Male Homosocial Landscape

MALE HOMOSOCIAL LANDSCAPE: FAULKNER,WRIGHT, HEMINGWAY, AND FITZGERALD A dissertation submitted To Kent State University in partial Fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Masaya Takeuchi December, 2011 Dissertation written by Masaya Takeuchi B.A., Rikkyo University, 2001 M.A., Rikkyo University, 2004 Ph.D., Kent State University, 2011 Approved by Robert Trogdon , Chair, Doctoral Dissertation Committee Mark Bracher , Member, Doctoral Dissertation Committee Kevin Floyd , Member, Doctoral Dissertation Committee Elizabeth M. Smith-Pryor , Member, Doctoral Dissertation Committee Marilyn A. Norconk , Member, Doctoral Dissertation Committee Accepted by Donald M. Hassler , Interim Chair, English Department Timothy Moerland , Dean, College of Arts and Sciences ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgments ……………………………………………………………………….iv Introduction …………………………………………………….………………………. 1 Part I: Chapter 1. ………………………………………………………………………………. 26 2. …………………..…………………………………………………………... 59 Part II: Chapter 3. ………………...……………………………………………………………... 93 Part III: Chapter 4. ……………...……………………………………………………………… 122 5. ………..……………………………………………………………………. 163 Part IV: Chapter 6. ……...……………………………………………………………………… 190 7. ……………………………………………………………………………... 225 Conclusion …………………………………………………………………………….. 254 Bibliography ….………………………………………..……………………………..... 261 iii Acknowledgements During the eight years I have studied in Ph.D. programs at Rikkyo University and Kent State University, I have received tremendous instruction and encouragement from many professors. I first wish to thank my dissertation faculties at Kent State University, Robert Trogdon, Mark Bracher, Kevin Floyd, Elizabeth M. Smith-Pryor, and Marilyn A. Norconk. I am especially grateful to Professor Trogdon’s insightful advice and constructive comments, Professor Bracher’s sincere encouragement and generous help, and Professor Floyd’s inspiring suggestions and stimulating discussions. I am also grateful to professors at Rikkyo University, including Kazuhiko Goto, Tomoyuki Zettsu, Takaki Hiraishi, Keiko Nitta, Shinji Watanabe, John T. Dorsey, and Hideyo Sengoku. Although I am deeply obliged to each professor, I want in particular to thank Professors Goto and Zetts. Professor Goto has taught me vigorously and heartwarmingly how to examine literary works and how to write research papers since I was an undergraduate student. Professor Zetts has given me ungrudging guidance and invaluable suggestions about literary studies before and during my study abroad. iv Portions of this dissertation were published as essays in Faulkner 8 (2006), Studies in American Literature 44 (2008), Studies in American Naturalism4.1 (2009), and The Midwest Quarterly 53.1 (2011). My appreciation to other faculties and people involved at Kent State University, especially Yoshinobu Hakutani, Michiko Hakutani, Tammy Clewell, Lewis Fried, Donald M. Hassler, Sue Hassler, Sanford Marovitz, Nora Marovitz, Masood Raja, Babacar M’Baye, Dawn Lashua, and librarians. My gratitude to other professors in Japan, especially Masahiko Narita, Kenichi Noda, Naoto Sasada, Teruko Kajiwara, and Nozomi Fujimura. My heartfelt thanks to friends at Kent State University, including Jason Ellis, Yufang Lin, David Murad, Seth Johnson, Sohomjit Ray, Swaralipi Nandi, Kolter Kiess, Robin Bellinson, Geoffrey Moses, Tim Jordan, Adam McKee, and Yeonmin Kim. I want in particular to thank Jason, Yufang, David, and Seth for their help and kindness. Lastly, I express my gratefulness to my parents, Kiyomi and Keiko, and my brother and his wife, Naoto and Michiko.Their understanding and support have always encouraged me to pursue literary studies. I apologize to those whom I may have left out of this brief statement of gratitude. No doubt all the people whom I met have influenced my thoughts and writings in some way. v Introduction The national ideals of the United States, such as freedom and equality, have clashed with the harsh, severe realities of racism, classism, sexism, and imperialism. The clash has been one of the largest themes for American writers who keenly detect the country’s irrationality and injustices, and who seek to investigate the anguish and suffering of its people. As literary critic Richard Chase argued in The American Novel and Its Tradition (1957), the origins of the American novel lie in the “contradictions” rather than the “unities and harmonies” of American culture (1). In revealing the gap between the ideal and reality, American authors often depict the repudiation and severance of human bonds due to social restraints or cultural codes. Their novels offer various illustrations of the union, conflict, and loss of human connections. In “Come Back to the Raft Ag’in, Huck Honey!” (1948), Leslie Fiedler provided an intriguing, controversial