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Scholarship > Performing the "Unnatural" Life
Performing the "Unnatural" Life:
The Autobiography of Claude Hartland
The first known autobiography written in America by a self-described homosexual man appeared just over a century ago. The author, who was thirty years old when he published the autobiography in 1901, adopted the pseudonym Claude Hartland. A publisher of medical textbooks in Saint Louis, Missouri, printed his book, a slender volume in a green, clothbound edition, which Hartland titled The Story of a Life. The narrative's one-hundred pages detail Hartland's physical symptoms and personal idiosyncracies as a kind of case history for the benefit of the local medical fraternity, to whom he dedicates the book. Records show that Hartland's memoir actually reached few of those physicians. It probably became an obscure source of rumors and legends until San Francisco's Grey Fox Press reissued Hartland's memoir in paperback in 1985, with a foreword by C. A. Tripp.1 David Bergman, James Gifford and Jonathan Ned Katz have recently joined Tripp in recovering Hartland's memoir and including it in developing histories of gay and lesbian lives and life-writing.2 This article takes up a number of points from these historians and theorists of sexuality and autobiography to explore more specifically this memoir's original geographic context and professional nature. Revisiting the book's urban setting, reconstructing the medical community as a professional entity receiving Hartland's work, and recreating some of middle America's popular attitudes toward sexuality at the turn of the twentieth century, serve to specify the work Hartland accomplishes in this memoir on local, even interpersonal levels.
Even at these intimate levels, however, his memoir sounds remote from contemporary British autobiographies, which remain more familiar to modern readers. In Britain, John Addington Symonds, Edward Carpenter, Edward Prime-Stevenson, and Oscar Wilde, had begun to coin such terms as "intersexes," "simisexualist," "uranian," or more famously, "the love that dare not speak its name." Hartland only seems to have access to the languages of medical pathology and Christian morality. They seem to have found receptive, if narrow and sharply defined audiences. He addresses professionals who referred to his kind - if at all - as "inverts" or "erotopaths," who saw his behavior as perverse, his life as unnatural. Hartland's work can, however, provide further nuances to critics' understanding of more prominent and popular memoirs, in terms of the literary genres of autobiography and the historical construction of gay and lesbian identities with respect to socioeconomic class. Oliver S. Buckton has recently written that the varying modes of "secrecy" in the autobiographies of these relatively wealthy gay English writers result from "an unwillingness to jeopardize the cultural privilege and textual authority of the Victorian male author" (13). As a working-class Midwesterner who had never finished college, Hartland lacked much of the authority these other writers enjoyed, and possessed fewer means of reaching like-minded audiences. Even as an Anglo-American male who sometimes benefitted from his status, Hartland necessarily made a more candid confession than contemporary autobiographers, precisely because he had less to lose in terms of personal authority and cultural privilege.
Explaining at age thirty that his life is over, he seems indeed to have little choice but to conform to the medical case history model that his audience of presumably heterosexual physicians expected. He works without any noticeable tradition of gay life-writing, and seems to find that the only model available to him constructed his personality as pathological, his stance as penitent. Acting out of desperation as well as strategic self-disclosure, however, he makes his autobiography a covert advertisement intended for a more exclusive readership. He narrates supposed perversity to a mainstream audience of physicians, but simultaneously winks toward a narrower group who could detect in Hartland's prose a subtler appeal for sympathy. Elaborately performing a life thought to be "unnatural," Hartland flirts with readers whose lives more closely resembled his own.
Hartland's Performances
A brief survey of Hartland's work shows how willingly he makes concessions to his audience of physicians as he tries to match his performance to their expectations. His book announces itself as "the history of a being who has the beard and the well developed sexual organs of a man, but who is, from almost every other point of view, a woman" (xiii). He offers no apology, swears to the book's truth, and admits that his language falls short of explaining his existence to people unlike himself. "To the natural man," the story that he tries to tell "is incomprehensible, unbelievable; and, as a general thing, the victim would rather suffer in silence than to seek relief at the risk of divulging his secret. Year after year the malady spreads." Only certain men can know this "malady," and yet the book makes it sound contagious. "In the last few years the list of suicides without apparent cause has swollen to alarming proportions"; "Week after week, with the hope of finding relief, misalliances are made, hearts broken, lives wrecked and ruined, and the world wonders why." Hartland not only tries to explain why, but offers himself as a representative case: his life "is but a counterpart to thousands in our country and even in this city today" (xv). This leads in turn to a kind of contract between Hartland and his readers: "so with the physicians' scientific achievements, which are beyond my reach, combined with my personal experiences, which can never be theirs, I believe a great step can be taken toward relieving such sufferers as myself, and preventing the existence of others yet unborn" (8 - 9). The readers as Hartland constructs them cannot understand, since they see the world from their own perspectives, and yet must understand, if they want to treat the affliction. Performing an explicit freakishness and invoking his own ineffable experience, Hartland awards himself the authority to narrate what he nonetheless concedes is an unnatural life.
Natural and unnatural also become vexed concerns when he treats the origins of his homosexual inclinations. Paul Robinson has noted that students of gay autobiography might call John Addington Symonds "the original essentialist" (13). Hartland, who was thirty years younger than Symonds, seems rather to have viewed homosexuality as an alterable condition - at least, alterable for others. "While I am convinced that I was never a natural child," Hartland says, once again adopting familiar terms, "by proper early training, mental and physical, I might have been able to subdue these terrible impulses and finally to have overcome them; but 'tis useless to reflect; there is no rescue now" (16). Early intervention might have altered a life shaped by forces that sound familiar, even clichéd. Hartland's maternal grandfather, who belonged to a slave-owning family of Virginia, showed skill in mending and cooking, often thought to be women's work. Though this grandfather "was strong and manly in appearance," Hartland explains that he "can but look to him as the source of my own trouble, for experience and observation have taught me 'tis only the effeminate that turn so naturally to household pursuits" (3). A sensitive and poetic father, a strict and pragmatic mother, and a robust yet feminine grandfather conspire against Hartland's gender identity. Constructing himself as an uneasy combination of male and female traits, he does not avail himself of theories of androgyny or "intersexes." He seems undecided if his inclinations come from inherited nature or his family's nurture. Never specifying how many siblings he has, he does not explain why his several heterosexual brothers turn out "normal." . . .
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