Carson McCullers--Reflections in a Golden Eye (1941)

This novel, McCullers’ second after The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, is set on a military base in the South in the 1930s.  It follows two marriages—that of Captain Penderton and his adulterous wife Leonora, and their neighbors, the sickly Alison Langdon and her husband (and Leonora’s lover) Major Morris Langdon, through the heart attacks and death of Alison at a sanatorium, and Captain Penderton’s growing obsession with the enlisted man Private Ellgee Williams, whom he catches in his wife’s room watching her sleep and shoots and kills him. 

As the opening paragraph explains, “There is a fort in the South where a few years ago a murder was committed.  The participants of this tragedy were: two officers, a soldier, two women, a Filipino, and a horse” (3).  Throughout the novel, the themes of sexual deviance and Southern identity frequently emerge, and it is at times implied that they are related in some way.  Though Leonora is “not a pure-bred Southerner,” she is “Southern enough” in her ways to offend her husband’s sensibilities (12-3).  Captain Penderton seems to make distinctions between Leonora’s southern-ness and his own “pure-bred” Southern identity—for the Captain, his southern heritage is distinguished as a “history of barbarous splendor, ruined poverty, and family hauteur….the Captain set exaggerated store by the lost past” (71-2).  Interestingly, the distinctions which the Captain makes between levels of southern identity are through food.  Leonora’s southern-ness can be seen in her dirty stove—“Their gas stove was not crusted with generations of dirt as her grandmothers’ had been, but then it was by no means clean” (13) and the “plain, heavy Southern meals” which Leonora and Major Langdon enjoy, unlike the “subtle cookery of New Orleans” and the “balanced harmony of French food” which the Captain prefers (113).  Leonora’s southern identity is a class-based one, while the Captain’s is one of aesthetic heritage. 

Specifically, Leonora’s problematic identity is based on a sense of sexual excess—not only does she herself take lovers, but she is described as “a little feeble-minded” (16), a quality which endears her to some (such as the Major) and which simply reinforces her husband’s misogyny.  Captain Penderton from the beginning of the novel is described in queer terms, such as “having a penchant for becoming enamoured of his wife’s lovers” (11).  While his own understanding of his sexuality is in terms of balance—“Sexually the Captain obtained within himself a delicate balance between the male and female elements,” this balance is one of infertility: he possesses “the susceptibilities of both the sexes and the active powers of neither” (10).  Throughout the course of the novel, he develops a growing obsession with Private Ellgee Williams, one which drives him to stalk the soldier and the homo-ness of the world of the enlisted man.  Unlike his own home, which is pervaded by the feminine sensuality of his sexually active wife, Captain Penderton longs for the world of the barracks, “two thousand men living together in this great quadrangle” (97), “the neat cots placed in a row, the bare floors, and stark curtainless windows” (118).  The masculine aesthetics for which Captain Penderton longs are acknowledged as a place of queer behavior (122).  Ironically, by the novel’s end the Captain’s obsessive desire has feminized him, as Williams’ invasion of his bedroom reduces the Captain to “clutch[ing] the front of his wrapper and press[ing] his hand against his breast” (126).  The perverse homosocial connection which the Captain realizes exists between himself and the soldier through the sleeping figure of his wife drives him to murder the soldier in the last scene in the novel.

One reading of the novel would identify in Private Williams a root of sexual deviancy, one which the Captain kills in a futile attempt to uproot such perversion.  Private Williams is completely of a world of “homo-ness,” as he was raised in an exclusively male household by a father who preached that “women carried in them a deadly and catching disease which made men blind, crippled, and doomed to hell” (18-9).  Amusingly, he hears similar ideas in the homosocial world of the military in their warnings against venereal disease, and the result is that “Private Williams had never willingly touched, or looked at, or spoken to a female since he was eight years old” (19).  With this foundation, the Private’s vigils at the bedside of the sleeping Leonora seems to be his own flirting with sexual deviance, as he approaches the altar of what he understands as the root of sexual sin. 

That such a hegemonic institution as the military should be designated as such a queer space is perhaps best summarized by a conversation between the two officers over dinner: “You mean…that any fulfillment obtained at the expense of normalcy is wrong, and should not be allowed to bring happiness.  In short, it is better, because it is morally honorable, for the square peg to keep scraping about the round hole rather than to discover and use the unorthodox square that would fit it?” (114).  Major Langdon agrees, and Captain Penderton disagrees.  Nevertheless, they both acknowledge the existence of what Tennessee Williams (in his 1971 afterword to the novel) describes as “something almost too incredible and shocking to talk about….the incommunicable something that we shall have to call mystery which is so inspiring of dread” (133).  In McCullers’ vision of the South (which Tennessee Williams ties to a larger “Gothic School” of southern writers), there is this intuition of unspoken decadence which these writers are able to articulate and evoke in their work, and it is this acknowledgement of the dreadful and mysterious which makes them so popular.

