Cross-dressing in the family

In the middle of “Theresa: A Haytien Tale” (1827) lies a slender scene of cross-dressing.Footnote ¹ The story’s pseudonymous author, S., centers the tale on how fictional protagonists Madame Paulina and her two daughters save one another from the violence of French colonialism and advance Haitian independence. To flee French attacks on their home of St. Nicholas, Paulina dresses herself as a French captain and her two daughters, Theresa and Amanda, as her prisoners. In treating cross-dressing as an avenue of escape, this scene resonates with numerous representations of nineteenth-century women who cross-dress to access safety, mobility, and agency. Nineteenth-century woman warrior tales and slave narratives regularly feature figures who pass as men to escape sex work or slavery and to become soldiers and spies.Footnote ² S. contributes to this tradition by imagining that, once Paulina and her daughters adopt men’s clothing, they can move about Haiti unmolested. As in many other such tales, the heroines prove more adept at performing tasks associated with masculinity than some of the men they encounter.Footnote ³ For instance, when they meet a French lieutenant, he believes their disguises and shares intelligence about French military movements; the eponymous Theresa recognizes this knowledge as essential to the revolutionary cause and later carries it to Toussaint L’Ouverture. Yet S. also breaks from many stories of cross-dressing that picture it as a form of individual heroism conducted in secrecy. Instead, “Theresa” locates cross-dressing within a family as Paulina disguises herself and her daughters to preserve their lives and their bonds.Footnote ⁴

While “Theresa” breaks from more familiar depictions of cross-dressing, the story is not the only one to explore what it could mean for a parent to choose for her child to cross-dress. This plot point also surfaces in Eliza Leslie’s story “Lucy Nelson; or The Boy Girl” (1831) from the children’s magazine Juvenile Miscellany.Footnote ⁵ Recent archival research on nineteenth-century depictions of nonbinary and trans identity has led to the digital reprinting of “Lucy Nelson” and informs criticism on it. The story opens with a detailed depiction of the “strange” behavior of a young white American character, Lucy: while assigned the identity of girl, Lucy enacts a masculine-coded gender expression through their active, outdoor play. As Jen Manion observes, the story’s opening paragraph simultaneously implies Lucy’s whiteness and suggests that their gender nonconformity threatens this identity. The narrator asserts that Lucy’s time outside the home leaves “her skin … so sunburnt that she might have been mistaken for an Indian child.”Footnote ⁶ In the plot that follows, Lucy’s parents work to shore up Lucy’s belonging to white, heteropatriarchal culture. Specifically, they enforce feminine ideals by compelling Lucy to wear boy’s clothing. The punishment proves humiliating, leading Lucy to assert “I am not a boy” (157) and to become “a modest well-behaved little girl” (159).

“Lucy Nelson” and “Theresa” thus both associate femininity with domesticity, chastity, and submissiveness – virtues that Barbara Welter long ago defined as central to the antebellum era’s “cult of true womanhood”Footnote ⁷ – and investigate how the parents can instill these qualities. Notably, the parents’ efforts to pass along femininity meet with different obstacles: the child’s inclination toward masculine-coded behaviors in “Lucy Nelson” and the French colonists’ efforts to deny Haitian people’s humanity, including their gender, in “Theresa” speak to the distinct contexts of each text. These differences render it striking that parents in both tales deploy cross-dressing to ensure their children’s girlhood.

Here I should note that such scholars as Peter Boag highlight the problems of labeling scenes like these “cross-dressing.” This specific language is absent from both stories, and, as Boag explains, “when one dresses as the sex with which one identifies – even when one has a body that, according to society’s demands, indicates he or she should dress otherwise – this is an act that confirms who one is. One is hardly crossing in that instance.”Footnote ⁸ Jen Manion and Travis Foster make persuasive cases for reading Lucy not as a cross-dresser, but as trans.Footnote ⁹ Thus, while the story uses the pronouns she/her for Lucy, I deploy they/them to underscore this possibility and to highlight that Lucy’s gender identity remains open to interpretation for much of the story. The term “cross-dressing” does not tell us how the children view their own gender, but rather conveys how the fictional parents understand the acts imposed upon Theresa and Lucy at moments when they perform genders other than their own. Indeed, both texts evoke the disjunctions between a family’s view of a child’s gender and the child’s gender expression, even without the children explicitly naming their gender identities. Thus reading the texts together helps us attend to what they suggest attracts the children and parents to specific gender identities – a combination of the children’s inclinations (that may not neatly align with their assigned sex) and the parents’ efforts to guide their gender identity and expression. By representing children who are not innately drawn to normative gender roles (Lucy) or are actively denied entry to them (Theresa), the stories underscore that families play significant roles in directing children’s expression of gender. Lucy’s parents and brothers violently discipline her into femininity, whereas Paulina works to protect her children’s status as women by evading colonial violence. Ironically, both narrators present these disparate familial efforts to direct the children’s gender expression – and their relation to larger systems of racialized and gendered power – as forms of care.

