Queer Utopian Geographies and Cold War Poetry Brigitte Natalie Mccray Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College, [email protected]
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Louisiana State University LSU Digital Commons LSU Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 2012 Queer utopian geographies and Cold War poetry Brigitte Natalie McCray Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation McCray, Brigitte Natalie, "Queer utopian geographies and Cold War poetry" (2012). LSU Doctoral Dissertations. 2698. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations/2698 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at LSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in LSU Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized graduate school editor of LSU Digital Commons. For more information, please [email protected]. QUEER UTOPIAN GEOGRAPHIES AND COLD WAR POETRY A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College In partial fulfillment of the Requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in The Department of English by Brigitte Natalie McCray B.A., Emory & Henry College, 1999 M.A. and M.F.A., Virginia Commonwealth University, 2006 May 2012 Dedication In memory of my grandmother Betty Sue, who taught me the power of empathy and compassion. ii Acknowledgements I have been fortunate to be surrounded by supportive and inspiring teachers, friends, and family throughout my graduate school journey. My dissertation director Joseph Kronick has been a wonderful mentor, a critical editor, and an attentive reader. His patience as I recreated my chapters has meant the world to me. His trust in my abilities has also given me faith in my own critical writing. Benjamin Kahan‘s work on LGBT writers continues to inspire me and his feedback throughout my own writing has challenged my thinking and led the project in a stronger direction. Carolyn Lewis has been a great friend; I have learned so much about Cold War history and culture from her; this knowledge inspired and propelled this project forward. I am particularly grateful to Dan Novak for his insight and help on the job market. I am also so appreciative of Loretta Pecchioni, whose feedback was particularly useful during my revisions. I am particularly grateful to the faculty in the English department at Emory & Henry College; they encouraged me to go to graduate school. My good friend and mentor Felicia Mitchell continually challenged me to pursue poetry and taught me to appreciate poetry with a critical eye. John Lang always challenged my thinking and writing and inspired me with his love of American literature. I am also forever indebted to Laura Browder and Bryant Mangum. While a graduate student at Virginia Commonwealth University, Laura and Bryant gave me so much support in developing my critical and writing abilities. I am grateful for my mother, Dianna Farris, and my step-father, Paul Farris, Jr. Their support provides me with strength and encouragement and their love means the world to me. iii Table of Contents Dedication………………………………………………………………………………………. ii Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………………………...iii Abstract…………………………………………………………………………………………...v Introduction Queer Utopian Geographies and Cold War Poetry ………………………………………………1 Chapter One ―To Be Sure to Reach You‖: The Utopian Potential of Velocity………………………………..17 Chapter Two The Shore Knows About Dying: Fantasy Ideals, the Cult of Pleasure, and False Utopias……...56 Chapter Three W.H. Auden, Austria, and the Search for a Christian Social Utopia…………………………….91 Chapter Four ―The Beautiful Completeness of the View‖: Elizabeth Bishop and the Representation of Queer Space………………………………………………………………………………….130 Conclusion: You Are Here……………………………………………………………………...166 Works Cited…………………………………………………………………………………….172 Vita……………………………………………………………………………………………...182 iv Abstract Queer Utopian Geographies and Cold War Poetry intervenes in the general narrative about Cold War culture, made even more famous by such recent popular shows like Mad Men and Pan Am, that describes the era as a repressed society in desperate need of liberation. While indeed Cold War America was a time of paranoia and loyalty oaths, even before the Stonewall Riots of 1969 gay men and lesbians found subtle ways to resist popular media and government discourse that perpetuated the myth that the homosexual was the anti-citizen. A number of gay men and lesbians traveled extensively to escape this Cold War culture, and it is through the trope of geography in the terrain of Cold War poetry that readers recognize that resistance is able to occur under authority‘s nose and outside closely controlled places. This forces us to confront the assumption that resistance needs to be violent and highly visible in order to be successful. For instance, my project argues that the poetry of W.H. