Title Passing into the Darkness : Sexuality, Race, and Integration of the Segregated in the Works of the Southern Renaissance Author(s) 松井, 美穂 Citation 北海道大学. 博士(文学) 甲第11178号 Issue Date 2014-03-25 DOI 10.14943/doctoral.k11178 Doc URL http://hdl.handle.net/2115/55346 Type theses (doctoral) File Information Miho_Matsui.pdf Instructions for use Hokkaido University Collection of Scholarly and Academic Papers : HUSCAP Passing into the Darkness: Sexuality, Race, and Integration of the Segregated in the Works of the Southern Renaissance by Miho Matsui CONTENTS Acknowledgements Introduction 1 Chapter I Sexualizing a Body, Passing as a Lady: Frances Newman’s The 20 Hard-Boiled Virgin and Julia Peterkin’s Scarlet Sister Mary 1. Katharine Faraday, a Black “White Southern Lady”: Frances Newman’s 24 The Hard-Boiled Virgin 2. Scarlet Mary, a White “Black Woman”: Julia Peterkin’s Scarlet Sister 46 Mary Chapter II Black Vision and Grotesque Whiteness: Reconsidering the Southern 64 Grotesque 1. Looking through the Grotesque: Short Stories of Julia Peterkin and 67 Eudora Welty 2. Who Is Tobe?: William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” 81 Chapter III The Sexuality, Masculinity, and Fragile Whiteness of Quentin 94 Compson in The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom! 1. The “Failed Champion of Dames”: Quentin in The Sound and the Fury 96 2. With “Garrulous Outraged Baffled Ghosts”: Quentin in Absalom, 109 Absalom! Chapter IV Crossing into Queer Whiteness: Carson McCullers’ Reflections in a 126 Golden Eye, The Member of the Wedding, and The Ballad of the Sad Café 1. Queering the Southern White Masculinity: Reflections in a Golden Eye 128 1.1 Captain Penderton: An Officer with a Delicate Masculine-Feminine 132 Balance 1.2 Anacleto: Grotesque Otherness that De/Constructs Difference 137 1.3 Alison/Anacleto: Subversive Assimilation 141 1.4 Golden Eyes: Penderton and Two Men as Racial Otherness 144 2. Taming of the Tomboy and Her Queer Resistance: The Member of the 151 Wedding 2.1 What Is Frankie Afraid of? 155 2.2 The Wedding: Normalizing a Tomboy 158 2.3 Fear of Sex, Fear of Marriage 162 2.4 Berenice with a Blue Glass Eye 167 2.5 End of Innocence and Awakening/Returning of Queer Desire 171 3. Queer Eyes: Cross-Gendering, Cross-Dressing, and Cross-Racing Miss 179 Amelia 3.1 Miss Amelia and the Gaze 184 3.2 Cross-Dressing Amelia / Cross-Dressing Narrator 191 3.3 Return of the Crossed/Queer Eyes 198 Conclusion: From Double Vision to Queer Vision 205 Notes 211 Works Cited 241 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First and foremost, I would like to express my sincerest gratitude to my advisor, Professor Eijun Senaha, for his patience, continuous guidance and helpful comments, which were necessary for the completion of my dissertation. He has been very supportive from the inception of the doctoral project, and with valuable advice, he has motivated me to continue my study. I would also like to thank the members of my thesis committee, Professors Yasuhiro Takeuchi and Hidemitsu Takahashi for their insightful comments and suggestions. I am thankful to the scholars and staff of Sapporo City University for their support and understanding. Above all, I am grateful to Professor Kayoko Machida who has always cheered me up with her warm words of encouragement. My sincere thanks go to the members of the Hokkaido American Literature Society. Stimulating and fruitful discussions with them were crucial to the completion of my thesis. I should mention Professor Sachiko Kamada, without whose friendship, support, and encouragement I would not be able to overcome difficulties to persevere with my study. I am also very grateful to Professor Emeritus of Hokkaido University, Atsushi Katayama, who led me to the study of American literature when I was an undergraduate student at Hokkaido University. Since then, he has provided me with tremendous support for my study. I would not have been an American literature scholar had I not met him. I wish to thank the former director of the Carson McCullers Center for Writers and Musicians, Professor Cathy Fussell. Cathy has been very helpful in giving me beneficial information and imparting knowledge about the American South. These interactions deepened my understanding of the South and provided me with inspiration for my study. Last but not the least, I would like to thank my family. My parents and sister provided me with warm encouragement and were willing to give me whatever help I needed. I cannot express how grateful I am to my husband and two daughters because they allowed me to spend a great deal of time on my research and encouraged me to pursue and complete my thesis. Their smiles and words were always emotionally supportive, particularly when I experienced difficulty in my study. I hereby dedicate this thesis to my mother who has always been my model of a working mother. Her way of life has made me who I am, and I hope she is proud of my achievement. Introduction During the Southern Renaissance, from the 1920s to the 1950s, when the policy of racial