Tomorrow's Parties

Sex and the Untimely in Nineteenth-Century America

Peter Coviello

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780814790304
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Antropología cultural y social

Honorable Mention for the 2014 MLA Alan Bray Memorial Award
Finalist for the 2013 LAMBDA LGBT Studies Book Award

In nineteenth-century America—before the scandalous trial of Oscar Wilde, before the public emergence of categories like homo- and heterosexuality—what were the parameters of sex? Did people characterize their sexuality as a set of bodily practices, a form of identification, or a mode of relation? Was it even something an individual could be said to possess? What could be counted as sexuality? Tomorrow’s Parties: Sex and the Untimely in Nineteenth-Century America provides a rich new conceptual language to describe the movements of sex in the period before it solidified into the sexuality we know, or think we know. Taking up authors whose places in the American history of sexuality range from the canonical to the improbable—from Whitman, Melville, Thoreau, and James to Dickinson, Sarah Orne Jewett, Harriet Jacobs, Frederick Douglass, and Mormon founder Joseph Smith—Peter Coviello delineates the varied forms sex could take in the lead-up to its captivation by the codings of “modern” sexuality. While telling the story of nineteenth-century American sexuality, he considers what might have been lostin the ascension of these new taxonomies of sex: all the extravagant, untimely ways of imagining the domain of sex that, under the modern regime of sexuality, have sunken into muteness or illegibility. Taking queer theorizations of temporality in challenging new directions, Tomorrow’s Parties assembles an archive of broken-off, uncreated futures—futures that would not come to be. Through them, Coviello fundamentally reorients our readings of erotic being and erotic possibility in the literature of nineteenth-century America.

PART ONE

Lost Futures

1
Disappointment, or, Thoreau in Love

The revelations of nature are infinitely glorious & cheering—hinting to us of a remote future—of possibilities untold—but startlingly near to us some day we find a fellow man.

—Henry David Thoreau, Journal, 21 May 1851

People, Things

In the midst of the “Ponds” chapter of Walden, his much-polished opus of 1854, Henry David Thoreau offers up a wonderfully illustrative anecdote— wonderful because, though largely shorn of the leaning toward metaphor that characterizes so much of the rest of the book, the little passage nevertheless elegantly condenses many of the principal elements of Thoreau’s style, his humor, and his genuine idiosyncrasy as both writer and thinker. “Once in winter, many years ago,” Thoreau writes,

when I had been cutting holes through the ice in order to catch pickerel, as I stepped ashore I tossed my axe back on to the ice, but, as if some evil genius had directed it, it slid four or five rods directly into one of the holes, where the water was twenty-five feet deep. Out of curiosity, I lay down on the ice and looked through the hole, until I saw the axe a little on one side, standing on its head, with its helve erect and gently swaying to and fro with the pulse of the pond; and there it might have stood erect and swaying till in the course of time the handle rotted off, if I had not disturbed it. Making another hole directly over it with an ice chisel which I had, and cutting down the longest birch which I could find in the neighborhood with my knife, I made a slip-noose, which I attached to its end, and, letting it down carefully, passed it over the knob of the handle, and drew it by a line along the birch, and so pulled the axe out again.¹

If you are a reader at all susceptible to the charm of Thoreau’s crafted Walden persona—to that admixture of wry amiability, occasional preach-iness, and sometimes caustic irreverence—this is probably a moment you will find difficult to resist. Thoreau turns a scene of what appears to be commonplace irritation (his axe falls into an ice hole like a set of keys into a storm grate) into an occasion not for a burst of pointless rage but for something else: we are treated, instead, to a sudden deceleration and expansion of purpose, a swift movement beyond the merely practical and out toward the swervings, and the looser temporality, of what he calls “curiosity.” Part of the charm of the passage, too, lies in its gentle self-deprecation, there in the deadpan invitation Thoreau extends to us to note the not-a-little-absurd figure he cuts, splayed face-first and nose-down on the ice. And more perhaps than any of this (beyond even the repeated figures of unperturbed “erection” we could surely remark upon), the passage underscores one of the most basic, most crucial elements of Thoreau’s entire body of work: in his deft and unflustered engagement with knives, chisels, birch branches, pickerel, pond ice, fishing line, and axe helves, we see displayed again, in exquisite miniature, Thoreau’s prodigious and articulate fluency with the world of things. Though an Emersonian in many inarguable respects, he is nevertheless demonstrably less interested in Nature as titanic system, or as vast unfolding metaphor, than as an array of small, complex, infinitely fascinating details—of particular surfaces and objects, of tangible things—even the least of which commands meticulous scrutiny and offers the possibility of nearly limitless revelation.

