2013/2014, I semestre Corso di laurea magistrale ... - people.unica.it

LETTERATURA ANGLOAMERICANA (L-LIN/11)
Anno accademico: 2013/2014, I semestre
Corso di laurea magistrale (30 ore, 6 CFU)
Dott. Fiorenzo Iuliano
Queer Modernisms
Il corso, che sarà tenuto in lingua inglese, intende analizzare una serie di testi prodotti negli Stati
Uniti nei primi decenni del Novecento che problematizzano e mettono in discussione le categorie
tradizionali di genere e di identità sessuale. In particolare, le lezioni si soffermeranno sui seguenti
temi, esaminati in relazione ai testi letterari analizzati: (auto)rappresentazione delle donne e
dell’identità femminile e crisi del ruolo maschile tradizionale nella società e nella cultura degli Stati
Uniti agli inizi del Novecento; l’omosessualità come nuovo paradigma di identificazione o come strumento
di radicale decostruzione delle categorie di gender e sessualità; rapporto tra identità sessuale
e identità etnica.
Bibliografia
Testi primari
1. Henry James, “The Beast in the Jungle” (1903)
2. Gertrude Stein, Q.E.D. (1903)
3. Claude McKay, “The Clinic” (1923)
4. Ernest Hemingway, Fiesta. The Sun Also Rises (1926)
5. Nella Larsen, Passing (1929)
Bibliografia teorico-critica
1. Rita Barnard, “Modern American Fiction”, in Walter B. Kalaidjian, ed., The Cambridge Companion
to American Modernism, Cambridge UP, Cambridge, 2005, pp. 39-67.
2. Raman Selden, Peter Widdowson, Peter Brooker, “Gay, lesbian and queer theory”, in A
Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory (5th edition), Harlow, Longman, 2005, pp.
243-266.
3. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, from “Introduction: Axtiomatic”, in Epistemology of the Closet, University
of California Press, Berkeley-Los Angeles, 1990, pp. 1-22.
4. Eric Haralson, “‘The Other Half Is the Man’: the queer modern triangle of Gertrude Stein, Ernest
Hemingway, and Henry James”, in Henry James and Modernity, Cambridge UP, Cambridge,
2003, pp. 173-204.
5. Marshall Boswell, Carl Rollyson, eds, Encyclopedia of American Literature. 1607 to the Present,
Facts on File, New York, 2008 (le voci su H. James, G. Stein, C. McKay, E. Hemingway,
N. Larsen).
Avvertenze per il corso e per l’esame
a. Dato il carattere monografico del corso, la frequenza è assolutamente consigliata. Il corso si svolgerà
in maniera seminariale: per questo motivo, la partecipazione attiva di studenti e studentesse alle
lezioni sarà valutata ai fini dell’esame finale.
b. I romanzi e racconti devono essere letti nell'originale. All’esame si dovrà essere in grado di leggere
e tradurre qualunque parte del testo inglese. Di tutti i testi si richiede comunque una conoscenza
diretta, critica e dettagliata: vale a dire, non una generica cognizione della trama, o l’apprendimento
di un commento generale. Studenti/esse dovranno mostrare di orientarsi nei singoli testi ed essere in
grado di analizzarne e commentarne criticamente le specifiche articolazioni, con riferimento sia ad
altre parti del testo che alia bibliografia critica prescritta.
c. I testi di McKay e Stein e tutti i testi critici saranno forniti dal docente in fotocopia.
d. I testi di James, Hemingway e Larsen sono facilmente reperibili in biblioteca e nelle librerie. Queste
sono le collocazioni nelle biblioteche di ateneo:
- Henry James, “The Beast in the Jungle”. Il testo è incluso nelle seguenti raccolte: Fifteen Short Stories
(Biblioteca di Scienze del Linguaggio; collocazione: AMERICANO NARR JAMEH 004 I); Selected
Short Stories, a cura di Quentin Anderson (Biblioteca Dante Alighieri; collocazione: DEPOSITO
C.A1 2473); The Portable Henry James, a cura di Morton Dauwen Zabel (Biblioteca Dante Alighieri;
collocazione: DEPOSITO C.A1 2410)
- Ernest Hemingway, Fiesta: Biblioteca di Scienze del linguaggio; collocazione: AMERICANO NARR
HEMIE 007 X
- Nella Larsen, Passing: Biblioteca di Scienze del linguaggio, collocazione: AMERICANO NARR
LARSN 001

2
RITA BARNARD
Modern American fiction
Introduction
There is no need for us to quarrel with Alfred Kazin when he writes in the
introduction to On Native Grounds (1942) that modern American fiction
is “at bottom only the expression” of American life in the late nineteenth
and early twentieth century. No one cause or project can be singled out
as the defining feature of this diverse body of writing. “Everything,” says
Kazin, “contributed to its formation.” Its roots were “nothing less than the
transformation of our society in the great seminal years after the War” and
its project was ultimately a cognitive one: “the need to learn what the reality
of life was in our modern era.” 1
The social transformation in question has been characterized in many different
ways, both before and since Kazin’s day. The historian Warren Susman
saw the period as marking a transition from a producer-capitalist culture
(with a focus on work, thrift, and self-denial) to a new culture of abundance
(with a focus on leisure, spending, and self-fulfillment). This broad shift, he
observed, was partly the consequence of new communications media, which
affected not only the distribution and circulation of goods and ideas, but
altered perceptions of time and place and thereby changed consciousness
itself. The novelist John Dos Passos, whose U. S. A. trilogy (1938) is a veritable
archive of the technological, political, and linguistic changes that shaped
the nation from the turn of the century to the Great Depression, saw these
years in terms of the “crystallization” of monopoly capitalism out of an
earlier, more individualistic competitive capitalism. 2
But it is an older writer, Sherwood Anderson, who gives us the most
vivid thumbnail sketch of the changes from which modern American fiction
emerged. In Winesburg, Ohio (1922), Anderson observes that the readers
of his day may already find it difficult to understand the sensibilities of
people whose lives were shaped by an earlier world of harsh agricultural
labor:
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The coming of industrialism, attended by all the roar and rattle of affairs, the
shrill cries of millions of new voices that have come among us from overseas, the
going and coming of trains, the growth of cities, the building of the interurban
car lines that weave in and out of towns and past farmhouses and . . . the
coming of the automobile has worked a tremendous change in the lives and in
the habits of thought of our people of Mid-America. Books, badly imagined and
written though they may be in the hurry of our times, are in every household,
magazines circulate by the millions of copies, newspapers are everywhere. In
our day a farmer standing by the stove in the store in his village has his mind
filled to overflowing with the words of other men ...[He] is brother to the
men of the cities, and if you listen you will find him talking as glibly and as
senselessly as the best city man of us all. 3
The “revolution” of modernity, as Anderson calls it, was not the exclusive
experience of urban sophisticates: it extended unevenly but inexorably across
the nation – even into the country store and into the minds of the folks who
still gathered around the woodstove to chat.
Now, it is easy to come up with a long line-up of writers – from Upton
Sinclair to John Dos Passos, from Theodore Dreiser to Nathanael West, and
from Abraham Cahan to Henry Roth – who have tackled such issues as
urbanization, industrialization, immigration, and the rise of the mass media
in their work. But to say that modern fiction takes these topics as its subject
matter does not fully address the way in which it might “express” its
historical moment, especially given the fact that this “moment” may not be
experienced everywhere in the same way, nor at the same pace. How exactly
did the transformation of modern life change narrative form? And does modern
fiction in fact provide that special knowledge about modern “reality” of
which Kazin speaks? Or is there something about modernity that disables
cognition, if not narrative itself?
In his “Literary Prophecy” of 1894, the novelist Hamlin Garland, taking
courage from what he saw as the positive evolution of society, predicted
the shape that the fiction of “modern man” was to take. He got
several things right, even though his belief in progress now makes his essay
seem like the product of a bygone age. Garland believed that the emergent
literature would react against the traditions of the past and attend fearlessly
to the uglier contemporary aspects of reality. Narrative techniques,
he predicted, would be streamlined: “Because the novels of the past were
long, involved, and given to discussion and comment upon the action,”
he observes, “so the novel of the future will be shorter” and less obvious
in its method. Its “lessons” will be brought out, not by explanation, but
“by placing before the reader the facts of life as they stand related to the
artist.” 4
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Though few modern writers, living in the wake of World War I and
the stock market crash of 1929, would have endorsed Garland’s optimistic
beliefs, there were certainly some who found in the speed, scale, and technological
inventiveness of the age a stimulus for new forms. Nathanael West,
for one, also imagined that the short novel would become the quintessential
American form, since it is more suited to a “hasty” people than the long
“Scandinavian” tomes of yesteryear. Modern works of fiction only had time
to “explode” like “cannon balls.” In a culture where “violence is idiomatic,”
where a brutal crime may not even make it to the front page of a newspaper,
there is no need to follow a Dostoyevsky in spending whole chapters providing
the psychological motivation “for one little murder.” A new kind of
fiction, adapted to an environment of screaming headlines, would have to be
devised, even if the writer had to turn to commercial forms like the comics
for inspiration.
If some American writers could, in a spirit of national bravado, dispense
with traditional narrative forms (or pretend to do so), the most important
European theorists of modern fiction, Georg Lukács and Walter Benjamin,
saw the decline of such forms as a cognitive and political crisis. For Lukács the
realist novel offered a way of understanding historical causality – the workings
of the entire social process – by representing the interaction of human
subjects and the objective world. When this dialectic vision is abandoned,
he argues, narration loses its dynamic quality: it becomes fixed either on the
subject or the object. The result is either an overemphasis on the inner psychological
world or an overemphasis on the external world. Antithetical though
these two strategies may seem, they are for Lukács identical in their presumption
of a static world: they tend to produce series of disjointed scenes and to
turn human lives into still lives. Moreover, while the traditional omniscient
narrator, deploying the retrospective vantage of the past tense, was able to
provide the reader with a sense of the overall direction and significance of the
action, the modernist writer, often using the present tense and experimental
points of view, is caught up in a flux of emotions, memories, and sense perceptions.
In Lukács’s view, this loss of an interpretive purchase on the world
cannot be offset by attaching a symbolic meaning to objects or incidents. In
fact, all of modernism’s technical experimentation seemed dangerous to him
in that it undermined the significance and transformative potential of human
action: hence the harsh prescriptiveness that characterizes his work. 5
Though more sympathetic to modernism than Lukács, Benjamin also
despaired of drawing any “lesson” or useful knowledge from modern fiction.
Experience itself, or so he declared in his “Storyteller” essay of 1936,
had “fallen in value”: its inherent meaningfulness and narratability had been
lost. Thus the soldiers who returned from the battlefields of the World War I
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had “grown silent, not richer – but poorer in communicable experience.”
But unlike Lukács, for whom the realist novel represented a cognitive ideal,
Benjamin regarded the novel itself as an early symptom of a crisis in narration.
While the storyteller, whom Benjamin locates in a pre-capitalist world
of artisanal production, could readily offer advice – the proverbial “moral of
the story” – to his auditors, the novelist, who emerges in a bourgeois world
of mechanized production and isolated consumption, can reveal the “meaning
of life” only at the conclusion of strenuous artistic labors. In the bustle
of the modern world, even this hard-won, synthetic meaning threatens to
disappear. For as mechanized production accelerates, the novel is gradually
replaced by “information” – by the shards of narrative we find in the newspaper.
Feeding on experiences that are in constant danger of obsolescence,
the fractured format of the daily news destroys our narrative abilities and
depreciates experience even further: “modern man no longer works at what
cannot be abbreviated.” 6 Thus brevity, the very quality that some American
writers celebrated as an exciting innovation, comes to be viewed in
Benjamin’s mournful meditation as a distressing symptom of a reified world.
With these initial reflections on modernist form in place, we are ready for
a thought experiment. In light of the terms set up so far, let us ask ourselves
what the most thoroughly “modern” American novel might be, and then
consider whether or not that novel can be viewed as a representative product
of the period. Or to put the question differently and more perversely: which
American novel would Georg Lukács have hated the most?
I vote that the prize should go – why not? (we are experimenting here) – to
Nathan Asch for Pay Day, published to no acclaim whatsoever in 1930. Let
me briefly describe its relevant qualities, before returning to broader considerations.
Pay Day is a compact novel: the action, such as it is, is confined
to a twelve-hour period, from the end of one workday to the dawn of the
next. Even so, it is episodic, lacking in any sense of cumulative significance.
The desultory character of the narration (which is mimicked in the disappointingly
plotless movie the main character goes to see midway through the
novel) is presented as an effect of the modern settings from which the various
chapters derive their titles: “The Subway,” “The Street,” “The Speakeasy,”
“The Taxi,” and so forth. In the chapter entitled “The L,” for instance,
the stream-of-consciousness narration records one trivial urban scene after
another in rapid succession; it mimics the passive, spectatorial experience
of the commuter, looking out at the passing cityscape from a fast-moving
train. Pay Day’s modernity can also be seen in its obvious economic concerns.
Though Asch’s novel is devoid of the Jazz Age glamor of, say, Fitzgerald’s fiction,
it is similarly concerned with the emerging ethos of consumption. The
novel’s antihero, a spotty young clerk called Jim Cowan, having received
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his pitifully small paycheck, feels compelled to hit the town and blow his
earnings on a date with a waitress. But since Cowan’s means are so petty, his
version of “nightlife” is entirely unromantic: it merely exacerbates his sense
of resentment. Indeed, the rapid oscillation of his emotions, which switch in
a matter of seconds from self-satisfaction to self-pity and then to aggression
is a symptom of the powerlessness of the white-collar flunkey, liable to be
fired at any minute.
But Pay Day, while clearly symptomatic of modernity, at times seems diagnostic
of it as well: it draws the reader’s attention to the way the distraction of
urban life impedes active political involvement. The novel takes place on the
night of August 23, 1927, the same night that anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti
were executed in Boston. Headlines, newsboys, and taxi-drivers constantly
remind Cowan of this significant political event. But the barrage of sense
impressions to which he is subjected make it impossible for him to reflect on
the implications of the men’s deaths: he only remembers the executions at
the end of the novel, when a new day dawns without bringing much insight
or hope to Manhattan’s ordinary Jims and Joes.
Pay Day is deeply responsive to some of the quintessential features of
social modernity and to the challenges they present to conventional fictional
forms. But the truth is that it is neither as apolitical as Lukács would assume,
nor is it a particularly typical novel of its day (if there is such a thing), even
though it resembles the novels of Dos Passos and West in various ways,
and seems to have influenced Richard Wright’s Lawd Today!, an equally
plotless urban novel which takes place on February 12, 1936: the anniversary
of Lincoln’s birthday. Pay Day does what failed works of fiction often
do: it serves as a kind of limit text compared to which other more successful
or canonical works might seem more traditional, less tailormade to the
theorist’s or polemicist’s order. If we think of the vast body of fiction produced
in the United States between 1895 and 1939, the dates that frame this
volume, it is clear that brevity, for one thing, did not turn out to be a universal
feature. Alongside the many compact novellas and the short story
cycles of the period (including Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, Toomer’s Cane,
Hemingway’s In Our Time, Faulkner’s The Unvanquished and The Wild
Palms, Steinbeck’s Pastures of Heaven and Tortilla Flat, Caldwell’s Georgia
Boy, and McCarthy’s The Company She Keeps), there are also many voluminous
works, like the novels of James T. Farrell and Thomas Wolfe. Alongside
the many works that are urban in their setting and inspiration, there are
also many that take place in far-flung rural places: in Faulkner’s Northern
Mississippi, in Hurston’s Everglades, in McNickle’s Montana, in Hemingway’s
Upper Peninsula, or in another country, for that matter – in rural Spain,
on the quay at Smyrna, or in the mud of the Italian front. And alongside
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works that are concerned with pathological states and experimental points
of view, there are also many works, especially in the 1930s, which return to
various versions of realism and documentary. Whole new genres concerned
with action rather than inner states arose: one might think, for instance, of
the many strike novels produced as part of the experiment in Proletarian
Literature, and of popular genres like the Western and the hardboiled
detective novel. The storyteller’s voice, finally, did not entirely disappear:
Faulkner’s The Hamlet (1940) offers us the folksy narration of the loquacious
sewing machine salesman, V. K. Ratliffe, while Hurston’s masterpiece,
Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), presents itself as a life story shared
between two friends as they sit on the porch one evening. And West’s Miss
Lonelyhearts (1933), while it traces the debilitating effects of the mass media
on individuals’ ability to narrate their lives, also recognizes that “lessons”
and “advice,” which once circulated so freely in traditional communities,
had reappeared in commercial guise in advertisements and newspaper sob
columns.
Literary critics are fond of quoting famous authors who announce the
exact moment (more or less) when social modernity transformed the character
of life, whether it is Virginia Woolf, who declared that “on or about
December 1910, human character changed,” or Robert Musil, who observed
that “there was a sudden rift” in European civilization in 1914, when “all
of a sudden, the world was full of violence,” or Willa Cather, who lamented
that “the world broke in two in 1922 or thereabouts.” 7 The reason for our
attachment to these dramatic pronouncements is perhaps that they relieve
us of the obligation of considering the extent to which the old and the new
coexist, with varying degrees of tension, in any given period. It is important
to remember that the rapid pace of social change brought with it a hankering
for tradition and that the revolution of modernity triggered its counterrevolutions.
The “New Era” or “Jazz Age,” as the historian Lawrence Levine
observes, was in many ways backward-looking: it was certainly an age of
new technologies and lifestyles, of the automobile, the movies, the flappers,
and the cynical “Lost Generation,” but it was also a time when many Americans
tried to turn the clock back from the ideas and the progressive spirit of
the prewar years. Fundamentalism, nativism, and the Ku Klux Klan flourished,
Prohibition was instituted, and Left-wing political movements were
suppressed. 8 The culture of the 1930s was similarly complex. Even though
radical commitments were widespread and Communist Party membership
was at a high during this decade, it was also a time when insecurity imposed
a certain conformity and when a homegrown idea of “culture” thrived: “The
American Way of Life” was, in fact, a coinage of the so-called Red Decade.
And if the World Fair of 1939 celebrated modern technology (including the
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first prototype of television), it was also the year when Colonial Williamsburg
was reconstructed and opened to tourists.
It should therefore not surprise us that novels like Pay Day and Gone
With the Wind (to reach for its polar opposite) should be produced within
five years of each other. Nor should it surprise us that a novelist like Willa
Cather should deploy some of the techniques of the modern novel – its
spareness, its attentiveness to point of view and structure – to voice a criticism
of modernity and celebrate what she saw as the anti-materialist values of a
pioneer aristocracy. Anyone approaching American culture in the first three
decades of the twentieth century has to untangle “a web of ambivalence”
(204), a manifestation of what Levine identifies as
the central paradox of American history: a belief in progress coupled with a
dream of change, an urge towards the inevitable future combined with a longing
for the irretrievable past; a deeply ingrained belief in America’s unfolding
destiny and a haunting conviction that the nation was in a state of decline.
(191)
The task of offering an overview of modern American fiction is therefore
a difficult one, and I would like to approach it by adopting a modernist
strategy: that of reducing things to their basic constitutive elements. In the
pages that follow, I will consider a number of key works under three very
simple rubrics: place, time, and value (both moral and economic). But there
is an additional element of narrative – one so fundamental that it often eludes
discussion. That element is, quite simply, the word, which modernist writers
often tried to make especially visible to their readers by techniques of defamiliarization,
repetition, or poetic figuration. Literary historians often cite
the powerful passage from Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms (1929) in which
his narrator summarily bans an entire vocabulary of idealistic generalization:
I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and
the expression in vain . . . [F]or a long time now I had seen nothing sacred,
and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the
stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it.
There were many words you could not stand to hear and finally only the names
of places had dignity. 9
But which words were newly permissible and resonant in the fiction of the
period? We might think, first, of the perfectly ordinary words (“beginning,”
“interesting,” “always,” and “certainly”) that came to seem like familiar
strangers in Stein’s rhythmic reiterations. Or, we might think of the spare
diction of Hemingway’s best novels: the way words like “nice” or “utilize”
come to seem overdetermined in the conversations of his terse expatriates.
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We might think next of the folksy vocabulary Hurston (writing “with the
map of Florida on her tongue”) introduced into American fiction: not only
such playful, earthy words as “woof” and “boogerboo,” but also hightoned
malapropisms like “monstropolous,” “combuction,” “diasticutis,”
and “freezolity.” We might think also of those ponderous adjectives like
“myriad,” “immemorial,” “immutable,” and “impervious,” which, along
with a few “grand, truculent indomitables,” gave the idiosyncratic flavor to
Faulkner’s work. 10 We might think furthermore of the many brand names
that come into play as markers of consumerist know-how: Chesterfields,
Wrigley, Coca-Cola, Listerine, Remington, Kodak, and Chrysler. And we
might consider, finally, the grim, monosyllabic vocabulary that brought to
life the world of the marginal men of the 1930s: words like “vag,” “gat,”
“flop,” “bull,” “drag,” and “stiff,” which reminded readers how far America
remained from the place of promise and prosperity projected by the utopian
writers of the Progressive Era.
For Lukács, the fact that modern fiction made individual words noticeable
was yet another sign of its impotence – of its failure to provide the sense of
hierarchy, by which words, sentences, and paragraphs could be subordinated
to the narrative’s overall revelation of the social totality. But for many American
modernists it was precisely by attending to words, by revitalizing them
and by placing them in new contexts that the novel could begin to do political
work. “[W]e have only words” against “Power Superpower,” declared John
Dos Passos near the end of U. S. A. And at the end of Pay Day (to return to
our typical-atypical modern novel), Nathan Asch puts a striking message in
the mouth of a drunk who denounces his fellow subway passengers for their
inattention to Sacco and Vanzetti’s unjust execution. In a world of headlines,
of the easy amusements of sports page and the comics, the orator proclaims,
language becomes “old, stale . . . used too much.” What is needed is “a way
to wake [people] up, to make them realize words.” 11 In his insistence on this
need, if in no other respect, Asch is a representative voice of his times.
Place
In recent years, a concern with spatiality (as opposed to temporality) has
come to be regarded as the defining trait of postmodernism (as opposed to
modernism). But broad distinctions of this sort are not, in fact, so readily
made. Modernism, after all, has long been associated with a movement
from the country to the city – and thus with questions of place and space.
Moreover, many of the technical innovations in the modernist novel (e.g.,
the creation of the impressionistic, synchronous, anti-individualist form of
narration that we see in a work like Manhattan Transfer [1925]) are the
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result of an intensified interest in the writer’s immediate milieu – in what
we may call the “location of culture.” The rise of a theoretically sophisticated
cultural geography over the past decade or so suggests that critical
interest in the socio-spatial aspects of modernist fiction is likely to remain
strong. With its emphasis on the dialectics of subjectivity and space and the
textual nature of geographical environments, the new cultural geography
may enable new readings of virtually forgotten urban novels, such as Waldo
Frank’s City Block (1922) and Albert Halper’s Union Square (1933), both of
which explore the way in which human interactions are defined by complex,
but narrowly circumscribed physical spaces.
But postcolonial studies too, with its profound questioning of the relationship
between cultural centers and peripheries, may come to provide new
perspectives on the imaginative geographies of modern American fiction. In
fact, the story that Malcolm Cowley tells in his memoir Exile’s Return (1934)
of a generation’s cultural deracination, its exile, and its eventual reclaiming of
native turf now strikes one as very similar to the creative struggles recounted
some thirty or forty years later by postcolonial intellectuals (and this similarity
reveals much about the dramatic shift in power between America
and Europe over the course of the twentieth century). Cowley notes that
the writers of his generation, the men and women born around the turn
of the century, would have considered the site of their childhood – a farm
in Wisconsin, a plantation house among the cane brakes, a bluff overlooking
the Cumberland, or a Nebraska prairie – as “home.” But their formal
education was aimed at “destroying whatever roots they had in the soil”
and “making [them] homeless citizens of the world.” They absorbed the
message that art, learning, and literature existed “at an indefinite distance
from [their] daily lives” – that “[w]isdom was an attribute of Greece and
art of the Renaissance; glamour belonged only to Paris or Vienna.” 12 For
the modernists of Cowley’s generation, as for contemporary writers like
Nadine Gordimer and Ngugi Wa Thiong’O, formal education was a matter
of cultural alienation, of reading books that took place elsewhere, and their
intellectual self-discovery involved either a “journey back” or a rewriting
of established cultural geographies – the difficult enterprise of “moving the
center,” as Ngugi puts it. 13
In the case of the modern American writer, however, one must specify that
the “return” would not exactly be a journey home. (We need only recall Hemingway’s
depiction of a returned veteran’s profound dislocation in “Soldier’s
Home.”) The “return” was more likely to involve the discovery of forms in
which a sense of being out of place or off-center could be turned to aesthetic
advantage. Modern American fiction, as Kazin observes, is characterized by
a sense of “alienation on native grounds” (ix).
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This structure of feeling is captured perfectly in Sherwood Anderson’s
“Certain Things Last” (1920), a self-reflexive story on the difficulties of
finding a place in and about which to write. The city of Chicago, where the
story’s narrator lives, presents ceaseless distractions to the would-be writer:
even as he confesses his problems to the reader, he hears the driver of a horsedrawn
coal wagon cursing at the driver of a Ford. His boyhood home, the
only place he can turn to in memory, happens to be “a dreary, lonely little
place in the far western section of the state of Nebraska.” It is, Anderson
tells us, the kind of place that makes a “middle-westerner” dream that he is
in Italy, or in a Spanish town where “a dark-looking man is riding a bony
horse along a street,” or that “he is being driven in a sled over the Russian
steppes by a man whose face is covered in whiskers.” But the narrator realizes
almost instantly that his imagined “Italy,” “Spain,” and “Russia” derive
from “the cartoons in the newspapers” or lectures he might have attended
in a church hall and the story ends with his recognition that he should write
about things closer at hand: about the woman who is with him, or about a
certain “moment” that “changed the whole current of his life.” 14
This particular solution is vintage Anderson; but the story is evocative
of the challenge confronting many modern American writers and to which
they produced an immense variety of responses. Let us consider the case
of Willa Cather. In contrast to Anderson’s narrator, she seems effortlessly
able to discover the stuff of novels in rural Nebraska. By dint of a nostalgic
recollection of her childhood on the plains, she is able to project a sense of
cultural authority and normativity with regard to the period of early settlement,
when pioneer virtue was leavened by the spirit of cosmopolitanism,
contributed by large numbers of immigrants from various parts of Europe:
Germany, Norway, France, Denmark, Poland, and Bohemia. Cather’s success
in imaginatively “moving the center” westward is such that her cowboyscholar
Tom Outland in The Professor’s House (1926) is able to compare
the Aeneid to a mesa in New Mexico without the slightest sense that the cultural
importance of the former outweighs that of the latter. But we should
not therefore underestimate the initial difficulty of writing about a place
where, as the narrator Jim Burden puts it in My Ántonia (1915), “[t]here was
nothing but land: not country at all, but the material out of which country
was made.” This difficulty is strikingly underscored by Cather herself when
she reminds us in 1931 that when she published her first novel Alexander’s
Bridge in 1912, the proper setting for fiction was still thought to be a drawing
room – and a drawing room full of “smart people and clever people” to
boot. 15
If Cather’s work was enabled and her sense of belonging enriched by the
historical fact of mass immigration, the opposite was true for some writers
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of Anglo-American descent. An extreme and early case may be that of Henry
Adams, the son of presidents, “American of Americans, with Heaven knows
how many Puritans and Patriots behind him,” who recorded in The Education
of Henry Adams (1906) his mournful sense of having been displaced
by the new residents of America’s cities – the energetic immigrants, “still
reeking of the Ghetto” – and who likened himself to “the Indians or the buffalo
who had been ejected from their heritage.” 16 The anxieties about new
demographic configurations and forms of social mobility registered here were
exacerbated after World War I, when they influenced the characterization,
narrative shape, and symbolic geographies of some of the most celebrated
novels of the Jazz Age. For all its interest in social climbing and self-invention,
The Great Gatsby (1925) seems quite conservative if we attend to its treatment
of place, in both the social and geographical sense of the term. Fitzgerald
presents New York, “with its racy adventurous feel,” as the site of a
new urban poetry. But he also imagines it as the all-too-fluid location of a
new kind of threat: in the novel’s “metropolitan twilight,” the pre-eminent
place of a wealthy white man is challenged every time a group of “modish
Negroes” in a fine limousine happens to pass him in traffic. 17 The established
social hierarchy is also symbolically undermined by the undifferentiated desolation
of the Valley of Ashes, the uncanny dumping ground through which
commuters from the Long Island suburbs must pass on their way to the city.
Critics have often remarked on Jay Gatsby’s confused sense of geography
(social and otherwise), as reflected in his ludicrous claim that he is the scion
of a prominent midwestern family from San Francisco. But the closing meditations
of Nick Carraway, the novel’s cautious narrator, also attach some
rather idiosyncratic meanings to the “East” and the “West” of the United
States. In a reactionary version of an exile’s return, Nick reclaims the West
as the “warm center of the world” rather than the “ragged end of the universe,”
and idealizes the kind of city “where dwellings are still called through
decades by a family’s name” (184). This resigned conclusion expresses a nostalgic
hankering for a landscape in which “Mr. Nobod[ies] from Nowhere” –
the charming Gatbsy no less than the uncharming Jewish gangster, Meyer
Wolfsheim – would be excluded almost automatically. The novel’s symbolic
geography lends considerable credence to Walter Benn Michaels’s judgment
that The Great Gatsby, like many of the major novels of the midtwenties,
is fraught with nativist fears that demand narrative resolution: in
this case the hope that the hybrid entanglements and “gonnegtions” spawned
by a polyglot metropolis may be confined, somehow, to the dangerous
“East.”
The quintessentially modern sense of dislocation and alienation is also
a crucial theme in immigrant fiction. In these texts the protagonists’
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development of any coherent sense of identity is impeded by a pervasive sense
of being simultaneously in America and “in a world somewhere, somewhere
else.” 18 This peculiar self-division is beautifully captured in the rendering of
the immigrants’ accented English in Henry Roth’s Call it Sleep: “Land where
our Fodder’s Died” turns the anthem “My Country ‘tis of Thee’ into a parody
and makes nonsense of its nativist geography. The confusion captured
here is in no way simplified by the fact that second-generation immigrants
retained little if any memory of the Europe of their fathers and mothers. In
Mike Gold’s semi-autobiographical Jews Without Money (1930), the young
Mikey is able to get some idea of what his mother’s beloved Hungarian
forests must have been like only during a rare visit to the Bronx Park, and
he can understand his father’s longing for the communal sociability of his
Romanian stetl only in a neighborhood wine cellar, where a traditional musician
plays the old shepherd songs on the cymbalon. But, for all its old-world
associations, the wine cellar – like New York itself – is a hybrid space, offering
confused models of identity: on one wall there is a picture of Theodor
Hertzel and, on the other, a picture of Teddy Roosevelt charging up San
Juan Hill. It is no wonder that Mikey ends up dreaming a syncretic dream of
“a Messiah who would look like Buffalo Bill.” The difficulty of imaginary
journeys “home” makes for a paradoxically “forward-looking nostalgia” in
immigrant fiction: it is characterized by a yearning for places, ideals, and
forms of expression that are not yet in existence. 19
The time-honored pastoral tradition, consequently, tends to play out in
problematic ways in these mostly urban texts. The opposition between country
and city, as James T. Farrell once observed, is not particularly real to
people “affected since childhood by the sights, sounds, odors, and objects
of an industrial city.” But the residual power of this opposition leaves them
entrapped in “a technical dilemma, deriving from ...adichotomy between
the objects and sensations they have sought to describe and the language
and symbolism they have inherited.” 20 The point is well illustrated in Jews
Without Money. Though Gold denounces a teacher who preaches about
nature to the children of a “petrified city” (to do so, he says, is to offer
“snapshots of food to a starving man” [40]), he nevertheless represents the
abandoned lots where the tenement children play as the Western plains and
rhapsodizes about the clumps of grass which bravely managed to sprout from
cracks in the sidewalk. Gold is ultimately unable to imagine revolution without
recourse to the most pastoral of tropes: it is figured at the end of the novel
in terms of a rebuilding of the ghetto as “a garden for the human spirit” (309).
And even Farrell’s own work is not entirely free of the dilemma he identifies.
His depictions of Chicago’s South Side neighborhoods in the Studs Lonigan
trilogy are by no means romantic; yet there are moments when he turns to
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natural images to express the energies of an urban scene in which even his
more loutish characters are, at times, able to take some pleasure. Thus, in
Young Lonigan: “Studs looks about at the patches in the grass that Martin
and his gang had torn down playing their cowboy and Indian games. There
was something about the things he watched that seemed to enter Studs as
sun entered a field of grass; and as he watched, he felt that the things he saw
were part of himself, and he felt as good as if he were warm sunlight.” 21 This
persistence of pastoral ideas, however attenuated, incongruous, and ironic,
is a mark of modernism’s difference from nineteenth-century naturalism: it is
one thread in the intricate “web of ambiguity” of modern American culture.
But as with all generalizations, this observation requires qualification.
For in the work of Richard Wright, one of the most important American
modernists, the pastoral seems to have lost all relevance, even on the level
of figuration – and for good reason. For many African-American migrants
to northern cities, the historical memory of slavery and the indignities of
Jim Crow foreclosed on nostalgia for rural life. The sole utopian moment in
Native Son (1940) is thus inspired by an urban scene viewed from a prison
window: a vision of tall buildings expanding and unfolding as a result of the
collective desires and longings of men.
The radical intervention of Wright’s dark urban masterpiece is strikingly
underscored if we relate it to a problematic moment in “Certain Things Last”
that I have refrained from discussing so far. Though Anderson’s sketch ultimately
dismisses the narrator’s dreams of discovering “simpler” milieus in
foreign places, it nevertheless holds on to certain primitivist notions as a
way of making the modern city more available for fiction. The narrator
imagines that the song of a Negro, humming to himself as he goes along
the street, might “[freshen] the air above the hot stuffy city” in the way that
“a tiny stream running down a hill might freshen the plains below” (4). Such
folksy fantasies of redemption are unthinkable in the relentlessly modern
and secular world of Native Son. For Bigger Thomas, the novel’s protagonist,
the city of Chicago remains an airless, oppressive place. Though his
mother may still hum spirituals (including “Steal away, steal away to Jesus /
Steal away home”), her singing cannot mitigate the novel’s profound sense
of homelessness: a homelessness that is a material rather than a metaphysical
condition for African-Americans, inadequately housed as they are in
“a prescribed corner of the city.” 22 Native Son, in effect, replaces the dualities
of the pastoral with the more intractable and volatile duality between the
white world of comfort and security and the black world of fear, shame, and
deprivation. Indeed, duality is too weak a term: for what Kazin describes as
the disquieting “irony” in Americans’ “possession” of their native grounds
(ix) is strikingly politicized in Native Son, to the point that it becomes a
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full-blown ethical and political contradiction. The brunt of Wright’s critique
of the structural violence of urban segregation is directed at the self-serving
morality of the wealthy realtor Dalton, who gives millions of dollars to educate
and uplift “Negroes” but makes a fortune out of renting rat-infested
properties to them.
The dynamic of blindness and insight exposed here has crucial implications
for the novel’s form and style. Ways of seeing are simultaneously ways of not
seeing; and black and white characters, shaped by their radically different
experiences, do not see the same city. 23 This explains why Native Son, for
all its grimness and interest in social causality, is resolutely modernist, rather
than naturalist: though Wright was concerned to get the Chicago street map
exactly right, the city is never objectively described. While the young communists,
Jan Erlone and Mary Dalton, are able to admire the city’s grand
skyline and its cultural landmarks, these things are meaningless to Bigger,
who can perceive the city only as a treacherous and airless labyrinth, which
permits no possibility of escape. Even at the end of the novel, when Bigger’s
lawyer provides him with a sense of perspective – he gains for a moment
“a pinnacle of feeling upon which he can stand and see vague relations he
had never dreamed of” (782) – he cannot shake the sense that this vision,
like the mendacious promises of cinema and advertising, may lead him into
a blind alley.
The nightmarish urban scenes of the novel’s second section (reminiscent
of the gangster films of the period) are thus essentially expressionist: they
reveal Bigger’s vulnerability, entrapment, and alienation. But they also hint,
at times, at more allegorical interpretive possibilities. The abandoned shells
of houses on the South Side, where “windows gape blackly, like the eyesockets
of empty skulls” (661) are also an objective correlative of the blindness
of their owners: of the ruling classes, who, as Bigger’s lawyer puts it,
“could not have built nations on so vast a scale had they not shut their eyes
to the humanity of other men” (810). With this sweeping indictment, the
implications of the novel move far beyond their immediate time and place,
looking ahead to literary and critical movements still to follow: to the work
of African-American writers like Baldwin and Ellison, to Existentialism, and
to contemporary theory, where questions of blindness and insight, visibility
and marginalization, and so forth, have been of paramount concern.
In Wright’s work, the great modernist discovery of point of view becomes
more than a technical device for exploring individual experience. It becomes
a matter of ideology, an effect of one’s location in the divisive geographies
of American Apartheid. Native Son, in short, forces us to consider the relationship
between power and knowledge and between subjectivity and space
in strikingly contemporary ways.
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Time
To take on the concept of time in modern American fiction is a risky venture.
Not only is it a difficult and abstract topic, but in our postmodern academy
it has come to seem like an outmoded one as well: “Time has become a
nonperson,” Fredric Jameson remarks in a recent essay, and novelists, poets,
philosophers, and critics alike have “stopped writing about it.” 24 Yet time
is not only a constitutive element of all narration, but a major thematic
preoccupation in modern American fiction. Modernity, as we have already
seen, is intimately connected to the idea of acceleration: in the modern world,
as Benjamin suggests, Erfahrung (i.e., experience in the sense of wisdom
or skills developed over a long period of time) is gradually displaced by
Erlebnis (i.e., experience in the sense of immediate sensations). 25 Implicit in
Benjamin’s assertion is a sense that the dominant mode of production affects
our most basic ways of processing the world; thus modern consciousness is
shaped by the rapidity and seriality of assembly line production. But forms
of leisure, too, as we have seen in Asch’s Pay Day, can affect those aspects of
human experience most suited to conventional novelistic treatment: memory,
desire, and hope.
In his intellectual history of the period from 1880–1918, Stephen Kern
identifies a discovery of interior or “private time” (the kind of flexible temporality
we see in stream-of-consciousness narration) as one of the most
important cultural phenomena of early modernist culture. 26 This emphasis
on interiority and “private time,” much as Lukács might denounce it,
is not without a social dimension: it is, at least in part, a reaction against
the increasing impact of the standardized time of factories, offices, and train
schedules. Modernist time, in other words, can itself be historicized, even
if the experiments of some modern writers lay in the excision of any sense
of historical context and historical causality from their work. It is useful to
speculate, along with Jameson, about the conditions that produced modern
literature’s obsession with time. Modernism, he insists, is best grasped
as the culture of an incomplete and uneven modernity. Until World War
II, Europe was only partly industrialized and partly bourgeois. The creators
of modernist literature were often men and women who had been
born in small villages, but who pursued their careers in large industrial
cities: they were people who lived in two distinct worlds simultaneously.
Though fascinated by the new and absorbed in it in their daily lives, they
were also constantly aware of the old: of residual modes of production that
they themselves had witnessed or participated in. Their experiments with
narrative time can thus be related to the fact that they had to negotiate in
their own lived experience the disjuncture between modern and premodern
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temporalities. 27 Now, it is certainly true that the United States was by the
end of the nineteenth century the most modern nation in the world (and the
oldest, as Gertrude Stein perversely liked to put it, since it entered the age of
mass production the soonest), but the impact of modernity was registered
unevenly across its vast territorial sprawl. 28 Many American modernists,
like their European counterparts, had a strong sense of alternate ways of living,
whether through memories of rural childhoods, through what we might
loosely call anthropological experiences, or simply through an alertness to
the residual cultural forms still evident in their daily lives. It is no accident,
by this logic, that it was Faulkner, the Mississippian, who, of all the major
American modernists, had the keenest sense of a pre-industrial mode of production
(namely, plantation slavery) and pushed the experimentation with
time the furthest.
The obvious entry point for a discussion of the temporalities of American
modernism, however, is not the work of Faulkner, but that of William James,
to whom we owe that useful and flexible term “stream of consciousness.” The
project of James’s Principles of Psychology (1890) was ultimately to enhance
our appreciation of the richness of our experiential lives and cognitive processes.
It is fair to say, therefore, that James gave certain philosophical weight
to the notion of living for the moment: one of the key ideas of the emergent
culture of abundance. Experience (in the sense of Erlebnis) is of immense
importance in James’s thinking. Indeed, in his chapter on “The Stream of
Thought,” he makes the case that each experience we have of a given fact
is essentially unique. This is not to say that for him the truth is made up of
raw sensory experiences, severed from the past or future: James’s concern
is not to atomize time, but to “thicken” our sense of the present moment:
to imagine a sustained or “specious present,” imbued with a “halo” of past
experience and future anticipation. James’s interest, moreover, is not so much
in our perceptions of fixed objects, but in those experiences of direction and
tendency that are not readily labeled by nouns – except perhaps by strange
new terms like “nextness, andness, and ifness.” 29
The influence of Jamesian psychology is palpable in the early experimental
fiction of his student Gertrude Stein: the short story cycle Three Lives (1906)
and the sprawling, self-reflexive immigrant saga, The Making of Americans
(1923). Though Three Lives takes its inspiration from Flaubert (Stein had
tried her hand at translating his Trois Contes before embarking on her own
stories), it shows no interest in the dense depiction of social milieu that
characterizes Flaubert’s work, and very little in conventional plotting and
denouement. All three of the stories (“The Good Anna,” “Melanctha,” and
“The Gentle Lena”) end with the death of the title character, but the death
brings no particular lesson or emotional charge. The compositional principle,
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as Stein liked to say, is cubist: as in the work of Cézanne, “everything is as
important as everything else.” The moment of closure is therefore no more
significant than any other moment and provides no retrospective insight;
such meaning as there is, is revealed in the ongoing “habits of attention”
by which “the total of character is revealed” (Stein, Selected Writings, 243).
But it is Jamesian psychology rather than cubism that explains the texture
of Stein’s prose. Her project (which she was later to describe as “ridding . . .
[herself] of nouns”) was to devise a style that in its very syntax and lexicon
draws our attention to the transitive rather than to the substantive, noun-like
aspects of cognition (460). Thus Stein’s keywords, especially in “Melanctha,”
the most experimental of the three stories, are participles like “feeling,”
“understanding,” “beginning,” “happening,” and “living”: words which
might be said to hover between verbs and nouns and which alert us to
sustained or habitual states of feeling. “He was now never taking any part
in this fighting that was always going on inside him” (95) is the kind of thing
that counts as an incident in Three Lives. In fact, all of Stein’s narrative
devices – the reiteration of “always” and “never,” the meandering reprises,
the simple and tentative vocabulary, which seems to suspend any definitive
naming of an experience – are intended to give the effect of what she termed
a “prolonged present” (417): this despite the fact that the stories in Three
Lives are written in the past tense.
If the experimental effect of Stein’s early prose derives in good measure
from a grammatical oscillation between verb and noun, the experimental
interest of Sherwood Anderson’s story cycle Winesburg, Ohio derives
from a generic oscillation between the traditional Bildungsroman and a
form of serial composition that owes much to Stein. Malcolm Cowley once
described the aesthetic that animates Winesburg, Ohio – and, indeed, all of
Anderson’s work – as one of “moments,” of brief intensities without sequel.
Anderson can, to be sure, provide illuminating comments about the broader
historical forces that shape his characters’ lives. (Indeed, such broader perspectives
are essential in order to emphasize the anachronistic nature of his
small-town grotesques, who all yearn for things that are no longer, or not
yet, possible.) But Winesburg, Ohio’s series of structurally identical stories,
in which the townspeople, one after another, reveal themselves to the young
reporter, George Willard, does not really allow for any development, beyond
the climactic moment when the characters articulate (or fail to articulate)
their desires, disappointments, or loneliness. The aim of the cycle thus seems
to be something quite different from the creation of a conventional plot with
a beginning, middle, and end: the stories, as Cowley puts it, “exist separately
and timelessly.” And yet, the conventional notion of character development
does not disappear altogether. The three closing stories (“Death,”
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“Sophistication,” and “Departure”) impose, in a somewhat contrived way,
the narrative of George Willard’s acquisition of maturity onto the preceding
series of fragments, so that by the end of the volume, the grotesques – the
very means of Anderson’s protest against the commercialism of the modern
world – threaten to become “but a background on which to paint the dreams
of [the young reporter’s] manhood” (243). At the heart of Anderson’s most
accomplished work lies a narrative and perhaps ideological contradiction
between the fractured, lyrical temporality of Erlebnis and the more novelistic
temporality of Erfahrung.
The same could be said of Hemingway’s In Our Time, where the pervasive
irony and imagery of dead babies and unwanted pregnancies should
deter readers from approaching the work as a simple Bildungsroman, featuring
Hemingway’s alter ego Nick Adams. In Our Time is in fact a challenging
experimental work, and one that can be read, as Peter Messent has
shown, as an almost point-by-point illustration of Lukács’s account of modernist
fiction and its fall from dynamic narration to static description. 30 In
Messent’s reading, the most crucial aspect of Hemingway’s famous aesthetic
of “leaving things out” is a temporal one: the excision of any sense of historical
causality and continuity. Though the collection is tightly knit in terms
of recurrent motifs and striking juxtapositions, it dispenses (at least in the
“chapters” or vignettes dealing with war, crime, and bullfighting) with any
chronological and developmental order. Moreover, the structural disjuncture
between the brief, objective “chapters” and the more intimate, subjective stories
expresses a stark opposition between the individual and the historical
world: no interaction or mediation between subject and object seems to be
possible. The vision, in other words, is fatalistic: story after story, vignette
after vignette, image after image evoke a condition of being “out of season”
in modern times. It is entirely appropriate, then, that the only instance in
which Nick Adams enters the sequence of “chapters” (and by extension, the
wider social context to which they allude) is when he is wounded on the
Italian front. The rituals of masculinity that abound in Hemingway’s work
in no way contradict Messent’s claim regarding the disappearance of agency
from Hemingway’s early and most interesting fiction. If, as Lukács suggests,
the symbol imposes a kind of synthetic meaning on objects and events that
have in fact lost their significance, the same kind of thing can be said of
the bullfight: however brave and skillful, it is ultimately a synthetic action,
removed from the historical world – the only theatre in which actions can
have transformative consequences.
These considerations go some way toward explaining the paradoxical
effects of Hemingway’s simple paratactic prose. Though he consistently
writes in the active voice and with an apparently meticulous interest in the
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sequence of actions, the effect is curiously passive; and though the prevailing
tense is the past tense, it provides none of the cognitive advantages of retrospect.
The effect is one of extreme immediacy, of what Pound would call “a
rain of factual atoms,” reproduced in all their confusing singularity. Thus
Nick Adams in “Big Two-Hearted River” knows exactly how to set up camp
and make coffee, and sets about performing these tasks in the proper way.
But the cumulative effect of his activities is to repress, rather than enhance
any understanding of, or even any thought about what Lukács would have
called the social totality.
The purpose and effect of focusing on the present, rather than on the
past or future, is therefore quite different in Stein and in Hemingway. In
the case of the former, one might say, it is a quasi-scientific enterprise, and
in the case of the latter, a way of blocking out broader (and traumatic)
historical truths. To recognize this difference is to register something of the
impact of World War I on Hemingway’s generation, and especially on the
combatants. In Stephen Kern’s view, World War I condemned early twentiethcentury
attempts to conceptually extend the interval between past and future
(including those of James and Stein) to obsolescence. The war isolated present
experience from the usual flow of time. Not only did the lived moment
become extraordinarily compelling, both in its shocking violence and its
vast spatial extension (observers of the war needed to attend to distant events
taking place simultaneously along a vast front line), but it also attenuated
any sense of continuity and tradition (294). Hemingway’s In Our Time,
with its ironic treatment of conventional pieties, its exclusive attention to
the luminous moment, and its wide geographical range – with stories and
vignettes taking place all the way from Asia Minor to the Midwest – would
seem to give some credence to Kern’s broad claims.
But while the effects of World War I on the techniques of modern fiction
have been amply considered, not enough has been said about the equally
far-reaching effects of the Great Depression, with its pervasive insecurities
and sudden reversals of fortune. The poetry and prose of the early 1930s,
when millions were unemployed and the old American dream of success –
or even just the expectation of a meaningful career – seemed to be in tatters,
is often marked by a characteristic sense of time. It can be likened to the
atomistic and potentially cataclysmic temporality of gambling, of the long
shot: the sense that “one minute you are sitting on top of the world the
next you are sitting around a jungle fire telling about it,” as a hobo in Tom
Kromer’s Waiting For Nothing (1936) puts it. 31
This novel, based on the author’s personal experiences, is one of a
number of novels documenting the grim lives of society’s bottom dogs,
including Edward Newhouse’s You Can’t Sleep Here (1934), Jack Conroy’s
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The Disinherited (1933), and Nelson Algren’s Somebody in Boots (1935). But
the interest of Waiting for Nothing becomes evident when we relate it not to
the proletarian novels with which it tends to be pigeonholed, but to the more
canonical modernist works we have discussed so far. Kromer’s novel adopts
not only the mannerisms of Hemingway’s early style, but also its implicit
attitude toward history: one of fatalistic incomprehension and passivity.
The title already draws our attention to a particular kind of temporality.
“Waiting” is not entirely a suspension of time (“You do not stay young in
a soup line,” observes Tom Kromer, the unfortunate protagonist [66]), but
rather a suspension of meaningful, directed action. The novel’s many reiterations
thus serve not to satisfy an aesthetic of abstract composition, but to
emphasize the complete inefficacy of personal effort and initiative. Try as he
may to improve his situation, Tom finds himself resorting again and again to
some variation of the panhandler’s humiliating line: “Buddy, can you spare
a dime?” The pressing need to find food or shelter (“three hots and a flop,”
in the novel’s harsh vocabulary) renders sustained reflection impossible, and
the novel’s one instance of historical interpretation is, in effect, censored.
When Tom, appearing in court on charges of vagrancy, tries to explain his
transgression as the result of a worldwide crisis of unemployment, the magistrate
gavels him down, finds him guilty, and moves on to sentence the next
bum.
The final chapter of Waiting for Nothing offers an attempt at a retrospective
assessment, but the futile seriality of his life seems to have disabled
Tom’s capacity for memory: “I try to think back over the years that I have
lived,” he laments, “but I cannot think of years any more. I can think only
of the drags I have rode. Of the bulls that have sapped up on me, and the
mission slop I have swilled. People I have known, I remember no more . . .
My life is spent before it is started . . .” (128). The present tense narration
thus comes to seem not an experimental option, but an additional mark of
privation. The atomistic temporality of Depression-era modernity has not
only eliminated any sense of personal significance, but even the promise of
religious transcendence: “[S]ince when did Jesus start keeping office hours?”
Tom asks himself at the end of the novel, as he stares at the closed door of a
mission, above which a giant electric sign flashes the message: JESUS SAVES
(124).
The politicized climate of the 1930s, when Gertrude Stein first achieved the
celebrity status she craved, provides an interesting perspective on the experiments
in narrative time with which I began this discussion. Mike Gold, the
tireless Marxist polemicist, described her work as symptomatic of the decay
of capitalist culture and as “an attempt to annihilate all relations between
the artist and the society in which he lives.” 32 And it is true that Stein had
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little interest in history (except perhaps in the very general and abstract sense
of “how everybody is doing everything”). But she was deeply interested in
mimicking what she described as her period’s characteristic “time-sense” in
the “time-sense” of her own composition. 33 She was concerned to represent
the one quality that lived history and fiction have in common: the temporality
and pace of human experience, which, in Stein’s view, was one of the
most important distinctions between one period and another.
In this respect, if in no other, Stein resembles John Dos Passos, whose
U. S. A. trilogy was concerned to examine and represent the speed of history.
It is a novel about the socio-political effects of modern technologies
of production, and includes among its major personnages the historical figures
of Frederick “Speedy” Taylor, Henry Ford, and the Wright brothers,
whose inventions radically accelerated the pace of human life. The various
modes of writing that make up the trilogy – the biographies of historical figures,
the narratives of fifteen fictional characters, and so-called “Newsreels”
and “Camera Eyes” – are all designed to be read at different velocities. 34 The
collage-like effects of the newsreels, for instance, slow down the pace of reading
(thus counteracting the high speed at which the language of the media is
usually devoured), while the idiosyncratic run-on words (like “pinkishcolored,”
“nattilydressed,” “slightlybulging,” “internalcombustion,” and “fifteenhundreddollar”)
accelerate the otherwise steady clip at which we consume
the reasonably suspenseful and realistic fictional narratives. In other
words, the novel’s various experimental techniques alert us to what Dos
Passos sees as the multiple and unsynchronized temporalities of twentiethcentury
life. Modernity in U. S. A. is not represented as a simple progression,
in which everyone is swept along, but as a dangerous assemblage of unsychronized
forces, which seldom advances the interest of the individual.
It is no accident, then, that the prose poem with which the trilogy opens
should represent a young man who is walking “fast but not fast enough ...to
catch the last subway, the street car, the bus.” This figure is emblematic, as it
turns out, of many of the novel’s characters. Even those who are innovators
(like the aviator Charley Anderson and the public relations man J. Ward
Moorehouse), or those who seem crafty and dogged enough to surf the trends
(like the movie-star Margot Dowling), end up being anachronisms, defeated
by relentless processes of acceleration and obsolescence in an economy of
scale. In the novel’s closing prose poem, entitled “Vag,” the idea that America
has fragmented into “two nations” (1157) – an idea that is also put forward in
the stark material oppositions between the haves and have-nots of Kromer’s
novel – is expressed in terms of temporality and velocity. The poem contrasts
the situation of a hungry hitchhiker, who waits by the side of the road while
cars and trucks pass him by, with that of a rich man, who flies overhead in a
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transcontinental plane, and vomits a meal of steak and mushroom into his
airsick bag. “History, the billiondollar speedup” has clearly left the young
man behind, while the privileged air-traveler is, at least for the moment,
keeping up (1240).
If Stein’s experiments with time led her in the end to something rather different
from fiction, the same might be said, curiously, of Dos Passos. U.S.A is
a novel without a denouement: the different modes of writing that constitute
it all encompass a somewhat different span of time (the narratives seem to
end in 1928, whereas the newsreels include events that took place as late as
1936). The various parts of the novel do not end, as it were, on the same
beat, nor do they all permit or demand a similar sense of closure. In order to
assess the meaning of U. S. A., or so Barbara Foley has suggested, the reader
is forced to attend to the drama of real history – to the fortunes of American
capitalism during the Great Depression – rather than to seek for any retrospective
synthesis within the novel itself. 35 Dos Passos’s extraordinary effort
at including history (and the mass-mediated discourses that shaped it) in the
body of his fictional work requires a degree of experimentation at least as
radical as that of the various modernist efforts at excluding history from the
work of art.
Value
I started this essay by suggesting, along with John Dos Passos and Warren
Susman, that the transformations of American society in the first half of
the twentieth century must be understood in broadly economic terms as a
transition from competitive to monopoly capitalism, or from a culture of
production to a culture of consumption. It seems fitting, then, to conclude
with some comments on the sometimes quite intimate ways in which the
aesthetic economies of texts – the systems of values and tropes within them –
correlate with actual economic conditions. After all, money, as the “material
symbol of value itself” is a sign or trope; and many other financial concepts –
appreciation, interest, and accounting, for instance – are readily connected
to the realm of literature. 36 This last connection is nicely captured in the
“Storyteller” essay, where Benjamin describes the novelist as an executor
of memories, of a sum of experiences, the value of which often adds up to
zero (98–99). Whether or not we agree with his melancholy assessment of
the novelist’s task, the conception of narrative closure as the moment when
the value of the various transactions initiated in a novel is finally calculated
remains an intriguing and productive one. It is therefore not surprising that
the meeting ground of literature and economics should have proven a fertile
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terrain for scholarly work, whether focused on the material aspects of literary
production or the economic thematics of texts themselves.
As in our earlier investigation of place, Malcolm Cowley’s Exile’s Return
provides a useful entry point. If the memoir is, on one level, the record of
a generation’s conversion from a spirit of deracinated cosmopolitanism to
a re-invented literary nationalism or journey home, it is also, on another
level, the record of Cowley’s personal conversion from the view that “the
productive forces of society” were “alien to poetry and learning” to a preoccupation
with the economic conditions and impact of literary creativity
(35–36). He argues, for instance, that the values of the Greenwich Village
bohemians of the late teens and twenties, though on the surface antagonistic
to the materialism of mainstream American culture, actually “fitted into the
business picture” quite readily: the ethos of “self-expression” stimulated a
demand for all manner of consumer goods from beach pajamas to cosmetics,
while “living for the moment” often came down to buying things from
radios to automobiles to houses on the installment plan (62–63). Nor were
these material concerns and contradictions avoided when the writers of his
cadre escaped to Europe. In search of eternal values, Cowley observes, they
discovered instead “valuta” (81). The rapidly fluctuating exchange rates for
European currencies not only meant that writers were able to support themselves
on the strong dollar, but sensitized them to the disjuncture between
price and value, utility and worth – a matter that became a major theme in
several important fictional works.
An alertness to economic concerns, moreover, was not exclusive to writers
who went abroad. In the U.S. savings declined precipitously and debt
increased during the Jazz Age. Wealth and class suddenly seemed to be a
fluid matter, marked by expenditures rather than by money in the bank: a
situation recorded in imaginative detail in novels like The Great Gatbsy and
The Big Money, as well as less canonical works like Anita Loos’s Gentlemen
Prefer Blondes (1925). And though the stock market crash of 1929 forced a
re-evaluation of the capitalist system and undermined the general faith in the
old rags-to-riches dream (Nathanael West’s A Cool Million [1934] offers the
period’s most brutal debunking of this theme), the nation’s fascination with
consumer goods did not decline during the so-called Red Decade. Outrage
at the ironic coexistence of plenty and scarcity during the Great Depression
frequently animated the fiction of the period. One need only think of the
striking passage in The Grapes of Wrath (1939), where Steinbeck denounces
the wastefulness of a system which demands that “golden mountains” of
oranges must be burned to keep up the market price, even though poor
children are dying of malnutrition. 37 61
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If one reads the fiction of this period with an eye to economics, monetary
concerns and metaphors come to seem quite pervasive and arise in
quite surprising places. For all its thinness of social representation, Stein’s
Three Lives, for example, is shaped by the contrast between the two thrifty
German immigrants, Anna and Lena, and the wasteful, impetuous,
Melanctha, drawn as she is to speed, gambling, and the pleasures of the
moment. Even Willa Cather, who, in a 1922 essay, questioned whether “the
banking system and the Stock Exchange [were] worth being written about
at all,” actually wrote extensively about money and even banks in her two
most important novels from the 1920s, A Lost Lady (1923) and The Professor’s
House (1925). In the first, Captain Forrester, one of Cather’s pioneer
aristocrats, finds his mettle tested when the bank of which he is a director
fails, and he – alone among the members of the board – decides to refund
his investors’ deposits dollar-for-dollar out of his own personal wealth. His
magnificent impracticality places him and his wife at the mercy of a new
generation of money-grubbing, self-seeking businessmen, “who would cut
everything up into profitable bits as the match factory splinters the primeval
forest.” 38 The older values based on good character and trust yield inexorably,
in Cather’s elegiac assessment, to a new spirit of sheer utility and
gain. The narrative crisis of The Professor’s House is, similarly, a financial
one: the plot takes off at the moment when Professor Godfrey St. Peter has
finally made enough money through his intellectual work to buy a luxurious
new house and the entire novel is structured in terms of a tension (an
irresolvable one for Cather) between money and creativity, gifts and acquisitions,
reserve and ostentation. The novel asks, in essence, how personal
and historical legacies can be valued without “‘realiz[ing]’ on them” (220):
without translating them into the reifying economy of the marketplace. 39
While Cather (or at least her character Professor St. Peter) seems nauseated
by all forms of commercial expenditure and considers the discourse of
money to be “a vulgar tongue” (50), Hemingway’s attitude, as presented in
The Sun Also Rises (1926), is more complex. In the moral economy of the
novel, anything of value must be paid for (hence the disdain of bankrupts,
like Mike Campbell, and of people who expend money in order to avoid
giving of themselves, like Robert Cohen). But payment is also intricately
involved in a kind of savoir vivre or, more seriously, an ethical code for a
secular age. One might therefore argue that the aging Greek count (the owner
of a chain of stores in the U.S.), who knows how to get value for his money,
whether in the form of good service or vintage brandy or female company,
is more of a code hero in the novel than is the handsome young bullfighter.
There is, moreover, a residual sense that exchange values need, in some way
or another, to be in balance with use values and work: Hemingway makes
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it clear that the fiesta in Pamplona, during which people behave as though
there were no consequences to their actions, makes exorbitant demands on
the Spanish peasants who attend it: it is not just that the price of wine at
cafés seems entirely incommensurate with the value of “the hours worked
and bushels of grain sold,” but that the fleeting exhilaration of the running
of the bulls ends up costing the life of a man, who is gored: “all for fun,”
as a sober Spanish waiter notes. In its partly serious, partly ironic validation
of a “simple exchange of values,” the novel seems to simultaneously
endorse and recontain the ethos of expenditure and consumerism. 40 It is
worth speculating that the popularity of Hemingway’s work might be tied
to his attempt to salvage a certain masculine austerity (or moral solvency)
in a world where the locus of value was rapidly shifting from the traditionally
masculine sphere of production to the traditionally feminized sphere of
consumption and leisure.
The economic crisis of the 1930s moved many writers (including
Hemingway and Fitzgerald) to take a considerably harsher stance toward
the emerging culture of abundance. We might think back to Nathan Asch,
whose Pay Day derives whatever social implications it has through an implicit
comparison of the value of the political commitment of Sacco and Vanzetti
(for whom August 23, 1927, was “pay day” in a very serious sense of the
term) and the trivial and questionable good time pursued by the antihero
on his night out. The work of several proletarian authors, including Grace
Lumpkin in To Make my Bread (1932), or Fielding Burke in Call Home
the Heart (1932), has a similarly anti-consumerist message. The target of
critique in these strike novels is not only the exploitative mill management,
but the installment plan, which entraps the members of an idealized rural
community in the snares of capitalism in a brand new guise.
However, some of the most important writers of the 1930s do begin in various
ways to reconfigure and reclaim aspects of the ethos of expenditure and
abundance (which, after all, has utopian as well as repressive implications). In
Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), for example,
the life of the heroine Janie may be read as an “education in expenditure.” 41
This education does not imply subservience to the new strategies of business,
or to the Keynesian view of consumption as ultimately functional: a means of
jumpstarting the national economy. Janie’s first husband, Logan Killicks, is
devoted to an ethos of production and simple accumulation and he assesses
her value merely in terms of her labor. Her second husband, Jody Stark,
has begun to understand the idea of conspicuous consumption: he indulges
in carefully calibrated expenditures, designed to enhance his own status in the
community, and sees Janie largely as a pretty acquisition to put on display.
Her third husband, whose very name – “Tea Cake” – suggests something
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of the sweetness of living for the moment, spends money and time excessively
and uselessly, for the sheer playful delight of it. His irresponsible acts
of expenditure are certainly open to criticism (he steals $200 from Janie to
throw a party and to savor the feeling of wealth), but they are not readily tied
to the needs of the mainstream economy and its racialized class structures.
Indeed, in the symbolic economy of the text, Tea Cake’s reckless spontaneity,
of which Janie also comes to partake, seems linked to the recklessness
of God, who in his abundance can afford to unleash the destructive power
of a hurricane on the world. Needless to say, this is a remarkable vision to
put forward in an era when economic deprivation often fostered a spirit of
caution and it helps us make sense of the fact that Hurston’s reputation only
soared several decades after her major works were produced.
Curiously, the writer who comes closest to Hurston in validating an uncalculating
generosity, as opposed to a spirit of cheap acquisitiveness, or selfserving
accumulation, may be William Faulkner, whose novels are deeply
concerned with economic issues. It is fair to say that his characters’ attitudes
toward money are as important as their attitudes toward time and
that his work always comes down on the side of those who give unstintingly,
as opposed to the schemers and accountants, like the repulsive Flem
Snopes and Jason Compson. In The Sound and the Fury, the latter obsessively
hoards money and calculates profits; and though he claims to believe
that “money has no value: it’s just the way you spend it,” his interactions
with others constantly reveal his instinctive equation of price and value. His
miserliness is exposed, significantly, by the black characters in the novel,
such as his colleague Job, who feels himself rich enough to give up his two
bits in exchange for the immediate pleasure of hearing a man play the saw
at a traveling show. 42
Such details abound in Faulkner’s work and this is not the place to record
them in any detail. I will close instead by commenting briefly on the relationship
between form and economics in his masterpiece, Go Down, Moses
(1942), where the issue at stake is the historical legacy of slavery. This cycle
of interconnected stories, which runs the gamut of money matters – from
wagers, treasure hunts, bribes, inheritances, wages, gifts, sales, pay-offs, and
robbery to charitable fundraising – begins, strikingly, with a dedication to
the Faulkner family’s servant, Caroline Barr, whom he praises for her gift
of fidelity “without calculation of recompense.” 43 Though one might argue
that Faulkner has difficulty in imagining a place for African-Americans in
the new market economy and that this difficulty is a sign of his residual
paternalism, the generosity of Caroline Barr nevertheless marks an ethical
position from which to measure the full horror of the story recorded in the
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ledger book of the McCaslin plantation: a story about the scandal of treating
people – even kinsfolk – as commodities. The excessive eloquence of the
central story “The Bear,” with its interminable, all-inclusive sentences, must
be read as a challenge to the language and ethos of the slave owners’ ledger
book, with its eccentric abbreviations and its terse arithmetic about human
lives. 44
Richard Wright ends Native Son with the clang of the prison door, shutting
in the face of a condemned murderer in Chicago; Faulkner concludes
Go Down, Moses by, as it were, picking up the story of the murderer where
Native Son leaves off. He concludes his fictional investigation of the intersections
of race and economics by imagining the aftermath of an execution in
Chicago: that of one Samuel Beauchamp, a descendant of the McCaslin and
Beauchamp families whose intertwined fates are at the center of Go Down,
Moses. Like several other stories in the cycle (most notably “Pantaloon in
Black”), the final story is about mourning; but once again money matters are
at the center of the action. The lawyer Gavin Stevens, out of sympathy for the
criminal’s grandmother, goes around to collect the necessary funds for the
transportation and proper burial of the body from various prominent whites
in the local community. Whatever we make of Faulkner’s treatment of Samuel
Beauchamp and his crime of “[g]etting rich too fast” (370), or of the attitudes
of the whites, with their residual sense of paternalistic obligation and their
muted, but clearly insufficient recognition of their complicity in Beauchamp’s
death, it is clear that the funeral will not lay to rest the historical debts of
the South. Nor will the intertwined, but nevertheless disjointed stories that
make up Go Down, Moses yield the kind of closure Benjamin describes in the
“Storyteller.” And the eschewal of such accounting is precisely the point: the
complex, but elusive construction of the cycle as a whole offers a fittingly
open-ended way of narrating an “injustice” that, in Faulkner’s severe but
accurate judgment, “can never be amortized” (226). In its style, structure,
and tragic narrative contents, Go Down, Moses protests against the reifying
language of money. But it is nevertheless through the work’s various economic
tropes – no less than through the more conventionally poetic symbols
like the bear, the deep woods, and the fire on the hearth – that we may trace
out Faulkner’s major thematic preoccupations: the persistence of the past,
and the meaning and cost of modernity.
NOTES
1. Alfred Kazin, On Native Grounds: An Interpretation of Modern American Prose
Literature (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1942), viii, ix.
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2. Warren I. Susman, Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society
in the Twentieth Century (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2003), xx;
John Dos Passos cited in Townsend Ludington, John Dos Passos: A Twentieth-
Century Odyssey (New York: Dutton, 1980), 286.
3. Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio (New York: Penguin, 1992), 70–71.
4. Hamlin Garland, “Literary Prophecy,” in Modern American Fiction: Essays in
Criticism, ed. A. Walton Litz (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963), 30, 32.
5. Georg Lukács, “Narrate or Describe,” in Writer and Critic and Other Essays, ed.
Arthur Kahn (London: Merlin, 1978), 110–148; “The Ideology of Modernism,”
in Realism in Our Time: Literature and Class Struggle (New York: Harper &
Row, 1971), 17–46.
6. Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Work of Nikolai Leskov,”
in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections (New York: Schocken, 1969), 83–84,
93.
7. Virginia Woolf, Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown (London: Hogarth, 1924), 4; Robert
Musil quoted in Lukács, “The Ideology of Modernism,” 35; Willa Cather quoted
in Susman, Culture as History, 105.
8. Lawrence Levine, The Unpredictable Past (New York: Oxford University Press,
1993), 193–195.
9. Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms (New York: Scribner’s, 1969), 184–185.
10. On Faulkner’s vocabulary, see Kazin, “Faulkner in his Fury,” in Modern
American Fiction ed. Litz, 170, and Nick Tosches, Country: The Twisted Roots
of Rock ‘n’ Roll (New York: Da Capo Press, 1995), 74.
11. Nathan Asch, Pay Day (Detroit: Omnigraphics, 1990), 255; John Dos Passos,
U. S. A. (New York: Library of America, 1996), 1,210.
12. Malcolm Cowley, Exile’s Return: A Literary Odyssey of the 1920s (New York:
Penguin, 1994), 14, 27, 28.
13. Ngugi Wa Thiong’O, Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics of Language in African
Literature (London: James Currey, 1986), 10–12; and Moving the Center: The
Struggle for Cultural Freedoms (London, James Currey, 1993), 2–12; Nadine
Gordimer, “What Being a South African Means to Me,” South African Outlook
107 (June 1977), 88.
14. Sherwood Anderson, The Egg and Other Stories (New York: Penguin, 1998),
6, 7.
15. See Kazin, On Native Grounds, 249–250; Willa Cather, My Ántonia (Boston:
Hougton, Mifflin, 1954), 7, and “My First Novels,” in Stories, Poems, and Other
Writings (New York: Library of America, 1992), 963–964.
16. Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (New York: Random House,
1931), 238.
17. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (New York: Collier, 1992), 73.
18. Henry Roth, Call It Sleep (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1991), 23.
19. Mike Gold, Jews Without Money (New York: Carol & Graf, 1984), 190; Werner
Sollers, “Ethnic Modernism,” in The Cambridge History of American Literature.
Volume 6: Prose Writing 1910–1950, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch (Cambridge University
Press, 2002), 482.
20. James T. Farrell, “In Search of an Image,” in The League of Frightened Philistines
(New York: Vanguard Press, 1945), 156.
21. James T. Farrell, Young Lonigan (New York: Avon, 1972), 83.
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22. Richard Wright, Early Works: Lawd Today!, Uncle Tom’s Children, Native Son
(New York: Library of America, 1991), 682, 550.
23. My reading of Wright is indebted to Charles Scruggs’s Sweet Home: Invisible
Cities in the Afro-American Novel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1993), 75–79.
24. Frederic Jameson, “The End of Temporality,” Critical Inquiry 29 (Summer 2003),
695.
25. Benjamin, Illuminations, 163.
26. Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space: 1880–1918 (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1983), 8.
27. Fredric Jameson, “The End of Temporality,” 699.
28. Gertrude Stein, Selected Writings (New York: Vintage, 1990), 73.
29. William James, Principles of Psychology (New York: Dover, 1950), vol. ii, 608–
609; see also Elizabeth Flower and Murray G. Murphey, A History of Philosophy
in America (New York: Putnam’s, 1977), vol. ii, 646–647.
30. Peter Messent, “Style: Personal Impressions” in Ernest Hemingway (New York:
St. Martin’s Press, 1992), 5–22.
31. Tom Kromer, Waiting For Nothing (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986),
116.
32. Cited in Sollers, Ethnic Modernism, 377.
33. Stein, Selected Writings, 513, 516.
34. See Carin Irr, The Suburb of Dissent (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998),
45–46, 56–57.
35. Barbara Foley, “The Treatment of Time in The Big Money,” Modern Fiction
Studies 26 (Autumn 1980), 460–461.
36. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, i, trans. Ben Fowkes (New
York: Vintage Books, 1977), 221–222.
37. John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath (New York: Penguin, 1992), 477.
38. Willa Cather, A Lost Lady (New York: Knopf, 1923), 106.
39. Willa Cather, The Professor’s House (New York: Vintage, 1990), 220.
40. Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises (New York: Macmillan, 1986), 152, 197,
72.
41. See Thomas F. Haddox, “The Logic of Expenditure in Their Eyes Were Watching
God,” Mosaic 34 (March 2001): 19–34.
42. Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (New York: Vintage, 1990), 194, 231.
43. William Faulkner, Go Down, Moses (New York: Vintage, 1973), np.
44. For this insight I am indebted to Eric Dussere, “Accounting for Slavery:
Economic Narratives in Morrison and Faulkner,” Modern Fiction Studies 47
(Summer 2001), 336.
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A Reader’s Guide
to Contemporary
Literary Theory
FIFTH EDITION
Raman Selden
Peter Widdowson
Peter Brooker