In asking what draws the parents and children of “Theresa” and “Lucy Nelson” to the various gender roles that they inhabit, I am influenced by scholars’ efforts to address the problem Marjorie Garber observed in Vested Interests: that earlier studies of cross-dressing had often focussed so intently on what various texts say about femininity, masculinity, and the social construction of gender that they neglected the question of how these texts represent cross-dressers.Footnote ¹⁰ Recent scholarship attends to the representations and experiences of cross-dressing in nineteenth-century literature and historical records, contesting the notion that the female-coded character cross-dressing as a man serves largely to show us the constraints of femininity that she may wish to escape in claiming the freedom associated with masculinity. Jody Norton calls on scholars to explore “strategies of transreading: intuiting/interpreting the gender of child characters as not necessarily perfectly aligned with their anatomies.”Footnote ¹¹ And Jen Manion offers just such a reading of “Lucy Nelson” via a digital exhibit of the story for Out History.Footnote ¹² Further, recent scholarship invites us to broaden the kinds of stories we examine about gender, as Emmett Harsin Drager asserts the “pitfalls of only looking for stories that are of resistance or ‘radical politics’.”Footnote ¹³ Andrea Long Chu builds on this idea to assert that “transness requires that we understand, as we never have before, what it means to be attached to a norm – by desire, by habit, by survival.”Footnote ¹⁴ Drager’s and Chu’s invitation to consider characters’ attachment to norms offers us a vital way to approach scenes of cross-dressing – to ask what hints we get about the gender attachments of these children and the parents who orchestrate their children’s gender expression.

Indeed, reading “Theresa” and “Lucy Nelson” together suggests that, while scenes of cross-dressing can destabilize gender binaries, locating this practice within the family can evoke a conservative or radical politics. Even stories that assert the need to conserve existing gender norms offer a chance to consider the (mis)alignment between characters’ desires and such norms, as well as the ways in which characters approximate them. Whether they express a deep attachment to the gender presentation associated with their assigned gender or seek out nonnormative forms of expression, the characters evoke the impossibility of these norms and the appeal of various gender roles for distinct characters. Further, they offer a chance to consider that gender can become a source of conflict as something that is both deeply felt and shaped by the specific culture in which one lives, such that tensions arise when characters’ gender expressions do not align with their family’s or community’s norms.

In taking this approach – of asking what these texts say about the draw of impossible norms and the ways they shape the relations among parents and children – I am indebted to prior criticism that has established the centrality of gender to both stories. In her work on “Theresa,” Frances Smith Foster notes, “Gender is the single most important element that complicates [the characters’] conflict and accentuates their heroism”,Footnote ¹⁵ and subsequent scholarship debates what sort of representation of Black women S. offers. Whereas Jean Lee Cole suggests that “Theresa” treats the characters’ womanhood as a liability that they must overcome to support the revolution,Footnote ¹⁶ Marlene Daut asserts that the story “seems to suggest that women of color could not have been ancillary to the projects of freedom and independence in Haiti in the way they had been represented in dominant histories that circulated throughout the Atlantic World.”Footnote ¹⁷ Setting aside the question whether to read the story as feminist, I consider what draws the characters to the very roles they are denied as Haitian women, as gens de couleur libre or enslaved Black people,Footnote ¹⁸ and how they respond to conflicts that emerge within and outside the family as they pursue these roles.