This is a Thoreau that we have come, by now, to know, a version of the author that is as legible in the popular imagination as in a range of scholarship.² But, as is perhaps appropriate to the man who left his cabin beside Walden Pond because “it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one” (W, 323), there are other Thoreaus as well, not all of them as renowned, or for that matter as cheering. Consider the very different tenor of this passage from the sole work that competes with Walden for ranking as his magnum opus, his Journal:

Ah I yearn toward thee my friend, but I have not confidence in thee. We do not believe in the same God. I am not thou—Thou are not I. We trust each other today but we distrust tomorrow. Even when I meet thee unexpectedly I part from thee with disappointment. . . . I know a noble man; what is it hinders me from knowing him better? I know not how it is that our distrust, our hate is stronger than our love. Here I have been on what the world would call friendly terms with one 14 years, have pleased my imagination sometimes with loving him—and yet our hate is stronger than our love. Why are we related—yet thus unsatisfactorily. We almost are a sore to one another.³

For those who have read little beyond Walden, the note of anguish here— of a frustration deepening into something painfully insoluble—may come as a surprise. Dismay and even rage (what Sharon Cameron, summarizing a whole tradition of Thoreau criticism, calls “rage at the social”⁴) are familiar enough features of Walden, to be sure, but this is something else again. And yet the note of bewildered and wearied heartsickness—Thoreau names it disappointment—is not at all uncommon in the journals, especially in those completed in the early 1850s, during Thoreau’s last extended period of work on Walden, and also during a long moment of strain and dissatisfaction in his relation to Emerson.⁵ The differences between the Walden persona and the Thoreau of the journals have been accounted for in a number of plausible ways—as, for instance, the differences between a published persona and a private self, or between a view of Nature that accommodates the demands of communicable legibility and a view that actively refuses such demand—and I have no wish to dispute these appraisals.⁶ But we might frame the matter in differently suggestive ways by saying that if much of the lasting pleasure of Walden lies in Thoreau’s splendid articulacy with the things of his world, what we find expressed most vividly in the journals is an ongoing consternation about just what kind of thing other people are. (As he writes memorably in December of 1851: “I do not know but a pine wood is as substantial and as memorable a fact as a friend. I am more sure to come away from it cheered” [J, 4:207–8].)⁷ “A preoccupied attention is the only answer to the importunate frivolity of other people,” Emerson had written rather imperiously in “Experience.”⁸ Thoreau, for his part, writes often like a man trying to convince himself of just that dictum, but whose attention keeps curving back toward the problem these frivolous creatures invoke, and are.

Much of what I want to do here is simply to introduce this other Thoreau, and along the way to think hard about this consternation of his, which shuttles in the work between anger and wistfulness, pained confusion and, at telling moments, a dreamy imaginative extravagance. My principal claim is that Thoreau was not just a man disappointed in others, as we are often told, but that he possessed what we might also think of as a kind of genius for disappointment. This is so to the degree that we understand his hallmark disappointment less as the sign of resignation, or surrender, or apathy, than as a particular kind of yearning—as, perhaps, a species of present-tense unhappiness that has neither forgotten joy nor abandoned its expectation.⁹ Following several pathbreaking essays by Michael Warner, I want to suggest, too, that it is precisely this yearning, tuned as it so frequently is to the note of expectancy, that makes Thoreau so engaging and suggestive a figure in the American history of sexuality, and particularly in the history of sexuality as it unfolded across the middle of the nineteenth century, in that long, vexed moment before it was assumed every person and every intimacy could be assigned a heteroor homosexuality, but in which the stirrings of that taxonomical division could already be felt in a number of quarters.¹⁰ Thoreau’s is a voice that speaks to us from before the apotheosis of those now commonsensical renderings of sexuality, and part of what is abidingly compelling about his work is how ill fitted it is, despite its expectant orientation toward the future, to the conceptual frameworks that in the decades after his death did in fact achieve broad currency.

