In the Closet With Frederick Douglass: Reconstructing Masculinity in The Bostonians

In a brutal scene from his 1845 Narrative Frederick Douglass describes his Aunt Hester being whipped by the overseer Aaron Anthony. “It was the blood-stained gate,” Douglass says, “the entrance to the hell of slavery, through which I was about to pass” (51). Hiding in a closet, afraid to “venture out till long after the bloody transaction was over” (52), Douglass has a revolutionary primal scene experience in which he identifies himself as a slave for the first time. As Eric Sundquist has argued, the scene also registers confusion in Douglass’s gendered and racial self—the “chilling bifurcation” of his “double racial identity” (100). That is, if Douglass identifies with Aunt Hester as a slave, he identifies as a woman; being a slave means being inverted, or feminized—taking a woman’s place as the object of male sado-erotic violence. If he identifies with Mr. Anthony as a man, on the other hand, he identifies with a sadistic, misogynistic—and white—manhood; being a man means being the subject rather than object of the same sado-erotic violence. I want to put several other male characters, especially Basil Ransom in The Bostonians, in the closet with Frederick Douglass, because Douglass’s precarious position between races and genders offers a paradigm that can illuminate other male subjectivities.

Not surprisingly, during a period in which many structures of Southern power destabilized, political and social reversals translate into racial and sexual inversions. But in novels like The Bostonians (1886) or Huckleberry Finn (1884) or Thomas Dixon’s racist jeremiad The Leopard’s Spots (1902), a reconstructed male subjectivity depends upon the reversal of reversal—the re-inversion of inversion. Most graphically, such power struggles involve cross-dressing. Kenneth Warren, for example, refers to The Leopard’s Spots, in which Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Simon Legree reappears as Speaker of the North Carolina House of Representatives. Dixon signals Legree’s moral and political venality by observing that he saved himself from capture during the war by dressing as a German emigrant woman, passing “for a sister,” and doing housework (85). Transposing the pervasive rumors that Jefferson Davis had donned drag to evade his Union pursuers (see Silber), Dixon rehearses postbellum attempts to emasculate Southern men. Taking a woman’s place, dressing like a woman, leading a black and white coalition—in The Leopard’s Spots all signify the inversion of true manhood. In Huckleberry Finn, male power struggles involve making another man wear drag. Jim’s power to dress Huck in women’s clothing early in the novel coincides with the manhood he displays in plotting his own escape from slavery and planning to ransom his wife and children. Huck and Tom later reverse Jim’s power, making him wear a dress when they finally free him and humiliating him in the process. Jim’s feminization signals his re-enslavement—and his emasculation.

More subtly than The Leopard’s Spots or Huckleberry Finn, The Bostonians transposes gender and race through a complex process of subject positioning. As Olive Chancellor notes, Basil Ransom “desired to treat women with the lash and manacles, as he and his people had formerly treated the wretched coloured race” (172). James undercuts Ransom’s efforts to reconstruct his manhood by treating women like slaves, however, inscribing him with several discordant subjectivities from a Reconstruction-era culture rife with gender and race conflicts. Although never appearing in black face or drag, Ransom repeatedly occupies triangulated positions with others that force him to inhabit “other” subject positions. Ransom responds to such subjection by reconstructing an archaic, phallogocentric male self, but James persistently subverts that construct of male identity. The result is a Reconstruction novel of unreconstructed manhood and constant imaginative tension for its male protagonist as he seeks to control the constitutive process of his own subjectivity.

Although Warren discusses The Bostonians as a representative Reconstruction-era text, the novel reveals little overt interest in race. When Ransom first sees Selah Tarrant, however, he finds himself uncannily occupying a position like Douglass’s—in the closet of racial and gender instability. “There...