Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory

mitchell breitwieser

Pacific Speculations: Moby-Dick and Mana He had just come up from the South Seas with John LaFarge, who had reluctantly crawled away toward New York to resume the grinding routine of studio work at an age when life runs low. Adams would rather, as a choice, have gone back to the east, if it were only to sleep forever in the trade-winds under the southern stars, wandering over the dark purple ocean, with its purple sense of solitude and void. Not that he liked the sensation, but that it was the most unearthly that he had felt. —Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams

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h e n ry adams (though younger, and in

poorer accommodations), Herman Melville set out for the Pacific hoping for ease, pleasure, and relief from the demands of American life. But, though, like Adams, he found what he went looking for, the people there struck him as deeply odd, rather than congenial and familiar. Their peculiarity excited fear and revulsion, but interest as well, interest that prompted speculative curiosity concerning the constitutive patterns of their culture. Rather than a mirrored reverse of life in the United States, Melville came upon an independent social whole equipped with unanticipated resources. In this essay I will argue that his memory of this discovery may have asserted itself during the composition of Moby-Dick. Since much of what I will contend is speculative, I hope my readers will agree to consider themselves asked to entertain a possibility, rather than to swallow a fact. I hope in particular to suggest something about the origin of Ishmael’s attitude, an attitude that grows from both a strong identification with Ahab’s wounded outrage and a desire to hold that feeling at arm’s length in order to stymie or at least retard its disastrous issue. “In the Arizona Quarterly Volume 67, Number 1, Spring 2011 Copyright © 2011 by Arizona Board of Regents issn 0004-1610



Mitchell Breitwieser

Louvre,” William James writes, “there is a picture by Guido Reni, of St. Michael with his foot on Satan’s neck. The richness of the picture is in large part due to the fiend’s figure being there. The richness of its allegorical meaning also is due to his being there, that is, the world is all the richer for having a devil in it, so long as we keep a foot upon his neck”(Varieties 49–50).1 The fiend, here, “the negative or tragic principle,” enriches life so long as it is managed, rather than extirpated, as Ahab would do if such were doable. And whatever it is that Ishmael manages, and however it is that he does it, this capacity to manage, or desire to manage, or will to manage, this is what is lost, relinquished or transcended as Melville moves on to Pierre, a book which does not manage as Moby-Dick manages, or does not manage at all. According to Charles Feidelson, “Ishmael is the binder of Moby-Dick; he keeps the book from disintegrating in the furnace of Ahab’s despair” (184) but in the writing of Pierre “Ahab supplants Ishmael within [Melville]” (206). Pierre is afflicted by “infinite regress,” “bankruptcy” (199), the creation of a writer who is “contemptuous of literary form in general” (201). Like his protagonist, Pierre’s Melville “achieves nothing positive and yet destroys all human scales of measure” (203). Lewis Mumford agrees: “[in writing Pierre], Melville had lost the power to fuse these discordant elements, to reject what could not be fully absorbed: he was at the mercy of his material. All that lives with a vital unity in MobyDick has become a corpse in Pierre: there is life in the dead members, but it does not pertain to the body as a whole. The fragments of Pierre are sometimes marvelous, as the broken leg or arm of a great sculpture may be: but the whole is lost” (206). Much subsequent criticism challenges Mumford’s assumptions that Moby-Dick is whole rather than fragmentary and that fragmentation signals aesthetic failure. But the sense that fragmentation is different in Pierre, that the book succumbs to it, persists, even as, for some, this change indicates an advance on Melville’s part. Here is Edgar A. Dryden’s version of what happened: As the troubling eccentricities of Pierre suggest, the creative tensions of Moby-Dick are not easily sustained. The chapter called “The End,” in the later novel, offers an illuminating contrast to Moby-Dick’s Epilogue, for it dramatizes Melville’s discovery that Ishmael’s voice is a figure that disguises a muteness. Here the eponymous hero, his own “vile book” unfin-



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ished, and having “extinguished his house in slaughtering the only unoutlawed human being by the name of Glendinning,” sits alone in his dungeon and speculates on the meaning of his shattered life . . . . Here as in Moby-Dick the “curtain . . . falls upon a corpse,” but in this case there is no “great shroud of the sea” to provide a decent burial, and no resurrected “I” with the power of naming and speaking. Of course we know only the assumed name of Moby-Dick’s storyteller, but it is one richly allusive and suggestive. By the end of Pierre, however, the hero’s family name has been extirpated and his given name reduced to its literal meaning, as his corpse is figuratively transformed into a silent, stony ruin, “arbored in ebon vines.” (21–22) But if Melville ultimately decided that Ishmael’s stylistic demeanor, “disguising a muteness,” was the latest in an interminable series of mystifications or masquerades rather than an escape from the series, Ishmael nonetheless managed to get some good work done before Melville revoked his artistic license, and he might be imagined to have been more satisfied with that than his restless maker proved to be. In what follows I will continue to prefer the notion of managing when describing Ishmael’s style, rather than Mumford’s “power to fuse,” or similar terms such as artistic control, because managing suggests something more like getting by, or having the wiles to persist in an imperfectly comprehended and imperfectly responsive environment, neither surrendering nor triumphing, getting on or getting by in the company of his memories of poor Pip and poor Ahab. Managing is perhaps akin to what Dryden calls creative tension, though I might refer instead to creativity in and despite tense circumstances, a knack he may have acquired in Polynesia.

Melville used his encounter with Polynesian culture as the basis for his first book, Typee, a fictionalized rendition of the six weeks he spent as the unwilling guest of the Typee people on the island of Nukuhiva. The book, written from what T. Walter Herbert calls a “beachcomber perspective” (Marquesan Encounters 152), includes a rich record of Polynesian cultural practices, including language, sexuality, familiality, industry, diet, religion, architecture, gender, mourning, government and music. The motivation for the narrator Tommo’s ethnography,



Mitchell Breitwieser

however, is not, primarily, scientific curiosity, but rather concern for his own well-being. Congenial as the Typees seem to him, their intentions remain obscure, concealed deep within the peculiarity of their manner of acting. Typee might usefully be held up alongside captivity narratives, because, like Mary White Rowlandson, for instance, Tommo suspects that his survival may depend upon his ability to parse his hosts’ odd ways. Because he cannot discern the other culture’s foundational rationale, he is confined to outsider investigation, a close observation of all facts, no matter how minute, because one cannot know in advance which are another culture’s significant artifacts; and to speculations about patterns and regularities. If ethnology arose because the outward expansion of European power made the question of other cultures inescapable, Tommo’s inquiry, like Rowlandson’s, recapitulates in miniature the origin of the discipline. Melville again dramatized such worried exegesis in the early pages of Moby-Dick, where Ishmael nervously scans Queequeg in an attempt to adjust himself to the successive shocks of his unrequested roommate’s strange and possibly sinister behavior. Unlike Tommo, though, Ishmael does not flee from the encounter, but rather, eventually, finds friendliness in bemused acceptance: the ways of the other are no more bizarre than one’s own, they only happen to be less familiar; and the familiarity of one’s own ways, therefore, conversely, does not ensure that they are not bizarre. Ishmael is helped to this affable outcome by the fact that he is already well along in viewing his own culture as non-benevolent when he meets Queequeg: naming himself after the inconvenient son who had been excluded at the foundation of Abraham’s line, he considers himself culturally dislodged before he comes to the alien encounter and implies that his aptitude for open response is a consequence of a prior disturbance that taught him not to be quick in reaction to the stranger. Ishmael is taciturn about what puts the November into his soul, but Redburn, a prototype in Melville’s previous novel, offers biographical details that echo the great shock and subsequent disappointments that fell upon Melville after his father’s death in January, 1832, as a consequence of exposure, exhaustion, and hyperexcitation that brought Allan Melvill to the verge of lunacy in his last days. In the months that followed, the survivors learned that he had gambled wildly in business, maintaining the family’s lifestyle and social status by means of a debt that had grown to exceed their assets, with the result that the terror and



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grief of his dying were augmented by the realization that the life that was to come would differ greatly and for the worse from the life that they had come to expect a smaller house, poorer circumstances, the sons having to devote their lives to supporting the family, a struggle, especially after the onset of the 1837 depression. The surviving Melvills, or Herman and his mother at least, seem to have been singularly unequipped to assimilate the disaster, in part, perhaps, because the first rumblings of what would culminate in the crash of 1837 had not yet begun when the father died, so their devastation in the midst of general prosperity may have left them feeling Ishmaelean, outcast. Melville’s choice of an Old Testament figure to emblematize misfortune indicates additionally the role that religion must have played in their attempt to understand what had happened to them. Both of Melville’s parents’ families had been prominent and well-to-do since the previous century, and there was an expectation of privilege and distinction fortified by a sense of divine entitlement. “During the happy and prosperous years in New York,” according to T. Walter Herbert, “there was no reason for Allan Melvill’s authority to lose its grip. His business successes provided a solid basis for the piety of family pride . . . . The Melvills worshipped a God who ‘orders all for our Good and will not afflict willingly, nor Grieve the Children of Men’” (43). Maria, Melville’s mother, turned to her faith for solace after the family crash, but its comfort must have been cold: scrupulous in its loyalty to the tradition of Dutch Calvinism as codified at the Synod of Dort in 1619, the Reformed Dutch Church in America upheld the doctrine of predestination and the concomitant tendencies toward notions of visible spiritual aristocracy and sacralized social institutions. By the 1830s, the members of the Reformed Dutch Church, while maintaining their Calvinism, were relinquishing Dutchness and becoming enthusiastically patriotic, affirming the United States as a new Zion, and the Americans as a chosen people. The communicants in the Reformed Dutch Church, therefore, did not Americanize Calvinism, but rather they re-Calvinized Americanism, viewing nineteenth century America as a final realization of the Calvinist spirit as Ernst Troeltsch describes it: Since the Calvinistic idea of God is in many ways similar to the Idea of Jahweh whose Being is Will, the necessities of practical life led to an increasing use of the Old Testament . . . . This



Mitchell Breitwieser development, however, meant that the Calvinistic Theocracy became a Divine covenant with the Church upon the basis of revelation, in which the State is to serve the Church after the manner of the Kings of Israel, and in which public life is controlled by the pastors after the manner of the Prophets. Thus we may sum up the Gospel of Calvin in the following terms: a new Israel has been born, a new holy city has been founded, established upon the Divine Law, which has been deepened by the spirit of the New Testament, directed by the Will and the Grace of God, which deals out punishments and rewards, elected to be the organ for the glorification of Christ, the Godman, in whom the hidden electing will has become flesh, with power to create the community of the Church. (586)

Herbert contends that Allan Melvill’s faith was more liberal than Maria’s, but by this he means that Allan was more willing to entertain the conviction that divine blessing is deserved, rather than predetermined, so cold comfort here as well. Importantly, though, Melville seems not to have been much tempted by the conclusion that either view would have proposed, that his was a reprobate family. Like the Ishmael of Genesis, they had done nothing wrong, only been found wrong, inopportune, by an arbitrary power advancing the cause of His or Its own lineage. According to Herbert, the young Melville “found himself incapable of seeing moral experience intelligibly in theocentric terms. This disaster provided the impetus and the themes for an endless round of agonized meditations in Melville’s adult life” (Moby-Dick and Calvinism 45). The litter of Melville’s ruined Calvinism is strewn across MobyDick in a welter of Old Testament citation—Ishmael, Elijah, Ahab, Jonah, Rachel—but that faith is voiced in more intact form in the earlier works. White-Jacket and Redburn, young men struggling to maintain their social faith through grim experience, both express a euphoric American typology, likening the U.S. to a new Israel, superior to the old one. . . . we Americans are the peculiar, chosen people—the Israel of our time; we bear the ark of the liberties of the world. Seventy years ago we escaped from thrall; and, besides our first birthright—embracing one continent of earth—God has given to



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us, for a future inheritance, the broad domains of the political pagans, that shall yet come and lie down under the shade of our ark, without bloody hands being lifted. God has predestinated, mankind expects, great things from our race; and great things we feel in our souls. The rest of the nations must soon be in our rear. We are the pioneers of the world; the advance-guard, sent on through the wilderness of untried things, to break a new path in the New World that is ours. (White-Jacket 151) But the two young narrators’ affirmations are nervous and defensive, over-amplified to drown out dark suspicions concerning the real drift of things. By thus highlighting and ironically dramatizing Calvinistic spiritual nationalism, Melville confessed that his father’s death had cost him not just a social and monetary patrimony, but also the ability to regard American life as a full expression of God’s deep intent, a loss that helps explain the persistent intertwining of politics and metaphysics in his work. From William Bradford through Henry Adams, those who have savored the fruits of such a worldview when times were stable and good have been incapacitated and thrown into silence or irony when they went bad. For such Americans, personal disappointment precipitates ontological crisis because one’s life had been thought to partake of, to be featured in, the vast drama.

The great shock of his young life helps to explain the strength of Melville’s interest in Polynesian religion, particularly in its manner of assisting in the response to unintelligible experience, something that Calvinism had turned out not to be able to do very well. In Chapter 24 of Typee, Tommo repeatedly asserts his inability to comprehend the local religion: “Although I had been baffled in my attempts to learn the origin of the Feast of the Calabashes” (169); “For my own part, I am free to confess my almost entire inability to gratify any curiosity that may be felt with regard to the theology of the valley” (177); But in sober seriousness, I hardly knew what to make of the religion of the valley. There was nothing that so much perplexed the illustrious Cook, in his intercourse with the South Sea islanders, as their sacred rites. Although the prince of navigators was in many instances assisted by interpreters in



Mitchell Breitwieser the prosecution of his researches, he still frankly acknowledges that he was at a loss to obtain anything like a clear insight into the puzzling arcana of their faith. A similar admission has been made by other eminent voyagers: by Carteret, Byron, Kotzebue, and Vancouver. (176–77)

If he is obtuse, Tommo asserts, obtuseness in these matters is general, rather than particular to him. Tommo returns so often to this feeling of stupidity that it becomes a motif, suggesting that Melville wants some air between his narrator and himself. Tommo is especially emphatic about the unintelligibility of the practice of taboo: “At last he entered into a long, and I have no doubt a very learned and eloquent exposition of the history and nature of the ‘taboo’ as affecting this particular case; employing a variety of most extraordinary words, which, from their amazing length and sonorousness, I have every reason to believe were of a theological nature. But all that he said failed to convince me: partly, perhaps, because I could not comprehend a word that he uttered” (132–33). Though, as Alex Calder remarks, Tommo experiences taboo as “a network of individual trip wires whose location is revealed, as Tommo says, ‘by a variety of gestures and the eloquent expression of the countenance’” (225), he remains oblivious to its motivation: There is a marked similarity, almost an identity, between the religious institutions of most of the Polynesian islands, and in and in all exists the mysterious ‘Taboo’, restricted in its uses to a greater or less extent. So strange and complex in its arrangements is this remarkable system, that I have in several cases met with individuals who, after residing for years among the islands in the Pacific, and acquiring a considerable knowledge of the language, have nevertheless been altogether unable to give any satisfactory account of its operations. Situated as I was in the Typee valley, I perceived every hour the effects of this all-controlling power, without in the least comprehending it. Those effects were, indeed, wide-spread and universal, pervading the most important as well as the minutest transactions of life. The savage, in short, lives in the continual observance of its dictates, which guide and control every action of his being. (Typee 221)



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Melville’s preface to Typee, however, notes that Tommo, “in describing their customs, refrains in most cases from entering into explanations concerning their origin and purposes” (xiii, emphasis added). Though Tommo says he has no such explanations, the author of the preface seems to think differently. Tommo’s deep interest in taboo, if not his analytical reluctance, was a motif in narratives of Pacific cultural encounter. As Calder argues, “in the years following the publication of James Cook’s third voyage, anyone who had anything to say about Polynesia had something to say about taboo” (27). For example, in A Visit to the South Seas, one of the texts from which Melville drew material for Typee, C. S. Stewart argued that taboo was a means of enforcing gender protocols: The whole population is divided into two classes: the common and the tabu. The common class embraces all of the female sex, at every rank and station, and all men engaged in their immediate service as attendants. It also includes such of the male sex, as engage in the public songs and dances, at their places of amusement: by which it would seem that the occupation among them is looked upon as effeminate and degrading. All other men belong to the general tabu class. (216) Three pages later, however, the motives for individual instances of taboo have come to seem “arbitrary,” “unmeaning,” and “capricious.” Now, the system as a whole functions as a sort of deranged copy of Calvin’s Providence, supplying a feeling of intelligibility and moral consequence to the turn of events: It would appear that the observance of these arbitrary superstitions, constitutes the principal rule of right and wrong in the nation, and is the regulator of their consciences, and chief law of the people. Instead of imputing the calamities of life to the vices and moral enormities of which they are guilty, diseases and death, famine and war, and every desolating dispensation of Providence, are interpreted by them, into just retributions for the violation or neglect of the unmeaning prohibitions and capricious demands of the tabu. (219)

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Lacking the only true means of explaining misery’s onset, even needing to avoid knowledge because it would condemn them, the Polynesians nevertheless require some schematization of things, and they have therefore devised a catalog of infractions, a preposterous one, but one which nevertheless does some work by imparting a feeling of connection between transgression and mishap that helps to hold things together socially. Stewart’s two theories are strikingly divergent: he seems to have forgotten gender segregation by the end of one page, and started from scratch with moral economy on the next. Or perhaps he recalled a number of instances of taboo that did not seem to have much to do with gender, so he shifted his analytic attention from individual instances to overall system: such abrupt volteface—also prominent in Typee—is produced when the object of attention exceeds the paradigm by which it was to have been subsumed, requiring the generation of a second paradigm with, it is hoped, greater explanatory power. Something similar happens when Robert Louis Stevenson writes about taboo in the 1890s. Stevenson was an avid reader of Melville, whom he once referred to as a “howling cheese” (a term of praise, I gather), so his remarks on taboo may even be intended as a resolution of Tommo’s perplexity. Citing two occasions when a necessary food-source was endangered, devil-fish that had grown scarce upon a reef, and cocopalms that were suffering because too many green nuts had been picked, Stevenson notes that taboos were declared on those foods, allowing replenishment. Additionally, taboo “serves to enforce, in the rare case of some one wishing to enforce them, rights of private property.” Taboo is in such cases “the instrument of wise and needful restrictions,” an “organ of parental government,” a means to “thoroughly sensible ends” (39–40). Though it is true that Polynesians are irrationally afraid of the consequences of transgression, this irrationality is a functional part of a rational system because transgression sickens the superstitious perpetrator, thereby removing the need for external enforcement. Superstition even helps with detection, because if someone gets sick, it’s a sign that he has transgressed, so he only needs to be asked which taboo he has broken, since his body has already confessed. Taboo, for Stevenson, is agile in its redirection of irrationality to rational ends, Benjamin Franklin’s art.



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Most of the time. For Stevenson, as for Stewart, there is a leftover, a number of taboos that don’t fit, and that require a second analytic container: It will be observed with surprise that both these tapus [on scarce foods] are for thoroughly sensible ends. With surprise, I say, because the nature of that institution is much misunderstood in Europe. It is taken usually in the sense of a meaningless or wanton prohibition, such as that which today prevents women in some countries from smoking, or yesterday prevented anyone in Scotland from taking a walk on Sunday. The Polynesians have not been trained in the bracing, practical thought of ancient Rome; with them the idea of law has not been disengaged from that of morals or propriety; so that tapu has to cover the entire field, and implies indifferently that an act is criminal, immoral, against sound public policy, unbecoming or (as we say) “not in good form.” Many tapus were in consequence absurd enough, such as those which deleted words out of the language, and particularly those which related to women. Tapu encircled women upon all hands. They must not sit on the paepae; they must not go up to it by the stair; they must not eat pork; they must not approach a boat; they must not cook at a fire which any male had kindled. The other day, after the roads were made, it was observed the women plunged along the margin through the bush, and when they came to a bridge waded through the water: roads and bridges were the works of men’s hands, and tapu for the foot of women. Even a man’s saddle, if the man be native, is a thing no self-respecting lady dares to use. Thus on the Anaho side of the island [of Nuka-hiva], only two white men, Mr. Regler and the gendarme, M. Aussel, possess saddles; and when a woman has a journey to make she must borrow from one or the other. It will be noticed that these prohibitions tend, most of them, to an increased reserve between the sexes. (39) There are thus two clusters, one having to do with the rational stewardship of resources and property, the other having to do with the irrational and customary maintenance of gender roles. Like Stewart and Stevenson, Melville noticed that gender was a key concern, and con-

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temporary ethnology has agreed. But we must notice that Stevenson has no uniform theory of taboo per se, but rather two theories. To suit two kinds of taboos, he might say, but that’s not quite right: “most” of the irrational prohibitions tend to segregate the sexes, but not all of them; the deletion of words, for example, seems not to have had much to do with gender. The protocols of gender, though perhaps the largest, are still only a subset of legalized customs and fashions, an aggregate of miscellaneous interdictions serving a heterogeneous array of obscure and in many cases long-forgotten social purposes, an array that will necessarily exceed functionalist analysis. For Stevenson as for Stewart, the practice of taboo overwhelms the paradigms brought to bear on it, inducing a succession or oscillation of incompatible takes, an ongoing frustration rather than an adequate explanation. So, Tommo’s decision to throw up his hands may be a happy one. Charles Roberts Anderson commends Melville for having “had the wisdom to pass by the pat and often facetious explanations suggested by [the authors he drew upon in writing Typee, including Stewart], remarking unpretentiously that he did not in the least comprehend the system.” Confronted by “the perplexing and complex system of tapu, which, enjoying the authority of a religious institution, apparently regulated the minutest as well as the most important transactions of their lives,” Melville confessed his bafflement: “although his list of the persons, things, and situations to which it applied is perhaps more complete than any single one of his predecessors, the shortcomings of his account of the system is precisely theirs: an inability to explain its origins or purposes”(166–67). By contrast with other accounts of taboo, Tommo’s decision to not even try to explain seems prominent because exceptional. But, again, this prominence may be Melville’s way of indicating something about Tommo, rather than Melville’s last word on taboo. Some sense of Melville’s own thoughts on the matter might emerge from Anderson’s remark on the length of Tommo’s list of the persons, things, and situations to which taboo is applied. For both Stewart and Stevenson, the lengthening of the list jeopardized the theory; once Stewart began to recall taboos that didn’t have much to do with gender, or Stevenson began to recall taboos that didn’t have much to do with resource management, a scramble started, to devise either a replacement or a supplemental backup. By extending the list, Melville may



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well have meant to aggravate puzzlement, but he may also have meant to demonstrate that taboo was not bound to some segment of Marquesan experience—gender, diet, language, class, architecture, animal and vegetable life, dress, grief, the passage through adolescence—but rather that it concerned itself with all of these, that it was about order per se, rather than about any of the particular aspects of order. Taboo is “wide-spread and universal, pervading the most important as well as the minutest transactions of life,” as Tommo remarks, because order is an issue everywhere. In this he echoes David Darling, an English missionary writing in 1835, for whom “Satan’s strong hold in all the Marquesas Islands” results from the lamentable fact that “almost every thing has a tapu attached to it less or more.” The variety of taboo is great: “Almost all things have tapu about them: such as the building of a house; the learning of a song or tradition; the getting of a body tatood or marked with the tatau &c.” He adduces a number of taboos having to do with gender, but does not conclude that tabooing is at bottom about gender, because other taboos were affixed to ceremony, the gods, rank, birth and death (236–37). Though Darling’s list is as long and heterogeneous as Tommo’s, he’s more willing to venture a theory: “The Tapu is the making of a thing or a person sacred, or separating them from another thing or person, a prohibition, the breaking of which is often punished with death, but sometimes only with disease according to the natives account” (236). This speculation anticipates what has become the predominant way of understanding taboo. Roger M. Keesing, for instance, discussing “abu,” the Solomon Islands equivalent to taboo, sees it as a system of “invisible boundaries” that declare disturbing entities “off-limits,” thereby maintaining “underlying symbolic structures” (61–65). Taboo originates in the need to secure the border between the ordinary human world and the metaphysical realm that surrounds it, according to E. S. Craighill Handy, an early twentieth century ethnologist who did pioneering work in Polynesia: “In its fundamental meaning tapu as a word was used primarily as an adjective and as such signified that which was psychically dangerous, hence restricted, forbidden, set apart, to be avoided, because (a) divine, thereby requiring isolation for its own sake from both the common and the corrupt; (b) corrupt, hence dangerous to the common and the divine, therefore requiring isolation from both for their own sakes” (43). Handy contends that Polynesian thought about cosmic

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matters was dualistic, dividing existence between “the male procreative mana at work in creation [that is associated with] the idea of light and with the sky, the visible embodiment of light and at the same time the symbol of nature’s superior aspect, and . . . the opposed but complementary darkness which is female” (35). “The word mana,” Handy writes, “referred to the manifestation of [the psychic dynamism] of nature, when its dynamism was centered in or focused through specific gods, spirits, individuals, rites or objects. Mana was exhibited in persons, in power, strength, prestige, reputation, skill, dynamic personality, intelligence; in things, in efficacy, in ‘luck’; that is in accomplishment. These qualities were not mana; they were the evidences of mana, which was itself but the focusing and transmission of the potency of nature” (26). Mana-bearing entities were protected from both the common and the metaphysically corrupt by “consecrational” taboos (45). The sacred and the common were both protected from the metaphysically corrupt— darkness, death, the earth, woman—by “the tapu of unsacredness” (47). Taboos are thus for Handy of two sorts, as they were for Stewart and Stevenson, but they have a common rationale, the segregation of metaphysical realms. The “consecrational taboo” would seem equivalent to prohibitions in any religion concerned with protecting holiness from the world, “requiring,” as Handy put it, “isolation for its own sake from both the common and the corrupt.” But Handy’s next sentence, seemingly intended as an expansive restatement, in fact proposes a quite different theory: “What is spoken of as the ‘common’ needing protection from both divine and inferior aspects of nature, represents the common ground of human beings and natural objects, where superior and inferior united in a balanced equilibrium. It should be noted that the dualism which was the basis of tapu was a theory not of opposition, but of balance and complement which made up a unity. Any disturbance of this equilibrium in an individual, either by a surcharge of mana or by a loss of his natural endowment of mana, affected him disastrously” (43). In this second formulation, the “divine” no longer needs protection against the “common,” but rather the “common” needs to be protected from a “surcharge of mana.” Using electricity as an illustrative symbol for mana, Handy contends that the common person, “unsuited as a transmitter or container, was subject to various injurious effects as a result of the overload or surcharge. Hence the necessity for insulation



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of the transmitter and reservoir (the sacred chief or priest, for example) for his own protection and that of the higher mediums with which he was in contact (the gods), and for the protection of others; by means of tapu designed to protect direct contact, or indirect contact through the medium of food, clothing or other conductors; and hence also various rites designed to relieve the commoner of a surcharge of mana, and to restore it to its rightful owner” (28). The commoners continue to be concerned about the well-being of the divine, but they are concerned for their own well-being as well, worrying over two sorts of metaphysical intrusion, divinity and abomination, both of which endanger the security of ordinariness. In his Journal of a Cruise Among the Islands of the Western Pacific (1853), Captain John Elphinstone Erskine offers an example of taboo as a way of protecting the common from a surcharge of the sacred: “the most absurd application [of taboo] (which I never had the opportunity of witnessing) is described to be that laid on the hands of a man who has touched either the head of a living chief or the body of a dead one, by which the tabued person is prevented from handling his food, and must be fed by another” (254). Marcel Mauss denies that taboo is directed toward two separate and opposed intruders into the common world: “all taboo objects must contain mana” (137). But Mauss does not thereby dispute the existence of abomination taboos. Rather, he contends that the sacred is “a species of the genus mana,” that “the idea of mana [is] more general than that of the sacred” (146). This statement, however, implies a differentiability of distinct types within mana, a possibility at odds with Mauss’s general line of assertion, that mana confutes categorization. It “confus[es] actor, rite and object.” “It is obscure and vague, yet the use to which it is put is curiously definite. It is abstract and general, yet quite concrete. Its primitive nature—that is, its complexity and confusion—resists any attempt at a logical analysis, and we must remain content to describe the phenomenon” (134). “The idea is too general and too vague, too concrete, covering so many things that it is only with difficulty that we can begin to understand it” (129). It encompasses both the powers of life and growth, but also the illness afflicting the sick person and the piece of bone from a dead man that is incorporated into the shaft of an arrow. Even the magical power of women and menstruation seems to be an aspect of mana, rather than its contrary. It is “a kind of ether, imponderable, communicable, which spreads of its own accord” (138).

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In “The Science of the Concrete,” Claude Levi-Strauss, echoing Stewart’s notion of tabu as a useful cosmological schematization, contends that those people formerly known as primitive attempt to construct a general taxonomy of the things in their world as a way of establishing a feeling for its intelligibility: “animals and plants are not known as a result of their usefulness; they are deemed to be useful or interesting because they are first of all known.” Classification is not aimed at immediate practical result: “science of this kind can scarcely be of much practical effect. The answer to this is that its main purpose is not a practical one. It meets intellectual requirements rather than or instead of satisfying needs.” The question guiding their labor is “whether some initial order can be introduced into the universe by means of these groupings. Classifying, as opposed to not classifying, has a value of its own, whatever form the classification may take.” This work is considered essential: “A native thinker makes the penetrating comment that ‘All sacred things have their place.’ . . . It could even be said that being in their place is what makes them sacred for if they were taken out of their place, even in thought, the entire order of the universe would be destroyed. Sacred objects therefore contribute to the maintenance of order in the universe by occupying the places allocated to them” (Savage 9, 10). The primary yield of this science of the concrete is not whatever useful discovery concerning whatever plant or animal might happen to emerge, but the establishment of the intelligibility of the universe as a functional postulate that, Levi-Strauss contends, is a necessary condition for the subsequent development of what we commonly mean by science. As William James might put it: “‘That there is more order in the world than appears at first sight is not discovered till the order is looked for,” until people are excited by a “conscious wish to find realized throughout the entire phenomenal world those rational continuities, uniformities and necessities which are the fundamental element and guiding principle of [their] own thought’” (“Necessary” 91). The tabooed entities cited in Typee uniformly decline to occupy readied locations. They are offenses against category, menstruating women in canoes, animals from off the island, undistributed fish, mediators, interpreters, dead bodies, young men being tattooed, and Tommo himself. (The taboo on “certain parts of the valley during the continuance of a shower” remains enigmatic to me) (Typee 221–25). For James, “exception has a peculiar fascination: it is a subject of astonishment, . . .



