University of Pennsylvania Press
Abstract

This article explores the gender and sexual politics of the picturesque and the sublime, two aesthetic categories that predominate Washington Irving's writing. I focus on three of Irving's "sketch books" written under the pseudonym of Geoffrey Crayon: The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1819–20), Bracebridge Hall; or The Humourists, A Medley (1822), and Tales of a Traveller by Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1824). Whereas the picturesque envisions a form of personhood rooted in aristocratic wealth and biological reproduction (from which, as a bachelor, Crayon is excluded), the domain I designate as the "queer sublime" locates, in the emotions associated with the sublime—terror, thrill, astonishment, fear, and the pleasure of annihilation—the very contours of Crayon's and Irving's male painters' visceral response to other men. As depicted in a sequence of tales from Tales of a Traveller, the queer sublime identifies a form of desire that disrupts the psychic boundaries between self and other and temporarily coheres via aesthetic philosophy. The article contributes to the literary history of sexuality by arguing that aesthetics helped organize nascent forms of queer desire and attachments prior to the so-called "invention of the homosexual" dated to the 1870s–90s.

Keywords

Washington Irving, aesthetics, painting, visual culture, gender and sexuality, queer theory, The Sketch-Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Bracebridge Hall, Tales of a Traveller, taste

The truth is, we generally make love in a style and with sentiments very unfit for ordinary life: they are half theatrical and half romantic. By this means we raise our imaginations to what is not to be expected in human life.

—Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, Spectator, no. 479

Whether one goes by the coinage of the word "homosexual" (typically dated to 1868), the press coverage of same-sex criminal activity, or the rise of sexology, most historians of sexuality agree that the so-called invention of the homosexual1 occurred during the second half of the nineteenth century.2 Recently, scholars have sought prehistories and prototypes of queerness avant la lettre in ways that frequently diverge from the well-trodden path of same-sex desire. From Greta LaFleur's environmental theory of sexuality to Jen Manion's "female husbands" and C. Riley Snorton's history of Black trans identity; from Natasha Hurley's exploration of circulated queerness to Travis Foster and Timothy M. Griffiths's positioning of queer thought as an outgrowth of nineteenth-century women's writing—it now seems commonplace to accept that queerness preceded the invention of the homosexual, even if, as Peter Coviello reminds us, these experimental or ephemeral forms often failed to make the cut in terms of the homo-/heterosexual binary that crystallized by century's end.3 Within this archive of speculative queerness, one encounters what Coviello designates as "an erotic self in the twilit moment before the arrival or [End Page 23] calcifying of the terms of sexual identity … whose fragile, uncollapsed spaces of illegibility or definitional ambiguity left precious room for much besides suffering and loneliness."4 Thus understood, queerness in pre-1900 American literature can seem like a dress rehearsal for what would later cohere in a recognizable discourse of homosexuality.

This article situates the search for queerness's antecedents in terms of the recent aesthetic turn in American literary studies. Scholars working in visual culture have demonstrated that spectatorship helped stabilize notions of race, gender, and class at crucial moments of early national identity.5 Taste was central to this project, as citizens and writers situated refinement as a hallmark of social distinction and erudition based upon purchasing power in the aftermath of the consumer revolution in the late eighteenth century.6 For instance, Simon Gikandi and Kyla Schuller have positioned the cultural formation of whiteness and heteronormative gender in terms of the rise of taste cultures and sentimentalism.7 Yet despite this body of work concerning the consumption of luxury goods, comparatively little ink has been spilled on the relation between queerness and taste. (One can practically hear a stifled voice shouting from the archives, "We're here, we're queer, we import cashmere!") Especially for aristocratic gentlemen and upwardly mobile men of feeling, taste occupied a tenuous relation to manhood: although it was regarded as an exercise of decorum and restraint, one might always overdo it.8 Satirical representations of overly refined men in early US literature suggest that one could become too ostentatious in ways that anticipate the homosexual dandy or flamboyant aesthete associated with the fin de siècle. As I will argue, taste shared an uneasy relation to gender in which misogynist stereotypes aligned vapid or superficial consumption with indecorous women and macaroni men.

By reconciling the "invention of the homosexual" with the rise of the observer during the early nineteenth century, I demonstrate that aesthetic writing offers a capacious archive of queerness in which taste and visual perception organize, and thus alternatively disrupt, a spectator's relation to desire. Prior to the advent of a homosexual discourse, nascent forms of queer desire flourished in ekphrastic writing, especially within the masculine realm of aesthetic philosophy in which male spectators behold and deliberate works of beauty. For the art historian Jonathan Crary, the rise of the observer in the early nineteenth century fueled a vibrant discussion of spectatorship, an "undemarcated terrain [in] which the distinction between internal sensation and external [End Page 24] signs is irrevocably blurred."9 Ekphrasis offered spectators the chance to acknowledge, if not exactly understand, the "internal sensation[s]" often inextricable from arousal and desire (or what we might call "sexual orientation" today). Those well versed in aesthetic philosophy will recognize in Crary's account the lingering effects of associationism, a tradition that arose from the Scottish Enlightenment and provided an empirical basis for visual perception.10 For associationist philosophers and critics, spectatorship provoked a wide array of ideas, memories, and concepts that problematized the relation between a spectator and the work of art. Could a work of art inspire or expose a spectator's latent affinities?

Washington Irving dramatizes the twinned rises of the "observer" and the "homosexual" in his extended writing under the pseudonym Geoffrey Crayon from 1819 to 1824: The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1819–20); Bracebridge Hall; or The Humourists, a Medley (1822); and Tales of a Traveller by Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1824). Crayon's numerous sketches—117 in all—depict numerous scenes of consumption by adopting the terminology and conventions of associationism. I argue that these (necessarily formulaic) sketches are crucial for the literary history of sexuality because they dramatize what queerness looked and felt like before it could be identified as such. For Irving and his fictional surrogate Crayon, aesthetics is a profoundly erotic experience in which taste appears antithetical to marriage and family. As Irving makes clear in the epigraph for The Sketch Book, spectatorship and singledom are complementary affiliations: "I have no wife nor children, good or bad, to provide for. A mere spectator of other men's fortunes and adventures, and how they play their parts."11 Irving's epigraph refashions Richard Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) in order to situate Crayon within a longer genealogy of male observers who abstain from courtship so that they may congregate among connoisseurs and aficionados in the homosocial realm of the fine arts. Irving's own singledom has been persuasively claimed as a prototypically queer position.12 More relevant to my interests, however, is Crayon's idiosyncratic style of spectatorship that sublimates erotic longing into ekphrasis. The first American aesthete (albeit a fictional one), Crayon expresses his most profound emotions through belles lettres. Yet although Crayon's fellow aesthetes prefer the picturesque, Crayon gravitates toward sublime art that marks both the limits of extant aesthetic categories as well as the very boundaries of intelligible experience. Aesthetic experience pushes Crayon to bodily and cognitive extremes through sensations [End Page 25] that divert—indeed, even pervert—psychic energies to queer, wholly unexpected, ends.

