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  • Taming Lust: Crimes against Nature in the Early Republic by Doron S. Ben-Atar and Richard D. Brown
  • Greta LaFleur
Taming Lust: Crimes against Nature in the Early Republic. By Doron S. Ben-Atar and Richard D. Brown (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014) 209 pp. $84.95 cloth $24.95 paper

Ben-Atar and Brown”s Taming Lust is a comparative study of two bestiality cases from the late 1790s. The authors” detailed investigation discovers that the convictions of eighty-five-year-old John Farrell in Northampton, Mass., in 1796, and eighty-three-year-old Gideon Washburn in Litchfield, Conn, in 1799, were deeply anomalous; Farrell and Washburn were tried, convicted, and sentenced to death for a crime that had not been punished by death in either Massachusetts or Connecticut for more than a century. During an era in which capital punishment was broadly on the wane and sodomy (the legal category into which bestiality was frequently subsumed) no longer carried the death penalty, what can explain the plight of these two elderly men who were successfully tried and convicted for a “victimless” crime that was almost exclusively associated with young men? Ben-Atar and Brown situate these exceptional trials and convictions within a changing political and religious climate, thus shedding light on an understudied location and moment in the history of the early republic and demonstrating the degree to which the history of federalism is bound to the history of sexuality in early national North America.

Taming Lust is, for all intents and purposes, a microhistorical study of two anomalous bestiality cases that provide Ben-Atar and Brown with an opportunity to launch a discussion about the weakening of federalist political principles in New England at the end of the eighteenth century. Although the authors hint at a reliance on a multiplicity of intellectual frameworks—there are glimmers of psychoanalytical thinking with regard to bestiality in Chapter 2 and occasional anthropological references in the introduction—the book is primarily a historicist study of the federalist political landscape within which the Farrell and Washburn cases were located.

One opportunity for interdisciplinary exploration that this text notably misses can be found in its surprising lack of engagement with the rich body of scholarship in the history of early sexuality. Despite a long discussion of the ideological, legal, and theological territory that bestiality shares with sodomy in Chapter 1, Ben-Atar and Brown read the accusations of bestiality levied at Farrell and Washburn as a purely anomalous example of an instance in which “the policing of sexual transgression . . . intertwined with religious, political, and cultural anxieties” (127). They neither mention nor explore possible alternate ways of understanding these sodomy allegations. They gently speculate that Washburn”s indictment for bestiality was the result of his family”s role in an ugly local property dispute, not his 1747 arrest for counterfeiting, a crime that bore a long-standing religious and historical association with sodomy.1 Their [End Page 459] close focus on the subject matter renders Taming Lust a rich study of the local politics of these specific inland regions of Massachusetts and Connecticut—areas too often ignored in studies of the early national period—but it inadvertently narrows the broad field of questions that would make this study more conversant with the history of sodomy and bestiality, and with the history of federalism more generally.

Greta LaFleur
Yale University

Footnotes

1. See Will Fisher, “Queer Money.” English Literary History, LXVI (1999), 1—2, 3.

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