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the credulity with which in this first stage of pure association we adopt our supposed rules is matched by the equal credulity with which we adopt the miracles that interfere with them” (“Necessary” 91); “every science confesses . . . that the subtlety of nature flies beyond it, and that its formulas are but approximations. Philosophy lives in words, but truth and fact well up into our lives in ways that exceed verbal formulation. There is in the living act of perception always something that glimmers and twinkles and will not be caught, and for which reflection comes too late” (Varieties 456–57). In “The Science of the Concrete,” Levi-Strauss is returning to issues raised twelve years before in his Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss, the final section of which is dedicated to explaining the way in which the scientists of the concrete cope with the threat of the exception. Their world having been identified as universally significant, they find themselves coming across signifiers, meaning-potencies, lacking signifieds, clear meanings, to which the signifieds can be affixed: . . . man has from the start had at his disposition a signifiertotality which he is at a loss to know how to allocate to a signified, given as such, but no less unknown for being given. There is always a non-equivalence or “inadequation” between the two, a non-fit and overspill which divine understanding alone can soak up; this generates a signifier-surfeit relative to the signifieds to which it can be fitted. So, in man’s effort to understand the world, he always disposes of a surplus of signification . . . . (62) Levi-Strauss’s terminology may be confusing. In Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics, “signifier” refers to spoken or written words or visible images intended to correspond to mental concepts of actual things, which are called “signifieds” (67). A sign, according to Saussure, is the conjunction of the two. Levi-Strauss’s reference to a surfeit of signifiers therefore seems to suggest an excess of words or images, and a shortage of concepts to which they might be affixed. Oftentimes, though this is not what Saussure intended, signified is taken to mean, the thing to which the signifier refers, rather than to the concept of a thing to which the signifier refers, so that the notion of signifier surfeit might seem to suggest that the scientist of the concrete suffers from too

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many words for the things at hand. For Andrew Cutrofello, for example, the “inadequation between signifier and signified” is an inadequation between “language and world” (142). But in his essay on Mauss LeviStrauss plainly means that the scientist of the concrete suffers from too many things, rather than too many linguistic artifacts. For example, he quotes a remark from Mauss concerning the Algonquian word Manitou, which Levi-Strauss finds to be roughly equivalent to mana: “‘It more particularly designates any being which does not yet have a common name; of a salamander, a woman said she was afraid: it was a manitou; people laughed at her, telling her the name salamander.’” Levi-Strauss also cites the word atásu, in use among the Brazilian Nambikwara, and claims that it is another analogue to mana, noting that they applied it to oxen, which they had not seen before 1915 (54). In both cases, an excess of thing and a shortage of word, he continues: These assimilations [of unknown things to a general containing category] are not so extraordinary; we do the same type of assimilating, doubtless more guardedly, when we qualify an unknown object, or one whose function is unclear, or whose effectiveness amazes us, by the French terms truc or machin. Behind machin is machine, and, further back, the idea of force or power. As for truc, the etymologists derive it from a medieval term which signifies the lucky move in games of skill or chance, that is, one of the precise meanings given to the Indonesian term in which some see the origin of the word mana. (54–55) The solution is to think of Levi-Strauss as a free indirect narrator expressing the world-view he is describing, one in which every thing is a signifier, a meaning-signaling entity, potentially corresponding to a location in a system of classification, a signified. Levi-Strauss’s scientists live amid something akin to what Michel Foucault called “the prose of the world”: “The universe was folded in upon itself: the earth echoing the sky, faces seeing themselves reflected in the stars, and plants holding within their stems the secrets that were of use to man” (17). “There is no difference between the visible marks that God has stamped upon the surface of the earth, so that we may know its inner secrets, and the legible words of the Scriptures, or the sages of Antiquity, have set down in the books preserved for us by tradition. The relation to these texts is of the same nature as the relations to things: in both cases there



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are signs that must be discovered” (33). In such a cultural universe, Levi-Strauss contends, signifiers are not primarily human artifacts but rather forceful objects signifying locations in a human array of uses and dispositions: “the universe signified the totality of what humankind can expect to know about it.” But, “the universe signified long before people began to know what it signified” (Introduction 61), so that the scientist of the concrete experienced a surfeit of potent, meaning-proffering things that he was unable to receive into the cognitive scheme at hand. Surrounded by such thing-signifiers, he felt lost in a glut of messages he couldn’t receive. Foucault: “the face of the world is covered with blazons, with characters, with ciphers and obscure words—with ‘hieroglyphics,’ as Turner called them. And the space inhabited by immediate resemblances becomes like a vast open book: it bristles with written signs; every page is seen to be filled with strange figures that intertwine and in some places repeat themselves” (27). Melville: In life, the visible surface of the Sperm Whale is not the least among the many marvels he presents. Almost invariably it is all over obliquely crossed and re-crossed with numberless straight marks in thick array, something like those in the finest Italian line engravings. But these marks do not seem to be impressed upon the isinglass substance above mentioned, but seem to be seen through it, as if they were engraved upon the body itself. Nor is this all. In some instances, to the quick, observant eye, those linear marks, as in a veritable engraving, but afford the ground for far other delineations. These are hieroglyphical; that is, if you call those mysterious cyphers on the walls of pyramids hieroglyphics, then that is the proper word to use in the present connexion. By my retentive memory of the hieroglyphics upon one Sperm Whale in particular, I was much struck with a plate representing the old Indian characters chiselled on the famous hieroglyphic palisades on the banks of the Upper Mississippi. Like those mystic rocks, too, the mysticmarked whale remains undecipherable. (306) We lack a decoder: “Champollion deciphered the wrinkled granite hieroglyphics. But there is no Champollion to decipher the Egypt of every man’s and every being’s face. Physiognomy, like every other human

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science, is but a passing fable. If then, Sir William Jones, who read in thirty languages, could not read the simplest peasant’s face in its profounder and more subtle meanings, how may unlettered Ishmael hope to read the awful Chaldee of the Sperm Whale’s brow? I but put that brow before you. Read it if you can” (347). It is useful to ask if in such passages Ishmael might not be reviving an ancient tension, rather than articulating a modern or postmodern predicament, and to wonder as well if, for Melville at least, the modern or postmodern condition differs from the ancient tension not in having transcended naïve certainties but in having forgotten a precious resource for managing experiences that imperil clarity. According to Mauss, “all taboo objects must contain mana and . . . many mana objects are taboo” (137). Taboo contains the dismay occasioned by the surfeit or surplus of signifier-entities, Handy’s “surcharge of mana,” by assigning noncompliant beings and objects to something like a sacralized miscellaneous pile, judging that all such odd things are invested with or suffused by mana: I believe that notions of the mana type, however diverse they may be, and viewed in terms of their most general function (which as we have seen has not vanished from our mentality and our form of society) represent nothing more than that floating signifier which is the disability of all finite thought (but also the surety of all art, all poetry, every mythic and aesthetic invention), even though scientific knowledge is capable, if not of staunching it, at least of controlling it partially. (LeviStrauss, Introduction 63) For Levi-Strauss, mana is the omnipurpose symbol: I see in mana, wakan, orenda, and other notions of the same type, the conscious expression of a semantic function, whose role is to enable symbolic thinking to operate despite the contradiction inherent in it. That explains the apparently insoluble antinomies attaching to the notion of mana, which struck ethnographers so forcibly, and on which Mauss shed light: force and action; quality and state; substantive, adjective and verb all at once; abstract and concrete; omnipresent and local-



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ized. And indeed mana is all those things together; but is that not because it is none of those things, but a simple form, or, to be more accurate, a symbol in its pure state, therefore liable to take on any symbolic content whatever? In the system of symbols which make up any cosmology, it would just be a zero symbolic value, that is, a sign marking the necessity of a supplementary symbolic content over and above that which the signified already contains, which can be any value at all, provided it is still part of the available reserve, and is not already, as the phonologists say, a term in a set. (63–64) “But always and everywhere,” Levi-Strauss writes, “those types of notions, somewhat like algebraic symbols, occur to represent an indeterminate value of signification, in itself devoid of meaning and thus susceptible of receiving any meaning at all; their sole function is to fill a gap between the signifier and the signified, or, more exactly, to signal the fact that in such a circumstance, on such an occasion, or in such a one of their manifestations, a relationship of nonequivalence becomes established between signifier and signified, to the detriment of the prior complementary relationship” (55–56). Though in “The Science of the Concrete” sacred objects are said to be those that keep to their places, in the essay on Mauss they are what is primordially out of all place, and therefore in need of careful designation and attendant caution. When Melville returned to the question of taboo after Typee, taboo was no longer itself incomprehensible, but rather a comprehensible response to incomprehensible forces, a deep concern for the wellbeing of classification, for categories and discriminations. The narrator of Melville’s next book, Omoo, identifying himself as the person who had lived among the Typees in Typee, clearly apprehends taboo as a means of segregating off the disturbing power of anomalous things and events: his ship, upon arrival at an island port (20); French gold and emissaries from the Pope (125); certain buildings restricted to tattooers and chiefs (32); the natives from another harbor who rescued him from the Typees (3); men while “under the hands of a tattooer” (31); native rovers (xiv); liquor, “strictly prohibited to the natives,” stored in a calabash, underground, apparently (272); their sacred days (176); certain nearly-destroyed herds (211); and an English “renegado from Christendom and humanity,” his face tattooed from ear to ear, a shark

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across his forehead, become a military leader of a tribe and “war-god of the entire island,” now enjoying the “sacred protection of an express edict of the Taboo, declaring his person inviolable forever” (27–28). And in The Confidence-Man, Melville recalls his interest in the power of semiotic contamination: a woman named Goneril, “bestowing mysterious touches” on “comely young men,” “reaps a secret delight” from the disturbing and enigmatic corruption of sense of that ensues—“the strangeness of the thing seemed to strike upon the touched person”; her “enigmatic,” “wonderful,” and “deplorable” power “had the dread operation of the heathen taboo” (61–62). Other Melvillian fascinations might qualify as well, Plotinus Plinlimmon’s “nonbenevolent” manner, for example (Pierre 290).

Ishmael tries his hand at classification “Cetology.” At first, he is sanguine: “It is some systematized exhibition of the whale in his broad genera, that I would now fain put before you. The classification of the constituents of a chaos, nothing less is here essayed” (134). But, surveying the literature, he discovers that his is no easy task: “As yet, however, the sperm whale, scientific or poetic, lives not complete in any literature. Far above all hunted whales, his is an unwritten life” (135). He retreats: “I promise nothing complete: because any human thing supposed to be complete, must for that very reason infallibly be faulty.” He now has a healthy respect for what lies ahead: “To grope down into the bottom of the sea after them; to have one’s hands among the unspeakable foundations, ribs, and very pelvis of the world: this is fearful thing” (136). But begin he does, by asking whether the whale is a fish. Linnaeus, citing the whale’s mammalian features, says no; Ishmael’s friends, Simeon Macey and Charley Coffin, both of Nantucket, together with the book of Jonah, say yes. That’ll do for Ishmael, so fish it is. But, Ishmael, asks, what distinguishes the whale from other fishes? Exactly the mammalian features that Linnaeus supplied, which are “humbug” if used to divide whales from fishes, but just fine for dividing whales from other fishes. It all turns out to depend on what the word fish means—oviparous, coldblooded, etc., or swims in the water? Ishmael goes with Scripture and the wisdom of old salts. “Cetology” is thus from the first unapologetically founded on arbitrary affections, and doesn’t transcend that foundation thereafter: the whale in itself gets away, a “loose-fish” (395–98).



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Ishmael seems never to have met a discourse he didn’t want to satirize, but there may be more than the usual measure of sympathy for the victim here. In Melville’s time scientific classification was asked to revive what religion had promised. In the 1830s Emerson, for instance, took classification as proof that “undoubtedly, we have no questions to ask which are unanswerable. We must trust the perfection of the creation so far, as to believe that whatever curiosity the order of things has awakened in our minds, the order of things can satisfy. Every man’s condition is a solution in hieroglyphic to those inquiries he would put” (“Nature” 7). In “The American Scholar” he argues that: Classification begins. To the young mind, every thing is individual, stands by itself. By and by, it finds how to join two things, and see in them one nature; then three, then three thousand; and so, tyrannized over by its own unifying instinct, it goes on tying things together, diminishing anomalies, discovering roots running under ground, whereby contrary and remote things cohere, and flower out from one stem. It presently learns, that, since the dawn of history, there has been a constant accumulation and classifying of facts. But what is classification but the perceiving that these objects are not chaotic, and are not foreign, but have a law which is also a law of the human mind? (47) Reality answers questions posed by the mind because reality and the mind derive from a common spirit. Laura Dassow Walls explains the work being done: Emerson’s doctrine worked so well because it creatively appropriated traditions with deep roots in Anglo-American culture. Emerson did not, for example, need to argue that nature was lawfully designed by God, for the notion had been a mainstay of Protestant theology. He need only to ask, rhetorically, “But what is classification but the perceiving that these objects are not chaotic, and are not foreign, but have a law which is also a law of the human mind?” Such a claim was more than the avowal of a post-Kantian Romantic; it was authorized by the very progress of science. (42)

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“Cetology” may be pointed more particularly at Louis Agassiz, professor of zoology and geology at Harvard, who was during the 1840s and ’50s promoting creationism as a scientific paradigm, and who was getting famous doing so; in Chapter 68 of Moby-Dick, Melville refers to him by last name only, an indication of his familiarity to contemporary readers. It is tempting to suppose that Melville consulted Agassiz’s Principles of Zoology for the Use of Schools and Colleges (1848), co-authored with A. A. Gould, when writing “Cetology,” not only because Agassiz’s book explains, among many other things, the principles by means of which assignments to genus and species are decided, and because it would therefore have been a useful reference for Melville, but also because in his first chapter Agassiz asserts, like Emerson, that the human ability to apprehend nature’s design evidences the divine origin of both. To appreciate the satire in “Cetology” fully, however, it is instructive to turn to a later and more ambitious work, Agassiz’s Contributions to the Natural History of North America, published between 1857 and 1862, which reiterates in more expansive and revealing terms the theological claims Agassiz had made on behalf of zoology in the first chapter of Principles. Oliver Wendell Holmes sized up Agassiz’s accomplishment in Contributions in The Atlantic Monthly for January, 1858: We have taken the Master’s hand, and followed Nature through all her paths of life. We have trod with him on shores of old oceans that roll no more, and traced the Providence that orders the creation of to-day engraved in every stony feature of their obsolete organisms. We have broken into that mysterious chamber, the chosen studio of the Infinite Artist, where, beneath its marble or crystalline dome, he fashions the embryo from its formless fluids. And as we turn reluctantly away, the accents we have once already heard linger with us: “In one word, all these facts in their natural connection proclaim aloud the One God, whom man may know, adore, and love; and Natural History must, in good time, become the analysis of the thoughts of the Creator of the Universe, as manifested in the animal and vegetable kingdom.” (333) Like Thoreau dumbstruck with wonder before the thawing sandbank, Agassiz stands in “the laboratory of the Artist who made the



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world and me—[I] had come to where he was still at work, sporting on this bank, and with excess of energy strewing his fresh designs about” (337–38). Or like Pip in Moby-Dick, Agassiz “saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it” (414), though with a better outcome than in Pip’s case. According to Edward Lurie, Contributions was envisioned as a “human thing supposed to be complete”; at the commencement of his work on the project, Agassiz imagined “a series of volumes covering the entire sweep of American natural history” (195); “the universality of nature would be captured within the framework of his all-embracing intellect” (196). Unfortunately, only four of a projected ten volumes were completed, a misfortune Agassiz shared with our melancholy Cetologist: “Finally: It was stated at the outset, that this system would not be here, and at once, perfected. You cannot but plainly see that I have kept my word. But I now leave my cetological System standing thus unfinished, even as the great Cathedral of Cologne was left, with the crane still standing upon the top of the uncompleted tower. For small erections may be finished by their first architects; grand ones, true ones, ever leave the copestone to posterity. God keep me from ever completing anything” (145). Agassiz was an anti-Darwinian, but in the Essay on Classification, a large portion of volume one excerpted and published separately in 1857, his prime nemesis is not the theory of evolution per se but rather a broader claim that “this complicated structure of Classification [is] merely an ingenious human invention which every one may shape as he pleases to suit himself,” a set of “convenient devices, framed with the view of facilitating the study of innumerable objects and of grouping them in the most suitable manner” (5). Agassiz here anticipates the philosophical position that his former student William James would in seventy years call radical empiricism, and refuses to have anything to do with it. I quote at length in order to illustrate what is at stake in “Cetology.” Some of the echoes are so strong as to make one think that Agassiz had taken to reading Melville, rather than vice-versa: The divisions of animals according to branch, class, order, family, genus and species, by which we express the results of our investigations into the relations of the animal kingdom, and

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Classifying the constituents of a chaos, as Ishmael puts it: “To grope down into the bottom of the sea after them; to have one’s hands among the unspeakable foundations, ribs, and very pelvis of the world; this is a fearful thing” (Moby-Dick 136). Is this order the result of the exertions of human skill and ingenuity, or is it inherent in the objects themselves, so that the intelligent student of Natural History is led unconsciously, by the study of the animal kingdom itself, to these conclusions, the great divisions under which he arranges animals being indeed but the headings of the chapters of the great book which he is reading? (Agassiz 9) (A “Bibliographical system [is] here adopted”: “According to magnitude I divide the whales into three primary BOOKS (subdivisible into Chapters), and these shall comprehend them all, both small and large. I, The FOLIO WHALE; II. the OCTAVO WHALE; III. the DUODECIMO WHALE”) (Moby-Dick 137). To me it appears indisputable that this order and arrangement of our studies are based upon the natural, primitive relations of



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animal life—those systems to which we have given the names of the great leaders of our science who first proposed them being in truth but translations into human language of the thoughts of the Creator. (Agassiz 9) “But what is classification but the perceiving that these objects are not chaotic and are not foreign,” as Emerson asked, “but have a law which is also a law of the human mind?” And if this is indeed so, do we not find in this adaptability of the human intellect to the facts of creation, by which we become instinctively, and, as I have said, unconsciously, the translators of the thoughts of God, the most conclusive proof of our affinity with the Divine Mind? (Agassiz 9) “[Pip] saw God’s foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad. So man’s insanity is heaven’s sense; and wandering from all mortal reason, man comes at last to that celestial thought, which, to reason, is absurd and frantic; and weal or woe, feels then uncompromised, indifferent as his God” (Moby-Dick 414). And is not this intellectual and spiritual connection with the Almighty worthy our deepest consideration? If there is any truth in the belief that man is made in the image of God, it is surely not amiss for the philosopher to endeavor, by the study of his own mental operations, to approximate the workings of the Divine Reason, learning from the nature of his own mind better to understand the Infinite Intellect from which it is derived. Such a suggestion might at first sight appear irreverent. But who is the truly humble? He who, penetrating into the secrets of creation, arranges them under a formula which he proudly calls his scientific system? Or he who, in that same pursuit, recognizes his glorious affinity with the Creator, and in deepest gratitude for so sublime a birthright strives to be the faithful interpreter of that Divine Intellect with whom he is permitted, nay, with whom he is intended, according to the laws of his being, to enter into communion? (Agassiz 9–10) Agassiz’s escalating questions are assertions, really, rhetorical questions, but, though they invite only one answer, they nonetheless betray

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an anxiety, an unwillingness to go it on his own by way of calm and direct assertion as he had done in Principles, a desire for an assenting chorus; this is why they seem so oratorical, as if the murmur of assent should swell in tandem with the questions. Agassiz’s need to imagine such a response as he writes suggests that, though his attempt to theologize classification echoes Emerson’s attempt to transcendentalize it, he feels in 1857 notably more beset by a countervailing skepticism, less sure of a sufficient body of readers who do and will see things his way, more worried that he needs to raise the pitch of his rhetoric to rally support. In the remainder of the Essay on Classification he states his reasons for believing that the structures of life forms arise from divine design rather than in response to physical circumstances, signaling that pre-Darwinian developmentalism is the antagonist pressing hardest on him. But the specific position he upbraids, that classificatory schemes are only useful artifices, reveals that the particular dismay developmentalism inspires in him is what Foucault calls the “profound historicity [that] penetrates into the heart of things” in the mid-nineteenth-century study of natural history, “the analysis of . . . the organism tak[ing] precedence over the search for taxonomic characteristics,” science “seeking the principle of [things’] intelligibility only in their development . . .” (xxiii), a “mutation of Order into History” (220). Though Darwinism would eventually avail itself of the Linnean scheme, for Agassiz developmentalism seems to have amounted to a vision of a purely fluviatile life force, unending succession, as Foucault puts it, “the depths from which all beings emerge into their precarious, glittering existence” (219), an elemental flux that thought could grasp partially, imperfectly, but never essentially, and never in such a way as to experience a consubstantiality that was anything other than deeply distressing. Natural history, like American religion, founders on the sorts of unanswerable questions of which Emerson had claimed there were none to be found: arrayed on one side, classificatory schemes, clever, elaborate, but nevertheless infallibly as factitious as Ishmael’s hapless cetology; on the other, distressing entities that were no more than pauses in the organic world’s impulsive saltation: There is being only because there is life, and in that fundamental movement that dooms them to death, the scattered beings, stable for an instant, are formed, halt, hold life immobile—and in a sense kill it—but are then in turn destroyed



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by that inexhaustible force. The experience of life is thus posited as the most general law of beings, the revelation of that primitive force on the basis of which they are; it functions as an untamed ontology, one trying to express the indissociable being and non-being of all beings. But this ontology discloses not so much what gives beings their foundation as what bears them for an instant towards a precarious form and yet is already secretly sapping them from within in order to destroy them. In relation to life, beings are no more than transitory figures, and the being that they maintain, during the brief period of their existence, is no more than their presumption, their will to survive. And so, for knowledge, the being of things is an illusion, a veil that must be torn aside to reveal the mute and invisible violence that is devouring them in darkness. (Foucault 278) “In a cabinet of natural history,” Emerson had written in “Nature,” “we become sensible of a certain occult recognition and sympathy in regard to the most unwieldy and eccentric forms of beast, fish and insect” (“Nature” 40). But if one were out on the open ocean among living beings, rather than in front of a cabinet filled with preserved specimens, such a recognition of common life might well produce a sharp blow to the species-ego, rather than sentimental sympathies: Almost forgetting for the moment all thoughts of Moby Dick, we now gazed at the most wondrous phenomenon which the secret seas have hitherto revealed to mankind. A vast pulpy mass, furlongs in length and breadth, of a glancing cream-color, lay floating on the water, innumerable long arms radiating from its centre, and curling and twisting like a nest of anacondas, as if blindly to clutch at any hapless object within reach. No perceptible face or front did it have; no conceivable token of either sensation or instinct; but undulated there on the billows, an unearthly, formless, chance-like apparition of life. (276)

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Cyanea arctica, from Louis Agassiz, Contributions to the Natural History of the United States (1857–1862). Courtesy of the Bancroft Library.

Physalia arethusa, from Louis Agassiz, Contributions to the Natural History of the United States (1857–1862). Courtesy of the Bancroft Library.

If Agassiz dreaded the thought of, as Foucault puts it, “life withdraw[ing] into the enigma of a force inaccessible in its essence, apprehensible only in the efforts it makes here and there to manifest



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and maintain itself ” (273), he might have found some relief if there had been a mana-symbol on hand; and perhaps Ishmael’s greater ease with incomplete systems is due at least in part to his having come up with or come across just such a thing. For Mauss, mana, in “its primitive nature—that is its complexity and confusion—resists any attempt at a logical analysis” (134). Several of Levi-Strauss’s phrases expanding upon Mauss—surplus of signification, signifier surfeit, the disability of all finite thought, floating signifier, a symbol in its pure state, therefore liable to take on any symbolic content whatever, in itself devoid of meaning and thus susceptible of receiving any meaning at all—recall Ishmael’s description of his personal spiritual adversary, the squid’s “glancing cream color,” whiteness, “not so much a color as the visible absence of color, and at the same time the concrete of all colors,” “a dumb blankness, full of meaning,” “a colorless, all-color of atheism from which we shrink” (195) because it awakens “the instinct of the knowledge of the demonism of the world” (194).2 This parallelism between Levi-Strauss and Melville may be only that, or there may be a common root. In Chapter 24 of Typee, Tommo appends a footnote to a passage concerning white tappa, a kind of fabric that was conspicuously displayed to identify places that were taboo: “White appears to be the sacred color among the Marquesans” (172). The possibility that this is more than a remark in passing is strengthened by the fact that Melville borrowed this information from David Porter, suggesting that it had for him some special interest worth promulgating: White among these people is considered sacred: a white flag is an emblem of peace, and a white flag marks out their tabooed and most sacred places; they have also a method of designating the places which are tabooed by bundles of long sticks about half the size of the wrist, with the bark stripped off and placed an [sic] end; these are planted on all the platforms of stones where women are not permitted to approach, and this practice appears more generally adopted than any other—the sticks used on such occasions are of a very light and white kind of soft wood (used by the natives for producing fire by friction) of the bark of which they make cordage of a handsome and strong quality. (Porter 172)

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For Ishmael, the failure of the human effort to prove the world’s metaphysical hospitality is experienced differently than it is fror Agassiz, as a sensation of flipping, or repeated reversal, rather than of blank organic flow. According to Herbert, the “contradiction between Allan’s optimistic faith and the tragic reality of his fate was suffered by Herman as a conflict between evident features of the real world” (Moby-Dick and Calvinism 54). Life sometimes stabs and sometimes blesses, and the answer to the question of which of the two is fundamental is a recalcitrant hieroglyph. At times stabbing seems the reality, with blessing as a surrounding illusion: “Warmest climes but nurse the cruelest fangs: the tiger of Bengal crouches in spiced groves of ceaseless verdure” (MobyDick 503). And sometimes the opposite: “For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all of the horrors of the half known life” (274). In either view, being is only half-known. In “The Whiteness of the Whale,” conceding that whiteness is associated with physical and spiritual beauty, Ishmael adds that “there yet lurks an elusive something in the innermost idea of this hue, which strikes more of panic to the soul than the redness which affrights in blood” (189), intimating that panic is innermost for him, but also permitting the supposition that panic is to be added to rather than substituted for the feelings attendant upon beauty. Experience permits both takes, since they are equally valid, but confirms neither, with the result that any rendering supposed to be complete is again found necessarily to be faulty. The predicament is produced not by experience itself, but by the demand or desire that either malignity or benignity be established as experience’s fundamental tone, and experience does not tip its hand, instead advancing both possibilities with equal regularity. For Ishmael, the route toward a conclusion is therefore not through observation, but through the predisposition or predilection that the one who observes brings to experience: “In gazing at such scenes, it is all in all what mood you are in; if in the Dantean, the devils will occur to you; if in that of Isaiah, the archangels” (378). If you hollow out and reverse the whale’s prick, you get a cassock, or go ahead and convert a coffin into a lifebuoy: “‘It’s like turning an old coat; going to bring the flesh on the other side now’” (525). As soon as one of the moods is put into play, evidence to the contrary commences to present itself forcefully, negating the first hypothesis and proposing for consideration its opposite,



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which will be negated in its turn, and so on, leaving the poor spectator flipping, or spinning, adrift in contradiction, but put there, again, by the fact of having insisted that experience be lucid. James agrees: “Conceptual treatment of perceptual reality makes it seem paradoxical and incomprehensible” (“Percept” 245–46); “it is only the conceptual form which forces the dialectic contradictions upon the innocent sensible reality” (Some Problems 95). The jumble is a product of the demand imposed, rather than an objective feature of experience: “if my reader can succeed in abstracting from all conceptual interpretation and lapse back into his immediate sensible life at this very moment, he will find it to be what someone has called a big blooming buzzing confusion, as free from contradiction in its ‘much-at-onceness’ as it is alive and evidently there” (“Percept” 233). Ishmael has his moments when he achieves what James admonishes his reader to attempt, for instance when he and his comrades, their hands plunged into a vat full of the whale’s spermaceti, squish lumps as they begin to form, and surreptitiously squeeze each others’ hands as well, like James striving to dissolve conceptual lumps that begin to congeal in the midst of the living muchat-onceness: “The belief in the genuineness of each particular moment in which we feel the squeeze of this world’s life, as we actually do work here, or work is done upon us, is an Eden from which rationalists seek in vain to expel us, now that we have criticized their state of mind” (Some Problems 110). Such Edens become accessible, Ishmael contends, when one manages to “lower, or at least shift, his conceit of attainable felicity” away from what “the intellect or the fancy” require of life and toward a more mediocre and worldly happiness (606). But intermissions never really quiet the demand for truth and the oscillation it creates within Ishmael. Rather than giving contradiction the slip, he balances it, or balances on it. He manages. Such at least has been what the critical tradition has concluded to be Ishmael’s achievement. F. O. Matthiessen, who is, as far as I have been able to discover, the only one among Melville’s critics to have connected the remark on whiteness in Typee with the chapter on whiteness in Moby-Dick, praises Ishmael’s ability to maintain aesthetic composure: “The balance of the symbol is precarious: the tensions it had to support in Melville’s mind were great” (286): “a quality such as whiteness [that] can hold different contents at different times” (290), a useful device for negotiating the suspicion that “there is terror at the heart of worship—a

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theme that is underscored by his continual contrast between calm and storm” (290), for achieving an “amazing union of opposites, the fleece of innocence with ferocity” (291). Feidelson agrees, contending that Pierre’s “great defect is the inability of Melville and Pierre to preserve . . . a sense of the tragic convertability between truth and falsehood, good and evil” (205). Charles Olson praises Melville for his “Negative Capability’ in Moby-Dick, his capacity (Olson is quoting from Keats) for “being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason” (46), a judgment echoed by Robert Weisbuch: “[Ishmael’s] progress is measured by the extent to which he can relax in contradiction, can be grasped by phantoms without returning upon mystery the grasp that a strangulating single-mindedness could afford” (255). According to John P. McWillams, “Moby-Dick holds contradictions in suspension without reaching impulsively after certainties, or denying that they might be obtained” (157). John Seelye: The indifferent hermaphroditic ocean which swallows Ahab, along with his charts, compass, harpoon, and ship, is a blend of contrasts, shades and gleamings which absorb man’s purposeful thread with its great conjugal harmonies, its symphony of contrasting yet complementary elements . . . . Ahab throughout has eyes only for darks and depths, for leviathans and sharkish thoughts—like Narcissus he mistakes his own dark reflection for truth, “and this is the key to it all.” Having converted himself, like his razors, into an instrument of his ruling passion, the captain has become his own fate indeed, but in a sense not realized by himself. The world is a fluid loom through which he drives the shuttle of his quest, but the willful pattern of his plan is ultimately absorbed by the whole, the Whale, the fabric of being constructed from the matched contraries of existence. (71–73) Sharon Cameron sees a “circular pattern of contradiction” as “the narrative thrust of the entire novel,” seeing in circularity “a way of dealing with contradiction [that] is a psychological as well as a narrative strategy” (29), a way of managing: “The ability to escape an easy reductionism, and to work away from a point of intolerable comparison by following it around to the other side, is a crucial strategy adopted by the novel as a cure for the violence of extremes that cannot come into unmediated contact” (38).



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Contradiction thus ensues from the encounter between hermeneutical demand on the one hand and whiteness, being’s tone, “the concrete of all colors,” “full of meaning,” “a colorless all-color,” on the other. Humanity suffers from too much meaning, rather than its absence; the clamor of being, rather than silence, precludes the cosmic hominess that Calvinism, Emerson and Agassiz had promised, though a jetsam Calvinism is allowed to continue to play amid the blooming buzzing discursive confusion of Moby-Dick.3 “Signifier-surfeit” and “surplus of signification” are therefore more useful than existential impoverishment as terms for getting at Ishmael’s claim, especially when we recall Levi-Strauss’s association of surfeit with heterogeneity, with “the apparently insoluble antinomies attaching to the notion of mana, which struck ethnographers so forcibly, and on which Mauss shed light.” Entities invested with mana, tabooed entities, fail to heed of distinctions that have been developed to bring the world into thought, they fail or refuse to be ordinary, and they will therefore not support the sort of clear response that stay-in-place entities do, but rather they will provoke a sensation of potent and disturbing both-andness or “muchat-onceness”—both reverence and revulsion, for instance—that is primary and unintelligible rather than synthetic or transcendent. Handy, recall, asserted that what he called Polynesian religion was dualistic, with mana being a power of life and light distinct from and in opposition to powers of darkness and death, and that there were therefore two sorts of taboos, those that “were always connected directly or indirectly with the higher gods who embodied the positive mana in the universe and protected all that was intimate rapport with them,” and those that were “always associated with the malicious and destructive evil agencies of the earth. These tapu were associated for the most part with women, to whom dangerous spirits were likely to attach themselves, and who were at times in a contaminated state psychically; and with sickness and death which were the signs of the presence of fearful demons” (47). Such a subdivision of taboo might have clarified matters some for Tommo, and Ishmael also feels the pull of duality: “Though in many of its aspects this visible sphere seems formed in love, the invisible spheres seem formed in fright” (195). The problem, though, is that, for Ishmael if not for Handy, awe-generating entities cannot be sorted into two piles, they never appear purely, but rather they project irreducible duality: “there is no quality in this world that is not what it is

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merely by contrast” (53). Thinking with awe of the whale’s tail, Ishmael remarks, “Could annihilation occur to matter, this were the thing to do it.” But, he continues, “Nor does this—its amazing strength, at all tend to cripple the graceful flexions of its motions; where infantileness of ease undulates through a Titanism of power. On the contrary, these motions derive their most appalling beauty from it. Real strength never impairs beauty or harmony, but it often bestows it; and in everything imposingly beautiful, strength has much to do with magic” (376).4 In this assertion Ishmael is closer to Mauss, for whom mana is the “power, par excellence, the genuine effectiveness of things which corroborates their practical actions without annihilating them,” an effectiveness that encompasses prestige and fecundity, “a stone for making taros grow or for rendering sows fertile,” but also illness, evil, destruction, “on an arrow it is the substance that kills” (136–37). Mauss mentions no counter-force. In his study of Solomon island culture, Keesing agrees: “Being abu does have, in a sense, a positive and negative valence. A man who is abu by virtue of acting as priest for his group might be thought of as ‘sacred’; a woman who is abu to confine the dangerous blood of childbirth in the forest might be thought of as ‘polluted.’ But Kwaio makes no such terminological distinction, and I believe it is dangerous and unwarranted to impute one to them” (66). Giorgio Agamben sees Mauss upholding a notion of taboo as “originary ambiguity of the sacred,” “august and damned, worthy of veneration and provoking horror” (73), a notion that Agamben contends grew into a “scientific mythologeme” during the first half of the twentieth century, appearing in the writings of William Robertson Smith, Sigmund Freud, Emile Durkheim, Emile Benveniste, Max Wundt, and others. Agamben argues, “Once it is formulated, the theory of the ambivalence of the sacred has no difficulty extending itself over every field of the social sciences, as if European culture were now only noticing it for the first time” (77). He contends that this extension of the theory of taboo is undue and insufficiently thought-through, but seems to have no difficulty accepting it as an explanation of taboo per se (73–80). We might therefore, speculatively, add Melville’s name to the list of those attempting to extend such a theory of taboo, though with the qualification that he picked his theory up on Nukuhiva, rather than in Mauss. The faultiness of human systems, according to Ishmael, stems from their having been supposed to be complete, not from their having been



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incomplete. A nonfaulty system, therefore, would be one that is not supposed to be complete, or one that is supposed to be incomplete, and one way to do this would be to equip it with something like “the French terms truc or machin. Behind machin is machine, and, further back, the idea of force or power.” Such may be the purpose behind Ishmael’s speculation that whiteness is “the intensifying agent in the things most appalling to mankind” because “by its indefiniteness it shadows forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe, and thus stabs us from behind with the thought of annihilation, while beholding the white depths of the milky way” (495). Looking at a white thing, we are stabbed from behind, by something irremediably absent from the visual field, because if we spin round the behind-us will still be where it was: even Moby-Dick, with eyes on the two sides of his head, has no vision to the rear, or so we may conclude from the fact that, seeking men and boats to smash during combat, he seems to have had to feel around among the broken pieces of boats on the surface of the water with his tail. The visual field is incomplete, but not therefore inevitably faulty, only so if we suppose it complete, ignoring the imperturbable la-arrière. White things we see, whether distinct objects, vague areas, or even the general whiteout of a blizzard are not instances or embodiments of an accessible essence—whiteness is not itself white—but rather they are “intensifying agents” that “shadow forth” what the ocular system cannot bring in. Hence the panic they incite, but also the work they do toward enabling a thought of annihilation. Whiteness, like truc, and machin, might thereby assist in the task that Handy saw as the animating motive behind mana, “the focusing and transmission of the potency of nature,” that “common vitality” that escapes from bondage when Ahab sleeps, “a ray of living light, to be sure, but without an object to color, and therefore a blankness in itself ” (219–20). Henry Adams featured a similar semiotic resourcefulness in his discussions of the Virgin of Chartres cathedral, an efficacious symbolization of abstract force that his Protestant forebears had supposed that they could do without, with the sweeping away of their culture after the Civil War as a consequence. “True symbols,” R. P. Blackmur writes in his book on Adams, are the means by which we express our understanding, or our helplessness in understanding, of what we cannot articulate

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Mitchell Breitwieser verbally or by any other intellectual means. Symbols actually accrete and store the power with which we credit them, and become the more inexhaustible of that power the more they are used, providing the user still feels within himself what that power is. But true symbols cannot do the work of the intellect, and whenever else the intellect is actually able to do the work of the symbol, the power in the symbol disappears. Thus the validity and necessity of symbols depend on the human situation in which the mind realizes that it is dealing with energies beyond its descriptive knowledge or that it is helpless under the pressure of energies of which it has no direct knowledge at all. This was the human situation of Henry Adams. (29)

The Virgin was his white whale. Adams’ insight into the efficacy of this sort of symbolization raises the question of his own sojourn, in company with his friend the artist John LaFarge, in the South Pacific from September 1890 until July 1891, an adventure motivated in part by avid memories of having read Typee and Omoo while still a young man, before his life had bequeathed to him its great complications. In the event, Adams and LaFarge never made it to the Marquesas, but their longing for indolence and pleasure was fully satisfied on other islands, especially by the siva, a women’s dance that Adams observed several times, and found exciting. Fairly quickly, however, Adams’ scholarly side asserted itself, too. During two visits with Stevenson on Samoa, conversation turned to ethnology, of which Adams had already become an amateur practitioner, noting and describing, for example, a war-dance that might have drawn Melville’s attention: “The dancers come in enveloped in fantastic mountains of white tapa which is wound round them up to their necks; coils and puffs, making them look like walking bags, brandishing long spears and clubs. When the dance is over, they uncoil themselves, and leave the tapa in a big heap on the ground as a gift for the governor” (505–06). He made a practice of investigation: “Once a day I pump all the information out of at least one Samoan chief; and it is great fun” (306). His interest was drawn toward the sacred, the mysterious, and the forbidden: “To-Fai, an elderly man of the highest rank, and a redoubtable warrior . . . let me ask him questions for two hours, which implies strength at least, for the Samoans easily weary of any effort, especially intellectual; but I was



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asking about subjects which are saa to the common people, and vavao, or forbidden, except among the highest or most courageous chiefs, who can afford to disregard their own rules. I asked much, too, about their a-iku or spirits, ghosts and devils, of which they have a plenty, though commonplace enough” (339). Like Tommo, he feels outside of Polynesian spirituality, but has no doubt that there is a coherent if elusive core: In other ways the natives are more inscrutable. Chiefly for want of something to talk about during the interminable visits of native chiefs, I ask questions about the old customs, families and religion. I am blocked by the reply that what I ask is a secret. At first I thought this was only a way of disguising ignorance, but was assured that it was not so. I am pretty well convinced that all matters involving their own superstitions, priesthood, and family history, are really secret, and that their Christianity covers a pretty complete paganism with priests and superstitions as strong as ever. To-Fai made no bones of telling me, at great length, the whole story, and on his information I have in several cases surprised other chiefs into admissions they did not intend to make; but I am still convinced that the Samoans have an entire intellectual world of their own, and never admit outsiders into it (330–31). Arii Taimai, “Last Queen of Tahiti,” was more open, allowing Adams to write up her memoirs and publish the result as a book entitled Tahiti, identified as “by Henry Adams” on the title page. Although the narration is attributed to Arii Taimai, the voice of the book is at several points clearly Adams’ rather than hers, which I don’t mention to suggest that Adams fabricated her words but rather that he was open about the fact that this was a collaborative project at every point along the way, from their long conversations to his rendering of them in prose. His part in the work is perhaps clearest in the topics he pursued with her, family history, for example. As Robert Spiller remarks in his introduction, “Arii Taimai’s proud memories of the Teva clan and its genealogy could hardly fail to meet a responsive hearer in the descendant of Presidents whose policies had been repudiated by the march of events” (5). Adams’ interest in the melancholy politics of Arii Taimai’s family’s fortunes accompanies his interest in a force that, he would suggest in The