This article focuses on two aesthetic categories that inflect Crayon's sketches: the picturesque and the sublime. I propose that Irving and Crayon refract sexual desire through aesthetic categories that assume, in these sketch books, a geographic tint. The Sketch Book and Bracebridge Hall narrate Crayon's mock grand tour of the picturesque British countryside (based upon Irving's own travels of 1815–24). The Sketch Book and Bracebridge Hall reify the emblems of the British aristocracy—marriage, family, children, and the promise of posterity—that prefigure what is commonly referred to as "heteronormativity."13 But upon leaving England for the tumultuous, romanticized terrain of Germany and Italy in Tales of a Traveller, Crayon finds himself among bohemian artists and their sublime, melancholic paintings—a domain I designate as the "queer sublime," where emotions associated with the sublime (terror, thrill, astonishment, fear, and the pleasure of annihilation) map the same contours of Crayon's and Irving's male painters' visceral response to other men.14 Anticipating the "antisocial thesis" of queer theory, the queer sublime names a desire predicated on the disruption of the psychic boundaries between self and other in ways that originate in what Edmund Burke terms the "obscure" and overwhelming emotions associated with the sublime.15 The queer sublime thus anticipates, for instance, Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman's definition of sex as a relation to "something in excess of pleasure or happiness or the self-evidence of value."16 This essay bifurcates the homosocial picturesque of The Sketch Book and Bracebridge Hall from the queer sublime as portrayed in a sequence of interrelated stories from Tales of a Traveller: "The Adventure of the Mysterious Picture," "The Adventure of the Mysterious Stranger," and "The Story of the Young Italian." Upon hearing the tale of Ottavio—a painter attracted to a romantic rival he will eventually murder and then compulsively paint—Crayon confronts more disruptive forms of aesthetic experience that offer lurid thrills. According to Edward Cahill and Edward Larkin, aesthetics promises "insight into the shape and consistency of private interiority and public collectivity that defy empirical assessment; the nonrational premises out of which rational thought and action emerge; and the idealist projections that are, for the artist, the only true measures of the real."17 The queer sublime foregrounds the erotic potential of "nonrational premises" and "idealist projections." This messiness speaks to the inchoate queerness animating Crayon's sketchbooks that, when taken together, demonstrate [End Page 26] that aesthetics contributed to the development of queer sexuality in American literature by providing a means to bear and render inscrutable attachments through the frame of art.

Part One: Feeling like a Man of Feeling

Aesthetic philosophy understood spectatorship as a realm adjacent to what Addison and Steele designate in this article's epigraph as "ordinary life." Because visual perception offers a domain in which, according to Addison and Steele, "we raise our imaginations to what is not to be expected in human life," it allows spectators the chance to pursue that which "ordinary life" does not provide.18 Crayon thus seeks, from aesthetic experience, the chance to reinvent himself through temporary forms of personhood glimpsed through art. No stranger to the art of fictional personae, Irving's alter egos are as varied as they are numerous.19 Yet writing as Crayon far longer than he did as his earlier short-lived personae, Irving refashions what he calls his "fatal propensity to Belles lettres" into Crayon's contemplative responses.20 Crayon's preferred literary genre, the sketch, depicts this tension between ordinary and aesthetic experience. Time and again, Crayon reacts to a painting, a tale, or a character sketch as if he were moved and changed by it—becoming more refined, more sensitive, more genteel on the basis of his consumption. Just as an artist's sketch is a preliminary drawing that rehearses a more daunting or high-stakes work, Crayon's sketches chart a variety of emotions that lack the contours of more pronounced sentiment.21 As a genre prized for both its ephemerality and its formulaic nature, the sketch offers Crayon the chance to experiment with a variety of personae including the gentleman, the man of feeling, the connoisseur, and the litterateur. In keeping with his namesake (which reflects an instrument that could be used for writing or drawing), Crayon relishes visual culture for its improvisational nature that affords him the chance to linger in the spontaneity of his impressions.22

Crayon problematizes the distinction between reality and representation by conflating what he sees with what he writes. Early on, Crayon introduces himself as someone who has "wandered through different countries and witnessed many of the shifting scenes of life. I cannot say that I have studied them with the eye of a philosopher, but rather with the sauntering gaze with which humble lovers of the picturesque stroll from the window of one print shop to another; caught sometimes by the delineations of beauty, sometimes by the distortions of caricature and [End Page 27] sometimes by the loveliness of landscape" (SB, 745). By apprehending ordinary activity as commodified tableaux, Crayon conflates spectatorship with consumption. Seeing "the shifting scenes of life" as if he were a window shopper, Crayon remains decidedly uncommitted about who he wants to be. Like the flâneur popularized by the nineteenth century's end, Crayon flocks to "delineations of beauty," "distortions of caricature," or "the loveliness of landscape" based upon his proclivities. But in preferring the "print shop" to the real thing, he pursues reproductions (i.e., landscape prints) rather than reality (i.e., nature) itself. This preference sustains his identity as both a spectator and a tourist, as both activities recapitulate experience through stylized representation. His travels are so significant, then, because they provide a stage on which he can play the role of spectator. "Europe held forth the charms of storied and poetical association," he explains. "There were to be seen the masterpieces of art, the refinements of highly cultivated society, the quaint peculiarities of ancient and local custom. My native country was full of youthful promise; Europe was rich in the accumulated treasures of age" (744). Here Crayon refashions the familiar dichotomy between American infancy and European maturity into an allegory for aesthetic experience: "I longed to wander over the scenes of renowned achievement—to tread as it were in the footsteps of antiquity—to loiter about the ruined castle—to meditate on the falling tower—to escape in short, from the commonplace realities of the present, and lose myself among the shadowy grandeurs of the past" (744). His preference for "storied and poetical association" renders tourism as fantasy by couching travel in terms of "the language of polite and cultivated life" (1043). By refracting experience through stylized conventions, he inhabits "the picturesque situation of [a] village" or "the simplicity of rural life" (1042) as a fictionalized character who populates his own scene.

But unlike his British counterparts who consumed the picturesque during its heyday in the 1790s—the so-called decade of the picturesque—Crayon's fondness for "polite and cultivated life" is passé. By the time The Sketch Book was published in 1819, the picturesque style had fallen out of fashion. As the art historian Ann Bermingham has demonstrated, the popularity of the rustic landscape tradition in 1750–1815 coincided with the enclosure of the English countryside. The picturesque helped assuage class-based anxieties regarding the displaced rural poor and the industrial proletariat by staging pastoral scenes featuring harmonious relations among stratifying social classes.23 The picturesque was borne by a variety of belletristic [End Page 28] genres—including landscape prints, travel writing, and guidebooks—that standardized a vocabulary that amateurs could easily adopt and imitate.24 (Since the tradition was associated with British literature, Irving was one of the first writers to popularize the picturesque for American audiences.)25 When Crayon opines that "an old English family should inhabit an old English manor house" (SB, 1034), he reproduces the idyllic pastoral by reenacting it at historical remove. His nostalgia for "the joviality of long departed years" (961) asserts his status as a man of feeling, a cultural ideal associated with a distinctly masculine form of genteel wealth, decorum, and sensibility.26 In claiming that "the man of refinement … finds nothing revolting in an intercourse with the lower orders in rural life," Crayon aligns himself with a figure who "lays aside his distance and reserve, and is glad to wave the distinctions of rank, and to enter into the honest heartfelt enjoyments of common life" (799).27 During such moments, Crayon presents himself as a man of feeling on the basis of beholding scenes with a disinterested gaze.

Crayon's relation to the bygone picturesque constitutes, I would argue, an act of queer self-fashioning that anticipates a central preoccupation of contemporary queer theory. From what Michael Moon refers to as "queer hypermimeticism," to what Gayatri Gopinath deems the "queer curation" of global diasporic communities, to the sharing of books among New England women that Natasha Hurley and J. Samaine Lockwood have excavated, queer audiences and artists have expressed themselves through cultural artifacts for quite some time.28 Thus for David Halperin, queer subjectivity often "expresses itself through a peculiar, dissident way of relating to cultural objects." "As a cultural practice," queerness "involves a characteristic way of receiving, reinterpreting, and reusing mainstream culture, of decoding and recoding the heterosexual or heteronormative meanings already encoded in that culture, so that they come to function as vehicles of gay or queer meaning."29 Although Crayon's sketchbooks lack the subversive bent that Halperin identifies, they nevertheless participate in the "decoding and recoding of the heterosexual or heteronormative meanings already encoded in that culture." Crayon performs the picturesque with considerable panache, even if he is prone to overwrought tears, overeager declarations, and overzealous mimicry of British texts associated with the cult of sensibility, including Henry Mackenzie's The Man of Feeling (1771) and Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journal Through France and Italy (1768). [End Page 29]

