Strange Dwellings: Inhabiting American Literary Modernism by Alexander John Eastwood A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English University of Toronto © Copyright by Alexander John Eastwood (2015) Strange Dwellings: Inhabiting American Literary Modernism Alexander Eastwood Doctor of Philosophy Department of English University of Toronto 2015 Abstract This dissertation probes the relationship between sexuality and the home in American literature from the early twentieth century, asserting forms of dwelling that challenge the values given to itinerancy and vagrancy in criticism on queer modernism. Within queer theory, which since its inception has prescribed an anti-social, anti-normative position, scholars have mined modernist texts for their transgressive potential. Indeed, modernist texts frequently exhibit precisely the qualities that American culture negatively associates with queerness: urbanism, exile, dislocation, disorientation, loss, and infertility. However, I argue that narratives of queerness that privilege anti-social behaviour risk occluding more granular discussions of the murky relationships that queer subjects have with ordinariness and normativity. The basic premise of “Strange Dwellings” is, therefore, that sexuality in American modernism indexes a range of concomitant concerns and anxieties, including a pervasive fascination with home. Affective ambivalence permeates many of the texts in this project, which simultaneously express profound nostalgia and strain toward new aesthetic, social, and political realities. While the home may find its form in the house, home is ultimately an affective state, I conclude, rather than a material space. I re-direct our attention to the ways in which modernist texts refuse to assimilate ii to traditional social and literary formations, and yet strive to recuperate and transform them. “Strange Dwellings” examines instantiations of the queer home in texts by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Wallace Thurman, Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Willa Cather, and James Agee. While my aims extend well beyond those of a revisionist project, I deliberately return to well-trodden critical ground in order to consider modernism’s fraught relationship to the peripatetic. Rather than pursuing questions of recovery or canonicity, I contend that the authors I take up envision their place within literary history by conceiving of place in physical terms. Just as their texts come to constitute forms of housing, writing serves as an act of homemaking. These authors mobilize form itself as a dwelling space, recasting the home as a site of endurance. In doing so, they treat writing as a practice with the capacity to aesthetically re-imagine the social. iii Acknowledgments I would like to express my deep appreciation to my Supervisor, Michael Cobb, for his generosity, his candid and supportive engagement with my work, and his utmost confidence in me. He has been a superb model of intellectual curiosity. I am also sincerely thankful to my committee members, Dana Seitler and Sarah Wilson, for their insights and encouragement at every step of this process. Many other teachers have played an important role in my doctoral education; I am indebted to Mari Ruti, Deidre Lynch, Scott Rayter, and Nick Mount. A dissertation is a labour of love that is many years in the making, and I wish to thank my friends and colleagues, academic and otherwise, for keeping me buoyant, especially Alpen Razi, Aaron Goldsman, Sean Starke, Talia Regan, Abi Dennis, Kyle Lasky, Jessica Haldane, Mackenzie Ogilvie, Kris Mielenhausen, Spencer Morrison, Eddie Kolla, Rebecca Reisler and Jackie Grandy. Tom Laughlin has been a continuously heartening presence, and I have benefited from his grounded perspective and his humour. Without the slightest embellishment, I honestly cannot fathom what the experience of writing this dissertation would have been like without the presence of my dear pal Simon Reader, whose astute grasp on the essence of the project has been enormously helpful and reassuring. I am grateful to the Social Sciences Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Ontario Graduate Scholarship program, as well as to the Department of English and the Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies at the University of Toronto for their financial support. A highlight of my graduate career was the magical summer I spent at Cornell participating in The School of Criticism and Theory. I wish to thank Amy Villarejo for her mentorship in our “Queer Technics” seminar, and the colleagues I befriended there, particularly Jonathan Mullins and Jacqueline Bialostozky. This past fall, the students in ENG434 “Jazz Age Modernism” helped iv reanimate for me, at a crucial time, texts that are by now well-trodden with originality and zeal. I am grateful to them, and to the many other students I have taught. It is my pleasure to thank my family, without whose unwavering support this dissertation surely would not exist. Their respect for my decision to pursue a doctorate and their strong belief in the value of the Humanities are not things I take for granted. I thank my parents, Robin Eastwood and Judith McCaffrey, for fostering my intellectual maturation and for never shying away from challenging dinner table debates. My siblings, Hugh Eastwood and Kirsten Eastwood, have been steadfast sources of inspiration, and my aunt, Margaret Sumadh, has provided me with much needed cheer. In the early years of the degree, I gained a second family, which continues to awe me with their extraordinary generosity. Words cannot fully express my gratitude to my in- laws, David Rounthwaite and Leith Hunter, who have provided me with loving guidance, and with shelter, in its many senses. Adair and Meredith Rounthwaite have kept me in good spirits throughout this journey. Finally, I take the greatest joy in thanking my wife, Hilary. Her tremendous patience and faith in me have been invaluable and unparalleled as I completed what at times felt like a Sisyphean task. Everyday she gifts me with a profound sense of home; my deepest love and respect are forever hers. v Table of Contents Acknowledgments.……………………………………………………………………………….iv Table of Contents…………………………………………………………………………………vi Introduction………………………………………………………………………………………..2 1 Gatsby’s Nostalgic Futurity……………………………………………………...............23 2 Settling Gertrude Stein…………………………………………………………………...58 3 Queer Harlem and the Poetics of Habitation…………………………………………….85 4 The House is an Archive: Let Us Now Praise Famous Men…………………...............124 5 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………...............164 Works Cited…………………………………………………………………………………….173 vi 1 We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time. T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets 2 Introduction “You are all a lost generation,” Gertrude Stein once famously remarked to Ernest Hemingway, and, in doing so, neatly summed up the sense of displacement that permeated the particular cultural moment we have come to refer to as high modernism.1 Stein’s comment also urges an important question: if Hemingway’s generation has been lost, then what would it mean for it to be found? History tells us that his generation did indeed suffer immense loss, but Stein uses “lost” here as an adjective, grammatically figuring Hemingway’s generation as a missing object that haunts the present only through its absence. According to Stein, the “lost generation” experiences an absent presence as both a subject that has lost, and as an object that has been lost. “Lost,” of course, also retains a different meaning, one that is rooted more in space than in time. To be “lost” is a form of phenomenological disorientation. Time is touted as modernism’s great fixation yet in the texts that I herein examine, time is often explored through space, or rendered secondary to it. This dissertation challenges the values given to itinerancy and vagrancy in modernism and queer theory, instead positing a notion of dwelling that may at first blush appear normative or even conservative but which in point of fact constitutes what I term recuperative sociality. Specifically, I probe the relationship between sexuality and the home in American literature from the early twentieth century, a period in which rapid socioeconomic, political, and technological changes were undermining the stability of the concept of home. While my aims extend well beyond those of a revisionist project, I am deliberately returning to well-trodden critical ground in order to consider what we have overlooked in our rush to champion the negative and the peripatetic. Rather than pursuing questions of recovery or canonicity, I contend that the authors I take up envision their place within literary history by 1 Hemingway attributes this line to Stein in his epigraph to The Sun Also Rises (Scribner, 2006). 3 conceiving of place in physical terms. Just as the text comes to constitute a form of housing, writing serves as an act of homemaking. Within queer theory, which since its inception has prescribed an anti-social, anti- normative position, scholars have mined modernist texts for their transgressive potential. Indeed, modernist texts frequently exhibit precisely the negative qualities that American culture associates with queerness: urbanism, exile, dislocation, disorientation, loss, and infertility. However, I argue that narratives of queerness that privilege abjection and transience