, I met Annette when I took her graduate seminar on the literature and theory of the American frontiers as a doctoral student at the University of Arizona.1 The course was centered on her 1992 essay "Letting Go Our Grand Obsessions," which expands the origins of American literary history beyond "European colonial beginnings" with the aim that "no ethnic, racial, or cultural enclave, and no political or scholarly party could ever again take control" of what she envisioned as a more inclusive and diverse US literary canon ("Letting Go" 2, 15). The syllabus opened with the thirteenth-century [End Page 154] Vinland Sagas' portrayals of first contact between the Native peoples of the Americas and Viking explorers in Greenland. We also read Puritan texts such as Mary Rowlandson's captivity narrative, a gesture toward Annette's training as a scholar of early American literature and her commitment to the recovery of the lost women's voices in American literary history. In lecture and class discussion, Annette modeled feminist ecocritical readings of James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking tales and Willa Cather's O Pioneers! The syllabus integrated American Indian literatures such as Handsome Lake's "How America Was Discovered" (Seneca) and excerpts from Joseph Nicolar's 1893 Life and Traditions of the Red Man (Penobscot), which Annette would later restore to print.2 While I signed up for Annette's seminar because of my interest in western American literature and feminist critical approaches, other graduate students were there because of her reputation in feminist ecocriticism, and still others for her contributions to the field of early American literature. Some students registered for the class because of her commitment to teaching American Indian literatures and her social and political activism. All of us were inspired by Annette's insistence that literature and literary criticism matter and that these "ideas are important because they determine the ways we live, or want to live" ("Dancing" 186). My graduate student colleagues in Annette's frontiers course eventually went on to have careers in and make significant scholarly and pedagogical contributions to the fields of early American literature, American Indian literature, American women writers, frontier studies, ecocriticism, western American literature, and women's and gender studies. The range of her students' specializations and career paths is a testament to Annette's own scholarly acumen and diversity, and, certainly, her commitment to mentoring the next generation of the profession's scholars and teachers. As a leading early feminist literary critic, Annette embodied the second-wave adage that the "personal is political." Her personal commitments and passions influenced her scholarship and research, just as the conditions and structures of academia, in turn, shaped her life and career. As a graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley, in the 1960s she was active...

Editor's Note Susan Tomlinson Why, with notable exceptions like Patricia Highsmith and Gertrude Stein (an author whose work I am desperate to publish about in Legacy; tell your friends), has the emerging American queer canon centered on male authors; and why has the discourse on American queer writing been largely defined by approaches to male writers and their work? To borrow from "Disturbing the Peace: What Happens to American Studies If You Put African American Studies at the Center?," Mary Helen Washington's presidential address to the American Studies Association in 1997, what happens to queer thought when you put American women writers at its center? What happens to American literary studies when you put women writing queerly at its center? How does that reorientation reshape the work we do and reaffirm its urgency? "American Women's Writing and the Genealogies of Queer Thought," guest-edited by Travis Foster and Timothy Griffiths, is our first special issue since Katherine Adams, Caroline Gebhard, and Sandra Zagarell's "Recovering Alice Dunbar-Nelson for the Twenty-First Century" (vol. 33, no.2) in 2016. Legacy doesn't publish that many special issues—roughly one every four years—because with only two issues a year and so many general submissions to consider, we are committed to publishing a range of work that spans several centuries of women writing in the United States. Our only criterion for taking on a special issue is that its subject transform existing critical conversations and create new ones in our field and beyond. The articles, archival feature, and review essay in this issue, framed by the guest editors' powerful introduction, will do just that. Just as Washington exhorted the ASA membership to make the association "more than ever a place that encourages, promotes, and supports—consistently and enthusiastically—scholarship which moves us toward institutional change . . . a place in the forefront of American society in the sense that here you have a chance to step outside of the general apartheid mentality that continues to dominate our social life in one form or another," our challenge as a journal is to affirm Legacy as a space that supports and affirms a profession worth saving. [End Page ix] Susan Tomlinson Editor Legacy work cited Washington, Mary Helen. "'Disturbing the Peace: What Happens to American Studies If You Put African American Studies at the Center?': Presidential Address to the American Studies Association, October 29, 1997." American Quarterly, vol. 50, no. 1, 1998, pp. 1–23. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/30041597. Accessed 7 Feb. 2020. Copyright © 2020 The University of Nebraska Press