For a US writer and fictional character to emulate the British aristocracy in the 1810s would be unorthodox to say the least. On the one hand, Irving's fondness for England resonates with the Anglophilic tendencies that characterized many of the cultural elite in the early national era, who professed sophistication by consuming imported luxury goods.30 Yet on the other hand, the War of 1812 intensified anti-British sentiment, especially after British troops set fire to numerous federal buildings and residences in Washington, DC, in 1814. As the historian Nicole Eustace persuasively argues, the War of 1812 fueled patriotic iconography related to romance, marriage, and children that established procreation as intrinsic to national well-being.31 In the aftermath of the war, US cultural forms established the nuclear family as the epicenter of civic virtue and the domestic sphere, in turn, as a training ground for morality and duty.32 But as a perennial bachelor excluded from the courtship and marriages that unfold at Bracebridge Hall, Crayon reserves his psychic and erotic energies for transatlantic belles lettres rather than patriotic procreation. Preferring the company of authors and artists to women or children, Crayon opts for textual, rather than sexual, reproduction. As he remarks in "The Art of Book Making," Crayon refashions authors in a process by which "many of their works … undergo a kind of metempsychosis and spring up under new forms. What was formerly a ponderous history, revives in the shape of a romance—an old legend changes into a modern play, and a sober philosophical treatise, furnishes the body for a whole series of bouncing and sparkling essays" (SB, 811).33 Crayon's procreative relation to cultural artifacts evokes Halperin's description of queer expression as interested in "decoding and recoding the heterosexual or heteronormative meanings already encoded in that culture." This passage elucidates how Crayon jettisons "ordinary life" for what critics have deemed his "archaic," "anachronistic," and "amateur antiquarian" impulses that place him at cross-purposes with contemporary American manhood.34

Crayon's status as an amateur man of feeling is predicated upon feminized and queer desire in which he aspires to become, and also to possess, the man of feeling. As suggested by the impressively eligible bachelor Simon Bracebridge, the man of feeling stands at the center of the homosocial picturesque of Bracebridge Hall. Crayon vies with other women, servants, and admirers for Simon's time and attention. When it comes to "English gentlemen," Crayon declares that "I do not know a finer race of men": [End Page 30]

Instead of the softness and effeminacy which characterize the men of rank in most countries, they exhibit a union of elegance and strength, a robustness of frame and freshness of complexion, which I am inclined to attribute to their living so much in the open air, and pursuing so eagerly the invigorating recreations of the country. These hardy exercises produce also a healthful tone of mind and spirits, a manliness and simplicity of manners, which even the follies and dissipations of the town cannot easily pervert, and can never entirely destroy.

(SB, 798)

Crayon's quasi-ekphrastic account renders the man of feeling as if he were a rustic landscape. The gentleman and his estate exist in symbiotic harmony, as both possess an "elegance" and a "simplicity." Notably, Crayon's admiration for the gentleman rests upon physical attributes (a robust "frame" and fresh "complexion") that suggest something in excess of genteel leisure. Yet although Crayon presents Simon and Bracebridge Hall as refined objects, he himself remains peripheral to this category. Simon Bracebridge is everything that Crayon is not: landed, wealthy, and successful in love. Crayon's subordinate position indexes, then, a nascent queer status that does not adhere to conventional forms of courtship and romance. Crayon is unable, or unwilling, to discipline his emotions with the decorum expected of a man of feeling. Rather, he relishes art with the quixotic tendencies he associates with women, who, like him, remain adjacent to the patriarchal conventions of the picturesque.

Part Two: Taste among the Picturesque (or, Male Quixotism)

Despite his enthusiasm for consumption, Crayon discovers, at Brace-bridge Hall, that men of feeling are expected to sublimate desire into stylized depictions rather than the real thing. "I have seldom met with an old bachelor," Crayon remarks, "that had not, at some time or other, his nonsensical moment, when he would become tender and sentimental, talk about the concerns of the heart, and have some confession of a delicate nature to make." By cordoning off "concerns of the heart" as "nonsensical," Crayon bifurcates reason and emotion by suggesting that men access, and ultimately compartmentalize, emotions through the arts. This gendered model structures how men interact with one another at Bracebridge Hall, such as when Simon Bracebridge confides to Crayon that he has preserved a lock of his unrequited love's hair, "which [End Page 31] he wore in a true lover's knot, in a large gold brooch."35 The beloved's transfiguration from person into brooch speaks to the broader metamorphosis that Crayon seeks in aesthetic experience by which souvenirs structure relations through forms that endure. That is to say, he searches for the rituals that can illustrate attachments even if such illustration idealizes, rather than consummates, desire. Unrequited longing hence comprises a key component of the man of feeling's disposition. As Crayon remarks about romance, "With a bachelor, though it may slumber, it never dies. It is always liable to break out again in transient flashes, and never so much as on a spring morning in the country; or on a winter evening, when seated in his solitary chamber, stirring up the fire and talking of matrimony" (BH, 200). The ideal spectator is thus a single one, ideally a man, who reroutes emotions and desires through the chaste appreciation of beautiful objects rather than people.

But unlike the man of feeling who is moved but not overcome by sensibility, Crayon craves more intimate forms of aesthetic experience. His love of reading recalls Don Quixote, the wanderer from Miguel de Cervantes's anti-romance, who had become the icon of naive consumption by the 1810s.36 Referring to the stereotypical "boarding-school girl" who "devour[s] the pages of a sentimental novel, or Don Quixote a chivalrous romance" (BH, 78), Crayon distinguishes himself from women's quixotic habits lest he become an undiscriminating reader "stark mad … from reading books of chivalry" (SB, 1049). As Julie Ellison writes, "Sensibility becomes fashionable when men practice it—although they are not the only ones who practice it and although their practices have variable meanings."37 Crayon adopts the cult of sensibility so that he may identify with an idealized masculinity predicated upon disidentifying with femininity. "Man is the creature of interest and ambition," Crayon claims. "But a woman's whole life is a history of the affections. The heart is her world." As "the companion of her own thoughts and feelings," "woman's is comparatively a fixed, a secluded, and a meditative life" (SB, 802–3). But as a bachelor and adamant connoisseur, Crayon contradicts his own schema. His sketches constitute "a history of the affections" that foreground his "fixed," "secluded," and "meditative" tendencies. As "the companion of [his] own thoughts and feelings," Crayon inhabits the very quixotism at odds with the man of feeling.

Enter the work of taste. Irving differentiates between masculine and feminine forms of aesthetic consumption by appealing to taste as the prerequisite for whiteness, manhood, and aristocracy. Crayon affirms [End Page 32] these values when declaring that the gentleman "should not be a mere man of pleasure" but rather "a man at all points; simple, frank, courteous, intelligent, accomplished, and informed; upright, intrepid, and disinterested" (BH, 110). Crayon's final term, "disinterested," is telling. Signaling a spectator's capacity to remain stoic in the face of sentiment, disinterestedness was deliberated with considerable vigor in Immanuel Kant's Critique of Judgment (1790), which establishes critical judgment as the hallmark of aesthetic value.38 Crayon's sketchbooks enact Kant's theory of disinterested spectatorship in depicting men of feeling who curb emotions, seemingly at will, in contradistinction to quixotic audiences' sentimental or overwrought reaction. To respond to a work of art without becoming beholden to it signals the disinterested judgment that Crayon desires and upholds. As Terry Eagleton has made clear, aesthetic philosophy exerted a powerful influence upon the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries because it functioned as "a bourgeois concept in the most literal historical sense, hatched and nurtured in the Enlightenment." A surprisingly versatile concept, disinterested spectator-ship encompassed what Eagleton calls "a varied span of preoccupations: freedom and legality, spontaneity and necessity, self-determination, autonomy, particularity and universality, along with several others."39 Such preoccupations suffuse Burke's definition of taste, which he argues "is partly made up of a perception of the primary pleasures of sense, of the secondary pleasures of the imagination, and of the conclusions of the reasoning faculty, concerning the various relations of these, and concerning the human passions, manners and actions" (PE, 23). Taste, in other words, keeps fancy and sentiment in check by prioritizing critical judgment over the pleasures of the imagination.

