Richard Dyer, White, 20th anniversary ed. (London: Routledge, 2017), 20.
74. Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields, Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life (London: Verso, 2014), 16.
75. Michele Mitchell and Naoko Shibusawa with Stephan F. Miescher, introduction to Gender, Imperialism and Global Exchanges, ed. Miescher, Mitchell and Shibusawa (Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2015), 4–5.
76. For important albeit select statements on racialized gender, see Eileen Boris, “‘You Wouldn’t Want One of ’Em Dancing with Your Wife’: Racialized Bodies on the Job in World War II,” American Quarterly 50, no. 1 (1998): 77–108, esp. 80; Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Unequal Freedom: How Race and Gender Shaped American Citizenship and Labor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 7, 136, 252–56; Marisa J. Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 75, 86, 94, 96–97, 113, 129. For analysis of “racialized orgasm,” see Carolyn Herbst Lewis, Prescription for Heterosexuality: Sexual Citizenship in the Cold War Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 43–44.
77. Kevin P. Murphy and Jennifer M. Spear, Historicising Sexuality and Gender (Chichester, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 10. See also Afsaneh Najmabadi, “Beyond the Americas: Are Gender & Sexuality Useful Categories of Analysis?,” Journal of Women’s History 18, no. 1 (2006): 11–21.
78. For work that complicates Cold War–era marital sexuality in a different manner, see Lauren Jae Gutterman, Her Neighbor’s Wife: A History of Lesbian Desire within Marriage (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020). See also Clayton Howard, The Closet and the Cul-de-Sac: The Politics of Sexual Privacy in Northern California (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019).
1
Toward a Cultural Poetics of Desire in a World before Heterosexuality
Richard Godbeer
In early 1630, as John Winthrop prepared to cross the Atlantic and join the Puritan settlement in New England, he bade farewell to friends and loved ones. Some, including his third wife, Margaret Tyndal, would remain in England for a time and then join him in North America. Others he would in all likelihood never see again. The latter included his “most sweet friend” Sir William Spring. Winthrop sent his friend a parting letter in which he declared as follows: “I loved you truly before I could think that you took any notice of me: but now I embrace you and rest in your love and delight to solace my first thoughts in these sweet affections of so dear a friend. The apprehension of your love and worth together hath overcome my heart and removed the veil of modesty, that I must needs tell you, my soul is knit to you as the soul of Jonathan to David: were I now with you, I should bedew that sweet bosom with the tears of affection.” In the past, Winthrop wrote, when one of them set off on a trip, their good-byes had been “pleasant” because they could look forward to a reunion in the near future, but now “this addition of forever” was “a sad close.” Winthrop confessed quite openly to Spring his “envy” of their mutual friend Nathaniel Barnardiston and of Spring’s wife, neither of whom would suffer the anguish of long-term separation from William. Of Barnardiston, Winthrop wrote, “he shall enjoy what I desire.” And as for Spring’s wife, Winthrop could not but resent “the felicity of that good lady.” Winthrop consoled himself with the hope that he and Spring would be reunited in heaven. Meanwhile, their mutual “prayers and affections” would “represent [them] often with the idea of each other’s countenance.” Winthrop prayed that Christ would bless their “bond of brotherly affection: let not distance weaken it, nor time waste it, nor change dissolve it.”1
Envious though Winthrop was of Barnardiston and Lady Spring, there was another loving companion to whom he could entrust his friend without any twinge of jealousy: that is, their mutual savior. “I know not how to leave you,” he wrote, “yet since I must, I will put my beloved into his arms who loves him best and is a faithful keeper of all that is committed to him.” Winthrop described the comfort that Christ would provide in language that was even more passionate and demonstrative than his declarations of love for William Spring. In common with other Puritans, male and female, Winthrop envisaged Christ as a prospective spouse and relished “the most sweet love” of his “heavenly husband.” Winthrop imagined himself as “the loving wife” in the Song of Solomon and addressed his spiritual husband-to-be in a rhapsody of romantic infatuation: “O my Lord, my love, how wholly delectable art thou! Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth, for his love is sweeter than wine: how lovely is thy countenance! How pleasant are thy embracings! My heart leaps within me for joy when I hear the voice of thee, my Lord, my love, when thou sayest to my soul, thou art her salvation.” Winthrop would have to wait for union with his savior until the afterlife, when he hoped to join other redeemed souls in marriage to the heavenly bridegroom; but meanwhile, in his sleep, he “dreamed that [he] was with Christ upon earth” and “ravished with his love . . . far exceeding the affection of the kindest husband.” On awakening after one such dream, he found that the experience “had made so deep impression in [his] heart” that he wept for joy and “had a more lively feeling of the love of Christ than ever before.” Now that he was leaving England and would no longer be able to “bedew” William Spring’s “sweet bosom with the tears of affection,” he would find solace in Christ’s love and imagine his friend in their savior’s embrace.2
Winthrop’s dreams of ravishment by a heavenly bridegroom would have neither surprised nor disturbed his contemporaries. He saw his loving relationships in this world—with three successive wives and with close male friends—as analogous to the love raptures of the world to come. In Winthrop’s mind, earthly and spiritual loves were equally real and symbiotic. Looking over some of the letters that he and his first wife had written to each other, Winthrop found himself in “such a heavenly meditation of the love between Christ and [himself] as ravished [his] heart with unspeakable joy”: “methought my soul had as familiar and sensible society with him as my wife could have with the kindest husband.” In later years, he hoped that the love he and his third wife shared would rouse them “to a like conformity of sincerity and fervency in the love of Christ our lord and heavenly husband; that we could delight in him as we do in each other.” Winthrop never referred to William Spring as a spouse (at least not in any of his surviving letters), but he did see their loving friendship as a foretaste of the bliss awaiting the redeemed in the life to come: “if any emblem may express our condition in heaven, it is this communion in love.” Spring evidently felt the same way, depicting his love for Winthrop and for Christ as parallel devotions: he wrote longingly of Winthrop’s “bosom, whither I desire to convey myself and to live there, as we may to [Christ] also that owns that place.” Winthrop saw marital love, loving friendship, love of Christ, and Christ’s love for the faithful as mutually reinforcing devotions that conflated the earthly and spiritual as well as love for men and women. He finished his letter of farewell to Spring by praying that Christ would bless their love for each other and unite them in love for their redeemer: “make us sick with thy love: let us sleep in thine arms, and awake in thy kingdom: the souls of thy servants, thus united to thee, make as one in the bond of brotherly affection.”3
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It is difficult to make sense of this seventeenth-century romantic ménage using modern categories of sexual orientation or our own assumptions about what it means to be a heterosexual male. Puritan men like John Winthrop who considered themselves quite respectable