The Adelaide Brent Letters:Queer Care in Medical Correspondence Julia Dauer Nine years before the publication of Thomas DeQuincy's Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821), a young woman named Adelaide Brent wrote a letter about her opium habit. The letter, dated 1 December and likely composed in Washington, DC, in 1812, was meant for Dr. Benjamin Rush, the most famous physician in the early United States. Brent's family and physicians had written to Rush detailing her opium use and questioning her sanity, so she sent her own letter to counteract their reports. This Feature introduces four letters from Rush's incoming correspondence, all of which concern Brent's health. During his long career as a physician in Philadelphia, Rush received letters from patients and physicians all over the East Coast. He participated in a robust network of epistolary medicine, which allowed physicians to share information while also inviting patients to actively participate in narrating their own experiences of illness (Knott 646, 674; Dauer 781–82). Brent was one of many people who wrote to Rush to ask for medical advice and to shape her own care. Although she sought Rush's assistance, Brent does not appear to have been interested in subordinating her own assessment of her behavior to his expert authority. She instead aimed to mobilize Rush's expertise in support of her self-assessment. In their content and context, Brent's letters offer us an opportunity to locate queer forms of refusal and care in medical correspondence. Brent powerfully revises discourses of independence and freedom to justify her opium use and her rejection of normative standards of behavior. The queer freedom she posits relies on her attachment to a female friend, whose letter of support legitimizes Brent's account and suggests a network of resistant homosocial care at work in early republican medicine. [End Page 132] The Brent letters are compelling because they record a conflict among Brent, her family, and her physicians. These letters offer a glimpse into the disputes around appropriate care and trustworthy observation that permeate medical practice in the United States in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Letter 1 describes Brent as a woman whose "ambitious notions of Independence" have fueled her life-threatening opium habit (138). The letter describes Brent as "perverse," details her opium and laudanum usage and other objectionable behavior, and muses about how best to control her in the future (137). On first reading, this letter comes across as a devastating account of addiction, linked to conflicts about inheritance (Brent took control of her father's estate at a young age after her mother's death), the appropriate role of women in their families (Brent's father and brothers continually wrangle with her behavior), and the impacts of education (Brent's liberal education and high ideals are deemed partially responsible for her mental distress and substance abuse). Already, a strain of queer desire runs through this narrative of addiction and refusal, as the writer of this letter links Brent's prolific opium use to her rejection of normative expectations about gender and attachment. As this writer puts it, Brent's behavior is "elevated by her high and ambitious notions of Independence," which guide her conduct "in defiance of the disapprobation of her friends & the censure of the World" (138). Convictions about the ideal of independence and the power of desire supersede moral judgment. Letters 2 and 3 shift this picture significantly, adding depth to the conflicts around self-determination, desire, and gender that are hinted at in Letter 1. Letter 2 is Brent's own letter to Rush, rebutting the narrative produced by her father, brother, and physicians. Brent outlines her experience of health, her use of opium, and her objection to the forms of evidence offered in the unsigned first letter. While Brent acknowledges her "distress" over the possibility of having committed an unforgivable sin, and her use of opium to assuage her "exquisite" suffering, she also maintains that she is a moral, socially fit, and rational person, fully in control of her opium usage and her behavior in the rest of her life (140, 141). Brent's letter is self-assured and insistent...

