Befriending the Queer Nineteenth Century

Curious Attachments

Michael Borgstrom

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000299625
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: LGBT Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Befriending the Queer Nineteenth Century: Curious Attachments addresses a longstanding question in literary and cultural studies: how can a case be made for the ongoing value of the humanities without an articulation of that field's social effects? In response, this book examines how readers "befriend" works of literature, overtures that are based in a curiosity about the world that help those readers to appreciate the world anew. As an instance of this dynamic, it examines how the contemporary social interest in queerness can be contextualized through encounters with texts produced during an earlier era of queer flux: the U.S. nineteenth century. The book offers first-hand accounts of such meetings, weaving within its analysis reports on readers' engagements with literature and the consequences of those connections. It frames such dynamics as central to a new politics, or to finding a vocabulary for a familiar politics that has not received its due.

1 Curiosity, Attachments, Befriending

This chapter begins with an incident that may be familiar to those who teach in departments of literature. Not long after I joined the faculty at my current institution, I was assigned to teach a traditional course focused on works of the nineteenth-century United States. The Americanist curriculum for this era had been created decades earlier and was split into two classes, framed by the Civil War. I was to teach the earlier half of the century, and I dutifully assembled various materials (novels, poems, short stories, essays, diaries) that were representative of the age. This was a time period I regularly taught, but the works I selected for the fall of 2008 edged, deliberately, toward the orthodox. During my personnel review the previous academic year, I had received a sharp rebuke from senior colleagues who objected to the fact that I had not included Nathaniel Hawthorne on my syllabus and had instead devoted too many class sessions to Frederick Douglass and Harriet E. Wilson. (The review was careful not to label these authors as “minor,” but the implication was clear.) The evaluation sounded a somber note of concern that students would come away from the course without a “proper view” of the era’s most important literary works. These colleagues were also concerned that my course was “overly polemical”—an assessment that seemed, in this instance, to indicate that I assigned too many works that advanced too distinct a political position.

This was an outmoded, though not uncommon, perspective on texts of the nineteenth century, but because I did not yet have tenure, I decided that the most prudent course of action was to take a prudent course of action: while I retained Douglass and Wilson, I made certain to beef up Hawthorne’s presence. In truth, such calibrations did not amount to much of a significant change. The keywords around which I organized the course were flexible enough to accommodate a variety of texts and to arrange them in diverse constellations. Hawthorne, certainly, could be profitably read alongside any number of authors (including Douglass and Wilson). In an effort to satisfy my senior colleagues, while still attempting to highlight the fundamentally radical nature of the early nineteenth century, I thus added The Blithedale Romance to my revised course reading list. The novel’s wry tone and unusual narration complemented its reformist topic in thought-provoking ways, and Hawthorne’s own unsettled relation to the book’s subject matter, epitomized in his prefatory statement, deliberately (or at least theoretically) sidestepped polemicist agitation. Including Blithedale on my syllabus, I reasoned, would not roil any of the political waters that my colleagues had urged me to avoid.

I was wrong. The novel captivated students that semester in precisely political terms, though not in ways I might have expected. The review’s directive to me (“tone down your syllabus and add Hawthorne”) and my subsequent pedagogical response (to simply add Hawthorne) rested on an inherently top-down model: my colleagues and I each believed we knew what was best for the students enrolled in the course, albeit in differing ways. But students, naturally, have their own sets of interests, values, and concerns, ones that are inevitably shaped by the cultural moment in which they find themselves. As I note in the book’s preface, students at my university that term were riveted by the ballot initiative that aimed to render same-sex marriage illegal in California. Class discussions (on Transcendentalism, on abolition) regularly found their way back to Proposition 8, and authors who would not have dreamed of their works being marshaled to parse the contours of same-sex unions (Hannah Crafts, Margaret Fuller) were scrutinized for the wisdom they might offer. Queerness was very much on my students’ minds. Its presence percolated through their casual conversations, through their more formal exchanges, through their writing, through their day-to-day lives.

This is not to say, though, that their investment in the outcome of the initiative, and in queerness more broadly, rested on an exclusively solemn engagement with queer culture. Indeed, their conversations also moved in lighthearted directions, even while they took the ontological realities of queer life quite seriously. Their experience reading The Blithedale Romance was a case in point. At one point in our discussions of the novel’s utopian experiment—its ideals and consequences—a group of students directed the class to the homoerotic undercurrents in the relationship between the tale’s narrator, Miles Coverdale, and Hollingsworth, another of the book’s primary male characters. The rest of the class did not need much convincing to see the saliency of this observation; indeed, for a time it was all anyone in the class could talk about. Our discussions on the various relationships at Blithedale, and the ways they intersected with the book’s presentation of communal life, eventually evolved, at the prompting of some students, into an opportunity for the class as whole to become conversant with terminology specific to gay male culture. Most specifically: the group wanted to determine, given Coverdale’s evident attraction to him, whether the “mas-sive and brawny” Hollingsworth should be identified as either a “bear” or a “daddy” figure.

