One easy mistake to make about this novel’s plot, however, is to judge that the eventual revelation of Cecil Dreeme’s female identity constitutes a wary retreat from the queer potential that the novel has created. It might seem, to be sure, that Winthrop’s novel about a man’s love for another man is fatally compromised—or, as some recent readers would have it, rescued—by the belated revelation that one of them is in fact (sigh of relief) a woman. One commentator, for example, writes of Byng and Dreeme that “gradually their comradeship deepens into something more: a friendship ‘more precious than the love of women,’ reminiscent of the Greek lovers Damon and Pythias.” But then he adds, not very coherently, “At last, to the narrator’s relief, his heterosexuality is reaffirmed—more or less—when it turns out that the delectable roommate is a woman in disguise.”14 (That “more or less” is a nasty touch: it amounts to a homophobic sneer.) The novel, as I have emphasized, portrays Byng as emphatically not relieved to discover that Dreeme is a woman but as in fact quite the opposite: surprised, disappointed, confused, and dismayed. Nor is his “heterosexuality” reaffirmed by this revelation—it is anachronistic to think of him as securely possessing a quality of “heterosexuality” that would be satisfyingly “reaffirmed” by the revelation of Dreeme’s female sex. It would be more accurate to say that with the revelation that Cecil is really Clara, the unwelcome fate of heterosexuality is rudely forced upon him.
In a similar vein, another commentator has written that when Dreeme is revealed to be a woman in masculine disguise, “the revelation is startling to Robert who now has an explanation for his sexual attraction to the young man.”15 Again, this gets things desperately—one wants to say deliberately, perversely—wrong. Byng has not been at all troubled by his romantic attraction to Cecil Dreeme; on the contrary, he has felt personally gratified and even morally strengthened by it. Thus he has never felt any need of an “explanation” for this attraction; such a claim betrays, again, an anachronistic imposition of later ideas of sexual normalcy upon a very different nineteenth-century set of assumptions about the moral value and intrinsic beauty of samesex intimacies. And it prejudicially assumes, to boot, that heterosexual attraction is natural and proper and that its hidden motivating presence here would somehow justify Byng’s otherwise inexplicable erotic attraction to another man. Cecil Dreeme does not think that there is anything wrong with same-sex passion, that it needs “explanation” or that one would naturally be relieved to have an opportunity to disown it. Could this in fact be what Henry Blake Fuller found so “peculiar” and yet so interesting about it?
Cecil Dreeme’s liminal historical position, on the cusp of the invention of sexuality, can be measured by the kinds of responses it began to engender in the decades after its initial popularity and Fuller’s intrigued but slightly nervous response to it. Julian Hawthorne in 1887 reviewed “Theodore Winthrop’s Writings” and found himself baffled and perturbed by the greater popularity of Cecil Dreeme as compared to Winthrop’s other novels, which he considered superior. John Brent, he writes, is “more mature” in style and “quality of thought,” and “its tone is more fresh and wholesome.”16 Hawthorne ratchets up the suggestive moralizing a few pages later on: in Cecil Dreeme “the love intrigue is morbid and unwholesome,” and the characters are “artificial and unnatural.” And there is more: “Cecil Dreeme herself [Hawthorne, unlike Byng, has no trouble assigning her the correct gendered pronoun] never fully recovers from the ambiguity forced upon her by her masculine attire.”17 Tellingly, Winthrop’s “unwholesome” production reminds the younger Hawthorne of his father Nathaniel’s Blithedale Romance, which, as we have hinted, had its own interest in the “beautiful peculiarities” of sexual irregularity.