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Education of Henry Adams, had been conspicuously absent or even exiled from the Adams way, the political and sexual power of women: “The most powerful chiefess in the island, like Purea or Marama or Tetuanui reiteraiterai, was as free from her husband’s control as any independent princess of Europe; she had as many lovers as she liked and no one made an objection” (Tahiti 17–18). For such a figure, “the right to impose a Rahui [a variant kind of prohibition concerned with interdicting periods of time, rather than things] or Taboo was essential” (10), and she was herself sacred: “Although I was born at Vaiari, the Papari people at once claimed me, and built for me a special house, the fareoa, usually built for the children of Arii, and sacred even to the parents. They placed it on a small point where two branches of a stream join to empty into the sea, a stone throw from Tati’s house. The fareoa was peculiar in having but one roof-post, and in being sacred. The attendants were also sacred; the child was fed by servants who were sacred, and who had charge of her to the exclusion of the mother” (175). Cumulatively, Adams’s observations concerning women in Polynesia controvert Handy’s assertion that the Polynesians held to a cosmological misogyny: taboo clusters around women, as Handy, Stevenson and others observed, but as a way of managing and channeling their considerable and precious force, rather than of sequestering an abomination. Cultural symbolization that could effect such an outcome, Adams would assert in Mont St. Michel and Chartres and in The Education of Henry Adams, was a potent art, but a lost one. William James, Adams’ friend, was more hopeful about meaning and modernity than Adams was, and therefore closer to Ishmael in attempting to devise systems that will do or get by, that are not faulty because incomplete, not futile because unfulfilled: It is for some unknown reason, a great aesthetic delight for the mind to break the order of experience, and class its materials in serial orders, proceeding from step to step of difference, and to contemplate untiringly the crossings and inosculations of the series among themselves. The first steps in most of the sciences are purely classificatory. Where facts fall easily into rich and intricate series (as plants and animals and chemical compounds do), the mere sight of the series fills the mind with a satisfaction sui generis; and a world whose real materials



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naturally lend themselves to serial classification is pro tanto a more rational world, a world in which the mind will feel more intimate, than with a world in which they do not. By the preevolutionary naturalists, whose generation has hardly passed away, classifications were supposed to be the ultimate insights into God’s mind, filling us with adoration of his ways. The fact that Nature let us make them was a proof of the presence of his Thought in her bosom. So far as the facts of experience can not be serially classified, therefore, so far experience fails to be rational in one of the ways, at least, which we crave. (“Necessary” 98–99) James refers to his teacher Agassiz here. There are for James other and better feelings than satisfaction and intimacy. Experience’s failure to conform is a salubrious occasion: The negative, the alogical, is never wholly banished. Something—“call it fate, chance, freedom, spontaneity, the devil what you will”—is still wrong and other and outside and unincluded, from your point of view, even though you be the greatest of philosophers. Something is always mere fact and givenness; and there may be in the whole universe no one point of view extant from which this would not be found to be the case. “Reason,” as a gifted writer says, “is but one item in the mystery; and behind the proudest consciousness that ever reigned, reason and wonder blushed face to face. The inevitable stales, while doubt and hope are sisters. Not unfortunately the universe is wild,—game flavored as a hawk’s wing. Nature is miracle all; the same returns not save to bring the different. The slow round of the engraver’s lathe gains but the breadth of a hair, but the difference is distributed back over the whole curve, never an instant true,—ever not quite.” (quoting B.P. Blood, The Flaw in Supremacy, 1893) (“Radical” 135) Something is always still wrong and other and outside and unincluded, call it fate, chance, freedom, spontaneity, the devil, what you will. James returned to the what-you-will in Some Problems of Philosophy, the book he was at work on when he died: “Anthropology shows that the earliest attempts at human theorizing mixed the theological and metaphysical

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together. Common things needed no special explanation, remarkable things alone, odd things, especially deaths, calamities, diseases called for it. What made things act was the mysterious energy in them, and the more awful they were, the more of this mana they possessed. The great thing was to acquire mana oneself ” (17). If calling “the unincluded” mana worked as a device that kept the system’s incompleteness from bringing it down, then mana might be an instance of what James called “colossally useful denkmittel,” “means by which we handle facts by thinking them” (“Pragmatism” 423, 420), or, perhaps more easily, thinkwiths, as a drill might be called a drillwith, an instrument for accomplishing particular tasks, to be assessed not for truth or falsity but for productivity or sterility (though mana would be not just one thinkwith among the many, but rather the sustaining one that kept the others up and running). The quotations in the “Extracts” section of Moby-Dick, for example, might be taken up (by James) as denkmittel awaiting experimental testing, rather than as gloomy discursive wreckage. Levi-Strauss sees a similar inclination in totemistic thought: “The animals in totemism cease to be solely or principally creatures which are feared, admired or envied: their perceptible reality permits the embodiment of ideas and relations conceived by speculative thought on the basis of empirical observation. We can understand, too, that natural species are chosen not because they are ‘good to eat’ but because they are ‘good to think’” (Totemism 89).5 If such an attitude skips over deep and urgent human questions, its capacity for skipping as well over the blockages that such questions precipitate in such persons as Melville, Adams and James might well be its specific utility. My essay is conjectural, full of perhapses. Perhaps Melville learned much more on Nukuhiva than has been before supposed; and perhaps the extreme suffering of his young life prepared him to do so, inspiring what Levi-Strauss praised in Mauss, an “exceptional talent for rehabilitating certain indigenous theories in their strangeness and authenticity,” helping him to become “an astronomer of the human constellations,” but something of a practitioner as well, capable of what Jean Jacques Mayoux praises in Moby-Dick, a “vision which brings immensity, forever strange and yet intimately experienced, into man’s very flesh, allows him to put his fingers on it” (72–73). And, finally, perhaps we might be able to think about classifying Melville’s men in terms of their attitude toward mana (whiteness), the narrator of “Bartleby,” for example,



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being a man who, like Henry Adams, suffers from the lack of a mana (whiteness) category, Ahab being a man who believes that there is a single instance of mana (whiteness) loose in the system, and that it can be purged, and Ishmael being a man who feels that he floats in a worldcovering sea of mana (whiteness) punctuated by rare islands of functional order, a man who is almost but not quite overwhelmed, clinging to a coffin turned inside-out, to his maker’s recollection of a wisdom he once apprehended and pondered. UC-Berkeley notes 1. Thanks to Rebecca Munson for drawing my attention to the importance of this passage, and to Rebecca, Ben Cullen, Martha DeBruin, Maud Emerson, and Julia Stern for help with this essay as a whole. 2. I have a distinct recollection of a moment more than thirty years ago, when, in a graduate seminar taught by Eugenio Donato, my (now) longterm friend Gregory Jay exclaimed, “Moby-Dick is the floating signifier!” This essay might be seen as an amplification of that insight—Jay’s remark a kind of zip file before there were such—though I would need to modify it to a claim that Moby-Dick’s whiteness is of (de la) the floating signifier, rather than that the particular whale Moby-Dick himself is the floating signifier. Jay also first drew my attention to the discussions of women in Henry Adams’s letters from Polynesia. 3. On the discursivity of Moby-Dick, see Carolyn Porter, “and Otter, Melville’s Anatomies (101–71). 4. On Melville’s aesthetic theory, see Otter, “An Aesthetics in All Things.” 5. I came across this quotation in an essay I very much enjoyed by Garber (14).

works cited Adams, Henry. The Education of Henry Adams. Ed. Ernest Samuels. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974. ———. The Letters of Henry Adams, Volume iii: 1886–1892. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982. ———. Tahiti: Memoirs of Arii Taimai e Marama of Eimeo, Teriirere of Tooarai, Terrinui of Tahiti, Tauraatua i amo; Memoirs of Marau Taaroa, Last Queen of Tahiti. Ed. and intro. Robert E. Spiller. New York: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1947. Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Trans. Daniel HellerRoazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. Agassiz, Louis. Essay on Classification. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962. Anderson, Charles Roberts. Melville in the South Seas. New York: Dover, 1966.

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Blackmur, R. P. Henry Adams. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980. Calder, Alex. “‘The Thrice Mysterious Taboo’: Melville’s Typee and the Perception of Culture.” Representations 67 (1999): 27–43. Cameron, Sharon. The Corporeal Self: Allegories of the Body in Melville and Hawthorne. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981. Cutrofello, Andrew. Continental Philosophy: A Contemporary Introduction. New York: Routledge, 2005. Darling, David. Remarks About the Marquesas, September 1835. Exploration and Exchange: A South Seas Anthology, 1680–1900. Ed. Jonathan Lamb, Vanessa Smith and Nicholas Thomas. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. 236–37. de Saussure, Ferdinand. Course in General Linguistics. Trans. and notes Roy Harris. Chicago: Open Court Press, 2005. Dryden, Edgar A. Monumental Melville: The Formation of a Literary Career. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “The American Scholar.” The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Nature, Addresses, and Lectures. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971. 52–70. ———. “Nature.” The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Nature, Addresses, and Lectures. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971. 6–45. Erskine, Captain John Elphinstone. Journal of a Cruise Among the Islands of the Western Pacific. London: John Murray, 1853. Feidelson, Charles, Jr. Symbolism and American Literature. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1953. Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. 1970. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Random-Vintage, 1994. Garber, Marjorie. “Good To Think With.” Profession 2008. New York: Modern Language Association, 2008. Handy, E. S. Craighill. Polynesian Religion. Honolulu: Bernice Bishop Museum Bulletin, 1927. Herbert, T. Walter. Marquesan Encounters: Melville and the Meaning of Civilization. Cambridge: Harvard University press, 1980. ———. Moby-Dick and Calvinism: A World Dismantled. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1977. Holmes, Oliver Wendell. “Agassiz’s Natural History.” The Atlantic Monthly January, 1858. James, William. “Necessary Truths.” McDermott 74–133. ———. “Percept and Concept — Import of Concepts.” McDermott 232–43. ———. “Pragmatism and Common Sense.” McDermott 418–28. ———. “Radical Empiricism.” McDermott 134–46. ———. Some Problems of Philosophy: A Beginning of an Introduction to Philosophy. London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1911.



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———. The Varieties of Religious Experience. New York: Penguin, 1985. Keesing, Roger M. Kwaio Religion: The Living and the Dead in a Solomon Island Society. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982. Levi-Strauss, Claude. Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss. Trans. Felicity Baker. London: Routledge, 1987. ———. The Savage Mind. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1966. ———. Totemism. Trans. Rodney Needham. New York: Beacon Press, 1971. Lurie, Edward. Louis Agassiz: A Life in Science. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988. Matthiessen, F. O. The American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979. Mauss, Marcel. A General Theory of Magic. Trans. Robert Brain. New York: Routledge, 2007. Mayoux, Jean-Jacques. Melville. Trans. John Ashbery. New York: Grove Press, 1960. McDermott, John J., ed. The Writings of William James. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1977. McWilliams, John. Hawthorne, Melville and the American Character. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984. Melville, Herman The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade. Evanston: NorthwesternNewberry, 1984. ———. Moby-Dick, or The Whale. Evanston: Northwestern-Newberry, 1988. ———. Omoo: A Narrative of Adventure in the South Seas. Evanston: NorthwesternNewberry, 1968. ———. Pierre, or the Ambiguities. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1975. ———. Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life. Evanston: Northwestern-Newberry, 1968. ———. White-Jacket, or the World in a Man of War. Evanston: Northwestern-Newberry, 1970. Mumford, Louis. Herman Melville. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1929. Olson, Charles. “Equal, That Is, To the Real Itself.” Selected Writings. Ed. Robert Creeley. New York: New Directions, 1966. Otter, Samuel. Melville’s Anatomies. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. ———. “An Aesthetics in All Things.” Representations 104 (2008): 116–25. Porter, Carolyn. “Call Me Ishmael, or How to Make Double-Talk Speak.” New Essays on Moby-Dick. Ed. Richard Broadhead. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Porter, David. Journal of a Cruise made to the Pacific Ocean by Captain David Porter in the United States frigate Essex, in the years 1812, 1813, and 1814. Philadelphia : Bradford and Inskeep : New-York ; Abraham H. Inskeep, and for sale by O.C. Greenleaf, Boston, 1815. Seelye, John. Melville: The Ironic Diagram. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970.

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Stevenson, Robert Louis. In the South Seas. New York: Penguin, 1998. Stewart, C.S. A Visit to the South Seas in the United States Ship Vincennes, during the Years 1829 and 1830; including Notices of Brazil, Peru, Manilla, the Cape of Good Hope, and St. Helena. Vol. 1. New York: J. Haven, n.d. Thoreau, Henry David. Walden. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1906. Troeltsch, Ernst. The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches. Vol. 2. Trans. Olive Wyon. Louisville, KY: Westminster-John Knox Press, 1931. Walls, Laura Dassow. Emerson’s Life in Science: The Culture of Truth. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003. Weisbuch, Robert. Atlantic Double-Cross: American Literature and British Influence in the Age of Emerson. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1986.

cody marrs

Whitman’s Latencies: Hegel and the Politics of Time in Leaves of Grass

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eaders of walt whitman all know that some-

thing happens to Leaves of Grass after the Civil War. But no one is quite sure what this “something” is. What we do know is that Whitman’s most mutable (and mutated) of books is discernibly different following 1865: its poems tend to be briefer, thinner, and more condensed; its lines are less populated by the bodies of artisans, and more replete with memories and fantasies of return; while death, which Whitman once deemed nothing but “good manure,” comes to acquires a new prominence and irrepressible force (LG 1:80). To account for this transformation, critics have described Whitman’s postwar career as the fruit of a politico-aesthetic weakening or decline. Some scholars point to his additions of titles and line numbers and claim that the postbellum volumes reflect a more conventional poetic sensibility, one that is standardized rather than avant-garde. Others draw attention to Whitman’s postwar politics and contend that his newfound Republicanism leads to an enervation of his verse. According to this reading, Whitman’s fixation on “Unionism,” which culminates in his hagiography of Lincoln, obliges a sacrifice of the very subversiveness upon which the antebellum Leaves hinged. Still other critics, in a more biographical vein, underscore the importance his wartime experiences in Washington’s hospitals and argue that his tending to the sick and wounded, and his abiding attachment to the soldiers who died, engender a modified worldview, one that issues not from the

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inviolable and satisfied self of an American Adam but, instead, from a perspective sutured through trauma and loss.1 These critical accounts elucidate important aspects of Whitman’s changes to Leaves. A different perspective emerges, however, when we attend to what I take to be the animating link in Whitman’s thought: the dynamic coupling of time and politics. From his 1855 depiction of the poet as a historical medium capable of resurrecting the dead and placing “himself where the future becomes present” to his 1888 vision of the rise, “inevitable in time,” of “towering roofs” and “solid-planted spires tall shooting to the stars,” temporality in Whitman’s verse consistently functions as a crucial vehicle for his political desires, anxieties, and expectations (PP 13; LG 3:719). The volume’s definitive shift— that which separates the later editions from their prewar analogues—is accordingly, I want to argue, a transformation of its temporal vision, a restructuring that takes shape as a turn away from the early verse’s “now-time” in favor of a teleological “not-yet.” Propelled by the war and its aftermath (and particularly by its reforming of labor relations), Whitman goes from being a poet of the conjuncture to an oracle of the imminent. In so doing he transforms Leaves from a vast song of the present into a chant of and for the future. The vast simultaneity that floods the antebellum Leaves—and is palpable in poems like “The Sleepers,” “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” and “Song of Myself ”—is by and large displaced by an anticipatory temporality, a revised framework that is predicated on a more or less Hegelian idea of fruition. My interest is in why this transition occurs, and in how this temporal refashioning—this re-forming of his verse by way of a philosophy of history—invites a different narrative for Whitman’s career, a narrative not of decline but of reengagment along other lines. In fact, across the arc of his revisions, we will find Whitman not withdrawing from the realm of the political but, instead, reimagining it temporally. His idea of what a nation is, and how it develops, changes. In response to the bloodshed of civil war and the subsequent modernization of the labor force, he discards an organic idea of national synchrony and embraces a more linear, teleological model of national becoming. Whitman thereby re-adapts his poetics to a progressive philosophy of history, and this remarkable shift, we shall see, obliges a reconsideration not only of the shape of his literary career but also of the scope and orientation of his politics.



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Let’s begin at the beginning. Before his shift toward a futural poetics, Whitman’s is fundamentally a chant of the present. In each of the antebellum editions of Leaves of Grass (1855, ’56, and ’60), what possesses the most determining force is not technology, or governments, or the arc of historical development but animate individuals and the past events, both great and small, which have molded them. The very idea of temporal measurement, Whitman writes in the 1855 preface, is fallacious since “all that has at any time been well suggested out of the divine heart of man or by the divinity of his mouth or by the shaping of his great hands” persists without limit. Life is saturated with innumerable prior causes, and the ideal poet—declaring to the past “Rise and walk before me that I may realize you”—is singularly capable, Whitman insists, of taking the pulse of the present (PP 22–23). From 1855 to 1860, the future figures into Whitman’s poetic vision primarily as an elusive horizon of transformation, and far more importance is placed on the present. In “Song of Myself,” the heterogeneous inclusions and unexpected juxtapositions are structured through synchronic arrest. Whitman’s suicides and hounded slaves, his mechanics, swimmers, lovers, and sailors are brought into relation with one another, and rendered nearly interchangeable, through a shared “now.” The assorted “Voices of the interminable generations of slaves” and “of the diseased and despairing” are not simply channeled through Whitman’s barbaric yawp but realized through and made comprehensible by a shared now-time, or what Walter Benjamin calls Jetztzeit, which contains the opposite of “homogeneous, empty time” (LG 1:32; “On the Concept of History” 395). For the antebellum Whitman, as for Benjamin, the present is an elastic force that assimilates the unassimilated and “makes the continuum of history explode” (396). “There was never any more inception than there is now,” Whitman declares in 1855, “Nor any more youth or age than there is now,” because this “now” is a plenum, resembling, in an anticipatory fashion, what Edmund Husserl would later call a “‘thickened’ present,” which is shot through with many times and histories (LG 1:3; Husserl 37).2 Whitman’s fixation on the present and all it contains runs like a red thread through almost all of his antebellum poetry. From his erotic inquiries into the nature of liberty in Calamus and Children of Adam to

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his paean to simultaneity in “Salut au Monde!” Whitman consistently echoes the idea, first articulated in “Who Learns My Lesson Complete,” that temporal measurement cannot quantify life’s vitality and diversity: I do not think seventy years is the time of a man or woman, Nor that seventy millions of years is the time of a man or woman, Nor that years will ever stop the existence of me or any one else. (LG 1:153) What Whitman is stating here, and in his prewar poetry more generally, is not simply that eternity manifests in individual bodies, acts, and thoughts, but that there is a single, vast now that stretches backwards and forwards in time indefinitely, through which “past and present and future are not disjoined but joined” (PP 13). Whitman’s militant commitment to the present and the motley “act-poems” it contains is, of course, neither self-generated nor freefloating. On one level, Whitman’s refusal of time’s measurability mounts a kind of ontological challenge to the temporal strictures of industrial capitalism. Whitman, as M. Wynn Thomas writes, “is supremely Lawrence’s poet of ‘the quivering nimble hour of the present.’ He is addicted to the present tense and the present participle, and his descriptions of people always catch them in the very act of living” (Thomas, Lunar 56; Lawrence 87). Writing in the wake of the early- to mid-century market revolution in the United States, which provided the financial and cultural bases for capital’s industrialization, Whitman figured time as free and erotic and immeasurable precisely when it was becoming increasingly instrumentalized.3 Unbound and vibrant, time in Whitman’s prewar poetry fills with joy the body that capitalism has frozen. Far from being a quantifiable substance—a soulless index of profit and productivity—time for Whitman is orgasmic. Instead of advancing, it bursts; instead of proceeding, it explodes. “With each instant the world is created anew in its totality, in a movement of dilation”—and this perpetual remaking, working against the temporality of capitalist production, is at once macro- and micro-political, manifesting in legislatures as well as in beds, in bills and speeches as well as in the body’s gifts (Negri 185).



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Whitman’s politico-erotic attachment to synchronic connection climaxes in the Calamus and Children of Adam poems. Added to Leaves in 1860, these clusters identify the fullness of the present with the experiences of desire and intimacy. Fascinated with the affective and erotic dimensions of freedom, poems such as “Native Moments,” “Whoever You are Holding Me Now in Hand,” and “Not Heaving from my Ribb’d Breast Only” are, as Betsy Erkkila has deftly noted, at once Whitman’s most private and his most public poems (“Public Love” 133). In “Ages and Ages Returning at Intervals,” Whitman construes history as but the repetition of a plenipotent experience of the now: Ages and ages returning at intervals, Undestroyed, wandering immortal, Lusty, phallic, with the potent original loins, perfectly sweet, I, chanter of Adamic songs, Through the new garden, the West, the great cities, calling, Deliriate, thus prelude what is generated, offering these, offering myself, Bathing myself, bathing my songs in sex, Offspring of my loins. (LG 2:362–63) History is not a succession but a perpetual return; it is the cyclical, incessant, “Deliriate” act of “Sex.” Whitman similarly tries to arrest the reproductive moment and explore its varieties and potentials in Calamus 43: O you whom I often and silently come where you are, that I may be with you, As I walk by your side, or sit near, or remain in the same room with you, Little you know the subtle electric fire that for your sake is playing within me. (LG 2:406) This “subtle electric fire” is a longing and attachment that bears directly on the temporality of democratic citizenship. As Whitman later wrote, “the special meaning of the ‘Calamus’ cluster of ‘Leaves of Grass’ . . . mainly resides in its political significance. In my opinion, it is by a fervent, accepted development of comradeship, the beautiful and sane affection of man for man, latent in all the young fellows, north and

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south, east and west . . . that the United States . . . are to be most effectually welded together, intercalated, anneal’d into a living union” (LGC 753). This sense of an almost unlimited “now” enables Whitman, in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” to not only introduce his unborn readers to the dead but also project his own poetic persona far into the future. The present and the future in this poem are not simply linked but utterly transposable, since a shared synchrony encompasses the whole of America’s histories: The impalpable sustenance of me from all things at all hours of the day, The simple, compact, well-join’d scheme—myself disintegrated, Every one disintegrated, yet part of the scheme, The similitudes of the past and those of the future, The glories strung like beads on my smallest sights and hearings on the walk in the street, and the passage over the river, The current rushing so swiftly and swimming with me far away, The others that are to follow me, the ties between me and them, The certainty of others—the life, love, sight, hearing of others. .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  . It avails not, neither time or place—distance avails not, I am with you, you men and women of a generation, or ever so many generations hence, (LG 1:217–18, 220) Glories are “strung like beads,” punctuating present and future alike, but this is not the rosary of Benjamin’s historian, which permits “the consequences of eventualities to run through the fingers” (“On the Concept of History” 397). The antebellum Whitman frames the future as but the present remade. Historical moments in the early Leaves are not separate constellations; they are not points strung together without touching. Epochs and ages intermingle instead of proceeding; amalgamate instead of advancing. For the Whitman before the break, the Whitman still unbaptized by the blood of the Civil War (and his was, indeed, a bap-



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tism-through-trauma, a rebirth through wounding and the witnessing of wounding), the future is no rupture or transition. It is, instead, but the present’s afterlife—today’s weightless echo.

But the future came to reassert itself, with all the force of a bullet, in Whitman’s thought after the Civil War. In his antebellum poetry, Whitman certainly posits a content to history’s development (one having to do with the collusion of eternity with the body), but the shape of history is still indistinct. Following the “shock electric” of the Union’s struggle, however, Whitman came to understand historical time as possessing a reason and an object. After 1865, Leaves of Grass tends to privilege diachrony over synchrony and becoming over being. Reborn through slaughter, Leaves is positively restructured through a new understanding of historical development, and the latter’s form is markedly Hegelian. Indeed, during the period of Reconstruction Hegel exercised an especially strong influence on Whitman, prompting him to rethink history as a unitary process. Not without reason did Whitman declare in his notebooks that “only Hegel is fit for America—is large enough and free enough” (CW 9:170). In his favorite philosophy anthology, Frederic H. Hedge’s Prose Writers of Germany (1848), Whitman read and was galvanized by Hegel’s introduction to The Philosophy of History. He was likely drawn to Hegel’s theory of freedom, according to which the state is coterminous with liberty, and to the philosopher’s conceptualization of the nation-state as an ethical whole, but what became especially vital to Whitman’s thought was Hegel’s dialectical theory of historical development.4 As Hegel writes (in Hedge’s translation), From the consideration of the history of the world itself, we shall come to the result, that . . . it has been the rational and necessary course of the spirit which moves in the world,—a spirit whose nature does indeed ever remain one and the same. . . . We may say that the history of the world is the exhibition of the process by which spirit comes to the consciousness of that which it really is,—of the significancy of its own nature. And as the seed contains in itself the whole nature of the tree, even to the taste and form of the fruit, so do the first traces of spirit virtually contain the whole of history. (450–51)

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Whitman’s appropriation of Hegel’s philosophy of history, however, was precisely that: a making-use-of, or rewriting, of idealist dialectics. For Whitman, Democracy rather than the Geist is that which “contains in itself the whole nature of the tree, even to the taste and form of the fruit.” The seed, a figure for latency, comes to occupy the place of simultaneity in Whitman’s postwar poetry, and the result is a decidedly more imperialist faith in American hegemony—that future “empire of empires,” as he worded it in Democratic Vistas, which promised the “culminat[ion of] time itself ” (PP 1014). No longer a version of the present merely repeated, the future becomes for Whitman the principal space for liberated experience. When he composes the 1872 poem “As a Strong Bird on Pinions Free,” he accordingly sings in the conditional, addressing his chant to a people not yet born and a state still unrealized. “For thee, the future,” Whitman writes, “the peerless grandeur of the modern” will bear its face: Equable, natural, mystical Union thou, (the mortal with immortal blent,) Shalt soar toward the fulfillment of the future, the spirit of the body and the mind, The soul, its destinies. The soul, its destinies, the real real, (Purport of all these apparitions of the real;) In thee America, the soul, its destinies, Thou globe of globes! thou wonder nebulous! By many a throe of heat and cold convulsed, (by these thyself solidifying,) Thou mental, moral orb—thou New, indeed new, Spiritual world! The Present holds thee not—for such vast growth as thine, For such unparallel’d flight as thine, such brood as thine, The FUTURE only holds thee and can hold thee. (LG 3:638, 641) Whereas in “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” the future is practically indistinguishable from the present, here it is the issue of a rather profound historical rupture. And the present is accordingly constructed through a not-yet since the coming global “Union,” which will endow each soul



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with its destiny and reality with its kernel (“the real real”), is still on the horizon. What the Hegelian schema of temporal progression offers Whitman is, ultimately, a way to fuse aesthetic production to a processual and unitary idea of history. Leaves of Grass, in the wake of this influence, becomes far less concerned with regenerative cycles and time’s multiplicity. Now fixated on all things still-to-come, Whitman’s postwar poetry tends to figure the past as a more or less harmonious unfolding, as in the 1871 poem “To Thee Old Cause”: To thee old cause! Thou peerless, passionate, good cause, Thou stern, remorseless, sweet idea, Deathless throughout the ages, races, lands, After a strange sad war, great war for thee, (I think all war through time was really fought, and ever will be really fought, for thee,) These chants for thee, the eternal march of thee. (A war O soldiers not for itself alone, Far, far more stood silently waiting behind, now to advance in this book.) Thou orb of many orbs! Thou seething principle! Thou well-kept, latent germ! Thou centre! (LG 3:628) Past events, Whitman suggests, are not chaotic but profoundly interwoven; history’s moments comprise so many instances of democracy’s gradual blossoming (a “stern, remorseless, sweet idea” incessantly advancing). The Civil War, according to this poem, was itself a kind of blood sacrifice, a ritualistic offering en masse for liberty’s “eternal march” forward; and this underlying Democratic Spirit, time’s “seething principle,” functions as the animating “centre” of historical movement. Leaves of Grass accordingly becomes a sourcebook—and songbook— of this linear development, disclosing, as Whitman words it in 1891, “Evolution—the cumulative—growths and generations” across time’s singular arc (LG 3:748).5 This futural turn also acquires distinct formal shape. In 1855, Whitman’s book is an organic collection of poems—all untitled and

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unclustered—that hook into, amplify, and extend one another’s lines and themes, even stretching back to readdress and reanimate one another’s political and philosophical intimations. In the initial volumes, the book’s own material presentation, from its exterior (green and yellow, like autumn) to its typeface (which twirls across the page, like natural outgrowths), mimics this sense of organic coextensiveness.

Title page of the 1860 Thayer and Eldrudge edition of Leaves of Grass. Courtesy of the Walt Whitman Archive: http://www.whitmanarchive.org

With its poems continuously looping together and moving backwards and forwards in rhythm and theme, Leaves of Grass is an intensely cycli-



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cal production before the Civil War. After the “streams of blood, full of volition, full of joy,” however, this circularity is supplanted by linearity: stanza and section numbers organize the poems’ progression; clusters forge narratives, both collective and self-contained, out of disparate poetic series; and the reader is evermore swept up, like the present itself, into time’s teleological flow (LG 2:458). In the changes that Whitman makes to Leaves from 1867 on through the 1880s and 1890s, we can thus discern a principle of arrangement and revision that rearticulates the structural reason of dialectics, which consists, as he argued in 1882, in the generation of unity out of antagonism: According to Hegel the whole earth . . . with its infinite variety, the past, the surroundings of to-day, or what may happen in the future, the contrarieties of material with spiritual . . . are all, to the eye of the ensemblist, but necessary sides and unfoldings, different steps or links, in the endless process of Creative thought, which, amid numberless apparent failures and contradictions, is held together by central and never-broken unity—not contradictions or failures at all, but radiations of one consistent and eternal purpose; the whole mass of everything steadily, unerringly tending and flowing toward the permanent utile and morale, as rivers to oceans. . . . [This is] the most thoroughly American point of view [emphasis added] I know. In my opinion the above formulas of Hegel are an essential and crowning justification of New World democracy in the creative realms of time and space. There is that about them which only the vastness, the multiplicity and the vitality of America would seem able to comprehend, to give scope and illustration to, or to be fit for, or even originate. It is strange to me that they were born in Germany, or in the old world at all. (PP 920–21) To correct for this strangeness, Whitman translated this philosophy into a structural principle for Leaves. His massive attempt to reorganize his poetry according to the “utile and morale” of history leads, among other things, to a careful reclustering of poems after the war. No longer a semi-organic, loosely contained mass of poems, Leaves is scattered in 1871 into seven discrete mini-clusters. These subsections, each removed from one another, perform an important balancing act in concert with

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the clusters and individual poems to which they are adjoined. “With Antecedents,” for instance, finds the rejoinder to its questions (“Have I forgotten any part? any thing in the past?”) in the aptly-titled cluster that immediately follows it, The Answerer (LG 3:621). Yet Whitman’s most powerful attempts to effect a structural equipoise inhere in his syntactic modifications. The inventories that fill out much of Whitman’s antebellum poetry appear far less frequently in his post-1867 poems. These prewar lists perturbed Emerson, who famously complained, “I expect him to make the songs of the nation, but he seems to be contented to make the inventories” (qtd. in Schyberg 104). But Whitman’s catalogs are hardly the empty obverse of the nation’s chants. Their heterogeneous images and excited bodies index nothing less than a universal motility. In “A Song for Occupations” (1855), for instance, Whitman makes democracy’s “whole come back” through this spectacular juxtaposition of locations and labors: The usual routine . . . . the workshop, factory, yard, office, store or desk; The jaunt of hunting or fishing, or the life of hunting or fishing, Pasturelife, foddering, milking and herding, and all the personnel and usages; The plum-orchard, and apple-orchard . . . . gardenings . . . . seedlings, cuttings, flowers, [. . .] [.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .] Manufactures . . commerce . . engineering . . the building of cities, and every trade carried on there . . and the implements of every trade, [.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .] The paper I write on or you write on . . and every word we write . . and every cross and twirl of the pen . . and the curious way we write what we think [. . . .] [.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .] The ring on your finger . . the lady’s wristlet . . the hammers of stonebreakers or coppersmiths . . the druggist’s vials and jars; [.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .] The pump, the piledriver, the great derrick . . the coalkiln and



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brickkiln, Ironworks or whiteleadworks . . the sugarhouse . . steam-saws, and the great mills and factories; [.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .] In them the heft of the heaviest . . . . in them far more than you estimated, and far less also, In them, not yourself . . . . you and your soul enclose all things, regardless of estimation, In them your themes and hints and provokers . . if not, the whole earth has no themes or hints or provokers, and never had. (LG 1:91–92, unbracketed ellipses original) To represent the present’s varied contents, Whitman deploys an almost endless series of sentence fragments, only loosely connected, which collectively impart a sense of organic cohesiveness. After the war, however, every one of these lines is expunged from the text, and they are replaced by a single assertion: “Strange and hard that paradox true I give, / Objects gross and the unseen soul are one” (LG 1:93). Whitman thereby condenses the content of the earlier passage into an enigmatic philosophy of balance. The profane and divine, like “the unseen soul” and the “objects gross,” are ostensibly combined—indissolubly—in the space of his Hegelian verse. And this revision is hardly isolated: from 1867 on, we witness a staggering effort to erase, rewrite, or recombine these lists under the rubric of a progressive conception of time. The inventories themselves in Whitman’s postwar poetry tend to be either supplanted or outnumbered by apostrophes that address the future. In the “Song of the Exposition (1876),” Whitman offers this dedication: And thou America, Thy offspring towering e’er so high, yet higher thee above all towering, With Victory on thy left, and at thy right hand Law; Thou Union holding all, fusing, absorbing, tolerating all, Thee, ever thee, I sing. Thou, also thou, a World, With all thy wide geographies, manifold, different, distant, Rounded by thee in one—one common orbic language, One common indivisible destiny for All. (LG 3:621)

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Shifting seamlessly from a perfected American present to an imminent global future, Whitman’s syntax enables him to directly address something that does not exist: a “World” consolidated through “one common orbic language.” This apostrophe is not dissimilar from the kinds of performative address staged in his earlier verse, in which Whitman, as Tenney Nathanson has eloquently argued, connects almost beyond the text itself by projecting a bodily sense of immediacy. But here he shifts this imaginary connection to the future in an attempt to close the distance between the present and democracy’s latent arrival. Such apostrophes, which proliferate in the postwar volumes, reconfigure the relation between poet and reader by making time itself the agent of transformation; and we, dislocated from the present into an infinite future, are absorbed—no less than the text’s own sentences—into history’s progressive drive.

