Queer Short Stories in Nineteenth-Century America
The short story is an American invention, and arguably the most important literary genre to have emerged in the United States.—Alfred Bendixen
There is something queer about the short story.—Axel Nissen
If the short story is an original American literary form, as Alfred Bendixen has claimed, and if the short story is in some way queer, as Axel Nissen has argued, then it would seem to follow that there is something fundamentally queer about the most distinctively American literary genre.1 American writers didn’t invent the short story out of nothing, of course. The short story as we know it had precursors in other prose forms—character sketches, moral anecdotes, illustrative material in sermons, inset narratives or digressive episodes in novels, to name a few—but it seems to have emerged in distinction from these other kindred forms, and as a genre with its own formal specificity and dedicated purpose, more or less when Washington Irving composed the stand-alone tales “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” (both 1820).
Like any genre, the short story exists in a differential relationship to other genres; in the case of the short story, most obviously in a contrastive relationship to the novel, as two prose fiction forms distinguished from each other according to their relative lengths. Nissen’s argument for the queerness of the short story begins with the idea that the novel and the short story define each other by their differences, one the longer “major” genre and the other the shorter “minor” one, and he suggests that this binary opposition operates in a dynamic conceptual field structured by other binaries like man/woman, heterosexual/homosexual, central/marginal, and normal/abnormal.2 The short story, as the “minor” genre, is implicitly allied (Nissen claims) with the disvalued halves of those other binaries: thus the short story is to the novel as woman is to man, abnormal is to normal, and queer is to straight. It might be hypothesized, then, that the short story as a genre emerged historically and developed formally in large part in order to explore and depict queer realms of experience for which the novel was felt to be, at least in some ways, unsuited. It would be no accident, therefore, that the short story was invented, developed, and came to flourish in the century that saw the modern sexual system (eventually organized around the homo-hetero binary) fitfully emerge and unevenly develop. Some historians of sexuality have seen early forms of sexual types (like the homosexual) appear on the scene in the eighteenth century; others have said that it was not until the word “homosexual” was coined in the 1860s that we can legitimately observe persons who answered to this description; still others have claimed that it was the trial of Oscar Wilde in the 1890s that truly marks the historical consolidation of homosexual identity. For the purposes of this collection of short stories, the dating of this process of emergence is not crucial; what is more important is that it was a process, uneven and elusive, and that many of these stories testify to that very unevenness and elusiveness.
Any number of scholars and critics have written about the relationships between sexual marginality or dissidence, on the one hand, and deviant narrative structures on the other. These critics often argue that many of the standard features of narrative genres, not exclusively but especially the novel (for example, orderly sequentiality, linear development over time, family continuity over generations, satisfactory ideological closure) are inherently normalizing in their tendencies.3 It would stand to reason, then, that a historically new narrative form (say, the short story) might find much of its purpose in representing characters and situations that did not conform to the deep structures of normative temporality that were otherwise ingrained in the existing literary culture. Perhaps the short story, not dedicated to creating long normalizing narratives, discovered and offered new queer expressive opportunities. And perhaps queer experience sought and found a natural home in the short story form.
Many of the classic American short stories that have been said (by Bendixen and others) to inaugurate the genre, such as Washington Irving’s famous two, already mentioned, and Edgar Allan Poe’s “Ligeia” (1838), “The Man of the Crowd” (1840), and “The Purloined Letter” (1844), have been the frequent objects of queer critical commentary.4 (Rather than reprint very many of these widely available canonical stories here, this anthology inclines toward the relatively unfamiliar.) And among the most celebrated later nineteenth-century American writers of short stories, such as Ambrose Bierce, Alice Brown, Willa Cather, Kate Chopin, Rose Terry Cooke, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Bret Harte, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, Sarah Orne Jewett, Herman Melville, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Harriet Prescott Spofford, Charles Warren Stoddard, Octave Thanet (Alice French), Mark Twain, Edith Wharton, and Constance Fenimore Woolson—many of whom are represented in the present anthology—it is not difficult to discover an argument for the queerness (understood in one way or another) of many of their tales.5 Perhaps it is no coincidence that the nineteenth century—the century when, it has been said, sexuality as such (and various taxonomized sexual identities) were invented—is the period when American short stories were invented, and when they were the queerest.6
