Queer Atlantic: Masculinity, Mobility, and the Emergence of Modernist Form 9780228006039

Table of contents :
Cover
Queer Atlantic
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction
1 Impressed into Service: Mobilizing Desire in Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, Sailor
2 Queer Wanderings: Transatlantic Piracy and Narrative Seduction in Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Master of Ballantrae
3 “A Question of an Imperium”: Queer Imperialisms in Henry James’s The Golden Bowl
4 A Tale of the Seaboard: Erotic Geographies and Interstitial Masculinities in Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo
5 “Those Queer Effects of Real Life”: Impressionism, Desire, and the Transatlantic in Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier
Conclusion: Queer Atlantic Modernism
Notes
Works Cited
Index

Citation preview

Queer Atlantic

Queer Atlantic Masculinity, Mobility, and the Emergence of Modernist Form

Daniel Hannah

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Chicago

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2021 ISBN 978-0-2280-0566-7 (cloth) ISBN 978-0-2280-0567-4 (paper) ISBN 978-0-2280-0603-9 (ePDF ) ISBN 978-0-2280-0604-6 (ePUB) Legal deposit first quarter 2021 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts. Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien. Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Title: Queer Atlantic : masculinity, mobility, and the emergence of modernist form / Daniel Hannah. Names: Hannah, Daniel, author. Description: Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20200334050 | Canadiana (ebook) 20200334255 | ISBN 9780228005667 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780228005674 (softcover) | ISBN 9780228006039 (PDF ) | ISBN 9780228006046 (ePUB) Subjects: LCSH: Homosexuality in literature. | LCSH: Gay men in literature. | LCSH: Masculinity in literature. | LCSH: Desire in literature. | LCSH: Imperialism in literature. | LCSH: Comparative literature – American and English. | LCSH: Comparative literature – English and American. | LCSH: American literature – 20th century – History and criticism. | LCSH: English literature – 20th century – History and criticism. Classification: LCC PN56.M316 H36 2021 | DDC 809/.9335309041–dc23

This book was designed and typeset by Peggy & Co. Design in 11.5/14 Adobe Garamond Pro.

for Kevin and Rachel

Contents

Acknowledgments Abbreviations Introduction

ix

xi 3

1

Impressed into Service: Mobilizing Desire in Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, Sailor 24

2

Queer Wanderings: Transatlantic Piracy and Narrative Seduction in Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Master of Ballantrae 56

3

“A Question of an Imperium”: Queer Imperialisms in Henry James’s The Golden Bowl 87

4

A Tale of the Seaboard: Erotic Geographies and Interstitial Masculinities in Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo 117

5

“Those Queer Effects of Real Life”: Impressionism, Desire, and the Transatlantic in Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier 149 Conclusion: Queer Atlantic Modernism Notes 201 Works Cited Index 221

207

179

Acknowledgments

Over the long genesis of this book, I have gathered intellectual and emotional debts to a wide array of people on both sides of the Atlantic. I am very lucky to be employed in such a collegial environment as the English department at Lakehead University, and my work on this book greatly benefited from the support and input of my colleagues and the engagement of my students during its production. I would particularly like to thank the students of the graduate course “Fictions of Masculinity” for providing a space in which some of the ideas behind this book were tested and stretched. Early work on this project was propelled by research I conducted in Boston with the support of a New Scholars grant from Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada in 2011. Some of my first thoughts about the project crystallized as I was working on my previous book and, while he may not realize it, my thinking at that time was helpfully guided by the input of my “mentor for life,” Denis Flannery. Conference papers, articles, and funding applications over the years have allowed me to bring my ideas into the orbit of a range of gifted scholars whose feedback I valued, including Kevin Hutchings, Julia Wright, Eric Savoy, Denis Denisoff, Rory Drummond, and Hazel Hutchinson. I am especially grateful to John Carlos Rowe, Adrian Poole, Jesse Matz, Rick Holmes, and Anna Guttman, who all took time out of their busy lives to read over chapters as the project neared its conclusion. Two anonymous readers for McGill-Queen’s University Press provided rigorous and generous reviews of the book’s initial manuscript; I was humbled by their belief in the project and the finished work owes much to their fine advice. I have been blessed by the editorial assistance of Richard Ratzlaff who

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Acknowledgments

encouraged my initial submission of a proposal and whose guidance through to publication has made the process pain-free. Scott Howard provided meticulous copy-editing in the book’s final stages. As always, I am most indebted to my patient family, to Anna (my best reader), Talia, and Eden for making it all worthwhile. An earlier version of chapter 2 appeared under the title “Queer Wanderings: Transatlantic Piracy and Narrative Seduction in Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Master of Ballantrae,” in English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920 57, no. 2 (2014): 184–209. It is reprinted by permission of the copyright owner, ELT Press. An earlier version of parts of the conclusion appeared under the title “Queer Atlantic Modernism and Masculinity in Claude McKay’s Banjo and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night” in The Edinburgh Companion to Atlantic Literary Studies, edited by Clare Elliot and Leslie Eckel, Edinburgh University Press, 2016, 189–201. It is reprinted by permission of the copyright owner, Edinburgh University Press.

Abbreviations

Reference to frequently cited primary texts is given following the abbreviations listed below. BB

Herman Melville, Billy Budd, Sailor (An Inside Narrative). Edited by Harrison Hayford and Merton M. Sealts, Jr. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962. GB Henry James, The Golden Bowl. London: Methuen, 1904. GS Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion. Edited by David Bradshaw. London: Penguin, 2002. MB Robert Louis Stevenson, The Master of Ballantrae. Edited by Adrian Poole. London: Penguin, 1996. N Joseph Conrad, Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard. London: Dent, 1923.

Queer Atlantic

Introduction

Herman Melville’s short story “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids,” first published in Harper’s New Monthly magazine in April 1855, begins in the lap of masculine privilege with its unnamed, American narrator celebrating a night of “genial hospitalities” (319) with a “band of brothers” (322), nine bachelor lawyers in London’s Temple district. In the second half of this diptych, the narrator reveals himself to be a wealthy seed merchant who, in a quest for paper to make envelopes to send out his seeds, visits a New England paper mill whose oppressed workforce is made up entirely of women. “This,” the narrator declares, “is the very counterpart of the Paradise of Bachelors, but snowed upon, and frost-painted to a sepulcher” – it is, he claims, the “Tartarus of Maids” (326–7). In the first half of the tale, the narrator’s guest status allows Melville to construct a scene of cloistered intimacy, a queerly suggestive bacchanalia complete with communal horn drinking and snuff taking; an entirely different kind of cloistering pervades the grim and disorienting sequel to this episode, suggesting that the New England maids’ servitude to the mill – constructed as a figurative sacrifice of their reproductive potential to mechanized, masculinist productivity – cannot be easily detached from the lives of the leisure class. In each part of the tale, the narrator’s privileged movements and marginal status in the story-world enable the text’s critical mapping of a globalized structure of inequality even as they also allow for his extractability, for a detachment that both might keep the story’s queer energies safe for Melville’s bourgeois audience and render the story’s various gendered, geopolitical, and erotic analogies bafflingly elliptical. The transatlantically mobile narrator of this story stands as an early

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Queer Atlantic

model for the kind of masculine presence, as a character and as a stylized voice, that I am seeking to trace in this book. The narrator’s physical and stylistic mobility, his penchant for sudden switches of both geographical reference and vocal registers captured in the unusual split-form of the tale itself, works to locate queer eroticism in a scene of masculine privilege, misogyny, and economic imperialism. But that same narratorial mobility also destabilizes the tale’s sexual and political energies. By the end of the nineteenth century, this idea of stretching and challenging narrative form through an erotically suggestive, transatlantically mobile, and politically ambivalent exploration of masculinity would, for a number of Anglo-American male novelists, become enormously generative. This book offers a close examination of five transatlantic novels written by five white men in Britain and America between the years 1886 and 1916: Herman Melville’s posthumously published Billy Budd (1886–91), Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Master of Ballantrae (1888–89), Henry James’s The Golden Bowl (1904), Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo (1904), and Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier (1916). Spanning a period of new imperialism that saw consolidations of British colonial power in Africa and Asia alongside British interest in and anxiety about the United States as a newly global, potentially superseding expansive force, these works offer a window onto the manner in which five privileged yet liminal Anglo-American authors formally negotiated anxieties about degeneracy, effeminacy, embodiment, and violence that attached to discussions of masculinity and its transatlantic shape during this period. Each of the novels considered in this book centres on the jarring sexual mobility, the gravitational pull and disorienting force, of an exceptional man (Billy Budd, James Durie, Prince Amerigo, Giovanni Battista Fidanza, and Edward Ashburnham). Evading, anticipating, exceeding others’ efforts to account for their erotic charge, each of these men challenges both the interpretive models of other (especially male) characters and the formal arrangements of their (male) narrators as they seek to distinguish the meaning, or meanings, of masculinity at this historical juncture. By virtue of either their availability to transnational flows of power, their cosmopolitan sensibilities, or their refusal of narrowly national identifications, each of these men also stands in the novel as an intersectional figure between European and American representational forms, epistemologies, and imaginings of subjectivity.

Introduction

5

The liminal, transitive, “queer” Atlantic becomes, in this context, a figurative space for exploring and sometimes containing mobilities of gender and desire. Initiating a formal ambivalence that will become key to modernist aesthetics, these novels’ experiments – with syntax, with structure, with perspective – move between channelling and resisting the challenges posed by their central characters to privileged narratives of national longing and belonging. And while these works frequently initiate analogies between (trans)national, gendered, and erotic mobilities, they also reflect upon narrative’s seemingly inexorable, almost compulsive drive toward unsettling analogies. As such, these novels open out vital space for reflecting on the value of a criticism traversing various modes of reading and, specifically, of a critical approach bridging the transatlantic and the queer. It is perhaps unsurprising that the already canonical works I have chosen to consider fail to adequately address the extent to which transatlantic mobilities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were experientially different, often radically so, for women and for people of colour – for instance, it is not unusual, with some debatable exceptions (perhaps most notably in The Golden Bowl), for the plots of these fictions to render female bodies, like those of the “maids” in Melville’s diptych, less agential and more vehicles for figurative work. This book is vitally interested, however, in how each of these novelists explores rather than merely assumes privilege, in particular the contingent privilege that attends an evasively queer whiteness in scenes of Anglo-Atlantic encounter and exchange (like that enacted between Melville’s cloistered bachelors). C. Brook Miller notes how pro-imperialist British writers from this period, faced with the spectre of a westward shift in global power, became invested in a “psychological” model of “Anglo-Saxon racialist discourse,” a “vision of racial integration” across the “white Atlantic” that could “guarantee national, and world, progress” (94). Likewise, from the other side, “imperialist excitement” in the United States frequently rested, as Meg Wesling notes, on a melding of “racialized fears about the erosion of white dominance in the face of Asian immigration and African American enfranchisement with opportunistic dreams of new markets and U.S. global naval power, all articulated through the religious and moral discourse of the divine supremacy of ‘Anglo-Saxon civilization’” (2). Queer Atlantic examines texts that reflect not only on the danger that the queer subject poses

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to such Anglo-Atlantic fantasies of cultural cohesion (and especially to their heteronormative fantasies of genealogical continuity), but also on the queer effects generated when that same subject lays claim to the privileges of Anglo-Atlantic whiteness, to a racialized bond between a select vision of Europeans and Americans. Where queerness, as Michael Warner argues, often surfaces as “a political form of embodiment that is defined as noise or interference in the disembodying frame of citizenship” (xix–xx), privilege, as Peggy McIntosh notes, always plays out, and is secured by, a system of invisibility, of “silences and denials” (26). I am aware that it may appear obtuse to write a monograph with “queer” in the title that takes as its primary archive works by authors who (with the perennial exception of Henry James) publicly participated in marriage and other culturally recognized performances of heterosexuality. While I will occasionally also be placing these works in dialogue with perhaps more recognizable queer authors (for instance, Oscar Wilde, Djuna Barnes, and James Baldwin), my primary interest is in how my chosen authors are able to move between queer and normatively straight registers of expression and what such movements reveal about the shape and interpretability of the heterosexual man in fiction. If it is the Anglo-American white man – the conventionally invisible subject – who represents the norm in these texts, he emerges as a subject formed by conflictual cultural fantasies, shaped and made visible by the spectral presence of the non-white or the non-male (and even, at times, the non-human). The charged male characters at the centre of these novels often move between spheres of privilege, sometimes violently demarcated, and experiences of abjection, of use and abuse by others. Their experiences symptomatize the novels’ attraction to male subjects with the capacity to be made both the subject and object of coercively enforced yet always unrealized masculinist norms. Each of the characters in question enters into a space of masculine stylization and brings into relief the range of performances by which masculinity mobilizes – that is, brings into being and renders unfinalizable – the male actor. I am interested, then, in what Dana D. Nelson terms “the plastic, even contradictory mobility of racial discourse in constructing and negotiating whiteness” (“Consolidating” 204), and I further trace the role of that mobility in “constructing and negotiating” (trans)national masculinities. Afloat on the Mediterranean, Billy Budd’s idealized Anglo-Saxon beauty is

Introduction

7

key to his selection for impressment and to his quick ascent through the ranks on board the Bellipotent; but his inciting whiteness also renders him a distasteful yet desirous object for Claggart and Vere, and an unfixable subject for Melville’s narrator. James Durie is both the eponymous “Master of Ballantrae” and the dark outcast, and his seemingly instinctive command over others surfaces for the staid narrator, Mackellar, as a sign of both Durie’s stylistic aptitude (which Mackellar seeks to harness) and excess (which he seeks to edit). Prince Amerigo’s aristocratic caché and his disarming style allow him, at first, to skillfully maneuver between the desirous claims of his father-in-law, Adam Verver, his wife, Maggie Verver, and his lover, Charlotte Stant. But James’s novel, like the economic imperialism of the Ververs, also seeks to contain Amerigo, to subject his Italian darkness to a queerly configured and assimilative form of embrace. Likewise the Latinate Nostromo seems defined, for large parts of Conrad’s novel, by his use for others, including the narrator who ascribes a world-projecting value to his transactional linkage of Costaguana’s various social circles. And yet, Nostromo’s attractiveness, like that of the silver of which he becomes the slave, animates uncertainties about the straightness (erotic and ethical) of colonial desire and of the narrative’s national imaginary. Recalling Stevenson’s naïvely seduced Mackellar, Dowell, the American expatriate narrator of The Good Soldier, fondly traces the cracks in the surface of Edward Ashburnham’s embodiment of heteronormatively English masculinity, exposing his own American desire to take up the domestic seat of English imperialism as a confused form of Romance. Equivocally aligned with Dowell’s own imperial style, Ford’s impressionism traces the fragmented English body of Ashburnham as an uncertainly resonant site of aesthetic difficulty, violence, and pleasure. My title, Queer Atlantic, names an imaginary space, a figurative encounter between European and American cultures structured by understandings of gender and desire as fundamentally disorienting spheres of performance. The physical space of the Atlantic Ocean plays some part in forging the experiences of the central characters in each of the novels I have chosen – in Billy Budd (albeit marginally), The Master of Ballantrae, and briefly in The Good Soldier, it is a scene of action for the novel’s plot; in The Golden Bowl and Nostromo it hovers only remotely as a background to the placement of the novel’s characters (and, indeed, Nostromo, for the most part, plays out against the Pacific

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Queer Atlantic

Ocean). But it is the imaginary space of the Atlantic, a space that both pulls together and separates European and American, that forms and undoes the desires of these characters and their circulation as objects of desire. Beyond being a merely geographical marker, “queer Atlantic” acts in my work as a descriptor of methodology, of the approach by which one might bring out these overlapping aspects of texts. It points, to borrow from Colleen Glenney Boggs’s account of the term “transatlantic,” to “a process of dislocation” (5), and “envisions literature in relationship to an always distant yet ever proximate other” (6). Rather than making a case for a broader body of “queer Atlantic” texts from this historical moment, I instead wish to emphasize how the fraught play with transatlantic and queer fluidities found in each of these novels can be read as both a specific response to the cultural configuration of European-American relations and as indicative of broader patterns in the discursive construction of masculine privilege during this time. My argument across the course of this book is that, through a thematization of mobility, the writers under consideration ambivalently interweave: a privileged wandering, like that of the male flâneur (the emergent modern subject traceable from Charles Baudelaire to Walter Benjamin); a queerly fluid imagining of desire as a social force; and the reader’s experience of spatio-temporal disorientation and difficulty. Such interweaving allows these texts to both unmoor cultural and generic expectations about novelistic form even as the open-endedness of these connections, their unresolved mobility, frequently allows these texts to distance themselves from and hold in suspense the more radical imaginings of masculinity and the novel that they evoke. While definitions of modernism are always notoriously unsettled, these novels bear many of the hallmarks of canonical modernist fiction: formal difficulty and ambiguity; frequent emphasis on both the experience of fragmentation and the search for meaning; interest in capturing a moment of cultural rupture; and, in Michael Levenson’s terms, a charting of both “the dislocation of the self within society” and a “nostalgic longing for a whole self ” (xiii). These novels, however, frame such recognizable formal and social concerns as effects of their own preoccupation with the “queer Atlantic” shaping of masculinity. As such, they open a window onto thinking about the larger work performed by mobility as a master trope for constructions of masculine, national, and exilic identities during the unfolding history of modernist writing.

Introduction

9

Outlining the features of “queer modernism” in the prewar era, Robert L. Caserio argues that the “modernist construction of homosexuality evolves from an alliance of plural erotic dispositions that are united in antagonism to opposite-sex love, bourgeois marriage, and the family” (201). But if, as Caserio astutely observes, “queer eros” in these modernist works “throws into suspense our understanding of what is ‘social’” (216), it does so with complicated political implications: queer modernism’s “liberating ethos” (203) calls into play both “ideologies” (borne in the works of Walt Whitman and John Carpenter) “that characterize queer persons as standard bearers of culture and as a paragons of democratic citizenship” (201), and a more Proustian dedication to a “withdrawn and passive vision” that might “inwardly level the world’s hierarchies (the social and moral ones that dominate eros)” (217). While the texts under consideration in this book share with Caserio’s archive an antinomian impulse in their querying of heteronormativity, their channelling of that impulse through a masculinist prizing of mobility, detachment, and autonomy gainsaid by existing social structures epitomizes the political contradictions of such antinomianism. Speaking to the diverse typology of men in modernist literature (especially after the Great War), Natalya Lusty notes how “the aesthetic and cultural practices of modernism defined masculinity in relation to cultural fragmentation and regeneration” (4): “high” modernist imaginings of manhood ranged from Joyce’s Leopold Bloom, “the effeminate man,” heroic yet “lampooned mercilessly as an effeminate parasite and cosmopolitan liberal,” to Eliot’s Prufrock, the embodied “enervation of the emasculated modern man,” to “the self-promotional hyper-masculinity of Futurism,” to “the deconstructed libidos and emancipated emotions of surrealism” (Lusty 7–8). Queer Atlantic locates the earlier emergence of such gendered dichotomies – heroism and parasitism, enervation and emancipation, self-promotion and deconstruction – in a series of narratives about the attraction and collision of both European and American men and European and American imaginings of nation and empire. In the conclusion to this book, I will make a case for how the specific engagements with transatlantic erotics in my chosen novels provide a perhaps surprisingly formative model for pivotal moments in a more cohesive, identifiable “queer Atlantic” body of work in the fiction of expatriate Americans after the First World War.

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As my subtitle suggests, I am interested in mobility: mobile subjects, refusing to be fixed; mobile narratives, shaping paths through space and time; mobile readings, cutting across contextual fields. I am, of course, not the first person to consider modernism’s entanglement in questions about mobility. Joseph Allen Boone, for instance, ties modernist fiction’s “breakdown of unitary modes of perceiving sexuality, identity, and narrative” (420) to “the ceaseless mobility of metropolitan modernity”: drawing on Michel de Certeau, Boone asks whether the “multiplication” of “pedestrian rhetorics” in the metropolitan city rendered “all urban mobility, to use gay parlance, a form of cruising” (214), so that “cruising” took “the place of the role Walter Benjamin attributes to the flâneur of the nineteenth-century city” (214–15). But if the modern metropolis, in Boone’s model, provides a thriving site of difference and multiplicity, its navigation in modernist fiction, however “cruisy,” remains coloured by the flâneur’s embodiment of “the privilege or freedom to move about the public arenas of the city observing but never interacting, consuming the sights through a controlling but rarely acknowledged gaze” (Pollock 94). Michael Trask’s Cruising Modernism: Class and Sexuality in American Literature and Social Thought (2003) illuminates the edges of such privileged navigation: arguing for the interconnectedness of American sociological and literary accounts of “innovative and unsettling” class relations (embodied in such mobile figures as the vagrant and the immigrant) and sexology’s deliberations on “irregular and perverse desires” (1–2) in the early twentieth century, Trask notes how perversion became, in this context, “both problem and explanation for the period’s excesses of mobility and uncertainty” (10). If “mobility and desire” tend to “stipulate each other” during this period, as Trask suggests (1–2), modernist fiction also tends to imbue the mobile male subject, moving through and around the drama of modernity, with a complicated mixing of privilege and perversion. Throughout this book, I seek to map out the ways in which mobility (of viewpoint, of bodies in space, of categories) acts in my chosen novels as an inherently ambivalent strategy for managing normative masculinity’s proximity to more marginal subject positions.1 In the remainder of this introduction, I seek to locate my “queer Atlantic” interpretive frame in three key fields of inquiry: transatlantic studies; queer theory; and masculinity studies. Throughout the book, I will trace both a historicized account of how these texts emerge from and

Introduction

11

contribute to specific discursive shifts during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and an analysis of how these texts challenge and bring into focus the strengths of these theoretical modes of reading. In the introduction to his formative work, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness (1993), Paul Gilroy advocates for an approach to “the Atlantic as one single, complex unit of analysis” in order “to produce an explicitly transactional and intercultural perspective” (15). Since then, the field of transatlantic studies has sought to highlight the ways in which European-American textual exchanges reflect back upon nationalist paradigms and imperial projects, complicate national literatures, and unsettle often-isolated accounts of European and American print circulations in the nineteenth century.2 Such scholarship has, however, only occasionally addressed how narratives that cross the Atlantic frequently depend upon an eroticized model of exchange and also frequently involve crossings and blurrings of the borders between genders and sexualities. Heidi Macpherson notes how the prefix “trans” in transatlantic, connoting “beyond,” “across,” and “through,” can be placed in productive dialogue with transatlantic texts’ gendered engagements with “space and reconstruction: of place and location (both figurative and real), of identity and of genre” (7). Whereas Macpherson attends largely to the question of how women’s imaginary “reconstruction[s]” play out in a transatlantic context, Queer Atlantic will aim to bring out the vital ways in which scenes of transatlantic encounter and contestation frequently involve displaced engagements “beyond,” “across,” and “through” the imagined borders of sex, gender, and sexuality (and specifically for male writers). While theorists of late-capitalist globalization have become increasingly interested in questions about “transnational sexual diasporas” (Povinelli and Chauncey 439), about a “social erotics” capable of acting as a coalitional and “dissident mode of globalization” (Sandoval 21), such questions have largely evaded genealogical consideration of how pre-twentieth-century transnational, sexual, and gendered mobilities intersected. By attending to the forms through which Anglo-American writers ambivalently imagined transatlantic exchanges (especially between men) as sites of queer resonance, I am seeking to trace a line of writing that had, by the dawn of the twentieth century, already forged an uneasy vision of the “social erotics” informing the globalizing, intertwined trajectory of British and American imperialisms. Despite the focus of this book being

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Queer Atlantic

on texts invested in transatlantic narratives of passage, exchange, and conflict, I also chart this path with an awareness that such narratives could not help but be informed by broader and varied explorations of geographical and cross-cultural mobility from the period – perhaps most obviously, larger concerns with oceanic exploration, displacement, and imperialism necessarily inflect the transatlantic fictions of Melville, Stevenson, and Conrad. 3 In her important book, Freedom’s Empire: Race and the Rise of the Novel in Atlantic Modernity, 1640–1940 (2008), Laura Doyle traces how the “race myth” (3) of “the Anglo-Saxon race’s entry into a ‘state’ of liberty” was “from the beginning associated with an Atlantic crossing and trauma of exile” (4): narrative accounts of such crossings, Doyle argues, stage the “swoon moment – the phoenix fall” as “a bodily ‘undoing’ or ‘ruin’ that is often sexual or coded as feminine” (6). According to Doyle, later modernist writers queerly rewrite that swoon moment as “a drowning of all unraced, unbordered sexuality” (414); Virginia Woolf writes “queer Atlantic” elegies for non-normative “bodies and sexualities drowned within” the “Anglo-Atlantic empire” (413).4 Doyle’s work offers an important template for thinking through the ways in which transatlantic encounters might code gendered and sexualized engagements with racialized notions like “liberty” or “freedom.” Transatlantic feminized “ruin” certainly plays a role in the trajectories of some of the characters under consideration in this book (Melville’s Billy Budd and Stevenson’s Mackellar, for instance). But the novels I am reading also frame the Atlantic – whether as a geographical locale for the novel’s plot or an invoked figurative space behind the novel’s action – as a site of conflictual experiences; readers are asked to identify not only with moments of “ruin,” but also enactments of queer violence, lawless pleasure, displaced mourning, or mobile displays of power (and its subversion). Queer theory is, I would argue, a critically mobile, and mobilizing, form of reading, and it is perhaps no accident that queer theory’s deconstruction of gendered and sexual orientations emerged in the 1990s at the same moment as Julia Kristeva’s advocacy for a “transnational or international position situated at the crossing of boundaries” (16), or Paul Gilroy’s emphasis on “the relationship of identity” to “routes” rather than “roots” (19). From its inception, queer theory has taken mobility as central to both its methodology and subject matter;

Introduction

13

indeed, one might even go so far as to say that it is this mobile (or mobilizing) link between methodology and subject matter that has come to characterize “queer” critical practice. Tracing the etymology of the word “queer” to its Indo-European root – twerkw, meaning “across” – Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick argues for an understanding of this critical term as “a continuing moment, movement, motive – recurrent, eddying, troublant” (Tendencies xii). Queer as a term describing sexuality through directionally rather than object-oriented desire, and as a critical approach that refuses to know in advance the shape of its subject or even the aiming point of its own analysis, establishes a certain conceptual, spatial-temporal mobility as key to both textual moments of desire and one’s approach to those moments. Along these lines, Kathryn Bond Stockton describes the queer child as a mobile, unfixable subject, refusing a knowing that would fix it in vertically oriented models of development; in place of the temporal-spatial imagining of the child’s “vertical movement upward (hence ‘growing up’) toward full stature, marriage, marriage, work, reproduction, and the loss of childishness” (4), Stockton coins the term “sideways growth” to describe how the queer child “locates energy, pleasure, vitality, and (e)motion in the back-and-forth of connections and extensions that are not reproductive” (13). Given the labile directionality of such theoretical moves, queer studies would seem well placed to account for the sideways movements (“beyond,” “across,” and “through”) of transnational literature, its formalized play with cross-cultural encounter and exchange. The temporal turn in recent queer theory (as Stockton’s valuing of the queer child’s delay suggests) has tended to shape current interest in queer mobilities. Where Lee Edelman’s now infamous “anti-social thesis” proposed a withdrawal from the heteronormative modalities of life, a refusal of reproductive futurity (embodied in the Child) through appropriation of the “death drive” that Western culture has consistently ascribed to queer lives, recent work has sought out alternative, ethically enabling imaginings of queer time. Elizabeth Grosz, for instance, calls for a queer politics modelled on Henri Bergson’s embrace of “a model of mobility that does not submit it to the privilege of immobile states or elements,” a commitment to “change that is not carried along by things but that problematizes the very stability of what counts as an immobility, a thing, that which is cut out from its environment” (194). Queerness, in other current scholarship, is imagined as a state of relationality, an

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unprescribed responsiveness to otherness – Tim Dean describes the theoretical (rather than sexual) orientation of queerness as an “ethics of alterity” (25), a relational openness to the other. It is the “yet to be” quality of an ideal queerness, its accessibility only through an ecstasy of “collective potentiality” (189), that thus drives José Esteban Muñoz to call for a “collective temporal distortion” of the present (185). As with any conceptualization of space, the (figuratively) spatial imaginings of queerness traced by my own work necessarily invoke a queerly disordered temporality. As the male characters I am reading experience violent, transatlantically displaced relations to the nation, called into being as Anglo-American men, those relations emerge from the strange temporality of their own placement as subjects and objects of desire – a desire that seems to precede them, to produce their desirability, and to circulate as an effect of their gendered performances. “Queer,” in this context, becomes a useful word for describing the representational strategies at play as each of these novels seeks to map the spatial-temporal placements of their male protagonists. As such, rather than simply locating the queer effects of these fictions in their explicit attention to sexual activities and identities (although these will figure in important ways), my argument will also attend to the queerness of their style and to their account of their masculine centres as creatures of style. I take my cue for this approach from Kevin Ohi’s formulation of queerness as an “antimimetic … practice of representation” (Henry James 17) that offers up a “systematic challenging of the presumption that desire can be, or ought to be, represented” (3). But where contemporary queer theory (by the likes of Dean, Muñoz, or Ohi) has centred on the ethical possibilities for queer futurities, this book primarily asks “queer,” as a critical term, to map the incoherence of nationalist reproductive histories. In doing so, Queer Atlantic also raises some significant questions about the field of queer ethics. While my writing follows through the deconstructive tendencies of queer reading, teasing out the inherent instabilities that structure heteronormative fantasies of Anglo-Atlantic masculinity, in doing so it also points to the strange companionship of queer relationality (an openness to the other) and imperialism (an engulfment of the other). What, I will ask, might it mean for a work to both evoke a mode of reading that queerly refuses to fix the subject even as it aligns such an openness to the other as strangely, perhaps unexpectedly, pivotal to imperialism’s imagining of the other as colonizable?

Introduction

15

Queer masculinity, a term that conjoins minoritized and universalized subject positions, plays a pivotal role in shaping the political ambivalence of these Anglo-American fictions. In each of the novels in question, it is frequently the central character’s claims on both sexual dissonance and patriarchal power that disrupt any easy placement of them in a coherent textual politics. The queer man and queer theory has, indeed, been critical to the rise of masculinity studies in the academy in the last twenty years and to its productively disruptive accounts of British and American manliness in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Michel Foucault’s genealogical account of the invention of “the homosexual” (who is implicitly male) as “a species” (43) and his ties to the proliferating erotic machinery of late nineteenth-century sexology firmly placed the destabilizing figure of the homosexual man at the centre of questions about the invention of the heterosexual man. Sedgwick’s first two books, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1985) and Epistemology of the Closet (1990), centre on readings of the contradictions that make up English and American white masculinity from the long nineteenth century. In Between Men, Sedgwick argues that an “acutely psychologized secular homophobia,” emerging in the late eighteenth century, policed not only “a nascent minority population of distinctly homosexual men” but also “the male homosocial bonds” that structured “all public or heterosexual culture” (Epistemology 184). In Epistemology, she traces the survival and domestication of this endemic “male homosexual panic” in the figure of the bachelor, a newly “representative man,” whose literary representations chart occasional recognitions of homosexual panic as a damaging “sexual anesthesia” and occasional returns of the “paranoid Gothic,” the man who would murder his own homoerotic potential (188). Sedgwick’s elaboration of the “homosocial continuum,” deconstructing easy separations of “normal” and “perverse” masculinity, is obviously crucial to my own interest in the disruptive effects of queer desire in works vitally concerned with privileged, often homosocially inscribed forms of white masculinity, and that deconstructive bent has remained critical to the shape of masculinity studies since the early 1990s. But just as Sedgwick herself would go on to query the paranoid structures of her own queer hermeneutic and its recapitulation of the very logic of the closet that it seeks to explain (see Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading”), my own reading of five late nineteenth-century, transatlantic, fictional men seeks to remain attuned to their refusals of narratives of transgression

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and punishment and to the diffuse and disordered forms taken by desire and its regulation in their novel-worlds. In doing so, I wish to take up Sedgwick’s own aim of charting “the broad field of forces within which masculinity – and thus, at least for men, humanity itself – could (can) at a particular moment construct itself ” (Epistemology 188). While Sedgwick’s archive was transatlantic, masculinity studies has tended to analyze types of manhood from this period along distinctly national lines, offering up geographically delineated accounts of Victorian forms of masculinity in Britain (see Sussman, Adams, Dowling) and the United States (see Carnes, Kimmel, Greven). Such accounts necessarily underplay the extent to which transatlantic cultural clashes and exchanges shaped these supposedly national forms. They have, however, highlighted the extent to which British and American men, in the face of the imperial trajectories of their respective nations, performed in similar discursive environments, which were measured and anxiously marked out by similar hegemonic, homosocially enforced, bourgeois masculine forms, and challenged by similarly constructed performances of effeminacy, dandyism, and queer eroticism (along these lines, Elaine Showalter traces a transnational “crisis of masculinity” [9] in the 1890s). Andrew Dowling notes, for instance, how as Britain expanded its territorial claims, particularly and somewhat ambivalently in Africa following the Berlin conference of 1885, Victorian novelists looked to policing counter-images of “deviance” (such as Stevenson’s Mr Hyde or Conrad’s Kurtz) in order to shore up and “maintain a disciplined ideal of manhood” (2). In America, Theodore Roosevelt’s works in the 1890s, leading up to his winning the presidency in 1901, popularized a vision of “strenuous” masculinity, a refusal of “anything that relaxes the manly fibre and lowers self-respect” (96), so as to gainsay the territorial ambitions and civilizing project of the United States. Besides such contemporaneously imperial imaginings of manhood, gendered events in the public sphere from this period tended to take on a transatlantic resonance sounding out beyond their immediate, more local environments. In accounts of late Victorian British masculinity, various scholars, including Jonathan Dollimore, Alan Sinfield, and Joseph Bristow, have emphasized the role played, first, by the Labouchère Amendment of 1885 (which banned “gross indecency” between men in public and private in Britain) and, subsequently, by the trials and eventual imprisonment of Oscar Wilde in 1895, not only

Introduction

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in regulating relations between men, but also in producing effeminacy as a homosexually marked attitude or pose. Such British developments should, however, as David Greenberg’s work reminds us, be read in a larger context of “reform capitalism” in the late nineteenth-century Anglo-American world, a broadening of the state’s role in “mediating the relationships among classes and solving social problems” that saw a restructuring of the economic and erotic exchanges between men and between adults and children (398). As Bristow notes, Wilde’s history – his trajectory from celebrated and self-consciously effete critic of Britain’s leisure classes to emasculated outcast and criminal – only makes sense in the context of Britain’s imperialist production of a masculine norm (“dutiful, self-sacrificing, and willing to go to the ends of the earth in a spirit of patriotic zeal”; “physically and morally robust” [Effeminate 9]) and Wilde’s specifically Irish, republican challenging of that norm (20–1). Wilde’s history cannot, at the same time, be easily disentangled from American attitudes toward male effeminacy – his 1882 lecture tour of North America and the concurrent touring production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s parodic Patience were, as Jonathan Freedman argues in Professions of Taste, signature moments in the development both of aestheticism and cultures of masculine taste in the United States (by chance, Wilde also first met Henry Labouchère, sponsor of the Criminal Law Amendment Act, while travelling in the United States at this time). Talking about Anglo-American manhood during this period thus involves engaging with complicated networks of legal, literary, and economic transatlantic crossings. Despite national accounts of masculinity dominating the critical field, some significant exceptions, tracking intersections between European and American forms of manhood and their imperial contexts, have been crucial to framing my own “queer Atlantic” approach. Christopher Lane’s The Ruling Passion: British Colonial Allegory and the Paradox of Homosexual Desire (1995) argues for the centrality of “the representational and political mobility of homosexual drives” as a rupturing force for “Britain’s imperial allegory” of national unity (4). Lane’s work raises important questions about the manner in which narratives attending to the queer male subject structured and indeed fractured British imaginings of empire as a national, rather than necessarily transnational and transformational, affair. Like Lane, I am interested in textual moments in which the queer man, in a period of imperial

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flux, comes to signify “what is precarious and lacking in heterosexual meaning and national formations” (4, emphasis in original). But the perversely mobile subject, as I have already suggested, need not always be a hub for nationalist anxiety; accordingly, Queer Atlantic examines the way in which queer mobilities can also enable imperial narratives of manhood as pervasive and unbordered. In Nature’s Noblemen: Transatlantic Masculinities and the Nineteenth-Century American West (2013), Monica Rico tracks just such privileged mobilities in “the networks of elite men, British and American, who circulated between the trans-Mississippi West and the metropoles of London and New York.” Seeking “to resolve their anxieties about class, gender, and empire in an era of profound economic and social transformation,” these men looked to “the American West” as “a global West,” constructing “gendered selves experiencing a frontier, understood as a line between civilization and savagery, humankind and nature” (4). While the American West does not figure substantially in any of the novels under consideration here, broader fantasies of masculinity being fashioned at the frontiers of empire shape the seascapes and landscapes of these fictions. Indeed, figurative frontiers, broadly conceived, prove crucial to the plots of these novels – the transnational waters of Billy Budd; Upstate New York in The Master of Ballantrae; Adam Verver’s civilizing vision for American City in The Golden Bowl; the new land of Conrad’s Costaguana; and Britain itself as a perverse frontier for the economic imperialism of Ford’s Dowell. As a space capable of unsettling national formation, the frontier surfaces in this book as a site for both the display of privileged mobility and the “fluid” and “liberatory possibilities” of “gender and race” (36). I have described the period covered by this book as an age of shifting empires, a transitional period in the arrangements and administration of geo-political power that could not help but colour the manner in which these five novelists approached transatlantic material. The case for this is clear for the final three works under consideration, concerned as they are with specific American acts of economic expansion and imperial acquisition: the Ververs’ purchasing of Amerigo and other European objets; the evangelical American financier Holroyd’s backing of the Anglophilic Charles Gould’s mining of Costaguanan silver; Dowell’s acquirement of the Ashburnhams’ English estate and his narration of their demise. The earlier works, Billy Budd and The Master of Ballantrae (to be discussed in chapters 1 and 2) are perhaps less obviously engaged

Introduction

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with the same historical moment. It is true that in 1886, as Melville began to work on a brief prose headnote to a ballad entitled “Billy of the Darbies,” and in 1887, as Stevenson, then in Saranac, commenced mapping out chapter titles for his next novel, the United States had not yet entered into the period of recognizably global expansion that began with its engagement in the Spanish-American War and subsequent occupation of the Philippines in 1898, and the acquisition of Puerto Rico, Cuba, and Guam in 1899. Both works emerge, however, at the tail-end of a century that, from the earliest jingoistic soundings of the doctrine of “Manifest Destiny,” to the large-scale annexation of Western lands during the Mexican War, to the appropriative ramifications of the Monroe Doctrine in South America, heralded an informal expansionism no less impressive than Britain’s lurch toward formalized empire in the wake of the Indian Mutiny. Along these lines, Eric Wertheimer argues for a more supple account of imperialism as “national thinking that envisions an expansionist and portable national presence, from the beginning of America’s self-recognition as being independent” (9). As Lawrence Buell has persuasively argued, “postcolonial anxiety” formed a “constituent shaping force” (“Postcolonial” 200) in early American writing, a force that might, in part, account for American forms of imperialist domination (213). Conceived as a perpetual, exceptionalist frontier, American imperialism is, Wertheimer suggests, marked by its simultaneous evocation of the “post-colonial and neocolonial (economic, as opposed to classic territorial, colonialism)” (10). More recently, Leonard Tennenhouse has reframed the colonial paradigm by arguing for a reading of early American literature “in terms of a diasporic literature – one aimed at reproducing certain traits of Englishness in a radically non-European environment” (8). Such theorizations of American engagements with displaced British and European culture suggest the value of considering American literature’s reproductions and refusals of British narratives of gender, desire, and race, narratives keyed to Britain’s imperial history. Historical turns backward structure both Billy Budd and The Master of Ballantrae, centred on resonant scenes of national revolution – the Spithead and Nore naval mutinies of 1797 that precede the action of Billy Budd, and the unsuccessful Jacobite uprising of 1745 which decides who will take up the title of “Master of Ballantrae.” It is this historical turn that allows these novels to offer up vitally comparative perspectives

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on British and American imperial forms, on their intertwined genealogies, and on the complicated history of American resistance to British power, resistance that marked American imperialism at the end of the nineteenth century as both postcolonial and neocolonial. While both Billy Budd and James Durie are, in quite different ways, coerced into becoming British subjects, their challenges to that coercion – manifested in their disruptive, sometimes violent, sometimes queerly attractive embodiments of manhood – figuratively signal Americanist forms of resistance. Imperialism, in both these texts, is both stylistic and erotic, a mode of “national thinking” (Wertheimer 9) that manifests and at times implodes in the desirous and desirable bodies of men. Initially accepting his naval impressment with “uncomplaining acquiescence” (BB 45), Billy’s resistance is, it seems, compulsive, perhaps unconscious. His impulsive, unintentionally ironic farewell to his former ship, the Rightsof-Man (evoking Thomas Paine) at the start of the novella, and the later, more catastrophic reflex of his fist in the murder of Claggart, inscribe his physical spasms in a genealogy of American revolutionary violence that emerges from and reacts to British management of his body. James Durie, by contrast, engages, from start to finish, in a Machiavellian wresting of mastery from his brother, Henry, whose support of the Royalists secures him the family estate. Seducing Mackellar (Henry’s apologist and narrator), James enacts his revenge via a transatlantic pursuit of his brother to New York, where he establishes a queer repetition of Britain’s political violence on American terrain. Anticipating the more radical experimentation of later modernist prose, Melville and Stevenson register the challenges posed by their dissonant male subjects as formal difficulties, as challenges to the conventions of realist fiction and its alignment with national imaginaries. Billy Budd and The Master of Ballantrae anticipate Henry James’s and Joseph Conrad’s more distinctly current projects, which are the focus of chapters 3 and 4. The broader contemporaneous history of American and British imperialism – especially Britain’s engagement in the Second Boer War (1899–1902), the United States’ Pacific expansionism, and Theodore Roosevelt’s acquisition of the Panama Canal through its establishment of Panama as an American Protectorate in 1902 – forms an important context for how these novels imagine transatlantic politics through the lens of capitalist desire and masculinist performance. Both James and Conrad, in very different ways, offer up a vision of American economic

Introduction

21

power as an unsettling agent of desire reconfiguring the erotic capital of European men. Yet even as these novels critique the objectifying effects of economic imperialism, The Golden Bowl and Nostromo take American imperialism’s acquisitive imaginary and flourishing style, its evocative management of space as an expansive site of desire, as a model for their own experiments in narrative form and their attempts to explore and incorporate unsettling encounters with otherness. James’s Adam Verver (shadowed by the fading colonial masculinity of Bob Assingham) and Conrad’s almost absent Holroyd exercise their economic power through an erotically charged, homosocial enlistment of a European (or Europeanized) man (Amerigo and Charles Gould); in Conrad, that enlistment resonates in a broader interest in how both characters and the narrative voice make use of the protagonist, Nostromo (“our man”). Both texts ambivalently frame these Anglo-American homosocialities as perverse threats to cultural order and as enabling, yet stifled, forms of masculine exchange. Accordingly, they also inscribe the imperial imagination of their American financiers as, alternately, anathema and essential to their own stylistic projects. Chapter 5 reads Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier as a kind of logical extension of the ideas at play in James’s and Conrad’s earlier novels. Ford, who self-consciously positioned his writing as building on the legacy of James and Conrad, practices an “Impressionism” modelled on a queerly intimate exchange between author and reader. Ford figures that exchange as forged through displacement: “we are almost always in one place with our minds somewhere quite other” (“On Impressionism” I. 174). Like James and Conrad, Ford treats the overlap between queerly homosocial and imperialist relations between men as the grounds for a figuratively spatial drama. Ford’s pyrotechnic experimentation with anti-linear plot and unreliable narration allows for a wandering style that maps the perversity of the transatlantic relationship between Dowell, the American narrator, and Edward Ashburnham, the eponymous “good soldier,” even as it signals Dowell’s efforts to distance himself from the “queer” effects of his infatuation with English form. Recalling earlier visions of British stoicism (in Melville’s Vere, Stevenson’s Mackellar, James’s Bob Assingham, and Conrad’s Charles Gould) and figures associated with an overpowering, machoistic sexuality (James Durie, Amerigo, Nostromo), Ashburnham represents a tellingly contradictory object for Dowell’s Anglophilia – Dowell’s elliptical, recursive narration

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of Ashburnham’s slide toward suicide offers up an account of his own symbolically resonant attainment of Edward’s estate (a kind of reverse colonization) as both a reinstatement and a refusal of the “normal,” heterosexually reproductive English home. The theoretical approach of this book, taking its cue from the works themselves, maps out, in Judith Butler’s terms, the means by which discourses of transnationalism, gender, and sexuality engage in “overlapping, mutually determining, and convergent fields of politicization” (“Merely” 269). These novels frequently position narrative’s attempts to open itself to a queer conceptualization of desire – one that refuses to know in advance and to direct the desiring subject, one that recognizes the necessary mobility of desire – as an ethical project, one that challenges stiflingly heteronormative accounts of masculinity. The novel’s opening of such ethical space becomes, in this context, a model for democratic hospitality, for the nation-state’s accommodation of the mobile other, l’étranger, in an increasingly transnational world. But, in these same novels, masculinist imperialism – the expansive nation-state’s violent othering and incorporation of the colonized other; its management of transnational mobility through the inscription of a unidirectional logic of centre and periphery – bears an uncanny resemblance to democratic accommodation. If queer style works by dancing around the desirous subject, refusing to finalize the form of desire, imperial style, in these novels, apes that dance, refractively casting openness as akin to acquisitiveness, accommodation as akin to violent incorporation, erotic play as akin to sexual sadism. As Derrida reminds us, “the law” of unconditional hospitality, seemingly queer in its radical openness, cannot be easily disentangled from the necessarily constraining (hostile even) effects of conditional hospitality, the laws; the other must be (violently) “conditioned” as other in order for any idealized openness to otherness to be invoked (77). Through their radical experimentation with syntax, temporality, and perspective, these novels tread an uncertain path between these stylistic possibilities, generating textual forms that align the act of reading with both ethical, queerly disoriented engagements and violently expansive incorporations of otherness. As such, the intersections drawn by these works between queer desire, queer ethics, cosmopolitanism, imperialism, and sexualized violence disrupt any easy account of the shifting quality of their transatlantic erotics. Mobility, as a conceptual motif running through

Introduction

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these novels, evokes, all at once: a representational style and potentially ethical form of address refusing closure, generating characteristically modernist experiences of ambiguity and uncertainty, and embedding the subject in relationships with others; a privileged capacity for movement through and across constraining social (and national) borders and for detachment from immobilizing cultural constraints; and an invasive tendency, the imperial subject’s almost compulsive encroachment on the other. This book seeks, through its “queer Atlantic” theorization, a critical mobility capable of doing such a complicated motif justice.

1

Impressed into Service Mobilizing Desire in Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, Sailor

Herman Melville’s final work, Billy Budd, Sailor (An Inside Narrative), takes place at the margins of the Atlantic Ocean, somewhere between the English Channel and the Mediterranean. Its cast, however, is principally British, with the central action playing out on board the Bellipotent, a British man-of-war in the summer of 1797. Ostensibly, transnational relations figure in the novella mainly through the historically recent events of the French Revolution, which the novella’s narrator and the Bellipotent’s chain of command cast as the source of a contagious rebelliousness that has surfaced in mutinies against the British navy at Nore and Spithead, and in the ongoing naval war between Britain and France in the wake of the Revolution. And despite certain resemblances between the material of this novella (especially its attentions to the spectacle of punishment) and that of Melville’s earlier American naval protest novel, White-Jacket, or The World in a Man-of-War (1850), the United States only explicitly figures in a handful of passing references which principally concern apprehensions about the transatlantic reach of Napoleonic France. On the surface, the novella seems preoccupied with questions about the administration of justice, the wielding of power, and the workings of desire in a British institution. Nevertheless, like Billy Budd, who at the moment of impressment is turned from his “homeward bound English merchantman” into an “outward bound” vessel (BB 44–5), Melville’s novella redirects its Anglocentric questions “outward” into an Atlantic space overwritten by broader, less containable political currents than its Anglo-Norman plot seems to suggest. Billy’s impressment into the Bellipotent, and the ambiguous

Impressed into Service: Billy Budd, Sailor

25

effects generated by his responses to his compelled enlistment, serve as figures for the text’s exploration of the complicated ways in which desire – queerly circulating between the compulsive and the compelled and inextricably tied to narrative form – can shape transatlantic space. A number of critics have identified how Melville’s novella, despite its apparent concern with power struggles within the British navy, reflects on conflicts present in America leading up to and during his composition of the text. Alan Trachtenberg suggests that in the Bellipotent’s priming for mutiny the “mass unrest and challenges to authority” of American labor riots in the 1870s and 1880s “resound too insistently to be ignored” (203); Gregory Jay situates Captain Vere’s execution of Billy Budd in “the politics of reunion that sacrificed black rights on the altar of American whiteness” (370); Nancy Ruttenburg finds in Billy’s communication of a “vocal current electric” to the potentially mutinous sailors a self-conscious critique of Emersonian and Whitmanesque imaginings of the American poet as an innocent (and, as such, potentially vacuous) electrical conductor. Each of these critics, however, treats Melville’s text as practising a kind of covert transatlanticism when, in fact, the novella’s surface invites the reader to think of its geography (and erotic arrangements) in more explicitly transnational terms. Reading the text as the apex of Melville’s “comparative cosmopolitanism” (86), Paul Giles argues that Billy Budd “takes British culture and demystifies its assumptions in the light of American cultural perspectives,” specifically from the perspective of Melville’s interest, in his later works, in the theme of “masquerade” as a form of authority (such as in “Benito Cereno,” Israel Potter, and The Confidence-Man). Melville, thus, frames “the plot of this novel within a matrix of estrangement, holding up the customs of English authority to the dark glass of comparative consciousness” (84). While, like Giles, I am interested in tracing Billy Budd ’s comparative frame for reading the plot’s British institutions, I also want to argue that that frame is less submerged than Giles suggests. When Billy Budd is impressed into naval service from the trade ship the Rights-of-Man (calling up expatriate Thomas Paine’s 1791 treatise of the same title), Melville’s novella stages his subsequent impressment as a narrative analogically, if obliquely and uncertainly, responding to a specifically American, (post)colonial framing of the French Revolution. From the moment of his impressment (into naval service and into

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the type of the “Handsome Sailor”), Billy’s circulation between men and between competing readings of his character figures his desirable mobility both as a threat to Anglo-American political order – to its vision of an authoritative masculinity – and as aesthetically containable, impressi(ona)ble, within that order and vision. Any account of Billy Budd’s radical form and its triangulated erotic relations must begin with some acknowledgment of the fluid state of Melville’s unfinished manuscript itself. Beginning in 1886 as a headnote to his early poem “Billy in the Darbies,” Melville expanded, composed, and rewrote the manuscript of what would become Billy Budd over the next five years until his death in 1891. In the notes to their transcription of the “Genetic Text” in 1962, Harrison Hayford and Merton Sealts Jr describe how Melville’s gradual unfolding and rewriting of the manuscript seemed to involve a shifting alignment of his narrative voice, and of the novella’s values, from Billy, through Claggart, to Vere (16–43). While on one hand these compositional shifts might suggest a political movement from democratically egalitarian toward a more conservative treatment of institutionalized power and privilege, it is, I think, more productive to consider the novella, in its unpublished state, as afloat and ongoing, an unfinished text whose stylistic difficulties, erotic incoherence, and political fluidity engenders a fragmentary interrogation of novelistic form and an ambivalent reflection on the regulation of desire. Seeking to reorient Melville studies in the context of queer theory (rather than “the earlier critical focus and interests of gay studies” [155]), Michael Snediker argues that “Melville’s texts are most queer in their treatment of characters as irresolvable aesthetic problems,” in their commitment to an “extravagance and indiscriminateness” of style that exceeds “the parameters of analysis predicated on gender and sexuality per se” (156). Along these lines, Melville, in the fragmentary shaping of his novella, attends to Billy Budd’s mobility as a formal problem, a challenge to conventional means for delineating character, perspective, voice, and structure. But even as that challenge produces a text whose stylistic queerness refuses normative formulae for reading desires between men, that same text allows the “aesthetic” challenges of Billy’s story to motivate, coterminously, an abstractable, privileged form of manhood, embodied in the expanding space given over to Vere’s judgements in the text’s extant copy. Billy Budd holds in tension queerness and privilege as textual effects.