In contrast to “Theresa,” “Lucy Nelson” is more straightforwardly conservative in the narrator’s didactic emphasis on reforming Lucy. Yet critics have explored the relation between the story’s express messaging and the ways in which its portrait of gender nonconformity may unsettle this message. For instance, Manion theorizes that some gender-nonconforming child readers may have located comfort in the tale’s suggestion that they were not alone. Etsuko Taketani likewise observes the story’s overt warning that the “tomboy … cannot breach putatively feminine behavioral codes without a penalty,” and implicit tensions between the ways it insists on the legibility of characters’ sex and yet also conveys the potential for misreading them.Footnote ¹⁹ I build on this work from African American criticism and transgender studies to argue that “Theresa” and “Lucy Nelson” depict characters’ gender attachments as both deeply felt and entangled with larger systems of power. This is, in part, what renders the stories particularly relevant today, when the different roles families can play in shaping children’s relation to their gender is the subject of profound political division. Indeed, the differences between these stories – with their disparate visions of care for their child characters – resonate with current debates over whether caring for children entails imposing gender conformity or resisting repressive systems that deny trans and nonbinary children’s gender and humanity.

Femininity denied and reclaimed

In these stories, the trope of cross-dressing suggests that characters introduced to us as female may easily present themselves as boys or men. In so doing, the texts do not treat the characters’ girlhood as inevitable, but rather create the occasion to ask what internal and external forces drive them toward these positions. Notably, the two stories provide related answers to these questions, as both consider how characters positioned outside femininity become targets for violence and how inhabiting this gender ideal promises them social recognition and participation. To explore where we see these ideas at work, I begin with “Theresa” because it so clearly conveys the high stakes of this threat – of being defined as outside gender. The story attends to how French colonialism works to deny the protagonists access to the ideals of femininity, which gets marked as the exclusive property of whiteness. Nonetheless, S. emphasizes that Paulina, Theresa, and Amanda embody the era’s dominant ideals of “true womanhood” through their response to the crises of French colonial violence against Haiti: they consistently signal their purity, domesticity, submissiveness, and piety. For instance, we first encounter Theresa and Amanda through the narrator’s description of them in “the morning of life … expanding, like the foliages of the rose into elegance and beauty,” in part thanks to the work of their mother, who has “kept them long concealed from the knowledge of the enemy” (2). S. thus presents their chastity and sexual autonomy as exceptional in the context of French colonialism. Whereas the French soldiers would threaten to cause “the mother’s wretchedness, and the daughter’s shame and ruin,” Paulina’s evasion of this suffering becomes a reminder of the maternal care that the daughters merit and Paulina skillfully provides (2). S. frames the characters’ gendered traits both as evidence that the French mistreatment of these protagonists is immoral and as values that guide the characters’ response to the revolution.

Notably, S. does not describe the home wherein their mother performed her feats of protection; instead, the story conveys the characters’ attachment to domesticity by depicting Paulina’s great “unhappiness” on recognizing that “she must depart from the endeared village of her innocent childhood” to flee attacks against the Haitian Revolutionaries (1). Again, the threat of loss in the context of French violence signals the colonizers’ failure to see Haitians as meriting access to the feminine-coded ideal of domesticity, demonstrates that the protagonists nonetheless feel a deep internal connection to home, and marks French destruction of their homes as inhumane. S. likewise suggests that the French attacks both highlight and undermine the protagonists’ submissiveness and piety, for instance when Paulina responds to the imminent destruction of their home by seeking advice from her male family members. Both her husband and brother, however, have been killed by the French. The story ultimately emphasizes that Paulina and, later, Theresa prove more than competent to take on the active roles of determining for themselves how best to protect their family. Nonetheless, the story imagines what it would mean to desire protection or advice in this revolutionary moment and to lack it, again emphasizing that French violence disrupts these gendered forms of care, of familial bonds. Theresa likewise feels this desire for counsel when she must decide whether to carry the knowledge of French movements to the revolutionaries. In an apostrophe to Haiti, she asks that she might be a worthy sacrifice to God, “who shall raise his mighty arm in defence of thy injured children” (5). Through this rhetorical device, Theresa envisions a higher authority approving the role she claims for herself. Together, these scenes suggest that the French Empire’s refusal to recognize the humanity and femininity of colonized women of color makes it impossible for them to enact the ideals of femininity, while ironically inspiring their efforts to embody femininity in new ways. “Theresa” thus resonates with later slave narratives – perhaps most famously Harriet Jacobs’s Linda, or Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl – that Hazel Carby argues “revealed the concept of true womanhood to be an ideology, not a lived set of social relations as she exposed its inherent contradictions and inapplicability to her life.”Footnote ²⁰

