Cecil Dreeme. Theodore Winthrop
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,7 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.”8 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.9 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.10 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.11 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 (197ff.). “Every moment it came to me more distinctly that Cecil Dreeme and I could never be Damon and Pythias again” (204), Byng laments. He continues: “And now that the friend proved a woman, a great gulf opened between us” (204). “But thinking of what might start up between Cecil Dreeme and me, and part us,” Byng rues, “I let fall the hand I held” (204, 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.12 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” (82). 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” (136, 172), “dearer to me than a brother” (175), “part of my heart” (190)—“this friend closer than a brother was [now] a woman” (197). What can happen to a friendship “more precious than the love of women” (139), “a love passing the love of women” (163), 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.”13 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 [138]; “I had fancied I loved” her, he later admits [166]). But he has all the while been more apt to worry about the dire prospect of being “imprisoned for life in matrimony” (43). 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” (199). Again: “Ignorantly I had loved my friend as one loves a woman only” (204).
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.”14 (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