Reading through Tribunella just invokes an appreciation for a good close reading. Other respondents have already noted that this article is a move to queer the canon through a historical recognition of gay literature (although I may disagree on the meaning of “subtly”). Like many of our other thinkers this semester, Tribunella also finds a need to remind us that children are not empty vessels sitting around to be filled (376). It wasn’t until I reached his discussion on blackmail that I really got engaged with the text.

Tribunella draws on Eve Sedgewick’s work, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire, to frame this historical precedent for sexual blackmail. This, alongside the paraphrase of McLaren that notes “it would have been difficult for informed nineteenth-century readers, even in the United States, not to read scenes of blackmail as associated with sexual secrets, especially sodomy and homosexuality,” dramatically opens up the way in which we might read other novels of the era. His use of Sedgewick is quite remarkable, and he continues to draw on the historical work of other queer theory thinkers to push his readings. The assumption of sexual deviancy behind these plots adds a level of sexual politics on entirely assumed behavior.

Although Tribunella has introduced some really interesting concepts, I did find his readings problematic. The emphasis on openness was particularly contentious for me. On the one hand, yes promoting openness – and affirmation – is obviously good. However, the affirmation of love and openness doesn’t seem to subvert the fear of sexual behavior. The juxtaposition of the two boys to the evil (?) Jennison is then a struggle of sexual behavior. The boys get to be homosexual and “out” for the novel in part because they, as children, don’t participate in sodomy. If we are to read the coded homophobia as true, doesn’t this then problematize the desexualized (although certainly no less passionate) boys?

Even if its true that “it is precisely his insistent honesty that enables Philip to triumph over Jennison,” it is an honesty that is put at odds with a sexual threat. In promoting honesty within a culture of blackmail, Stevenson seems forced to leave unchallenged destructive modes of thinking about sex. If “Stevenson casts the character whose manners and actions are most suggestive of closetedness as the villain,” he also characterizes closeted men (and I would imagine women as well) as intentionally deceitful. These are – to me – some dangerous points to be left out in the open, and I wished that Tribunella would have taken these issues up.

All said an done, Tribunella stands a solid example of a good close reading that draws productively from the theory he has available to him.