desires, some of them trembling on the edge of a legibility not yet arrived, and others skewing toward greater obscurity in the vocabularies of sexual being and sexual practice that would eventually rise to hegemonic prominence. Indeed, another of the real pleasures of Cecil Dreeme, another of the open avenues of its interpretability, is to be found in the curious way it seems to reach out and touch virtually every queerly resonant text in the canon of white male authors of the later nineteenth century. One hears Walt Whitman in the urban erotics of rootless young men, Edgar Allan Poe and George Lippard in the Gothic sensationalism, but also something of the Herman Melville of Billy Budd. (“To a bad man—to some bad men,” Cecil tells Byng, “every pure soul is a perpetual reproach, and must be sullied,” in a phrase we might expect to find appended to John Claggart, the conniving master-at-arms who is mysteriously “down on” the beatific Billy Budd.)
Perhaps the strongest echoes bring us back to Nathaniel Hawthorne, not only in the novel’s fascination with the horror of secret sin but in precisely those projective fantasies, those rescriptings of perverse desire as a menace from without, that we’ve seen in Byng’s interactions with Densdeth. Had he been looking for it, Theodore Winthrop could have found just such a dynamic played out in the pages of Hawthorne’s Blithedale Romance, whose narrator finds himself both powerfully attracted to the unconventional and erotically abundant people he meets at a commune of radicals and, in turn, repelled by that attraction, horrified by what they may portend for him. (“As I look back upon this scene,” Hawthorne’s narrator says of his near-allegiance to the man professing love to him, “there is still a sensation as if [he] had caught hold of my heart, and were pulling it towards him with an almost irresistible force. It is a mystery to me how I withstood it.”) Queer desires may not have come into cohesion as an identity in the middle of the century but, as Cecil Dreeme demonstrates quite as vividly as Hawthorne, this did not mean they were not full of titillation, or menace, or—in those wonderful, rarer cases—possibilities for pleasures too great and enticing to be easily forsworn.
Cecil Dreeme is that rarer case. Consider again the predicament in which we find our narrator. As the novel makes clear from its first scene, Robert Byng is a young man dangerously unmoored, failing conspicuously at his heteroreproductive duties to the nation and the race. “Why then haven’t you been five years at the bar, or ten years at the desk?” his old friend Harry Stillfleet asks him, having been ushered into his rooms by one of the degenerated Irish (a “Patrick” we are told). “Where is your wife?” Where indeed. Like other queer protagonists to come in American literature, Byng seems doomed to suffer the fate of the man who should make a saving peace with the rituals of heterosexuality but, alas, cannot bring himself to it. The portions of the novel involving his intimacy with Emma Denman are something like Henry James’s Beast in the Jungle in Gothicized miniature. Byng feels in relation to her less the passion of attraction than the persistent, curious failure of that attraction to present itself with any especially persuasive force, despite the normative imperative that it do so, and quick. “It was she whom I felt that I did not love,” he says, “yet ought to love” (ch. 18, emphasis added). Despite the urgency of his need for some bulwark against his own queerer compulsions, the charms of male-female romance fail to seduce him. By this point in the novel, this may not be too terribly surprising, and not only because of his attachment to Densdeth. Byng has already offered his sense of married life, in one of the most delightful of the book’s many winning sentences:
Antagonistic natures do not necessarily make man and woman hostile, even when they are imprisoned for life in matrimony; domestic life stirs and stirs, slow and steady, and at last the two mix, like the oil and mustard in a mayonnaise. (ch. 5)
It is not immediately obvious how one could better figure marriage as the opposite of a scene of ardor, ecstasy, dissolving intensity. It is, at best, a dull domestic equilibrium, a prison perhaps, but not the worst sort. Small wonder then that Emma, whom he cannot help but feel is nearly perfect for him, fails to secure Byng’s heart, producing in him only “a hesitant resolve to be her lover,” which he will renounce almost immediately (ch. 24).
And so, with a life of bland imprisonment on one side and the ruinous depravity of submission to Densdeth on the other, Robert Byng appears before us in Cecil Dreeme as the very emblem of imperiled white masculinity, as fantasized by midcentury moralists of many stripes. The fate of the nation and the race rests in his hands, but there he stands, paralyzed by indecision, his irresolution making him each day more vulnerable to catastrophe. What’s a Young American to do?
In Cecil Dreeme the solution arrives, as so often it does, in the form of a beautiful young man. Sensitive and artistic, world-weary and private, the young man in question, called Cecil Dreeme, lounges and paints and converses with what Melville calls “fraternal unreserve” with Byng, who is quickly a good deal more than charmed. “I loved him too much, and with too peculiar a tenderness,” Byng tells us of his reluctance to discuss with this sterling new friend his entangled affair with Emma Denman, “to tell him that I had fancied I loved even a woman better than him” (ch. 24). And why should his “peculiar tenderness” not be the largest ardor of his life? If matrimony is unappetizing and the enticements of Densdeth polluting, Cecil Dreeme appears to offer to Byng the possibility of a life at once unobjectionable in the eyes of the scrutinizing world but also, in its singular strangenesses, at a saving distance from the deadlier conventionalities of normative living. Is theirs a male friendship raised a power by the vitalizing presence of desire, of sex? Or are they something nearer to a sexual coupling, a marriage, though happily free of the more imprisoning antagonisms of gender difference? For Byng it hardly matters. Of course by the end of the novel we learn, in a confession that is likely to surprise very few readers, that Cecil Dreeme was born Clara Denman, sister of Emma, and had gone into hiding as a man to escape the cruel machinations of none other than Densdeth. But then Cecil’s gender transitivity had never not been the case, throughout the course of his intimacy with the beguiled Byng: “I did not quite give up my womanhood, as Cecil,” Cecil-now-Clara reminds him. And at any rate Clara’s having-been Cecil does not leave her either, certainly not in the eyes of Byng, who continues to call him “Cecil” after the confession. Cecil may have been born Clara, but it is precisely Cecil/Clara’s transitivity—his having been a man possessing an unsurrendered womanhood, a woman marked indelibly by having-been-a-man—that unlocks Byng’s attraction, and makes his desire possible.
Like the many other Gothic novels among which it takes its place, Cecil Dreeme does not want for passages of moral fulmination, the better part of them occasioned by Densdeth. Yet its heart, we could say, clearly lies elsewhere. If anything, the Gothic mode provides a formal means to give full voice to the suspicion that a life outside the confinements of matrimony, reasonable affection, and civilized reproductivity might have a gorgeousness, a sensual vitality and unrivaled intensity, that it would be a tremendous grief to forswear. This is what Byng has to say while looking upon the corpse of Densdeth, the putative villain of the novel, whose attractions extend even beyond the threshold of death:
There was the man whom I should have loved if I had not hated, dead at last, with this vulgar death. Only a single stab from another, and my warfare with him was done. I felt a strange sense of indolence overcome me. Was my business in life over, now that I had no longer to struggle with him daily? (ch. 28)
Freed at last from what he has described to himself as the menace of Densdeth, Byng suffers his demise with an altogether post-coital diminishment of spirit. What he feels here is something sharper than mere ambivalence. We can be forgiven, I think, for reading this and wondering if it isn’t the queer life that, really, he has loved all along: the struggle, the transgression, the intoxicating possibility of annihilation. Densdeth may be evil. But as Byng writes it, to do without the turbulent vitality of queer love is its own kind of death, a consignment to the dreariness of the ordinary, a mayonnaise life.
But then, saving him from all that, there is Cecil Dreeme. It is Cecil who keeps alive for our protagonist the delirious possibility—fine, fine, the dream—of an intimacy