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Billy Budd’s Impressment While Melville’s novella critiques naval impressment for identifying the sailor as a floating subject readily available for redeployment, impressment functions as a model for the narrator’s efforts to structure Billy’s story as the mobilization of an anticipated type. Along these lines, the novella begins not with Billy but with a seemingly nostalgic cruising, a turning back to a “time before steamships” during which (or at least “then more frequently than now”) “a stroller along the docks of any considerable sea-port would occasionally have his attention arrested by a group of bronzed mariners, man of war’s men or merchant-sailors in holiday attire ashore on liberty.” The narrator quickly narrows his account of the “arrested” gaze to sexually ambiguous “certain instances” in which this group of men offer “spontaneous homage,” “flank[ing], or, like a body-guard quite surround[ing] some superior figure of their own class, moving along with them like Aldebaran among the lesser lights of his constellation”: “That signal object was the ‘Handsome Sailor’ of the less prosaic time alike of the military and merchant navies” (BB 43). The narrator’s unconvincing efforts to detach his desirous gaze from the “homage” of the shipmates, to displace his gaze through the movements of an anonymous “stroller,” are one with his seeming rhetorical struggle, rife with temporal qualifications (“then more … than now”; “occasionally”; “in certain instances”), over how to account for the “signal” character of the Handsome Sailor (as an aberration? as an emblematic instance?). Indeed, rather than merely offering a general introduction to Billy Budd’s more specific attractiveness as a character, the associative multiplicity of the narrator’s nod to Aldebaran serves, as John Wenke notes, to dramatize “how such a figuration transcends narrow boundaries of representation” (507); the narrator begins by tying his optic pull toward the sailor to a destabilization of the very representative terms by which Billy will be approached. In the second paragraph, the narrator narrows his gaze further, turning to a “somewhat remarkable instance” of personal reminiscence about “a common sailor, so intensely black that he must needs have been a native African of the unadulterate blood of Ham” (BB 43). Laura Doyle persuasively argues that the African’s framing presence allows Melville to place the innocent Anglo-Saxon Billy’s conflict with the corrupt French-Norman Claggart “under the sign of race and within the larger

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history of black-white Atlantic encounters” (205–6). Billy’s substitution for the African establishes his role as the “innocent racial man, the one who submits freely to law,” who “Melville most calls on us to desire and then to sacrifice” (207). Seeking to “simply add a racial ground” to earlier queer readings of Billy Budd (206), Doyle’s compelling argument nonetheless fails to recognize the extent to which Melville situates the narrator’s racializing approach to the “native African” as an exemplary challenge to legible stylizations of masculinity in an increasingly globalized, circumatlantic world. The narrator’s scopophilic gaze dwells on the sailor’s body as a site of fashioned contrasts (“the displayed ebony of his chest” against a “gay silk handkerchief ”; his “shapely head” being “set off” by “a Highland bonnet with a tartan band”). And the African becomes, through the narrator’s figures, a site for effusive yet elliptical transnational displays of homosocial intimacy: the “assortment of tribes and complexions” gathered around him respond to wayfarers’ “spontaneous tribute[s]” to the African with a “sort of pride in the evoker of it which the Assyrian priests doubtless showed for their grand sculptured Bull when the faithful prostrated themselves” (BB 43–4).1 Even as the African quickly generates such figurative multiplicity, Melville’s narrator seems to want to shut down the sailor’s analogous potential with the succeeding paragraph’s opening, “To return” (BB 44) – allowing the African, as Robert K. Wallace notes, to “live outside the trajectory of the story” the narrator “is about to tell” (64). Indeed, the narrator’s segue from the African to Billy Budd is markedly equivocal about the value of his own analogy: Billy is “[s]uch a cynosure at least in aspect, and something such too in nature, though with important variations made apparent as the story proceeds” (BB 44). Accordingly, Jane Mushabac has called into question the appropriateness of this opening sequence as we move from “the black handsome sailor, a hearty bold man” to, in Billy, “a certain anxiety, a certain hermaphroditic submissiveness” (155). But Mushabac’s concern misses, I think, the manner in which the narrator frames the African’s attractiveness as an almost passive effect, as an item of value generated between spectators – in René Girard’s terms, the “motley retinue” of the African’s shipmates desire this particular Handsome Sailor for the desire he generates in others, the “tribute of a pause and stare” (and, in an extension of this triangulation of desire, the narrator approximates this desire through the figure of “the faithful prostrat[ing] themselves”). Indeed, I would

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argue the African’s stylized performance and reception anticipates Billy’s own ambivalent fulfillment of and challenge to narrative desire. A late and expanded entry in the manuscript, the African exerts uncertain force on the text’s structural incorporation of Billy’s story, and, indeed, the narrator’s astrological discourse hints at his hermaphroditic ambivalence: as a “cynosure,” the African, like the Pole-Star (located at the tip of Ursa Minor), guides; but as Aldebaran (whose name comes from the Arabic for follower, al-dabaran), the African can only, strangely, follow. (The narrator’s scopophilic hovering over the black sailor’s interstitial state also evokes a dynamic at the heart of “Benito Cereno” [1855]: it resembles Amasa Delano’s charmed bewilderment when faced with “the colossal form” [62] of Atufal in chains, a performance that stages one of the orchestrators of a slave mutiny as the follower of the puppet-captain, Don Benito; at the same time, it recalls that story’s endpoint as the severed head of the mutiny’s instigator and the ship’s actual leader, Babo.) Questions of agency, of leading and following, also attend the narrator’s subsequent account of Billy’s acquirement by the British navy. Just as Lieutenant Ratcliffe, “[p]lump upon Billy at first sight in the gangway,” “pounce[s] on” (BB 45) him as the sole recruit to be taken from the Rights-of-Man even before a formal inspection of the crew, so too the narrator’s introduction of this event treats the impressment as a fait accompli, a moment preceding the novella’s plot proper: “It was not very long prior to the time of the narration that follows that he had entered the King’s Service, having been impressed on the Narrow Seas from a homeward-bound English merchantman into a seventy-four outward-bound, H.M.S. Bellipotent” (BB 44–5). This narrative impressment underscores Billy’s entry into the text, with “uncomplaining acquiescence” (BB 45), as a character whose manhood resides in his value as an object of exchange (especially between men) in an economy that precedes and defines him. When the shipmaster meets the lieutenant in his cabin the pair are in immediate agreement that the scene represents the passing, from one man to another, of the shipmaster’s “best man” (BB 46). And when Billy emerges from the forecastle, ready to leave, the lieutenant lays claim to his “beauty”: “Apollo with his portmanteau! – My man!” (BB 48). Billy’s impressment situates the sailor’s desirability for other men as a queerly mobilizing force – anticipating his “narration,” “plump[ing]” male attendants,

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seemingly inviting the nation-state’s violent intervention alongside the narrative’s anticipatory accommodation of his movement. Like the acts of compulsive violence and blessing that punctuate Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and its tale of compelled motion, two moments of impulsiveness (one violent, one verbal) shadow the story of Billy’s impressment into naval service and prepare the reader for his fatefully thoughtless striking of Claggart. The first of these signal moments comes in the shipmaster’s tale of Billy’s impulsive “drubbing” of “Red Whiskers,” the “buffer of the gang” who seeks to initiate “an ugly row” with the new recruit, “thinking such a ‘sweet and pleasant fellow,’ as he mockingly designated him to the others, could hardly have the spirit of a game-cock.” Billy’s almost unconscious beating of the man (the shipmaster describes him as having “let fly his arm” and “never mean[ing] to do quite as much as he did”) installs domestic peace, a “happy family,” on board: Red Whiskers now really loves Billy … [T]hey all love him. Some of ’em do his washing, darn his old trousers for him; the carpenter is at odd times making a pretty little chest of drawers for him. Anybody will do anything for Billy Budd. (BB 47) George B. Hutchinson reads this engagement of “traditionally feminine qualities of the crew” (390) as a sign of Billy’s embodiment of a Melvillean “feminine principle,” of an “ability to live in harmony with natural order” (389). But the violent initiation of this “feminine” order on board the Rights-of-Man also lays out a micro-narrative of the means by which Billy’s body opens him to the state’s intervention. Initially reacting, it seems, to a querying of his masculinity by a standard that encompasses violence, virility, and animality (as “game-cock”), Billy’s impulsive responses lead to his assumption of a pacifying role that gainsays his exchange from the domesticated decks of an all-male “happy family” to the navy’s ranks as defenders of the national hearth (“the fighting peacemakers”). Evoking recognizable American plotlines from the period of the novella’s historicized setting, Billy’s passage works as a kind of homosocial, oceanic relocation of stories (as in Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland and The Somnambulist) in which the imperiled family, subject to a potentially contagious, sexual menace, stands in for a fragile, post-revolutionary national imaginary.

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The compulsiveness of Billy’s striking out in the “Red Whiskers” episode also asks us to connect his at once violent and feminizing touch to his subsequent, politically freighted, spontaneous farewell to the symbolically named Rights-of-Man: the new recruit jumped up … and waving hat to his silent shipmates sorrowfully looking over at him from the taffrail, bade the lads a genial good-bye. Then, making a salutation as to the ship herself, “And good-bye to you too, old Rights-of-Man.” (BB 48–9) While the lieutenant takes Billy’s words as “a covert sally,” “a sly slur at impressment in general, and that of himself in especial,” the narrator notes that “Billy … was yet by no means of a satirical turn,” rendering him an appropriately unselfconscious subject for “enforced enlistment” (BB 49). Billy’s former vessel acquired its title, we are told, from its “hardheaded Dundee owner” who “was a staunch admirer of Thomas Paine, whose book in rejoinder to Burke’s arraignment of the French Revolution had then been published for some time and had gone everywhere” (BB 48). Edward Larkin locates in this passage’s invocation of Paine’s “radically democratic” appeal an anticipatory critique of Vere’s “Burkean approach to reading” (185), or what Dan Sabia calls his “Burkean, or … ‘aristocratic,’ prudence” (10). One could perhaps even extend the gendered implications of the novella’s ironic attention to Billy’s unconscious rebellion, noting how the narrator’s turning of Billy’s words resembles Mary Wollstonecraft’s seminal critique of Burke’s reactions to the French Revolution, her charge that Burke’s impassioned “romantic enthusiasm” would have taken, in France, the form of “a benevolent respect for the rights of men” (109). But beyond these political inflections, Melville also situates Billy’s former vessel in a larger practice of literary ship-naming: “In christening his vessel after the title of Paine’s volume the man of Dundee was something like his contemporary ship-owner, Stephen Girard of Philadelphia, whose sympathies, alike with his native land and its liberal philosophers, he evinced by naming his ships after Voltaire, Diderot, and so forth” (BB 48). Billy’s farewell to the Rights-of-Man as he takes up his new role in the English navy becomes, in this context, not just an ambiguous, supposedly unwitting critique of impressment as a failure for England’s “liberal” possibilities. It also, by way of the narrator’s

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return to the ship’s genealogy, brings to the surface the transnational, fluid quality of liberalism as a political language, its availability for quotation and displacement.

Claggart’s “Space Between” Impressment acts, in the opening movements of Melville’s novella, with doubled social significance: while it mobilizes its subjects in advance, decentring agency by putting bodies into circulation as militarily, scopophilically available, that same circulation throws into question any terms we might arrive at for understanding the social dynamics of the ship’s crew. It is the notorious ubiquity of the press gangs, “afloat and ashore,” during this period that allows the rumours of the masterat-arms John Claggart’s foreign birth (the idea that he could be a disgraced chevalier) to take on a “vague plausibility”; the “fact that nobody could substantiate this report was, of course, nothing against its secret currency,” the narrator notes, but he also keeps that currency “afloat” by only belatedly (after a page of supporting anecdotes) refusing to give “credence … to the gun-deck talk touching Claggart” (BB 65–6). Indeed, the narrator thickens these rumours through his incorporation of an anecdote from “a Baltimore Negro, a Trafalgar man” (an American who served in the British navy), about a warship drawing its crew “by drafts culled direct from the jails.” The story forms the basis for the narrator’s attempt to paint impressment as an understandable response to French militarism and to the Revolution’s “eclipsing menace,” a menace that leaves America not “exempt from apprehensions,” with some revolutionary veterans looking “forward to the possibility that the Atlantic might prove no barrier” for Napoleon’s “unexampled conquests” (BB 66). It is against the backdrop of such contextualization of impressment as an inevitable response to the spectre of a “mysterious and prodigious” (BB 66) political threat, transoceanic in its scope, that Melville’s narrator holds in uneasy suspension readings of Claggart’s desire for Billy as enforcing and subverting the privileged terms of imperial manhood. In chapter 8, Melville introduces the character of Claggart and his scopic fixation on Billy in strikingly suggestive terms: “His portrait I essay, but shall never hit it.” The narrator famously poses Claggart’s

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character as a stylistically queer problem for a text speaking to a normative audience: “To pass from a normal nature to him one must cross ‘the deadly space between.’ And this is best done by indirection” (BB 74). In a formative essay, Barbara Johnson argues that it is Claggart’s placement as a “seemingly meaningless gap in knowledge,” as the nature which must remain hidden, that shapes the discontinuous “plot of Billy Budd ” (584). But where Johnson finds in Claggart’s provocation of the reader a general condition for human cognition (“it is that which, within action, prevents us from ever knowing whether what we hit coincides with what we understand” [599]), Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick argues that Claggart’s particular form of “knowing” carries a more concrete signification. By associating the vagueness of character with an attentiveness suggestive of “diagnostic specifications” (Epistemology 96), Melville’s narrator codes his epistemological presence in the text as “homosexual-homophobic knowing,” or “[i]n a more succinct formulation, paranoia” (97). Sedgwick’s deft redirection of Johnson’s deconstructive approach suggests how questions of style generated by the master-at-arms evoke, even as they suspend, a queer account of Claggart’s epistemological significance. Indeed, I would argue that it is the stylistic mobility of Melville’s representation of Claggart’s obscure identity – floating between nations, suggesting a “seemingly meaningless gap in knowledge,” even as it codes the repression of a queer self – that allows for Billy Budd’s anxiously balanced vision of masculinity being shaped in the “space between” privileged “normal” and “hidden” perverse natures. The narrator’s difficulties in pinning down Claggart’s “hidden nature” prove particularly significant for the novella’s handling of Billy as an impressed subject on board the Bellipotent. Early on Billy learns to conduct himself with “heightened alacrity” on account of “the impression made upon him by the first formal gangwaypunishment he had ever witnessed, which befell the day following his impressment” (BB 68) – here, Melville revisits his targeting, in White-Jacket, of American scourging as an illegitimate and perverse importation of Britain’s “Articles of War.” In this retrospectively recalled scene (presumably taking place under the eye of the master-at-arms), Billy’s “impression” of the punished man’s body – “the culprit’s naked back under the scourge, gridironed with red welts and worse” – furthers impressment’s anticipatory shaping of character; to be impressed

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into service (successfully), Melville suggests, is to be impressed upon, to be rendered self-surveillant. Billy resolves never to “make himself liable to such a visitation or do or omit aught that might merit even verbal reproof ” (BB 68). In his efforts to avoid becoming a feminized target for disciplinary “impression,” he calls to mind Melville’s earlier transatlantic bildungsroman, Redburn (1849), in which the eponymous narrator remembers his fears for the “girlish youth,” Harry Bolton on board the Highlander: “How they hunted you, Harry, my zebra! those ocean barbarians, those unimpressible, uncivilized sailors of ours!” (253). Despite his efforts to extract himself from the ship’s violence, to render himself “unimpressible,” Billy finds, from the start, that he is subject to the “vague threat[s]” of Claggart’s network of informants (BB 69). When Billy turns to the veteran Dansker to explain the origins of his dilemma, he receives an answer “incomprehensible to a novice”: “Baby Budd, Jemmy Legs [meaning the master-at-arms] is down on you.” “Jemmy Legs! ” ejaculated Billy, his welkin eyes expanding. “What for? Why, he calls me ‘the sweet and pleasant young fellow,’ they tell me.” (BB 71) The old Dansker’s response positions Billy as always already under the foot of Claggart’s “jemmy legs” – as “jemmy” simultaneously suggests connotations of dandyism and of forcible opening, Billy’s “ejaculated” response suggestively and ironically establishes his erotic interpellation by Claggart’s power. Indeed, the veteran’s reactions to Billy (a “certain grim internal merriment”) suggests a further example of his incorporation into a preceding mythology: “Was it that his eccentric unsentimental old sapience, primitive in its kind, saw or thought it saw something which in contrast with the warship’s environment looked oddly incongruous in the Handsome Sailor?” (BB 70). Thus, Billy, through Claggart’s network of surveillance, finds himself brought into immediate contact with impressment’s aftereffects, with an anticipatory reading of his character (as “the Handsome Sailor”) that renders his body no less on display than that of the naked, scourged victim of corporal punishment. Claggart enters the text, then, as the embodiment of impressment’s capacity for making men’s bodies available as punishable, manageable,

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and desirable. At the same time, Claggart, by virtue of his “hidden nature,” circulates as an elliptical sign of that power’s potential for perverse investment in spectacular male corporeality and revolutionary “ejaculation.” This dynamic becomes more immediately apparent in the scene in which Claggart recognizes that it is Billy who, in the company of “the members of his mess,” has spilt his soup with “a sudden lurch”: Pausing, he was about to ejaculate something hasty at the sailor, but checked himself, and pointing down to the streaming soup, playfully tapped him from behind with his rattan, saying in a low musical voice peculiar to him at times, “Handsomely done, my lad! And handsome is as handsome did it, too!” (BB 72) The scene juxtaposes two forms of spillage – Billy’s uncontainable “stream[ing]” of the soup’s “greasy liquid,” and Claggart’s careful management of a “hasty” “ejaculation,” redirected into a “playfully” phallic tapping and his curiously flirtatious yet “equivocal” reprimand. Claggart’s movements suggest a form of power capable of turning the dangerous spillage of both others and himself to his advantage. Accordingly, Billy and his comrades feel a requirement to respond to Claggart’s “musical” voice: “as coming from a superior they were bound to laugh ‘with counterfeited glee.’” Billy may join the laughter, the narrator speculates, because he hears in them the note of his impressed character, “the allusion to his being the Handsome Sailor” (BB 72). And Claggart’s response, the narrator will go on to elaborate, suggests that he reads Billy’s spillage as “confirm[ing] to him telltale reports” of the foretopman’s behaviour from his spy, “Squeak”; “he must have taken” the “greasy fluid streaming” (the narrator presumes) “for the sly escape of a spontaneous feeling on Billy’s part more or less answering to the antipathy on his own” (BB 79). For Billy, his messmates, and Claggart himself, this scene plays out the confluent shaping of impressment as a master narrative on the ship, placing and containing eruptive and fluid forces through the invocation of an anticipatory framework for reading character. In this same scene, Claggart’s surveillant hold over the “stage” that is the ship’s deck is subject to a kind of counter-surveillance from the narrator (and, by extension, the narrator’s audience): “Not noted by Billy as not coming within his view was the involuntary smile, or rather

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grimace, that accompanied Claggart’s equivocal words. Aridly it drew down the thin corners of his shapely mouth” (BB 72). This ambiguous unveiling of Claggart’s body as a site of spillage prepares us for a further instance of unviewed, involuntary response in the scene’s aftermath: that functionary, resuming his path, must have momentarily worn some expression less guarded than that of the bitter smile, usurping the face from the heart – some distorting expression perhaps, for a drummer-boy heedlessly frolicking along from the opposite direction and chancing to come into light collision with his person was strangely disconcerted by his aspect. Nor was the impression lessened when the official, impetuously giving him a sharp cut with the rattan, vehemently exclaimed, “Look where you go!” (BB 73) The scene both exposes and conceals the “distorting” and “disconcert[ing]” qualities of Claggart’s “aspect,” registering their “impression” on the boy even as the narrator’s conditional voice (“must have”; “perhaps”) holds its shape vaguely in suspense as an “expression less guarded.” The narrator’s shift from an assured revelation of Claggart’s decisions (“he was about to ejaculate something hasty … but checked himself ”) to an equivocal report of his effects sits in tension with the text’s coterminous placement of the narrator and audience as privileged witnesses. Indeed, even as it turns on facial expressions we cannot see, the very structure of this extension (spillage?) of the soup-spilling scene invites the reader to assume a sense of critical privilege: proximity, for instance, encourages us to read Claggart’s “sharp cut” of the boy “with the rattan” as a violent displacement of his playful tapping of Billy only a few sentences earlier, passing/parsing the “space between” his acts. So where it is the “impression” made by a beaten male body that disciplines Billy as a self-surveillant subject, the “impression” left on Claggart’s anonymous beaten boy encourages the reader to return the gaze of power even as that power is shown to reside in a peculiarly evasive body; we are incited to unveil that which would refuse unveiling. Claggart’s doubled production of impressions – as evidence of power through corporal punishment and as indicators of the male body’s unstable social signification – is critical to the narrator’s dual alignment with impressment as a mobilizing, erotic style of knowing and with

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indirection as a path to understanding natures outside the normal. Claggart’s type exhibits “a mind peculiarly subject to the law of reason” but, at heart, finds “little to do with reason further than to employ it as an ambidexter implement for effecting the irrational” (BB 76). Melville plays with the narrative desire for a causal explanation of Claggart’s seemingly irrational fixation on the Handsome Sailor – to “invent” some “romantic incident” that would locate his “knowledge” of Billy “at some period anterior” to this scene would be, he notes, “not so difficult to do” (BB 73). But in place of this “anterior” narrative, he famously turns, in chapter 11, to a chiasmatically tautological phrase lifted from “a list of definitions included in the authentic translation of Plato”: “Natural Depravity, a depravity according to nature” (BB 75). Christopher Looby notes how despite the fact that these sentences “come as close as anything in the novella to citing something like a modern homosexual identity, a type of person characterized by an ‘innate’ but ‘hidden nature,’” the passage “at once deploys these terms and fuddles them with its definition from Plato, which makes the depravity just as natural as the normal nature to which it is otherwise meant to contrast” (31). Indeed, in quick succession the narrator seems to self-consciously recognize the potential of his explanation to “fuddle” not only his account of Claggart but the entire narrative project: acknowledging that the biblical resonance of his chosen phrase (“Natural Depravity”) will “little … commend these pages to a many a reader of today” (BB 76), he resolves, nevertheless, to let it stand and to leave “the resumed narrative … to vindicate, as it may, its own credibility” (BB 77). Sedgwick reads Claggart as an exemplary instance of the homosexual subject’s status in both “minoritizing” and “universalizing” narratives at the end of the nineteenth century (Epistemology 92) – he is both the marked outsider and the symptom of a broader culture of desire between men at this moment; he traces the contours of a homosocial state even as he represents that which must be homophobically excised from the public sphere. While I would not disagree with the suggestion that Melville locates the queer resonance generated around Claggart’s character as symptomatic of a larger maritime and military culture of desire between men, I would suggest that it is precisely the text’s refusal to define that desire as “homosexual” (in the emergent terminology of the late nineteenth century) that allows the text to mobilize two coexistent and conflicting discourses for reading Claggart’s queerness. For Looby,

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the text’s consistent suppression of the terms by which Claggart might be read as “homosexual” points to Melville’s growing interest (over the course of novella’s multiple drafts) in “the undoing of sexual identity by way of its radical historicization” (32), to his “emergent desire … to render the question of sexuality finally inscrutable” (33). Such a reading offers, I think, only half the story – Melville’s destabilization of the terms by which Claggart circulates among men signifies not only a radically “inscrutable” understanding of desire’s queer mobility, but also, and at the same time, a willingness to suppress such a radical reading of desire through the adoption of an aestheticizing style. Like the haziness of Claggart’s backstory, Claggart’s own “aesthetic” appreciation for the “charm” of Billy’s “innocence,” an innocence which he “despair[s] of ” attaining or sharing (BB 78), provides an elliptically suggestive model for the text’s appeals to a privileged masculine reader capable of abstracting himself (and his desires). In this way, Melville’s narrator makes “ambidexter” use of Claggart’s character, staging his body and its various events of impressment and impression, spillage and suppression, as essential to the novella’s ambivalent handling of political revolution and mutiny as moments of both promise and threat for Anglo-American democracy.

Managing Mutiny Melville’s generation of erotic and stylistic friction in the relationship between Claggart and Billy (and in Captain Vere’s subsequent attempted management of that relationship) is inextricable from the novella’s thematic interest in the historically specific threat posed by mutiny. In chapter 3, the narrator positions the uprisings at Nore and Spithead as stylistic subversions of “a Power then all but the sole free conservative one of the Old World” (this final phrase reveals him as a specifically American narrator) – the scene that he uses synecdochally to stand in for the mutinies is the signal event of “the bluejackets” running “up with huzzas the British colors with the union and cross wiped out.” Where mutiny enters the novella as a vandalistic mark of cancellation and “transmut[ation],” of “unbridled and unbounded revolt” (BB 54), the narrator is quick to note how official records elided this threat: “Such an episode in the Island’s grand naval story her naval historians

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naturally abridge”; the mutiny’s “details” are not “readily to be found in libraries” (BB 55). The challenge, for readers of Melville’s novella, is to determine just where the narrator (as American “naval historian”) fits in this rendering of the mutinies as stylistic conflict. While such “events cannot be ignored,” he declares, “there is a considerate way of historically treating them”: “If a well-constituted individual refrains from blazoning aught amiss or calamitous in his family, a nation in the like circumstance may without reproach be equally discreet” (BB 55). The distinction between the narrator’s “considerate,” “discreet,” and adroitly distanced approach to Britain’s “grand naval story” (in which most of the specifics of the mutinies, the defacement of the flag, are passed over) and the kind of “abridge[ment],” the erasure of “details,” that he identifies in previous histories is fuzzy at best. Narratives of mutiny and its suppression lay bare nationalist stylizations of masculinity embodied, for Melville, in the figure of Horatio Nelson, who will float in the text as a haunting model for Captain Vere. “Final suppression” of the mutiny at Nore was, the narrator notes, “only made possible perhaps by the unswerving loyalty of the marine corps,” by a forceful reinstatement, that is, of martial law. But the “plenary absolution” of the mutineers, necessary for the navy’s unity, came as a result of those same sailors “by patriotism, or pugnacious instinct, or by both” helping Nelson to attain his famous victories at the Nile and Trafalgar; the mutineer’s “distempering irruption of contagious fever” finds itself, in these battles, converted to a “scenic naval display” (BB 56). Nelson’s fatally “ornate publication of his person” (BB 57) at the battle of Trafalgar, appearing “in the jeweled vouchers of his own shining deeds,” “adorned … for the altar and the sacrifice,” signifies for the narrator the Admiral’s mastery of style (to the point that his embodied “acts” render each “heroic line in the great epics and dramas” mere “affectation and fustian” [BB 58]). It is for this reason, the narrator surmises, that Nelson was stationed on one of the more treacherous ships after the Nore mutiny in order to win the crew over “by force of his mere presence and heroic personality”; that manly “force” could not, however, be detached from its backing by state-sanctioned violence, from the stationing of lieutenants “with drawn swords behind the men working the guns” (BB 59). In White-Jacket, Melville holds up Nelson’s admirable adversity “to flogging” as the consequence of his witnessing of “the mutinous effects of government abuses in the navy – unknown in our times – and

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which, to the terror of all England, developed themselves at the great mutiny of Nore” (186). By contrast, in Billy Budd, Melville’s narrator underlines how violence and “scenic” redirection go hand in hand in Nelson’s manly management of mutiny; as in the case of the public scourging that makes such an “impression” on Billy, the sailor’s body becomes a site of both physical punishment and “display,” a display that reinserts the disciplined body as (perhaps) a sign of “patriotism” in the “annals” of the nation. The narrator’s mobile “divergence,” veering from the “main road” to “err into such a bypath” in his discussion of Nelson (a relatively late addition to the manuscript), prepares the reader for his introduction of Captain Vere. Vere’s career, like Nelson’s, spans Britain’s Atlantic empire, from his service as a “flag lieutenant” in “West Indian waters” at the Battle of the Saintes to his deployment in the Mediterranean fleet. And Vere, like Nelson, seems capable of moulding his crew into a peaceable entity (although the narrator, once more, introduces this idea with some indeterminacy) – noting that there was “nothing obvious in the demeanor of the officers” on board the Bellipotent to suggest “the Great Mutiny was a recent event,” the narrator moves onto a more universal statement: “In their general bearing and conduct the commissioned officers of a warship naturally take their tone from the commander, that is if he have that ascendancy of character that ought to be his” (BB 60). Where Billy is the body made to bear the narrative’s erotics of impressment, Vere’s body is to be judged, this suggests, by its bearing on others, by his transmission of “demeanor” and “tone” to his crew. But by placing Vere’s capacity for producing such an effect on his crew in such general terms, the narrator immediately assumes that equivocal style of representation for the Captain that lies at the source of the endless critical disagreements about his disciplinary role. While he may install a post-mutiny calm on his ship which resembles that bestowed by Nelson’s manly displays, the narrator suggests Vere’s particular “unaffected modesty of manhood,” evoking “a virtue aristocratic in kind,” gives the appearance of a man cut off from his surroundings, resembling not so much a captain as “the King’s guest, a civilian aboard the King’s ship” (BB 60). The description recalls Melville’s earlier account of Don Benito Cereno, the captain whose own constrained efforts to host the American narrator, Captain Delano, betray his imperiled status as a guest aboard his own hijacked

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ship. Like the unfulfilled maritime figures that populate Melville’s and, later, Conrad’s fictions, Vere stands at the end of the novella as a figure marked (in Nelsonian terms) by his unrealized, “secret” desires: “Unhappily he was cut off too early for the Nile and Trafalgar. The spirit that ’spite its philosophic austerity may yet have indulged in the most secret of all passions, ambition, never attained to the fullness of fame” (BB 129). Vere embodies Melville’s treatment of institutional power (specifically, transatlantic imperialism) as a stylistic force for both perverse masculinity and its disciplinary undoing. Indeed, his popular “appellation ‘Starry Vere’” (lifted from Andrew Marvell’s “Upon Appleton House”) hints at the fragilities that will mark out his particular aestheticized embodiment of naval discipline and aristocratic privilege: This ’tis to have been from the first In a domestic heaven nursed, Under the discipline severe Of Fairfax and the starry Vere. (BB 61) As Lawrence Buell notes, the undisclosed referent in this textual fragment (“This”) is the character of Mary Fairfax, daughter of Marvell’s patron Thomas Fairfax and Mary de Vere (so that the fragment immediately positions Melville’s Vere as a motherly figure). The quotation asks us, Buell suggests, to compare Billy (the “nominally British” republican) with Mary (the marriageable heir) as figures brought into the “regulated and constrained” disciplinary realm of “cosmopolitan culture”; in this way the novella captures Melville’s persistent “American postcolonial anxiety” (“Melville” 215–16) at the end of the century. The reference should also, as Charles Larson has shown, ask us to think of the correspondences between Vere and Thomas Fairfax, whose role in toppling the monarch to whom he was “by birth and nature sympathetic” had left him “paralyzed by guilt and melancholy” in his country retreat (66). But, by virtue of the vexed sexual politics of Marvell’s paean to the colonial power of his patron, Melville’s poetic citation suggests an even more complicated form of transnational anxiety. By refusing to fill out the fragmented quotation, the unspecified reference (“This”) suspends Captain Vere between being the agent and the object of such “discipline,” a suspension, or perhaps “divergence,” present in the

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very name it bestows upon him, chiming not so much as a rhyme but as an enactment of the severance implicit in its coupled line-ending (seVere). And that very doubling of the disciplinary-disciplined subject evokes a similar structure at play in Marvell’s poem: Melissa E. Sanchez has recently argued that Mary appears at this point in the poem as a representation of “control and cultivation of nature,” both as a “straightening” (the word is Marvell’s) curb on the poet’s onanistic “fantasy of erotic pleasure” in the forest, and in her subjection to “a conjugal ideology” that leaves her “as cultivated as the lands with which she is identified” (90–1).2 Melville, thus, frames Vere’s presence as a captain and a pacifier of contagious mutiny in crucially stylistic terms (he has a passion for his private library but lacks “literary taste”), and establishes his performance of masculinity as both forceful and liminal. The chapters describing Vere’s character (the final newly drafted sections of the novella) allow his particular poetic outlook to expand the text’s concern with queer style as a twinned force for subversion and enforcement of social order. Vere is at sea but his naval service has not “resulted in absorbing and salting the entire man” (he is severed); his residual, unsailorly manhood (encapsulated in his preference for his private library over “social converse”) renders him, for his shipmates, “a dry and bookish gentleman” with “a queer streak of the pedantic” (BB 62–3, emphasis in original). That same “queer streak” determines Vere’s strictly disciplinary, or severe, responses to the current revolutionary moment as he finds, in his reading, “confirmation of his own more reserved thoughts”: “His settled convictions were as a dike against those invading waters of novel opinion social, political, and otherwise, which carried away as in a torrent no few minds in those days, minds by nature not inferior to his own” (BB 62). In Vere, then, Melville locates an aristocratic, consciously textualized style that, under the gaze of his crew and the narrator, situates his embodiment of naval power as both out of place (like the phallically challenged “King’s yarn in a coil of navy rope”) and, as a consequence, peculiarly capable of keeping the current of mutinous energies in place. Where Billy’s queerness circulates as an effect of the desires and discourses that precede him and condition his bodily performances, Vere enters the text as a divergent imperial force (“a migratory fowl that in its flight never heeds when it crosses a frontier” [BB 63]).

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When Claggart brings his false accusations of mutinous conspiracy against Billy to Vere, Melville shapes this climactic encounter between the three men as a flashpoint illuminating the queerly resonant, interconnectedness of revolution, impressment, and mutiny. Recalling the narrator’s earlier positioning of the reader’s approach to Claggart as indirect and “in between,” Vere moves swiftly from initial alarm at Claggart’s complaints to “an intuitional surmise,” “obscure in form,” that he will have to reorient his approach to the “supersensible and strained” quality of Claggart’s “patriotic zeal” and his “self-possessed and somewhat ostentatious manner” (BB 94); it is Claggart’s excessive style rather than the political threat posed by the content of his report that demands his management. Vere proposes a “quiet, undemonstrative” (BB 96) solution, a “shifting of the scene” from the deck to his private quarters, summoning Billy to a kind of makeshift stage so that he can “scrutinize the mutually confronting visages” (BB 98). The solution extends his already voyeuristic interest in the Handsome Sailor, who, he thinks, “in the nude might have posed for a statue of young Adam before the Fall” (BB 94); he has, we learn, previously contemplated promoting Billy to “captaincy of the mizzentop” in order to station him in “a place that would more frequently bring him under his own observation” (BB 95). As such, Vere’s decision to manage possible mutiny via a path that “guard[s] as much as possible against publicity” underlines his embodied doubling of privileged power and alienated difference: his scene-shifting returns his gaze to the secluded ship-space that has marked him out as “queer,” even as it acts to discipline the contagious, uncontained quality of Claggart’s accusations. Vere’s stage-setting arrangement of Claggart and Billy in his cabin calls to mind Melville’s persistent interest in scenes of vexed hospitality. For instance, the shift uncannily recalls Benito Cereno’s tortured efforts to entertain Delano in his captain’s quarters, his seemingly bizarre performance as a host failing to communicate his imperiled position to the unwitting, American narrator. Of course, it might also remind us obliquely of the narrator’s movements as guest in the uncannily paired scenes of cloistering in “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids.” In quite different ways, both of these earlier tales work to trouble privileged experiences of hospitality, and, indeed, the spatialized ambivalence of Vere’s new “scene” (recalling Nelson’s use of “scenic … display”) registers as a crisis in the terms of hospitality that guide his

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movements. When Billy finds “himself in the cabin, closeted” at the start of the next chapter (so that the narrative ellipsis reenacts, once more, the sailor’s anticipatory placement or impressment), he also reads the scene as hospitable – in perhaps our only insight into his unfiltered thought, Billy assumes that the captain “looks kindly on me” (BB 98). But these same conditions of hospitality, the decorum or “forms” in which Billy trusts and which Vere hopes will bring out the truth of the matter (and the innocence of Billy), are the same forms that will betray them (in Derrida’s terms, Vere becomes hostage, both host and guest – l’hôte – to the very terms of hospitality he relies on).

Executing Billy David Greven describes Billy’s stutter as “the story’s vital wound,” signalling the sailor’s “incompletely armored masculinity, and therefore his phantasmatic availability as a feminized male sexual object” (Men 207–8). Billy’s violent, hypermasculine refusal of this feminized potential becomes the means by which he (and Melville) deal “death to the desire he instigates but abhors” (both by killing Claggart and by setting in motion Billy’s death sentence) (218). What I would add to Greven’s incisive reading is that Billy’s fatal fall also takes the form of a crisis of style, a crisis shaped by the American narrator’s vexed sympathies for his failed republican protagonist. When Billy stutters, wordless, in the face of Claggart’s accusations, Vere “immediately divine[s]” his “startling impotence” but proves incapable of redirecting its import – his “fatherly tone” in fact engenders “yet more violent efforts” at speech, culminating in the flatly told, fateful act: “his right arm shot out, and Claggart dropped to the deck” (BB 99). Where Nelson and the narrator (in albeit uncertain terms) suggest mutiny can be contained through a “discreet” style (both at the scene of revolution and in its retelling), Billy’s stutter forms the effeminate gap that must haunt any such masculine rhetoric of suppression. At the same time, his sudden physical strike – narrated, as Nancy Ruttenburg notes, on the surface, with a discreet attention to “frontage” that can, paradoxically, only encourage speculation (95) – unearths the threat of martial law and state-sanctioned violence (the “drawn swords” lurking) that guarantees such performance of “discreet” power. The narrator’s flat description

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of Billy’s mobilized body encapsulates the doubled form of Melville’s rhetorical corporealization of the Handsome Sailor: like the stutter that gives way to the fist, the passage’s discretion has the capacity to function as both an opening out of the body’s meaning, its “availability,” and a closing off of its significance, a reduction of the event to an act under law and beyond intention. In keeping with the novella’s broader interest in circumatlantic masculinity, Melville frames Vere’s stylized approach to Billy’s compulsive violence as a gendered event shaped by the maritime environment. Prior to the scene of Claggart’s death, the narrator obscurely notes how the ship, while “on detached service of more important kind” than mere scouting, had chased a French frigate that it encountered when it “was almost at her furthest remove from the fleet” (BB 90). But if these details perhaps partially justify Vere’s prompt assembly of the drumhead court, they are just as significant for drawing our attention to the subsequent rhetorical presence of the novella’s Atlantic seascape. Before addressing the assembled men, Vere stands at the porthole, “apparently in one of his absent fits,” “gazing out … upon the monotonous blank of the twilight sea”; then, “arouse[d]” and “energize[d]” by the men’s “low earnest tones,” Vere turns and climbs “the slant deck in the ship’s lee roll, without knowing it symbolizing thus in his action a mind resolute to surmount difficulties even if against primitive instincts strong as the wind and the sea.” Vere’s unconscious performance of both a mesmerized gaze upon and a determined struggle with a “primitive” sea then translates into an argument for the court to abandon its sympathies for Billy’s plight. Appealing to their respect for the forms of state and “martial law” (the king’s buttons), Vere asks the men to put aside their “natural” sense of the youth’s innocence: “Though the ocean, which is inviolate Nature primeval, though this be the element where we move and have our being as sailors, yet as the King’s officers lies our duty in a sphere correspondingly natural? So little is that true, that in receiving our commissions we in the most important regards ceased to be natural free agents” (BB 110). What is at stake in such a conceptualization of duty is an idea of pure manhood – to give up one’s “natural free” agency in determining the mutineer’s fate, one also surrenders “the feminine in man.” The movement of the “heart,” Vere declares, can only impede “the imperial” conscience of a “formulated … code”: “she must here be ruled out” (BB 111) as the Mutiny Act “resemble[s] his

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father” (war) and, like war, “looks but to the frontage, the appearance” (BB 112). (Vere’s antioceanic logic resembles, in quite a different key, Ishmael’s attraction to and ultimate rejection of Ahab’s sensibility as the product of “many long night-watches in … remote waters,” of “receiving all nature’s sweet or savage impressions fresh from her own virgin, voluntary, and confiding breast” [Moby-Dick 73]). Vere demands a judgement that only attends to movement (that of Billy’s fist) and that, in abandoning the motive force of the “feminine” and the “inviolate” ocean, promises to produce a story stripped of any interior: “Budd’s intent or non-intent is nothing to the purpose” (BB 112). But despite speaking against the heart’s intercessions (acting like some “tender kinswoman” before a judge), it is to the heart that Vere returns to settle his “less convinced than agitated” audience (BB 111): “I feel as you do for this unfortunate boy. But did he know our hearts, I take him to be of that generous nature that he would feel even for us on whom in this military necessity so heavy a compulsion is laid” (BB 113). Confined to a nearby compartment as the jury deliberates, Billy and his “feminine” qualities as a man of feeling are quite literally impressed into service by Vere in this scene – through his deft deployment of the subjunctive mood, the captain anticipates, for the court, how the condemned man “would” respond “did he know” their feelings about him. But Vere also adopts the language of “compulsion” to describe not Billy, the mobilized referent, but the court, anticipating (as he does throughout his address) their verdict as “military necessity.” In this way, Vere’s final exhortation to the jury manages to destabilize an appeal to an isolated, androcentric code, revealing its dependence on “feminine” rhetoric, even as, at the same moment, it displaces the effects of that code’s “compulsion,” locating the men who enforce its rigid order (rather than the men who bear its violence) as its “heavy” victims. The question of how to read Vere’s alternately impassioned and dispassionate plea has, of course, defined many critical responses to Melville’s novella: is the narrative condoning Vere’s judgement and his adoption of a military rhetoric of “form” in a “testament of acceptance,” or critiquing it in a “testament of resistance”? Rather than resolve this longstanding debate, I would prefer to consider the ways in which the narrator shapes our understanding of Vere’s address as a not entirely successful exercise in rhetorical force and gendered style. I do not mean by this return to language to simply repeat the alternative critical

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path opened out by Barbara Johnson’s deftly deconstructive account of the undecidability, the “difference within,” that haunts each act of judgement in the novella (595), or to detail what Sharon Cameron terms the text’s insistent “establishment and dissolution of binaries” (240n8). Vere’s rhetorical and corporeal acts of representation need to be read, as I have already begun to suggest, as entries into a specific history of military and masculine style, rather than merely symptomatic of language’s innate incommensurability. Arguing that Billy Budd signals an “appeal for a judgment,” Brook Thomas suggests that poststructuralist readers risk complicity with a “repressive political system” when they identify Billy’s stutter as a solely textual problem, an ambiguous “gap” in language (209); deconstruction, in such an instance, confines “man to an ahistorical, textual world. Man becomes truly impressed” (210). But if Thomas’s Marxism promises freedom for the reader from complicity with impressment, its textual basis for such a claim is not entirely convincing (and, as such, revealing); conscious of the treacherousness of identifying absolute judgements, Thomas rests his critique of Johnson’s approach on a suggestion that “the text itself implies that basis for judgment” (203). The difficulty is that Melville’s novella specifically complicates the distinction Thomas draws between impressment and implication as textual effects. What makes Billy Budd so compelling (that is, both violently compulsive and fascinating) is its capacity to invite both judgement of Vere’s power and pleasure in the suspension of Vere and his manhood as sites of textual play; Vere’s style impresses Billy even as it evokes a queer understanding of desire that emerges from language’s refusal of a clear “basis” for “implied” readings of characters, their motives, and their actions. Vere begins his address as a seemingly self-conscious effort to choose a style capable of imposing his predetermined verdict concerning the need for Billy’s execution on the court. The narrator disrupts this individualized vision of rhetorical power by drawing attention to the motive power of language itself (and specifically the figures of mutiny and impressment). Where Vere approaches his speech as an exercise in persuading “well-meaning men not intellectually mature,” the narrator prepares us for the difficulties he will encounter by noting the captain’s inability to disguise “the influence of ” his “unshared studies,” the manner that has previously led to that “imputation of a certain pedantry” (BB 109) that defines the “queer” streak in Vere’s character. Midway

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through the speech, Vere’s efforts appear not wholly effective: having paused to “earnestly” study the reception of his call to not “let warm hearts betray heads that should be cool,” Vere “abruptly chang[es] his tone” to meet the “spontaneous conflict” he perceives (BB 111). It is at this point that, in an effort to persuade the court to focus on Billy’s act rather than his “intent or non-intent,” Vere evokes deaths of “impressed men” on the ship – “Englishmen forced to fight for the King against their will” and “cut down,” in battle, “in the same swath with our volunteers” – as evidence of war’s sole concern with “frontage”; like the French enemy killing their impressed troops, the court should pay no heed to the accused man’s motives. The rhetorical return of impressment as an analogy, however, shapes Vere’s speech and its effects in ways that seem to exceed the captain’s “intent” (indeed, it underlines the instability of a speech about the irrelevance of motive whose style is shaped, more that it ought to be, by predetermined judgement, by intention). In the end, it is not so much Vere’s “tone” that appears to guide the court in its return of the desired guilty verdict but his choice to frame the decision as one shaped by “the recent outbreak at the Nore” (BB 112) and the implications their verdict might have for “the unconfirmed tone of the fleet at the time” (BB 113). Where Vere approaches his speech as a rhetorical opportunity to bring his men toward what he perceives to be a sound judgement, those men’s responses are shaped most forcibly by fears concerning an unpredictable style, an “unconfirmed tone,” that they locate in the bodies of Billy’s fellow sailors – a “tone” that cannot, as the narrator has already alerted us, be divorced from the uncertainty generated on the British ships by the practice of impressment. This is not to say, however, that the narrator, rather than Vere, emerges as the ironic voice of authority or discursive control at this stage of the novella. Just as the “inviolate” ocean proves its irrepressible presence in the “feminine” figures of Vere’s speech, Vere’s specifically British defence of impressment and the king’s “imperial” code seems to shape the narrator’s subsequent tracing of a broader web of transatlantic military “compulsion” and masculine authority. In a move that echoes Vere’s search for an analogy for the court’s deliberations in the state of “impressed men” at war, the narrator proposes a correlation between this court’s situation and “that harassed frame of mind which in the year 1842 actuated the commander of the U.S. brig-of-war Somers to resolve, under the so-called Articles of War, Articles modeled upon the

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English Mutiny Act, to resolve upon the execution at sea of a midshipman and two sailors as mutineers designing the seizure of the brig” (BB 113). Recalling his earlier elusive advocacy for “discreet” attention to the nation’s flaws, the narrator rounds off his brief transatlantic segue forward in time with a terse, ambiguous refusal to spell out its significance: “History, and here cited without comment. True, the circumstances on board the Somers were different from those on board the Bellipotent. But the urgency felt, well-warranted or otherwise, was much the same” (BB 114). Critics have often returned to the question of Melville’s engagement with the Somers mutiny (through articles published in American journals at the time of the novella’s composition) and to his seemingly wavering judgement of the role played in the mutiny by his cousin, Lieutenant Guert Gansevoort. But the narrator’s passing reference to the incident is, I would argue, more significant as a signal instance of Billy Budd’s interest in the mobility of both dissent and discipline (and their resonance in readings of masculinity and the management of queer desire). The brief discussion naturally calls up Melville’s earlier, more extensive commentary on the incident in WhiteJacket, where the Mutiny Act is decried as “an importation from … Britain” (297). The return to this scene in Billy Budd invites the reader, as Paul Giles rightly notes, to consider how the “national situations” of the United States and Britain “complicate and interpenetrate each other’s local autonomy and identity” (84). But the introduction of the Somers mutiny “without comment” also reminds us of the American narrator’s ambiguous distance from the novella’s representation of military authority (and its suppression of revolutionary energy). Like Vere’s feminized exhortation to his men, the narrator’s analogy has the capacity to both inscribe and undo a transnational form of military authority.

“Aren’t It All Sham?”: Billy Budd’s “Impression” Vere’s and the narrator’s ambiguous enlistments of Billy’s body as the site of desire and discipline resonate in the questions of corporeal movement or immobility that attach to the scene of his hanging. At the moment of his execution, suspended from the yard-arm, the “pinioned figure” of Billy’s body “to the wonder of all” appears to show “no motion … none save that created by the slow roll of the hull in moderate weather, so

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majestic in a great ship ponderously cannoned” (BB 124). In the image of Billy’s seemingly resistant body, rocked by the motion of the ship, Melville gives the reader an iconic rendering of the novella’s doubled dynamic – the sailor’s body, held up for the consumption of both the ship’s crew and the text’s audience, suggests, in incommensurable proximity, the mobilizing desirability of the Handsome Sailor and, in his flaccid immobility, the absence of eros as a physical sign. His possibly willed silence inscribes a deathly disciplinary hold even as its suspension suggests a death by “extraordinary emotion” (BB 125), a refusal of the state’s erasure of the feeling man. In the same breath, the uncertain movements or absence of movement of Billy’s hanging corpse relay the inextricability of the queerly desirable male body from mobile geographies through the “slow roll” of the “great ship.” In closing, I want to examine how Melville frames the aftereffects of Billy’s execution as particularly visceral, textualized, and fragmented realizations of the novella’s tracing of masculinity as a dynamic, contested style. The novella’s conclusion exemplifies both Melville’s protomodernist investment in fragmentation and suspension, and his particular, queerly transatlantic contribution to imaginings of the masculine subject as a site of textual difficulty. For Sedgwick, the novella’s conclusion, marked by the “narrative fulcrum” of Claggart’s death and the “phosphorescent romantic relations between Vere and the doomed Billy,” spell out a phobic “fantasy trajectory toward a life after the homosexual” (Epistemology 127, emphasis in original). More recently, David Greven has suggested that the novella gives us “not life imagined after the homosexual but agonizingly with the homosexual, as exemplified by the novella’s spectacular depiction of male community’s constant embedding and expunging of mobilizing homosexual desires that remain murderously intangible yet forever circulated” (Men 215). For Greven, Billy Budd’s denouement performs a “striking political intervention” in the rigidity of American constructions of masculinity by identifying “homosocial community” as “a potentially tyrannical force”; but, at the same time, it makes Billy the agent of the novella’s troubling critique of “homoerotic attraction” and “homosexual desire” as a destructive source for such community (Men 217–8). Rather than adhere, as Greven does, to an interpretation of the text as practising a form of limited political critique (against homosocial normativity but also against homoerotic desire in general),

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I would argue that the novella’s tracing of structural and stylistic similarities between the state’s mobile impressment of its subjects and desire’s mobile destabilization of those same subjects complicates the terms of any such judgement of the text’s politics; any effort to extract the novella’s seemingly radical critiques of masculinity’s construction from its uncertain alignment with disciplinary mechanisms enforcing masculine norms is doomed to failure. Rather, Melville’s novella seems most motivated by the stylistic collisions made possible by manhood’s seemingly contradictory social formation and circulation. The effects generated by Billy’s final words, his final stylistic act through language, exemplify the ambivalent quality of his eroticized relationship to the state and to the body politic (as imagined in the homosocial space of the ship’s crew). In the “penultimate moment” preceding his execution, Billy reprises his first vocal role (the farewell to his previous ship) through the delivery of a salutation – “his words, his only ones, words wholly unobstructed in the utterance, were these: ‘God bless Captain Vere!’” (BB 123). Billy’s final “unobstructed” (non-stuttering) delivery seems to anticipate the impulsive echoes of Billy’s shipmates: Without volition, as it were, as if indeed the ship’s populace were but the vehicles of some vocal current electric, with one voice from alow and aloft came a resonant sympathetic echo: “God bless Captain Vere!” And yet at that instant Billy alone must have been in their hearts, even as in their eyes. (BB 123) The sailors’ seemingly unthinking repetition of Billy’s conventional benediction manages, in the same breath, to demonstrate both the state’s capacity for ideological impressment (converting the crew into “vehicles of some vocal current electric”), and impressment’s unstable containment of desire (the men’s feminine “hearts” make Billy the “resonant” object of their benediction despite their apparent obedience). Where Billy’s earlier fateful stutter made his body the site of a struggle within the novella’s yoking of the mutinous and the suppressive, his final “unobstructed” speech transfers that same struggle onto the collective body of the ship’s men. So in the immediate aftermath of the execution, the subversive potential of the crew’s seemingly faithful echo emerges in a less certain noise of “murmurous indistinctness,” an incipient

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“muffled murmur,” that the narrator suggests seems “to indicate some capricious revulsion of thought or feeling such as mobs ashore are liable to, in the present instance possibly implying a sullen revocation on the men’s part of their involuntary echoing of Billy’s benediction” (BB 126). Like Billy’s parting blessing, Vere’s quick suppression of this “murmur” and its “uncertain movement” (BB 127) reprises the yoking of discipline and its resistance as erotic forces. Matching the crew’s “inarticulate” stirrings, Vere’s officers respond with “silver whistles” that pierce “that ominous low sound, dissipating it” (BB 126) and a “drum beat to quarters” that “dissolve[s] the multitude” (BB 127). These sounds represent the “mechanism of discipline” (BB 126) working its way through the bodies of the men almost as “a sort of impulse,” or with “the effect of an instinct” (BB 127). Nevertheless, Vere’s famous imagined defence of this ideologically efficient suppression in terms of “forms, measured forms” connects the style of that suppressive force to the queer energies it would seem to undo. Vere ties this corporeal enactment of “[t]rue martial discipline” to “the import couched in the story of Orpheus with his lyre spellbinding the wild denizens of the wood” (BB 128). Vere’s “measured forms” are not, as most critics (both critical and supportive of Vere’s judgement) have suggested, merely the depersonalized rule of law; they are a seductive, potentially queer force. While Orpheus’s taming of the wood’s “wild denizens” suggests form’s capacity to control nature (much as Vere’s ordered drums compel what look like the “instincts” of his men), it also evokes the association of Orpheus with a charm resistant to what Herbert Marcuse termed “the repressive order of procreative sexuality” (171). Indeed, Vere’s doubled identification/destruction of Billy at the scene of Claggart’s death (“Struck dead by an angel of God! Yet the angel must hang!” [BB 101]) resonates with Orpheus’s fateful turn toward Eurydice in the underworld; it performs an alignment of Billy with the eternal feminine (the necessary absence located, in modernist thought, by Rainer Maria Rilke and later Maurice Blanchot, at the moment of textual creation). With his figurative “lyre” extending the perverse effects of Claggart’s mobilizing lie, Vere’s Orphic “spellbinding” of the Bellipotent’s men also reminds us (as Kathy Phillips points out) of Ovidian Orpheus’s turn toward pederasty in the wake of his loss and his own subsequent homophobic murder at the hands of avenging Thracian women (“Billy” 9).3

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Vere’s evocation of “forms” prepares us for the narrator’s often-noted framing of the novella’s conclusion as a challenge to the “symmetry of form attainable in pure fiction” (BB 128). The narrator’s dedication to “[t]ruth uncompromisingly told,” to “fact” over “fable,” would appear to align him with Vere in his enactment of a “[t]rue martial discipline.” But rather than appealing to “measured forms,” the narrator makes a case for the text’s lack of finish, its asymmetrical “form” and “ragged edges,” its failure to resemble “an architectural finial,” as the signs of its integrity (of course, the narrator’s split affection for formal symmetry and commitment to textual, even corporeal, fragmentation anticipates one of modernism’s driving dualisms, what T.S. Eliot’s speaker in The Waste Land terms the “shor[ing]” of fragments “against [his] ruins” [431]). Enacting once more his “discreet” inscription of “history,” Melville’s narrator produces a series of residual episodes that, in their paratactic placement beyond the point at which “properly” the Handsome Sailor’s “story ends” (BB 128), invite seemingly incommensurable readings of Billy’s narrativized, impressed body and its interpretive mobility. They suggest, at once, the enactment of a self-sustaining reproduction of ideology and an opening out of Billy’s story to uncontainable (and queer) resonances and geographical dislocations beyond the reach of the text. Four separate, brief reports ambiguously remobilize the Handsome Sailor’s name and body: Vere’s deathbed murmuring of “Billy Budd, Billy Budd,” without “accents of remorse” (BB 129); an article from “a naval chronicle of the time,” recounting Claggart’s murder as the attack of “one of those aliens adopting English cognomens” on a “respectable and discreet” figure with a “strong patriotic impulse” (BB 130); an account of sailors converting the “spar from which the foretopman was suspended” into a “monument,” like “a piece of the Cross” (BB 131); and, finally, the “rudely printed” ballad, “Billy in the Darbies,” which imagines Billy slipping into death like a dream (“I am sleepy, and the oozy weeds about me twist” [BB 132]). Each episode presents both a sign of impressment’s ideological reach beyond the death of Billy and an echo of Billy’s queerly attractive force. If Vere’s lack of remorse suggests an unrelenting commitment to Billy’s punishment, the youth’s repeated name cannot help but sound out the captain’s continuing devotion to this “angel of God.” While the newspaper’s rewriting of the terms of the conflict between Claggart and Billy suggests the state’s

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capacity to impress subjects into “alien” roles even after their passing, the “alien” narrator’s framing of the article as an act of “good faith” that has served to “deflect and in part falsify” the “facts” (BB 130) of the incident reminds us of the narrator’s own deflecting, “indirect” approach to Claggart’s character. The sailors’ veneration of the yardarm signals their continuing sense that “the penalty was somehow unavoidably inflicted from the naval point of view” (the mystery of naval law), as well as their enduring “impression” of Billy, “the fresh young image of the Handsome Sailor,” now “doubtless deepened by the fact that he was gone, and in a measure mysteriously gone” (the mystery of residual desire) (BB 131). The balladeer’s imagining of Billy’s acquiescent dreaming into death might appear to make the youth the willing subject of his own execution, but Billy (by the poet’s ventriloquism) also recasts his hanging – “Pendant pearl from the yardarm-end” – as strangely analogous to an earlier, unseen act of queerly solicitous male-nursing: “Like the eardrop I gave to Bristol Molly.” When the balladeer’s Billy zeugmatically declares “’tis me, not the sentence they’ll suspend” (BB 132), he offers us a shorthand enactment of the novella’s approach to his execution’s effects. It represents the merciless enforcement of the law, unwilling to suspend its sentencing; at the same time, as an enactment of military style (the crafting of a “sentence”), it cannot help but subject Billy to the mobilities of language (just as the suspended body cannot help but move with the motions of the ship). If we enter Billy Budd, Sailor (An Inside Narrative) through a series of anticipatory figures – the type of the “Handsome Sailor”; the African “cynosure” – we leave with a renewed sense of the mobility of both Billy’s type (in the “artless” poem of his successor) and his oppression (the travelling of his hanging spar “from ship to dockyard and again from dockyard to ship” [BB 131]). Through figurative movements (by analogies that render Billy’s character transatlantically resonant) and geographic movements (across unspecified Mediterranean waters near Gibraltar), the story of Billy Budd traces the inscription of both a militantly disciplined masculinity and an elusive, queerly compelling “image” of manhood. Mobility, for these visions of manliness, can signal both the pervasive reach of discipline and the unfixable quality of desire. The American narrator’s fluid approach to his story asks us to read this doubled circulation of Billy’s masculinity as akin to, and perhaps even an effect of, literary style – alternately “discreet” and extravagant,

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the narrator situates his own transatlantic distance from the story’s British/Mediterranean setting as a space capable of both extending and challenging Anglo-Saxon visions of the disciplinary nation-state. In this way, Melville’s queerly transatlantic turning back to the management of revolutionary fervour at the dawn of the nineteenth century offers up a dual genealogy for the production of Anglo-American masculinity, yoking the disciplinary and the perverse. At the same moment, Billy Budd casts the historical style required to translate the “deadly space between” the perverse and the normal as a crossing-over capable of remaking fictional form. Impressed into service in more ways than one, Billy leaves an “impression” that necessarily traces queer desire’s central and challenging presence in imaginings of men, of the nation, and of the textual spaces between men and nations.

