We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 16 January 2009
The aftermath of civil strife, note some historians, can change perceptions of gender. Particularly for males, the effect of exhaustive internal wars and the ensuing collapse of the warrior ideal relegates the soldier/hero to a marginal iconological status. Linda L. Carroll has persuasively argued, for instance, that, following the Italian wars, one finds the “damaged” images of males in Renaissance art: bowed heads, display of stomach, presentation of buttocks. In fact, male weakness and “effeminacy” can, notes Linda Dowling, follow on the military collapse of any collective state. Arthur N. Gilbert argues, in contrast, that historically in wartime, male weakness in the form of “sodomites” was rigorously persecuted. From 1749 until 1792, for instance, there was only one execution for sodomy in France, while, during the Napoleonic Wars, the period of 1803–14, seven men were executed. Such analysis suggests that, in the aftermath of civil wars, cultural attitudes toward effeminate or homosexual men shifted from suppression or persecution during martial crisis to one of latitude and perhaps tolerance in periods following the breakdown of the military collective.
The aftermath of America's Civil War, the decades of the 1870s and 1880s, provides a testing ground to examine attitudes toward the soldier/hero and toward the effeminate male in a time of social and cultural disarray. At this time, an art “craze,” the Aesthetic Movement, captured popular culture. Aestheticism, seen in the eighteenth century as a “sensibility,” had, by the nineteenth century, an institutional base and a social reform ideology.
1 Carroll, Linda L., “Who's on Top? Gender as Societal Power of Configuration in Italian Renaissance Drama, ” Sixteenth Century Journal, 20 (Winter 1989), 531–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Dowling, Linda, Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 149Google Scholar; Gilbert, Arthur N., “Sexual Deviance and Disaster during the Napoleonic Wars, ” Albion, 9 (1977), 98–113CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.
2 Burke, Doreen Bolger et al. , eds., In Pursuit of Beauty: Americans and the Aesthetic Movement (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rizzoli, 1986)Google Scholar; Stein, Roger B., John Ruskin and Aesthetic Thought in America, 1840–1900 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967), 240–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
3 On the rise of corporate America on the template of a military bureaucracy (multiunit enterprises, hierarchical administration), see Chandler, Alfred D. Jr, The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977)Google Scholar. On the “soldier aristocrats” as frontier heroes, see Slotkin, Richard, The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1986)Google Scholar. On the “manliness” of the Populists, see Silber, Nina, The Romance of Reunion: Northerners and the South, 1865–1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 99–101Google Scholar. On the “militant pragmatism” of the American worker, see Dawley, Alan, Class and Community: The Industrial Revolution in Lynn (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1976), 173–93Google Scholar. On the equation of athletics and war, see Rotundo, E. Anthony, American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 240Google Scholar; Collier, Richard, The General Next to God: The Story of William Booth and the Salvation Army (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1965), 80–16, 164–75Google Scholar; James, William, “The Moral Equivalent of War,” in James, William, Essays on Faith and Morals (New York: World Publishing, 1972), 311–29Google Scholar.
4 On the suppression of personal expression in wartime, see Wilson, Edmund, Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1962), 487Google Scholar.
5 On the dislocation of the returning veteran, see Adams, Henry, The Education of Henry Adams (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1973), 238Google Scholar. On the blurring of historical memory after the Civil War, see Kammen, Michael, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991), 93–113, esp. 105, 108–09, 117, 119, 128–29, 141Google Scholar.
6 McCabe, James D., The Illustrated History of the Centennial Exhibition (Philadelphia: National Publishing Co., 1876), 3, 125Google Scholar; Piehler, G. Kurt, Remembering War the American Way (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995), 74Google Scholar; Brown, Dee A., The Year of the Century: 1876 (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1966), 130, 132Google Scholar; Maass, John, The Glorious Enterprise: The Centennial Exhibition of 1876 and H. J. Schwarzmann, Architect-in-Chief (Watkins Glen, NY: American Life Foundation, 1973), 122Google Scholar. On the decline in Navy power after the Civil War, see Randel, William Pierce, Centennial: American Life in 1876 (Philadelphia: Chilton Book Co., 1969), 159Google Scholar.