Erskine Caldwell--Tobacco Road (1932)

Toward the end of Tobacco Road, preacher Sister Bessie Rice, explains why it’s better to preach against things rather than for things, because “That’s what the people like to hear about.  They want to hear about the bad things” (161).  This may be the theme for the entire novel, as the characters in the novel live in inescapably desperate poverty.  Tobacco Road is a trap—though it was once, a few generations ago, the successful place of transport for tobacco, the changeover to sharecropping cotton resulted in leached soil, an inequitable sharecropping system, the growth of cotton factories, and eventually the pullout of the boss, which resulted in the general collapse of the area.  With a very few exceptions, the only road for survival is escape—of the seventeen children born by Jeeter and Ada Lester, only two have remained at home: the harelipped and hypersexualized Ellie Mae and the simpleminded Dude, whose only interests are throwing a ball against the side of the house and finding a functioning automobile horn to honk.

Caldwell seems to be making a statement about those who have been left behind by industrialization and capitalism, as even those who are able to put in a crop can’t win: “A bale to the acre was the goal of every cotton farmer around Fuller; but the boll weevil and hard summer rains generally cut the crop in half.  And on the other hand, if it was a good year for the raising of cotton, the price would probably drop lower than it had before.  Not many men felt like working all year for six-or seven-cent cotton in the fall” (174).  Jeeter Lester is worse off than those, though, as he hasn’t planted a crop in several years, as all possible sources of credit have dried up.  The only possibility left for the Lesters is the county poor-farm—or, as the novel ends, death by fire.  Often, Jeeter refuses to leave for better economic prospects, however, because he claims that the land is in his blood.  Even then, however, the surviving son, Dude, seems to be haunted by the dead Jeeter, as he notes at the novel’s end that he thinks he might see about putting in a cotton crop, like his dad always wanted to.  The novel ends on this sense of absolute futility.

Nevertheless, what’ s most interesting to me are the presentation of female ugliness and sexuality in the novel.  Both Ellie Mae and Sister Bessie Rose are women whose faces are grotesque: Ellie Mae’s cleft lip is such that her “upper lip had an opening a quarter of an inch wide that divided one side of her mouth into unequal parts; the slit came to an abrupt end almost under her left nostril.  The upper gum was low, and because her gums were always fiery red, the opening in her lip made her look as if her mouth were bleeding profusely” (21).  Sister Bessie May, the preaching woman, is in fact “much better-looking than most women in the sand hills, except for her nose.  Bessie’s nose had failed to develop properly.  There was no bone in it, and there was no top to it.  The nostrils were exposed, and Dude had once said that when he looked at her nose it was like looking down the end of a double-barrel shotgun” (45).  Both of them are hypersexual—Ellie Mae doesn’t seem to talk, but only dawdles behind chinaberry trees, emerging to jump on men such as Lov with an “excited, feline agility” (34); Sister Bessie can’t keep her hands off of Dude when kneeling to pray with him, and the two of them shortly end up embracing and rubbing against each other (51).  Further, in the hotel scene—a scene so absurd as to echo a Restoration play—Sister Bessie is taken to several different rooms throughout the night, all of which have occupied beds (and it’s implied that she engaged in sexual activity throughout the night in these different occupied rooms).  

There’s a Faulknerian comparison of women to cows in the novel, as Lov’s complaint that his wife Pearl—the pretty Lester daughter, whom Jeeter approved marrying Lov at the age of twelve—as it’s considered as unnatural for a woman to reject male sexuality in the same way that Lester’s cow was worthless once it “wouldn’t take no freshening” (17).  In refusing to sleep in the same bed as Lov, Pearl is frequently characterized as “queer.”  (She’s also Ada’s daughter by someone other than Jeeter; all that’s known is that her father was that he was “from Carolina and on his way to Texas” (31)).  So, while a properly natural woman responds to a man’s advances, it’s only a monstrous woman who expresses or acts on her own sexual desires, as we see with Sister Bessie and Ellie Mae.  

This insistence on the “natural” is related to the role that God is understood to play in the novel’s deprivation.   Jeeter’s concept of the unshakeable divine plan for the farmer is reminiscent of Anse Bundren in As I Lay Dying, such as when he explains that, “When He aims for something to be always a-moving, He makes it long ways, like a road or a horse or a wagon, when He aims for something to stay put, He makes it up-and-down ways, like a tree or a man” (36).  Thus, anything that doesn’t work for Jeeter can be blamed on divine plan.  Bessie, on the other hand, represents an interestingly active interpretation of the divine.  Not only does God’s plan reveal itself to her to align nicely with her own desires—such as her desire to marry Dude—but she seems to consider God as finite, or having limited abilities.  When, for example, Jeeter asks her to pray for Pearl, she suggests that it might be more successful if she was to talk to Pearl herself, as “I expect I know more about what to tell her than He does, because I been a married woman up to the past summer….I expect I know all about it.  God wouldn’t know what to tell her” (48). Religion, like mules and guano (and women), is simply another resource available to those on Tobacco Road, to be used or blamed according to the individual’s ability and predilection.