.
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ISBN: 978-0-582-89410-5
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CHAPTER 10
Gay, lesbian and
queer theories
Lesbian and gay theories originate, like feminist and Black
criticism, not in academic institutions, but in the radical
movements of the 1960s. The birth of the Gay Liberation Movement can
be traced to the Stonewall Riot in New York in 1969 when occupants of
a gay bar resisted a police raid. The event had a radicalizing effect on
Homosexual Rights groups throughout the United States and Europe.
Thereafter, Gay Liberation in the 1970s had two main goals: to resist persecution
and discrimination against a sexual minority, and to encourage
gay people themselves to develop a pride in their sexual identities. The movement
utilized two main strategies: ‘consciousness-raising’, borrowed from
Black and women’s movements, and ‘coming out’ – publicly affirming gay
identity – which is unique to gay communities whose oppression partly lies
in their social invisibility. Gay Liberation activists saw themselves as part
of a more general move towards the liberalization of sexual attitudes in the
1960s, but in particular challenged the homophobic prejudices and repressive
character of mainstream heterosexual society.
Since then, gay and lesbian activists have employed the term ‘heterosexism’
to refer to the prevailing social organization of sexuality which
privileges and mandates heterosexuality so as to invalidate and suppress
homosexual relations. Whereas ‘homophobia’ – the irrational fear or
hatred of same-sex love – implies an individualized and pathological condition,
‘heterosexism’ designates an unequal social and political power relation,
and has arguably proved the more useful theoretical term in lesbian
and gay theories. It clearly owes a debt to the feminist concept of sexism:
the unequal social organization of gender, and in this respect has been
of more importance to lesbian feminist theory than to gay theory which
developed in overlapping but distinct ways in the 1970s and 1980s.

.
244 A READER’S GUIDE TO CONTEMPORARY LITERARY THEORY
Gay theory and criticism
The diversity of gay and bisexual research since the 1970s reflects the efforts
to reclaim literary texts, cultural phenomena and historical narratives which
had remained hidden from critical attention. At the same time (largely as
a product of psychoanalysis and feminism), there has been an explosion in
the diversity of strategies for exploiting these materials. While there have
been a number of attempts to provide explanatory models which posit
defining moments in the history of sexuality (Bray, 1988; Cohen, 1989),
this research generally concludes that past constructions of sexuality cannot
be exhaustively understood, either in their own terms or in ours. For
many critics the past offers alien constructions of sexuality in a contrasting
relation to the present, rather than possible identifications or celebratory
moments. Jonathan Katz (1994) draws such a lesson from his history of
sodomitical sin:
our own contemporary social organization of sex is as historically specific as
past social-sexual forms. Studying the past, seeing the essential differences
between past and present social forms of sex, we may gain a fresh perspective
on our own sex as socially made, not naturally given.
A shared interest in recent gay and historicist studies (Cohen, Katz,
Trumbach) has been the construction of sexuality in a network of power
relations, exercised both through the regulatory practices of church and
state and the less overt yet manifold ways in which Western culture has
circumscribed interpersonal relations.
Two main influences on gay theory have been Freud and Michel
Foucault. Already in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, detailed
psychological case-studies appeared to complicate and infinitely expand
the range of sexualities. Karl Heinrich Ulrichs published twelve volumes
on homosexuality between 1864 and 1879 (the term was first used by
Karl Benkert in 1869), and Krafft-Ebing’s Pyschopathia Sexualis (in its 1903
edition) included 238 case histories (see Weeks, 1985). Such works were
important to Freud in exploding the notion that heterosexuality was safely
grounded in nature. In Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, for instance,
he noted that it was not a self-evident fact that men should find a sexual
interest in women. Psychoanalytic theory therefore appeared to promise a
new plurality of possible classifications. Yet in certain respects Freud’s work
proved to have a strictly normative effect in that of his followers, whose goal
appeared to be to return the patient to an integrated, healthy state, purged
of the disorienting ‘illness’ of homosexuality. Jeffrey Weeks’s criticism of

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Freud focuses on the notion that desire ‘cannot be reduced to primeval
biological urges, beyond human control, nor can it be seen as a product of
conscious willing and planning. It is somewhere ambiguously, elusively,
in between, omnipotent but intangible, powerful but goal-less’ (1985).
In so far as desire is inherently unstable, the individual’s procreative goal
(or more specifically, genital sex) is threatened by perverse, transgressive
forces. Freud had noted in an Outline of Psychoanalysis that sexual life was
concerned primarily with obtaining pleasure from the body, often beyond
the needs of reproduction. If this is the case, heterosexuality supports bourgeois
ideologies to the extent that procreation mirrors production. Gay
sex, in contrast, is desire deprived of this goal; it is the very negation of
productive work.
The second major influence upon gay theory, which has returned some
critics to a re-reading of Freud, has been Michel Foucault (see Chapter 7,
pp. 178–80), who has inspired the study of the multiple operations of power
and set the problematics of defining homosexuality within discourse and
history. In The History of Sexuality (1976), Foucault sees late-nineteenthcentury
homosexuality as characterized ‘by a certain quality of sexual
sensibility, a certain way of inverting the masculine and the feminine in
oneself’. Homosexuality appeared as one of the forms of sexuality when it
was transposed from the practice of sodomy onto a kind of interior androgyny,
a hermaphroditism of the soul. ‘The sodomite’, he concludes, ‘had
been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species.’ Foucault
explored how sodomy was largely determined by civil or canonical codes
as ‘a category of forbidden acts’ which accordingly defined their perpetrator
as no more than their judicial subject. However, the nineteenth
century, Foucault argues, saw the emergence of the homosexual as ‘a personage,
a past, a case history, and a childhood . . . Nothing that went into
his total composition was unaffected by his sexuality.’ This model has been
broadly accepted, if elaborated or sometimes disputed in its details (Cohen,
1989). Nevertheless, a general problem lies in how Foucault theorizes the
transition from one mode to another. As noted by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
(1985 – and see below, pp. 256–9), in Foucault’s discontinuous profile ‘one
model of same-sex relations is superseded by another, which may again be
superseded by another. In each case the supposed model then drops out of
the frame of analysis.’ None the less, historians of sexuality have assembled
models of shifting sexual categories across time influenced by Foucault,
although more scholarly and less rigid or polemical than his own. The
historian Randolph Trumbach, for instance, has been much more open than
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Weeks, Greenberg and Bray, though accepting the constructedness of sexuality,
have resisted the extreme position on the dating of the category of
homosexuality which was characteristic of Foucault’s work.
Foucault’s influence upon gay studies, however, extends beyond the above
debates to work done within the areas of New Historicism and Cultural
Materialism (see Chapter 7, pp. 182, 187–8). Most noticeably in Great Britain
in the work of Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield, gay theory became
part of a wider cultural poetics and cultural politics, focused within literary
studies, and as such had affinities with the work of others pursuing a
similar general project (for example, Stallybrass and White, 1986).
A number of categories have been mobilized in this criticism to discuss
the inscription of homosexuality in texts and to reclaim aspects of gay
life: ‘effeminacy’, ‘drag’ and ‘camp’, for example, or the categories of ‘the
homoerotic’, ‘male bonding’ or ‘homosociality’, which have been used in
the reading of non- or anti-gay texts. In this connection, the theory of ‘homophobia’
has also given rise to the concepts of ‘panic’ and of ‘internalized
homophobia’. Alan Sinfield (1989), for instance, has shown how antieffeminacy
operated in ‘The Movement’ writing of John Wain and Kingsley
Amis (among others), and how effeminacy was used as a signifier of perversion.
Yet he also demonstrates that the muscular, down-to-earth writing
of ‘The Movement’ was subverted in the poetry of Thom Gunn, who constructed
figures of rough young men which shifted towards homoerotic
identification. The construction of masculinities has been explored further
in the essay by Sinfield and Dollimore on Shakespeare’s Henry V (Drakakis,
ed., [1985] 2002: see ‘Further reading’ for Chapter 7) and in Gregory
Woods’ work on Ernest Hemingway. Here Woods shows how writers who
have functioned as emblems of machismo need to be reassessed. What the
‘struggle against effeminate eloquence’ in this writing expresses, he argues,
‘is the nagging anxiety which is the true condition (in both senses) of
masculinity’. The voice of heterosexual masculinity is ‘to be compared with
that of closeted gay men, to the extent that it is terrified of indiscretion.
To say too much might be to sound queer’ (Still and Worton, 1993). In
the related study, Articulate Flesh (1987), Woods explores the expression
of homoeroticism in D. H. Lawrence, Hart Crane, W. H. Auden, Allen Ginsberg
and Thom Gunn.
Gay criticism of this kind both borrows the techniques of cultural
poetics and explores the relations between culture, history and text in an
increasingly politicized version of literary studies. Nicholas F. Radel, in his
essay ‘Self as Other: The Politics of Identity in the Works of Edmund White’,
for example (in Ringer, ed., 1994), has argued that White’s novels help reveal
‘a gay subject as it responds to political pressure from the culture at large.

