Wilson Collection: Romantic Friendships/Joseph Dennie and Roger Vose

Under construction.

Romantic Friendships

What are called romantic friendships were common in the 19th-century. These same-sex relationships were aided by the so-called social “spheres” that regulated gender roles and often kept males and females apart.[1]

Officially, romantic friendships were “pure” and chaste (not lustful or sexual), exemplifying the Victorian concept of “true love.”[2][3] They allowed intense emotional, physical, and spiritual same-sex intimacy marked by fluid expressions of affection. But as historians point out, the “overlap of the romantic, erotic, and physical” may now make these vintage relationships hard to define.[4]

(A copy of The Port Folio, 1803, edited by Joseph Dennie)

Joseph Dennie and Roger Vose

Joseph Dennie formed intense relationships with his Harvard college buddies. One close friend was Roger Vose. In 1790, Dennie wrote Vose, saying “The only wish I form is, that fortune, contenting herself with keeping us so long asunder, would now wheel about & suffer you to live & study with me at Groton [and that] for years to come one might be our table & one our bed.”[1] Vose replied, “A prospect of resting near Dennie for life would be very agreeable. Agreeable? It would be heavenly.”[2]

Dennie edited and, as “Oliver Oldschool, Esq.,” contributed to The Port Folio.[3] Pages of that literary publication were populated with discussions about male-to-male friendship.

References

Romantic Friendships

1. David Deitcher, Dear Friends: American Photographs of Men Together, 1840-1918 (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Publishers, 2001), 51. 2. Ibid., 96. 3. Jonathan Ned Katz, The Invention of Heterosexuality, with a new preface (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2007), 44. 4. John D'Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America (New York: Harper and Row, Publishers, 1988), 121.

Joseph Dennie and Roger Vose

1. The History Project, compiler, Improper Bostonians (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998), 34. 2. Ibid. 3. William Warland Clapp, Joseph Dennie: Editor of “The Port Folio,” and Author of “The Lay Preacher” (Cambridge: John Wilson and Son, 1880), 33, accessed October 19, 2012, http://books.google.com/books? id=njgRAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q=port&f=false.