As scholars have demonstrated, taste helped forge categories of race, gender, and class during the early national period.40 Consider, for instance, Thomas Jefferson's racist dismissal of Phillis Wheatley Peters and Ignatius Sancho in Notes on the State of Virginia (1785). Referring to people of African descent, Jefferson writes that "in imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous," and "their existence appears to participate more of sensation than reflection." As Jefferson's commentary reveals, taste was believed to restrain the excesses of "sensation" by reinforcing disinterested "reflection." Although Jefferson admires Sancho's "strong religious zeal," his "imagination is wild and extravagant, [and] escapes incessantly from every restraint of reason and taste."41 At Monticello and Bracebridge Hall, spectators gaze upon spectacles with a disinterested eye that can look away. Crayon's sketchbooks narrate [End Page 33] the racial and sexual politics of spectatorship, especially when Crayon reserves taste for men of feeling because he believes it marks the capacity to control and restrain one's reaction to sensation and sentiment. Recently, Schuller has termed this notion "impressibility," which she defines as the "ability to respond to sensory stimulations on the basis of emotional reflection, rather than instinctive reflex."42 Impressibility emerges from this genealogy of taste, I would argue, because it negotiates between "emotional reflection" and critical appraisal. According to Crayon, feminized quixotic readers lack the reserve to discipline aesthetic response, unlike their male counterparts. (Schuller helpfully notes that "impressibility was deemed to be heightened among the feminine: ladies, children, artists, and homosexuals, among others.")43 Crayon's sketches repeatedly attempt to curb "instinctive reflex" with "emotional reflection." By sympathizing with "the sorrows of the poor, … the sorrows of the aged, … [and] the sorrows of a widow, aged, solitary, destitute, mourning over an only son the last solace of her years" (SB, 837), he often brings himself into contact with what he is not—"poor," "aged," and "a widow"—to perform genteel white manhood through disinterested spectatorship.

Crayon's curated performance engages two forms of visual culture that predominated in British aesthetics: beholding paintings and reading literature. As a figure who oscillates between the two forms, Crayon valorizes painting while disparaging feminized literary consumption. Thus when Lady Lillycraft arrives at Bracebridge Hall, her entrance undermines Crayon's self-appointed status as a cultural arbiter. Notably, Crayon reserves his derision for her habits of consumption: "One of those tender, romance-read dames of the old school," her "mind is filled with flames and darts," and she "breathe[s] nothing but constancy and wedlock." Much like Crayon himself, Lady Lillycraft is known for her love of books. She "is generally surrounded by little documents of her prevalent taste; novels of a tender nature; richly bound little books of poetry, that are filled with sonnets and love tales, and perfumed with rose-leaves" (BH, 54). Whereas Crayon justifies his refashioning of literature as an act of pseudo-procreation, Lady Lillycraft's reading threatens to seduce Simon with the real thing. Crayon bemoans the fact that Simon "is very attentive and officious, and somewhat sentimental, with Lady Lillycraft; copies out little namby-pamby ditties and love-songs for her, and draws quivers, and doves, and darts, and Cupids to be worked on the corners of her pocket handkerchiefs." Yet when Simon "gets among young company, such as Frank Bracebridge, the Oxonian, [End Page 34] and the general, he is apt to put on the mad wag, and to talk in a very bachelor-like strain about the sex" (51–52). The ease with which Simon transitions between these gendered styles unnerves Crayon precisely because it exposes just how tenuous these divisions are. Unlike Crayon, Simon freely partakes in sentimental culture without losing fluency in "a very bachelor-like strain."

Because she would prefer to consummate desire rather than sublimate it, Lady Lillycraft upends Crayon and Simon's delicate homo-social arrangement. As critics have observed, Irving's fiction is replete with bachelors who siphon sexuality into romantic friendship between men.44 But in Irving's riff upon what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick refers to as the "erotic triangle," Crayon competes with Lady Lillycraft for Simon's affections (rather than the two men jockeying for the woman's). Crayon's disdain for Lady Lillycraft hence affirms Sedgwick's claim that "the bond that links the two rivals is as intense and potent as the bond that links either of the rivals to the beloved."45 Crayon ridicules Lady Lillycraft's "little namby-pamby ditties and love-songs" (BH, 51) because they intend to catalyze erotic activity. Given that Crayon prefers to displace his emotions, he disparages women who seek more fulfilling emotional experience. "I have often thought it a pity," he declares,

that plays and novels should always end at the wedding, and should not give us another act, and another volume, to let us know how the hero and heroine conducted themselves when married. Their main object seems to be merely to instruct young ladies how to get husbands, but not how to keep them … It is appalling to those who have not yet adventured into the holy state, to see how soon the flame of romantic love burns out, or rather is quenched in matrimony; and how deplorably the passionate, poetic lover declines into the phlegmatic, prosaic husband. I am inclined to attribute this very much to the defect just mentioned in the plays and novels, which form so important a branch of study of our young ladies; and which teach them how to be heroines, but leave them totally at a loss when they come to be wives.

(55)

Crayon's "flame of romantic love" burns brightest in his romanticized homosocial domain where suitors play the role of "passionate, poetic lover" if only among themselves. In this regard, Crayon and Lady Lillycraft both desire "the passionate, poetic lover" that Simon Bracebridge [End Page 35] embodies, but only "the passionate, poetic lover" can keep the "flame of romantic love" alive. According to Crayon's misogynist critique, marriage and women are simply obstacles for men to overcome.46 By contrast, the homosocial realm offers men the chance to fashion themselves as someone other than "the phlegmatic, prosaic husband." Yet despite Crayon's willingness to forsake marriage and family, he discovers that not all men share his enthusiasm for sacrifice. After departing Brace-bridge Hall in the closing sketch significantly titled "The Wedding," Crayon begins his next sketchbook, Tales of a Traveller, from Mainz, Germany, where he finds himself in more tumultuous terrain. "My brain is filled," he writes, "with all kinds of odds and ends. In travelling, these heterogeneous matters have become shaken up in my mind, as the articles are apt to be in an ill packed travelling trunk; so that when I attempt to draw forth a fact, I cannot determine whether I have read, heard, or dreamt it" (385). Having ventured even further into the realm of aesthetic experience, he cannot differentiate between reality and representation.

Part Three: The Queer Sublime

As I have been arguing, Irving's alter ego Geoffrey Crayon struggles to perform as the man of feeling because he remains uncommitted as to whether he should sublimate desire into stylized form. Although he occupies a tenuous relation to the British aristocracy in the Sketch Book and Bracebridge Hall, Crayon discovers his kinship with the figure of the romantic artist in Tales of a Traveller. As embodied by the Byronic painter named Ottavio, Irving's romantic artist is a decidedly subcultural figure whose creative genius and unorthodox sexuality depart from the artisanal or craftsman tradition of painters.47 Compared to the Sketch Book or Bracebridge Hall, Tales of a Traveller imagines more expansive, experimental desires that resist the orderly design of the picturesque. In the sequence of interrelated tales, "The Adventure of the Mysterious Picture," "The Adventure of the Mysterious Stranger," and "The Story of the Young Italian," Irving refashions the aesthetic philosophy of the sublime to represent Ottavio's homoerotic, rather than homosocial, desire for another man.48 The sequence portrays queer desire using the discourse of the sublime as both Crayon and Ottavio attempt to decipher what they see and feel. Ottavio's painted portrait of another man, Filippo, jars against the limits of disinterested spectatorship because it indulges, rather than suppresses, desire. [End Page 36]

A far cry from the genteel picturesque of Bracebridge Hall, the romantic extravagance of Ottavio's tale relishes the overwhelming emotions that exceed the spectator's capacity to narrate or interpret. Whereas the man of feeling reasserts class privilege through his capacity to look away, the painter Ottavio gravitates toward disruptive aesthetic experience associated with the sublime. Within the context of contemporary queer theory, Leo Bersani has described the queer sexual act in terms analogous with Burke's description of the sublime, where, according to Bersani, "pleasure occurs whenever a certain threshold of intensity is reached, when the organization of the self is momentarily disturbed by sensations or affective processes somehow 'beyond' those connected with psychic organization."49 Although Crayon prides himself upon his fluency in aesthetic discourse, Ottavio reaches the limits of his perceptual capacities during encounters with other men. Given the erotic undertones of his relation to art, Crayon's sketchbooks brush up against the boundaries of what Bersani calls "the organization of the self."