7 Ryan, Mary, “The American Parade,” in Hunt, Lynn, ed., The New Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 149Google Scholar; “Jefferson Davis and His Book,” American Pottery and Glassware Reporter 5 (1881), 18Google Scholar. On the failure to valorize the inventor of the “Monitor,” see Ericsson, John, Contributions to the Centennial Exhibition (New York: printed for the author at “the Nation” press, 1876), 111Google Scholar. On the “dread and heart–ache” of the Civil War veteran, see Holley, Marietta, Samantha at the Centennial (Hartford: American Publishing Company, 1887), 517Google Scholar; Wilson, Edmund, Patriotic Gore (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962), 152–58Google Scholar; Grant, Ulysses S., Memoirs and Selected Letters: Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant, Selected Letters 1839–1865 (New York: Library of America, 1990), 348Google Scholar.
8 Edmund Wilson notes of Sherman's widow, Ellen: “Her son's dedication to the priesthood was perhaps the price paid by his father for the reckless elation of his March to the Sea.” Wilson, ibid., 210, 208–18. On “untrustworthiness” in men after the Civil War, see “The Sense of Honor in Americans,” North American Review 149 (1889), 207Google Scholar. On the failure of moral reform after the Civil War, see Walters, Ronald S., American Reformers, 1815–1860 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978), xGoogle Scholar.
9 Lutz, ibid., 249–50; Fredrickson, George M., The Inner Civil War: Northern Intellectuals and the Crisis of the Union (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), 86, 194–95, 217–38Google Scholar. On Holmes, see Royster, Charles, The Destructive War: William Tecumseh Sherman, Stonewall Jackson, and the Americans (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991), 280–85Google Scholar; Wilson, ibid., 743–96; Lears, T. J. Jackson, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1981), 23–24Google Scholar; Howells, William Dean, The Rise of Silas Lapham (New York: Library of America, 1982), 1046Google Scholar. On the “distancing, if not expunging of the working war” in Civil War photography, see Trachtenberg, Alan, “Albums of War: On Reading Civil War Photographs,” in Fisher, Philip, ed., The New American Studies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 287–319Google Scholar.
10 Ferber, Linda S. and Gerdts, William H., The New Path: Ruskin and the American Pre–Raphaelites (New York: Schocken Books, Inc., 1985), 50–51Google Scholar. On Frederic Church's Hudson River School as “alien… defunct or moribund,” see Cook, Clarence, “Art in America in 1883,” Princeton Review (01–05 1883), 312Google Scholar. On Elihu Vedder and John La Farge as the new artists with a “psychology in color… [and] the language of the soul,” see “Fifty Years of American Art, 1828–1878,” Harper's New Monthly Magazine, 59 (06 to 11 1879), 495Google Scholar; Gowans, Alan, “Painting and Sculpture,” in Garrett, Wendell D. et al. , The Nineteenth Century: Arts in America (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1969), 235, 238Google Scholar; Brown, Elizabeth, Albert Pinkham Ryder (Washington, D.C.: National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 1990)Google Scholar; Lois Marie Fink, interview with author, 23 May 1990, Smithsonian National Museum of Art; Fink, Lois Marie, American Art at the Nineteenth-Century Salons (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 163, 164, 211Google Scholar; Wilson, ibid., 49, 68, 69, 91, 96.
11 On Chase's portrait of Whistler as controversial, see Pisano, Ronald G., William Merritt Chase (Seattle: University of Washington, 1983), 81Google Scholar. On the multiplicity, divergence, and anti-enclosure of Eakins, Sargent (and Henry James) as well as the sexual ambivalence of Sargent and James as due to their lack of participation in the Civil War, see Lubin, David M., Act of Betrayal: Eakins, Sargent, James (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 14–21Google Scholar; Johns, Elizabeth, Thomas Eakins: The Heroism of Modern Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), esp. 144–69Google Scholar.
12 Museum, Brooklyn, The American Renaissance, 1876–1917 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1979), 42–43Google Scholar; Gowans, Alan, “Painting and Sculpture,” in Garrett, Wendell D. et al. , The Arts of America: The Nineteenth Century (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1969), 264–65Google Scholar; Savage, Kirk, “The Politics of Memory, Black Emancipation and the Civil War Monument,” in Gillis, John R., ed., Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 127–49Google Scholar. G. Kurt Piehler notes that Civil War battlefields weren't preserved until the late nineteenth century: Piehler, ibid., 66–69.