Dorothy Allison--Bastard Out of Carolina (1992)

This novel tells the story of Ruth Anne “Bone” Boatwright, a young girl in South Carolina who grows up the bastard child of Anney Boatwright.  The Boatwrights are not the deserving poor which Allison writes elsewhere are romanticized in stories of the South; rather, they are more aligned with the Slatterys in Gone with the Wind, the “trash down on the mud-stained cabins, fighting with the darkies and stealing ungratefully from our betters, stupid, coarse, born to shame and death” (206).  Elsewhere, Allison explains that she wrote the novel “because, ultimately, the way to claim my family’s pride and tragedy, and the embattled sexuality I had fashioned on a base of violence and abuse” (“A Matter of Class”).  In this novel, Bone grows up amid dire poverty, deprivation, and violence.  Molested and beaten savagely by her stepfather, Bone survives with the help of her extended family of aunts and uncles who are similarly trapped by poverty and violence.

There are no easy answers in this novel.  People are trapped by decisions they were too young to realize they were making when they made them, whether by having children at 15 or by petty theft even earlier.  Anney can’t stay away from her husband, Glenn, even after seeing him rape her 13-year-old daughter.  Bone’s beloved Uncle Earl is a womanizer who can’t stay out of jail.  Still, there’s a fierce sense of familial solidarity which is (to me, at least) uniquely southern, as the way in which these characters claim their Boatwright identity seems to be their most fundamental sense of personal identification.

Reading this for a Queer South class, there’s certainly plenty to be said about sexuality and sexual identity in the novel.  In “A Matter of Class,” Dorothy Allison is quite specific about her own use of the word “queer” in describing her own sexual identity:

I use the word queer to mean more than lesbian.  Since I first used it in 1980 I have always meant it to imply  that I am not only lesbian but a transgressive lesbian-femme, masochistic, as sexually aggressive as the women I seek out, and as pornographic in my imagination and sexual activities as the heterosexual hegemony has ever believed….My sexual identity is intimately constructed by my class and regional background, and much of the hatred directed at my sexual preference is class hatred—however much people, feminists in particular, like to pretend this is not a factor.

Allison does not shy away from troubling sexuality in Bastard: in addition to the scenes of molestation and rape, Bone’s emergent sexuality is one in her sexual fantasies usually incorporate violence and danger, and at times she fantasizes about being watched while Daddy Glen is beating her.  It is this frankness, however, which I think gives the novel its strength.  While the novel’s ending is hopeful to a certain extent—Bone lives with her Aunt Raylene, escaping the violence and danger of Daddy Glenn’s house—it’s certainly not an overly optimistic one. 

For my own research purposes, there are many places in the novel in which ugliness appears.  Boatwright family appearance is itself a physical marker, one of tragedy is recorded on the body.  After Anney’s husband Lyle dies, her sister Ruth notes that, “Nothing will ever hit you this hard….Now you look like a Boatwright….Now you got the look.  You’re as old as you’re ever gonna get” (8).  Bone herself identifies as ugly: “No part of me was that worshipful, dreamy-eyed storybook girlchild, no part of me was beautiful” (208).  To Bone, her ugliness is a marker of her unwanted state: “Love would make me beautiful; a father’s love would purify my heart, turn my bitter soul sweet, and lighten my Cherokee eyes” (209).  Bone sees her own inner rage and bitterness as written on her body, a vicious cycle in which she’s hated for her ugliness, a hatred which in turn feeds her own inner rage and keeps her angry eyes dark.

Even more fascinating to me is the story of Shannon Pearl which is embedded in the novel, a story which I’ve frequently seen anthologized as a stand-alone story.  Shannon Pearl is the almost albino-looking child of parents deeply involved in evangelical Christianity, as her mother manages a Christian bookstore and sews costumes for gospel singers, while her father books acts on the gospel music circuit.  Shannon’s ugliness is a threatening one which people find it difficult to turn away from; Bone compares her need to “hang around what Granny called ‘that strange and ugly child’” to a compulsion to pick at scabs (156).  In one description, Bone sees Shannon, “Looking back at me from between her mother’s legs, Shannon was wholly monstrous, a lurching hunched creature shining with sweat and smug satisfaction” (155)—a description which to me seems to posit Shannon as a monstrous vagina dentata creature, an incarnation of the monstrous feminine. 