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Far from being mere aesthetic products, these novels about gay life both
confirm and interrogate their historical milieu and its construction of sexual
orientation as gender difference.’ David Bergman’s analysis of James
Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room serves to illustrate its deployment of ‘internalized
homophobia’. He seeks to position Baldwin ‘within a line he nowhere
acknowledges – a line of both gay and African-American writers’ (in
Bristow, ed., 1992). Increasingly, too, critics have been exploring the relationship
between nationalism, anti-imperialism and sexuality – in Parker
et al., Nationalisms and Sexualities (1992), for example, and Rudi C. Bleys’s
The Geography of Perversion (1996).
In Foucault’s work, multiplying configurations of power are shown to
be central to the production and control of sexuality. In developing this
insight, Jonathan Dollimore, in particular, has explored the complex involvement
of power with pleasure: ‘pleasure and power do not cancel or turn
back against one another’, he writes in Sexual Dissidence (1991), ‘they seek
out, overlap, and reinforce one another. They are linked together by complex
mechanisms and devices of excitation and incitement.’ In this way,
Dollimore has effectively returned gay theory to Freud’s concept of ‘polymorphous
perversity’ – the theory that the child enjoys multiple sexualities
before it moves to the reductive primacy of genital sex. But Dollimore
moves beyond Freud, and arguably beyond Foucault, in remapping a
politically subversive programme for perversity. He argues that we should
think in terms of the ‘paradoxical perverse or the perverse dynamic’, which
he claims is ‘a dynamic intrinsic to social process’. Both Sinfield and
Dollimore, and others working within a tradition of gay cultural materialist
criticism, have drawn attention, in new ways, to the example of Oscar
Wilde. In Wilde, Dollimore discovers a transgressive aesthetics:
Wilde’s experience of deviant desire . . . leads him not to escape the repressive
ordering of society, but to a reinscription within it, and an inversion of the
binaries upon which that ordering depends; desire, and the transgressive
aesthetic which it fashions, reacts against, disrupts, and displaces from within.
(Dollimore, 1991)
Such a shift beyond binary oppositions marks the transition from gay to
queer theory.
Lesbian feminist theory and criticism
Lesbian feminist theory emerged as a response both to the heterosexism
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male-dominated Gay Liberation Movement. Its focus is the interlocking
structures of gender and sexual oppression. In particular, lesbian feminist
theory has consistently problematized heterosexuality as an institution
central to the maintenance of patriarchy and women’s oppression within
it. Lesbian feminist theory, like lesbian feminism, is a diverse field which
draws on a wide range of other theories and methods. While it cannot
be reduced to a single model, several features stand out: a critique of ‘compulsory
heterosexuality’, an emphasis on ‘woman identification’, and the
creation of an alternative women’s community. Whether taking a Black
feminist, a radical feminist or a psychoanalytic approach, lesbian feminist
theory foregrounds one or all of these elements.
The concept of ‘compulsory heterosexuality’ was first articulated by Gayle
Rubin (1975), and subsequently given wide circulation by Adrienne Rich in
her essay ‘Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence’ (1980). The
concept challenges the common-sense view of heterosexuality as natural and
therefore requiring no explanation, unlike lesbian and gay sexuality. Rich
argues that heterosexuality is a social institution supported by a range of
powerful sanctions. The fact of lesbian existence, notwithstanding such sanctions,
is evidence of a powerful current of woman-bonding which cannot
be suppressed. Rich locates the source of lesbianism in the fact that girl
children are ‘of woman born’ and have an original same-sex attachment to
their mothers.
Monique Wittig’s analogous concept of ‘the straight mind’ (1980,
reprinted 1992) views heterosexuality as an ideological construct which is
almost completely taken for granted, yet institutes an obligatory social relationship
between men and women: ‘as an obvious principle, as a given prior
to any science, the straight mind develops a totalizing interpretation of
history, social reality, culture, language and all subjective phenomena at the
same time.’ The discourses of heterosexuality work to oppress all those
who attempt to conceive of themselves otherwise, particularly lesbians. In
contrast to Rich, Wittig rejects the concept of ‘woman identification’, arguing
that it remains tied to the dualistic concept of gender which lesbians
challenge. She claims that in an important sense lesbians are not women,
‘for what makes a woman is a specific social relation to a man’ and so ‘woman’
acquires ‘meaning only in heterosexual systems of thought and heterosexual
economic systems’.
Judith Butler (1992), drawing on the work of both Wittig and Rich, uses
the term ‘heterosexual matrix’ to ‘designate that grid of cultural intelligibility
through which bodies, genders, and desires are naturalized’. Butler
ceases to use the term in her later work (see below, pp. 255–6) but continues

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to argue for the subversion of sexual identities and for a distinction
between sex, sexuality and gender in the social ‘performances’ that constitute
them.
The concepts of ‘woman identification’ and ‘lesbian feminist community’
were introduced by Radicalesbians in their influential essay, ‘The
Woman-Identified Woman’ (1970), and further developed once more by
Adrienne Rich. Rich (1980) depicts woman-bonding as an act of resistance
to patriarchal power, and advances the concept of ‘lesbian continuum’
to describe ‘a range – through each woman’s life and throughout history –
of woman-identified experience’. Her definition encompasses not simply
sexual experience but all forms of ‘primary intensity’ between and among
women, including relationships of family, friendship and politics. Rich’s
own 1976 essay, ‘The Temptations of a Motherless Girl’, perfectly illustrates
the concepts of ‘lesbian continuum’ and the related lesbian critical ‘revisioning’.
It offers a lesbian reading of Jane Eyre which changes the focus
from a heterosexual romance plot to a narrative of loving female pedagogy
in which Jane is nurtured and educated by a succession of female mother/
mentors. Rich convincingly demonstrates and denaturalizes the ideological
hegemony of heterosexuality in our reading and interpretative strategies.
Barbara Smith’s essay, ‘Towards a Black Feminist Criticism’ (reprinted
in Showalter, 1986), adopts a critical model similar to Rich’s in order to
argue that Toni Morrison’s Sula can be productively reread as a lesbian novel,
‘not because the women are “lovers”, but because they . . . have pivotal
relationships with one another’. ‘Whether consciously or not,’ she adds,
‘Morrison’s work poses both lesbian and feminist questions about Black
women’s autonomy and their impact on each other’s lives.’ The French
feminist, Luce Irigaray, explores an analogous concept of autonomous
female sexuality in This Sex Which Is Not One (1985). She redefines
women’s sexuality as based on difference rather than sameness, arguing
that it is multiple: ‘Woman does not have a sex. She has at least two
of them . . . Indeed she has more than that. Her sexuality, always at least
double, is in fact plural.’
Irigaray further attempts to combine a psychoanalytic and political
approach to lesbianism. In ‘When the Goods Get Together’, she advances
the concept of ‘hom(m)osexuality – punning on the signifiers of both
maleness and sameness – to capture the dual nature of hetero-patriarchal
culture. ‘Hom(m)osexual’ discourse privileges male homosocial relations
and a male sexuality of the same (whether hetero- or homosexual). Her
work links critiques of both gender and sexual power relations and in its
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The concept of ‘woman-identification’ has been challenged by some
lesbian feminists, especially Black and Third World critics. Cherrie Moraga
and Gloria Anzaldúa (1981), for example, draw attention to the way the
concept has been used to mask power relations among women. Rejecting
a universal model of identity, they create more flexible concepts of lesbian
identity – such as Anzaldúa’s (1987) concept of the new mestiza – able to
encompass the connections between women of different cultures and
ethnicities (see Chapter 9, p. 234).
Representation – in both the political and the literary senses – is a key
issue for lesbian criticism. In 1982, Margaret Cruikshank identified the
crucial role literature has played in the development of lesbian criticism.
In the thirty and more years since its emergence, lesbian literary criticism
has developed from being largely polemical – calling for the acknowledgement
of lesbian writers, readers and texts, and the definition of these – to
a sophisticated and diverse body of politically informed theoretical work
which aims to explore the multiple articulations of the sign ‘lesbian’.
The early agenda for lesbian criticism was set by Virginia Woolf’s
analysis of the relationship between women and writing in A Room of One’s
Own (1929 – see Chapter 6) which showed how literary power relations result
in a textual effacement of relationships among women. It was not until Jane
Rule’s Lesbian Images (1975), however, that a critical text sought to delineate
a lesbian literary tradition. Here Rule analyses the life and work of
a group of twentieth-century lesbian writers, including Gertrude Stein,
Ivy Compton-Burnett, Maureen Duffy and May Sarton. Despite its focus
on individual writers, Rule’s text goes beyond a celebratory biographical
approach and anticipates the multigeneric and intertextual style of much
later lesbian literary criticism.
Lesbian literary criticism of the 1970s and early 1980s was concerned to
identify a lesbian literary tradition and a lesbian literary aesthetic, whether
this was based on textual content, characters, themes, or the identification
of the author as herself lesbian. This was aided by a number of reference
works (Grier, 1981; Cruikshank, 1982; Wittig and Zeig, 1979) which continue
to provide invaluable source materials for lesbian teachers, students
and researchers. Work of this kind also performed the valuable ‘(re)discovery’
of writers assumed to be heterosexual (Judith Fetterley’s essay on Willa
Cather (1990) is a later example), or, in Alison Hennegan’s 1984 essay, ‘What
is a Lesbian Novel?’, identified a lesbian ‘sensibility’ in a text’s ‘necessarily
oblique vision of the world’. Related to this is the ‘encodement’ approach
advanced by Catharine Stimpson (1988) which analyses the strategies of concealment
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a male pseudonym), or of internal censorship and silence necessarily
employed by woman-identified writers in a homophobic and misogynistic
culture. One example of this approach is Stimpson’s analysis of the sexual
codes, use of silence, and experimentation with syntax in the writings of
Gertrude Stein. Other critics have used the approach to interpret the work
of Angelina Weld Grimke, Emily Dickinson, H.[ilda] D.[oolittle], and Willa
Cather.
Given the historical difficulty of writing lesbian, however, as well as the
changing definitions of the sign ‘lesbian’, lesbian critics have progressively
moved away from this search for a single lesbian identity or discourse. Mandy
Merck (1985), for instance, takes issue with Hennegan’s view that lesbians
share a common perspective. What Hennegan calls lesbian ‘sensibility’,
says Merck, can be found in works by other writers who don’t identify as
lesbian. She also questions an emphasis, such as there is in Hennegan’s ‘On
Becoming a Lesbian Reader’, on the importance of textual representations
in the formation of readers’ lesbian identities. A more radical approach, Merck
argues, lies in the application of perverse readings which rely neither on
the author’s or text’s concealment or disclosure of sexual identity but on
the queer perspective of the reader who subverts the dominant interpretative
frameworks. Bonnie Zimmerman (1986) also, in her essay ‘What Has
Never Been: An Overview of Lesbian Feminist Literary Criticism’, offers a
more sophisticated model of lesbian textuality. She cautions against reductive
and essentialist models of the lesbian text, and proposes the notion
of lesbian ‘double vision’ drawn from the dual perspectives of lesbians as
members of mainstream and minority cultures simultaneously. In a later
study, The Safe Sea of Women (1991), Zimmerman advances a historically
based definition of lesbian fiction, grounding this category in the cultural
and historical contexts in which it is produced and read.
Rather than seek an autonomous lesbian tradition, distinctive aesthetic,
lesbian author or reader, therefore, more recent lesbian criticism has
addressed the question of how texts internalize heterosexism and how
lesbian literary strategies can subvert its norms. One such strategy is
intertextuality. In an early essay, Elaine Marks (1979) argued that lesbian
writing is fundamentally intertextual, and that it has drawn on historical
figures such as Sappho in the rnaking of its discursive history and the
production of ‘challenging counterimages’: lesbian texts ‘written exclusively
by women for women, careless of male approval’. More recently, some
of the most exciting lesbian criticism has been produced by bilingual and
postcolonial/Third World lesbian writers who similarly foreground the
intertextual, dialogic aspects of their texts. The Quebequoise writer, Nicole

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Brossard, and the Chicana writer, Cherrie Moraga, produce lyrical, polemical
writings which interweave theory, politics and poetry. In Amantes
(1980, translated as Lovhers, 1987), Brossard practises ‘writing in the feminine’
which like écriture féminine deconstructs the opposition body/text.
Similarly, Moraga and Anzaldúa’s concept of ‘theory in the flesh’ (1981) elides
the gap between the Chicana lesbian body and text.
Teresa de Lauretis, in her article ‘Sexual Indifference and Lesbian
Representation’ (1993), also draws on French theory, using Irigaray’s concept
of ‘hom(m)osexuality’ to discuss the invisibilizing of the lesbian
body/text. Her essay subverts dominant interpretations of Radclyffe Hall’s
famous lesbian novel, The Well of Loneliness (1928), by reading against the
grain of sexology and drawing out the text’s ‘other’ lesbianism. In common
with lesbian and queer theory, de Lauretis plays on the distinction between
sex/gender and sexuality, celebrating the diversity of lesbian writing, both
critical and creative, and the ways in which lesbian writers ‘have sought
variously to escape gender, deny it, transcend it, or perform it in excess,
and to inscribe the erotic in cryptic, allegorical, realistic, camp, or other modes
of representation’.
These various strategies and the resulting intersection of postmodern
discourses and lesbian criticism have led to the textualization of lesbian
identity, whereby lesbianism is seen as a position from which to speak
‘otherwise’ and thus ‘queer’ heterosexist discourse.
Queer theory and criticism
During the 1980s, the term ‘queer’ was reclaimed by a new generation of
political activists involved in Queer nation and protest groups such as ActUp
and Outrage, though some lesbian and gay cultural activists and critics who
adopted the term in the 1950s and 1960s continue to use it to describe their
particular sense of marginality to both mainstream and minority cultures.
In the 1990s, ‘Queer Theory’ designated a radical rethinking of the relationship
between subjectivity, sexuality and representation. Its emergence in that
decade owes much to the earlier work of queer critics such as Ann Snitow
(1983), Carol Vance (1984) and Joan Nestle (1988), but also to the allied
challenge of diversity initiated by Black and Third World critics. In addition,
it gained impetus from postmodern theories with which it overlapped
in significant ways. Teresa de Lauretis, in the Introduction to the ‘Queer
Theory’ issue of differences (1991), traced the emergence of the term ‘queer’
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Further examples which explore this intersection, and the way both discourses
operate to decentre foundationalist narratives based on ‘sex’ or ‘reason’,
would include Judith Roof’s A Lure of Knowledge (1990), Laura Doan’s
The Lesbian Postmodern (1994), and essays in the volume Sexy Bodies (Grosz
and Probyn (eds), 1995). Queer theory’s foregrounding of a politics of difference
and marginality has assisted gay and lesbian critiques of heterosexual
hegemony and patriarchy while the development of a postmodern aesthetic
has helped inspire the expression of sexual plurality and gender ambivalence
in the area of cultural production: a dynamic dialogue which has placed
lesbian and gay theories at the forefront of work in the increasingly crossdisciplinary
field of critical theory.
Signs of this development have since appeared in the academic rise of
Gender Studies and the dialogues in Gay Studies with the emerging discipline
of Men’s Studies, which aims to build on feminism and gay theory
so as to provide a critique and reconstruction of men’s sexualities and
lifestyles. There has been anxiety over and opposition to both these tendencies,
and there remains in some quarters an unsettled, even antagonistic,
relationship between gay theory and feminism. In Joseph Bristow’s view
in 1992, ‘lesbian and gay criticism does not comprise a coherent field’, but
this, he argued was ‘its strength’. Bristow’s exploration of what lesbian and
gay mean involves a sense of their sameness and difference: they ‘designate
entirely different desires, physical pleasures, oppressions, and visibilities
. . . But both subordinated groups share parallel histories within a sexually
prohibitive dominant culture . . . ’. As new areas of theoretical enquiry
emerge it becomes less clear how to maintain academic boundaries. Are
transvestitism or cross-dressing, for example, topics for lesbian, gay or
bisexual studies, or for Men’s, Women’s or Gender Studies, or for Shakespeare,
theatre or performance studies? Queer studies ‘queries’ orthodoxies
and promotes or provokes such uncertainties, moving beyond lesbian and
gay sexualities to include a range of other sexualities that disrupt such fixed
or settled categorization altogether.
Some of the figures and arguments influencing the transition from gay
to queer theory have been referred to above. Jeffrey Weeks, for example,
while arguing that sexualities are historically constructed, sees them as none
the less refusing to yield up a stable cognitive core, but ‘only changing
patterns in the organization of desire’ (1985). Yet if this is true of homosexuality,
surely heterosexuality too is also a recent construction and not a
naturally grounded identity. As we have seen, the notion that sexual desire
naturally and necessarily involves a gravitation towards a person of the opposite
biological sex was already challenged by Freud (see also Laqueur, 1990).

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In a postmodern, postcolonial world, in which the object of knowledge has
itself become a problematic space, queer theory seeks further to question
all such essentializing tendencies and binary thinking. An elusive sexuality,
fragmented into local, perverse particularities, is celebrated in all its deviant
versions. Such ‘perversions’ are mobilized in resistance to the bourgeois construction
of self modelled upon a rigid, patriarchal heterosexuality which
has exercised its hegemony for over two centuries.
In repoliticizing gay theory along these lines, queer theory has drawn
on Foucault, as discussed earlier in this chapter, and in its inflection in Great
Britain especially towards cultural materialism, on the work of Althusser and
Raymond Williams. Here some tension has emerged between queer positions
and more traditional Marxist approaches. In Jeffrey Weeks’s view, for
instance, capitalist social relations have an effect on sexualities (as on
many other matters), ‘but a history of capitalism is not a history of sexuality’
(1985). His own work demonstrates that power should not be treated
as single and unitary but as itself diverse, shifting and unstable, and hence
as open to resistance in a variety of ways. This argument makes possible
the formation, in Foucault’s terms, of a ‘ “reverse” discourse’ in which
‘homosexuality began to speak in its own behalf, to demand that its legitimacy
or “naturality” be acknowledged, often in the same vocabulary,
using the same categories by which it was medically disqualified’ (1976).
Theorists and critics following this Marxist or post-Marxist tradition must
negotiate the situation summarized by Raymond Williams in Marxism and
Literature (1977 – see Chapter 5) as one in which ‘all or nearly all initiatives
and contributions, even when they take on manifestly alternative
or oppositional forms, are in practice tied to the hegemonic’. Queer theory
would question the implication, apparent here and in Foucault’s work, that
alternative or oppositional meanings are fully appropriated by the state.
As Dollimore (1991) writes, ‘Thinking history in terms of the perverse
dynamic begins to undermine that binary opposition between the essentialist
and the anti-essentialist.’ As he discovers in the multiple resistances
to Renaissance ideologies, marginality is not simply marginal. Dollimore’s
and Sinfield’s work, in theoretical tandem with other examples in Cultural
Materialism and New Historicism (Stallybrass and White, 1986; Bredbeck,
1991; Goldberg, 1992, 1994, progressing again beyond Foucault, especially
in the area of Renaissance studies. See also Chapter 7), shows that binary
oppositions become unstable in the subversive moment of queer writing.
A key instance here, once more, is Oscar Wilde. Identifying a series of
oppositions between Wilde and his culture, such as ‘surface/depth’; ‘lying/
truth’; ‘abnormal/normal’; ‘narcissism/maturity’, Dollimore concludes:

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‘That which society forbids, Wilde reinstates through and within some of
its most cherished and central cultural categories – art, the aesthetic, art
criticism, individualism.’ Wilde, he argues, appropriates dominant categories
in the same gesture that he ‘transvalues them through perversion and
inversion’, demonstrating how ‘abnormality is not just the opposite, but
the necessarily always present antithesis of normality’.
Two further figures of special importance to the emergence of queer
theory are Judith Butler and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. At the same time, their
influence extends beyond this category, Butler in fact claiming that in the
first instance she wrote Gender Trouble (1992), her most influential book in
this field, primarily as a feminist for feminist readers. Also, queer theory
itself, certainly in versions indebted to Butler, contests the categorization
which would limit it to questions of gay or lesbian sexual identities. In this
view, queer theory does not name a separatist movement claiming an essence
of gayness, but on the contrary emphasizes the constructedness, ambivalence
and potential plurality of all gendered and sexual identities. As David
Halperin has said in emphasizing the critical ‘querying’ aspect of queer
theory, ‘Queer is by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the
legitimate, the dominant. There is nothing in particular to which it necessarily
refers. It is an identity without an essence’ (Halperin, 1990). Butler
accordingly uses the (non)category of queer to disrupt not only the authority
of the hom(m)osexual economy but also the attribution of identity
per se. In ‘Imitation and Gender Insubordination’ (1991), she calls for a
rejection of the essentialism of the hetero/homosexual binary opposition,
and for the queering of heterosexist master narratives. Unlike lesbian
feminists such as Wittig, she refuses to identify lesbian as a positive
oppositional term, arguing that it is the absence of a defined lesbian
counter-identity that enables the postmodern lesbian to queer the master
discourse. As Butler puts it, ‘I would like to have it permanently unclear
what precisely that sign signifies.’ In this way, queer theory proposes a
disruption of normative sexual identities and a conception of agency
linked to the ‘performance’ which installs those identities. Butler’s work
is known above all for her association of the idea of ‘performativity’ with
sexual or gendered identities. Often this is taken to posit a theatrical
self, able to freely select from a range of possible identities. Moe Meyer, for
example, argues that queer theory is ‘an ontological challenge that displaces
bourgeois notions of the Self as unique, abiding, and continuous while
substituting instead a concept of the Self as performative, improvisational,
discontinuous, and processually constituted by repetitive and stylized acts’
(Meyer, 1994).

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While recognizing that there is an evident popular desire for a conception
of improvised identity and that her own work has been seen to
endorse this, Butler has explained that she intends a more philosophically
rigorous and more limited popular notion of performativity which makes
plain that gender is constructed, or ‘contoured’, through ‘repetition and recitation’,
is the subversive ‘re-signification’ of normative identities – but is not
a matter of free choice (Butler, 1994). Liz Grosz (1996) concurs with Butler
that it is the indeterminacy of the sign ‘lesbian’ which gives it its radical
potential, but she also offers a critique of queer theory’s elision of systematic
structures of power and its celebration of deviant sexual practices of
whatever kind. Other lesbian feminists are critical of queer theory’s tendency
to downplay the significance of gender difference. Many would argue
that, although distinct, gender and sexuality cannot be completely disarticulated.
It makes no sense to claim that lesbians’ oppression, while
being specific, is not connected to their oppression as women. The tendency
for lesbian existence to be marginalized in the new queer discourses
is no doubt indicative of the continuing power relations between the sexes.
Nevertheless, there exists a productive tension between lesbian, gay male
and feminist theory in the development of textual and intertextual strategies
which undermine both literary norms and everyday sexual stereotypes
(Humm, 1994).
Butler’s recent work, in the meantime, while revisiting the themes of
performativity and regulative social-sexual norms, has confirmed the
breadth of her theoretical sources (Freud, Foucault, Derrida), and sought
to address broader political themes. Excitable Speech: A Politics of the
Performative (1997) is a study of racist ‘hate speech’, pornography, and the
discourse about gays in the military. What Butler argues, however, is that
an inevitable disjuncture between intent and effect, or speech and conduct,
means that injurious terms can be appropriated and re-deployed for
counter purposes (the term ‘queer’, used to reverse its intended meanings,
would be a case in point). The Psychic Life of Power, also produced in 1997,
argues that the psyche is crucial to the formation of normative sexual identities
in that it is constrained to adopt the exclusionary prohibitions – upon
homosexuality, for example – determined by the hegemonic social order.
The result is a ‘melancholy’ loss of what is forbidden but cannot be
avowed. But here again, Butler argues that this experience may be countered
through the unpredictable, and therefore resistant, ways in which norms
might be adopted or performed.
Butler’s reputation rests primarily on her earlier works. Eve Kosofsky
Sedgwick, similarly, made her most significant contribution to gender and

.
GAY, LESBIAN AND QUEER THEORIES 257
queer theory in two key early studies, Between Men (1985) and Epistemology
of the Closet (1990). Like Butler, she draws in these works on deconstructive
postmodern theory but with a more evident political intent or implication
and also with more direct reference to literary texts. The supposed
opposition between sex and gender, she argues, seems ‘only to delineate a
problematical space rather than a crisp distinction’ (1990). Sexuality has often
been confused with sex, she says, adding that other categories such as race
or class might themselves be important in the construction of sexuality. Just
as there is no single sexuality, so there is no privileged narrative of nation.
Sexualities, like nationalities, are therefore simply shaped by their differences,
not by something innately grounding them. Sexual boundaries are
no more fixed than national ones, though they may, for a period, serve to
delineate a particular discursive space. More recent work in this area has
shown how sexology and colonial anthropology were linked but that one
nation’s sexual classifications do not neatly equate with those of another.
This has coincided with a move away from the black denunciation of homosexuality
as something alien to black culture. At the same time, though the
existence of cross-dressing and a homosexual rite of passage into manhood
in other cultures have been sometimes exoticized and misunderstood, a
critical reading of ethnographic literatures (such as that of Rudi C. Bleys,
1996) can provide a sense of the larger narratives involved in the construction
of gay identities.
Sedgwick has also deployed the concept of ‘homosociality’ as an interpretative
tool to demonstrate ‘the usefulness of certain Marxist-feminist
historical categories for literary criticism’. In her Between Men: English
Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1985), she begins to distance herself
from determinate notions of patriarchy; male and female homosociality none
the less have different historical shapes and they remain ‘articulations and
mechanisms of the enduring inequality of power between women and men’.
She acknowledges a debt to feminism, but increasingly, in a move typical
of the deconstructive tendencies of queer theory, considers the multiple
constructedness of sex, gender and sexuality. Her study of Shakespeare’s
Sonnets, Wycherley’s play, The Country Wife, Tennyson, George Eliot and
Dickens illustrates the paradoxically historicizing and dehistoricizing tendencies
of this kind of work. The book is also notable for its discussion of
the Gothic as ‘Terrorism and Homosexual Panic’. In particular (building on
Freud), she explores the theory that ‘paranoia is the psychosis that makes
graphic the mechanisms of homophobia’.
Queer theory views the traditional and prescriptive essentialist model of
sexuality as failing to do the conceptual work involved in the adequate

.
258 A READER’S GUIDE TO CONTEMPORARY LITERARY THEORY
description of how desires function, and how sexualities are made. The range
of critical terminologies, models and strategies outlined above confirms that
it is no longer viable to think in terms of a single, coherent ‘sexuality’ and
has effected the transition from the ‘natural’ homosexual individual, to whom
rights could be attached, to the disorienting notion that all sexualities are
perverse and can be reclaimed and celebrated as such. If gay or lesbian theory
has often been defensively grounded in liberal rights, queer theory is a
deeper philosophical challenge to the status quo, which at the same time
aims to provide readings which at once subvert sameness and celebrate
otherness.
In consequence, queer theory is mobile and varied in its assault upon
privileged, stable, heterosexual ‘origins’. While some, in a mood of holiday
fun, seek to celebrate the carnival of style, artifice, performance and play
discovered in perverse sexualities, others seek a more politicized stance,
moving beyond Foucault or adopting a more materialist response to poststructuralist
textualism. Jeffrey Weeks sees the ‘flux of desire’ as itself too
much for capitalist society to endure, for it simultaneously encourages
and abhors this chaos, and cannot live with the infinite variety of potential
interconnections and relationships. Sedgwick has similarly attacked the
assumption that homosexuality today ‘comprises a coherent definitional
field rather than a space of overlapping, contradictory, and conflicting
definitional forces’. In questioning stable, unproblematic classifications of
sexuality, this seems to remove any common platform for action. However,
Sedgwick urges a less systematic approach: surely, she argues, it would be
sensible to work from ‘the relation enabled by the unrationalized coexistence
of different models during the times they do exist’.
Accordingly, the starting-point for ‘queer theory’ is, in Moe Meyer’s
words, ‘an ontological challenge to dominant labelling philosophies’. This
strategy takes up Weeks’s ‘whirlwind of deconstruction’ by contesting the
binary opposition between (among other things) homosexuality and heterosexuality,
and has taken important effect in gay and academic communities.
In the 1980s, it was feared that the spectre of AIDS would unleash
homophobic repression, that gay men would be marginalized, and the right
to a diversity of sexual pleasure be strictly limited. Yet the message that sex
must simply be safer, not less varied, has led to the recovery and reinvention
of erotic possibilities. Gay groups are working with sex-workers (male
and female), forcing a concern with sexuality to return to questions of
class, economics and inequality. The appearance of AIDS and HIV shifted
notions of identity, and brought with it new challenges, discourses and forms
of representation. In a more theoretical direction, Lee Edelman, taking up

.
GAY, LESBIAN AND QUEER THEORIES 259
the associations of AIDS and plague mapped by Susan Sontag (1989),
argues in his ‘The Plague of Discourse: Politics, Literary Theory, and Aids’
(in Butters, AIDS and its Metaphors, 1989), for the placing of literary theory
between ‘politics’ and ‘AIDS’, since ‘both of those categories produce, and
are produced as, historical discourses susceptible to analysis by the critical
methodologies associated with literary theory’. His essay questions the
ideological opposition between the biological, literal and real on the one
hand, and on the other, the literary, figural and fictive, and concludes that
a deconstructive queer theory must make its case on AIDS through a
necessarily ‘diseased’ discourse.
Queer critics continued in this same period to mobilize the ‘coming out’
of theory in the academic world. Silence in this regard was seen as a species
of closetedness. Writing in 1990, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick recalled that, ‘in
a class I taught at Amherst College, fully half the students said they had
studied Dorian Gray in previous classes, but no one had ever discussed the
book in terms of any homosexual content’. As this tells us, much has had
to be done in learning to speak and write about literature’s and our own
sexual constructedness. Fifteen years on, what would teachers and students
of Dorian Gray now have to say?
Selected reading
Key texts
Abelove, Henry et al. (eds), The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader (Routledge,
London, 1993).
Adams, Rachel and Savran, David (eds), The Masculinity Studies Reader
(Blackwell, Oxford, 2002).
Anzaldúa, Gloria, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (Aunt Lute
Books, San Francisco, 1987).
Bristow, Joseph (ed.), Sexual Sameness: Textual Difference in Lesbian and
Gay Writing (Routledge, London, 1992).
Bristow, Joseph, Effeminate England: Homoerotic Writing after 1885 (Open
University Press, Milton Keynes, 1995).
Bristow, Joseph, Sexuality (Routledge, London, 1997).
Bristow, Joseph and Wilson, Angela R. (eds), Activating Theory: Lesbian,
Gay and Bisexual Politics (Lawrence & Wishart, London, 1996).

.
260 A READER’S GUIDE TO CONTEMPORARY LITERARY THEORY
Butler, Judith, ‘Imitation and Gender Subordination’, in Diana Fuss (ed.,
1991), below.
Butler, Judith, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity
(Routledge, London and New York, 1992).
Butler, Judith, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’
(Routledge, London and New York, 1993).
Butler, Judith, ‘Gender as Performance: An Interview with Judith Butler’,
conducted by Peter Osborne and Lynne Segal, Radical Philosophy,
67 (Summer, 1994).
Butler, Judith, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (Routledge,
London, 1997).
Butler, Judith, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford
University Press, California, 1997).
Butler, Judith, Undoing Gender (Routledge, London, 2004).
Butler, Judith, The Judith Butler Reader, ed. by Sara Salih (Blackwell,
Oxford, 2003).
Cohen, Ed., ‘Legislating the Norm: From Sodomy to Gross Indecency’,
South Atlantic Quarterly, 88 (1989), 181–217.
Corber, Robert J. and Valocchi, Stephen J. (eds), Queer Studies: An
Interdisciplinary Reader (Blackwell, Oxford, 2003).
Cruikshank, Margaret (ed.), Lesbian Studies: Present and Future (The
Feminist Press, New York, 1982).
Daly, Mary, Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (Beacon Press,
Boston, 1978).
de Lauretis, Teresa, ‘Introduction’, differences: ‘Queer Theory Issue’, 3:
2 (Summer, 1991).
de Lauretis, Teresa, ‘Sexual Indifference and Lesbian Representation’, in
Henry Abelove et al. (eds), above.
Doan, Laura (ed.), The Lesbian Postmodern (Columbia University Press,
New York, 1994).
Dollimore, Jonathan, Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to
Foucault (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1991).
Dollimore, Jonathan, Sex, Literature and Censorship (Polity Press,
Cambridge, 2001).
Edelman, Lee, Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory
(Routledge, London, 1994).

.
GAY, LESBIAN AND QUEER THEORIES 261
Epstein, Julia and Straub, Kristina (eds), Body Guards: The Cultural Politics
of Gender Ambiguity (Routledge, London and New York, 1991).
Fetterley, Judith, ‘My Antonia! Jim Blunden and the Dilemma of the
Lesbian Writer’, in Karla Jay, Joanne Glasgow and Catharine R.
Stimpson (eds), Lesbian Texts and Contexts: Radical Revisions (New
York University Press, New York, 1990).
Foucault, Michel, The History of Sexuality: Volume 1. An Introduction
[1976], trans. by Robert Hurley (Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1990).
Fuss, Diana (ed.), Inside/Outside: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories (Routledge,
London, 1991).
Gever, Martha, Parmar, Pratibha and Greyson, John, Queer Looks
(Routledge, London, 1993).
Goldberg, Jonathan, Sodometries: Renaissance Texts: Modern Sexualities
(University of California Press, Stanford, 1992).
Goldberg, Jonathan (ed.), Reclaiming Sodom (Routledge, London and New
York, 1994).
Goldberg, Jonathan (ed.), Queering the Renaissance (Duke University Press,
Durham, NC and London, 1994).
Greenberg, David F., The Construction of Homosexuality (University of
Chicago Press, Chicago, 1988).
Grier, Barbara, The Lesbian in Literature: A Bibliography (The Naiad Press,
Tallahassee, 1981).
Grosz, Elizabeth, Space, Time, Perversion (Routledge, London, 1996).
Grosz, Elizabeth and Probyn, Elsbeth (eds), Sexy Bodies: The Strange
Carnalities of Feminism (Routledge, London, 1995).
Hennegan, Alison, ‘What is a Lesbian Novel?’, Woman’s Review,
no. 1 (1984).
Hennegan, Alison, ‘On Becoming a Lesbian Reader’, in Susannah
Radstone (ed.), Sweet Dreams: Sexuality, Gender and Popular Fiction
(Lawrence & Wishart, London, 1988).
Hocquenghem, Guy, Homosexual Desire (Allison & Busby, London, 1978).
Irigaray, Luce, This Sex Which Is Not One (Cornell University Press, Ithaca,
1985).
Jay, Karla and Glasgow, Joanne (eds), Lesbian Texts and Contexts: Radical
Revisions (New York University Press, New York, 1990).

.
262 A READER’S GUIDE TO CONTEMPORARY LITERARY THEORY
Johnstone, Jill, Lesbian Nation (Simon & Schuster, New York, 1973).
Kopelson, Kevin, Love’s Litany: The Writing of Modern Homoerotics
(University of California Press, Stanford, 1994).
Laqueur, Thomas, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud
(Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1990).
Lilly, Mark (ed.), Lesbian and Gay Writing: An Anthology of Critical Essays
(Macmillan, Basingstoke, 1990).
Lorde, Audre, Sister/Outsider (Crossing Press, New York, 1984).
Marks, Elaine, ‘Lesbian Intertextuality’, in George Stamboulian and Elaine
Marks (eds), Homosexualities and French Literature (Cornell University
Press, Ithaca, 1979).
Merck, Mandy, Review of ‘Girls Next Door’, Women’s Review, 1
(Nov. 1985), 40.
Merck, Mandy, Perversions: Deviant Readings (Virago, London, 1993).
Meyer, Moe (ed.), The Politics and Poetics of Camp (Routledge, New York
and London, 1994).
Moraga, Cherrie and Anzaldúa, Gloria, This Bridge Called My Back:
Writings by Radical Women of Color (Kitchen Table Press,
New York, 1981).
Munt, Sally (ed.), New Lesbian Criticism (Harvester Wheatsheaf, Hemel
Hempstead, 1992).
Parker, Andrew, et al. (eds), Nationalisms and Sexualities (Routledge,
London and New York, 1992).
Radicalesbians, ‘The Woman-Identified Woman’, The Ladder, vol. 14,
11/12 (1970).
Rich, Adrienne, ‘Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence’,
Signs, 5, 4 (Summer, 1980), 631–60.
Rich, Adrienne, ‘The Temptations of a Motherless Girl’, in On Lies, Secrets
and Silence (Virago, London, 1980).
Roof, Judith, A Lure of Knowledge: Lesbian Sexuality and Theory (Columbia
University Press, New York, 1990).
Rule, Jane, Lesbian Images (Crossing Press, Trumansberg, NY, 1975).
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, Between Men: English Literature and Male
Homosocial Desire (Columbia University Press, New York, 1985).
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, Epistemology of the Closet (University of California
Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1990).

.
GAY, LESBIAN AND QUEER THEORIES 263
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, Tendencies (Routledge, London, 1994).
Showalter, Elaine (ed.), The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women,
Literature and Theory (Virago, London, 1986).
Sinfield, Alan, Literature, Politics and Culture in Postwar Britain (Basic
Blackwell, Oxford, 1989).
Sinfield, Alan, The Wilde Century (Cassell, London, 1994).
Sinfield, Alan, Cultural Politics – Queer Reading (Routledge, London, 1994).
Smith, Barbara, ‘Towards a Black Feminist Criticism’, in Elaine Showalter
(ed., 1986), above.
Stallybrass, Peter and White, Allon, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression
(Methuen, London, 1986).
Still, Judith and Worton, Michael, Textuality and Sexuality: Reading Theories
and Practices (Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1993).
Weeks, Jeffrey, Sexuality and its Discontents: Meanings, Myths and Modern
Homosexualities (Routledge, New York and London, 1985).
Whitehead, Stephen M. and Barrett, Frank J. (eds), The Masculinities
Reader (Polity Press, Cambridge, 2001).
Wittig, Monique, ‘The Straight Mind’ [1980], reprinted in The Straight
Mind and Other Essays (Harvester Wheatsheaf, Hemel Hempstead,
1992).
Wittig, Monique, ‘One Is Not Born a Woman’, Feminist Issues, 1/2 (1981),
47–54.
Wittig, Monique and Zeig, Sandi, Lesbian Peoples: Materials for a Dictionary
[French edn, 1976] (Avon, New York, 1979).
Woods, Gregory, Articulate Flesh: Male Home-Eroticism in Modern Poetry
(Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1987).
Zimmerman, Bonnie, ‘What Has Never Been: An Overview of Lesbian
Feminist Literary Criticism’, in Elaine Showalter (ed., 1986), above.
Zimmerman, Bonnie, The Safe Sea of Women: Lesbian Fiction 1969–1989
(Beacon Press, Boston, 1991).
Further reading
Bingham, C., ‘Seventeenth-Century Attitudes Toward Deviant Sex’,
Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 1 (1971), 447–68.

.
264 A READER’S GUIDE TO CONTEMPORARY LITERARY THEORY
Bleys, Rudi C., The Geography of Perversion: Male-to-Male Sexual Behaviour
Outside the West and the Ethnographic Imagination 1750–1918 (Cassell,
London, 1996).
Bray, Alan, Homosexuality in Renaissance England (Gay Men’s Press,
London, 1988).
Bredbeck, Gregory W., Sodomy and Interpretation: Marlowe to Milton
(Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 1991).
Bremner, Jeni, From Sappho to de Sade: Moments in the History of Sexuality
(Routledge, London, 1989).
Burston, Paul and Richardson, Colin (eds), A Queer Romance: Lesbians, Gay
Men and Popular Culture (Routledge, London, 1995).
Butters, Ronald R. et al. (eds), Displacing Homophobia: Gay Male Perspectives
in Literature and Culture (Duke University Press, Durham, NC and
London, 1989).
Clark, David and Barber, Stephen (eds), Regarding Sedgwick: Essays on
Queer Culture and Critical Theory (Routledge, London, 2002).
Cleto, Fabio (ed.), Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject: A
Reader (Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 1999).
Davenport-Hines, R., Sex, Death and Punishment: Attitudes to Sex and
Sexuality in Britain Since the Renaissance (Collins, London, 1990).
De Jean, Joan, Fictions of Sappho 1565–1937 (University of Chicago Press,
Chicago and London, 1989).
Donoghue, Emma, Passions Between Women: British Lesbian Culture
1668–1801 (Scarlet Press, London, 1993).
Dynes, Wayne, Homolexis: A Historical and Cultural Lexicon of
Homosexuality (Gai Saber Monograph, New York, 1985).
Ferris, Lesley (ed.), Crossing the Stage: Controversies on Cross-Dressing
(Routledge, New York and London, 1993).
Garber, Marjorie, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety
(Routledge, New York and London, 1992).
Glover, David and Kaplan, Cora, Genders (Routledge, London, 2000).
Hall, Donald E., Queer Theories (Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2002).
Halperin, David M., One Hundred Years of Homosexuality and Other Essays
on Greek Love (Routledge, London, 1990).

.
GAY, LESBIAN AND QUEER THEORIES 265
Hamer, Diane and Budge, Belinda (eds), The Good, The Bad and The
Gorgeous: Popular Culture’s Romance with Lesbianism (Pandora,
London, 1994).
Hawkes, Terence, Alternative Shakespeares, Volume 2 (Routledge, London,
1996).
Humm, Maggie, A Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Feminist Theory
(Harvester Wheatsheaf, Hemel Hempstead, 1994).
Katz, J. N., ‘The Age of Sodomitical Sin, 1607–1740’, in Jonathan
Goldberg (ed., 1994), see Key texts, above.
Lewis, Reina, ‘The Death of the Author and the Resurrection of the
Dyke’, in Sally Munt (ed., 1992), see Key texts, above.
Maccubbin, Robert P., ’Tis Nature’s Fault: Unauthorised Sexuality during the
Enlightenment (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1985).
Nestle, Joan, A Restricted Country: Essays and Short Stories (Sheba, London,
1988).
Norton, Rictor, Mother Clap’s Molly House: The Gay Subculture in England
1700–1830 (The Gay Men’s Press, London, 1992).
Palmer, Paulina, Contemporary Lesbian Writing (Oxford University Press,
Oxford, 1993).
Ringer, R. Jeffrey (ed.), Queer Words, Queer Images: Communication and the
Construction of Homosexuality (New York University Press, London
and New York, 1994).
Rousseau, G. S. and Porter, Roy (eds), Sexual Underworlds of the
Enlightenment (Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1992).
Rubin, Gayle, ‘The Traffic in Women’, in Rayna R. Reiter (ed.), Toward an
Anthropology of Women (Monthly Review Press, New York, 1975).
Salih, Sara, Judith Butler (Routledge, London, 2002).
Saslow, James M., Ganymede in the Renaissance: Homosexuality in Art and
Society (Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1986).
Senelick, Laurence, ‘Mollies or Men of Mode? Sodomy and the
Eighteenth-Century London Stage’, Journal of the History of Sexuality,
1 (1990), 33–67.
Smith, Bruce, R., Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare’s England: Cultural
Poetics (University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 1991).

.
266 A READER’S GUIDE TO CONTEMPORARY LITERARY THEORY
Snitow, Ann et al. (eds), Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality (New
Feminist Library, New York, 1983).
Stimpson, Catharine, Where the Meanings Are: Feminism and Cultural
Spaces (Routledge, London, 1988).
Sullivan, Nikki, A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory (Edinburgh
University Press, Edinburgh, 2003).
Trumbach, Randolph, ‘Sodomitical Subcultures, Sodomitical Roles, and
the Gender Revolutions of the Eighteenth Century: The Recent
Historiography’, Eighteenth-Century Life, 9 (1985), 109–21.
Trumbach, Randolph, ‘London’s Sapphists: From Three Sexes to Four
Genders in the Making of Modern Culture’, in Julia Epstein and
Kristina Straub (eds, 1991), see Key texts, above.
Vance, Carole S. (ed.), Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality
(Routledge, London, 1984).
Whitehead, Stephen J., Men and Masculinities (Polity Press, Cambridge,
2002).