13 On the Civil War as an apocalyptic vision, see Royster, ibid., and Russell F. Weigley, “War as Apocalypse in Nineteenth–Century America,” Reviews in American History, 20 (September 1992), 326–30. On male supremacy in wartime, see Divale, William and Harris, Marvin, “Population, Warfare, and the Male Supremacist Complex,” American Anthropologist, 78 (1976), 521–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar. By 1898, Civil War veterans would protest the choice of a female figure as “Victory” because it lacked “martial character.” See Phieler, ibid., 83; Banta, Martha, Imaging American Women: Idea and Ideals in Cultural History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 481Google Scholar; Wilmerding, John, American Views: Essays on American Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 273–75Google Scholar.
14 Park, Roberta A., “Biological Thought: Athletics and the Formation of a ‘Man of Character,’: 1830–1900,” in Mangan, J. A. and Walvin, James, eds., Manliness and Morality: Middle-Class Masculinity in Britain and America, 1800–1940 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1987), 7–35Google Scholar; E. Anthony Rotundo, “Learning about Manhood: Gender Ideals and the Middle–Class Family in Nineteenth–Century America,” in Mangan and Walvin, ibid., 35–51; Lewis, Lloyd and Smith, Henry Justin, Oscar Wilde Discovers America, 1882 (New York: Benjamin Blom, 1936)Google Scholar.
15 Roger B. Stein, “Artifact as Ideology: The Aesthetic Movement in Its American Cultural Context, ” in Burke, ibid., 26; Brooklyn Daily Eagle. 3 Jan. 1882, p. 2. On the institutionalization of “manly” love in the nineteenth century, see Jeffrey Richards, “‘Passing the Love of Women’: Manly Love and Victorian Society,” in Mangan and Walvin, ibid., 92–123. On homoerotic tendencies in straight men, see Duberman, Martin Bauml, About Time: Exploring the Gay Past (New York, 1986), 43–45Google Scholar. On Wilde as the leader of a homosexual subculture in London, see Dollimore, Jonathan, “Different Desires: Subjectivity and Transgression in Wilde and Gide,” Genders, 2 (Summer 1988), 34Google Scholar.
16 On the view that nineteenth century Americans “who were wholly heterosexual were obsessed with homosexuality,” see DrRuitenbeek, Hendrik M., Homosexuality and Creative Genius (New York: Astor–Honor, Inc., 1967), 134–35Google Scholar; Katz, Jonathan, Gay/Lesbian Almanac (New York: Harper & Row, 1983), 213, 219, 221, 235Google Scholar; Katz, Jonathan, Gay American History: Lesbians and Gay Men in the U.S.A. (New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1987), 47, 368Google Scholar; Chauncey, George Jr, “Negotiating the Boundaries of Masculinity: Gay Identities and Culture in the Early Twentieth Century,” paper presented 9 December 1989, conference on “Constructing Masculinities,”Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis.Google Scholar On the nineteenth century homosexual culture at City Hall and in Battery Park (and the “silences” over the term sodomite), see Lynch, Michael, “Silent Sodom,” paper presented 5 November 1989, American Studies Association International Convention,TorontoGoogle Scholar.
17 Ellmann, Richard, “Oscar Meets Walt,” New York Review, 3 12 1987, 44Google Scholar. “Wilde and Whitman,” Newark Daily Advertiser, 20 01 1882, 1Google Scholar. Ellman, , Oscar Wilde, 166–72Google Scholar. Washington Post, 21 Jan. 1882, 2; Oscar Wilde to Walt Whitman, from New York, 1 Mar. 1882, Feinberg/Whitman Collection, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress. For a critique of Whitman, see “Walt Whitman's Poems,” Littell's Living Age, 13 (01–03 1876), 91–102Google Scholar. On Whitman as a homosexual (“the scandalous suppression or bigoted interpretation of Whitman's homosexuality”), see Katz, , History, 337Google Scholar. On Whitman's disavowal of his homosexuality to John Addington Symonds, see Katz, , History, 337–57Google Scholar. On Whitman as a homosexual and American man of letters, Ruitenbeek, ibid., 120–40. On perceived connections between Whitman and the “peculiarly hot–house atmosphere of Mr. Rossetti,” see Limpus, Robert Moore, American Criticism of British Decadence, 1880–1900 (Chicago: University of Chicago Libraries, 1939), 71Google Scholar. On Wilde's homosexuality: at Portora Royal School in Ireland, see Woodcock, ibid., 24; at Oxford, see Pine, Richard, Oscar Wilde (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1983), 19Google Scholar; as claimed by Robert Ross in 1886, see Colson, Percy, “Oscar Wilde and the Problem of Sexual Inversion,” in The Marquess of Queensberry, Oscar Wilde and the Black Douglas (New York: Folcroft Library Editions, 1977), 167Google Scholar; as a bisexual, see Fido, Martin, Oscar Wilde (New York: Viking Press, 1973), 41Google Scholar. On Whitman's homoeroticism as a reflection of acceptable same–sex love in the nineteenth century, see Reynolds, David S., Walt Whitman's America: A Cultural Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), 391–403Google Scholar.
