The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

238 chapter 19or Huck Finn trying to pass in drag—but are not particularly sexualized orscorned.The dime novels referred to gender bending with a calmness that startlesthe modern reader. Deadwood Dick and pals, male and female, jumpedwith abandon into and out of drag. 19 The Adventures of Buffalo Bill around1882 in Beadle’s Boy’s Library of Sport, Story, and Adventure, chapter 18,“A Clever Disguise,” claims that our hero captured a road agent by posing asa girl rider. “Buffalo Billy got the reward for his capture, and a medal fromthe company, and he certainly deserved all that he received for his daringexploit in the guise of a young girl, and a pretty one too, the boys said hemade, for he had no mustache then, his complexion was perfect, thoughbronzed, and his waist was as small as a woman’s.” 20 The actual Wild BillHickok, too, it appears, was notably androgynous in behavior. But the booktaking special, disdainful note of Hickok’s queerness is not contemporary. Itlooks back from the gender-anxious date of 1930. 21Something special, in other words, happens in the half century ofmiddle-class but tough-guy fiction in America after Owen Wister and JackLondon. The fictional shift is especially American, not French or British,though I understand that Argentina at the same time developed in Spanisha similar tough-guy fiction.In The Sun Also Rises (1926) Hemingway’s narrator and alter ego is a figureof ethical seriousness, practicing his American bourgeois ethic in whichone pays the price, working for the one true sentence. He observes “a crowdof young men,” homosexuals, coming into a Parisian dance hall, and almostpermits his fears to arouse his manly skill at boxing: “I could see their handsand newly washed, wavy hair in the light from the door. The policemanstanding by the door looked at me and smiled. ...I was very angry. Somehowthey always made me angry. I know they are supposed to be amusing,and you should be tolerant, but I wanted to swing on one, any one, anythingto shatter that superior, simpering composure.” 22Hemingway was always interested in gender roles, and was sophisticatedfor his time about homosexuality. He was even sophisticated about transvestismand transsexuality, which was extremely unusual. Aside from theimplied transsexuality in his novels, especially his posthumous last, hismother dressed him quite late in girl’s clothing and in the 1920s and 1930sthe works of the pioneering sexologist Havelock Ellis were among hisfavorite books. It seems like something out of his novels, but is true, that his