EPISTEMOLOGY
OF THE CLOSET
EVE KOSOFSKY SEDGWICK
'"
University of California Press
Berkeley • Los Angeles

P$J7q-
. Hb:J s
/GfCjO
:I ,,
Contents
I,
Acknowledgments
ix
Credits
xi
Introduction: Axiomatic
I
Chapter 4, "The Beast in the Closet, .. first appeared in
Ruth Bernard Yeazell, ed., Sex. Politics, and Science in the
Nineteenth-Century Novel, Selected Papers from the English
Institute. 1983-84. The johns Hopkins University Press,
Baltimore/London, 1986, pp. 148-86. Reprinted by
permission of the publisher.
University of California Press
Berkeley and Los· Aiigeles; Califolnia
© 1990 by
The Regents of the University of California
1
I
I. Epistemology of the Closet
l.l
v
r; 2.. Some Binarisms (I)
[l)
lA
Billy Budd: After the Homosexual
3- Some Binarisms (II)
Wilde, Nietzsche, and the Sentimental Relations
of the Male Body
91
I3I
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky.
Epistemology of the closet I Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick.
p. ern.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 0-520-07042-9
1. American fiction-Men authors-History and criticism.
2. Homosexuality and literature. 3. Melville, Herman, 1819-1891.
Billy Budd. 4. James, Henry, 1843-1916-Criticism and
interpretation. 5. Wilde, Oscar,1854-1900-Criticism and
interpretation. 6. Proust, Marcel, 1871-1922. Ala recherche du
temps perdu. 7. Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 1844-1900. 8. Gays'
writings.:..:. History and criticism-Theory, etc. 9. Gay men in
literature. I. Title.
PS374.H63S42 1990
813'.309353-dc20 90-35697
CIP
I
-' 4· The Beast in the Closet
')
,

Introduction: Axiomatic
I
!
I
I
i .I
I
!I
.J
Epistemology of the Closet proposes that many of the major nodes of
thought and knowledge in twentieth-century Western culture as a whole
are structured-indeed, fractured- by a chronic, now endemic crisis of
homo/heterosexual definition, indicatively male, dating from the end
of the nineteenth century. The book will argue that an understanding of
virtually any aspecr of modern Wb;tern culture must be, not merely
incomplete,'but damaged in its central substance to the degree that it does
not incorporate a critical analysis of modem homo/heterosexual definition;
and it will assume that the appropriate place for that critical analysis
to begin is from the relatively decentered perspective of modem gay and
antihomophobic theory.
The passage oftime, the bestowal of thought and necessary political
struggle since the tum of the century have only spread and deepened the
long crisis of modem sexual definition, dramatizing, often violently, the
internal incoherence and mutual contradiction of each of the forms of
discursive and institutional "common sense" on this subject inherited
from the architects of our present culture. The contradictions I will be
discussing are not in the first place those between prohomosexual and
antihomosexual people or ideologies, although the book's strongest motivation
is indeed the gay-affirmative one. Rather, the contradictions that
seem most active are the ones internal to all the important twentiethcentury
understandings of homo I heterosexual definition, both heremsexist
and antihomophobic. Their outlines and something of their history
are sketched in Chapter 1. Briefly, they are two. The first is the contradiction
between seeing homo/heterosexual definition on the one hand as an
issue of active importance primarily for a small, distinct, relatively fixed
homosexual minority (what I refer to as a minoritizing view), and seeing it)
on the other hand as an issue of continuing, determinative importance in
the lives of people across the spectrum of sexualities (what I refer to as a
universalizing view). The second is the contradiction between seeing
same-sex object choice on the one hand as a matter of liminality or
I

2 Introduction: Axiomatic
transitivity between genders, and seeing it on the other hand as reflecting
an impulse of separatism-though by no means necessarily political
separatism-within each gender. The purpose of this book is not to
adjudicate between the two poles of either of these contradictions, for, if
its argument is right, no epistemological grounding now exists from
which to do so. Instead, I am trying to make the strongest possible
'introductory case for a hypothesis about the centrality of this nominally
marginal, conceptually intractable set of definitional issues to the important
knowledges and understandings of twentieth-century Western
culture as a whole.
The word "homosexual" entered Euro-American discourse during the
last third of the nineteenth century-its popularization preceding, as it
happens, even that of the word "heterosexual."' It seems clear that .the
sexual behaviors, and even for some people the conscious identities,
denoted by the new term "homosexual" and its contemporary variants
already had a long, rich history. So, indeed, did a wide range of other
sexual behaviors and behavi()ral cll!sters. What was new from the turn of
the century was the world-mapping by wJ;lich every given person, just as
he or she was necessarily assignable to a male or a female gender, was now
considered necessarily assignable as well to a homo- or a hetero-sexuality,
-a binarized identity that was full of implications, however confusing, for
even the ostensibly least sexual aspects of personal existence. It was this
new development that left no space in the culture exempt from the potent
incoherences of homo/heterosexual definition.
New, institutionalized taxonomic discourses-medical, legal, literary,
psychological-centering on homo/heterosexual definition proliferated
and crystallized with exceptional rapidity in the decades around the turn
of the century, decades in which so many of the other critical nodes of the
culture were being, if less suddenly and newly, nonetheless also definitively
reshaped. Both the power relations between the genders and the
relations of nationalism and imperialism, for instance, were in highly
visible crisis. For this reason, and because the structuring of same-sex
bonds can't, in any historical situation marked by inequality and contest
betuJeen genders, fail to be a site of intensive regulation that intersects
Introduction: Axiomatic 3
virtually every issue of power and- gender, 2 lines can never be drawn to
I
circumscribe within some proper domain of sexuality {whatever that
I
might be) the consequences of a shift in sexual discourse. Furthermore, in
l
accord with·Foucault's demonstration, whose results I will take to be
axiomatic, that modern Western culture has placed what it calls sexuality
in a more and more distinctively privileged relation to our most prized
constructs of individual identity, truth, and.knowledge, it becomes truer
and truer that the language of sexuality not only intersects with but
transforms the languages and relations by which we know.
Accordingly, one characte,istic of the rea4.ings in this book is to attend
to perforroative aspects of texts, and to what are often blandly called their
I {-"reader relations," as sites of definitional creation, violence, and rupture
in relation to particular readers, particular institutional circums.tan,ces.
I
An assumption underlying the book is that the relations of the closet-the
relations of the known and the unknown, the explicit and the inexplicit
around homo I heterosexual definition- have the potential for being peculiarly
revealing, in fact, about
ore generally. It has felt
throughout this work as though the ensity of their social meaning lends
any speech act concerning these issues- and the outlines of th

•
4 Introduction: Axiomatic
best friends, who for years canvassed freely the emotional complications
of each other's erotic lives-the man's eroticism happening to focus exclusively
on men. But it was only after one particular conversational
moment, fully a decade into this relationship, that it seemed to either of
these friends that permission had been given to the woman to refer to the
man, in their conversation together, as a gay man. Discussing it much
later, both agreed they had felt at the time that this one moment had
constituted a clear-cut act of coming out, even in the context of years and
years beforehand of exchange predicated on the man's being gay. What
was said to make this difference? Not a version of "I am gay," which could
only have been bathetic between them. What constituted coming out for
--=
this man, in this situation, was to use about himself the phrase ''coming
out" -to mention, as if casually, having come out to someone else.
(Similarly, aT-shirt that ACT UP sells in New York bearing the text, "I am
out, therefore I am," is meant to do for the wearer, not the constativework
of reporting that s/he is out, but the performative work of coming out in
the first place.) And as 1 will diss:uss, thr fact thawilence is
f rendered as pointed and performative as speech, in
closet;dePe'nd7 on 'i_ndhighlights more broadlythe fact that ignorance is
as potent and as
ail, is not itself power, although it is the magnetic field
' '
of power. Ignorance and opacity collude or compete with knowledge in
mobilizing the Bows of energy, desire, goods, meanings, persons. If M.
Mitterrand knows English but Mr. Reagan lacks-as he did lack-
French, it is the urbane M. Mitterrand who must negotiate in an acquired
tongue, the ignorant Mr. R;agan who may dilate in his native one., Or in
the interactive speech model by which, as Sally McConneii-Ginet puts it,
"the standard ... meaning can be thought of as what is recognizable
solely on the basis of interlocutors' mutual knowledge of established practices
of interpretation," it is the interlocutor who has or pretends to have
the less broadly knowledgeable understanding of interpretive practice
who will define the terms of the exchange. So, for instance, because "men,
with superior extralinguistic resources and privileged discourse positions,
are often less likely to treat perspectives different from their own as mutually
available for communication," their attitudes are "thus more likely to
leave a lasting imprint on the common semantic stock than women's. " 4
(l) Sally McConnell·Ginet, "The Sexual (Re)Production of Meaning: A Discourse-
Based manuscript, pp. 387-88, quoted in Cheris Kramarae and Paula A.
Treichler, A Feminist Dictionary (Boston: Pandora Press, 1985), p. 264; emphasis added.
I
I
il
\
,
Introduction: Axiomatic 5
Such ignorance effects can be harnessed, licensed, and regulated on a
mass scale for striking enforcements-perhaps especially around sexuality,
in modern Western culture the most meaning-intensive of human
activities. The epistemological asymmetry of the laws that govern rape,
for instance, privileges at the same time men and ignorance, inasmuch as
it matters not at all what the raped woman perceives or wants just so long
as the man raping her can claim not to have noticed (ignorance in which
male sexuality receives careful education)! And the rape machinery that
is organized by this epistemological privilege of unknowing in turn keeps
disproportionately under discipline, of course, women's larger ambitions
to take more control over the terms of our own circulation. 6 Or, again, in V'
an ingenious and patiently instructive orchestration of ignorance, the
U.S. Justice Deparrment ruled in june, 1986, that an employer may freely
fire persons with AIDS exactly so long as the employer can claim to be
ignorant of the medical fact, quoted in the ruling, that there is no known
health danger in the workplace from the disease.' Again, it is clear in
political context that the effect aimed at-in this case, it is hard to help
feeling, aimed at with some care-is the ostentatious declaration, for the
private sector, of an organized open season on gay men. 8
5· Catherine A. MacKinnon makes this point more fully in "Feminism, Marxism,
Method, and the State: An Agenda for Theory," Signs 7, no. 3 (Spring 1982): 515-44.
6. Susan Brownmiller made the most forceful and influential presentation of this case
in Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape {New York: Simon & Schuster, 1975).
7· Robert Pear, "Rights Laws Offer Only Limited Help on AIDS, U.S. Rules," New
York Times,June 23, 1986. That the ruling was calculated to offer, provoke, and
legitimize harm and insult is clear from the language quoted in Pear's article: "A person,"
the ruling says, for "cannot be regarded as handicapped (and hence subject to
federal protection] simply because others shun his company. Otherwise, a host of personal
traits, from ill temper to poor personal hygiene, would constitute handicaps."
8. Not that gay men were intended to be the only victims of this ruling. In even the
most conscientious discourse concerning AIDS in the United States so faf there has been
the problem, to which this essay does not pretend to offer any solution, of doing justice at
once to the relative (and increasing) heterogeneity of those who actually have AIDS and to
the specificity with which AIDS discourse at every level has until very recently focused on
male homosexuality. In its worldwide epidemiology, of 'ourse, AIDS has no distinctive
association with gay men, nor is it likely to for long here either. The acknowledgment/
management of this fact was the preoccupation of a strikingly sudden media-wide discursive
shift in the winter and early spring of 1987. If the obsessionally homophobic focus of
AIDS phobia up to that moment scapegoated gay men by (among other things) subjecting
their sexual practice and lifestyles to a glaring and effectually punitive visibility, however, it
worked in an opposite way to expunge the claims by expunging the vi,sibility of most of the
disease's other victims. So far, here, these victims have been among groups already the
most vulnerable-intravenous drug users, sex workers, wives and girlfriends of closeted
men- on whom invisibility, or a public subsumption under the incongruous heading of
gay men, can haVe no protective effect. (It has been notable, for instance, that media
coverage of prostitutes with AIDS has shown no interest in the health of the women
themselves, but only in their potential for infecting men. Again, the campaign to provide

6 Introduction: Axiomatic
Although the simple, stubborn fact or pretense of ignorance (one
meaning, the Capital one, of the word "stonewall") can sometimes be
enough to enforce discursive power, a far more complex drama of ignorance
and knowledge is the more usual carrier of political struggle. Such a
drama was enacted when, only a few days after the Justice Department's
private-sector decision, the U.S. Supreme Court correspondingly opened
the public-sector bashing season by legitimating state antisodomy laws
in Bowers v. Hardwick. 9 In a virulent ruling whose language made from
beginning to end an insolent display of legal illogic- of what Justice
Blackmun in dissent called "the most willful blindness"lO_a single,
apparently incidental word used in Justice White's majority opinion became
for many gay or antihomophobic readers a focus around which the
inflammatory force of the decision seemed to pullulate with peculiar
density. II In White's opinion,
to claim that a right to engage in sodomy is "deeply rooted in this nation's
·history and tradition" or "implicit in the concept of ordered liberty" is, at
best, facetious.1 2
What lends the word "facetious" in this sentence such an unusual power to
offend, even in the context of a larger legal offense whose damage will be
drug users with free needles had not until early 1987 received even t4e exiguous state
support given to Safer-sex education for gay men.) The damages of homophobia on the
one hand, of classism/ racism/sexism on the other; of intensive regulatory visibility on the
one hand, of discursive erasure on the other: these pairings are not only incommensurable
(and why measure them against each other rather than against the more liberating
possibilities they foreclose?) but very hard to interleave with each other conceptually. The
effect has been perhaps most dizzying when the incommensurable damages are condensed
upon a single person, e.g., a nonwhite gay man. The focus of this book is on the specific
damages of homophobia; but to the extent that it is impelled by {a desire to the
public pressures of AIDS phobia, I must at least make clear how much that is important
even to its own ambitions is nonetheless excluded from its potential for responsiveness.
9· Graphic encapsulation of this event on the front page of the Times: at the bottom of
the three-column lead story on the ruling, a photo ostensibly about the influx of various
navies into a welcoming New York for "the Liberty celebration" shows two worried but
extremely good-looking sailors in alluring whites, "asking directions of a police officer"
(New York Times, July 1, 1986).
ro. "The Supreme Court Opinion. Michael J. Bowers, Attorney General of Georgia,
Petition v. Michael Hardwick and John and Mary Doe, Respondents," text in New York
Native, no. 169 (July 14, 1986): 15. '
rr. The word is quoted, for instance, in isolation, in the sixth sentence of the Times's
lead article announcing the decision (July 1, 1986). The Times editorial decrying the
decision (July 2, 1986) remarks on the crudity of this word before outlining the substantive
offensiveness of the ruling. The New York Native and the gay leaders it quoted also gave the
word a lot of play in the immediate aftermath of the ruling(e.g., no. 169 Uuly 14,1986]:
8, 11).
12. New York Native, no. 169 (July 14, 1986): 13.
Introduction: Axiomatic 7
much more indelible, has to be the economical way it functions here as
switchpoint for the cyclonic epistemological undertows that encompass
power in general and issues of homosexual desire in particular.
One considers: (1) prima facie, nobody could, of course, actually for
an instant mistake the intent of the gay advocates as facetious. (2) Secunda
facie, it is thus the court itself that is pleased to be facetious. Trading on the
assertion's very (3) transparent sttipidit)' (not just the contemptuous demonstration
that powerful people don't have to be acute or right, but even
more, the contemptuous demonstration-this is palpable throughout the
majority opinions, but only in ,this word does it bubble up with active
pleasure-of how obtuseness itself arms the powerful against their enemies),
the court's joke here (in the wake of the mock-ignorant mockjocose
threat implicit in "at best") is (4) the clownish claim to be able at
will to "read"-i.e., project into-the minds of the gay advocates. This
being not only (5) a parody of, but ( 6) more intimately a kind of aggressive
jamming technique against, (7) the truth/paranoid fantasy that it is gay
people who can read, or project their own desires into, the minds of
''straight" people.
Inarguably, there is a satisfaction in dwelling on the degree to which
the power of our enemies over us is implicated, not in their command of X
knowledge, but precisely in their ignorance. The effect is a real one, but it
carries dangers with it as well. The chief of these dangers is the scornful,
fearful, or patheticizing of "ignorance"; it goes with tll_e unexamined
Enlightenment assumptions by which the labeling of a particular
force as "igriorance" seems to place it unappealably in a demonized space
on a never quite explicit ethical schema. (It is also dangerously close in
structure to the more palpably sentimental privileging of ignorance as an
originary, passive innocence.) The angles of view from which it can look
as though a political fight is a fight against ignorance are invigorating and
maybe revelatory ones but dangerous places for dwelling. The writings of,
among others, Foucault, Derrida, Thomas Kuhn, and Thomas Szasz have
given contemporary readers a lot of practice in questioning both· the
ethical/political disengagement and, beyond that, the ethical/political /
simplicity of the category of "knowledge," so that a writer who appeals
too directly to the redemptive potential of simply upping the cognitive
wattage on any question of power seems, now, naive. The corollary
problems still adhere to the category of "ignorance," as well, but so do
some additional ones: there are psychological operations of shame, denial,
projection around "ignorance" that make it an especially galvanizing
.,

8 Introduction: Axiomatic
category for the individual reader, even as they give it a rhetorical potency
that it would be hard for writers to forswear and foolhardy for them to
embrace.
Rather than sacrifice the notion of"ignorance," then, I would be more
interested at this point in trying, as we are getting used to trying with
"knowledge," to pluralize and specify it. That is, I would like to be able to
make use in sexual-political thinking of the deconstructive understanding
that particular insights generate, are lined with, and at the same time are
themselves structured by particular opacities. If ignorance is not-as it
evidently is not-a single Manichaean, aboriginal maw of darkness from
which the heroics of human cognition can occasionally wrestle facts,
insights, freedoms, progress, perhaps there-exists instead a plethora of
ignorances, and we may begin to ask questions about the labor, erotics,
and economics of their human production and' distribution. Insofar as
ignorance is ignorance of a knowledge-a knowledge that may itself, it
goes without saying, be seen as either true or false under some other
regime of truth -these ignorances, far from being pieces of the originary
dark, are produced by and correspond to particular knowledges and
circulate as part of particular regimes of truth. We should not assume that
their doubletting with know ledges means, however, that they obey identical
laws identically or follow the same circulatory paths at the same
pace. 13
Historically, the framing of Epistemology of the Closet begins with a
puzzle. It is a rather amazing fact that, of the very many dimensions along
which the genital activity of one person can be differentiated from that of
another (dimensions that include preference for certain acts, certain
zones or sensations, certain physical types, a certain frequency, certain
symbolic investments, certain relations of age or power, a certain species,
a certain number of participants, etc. etc. etc.), precisely one, the gender
of object choice, emerged from the turn of the century, and has remained,
as the dimension denoted by the now ubiquitous category of "sexual
orientation." This is not a development that would have been foreseen
from the viewpoint of the fin de siecle itself, where a rich stew of male
algolagnia, child-love, and autoeroticism, to mention no more of its
components, seemed to have as indicative a relation as did homosexuality
13. For an essay that makes these points more fully, see my "Privilege of Unknowing,"
Genders, no. 1 (Spring 1988): 102-24, a reading of Diderot's La Religieuse, from which
the preceding six paragraphs are taken.
Introduction: Axiomatic 9
to the whole, obsessively entertained problematic of sexual "perversion"
or, more broadly, "decadence." Foucault, for instance, mentions the hysterical
woman and the masturbating child, along with "entomologized"
sexological categories such as zoophiles, zooerasts, auto-monosexualists,
and gynecomasts, as typifying the new sexual taxonomies, the "specifica-
- tion of individuals" that facilitated the modern freighting of sexual definition
with epistemological and power relations. 14 True as his notation is, it
suggests without beginning to answer the further question: why the
category of "the masturbator," to choose only one example, should by
now have entirely lost its diacritical potential for specifying a particular
kind of person, an identity, at the same time as it continues to be truebecomes
increasingly true -that, for a crucial strain of Western discourse,
in Foucault's words "the homosexual was now a species. " 15 So, as a result,
is the heterosexual, and between these species the human spec:ies has come
more and more to be divided. Epistemology of the Closet does not have an
explanation to offer for this sudden, radical condensation of sexual
categories; instead of speculating on its causes, the book explores its
unpredictably varied and acute implications and consequences.
At the same time that this process of sexual specification or speciesformation
was going on, the book will argue, less stable and identitybound
understandings of sexual choice also persisted and developed,
often among the same people or interwoven in the same systems of
thought. Again, the book will not suggest (nor do I believe there currently
exists) any standpoint of thought from which the rival claims of these
minoritizing and universalizing understandings of sexual definition could
be decisively arbitrated as to their "truth." Instead, the perfonmative
effects of the self-contradictory discursive field of force created by their
overlap will be my subject. And, of course, it makes every difference that
these impactions of homo/heterosexual definition took place in a setting,
not of spacious emotional or analytic impartiality, but rather of urgent
homophobic pressure to devalue one of the two nominally symmetrical
forms of choice.
As several of the formulations above would suggest, one main strand of
argument in this book is deconstructive, in a fairly specific sense. The
analytic move it makes is to demonstrate that categories presented in a
culture as symmetrical binary oppositions-heterosexual/homosexual,
14. Foucault, History of Sexuality, pp. 105, 43.
15. Foucault, History of Sexuality, p. 43.

IO
Introduction: Axiomatic
/
Introduction: Axiomatic
II
in this case-actually subsist in a more unsetded and dynamic tacit
relation according to which, first, term B is not symmetrical with but
subordinated to term A; but, second, the ontologically valorized term A
actually depends for its meaning on the simultaneous subsumption and
exclusion of term B; hence, third, the question of priority between the
supposed central and the supposed marginal category of each dyad is
irresolvably unstable, an instability caused by the fact that term B is
constituted as at once internal and external to term A. Harold Beaver, for
instance, in an influential 1981 essay sketched the oudines of such a
deconstructive strategy:
The aim must be to reverse the rhetorical opposition of what is "transparent"
or "natural" and what is "derivative" or "contrived" by demonstrating
that the qualities predicated of "homosexuality" (as a dependent
term) are in fact a condition of "heterosexuality"; that "heterosexuality,"
far from possessing a privileged status, must itself be treated as a dependent
term. 16
To understand these conceptual relations as irresolvably unstable is
not, however, to understand them as inefficacious or innocuous. It is at
least premature when Roland Barthes prophesies that "once the paradigm
is blurred, utopia begins: meaning and sex become the objects of free play,
at the heart of which the (polysemant) forms and the (sensual) practices,
liberated from the binary prison, will achieve a state of infinite expansion.
"17 To the contrary, a deconstructive understanding of these binarisms
makes it possible to identify them as sites that are peculiarly densely
charged with lasting potentials for powerful manipulation-through precisely
the mechanisms of self-contradictory definition or, more succinctly,
the double bind. Nor is a deconstructive analysis of such definitional
knots, however necessary, at all sufficient to disable them. Quite the
opposite: I would suggest that an understanding of their irresolvable
.! instability has been continually available, and has continually lent discur,
sive authority, to antigay as well as to gay cultural forces of this century.
Beaver makes an optimistic prediction that "by disqualifying the autonomy
of what was deemed spontaneously immanent, the whole sexual
system is fundamentally decentred and exposed. " 18 But there is reason to
16. Harold Beaver, "Homosexual Signs," Critical Inquiry 8 (Autumn 1981 ): 115.
17. Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and
Wang, 1977), p. 133.
18. Beaver, "Homosexual Signs," pp. 115-16.
believe that the oppressive sexual system of the past hundred years was
if anything born and bred (if I may rely on the pith of a fable whose
value doesn't, I muschope, stand or fall,with its history of racist uses)
in the briar patch of the most notorious and repeated decenterings and
exposures. .3;.
These deconstructive contestations can occur, moreover, only in the 2..
context of an entire cultural network of normative definitions,·definitions
themselves equally unstable but responding to different sets of contiguities
and often at a different rate. The master terms of a particular historical
moment will be those that are so situated as to entangle most inextricably
and at the same time most differentially the filaments of other important
definitional ne>:uses. In arguing that homo/heterosexual definition' has
been a presiding master term of the past century, one that has the same,
primary importance for all modem Western identity and social organization
(and not merely for homosexual identity and''culture) as do the more
traditionally visible cruxes of gender, class, and race, I'll argue that thenow
chronic modern crisis of homo/heterosexual defin.ition has affected
our culture through its ineffaceable marking particularly of the categories
secrecy I disclosure, knowledge/ignorance, private/public, masculine/
femmme, maJoritylminonty, .mu"oceii"ce/initiation, natural/ artificial,
new I old, discipline/terrorism, canonic/noncanonic, Wholeriess/ decadence,
urbane I provincial, domestic/ foreign, health I illness, same I
different, active/ passive, in/ out, cognjrjon !paranoia, art/kitsch, utopia/
apocalypse, s!!!_ce_my/ sentimentality, and voluntarity I addiction. 19
And rather than embrace an idealist faith in the necessarily, immanently
self-corrosive efficacy of the contradictions inherent to these definitional
binarisms, I will suggest instead that contests for discursive power can be .
specified as competitions for the material or rhetorical leverage required
to set the terms of, and to profit in some way from, the operations of such
an incoherence of definition .
Perhaps I should say something about the project of hypothesizing that
certain binarisms that structure meaning in a culture may be "ineffaceably
marked" by association with. this one particular problematic-inefface-
19. My casting of all these definitional nodes in the form of binarisms, I should make
explicit; has to do not with a mystical faith in the number two but, rather, with the felt
need to schematize in some consistent way the treatment of sociitl vectors so exceedingly
various. The kind of falsification necessarily performed on each by this reduction cannot,
unfortunately, itself be consistent. But the scope of the kind of hypothesis I want to pose
does seem to require a drastic reductiveness, at least in its initial fonTiulations.

12 Introduction: Axiomatic
ably even when invisibly. Hypothesizing is easier than proving, but indeed
I cannot imagine the protocol by which such hypotheses might be tested;
they must be deepened and broadened-not the work of one book-and
used, rather than proved or disproved by a few examples. The collecting
of instances of each binarism that would appear to "common sense" to be
unmarked by issues of homo I heterosexual definition, though an in exhaustibly
stimulating heuristic, is not, I believe, a good test of such a
hypothesis. After all, the particular kinds of skill that might be required
to produce the most telling interpretations have hardly been a valued part
of the "common sense" of this epistemologically cloven culture. If a painstaking
process of accumulative reading and historical de- and recontextualization
does not render these homologies resonant and produqive,
that is the only test they can directly fail, the only one they need to pass.
The structure of the present book has been markedly affected by this
intuition-by a sense that the- cultural interrogations it aims to make,
imperative will be trivialized or evacuated, at this early stage, to the
degree that their procedures seem to partake of the a priori. I've wanted
the book to be inviting (as well as imperative) but resolutely nonalgorithmic.
A point of the book is not to know how far its insights and
projects are generalizable, not to be able to say in advance where the
semantic specificity of these issues gives over to (or: itself structures?) the
syntax of a "broader" or more abstractable critical project. In particular,
the book aims to resist in every way it can the deadening pretended
knowingness by which the chisel of modern homo/heterosexual definitional
crisis tends, in public discourse, to be hammered most fatally
home.
Perhaps to counter that, it seems now that the book not only has but
constitutes an extended introduction. It is organized, not as a chronological
narrative, but as a series of essays linked closely by their shared project
and recurrent topics. The Introduction, situating this project in the larger
context of gay /lesbian and antihomophobic theory, and Chapter 1,
outlining its basic terms, are the only parts that do not comprise extended
readings. Chapter 2 (on Billy Budd) and Chapter 3 (on Wilde and
Nietzsche), which were originally conceived as a single unit, offer a
different kind of introduction: an through the specificity of these
texts and authors, of most of the bravely showy list of binarized cultural
nexuses about which the book makes, at other places, more generalized
assertions. Chapter 4 discusses at length, through a reading of James's
"The Beast in the Jungle," the elsewhere recurrent topos of male homosex-
'
Introduction: Axiomatic '3
ual panic. And Chapter 5, on Proust, focuses more sharply on the book's
preoccupation with the speech-act relations around the closet.
In consonance with iny fihph·asis ol) the performative relations of
double and conflicted definition, the theorized_ prescription for a practical
politics implicit in these readings is for a multi-pronged movement whose
idealist and materialist impulses, whose minority-model and universalistmodel
strategies, and for that matter whose gender-separatist and genderintegrative
analyses would likewise proceed in parallel without any high
premium placed on ideological rationalization between them. In effect
this is how the gay movements of this century have actually been structured,
if not how they have often been perceived or evaluated. The breadth
and fullness of the political gestalt of gay-affirmative struggle give a
powerful resonance to the voice of each of its constituencies. The cost in
ideological rigor, though high indeed, is very simply inevitable: this is not
a conceptual landscape in which ideological rigor across levels, across
constituencies is at all possible, be it ever so desirable.
Something similar is true at the level of scholarship. Over and over I
have felt in writing the book that, however my own identifications,
intuitions, circumstances, limitations, apd talents may have led its interpretations
to privilege constructivist oVer essentialist, universalizing over
minoritizing, and gender-transitive over gender-separatist understandings
of sexual choice, nevertheless the space of permission for this work and the
depth of the intellectual landscape in which it might have a contribution to
make owe everything to the wealth of essentialist, minoritizing, and
separatist gay thought and struggle also in progress. There are similar
points to be made about the book's limitation to what may sound, in the
current climate of exciting interstitial explorations among literature,
social history, and "cultural studies," like unreconstructedly literary readings
of essentially canonical texts. I must hope that, as the taken-forgrantedness
of what constitutes a literary text, a literary reading, a
worthwhile interpretive intervention, becomes more and more unstable
under such pressures, the force of anyone's perseveration in this spe·
cializeq practice (I use "specialized" here not with the connotation of the
"expert's" technique, but with the connotation of the wasteful, valuemaking
partiality of the sexual perversion) could look less like a rearguard
defense than like something newly interrogable and interrogatory. Even
more is this true of the book's specification of male, and of Euro-
American male, sexual definition as its subject. Any critical book makes
endless choices of focus and methodology, and it is very difficult for these

14 Introduction: Axiomdtic
choices to be interpreted in any other light than that of the categorical
imperative: the fact that they are made in a certain way here seems a priori
to assert that they would be best made in the same way everywhere. I
would ask that, however sweeping the claims made by this book may seem
to be, it not be read as making that particular claim. Quite the opposite: a
real measure of the success of such an analysis would lie in its ability, in the
hands of an inquirer with different needs, talents, or positionings, to
clarify the distinctive kinds of resistance offered to it from different spaces
on the social map, even though such a project might require revisions or
rupturings of the analysis as first proffered. The only imperative that the
book means to treat as categorical is the very broad one of pursuing an
antihomophobic inquiry. If the book were able to fulfill its most expansive
ambitions, it would make certain specific kinds of readings and interrogations,
perhaps new, available in a heuristically powerful, productive, and
significant form for other readers to perform on literary and social texts
with, ideally, other results. The meaning, the legitimacy, and in many
ways even the possibility for good faith of the positings this book makes
depend radically on the production, by other antihomophobic readers
who may be very differently situated, of the widest possible range of other
and even contradictory availabilities.
This seems, perhaps, especially true of historical periodization
implied by the structure of this book, and its consequences. To hypothesize
the usefulness of taking the century from the 1880s to the 1980s as a
single period in the history of male homo/heterosexual definition is
necessarily to risk subordinating the importance of other fulcrum points.
One thinks, for instance, of the events collectively known as
the New York City riots of June, 1969, protesting police harassment of
patrons of a gay bar, from which the modern gay liberation movement
dates its inauguration. A certain idealist bias built into a book about
definition makes it too easy to level out, as from a spuriously bird's-eye
view, the incalculable impact-including the cognitive impact-of political
movements per se. Yet even the phrase "the closet" as a publicly
intelligible signifier for gay-related epistemological issues is made available,
obviously, only by the difference made by the post-Stonewall gay
politics oriented around coming out of the closet. More generally, the
centrality in this book's argument of a whole range of valuations and
political perspectives that are unmistakably post-Stonewall will be, I
hope, perfectly obvious. It is only in that context that the hypothesis of a
Introduction: Axiomatic 15
certain alternative, overarching periodization of definitional issues can be
appropriately entertained.
The book that thkone, Between Men: English Literature and
Male Homosocial Desire, attempted to demonstrate the immanence of
men's same-sex bonds, and their prohibitive structuration, to malefemale
bonds in nineteenth-century English literature. The relation of this
book to its predecessor is defined most simply by the later time span that it
treats. This has also involved, however, a different negotiation between
feminist and antihomophobic motives in .the two studies. Between Men
ends with a coda pointing toward "the gaping and unbridgeable rift in the
male homosocial spectrum" at the end of the nineteenth century, after
which "a discussion of male homosocial desire as a whole really gives way
to a discussion of male homosexualitY and h01p.ophobia as we know
them. " 20 (For more on that facile "as we know them," see Axiom 5 below.)
Epistemology of the Closet, which depends analytically on the conclusions
reached in Between Men, takes up the story at exactly that point, and in
that sense can more accurately be said to be primarily an antihomophobic
book in its subject matter and perspective. That is to say, in terms that I
will explain more fully in Axiom 2 below, the book's first focus is on
sexuality rather than (sometimes, even, as opposed to) gender. Between
Men focused on the oppressive effects on women and men of a cultural
system in which male-male desire became widely intelligible primarily by
being routed through triangular relations involving a woman. The inflictions
of this system, far from disappearing since the tum of the century,
have only. become adapted and subtilized. But certainly the pressingly
immediate fusion of feminist with gay male preoccupations and interrogations
that 'Between Men sought to perform has seemed less available,
analytically, for a twentieth-century culture in which at least some versions
of a same-sex desire unmediated through heterosexual performance
have become widely articulated.
Epistemology of the Closet is a feminist book mainly in the sense that
its analyses. were produced by someone whose thought has been macroand
microscopically infused with feminism over a long period, At the
many intersections where a distinctively feminist (i.e., gender-centered)
and a distinctively antihomophobic (i.e., sexuality-centered) inquiry have
20. Sedgwick, Between Men, pp. 201, 202.

Introduction: Axiomatic
seemed to diverge, however, this book has tried consistently to press on in
the latter direction. I have made this choice largely because I see feminist
analysis as being considerably more developed than gay male or antihomophobic
analysis at present-theoretically, politically, and institutionally.
There are more people doing feminist analysis, it has been being
done longer, it is less precarious and dangerous (still precarious and
dangerous enough), and there is by now a much more broadly usable set
of tools available for its furtherance. This is true notwithstanding the
extraordinary recent effiorescence of gay and lesbian studies, without
which, as I've suggested, the present book would have been impossible;
that .flowering is young, fragile, under extreme threat from both within
and outside academic institutions, and still necessarily dependent on a
limited pool of paradigms and readings. The viability, by now solidly
established, of a persuasive feminist project of interpreting gender arrangements,
oppressions, and resistances in Euro-American modernism
and modernity from the turn of the century has been a condition of the
possibility of this book but has also been taken as a permission or
imperative to pursue a very different path in it. And, indeed, when
another kind of intersection has loomed-the choice between risking a
premature and therefore foreclosing reintegration between feminist and
gay (male) terms of analysis, on the one hand, and on the other hand
keeping their relation open a little longer by deferring yet again the
moment of their accountability to one another-I have followed the latter
path. This is bound to seem retardataire to some readers, but I hope they
are willing to see it as a genuine deferral, in the interests of making space
for a gay male-riented analysis that would have its own claims to make
, for an illuminating centrality, rather than as a refusal. Ultimately, I do
feel, a great deal depends-for all women, for lesbians, for gay men, and
possibly for all men-on the fostering of our ability to arrive at un-
J) derstandings of sexuality that will respect a certain irreducibility in it to
(. the terms and relations of gender.
A note on terminology. There is, I believe, no satisfactory rule for
choosing between the usages "homosexual" and "gay," outside of a post-
Stonewall context where "gay" must be preferable since it is the explicit
choice of a large number of the people to whom it refers. Until recently it
seemed that "homosexual," though it severely risked anachronism in any
application before the late nineteenth century, was still somehow less
temporally circumscribed than "gay," perhaps because it sounded more
official, not to say diagnostic. That aura of timelessness about the word
Introduction: Axiomatic !7
has, however, faded rapidly-less because of the word's manifest inadequacy
to the cognitive and behavioral maps of the centuries before its
coining, than because the sources of its authority for the century after have
seemed increasingly ...... tendentious ..__.- and dated. Thus "homosexual" and
"gay" seem more and moi-e to be tirms applicable to distinct, nonoverlapping
periods in the history of a phenomenon for which there then remains
no overarching label. Accordingly I have tried to use each of the. terms
appropriately in contexts where historical differentiation between the
earlier and later parts of the century seemed important. But to designate
"the" phenomenon (problematical notion) as it stretches across a larger
reach of history, I have used one or the other interchangeably, most often
in contrast to the immediatelY relevant historical usage. (E.g., "gay" in a
turn-of-the-century context or "homosexual" in a 1980s context would
each be meant to suggest a caiegorization broad enough to include at least
the other period as well.) I have not followed a convention, used by some
scholars, of differentiating between "gay" and "homosexual" on the basis
of whether a given text or person was perceived as embodying (respectively)
gay affirmation or internalized homophobia; an unproblematical
ease in distinguishing between these two things is not an assumption of
this study. The main additional constraint on the usage of these terms in
this book is a preference against employing the noun "gayness," or "gay"
itself as a noun. I think what underlies this preference is a sense that the
association of same-sex desire with the traditional, exciting meanings of
the adjective "gay" is still a powerfully assertive act, perhaps not one to be
lightly routinized by grammatical adaptations.
Gender has increasingly become a problem for this area of terminology,
and one to which I have, again, no consistent solution. "Homosexual"
was a relatively gender-neutral term and I use it as such, though it
has seemed to have at least some male bias-whether because of
the pun on Latin homo= man latent in its etymological macaronic, or
simply because of the greater attention to men in the discourse surrounding
it {as in so many others}. "Gay" is more complicated since it makes a
claim to refer to both genders :but is routinely yoked with "lesbian" in
actual usage, as if it did not-as increasingly it does not-itself refer to
women. As I suggest in Axiom 3, this terminological complication is
closely responsive to real ambiguities and struggles of gay !lesbian politics
and identities: e.g., there are women-loving women who think of themselves
as lesbians but not as gay, and others who think of themselves as gay
women but not as lesbians. Since the premises of this study make it
1

18 Introduction: Axiomatic
Introduction: Axiomatic '9
h 7
impossible to presuppose either the unity or the distinctness of women's
and men's changing, and indeed synchronically various, homosexual
identities, and since its primary though not exclusive focus is in fact on
male identities, I sometimes use "gay and lesbian" but more often simply
"gay," the latter in the oddly precise sense of a phenomenon of same-sex
desire that is being treated as indicatively but not exclusively male. When I
mean to suggest a more fully, equitably two-sexed phenomenon I refer to
"gay men and women," or "lesbians and gay men"; when a more exclusive
one, to "gay men."
Finally, I feel painfully how different may be a given writer's and
reader's senses of how best to articulate an argument that may for both
seem a matter of urgency. I have tried to be as clear as I can about the
book's moves, motives, and assumptions throughout; but even aside from
the intrinsic difficulty of its subject and texts, it seems inevitable that the

Introduction: Axiomatic
Thus, a lot of the popularity of the "homosexual panic" defense seems
to come simply from its ability to permit and "place," by pathologizing,
the enacrment of a socially sanctioned prejudice against one stigmatized
minority, a particularly demeaned one among many. Its special plausibility,
however, seems also to depend on a difference between antigay
crime and other bias-related antiminority crime: the difference of how
much less clear, perhaps finally how impossible, is the boundary circumscription
of a minoritizing gay identity. After all, the reason why this
defense borrows the name of the (formerly rather obscure and litdediagnosed)
psychiatric classification "homosexual panic" is that it refers to
the supposed uncertainty about his own sexual identity of the perpetrator
of the antigay violence. That this should be the rypifying scenario of
defenses of gay-bashers (as uncertainty about one's own race, religion,
ethnicity, or gender is not in other cases of bias-related violence) shows
once again how the overlapping aegises of minoritizing and universalizing
understandings of male homo/heterosexual definition can tend to redouble
the victimization of gay people. In effect, the homosexual panic
defense performs a double act of minoritizing taxonomy: there is, it
asserts, one distinct minority of gay people, and a second minority,
equally distinguishable from the population at large, of"latent homosexuals"
whose "insecurity about their own masculinity" is so anomalous as
to permit a plea based on diminution of normal moral responsibility. At
the same time, the efficacy of the plea depends on its universalizing force,
on whether, as Wertheimer says, it can "create a climate in which the
jurors are able to identify with the perpetrator by saying, 'My goodness,
maybe I would have reacted the same way.'" 23 The reliance of the homosexual
panic plea on the fact that this male definitional crisis is systemic
and endemic is enabled only, and precisely, by its denial of the same fact.
When in my work on Between Men, knowing nothing about this
judicial use of "homosexual panic" (at that time a less common and publicized
defense), I needed a name for "a structural residue of terrorist potential,
of blackmailability, of Western maleness through the leverage of
homophobia," I found myself attracted to just the same phrase, borrowed
from the same relatively rare psychiatric diagnosis. Through a linguistic
theft whose violence I trusted would be legible in every usage of the
phrase, I tried to tum what had been a taxonomic, minoritizing medical
Introduction: Axiomatic
category into a structural principle applicable to the definitional work of
an entire gender, hence of an entire culture. I used it JO denominate "the
most private, psychologized form in which many twentieth-century West-
....... - ....
ern men experience their vulnerability to the social pressure of homophobic
blackmail"- as, specifically, "only one path of control, complementary
to public sanctions through the institutions described by
Foucault and others as defining and regulating the amorphous territory of
'the sexual."' 2 4
The forensic use of the "homosexual panic" defense for gay-bashers
depends on the medically mediated ability of the phrase to obscure an
overlap between individual pathology and systemic function. The reason
I found the phrase attractive for my purposes was quite the opposite: I
thought it could dramatize, render visible, even render scandalous the
same space of overlap. The set of perceptions condensed in that usage of
"male homosexual panic" proved, I think, a productive feature of Between
Men for other critics, especially those doing gay theory, and I have
continued my explorations of the same phrase, used in the same sense, in
Epistemology of the Closet. Yet I feel, as well, with increasing dismay, in
the increasingly homophobic atmosphere of public discourse since 1985,
that work done to accentuate and clarify the explanatory power of this
difficult nexus may not be able to be reliably insulated from uses that
ought to be diametrically opposed to it. For instance, it would not require
a willfully homophobic reader to understand these discussions of the
centrality and power of male homosexual panic as actually contributing
to the credibility of the pathologizing "homosexual panic" legal defense of
gay-bashers. All it would require would be a failure or refusal to understand
how necessarily the discussions are embedded within their context-the
context, that is, ofan analysis based on systemwide skepticism
about the positivist taxonomic neutrality of psychiatry, about the classificatory
coherence (e.g., concerning "individual responsibility") of the
law. If, foreseeing the possibiliry of this particular misuse, I have, as I
hope, been able to take the explanatory measures necessary to guard
against it, still there may be too many others unforeseen.
Of course, silence on these issues performs the enforcing work of the
status quo more predictably and inexorably than any attempt at analysis.
Yet the tensions and pleasures that, even ideally, make it possible for a
23. Freiberg, "Blaming the Victim," p. 11.
24. Sedgwick, Between Men, p. 89.

