Sexuality, History, Difficulty, Pleasure

The pleasure involved in reading and teaching "The Man Who Thought Himself a Woman," an anonymous story of transvestism and gender inversion that appeared in December 1857 in The Knickerbocker; or New York Monthly Magazine, has to do with the difficulty of historicizing it adequately. (Yes, the perverse pleasure of the difficult.) The story is self-consciously quaint, setting its action in the indeterminate but not very distant past and adducing a longer history of one family's many generations of per sis tent oddity, while imbuing that narrative retrospect with an Irvingesque quality of fond nostalgia (implying that the gender disorder it narrates is a curious anomaly of a romanticized yesteryear). It thus seems to reference a moment in history before the invention of intrinsic sexual identities—indeed, it markedly predates the discourses of sexology.¹ But it is also curiously ahead of its time (as we are wont to say), anticipating the later sexological model of the "woman trapped in a man's body," and thus its prescient formulation of gender inversion seems curiously premonitory. But I am getting ahead of myself.

The Knickerbocker was one of the leading literary periodicals of mid-nineteenth-century America (under different titles it lasted from 1833 to 1865).² Its contributors were sometimes known as the "Knickerbocker Group" and included Washington Irving himself, along with William Cullen Bryant, Lydia Maria Child, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Nathaniel Parker Willis among the better remembered, as well as Fitz-Green Halleck, James Kirke Paulding, Epes Sargent, and many others. Contributors affiliated to some degree with the magazine included George William Curtis, Oliver Wendell Holmes, James Russell Lowell, Fitz Hugh Ludlow, Donald Grant Mitchell ("Ik Marvel"), Richard Henry Stoddard, Bayard Taylor, and John Greenleaf Whittier. Among these writers it is not difficult to name several whose work occasionally or frequently addressed questions of gender inversion or something like nonnormative "sexuality." Bayard Taylor's 1870 novel Joseph and His Friend: A Story of Pennsylvania is a tale of passionate romantic friendship between two adult men and includes a jaded account of a sordid and miserable marriage (to which the eponymous male-male friendship is contrasted very invidiously).³ Fitz-Green Halleck has been described by a biographer as homosexual, and his poetry has been held to embody a classical pederastic ethos.⁴ Nathaniel Parker Willis was a famous dandy and aesthete, often satirized for his effeminate characteristics (and he wrote, for instance, "The Marquis in Petticoats," evincing an interest in dramas of transvestism).⁵ George William Curtis in The Howadji in Syria (1852) described vividly, and with richly erotic overtones, the ecstatic pleasures of a Near Eastern steam bath and deep massage.⁶ Ik Marvel's best-selling Reveries of a Bachelor (1850) celebrated bachelor self-indulgence and kept its ostensibly happy dreams of future marriage carefully in the realm of unrealized fantasy.⁷ And Washington Irving (whose work gave the magazine its name, and whose spirit presided over the generally sentimental style of the group) was well known for his bachelor narrators.⁸ Any one of these contributors could have written "The Man Who Thought Himself a Woman," although I haven't been able to determine its authorship definitively; perhaps ascribing it to an author matters less than that it appeared in the print milieu of a school of writers who collectively had gender trouble on their minds.

Stories of cross-dressing were not at all uncommon in nineteenth-century America: among many familiar examples we might cite E. D. E. N. Southworth's The Hidden Hand (1859), with its heroine who prefers to dress in boy's clothes, and Theodore Winthrop's Cecil Dreeme (1861), in which the title character passes successfully as a young man but turns out to be a young woman. Louisa May Alcott's tomboyish heroine Jo March (Little Women, 1868-69); Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), in which Huck dresses as a girl during one episode; and Henry James's mannish character Olive Chancellor (The Bostonians, 1886) are slightly later examples of cross-gender literary characters. But it is noteworthy that nearly all...