They were queerest, in part, of necessity—simply because they date from a time when fixed itineraries of sexual desire and settled categories of sexual identity had not yet been fully constituted, and so the errant desires and feelings the stories portrayed would not necessarily correspond to what later became the standard types of erotic orientation (for example, straight, gay). As the genre has continued to flourish in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, its queerness has only become more evident, as a very partial list of names can only begin to suggest—Sherman Alexie, Sherwood Anderson, James Baldwin, Paul Bowles, Truman Capote, William Faulkner, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Ernest Hemingway, Langston Hughes, H. P. Lovecraft, Flannery O’Connor, Annie Proulx, James Purdy, Eudora Welty, Tennessee Williams. But many of these writers’ short stories seem less queer in the semantically unstable nineteenth-century sense than gay or lesbian as the twentieth century largely understood those terms: they tend to have internalized the “deployment of sexuality,” as Foucault called it, the disciplinary structure that insists that each person belongs natively to a particular sexual category.7
Such lists of writers as those assembled above will immediately betray the fact that defining what counts as “queer” is a vexing question—a question for which this anthology certainly does not propose a definitive answer. Instead, this collection wants to enlarge the boundaries of the queer (or even start to dissolve them)—or, to be more historical, to recover a sense of the relative unboundedness of the nineteenth-century range of queer experience. This collection therefore does not require that the author of a given story be gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, or queer under some other description (although many of the writers could be described in these terms); it does not require that there be uncontestably queer characters in the stories (whatever that might mean); nor does it insist that same-sex or otherwise nonnormative passionate relationships must appear therein (although, of course, they often do). In nineteenth-century America the categories of sexual identity and erotic practice were much less crisply defined than they later became, so choosing stories on the basis of rigid criteria from later eras would be both unduly restrictive and historically incorrect. Rather, this anthology means to pose the question of literary queerness in several unprescriptive ways. To that end it is organized into four sections under different overlapping rubrics: queer places, queer genders, queer attachments, and queer things. Instead of locating queerness only as a quality of persons, that is, it proposes that queerness can be found elsewhere too.
This collection of stories first asks whether a place, such as a region or a city, a landscape or a built structure—a raucous tavern, a lush island in the Pacific, a strange house, a remote valley, a foreign city—can be queer. Or whether one’s spatial location within (or without), emotional relationship with, or visceral response to that place can be considered queer. Many of these stories find queerness to be site-specific. It may seem obvious that one’s gender can be queer—the complex relationship of gender nonconformity to dissident sexualities is well known—but the queerness of one’s relationship to one’s own gender (desired or hated, owned or disowned, freely chosen or coercively assigned, deeply ambivalent) is what many of the stories explore. Then: can the forms of our attachments be themselves queer, even if in other respects (in the joining, say, of a man and a woman) the attachment may be utterly normal? Can a woman’s relationship to a man be queer? Conversely, can a woman’s passionate relationship to another woman be normal? Quite a few of the stories here appear to find same-sex passions to be unremarkable but opposite-sex romance to be odd or even perverse. And finally this collection asks: can one’s relationship to things—nonhuman animals, inanimate objects, architectural features, foodstuffs, flowers—be queerly intense or perversely consuming? Some people’s strongest attachments, obviously, are not to other persons or bodies but to nonhuman objects of one kind or another. Can that count as queer? The stories in this collection entertain and explore all of these questions and more.
As a result of this intentional dilation of the range of the queer, some of the stories may seem, to some readers, not really very queer at all. Where is the sex, these readers might ask. It’s a reasonable question, to be sure. This collection understands sex and sexual pleasure (or displeasure, or indifference) not to be strictly segregated from other forms of sensuous pleasure or embodied experience but always to be in a lively interanimating relationship to them. A crucial aspect of the modern sexual system that was consolidated in the nineteenth century was its reduction of sexual expression to a limited repertoire of genitally centered acts and sensations: everything outside this repertoire was not sex. That reduction has come to seem quite strange and deformative in retrospect. One critic has recently written of sexual celibacy, for instance, that while it can be understood as the opposite of (or absence of) sexuality, it can also be taken as a kind of sexuality in its own right.8 Other critics have understood the polymorphous perversity and relative disinhibition of children to be fundamentally queer.9 With such bracing stipulations in mind, this collection of stories features excitable nuns, passionate children, and many other sorts of rebellious or nonconforming people who might all be counted as in some sense queer because of their slantwise relationship to norms of gendered bodily propriety: bachelors and spinsters, drunks and gamblers, coquettes and playboys, murderers, thieves, and other criminals, bad husbands, reluctant wives, ungrateful children, irresponsible parents, fops, dandies, loungers, artists, travelers, overeaters, artists—rogues, we might say, of all kinds.10 Are they all queer, or would this be to stretch even this elastic category—meant, to be sure, as a kind of anti-category—beyond its breaking point?
