Chrysaline Aesthetics: The Queer Time of Cecil Dreeme

Chrysalis College, the lodging house of Theodore Winthrop’s Cecil Dreeme, is one of the few unambiguously queer heterotopias of nineteenth-century American literature. Home to a coterie of miscreants, its architectural... [ view full abstract ]

Chrysalis College, the lodging house of Theodore Winthrop’s Cecil Dreeme, is one of the few unambiguously queer heterotopias of nineteenth-century American literature. Home to a coterie of miscreants, its architectural “bastard mediævialism” suggests a historical rupture, some kind of lag, between antebellum New York and Chrysalis’ fraternity of Byronic heroes, Faustian transgressors, and Renaissance artists.  “Outside was the nineteenth century,” and inside an anachronistic queer intimacy that occurs in a time disjointed from the present.  Winthrop’s mélange of tragic artistry situates aesthetics as the site of the queer utopian imagination; the “bastard” temporality of aesthetics concretizes what José Esteban Muñoz refers to as “the then and there of queer futurity,” a dreamy horizon of collectivity.  Like Dreeme’s paintings, Winthrop’s novel logs both a recalcitrant longing for—and Chrysallis’ failed attempts at nurturing—queer relationality.  Taking seriously Jack Halberstam’s claim that “queerness offers the promise of failure as a way of life,” I situate aesthetics as a contingent orientation that dwells alongside the contemporary and, by so doing, conjures intimate counterpublics yet-to-come and yet also belated, cathected onto a dream of bygone male artistry.