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Queer Wanderings Transatlantic Piracy and Narrative Seduction in Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Master of Ballantrae

“Sure, no one could wish to read anything so ungenteel as the memoirs of a pirate, even an unwilling one like me!” So declares Chevalier Burke, James Durie’s Irish companion and (briefly) narrator as he “pass[es] swiftly” over the “pretty fortunate business” (MB 41) of their time as pirates. Yet Burke’s swiftness runs counter to Robert Louis Stevenson’s clear interest, in The Master of Ballantrae, in the allure and structure of this “ungenteel,” violent episode in which James, or “the Master,” stages a mutiny and steals a treasure having been taken prisoner by the grotesquely violent Captain Teach. Upset by the Master’s abrasive imperiousness as they bury the treasure in Upstate New York, Chevalier Burke later notes how he “had contracted on board the pirate ship a manner of address which was in a high degree unusual between gentlemen” (MB 56). Piracy becomes, in Stevenson’s novel, a “contracted … manner,” a contagious mode of performance shaping not only the Master’s masculine identity – and his homosocial and homoerotic circulation “between gentlemen” – but also the peripatetic, protomodernist form of the narrative itself. Rather than reading Stevenson’s novel, in George Moore’s well-known terms, as “a story of adventure with the story left out” (354), this chapter traces how the fleeting narrative of James Durie’s adventures as a transatlantic pirate captain haunts The Master of Ballantrae. Where Melville’s Billy Budd engages in a narrative figuration of the practice of naval impressment, Stevenson allows the story of a piratical conversion to become a structuring trope for his novel about fraternal rivalry (and intimacy), a trope that engenders a quite different formal imagining of masculinity. The episode in which James Durie “contract[s]” his piratical “manner,” detailed in

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the chapter entitled “The Master’s Wanderings,” queerly unsettles the novel’s relation (through the voice of the novel’s principal narrator, Ephraim Mackellar) to more ordered forms of narration and manhood associated with the domestic, the national, and the reproductive. Stevenson’s writing bears the imprint of his abiding interest in Melville and, especially, his Pacific novels, Typee and Omoo – in a letter from 1888 (the year Ballantrae first began its serial run in Scribner’s Magazine), Stevenson wrote to Charles Baxter, on the eve of his arrival in the South Seas, imagining his future “book of travels” as second only to “Herman Melville perhaps, who is a howling cheese” (Letters III.78). Frank McLynn makes the case that Melville can be felt as a “pervasive” influence in The Master of Ballantrae, providing (in Moby-Dick) the archetype for Stevenson’s “pursuit romance” and its sustained “ambivalence and ambiguity” (308). Indeed, The Master of Ballantrae and Billy Budd, in spite of their pronounced differences, share much in common, and these points of connection help to illuminate Melville’s and Stevenson’s particular queerly transatlantic contributions to experiments in novelistic form. Written at almost the same time (despite the delayed publication of Melville’s manuscript), both texts look back to political turmoil in the previous century even as their themes suggest more contemporary concerns with late nineteenthcentury imperialism and its discontents. Where Melville’s return to the French Revolution and its felt aftereffects and suppression in the British navy provides the basis for an ambiguous meditation on the nature and costs of an Anglo-American military culture, Stevenson’s interest in Bonnie Prince Charlie’s Jacobite rebellion of 1745 provides the starting point for his novel’s ambivalent treatment of revolutionary politics and (anti)heroism. Crucially, even though James Durie, as a late embodiment of the familiarly dangerous Byronic hero, appears radically different from the passive, almost vacuous protagonist of Melville’s novella (and perhaps owes more to Moby-Dick’s Captain Ahab), both narratives work to situate their attractive male centres as disorientingly produced by the desires that cluster around them; both texts enact their inconsistent critiques of Britain’s colonial order through this doubled placement of their protagonists as privileged attractive subjects and passively mobilized objects; and both texts turn on a pivotal configuration of shipspace as simultaneously queer and homophobically suppressive.1 But for all the parallels of these novels in

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their approach to the politics of masculinity, The Master of Ballantrae works through an alternative formal understanding of how such an approach might reshape narrative fiction. If Melville’s accretive yet elliptical character studies look forward to the intensely and ambiguously introspective quality of later modernist fiction, Stevenson’s novel provides an early example of the mobilization of exilic wandering as both a structural device and a figure for epistemological uncertainty, anticipating experimental reanimations of picaresque form by the likes of James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, and Claude McKay. Joseph Bristow has suggested that one can trace, in Stevenson’s oeuvre, “a larger pattern of disillusionments” moving from “the Crusoe myth” of appropriation as adventure “towards the restless form of alienation to be located in literary modernism” (Empire 123). Certainly, one can read The Master of Ballantrae as a key text in that transition: its narrative of a destructive journey from the frustrated promise of European revolution to alienation in the supposedly “savage country” (MB 136) of northern New York looks forward to the bleak tales of dilapidated Anglo-Americans in his final Pacific writings. As the setting for both the Master’s formative piratical adventure and, later, for his seduction of Mackellar, the Atlantic figures forth an uncanny space outside or between nations in which Stevenson’s novel probes the queer forms of mastery – appropriative and alienating – that order national narratives. Critics have long commented on the heterogeneity of Stevenson’s narrative structure in The Master of Ballantrae. Carol Mills, for instance, describes the novel as a “hybrid” story of Scottish “historical romance” and international “adventure yarn”: “at a fundamental level it is experimental, intermingling the two sub-genres in the manner of a collage” (123). Rather than reading the novel as a collage, however, I want to consider the significance of sequence for the arrangement of Ephraim Mackellar’s manuscript (and the various paratexts attached to it). In a manner resembling the rhetorical impressment of Billy Budd, Stevenson’s novel draws readers into an anticipatory and seductive pattern of narrative framing; readers encounter James Durie (the novel’s eponymous “Master”), and the sensational and piratical aspects of his story, through a series of approaches that suggest his presence precedes him and which prepare the reader for his magnetic appeal. In this way, the narrative structure ambivalently replicates the very process of seduction that James Durie seeks to use to “master” others in this

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novel; it mimes his projection of a mythology that precedes and justifies his manner. As such, the brief story of James Durie’s mutinous rise to the position of transatlantic pirate captain plays out, in miniature, the novel’s broader uneasy interest in the contagious and queer attractiveness of piracy and pirate fiction, and its figurative use of the Atlantic as an unsettling space. At the same time, this anticipatory pattern ensures that the national narratives – through which the novel has predominantly been read – are always framed by broader transnational concerns, calling into question the provincial and nostalgic terms by which Mackellar seeks to read his “Winter’s Tale.”

Anticipating the Master: The Master of Ballantrae’s Paratexts The Master of Ballantrae’s various paratexts – the dedication, the unfinished note on the novel’s genesis, and the preface – play a critical role in establishing the novel’s anticipatory model for desire and masculine identity, pulling into relation notions of transnational analogy, formal incoherence, and unsettling seduction.2 Recalling the novel’s composition “among distant and diverse scenes,” “much upon the sea,” Stevenson’s dedication to Sir Percy and Lady Shelley immediately establishes a relationship between the novel’s composition, its narrative structure, and oceanic traversal. Stevenson remembers his “company on deck,” in the course of his seaborne travels, as being made up of the character of his “fraternal enemies,” the setting of Durrisdeer, and “the problem of Mackellar’s homespun and how to shape it for superior flights.” But if such narrative difficulties “ran often in his mind at sea,” and were only “dismissed (something of the suddenest) on the approach of squalls,” Stevenson likewise dismisses his own critical struggles and achievements in favour of a genial appeal to the Shelleys’ less intellectualized love of boats: “It is my hope that these surroundings of its manufacture may to some degree find favour for my story with seafarers and sea-lovers like yourselves.” While the dedication announces, in its opening sentence, Stevenson’s hopes for a novel whose form seeks to approximate its epic scope – “Here is a tale which extends over many years and travels into many countries” – it evokes the more accessible “surroundings” of its “manufacture” as an

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alternative lure for the reader. In fact, even the exotic seaside location of the dedication’s composition wryly serves, for Stevenson, as the grounds of an appeal, the medium for an apparitional encounter of author and reader: “at least here is a dedication from a great way off: written by the loud shores of a subtropical island near upon ten thousand miles from Boscombe Chine and Manor: scenes which rise before me as I write, along with the faces and voices of my friends” (MB 3). The dedication anticipates, albeit in muted and ironically comical terms, the novel’s incorporation of both an epic conceptualization of traversal (temporal, geographic, thematic) and a more popular and accessible narrative of passage (of “seafarers and sea-lovers,” of pirates); it looks forward to the novel’s own abrupt and elliptical splicing of these narrative modes. Stevenson’s notes on the novel’s genesis – which, in his initial plans for them, would have preceded the narrative – builds on and complicates the dedication’s appeal to an originary “manufactur[ing]” of narrative form. They suggest that The Master of Ballantrae (both the character and the novel) emerged from a seductive demand for imaginary traversal. This time, rather than providing a supposedly accessible window onto the world that precedes the text, Stevenson’s description of the scene of composition treats geography as a site of compulsive desire and discursive slippage. Calling up the disparate settings of Saranac Lake, New York (the scene of inspiration), India (the source of the story’s germ), and the Scottish moors (the site of the germ’s antecedent), the notes underscore the novel’s transnational imaginary, tying this geographic traversal to an imaginative process that renders the writing of desire, and the desire to write, as always already begun. The notes initially position reading (specifically reading Frederick Marryat’s The Phantom Ship) as a generative act, producing Stevenson’s desire to write a novel of epic scope, “a story of many years and countries, of the sea and the land, savagery and civilization” that could “be treated in the same summary elliptic method” as Marryat’s book. Stevenson’s desire maps onto his vision of a novel that would initiate his reader’s desires – he gropes for a mythic beginning that (like Marryat’s borrowed legend) would prepare “his readers on the very title-page” (MB 222) for something of epic scope. Margaret Cohen reads Marryat’s epic maritime novel (in which Philip Vanderdecken traverses the globe in an effort to contact and save his father, Mynheer, the cursed Flying Dutchman) as a text with “imperial overtones,” tracing

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out a vision of “British subjectivity” and “national identity” as “not a place but a world order of unobstructed movement” (168). If, in The Phantom Ship, it is the queerly haunting character of Schriften (who has made a pact with the devil to forestall Vanderdecken’s efforts) who binds the disparate geographical settings of the quest, we might locate in Stevenson’s allusion to Marryat a formative model for the novel’s ambivalent use of James Durie’s compellingly queer, almost spectral mobility, its ambivalent challenge to and mimicry of the British imperial subjectivity embodied in his brother. In his notes, Stevenson claims that Marryat’s novel points him to his landing on “a singular case of a buried and resuscitated fakir” as a suitable hook for his prospective story, but it is a narrative germ that eludes his control, relocating, it seems, by the volition of his American surroundings: “On such a fine frosty night, with no wind and the thermometer below zero, the brain works with much vivacity; and the next moment I had seen the circumstance transplanted from India and the tropics to the Adirondack wilderness and the stringent cold of the Canadian border” (MB 222). It is in the context of this compulsive transnational shift, this un-mastered effort to write the desires of a reader, that Stevenson summons the account of James Durie’s genesis. The Master’s character becomes a narrative device for solving a mythographical problem: “If the idea, then, was to be of any use at all for me, I had to create a kind of evil genius to his friends and family, take him through many disappearances, and make this final restoration from the pit of death, in the icy American wilderness, the last and the grimmest of the series” (MB 223–3). And that emergence of Durie’s “evil genius” provides, in itself, the “solution” to an even earlier and further removed imagining of “the mutual tragic situation of the men of Durrisdeer,” a “story conceived long before on the moors between Pitlochry and Strathardle” (MB 223). Assuring “evil genius” its place in the narrative schema as a seemingly necessary response to the germ’s geographical scope and to its strange temporality, the notes look forward to (or reflect back on) the Master’s own (and, unwittingly, Mackellar’s) seductive staging of compulsion and necessity as the grounds for his attractiveness. Stevenson’s completed preface (planned for the Edinburgh edition) extends the novel’s anticipatory narrative framing of the reader’s first approach to James Durie, metatextually incorporating Stevenson, or at least his avatar, as a character within the text. Splicing, once more, an account of geographical displacement and narrative initiation, it

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opens with a faux discovery of Mackellar’s manuscript by “RLS,” the “editor of the following pages,” who describes himself as an “old, consistent exile,” returning, with considerable ambivalence, to “the city of which he exults to be a native.” Mackellar’s manuscript comes to him by the hands of “his friend, Mr Johnstone Thomson, W.S.,” whose welcoming “almost console[s]” RLS for “ever” leaving “his native city, or ever return[ing] to it” (MB 5). With this uncanny sense of a displaced return, RLS enters Thomson’s home as a space of spurned desire – when Thomson mentions his predecessor, Peter M’Brair, RLS muses on their lost chance for intimacy: “I remember him acutely; he could not look at me without a pang of reprobation, and he could not feel the pang without betraying it. He was to me a man of a great historical interest, but the interest was not returned.” Thomson introduces Mackellar’s archive as a compensation for this loss: “‘Ah well, we go beyond him,’ said Mr Thomson. ‘I daresay old Peter knew as little about this as I do’” (MB 6). Their reading of the manuscript in the smoking room becomes, then, the grounds for an intimacy traced by an idea of the illicit: “As Mr Thomson is a married man, I will not say what hour had struck when we laid down the last of the following pages.” But if this scene anticipates later scenes in the novel of reading and narration haunted by queer intimacy, it also makes that intimacy the starting point for a generative disagreement over narrative form. Whereas Thomson feels Mackellar’s story “ought to be melodramatic,” and encourages RLS to “improve the style,” RLS revels in the manuscript’s “baldness”: “‘I believe there is nothing so noble as baldness,’ replied I, ‘and I am sure there is nothing so interesting’” (MB 8). Stevenson’s preface sets in play two key strands for the novel. We enter the text through an almost illicit intimacy between men, a scene of reading that, it is suggested, might compensate for an unconsummated desire between men; but even as the novel establishes its narrative as a queer kind of contract, it remains divided in its account of just what could compel and reward the reader’s attention – is it the baldness of Mackellar’s voice or the potential of the Durrisdeers’ story for melodrama? As such, the preface establishes the novel’s consistent concern with sensational narrative as the site of a seductive intimacy, which the novel evaluates in formal terms. Like M’Brair and Thomson, the novel appears divided over whether it will reprobate or queerly welcome the reader’s “interest” in its sensational material.

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“Intimately Mingled”: Mackellar and “The Master’s Wanderings” Beyond the paratexts, Mackellar’s subsequent opening chapters leading up to the account of James Durie’s piratical career also stage our introduction to the Master through a series of anticipatory framings. While Mackellar announces himself as “intimately mingled” with the family and as an embodied “authentic memoir” (MB 9) of the Master, his first chapter recounts, without a clear source, the initial altercation between the brothers up until the moment “they befell under [his] own observation, like a witness in a court” (MB 19). As he arrives after James’s departure and presumed death, the second “witness[ed]” chapter gives the reader, again, a prior framing of the Master through an account of his haunting the Durrisdeer estate. He occupies the house like a “shadow” (MB 21) and a “secret inclination” (MB 22); soon, Mackellar notes, “an unnatural jealousy of the dead man for Mr Henry’s sake, that had even then begun to grow on me” (MB 23). At the tail end of this chapter, Chevalier Burke, James’s companion in his adventures after the fall of the rebels, arrives at the house to once more provide a foreshadowing of the Master’s presence. The anterior narrative, this time, gets told twice, first orally and then, for the reader’s benefit (and reprising the homosocial editorial scene in the preface), through Mackellar’s edited excision of fragments from Burke’s memoir, sent to Mackellar after he requests Burke’s help with the story’s details. (In February 1888, in a letter to Edward L. Burlingame, his editor at Scribner’s, Stevenson defended the preparatory role of “the Chevalier’s narration” as “in its place”: “it not only prepares the end, it thoroughly prepares the reader for the Master himself when he is to come upon the stage” [Letters VI.115].) So the story of James Durie’s escapades as a makeshift pirate comes to the reader as the last in a series of anticipatory moves. Recalling the structure of the preface, James, in the account of his adventures, performs the role of pirate, viewed through the lens of two male narrators (Mackellar and Burke) at odds over how to narrate these events. While the complexity of the narrative arrangement is interesting in itself (the melodramatic mode preceding and being incorporated into Mackellar’s “bald” style), I want to draw particular attention to the way the action of the pirate escapade itself mirrors this arrangement. In the novel’s

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third chapter, the pirate ship itself – “keep[ing] the sea in the North Atlantic” (MB 41), traversing a space from “the Great Minch” (MB 36) to the “southern provinces” of North America (MB 50) – becomes the scene of a transition from one narrative style (childish, generic, predictable) to another (ordered, “bald,” yet irresistible). In his essay “My First Book: ‘Treasure Island’” (first published in the Idler in August 1894), Stevenson describes the composition of his earlier, wildly successful pirate novel as a stream of unconscious plagiarism, triggered by a map but fleshed out by “reminiscences of Poe, Defoe, and Washington Irving” and “a copy of Johnson’s ‘Buccaneers’” (129). In The Master of Ballantrae, Stevenson returns to piratical material but self-consciously draws attention to the generic, plagiarized quality and popular appeal of James Durie’s adventure.3 Through the lens of Burke, the pirate Captain Teach (whose men capture James Durie and Burke) is “like a wicked child or a half-witted person” (MB 37) and his ship is a Defoe-borne scene of undisciplined and undignified chaos: What kind of a pandemonium that vessel was, I cannot describe, but she was commanded by a lunatic, and might be called a floating Bedlam. Drinking, roaring, singing, quarrelling, dancing, they were never all sober at one time; and there were days together when, if a squall had supervened, it must have sent us to the bottom; or if a king’s ship had come along, it would have found us quite helpless for defence. (MB 37–8)4 Teach takes on the guise of a cartoon pirate: he is “a perfect figure of fun, his face blacked, his hair and whiskers curled, his belt stuck full of pistols; chewing bits of glass so that the blood ran down his chin, and brandishing a dirk” (MB 40). (In a letter to Sidney Colvin, Stevenson described the pirate captain as “vulgarly Blackbeard” [Letters 87].) In a later footnote, Mackellar is careful to distinguish Teach from his historical namesake, highlighting the captain’s exaggerated performance of piracy: “This Teach of the SARAH must not be confused with the celebrated Blackbeard. The dates and facts by no means tally. It is possible the second Teach may have at once borrowed the name and imitated the more excessive part of his manners from the first. Even the Master of Ballantrae could make admirers” (MB 47).

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This last line, oddly thrown away and seemingly out of place, ties Teach’s imitative piracy to James Durie’s own forceful charm – it is a crucial link, as Mackellar’s narrative turns on precisely this compelling aspect of James’s character. James’s ability to “make admirers” becomes immediately apparent in his overthrow of the pirate ship: whereas Teach rules with a “rule which brought no order” (MB 38), James takes charge of the ship, assuming the position of “quartermaster” by “acclamation,” and evoking a semblance of legal order – “laws were passed in imitation of those of a pirate by the name of Roberts” (MB 41). In Burke’s eyes, James’s “genius” lies in his ability to manage the ship at a distance: whereas Teach was childlike and lacked dignity, James, according to Burke, “preserve[s] … a great deal of gravity and distance; so that he was like a parent among a family of young children, or a schoolmaster with his boys” (MB 42). James’s takeover signals a transition, on board the pirate ship, from Teach’s realm of exaggerated display and “terror” (i.e., from a narrative mode in which action and aspect seem more important than story) to a realm of more regimented and impersonal order (i.e., to a narrative mode of plotting and tutelage). But, as I shall show, James’s subsequent performances as “the Master” in Stevenson’s novel owe much also to his redirection of Teach’s pantomimic display, a redirection indicative of the novel’s theatrical conceptualization of masculinity. James’s potential for mastery plays out not only in his usurping of the pirate ship but also through his compelling effect on the narrative voices that precede and frame his presence in the text. And while his overrunning of Teach comes as an enforcement of order, even at this early stage Stevenson suggests that James’s piratical pull on the narrative will prove a force for disorder. With one of the many editorial elisions that litter his manuscript, Mackellar cuts off Burke’s account of his parting from James in the wake of their burial of the pirates’ treasure in New York state, when he finds himself unable to square Burke’s re-telling of the quarrel that broke them off: “his version of the quarrel is really more than I can reproduce; for I knew the Master myself, and a man more insusceptible of fear is not conceivable. I regret this oversight of the Chevalier’s, and all the more because the tenor of his narrative (set aside a few flourishes) strikes me as highly ingenuous” (MB 60). While Mackellar claims that his editorial discretion comes in order to counteract Burke’s unconscious sympathies with the Master

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(“The simplicity of Mr. Burke’s character leads him at this point to praise the Master exceedingly” [MB 59–60]), his subsequent justification of this elision on the basis of the Master’s insusceptibility to fear suggests his own sympathetic, or at least compelled, respect for James’s bluster. Preceding what will finally become Mackellar’s first physical meeting with James in the next chapter, this elision anticipates the difficulties Mackellar will experience in attempting to accommodate James’s stories of mastery.

“The Effect of Manner”: Piratical Style and Pederastic Contagion In his essay entitled “Letter to a Young Gentleman Who Proposes to Embrace the Career of Art” (first published in Scribner’s only two months prior to serialization of The Master of Ballantrae), Stevenson described the author-artist as writing with “unreasoning good faith and the unflagging spirit of children at their play”: Is it worth doing? – when it shall have occurred to any artist to ask himself that question, it is implicitly answered in the negative. It does not occur to the child as he plays at being a pirate on the dining-room sofa, nor to the hunter as he pursues his quarry; and the candor of the one and the ardor of the other should be united in the bosom of the artist. (378) For Stevenson, the child playing pirate – unquestioning in his commitment to play – becomes a cipher for the artist at work. In The Master of Ballantrae, James Durie (“MASTER OF THE ARTS AND GRACES” [MB 219] as Mackellar later terms him) impulsively usurps Captain Teach by declaring his play insufficient: All of a sudden Ballantrae stepped forth. “Have done with this play-acting,” says he. “Do you think to frighten us with making faces? We saw nothing of you yesterday, when you were wanted; and we did well without you, let me tell you that.” (MB 40)

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“Ballantrae’s performance” (as Burke terms it) is a “master[ing]” of schoolboys because, unlike Teach, he plays “his part” with a “discipline” (MB 42) that suggests there is no part to play, no performance at work (indeed, according to Burke, he initially makes sure that the pirates spare Teach’s life because he gains from the contrast and is “afraid of a more efficient captain, who might be a counter-weight to himself ” [MB 41]). And yet, for all his piratical, playful, and manly artistry, James Durie’s sea adventures – evoking the popular genre exploited so successfully in Treasure Island – also signal Stevenson’s sense of artistry’s emasculating debt to a paying public. (In his “Letter to a Young Gentleman,” Stevenson likens the author to the prostitute: he “chose his trade to please himself, gains his livelihood by pleasing others, and has parted with something of the sterner dignity of man” [379]). Anticipating this cluster of concerns with the artist and the pirate, the child and the man, Stevenson’s and Henry James’s disagreements over narrative form (in “The Art of Fiction” and “A Humble Remonstrance,” both from 1884) circled around the appeal of “adventure” fiction for boy readers. Stevenson chided James’s suggestion that the novel of childhood appealed more to his own personal experience than the novel of piracy: “Here is, indeed, a wilful paradox; for if he has never been on a quest for buried treasure, it can be demonstrated that he has never been a child” (Memories 287). In place of James’s focus on the “experience” of the child, Stevenson claims to focus on the child’s desires: “Desire,” he notes, “is a wonderful telescope and Pisgah the best observatory.” Stevenson imagines the author of Treasure Island (“cunning and low-minded man!”) as finding “a readily accessible and beaten road to the sympathies of the reader” (Memories 288) by “address[ing] himself throughout to the building up and circumstantiation of this boyish dream” (Memories 288–9). And he contrasts this emotive and action-centred work with James’s own “The Author of ‘Beltraffio,’” in which “the statics of character” are centre-stage, and in which the “stronger passions which would deform the attitudes [James] loves to study” (Memories 290) are left off-stage, unrepresented (as in the scene of the boy’s death at the tale’s denouement). The contrast with James’s tale – a tale saturated with suggestions of the eponymous author’s queerly aestheticist contagion of both his child and the American narrator, and of the narrative’s own queerly contagious quality – is fascinating; for in The Master of Ballantrae, the possibly contagious

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(and queer) allure of stories of piracy, the disarming attraction of that material for an uncritical audience of boys, become key to the novel’s anxieties about the artistry of its own narrative efforts to contain its “adventure” material.5 Bradley Deane suggests that, in Treasure Island, Stevenson helped initiate an “imperial play ethic” (692) by which piratical boys at play – boys who refused to grow up – were set at the vanguard of an expansionist late nineteenth-century imperialism no longer tied to narratives of progress and development. This shift in imperial discourse saw a correlative shift in the representation of piracy and piratical “play”: Pirates who in mid-century fiction had clashed with the virtuous youth of England began to look less like the heroes’ foils than their doubles, partners, or secret sharers. By the end of the century pirates could be heroes themselves – not simply in the mold of the misunderstood but noble corsairs of the romantic era, but as cynical, amoral, brutal adventurers. (693) Deane’s argument persuasively situates Treasure Island as a kind of isolated “playground” for “masculine self-fashioning” (700) (it forms a model for numerous “playgrounds” that follow: “Haggard’s Kukuanaland, Kipling’s Kaffiristan, Doyle’s Maple-White Land, and Barrie’s Neverland” [701]). But in The Master of Ballantrae (which Deane does not discuss), Stevenson stages a complicated return to the notions of piratical play and the juvenile pull of piracy – the pirate now figures as both an emasculated foil and an anticipatory model for the Master’s transgressive gendered “play.” On one hand, as Leslie A. Fiedler has argued, James Durie’s mutinous usurpation of Captain Teach (whom he rechristens “Captain Learn” [MB 46]) suggests the inadequacy of the pirate genre for his purpose, his turning to a more profound evil: “Beside ultimate villainy, the Pirate[s] … seem scarcely adult; theirs is the rascality of the nursery, laughable rather than terrible” (Fiedler 18). But the Master’s personal magnetism also draws on the pirate – he renders those around him childlike by an amoral charisma, a camped-up and foppishly costumed physicality that evokes both Teach and Long John Silver. As we have seen, Burke’s narrative glosses over the details of James’s piracy with Mackellar noting that “the pirate ship was very gently

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touched upon” (MB 61). Nevertheless, James’s role as a charming, even dandyish, pirate captain, disciplining unruly and caricatured narrative material, is critical to the novel’s ambivalent account of his allure. In Treasure Island, Stevenson also attended to the physical allure of the pirate as a site for boyish fantasy. Initially, Long John Silver’s physical entrance into the novel as the master of a tavern – “very tall and strong, with a face as big as a ham” and managing his crutch with a “wonderful dexterity” – allays Jim Hawkins’s concerns that he may be the one-legged pirate for whom he is supposed to be looking out: one look at the man before me was enough. I had seen the captain, and Black Dog, and the blind man, Pew, and I thought I knew what a buccaneer was like – a very different creature, according to me, from this clean and pleasant-tempered landlord. (42) But Silver’s eventual revelation of his piratical self does little to turn Hawkins’s fascinated gaze: when Hawkins sees Silver for the first time after the mutiny, approaching the stockade with a flag of truce, he is “far too much taken up with what was going on to be of the slightest use as sentry.” Through the eyes of Jim, the narrative provides us with a display of piratical finery as a sign of Silver’s new role: “He was tricked out in his best; an immense blue coat, thick with brass buttons, hung as low as to his knees, and a fine laced hat was set on the back of his head” (105). In The Master of Ballantrae, James Durie’s costumed manliness exercises a similar visual pull on Mackellar’s attention. When, in the fourth chapter, James arrives at Durrisdeer, back from the grave after his supposed death fighting for Bonnie Prince Charlie’s rebels, Mackellar – who only a few pages earlier admits having “never had much toleration for the female sex” (MB 68) – finds himself drawn to the Master’s performance of a resplendent masculinity unsoiled by the smuggling company he has kept: I was now near enough to see him, a very handsome figure and countenance, swarthy, lean, long, with a quick, alert, black look, as of one who was a fighter, and accustomed to command; upon one cheek he had a mole, not unbecoming; a large diamond sparkled on his hand; his clothes, although of the one hue, were of a French and foppish design; his ruffles, which he wore longer

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than common, of exquisite lace; and I wondered the more to see him in such a guise when he was but newly landed from a dirty smuggling lugger. (MB 72)6 Faced with the foreignness of James’s “graceful elegance” (MB 76) and his devilish taunting of Henry, Mackellar learns “the effect of manner,” lamenting his own, and Henry’s, plainness: “The Master … had never a movement but it commanded him … [T]he more the Master enjoyed his spiteful entertainment, the more engagingly, the more smilingly, he went! So that the plot, by its own scope and progress, furthered and confirmed itself ” (MB 79). The Master’s “command” over others surfaces, as on the pirate ship, as a “command” over representation, as a charm that makes plot, the stuff of stories, appear to work by itself. The Master’s “ultimate villainy” (Fiedler 18), his vengeful haunting of Henry, ensures that the last phase of the novel (which Stevenson saw as both compelling the narrative and resisting his effort to write it) takes on the trappings of adventure fiction with a transatlantic pursuit followed by a hunt for buried treasure. Treasure Island, through the child’s voice of Jim, encourages an amoral collapsing of child and pirate (an “imperial play ethic,” as Deane terms it) that allows for a newly expansive colonial adventurism. By contrast, the pirate, as a figure for juvenile fantasy in The Master of Ballantrae, becomes a queer site for working through the novel’s uncertain responses to colonial transatlanticism. Ambivalently pondering why “we extend a good deal of sympathy towards” pirates, those “truculent children of the ocean,” W.H. Davenport Adams, writing in The Gentleman’s Magazine in February 1889, suggested “few active-minded boys, with a taste for the sea or sea books, escape an attack of what I may call the pirate fever … and … none are the worse for it” (136). Along similar lines, Stevenson’s novel supports the childish appeal of the pirate, and exposes the hypocrisy of Mackellar’s efforts to repress his own attraction to the pirate, even as it casts James Durie’s homoerotic, piratical narrative drive as deathly, as a plot with (to borrow from Lee Edelman) “no future.” In Treasure Island, piracy enters the text through the tale-telling of Billy Bones, and Stevenson immediately alerts his audience to the pleasures to be taken from such “[d]readful stories” (5) and the magnetism exercised by the tale-teller:

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I really believe his presence did us good. People were frightened at the time, but on looking back they rather liked it; it was a fine excitement in a quiet country life, and there was even a party of the younger men who pretended to admire him, calling him a “true sea-dog” and a “real old salt” and such like names, and saying there was the sort of man that made England terrible at sea. (5–6) As Deane notes, this “passage suggests that the appeal of the pirate,” and of “the lawless violence of piracy,” “extends to the national self-image” (695): Stevenson’s novel acknowledges the attraction of an alignment of naval power and piratical violence for the same nationalist audience of “younger men” targeted by Young Folks, the children’s magazine in which Treasure Island first appeared. In The Master of Ballantrae, however, similar scenes of attractive tale-telling become sites of unease for Mackellar and, as a consequence of the narrative’s unclear navigation of its moral relation to its staid narrator, they trouble the novel’s handling of its seminal piratical material. James Durie’s power as a storyteller becomes a prevalent concern when he returns to Durrisdeer with his Indian companion, Secundra Dass, back from the grave for the second time after his supposed death and subsequent disappearance after the midnight duel with Henry. On his return, Mackellar immediately refracts his attraction to the Master through his fears for the corrupting effect James’s presence could have on Henry’s son, Alexander: “when I looked upon the man before me,” he remarks, “still so handsome, so apt a speaker, with so great a variety of fortunes to relate, I saw he was the very personage to captivate a boyish fancy.” Captivate, and queerly woo, it would seem, for Mackellar immediately casts James as a “diabolical Aeneas” returned from afar to court Alexander “in the part of Dido, with a curiosity inflamed to hear.” Crucially, James’s perverting influence figures, for Mackellar, most especially in his ability to tell stories (especially stories of the sea). He recalls to Mackellar’s mind a youthful scene of seemingly masochistic narrative attraction – an “ancient sailor man” who drew boys to him “as thick as crows about a carrion,” despite his drunken abuse and despite their hating him. It is a scene that Mackellar is careful to distance himself from even as he inscribes his own fascination with

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it, noting how he viewed it from afar (clearly more than once), being “a young student, on my own more meditative holiday diversion.” In the end, Mackellar’s curious aside only serves to underline the similarities between his own behaviour in these two scenes (rather than, as he would have it, the similarities between the old sailor’s attractiveness and the Master’s). At James Durie’s return, Mackellar again observes, almost with relish, the pederastic scene of the “handsome,” “apt,” yet “diabolical Aeneas” wooing the young boy, “found[ing], as he suggests, “an empire” in “the mind of ” the boy (MB 143), using his “high-looking, high-spoken” influence “for the child’s perversion” (MB 144). Even as he invokes his familiar Manichean moral register of the diabolical and angelic, Mackellar’s narrative traces its own absorbed orbit around the Master’s adventure stories.

The Master’s Atlantic Passage The magnetic pull of James Durie on Mackellar (and the narrative) evokes not only the forceful presence of Long John Silver but also Stevenson’s most compelling treatment of repressed masculine violence. While in Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (first published in 1886), none can approach the “monstrous” (86) Edward Hyde “without a visible misgiving of the flesh” (85), Jekyll’s written narrative details his own destructive attraction to his alter ego and situates that attraction, as numerous critics have noted, in the queerly resonant context of the secret, “almost morbid sense of shame” (81) that haunts his homosocially established respectability (even more so than Ballantrae, the novella is dominated by male characters). Hyde’s capacity to give “an impression of deformity without any nameable malformation” (a perceptual problem, the narrator suggests, “of a class that is rarely solved” [40]) evokes Melville’s inexplicably repulsive Claggart; but Jekyll’s framing of “dwarfish” (40) Hyde’s attractiveness for him in terms of his apparent youth (he is “so much smaller, slighter, and younger” [84]) offers further evidence of Stevenson’s generative interest in the potentially violent effects of childish men. “I was the first,” Jekyll declares, “that could plod in the public eye with a load of genial respectability, and in a moment, like a schoolboy, strip off these lendings and spring headlong into the sea of liberty” (86). Jekyll’s explanation of his experimental path in

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terms of his understanding of the “primitive duality of man” (82) clearly points towards Stevenson’s use of the Durie twins in Ballantrae, and we can find in the signature of Hyde’s destructive mobility an anticipation of the attractive, piratical violence that ambivalently structures Stevenson’s later novel (indeed, even though Hyde is evocatively tied to the exploration of unvoiced male passions, his violence, not unlike Durie’s, suggests that he acts out of homophobic distaste – his one reported adult murder, of Sir Danvers Carew, comes in response to being “accosted …with a very pretty manner of politeness” by the “aged beautiful gentleman” [46]). But where, in the novella, Stevenson places the eventual standoff between Jekyll and Hyde in the seclusion of his laboratory (a standoff reported by Utterson retrospectively through the discovery of Lanyon’s and Jekyll’s letters), in Ballantrae, Stevenson tracks the effects of James Durie’s magnetism on Mackellar and his narrative form through a story of geographic, transatlantic displacement. Henry seeks to escape the haunting presence of his brother by secretly fleeing to New York. Henry and Alison imagine their Atlantic passage as a possible renewal of their marriage, a marriage that has been haunted from the start by Alison’s lingering attraction to James. Colonial privilege seems to offer the promise of a renewal to be enacted through a secure movement between estates (“Thank Heaven, we have another house!”) and a necessitated venture “into a savage country” (MB 136). But, refusing this familial charting of the Atlantic passage, their flight, in fact, initiates a return to destabilizing sea-space and the novel’s concluding turn toward a queerly piratical plot. In Henry’s absence, James sets to inducing Mackellar to reveal their whereabouts, and the novel takes on the shape of a pederastic seduction plot, a plot played out through acts of narration. While, initially, James takes up the position of the child, “after the manner of a schoolboy,” the plot hinges on Mackellar eventually being rendered childlike and feminine. Mackellar, faced with James’s “brilliancy of … discourse” (MB 149) and his “engaging … flattery” (MB 150), inadvertently reveals Henry’s location: “I let him cajole me, and, in short, I think the watch-dog was going sound asleep, when he was suddenly aroused” (MB 150). But the seduction does not stop there as James, recalling his earlier incarnation as pirate captain, insists on Mackellar accompanying him and Secundra Dass on their journey to America on board the Nonesuch (a name whose empty comparative seems to anticipate the resistance its

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shipspace will pose to Mackellar’s frameworks for reading, even as it also raises the unstable proposition that what plays out aboard the Nonesuch might bear no relation to what precedes or follows it). Figuratively driven by the ship’s oscillating movements atop the Atlantic Ocean, the rhetorical jostling of James and Mackellar on board the Nonesuch resembles, in part, the drama of the drumhead court on board Melville’s Bellipotent. In both these scenes, the sea’s motivating yet enigmatic force colours a scene in which norms of masculine behaviour are enforced (through the threat of emasculation) but also contested (by a playful adoption of the language of emasculation); and both scenes prepare readers for their respective texts’ investment in concluding passages built around a confluence of uncertainly gendered performances and geographical displacement. In their preparations for and eventual journey across the Atlantic, James establishes his refusal of Mackellar’s ordering narrative: through a series of orations, the Master challenges Mackellar’s claims to “witness[ing]” as a guarantee of order and queries the desire that directs the servant’s gaze. On the morning of their departure, the Master walks “side by side in the wet” (MB 153) with Mackellar, singing “Wandering Willie,” a plaintive ballad of lost childhood and an abandoned family home. Mackellar, once again, finds his critical faculties disarmed: “I could never be a judge of the merit of these verses; they were so hallowed by the melancholy of the air, and were sung (or rather ‘soothed’) to me by a master-singer at a time so fitting” (MB 153–4). On board the Nonesuch, Stevenson renders their subsequent struggle as a quite bizarre “battle of the books” (Sandison 280), a declamatory face-off: The book [James] had on board with him was Mr Richardson’s famous Clarissa, and among other small attentions he would read me passages aloud; nor could any elocutionist have given with greater potency the pathetic portions of that work. I would retort upon him with passages out of the Bible, which was all my library – and very fresh to me, my religious duties (I grieve to say it) being always and even to this day extremely neglected. He tasted the merits of the word like the connoisseur he was; and would sometimes take it from my hand, turn the leaves over like a man that knew his way, and give me, with his fine declamation, a Roland for my Oliver.

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While Mackellar’s turn to the Bible and then the Song of Roland seeks to locate his struggles with James in a genealogy of moral stewardship (spurned stewardship in the case of Oliver), James’s Clarissa frames their exchange as a scene of violent seduction.7 Yet even as James’s choice of reading material suggests an arch and strategically perverse course of declamation, Mackellar insists on reading James’s attitudes as a failure to read: it was singular how little he applied his reading to himself; it passed high above his head like summer thunder: Lovelace and Clarissa, the tales of David’s generosity, the psalms of his penitence, the solemn questions of the book of Job, the touching poetry of Isaiah – they were to him a source of entertainment only, like the scraping of a fiddle in a change-house. (MB 156) Alan Sandison notes how Mackellar’s “limited moral sensibility” brings him to point to the Master’s “ability to read with great feeling … from both texts” (the Bible and Clarissa) as proof of his “levity and obduracy,” despite Clarissa’s appeal to eighteenth-century clerics as a work of “edification” (280). But Mackellar’s sensibility also traces unconscious ties between their choice of texts: Mackellar determines that the moral lessons of their readings pass over James’s head even as he traces, unwittingly, a queer trajectory from “Lovelace and Clarissa” to David and Jonathan. The novel, here, suggests it is the potential for moral narratives to seduce, to entertain and entice, that passes over Mackellar even as he finds himself drawn into the Master’s audience.8 In the earlier rendition of “The Master’s Wanderings,” Mackellar sought to accommodate Burke’s slight account of James’s piracy within his own excising narrative order (he even steps in and announces he is cutting off Burke’s narrative of his parting ways with the Master, unconvinced by its representation of James Durie as susceptible “of fear” [MB 60]). The return to the shipspace of the Nonesuch, however, occasions a disordering, a “blackness of spirit and a painful strain upon [his] temper” (MB 155) that Mackellar can only account for as an ambiguous form of contagion (recalling his earlier fears for Alexander): the malady (whatever it was) sprang from my environment; and if the ship were not to blame, then it was the Master … [N]ever

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before, nor after, have I been so poisoned through and through, in soul and body, as I was on board the Nonesuch. (MB 155–6) Much as Mackellar positions these contagious effects between the ship and the Master, his “malady” moves him between despising and desiring James. Mackellar suggests that it is the Master’s seeming doubleness that awakens his visceral responses to his presence. His combination of “outer sensibility and inner toughness,” the “veneer of his fine manners” and his underlying “impudent grossness,” the impression he leaves of masking a “mere vacuity,” occasion in Mackellar an impulsive violence that both propels and repels him: “sometimes my gorge rose against him as though he were deformed – and sometimes I would draw away as though from something partly spectral.” But his “not merely fanciful” horror, his “longing to cry out,” his desire to strike, are, he freely admits, “helped by” his “shame” at having recently tolerated the Master’s company. Despite his professed “detestation” (MB 156), this violence enacts Mackellar’s struggle with his own attraction to James. The duality he locates in James’s outlook – his “outer sensibility and inner toughness” – forms an uncanny double for his own shame-laden split responses to the Master. Stevenson underscores his interest in the disordering narrative effects of the Master by staging the final phase of Mackellar’s seduction as a scene in which James tells a tale about tale-telling (the scene returns us, once more, to the novel’s investment in acts of narrative framing with James now providing his own anticipatory narratives). Mackellar takes up the position of the besotted boys in his earlier reminiscence: storytelling, Mackellar notes, is something James “did always with affectation and display; generally with a good effect,” but this time it takes a “hold upon” him “in a degree quite singular” (MB 160). By the end of the tale, Mackellar is “follow[ing]” James’s “evolutions” (up and down with the movements of the boat) “with a childish fixity; they made me giddy and vacant, and I spoke as in a dream” (MB 163). James’s story is about a count, “something of the artist” (MB 160), who, holding a deep hatred for a certain baron, lures him to his death at the bottom of an abandoned well he has previously encountered by narrating a fictitious dream in which he sees a vision of this same well. The count’s laying of the trap through his teasing story of the dream takes the form of a seduction: “The count, sure that” the baron’s desire to know the

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dream “would never desist, kept him in play till his curiosity was highly inflamed, and then suffered himself, with seeming reluctance, to be overborne” (MB 162). The story functions, fairly unambiguously, as a warning to Mackellar of James’s own dangerous charm as a storyteller; indeed James concludes the tale by wishing “the Lord” would “deliver you, Mackellar, from an enemy so subtile!” And yet, Mackellar’s childish acquiescence to James’s storytelling in this instance involves a willingness to be charmed by an account of the dangers of being charmed by the storyteller. Even as Mackellar, the framing narrator, seeks to contain the effects of James’s own narration, his account accedes to the pleasures of both seduction and an unmastering hate, key elements in James’s own tale. When James, in response to Mackellar’s questions, informs Mackellar that the count hated the baron so that “[h]is belly moved when the man came near him,” Mackellar immediately recognizes himself in the figure of James’s storytelling artist. “I have felt that same” (MB 163), he declares, recalling the development of his obsessive desire for James’s death onboard the ship: “The thought of the man’s death, of his deletion from this world, which he embittered for so many, took possession of my mind. I hugged it, I found it sweet in my belly” (MB 157). I began by addressing the seductive patterning of anticipatory narratives in our introduction to the piratical James Durie, and this climactic seaborne, pseudo-pederastic scene offers a telling return to that structure. At the climax of his tale, James’s count notes that the abandoned well appeared to him under the title of a “vestibule”: “Such was the word I used in my dream, and it seemed then to have a clear significancy” (MB 162). While the word “vestibule” – in classical times, an entrance court or forecourt, and in modern usage, an ante-chamber, entrance-hall, or lobby – suggests to the baron that the space might open out onto something important, it also resonates with the novel’s broader concerns about tale-telling. Both the count and the Master see their tales as “vestibules” (as ante-chambers or forecourts), inviting the baron and Mackellar to imagine themselves into the space of these stories. Mackellar’s imagining, however, requires him to hold in tension identification as both count (driven by a passionate hate, narrating from an obsessive desire for order) and baron (lured into a state of childish fixity, disordered by a desire to get behind the taleteller’s facade). The process recalls the reader’s earlier welcoming into

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Mackellar’s manuscript – the “vestibules” of the narrative frames that establish the Master’s adventures as simultaneously sites of desire and subject to an unconvincing imposition of narrative order. James’s story of the count and the baron, its charged and ungrounded circulation of the term “vestibule,” encapsulates the ways in which Stevenson’s text attends to desire as a disruptive narrative and linguistic effect, a queer derailing of Mackellar’s domesticating narrative order. Mackellar’s subsequent attempt to kill the Master comes not only as a reaction to the story but also, it seems, as an impulsive response to the maddening view of the Master, en pose, oscillating above and below him with the rocking of the ship, a view that once more stages James’s queer attention to Mackellar’s consumption of his displays: He was quite capable of choosing out a graceful posture, even with no one to behold him but myself, and all the more if there were any element of peril. He sat now with one knee flung across the other, his arms on his bosom, fitting the swing of the ship with an exquisite balance, such as a featherweight might overthrow. (MB 164) The unsuccessful assassination signals, perversely, a new level of intimacy between the Master and the servant – “the old wife,” James declares, “has blood in his body after all!” (MB 165). While the oscillations of the Master’s body (and of Stevenson’s verse-like prose) might, as Adrian Poole argues, render him “the epitome of perilous grace” (xvi), they also succinctly signal the Atlantic’s extra-national capacity to lock Mackellar into a new doubled relation to the Master, compelled and repulsed by the same movement. Accordingly, Mackellar’s botched action finds its reaction in the Master’s failed efforts to enlist him as an attendant. Recognizing in Mackellar a “devil of a soldier,” James calls on the servant to surrender to himself as the “good tyrant”: “Cast in your lot with me to-morrow, become my slave, my chattel, a thing I can command as I command the powers of my own limbs and spirit.” When Mackellar tries to fend off the Master by comparing his aspirations, his “vanity,” to “the same sentiment that sets a lassie mincing to her glass” (MB 167) (recalling his earlier emasculation as “wife”), James nonchalantly responds by challenging Mackellar’s hold on language: “O! there are double words for everything: the word that swells, the

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word that belittles; you cannot fight me with a word!” (MB 167–8). James Durie’s owning of the “double” quality of language (and “vanity” in particular) proves, for Mackellar, a stumbling block in his efforts to contain the effects of his Atlantic passage. Indeed, the narrative suggests that part of James’s attraction, for Mackellar, lies in his doubled oscillating movements between effeminately posed and aggressively macho display. While Mackellar experiences “a shade of embarrassment” (MB 168) at James’s outstretched hand in farewell from the Nonesuch, the Master underlines the difficulty Mackellar will face in containing his “dangerous[ly]” attractive and transgressive presence: I never yet failed to charm a person when I wanted; even you, my good friend – to call you so for once – even you have now a very different portrait of me in your memory, and one that you will never quite forget. The voyage has not lasted long enough, or I should have wrote the impression deeper. (MB 169) Whereas Mackellar’s narration of the events on board the Nonesuch ensures their segregation in a chapter that could stand alone, the Master’s parting words suggest that the framing of the ship’s passage arbitrarily forecloses his seduction of Mackellar. Just as stories seductively preceded James Durie’s presence in the novel’s opening, here he leaves a story of Mackellar’s seduction suspended – the passage functions as a vestibule, opening out, and thereby destabilizing, Mackellar’s efforts to manage the story’s American conclusion.