Certain of the stories included here will seem, to some readers, quite familiarly queer: they match up fairly closely with our categories of gay or lesbian, queer, bisexual, or transgender identity, feeling, or attachment. But it is important that they don’t tend to match up exactly: things were quite different in the nineteenth century. For example, Japhet Colbones (in “The Man Who Thought Himself a Woman”), Felipa (in the story of that name), Nancy Jackson (in Twain’s story), and Ah Wee (in “The Haunted Valley”) all evidently cross-dress, but they don’t seem to be of the same sort with one another, never mind of a kind with the transgender lives that we encounter or live today. What all of these stories do, in one fashion or another, however, is pose the question of queerness—of desires, feelings, sensations, inhibitions, urges, and affiliations (or disaffiliations) that escape narrow categorical description.
It’s noteworthy that in fact in many of the stories some psychic phenomenon or moment of experience is explicitly tagged as outside the normal range of everyday phenomena: inexplicable, unprecedented, opaque, even supernatural. When John Lankton, a dissipated young man who is the hero of Walt Whitman’s “The Child’s Champion,” first lays loving eyes on a twelve-year-old boy named Charley, the baffled narrator can only helplessly ask, “Why was it that from the first moment of seeing him, the young man’s heart had moved with a strange feeling of kindness toward the boy?” (8). There is no rational explanation for it: the sudden emotion, the narrator avers, is merely “wondrous” (8). Likewise George, in Elizabeth Stoddard’s “Out of the Deeps,” upon seeing his cousin’s wife Charlotte alive after thinking her dead, disconcertedly experiences “a host of sensations which he believed no man had ever felt before” (180). Martin Morse, in Bret Harte’s “In the Tules,” to take another example, experiences utterly “unaccountable feelings” (193) for the mysterious stranger, Captain Jack, who exerts such a “complete fascination” (191) over him. The eponymous twin brothers of Bayard Taylor’s “Twin-Love,” David and Jonathan, appear to communicate telepathically over vast distances in order to redress their mistaken submission to regrettable social norms.
The elusiveness or inscrutability of queer feelings or urges (even one’s own feelings, illegible to oneself) are often registered in these stories. In Charles Warren Stoddard’s “A South-Sea Idyl” the narrator, who cannot sleep, observes uncertainly (or coyly?) of himself, “I think I must have been excited” (17). In Constance Fenimore Woolson’s “Felipa” the narrator, Catherine, observing the curiously unsettled relationship between her friend Christine and Christine’s suitor Edward, says parenthetically, “I call them lovers for want of a better name, but they were more like haters: however, in such cases it is nearly the same thing” (43). When Constance suddenly kisses Undine (and then repeats the act) in Octave Thanet’s “My Lorelei,” she cannot confidently parse her own intentions: “Almost involuntarily, I drew her to me and kissed her” (62). Noticing of a surprised Undine that the “faintest flush had tinged her cheek,” the second kiss cannot be so ambiguously detached from Constance’s will (62). Tiddy Colbones, in “The Man Who Thought Himself a Woman,” has “a peculiar feeling” at the dinner table one evening, an ominous feeling “that something seemed to choke me”; her sister-in-law Drusy at the same moment “grew dizzy, too” and has “felt queer ever since” (106). These inexplicable sensations turn out to be omens of terrible tragedy. When the lovely Helena suddenly returns to her aunt’s provincial New England home after being away for many years, in Sarah Orne Jewett’s “Martha’s Lady,” the servant Martha can barely speak, “there [is] such a ringing in her ears”; her employer, Miss Pyne, is “a little puzzled by something quite unusual in Martha’s face” (218). The unnamed little girl in Sadakichi Hartmann’s “Schopenhauer in the Air” rises “slowly” from the gutter and moves in a kind of trance with the crowd that surrounds her, proceeding “slowly, as if by mere accident, in the same direction” as the others until she finds “herself at the end of the wharf, looking down into the water, lapping against the framework like the soft caresses of living hands” (281). When Adrienne Farival in Kate Chopin’s “Lilacs” catches the first whiff of those flowers every spring she almost compulsively returns to the convent where she had once been a schoolgirl (292) and annually enjoys a sort of queer hiatus in her otherwise worldly existence.