Most readers of this essay will likely not have heard of Gale Wilhelm. Those who have will likely have heard something like this: Wilhelm wrote two important and distinctly modernist novels that unapologetically presented lesbian sexuality as both natural and good and then followed those with other, non-lesbian novels that were disappointing. Most discussions of Wilhelm omit her late novels entirely. A few emphasize that disappointment, as Harriette Andreadis does in her entry on Wilhelm in Gay and Lesbian Literary Heritage: Wilhelm's "final three books abandon the subject of lesbian sexuality," Andreadis explains, and "have been described as mannered and precious"; making her own position evident, she adds that Wilhelm's "last novel was described, not unfairly, as shallow" (697). Others are more circumspect, if not much. Chase Dimock, for instance, writes that "her subsequent novels from the 1940s failed to live up to the promise of her two previous lesbian-themed works," implying that it was because of the later novels' failure that Wilhelm "ceased writing and dropped out of literary society altogether" (45). Given this consensus, these late novels—criticized for their simplicity and their adherence to the well-worn tropes of heterosexual marriage that structure their plots—might seem an unlikely topic for queer scholarship. However, by resisting this easy dismissal and arguing that two of these novels, specifically Bring Home the Bride and Never Let Me Go, in fact employ the marriage plot in order to think structurally about queerness, I demonstrate that abandoning lesbianism as a theme allows Wilhelm to embed queerness into the plots of her novels, illuminating a queer ambiguity within the familiar middlebrow marriage plot. In making this argument I am undertaking two kinds of recuperative work: one, arguing for the importance of Wilhelm herself as part of a canon of queer literature, and two, arguing specifically for the importance of her late novels.

Producing Intimacy:Queer Attachments in Workingwomen's Writings Emily Coccia Mr. Lee has here turn to me he has been expecate his Affec towards me but I act so indifferently that he dont know what to make of me I like him as a Friend and nothing more then that but Dear Rebecca if I should ever see a good chance I will take it for I'm tired roving around this unfriendly world . . . I do believe by Mr. Lee action that he truly loves me I cannot reciprocate his love. . . . [I]f I only exchange this pen and paper for a seat by my loving Rebecca it is possible and must be thus separation how long how long God knows and he only my heart is breaking for you and only you good night from your sweet Affec. Addie —Addie Brown to Rebecca Primus, 24 May 1861 (35, 36) For nearly a decade after meeting, Addie Brown and Rebecca Primus, African American women from the working poor and a wealthy, prominent family, respectively, exchanged passionate letters. Their correspondence reflects a romantic emotional intensity similar to that found in the preserved correspondence between wealthy white women whom scholars have identified as part of a genealogy of lesbian love. In the sections quoted above, for instance, Brown makes clear that her love for Primus supersedes any sense of affection she has for Mr. Lee; although both are called "friends" in that letter, the "Affec" and love are only reciprocated in one instance. Yet unlike the romantic friendships described in much of the existing literature, Brown and Primus's relationship was subjected to additional constraints. The economic realities of Brown's life as a domestic servant in "this unfriendly world," for instance, lead her to consider marrying Mr. Lee, even though she does not love him. Furthermore, in her letters Brown invokes tropes either not seen or found infrequently in wealthy white women's writing to express her love for Primus. Despite these moments of [End Page 17] difference from the lifelong relationship of, say, the famed Ladies of Llangollen, the letters from Brown to Primus—preserved in the Connecticut Historical Society and later transcribed and published by Farah Jasmine Griffin—resonate with an undeniable passion and eroticism. Much of the scholarship on queer history minimizes the possibility of working-class women forming same-sex intimacies during the nineteenth century in America. I argue, however, that this tendency represents a failure to recognize the differing tropes and linguistic registers that mark these relationships as queer, rather than the impossibility of their existence. As Saidiya Hartman writes about African American women in the twentieth century, "Few, then or now, recognized young black women as sexual modernists, free lovers, radicals, and anarchists, or realized that the flapper was a pale imitation of the ghetto girl. They have been credited with nothing: they remain surplus women of no significance, girls deemed unfit for history and destined to be minor figures" (xv). I do not advocate for these women and their relationships to be subsumed under the category of romantic friendship, which has, from its premise, been grounded in a vision of privileged white women's relationships, nor do I want them to be made legible only through the taxonomic confines of the white, bourgeois regimes of sexuality that Foucault argues did not "spread through the entire social body" until the end of the nineteenth century (122). However, I contend that we miss something important if we use the narrowness of such historical constructs to deny the inclusion of these non-wealthy, non-white women in a history of queer female intimacies. My use of "queer" here is meant to acknowledge how these women's class and race already marked them as deviant—whether that be the way factories placed workingwomen in a non-reproductive relationship to labor (Kent 28) or the way the system and legacy of slavery throw "into unrelieved crisis" gender roles as defined by patriarchal society and the "customary lexis of sexuality" (Spillers 76). I partner "queer" with "intimacies" as my guiding framework to stress that I am looking primarily at pairs of women, at women whose queerness stems not only from...