A

CROSS-DRESSING

---

If the American nation and American literature shared an infancy in the late eighteenth century, then we might look at the nineteenth century as an adolescence and coming-of-age. American literature achieved both fertility and emotional intensity in the nineteenth century and reflected a restlessness evident in the American population. Just as the Missouri Compromise of 1820 marked the dividing line between Southern slave and Northern free territories, it simultaneously divided "settled" territories in the East from "Indian" territories in the West. These dividing lines were also transgression lines; the invisibility of state lines (other than on a map or as represented by geographical features, such as the Ohio River, which themselves became symbolic of division and transgression) served as an apt metaphor for American anxieties about how cultural categories were to be policed—anxieties about intermarriage and miscegenation, for example. This geography of racial tension was echoed in American gender relations: Sarah Bartley Smith, also in 1820, tested the line drawn for women between the private and public spheres by playing "the first transvestite Hamlet" at New York City's Park Theatre (Shattuck, p. 37); just a year later, the first American college for women was established in Waterford, New York. As contemporary critics look back over American literature's nineteenth-century adolescence, one literary type emerges again and again: the cross-dresser.

Cross-dressing—generally understood as the practice of one sex wearing clothes traditionally assigned to the other, but expandable to include the crossing of other cultural categories through dress—was not new or specific to American literature or culture. Literarily, the American cross-dressed character had ancestors not only in European literature accepted as germinal to American letters, such as Greek dramas, Medieval romances and saints' lives, Elizabethan plays, and European novels (such as Don Quijote [1605] and The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders [1722]), but also in Native American and African American folklores. As Marjorie Garber has noted, "at times of national strife or social change . . . aspects of dress often become emblematic of political position" (p. 22), and cross-dressers therefore often signify unstable positions, symbolically embodying societal conflicts. The figure of the cross-dresser in American literature emerges simultaneously as male and female, native and colonist, captive and free, and represents conflicts central to American identities.

SHAKESPEAREAN CROSS-DRESSING AND THE AMERICAN STAGE

Though in America Shakespearean actresses had been playing since the mid-1700s—not only women's roles, such as Portia in Merchant of Venice, but also men's roles, such as Hal in Henry IV—the demand for "breeches parts" (roles played by women in men's clothing) became respectable in the early part of the nineteenth century. Charlotte Cushman (1816–1876, who was famous for portrayals of both Rosalind in As You Like It and Romeo in Romeo and Juliet, and also played Oberon from A Midsummer Night's Dream), Fanny Kemble (1809–1893, who played Portia), and Ellen Tree Kean (1805–1880, who performed Viola from Twelfth Night, in addition to Romeo and Rosalind) are some of the actresses who played Shakespearean transvestite roles in the early 1800s. Cushman was especially known for these roles; one of the early Shakespearean exports to England from America, she was often praised in London for her masculine verisimilitude. Many of these actresses also played cross-dressed roles in works by American authors.

Shakespearean themes of cross-cultural and cross-gender investigation are abundant in the above-listed repertoires, as well as in other works performed in America during the period, such as Othello, The Tempest, and The Taming of the Shrew. Shakespeare and his plays represented these cultural themes to an American audience, allowing it to wrestle with the meaning and mission of America—which may account, in part, for Shakespeare's status as a "bestseller" in the new republic (Mott, p. 305). In contrast with English theater, from the inception performances of Shakespeare's plays in America relied on a mixed cast of men and women; in America, then, while one direction of cross-dressing (from actor to heroine) was lost to audiences, the cross in the other direction (from actress/heroine to male alter ego) was emphasized. No doubt this fact reflected a certain willingness in the colonies to explore expanded roles for women in the new republic and also helped to foster the dialogue about that expanded role. American Shakespearean actresses, in confronting stereotypes about women in the theater, gradually began to transform American theatergoing into a genteel activity—one suitable for respectable women (Shattuck, p. 98). Women's expanded roles in the theater as actresses and audience members allowed audiences to work through cultural anxieties as women's roles expanded in other directions—for example, as mothers became responsible for religious education and moral authority within the home (Davidson, p. 13).

THE AMERICAN CROSS-DRESSING NOVEL

Shakespearean theater was a tremendous force in America, and it had an observable impact on conversations about race, class, and gender—not exclusively, but especially in the pages of American novels. Novelist Catharine Maria Sedgwick (1789–1867), for example, was a close friend of Fanny Kemble's and drew on Shakespeare's Rosalind for one of the characters in her widely acclaimed novel Hope Leslie (1827). Indeed, the cross-dressed page, Rosa (whose male alter ego is Roslyn), is only one of several characters who cross-dress over the course of the novel—two others being the lead female characters, Hope (an English immigrant) and Magawisca (an Indian princess). Magawisca is one party in a chiasmatic exchange of clothing between herself and Hope's tutor, Cradock, which facilitates her escape from an unjust imprisonment at the hands of the Puritans—a plot device that stands on its head the traditional Indian captivity narrative relating the imprisonment and escape of white colonials from Indian captives.

