Theodore Winthrop

Cecil Dreeme (eBook, ePUB)

Redaktion: Looby, Christopher

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

"Heterosexuality, this novel forthrightly claims, is a poor substitute for passionate love between men-and heterosexuality's historical emergence in the nineteenth century is consequently, Cecil Dreeme laments, a grave misfortune."-Christopher Looby, from the Introduction Freshly returned to New York City from his studies abroad, unmoored by news of the apparent suicide of his accomplished childhood friend Clara Denman, and drawn in spite of himself toward the sinister man-about-town Densdeth, Robert Byng is unsettlingly adrift in the city of his birth. Things take an even stranger turn once he finds lodgings in the Gothic halls of Chrysalis College in lower Manhattan. There he meets the mysteriously reclusive Cecil Dreeme, brilliant artist and creature of the night. In Dreeme, Byng finds a friend unlike any he has known before. But is Cecil the man he claims to be, and can their friendship survive the dangers they will soon face together? Issued posthumously in 1861, Cecil Dreeme was the first published novel of Theodore Winthrop, who has the unfortunate distinction of being one of the first Union officers killed in the line of duty during the Civil War. Newly edited by Christopher Looby, it is a very queer book indeed.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Seitenzahl: 256
• Erscheinungstermin: 20. September 2016
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9780812293142
• Artikelnr.: 46754530

Autorenporträt

Theodore Winthrop. Edited and with an introduction by Christopher Looby

Inhaltsangabe

Introduction: Cecil Dreeme and the Misfortune of Sexuality -Christopher
Looby Editor's Note
Biographical Sketch of the Author -George William Curtis I. Stillfleet and
His News II. Chrysalis College III. Rubbish Palace IV. The Palace and Its
Neighbors V. Churm Against Densdeth VI. Churm as Cassandra VII. Churm's
Story VIII. Clara Denman, Dead IX. Locksley's Scare X. Overhead, Without
XI. Overhead, Within XII. Dreeme, Alseep XIII. Dreeme, Awake XIV. A Mild
Orgie XV. A Morning with Densdeth XVI. Emma Denman XVII. A Morning with
Cecil Dreeme XVIII. Another Cassandra XIX. Can This Be Love? XX. A Nocturne
XXI. Lydian Measures XXII. A Laugh and a Look XXIII. A Parting XXIV. Fame
Awaits Dreeme XXV. Churm Before Dreeme's Picture XXVI. Towner XXVII.
Raleigh's Revolt XXVIII. Densdeth's Farewell XXIX. Dreeme His Own
Interpreter XXX. Densdeth's Dark Room
Notes
* * * * *
Introduction Cecil Dreeme and the Misfortune of Sexuality Christopher Looby
It's always fascinating to come upon a record of an actual reader's lively
encounter with a book. Here is a story about a real nineteenth-century
reader and his fraught engagement with the novel you are holding, Theodore
Winthrop's Cecil Dreeme. On January 10, 1875, a young man named Henry Blake
Fuller was enduring a dismal stint as a clerk in Ovington's crockery store
in Chicago. He had turned eighteen years old the day before, and he
confided moodily to his diary (to which he gave the grandiloquent title "A
Legacy to Posterity") that he felt he would always look back upon himself
at eighteen "as a boy in bad health, & who wished to be somewhere else. In
short as a discontented young person. Unfortunate!" Fuller felt acutely
conscious, he told his diary, of his many personal inadequacies, which he
tallied in self-deriding terms reflecting the standard novelistic clichés
of the time: "Harry Fuller at eighteen would never serve as a romantic
hero. No olive complexion, no hair in graceful curves and black as the
raven's wing; no commanding figure, no fascinating presence, no woman's
tenderness with a man's courage.-but why torment myself by prolonging the
list of my own deficiencies. Yes, I may set myself down as quite an
ordinary person." Then suddenly the diarist's attention turned from morose
self-examination, rendered in familiar novelistic terms, to a novel he had
just read-this very novel. "Read Cecil Dreeme yesterday. A peculiar book.
Not a profound observation. A book that interests me greatly." Versions of
many of the romantic clichés with which he had just berated himself would,
in fact, have been ready to hand in the florid "Biographical Sketch of the
Author" by George W. Curtis that prefaces Cecil Dreeme (included here as an
integral part of this "peculiar" book). Fuller would have read there of
Winthrop's "keen gray eye" and "clustering fair hair" (5), would have
learned that Winthrop's "sensitive seriousness grew sometimes morbid" (8)
and that he was afflicted with "an ill-health that colored all his life"
(9); that he had "a flower-like delicacy of temperament" characterized by
"the curious, critical introspection which marks every sensitive and
refined nature" (11), but that his "womanly grace of temperament merely
enhanced the unusual manliness of his character and impression" (11-12).