Notably, Ottavio's tale is one of the few sketches that Crayon does not narrate. Rather, the story is recounted by a figure known as "the nervous gentleman" (TT, 389). More "nervous" than "gentleman," he embodies the nervous system and its gendered association with excitability and excess.50 By jettisoning the loquacious Crayon for the nervous gentleman, Irving dramatizes the overwhelming effects of the sublime upon the mind. Ill equipped to narrate his tale, the nervous gentleman concludes each sketch with another unresolved mystery as if he were incapable of explaining what he describes. Each sketch depicts a different man coming into closer contact with Filippo: first, the nervous gentleman beholding Ottavio's portrait of Filippo in "The Adventure of the Mysterious Picture"; then the nervous gentleman's host, the Baronet, recounting how he met Ottavio in "The Adventure of the Mysterious Stranger"; and finally Ottavio's manuscript, "The Story of the Young Italian," which provides the origins of the mysterious portrait. If the literary critic Jeffrey Rubin-Dorsky refers to this sequence as "a readerly coitus interruptus" that "denies … the pleasure of the anticipated climax," what does it mean that this pseudo-sexual literary act involves "manly beauty" (435)?51 Working through what happens when men behold men, rather than women, as works of art, Ottavio's story affirms that "manly beauty has its effect even upon men" (TT, 435). By staging same-sex intimacy using gothic conventions, Irving charts the "homosexual panic" that Sedgwick argues was foundational to gothic literature [End Page 37] with its interest in close, occasionally violent and sadistic, relations between men.52

Unlike the man of feeling, Ottavio refuses to discipline or regulate his tempestuous passions, likening them to sublime, gothic forces that control his every move. With his "eye … full of expression and fire, but wild and unsteady" (TT, 433), Ottavio is prone to what he calls an "extreme sensibility." As a child, he was "easily transported into paroxysms of pleasure or rage" (439). After his mother's death, he is sent to a convent near Vesuvius where the "convulsive throes" of the volcanic lava "shook the solid foundations of nature" beneath. Unlike the picturesque beauty of Bracebridge Hall that spectators appreciate from a distance, Ottavio's proximity to nature fuels his creativity. Irving attributes Ottavio's emotional state to his surroundings, especially the monastery, where Ottavio's excited interest in the volcano resembles the painter's dormant unconscious.53 There he learns how to paint from monks who "talked of … streams of molten lava raging through [the earth's] veins; of caverns of sulphurous flames roaring in the centre, the abodes of demons and the damned; of fiery gulfs ready to yawn beneath our feet" (TT, 441). Conflating gothic imagery with unconscious thought, the monks teach the young boy how to channel his "riot of vague but delicious emotions" (442) into art. But whereas Crayon organizes his impressions through aesthetic experience, Ottavio descends into subterranean, unconscious depths.

At stake in Ottavio's portrayal are the racial and sexual politics that align whiteness with disembodied spectatorship and ethnic identity with impressibility. By narrating the tale of somebody he calls "that crack brained Italian," the nervous gentleman establishes normative spectatorship by ascribing volatile emotions to Ottavio, a "tempest of mighty passion in a pigmy frame" (TT, 439). In contradistinction to Crayon's quasi-disinterested gaze, Ottavio enjoys being dominated by art and others. After returning from his travels to discover that his intended fiancée, Bianca, has married his childhood friend Filippo, Ottavio cannot restrain his rage. "My blood boiled like liquid fire in my veins," he writes with language recalling the volcanic imagery from the monastery. "Every passion seemed to have resolved itself into the fury that like a lava boiled within my heart" (461). Significantly, Ottavio reserves his emotions for his romantic rival Filippo rather than Bianca. With his "brain … in delirium," he "snatched forth a stiletto, put by the sword which trembled in his hand, and buried my poniard in his bosom. He fell with the blow, but my rage was unsated. I sprang upon him with the [End Page 38] thirsty feeling of a tiger; redoubled my blows; mangled him in my frenzy, grasped him by the throat, until with reiterated wounds and strangling convulsions he expired in my grasp" (462). Unlike the comparatively chaste configuration of Crayon/Simon/Lillycraft, the entanglement of Ottavio/Bianca/Filippo ends in consummation. With frenzied "blows," strangled "convulsions," and an intimate "grasp," Ottavio's animalistic state aligns the painter with the banditti and scoundrels who wreak havoc elsewhere in Tales of a Traveller. Ottavio's "delirium" yields numerous overdetermined meanings that the painter cannot, or does not care to, interpret. Although the "stiletto" Ottavio murders Filippo with recalls "stylo" (for stylograph, a fountain pen) and "stylus," this etymological association only underscores the illegibility of his emotions.54 If Crayon describes his aesthetic response with eloquence and avidity, Ottavio occupies the psychosexual territory of the queer sublime, where desire, aggression, and fear collide.

In a markedly different relation to power than Crayon's, Ottavio derives pleasure from being haunted by an eroticized fantasy of the murdered Filippo. With Filippo dying in his arms after Ottavio "buried [his] poniard in his bosom," the painter "remained glaring on the countenance, horrible in death, that seemed to stare back with its protruded eyes upon me" (TT, 462). Within this imagery lurks Burke's account of the "modification of power" (PE, 53) that occurs between spectator and sublime environment. Filippo's haunting of Ottavio suggests what Burke calls an annihilation: "Whilst we contemplate so vast an object, under the arm, as it were, of almighty power, and invested upon every side with omnipresence, we shrink into the minuteness of our own nature, and are, in a manner, annihilated before him" (56). Similarly, Ottavio is overpowered by the image of Filippo's face: "Wherever I went," Ottavio writes, "the countenance of him I had slain appeared to follow me. Whenever I turned my head I beheld it behind me, hideous with the contortions of the dying moment" (TT, 463). Compared to Crayon's sketches that chart the intricacies of his aesthetic experience, Ottavio's manuscript is riddled with scattered impressions of his cathexis upon Filippo. Alternating among fear, guilt, melancholy, and longing, Ottavio's description transfigures Filippo to a status higher than Bianca's, in that the slain inspires more vehement reactions than his former betrothed. Usurping Bianca as the artist's muse, Filippo overpowers Ottavio with an intensity seldom seen in Crayon's sketchbooks.

Ottavio's yearning for annihilation inflects two portraits: one of his fiancée, Bianca, and another of Filippo. In both instances, Ottavio is [End Page 39] overwhelmed by what he depicts. While painting Bianca, her beauty sends him into a "kind of dream, I might almost say delirium" (TT, 448) that spirals into "a kind of idolatry" (450). His fetishistic painting "elevated her into something almost more than mortal. She seemed too exquisite for earthly use; too delicate and exalted for human attainment." On canvas, Bianca exists as an abstraction rather than a person, described as "the beau ideal that haunts [artists'] minds with shapes of indescribable perfection" (447). Recalling Simon's brooch of his beloved's hair, Ottavio's portrait preserves Bianca's "indescribable perfection" in unconsummated form. But whereas Bianca's beauty remains "too exquisite" and "too delicate" for contact, Filippo is all too near, haunting Ottavio's memory like a "permanent malady of the mind" (463). Ottavio resembles Burke's spectator encountering the sublime, whose "mind is so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other, nor by consequence reason on that object which employs it" (PE, 47). In Burke's terms, Filippo is "a delightful horror" (109) that Ottavio cannot escape: "I have travelled from place to place, plunged into amusements—tried dissipation and distraction of every kind—all—all in vain" (TT, 463). Filippo's sublimity derives from what Burke would call his "obscurity" (PE, 109), as Ottavio remains lost in an emotional, if not a cognitive, fog. Beset by terror, Ottavio flees "without knowing whither—almost without knowing why":

My only idea was to get farther and farther from the horrors I had left behind; as if I could throw space between myself and my conscience. I fled to the Apennines, and wandered for days and days among their savage heights. How I existed I cannot tell—what rocks and precipices I braved, and how I braved them, I know not. I kept on and on—trying to outtravel the curse that clung to me … Rocks, trees, and torrents all resounded with my crime.