Burying the Master: At the Limits of the Nation? Laura Doyle’s charting of literary transatlantic crossings as feminizing scenes of racial self-realization born of a “bodily ‘undoing’ or ‘ruin’” (6) provides a useful model for thinking through the implications of Stevenson’s imagining of the Atlantic passage. Along these lines, Mackellar’s Atlantic passage and his attempt on James Durie’s life is the scene of his feminized “undoing.” However, Mackellar’s fall (and his recalling of the Master’s piratical mutiny) signals not a move toward an American freedom reborn (as Doyle’s model would suggest), but a passage toward the novel’s conclusion in an almost lawless, borderland

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space. This space, like the pirate ship, hovers at the outer limits of the nation (again, the dispersed, unmoored fate of Billy Budd resonates with this, his trial and sentence taking place out of reach of the British fleet and the law, and the site of his sentencing, the cross-like spar on which he hangs, becoming a diasporically circulated relic). Stevenson’s skeptical response to a white colonial narrative of transatlantic freedom plays out in the prominent role played in the unsuccessful treasure quest by the randomly violent and unseen “Indian” (Native American) scalpers and Secundra Dass, the devoted then dismissive Indian (South Asian) servant. Adrian Poole notes how a “savage narrative logic” couples these figures as “the two extremes of native reaction to the incursion of colonialism” (MB xvi), but it is worth noting how this coupling also recalls Teach’s violent “manners” which Burke suspects were “taken … from the Indians of America, where he was a native” (MB 40). The liminal geography of the conclusion to Ballantrae not only recalls the eponymous Treasure Island but provides a model for the terrain Stevenson would chart five years later, in collaboration with his stepson Lloyd Osbourne, in his last completed fiction, The Ebb-Tide: A Trio, and a Quartette. Where the physical crossing of the Atlantic becomes a figure for exploring the disruptively queer effects of James Durie on Mackellar and his narrative, The Ebb-Tide asks questions about the violently queer relations between British and American imperialists in the Pacific setting of an island not far from Tahiti (this not only recalls Melville’s comparative interest in American and British sailors in his first two Pacific novels, Typee and Omoo, but it also looks forward to Conrad’s Nostromo, which attends, in similar ways, to the erotics of displaced transatlantic exchanges). In The Ebb-Tide, the disgraced American naval captain, Davis plans to steal the cargo of the American schooner of which he has been placed in charge (a kind of internalized piracy). This leads to his makeshift crew (the fallen English gentleman and narrative centre, Herrick, and the feminized Cockney, Huish) falling into the orbit of the sadistic English missionary, Attwater, who abusively rules over a small band of indigenous slaves (Kanakas) on an unknown atoll (Attwater’s deranged state clearly anticipates Conrad’s Kurtz going mad at the “heart” of the Belgian Congo). Like Durie the transplanted Scot in an American wilderness leading Mackellar astray, Attwater exercises a disorienting erotic sway over Herrick, who is “attracted and repelled” by his fellow Oxbridge

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graduate (197). Physically, Stevenson locates Attwater’s dual effect on Herrick in the confused manhood of his colonial body: he exhibits both strength and “a listlessness that was more than languor” (191); he is tanned to a “hue hardly distinguishable from that of a Tahitian,” but “betray[s],” by “the living force that dwelt in him,” his unmistakable Europeanness (192). Describing a certain ambivalence built into the novella’s twinned “trenchant critique” of imperialist possession and the “‘aggressive self-mastery’ of Victorian bourgeois masculinity,” Guy Davidson notes how Attwater, as a “pathologized exaggeration of the manliness idealized under imperialism” (“Homosocial” 130), embodies a masculine perversity that is both policed and dwelt upon by Stevenson’s narrator. As such, Attwater’s sadism, geographically untethered to European-American forms of civilization, recapitulates, I wish to suggest, the disruptive effects wrought by James Durie in the conclusion to Stevenson’s earlier novel. In the wake of his transatlantic seduction, Mackellar’s struggles to read the erotic structure of the brothers’ new relations in America (and Mackellar’s relations to the brothers) play out as a renewed struggle to accommodate a resurfacing narrative of piracy. Settling in New York, James’s haunting revenge on Henry is explicitly, though unpredictably, piratical: It appears, on board the pirate ship he had acquired some quickness with the needle – enough, at least, to play the part of tailor in the public eye; which was all that was required by the nature of his vengeance. (MB 174) Advertising himself as a tailor and “FORMERLY MASTER OF BALLANTRAE” (MB 174), James seeks to unseat Henry from his established social position but he mainly succeeds in driving his brother to a reciprocal haunting that resembles an illicit erotic fixation. Noting Henry’s frequent absences and seemingly joyful returns, Mackellar suspects Henry of adultery, but, after tracking his movements, discovers his sinister visits to the tailor’s store where the brothers “gaze upon each other with hard faces”: “Here was his mistress: it was hatred and not love that gave him healthful colours” (MB 176). Making mistresses of them both, Stevenson ironically knits Mackellar and the Master together as Henry’s steadfast lovers, abandoned as his hate grows obsessive:

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while James Durie acquires few customers, making his sewing “more in the manner of Penelope’s” (174), Henry puts Mackellar to idle work when he brings him upstate to Albany, laying upon him “endless tasks, which he showed considerable ingenuity to fish up and renew, in the manner of Penelope’s web” (MB 188). Indeed, it is James’s performance of a domesticated piracy – his “play[ing] the part of tailor” – that drives Henry to seek an end to his brother’s haunting presence: when Henry turns down his brother’s request for funds, the “sight of ” the Master “patiently returning to his needlework was more than” his “imagination could digest” (MB 178). As if desiring a return to James’s swashbuckling self-representation, Henry’s deathly solution to this provocation is to launch the novel on a reprisal of the piratical plot that anticipated his first appearance in the text. He calls on Harris, “a dangerous adventurer, highly suspected of piracy in the past” (MB 183), to engage James in a false quest for the treasure he buried (they plot to murder him instead). Recoiling once more from Henry’s vengeance and recalling the narrative’s earlier ridicule of Teach’s role-playing as pirate captain, Mackellar is “pained and could have blushed” when he hears of, and imagines, the Master assuming his usual “high, authoritative attitude” as “the contriver and the leader” of this company of scheming “desperate, bloody-minded miscreants” and “reputed pirates” (MB 195). In a well-known letter to Henry James from March 1888, Stevenson, painfully eking out the fantastical American end to his novel, lamented his tale-telling bind: I almost hesitate to write [the last parts of the novel]; they are very picturesque, but they are fantastic; they shame, perhaps degrade, the beginning. I wish I knew; that was how the tale came to me however … Then the devil and Saranac suggested this denouement, and I joined the two ends in a day or two of feverish thought, and began to write. (Letters VI.104–5) Like the Master in the novel, Stevenson’s project, and specifically its conclusion, exerts a force of its own on his writing, a force outside his knowledge and emerging from the space (Saranac) that he occupied at its inspiration (he concludes the writing in Tahiti and Hawaii en route to Samoa). Yet even as this initiatory “denouement” anticipates the end of the writing it brings about, it also threatens to “shame, perhaps degrade” that writing – like the Master in his charming of

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Mackellar on the Nonesuch, the envisaged ending compels an attention haunted by the ease of its own seduction. Indeed, while Stevenson, in a later letter to Burlingame, suggested that the greatest difficulty posed by the conclusion was his rendering of its fantastical material “in Mackellarese” (Letters VI.278), it is the lingering effects of Mackellar’s seduction by the Master that, in the end, ensures the ending’s structural fit. Having acknowledged a “weakness of the flesh” that brought about his “melt[ing] towards” the “enemy” (MB 187), Mackellar’s “weakness” guides his assembly of the various narratives (from gang-member “Mountain” and Secundra Dass) that make up his account of the Master’s ill-fated final journey. When James Durie discovers the plot against his life and sets to destabilizing the assembly of ruffians, Mackellar gives us one final vision of his posed self-assurance as he seeks (Mackellar surmises) “to repeat the business of the pirate ship, and be himself, perhaps, on hard enough conditions, elected leader” (MB 202): the Master had set himself in the brightest place, and kept his face there, to be the centre of men’s eyes: doubtless on a profound calculation. Silence followed for a while, and presently the whole party became involved in disputation: the Master lying on his back, with his hands knit under his head and one knee flung across the other, like a person unconcerned in the result. (MB 201) While the Master’s final gamble fails (the fault, Mackellar thinks, of “his bravado carr[ying] him too far” [MB 202]), the visual attention to his (re)pose, in “the centre of men’s eyes,” reinforces his “flesh[ly]” hold on the narrator. Mackellar remains drawn to James’s aesthetic of masculine performance and, in the end, it is the novel’s ironic touch that a final desperate performance seals the Master’s tomb as he is buried alive – he plays dead so well that he dies (shocking his brother to death in the process). By a further irony, James Durie’s final ruse, calling on Secundra Dass to return and unearth him, stages his body (formerly the site of Mackellar’s unstated desires) as the fateful buried treasure in the novel’s concluding quest narrative – the piracy plot seems, quite literally, to have consumed the Master. The Master’s seductive and anticipatory presence haunts Mackellar’s inscription of the epitaphs on the brothers’ shared tomb at the novel’s conclusion:

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J. D., HEIR TO A SCOTTISH TITLE, A MASTER OF THE ARTS AND GRACES, ADMIRED IN EUROPE, ASIA, AMERICA, IN WAR AND PEACE, IN THE TENTS OF SAVAGE HUNTERS AND THE CITADELS OF KINGS, AFTER SO MUCH ACQUIRED, ACCOMPLISHED, AND ENDURED, LIES HERE FORGOTTEN. ***** H. D., HIS BROTHER, AFTER A LIFE OF UNMERITED DISTRESS, BRAVELY SUPPORTED, DIED ALMOST IN THE SAME HOUR, AND SLEEPS IN THE SAME GRAVE WITH HIS FRATERNAL ENEMY. ***** THE PIETY OF HIS WIFE AND ONE OLD SERVANT RAISED THIS STONE TO BOTH. (MB 219) Jean-Pierre Naugrette has described Stevenson’s writing as “epitaphic,” finding in Mackellar’s inscriptions “a mise-en-abyme portrait of the artist as one who chisels and cuts out his prose into a monument” (105). But if Stevenson’s writing could be described as “epitaphic,” I would contend it is so by virtue of the epitaph’s capacity to generate fissures even as it purports to seize language’s mobility, setting it in stone. Mackellar’s double epitaph – in its ascription of mastery (albeit “of the arts” rather than the familial title), in its unbalanced attention to James’s qualifications, and in its unconvincing announcement of their being forgotten (even as they are memorialized) – struggles to contain the desire that rendered the Master a more compelling character for his narrative throughout. Framing himself as the second subject who “raised this stone,” Mackellar leaves his memorializing act in an ambiguous relation to the “piety” that precedes (one might say, anticipates) its emergence in the final sentence – is this a zeugmatic phrase, yoking Alison’s piety and his own more physical involvement as the twinned

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forces of stone-raising? If Mackellar’s piety is being evoked, is that piety solely in remembrance of Henry, or is his servitude less clear? Once again, the Master’s prior inscription, at the head of the stone, complicates and confuses the erotic valence of the inscribed text. Even as it finally announces an exiled end to “The Master’s Wanderings,” the epitaph memorializes James Durie, the transatlantic pirate’s formally queer resistance to Mackellar’s efforts at narrative mastery. The next two chapters represent a closely related but somewhat different path for my project of “queer Atlantic” reading. I now turn from tracing a structural concern with the anticipatory force of queer desire in Melville’s and Stevenson’s fictions to two writers, Henry James and Joseph Conrad, whose experiments with novelistic form consistently forge an understanding of male desire and identity as spatial. Where Melville’s Billy Budd and Stevenson’s Master of Ballantrae looked to the past, and specifically to a British history of revolution and state-suppression, in order to produce distanced reflections on the shape of Anglo-American masculinities in the nineteenth century, James’s The Golden Bowl and Conrad’s Nostromo offer more direct, albeit highly symbolic responses to the emergence of American imperialism and the waning influence of British imperialism at the turn of the twentieth century. And where Melville and Stevenson allowed a disorientingly desirable British subject to form the centre of their novels’ challenging approaches to imagining Anglo-American masculinity, James’s and Conrad’s interrogations of imperial manhood turn on the gravitational pull of two expatriate Italians (Prince Amerigo and Nostromo), both highly attractive to women (Nostromo and especially The Golden Bowl are both less suffocatingly male-centric than either Billy Budd or Ballantrae). Given the manner in which both these novels stress the exotic nature of their protagonists’ attachments to women and their enmeshment in feminized nets, how can their stories furnish an understanding of “queer Atlantic” masculinity and privileged male mobility as mutually imbricated fictional projects? The answer, I will suggest, lies in James’s and Conrad’s particular contributions to modernism’s emergent treatment of the novel as a site of aesthetic collision, disjunction, and ambiguous resolution. James’s and Conrad’s novels are both dramas about the (im)possibilities of integration and assimilation and both stage the terms of that drama by playing with the idea of the novel as an integrative, capacious, and containing space. It is in this

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context that James and Conrad both make use of the ambiguous social spaces occupied by the male Italian characters and the narrative space opened up by the focalization of their perspectives (and sometimes the silent space produced by the foreclosure of their perspectives). Both The Golden Bowl and Nostromo position their central male characters as used and usable entities whose Italianness places them – in different ways according to their quite different class backgrounds – both inside and outside the seats of power in these texts, illuminating that power’s privileged and perverse shaping of manhood.

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“A Question of an Imperium” Queer Imperialisms in Henry James’s The Golden Bowl

Henry James’s architectonic penultimate novel begins with a slippery scene of masculine gazing on and across a cityscape of empire. For the narrative’s initial focal centre Prince Amerigo, who “always liked his London, when it had come to him,” the appeal of the English capital has been its ability to meet the “question of an Imperium” with more “real dimensions” than contemporary Rome, especially in its monumental guise at London Bridge or Hyde Park Corner. But the novel’s present action begins with a more specifically situated scene of the prince straying, “undirected” and “restless,” pausing before the window of a store in Bond Street where “objects massive and lumpish, in silver and gold” have been “tumbled together as if, in the insolence of the Empire, they had been the loot of far-off victories.” The prince, we learn, has eyes for neither these spoils nor the “possibilities in faces shaded” of the women that pass “him on the pavement” – his “undirected thought” draws him on through the streets (and draws the reader through this roaming exposition), so that masculine mobility immediately charts an uncertainly touristic and erotic path into the world of the novel. While Amerigo’s wandering eye and the narrator’s circumlocution signal restless detachment from the imperial scene, it is the “insolence of empire” (the language of spoils, pursuit, and capture) that formally ties these wanderings together, that asks us to connect the “tumbled” window-dressing of capitalism with the “perverse angles” of a distracted and abandoned erotic pursuit (GB 1). Through both syntactic force – messy yet mesmerizing in its paratactic and hypotactic stretching of the sentence – and a characteristic mobilization of the abstract (the empire’s “insolence,” the animated “possibilities”), James’s incipiently modernist,

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late style lays the grounds of the Imperium’s compelling form, its often erotic demand to be taken as it comes, even as we are reminded of how that form functions as a “perverse[ly]” refusable stylized effect. The opening paragraph of The Golden Bowl is symptomatic of James’s consistently doubled fascination with the style of empire, or empire as style, throughout his career. Obelisks, pagodas, figures in Persian carpets, golden bowls, ivory towers – as this recognizable catalogue of placeholders suggests, James’s reflections on imperialism frequently centre on examples of ornamentation, of what David Cannadine has termed “imperialism as ornamentalism.” Cannadine describes Britain’s endeavours to make hierarchy “visible, immanent and actual,” through an identification with and replication of ritualistic ornament at its periphery (122). Ornament, in Cannadine’s reading of empire, provides the signifier of colonial authority – it offers up, in Homi K. Bhabha’s terms, “a measure of mimesis,” a miming of the order it stands in for, “and a mode of civil authority and order” (152); it plots, in the most common translation of Hélène Cixous’s famous phrase, an “Empire of the Selfsame” (“l’empire de propre”) (Cixous and Clement 79). But “colonial presence,” as Bhabha goes on to note, “is always ambivalent, split between its appearance as original and authoritative and its articulation as repetition and difference” (153). As empire’s symbolic language, ornamentation made imperial style available as a force in itself, as an unstable iconography of power by which nascent empires could register their entry into history (as witnessed in the economic and military expansion of the United States of America during the years preceding this novel). It is exactly this transatlantic mobility of imperial style – as a transportable symbolism of power and as an uncontainable performance, a potentially ironic repetition – that fascinates James in The Golden Bowl. In this chapter, I dwell particularly on James’s interest in the transmission of imperial style in making a case for the specific significance of The Golden Bowl’s imagining of transatlantic masculinity. By a complicated series of interlocking and recursive figures, James’s novel explores the shifting discourses of (trans)nationality, empire, and manhood as questions of space and allows its spatial-erotic language and structure to carve out new possibilities for novelistic form. Whereas the novel-worlds of Melville’s Billy Budd and Stevenson’s Ballantrae are almost exclusively masculine, James’s The Golden Bowl spins a wider gendered web, centring the entire second half of the novel

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in the consciousness of Maggie Verver and turning on our judgement of the exiled adulteress, Charlotte Stant, who returns to America with her husband, Maggie’s father, Adam Verver. But even as James examines imperial mobilities through this tense conflict between women, it is suggestively queer transactions between men – Bob Assingham, Amerigo, and Adam – that structure the novel’s disarming pleasure in performances of power and its formal containment of its own potential perversity. From his mooning over military parades in the early essay “The British Soldier” (1878) to his much later imagining of himself as a bristling Anglophilic fortress on the coast of Surrey in “Within the Rim” (1917), James’s writings suggest a career-long interest in what we might call the “campiness” of imperial display. James’s “campiness,” Jonathan Warren has argued, usually manifests in “the exposure of the elaborate stylistic inventedness of the putatively normal, given, and goodly,” an exposure that is “typically as critical as [it is] provocatively appreciative of falsehood, as committed to upsetting the regulatory center of discovered corruption as [it is] to staging and occupying a stylistic intensification of its very features” (376–7). But if Warren’s account of James’s campiness helps us to, once more, assert James’s evasive mastery of the cultural scene – his delightful, and delighted, critical distance from the techne of power – I am more interested in how his performances maintain a fragile balance between critique of imperial forms and pleasurable reveling in an “intensifi[ed]” miming of those forms. Where Kevin Ohi argues that The Golden Bowl poses a queer challenge to “boundaries and forms of differentiation” (Henry James 34), engaging in a liberating and “disorienting” interruption “of presumed representabilities” (58), I want to consider further how James’s overwhelming figural style – especially its attention to the language of ornamentalism – draws unsettling equivalences between a queer undoing of the subject and imperial assimilation and containment of otherness. James’s parallel treatment of the Italian and the Jew as galvanizing figures for his narrative structure tests, with greater specificity, the limits of Anglo-American masculine norms assumed in the fictions of Melville and Stevenson. More than any other author under consideration in this book, Henry James’s fiction returned repeatedly to the subject of transatlantic relations or to what he termed his “International Theme.” Crucially, those narratives, which dominate his early and late novels, frequently

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resolve through movements that tend to empty out the seemingly heterosexual framework of their romance plots: in The American (1877), Christopher Newman restlessly returns to and then departs from Paris in the wake of Claire de Cintré’s entry into a convent; in The Portrait of a Lady (1880–81), with little explanation, Isabel Archer rejects Caspar Goodwood’s aggressively sexual appeals and returns to a loveless marriage; The Ambassadors (1903) ends with Lewis Lambert Strether leaving Paris for Woollett and his lukewarm and uncertain engagement to Mrs Newsome, renouncing the claims of both Maria Gostrey and Marie de Vionnet on his presence. Movement is also central to The Golden Bowl’s imaginary even if its conclusion seems to rest on the reinstatement of domesticity: Leon Edel long ago identified the novel’s “prevailing imagery … of voyage and exploration,” its clustered “allusions to ships and quests, harbors and searches for the Northwest passage or the Golden Isles, or even the narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym and his macabre polar journey” (220). As with Amerigo’s wandering in the opening pages of The Golden Bowl, James threads these geographical figures through an ambivalent treatment of both desire and cultural imperialism as forces of crude expansion and exhilarating disorientation; that ambivalence surfaces formally in the novel’s baroque treatment of narrative space as a space of both containment and capacity. I am referring here both to the novel’s recursively structured plot, its tendency to fold the narration of some scenes into others, and to the Jamesian sentence’s recognizably hypotactic ringing round of parenthetical material (these are perhaps James’s late style’s clearest contributions to modernism’s structural reimagining of realism). Through a series of complementary, elaborate figures (including the initially material, eponymous bowl), James implicates the novel’s own hypotactic style in questions about the queer form of both transatlantic, colonial identity and – in its especial attention to the fate of Amerigo – mobile masculinity.

Bob Assingham and the “Hymeneal North-West Passage” British imperialism laid out, in James’s eyes, a possible model for the United States’ own imperial ambitions, and it is the transfer from British to American forms of empire, and the fierce interdependence

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of these models, that lies behind James’s representation of the Ververs in The Golden Bowl. The novel, in Margery Sabin’s terms, “allegorically dramatize[s] America’s embattled postcolonial position at the end of the nineteenth century” (206), working through the historical meaning of the United States as inheritor, refuser, and instigator of an expansionism critical to Britain’s colonial legacy. In February 1899, in a letter to his nephew Harry, James made a case for empire as a site of tutelage: “Expansion,” he writes, “has so made the English what they are for good or for ill, but on the whole for good that one doesn’t quite feel one’s way to say for one’s country ‘No I’ll have none of it!’ It has educated the English. Will it only demoralize us?” (Letters 4:239). In the same letter, however, James goes on to step back from the question of making a case for America’s expansion: “Thank God, however, I’ve no opinions not even on the Dreyfus case. I’m more and more only aware of things as a more or less mad panorama, phantasmagoria and dime museum” (Letters 4:240). America’s burgeoning presence as an imperial force – in the Philippines, Guam, Cuba, and Hawaii – figures for James, like the Dreyfus case in France, as an aesthetic assault (and it might be noted how James’s distancing of himself from the Dreyfus incident’s exposure of French anti-Semitism anticipates the ambiguous, primarily formal manner in which he will make use of the figure of the Jew in The Golden Bowl). James’s specific sense of the British Empire’s impending decline and potential for violent collapse sound out in his responses to the contemporaneous outbreak of the Second Boer War – in a letter to Charles Eliot Norton from November 1899, James laments living “under the very black shadow of S. Africa,” haunted by the knowledge of his friends’ “young barbarians” fighting “in the thick of it” (Letters IV.124–5). In a letter to William James, one of the founding members of the Anti-Imperialist League, America’s violent presence in the Philippines occasions James’s lament for the nation’s lost possibilities: “we have ceased to be, among the big nations, the one great thing that made up for our so many crudities, & made us above all superior & unique – the only one with clean hands & no record of across-the-seas murder & theft. Terminato – terminato! ” (William and Henry James, Selected Letters 374). America’s “blaze about to come” left him, as he elaborated in a further letter, “woefully cold, thrilling with no glorious thrill or holy blood-thirst whatever” (William and Henry James, Selected Letters, 351).

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In The Golden Bowl, it is the peculiarly Anglophilic form of expansionism practised by the Ververs – expansion as a form of self-tutelage, as a quiet and ornamental accommodation of the other – that, I want to suggest, leaves James’s narrative voice more ambivalently poised over and sometimes even breathlessly charged by its violent possibilities. As an analogic British model for this conception of imperialism as a style, the novel offers up Colonel Bob Assingham as an embodiment of British imperial history, its supposedly quiet, efficient violence, its contemporary decline, and, in his relationship with Fanny, its centrality to America’s emerging imperialist narrative. Susan Griffin has tied James’s imagining of masculinity to his numerous returns, especially in his early fiction and late war writings, to the figure of the wounded soldier: the soldier’s textualized scars embody a distanced male otherness – a vulnerable surface without depth – necessary to the representational work of the Jamesian observer (Griffin 64). Bob Assingham’s body betrays no significant scars but his apparent imaginative dormancy functions in the novel as a similarly provocative surface; his relative quietude evokes a familiar image of British soldiery as stoic, of the kind of “Man” who, as in Rudyard Kipling’s “If,” can “wait and not be tired by waiting” (5) as he lays claims to “the Earth and everything that’s in it” (31).1 Stephen Arata finds in Bob Assingham’s relative imaginative poverty a representation of the self-consuming trajectory of empire, figuring “the decline of British imperial might in terms of an inability to engage in fruitful perception” (206). But James’s narrator is more interested in Bob Assingham’s unimaginative perspective than Arata suggests – Assingham stands in for a specifically British and male form of apperception that James will queerly return to at the end of his career (both his late essays “The Long Wards” and “Within the Rim” evince his intense interest in a peculiarly British form of military masculinity marked out by unimpressionability).2 From the novel’s opening, the transatlantic coupling of Bob and Fanny Assingham takes on a formative, even symbolic, status for the narrative’s central quartet, yet James’s narrator is quick to underscore the constructed nature of this status. The pair’s marriage, we are told, becomes the subject of “a legend, almost too venerable for historical criticism,” suggesting that it was made at a time in which “such things as American girls” being “accepted as ‘good enough’” had “not begun to be”; their marriage figures them as “discoverers of a kind of hymeneal

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North-West passage.” While Fanny knows “better” that such a time is fictional, that American girls had proved attractive enough from the time “of Pocahontas down” (GB 24), she accepts “resignedly the laurel of the founder, since she was in fact pretty well the doyenne, above ground, of her transplanted tribe, and since, above all, she had invented combinations, though she had not invented Bob’s own” (GB 24–5). In this way, the novel ties Fanny’s directive function in the plot – her preparation of “the ground” for Charlotte’s marriage (GB 61); her attraction to the supposed innocence of the Ververs, her “own sweet country-people, from whom” she has “so deplorably degenerated” (GB 282); her “exasperated … infatuation” with Amerigo and his interests (GB 377) – to an ambivalent allegorization of her Americanness. Assuming figuratively genealogical ties to both Pocahontas and “the founder,” Fanny’s marriage to Bob Assingham suggests that her role as “doyenne” evokes America’s postcolonial status as both colonized and a colonial force in its own right (even as it positions that status as an “invented combination”). Fanny’s and Bob’s charting of a “hymeneal North-West passage” establishes both the contingency and the pull of narratives of original contact and formative transatlantic migration for James’s characters. The novel looks to Bob Assingham as a corporeal rendition of British imperial style, evincing strict and strangely foppish restraint, seemingly natural authority, and necessary detachment. His body tells a story of empire as a happy combination of discipline and destiny. His “extremely slender foot which he kept jerking in its neat integument of fine-spun black silk and patent leather” bespeaks a “consciousness of military discipline,” of punishment “if it hadn’t been just as it was.” His body, “hungrily thin,” seems supernaturally suited to “transport and accommodation,” to assuming a role that would make others his transporters and hosts. He suggests “the habit of tropic islands, a continual cane-bottomed chair, a governorship exercised on wide verandahs” (GB 46). Yet his colonial experiences, “in old bewildering climates, in old campaigns of cruelty and license” (or the effect he produces of having had colonial experience), allows him to distance himself from things, to calculate them “without horror,” to “deal with things perfectly … without getting near them”; unlike Conrad’s Kurtz, Assingham seems to have emerged from the cruel, dark heart of colonial rule unscarred by “the horror.” Bob Assingham’s detached intellectual jousting with

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his wife (“a large proportion of whose meanings he knew he could neglect”) becomes a stand-in for the retired colonel’s former career (GB 47). Fanny recognizes his “military instinct” in his penchant for “extravagant language,” and likens him to a “retired General,” immersed in “the romance … of camp life,” playing with “toy soldiers”: “bad words, when sufficiently numerous and arrayed in their might, could represent battalions, squadrons, tremendous cannonades and glorious charges of cavalry” (GB 44–5). Colonial violence, the novel suggests, might easily be redirected and disciplined in “fine-spun” masculine display, “extravagant language,” and the “general economy” (GB 47) of parlour-talk; it might refigure itself as a social style. James sets Bob Assingham’s imperial self-assurance against his wife’s more complicated evocation of the colonial scene. If the colonel’s body indicates both accommodation by and detachment from colonial horrors in “bewildering climates,” Fanny’s “aspect” insistently calls up an orientalized ornamentality that resembles her husband’s exotic dislocation (“the habit of tropic islands”) even as it renders her detachment from the exotic less certain; she evokes, as Leisl M. Olson has argued, a cosmopolitan understanding of race as performed, transmittable, and always already intermixed (661–2). Fanny’s “Eastern” appearance “seemed to present her insistently as a daughter of the South, or still more of the East, a creature formed by hammocks and divans, fed upon sherbets and waited upon by slaves” (GB 23). Bob Assingham’s dress suggests a “fine” disciplining of twitchy violence, a “habit” of accommodation in colonial locales, and an almost parodic assumption of racial purity – “a certain conformity to the whiteness of inaccessible snows in his necktie, shirt-front and waistcoat” (GB 264). Fanny’s appearance suggests she is “a creature” no less “formed” by colonial comforts (by slavery, for instance), yet it renders her own whiteness, by “nature,” more contingent – her “dark, neat head,” her “richness of hue,” suggest “the pampered Jewess,” the “lazy Creole,” the “Queen of Sheba.” However, whereas Bob Assingham’s passive front bespeaks his imaginative detachment from his surroundings, Fanny’s friends are “in the game … of playing with the disparity between her aspect and her character” (GB 23): “her vision,” we are informed, is “not supine, not passive,” and “her false indolence” belies her interest in the “multitudinous detail” of life. As the American foil to her husband’s displaced English imperial energies, Fanny presents a less contained “vision” of the

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colonial project, a performance of authority that accepts both the power of staged passivity and the inevitability of racial impurity, even as it casts an “unappalled and unwearied” gaze, rather than a detached calculation, over the scene of violence (GB 24). Not unlike the attractive “golden bowl” which she will eventually shatter with impulsive violence, Fanny Assingham evokes a colonial aesthetic that yokes an orientalized allure of otherness, a concealed potential for destruction, and an Anglophilic appreciation of form. By allowing the Assinghams’ discussions to function as a kind of commentary on the relations at the centre of the text, James places their particular enactment of an allegorized imperial transition at the centre of his novelistic method. Bob Assingham’s distinctly English, detached play is crucial to his narrative function as the ear to his American wife’s analysis of, and interventions in, the novel’s central marital and extramarital relations. Bob’s only substantive contribution to the direction of the plot comes, at the start of Part Third, when, assuming the Jamesian observer’s habitual posture of hanging over a balustrade, like “some quite presentable person in charge of the police arrangements or the electric light” (GB 175), he observes Charlotte waiting for the prince at an official function and, subsequently, communicates his “impression” of the scene to his wife (GB 199).3 The colonel’s role in this scene is to put Fanny on the scent of Charlotte’s and Amerigo’s secret relations. Vessel-like, he carries his “impression” for Fanny’s benefit, and, as Fanny notes, his inability to interpret what he sees leaves her just “the truth of his plain vision, the very plainness of which was its value” (GB 200); his “confirmed old toughness” takes on “limited vibration” (GB 201). F.O. Matthiessen went so far as to describe the Assinghams’ coupling as a union of “the typical spokesman for James’ milieu” (Fanny) with “the staunchest anti-Jacobite on record” (Bob) (94–5). Certainly, James takes pains, within the novel, to highlight the functional aspect of the colonel’s character as a kind of pragmatic foil, opening his wife’s theorizing up to a broader audience: “He made her, when they were together, talk, but as if for some other person; who was in fact for the most part herself. Yet she addressed herself with him as she could never have done without him” (GB 195). But the colonel’s imaginative dormancy also makes him the prompter of his wife’s queer movements as a go-between for Amerigo’s and Maggie’s desires – his detachment, his “listening look” (GB 277), opens out the space in which Fanny

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will play with these relations and, in which these relations, their style, will eventually resist Fanny’s play. At the same time, Bob Assingham’s spatialized, passively positioned, masculine listening also proves critical to the novel’s erotics of assimilation and occlusion: his response to otherness – distanced, disciplined, and unimaginative – will, in James’s allegorical schema, both resist and inevitably shape Fanny’s efforts to interpret, steer, and foretell the trajectory of her “transplanted” tribe’s imperial self-imaginings. Fanny initially perceives her role in preparing “the ground” for Charlotte’s marriage, in prompting the Ververs to make “use” of Charlotte, as a necessary intervention in the limited and inefficient imaginative economy of her Anglophilic compatriots: as the Ververs fail to “see [their lives] for themselves,” they are, in Fanny’s eyes, “but wasting it and letting it go” (GB 276). Yet, if Fanny frames her intervention as the inevitable result of having fallen “in love with the beautiful symmetry of [her] plan” (GB 277), her economic terms also bespeak the colonel’s influence, the “English husband who in his military years had ‘run’ everything in his regiment” and could, thus, “make economy blossom like the rose” (GB 24). This entanglement of Fanny’s ornamentalizing outlook within her husband’s displaced colonial energies anticipates the manner in which Fanny’s function in the text, for the Ververs, will shift and Bob will provide the model for his wife’s accommodation of the Ververs’ expansionist manoeuvres. Where Fanny initially responds to Amerigo’s request to act as a guide, a “consort” whose sail will provide him with “orientation” through “the unknown sea” of the Ververs (GB 18), her role shifts as she comes to understand, in a visit to Maggie’s home in Eaton Square, the complicated social style that is shaping the lives of the quartette – she self-consciously throws off Amerigo’s maritime figure: “I see the boat they’re in, but I’m not, thank God, in it myself ” (GB 263). Resembling “with her so free orientalism of type, the immemorially speechless Sphinx about at last to become articulate,” Fanny remains, for Bob, adrift on a “mystic lake” of meditation as he circles the shore in the role “of the master and the manager, the commandant and the ratepayer” (GB 259). Indeed, it is Bob’s soft mastery, despite the “perversity” of Fanny’s felt connection with the couples, that covers Fanny’s return to shore: the colonel’s “type,” his “certain conformity to … whiteness,” gives the Assinghams the appearance of “a pair of specious worldly adventurers driven for relief under sudden stress” (GB 264). And, as such, it is Bob’s specifically

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English, quietly efficient conformity that models, for Fanny, the function she will take on by the end of the novel at Maggie’s unspoken behest for the restitution of an undisturbed “equilibrium” between the couples in the wake of Amerigo’s and Charlotte’s concealed adultery (GB 357). Like her husband, Fanny will administer a paradoxically violent quietude, “an extravagant expressive aggressive peace … a kind of helmeted trident-shaking pax Britannica” (GB 435). In this way, the structures of response associated with Bob Assingham prove critical to the path by which Fanny, Maggie, and indeed James’s narrator will carve out an “aggressive peace” from the transatlantic exchanges and conflicts that shape this narrative.

Amerigo and Adam: Queer Colonization Leo Bersani, in his important reading of “the Jamesian lie,” notes how Maggie’s “irresistibly coercive” vision produces a novel in which “human relations are seen entirely in terms of their compositional appeal” (147), and feelings register only as “the elaboration of surfaces,” as if “the geometry of human relations implied what we call human feelings into existence” (148). Where Bersani sees James’s novel as a morally ambiguous affirmation of “the triumph of fictional composition over a powerfully resistant reality,” I wish to dwell on how James’s radically formalist “dehumanization of desire” (Bersani 146) manages to unhinge the novel’s seemingly heterosexual frame while, at the same time, shedding light on the “compositional” force of imperial ideology. A strangely agential “geometry of human relations” marks the novel’s investment in Bob Assingham’s quietly violent, administrative style as well as Amerigo’s attraction to Adam Verver’s style, a style that seems, paradoxically, to both precede and proceed from the businessman. In the opening chapter, the prince tells Maggie that he is drawn to the “form” that “has brought” her father “out” (GB 4): “he’s a kind of result of his inevitable tone. My liking is accordingly for the tone – which has made him possible” (GB 5). Whereas Maggie naturalizes her father’s style, contending that he “hasn’t got any” form but “the American way” (GB 4), Amerigo recognizes that Adam’s style consists of exactly this rendering of his “way” as self-evident, as a surface concealing nothing. In Adam, Amerigo locates a continuity of form that seems to reside in a cosmopolitan, specifically Anglo-Saxon claim to wealth – Adam’s

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“way” represents for Amerigo, who is “somehow full of his race” (GB 10), an assimilative economic might gainsaying the Ververs’ “absolutely romantic” (GB 7) acquisition of international artifacts. Accordingly, Amerigo positions himself as both a consumer of that style and an object to be acquired and consumed by that style: while he proposes “eating” Maggie’s “father alive” by “cultivat[ing]” his own American tone, “to taste him,” “to get my pleasure” (GB 4–5), he accedes to Maggie’s rendition of him as her father’s “morceau de musée,” a “part of his collection” (GB 7–8). Rather than reading Amerigo’s attraction to Adam as James’s overwriting of “homoerotic desire with narcissistic longing – redirecting homoerotic desire into emulation” (Person 158), I want to suggest that such passages immediately establish the novel’s interest in style as a queer, colonizing force in itself, producing, coupling, and consuming the prince and his father-in-law. Amerigo’s racialized attraction to an American form of mobility evokes, of course, a series of precedents in American fiction: Donatello’s obsession with Miriam’s haunted movements in Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun (1860); Don Ippopolito’s pursuit of Florida Vervain in William Dean Howells’s A Foregone Conclusion (1875); and James’s own Giovanelli and his ambiguous courting of the verbose protagonist of Daisy Miller: A Study (1878–79). But where these earlier texts anticipate the treatment of Amerigo’s Italian passion as a seemingly “inexpugnable” trait (as if he had been “steeped … in some chemical bath” [GB 10]), The Golden Bowl generates more specific erotic tensions around the assimilative quality of the prince’s desire. The introduction of cannibalism as a trope for figuring Amerigo’s deracinating desire for Adam returns obliquely when James, through Amerigo, turns to Edgar Allan Poe as a literary precedent for his bewildering social environment. He recalls the story of the shipwrecked Gordon Pym, who, drifting in a small boat further toward the North Pole – or was it the South? – than any one had ever done, found at a given moment before him a thickness of white air that was like a dazzling curtain of light, concealing as darkness conceals, yet of the colour of milk or of snow. There were moments when he felt his own boat move upon some such mystery. The state of mind of his new friends, including Mrs. Assingham herself, had resemblances to a great white curtain. (GB 14–15)

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Rather than, as Paul Grimstad argues, just serving to expose Amerigo’s poor literary taste and “mercenary charlatanry” (232), The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket provides a specific and significant context for Amerigo’s queer desire to consume and be consumed by Adam. Arthur Pym’s suggestively queer companionship with his “intimate” companion, Augustus Barnard – they occupy “the same bed,” with Augustus telling stories of his travels – frames and initiates his desire for colonial adventure onboard the Grampus (1009). At sea, as two of only four survivors of a bloody mutiny, “the eyes of Augustus,” meeting his “with a degree of intense and eager meaning,” initially save Pym from a descent into cannibalism when a seagull drops part of its feast from the corpses of a passing hermaphrodite brig onto their raft (1087); the “perfervid scene,” as David Greven notes, calls up both the source and the prohibition of Pym’s “desire for another man’s flesh” (“Whole” 48). When Pym eventually has to engage in the act’s “exquisite horror” (1099), the mutineer Robert Parker’s self-sacrifice allows Pym to retain his unwilling detachment from the homosocial rite. In this sequence, Pym (and Poe) perform, as Paul Lyons argues, “a representative American man’s psychic need to differentiate himself from the ‘natural’ cannibals” that populate formulaic “discovery narrative[s]” (300). While such a literal plot of cannibalism’s “exquisite horror” might seem some distance from Amerigo’s playful banter at the opening to The Golden Bowl, Pym’s containment of a gothically queer plot of cannibal desire also looks forward to the ways in which James’s novel will reframe, and contain, the relationship between Amerigo and Adam through a series of sacrifice fantasies (the novel traces imaginings of Maggie, Charlotte, and Adam as necessary sacrificial victims for the containment of adultery’s “horror” – “the horror of the thing hideously behind” [GB 455]). Both The Golden Bowl and The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym attend to the investment of colonial discourse and, ambivalently, the novel itself in a frangible ideal of masculine whiteness built on an uneasily queer ingestion of otherness. So Pym’s carefully managed cannibalism acts out, to this end, a logical climax to Pym’s struggles against the mutineers whose initial rebellion had taken on a racialized guise when the “black cook,” a “perfect demon,” takes charge of the Grampus crew’s executions (1043). Pym’s subsequent passage on board the Jane Guy into undiscovered Antarctic territories – to the

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all-black island of Tsalal (where whiteness is feared and where the Jane Guy’s crew is all but massacred) and onward (with fellow survivor, the “half-breed” Dirk Peters, and their hostage, Nu-Nu) toward the “great white curtain” that marks the narrative’s endpoint – furthers the novel’s uncertain mapping of a naturalized geography of race. Dana Nelson notes how the ending of Pym (as Nu-Nu convulses and dies in the face of the encroaching whiteness) works as “a segregationalist parable” and “a fantastic confirmation of Manifest Destiny”: the “dazzling curtain of light” signals, in Poe’s novel, “that the white colonist’s right – physically and metaphysically – to the South Sea is already guaranteed: it is white” (Nelson, Word 97). But Pym’s ending, as decades of critical debate have suggested, is also maddeningly elliptical – the beckoning on of the supersized “shrouded human figure” whose skin is “the perfect whiteness of the snow” necessarily functions as a textual blank (1179); James himself found Poe’s “would-be portentous climax” wanting in “connexions,” its “elements … hang[ing] in the void,” so that its “immediate and flat” attempt at representing “the horrific in itself ” was lost (Literary Criticism II.1259). It is precisely the doubled significance of Pym’s white resolution as race fantasy and empty enigma that accounts for Poe’s resonant circulation in the narrative of Amerigo’s entry into Adam Verver’s ken. The return of Pym’s ending in the account of Amerigo’s responses to the Ververs works as an ironic reanimation of Poe’s flatness – Amerigo’s vague recalling of Poe’s white curtain as a sign of the possibilities for “what imagination Americans could have” (GB 14) recontextualizes Pym’s fate as an assimilative desire for consumption, anticipating the security the prince will locate in the superficial values of his marriage: “the positive flatness of their tenderness, a surface all for familiar use” (GB 344). Like Poe’s novel, James’s charts an uncertain relationship between the culturally immanent and erotic pull of assimilation (embodied, especially, in Adam Verver, whose vision “sometimes ache[s]” for a “blessed impersonal whiteness” [GB 88]) and its own narrative acts of absorption and containment. The reader’s earliest introduction to Adam at his Fawns estate, in the opening two chapters of Part Second, establish the American’s proprietorial narcissism as he looks “out into spaces of terrace and garden, of park and woodland and shining artificial lake, of richly condensed horizon” with a sense of having “the world to one’s self ” (of course, as the narrator reminds us, “our attention,”

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as silent witnesses, “qualif[ies] his achieved isolation” [GB 87]; the chapter “draw[s] our circle” round him [GB 105]). Adam’s colonial gaze (a recognizable example of what Mary Louise Pratt calls “the monarch-of-all-I-survey scene” [197]) chimes with the later account of his discovery of his vocation as a “connoisseur,” evoking Keats’s “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”: “His ‘peak in Darien’ was the sudden hour that had transformed his life, the hour of his perceiving with a mute inward gasp akin to the low moan of apprehensive passion that a world was left him to conquer and that he might conquer it if he tried” (GB 98). Stuart Burrows notes how it is the “pregnant silence” of Keats’s Cortez at the end of the poem (not unlike the whiteness that greets Poe’s Pym) that anticipates the Ververs’ combined efforts to re-read their environs and to “retain the world of appearances – or innocence – in the face of terrible knowledge” (104). But the citing of Keats’s sonnet also evokes, even as it occludes, the obliquely staged and ambiguously weighted “wild surmise” of the men in Keats’s poem who look, not on the Pacific, but on Cortez himself. If, as Marjorie Levinson has argued, the men’s mediating presence suggests Keats’s sense of estrangement from the classed privileges usually accorded to poetic sensibility (13–14), Adam’s evocation of this scene also raises the spectre of the qualifying reader’s (or perhaps the narrator’s) own “wild surmise” outside his self-sufficing, privileged gaze, uncertainly poised at the margins of the American’s “inward vagueness” (GB 88). As a kind of logical progression from this early, contingent vision of Adam Verver’s “apprehensive passion” (GB 98), James treats his accommodation of, and attraction to, the prince’s personal style as part of an unfolding spatial erotics. The prince’s arrival strikes Adam, at first, as a kind of architectural assault, like the dropping of “a great Palladian church” into their “pleasant public square.” In the aftermath, Amerigo becomes subject to a kind of “phenomen[al]” colonization; the narrator, focalizing Adam, imagines this as a reversal of the prince’s stylistic disruption, a hypotactic incorporation of him from the “vantage of wide, wooded Fawns” with “its spreading park,” so that “no visibility of transition showed, no violence of accommodation, in retrospect, emerged” (GB 94). Adam frames his acquisition of Amerigo as a queerly tactile transaction, finding in his son-in-law’s assimilative desires a delightful “roundness”: “It’s the sort of thing in you that one feels – or at least I do – with one’s hand. Say you had been formed all

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over in a lot of little pyramidal lozenges like that wonderful side of the Ducal Palace in Venice – so lovely in a building, but so damnable, for rubbing against, in a man, and especially in a near relation.” “[W]ell accustomed, by this time, to taking,” Amerigo takes the “golden drops” of Adam’s figure and his “uniform smoothness” betrays their presence only “by showing for the moment a richer tone.” The eroticized compact of Adam and Amerigo, formalized in the “pure and perfect crystal” (GB 96) of the prince’s attention and in the narrator’s artful folding of syntax, replicates, then, the novel’s governing figure, the titular ornament whose “golden” surface conceals the cracks that will both bring Maggie’s recognition of her husband’s adultery and occasion her elaborately ornamental, perversely pleasurable reconfiguration of the marriages. Adam’s acquisition of Amerigo – an acquisition that ambivalently hints at its potential for perversity even as it assures others of the participants’ penchant for moral delicacy – serves as a concretization of the father-in-law’s taste, his “American way” (GB 4). Adam Verver’s specific style, his Paterian “aesthetic principle, planted where it could burn with a cold, still flame,” his attraction to the “plastic beauty” (GB 189) of things (like the prince), figures as both a guarantee of the surface’s smoothness and a passion requiring careful secretion in order not to disrupt that surface. In a fascinatingly evasive and evocative move, adopting a “figure” with “a freedom that the occasion scarcely demands,” the narrator calls up the ghost of Dorian Gray (and Oscar Wilde) when comparing Adam’s containment of the “scandal” of his aesthetic passion to “those fortunate bachelors or other gentlemen of pleasure who so manage their entertainment of compromising company that even the austerest housekeeper, occupied and competent belowstairs, never feels obliged to give warning” (GB 189). Such a passage – with its curious combination of narratorial freedom and discretion finding its double in the figure of the “austerest housekeeper” – supports Denis Flannery’s contention that “motivations and desires” circulate in this novel “in a vortex that can encompass almost anything and whose strategies of concealment include display.” This structured trope for Adam Verver’s aesthetic taste cannot help but evoke the open secret of this widower-bachelor’s “compromising” companionship with Amerigo, his “foundational, unspeakable, but everywhere spoken and potentially enactable desire for his son-in-law” (210).

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The arrangement of Amerigo and Adam as a couple becomes a specific subject for discussion and planning when, in the second half of the novel, Maggie, suspicious of Amerigo’s and Charlotte’s attachment, proposes to send her husband and her father off together. “He would go off anywhere, I think,” Maggie informs Amerigo; “you know, if you would go with him. I mean you and he alone” (GB 328). Amerigo’s “exquisite instincts” have, Maggie insists, “produced” their “effect – that of [Adam’s] wanting not to be, even for a month or two, where you’re not” (GB 328–9); Maggie sells the trip to her father as an escape from the “furiously domestic,” an opportunity for these “spirited young men” to “encounter the agreeable in forms that would strike them for the time at least as novel” (GB 350). While Maggie’s quasi-flirtatious appeals prove ultimately unsuccessful, the queer suggestiveness of her “proposal” colours Adam’s sense of averted danger after the plan’s abandonment, of “something haunting – as if it were a bit uncanny” lurking in the “general comfort and privilege” (GB 353) of their marital arrangements: it’s “sort of ” soothing; as if we were sitting about on divans, with pigtails, smoking opium and seeing visions. “Let us then be up and doing” – what is it Longfellow says? That seems sometimes to ring out; like the police breaking in – into our opium-den – to give us a shake. But the beauty of it is at the same time that we are doing; we’re doing, that is, after all, what we went in for. We’re working it, our life, our chance, whatever you may call it, as we saw it, as we felt it, from the first. We have worked it, and what more can you do than that? (GB 353–4) Adam’s rhetoric ambivalently manages this “uncanny” threat of “scandal” and the policing of illicit pleasure: on one hand, his defence of the “opium den” lays claim to a perversely capacious space of “beauty” and “visions”; on the other hand, it is Adam’s vision, under the imagined threat of suppressed thought “breaking in,” that converts this den of masculine indolence into a more acceptable space of capitalist “doing,” a site of work. Recalling the utterances of Wilde’s enigmatic anti-hero Dorian Gray or the addled, Orientalizing visions of Dickens’s John Jasper, Adam Verver’s rhetoric bespeaks a necessarily sexually dissonant, colonial vision in which the occupation of exotic space (pigtailed in the opium den) represents both a mastery of that space (“working it”)

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and a “shake[n]” unmastering. Like the queerly resonant silences that accrue around Dorian Gray’s secret life and the “great white” blankness that greets Poe’s Pym (and annihilates Nu-Nu), Adam’s Orientalized “soothing” state, even in its immobility, speaks to the availability for white men of a discourse of exotic adventure capable of yoking the perverse and the perversely disciplined.

“Something So Ornamental”: Figures of Capacity and Containment Late in Book First, at the country estate of Matcham where the prince and Charlotte will be left for the first time in each other’s company by Maggie and her father, the narrator exposes Amerigo’s constant experience of his body being “engaged at the front,” doing “English things … in the English way”: “English society,” as he would have said, cut him … in two, and he reminded himself often, in his relations with it, of a man possessed of a shining star, a decoration, an order of some sort, something so ornamental as to make his identity not complete, ideally, without it, yet who, finding no other such object generally worn, should be perpetually, and the least bit ruefully, unpinning it from his breast to transfer it to his pocket. (GB 233) Leland S. Person locates, in this moment, the terms by which James and Adam Verver will tame and contain the prince’s “sexually potent male character” (159) – “Amerigo’s individuality” is made available “as an ornamental object” (161), “an attenuated, narcissistic ‘trace’ or residue” (162), which he now “finger[s] … a good deal, out of sight – amounting as it mainly did for him to a restless play of memory and a fine embroidery of thought” (GB 233–4). Guy Davidson finds in this scene an alignment of Amerigo both with more feminized conceptualizations of the sexual self as interior space (as “vessel,” as “reproductive capacity” [33]) and with the “social system of women’s circulation” as ornamentation (“Ornamental” 34). As such, the text positions Amerigo’s sexual subjectivity as “an alternative model of masculine identity to the – implicitly normative – model of masculinity described in Adam’s

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references to monolithically ‘angular’ men” (33). The tension between containment and capacity, drawn out by Person and Davidson, work in this scene to construct a torn representation of the prince’s sexual agency. On one hand, Amerigo’s onanistic secretion of his detachably phallic “shining star” (“finger[ing] it “out of sight”) suggests an uncanny transmutation of an identifiable marker of his racialized subject position into an internal, erotically capacious seat of selfhood. At the same time, the prince’s engagement of his body “at the front” points to his growing awareness of how the British Empire’s ornamental forms can be used to project culturally prescribed notions of one’s capacity for others. Amerigo’s dual approach to the logic of “ornamental” identity positions his character as neither wholly interior nor exterior and reflective of fissures in the form of English identity itself. James’s rendering of Amerigo in “ornamental” terms highlights the manner in which the golden bowl itself plays a critical role, at this point, in leading the reader through the novel’s shift to a perspective increasingly aligned with Maggie (“The Princess” of Book Second) and increasingly detached from the prince. Amerigo’s and Charlotte’s plans for their tryst to Gloucester, the unnarrated beginning of their affair, are launched when Amerigo presents their opportunity as “a great gold cup that we must somehow drain together”; the prince’s figure prompts Charlotte to recall “the gilded crystal bowl in the little Bloomsbury shop” that she had contemplated buying for him in one of the novel’s opening scenes (GB 255). While much has been made of how Maggie’s (and the narrator’s) social imaginary – their delicate “equilibrium” – replicates the bowl’s artful concealment of its cracks, recent criticism has given overdue attention to the bowl’s Jewish seller. Placed as an object amongst a miniaturized rendition of the detritus of recent but waning neoimperialism (“things consular, Napoleonic, temples, obelisks, arches, tinily re-embodied” [GB 76]), the bowl in the hands of the Jewish shopkeeper is, Jonathan Freedman argues, an “overdetermined symbol” of the novel’s larger thematic tracing of “racial degeneration or cultural decline” (Temple 142). As a foil to Amerigo’s successful yet fraught deracination, the Jew, by virtue of his association with the bowl, functions for James “as a receptacle: a figure onto which can be loaded all the sources of his inchoate anxieties and unacknowledged terrors” (149). Shifting focus somewhat, I want to draw attention to how the feminized figure of the Jewish

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shopkeeper, the “queer little foreign man” (GB 401), makes alternative readings of masculinity available to the novel’s particular staging of male assimilation as an aesthetic event. Sharon B. Oster argues for a redemptive reading of the shopkeeper, noting the parallels between the antique dealer and the Jamesian author as mediating figures who reveal “aesthetic value to be not absolute but negotiable” (982); the Jew’s handling of the bowl offers James “a position from which to explore the transferability of value between people and things, and the ethical economy that undergirds acts of material exchange and the production of exchange value” (978). But the bowl’s resonance also owes much, I would argue, to its movement, figurative and literal, in queer traffic between men and its uncanny illumination of that traffic; the antiquario’s management of the bowl’s symbolic value offers a critical window onto Amerigo’s negotiation of his ornamentalized masculinity. In place of more obvious anti-Semitic signifiers (like the proverbial hooked nose) that mark out the Jewish male body in works by the likes of Dickens and Hawthorne, the scene of the bowl’s first appearance substitutes a set of somewhat fuzzier, metonymic markers – the gaze and the secret tongue – that serve to situate the Jewish male body within the novel’s broader epistemological and political interest in vision and language as fields of contested power. Amerigo’s masculinity, in the second half of the novel, becomes especially tied to negotiating a politics of vision (how Maggie sees him and how, being seen, he might assuage his wife’s gaze), and it is his earlier encounter with the fateful bowl and its seller that prepares the ground for this negotiation and gives it a particular racial ambivalence. “The man in the little shop” meets Charlotte and Amerigo, as they peruse his wares, with a gaze that is “remarkable for an insistence not importunate, inasmuch as it was mainly mute, but singularly, intensely coercive – this personage fixed on his visitors an extraordinary pair of eyes” (GB 74). While the reader is left with little other signs of the antiquarian’s body (a sign, in itself, of Amerigo’s, and consequently the narrator’s, aversion to looking too closely), the singularity and “coercive” intensity of his sight evokes contemporaneous representations of the mesmeric Jewish gaze (most familiar in the figure of Svengali from George Du Maurier’s enormously popular Trilby [1895]); his “insistence” evokes a broader concern, in racial writings of the period, with the piercing eyes of the Jew as a force for covert unsettling and colonization of the Gentile

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subject (Pick 106–7). At the same time, the shopman’s seemingly passive participation in this scene – “not importunate” and “mainly mute” – disrupts more actively masculine accounts of the body as a colonizing force. In this way, James’s picture of the shopman also intersects with eugenicist readings of “the Jewish gaze” (Gilman 69), readings that tended to construct the “pathognomonic physiognomy of the Jew – especially his eyes” as a site of gendered perversity, of the male Jew’s propensity for feminine hysteria (76). Straddling the roles of the passive and the coercive, of the perpetual outsider and the colonizer, the shopman’s visual entrance into the text looks forward to the doubled force of his bowl, its propensity both, as an ornament, to merely, mutely, occupy space for the imaginative flights of others and, as a “ricordo” (GB 77), to shape human thoughts with strange agency through its capacity to recollect. If my reading of the shopman’s gaze appears to be building on fairly slim material (he is certainly no Svengali despite James having provided the anecdotal germ for Du Maurier’s novel), it is worth noting how his spectatorial presence generates a suggestive drama of vision through the contrasting responses of Charlotte and Amerigo. Charlotte, converting the seller’s gaze into an object to be consumed, leaves with the impression that “the man himself was the greatest curiosity they had looked at” (GB 75). She finds in his manner a “regular” (i.e., habitual or typical) form of attention: “he has his way; for that way of saying nothing with his lips when he’s all the while pressing you so with his face, which shows how he knows you feel it – that is a regular way” (GB 75–6). By contrast, according to Charlotte, the prince “hadn’t looked at him,” because “below a certain social plane, he never saw” (GB 75). And yet if Amerigo appears to make “nothing, clearly, of the little man’s attention” (GB 78) and leaves the store before Charlotte, he later claims to have seen through the manner of this “rascal” to the obscured flaws of the object he placed before her: “I did look. I saw the object itself. It told its story” (GB 84). Where Charlotte feels a characteristic force in the antiquarian’s look, the prince seeks to assert a critical distance from this scene of feminized advertisement and lays claim to a superior form of objective looking to the diminutively placed “little man” – accordingly, Amerigo’s discriminating gaze falls in, for Charlotte, “with a general, or rather with a special, vision” (GB 85). It is no accident that when they later recur to this scene, during the preparation for the tryst to

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Gloucester, Amerigo will provide the explicit racial terms by which they will together recall “the little swindling Jew” (GB 255). Through the shopkeeper’s staging of the bowl as a rupturing of parochial discourses of national belonging (and longing), James situates the bowl as a placeholder capable of queerly overturning the terms by which Amerigo seeks to contain its appeal. Amerigo’s claims to see through the seller and the bowl potentially signals overcompensation for the embarrassment he experiences when the antiquario’s “suddenest, sharpest Italian” alerts Charlotte and Amerigo to the fact that he has been party to their final, intimate endeavour before the prince’s marriage. While the shopkeeper is not marked by a Yiddish inflection of speech, the translational terms by which he intrudes on and evades linguistic, national, and erotic boundaries establish him as suggestively cosmopolitan and make the bowl a kind of symbolic bearer of this transnational fluidity.4 When Amerigo, upset by the seller’s exposure, challenges him to identify his nationality (“You’re English?”), the shopkeeper responds with the “briefest Italian” exclamation – “Che!” (GB 79) – as he turns to bring out the fateful receptacle: He handled it with tenderness, with ceremony, making a place for it on a small satin mat. “My Golden Bowl,” he observed – and it sounded on his lips as if it said everything. He left the important object – for as “important” it did somehow present itself – to produce its certain effect. (GB 80) Just as the antiquario refuses the prince’s attempt to classify his nationality, “waiv[ing] the question” (GB 79), he also allows the bowl to “present itself ” (GB 80), establishing its mobile signification in a scene of racial confusion. The antiquario’s exclamation “Che! ” might easily function as a declarative dismissal (like “What?” in English) of the prince’s question as foolish, because he either obviously is or obviously is not Italian (as such, the ambiguous statement could suggest both Amerigo’s distaste for the suggestion of their shared cultural roots and the antiquario’s own sense of limited participation in anti-Semitic European citizenry). At the same time, “che” might ambiguously serve to introduce “My Golden Bowl” as an answer to Amerigo’s question – as if the “impressive” bowl’s “certain effect” (unlike its uncertain grammatical entry) might settle, or perhaps render redundant, the question of the antiquario’s national

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belonging. The “ceremony” of the bowl’s unveiling suggests a kind of ornamental identity, a self-possession signalled by the antiquario’s possessive pronoun that will refuse Amerigo’s subsequent efforts to manage its “certain effect.” It is, of course, in the scene of the bowl’s return, and the return via Maggie’s retrospective narration of the “queer little foreign man” (GB 401) who sells her the bowl, that James introduces the most explicit shift in Amerigo’s claims to power. Maggie reintroduces the ornament as a specifically optical test: with “strange wide eyes” (GB 403), she informs Fanny Assingham that she intends to place the bowl in a visible location so that it will “meet him” (GB 405) and so that she can “hear and … watch herself ” (GB 406). When, in the aftermath of Fanny smashing the bowl, Maggie is left face to face with her husband over this now impossible plan, Maggie accounts for the prince’s distaste for the shopman as a failure of imagination. Where Amerigo only vaguely recalls the episode in Bloomsbury as an encounter with a “decided little beast” (GB 429) who “wanted awfully to work off his bowl” (GB 427), Maggie informs him that it was the imaginative vision of “the little man,” his recognition of Amerigo’s and Charlotte’s intimacy and his “sympathy” (GB 428) for Maggie, that was responsible for her attaining the fateful knowledge: “you too had produced your effect; only, unlike you, he had thought of it again – he had recurred to it” (GB 429). James positions both Maggie’s and the Jew’s interventions in the plot at this point as acts of narrative looping – the shopman only figures in retrospect through Maggie’s delayed account of the scene of her purchase and his later efforts to take back the bowl on account of its concealed flaws; the antiquario’s visit to Maggie’s home functions as both an attempted undoing of the story of their economic transaction and, inadvertently, a recursive arcing of the narrative back to the scene of his earlier witnessing after he sees photos of the adulterous couple. His “recurr[ing]” uncannily, belatedly renders that scene the “ricordo” (GB 77) that Charlotte had hoped for and that the prince had dismissed. The bowl’s “conscious perversity” (GB 406), enfolding the prince in its plot, produces a crisis in the maintenance of his assimilative masculinity; the antiquario’s racially recognizable, compellingly ambiguous gaze can be felt in the tenor of these aftereffects. Even as his gaze “fixed her” with a “hard yearning,” Maggie keeps Amerigo at a distance and “his eyes” meet hers “as if something cold and momentarily

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unimaginable breathed upon her, from afar off, out of his strange consistency” (GB 431). When Maggie suggests the scene has revealed the “deep” quality of Amerigo’s character, the narrative voice offers a cool appraisal of how this accusation brings the prince’s suppressed racial characteristics to the surface, renders them legible: it produces “in his features, in spite of his control of them, one of those quick plays of expression, the shade of a grimace, that testified as nothing else did to his race” (GB 432). And it is, once more, the inscription of Amerigo within the rounded form of Adam’s quiet order that queerly circulates as the sign of the prince’s containment by an ornamental logic he had thought to control. As Maggie leaves him with the vague command to find out for himself what others know about what Maggie knows, Amerigo feels the note of “her father’s motive and principle”: “He was ‘deep,’ as Amerigo called it, so that no vibration of the still air should reach his daughter.” Protecting “the firm outer shell of ” Adam’s “dignity, all marvelous enamel,” becomes the “paramount law” (GB 433) of Maggie’s interaction with Amerigo. Recalling the quiet stoicism of the British soldier, the quietude of Adam Verver incorporates, like the bowl, the studied, potentially unsettling suppressions of Amerigo’s public self. And in this ornamentalized drama of an ever-present and suppressed desire between men, the diminutive Jew, “the little man” shadowing Amerigo’s machismo, suggests both the mobilizing force of a racialized otherness within the colonial economy and the availability of that otherness for conversion, incorporation, containment.

