Gender Protest and Same-Sex Desire in Antebellum American Literature: Margaret Fuller, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville by David Greven (review)

Before Oscar Wilde’s gross indecency trials and even before Walt Whitman’s calamus leaves, same-sex desire could be found lurking in unexpected places: from Hester Prynne’s scarlet letter to Arthur Gordon Pym’s ship hull. In keeping with new critical scholarship exploring these subjects, David Greven’s latest book supplies us with a useful framework for bridging modern consciousness with historically liminal moments of queerness in the American literature of the 1840s (a decade that rarely takes center stage in studies of sexuality). Using the tools of psychoanalysis to structure readings of the “unruly affect” that usually registers queerness, Greven succeeds in showing that same-sex desire was far from silent in this moment (35). Demonstrating that same-sex desire had many different voices and modes of expression, he helps readers listen to the strange and unruly whispers, sighs, and hiccups of same-sex desire in antebellum literature. On the most basic level, Greven argues that antebellum writers framed questions of nonnormative sexuality within scenes that foreground resistance to gender performance; that is, “an expression of frustration and dissatisfaction with the normative demands of gender identity” often precedes or exists alongside subtle (and sometimes not-so-subtle) articulations of same-sex desire (5). At its best, the book’s investigation of this pattern can help readers more fully consider the textual and sexual disruptions that emerge in moments of gender trouble. As an analytic frame, however, the notion of protest and possibility remains, at times, like the texts it serves, too ambiguous.

In the first two chapters on Margaret Fuller and Edgar Allan Poe, Greven seeks to “demonstrate that pre-psychoanalytic texts engaged in a psychoanalytic discourse that evinces the long historical reach of this discourse” (93). Accordingly, Greven teaches us that Fuller and Poe along with contemporary social reformers were “preoccupied with phallic images” (49). Perhaps surprisingly, Greven argues that each writer employs the same pattern of phallic images in order to challenge heteropatriarchal structures. In his analysis of Poe’s short story “Ligeia,” for example, Greven writes that Ligeia’s spectacular resurrection exudes “phallic rectitude” as she rises powerfully before her husband. Her subsequent shrinking from her husband’s touch is, in this respect, “a profound expression of heterosexual ambivalence” that defies and disrupts sexual taxonomies of the period (81).

The third chapter offers a sustained Freudian reading of the pleasures and dangers of female narcissism in Fuller’s Summer on the Lakes, an account of her travels in the Great Lakes region. Greven claims that Fuller sought “to explore how desire for the self can also be homoerotic and how one person’s narcissistic desire can generate desire in others” (109). Taken together with chapter 1, this analysis establishes Fuller as a writer deeply engaged with questions of gender and same-sex desire.

The fourth and fifth chapters attend to Jacksonian masculinity and shipboard male homosexuality in Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket and Herman Melville’s Redburn, respectively. Drawing on Freud’s theory of melancholia, Greven understands Pym’s “homodepression” for his lost shipmates as interminable mourning that reflects the limits of male love in American culture (125). The book’s most sophisticated reading comes in the fifth chapter, where Greven decodes the word “shuddering” as a legibly queer term in the works of Melville, Hawthorne, and Poe. Greven argues that “‘to shudder’ emerges as a verb that expresses one’s responses to beholding another man and having a powerful reaction to him” (193). In this chapter, Greven attends to the ways that gender identity and racial difference structure the possibilities of sexual experience in the homosocial and interracial environment of a ship long at sea. Deftly bringing together questions of race, class, gender, and fear, this analysis locates...