J
22 Introduction: Axiomatic
writer to invest such a project with her best thought may be so different
from those that might enable a given reader to.
•
In the remainder of this Introduction I will be trying to articulate some
of the otherwise implicit methodological, definitional, and axiomatic
groundings of the book's project and explaining, as well, something of my
view of its position within broader projects of understanding sexuality
and gender.
Anyone working in gay and lesbian studies, in a culture where samesex
desire is still structured by its distinctive public/private status, at once
marginal and central, as the open secret, discovers that the line between
straining at truths that prove to be imbecilically self-evident, on the one
hand, and on the other hand tossing off commonplaces that turn out to
retain their power to galvanize and divide, is weirdly unpredictable. In
dealing with an open-secret structure, it's only by being shameless about
risking the obvious that we happen into the vicinity of the transformative.
In this Introduction I shall have methodically to sweep into one little heap
some of the otherwise unarticulated assumptions and conclusions from a
long-term project of antihomophobic analysis. These nails, these scraps
of wiring: will they bore or will they shock?
Under the rule that most privileges the most obvious:
Axiom 1: People are different from each other.
It is astonishing how few respectable conceptual tools we have for dealing
with this self-evident fact. A tiny number of inconceivably coarse axes of
categorization have been painstakingly inscribed in current critical and
political thought: gender, race, class, nationality, sexual orientation are
pretty much the available distinctions. They, with the associated demonstrations
of the mechanisms by which they are constructed and reproduced,
are indispensable, and they may indeed override all or some
other forms of difference and similarity. But the sister or brother, the best
friend, the classmate, the parent, the child, the lover, the ex-: our families,
lOves, and enmities alike, not to mention the strange relations of our
work, play, and activism, prove that even people who share all or most of
our own positionings along these crude axes may still be different enough
from us, and from each other, to seem like all but different species.
Everybody has learned this, I assume, and probably everybody who
Introduction: Axiomatic 23
survives at all has reasonably rich, unsystematic resources of nonce
taxonomy for mapping out the possibilities, dangers, and stimulatim;;;_;f
their human social landscape. It is probably people with the experience of
oppression or subordinatiorfwho hl.ve most need to know it; and I take
the precious, devalued arts of gossip, immemorially associated in European
thought with servants, with effeminate and gay men, with all
women, to have to do not even so much with the transmission ofilecesSary
news as with the refinement of necessary skills for making, testing, and
using unrationalized a11d provisional hypotheses about what kinds of
people there are to be found in one's world: 25 The writing of a Proust or a
James would be exemplary here: projects precisely of nonce taxonomy, of
the making and unmaking and remaking and redissolution of hundreds of
old and new categorical imaginings concerning all the kinds it may take
to make up a world.
I don't assume that all, gay men or alJ women are very skilled at the
nonce-taxonomic work represented by gossip, but it does make sense to
suppose that our distinctive needs are peculiarly disserved by its devaluation.
For some people, the sustained, foregrounded pressure of loss in the
AIDS years may be making such needs clearer: as one anticipates or tries
to deal with the absence of people one loves, it seems absurdly impoverishing
to surrender to theoretical trivialization or to "the sentimental"
one's descriptive requirements that the piercing bouquet of a given friend's
particularity be done some What is more dramatic is that-in
spite of every promise to the contrary-every single theoretically or
politically interesting project of postwar thought has finally had the effect
of delegitirnating our space for asking or thinking in detail about the
multiple, unstable ways in which people may be like or different from
each other. This project is not rendered otiose by any demonstration of
how fully people may differ also from themselves. Deconstruction,
founded as a very science of differ(e/a)nce, has both so fetishized the idea
of difference and so vaporized its possible embodiments that its most
thoroughgoing practitioners are the last people to whom one would now
look for help in thinking about particular differences. The same thing
seems likely to prove true of theorists of postmodernism. Psychoanalytic
theory, if only through the almost astrologically lush plurality of its
overlapping taxonomies of physical zones, developmental stages, repre-
2.5. On this, see Patricia Meyer Spacks, Gossip (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985). ,/'
r
v
J
,,

HENRY JAMES AND
QUEER MODERNITY
ERIC HARALSON

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
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Cambridge University Press
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© Eric Haralson 2003
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6
“The other half is the man”: the queer modern
triangle of Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway,
and Henry James
Among the more overt targets of Ernest Hemingway’s neglected parody
The Torrents of Spring (1926) are his former mentors Gertrude Stein and
Sherwood Anderson. 1 Less obviously, but not coincidentally, the work
marks Hemingway’s first notable public engagement with Henry James,
both as master and as man – or rather, as something less than a man. In The
Sun Also Rises (1926), drafted before but published after Torrents, James’s
alleged sexual damage – or what his autobiography obscurely called an
“obscure hurt” – constitutes an historical parallel for Jake Barnes’s impairment,
with the implied distinction that Barnes had come by his disabling
wound through active service in the military, unlike the already unmasculine
James (AU 415). More privately, Hemingway went on to demean
the drawing-room “fairies” who languished about in James’s The Awkward
Age (1899), to scorn his predecessor under the sign of emasculation (James
had “no balls”) and effeminacy (one of the “male old women”), to dismiss
most of James’s writing as “snobbish, difficultly written shit” – and to covet
his transatlantic fame (SL 266, 673, 703). Only after Hemingway won the
Nobel Prize in 1954 could he publicly concede that James ought to have
received the honor, too. 2 Yet like the other modern writers under survey
here, Hemingway continued to feel James’s monumental presence up until
the end of his career, as seen from the continued skirmishing with James
in True at First Light (composed 1953–4) and A Moveable Feast (composed
1957–8). 3
This chapter revisits the formative phase (1925–35) of this telling confluence
between sex/gender anxiety and anxiety of influence, an exemplary
instance of modern straight masculinity (as it seems) reading Victorian
gay masculinity. At the same time, Stein’s perception that the “future feeling”
James “felt the method of the twentieth century,” while Hemingway
“look[ed] like a modern...[but] smell[ed] of the museums,” may queer
considerably more than the notion of chronological sequence in the formal
history of American prose (ABT 739, 873). 4 James’s reading of Hemingway,
173

174 Henry James and Queer Modernity
as it were, lies embedded in Hemingway’s reading of James, and especially
within the thematic orbit of sex/gender politics. Stated another way, just
as Hemingway (although certainly not he alone) shaped his masculinity
in reaction against Jamesian interiority, aestheticism, homoeroticism, and
subtle sociability, so does the Jamesian critique of overdetermined manhood
(“active,” externalized, commercial, hetero) anticipate an Ernest Hemingway,
with his dire performance pressures and his violent energies.
In this respect, I want to keep in play Stein’s trenchant constructionism,
which helped her to understand how the young Ernest’s “truly sensitive
capacity for emotion” succumbed to shame under the spotlight of celebrity,
forcing him to adopt, “as a shield, a big Kansas City–boy brutality.”
Hemingway’s “really gentle and fine” side could not survive the conditioning
of the market, which set its performance expectations and levied
its taxes according to an author’s gender, while his “agonizing shyness”
almost demanded the compensatory swagger of the manly man. 5 To put
this devolution in terms of James’s fiction (and thus rather schematically),
Hemingway had the makings of a Little Bilham (The Ambassadors), but
developed instead into a sort of Christopher Newman (The American),
courting associations with femininity and sexual changings (Hemingway’s
own word), but then warding them off, and indulging his “unresolved
androgynous inclinations” only very late in life. 6 Stein suggested that the
evolved figure of “Papa” Hemingway posed for and was posed by Anglo-
American culture neither more nor less than Oscar Wilde, only differently,
which explained why his theatre of hypermasculinity (boxing, bullfighting,
big-game hunting) failed to produce either “real brutality” or “real literature.”
7 On the contrary, Sherwood Anderson added, the self-conscious
posturing of a work such as Hemingway’s Green Hills of Africa (1935) suggested
a “queer bird” seeking a straight path by means of Rooseveltian rituals
of “guts and dung,” but losing his way (“the whole world of men he can’t
get at all”) and making a “mess” of himself in the process. Yet Anderson,
too, recognized “Hemingway” as more of a cultural construction than an
individual personality: “they really did destroy him” (SA 169). 8
The question of which force bears the most blame for such destruction –
the “enormous publicity business” of modernity, as Stein called it and as
James satirized it in his mature fiction; the gender and sexual prejudices inscribed
in that “business”; or Hemingway’s own ruthless careerism – almost
dissolves in the fact that these forces were interlocking and collaborative,
and perhaps only the consequence matters. 9 The “real story” of the “real
Hem,” as Stein put it, would never get told, and therein (for both Stein and
Anderson) lay the true shame: that story “would be for another audience

Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, and Henry James 175
than the audience Hemingway now has but it would be very wonderful”
(ABT 872–3). 10 Almost as if troping James’s The American, Stein would
make Hemingway emblematic of a national defect in the creative realization
of gender: “He went the way so many other Americans have gone...
[and] are still going...He is skillful, yes, but that is the writer; the other
half is the man.” 11
Yet Stein drew another moral from the strenuous public displays that
misrepresented, then disfigured the “other half” of Hemingway: his “wonderful”
story, she implied, the real one for another audience, might well
have been (in his own scandalized words) “some fag story, which proved
[him]...conclusively very queer indeed” (SL 387). In A Moveable Feast,
Hemingway retaliated by attributing to Stein an almost visceral repugnance
toward male–male love, but apparently the joke (an earnest one) was on him
(MF 20). Stein would later confide: “Homosexuals...doallthegood things
in all the arts, and when I ran down the male ones to Hemingway it was because
I thought he was a secret one.” 12 The keenness of Stein’s tactic (“come
out, wherever you are”) is rather beside the point, for as with James, claiming
Hemingway “conclusively” for the closet is less interesting than asking
how that closet was structured and maintained – how it worked, in this case,
to keep a male author candidly tantalized by the idea of going “outside all
tribal law,” in matters of sex, from ever getting there. 13 Like Eve Sedgwick’s
conception of John Marcher, in James’s “The Beast in the Jungle” (1903),
Stein’s Hemingway was “not a homosexual man” so much as he was a man
confined to “the closet of imagining a homosexual secret”; what required
“liberat[ing] in the first place” was his “potential for homosexual desire,”
but that release, owing to his collusion with powerful norms, could never
occur. 14 If Hemingway, on Stein’s view, seemed fated to pass a lifetime as
“a secret one” – “very queer indeed” behind his tough-guy exterior – the
beauty of the system was that he kept the secret not to himself, but from
himself, and that he had all the help in the world in doing so.
In order to treat Hemingway’s relation to James in its full symptomatic
complexity this chapter invokes several contemporary observers besides
Stein and Anderson, notably F. Scott Fitzgerald and the then popular, now
recuperated gay author Glenway Wescott – memorialized in The Sun Also
Rises as the “rising new novelist” who flirts with a disgusted Jake Barnes in the
bal musette scene (SAR 21). 15 As a more aggravated example of how James’s
queerness troubled (and again, proleptically “read”) the literary, social, and
psychic stance of modern masculinity, I also consider the experience of the
important cultural critic Van Wyck Brooks, whose biographical treatise of
1925 fashioned the “Henry James” familiar to Hemingway and his cohort,

176 Henry James and Queer Modernity
while also influencing the British reception of James in such authors as
Stephen Spender and Christopher Isherwood. This caucus of modern male
writers huddled almost obsessively over the Jamesian corpus as part of their
own self-definitional trials at the fraught intersections of gender, sexual,
and national (or “racial”) identity.
To be sure, one must draw some distinctions, recognizing how concertedly
Brooks tried to avoid seeing James’s gayness as a relevant factor in reading
the alternative masculinities modeled in his work. Even Hemingway, or
perhaps especially Hemingway, as a facet of his ambivalent homophobia,
found “fairies” in the Jamesian picture, while Anderson, who conventionally
viewed homosexuality as a “terrible problem,” approached James with
something like a gay reading practice (SAM 340). Well ahead of the critical
curve, Wescott published the “secret” motive of James’s late fiction as being
“the anarchist’s excitement about the rupture of conventions” and discovered
at least one “homosexual man” in the thick of James’s plots (Prince
Amerigo of The Golden Bowl), thus coming about as close to outing the
author as was conceivable in the early 1930s. 16 More discreetly, Spender
added that it was “difficult not to conclude...that [James’s] The Pupil is a
fantasy about homosexuality.” 17
Yet all of these authors – along with Fitzgerald, who fostered the idea of a
Jamesian “impotence” that shaded into effeminacy, and thence into samesex
desire – remained as subject to the strictures on sexual difference and
its public articulation, whether dissident or conformist, as did Van Wyck
Brooks. 18 In this sense, Brooks’s engagement with James, which culminated
in psychosis, only somatized the counterpressure of the Jamesian challenge
to modern masculinities as these men wrestled with private desires and
normative injunctions – a pressure sustained, as I will suggest, by Gertrude
Stein, perhaps the most canny and resilient “masculinity” in this genealogy.
The extremity of Brooks’s ordeal, that is, should not prevent one from
seeing its tacit “moral” for Hemingway and for the gender style that he
enacted for his generation: there was a high price to be paid for resisting
the lesson of the Master.
Anyway I think you’ll think [The Torrents of Spring] is funny . . . you being the
middle weight champion and as such not having a glass jaw. (Hemingway to
Sherwood Anderson, 1926)
Funny is again used in the sense of diverting and disturbing. (Gertrude Stein,
“Henry James,” Four in America, 1932–33)
Contemporary reviews set the tone for the critical understanding of
Torrents as a burst of youthful hijinks with little thematic content: sly

Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, and Henry James 177
perhaps, but not malicious, and besides, Hemingway’s victims had it coming.
In fact, the book signaled all the important preoccupations that would
organize his “serious” fictions to follow, marking Hemingway’s first disciplinary
intervention against adolescent or unmanly emotionalism (associated
with Anderson), ethnic and sexual difference (literally embodied in
Stein), and élite, expatriate effeminacy – the position in Anglo-American literary
culture increasingly assigned to the figure of Henry James. In this early
work Hemingway was feeling out James, like a prize-fighter his opponent,
and yet that testing was part and parcel of his more brazen confrontation
with immediate rivals Anderson and Stein.
Torrents, that is, expertly “[made] a bum” out of Anderson for his “pretensious
[sic] fake” of a novel, Dark Laughter (1925), while strongly hinting
that Stein – both as Hemingway’s literary foster mother and as a Jewish
decadent – stood next in line to receive the rough stuff (SL 183, 174). The
book’s section headings alone tells a story. If the first heading, “Red and
Black Laughter,” announced a satirical design on the romantic racialism of
Dark Laughter, the last – “The Passing of a Great Race and the Making and
Marring of Americans” – yoked together Madison Grant’s infamous antiimmigration
tract of 1916 with Stein’s just released saga of German-Jewish
families in the United States, The Making of Americans (1925; composed
1903–11). It was Hemingway, then, who initiated the long, cagey quarrel
with Stein that flashed into open warfare in The Autobiography of Alice B.
Toklas (1933), which lauded Anderson’s sensitivity as true courage while
branding Hemingway “yellow”; in response, Green Hills of Africa sought
to denigrate “some female” whose work of jealous “malice” (rhymes with
“Alice”) had maligned both the artistic talent and the masculine credentials
of “Poor old Papa” Hemingway (ABT 872; SL 387). 19
“Imagination is racial experience,” Hemingway would declare in his unpublished
parody of Stein’s Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas and race, in
the broadest sense, also forms a focal point of Torrents. 20 On this score, the
book is “funny” (and serious) indeed, offering a send up of white authorial
fantasies of the redemptive, primitive African or American Indian – a strain
of idealizing pervasive in modernism, and found not only in Dark Laughter
but also in Stein’s “Melanctha” (composed 1905–6) and in the characterization
of the piano-playing “negro prodigy” Blind d’Arnault of Cather’s My
Ántonia (1918; EN 832). Hemingway, too, frequently yielded to this temptation,
from the portrait of the “noble-looking” black boxer in Sun all the
way to the very late True at First Light, which can be read as a Kiplingesque
sort of “going fantee” in Africa itself (SAR 71). 21 If the discourse of race
or ethnicity appears slightly subsidiary to the sex/gender discourse in
Hemingway, the category markers of difference continually inflect one

178 Henry James and Queer Modernity
another: Stein, as I have already shown, emerges as an objectionable compound,
the Jewish lesbian.
In the first paragraph of Torrents an Andersonian naïf addresses the disparate
milieux of sexuality in the industrial backwaters of the American
Midwest, on the one hand, and the fast, queer salon-world of modern
Paris, on the other: “Yogi Johnson stood looking out of the window of a
big pump-factory in Michigan ...His breath made little fairy tracings on
the cold window-pane...that reminded him of the gay city” (T 3). Gay
“Paree,” in Hemingway’s extended joke, had been a grim scene of sexual
humiliation for Yogi Johnson, causing his regression to the sort of boyish
sensualism so fondly evoked in such Anderson stories as “I’m a Fool” and
“I Want to Know Why”: “Well, Yogi thought, women are gone...but I
still have my love of horses” (T 52). Granting Michael Reynolds’s point
that Anderson’s fictional men (like Anderson himself) indulged in the very
“maundering Whitmanianism” that Hemingway convicts them of, much
more was at stake in the latter’s spoofing. 22 In part, Hemingway believed
that Anderson, who had once written “very beautifully” and “best of all
about adolescence,” had started “slopping” in the formal control of his
fiction – one of many terms (as Frances Kerr shows) that connoted a
dreaded, feminized flaccidity for male modernists (SL 206). 23 Relatedly,
Hemingway strove to eradicate or to conceal in himself Anderson’s “sweetness”
and “genius for...direct emotion” (as these qualities are described
and celebrated in Stein’s Autobiography) in order for the persona of “Papa”
to cohere and for the pursuit of the title “[literary] champion of the world”
to commence (ABT 874; SL 673). By promoting an ethos of tough love
among fellow authors such as Anderson and Fitzgerald – “Why the hell
should we have to pull our punches?” – Hemingway also bullied the wimp
within (SL 204, 205).
To contextualize the personal-cultural work of Torrents, Sun (then in draft
form) offers a useful figure for this kind of self-policing when Jake Barnes
finds it “awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime,”
while reserving the contemplation of his vulnerabilities for the privacy of
the night (SAR 34). Henceforth, with the growing popularity of his work,
Hemingway himself would live in the glare of high noon, so to speak, and
public scrutiny of his gender performance would be intense. As if to mark
the juncture where personal met public policing, the poet Allen Tate chose
exactly this night-time scene in Sun to task Hemingway for “betray[ing] the
interior machinery of his hard-boiled attitude” and revealing the hidden
“history of his sentimentality.” 24 Astutely, Hemingway complained about
Tate’s attempted manipulation to his editor, Maxwell Perkins – “Mr. Tate

Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, and Henry James 179
feels so badly that I’m not as hard-boiled as he had publicly announced” –
and, suggestively, he related his own genius for “direct emotion” (as it then
was) to his experience of being wounded on the Italian front in 1918 (SL
240). Still, the pressure to purge himself of “sentimentality” registered,
and Hemingway’s scrupulous self-regulation of sex/gender valences must
be seen as coeval with his very first ventures into cultural visibility. The
sympathetic contract with his readership would have to be renegotiated,
too. If readers “went any deeper inside [The Sun Also Rises] they couldn’t
read because they would be crying all the time,” Hemingway boasted to
Perkins, but that sort of design upon his audience’s emotions steadily diminished
over the course of the 1920s (SL 226). After A Farewell to Arms
(1929), as Rena Sanderson points out, the “he-man of exaggerated virility
and masculine expertise” took center stage, muscling aside the lad of easy
tears. 25
As Tate’s example indicates, the reviewing community conspired with
Hemingway in this makeover, either praising him as a peerless kudu killer
and a reveler in “Peninsular [bulls’] testicle feasts” (criadillas) or alternatively
(like Tate) peeping under Hemingway’s khakis or cape to discover an
insufficient manliness. In the latter vein, the damning evidence produced by
the critics included yet more “sentimentality disguised as bravado”; a fascination
with “abnormalities” (“Lesbianism . . . castration”) that belonged to
authorial adolescence and the American cultural adolescence of the early
twenties; a penchant for “sophomoric” antics and “boyish” reasoning; and
most importantly (as Stein and Anderson had been among the first to discern)
a “very sensitive” intelligence that was caught up in romanticized
violence, suggesting not the writer’s conviction of his own “red-blooded
masculinity” but rather his lack of a “serene confidence that he [was] a fullsized
man.” 26 Hemingway defiantly prided himself on ignoring reviews,
which he believed “poison[ed]” and “destroy[ed]” other male authors such
as Fitzgerald: “believ[ing] the critics...made them impotent” (SL 276). 27
But as his correspondence proves, nothing could be farther from the truth.
Hemingway listened closely and reacted strongly (if often ambivalently) to
the critics, so that by the time his career culminated with The Old Man
and the Sea (1952), the writer who had started out by “pulling no punches”
had attained a fitting public image as an ultra-masculine fighter, to the approbation
of at least certain reviewers: “Like...the Manassa Mauler [i.e.,
Jack Dempsey] battering big Jess Willard, a book by Papa [Hemingway] is
front-page news.” 28
Gertrude Stein shrewdly forecast this transition, and the young Hemingway
of the 1920s, one may be sure, heard her lecture on the perils of the

180 Henry James and Queer Modernity
popular artist under mass-market commercialism. Reflecting on her own
struggles with public recognition, Stein’s Everybody’s Autobiography (1937)
cited the risks involved when readers were permitted “deeper inside” not
only an author’s texts but his or her self-constitution:
It is funny about money. And it is funny about identity. You are you because your
little dog knows you, but when your public knows you . . . you are not the same
you . . . As long as the outside does not put a value on you it remains outside but...
if the outside puts a value on you then all your inside gets to be outside...Iused
to tell all the men who were being successful young how bad this was for them.
(EA 46–8)
As Stein must have stressed to Hemingway, the market’s unresisted incursion
into the space of personality replaced intimate procedures of selfappraisal
with gross cash value, leaving the writer largely at the mercy of
the cult of “image,” with its technologies for circulating that now adulterated
commodity, the modern author. For James, whose important currency
designated “identity” reappears in Stein’s analysis, the actor more than any
other type of artist had figured as the “producer whose production is her own
person” and who was thus most exposed to those degradations of “modernness”
– not least a “colossal, deafening newspaperism” – that spectacularized
the artist, jeopardized the principle of “quiet growth,” so essential to artistic
maturation, and reduced the “real producer” to shallow “humbuggery” (it is
Gabriel Nash of The Tragic Muse who offers this view, with campy delight;
TM 375–6, 484). By the period of Stein’s “autobiographies” in the 1930s,
apparently no type of cultural producer, not even the would-be solitary
novelist, could escape this fate once popular success had set in.
Both James and Stein allowed for the artist’s capacity to play the “image”
market to advantage, either by making “an income out of the photographers”
(as James wrote, and as Stein and Hemingway might well have
done) or by supplying the media with “floods of unscrupulous romance”
and capitalizing on all the “marvellous publicity” (TM 494). Yet such a
move required the artist never to forget that popularity came at a price, demanding
continual concessions to normativity. Although sex/gender norms
were not alone in governing the transaction between “you” and “your public,”
the institutions of heterosexism and patriarchy certainly foregrounded
these norms, as the narratives (and life narratives) of James, Stein, Cather,
and above all Wilde attest. In urging “successful young” men such as
Hemingway to weigh the cost of fame, that is, Stein urged him to study in
particular what was gained and what was lost by agreeing to act the part
of “he-man” and expert in all things manly for an eager Anglo-American

Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, and Henry James 181
audience: “After all if nobody refuses what you offer there must be something
the matter” (EA 47).
Yet if “Miss Stein” had so instructed (to adapt a chapter heading from A
Moveable Feast), not all young men could accept or implement her teaching.
As I have started to show in Torrents, Hemingway resorted instead to a
raillery that sought to diffuse Stein’s challenge, but that ultimately served
the difference- and dissidence-containing functions of the cultural system
she analyzed. His parody of “deviant” gender styles became not only a
means of defining an exemplary public manhood (“Papa”) but also a way
of resisting insight into the parodic character of that very construction. If
gender, in Judith Butler’s terms, is a “repeated stylization of the body...
that congeal[s]...to produce the appearance of substance,” with certain
styles coming into dominance through “felicitous self-naturalization,” one
might say that Hemingway cooperated admirably in playing the paragon
of (apparent) substantiality that seemed most “naturally” to fill out the
category masculinity. 29
Yet the actual positions in contest were more complicated than such
a summary might suggest. Insofar as Hemingway’s “gentle and fine” side
warred with cultural prescriptions, it also weakened his bid to outman a
competitor such as Sherwood Anderson. Moreover, although Anderson deplored
and teased his young antagonist’s liabilities of gender performance
(“I hauled out big fish,” he reports to Stein from the Gulf of Mexico;
“Hemingway...would have loved seeing them suffer”), neither he nor any
other mainstream male author was immune from environmental conditioning
– the interpenetration of “inside” man and “outside” market. Thus
in 1927 one finds Anderson chafing under the same labels that Hemingway
used to criticize (and Stein to extol) his sensitive masculinity: even in his
view, there was regrettably “too much talk...ofthesweet, naïve S[herwood]
A[nderson] – adolescence etc.” Anderson notably joined Hemingway in
calling for a “body-punching criticism” among authors as a corrective to
artistic “softness” (SA 312, 174). As Ezra Pound made explicit in demeaning
the gay author Wescott – “what Hemingway did, nobody could improve
on . . . Tough realism. Not like Glenway Wescott. He’s soft” – the fiber of
literary manhood was felt to be threatened not merely by the feminine
in conventional forms (women writers, editors, and critics) but also by
the effeminacy of the queer, which indicated that biological gender alone
could not guarantee heteromanliness. 30 In fact, Hemingway mobilizes the
Wescott character in Sun (Roger Prentiss) precisely in keeping with the
terms of Pound’s dismissive comparison, as well as with Fitzgerald’s evocation
of Wescott in person as “an effeminate Oxford fairy.” 31

182 Henry James and Queer Modernity
Given the internal divisions and the external influences working on both
Hemingway and Anderson – not to mention their shared experience of
military and sporting life, or their many marriages – one cannot simply
restage them as representing oppositional masculinities. Anderson’s own
store of manly credentials meant that Hemingway’s objective in Torrents –
distancing parts of himself by distancing his mentor – would be no easy
task. Indeed he only fully realized this objective after Anderson’s death
in 1941, remembering Sherwood (in 1953) as “wet and sort of mushy” with
“very beautiful bastard Italian eyes” – eyes that perhaps link Anderson to the
Italian aristocrat with “beautiful manners” who had sexually propositioned
the wounded young Hemingway in a Milan hospital (yet another instance
of the violated body as a site of convergence for emotional, vocational, and
sexual identity matters: SL 862; MF 19–20). If Hemingway could never
relegate Anderson to the ranks of the desexed “male old women,” like
James, or “withered old maid[s],” like André Gide, Anderson nonetheless
went down in Hemingway’s book as yet another man who could not keep
his sex or gender straight – a “jolly but tortured bowl of puss [sic] turning
into a woman in front of your eyes” (SL 862). 32
Given what Frances Kerr calls the “barely camouflaged paranoia about
being feminine” among male modernists, Hemingway’s misspelling of the
word pus (“puss”) performs a sort of double duty as a signifier. 33 The intended
“pus” (not unlike James’s “difficultly written shit”) belongs to an
imagery of excretion that indicates not the man-making wound but rather
those breaches in the female body notionally connected with the unregulated
flow of unclean, ill-formed matter (SL 266). The spelling “puss,” in
turn, identifies one of those breaches – a usage (as “pussy”) that Hemingway
later foregrounds in what Charles Caramello justly calls “the homophobic
account...that blots his Moveable Feast.” 34 For in that memoir, “pussy”
functions as Stein’s term of endearment for Alice B. Toklas (whom Hemingway
studiously avoids naming as Toklas), and the text exploits this term
or nickname to call attention to the evident irony of a woman’s anatomy
that only another woman can experience in sexual pleasure: “Then Miss
Stein’s voice came pleading and begging [to Toklas], saying, ‘Don’t, pussy...
Please don’t, pussy’ ” (MF 118). 35 Equally pertinent here, with another male
author’s gendering on the line, namely Anderson’s, is the slang metonymy
that makes “pussy” a slur intended to shame “an effeminate man or boy.” 36
Whatever it was that formed the content of the “tortured bowl” bearing
the name of Sherwood Anderson, it possessed the scary magic to change
into its opposite – to become inverted or queer – right in front of one’s
eyes.

Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, and Henry James 183
By an almost predictable symmetry, Torrents also features Gertrude Stein,
a woman who would eventually turn into a man right in front of Hemingway’s
eyes. As the hapless Yogi Johnson ponders how to restore his
heterosexual appetite, he conjures up a map of Paris – the same “gay city”
responsible for disabling his masculinity – that in a sense highlights the
address 27 rue de Fleurus, the site of Stein and Toklas’s famous salon.
In the terms of Johnson’s dithery free association: “Where did it all lead?
Would it help him to want a woman?...Enroute. Huysmans wrote that. It
would be interesting to read French...There is a street in Paris named after
Huysmans. Right around the corner from where Gertrude Stein lived.
Ah, there was a woman! Where were her experiments in words leading
her? What was at the bottom of it?” (T 74–5). In this passage Hemingway
situates Stein “right around the corner” from Joris-Karl Huysmans,
the author of En route but more significantly of the scandalous A rebours
(1884). As Stephen Calloway relates, A rebours was “hailed as the ‘Breviary of
Decadence’...on both sides of the English Channel,” while its protagonist,
Des Esseintes, stood for the “very quintessence” of queer luxury. 37
The work had also been attacked on the same grounds – as noted earlier,
James recoiled from Huysmans’s “incurable rot” in due proportion to his
covert attraction – and the book’s linkage with homosexuality was firmly
established when Wilde, in the dock, acknowledged A rebours as the unidentified
panoramic survey of “the sins of all the world” in which Dorian Gray
discovers the “prefiguring type of himself” (DG 155–8). 38 As Hemingway
would not have known (but seems almost to have intuited), Huysmans’s
En route was among the books that Wilde petitioned for while confined in
Reading Gaol (“vital for the preservation of my mental balance”), only to
have the request vetoed by the prison warden. 39
Hemingway did not need such particulars in order to exploit the associations
that had grown up around Huysmans’s name and to use them to
score points against Stein. By implication, Stein’s “experiments in words”
constituted the new decadent breviary of the postwar generation, leading
her (and susceptible readers) into an idle, narcissistic aestheticism that came
trailing clouds of sexual deviance, or as he later charged: “She [Stein] wanted
to know the gay part of how the world was going, never the real” (MF 25).
Here Yogi Johnson’s pun (“What was at the bottom of it?”) reinforces the
suggestion of a lurking deviance, for Stein’s The Making of Americans –
which Hemingway knew well from copying the manuscript and correcting
proofs – aspired to be an encompassing poetics of the “bottom nature”
of all human types, a radically democratic compendium of the “many
ways of being and of loving,” not just those ways that conformed to the

184 Henry James and Queer Modernity
prejudices of heterosexist culture, but also those experienced and exhibited
“in pairs of women, in pairs of men” (MOA 248, 505, 221). At the bottom
of Stein’s narrative “experiments,” Hemingway hinted, was Stein’s bottom,
making him probably the first reader to interpret her ambitious novel as
the “spectacularly anal text” that literary scholars now take it to be. As Lisa
Ruddick writes: “The notable feature of each character [in The Making of
Americans]is...notmembership in the class male or female...butinstead
the sort of ‘bottom’ the person has, as if Stein were unconsciously marginalizing
genital sexual difference in favor of a weird and indistinct notion of
anal identity.” 40
Hemingway’s jest at Stein’s expense is meant to intensify as the reader
grasps that her “bottom” will be off-limits to the desperate Yogi Johnson,
while his mental juxtapositions – “Would it help him to want a woman?...
Ah, there was a woman!” – comment indirectly and ironically on Stein’s
lesbianism. Like Anderson’s volatile masculinity, Stein’s emphatic femininity
(as it could seem only to a deficient mind like Yogi Johnson’s, the text
implies) is perfectly ripe for degeneration and regendering. In this respect,
Torrents virtually predicts Hemingway’s future course of interaction with
Stein’s masculinity, including episodes such as the drastic cutting of her
“lovely, thick, alive immigrant hair” that would change her, in his eyes,
from the ethnic earth mother depicted in Picasso’s famous portrait into
a domineering “Roman emperor” (MF 14, 119), 41 and the onset of what
Hemingway called “the old menopause,” which would almost biochemically
induce Stein’s critical politics to shift to “the idea that anybody who
was any good [in the arts] must be queer” (SL 384).
Indeed, the Hemingway of Torrents seems already to foresee the Stein
who would become, in his words, so “patriotically goofily complete...
stoppage of all sense lesbian” that she “opted for fags and fags alone” in the
conduct of her patronage, trying to recruit even Hemingway (of all men)
for her queer nation of the arts: “Patriotism is a hell of a vice” (SL 384, 388).
By the 1920s, writes Andrew Elfenbein, “the link between homosexuality
and genius was familiar,” and the idea of this linkage circulated especially
within intellectual élites in urban centers such as New York and Paris. 42
In the early 1930s Hemingway himself would demonstrate the idea’s currency
by assailing “those interested parties who are continually proving that
Leonardo da Vinci, Shakespeare, etc. were fags.” 43 Yet when Stein apparently
advanced this commonplace (“anybody who was any good must be
queer”), Hemingway blamed her views on female biology – or more precisely,
on the “change of life” that definitively removed Stein’s body from
the orbit of reproductive heterosexuality (SL 736). With the aging-out of

Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, and Henry James 185
her body and the adoption of a mannish hairstyle (“a turning point in all
sorts of things”) would come the end of all hope that Stein (or her anatomy)
might be salvaged for straightness (SL 650). Admittedly, Torrents foreruns
these developments by several years, and the Stein represented in this early
text could still be managed by means of a sportive rhetoric, but the broad
contours of the two authors’ hostile relationship were already mapped out.
Notably, that aggravated version of Gertrude Stein beginning to appear
on Hemingway’s horizon – unsexed, post-menopausal, and imperiously
gay – belongs to essentially the same category of magisterial “male old
women” as Henry James, the third principal in The Torrents of Spring. I
have characterized Stein and Anderson as Hemingway’s patent adversaries
in the book, and they themselves certainly saw it that way. “One is always
naturally antagonistic to one’s parents,” as Stein said of her own relation to
James, but when she and Anderson felt themselves so deftly thumbed and
gouged in public print by this young monster “formed by the two of them,”
it made them “a little ashamed of the work of their minds” (ABT 739, 872).
Yet one should not neglect the more subdued ridicule that Hemingway’s
Torrents directs at James, the very tenor of which acknowledges this important
predecessor in Anglo-American fiction as a far more formidable
quantity to be reckoned with.
Hemingway was not alone in this wary estimate of James’s prestige, of
course. Recall Willa Cather’s ardent testimonials to James as the “mighty
master” of English prose, and even E. M. Forster’s awed impression of this
“lord” of late Victorian culture, and it seems apparent why a friend of Stein’s
would have written to her in 1903: “Your literature must be as good as Henry
James’s – or I shall be disappointed.” 44 But owing to the usual curricular
construction of James, which ends with “The Beast in the Jungle” (1903)or
“The Jolly Corner” (1908), one perhaps forgets that this prodigious force
in Anglo-American letters had just passed from the scene when the Jazz
Age dawned. Hemingway bridled at reviews citing his debts to Anderson
and Stein, but it was not lost upon him that Allen Tate had attacked The
Sun Also Rises precisely because other reviewers were approaching the novel
in “that cautiously critical spirit which the followers of Henry James so
notoriously maintain toward the master.” 45 As Hemingway also knew, his
collaborator Ford Madox Ford had granted James literary “immortality” for
“reunit[ing] the stream of Anglo-Saxon imagination with the broad stream
of international culture” (1913), an opinion seconded by T. S. Eliot in
“On Henry James” (1918) and then by Ezra Pound in Instigations (1920). 46
As Virginia Woolf (yet another fault-finding critic of Sun) summarized
the prevalent mood, with the added compliment of her Jamesian diction,

186 Henry James and Queer Modernity
the Master had become “a portentous figure looming large and undefined
in the consciousness” of all modern authors, who must accordingly “do
homage” to his memory and example. There will be cause to revisit Woolf’s
rather ominous imagery in considering the emotional fate of Van Wyck
Brooks, who felt “the weighted pressures of the James cult” more keenly
than others, but for now Woolf’s categorical observation will suffice: “To
some an oppression, to others an obsession,” Henry James was “undeniably
present to all.” 47
For his part, Hemingway would long toy with (albeit always in the
distancing mode of the “funny”) the “strange coincidence” that his youthful
exposure to battlefield trauma – “something quite irreplaceable that
[other authors] had missed” – had come “after the death of Henry James”
(SL 768). 48 Such a conjunction gives a quasioedipal spin to Hemingway’s
self-positioning (as in Stein’s construction of her own case), yet this modernist
offspring of James suggestively went out of his way to arrive at
his “coincidence”: James had in fact died more than two years before
Hemingway’s wartime service as an ambulance driver. Woolf’s point, of
course, is that Hemingway (or Stein) was far from unique in feeling the
anxiety of a Jamesian influence, but it is worth noting that other male authors
availed themselves of very different avenues of response. T. S. Eliot,
for instance, ushered the Master safely into the past with the sanguine remark
that “Henry James has been dead for some time,” when it had been
a matter of only two years. 49 In other words, the circumstances of James’s
extinction seem to have played a more special role in Hemingway’s scenario
of his own maturation. By extension, the question of James’s posthumous
vitality also became psychically implicated in the severe wounding to which
Hemingway ascribed his masculine authority – an authority complicated,
moreover, by the fact that he also dated the discovery of a new emotional
tenderness from that same momentous event: “I have not been at all hard
boiled since July 8 1918” (SL 240). As a further key to the gravity of what
was at stake in Hemingway’s ambivalence, one notes that masculine making
consistently appears under the fearful figure of castration for him (“something
quite irreplaceable”) – a motif that would profoundly shape his stories
of men, women, and romance in a fallen world.
As a corollary of these psychodynamics, sexual “impotence” and the
“inability to write” became highly intertwined symptoms for Hemingway. 50
Not only did this association form the basis for his disparagement of Gide
and James, and inform his criticism of well-known critics – “camp following
eunochs [sic] of literature...all virtuous and sterile” – but it also cropped
up in moments of self-portraiture (SL 162). As is clear even in A Moveable

Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, and Henry James 187
Feast, Hemingway often repaired to Stein’s queer domestic space (near rue
de Huysmans) partly to see which of the two authors was the bigger man,
performatively speaking, but more importantly to gain relief from the
“severe discipline” of writing, which, if unalleviated, would “make [him]
impotent to do it” (MF 12–13). At some level, Hemingway recognized how
the strict regimen intended to distinguish the gendering of his work (hard,
straight, true, firm, real) from the profligate, compromising fluencies of
Stein and James operated within a delicate economy – an economy in which
straining one’s literary-libidinal resources could lead to emasculation, or an
incapacity to “do it.” 51 This discomfiting recognition generated much of
the malicious “joking” of Anderson, Stein, and others, but it also inspired
self-satire, as in this comment on an illustration for Sun: “Bloomshield’s
drawing...looks very much like a writer...saddened by the loss or atrophy
of certain non-replaceable parts. It is a pity it couldn’t have been Barnes
instead of Hemingway” (SL 223). As the record demonstrates, jokes of this
sort set the pattern for the author’s depressive tendencies. By the same
measure, Hemingway’s need to deprive James and other competitors of
their “balls” was just as defensive a move as his negotiation with the moist,
mushy masculinity he attributed to Anderson, but that also appeared in the
“slightly wet,” sentimental well of the self (SL 666). In terms of his authorial
persona, Hemingway was at pains to resemble the “valorous bullfighter...
plentifully equipped” with cojones, and to this end, some version of the
“cowardly bullfighter,” in which “they are said to be absent,” was always
useful: 52 “Mr. Henry James[,] I would...hit him once where he had no
balls” (SL 673).
It is no “strange coincidence,” then, that Henry James – and a dying
James at that – factors in the foundational text The Torrents of Spring.
Again, one needs to look beyond the text’s persistent ribaldry for what it
disguises or disavows – a self-interested inquiry into masculine formation
(or degradation) in which some now familiar elements recur. It amuses
Hemingway to assign the story of James’s deathbed scene to Mandy, a
“buxom” waitress at Brown’s Beanery, or in other words, a figure of female
seduction in a setting far removed from Jamesian fictional venues (in terms
of class, nationality, and social refinement) that annexes excretory discourse
through the humor of flatulence (T 35). Mandy’s sentimental indulgence
(“I feel very strongly about Henry James”) sexually arouses a customer who
has significantly missed the “irreplaceable” experience of soldiering in the
Great War. Hemingway permeates the scene with hetero desire and male
performance anxiety in order to realize the comic payoff of Mandy’s incongruent
anecdote, for the dying “James” seems as prissy as the desiccated

