Joseph and His Friend: A Story of Pennsylvania is an 1870 novel by American author Bayard Taylor, a prolific writer in many genres. It presented a special attachment between two men and discussed the nature and significance of such a relationship, romantic but not sexual. Critics are divided in interpreting Taylor's novel as a political argument for homosexual relationships or an idealization of male spirituality.
The better angel is a man right fair; The worser spirit a woman colour'd ill.
Joseph Aster is a wealthy young farmer in his twenties, with little experience of the world outside of his ruralPennsylvania community. He meets Julia Blessing, a woman from the city, at a gathering for the young people of his community. Joseph quickly becomes interested in Julia, who seems to reciprocate his feelings. They are engaged within a few months.
While returning from a visit to Julia’s family in the city, Joseph is involved in a train crash. He is cared for by a fellow passenger, Philip Held, who is moving to the countryside to oversee a forge. Philip is worldlier than Joseph, and is charmed by Joseph’s innocence. Joseph and Philip immediately take to each other, and soon develop a strong friendship. The romantic undertones of their relationship is evidenced in Philip’s profession of love and “a man’s perfect friendship.”[2]
After he marries Julia, Joseph quickly discovers that she is manipulative and cold-hearted. Julia pushes Joseph to invest more and more in an oil operation on behalf of her father. Meanwhile, she squanders Joseph’s existing wealth on unnecessary and ostentatious additions to his farmhouse. When Joseph finally visits the oil well he has been investing in on the Blessings’ behalf, he discovers that it has little monetary potential. He returns to the countryside, reveals his imminent losses to Julia, and demands that she give up her scheming and greed. Julia’s excitement and anger at Joseph culminate in a fit; when the doctor is called, he explains that she has died, likely from consuming arsenic.
The community comes to suspect that Joseph was involved in his wife's death. Philip launches an extensive investigation to prove Joseph’s innocence. Over the course of a trial, it is revealed that Julia’s death was accidental, and that she had been regularly consuming arsenic in order to improve her complexion.
After the trial, Joseph leaves his community and travels through the frontier on Philip’s advice. When he returns home, he is worldlier and happier with his farming life. Philip realizes that Joseph has fallen in love with Madeline Held, Philip’s sister. He laments that Joseph and Madeline’s romance will “take Joseph further from [his] heart,” but decides that he "must be vicariously happy" for their sake.[2]
Publication history
Joseph and His Friend was the last of Taylor's four novels. It was in the genre then known as the "New England novel".[3][4] It was the only one to be serialized before publication in book form, with its 33 chapters appearing in The Atlantic Monthly beginning in January 1870 and ending in December.[5][6] The book was reprinted eight times by 1893, while a German translation was published in 1879 and 1900, and once more in England in 1903.[5] Taylor also wrote a large amount of poetry and travel literature, and later turned to translation, particularly that of Goethe's Faust.[5]
Literary significance and criticism
Near the end of the 19th century, poet and critic Richard Henry Stoddard, in a brief biography of Taylor, described Joseph and His Friend as "an indictment of rural poverty in Pennsylvania".[7] It has been called "America's first homosexual novel" and was inspired in part by the relationship of earlier poets Fitz-Greene Halleck and Joseph Rodman Drake.[8][9] Taylor's prefatory note to the reader is opaque:[10][11][12]
To those who prefer quiet pictures of life to startling incidents, the attempt to illustrate the development of character to the mysteries of an elaborate plot, and the presentation of men and women in their mixed strength and weakness to the painting of wholly virtuous ideals and wholly evil examples: who are as interested in seeing moral and intellectual forces at work in a simple country community as on a more conspicuous place of human action: who believe in the truth and tenderness of man's love for man, as of man's love for woman: who recognize the trouble which confused ideals of life and the lack of high and intellect culture bring upon a great portion of our country population,–to all such, no explanation of this volume is necessary. Others will not read it.
The book was not well received[11] and became the author's least successful and most disliked novel. However, a contemporary reviewer in The Examiner wrote that "although Mr Taylor travels over familiar ground, and has no notable discovery to disclose, the people who figure in his novel are so interesting in themselves and are so agreeably introduced to our notice, that we cannot grudge them a hearty welcome."[4] The novel's failure in comparison with his work in other genres may have caused Taylor to stop writing novels.[6]
A later critic of Taylor, Albert Smyth, found Joseph and His Friend to be "an unpleasant story of mean duplicity and painful mistakes. The characters are shallow and their surroundings mean. There is not a single pleasing situation or incident in the book."[6] According to Robert K. Martin, the novel "is quite explicit in its adoption of a political stance toward homosexuality". As he summarizes the story:[13]
[Joseph] meets Philip Held, with whom he falls in love and who explains to him "the needs" that are often unfulfilled in conventional society. Philip argues for the "rights" of those "who cannot shape themselves according to the common-place pattern of society."
Taylor's biographer Paul C. Wermuth wrote that homosexual themes could not be overlooked in the novel, but "it is by no means certain that the book should be interpreted this way."[14]
Rob Ridinger writes that male friendship was viewed differently in the 1800s than it is today, and the term "homosexual" did not appear in English until twenty years after the publication of Joseph and His Friend. He believes the novel belongs to the nineteenth-century genre of non-sexual romantic friendships between men, to which such authors as Mark Twain, Bret Harte, and Henry James also contributed.[15]
Gifford, James (2006). Glances Backward: An Anthology of American Homosexual Writing, 1830-1920 (1sted.). Broadview Press. ISBN978-1-55111-728-7.