Fuller would have found, in other words, someone whose "ill-health" matched
his own "bad health," but who was somehow a paragon of the "romantic hero"
he felt he was not. He would have found a model for his own morbid
self-castigation, but perhaps also an image of something less "ordinary"
that he might aspire toward.
Many questions arise here. The teenaged Fuller was certainly a great
reader: the diary in question is full of references to novelists and
novels, poets and poetry, as well as histories and other literary genres.
Wilkie Collins (July 12, 1874), Charles Dickens-he reported reading David
Copperfield and Dombey and Son (July 14), Nicholas Nickleby (Aug. 23), and
Bleak House (Nov. 22)-Goethe's Iphigenie auf Tauris and Schiller's Maid of
Orleans (July 17), Longfellow's "Wayside Inn" (July 20), Johnson's Rasselas
(Aug. 30), Bulwer's The Last Days of Pompeii (Sept. 27), Gibbon's Decline
and Fall of the Roman Empire (Jan. 28, 1875), Scott's The Lay of the Last
Minstrel and The Lady of the Lake (Nov. 25), and Macaulay's Essays (Dec.
25)-Fuller mentioned all of these and more. About many of them he had
substantive critical observations to make, as a future novelist very well
might. Some of them he read patiently over an extended period of time, and
returned to for rereading and reconsideration. But about Cecil Dreeme,
which he evidently read in one day-on his eighteenth birthday, no less, and
in a state of deep discontent-he could not muster anything that would
satisfy him as "a profound observation." Something about Cecil Dreeme left
him nonplussed, but at the same time intrigued. "A peculiar book," he
wrote. "A book that interests me greatly."
How did Cecil Dreeme come to Fuller's attention? What did he find
"peculiar" about it, and why did it interest him so "greatly"? Did someone
who had responded to its peculiarity-and who thought its peculiarity would
interest Fuller-recommend it to him? We probably cannot know. Fuller went
on to become a noted writer himself, and many decades later he would write
one of the earliest unmistakably queer American novels, Bertram Cope's Year
(1919). The fact of this later literary performance, and the knowledge that
Fuller was also an avid lover of men, perhaps licenses us to infer that the
great and baffled interest that his teenaged self took in the "peculiar
book" Cecil Dreeme must have had something to do with its (and his)
incipient queerness.
The single word Fuller used to describe the novel, the mere epithet
peculiar, is a curious one, having served over the years prior to the
invention of homosexual identity as one of the many vague euphemisms that
could evoke what was not yet, in 1875, as firmly conceived, securely
denoted, or publicly recognized as it would soon come to be: a style of
sexual personhood that had not yet coalesced into a defined social
identity, did not yet have a label, had not yet become a description under
which people could act and could understand themselves and others to exist.
Cecil Dreeme's narrator, Robert Byng, tellingly refers at one point to the
"peculiar power" that the dangerously magnetic Densdeth exerted over him,
and at another place to the "too peculiar a tenderness" he himself felt for
his beloved Cecil Dreeme (194, 281, emphasis added). A decade earlier
Nathaniel Hawthorne's narrator, Miles Coverdale, teased his friend
Hollingsworth in The Blithedale Romance (1852) by reading to him some
suggestive passages from the writings of Charles Fourier, and explaining to
him ("as modestly as I could") the radical sexual arrangements that Fourier
advocated. Coverdale then provocatively asked Hollingsworth whether he
thought they could introduce these "beautiful pecularities" into their own
communal practice. At roughly the same time as Winthrop published Cecil
Dreeme another adventurous novelist, Margaret J. M. Sweat, had the
eponymous protagonist of Ethel's Love-Life (1859) describe to her fiancé
Ernest the "peculiar relationship" she had with a woman named Leonora:
"Women often love each other with as much fervor and excitement as they do
men," Ethel patiently explained, and although Leonora has been banished
from Ethel's life their "subtle essences mingled and assimilated too
thoroughly ever to be entirely disunited."
