ABSTRACT
This chapter examines, through a term a queer Atlantic lens, two distinct moments in nineteenth-century transatlanticism: Felicia Hemans's long narrative poem The Forest Sanctuary, first published in 1825. Herman Melville's two-part short story The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids, first published in 1855. A parallel reading of Hemans's and Melville's works can offer important windows onto the complicated interrelations of desire and displacement that sometimes structured the nineteenth-century transatlantic imaginary. Indeed, queer theory's deconstruction of borders between genders and between sexualities holds much in common with Julia Kristeva's advocacy for a transnational or international position situated at the crossing of boundaries and Paul Gilroy's emphasis on the relationship of identity' to routes rather than roots. In 1986, Robert K. Martin's groundbreaking Hero, Captain, and Stranger spoke to the politically critical potential of Melville's deployment of homosexuality, tying it to his enduring interest in the sea as a space of international exchange.
