THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO QUEER HONOR: WHITE MASCULINITY IN THE SOUTHERN NOVEL, 1936 – 1970 A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE DIVISION OF THE HUMANITIES IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE BY PETER JOHN LIDO CHICAGO, ILLINOIS JUNE 2019 Copyright © 2019 by Peter John Lido All Rights Reserved “Now I want you to tell me just one thing more. Why do you hate the South?” “I don’t hate it,” Quentin said, quickly, at once, immediately; “I don’t hate it,” he said. I don’t hate it he thought, panting in the cold air, the iron New England dark: I don’t. I don’t! I don’t hate it! I don’t hate it! —William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS . v LIST OF FIGURES . viii ABSTRACT . ix INTRODUCTION. .1 WILLIAM FAULKNER AND THE MOTIONS OF QUEER HONOR . 48 THE PASSION OF JULIEN GREEN: REREADING MOIRA AND TERRE LOINTAINE . .102 "WE DIDN'T": DAMMED MASCULINITY AND BODY FASCISM IN DELIVERANCE . 148 CODA: RESIDUES OF HONOR . .185 APPENDIX . 203 BIBLIOGRAPHY . 229 iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This project’s completion would never have been possible without a wide network of family, friends, and mentors, who have tirelessly supported me. Greatest thanks go to my parents, Peter D. and Geraldine M. Lido, without whose love I would be more than lost and less than whole. To you, I quite simply owe everything. I’d also like to thank my sisters Elizabeth and Catherine, my nieces Ainsley and Wynn, and my nephew Jack, for your unconditional love and acceptance. This project was generously funded by the University of Chicago Department of English Language & Literature’s Blair Dissertation Fellowship Award and the Maramarco Summer Research Award. Thank you to my advisors, Eric Slauter and Ken Warren, who have helped steward my project from its embryonic stages. Thank you to Julia Gardner, Leah Richardson, Christine Colburn, and Barbara Gilbert, my esteemed colleagues at the Special Collections Research Center at the Regenstein Library. Thank you also to the brilliant students in my undergraduate seminars – “Outsiders in Southern Literature,” “The Global South: Knowledge, Culture, Aesthetics,” and “The Literature of Masculinity-in-Crisis” – whose generous insights helped me work through the many questions and texts at hand in this project. v Thank you to my mentors at Emory University—Richard Rambuss, Harry Rusche, Michele Schreiber, and especially Paul Kelleher—for generously dedicating their time and energy to helping me grow as a writer, thinker, and person, during a crucial period in my life. Thank you to Ben Reiss and Carolyn Denard for allowing and encouraging me to pursue a Master’s Thesis about which I felt deeply passionate. Thank you also to Margaret Rice and Scott Zucker at Wellington Community High School for nurturing my interest in writing, literature, and creativity early on—you don’t know it, but you saved my life. There are many friends who have sustained and inspired me throughout this process. Christopher James Wahl, Milo Neelands, and Jake Miller, thank you for leading by example and showing me light. I don’t even want to think about where I’d be or who I’d be without you. Lisa Rodziewicz, Megan Dolph, Chelsea Spencer, and Michal Flombaum, thank you for your loyalty, strength, humor, and patience. Rachel Kyne and Abigail Marcus, you have given me more love and support these past years than I could ever possibly hope to express or repay, and for that I will never be able to thank you enough. Thank you to my incomparable Chicago crew—Molly Durham, Joseph McMahon, Jenn Stanley, Daniel Hooper, Dallas Krentzel, Andrea DaViera, Victoria vi Flores, Michael LeChevallier, Evan Koch, and -- with special love -- Karl Schaefer. I’m speechless. You make me feel like I’m home. Lastly, thank you to my queer brothers and sisters around the world and throughout history, especially those who are struggling right now. You honor me. This project is for you. vii LIST OF FIGURES Figure 2.1: Jacques-Louis David, Patroclus (1780) . 143 Figure 2.2: Jacques-Louis David, Hector (1778) . 143 Figure 5.1: Photograph of William H. Laird (1923) . 214 viii ABSTRACT This dissertation examines one aspect of the representation of queer white masculinity in the Southern novel between 1936 and 1970, which I argue revolves around the disciplinary notion of honor. What I call "queer honor" refers to a specific genre of tragic literary narrative that mobilizes homophobic-homoerotic relations of proto-fascist power between Southern men in predominantly or exclusively white male homosocial spaces. The first line of inquiry in this project is historical -- how and why did historical ideas about honor come to impact the aesthetic development of representations of white masculinity in the Southern novel of this period? Southern historians have conventionally argued that by the mid twentieth-century, honor was no longer a prime animating force in Southern life, a fact that seems to be undermined by the intense, even