188 Henry James and Queer Modernity
André Gide (“nurse...spare my blushes”) owing largely to his mitigated
lifestyle as an expatriate bachelor: “Henry James. That chap who had gone
away from his own land to live in England among Englishmen...Whyhad
he done it?....Wasn’tAmerica good enough for him?” (T 38–9).
In fairness, the text chides such chauvinist intolerance, yet even through
the filters of satire and parody one finds a decided distaste for James’s
effete, sedentary life “among Englishmen” such as the homophile Edmund
Gosse (explicitly named). This is not to say that Hemingway had the full
sexual subtext of that friendship or of its triangulations with the figure of
J. A. Symonds, which I have studied in chapter 2; it is merely to note that
Hemingway’s radar for reading gayness from style (“[James’s] men all...
talk and think like fairies”) was clearly switched on already by the mid-
1920s (SL 266). The text’s answer to “why had he done it?” – why had
James gravitated to the England of Gosse and Symonds, which was also
the England of Wilde – seems to lie in certain natural affinities among
those unnatural men who went in for parlor sports, hypercultivation, and
(at a minimum) latent homosexuality.
Yet it is important to see that Hemingway’s fictional address of James, and
the more blatant diatribe found in his correspondence, only completed the
late Victorian phrase, supplying a name (“fairy”) for the type of Jamesian
masculinity that earlier reviewers had also deemed “artificial” and dandiacal
– a type evincing the gender style of “strolling mummer[s]” rather
than that of red-blooded Anglo-Saxon men. Similarly, in judging James
a “male old woman,” Hemingway was merely embellishing a critical line
of the 1890s that had viewed James as growing dangerously “careless of his
literary person,” turning into a Wildean flourisher of “flashy” epigrams and
dealing in subjects of a distinct “effeminacy,” such as “matchmaking and...
silken embroideries” (CR 381–2). Thus Allen Tate’s public pressure on Hemingway’s
own sentimentality (subtextually: his feminine side) had precedents
in Victorian criticism, while Hemingway’s disdain for James’s unmasculinity
begins to appear less than original. In this respect, Hemingway’s
importance lies less in what he said about James than in how he said it,
with casual tacitness in his fiction and casual overtness in his letters, thereby
indicating how things deemed typically “Jamesian” – mannered smartness,
boudoir intrigue, and the interior decorating of bourgeois homes and
souls – had been simply absorbed into the catalog of modern homosexuality,
or matched with subcultural tastes and proclivities coded gay.
But one did not have to read James or musty reviews of James to come
into contact with tokens of this post-Victorian gayness. As I suggested
earlier, Hemingway agreed with Pound and Fitzgerald that a living remnant

Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, and Henry James 189
of this gender style survived in their fellow American writer Glenway
Wescott, the nominal “Oxford fairy” whose fictional counterpart flatters
Jake Barnes in “some sort of English accent”; if “the whole show” of continental
sexual diversity nauseates Barnes, it is this mannered voice of gayness
that most makes him want to “throw up” (SAR 21). Yet perspective is everything.
For Margaret Anderson, the editor of the highly respected Little
Review, Wescott’s “clipped and distinguished speech” was not a marker of
deviance, but rather the tribute of a one-time poor Wisconsin farmboy
for whom literature had been the only source of sustenance in a cultural
wasteland: “[Glenway] loved the English language and had trained himself
to speak it beautifully.” 53 Interestingly, one discerns a common ground of
both her admiration and Hemingway’s revulsion when one learns from
Wescott’s own writing just how much his intonations of speech and prose
rhythms owed to none other than Henry James: “[In] the corner of the
orchard where sick but beloved snow-apple-trees ripened over a dark hogwallow;...there,
seated in a high hard-wheeled three-seated second-hand
automobile...one of my sisters and I read books by Henry James, and
wept.” This openly sentimental response to James’s “vast double-deckers”
had acquainted Wescott with his personal “effeminacy” (his word), which
later had to be toned down and “reconditioned” for everyday life in conventional
homophobic society. 54 Yet as I have shown using the example of
James’s aesthete Gabriel Nash, whose conspicuously “perfect” speech linked
him with the transgressive Wilde (see chapter 2), no man could “recondition”
himself entirely out of social history, especially with the advent of the
new “semiotics of inversion” (linguistic, sartorial, and gestural) that regulated
masculine embodiment and expression after 1895. 55 For Hemingway,
Wescott’s veneer of Victorian élan disguised nothing and succeeded only in
confirming his lineage with Nash, Wilde, and other “fairies” both fictional
and real – in highlighting certain stylistic continuities that homosexualized
the Jamesian milieu in retrospect.
By means of the living artifact Wescott, that is, as well as through a passing
acquaintance with other gay artists such as Gide, Jean Cocteau, and
Ronald Firbank (another resented favorite of Stein’s), Hemingway effectively
read queerness back into James – meaning both the fiction and the
“blushing” biographical bachelor who wrote it. To this extent, the “highspirited
nonsense” of The Torrents of Spring (as reviewers lightly judged
it) was nonsense neither in matter nor in method. For all the sparring
with Anderson and Stein, Hemingway had sized up “Mr. Henry James” as
the literary champion to beat, while imagining the terms of their bout as
an opposition between a straight, quasimartial vigor – in both living and

190 Henry James and Queer Modernity
writing – and a shameful masculine inadequacy tantamount to gayness.
More generally, the body or the subjectivity that was expatriated from
the realm of heterosexuality, so to speak, formed a chief concern of this
first extended piece of fiction by Hemingway – whether adumbrated in
Sherwood Anderson’s middle-American sentimentalism, or manifested in
the “fairy tracings” and wayward erogenous zones of Gertrude Stein and the
denizens of her Parisian salon, or reconstructed from the precious, effeminate
affectation (as it seemed to Hemingway) of Henry James’s Victorian
London.
God knows Ernest was getting hit with James from all sides. (Michael Reynolds,
“Hemingway’s Bones”)
According to Michael Reynolds, his most thorough biographer, Hemingway
“read more Henry James than we have credited him with,” under the
“excellent tutelage” of the odd couple Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein. 56
Linda Wagner-Martin even finds it “plausible” to interpret The Sun Also
Rises as a “recasting” of The Ambassadors, with Jake Barnes in the place
of Lambert Strether, renovating the latter’s famous injunction to “live all
you can” while criticizing Strether’s (or James’s) “passivity.” 57 Undeniably,
Hemingway was “getting hit” with James before the mid-1920s, and not
only in the form of public encomiums from the arbiters of modern taste,
but also in the more private applause coming from Stein, her brother Leo,
and especially Alice B. Toklas – a self-proclaimed “great admirer” who had
gone so far as to write to urge James that The Awkward Age (the text overrun
by “fairies”) would make “a very remarkable play” (ABT 659). James also
invaded Hemingway’s domestic sphere after 1921, being a favorite author
of two of his wives in succession, Hadley Richardson and Pauline Pfeiffer;
in A Moveable Feast Hemingway would still be distancing himself from
Hadley’s critical standards (“her idea of a good writer was Henry James”),
and it was Pauline who read The Awkward Age aloud to him in December
1927 (“it seems to me to be the shit”) during his recuperation from a serious
eye injury as well as a case of hemorrhoids (MF 156; SL 266).
Yet was getting hit with James, in the years before 1928, the same thing
as actually reading James? Or might one speculate that an ambitious but
untried young author would have shied away from the so-called “Master”
exactly because of all the hype? 58 Whatever the facts, Hemingway’s radical
gesture of “know[ing] nothing about James” before this time (the very
end of 1927) makes a strong bid for critical attention. James had already
assumed a detailed biographical presence for Hemingway, 59 but his early
invocations of James as “quite a writer” (in Torrents) and as “a good writer”

Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, and Henry James 191
(in Sun) seem to represent not an informed view (either sincere or ironic) so
much as a gross measure of his predecessor’s hefty reputation. Meanwhile,
Hemingway’s anecdotal take on his illustrious forebear in American fiction
shows an interest at once deeper and more specialized (T 39; SAR 116).
Being relatively unfamiliar with James’s work, that is, did not prevent
Hemingway from knowing what was supposedly “generally known” about
his manhood – namely, that a youthful injury incurred while helping to fight
a fire at a Newport horse barn had sexually incapacitated James (SL 209).
The biographical consensus now concurs with what James’s autobiography
clearly suggests, that the “horrid...obscure hurt” he suffered around the
outbreak of the Civil War was nothing so lurid as castration, but rather
a sprained back, the result of pumping an ancient fire engine for “twenty
odious minutes” while “jammed into the acute angle between two high
fences” (AU 414–15). Shortly, I will want to consider how the so-called
general knowledge (or more accurately, the disinformation) about James’s
sexual impotence became “generally known” among Anglo-American male
authors, besides Hemingway, and how this powerful rumor interacted with
James’s iconic pressure on these young writers in his guise as “the Master.”
For now, it should be noticed how this “knowledge” informs the scene in
Sun in which Barnes and his writer friend Bill Gorton prepare for a fishing
excursion in Spain, bantering about a “hurt” of Barnes’s that is equally as
obscure – and equally as central, in narrative terms – as James’s. While it is
hardly news among scholars that James is the “Henry” they discuss, whose
genital or sexual damage is invoked to parallel Barnes’s, the importance of
this unmanned “James” to Hemingway’s breakthrough novel and to the
general cultural conversation about Jamesian sexuality remains seriously
underestimated.
For all their seemingly aimless bonhomie, Barnes and Gorton suggestively
fixate in their exchanges on such topics as gender inversion (“Caffeine
puts a man on her horse and a woman in his grave”), unmanliness by way
of ethnic stereotype (the emotional Jew, Robert Cohn, emblematizes the
“pitiful”), the complicating institution of marriage (Gorton deforms a popular
wedding song), and the bodily mechanics of sex, with byplay about
a woman’s “jam” and a man’s “joystick” (SAR 114–16). According to one
review, Hemingway intended to set this “healthily and naturally masculine”
pastoral chumming against a diseased urban modernity, represented
by the “neurotic triangle” of Cohn, Brett Ashley, and her fiancé (CR 50).
But these chummy exchanges also point toward and test the limitations
of “Irony and Pity” as a means of coping “when you’re feeling [shitty]”
(the rhyming word was elided for editor Perkins’s sake) in a social order
whose systematic suspicion constrained both the expressivity of men (pity

192 Henry James and Queer Modernity
uncontrolled by irony) and the acceptable range of male–male intimacies.
When Gorton declares his “fondness” for Barnes, his riff bristles with all
the defensive-aggressive humor already observed in Torrents, only now the
mockery is directed at sexological discourse, with its overreaching theories
and its tendency to find the prime motive of history (both individual and
collective) in same-sex desire: “I’m fonder of you than anybody on earth. I
couldn’t tell you that in New York. It’d mean I was a faggot. That was what
the Civil War was about. Abraham Lincoln was a faggot...in love with
General Grant. So was Jefferson Davis...Sexexplains it all. The Colonel’s
Lady and Judy O’Grady are Lesbians under their skin” (SAR 116).
Oddly anticipating the campy speeches in Terrence McNally’s recent
play Love! Valour! Compassion! (see the introduction above), Gorton’s verbal
sport – or rather Hemingway’s – turns on an updating and indeed a
queering of Rudyard Kipling’s lyric “The Ladies,” in which a cockney soldier
concludes his romantic researches with the finding that “the Colonel’s
Lady an’ Judy O’Grady / Are sisters [not “Lesbians”] under their skins!” 60
Yet Gorton’s sharp-edged humor here (or Hemingway’s) betrays uneasiness
about the psychosexual complexity of life after Kipling, both as a matter of
sexological speculation (by Havelock Ellis, for example, or by certain psychologists
whom Hemingway called the “discards from Freud”) and as a
matter of irrefutable embodiment in persons familiar to the author (such as
Glenway Wescott; SL 751). Gorton resembles the Hemingway who delved
into Ellis’s writing on sexual difference with relish, yet who made sure to
treat it publicly as “a running joke” (“you’ll find your case analyzed on
page . . .”). 61 Meanwhile, the capital-L “Lesbian” who was most responsible
for inspiring this lively tirade in Sun was clearly Gertrude Stein, whose
“splendid bombast” (“You are all a lost generation”) served as the novel’s
epigraph and generated its main argument (SL 229).
But whether as a postulate of science or as an observable feature of
contemporary society, same-sex love emerges here as pervasive, the nominal
engine of all experience and the germ of all narrative. If “sex explain[ed]
it all,” and “sex” was synonymous with homosexuality, then not only the
grand public dramas of the past (such as the Civil War) but the most
personal minutiae of the present and future stood in bondage to the queer.
Outside the space of the homosocial idyl something as subjective as “talking
like a fairy” (to put Hemingway’s scornful phrase to better effect) could
call into question a man’s sexing, while expressing warmth for another
man could “mean [one] was a faggot”; a semantic fuzziness leaves it unclear
whether Gorton’s worry is primarily for surveillance and scandal (expressing
fondness would be taken to mean one was gay) or, more disconcertingly, for
the implications of speech for sexual identity (expressing fondness would

Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, and Henry James 193
make one a “faggot,” or confirm one as such). Yet Hemingway’s punch line
lies in the irony that male sexual orientation has been rendered irrelevant,
since modern women, unlike their Victorian “sisters,” secretly reserve their
bodies (or bottoms) for other women. The Stein of Torrents – the particular
lesbian under Hemingway’s skin – had become epidemic. Like his creator,
Gorton could laugh at, but could not laugh off, the prospect of a world in
which, for both genders, heterosexuality was only skin deep (dark laughter
indeed).
But Stein was not the only figure to make a repeat performance in The
Sun Also Rises. The Barnes–Gorton relationship also alludes to Sherwood
Anderson’s extraordinary tale “The Man Who Became a Woman” (1923).
In fact, Hemingway essentially steals (to deliver in a more sarcastic “adult”
register) what the narrator of Anderson’s story says about his youthful infatuation
for another boy: “I got to love Tom Means...although I wouldn’t
have dared to say so . . . A man . . . don’t dare own up he loves another
man . . . [Men] are afraid to admit such feelings to themselves even...It
may be taken to mean something it don’t need to at all.” 62 If Hemingway
intended Sun as a “gesture of farewell” to Anderson, this was hardly the
way to make a clean break. 63 Both authors’ texts, that is, regret the loss
of a cultural space for the enactment and acceptance of what Anderson
movingly (yet also defensively) called “the idea that love could grow as between
man and man, a thing outside sex...founded upon brotherhood,
realization of self in another man, your own curious loneliness...in him
too” (SAM 286).
In other words, the nostalgia that informs both texts – more “sentimental”
in Anderson, more caustic in Hemingway – attempts to fence out
the possible implication of gay genital expression (“a thing outside sex”),
along with meanings that “don’t need to [mean] at all” what they otherwise
might mean if permitted to. Like Hemingway – as well as Cather
and even like Stein – Anderson resented the encroachment of “the great
Sigmund Freud passion,” with its “inclination to suspect” homosexuality in
all same-gender friendships of any intensity or duration (SAM 473). Both
Hemingway and Anderson were reacting, in effect, against Freud’s finding
that “all human beings are capable of making a homosexual object choice
and have in fact made one in their unconscious.” 64 Or in the terms of Eve
Kosofsky Sedgwick’s familiar continuum, both authors seek to cordon off
buddying or “brotherhood” from male–male desire, so that the “potential
unbrokenness” between the homosocial and the homosexual cannot even
be envisioned. 65
As I have shown using Cather’s example, this resistance to sexual implication
was not limited to male American authors, and the point can

194 Henry James and Queer Modernity
be extended to include a gay British writer such as James’s friend Hugh
Walpole. In 1920 Walpole commended the theme of “male friendship” in
fiction but warned of the risks inherent in this “dangerous...subject”: “So
many people see [a same-gender relationship] only as homosexual, which is
the last thing it generally is.” 66 The comment may be slightly evasive, but it
also expresses a veiled objectivity about how homophobia and sexual panic
conspire to curtail same-sex indulgence. In any event, none of these various
authorial caveats (whether American or British) against a proliferating
sexual discourse could quite explain why “so many people see” queerness
as the rule in other same-sex friendships when it was purportedly “the
last thing” imaginable in their own. In Anderson, as I have shown earlier,
homosexual possibility is attenuated by a calculated naïveté, yet his haziness
also covers for a greater sensitivity to “other,” more dissident masculinities.
Hemingway, on the other hand, stifles the drift of male bonding into gay
meaning by the strategy of brusque address. If Gorton and Barnes speak
the unspeakable extravagantly (“faggots”), it is precisely to banish it from
the field of interpretation, both for themselves and for readers.
In Sun, then, one encounters a work energized by an ambivalent, contestatory
history with Gertrude Stein and partially indebted to the same
Anderson whose writing Hemingway had disparaged in Torrents. Soone
is not unprepared to find the figure of Henry James mobilized again as
well, in this very segment centered on masculine camaraderie, potency, and
desire. The outright naming of James in manuscript drew an objection
from editor Perkins, and Hemingway’s self-defense gives an inkling of why
he might have linked James with “Barnes’ mutilation”: “Henry James...
left no descendants...nor any wife, and therefore...he is as dead as he
will ever be.” Ostensibly an argument that James’s death made him fair
game – “as historical a name as Byron” – the remark also circumscribes
the concept of literary posterity, and the question of who may or may not
become a member of the writers’ hall of fame (SL 209). A male author’s
long-range reputation, it is implied, hinges appreciably upon his degree of
heterosexual investiture. “Mutilation” could thus have a more far-reaching
figurative resonance: as a nonreproductive bachelor whose “great knowledge
of drawing-rooms” originated in a great dread of bedrooms (again,
the note of Torrents), James could not be more beastly dead (SL 266).
Yet as this instance attests, James remained very much alive to Hemingway,
not at all “historical.” Tellingly, Hemingway’s license, in Sun, with
the occasion of James’s famous accident obeys the need to infantilize James
(“I heard it was a tricycle”), and then makes an in-joke about his apparent
masculine incompetency: the accident occurred while “riding horseback”

Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, and Henry James 195
(James was in fact rather adept at riding; SAR 115–16). Aesthetic rather than
athletic, this version of “Henry James” might as well be the “man on her
horse” of Bill Gorton’s gender-switching patter. Both by his queer nature
and his early unmanning, James seemed almost predestined to write an
overrefined prose, and to offer a fictional universe populated by femmy
“fairies”: how much more aggravating, then, for Hemingway, to have to
witness James’s perversely growing fame.
The other things . . . are all fixed up. We’ve . . . made Henry James Henry, made
Roger Prescott [Glenway Wescott] into Roger Prentiss and unfitted the bulls for
a reproductive function. (Hemingway to Maxwell Perkins, editor of The Sun Also
Rises)
My experience in teaching The Sun Also Rises suggests that Perkins’s intervention
achieved its goal: even for many graduate students, the identity of
the afflicted, unmanly “Henry” has now become lost in a clutter of other
period references. In the mid-1920s, however, with the Master only recently
deceased, the reference was not at all mysterious. Leon Edel went so far as
to stake his claim for Hemingway as the “creator of the legend that James
was impotent” on the Barnes–Gorton exchange. 67 But in fact the broad
trend that permitted Glenway Wescott, by the early 1930s, to subsume
James under the succinct conjunction “expatriation and castration” had
begun more than a decade earlier, when Van Wyck Brooks published part
of The Pilgrimage of Henry James (1925) in the important journal Dial in
May 1923. 68
Brooks warrants close attention in this section, for his Henry James became
the Henry James of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Anderson, and other
male authors struggling to position themselves in the shadow of the
Master’s prestige and stylistic presence, which were so densely interwoven
with evolving sex/gender norms. “I read the James book,” Fitzgerald
notified Brooks in June 1925,and“sodid...Ernest Hemminway [sic]” – a
fact independently verified in Sun, which rehearses Brooks’s primary thesis,
no doubt with the example of James in view: “Nobody that ever left their
own country ever wrote anything worth printing...You get precious...
[with] fake European standards” (SAR 115). 69 Yet if Brooks laid the groundwork
for linking James’s removal to Europe and his “preciousness,” on the
one hand, with his “castration” or demasculinization, on the other, it bears
noting that The Pilgrimage of Henry James makes only passing mention of
the “accident” or “invalidism” that Hemingway and others found so compelling.
70 As I will shortly show, Brooks had his own constitutional reasons

196 Henry James and Queer Modernity
for soft-pedaling this event in James’s life. The key point for now is that the
project of making “expatriation and castration” (or cognates such as feminization
and sexual inversion) appear all but synonymous in James’s case
was a group project among Anglo-American authors, for which Brooks’s
study merely served as the catalyst.
Apart from Hemingway’s contributions, one might pursue what Fitzgerald
meant by complaining to Brooks about his sin of biographical
omission – “why didn’t you touch more on James [sic] impotence (physical)
and its influence [on his work]?” – or by implying that both James’s foreign
relocation and his “feminine” impress on the Anglo-American novel
had roots in a sexual identity less than straight. Elaborating a subtext in
Brooks’s book, Fitzgerald tried to imagine how different modern literary
history would look if James had not expatriated but had instead been
held back by a “poignant emotional love affair with an American girl on
American soil”; that Fitzgerald wrote this passage under the sign of farce is
clear enough from his concession that such an Americanized, heterosexualized
James, with “the picaresque past of Huck Finn,” was inconceivable. 71
Alternatively, one might examine Wescott’s distinctive line of interpreting
his beloved, Anglicized James also in light of physical impotence – a rhetorical
movement that carries Wescott from James’s “rumored” inability to
produce children and his fortunate expatriation to the insight that homosexuality
explained a good deal about James’s life and work, especially his
anarchistic enthusiasm for “the rupture of...inhibitions.” 72
But it is Stephen Spender who provides the most revealing evidence of
how the James-as-castrato legend came to dominate transatlantic discourse.
Writing to Christopher Isherwood in 1933, Spender spoofed the idea, initially
suggesting that his forthcoming book on James would be about boy
love (“his friendships with Boston lads between the ages of 7 and 17”) and
then purporting to have found that James was castrated at age 40 “by an
accident which happened to one of the earliest central heating radiators.”
Confidentially, that is, Spender joked away all such speculation, while associating
the famous accident with a sedentary, middle-aged, and slightly
chilly Henry James; the book’s cover, he further pretended for Isherwood’s
sake, would feature the culprit in the plot, “a trellis of hot pipes with little
jets of steam peeping out.” 73 Yet when the book appeared, Spender bowed
to consensus, duly citing Wescott’s theories and borrowing yet another hypothesis
(unsupported in James’s account) that the Master’s privates had
been “very severely scalded.” This might well explain the “attitude to sex”
in James’s writing, Spender agreed, as well as some of the grimmer endings
in his works: “Castration...issupposed to preoccupy the mind with ideas
of suicide and death.” 74

Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, and Henry James 197
To judge by Fitzgerald, Wescott, and Spender, then, the anomalous view
of James’s sexuality at this time belonged not to those who read him as
a queer, damaged expatriate but rather to a lesser author like Gamaliel
Bradford, whose appreciation of James in American Portraits (1922) had in
fact provoked Brooks’s attack in The Pilgrimage. According to Bradford,
James’s “love-letters would have been one of the curiosities of literature,”
given his stylistic queerness (decidedly in the old sense of the word), but
then: “Who can say? Unless some woman still lives who has some of his
letters.” 75 (This lament for the missing proof of James’s heterosexuality is
humorously, but tellingly, reversed in a recent anthology that includes his
work in the “hidden tradition” of gay writing yet resists the biographical
claim: “Failing the discovery of love letters to a young man...[James’s]
homosexuality must remain theoretical”; 76 the further humor, in turn,
of this reluctance to call James’s gayness anything more than theoretical
becomes clear from perusing Susan Gunter and Steven Jobe’s excellent
compilation of James’s “love letters” to younger men. 77 ) For the avant-garde
male modernists – gay or straight, American or British, impotence theory or
no – James increasingly appeared under the auspices of queerness, implying
a distinct name – homosexuality – for those “thicker traces of another sort”
that James’s intimate friends such as Constance Woolson had detected in
his nature and in his work (L iii: 559).
Next to Hemingway, however, it was Sherwood Anderson who became
Van Wyck Brooks’s key interlocutor on the question of James. The first serialized
portion of Brooks’s The Pilgrimage proved so seductive to Anderson
(“you have a kind of power over my mind, Van Wyck”) that he embarked
on several “solid weeks of James reading” in 1923. Anderson came to sympathize
with James as a man who “did not dare love” (hinting perhaps at
a love that dared not speak its name), but still he found the experience of
reading James emotionally privative, writing to Brooks: “I really can’t care
much for any character after he gets through with it; he, in short, takes my
love from me, too” (SA 102). At the same time, Anderson strongly urged
Brooks, in developing his book’s thesis in further installments, to factor
in the “struggling side of James” and treat him not like a “judge trying a
criminal” but rather as a “sympathetic friend or lover”: “Can we understand
at all, ever, where we do not love?...Giveyourself wholly to James”
(SA 104).
The recurrence of the word love here, with its linkage to understanding,
is extremely striking. As suggested earlier, there is no need to romanticize
Anderson’s sexual politics (as Stein sometimes did, both genuinely and
strategically). If Hemingway honed his masculinity by grinding against
Jamesian effeminacy, Anderson similarly wrinkled his nose up at a “very

198 Henry James and Queer Modernity
womanish” portrayal of Oscar Wilde on Broadway (1938), objecting especially
to the play’s suggestion that “perversion has in it some beauty and
meaning that is not in the natural flow of life” (SA 418). Furthermore,
even Anderson’s sensitive-male characters issue self-protective disclaimers
(“I’m not any fairy” 78 ) that also echo in the author’s memoirs (“[my friend]
Luther was no fairy”), which unabashedly associate his encounters with
urban homosexuality or transvestism with a sort of gothic horror: “a kind
of door opened, as though I looked down...into a dark pit, a place of
monstrous shapes, a world of strange unhealth” (SAM 285, 340).
Yet again, Anderson’s resistance to seeing same-sex desire as such (as opposed
to fraternal or sororal bonds “based on natural loneliness”) mainly
reflected a wish to harbor human relationships from the incursions of the
modern sex police. Anderson’s well-known story “Hands,” which features
an effeminate schoolteacher run out of town (indeed nearly lynched) for allegedly
fondling schoolboys, resolutely argues against homophobia, perhaps
because Anderson himself had flourished as a journeyman printer under
“sudden caresses” bestowed by older men whose guidance he remembered,
positively, as “a kind of love making.” 79 If to his view homosexuality remained
a “terrible problem,” Anderson openly welcomed what might be
called early gay pride readings of his work, as when an elderly gay man
paid him this compliment: “I myself often read [“Hands”] . . . aloud to
young men among us...It is an effort to bring a little nobility into our
relationships.” Surely one personal strength that Stein valued in Anderson
(and missed in Hemingway) was the capacity to trace his homophobia to
its foundations, uncovering, as it were, the sexual invert within: “Why,
I was myself, unconsciously, one of them. The thing was in me too and
the fear I had expressed was a sure sign of its presence” (SAM 285–6, 340,
473).
Suggestively, Anderson’s admonition to Brooks to “give yourself wholly
to James,” especially before writing critically about him, resembles the
argument put forth in the tale “Hands” for broadly circulating the account
of its queer character: “Sympathetically set forth [his story] would tap
many strange, beautiful qualities in obscure men” (WO 29). A queer reader
before the fact, Anderson coaxed Brooks toward what would now be called
an “identificatory standpoint” receptive to the “sentimentally attaching
power” of the Jamesian text, with its subdued eroticism, 80 encouraging
Brooks to recognize “the access to ‘perverse’ energies that [James’s] writing
frequently affords.” 81 By further implication, the reader/author who went
into James’s texts looking not for strange beauties in obscure masculinities
but only for heterosexual success stories, was likely to find precisely what

Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, and Henry James 199
Brooks ultimately found, a host of characters who seemed disappointingly
averse to normal (straight) emotions, “shadow-like passionless women and
fish-blooded men” (a variant, one might add, on Lionel Trilling’s response
to Willa Cather, discussed in chapter 5). 82
Anderson’s mediation failed miserably, that is, and not only did Brooks
not yield to James’s queerness, but he assailed it. For Brooks, too, was edgy
about the feminized aura that had gathered around a form of cultural authority
that should have been, just as authority, the province of men; and
he only later realized what Hemingway would never fully accept: that he
was “quarreling with myself” by way of quarreling with the Master. 83 As
James Hoopes remarks, Brooks’s “strenuous, lifelong insistence” that literature
be rooted in native soil and express American practicality – the main
basis of his attack on James – was also a rearguard “defense of his masculinity,”
obstructing his appreciation of other gay writers as well, including
those whom he admired, such as Walt Whitman and J. A. Symonds. 84 For
instance, Brooks labored to refute what he called the “crass misunderstandings”
that had grown up around Symonds’s “passion for ideal [male] beauty”
(a sorry project given what is now known of the English author’s brave, if
cautious, gay advocacy), and Brooks was accordingly “greatly perplexed” by
Symonds’s famous attempt to enlist Whitman in support of Greek love. 85
Leaning not on the Whitman of manly comrade love but on the
masculinist, nationalist Whitman of Democratic Vistas, Brooks argued
that James’s deviance began with imitating the “spare, withdrawn” (read
effeminate) aesthetes of Europe. Inevitably, James’s long sojourn in modern
London, the capital of Anglo-American decadence and the scene of
Wilde’s disgrace, had led to “the gradual decomposition...of his sense
of human values,” and his “sterilizing” influence on the next generation
of writers could be seen in the work of those American exiles in Paris
(naming Stein would have been superfluous) who pursued “the so-called
expatriate religion of art.” Given the organizing terms of this narrative
of James’s degeneration and his incomparable agency in a much broader
cultural decline – not coincidentally, the very terms of Hemingway’s vignettes
involving James – one readily grasps Brooks’s difficulty in keeping
homosexuality out of the picture. Brooks all but identifies queerness as the
origin of “the style that was the man Henry James had become” – decorative,
sensualist, ceaselessly hedging – unconsciously isolating the queerest
of his works (The Tragic Muse, “The Altar of the Dead”) as evidence of
how James’s aberrant personal “texture” had “infected the creatures of his
fancy,” making them behave “in violation of the nature of things.” 86 As
in Anderson’s more conscious and conspicuous appeal to “the natural flow

200 Henry James and Queer Modernity
of life,” and its fundamental opposition to Wildean perversion, Brooks
implied more than he knew in setting James and his characters “against
nature.” Put otherwise, the strain of sexual dissidence in the Master’s voice
vibrated in Brooks’s mind, even as he sought to neutralize and castigate it
as a debased expatriate cosmopolitanism.
As Hemingway proved in other dire ways, taking on Jamesian gay masculinity
could exact penalties, especially when such a confrontation involved
aggressions toward unacknowledged parts of the self. In the words of his
own later account, Brooks became so “drugged” with his protagonist Henry
James that he feared he would “never be sane again” until released from
the grip of his book project. Describing the deliverance that came with the
publication of The Pilgrimage, Brooks interestingly genders the body of his
metaphor: “Henry James...came alive...inside of me,” and “the infant
monster, kicking...hard at the walls of my psyche” entered the world. 87
In the natural flow of life, postpartum depression followed. “Pursued...
with nightmares in which Henry James turned great luminous menacing
eyes upon me” – as it were, Woolf’s hauntingly “portentous” James run
amok – Brooks was especially beset by the fantasy of being buried alive
by a decree of Parliament (not coincidentally, the law-making assembly
of the American-turned-British subject Henry James). When consulted
on the case, Carl Gustav Jung diagnosed the patient as beyond help, and
Brooks passed the remainder of the 1920s in a sequence of American and
English hospitals, or what he called “houses of the dead” (including one
annexed by Harrow, where the schoolboy Symonds first encountered the
homosexuality that Brooks refused to see. 88 ) To insist upon the workings
of ironic retribution here would perhaps smack of gothic fatalism, yet the
gothic intensity of Brooks’s breakdown measured the psychic costs of denial
in engaging Henry James under the sign of gender, sexuality, and nation.
Hemingway and others, one might say, got off easy.
I have to . . . deny myself...many of the little comforts like toilet paper, semicolons,
and soles to my shoes . . . [Otherwise] people begin to shout that old Hem
is just a fairy after all and no He man ha ha. (Hemingway to Fitzgerald, 1927)
As Brooks’s case is only the most dramatic to confirm, it will not do to
construe Hemingway’s anxious masculinity as too exceptional. Fitzgerald
fretted that The Great Gatsby would show the “feminine” influence of James
(as reviewers later claimed it did) rather than the virile influence of Dostoevsky.
89 Ezra Pound (as Kerr quotes him) was obsessed with keeping a “hardness
of edge” in creative writing in order to remasculinize the “perpetual

Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, and Henry James 201
mother’s meeting” of a “Eunuchated” American culture. 90 Less invidiously
but in the same vein, Stephen Spender, who presciently noted a “hint of the
androgynyous” in Hemingway’s work, cited “the often feminine presence of
a second Henry James” throughout the entire Jamesian canon, as if inscribing
a man who had “lived the life of...hisRowlands” (referring to Rowland
Mallet of Roderick Hudson) and his Lambert Strethers – passive observers
rather than real men of action. 91 Even Anderson, although less fearful both
of James and of things feminine, reacted to Hemingway’s “completely patronizing”
challenge to him as a man and an author in the challenger’s
own masculinist idiom: judging as “a pretty good middle weight” himself,
Anderson predicted that Hemingway would never “make the heavy weight
class” (SAM 464).
From another direction, but equally symptomatically, the critic Edmund
Wilson felt moved to a public defense of Hemingway’s manhood against the
most punishing pugilist of all, Gertrude Stein; after being “waspish” toward
Pound, Wilson wrote, she had beat up on Hemingway “pretty hard” in The
Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, which retailed the “endlessly amusing”
gossip (in the gay city of Paris) about Hemingway’s debility and “yellow”
cowardice (ABT 875). 92 Even Glenway Wescott, whose own masculinity
had been ridiculed in The Sun Also Rises, perceived Stein’s treatment of
Hemingway as “odious,” while her ally and ideal man Anderson found that
his “great joy” in reading The Autobiography was tempered by Stein’s move
(figuratively, either savage or castrative or both) to take “such big patches
of skin off Hemmy with [her] delicately held knife” (SA 295).
Yet as this turbulent body of response further indicates, Hemingway had
elected himself, or had agreed to his election, as the primary icon-cumtarget
of insistently straight hypermasculinity in Anglo-American culture.
As such, he had also become the foremost victim of the post-Victorian
practice of reading (and self-reading) that assumed a tight fit between person
and persona, collapsing masculine and artistic authenticity or inauthenticity
in the process. In calling Anderson’s work a “pretensious fake,” Wescott’s
work a “literary fake,” or James’s work “an enormous fake,” Hemingway selfevidently
implied an author whose manhood, too, was artificial, a man who
was perhaps both “a phony and a buggar [sic]” (SL 195, 266, 413). By the same
token, when Hemingway became rattled by Virginia Woolf’s “imputation
that I faked” in The Sun Also Rises, the insult fell into essentially the same
category as charges that his boxer’s crouch was an imitation of Anderson’s
(thus Stein), that his bullfighting enthusiasm was “all simulation” (Margaret
Anderson), and that his masculinity in toto was as “phony as a rubber check”

202 Henry James and Queer Modernity
(Zelda Fitzgerald). The sting in these formulas of detraction must have
been all the worse for their having come from women (SL 265, ABT 873,
SL 388). 93
The best index to how the modern regulation of gender and sexuality
worked, that is, came in the form of Hemingway’s brittle susceptibility when
the tables were turned, and his own masculine prose, as well as his own
pose, was pronounced “fake.” Finding no quarter in which to laugh off such
imputations as groundless or irrelevant (“no He man ha ha”), Hemingway
self-consciously redoubled his manly displays, battling swordfish in the
gulfstream (“poor fragile old Hem posing as a fisherman”), hunting in
Africa (where “Gertrude’s feathered friends,” he predicted, would quickly
perish), and boxing against all comers, including an unfortunate, inebriated
Wallace Stevens: “Gertrude Stein ought to give all these people who pick
fights with poor old papa at least their money [back]” (SL 388, 403, 439).
In accordance with the harsh binary logic of the modern gender system,
which was extended and compounded in the equation of effeminacy with
homosexuality, Hemingway’s internalized fear of being no “He man” (all
kidding aside) harbored the deeper fear that his audience would proceed
to deduce the very worst about him: “old Hem is just a fairy,” no different
from the noxious male creatures that he reviled in James’s fiction or found
embodied in literary competitors such as Glenway Wescott.
As always, Stein emerges as the keenest analyst of what went wrong for
Hemingwayesque masculinity and its manifestation in Hemingway’s art.
Owing largely to a more stable patriarchy, “nineteenth-century men were
confident,” she observed in Everybody’s Autobiography, and thus Victorian
male authors were able to “invent all kinds...of men” in their fiction (a
generalization that holds even for the putatively “feminized” James). With
the weakening of patriarchal privilege, though, male modernists became
defensive, “hold[ing] on to themselves” in their fictional representations
and trying to make themselves appear “more beautiful more intriguing
more everything” (EA 3–4). Hemingway exemplified the “more everything”
category – staging a campaign, at once quixotic and pathetic, to recover lost
ground for modern men by main force – whereas Anderson’s “perfect freshness”
derived from his relative indifference to being “small in the world’s
eyes.” 94 In other words, Stein promoted much the same type of masculinity
that was complimented and revalued throughout James’s work; it was
also of the kind that Willa Cather advanced in her writings, including
what Hemingway saw as the pitiful simulacrum of manhood, cribbed from
Hollywood movies, that had betrayed Cather in the prize-winning novel
One of Ours: “Poor woman she had to get her war experience from

Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, and Henry James 203
somewhere” (SL 105). In the long run, as both Stein and Anderson intuited,
Hemingway himself would be betrayed by the constant exertion
and self-vigilance required in playing the big, strong, straight man for “the
world’s eyes.” In that regard, perhaps a poignant symbolism can be read
in Hemingway’s unsuccessful struggle with a piece of fiction entitled “The
Faker”; as D. T. Max writes, it was to be “the story of a man returning
from . . . war pretending to be a hero...[but] he never finished it.” 95
Farewell is about the best word I know in English. (Hemingway, Selected Letters,
1932)
If nobody refuses what you offer there must be something the matter. (Stein,
Everybody’s Autobiography, 1937)
In his impressive study Libidinal Currents, Joseph A. Boone sums up the
recent trend in American literary and cultural studies that has seen “concepts
of canonicity...fiercely debated...resulting in the dethroning of certain
authors (farewell Hemingway) and the rise of hitherto neglected ones,” such
as Djuna Barnes. 96 Although Boone’s incisive readings contribute much to
this pivotal recovery project, one senses that he may be premature in bidding
Hemingway, in particular, a fond farewell. Nor is it the first time that Papa
Hemingway has been shown the door without his having taken it. Indeed,
more than half a century after Fitzgerald agreed with Stein’s assessment
that his friend’s work was bound for “the museums,” and long after Alice
B. Toklas also dismissed that work as “hopelessly 1890,” Hemingway is not
only not being “refused,” he is being positively embraced. 97
In 1999, to honor of the centennial of Hemingway’s birth – only coincidentally
the anniversary of James’s publication of The Awkward Age – the
National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC, mounted a major exhibition
dedicated to Hemingway, with Yale University Press publishing the exhibition’s
photographs of this “emphatically virile...American legend.” 98 Popular
magazines from People to Cigar Aficionado featured Hemingway on their
covers. Meanwhile, Hemingway’s offspring (the lucky Henry James did not
have any) have continued to flood the market with spurious posthumous
“novels,” such as True at First Light, as well as with a line of “Hemingway”
furniture. 99 At the risk of reproducing what James Kincaid calls the “narratives
of fierce causality” that marked and marred Victorian conceptions of
sexual identity, it is perhaps worth noting that the Hemingway descendant
who testified most candidly to the author’s self-damage and its ramifications
for others around him was his transgendered son Gregory/Gloria,

204 Henry James and Queer Modernity
whose difficult life ended recently in the women’s section of a Miami
jail. 100
More to the point of Boone’s argument are the results of a poll conducted,
also in 1999, by the newsletter of the Heath Anthology of American
Literature, which is conceived as the avant-garde multiculturalist teaching
anthology of our time. Having asked their sizeable constituency of college
educators to name the twentieth-century works in English most essential
to the millennial curriculum, the newsletter’s editors reported that two
Hemingway novels, The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms, were voted
into the “top twenty-five” list, thus tying the American author with James
Joyce and Virginia Woolf for second place; the only writer who placed three
works in the top echelon (and here one may imagine Hemingway spinning
in his grave) was William Faulkner. 101 To all appearances, then, whether
in academe or in popular mass media, the figure of “Hemingway” does
not plan on departing anytime soon, leaving us to confront the troubling
implication that perhaps Anglo-American culture itself has become the
“museum” of Stein’s prediction. (Although the year 1999 was also the birth
centennial of the gay American poet Hart Crane, author of The Bridge, his
image was nowhere to be found on the cover of People or elsewhere.)
As for the other Hemingway, the “other half” of the man that did not
really factor into these recent festivities and celebrations, a diary entry from
the 1950s – involving sexual role-playing with his fourth wife, Mary –
provides a remarkable glimpse into the possibilities, both personal and
artistic, that Stein had once seen, before the overdetermined masculinist
persona of “Papa” was superimposed:
[Mary] loves me to be her girls [sic], which I love to be, not being absolutely stupid.
Mary has never had one lesbian impulse but has always wanted to be a boy. Since
I have never cared for any man and dislike any tactile contact with men except the
normal Spanish abrazo, I loved feeling the embrace of Mary, which came to me as
something outside all tribal law. 102
Although the armor of negation remains firmly in place for Hemingway
(“never . . . never”), this fantasy of sexual inversion, resulting in something
bordering on same-sex intimacy, leads one to wonder just how far outside
of tribal law this brave, manly man might have ventured, if only his “inside”
had not become “outside” all too soon. 103

