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

In this densely researched and provocative book, David Greven seeks to reinsert psychoanalytic theories of gender and desire into critical debates about nineteenth-century US sexualities that predate the emergence of our modern sexual categories as theorized by Foucault. Greven argues that the familiar nineteenth-century division of separate gender spheres inevitably produced feelings of gendered exclusion or dissociation in some subjects. He describes this gender disturbance in a number of antebellum literary texts that show how “an essential distance from one’s own gendered identity informs and perhaps even incites...sexual desire for others of the same gender” (17). These scenes of what he calls “gender protest” open pathways for a wider “sexual possibility” (5), particularly same-sex desire; and he illuminates these psychic processes of protest and possibility in detailed readings of Fuller’s Summer on the Lakes, Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym and “Ligeia,” Melville’s Redburn, and Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. All of his readings are compelling, and two stand out as especially sharp: his reading of the same-sex attraction between a younger, quasi-fictionalized Margaret Fuller and the gender-aberrant Mariana in Summer on the Lakes and his analysis of Hester Prynne’s defiant, unbounded, and sometimes homoerotic desires in Hawthorne.

Greven’s approach to these texts directly challenges the “historical materialism” (29) of other nineteenth-century critics (he singles out Christopher Looby) who, as he sees it, overstate the Foucauldian paradigm that homosexuality per se did not come into being until the end of the century. Arguing that these critics fail to provide a full or adequate theory of desire within their historicist readings, Greven shows how certain antebellum texts exhibit and work through structures of resistance, attachment, and mourning—feelings all rooted in the “pressure points, sites of anguish, frustration, narrow circumspection, and...loss” (23) experienced in gender protest—in ways that uncannily resemble or anticipate psychoanalytic theories, particularly those of Freud and Lacan. In this attempt to position psychoanalysis as “not categorically opposed” to “the ‘historical’” (33), but rather more complementary to it, Greven’s book makes a useful and important intervention in both the history of sexuality and American literary studies.

Like the critics Greven challenges in his introduction, I am generally skeptical about using psychoanalytic theories of desire and subjectivity to discuss earlier periods and texts, as if literary characters were real persons and subjectivity itself were more or less universally consistent. And thankfully, Greven does not blindly apply these theories to the texts he reads, such as when he makes a refreshing and interesting “reparative” reading of Freud’s Dora in relation to The Scarlet Letter (210). However, sometimes his readings begin to feel unnecessarily complicated and technical, such as his discussion of the phallic mother in Poe’s “Ligeia.” And at other points Greven’s protest against the Foucauldian paradigm feels almost too insistent. He claims that “too much emphasis has been placed on the idea that same-sex desire and sex could not be named” (34), yet instead of mapping explicit accounts of what came to be called homosexuality, he continues to uncover those relations in textual codes and innuendo: “The apparent namelessness, unspokenness, and silencing of same-sex love and desire and sexuality was itself a kind of naming, a cultural code through which writers could paradoxically designate the love that did not dare to speak its name explicitly but certainly found a number of other means of making its presence felt” (35). These literary strategies for speaking in code include theatricality and excess, depictions of “unruly affect” (35), classical allusion, and the use of race as an allegorization of same-sex desire, particularly in Poe’s Pym and Melville’s Redburn. And as with his use of psychoanalytic theory, Greven does not apply a narrowly uniform system of...