What, then, are we to make of these changes to Leaves of Grass? How should we account for this metamorphosis that extends from the most local points of Whitman’s syntax to the broadest limits of his politics? To address such questions, the standard move in Whitman criticism has been to extract some narrative of withdrawal from the texts at hand. Luke Mancuso, for instance, discerns in these postwar poems “a conservative nostalgia for antebellum cultural stability,” a retrograde politics of memory that causes “traces of ghostliness” to “linger” throughout his later writings (291). In a similar vein, Betsey Erkkila claims that these texts tend to “affirm rather than question” the status quo (Whitman the Political Poet 273), and Kenneth Cmiel finds in them little more than “an increasingly [abstract], stale, and out-of-touch version” of what came before (206). Yet, this story of declension seems to me spectacularly inadequate at explaining either the formal intricacies of these changes or the political concerns with which they are bound up. In fact, Whitman’s temporal restructuring of Leaves looks very different when we consider it in light of his abiding engagements with the problems of labor in the United States. This is an interest—at once political and aesthetic, poetic and libidinal—in the actions, and bodies, and desires of workers, a preoccupation that stretches from his earliest journalism to his final death-bed revisions.6



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This fixation on work and labor guides his refashioning of Leaves. It is no accident that the erasure of now-time in his poetry coincides quite directly with the disappearance of artisinal labor in the postwar United States. Whitman, for whom time and politics are always coupled, registered and refigured the economic events of the postbellum period temporally in his verse. Prior to the war, his poetics of the present forge an expansive vision for the workers of the world, one that not only enfolds the most diverse of labors but also fuses them together. In the “Song for Occupations,” for instance, this distended and ubiquitous present draws “House-building,” carving, and the “sawing the boards,” “Blacksmithing” and “nail-making” and innumerable other labors into one another, presenting them as coterminous acts that, in making things at the same moment, make the world. Simultaneity, in the prewar poetry, thereby becomes almost synonymous with democracy itself, and the latter is depicted not as some mere form of government but as the very act and experience of cooperation. Yet the paradise for labor that Whitman had initially envisioned as the fated outcome of American progress was imperiled after the war by economic conditions not at all unlike those of the twenty-first century. The years of Whitman’s most strident futural revisions were marked by massive unemployment (at one point in the 1870s reaching almost 25% in New York City), periodic economic recession (including what was previously the United States’ “longest period of uninterrupted economic contraction,” 1873–1879), and an unprecedented centralization of wealth during the Gilded Age (E. Foner 513; Fels 107–08). By 1880, nearly eighty percent of all the manufacturing workers in the United States were part of a vast industrial factory system (U.S. 2:16). The disappearance of the independent artisan—that central figure of Leaves before the war—had proven to be one of the most enduring legacies of the Union’s victory.8 This supplanting of artisans with operatives, which made America’s modern proletariat, did not go unnoticed by Whitman, who experienced and responded to these changes by refashioning the temporal structures of his verse. These transformations threatened to destroy his vision of a harmonious present, and Whitman, accordingly, shifted this harmony to the future. The space of dialectical imminence, of the still-to-come, thereby became coterminous with freedom. The origins of this shift lie, in large part, in his response to the Civil War as a struggle over labor. He called the period 1861–1865 “the

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real parturition years (more than 1776–’83)” because it destroyed—or seemed to have destroyed—all forms of unfree labor and liberated the United States from the throes of feudalism (PP 666). Whitman’s idea of historical linearity responds to the war’s trauma by reframing this unprecedented bloodshed as both necessary and inevitable. This faith in teleology thus functions, on one level at least, as an ideological mystification, insofar as it deracializes this conflict and willfully forgets that the Civil War was a struggle not over labor in general but over racial slavery. However, it would be a mistake to read this shift as only a compensatory reaction on Whitman’s part, because it also contains a rather thoroughgoing critique of the postwar present. A critical perspective, in other words, emerges through this very compensation, fulfilling the promise he first outlined in his pre-Leaves notebooks to “not descend among professors and capitalists.” “I will instead,” he proclaimed, “turn the ends of my trousers around my boots, and my cuffs back from my wrists, and go with drivers and boatmen and men that catch fish or work in the field. [For] I know they are sublime” (UPP 68–69). If this sublimity, once attached to the present in all its variety, disappears from Whitman’s Leaves, that is because it is imaginable now only as something that has either been expunged or has not yet arrived. The futural turn in Whitman’s verse thus issues from a refusal to accept the troubled present as the sole horizon of political possibility. This investment in deferral proved especially important for Whitman in 1870s, as the economy collapsed in state after state and the exploited and unemployed began to revolt. The anxiety that underpins his interest in dialectics is evident, for instance, in this brief but remarkable meditation that he penned in 1879, following one of his daily walks through his beloved Manhattan: I saw to-day a sight I had never seen before—and it amazed, and made me serious; three quite good-looking American men, of respectable personal presence, two of them young, carrying chiffonier-bags on their shoulders, and the usual long iron hooks in their hands, plodding along, their eyes cast down, spying for scraps, rags, bones, &c [. . . I am forced to conclude that b]eneath the whole political world, what most presses and perplexes to- day, sending vastest results affecting the future, is not the abstract question of democracy, but of social and economic organization, the treatment of working-people by employers,



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and all that goes along with it . . . The American Revolution of 1776 was simply a great strike, successful for its immediate object—but whether a real success judged by the scale of the centuries, and the long-striking balance of Time, yet remains to be settled . . . If the United States, like the countries of the Old World, are also to grow vast crops of poor, desperate, dissatisfied, nomadic, miserably-waged populations, such as we see looming upon us of late years—steadily, even if slowly, eating into them like a cancer of lungs or stomach—then our republican experiment, notwithstanding all its surface-successes, is at heart an unhealthy failure. (PP 1088–89) These seem to be surprising claims coming from the author of Leaves of Grass. Uncertainty and anxiety loom in Whitman’s words. Once the sublation “of all the civilization so far known,” the United States has metamorphosed into a potentially failed “experiment” (PP 1007). The iron constructions and steel machines of industrial modernity may curtail or perhaps even extinguish the principles of that first great strike; this is the nightmare that, Whitman attests, “continually haunts me”—the specter of a dream stamped out (PP 959). The gleaners that invite the poet’s gaze at the outset are a far cry from the robust artisans of his prewar verse. In 1855 the proud worker’s body “balks account.” “The expression of a wellmade man,” he writes, “strikes through the cotton and flannel; / To see him pass conveys as much as the best poem . . perhaps more” (LG 1:122). Now, in the age of the strike, there is still a “divine nimbus” that “attracts with fierce undeniable attraction,” but the body has been broken and misused. If the “expression of the wellmade man” manifests in “his walk” and in the “carriage of his neck,” these gleaners, who shuffle and “plod along” with “their eyes cast down,” manifest the absence of this expression. And this shift is tied to a broader transition from fulfillment to collapse, from antebellum harmony to postbellum declension, as the United States—which, he proclaimed in 1855, was “the world’s greatest poem”—has either reached its final stanza or become a kind of vast, material elegy (PP 5). The strikes to which Whitman refers in his note are the labor revolts of 1877, which commenced with railroad workers in Martinsburg, West Virginia, and then spread from the eastern seaboard to the western territories in the summer of that year. In Baltimore, soon after the revolts began

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and the state militia was sent south to suppress the strike in its birthplace, working-class citizens descended upon the passing soldiers, hurling rocks and other projectiles at them. Half of the militia deserted out of sympathy. In St. Louis, workers halted commerce in the city and challenged the municipal government. In Chicago, workers battled the Illinois National Guard and took over much of the city, and their insurrection ended only when the Secretary of War called in six companies of federal troops from Omaha. In Pittsburgh, a general strike emerged among laborers in the iron mills, glass factories, coal mines, and steel plants. When 2,000 militia arrived from Philadelphia, the workers already controlled much of the city. As a reporter recounted: the troops arrived “shortly after 4 o’clock, by which time an immense crowd had congregated. The hillside was literally black with people . . . . At this hour—9 p.m., excitement is raging all over the city, which is virtually in the hands of . . . iron-workers, coal-miners, stevedores, and others who are in fully sympathy with the strikers” (“A Day of Fighting”). Although each of these worker revolts were squelched by the state, they helped spawn a radical labor movement and, in so doing, shifted the fault lines of American political ideology. As Frances Parkman wrote one year later, “Two enemies, unknown before, have risen like spirits of darkness on our social and political horizon—an ignorant proletariat and a half-taught plutocracy” (14).8 It is in the midst of this conflict that Whitman’s postwar Leaves are born. This eruption of class consciousness is, in some respects, the condition of possibility for his postbellum revisions. As he wrote around this same time, Not songs of loyalty alone are these, But songs of insurrection also; For I am the sworn poet of every dauntless rebel, the world over And: Courage! my brother or my sister! Keep on—Liberty is to be subserv’d whatever occurs; That is nothing that is quell’d by one or two failures, or any number of failures, .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .



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Or the show of the tushes of power, soldiers, cannon, penal statutes. Revolt! and still revolt! revolt! What we believe in waits latent forever through all the continents (LG 1:249–50)9 Yet Whitman’s is an insurrection, ultimately, of deferral, a revolt whose militancy consists in anticipation. This political context accordingly recasts how we should understand Whitman’s taking up of Hegel. His turn to teleology in the wake of the war is not simply, as David Reynolds puts it, a kind of “philosophical consolation,” one that enables him to “resolve problems” once “his poetic ‘I’ is no longer able to absorb and recycle . . . cultural material” (449–50). Whitman’s embrace of Hegel is, rather, a form of political reengagment. When he enlists dialectics, he does so to construct a poetic vision not of temporal harmony but, instead, to account for disharmony, and to hold onto some vision of democracy precisely when it appears to be most implausible. Consider the 1881 poem, “Roaming in Thought (After reading HEGEL.)”: Roaming in thought over the Universe, I saw the little that is Good steadily hastening towards immortality, And the vast all that is call’d Evil I saw hastening to merge itself and become lost and dead. (LG 3:685) The “vast all” that is evil and “the little that is Good” are not, for Whitman, equal forces. Even if it is hastening toward extinction, Evil is today larger and greater—and this is no purely metaphysical problem. As “things now exist in the States,” he soon wrote, “what is more terrible, more alarming, than the total want of any . . . fusion and mutuality . . . between the comparatively few successful rich, and the great masses of the unsuccessful, the poor? As a mixed political and social question, is not this full of dark significance?” (PP 1094). These same misgivings find powerful expression at the end his centennial chant, “Song of the Universal”: And thou America, For the scheme’s culmination, its thought and its reality . . . In Thy ensemble, whatever else withheld withhold not from us,

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Here we discover a reimagining of freedom in the Gilded Age as an almost ghostly fantasy. In these lines, an unsteady time scale of hope and desire erupts, and it is a temporality that instead of unfolding through an iron law of progression, resembles a dream. Rather than advancing, democracy flees. Rather than realizing itself in some vast sublation, it vanishes into some unknown ether. And we are left with a doubt that would have struck fear in Hegel’s heart, a suspicion that history’s fated end will, perhaps, never arrive. Whitman continues: In this broad earth of ours, Amid the measureless grossness and the slag, Enclosed and safe within its central heart, Nestles the seed perfection . . . For it the mystic evolution, Not the right only justified, what we call evil also justified. (LG 3:679–80) Despite all the setbacks and failures and excesses of this modern world, a hidden “seed” of perfected democracy, Whitman insists, is already “nestle[d]” away. What propels this evolutionary sense of history, however, is not a naïve belief in amelioration but an anxious awareness of the partialities and imperfections of “progress.” Whitman returns again to Hegel’s metaphor of the seed in order to envision democracy as incomplete. In a postbellum world in which city governments are almost toppled by their workers, in which class strife rather than synchronic harmony underpins the nation’s polity, and in which the masses “spy” the ground “for scraps, [and] rags, [and] bones,” dialectical idealism is, in a way, for Whitman, the only way that freedom still can be envisioned at all. What Hegel provides for Whitman, then, is an alternative time frame for democracy, a capacious historical imaginary that, in the midst of upheaval, discovers a promise in conflict and failure. Through his



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wayward reading of Hegel, Whitman reimagines history as antagonism, as a process tending toward a sublation that has not yet come, and might never occur. This understanding of historical time is of course not Hegelian in the strict sense of the word: it is instead a Whitmanian vision, one that retains the structure of dialectical anticipation but prizes deferral, one that improvises on Hegel by imagining the real possibility of non-resolution. Thanks to this strange influence, this transatlantic mixture of philosophy and poetry, Leaves of Grass is afterwards never the same. Whitman’s innumerable deletions, substitutions, additions, and rearrangements—his fluid acts of modification that unfold in edition after edition and make Leaves of Grass so singularly protean—are henceforth predicated on imminence. There is, of course, something that is lost in this transition: the powerful synchronism that sustains the antebellum verse. The distended now-time that makes possible poems like “The Sleepers” and “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” falls away, and in its place there arises an anticipatory poetics, a verse of and about teleological becoming that carries all the political freight and contradictions that come with this philosophical wish. Yet, I would suggest, there is also something gained in this loss, something counter-intuitive but nonetheless salutary and sobering. The fact is that the more dialectical and future-oriented his poetry becomes, the more militantly is it engaged in issues of labor and its place in the postbellum United States. Contained in Whitman’s attachment to imminence, in other words, is a quite radical insistence on freedom’s absence in the present, as well as a keen awareness of the ways in which the Civil War never truly ended but was instead reborn as a conflict between bosses and workers. This blending of prophecy with critique is especially palpable in a passage that Whitman penned in 1876, not long before the railroad strikes began in West Virginia. At the very end of his Memoranda of the War, he writes: The glory of the Republic of The United States, in my opinion, is to be that, emerging from the light of the Modern . . . it is to cheerfully range itself, and its politics are henceforth to come, under [. . .] universal laws, and embody them, and carry them out . . . And the real History of the United States—start-

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There is, to be sure, something deeply quietist, and perhaps even politically retrograde, about this declaration of future fulfillment out of a “series of [historical] steps.” Written on the eve of a compromise between the North and South that would terminate black Reconstruction and literally make “the South victorious, after all,” Whitman’s optimistic, evolutionary interpretation of American democracy seems to be woefully farsighted.10 And yet, beyond and between its lines, Whitman’s projection is also more than this. Whitman hints that, in a sense, the ideal readers of his verse have not yet even been born. The “weight and form and location” of the “world’s greatest poem” is, in a sense, utterly unavailable to the Americans of the Gilded Age, who are surrounded by inequality (LG 1:104; PP 5). Freedom will arrive only “at the remove of hundreds, perhaps a thousand, years hence”: there is a capitulation here, but there is also an insistence on the present’s radical inadequacy. And this condition of continued deferral positions us, as much as Whitman, in a present that is still ongoing, a present in which “the light of the Modern” has emerged as a fantasy of illumination, and in which the “vast crops of poor” have indeed cast doubt on the success of our first great strike. “Is it a dream?” he asks. Has our experiment, “judged by . . . the long-striking balance of Time,” and “notwithstanding all its surface-successes,” in some sense failed? And we, living where his future has now finally become present, can only answer: yes. University of Georgia notes 1. On the gradual standardization of Whitman’s poetry and politics, see especially Reynolds 448–590, Killingsworth 155–74, Thomas 252–82, and Bellis 102–20. The fullest accounts of Whitman’s “Unionism” are provided by Erkkila, Whitman 190–292, Morris, and Mancuso, while Davis and Shively develop compelling readings of Whitman’s experiences in Washington’s wartime hospitals. 2. This poetics of immediacy is, in other words, both structurally and politically fundamental to how Whitman oscillates between individuality and collectivity in “Song of Myself.” If, as critics such as Pease, Coviello, Wilson, and Altieri have argued, the poem models its politics through its development of a syncretic poetic self, the latter, I am arguing, is a decidedly temporal construction.



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3. On the market revolution, see Sellers, Livingston, and Martin. 4. Whitman’s knowledge of Hegel likely came from three sources: (1) Hedge’s anthology, which contained a translation of Hegel’s Introduction to The Philosophy of History and a very brief excerpt from his Aesthetics; (2) Joseph Gostwick’s Outlines of German Literature, which provided a broad outline of Hegel’s dialectical philosophy of history and theory of freedom; and (3) personal conversations with Hegelians such as Amos Bronson Alcott and W. T. Harris, the editor of Speculative Philosophy (a journal of idealist philosophy published between 1867 and 1893). 5. This altered historical sensibility finds its most comprehensive prose voice in Democratic Vistas (1867–71), an essay-cum-prophecy that redefines Whitman’s conception of poetry through Hegel’s philosophy of history. As in 1855, the poet is still the agent of distillation, but now he is also a dialectician “consistent with Hegelian formulas” (PP 1012). After the Civil War, the poet and the state are categorically doubled in Whitman’s thought: constantly folding into and realizing one another, they allow democracy to unleash itself in “ceaseless succession through time.” “Would you have in yourself the divine, vast, general law?” Whitman asks. “Then merge yourself in it” (948). Of course this progressive vision, which pivots on the imperial development the American nation-state, goes where Hegel himself never did. The Philosophy of History famously describes America as “the land of the future, where, in the ages that lie before us, the burden of the World’s History shall reveal itself,” but for Hegel this exceptionalism derives from the New World’s nonhistoricity, its definitive removal from time’s dialectical oscillations (86). In the space of Hegel’s lectures, this statement is deployed chiefly to justify passing over the Americas in his explication of Spirit’s world-historical development. On one level, Democratic Vistas and the postwar Leaves of Grass can be read as an extended and eloquent response on Whitman’s part to Hegel’s qualified statement about America’s futural transformation. 6. This argument thus extends Thomas’s claim that “the passion of Whitman’s identification with the workers never really waned” but, in fact, subsisted throughout his poetic career (“Labor and Laborers” 60). 7. When the final edition of Leaves was published, as Alan Trachtenberg notes, “the richest one percent commanded more wealth than the remaining 99 percent” of the population, while roughly “half of all American families lived without property [whatsoever]” (99). Even as early as 1869, the New York Times went so far as to claim that the independent artisan had nearly vanished from the postbellum world: “one capitalist employs five men now where he employed one twenty years ago; and thus there is gradually developing at the North a system of slavery as absolute if not as degrading as that which lately prevailed at the South. The only difference is that there agriculture was the field, landed proprietors were the masters and negroes were the slaves; while in the North manufactures is the field, manufacturing capitalists threaten to become the masters, and it is the white laborers who are to be slaves . . . . A casual observer, walking the streets of a city familiar to him . . . cannot fail to notice this fact” (“Our Working Classes”).

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8. The details I outline here on the strikes of 1877 come from the historical accounts developed by P. Foner, Schneirov, Burbank, and Stowell. 9. These quotes come from Whitman’s 1871 revisions to “Europe, The 72d and 73d Years of These States,” a poem he initially penned in response to the revolutions of 1848 (“Resurgemus”) and then integrated into Leaves of Grass in 1855 (as “Europe, The 72d and 73d Years of These States”), 1856 (“Liberty Poem for Asia, Africa, Europe, America, Australia, Cuba, and The Archipelagoes of the Sea”), 1860 (“To a Foiled Revolter or Revoltress”), 1867 (“To a Foil’d Revolter or Revoltress”), and 1871 (“To a Foil’d European Revolutionaire”). After the Civil War, the poem still retains its original references to the mid-century revolts in France, Hungary, and Italy, but its new and altered lines also take up the postbellum politico-economic struggles of the United States.  As Whitman declared in a note that he added to the 1871 manuscript, “Not only are These States the born offspring of Revolt against mere overweening authority—but seeing ahead for Them in the future a long, long reign of Peace with all the growths corruptions and tyrannies & formalisms of Obedience, (accumulating, vast folds, strata, from the rankness of continued prosperity and the more and more insidious grip of capital) I feel to raise a note of caution (perhaps unneeded alarm) that the ideas of the following cluster will always be needed, that it may be worth while to keep well up, & vital, such ideas and verses as the following” (Walt Whitman’s Workshop 229). 10. I am referring, more specifically, to what Dubois calls “the counter-revolution of property” that culminated in the negotiated election of 1876. Dubois summarizes: “On the 26th of February, . . . there were three conferences. The outcome was an agreement. The Republicans guaranteed that Mr. Hayes, when he became President, would by non-interference and the withdrawal of troops allow the planter-capitalists, under the name of Democrats, to control South Carolina and Louisiana [. . .] This meant that Southern landholders and capitalists would be put in complete control of disfranchised black labor” (692).

works cited Altieri, Charles. “Spectacular Antispectacle: Ecstasy and Nationality in Whitman and his Heirs.” American Literary History 11.1 (1999): 34–62. Bellis, Peter J. Writing Revolution: Aesthetics and Politics in Hawthorne, Whitman, and Thoreau. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2003. Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann. Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002. ———. “Central Park.” Selected Writings 161–199. ———. “On the Concept of History.” Selected Writings 389–400. ———. Selected Writings, Vol. 4: 1938–1940. Ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003. Burbank, David. Reign of Rabble: The St. Louis General Strike of 1877. Fairfield, NJ: Augustus Kelley, 1966. Cmiel, Kenneth. “Whitman the Democrat.” A Historical Guide to Walt Whitman.



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Ed. David S. Reynolds. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. 205–34. Coviello, Peter. Intimacy in America: Dreams of Affiliation in Antebellum Literature. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005. Davis, Robert Leigh. Whitman and the Romance of Medecine. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997. “A Day of Fighting in Chicago.” New York Times 27 July 1877. DuBois, W. E. B. Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880. New York: Free Press, 1998. Erkkila, Betsy. “Public Love: Whitman and Political Theory.” Whitman East & West: New Contexts for Reading Walt Whitman. Ed. Ed Folsom. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2002. 115–44. ———. Whitman the Political Poet. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. Fels, Rendigs. American Business Cycles, 1865–1897. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1959. Foner, Eric. Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877. New York: HarperCollins, 2002. Foner, Philip S. The Great Labor Uprising of 1877. New York: Monad Press, 1997. Gostwick, Joseph. Outlines of German Literature. Philadelphia: 1854. Hedge, Frederic H. Prose Writers of Germany. Philadelphia: Carey and Hart, 1848. Hegel, G. W. F. The Philosophy of History. Trans. John Sibree. New York: Dover, 1956. Husserl, Edmund. On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893– 1917). Trans. John Barnett Brough. Vol. 4 of Edmund Husserl: Collected Works. Ed. Rudolf Bernet. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1991. Killingsworth, M. Jimmie. Whitman’s Poetry of the Body: Sexuality, Politics, and the Text. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989. Lawrence, D. H. Selected Literary Criticism. Ed. Anthony Beale. London: Heinemann, 1961. Livingston, James. Pragmatism and the Political Economy of Cultural Revolution, 1850–1940. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997. Mancuso, Luke. The Strange Sad War Revolving: Walt Whitman, Reconstruction, and the Emergence of Black Citizenship, 1875–1876. Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1997. Martin, Scott, ed. Cultural Change and the Market Revolution in America: 1789–1860. Oxford: Rowan & Littlefield, 2005. Morris, Roy, Jr. The Better Angel: Walt Whitman in the Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Nathanson, Tenney. Whitman’s Presence: Body, Voice, and Writing in Leaves of Grass. New York: New York University Press, 1992. Negri, Antonio. Time for Revolution. Trans. Matteo Mandarini. New York: Continuum, 2003. “Our Working Classes: Their Condition and Prospects—Concentration of Capital in the Hands of the Few—Employers Becoming Fewer and Laborers More

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Numerous—The Rich Richer, the Poor Poorer.” The New York Times 22 February 1869. Parkman, Frances. “The Failure of Universal Suffrage.” North American Review 127 (July–August 1878): 1–20. Pease, Donald. “Walt Whitman’s Revisionary Democracy.” Columbia History of American Poetry. Ed. Jay Parini. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993. 148–171. Reynolds, David. Walt Whitman’s America: A Cultural Biography. New York: Random House/Vintage, 1996. Schneirov, Richard. Labor and Urban Politics: Class Conflict and the Origins of Modern Liberalism in Chicago, 1864–97. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1998. Schyberg, Frederik. Walt Whitman. Trans. Evie Allison Allen. New York: Columbia University Press, 1951. Sellers, Charles. The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815–1846. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. Shively, Charles, ed. Drum Beats: Walt Whitman’s Civil War Boy Lovers. San Francisco: Gay Sunshine Press, 1989. Stowell, David O. Streets, Railroads, and the Great Strike of 1877. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Thomas, M. Wynn. The Lunar Light of Whitman’s Poetry. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987. ———. “Labor and Laborers.” A Companion to Walt Whitman. Ed. Donald D. Kummings. Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell, 2006. 60–75. Trachtenberg, Alan. The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age. New York: Hill and Wang, 1982. U.S. Bureau of the Census. Tenth Census. Washington, D C: U.S. Government, 1880. Whitman, Walt. The Complete Writings. Ed. Richard Maurice Bucke, et al. New York: Putnam, 1902. ———. Leaves of Grass: A Textual Variorum of the Printed Poems. 3 Vols. Ed. Sculley Bradley, Harold W. Blodgett, Arthur Golden, and William White. New York: New York University Press, 1980. ———. Poetry and Prose. Ed. Justin Kaplan. New York: Library of America, 1996. ———. Leaves of Grass, Comprehensive Reader’s Edition. Ed. Harold Blodgett and Sculley Bradley. New York: New York University Press, 1965. ———. The Uncollected Poetry and Prose of Walt Whitman. Ed. Emory Holloway. 2 Volumes. Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1972. ———.Walt Whitman’s Workshop: A Collection of Unpublished Manuscripts. Ed. Clifton Joseph Furness. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1928.   Wilson, Ivy G. “Organic Compacts, Form, and the Cultural Logic of Cohesion; or, Whitman Re-Bound.” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 54.1–4 (2009): 199–216.

elizabeth festa

Conveniently Situated Museums: The House Museum Movement and Modernist Interiority in Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House

In her promotional essay of 1916, “mesa verde

Wonderland,” Cather describes at length the remarkable homes of an ancient people. Praising these “strong habitations” for their beauty, their “absence of clutter,” and the “settled, ritualistic life” they once fostered, Cather suggests that within their walls a modern visitor might experience a propinquity to “custom, ritual, [and] integrity of tradition” as distinct from “the “bustling business of the world” (qtd. in Rosowski and Slote 84–86). Yet if Cather argues persuasively for the privileged role of domestic space and housekeeping in the transmission of historical and cultural meaning, she also alludes to the violability of these utopian interiors. In a curious statement, she insists that the Mesa Verde is “the story of an early race” and “not, as many people think, an inconveniently situated museum” (85). While Cather surely gestures to the geographic context and setting that made the Mesa Verde a more compelling reliquary of the past than any urban museum representation of the region, her emphasis on securing the home’s meaning also suggests a different subtext: the conflation of museum and market that was destabilizing the historical and cultural significance of these domestic interiors.1 In the short tale, “Tom Outland’s Story,” inspired by her trip, Cather alludes to the compromised integrity of southwestern domesticities that was an effect of such enterprising efforts. By the 1920s, however, her Arizona Quarterly Volume 67, Number 1, Spring 2011 Copyright © 2011 by Arizona Board of Regents issn 0004-1610

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critique was not limited to the immediate effects of enterprise on the historical sites themselves, or even to southwestern spaces specifically. Directing her attention to her era’s broader interest in contextualized interiors, Cather became increasingly concerned with the effects of modeling and marketing iconic Native American as well as colonial domiciles for private use in the more conveniently situated “museums” of the private home.2 In her 1925 novel, The Professor’s House, Cather most fully considers the implications of the intersections between institutional and personal collecting practices that accompanied the development of the house museum movement. The Professor’s House was published at the peak of the historic house museum movement and its plot and structure situate the collecting of Native Americana within the encompassing neo-colonial manifestations of the movement. Homes were privileged milieus for culture during this era; historic domesticities made the notion of an idealized past tangible by embedding the social values and aesthetic sensibilities of earlier Americans in the architecture and design of their homes and furnishings. By immersing visitors within the mise-en-scène of the past, such spaces staged intimate encounters with history. After 1900, the movement was propelled by the belief that civic homes could shore up the increasingly tenuous boundaries of national identity and provide idealized pre-modern settings for visitors amid the deracinating effects of an emerging modernity. The period between the Civil War and the 1930s would witness the restoration of a constellation of civically oriented domestic settings. Many of these early American homes were cultish restorations of the houses of iconic figures such as Mount Vernon, Daniel Webster Birthplace, The Hermitage, and Monticello. While there were twenty historic houses in 1895, this number increased to a hundred by 1910 and over four hundred by the early 1930s (Coleman 18). The movement would also come to include a wide range of paradigmatic interiors such as the colonial kitchens and colonial log cabins that were popularized at the U.S. Sanitary Fairs during the war, the Centennial Exhibition of 1876, and the Columbian Exhibition of 1893; the period room displays of art museums such as the Golden Gate Park Museum, Essex Institute, Wadsworth Athenaeum, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art; and open-air museum villages such as Colonial Williamsburg and Ford’s Greenfield Village.3



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The interest in Native American home-life dovetailed with the commitment to restoring the material evidence of uniquely American origins as well as with the form that such settings tended to take. The Mesa Verde cliff-dwellings that Cather visited were but one of many efforts to contextualize historic domiciles. Both professional and popular institutions capitalized on the public fascination with the home. The life groups of such institutions as the American Museum of Natural History and the Smithsonian, the recreations of cliff-dwellings and hogans at world’s fairs such as the Columbian Exhibition of 1893, and the museum exhibits and artisan displays of touristic venues such as the Harvey Company’s Indian Department were similar in that they adjoined the pedagogical goals of collecting with a fantasy pre-modern domesticity. In literally bringing precious things inside, house museums created sites for celebrating and sheltering an idealized American history from the flux of modern life; however, although historic homes stood for inviolable values, they would ultimately support personal ends as much as national ones. The interest in historic domiciles paralleled the commercial developments of the decades following the war, developments facilitating historical reproductions that would become popular in home décor (P. West 42). Moreover, commercial enterprises such as tourist sites began to co-opt museum modes including contextualized scenery as a means of authenticating cultural objects and settings for marketing purposes. As the historic interior’s role shifted from one of preserving the material traces of iconic figures to modeling these new styles for private use (42), historical objects and settings were dislodged from their signifying contexts. In the private home the museum epistemologies of historical, cultural, scientific, and aesthetic value were conflated with social convention, taste, and personal fantasy. Cultural consumption found museum displays construed as vehicles of modernist self-fashioning as much as venues for culture. Cather’s exploration of the varied effects of locating historical and cultural experience in the private home shapes her novel’s formal as well as thematic concerns. The centerpiece of her novel, “Tom Outland’s Story,” fictionalizes the Wetherill family’s discovery in 1888 of the Mesa Verde cliff-dwellings. In Cather’s version, a Santa Fe railroad call-boy excavates the dwellings and attempts to transfer his collections to the Smithsonian. Throughout the story, Tom and his makeshift family engage in archival activities within the space of the home, and

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their kitchen table curation and bedroom museum mark the domestic interior’s coextension with the civic space of the museum as mutually secure sites for experiencing the interiority of history. However, as the museum—and then the home—prove vulnerable to external interests, the artifacts are lost. “Tom Outland’s Story” suggests the slippage between precious relic and mere souvenir, artifact and decoration, and museum space and trading post that occurs upon contact with the modern world. However, the novel as a whole elaborates this more straightforward reading. Enacting a gesture key to her era’s commitment to interiorizing history, Cather inserted her free-standing tale into a longer domestic story set in the contemporary Midwest. This story, which engages the neo-colonial aspects of the house museum movement, is set almost exclusively in domestic interiors that double as archival spaces. Historical work, civic gestures, private memorializing, decorating, social climbing, and sexual activity spring organically from the kitchens, bedrooms, dining rooms, studies, and libraries of the characters’ homes, underscoring the contiguity between the domestic interior and modern spheres of engagement and desire. The Professor attempts to adjudicate the claims on the late Tom’s economic, cultural, historical, and social legacy. Yet as the material vestiges of Tom’s life begin to furnish both physical and mental interiors—including a house museum devoted to his memory—his fragmented remains ultimately serve a variety of objectives and desires. Cather’s contemporary readers found her novel’s structure gratuitous and artistically flawed.4 By contrast, recent critics of The Professor’s House understand the novel’s form as crucial to its meaning, interpreting its radical break in story line as an interrogation of the losses to history and culture that are inevitable in a modern world of circulation and exchange.5 This essay supports such a reading. Cather had long implicated the domestic interior in such loss, and her novel reflects her critique of the home as a locus of consumerism, social convention, and self-expression. However, this essay moves beyond this reading to argue for an understanding of The Professor’s House as a transitional text in which Cather reconsiders both home and cultural institution. Cather recognizes that the home is fraught with the potential for cultural loss, but she also understands that it is inextricably intertwined with the contexts that make cultural experience meaningful. In archiving her short story within a broader tale of modern life, Cather was archiving



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her earlier idealization of preservation in favor of a more dynamic approach to culture. This essay historicizes Cather’s conception of the losses and gains of contextualizing culture within the home by situating The Professor’s House within the broader late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century establishment of historic homes as civic venues. It further reexamines the novel in relation to literary attempts to critique and re-stage the domestic interior. Through her novel’s experimental form, Cather was participating in a transatlantic framing project that was shared by many of her contemporaries including Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, and Mabel Dodge Luhan who explored the relationship between physical interiors and the production of cultural, social and aesthetic meaning. Dubbing such domestic interests as “kitchen table modernism” (1), Victoria Rosner has argued that modernists, far from being separated from material realities, took up the spaces and objects of private life as the very subject of their transformative efforts (2–20). Among those revisions that modernism’s experimental forms staged were more intimate domestic encounters with cultural objects once limited to the museum world and a radical recasting of household work as a cultural activity uniting the home with public cultural spaces. While Cather’s interests were perhaps less avant-garde than those of Woolf or Stein, The Professor’s House resides on the cusp of modernism, poignantly recording the loss of regional differences and the advent of a modern culture of change and loss.6 Yet Cather’s novel presages a new form of interiority—a modernist interiority—in which the home fulfills an important civic role. Charting a shift in cultural primacy from original sites and their museum representations to the exhibition space of the private home, The Professor’s House envisions the home not simply as an alternative site to the museum but as a new kind of museum. Cather’s unique concern with the place of history within modernity finds her negotiating the home’s conflation of economic, social, and cultural value to imagine how the domestic interior could renew culture. To recast the home as a museum requires attentiveness to the formal as well as the social aspects of the domestic interior, and in her novel Cather restages the revivification of cultural objects by incorporating them into the settings and scenery of daily life. Yet she goes further to deny that this affective relation is limited to a singular space or time. The mise-enscène of history and culture is maintained through distinctly curato-

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rial household rituals and performances that establish a relationship between objects, spaces, and persons both within and between homes. Undercutting more traditional notions of preservation, Cather’s novel creates a literary museum that models a mobile and generative archive for the modern era. house museums, southwestern interiors, interiority Cather’s treatment of the home in The Professor’s House reveals her familiarity with a wide range of historic domesticities that were produced in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, some of which she experienced first-hand and others produced in areas where she lived and worked. Her novel reflects her era’s understanding of the cultural value of historic homes as residing in their powerful projection of the interiority of history. This interiority was two-fold; in embedding literal interiors with the values of an idealized past, historic homes catalyzed personal encounters with a living history. For example, at the very first official house museum, Mount Vernon, Washington’s rooms and personal objects afforded visitors who made the pilgrimage to his home a tantalizing closeness to Washington himself (Marling 84).7 The values of an idealized past also extended to the structure and design of historic homes. Architectural and decorative soundness were cast as the material vestiges of moral and ethical soundness, and visitors were often encouraged to read into the exhibits to locate this meaning. At the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s American Wing (1925) the permanent installation of the period rooms first exhibited at the Hudson-Fulton Expo of 1909, the timbering of a seventeenth-century Massachusetts meeting house was said to be “as sturdy as the courage of the men who founded this country” (“Open American Wing” 25). The decorative objects in these rooms suggested the taste and craftsmanship of their owners while also revealing those “qualities in their character that made for love of beauty, symmetry of form, for purity of line” (de Forest, et al. 295). Historic interiors not only housed the relics of iconic persons, but served as stage sets for reviving the domestic rituals that were believed to impart a sense of order and stability to their visitors. During the unrest of the Civil War and the deracinating decades of rapid urbanization and industrialization that followed, cultural productions of the archive such as the colonial kitchens of the U.S. Sanitary fairs, Cen-



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tennial Exposition, and Columbian Exhibition encouraged visitors to engage in dramatic reenactments of bygone domestic activities such as “old-fashioned” dining, spinning, colonial wedding ceremonies, quilting bees, and “apple bees” (Roth 162–66) (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1. New England Kitchen at the Centennial Exposition, Philadelphia, 1876. Leslie’s Illustrated, June 10, 1876.

