Boyish Narratives: The Art of Not Acting Your Age by Chung-Hao Ku A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (English Language and Literature) in the University of Michigan 2013 Doctoral Committee: Professor David M. Halperin, Co-Chair Professor Patricia S. Yaeger, Co-Chair Professor David Caron Associate Professor Jarrod L. Hayes Copyright © 2013 Chung-Hao Ku All rights reserved For Little Father Time and other boys who are hanging ii Acknowledgements Gratitude grows as I trace the genealogy of this dissertation. I am grateful for the patience and support of my chairs, David M. Halperin and Patricia Yaeger. I am also thankful for David Caron, Jarrod Hayes, and Valerie Traub for their comments and suggestions at different stages of this project. Michael Awkward, Adela Pinch, Martha Vicinus, and Jennifer Wenzel had inspired me to ponder questions of time, modernity, sexuality, and intimacy mediated by writing or objects. Among my friends at the University of Michigan, I give my particular thanks to Alex Beringer for introducing me to the article on 20-somethings in the New York Times Magazine; to Roxana Galusca for her exemplary scholarship; to Dina Karageorgos and Brian Matzke for hugs and quips at hard times; to Rostom Mesli for organizing the workshop of my chapter on Henry Blake Fuller; to Nate Mills for his passion for American literature and country music over my first sip of Guinness; to Mei-Chen Michelle Pan and Yu-Chung Li for their hospitality; and to Katie Will for her welcoming smile in one late August of 2005. Finally, I am indebted to my family, whose playful digs and ridiculous love helped me ride out moments of uncertainty. iii Contents Dedication ii Acknowledgements iii Abstract vi Introduction Boyish Narratives: The Art of Not Acting Your Age 1 Chapter One “A Boy under the Ban of Suspension”: Renouncing Maturity in Willa Cather’s “Paul’s Case” 56 Chapter Two “A Little Short of That”: The Indefinitely Delayed Marriage in Henry Blake Fuller’s Bertram Cope’s Year 91 Chapter Three “Indifferent to Time”: Homosexual Reproduction in Tennessee Williams’s “The Mysteries of the Joy Rio” 137 Chapter Four iv “Riding Backward”: The Creolized Genealogy in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon 168 Chapter Five “God, How Retro”: Spatiotemporal Displacements in David Wong Louie’s “Pangs of Love” 207 Bibliography 234 v Abstract “Boyish Narratives: The Art of Not Acting Your Age” challenges identitarian views of sexuality, narrative, and time. Although recent studies of queer temporalities and queer diasporas argue that queers may resist the straight timeline of marriage and reproduction, such queer- inflected views often produce new timelines of transition, maturation, and growth. As a result, queers who once were pathologized as cases of arrested development are now normalized by reference to regulatory notions of coming out, getting married, and having children. In literary studies, developmental expectations obscure non-normative uses of time by characters who defy hetero/homo models of progress without necessarily identifying themselves as sexual nonconformists. Developmental assumptions also miss the way some authors use temporal suspension, deferral, or repetition to counter various progress narratives. In order to critique identity-based temporal norms, I take a transnational, backward- glancing approach to several works of twentieth-century U.S. fiction, and highlight two types of narratives that can be described as “boyish.” First, I study male characters who are deliberately constructed as not yet (re)productive or sexually definite, and who do not mature by the end of the narrative. How do texts like Willa Cather’s “Paul’s Case” (1905), Henry Blake Fuller’s Bertram Cope’s Year (1919), and Tennessee Williams’s “The Mysteries of the Joy Rio” (1941) vi use, respectively, an adolescent’s suicide, a youth’s insistence on friendship, and a protégé’s intergenerational relationship with his master-lover to reconfigure normative modes of growth? Second, I study characters whose transnational connections, postmemories, or “outdated” practices undo the inevitability of Western modernity and maturity. How do texts like Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon (1977) and David Wong Louie’s “Pangs of Love” (1991) shatter the teleologies of liberation, white assimilation, and gay visibility, when their main characters become susceptible to the past in the context of the black Atlantic, the Asian Pacific, or camp aesthetics? Together, these two types of boyish narratives complicate issues of queer temporality and subjectivity. Although the discourse of belated maturity can represent boyish characters as immature for now and yet tending to eventual maturity, boyish narratives challenge various temporal norms, thereby highlighting the stakes in progressivism and American exceptionalism. vii Introduction Boyish Narratives: The Art of Not Acting Your Age Belated Maturity A 2010 article in the New York Times Magazine discusses the phenomenon of 20- somethings in the contemporary United States and other industrialized societies: why