Recovering Childhood Desire: Alice Dunbar-Nelson's "His Heart's Desire" (1900)

Part archival research project, part venture into queer theory and childhood studies, this paper analyzes “His Heart’s Desire,” an exquisitely crafted short story by Alice Dunbar-Nelson that was recently reprinted in a... [ view full abstract ]

Part archival research project, part venture into queer theory and childhood studies, this paper analyzes “His Heart’s Desire,” an exquisitely crafted short story by Alice Dunbar-Nelson that was recently reprinted in a special issue of Legacy: A Journal of American Women Writers 33:2 (2016). The issue’s editors noted that they found a manuscript of the story in the Dunbar-Nelson archive at the University of Delaware, along with a notebook entry that listed the story as published by the “Chic. News” (406). Building on their work, I have confirmed that the story was indeed published, with some telling changes, in The Chicago Daily News of June 21, 1900, under the same title and with a byline of “Mrs. Paul Laurence Dunbar.” Inspired at least in part by Dunbar-Nelson’s work teaching kindergarten to children from poor African American families at the White Rose Mission in New York in 1897-98, the story features a five-year old “regular boy” of unmarked race who harbors a fierce “secret desire” for a blonde, blue-eyed doll with a pink silk dress. A meditation on gender, nation, and race, the story frames a climactic moment in the boy’s life—he appears in a starring role in his school pageant, draped in the American flag—with his increasingly desperate desire to own a doll. In “His Heart’s Desire,” Dunbar-Nelson imagines a childhood teleology of desire that mixes up the determination to give up childish things with a worship of white femininity. Centered on the boy’s struggle to maintain his dignity in the face of his passion to own the doll, the story makes the pursuit of gender normativity its central drama. If, as Robyn Wiegman and Elizabeth A. Wilson have suggested, queer theorists have underestimated the complexity of normativity itself, then Dunbar-Nelson’s story offers an opportunity to reflect on the potential capaciousness of normative masculinity in the United States.[1]

[1] Robyn Wiegman and Elizabeth A. Wilson, “An Introduction: Antinormativity’s Queer Conventions” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 26:1 (2015): 1-25.