My point here is not that Theresa and her family are drawn to femininity for its political stakes alone – as a way to critique true womanhood or prove they are real women. Just as important to the narrative is the pleasure they locate in their feminine-coded relations to those around them. In other words, they value the ways in which enacting gendered virtues shapes their relatives’ treatment of them. S. underscores the appeal of these bonds when Theresa is torn about whether to travel to L’Ouverture’s camp while her mother and sister sleep. She worries about causing her family pain when they wake, and this very pain speaks to their attachments: “she also owed a duty to that mother, whose tender solicitude for her happiness, could not be surpassed by any parent, and a sister too, whom she tenderly loved, and whose attachment to her was undivided” (5). While the narrator does not suggest that the “tender solicitude” that Paulina provides or the “attachment … undivided” that her sister feels are limited to women, the affection Theresa receives emerges from being recognized as a daughter and a sister. S. underscores the pleasure of such relations when Theresa successfully aids the revolutionaries and thereby claims a familial bond with L’Ouverture; she looks for “his fatherly protection, and seek[s] a home in the bosom of those, to whom she had rendered herself dear by her wisdom and virtue” (8). As she protects her family in this same act, her biological and elective familial attachments read as a benefit of performing daughterhood successfully.

Femininity absent and acquired

If S. evokes an abundance of feminine traits, the better to mark the Haitian characters as deserving of the homes being stripped away from them, Leslie defines the norms of femininity by detailing the traits and behaviors absent from her eponymous protagonist. In the first paragraph, we learn that Lucy “showed no inclination to dress dolls, and make feasts, and read story-books with her sisters” (149). Notably, the narrative evokes a lighthearted tone in this description of Lucy’s behaviors as nonnormative. Focussing largely on the forms of play that Lucy prefers and those that do not interest her, the narrator finds these preferences “very strange,” but does not issue dire warnings about what they mean for her future. Nonetheless, the narrative style here signals that Lucy’s break from domesticity – particularly from practicing domestic work as a form of play – defines her. So, too, does a lack of submissiveness. Lucy not only plays with her brothers, but also sometimes inspires their games – from turning the noise of rolling a barrel down the house stairs into a pastime to leading her brothers up a ladder to play on the roof of their unfinished barn (151). Lucy’s actions offer a kind of anti-domestic model: resisting housework in favor of outdoor play and disrupting the ideals their parents try to enact in making a quiet and safe home. More broadly, this play unsettles some of the central premises of true womanhood as a “cult,” by signaling that these feminine ideals are not necessarily innate and representing the various forms of power and pleasure she gives up when accepting a feminine role at the end of the story. At the same time, the narrator consistently describes Lucy’s behavior in relation to these norms, suggesting that they define Lucy’s identity, even when absent, and that they ultimately must embrace “all the occupations and amusements that are suited to her sex” (159).

So what compels Lucy into femininity – into not only performing its tasks, but working to enjoy it? Both Etsuko Taketani’s and Jen Manion’s readings of the story rightfully emphasize that Lucy is drawn to femininity in large part to avoid humiliation. Cross-dressing humiliates Lucy by placing them in a position of lower status.Footnote ²¹ Taketani reads the question of Lucy’s gender identity here as less significant than the ways in which the compulsory act of cross-dressing sexualizes Lucy; their clothing becomes an index of sex (accurate or not), evokes its secrecy, and yet also invites others’ readings of and attention to it. Yet while the layers of clothing become a problem for Lucy in this reading, as the apron separates and threatens to reveal the boy’s clothing, there is little sense that turning to girlhood and removing boys’ clothing would halt the process of sexualization that Taketani sees at work. So this reading can help us recognize how Lucy is disciplined out of masculinity, but it proves less useful in asking what drives Lucy toward femininity. Manion, however, underscores the role that humiliation plays in altering Lucy’s gender expression. Once Lucy faces the regular mockery of their brothers and the embarrassment of their neighbor’s struggles to read Lucy’s gender, we can understand them as seeking to escape these sentiments that become associated with gender nonconformity, as pursuing femininity in the interests of survival.

