Cecil Dreeme is that rarer case. Consider again the predicament in which we find our narrator. As the novel makes clear from its first scene, Robert Byng is a young man dangerously unmoored, failing conspicuously at his heteroreproductive duties to the nation and the race. “Why then haven’t you been five years at the bar, or ten years at the desk?” his old friend Harry Stillfleet asks him, having been ushered into his rooms by one of the degenerated Irish (a “Patrick” we are told). “Where is your wife?” Where indeed. Like other queer protagonists to come in American literature, Byng seems doomed to suffer the fate of the man who should make a saving peace with the rituals of heterosexuality but, alas, cannot bring himself to it. The portions of the novel involving his intimacy with Emma Denman are something like Henry James’s Beast in the Jungle in Gothicized miniature. Byng feels in relation to her less the passion of attraction than the persistent, curious failure of that attraction to present itself with any especially persuasive force, despite the normative imperative that it do so, and quick. “It was she whom I felt that I did not love,” he says, “yet ought to love” (ch. 18, emphasis added). Despite the urgency of his need for some bulwark against his own queerer compulsions, the charms of male-female romance fail to seduce him. By this point in the novel, this may not be too terribly surprising, and not only because of his attachment to Densdeth. Byng has already offered his sense of married life, in one of the most delightful of the book’s many winning sentences:
Antagonistic natures do not necessarily make man and woman hostile, even when they are imprisoned for life in matrimony; domestic life stirs and stirs, slow and steady, and at last the two mix, like the oil and mustard in a mayonnaise. (ch. 5)
It is not immediately obvious how one could better figure marriage as the opposite of a scene of ardor, ecstasy, dissolving intensity. It is, at best, a dull domestic equilibrium, a prison perhaps, but not the worst sort. Small wonder then that Emma, whom he cannot help but feel is nearly perfect for him, fails to secure Byng’s heart, producing in him only “a hesitant resolve to be her lover,” which he will renounce almost immediately (ch. 24).
And so, with a life of bland imprisonment on one side and the ruinous depravity of submission to Densdeth on the other, Robert Byng appears before us in Cecil Dreeme as the very emblem of imperiled white masculinity, as fantasized by midcentury moralists of many stripes. The fate of the nation and the race rests in his hands, but there he stands, paralyzed by indecision, his irresolution making him each day more vulnerable to catastrophe. What’s a Young American to do?
In Cecil Dreeme the solution arrives, as so often it does, in the form of a beautiful young man. Sensitive and artistic, world-weary and private, the young man in question, called Cecil Dreeme, lounges and paints and converses with what Melville calls “fraternal unreserve” with Byng, who is quickly a good deal more than charmed. “I loved him too much, and with too peculiar a tenderness,” Byng tells us of his reluctance to discuss with this sterling new friend his entangled affair with Emma Denman, “to tell him that I had fancied I loved even a woman better than him” (ch. 24). And why should his “peculiar tenderness” not be the largest ardor of his life? If matrimony is unappetizing and the enticements of Densdeth polluting, Cecil Dreeme appears to offer to Byng the possibility of a life at once unobjectionable in the eyes of the scrutinizing world but also, in its singular strangenesses, at a saving distance from the deadlier conventionalities of normative living. Is theirs a male friendship raised a power by the vitalizing presence of desire, of sex? Or are they something nearer to a sexual coupling, a marriage, though happily free of the more imprisoning antagonisms of gender difference? For Byng it hardly matters. Of course by the end of the novel we learn, in a confession that is likely to surprise very few readers, that Cecil Dreeme was born Clara Denman, sister of Emma, and had gone into hiding as a man to escape the cruel machinations of none other than Densdeth. But then Cecil’s gender transitivity had never not been the case, throughout the course of his intimacy with the beguiled Byng: “I did not quite give up my womanhood, as Cecil,” Cecil-now-Clara reminds him. And at any rate Clara’s having-been Cecil does not leave her either, certainly not in the eyes of Byng, who continues to call him “Cecil” after the confession. Cecil may have been born Clara, but it is precisely Cecil/Clara’s transitivity—his having been a man possessing an unsurrendered womanhood, a woman marked indelibly by having-been-a-man—that unlocks Byng’s attraction, and makes his desire possible.
Like the many other Gothic novels among which it takes its place, Cecil Dreeme does not want for passages of moral fulmination, the better part of them occasioned by Densdeth. Yet its heart, we could say, clearly lies elsewhere. If anything, the Gothic mode provides a formal means to give full voice to the suspicion that a life outside the confinements of matrimony, reasonable affection, and civilized reproductivity might have a gorgeousness, a sensual vitality and unrivaled intensity, that it would be a tremendous grief to forswear. This is what Byng has to say while looking upon the corpse of Densdeth, the putative villain of the novel, whose attractions extend even beyond the threshold of death:
There was the man whom I should have loved if I had not hated, dead at last, with this vulgar death. Only a single stab from another, and my warfare with him was done. I felt a strange sense of indolence overcome me. Was my business in life over, now that I had no longer to struggle with him daily? (ch. 28)
Freed at last from what he has described to himself as the menace of Densdeth, Byng suffers his demise with an altogether post-coital diminishment of spirit. What he feels here is something sharper than mere ambivalence. We can be forgiven, I think, for reading this and wondering if it isn’t the queer life that, really, he has loved all along: the struggle, the transgression, the intoxicating possibility of annihilation. Densdeth may be evil. But as Byng writes it, to do without the turbulent vitality of queer love is its own kind of death, a consignment to the dreariness of the ordinary, a mayonnaise life.
But then, saving him from all that, there is Cecil Dreeme. It is Cecil who keeps alive for our protagonist the delirious possibility—fine, fine, the dream—of an intimacy that may be straight and narrow by the lights of Knickerbocker New York but that carries within it still the errancy, the unexpurgated queerness, without which there is only, for this Young American, ardorless obedience, paralysis, that familiar midcentury life of quiet desperation. That there were not easily-to-hand nominations for the weirder loves that so flourish in Cecil Dreeme—“gay” or “homosexual” or any of their satellite designations—does not diminish them, or render them superfluous. Nor does it make attention to their depiction any less edifying, or the novel in which they appear any less queer.
Biographical Sketch of the Author
From the Original 1861 Edition
George William Curtis
Theodore Winthrop’s life, like a fire long smouldering, suddenly blazed up into a clear, bright flame, and vanished. Those of us who were his friends and neighbors, by whose firesides he sat familiarly, and of whose life upon the pleasant Staten Island, where he lived, he was so important a part, were so impressed by his intense vitality, that his death strikes us with peculiar strangeness, like sudden winter-silence falling upon these humming fields of June.
As I look along the wooded brook-side by which he used to come, I should not be surprised if I saw that knit, wiry, light figure moving with quick, firm, leopard tread over the grass,—the keen gray eye, the clustering fair hair, the kind, serious smile, the mien of undaunted patience. If you did not know him, you would have found his greeting a little constrained,—not from shyness, but from genuine modesty and the habit of society. You would have remarked that he was silent and observant, rather than talkative; and whatever he said, however gay or grave, would have had the reserve of sadness upon which his whole character was drawn. If it were a woman who saw him for the first time, she would inevitably see him through a slight cloud of misapprehension; for the man and his