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, Frank O‘Hara, and Allen Ginsberg represents utopian concepts. Not only do the poets depict geographical space as offering utopian possibility, but they also reveal how daily moments and experiences provide hope, what I refer to as utopian practice throughout the project. Furthermore, these practices and spaces typically conjure queer specters of the past and these hauntings also point to a hopeful future. This dissertation claims that, while scholars and readers cannot ignore the negativity of Cold War homophobia, these poets actively worked to reshape the world at the literal level and through lyric subjectivity. v Introduction Queer Utopian Geographies and Cold War Poetry Where in the older society . Utopian thought represented a diversion of revolutionary energy into idle wish-fulfillments and imaginary satisfactions, in our own time the very nature of the Utopian concept has undergone a dialectical reversal. Now it is practical thinking which everywhere represents a capitulation to the system itself, and stands as a testimony to the power of the system to transform even its adversaries into its own mirror image. The Utopian idea, on the contrary, keeps alive the possibility of a world qualitatively distinct from this one and takes the form of a stubborn negation of all that is. –Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form During his lunch break on September 29,, 2010, Manhattan resident Jim Swimm walked through Inwood Hill Park and came across a body floating in the Hudson River. The police discovered the body was that of gay Rutgers University student Tyler Clementi, who had committed suicide by jumping from the George Washington Bridge after being taunted for weeks by his college roommate through the use of a webcam and social media. In a recent New Yorker article about Clementi‘s death and the trial of his roommate, Ravi Pazhani, the writer, Ian Parker, notes that Swimm is also gay and quotes him as saying, ―Not to sound metaphysical about it, but I feel as if [Clementi] was speaking to me that day—saying, people need to pay attention to what‘s happening‖ (23). Swimm‘s use of the word ―metaphysical‖ is pertinent because it indicates the way, as scholar José Esteban Muñoz argues, we carry our dead with us into battle (47). This will become a running theme throughout this project. We are haunted by the traumas of the past; however, Swimm‘s comment also provides hope that the future will be transformed. Queer specters in particular allow us to conceive of a world that is better than our present one because, as ghostly presences, they burn into our memories, reminding us that we must put right what is off balance in the present. 1 That Swimm found Clementi‘s body in a river is also, I think, significant. Geographies are often painful reminders of the limits of the here and now and are often the symbolic representation of the body. Through the mapping of space, geography parallels the control and surveillance of the body, but maps also enable us to envision new and better spaces. In For Space, geographer Doreen Massey uses the term ―taming of the spatial‖ to refer to maps. She writes: Faced with a need to know . you reach for the map and lay it out upon the table. Here is ‗space‘ as a flat surface, a continuous surface. Space as the completed product. As a coherent closed system. Here space is completely and instantaneously interconnected; space you can walk across. The map works in the manner of the synchronies of the structuralists. It tells of an order in things. With the map we can locate ourselves and find our way. And we know where others are as well. So yes, this map can set me dreaming, let my imagination run. (106) Maps are used to control, or, like Massey suggests, they also enable our imagination. The love for maps is obvious in this quotation from Massey, and I too love maps. When I visit a new city, the first item on my to-do list is to obtain a map. I take a Sharpie and trace my routes. This grounding of the body in space and time allows me to enter new and confusing worlds on my own terms. I am able to imagine myself belonging in the neighborhoods and fitting-in with the communities and people. This movement is important because, while places are static and unchanging, space, as cultural geographers frequently remind us, is changed when we enter it. The imagined belonging is transformed into literal connections between people in those spaces. Marginalized individuals then see geographies not just in the negative but also as offering the possibility of positive transformation. This is what triggers Cold War poet Frank O‘Hara, in his poem ―Second Avenue,‖ to use the phrase ―map of ecstasy‖ (196) and in ―Sneden‘s Landing Variations,‖ ―map of love‖ (79). O‘Hara‘s poetry illustrates that places on maps may become hopeful sites. Although Swimm 2 located Clementi‘s body in the Hudson River, that he found him and managed to turn the fact of Clementi‘s suicide into a reminder of our ethical obligation to the student shows how the spaces within geography, haunted by ghostly presences, may be used for social and political purposes.