ABSTRACT

This chapter focuses on homoerotic, same-sex friendships that challenge the binary of romantic and platonic love, and the understanding of queer friendship, which includes relationships that subvert the primacy of the heterosexual, dyadic couple in other ways: They may violate taboos against incest and non-monogamy or even the expectation that friendships should include human participants. The chapter expresses that the nineteenth-century literary conventions, which tended to portray young protagonists' formations of surrogate families, as well as cultural norms, in ways that suggested sibling-like relationships were ideal preparation for marriage. Queer friendships and evangelicalism may seem like rather unlikely companions, regardless of whether one is discussing nineteenth-century sentimental literature or our contemporary historical moment. Queer friendship leads to Christian transformation in both The Wide, Wide World and Anne of Green Gables, albeit in different ways.