Many of the stories themselves include intradiegetically what I would like to call queer inset texts. It is as if they are drawing attention to the queerness of their own literary projects, one short story exhibiting within itself an—even shorter!—model of its own queer narrative ambitions. In Bierce’s “The Haunted Valley,” for instance, the narrator—an unnamed urbane traveler in the American west—reproduces on the page as best he can what he calls the “exaggerated eccentricity” of a nearly unreadable grave marker inscription that one semiliterate character called Whisky Jo has composed as the epitaph for another, named Ah Wee:
AH WEE—CHINAMAN.
Aig unnone. Wirkt last fur Wisky Jo. This monment is ewreckted bi the saim to keep is memmerry grean an liquize a wornin to Slestials notter take on ayres like Wites. Dammum! She wus a good eg. (29)
Fully decoding this epitaph, characterized by its misspelling and dialect, requires the complete context of the story, naturally; but I would like it to stand here, detached from that context and with its obscurity thereby heightened, as an emblem of the queer short story itself, with its vexed relationship to legibility as such. The cosmopolitan narrator, with his command of proper English, confesses to “amazement” as he reads the epitaph, and calls attention to “the meagre, but conscientious description of the deceased, the insolent frankness of confession, the grotesque and ambiguous anathema, and last, but not least, the ludicrous transition of gender and sentiment” (29). Did Whisky Jo love or hate Ah Wee (or is that too reductive a question)? Is the deceased “Celestial” (a term that once was used to refer to Chinese people) still resented for putting on airs like whites? Or is Ah Wee still longed for, and his (or her?) memory kept green with devotion? In the epitaph the word “is” (that is, “his”) precedes the word “memmery,” but then “She” is used in the final sentence. Was Ah Wee, after all, male or female (or is that also too simple a question)? Did Whisky Jo even know, in fact—or care—whether Ah Wee was a man or a woman? Did Ah Wee cross-dress, and is that the reason for Whisky Jo’s confusion (or, for that matter, the ground of his attraction)? The story is perhaps most queer because it does not make it easy (may in fact make it impossible) to resolve any of these questions. But its very obscurity entices the reader, enlists the reader in an attempt to penetrate a realm of experience that is at once alien and alluring.
Among other such queer intradiegetic texts is the diary kept by Constance Lynde, excerpts from which purportedly constitute Octave Thanet’s “My Lorelei,” with their glaring five-year gap (68), after which the interrupted story of a brief same-sex passion is completed in distant retrospect. There are the letters Nancy Jackson writes to her mother from sad involuntary exile in Mark Twain’s “How Nancy Jackson Married Kate Wilson”—writes, we are told, in “a disguised hand” (126), to match the gender disguise she has been compelled to assume. There is the unseen poem called “Urania,” written by the bachelor florist John Thompson in Samuel L. Knapp’s “The Bachelors” (91); the deeply ambiguous suicide note left by Japhet Colbones in “The Man Who Thought Himself a Woman” (108); the brief missive written by Li Chung O’Yam in Sui Sin Far’s “The Heart’s Desire,” bound under the wing of a carrier dove and sent to invite Ku Yum to join her in the palace (221). These and others are embedded emblems, so to speak, of the queer work of writing that these stories perform. It is tempting to think of the short stories gathered here as themselves texts meant to be found or returned to after a temporal hiatus, or letters sent with a yearning hope but no assurance of receipt, or notes posted to an unimaginable future.11
Although they are not represented within their stories as written tales, we might also add to this list of queer inset texts the gaudy lies that Paul tells in Willa Cather’s “Paul’s Case,” the telepathic summons Jonathan sends to David (already mentioned) in Bayard Taylor’s “Twin-Love,” the painful confessions made by Sarah to Mrs. Dunbar in Mary Wilkins Freeman’s “Two Friends” and by George to his cousin Horace in Elizabeth Stoddard’s “Out of the Deeps,” and, especially, the “quare things” Dave says to his fellow slaves in Charles Chesnutt’s “Dave’s Neckliss,” such as the preposterous claim that hams grow on trees (274). These might all be counted as queer literary productions, and they might instruct us as readers in how to approach the stories of which they form parts.
