Matthiessen's Public Privates: Homosexual Expression and the Aesthetics of Sexual Inversion

Abstract

Even before. .. [Mr. Fields's] death Sarah Jewett had begun to be a more frequent visitor in Charles Street, and now impalpably-Mrs. Fields was fifteen years older than Sarah-the two women were absorbed into a union that endured as long as their lives.-F. O. Matthiessen, Sarah Orne Jewett In1949,l ess than a year before his suicide, the prolific and now renowned literary critic F. O. Matthiessen reviewed A Bibliography of the Published Writings of Sarah Orne Jewett. His review praises the bibliography's handsome printing, flatters the erudition and painstaking scholarship of its compilers, and notes with no small degree of joy the increased critical and biographical attention paid to Jewett, who twenty years earlier had been the unlikely subject of Matthiessen's first book. 1 The kernel of his review traces Jewett's ''increasing appeal to readers everywhere'' and singles out in particular the popular film star Barry Fitzgerald, ''who spoke lovingly of her 'good, slow-natured prose,' '' as if to celebrate Jewett's popular circulation and continued relevance, even in an age of film and mechanical reproduction. 2 Matthiessen's admiration of this bibliography and the pleasure he expresses at Jewett's increasing readership bring into relief a still germinating field of inquiry: What are the traces, consequences, and effects of Matthiessen's homosexuality on and for his scholarship? How might those effects in turn have wound their way into a genealogy of modern literary criticism and American studies? Thus far,