Cross purposes: Transvestic figures in nineteenth-century American literature and culture

Even in the nineteenth century, Americans displayed a great fascination with cross-dressers-people who superficially altered not only their gender but often their race and/or class as well. Since their desire to “pass” usually prevented real transvestites from recording their experiences, some writers created a fictionalized space where the ambiguous yet alluring cross-dresser could be explained and contained. These authors who spanned the century saw cross-dressing as indicative of the anxiety and confusion arising from various cultural concerns. Tabitha Tenney's Female Quixotism (1801), Charles Brockden Brown's Ormond (1799), and Herman Mann's The Female Review (1797) feature female soldiers (such as the famous Deborah Sampson) and other impersonators who reflect the social and gender mobility implied by the Revolution. As narratives that address the blurring of racial divisions embodied by mulatto/a slaves, William Wells Brown's multiple versions of Clotel (1853) and William Craft's Running a Thousand Miles to Freedom (1860) depict African Americans who, like Craft's wife Ellen, cross literal and figurative borders by cross-dressing and “passing” as white. Sensitive to the increased presence of women and homeless children in the urban public sphere, the popular novelists E. D. E. N. Southworth (in The Hidden Hand [1859]) and Horatio Alger (in Tattered Tom [1871]) created female “street Arabs” whose male wardrobe serves to protect and reinforce their feminine purity. Finally, reacting to the postbellum trend of lynching and other forms of racial violence, Mark Twain and Charles Chesnutt used the minstrel traditions of blackface and transvestism to expose the degenerate state of aristocratic white masculinity in their novels Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894) and The Marrow of Tradition (1901). As evidenced by these authors' works, the mediating position of cross-dressers made them handy surrogates for testing the new nation's sense of equality and identity in the wake of social upheaval. Rather than a lone figure walking the fringes of society, the cross-dresser was a literary and cultural archetype who enabled Americans to confront and smooth over a host of their own disruptive contradictions.