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.”16 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.”17 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.18 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,”19 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.20 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 establishes his managerial authority and manly dominance by beating Tarbox in a fistfight; Tarbox thenceforth respects and admires Wade, and becomes his devoted ally—as well as avid ice-skating partner. When the river freezes over one Christmas Day, and the entire town goes out for a frolic on the ice, Wade and Tarbox have an opportunity to demonstrate their well-rehearsed skill as a figure-skating pair: “Wade backwards, Bill forwards, holding hands … both dropped into a sitting posture, with the left knee bent, and each with his right leg stretched out parallel to the ice and fitting compactly by the other man’s