In the first section of this anthology, five stories are grouped under the rubric “queer places” in order to highlight the ways in which queerness may be present not just in a person but in a geographical place, or a region, or a local setting. In Walt Whitman’s “The Child’s Champion” (1841), the queer place is a rowdy New York tavern and then the cozy bedroom of an inn. (It might also be the quaint Hudson Valley environs, which had already been invested by one of the short story’s inventors, Washington Irving, with queer atmospherics. This region will appear once more in “The Man Who Thought Himself a Woman.”) In Charles Warren Stoddard’s “A South-Sea Idyl” (1869) it is an island in the Pacific—“How queer the whole atmosphere of the place was!” (17), he exclaims. In Ambrose Bierce’s “The Haunted Valley” (1871) it is a desolate and violent western landscape, and a particular secluded topographical depression. In Constance Fenimore Woolson’s “Felipa” (1876) it is “a wild place” (37) on the coast of Florida. And in Octave Thanet’s “My Lorelei” (1880) it is a “queer” town (56), Heidelberg, in a romantically picturesque Germany. All of these queer locations are evidence of the spatial unevenness of nineteenth-century sexual formations. Another writer, born in the nineteenth century and pseudonymously known as Earl Lind or Ralph Werther, who was the author of Autobiography of an Androgyne (1918) as well as its sequel, The Female-Impersonators (1922), later claimed that, having traveled extensively in the United States as well as in Europe, and having “explored the Underworld in many cities of both continents,” he had found that “in America’s smaller cities west of the meridian of Kansas City, the sexual Underworld is more bold . . . than anywhere else in the United States or Europe.”12 Charles Warren Stoddard, meditating on the same east-west geographical axis, wrote on March 2, 1869, to Walt Whitman from Honolulu, describing his delightful “intercourse with these natives”: “For the first time in my life I act as my nature prompts me. It would not answer in America, as a general principle, not even in California where men are tolerably bold.”13
It is worth noting that a good number of the stories gathered here either locate their action or have a publication provenance “west of the meridian of Kansas City”: Bierce’s “The Haunted Valley” and Stoddard’s “A South-Sea Idyl” were both first printed in the Overland Monthly, a San Francisco literary journal (edited by Bierce); Thanet’s “My Lorelei” appeared in The Western (a St. Louis magazine); Twain’s “How Nancy Jackson Married Kate Wilson” is conspicuously set in his usual southwestern American region; in Bayard Taylor’s “Twin-Love” one of the twin brothers, David, goes “westwards” for a time into physical and emotional exile in “the outer line of settlement,” where he led “a wild and lonely life” (171); and Bret Harte’s “In the Tules,” while first published in London, set its action in California. It is hard not to think that Harte, late in his career, living in England and publishing this tale of intense but virtually indescribable male-male passionate attachment in the Strand Magazine (London) in 1895—a few months after Oscar Wilde was notoriously prosecuted, convicted on charges of “gross indecency,” and imprisoned—would advert pointedly to an earlier, less punitive time and, tellingly, to a distant place—what Stoddard referred to as “California where men are tolerably bold.”
In the next section, “Queer Genders,” each of the five stories may be said to confound our usual sense of gender identity in some fashion. Samuel L. Knapp’s “The Bachelors” (1836) features three young men who pledge to each other to remain unmarried; two of them keep their promise, while one does not. Adult masculinity was often in the nineteenth century felt to be imperfect or incomplete if it did not entail marriage: we might therefore think of “married” and “unmarried” as categories of gender. The anonymous 1857 story, “The Man Who Thought Himself a Woman,” may seem to give itself away in its title as a story of what we now call a transgendered person. But its mapping of the gender landscape is in many ways different from ours, and deeply confounding: Japhet Colbones likes the company of women and likes feminine occupations such as sewing and embroidery, but those traits do not effectively disqualify him for marriage and fatherhood. Mary Wilkins Freeman in “Two Friends” (1887) depicts a lifelong domestic attachment between two women, one of whom does “the rough work, the man’s work,” the other “the woman’s work” (113), but in other ways their roles do not line up with this conventionally gendered division of labor. Mark Twain’s grim and merciless tale “How Nancy Jackson Married Kate Wilson,” probably written between 1900 and 1903 but left unpublished during his lifetime, tells the story of a young woman coerced into permanently masquerading as a man; it might be said to highlight the essentially coercive nature of gender roles as such. Willa Cather’s celebrated “Paul’s Case” (1905) may seem most familiar to us, featuring, as it does, a young protagonist perceived to be effeminate, having certain tastes that have been associated with homosexuality, and exhibiting behaviors that came to be signifiers of gay identity; but one thing that is striking about this story is how it refrains from classifying Paul narrowly, how it depicts a world that doesn’t know quite what to make of him (as he doesn’t really know what to make of himself).