Fuller in 1875 may not yet have had any sense of a firm sexually
categorical possibility for himself or for a character in a novel. But he
was certainly aware of the bent of his own desires, and of his unsuitedness
for the role of romantic hero if it would entail an erotic interest in
women. Naturally, then, he would have taken a great interest in a novel
that, among many other things that might have appealed to him, featured a
passionate friendship apparently between two men, described unabashedly
(and repeatedly) as "more precious than the love of women" (235), "a love
passing the love of women" (275). But that passionate friendship,
forthrightly depicted in 1861 by Theodore Winthrop as something that did
not entail categorization as "homosexual," would have been at least
somewhat more likely by 1875, when Fuller read the novel, to have had such
an implication. But then again, it would not yet certainly have had this
implication: many readers and reviewers at the time did not detect any such
suggestion. Same-sex romantic friendship was then in the midst of a long
late nineteenth-century transition from a perfectly normal and even
celebrated form of personal attachment to a suspect and eventually deviant
form of desire. What we have, in the encounter between Henry Blake Fuller
and Cecil Dreeme, then, is a neat vignette exhibiting a book written and
published before what is often called the "invention" of the homosexual
(indeed, the invention of the heterosexual too) and an act of reading
coming in an uncertain, slightly later moment when that incomplete
invention may or may not have been clearly known to this particular young
reader. The book's transitional status, and the liminal quality of this
scene of reading, both contribute to what Fuller called "peculiar" about
Cecil Dreeme.What he called "peculiar" corresponds to what we might today
call queer.
Queer is a term in use today to suggest a broad range of erotic tastes,
inclinations, attachments, and desires that do not fall neatly into the
binary categories the dominant culture still frequently deploys for the
sake of distinguishing between the normal (heterosexual) and the abnormal
(homosexual). It seems fair, then, to describe Cecil Dreeme as a queer
novel, since it doesn't entirely observe or respect that binary distinction
(and certainly doesn't frame that distinction in the rigid way that later
generations would do). Cecil Dreeme depicts some "peculiar" ways of feeling
and desiring, relatively unfamiliar to us today, and registers the profound
effects of what may have seemed to its author like the faintly incipient
and unwelcome emergence of sexual taxonomies that (as it happens, because
Theodore Winthrop was killed in the Civil War) he would not live to see put
firmly in place. Unlike his reader Henry Blake Fuller (1857-1929), whose
life began before the homosexual had fully become, in Michel Foucault's
famous phrase, "a species," a recognized type of person, but who did live
to see that historical emergence play itself out, Winthrop died in 1861
just as that process of sexual emergence was faintly beginning to get
traction. Fuller's youthful recognition of this quality in Cecil
Dreeme-what he was able in 1875 to call "peculiar" and what we might today
call queer-hints at the role Winthrop's novel may have played in the lives
of other readers who recognized in it something that interested them
greatly but that they could not precisely describe. And it suggests as well
the agency Cecil Dreeme may have exercised in beginning to articulate
modern forms of disciplinary sexual identity (the novel taints some forms
of desire as "perverse," and there is, after all, a faint odor of suspicion
attached to Fuller's adjective "peculiar") as well as articulating
countervailing literary resources for erotic dissidence ("It interests me
greatly").
At the same time, then, as Cecil Dreeme takes its historical place in a
genealogy of emergent sexual identities, it also takes its place in a
history of resistance to that emergence, because of the share it takes in
the devoted preservation of what Peter Coviello has nicely called "all the
errant possibilities for imagining sex that have sunk into a kind of
muteness with the advent of modern sexuality." Cecil Dreeme regrets what it
senses as the imminent "deployment of sexuality," in Foucault's terms-the
stringent necessity people would soon be under to sign up for (or be
assigned to) one sexual category or another. Cecil Dreeme thus takes us
back to a time before "homosexuality" and "heterosexuality" fully
existed-indeed, even before a crisp distinction came to be made between the
realms of the sexual and the nonsexual as such. Perhaps the queerest thing
about Cecil Dreeme is its tense negotiation of the fuzzy boundaries between
the realms of the senses that it would designate as, on the one hand,
morally blameworthy "sensuality" (184), and, on the other, those it would
celebrate as innocent pleasures of the senses.
If you have ever wondered how and why the unnecessary institution of
heterosexuality emerged in history, Cecil Dreeme has a provocative answer.
The novel's date, as I have suggested, is fairly close to one of the usual
chronological markers of the advent of heterosexual/homosexual
differentiation, that is, the first appearance of the term homosexual in
print-in German-in 1869 or so. Many historians of sexuality have pointed
out how the articulation of one category of sexual existence,
homosexuality, implies the existence of its opposite, heterosexuality.
