“Queer is a good nineteenth-century American word, appearing almost everywhere in the literature of the time. And, as often as not, the nineteenth-century use of it seems to anticipate the sexually specific meanings the word would later accrue. Sometimes queer could mean simply odd or strange or droll. But at other times it carried within itself a hint of its semantic future."
The introduction by the series editor lays out the purpose and intent of the volume. The word “queer” has a history of connotative evolution in which its fundamental meaning has taken an off-ramp into the world of sexual semantics. The word does pop up in one form or another in every story included in the text and it is fascinating to see how one can interpret it using that off-ramp even when its use by the author may not necessarily be applicable in that direction at all.
“I think I am a woman. I have been seven years making me a perfect suit of garments appropriate for my sex. As I have passed so long, falsely, for a man, I am ashamed to show myself in my true colors; therefore, I hang myself. The property all to go to the woman I have called my wife. It is now twelve o’clock. I have prepared everything for the funeral, and desire that I may be laid out in the clothes I have on.”
The story which gives the collection its title is one of the examples of the way in which the use of the word “queer” as far as 1857 seemed to be making the shift from meaning merely odd in a general sense to a specificity related to questions of sexual abnormality and deviance from the norm. All hopes that Japhet Colbones might avoid “the queer freaks of the masculines” of his family are ultimately dashed when he hangs himself and leaves behind the note quoted in full above.
“The story of the marriage, and what brought it about, and what happened after it, was detailed and complete—all the facts, just as we already know them—and they gave Mr. Furlong high satisfaction and amusement, particularly where poor Finlay broke into pathetic lamentations over his miseries and wrongs and humiliations. “
The author is none other than Mark Twain, but this story sounds like anything but a Mark Twain tale. Twain is generally not a writer to hold back information or not make explicit what is happening even if he is a bit tricky about what is really going on. This is the story of the unhappy marriage of Robert Finlay and it is a queer sort of union, indeed. Made all the more so by Twain’s elliptical and allusive manner of relating the “facts” of the story.
“She was a queer little thing: we used to find her sometimes dancing alone out on the barren in a circle she had marked out with pine-cones, and once she confided to us that she talked to the trees.”
This quote from a story originally published in 1876 offers a perfect example of how the word “queer” was generally used by writers in the 19th century. A young girl dancing by herself and talking to trees was the epitome of queer behavior for most folks back then. No sexual connotation is to be found in this description, though clearly from a modern perspective enough information is there to interpret it as some sort of coded inference by the author. Even so, the real inference going on here with such an interpretation would be on the part of the reader rather than the writer.