The story Thoreau’s work helps us to tell about this epoch of American sexual history is not, then, an overly familiar one. It is not the story of a monkish celibate who, out of fear or disgust or rigorous self-denial, fled from the debased modes of sexual being available to him. Nor is it quite the story of a man whose affinities and inchoate desires would later be codified, and come into more stable articulacy, as queer. It is, in other words, neither the story of a particular figure’s place within a web of emerging sexual “discourses,” nor the story of protoqueerness, of desires that anticipate forms of sexual specification yet to arrive. Important and even revelatory as those stories can be, Thoreau is perhaps more profitably understood as a figure who neither exemplifies his present nor anticipates the future but who, in his idiosyncratic conjugations of sexual being, suggests instead the outlines of a future that would not come to be.¹¹ Thoreau may strike us as so beguilingly strange a writer less because we can so easily read back into him a sexual bearing that he simply lacked the conceptual vocabulary to describe than because much of what looks like sex to him has, over time, dropped out from our commonsense understanding of where the perimeters of the sexual actually lie. And it is just this untimeliness in Thoreau—“untimely” in the sense borrowed most from Nietzsche¹²—that has made his odd visions of the very domain of sexuality, of its habitable forms and extensions, as nettling and intriguing as they are.

In what follows, then, I take Thoreau’s famous dissatisfaction with his fellow men to be part of a career-wide effort to imagine the domain of sexuality itself in alternate terms—alternate not only to the encroaching hetero/homo division of gendered object-choice, but to the very vision of sexuality as, at base, another of the liberal self’s secured properties. In this reading, Thoreau takes his place among many other writers of the American nineteenth century—figures ranging from Dickinson, Whitman, and Henry James to Frederick Douglass, Sarah Orne Jewett, and even Joseph Smith—who labor to wrench sex away from not only punitive languages but from possessive understandings of sexuality, from a conception of sexuality as something isolable in, and a property of, individual persons. For Thoreau this means, among other things, conceiving sexuality as a way of inhabiting a unique temporality, one that renders the body at once out of step with modernity’s sped-up market time and exquisitely responsive to the call of an intuited but inarticulate future.

If it does nothing else, then, Thoreau’s story usefully reminds us that the late-century arrival of identity-languages of sexuality—such that same-sex desire could, in the famous phrase, begin to speak its own name— was a development not without significant losses. In his yearning toward a future markedly out of step with the one that would actually arrive, Thoreau helps us begin to make legible some of the possibilities that may have dropped out from our visions of “the sexual” as such. In so doing, he helps us surrender, at least a bit, the faintly self-flattering tendency to regard the sexual past as essentially anticipatory: a version of the present in a moment before its (hermeneutic, ethical, political) fulfillment. It may not be that poor, priggish, prudish, conflicted Thoreau was unable to confront what we savvy moderns plainly see were sexual longings that he feared even to name. Rather, Thoreau may have envisioned sex in ways we ourselves have not learned, or have forgotten, how to see.