The stories in this section on “queer genders,” might just as well have been listed under “queer places,” to be sure. The anonymous streets, as well as the hotels and the concert halls of the big city, seem infused with queer energy in “Paul’s Case”; the Irvingesque Rattle-Snake Village of “The Man Who Thought Himself a Woman” is a setting that kindly tolerates the “queerities, quips, and quirks” (96) of its inhabitants; the garden, conservatory, and greenhouse of Thompson, one of Knapp’s bachelors, “who was in advance of all the florists in the country” (90), is an extraterritorial environment of freedom where at least some of the rules of ordinary life are suspended. Indeed, it might be noted here as an aside that flowers play an important role in many of the stories throughout this volume: someone has planted and tended to “a clump of unmistakable garden-violets” (29) by the grave of the ambiguous Ah Wee in Bierce’s “The Haunted Valley,” Cather’s Paul is often associated with flowers, Jewett’s Martha is taught how to arrange flowers by Helena, the “rarest flowers” (220) bloomed only for Li Chung in Sui Sin Far’s “The Heart’s Desire,” a girl named after a flower (Lilly) eats candy flowers in Alcott’s “The Candy Country,” and the heroine of Chopin’s “Lilacs” is intoxicated by the odor of the flowers that give the story its name.
“Queer attachments” is the rubric that helps organize the third section of stories. Each of these stories depicts unusual configurations of persons, forms of attachment (or disattachment) that are marked as somehow odd or idiosyncratic. Bayard Taylor’s “Twin-Love” features identical twins, named by their mother after the biblical pair David and Jonathan, whose passionate attachment to one another at first apparently excludes the possibility of any other strong relationship. But their deep bond eventually comes to include a woman, Ruth, who is officially married to Jonathan but, in a sense, is united to (and queerly unites) them both. “ ‘Ruth is ours, and I bring her kiss to you,’ Jonathan said, pressing his lips to David’s” (168). Elizabeth Stoddard’s “Out of the Deeps” depicts two men, one of whom, George (a bachelor), professes to love his cousin Horace’s wife Charlotte; when she is (temporarily, erroneously) believed to have died in a shipwreck, the memory of this mutual love proves an uneasy basis for the men’s ongoing attachment to one another. When Charlotte is found to be alive after all (and her shocked husband thereupon deteriorates and dies), mutual admiration of her then forms the ground for the surviving bachelor’s new bond with yet another man, Charlotte’s rescuer. Bret Harte’s “In the Tules” features an indescribable relationship, mostly conducted in absentia, between two men, and the previously mentioned “unaccountable feelings” (193) that the one has for the other. Part of what is queer about Martin Morse is his strong preference for solitude and social disconnection; another part of what is queer about him is the intensity of his feelings for a man who exists, more or less, only in his imagination. Likewise, in Sarah Orne Jewett’s “Martha’s Lady” (1897) Martha spends her life devotedly loving a woman whom she knew only briefly and who has now been absent for more than forty years. Some queer theorists have argued for the “antisocial” essence of queerness.14 David’s frontier exile in “Twin-Love,” Morse’s “habits of loneliness and self-reliance [which] made him independent of his neighbours” (186), Martha’s radical social isolation in Jewett’s story, and Li Chung O’Yam’s alienated life “in a sad, beautiful old palace” (220) might all be counted as instances of queer antisociability. Certain other queer critics and psychoanalytic theorists would advise us that erotic desire is always mediated by representation—that even though we may think we love a person, in truth we always principally love an idea of that person. Both “In the Tules” and “Martha’s Lady” explore attachments that are no less powerful for being drastically attenuated, essentially notional, and severely asymmetrical. Sui Sin Far’s exquisitely short tale “The Heart’s Desire” (1908) is a gemlike parable about forming one’s own improvised attachments regardless of what society prescribes for you. An unhappy little princess living alone in a palace, Li Chung O’Yam is first offered a father, then a mother, then a brother—but none of these is at all what she truly wants. She takes matters into her own hands: “Trouble not your minds. I will find my own hearts-ease,” she tells her attendants (221). What she finds is another little girl with whom to live “happily together” (221).
Many of these stories featuring “queer attachments” might also have been grouped under “queer places” or “queer genders,” to be sure. These orienting rubrics are meant to be suggestive but not limiting. The underpopulated marshy landscape of the flood-prone Sacramento River Valley and the roistering Gold Rush camps of “In the Tules,” for example; the magnificent but lonely palace of “The Heart’s Desire”; the elegant spinster household and provincial New England village of “Martha’s Lady”—all of these places seem imbued with queer energy, or enabling of queer adventure. Martha’s tomboyish tree climbing; Captain Jack’s finely scented clothes; Li Chung’s bold assertiveness—these all seem to transgress gender norms in subtler or less subtle ways. Conversely, we might add to the roster of “queer attachments” some that are grouped elsewhere in this volume, for instance Woolson’s “Felipa,” in which the eponymous small boyish girl falls in love not with Christine or Edward singly but with the two of them as a couple. As Catherine narrates, “The child had a curious habit of confounding the two identities which puzzled me then as now” (47). We might note that threesomes or triangulated configurations of desiring persons abound throughout this collection: there are Whisky Jo, Ah Wee, and the odd third party named Gopher, for instance, in “The Haunted Valley”; there are Nancy Jackson, her sadistic tormentor the “sour bachelor” Thomas Furlong (122), and Nancy’s mother who jilted Furlong many years before; the two friends of Mary Wilkins Freeman’s story enjoy a friendship uncomfortably haunted by the unspoken presence of John Marshall, Abby’s former suitor.