Despite the silliness of this conversation, it had significant social and epistemological consequences. Not only did it leaven the mood of a group of students who were anxious about the imminence of Proposition 8, it also showcased the cultural potential that the classroom uniquely makes possible: how shared investments can generate knowledge across diverse constituencies; how such interests need not be shaped by sheer nosiness or responded to with kneejerk defensiveness; and how literature itself can effect these sorts of cultural exchanges. Granted, debating the saliency of “dad-dies” and “bears” in the context of one of Hawthorne’s most important works was perhaps not the most intellectually rich conversation the class had that term, but it affirmed, for me, how students (how readers, in gen-eral) often engage literature for their own needs, on their own terms. This is not to say that the perspective and insight granted by works of earlier historical periods need be wholly subsumed to contemporary concerns, but there, in the specific occasion of that autumn term, The Blithedale Romance opened up to my students in ways that spoke, insistently, to their current cultural moment. It also provided them with an avenue to engage Michel Foucault’s well-known commentary on the discursive “creation” of the homosexual later in the nineteenth century, since the students’ affective sense of the novel pointed to incipient desires (and erotic roles) in 1852 that were quite evident, to them, in future eras.¹ The colleagues who had recommended that I calibrate my syllabus to a more neutral register surely would have been appalled by this discussion, since their advice to me had been grounded in an understanding that literature should function, primarily, as cultural inheritance, organized in vertical alignment with the past. In this instance, though, Hawthorne’s text acted as a tool for contemporary social analysis, as a means through which students might contextualize and reorient perspective. The conversation about how Hollingsworth’s character could be understood within contemporary erotic configurations—minor though the discussion was, and lasting just one part of one class session-clarified how the dialectic between texts and readers, and even between the past and the present, frequently operates in horizontal relation, as a shared curiosity propelled the class to examine both their current and historical worldviews.

This experience also clarified, for me, a different orientation for queer studies than the one in which I had been trained. With the passage of Pro-position 8 in California, and with eventual transformations in public policy on the national level, queerness found itself in an uncommonly social register (evident, for instance, in this casual classroom conversation). With these momentous shifts in legal arrangement and cultural perspective, to be queer was no longer to be cast, automatically, as an outsider or an outlaw. Such developments stood in stark contrast to the antisocial thesis within queer theory—a view articulated most vividly in works by Leo Bersani and Lee Edelman—which had operated as one of the field’s most influential tenets for some time. Just a few years earlier, in fact, Edelman’s No Future had urged queer people to embrace their role as the embodiment of a future-negating death drive, one that actively resisted accommodation to a reproductive political order that was epitomized in the figure of the child.² To be sure, the rapid political changes that occurred in the years following Edelman’s manifesto certainly did not translate into widespread social acceptance for queer people, but because queerness itself was no longer viewed exclusively in relation to dissidence, such changes shifted portions of the cultural terrain on which the antisocial thesis relied. This is not to say that queer people suddenly adopted attitudes of complacency in terms of cultural position (indeed, many were deeply troubled by these developments, especially with respect to the movement for marriage equality), but it did mean that the ways that U.S. culture talked about queerness required adjustment in light of its status as a newly-affirmed ontological fact—a turn of events that appeared, as well, to have consequences both for some of the protocols of queer critique and, at least on my campus, for otherwise conventional courses in literary and cultural studies.

Simply put: if the atypicality typically aligned with (and even embraced by) queerness was no longer socially salient to quite the same degree as it had been in the past, and if that perception informed the ways that readers approached even the most traditional of texts, a need emerged to carve out space for intellectual and cultural alternatives to frameworks that had been understood, until quite recently, as intrinsically transgressive. Such options did not necessarily require a wholescale overhaul to methodology, however, so much as they obliged a shift in outlook, one that acknowledged new cultural realities (albeit with new cultural challenges). I believe this is why my students increasingly gravitated toward critical models that were not scaffolded by cynicism and cultural dissociation, an analytical disposition that tended to prioritize distance and detachment.³ They clearly were not ignorant of the ongoing, persistent challenges that queerness faced in cul-ture—a fact indicated in their desire to understand (and to push against) the public backlash epitomized by Proposition 8—but they sought answers in shared commitment across varied social groups rather than in isolationism. While they did not dispense with melancholy and outrage, they wanted to redirect such reactions to different ends than an exclusively antisocial bearing would allow. Their watchwords were association, affiliation, and connection, forms of relation that featured even in their free-wheeling conversation about The Blithedale Romance. They understood, instinctively, that their shared interests (about the world, about each other) had social consequences. Even more significantly, they understood that the various attachments that formed as a result of these curiosities might function as a key to a new politics, or at least to finding a vocabulary for a familiar politics that had not fully received its due.

Curiosity

What does it mean to be curious? What forms of knowledge arise from being interested in the various objects and ideas that draw our attention: cultural politics and the works of Jane Austen; serial killers and resistance movements; gender roles and nanotechnology? The work of curiosity fills our lives with bits and pieces of information that can become self-defining and self-redefining, as our interests tug us along to new attractions, new enthusiasms, new absorptions. To be curious is to be engaged with the world, and the terms of those engagements are neither predetermined nor fixed. Within literary analysis, however, such forms of connection often exist in opposition to a tendency to position scholarly work as a coolly disinterested scrutiny of social regimes or as an excavation of subterranean meaning.⁴ Unsurprisingly, this critical disposition can shave off other avenues for insight, particularly since an overarching skepticism tends to preclude openness to revelation and surprise. What might scholarship look like, though, if readers were instead to situate themselves, as Rita Felski asks, “in front of the text, reflecting on what it unfurls, calls forth, makes possible”?⁵ How might this repositioning underscore an appreciation for the ways that texts weave themselves into our lives? Could such a shift in perspective offer new avenues for interpretation and thus for social knowledge? Might it provide reinvigorated understandings of some of the reasons we read and study literature in the first place?

Such questions are not merely representative of a set of wistful possibilities to which academics might roll their eyes in worldly exasperation. They are also provocations to business as usual within the discipline. Because scholarship in literary and cultural studies tends to mandate a certain degree of chariness on the part of its practitioners, a skeptical response to notions of intellectual and affective potential is as predictable as it is dispiriting.⁶ Any gesture toward possibility (in culture, in life) can seem too starry-eyed, too Pollyanna-ish, to be taken seriously, lacking in the hard intellectual force that a more cynical disposition appears to provide in spades. As Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick noted several years ago, ...