osprey_archer | Sleeping Soldier Historical Note

As with so many of my books, The Sleeping Soldier grew from an observation in George Chauncey’s Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940. Chauncey notes that when historians discuss passionate male friendship in 19th century America, they often “mistake the fact that men who passionately and physically expressed their love for other men were considered normal for their having been considered heterosexual, as if it were not the very inconsistency of their emotional lives with contemporary models of heterosexuality that made them seem curious to historians in the first place.”

What would happen, I wondered, if a normal nineteenth century man found himself in the twentieth century, and discovered that behavior that had been acceptable and even celebrated in his own time had come to be seen as homosexual, and therefore aberrant?

E. Anthony Rotundo’s “Romantic Friendship: Male Intimacy and Middle-Class Youth in the Northern United States, 1800-1900” provided an invaluable description of nineteenth-century romantic friendship, with its kissing and cuddling and passionate declarations of love. Jonathan Ned Katz’s Love Stories: Sex Between Men before Homosexuality defined the outer boundaries of acceptable romantic friendship (basically, you’re fine as long as there are no genitals involved), and shows how those boundaries contracted as the concept of homosexuality began to spread in America in the 1880s and 1890s.

John Ibson’s Picturing Men: A Century of Male Relationships in Everyday American Photography provides a pictorial account of the same process. In the 1860s, Civil War soldiers cheerfully got their photographs taken holding hands or snuggling with their friends. By the 1960s, snapshots show straight men standing rigidly upright, with a carefully defined margin of space between them. The popularization of the idea of homosexuality had not, as many sexologists hoped, led to increased tolerance. Instead, it made many previously acceptable practices morally suspect, resulting in far more stringent boundaries on appropriate male behavior.

Exploring this century of changes required a massive research job. For Russell’s boyhood in the 1840s and 50s, I relied heavily on William Dean Howells’s childhood memoir A Boy’s Town. His novels offer invaluable (and often quite funny) explorations of nineteenth century life and mores. The Shadow of a Dream and Mrs. Farrell both include fascinating depictions of passionate male friendships, one begun during college and the other during the Civil War. (The titular Mrs. Farrell even observes of the friendship, “It’s quite like a love-affair.”)

One could spend a lifetime reading Civil War histories without beginning to read all that has been published about the war. John D. Billing’s memoir Hardtack and Coffee and
Bell Irvin Wiley’s history The Life of Billy Yank: The Common Soldier of the Union are stuffed with fascinating information about the everyday life of Union soldiers. Bruce Catton’s Centennial History of the Civil War was the premier Civil War history in the 1960s, an immensely readable political and military history that tends toward the then-prevailing view that hotheaded abolitionists and secessionists were equally culpable in bringing about a tragic and unnecessary war.

Caleb’s Civil War professor is ahead of his time in his view that the Civil War was a just war against slavery - or else very much behind it: this was the view of many Northern abolitionists during and after the war. Many of the Civil Rights measures passed in the 1960s were reiterations or elaborations of laws first passed during Reconstruction, which recalcitrant white Southerners rolled back through a combination of politics and violence after Union troops left the South in 1877. (Charles W. Chesnutt’s 1901 novel The Marrow of Tradition provides a harrowing local view of how this process played out on the ground.)

Frederic W. Loring’s 1871 Two College Friends shows less literary skill than Chesnutt’s or Howells’ work, but makes up for it in sheer enthusiasm. Loring’s two college friends join the Union Army, repeatedly save each other from death, and address to each other panegyrics like “O my darling, my darling, my darling! please hear me. The only one I have ever loved at all, the only one who has ever loved me.”

These contemporary sources were also invaluable in helping me capture the cadences of Russell’s voice, as was Louisa May Alcott’s work, especially Little Women. Many grammatical rules that were codified later in the nineteenth century were still not set as of the 1860s, like the prohibitions on saying “ain’t” or “he don’t.” (“She don’t deserve to be forgiven,” cries Jo, after Amy burns Jo’s irreplaceable manuscript.) Russell’s attitude toward women’s changing roles in society echoes Alcott’s, while his stance toward Dan and Lacy’s romance was suggested by the characters’ easy acceptance of Annabel and Fun See’s engagement in Rose in Bloom.

