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

How might we recognize the same-sex desire flowing beneath the surface of nineteenth-century American literary texts when they comply so habitually with the dominant cultural practices of silence and evasion regarding sexuality of all sorts? Greven seeks to answer this question by positing a link between resistance to gender identity norms and queer affects, in which deviations from codes of masculinity and femininity signal “an incipient queer desiring presence” (4). While attentive to the many theorists of sexuality who resist the conflation of gender non-conformity and same-sex attraction, Greven maintains that we miss a good deal of sexual subtext if we ignore the cultural history of this connection, especially insofar as nineteenth-century texts register same-sex desire as an attraction between apparently unlike and often racially differentiated individuals. Also essential to the theoretical frame is the idea that “gender protest,” defined as “a form of mourning for the lost potentialities and possibilities open to the gendered subject,” could both fuel and indicate same-sex desire (39). The introduction offers a robust and, dare one say, passionate appeal for the continuing relevance of psychoanalytic theories of desire to nineteenth-century literary studies, alongside a critique of the constraints of historicism; Greven artfully blends these methodologies in subsequent chapters. The chapter on Redburn (a longer version of an essay that appeared in the June 2014 issue of Leviathan) details the inextricable fascination and horror that same-sex shipboard practices hold for the young narrator Wellingborough Redburn, with particular focus on the villainous Henry Jackson, read as a satirical commentary on Andrew Jackson, and on the unsettling, racialized monument to Lord Nelson in Liverpool. If Greven’s tendency to see homosexual innuendo as near-ubiquitous strains credibility at times (an “&c.” is not necessarily a wink and a nudge), the book nonetheless brings to light numerous plausible subtexts and engages in an especially fine reading of the “shudder” as a multivalent register of same-sex desire.