"The Sea Will Make a Man of Him?" Hypervirility, Effeminacy, and the Figure of the Queer Pirate in the Popular Imagination from the Early Eighteenth-Century to Hollywood.
I.
1The figure of Captain Jack Sparrow, charismatic rogue and best pirate ever, has captured the cinema audience like no other pirate before him, it seems. Ask anyone what they think about Pirates of the Caribbean, and their response will very likely be centred on Johnny Depp's flamboyant performance. Sparrow's insistence on status ("It's Captain Sparrow!"), on physical prowess, his skills in navigation and his having a bride in every port seem to mark him out as the typically virile pirate familiar to us from so many pirate movies of the twentieth century.[1]James Robert Parish’s reference guide, listing all theatrical feature films, television movies and sound serials featuring pirates from 1914-1991, focuses entirely on the “derring-do, courage and right of might”-appeal of the manly pirate-hero and manages to ignore all campier or downright queer filmic, theatrical, musical or operatic incarnations of this figure (1995: 1). Similarly, while his introduction meticulously (if quite superficially) lists the general literary heritage of piracy, mutiny and seafaring since Daniel Defoe’s adventure novels, it omits such famous studies of all-male society on board a ship as Melville’s Billy Budd, Sailor (1849). For a brilliant reading of the homosexual trajectories of the latter, see the chapter in Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet (1990). Yet from the start, Sparrow's virility sits oddly with his other signature character traits: his failure as a leader, his preference of negotiation to open fight ("Why fight when you can negotiate? All one needs is the proper leverage."), his slightly drunken swagger and mannered gesticulation, his mixture of elaborate wordplay and slurry pronunciation, let his demonstrative virility look like an act. Indeed, his performance of pirate manliness forever hesitates – almost uncannily, always hilariously – between hypervirility and effeminacy.[2]Prompted by this oscillating performance, Heike Steinhoff, too, explores the “queer positionalities” of Jack Sparrow as well as offering a queer reading of the seemingly securely heterosexual couple Will Turner and Elizabeth Swann. Where does this ambiguous style of masculinity come from, and what (apart from the fascination this very ambiguity holds) is its particular appeal?
2While Depp himself claims to have modelled Jack Sparrow on rock-star legend Keith Richards and, less prominently, on the womanizing cartoon-skunk Pepé Le Pew, drawing on their decadent outlaw image and over-the-top virility respectively, I propose to explore an alternative model: the pirate as an ambiguously gendered figure in the popular imagination from the early eighteenth century until its most recent Hollywood incarnation. At the very moment that the Golden Age of Piracy was over, the figure of the pirate entered the popular imagination as a fascinating anti-hero who habitually transgressed the limits set by society. In this essay I am concerned with exploring precisely these limits of what counted as normative and successful masculinity at that time. While sea-faring was widely believed to ”make” a man – in terms of financial success, military career and, more generally, of character – apparently much could go wrong on board a ship. The sea will make a man of him? Not always, if we take into account the myriad of cross-dressed women, effeminate gentleman-captains, inhumanly brutal first mates or sodomitical sailors that abound in popular literature from street ballads and sensational rogue-biographies to Smollett's Roderick Random (1749) and beyond. Drawing predominantly on Captain Johnson's General History of the Pirates (1724), a collection of factual and fictional biographical accounts, this essay will show that much of the fascination the pirates held for the eighteenth-century audience rested on their – at times highly ambiguous – gender performances. Exploring the gender history of the pirate figure can tell us much about how Depp's performance in Pirates of the Carribean works, and that it is this gender ambiguity that holds the audience in a spell, now as much as then.
II.
3The story of Britain as a naval power is a success story. Beyond the material impact of sea trade on the economic and cultural life at home, "it is a story of what binds and unites the nation, a story in which the country believes its best qualities are on display," as John Peck asserts in his study on Maritime Fiction (27). The naval supremacy of Britain was and to an extent still is a matter of national pride. The loud chanting of "Rule, Britannia" (1740) at international sports events, for example, illustrates that this connection between maritime dominance and national pride is alive even today. In the eighteenth century, enlightenment values such as liberty, freedom of expression and unrestricted development of liberal thought were linked with maritime trading powers like Holland or England (see Brown). And indeed, naval historiography up to our days likes to stress the intimate connection between trade, maritime warfare, the circulation of capital and credit, and a progressive society: "The intellectual, artistic and technological achievements flowed [...] from the freedoms necessarily accompanying merchant power. Liberty, tolerance and wealth unlocked natural genius." (Padfield 184)
4How much this naval success story contributed to the political process of ”forging the nation” (Colley), becomes clear when we look at eighteenth-century statements such as the following by Lord Halifax from 1694, who asserted that, "[t]he first article of an Englishman's political creed must be, that he believeth in the sea." Half a century later, Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke characterized his country men as "amphibious animals," who "must occasionally come on shore: but the water is more properly our element, and in it [...] as we find our greatest security, so we find our greatest force." (Idea of a Patriot King, 1749) During the eighteenth century the navy became so important for the country that the future Duke of Wellington described it in 1808 "as the characteristic and constitutional force of Britain" (quoted in Peck 27-28).
5In naval historiography as well as in biographies and fictional accounts, this story was being retold again and again over the course of the century. Invariably, the narrative follows the pattern of sailors as men taking control of and dominating their environment. Be it the triumph of superior naval strategy or the triumph of trade – the maritime story is always about successful commercial enterprise, about seeing an opportunity and seizing it. Encoded in these stories, in other words, is a distinctly middle-class ideology and identity that is increasingly regarded as an expression of the national character. Also inscribed in this "energetic, and money-making spirit" (Peck 4) is, I would argue, a specifically middle-class notion of manliness. Life on board a ship, already an exclusively male environment, fosters culturally masculine qualities such as aggression and risk-taking, and requires physical prowess. As Peck puts it, "Life at sea is [...] a life built upon the notions of manliness, in which strength is the only quality that really matters." (5) Stories about seafaring, both fictional and historical, can thus be seen as a cultural site where an idealized male identity is being constructed in terms of nation, class, and gender.[3]Add to this, race or ethnicity, but since I will not be dealing with either the slave trade or the seafarers' contacts with native people on Caribbean or Polynesian islands, they remain at the margins of my focus here.