Queer Visibility on the Transatlantic Modernist Stage
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© 2016 Ben De Witte ALL RIGHTS RESERVED QUEER VISIBILITY ON THE TRANSATLANTIC MODERNIST STAGE By BEN DE WITTE A dissertation submitted to the Graduate School-New Brunswick Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey In partial fulfillment of the requirements For the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Program in Comparative Literature Written under the direction of Elin Diamond And approved by ___________________________ ___________________________ ___________________________ ___________________________ ____________________________ New Brunswick, New Jersey October, 2016 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Queer Visibility on the Transatlantic Modernist Stage By BEN DE WITTE Dissertation Director: Elin Diamond My dissertation analyzes a selection of Argentinean, Spanish and U.S. modernist plays that dramatize the double movement of what I call “queer visibility.” That is, they make queer themes “visible” but also render the visible “queer” by extending our notions of modernist experimentation. Such experimentation, I argue, is intelligible only within a transatlantic history of, in Edward Said’s sense, “traveling” influences that have informed queer drama in the twentieth century. Each of the dissertation’s chapters offers a comparative angle on a playwright and their staging of queer materials, establishing surprising connections between various geographies and theatrical cultures. Chapter one analyzes the Argentinean José González Castillo’s naturalist play Los invertidos (1914), the first in its kind to plot the medical category “sexual inversion” as material for modern drama. González Castillo joins in the Argentinian vogue for realismo with its disjunctive relation to queer visibility, the latter a symptom of morbid degeneracy. Chapter two discusses the thoroughly anti-realist practices of queer staging in El público (1930), an unfinished, posthumously published play by Spanish poet-playwright Federico García Lorca, which imagines a paradoxical shape for queer visibility: “a theater beneath the sand” that draws on international vanguardist desires to offend rather than entertain ii audiences. The chapters on Los invertidos and El público present international models of queer visibility that cast new light on my two North American writers. Chapter three compares two works by the prominent U.S. playwright Tennessee Williams, the iconic Suddenly Last Summer (1957) and the little-known Kirche, Küche, Kinder (1979), that expose the mechanics of queer visibility as both perplexing and violent. Then I consider two understudied dramas of expatriate writer Djuna Barnes, the early one-act The Dove (1924) and the arcane verse drama The Antiphon (1957), which deploy a convoluted allegorical vision that projects an anti-modern strain in queer dramatic modernism. Combining formal analysis and historical research in each chapter, my comparative project aims, first, to theorize queer visibility as a recurrent theatrical problem grounded in material practices and, second, to contribute to a more nuanced and inclusive history of modern drama in conversation with transnational figurations of queer sexuality. iii ACKNOWLEGDMENT I would first of all like to express my gratitude to my committee members, Elin Diamond, for guiding me through the writing, and Andrew Parker and Ben. Sifuentes-Jáuregui for their support and advice. The dissertation owes a substantial intellectual debt to the wit, vision and teaching of each. Many thanks to my external readers, Jean Graham-Jones (CUNY Graduate Center) and Nick Salvato (Cornell), for joining the conversation at the defense. For financial support, which allowed me to study, write, and travel, I am grateful to the Rutgers Graduate School and to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. In addition, I would like to thank the Belgian American Educational Foundation (B.A.E.F.) for the generous fellowship that facilitated my decision to pursue graduate education in the United States. My especially heartfelt appreciation goes out to friends, back home and in the United States (you know who you are!), to my family (my parents, Jozef and Rita, my sisters Lies and Leen) and my partner João. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract of the Dissertation ii Acknowledgment iv Introduction 1 Chapter 1: Sexual Inverstion, Modern Drama and the Performance Genealogies of Queer Visibility in José Gonzalez Castillo’s Los invertidos 15 1.1 Queering the Bourgeoisie: Anarchist Upheavals in the Backward Past 20 1.2 Sexual Inversion, Genre and the Making of Queer Drama 31 1.3 Being/ Feeling Decadent: Modernity and the Symptom of Queer Visibility 46 Chapter 2: Queer Visibility in El público: To the Modern Theater with Federico García Lorca 61 2.1 Visual Disruptions in the Modernist Theater: The Mirror of the Audience 66 2.2 “Beneath the Sand”: The Mask of Queer Visibility 77 2.3 “Mud on the Mirrors:” Queer Visibility in the Ruins of Representation 84 2.4 Staging the “Impossible”? 