(TT, 462)

His asides—"almost without knowing why," "how I existed I cannot tell," "I know not"—reveal the uncertainty and haze that animate the queer sublime. Upon scaling the geographical and emotional heights of the Apennines, Ottavio is astonished by his behavior. Astonishment, "the effect of the sublime in its highest degree" (PE, 47), excludes him from the realm of genteel impressibility associated with the man of feeling.

To imitate the man of feeling who siphons desire into art, Ottavio attempts to purge himself of Filippo through painting. With Filippo's [End Page 40] face "burned within my brain" (TT, 463), Ottavio is caught in the realm of introjection that effectively erodes psychic boundaries. Whether this is Burke's "annihilation" of the self through the sublime or Bersani's "shattering of … psychic structures" through sex, the interstice between the two men has clearly collapsed. Ottavio seeks to cleanse himself by displacing Filippo onto a canvas. "I painted an exact resemblance of this phantom face," Ottavio writes. "I placed it before me in hopes that by constantly contemplating the copy I might diminish the effect of the original. But I only doubled instead of diminishing the misery" (463). Only, his attempt at a "copy" backfires. The awkwardness of the grammar ("I only doubled instead of diminishing the misery") mimics the portrait's disorienting sensations that lure other spectators, including the nervous gentleman and the Baronet, into rapt fascination. When the nervous gentleman sees "an expression that was startling" in the portrait's face, he struggles to interpret the canvas. "I sat in my chair gazing at it," he remarks, "and the more I gazed the more it disquieted me. I had never before been affected in the same way by any painting. The emotions it caused were strange and indefinite. They were something like what I have head ascribed to the eyes of the basilisk; or like that mysterious influence in reptiles termed fascination." Such "strange and indefinite" emotions induce a physical response: "I passed my hand over my eyes several times, as if seeking instinctively to brush away the illusion—in vain—they instantly reverted to the picture, and its chilling, creeping influence over my flesh and blood was redoubled" (426). Ottavio's portrait is so startling, I contend, because it does not inspire the customary emotions associated with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century portraiture. At a time when portraits were prized for capturing a sitter's "likeness," Ottavio's portrait is something other than a mimetic copy.55 In their struggle to provide an ekphrastic account of what they see and feel in the presence of Ottavio's portrait of Filippo, the Baronet and nervous gentleman encounter sensations and longings that exceed extant aesthetic categories. Ottavio's rendering of Filippo attempts to offer its painter some semblance of catharsis or closure but accomplishes only the opposite: it amplifies and exacerbates Ottavio's longing for the dead.

Irving's homophobic tale depicts queer desire as a destructive force that spreads like a contagion, emanating from Ottavio onto his portrait and finally onto its spectator. Two of the portrait's viewers, the Baronet and the nervous gentleman, absorb Ottavio's passions as if the emotions were their own. After first meeting Ottavio in Venice, the Baronet [End Page 41] remarks that "I felt this melancholy to be infectious" (TT, 436). When the nervous gentleman beholds the painting, he feels "as if an electric shock darted through me," and "some horror of the mind, some inscrutable antipathy awakened by this picture … harrowed up my feelings" (426). Unlike the elegance of Bracebridge Hall, the queer sublime is characterized by what sticks. Ottavio's fixation on Filippo—first in life, then in death—baffles spectators more familiar with homosocial intimacy. Irving pathologizes queer desire by depicting Ottavio as a murderer who concludes his manuscript by confessing that he intends to surrender himself to the law: "You who have pitied my sufferings; who have poured the balm of sympathy into my wounds, do not shrink from my memory with abhorrence now that you know my story. Recollect, when you read of my crime I shall have atoned for it with my blood!" (464). In keeping with the alienation that Frances Ferguson argues is foundational to the sublime, Ottavio's manuscript offers a portrait of solitude that anticipates the antisocial thesis of queer theory.56 As a figure who annihilates himself in the shadow of insurmountable desire, Ottavio disavows futurity by willingly, even masochistically, surrendering to the state.

Conclusion

Heaven help us! … how far the artistic point of view may take a man!

—Henry James, The American57

As Crayon's sketchbooks reveal, spectatorship was inextricable from burgeoning gender and sexual categories of the early nineteenth century. Juxtaposing the British picturesque countryside to the sublime landscapes of Italy, Crayon aligns aesthetic categories with particular regions. His sketches belong to what literary critic Jonah Siegel refers to as "the art-romance," a literary genre that "evokes the conventional frustrations of the romance form broadly understood in order to represent an overdetermined anxiety about intimacy with culture that is particularly pressing in the artistic self-imagination of the period. If romance has at its heart the inability to arrive at a prized but ever-deferred goal, Italy is an overdetermined destination for the artist, a passionately desired space combining the prospect of erotic pleasure with the hope for intimacy with the most profound sources of culture."58 For Siegel, the art-romance consolidated "a new set of relationships, practical and imaginary, between an ascendent North and a politically [End Page 42] weak but culturally rich South."59 As aristocrats and tourists flocked to Italy, Greece, and France as sites of cultural heritage, their writings depict a fantastic terrain that afforded new experiences channeled through the arts. Beholding works from classical antiquity and the Renaissance, tourists encountered a territory that occupied a vexing relation to reality and the world back home. Once in the "culturally rich South," British and American writers could inhabit, much like Crayon, the realm of romance.

Although Irving abandoned the persona of Geoffrey Crayon after Tales of a Traveller and published his next sketchbook, The Alhambra (1832), under his own name, the art-romance endured well into the nineteenth century. Antebellum romances, including the painter Washington Allston's Monaldi: A Tale (1841) and Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Marble Faun (1860), depict Florence and Rome as the fount of art and beauty.60 Allston and Hawthorne position Italy as an alternative to the United States' provincial or infantile artistic status. Frustrated with the dearth of professional opportunities, artists and writers turned to Europe, and especially Italy, as the site for prestige and inspiration. Following in Irving's footsteps, Allston and Hawthorne limn the region as rife with romantic plots featuring disguised identities, murder plots, and extramarital affairs as if such contrivances were conducive to creativity. The conjunction among Italy, art, and sensual (if not sexual) freedom persisted throughout the postbellum era, inspiring works such as Henry James's Roderick Hudson (1875), William Dean Howells's Indian Summer (1886), and Edith Wharton's "The Fulness of Life" (1893). Upon arriving in Rome, James's sculptor Roderick Hudson realizes that the city "made him feel and understand more things than he could express; he was sure that life must have there for all one's senses an incomparable fineness; that more interesting things must happen to one there than anywhere else."61

Like Roderick, Crayon attributes "interesting things" to atmospheric and environmental influence in ways that anticipate what John Ruskin would identify as the pathetic fallacy. As defined in the third volume of Modern Painters (1856), the pathetic fallacy is "caused by an excited state of the feelings" and makes "us, for the time, more or less irrational." In this state, a spectator projects emotions onto surroundings with what Ruskin calls "a falseness in all our impressions of external things."62 This "falseness" amounts to a slippage between spectator and environment, where observers practically absorb their surroundings so that a sublime landscape or elegant painting seems to seep into a spectator's [End Page 43] contemplative thought. For the history of sexuality, Italy stages something like an environmental theory of queerness, one in which spectators inhabit, however temporarily, "excited" emotions prompted by an atmosphere or work of art. Crayon's sketchbooks suggest how spectators worked through "more or less irrational" feelings by describing works of art through ekphrasis, which often involves attributing inner sensations to environmental influence, such as Ottavio's tumult coalescing around the lava flowing beneath the Vesuvian monastery. Although spectators acknowledge "more or less irrational" sentiments as originating in works of art or the landscape, they nevertheless refuse to claim them by identifying them as an external influence rather than internal desire (let alone something akin to a sexual orientation). These ekphrastic emotions constitute what Addison and Steele refer to as the "sentiments very unfit for ordinary life," or the "half theatrical and half romantic" feelings that proliferate the aesthetic terrain bracketed from ordinary experience. In this manner, visual culture offered authors and spectators a chance to explore, yet ultimately distance themselves from, burgeoning queer affinities that could be attributed to the environment or a work of art rather than the spectator. Prior to the advent of a recognizable discourse of homosexuality, Crayon's sketchbooks render aesthetics the domain of tentative sexual categories simultaneously limned and disrupted within the frame of art.