does it take longer for young people nowadays to reach adulthood?1 Listing reasons like higher education, delayed marriage, birth control, prolonged life expectancy, and economic recession, the report addresses the phenomenon from the perspectives of sociology, psychology, and neuroscience. In particular, the term emerging adulthood spurs the exposition. According to psychologist Jeffrey Jensen Arnett, the term emerging adulthood refers to people who postpone marriage and childbearing to experiment with love and work in their twenties; they face a new life stage marked by identity exploration, instability, self-focus, feeling in-between, and a sense of possibility.2 Arnett coins the phrase by analogy with adolescence: just as psychologist G. Stanley 1 Robin Marantz Henig, “The Post-Adolescent, Pre-Adult, Not-Quite-Decided Life Stage,” New York Times Magazine, August 22, 2010, 28-49. 2 Jeffrey Jensen Arnett, Emerging Adulthood: The Winding Road from the Late Teens through the Twenties (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 8. Also see Jeffrey Jensen Arnett and Jennifer Lynn Tanner, eds., Emerging Adults in America: Coming of Age in the 21st Century (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2006); Jeffrey Jensen Arnett, Adolescence and Emerging Adulthood: A Cultural Approach (Upper 1 Hall invented the term adolescence in 1904 to highlight an age group that depends on family, attends school, and yet strives for individual autonomy, so too does Arnett create the term emerging adulthood to capture the prolonged transition from adolescence to adulthood, pushing the threshold of adulthood up to the “age 30 deadline.”3 Accommodating individual differences, Arnett’s view of maturity is nevertheless normative and progressivist. Even though emerging adults may be as various as those who are sexually active but single, those who move from job to job to find the perfect niche or experience all walks of life, and those who postpone marriage or childbearing to finish graduate school, developmental psychology as a discipline upholds an arc of maturity: people need to grow up, however belatedly or at their own pace. Insofar as milestones such as finishing school, leaving home, earning income, getting married, and having children still define adulthood, Arnett’s “age 30 deadline” not only translates those in their twenties into adults in the making but also pronounces thirty-five-year-old bachelors slow in their progress. Moderating the rate of maturation, Arnett allows people to fool around or search for self, as long as they reach adulthood in the end. Not demanding that everyone act his or her age like clockwork, he converts life into a flexible yet mandatory checklist: take your time, but make sure you meet all the requirements eventually. Seeing maturity as a matter of time, developmental psychology affects more than those in their twenties. The tacit principle of life stages presumes children to be innocent and dependent, adolescents to be sexually aware and contemplating autonomy, emerging adults to be experimenting with love and work, and adults to be (re)productive. In a society regulated by such Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2001); and Christine Hassler, 20 Something Manifesto: Quarter-Lifers Speak Out about Who They Are, What They Want, and How to Get It (Novato, CA: New World Library, 2008). 3 Ibid., 98. 2 a progress narrative of maturity, an eight-year-old should be protected from child labor and exposure to graphic sex and violence, an eighteen-year-old might be leaving home for college or starting work to pay his or her own bills, a twenty-eight-year-old might be studying at graduate school in order to become a professional or still looking for the perfect job or/and life partner, and a thirty-eight-year-old should be considering setting down—it is already a little bit late. In each stage, maturity dictates individual behavior, interpersonal relations, sex education, parenting styles, work-life balance, birth control, social welfare, state legislation, and life forms. Insofar as intelligence, ability, sexuality, sexual consent, gender behavior, career, marriage, and (re)production all figure as matters of time, concepts of prematurity, immaturity, belatedness, underdevelopment, and proto-ness prevail in interpretation of daily lives. And it is difficult for people to suspect such an enterprise because, operating through institutions like family, school, and government, it claims to cater to individual differences. To be sure, Arnett’s concept of emerging adulthood needs qualification. First, emerging adulthood usually happens in urban, industrial regions, and it implies straight people who postpone marriage, career, and childbearing. When Arnett mentions gays and lesbians in relationships, he does not go beyond Internet dating services. And his idea of emerging adulthood has a limited currency in rural, agricultural regions, where straight people still tend to marry and have children early. Second, emerging adulthood is not just a recent phenomenon: some baby boomers had delayed their career and marriage themselves.