Gender Protest and Same-Sex Desire
in Antebellum American Literature
by David Greven
Ashgate Publishing Limited. 250 pages, $109.95
AN ALARMING PASSAGE occurs on page 56 of David Greven’s Gender Protest and Same-Sex Desire in Antebellum American Literature. After a lengthy introduction, in which author David Greven discusses subjects ranging from Freud to Lacan and a myriad of other sources in between, he proclaims that he’s more interested in comparing these psychoanalytic accounts to each other than he is in actually applying them to literature. Thus the title of his work might more accurately be “A Comparison of Various Psychoanalytic Theories about Antebellum Literature.”
Once the author finally gets down to exploring the literature itself, however, his book is actually rather interesting. Focusing on certain unnamed feelings and emotions in pre-Civil War literary works, he remarks that “this apparent namelessness, unspokenness, and silencing of same-sex love and desire and sexuality was itself a kind of naming.” Some may see this argument as tendentious, but Greven’s painstaking excavation of hidden motives and desires—while startling at first glance—is often ingenious and convincing. For instance, his assessment of Edgar Allen Poe’s Ligeia argues that it is “a queer scene between women, a female-female exchange not of bodily fluids, but of actual bodies.” He continues: “Instead of producing an offspring with an independent life, Ligeia regenerates herself. Chillingly, she co-opts another woman’s body chamber as her birth-chamber, bursting out of it,” rendering unnecessary the male component of sexual commerce.
Greven builds many of his arguments around what he calls “gender protest” whereby unstated same-sex attraction is conveyed through characters who express atypical gender traits. For example, during Andrew Jackson’s presidency the dominant depiction of American masculinity stressed the unflinching, even brutal determination of the frontiersman. But there were also those men who suffered from “melancholia,” which may be interpreted as a backlash against this notion of the typical male temperament. He cites James Fenimore Cooper’s character Natty Bumppo, who “reveals that he finds heterosexual relations bewildering and enigmatic.” He also discusses at length the rather extravagant (by our standards) culture of mourning that governed much antebellum literature. These were periods of mourning when both men and women were allowed to grieve openly over same-sex attachments that had hitherto gone unacknowledged. An example is the melancholic Arthur Pym in Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, which Greven sees as “an allegory of lost male bonds.”
Greven is perhaps at his most provocative when he calls Hawthorne’s A Scarlet Letter a “queer text,” which even he admits could be a stretch. The focus is on Hester Prynne herself, who by definition displayed an outlaw sexuality, though not quite in the sense that equates with our word “queer.” Still, Greven’s argument is more subtle and ingenious than it may at first appear, notably because Hester (unlike Dimmesdale) refuses to renounce her nonconforming desire. Instead, she chooses to live as an outlaw in the community that has stigmatized her, much as many lesbians and gay men today choose to live openly in an often hostile society.
Gender Protest is not an easy text to read, and it’s clearly intended mostly for academics. The author sometimes overstates his case, as when he finds a “startling suggestion of same-sex desire” in a female character’s “sympathetic throb” toward Hester Prynne. Nevertheless, for those willing to take up the challenge, the reward is a perceptive, subtly radical, and ultimately quite persuasive study.
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Dale W. Boyer is a writer based in Chicago.