Embracing and Enclosing: What Does Imperial Style Want? In a rare foray into James studies, Judith Butler reads the conclusion to The Golden Bowl – its reinscription of Maggie’s and Amerigo’s marriage through the missing term of Charlotte, their common desire – as an exemplary scene for thinking through Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s “ethically capacious” approach to desire’s triangulations (“Capacity” 119). “What emerges” at the novel’s end, Butler claims, is an “ethical affirmation of the middle terms that hover in partial shade between any two lovers. It is an ethics of capacity rather than of disavowal” (118). Butler’s focus on the “middle terms” of male-female and female-female

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relations at the novel’s close overlooks its lingering, if marginalized, interest in the mediating, incongruous trajectories of desire between men. James seals The Golden Bowl’s final scene with an ambiguous event of corporeal containment: while Maggie appeals to Amerigo to “see” the “help” provided to them by Charlotte’s “mastery of the greater style” as Adam leads her off to American City, her husband attempts “to meet her in her own way” by a physical enfolding, “his hands holding her shoulders, his whole act enclosing her.” Bringing a larger thematic interest in analogies between masculine embrace and narrative enfolding to a climax, Amerigo’s “enclosing,” in conjunction with his elliptical utterance (“‘See?’ I see nothing but you” [GB 548]), raises complicated questions about the value of the “equilibrium” reinstated by James’s, and Maggie’s, ultimate arrangements; the novel’s elastic “constellation of desire” (Butler, “Capacity” 119), its charting of the messy intersections of patriarchy, transatlantic imperialism, and the queer contours of homosociality suggest something more difficult than an embodied “ethics of capacity.” Just as the bowl and Maggie’s famous vision of the “outlandish pagoda” (GB 290) at the opening of the second book offer up figures of enclosed spaces that both invite and refuse interpretive access, the novel uses the ambiguous, corporeal figure of embracing or enfolding another to track scenes of domination and submission enacted by, and on, the stylized male body.5 In the opening scenes of the novel’s second half, Amerigo seeks to maintain the facades of his marriage by acts of embrace that, despite their apparent expression of an overwhelmingly straight form of desire as colonization, become subject to often queer, encircling disorientation as Maggie (and the narrator through Maggie’s focalizing consciousness) enfolds these acts in a recursive narrative circuitry. It is with an embrace that Amerigo meets Maggie’s silent appeal to him on his return from the trip to Gloucester, the presentation of her cup “filled to the very brim”: he holds “her close and long, in expression of their personal reunion” and “with a deep vague murmur” rubs his cheek against the side of her face (GB 300). In the aftermath of this brief reunion, in a passage of doubled retrospection (the narrator gives us Maggie, days later, recalling her response after he leaves the room), Maggie remembers feeling a subsidence of “fear” and a “sweet” emergence of “the sense of possession” (GB 301). Despite Maggie’s subsequent, masochistic reflections on Amerigo’s power (she has “never felt … so abjectly

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conscious of a master of her fate. He could do what he would with her” [GB 302]), her experience of a “sense of possession” necessarily complicates the effects of Amerigo’s “expression” – the phrase “sense of possession” captures both Amerigo’s attempted enclosure of his wife and her experience of that enclosure as a confirmation of his belonging, of his “unuttered” (GB 300) participation in the equilibrium that sustains her father’s presence between them. But the phrase also reflects how it is the act of recollection, and the narrative’s own tracing of how “such things …. played, through her full after-sense, like lights on the whole impression” (GB 301) that makes this delicately balanced “possession” possible. In the first half of Book Second, Amerigo’s insistent embracing of Maggie (shadowed as this is by his memories of the “long embrace of arms and lips” with Charlotte [GB 210]) performs a kind of sexual possession, an “infinite pressure of her whole person to his own” (GB 327). With his hold consistently acting in place of “the words he hadn’t uttered,” Maggie finds, in her held state, her “foredoomed” and “virtual assent” analeptically guaranteeing “the assumption he had thus made that there was really nothing such a demonstration didn’t anticipate and didn’t dispose of ” (GB 307). But as Maggie continues to probe at the relations between Amerigo and Charlotte, her trick is to return such embraces, once more, to the figure of her father, the remainder to be quietly squared in the strange arithmetic of their desires. When, in the scene discussed earlier, Maggie prompts Amerigo, as they drive to their home, to propose to Adam a trip to Europe (“he’d go ‘like a shot,’ … if you were to suggest it” [GB 330]), she does so as an attempt to reframe her husband’s “long, firm embrace” (GB 326) in the carriage: because Maggie’s proposed “condition” fails to “cause his arm to let her go,” she feels she has “made him, of a sudden, still more intensely think, think with such concentration that he could do but one thing at once” (GB 331). Ultimately, Amerigo defuses the threat posed by Maggie’s plan by proposing that they convince Charlotte to act as an intermediary, immediately raising Maggie’s fears that Charlotte will alert her father to his daughter’s concerns; the power of the prince’s embrace resonates at the chapter’s end in Maggie’s “new uneasiness” at “the way she had slipped from” her husband’s (rhetorical and physical) hold (GB 335). Nevertheless, the exchange replays Maggie’s queerly disorienting inclination to shape and place her adulterous husband by

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converting his physical enclosure of her into an imagined engagement with her father: “I verily believe,” she informs Amerigo, “he’d like to have you for a while to himself ” (GB 330). Maggie’s queer coupling of Amerigo and Adam depends, once more, on the novel’s delicate ties between the silence that gainsays adultery and the unuttered quietude of Anglophilic good form, the “sense of a life tremendously ordered and fixed” that rises to greet Maggie at the chapter’s conclusion (GB 334). It is worth noting how the quiet act of embrace also becomes one of Adam’s resounding contributions to the narrative’s concluding drama. In the scene in which Maggie and her father dance round the prospect of Adam’s removal with Charlotte to American City, Adam’s “square[d]” bodily presence gives Maggie “the effect … of a reminder” of “all … she might take him as representing.” Adam’s “very quietness” offers “his exquisite public perversity” up to Maggie as the ultimate embodiment of the imperial ornament: this quality perhaps it might be – all the more too as the result, for the present occasion, of an admirable, traceable effort – that placed him in her eyes as no precious work of art probably had ever been placed in his own. There was a long moment, absolutely, during which her impression rose and rose, even as that of the typical charmed gazer, in the still museum, before the named and dated object, the pride of the catalogue, that time has polished and consecrated. (GB 481) The narrative voice wavers in this passage between a conditional mood that acknowledges Maggie’s framing vision and indicative statements that suggest her vision is shaped by Adam’s own. Evoking the famous “fair structure” of the pagoda, at the start of Book Second, which “spread itself so amply and rose so high” (GB 289), the mediating “impression” in this scene, which “rose and rose” (and which will “raise” Maggie “higher, higher” [GB 482]) allows the narrative voice to enact a slide that stages Adam’s effects as self-perpetuating, as brought into being by his own style as “the consummate collector and infallible high authority” (GB 481). The narrative’s wavering focalization and its accretive rhetorical force becomes a tribute to, and an enactment of, cultural authority’s ornamental force. It is in this context that Adam takes his daughter in an “august and almost stern” embrace at the

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chapter’s end, which produces “for its intimacy, no revulsion and” breaks “into no inconsequence of tears” (GB 483). But if Adam’s embrace reminds us of his potential for a quiet mastery of the social scene, James’s narrative form (and Maggie’s recursive gaze) interrupts and resignifies his accommodating hold (even as it structurally mirrors the enfolding act). Adam’s embrace of Maggie, as a quiet, enfolding consecration of the Ververs’ power, becomes, at the start of the succeeding chapter, a switchpoint for recalling Maggie’s and Charlotte’s kiss at the end of the famous card game scene which immediately preceded the meeting of Maggie and Adam – in structural terms, Maggie’s and Charlotte’s moment of interrupted intimacy recursively encloses Adam’s enfolding of Maggie. The embrace of father and daughter returns the narrator to the “unanimities of silence” that “consecrated” (GB 484) the women’s kiss as the spectators (Adam and Amerigo) find themselves unable to name what “estrangement” has been resolved, quelled as they are by their sense of a truth “which had so long, for the finer sensibility, pervaded the air” (GB 485). The reaction, as Kevin Ohi notes, queerly splices the spectators’ avoidance of locating “Maggie’s specific grounds for resentment” with their avoidance of mentioning “the particular absurdity that two women caught together might be suspected of, and that might, if only by vulgar others, be mentioned” (Henry James 34). Enacting, on a larger scale, the hypotactic arrangement of the Jamesian sentence, the novel formally embraces the strangely “seducti[ve]” scene with her father within the act and recollection of Maggie’s and Charlotte’s “prodigious kiss” (GB 465), suggesting the enablement of the father’s enfolding by similar sexual tensions, enacted and restrained. Just as Amerigo’s acts of embrace formally inscribe marital desires yet inevitably trace bonds between men, Adam’s hold on Maggie (no less imperial in its quiet forcefulness) enacts a quasi-incestuous compact ineluctably tied to broader desires beyond the family unit. Both men seek familial and marital forms of order by harnessing an understanding of social bodies as ornamental; both men find themselves inscribed by that same ornamental logic in relations less containable than they have imagined. How, then, do these various scenes of embrasure prepare us for the novel’s charged denouement, the breathless tableau of Amerigo’s and Maggie’s enfolded bodies? Eschewing the death scenes by which Melville’s and Stevenson’s “queer Atlantic” fantasies both affirm and expel the perverse, stylistic force of their protagonists, James, not for the

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first or last time, invokes the embrace as a suitably enigmatic endpoint for thinking through the novel’s erotic terrain.6 Amerigo’s enclosure of Maggie returns us one final time to a physical rendering of the doubled signification of masculine detachment: what Amerigo sees may signal a willed detachment from the crushing of Charlotte, an active ignorance and refusal to see his role in that crushing; but his statement also functions to position that ignorance as anything but active – as the perfect fulfillment of Maggie’s plan, Amerigo quite literally now only has eyes for her, and he signals, by this shared vision, his ultimate deracination beyond the “great white curtain” of the Ververs’ economic and racialized might. Along these lines, Amerigo’s embrace, sealing the compact he has made and bringing to a rest his wandering gaze, plays out as the domestic(ated) counterpart to Charlotte’s redeployment as an imperial agent in the “queer future” (GB 532) of her and Adam’s life in American City: Charlotte’s “mastery of the greater style” (as Maggie envisages her muted dignity) involves an imagining of her role in this removal as a chance for “representing the arts and the graces to a people languishing, afar off, in ignorance” (GB 540). But Amerigo’s embrace, and the ambiguities that attend his statement of allegiance (“I only have eyes for you”), also refuses to give up the prince’s motivations; if Maggie’s burying of her own eyes in his breast for “pity and dread” of what she finds in her husband’s gaze signals her horror of the effects that her plotting, her styling of the story’s equilibrium, have generated, this act also helps to solidify the novel’s signification of the embrace as a space of suppression, of “buried” truths and deceptions (GB 548). James’s final tableau of enfolding give us a lasting image of the novel’s driving, formal interest in the thin lines between the violence of masculine containment, imperial conquest, and racial assimilation, and the capacious possibilities of queer desire, ornamental identities, and social entanglements. “What does Jamesian style want?” – so David Kurnick poses the question in a suggestive and insightful essay. Noting the tendency for characters and narrators in late James to speak in the same voice, Kurnick makes a case for “performative universalism,” for the characters’ extra-diegetic enactment of a “radically collectivist ethical imagination” (124). In The Golden Bowl, not only do the characters tend to speak a similar Jamesian language, replete with appositives, grammatical postponements, and parenthetical interruptions, they also act out of respect for a style committed to the minimum of vibration – in

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this way, the unvoiced and ambiguous support of the principal male characters in the novel (Bob Assingham, Amerigo, Adam) ensures the apparent success of Maggie Verver’s social architecture at the novel’s end. If such an enactment of collectivity works through a detached integration of the novel’s more perverse imaginings of male desire (the interlaced desires of Amerigo and Adam; the tracing of those desires by Adam’s incestuous attachment to Maggie) into the family fold, then perhaps one could argue, as Kurnick does of The Wings of the Dove, that The Golden Bowl seeks to formally realize an “ethics of queer life,” encouraging an “interpretive agnosticism when faced with questions of sexual and identitarian ‘truth’” (221n2). But the novel’s collectivizing voice also suggests a less egalitarian mode of imaginary unification, a stylistic performance of what Jonathan Freedman has identified as the novel’s fearful endorsement of “the maintenance of an Anglo-American cultural and racial identity under the threat of a seemingly inevitable decline by means of the careful infusion of other racial ‘bloods’ and cultural experiences” (Temple 135). Amerigo’s reintegration and Adam’s transporting of Charlotte to American City manage, in this reading, to attach a radical deconstruction of heterosexual domesticity to the mobilization of colonial discourse. If analogy is the key means by which the novel asks us to link imperialism with desire, what, as Margery Sabin has asked, is the “cultural logic” (212) of Adam’s and Charlotte’s future in American City? With Amerigo, the sexually magnetic Roman, accommodated, once more, within a superficially normal English domesticity established by his secretly masochistic American wife, and with Charlotte, the erotically disruptive expatriate, returning to enact her imperial “mission” in a guise suggesting some sort of sexual slavery, what do these quasi-allegorical marriages tell us about the Imperium’s trajectory? These narrative endpoints suggest disorder, an incoherence seemingly at odds with the careful placement of the “human furniture” (GB 542). And yet, these same messy analogies are, as the novel’s opening pages map out, a return to the wandering yet pervasive ways in which empire makes itself reproducible; James, by a campy “stylistic intensification” (Warren 377), gives us imperial style and its availability to transatlantic dislocation writ large. In such a way, readers, like the characters, of The Golden Bowl repeatedly confront their incorporation into desire for and desire by a style, an ornamental style, that precedes them: imperialist style, James’s novel suggests, is always already queer.

4

A Tale of the Seaboard Erotic Geographies and Interstitial Masculinities in Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo

Like Stevenson, Joseph Conrad frequently returned in his fiction to the disoriented movements of European men across the Pacific, and, in perhaps his best known work, “Heart of Darkness,” European-African circulations: that novel famously begins with Marlow’s reading of London, from the Atlantic pathway of the Thames, as “one of the dark places of the earth” (48). Nostromo, first published serially in T.P.’s Weekly and then significantly revised for publication by Harper’s in 1904, represents Conrad’s only fictional foray into South American material and his only fiction solely set in the Americas. As with Melville’s Billy Budd, Conrad’s Nostromo is not, in simple terms, a geographically Atlantic novel, but its action and the political tensions of the novel are, as Joslyn Almeida has suggested, “pan-Atlantic” in flavour (199). Panama, at the intersection between Pacific and Atlantic trade routes, provides a possible model for Conrad’s imagined nation of Costaguana – as Ian Watt notes, the Occidental Province of Sulaco’s eventual secession from Costaguana, financed by the American Holroyd’s support of the Gould Concession and enforced by the American navy, closely resembles the United States’ involvement in the secession of the Panama Canal from Colombia in 1903 (Nostromo 10).1 Like James’s contemporaneous The Golden Bowl, Conrad’s Nostromo is deeply concerned with the movement from British to American forms of imperialism; unlike James, Conrad locates his reading of that movement far from the once “dark” heart of England, at the periphery, rather than the unsettled centre, of empire. While the novel operates through a Eurocentric focus on the lives of expatriates (the Italian Viola family and Nostromo; the English

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Goulds; the French Martin Decoud), its more marginal attentions to native Costaguanans and to the imperial economic and military presence of the United States asks us to consider European colonial practices through a transatlantic lens. Luz Elena Ramirez suggests this “Americanist” novel queries postcolonial renderings of empire as “relatively coherent” and “self-perpetuating” structures, compelling readers “to reconceptualize the standard geographical divisions of East and West in light of North, South, and continental contingencies” (93). Indeed as A Tale of the Seaboard, Conrad’s novel specifically mobilizes coastal geography – the alternately porous and protective border of the nation – as a figure for the self ’s unstable location in networks of desire. Where The Golden Bowl traces its imperial thematics through figures and textual structures of containment and capacity, Conrad’s novel explores its more explicit concern with the economic and political repercussions of colonial interference and exploitation through a mobilization of interstitial geography. While Nostromo shares with James’s novel an overarching concern with the spatial-erotic dynamics of male intimacy against the backdrop of empire, in this chapter I argue that Conrad’s narrative offers up, through its specific formal interest in parataxis and suspension, a reading of the traffic of men’s bodies more attuned to the epic, global possibilities of “queer Atlantic” politics. In Nostromo, imperialism and desire are marked by the evocative spaces – between men, between political forces, between ocean and land – across which they operate. Giovanni Battista Fidanza, or Nostromo, the novel’s quite literally pivotal character, enters the text as a mediating figure, a character whose marginal presence and magnetic desirability, for men and women, brings together various spheres of action. As an interstitial plot device, Nostromo, in his initial mobility, allows the reader to project a coherent and epic imaginary realm. As the novel progresses, however, Nostromo’s liminality and the narrative’s placement of his actions at transitional textual moments – between chapters, scenes, and paragraphs – destabilize Costaguana as both a nationalistic and novelistic fantasy. Indeed, Nostromo’s narrative functionality works to underscore the vulnerability of the novel’s seemingly more agential, alternative protagonist Charles Gould, illuminating the intertwining of privilege and perversion that secure his status as the novel’s principal Anglo-white landholder.

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While questions about the text’s political attitudes and its sweeping form have understandably dominated critical discussions about Nostromo, in the last fifteen years some scholars have also traced with new interest the novel’s gendered contours. Karen Klein, in a formative essay, describes how, despite Conrad’s and the narrator’s “deep condescension” toward women (116), the novel critically traces a shift in Nostromo’s status from the “masculine situation,” in which one carries a “sense of one’s body as autonomous” and empowered, to the “feminine predicament,” an experience of “one’s body as not under one’s control, but subject to the force and will of others” (104). Andrew Michael Roberts notes how Klein’s terms tend to treat “‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’” as “merely markers for degrees of power or powerlessness,” so that her argument “risk[s] dilution of its specificity to the point where the issue of gender tends to disappear” (102). Through readings of the stereotypically racialized masculine displays of Nostromo and Charles Gould and of their eventual realizations of the vacuity of these stereotypes, Roberts offers an account of the novel’s treatment of “masculinity as a discipline or technology of normalization” (111). But while Roberts recognizes the importance of “same-sex desire” as the “excluded term which determines many” of the features of “normative masculinity,” he oddly fails to elaborate on the role played by such desire in Nostromo itself (despite noting its presence in the pairings of Charles Gould and his father, Nostromo and Viola, and Gould and Holroyd [112]). This chapter attends to that “excluded term” not only to highlight the novel’s placement of same-sex desire at the source of normative masculinity, but also to unhinge Roberts’s somewhat overdetermined account of the novel’s normalizing tendencies. Certainly Conrad’s authorial third-person narrator seeks, sometimes quite heavy-handedly, to manage the reader’s gendered expectations – we might consider, for instance, the narrator’s insistence, in discussing Emilia Gould, that “a woman with a masculine mind is not a being of superior efficiency; she is simply a phenomenon of imperfect differentiation – interestingly barren and without importance” (N 66–7). But much as the novel compels its readers to reconceptualize imperial geographies, so too does it set in play an eroticism that complicates normative genealogies and that asks readers to reconfigure the very gendered identities that the narrator seems to want to stabilize. The

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interstitial placement of Nostromo’s masculine identity – seemingly compelling but eluding desire for his presence – locates just such gendered reconfiguration in the narrative’s protomodernist form, its use of Nostromo as a generative gap and a switch-point for dizzying shifts in perspective and time. Critical disagreements over the significance of the erotic for a reading of Conrad illuminate, I think, his work’s particular interlacing of normative and non-normative desire and of privileged and queer forms of masculinity. In his account of Conrad’s interest in linguistic mastery, Geoffrey Halt Harpham argues for the unconscious quality of unscreened sexuality as a formative element for Conradian style, “a foreign element” flashing “intermittently along wires designed primarily to carry other messages” (176). This “fugitive sexual energy,” Harpham claims, “provides Conrad’s work with a personal urgency that it would not otherwise have, and gains, itself, in gravitas by being confused with public and political themes that seem remote from it” (183).2 In response to Harpham’s identification of this unplanned interlocking of an “undefined and therefore unrestricted desire” with “public and sanctioned themes” (183), Jeremy Hawthorn makes a case for Conrad’s more “deliberate recognition of similarities and connections between the private (including the sexual) and the public”: “the varied rôles played by sexual desire and erotic experience in his fictions cannot be isolated from other uses of power: political, economic and emotional” (Sexuality 14–15). Like Hawthorn, I am interested in Nostromo’s tracing of a desire that moves across the private and the public, but I am less convinced by Hawthorn’s reading of sexuality as “the arena in which the exercise of power is subjected to” Conrad’s “most rigorous critique” (Sexuality 156) – rather, Conrad’s novel invites its readership, as we navigate movements between private and public registers of manliness, to reflect on the complicated coexistence of power and pleasure, of hegemonic placements of men within normative discourse and heterogeneous circulations of masculine desirability. Nostromo does not plainly celebrate a diverse erotics any more than it offers an entirely unproblematic critique of imperialisms in South America. While Conrad’s interstitial treatment of Nostromo’s character emerges as queerly resonant – in its invitation of diffuse desires, in its tracing of unacknowledged networks of desire between men, in its placement of an elusive gap at the site of desire – Nostromo’s availability to masculinist

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voices (such as Conrad’s third-person narrator and Captain Mitchell) also proves critical to the novel’s incorporation of an imagining of South American space as colonizable, as open to homosocial and sometimes figuratively heterosexual conquest.

“Our Man”: Narrative Mobility and Nostromo’s Liminality Critics have long identified Nostromo’s wide-ranging “mobility of viewpoint” (Watts 150), the “flexibility and mobility of the authorial narrative” (Lothe 194), as its key formal innovation, a mobility that, with its sudden, anachronous shifts across time, space, and focalized perspectives, lays a path for the later experimental, polyphonic prose of modernists like James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. Jacob Lothe has linked the fluctuating “attitudinal position and complex narrative function of ” Nostromo’s “authorial narrator” (225) to the novel’s thematic interest in “the various inconsistencies of human behaviour” (214). More specifically, I wish to suggest that the narrator’s complicated circumlocutions are part of the novel’s engagement with the “various inconsistencies” of masculine mobility in a colonial context, an engagement that locates such mobility as both enacting and destabilizing constructions of AngloAmerican privilege in the Global South. The novel’s opening both establishes the narrator’s fluid presence and anticipates the pivotal role that Nostromo, as an interstitial narrative figure, will play in yoking and destabilizing the text’s gendered and geographical discourses. Tracing the imaginary geography of Sulaco’s port, the Golfo Placido, from Punta Mala to the Azuera peninsula, chapter 1 performs, in a compressed format, the epic sweeping motions of Conrad’s broader narrative scheme. Beyond panoramically mapping the novel-world as topographically coherent, the opening camera-like movements into the gulf, whose “prevailing calms” rendered it historically “an inviolable sanctuary from the temptations of a trading world” (N 3), link the narrator to the new form of economic imperialism ushered in by the steam-powered arrival of the Oceanic Steam Navigation Company. Unlike the earlier European ships, prey to “capricious airs” once they crossed “the imaginary line drawn from Punta Mala to Azuera” (N 5), the OSN’s ships – like the novelistic gaze – “violate the sanctuary of

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peace sheltering the calm existence of Sulaco” (N 9). This chimes with the brief window we are given into this seemingly omniscient narrator’s embodied identity as a contemporaneous, touristic outsider (not unlike the detached, privileged position Marlow seeks to occupy in “Youth,” “Heart of Darkness,” and Lord Jim). In Part First, chapter 8, he vaguely identifies himself as one of those “whom business or curiosity took to Sulaco in [the] years before the first advent of the railway,” an onlooker at the “steadying effect of the San Tomé mine,” and as one who has since relocated (“The outward appearances had not changed then as they have changed since, as I am told…” [N 95]). The narrator’s geographical mobility in the opening pages signals not only his, and the British company’s, phallically “violat[ing]” access to this historically remote American “sanctuary,” but also anticipates his touristic detachment, his retrospective account of this space from an undisclosed (and as such privileged) location. Yet the opening chapter also introduces an alternative yoking of masculine mobility, colonial penetration, and narrative form that contests and complicates the narrator’s authoritative detachment. Pausing over “the peninsula of Azuera, a wild chaos of sharp rocks and stony levels cut about by vertical ravines,” the narrator, calling up the local lore of “the poor,” “the common folk,” and the “tame Indians,” introduces “[t]he story” of the “two wandering sailors – Americanos, perhaps, but gringos of some sort for certain”: the “gringos” ventured, with the aid of “a gambling, good-for-nothing mozo,” into the “deep precipices” of the Azuera to seek out its legendary “heaps of shining gold,” only never to return (N 4). Drawing together various peoples of Sulaco (“the crew of a coasting schooner,” a “Negro fisherman” and his wife) as an audience, the “impious adventurers” send up smoke from a campfire on their first night and then give “no other sign” (N 4–5). Evoking, at first, a familiar narrative of Anglo-American adventure into an unclaimed wilderness, the “wandering sailors” unite the Costaguanan onlookers, inspiring “amazement,” “envy, incredulity, and awe” (N 4–5). But their disappearance, without any further “sign,” also allows for them to be reimagined as undead spirits, “spectral and alive,” held by “the fatal spell of their success,” ciphers for unappeasable desire: “They are now rich and hungry and thirsty – a strange theory of tenacious gringo ghosts suffering in their starved and parched flesh of defiant heretics, where a Christian would have renounced and been released” (N 5).

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The segue through the tale of the Azuera peninsula hovers over a fissure in the geographical landscape, in its mythic history, and in the novel’s mobile and masculine, panoramic form – the animating gap evokes a range of exoticized spaces in modernist fiction from Poe’s “great white curtain,” to the figurative space of James’s indeterminate “Beast in the Jungle,” to E.M. Forster’s fateful Malabar Caves. Conrad’s Azuera tale places the “heretic” desires of two men, chained to their insatiably “hungry and thirsty” bodies, as a localized haunting from within a master narrative. If the narrator’s account suggests that the Costaguanans’ story has borrowed and bastardized a properly European “Christian” logic of renunciation, the novel’s taking up of this story as a mobile analogy for the lives of its European twinned protagonists, Nostromo and Charles Gould, suggests the resistant and resilient animating powers of this “strange theory.” Where the narrator and the steam-powered English ships, in what seem like classically colonial invocations of rightful rape, successfully “violate” a “capricious” harbour, the ghosts’ efforts to penetrate a ravine only result in a suspension of their desires and a provocative erasure of their “flesh”; the pairing of the adventurers, their alignment with “heretic” hunger, their estrangement from the domestic, and their anticipation of the novel’s attention to Nostromo and Gould as desirous slaves all coalesce to render the Azuera’s ravine a queerly resonant gap in the narrator’s epic project. Indeed, it is the gap – the failure of the adventurers to produce any further “sign” after their column of smoke – that allows for the local population to mobilize, to uncannily reanimate their bodies through storytelling. That gap also formally anticipates the manner in which the novel’s protagonist, Nostromo, will enter the text as more of a narrative space than a fully realized character. Despite his ostensible resemblance, in his impressive exploits, to a range of action heroes popular in late-colonial English writing by the likes of H. Rider Haggard, Rudyard Kipling, and Arthur Conan Doyle, Nostromo is closer to James’s Prince Amerigo in terms of his often passive placement in the novel. From the outset, Nostromo’s masculinity uncertainly figures, like the silver of the San Tomé mine, as both an agential force and an object of value. Entering the text through the lips of Captain Mitchell as “my Capataz de Cargadores” (N 13), Nostromo is, we are told, “much of a man” (N 15). His “force of character” (N 13) is capable of commanding the respect of not only the Italian and Basque

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workers under him, but also the “natives of the Republic” (N 14); like Amerigo amongst The Golden Bowl’s Anglo-Americans, Nostromo, as a Southern European (along with his compatriots, the Violas), floats in a culturally intermediary space between the novel’s various representatives of the Global North and South. Mitchell’s claims on Nostromo (“discover[ing] his value” [N 13]) are, of course, symptomatic of a broader possession of manliness evoked by his name. Christened Giovanni Battista Fidanza, Nostromo’s more familiar title signals both his usefulness to others (especially the English) and the potential for that usefulness to distort and devalue him: he has taken, his would-be mother-in-law Teresa Viola declares, “a name that is properly no word from them” (N 23). Circulating through the text as an Anglicized rendition of either the Spanish nostramo (“our master”) or the Italian nostro uomo (“our man”) or naestramo (boatswain), Nostromo’s name bespeaks his objectified status as property or functionary (and as the subject of an Anglo failure to correctly use a name that is “properly no” English “word”), even as it names him as master or man (Watt, Nostromo 6). Nostromo is, as Teresa notes, “an attractive young fellow … attractive to men, women, and children, just by that profound quietness of personality which, like a serene twilight, rendered more seductive the promise of his vigorous form and the resolution of his conduct” (N 253–4). And that attractiveness, as Teresa is well aware, invites the efforts of various characters in the novel, including Teresa herself, “to annex” the man (N 253). Much as, in Lord Jim, Marlow seeks, perhaps fruitlessly, to enlist the support of his readership in claiming his protagonist as “one of us,” part of an interpretive community, Nostromo calls on us, as readers, to “annex” the strangely absent protagonist in his magnetic usefulness as “our man,” even as it alerts us to the distorting, devaluing possibilities of such use. Where James mobilized the figure of hypotactic embrace, Conrad establishes Nostromo’s queer effects as enacting a kind of parataxis, an aesthetics less of containment (as in The Golden Bowl) and more of intimate and discomfiting proximities. Nostromo first comes to the reader’s attention through the ironized and limited perspective of Captain Mitchell, a prolix and rather pompous narrator who leads, we are later informed, a “privileged old bachelor, man-about-town existence” (N 474). Mitchell’s investment in the story of Nostromo immediately frames the Italian’s value in a network of homosocial,

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non-reproductive intimacies; it is no accident that Mitchell will later mention in passing that being possessed of “quite a little fortune to leave behind,” he is forced to think of his niece’s children, having “never married myself ” (N 476). In chapter 2, Mitchell reflects back, in a bewildering example of proleptic analepsis, on the period of “the troubles” (N 39), when Vincente Ribiera, dictator of Costaguana, fled for safety across the mountains into Sulaco (an event which, as Frederic Jameson notes, remains – like Jim’s jump from the Patna in Lord Jim or the explosion of the bomb in The Secret Agent – a narrative gap, returned to several times but never directly represented [240]). Mitchell’s account of this “historic” event returns compulsively to the value of Nostromo: he is nostalgically drawn back to “Nostromo – invaluable fellow”; to “Nostromo, a fellow in a thousand” (N 12); to “my Capataz de Cargadores, as they called him in the town, a man who, when I discovered his value, sir, was just the bos’n of an Italian ship…”; to “[t]his Nostromo, sir, a man absolutely above reproach…” (N 13). Edward Said notes how such “excessive … appositional phrases” (a Dickensian note traceable also in descriptions of Charles Gould and Martin Decoud) characterize “the style of the whole novel” and serve, in their “ironic” excess of “jocularity and courtesy,” to remind us of the character’s “initial desire to be a public institution or monument or record” (127). But rather than affirming Nostromo’s self-constructions, I would contend that Mitchell’s compulsive reiterations hold in tension his desire to locate his Capataz as a stylistic marker of assured masculine performance, where a name simply denotes manly value, and the idea of Nostromo’s presence as consistently broaching terms, as a paratactic movement between name and man, that cannot help drawing attention to the gap it traverses. Nostromo’s appositional introduction through the voice of Mitchell provides a model for his structural function as a figure of “extraordinary value” (N 44) in the novel’s succeeding chapters (I will return to the fact that such a phrase, of course, also asks us to think of Nostromo’s circulating function in the text as similar to the “suspended” value of the silver “as a persistently deferred token” [Wilkinson 206]). Chapter 3, in which Nostromo’s presence is “call[ed] upon” (N 17) like a saint but in which he also does not appear directly (until as a disembodied and anonymous voice, he announces his arrival in the final line), starts out from noting the Capataz’s “intimacy” with his fellow Italians, the

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Violas: “It might have been said that there he was only protecting his own” (N 16). In chapter 4, he remains a disembodied voice calling in from the outside of the Casa Viola, and when he returns to the fighting after briefly checking on its residents, he remains as a subject of conversation for Teresa who bitterly reflects on the manner in which he will be traded amongst the English. Chapter 5 begins by moving analeptically eighteen months earlier to Ribiera’s attendance at the ceremonial turning of the sod for the laying down of the National Central Railway through Sulaco. At the close of the chapter, in a conversation between Sir John and the chief engineer of the railway, Nostromo emerges vaguely in the background, “the figure of a man” (N 42), as the pair discuss his value – the engineer notes how Mitchell lent him the “most useful fellow” (N 43) and lends him on to Sir John as his protector for the ride out. Mitchell’s habitual advertisement of his “discovery” of Nostromo then becomes the switch-point for chapter 6’s shift into an account of Dr Monygham, who is introduced as the lone critic of Mitchell’s account, sounding his cynical queries in the Casa Gould. Where Mitchell positions Nostromo as an inseparable servant (“The fellow is devoted to me, body and soul!”), Monygham queries the reasonableness of demanding “that a man should think of other people so much better than he is able to think of himself ” (N 44–5). Nostromo’s movement across social scenes becomes crucial to the novel’s emerging form, bringing various actors into relationship while exposing the contingent quality of that coherence built, as it is, on coalescing desires for a character defined, somewhat vacantly, by the “force” of his desirability. Nostromo is by no means the only Conradian protagonist subject to interpretive use by others – possibly the best examples of this are Yanko Goorall, the castaway whose foreign language alienates him from his English surroundings in “Amy Foster,” and Razumov, whose brusque taciturnity takes on various, contradictory political meanings in Under Western Eyes – yet Conrad’s formally interstitial placement of Nostromo is a significant variation on this theme. The narrative’s structural investment in both the kind of desirous possession of Nostromo announced by Mitchell and the rendering of Nostromo’s character as instrumentally stylistic, curiously disembodied, is made most readily apparent in chapter 8, the final chapter of Part First. The chapter is bookended by a brief “phantom-like” (N 95) appearance of Nostromo

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in the second paragraph and a curiously prolonged description of his costumed return to the stage at the chapter’s end: his items of dress together proclaim “the unapproachable style of the famous Capataz de Cargadores – a Mediterranean sailor – got up with … finished splendour…” (N 125). The ensuing, ostentatiously choreographed display of heterosexual passion – as the “carelessly public” Nostromo flings “his arm around” the Morenita’s neck “and kisse[s] her spluttering lips” (N 129) – cannot help but draw attention to the same scene’s ornamental thematics: the narrator’s attention to the Capataz’s costume and then the Capataz’s bestowal of love on the Morenita by offering a dagger to cut off the “hoard of silver buttons” that adorn his coat (N 130). Anticipating the manner in which the secreted silver will shadow and complicate Nostromo’s motions in the final third of the novel, the buttons synecdochally suggest that his role as manly conqueror of woman is shaped by “material interests”; the moment is of a piece with his acquisition and use by Mitchell, Sir John, and the narrator in the novel’s earlier phases. Like the “shining star” that comes to figure Prince Amerigo’s sense of his own erotic currency, the performance over the buttons inscribes Nostromo’s masculine character as detachable, available, substitutable, and we cannot help but recognize that logic’s return in the narrator’s subsequent appositional account of the withdrawal of “the lordly Capataz de Cargadores, the indispensable man, the tried and trusty Nostromo, the Mediterranean sailor come ashore casually to try his luck in Costaguana” (N 130). As if to underscore the connection between the Capataz’s heterosexual ornamentalism and the narrator’s interstitial use of him, the chapter (and Part First) concludes with an associative slide from the narrator’s appositions once more into the focalized perspective of Mitchell, who, again in a proleptically analeptic sequence, looks back to the occluded scene of Nostromo saving Ribiera from “the hands of a mob”: “that fellow of mine, Nostromo, you know, was right in it. Absolutely making history, sir,” Mitchell, we are informed, “used to say” (N 130). Then, in a dizzying final temporal jump, Part First concludes with Mitchell looking back, possibly from an even further future, to a vaguely specified “event” of “misfortune” (readers will only later be able to place this as the supposed loss of the silver). “To my mind,” Mitchell declares, Nostromo “has never been the same man since” (N 131). How, then, does this patterned, interstitial, and displaced management of the

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ornamentalized protagonist prepare the reader for what follows? Bruce Henricksen notes how the novel’s central male characters (Nostromo, Charles Gould, and Martin Decoud) insistently invoke “feminine beauty and libidinal gratification” as a kind of legitimating alibi for their political causes, an alibi that in each case proves seemingly incapable of sexual reproduction (190); each of these characters in the novel’s final phases seeks self-realization in homosocial relations that are both legitimated and hollowed out by being channelled through their desire for the Gould Concession’s silver (the mining of the silver itself being, as critics have often noted, a replacement of sexual reproduction). Mitchell’s retrospective declarations at the close of Part First anticipate how the novel will suspend the question of Nostromo’s masculine value – from a “fellow … right in it” to a man “never … the same” – by staging it as contingent on his narrative circulation between men. Like the “gringo ghosts” of the opening chapter, Nostromo, as a transitional narrative figure in Part First, illuminates the fissures within the novel’s stagings of heroism and romance; Charles Gould’s decidedly English reserve, as a kind of textual blank, plays out a fascinating counterpoint to these gaps in Nostromo’s heterosexual imaginary.

“What Sort of a Man Is He?”: Charles Gould’s Perverse Genealogies If Nostromo embodies, in the first half of the text, a flexible Latinate masculinity that thrives on his availability for circulation and on his confirmation of a kind of masculine solidarity amongst those who make use of him, Charles Gould, at least initially, typifies an immobile and resolutely English resistance to use by others. Charles’s taking up of the “Gould Concession” – a pact drawn up between the Costaguanan government and Charles’s father that granted him perpetual concession of the mine as a means of settling debts from forced loans to the government – involves a gradual attempt (funded by the American financier, Holroyd) to resist the Ribierist government’s influence over the mine and eventually, toward the end of the novel, a plan to dynamite the mine rather than have it fall into the hands of the Monterist revolutionaries. But Charles Gould’s efforts to hold himself aloof in an

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English manner from the politics of Costaguana and to put his faith in “material interests” remains haunted by the genealogical presence of his father’s prior use. Beyond the overdetermined analogies between the erosion and sterility of Charles and Emilia Gould’s marriage and the symbolic infidelity of Charles’s obsessive attachment to the silver mine, the novel also traces a queer trajectory behind Gould’s gradual involvement in the family mining business via his relationships with his father and with the absent American financier, Holroyd. Terry Collits suggests that Nostromo’s marginality to the action that unfolds around him should be understood as part of the novel’s critique of epic form’s historical veneration of embodied male heroism: the emergence of the masculine “intellectual” (Gould, Decoud, Monygham) as the new centre of the epic form in “modern historical narratives” means there is no place for heroes “distinguished for their physical exploits” (158). But if Charles Gould occupies greater directly represented narrative territory in the first two parts of Conrad’s novel, he still shares with Nostromo a generative resistance to representation. Gould repeatedly features for others as an embodiment of reserved composure, and consequently as a narrative gap: he has, according to Don Avellanos, an “English, rock-like quality of character” (N 86); for Martin Decoud, “with his English impenetrability, nobody can tell what he thinks” (N 189); there is “a want of all proper feeling and mobility in [his] features” (N 403); he has, Captain Mitchell notes, learned “to keep a tight hand on his feelings” (N 488). Just as the popularly titled “Horse of Stone,” the equestrian statue of Charles IV at the entrance to the Alameda, presents “an inscrutable breast to the political changes which had robbed it of its very name” (N 49), Gould’s “quietude of mind” (N 50) also seems to separate him from the political strife that surrounds him: “His mind preserved its steady poise as if sheltered in the passionless stability of private and public decencies at home in Europe” (N 49). Where Nostromo, initially, renders himself socially mobile by opening himself up to use by others, Gould’s English immobility seems to extract him from the passions and politics of South American life; his “steady poise” suggests a fantasy of integrity not dissimilar from the absolute material value he attributes to the silver of the mine. Gould’s inscrutability, however, also figures an erasure of the self, a narrative fissure that opens him to deployments he fails to anticipate.

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For Gould’s father, the mine “distresse[s] his sensibilities” (N 56) – its spectral, enervating presence evokes a series of prevalent contemporaneous homophobic figures for queer degeneration. Having “swallowed the pill” of the “iniquitous” Concession, he becomes “at once mine-ridden” (N 55) – his “vigorous physique” finds itself under attack by the Concession’s “malignancy of perverted justice.” The mine’s hold resembles, we are told, “the Old Man of the Sea fasten[ing] upon his shoulders” – drawn from the story of Sinbad in 1001 Arabian Nights, this account of an older man’s parasitic attachment to the back of a younger man resonates with other contemporaneous doubling stories of dependence and degeneration, such as Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and James’s short story, “The Private Life.” Along similar lines, Gould begins “to dream of vampires” (N 56) – Bram Stoker’s Dracula, first published in 1897, is the bestknown text of the period that consistently ties vampirism to homosocial and homoerotic bonds between men. But when Gould seeks to manage his son’s exposure to “tainted” Costaguana, beseeching him “never to touch it, never to approach it,” he only succeeds in whetting Charles’s interest. His father’s letters, describing his desire “ardently” to fling the “iniquitous Gould Concession” (N 57) in the face of the government, become, for the son, an exercise in illicit reading and the vehicle for the development of his attachment to the mine: “In the end, the growing youth attained to as close an intimacy with the San Tomé mine as the old man who wrote these plaintive and enraged letters on the other side of the sea” (N 58). Like the perverting “yellow books” of Dorian Gray, Gould’s father’s letters awaken a queerly displaced “desire” for the mine (rather than for its destruction). While Charles claims to have read through the “fantastic” character of his father’s style to “the plain truth of the business,” the narrator’s description of this process suggestively traces Charles Gould’s “intimacy” with the mine to his father’s contagious influence as “the old man … [on the other side] of the sea” (N 58). In the wake of his father’s death, as he resolves to take on the perverse legacy of the Concession, Charles Gould’s immediate overtures to his prospective American financier, Holroyd, take on the guise of a queerly oriented contract negotiation that positions Gould as both masterful and overmastered by prohibited desires. The narrator frames Gould’s takeover of the mine as a potentially illusory act of masculine

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grieving and filial disobedience. “[F]illed” by his father’s death “with a mournful and angry desire for action,” Gould’s “conquest of Sulaco” (undoing his father’s conquest by Sulaco) seems to signify the “true virility of man” (N 67), “the man’s instinct of activity” and his desire to “make good” his “vigorous view of life against the unnatural error of weakness and despair” (N 74). Holroyd becomes, in this context, both a displaced father figure and forbidden lover, capable of securing Charles Gould’s desire for conquest. The “man from San Francisco” is, we are told, lonely, even though he has “his womankind with him”; as an antidote to such loneliness, Gould brings “with him the inseparable companionship of the mine.” Under the sign of this material interest, they talk “together with some intimacy which was made possible by the difference of their ages” (N 64–5). Much as Gould falls “under the spell” of the mine’s “enchantment” (N 59), his passion for the mine becomes a “contagious” force in his courting of capital – businessmen fall for his “unshaken assurance” because they are “as sanguine and imaginative as lovers” (N 75). C. Brook Miller describes Holroyd’s acquirement of Gould in terms of fetishization: his attachment is symptomatic of “sublimated mastery,” of how “the subject overvalues the fetish object even while conscious that the object is being overvalued” (162). The economic and erotic registers of fetishization as a term offer a useful shorthand for describing how Holroyd’s “apparently impulsive and human” (N 75) decision to fund the Goulds’ venture in Sulaco manages to combine his American exceptionalism, his “insatiable imagination of conquest” (N 76), and his desire to harness the passion of Gould “the pure-bred Englishm[a]n” (N 80): “He was not running a great enterprise, there … He was running a man!” (N 81). Indeed, Gould welcomes the personalized quality of Holroyd’s investment in his venture, maintaining, as it does, his almost intimate relationship with the mine, “preserv[ing]” the “identity, with which he had endowed it as a boy” and leaving it “dependent on himself alone” (N 82). As such, the tensions between father and son concerning Sulaco’s silver provide the ground for the queer, Anglo-American compact of Gould and Holroyd – the relationship signals the silver’s perverse and fetishistic mobilizing force, contagiously drawing active, impulsive, and virile men to each other in exchanges that render uncertain the grounds for claims to mastery. And where Gould’s father’s failures bring him to demand that his son

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“forget that America existed” (N 57), his son’s desire to undo his father’s “unnatural” fate sees him transgressing that prohibition by a queer courting of the North American imperial “imagination of conquest.”3 Henricksen notes how Gould’s faith in an “economic eschatology” – a wedding of the religious to the economic through his partnership with Holroyd (as a kind of debased God-figure) – finds its allegorical partner in Gould’s “childless marriage to the pious Emilia (who is repeatedly associated with the statue of the Madonna) in the literal story” (122). Along these lines, we can read the Goulds’ marriage as the novel’s displaced and uncertain meditation on the disquieting effects of queer, non-reproductive intimacy for a presumptively heteronormative, nationalist imaginary. Jeremy Hawthorn reads Emilia Gould as one of a series of women in Conrad’s works (including the Intended in “Heart of Darkness” and Jewel in Lord Jim) whose “idealism allows a man to become a ruthless servant of imperialism … while pretending to himself and others he is inspired by selfless and disinterested ideals” (Narrative 211). But I would also draw attention to how Conrad frames Emilia’s idealistic devotion to Charles’s project as uncannily echoing the secreted queer intimacies behind its financial arrangements. Emilia Gould is drawn, from the start, to Charles’s “dramatic interest” in mines and his “strong fascination” with especially “[a]bandoned workings.” She is attracted to the “secret mood which governed the profoundly sensible, almost voiceless attitude of this man towards the world of material things.” The narrator frames Emilia’s “delight in” her husband, and her triangulated investment in her husband’s desires, as an animating attraction to structure (akin to the kind of disorienting appeal that James seeks to lay out for Maggie Verver’s phallically architectural imagination). There is an excess of pleasure, something perhaps akin to Lacanian jouissance, in Emilia’s responses to the “secret” gap that motivates Charles’s attachment to the mine – Charles’s “voiceless attitude” becomes the “pinnacle from which,” like a bird with “half-open wings,” she can “soar up into the skies.” Accordingly, their relationship incorporates and displaces Gould’s “secret mood” (N 59): their discussions turn on his father’s misfortunes with the mine “because,” the narrator ironically notes, “the sentiment of love can enter into any subject and live ardently in remote phrases” (N 60). In the wake of his decision to take up the mantle of the mine, Conrad’s novel explicitly, and somewhat heavy-handedly, frames Gould’s

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“cold and overmastering passion” (N 245) as a form of “subtle conjugal infidelity through which his wife was no longer the sole mistress of his thoughts” (N 365). The novel seems then to stage Gould’s betrayal of his wife as an instance of conventionally straight adultery (and, in doing so, anticipates the conclusion in Nostromo’s fatal infidelity to Linda through his nocturnal visits to Giselle and to the silver). But the text complicates such a reading by establishing Emilia’s own attraction to her husband and to the mining project as a queer displacement of reproductive sex. In chapter 8 of Part First, Conrad deftly traces a line from Charles’s visceral response to “the growling mutter of the mountain pouring its stream of treasure” (“it came to his heart with … the marvelousness of an accomplished fact fulfilling an audacious desire” [N 105]) to a retrospective account of his wife’s “trembl[ing]” welcome of the “first spungy lump of silver” from the mine’s “dark depths”: she endows the lump “with a justificative conception, as though it were not a mere fact, but something far-reaching and impalpable, like the true expression of an emotion or the emergence of a principle” (N 107). While Emilia’s privileging of “emotion” and “principle” over “fact” distinguishes her from her husband’s pragmatic charting of attainment, it is the Goulds’ twinned capacities for reading the mining of the silver as an absorbing erotic event – a fulfillment of “audacious desire,” a scene of “conception” – that paves the way for the adultery plot that will leave Emilia Gould childless and lonely at the novel’s end. On the surface, the failure of the Goulds to produce a child appears to float as a sign of the damage wrought by Charles Gould’s capitalist and imperialist monomaniac attachment to the mine and, more broadly, of the socially sterile and stifling conditions imposed by economic imperialism in Latin America.4 More pointedly, Miller argues that Conrad’s location of “insidious new forms of capital development” in “the emergent phenomenon of American imperialism” – in the corrupting body of Holroyd – allows the novel, through Gould’s ideals, to indirectly legitimize “Britain’s imperial tradition” (155) and obscure “the British role in financing the new imperialism” (157). Holroyd’s framing of imperialism as an “unconscious force” works to position the erosion of the Goulds’ ideals as a logical endpoint for British colonial ambitions at the moment of Rooseveltian interventionism: in Conrad’s novel, “the United States represents the threat of commercialization and the displacement of historical agency from individual to impersonal

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forces” (167–8). Miller’s incisive reading helps to illuminate how Conrad’s novel manages, through its adoption of the contemporaneous homophobic tropes of parasitism and vampirism, to structure Gould’s relationship to the silver in terms that queer his marriage while preserving the privileged status of Anglo-white colonialism. But the novel also complicates its homophobic thematization of Gould’s English detachment and commercialized degeneracy through the interlacing of his plotline with that of Nostromo. Gould’s first mention in the novel immediately positions the terms of his character as resonant for Conrad’s questioning of masculine construction: “What sort of a man is he?” Sir John asks his chief engineer. While the engineer in reply emphasizes both Gould’s “immense influence” and “hospitality,” he closes by elliptically referencing his national disposition: “Of course, you must be careful in what you say. He’s English, and besides he must be immensely wealthy. The Holroyd house is in with him in that mine, so you may imagine – ” (N 42) Just what Sir John should imagine is interrupted, paratactically, by the arising of “the figure of a man” at a nearby campfire, a man soon revealed to be Nostromo and who, the engineer notes, has been lent to him by Mitchell with Gould’s recommendation (N 42). This suggestive scene’s stylistic fissures – yoking Gould’s “English impenetrability” and his evasive management of the language used to approach him (“be careful in what you say”) to Nostromo’s interstitial narrative function – anticipate, in miniature, Conrad’s striking parallel treatment of the two men. Just as Holroyd perceives himself “running a man” from the margins of the text, Gould, in the second half of the novel, manages Nostromo’s movements by assigning him to protect the silver of the mine, despite sharing no directly represented scenes of interaction with his Italian. In this light, the Gould plotline charts the entanglement of transatlantic capitalism in the broader, more messy and fissured, network of desire’s “impersonal forces.” Nostromo’s interruption of this early scene asks us to “imagine” Gould’s manhood (and his economic intimacy with Holroyd) through the suspension of the dash, a kind of typographical cipher for Nostromo’s stylistic force in its capacity both to connect and separate text. In the second half of the novel, as the

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narrative focuses in on Nostromo’s (and Martin Decoud’s) efforts to save Sulaco’s silver, suspension becomes the key trope through which Conrad explores his sense of the fluid interconnections between male intimacy and economic imperialism.