I would add that the story imagines Lucy as both evading future humiliation and trying to regain social recognition and belonging. Lucy’s desire to socialize, to enjoy others’ company, surfaces when neighbors, the Halfords, visit the Nelsons. Leslie emphasizes Lucy’s intense desire to avoid further humiliation here – devoting four paragraphs of the short story to describing how Lucy remains closeted to escape the neighbors’ notice and constructs an apron large enough to cover the underlying boys’ clothes during dinner. Already we can see that the risk of humiliation aligns Lucy’s behavior more closely with the feminine role of domesticity that their parents seek to instill, but also underscores that these ideals are confining. Leslie tells us twice that Lucy considers avoiding even dinner, but is drawn to experiment with the apron as disguise because “she did not like dining by herself – she had a great desire to hear the conversation at table, and to see the visiters [sic]” (154). In other words, Lucy works to fit into femininity to avoid mockery while participating in this social environment. Lucy is drawn to sociality, to not losing community.

This sociality also informs Lucy’s masculine-coded play near the start of the story, where Leslie depicts how Lucy performs activities with their brothers. Early on, the narrator offers a long list of games they play together: Lucy liked to “wade through the creek with the boys,” “always accompanied her brothers” ice skating, “helped them to make men of snow,” and “hastened to join them” to play in the garret in cases of bad weather. On first reading, I took these lines largely as reinforcing the association of such activities with boyhood. But just as central to the story’s conception of gender are the ways these lines emphasize the social attachments between Lucy and their brothers. The story suggests that Lucy finds pleasure in rowdiness and movement among others. Also notable is the ways in which their roles in this play seem open, as Lucy sometimes “helped” or “joined” and sometimes led. Leslie’s language suggests that there is not a clear hierarchy amongst them until their parents impose cross-dressing as a punishment, which elevates the brothers by inviting them to humiliate Lucy. This underscores that even as the Nelsons and the narrator present Lucy’s gender tastes as the problem in need of resolution, it is the acts of denying and disciplining Lucy’s gender that disrupt family bonds.

Thus I understand Lucy’s subsequent choice to mask the boy’s clothing for dinner with the Halfords and “resolution to try to subdue … her love of boyish pastimes” (158) as efforts to access once again the pleasures of playing alongside and with others that their family withholds. Notably, as Lucy tries to resume feminine clothing to participate in this dinner, Leslie juxtaposes the other characters’ conflicting sense of Lucy’s gender. The parents and brothers clearly perceive Lucy as still outside normative behavior and, as a result, in a degraded position: the Nelson brothers “bit their lips and looked at each other, but they did not dare to laugh out,” while their parents signal Lucy’s low status by “pitying her confusion,” as they “avoided noticing her” (154). Even when Lucy hides the clothing that indexes their gender nonconformity, their family fixate on it, and it prevents their family from meeting Lucy’s gaze or acknowledging them verbally. Lucy remains very much on the outside of these social exchanges.

By contrast, their neighbor, Mrs. Halford, consistently tries to read Lucy as belonging to and even perfecting their gender. Mrs. Halford first praises Lucy as a model girl, “neat” and “remarkably careful of her clothes,” based on their apron; when Lucy tries to leave the table without revealing their pants by walking backwards, as “the most respectful young lady I have yet seen” (156). When Mrs. Halford spies the trousers after all, she immediately tells her host, “I must beg your pardon” and “I must also beg this young gentleman’s pardon, for mistaking him all dinner-time for a young lady” (157). Her reactions evoke an effort toward kindness, coupled with an assumption that the children’s clothing offers an easy guide to categorizing them as boy or girl. When Mrs. Halford subsequently learns from Mrs. Nelson why Lucy is dressed as a boy, Mrs. Halford “begged of Mrs. Nelson to oblige her by permitting poor Lucy to resume her proper attire” (157, original emphasis). Her reaction can mean both that Mrs. Halford recognizes Lucy’s deep discomfort and that she wants to avoid the uncertainty and remorse she has felt in mistaking Lucy’s gender. What is clearest about Mrs. Halford’s response is the way in which she turns our attention to her response to Lucy’s gender expression and identity, as she persistently dwells on her own impulse to seek pardon and her own feelings about what constitutes Lucy’s “proper attire” (157). Thus even as Mrs. Halford’s reaction to Lucy’s clothing differs significantly from that of the Nelsons, these responses together imply that Lucy’s social participation depends upon other people’s recognition of their gender; they do not enter into social relations until they identify Lucy’s gender and perceive it as valid.