In the final group of stories, arranged under the title “Queer Things,” queerness is relocated from the space of interpersonal relationships to the realm of attachment (or aversion) to things: here, unusual architectural features (a gigantic chimney in Melville’s tale), pastries and other sweets (in Alcott’s “The Candy Country”), smoked meats (a tantalizing ham in “Dave’s Neckliss”), and a “single grape, slightly rotten on one side, that had dropped into the gutter” (in Hartmann’s “Schopenhauer in the Air,” 279), as well as the lavish bunches of lilacs, along with other household objects—the rich accouterments of the heroine’s dissipated urban life and the contrasting spare furnishings and devotional objects of the nunnery—in Chopin’s story.
Again, other stories that happen to be placed elsewhere in this volume might very easily have qualified for the “queer things” section. Alongside Melville’s “I and My Chimney,” featuring queer architecture, we might very well have placed Bierce’s “Haunted Valley” on account of the “hermaphrodite habitation” (24) in which Whisky Jo lives, or “The Man Who Thought Himself a Woman,” for the “uncouth, irregular” structure (94) that Japhet Colbones’s great-great-grandfather built for his solitary residence when, in his old age, a strange “freak” led him to abandon wife and family, forswear social and kinship relations altogether, and live by himself in a hut in the woods. Then there is Felipa’s strong bond with her dog Drollo, her “second self” (38), not to mention her attachment to a crude doll or “fetich” (39) and the “secret lair” (39) she has constructed as a home for her doll, which serves also as her own antisocial hut in a thicket of weeds, and to which she brings “portions of her meals or a new-found treasure—a sea-shell, a broken saucer, or a fragment of ribbon” (39). Queer things can be identified virtually everywhere. Among the more obvious, of course, are Japhet Colbones’s secretly gathered feminine habiliments in “The Man Who Thought Himself a Woman”; also in the category of clothing are the lovingly made adornments that Sarah creates for Abby in “Two Friends.” Intoxicating drinks make frequent appearances, along with the disinhibition that alcohol is known to produce: in Whitman’s “The Child’s Champion,” in Bierce’s “The Haunted Valley,” Harte’s “In the Tules,” Hartmann’s “Schopenhauer in the Air,” and in Chopin’s “Lilacs,” to name a few. In Thanet’s “My Lorelei” there is the engagement ring that Undine returns with understated drama to her fiancé; in Jewett’s “Martha’s Lady” there is the piece of wedding cake, the handkerchief, and the small lovely toilet implements that Helena sends to Martha, who lovingly cherishes them for decades. These things are all invested with the queer desires that they betoken.
One serious matter that ought to be acknowledged candidly, when thinking of this collection as a whole, is that many of these stories involve grave violence, ranging from frightening but nonlethal and finally inconsequential bodily violence (“The Child’s Champion”), to stabbing (“Felipa”) and murder (“My Lorelei,” “The Haunted Valley,” “How Nancy Jackson Married Kate Wilson,” “In the Tules”), as well as extrajudicial lynching (“In the Tules”). There is also the strangely ambiguous case of “The Candy Country,” in which a child eats apparently human creatures who are made of sugar and other delectable substances. Several of the stories involve attempted suicide (“Felipa”) or completed suicide (“The Man Who Thought Himself a Woman,” “Paul’s Case,” “Dave’s Neckliss,” “Schopenhauer in the Air”). Some of the stories involve psychological or physical coercion or punishment of a cruel or abusive kind (“Dave’s Neckliss” stands out here). Such scenarios can be unsettling, even seriously disturbing to many readers. And there is a long and dubious tradition, beginning at least in the nineteenth century and certainly continuing well into the twentieth, of queer fictions resolving the intractable social and psychological dilemmas of their characters by killing them off or, just as often, having them kill themselves.15 Much could be said about the complicated social and historical circumstances that frame the prevalence of such horrifying violent events in queer literary texts and in fictions that feature queer protagonists. On the one hand, these dire plot turns and narrative outcomes bear stringent witness to the real historical violence that has often been visited upon erotic and gender nonconformists in queer-hating societies. But these stories can also be unsettling because in some sense they seem to be visiting that violence upon their characters themselves.