Even more importantly, Shannon is just as ugly on the inside.  Bone notes, “I had the idea that she was so ugly on the outside, it was only reasonable that Shannon would turn out to be saintlike when you got to know her,” and explains that such a characterization is what would happen in storybooks (157).  However, Shannon is angry and mean, getting drunk at gospel shows and calling Bone out on her poverty and dependence.  Shannon’s death is just as monstrous as her appearance while alive: at a barbeque, she plays with lighter fluid and is almost immediately turned to ashes, as “all around her skull her fine hair stood up in a crown of burning glory” (201).  The story of Shannon Pearl is a fascinating amalgamation of the monstrous feminine and the monstrous Christian, obsession, love and disgust.  In some way, it connects female ugliness with devotion and religion, and her death in somewhat seems to illuminate Bone’s earlier description of religious devotion: “This was what the gospel was meant to do—make you hate yourself and love yourself at the same time, make you ashamed and glorified” (136).  Shannon’s life and death seems to personify the combination of shame and glory.

James Baldwin--Go Tell It On the Mountain (1952)

Baldwin’s first novel, it opens with John’s recollections of church and his church community.  The first part, “The Seventh Day,” shows John’s anger toward his stepfather, Gabriel (particularly given Gabriel’s obvious favoritism for his brother, Roy), and follows him to church, where he meets Elisha, an older boy who encourages him to turn his trouble over to God.  In Part Two, “The Prayers of the Saints,” the prayers of Gabriel, his sister Florence, and his current wife (and John’s mother) Elizabeth.  Part Three returns to the church service, where John has a dream vision which results in his religious awakening.  John’s terrifying dream vision of Hell leads him to conclude that “the heart was a fearful place” (207), a statement which might be used to summarize the novel’s overall theme.  

Over the course of the novel, the familial relations are revealed: John is Elizabeth’s child by Richard, her lover in New York who was falsely arrested for robbery, who committed suicide after realizing how doomed he was in the system.  In Gabriel’s section, we learn that he fathered a child named Royal (not the one in the first section, who was stabbed) by a woman named Esther, and that he was also married previously to a woman named Deborah, who died barren.  Gabriel fathered Royal while Deborah was still alive, and refused to help Esther once she discovered she was pregnant.  

The novel addresses themes of righteousness, desire, and forgiveness through strong biblical allusions, especially in character names such as Gabriel, Esther, and John, and uses rhythmic language which is often evocative of the cadence of sermons.  There’s also a recurrent subtle theme of homosociality which comes just to the edge of homoeroticism, in John’s persistence references to the sin of Ham and seeing his father’s nakedness, and his relationship with Elisha.  Throughout John’s nightmare vision, Elisha prays for him, which John senses, such as when “In his heart there was a sudden yearning tenderness for holy Elisha; desire, sharp and awful as a reflecting knife” (194-5).  

Though these themes are interesting, what’s most interesting to me in light of my own work is the characterization of the women in the novel.  Ironically, it is Gabriel who is most often referred to as a “pretty man,”[1] while women are often described as ugly.  In fact, in John’s apocalyptic vision, Sin itself is personified as an ugly woman: “ he saw a woman, very old and black, coming toward them, staggering on the crooked stones.  She was drunk, and dirty, and very old, and her mouth was bigger than his mother’s mouth, or his own; her mouth was loose and wet, and he had never seen anyone so black” (198).  Once Esther announces her pregnancy to Gabriel, and threatens to tell of his infidelity to the community, Esther suddenly becomes ugly: “Her face was cold and hard—ugly; she had never been so ugly before” (132).  

The most intriguing characterization of an ugly woman is that of Deborah, Gabriel’s first wife, who was gang raped by a group of white men before she married Gabriel.  Her history is marked on her body:

there was her legend, her history, which would have been enough, even had she not been so wholly unattractive, to put her forever beyond the gates of any honorable man’s desire….she moved, therefore, through their small community like a woman mysteriously visited by God, like a terrible example of humility, or like a holy fool.  No ornaments ever graced her body; there was about her no tinkling, no shining, and no softness.  No ribbon falsified her blameless and implacable headgear; on her woolen head there was only the barest minimum of oil. (98)

Her history has interfered with her gender expression: the sexual crime perpetrated against her has made her barren, unsexing her to a certain extent.  Her ordeal has made her less human, to a certain extent, as her community suspects that she might be “the greatest saint among them, the Lord’s peculiar treasure and most holy vessel” (99).  Her biblical counterpart is the only female judge mentioned in the Bible, and Deborah is certainly set apart from the other women because of her past; she exemplifies the kind of history of racial violence written on the body as described by Patricia Yeager.

---

[1] See, e.g., 137.