The Literariness of Sexuality: Or, How to Do the (Literary) History of (American) Sexuality

Abstract

Some people would never have fallen in love if they had never heard of love [Il y a des gens qui n'auraient jamais été amoureux s'ils n'avaient jamais entendu parler de l'amour]. Historians of sexuality rely heavily on literary evidence. Why should this be so? My argument is that sexuality is essentially a literary phenomenon. Following François de La Rochefoucauld's maxim that “people would never have fallen in love if they had never heard of love,” I contend that people would never have had sexuality (never mind any particular sexuality) if novelists and others hadn't invented it (and them). My evidence will be drawn chiefly from several American novels of the long nineteenth century, beginning with Charles Brockden Brown's 1799–1800 Memoirs of Stephen Calvert (in which the protagonist declares that reading a certain book made him what he is, “a thing of mere sex”) and ending with Charles Warren Stoddard's 1903 For the Pleasure of His Company: An Affair of the Misty City, Thrice Told, which self-reflexively aligns literary innovation and sexual self-invention in multiple ways. These are the bookends, so to speak, of a project of mine called “The Sentiment of Sex,” which is about the literary history of American sexuality during roughly this period. It follows, for me, from the fact that sexuality is a literary phenomenon that its history must perforce be a literary history.

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