When the story concludes by noting that Lucy resolved to “subdue her fondness for romping” (158) and eventually “took pleasure in all the occupation and amusements that are suited to her sex” (159), I found myself looking for clues as to what these pleasures of femininity might be. Yet while determined to make Lucy like femininity, the story does not detail the activities themselves in a way that might convey their pleasure, as when Leslie describes Lucy’s masculine-coded pursuits at the start. Instead, Leslie emphasizes that Lucy alters her tastes out of a desire to avoid further humiliations and to engage in the companionship that her family’s punishment has halted.

The parents: nonconformity and reform

Both “Lucy Nelson” and “Theresa” imply that the parents’ efforts to direct their children toward femininity are acts of care. We see this when S.’s narrator informs us that, in the midst of the revolution, Madame Paulina’s “greatest solicitude was for the safety of her daughters” (2), and when Leslie characterizes Mrs. Nelson as eager to abbreviate Lucy’s punishment because it “gave her much pain to punish” her children (157). If Mrs. Nelson is hurt by hurting Lucy, the narrator implies, then this violence must be love. Indeed, both stories explore the threat that people outside the family will fail to recognize the children’s girlhood and that this will elicit violence, in contrast to the parents’ (ostensible) compassion. Yet the stories also differ radically in their responses to this threat. The Nelsons subject Lucy to the very harm that they seem to be guarding against, by fostering the rough physical play and humiliation Lucy finds so devastating. By contrast, Madame Paulina hides her daughters to prevent the sexualized violence that the French are likely to direct at them as colonized, nonwhite subjects (2). Like figures of cross-dressing in slave narratives that C. Riley Snorton analyzes, Madame Paulina draws on the fungibility of flesh here in a system that denies gender to colonized people when she takes on the role of French captain and dresses her daughters as prisoners (58). One way to understand the differences between the two stories is that “Lucy Nelson” suggests that only white girlhood merits tenderness and tasks Lucy with fitting this ideal to access such care, whereas “Theresa” underscores the violence of this proposition. In response, S. suggests, Paulina and Theresa engage in creative forms of resistance, hoping to alter the systems of racialized and imperialist violence that deny their humanity. Put otherwise, the two stories emphasize their characters’ desire for social recognition and fear of the violence and humiliation that occurs when people around them deny their gendered identity, but whereas the Nelsons insist that Lucy can only gain a sense of belonging by fitting into the assigned role, Madame Paulina seeks out loopholes in the system that denies her children their gender. We also get much less sense of what Lucy’s gender is, what language they might claim, because Leslie instead emphasizes a route toward reform.

Notably, the parents’ different views of their children’s cross-dressing – as a means to reform gender nonconformity or to evade the state’s dehumanization of the children – is entwined with differences in how the two stories present the act of cross-dressing itself. The depiction in “Lucy Nelson” closely resembles other nineteenth-century scenes of cross-dressing, insofar as Leslie describes the clothing afforded to Lucy and the experience of inhabiting it and creates drama through the threat that the performance will break down to reveal a discrepancy between the body and the gender expression. These tropes do not simply serve as punishment for the character, one that becomes deeply humiliating to Lucy, but also are marked as entertainment for the readers. The treatment of these scenes underscores the idea that their body and dress are there to be read and laughed at by Lucy’s family and neighbors and by Leslie’s audience.