“Not Dead Yet”: Nostromo’s and Hirsch’s Suspended Manhood In a well-known scene from the eighth chapter of Part Third (“The Lighthouse”), Nostromo, figuratively reborn after his concealment of Sulaco’s missing silver and newly awake to his manipulation by others, is called to an encounter with what will be revealed to be the dead, tortured body of Señor Hirsch, the unfortunate Jewish hidemerchant from Esmerelda. Hirsch’s “projecting head and shoulders, in ghastly immobility” seem “intent on catching every word” (N 430) of the ensuing conversation between Nostromo and Dr Monygham, and Nostromo comes to identify with “the indistinct motionless shape of the dead man … disregarded, forgotten, like a terrible example of neglect” (N 435). But Hirsch, “suspended in his awful immobility” (N 436), under the shadow of Nostromo’s suspicions about Monygham as “a dangerous man,” also shrouds the scene in uncertainty, the extremity of his death by estrapade rendering his corpse a “gruesome enigma” (N 438). At the same moment, that corpse appears to catalyze a shift in narrative perspective: as Monygham himself ponders the mystery of Hirsch’s fate, the chapter’s closing attention to Nostromo’s inscrutable response – “Nostromo kept very still” (N 439) – formally mimics the corpse’s “suspended immobility” (the four words stand as their own paragraph, detached from the long passage preceding this description). This appended description forms a pivot point for the next chapter’s analeptic return to Sotillo’s torture of Hirsch on the preceding morning. This scene has proven, for critics, to be an emblematic moment for thinking about the shape and place of masculinity in Conrad’s narrative machinery. Karen Klein identifies Hirsch’s suspended body as “the core symbol of this novel” (114), “an obscene reminder” (111) of Nostromo’s shift in the novel “from the “masculine situation to the feminine predicament” (104), “subject to the will of others” (113). Andrew Michael Roberts suggests that the image stages, more specifically, the

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novel’s interest in the “sinister” effects of masculine, authorial “passivity,” “subjugat[ing] the bodies of others” (116): “Passivity as non-being, as bodily subjection, as loss of identity: the author as abject, in the feminine predicament, grotesque” (117). I would like to extend and complicate Roberts’s account of Nostromo’s embodied manhood by focusing specifically on Hirsch’s association with the theme of suspension. Andrew Bartlett notes how Hirsch’s first appearance in the text, in the Casa Gould in conversation with Charles Gould in Part Second, chapter 5, fits him for his role as “scapegoat-to-be” by situating him as the stereotypical, wandering Jew, “the mediator between” (54) the revolution’s two sides. Peter Lancelot Mallios notes how the suspended, almost arbitrary relationship of Hirsch to the plot allows for the novel’s “reactionary conceptual operations” (using and expending Hirsch as a prop) even as it asks the reader to reflect on the “arbitrary narrative and physical torturing, the scapegoating, by which Jews have been historically victimized” (220–1). Along these lines, I wish to consider how Hirsch’s suspended presence in the text adumbrates the complex figuration of Nostromo’s mobility, its inscription of a masculine subjectivity both privileged in its wandering and abject in its disposability. Much as James’s Jewish antiquario functions as both scapegoat and narrative marker for Amerigo’s reactionary scapegoating, Hirsch illuminates Nostromo’s vexed attentions to minority masculinity in a transnational, cultural economy. But whereas the Jewishness of the antiquario floats obliquely in the margins of James’s plot through the signs of the gaze and the voice, Conrad explicitly renders Hirsch’s Jewish body a feminized site of abjection and sacrifice, a visceral indicator of the costs exacted by imperial framings of normative manhood as mastery. The reentry of “the little man from Esmerelda” (N 204) into the text after his introduction in the Casa Gould comes in the well-known Placido scene (the final two chapters of Part Second) in which Nostromo and Martin Decoud discover Hirsch’s “absurd” body, as “silent as death,” “limp – lifeless” (N 270) on board the lighter they are using to steer the Concession’s silver out of reach of the invading Monterist forces. Where Jacob Lothe finds in the isolated exchanges between Decoud and Nostromo a stylistic difference – “the complexities of Nostromo are, as it were, temporarily suspended, and its narrative attains an exceptional simplicity” (193) – Conrad’s suggestive language also ties the interruptive force of this sequence to the intense and uncomfortable

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intimacy between the two men, “embraced” by a “great recrudescence of obscurity” and cut off from the world (N 261). Responding to Terry Eagleton’s suggestion that the “fine artistic force” of this episode is a product of Conrad’s “ideological pessimism,” his immersion in that specific historical moment’s “drastic crisis in the ideology of the Western bourgeois class” (7), Geoffrey Halt Harpham argues for a more corporeal understanding of the scene’s particular narrative energy: “What Eagleton registers as ‘artistic’ quality is not Conrad’s deep macroeconomic insight, but rather the effective sublimation of the impulse to penetrate, the finessing of the question of ‘the embrace’” (178). We need not, however, insist that the sublimated eroticism of this scene supersedes the text’s classed tensions: indeed, it is Hirsch’s mediating (and abjectly mercantile and Jewish) body that acts as a kind of conduit between the men in this scene, inviting our awareness of how the novel’s treatment of male intimacies, ethnicity, and economics cross. Paul Mallios argues for a reading of Hirsch, in his repeated suspensions, in time and space, as “a figure of narrative contingency” (224). I am more specifically interested in how Hirsch’s undead body serves as a symbolic key to this scene’s suspension and spectralization of heterosexuality. Both Nostromo and Decoud experience their mission as an estrangement from the domestic: in the enveloping darkness of the Gulf, Decoud feels his “passionate devotion to Antonia” is beginning to lose “all appearance of reality”; likewise, the Capataz, in his desire to prove himself “the man they take me for,” declares to his companion that the “desperate affair” of saving the silver is the only “affair” that now concerns him (N 267). When Nostromo, early in the scene, mistakes Hirsch’s crying, “a sound of blubbering, a sound a sorrowing man could make” (N 262), for evidence of Decoud’s distress, this inadvertent haunting of Decoud’s body both underscores the Frenchman’s feminized thrall to Nostromo and occasions the closest physical intimacy of the sequence (Nostromo informs Decoud of someone else’s presence with “his lips touching Decoud’s ear”). As an othered male space over which Nostromo and Decoud can gaze “at each other” (N 270) without danger, Hirsch takes on, in a grotesque and overdetermined manner, Nostromo’s previous interstitial function, queerly illuminating the narrative’s unstable logics of value. Looking forward to the suggestive character of Leggatt, the concealed alter ego of the young ship captain and narrator of Conrad’s “The Secret Sharer” (1909), Hirsch both

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mimics the terms of Nostromo’s earlier circulation and renders himself expendable; Leggatt will, like Hirsch, free his “secret sharer” by a sacrificial departure from the captain’s boat. Hirsch’s “absurd pretence of sleep, faintness, or death” (N 270) forms the final sentence of chapter 7, so that his body is quite literally suspended (in uncertain and “absurd pretence”) across the space between Part Second’s final two chapters. Befitting Hirsch’s role as a legitimating alibi, this is a transitional space in which, we are informed in the opening sentence of chapter 8, Decoud and Nostromo can lose themselves, forgetting “their own concerns and sensations” (N 271). Indeed, despite the Placido scene seeming to hinge on the emergence of Nostromo as a more proactively thoughtful figure, it is through the body of Hirsch, the “man of fear” (N 461), that Conrad emphasizes how this shift leaves his protagonist no less passively immobile: “Nostromo did nothing. And the fate of Señor Hirsch remained suspended in the darkness of the gulf at the mercy of events which could not be foreseen” (N 275). In this way, the feminized Jewishness of the trader from Esmerelda proves critical to Conrad’s interlacing of the narrative’s formal mobility with its attention to the queer traffic of men between men in the context of the new imperialism. Hirsch, in his suspended and absurdly coincidental fate (he falls from the lighter at the point of colliding with the steamer only to end up literally suspended from the larger vessel’s anchor), figures as a man between nations whose fear sets him adrift from the norms of macho heroism. His story haunts Nostromo’s and Decoud’s concealment of the silver on the island of Great Isabel and their newly visceral sense of the estranging force of the masculinist worlds that have defined their self-representations up until this point. Conrad stages Nostromo’s figurative rebirth, after he swims to shore at Sulaco and sleeps fourteen hours on the beach, having deposited the silver and Decoud on Great Isabel, as a passage from the “unconscious wild” animality of a “beast” to a newly conscious or “thoughtful” manhood: “Then … appeared the man” (N 412). But in his emergence from a death-like sleep “as still as a corpse” to a reanimation through language (“I am not dead yet,” he announces [N 413]), Nostromo’s physical presence, “[h]andsome, robust, and supple” (N 411), remains shadowed by narrative absence – in the first English edition of the text, evoking the novel’s own requirement to reanimate a character who has

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been absent for most of the first seven chapters of Part Third the narrator accounts for Nostromo’s time on shore as being “like a break of continuity in the chain of experience,” so that he must now find “himself in time and space” (460). It is in this context that Nostromo’s encounter with the hanging corpse of Hirsch illuminates the contingent quality of the Capataz’s reoriented sense of his masculine identity. At first, the “distorted shadow” (N 427) of Hirsch’s body appears to Nostromo to take the form of a man “doing apparently nothing … as though he were meditating – or, perhaps, reading a paper.” Ostensibly the treasure, “confus[ing] his thoughts with a peculiar sort of anxiety” (N 424), helps to propel Nostromo’s anxious escape from this scene. But Hirsch’s corpse also bodies forth the passivity (“doing nothing”) that marked out Nostromo’s final, fateful interactions with the Jewish merchant, reminding us of passivity’s capacity for action (“meditating,” “reading”) and colouring Nostromo’s movements as an unconscious flight from the uncannily reverberating repercussions of his own immobility. Nostromo attempts to play down the feminizing quality of his escape once Dr Monygham, having bumped into him, returns him to the site of the body as a man he “need not fear” (“fear a man! It angered him that anybody should suggest such a thing” [N 426]). Nevertheless, the structure of this scene depends upon a tension between such efforts at composure (or even composition) and an awareness of language’s capacity to unravel the subject. Nostromo’s encounter with Hirsch’s corpse appears to take the characteristically Conradian form of what Ian Watt famously identified as “delayed decoding” (Conrad 175), immersing the reader in the Capataz’s unfolding, subjective experience in a path from fragmented to cohesive reading of the tortured body. But Conrad also posits the Jew as a figure in resistance to such narrative completion. As noted earlier, it is a suspended description of Nostromo’s immobility (“Nostromo kept very still”) that forms the pivot point for the narrator from the scene of Nostromo’s and Monygham’s perplexed encounter with Hirsch’s body to chapter 9’s analeptic filling in of the scene of his torture and death. At the tail end of this narrative introjection, Hirsch’s “breathless immobility” functions as the node that allows the narrator to carry the action back to the present site of Nostromo’s and Monygham’s conference with the dead man: “He remained to startle Nostromo by his presence, and to puzzle Dr Monygham by the mystery of his atrocious

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end” (N 451). Nostromo’s and Hirsch’s twinned, immobilized bodies form the entry points for an analeptic sequence that, even as it fills in the gaps in Nostromo’s and Monygham’s knowledge of Hirsch, only does so by underscoring the arbitrary suddenness of Sotillo’s murder of him and the jarring emptiness attending any description of his pain. Hirsch’s screaming “wide-open mouth,” we are told by the narrator (in the absence of any other witnesses), appears as a literal fissure in the text: “incredibly wide, black, enormous, full of teeth – comical” (N 447). The scene’s composition through and around the abject, isolated, and enigmatic figure of Hirsch suggests the structural dependence of imperial masculine forms of mobile mastery (enacted through the objectification of the body of the other) on emasculating, unmastering circuits of language (even as the authorial narrator strikes a jarringly unempathetic, even complicit note with the word “comical”). The reader’s complicated access to Martin Decoud’s suicide also works to highlight the novel’s clustered treatment of Nostromo’s and Hirsch’s suspended masculinities as problems for narrative form. We approach this event through a sequence that moves from the proleptically analeptic perspective of Captain Mitchell, outlining changes in Sulaco in the years following the silver’s loss, through a more direct account of Nostromo spying and swimming to the abandoned lighter afloat in the Gulf, to an analeptic window onto Decoud’s final days. Conrad frames the scene in which Nostromo clambers onto the abandoned boat as one of uncanny reanimation – Nostromo awakes on the boat from a “glazed emptiness” to a “living expression”: “deep thought crept into the empty stare – as if an outcast soul, a quiet, brooding soul, finding that untenanted body in its way, had come in stealthily to take possession” (N 493). Nostromo’s suspended state finds its counterpart when the narrator shifts to an imagining of Martin Decoud’s desperate sense of isolation on the island of Great Isabel, where he experiences “the silence of the gulf like a tense, thin cord to which he hung suspended by both hands, without fear, without surprise, without any sort of emotion whatever” (N 498). Mark Wollaeger argues that the novel’s structural parallels between Hirsch’s suspended torture and Decoud’s suicide function to suggest “the author’s awareness of the extent to which the narrative machinery of Nostromo may exist in order to torture its characters” (140–1). But Decoud’s death produces an ambiguous imagining of the tortured male body as a kind of interstitial ideal,

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necessary to both the oppressive logic of imperialism and the critical mobility of the novel. Beside Nostromo, Martin Decoud (as the Capataz’s dandified, Europeanized foil) is the character most subject to appositional description – in his final scene, he is the “young apostle of Separation,” the “brilliant Costaguanero of the boulevards” (N 496), “the spoiled darling of the family, the lover of Antonia and journalist of Sulaco” (N 497). But on Great Isabel, such appositional excess, with its notes of sardonic irony, only serves to underscore the meaninglessness that threatens such a substitutive form of identity: anticipating the aesthetic collisions of surrealism and cubism and voicing a nihilism that marks the thought of a range of Conrad’s characters (for instance, Marlow, Kurtz, Razumov), on the eve of his death, Decoud comes to behold “the universe as a succession of incomprehensible images” (N 498). Such an idea haunts the report of Decoud’s death by revolver – snapping the suspended silence of the gulf, “stretched taut like a dark, thin string” (N 500) – as we are returned to Nostromo’s puzzled presence on the abandoned lighter through a kind of narrative reanimation, both corporeal and inversely syntactic, of the intimacy he previously shared with Decoud: A victim of the disillusioned weariness which is the retribution meted out to intellectual audacity, the brilliant Don Martin Decoud, weighted by the bars of San Tomé silver, disappeared without a trace, swallowed up in the immense indifference of things … The magnificent Capataz de Cargadores, victim of the disenchanted vanity which is the reward of audacious action, sat in the weary pose of a hunted outcast through a night of sleeplessness as tormenting as any known to Decoud, his companion in the most desperate affair of his life. (N 501–2) Although Nostromo takes up, for the final phase of the novel, a familiar pattern of restless mobility, shuffling between the concealed silver and the world, he regards his fate as further confirmation of his manly individuality: “There was no one in the world but Gian’ Battista Fidanza, Capataz de Cargadores, the incorruptible and faithful Nostromo, to pay such a price.” But in the shadow of Hirsch and Decoud, Nostromo’s

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characteristically appositional return to a sense of “immense pride” (N 502) cannot help but sound out words haunted by a suspension of meaning, “a succession of incomprehensible images.”

“Conquests of Treasure and Love”: Ending Nostromo Disappointment has been the note most often sounded in critical responses to the conclusion of Nostromo. Albert Guerard argues that the “great book” gives way (especially in its “inevitably embarrassed treatment of sexual passion”) to a “popular fiction” of “diminished seriousness and dwindling creative energy” (204). The novel’s last sentences, in the wake of Nostromo’s death, perhaps encapsulate the sentimental character of its final phase: She [Linda Viola] stood silent and still, collecting her strength to throw all her fidelity, her pain, bewilderment, and despair into one great cry. “Never! Gian’ Battista!” Dr. Monygham, pulling round in the police-galley, heard the name pass over his head. It was another of Nostromo’s triumphs, the greatest, the most enviable, the most sinister of all. In that true cry of undying passion that seemed to ring aloud from Punta Mala to Azuera and away to the bright line of the horizon, overhung by a big white cloud shining like a mass of solid silver, the genius of the magnificent Capataz de Cargadores dominated the dark gulf containing his conquests of treasure and love. (N 566) Certainly, the narrator’s suggestion that Linda’s “true cry of undying passion” rings out “the most sinister” of “Nostromo’s triumphs” might seem to imply an abandonment of the novel’s broader political resonances in favour of a privileged tracing of personalized, romantic effects. But it is critical to recognize how Conrad marks out this final triumph for Nostromo’s “genius” as registering only in a fleeting, mobile experience of masculine witness (Dr Monygham hears “the name pass over his head”) and an uncertainly enacted, geographical imprint (his genius “dominate[s] the dark gulf ”). Suspended by the syntax of the novel’s final sentence, the cloud, “shining like a mass of solid silver,” also

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hovers in enigmatic conjunction with the strangely solid presence of Nostromo’s sounded name – does that moonlit cloud, and its evocation of the “treasure” that has marked out Gian’ Battista’s fate, overhang the horizon or his “genius”? is Nostromo’s “sinister” domination of a woman’s memory and the landscape akin to or overshadowed by the silver’s suspended mass? The novel’s ending appears more consistent, I want to suggest, if we attend to its continued treatment of Nostromo’s plot as structured by a masculine style moving between domination and abjection, between heterosexual conquest and an uncertainly interstitial circulation between men; while Nostromo’s suspended masculinity traces queer networks of desire and transnational mobility across the text, the novel’s conclusion increasingly emphasizes the availability of Nostromo’s story for straight, nationalist acts of narration. Brian Richardson notes how the novel attains a “definite sense of completion” through Linda’s crying of Gian’ Battista’s name as it performs “an ironic reversal of Nostromo’s inability to speak her sister’s name” at the earlier scene of his engagement (302). But beyond a merely ironic return to the idea of Nostromo’s failure to master his fate, Linda’s cry also invites a closer account of the novel’s management of his generative silence and of its densely thematic interest in the idea of a hidden, galvanizing force. Against a backdrop of Sulaco’s “new life,” “growing rich swiftly on the hidden treasures of the earth” and “scattering lavishly its wealth to the four corners of an excited world” (N 504), the final phase of the novel brings its paired treatment of Charles Gould and Nostromo, as the beneficiaries of excavated wealth, to its logical conclusion. As Emilia Gould, in her sad “immobility” (N 520), sees the San Tomé mine “possessing, consuming, burning up” the Goulds’ genealogical line, “mastering the energetic spirit of the son as it had mastered the lamentable weakness of the father” (N 522), readers are asked to consider Nostromo’s own overpowering passion for the silver as an emptying out of the Capataz’s role as heterosexual love interest at the very point at which the marriage plot is belatedly introduced. In chapter 12, the narrator reports on how Nostromo, now appearing under the title “Captain Fidanza” and burdened by a “fearful and ardent subjection” (N 526–7) to his hidden loot, orchestrates the moving of the Violas to Great Isabel to run its newly built lighthouse, a move that is intended to safeguard his access to the secreted silver, which he “yearn[s] to clasp, embrace, absorb, subjugate in unquestioned

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possession” (N 529). In the same breath, the relocation of the Violas allows for, even demands, his long-awaited marriage proposal: “He must establish a regular position. He would ask him for his daughter now” (N 530). Marriage, for Nostromo, takes the form of an alibi, so when Giorgio misunderstands his hesitant declaration that he has come to ask for his wife (with “sudden dread,” he “dare[s] not utter” Giselle’s name) and calls in Linda instead, the captain remains silent for fear of losing access to the island: “He was afraid, because, neither dead nor alive, like the Gringos on Azuera, he belonged body and soul to the unlawfulness of his audacity.” In this way, Conrad establishes the trajectory of the novel’s final third as a kind of zombie-romance, a haunting of romantic fiction’s expected plotlines by “the shining spectre of the treasure” (N 531). Nostromo’s haunted silence (marked by a love that dare not speak its name) becomes an ambivalent sign of both his estrangement from and his passive retention of a privileged masculine position in such plotlines. Captain Fidanza’s operative silence points to suggestive parallels between his adoption of an abject yet agential masculine style and Nostromo’s adaptation of feminized narrative forms (the sentimental novel, melodrama) in its concluding sequence. Susan Jones has identified how Conrad’s late work increasingly turned toward “the issue of gender, female identity, and, in relation to romance, how women are invited to conform to its conventionalized gestures and plots” (2); Nostromo’s turn toward romance asks questions not only about the social shaping of women’s plotlines (especially for Emilia Gould and the Viola sisters) but also about masculinity’s functional status in terms of the plot dynamics within such conventional and feminized narrative systems. Just as in Lord Jim, Jim’s doomed attempt to realize a romantic dream of himself in far-flung Patusan finds itself reflected in Conrad’s unconvincing adoption of the style and form of popular romance, so too can the exaggerated emotional gestures of Nostromo’s late love-plot be read as an uncertain querying of the romantic, heteronormative value attributed to the protagonist’s name at the novel’s endpoint. That querying is uncertain because romance, in these final chapters, works in a contradictory fashion, destabilizing even as it sediments expectations for the heterosexual hero. Conrad situates the complicated significations of Nostromo’s movements at the novel’s end as symptomatic of the nation-state’s uncertain, interstitial position at

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the crosscurrents of burgeoning European and American investment and trade. Conrad’s narrator repeatedly frames Nostromo’s enslaved path toward his death as a set of constrained performances of masculine style and contesting narrative possibilities for the colonial male body. Where, in the earlier Morenita scene, Nostromo’s costume bespoke his corporeal insertion into ornamental accounts of heterosexual power, his appearances in post-independence Sulaco indicate the “less picturesque” circulation of his body in a newly configured, transatlantic economy: “Fiercely whiskered and grave, a shade less supple in his walk, the vigour and symmetry of his powerful limbs lost in the vulgarity of a brown tweed suit, made by Jews in the slums of London, and sold by the clothing department of the Compania Anzani” (N 527). The shorthand anti-Semitism lurking in this account of Nostromo’s supposed vulgarization serves to once more suggest both his (and, perhaps, also the narrator’s) imagined detachment from and necessary immersion in an emasculating, globalized network of trade previously embodied in the expendable figure of Hirsch. Along similar lines, in the romance plot of the final two chapters, Nostromo initially seems to signal an attempt to shore up a vision of himself as “the independent Captain Fidanza” (N 526–7), a figure of “vigour” and power who finds in Giselle’s “surface placidity” the requisite “promise of submissiveness” (N 524–5). But Conrad constitutes the moment of Nostromo’s entry into the “ambient seduction” of Giselle – the “charm of her body, the promising mysteriousness of her indolence” – as a corruption of his masculinist narrative, an incorporation of sentimental, feminized discourse “like a fresh and intoxicating fragrance spreading out in the shadows, impregnating the air”; as if aware of the text’s shifting generic markers, Nostromo acts out his romantic role through a change in costume, “throw[ing] off the store clothing of Captain Fidanza,” returning to her “in the red sash and check shirt” of the “Mediterranean sailor come ashore to try his luck in Costaguana.” At the same time, the gathering “dusk of purple and red” to which Giselle “seem[s] to surrender herself ” holds, in suggestive proximity, the unspoken source of the silver’s haunting power, the suspended memory of Decoud’s “self-destructive passion … flaming up to death in solitude” (N 537). But as his passion for Giselle unmans him, as Giselle’s “ambient seduction” becomes equated with the spectral influence of the secreted silver (“He

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had two masters now” [N 547]), Nostromo cannot help living up to a narrative of heterosexual mastery that makes sense of his unsettled mobility; Nostromo’s queerly interstitial movements become subject to, and displaced through, a narrative of containment. When, having declared his love for Giselle in the immediate wake of his engagement, he departs the Viola household without explanation for his fiancée (in order to take more of the silver), Giorgio returns to the “Spanish proverb” (N 254) through which he had earlier responded to his late wife’s concerns about losing this attractive, prospective son: “A man should not be tame” (N 543). As my reading of Captain Fidanza’s costume has already suggested, the novel’s finally interstitial treatment of its stylized leading man also cannot be divorced from its broader configuration of Sulaco and its geography in an increasingly globalized, pan-Atlantic cultural economy. Indeed, Nostromo’s “definite sense of completion” (Richardson 302) depends on its drawing of a generative analogy between the protagonist’s doubled position (as enactor of heterosexual mastery; as suspended spectre of homosocial intimacy) and the ambivalent, international narratability of Sulaco and the Occidental Republic at the novel’s end (as incipient, autonomous nation; as penetrable, vulnerable coastal state). Part Third offers glimpses, primarily through Captain Mitchell’s narration to a “privileged captive” (N 475) in chapter 10, of Sulaco’s emergence as the American-backed “Treasure House of the World” (N 489). In what we are told is a representative example of his speech for a “more or less willing victim” (“all day” he “would talk like this” [N 476]), Mitchell offers a colonial vision of Sulaco’s independence as the conversion of a wasteland and progressive expansion: “Lot of building going on, as you observe. Before the Separation it was a plain of burnt grass smothered in clouds of dust, with an ox-cart track to our Jetty. Nothing more. This is the Harbour Gate. Picturesque, is it not? Formerly the town stopped short there” (N 475). Just as modernization transforms the cityscape into something “picturesque,” Mitchell’s repeated narrations of Sulaco’s secession serve to convert the events of that period into something “historical” – Mitchell’s obsessive returns to that word serve, as Richard Niland has argued, to underline the rapid “mythologising” behind “the constructed nation” and “the edifice of modern national identity” (117). Like his considerable stocks in the Consolidated San Tomé mines that he goes onto describe, Mitchell

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views Sulaco as material to be made profitable by being cast in a story of masculine autonomy. Despite delivering the novel’s only reference to the Occidental Republic’s independence being secured by American military intervention through a “naval demonstration” by the “United States cruiser, Powhattan” (N 487) (ironically named for the imperial use to which it puts the name of Pocahontas’s father and the nation he led), Mitchell finds in these “historical events” (N 508) a narrative of individualist heroism hinging on the actions of Nostromo: “The sailor whom I discovered, and, I may say, made, sir” (N 473). “Stunned and as it were annihilated mentally by a sudden surfeit of sights, sounds, names, facts, and complicated information imperfectly apprehended,” Mitchell’s representative auditor “would listen like a tired child to a fairy tale” (N 486–7) (evoking an archetypal narrative of homosocial mobility estranged from domesticity, he resembles, in this, the captivated wedding guest of Coleridge’s obsessive historian, the ancient mariner). Like the haunted romance that defines Nostromo’s plotted death, Mitchell’s narrative is familiar in its rehearsal of a plot of masculine autonomy and authority, and yet clearly at odds with what we, the “privileged” reader, know about Nostromo’s mission. But what is perhaps most significant about Mitchell’s narrative mining of Sulaco is the manner in which Conrad situates this ironic history as an interruption, once more, of Nostromo’s suspended body. Chapter 9 concludes with the scene of Nostromo’s return to the Viola household after his resurrected meeting with Monygham. Having been informed by Giorgio of Teresa’s death, Nostromo stands poised, pondering the unknown fate of Decoud: “the motionless Capataz dropped his long, soft eyelashes, which gave to the upper part of his fierce, black-whiskered face a touch of feminine ingenuousness” (N 472). The Capataz’s feminized body becomes the switchpoint for chapter 10’s movement into Mitchell’s perspective as he recalls, the following day, seeing “that poor fellow of mine – Nostromo” (N 473). While Mitchell’s narrative focuses on the heroic successes of Nostromo, such as his “famous ride to Cayta” (N 473), it is to his memory of Nostromo’s deflated appearance on that day, “like a haunting ghost” (N 487) and “another man” (N 488), that he returns at the close of his narrative (although he claims that, as with all other passages in Nostromo’s life, this disturbance was eventually crowned with “success”). This image, as Mitchell’s “cycle” comes “to close at last” (N 489), is what allows the

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narrative to return to the past and to the scene of Nostromo standing on Barrios’s transport, spying the boat that had previously carried Decoud and himself to Great Isabel. Nostromo’s formal suspension across these two chapters, poised between effeminate reflection and a “vigorous and skilful” (N 492) display of his physical prowess (as he swims to the boat), provides a useful shorthand for the ambivalent use to which Conrad’s novel puts his body. The ironic framing of Mitchell’s “pompous” (N 487) history asks us to think of Nostromo, and its protomodernist play with time, space, and perspective, as a critique of imperialism as narrative, imperialism as a claiming of time and space in the name of a masculine autonomy that, like the gringos of Azuera, is inevitably haunted, hollowed out. Nostromo’s performances of heroism, like his performances of heterosexual mastery in the romance plot, cannot be disentangled from the narrative’s investment in intensely influential yet disavowed, spectralizing, and feminizing scenes of homosocial intimacy (especially those between Holroyd and Gould and between Decoud and Nostromo). And yet, Nostromo also mobilizes a homosocial intimacy between the authorial narrator and the “privileged” reader, one that sees beyond the simplistic histories of a figure like Mitchell and acts by virtue of Nostromo’s interstitial function, pulling into symbolic relation the novel’s various suspended male bodies. That same narrative voice maps out its own, albeit contingent, masculine authority by a combination of seemingly objective distance (as in the novel’s almost filmic opening) and occasional efforts to differentiate “the true virility of man” from, for instance, a “woman’s true tenderness” (N 67). In this way, Conrad’s novel invites a kind of mastery of narrative space, a movement through the novel’s formal geography that, like Linda’s cry at the novel’s end, allows the name of Gian’ Battista Fidanza to “dominate the dark gulf.”

5

“Those Queer Effects of Real Life” Impressionism, Desire, and the Transatlantic in Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier

Ford Madox Ford consistently positioned himself, in relation to James and Conrad, as a fellow practitioner of literary Impressionism. In Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance, Ford recalled how he and Conrad accepted this critical designation because “we saw that Life did not narrate, but made impressions on our brains. We in turn, if we wished to produce on you an effect of life, must not narrate but render … impressions” (182). In James’s writings, Ford especially prized the particular “impression that his books give us of vibrating reality”: “the sensation is due to the fact that the mind passes, as it does in real life, perpetually backwards and forwards between the apparent aspect of things and the essentials of life” (Henry James 153). That appreciation resonates with the account he gives in his two-part 1913 essay, “On Impressionism,” of the writer’s “queer” engagement with otherness: I suppose that Impressionism exists to render those queer effects of real life that are like so many views seen through bright glass – through glass so bright that whilst you perceive through it a landscape or a backyard, you are aware that, on its surface, it reflects a face of a person behind you. For the whole of life is really like that; we are almost always in one place with our minds somewhere quite other. (I. 174) Queerness here, in terms of mere strangeness, seems to reside in the view’s disorientation of vision; the gaze through (and upon) the window captures the “queer effects” of a life in which “our minds are somewhere quite other,” a phrase suggesting not only the mind’s wandering or

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“vibrating” (from here to there, and from self to other) but also, potentially, a reconceiving of the mind as spatial, as a “somewhere quite other.” As a supplement to this othered vision, Ford suggests that, to succeed, the Impressionist also requires the engagement of a quite particular, “queer” reader, a “silent listener who will be attentive to him, and whose mind acts very much as his acts” (II. 328) – a “peasant intelligence” who has “time for many queer thoughts” and who, when faced with a “queer sensation” will put it down as “a queer thing,” “not classified under any headings of social reformers, or generalized so as to fulfil any fancied moral law” (II. 332). While Ford, recalling Stevenson, imagines the author taking up a “seductive occupation” (I. 172), “employ[ing] all the devices of the prostitute,” that seduction depends upon the listener’s “particular and virgin openness of mind” (II. 333), refusing to decide in advance the dogmatic significance of the Impressionist’s effects.1 Ford’s modelling of this erotic and “queer” exchange between self and other and between author and reader has particular significance for a reading of his novel, The Good Soldier, in which Dowell, the American narrator, seeks to produce for his “silent” listener (GS 21) – his imagined “sympathetic soul” (GS 19) – an “impression” of Edward Ashburnham. First released as an extract entitled “The Saddest Story” in the inaugural issue of Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis’s Vorticist magazine BLAST in June 1914, and subsequently published as a full-length novel in March 1915 by John Lane in London and New York, Ford’s novel has often been read as a transitional text, acting as a bridge between the forms and concerns of Victorian social realism and the kinds of fragmented textual and visual experiments (by the likes of Pound, Lewis, and Jacob Epstein) that dominated BLAST. The tension between these aesthetic impulses manifests most clearly, I wish to argue, in Dowell’s tortuous approach to the question of how to represent the English gentleman and in related, larger questions about the form of transatlantic masculinity and desire between men. While Ford’s novel appears to centre on the repercussions of Ashburnham’s unambiguously straight affairs (or repressed affairs) with a series of women (Maisie Maidan, Dowell’s wife Florence, and his ward Nancy Rufford), Dowell’s narration not only calls attention to the “queer” character – the circuitous and diffuse quality – of “normal” desires, but also to the manner in which his own ambiguously managed desire for Edward structures the text. Dowell’s status as an expatriate

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American, and specifically as a Philadelphia Quaker, is critical to the shape of his desires for both Edward Ashburnham, as an embodiment of English “good form,” and for the space that he occupies; indeed, in ways that return us specifically to James’s ambivalent representation of American cultural imperialism on English soil, Ford’s novel frames Dowell’s reading of Edward’s adulteries and his managing of his own queer desires as a spatial drama. But Ford’s novel also strikes into new territory for the “queer Atlantic” fiction I have been engaging with in this book: Dowell’s chaotic, American narration (unlike the staid first-person narration of Mackellar in Ballantrae) allows Ford’s novel to engage in a more sustained, however ambivalent, psychological interrogation of the Anglophilia – of the respect for English forms and customs – that at times seems to animate the plots of his predecessors (in, for instance, Captain Vere’s insistence on the “measured forms” of naval law, or Maggie Verver’s enlistment of Amerigo in the protection of their “equilibrium”). Ford’s radical experiments with narrative voice reflect, I will argue, the novel’s vested and vexed interest in the queer dimensions of Dowell’s love for the English soldier. Just as Ford’s imagining of the Impressionist window in his 1913 essay spatializes the author’s and reader’s conjoined experience of a “queer effect,” his later novel consistently intertwines the disorienting experiences and effects of desire with the movements of both the characters and the narration across space. Dowell’s narrative insists on the value of his American voice seeking to claim and contain European space, acquiring English property (and English proprietors), while also drawing attention to desire’s mapping out and disorientation of space. We might even say it is the figure of Edward Ashburnham – the impressively immobile, unrequited object of Dowell’s queer desire and, in the last quarter of the novel written after his suicide, a ghostly presence – that hovers over the shoulder of his narrative’s reflected image. Dowell’s mobile, “vibrating” narrative form (as the vehicle of Ford’s Impressionism) becomes a doubled project: on one hand, it traces the American narrator’s transatlantic desires to replicate the colonizing mobility of the English gentleman in his own claiming of Edward (“I loved Edward Ashburnham – and … I love him because he was just myself ” [GS 197]); at the same time, it renders such a spatialized requital of desire impossible by refusing to fix in place any one reading of the “good soldier” or his narrator.

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In making such claims, I wish to distinguish my reading of the novel’s spatial erotics from that of Karen Hoffman, who locates in the text an ambivalent critique of the inextricability of “patriarchal masculinity” and “the assumptions and practices of imperialism, likening the expectation that men transgress boundaries in order to possess ever more women to the scramble for colonies among colonial powers” (30). For Hoffman, Dowell’s narration of Edward Ashburnham’s attractiveness, his eventual demise, and his own colonization of Edward (as he takes up tenancy of Edward’s Bramshaw Manor while penning the conclusion to his narrative) signal the failure of both a waning British aristocracy and an emergent American imperialism to imagine alternatives for normative, militant masculinity (38, 46). In contrast, I will argue that Ford’s interest in a transition from British to American imperialist masculinities involves an intrinsic querying of normative manhood, a tracing of desire’s “queer effects” on and through men rendered as a kind of spatial disorientation. While Hoffman, drawing on Sedgwick, recognizes the novel’s analogous treatment of adultery and imperialism as a triangulated “competition among men” (38), and acknowledges a “degree of sexual attraction” in Dowell’s attention to Edward (40n28), this chapter will make a case for the more central structuring role played by Dowell’s queer desire and its delineation of both unstable masculinities and the erotic form of transatlantic Anglophilia. Jesse Matz reads The Good Soldier as an exemplary instance of the contradictory, intersubjective impulse behind Ford’s Impressionist method – Dowell’s failed efforts to establish “collaborative relationships” (169) with Edward, Nancy, and the reader come to signify the impossibility of Ford’s anti-modern aesthetic, its primitivist fetishization of “peasant intelligence” and its paternalistic, feudal efforts to construct the “virgin mind” as an “impressionable audience” (163–4). My own reading stresses the instability of both Dowell’s collaborative engagements and Ford’s politics: the uncertain success of Dowell’s wandering narrative project depends on the queer enlistment of the reader as a silent partner in his ambiguously calibrated path toward domesticity and landlordism. Dowell’s transatlantic mobility – his exilic wandering, his Anglophilic anchoring – becomes an equivocal force in the text, queering the rampant heterosexuality of its plot but inscribing persistent uncertainties about the value of such queer reorientations. Where James and Conrad allow the limited distance and mobility of their

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third-person narrators to raise unresolvable questions about the ties between novelistic form and transatlantic colonialism, Ford, through Dowell’s “very rambling” (GS 147) narration and his consistent nods toward the reader as a generative absence, traces an ambivalent response to the homonationalistic quality of American Anglophilia – the novel uncertainly situates American desires for the signs of British, imperial belonging (America’s love for Britain as “just [it]self ”) as queerly, passionately necessary and violently distasteful. Accordingly, Ford’s representation of Dowell’s desire for Ashburnham as a displaced, macho reflection of his effeminate self invites a readerly response at once ironic and passionate, distanced and intimately attached. Mediating between self and other, Impressionism – as a mirrored layering of “the queer effects of real life”; as the artist’s seduction of silent listener “whose mind acts very much as his acts” – allows Ford to take up Dowell’s Anglophilic outlook as both the model for his own novelistic practice and its ironic subject. On its own terms, the novel’s aesthetic achievement (and its motion toward further modernist destabilizations of character, epistemology, and chronology, its anticipation of more radical play with voice and time by the likes of James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, and Virginia Woolf ) depends on this doubled relation to queerly transatlantic desires between men.

Dowell’s Narrative Mobility Early in the narrative, Dowell describes the “intimacy” shared by himself, his wife Florence, and Edward and Leonora Ashburnham as being “like a minuet, simply because on every possible occasion and in every possible circumstance we knew where to go, where to sit, which table we unanimously should choose” (GS 15). The musical trope aptly captures the often-unconscious manner in which these characters operate under the guiding star of a shared set of cultural forms and expectations, what Dowell thinks of as the signs of the “quite good people” of England (GS 14). But Dowell’s trope also evokes a more ecstatic, less containable mobility: writing in the wake of the dissolution of his charmed circle, Dowell insists that one “can’t kill a minuet de la cour”; even if you “shut up the music-book, close the harpsichord,” the “minuet itself is dancing itself away into the furthest

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stars, even as our minuet of the Hessian bathing places must be stepping itself still.” Mobility – sometimes repetitive and patterned, sometimes seemingly spasmodic – structures Dowell’s narrative form, as it does when he almost immediately and violently dissolves his musical figure: “It wasn’t a minuet that we stepped; it was a prison – a prison full of screaming hysterics, tied down so they might not outsound the rolling of our carriage wheels as we went along the shaded avenues of the Taunus Wald.” From this early stage, Dowell’s movements in narration (he will, again, almost immediately take this back, returning to “the true music” [GS 15]) become a complicated reflection of the figurative movements that describe his characters’ interrelations, coded by shared cultural forms and shaped by irrepressible desires. Readers, from the outset, are called to consider how the narrative’s often disorienting shifts may, all at once, play out a beautiful or perhaps imprisoning shared social dance and trace desire’s uncontainable but also, perhaps, hysterical continuance. Such narrative play is symptomatic of Ford’s novel; more than any of the other texts under consideration in this book, The Good Soldier revels in a proliferation of disruptive rhetorical strategies. In particular, the distinctive and disruptive quality of Dowell’s narration depends on just such sudden shifts in judgement and figures, on a tendency to trail off into ellipsis, on narrative gaps (often retroactively, asynchronically filled), and on repetitions (of scenes and of phrases), often from different perspectives (or, at least, Dowell’s approximations of those perspectives). Ford’s radical destabilization of Dowell’s narrative voice anticipates later modernist play – in, for instance, “Penelope” from Joyce’s Ulysses, or Woolf ’s Orlando – with first-person address as a site for exploring consciousness in motion across time and space. The novel asks the reader to consider correspondences between its narrative mobility, pulling Dowell’s voice across subjects, places, and temporalities, as well as the manner in which characters (and especially Dowell himself ) traverse the novel’s transatlantic world, be that by a physical movement or by a desiring gaze. The ambiguities inherent in Dowell’s representational style, in its rambling and redoubling paths, necessarily unsettle the terms by which he seeks to locate and explain the desires of the characters in his story even as they also allow for his suggestive reinforcement of social norms. The novel’s ambivalent management of imperialist masculinity, as both an instrument of colonial power and a locus for

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queer desire, emerges from Dowell’s treatment of desire as a spatial and spatializing force. Dowell’s own allotment and arrangement of narrative space – exploiting and containing the queer magnetism of Edward Ashburnham – becomes an uncanny double for the spatial effects, repressive and subversive, that he locates in the body of the titular “good soldier.” Tamar Katz reads Dowell’s narrative unreliability, his status as an “explicitly feminized narrating subject,” as Ford’s method for managing “a treacherous interiority” associated, in his writing, with both women and the “social crisis” of modernity: Dowell “frames himself as an everyman universal in his bewilderment, and defines bewilderment as the prerequisite for narrative authority” (110–11). Katz is right, I think, to highlight the masculinist quality of Ford’s uncertainties, but the novel goes further, I would suggest, in its construction of masculinity, especially the meaning and narratability of heterosexual masculinity, as subject to “bewilderment.” “[P]erhaps all men are like that,” Dowell wonders, posing and dismissing the idea that “Teddy” Ashburnham was “a brute”: “as I’ve said what do I know even of the smoking room?” Dowell’s narration takes its shape in the shadow of his felt estrangement from the homosocial space of the “smoking room,” from a performative space in which the men will take special “delight in listening to or telling gross stories” but will be “quite properly offended” if anyone “suggested that they weren’t the kind of person you could trust your wife alone with” (GS 18). Offering up a “nebulous” rendering of “the morals of sex,” Edward’s own command of such seeming contradictions – the evidence of his affairs jarring against the “cleanness of [his] thoughts and the absolute chastity of [his] life” – generates an open question about Dowell’s sense of his own claims to masculinity: “Am I no better than a eunuch or is the proper man – the man with the right to existence – a raging stallion forever neighing after his neighbour’s womankind?” (GS 19). That question is in fact immediately multifold. Does Dowell gain anything, in terms of a masculine identity, by refusing to engage in “gross stories”? If not “gross,” then what kind of stories does Dowell like to tell? And just how seriously does this narrative take the disturbingly punitive idea that the improper man has no “right to existence”? Outside the performative demands made by male spaces like the smoking room, The Good Soldier poses the space of the novel as an alternative and uncertain space for exploring the notion of “proper”

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masculinity through a retrospective revaluation of the impressions left by Edward Ashburnham. At various points in the narrative Dowell justifies his disruptive, disorienting, and tangential approach as an appropriate form for this “Tale of Passion” and the spatialized desires it traces. Like Billy Budd’s forceful presence, impressed into service, or the anticipatory shape of the narratives that attach to James Durie, Dowell’s tracing of the history of Edward’s adulteries positions “passion” (even when it seems most straightforwardly heterosexual) as a specific challenge to conventionally linear narrative structure. For instance, Dowell initially describes Edward’s first foray into adultery, his illicit kissing of a working-class girl in a train car in what becomes known as the “Kilsyte Case,” as a simple instance of overmastering desire: Edward had informed Maisie Maidan that “he was driven to it. I daresay he was driven to it, by the mad passion to find an ultimately satisfying woman” (GS 46). But when Dowell returns to this affair much later in the narrative, he gives Edward’s retrospective account (from an unspecified time) of how he approached the crying girl from a “quite democratic” wish to comfort her and “pool their sorrows” (GS 122). His ideas about adultery, he suggests, were formed as he listened to the “dirty-mindedness” of lawyers, “in the witness-box,” at his own trial: “in the midst of those august ceremonies of the law there came suddenly into his mind the recollection of the softness of the girl’s body as he had pressed her to him. And, from that moment, that girl appeared desirable to him” (GS 127). Dowell himself will enact a similar kind of retrospective desire when, at the start of part 3, he suggests that his wish to marry Nancy Rufford only emerges when he hears Leonora return to him his own forgotten expression of that desire. And Nancy, in the final part of the novel, also undergoes a transformative reading of her relation to Edward when she learns of divorce law from a newspaper article; in the wake of her discovery, she finds the manor at Bramshaw Teleragh has taken on “a changed aspect,” no longer offering up “the comfortable symbols of an indestructible mode of life” (GS 173). Consistently disabling and revising the agency of his central characters (especially Edward) in light of this actional reading of desire’s effects (desire being produced by actions rather than producing actions), Dowell thus justifies his “rambling” form (GS 147), “drifting down life,” like Edward and Leonora, with “no current to draw things along to a swift and inevitable end” (GS 132).

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Outside of his account of desire as a disorientation of time and space, Dowell’s narrative also often depends on a sense of himself as contingently removed from such disorientations. Dowell opens his narrative by immediately disclosing his failure to know anything “at all about” the Ashburnhams, attributing this to the unfathomable “English heart” rather than to his failure to enter into the classed domains of England’s “quite good people”: “Living, as we perforce lived, in Europe and being, as we perforce were, leisured Americans, which is as much to say that we were un-American, we were thrown very much into the society of the nicer English” (GS 13). Dowell tethers his “un-American” wandering to a mobile, Anglicized belonging to his family estate in “Pennsylvania, Pa. where, it is historically true, there are more old English families than you would find in any six English counties taken together.” He confesses to carrying with him, “as if it were the only thing that invisibly anchored me to any spot upon the globe,” the “title deeds” to the family farm, given as “wampum, the grant of an Indian chief to the first Dowell, who left Farnham in Surrey in company with William Penn” (GS 14). Tracing genealogical ties to an English founder of American religious dissent and to an image of transatlantic colonization gainsaid by indigenous “title deeds,” Dowell situates his movements among “the nicer English” (GS 13) as the product of an ambivalent sensibility, “invisibly anchored” yet “thrown,” shaped by colonial and postcolonial claims on American lands and English manners. Umila Seshagiri reads Dowell’s ancestral backstory, marked by relocation and the dislocation of others, as symptomatic of a “tenuousness in the familial and racial ties” of the novel’s characters, and of Ford’s broader, incredulous lament for modernity’s disruption of “racial or national collectivity” (117). If, as Dowell claims, the drifting form of desire demands that he give his narrative the title of “the Saddest Story, rather than ‘The Ashburnham Tragedy’” (GS 132), his larger narrative asks us to think about the relation between such fictional shaping (deeds of titling/entitlement) and the forms of property and privilege (title deeds) that cut through experiences of “racial or national collectivity” – narrative space, like the imagination of national space, emerges as a contested field shaped by the novel’s interwoven figures for desire and colonial power. “I don’t know how it is best to put this thing down,” Dowell muses early in his narrative: “whether it would be better to try and tell the story from the beginning, as if it were a story; or whether to tell it

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from this distance of time, as it reached me from the lips of Leonora or from those of Edward himself ” (GS 19). His decision to take both paths pulls the narration between Bramshaw Teleragh (“From there at this moment, I am currently writing” [GS 14]) and the time of the couples’ first acquaintance over nine seasons at Nauheim. In recalling the moment of his arrival at Bramshaw, “descend[ing] on it” in properly picturesque manner “from the high, clear, windswept waste of the New Forest” (GS 25), Dowell positions his “first taste of English life” (GS 24) as defined by the English estate’s façade of stability, its apparent embodiment of “the very spirit of peace” (GS 25). It is from the privileged, supposedly stable space of the English estate that Dowell looks back on his sense of “wander[ing]” at Nauheim. Where the patients established “some sort of anchorage in the spot,” Dowell experiences “a sense almost of nakedness,” of “no attachments, no accumulations.” He misses the “little, innate sympathies” that “draw one” to the material items of “one’s own home” and insists that such a “feeling is a very important part of life”: “I know it well, that have been for so long a wanderer upon the face of public resorts” (GS 25). The self-conscious irony implicit in that final biblical parody (the ridiculousness of Dowell’s comparison of his leisured sense of “nakedness” with Cain’s wandering on “the face of the earth” suggests his self-awareness) exemplifies the complicated quality of Dowell’s distanced narration – Ford asks us to consider Dowell’s writing as a peculiarly transatlantic wandering defined by both conscious and unconscious privilege and alienation. Ensconced in Bramshaw at the time of writing, Dowell’s retrospective traversal of the privileged spaces mapped out by his narrative – spas, country houses, and wealthy homes in Philadelphia – depends upon his determining sense of himself as both a part of and apart from the English leisure classes whose space he has come to occupy. Perhaps the key space that comes to determine the shape of Dowell’s narrative and its time-shifts is that of his imagined discourse with the tale’s audience. Dowell informs the reader that he plans to “just imagine myself for a fortnight or so at one side of the fireplace of a country cottage, with a sympathetic soul opposite me”: And I shall go on talking, in a low voice while the sea sounds in the distance and overhead the great black flood of wind polishes the bright stars. From time to time we shall get up and go to the door and look out at the great moon and say: “Why it

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is nearly as bright as in Provence!” And then we shall come back to the fireside, with just the touch of a sigh because we are not in that Provence where even the saddest stories are gay. (GS 19) At the opening of part 4 (six months after he begins to write the story), Dowell excuses the “maze” that his story has become by returning to this imagined reader’s displacing presence: “I cannot help it. I have stuck to my idea of being in a country cottage with a silent listener, hearing between the gusts of the wind and amidst the noises of the distant sea, the story as it comes.” The reader, in Ford’s image, mediates between the embodied scene of Dowell’s delivery and the interruptive presence of sounds from outside, intertwining – by experience and by analogy – the tidal motion of the Atlantic and the “rambling” path of his narrative: “one goes back, one goes forward,” seeking to fix “a false impression.” Indeed, it is this mapping of the story’s form onto the reader’s imagined experience that, in Dowell’s view, is crucial to the text’s attempt to produce the “impression” of verisimilitude: “I console myself with thinking that this is a real story and that, after all, real stories are probably told best in the way a person telling a story would tell them. They will then seem most real” (GS 147). Like the dancers in Dowell’s figurative minuet or the “screaming hysterics” in his prison, readers of his narrative become subject to a choreography, an unexpressed code of shared movements that places and manages their desires. But, in Dowell’s vision, the same imagined space of storytelling cannot help but evoke more elemental forces – what he will come to thematize as “passions” – and their inevitable presence in even the most sheltered of domestic arrangements. Readers, like Dowell’s characters, must negotiate a world in which text (like the notation of a “true music”) evokes a form and a space of delivery which challenges our capacity to easily distinguish between experiences of aesthetic pleasure and privileged leisure, between freely mobile expressions of desire and an imprisoning structure for desire’s encodation.

Dowell’s Passions It has become a critical commonplace that The Good Soldier – in terms drawn from Samuel Hynes’s formative reading of the novel – revolves around the interaction of “two conflicting principles”: “Convention and

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Passion” (232). Hynes argues that through the course of the narrative Dowell acquires knowledge and “perfect sympathy,” learning, from Ashburnham, “the reality of Passion” and realizing “that Convention will triumph, because it must” (234). But while Dowell’s knowledge and, by association, his reliability as a narrator has become a site of much critical controversy, Hynes’s account of him as “the Philadelphia eunuch,” the man who can only attain his awareness of physical passion from the sidelines, remains a guiding star for more recent scholarship. Indeed, the idea of Dowell as a passionless spectator is often central to arguments about his narrative function. Dowell “suffer[s] from Impressionism” (112), Michael Levenson provocatively suggests – his “lack of passion” and his freedom “from the tyranny of desire” come as “the final consequence of the Impressionist pursuit of immediate experience, the attempt to render a first stratum of personality that exists before doing, feeling, and knowing take place.” As such, Dowell provides an “opportunity” (116) for Ford to examine “the act of writing” (118) as a site for the construction of character, tracing “an unformed ego taking its first steps towards articulation” (119). Where Levenson situates Dowell’s “accidia” (the term is Mark Schorer’s) in a broader reading of the narrator as a void, Eugene Goodheart specifically identifies Dowell’s “utter failure as a man – that is, as a sexual being” (70) as the “Device” (71) that guarantees his accounts of others’ passionate lives: “Dowell’s freedom from passion gives him a more or less disinterested eye, a capacity to contemplate the spectacle of the passions of others without being unduly unsettled by them” (70–1). But it is precisely the unsettling quality of “Passion” in Ford’s novel, I wish to contend, that troubles this account of his narrator as asexual, unconstrained, and disinterested. Goodheart’s equivalent take on Dowell’s “failure as a man” and “as a sexual being” lays bare a tendency in criticism of the novel to associate “Passion” with heterosexual desire and straight masculinity; and to be fair, this is an association that Dowell himself makes for the reader in his sporadic bursts of self-portraiture. In his descriptions of his role as first Florence’s and later Nancy’s “male sick nurse” (GS 60) and in his repeated references to Edward Ashburnham pouring out his heartache to him as a “woman or a solicitor” (GS 30, 194), Dowell paints himself as an effeminate attendant to the needs and desires of others. Likewise, he makes numerous passing references to his lack of interest in sex: “Of

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the question of the sex-instinct I know very little,” he declares, “and I do not think that it counts for very much in a really great passion” (GS 97). But Dowell’s passionless relations with women and his feminized relationship with one man suggest the value of a queer account of his role as a narrator of failed marriages and fatal adulteries. It is Dowell’s status as an outsider – as an American in Europe, as a stranger to his own wife, as a retrospective narrator of concealed affairs – that allows the novel to keep its distance from its own tracing of Dowell’s desires for a “good” man; formally, moments of ellipsis in Dowell’s narrative serve to underscore how heterosexual desire figures as both a suggestive void and as a normative force, resolving the fissures in Dowell’s desires through an implication of marriage’s inevitability. Dowell’s retrospective account of his marriage to Florence in part 2 makes more sense when read as a relationship built on displaced or deflected queer passions, passions that are normalized and contained by the relationship’s foundation in Anglophilia. Rather than providing us with a backstory for his initial interest in Florence, Dowell stages his marriage as almost an effect of the space in which he finds her: “I first met Florence at the Stuyvesants’, in Fourteenth Street. And, from that moment, I determined with all the obstinacy of a possibly weak nature, if not to make her mine, at least to marry her” (GS 67). “[C]amp[ing] down” in Florence’s neighbourhood and placing himself daily in her “sitting-room,” Dowell establishes himself as a strangely reluctant fixture: “I was timid as you will, but in that matter I was like a chicken determined to get across the road in front of an automobile” (GS 67–8). In the process, he learns from Florence, without having “so much as kissed” her, her “simple wants”: She wanted to marry a gentleman of leisure; she wanted a European establishment. She wanted her husband to have an English accent, an income of fifty thousand dollars a year from real estate and no ambitions to increase that income. And – she faintly hinted – she did not want much physical passion in the affair. Americans, you know, can envisage such unions without blinking. (GS 68) Dowell positions his path toward marriage, then, as a desire to fulfill Florence’s desires for “a European settlement” (GS 69): realizing that he

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“could supply” her “wants” (GS 68), he recalls feeling himself “mightily elevated” by his status as the only man “amongst her acquaintances in Stamford” who could “fill the bill” (GS 69). Accordingly, Florence’s specifically American proposition of a union without “much physical passion” finds a ready partner. When Dowell later goes to Florence in her bedroom to propose an elopement, he acts “like a Philadelphia gentleman,” receiving “her advances with a certain amount of absence of mind” (GS 71); when the ship’s doctor later advises him to “refrain from manifestations of affection” on account of Florence’s heart, Dowell declares, “I was ready enough” (GS 74). Thus, Dowell frames the story of his marriage as an almost compulsive and convenient alignment of American desires for Europe. But where Florence’s proposition and heart condition are then revealed by Dowell as a ruse to protect her ongoing affair with the “very sallow and dark” Jimmy (“I was much the better man!” Dowell declares [GS 74]), he paints his acceptance of Florence’s terms as a necessary step in the couple’s path toward the superior “good soldier”: “Well, Edward Ashburnham was worth having” (GS 78). If Florence’s Anglophilia lays a path for Dowell’s gravitation toward Edward Ashburnham, it is his second would-be wife (and Edward’s subsequent lover after Florence), Nancy Rufford, who cements his admiration for the soldier. Dowell acknowledges that he “never knew” Ashburnham’s “splendid” character” until “the poor girl,” Nancy, “came along”: “I suppose that was, really, why I liked him so much – so infinitely much” (GS 78). Where Dowell saw himself as “apt to take” Edward’s attributes “for granted” as “part of the character of any English gentleman,” Nancy illuminates, for him, his more specific charms: “She had for him such enthusiasm that, although even now I do not understand the technicalities of English life, I can gather enough” (GS 79). Where Florence looks to Edward as “the proprietor of the home of her ancestors” (GS 82) and, thus, a sort of miraculous fulfillment of her desire for “a European settlement,” Dowell lays claim (through Nancy) to something more personal (not just English) in his attachment to the master of Bramshaw (despite the fact that his eventual occupation of Edward’s estate will be indistinguishable from Florence’s plan to “buy some real estate” and “take her place in the ranks of English county society” [GS 69]). In this way, Florence and Nancy function for Dowell as the grounds for his intimate attachment to Ashburnham, an attachment that both replicates and refuses a feminized Anglophilia.