Chip Badley
University of California, Davis
Chip Badley

Chip Badley is a lecturer in the English department at University of California, Davis. He is at work on a book project concerning aesthetics and queer sexuality in nineteenth-century American literature. He is a former managing editor of Camera Obscura: Feminism, Culture and Media Studies, and his writing has appeared or is forthcoming in the Henry James Review and the Oxford Handbook of Charles Dickens.

Notes

I would like to thank Katie M. Adkison, Jeannine DeLombard, Mark Maslan, Christopher Looby, Tyler Morgenstern, Tyler Shoemaker, and Kay Young for their feedback and support. Audiences at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies and the anonymous readers at J19 were ideal interlocutors who helped me clarify the stakes of this essay.

1. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley, vol. 1 (New York: Vintage, 1990), 43.

2. On the term "homosexual," see Jonathan Ned Katz, The Invention of Heterosexuality (New York: Dutton, 1995), 52. On press coverage of the Alice Mitchell and Oscar Wilde trials, see Ed Cohen, Talk on the Wilde Side: Toward a Genealogy of a Discourse on Male Sexualities (New York: Routledge, 1993); Lisa Duggan, Sapphic Slashers: Sex, Violence, and American Modernity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000).

3. Greta LaFleur, The Natural History of Sexuality in Early America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018); Jen Manion, Female Husbands: A Trans History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020); C. Riley Snorton, Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017); Natasha Hurley, Circulating Queerness: Before the Gay and Lesbian Novel (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018); Travis Foster and Timothy M. Griffiths, "Introduction: American Women's Writing and the Genealogies of Queer Thought," Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers 37, no. 1 (2020): 1–16; Peter Coviello, Tomorrow's Parties: Sex and the Untimely in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: New York University Press, 2013).

4. Coviello, Tomorrow's Parties, 7.

5. Sarah Blackwood, The Portrait's Subject: Inventing Inner Life in the Nineteenth-Century United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019); Shawn Michelle Smith, American Archives: Gender, Race, and Class in Visual Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999).

6. Richard Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992); Barbara Dayer Gallati, "Taste, Art, and Cultural Power in Nineteenth-Century America," in Making American Taste: Narrative Art for a New Democracy, ed. Barbara Dayer Gallati (New York: New-York Historical Society, 2011), 11–122; Catherine E. Kelly, Republic of Taste: Art, Politics, and Everyday Life in Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016); David S. Shields, Civil Tongues and Polite Letters in British America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997).

7. Simon Gikandi, Slavery and the Culture of Taste (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012); Kyla Schuller, The Biopolitics of Feeling: Race, Sex, and Science in the Nineteenth Century (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018).

8. On gender and taste, see G. J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 154–214; Lori Merish, Sentimental Materialism: Gender, Commodity Culture, and Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 29–87; John Styles and Amanda Vickery, ed., Gender, Taste, and Material Culture in Britain and North America, 1700–1830 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007).

9. Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), 24. For the American context, see Wendy Bellion, Citizen Spectator: Art, Illusion, and Visual Perception in Early National America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011).

10. Timothy M. Costelloe, The British Aesthetic Tradition: From Shaftesbury to Wittgenstein (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 94–134; Thomas Dixon, From Passions to Emotions: The Creation of a Secular Psychological Category (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 98–134.

11. Washington Irving, The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, in History, Tales, and Sketches, ed. James W. Tuttleton (New York: Library of America, 1983), 735. Cited parenthetically in the text as SB.

12. Jenifer S. Banks, "Washington Irving, the Nineteenth-Century Bachelor," in Critical Essays on Washington Irving, ed. Ralph M. Aderman (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1990), 253–65; Bryce Traister, "The Wandering Bachelor: Irving, Masculinity, and Authorship," American Literature 74, no. 1 (2002): 111–37; Michael Warner, "Irving's Posterity," ELH 67, no. 3 (2000): 773–99. As Andrew Burstein argues, the author "generally subsumed libidinous desire in his commitment to literature." Burstein, The Original Knickerbocker: The Life of Washington Irving (New York: Basic Books, 2007), 335. Warner reaches a similar point, concluding that "literary reproduction is, for Irving, the ultimate form of surrogacy: a mode of cultural reproduction in which bachelors are, at last, fully at home" ("Irving's Posterity," 792). On singledom as a queer category, see Michael Cobb, Single: Arguments for the Uncoupled (New York: New York University Press, 2012).

13. I define heteronormativity as a sociopolitical order that privileges the heterosexual (dyadic, monogamous) couple and establishes biological reproduction as a universalizing norm.

14. Although Davin Grindstaff also refers to the "queer sublime," his usage of the term pertains to audiences' responses to homosexual acts depicted in Brokeback Mountain (dir. Ang Lee, 2005) that "transcend the terror that would ordinarily accompany such encounters" (225). In a similar vein, Max Fincher detects the "queer sublime" in William Godwin's Caleb Williams (1794) in how "Caleb reads and reacts to Falkland's body" (117). My usage of "queer sublime" departs by stressing the category's origins in associationism and degree of psychic intensity. Grindstaff, "The Fist and the Corpse: Taming the Queer Sublime in Brokeback Mountain," Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 5, no. 3 (2008): 223–44; Fincher, Queering Gothic in the Romantic Age: The Penetrating Eye (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 110–30.

15. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. Paul Guyer (New York: Oxford World's Classics, 2015), 109. Cited parenthetically in the text as PE.

16. Lauren Berlant and Lee Edelman, Sex, or the Unbearable (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014), 12.

17. Edward Cahill and Edward Larkin, "Aesthetics, Feeling, and Form in Early American Literary Studies," Early American Literature 51, no. 2 (2016): 244.

18. The Spectator; With Notes and a General Index (Philadelphia: J. J. Woodward, 1832), 1:231. On the emergence of aesthetics as a distinct sphere in the eighteenth century, see Paul Oskar Kristeller, "The Modern System of the Arts: A Study in the History of Aesthetics (I)," Journal of the History of Ideas 12, no. 4 (1951): 496–527; Kristeller, "The Modern System of the Arts: A Study in the History of Aesthetics (II)," Journal of the History of Ideas 13, no. 1 (1952): 17–46; Larry Shiner, The Invention of Art: A Cultural History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 75–151.

19. An incomplete list includes the theater critic Jonathan Oldstyle, who penned reviews for the Morning Chronicle (1802–3); the actor Dick Buckram, who also wrote for the Morning Chronicle; Anthony Evergreen, Gent., featured in Salmagundi (1807); Christopher Cockloft, also appearing in Salmagundi; and the historian Diedrich Knickerbocker, of A History of New York (1809). Irving adopted the name Geoffrey Crayon in 1819, likely as an acknowledgment of his friendship with the English painter Charles Robert Leslie. Stanley T. Williams, The Life of Washington Irving (New York: Oxford University Press, 1935), 1:169–70. On Crayon as Irving's persona, see Jeffrey Rubin-Dorsky, Adrift in the Old World: The Psychological Pilgrimage of Washington Irving (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 59–64.

20. Williams, The Life of Washington Irving, 2:256. Irving based his writing for Salmagundi upon Addison and Steele's Tatler and Spectator magazines; see Burstein, Original Knickerbocker, 21–22; Carla L. Peterson, "Mapping Taste: Urban Modernities from the Tatler and Spectator to Frederick Douglass' Paper," American Literary History 32, no. 4 (2020): 697–99.

21. I am thankful to Zara Anishanslin for this point. On sketches as the preeminent genre of aesthetic experience in the eighteenth century, see Ann Bermingham, Learning to Draw: Studies in the Cultural History of a Polite and Useful Art (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 77–126.

