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My dissertation reorients the prevailing understanding that the gay and lesbian novel came into view in response to the emergence of homosexuality as a concept. I argue that the gay and lesbian novel has a much longer history, which I trace by considering the literary circulation of homosexual types--types that through course of the nineteenth century accrete more and more language to themselves while also generating new abstract terms to describe same-sex sexual sociability. Eighteenth-century literature was sparsely populated by minor characters or fleeting episodes of desire expressed between members of the same sex. By the end of the nineteenth century, minor characters evolve into protagonists and their episodic encounters are either multiplied or developed into novel-length narratives with the texture of entire worlds. "Getting Around" thus takes as its focus the development not just of queer characters or subjects, but of queer protagonists and complete narrative worlds in which those protagonists make sense.
My chapters focus both on the ways authors respond to the language of sexual types in other texts and on the ways other texts respond to them as they continue to circulate. My first chapter argues that Herman Melville's Typee has gradually acquired its status as a queer text: in the ways Melville engages with sexuality in missionary writings and in the way other writers engage with sexuality in Typee. This influence can be seen fully in Charles Warren Stoddard's writing, which I explore in Chapter Two. Stoddard's depictions of sexual sociability between men in the South Seas respond directly to Melville's and are, in turn, nurtured by Stoddard's wide circuits of literary and social circulation. My third chapter charts the circulation of female sexual types, tracing the overlapping, and mutually constituting, relationships between old maids and lesbians that are central to the social worlds depicted by Sarah Orne Jewett and Henry James. My final chapter turns fully to James's The Bostonians. In the space of one novel, I argue, James dramatizes the processes of sexual type production and social circulation that I have been documenting in American literature throughout the nineteenth century.

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 266-297).

http://hdl.rutgers.edu/1782.2/rucore10001600001.ETD.16095

ETD_507

doi:10.7282/T3416XGD

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.

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