Cecil Dreeme
Cecil Dreeme
A Novel
Theodore Winthrop
With an Introduction by Peter Coviello
Washington Mews Books
an imprint of
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York
Washington Mews Books
an imprint of
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York
www.nyupress.org
Preiviously published material in this volume © 2016 by New York University
All rights reserved
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ISBN: 978-1-4798-0901-1 (hardback)
ISBN: 978-1-4798-5529-2 (paperback)
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Contents
A Note on the Fales Library
Marvin J. Taylor
Introduction: Peculiar Tendernesses: Cecil Dreeme and the Queer Nineteenth Century
Peter Coviello
Biographical Sketch of the Author: From the Original 1861 Edition
George William Curtis
Cecil Dreeme
1. Stillfleet and His News
2. Chrysalis College
3. Rubbish Palace
4. The Palace and Its Neighbors
5. Churm against Densdeth
6. Churm as Cassandra
7. Churm’s Story
8. Clara Denman, Dead
9. Locksley’s Scare
10. Overhead, Without
11. Overhead, Within
12. Dreeme, Asleep
13. Dreeme, Awake
14. A Mild Orgie
15. A Morning with Densdeth
16. Emma Denman
17. A Morning with Cecil Dreeme
18. Another Cassandra
19. Can This Be Love?
20. A Nocturne
21. Lydian Measures
22. A Laugh and a Look
23. A Parting
24. Fame Awaits Dreeme
25. Churm before Dreeme’s Picture
26. Towner
27. Raleigh’s Revolt
28. Densdeth’s Farewell
29. Dreeme His Own Interpreter
30. Densdeth’s Dark Room
About the Author
A Note on the Fales Library
The Fales Library, comprising nearly 350,000 volumes of book and print items, over 11,000 linear feet of archive and manuscript materials, and about 90,000 media elements, houses the Fales Collection of rare books and manuscripts in English and American literature, the Downtown Collection, the Food and Cookery Collection, the Riot Grrrl Collection, and the general Special Collections of the New York University Libraries.
We maintain a closed stacks reading room for scholarly access to our book collections, archival and manuscript collections, and media holdings. We also host public events and exhibitions, provide bibliographic instruction to class groups, and loan material from our collections for exhibitions and screenings worldwide.
Our mission is to acquire, preserve, and provide access to a wide range of primary research materials in their original formats, including books, manuscripts, media, archives, and other items in support of the educational and research activities of our various constituencies.
The Fales Library holds two copies of the 1861 first edition of Theodore Winthrop’s novel Cecil Dreeme and one copy of the 1862 fifth edition. The number of editions Cecil Dreeme went through indicates that the story found a fairly large audience in the mid-nineteenth century, which seems curious for a book with a cross-dressing main character. In general, the Fales Library has outstanding holdings for anyone interested in issues of gender and sexuality as represented through fiction.
—Marvin J. Taylor, Director, Fales Library and Special Collections
Introduction
Peculiar Tendernesses: Cecil Dreeme and the Queer Nineteenth Century
Peter Coviello
Earlyish in Cecil Dreeme, a novel written by a young man named Theodore Winthrop and published posthumously by the prominent Boston firm Ticknor and Fields in 1861, we are introduced to a minor character called Towner. He is for Robert Byng, our protagonist and narrator, a glancing acquaintance at best, the friend of a friend. But Byng himself needs all the friends he can find. Having returned only recently from travels in Europe, the young and rootless Byng—unmarried and underemployed, adrift as much in his fatherlessness as in the heathenish dens of lower Manhattan—spends much of the opening portions of the novel wondering over his ongoing attraction to the man who befriended him on his shipboard journey across the sea. This is the sinister and magnetic Densdeth, a figure of insinuating charisma and, we are given to know, resolutely bad intention. Once on shore, and housing himself in rooms at “Chrysalis College” (a thinly veiled New York University), Byng fortuitously encounters John Churm, an old family friend. Churm is, by contrast, avuncular, steadying, and solid of character, and promises precisely the sort of wholesome patriarchal tutelage that might oppose the dire influences of a scoundrel like Densdeth. It is Churm who introduces our young narrator to Towner, and he does so, we could say, to scare him straight. “He is lying perdu here,” Churm says of Towner,
hid from Densdeth and the world. He has been a clerk, agent, tool, slave, of the Great Densdeth. The poor wretch has a little shrivelled bit of conscience left. It twinges him sometimes, like a dying nerve in a rotten tooth. (ch. 5)
Toward the end of the book the victim of “the Great Densdeth” speaks in propia persona, and the portrait of a young man rotted out by depravity is complete: “The first time he saw me,” Towner confesses, “he laid his finger on the bad spot in my nature, and it itched to spread. I’ve been his slave, soul and body, from that moment” (ch. 26). Corrupted in soul and in body, the victim of a corrosive touch, “a bloodless, unwholesome being, sick of himself,” Towner acts here as a kind of living prophecy, a frightful harbinger of the horrors that might visit our uncommitted protagonist should he venture nearer to Densdeth than he already is. “No one ever showed me how to keep straight,” Towner says in neat summary, “and naturally I went crooked” (ch. 26).
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 i
n 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.
* * *
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 hold of my heart, and were pulling it towards him with an almost irresistible force. It is a mystery to me how I withstood it.”) Queer desires may not have come into cohesion as an identity in the middle of the century but, as Cecil Dreeme demonstrates quite as vividly as Hawthorne, this did not mean they were not full of titillation, or menace, or—in those wonderful, rarer cases—possibilities for pleasures too great and enticing to be easily forsworn.
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).
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