Vain Reality, Bodies Out of Time

Even schoolchildren know Thoreau was a bachelor, though they may know less well the vehemence of his bachelorhood. As he writes, not at all untypically, in his journal in November of 1851: “In the evening went to a party. It is a bad place to go.” Why so? “These parties I think are a part of the machinery of modern society—that young people may be brought together to form marriage connections” (J, 4:185). That marriage is linked for Thoreau to the “machinery of modern society”—it is hard to know which of those words carries the greatest weight of Thoreau’s contempt— speaks tersely enough of the depth of his resistance. The perhaps inchoate erotic potentialities of that bachelorhood, too, have not wanted for attention, of various calibrations. As Perry Miller observes, “what for long especially outraged commentators was the supposition that Thoreau flouted the highest, the most sacred, duty of masculinity: he was not interested in women!”¹³ Readers of less-punitive inclination have been known to turn with particular determination to Thoreau’s intriguingly puzzled affection for the French-Canadian woodchopper, Alek Therien, as the place in the work where the possibilities of a specifically queer reclamation of Thoreau appear most prominently and undeniably. Even here, though, the matter is hardly uncomplicated, since Thoreau’s relation to Therien, as portrayed in the “Visitors” chapter of Walden, is, though plainly ardent, not at all transparent. The quality of that relation seems, rather, to range quite widely. At moments, Thoreau’s enthusiasm for the young man—“A more simple and natural man it would be hard to find”—rises in pitch toward a striking affective intensity. “He was cast in the coarsest mold,” Thoreau says, offering (as Henry Abelove notes) as detailed a description of anyone’s physical figure as we find in Walden: “a stout but sluggish body, yet gracefully carried, with a thick sunburnt neck, dark bushy hair, and dull sleepy blue eyes, which were occasionally lit up with expression” (W, 145).¹⁴ Then, too, there is the famous scene in which Thoreau prompts Therien to read aloud from the Iliad and he translates for him “Achilles’s reproof” to his most intimate comrade Patroclus—a moment whose desiring resonances you need not be a credentialed classicist to parse: they are a good deal easier to sound than, say, the muddy bottom of Walden Pond.¹⁵

But these instances, however delectable they may be (and however purposefully we read Thoreau’s deployment of them to have been), are crosscut in the “Visitors” chapter with passages very different in tenor. Compounded with, and to some degree confounding, this subtle eroticism are moments of almost clinical narrative detachment in which Therien emerges less as an object of seduction than of a naturalist’s calculated scrutiny—as, in truth, a kind of specimen. “In him the animal man chiefly was developed,” Thoreau succinctly informs us (W, 146). “There was,” he avers, “a certain positive originality, however slight, to be detected in him, and I occasionally observed that he was thinking for himself and expressing his own opinion” (W, 150). The matter is not that Thoreau’s enthusiasm wanes or buckles, but that the quality of his regard changes key, as it were, in fairly dramatic ways. When Thoreau writes, “I loved to sound him on the various reforms of the day, and he never failed to look at them in the most simple and practical light,” the pleasure he expresses leans considerably more toward the anthropological (the joy of having found so intriguing an object) than when he recites suggestive verse (W, 148). I do not mean to suggest that these moments cancel the force of the more erotically piquant scenes. But they do, in their abrupt dilations and contractions of proximity to Therien, point to a certain uneasiness in Thoreau’s regard for the young man. We see in these shifts and fractures of steady perspective not only the bafflement that Thoreau himself underscores, about how Therien can be so unspiritual yet so happy, but also a more poignant uncertainty as to just what register his affection can or ought to take. Over the course of the chapter, Thoreau seems to cast about for a mode of address that might be adequate to the idiosyncrasy of his feeling. He does not find one. Therien thus emerges as an object of curiosity in Walden, and in this he is like the other meticulously observed forms of wildlife. But he is also, evidently, an object of a different order, one for which Thoreau has no comparably stable or settled mode of address. If this is something of what love looks like in Walden—and I think it is—then that experience has at its center for Thoreau the practical problem we noted at the outset: the problem of just what kind of object other people are, and of what form of regard is proper to them.

What reads with respect to Therien as a kind of obliquity, or an instability of registers, often expresses itself more directly in the journals as pain. “It would give me such joy to know that a friend had come to see me,” he confides, “and yet that is a pleasure I seldom if ever experience” (J, 4:217). Or again, in conclusion to the passage I quoted at the outset: “Ah I am afraid because thy relations are not my relations. Because I have experienced that in some respects we are strange to one another—strange as some wild creature. Ever and anon there will come the consciousness to mar our love— that change the theme but a hair’s breadth & we are tragically strange to one another. We do not know what hinders us from coming together” (J, 4:137). “Who are the estranged?” Thoreau asks e...