In the midst of turn of the century immigration, such theatrics would further serve to reassert the boundaries of national identity and memory by providing a culturally charged space for forging an exclusive community with a shared domestic mythology. For instance, the promoters of the American Wing emphasized the role of the period room as an architectural and decorative mnemonic device for a nation with an “influx of foreign ideas” that were making it increasingly forgetful of its “traditions” and “character” (Halsey and Tower xxii). Imagining the fragile nation in structural terms, the Wing’s organizers warned that “Unless checked” this new foreign influence might “shake its foundations” (xii). As they suggested, those who could claim a more authentic American ancestry might experience a reassuring encounter with the ghosts of the past by visiting the museum (de Forest, et al. 293).

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If the American Wing’s self-promotion was unabashedly exclusive, other institutions sought to work through the problematic cultural and political implications of immigration by promoting assimilation through domestic work. Along these lines, the refurbishing of the Turner-Ingersoll house, thought to be the inspiration for Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “House of Seven Gables,” was part of an effort to preserve culture, but also to promote the proper cultural orientation for new citizens. The home was purchased by the Settlement Association of Old Salem. While settlement associations functioned primarily to provide social services to immigrant communities, they shared with the house museum movement the desire to promote “American” values. The “House of Seven Gables,” located in an ethnic neighborhood, served as a “museum and literary shrine of Old Salem” (Conforti 249) as well as a site for holding domestic classes for immigrants. Immigrants who came to the site for services necessarily encountered—and were brought under—the broader cultural umbrella represented by the house and its collections. At house museums, as distinct from settlement homes, the project of conjuring a living history was typically conceived of as a collaborative venture between visitors and curators. This was especially true of the later manifestations of this genre, such as period rooms. These rooms grew in popularity after the turn of the century as part of the broader movement toward contextualized displays that included the habitat groups and life groups of natural history and anthropology museums.8 Curators often experimented with techniques directed towards creating the elusive “liveable and lived-in quality” of a contemporary home as a means of tantalizing visitors with the palpable presence of a living past. The promoters of the American Wing insisted that the measure of its success was the joint commitment of curators and visitors to erase the “institutional quality” of the museum (de Forest, et al. 293). Casting the opening events for the exhibit as “housewarming ceremonies” (“Open American Wing” 25), the exhibition went to great lengths to disguise its own framework by creating a separate entrance that would not require visitors to enter the main halls of the Metropolitan. In passing through this portico to the past, visitors were encouraged to suspend disbelief and to inhabit the home-life presented in the historic domestic interior. Grosvenor Atterbury insisted, “you will forget the Metropolitan Museum of Art as you enter the first low-ceiled room and not remember it again until you are fairly out on the street and find you



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have forgotten the umbrella you had to leave in the checkroom on Fifth Avenue” (de Forest et al. 293). Yet if such techniques made the museum experience a meaningful projection of the interiority of history, they also catered to a more personalized conception of culture that un-tethered historic homes from the traditions and values which they were initially meant to define and delimit. When the Wing’s benefactor Robert W. de Forest reflected that “Perhaps we have helped to market it to our own undoing” (291), the subtext for his reflections was the instability of cultural meaning that accompanied the craze for historical furnishings and settings as expressions of personal style. Such a “self-revelation through objects” was inherent in the appeal of house museums and period rooms of this era, in particular, the “domestic habitats” (Kaufman 286) of private collectors such as DuPont’s Winterthur Museum or Henry Ford’s Greenfield Village. So too, however, were they true of the sentiments of visitors who were inspired by such spaces and similarly sought to appropriate cultural objects on behalf of their own desires and vision. While such a shift in meaning was facilitated by the mass-production of goods in the post-war era, it was also an effect of the growing similarity between museum and marketing exhibitionary modes (286). Museum displays such as period rooms, which capitalized on contextual settings to create interest, were not unlike “model rooms” that displayed furnishings in realistic arrangements as a part of a novel marketing approach to appeal directly to the viewers’ sense of self. “Providing access to a setting that allowed one to imagine owning and using such a room,” Katherine Grier observes, “they were settings in which people could picture themselves” (23).9 In the home, the marketing of historical fashions would come to be understood as an extension of the owner’s taste and “personality.”10 In some cases, museums were complicit with this shift. Civic displays were used to authenticate items for sale, prompting visitors to live out their own versions of these idealized settings through the purchase of replicas they saw on display. For example, the conjoining of the museum and market underwrote the success of furniture marketer and lay-historian Wallace Nutting, whose association with the Wadsworth Athenaeum, a bastion of high culture, helped to legitimize his nostalgic collections of period reproductions (Denenberg 114–18). While early house museums provided a specific locus for experiencing a shared

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domestic mythology, reproductions of period objects enabled identity to become attachable to many persons. At the immersive Colonial Williamsburg, replicas of furnishings gained historical authenticity from the city and its buildings, allowing viewers to claim their own colonial heritage through the purchase of objects whether they possessed such a pedigree or not (Greenspan 49). As museum goods moved into private homes, these new interiors became potent venues for self-expressive values. The costs of interiorizing culture that marked this broader house museum movement would come to typify much of the collecting of Native America. The interest in Native American homes and homelife was in many respects coextensive with the cultural concerns and nativist impulses that informed the neo-colonial revival. Collecting efforts were first imagined as a national domestic project directed towards locating the origins of an indigenous American history and artistic tradition. Following the Civil War, professional museums such as the Smithsonian and American Museum of Natural History began projects to salvage the material culture of what they believed to be a vanishing race. Even from its early days civic projects were conflated with the personal expression associated with the domestic interior. The copious collecting of moguls such as Edward Ayer, Phoebe Hearst, and George Gustav Heye did not only establish and enrich such famous museum collections as the Field Columbian Museum, University of Pennsylvania, and the American Museum of Natural History—it furnished their own domestic residences.11 Museum collections, which did much to bolster the reputations of prominent families and business interests, were an extension of these domiciles—writ large.12 The establishment of railroads in the 1880s set the stage for a “tourist-based feeding frenzy.” The “hunger for artifacts” was “a central element in the cultural process whereby the Southwest became domesticated into the imaginative American national community”—a site of cultural, social, and aesthetic meaning (Hinsley 13–14). Southwestern interiors projected a coveted utopian domesticity to the tourists who visited them. In this project, the museum was used to authenticate historical spaces and objects to assist visitors in achieving the proper spirit to experience a personal encounter with the past. For example, the Wetherill family, whose account of their excavation of the Mesa Verde cliff-dwellings Cather amply drew upon to shape her account, understood the difficulty of conveying the mystique of these interiors to



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the public. Creating an on-location museum for displaying artifacts in order to convey the material presence of the past, the Wetherills also overlooked the casual pilferage by tourists who “wanted to take home a souvenir,” to prolong this experience of immersion (Kot 397).13 Perhaps no institution more seamlessly integrated serious collecting with the marketing and displacement of Indian domesticity than the Harvey Company. Originally a chain of hotels and restaurants, in 1902 the company expanded its interests with the creation of the Indian Department museum at the Alvarado Hotel in Albuquerque. This award-winning ethnographic museum quickly established itself as a supplier for regional and national museums, among them the Carnegie Museum, Field Columbian Museum, and the U.S. National Museum (Harvey 71, Pardue 105), but its greatest success was in sales to private individuals. The Indian Department’s tripartite structure adjoined a museum, which displayed artifacts curated by anthropologists, a craft demonstration area in which tourists could observe Native Americans producing handmade objects, and a salesroom for both curios and relics (Howard 90). Museum displays, as Leah Dilworth argues, created a “hierarchy of desire” that “transformed” the tourist “into the collector.” “Upon entering the Indian Building,” Leah Dilworth explains, “the visitor was . . . educated in connoisseurship and authenticity and then encountered an opportunity to buy Indian-crafted objects” (85). In particular, the living exhibits of Native American craftsmanship created an immersive context for experiencing the daily life of Indians and imagining what it would be like to inhabit such a scene. These living exhibits shared similarities with the life group displays implemented by such museums as the American Museum of Natural History (Fig. 2). Contextualized settings integrated cultural objects with domestic activities to edify the public. Though life groups were underwritten by a scientific attention to detail, Alison Griffiths explains that they also “occup[ied] a more liminal space in the spectator’s imagination” in proffering “pristine image[s] of a dramatized world . . . a site of wonder and magic” (37).14 The Indian Department’s craft-making displays like the weaving exhibit featuring Elle of Ganado (Fig. 3) created this sense of wonder by replacing the museum framing devices of cordons, glass, and pedagogical labeling with artisans producing traditional handcrafts for personal possession. In purchasing objects, visitors could transfer this idealized domesticity to their own homes.

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Fig. 2. Apache Group, displayed at the American Museum of Natural History, 1916. Photograph by Julius Kirschner. Neg. no. 310795. Courtesy Dept. of Library Services, AMNH.

Fig. 3. Untitled. Albuquerque, New Mexico. Fred Harvey Collection AZ 326, Box 7, Folder 4, Print 7-4-25. Original Size 20 x 15 cm. Elle of Ganado (fifth from the left) and Navajo Weavers at the Alvarado Hotel—early 1900s. Courtesy University of Arizona Special Collections.



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It is not surprising that here the museum world and the domestic world were understood as contiguous. To capitalize on this market, the Harvey Company situated its museum within a replica of a Hopi house, featured in the gift-book souvenir, John Huckel’s First Families of the Southwest under the caption, “A Hopi Pueblo of Other Centuries Reproduced.” First Families, the title exemplifying the coextension of neocolonial and indigenous interests, featured domestic vignettes from Hopi, Acoma, and Navajo Indian life: Indians baking bread, weaving baskets, and making pottery either in the interior of a home, or with a home in the backdrop. The book further emphasized the cleanliness and order of these domestic settings. In the midst of the Arts and Crafts movement, hand-made Indian objects and interiors suggested a return to natural settings and practices that served as a modern salve (Dubin 18); the Harvey Company suggested that daily immersion in the warmth of such scenes was only a purchase away. To that end, curatorial practice was casually intertwined with that of home décor and self-expression. Decorator Mary Colter, hired to create such persuasive sales displays for the Harvey Company, arranged objects in domestic settings that encouraged a personalized engagement with material culture.15 As manager Herman Schweizer would write to Mary Austin in 1930, “The major part of the Indian Building here was arranged in the form of exhibits, cozy corners, etc. to illustrate to people how these things can be utilized to best advantage” (Howard 92, emphasis added). The “displacement” of objects into the private home created a “disjuncture” between their original meaning and their new—and varied—meaning for the collector (Dubin 140).16 As in the broader house museum movement, these new settings supported wideranging cultural, aesthetic, commercial, and personal purposes. In perhaps one of the most surprising paradoxes of the movement, the craze for historic domiciles in both their neo-colonial as well as Native American forms not only destabilized the meaning of such spaces—it encouraged a privatized conception of history that was too hermetic to provide an active context for culture. The miniature period room dioramas of Mrs. John Ward Thorne first conceived in the 1920s and later installed at the Art Institute of Chicago capture the intersections between historical homes and psychological interiority. These rooms, ranging from the Massachusetts Living Room and Kitchen c. 1675–1800 to the New Mexico Dining Room c. 1940 (Fig. 4), document the history of national craftsmanship and taste.

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Fig. 4. Mrs. James Ward Thorne, American, 1882–1966, A34: New Mexico Dining Room, c. 1940, Miniature room, mixed media. Interior: 12" x 17" x 16" Gift of Mrs. James Ward Thorne 1942. 514 overall view. Photograph by Kathleen Culbert-Aguilar, Chicago. Reproduction, The Art Institute of Chicago.

In creating her miniatures, Thorne drew upon the life-sized period rooms of museums like the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Essex Institute, Brooklyn Museum and Art Institute of Chicago as well as a variety of more commercial sources, including dollhouses, and the historical décor that was in vogue in the homes of the wealthy class (Miniature Rooms 14– 15). By inviting viewers to gaze upon a glassed-in domestic utopia, her rooms appeal by piquing desire for an imaginative inhabitation unlimited by any context. “As we stand in the darkened galleries, our faces pressed against the glass, alone or perhaps with one other person, we enter a private world,” the Art Institute explains of this urge to enter and populate these interiors: “We are not just the audience anymore, we are playwright and stage director as well. The Thorne Rooms become for us a springboard into our own imaginations, a vast array of stage sets waiting for the drama that only our fantasies can create” (25). ‘in good order’: culture in a domestic context in ‘the professor’s house’



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In “Tom Outland’s Story,” Cather encodes the losses as well as the gains of interiorizing history in a domestic setting. Separated from the main action by almost twenty years, Tom’s serendipitous discovery of the Mesa takes hold of his imagination at the moment he realizes that these cliffs, which “seemed so solid” (172), actually have interiors. Tom’s description of the cliff-dwellings exemplifies the way homes served as vehicles for narrating an idealized and cogent history. The cliff-dwellings are “symmetrical and powerful”; they form an orderly “kind of composition” (180). Their supports, including the “poles” and “joists” and “door lintels” (190), are all carefully constructed and “fitted” (197), suggesting attention to detail and stability that now comfort the dwellings’ modern occupants. Moreover, as in the historic homes of the period, the sound design and craftsmanship of the dwellings express the exemplary personal qualities of their former inhabitants. When Tom’s mentor, Father Duchene, praises the dwellings for having emanated from “no incentive” but the cliff-dwellers’ “natural yearning for order and security” (199), his words echo the vocabulary and affect of the era’s interest in historic interiors that embedded superior human qualities in the architecture, furnishings, and sociability of exemplary premodern homes. Tom’s revivification of the past is figured in his literal movement into the heart of the domestic interior. He locates interiors within these interiors, including a “closet in the wall” that is filled with handmade tools (190), a “cupboard” with kitchen things (187), and an empty “cupboard” in the upper recesses of the dwellings, which Tom appropriates for his notebooks (200). His unveiling of these spaces constitutes a movement into what Bachelard describes as a “dimension of intimacy” that attends a personal encounter with history (85). Uncovering the kitchen, he is drawn to the soot on the jars and ceiling, suggesting the last cooking fire where the cliff-dwellers had “roasted and baked and probably gossiped” (Cather 187). As these interiors become stage sets for the reenactment of the everyday rituals of the past, the men’s excavation project and their housekeeping efforts become indistinguishable cultural activities. The painstaking excavation echoes the “patience and deliberation” (190) of the cliff people whose superior craftsmanship and artistry suggest that they “hadn’t built their town in a hurry” (190). Henry’s salvage efforts also replicate the preservative aspects of the southwestern climate that kept the artifacts intact until Tom’s dis-

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covery. Henry is said to be Tom and Roddy’s “good housekeeper” (176) much as the “wind and sun are good housekeepers” (186). Henry’s death disrupts this utopian domesticity, and Tom’s efforts to re-secure an idealized domesticity lead him to translate the family project into the broader venue of the professional museum. Removing all the excavated objects to their cabin, the men lock every opening of the building to prevent loss during Tom’s pilgrimage to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington (200). In a most striking gesture, they also attempt to secure the cultural meaning of the objects; appropriating their “sleeping-room” (189) as an exhibition space for the artifacts so they will be “in good order” (200) for the museum officials, they build shelves around the room to store the smaller artifacts. Removing the artifacts to this most intimate and private space identifies their family project with national collecting efforts while recasting the more familiar gestures of museum curation as contiguous with housekeeping and decoration. In spite of these efforts towards security, however, the second half of the story is characterized by profound loss that is figured through flawed interiors and domesticities. The Smithsonian directors prove motivated by showmanship and serve primarily as adjuncts to the tourist industry and its satellite museum venues, the exhibitions. Homes provide no security from the effects of modernity, and Tom returns to discover even his most private space has been compromised. In the oft-cited debate between Tom and Roddy over the latter’s sale of the artifacts to a trader, cultural meaning initially hinges on a dichotomized conception of value. Tom’s nativist conception of possession posits the artifacts as belonging to the homes of his “grandmothers a thousand years ago” (219).17 Roddy’s more market-based conception imagines artifacts and the cultural identities they confer as circulating goods: “We’d have had to pack it around at Harvey Houses selling it at a dollar a bowl” (218). The story seems to suggest that a unidirectional loss of historical and cultural meaning is the effect of contact with the modern world; however, Cather elides such a straightforward reading by repeatedly alluding to effects of domestic framing and spatiality. In her study of nineteenth-century material culture, Janell Watson debunks the myth of separate “spheres” of meaning within the domestic interior or the museum.18 “Spheres of material things” Watson observes, are “inseparable not only from . . . disciplines such as . . . history, but also from daily domestic life, the marketplace, and the larger social



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sphere around them” (89). This heterogeneity of meaning appears in the ironic juxtapositions of “Tom Outland’s Story”; different ordering systems physically intermingle within the domestic setting to make objects appear at turns as “specimens” (200), “curios” (214), and “relics” (218). It is the kitchen table, for instance, that brings Tom’s private archival work and Roddy’s newspaper reading (189) into literal proximity, connecting hermetic historical activity to “what [is] going on in the world” (166). In such a setting, it is hardly surprising that Tom logs the “specimen[s]” (189) of his budding nationalist effort in a “merchant’s ledger” (189), inadvertently mirroring the practices of traders who catalogued objects for sale. In Tom’s recollection, “every night after supper . . . I sat down at the kitchen table and wrote an account of the day’s work” (189, emphasis added). In a similar fashion, the men’s bedroom museum conjures the contextualized displays created by historicallyminded institutions, but also those of tourists’ venues such as the Harvey’s Indian Department that brokered goods for exhibition in private homes. “He made our bunks feel like a Harvey House bed,” Tom recalls of Henry’s natural sense of domestic order, “To this day that’s the best I can say for any bed” (176). Tom’s observation not only testifies to the intrusion of commerce into the most private space of the home, but also to the different modes of ordering and valuation that characterize the domestic interior. Everyday domestic activity, commercialized tourist experiences, and museum work make for curious bedfellows, and Tom’s argument with Roddy is similarly related in terms of confusion about what the space of the home means. “I walked up and down the kitchen trying to make Blake understand the kind of value those objects had had for me” (221, emphasis added), he recalls of his ineffective diatribe, unaware of how the framework of the domestic interior has fostered this sort of confusion. When Tom accuses Roddy of treason akin to Dreyfus, Roddy retorts, “It was a frame-up” (219), alluding directly to Dreyfus’s innocence and indirectly suggesting how the framing of the cabin space influenced his perceptions. If “Tom Outland’s Story” ends on an unfinished note, the enveloping tale logically extends its themes to reveal in greater detail the effects of interiorizing culture within the private home. From the perspective of the enveloping domestic novel, Tom Outland’s history appears as a pristine site that promises security from modern life. The framing of the Mesa episodes is not unlike a life-group diorama in which Tom Outland

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and his curatorial work become the focus of cultural meaning (Raine 136). Entrenched in the materialism, manners and social constraint that characterize home-life in the 1920s, Cather’s study of the St. Peter family interrogates how the spatial and social dynamics of the domestic interior promote privatized historical encounters, but also the loss of historical “mood” (18), subjectivity, and even desire. The novel opens with the Professor’s denial of modern circulation: “The moving was over and done” (3). This double entendre captures his family’s impending relocation to a new home purchased with money he has won for his historical research and his subsequent retreat to his attic study to pursue the interiority of history. The space of the study is inseparable from its role in preservation. The architectural development of the study reflected its status as a masculine space that was “autonomous, knowledge-based, and resistant to both physical and psychological penetration” (Rosner 95). The Professor commits himself to shoring up the boundaries of this space; he maintains a “show study” downstairs, a “sham” that serves a purely social function as a decoy that diverts curiosity from his real place of work (8). For those who might venture further, the attic’s “wobbly stair treads” and dangerous “rusty, round gas stove . . . . which consumed gas imperfectly and contaminated the air” discourage access and permanent occupation (17). Yet the attic proves permeable. The Professor receives a number of unhappy visitors into the private abode, and at times, must move beyond the space into the other domestic settings occupied by the material vestiges of Tom. The monetary yields of Tom’s inventions, a new type of gas and engine, have been inherited by Rosamond St. Peter and her Jewish husband, Louie, who have used them to build their new home, dubbed “Outland.” This Norwegian-style manor references the era’s associatively empty craze for historical architecture and décor. The neo-colonial revival had become middle-brow by the 1920s, and Louie’s elated declaration, “None of your Colonial glass knobs for us!” (29), posits his finds and fashions as distinct from the ubiquitous mass-produced reproductions common to the period. Nevertheless, the Marsellus’s historical hodge-podge appears more decorative than historical for those who knew Tom. As a discordant architectural translation of Tom’s fortune furnished through shopping sprees to Chicago, the manor provokes feelings of want in Kathleen and Scott’s household. Scott’s quip, “Outland, outlandish!” (33), captures the domestication of Tom at the Outland estate as he is



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transformed into the material offshoots of enterprise. Kathleen and Scott reside in a Craftsman bungalow, popular in the 1910s and 1920s in response to the “architectural excesses” of the period (Roberts 44). However, their simple quarters serve less as a foil for Louie’s and Rosamond’s grandiose production than as a testament to their own unfulfilled desires. The two re-knob their bungalow in the neo-colonial style in a tribute to American origins that appears as a fragmented and incomplete attempt to recapture Tom’s idealized past of (29). Although Kathleen’s intimate memories of Tom manage to elide the commercial realization of Tom’s discoveries, they prove no less possessive. As she explains, “Now that Rosamond has Outland, I consider Tom’s mesa entirely my own” (112). Throughout the enveloping narrative, the sundry domestic settings reframe objects and memories according to their owners’ desires, and no single site has primacy in establishing meaning. The material record of Tom’s life—a blanket, notebook, pottery, turquoises, lab equipment, books—appears only in fragments that present a shifting image of him. For example, the Professor possesses a sacred relic, Tom’s Mexican blanket, an object cast as a part of Tom: “It was like his skin” (111). Although the Professor secures the treasure in his attic study, the space cannot convey its provenance. Louie enters the Professor’s study donning a purple jacket and seizes the purple blanket, remarking at first that it would serve as “a very proper dressing gown” (145). This incident points to the ease with which a sacred article becomes a decorative object within the domestic setting. When the Professor informs him that this was Tom’s blanket Louie’s perspective shifts and he expresses his regret that he never met Tom, his “gifted and adored brother” (144). However, even in this more familial reclamation, the meaning of the artifact proves easily and—for the Professor—distastefully attachable to Louie. The domestic setting of “Outland” ultimately prompts a range of such “personal recollections” of Tom (94). Nowhere does this become more evident than in the museum that Louie and Rosamond install in their new home. Seldom mentioned in the criticism of the novel, this house museum is central to Cather’s exposé of the effects of interiorizing history. Relocating Tom’s laboratory equipment, books, and papers from the university to their home, they create an exhibit that is meant to commemorate Tom’s scientific achievements. Although this gesture seems peculiar, efforts to domesticate spaces that were not explicitly domestic were an extension of the house museum movement. In this

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sense, we might think of Outland as anticipating Henry Ford’s relocation of Thomas Edison’s laboratory to his open-air museum, Greenfield Village, in 1928.19 The exhibit’s contextualization in “Outland” proves ironic because this tribute is shaped in part through the same spirit of promotion that enables Louie to market and capitalize on Tom’s discoveries. The Professor, even more uncomfortable with the consumption of Tom as social capital than he is with the monetary realization on Tom’s genius, interprets the museum gesture as the “conver[sion] of his very bones into a personal asset” (36). The Professor expresses this discordance between Tom and the house—and house museum—that now frame him: “I can’t bear it when he talks about Outland as his affair. (I mean Tom, of course, not their confounded place!)” (36). But the Professor’s objections are directed towards the fluid identities and cultural affiliation that the house museum enables. Louie exclaims, “We’ve named our place! [and] I’ve already ordered the house stationery” (29). Correspondence from “Outland” will ironically bring Tom back to life by allowing Louie to express himself through the mouthpiece of this idealized son. In this respect, “Outland” serves a purpose similar to the neo-colonial house museums that persuaded immigrants to affiliate through the purchase of mass-produced objects. Indeed, the Professor’s critique of the Outland estate appears little different from that of columnist Dorothy Dix who wrote an essay in 1914 for Good Housekeeping advocating the eviction of the Jewish Levy family, the owners of Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, so that the house could be restored as a museum for its “rightful” inheritors. Bemoaning the lack of ancestral homes, Dix claimed, “The hand of the vandal has torn down their birthplaces, or an alien sits at the fireside where they planned their immortal deeds, and their belongings have been scattered” (qtd. in P. West 104). Quoting Brahms’ Requiem, the Professor mourns Tom’s fate, “He heapeth up riches and cannot tell who shall scatter them!” (233). In spite of his astute assessment of the self-promotional aspects of Outland, the Professor’s own idealized vision of the home as a site for forging a limited construction of history, culture, and familial identity contrasts with the openness of cultural engagement at Louie and Rosamond’s house museum. To shore up the boundaries of family life the Professor partitions his own home into enclaves. The Professor’s relationship with Tom was a possessive one in which the two enjoyed



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clandestine meetings within the “walled in” garden (5) in the Professor’s study (151), and at the family’s hearth where the two once shared a dinner of lamb, asparagus, and Asti while Mrs. St. Peter and the girls were vacationing (155). Long after Tom’s death, their relationship sparks insecurities that further compromise domestic life. Mrs. St. Peter responds with her own partitioning of the domestic interior into closeted spaces in which she engages in tête-à-têtes with her sons-in-law. Her “arch and confidential relations” (64) with Scott to appease his insecurities and her excursion to her bedroom with Louie on the pretense of showing him a “new rug” (32) are laden with allusions to incest, the sexual correlative to the hermetic preservation that has stifled the generative capacity of their home. In spite of the Professor’s critique, the Outland house museum presents a surprising alternative mode of preservation that upsets this family dynamic. Created from the same promotional spirit that constitutes Louie’s economic and social cachet, Outland nonetheless fulfills a legitimate civic function.20 In providing a place for Tom’s “brother scientists . . . to get information about him” and establishing an endowed scholarship in Tom’s name, “Outland” expands the family circle to include anyone who visits the museum’s displays as well as those who will continue some aspect of Tom’s work. Moreover, the museum’s variant meanings immortalize a Tom who was not only multifaceted, but in some ways, the personification of modernity. Louie’s boast that the estate and museum showcase “all the sources of his inspiration” conjures a Tom who moved fluidly between railroad workers’ cabins, gambling tables, cliff-dwellings, laboratories, museums, and—as Scott wryly hints—Rosamond’s bedroom (31), suggesting that culture is inseparable from a variety of sources. Whereas “Tom Outland’s Story” showcases a cabin museum that proves vulnerable to the traffic in objects that characterizes modernity, the Professor’s narrative depicts a house museum, Outland, that capitalizes upon such permeability and mobility. Nevertheless, the endings of the two stories parallel one another. Returning to the Mesa, Tom hovers at the threshold of the cabin, dreading an encounter with the emptiness that testifies to the home’s penetrability. But in observing birds returning to the nest, he also discerns the powerful pull of the home as a real space for indulging in the “habit[s]” of domestic activity. “The kitchen table was spread for supper,” he notes as he crosses the threshold, “It was

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the time of day when everything goes home” (218).21 Tom ultimately rejects home and domestic work, experiencing his first sense of “possession” only after the artifacts and Roddy are gone (226). However, in his lingering guilt over the loss of Roddy he intuits that he will be “called to account” (229) for sacrificing the domestic contexts that revitalized the dwellings and their inhabitants in the first place. Similarly, the ending of the encompassing narrative finds the Professor rejecting the Outland estate’s multiple commitments, which seem to him metonymic for modern life. Escaping to his attic, he embraces the possibility of a premature death. Yet in the pivotal scene in which Augusta saves him from asphyxiation, Cather underscores the endpoint of such a commitment to interiority (253). She invites her reader to reconsider the whole of the novel—in particular, the relationship between the dovetailing house museums of the interior and exterior narratives. In housing both kinds of spaces in her book, Cather charts the losses, but also hints at the gains that characterize the interiorizing of culture in a domestic context. at home in the museum: modernism’s interiors In her critique of literary realism, “The Novel Démeublé,” Cather infamously argues that the novel had been “for a long while . . . overfurnished” (On Writing 35). While Cather’s comparison of the contemporary craze for “cataloguing” (37) the contents of the domestic interior to the “gaudy fingers of the showman” and the “mechanical industry of a department-store window dresser” (41) is a literary indictment, it also suggests her awareness of the vulnerability of real and fictional houses to culturally empty modern displays and exhibitionary modes and her drive to conceptualize a different kind of interior. Cather’s literary preferences extended to real homes. In an interview in 1921, Cather stated that she preferred an “old house built and furnished in miserable taste” to “a new house built and furnished in correct taste” (Willa Cather 46). The older house was significant for “the associations that cluster around it, the way the house has fitted itself to the people” (46). In her essay “148 Charles Street” Cather would describe her own experience at a real space that provided such a perfect “fit”—the home of James Ticknor Fields and Annie Adams Fields. In remembering her first visit to this home in 1908 when she met Annie Adams and Sarah Jewett for the first time, Cather offered



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a detailed description of the design of the home and gardens, the view from the drawing-room window, the clothing of Fields and Jewett, and the housekeeping practices that made the space so inviting (Not Under Forty 32–75). Her reflections speak to her understanding of the physical aspects of a home as deeply intertwined with its role in creating a historical sensibility that could undergird cultural production. For Cather, 148 Charles Street and its “material keepsakes” (75) did more than preserve the past—they revitalized it. Her description of the propinquity to the past she experienced in this home resembles the accounts of house museum curators such as those of the American Wing who hoped that visitors would encounter and reclaim the past in their contextualized settings. Cather recalled 148 Charles Street as a space in which “an American of the Apache period and territory could come to inherit a Colonial past” (57). This sense of the past “lay in wait for one in all the corners,” and “exuded from the furniture, from the pictures, the rare editions, and the cabinets of manuscript” (61). Reflecting on the prominent authors and artists who visited the home before her and whose presence was so poignantly palpable to her, Cather remembered that, “one came to believe that they had been very living people—to feel that they had not been long absent from the rooms so full of their thoughts, of their letters, their talk” (56–57). In her commentary on The Professor’s House, however, Cather mused about the possibility of getting beyond the home. Claiming that she drew upon Dutch genre paintings of household interiors that featured “a living-room warmly furnished, or a kitchen full of food and coppers,” and a “square window, open, through which one saw the masts of ships or a stretch of gray sea” in shaping the form of her novel, Cather also described her minimalist efforts as an expression of the desire “to open the square window and let in the fresh air” (On Writing 31). At first glance, The Professor’s House seems to preserve only those architectural features that suggest Cather’s commitment to psychological interiority, such as her childhood bedroom at Third and Cedar in Red Cloud, which had a sloping roof much like the Professor’s attic (Slote and Woods 27, 103), her bedroom at Isabella McClung’s house on Murray Hill Avenue in Pittsburgh which had a view (40), and her room at the Shattuck Inn in Jaffrey, New Hampshire which had both (59). Nevertheless, in spite of her protests to the contrary, a close reading of the novel suggests Cather’s growing interest in bringing literature to bear on the interior of the home and its relationship to active, communal cultural experiences.22

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Cather was not alone in the pursuit, and The Professor’s House appeared during a time when other modernist artists were looking to the spatiality and materiality of real interiors as inspiration for their work. Noting the similarities between Cather’s critique of gratuitous detail as expressed in “The Novel Démeublé,” and the arguments for minimalist and “functionalist” décor and home design by architects such as Le Corbusier and Frank Lloyd Wright and arbiters of taste such as Edith Wharton, Bill Brown reflects that Cather “could put the trope of the house of fiction to new use,” because “by the 1920s, the house as such was being re-thought” (143). This “house” was a literary venue as well as a physical and residential realm, and modernist authors such as Virginia Woolf, whose work Cather admired, and Gertrude Stein, whose work threw Cather’s own efforts into relief, were also involved in rethinking the relationship between literature and the domestic spaces in which it was conceived and produced. Cather’s contemporaries understood that the home was a permeable space that intersected with the marketplace, the city street, the museum, and other public venues, and they conceived of it as a proving ground for new ideas about private life and public culture. Debunking the myth of modernism’s commitment to psychological interiority, Victoria Rosner has argued that modernists located in architecture and design a vocabulary and a vision for social and literary change that linked private experience to that of the broader community (11–12). Dismissing the home as a bastion of tradition and social convention, writers such as Woolf, Strachey, Wilde, and Forster explored and participated in avant-garde design and aesthetics movements that imagined how changes to the “built environment” (2) of the domestic interior might serve to restage and restructure social custom, privacy, gender relations, class, and taste. Their literature, much like their revolutionized conception of the home, proposed formal solutions to social problems. In novels such as Howard’s End (1910) and Night and Day (1919) the acts of redecorating, rearranging furnishings, and bringing new art into the home are curiously cast as solving such wide-ranging problems as creating a proper home for an unwed mother (142), and infusing mundane domestic existence with the excitement of the city (159). In To the Lighthouse (1927) a novel whose three-part structure and characterization is thought to have been inspired by that of The Professor’s House, the female protagonist deploys a formal artistic gesture that eschews restrictive gender roles in favor of a life committed to art.23



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Among the most important of these revisionary concerns was the relationship between the home and public cultural venues. Dismissing the coldness and formality of the professional public institution, both real and fictional modernist interiors intermingled serious contemplation with a more intimate and sensorial engagement with culture. More radically, modernists raised questions about the very distinctions between the cultural realm and the domestic realm in the first place. At Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas’s home at 23 Rue de Fleurus in Paris, high art by Picasso and Matisse shared space with the “banal objects sustaining an everyday bourgeois domestic life” (Blair 425).24 Such revisionism extended to Stein’s literature, and in her unconventional poetry collection Tender Buttons (1914) she not only revises traditional conceptions of collecting and possession, but she also redefines what counts as a cultural experience. The first two sections of Stein’s domestic museum, “Objects” and “Food,” display a farrago of objects, including umbrellas, dresses, feathers, chairs, tables, asparagus, and potatoes. However, as Catherine Paul observes, in Stein’s final section, “Rooms,” her curation culminates in a free-flowing tribute to the domestic collection as a whole, including those things “impossible to possess in any literal sense” (222). Among this genre of collectibles is housekeeping itself, recast in “Rooms” as indistinguishable from cultural production. “There was a whole collection made,” Stein muses, “A damp cloth, an oyster, a single mirror, a manikin, a student, or a silent star, a single spark, a little movement and the bed is made” (qtd. in Paul 222). In moving fluidly between a “highbrow aesthetic practice” and “a much more mundane domestic task” (222)—making the bed—Stein greatly broadens the definition of collecting and collections to include everyday objects and activities as well as the more unusual or noteworthy items and tasks (223). Woolf’s dauntless revision of social conventions and Stein’s notorious playfulness in capitalizing literally and figuratively on the home’s contiguity with the literary marketplace were not goals that were necessarily representative of Cather’s own interests. However, the three writers found common ground in their mutual alignment of cultural revision with the personally associative aspects of the home as an exhibition venue. Perhaps the modernist home that most fully realized these cultural goals for Cather was that of Stein and Cather’s mutual friend, Mabel Dodge Luhan. Luhan’s childhood homes had been dominated by

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materialism, stifling social conventions and unhappy marriages similar to that which Cather ascribes to Godfrey St. Peter’s home. For Luhan as for Cather, the literal and figurative gluttedness of the modern household was anathema. Boasting of her ability to “make rooms that had power in them” (qtd in Everett 87), she accomplished her finest work in Taos, New Mexico, where her home with Tony Luhan, dubbed Los Gallos, became a popular salon for modernist artists and writers including Cather (Fig. 5).

