Joseph and His Friend: A Story of Pennsylvania

Plot

The title page carries a quote from Shakespeare's sonnets, Number 144 "Two loves I have of comfort and despair":

Joseph Aster, a young farmer in his twenties, marries Julia Blessing, a wealthy woman. While returning from a visit to her father, he is involved in a train crash, and in consequence meets Philip Held, who becomes his somewhat older and more worldly friend. As the story progresses, Joseph comes to recognize his wife's manipulative nature and begins to develop a reciprocated romantic attachment to Philip. This is evidenced in Philip's profession of love and "a man's perfect friendship".

Publication history

Joseph and His Friend was the last of Taylor's four novels. It was in the genre then known as the "New England novel". It was the only one to be serialized before publication in book form, with its 33 chapters appearing in The Atlantic Monthly beginning in January 1870 and ending in December. The book was reprinted eight times by 1893, while a German translation was published in 1879 and 1900, and once more in England in 1903. Taylor also wrote a large amount of poetry and travel literature, and later turned to translation, particularly that of Goethe's Faust.

Literary significance and criticism

Near the end of the 19th century, poet and critic Richard Henry Stoddard, in a brief biography of Taylor, described Joseph and His Friend as "an indictment of rural poverty in Pennsylvania". It has been called "America's first homosexual novel". Taylor's prefatory note to the reader is opaque:

To those who prefer quiet pictures of life to startling incidents, the attempt to illustrate the development of character to the mysteries of an elaborate plot, and the presentation of men and women in their mixed strength and weakness to the painting of wholly virtuous ideals and wholly evil examples: who are as interested in seeing moral and intellectual forces at work in a simple country community as on a more conspicuous place of human action: who believe in the truth and tenderness of man's love for man, as of man's love for woman: who recognize the trouble which confused ideals of life and the lack of high and intellect culture bring upon a great portion of our country population,–to all such, no explanation of this volume is necessary. Others will not read it.

The book was not well received and became the author's least successful and most disliked novel. However, a contemporary reviewer in The Examiner wrote that "although Mr Taylor travels over familiar ground, and has no notable discovery to disclose, the people who figure in his novel are so interesting in themselves and are so agreeably introduced to our notice, that we cannot grudge them a hearty welcome." The novel's failure in comparison with his work in other genres may have caused Taylor to stop writing novels.

A later critic of Taylor, Albert Smyth, found Joseph and His Friend to be "an unpleasant story of mean duplicity and painful mistakes. The characters are shallow and their surroundings mean. There is not a single pleasing situation or incident in the book." According to Robert K. Martin, the novel "is quite explicit in its adoption of a political stance toward homosexuality". As he summarizes the story:

[Joseph] meets Philip Held, with whom he falls in love and who explains to him "the needs" that are often unfulfilled in conventional society. Philip argues for the "rights" of those "who cannot shape themselves according to the common-place pattern of society."

Taylor's biographer Paul C. Wermuth wrote that homosexual themes could not be overlooked in the novel, but "it is by no means certain that the book should be interpreted this way."

Rob Ridinger writes that male friendship was viewed differently in the 1800s than it is today, and the term “homosexual” did not appear in English until twenty years after the publication of Joseph and His Friend. He believes the novel belongs to the nineteenth-century genre of non-sexual romantic friendships between men, to which such authors as Mark Twain, Bret Harte, and Henry James also contributed.