Like Shakespearean theater, the Indian captivity narrative was an important source for novels drawing the cross-dressed character. While often depicting heroines such as Mary Rowlandson (c. 1636–1711), who adhered in the extreme to traditional European gender roles, the Indian captivity narrative also related the cautionary tales of intriguing figures like Mary Jemison (1743–1833), who remained with her Indian "captors" by choice after it was possible for her to return. James Everett Seaver's (1787–1827) introductory description of Jemison relates Jemison's masculine qualities—such as the ownership of a house, barn, and considerable livestock—to her style of dress, which is both cross-cultural (a pair of moccasins) and cross-gender (a man's shirt). Earlier narratives by explorers like Jacques Marquette (1637–1675) and Pierre François Xavier de Charlevoix (1682–1761) related a Native American gender system more fluid than the European, and American authors like Sedgwick and also James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851) drew on these texts in their tales of the American frontier. The clash of gender systems is visible in Cooper's Last of the Mohicans (1826) in the character of psalmodist David Gamut—a precursor to Sedgwick's Cradock—who is feminized by Cooper and initially ridiculed by Hawkeye until his unusual gifts so impress the Hurons that he is allowed to pass freely in and out of their camp, thus facilitating the rescue of the women captives. Gamut is feminized throughout the novel and exhibits some qualities associated with the "berdache," or two-spirit, members of certain Native American tribes, and his cross-cultural dress late in the novel marks him as a traverser of many cultural categories.

Another kind of captivity narrative, the slave narrative was also a source for American novelists who created cross-dressed characters—most notably, perhaps, the escape of William and Ellen Craft (1821–1900, 1826–1891), as told in their book Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom; or, The Escape of William and Ellen Craft from Slavery (1860) and circulated widely in the abolitionist press starting in 1849. William and Ellen managed their escape by using a disguise for light-skinned Ellen, who wore a man's suit and invalid's veil and passed for an ailing white slave owner, with husband William passing as her slave. The story was extremely popular in the press and a drawing of Ellen in disguise was widely distributed. The Crafts' story was compelling enough to foster similar plots in several novels, including Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin: or, Life Among the Lowly (1852), William Wells Brown's Clotel; or, The President's Daughter (1853), and Hannah Crafts's The Bondwoman's Narrative (c. 1850s); indeed, there is speculation that the author of The Bondwoman's Narrative may have drawn on the story of her own escape, inspired by Ellen Craft's disguise (Crafts, p. xxii). In all of these stories, boundaries of race, class, and gender are crossed simultaneously to give the disguise its effectiveness; in two of them, the female-to-male cross by the heroine (Eliza in Uncle Tom's Cabin and Clotel in Clotel) is countered by a male-to-female cross (by baby Harry in Uncle Tom's Cabin and by George in Clotel). As in the novels of Sedgwick and Cooper, cross-dressing in Stowe's, Brown's, and Crafts's novels is associated with escape from a captivity representative of diverse cultural constraints.

Whereas escapes from captivity are depicted in these earlier novels, however, gender itself is the prison to be escaped in works in circulation during and after the Civil War: The Hidden Hand (published serially in 1859, as a book in 1888), by E. D. E. N. Southworth (1819–1899); Little Women (1868–1869), by Louisa May Alcott (1832–1888); and a host of novels published during the period—a trend in fiction reflecting significant numbers of historical women who cross-dressed to fight in the Civil War (see Young, pp. 132, 340). Southworth's antebellum novel, in contrast with those described above, uses slave characters mostly as a comic backdrop; Capitola's cross-dressing at the start of the novel is likewise comic, though it also creates sympathy for the heroine, who is orphaned and must pass as a newsboy to survive on the streets. Capitola puts the cross behind her at the start of the novel and heads out to her grandfather's Southern plantation, obscuring issues of both gender and race as she goes.