234 Notes to pages 165–175
as in One of Ours, the attempt to map out a new order of relations between
men or between women becomes entangled in the very structures it seeks to
subvert.
62 Goldberg, “Strange Brothers,” p. 471.
63 Abraham, Are Girls Necessary?, p.52.
64 Rowe, Other Henry James, p.108.
65 Goldberg, “Strange Brothers,” p. 473.
66 Goldberg makes a strong case for Louie Marsellus, the Professor’s son-in-law,
as the texts Wildean figure, and some of Marsellus’s penchant for sensualism
rubs off on the Professor. St. Peter’s taste coincides with “Louie’s taste” as he
“strokes . . . with evident pleasure” the furs that Louie buys for his wife (PH
67). The furs that link Louie, Tom, and the Professor clearly correspond with
the fetishized blanket that brings the bodies of Roddy Blake, Tom, and St.
Peter into relation; see Goldberg, “Strange Brothers,” pp. 470, 473.
67 Forster, Maurice, p.209.
6 ‘‘THE OTHER HALF IS THE MAN’’: THE QUEER
MODERN TRIANGLE OF GERTRUDE STEIN,
ERNEST HEMINGWAY, AND HENRY JAMES
1 As a measure of the status of The Torrents of Spring in the Hemingway canon, the
300-page Cambridge Companion to Ernest Hemingway, ed. Scott Donaldson,
Cambridge University Press, 1996, contains only three passing mentions of the
text.
2 Harvey Breit, The Writer Observed, Cleveland, OH: World Publishing, 1956,
p. 276.
3 Hemingway scholars will recognize my renovations of Philip Young’s Ernest
Hemingway: A Reconsideration, University Park: Pennsylvania State University
Press, 1966. I have benefited particularly from Comley and Scholes’s thoughtful
study, Hemingway’s Genders.
4 Gertrude Stein, Lectures in America, New York: Random House, 1935,p.52.
5 John Hyde Preston, “A Conversation with Gertrude Stein,” in Linda Simon
(ed.), Gertrude Stein Remembered, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994,
pp. 159–61.
6 Rena Sanderson, “Hemingway and Gender History,” in Donaldson,
Cambridge Companion to Hemingway, p.171.
7 Preston, “Conversation with Stein,” p. 160.
8 Anderson’s Love Letters, pp. 306–7.
9 Gertrude Stein, “Transatlantic Interview,” in Robert Bartlett Haas (ed.), A
Primer for the Gradual Understanding of Gertrude Stein, Los Angeles, CA:
Black Sparrow Press, 1971, p.22.
10 Joseph Allen Boone argues, on the basis of Charles Henri Ford and Parker
Tyler’s The Young and Evil (1933), that another audience did exist, as well
as other types of authors, in whose shared world Jake Barnes’s “sexual dysfunction
and Brett’s ‘faghag’ propensities” would have “fit right [in]” rather

Notes to pages 175–177 235
than “wreaking the havoc” that Hemingway depicts. But The Young and Evil,
consciously modeled after The Sun Also Rises, circulated mainly in Paris (with
Stein’s support), having been “instantly seized by English and American customs”
before sinking out of sight altogether – a prospect hardly to be risked by
Hemingway, or very many others; Libidinal Currents: Sexuality and the Shaping
of Modernism, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998,pp.225, 471,n.104.
11 Preston, “Conversation with Stein,” p. 159.
12 Dear Sammy: Letters from Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, ed. Samuel M.
Steward, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977, p.56.
13 Hemingway quoted in Kenneth S. Lynn, Hemingway, New York: Simon &
Schuster, 1987, p.533.
14 Sedgwick, “Beast in the Closet,” pp. 205, 207.
15 Introducing the welcome reissue of Glenway Wescott’s The Pilgrim Hawk,
Michael Cunningham joins Edmund White and many other readers in
attributing a Jamesian quality to Wescott’s prose: “It is James... whom
Wescott most nearly resembles . . . produc[ing] all his sparks from within:
what fascinates him are devastating events that spring directly from character”;
The Pilgrim Hawk: A Love Story, New York: New York Review Books,
2001, pp. xviii–xix. This reception history reverses the invidious take on the
James–Wescott relation, treated at length here, seeing it more as one of intergenerational
gay “influence” in both style and subject matter. I am indebted
throughout this chapter to Jerry Rosco’s valuable new study Glenway Wescott
Personally: A Biography, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002.
16 Glenway Wescott, “A Sentimental Contribution,” in Homage to Henry James,
1843–1926, Mamaroneck, NY: Paul P. Appel, 1971, pp. 186–7.
17 Spender, Destructive Element, pp. 34–5.
18 F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Life in Letters, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli, New York: Charles
Scribner’s Sons, 1994, p.123.
19 Ernest Hemingway, Green Hills of Africa, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons,
1935, pp.65–6. Linda Wagner-Martin argues that Stein’s motive in counter
attacking was “guilt over her sponsorship” of Hemingway after wading through
the “scathing undercurrent of anti-Semitism and homophobia” in The Sun Also
Rises;“Favored Strangers”: Gertrude Stein and her Family, New Brunswick, NJ:
Rutgers University Press, 1995,pp.186–7. Caramello reads The Autobiography
as a preemptive strike against the “symbolic matricide” that Stein expected
from her protégé, but also as a sign of resentment toward a patriarchal spoils
system that honored Hemingway’s labors (and Picasso’s) while neglecting her
own; James, Stein, and the Biographical Act, p.161.
20 Ernest Hemingway, “The Autobiography of Alice B. Hemingway,” unpublished
MS, Ernest Hemingway Collection, John Fitzgerald Kennedy Library,
Columbia Point, Boston, MA, no pagination.
21 For a further example, here is Sherwood Anderson, writing in 1923: “Horses and
Negroes seem to be the two things in America that give me the most ascetic [sic]
pleasure . . . In the horse what a noble bearing. No lousy inferiority complex
there” (SA 101). Stein’s variant form of romantic racialism, and its role in her

236 Notes to pages 178–183
emergent sense of sexual identity, is well discussed in Lisa Ruddick, Reading
Gertrude Stein: Body, Text, Gnosis, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990,
pp. 32–3, 120, 21. For sociohistorical context, see David Levering Lewis, When
Harlem was in Vogue (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981; Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1997) and Michael North, The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language,
and Twentieth-Century Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).
22 Michael Reynolds, Hemingway: The Paris Years, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989,
p. 335.
23 Frances Kerr, “Feeling ‘Half Feminine’: Modernism and the Politics of Emotion
in The Great Gatsby,” American Literature 68, no. 2 (June 1996), 405–31.
24 Allen Tate, “Hard-Boiled,” in Robert O. Stephens (ed.), Ernest Hemingway:
The Critical Reception, n.p.: Burt Franklin & Co., 1977,p.43.
25 Sanderson, “Hemingway and Gender History,”p.182.
26 Stephens, Hemingway: The Critical Reception, pp. 127, 142, 145, 131, 155.
27 Hemingway, Green Hills of Africa, pp. 23–4.
28 Breit, Writer Observed, p.263.
29 Butler, Gender Trouble, pp. 32–3.
30 Ezra Pound quoted in Robert McAlmon, McAlmon and the Lost Generation: A
Self-Portrait, ed. Robert E. Knoll, Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press,
1962, p.353.
31 Fitzgerald: A Life in Letters, ed. Bruccoli, p. 119.
32 Hemingway’s description of Gide, from Death in the Afternoon, is quoted in
Comley and Scholes, Hemingway’s Genders, p.120. The passage praises the
painter El Greco for “redeem[ing], for the tribe” of “fairies,” not just the
“prissy... moral arrogance” of Gide, but “the lazy, conceited debauchery of
a Wilde who betrayed a generation” – a judgment curiously akin to James’s
and Cather’s – and “the nasty, sentimental pawing of humanity of a Whitman”;
Comley and Scholes argue that these are not “blanket condemnations”
of homosexuality but rather objections to a “way of textualizing that sexuality
that allies it with the sentimental and moralistic”; pp. 120–1. The fine distinction
is untenable, however, given the powerful cultural logic by which the
sentimental and moralistic get routed back into the discourse of effeminacy:
a condemnation of this sensibility in men is perforce a condemnation of the
queer.
33 Kerr, “Feeling ‘Half Feminine,’ ” p. 405.
34 Caramello, Biographical Act, p.120.
35 See Susan M. Griffin’s insightful treatment of James’s recurrent narrative interest
in “laceration” and “mutilation” in “Scar Texts: Tracing the Marks of
Jamesian Masculinity,” Arizona Quarterly 53, no. 4 (winter 1977), 61–82.
36 Harold Wentworth and Stuart Berg Flexner, Dictionary of American Slang, 2nd
supplementary edn, New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1975,p.413.
37 Stephen Calloway, “Wilde and the Dandyism of the Senses,” in Peter Raby
(ed.), The Companion to Oscar Wilde, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1997, pp. 47–8.

Notes to pages 183–184 237
38 On Huysmans’s impact on Wilde and on European aestheticism generally, see
also Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, pp. 252–3.
39 Holland and Hart-Davis, Complete Letters of Wilde, pp. 660, 656.
40 Ruddick, Reading Gertrude Stein, pp.77, 83. The use of “bottom” or “bottom
nature” is pervasive in Stein’s text; for example, describing a partner in
one of the work’s “pairs of women”: “Mary Maxworthing . . . had not a very
large bottom in her to her, she had a little sensitive bottom in her” (MOA
215). In the “repetitive, almost drugged” cadences of The Making of Americans,
Ruddick discerns a deeper logic where readers like Hemingway found the
formal slovenliness of the eternal feminine: Stein’s “strange style reflects not
absentedmindedness or self-indulgence but self-exploration” of complicated
“primitive fantasies” in the working-out of her identity and sexual politics; pp.
72–3. Similarly, when Hemingway later dismisses Stein’s work as the “manure”
of “contented cows,” he again shows his (allergic) insightfulness into the lesbian
thematics and excremental metaphorics of a piece such as “As a Wife has a cow a
Love Story”; “Autobiography of Alice B. Hemingway.” As Kay Turner’s archival
research shows, “cow” was Stein’s codeword for Toklas’s stools, constituting a
sort of “hallmark of married intimacy” and mutual nurture : “Gertrude’s devotion
to Alice’s ‘cows’...combines a heightened and freely discursive eroticism
with the desire to make art. Both in lovemaking and in defecating...Toklas’s
body provided the sensual, corporeal model...[for Stein’s] writing pushed out
on the page in all its rhythmic, repetitive, regressive and erotic glory”; Baby
Precious Always Shines: Selected Love Notes Between Gertrude Stein and Alice B.
Toklas, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999, pp. 33–4.
41 Men of other stripes saw Stein’s new hairstyle otherwise. To Samuel Steward,
she resembled “a Roman senator about to break into voluble Latin”; Dear
Sammy, p.7. Anderson found, approvingly, that the tonsure made her look
“like a monk” (ABT 907), while the aesthete Harold Acton thought of her
in the guise of a priestess of the “Aztec Mexicans”; Simon, Stein Remembered,
p. 113. The challenge Hemingway faced in absorbing Stein’s physical transformation
rehearsed the challenge to narrative management that earlier male
authors, including James, confronted in the hystericized female body. Ender
observes: “what produces the fiction . . . of sexual difference is surely a system
of representation where (masculine) knowledge or consciousness overrides
(feminine) passion and maintains the separation between spectator and spectacle.”
Yet this “fiction” collapses, for sexual identity proves to be, on the evidence
of the male-authored text itself, “an inherently deconstructive construct”: “the
attempt to master sexual difference...ends up producing not knowledge, but
some hysterical enactment of the impossibility of distinguishing”; Sexing the
Mind, p.95.
42 Andrew Elfenbein, Romantic Genius: The Prehistory of a Homosexual Role,New
York: Columbia University Press, 1999, p.2.
43 Ernest Hemingway, “Explanatory Glossary,” Death in the Afternoon, quoted
in Comley and Scholes, Hemingway’s Genders, p.107.

238 Notes to pages 185–189
44 E. M. Forster quoted in P. N. Furbank, E. M. Forster: A Life, 2 vols., New York:
Harcourt, 1977/1978, volume i,p.164; Emma L. Erving’s letter to Stein quoted
in Brenda Wineapple, Sister Brother: Gertrude and Leo Stein, Baltimore, MD:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996, p.205.
45 Tate, “Hard-Boiled,” p. 43.
46 Ford Madox Ford, Henry James: A Critical Study, New York: Octagon Books,
1964, pp. 170–4.
47 Virginia Woolf, “The Method of Henry James,” in Andrew McNeillie (ed.),
The Essays of Virginia Woolf , volume ii, 1912–1918, San Diego: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1987, pp.346, 348; Gladys Brooks, If Strangers Meet: A Memory,
New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1967, p.53.
48 Hemingway, Green Hills of Africa, p.70. See also Marilyn Elkins, “The Fashion
of Machismo,” in Linda Wagner-Martin (ed.), A Historical Guide to Ernest
Hemingway, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000,pp.93–115, which is valuable
for understanding the sartorial elements and stage props involved in
Hemingway’s self-conscious pose as a man with the military bona fides that
Cather and James lacked; it must be said, however, that the general argument –
having had “no literal war experience... Hemingway had never earned the
right to wear” a soldier’s uniform – rehearses the culturally charged opposition
between authentic and fake (or vicarious) masculine credentials that seems to
have motivated Hemingway’s aggressive virility in the first place; p. 99.
49 T. S. Eliot, “On Henry James: in Memory,” in Dupee, Question of James,
p. 123.
50 The full formulation, from Hemingway’s 1936 correspondence, reads rather
chillingly: “Thought I was facing impotence, inability to write . . . and was
going to blow my lousy head off”; quoted in Sanderson, “Hemingway and
Gender History,” p. 184; or to take a later, kindred example from a 1949 letter:
“Can fuck better than when I was 25 and write good afterwards which was
never true before” (SL 668).
51 Here I take exception with Jamie Barlowe’s useful “Hemingway’s Gender Training,”
in Wagner-Martin, Historical Guide to Hemingway, pp.117–53, which
argues that we lack evidence that Hemingway was “consciously aware of the
consequences of his notions of gender...[or] of the connections between his
guilt-ridden bouts of depression and his refusal to reconsider his ideas about
gender”; I contend that his awareness on this score was almost too acute, if
powerfully resisted, adding another level of pathos to his trials of masculinity;
p. 130.
52 This passage from Death in the Afternoon is quoted and well discussed in
Comley and Scholes, Hemingway’s Genders, pp. 109ff.
53 Margaret Anderson, My Thirty Years’ War: An Autobiography, London: Alfred
A. Knopf, 1930, p.140.
54 Wescott, “Sentimental Contribution,” pp. 179, 181.
55 Chauncey, Gay New York, p.50. InSun a single overture to another man
(“Oh, how charmingly you get angry”) marks the speaker – the fictionalized
Wescott – as gay (SAR 21). The subcultural signifiers of gayness in Sun (hair,

Notes to pages 190–195 239
dress, gesture, voice, mannerism [e.g., SAR 20]) show how attentive Hemingway
was as an ethnographer, bearing out as well Chauncey’s claim for a
hermeneutics of suspicion that construed “an inversion of any one aspect of
one’s prescribed gender persona” as being “symptomatic of a much more comprehensive
inversion”; pp. 55–6. In other words, Hemingway was, like most
modern men, at once a subject and an agent of sexual surveillance.
56 Michael S. Reynolds, “Hemingway’s Bones,” in Hemingway’s Reading,
1910–1940: An Inventory, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981,
p. 23.
57 It seems backwards to label Strether’s fate a “tragedy,” as Linda Wagner-Martin
does (see my chapter 4), while at the same time discounting the ways in which
Barnes’s experience, and that of his social set, appears to be just what Hemingway
called it, “a damn tragedy” (SL 229); “The Intertextual Hemingway,” in
Wagner-Martin, Historical Guide to Hemingway, pp.175–6. Lynn also asserts
that Strether’s best-known speech “left a deep impression” on Hemingway,
“echoing” not in Barnes’s dialogue but in Robert Cohn’s; yet he cites no concrete
evidence that Hemingway had yet read The Ambassadors; Hemingway,
pp. 328–9.
58 Although Hemingway could be tendentious about the biographical record, I
take at face value his claim that The Awkward Age marked his first meaningful
encounter with James’s novels. His air of startled discovery seems genuine, and
when he subsequently reproached Pound for his high estimate of James, the
latter replied (in early 1928): “I never suggested that you read the Awkward
Age.” Pound only then referred Hemingway to his own “nice little map of
Henry,” which does not seem to have included The Ambassadors on its itinerary;
Reynolds, Hemingway’s Reading, pp. 22–3.
59 For example, James’s appeal to “spare my blushes” was not invented but rather
selected by Hemingway for effect; see Kaplan, James: The Imagination of Genius,
p. 565.
60 Rudyard Kipling, “The Ladies,” in The Complete Poems of Rudyard Kipling
(poetryloverspage.com).
61 Hemingway quoted in Reynolds, “Hemingway’s Bones,” p. 18.
62 Sherwood Anderson, “The Man who Became a Woman,” in Maxwell Geismar
(ed.), Sherwood Anderson: Short Stories, New York: Hill & Wang, 1966,p.60.
63 Wagner-Martin, “Intertextual Hemingway,” p. 177.
64 Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1915), quoted in Bech,
When Men Meet, p.17.
65 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial
Desire, New York: Columbia University Press, 1985, pp. 1–2.
66 Walpole’s letter quoted in Hart-Davis, Walpole: A Biography,p.193.
67 Edel, James: A Life, p.721.
68 Wescott, “Sentimental Contribution,” p. 179.
69 Fitzgerald: A Life in Letters, ed. Bruccoli, p. 122.
70 Van Wyck Brooks, The Pilgrimage of Henry James, New York: E. P. Dutton,
1925, pp. 32–3.

240 Notes to pages 196–203
71 Fitzgerald: A Life in Letters, ed. Bruccoli, p. 123.
72 Wescott, “Sentimental Contribution,” pp. 179, 186.
73 Stephen Spender, Letters to Christopher, ed. Lee Bartlett, Santa Barbara, CA:
Black Sparrow Press, 1980, pp. 62–3.
74 Spender, Destructive Element,pp.36–7. In the fine print of a footnote, Spender
concedes that “the rumour of [James’s] castration seems exaggerated and improbable”;
p. 37, n. 1.
75 Gamaliel Bradford, American Portraits, 1875–1900 (1922), Port Washington, NY:
Kennikat Press, 1969, p.187.
76 Mitchell and Leavitt, Pages Passed, p.220.
77 Gunter and Jobe, Dearly Beloved Friends.
78 Anderson, “Man who Became a Woman,” p. 73.
79 Anderson’s narrative treats the abjected ex-teacher Biddlebaum with compassion
as “one of those rare, little-understood men who rule by a power so gentle
that it passes as a lovable weakness. In their feeling for the boys under their
charge such men are not unlike the finer sort of women in their love of men”
(WO 31).
80 Creech, Closet Writing/Gay Reading, pp. 44, 48, 50–1.
81 Moon, Small Boy and Others, p.27.
82 Van Wyck Brooks, An Autobiography, New York: E. P. Dutton, 1965,p.429.
83 Ibid., pp. 432–3.
84 James Hoopes, Van Wyck Brooks: In Search of American Culture, Amherst, MA:
University of Massachusetts Press, 1977, p.303.
85 Van Wyck Brooks, John Addington Symonds: A Biographical Study, NewYork:
Mitchell Kennerley, 1914,pp.19–20, 47, 57–8. For a valuable treatment of the
Symonds left out of Brooks’s account, see Robinson, Gay Lives, pp. 7–26.
86 Brooks, “Two Phases of James,” pp. 138–40. According to Stevens, “The Altar
of the Dead,” which revolves around one man’s mourning rituals for another,
marked a turning point for James (as Brooks apparently perceived), establishing
“a queer context for melancholia” and dramatizing the sociopolitical “ills
attending any construction of sexuality depending on repudiation”; James and
Sexuality, pp. 162–3.
87 Brooks quoted in Hoopes, Van Wyck Brooks, pp. 156, 158, 159.
88 Brooks, Autobiography, pp. 439, 441.
89 Correspondence of F. Scott Fitzgerald, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli and Margaret M.
Duggan, New York: Random House, 1980, p.168.
90 Pound quoted in Kerr, “Feeling ‘Half Feminine,’ ” p. 408.
91 Stephen Spender, Journals 1939–1983, ed. John Goldsmith, New York: Random
House, 1986, p.416; The Destructive Element, pp. 27–8.
92 Wilson, Shores of Light, p.577. Wescott quoted in Bruccoli and Duggan,
Correspondence of Fitzgerald, p.331.
93 Zelda Fitzgerald quoted in Lynn, Hemingway, p.286.
94 Preston, “Conversation with Stein,” p. 158.
95 D. T. Max, “Ernest Hemingway’s War Wounds,” New York Times Magazine,
18 July 1999, p.29.

Notes to pages 203–210 241
96 Boone, Libidinal Currents, p.202.
97 Burns, Staying on Alone: Letters of Toklas, p.210.
98 Yale University Press catalog (spring 2000), p. 12.
99 True at First Light still finds Hemingway preoccupied with contrasting the
authorial type of the aloof, sterile bachelor, epitomized in James, whose troubles
are purely aesthetic (“line of departure problems”) and the male writer of
experience, celebrity, and romantic entanglements that “Henry James was not
faced with” (SL 709). At the same time, his weird fantasy of snatching away
James’s “consolatory cigar” (smoked on a balcony overlooking Life) and giving
it to a young African woman whom he desires contains the recognition that
he has authorized himself as both man and artist partly through a history of
aggression against James and his supposedly vestigial masculinity; New York:
Scribner’s, 1999, pp. 232–3.
100 Kincaid, Child-Loving, p.134.
101 Paul Lauter, “The Heath Top 100,” The Heath Anthology of American Literature
Newsletter, no. 19 (Spring 1999), p. 1. The survey does confirm Boone’s point
about canon reformation to the extent that the top two vote-getters were not
Faulkner and Hemingway, but Toni Morrison and Ralph Ellison.
102 Hemingway quoted in Lynn, Hemingway, p.533.
103 Ironically, Hemingway’s fantasy role-playing provides evidence for Gide’s claim
about “male Lesbians”: “many heterosexuals [i.e., straight men], either through
diffidence or self-impotence, behave in relation to [women] like women and,
in an apparently ‘normal’ pair, play the role of true inverts” (GL 421).
CODA ‘‘NOBODY IS ALIKE HENRY JAMES’’: STEIN,
JAMES, AND QUEER FUTURITY
1 Gertrude Stein quoted in Diana Souhami, Gertrude and Alice, London: Pandora,
1991,p.12. See also Turner’s superb account of the Stein–Toklas marriage
in the introduction to Baby Precious Always Shines.
2 Burns, Staying on Alone: Letters of Toklas, p.357.
3 Ibid.
4 Wineapple, Sister Brother, p.120.
5 Gertrude Stein quoted in Caramello, James, Stein, and the Biographical Act,
p. 171.
6 Ibid., p. 179.
7 Ibid., p. 172.
8 Ibid., p. 198.
9 Ezra Pound, “A Brief Note,” in Leon Edel (ed.), Henry James: A Collection of
Critical Essays, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1963, pp. 28–9.
10 See Bruce Kellner (ed.), A Gertrude Stein Companion: Content with the Example,
New York: Greenwood Press, 1988, p.33.
11 Phelps and Rosco, Continual Lessons: Journals of Wescott,p.52.
12 Ernest Hemingway quoted in Comley and Scholes, Hemingway’s Genders,
p. 107.

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590 entry James, Alice
abolitionist Cornelia Grinnell Willis (1825–1904) raised
funds to purchase Jacobs’s freedom.
At the suggestion of the feminist abolitionist Amy Post
(1802–1889), Jacobs began to write her memoir in 1853. Jacobs
resisted Harriet Beecher Stowe’s suggestion that her
story be integrated into Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1851) as fiction,
and with the editorial help of the abolitionist writer
Lydia Maria Child, Jacobs published her autobiography, one
of the earliest slave narratives to be written by a woman,
in 1861. The book, titled Incidents in the Life of a Slave
Girl, Written by Herself, was originally published under
the pseudonym Linda Brent.
Sources
Andrews, William L. To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of
Afro-American Autobiography, 1760–1865. Urbana: University
of Illinois Press, 1986.
Johnson, Yvonne. The Voices of African American Women: The
Use of Narrative and Authorial Voice in the Works of Harriet
Jacobs, Zora Neale Hurston, and Alice Walker. New York: Peter
Lang, 1998.
Yellin, Jean Fagan. Harriet Jacobs: A Life. New York: Basic Civitas,
2004.
James, Alice (1848–1892) diarist
Born in New York City, Alice James was the fifth child and
only daughter of Mary Robertson Walsh and Henry James
Sr. The sister of novelist Henry James and philosopher William
James, she was denied the education granted her siblings
and discouraged from pursuing a profession. As her
brother Henry once remarked, “in our family group girls
seem scarcely to have had a chance.”
From about the age of nineteen onward, Alice James suffered
from repeated mental breakdowns and depression. In
1889 she started a diary that spoke in plain and vivid terms
about her interior life and about the world around her—a
task she undertook with the apparent intention that it be
published. She was also an avid correspondent, and her letters
are among the most memorable written during her time. In
1873 Alice James met another single woman, Katherine Loring,
with whom she formed an intense bond of the sort referred
to at the time as a Boston marriage. James succumbed
to breast cancer in early middle age.
Sources
The Diary of Alice James, edited by Leon Edel. New York: Penguin,
1964.
Lewis, R. W. B. The Jameses: A Family Narrative. New York: Farrar,
Straus & Giroux, 1991.
Strouse, Jean. Alice James: A Biography. London: Cape, 1980.
Yeazell, Ruth Bernard, ed. The Death and Letters of Alice James:
Selected Correspondence. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1981.
Henry James, 1906
James, Henry (1843–1916) short-story writer, novelist,
critic
We work in the dark—we do what we can—we give
what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our
passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.
—“The Middle Years” (1893)
Henry James Jr. was one of four children fathered by Henry
James Sr., a prominent writer on religion and philosophy.
Born in New York City, Henry Jr. grew up abroad. He was
greatly influenced by his father’s cosmopolitan outlook and
exposed at an early age to his father’s intellectual friends. He
also had the example of his older brother William James,
who became a distinguished philosopher and psychologist.
Educated by tutors, Henry spent his time in Newport, Rhode
Island, and in Europe. In 1862 he entered Harvard Law
School, but he soon concluded that writing was his métier
and that America was unlikely to foster his talent. To James,
Americans seemed too intent on commerce and lacked the
sophisticated social structures and manners that he found so
attractive in European culture.

James, Henry entry 591
James began his literary career by writing articles, stories,
and reviews. “A Passionate Pilgrim” (1871), his first
story to be characterized by an international theme, examines
the confrontation between American and European
culture. By 1875 James had settled permanently in Europe
and published Transatlantic Sketches (1875). Roderick Hudson
(1876) was his first novel to employ the international
theme, telling the story of an American sculptor who cannot
adjust to Rome. Similarly, The American (1877) describes
the struggle of a man as he attempts to negotiate
the intricacies of French life and to fathom standards of
conduct different from his American values. The Europeans
(1878) reverses James’s angle by importing Europeans
into a New England setting.
Of the novels and stories of this early period, Daisy
Miller (1878) is the most representative of James’s idea of
the nobility possible in innocence and of the value in not
being spoiled by too much culture. It is the story of a young,
naive American woman who pays with her life for her ignorance
of the European milieu, but whose life is also an
affecting rebuke of European corruption. An International
Front cover for the 1905 collection of English travel sketches
Episode (1879) presents Americans in England as well as
Englishmen in America for a simultaneous exploration of
aristocratic and democratic values. James returned twice
more to American settings for his stories, in Washington
Square and The Bostonians. Both novels, however, show
that he had become increasingly distanced from the American
scene, to which he later returned only in his nonfiction.
The Portrait of a Lady (1882) marks the major phase
of James’s creativity. A portrayal of a young woman who
mistakes European sophistication for moral sensitivity, the
book is James’s first prolonged exploration of the American
mind in Europe.
James’s novel The Princess Casamassima (1886) was a departure
for him because it dealt so directly with politics. Although
his treatment of radicals in London is more a study
than a full-blown dramatic account, he anticipated the political
novels of Joseph Conrad (1857–1924) in portraying the
futility and absurdity of fanatics who believe they can change
their world with narrow but fervent ideas. More typical of
James’s work is The Aspern Papers (1888), a novella that
deals with a biographer’s efforts to obtain the papers of a notable
poet, Jeffrey Aspern, and the reluctance of the poet’s
beloved to yield them. Set in Venice, the story provides an
example of the way in which James—often thought of as one
of the world’s great psychological novelists—characterized
conflicting points of view.
James continued writing into the 1900s, publishing A London
Life (1889), The Real Thing and Other Tales (1893), The
Private Life (1893), The Wheel of Time (1893), What Maisie
Knew (1897), The Wings of the Dove (1902), The Ambassadors
(1903), and The Golden Bowl (1904). His work represented
acute statements on the subject of human relationships and
cultural settings, and it brought to American fiction a degree
of sophistication not seen before. In theme and technique—his
studies of European and American societies and
his experimentation with point of view and exploration of
states of mind—James brought American literature into the
world arena. He influenced poets as well as novelists. The
early work of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot show James’s influence,
particularly in dramatic monologues like Eliot’s Portrait
of a Lady.
James also made an incalculable contribution to the criticism
of American fiction and to the American writer’s sense
of himself as pursuing a disciplined craft. James advanced
the art of the novel not only through the brilliant prefaces
to his novels, collected as The Art of the Novel: Critical Prefaces
(1934), but also in works of literary criticism. James is
also an important figure in the history of American travel
writing. His works in this genre include Portraits of Places
(1883), A Little Tour in France (1885), English Hours (1905),
The American Scene (1907), and Italian Hours (1909). James
wrote several volumes of autobiography: A Small Boy and
Others (1913), Notes of a Son and Brother (1914), and The
Middle Years (1917).

592 entry James, Henry
James’s revisions of a page of his 1886 novel for publication as volumes seven and eight of the New
York Edition, published by Charles Scribner’s Sons 1907–1917.

James, Henry entry 593
Principal Books by James
A Passionate Pilgrim, and Other Tales. Boston: Osgood, 1875.
Transatlantic Sketches. Boston: Osgood, 1875.
Roderick Hudson. Boston: Osgood, 1876; revised edition, Boston
& New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1882.
The American. Boston: Osgood, 1877.
French Poets and Novelists. London: Macmillan, 1878.
Watch and Ward. Boston: Houghton, Osgood, 1878.
Daisy Miller: A Study. New York: Harper, 1878.
The Europeans. Boston: Houghton, Osgood, 1879.
An International Episode. New York: Harper, 1879.
The Madonna of the Future and Other Tales, 2 volumes. London:
Macmillan, 1879.
Hawthorne. New York: Harper, 1880.
Confidence. Boston: Houghton, Osgood, 1880.
A Bundle of Letters. Boston: Loring, 1880.
The Diary of a Man of Fifty and A Bundle of Letters. New York:
Harper, 1880.
Washington Square. New York: Harper, 1881.
Washington Square, The Pension Beaurepas, A Bundle of Letters,
2 volumes. London: Macmillan, 1881.
The Portrait of a Lady. Boston & New York: Houghton, Mifflin,
1882.
The Siege of London, The Pension Beaurepas, and The Point of
View. Boston: Osgood, 1883.
Daisy Miller: A Comedy in Three Acts. Boston: Osgood, 1883.
Portraits of Places. Boston: Osgood, 1884.
Tales of Three Cities. Boston: Osgood, 1884.
A Little Tour in France. Boston: Osgood, 1885; revised edition,
Boston & New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1900.
The Author of Beltraffio, Pandora, Georgina’s Reasons, The Path
of Duty, Four Meetings. Boston: Osgood, 1885.
The Art of Fiction. Boston: Cupples, Upham, 1885.
Stories Revived, 3 volumes. London: Macmillan, 1885.
The Bostonians: A Novel. 3 volumes, London: Macmillan, 1886; 1
volume, London & New York: Macmillan, 1886.
The Princess Casamassima: A Novel. New York: Macmillan, 1886.
Partial Portraits. New York: Macmillan, 1888.
The Reverberator. New York: Macmillan, 1888.
The Aspern Papers, Louisa Pallant, The Modern Warning. New
York: Macmillan, 1888.
A London Life, The Patagonia, The Liar, Mrs. Temperly. New
York: Macmillan, 1889.
The Tragic Muse, 2 volumes, Boston & New York: Houghton,
Mifflin, 1890.
The American: A Comedy in Four Acts. London: Heinemann,
1891.
The Lesson of the Master, The Marriages, The Pupil, Brooksmith,
The Solution, Sir Edmund Orme. New York: Macmillan, 1892.
The Real Thing and Other Tales. New York: Macmillan, 1893.
Picture and Text. New York: Harper, 1893.
The Private Life, The Wheel of Time, Lord Beaupré, The Visits,
Collaboration, Owen Wingrave. London: Osgood, McIlvaine,
1893.
John Singer Sargent’s portrait of James, 1913, three years
before his death
Essays in London and Elsewhere. New York: Harper, 1893.
The Private Life, Lord Beaupré, The Visits. New York: Harper,
1893.
The Wheel of Time, Collaboration, Owen Wingrave. New York:
Harper, 1893.
Theatricals, Two Comedies: Tenants, Disengaged. New York:
Harper, 1894.
Theatricals, Second Series: The Album, The Reprobate. New York:
Harper, 1895.
Terminations: The Death of the Lion, The Coxon Fund, The Middle
Years, The Altar of the Dead. New York: Harper, 1895.
Embarrassments: The Figure in the Carpet, Glasses, The Next Time,
The Way It Came. New York & London: Macmillan, 1896.
The Other House. New York & London: Macmillan, 1896.
The Spoils of Poynton. Boston & New York: Houghton, Mifflin,
1897.
What Maisie Knew. Chicago & New York: Stone, 1897.
In the Cage. Chicago & New York: Stone, 1898.
The Two Magics: The Turn of the Screw, Covering End. New York
& London: Macmillan, 1898.
The Awkward Age. New York & London: Harper, 1899.
The Soft Side. New York: Macmillan, 1900.
The Sacred Fount. New York: Scribners, 1901.

594 entry James, Henry
The Wings of the Dove, 2 volumes. New York: Scribners, 1902.
The Better Sort. New York: Scribners, 1903.
The Ambassadors. New York & London: Harper, 1903.
William Wetmore Story and His Friends, 2 volumes. Boston:
Houghton, Mifflin, 1903.
The Golden Bowl. New York: Scribners, 1904.
The Question of Our Speech, The Lesson of Balzac: Two Lectures.
Boston & New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1905.
English Hours. Boston & New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1905.
The American Scene. New York & London: Harper, 1907.
Views and Reviews. Boston: Ball, 1908.
Italian Hours. Boston & New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1909.
The Finer Grain. New York: Scribners, 1910.
The Outcry. New York: Scribners, 1911.
A Small Boy and Others. New York: Scribners, 1913.
Notes of a Son and Brother. New York: Scribners, 1914.
Notes on Novelists with Some Other Notes. New York: Scribners,
1914.
The Middle Years, edited by Percy Lubbock. New York: Scribners,
1917.
The Complete Plays of Henry James, edited by Leon Edel. Philadelphia
& New York: Lippincott, 1949.
Henry James: Literary Criticism, edited by Edel and Mark Wilson,
2 volumes. New York: Library of America, 1984.
The Complete Notebooks of Henry James, edited by Edel and Lyall
H. Powers. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.
Letters
Henry James: Letters, edited by Edel, 4 volumes. Cambridge &
London: Harvard University Press, 1974–1984.
Studying Henry James
Widely considered one of the most important writers of
American fiction, Henry James produced novels, stories,
travel writing, and essays on the art of fiction. Although he
wrote fiction and nonfiction of very high quality from at
least the mid 1870s, James was not widely recognized as a
major writer until near the end of his life. In 1905 Joseph
Conrad published an appreciation in which he asserted “the
magnitude of Mr. Henry James’s work,” but James’s central
place in the American literary canon was not secured until
the 1940s. His development of the modern psychological
novel, together with his critical prefaces, exercised a profound
influence on the writing and criticism of twentiethcentury
fiction.
For a good firsthand survey of James’s oeuvre—from
its beginnings in Romanticism-inflected realism through
naturalism to its culmination in psychological realism—
students are advised to read a selection of his short novels
or “nouvelles” (as he called them): Daisy Miller (1878),
The Aspern Papers (1888), “The Turn of the Screw”
(1898), and The Beast in the Jungle (1903). Students interested
specifically in James’s novels should begin with The
Portrait of a Lady (1881) and The Ambassadors (1903).
James’s fictional works are complemented by reading his
critical writings, especially those collected in The Art of the
Novel, edited by R. P. Blackmur (New York: Scribner, 1934).
Tony Tanner’s Henry James: The Writer and his Work (Amherst:
University of Massachussetts Press, 1985) and D. W.
Jefferson’s Henry James (New York: Grove Press, 1961) both
provide excellent surveys of James’s career. Roger Gard’s
Henry James: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1968) collects reviews, letters, and essays on
James’s work by his contemporaries.
James’s early fiction is marked by a dependence on realist
techniques. Lyall Powers’s Henry James and the Naturalist
Movement (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press,
1971) and Philip Grover’s Henry James and the French Novel:
A Study in Inspiration (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1973) both
demonstrate James’s indebtedness to French sources. Cornelia
Kelley’s The Early Development of Henry James (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, revised 1965) outlines the writer’s
development from Romanticist to realist, showing how his
early work emerges from his engagement with contemporary
European as well as American fiction.
James’s mature works of psychological realism are analyzed
by F. O. Matthiessen in Henry James: The Major Phase
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1963). More-advanced
students will find the same subject treated by Donna Przybylowicz
in Desire and Repression: The Dialectic of Self and
Other in the Late Works of Henry James (Tuscaloosa: University
of Alabama Press, 1986) and Sharon Cameron in Thinking
in Henry James (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1989), the latter of which argues that James’s prefaces radically
oversimplify what is represented in the novels—a claim
that other recent critics have advanced. Critical attention has
also lately turned to the subjects of race and gender in the
novels. Sara Blair’s Henry James and the Writing of Race and
Nation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) and
The Other Henry James by John Carlos Rowe (Durham, N.C.:
Duke University Press, 1998) are important studies of these
subjects. Students seeking an introduction to James criticism
will be well served by the essays collected in Henry James,
edited by Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1987).
James was once quoted as saying “Nothing is my last word
about anything,” and this statement is borne out by his habit
of revision. The Complete Notebooks of Henry James, edited by
Leon Edel and Lyall H. Powers (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1987) show how James’s stories developed through the
process of writing. James also made considerable revisions to
his previously published works (most notably, Roderick Hudson,
The American, The Portrait of a Lady, Daisy Miller, The
Aspern Papers, and The Lesson of the Master), changes which
have prompted some critics to argue that the earlier versions
were better aesthetically. Avoiding this dispute, Philip Horne
offers a penetrating look at James’s method of revision in
Henry James and Revision: The New York Edition (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1990).

