The 1629 Thomas(ine) Hall case offers an invaluable account of seventeenth-century gender fluidity, ambiguous body presentation, and nonnormative sexual behavior; since 1978 it has inspired quite a range of different readings. The point of consistency across thirty-five years of scholarship on the case is the fact that Hall and the other parties present before the General Court in Jamestown on March 25, 1629, have been interpreted in ways that trace shifting models for theorizing gender and sexual identity during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Much of the work on Hall and her/his community is excellent; however, taken as a whole, this body of scholarship implies the historical possibility of an originary feminist or queer (or both) early American community, effectively eliding important distinctions among different groups as well as downplaying their significance in our own period. I argue that while we can and should apply the tools of gender theory and sexuality studies to early American subjects, the diversity in interpretations of the Hall case suggests that we need to be even more rigorous in avoiding descriptions that risk implying that our own notions of identity can be superimposed onto the past.On March 25, 1629, the Council and General Court of colonial Virginia heard the case against Thomas Hall, an indentured servant living in the settlement of Warraskoyack. 1 The minutes of the session do not specify Hall's crime; although a charge of fornication with a female servant called

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The year after the 1878 publication of Henry James's The Europeans , Emily Dickinson refers to the novel or its author twice in her epistolary writing. This article suggests that her two evocations of James provide further insights into the poet's relationships with the recipients of the letters, Elizabeth Holland and Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Writing Holland, Dickinson deploys characters from The Europeans sympathetically, in a complex articulation of the necessity of women's spiritual and artistic self-determination. Her letter to Higginson is a response to his Short Studies of American Authors ; the poet seems to recognize that Higginson's objections to James's style echo his advice about her own work. Throughout his critical corpus and in his essay on James in Short Studies , Higginson conflates heteronormative ideals of gender with literary quality and true American citizenship. In these letters, Dickinson uses James and his characters to complicate the specifically gendered notions (of behavior, of style, of authorial citizenship) important to these correspondents.