97 v Chapter 3: Tennessee Williams’s Queer Scandals: The Al/luring Spetacles of Suddenly Last Summer and Kirche, Küche, Kinder 107 3.1 The Rethoric of Queer Scandal: Suddenly Last Summer 111 3.2 Queer Uses of Parody: Kirche, Küche, Kinder 131 Chapter 4: Djuna Barnes and the “Confusion that is Called Biography”: The Queer Modernist Theatricalities of The Dove and The Antiphon 151 4.1 Modernist Theatricality: The Dangerous Pleasures of The Dove 155 4.2 Allegorical Visions for a Backward Modernism: The Antiphon 170 Conclusion 197 Bibliography 205 vi 1 Introduction My dissertation “Queer Visibility on the Transatlantic Modernist Stage” investigates the transatlantic circulation of techniques for staging and performing queer plots and persons in modern drama. I argue that my playwrights – José González Castillo (1885-1937), Federico García Lorca (1898-1936), Tennessee Williams (1911-1983), and Djuna Barnes (1892-1982) – in their respective ways dramatize the double movement of what I call “queer visibility.” That is, they make queer themes “visible” but also render the visible “queer.” Simultaneously revealing and troubling, queer visibility extends the limits of modernist experimentation in heretofore unrecognized ways. Combining formal analysis and historical research my project aims, first to theorize queer visibility as a concept grounded in material theatrical practices and, second, to contribute to a more nuanced and inclusive history of modern drama, one that is both comparatist in methodology and international in scope. In line with a number of calls to increase awareness for the international dimension of modernism and its repercussions for theater and performance studies, one of the axiomatic assumptions of the dissertation is, in Edward Said’s words, that “Like people and schools of criticism, ideas and theories travel—from person to person, from situation to situation, from one period to another” (“Traveling Theory” 226).1 In each of the following chapters, I argue that the themes, techniques and sensibilities that inform queer visibility in my selected Argentinean, Spanish and U.S. plays point to a history of circulation and of—pace Said—“traveling” ideas on modern drama and queer sexuality. 2 Grouping these four self-consciously modernist playwrights is significant because it establishes unexpected connections between various geographies and theatrical cultures, and offers new angles on each author and their staging of queer materials. My dissertation thus incorporates a comparatist methodology that restores modern drama to its transatlantic contexts of circulation while acknowledging local concerns that shaped and altered its expressions. Queer visibility is the focal point of interest that emerges from this dynamic model of travel and adaptation. The dissertation inquires into the formal and historical conditions of queer-themed modern drama,2 and further claims that each playwright, in his or her respective manner, treats queer visibility as a problem for dramatic representation, modernist skepticism and avant-garde experimentation.3 Generally speaking, my project is embedded in, and further expands parameters set out by Heather Love in her discussion of “queer modernism” in a recent PMLA special issue on queer expression in Anglophone literary modernism.4 Love suggests that “what makes queer and modernism such a good fit is that the indeterminacy of queer seems to match the indeterminacy, expansiveness, and drift of the literary—particularly the experimental, oblique version most closely associated with modernist textual production” (“Modernism at Night” 745). “Critics,” she notes, “have long pointed out the pervasiveness of nonnormative desires in the making of the modern; queer, unlike gay or lesbian, is by definition generalizable and therefore apt to make the most of this atmosphere of permission” (744).5 However, calling attention in queer studies to “the effects of what has often been called the affective turn in a broader context,” Love also urges that such an atmosphere of “permission” and “indeterminacy,” however stimulating to the conversation, cannot lose sight of what queer scholarship has to offer: “not blank 3 indeterminacy” but contributions to “embodied knowledge and emotion, fantasy and confusion, identity and its effacement” (747). The turn to affect, she concludes, “may suggest a new scene for queer modernism: not the epistemology of the closet but an encounter with the illegible. Queer lives and queer feelings scribbled over but still just visible—you can half make them out in the dark” (747).6 The explicit connection Love establishes