James’s subscription to the Wilkie Collins memorial, which resulted in a library housed briefly
at the People’s Palace in London, East End. The subscription is the equivalent of over $1,000 in
2007 U.S. dollars.
James, Henry entry 595

596 entry James, Henry, Sr.
The best full-length biography remains Edel’s five-volume
Henry James (London: R. Hart-Davis, 1953–1972), later
abridged in one volume as Henry James: A Life (New York:
Harper & Row, 1985). For a critical biography and overview
of James’s canon, students should begin with F. W. Dupee’s
Henry James: His Life and Writings, second edition (Garden
City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1956).
Though incomplete, the twenty-six-volume The Novels
and Tales of Henry James: New York Edition (New York:
Scribners, 1907–1909, 1918) is valuable insofar as it suggests
to some extent which works James most desired to see preserved
(among other works of fiction, it does not include
The Bostonians, Washington Square or The Europeans). The
Library of America has recently published a nearly complete
multivolume collection of James’s fiction, travel writing, and
literary criticism. Edel’s and Dan H. Laurence’s Bibliography
of Henry James, third edition (Oxford [Oxfordshire]: Clarendon
Press, 1982) is the standard Henry James bibliography.
—Student Guide by C. Love
James, Henry, Sr. (1811–1882) essayist
Father of Henry James, William James, and Alice James,
Henry James Sr. was born into a Calvinist family in Albany,
New York, but rebelled against the strictures of orthodoxy.
An accident in childhood cost him a leg and inspired a
turn toward intellectual pursuits. In 1835, after two years
at the Princeton Theological Seminary, he withdrew, finding
religious orthodoxy incompatible with his beliefs. Two
years later, during a trip to England, he encountered the
works of Robert Sandeman (1718–1771), a Scottish anti-
Calvinist whose ideas James adopted. (James also edited
one of Sandeman’s books in 1838.) In 1839 James was introduced
to the philosophy of Swedish theologian Emanuel
Swedenborg (1688–1772), whose mystical approach
to Christianity had a profound effect on him, as it had on
other nineteenth-century idealists.
An intimate friend of Albert Brisbane (1809–1890) and
George Ripley, James came to embrace many of the doctrines
of Fourierism. Most of his writings, however, were
devoted to religious philosophy and an exploration of the
Swedenborgian concept of “divine-natural humanity,” or
“the immanence of God in the unity of mankind.” Among
James’s most important works are Christianity, the Logic of
Creation (1857); Substance and Shadow; or Morality and
Religion in Their Relation to Life (1863); The Secret of Swedenborg
(1869); and Society, the Redeemed Form of Man
(1879).
Sources
Bell, F. A., ed. Henry James: Fiction as History. Totowa, N.J.:
Barnes & Noble, 1984.
Habegger, Alfred. The Father: A Life of Henry James, Sr. New
York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1994.
Margolis, Anne Throne. Henry James and the Problem of Audience:
An International Act. Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Press,
1985.
James, William (1842–1910) philosopher, psychologist
As the brain changes are continuous, so do all
these consciousnesses melt into each other like
dissolving views. Properly they are but one protracted
consciousness, one unbroken stream.
—Principles of Psychology (1890)
William James was born in New York City, but he spent much
of his life abroad. His father, Henry James Sr., was a writer on
religious, social, and literary topics, and his brother was the
novelist Henry James. Although interested in art, especially
painting, William studied medicine at Harvard and obtained
an M.D. in 1869. In poor health and apparently suffering from
doubts about his abilities, James became interested in psychology
as a discipline that had the potential to liberate the mind.
James began teaching at Harvard in 1872, drawing on the
thought of both Charles Darwin and the philosopher Herbert
Spencer. His shift from medicine to philosophy and psychology
led him to establish the first laboratory for psychological
studies. Principles of Psychology, his first important published
work, appeared in 1890. This landmark work relied
on James’s understanding of physiology, which he had taught
at Harvard, to explore the nexus between emotions and the
human body. James traveled widely in Europe, meeting with
philosophers and psychologists and participating in the Society
for Psychical Research. The result of this experience is
evident in The Will to Believe (1897), in which James showed
considerable sympathy for the way science and faith might
be combined to offer a better understanding of the human
personality. Although he never abandoned his belief in empiricism,
he vigorously investigated the claims of spiritualists
and the practices of Christian Scientists. This desire to
reconcile the ideas of science and religion culminated in his
masterpiece, Varieties of Religious Experience, which
explored the psychological and practical bases of religious
experience without denigrating the idea of faith itself.
James’s great contribution to American philosophy is the
concept of pragmatism, a term first used by the philosopher
C. S. Peirce and developed by James in Pragmatism (1907).
This book advanced the argument that ideas have significance
only insofar as they have an impact on the world of
experience. Pragmatism has often been cited as the only
original contribution to philosophy made by an American.
The concept has been discussed as an example of the American
devotion to practicality: that is, no idea is important if
it is not useful. James also wrote essays, most notably “The
Moral Equivalent of War” (1910), which reflects his liberalism,
his dedicated search to find alternatives to the inhuman-

1036 entry Stearns, Harold E.
Stearns, Harold E. (1891–1943) critic, journalist
A graduate of Harvard, Harold E. Stearns began his long career
in journalism by writing book reviews for the Boston
Evening Transcript before he even entered college. He was
the editor for The Dial (1917–1918) and helped to articulate
the attitude of the post–World War I generation in
America and the Young Intellectual (1921) and the collection
of essays he edited, Civilization in the United States: An Inquiry
by Thirty Americans (1922), which included essays by
Conrad Aiken, H. L. Mencken, Lewis Mumford, George
Jean Nathan, and Ring Lardner. These books expressed
a profound dissatisfaction with the culture and politics in
the country and inspired many young Americans to travel
abroad. Stearns experienced some difficult years in Paris and
was portrayed by Ernest Hemingway as the indigent Harry
Stone in The Sun Also Rises (1926). His later work includes
his autobiography The Street I Know (1935) and America: A
Re-Appraisal (1937), in which he defends the country against
Marxist critics.
Source
Ford, Hugh. Four Lives in Paris. San Francisco: North Point
Press, 1987.
Steffens, Lincoln (1866–1936) writer, editor
Lincoln Steffens was born in San Francisco and graduated
from the University of California in 1889, after which he
studied for several years in Germany and France. He began
working as a reporter at the New York Evening Post in 1892,
and from 1897 to 1911 served as an editor at the New York
Commercial Advertiser, McClure’s Magazine, The American
Magazine (which he cofounded with Ida M. Tarbell, Ray
Stannard Baker, and others in 1906), and Everybody’s Magazine.
Steffens’s progressive political beliefs led him to focus
on exposing corruption in government and industry, for
which Theodore Roosevelt labeled him and like-minded
writers “muckrakers” (see Muckraking Movement). Steffens’s
books include The Shame of the Cities (1904), The
Struggle for Self-Government (1906), Upbuilders (1909),
and The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens (1931).
Source
Kaplan, Justin. Lincoln Steffens: A Biography. New York: Simon
& Schuster, 1974.
—Alex Feerst
for six years in East End, Saskatchewan, and for eleven years
in Salt Lake City, Utah—settings that became important in
his writing career. Stegner graduated from the University of
Utah, where he studied with Vardis Fisher, and earned graduate
degrees from the University of Iowa. In 1935 he began
his distinguished teaching career, which in 1945 led him to
Stanford University, where he directed the writing program
until his retirement in 1971.
Stegner has often been called a regional writer (see Regionalism)
because of his close identification with the
Rocky Mountain region of the West. His work is frequently
concerned with the way place and culture shape human character.
His first book of fiction, the novelette Remembering
Laughter (1937), examines a love triangle and bitter rivalry
involving two sisters on an isolated Iowa farm. Stegner set his
first full-length novel, On a Darkling Plain (1940), on the Saskatchewan
prairie, where a World War I veteran unwillingly
becomes involved with the concerns of his fellow human beings
in the flu epidemic of 1918. One of his most memorable
novels, The Big Rock Candy Mountain (1943), is in part based
on his family experience. Like Stegner’s father, Bo Mason, the
tyrannical head of his family, is inspired by the myth of the
West and searches for a pot of gold that forever eludes him.
In addition to his work as a novelist, Stegner is also respected
for his nonfiction and short stories. He has written of
the culture of the Mormons in Mormon Country (1942) and
The Gathering of Zion (1964). His biographies are about a great
naturalist, Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell
and the Second Opening of the West (1954), and a literary critic,
The Uneasy Chair: A Biography of Bernard DeVoto (1974). He
published two collections of short fiction—The Women on
the Wall (1950) and The City of the Living and Other Stories
(1956)—and collected the most important of his essays and articles
in The Sound of Mountain Water (1969). Stegner received
critical acclaim in the 1970s, winning the Pulitzer Prize for
his Angle of Repose (1971), which concerns a retired University
of California history professor who must cope with a degenerative
disease and his wife’s abandonment, and a 1977 National
Book Award for The Spectator Bird (1976), about a New York
literary agent who retires to the West Coast.
Sources
Benson, Jackson J. Wallace Stegner: His Life and Work. New York:
Viking, 1996.
Colberg, Nancy. Wallace Stegner: A Descriptive Bibliography.
Lewiston, Idaho: Confluence Press, 1990.
Stegner, Wallace (1909–1993) novelist, short-story
writer, historian, biographer
The Iowa-born Wallace Stegner experienced an often unsettled
childhood as his father, a restless spirit whose activities
included wheat farming and bootlegging, moved his wife and
two sons across the Midwest and the West. The Stegners lived
Stein, Gertrude (1874–1946) fiction writer, poet,
playwright, critic
Think of the Bible and Homer think of Shakespeare
and think of me.
—The Geographical History of America (1936)

Steinbeck, entry John 1037
Gertrude Stein always thought of herself as an American,
despite the relatively short portion of her adult life that
she lived in the United States. She was the youngest child
born to prosperous German Jewish parents in Allegheny,
Pennsylvania. Her family settled in Oakland, California,
when she was five. Stein attended Radcliffe College, where
she studied with William James. In 1903, just short of the
coursework required for a medical degree from Johns Hopkins,
Stein left for Paris. She did not return to the United
States for a visit for more than thirty years and never lived
there again.
In Paris, Stein at first lived with her brother Leo, who
introduced her to modern art, one of the inspirations for her
writing (see Modernism). In 1907 she met Alice B. Toklas
(1877–1967), who traveled abroad after the earthquake in
her native San Francisco. By 1910, Toklas had moved into
the Steins’s residence at 27, rue de Fleurus, which the two
women then shared after Stein and her brother had a fallingout.
Toklas encouraged Stein’s writing and became her life
partner, or “wife,” assisting her with the typing and preparation
of her manuscripts for the next forty years until Stein’s
death. Stein became a central figure in an avant-garde literary
and artistic community that included Cubism pioneers Pablo
Picasso, Henri Matisse, and Juan Gris, along with American
expatriates. Her residence evolved into a gathering place for
the literary and artistic set, as she described in The Autobiography
of Alice B. Toklas (1933).
Stein’s work crossed genres and frequently defied categorization,
encompassing poetry, fiction, drama, essays,
speeches, and even an opera libretto. Critics generally
divide her work into narrative and experimental writing
based on the extent to which a text has or lacks an easily
discernible and coherent plot. Some suggest three phases
for Stein’s work: early writings that focused on consciousness,
perception, and the representation of the perception
of the present; 1920s radical avant-garde experimentalism;
and 1930s audience-friendly memoirs and narratives. But
such divisions fail to effectively trace Stein’s literary trajectory,
since her preoccupations and techniques transcended
time periods and her works were not always published
when they were written. (The Making of Americans, for
example, was written by 1908 but not published until 1925.)
Stein did not find a publisher for her work until 1909 with
Three Lives, a collection of three novellas that explore the
nature of human consciousness. While her work could be
philosophical, it could also be playful, as seen, for example,
in the poems of Tender Buttons (1914).
Stein went on the lecture circuit in England in 1926; her
Oxford and Cambridge lectures were collected in Composition
as Explanation (1926). Popular success eluded her
until the publication of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas,
a Book-of-the-Month Club selection, which led to her
return to the United States in 1934 for a highly successful
nine-month tour. Readers responded favorably, as well, to the
other two texts of her memoir trilogy, Everybody’s Autobiography
(1937) and Wars I Have Seen (1945).
Always striving to create a “continuous present,” Stein experienced
a tension between narrating and creating, between
writing for an audience and writing self-reflexively for its
own sake. Stein’s more experimental texts sought to deploy
language in unconventional and nonrepresentational ways,
and her use of time tended to be circular and repetitive rather
than chronological. Although she appreciated the money and
popularity that her autobiographies garnered, she was not interested
in writing additional best-sellers in the same mode.
Throughout her career she remained as interested in sound
as sense, and she never stopped experimenting and playing
with words.
Before the success of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas,
Stein was better known for her personality, lifestyle, artistic
milieu, and for her influence on other writers than for her
own work. She coined the term “Lost Generation” in reference
to the Paris expatriate community in a conversation
with Ernest Hemingway, which he used as an epigraph for
his novel The Sun Also Rises (1926). She was prescient in
her tastes and groundbreaking in her refusal to accept contemporary
bounds on gender and sexuality, but more and
more her work is gaining acclaim on its own terms as readers
are more willing to engage with her texts even as they must
struggle with her use of language. History seems to have at
least in some measure confirmed Stein’s prediction that she
would “some day . . . be the acknowledged grandmother of
the modern movement”—and perhaps the postmodern
movement as well.
Sources
Gallup, Donald, ed. The Flowers of Friendship: Letters Written to
Gertrude Stein. New York: Knopf, 1953.
Wagner-Martin, Linda. “Favored Strangers”: Gertrude Stein and
Her Family. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press,
1995.
—Jessica G. Rabin
Steinbeck, John (1902–1968) novelist, short-story
writer
A book is like a man—clever and dull, brave and
cowardly, beautiful and ugly. For every flowering
thought there will be a page like a wet and mangy
mongrel, and for every looping flight a tap on the wing
and a reminder that wax cannot hold the feathers firm
too near the sun.
—“On Publishing” (1977)
John Steinbeck wrote more than thirty books from 1929 to
1966, ranging from social criticism in his Pulitzer Prize–
winning novel The Grapes of Wrath (1939) to witty com-

736 entry McKay, Claude
publications are The Mortgaged Heart (1971), a collection of
essays; Collected Stories of Carson McCullers (1987); and Illumination
and Night Glare: The Unfinished Autobiography of
Carson McCullers (1999).
Sources
Carr, Virginia Spencer. The Lonely Hunter: A Biography of Carson
McCullers. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1975.
Carr. Understanding Carson McCullers. Columbia: University of
South Carolina Press, 1990.
Clark, Beverly Lyon, and Melvin J. Friedman, eds. Critical Essays
on Carson McCullers. New York: G. K. Hall, 1996.
McKay, Claude (1890–1948) poet, novelist
I have nothing to give but my singing. All my life I have
been a troubadour wanderer, nourishing myself mainly
on the poetry of existence.
—A Long Way from Home (1937)
Born in rural Jamaica, Claude McKay became one of the most
versatile and forceful voices of the Harlem Renaissance.
His early influences include his brother, a teacher who introduced
him to European literature and philosophy, and Walter
Jekyll, a white British expatriate and folklorist who urged
McKay to write about his land and people. In the poetry collections
Songs of Jamaica (1912) and Constab Ballads (1912),
McKay employs the voices of farmers, street constables, and
other common people to express in their native dialect the
joys and pains of human relationships and the love of the
simple country life and the countryside of Jamaica.
McKay first encountered the intense racism of the segregated
United States when he attended Tuskegee and Kansas
State College. In 1914 he moved to New York City, where he
published two of his best-known poems: “The Harlem Dancer”
(1917) and “If We Must Die” (1919), a protest poem written
about the race riots of that year. From 1919 to 1922 McKay
worked for socialist publications, The Liberator in New York
and Worker’s Dreadnought in London. The poems he collected
in Harlem Shadows (1922) demonstrate his continuing affection
for his homeland and common people, but in sonnets such
as “America,” “The Lynching,” and “If We Must Die,” he voices
outrage and defiance over American racism and violence.
After the publication of Harlem Shadows, McKay traveled
to the Soviet Union to attend an international meeting
of socialists. He remained abroad for twelve years, living in
France, Spain, and Morocco, often in tight financial straits,
and began publishing fiction. His first two novels are episodic,
with the central character embodying simple, natural
urges and a spontaneity that is favorably contrasted to the
sterility of middle-class black characters who have assimilated
into white culture. Home to Harlem (1928) follows Jake
as he roams from bar to bar and woman to woman, encountering
along the way Ray, an intellectual from Haiti generally
seen as a spokesman for McKay. Ray reappears in Banjo: A
Story Without a Plot (1929), set in the French port of Marseilles,
to praise the intuitive creativity and spirit of the black
characters. McKay also used Harlem and Marseilles as settings
for the stories published in Gingertown (1932). His next
novel, Banana Bottom (1933) continues to develop themes
on the values of African identity as it follows Bita Plant, a Jamaican
woman raised in Europe by white missionaries, who
reconnects with her racial roots after returning home. While
McKay’s poems were generally well received and some were
widely reprinted, his novels were published to mixed reviews,
and only the first sold well. After he returned to the United
States in 1934, McKay focused on racial nationalism rather
than broader class conflicts. His autobiography A Long Way
from Home (1937) offers anecdotes and opinions about his
literary and political experiences.
Sources
Cooper, Wayne F. Claude McKay: Rebel Sojourner in the Harlem
Renaissance. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press,
1987.
Maxwell, William, comp. “Claude McKay.” Modern American
Poetry. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. .
Tillery, Tyrone. Claude McKay: A Black Poet’s Struggle for Identity.
Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992.
—Michael Schroeder
McTeague: A Story of San Francisco by Frank
Norris (New York: Doubleday & McClure, 1899) novel
McTeague, Frank Norris’s most influential novel, is an important
example of Naturalism. The title character is a
practicing dentist in a poor section of San Francisco, a thickheaded,
strong man with a pathetic urge toward aesthetics
(he plays the concertina). He marries Trina Sieppe, a patient
whom his “animal” nature has led him to kiss while she is
chloroformed. After Trina wins $5,000 in a lottery, her cousin
Marcus Shouler, who had hoped to marry her and feels that
he should have some of the money, exposes the unlicensed
McTeague, who can then no longer practice his trade. Trina
becomes possessive of her money; McTeague then deserts her
but returns to murder her. He flees to Death Valley, pursued
by Shouler. Although McTeague manages to kill his nemesis,
before he dies Shouler handcuffs himself to McTeague,
dooming him to a slow death in the unremitting heat of the
desert. Chance, circumstance, and nature control the actions
of all these characters.
The dominant theme of the novel is the pervasive power
of money. Distributed haphazardly, money comes to rule the
passions not only of secondary characters but also of Trina
and McTeague. Trina controls her husband by denying him

Hemingway, Ernest entry 523
Principal Books by Hellman
The Children’s Hour. New York: Knopf, 1934.
Days to Come. New York & London: Knopf, 1936.
The Little Foxes: A Play in Three Acts. New York: Random House,
1939.
Watch on the Rhine: A Play in Three Acts. New York: Random
House, 1941.
The North Star: A Motion Picture about Some Russian People.
New York: Viking, 1943.
The Searching Wind: A Play in Two Acts. New York: Viking,
1944.
Another Part of the Forest: A Play in Three Acts. New York: Viking,
1947.
Montserrat: Play in Two Acts, adapted from Emmanuel Roblès’s
play. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1950.
The Autumn Garden: A Play in Three Acts. Boston: Little, Brown,
1951; revised acting edition, New York: Dramatists Play Service,
1952.
The Lark, adapted from Jean Anouilh’s L’Alouette. New York:
Random House, 1956.
Candide: A Comic Operetta Based On Voltaire’s Satire, book by
Hellman, score by Leonard Bernstein, lyrics by Richard Wilbur,
John Latouche, and Dorothy Parker. New York: Random
House, 1957.
Toys in the Attic. New York: Random House, 1960.
My Mother, My Father and Me, adapted from Burt Blechman’s
novel How Much? New York: Random House, 1963.
An Unfinished Woman: A Memoir. Boston: Little, Brown, 1969.
Pentimento: A Book of Portraits. Boston: Little, Brown, 1973.
Scoundrel Time. Boston: Little, Brown, 1976.
Maybe: A Story. Boston: Little, Brown, 1980.
Eating Together: Recipes and Recollections, by Hellman and Peter
S. Feibleman. Boston: Little, Brown, 1984.
Studying Lillian Hellman
Lillian Hellman was the most successful woman playwright
of the twentieth century. She was significant both as a literary
figure and as a cultural celebrity. Her career falls into
two periods: from 1934, when her first play, The Children’s
Hour, was produced, to 1960, the date of her last original
play; and from 1969, the date of her first memoir, to her death
in 1984. The first period roughly corresponds to the dates of
her intimate friendship with Dashiell Hammett, who died in
January 1961. During the last period she wrote four volumes
of memoirs, mostly well received, but often faulted for their
self-serving versions of the events of her time.
The study of Lillian Hellman’s plays should begin with
The Children’s Hour (1934), The Little Foxes (1939), Watch on
the Rhine (1941), and Toys in the Attic (1960). They are collected
in Six Plays by Lillian Hellman (1979). Of her memoirs,
the two most significant are An Unfinished Woman (1969)
and Pentimento (1973), which includes the chapter “Julia,”
made into an award-winning movie. Scoundrel Time (1976),
an account of her testimony before the House Committee on
Un-American Activities, is a faulty account of the communist
scare of the late 1940s and early 1950s.
There are at least seven biographies of Hellman or biographical
accounts by people associated with her. The best
is Joan Mellen’s Hellman and Hammett (New York: Harper-
Collins, 1996). Carl Rollyson’s Lillian Hellman, Her Legend
and Legacy (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988) should also
be consulted. Hellman’s literary executor and intimate friend
Peter Feibleman wrote a casual memoir about her last years,
Lilly: Reminiscences of Lillian Hellman (New York: Morrow,
1988). Robert Newman’s The Cold War Romance of Lillian
Hellman and John Melby (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1989) is a solid account covering an important
period of her life.
Students should consult Conversations with Lillian Hellman
(Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1986) early
on, especially the Paris Review interview, which is included.
Good general bibliographical references can be found in Barbara
Lee Horn’s Lillian Hellman: A Resource and Production
Sourcebook (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1998), Mark
Estrin’s Lillian Hellman: Plays, Films, and Memoirs: A Reference
Guide (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1980), and Steven H. Bills’s
Lillian Hellman: An Annotated Bibliography (New York: Garland,
1979).
For a general critical overview, Katherine Lederer’s Lillian
Hellman (Boston: Twayne, 1979) and Critical Essays on Lillian
Hellman, edited by Mark Estrin (New York: G. K. Hall, 1989),
are good places to start. Bernard Dick’s Hellman in Hollywood
(Rutherford, N.J. Fairleigh Dickinson, 1982) covers Hellman’s
screenwriting, an important aspect of her career.
—Richard Layman
Hemingway, Ernest (1899–1961) novelist, short-story
writer
A country, finally, erodes and the dust blows away, the
people all die and none of them were of any importance
permanently, except those who practiced the arts,
and these now wish to cease their work because it is
too lonely, too hard to do, and it is not fashionable. A
thousand years makes economics silly and a work of
art endures forever, but it is very difficult to do now
and it is not fashionable.
—The Green Hills of Africa (1935)
The second of six children of Dr. Clarence Hemingway and
Grace Hall Hemingway, Ernest Miller Hemingway was born
in the affluent, conservative community of Oak Park, Illinois,
on July 21, 1899. During his youth Hemingway spent
summers at his parents’ house in northern Michigan. There
his early hunting and fishing experiences, his associations
with the Ojibway Indians, and his observations of discord
between his parents provided material for many of his Nick

524 entry Hemingway, Ernest
Ernest Hemingway, 1939
Adams stories. Following graduation from Oak Park High
School, Hemingway worked as a cub reporter on the Kansas
City Star, and in the spring of 1918 he joined the American
Red Cross, which sent him to Italy to drive ambulances for
the Italian Army. On July 8, 1918, he was wounded by an
Austrian trench mortar shell. After recuperation and an affair
with his nurse, Agnes Von Kurowsky, Hemingway returned
home, worked briefly for the Toronto Star, and moved
to Chicago, where he met Sherwood Anderson and Hadley
Richardson, whom he married on September 3, 1921.
Hemingway sailed for France in December of that same year
to pursue a literary apprenticeship.
In Paris, Hemingway met people influential in his career,
including his three greatest influences: F. Scott Fitzgerald,
Gertrude Stein, and Ezra Pound, who served not only as a
mentor but along with Fitzgerald facilitated the publication
of his work. As a stringer for the Toronto Star Hemingway
traveled widely throughout Europe, covering major news
events and acquiring material for his fiction. In Spain he
was also introduced to bullfighting, a sport he studied passionately.
Divorced from Hadley in 1927, he married Pauline
Pfeiffer and in 1930 moved to Key West, Florida. Although
the Great Depression had begun, Pauline’s wealth and his
own growing income enabled Hemingway to travel widely,
buy a thirty-seven-foot fishing cruiser, and go on an African
safari.
In March 1937 Hemingway covered the Spanish Civil
War for the North American Newspaper Alliance along with
journalist/novelist Martha Gellhorn, with whom he began
an extramarital affair. By the end of 1939 Hemingway’s marriage
to Pauline was over, and he moved from Key West to
Cuba. He divorced Pauline in 1940 and married Martha Gellhorn.
During most of the years of World War II Hemingway
produced no significant work. He drank heavily and
remained at home, using his fishing boat to serve as a spotter
for German submarines while Martha was away reporting
on the war. His third marriage disintegrating, Hemingway
left Cuba in May 1944 on assignment for Collier’s to cover
the war in Europe and in London met correspondent Mary
Welsh, with whom he also had an affair. After covering the
D-Day invasion and the liberation of Paris, Hemingway returned
to Cuba in 1945, divorced Martha Gellhorn, and married
Mary Welsh in 1946.
As long as his health permitted, Hemingway continued to
visit the places he loved, while also embellishing his already
larger-than-life persona. In 1958 revolutionary actions making
Cuba an undesirable residence, Hemingway left behind
the country in which he had lived for twenty-eight years and
moved to Ketchum, Idaho. Although he seemed indestructible,
having survived two near-fatal airplane crashes in Africa
in 1954, his physical condition steadily declined, and he suffered
increasingly severe depression, for which he was hospitalized
and given electroshock therapy. His creative powers
gone, Hemingway killed himself with one of his shotguns in
his home on July 2, 1961.
Following the publication of two Paris small-press books
(actually pamphlets), Three Stories & Ten Poems (1923) and
in our time (1924), a collection of vignettes, Hemingway published
his first American book, In Our Time (1925), a shortstory
collection that brought his work needed attention, and
The Torrents of Spring (1926), a satire of Sherwood Anderson
and Gertrude Stein. However, his career was really launched
by his first novel, The Sun Also Rises (1926), in which he depicted
in hard, spare, unliterary prose and original dialogue
members of a post–World War I generation whose psychic
wounds bore evidence of a subsurface malady. A Farewell
to Arms (1929), a story of love, war, and death set during the
Great War, established his reputation as a major American
writer.
During the decade of the 1930s no significant Hemingway
novel appeared. He published Death in the Afternoon
(1932), a bullfighting manual; Green Hills of Africa (1935),
a book about big-game hunting with observations about
writing; To Have and Have Not (1937), a flawed novel set in
Key West and Cuba during the Depression; and an unsuccessful
play, The Fifth Column, in his major story collection,
The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories (1938). For
Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), Hemingway’s book about the

Hemingway, Ernest entry 525
largely in the south of France treating effects of sexual conflicts
upon the lives of a writer and his wife; True at First
Light (1999), an abridged version of Hemingway’s “African
book” recounting his 1953 safari; and Under Kilimanjaro
(2005), an unabridged version of the same text.
Following the publication of The Sun Also Rises Hemingway
was regarded as one of the most promising writers in
America, and he became also one of the most imitated.
Soon after the publication of his second novel, A Farewell
to Arms, many critics and reviewers acknowledged him as
a master. However, during the 1930s, when Marxists and
far-left critics called for literature to become a weapon in
the struggle of the proletariat, Hemingway’s work was often
attacked for his failure to address the needs of the masses.
Dust jacket for the first book by Hemingway to be published
in the United States (1925), which includes seven stories
about Nick Adams, his autobiographical hero
Spanish Civil War, reaffirmed his commitment to truth over
propaganda and was regarded as evidence of the return of
Hemingway the artist during a highly politicized era. Across
the River and Into the Trees (1950), a novel set in Venice in
1948, balancing the cynicism of a dying colonel with his love
for a young Venetian woman, was a critical failure. Although
Hemingway had been at work on an ambitious project about
“the land, sea, and air” since 1945, only one work from that
effort appeared during his lifetime, The Old Man and the Sea
(1952), his all-time best-selling book.
Hemingway’s posthumously published works include: A
Moveable Feast (1964), a memoir of the Paris years; Islands
in the Stream (1970), an unfinished novel about German
submarine hunting in Cuban waters; The Dangerous Summer
(1985), a nonfiction account of Spanish bullfights in
1959; The Garden of Eden (1986), a heavily edited novel set
Dust jacket for Hemingway’s 1926 novel about a group of
post–World War I American expatriates. The title is taken
from Ecclesiastes: “One generation passeth away, and
another generation cometh; but the earth abideth forever . . .
The sun also ariseth , and sun goeth down, and hasteth
to the place where he arose. . . .”

526 entry Hemingway, Ernest
Dust jacket for Hemingway’s 1929 novel, in which Frederic
Henry tries to escape the carnage of World War I with nurse
Catherine Barkley. Hemingway disapproved of the jacket illustration,
referring to it in a letter to editor Maxwell Perkins
as “The tragedy of the Broken Axle.”
But by 1940, when the Soviet mystique had begun to wane,
many American critics highly praised For Whom the Bell
Tolls. However, the most productive period of Hemingway’s
literary career was behind him; he had written three
of America’s best novels and several of its greatest short
stories. In 1952 the publication of The Old Man and the
Sea refocused the world’s attention upon Hemingway. His
novella about a Cuban fisherman and a giant marlin was
awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1953, and it was instrumental
in his being awarded the Nobel Prize in literature
in 1954. Hemingway crafted a distinctive and recognizably
American style whose simplicity, understatement, and objective
tone had a lasting influence upon American fiction.
At the time of his death he was the most famous writer in
America—and possibly the world.
—John C. Unrue
Principal Books by Hemingway
Three Stories & Ten Poems. Paris: Contact Editions, 1923.
In Our Time. Paris: Three Mountains Press, 1924.
In Our Time. New York: Boni & Liveright, 1925. Revised edition,
New York: Scribners, 1930.
The Torrents of Spring. New York: Scribners, 1926.
The Sun Also Rises. New York: Scribners, 1926.
Men Without Women. New York: Scribners, 1927.
A Farewell to Arms. New York: Scribners, 1929.
Death in the Afternoon. New York: Scribners, 1932.
Winner Take Nothing. New York: Scribners, 1933.
Green Hills of Africa. New York: Scribners, 1935.
To Have and Have Not. New York: Scribners, 1937.
The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories. New York:
Scribners, 1938. Republished as The Short Stories of Ernest
Hemingway. New York: Scribners, 1954.
The Fifth Column: A Play in Three Acts. New York: Scribners,
1940.
For Whom the Bell Tolls. New York: Scribners, 1940.
Across the River and Into the Trees. New York: Scribners, 1950.
The Old Man and the Sea. New York: Scribners, 1952.
Hemingway: The Wild Years, edited by Gene Z. Hanrahan. New
York: Dell, 1962.
A Moveable Feast. New York: Scribners, 1964.
By-Line, Ernest Hemingway: Selected Articles and Dispatches of
Four Decades, edited by William White. New York: Scribners,
1967.
The Fifth Column and Four Stories of the Spanish Civil War. New
York: Scribners, 1969.
Ernest Hemingway, Cub Reporter: Kansas City Star Stories, edited
by Matthew J. Bruccoli. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh
Press, 1970.
Islands in the Stream. New York: Scribners, 1970.
Ernest Hemingway’s Apprenticeship: Oak Park, 1916–1917, edited
by Bruccoli. Washington, D.C.: Bruccoli Clark/NCR Microcard
Editions, 1971.
The Nick Adams Stories, edited by Philip Young. New York:
Scribners, 1972.
88 Poems, edited by Nicholas Gerogiannis. New York & London:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich/Bruccoli Clark, 1979. Enlarged as
Complete Poems. Lincoln & London: University of Nebraska
Press, 1983.
Ernest Hemingway on Writing, edited by Larry W. Phillips. New
York: Scribners, 1984.
The Dangerous Summer. New York: Scribners, 1985.
Dateline, Toronto: The Complete Toronto Star Dispatches, 1920–
1924, edited by William White. New York: Scribners, 1985.
The Garden of Eden. New York: Scribners, 1986.
The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway. New York:
Scribners, 1987.
True at First Light, edited by Patrick Hemingway. New York:
Scribners, 1999. Re-edited and republished as Under Kilimanjaro,
edited by Robert W. Lewis and Robert E. Fleming.
Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2005.

Hemingway, Ernest entry 527
Hemingway and the Mechanism of Fame: Statements, Public Letters,
Introductions, Forewords, Prefaces, Blurbs, Reviews, and
Endorsements, edited by Bruccoli and Judith S. Baughman.
Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2005.
Studying Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Hemingway’s career spanned four decades. During
his lifetime twenty of his books were published, including
one unauthorized poetry collection. Seventeen additional
Hemingway volumes have been published since his death.
His literary career is often divided into periods associated
with his primary residences. Biographer Michael Reynolds
has designated them: The Paris Years (1921–1929), The Key
West Years (1930–1939), The World War II Years (1940–
1945), and The Cuban Years (1945–1961).
A study of Hemingway’s fiction should begin with his
early work, the miniatures or vignettes in in our time (1924)
reprinted as interchapters in his first story collection In Our
Time (1925) and in particular “Big Two-Hearted River,”
works that reflect Hemingway’s evolving style under the influence
of modernism. Hemingway’s three classic novels,
The Sun Also Rises (1926), A Farewell to Arms (1929),
and For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), should be read next
along with his major short stories, in particular “The Killers”
(1927), “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936), and “The
Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” (1936). Although
The Old Man and the Sea (1952) is Hemingway’s best-seller,
Hemingway’s major work was completed by 1940.
The standard Hemingway biography is Carlos Baker’s Ernest
Hemingway: A Life Story (New York: Scribners, 1966). Michael
Reynolds’s comprehensive five-volume biography (1986–1999)
supplements Baker’s book and thematically links Hemingway’s
life and works; Reynolds’s brief biography, Literary Masters: Ernest
Hemingway (Detroit: Manly/Gale, 2000), provides a good
introductory overview of Hemingway’s life and work. Also
recommended is Ernest Hemingway: A Documentary Volume,
edited by Robert W. Trogdon (Dictionary of Literary Biography,
volume 210. Detroit: Bruccoli Clark Layman/The Gale Group,
1999), which is available in paperback as Ernest Hemingway: A
Literary Reference (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2002). Matthew J.
Bruccoli’s Fitzgerald and Hemingway: A Dangerous Friendship
(New York: Carroll & Graf, 1994) analyzes the troubled relationship
between Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald as well
as demonstrating Fitzgerald’s role in Hemingway’s career. Conversations
with Ernest Hemingway, edited by Bruccoli (Jackson:
University Press of Mississippi, 1989), provides informative
comments by Hemingway about writing and events that informed
his work.
Not all of the large number of books and articles on Ernest
Hemingway are worthwhile. Among critical studies Charles A.
Fenton’s The Apprenticeship of Ernest Hemingway (New York:
Farrar, Straus & Young, 1954) provides an excellent background
for Hemingway’s earliest writing and newspaper training, and
Carlos Baker’s Hemingway, The Writer as Artist (Princeton,
Dust jacket for Hemingway’s 1940 novel, in which American
Robert Jordan fights against the Fascists in Spain. Hemingway
took his title from John Donne’s Meditation 17: “Any man’s
death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and
therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
it tolls for thee. . . .”
N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1972) contributes perceptive
and credible readings of Hemingway’s fiction, including the
posthumously published Islands in the Stream (1970). Paul A.
Smith’s A Reader’s Guide to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway
(Boston: G. K. Hall, 1989) is the best reference for criticism
of Hemingway’s stories. Those interested in observing
how Hemingway incorporated researched material about the
Italian front of World War I into A Farewell to Arms should
see Reynolds’s Hemingway’s First War (Princeton, N.J.; Princeton
University Press, 1981). Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell
to Arms: A Documentary Volume, edited by Charles M. Oliver
(Dictionary of Literary Biography, volume 308. Detroit: Bruccoli
Clark Layman/Thomson Gale, 2005) chronicles the making
of the novel and traces its popular and critical reputation.

528 entry Herbst, Josephine
Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, 1917–1961, edited by
Carlos Baker (New York: Scribners, 1981), should be read
along with Hemingway’s work. The Only Thing That Counts:
The Ernest Hemingway/Maxwell Perkins Correspondence,
1925–1947, edited by Bruccoli, with the assistance of Trogdon
(New York: Scribners, 1996), provides a record of the
professional relationship between Hemingway and his legendary
Scribners editor, Maxwell Perkins.
Audre Hanneman’s Ernest Hemingway: A Comprehensive
Bibliography (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press,
1967) and her Supplement to Ernest Hemingway: A Comprehensive
Bibliography (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University
Press, 1975) are the standard Hemingway bibliographies
and indispensable research tools. Kelli A. Larson’s Ernest
Hemingway: A Reference Guide (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1991)
lists writings about Hemingway and his works from 1974
to 1989. Students should also consult the Modern Language
Association bibliographies on-line and current bibliography
in The Hemingway Review, which since 1981 has provided
a forum for scholarship and criticism, following the Fitzgerald/Hemingway
Annual (1969–1979). The principal research
archive is at the Kennedy Library.
—John C. Unrue
Herbst, Josephine (1897–1969) novelist
After graduating from the University of California in 1918,
the Iowa-born Josephine Herbst left for New York City to
begin her career as a writer. By the 1920s she was in Paris,
associating with the important American writers there. She is
regarded as a proletarian writer (see Proletarian Literature)
because she was a hard-line Marxist and her fiction
treats the social, economic, and political issues that affect the
laboring poor. Herbst is best known for her trilogy on the
Trexler family: Pity Is Not Enough (1933), The Executioner
Waits (1934), and Rope of Gold (1939). This saga, based on
her own family, follows the Trexlers from the late nineteenth
century to the 1930s, exploring their troubles after they lose
their money, grapple with the fast-changing period of the
1920s, and then confront bleak economic times during the
Great Depression. Her memoir of her days in Spain during
the Spanish Civil War, originally published in a periodical
in 1960, is the title piece of The Starched Blue Sky of Spain,
and Other Memoirs (1991).
Source
Langer, Elinor. Josephine Herbst. Boston: Little, Brown, 1984.
Hergesheimer, Joseph (1880–1954) novelist,
short-story writer
Hergesheimer was a best-selling and well-respected novelist
of his day, whose work was often first published in The
Saturday Evening Post before appearing in book form. His
best-known novels are Java Head (1919), a study of the trade
with China in the New England of the 1840s that deals with
miscegenation, and Linda Condon (1919), a portrayal of an
intense woman that shows the author’s growing distaste for
contemporary American culture. Hergesheimer’s later books
forsake Realism for romance. He favored exotic settings—
the West Indies in The Bright Shawl (1922), Cuba in Balisand
(1924), Mexico in Tampico (1926). From an Old House (1925)
is an essay-memoir.
Source
Gimmestad, Victor E. Joseph Hergesheimer. Boston: Twayne,
1984.
Heyward, DuBose (1885–1940) playwright, novelist,
poet
DuBose Heyward is chiefly remembered for the folk dramas
of African American life in the early twentieth century that he
based on his novels. A South Carolina native descended from
Thomas Heyward Jr., a signer of the Declaration of Independence,
Heyward worked as an insurance and real estate salesman
in Charleston before he began to publish poetry and short
stories in the early 1920s. His first books were poetry collections:
Carolina Chansons; Legends of the Low Country (1922),
written with Hervey Allen; and Skylines and Horizons (1924).
With the collaboration of his wife, Dorothy, who is credited
with providing dramatic structure to his writing, Heyward
scored his greatest theatrical success when their adaption of
his first novel, Porgy (1925)—about a crippled black beggar’s
doomed love for a faithless woman in the fictional slum Catfish
Row—was produced by the Theatre Guild in 1927 and won
a Pulitzer Prize. Heyward subsequently collaborated with
Ira and George Gershwin, who composed a folk opera, Porgy
and Bess (produced 1935), adapted from this play. The enduring
popularity of the Gershwin opera eclipsed that of the original
play and made Heyward’s story and characters a permanent
fixture on American stages.
Heyward continued to be productive in the latter half of the
1920s through the 1930s, as he published six more novels and a
third collection of poetry. In 1931 Brass Ankle (produced 1931),
a play Heyward wrote directly for the stage about a woman who
plans suicide when she learns of her Negro parentage, flopped.
In 1933 he wrote the screenplay for the movie version of Eugene
O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones. His play Mamba’s Daughters—an
adaptation of his third novel, published in 1929—was
well received when it was produced in 1939. A tragic melodrama
depicting the tribulations of three generations of a black
family, Mamba’s Daughters was praised as a realistic portrait of
African American life. Much of its success was attributed to the
compelling performance of Ethel Waters in the lead, the first
starring role for a black woman in a Broadway drama. Heyward
also published a popular children’s book, The Country Bunny
and the Little Gold Shoes (1939).

The Last Tycoon/The Love of the Last Tycoon entry 667
Ring Lardner (New York: Ungar, 1979), Otto Friedrich’s
Ring Lardner (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press,
1965), and Patrick Walton’s Ring Lardner (New York:
Twayne, 1963) that might be useful starting points.
Critical study of Lardner begins with context—both his
place in the tradition of the American fiction and in the tradition
of American humor writing. Maxwell Geismar’s Writers
in Crisis: the American Novel 1925–1940 (1941; reprinted,
New York: Hill & Wang, 1961) is a good place to start on the
former; Norris Yates’s The American Humorist: Conscience of
the Twentieth Century (Ames: Iowa State University Press,
1964) is a good place to start on the latter.
—Richard Layman
Larsen, Nella (1891–1964) novelist
This, then, was where she belonged. This was her
proper setting. She felt consoled at last for the spiritual
wounds of the past.
—Quicksand (1928)
Born to a Danish mother and a West Indian father, Larsen
studied at Fisk University and later obtained a nursing degree.
In 1919 she married physicist Elmer Imes and became a
member of the black elite in New York City, socializing with
other Harlem Renaissance notables. Her literary reputation
rests on two novels she published in the 1920s.
Quicksand (1928) is a semi-autobiographical text about
the travels—physical and psychological—of a biracial
woman trying to find the place “where she belonged.”
Helga Crane leaves her job at a New Negro school in the
South, seeking a fulfilling identity. When she does not find
what she seeks in Chicago, New York, or Denmark, Helga
experiences a moment of spiritual enlightenment or weakness
and ends up married to a southern preacher in backwoods
Alabama, trapped in a cycle of childbirth. Larsen’s
second novel, Passing (1929), focuses on an upper-middleclass
African American woman, Irene Redfield, and her increasingly
disturbing encounters with a childhood friend,
Clare Kendry, who is passing for white and pursuing relationships
in Harlem behind her bigoted husband’s back.
In 1930 Larsen became the first African American woman
to earn a Guggenheim Fellowship, but that year she was also
accused of plagiarizing a 1922 story from Century magazine
for her story “Sanctuary,” which appeared in Forum in 1930.
The charge, though unsubstantiated, along with her 1933 divorce
led Larsen to withdraw from society and to stop writing.
From 1934 until her death thirty years later, she worked
as a nurse, lived as a recluse, and never published again. Although
her literary standing faded during her lifetime, Larsen
has recently been reinstated among her Harlem Renaissance
peers such as Jessie Redmon Fauset and Zora Neale Hurston,
and her work is the subject of renewed critical interest.
Sources
Davis, Thadious M. Nella Larsen, Novelist of the Harlem Renaissance:
A Woman’s Life Unveiled. Baton Rouge: Lousiana State
University Press, 1994.
Larsen, Nella. Quicksand and Passing, edited by Deborah Mc-
Dowell. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press,
1986.
Rabin, Jessica. Surviving the Crossing: (Im)migration, Ethnicity
and Gender in Willa Cather, Gertrude Stein, and Nella Larsen.
New York: Routledge, 2004.
—Jessica G. Rabin
The Last Adam by James Gould Cozzens (New York:
Harcourt, Brace, 1933) novel
The main character in this novel is George Bull, a small-town
doctor in Connecticut during the 1930s. He is barely competent
and is not greatly concerned about his patients. Yet, he is
the doctor who diagnoses the typhoid fever epidemic in his
town—for which he may be partly to blame because of his lax
inspection of the water supply.
The main subject of the novel is the social structure of
New Winton, as James Gould Cozzens examines the stratification
of the characters in terms of their intelligence and
class position.
—Morris Colden
“The Last of the Belles” by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1929)
short story
F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote important stories set in the South
drawing upon his experiences during World War I and his
marriage to a Southerner. The narrator of “The Last of the
Belles” is Andy, a Yankee who tries to understand Ailie Calhoun,
a popular girl he meets while stationed in Georgia: “It
was a time of growth and war, and there was never so much
love around.” Six years later when Andy returns to Georgia
to visit Ailie, he realizes that he will never be able to recover
Ailie or his youth. The South and its women are lost to him.
The story was first published in The Saturday Evening
Post and collected in Taps at Reveille (1935).
Source
Bruccoli, Matthew J. Classes on F. Scott Fitzgerald. Columbia:
Thomas Cooper Library, University of South Carolina, 2001.
—Morris Colden
The Last Tycoon/The Love of the Last Tycoon by
F. Scott Fitzgerald (New York: Scribners, 1941) novel
At the time of his death in December 1940, F. Scott Fitzgerald
had written seventeen of the thirty episodes in the plan
for his Hollywood novel with the working title The Love of
the Last Tycoon: A Western. Edmund Wilson assembled the