Brent ends up at the novel’s end with an anticipated marriage to a fine woman, abetted by his loyal friend Wade, the latter is left alone for the moment with his bated love for Brent—whom he loved, he tells us, “as mature man loves man. I have known no more perfect union than that one friendship. Nothing so tender in any of my transitory loves for women” (57). When this same Richard Wade appears again in another piece of Winthrop’s fiction, a long story published in the Atlantic Monthly, “Love and Skates” (1862), he is somewhat older and now expressly in search of a wife of his own: he is judged to be “incomplete and abnormal” because he’s unmarried.20 Wade eventually, like Brent earlier, finds his own excellent woman to marry, but not until he has a peculiarly intense passage with one Bill Tarbox, a rough worker in the Hudson River Valley iron factory Wade has been sent to superintend. Wade and Tarbox are both thirty years old, described as each other’s matching physical counterparts, each a “Saxon six-footer” (137, 139). Wade first establishes his managerial authority and manly dominance by beating Tarbox in a fistfight; Tarbox thenceforth respects and admires Wade, and becomes his devoted ally—as well as avid ice-skating partner. When the river freezes over one Christmas Day, and the entire town goes out for a frolic on the ice, Wade and Tarbox have an opportunity to demonstrate their well-rehearsed skill as a figure-skating pair: “Wade backwards, Bill forwards, holding hands … both dropped into a sitting posture, with the left knee bent, and each with his right leg stretched out parallel to the ice and fitting compactly by the other man’s leg. In this queer figure they rushed through the laughing crowd” (154). A “queer figure” indeed, holding hands face to face and with legs interlaced, but with sharp blades extended in each other’s vicinity too—their tense rivalry and their tight attachment both expressed in this peculiar posture.
I have thus far concentrated on representing Winthrop’s depiction of same-sex love as a mainly positive phenomenon—and something that threads through many of his published writings—in order to correct a few egregious misrepresentations of Cecil Dreeme. But it must be conceded after all that this is itself a rather one-sided account of queer relations in it. This is a novel that presents what I will call a “stereoscopic” picture of male-male love. There are two same-sex love plots in it, one of which I have discussed (involving Byng and Dreeme), which is understood to be beautiful and healthy, while the other (between Byng and a seductive character named Densdeth) is condemned as morbid and suspect. The two queer love plots share the space of the novel uneasily, we might say; the one fits within the literary tradition of exalted same-sex romantic friendship, the other within a competing tradition that Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has called the “paranoid gothic,” characterized by its melodramatic depiction of “homosexual panic.”21
I borrow the term “stereoscopic” from the novel itself (88). One of the peculiarities of the tale has to do with Byng’s nonrecognition of Clara Denman when she is first presented to him in male disguise. This obtuseness may seem implausible to some readers. After all, Byng knew Clara and her sister Emma intimately in childhood, even played “little husband and little wife” with them (112), but oddly he doesn’t at all recognize Clara now. True, Byng has been told that Clara is dead, so he does not expect ever to meet her; she is also in masculine disguise, apparently quite convincing; he has been prepared by others in various ways to meet a young man, an artist named Cecil; the room where they first meet is dark; Cecil is pale and wasted with lack of nourishment; and ten years have passed since they last met (when he was fifteen and Clara was several years younger). Clearly Winthrop labors to make this nonrecognition seem passably believable under the circumstances. At several moments in the story Byng almost thinks he has seen Cecil before, but he cannot quite remember where or when. Later, Clara says that she recognized him instantly: “I knew you as my old playmate from the first moment” (204). But because he does not appear to recognize her in that first moment, she doesn’t reveal herself to him. She is relieved, also, to be able to go unrecognized, since she is in hiding from Densdeth, living in deep fear of being located by him. Dreeme’s reclusiveness argues that he has a secret of some kind, and this putative secret continues to stimulate Byng’s curiosity even as he feels duty-bound to respect its privacy—but still he never brings himself to recognize Clara in Cecil.
There is certainly something willful in Byng’s nonrecognition, as he later comes to admit: “And every moment fancies drift across my mind that I actually know his secret, and am blind, purposely blind to my knowledge, because I promised when we first met that I would be so” (126). When he first encounters Cecil Dreeme, famished and half-conscious, he forbears to look directly at him, thinking it would be rude to stare at someone who was only half awake and too weak to resist uninvited inspection: “Curiosity urged me to study the face more in detail. But that seemed disloyal to the sleeper…. I therefore stopped intentionally short of a thorough analysis of his countenance” (81). When Dreeme does become fully conscious, however, Byng looks intently at him, “eye to eye” (87), and he has one of his fleeting sensations of half-recognition: “As we regarded each other earnestly, I perceived the question flit across my mind: ‘Had I not had a glimpse of that inspired face before?’” (88). He already knows that Dreeme is a painter, so he immediately thinks of likely places he might have caught sight of him plying his trade in the past (here is where the image of a stereoscope comes in): “I may have seen him copying in the Louvre, sketching in the Oberland, dejected in the Coliseum, elated in St. Peter’s, taking his coffee and violets in the Café Doné, whisking by at the Pitti Palace ball. He may have flashed across my sight, and imprinted an image on my brain to which his presence applies the stereoscopic counterpart” (88). The stereoscope (also called a stereograph) was a technology, widely popular in the nineteenth century, for creating the illusion of three-dimensional depth in a photographic image. A pair of almost identical pictures was printed side by side on a single paper card, one a right-eye view and the other a left-eye view of the same scene (that is, the images were captured from fractionally divergent perspectives, as a person’s two eyes would see a scene from very slightly different angles). The photographic card was inserted into a viewer (a hand-held viewer, sometimes called a Holmes Stereoscope, after its inventor, Oliver Wendell Holmes, who made this entertainment device affordable for the American market). The parallax effect of the two slightly offset images required that the viewer’s brain combine them, as it combined the visual sensations from a viewer’s own two slightly divergent eyes, thus producing the appearance of three-dimensional depth of field.22 Used metaphorically by Winthrop (or, rather, by the narrator Byng), the idea of having seen Dreeme fleetingly once, somewhere in the past, and now having a second image to complete, as it were, the stereoscopic effect, should logically lead to recognition rather than stymie it.
But instead of recognizing his old playmate, Byng cannot (or will not) do so, even as he observes that Dreeme appears to recognize him:
When he glanced up at me anew, I fancied I saw an evanescent look of recognition drift across his face.
This set me a second time turning over the filmy leaves of the book of portraits in my brain. Was his semblance among those legions of faces packed close and set away in order there? No. I could not identify him. The likeness drifted away from me, and vanished. (89)
As readers we must take Cecil Dreeme stereoscopically, as it were: the two queer romances (one beautiful, one sinister) are each other’s slightly mismatched counterparts, which, if taken together, produce a historical reality effect. The “stereoscopic counterpart” of the plot of glorious romantic friendship in Cecil Dreeme is the counterplot of sinister same-sex attraction centered in the figure of Densdeth. And just as Byng cannot bring his two images of Cecil together, the novel, we might say, does not bring its two homoerotic love plots into a single focus. This is not, in my view, a deficiency at all—rather, it is one of the qualities that makes Cecil Dreeme such a powerfully queer witness to the contradictions of its historical moment, its suspension between a prior historical deployment in which same-sex passion was uncontroversial and celebrated and an emerging historical deployment that would soon stigmatize same-sex love as morbid, unwholesome, indecent, and perverse.
Roland Barthes in his classic essay “From Work
