Daring to Speak a Name

Questions about naming lie at the heart of David Greven’s newest book, Gender Protest and Same-Sex Desire in Antebellum American Literature. The first of these questions might be apparent in the book’s very title: how can critics name same-sex desire in literary works produced before the discourse of “homosexuality” came into being? As Greven notes, such desire, “particularly in the antebellum period,” has “often been framed as something unnamed and unnamable, and therefore unknown” [3]. Reading works by canonical writers such as Edgar Allan Poe, Margaret Fuller, Herman Melville, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, Greven makes a compelling case not only for the “namability” of same-sex desire in antebellum texts but also for its crucial relationship to representations of gender and race. He focuses primarily on what he calls “gender protest,” representations of frustration with and expressions of melancholy surrounding the adoption of normative gender practices. In identifying a range of gender protests within antebellum works, Greven also identifies what he terms “sexual possibility”—forms of desire that run counter to cultural demands. It is important to note, though, that Greven does not deem these “possibilities” utopian or necessarily liberatory. Focusing on the period’s complex interweaving of gender performance and sexuality, Gender Protest shows that same-sex desire is often a disturbing presence in these texts. It is a presence nonetheless, however, one with which critics of the period must come to terms.

A second set of questions related to naming structures Gender Protest’s theoretical framework: Can we name psychoanalytic concepts in pre-psychoanalytic texts? How might those as-yet-unnamed concepts allow us to better understand these early texts? And what do such texts teach us about emerging conceptions of sexuality and the psyche in the nineteenth century? The project Greven undertakes in this study is thus very ambitious. He discusses phenomena that often exist only in the shadows of antebellum texts, using a discourse that did not exist at the time of their writing. The results of this approach, however, are of great use to scholars of the early nineteenth century, as Greven aims “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 of sexuality at the end of the century and the beginning of the next” [4]. This book invites us to revise critical paradigms that insist on the impossibility of “homosexuality” prior to its naming in juridical and medical discourses by excavating the variety of ways in which antebellum texts grapple with issues of psycho-sexual development.

Gender Protest examines representations of same-sex desire between women as well as men in a variety of texts. Scholars of Poe will be particularly interested in the book’s chapters on “Ligeia” and The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. These chapters not only offer fresh insights into the works they examine, but they also make the broader claim that Americanist criticism has neglected questions of same-sex desire in favor of discussions of race, and that such neglect has impoverished our understanding of the interconnectedness of identity functions. Thus in discussing “Ligeia,” Greven deploys the psychoanalytic concept of the “phallic feminine” to assess Ligeia’s final annihilation of Rowena, while simultaneously situating the story within the context of other contemporary accounts of violent yet eroticized relations between women identified as racially different, particularly mistress/slave relations. In his consideration of Pym, Greven highlights the novel’s presentation of American manhood as “fundamentally, intrinsically disorganized, suggesting an inability or refusal to adhere to the gendered status quo” [124]. Reading the tale’s many fraught scenes of failed male bonding, incomplete mourning, cannibalism, and hypocrisy through a queer theory–inflected notion of melancholy, Greven configures Pym as a meditation on male rejection of patriarchal power and the consequences that might follow on such a rejection. Alone, these chapters...