Not My Father's Son: the Gay Subject

© Copyright by Kevin L. Murphy, 2013 All Rights Reserved ABSTRACT My dissertation, “Not My Father’s Son: The Gay Subject and White Masculine Identity in Contemporary Southern Literature,” explores a new generation of white southern sons in the late twentieth century whose resistance to the southern father’s problematic construction of masculinity and the violence needed to sustain it allows them both the freedom to acknowledge openly their same-sex desires and to embrace life, as opposed to death, in the face of a homosexual identity that lies before them. Rather than excavate queer subjects that may have been coded in earlier mid-twentieth-century texts, my dissertation examines the psychological shifts concerning white masculinity that must occur for these gay subjects to exist openly and without compromise. In addressing the struggle these sons face in revising a problematic vision of the father, I discuss selected fiction and non-fiction from southern, white male authors written in the past thirty years, including two recently published memoirs by gay, southern, white men, Kevin Jennings and Kevin Sessums; a memoir by Lewis Nordan; and selected fiction from both Nordan and Jim Grimsley. I argue that these historical and literary depictions of white, gay, southern men in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century invoke a new paradigm in which the sons’ challenge to the historical forces of supremacy (racism, sexism, and homophobia) inherent in the legacy of the white southern father opens up new spaces for both gay characters and gay men to exist. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Numerous institutions and individuals have supported me throughout this marathon process of completing my dissertation, and for their generosity, support, and guidance, I wish to offer my sincere thanks. First and foremost, I would like to thank my partner, Donnie McMahand, for his love, encouragement, and support, which allowed me to complete this project, and for continuing to challenge and inspire me to think beyond expected conventions. To Rebecca Mark, my director and friend, I extend my gratitude for her commitment to me and my project’s vision, which took shape only after two provocative graduate courses she taught in southern literature. I would not have had the chutzpah to write this dissertation had she not come before me. To Molly Travis, I offer my thanks for her keen eye for details and her absolute professionalism in her capacity as my second reader. To Joel Dinerstein, I also express my gratitude for his kindness from the very beginning and particularly for his encouraging conversations about this project’s future. To Minrose Gwin and Ruth Salvaggio at the University of North Carolina, I offer my sincere appreciation for their encouragement and friendship during those difficult years after Hurricane Katrina. I would also like to thank Michael Bibler for his time, energy, and willingness to read sections of my dissertation and for his superb editing skills and expertise. Special thanks go to my parents, Kay and Dave Murphy, whose sacrifice continues to make my education possible and whose lives serve as testimonies ii to the power of dedication and compassion. To my brother, Brian, I extend my heartfelt appreciation for showing me that he loved me when I needed it the most. To my sister, Holly, I wish to thank her for showing up when no one else would. Finally, to Martha and Johnnie, I wish to express my gratitude for their love and unwavering support of me over the years. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS.……………………………………………………..………...ii CHAPTERS INTRODUCTION………………………………………………….............………1 1. Queering Heterosexuality: Rewriting Oedipal Structures in Lewis Nordan’s Fiction.……………………………………………………………...24 2. From Abject to Agential: The Queer Subject in Lewis Nordan’s Fiction ...….70 3. Jim Grimsley and Survival Fiction: Fathers, Sons, and the Gay Bildungsroman …………………………………………………………114 4. Writing the Father, Rethinking the Self: The Impulse For Reform in Contemporary Southern Memoirs ………………………………………......183 BIBLIOGRAPHY ………………………………………………………………………246 iv 1 Introduction: Gay Southern Sons and the Prospect of a Livable Future Any consideration of the future of southern writing must take note of how powerfully the historic forces in earlier poems and stories and novels have denied characters a future. -- James Applewhite Writing about the inability for southern white male characters in mid- twentieth-century literary texts to move beyond the past, James Applewhite, in his 1996 essay “Southern Writing and the Problem of the Father,” explains how the southern white male writer’s penchant for a mythologized male leader often foreclosed any possibility of a future for the next generation of men. Mid-century