Gender Protest and Same-Sex Desire in Antebellum American Literature by David Greven (review)

In his latest book, Gender Protest and Same-Sex Desire in Antebellum American Literature, David Greven explores the possible representations of nonnormative and same-sex expressions of desire in works by Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Edgar Allan Poe. Continuing his long attention to issues of gender and sexuality in previous studies like Men Beyond Desire: Manhood, Sex, and Violation in American Literature and The Fragility of Manhood: Hawthorne, Freud, and the Politics of Gender, Greven’s current work combines a historical approach with psychoanalysis as a way to gain new access to antebellum literature’s representations of sexuality, especially those which deviate from the period’s expected, rigidly heterosexual norms. The study’s greater goal is to “establish that a continuum of developing ideas about, attitudes toward, and experiences of sexuality can be tracked from the early nineteenth century to the birth of modern taxonomies,” an effort to correct the difficulties in past decades of naming and anachronism that troubled the study of same-sex desire’s depictions in the nineteenth century (4). It is an ambitious project, one that joins the growing number of critical works seeking to expand our understanding of the history of sexuality in antebellum America by scholars like Christopher Castiglia, Dana Luciano, Heather Love, and Christopher Looby; Greven’s contribution to this much-needed conversation via psychoanalysis-inflected readings provides a strong yet flexible framework for parsing the suggestive sexual possibilities offered by some of the period’s great writers.

At the heart of Greven’s examination is what he terms “gender protest,” an alienation from or strain against the demands of the era’s normative gender identities that allows for the presentation of same-sex desires and relationships at a time when they were harshly proscribed by the dominant culture. Building on an impressive foundation of psychoanalysis and gender theory by Freud, Lacan, Judith Butler, Leo Bersani, Richard Briggs Stott, and many others, Greven’s inquiry into antebellum literature works to elaborate the common systems and symbols through which the “unspeakable vice” of same-sex longing could be represented in texts of the period. As Greven frames the argument, “What I try to recover in this book is the antebellum awareness of energies that could not be explicitly rendered in discourse but that nonetheless informed and perhaps even saturated discourse. Topics that could be explicitly discussed provided an opportunity for the exploration of what could not be made explicit” (26). Race, for example, a powerful way of encoding one form of difference, could be used as allegory for other forms, as Greven shows in his discussion of race, slavery, and femininity in Poe’s “Ligeia.” Importantly, Greven’s focus on psychoanalysis opens up the affective dimensions of texts, often through the exploration of acts of melancholy and mourning, expressions of “desire and frustrations, dissatisfactions with, and attempts to challenge conformist models of gender identity” in this theoretical frame (36). The study of grief and mourning, particularly through the combination of gender and sexuality theory and psychoanalysis, has gained considerable critical interest in recent years; Greven’s own theory of gender protest, growing out of this burgeoning tradition, provides another fine angle for the reevaluation of the possibility of same-sex desires in the early nineteenth century.

The introduction, “Battle with the World: Theorizing Same-Sex Desire in Antebellum American Literature” begins with an insightful reading of the climactic scene of Dimmesdale’s death on the scaffold in The Scarlet Letter as an entry point into the critical framework of gender protest. Pearl, the mischievous tormenter of most forms of authority, is reformed out of her subversive, often masculine misbehavior by the benediction of her father’s death, and we learn in the novel’s final sections that she marries and becomes normative in her gender and sexual identities. In Greven’s Freudian approach, Pearl’s previously incomplete development into the typical heterosexual female is now finally fulfilled...