22. In this regard, the crayon anticipates the pencil, which, as Blake Bronson-Bartlett reveals, "mobilized writers and accelerated their hands—in the moment and on the move—and thus promised a means of getting close to, if not capturing, ephemeral experience." Bronson-Bartlett, "Writing with Pencils in the Antebellum United States: Language, Instrument, Gesture," American Literature 92, no. 2 (2020): 202.

23. Ann Bermingham, Landscape and Ideology: The English Rustic Tradition, 1740–1860 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 73–83. As Nancy Armstrong argues, the Restriction Bill of 1797, shifting England from a gold to a paper standard of currency, fueled nostalgic portrayals of the landed gentry. Armstrong, Fiction in the Age of Photography: The Legacy of British Realism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 45–56.

24. Costelloe, British Aesthetic Tradition, 135–66; Peter de Bolla, The Education of the Eye: Painting, Landscape, and Architecture in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 108–28; John Dixon Hunt, The Figure in the Landscape: Poetry, Painting, and Gardening during the Eighteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976); Martin Price, "The Picturesque Moment," in From Sensibility to Romanticism: Essays Presented to Frederick A. Pottle, ed. Frederick W. Hilles and Harold Bloom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), 259–92; Cynthia Wall, Grammars of Approach: Landscape, Narrative, and the Linguistic Picturesque (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019).

25. Matthew Redmond, "Trouble in Paradise: The Picturesque Fictions of Irving and His Successors," ESQ 62, no. 1 (2016): 2–4; Michael Hurst, "Reinventing Patriarchy: Washington Irving and the Autoerotics of the American Imaginary," Early American Literature 47, no. 3 (2012): 649–78; Rubin-Dorsky, Adrift in the Old World, 80–93.

26. On the rise of the man of feeling, see Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility, 340–44; George E. Haggerty, Men in Love: Masculinity and Sexuality in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999); Ann Jessie Van Sant, Eighteenth-Century Sensibility and the Novel: The Senses in Social Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 98–115.

27. In Nancy Armstrong's trenchant turn of phrase, "the picturesque aesthetic had been uniquely geared to the task of turning poverty into art." Armstrong, Fiction in the Age of Photography, 95.

28. Michael Moon, A Small Boy and Others: Imitation and Initiation in American Culture from Henry James to Andy Warhol (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 9; Gayatri Gopinath, Unruly Visions: The Aesthetic Practices of Queer Diaspora (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 4–5; Hurley, Circulating Queerness, 109–48; J. Samaine Lockwood, Archives of Desire: The Queer Historical Work of New England Regionalism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015).

29. David Halperin, How to Be Gay (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 12 (italics removed).

30. Elisa Tamarkin, Anglophilia: Deference, Devotion, and Antebellum America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).

31. Nicole Eustace, 1812: War and the Passions of Patriotism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 1–35.

32. Ruth H. Bloch, Gender and Morality in Anglo-American Culture, 1650–1800 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 136–53.

33. As Grantland S. Rice argues, this passage reflects recent developments in copyright law in light of the 1790 Federal Copyright Act, which obscured the notion of ownership over intellectual property. Rice, The Transformation of Authorship in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 70–72.

34. Warner, "Irving's Posterity," 775; 776; Carolyn Dinshaw, How Soon Is Now? Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012), 138.

35. Washington Irving, Bracebridge Hall, Tales of a Traveller, and The Alhambra, ed. Andrew B. Myers (New York: Library of America, 1991), 200. Cited parenthetically in the text as BH and TT.

36. Amelia Dale, The Printed Reader: Gender, Quixotism, and Textual Bodies in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2019). This phenomenon is satirized in Charlotte Lennox's The Female Quixote (1752) and Tabitha Gilman Tenney's Female Quixotism (1801).

37. Julie Ellison, Cato's Tears and the Making of Anglo-American Emotion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 4.

38. Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews, ed. Paul Guyer (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 90–96.

39. Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 9, 3.

40. Gikandi, Slavery and the Culture of Taste, 145–87; Kelly, Republic of Taste.

41. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, ed. William Peden (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), 139–40.

42. Schuller, Biopolitics of Feeling, 4.

43. Ibid., 16.

44. David Greven, "Troubling Our Heads about Ichabod: 'The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,' Classic American Literature, and the Sexual Politics of Homosocial Brotherhood," American Quarterly 56, no. 1 (2004): 93. On homosociality and Irving's Knickerbocker coterie, see David Dowling, The Business of Literary Circles in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 43–47.

45. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 21. On homosociality in eighteenth-century England, see Declan Kavanagh, Effeminate Years: Literature, Politics, and Aesthetics in Mid-eighteenth-Century Britain (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2017); Rictor Norton, Mother Clap's Molly House: The Gay Subculture in England, 1700–1830 (London: GMP, 1992).

46. In a foundational analysis of The Sketch Book, Judith Fetterly argues that "the basic fantasy 'Rip Van Winkle' embodies is that of being able to sleep long enough to avoid at once the American Revolution and the wife" (6). Fetterly, The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), 1–11.

47. On the romantic artist as queer or melancholic figure, see Andrew Elfenbein, Romantic Genius: The Prehistory of a Homosexual Role (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999); Kay Redfield Jamison, Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament (New York: The Free Press, 1993), 149–90.

48. As with other sketches, Irving derived Ottavio's tale from numerous European inter-texts including Friedrich Schiller's play Die Räuber (The Robbers, 1781), Charles Maturin's novel Fatal Revenge; or The Family of Montorio (1807), and possibly an anecdote Irving heard from Samuel Taylor Coleridge's father. Williams, The Life of Washington Irving, 2:288–89.

49. Leo Bersani, "Is the Rectum a Grave?" and Other Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 24.

50. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility, 1–36; Van Sant, Eighteenth-Century Sensibility and the Novel, 104–9.

51. Rubin-Dorsky, Adrift in the Old World, 183–84.

52. Sedgwick, Between Men, 83–117.

53. On nature and the gothic sublime in nineteenth-century American painting, see Sarah Burns, Painting the Dark Side: Art and the Gothic Imagination in Nineteenth-Century America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 226–29; Barbara Novak, Nature and Culture: American Landscape and Painting, 1825–1875 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 34–44; Bryan Jay Wolf, Romantic Re-Vision: Culture and Consciousness in Nineteenth-Century American Painting and Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 195–97.

54. Rubin-Dorsky, Adrift in the Old World, 192.

55. Carrie Rebora Barratt, "Faces of a New Nation: American Portraits of the 18th and Early 19th Centuries," Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin (2003); T. H. Breen, "The Meaning of 'Likeness': American Portrait Painting in an Eighteenth-Century Consumer Society," Word & Image 6, no. 4 (1990): 339–40; Wayne Craven, Colonial American Portraiture: The Economic, Religious, Social, Cultural, Philosophical, Scientific, and Aesthetic Foundations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); de Bolla, Education of the Eye, 28–34.

56. Frances Ferguson, Solitude and the Sublime: Romanticism and the Aesthetics of Individuation (New York: Routledge, 1992). For helpful glosses of the antisocial thesis, see Robert L. Caserio, Edelman, Jack Halberstam, José Esteban Muñoz, and Tim Dean, "The Antisocial Thesis in Queer Theory," PLMA 121, no. 3 (2006): 819–28; Benjamin Kahan, "Queer Sociality after the Antisocial Thesis," American Literary History 30, no. 4 (2018): 811–19.

57. Henry James, The American, ed. James W. Tuttleton (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), 135.

58. Jonah Siegel, Haunted Museum: Longing, Travel, and the Art-Romance Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 7.

59. Ibid., 5.

60. Nathalia Wright, American Novelists in Italy: The Discoverers; Allston to James (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1965), 35. Barbara Novak provocatively likens the relation between Italy and the American artist to one of sexual freedom: "The American artist could marry the wilderness, which was, in many ways, more familiar to him. But Italy was his mistress and the affair could maintain its potency as long as the elusive mystery was maintained." Novak, Nature and Culture, 215.

61. Henry James, Roderick Hudson, ed. Geoffrey Moore and Patricia Crick (New York: Penguin, 1986), 108.

62. John Ruskin, Modern Painters, vol. 3 (London: Smith, Elder, 1856), 160.

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