Mitchell, Mark (1998). Pages Passed from Hand to Hand: The Hidden Tradition of Homosexual Literature in English from 1748 to 1914 (1sted.). Wilmington, MA: Mariner Books. ISBN978-0-395-83705-4.
External links
Wikisource has original text related to this article:
Thomas Bailey Aldrich was an American writer, poet, critic, and editor. He is notable for his long editorship of The Atlantic Monthly, during which he published writers including Charles W. Chesnutt. He was also known for his semi-autobiographical book The Story of a Bad Boy, which established the "bad boy's book" subgenre in nineteenth-century American literature, and for his poetry.
Joseph Leo Mankiewicz was an American film director, screenwriter, and producer. Mankiewicz had a long Hollywood career, and won both the Academy Award for Best Director and the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay in consecutive years for A Letter to Three Wives (1949) and All About Eve (1950), the latter of which was nominated for 14 Academy Awards and won six.
Richard Henry Stoddard was an American critic and poet.
Bayard Taylor was an American poet, literary critic, translator, travel author, and diplomat. As a poet, he was very popular, with a crowd of more than 4,000 attending a poetry reading once, which was a record that stood for 85 years. His travelogues were popular in both the United States and Great Britain. He served in diplomatic posts in Russia and Prussia.
Fitz-Greene Halleck was an American poet and member of the Knickerbocker Group. Born and raised in Guilford, Connecticut, he went to New York City at the age of 20, and lived and worked there for nearly four decades. He was sometimes called "the American Byron". His poetry was popular and widely read but later fell out of favor. It has been studied since the late twentieth century for its homosexual themes and insights into nineteenth-century society.
Sylvester Judd was a Unitarian minister and an American novelist.
Edmund Clarence Stedman was an American poet, critic, essayist, banker, and scientist.
Gay literature is a collective term for literature produced by or for the gay community which involves characters, plot lines, and/or themes portraying male homosexual behavior.
Richard Gustave Stern was an American novelist, short story writer, and educator.
Imre: A Memorandum is a 1906 novel by the expatriate American-born author Edward Prime-Stevenson about the homosexual relationship between two men. Written in Europe, it was originally published under the pseudonym "Xavier Mayne" in a limited-edition imprint of 500 copies in Naples, Italy.
John Galt is a character in Ayn Rand's novel Atlas Shrugged (1957). Although he is not identified by name until the last third of the novel, he is the object of its often-repeated question "Who is John Galt?" and of the quest to discover the answer. Also, in the later part it becomes clear that Galt had been present in the book's plot all along, playing several important roles though not identified by name.
Thomas Holley Chivers was an American doctor-turned-poet from the state of Georgia. He is best known for his friendship with Edgar Allan Poe and his controversial defense of the poet after his death.
Strange Brother is a gay novel written by Blair Niles published in 1931. The story is about a platonic relationship between a heterosexual woman and a gay man and takes place in New York City in the late 1920s and early 1930s.
Cedarcroft, also known as Bayard Taylor House, is a historic house on Gatehouse Drive in Chester County, Pennsylvania near Kennett Square. It was built in 1859 for writer Bayard Taylor (1825–1878), and is a good local example of Italianate architecture. It remained Taylor's home until 1874, and is where he wrote some of his well-known works. It has been a private residence for most of its existence, spending a few years in the early 20th century as a private boys' school. It was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1971 for its association with Taylor.
George Pope Morris was an American editor, poet, and songwriter.
Philip and His Wife is a novel by the American writer Margaret Deland (1857–1945) set in the 19th century fictional locale of Old Chester, a fictional Western Pennsylvania rural village near Pittsburgh.
"A Diamond Guitar" is a short story by Truman Capote, first published in Harper's Bazaar in 1950; it is noted as one of his better quality early short stories. The title refers to the prize possession of the younger man, a rhinestone-studded guitar; the guitar serves as the key image of the story.
Crossing the Border: Fifteen Tales is a collection of short stories by Joyce Carol Oates written while the author was residing in Canada. Published simultaneously by Vanguard Press in the United States and by Cage Publishing Company, Agincourt, Canada in 1976. The stories had appeared previously in different US and Canadian magazines, often in different versions. Seven of the stories, "Crossing the Border", "Hello Fine Day Isn’t It", "Natural Boundaries", "Customs", "The Scream", "An Incident in The Park", and "River Rising" depict conjugal life of an American couple, Reneé and Evan Maynard, in Canada. The characters in "The Transformation of Vincent Scoville" and "The Liberation of Jake Hanley" are instructors at the same Canadian college. The rest of the stories are not connected to each other.
Romance, is a "a fictitious narrative in prose or verse; the interest of which turns upon marvellous and uncommon incidents". This genre contrasted with the main tradition of the novel, which realistically depict life. These works frequently, but not exclusively, take the form of the historical novel. Walter Scott describes romance as a "kindred term", and many European languages do not distinguish between romance and novel: "a novel is le roman, der Roman, il romanzo".
The Time of Friendship is a collection of 13 works of short fiction by Paul Bowles published in 1967 by Holt, Rinehart and Winston. A number of the stories included in this volume appeared earlier "in various places during the 1950s and 1960s."
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