Fig.5. Living Room, Mabel Dodge Luhan House. Photograph. Bunting Collection, Box 15, Notebook 9, Picture Collection #000-385. Courtesy Center for Southwest Research, University Libraries, The University of New Mexico.

In her memoir, Edge of Taos Desert, Luhan envisions her home not merely as an alternative site for the museum, but as a new kind of museum altogether. Deploying the Metropolitan Museum of Art as a



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foil for her own curatorial vision, Luhan recounts her husband Tony’s pilgrimage to the east coast, during which he nearly faints upon encountering the “great, motionless, figures” of the Met’s Hall of Statuary (212). Unlike the Met’s formal mode of collecting that produces a deadened environment abstracting culture from the contexts that make it vital, her own home at Los Gallos serves as an ideal exhibition space. In one episode her neighbor Mr. Manby tries to persuade her to give him two of her Santos to exhibit in his gallery of silver, turquoise, serapes, and icons where “they will fit in perfectly”; in a humorous aside to her readers Luhan reveals the location of her own display “(In my kitchen!),” demonstrating the cultural superiority of this most communal of spaces (128). A proper “fit” is one in which the Santos gain meaning through their proximity to daily ritual and human activity like their context within Indian life. Luhan makes clear, however, that her home is not primarily a space for display, but a space that works within the flux and change of modernity to establish a cultural context. In Winter in Taos, Luhan claims that the counter-movements of domestic work at Los Gallos serve the needs of the transient and deracinated modern citizens who “float around the world in hotels and boarding houses,” (78), satisfying them much more than “theaters [or] art galleries” (79). The daily rituals of housekeeping, “the coping and the managing, and all the crowding movements of life, the eternal adjustments and the never-ending ‘fixing’ one has to do in the house and garden” (50) creates a more figurative kind of “storehouse” in “one’s soul” (51). Yet Luhan’s philosophy was not limited to associative abstraction but dictated the architecture and design of Los Gallos itself. The adobe home required “constant repair,” (Bunting, qtd. in Rudnick 44) and such maintenance offered ample opportunities for revisions and extensions to the original structure. Growing from “a long, coffin-shaped, bare box” (Luhan, Winter 60), into an eighteen room residence large enough to house dozens of writers and artists including Mary Austin, Jean Toomer, Georgia O’Keefe, Paul and Rebecca Strand, Marsden Hartley and of course, Cather, Luhan’s memoirs trace the development of her home from mausoleum to modernist museum where thoughts and ideas became material things, and the home could become a generative space for the development of new traditions.25 Cather’s purchase on the home as a museum takes shape through a similar commitment to forging connections between spaces, persons,

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objects, and practices. The Charles Street home was ultimately lost to modern upheaval, and while Cather was nostalgic for this kind of interior and interiority of history, she also knew that such a sanctified setting was not a viable model for history and culture in the modern era. The Professor’s House is Cather’s attempt to work within and through the home to negotiate the losses of modernity. In a series of elegant twists, the losses of both the interior and the enveloping stories are recouped as Cather refigures salvage and preservation in terms of the multi-faceted contextualization, circulation, and exchange that characterize modern domestic interiority. For example, in one curious moment in “Tom Outland’s Story,” Tom breaks from his account of the cliff-dwellers’ pottery to remind the Professor that he “gave Mrs. St. Peter” (187) one of the pots. As the sole direct reference to the enveloping narrative in the interior story, Tom’s interjection redirects the Professor’s attention from the ancient household to the modern one. In the corresponding account within the enveloping narrative, Tom offers a gift of pottery at the St. Peters’ dining room table after having expounded on the virtues of “Indian housewifery” (100). When Mrs. St. Peter suggests to him that he must entertain the dichotomized options of personal or professional possession: “You must keep it for yourself, or put it in a museum” (102), Tom dismisses each of these options. While he observes the differences between the cliff dwellings and the St. Peters’ household, in particular the trappings of bourgeois self-fashioning that mark the latter space, Tom nevertheless declares that he would like the pottery “to have a good home among your nice things” (102). This definition of a “good home” captures a space that is not only inseparable from matters of taste, aesthetic appreciation, sociability, and self-fashioning, but that brings these objects into contact with the lives of the family members. The loss of history and memory that marks the interior narrative is similarly recouped through Tom’s romanticized stories that recreate the spaces of the Southwest and encourage the family to imaginatively inhabit these interiors. “You children used to live in his stories,” the Professor recalls of Tom’s ritualistic evening tale-telling to Rosamond and Kathleen in the garden. Making “Hopi villages with sand and pebbles” (104) and redistributing his sacred turquoises to the girls as “pretty playthings” (103), Tom’s theatrical play resembles the commodified histories and activities promoted by house museums and other historic interiors marketing goods to tourists. Nevertheless, through their dis-



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semination, Tom’s tales achieve what history has not—the salvation of Roddy. Kathleen confesses to the Professor that she has engaged in her own rewriting of history, and in her stories, she saves Roddy over and over again, revitalizing him through the act of recollection: “I used to swim rivers and climb mountains and wander about with Navajos, and rescue Roddy at the most critical moments when he was being stabbed in the back, or drugged in a gambling-house, and bring him back to Tom” (112). But most significantly, Cather’s novel articulates an understanding of salvage and preservation that conceptualizes the home as an evolving cultural space. In the final scenes of the novel, the loss of the active domestic context of the Mesa is symbolically recouped in the course of a literal move across domiciles. Tasked with getting the Professor’s new home “properly put in order” (249), Augusta’s housekeeping efforts are both domestic and curatorial; in the most significant salvaging gesture of the novel, she rescues the Professor from suffocation in the course of coming to retrieve the key for this new house. Augusta’s action redefines the interior by equating the vitality of history and culture with literal movement and change. The high pursuit of historical work, the mundane duties of domestic work and the pleasures of sociability alike are mediated through the space of the domestic interior—in particular the shared space of the attic and the breakfast table where she and the Professor labored, shared meals, conversed. Augusta’s insistence on maintaining these habits and patterns of work and sociability denies that these activities are limited to any one home, but instead, are the very means of maintaining cultural and historical meaning over time and space. Yet if Cather’s authorial or curatorial viewpoint continues to invite speculation from her critics, it is because she does not offer a facile solution to the contradictory practices and desires her novel engages. In the novel’s uneasy ending, Cather seems to suggest: if the home is the ultimate cultural space, that is precisely because it is never exclusively a cultural space. Invested with a privileged status as a cultural arena, the home’s power is perplexingly dependent on its accessibility, its penetrability, its fluidity of meaning. As such, the dilemmas of The Professor’s House adumbrate the inevitable entwinement of personal and civic pursuits that marks the success of even the most historically and politically self-conscious of

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our own contemporary institutions and their relationship to the space of the home. In September of 2004, the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) opened in Washington D C (Fig. 6). Patterned after a cliff-dwelling, this museum, which occupies the last space on the National Mall, seems an uncanny realization of Tom Outland’s dream of a native domesticity in the capital city. Yet the debates it has sparked are reminiscent of Cather’s own worst fears about cultural loss.

Fig. 6. The National Museum of the American Indian. Washington, D C September 2004. Photograph by Willard K. Morris.



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The museum’s supporters have hailed its efforts to repossess the material objects and the history of Native American people on behalf of an evolving, as opposed to a vanishing culture. Eschewing the authenticating gestures of anthropology and history that undergird the displays of institutions like the Smithsonian, the NMAI’s celebrators declare that it successfully affords its visitors an intimate look at Native American culture as expressed through the voices of Native Americans (W. West 42–43). Rejecting a stasis relegating cultural meaning solely to the past, the museum has re-figured its salvage efforts through circulation between museum and tribe, and museum and non-Native visitor. Releasing sacred objects to tribes for use in ceremonies, the museum also promotes the sale of Indian-made crafts to its visitors. Yet the museum’s critics argue that while the NMAI eludes the white coopting of Native American objects and traditions that has riddled the history of more traditional institutions, NMAI replaces it with equally problematic institutional goals. Without the scaffolding of more traditional curatorial conventions, critics charge that the NMAI’s exhibits entertain more than they educate, offering platitudes that reconfirm rather than debunk earlier romanticized notions about Indian life (Richard). Charging that the museum’s displays seem directed towards authenticating the goods for sale in its massive gift shops, they argue that this emphasis on consumption also shifts visitors’ perceptions of the exhibition spaces, making the museum seem like a “trade show,” in which “each room is a sales booth of its own, separate, out of context” (Fisher). Perhaps neither the museum’s supporters nor its critics hold the monopoly on truth. For more significant than the points of either side is the debate itself, in which postmodern preoccupations with identity and the “possession” of stories comes head to head with persistent modernist anxieties about the fault lines of pedagogy and entertainment, civic goals and self-promotion, art and décor, the museum space and the household interior. If the NMAI’s contemporary politics extend beyond the scope of Cather’s novel, its fluid relationship with spaces beyond its walls mark its similarities with the exhibition space of The Professor’s House, which raises more questions than it answers and ultimately denies us the sense of resolution we desire. In the case study of the NMAI, we can discern the continuing interdependence of cultural gain with cultural loss. The space of the

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museum—much like Cather’s house of fiction—stages a cultural model that sustains the practices and interactions that foster the generation of new cultural opportunities. But in attempting to be a “living museum” (Spruce 19) in the postmodern world, the NMAI has loosened its grip on historical and cultural specificity, leaving it vulnerable to appropriation for a variety of ends. If some visitors gain an appreciation for the museum’s mission, others may not find it meaningful except as a supplier of objects that will fill their own private spaces and project their own sense of identity. To co-opt Cather’s description of the most culturally resonant domiciles, we might think of the NMAI as a museum that has ironically “fitted itself to the people” (Willa Cather 46) by making original objects and older traditions new again. To be a museum that is “fitted” for the modern world implies a willingness to bear the imprint of all who enter its domain, to satisfy their desires and their intellectual, cultural, and personal pursuits. To be fitted—or simply fit—for consumption of all sorts. Rice University notes With thanks to Teresa Goddu for her indefatigable assistance with this article, Deak Nabers for introducing me to The Professor’s House, Cecelia Tichi, for her insights into the larger project of which this article is a part, and to John Swift (ALA 2003) and Mary Titus (M/MLA 2006) who entertained much earlier versions of this project on their panels at those conferences. I am also grateful to the anonymous reader whose suggestions have improved the ending of this essay. 1. For a different reading of this essay and Cather’s novel, see Kot. Kot discerns that although Cather’s promotional piece elides any mention of the deep entwinement of commerce with historical and cultural idealism, her experiences at Mesa Verde made her aware of this relationship. While Cather had long touted the independence of art and commerce in The Professor’s House, Cather sheds “her youthful idealism and her consciousness of the indissoluble ties between land economics and storytelling” (395). My reading locates Cather’s discernment of the problematic relationship between market and historical idealism in her reference to the museum in her Mesa Verde promotional piece. In her novel, however, she explores not only the losses but also the potential gains of locating the museum in the private home. 2. Cather experienced the strong desire to bring objects into her home. In 1914, while visiting the American Museum of Natural History she described her rejuvenation upon encountering an exhibit of cliff-dweller pottery that enabled her to “conjure up the women who, under conditions of incredible difficulty and fear of enemies, had still designed and molded them, ‘dreamed’ the fine geometry of the designs, and made beautiful objects for daily use out river-bottom clay.” Yet the exhibit also conjured a more personal memory of the potsherds that she had



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“shamefacedly” taken from an earlier visit. Unable to resist her desires to integrate history and culture into her everyday life through the immersive pleasures of her own potential “daily use” of the pots (if only through her reveries of the pots’ owners), Cather nonetheless admitted, “It had seemed a sacrilege to take anything for oneself from those cliff dwellings” (qtd. in Sergeant 123). 3. See Coleman, for a listing of house museums and a contemporary history of the movement. For a detailed history of the U.S. Sanitary fairs and the colonial kitchens displayed at these events, see Gordon, especially 73–76. For a detailed account of the museum representations of the neo-colonial revival, see Alan Axelrod’s anthology; Roth’s essay in this collection discusses the colonial kitchens at both U.S Sanitary fairs and world’s fairs. Marling’s book on George Washington’s memory in popular culture, gives ample treatment to the role Mount Vernon played in creating and sustaining Washington’s iconic status. Patricia West’s study of four house museums, Mount Vernon, Louisa May Alcott’s Orchard House, Monticello, and Booker T. Washington’s house offers an insightful look at how the domestic interior became a venue for negotiating political, gender, ethnic, and racial dynamics from the Civil War through the first half of the twentieth century. For an excellent time line of the development of the period room and a history of the period rooms at the Brooklyn Museum, see Pierce and Alswang 63–64. For a contemporary study of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s American Wing, see Halsey and Tower. 4. The critical disjuncture between contemporary and recent criticism on the novel offers an ironic commentary on the historical perspective necessary to discern the effects of the entwinement of museum and domestic settings that Cather observed as she was formulating her novel. For example, Carl Van Doren, writing for Century Magazine, which frequently featured articles on the Southwest, asserts, “I am sure there is too much of Tom Outland’s story” (O’Connor 269). A. Hamilton Gibbs, writing for The New York Evening Post, asserts that the narrative insert “to all intents and purposes . . . has nothing to do with the story” (234). See O’Connor for many other similar reviews of The Professor’s House. 5. For example, Wilson reads the form of Cather’s novel as an implicit critique of the imperialistic appropriation of Native American history in the service of a national myth that was propagated by artists, authors, historians and anthropologists in the first decades of the twentieth century. She asserts that the “narrative fracture” of The Professor’s House formally enacts Cather’s uncertainties about this project, which tended to posit the Southwest and its people “in the domain of nostalgia rather than historicism” (584). Woidat’s study shows how the Southwestern insets in both The Song of the Lark and The Professor’s House operate as “detours” in the context of their surrounding novels, in much the same fashion as the travel packages to the Southwest that were promoted by the railroads. Woidat suggests that Indian detours provided “escape” (37) for their modern visitors by romanticizing the past and ignoring the “cultural differences and conflicts” (44) that existed between white Americans and indigenous peoples. Kot reads the novel’s structure as revealing Cather’s recognition of the entwinement of the idealism of nationalist

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efforts and the speculation that accompanies the “new commercialism” (417). For a reading of the novel’s form that does not focus exclusively on the southwest, see Hilgart, who interprets the narrative inset as throwing into relief the antithetical relationship between cultural objects and the commodity form that marked Cather’s critiques of American culture in the 1920s. He notes, “beautiful or meaningful form, extricated from its messy contingencies, is doomed once it is placed in an active cultural situation” (398), and hence, “to counter modern America’s erasure of cultural and historical meaning one must reassert history, not attempt to spirit valued things away to a place outside of its reach” (388–89). 6. For example, Goodman reads Cather’s work as neither a regionalist work nor a modern one, but rather lying “at the intersection” of regionalism and modernism (163). Cather’s southwestern novels express her interest in “local ways of life divided by desires for mobility and rootedness” while also revealing the “larger economic and cultural conditions that produced . . . regionalism and modernism” (164). 7. Marling explains how the refurbishing and establishment of Washington’s home as a historic house museum served to quell anxieties caused by the Civil War and the industrialization, urbanization and immigration of the decades following the war (53–84). The house and its artifacts conjured the soothing presence of Washington and his values. She concludes, “if the volumetric solidity of artifacts . . . filled up the emptiness of historical distance,” such materiality also “reinforced the modern acquisitive itch” that would be duplicated in the “cluttered Victorian interiors” of the visitors’ own homes (84). 8. American period rooms were influenced by Scandinavian folk cultural displays of the late nineteenth century that salvaged real homes and recreated them as museum representations. For a deeper consideration of these folk cultural displays, see Sandberg who discusses experiments with the creation of “surround-style, wholeroom interiors” (Living Pictures 208) that could fulfill the fantasy of “a literal entry into the representational space” (209). While such an encounter presented the tantalizing possibility of recapturing an original ancestral space, visitors ultimately recognized that they were, “on the other side of a divide, no longer a firstborn son with access to the space through direct inheritance but instead a visitor—or, shall we say, a spectator” (230–31). These homes were not evocative because they bridged the space between past and present but because they accentuated the inaccessibility of the past. It was this combination of the feeling of distance and the excitement of a theatrical regaining “of the sensation of originary presence” that made visits to historic interiors “a modern experience” (“Mimetic Home” 42). 9. Grier’s examination of the parlor and its furnishings in late nineteenth and early twentieth century America focuses on the ways in which this domestic interior expressed culture, the projection of an “educated, genteel, and cosmopolitan people whose habits of consumption . . . were intended to create an expressive social facade” and comfort the conveyance of “more family-centered values associated with ‘home,’ values emphasizing domesticity, perfect sincerity, and moderation in all things” (2).



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The décor of the private parlor was influenced by other kinds of public “parlors” associated with an emerging modernity, including daguerreotype galleries, Pullman cars, city hotels, and the model rooms of the world’s fairs (22–63). 10. In this pursuit, the vocabulary used to promote historical furnishings and décor for personal use is strikingly similar to what was used to promote the realistic recreation of historic interiors in museum settings. See Chamberlain who features images of Sarah Orne Jewett’s home (72), the Old Ballroom at Longfellow’s Wayside Inn (84), and the attic of the House of Seven Gables (87) as models for modern homes. See also Wright for a contemporary example of decorating tips that imagine the physical features of the home as an extension of the “taste” and “character” (79) of its owner. Wright’s book emphasizes intimacy and warmth as the most desirable qualities and advises the reader on how he or she might create that “pleasant atmosphere of having been lived in” through the careful arrangement of “personal and intimate accessories and belongings” (61). 11. Perhaps one of the earliest American efforts to intermingle house and museum was Thomas Jefferson’s “Indian Hall” at Monticello. Jefferson’s display of native Americana, which included artifacts collected during the expedition of Lewis and Clark, was meant to “celebrate the indigenous puissance and incipient potential of the New World” even as it exhibited Jefferson’s status as a learned gentleman (Robinson 26). 12. See Kastner for a reading of Edward Ayer’s collecting and philanthropy against the grain of Ayer’s memoirs and history writing as well as E. A. Burbank’s 1897 painting of Ayer depicting him surrounded by his Indian things at home. Although Ayer professed an interest and sensitivity towards Native American history and the plight of Native American peoples, his collections and accounts of his efforts were “signs of status” that deeply entwined his “wealth . . . power [and] business interests” with “the devastating process that separated Americans from their land, culture and history” (157). 13. Wetherill’s account of his family’s discovery of the cliff-dwellings at Mesa Verde describes the mystique of these spaces in terms echoing the curatorial goals of the era: “Things were arranged in the rooms as if the people might just have been out visiting somewhere” (111). Their excavation of the dwellings consolidated this experience by encouraging an encounter with the dwellings’ former residents: “the mood of the Mesa Verde . . . t[ook] possession . . . and the mind’s eye br[ought] back to life . . . the people . . . . We could almost see them around us” (114). 14. Griffiths focuses on the intersections between the visual culture of natural history museums and that of early cinema, re-reading Donna Haraway’s description of the mesmerizing quality of the life group diorama as a “meta-commentary on the very nature of cinematic spectatorship” (37). However, the visual culture of film differs importantly from the three-dimensional materiality of a life group diorama where the longing to enter the scene could be particularly intense. See Brown’s treatment of the life group: the “absorption” of mannequins in a still life group

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“invites the onlooker to participate in the occupation, to imaginatively inhabit the local scene” (95). 15. Colter’s talent resided in her ability to create spaces that evoked a feeling of indigenousness, and her imagination played at least as important a role in ushering her buildings into being as did historical research. Grattan describes Colter’s design process at La Posada: “She could not visualize the design of a building or plan its decorations until she had though its ‘history.’ For La Posada, she developed an elaborate history. It was to be like one of the large ranchos of the southwest a century earlier, the residence of a wealthy Spanish don and his family. The building would be a large rambling ranch house set on eight acres of land, decorated and landscaped to suit the tastes of this affluent, educated, well-traveled family” (59–60). 16. Dubin traces the collecting of Native Americana from the nineteenthcentury museum to the contemporary private collector, showing how the cultural meaning of Native American objects has been displaced into other realms. For an account of Native Americana in the private home, see Chapter 3 (49–64). 17. For a reading of Tom’s archaeological project within the context of 1920s nativism, see Michaels, especially 29–52. Reading the novel against the backdrop of the passing of the Immigration Act of 1924 and the Indian Citizenship Act, Michaels interprets Tom’s curious ancestral claim as exemplary of the era’s understanding of a “process of acculturation” that was “imaginable only as a kind of education which is simultaneously a kind of blood affiliation” (38). The American Wing may serve as a material cultural expression of the 1920s nativism Michaels describes. The museum’s exhibits were meant to provide an encounter with a ghostly ancestral past for those who were already affiliated with that past. A pilgrimage to the museum was a cultural activity directed towards “remembering” the national “character.” 18. Watson advocates a “post-historical” stance reading history in conjunction with other “cultural productions, such as daily life, consumer culture, literature, and even economics” (89). The collecting practices of “Tom Outland’s Story” are similar to the treatment of the museum in Flaubert’s unfinished novel Bouvard and Pécuchet (1880) that Watson analyzes. The novel tells of two Parisian copy clerks who take up an amateurish archaeology project and create a museum to house their collections within their living room. The things they collect resonate as specimens of knowledge, as domestic objects, and as mere curiosities. Watson reads this episode against the backdrop of the cultural history of the nineteenth century, in particular consumerist production and epistemological knowledge in the public museums of the period. Other critics of this novel have typically read it from an ahistorical Enlightenment-based museum perspective that overlooks the setting of the home in which the narrative takes place. Watson’s work recontextualizes these scenes within the nineteenth-century museum culture (to include house museums) that would have been familiar to Flaubert. See especially 83–108. 19. See Conn 151–60 for a history of Ford’s Greenfield Villiage.



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20. Wilson notes, “Louie’s belief that all of Tom’s sources of inspiration can be gathered together at Louie’s country home . . . is naïve and a touch imperialistic. Nonetheless, the Tom Outland collection represents one of the best examples of historicism the novel presents, as it is committed to the contextualization of its object and unwilling to restrict itself to any one vision of Tom. The material culture of Tom Outland enables everyday people, those untouched by him before his death, to connect legitimately to some aspect of him. Louie’s collection proposes Tom Outland as a historically relevant social figure in addition to a private memory” (598n). Wilson does not note, however, that these variegated impressions of Tom are prompted by the contextualization of the museum within a home. 21. Bachelard analyzes literary/artistic references to nests, including those of Michelet and van Gogh. The nest is both a symbol of a security and a symbol of vulnerability: “If we go deeper into daydreams of nests, we soon encounter a sort of paradox of sensibility. A nest—and this we understand right away—is a precarious thing, and yet it sets us to daydreaming of security . . . . when we examine a nest, we place ourselves at the origin of confidence in the world, we receive a beginning of confidence, an urge toward cosmic confidence. Would a bird build its nest if it did not have its instinct for confidence in the world?” (102–03). 22. Romines identifies the 1920s as the decade when Cather most began to revise her sensibility towards the home as a space for art and culture. Tracing examples of Cather’s representations of domesticity and domiciles from her early writings onward, Romines locates Cather’s most sophisticated example of the cultural aspects of housekeeping in Shadows on the Rock (1931) in which the daily rituals of housekeeping make culture “portable” (153). See Chapter 5 (151–91). 23. For readings of these three novels, see Rosner (127–75), who suggests that the three sections of To the Lighthouse stage the literal disintegration and rebuilding of a home that allows its protagonist to pursue a life as an artist as opposed to a wife. Lily Briscoe elides marriage and its social expectations by balancing images representing conventional domesticity and artistic endeavors within one of her paintings—a formal gesture that re-authorizes her own destiny (169). For a reading that argues for the influence of The Professor’s House on To the Lighthouse, see Poresky. For an argument asserting that Cather was subsequently influenced by To the Lighthouse in her later novel Lucy Gayheart, see Williams. 24. Blair’s commentary refers to Man Ray’s iconic photograph of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas at their home/salon at 27 Rue de Fleurus, 1922. “What I would remark here is the careful division of the image’s visual field into distinct (or unlike) zones of meaning and cultural value: bottom and top; bourgeois bric-abrac and avant-garde masterworks; well-made home and modernist museum” (424). “Man Ray’s image adroitly places its subjects in the visual field, rejects depth and visual emphasis, so as to foreground the distinction between those zones of spatial and cultural import” (425). 25. Carl van Vechten fictionalized the materiality of thoughts and ideas at Mabel Dodge Luhan’s New York salon in Peter Whiffle: “Arguments and discussions

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floated in the air, were caught and twisted and hauled and tied, until the white salon itself was no longer static” (qtd. in Everett 128). Such a vibrant and palpable excitement was inseparable from the space of Luhan’s domestic interior and décor. Los Gallos, while of a different design, also embodied this spirit.

works cited Axelrod, Alan, ed. The Colonial Revival in America. New York and London: Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum, 1985. Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Foreword John R. Stilgoe. Trans. Maria Jolas. Boston: Beacon Press, 1994. Blair, Sara. “Home Truths: Gertrude Stein, 27 Rue de Fleurus, and the Place of the Avant Garde.” American Literary History 12 (2000): 418–37. Brown, Bill. A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. Cather, Willa. Not Under Forty. New York: Alfred Knopf, 1970. ———. On Writing: Critical Studies on Writing as an Art. Foreword Stephen Tennant. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988. ———. The Professor’s House. New York: Vintage Books, 1995. ———. Willa Cather in Person: Interviews, Speeches, and Letters. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986. Chamberlain, Narcissa. Old Rooms for New Living, Being a Collection of Early American Interiors Authentic in Design, Various in Period and Suitable for TODAY’S LIVING. Photographs by Samuel Chamberlain. New York: Hastings House, 1953. Coleman, Laurence Vail. Historic House Museums: With a Directory. 1933. Detroit: Gale Research Company, 1973. Conforti, Joseph A. Imagining New England: Explorations of Regional Identity from the Pilgrims to the Mid-twentieth Century. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. Conn, Steven. Museums and American Intellectual Life, 1876–1926. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. de Forest, Robert W., Grosvenor Atterbury, and Elihu Root. “Addresses on the Occasion of the Opening of the American Wing, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, (November 10, 1924).” Museum Studies: An Anthology of Contexts. Ed. Bettina Messias Carbonell. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004. 290–95. Denenberg, Thomas Andrew. Wallace Nutting and the Invention of Old America. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003. Dilworth, Leah. Imagining Indians in the Southwest: Persistent Visions of a Primitive Past. Washington, D C: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996. Dubin, Margaret. Native American Collected: The Culture of an Art World. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2001. Everett, Patricia R. A History of Having a Great Many Times Not Continued to Be



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Friends: the Correspondence Between Mabel Dodge and Gertrude Stein, 1911– 1934. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996. Fisher, Marc. “Indian Museum’s Appeal, Sadly, Only Skin-Deep.” Washington Post 21 Sept. 2004. B01. Goodman, Audrey. Translating Southwestern Landscapes: The Making of an Anglo Literary Region. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2002. Gordon, Beverly. Bazaars and Fair Ladies: The History of the American Fundraising Fair. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1998. Grattan, Virginia L. Mary Colter: Builder Upon the Red Earth. Flagstaff, AZ: Northland Press, 1980. Grier, Katherine C. Culture and Comfort: Parlor Making and Middle-Class Identity, 1850–1930. Washington, D C: Smithsonian Institute Press, 1997. Greenspan, Anders. Creating Colonial Williamsburg. Washington, D C: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2002. Griffiths, Alison. Wondrous Difference: Cinema, Anthropology, and Turn of the Century Visual Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. Halsey, R. T. H. and Elizabeth Tower. The Homes of Our Ancestors As Shown in the American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art of New York From the Beginnings of New England Through the Early Days of the Republic. Garden City and Long Island: Double Day, Page, and Company, 1925. Harvey, Byron III. “The Fred Harvey Company Collects Indian Art: Selected Remarks.” Weigle and Babcock 69–85. Hilgart, John. “Death Comes for the Aesthete: Commodity Culture and the Artifact in Cather’s The Professor’s House.” Studies in the Novel 30 (1998): 377–403. Hinsley, Curtis. “Collecting Cultures and Cultures of Collecting: The Lure of the American Southwest 1880–1915.” Museum Anthropology 16.1 (1992): 12–20. Howard, Kathleen L. “A Most Remarkable Success: Herman Schweizer and the Fred Harvey Indian Department.” Weigle and Babcock 87–101. Huckel, John F., ed. First Families of the Southwest. Kansas City, MO: Fred Harvey Company, 1913. Kastner, Carolyn. “Collecting Mr. Ayer’s Narrative.” Acts of Possession: Collecting in America. Ed. Leah Dilworth. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University, 2003. 138–62. Kaufman, Edward N. “The Architectural Museum from World’s Fair to Restoration Village.” Museum Studies: An Anthology of Contexts. Ed. Bettina Messias Carbonell. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004. 273–89. Kot, Paula. “Speculation, Tourism, and The Professor’s House.” Twentieth-Century Literature 48 (2002): 393–426. Luhan, Mabel Dodge. Edge of Taos Desert: an Escape to Reality. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1987. ———. Winter in Taos. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1935. Marling, Karal Ann. George Washington Slept Here: Colonial Revivals and American Culture 1876–1986. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988.

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Michaels, Walter Benn. Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1995. Miniature Rooms, the Thorne Rooms at the Art Institute of Chicago. 2nd ed. New York: The Art Institute of Chicago and Abbeville Press, 2004. “Open American Wing.” New York Times 11 November 1924: 25. Proquest Historical Newspapers, The New York Times (1851–2003). 24 July 2009 O’Connor, Margaret Anne, ed. Willa Cather: The Contemporary Reviews. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Pardue, Diana F. “Marketing Ethnography: The Fred Harvey Indian Department and George A. Dorsey.” Weigle and Babcock 102–09. Paul, Catherine. Poetry in the Museums of Modernism: Yeats, Pound, Moore, Stein. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002. Pierce, Donald C. and Hope Alswang. American Interiors: New England and the South, Period Rooms at the Brooklyn Museum. New York: Universe Books, 1983. Poresky, Louise A. “Cather and Woolf in Dialogue: The Professor’s House and To the Lighthouse.” Papers on Language and Literature 1 (2008): 67–86. Raine, Anne C. “Object Lessons: Nature Education, Museum Science, and Ethnographic Tourism in The Professor’s House.” Willa Cather and Material Culture: Real-World Writing, Writing the Real World. Ed. Janis P. Stout. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2005. 125–43. Richard, Paul. “Shards of Many Untold Stories: In a Place of Unity, a Melange of Unconnected Objects. Washington Post 21 Sept. 2004: C01. Roberts, Kate. “Fireside Tales to Fireside Chats: The Domestic Hearth.” The Arts and the American Home 1890–1930. Ed. Jessica H. Foy and Karal Ann Marling. Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1994. 44–61. Robinson, Joyce Henri. “An American Cabinet of Curiosities: Thomas Jefferson’s ‘Indian Hall’ at Monticello.” Acts of Possession: Collecting in America. Ed. Leah Dilworth. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003. 16–41. Romines, Ann. The Home Plot: Women, Writing, and Domestic Ritual. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993. Rosner, Victoria. Modernism and the Architecture of Private Life. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. Rosowski, Susan J. and Bernice Slote, “Willa Cather’s 1916 Mesa Verde Essay: The Genesis of The Professor’s House.” Prairie Schooner 58.4 (1984): 81–92. Roth, Rodris. “The New England, or ‘Olde Tyme,’ Kitchen Exhibit at NineteenthCentury Fairs.” The Colonial Revival in America. Ed. Alan Axelrod. New York: Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum, 1985. 159–83. Rudnick, Lois. Utopian Vistas: the Mabel Dodge Luhan House and the American Counterculture. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996. Sandberg, Mark B. “Ibsen and the Mimetic Home of Modernity.” Ibsen Studies 1.2 (2001): 32–58.