Cecil Dreeme evocatively captures the feeling of the fraught moment when
this strange new thing, heterosexuality, appeared on the historical scene
as an untested and not universally welcomed phenomenon-one whose cunning
attractions, it appeared to some, might not outweigh its punitive
exactions. Heterosexuality, this novel forthrightly claims, is a poor
substitute for passionate love between men-and heterosexuality's historical
emergence in the nineteenth century is consequently, Cecil Dreeme laments,
a grave misfortune.
But if we must resign ourselves to the unhappy fate of heterosexuality's
emergence and eventual dominance, Cecil Dreeme further implies, then
perhaps something can be done to make it a tolerable form of life. If only
it could be infused, the novel finally suggests, with the passionate
intensity that had belonged principally to male same-sex attachments,
heterosexuality might then prove to be a more or less satisfactory
arrangement. (Readers who don't want the plot's twists to be revealed
should postpone reading the rest of this introduction). This is the meager
hope with which the novel's narrator, Robert Byng, is left when the man he
loved (known to him as Cecil Dreeme) turns out to be a woman (Clara Denman)
in male disguise. This revelation creates for Byng a vexatious problem. Can
his cherished same-sex love be transmuted, somehow, into heterosexual
attachment? Perhaps it can-although Byng continues to refer to his beloved
mostly as "he" and "him" and "Cecil Dreeme" even after Clara's true sex and
actual name have been revealed (335ff.). "Every moment it came to me more
distinctly that Cecil Dreeme and I could never be Damon and Pythias again"
(347-48), Byng laments. He continues: "And now that the friend proved a
woman, a great gulf opened between us" (348). "But thinking of what might
start up between Cecil Dreeme and me, and part us," Byng rues, "I let fall
the hand I held" (348, emphasis added). If something were now to "start up"
between them-and if Byng could reconcile himself to recognizing her as
"Clara," which he continues to be unable or unwilling fully to do even at
the novel's end-it seems it would always be an attachment troubled by the
sacrifice it exacts from its practitioners, the compulsory abandonment of
the prior institution of same-sex friendship. Robert's love for Cecil was
fundamentally predicated on his being a man-although, to be sure, a
peculiar man, "a man of another order, not easy to classify" (138). If he
could now love the woman, Clara, it would be a love always haunted by its
need to draw upon and, if possible, transmute the charisma of homoerotic
attachment into heterosexual desire.
Here is how it goes. Having been surprised and dismayed by the discovery
that the man he loved dearly-the delicately enchanting young painter Cecil
Dreeme-was in fact, all along, a young woman in disguise, the novel's
narrator is left at the tale's close with a melancholy task ahead of
him-converting his powerful love for Cecil into a different, derivative,
and denatured kind of love, the love of the woman Clara Denman, who had
been masquerading as Cecil. The man Byng has called his "friend of friends"
(229, 291), "dearer to me than a brother" (296), "part of my heart"
(321)-"this friend closer than a brother was [now] a woman" (335). What can
happen to a friendship "more precious than the love of women" (235), "a
love passing the love of women" (275), when its object now turns out to
be-a woman? It is a bit like what Millamant says to Mirabell in William
Congreve's The Way of the World (1700), setting out her conditions for
consenting to marry him: if he will agree to her various stipulations, she
says, it is possible that she "may by degrees dwindle into a wife." Cecil
Dreeme leaves Robert Byng to wonder what it would mean, and whether he can
consent, to dwindle into a husband and, perforce, reconcile himself to
being in effect a heterosexual. Byng has spent a considerable portion of
his tale describing his never very enthusiastic or strenuous attempts to
convince himself to fall in love with a woman ("I loved, or thought I
loved, or wished that I loved" another character, he avers, the enchanting
Emma Denman [232]; "I had fancied I loved" her, he later admits [281]). But
he has all the while been more apt to worry about the dire prospect of
being "imprisoned for life in matrimony" (72). It is as if we see him,
then, when the gender of his love object has been suddenly switched,
internalizing the new coercions of heterosexuality before our eyes. To the
revealed Clara he says, "I talked to you and thought of you, although I was
not conscious of it, as man does to woman only" (338). Again: "Ignorantly I
had loved my friend as one loves a woman only" (348).