argument that American novels such as Huckleberry Finn and Moby Dick describe “the mutual love of a white man and a colored” (667) and represent the colored man as “homoerotic lover” (668). According to Fiedler, the white American feels a “compelling anxiety” of being “alone” and an inerasable sense of “guilt” for his historical oppression of 1 2 the colored population; the two novels allow the American public to “[dream] of his acceptance at the breast he has most utterly offended” (670-71). Fiedler’s analysis throws light on the white man’s conflict between his desire for uniting with African Americans and his (as well as his ancestors’) guilt at having persecuted them. This suggests that the conflict motivates white writers to create novels and also that their novels function as a space in which white readers can fantasize about having a rapport with the black men to appease their compunction about racial discrimination. However, no matter how sincerely white men desire to reconcile with black men, racism often prevents reconciliation. In general, not only racism but also sexism, classism, nationalism, and imperialism often lead to a human’s failure to compromise with other people. In The Art of Loving (1956), Erich Fromm defined love as “the overcoming of human separateness,” as “the fulfillment of the longing for union” (30), claiming that human desire for “interpersonal fusion” is “the force which keeps the human race together, the clan, the family, society” (17). Despite, or rather because of, this fundamental desire to establish groups in accordance with social conditions, the American people have experienced the union and rupture of men between different races, sexes, classes, and nationalities. How did novelists, then, give literary expression to the pleasure and pain of human relationships while they themselves struggled with cultural and historical forces that constructed and controlled their identity and ideology? 3 My subject is American modernists such as William Faulkner, Richard Wright, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. This dissertation analyzes male homosocial systems in order to reveal how male homosocial relationships are established and transformed in accordance with impersonal historical forces that lay behind racism, World War I, and capitalism. It shows how male fictional characters struggle to construct, transform, and assert masculinity in a homosocial system while anguishing over its power structure or discovering the value of life amidst despairing conditions. The concept of homosociality that I employ is based on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s theory. This theory offers an effective methodology for analyzing homoerotic tendencies in male bonds and the power of these bonds to exclude socially disadvantaged persons, such as women and homosexuals, to create and maintain a patriarchal society. In Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1985), Sedgwick develops Gayle Rubin’s concept of “male traffic in women”—“the use of women as exchangeable, perhaps symbolic, property for the primary purpose of cementing the bonds of men with men” (Sedgwick 25-26). Sedgwick develops it into the concept of male “homosocial” relation, identified as male bonding, which is cemented through the exchange of women between men and characterized by misogyny and homophobia.1 Rubin, a feminist, defines “a sex/gender system” as “a set of arrangements by which the biological raw material of human sex and procreation is shaped by human, social intervention and satisfied in a conventional manner” (32). She goes on to criticize Claude Lévi-Strauss’ anthropological 4 account of marriage—the “exchange of women”—as a vehicle for constructing and reinforcing a male coalition: “The total relationship of exchange which constitutes marriage is not established between a man and a woman, where each owes and receives something, but between two groups of men, and the woman figures only as one of the objects in the exchange, not as one of the partners between whom the exchange takes place” (Lévi-Strauss 115; Rubin quoted 37; Sedgwick Between quoted 26). Drawing upon Rubin’s criticism of Lévi-Strauss’s understanding of the “exchange of women,” Sedgwick offers analytical tools for examining male patriarchal groupings in light of men’s misogyny and homophobia. To parse the constitution of male bonding, Sedgwick also refers to René Girard’s concept of “the triangle of desire” in Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure (1961). By examining European classics, including Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, and Stendhal’s The Red and the Black, Girard argues that the subject desires the object through an imitation of a model that has

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