Cecil Dreeme. Theodore Winthrop
Of all the things Cecil Dreeme might be said to be, straight it is not. An extravagant, overheated, splendidly heterodox genre mash-up of a novel, it is also frankly perverse and, as you very quickly discover, indelibly queer. Towner, for instance, appears to have leapt into decaying life directly from the pages of anti-onanist literature, a wonderful midcentury genre in which terrible prophecies about the fate of those undone by carnal indulgence hold space with what are also, as a keen student of the genre like Walt Whitman well knew, portraits of the awesome, world-shaking power of sex. (Whitman would shed the prohibitiveness while embracing the aggrandizement of the erotic, eventually fashioning a plan to gather up the rootless young men of America—men just like Robert Byng—and fuse them into loving cohesion under the sign of what he called comradeship.) There is no deficit of ardent comradeship in Cecil Dreeme, nor of Gothic dread. And yet if this is a frontally perverse novel, in which dramas of temptation and submission hover at all points just fractionally beneath the level of sexual explicitness, it is so in ways that are nevertheless a bit bedeviling to the commonplace languages of erotic deviance we might incline to bring to it.
One wishes to say from the first: Cecil Dreeme is, without question, a queer novel. It is, simultaneously, a range of other things as well: a Gothic novel, a campus novel, a proto-trans novel, an urban-underground novel, a knockoff Dickensian pastiche, and much besides. But what does it mean to nominate as queer a novel published not in 1919 or 1954 but 1861, in mid-nineteenth-century America? This is not a passage of sexual history especially easy to finesse into clarity. Cecil Dreeme speaks to us from a moment well before the solidification of taxonomic identity categories like “the homosexual”—“homosexuality” in its specific modern senses did not, properly speaking, exist in 1861—but in which the elements of those modern conceptual vocabularies for sex were beginning, in their halting and diffuse way, to coalesce. You might say that one of the great pleasures of the book for twenty-first-century readers comes with the chance it affords us to look squarely at imaginings of erotic life, and especially of erotic errancy, in that intriguing in-between time, before they became stabilized under the now-familiar signs of modern sexuality (signs like “gay” and “homosexuality”) but in which the gravitational pull of those ways of organizing and conceiving sex was, if not yet arrived, impending. Which is perhaps another way of saying that Cecil Dreeme, however devoutly it may at moments inhabit the familiar narrative postures of moralizing horror, is also a novel committed, with remarkable tenacity, to its perversities.
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Consider the man who stands at the dark heart of the novel, the domineering, magnetic, altogether Mephistophelean Densdeth. If in Towner we find the archetype of a man destroyed by a carnality insufficiently self-regulated, just as prescribed in the hygienic discourses of anti-onanism, in Densdeth we find a figure no less typological, no less indebted to the stock figures of the midcentury. He is the very type of Gothic villainy: cynical and charming, evil and without remorse, as rich and ruthless as he is elaborately depraved. Any reader of the Gothic will quickly recognize him and the whole atmosphere of unspeakable crime that surrounds him. And yet, for all that familiarity, in Cecil Dreeme the sexualization of Densdeth’s depravity, which reaches toward startling degrees of explicitness, resonates with a unique intensity. Watch as Byng attempts both to resist Densdeth’s seductive authority and to explain it to himself:
Densdeth was studying me, with a covert expression,—so I felt or fancied. I interpreted his look,—“Young man, I saw on the steamer that you were worth buying, worth perverting.”