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———. Living Pictures, Missing Persons: Mannequins, Museums, Modernity. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. Sergeant, Elizabeth Shepley. Willa Cather: A Memoir. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1953. Slote, Bernice and Lucia Woods. Willa Cather: A Pictorial Memoir. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1973. Spruce, Duane Blue, ed. Spirit of a Native Place: Building the National Museum of the American Indian. Washington, D C: National Museum of the American Indian, 2004. Watson, Janell. Literature and Material Culture from Balzac to Proust: the Collection and Consumption of Curiosities. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Weigle, Marta, and Barbara A. Babcock, eds. The Great Southwest of the Fred Harvey Company and Santa Fe Railway. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1996. West, Patricia. Domesticating History: The Political Origins of America’s House Museums. Washington, D C: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1999. West, W. Richard, Jr., “As Long as We Keep Dancing.” Spruce 46–65. Wetherill, Benjamin. The Wetherills of Mesa Verde: Autobiography of Benjamin Alfred Wetherill. Ed. Maurine S. Fletcher. Rutherford, Madison, Teaneck, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1977. Williams, Deborah Lindsay. “Cather, Woolf, and the Two Mrs. Ramsays.” College English 61.1 (1998): 29–40. Wilson, Sarah. “‘Fragmentary and Inconclusive’ Violence: National History and Literary Form in The Professor’s House.” American Literature 75 (2003): 571– 99. Woidat, Caroline M. “The Indian-detour in Willa Cather’s Southwestern Novels.” Twentieth-Century Literature 48.1 (2002): 22–49. Wright, Richardson, ed. House and Garden’s Book of Interiors. New York: Conde Nast and Company, 1920.

kevin arnold

“Male and Male and Male”: John Rechy and the Scene of Representation not telling enough: the ‘myth of the streets’ “This is a lie and I’m going to try like hell to convince you it’s true.” John Rechy, interview

Jo h n

rechy’s notoriety as a writer has

seemingly been based on his documentation of gay male subcultures in the 1960s and ’70s. The jacket cover to the first edition of City of Night, for example, declares the novel a “bold . . . account of the urban underworld of male prostitution” and “an unforgettable look at life on the edge.” It would seem that Rechy’s essential contribution to American letters was quite simply to bring his own “true-life” experiences with gay sex to respectable middle class readers, presumably unfamiliar with such “underworlds” in 1963, yet inexplicably curious about them. Since this is what Rechy is typically praised for (if usually in less stark terms), one wonders whether, without this ethnographic and even autobiographic aspect, Rechy’s novels would have been the success that they were? Rechy, for one, seems to authorize and validate this truth-value in his novels. He explicitly describes his most philosophical text, The Sexual Outlaw, as a “prose-documentary,” recording for the reader “sexhunts throughout Los Angeles for three days and nights” (15). It is wellknown, as it was at the time he was writing, that Rechy participated first-hand in the worlds he describes: California body-building culture, hustling and cruising on the streets of Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, etc. And Rechy’s most notorious display of his own life in Arizona Quarterly Volume 67, Number 1, Spring 2011 Copyright © 2011 by Arizona Board of Regents issn 0004-1610

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his novels occurs on the jacket cover, where Rechy often posed shirtless in the very same style as the hustlers he writes about. Undoubtedly, as Ricardo Ortiz notes, “Rechy loves to offer himself up as an erotic image” (“Sexuality” 114). It is strange to think that this image, certainly marketed towards a minority of gay male readers, would have proven relatively successful with a more staid audience curious about so-called “underground” gay life. Nevertheless City of Night was a big hit, and so we might explain its success through Rechy’s opportunity to “come out” to his readers, to reveal to them an unknown truth that played on their desires for it. The desire for a truth of sexuality (especially a sordid one) is indeed an immensely powerful force, as queer theory has repeatedly demonstrated.1 As is the case with all desire, it also elicits repulsion; not as a force counter to that desire, but rather as an integral component of it. The critic Alfred Chester, in an openly hostile review of City of Night for The New York Review of Books remarked, “I can hardly believe there is a real John Rechy” (97). This quotation is where I’d like to begin because it manifests, through its apparent opposition to Rechy’s documentation of so-called truth (i.e. as a denial), a binary structure of knowledge and desire; namely, the closet. It is not only Chester’s renunciation of Rechy’s work that is problematic, but the entire epistemological structure.2 Even the most optimistic and enthusiastic reader of Rechy, including those who would denounce Chester’s reaction as homophobic denial, would then propagate that structure by having to insist on the truth of Rechy’s writing over and against Chester’s falsification of it.3 What is important, then, is not whether the novels are “true” or not. They might very well be, or they might not be, and in the end there is no real way to know for sure. What matters is the way that fantasy overwhelms this question of the truth in Rechy’s writing, that we cannot separate our own desires and anxieties from it when we consider whether it is believable or not. What matters is the way our desire is directed in response to the question opened up by Rechy’s fantasy: either we disavow this fantasy and assert, “no, it can’t be true!” or, if we desire this fantasy, we eagerly cling to it, insisting, “yes, it must be true!” In the end, the reactions are not entirely different from one another. Rechy himself describes such a fantasy, what he calls “The Myth of the Streets,” in his 1967 novel, Numbers,



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a curious myth which says that a man may go with other men, over and over—especially to make money—and with as many as he wants—and still be “straight” (that is, heterosexual) as long as he doesn’t reciprocate sexually. Whether all that is true or not—self-knowledge not being one of Johnny’s characteristics, he’s content to leave the Myth intact. (45–46) This passage is typical of Rechy’s work in that it positively exudes desire from a variety of positions (gay male, middle class, etc.) that coalesce though a cultural fantasy of secrets, deceptive appearances, masculinity, and clandestine gay sex. It is the most concise articulation of what structures the fantasy of the Rechean subject, in this case, Johnny Rio, the protagonist of Numbers. Numbers follows the relatively straight-forward plot trajectory of all of Rechy’s early novels, where a very macho, masculine young man moves from a rural setting that seems repressive to him in some indefinable way to “the big city” (New York, Los Angeles, etc.), eventually getting caught up in the “sexual underground,” as Rechy himself describes it, of male prostitution or “hustling.” This narrative is, of course, a “myth” of gay male culture in more ways than one. It is not only the mythological narrative of coming out that most gay men are thought to undertake but also, like Rechy’s description here of the Myth of the Streets, a narrativization of the deeply eroticized fantasy of having sex with a “straight” man. These myths of gay male culture have a similar structure: like the fantasy, they do not and cannot finally represent any truth of the subject, even as they come to structure the subject’s existence. It goes without saying, of course, that the mythological movement of gay men from the country to the city, from “repression” to “liberation” does not simply and accurately portray anyone’s “real” experience: it’s always more complicated than that.4 And in the text, despite whatever geographical and epistemological movement Rechy’s characters undertake, this never causes any of them to come out or articulate a properly gay identity. This is not a bildungsroman: as much as these characters see and do, they never seem to learn anything. Rechy’s novels may be setup around a realist narrative of coming out, but ultimately they articulate the impossibility of this narrative, as that narrative circles around endlessly, never really getting anywhere, never finally satisfying us with any truth of the subject.

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Secondly, there is an obvious impossibility, an untruth, in the idea of sex with men if you are “straight,” which here means not only heterosexual, but also masculine, “normal,” etc. for Rechy’s characters. Being straight is about something more than heterosexual identity or privilege in Rechy’s novels. It is a representational position, an appearance that is desirable for both Johnny and his sexual “contacts,” the figuration of a desiring subject as well as a desirable object that we might call “straightacting.” I will return to this problematic relationship between masculinity and homosexuality throughout the essay, but here I would like to point out the paradoxical quality of their relationship. It important to recognize that having sex with men while still remaining “straight” presents a kind of anxiety for Rechy’s characters. While Rechy presents us with a series of fantasies, Johnny cannot occupy all of them and, moreover, these fantastic positions are themselves impossible to occupy. Johnny cannot be both the young gay man coming out (a political narrative that never really happens) and the straight country boy from Texas we desire (a sexual fantasy that is itself impossible). Recall Alfred Chester’s assertion that he “can hardly believe there is a real John Rechy.” Chester’s reaction helped us to frame the documentary character of Rechy’s novels in terms of a closet logic and moreover, demonstrated the way that desire and anxiety always play into this logic, but I think there is something more here. As problematic as his response is, it manifests the fundamentally impossible character of the subject of fantasy. Chester’s challenge to Rechy’s “real” identity is a symptom of the impossibility of that identity, almost as if he is asking (with tongue firmly in cheek), “you don’t really believe this do you?” And indeed, it’s hard to shake the thought that Rechy’s writing does seem unbelievable. The world of Rechy’s novels is an incredibly seductive one, both in the sheer quantity of sex he details and in the quality of it, a world full of macho, muscled, straight men having sex for money, what we might call a pornographic fantasy. But in giving articulation to this fantasy and at the same time telling us that it is “documentary” or true, I think Rechy is playing into a reader’s desire for this fantasy as a structure of knowledge and desire. Rechy’s version of documentation is, therefore, a strange one, as he is ultimately less concerned with factual reportage than he is with the impossibility of documentation, with what he cannot represent. Though Rechy describes his work as “documentary,” he also disavows what might



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be read as the autobiographical in his work, as he says in an interview, “of all the literary forms, autobiography is the most fraudulent, because the author claims: ‘This is true, I lived it.’ But it’s no longer being lived, it’s being remembered, selectively” (122). Rechy’s writing, on the other hand, presents itself directly as a lie. “The writer says, ‘this is a lie and I’m going to try like hell to convince you it’s true’” (123). What Rechy actually presents the reader with is a series of untruths (fantasy, the problems of representation), which produce, as an effect, an erotics of representation through writing. This is what I will argue constitutes the ground of Rechy’s erotics and his vision of a sexual future, an eroticization of this very impossibility. Rather than taking this impossibility of sexual truth or identity as the grounds of a queer body politics, Rechy’s politics is a politics of the structure of representation, an investment in this impossibility that produces an erotic, representational effect. For now, let us take another impossible example from Numbers in the character of Danny, a young Southern Californian body-builder whom Johnny has known for many years and with whom he briefly reunites during his return to Los Angeles. Danny is “straight” like Johnny but, unlike Johnny, he doesn’t have sex with men so far as we can tell. Nevertheless it quickly becomes clear that Danny has some kind of desire for Johnny he cannot articulate: “Say,” Danny says suddenly to Johnny as if it just occurred to him, “why don’t you work out with me this afternoon, kid?” His eyes are fixed on Johnny’s almost imploringly. “There’s a gym downstairs where I live—it’s got pulleys, racks, everything. You got a great build now, but you gotta keep it that way. But you need a partner, everybody does.” (67) Again, it is easy to laugh dismissively at this scene and just as easy to caricature it as a misrecognition between two “straight” men apologizing for a potential homosexual relation. But what it isn’t easy to do is take account of the paradoxes of gender and sexuality that perpetually circulate within scenes like this one, as they never finally arrive at any kind of tangible or concrete articulation of sexuality. If we laugh at the scene we not only run the risk of trivializing it but moreover making a judgment about it. Laughter here not only staves off our anxieties about its ambiguous meaning, but stabilizes that meaning into an easily recog-

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nizable form that establishes “our” epistemological superiority (i.e. “we know Danny ‘really’ is gay after all”). But what if we took this scene seriously as an articulation of a gendered and sexual problematic? Danny’s language, calling Johnny “kid” and using technical terms associated with weightlifting (“pulleys, racks”) articulate a hyper-masculine or even heterosexual form of male bonding with Johnny. Nothing in his discourse would “openly” indicate homosexual desire. Yet his observations on Johnny’s body, his suggestion that they might become “partners,” and, most glaringly, that “almost” imploring look in his eyes, indicate some kind of desire. If we refrain from making any absolute judgments about Danny’s sexual identity or avoid “essentializing” it, it becomes impossible to know for sure. Danny’s subject position is ultimately unclear; what is represented in the scene is obscured by its representation as much as it is revealed by it. In this way, meaning is not so much in the scene as it is of the scene, as a representation of this ambiguity itself. Danny’s language here perpetually circulates around the question of homosexuality, always connoting but never ultimately denoting anything. This scene, like many in Rechy’s novels, is about a representational problematic, the fact that we can’t really read sexuality and gender in it reliably. But it’s also about something more than ambiguity. Though it does not appear “openly,” there clearly is some kind of desire here. On the one hand, it’s the desire that straight men display for each other, a kind of camaraderie, a mutual respect and admiration.5 It would be inaccurate (not to mention disrespectful) to off-handedly deem this “merely gay.” On the other hand, whatever “homosexual” desire Danny might have, this desire seems contingent upon its masculine character and appearance, perhaps even the fact that it not appear gay. Danny’s masculine language does not, in fact cannot, represent homosexuality for us in the given discursive field, because it only becomes desirable in Rechy’s novels when it excludes homosexuality. The gay mythology surrounding “straight” or masculine men is one that circulates around an anxiety-ridden core, a “truth” of sexuality that can never be articulated. Rechy quite compellingly sustains this ambiguity, rather than stabilizing it, and allows it circulate: Danny is figured neither as a homophobic (“masculine”) character nor as a self-hating closeted (“gay”) one that could achieve happiness should he only be capable of coming out. Rather, Rechy describes him as “helpless and



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pitiful” and as “isolated.” What Rechy is pointing to here is, in fact, the impossibility of coming out for a character like Danny. Any “open” articulation of homosexual desire would betray the masculine position upon which his desire is contingent, the position from which he would speak that desire in the first place. It is possible to derive meaning from this scene either as an articulation of masculinity or homosexuality, but never as both, leaving Danny estranged, “doomed always to surrogate sex” with his “buddies,” his sexual desire incommensurate with his masculine representation that is, in part at least, the very source of that desire (69). Rechy is usually credited for his candid, “honest” depictions of gay male sex and subcultures, in the way that he describes one of his characters, as having “a compulsive honesty about his sexuality” (Numbers 167). But how are we to reconcile this characterization of his work with the Rechy who never seems to tell us enough, of whom we might say (like Rechy says of Johnny), “self-knowledge not being one of his characteristics, he’s content to leave the Myth intact?” Rechy’s problematization of documentary and sexual knowledge calls into question most critics’ presupposition that his novels function as “coming out” narratives.6 In fact, Rechy’s early novels might be read as kinds of “anti-coming out” narratives, articulations of the impossibility of identification, of reconciling masculinity with homosexuality into a stable identification. This impossible fantasy of their coincidence functions, I argue, at the core of Rechy’s writing: impossibility is not a limitation, but the structure around which desire and representation circulate. telling too much: de-queering rechy “[Sexuality is] not a problem of fantasy; it’s a problem of verbalization.” Michel Foucault, interview

Rechy’s problematization of any sexual truth of the subject refers primarily to coming out narratives and essentialist determinations of identity, but this problematization does not necessarily entail a critique of identification as such. As we have seen, Rechy and his characters invest deeply in the discourses of masculinity and homosexuality as the coordinates of their desiring economies. As “helpless” and “isolated” as a character like Danny is by the vexed relationship between masculinity and homosexuality, this does not lead him to abandon identifica-

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tion altogether. On the contrary, this impossibility seems to heighten and augment his desire and identification, as it produces a counterloop of desire that invests back into the very system from which he is estranged. As Rechy’s work never seemed very available for gay, identity politics activists in the 1960s and ’70s, there have been a few contemporary queer theoretical attempts to reclaim his work. It is not difficult to see why queer theorists might want to look to Rechy as an example of an author for whom, as Foucault argued in the History of Sexuality, Volume 1, “The rallying point for the counterattack against the deployment of sexuality ought not to be sex-desire, but bodies and pleasures” (157). Indeed, Rechy’s writing often verges on the pornographic, as he endlessly, even compulsively details sexual acts and describes sexual bodies. We may wonder if Rechy’s early novels, published in the 1960s and ’70s, might present some kind of prescient queer theory, an early precursor to queer theory before the publication of Foucault’s History of Sexuality, Volume 1. Perhaps Rechy’s articulation of bodily sex acts are the iterations of a performative subject, whose repetition and parody of the regulatory structures of identification presents, through those iterations, the possibility of their subversion? Yet Rechy’s writing consistently defies queer classification, as well as more broadly defined anti-identitarian bodily politics. Though drawing on Jean-Luc Nancy’s concept of the “inoperable community,” David Johnson, in his essay “Intolerance, the Body, Community,” seems almost forced to concede that ultimately, “a logic of positionality . . . governs subjective existence” in Rechy’s writing (460). Johnson’s essay tries to show that despite the importance Rechy places on subjective positioning, Rechy simultaneously subverts that logic through a re-description of community, not as an identification, but as “only bodies in common, in contact, always turning towards others, turning away from others, always turning among others” (462). This description belies the complex contraditions Rechy’s novels confront us with, an articulation of the body as simultaneously defined by subjective positionality and in excess of it. While Numbers perhaps must be read as an attempt to secure identity by way of a proprietary relation to one’s own place or ‘scene,’ as Johnny calls it, to secure identity by way of a proper



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relation to one’s own body and thus an effect of liberalism, it is no less necessary to read Numbers as the rearticulation of the place of the body in community. (459) It is not difficult to read queer utopianism into this definition of community, defined through desubjectivized “bodies and pleasures” rather than as identification with a group. Johnson aims in his essay to desubjectivize community in Rechy, to argue that it is something “that takes place randomly, every time for the first time, without reason” (462). Yet the persistence of and even Rechy’s libidinal investment in subjective positionality and representational structures (which queer theorists take to be the site of the regulation of the sexual subject) make Rechy’s work consistently difficult for queer theorists to manage. Sexuality, perhaps even sex itself, is always subjectivized, as it is made possible in Rechy’s novels through differential economies: dominant/submissive, masculine/feminine, hetero/homo, hustler/score, etc. These representational differentials establish the subjective positions of the characters and make their relation both desirable and legible. Putting his hands on the loops of his own Levi’s, Johnny pushes them very low on his hips, almost half-way to the triangle of hair. The heavily muscled youngman does the same. Johnny rubs his own cock, hardening it—so does the other to his own. And now they’re playing a familiar game of follow-the-sexualleader, determining who’ll be the one to break it. Soon both have their pricks out, stiff. But there is this difference: Whereas Johnny is looking away from the muscular youngman, the other is looking straight at him, which, however, makes this possible: Soon after the muscular youngman took Johnny’s erect cock in his hand, he put his own aroused cock under Johnny’s, Johnny’s cock now lying on his; and clasping both firmly with one hand, the muscular youngman is jerking them off simultaneously. (Numbers 220) While sexual desire in this scene, as in others, is rooted in a narcissistic fantasy, an impossible similitude of two masculine men facing each other, it only becomes “possible” when there is a “difference” between them, namely the other man submitting to Johnny by looking at him longingly and placing his cock underneath Johnny’s, breaking that

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similitude. Reciprocation implies submission here, a threat to the masculine identification that Rechy’s dominant characters cannot seem to do without (i.e. the Myth of the Streets: “as long as he doesn’t reciprocate”). Yet the sexual act is only legible when one of them is willing to do this, producing the differentials necessary to make sex possible in a discursive, but also a very literal sense. Clearly this description of sex and sexuality does not conform to an anti-identitarian queer model, as the subject position of the characters (here, dominant and submissive) is what “makes this possible.” This is the case throughout Rechy’s early novels, as we have already seen, for example, how a character like Danny is obsessed with discourses of masculinity, with his own position as masculine. In spite of the fact that Rechy’s characters are perpetually dissatisfied with the identifications and subject positions available them, this does not lead them away from an erotic attachment to the signifier. Rechy’s characters are obsessed with their appearances, and their sexual world is a highly structured and vigorously regulated one: characters’ worth and value is contingent upon the way they appear, what roles they play (sexual or otherwise), and how other characters perceive them. For Rechy, masculinity is more than a hegemonic regulation of the subject: masculinity is sexy. Masculinity is such an integral component to Rechy’s sexual world that it seems his characters cannot do without this identification or subject position if they are to sustain an economy in which sex is even desirable in the first place. Rather than a modality of queer askesis or a “practice of the self,” the practices Rechy’s characters undertake (weightlifting, tanning, cruising, fucking, etc.) seem to consolidate a type of identification as much as they resist one.7 Rechy thus provides us with a very un-queer conceptualization of the body as invested by representation rather than as resistant to it. Remaining irreducible to a queer body politics, Rechy’s work is not about pleasure either, which queer theory connects to the desubjectivized queer body: for all Rechy’s endless description of bodily sexual acts, the term pleasure hardly appears in his texts at all. Rather, Rechy’s body is a signifying, representational body whose sexual value is contingent upon its ability to articulate a sexual position or even an identification, especially a masculine one: “Male and male and male, hard limbs, hard cocks, hard muscles, hard stomachs, strong bodies, male and male”



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(Sexual Outlaw 27). The sex act for Rechy is not about pleasurable, arbitrary bodies in contact, but a specific and particular masculine body: “Jim looks down, seeing his own firm thighs, the other’s; his flat stomach, the other’s; his stone-hard cock, the other’s. Their muscles” (Numbers 129). What Rechy finds desirable not only in other men but in sex itself is a representation of the masculine body. Rechy hones sex down into the masculine body, in the same manner that the characters in his novels sculpt their muscled frames, figuring it as a “stone-hard” engine whose function is the representation of masculinity. Ricardo Ortiz attempts to produce an anti-identitarian, specifically, queer, reading of Rechy. Like Johnson, Ortiz is attentive to the complexities of Rechy’s work, his paradoxical investment both in liberation from hegemonic identificatory structures and also in an erotic fidelity to them. Ortiz argues that this paradox forces us to consider Rechy’s status as a gay writer in the first place: “even Rechy’s ostensibly ‘out’ activist texts bear an anxiety about their political projects, an anxiety which evidently stems from the manner in which desire plays more often against than with itself in the construction of a subject at once libidinally and ideologically ‘free’” (“Sexuality” 113). This argument makes clear the reasons why Rechy’s work remained largely unavailable to identity politics activists, as for him there is no firm foundation of the sexual subject, even in that subject’s own desire. For Ortiz, this unstable grounding of the sexual subject opens onto a politics of queer performativity, “the possibilities of gender transformation . . . to be found . . . in the possibility of a failure to repeat, a deformity, or a parodic repetition that exposes the phantasmatic effect of an abiding identity as a politically tenuous construction” (“John Rechy” 65). Rather than seeing transformative possibility in “parodic repetition,” Johnny is so attached to masculine identification that he is unwilling to allow it to be subverted. In some sense, Ortiz is correct when he argues that Johnny’s “failure” at the end of Numbers “comes in the form of a failure not to repeat,” to conform endlessly and faithfully to the so-called normative strictures of identification rather than seeing possibility in their subversion through parody. In this way, for Ortiz, whatever “limited critical power” Numbers has as a “parodic reinscription” is ultimately cut short by the fact that Johnny’s career is certainly “too true to form in the way that it conforms . . . confirm[ing] the tragic cast of his character’s fate” (65).

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Yet I would argue that Rechy’s work is not about parody in the first place, as he clearly takes masculinity very seriously as a structure and a condition for desire. Leo Bersani has contested parodic politics on these grounds in his essay, “Is the Rectum a Grave?” where he brilliantly observed that parody “is an erotic turn-off, and all gay men know this.”8 While both Johnson and Ortiz attempt to describe Rechy’s work in anti-identitarian terms that aim towards the subversion of “positionality” or identification, it is clear that neither of these attempts can fully take account of Rechy’s investment in identification. Both readings ultimately reach an impasse: though Rechy’s writing is overtly liberationist (Rechy’s own term) in its “outlaw” political orientation, seeking to break the boundaries of normative structures of sexuality, in the end Rechy remains tied to those very normative structures as the basis for what is desirable. The paradox, then, is not in either Johnson or Ortiz’s readings, but in Rechy’s text itself. I think this is what Foucault is getting at when he claims in an interview that sexuality is “not a problem of fantasy, it’s a problem of verbalization” (126). Fantasy’s impossible position outside of discourse makes it unavailable for political use: what matters is the way sexuality is put into discourse. But this does not mean that fantasy or identification are not “real” or should be dismissed as illusory. Despite Rechy’s resolutely un-queer sexuality, his work resonates with Foucault’s History of Sexuality, Volume 1 in that it views identification not as a problem, but as a problematic, something to be examined and negotiated rather than explained away. Perhaps Rechy’s work helps us to re-read Foucault as something other than a precursor to queer theory through this insistence on identification as a structural problematic of the subject. As we will see in the following section, although Rechy’s work is undoubtedly underwritten by a masculine fantasy, like Foucault he also understands sexual desire primarily as “a problem of verbalization.” telling, and telling, and telling . . .: rechy’s representational subject “you never can tell, man—some queers look just like us.” John Rechy, Numbers

Given our description thus far, it seems that Rechy’s work is defined mostly by paradox, contradiction, and impossibility that result in a sort of deadlocking for both characters and critics. Yet ironically, this



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description of the novels doesn’t sound much like Rechy at all, who is known for his wildly exuberant, almost breathless novels, and who is rivaled in his youthful energy only by someone like Jack Kerouac. If this dead-locking, this impossibility, is in fact a guiding structure of Rechy’s writing, it is not the only thing going on. In this section I argue that it is precisely because Rechy is unwilling to forfeit his investment in an impossible identification that his writing is able to produce, as an effect, a representation that is the eroticiziation of impossibility. That is to say that the impossible coincidence of masculinity and homosexuality is not an unfortunate lack in the social order, but rather is that which makes a certain kind of representation and desire possible. Though I have defined the coincidence of masculinity and homosexuality in theoretical terms as an impossible fantasy, at this point we need a more concrete articulation of the social structure of this dissonance. If I say that masculinity and homosexuality are “impossible,” this does not mean that there are no actual, physical “masculine homosexuals” in either Rechy’s novels or in the world (clearly there are, in some way, in both). What I mean is that masculinity and homosexuality (as well as perhaps other gendered and sexual categories) have nothing to do with actual people or sexual intercourse: they are discursive, representational positions that the subject might or might not occupy. Given this definition, it is representationally impossible for a subject to occupy both masculinity and homosexuality in the discursive space of Rechy’s novels. Characters are either masculine or they are not, and if they appear (i.e. are representationally) gay, regardless of what they actually desire or do sexually (which has nothing to do with their appearance), they are not considered masculine. And, as we have seen, appearance or representational positioning (“verbalization”) is everything in Rechy’s novels.9 Perhaps every character is constituted in Rechy’s novels through this representational structure, but I will return to Danny’s character since he seems to most concisely articulate this structure as a problematic that pertains specifically to masculinity and homosexuality. If Danny were to appear gay or to come out (i.e. to obtain what he seems to want sexually), it would call into question his masculinity. His masculine language therefore cannot represent homosexuality in the space of Rechy’s novels. It is not simply the fact that Danny immaturely or tragically does not want to accept the stigma attached to homosexual-

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ity. In fact, Danny’s subjectivity doesn’t really even have anything to do with homosexuality: it’s about masculinity. This, moreover, is how we might understand Johnny’s sexuality. If Johnny refuses to “reciprocate” sexually it is not (only) for fear of contamination with a stigmatized homosexuality, but rather to bolster his masculine representation. Johnny in this way is not a “top”: he is masculine. We have already seen how Rechy’s characters and seemingly Rechy himself are perpetually, even compulsively, pushing towards a sexual truth, a zero degree of sexuality that would guarantee desire. But at the same time, Rechy’s compulsive drive towards a truth of sexuality is also precisely that which staves off this truth, keeping it at a distance. As the narrator of Numbers explains, Whether or not it’s the real reason (he has never looked too closely)—a reason has always emerged to save him from disorder, to keep him from surrender to chaos, from complete disintegration. (When he hustled: I go with men only because I need the money they give me. And so on: the entire Myth of the Streets). (177) These reasons always emerge precisely at the point “before [Johnny’s] imagination carries him too dangerously far” (217). This willful ignorance is not an excuse or an inability to face up to the “truth” of sexuality. Rather, sexuality in Rechy’s novels is nothing more than these excuses, these continual deferrals that keep the impossible, traumatic truth of sexuality at bay while producing and perpetuating desire through representation. In some way, all the endless description of sex (which occupies a majority of the novels’ content) is merely a ruse, their least “true” aspect, a continual deferral of the truth (of the lie) of fantasy. Johnny’s real failure is not in his subjective structuring or in his investment in masculine identification. The real failure is in his inability to produce another symbol, another alibi, another representation (though, of course, one has the sense after the novel has ended that he will, or that Rechy will, or that the reader will). Johnny has circled too close to (the impossibility of) the fantasy. This “failure” is also apparent in the juxtaposition of Johnny and Danny (who is, like Johnny, “doomed”). Whereas Danny is deadlocked through the impossibility of reconciling masculinity and homosexuality, Johnny is actually freed up



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by it, as it allows him the conditions to elaborate a representation of masculinity and desire. Ironically, the dead-locking of sexuality does not simply limit or contain Rechy’s characters; it actually frees them up to eroticize this impossibility and “play the game,” so to speak, of its ambiguity through representation. What this points to is a different account of the subject’s relation to and constitution in the discursive field than that which is offered by either identitarian models or by queer politics. Rechy’s subject is a representational subject that perpetually circulates around this deadlocked, impossible core (here, between masculinity and homosexuality), elaborating significations that move through and between these poles of identification. The limit therefore is not also a limitation. Rechy’s work articulates the sense in which subversion (i.e. of masculinity or identification more generally) is not only not possible, but that it might not be desirable in the first place, since it affords us a kind of representational economy that makes desire possible. The limit is thus not an external barrier placed on desire, but is incorporated as an integral component of that desire. To reiterate, this structure of sexuality is contingent upon a nonsubversive relation to sexual and gendered norms; in fact, it requires the articulation and perhaps preservation of sexual norms. That is to say that masculinity and homosexuality don’t go away. They have to be there as integral components of the sexual economy for the subject to navigate its desire, even when those components function as threats or limits. Though this seems to cripple a character like Danny; in some sense Danny does not want masculinity to represent homosexuality and vice versa because that would signal the end of the game of desire. Without the threat of homosexuality as the disintegration of masculinity, masculinity is not desirable in the same way, either as an identification or as an object of desire. What this structure produces for the subject is a singular, if polyvalent, representational field of desire. The field is full of contradiction and paradoxes that the subject must both manage and which, through their circulation, get desire moving. At one point in Numbers, for example, Rechy observes that “men and women are like a distinct, incestuous species,” an utterance that attempts to manifest a global erotic fantasy or imaginary of same-sex desire (65). Here, as in other passages through-

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out this paper, we have seen how Rechy’s sexual fantasies have more to do with a gendered imaginary than with sexual norms. On the other hand, it is precisely this hyper-fidelity to gender, what Ricardo Ortiz calls “too true to form,” that produces inconsistencies and incoherence: that guy who is (without irony) just a little too masculine to be straight, a bit too invested in masculinity for heterosexuality. According to Ortiz, Rechy’s hyper-fidelity to gendered (i.e. masculine) identification ultimately moves full-circle, figuring its opposite. Johnny’s manic psychic passivity belies his ostensibly macho ‘top’ posturing; in the play of the gaze, he is more seen than seeing, certainly more sucked than sucking. His ‘jetting thrust’ is as much a sign of helpless depletion as it is of active satisfaction; in the park, between the trees, in the play of light and dark signaling competing male desires, Johnny has become the all-giving maternal source. He has, in his absolute phallicization, become his mother. (“John Rechy” 65) Ortiz’s formulation of gendering in Rechy’s writing seems to provide textual evidence for Lacan’s claim in Seminar XX that “all virile displays appear feminine” (291). Gender transivity appears here not as a deviation away from one’s gender, but rather through a hyper investment in it. While the criticism of Rechy’s work tends to circulate in a closet economy (as we have seen with a critic like Alfred Chester), conversely the problematization of sexual truth and the corresponding economy of appearance means that there is no closet in Rechy’s representational world. There are no gay or straight characters, but rather all men are distributed around the same representational poles of masculinity that makes them more or less available, which is to say that the fantasy underwrites masculinity, homosexuality, heterosexuality, as well as the difference between them. What seems to matter most in Rechy’s representational world is how they are (or are not) available. Though Rechy is unabashedly critical of his “homophobic” characters, there is without doubt a kind of eroticism in his depiction of, “cowardly punks crushed tightly in hot cars, hot knees touching hot knees in hateful intimacy, thrown rocks, bottles and refuse at cars in cruising areas,” or cops, “buddy-locked in steamy squad-car intimacy . . . cruising gay areas [as



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they] turn up their speakers to screech: ‘Cocksuckers!’” (Sexual Outlaw 29–30).10 Like the masculine figure that is a little too true to form, these characters’ circulation around the impossible fantasy of masculinity and homosexuality produces paradoxes and contradiction (that homophobic guy who is a little too interested in homosexuals). These contradictory representations can only be sorted out in an equally contradictory discursive field where desire plays itself out. It is a way of playing the game of representation that elicits and augments desire in Rechy’s novels, as when Danny coyly remarks, “you never can tell man—some queers look just like us” (Numbers 63). The “us” of the utterance is not readily distinguishable from the “queers” on a representational level. Rechy’s novels open onto the possibility of “passing” not as a necessary political tactic, but a broad strategy of utilizing desire and ambiguity through representation. As we have seen, Rechy, that compulsively “honest outlaw,” is someone who simultaneously tells us too much and too little: too little because he can never tell enough, never get at the truth of fantasy that is the object of his discourse; too much because he embarrassingly lets slip the conditions of fantasy, that which is usually brushed under the rug. Ultimately what the subject does, rather than obscure or reveal the truth, is tell, and tell, and tell . . . as when Rechy says, in the interview I quoted earlier, “this is a lie and I’m going to try like hell to convince you it’s true.” As much as Rechy is always, endlessly “telling,” he can never tell us what he aims to depict: the ever-elusive coincidence of masculinity and homosexuality as fantasy. Yet what is elusive in that paradox is precisely what keeps desire going. It would be overly optimistic to argue that Rechy provides us with a utopia or a specific political strategy outside or away from the oppressions of gender and sexuality. Rechy’s vision is far from utopic and his writing and his sexual economy seem predicated on a conservative preservation of sexual norms. But what Rechy’s work also provides us is a different configuration of these norms and a different relation to them. If Rechy’s characters remain too closely tied to identification, which queer theory has taken to be the site of the regulation of the sexual subject, at least they find within this economy the possibility of desire. SUNY Buffalo

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1. Herring argues for a politics of “sexual unknowing” as a response to this cultural and epistemological desire, a strategy that has both resonance and dissonance with my argument, though its implications are too broad for a thorough discussion here. 2. See Sedgwick. A thorough discussion of sexual epistemology and desire is beyond the scope of this paper. I would suggest that Sedgwick’s account of a closet structure, defined by its opposition of silence and disclosure, cannot account for the complex, but constitutive, relation between masculinity and homosexuality. Specifically, that the coincidence of masculinity and homosexuality is a structural, representational impossibility that cannot be articulated (rather than being merely “silenced”), which I discuss throughout the paper and especially in the final section. 3. The imperative to read Rechy’s work ethnographically and even autobiographically seems too difficult for critics to resist. Saldivar argues that in Rechy’s later novel The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gomez, “we must understand how Amalia’s oppression and humiliation serve as an analogy for the misunderstood artist Rechy himself ” (119). I appreciate Saldivar’s attempt to connect the ethnic and feminist aspects of the novel to Rechy’s own subjectivity, which is (often homophobically) masculine and (often misogynistically) gay. At the same time, this ethnographic or autobiographical reading, which connects Rechy’s writing to a presentation of fact, necessarily limits what Rechy’s novels are able to accomplish. 4. Even for the most “out” individual: “there are remarkably few of even the most openly gay people who are not deliberately in the closet with someone . . . . Even an out gay person deals daily with interlocutors about whom she doesn’t know whether they know or not” (Sedgwick 68). I would take this argument even further to suggest that more than just being “deliberately” in the closet, it is the structural constitution of the social order that certain signifiers remain outside of it. Which is to say that it is not a matter of politics or agency, but rather of the language that structures sexual subjectivity. 5. Malebranche suggests that this form of male-bonding should become the basis for a non-gay, anti-identitarian mode of male sexual relations. The book is compelling, though Malebranche’s argument seems to be caught within the same problematic as Rechy’s novels: while arguing for an anti-identitarian (i.e. non-gay) mode of male erotics, Malebranche simultaneously argues for a new, specific “class” of men defined by this modality (“androphiles”) (22–29). Nevertheless, Malebranche’s theory of masculinity is a refreshing departure from the discourse that currently dominates “masculinity studies” and is deserving of further commentary and consideration. On homosexuality in masculinity studies, see Levine’s sociological study of the “clone” subculture and Connell Chapt. 6 (143–64). 6. The notion of the “coming out” narrative undergirds most of the Rechy criticism. See esp. Zamora.



