Tennessee's Partner

Friendship is a main theme of “Tennessee’s Partner” and provides a lens through which to examine the story’s central conflict. The story takes place in an era when deeply intimate relationship between partners of the same sex were relatively common. While these relationships, sometimes called “romantic friendships,” could be long-lasting and life-defining and may have included some physical intimacies and cohabitation, they were not considered erotic or threatening to heterosexual marriages. “Tennessee’s Partner” explores a friendship of this kind, which, observed through the eyes of townsfolk in a mining camp, elevates not only the relationship’s participants but also those around them.

Harte titles the story with a reference to the central relationship, but the meaning of the word “partner” changes as the narrator’s understanding of the relationship becomes clearer. At first, the narrator implies that the partner is Tennessee’s criminal partner, but by the end, the term encompasses a deeper relationship that feels more like a life partnership. The centrality of the relationship in the life of Tennessee’s partner is evident in everything from his attempt to bribe the judge on Tennessee’s behalf, to his grief after Tennessee’s death, to his reunion (real or imagined) with