Crayon, Looking: Washington Irving and the Queer Sublime

Abstract:This article explores the gender and sexual politics of the picturesque and the sublime, two aesthetic categories that predominate Washington Irving's writing. I focus on three of Irving's "sketch books" written under the pseudonym of Geoffrey Crayon: The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1819–20), Bracebridge Hall; or The Humourists, A Medley (1822), and Tales of a Traveller by Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1824). Whereas the picturesque envisions a form of personhood rooted in aristocratic wealth and biological reproduction (from which, as a bachelor, Crayon is excluded), the domain I designate as the "queer sublime" locates, in the emotions associated with the sublime—terror, thrill, astonishment, fear, and the pleasure of annihilation—the very contours of Crayon's and Irving's male painters' visceral response to other men. As depicted in a sequence of tales from Tales of a Traveller, the queer sublime identifies a form of desire that disrupts the psychic boundaries between self and other and temporarily coheres via aesthetic philosophy. The article contributes to the literary history of sexuality by arguing that aesthetics helped organize nascent forms of queer desire and attachments prior to the so-called "invention of the homosexual" dated to the 1870s–90s.