One easy mistake to make about this novel's plot, however, is to judge that
the eventual revelation of Cecil Dreeme's female identity constitutes a
wary retreat from the queer potential that the novel has created. It might
seem, to be sure, that Winthrop's novel about a man's love for another man
is fatally compromised-or, as some recent readers would have it, rescued-by
the belated revelation that one of them is in fact (sigh of relief) a
woman. One commentator, for example, writes of Byng and Dreeme that
"gradually their comradeship deepens into something more: a friendship
'more precious than the love of women,' reminiscent of the Greek lovers
Damon and Pythias." But then he adds, not very coherently, "At last, to the
narrator's relief, his heterosexuality is reaffirmed-more or less-when it
turns out that the delectable roommate is a woman in disguise." (That "more
or less" is a nasty touch: it amounts to a homophobic sneer.) The novel, as
I have emphasized, portrays Byng as emphatically not relieved to discover
that Dreeme is a woman but as in fact quite the opposite: surprised,
disappointed, confused, and dismayed. Nor is his "heterosexuality"
reaffirmed by this revelation-it is anachronistic to think of him as
securely possessing a quality of "heterosexuality" that would be
satisfyingly "reaffirmed" by the revelation of Dreeme's female sex. It
would be more accurate to say that with the revelation that Cecil is really
Clara, the unwelcome fate of heterosexuality is rudely forced upon him.
In a similar vein, another commentator has written that when Dreeme is
revealed to be a woman in masculine disguise, "the revelation is startling
to Robert who now has an explanation for his sexual attraction to the young
man." Again, this gets things desperately-one wants to say deliberately,
perversely-wrong. Byng has not been at all troubled by his romantic
attraction to Cecil Dreeme; on the contrary, he has felt personally
gratified and even morally strengthened by it. Thus he has never felt any
need of an "explanation" for this attraction; such a claim betrays, again,
an anachronistic imposition of later ideas of sexual normalcy upon a very
different nineteenth-century set of assumptions about the moral value and
intrinsic beauty of same-sex intimacies. And it prejudicially assumes, to
boot, that heterosexual attraction is natural and proper and that its
hidden motivating presence here would somehow justify Byng's otherwise
inexplicable erotic attraction to another man. Cecil Dreeme does not think
that there is anything wrong with same-sex passion, that it needs
"explanation" or that one would naturally be relieved to have an
opportunity to disown it. Could this in fact be what Henry Blake Fuller
found so "peculiar" and yet so interesting about it?
Cecil Dreeme's liminal historical position, on the cusp of the invention of
sexuality, can be measured by the kinds of responses it began to engender
in the decades after its initial popularity and Fuller's intrigued but
slightly nervous response to it. Julian Hawthorne in 1887 reviewed
"Theodore Winthrop's Writings" and found himself baffled and perturbed by
the greater popularity of Cecil Dreeme as compared to Winthrop's other
novels, which he considered superior. John Brent, he writes, is "more
mature" in style and "quality of thought," and "its tone is more fresh and
wholesome." Hawthorne ratchets up the suggestive moralizing a few pages
later on: in Cecil Dreeme "the love intrigue is morbid and unwholesome,"
and the characters are "artificial and unnatural." And there is more:
"Cecil Dreeme herself [Hawthorne, unlike Byng, has no trouble assigning her
the correct gendered pronoun] never fully recovers from the ambiguity
forced upon her by her masculine attire." Tellingly, Winthrop's
"unwholesome" production reminds the younger Hawthorne of his father
Nathaniel's Blithedale Romance, which, as we have hinted, had its own
interest in the "beautiful peculiarities" of sexual irregularity.
Theodore Winthrop's other novels-Fuller would have found them all quite
"peculiar" too, despite Julian Hawthorne's insistence that they were not
"unwholesome" like Cecil Dreeme-are ripe with suggestions of same-sex and
other queer desires that do not conform to either Winthrop's
contemporaries' emergent norms or to what have become ours. Edwin
Brothertoft (1862), for example, is a historical romance of the American
Revolution, in which the narrator is fascinated by nothing so much as the
magnificent and evidently locally celebrated moustache that one of the
tale's heroes, the patriot Major Peter Skerrett, wears. "On his nut-brown
face his blonde moustache lay lovingly curling," we are told. When Skerrett
disguises himself as a redcoat officer as part of a plot to rescue Edwin
Brothertoft's estranged daughter Lucy-whose coarse and dishonest mother,
having deceived Brothertoft into marriage, now intends to marry her
daughter unwillingly to an oafish British officer named Kerr-the patriotic
destruction of this fabled moustache is called for, since its widespread
celebrity would otherwise give Skerrett's true identity away. But Skerrett
at the same time fears-because he is dreaming romantically of Lucy, whom he
has yet to meet-that without his beauteous and "lovingly curling" moustache
he will not make the best first impression on her when he achieves her
rescue.
