Cecil Dreeme

Theodore Winthrop, Christopher Looby, Christopher Looby

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780812293142
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: LGBT Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

"Heterosexuality, this novel forthrightly claims, is a poor substitute for passionate love between men—and heterosexuality's historical emergence in the nineteenth century is consequently, Cecil Dreeme laments, a grave misfortune."—Christopher Looby, from the IntroductionFreshly returned to New York City from his studies abroad, unmoored by news of the apparent suicide of his accomplished childhood friend Clara Denman, and drawn in spite of himself toward the sinister man-about-town Densdeth, Robert Byng is unsettlingly adrift in the city of his birth. Things take an even stranger turn once he finds lodgings in the Gothic halls of Chrysalis College in lower Manhattan. There he meets the mysteriously reclusive Cecil Dreeme, brilliant artist and creature of the night. In Dreeme, Byng finds a friend unlike any he has known before. But is Cecil the man he claims to be, and can their friendship survive the dangers they will soon face together?Issued posthumously in 1861, Cecil Dreeme was the first published novel of Theodore Winthrop, who has the unfortunate distinction of being one of the first Union officers killed in the line of duty during the Civil War. Newly edited by Christopher Looby, it is a very queer book indeed.

NOTES

INTRODUCTION

1. Henry Blake Fuller, “A Legacy to Posterity,” leaf 20 (entry for Jan. 10, 1875). Henry Blake Fuller Papers, Newberry Library, Chicago. Series 4, Box 9, Folder 294. My thanks to Joseph Dimuro for drawing my attention to this passage.

2. Henry Blake Fuller, Bertram Cope’s Year, ed. Joseph Dimuro (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2010). Originally published in 1919.

3. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Blithedale Romance (New York: Penguin, 1983), 53.

4. Margaret J. M. Sweat, Ethel’s Love-Life: A Novel (New York: Rudd and Carleton, 1859), 92, 82, 92. For a brilliant reading of the vagaries of desire in Ethel’s Love-Life see Dorri Beam, “Transcendental Erotics, Same-Sex Desire, and Ethel’s Love-Life,” in Toward a Female Genealogy of Transcendentalism, ed. Jana L. Argersinger and Phyllis Cole (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2014), 327–47. An earlier version of this essay appeared in ESQ 57 (2011): 1–27.

5. In an excellent discussion of this novel Axel Nissen calls Cecil Dreeme “a paradigmatic example of romantic friendship fiction,” even “the ultimate fiction of romantic friendship.” Axel Nissen, Manly Love: Romantic Friendship in American Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 57–88 (quotations at 58). Other valuable critical discussions of Cecil Dreeme include Robert K. Martin, “Knights-Errant and Gothic Seducers: The Representation of Male Friendship in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America,” in Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, edited by Martin Duberman, Martha Vicinus, and George Chauncey Jr. (New York: New American Library, 1989), 162–89, and Michael Millner, “The Fear Passing the Love of Women: Sodomy and Male Sentimental Citizenship in the Antebellum City,” Arizona Quarterly 58, 2 (Summer 2002): 19–52.

6. For the “invention” of homosexuality and heterosexuality, see, among many other works, Jonathan Ned Katz, The Invention of Heterosexuality (New York: Dutton, 1995); Siobhan Somerville, Queering the Color Line: Race and the Invention of Homosexuality in American Culture (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000); and Hanne Blank, Straight: The Surprisingly Short History of Heterosexuality (Boston: Beacon Press, 2012).

7. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction, translated by Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990), 43.

8. Peter Coviello, Tomorrow’s Parties: Sex and the Untimely in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: New York University Press, 2013), 20.

9. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 75ff.

10. See, among many other general sources, Kim M. Phillips and Barry Reay, Sex Before Sexuality: A Premodern History (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011).

11. Katz, The Invention of Heterosexuality, 10; Blank, Straight, xiv.

12. Judith Butler has described in several places what she calls “heterosexual melancholy,” the way that normative heterosexuality is constituted via the prohibition of same-sex desires—desires whose loss is neither acknowledged nor mourned, thus instituting and maintaining heterosexuals as perpetual melancholics. See Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990), 70; see also Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993), 235. One way to gloss my argument about Cecil Dreeme would be to say that the novel offers a startling premonition of heterosexual melancholy.

13. William Congreve, The Way of the World and Other Plays, edited by Eric S. Rump (London: Penguin Books, 2006), 380.

14. Adam Goodheart, “In Death, a Young Author Is Born,” Opinionator, New York Times (June 19, 2011). http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/19/in-death-a-young-author-is-born/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0. Accessed Aug. 31, 2015.

15. This language appears on a website, “NYU and the Village: An Urban University in Bohemia,” presented by the NYU Archives and Fales Library of the NYU Division of Libraries. www.nyu.edu/library/bobst/collections/exhibits/bobst/washsq/voices/cd.html. Accessed Aug. 31, 2015.

16. Julian Hawthorne, Confessions and Criticisms (Boston: Ticknor, 1887), 176.

17. Hawthorne, Confessions and Criticisms, 180. He adverts to the story’s “morbidness” once more at p. 181.

18. Theodore Winthrop, Edwin Brothertoft (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1862), 106. Further page references will be given parenthetically.

19. Theodore Winthrop, John Brent (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1862), 34. Further page references will be given parenthetically.

20. Theodore Winthrop, “Love and Skates,” Atlantic Monthly 9, no. 51 (January 1862): 70–85 and 9, no. 52 (February 1862): 223–40; also reprinted in Theodore Winthrop, Life in the Open Air, and Other Papers (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1863), 123–215 (quotation at 181). Further page references will be to the latter version and will be given parenthetically.

21. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 16 et passim; Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, updated with a new preface (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 188–89.

22. Oliver Wendell Holmes, “The Stereoscope and the Stereograph,” Atlantic Monthly 3, no. 20 (June 1859): 738–48. See also Holmes, “The American Stereoscope,” Image: Journal of Photography of the George Eastman House 1, no. 3 (March 1952), 1 (repr. from Philadelphia Photographer, Jan. 1869); Edward W. Earle, ed., Points of View, the Stereograph in America: A Cultural History (Rochester, N.Y.: Visual Studies Workshop Press, 1979).

23. Roland Barthes, Image-Music-Text, translated by Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978), 159.

24. Roland Barthes, S/Z: An Essay, translated by Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975), 15.

25. There is another image in the text that appears to want to give out this secret, too: the image of the wine that “had two flavors” because it was made from grapes that seemed to have been “drinking two kinds of sunshine all the long afternoons of ripe midsummer,” the direct sunlight hitting them from above and also the reflected “sunshine shining back from the glassy bay its vineyard overhung” (148–49).

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH OF THE AUTHOR

This biographical sketch first appeared as “Theodore Winthrop,” Atlantic Monthly 8, no. 46 (Aug. 1861): 242–51.

1 George W...