Wilson Collection: Romantic Friendships/Joseph Dennie and Roger Vose
(A copy of the journal, The Port Folio, 1803, edited by Joseph Dennie)
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]
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.”[5] Vose replied, “A prospect of resting near Dennie for life would be very agreeable. Agreeable? It would be heavenly.”[6]
Dennie edited and, as “Oliver Oldschool, Esq.,” contributed to "The Port Folio".[7] Pages of that literary publication were populated with discussions about male-to-male friendship.
References
- ↑ David Deitcher, Dear Friends: American Photographs of Men Together, 1840-1918 (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Publishers, 2001), 51.
- ↑ Deitcher, 96.
- ↑ Jonathan Ned Katz, The Invention of Heterosexuality, with a new preface (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2007), 44.
- ↑ John D'Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America (New York: Harper and Row, Publishers, 1988), 121.
- ↑ The History Project, compiler, Improper Bostonians (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998), 34.
- ↑ History, 34.
- ↑ 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.