He goes on, stricken with a temptation he feels powerless to resist,
“What does it mean,” thought I, “this man’s strange fascination? When his eyes are upon me, I feel something stir in my heart, saying, ‘Be Densdeth’s! He knows the mystery of life.’ I begin to dread him. Will he master my will? What is this potency of his? How has he got this lodgment in my spirit? Is he one of those fabulous personages who only exist while they are preying upon another soul, who are torpid unless they are busy contriving a damnation? Why has he been trying to turn me inside out all the voyage? Why has he kept touching the raw spots and the rotten spots in my nature?” (ch. 5)
Sketched out here, with an almost diagrammatic precision, is what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick long ago described as the sexual panic that structures male intimacy in the fraught terrain of the Gothic. Byng encounters his own flaring desires, which in this moment are desires to be touched and turned inside out and in fact to submit to being Densdeth’s, almost as if they originated less in himself than in the other man’s devilish magnetism, his eerie potency, his half-hypnotic power over him. It is, as Byng tells it to himself, Densdeth who is “contriving a damnation,” and not the contrivance of his own wishes. As Byng himself seems to recognize, Densdeth potentiates all that is queer within him, all his desires for ruination. Unable either to countenance or to forswear entirely those desires in himself, Byng twists in a kind of erotic bafflement, one made more intricate with each encounter with Densdeth. We wonder very little at his growing dread.
We might yet have room to wonder, though, at Densdeth—or rather, at how overfull Densdeth’s character manages to be with the sexual menace proper to one man claiming dominion over another man, from soul to carnal body, and yet how free from, how unmarked by, any typifying language that might specify him for us as a type defined by that sexual perversity. Perverted without being gay, sick in soul without being homosexual, Densdeth is a figure who stands intriguingly aslant of these styles of erotic determination. He offers us instead the rich spectacle of a sexual malignancy only barely not ripened into the modern taxonomical character “the homosexual”—just as in Byng’s longing to be possessed soul and body is the portrait of a desire that is perverse, errant, surely endangering, and very possibly ruinous, but is also not quite, not yet, legible as simply “gay.”
These taxonomic designations were coming over the horizon—the hugely publicized Wilde trials of 1895 would do an immense amount to crystalize “the homosexual” as a type of being, defined with a sweeping character-synthesizing depth by a new possession of the self, called “sexuality”—and it is mostly through their clarities, hardened as they have over the century, that we encounter the extravagant ardors of the novel. Those clarities may thus be rather more ours than those of our antebellum counterparts, though this is not to say what passions we find there are therefore out of bounds, insusceptible to our critical gaze, and not to be approached as anything but chaste-until-proven-otherwise. The interpretive possibilities here are a good deal livelier. After all, Cecil Dreeme is far from the only piece of literature in nineteenth-century America to be marked by these queer desires, some of them trembling on the edge of a legibility not yet arrived, and others skewing toward greater obscurity in the vocabularies of sexual being and sexual practice that would eventually rise to hegemonic prominence. Indeed, another of the real pleasures of Cecil Dreeme, another of the open avenues of its interpretability, is to be found in the curious way it seems to reach out and touch virtually every queerly resonant text in the canon of white male authors of the later nineteenth century. One hears Walt Whitman in the urban erotics of rootless young men, Edgar Allan Poe and George Lippard in the Gothic sensationalism, but also something of the Herman Melville of Billy Budd. (“To a bad man—to some bad men,” Cecil tells Byng, “every pure soul is a perpetual reproach, and must be sullied,” in a phrase we might expect to find appended to John Claggart, the conniving master-at-arms who is mysteriously “down on” the beatific Billy Budd.)
Perhaps the strongest echoes bring us back to Nathaniel Hawthorne, not only in the novel’s fascination with the horror of secret sin but in precisely those projective fantasies, those rescriptings of perverse desire as a menace from without, that we’ve seen in Byng’s interactions with Densdeth. Had he been looking for it, Theodore Winthrop could have found just such a dynamic played out in the pages of Hawthorne’s Blithedale Romance, whose narrator finds himself both powerfully attracted to the unconventional and erotically abundant people he meets at a commune of radicals and, in turn, repelled by that attraction, horrified by what they may portend for him. (“As I look back upon this scene,” Hawthorne’s narrator says of his near-allegiance to the man professing love to him, “there is still a sensation as if [he] had caught