Lucy, for her part, is actively conjuring a mental image of her fondly
awaited handsome rescuer and his anticipated virtues: "Truth, Virtue,
Courage and the sister qualities, Lucy had dimpled into the bronzed cheeks,
as a sailor pricks an anchor, or Polly's name, into a brother tar's arm
with Indian ink" (240). It is tempting to say that something like a fantasy
of heterosexual romance is being metaphorically converted here into a
moment of pricking intimacy between two sailors for whom "Polly" is just
the generic name for a little-regretted absence. In Edwin Brothertoft
nearly every realized affiliation between a man and a woman is ugly and
deformed, characterized by treachery and horror; even the promising match
between Peter Skerrett and Lucy Brothertoft, once he (sans moustache) does
rescue her, is left conspicuously unrealized and strenuously uncertain at
the end. "It seems the fair beginning of a faithful love" (emphasis added),
we hear from the narrator, but he asks nervously whether this love will
"end in doubt, sorrow, shame, and forgiveness; or in trust, joy, constancy
and peace" (369). That pregnant question is the very last line of the
novel, and no answer is given-unless the discouraged answer lies, only
partially hidden, in the near-homonymy between "brother tars" and
"Brothertoft."
Winthrop's other completed novel, John Brent (1862), has an even weirder
and richer queer subtext. The first-person narrator, Richard Wade, early in
the Western portion of the tale acquires a magnificent black stallion that
no one has yet been able to tame and ride. But Wade himself is able to
domesticate the steed using the methods of love. "I loved that horse as I
have loved nothing else yet, except the other personage for whom he acted,"
prefiguring the heroic horse's later crucial mediation of his relationship
with the eponymous John Brent, a dear college friend with whom Wade was
once intimate and with whom he is now to be reunited. "Brent was [then] a
delicate, beautiful, dreamy boy" (41), Wade recalls; he reappears suddenly
in Nevada ten years later when Wade, who has been seeking gold, is packing
up to return east and care for his widowed-and now dead-sister's two
orphaned children. When the long-lost Brent rides toward him Wade first
mistakes him at a distance for a handsome Indian brave of the kind that
James Fenimore Cooper's pen might have drawn in his lustrous beauty: "'The
Adonis of the copper-skins!' I said to myself." And then Wade unabashedly
confides to the page: "I wish I was an Indian myself for such a companion;
or, better, a squaw, to be made love to by him" (38).
But as Brent draws nearer, Wade begins to recognize him as a deeply tanned
white man-"not copper, but bronze" (38)-and, indeed, soon hails him as his
beloved school friend, whereupon their interrupted intimacy is resumed and
they set out across the prairie together. Brent has changed-those ten
years, we learn, have involved struggle and pain, due to a woman's
perfidy-but those difficulties, in Brent's own words, "have taken all the
girl out of me" (39). And to explain Wade's initial misrecognition, he
adds-here it comes again-"'Ten years have presented me with this for a
disguise,' said he, giving his moustache a twirl" (39). The moustache
aside, however, this doesn't explain Wade's fantasy of being a "squaw" so
that he might be "made love to" by a handsome Indian brave; in Winthrop's
world, this desire evidently needs no explanation at all.
Although Brent ends up at the novel's end with an anticipated marriage to a
fine woman, abetted by his loyal friend Wade, the latter is left alone for
the moment with his bated love for Brent-whom he loved, he tells us, "as
mature man loves man. I have known no more perfect union than that one
friendship. Nothing so tender in any of my transitory loves for women"
(57). When this same Richard Wade appears again in another piece of
Winthrop's fiction, a long story published in the Atlantic Monthly, "Love
and Skates" (1862), he is somewhat older and now expressly in search of a
wife of his own: he is judged to be "incomplete and abnormal" because he's
unmarried. Wade eventually, like Brent earlier, finds his own excellent
woman to marry, but not until he has a peculiarly intense passage with one
Bill Tarbox, a rough worker in the Hudson River Valley iron factory Wade
has been sent to superintend. Wade and Tarbox are both thirty years old,
described as each other's matching physical counterparts, each a "Saxon
six-footer" (137, 139). Wade first esta