Theodore Winthrop - Cecil Dreeme: A Novel

CECIL DREEME

Q19: THE QUEER AMERICAN NINETEENTH CENTURY

Christopher Looby, Series Editor

Queer is a good nineteenth-century American word, appearing almost everywhere in the literature of the time. And, as often as not, the nineteenth-century use of the word seems to anticipate the sexually specific meanings it would later accrue. Sometimes queer could mean simply odd or strange or droll. But at other times it carried within itself a hint of its semantic future, as when Artemus Ward, ostensibly visiting a settlement of Free Lovers in Ohio, calls them some queer people, or when the narrator of Constance Fenimore Woolsons Felipa refers to the eponymous child, who wears masculine clothing, as a queer little thing, or when Herman Melville, writing of the master-at-arms Claggart in Billy Budd, tells us that young Billy, sensitive to Claggarts attentively yearning yet malicious behavior toward him, thought the master-at-arms acted in a manner rather queer at times. Q19: The Queer American Nineteenth Century makes available again a set of literary texts from the long American nineteenth century in which the queer appears in all its complex range of meanings. From George Lippards The Midnight Queen: Strange! cried one. Odd! another. Queer! a third.

CECIL DREEME

Theodore Winthrop

Edited and with an introduction by Christopher Looby

PENN

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia

Publication of this volume was aided by gifts from the UCLA Friends of English and the UCLA Dean of Humanities.

Copyright 2016 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

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University of Pennsylvania Press
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Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

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A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN 978-0-8122-2365-1

CONTENTS

Christopher Looby

George William Curtis

INTRODUCTION

Cecil Dreeme and the Misfortune of Sexuality

Christopher Looby

I ts always fascinating to come upon a record of an actual readers lively encounter with a book. Here is a story about a real nineteenth-century reader and his fraught engagement with the novel you are holding, Theodore Winthrops Cecil Dreeme. On January 10, 1875, a young man named Henry Blake Fuller was enduring a dismal stint as a clerk in Ovingtons crockery store in Chicago. He had turned eighteen years old the day before, and he confided moodily to his diary (to which he gave the grandiloquent title A Legacy to Posterity) that he felt he would always look back upon himself at eighteen as a boy in bad health, & who wished to be somewhere else. In short as a discontented young person. Unfortunate! Fuller felt acutely conscious, he told his diary, of his many personal inadequacies, which he tallied in self-deriding terms reflecting the standard novelistic clichs of the time: Harry Fuller at eighteen would never serve as a romantic hero. No olive complexion, no hair in graceful curves and black as the ravens wing; no commanding figure, no fascinating presence, no womans tenderness with a mans courage.but why torment myself by prolonging the list of my own deficiencies. Yes, I may set myself down as quite an ordinary person. Then suddenly the diarists attention turned from (There is a truly uncanny echo here of the novels narrator, Robert Byng, who explains to Cecil Dreeme his attraction to the alluring villain Densdeth: He interests me greatly [124].) Versions of many of the romantic clichs with which he had just berated himself would, in fact, have been ready to hand in the florid Biographical Sketch of the Author by George W. Curtis that prefaces Cecil Dreeme (included here as an integral part of this peculiar book). Fuller would have read there of Winthrops keen gray eye and clustering fair hair (1), would have learned that Winthrops sensitive seriousness grew sometimes morbid (4) and that he was afflicted with an ill-health that colored all his life (4); that he had a flower-like delicacy of temperament characterized by the curious, critical introspection which marks every sensitive and refined nature (6), but that his womanly grace of temperament merely enhanced the unusual manliness of his character and impression (6). Fuller would have found, in other words, someone whose ill-health matched his own bad health, but who was somehow a paragon of the romantic hero he felt he was not. He would have found a model for his own morbid self-castigation, but perhaps also an image of something less ordinary that he might aspire toward.

Many questions arise here. The teenaged Fuller was certainly a great reader: the diary in question is full of references to novelists and novels, poets and poetry, as well as histories and other literary genres. Wilkie Collins (July 12, 1874), Charles Dickenshe reported reading David Copperfield and Dombey and Son (July 14), Nicholas Nickleby (Aug. 23), and Bleak House (Nov. 22)Goethes Iphigenie auf Tauris and Schillers Maid of Orleans (July 17), Longfellows Wayside Inn (July 20), Johnsons Rasselas (Aug. 30), Bulwers The Last Days of Pompeii (Sept. 27), Gibbons Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Jan. 28, 1875), Scotts The Lay of the Last Minstrel and The Lady of the Lake (Nov. 25), and Macaulays Essays (Dec. 25)Fuller mentioned all of these and more. About many of them he had substantive critical observations to make, as a future novelist very well might. Some of them he read patiently over an extended period of time, and returned to for rereading and reconsideration. But about Cecil Dreeme, which he evidently read in one dayon his eighteenth birthday, no less, and in a state of deep discontenthe could not muster anything that would satisfy him as a profound observation. Something about Cecil Dreeme left him nonplussed, but at the same time intrigued. A peculiar book, he wrote. A book that interests me greatly.

How did Cecil Dreeme come to Fullers attention? What did he find peculiar about it, and why did it interest him so greatly? Did someone who had responded to its peculiarityand who thought its peculiarity would interest Fullerrecommend it to him? We probably cannot know. Fuller went on to become a noted writer himself, and many decades later he would write one of the earliest unmistakably queer American novels, Bertram Copes Year (1919). The fact of this later literary performance, and the knowledge that Fuller was also an avid lover of men, perhaps licenses us to infer that the great and baffled interest that his teenaged self took in the peculiar book Cecil Dreeme must have had something to do with its (and his) incipient queerness.

The single word Fuller used to describe the novel, the mere epithet peculiar, is a curious one, having served over the years prior to the invention of homosexual identity as one of the many vague euphemisms that could evoke what was not yet, in 1875, as firmly conceived, securely denoted, or publicly recognized as it would soon come to be: a style of sexual personhood that had not yet coalesced into a defined social identity, did not yet have a label, had not yet become a description under which people could act and could understand themselves and others to exist.