In sharp contrast, S. asks readers to treat Theresa as embodying a heroic, nonsexualized ideal and reinforces this posture toward the protagonist by offering only minimal description of cross-dressing. Indeed, S. provides so little detail that it is not explicitly declared that Theresa and Amanda are dressed specifically as male prisoners, though this is strongly implied, given their mother’s consistent efforts to secure her daughters from sexualized violence and her own disguise in a captain’s uniform. The story does not give us scenes of the characters attiring themselves as prisoners and moving about in the clothing they have adopted, nor does it name the possibility that their clothing could fail to reveal their bodies. These absences keep the focus on Theresa’s and Amanda’s feminine identities and, in conjunction, resist any tendency to sexualize or objectify them for the readers’ imagined gaze. The story thus resonates with Snorton’s observation that Black authors faced pressures to represent cross-dressing and passing as a form of “agency,” but specifically one with a “limited durational performance” that culminates in a “return to a natural-cum-biological mode of being.”Footnote ²² The fact that Paulina, Theresa, and Amanda disguise themselves together means that they enact their gendered bonds to each other even while cross-dressing. Through the two narrators’ different choices of what to represent and what to leave out, we can see the different functions the cross-dressing serves: as alternatively marking Lucy’s gender nonconformity as absurd and refusing the French colonial soldiers’ understanding of Haitian girls and women as outside humanity.

While I read “Theresa” as imagining a parent prepared to challenge the larger system of gender that threatens her children, I do not want to suggest that this story envisions a perfect synthesis between Paulina’s understanding of her daughters’ gender roles and Theresa’s sense of herself. Indeed, the story gives us relatively little sense of Theresa’s gender identity or expression, outside the value she places on her roles as daughter and sister, instead keeping the focus on the ways in which French imperialism denies her access to gender roles and her mother works to secure this. Yet Theresa experiences tension over how to enact her gendered role when the story details how her sense of responsibility to advance the Haitian Revolution conflicts with her sense of her role as daughter to Paulina. When Paulina and Amanda sleep in the country outside St. Nicholas, Theresa debates what to do with the military intelligence they acquired during their flight. Whereas Paulina has consistently protected her daughter, often by hiding her, Theresa moves away from her mother’s protection to become a revolutionary daughter to Haiti. S. juxtaposes Theresa’s sense of duty to her country with her sense of duty to her mother. Theresa knows that she and her family are the only ones to possess their “discoveries” about the French plans, and yet she also knows that her mother would be shocked by her absence and even killed by the fears it would raise (5). Thus Theresa worries that she will cause her mother’s death either by failing to deliver the intelligence and so enabling French victory or by leaving her mother to deliver this knowledge. Further complicating this double bind is that the story has earlier marked the kinds of choice Theresa is making here as one where women would normally seek male guidance – as Paulina repeatedly seeks male guidance when trying to determine whether to flee St. Nicholas in the face of French attacks. Given both Theresa’s pain at the possibility of harming her mother and the agency she must claim in deciding how to act, I wondered briefly whether S. could resolve this tension were Theresa simply to wake her mother for her advice or to inform Paulina of her intent.

Yet Paulina’s effective absence does not just help create dramatic tension, but also lets S. imagine how Theresa navigates the paradoxical pressures she faces in performing the role of daughter. The mother’s absence does not enable Theresa to do whatever she wants; rather it creates a space where Theresa must navigate her values, where the paradox of how best to save her family lets us see that she has internalized the ideals of her mother and revolutionary community, but also that inhabiting them requires her to interpret them for herself. We see this in the moment when she chooses to carry the information to the revolutionaries: “She paused, then as if aroused by some internal agent, exclaimed, “Oh Hayti! – be independent, and let Theresa be the unworthy sacrifice offered to that God, who shall raise his mighty arm in defence of thy injured children” (5). She brings together the gender roles she has learned – positioning herself in a subordinate role and evoking her piety as a “sacrifice” who defers to the greater authority of country and God – even as she takes on authority by imagining that power filtered through herself, as the “internal agent” that activates her. Notably, her action amplifies her mother’s choice at the start of the story: each character contests colonial violence by breaking from conventions of feminine expression, while continuing to claim femininity. Paulina helps to establish a new model of femininity for her children, by fleeing violence to preserve her family, which Theresa expands upon when she takes on a more overtly military aim of carrying news to L’Ouverture, with the ultimate desire of protecting family and country. Broadly, then, S. emphasizes that Theresa’s family profoundly influences who she is, without leaving the mother in control of the daughter’s identity. Indeed, the gap between the two suggests the limits to the parent’s ability to choose the child’s role, even when they are deeply attached to one another, and gestures to how the parent’s perpetual worry about the child affects the child, too, without suggesting that the child must ultimately defer to the parent’s authority.