Theodore Winthrop’s other novels—Fuller would have found them all quite “peculiar” too, despite Julian Hawthorne’s insistence that they were not “unwholesome” like Cecil Dreeme—are ripe with suggestions of same-sex and other queer desires that do not conform to either Winthrop’s contemporaries’ emergent norms or to what have become ours. Edwin Brothertoft (1862), for example, is a historical romance of the American Revolution, in which the narrator is fascinated by nothing so much as the magnificent and evidently locally celebrated moustache that one of the tale’s heroes, the patriot Major Peter Skerrett, wears. “On his nut-brown face his blonde moustache lay lovingly curling,” we are told.18 When Skerrett disguises himself as a redcoat officer as part of a plot to rescue Edwin Brothertoft’s estranged daughter Lucy—whose coarse and dishonest mother, having deceived Brothertoft into marriage, now intends to marry her daughter unwillingly to an oafish British officer named Kerr—the patriotic destruction of this fabled moustache is called for, since its widespread celebrity would otherwise give Skerrett’s true identity away. But Skerrett at the same time fears—because he is dreaming romantically of Lucy, whom he has yet to meet—that without his beauteous and “lovingly curling” moustache he will not make the best first impression on her when he achieves her rescue.
Lucy, for her part, is actively conjuring a mental image of her fondly awaited handsome rescuer and his anticipated virtues: “Truth, Virtue, Courage and the sister qualities, Lucy had dimpled into the bronzed cheeks, as a sailor pricks an anchor, or Polly’s name, into a brother tar’s arm with Indian ink” (240). It is tempting to say that something like a fantasy of heterosexual romance is being metaphorically converted here into a moment of pricking intimacy between two sailors for whom “Polly” is just the generic name for a little-regretted absence. In Edwin Brothertoft nearly every realized affiliation between a man and a woman is ugly and deformed, characterized by treachery and horror; even the promising match between Peter Skerrett and Lucy Brothertoft, once he (sans moustache) does rescue her, is left conspicuously unrealized and strenuously uncertain at the end. “It seems the fair beginning of a faithful love” (emphasis added), we hear from the narrator, but he asks nervously whether this love will “end in doubt, sorrow, shame, and forgiveness; or in trust, joy, constancy and peace” (369). That pregnant question is the very last line of the novel, and no answer is given—unless the discouraged answer lies, only partially hidden, in the near-homonymy between “brother tars” and “Brothertoft.”
Winthrop’s other completed novel, John Brent (1862), has an even weirder and richer queer subtext. The first-person narrator, Richard Wade, early in the Western portion of the tale acquires a magnificent black stallion that no one has yet been able to tame and ride. But Wade himself is able to domesticate the steed using the methods of love. “I loved that horse as I have loved nothing else yet, except the other personage for whom he acted,”19 prefiguring the heroic horse’s later crucial mediation of his relationship with the eponymous John Brent, a dear college friend with whom Wade was once intimate and with whom he is now to be reunited. “Brent was [then] a delicate, beautiful, dreamy boy” (41), Wade recalls; he reappears suddenly in Nevada ten years later when Wade, who has been seeking gold, is packing up to return east and care for his widowed—and now dead—sister’s two orphaned children. When the long-lost Brent rides toward him Wade first mistakes him at a distance for a handsome Indian brave of the kind that James Fenimore Cooper’s pen might have drawn in his lustrous beauty: “‘The Adonis of the copper-skins!’ I said to myself.” And then Wade unabashedly confides to the page: “I wish I was an Indian myself for such a companion; or, better, a squaw, to be made love to by him” (38).
But as Brent draws nearer, Wade begins to recognize him as a deeply tanned white man—“not copper, but bronze” (38)—and, indeed, soon hails him as his beloved school friend, whereupon their interrupted intimacy is resumed and they set out across the prairie together. Brent has changed—those ten years, we learn, have involved struggle and pain, due to a woman’s perfidy—but those difficulties, in Brent’s own words, “have taken all the girl out of me” (39). And to explain Wade’s initial misrecognition, he adds—here it comes again—“‘Ten years have presented me with this for a disguise,’ said he, giving his moustache a twirl” (39). The moustache aside, however, this doesn’t explain Wade’s fantasy of being a “squaw” so that he might be “made love to” by a handsome Indian brave; in Winthrop’s
