The Manly Love of Comrades : Male Romantic Friendship and Masculinity in "Tennessee's Partner," The Shadow of a Dream, and Home to Harlem

Abstract

The main question I structure my investigation around is how society’s sexual mores and conceptions of masculinity influenced the way in which men could be intimate friends in the last part of the nineteenth century and the first part of the twentieth. Analyzing one short story and two novels that celebrate, illustrate, and at times question male friendship and its borders, my methodology is partly inspired by some important directions in modern literary theory, namely reader-response theory and new historicism. Moreover, theories on gender, specifically men’s studies, queer theory, and feminist theory, are ubiquitous and form the most important groundwork this thesis rests on. Written from different temporal, cultural, racial, geographical, and class based viewpoints, my chosen literary works are Bret Harte’s short story “Tennessee's Partner” (1869), William Dean Howells’s novel The Shadow of a Dream (1890), and Claude McKay’s novel Home to Harlem (1928).