Unfriendly Thresholds: On Queerness and Misanthropy in Nineteenth-Century America

Throughout the nineteenth century the pages of American newspapers were filled with stories about misanthropic individuals who chose to sever all meaningful contact with their fellow countrymen and effectively withdraw from society.  Referred to variously as hermits, recluses and occasionally misers, these individuals were notable in their day not only for their dislike of other people, but quite often for their very specific dislike of members of the opposite sex. 

This essay raises and then attempts to respond to the question of how such individuals can and should be read within the context of the history of gender and sexuality in the United States.  While it seems like a bit of a stretch to try to claim them as nineteenth century ancestors of modern lesbians and gay men, it doesn’t seem at all inappropriate to argue that they are queer historical figures, particularly in light of what some are now referring to queer theory’s “anti-social” thesis:  the claim, perhaps most famously laid out by Lee Edelman, that what the term “queer” actually names, more than a mode of sexual difference, is a kind of obstinate refusal to comply with ostensibly life-affirming narratives of biological and social reproduction. In such a narrative framework, Edelman argues, anyone who fails to throw themselves whole-heartedly into the never-ending work of biological and social reproduction is marked not only for death, but as death.  That is, “queerness” becomes the master signifier for all that seems threatened or destined to end, and end badly:  love, prosperity, the institution of marriage, the family, the nation, society, indeed life as we know it. 

Hermits and recluses, this essay argues, signified all of these things during the nineteenth century, and in ways that meaningfully presaged the emergence of modern homosexuality even if they cannot exactly be said to have anticipated it.