Reading “Theresa” and “Lucy Nelson” together continues to elucidate how nineteenth-century texts treat the ways in which gender could become a site of conflict for families: these writers suggest that parents’ efforts to preserve particular gender roles for their children evoke tension between parents and children and, at times, between parents and the larger world. Such conflicts underscore the multiple understandings of gender that circulate, even within a single short story. For instance, through this conflict, the stories consider how gender may be something that feels deeply internal – in the case of “Lucy Nelson” characters feel a strong orientation to specific kinds of pleasures and acts that may not align with their assigned sex or gender roles – and also profoundly influenced by the family and broader culture around them. In both stories the turn to cross-dressing highlights that there’s been a break in the image of true womanhood: that the characters do not get to have the protection they are promised through femininity or that they are not crafting the image of femininity as tender and domestic. In effect, both texts are grappling with the impossibility of gendered norms: the parents cannot simply make Lucy or the French colonial soldiers eager to embrace these norms, and so ask the question whether casting these norms aside temporarily could be a way to move closer to them. The parents deploy cross-dressing to gain more control over what’s happening with their children’s gender roles, which thematically underscores their lack of control. Even those adults who treat their children’s femininity as natural and internal to them also believe in a need to engage in active construction or, to move closer to the stories’ idioms, in tending to these identities. At the same time, the stories underscore how different the parents’ responses can be; they have really different relations to these systems of radicalized and gendered power. Leslie ultimately imagines Lucy as needing to prove that they not only fit within, but even like, the existing system of gender in order to survive, whereas S. depicts how Theresa is under great threat from the existing systems of power and must navigate her own gendered role to survive by enacting change. In other words, while both stories imagine parents attempting to pass down dominant models of femininity to their children, “Lucy Nelson” treats nonnormative gender expression as punishment and violence as care, while “Theresa” explores the possibility that nonnormative gender performance and expression can offer affirming means of care.

My interest in how both stories frame the characters’ efforts to pass down particular versions of gender through their children as a form of parental care stems, in part, from ongoing anti-trans attacks on gender-affirming care. The deep conflict between anti-trans legislation that purports to benefit children and well-supported research that gender affirming significantly improves trans children’s mental-health outcomes draws my attention to the ways in which “Lucy Nelson” and “Theresa” explore what it means to care for gender-nonconforming children.Footnote ²³ While of course acknowledging that these stories do not anticipate the specific forms of medical support under attack today, read together these texts do suggest that two hundred years ago writers were exploring how to represent the roles parents could play in affirming or denying children’s gender. And they show us that, much like today, some writers justified or even glorified efforts to impose gender conformity as a form of tenderness, while others articulated how refusing someone’s gender is part and parcel of dehumanizing violence. Indeed, these stories suggest that anti-trans activists today redeploy familiar strategies for dehumanizing people in denying their gender and, at the same time, mark this violence as care or concern.

In a recent episode of the C19 podcast, Eagen Dean underscored the value of attending to the specific, varied versions of gender that surface in nineteenth-century literature by arguing that “the long and ongoing history of trans life sits in contrast to a firm cultural and political refusal to acknowledge that transness has any history at all.”Footnote ²⁴ Revisiting “Theresa” and “Lucy Nelson” offers one way to address these calls, as both texts speak to the longer history of gender nonconformity and efforts to impose conformity, without suggesting that we can neatly collapse the identities or experiences of such characters as Lucy and Theresa with those of people today. In particular, “Lucy Nelson” exemplifies how nineteenth-century literature reinscribes dominant gender ideals, and also registers the various forms of pain that can arise when children see their performance of gender become a subject of amusement. “Theresa,” meanwhile, tells a story about the suffering that emerges when parents see their children excluded from the gender that the parents hope to instill in their children, as well as when children absorb parental fears so that children know that, whatever they do, their enactment of gender can hurt their parents.