poets like Allen Tate mythologized Confederate figures like Robert E. Lee “whose status in extreme honor and defeat puts him almost beyond the bounds of ordinary human interaction” (21). Such a treatment, as Applewhite notes, leaves the next generation of white men at a loss. Not only are they unable to have a real connection with such a distant, idealized father figure, but they are unable to take part in “the old war.” Consequently, this generation of men in the mid-century remains static, “unable to act,” a condition most powerfully represented by Quentin Compson in The Sound and the Fury (22). Quentin has, according to Applewhite, “inherited a time without an is or will be. Everything important was” (24). Quentin is the most notable example of the white southern man who is unable, or unwilling, to live in a world in 2 which southern honor, one of the defining characteristics of southern masculinity, has been emptied of meaning. Quentin Compson’s influence looms large for those writing after Faulkner, and he has become an important literary touchstone for this ongoing struggle to keep white southern sons alive as they confront the legacy of the white southern father. More so than their fathers before them, these sons face a South in transition and can no longer depend upon racial and gender subordinates to ensure the white male supremacy enjoyed by their fathers. As Susan Donaldson asserts in “Keeping Quentin Compson Alive: The Last Gentleman, The Second Coming, and the Problems of Masculinity,” Quentin Compson “serves as a highly appropriate symbol of tradition— of white southern masculinity under siege—for both Faulkner and Percy” (62). White men like Quentin Compson and Will Barrett in Percy’s The Last Gentleman and The Second Coming encounter a South in which their white male identities no longer seem natural or self-sustaining and subsequently find “it increasingly difficult to perceive themselves as protectors, providers, and patriarchs” (Donaldson 65-66). Unable to fulfill this narrow definition of southern white masculine identity needed to sustain white male superiority, Quentin turns to suicide as a way to achieve the vision of white male honor that eluded him in life. As Donaldson argues, “only through self- destruction, apparently, can he resolve his problematic relationships with women and black subordinates and questions about his own masculinity” (69). As a result, this tendency toward self-destruction in light of the overshadowing presence of the traditional masculine identity of the white southern father has emerged as part of the literary legacy inherited by writers like Percy, and it poses a significant challenge to 3 the continuation of the lives of those sons who cannot or will not conform to such a rigid vision of white masculine identity. Moving beyond the emphasis placed on heterosexuality in a purely Freudian reading of the oedipal tensions in father/son relationships, more contemporary scholars reframe Quentin’s problem and position it in terms of his inability to act upon his queer attachment to his roommate, Shreve, in Absalom, Absalom, given Quentin’s continued investment in a southern culture that does not offer homosexual men a viable future. Most notably, Michael Bibler, in his book Cotton’s Queer Relations: Same-Sex Intimacy and the Literature of the Southern Plantation, 1936- 1968, argues how new threats to white male supremacy after the Civil War prevented the fulfillment of same-sex desire between white men of the same class because white male superiority could no longer be exclusively maintained through the subordination of women and blacks: “In the post-Civil War South, all forms of masculine difference must be suppressed or denied in order to protect white male superiority, thus closing the loophole in the taboo against male homoeroticism and leaving Quentin and Shreve, like their queer forbears Henry and Bon, tragically unable to consummate their desires without also suffering the dire social consequences” (65). The potentiality of gay life for white southern sons after the Civil War diminishes as homophobia becomes necessary to solidify white male superiority, and those queer sons like Quentin face a particularly bleak future, one that offers little space for them to live openly as homosexual men. For those sons who exhibit same-sex desire, the problem of white masculine identity becomes increasingly dire, for they remain unable to replicate the father’s 4 heterosexual identity and thus disrupt the process of paternal succession necessary to maintain white male supremacy. As a result of the son’s non-traditional masculinity, in those texts containing men who embody the old, white, southern father figure, the queer son has had little space to express his same-sex desire within the father’s

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