Among the many challenges these stories present, in different ways, to contemporary readers, perhaps the most troubling is this: they often feature, in ways that are finally not resolvable, both queer-affirmative and queer-negative elements. That is, they include scenarios that bear witness to the deep suffering that has been imposed upon queer dissidents by societies that have despised and harmed them. But they also feature scenarios that describe and preserve queer forms of life and queer collective worlds that history may have largely left behind but that are not—by dint of the fact that they are attested to here—necessarily lost forever. Another way to put this is that the stories can appear to show that the world in the past was less rigidly and punitively organized around enforceable structures of sexual normativity—the nineteenth century can look in retrospect like a time of relative freedom around questions of bodies and pleasures—while at the same time they appear to document the infliction of harm on sexual nonconformists. Thus these stories all feel as though they can be read both “symptomatically” (as historical evidence of social injustice) and “reparatively” (as offering usable resources for beneficial social change).16
Such deep ambiguities raise as well some difficult questions about how these stories were received in their time. Did readers recognize such queer ambiguities when the stories were first published? It is notoriously hard to find reliable substantive evidence of how readers in the past responded to literary works; perhaps this collection will lead some of its own readers to pursue research along these lines. With respect to the contemporary reception of the stories collected here, in some cases inferences can be made on the basis of the revisions their own authors made to them, and a good many of these revisions are recorded in the notes to this volume. Walt Whitman revised “The Child’s Champion” in such a way as to suggest that he grew wary of the homoerotic feelings he had dramatized, and it appears that he sought to disguise those feelings at least partly in later reprintings. On the other hand, Sarah Orne Jewett made some small but telling revisions to the ending of “Martha’s Lady” between its first publication in 1897 and its next printing in 1899, changes that arguably bring its same-sex passion into higher relief. Willa Cather revised “Paul’s Case” in ways that may also bear upon her careful negotiation of the cultural boundaries around queer expression. We might also infer—although it is what might be called a strong inference—that Octave Thanet never reprinted “My Lorelei” after its first rather obscure appearance because she came to rue its somewhat explicit depiction of a same-sex passion. Mark Twain never published “How Nancy Jackson Married Kate Wilson” while he was alive: is this evidence of his recognition that its content somehow violated the boundaries of acceptable erotic expression in its day? One of the most intriguing cases here is that of Bayard Taylor’s “Twin-Love.” On the one hand, it was published in 1871 in a completely respectable mainstream elite periodical, the Atlantic Monthly. Readers today will wonder quite naturally whether any of its readers then considered it queer that two twin brothers should share a bed into adulthood, profess to be emotionally sufficient unto themselves, suffer a traumatic separation when one of them marries a woman, then miraculously and happily reunite and resume their intimacy with the blessing of the wife—who contentedly dies to make their exclusive devotion once again possible. Later on, in 1936, Taylor’s biographer Richmond Beatty would describe the story as “rather suspicious in its implications” and would assert inaccurately that David and Jonathan’s father sensed “a more than normal intimacy between them.”17 Yet another scholar—at yet another chronological remove—would observe that “what readers of the Atlantic made of it can only be conjectured,” judging “Twin-Love” on his own account to be “most peculiar” and averring that it skirted “the edge of suggestive sexuality.”18 Such scattered treatments of an obscure short story by a now little-known author demonstrate that at least some readers sensed—some years after its publication—at least something queer about it, even as they attested to the enduring difficulty of saying exactly what that queerness amounted to. “Twin-Love” made a strong claim in 1871 for the moral propriety and emotional beauty of the brothers’ love: “It is no blame in us to love one another,” David avers to his brother’s wife, Ruth (169). After Ruth’s death “they still walk hand in hand, still sleep upon the same pillow, still have their common wardrobe” (173–74). Taylor’s story ends by invoking “the touching mystery of their nature” (174). We might well choose to respect that refusal to explain or decipher something announced as ineradicably mysterious.
It can occasionally feel today—although historical predictions are dicey—as though the modern sexual regime of homo-hetero disciplinarity is finally fading away, and that bodies and pleasures might really be reconfigured in less prescriptive ways in the impending future. In this regard these stories offer us a weird and intransigent mixture of bated hope and wary admonition.