obsessive investments in honor that the authors under consideration in this project display. The novels here by William Faulkner, Julien Green, and James Dickey are all both inward looking and backward looking, reflecting a pervasive and even solipsistic interest in white masculinity and white male homosociality. These impulses engage not only the inward-looking regional history of the American South, but also a ix deep history of queer iconography yoking same-sex desire to physical violence, dating back to the ancient world. I begin by asking why figurative descriptions and thematic examinations of honor emerged in the Southern literature of the 1930s, and why they paradoxically reveal queer relations of power and desire between white Southern men. I argue this pattern of queer relations take the form of particular type of authoritarian homophobic- homoeroticism. Honor, which in these novels is often exposed to be a performative veneer of itself, or merely a series of ritual motions, tends to turn men away from domestic responsibility, heterosexuality, and the law, even as it nominally reinforces commitments to these normative sociopolitical structures. It also instills in men a fear of other men, paranoia about being perceived as men, and the intensification of male masculinity into competitive hyper-masculinity. The second question is methodological. How ought one read and critique the literary representations of queer white masculinity in the Southern archive of this period? Theorizing queer Southern white male sexuality poses a specific problem, I argue, within the field of anti-relational queer theory. Although many scholars have formulated "shame" to be the crucible from which queerness emerges, Southern historians like W. J. Cash and writers like Faulkner take "honor" to be the motivating complex or sensibility around which all white Southern masculinity develops. My x project examines what happens when these two notions -- shame and honor -- converge on the site of the queer white Southern male body in the literature and history of the American South. The third question is about form, genre, and aesthetics. How does the obsession with honor produce a unique strain of narrative within the form of the novel, and within the genre of Southern Gothic literature? I argue that the phenomenon of queer honor reveals a violent, homophobic, even white supremacist genre that summons its thematic reserves of Gothic horror from the very gestures of authority, subjugation, and violence that have historically repressed queer, non-gender-conforming, and non-white American citizens. This tendency anticipates postwar traditions of gay male representation and iconography, as well as historically queer canons of literature and art. What binds this aesthetic tradition together across ancient and modern history are fascinations with hyper-masculinity, sadomasochism, and exclusively male homosocial domains, as well as an investment in the idea of queer male desire as an inherently warlike or martial phenomenon. The last question is about culture and politics. How might one use the concept of queer honor to study the homophobic-homoerotic relations of power in American political and cultural life more broadly? In the introduction and coda, I suggest that queer honor is a phenomenon that can be said to apply to any hyper-masculine xi domain of culture and politics where presumably heterosexual white men are interested exclusively in the company of other presumably heterosexual white men, and cite Tony Kushner's dramatization of Roy Cohn as the most exemplary representation of this cultural phenomenon in the period of American literature after which my project ends. In Chapter 1, I use W. J. Cash's The Mind of the South, and in particular his notion of the "favorite enemy," as a way to read the honor-bound relationship between the half-brothers Henry Sutpen and Charles Bon in William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! I argue that Cash's work of literary historiography and Faulkner's historical novel, which were both being written around the same time, disclose a vision of Southern masculinity that is marked by "paradox, irony, and guilt" — three cultural paradigms that Southern historians consider to be essential to an understanding of Southern history. I interpret the tempestuous affair and subsequent rivalry between Henry and Bon, which culminates in a fatal duel, as a paradigmatic example of the way in which fathers encouraged Southern boys from an early age to form competitive, aggressive impulses against other males, regardless of kinship or camaraderie. This leads inevitably to tragedy when Bon is killed in the duel and Henry is forced into exile, leaving the patriarch Thomas Sutpen with no male heir. xii In Chapter 2, I turn to the personal diaries of Julien Green, in particular Terre Lointaine, to recover his spiritual conception of queer honor and the intellectual and aesthetic context behind his largely forgotten 1950 Southern Gothic novel Moira.