In contrast, Jo March's cross-gendered identification and appearance in Little Women are developed over the course of the novel and are rendered most visible by her efforts to support the Civil War against slavery. Within the first few pages of the novel, we learn that Jo laments the fact of her sex and wishes to be a man so that she can fight on the Union side with her father. Like Kemble, Cushman, and Kean, Alcott stands the Shakespearean tradition on its head by having Jo write plays in order to play the swashbuckling male roles herself, with the boots, foil, and doublet that are her "chief treasures" (p. 17). Though all the March sisters adopt male pseudonyms for the family newspaper, The Pickwick Portfolio, only Jo later goes on to do so in actually publishing her gothic thrillers. Like Joan of Arc and other cross-dressing female saints (and Alcott herself, as well) Jo sacrifices her hair for the martial cause, selling it to bring her injured father home from the fighting. Jo is the only one of the sisters to leave the March home to strike out on her own, taking a governess position and circulating her writing in New York City; it is here that she determines to put aside the gothic thrillers, but she continues in her "masculine" profession of writing to the novel's end, where her poem brings her lover to her so that she may tell him she is determined "to "help to earn the home" (p. 367). Alcott's treatment of Jo is an exceptional innovation of the cross-dressing tradition in that it begins to develop the possibility of "cross"-dressing as true self-expression—in other words, the possibility that the clothes of the "other" may, in truth, be one's own best attire. In her postbellum novel, Alcott attempts to create a postwar reconstruction of gender in line with the goals of postslavery Reconstruction legislation passed as she wrote and published Little Women.

The novels described here all contain characters who come of age in a world of fractured identities, the real condition in which Americans found themselves. Represented in these texts is the idea that as American youth come to consciousness about the human condition, they must learn not only to traverse territories of race, class, and gender but also to some extent to contain these fractured territories of identity. In Disarming the Nation: Women's Writing and the American Civil War, Elizabeth Young discerns a central Civil War metaphor in nineteenth-century fiction, representing fractured geographic, social, and psychological regions often represented in a language of captivity, disguise, and escape. While the term "cross-dressing" is generally understood as having to do with sex and gender, the scope is clearly much larger, with many more cultural boundaries crossed—a series of symbolic jail-breaks within the pages of American novels, often represented and facilitated through cross-dressing. As these cross-dressed characters come of age, then, they show us that part of what it means to be a full-fledged American is that disguise, betrayal, desire, and self-revelation are unavoidable; these are part of the human condition in America, where so many cultures interact and intertwine. A comforting structure of wholeness that holds these fractured territories together, the novel as book becomes, like Lincoln's trope of the "house united," representative of a human family made up of fractured identities (Young, pp. 26–27). The cross-dressed character within the novel, then, is the book within a book, within whose "covers" is contained all of the myriad identities and desires of the American people, embodying the conflicts and deceptions but also the truths of fiction—the book whose cover we judge, but whose content we must read if we are to know the American family.

See also The Bondwoman's Narrative; Captivity Narratives; Civil War; English Literature; The Hidden Hand; Hope Leslie; Indians; Little Women; Slave Narratives; Theater

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Works

Alcott, Louisa May. Little Women. 1868–1869. New York: Penguin Books, 1989.

Brown, William Wells. Clotel; or, The President's Daughter: A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States. 1853. Edited by Robert S. Levine. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2000.

Cervantes, Miguel de. Don Quijote. 1605. Translated by Burton Raffel and edited by Diana de Armas Wilson. New York: W. W. Norton, 1999.

Cooper, James Fennimore. Last of the Mohicans. 1826. New York: Penguin Books, 1986.

Craft, William and Ellen. Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom; or, The Escape of William and Ellen Craft from Slavery. 1860. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1999.

Crafts, Hannah. The Bondwoman's Narrative. c. 1850s. Edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr. New York: Warner Books, 2002.

Defoe, Daniel. The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders. 1722. Middlesex, U.K.: Penguin, 1980.

Derounian-Stodola, Kathryn Zabelle, ed. Women's Indian Captivity Narratives. New York: Penguin, 1998.

Sedgwick, Catharine Maria. Hope Leslie. 1827. Edited and with an introduction by Mary Kelley. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1987.

Shakespeare, William. The Riverside Shakespeare. 2nd ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1997.

Southworth, E. D. E. N. The Hidden Hand. 1859. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Uncle Tom's Cabin: or, Life among the Lowly. 1852. Edited by Ann Douglas. New York: Penguin Books, 1986.

Secondary Works

Bullough, Vern L., and Bonnie Bullough. Cross Dressing, Sex, and Gender. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993.

Davidson, Cathy N. Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.

Garber, Marjorie. Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety. New York: Routledge, 1992.

Mott, Frank Luther. Golden Multitudes: The Story of Best Sellers in the United States. New York: Macmillan, 1947.

Shattuck, Charles H. Shakespeare on the American Stage: From the Hallams to Edwin Booth. Washington, D.C.: Folger Shakespeare Library, 1976.

Young, Elizabeth. Disarming the Nation: Women's Writing and the American Civil War. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999.

Mary Lamb Shelden