(Lacy’s family history was inspired by Buwei Yang Chao’s delightful Autobiography of a Chinese Woman, which was translated into English by Chao’s husband Yuen Ren Chao (who also translated Alice in Wonderland into Chinese). Sometimes husband and wife bicker affectionately in the footnotes.)

Caroll Smith-Rosenberg’s Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America is an excellent resource about women’s nineteenth romantic friendships, and the changing social roles of women from the nineteenth into the twentieth centuries. Laura Shapiro’s Something from the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America continues that story into the mid-twentieth century, while also offering tantalizing tidbits about mid-century food.

Hazel’s opinion column parodying anti-suffrage arguments is drawn largely from Marie Jenney Howe's satirical An Anti-Suffrage Monologue, as quoted in Judith Schwartz’s Radical Feminists in Heterodoxy: Greenwich Village 1912-1940. And yes, I did saddle Caleb with a research project about early twentieth-century college girls partly just to get in a little information about girls’ romantic friendships, which remained socially acceptable a few decades longer than romantic friendships between boys. See, for instance, Annie Fellows Johnston’s 1918 book for girls Georgina’s Service Stars, a book for girls in which Georgina mentions matter-of-factly that a younger girl has a crush on her, and gets a pretty severe case herself on an older girl named Esther: “She is so wonderful that it is a privilege just to be in the same town with her. Merely to feel when I wake in the morning that I may see her some time during the day makes life so rich, so full, so beautiful! How I long to be like her in every way!”

Like Russell, I’ve never cared for Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass as a literary production, but it is undeniably an excellent source of information about 19th century understandings of passionate male relationships. In the mid-nineteenth century he published lines like my dear friend my lover was on his way coming, O then I was happy, and the general reading public accepted this without demure until the 1890s.

In the nineteenth century, “lover” had a platonic as well as a romantic meaning. It was most often used to describe a young man who was in love with a girl, whether or not she returned the feeling, but it was also perfectly acceptable for a lonely Jo March in Little Women to sigh to her mother, “Mothers are the best lovers in the world; but I don’t mind whispering to Marmee that I’d like to try all kinds.”

Or, as Florence Morse Kingsley wrote in 1907 in Those Queer Browns (and I cannot emphasize enough that these Browns are queer because they’re socialists): “As for William, he could never have been so wise, so tender, so lovable, so altogether delightful and worshipful, had it not been for his long guardianship of [his sister] Agatha. He has been father, mother, brother and lover to her.”

Conversely, the word "friend" conveyed fervent emotional intensity. Louisa May Alcott, among many others, used it to describe Jesus, “the Friend who welcomes every child with a love stronger than that of any father, tenderer than that of any mother." And it was by no means exclusively attached to platonic relationships: during the Civil War, soldiers often began letters to their wives with the salutation “Esteemed Friend.”

The past is another country; they speak a different language there. Their words may look the same as ours, but they are full of different meanings, and the feelings of the heart are as difficult to translate as poetry. Therefore, let them speak for themselves. Listen to Alfred Dodd’s apostrophe to Anthony Halsey: “Dear, dearest Anthony! Thou art mine own friend. My most beloved of all! To see thee again! What rapture it would be, thou sweet, lovely, dear, beloved, beautiful, adored Anthony!”

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phantomtomato

This writeup of your sources is fantastic. I am letting it simply wash over me and I am awed.

The resources on 19th century America, especially, are very interesting! I've got a PDF of Chauncey's work, but I hadn't heard of either the Rotundo or Katz books. I'm eager to add them to the reference list. The structure and boundaries of romantic friendships are a favorite topic. Thank you so much for sharing this!

From:

phantomtomato

Ah, correction! Rotundo's piece is an article. Fantastic; easier for me to find. :D

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Sleeping Soldier Historical Note

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