18 On the Cleveland Street scandal, see Katz, , Almanac, 215–16Google Scholar; Hyde, ibid., 123–27; Cohen, Ed, Talk on the Wilde Side: Toward a Genealogy of a Discourse on Male Sexuality (New York: Routledge, 1993), 121–35Google Scholar; “Dancing in Stock Exchange,” Harper's New Monthly Magazine, 71 (18 11 1885), 844Google Scholar; “Oscar Wilde in Wall Street,” Washington Post, 20 09 1882, p. 2Google Scholar.
19 On incidents of impersonation, see “Oscar Field, How the Managing Editor of the Tribune Palmed Himself Off as Oscar Wilde,” Denver Republican, 17 04 1882, 1Google Scholar; on a bum's impersonation of Wilde, “Oscar Wilde's Renaissance,” National Police Gazette, 11 03 1882, 7Google Scholar; on a St. Louis grocer's impersonation of Wilde, New Orleans Times Picayune, 28 06 1882, 2Google Scholar; on impersonations of Wilde in Milwaukee, “Rich Revelations, What May Be Expected When Milwaukee Men Don Oscar Wilde Attire,” Milwaukee Sentinel, 5 03 1882, 7Google Scholar; National Police Gazette, 21 Jan. 1882, 10; National Police Gazette, 11 March 1882, 7; Jerseyman (Morristown), 6 Jan. 1882, 2.
20 Crowley, John, “Charles Warren Stoddard: Locating Desire,” paper presented 5 November 1989, American Studies Association International Meeting,TorontoGoogle Scholar.
21 Michael Moon, “‘The Gentle Boy from the Dangerous Classes:’ Pederasty, Domesticity, and Capitalism in Horatio Alger,” in Fisher, ibid., 260–87; Bullough, Vern L., Sexual Variance in Society and History (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1976), 611Google Scholar; Katz, , History, 33Google Scholar; Harrison, Brian, “Underneath the Victorians,” Victorian Studies, 10 (03 1987), 239Google Scholar. On the “high proportion of deviates” among lower-class emigrant groups to America, see Bullough, ibid., 607.
22 Salt Lake Tribune, 5 March 1882, 6; Milwaukee Sentinel, 5 March 1882, 6; Milwaukee Sentinel, 6 March 1882, 5; Boston Evening Transcript, 14 Jan. 1882, 6; “Oscar Wilde's Talk,” (Denver) Tribune, 16 Apr. 1882, 12; Newark Daily News, 10 Jan. 1882, 3; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 4 Jan. 1882, 2; Independent, 7 Sept. 1882, 25.
23 The Veteran's Room, Seventh Regiment, N.G.S., N.Y. Armory (New York: “Privately printed,” 1881), 17Google Scholar.
24 The Veteran's Room, 13, 18; Brownell, William C., “The Seventh Regiment Armory,” Scribner's Monthly, 22 (07 1881), 374–75, 378Google Scholar; Burke, ibid., 125–27.
25 Weilbacker, Lisa, “The Decoration of the Veterans' Room by Louis Comfort Tiffany with Associated Artists,” paper presented 21 November 1992, Victorian Society in America Fall Symposium,New YorkGoogle Scholar; Lisa Weilbacker, interview by author, 28 January 1993 and 1 February 1994.
26 Huysmans, J. K., Against the Grain (A Rebours) (1884; rept. New York: Three Sirens Press, 1931; Dover Publications, Inc., 1969), 7Google Scholar.
27 Limpus, ibid., 84–5; Chapman, Terry L., “‘An Oscar Wilde Type’: ‘The Abominable Crime of Buggery’ in Western Canada, 1890–1920,” Criminal Justice History, 4 (1983), 97–118Google Scholar; Oscar Wilde, “De Profundis,” in Complete Works, ibid., 755, 808, 788.
28 Chauncey, George, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994)Google Scholar.
