Describing Desire: Ekphrasis and Queer Sexuality in Fitz-Greene Halleck’s “Red Jacket”

This article analyzes Fitz-Greene Halleck’s “Red Jacket” (1828), a poem that stages interracial intimacy using a work of art: Robert Walter Weir’s 1828 portrait of the Seneca orator Sagoyewatha. I propose that the literary device of ekphrasis enabled US authors to imagine queer contact borne by looking. By celebrating Sagoyewatha’s rhetorical eloquence as well as his physical appearance, the poem perpetuates an increasingly racialized spectatorship associated with the aesthetic category of the picturesque and the pseudo-scientific practice of phrenology. The poem’s surprisingly eroticized scopophilia is inextricable from a pervasive belief in the ability to scrutinize bodies for signs of inner character. As the poem’s lyric persona gazes upon a painting rather than a human being, his homosocial admiration for the sitter fetishizes the Indigenous figure as an emblem of heroic masculinity. The poem’s ambivalence toward its subject, I claim, derives from the conflict between its interest in Sagoyewatha’s supposed virility and its obstinate commitment to the trope of the “Vanishing Indian” associated with the Indian Removal era. Ultimately, the article develops a method for reading ekphrastic writing as an archive of queer feeling prior to the “invention of homosexuality” typically dated to the 1870s.