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Ford frames Dowell’s relationships with both Florence and Nancy as the products of linguistic gaps, of Dowell’s lack of a personal language for heterosexual desire. In life, Dowell’s devotion to protecting Florence and her heart, “a rare and fragile object,” leads him to think of her as “the trophy of an athlete’s achievement, a parsley crown that is the symbol of his chastity, his soberness, his abstentions, and of his inflexible will” (GS 77). Ultimately, Dowell’s discovery of the lie at the centre of this symbolic project leads him to dismiss Florence, at her death, as an expendable “matter for study, not for remembrance.” Dowell suggests that his “inner soul” or “dual personality” had long realized that Florence was “a personality of paper”: “she represented a real human being … only as a banknote represents a certain quantity of gold” (GS 101). If Florence passes from being a “rare” to an expendable and empty symbol of Dowell’s sexless attentions, Dowell’s pursuit of Nancy (oddly initiated on the night of Florence’s suicide) seems to emerge from an elliptical void both in Dowell’s emotions and in the narrative itself. Where part 2 closes with the discovery of Florence’s body (whose suicide is, at this point, withheld from the reader), part 3 of the novel opens with a disorienting shift to Dowell’s memory of Leonora returning his own unremembered words about Nancy: The odd thing is that what sticks out in my recollection of the rest of that evening was Leonora’s saying: “Of course you might marry her,” and, when I asked whom, she answered: “The girl.” (GS 89) Anticipating Eliot’s Prufrock, whose prevarication leaves him seemingly estranged from heterosexual romance in an “eternal present” (J. Hillis Miller 140), Dowell’s narration situates his desire to marry Nancy outside of time, a temporal gap echoing the vacuous “personality” he retrospectively assigns to Florence; Dowell’s unrecalled expression comes, he is convinced, from his “dual personality, the one I being entirely unconscious of the other” (GS 89). At this pivotal node in the novel’s complicated structure, Ford locates Dowell’s almost immediate desire to remarry in a narrative gap (between parts 2 and 3) and in the words of an other (Leonora). Where Dowell’s sudden shift suggests the force of marriage in the novel’s social sphere (as one wife dies another emerges), the narrative structure dislocates

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Dowell from his enunciation of those desires. The complicated narrative passage clarifies the doubled quality of ellipsis in the novel: the abrupt transition with its missing enunciation enacts both the normative force of marriage and Dowell’s disruptive yet perhaps “unconscious” refusals of that force in the same textual moment. And indeed, as if to underscore the manner in which this enjoined writing of privileged and refused desire also casts Dowell in a queer network of relations, Leonora takes this omitted enunciation as her cue to discuss Florence’s and Edward’s affair with Dowell (she assumes he knows of the affair but he claims to have remained unaware of the relationship until this point). Just as his words come back to him as if they are the words of an other producing the very desire they recall (a kind of feedback loop between Dowell and Leonora), they also enlist him as the agent of his own cuckolding, as unwittingly invested in exposing both his marriage’s hollowness and Ashburnham’s capacity for disrupting marital narratives. Tellingly, Dowell’s ensuing response to Leonora’s revelation comes as one more sign of his emptied-out sense of himself as a married subject and of his relocation of any attachment he has to the marital institution in an unconvincing second self: I don’t suppose I felt anything, unless maybe it was with that mysterious and unconscious self that underlies most people. Perhaps one day when I am unconscious or walking in my sleep I may go and spit upon poor Edward’s grave. It seems about the most unlikely thing I could do; but there it is. (GS 90) Rather than writing from a complete lack of passion as critics have tended to assume, Dowell writes more specifically out of a deeply skeptical relationship to the institution of marriage; heterosexual desire and its codification become the (over)determining gaps in his narrative. Ford’s subversive move at this particularly significant transition point in the narrative is to locate Dowell’s unfeeling attachment to and defence of marriage in an “unconscious” self, the self that recognizes Florence’s flaws, proposes a marriage to Nancy, and punishes Edward for his infidelities. Dowell’s second self speaks a language outside of thought, feeling, or desire – it is, in Freud’s terms, the superego acculturated to meet societal expectations. But Dowell, as he has made clear, has no interest in a form of narrative in which man is “a raging stallion

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forever neighing after his neighbour’s womankind.” In his “nebulous” picture of “the morals of sex,” Dowell is drawn, rather, to an elusive sense of connection between himself and his wife’s lover, to the shared “chastity of ” their “expressions” (GS 19), even if such a surface only masks, in Edward’s case, the soldier’s designs on other men’s wives. In place of the passionless Dowell, we should consider the curious effects produced by his guiding attraction to the specifically English form of Ashburnham’s masculinity; Dowell’s narrative mobility – its attachment to the body, the public character, and the colonial authority of Edward Ashburnham the landowner – traces refusals of marriage’s containment of passion even as it seeks to contain the narrative’s queer potential in a “chastity” of expression.

Impressionist Desires: The “Case” of Edward Ashburnham Seeking to overturn critical tendencies to read Ford’s style solely in terms of “epistemology or ethics” (20), Max Saunders argues that The Good Soldier is “as much concerned with feelings as with perception and knowledge” (18), and the feeling that it turns on is “love.” Such a reading is necessary, he suggests, to account for the “almost bizarre” (18), “extreme; absurd even” (19) quality of Dowell’s attachment to Edward. Dowell’s insistent identification with the Englishman (“I love him because he was just myself …” [GS 197]) stands in an analogous relation to Ford’s own “Impressionist desire for vicarious experience” (18), for a reader capable of losing his or her identity in a reading “inflected by love” (20). Saunders’s argument provides a powerful model for thinking through the relationship between the desires of Ford’s characters and desire as an Impressionist effect of the text. But where Saunders finds Dowell’s attraction to Ashburnham “bizarre,” “extreme,” or “absurd” (on account of the manner in which “Dowell has consistently portrayed himself as diametrically opposed to Ashburnham as a type or character” [19]), I want to suggest that it is precisely this conflictual account of queer desire between “the feminised American” and the “macho Englishman” (Saunders 19) that is key to the novel’s imagining of transatlantic masculinity as a site demanding modernism’s narrative redirection and experimentation.

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Paul B. Armstrong, comparing Dowell with James’s bewildered first-person narrators in “The Aspern Papers” and The Sacred Fount (alongside Conrad’s Marlow), notes the important difference that none of these writer-narrators treat, like Dowell, the act of writing as “an act of reflection whereby they increase their understanding and control over their story” (198). While I am less inclined to attribute eventual narrative mastery to Dowell, it is useful to recognize how Ford’s narrator grapples more explicitly, albeit unsuccessfully, with the destabilizing effects of his attraction to Edward Ashburnham than these other narrators whose indeterminate tales are inevitably inflected by unexpressed forms of male desire for men (for Jeffrey Aspern and the suppressed details of his Byronic backstory; for both Gilbert Long and Guy Brissenden in The Sacred Fount; for Jim in Lord Jim). James’s non-fictional writings about British army men in his final essays about tending to wounded soldiers at the outbreak of the First World War (discussed briefly in chapter 3) also provide something of a revisable template for Ford’s treatment of Edward Ashburnham (even as Bob Assingham – with the chime of his name – floats behind this as a vision of the future for such young men). Anticipating Dowell’s investment in “the traditional reticence of such ‘good people’ as the Ashburnhams” (GS 91), James in the late essays, like “The Long Wards,” is especially drawn to the “goodnatured” soldier, to the armyman whose “active goodnature, irreducible, incurable, or in other words all irreflective” (Collected II.349) seems to allow him to absorb the trauma of the battlefield. In these wartime essays James articulates an attraction to the image of the stoic, emotionally immobile British military man popularized in the early twentieth century by writers like H. Rider Haggard and Rudyard Kipling – Kipling’s address, in the opening lines of his 1895 poem, “If,” to a soldier who can “keep your head when all about you / Are losing theirs and blaming it on you” (1–2), resounds in these images of men with their “good,” unruffled surfaces projecting an absence of imagination. But as much as Dowell’s attraction to Ashburnham recalls James’s Anglophilic attachment to the social forms of being a “good” Englishman, Ford’s “good soldier” also emerges as a figure capable of unsettling speech, of an emotional and imaginative life that troubles the terms of Dowell’s narrative style. The formative scene of Edward Ashburnham’s first appearance in the dining room at Nauheim exemplifies the Englishman’s complication of

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Dowell’s movement through narrative space. With Dowell attentively watching his lips as he converses with the waiter, Ashburnham’s face, at first, “in the wonderful English fashion,” expresses “nothing whatever” (GS 28). His entry “snapped up the gaze of every woman in it” (GS 30), as it snaps up Dowell’s, so that he resembles a conjurer catching billiard balls in his pockets while “he stands perfectly still and does nothing.” Then, with Dowell “looking at him,” Ashburnham’s “immobile” and “unflinching blue eyes” betray his appraisal of the two women, Leonora and Florence, entering the room behind Dowell’s back. Ashburnham’s gaze, presumably at Leonora, resembles the gaze of “the possessor,” looking out “upon the sunny fields of Bramshaw and say[ing]: ‘All this is my land’”; his coterminous appraisal of Florence evokes “the same look” in “his eyes” from a polo match in which he sizes up an approaching opponent, “balancing the possibilities, looking over the ground” (GS 31). While Dowell’s queerly oriented Anglophilia, drawn to English immobility, figures as a sort of side-effect of Ashburnham’s imperialistic claiming of space and women, the American’s wandering narration forms a complicated counterpoint with the Englishman’s gravitational poise. Between his descriptions of Ashburnham’s entry and his appraisal of the women, Dowell moves through an itemized list of the material effects to which the Englishman would regularly attend (“Martingales, Chifney bits, boots” [GS 28]) to the specific item of “the profusion of his cases, all of pigskin and stamped with his initials, E.F.A.,” and, finally, to a curiously imagined, voyeuristic scene: And, if I ever penetrated into his private room it would be to see him standing, with his coat and waistcoat off and the immensely long line of his perfectly elegant trousers from waist to boot heel. And he would have a slightly reflective air and he would be just opening one kind of case and just closing another. (GS 29) The peculiar tense of this scene – possibly representatively subjunctive, or perhaps more likely, conditionally speculative – suspends the restrained eroticism of Dowell’s “private” vision between imagination and remembrance, just as it suspends Ashburnham between acts of opening and closing himself to Dowell’s desirous gaze. But Dowell’s narration quickly moves (like the shutting of a case) to close off the queer possibilities of this scenic suspending of diegesis: “Good god,

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what did they all see in him; for I swear that was all there was of him, inside and out; though they said he was a good soldier” (GS 29). Ashburnham’s queer disruption of Dowell’s voice makes itself felt frequently in his capacity to halt the American’s narrative wandering as he gives himself over to enumerating Edward’s fine features (for instance, he is the “cleanest looking sort of chap; – an excellent magistrate, a first rate soldier, one of the best landlords, so they said, in Hampshire, England” [GS 14]; and he is “the fine soldier, the excellent landlord, the extraordinarily kind, careful and industrious magistrate, the upright, honest, fair-dealing, fair-thinking, public character” [GS 78]). Looking back on the scene of Leonora’s revelation of Edward and Florence’s affair, in the days following Florence’s suicide, Dowell perversely chooses to dwell on his sense of the Englishman’s enduring appeal: It is impossible of me to think of Edward Ashburnham as anything but straight, upright and honourable. That, I mean, is, in spite of everything, my permanent view of him. I try at times by dwelling on some of the things that he did to push that image of him away, as you might try to push aside a large pendulum. But it always comes back – the memory of his innumerable acts of kindness, of his efficiency, of his unspiteful tongue. He was such a fine fellow. (GS 96) Dowell’s image of Ashburnham as “a large pendulum” captures the doubled (im)mobility that characterizes his account of the Englishman’s attractive force (even as it coyly hints at the erotic quality of Dowell’s attachment to this “straight” man); the Englishman swings into place as an image of both idealized permanence and insistent, rhythmic power. Dowell’s doubled placement of Ashburnham’s queer attraction as an immobile presence and as a generative force also shapes the American’s narration of his path toward a second marriage to Nancy. Dowell thinks of his desires to take Nancy’s hand (“in my American sort of way”) as a kind of tourism: wanting “to marry her as some people want to go to Carcassonne,” he feels the need to “smooth out certain fairly negligible complications before” he can “can go to a place that has … been a sort of dream city” (GS 102). Conscious that Nancy treats him as “a sort of convent,” Dowell resolves to leave his “rarefied atmosphere” and return to his native country, to do “a little fighting with real life,

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some wrestling with men of business, some travelling amongst larger cities, something harsh, something masculine”: “I didn’t want to present myself to Nancy Rufford as a sort of an old maid” (GS 102–3). Part 3 follows, in small part then, Dowell’s efforts to attain a specifically American, normative, masculine identity, distinct from that of the man around whom his narrative orbits and whose lack of business acumen comes increasingly under the spotlight. The specific terms of Dowell’s efforts at remasculinization, “fighting” and “wrestling with men of business,” bespeaks the conflicted terms of American masculinity in the early twentieth century, pulled between requirements for corporate success and, in the wake of Roosevelt, “strenuous” acts of physical prowess and, even, imperial conquest (see Rotundo 77–80). Indeed, it might also recall James’s “The Jolly Corner,” in which Spencer Brydon’s repatriation brings him face to face with his spectralized alter ego, the financially successful but physically ravaged American self he abandoned for Europe in his youth (“The Jolly Corner” was first published in Ford’s own English Review in 1908). Dowell in fact gives the story of his repatriation short shrift: the principal development he locates in the tale of his “short incursion into American business life” (GS 124) is his growing realization of how “difficult” it is “to give an all-round impression of a man” (GS 123), so that this section of the narrative becomes a brief segue designed to explain, once more, his struggle to present the Englishman’s “character” to the reader. Where Spencer Brydon’s queer encounter with his second self occasions a somewhat haunted return to the domestic in the figure of Alice Staverton, Dowell’s lacklustre “wrestling” with American business is relegated to a “little digression” (GS 126) justifying his “difficult” approach to the Englishman. While Dowell frames his own story as an effeminate American’s failure to grapple with and get behind the characters of men, he also suggestively interweaves this with the backstory of Edward’s specifically English ambivalence in response to the normative force of marriage as a feminizing institution. Averse to “coarse language or gross stories” but “keen on soldiering, keen on mathematics, keen on landsurveying, on politics and, by a queer warp of his mind, on literature,” young Ashburnham figures, for Dowell, as the logical product of the “pure tone” of England’s public schools (Winchester) and the “careful handling of his mother.” Dowell tells the tale of how Edward’s mother initiates his move to marriage after witnessing the young man’s head

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turning for “a second look at a well-dressed girl” (GS 113); but Edward’s first interactions with the Colonel Powys’s daughters are less encouraging – the “girls made really more impression upon Mrs. Ashburnham than upon Edward himself,” who it appears finds them so “clear run that, in a faint sort of way” he “seems to have regarded them as boys rather than as girls.” Edward’s decision to take Leonora (the third daughter) comes, then, only after “Mrs. Ashburnham had with her boy one of those conversations that English mothers have with English sons” (GS 114). Schooled in this most deliberately English approach to marriage, Edward will later recount the marriage as a passionless scene of motion: “as far as he could describe his feelings at all, later, it seems that, calmly and without any quickening of the pulse, he just carried the girl off, there being no opposition.” Edward’s passionless appreciation for Leonora, his “satisfaction” in “tak[ing] her about with him,” rises, in Dowell’s estimate, from his delight in that same androgynizing “cleanness of mind, and the clean-run-ness of her limbs” (GS 115). And in keeping with this image of their union as one of boys, Dowell describes how the marriage becomes defined by their failure not merely to reproduce but even, for the first few years of their marriage, to “really know how children are produced” (GS 120). Dowell gives us an image of Leonora’s engagements with Edward as being defined by this absence, “trying to keep things together for the sake of the children who did not come” (GS 121). If this account of Edward’s marriage seems positioned as a kind of justification for his path toward adultery as a natural outlet for his suppressed passions, Dowell is careful to also frame this potentially “libertine” representation of his protagonist as unrepresentative. Wondering whether “the important point” his narrative ought to communicate was that Edward’s “regular life” embodied “all the virtues that are usually accounted English” and whether he has “succeeded in conveying” that point, Dowell concedes that his attention to Edward’s passions has “made it hard for you, O silent listener, to get that impression.” Freezing the narrative’s progression before he launches into his digression on his American travels, Dowell seeks to correct this impression by refusing “the idea that Edward Ashburnham was a pathological case” (GS 123): “He wasn’t. He was just a normal man and very much of a sentimentalist … [T]he outline of Edward’s life was an outline perfectly normal of the life of a hard-working, sentimental and efficient professional man” (GS 123–4). As the novel

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moves toward its final phase (in which we will hear of what happened after Dowell’s arrival at Bramshaw), Dowell becomes progressively more defensive of Edward (even as he will place the term “normal” under increasing pressure). Dowell constructs Edward’s affairs as both a product of the law’s insinuations (the trial “had put ideas into his head” [GS 127]) and a mere reaching out for “moral support at the hands of some female, because he found men difficult to talk to about ideals”: “I do not believe,” Dowell claims, “that he had, at any time, any idea of making any one his mistress. That sounds queer; but I believe it is quite true as a statement of character” (GS 128). Edward’s affairs become merely stand-ins for the support from men that he would have preferred. As such, Dowell’s role as Edward’s occasional ideal audience at Bramshaw – listening like “a woman or a solicitor” – situates him, queerly, as the logical endpoint for the soldier’s philandering, the kind of womanly man his idealist and, in Dowell’s eyes, quintessentially English character desires. Along similar lines, Dowell offers up the story of the fallout from Edward’s spiralling affairs (especially after his expensive liaison with the luxury escort, La Dolciquita, in Monte Carlo) as more a story of spatial loss, displacement, and constraint than one of desires run rampant. Returning bankrupt from Monte Carlo, Edward feels Leonora’s intervention in the management of his estates as a loss of manhood; ceasing to be “the good landlord and father of his people,” he “went out” (GS 134). Her subsequent letting of Bramshaw (while they relocate to India) affects “him with a feeling of physical soiling … it was almost as bad for him as if a woman belonging to him had become a prostitute” (GS 134–5). Leonora, from this point on, moves from playing the role of boy to that of husband. While Edward woos Mrs Basil with “a huge map of his lands in his harness-room” (GS 136), Leonora nurses the estate by carefully “husbanding …. their resources” (GS 150). Where Edward feels he can “do nothing but drift” (GS 139) into the affair with Maisie (a drifting that will again require the Ashburnhams’ unceasing movements between Burma, Nauheim, and England), Leonora’s “passion” is awakened by her vision of Edward returning to her (as a result of her successful economic management) “wealthy, glorious as it were, on account of his lands, and upright” (GS 149). So where Edward’s immediate appeal in his first appearance in the text registered as the forceful traversal of a gaze measuring and colonizing space, Dowell frames Edward’s gradual fall from grace as the story of the Edwardian

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landed gentry’s slow loss of control over their hereditary estates. The representational strategy has particular transatlantic significance as it allows Dowell – as both the story’s and the estate’s destined American owner – to stage the shift in control of Bramshaw from Edward (the English gentry) to Leonora (the Irish woman) to Dowell (the queer American) as a stable resolution of the English upper class’s vulnerabilities. It is worth noting that such a transatlantic trajectory for aristocratic property of course replays the situation of a number of the houses of James’s fiction – the Touchetts’ Gardencourt, the Ververs’ Fawns – and looks forward to further fictional returns to this subject in, for instance, Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day or even the TV drama Downton Abbey. Dowell’s Anglophilia, as we shall see, signifies both a resolutely normative and irresolvably queer destination for the spatial power exercised by imperial English style.

The “Good” and the “Queer”: Dowell’s Reproductive Ending Part 4 begins with Dowell preparing the reader for the tale of his final summoning to Bramshaw to witness the climactic triangulated scenes between Edward, Leonora, and their ward, Nancy Rufford, whom Edward, in an effort to constrain his desires for the girl (and Leonora’s use of those desires and his guilt), will resolve to send to India. Dowell notes how the “charm” of Bramshaw, “its quiet and ordered living” and “silent, skilled servants,” meant that its inhabitants could only appear “like tender, ordered and devoted people … just good people!” Nevertheless, he feels it was “queer that they had not given me any warning of Nancy’s departure – But I thought that that was only English manners – some sort of delicacy that I had not got the hang of ” (GS 160). Dowell’s confusion is symptomatic of the text’s cumulative and complicated yoking of the “good” and the “queer” in this last phase of the novel, signalling the text’s dual attractions to English social style and an ambivalent management of queer eroticism (and, in colonial terms, the containment and displacement of the queerness of Nancy’s Irish Catholicism – Colm Toíbín has suggestively noted both the overlapping tone of The Good Soldier and Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis and the strange similarities between the cross-class scandals of the Wilde trials and Ashburnham’s “Kilsyte Case,” which is also set

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in 1895 [72]). While the term “queer” had, indeed, as Eric Haralson has argued, begun to accrue its vague, not exclusive, association with the non-normatively sexual during this period, it is the “chastity” of Dowell’s “expressions” in The Good Soldier that restrains that term’s erotic resonance, allowing it to float suggestively. The term “queer” yokes, as it circulates in Dowell’s narration, non-normative instances of national and gendered belonging along with desire. Nancy, in these closing scenes, figures insistently as the “queer” sacrifice necessary for the preservation of England’s social order. Dowell represents Nancy, from the moment of her introduction to the text, as “a queer girl” (GS 103), formed in “her queerness” by the “miserable nature of her childhood” and “the mixture of saturnalia and discipline that was her convent life” (GS 105). In the lead-up to Nancy’s departure from Bramshaw, Leonora (the Anglicized Irish Catholic) returns that discipline (“the crack of a whip” [GS 104]) to the frame when she begins to recognize her ward as a woman capable of making her “husband happy” and conceives a fantastical punishment: “Yes, Leonora wished to bring her riding-whip down on Nancy’s young face. She imagined the pleasure she would feel when the lash fell across those queer features.” A fortnight later, when Edward brings forth in “queer, deliberate heavy tones” his plans for Nancy’s removal, Nancy takes the announcement in a characteristic manner: The girl put her hand over her heart and cried out: “Oh, my sweet Saviour, help me!” That was the queer way she thought within her mind, and the words forced themselves to her lips. (GS 166) In this way, Dowell’s failure to get the “queer” quality of the Ashburnhams’ management of Nancy at the end of the novel signifies, with a kind of cumulative resonance, the manner in which his queerly Anglophilic return to Edward will reinforce the estate’s power and its management of the colonial subject (the “queer” Irish woman). Part 4 situates Dowell’s path toward ownership of Bramshaw as a kind of logical reproductive end, quietly confirming and repeating the English gentry’s complicated yoking of the “good” and the “queer.” The penultimate chapter begins by offering us the only advertised temporal break in Dowell’s composition of the manuscript: “I am writing this, now, I should say, a full eighteen months after the words that end my last chapter” (GS 183). While Dowell describes his narrative

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path toward becoming an estate owner and the guardian of Nancy as essentially stationary and repetitive (“So here I am very much where I started thirteen years ago” [GS 185]), his story’s ending turns on an unsettling of figures of settlement, immobility, and especially repetition. In the novel’s closing sequence, Dowell attends to repetition as reproduction – be it sexual, social, experiential – as a force for “normal” social configurations. In this “queer and fantastic world,” nobody, according to Dowell, gets “what they want,” so he records his begrudging purchase of Bramshaw as the displaced and deferred fulfillment of his late wife’s desires, a final confirmation of his feminized fate as Nancy’s minder: “Florence wanted Bramshaw, and it is I who have bought if from Leonora. I didn’t really want it; what I wanted mostly was to cease being a nurse-attendant. Well, I am a nurse attendant” (GS 185). Dowell’s experience of narrative reiteration find its uncanny double in the figure of Nancy who, in the wake of Edward’s suicide, is now only capable of two utterances (“Shuttlecocks” [GS 196] and “Credum in unum Deum Omnipotentem” [GS 183]) on an unending loop; she has become, Dowell’s declares, “a picture without a meaning. Yes, it is queer” (GS 197). As a counterpoint to such “queer” repetitions, Dowell describes the supposedly “happy ending” of Leonora’s marriage as a seemingly irrepressible, social and sexual reproduction of the normative family unit. As “the perfectly normal type,” Leonora “survives … married to a man who is rather like a rabbit. For Rodney Bayham is rather like a rabbit, and I hear that Leonora is expected to have a baby in three months’ time” (GS 186). Imagining himself as a pale repetition of the masculine (“I am no doubt like every other man, only probably, because of my American origin I am fainter” [GS 185]), Dowell positions his feminizing path toward Bramshaw and the fate of Edward and Nancy as necessary sacrifices for Leonora’s successful acquirement of “a modern mansion, replete with every convenience and dominated by a quite respectable and eminently economical master of the house” (GS 196). It would seem that Dowell’s mastery of his own estate can only render him “that absurd figure, an American millionaire, who has bought one of the ancient haunts of English peace,” a liminal guest in what is now his own house: “I sit here, in Edward’s gunroom, all day and all day in a house that is absolutely quiet” (GS 197). In the wake of Edward’s death, however, Dowell also positions himself as the inheritor of Edward’s passionate resistance to “the normal.”

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Indeed, it is in his desire for Edward that Dowell locates the basis of this identification with him: “For I can’t conceal from myself the fact that I loved Edward Ashburnham – and that I love him because he was just myself. If I had had the courage and virility and possibly also the physique of Edward Ashburnham I should, I fancy, have done much what he did” (GS 197). Where Mark Schorer, in an oft-quoted and influential early essay, declared this statement Dowell’s “weirdest absurdity, the final, total blindness of infatuation, and self-infatuation” (131), later critics have tended to distance themselves from such a definitive ironic judgement of the narrator’s fantasy; Arthur Mizener, for instance, derided Schorer’s reading as the product of a “Lawrentian conception of human nature” in which men’s sexual failures suggest mental imbalance (258). But both these approaches neglect the extent to which Dowell’s fantastic identification with Edward emerges from self-conscious recognitions of the “absurdity” of the comparison. Michael Levenson attributes this to the passage’s “question[ing] of character,” to Dowell’s refusal with “supreme negligence, to define himself in terms of traits” (117–18); we might revise this to note that what the passage most calls into question is masculine character. Dowell’s identification with Edward (“he was just myself ”) lays claim to the very physical attributes he lacks and speaks to a persistently ambiguous detachment underpinning his relationship with the Englishman. Dowell retrospectively pictures Edward’s earlier actions as being like those of “a large elder brother who took me out on several excursions and did many dashing things whilst I just watched him robbing the orchards, from a distance” (GS 197). Just as the filial figuring of Edward serves to distance Dowell’s “love” from its queer potential, his physical placement of himself at the edges of Edward’s “dashing[ly]” manly movements – recalling, perhaps, the distancing strategies of Stevenson’s Mackellar – allows him to continue to trace Edward’s optic pull even as he positions himself as passively immobile, “just watch[ing].” Where voyeuristic detachment becomes a charged figure for Dowell’s ambiguous relationship to Edward, ellipsis (as a kind of stylistic detachment) becomes the pivotal rhetorical device by which Ford’s fragmented prose suspends the meaning of masculinity. Consider, for instance, these final lines from three succeeding paragraphs in which Dowell trails off in his attempts to analyze Nancy’s and Edward’s feelings for each other, giving narrative judgement over to the silent reader: “I know nothing. I

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am very tired”; “I don’t know. I leave it to you”; “I can’t make out which of them was right. I leave it to you.” Such ruptures of analysis chime with Edward’s own quiet abiding of his treatment by Leonora: “He sat still and let Leonora take away his character … without stirring a finger” (GS 191). On one level, Dowell’s narrative detachments suggest, then, his ultimate willingness to reproduce, without question, the “good” form of Edward’s behaviour (even if his larger narrative insistently destabilizes that social style). But if Dowell ascribes the request for his arrival on the scene of Nancy’s departure to Edward’s and Leonora’s desire “to have a witness of the calmness of that function,” his witnessing also cannot help but reorient the meaning of Edward’s motionlessness. “It is queer,” Dowell notes, “the fantastic things that quite good people will do in order to keep up their appearance of calm pococurantism” (GS 193). Two staggering visual images of Edward’s state in the lead-up to and the aftermath of Nancy’s removal reconfigure his immobility as an erotically charged seizure of Dowell’s narrative motion. As he recounts Nancy and Leonora assailing Edward with their talk “like a couple of Sioux who had got hold of an Apache,” Dowell seems “to see him stand, naked to the waist, his forearms shielding his eyes, and flesh hanging from him in rags. I tell you that is no exaggeration of what I feel” (GS 186–7). And it is this stripped picture of the “good soldier” that continues to haunt his narration of Leonora’s “happy ending”: “I seem to see poor Edward, naked and reclining amidst darkness, upon cold rocks, like one of the ancient Greek damned, in Tartarus or wherever it was” (GS 196). If these two startlingly masochistic images trouble the American’s efforts to detach himself from his “tale of passion,” the first, evoking a scene of intra-indigenous North American warfare, does highlight Dowell’s interest in detaching his narrative from a larger story about nascent American imperialism. Where Seshagiri finds in the narrative’s late figures parallels between the “[d]rifting, deteriorating forms of Englishness” and Dowell’s (and Ford’s) “drifting and fragmented narrative forms” (122), I wish to highlight the way Dowell uses these same shocking instances of fragmentation to stake a claim for his own legitimacy, settled on English soil. For Dowell, who feels “anchored” by his Philadelphian “deeds … of wampum,” this figuring of Edward as an Indian dispossessed by other Indians positions the Englishman’s slide toward suicide as a tribal affair; its fallout (as in Dowell’s acquisition

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of Bramshaw) should not, Dowell implies, be attributed to any shift in political power. Just as he is the passive beneficiary of his family’s passive acquisition of Indian territory as a “grant” to the newly arrived emigrants from “Farnham in Surrey,” Dowell, the returned emigrant, will become the passive beneficiary of Indianized (and therefore non-colonial) violence and, in his claims to identification, a naturalized successor to Edward’s surrendered English title. It is no accident, then, that the boat that first brings Dowell and Florence to Europe is named “Pocahontas” (GS 72) (recalling Conrad’s pointed naming of the United States naval ship, Powhattan, in Nostromo). Ironically, this mythic icon of America’s redemption of indigenized violence and the colonial project sets Dowell in motion as the “un-American” in Europe, naturalizing in advance his American claims on English soil. Edward’s “naked” and tortured body surfaces repeatedly in these closing scenes as the “person behind” Dowell’s narrative gaze, the “somewhere other” that, like Dorian Gray’s secreted and disfigured portrait of his second self, cannot help but interrupt the scene of writing and direct the text’s movements. Dowell’s wandering narration moves immediately from his final tableau of Edward in Tartarus to the scene of Nancy suddenly “repeat[ing]” the word “‘shuttlecocks’ three times.” For Dowell, this scene of repetition gives itself up to an immediate translation: claiming to “know what was passing in [Nancy’s] mind,” he offers an interpretation, first, of Nancy as a shuttlecock between Edward and Leonora, and then passes on to the “odd” recognition that both Edward and Leonora also conceived of themselves as being “used … like a shuttlecock” (GS 196). What Dowell fails to recognize, of course, is his own mediating role, shuttling between the story’s various actors, and moreover the manner in which his acquirement of Nancy (another wife who cannot be a wife and the former love interest of his predecessor) enacts a stifled displacement of Edward’s desires: the shuttling of Dowell’s “cock” provides a repetition of Edward’s conventional repression of his lust for Nancy and a queer reminder of Dowell’s triangulated desire for Edward’s desire. Just as Nancy’s compulsive repetitions of the word signify her reduction to “a picture without a meaning,” Ford maps Dowell’s performances of elliptical detachment (“I don’t know”) onto his not-knowing (in the conjugal sense) of his would-be wife, an ironically unreproductive reproduction of the “shuttl[ing]” desires he refuses to name.

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Of course, Dowell plays the shuttlecock in one other key way at the story’s end – as the transporter of other people’s talk (in this way, he resembles James’s earlier experiment with narrative consciousness in Maisie Farange, who passes like a “little feathered shuttlecock” [16] between her parents). Dowell’s final time-shift, turning from “the end of [his] story” (in Leonora’s “normal” marriage) to the scene of Edward’s suicide as a kind of bizarre afterthought (“It suddenly occurs to me that I have forgotten to say how Edward met his death”), comes with a reminder of the reader’s role in returning the narrative’s spatialized accounts of intimacy: “You remember that peace had descended upon the house” (GS 198). In this elliptically managed second ending (a reproduction of the story’s ending with a difference), Dowell belatedly acknowledges his complicity in the scene that will secure both the passing of his desired other-self (Edward) and his path to inhabiting Edward’s house. In each of the novels I have dwelt on in this book, the path to closure seems to require ambiguous management of the normative forces that inscribe themselves, often as text, on the scene of the protagonist’s final sacrifice, be they the edicts of martial law (Billy Budd), the rhetorical weight of the epitaph (Ballantrae), the close embrace of marriage (The Golden Bowl), or the recognizable notes of sentimental fiction (Nostromo). Along these lines, English manners shape Dowell’s literal movements as a go-between in the final scene of The Good Soldier, as he carries Nancy’s fateful telegram from Edward to Leonora: just as Edward’s calm production of a penknife epitomizes his performance, “to the last,” of “the English gentleman” and the “sentimentalist” (GS 198), Dowell holds back his “sentimental” response, thinking “that would not be quite English good form.” “Trott[ing] off with the telegram” (GS 199), Dowell moves back to the house with disconcerting flippancy, recalling the offhandedness of the narrative’s own shift into this tacked-on conclusion. As such, Dowell’s final path to Bramshaw serves as a fittingly enigmatic staging of the motion that will install him as the estate’s new master. If this scene reinscribes once more Dowell’s narrative wandering, the impossibility of his putting an end on his narrative and putting it in order, it also aligns, one final time, his resistant mobility with the management of a queer attraction that must be displaced, resolved by his Anglophilic, ultimately unreproductive mastery of Edward’s house.

Conclusion Queer Atlantic Modernism

What then is the legacy of the “queer Atlantic” configurations of fictional masculinity traced by this book? How did the particular stylistic innovations of these protomodernist works and the indebtedness of those innovations to the “queer Atlantic” concerns of their authors resound in fiction of the postwar era? Throughout this book, I have taken care to emphasize that the particular intertwined treatment of transatlanticism, queer erotics, and masculine privilege I have located in my five chosen texts is not indicative of a broad body of writing from this period with identical interests; rather, it can be read as symptomatic of some larger confluences of questions about national, gendered, and sexual identity emerging at that historical moment. The figure of the Atlantic passage, marked as it was in the long nineteenth century by violent movements as diverse as slave transportation, revolutionary insurrection and colonial suppression, piracy, and mass emigration, provided the authors of these novels with evocative terrain through which they explored a broader, fraught cultural investment in masculine mobility. The specific transatlantic plots of these texts opened out space for their interlocking treatment of manliness as a dynamic motion of privileged access and potential coercion, as a site of queer incoherence and fluidity, and as a force for the production of stylistic experimentation and difficulty, for upsetting generic expectations about the realist novel and its form. But in the years following the First World War, as Europe struggled with the economic and social aftereffects of war’s carnage and the United States emerged as a nation of broadened international standing, a new, perhaps more cohesive variation on the “queer Atlantic” narrative came into being.

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Paul Giles points to how for cosmopolitan American expatriates of this era, such as Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Djuna Barnes (alongside Irish cosmopolitans such as James Joyce and Samuel Beckett), who “tended to cherish exile as generating an alternative form of identity” (123), the experience of “transatlantic displacement” often “problematize[d] the idea of identity altogether.” Attending to surrealist strains in such writing, Giles notes how not “belonging to a particular race runs in parallel in these texts with not adhering definitively to a particular kind of gender” and, as such, troubles “the teleological directions of modernism,” its tendency to emphasize universal human and aesthetic conditions (124). A dynamic ambivalence about the cultural status of masculinity – man as alienated everyman; man as contingently gendered subject – is critical, I would argue, to the fractured quality of high modernism’s forging in the transatlantic circulations of postwar Europe. In this concluding chapter, I seek to briefly sketch out the shape of “queer Atlantic” modernism in postwar American fiction, noting not only how a diverse group of writers placed pressure on earlier sedimentations of masculine privilege but also the sometimes surprising resilience of the manly figure around whom this book has circled. In the 1920s, the fiction of Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald offered up two differing trajectories for modernism’s yoking of disoriented, exilic masculinity and stylistic experimentation. Hemingway’s works and self-promotion infamously tie his clipped, oblique, surface-dwelling prose to specifically masculine artistry, an artistry whose claims on manliness, especially in the 1920s, registered as concurrent, fraught negotiations of his status as an expatriate writer. Michael Kimmel notes how various media traced a range of “crises” faced by white American masculinity during this period (including dwindling economic opportunities, demographic shifts, and new public cultures of femininity and homosexuality) (140–9). In line with this, Hemingway’s work from this decade frequently returns to scenes of anxious male performance framed by a shifting public sphere. The tension attending conjoined explorations of national belonging, supposedly “masculine” style, and the possibility of same-sex desire marks out an often-discussed scene from Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises (1927), in which the Americans, Jake Barnes and Bill Gorton, in their preparations for a fishing trip in Spain, engage in seemingly flirtatious repartee over

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the idea of expatriation resembling impotence. Rehearsing familiar tropes of European contagion and enervation, Bill playfully teases Jake for lacking sufficient, homegrown “irony and pity” (99) to write in a current American style: “You’re an expatriate. You’ve lost touch with the soil. You get precious. Fake European standards have ruined you. You drink yourself to death. You become obsessed by sex. You spend all your time talking, not working. You are an expatriate, see?” (101) The same wandering conversation ends, however, with Bill laying claim to his Spanish surroundings as offering freedom from American constraints on the expression of male camaraderie: “Listen. You’re a hell of a good guy, and I’m fonder of you than anybody on earth. I couldn’t tell you that in New York. It’d mean I was a faggot. That was what the Civil War was about. Abraham Lincoln was a faggot. He was in love with General Grant … Sex explains it all.” (102) Tellingly, between these two passages, the writer who enters the text here and who opens out the rhetorical space by which Bill manages this turning of Europe from “precious,” “fake,” and sex-obsessed to authenticating register of supposedly non-sexual American male companionship is Henry James – when Jake jokily suggests that his failure to “work” and his rumoured impotence are the product of “an accident,” Bill takes him to task for misusing his life’s materials: “Never mention that … That’s the sort of thing that can’t be spoken of. That’s what you ought to work up into a mystery. Like Henry’s bicycle” (102). How should we read this teasing performance of male flirtation and transatlantically displaced national ambivalence? Eric Haralson argues that “the figure of Henry James [is] mobilized” here as the “nonreproductive bachelor” (194) whose literary force must be set apart. His name, and Bill’s and Jake’s “ironic” play with all that it connotes (including the notorious history of his “obscure hurt”), energizes the text’s efforts (pace Sedgwick) to “cordon off buddying or ‘brotherhood’ from male-male desire, so that the ‘potential unbrokenness’ between the homosocial and the homosexual cannot even be envisioned” (193).

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By contrast, I am more tempted, despite the strenuous performances of macho heterosexuality that mark out most of the male acts of selfrepresentation both in this novel and in Hemingway’s larger career, to trace a continuing line of the by-now familiar, more risky cohabitation of queer and (homophobically) privileged discourses in this dialogue. Recalling the terms by which Adam Verver accommodates his vision of the quartette’s arrangements in The Golden Bowl as an opium den (and, indeed, returning us to moments when Stevenson’s Mackellar, Conrad’s Mitchell, and Ford’s Dowell invoke the language of business as a filter for their narratives’ erotic possibilities), Hemingway’s Jamesian homage allows the term “work” to suspend the text’s alignment with specific framings of the Anglo-American male body. Bill’s initial charge that Jake spends “all [his] time talking, not working” (101) – “You don’t work” – quickly morphs into a call for Jake to “work up” the rumoured impotence behind this indolence “into a mystery”; but when Bill pauses at this moment, Jake fears Bill is stopping because he thinks he has hurt Jake’s feelings: “I wanted to start him again. ‘It wasn’t a bicycle,’ I said. ‘He was riding horseback.’” Bill’s initial evocation of transatlantic expatriation as a source of enervating indolence gives way to an alternative, stylistic idea of work’s possibilities (“work[ing] up”) in the space opened out by such public emasculation. The force of that stylistic suggestion registers in Jake’s desire to keep Bill “going splendidly,” to “start him again” (102) – Hemingway’s signature clipped dialogue is, in this scene, a mode for intimate male incitement, for a working up of phallic sexual innuendo (joysticks and pedals) over the ground of an unspeakable mystery. The “obscure” history of James’s rumoured castration (and his unspoken queer potential) becomes the transitional space, transatlantically resonant, through which these mobile possibilities, albeit fleetingly, are sustained between Jake and Bill. A similarly conjoined treatment of American male privilege, mobile and moneyed, and queerly disoriented European wandering structures Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night (1934). While Fitzgerald’s shifting, experimental style with its windows into the inner breakdowns of his central characters shares more in common with the sweeping and introspective form of James’s and Conrad’s novels than with Hemingway, Tender Is the Night, like The Sun Also Rises, allows the characteristically modernist device of textual fragmentation to bridge its imagining of the disciplinary and disciplined American man in Europe. Fitzgerald’s novel

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situates Dick Diver’s eponymously phallic descent, the “blunt[ing]” of his manly “spear” (220), as a consequence of his suggestively pederastic marriage to his patient Nicole Warren and his dalliance with movie starlet Rosemary Hoyt (a.k.a. “Daddy’s Girl”). Yet as Katherine Cummings notes, Fitzgerald’s straight plot of masculine deflation depends on a cast of queerly coded characters “to introduce and in part represent a whole (dis)order of the perverse” (256). For instance, the curtailment of Dick’s career as an eminent psychoanalyst in Zurich comes on the heels of his attendance to the case of Señor Pardo y Cuidad Real who seeks assistance to curb his son Fransisco’s homosexuality (and drinking). Tucked away in a “corner of Europe” that “does not so much draw people as accept them without inconvenient questions” (268), Dick’s interview with Fransisco – whose “manliness” has been “perverted” – becomes his closest path “to comprehending such a character from any but the pathological angle,” and he finds himself subject to the “very charm” that “made it possible for Fransisco to perpetrate his outrages.” Critically, Dick finds in Fransisco a stylistic model – the “independent existence” of “charm” – capable of converting a “drab old story” through “courageous grace.” And in his assessment of that charm, his effort “to dissect it into pieces small enough to store away,” Dick recognizes the contours of his own dissipation: he is intimately composed of others’ fragments; “personalities had seemed to press up so close to him that he became the personality itself ”; “it was as if … he was condemned … to be only as complete as they were complete themselves.” While this scene animates distaste for “typically” (265) homosexual behaviour (behaviour that the novel would seem quite happy to bury in a remote “corner of Europe” [268]), it also positions the attractiveness of queer “charm” at the centre of its modernist play with paratactic proximity and fragmentation. It is precisely the form of Dick’s dissipation – his capacity “to dissect,” to “store away,” and to “carry with him the egos of certain people” – that provides the model for the novel’s characteristically modernist, paratactic rescuing of order from a “broken universe” (265). Like Jake Barnes’s meandering tourism, Dick Diver’s initially successful social mobility is made possible, largely offstage, by the transatlantic steamship and its steady channelling of American tourists into postwar Europe. Dick’s return from America after burying his father becomes an opportunity for the narrator to muse on the undesirability of the

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“steamship piers”: “the past, the continent, is behind; the future is the glowing mouth in the side of the ship; the dim, turbulent alley is too confusedly the present” (224). Dick’s privileged yet troubled return to his pursuit of “Daddy’s Girl” becomes, at this point, symptomatic of the father(land)less American, unable to occupy the present and drawn on by an irresolvable, reproductive desire for a new Europe. But towards the novel’s close Fitzgerald returns to further complicate this exploration of ship-motion as a figure for transatlantic desire. When Dick and Nicole swim out to join a party on board the Margin (the “motor yacht of T. F. Golding” [288]), Dick becomes caught up in a nasty series of exchanges with Lady Caroline Sibly-Biers, whose tubercular body bears “aloft the pennon of decadence, last ensign of the fading empire” (291) (and who, in a later episode, will be saved by Dick from scandalous accusations of lesbian solicitation). It is Nicole’s perspective that guides the reader through this scene and, as a result, we take in Dick’s reckless insults through the “snatches” that reach her: “… It’s all right for you English, you’re doing a dance of death … . Sepoys in the ruined fort, I mean Sepoys at the gate and gaiety in the fort and all that. The green hat, the crushed hat, no future” (292, ellipses in original). Dick’s distanced and dislocated speech recalls how Nicole’s earlier mental illness, revealed through belated snippets of their early correspondence, was rendered by Fitzgerald as an elliptical, paratactic collapse of language. In this instance, Dick’s broken speech extends to his response to Lady Caroline’s innuendoes about his time with a “questionable crowd” in Lausanne (tending to Francisco y Cuidad Real): “So I am actually a notorious – .” Golding “crushe[s] out” Dick’s “phrase with his voice” (293), and in the elliptical margins of Dick’s speech, Fitzgerald brings together narratives of decadent imperial decline and “notorious[ly]” queer dissipation; for the novel’s contested social imaginary, both are (anticipating Lee Edelman) sites with “no future.” So as the Margin follows a “motion westward” through the Mediterranean, reversing that of the steamship, Dick looks “toward the veil of starlight over Africa” and takes Nicole’s wrist with a seemingly “detached” contemplation of the prospect of a drowning to end his marriage: “You ruined me, did you?” he inquired blandly. “Then we’re both ruined. So – ” Cold with terror she put her other wrist into his grip. All right, she would go with him – again she felt the beauty of

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the night vividly in one moment of complete response and abnegation – all right, then – – But now she was unexpectedly free and Dick turned his back sighing. “Tch! tch!” (294) Dick’s “dance of death” gives way to the same elliptical disorder by which the narrative takes up and steers round imperial malaise and queer notoriety. Hemingway and Fitzgerald chart a path of dissolution and disillusionment for the privileged white male American in postwar Europe, one that often homophobically attaches their protagonists’ social breakdowns to a growing fluidity and permissiveness in the public discourse of sexuality. And yet that same interest in the unfixing of gender and desire registers in their novels as an animating force behind their experiments in style – as different as they are as writers, both Hemingway and Fitzgerald signal their investment in disrupting representational norms through formal acts of paratactic juxtaposition and fragmentation that necessarily stage the novel as a space of suggestive collisions as much as excisions. While their trajectories of post-war touristic movement and their particular manifestations of existential malaise and ennui represent shifts in the shape of masculinity particular to this historical moment, Jake Barnes and Dick Diver, in their tendency to set characters in orbit around themselves through performances of passivity, should remind us, in part, of the kind of ambiguous gravitational pull exercised by the other male characters at the centre of this book. The emergence of Jake and Dick, at various points in their narratives, as figures defined by their suspension between performances of privileged, normative manliness and queerness – and defined by the alignment of those performances with both stylistic experimentation and experiences of transatlantic displacement – suggests the resilience of the fictional structures I have been tracing in works from the turn of the century. But if Hemingway and Fitzgerald represent a continuing genealogy for familiar stories of Anglo-American privilege navigating transatlantic literary space, what relevance does that fictional paradigm hold for modernist artists who carved out alternative visions from the margins of the literary marketplace? What light might be shed on (trans)national and sexual imaginaries by a comparative reading of such white, male, canonical narratives with works by a broader, more diverse group of American authors who, in the first half of the twentieth century, made

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the changing sexual scene and the shifting demographics of Europe and America the twinned themes of their own “queer Atlantic” experiments? As a conclusion to my own argument, I turn to three exemplary moments of “queer Atlantic” conclusion, the final scenes of three novels that offer up alternative approaches to thinking through the modern transatlantic man as a sexual subject: Claude McKay’s Banjo (1929); Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood (1936); and James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room (1956). In these last pages, I wish to point to how these works by McKay, Barnes, and Baldwin pose, through their broader interest in the representation of marginalized identities as sites of aesthetic difficulty, a self-conscious challenge to earlier sedimentations of transatlantic whiteness as a vehicle for experimental narrative form. At the same time, however, through close readings of their final scenes, I address how these same works manage, perhaps surprisingly, to fall back on a familiar yoking of queer and privileged masculine mobility as a strangely agential force endemic to the modernist novel. I make this concluding move not without some misgivings – such a late turn to African-American writers and to one female writer risks, I realize, framing such texts as an afterthought, a supplement to the white, male writers on whom I have chosen to focus; moreover, it risks suggesting that such texts carry a representative quality, which seems too much of a burden for such a small selection of material to bear. My desire, however, is not to situate these texts as either residual or merely exemplary; rather, I hope to open out, through these texts, avenues for further research and debate in light of the genealogy traced by this book. At the close of Claude McKay’s 1929 picaresque novel Banjo: A Story without a Plot, Lincoln Agrippa Daily, “familiarly known as Banjo” (3), announces that he will not be sailing to the Caribbean from Marseilles with his friends, a “formidable polyglot outfit” (317) of transnational, makeshift sailors. Rather, Banjo vaguely plans to skip town and asks Ray, the novel’s bookish central character, to join him: “And Ise gwine beat it outa this burg some convenient time this very night, pardner. Tha’s mah ace a spades so sure as Ise a spade. You come along with me?” Not going on the ship … Beat it … Come along with me. (318)

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That Ray registers Banjo’s proposition through a coordinating series of asyndetonic, elliptical phrases encapsulates the novel’s characteristically modernist investment in parataxis as a formal feature – not only does parataxis emerge in similar moments of free indirect discourse, but it also describes the novel’s peripatetic structure in which both Ray’s wandering eye and Banjo’s freewheeling mobility ensure an episodic series of juxtapositions of scenes from the street-life of interwar Marseilles. But Banjo’s queerly resonant proposition – “You gwine with a man or you ain’t?” (325) – also asks the reader to think of the novel’s deployment of parataxis as thematically and erotically significant. When Ray suggests it “would have been a fine thing” for them to travel with their female companion, Latnah, he finds himself reproved in Banjo’s (and the novel’s) final words: “Don’t get soft ovah any one wimmens, pardner. Tha’s you’ big weakness. A woman is a conjunction. Gawd fixed her different from us in moh ways than one … Wese got enough between us to beat it a long ways from here.” (326) Such an ending invites, as Michelle Stephens notes, a “queering of heterosexual assumptions about the formation of a transnational African American masculinity” (169). It also, I wish to argue, ties Banjo’s vision of transatlantic vagabondage and suggestive and misogynistic male bonding to the novel’s own wandering aesthetic, its paratactic, anticonjunctional inscription of a “Story without a Plot.” As such, Banjo’s conclusion suggestively aligns the novel’s equation of modernist style – paratactic, juxtapositional, fragmentary – with a queerly masculinist and transatlantic erotics. By virtue of the protagonist’s racial and classed difference, McKay’s Banjo exercises a narrative mobility different in kind from Hemingway’s Barnes, however much these novels might share drunken wandering across the European cityscape as a structuring device. Throughout Banjo, ships in port stand as oddly immobilized symbols of transnational capital converted, by Banjo’s “polyglot” boys, into homosocial sites for illicit consumption – the panhandlers regularly gather to tap wine barrels being brought in. The largely stationary ships serve as a counterpoint to the mobility of Banjo who enters the text “like a sailor on the

