Circulating Queerness: Before the Gay and Lesbian Novel by Natasha Hurley (review)

Moby-Dick begins with the echoing and enduring statement "Call me Ishmael," which identifies the narrator and commands readers to consider his identity immediately. The opening imperative sets the stage for learning the character's inner workings, especially as he interacts with everything around him, and demands that the reader attend to a complex interiority as it is juxtaposed against the raging tides of the sea. In Circulating Queerness: Before the Gay and Lesbian Novel, Natasha Hurley considers one of Melville's earlier novels, Typee, along with other late nineteenth and early twentieth-century American novels, short stories like Mary E. Wilkins Freeman's "A New England Nun," letters like those passed between Charles Warren Stoddard and Walt Whitman, and the literary collection of Stoddard himself, as sites of world-making and identity circulation, especially gay and lesbian identities, with a focus on the same inner voice and circular relationship between self and world crystallized in the scene of Ishmael's call. Her argument is predicated on the idea that these cultural objects are the site of an emergent queer identity: that they capture a synergy between articulating a sense of self and actively shaping identity for the outside world. The key term throughout her analysis is circulation, and she threads this circularity both inside and outside the fictive worlds investigated. Circulation is paramount to her argument, which is that if we look closely at circulation, whether how narratives represent it or how texts are passed around, we can chart a slow emergence of queer identities that announce themselves as forcefully as Ishmael. Hurley's exacting inquiry provides an opportunity to contemplate the shaping of identity differently, to find the pulse of human interiority in circuits that hum across the narratives of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century American literature, eventually connecting together to make way for later, more concrete articulations of identity and personhood.

Circulating Queerness challenges scholars "to queer the very ways we read texts" (xv) and produces a critical argument that contains the promise to impact multiple fields, including Melville studies, nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American studies, potentially early modern British and American literary research, and gender and sexuality studies. The book "track[s] the force of literary objects and representations as accumulated, interactive, side-by-side, engagements of texts with other texts that make it possible to conceive of queer subjectivity itself" (xi). Hurley attends to literature that has historically been earmarked as queer and argues that if scholars place such works along a continuum, a steady materializing of immanent queer identities comes into focus. Unlike other scholars who have explored queer identities in literature, she decided that "rather than take as my object of study the figure of the subject of sexuality as a matter of textual representation," she would "examine instead the textual conditions of its possibility" (xi). Queer lives develop in literature through a constant process of relation that is sometimes only historical and situational but is, just as often, born of what she presents as a subtle process of circulation both within and outside of cultural material that delivers it into contemporary consciousness. For Hurley, contemporary thought visits its theoretical frameworks onto literature but is also influenced by the worlds generated through literature. She ventures that "the gay and lesbian novel emerges at the intersection of two different, yet connected, processes of cultural development: sexual type evolution and the emergence of a subgenre for the novel" (14). She points to an embryonic queer identity, predicated on circulation, found in narrators and characters attempting to capture complex interiorities at odds with the world around them and, too, to novels in which queer identities and characters come to acquire queerness. Queer identities are those that are forever in the process of being shaped through relationships internal and external.

Each chapter calls attention to particular novels, characters, or collectors. Typee, the archival papers of Stoddard, literature about the lives of old maids, The Bostonians, and the writings...