segregation was nearly universal in the South, certain white southern writers crossed racial boundaries into blackness in their literary efforts (or in their imaginations) and produced works through “double vision,” a vision that includes both white and black viewpoints.1 This vision penetrates the seemingly ordered surface of southern society and sometimes leads to grotesque representations of the South. In other words, white female and male writers, by embracing the racial Other’s viewpoint and committing racial transgression or passing, reveal that the society constructed by whites is merely fictional. When looking through the Other’s eyes, white society itself is distorted. At the same time, these writers who call into question the notion of whiteness seek “alternative” gender, sexual, and racial subjectivities. As a recent racial identity study has shown, cultural discrimination between whiteness and blackness in American society is a social construction. White people project negative thoughts or “undesirable qualities” (Entzminger 78), such as primitiveness, savageness, and promiscuity, onto their racial Others. Thus, blackness is not a representation of what black people really are, but rather of “what white is not” (Sturken and Cartwright 104) or, in other words, “the projection of the not-me” (Morrison, Playing 38).2 This view of racial identity enables the argument that being born 1 white does not ensure whiteness. For example, John N. Duvall notes racial ambiguity of former President Bill Clinton described in Toni Morrison’s essay: Years ago, in the middle of the Whitewater investigation, one heard the first murmurs: white skin notwithstanding, this is our first black President. Blacker than any actual black person who could ever be elected in our children’s lifetime. After all, Clinton displays almost every trope of blackness—single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonald’s-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas. (Morrison, “The Talk of the Town” 32) Using Duvall’s words, “[a]s President, Clinton projected a white face to America while performing cultural blackness” (Race x). Meanwhile, Duvall also argues that William Faulkner is “America’s first Black Nobel Laureate” because of the “whiteface minstrel” performance in his work (Race x). Faulkner creates “racially inverted white characters” in the form of “individual[s] who appear white even as [they] perform cultural blackness” (“Black Sexuality” 133).3 As Duvall argues, “white skin is insufficient to make a white Southerner” (Race xv), and “Caucasians as well as Negroes can perform blackness” (“Black Sexuality”135). This approach to determining whiteness and blackness based on performance has expanded the range of racial identities to be considered. The key element of the argument regarding 2 whiteness/blackness is sexuality. Sexuality has long played a critical role in the construction of racial and class identities, especially in the South. Southern sexual ideology, according to Anne Goodwyn Jones, emerged historically as “a sort of unhappy marriage between Victorianism and slavery” (“‘Like a Virgin’” 56). In the South, sex, sexuality, and sexual desire are allocated according to the color line. The myth of southern womanhood defines white middle- and upper-class women as embodiments of purity, as opposed to black women (and also lower-class white women), who are presented as being inherently sexual: “Sexuality was natural, even desired by black women, and unnatural (thus never officially desired) for white women” (A. Jones, “Women Writers” 277).4 Southern belles are supposed to lack sexual desire, and their sexuality is normative only when it is used for producing “a legitimate family line that is pure white” (A. Jones, “Women Writers” 281). The white southern woman is a “perpetuator of white superiority in legitimate line” (Cash 87) and a bastion against miscegenation, the southern white’s greatest fear. Thus, discrimination between the “asexual” female body and the “sexual” one creates southern whiteness, and in this regard, “the southern lady is at the core of a region’s self-definition” (A. Jones, Tomorrow 4). 5 As Diane Roberts points out, in southern culture, white and black women are represented in terms of the dichotomy between “high and low, pure and polluted, bodies,” and [t]his opposition became part of the ideology of slavery 3 itself: the sexual availability of slave women (who could not without danger refuse the Master), their ability to perform hard physical labour, their exposed bodies, their dark skin itself served to make the lady in the big house more ladylike: more untouchable, more angelic, more white. (Aunt Jemima 4; italics original) In the South, “[s]exuality itself is represented . as something black” (Roberts, Aunt Jemima 175), and this notion of “sexuality as black” is used to control the bodies of both white women and black people.6 Therefore, if white women have sexual desires and have sex outside of marriage, they transgress not only ethical but also racial boundaries.