The literary critic James Creech helps us to think about how we might
interpret relations between men during the nineteenth century:
For much of the century it was still possible among men to engage
in emotionally intense and deeply affectionate relationships, the
very relationships which later would be so problematic as to be almost
eliminated from the repertory of appropriate male behaviors. . . .
In the light of more recent scholarship, however, [we] might want
to acknowledge Eve Sedgwick's useful suggestion in Between Men
that as a part of the cultural shift toward homosexuality, relations
between men, for the first time, were beginning to be subjected to
a kind of "blackmailability.'' That is, precisely as the culture
was inventing homosexuality as a concept [in the last decades of the
century], it was becoming necessary for men to stand ready to prove,
in effect, that their florid intimacies with other men were not erotic
in nature. . . . [O]ne must be very prudent in attributing homosexual
content to what are only stock effusions in nineteenth-century writing;
but just as obviously, one must be careful not to mistake for mere
rhetoric the intensely sexual longings which can be smuggled into
expression using the very same language as a cover. Or again, one
must be careful not to presume that [a] more muted effusion . . .
denotes an absence of erotic fervor. (Closet Writing/Gay Reading:
The Case of Melville's Pierre 65)