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unsteady deck of a ship” (3). And indeed the novel’s “unsteady” narrative movement around the ships of commerce would seem, then, to signal what Brent Hayes Edwards describes as Banjo’s attempts “to locate what eludes or exceeds the logic of capitalist civilization” (224). Along these lines, the “wealthy shipowner from the Caribbean basin” who promises to take the beach boys west at the end of the novel, “profiting by the exchange rate” (317), exemplifies the lure of transnational capitalism for these homeless subjects. Rejecting his circulation in an “exchange rate,” Banjo proposes an elopement that, as Michelle Stephens argues, adjoins this economic rejection of “ships and seafaring” to a homosocial refusal of “dependence on women and the nation as the final source of home and employment” (197). But Banjo’s final plotting (in this plotless text) is also an extension of the novel’s earlier attention to the boys’ pilfering of ship-wine and, to a certain extent, of a piece with the other beach boys’ decision to join the crew: “They were all ‘going on the fly’ and none of them was thinking of staying with the boat after the trip, but rather of getting to Cuba, Canada, and the United States” (317). Banjo’s queer proposal to abscond with Ray and a “full month’s wages” (318) figures, then, as part of a range of redeployments of commercial shipping by black “vagabond” subjects in the novel. While economic “exchange” and regulation structures the transatlantic passage of ships in Banjo, McKay’s “queer Atlantic” involves men setting in motion, “like a sailor,” alternative forms of value, outside exchange and “on the fly.” Banjo maps out, then, an alternative vision of how privileged forms of masculinized movement – the mobility of capital, and of men as capital (the kind of economic mobility that bankrolls the plots of Jake Barnes and Dick Diver) – might coalesce with queerer forms of passage. While their lives might be circumscribed by economic constraint, Banjo and his boys seek out alternative routes by, through, and out of transatlantic modes of capitalist exchange. If Banjo is a “Story without a Plot,” Djuna Barnes’s avant-garde novel Nightwood offers, as Monika Faltejskova notes, “no story, no solution to the plot, and no ending – it breaks down and exceeds the traditional definition of novel based on a linear coherence of the narrative” (120). Nightwood’s stretching of the novel’s formal possibilities works in tandem with the text’s undoing of gendered and sexual norms, although this surreal portrait of, principally, American expatriates in Paris still manages to retrace familiar entanglements of masculinity

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and transatlantic mobility. Barnes explicitly places transgender or ambiguously gendered subjects – namely, Robin Vote and Dr Matthew O’Connor – at the centre of her meditation on desire, especially lesbian desire, and the unconscious; these characters are, in O’Connor’s own words, members of “the third sex,” “the conjunction of the identical cleaved halves of sexless misgiving” (134). Where much of the novel’s present action primarily takes place in Paris, the night, as the title hints, is a figurative territory, naming a realm beyond “normal” understandings of the human and – in its connection to sleep, dreams, and death – of the human subject’s relationship to time. Robin Vote, the enigmatic, boyish centre of the novel’s events, is (to borrow the title of the novel’s second chapter) “La Somnambule,” the night-walker whose wanderings draw partners to her side even as they render her unfixable. Much of the novel’s fairly light plot centres on Robin’s attractiveness to a succession of partners, men and women, and her incapacity to be held still – Robin marries Felix Volkbein, orphaned son of a Viennese aristocrat and “a Jew of Italian descent” (1), then attaches herself to Nora Flood, hostess of the “strangest ‘salon’ in America” (45), and finally, in terms of her named lovers, passes to Jenny Petheridge, a bird-like widow, “a middle-aged woman who had been married four times” (59). As Nora complains to Dr O’Connor, the novella’s Tiresias-like chorus-figure from San Francisco with a penchant for lengthy, cryptic diatribes, “Robin can go anywhere, do anything … because she forgets, and I nowhere, because I remember” (137). Robin’s “dissolute life, her life at night” (140) not only keeps her in motion through the streets and between Europe and America – it stands in the text as a sign of the challenge her body poses to understanding and, concomitantly, representation. Robin is the “beast turning human” (33) (and we might connect this to the beastly otherness of both Billy Budd and Nostromo); her nightly qualities, according to the doctor, confound Nora’s American sensibilities, the proclivities of “a clean race, of a too eagerly washing people” (75) who will “find no comfort until the night melts away; until the fury of the night rots out its fire” (76). Nightwood ends with its briefest chapter, “The Possessed” – a short, evocative, and highly enigmatic account of Nora – or, more accurately, Nora’s dog – finding Robin once more after Robin has moved to New York with Jenny. As Dianne Warren notes, the final chapter “problematises the boundary crossing tendencies of Barnes’s oeuvre,” so that its

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events “can be used to support widely divergent readings” (134). In the wake of Matthew’s drunken pronouncement that only he knows that “everything’s over” – “now nothing, but wrath and weeping!” (149) – “The Possessed” returns to a description of Robin in constant motion. She confounds Jenny with her visits to train terminals in “different parts of the country, wandering without design, going into many out-of-the-way churches” (150) and walking the “open country,” talking to animals and grasping them, “straining their fur back until their eyes were narrowed and their teeth bare, her own teeth showing as if her hand were upon her own neck.” Where Robin’s motions – her “engagements … with something unseen” – drive Jenny to hysteria because they seem beyond reason, they appear, as Robin heads into Nora’s unspecified “part of the country” (151) and sets up altar in a decaying chapel, to draw to her, like a magnet, Nora’s dog, and in his wake, Nora. Nightwood ends with Nora entering the chapel to see Robin, “in her boy’s trousers” (152), sliding down to greet the dog on all fours; in the final paragraphs, Robin backs the dog into a corner and, then, after a brief altercation, the pair circle each other, barking and crying, till they collapse, the dog’s “head flat along her knees” (153). As a measure of the novel’s consistent refusals of legible plots, what might look like a reunion scene for the text’s lesbian lovers plays out at an unclear remove through the extralinguistic interactions between the boyish Robin and the male dog who may or may not function as something of a conduit for Nora (who disappears from view in these last paragraphs). Barnes anticipates such a reading when, in an earlier scene, Matthew suggests that though Nora and Robin be “buried at opposite ends of the earth, one dog will find them both” (95). Carrie Rohman locates in Robin’s unwillingness “to inhabit a human identity that occludes animality” an exceptional form of modernist resistance to “the power of language to name and produce a differentiated subjectivity” (26). Such a reading might help to make sense of the impassioned collision of Robin and Nora’s dog: one feels, in this scene’s emphasis on Robin’s unvoiced mobility and on her animalistic potential, a straining against the articulable terms by which human subjectivity and desire have been rendered in fiction. The scene encapsulates the novel’s efforts to “span the impossible gap” between day and night (as Guido Volkbein, we are told, sought to “span the impossible gap” between Jew and Christian [3]). Of course that final analogy should also

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remind us that Nightwood, for all its carnivalistic investment in marginalized lives – of lesbians, of transgender individuals, of Jews – is also capable of inscribing, especially through its incorporation of Matthew O’Connor’s cryptic cynicism, a vision of the world as “impossibl[y]” bifurcated, of the other as inherently defined by their position outside dominant discourse. “[W]hy don’t they let me alone, all of them?” (148) Matthew cries out in his final speech, framing the novel’s closing moments as a possible untethering of these hardly realized characters from their would-be confessor. Such untethering lies at the source of significant critical disagreement over the poetics and politics of the novel’s denouement. Georgette Fleischer finds in the scene of Robin’s engagement with the dog (an inverted “god” made of her own image) traces of Barnes’s own “fascination with and horror at the aroused female body” (421); the novel’s final moments capture, in Fleischer’s reading, uneasy overlaps in Barnes’s imagination between lesbianism and “monogamy, religiosity, jealousy, and violence” (422). By contrast, Teresa de Lauretis reads Robin’s consistent ties to animality as signs of the text’s “figural inscription of sexuality as drive,” its radical recognition of desire as “something beyond, or before, representation” (127, emphasis in original). Rather than resolve such divergent readings, I would prefer to underline the pivotal role that mobility plays, in the text’s slight plot and in its baffling form, as the source of such ambiguity. While Robin’s wanderings – which the novel ties to her animal instincts and to her masculine refusals of the feminine gender she has been assigned – drive the novel’s stylistic refusals of plot and character development, they can also easily point, in the novel’s closing moments, toward an othered scene of collapse, a dehumanization that the novel refuses (by offloading any authorial judgement onto the cryptically caustic doctor) to unambiguously recuperate. Nightwood offers then, in its attention to female masculinity, an entirely different exploration of the intersections between queer and privileged modes of manly mobility in a transatlantic context. Its shockingly enigmatic conclusion points to modes of subjectivity seemingly beyond the imaginary of earlier “queer Atlantic” narratives even as it evokes a form of textual wandering capable of marking such otherness as outside the acceptable domain of gendered performances. The final scene’s suggestive locale – a decaying Catholic chapel on a private estate in the heart of America – locates that ambiguous performance

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at a troubled border between the Old World and the New. Is this unmaking of relations between man and woman, human and animal, playing out, as Fleischer suggests, in a “New Eden” marked by “an eschatology of Christianity” (425) and the birth of some new notion of value and relationality? Or has Robin wandered to the edges of the habitable world, the titular “Nightwood,” as if to spell out the impossibility of such reimaginings in either Europe or America? The difficulty for readers in resolving such questions can be attributed to the text’s narrative mobility. In contrast with Matthew’s lengthy, often baffling speeches, the novel frequently lurches forward through very brief, flatly descriptive accounts of Robin’s shifts in sexual partners and geographical location at the close of chapters; Robin’s masculinized movements refuse easy accounts of Barnes’s genre- and gender-bending strategies. A charged and ambivalently negotiated space of gendered performance and queer desire – a bedroom rather than a chapel – also lies at the centre of James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room (1956). Appearing much later yet still distinctly modernist in its outlook and approach, Baldwin’s novel returns self-consciously to the scenes of James’s and Fitzgerald’s fictions, of Americans in search of their lost selves in a European setting, but centres its drama around what Harry Thomas has termed “‘straight-acting’ gay men: gay men who appear and act masculine, who take pride in differing from heteronormative straight men only in the matter of their sexual object choice” (597). Familiar modernist concerns with alienation and fragmentation become in Baldwin’s novel effects of the narrator-protagonist David’s self-destructive efforts to contain a threatening effeminacy: “the mess Baldwin’s David makes of his life indicts both the desire for purity inherent in straight-acting gay male identity and the violence inherent in that desire” (613). A reading of Giovanni’s Room, in many ways, seems a fitting end to this book, as Baldwin’s second novel signals from its opening pages its critical response to mobilities borne of heteronormative masculinity and its historical alignment with the westward drive of Anglo-American imperialism. David, the novel’s American narrator and protagonist, has a face “like a face you have seen many times”: “My ancestors conquered a continent, pushing across death-laden plains, until they came to an ocean which faced away from Europe into a darker past” (3). David’s own transatlantic journey, eastward to Paris, figures, initially, as a flight from his own queer potential, from the menacing space he locates in

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the body of Joey, a one-time lover: “That body suddenly seemed the black opening of a cavern in which I would be tortured till madness came, in which I would lose my manhood” (9). If an ancestral colonial drive seems to gainsay his privileged navigation of Europe and its queer subcultures, that same capacity for movement functions for David as a self-deceptive protection of his masculinity: “I had decided to allow no room in the universe for something which shamed and frightened me. I succeeded very well – by not looking at the universe, by not looking at myself, by remaining, in effect, in constant motion” (20). Giovanni’s Room would seem, then, on the surface, to present a self-conscious critique of the forms of masculinity claimed by the characters at the centre of this book – Baldwin’s novel takes aim at performances of manhood capable of evoking an apparently untroubled entanglement of the fluid possibilities of queer desire with the violence wrought by imperialist expansion. As numerous scholars have noted, Baldwin’s novel – the only novel in his canon not to contain any explicitly black characters – equates the privilege David seeks by fleeing the “black opening” of his desire for men with the privilege he cannot help but exercise as a white American; “race,” Josep M. Armengol argues, “is deflected onto sexuality with the result that whiteness is transvalued as heterosexuality, just as homosexuality becomes associated with blackness, both literally and metaphorically” (673). The novel’s clear lament for the fate of the “dark and leonine” (28) Giovanni – who is sentenced to death for the murder of Guillaume, the owner of a gay bar in which David first finds Giovanni working – might recall the less-pronounced but generative interest in darker men in the novels I have discussed, especially Melville’s “native African,” Stevenson’s James Durie, and Conrad’s Nostromo (or the ways in which the Italian characters of Nostromo and Prince Amerigo bear witness to a displaced concern with liminal masculinities in the Jewish bodies of Hirsch and the antiquario). But Baldwin’s novel – especially in its formal experimentation, its structural return to familiar tropes of containment and suspension – also returns us to the resilient appeal of that same masculine figure that it makes its target; in many ways, Giovanni’s Room turns on an ambivalent invitation to its reader to both identify with and query the privileged mobility of its white American narrator. Indeed, it is worth noting that Giovanni’s Room is the only novel under consideration in this book in which the dangerously magnetic, male

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protagonist (if we take that, in this instance, to be David and not Giovanni) serves as the first-person narrator. If the tendency in recent criticism of Baldwin’s novel has been to uncover a racial subtext in order to recuperate the text from a neglect it faced earlier because of its seeming disinterest in race, that tendency runs the risk of obscuring the challenging identifications opened out by the novel’s manipulation of perspective. Where Banjo is purportedly plotless, one of the key formal features of Baldwin’s novel is how the ending frames the text’s entire plot – Giovanni’s Room opens, in present tense, in the midst of its closing scene as David stands before his “reflection in the darkening gleam of the window pane” of his house in the south of France the night before Giovanni’s execution (3). Through its specific attention to the reflected gaze, Baldwin’s novel tightly weds the circularity of its plot to its thematic treatment of masculine mobility and immobility, so that it is the novel’s form that determines its ultimately ambivalent negotiation of David’s struggles with his detachment from the death of his lover. The visual loop of the window before which David stands, from which he initially “cannot move” (166) in the novel’s closing sequence, frames and recalls the “claustrophobic room” (71) that gives the novel its title and that comes to signify, in David’s eyes, the stultifying impossibility of his relationship with Giovanni. If gazing at himself in a window or a mirror serves as an analogue for the form of David’s confessions, for their consistent back-and-forth movement between the narrating self as subject and the reflected self as object, it also becomes, at the novel’s end, a figure for the complicated quality of David’s gaze on and desire for Giovanni. As David eventually moves from the window – where his now “faint” reflection suggests he is “fading away before [his] eyes” (166) – to his bedroom, where he becomes “terribly aware” of its “large mirror,” the narration snaps to a disarming vision of his condemned lover: “Giovanni’s face swings before me like an unexpected lantern on a dark, dark night.” Immediately prior to this vision, the narrative begins a series of short, italicized juxtapositions of imagined speech: “Take off your clothes, something tells me, it’s getting late.” The context for such detached speech is not entirely clear; the next two interruptive lines appear to imagine Giovanni praying at his execution (“Mary, blessed mother of God” [167]) before returning to this first voice (“It’s getting late”) and, finally, introducing a biblical quote of suggestive relevance for the novel’s account of masculinity: “When I was a child, I spake as

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a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things” (168). In the closing pages of the novel, these two kinds of bifurcated movement – between narrative gaze and mirror image/imagined lover, and between italicized, detached speech and non-italicized narration – work in tandem both to underscore the bifurcated mirror-structure of the plot and to generate difficult questions about David’s phobic attachment to and abandonment of Giovanni. Baldwin’s novel depends, I wish to argue, on an uncertainty about whether to position David’s detachment and flight from desire as a specific consequence of societal homophobia and unreflective privilege or, in the mode of high modernism, as a more universally human state of alienation from both the self and others. Preceding our entry into the opening/closing scene of the novel, the reader encounters first the novel’s dedication (“FOR LUCIEN”) and its accompanying epigraph drawn from Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself ”: “I am the man, I suffered, I was there.” That epigraph, evoking the encompassing democratic empathy of Whitman’s poem, its robust articulation of the poem’s “I,” and (in its close conjunction with the name of Baldwin’s lover) the queer legacy of Whitman’s poetics mapping out love between men, prepares us for David’s visions before the mirror of Giovanni at the scene of Guillaume’s murder and on the day of his execution. We are invited to think of David’s speculative recreation of this last scene as indicating his new potential for imaginative empathy even as that imagining serves to remind us of empathy’s necessary limits, of the boundaries of the “I” (“I cannot read what is in his eyes” [167]). But the form of that imagining of Giovanni standing at the door of execution, with its increasingly paratactic arrangement suggesting the fracturing of David’s internal consciousness, renders ambiguous the nature of David’s connection to the condemned man: That door is the gateway he has sought so long out of this dirty world, this dirty body. It’s getting late. The body in the mirror forces me to turn and face it. And I look at my body, which is under sentence of death. It is lean, hard, and cold, the incarnation of a mystery. And I do not know what moves in this body, what this body is searching. It is trapped in my mirror as it is trapped in time and it hurries toward revelation. (168)

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David’s account of Giovanni’s state risks making his lover’s execution a mere example of man’s more generally mortal condition – his passage through the “gateway” is a signal instance of bodies that are necessarily “under sentence of death”; the speculative demands of this scene become emblematic of a more universal uncertainty underlying the division of the mind from the mysterious body. Such an account, of course, obscures David’s own role in producing Giovanni’s despairing desire for escape from “this dirty world, this dirty body,” a phrase he recalls earlier as indicative of the Italian’s despair in the wake of his abandonment: “I never wish to make love again with anything more than the body” (24). In his adamant yet potentially slippery disagreements with his English disciple John Addington Symonds over the possibilities of a homosexual reading of the “Calamus” poems, Whitman and his poetic legacy also bore witness to the complicating “cultural slippage of the Atlantic crossing” for the American’s “sexual-ideological packages” and their formative, if inadvertent, role in forging an “Anglo-American definition of male homosexuality” (Sedgwick, Between 203–4). Before the mirror, David’s splintered narration bespeaks a perspective that, in the spirit of Whitman, moves between the intimately personal and the universal in a manner capable of troubling clear distinctions between vigorous, phobic egotism and queerly visceral empathy. Turning to Baldwin’s 1949 essay “Preservation of Innocence,” Mae G. Henderson reads David’s desire “to crack [the] mirror and be free” (168), his movement away “from the mirror” (169) in the novel’s final pages, as evidence of his path toward a greater recognition of complexity – a path Baldwin identifies in the essay as “the death of the child and the birth of the man” (quoted in Henderson 324). But just how we are to read these final pages is, I would argue, not nearly so straightforward. Framed as an almost religious path toward conversion, David’s possibly redemptive move toward at least partial self-knowledge in the novel’s final paragraphs comes with a realization of how to “bec[o]me a man” (as the interruptive verse from Corinthians intones) by “the heavy grace of God” (169): “the key to my salvation, which cannot save my body, is hidden in my flesh.” His journey (juxtaposed with Giovanni’s “journey” into death [168]) begins with the covering of “that nakedness which I must hold sacred, though it be never so vile, which must be scoured perpetually with the salt of my life” (169). What, at this point in the novel, does it mean for David to “hold sacred” his “vile” nakedness

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even as he covers it? David’s actions in this scene and his subsequent final departure from the house, “step[ping] out into the morning,” clearly evoke a narrative of emergent, postlapsarian mobility – he will move forward from the troubled paradises of both Giovanni’s room and the rooms he has shared with Hella with knowledge borne of loss. Where Hella feels that this fate demonstrates just why “Americans should never come to Europe” for “they never can be happy again,” David contends that Americans have always had “much more than” happiness: “Only – only – it’s sometimes hard to bear” (165). But if David’s recognition of such a burden and his relinquishment of an American fantasy of heterosexual happiness suggest a legitimate turning away from the normative demands that shadowed his time with Giovanni, the religious, almost Puritanical, quality of his recognition – his commitment to “scour” the “sacred” body – betrays his occupation of the same privileged detachment that previously motivated his flight, first from America (and Joey), and later from Giovanni: he speaks the language of a man who, at a distance, can render another’s pain and even death abstract through the figure of the “journey,” who can commit to a “scour[ing]” of the abstracted body by the “salt of life.” Tellingly, he gives himself up to a passive rather than agential mobility that repeats, on a spiritual level, the very ease of movement that characterized the inexorable westward push of his ancestors: “I must believe, I must believe, that the heavy grace of God, which has brought me to this place, is all that can carry me out of it” (169). The novel ends with a seemingly simple figure for David’s troubled mobility – some of the “many pieces” of the blue envelope in which news of Giovanni’s execution has been relayed to David, and which he has just torn up, blow “back on” him as he walks “toward the waiting people” (169) at a nearby bus stop. It would seem not too difficult to read this final sentence as indicative of David’s inability to outrun either his desires or the guilt of his responsibility for Giovanni’s fate. But these “pieces” of text also echo the final chapter’s fragmentation of voice, its paratactic enactment of the novel’s governing figures of mirrored encounter through the collision and exchange of the italicized and non-italicized narrative voices: fragmentation in this closing chapter signifies not just a shattering of the phobic self but also a repetition of the unbreachable distance between self and reflection, mind and body, lover and beloved. In this way, the return of David’s fragmented text

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to his body serves as a final reminder of the ways in which Baldwin’s novel has charted its empathetic lament for the damage wrought by homophobia through a necessarily fracturing vision. The very means by which the novel communicates David’s potential for recuperation, for moving on – his pained imagining of the scene of Giovanni’s offstage execution – cannot help but underscore the novel’s dependence on Giovanni’s abject unrepresentability as an interruptive voice, his distanced placement as the other to David’s desirous gaze. If the ending also underscores the circularity of the novel’s structure (even as David seems to move out of the framing house and its windowed reflections, he is caught once more in a “claustrophobic” textual-bodily circle), it brings into sharp focus the extent to which Baldwin’s formal innovation ambiguously replicates the room-bound shape of the relationship between David and Giovanni and the privileged detachments such a shape makes available. I began this book with an account of two adjoined scenes of samesex cloistering, a diptychal bridging of queer leisure and economic imperialism in Melville’s “Paradise of Bachelors and Tartarus of Maids.” It is hard not to hear echoes of that same structure, in a perhaps quite different key, in the bipartite structures of Baldwin’s novel, and, indeed, it is worth noting how the fraught claustrophobia of Giovanni’s titular room chimes with the pressure points felt in enclosed spaces in all five of the novels covered in this book’s earlier chapters: the ambiguous violence and judgement meted out in Captain Vere’s quarters; Stevenson’s merged attentions to the figure of the vestibule and the confined shipspace of the Nonesuch; James’s baroque mobilization of the golden bowl and the pagoda as figures for capacity and containment; Nostromo’s pivotal encounter with the corpse of Hirsch; and the domesticated setting of Dowell’s narration and the abandoned scene of suicide in Edward Ashburnham’s gunroom. In each of these spaces, the actions of the central male figures of these novels bring into focus the contours of masculine privilege, especially when faced with the presence of a feminizing threat of confinement and immobilization and the risky possibility of male bodies being given up to uncanny circulation. And yet these same spaces, and these narratives’ self-conscious consideration of such spaces as models for textual form, hold in play and render contingent – queer – the very terms by which masculine privilege might be understood as a mobile force. The closing moments of McKay’s,

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Barnes’s, and Baldwin’s novels bespeak the resilience of this dynamic – of an aesthetic investment in masculinities suspended between the privileged and the queer – for later and in some ways more radical examples of transatlantic fiction. Tracing such a legacy helps, I would argue, to clarify the lingering impression of Melville, Stevenson, James, Conrad, and Ford, of their forging of a “queer Atlantic” narrative form, on twentieth-century figurations of manhood, mobility, and the varied shape of modernist fiction.

Notes

Introduction 1 Noting that “the major works of queer theory” have not “grappled with the facts of mobility and immobility,” Natalie Oswin argues that queer studies, particularly through its interest in “embodied, performative, affective, and other more phenomenological aspects of mobility,” should be “relevant to mobilities scholarship” (91): “we need to both consider ‘queer’ lives as mobile lives and to critique the heteronormative limits of mobility” (92). While this book does not, in any significant way, do the important work of attending to the specific challenge that disability poses to queer theorizing of the body (as Oswin advocates), I am hoping to bring out the ways in which ableist expectations of mobility, of a freedom of movement through space and thought, often work to establish masculine privilege, even as formal mobility renders that same privilege frangible. 2 For significant examples of work emphasizing transatlantic studies’ capacity to disrupt histories of literary nationalism during or immediately preceding the period under consideration, see especially Paul Giles, Virtual Americas: Transnational Fictions and the Transatlantic Imaginary (2002) and Atlantic Republic: The American Tradition in English Literature (2006), Leonard Tennenhouse, The Importance of Feeling English: American Literature and the British Diaspora, 1750–1850 (2007), and C. Brook Miller, America and the British Imaginary in Turn-of-the-Twentieth-Century Literature (2010). For work that attends more closely to questions about the material circulation of transatlantic literature at the end of the nineteenth century, see especially Boggs, Transnationalism and American Literature: Literary Translation, 1773–1892 (2007), Amanda Claybaugh, The Novel of Purpose:

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Literature and Social Reform in the Anglo-American World (2007), and Ann Ardier and Patrick Collier, eds., Transatlantic Print Culture, 1880–1940 (2008). 3 Mobility, as a concept, is critical to the recent theorizations of “transpacific” and “archipelagic American” studies: Viet Thanh Nguyen and Janet Hoskins locate “transpacific studies” within “a ‘mobilities’ perspective or paradigm that examines how social life gains expressions through the movement of people, things, ideas, and institutions across places and nations” (25); Elaine Stratford notes how “the idea of the archipelago both implies and inscribes figurative and literal assemblages, mobilities, and multiplicities, opening possibilities for new ways of thinking, not least along the fluid borders of island, archipelagic, oceanic, and hemispheric studies” (77). 4 While Doyle’s chapter title, “Woolf ’s Queer Atlantic Oeuvre,” introduces the adjectival concept of the “queer Atlantic,” she does not seek to theorize this particular compound as a field of inquiry or theoretical approach.

Chapter One 1 That Melville may have associated the Bull with sexual ambiguity – he will go on to describe the “Handsome Sailor” as being, like Aldebaran, a “superb figure, tossed up as by the horns of Taurus against the thunderous sky” (BB 44) – is suggested by an earlier reference to Taurus’s brightest star towards the end of Mardi (chapter 184): Babbalanja climactically imagines himself attaining oneness with the universe through a spiritual transportation to the star of Aldebaran where he is, it seems, immaculately impregnated by an unspecified “god” (616). 2 Kathy J. Phillips notes that “Vere’s suggestive name” may also evoke “the famous Vere Street scandal of 1810, when police arrested some 30 men for buggery at the White Swan Tavern in London” (“‘One of Those Aliens’” 169), a suggestion that aligns the captain with the space in which non-normative sex both took place and was policed. 3 It is no coincidence, I would argue, that Melville’s only other extant reference to Orpheus comes in his earlier narrative of a “queer Atlantic” passage from Britain to America, when Redburn describes the effeminate Harry Bolton’s irresistible “spell over” the rough sailors – Harry sits “among them like Orpheus among the charmed leopards and tigers” (Redburn 321).

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Chapter Two 1 McLynn makes an alternative case for reading “Henry’s descent into madness” as akin to “the increasing monomania of Ahab,” and he finds in James’s credo (“The height of beauty is in the touch that’s wrong”) the “sensibility … of Claggart in Melville’s Billy Budd” (308–9). The credo McLynn cites is taken from James’s later appearance in the abandoned fragment, “The Young Chevalier.” 2 The dedication was published in the first book edition of 1888. Stevenson planned the preface for the 1888 edition, removed it, but then planned to reinstate it for the Edinburgh edition (where it was published posthumously as an appendix). He wrote three fragmentary notes for The Master of Ballantrae in 1893 and 1894, initially intending to publish them as a critical preface but eventually abandoning this plan. For further details, see Adrian Poole’s notes to the Penguin edition (xxvii–xxviii, 221). 3 Scribner’s Magazine, in the year leading up to publication of Stevenson’s novel, had already been trading on piracy’s popularity through its publication of John S. White’s The Viking Ship (November 1887) and E.H. and E.W. Blashfield’s The Man at Arms (January–February 1888). 4 Burke’s account of the ship’s drunkenness as a force for both disorder and Teach’s authority seems lifted from Daniel Defoe’s account of the historical Edward Teach’s command over his crew’s “continual Course of drinking” (89). 5 Arguing that “The Author of ‘Beltraffio’” reads aestheticism as “the power of the literary to influence or seduce” (750), Kevin Ohi offers a brilliant account of the tale’s “various enactments of aestheticist logics” (“Author” 757). 6 Stevenson himself underscored the ineffable significance of James Durie’s physical appeal in a letter complaining about an illustrator’s handling of the Master: “Mine had a more slender body, a larger, a finer and darker countenance … more of the fairy prince, and more of Satan; and the black mole on his cheek (I could not tell you why) was an essential part of him” (quoted in Caldwell, 118). 7 In his essay “A Gossip on Romance,” Stevenson notes how Clarissa, despite being a book of “startling import, worked out, on a great canvas, with inimitable courage and unflagging art” (Memories 259), lacks the quality of “pictorial or picture-making romance” (261) that would have made it popular. The Master’s esoteric choice seems, then, seductively suited

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to Mackellar, who, early in his narrative, writes James Durie off as “the discredited hero of romance” (MB 89). 8 Charting a set of recurrent “narrative blueprints” in adventure fiction of the late nineteenth century, Claudia Nelson notes the “domestic value” accorded to “homoemotionalism” in arrangements of male characters that resemble the David-Jonathan-Saul triangle. She draws particular attention to Treasure Island’s configuration of Jim Hawkins, Long John Silver, and Doctor Livesey. Arguably, Mackellar, as he takes on a childlike quality onboard the Nonesuch, comes to resemble the youth in one of Nelson’s key “blueprints”: “the boy transferring his loyalties from one adult male to another” (121).

Chapter Three 1 In his curiously backhanded preface to the American edition of Kipling’s Mine Own People (1891), James describes his “morbid” pleasure in the author’s “surprises of his skill and the fioriture of his form, which are so oddly independent of any distinctively literary note in him” (Literary Criticism I.1125). Kipling’s unliterary success finds its apotheosis, for James, in his masterful renditions of “the common soldier,” especially the “charming” Mulvaney who, with his comrades, Learoyd and Ortheris, are “finished brutes” (Literary Criticism I.1129). 2 For further discussion of unimaginative masculinity in James’s late essays see my conclusion to Henry James, Impressionism, and the Public. 3 The colonel’s distanced and supposedly unreflective spectatorship recalls Maisie Farange’s education as “a little girl hanging over banisters” (45), and the repeated placement of American characters, uncertainly shaped by their surroundings, on Parisian balconies in The Ambassadors. 4 Jessica Berman, drawing on Homi K. Bhabha, describes the cosmopolitan as a “translational” subject, coming into being in the movement “between the self and its communities of affiliation, both past and present, as well as between the loyalties and allegiances demanded by those communities, both large and small” (17). 5 Martha Nussbaum suggests that it is Charlotte, “lost to our attention” in the novel’s final phases, who becomes “our pagoda” (47), her distance from the narrative consciousness serving to underscore James’s moral interest in the compromised limitations of human efforts to see and sympathize. I would only qualify this by noting how it is through the uncertain signification of

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Amerigo’s body – the original tenor of Maggie’s elaborate, ornamentalizing metaphor – that readers are confronted with Charlotte’s abjection. 6 Several of James’s late tales of uncanny confrontation with otherness, notably “The Altar of the Dead,” “The Turn of the Screw,” and “The Jolly Corner,” end by invoking the pietà, a feminine enfolding and incorporation of the traumatized male subject (in the case of “The Jolly Corner” that incorporation is shadowed by the story’s submerged interest in assimilation in the wake of mass European immigration). Amerigo’s obverse embrace of Maggie perhaps more closely resembles the desperate and ambiguous collapse of John Marcher, the burying of his “darkened” eyes “on the tomb” of May Bertram, at the end of “The Beast in the Jungle” (541).

Chapter Four 1 The dependence of Conrad’s text on material from Edward B. Eastwick’s Venezuela: Sketches of Life in a South American Republic (1868) points to a model that would situate Costaguana further east, on the Atlantic coast of South America, but one cannot read too much into this as Conrad also drew heavily on the history of an inland state in George F. Masterman’s Seven Eventful Years in Paraguay (1869) (see Watt, Nostromo 11–13). 2 Along somewhat similar lines, Richard J. Ruppel suggests that Conrad’s work manages an “evasive declaration of sexual, especially homosexual, energy in the face of some external censoring agency” (6). 3 Conrad’s attention, through Holroyd, to San Francisco as a distant centre of American economic imperialism might signal his awareness of Frank Norris’s fictional explorations of the businessman in that city in both McTeague: A Story of San Francisco (1899) and The Octopus: A Story of California (1901). Intriguingly, Norris’s contemporaneous The Pit: A Story of Chicago (1903) traces, like Nostromo, the destructive effects on a marriage of a man’s obsession with business, of the man “of the city” setting “his feet toward conquest, and mingl[ing] with the marchings of an army that surged forever forward and back” (64). Unlike Conrad, Norris structures The Pit around heterosexual romance and the eventual redemption of Jadwin, the businessman brought low, through a return to his marriage. 4 We might note something similar at play in The Golden Bowl in the marginal attention paid to Maggie’s and Amerigo’s son, the unnamed Principino, who, as John Carlos Rowe notes, functions as “a mere bibelot, another collectible for the Ververs” (20).

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Note to page 150

Chapter Five 1 In The Good Soldier, the term “queer” is certainly not used uniformly to refer to same-sex desires, acts, or identities, but it is used in ways that muddily and suggestively mix the novel’s various responses to English manners, adultery, and homosociality. Tying the term to ideas of the foreign and the odd, “queer” appears often in conjunction with the beliefs and practices of Roman Catholics (Ford’s home religion); but even these instances often speak to Catholics’ “queer, not very straight methods” for managing desires, methods that Dowell acknowledges could be well suited to “the queer, shifty thing that is human nature” (GS 193).

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Index

aestheticism, 17, 67, 203n5 American imperialism, 5–6, 151; and the frontier, 18–19; and heteronormativity, 192–3; as intertwined with British imperialism, 11, 16, 19–20, 133–4; as postcolonial, 19, 20, 93, 157; and “strenuous” masculinity, 16; superseding British imperialism, 4, 90–2, 117, 152–3. See also British imperialism analepsis. See time Anglophilia: and displaced queerness, 161, 178; and feminization, 162; and form, 95, 151, 166; and homonationalism, 153; and the military, 166 animality, 30, 138, 189–91 anticipation: and character, 33–5, 68, 83–4; and impressment, 33–5, 44; as narrative structure, 30, 58–63, 76–8; and passion, 156 anti-Semitism, 91, 106–8, 135–7, 145 apposition, 115, 125, 127, 141–2 assimilation, 106, 109, 115, 205n6; and cannibalism, 98–101; and novelistic space, 85, 96; and style, 89

asyndeton, 186–7 Atlantic Ocean, 7, 24, 45–6, 159; as feminine, 46; as unit of analysis, 11. See also Atlantic passage, the Atlantic passage, the: as feminizing, 79; in Giovanni’s Room, 192–3; in The Master of Ballantrae, 73–9; and tourism, 183–4; and Whitman, 196 bachelors, 15, 102 Baldwin, James, 6; Giovanni’s Room, 186, 192–9; “Preservation of Innocence,” 196 Barnes, Djuna, 6, 180; Nightwood, 186, 188–92 Beckett, Samuel, 153 Benjamin, Walter, 8, 10 Bergson, Henri, 13 Berman, Jessica, 204n4 Bhabha, Homi K., 88, 204n4 Billy Budd, Sailor (An Inside Narrative), 4, 6–7, 18–20, 24–55, 58, 80, 189; and the African, 27–9; and Claggart, 26–8, 32–8, 43–5, 52–4, 72, 203n1; and stuttering, 44–5, 47, 51; and

222

Index

Vere’s judgement, 45–9. See also impressment; mutiny blast, 150 body, the: and abstraction, 38, 197; and costume, 68–70, 126–7, 145–6; and disability, 201n1; and discipline, 33–4, 36, 40, 50, 52, 93–4; and display, 28, 34, 39–40, 78–9, 127, 148; and mortality, 196; and ornament, 104–5; and race, 81, 192–3; and suspension, 50, 54, 135–6, 138, 147; and torture, 135–6, 177. See also embrace Boer War (Second), 20, 91 Boggs, Colleen Glenney, 8 Boone, Joseph Allen, 10 Bristow, Joseph, 16, 17, 58 British imperialism, 61, 85; and decline, 85, 91; and homosexuality, 17–18; and ornament, 105; and style, 92–3. See also American imperialism Brown, Charles Brockden, 30 Buell, Lawrence, 19, 41 Burke, Edmund, 31 Butler, Judith, 22, 110–11

Collits, Terry, 129 colonization, 14, 22, 121; and Americanness, 93, 152, 157; and the body, 106–7, 111; and desire, 111, 151–2, 17; and style, 98, 101 Conrad, Joseph: “Amy Foster,” 126; and critical discussions of gender, 119–20; and delayed decoding, 139; “Heart of Darkness,” 16, 80, 93, 117, 122, 132, 141; Lord Jim, 122, 124, 125, 132, 144, 166; The Secret Agent, 125; “The Secret Sharer” 137–8; and sexuality, 120–1; Under Western Eyes, 126, 141; “Youth,” 122. See also Nostromo contagion, 43, 181; and mutiny, 24, 39, 42; in Nostromo, 130–1; and piracy, 56, 59, 67–8, 75–6; and revolution, 24, 30 containment, 104–5, 110–11, 146, 172, 193–4, 198 cosmopolitanism, 25, 94, 97–8, 180, 204n4; and discipline, 41; and effeminacy, 9; and language, 108 cruising, 10, 27 Cubism, 141

camp, 89, 116 Cannadine, David, 88 cannibalism, 98–100 capacity, 110–11, 115 Carpenter, John, 9 Caserio, Robert, 9 Catholicism, 172–3, 191–2, 206n1 child, the: and contagion, 67–8; death of, 196; and play, 66–8; and queerness, 13; and reproductive futurity, 13 class, 10 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 30, 147 collectivity, 14, 115–16, 157

dandyism, 16, 34, 69 Davidson, Guy, 81, 104–5 Dean, Tim, 14 Deane, Bradley, 68, 70–1 deconstruction, 12, 14–15, 33, 47, 116 Defoe, Daniel, 64, 203n4 Derrida, Jacques, 22, 44 desire, 10, 16; as an effect, 151–2, 156; lesbian, 189; and regulation, 16; as retrospective, 163; as spatio-temporal, 13, 155, 156–7; triangulation of, 26, 28, 110–11, 132, 152, 177, 204n8; and the unconscious, 120, 163, 189

Index Dickens, Charles, 103, 106, 125 Dowling, Andrew, 16 Downton Abbey, 172 Doyle, Arthur Conan, 68, 123 Doyle, Laura, 12, 27–8, 79, 202n4 Dreyfus case, 91 Du Maurier, George, 106, 107 Edelman, Lee, 13, 70, 184 effeminacy, 34; and AngloAmerican masculinity, 4, 16; and Leopold Bloom, 9; and cosmopolitanism, 9; and Dowell in The Good Soldier, 153, 160, 169; and James Durie, 79; and homosexuality, 17, 192; and Nostromo, 148; and stuttering, 44 Eliot, T.S., 9, 53, 163, 180 ellipsis: and narrative form, 44, 134, 161, 163–4; and syntax, 134, 175, 184–5, 186–7 embrace, 111–15, 137, 178, 205n6 empathy, 195–6 Englishness, 104–5, 151, 169, 176; in American literature, 19; and immobility, 128–9; and queer sacrifice, 173 Epstein, Jacob, 150 exile, 12, 180 feminization, 104, 139, 147–8, 198; and Atlantic passage, 12, 79; and Billy Budd, 30–1, 44; and Dowell in The Good Soldier, 162, 169, 174; and Jewishness, 104–5, 136, 138; and narration, 144–5, 155 fetishization, 131, 152 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 180, 192; Tender Is the Night, 182–5 flâneur, the, 8, 10

223

Ford, Ford Madox: Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance, 149; “On Impressionism,” 21, 149–50; Henry James, 149. See also Good Soldier, The form. See narrative form Forster, E.M., 123 Foucault, Michel, 15 Freedman, Jonathan, 17, 105, 116 French Revolution, 24–5, 31, 57 gaze, the, 109–10, 114, 115; and desire, 27, 74, 154, 167, 194, 198; and discipline, 43; and the flâneur, 10; and impressionism, 149–50; and Jewishness, 106–7; and monarch-of-all-I-survey, 101; and narration, 121–2, 177; and power, 36; and reflection, 194–5; and scopophilia, 27–8 geography: and borders, 18, 23, 202n3; coastal, 118, 121–2, 146, 205n1; interstitial, 118–21, 144–5 Giles, Paul, 25, 49, 180, 201n2 Gilroy, Paul, 11, 12 Girard, René, 28 globalization, 3, 11, 145–6 Golden Bowl, The, 4, 5, 7, 21, 85–116, 118, 182; and Bob Assingham, 89, 92–7, 116; and capacity, 104–15; and Jewishness, 105–10; and The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, 90, 98–101, 104. See also ornament Goodheart, Eugene, 210 Good Soldier, The, 4, 7, 21, 149–78; and Dowell’s narration, 150–9, 163–4, 167–8, 177–8; and impressionism, 150–3, 160, 165–6; and the reader, 150–3, 159, 165, 175–6, 178; and repetition, 173, 177

224

Index

Greenberg, David, 17 Greven, David, 16, 44, 50, 99 Grosz, Elizabeth, 13

Howells, William Dean, 98 Hynes, Samuel, 159–60 hypotaxis, 87, 90, 101, 114, 124

Haggard, H. Rider, 68, 123, 166 Haralson, Eric, 173, 181 Harpham, Geoffrey Halt, 120, 137 Hawthorn, Jeremy, 120, 132 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 98, 106 Hemingway, Ernest, 50; Fiesta: The Sun Also Rises, 180–2, 185 Henricksen, Bruce, 128, 132 heteronormativity: and the AngloAtlantic, 6, 14; and mobility, 201n1; and reproductive futurity, 13–14, 52, 132–3, 174; resistance to, 9, 13, 22, 177–8; and the “straightacting” gay man, 192 heterosexuality, 6, 182; in Giovanni’s Room, 187, 193, 197; in The Good Soldier, 152, 155–6, 160–1, 163–5; invention of, 15; in Henry James, 90, 97, 116; and the nation, 16; in Nostromo, 127–8, 137, 143–8 Hoffman, Karen, 152 homophobia, 57, 130, 134, 182, 185; and epistemology, 33; as heterosexual culture, 15, 195; and homosociality, 37; and Orpheus, 52; and violence, 73, 198 homosexuality, 37–8, 180, 181, 183, 193; and Conrad, 207n2; and effeminacy, 17; invention of, 15; and Whitman, 196 homosociality, 28, 72, 99, 111, 155, 206n1; in Banjo, 187–8; in Billy Budd, 30, 37, 50, 51; in The Master of Ballantrae, 56, 63; and normative culture, 15, 16, 181; in Nostromo, 121, 124, 128, 130, 146–8 hospitality, 22, 43–4

immobility: and death, 49–50, 135, 140; and detachment, 128–9, 151, 166–7, 175; and feminization, 198; and narration, 176; and passivity, 138–9; and privilege, 13; and queer theory, 201n1 imperialism, 14, 22; and the body, 140–1; and desire, 116, 118, 152; economic, 4, 18, 121, 133, 135, 138, 205n3; and hospitality, 22; and manliness, 81, 152; as narrative, 148; and ornamentalism, 88; and play, 68; and style, 4. See also American imperialism; British imperialism; new imperialism impressionism, 7, 21, 149–53, 160, 165 impressions, 54–5, 95, 113, 155–6, 159; and the body, 33–4, 36, 40; and impressionism, 149–50; and unimpressionability, 92 impressment, 24–38, 43–4, 47–8, 51, 53–5 indigeneity, 80, 122–3, 157, 176–7 interstitiality: and geography, 118, 146; and men, 137–8, 143; and narrative form, 120–1, 126–8, 134, 140–1, 148; and the nation, 144–5, 146 Irishness, 17, 172–3, 180 Ishiguro, Kazuo, 172 Italianness, 7, 85–6, 89, 98, 108, 123–6 Jacobite rebellion, 19, 57 James, Henry: “The Altar of the Dead,” 205n6; The Ambassadors,

Index 90, 204n3; The American, 90; and American imperialism, 91; “The Aspern Papers,” 166; “The Author of ‘Beltraffio,’” 67, 203n5; “The Beast in the Jungle,” 123, 205n6; Daisy Miller: A Study, 98; and imaginative dormancy, 92, 95–6; and “International Theme,” 89–90; “The Jolly Corner,” 169, 205n6; and Kipling, 204n1; and language, 115; “The Long Wards,” 92, 166; The Portrait of a Lady, 90; “The Private Life,” 130; The Sacred Fount, 166; and soldiers, 89, 92–4, 110, 166; and Stevenson, 67–8; and style, 87–8, 90, 115; “The Turn of the Screw,” 205n6; What Maisie Knew, 178, 204n3; “Within the Rim,” 89, 92. See also Golden Bowl, The James, William, 91 Jewishness, 105–7, 136–8, 193 Johnson, Barbara, 33, 47 jouissance, 132 Joyce, James, 9, 58, 121, 153, 154, 180 Katz, Tamar, 155 Keats, John, 101 Kimmel, Michael, 16, 180 Kipling, Rudyard, 68, 92, 123, 166, 204n1 Klein, Karen, 119, 135 Kristeva, Julia, 12 Kurnick, David, 115–16 Labouchère Amendment, 16–17 Lacan, Jacques, 132 Lane, Christopher, 17–18 law, 28, 39, 44–5, 54, 171 Levenson, Michael, 8, 160, 175 Lewis, Wyndham, 150

225

Looby, Christopher, 37 Lothe, Jacob, 121, 136 “Manifest Destiny,” 19, 100 Marryat, Frederick, 60–1 Marvell, Andrew, 41–2 masculinity: American, 169, 180; and crisis, 16; and heteronormativity, 14, 22; and hypermasculinity, 9, 44, 123, 165, 182; and imperialism, 17–18, 81, 93–4, 152; and the military, 39, 152; and mobility, 6, 8, 10; and modernism, 9; and normativity, 26, 128, 169; queer, 15, 128; “strenuous,” 16, 169; studies, 16–17; and style, 28, 143–5; and suspension, 175; theatrical, 65. See also feminization Master of Ballantrae, The, 4, 7, 18–20, 56–85, 151, 178 and Atlantic passage, 72–9; and the epitaph, 83–5; and Mackellar, 57–9, 63–6, 68–85; and paratexts, 59–62, 203n2. See also piracy Matz, Jesse, 152 McKay, Claude, 58; Banjo, 186–8, 198–9 Melville, Herman: “Benito Cereno,” 25, 29, 40, 43; Mardi, 202n1; Moby-Dick, 46, 57; Omoo, 57, 80; “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids,” 3–4, 43, 198; Redburn, 34, 202n3; and the Somers mutiny, 48–9; Typee, 57, 80; White-Jacket, or The World in a Man-of-War, 24, 33, 39, 49. See also Billy Budd, Sailor Miller, C. Brook, 5, 131, 133–4 misogyny, 4, 187 mobility: and desire, 10, 154; and the gaze, 87, 154; and modernism,

226

Index

10; and narrative, 121–8, 153–9, 187–8; and physical movement, 87, 154, 187, 189, 191; and queer theory, 12–13; of talk, 178. See also immobility modernism, 8, 23; and absence, 52; alienation, 58, 192, 195; and the exotic, 123; and fragmentation, 50, 53, 182, 183, 192; and gender, 9–10, 180, 185–6, 192; and mobility, 10; and narrative form, 56, 58, 90, 120–1, 148, 187; and picaresque, 58; queer, 9, 165, 179–80, 186; and style, 5, 20, 87–8, 90, 187; and subjectivity, 154, 190 Muñoz, José Esteban, 14 Mushabac, Jane, 28 music, 153–4, 159 mutiny, 25, 38–49, 56, 69, 79 narration: authorial, 48, 119, 121–3, 140, 148; and desire, 78, 194; unreliable, 21, 155. See also wandering narrative form: and anticipation, 27, 29–30, 44, 59–63, 77–8; and closure, 23, 178, 186, 194; and focalization, 101–2, 111, 113–14, 121, 127; and recursiveness, 90, 109, 111, 114, 194; and repetition, 154, 174, 177, 197; and seduction, 73–9, 83, 145, 150, 153. See also interstitiality; space; time; wandering nationalism, 11, 18, 71, 143, 201n2; as fantasy, 118; and masculinity, 39; and reproductivity, 14, 132 nature, 30, 37, 45, 100 Nelson, Claudia, 204n8 Nelson, Dana, 6, 100

Nelson, Horatio, 39–41, 43–4 new imperialism, 4, 133, 138 Nostromo, 4, 80, 85–6, 117–48, 177, 189, 193; and geography, 18, 117, 121–3, 205n1; and Charles Gould, 119, 123, 125, 128–36, 148; and Holroyd, 18, 21, 119, 128–34, 148, 205n3; narrator of, 119, 121–4, 140, 145, 148; and the silver, 123, 125, 127–38, 142–3, 145–6 Ohi, Kevin, 14, 89, 114, 203n5 onanism, 42, 105 1001 Arabian Nights, 130 ornament, 113, 116, 127–8, 204–5n5; and assimilation, 92; and the bowl in The Golden Bowl, 102, 109–10; and Fanny Assingham in The Golden Bowl, 94, 96, 102; and masculinity, 104–7, 114, 127–8; and ornamentalism, 88–9 Orpheus, 52, 202n3 Oster, Sharon B., 106 Pacific Ocean, 7, 57–8, 80–1, 101, 117, 202n3 Paine, Thomas, 20, 25, 31 Panama, 20, 117 parataxis: and modernism, 185; and narrative fragmentation, 53, 183, 195, 197; and narrative wandering, 124, 134, 187; and syntax, 87–8, 125, 184, 187 passivity, 9, 107, 139; and desire, 28, 185; and discipline, 96, 136; and mobility, 57, 123, 138, 175, 197; and privilege, 144, 177, 197 Patience (Gilbert and Sullivan), 17 picaresque, 58, 186 piracy, 56, 59, 63–72, 80–83, 203n3 Pocahontas, 93, 147, 177

Index Poe, Edgar Allan, 64; The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, 90, 98–101, 104 postcolonialism, 41, 118; and American imperialism, 19–20, 91, 157 Pound, Ezra, 150, 180 privilege, 6, 41, 101, 185; AngloAmerican, 121, 134, 185, 193; and audience, 36, 38, 147–8; and detachment, 122; and globalization, 121; and homophobia, 195, 197–8; and immobility, 13; and mobility, 8, 10, 18, 186, 188, 201n1; and passivity, 144; and property, 157–8; and whiteness, 5 Proust, Marcel, 9 “queer”: etymology of, 13; as a term in The Good Soldier, 172–3 queer Atlantic, definition of, 5, 7–8, 12, 202n4 queer ethics, 14, 22, 110–11, 115–16 queer intimacy: in Hemingway, 182–3; in The Master of Ballantrae, 62, 78; in Nostromo, 131–4, 137, 148 queer modernism, 9 queerness: and Catholicism, 172–3, 206n1; and mobility, 13, 14, 38; and tactility, 101–2 queer style: concept of, 14, 22, 26; in fiction, 33, 42, 89, 98 queer temporality, 13–14 queer theory, 12–16, 25, 201n1 race, 5–6, 187, 194; and the Atlantic passage, 12, 79; in Billy Budd, 28; and decline, 116, 157; in The Golden Bowl, 98, 105–6, 108–10, 115–16; and imperialism, 5, 100;

227

in The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, 98–100; and whiteness, 5–6, 94–5, 100, 115. See also Jewishness Ramirez, Luz Elena, 118 reproductivity, 3, 52; absence of, 125, 128, 132, 181; and gender, 104; and the mechanical, 3, 133; and the nation, 14, 57, 132, 184; and queer refusals of, 13, 132; and queer repetition, 173–4, 177–8 Rico, Monica, 18 Roberts, Andrew Michael, 119, 135–6 Roosevelt, Theodore, 16, 20, 133, 169 Said, Edward, 125 Saunders, Max, 165 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 110, 152, 181; Epistemology of the Closet, 15–16, 33, 37, 50; Between Men, 15, 196; Tendencies, 13 Seshagiri, Uma, 157, 176 sexuality, 10, 11, 13, 22, 185; in Conrad, 120; in Nightwood, 191; and race, 193; and the “straight acting” gay man, 192; undoing of, 12, 26, 38. See also heterosexuality; homosexuality ships (fictional): the Bellipotent, 24, 29, 35, 45, 48–51; and capitalism, 187–8; the Grampus, 99; the Jane Guy, 99–100; and homosociality, 187; the Margin, 184; the Nonesuch, 73–9, 82–3, 198, 204n8; the Rights-of-Man, 20, 25, 29–30, 31–2; and transatlantic passage, 183–4, 188 Showalter, Elaine, 16 Sinfield, Alan, 16 Snediker, Michael, 26

228

Index

space, 13, 14, 100–1, 171–2; and erotics, 101, 118, 151–2, 155; and impressionism, 150; and masculinity, 85, 88, 96, 152; and narrative form, 90, 121–3, 128, 155–7, 166–7, 198; and rooms, 43–4, 194, 197–8 Spanish-American War, 19 Stephens, Michelle, 187–8 Stevenson, Robert Louis: and duality, 73, 76; The Ebb-Tide: A Trio, and a Quartette, 80–1; “A Humble Remonstrance,” 67; and James, 67–8, 82; “Letter to a Young Gentleman Who Proposes to Embrace the Career of Art,” 66–7; and Melville, 57–8; “My First Book: ‘Treasure Island,’” 64; Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, 72–3; Treasure Island, 64, 67–71, 80, 204n8. See also Master of Ballantrae, The Stockton, Kathryn Bond, 13 Stoker, Bram, 130 style, 43, 44, 181; and costume, 39; and discipline, 39, 42, 48; imperialist, 98, 116; and Adam Verver, 97, 113. See also queer style superego, the, 164 suspension: and bodies, 54, 118, 138, 147; and language, 41–2, 54, 142; and masculinity, 132–42, 147, 175–6, 199; and narrative form, 79, 136, 139, 167; and typography, 134 Symonds, John Addington, 196 synechdoche, 38, 127 syntax. See apposition; asyndeton; hypotaxis; parataxis

taste, 17, 42, 99, 102 Tennenhouse, Leonard, 19, 201n2 Thomas, Brook, 47 time: and analepsis, 112, 135, 139, 139–40; and anti-linearity, 121, 127, 154, 156, 188; and Nightwood, 189; and proleptic analepsis, 125, 126, 127; and retrospective desire, 156. See also ellipsis; queer temporality Toíbín, Colm, 172–3 transatlantic studies, 10–11, 201n2 transgender, 189, 191 transpacific studies, 202n3 Trask, Michael, 10 violence, 30–1, 44, 45, 47, 76; and desire, 36, 73, 191, 192; and discipline, 36, 40, 97; and empire, 91–2, 94–5, 177, 179; and the nation-state, 30, 39, 92; and piracy, 71, 73, 80; and rape, 123 wandering, 87–8; and narration in Banjo, 187; and narration in Nightwood, 191; and narration in The Good Soldier, 152–3, 158, 167–8, 177–8; and narration in The Master of Ballantrae, 58, 63–6 Warner, Michael, 6 Warren, Jonathan, 89, 116 Wertheimer, Eric, 19, 20 whiteness. See race Whitman, Walt, 9, 25, 195, 196 Wilde, Oscar, 16–17, 102–3, 130, 172–3 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 31 Woolf, Virginia, 12, 121, 153, 154, 202n4 work, 103–4, 182