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7. See Foucault’s Use of Pleasure (esp. 72–77). In later interviews, Foucault will connect this Greek practice of self-making with the sorts of bodily and pleasurable practices he sees as resistant to dominant discourses of identification. See also Halperin on ascesis (101–12). 8. Bersani wisely circumvents all of the theoretical problems with parodic politics in favor of attacking their essential de-sexualization. I think Rechy would agree with Bersani here. 9. I realize that here I am collapsing a series of terms (appearance, representational positioning, and verbalization) in a way that requires a great deal more explanation, specifically the modality of “sexual representation” I have in mind vis-à-vis the fantasy. For the purposes of this essay, I only wish to cite a connection to Foucault’s work, particularly the idea that sexual discursivization or epistemology are not merely accurate or inaccurate representations of sexual truth, but that these representations take on a truth value of their own, a “truth” which is inseparable from sexuality as such. 10. Shortly after these passages, Rechy provides a more succinct definition of this phenomenon: “without exception, every cop who entraps or persecutes homosexuals, every judge who vindictively sentences them, every prosecuting attorney who pushes vengefully for gay convictions, every rabid police chief who rants against homosexuality—without exception each is to some extent at war with his own sexual fears, and those fears are probably grounded in latent, self-hating homosexuality” (96). This passage bears striking a striking resemblance to Hocquenghem’s account of homophobia, not as a relation between identities, but rather between economies of desire. Heterosexuality and homosexuality are not oppositional identitarian poles, for Hocquenghem, but rather are mutually constituted through what he calls “homosexual paranoia” (55–73). Hocquenghem’s formulation relies heavily on an out-moded definition of repression, but I think it bears further discussion here as another trajectory for sexual thought, especially with respect to Foucault’s collapsing of the distinction between desire and identification in the History of Sexuality, Volume 1. See also Mieli’s definition of homophobia.

works cited Chester, Alfred. “Fruit Salad.” The New York Review of Books 1.2 (1963): 6–7. Bersani, Leo. “Is the Rectum a Grave?” October 43 (1987): 197–222. Connell, R.W. Masculinities. 2nd ed. London: Blackwell, 2005. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage Books, 1990. ———. The Use of Pleasure: The History of Sexuality. Vol. 2. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage Books, 1990. ———. Interview with Stephen Riggins. The Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954–1984. Vol. 1. Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. Ed. Paul Rabinow. New York: The New Press, 1990.

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Halperin, David. Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. Herring, Scott. Queering the Underworld: Slumming, Literature, and the Undoing of Lesbian and Gay History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Hocquenghem, Guy. Homosexual Desire. Trans. Daniella Dangoor. Durham: Duke University Press, 1993. Johnson, David. “Intolerance, the Body, Community.” American Literary History 10 (1998): 446–70. Lacan, Jacques. On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX, Encore. Trans. Bruce Fink. New York: Norton, 1999. Levine, Martin. Gay Macho: The Life and Death of the Homosexual Clone. New York: NYU Press, 1998. Malebranche, Jack. Androphilia: Rejecting the Gay Identity, Reclaiming Masculinity. Baltimore: Scapegoat Publishing, 2007. Mieli, Mario. Homosexuality and Liberation: Elements of a Gay Critique. London: Gay Men’s Press, 1980. Ortiz, Ricardo. “John Rechy and the Grammar of Ostentation.” Cruising the Performative: Interventions into the Representation of Ethnicity, Nationality, and Sexuality. Ed. Sue-Ellen Case et al. Bloomington and Indianapolis: University of Indiana Press, 1995. ———. “Sexuality Degree Zero: Pleasure and Power in the Novels of John Rechy, Arturo Islas, and Michael Nava.” Critical Essays: Gay and Lesbian Writers of Color. Ed. Emmanuel S. Nelson. Philadelphia: Haworth, 1993. 111–26. Rechy, John. Interview with Debra Castillo. Diacritics 25.1 (1995): 113–25. ———. Numbers. New York: Grove, 1984. ———. The Sexual Outlaw. New York: Grove, 1984. Saldivar, Jose David. Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. Zamora, Carlos. “Odysseus in John Rechy’s City of Night: The Epistemological Journey.” Minority Voices 3 (1979): 53–62.

kevin arnold

“Male and Male and Male”: John Rechy and the Scene of Representation not telling enough: the ‘myth of the streets’ “This is a lie and I’m going to try like hell to convince you it’s true.” John Rechy, interview

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rechy’s notoriety as a writer has

seemingly been based on his documentation of gay male subcultures in the 1960s and ’70s. The jacket cover to the first edition of City of Night, for example, declares the novel a “bold . . . account of the urban underworld of male prostitution” and “an unforgettable look at life on the edge.” It would seem that Rechy’s essential contribution to American letters was quite simply to bring his own “true-life” experiences with gay sex to respectable middle class readers, presumably unfamiliar with such “underworlds” in 1963, yet inexplicably curious about them. Since this is what Rechy is typically praised for (if usually in less stark terms), one wonders whether, without this ethnographic and even autobiographic aspect, Rechy’s novels would have been the success that they were? Rechy, for one, seems to authorize and validate this truth-value in his novels. He explicitly describes his most philosophical text, The Sexual Outlaw, as a “prose-documentary,” recording for the reader “sexhunts throughout Los Angeles for three days and nights” (15). It is wellknown, as it was at the time he was writing, that Rechy participated first-hand in the worlds he describes: California body-building culture, hustling and cruising on the streets of Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, etc. And Rechy’s most notorious display of his own life in Arizona Quarterly Volume 67, Number 1, Spring 2011 Copyright © 2011 by Arizona Board of Regents issn 0004-1610

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his novels occurs on the jacket cover, where Rechy often posed shirtless in the very same style as the hustlers he writes about. Undoubtedly, as Ricardo Ortiz notes, “Rechy loves to offer himself up as an erotic image” (“Sexuality” 114). It is strange to think that this image, certainly marketed towards a minority of gay male readers, would have proven relatively successful with a more staid audience curious about so-called “underground” gay life. Nevertheless City of Night was a big hit, and so we might explain its success through Rechy’s opportunity to “come out” to his readers, to reveal to them an unknown truth that played on their desires for it. The desire for a truth of sexuality (especially a sordid one) is indeed an immensely powerful force, as queer theory has repeatedly demonstrated.1 As is the case with all desire, it also elicits repulsion; not as a force counter to that desire, but rather as an integral component of it. The critic Alfred Chester, in an openly hostile review of City of Night for The New York Review of Books remarked, “I can hardly believe there is a real John Rechy” (97). This quotation is where I’d like to begin because it manifests, through its apparent opposition to Rechy’s documentation of so-called truth (i.e. as a denial), a binary structure of knowledge and desire; namely, the closet. It is not only Chester’s renunciation of Rechy’s work that is problematic, but the entire epistemological structure.2 Even the most optimistic and enthusiastic reader of Rechy, including those who would denounce Chester’s reaction as homophobic denial, would then propagate that structure by having to insist on the truth of Rechy’s writing over and against Chester’s falsification of it.3 What is important, then, is not whether the novels are “true” or not. They might very well be, or they might not be, and in the end there is no real way to know for sure. What matters is the way that fantasy overwhelms this question of the truth in Rechy’s writing, that we cannot separate our own desires and anxieties from it when we consider whether it is believable or not. What matters is the way our desire is directed in response to the question opened up by Rechy’s fantasy: either we disavow this fantasy and assert, “no, it can’t be true!” or, if we desire this fantasy, we eagerly cling to it, insisting, “yes, it must be true!” In the end, the reactions are not entirely different from one another. Rechy himself describes such a fantasy, what he calls “The Myth of the Streets,” in his 1967 novel, Numbers,



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a curious myth which says that a man may go with other men, over and over—especially to make money—and with as many as he wants—and still be “straight” (that is, heterosexual) as long as he doesn’t reciprocate sexually. Whether all that is true or not—self-knowledge not being one of Johnny’s characteristics, he’s content to leave the Myth intact. (45–46) This passage is typical of Rechy’s work in that it positively exudes desire from a variety of positions (gay male, middle class, etc.) that coalesce though a cultural fantasy of secrets, deceptive appearances, masculinity, and clandestine gay sex. It is the most concise articulation of what structures the fantasy of the Rechean subject, in this case, Johnny Rio, the protagonist of Numbers. Numbers follows the relatively straight-forward plot trajectory of all of Rechy’s early novels, where a very macho, masculine young man moves from a rural setting that seems repressive to him in some indefinable way to “the big city” (New York, Los Angeles, etc.), eventually getting caught up in the “sexual underground,” as Rechy himself describes it, of male prostitution or “hustling.” This narrative is, of course, a “myth” of gay male culture in more ways than one. It is not only the mythological narrative of coming out that most gay men are thought to undertake but also, like Rechy’s description here of the Myth of the Streets, a narrativization of the deeply eroticized fantasy of having sex with a “straight” man. These myths of gay male culture have a similar structure: like the fantasy, they do not and cannot finally represent any truth of the subject, even as they come to structure the subject’s existence. It goes without saying, of course, that the mythological movement of gay men from the country to the city, from “repression” to “liberation” does not simply and accurately portray anyone’s “real” experience: it’s always more complicated than that.4 And in the text, despite whatever geographical and epistemological movement Rechy’s characters undertake, this never causes any of them to come out or articulate a properly gay identity. This is not a bildungsroman: as much as these characters see and do, they never seem to learn anything. Rechy’s novels may be setup around a realist narrative of coming out, but ultimately they articulate the impossibility of this narrative, as that narrative circles around endlessly, never really getting anywhere, never finally satisfying us with any truth of the subject.

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Secondly, there is an obvious impossibility, an untruth, in the idea of sex with men if you are “straight,” which here means not only heterosexual, but also masculine, “normal,” etc. for Rechy’s characters. Being straight is about something more than heterosexual identity or privilege in Rechy’s novels. It is a representational position, an appearance that is desirable for both Johnny and his sexual “contacts,” the figuration of a desiring subject as well as a desirable object that we might call “straightacting.” I will return to this problematic relationship between masculinity and homosexuality throughout the essay, but here I would like to point out the paradoxical quality of their relationship. It important to recognize that having sex with men while still remaining “straight” presents a kind of anxiety for Rechy’s characters. While Rechy presents us with a series of fantasies, Johnny cannot occupy all of them and, moreover, these fantastic positions are themselves impossible to occupy. Johnny cannot be both the young gay man coming out (a political narrative that never really happens) and the straight country boy from Texas we desire (a sexual fantasy that is itself impossible). Recall Alfred Chester’s assertion that he “can hardly believe there is a real John Rechy.” Chester’s reaction helped us to frame the documentary character of Rechy’s novels in terms of a closet logic and moreover, demonstrated the way that desire and anxiety always play into this logic, but I think there is something more here. As problematic as his response is, it manifests the fundamentally impossible character of the subject of fantasy. Chester’s challenge to Rechy’s “real” identity is a symptom of the impossibility of that identity, almost as if he is asking (with tongue firmly in cheek), “you don’t really believe this do you?” And indeed, it’s hard to shake the thought that Rechy’s writing does seem unbelievable. The world of Rechy’s novels is an incredibly seductive one, both in the sheer quantity of sex he details and in the quality of it, a world full of macho, muscled, straight men having sex for money, what we might call a pornographic fantasy. But in giving articulation to this fantasy and at the same time telling us that it is “documentary” or true, I think Rechy is playing into a reader’s desire for this fantasy as a structure of knowledge and desire. Rechy’s version of documentation is, therefore, a strange one, as he is ultimately less concerned with factual reportage than he is with the impossibility of documentation, with what he cannot represent. Though Rechy describes his work as “documentary,” he also disavows what might



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be read as the autobiographical in his work, as he says in an interview, “of all the literary forms, autobiography is the most fraudulent, because the author claims: ‘This is true, I lived it.’ But it’s no longer being lived, it’s being remembered, selectively” (122). Rechy’s writing, on the other hand, presents itself directly as a lie. “The writer says, ‘this is a lie and I’m going to try like hell to convince you it’s true’” (123). What Rechy actually presents the reader with is a series of untruths (fantasy, the problems of representation), which produce, as an effect, an erotics of representation through writing. This is what I will argue constitutes the ground of Rechy’s erotics and his vision of a sexual future, an eroticization of this very impossibility. Rather than taking this impossibility of sexual truth or identity as the grounds of a queer body politics, Rechy’s politics is a politics of the structure of representation, an investment in this impossibility that produces an erotic, representational effect. For now, let us take another impossible example from Numbers in the character of Danny, a young Southern Californian body-builder whom Johnny has known for many years and with whom he briefly reunites during his return to Los Angeles. Danny is “straight” like Johnny but, unlike Johnny, he doesn’t have sex with men so far as we can tell. Nevertheless it quickly becomes clear that Danny has some kind of desire for Johnny he cannot articulate: “Say,” Danny says suddenly to Johnny as if it just occurred to him, “why don’t you work out with me this afternoon, kid?” His eyes are fixed on Johnny’s almost imploringly. “There’s a gym downstairs where I live—it’s got pulleys, racks, everything. You got a great build now, but you gotta keep it that way. But you need a partner, everybody does.” (67) Again, it is easy to laugh dismissively at this scene and just as easy to caricature it as a misrecognition between two “straight” men apologizing for a potential homosexual relation. But what it isn’t easy to do is take account of the paradoxes of gender and sexuality that perpetually circulate within scenes like this one, as they never finally arrive at any kind of tangible or concrete articulation of sexuality. If we laugh at the scene we not only run the risk of trivializing it but moreover making a judgment about it. Laughter here not only staves off our anxieties about its ambiguous meaning, but stabilizes that meaning into an easily recog-

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nizable form that establishes “our” epistemological superiority (i.e. “we know Danny ‘really’ is gay after all”). But what if we took this scene seriously as an articulation of a gendered and sexual problematic? Danny’s language, calling Johnny “kid” and using technical terms associated with weightlifting (“pulleys, racks”) articulate a hyper-masculine or even heterosexual form of male bonding with Johnny. Nothing in his discourse would “openly” indicate homosexual desire. Yet his observations on Johnny’s body, his suggestion that they might become “partners,” and, most glaringly, that “almost” imploring look in his eyes, indicate some kind of desire. If we refrain from making any absolute judgments about Danny’s sexual identity or avoid “essentializing” it, it becomes impossible to know for sure. Danny’s subject position is ultimately unclear; what is represented in the scene is obscured by its representation as much as it is revealed by it. In this way, meaning is not so much in the scene as it is of the scene, as a representation of this ambiguity itself. Danny’s language here perpetually circulates around the question of homosexuality, always connoting but never ultimately denoting anything. This scene, like many in Rechy’s novels, is about a representational problematic, the fact that we can’t really read sexuality and gender in it reliably. But it’s also about something more than ambiguity. Though it does not appear “openly,” there clearly is some kind of desire here. On the one hand, it’s the desire that straight men display for each other, a kind of camaraderie, a mutual respect and admiration.5 It would be inaccurate (not to mention disrespectful) to off-handedly deem this “merely gay.” On the other hand, whatever “homosexual” desire Danny might have, this desire seems contingent upon its masculine character and appearance, perhaps even the fact that it not appear gay. Danny’s masculine language does not, in fact cannot, represent homosexuality for us in the given discursive field, because it only becomes desirable in Rechy’s novels when it excludes homosexuality. The gay mythology surrounding “straight” or masculine men is one that circulates around an anxiety-ridden core, a “truth” of sexuality that can never be articulated. Rechy quite compellingly sustains this ambiguity, rather than stabilizing it, and allows it circulate: Danny is figured neither as a homophobic (“masculine”) character nor as a self-hating closeted (“gay”) one that could achieve happiness should he only be capable of coming out. Rather, Rechy describes him as “helpless and



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pitiful” and as “isolated.” What Rechy is pointing to here is, in fact, the impossibility of coming out for a character like Danny. Any “open” articulation of homosexual desire would betray the masculine position upon which his desire is contingent, the position from which he would speak that desire in the first place. It is possible to derive meaning from this scene either as an articulation of masculinity or homosexuality, but never as both, leaving Danny estranged, “doomed always to surrogate sex” with his “buddies,” his sexual desire incommensurate with his masculine representation that is, in part at least, the very source of that desire (69). Rechy is usually credited for his candid, “honest” depictions of gay male sex and subcultures, in the way that he describes one of his characters, as having “a compulsive honesty about his sexuality” (Numbers 167). But how are we to reconcile this characterization of his work with the Rechy who never seems to tell us enough, of whom we might say (like Rechy says of Johnny), “self-knowledge not being one of his characteristics, he’s content to leave the Myth intact?” Rechy’s problematization of documentary and sexual knowledge calls into question most critics’ presupposition that his novels function as “coming out” narratives.6 In fact, Rechy’s early novels might be read as kinds of “anti-coming out” narratives, articulations of the impossibility of identification, of reconciling masculinity with homosexuality into a stable identification. This impossible fantasy of their coincidence functions, I argue, at the core of Rechy’s writing: impossibility is not a limitation, but the structure around which desire and representation circulate. telling too much: de-queering rechy “[Sexuality is] not a problem of fantasy; it’s a problem of verbalization.” Michel Foucault, interview

Rechy’s problematization of any sexual truth of the subject refers primarily to coming out narratives and essentialist determinations of identity, but this problematization does not necessarily entail a critique of identification as such. As we have seen, Rechy and his characters invest deeply in the discourses of masculinity and homosexuality as the coordinates of their desiring economies. As “helpless” and “isolated” as a character like Danny is by the vexed relationship between masculinity and homosexuality, this does not lead him to abandon identifica-

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tion altogether. On the contrary, this impossibility seems to heighten and augment his desire and identification, as it produces a counterloop of desire that invests back into the very system from which he is estranged. As Rechy’s work never seemed very available for gay, identity politics activists in the 1960s and ’70s, there have been a few contemporary queer theoretical attempts to reclaim his work. It is not difficult to see why queer theorists might want to look to Rechy as an example of an author for whom, as Foucault argued in the History of Sexuality, Volume 1, “The rallying point for the counterattack against the deployment of sexuality ought not to be sex-desire, but bodies and pleasures” (157). Indeed, Rechy’s writing often verges on the pornographic, as he endlessly, even compulsively details sexual acts and describes sexual bodies. We may wonder if Rechy’s early novels, published in the 1960s and ’70s, might present some kind of prescient queer theory, an early precursor to queer theory before the publication of Foucault’s History of Sexuality, Volume 1. Perhaps Rechy’s articulation of bodily sex acts are the iterations of a performative subject, whose repetition and parody of the regulatory structures of identification presents, through those iterations, the possibility of their subversion? Yet Rechy’s writing consistently defies queer classification, as well as more broadly defined anti-identitarian bodily politics. Though drawing on Jean-Luc Nancy’s concept of the “inoperable community,” David Johnson, in his essay “Intolerance, the Body, Community,” seems almost forced to concede that ultimately, “a logic of positionality . . . governs subjective existence” in Rechy’s writing (460). Johnson’s essay tries to show that despite the importance Rechy places on subjective positioning, Rechy simultaneously subverts that logic through a re-description of community, not as an identification, but as “only bodies in common, in contact, always turning towards others, turning away from others, always turning among others” (462). This description belies the complex contraditions Rechy’s novels confront us with, an articulation of the body as simultaneously defined by subjective positionality and in excess of it. While Numbers perhaps must be read as an attempt to secure identity by way of a proprietary relation to one’s own place or ‘scene,’ as Johnny calls it, to secure identity by way of a proper



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relation to one’s own body and thus an effect of liberalism, it is no less necessary to read Numbers as the rearticulation of the place of the body in community. (459) It is not difficult to read queer utopianism into this definition of community, defined through desubjectivized “bodies and pleasures” rather than as identification with a group. Johnson aims in his essay to desubjectivize community in Rechy, to argue that it is something “that takes place randomly, every time for the first time, without reason” (462). Yet the persistence of and even Rechy’s libidinal investment in subjective positionality and representational structures (which queer theorists take to be the site of the regulation of the sexual subject) make Rechy’s work consistently difficult for queer theorists to manage. Sexuality, perhaps even sex itself, is always subjectivized, as it is made possible in Rechy’s novels through differential economies: dominant/submissive, masculine/feminine, hetero/homo, hustler/score, etc. These representational differentials establish the subjective positions of the characters and make their relation both desirable and legible. Putting his hands on the loops of his own Levi’s, Johnny pushes them very low on his hips, almost half-way to the triangle of hair. The heavily muscled youngman does the same. Johnny rubs his own cock, hardening it—so does the other to his own. And now they’re playing a familiar game of follow-the-sexualleader, determining who’ll be the one to break it. Soon both have their pricks out, stiff. But there is this difference: Whereas Johnny is looking away from the muscular youngman, the other is looking straight at him, which, however, makes this possible: Soon after the muscular youngman took Johnny’s erect cock in his hand, he put his own aroused cock under Johnny’s, Johnny’s cock now lying on his; and clasping both firmly with one hand, the muscular youngman is jerking them off simultaneously. (Numbers 220) While sexual desire in this scene, as in others, is rooted in a narcissistic fantasy, an impossible similitude of two masculine men facing each other, it only becomes “possible” when there is a “difference” between them, namely the other man submitting to Johnny by looking at him longingly and placing his cock underneath Johnny’s, breaking that

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similitude. Reciprocation implies submission here, a threat to the masculine identification that Rechy’s dominant characters cannot seem to do without (i.e. the Myth of the Streets: “as long as he doesn’t reciprocate”). Yet the sexual act is only legible when one of them is willing to do this, producing the differentials necessary to make sex possible in a discursive, but also a very literal sense. Clearly this description of sex and sexuality does not conform to an anti-identitarian queer model, as the subject position of the characters (here, dominant and submissive) is what “makes this possible.” This is the case throughout Rechy’s early novels, as we have already seen, for example, how a character like Danny is obsessed with discourses of masculinity, with his own position as masculine. In spite of the fact that Rechy’s characters are perpetually dissatisfied with the identifications and subject positions available them, this does not lead them away from an erotic attachment to the signifier. Rechy’s characters are obsessed with their appearances, and their sexual world is a highly structured and vigorously regulated one: characters’ worth and value is contingent upon the way they appear, what roles they play (sexual or otherwise), and how other characters perceive them. For Rechy, masculinity is more than a hegemonic regulation of the subject: masculinity is sexy. Masculinity is such an integral component to Rechy’s sexual world that it seems his characters cannot do without this identification or subject position if they are to sustain an economy in which sex is even desirable in the first place. Rather than a modality of queer askesis or a “practice of the self,” the practices Rechy’s characters undertake (weightlifting, tanning, cruising, fucking, etc.) seem to consolidate a type of identification as much as they resist one.7 Rechy thus provides us with a very un-queer conceptualization of the body as invested by representation rather than as resistant to it. Remaining irreducible to a queer body politics, Rechy’s work is not about pleasure either, which queer theory connects to the desubjectivized queer body: for all Rechy’s endless description of bodily sexual acts, the term pleasure hardly appears in his texts at all. Rather, Rechy’s body is a signifying, representational body whose sexual value is contingent upon its ability to articulate a sexual position or even an identification, especially a masculine one: “Male and male and male, hard limbs, hard cocks, hard muscles, hard stomachs, strong bodies, male and male”



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(Sexual Outlaw 27). The sex act for Rechy is not about pleasurable, arbitrary bodies in contact, but a specific and particular masculine body: “Jim looks down, seeing his own firm thighs, the other’s; his flat stomach, the other’s; his stone-hard cock, the other’s. Their muscles” (Numbers 129). What Rechy finds desirable not only in other men but in sex itself is a representation of the masculine body. Rechy hones sex down into the masculine body, in the same manner that the characters in his novels sculpt their muscled frames, figuring it as a “stone-hard” engine whose function is the representation of masculinity. Ricardo Ortiz attempts to produce an anti-identitarian, specifically, queer, reading of Rechy. Like Johnson, Ortiz is attentive to the complexities of Rechy’s work, his paradoxical investment both in liberation from hegemonic identificatory structures and also in an erotic fidelity to them. Ortiz argues that this paradox forces us to consider Rechy’s status as a gay writer in the first place: “even Rechy’s ostensibly ‘out’ activist texts bear an anxiety about their political projects, an anxiety which evidently stems from the manner in which desire plays more often against than with itself in the construction of a subject at once libidinally and ideologically ‘free’” (“Sexuality” 113). This argument makes clear the reasons why Rechy’s work remained largely unavailable to identity politics activists, as for him there is no firm foundation of the sexual subject, even in that subject’s own desire. For Ortiz, this unstable grounding of the sexual subject opens onto a politics of queer performativity, “the possibilities of gender transformation . . . to be found . . . in the possibility of a failure to repeat, a deformity, or a parodic repetition that exposes the phantasmatic effect of an abiding identity as a politically tenuous construction” (“John Rechy” 65). Rather than seeing transformative possibility in “parodic repetition,” Johnny is so attached to masculine identification that he is unwilling to allow it to be subverted. In some sense, Ortiz is correct when he argues that Johnny’s “failure” at the end of Numbers “comes in the form of a failure not to repeat,” to conform endlessly and faithfully to the so-called normative strictures of identification rather than seeing possibility in their subversion through parody. In this way, for Ortiz, whatever “limited critical power” Numbers has as a “parodic reinscription” is ultimately cut short by the fact that Johnny’s career is certainly “too true to form in the way that it conforms . . . confirm[ing] the tragic cast of his character’s fate” (65).

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Yet I would argue that Rechy’s work is not about parody in the first place, as he clearly takes masculinity very seriously as a structure and a condition for desire. Leo Bersani has contested parodic politics on these grounds in his essay, “Is the Rectum a Grave?” where he brilliantly observed that parody “is an erotic turn-off, and all gay men know this.”8 While both Johnson and Ortiz attempt to describe Rechy’s work in anti-identitarian terms that aim towards the subversion of “positionality” or identification, it is clear that neither of these attempts can fully take account of Rechy’s investment in identification. Both readings ultimately reach an impasse: though Rechy’s writing is overtly liberationist (Rechy’s own term) in its “outlaw” political orientation, seeking to break the boundaries of normative structures of sexuality, in the end Rechy remains tied to those very normative structures as the basis for what is desirable. The paradox, then, is not in either Johnson or Ortiz’s readings, but in Rechy’s text itself. I think this is what Foucault is getting at when he claims in an interview that sexuality is “not a problem of fantasy, it’s a problem of verbalization” (126). Fantasy’s impossible position outside of discourse makes it unavailable for political use: what matters is the way sexuality is put into discourse. But this does not mean that fantasy or identification are not “real” or should be dismissed as illusory. Despite Rechy’s resolutely un-queer sexuality, his work resonates with Foucault’s History of Sexuality, Volume 1 in that it views identification not as a problem, but as a problematic, something to be examined and negotiated rather than explained away. Perhaps Rechy’s work helps us to re-read Foucault as something other than a precursor to queer theory through this insistence on identification as a structural problematic of the subject. As we will see in the following section, although Rechy’s work is undoubtedly underwritten by a masculine fantasy, like Foucault he also understands sexual desire primarily as “a problem of verbalization.” telling, and telling, and telling . . .: rechy’s representational subject “you never can tell, man—some queers look just like us.” John Rechy, Numbers

Given our description thus far, it seems that Rechy’s work is defined mostly by paradox, contradiction, and impossibility that result in a sort of deadlocking for both characters and critics. Yet ironically, this



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description of the novels doesn’t sound much like Rechy at all, who is known for his wildly exuberant, almost breathless novels, and who is rivaled in his youthful energy only by someone like Jack Kerouac. If this dead-locking, this impossibility, is in fact a guiding structure of Rechy’s writing, it is not the only thing going on. In this section I argue that it is precisely because Rechy is unwilling to forfeit his investment in an impossible identification that his writing is able to produce, as an effect, a representation that is the eroticiziation of impossibility. That is to say that the impossible coincidence of masculinity and homosexuality is not an unfortunate lack in the social order, but rather is that which makes a certain kind of representation and desire possible. Though I have defined the coincidence of masculinity and homosexuality in theoretical terms as an impossible fantasy, at this point we need a more concrete articulation of the social structure of this dissonance. If I say that masculinity and homosexuality are “impossible,” this does not mean that there are no actual, physical “masculine homosexuals” in either Rechy’s novels or in the world (clearly there are, in some way, in both). What I mean is that masculinity and homosexuality (as well as perhaps other gendered and sexual categories) have nothing to do with actual people or sexual intercourse: they are discursive, representational positions that the subject might or might not occupy. Given this definition, it is representationally impossible for a subject to occupy both masculinity and homosexuality in the discursive space of Rechy’s novels. Characters are either masculine or they are not, and if they appear (i.e. are representationally) gay, regardless of what they actually desire or do sexually (which has nothing to do with their appearance), they are not considered masculine. And, as we have seen, appearance or representational positioning (“verbalization”) is everything in Rechy’s novels.9 Perhaps every character is constituted in Rechy’s novels through this representational structure, but I will return to Danny’s character since he seems to most concisely articulate this structure as a problematic that pertains specifically to masculinity and homosexuality. If Danny were to appear gay or to come out (i.e. to obtain what he seems to want sexually), it would call into question his masculinity. His masculine language therefore cannot represent homosexuality in the space of Rechy’s novels. It is not simply the fact that Danny immaturely or tragically does not want to accept the stigma attached to homosexual-

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ity. In fact, Danny’s subjectivity doesn’t really even have anything to do with homosexuality: it’s about masculinity. This, moreover, is how we might understand Johnny’s sexuality. If Johnny refuses to “reciprocate” sexually it is not (only) for fear of contamination with a stigmatized homosexuality, but rather to bolster his masculine representation. Johnny in this way is not a “top”: he is masculine. We have already seen how Rechy’s characters and seemingly Rechy himself are perpetually, even compulsively, pushing towards a sexual truth, a zero degree of sexuality that would guarantee desire. But at the same time, Rechy’s compulsive drive towards a truth of sexuality is also precisely that which staves off this truth, keeping it at a distance. As the narrator of Numbers explains, Whether or not it’s the real reason (he has never looked too closely)—a reason has always emerged to save him from disorder, to keep him from surrender to chaos, from complete disintegration. (When he hustled: I go with men only because I need the money they give me. And so on: the entire Myth of the Streets). (177) These reasons always emerge precisely at the point “before [Johnny’s] imagination carries him too dangerously far” (217). This willful ignorance is not an excuse or an inability to face up to the “truth” of sexuality. Rather, sexuality in Rechy’s novels is nothing more than these excuses, these continual deferrals that keep the impossible, traumatic truth of sexuality at bay while producing and perpetuating desire through representation. In some way, all the endless description of sex (which occupies a majority of the novels’ content) is merely a ruse, their least “true” aspect, a continual deferral of the truth (of the lie) of fantasy. Johnny’s real failure is not in his subjective structuring or in his investment in masculine identification. The real failure is in his inability to produce another symbol, another alibi, another representation (though, of course, one has the sense after the novel has ended that he will, or that Rechy will, or that the reader will). Johnny has circled too close to (the impossibility of) the fantasy. This “failure” is also apparent in the juxtaposition of Johnny and Danny (who is, like Johnny, “doomed”). Whereas Danny is deadlocked through the impossibility of reconciling masculinity and homosexuality, Johnny is actually freed up



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by it, as it allows him the conditions to elaborate a representation of masculinity and desire. Ironically, the dead-locking of sexuality does not simply limit or contain Rechy’s characters; it actually frees them up to eroticize this impossibility and “play the game,” so to speak, of its ambiguity through representation. What this points to is a different account of the subject’s relation to and constitution in the discursive field than that which is offered by either identitarian models or by queer politics. Rechy’s subject is a representational subject that perpetually circulates around this deadlocked, impossible core (here, between masculinity and homosexuality), elaborating significations that move through and between these poles of identification. The limit therefore is not also a limitation. Rechy’s work articulates the sense in which subversion (i.e. of masculinity or identification more generally) is not only not possible, but that it might not be desirable in the first place, since it affords us a kind of representational economy that makes desire possible. The limit is thus not an external barrier placed on desire, but is incorporated as an integral component of that desire. To reiterate, this structure of sexuality is contingent upon a nonsubversive relation to sexual and gendered norms; in fact, it requires the articulation and perhaps preservation of sexual norms. That is to say that masculinity and homosexuality don’t go away. They have to be there as integral components of the sexual economy for the subject to navigate its desire, even when those components function as threats or limits. Though this seems to cripple a character like Danny; in some sense Danny does not want masculinity to represent homosexuality and vice versa because that would signal the end of the game of desire. Without the threat of homosexuality as the disintegration of masculinity, masculinity is not desirable in the same way, either as an identification or as an object of desire. What this structure produces for the subject is a singular, if polyvalent, representational field of desire. The field is full of contradiction and paradoxes that the subject must both manage and which, through their circulation, get desire moving. At one point in Numbers, for example, Rechy observes that “men and women are like a distinct, incestuous species,” an utterance that attempts to manifest a global erotic fantasy or imaginary of same-sex desire (65). Here, as in other passages through-

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out this paper, we have seen how Rechy’s sexual fantasies have more to do with a gendered imaginary than with sexual norms. On the other hand, it is precisely this hyper-fidelity to gender, what Ricardo Ortiz calls “too true to form,” that produces inconsistencies and incoherence: that guy who is (without irony) just a little too masculine to be straight, a bit too invested in masculinity for heterosexuality. According to Ortiz, Rechy’s hyper-fidelity to gendered (i.e. masculine) identification ultimately moves full-circle, figuring its opposite. Johnny’s manic psychic passivity belies his ostensibly macho ‘top’ posturing; in the play of the gaze, he is more seen than seeing, certainly more sucked than sucking. His ‘jetting thrust’ is as much a sign of helpless depletion as it is of active satisfaction; in the park, between the trees, in the play of light and dark signaling competing male desires, Johnny has become the all-giving maternal source. He has, in his absolute phallicization, become his mother. (“John Rechy” 65) Ortiz’s formulation of gendering in Rechy’s writing seems to provide textual evidence for Lacan’s claim in Seminar XX that “all virile displays appear feminine” (291). Gender transivity appears here not as a deviation away from one’s gender, but rather through a hyper investment in it. While the criticism of Rechy’s work tends to circulate in a closet economy (as we have seen with a critic like Alfred Chester), conversely the problematization of sexual truth and the corresponding economy of appearance means that there is no closet in Rechy’s representational world. There are no gay or straight characters, but rather all men are distributed around the same representational poles of masculinity that makes them more or less available, which is to say that the fantasy underwrites masculinity, homosexuality, heterosexuality, as well as the difference between them. What seems to matter most in Rechy’s representational world is how they are (or are not) available. Though Rechy is unabashedly critical of his “homophobic” characters, there is without doubt a kind of eroticism in his depiction of, “cowardly punks crushed tightly in hot cars, hot knees touching hot knees in hateful intimacy, thrown rocks, bottles and refuse at cars in cruising areas,” or cops, “buddy-locked in steamy squad-car intimacy . . . cruising gay areas [as



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they] turn up their speakers to screech: ‘Cocksuckers!’” (Sexual Outlaw 29–30).10 Like the masculine figure that is a little too true to form, these characters’ circulation around the impossible fantasy of masculinity and homosexuality produces paradoxes and contradiction (that homophobic guy who is a little too interested in homosexuals). These contradictory representations can only be sorted out in an equally contradictory discursive field where desire plays itself out. It is a way of playing the game of representation that elicits and augments desire in Rechy’s novels, as when Danny coyly remarks, “you never can tell man—some queers look just like us” (Numbers 63). The “us” of the utterance is not readily distinguishable from the “queers” on a representational level. Rechy’s novels open onto the possibility of “passing” not as a necessary political tactic, but a broad strategy of utilizing desire and ambiguity through representation. As we have seen, Rechy, that compulsively “honest outlaw,” is someone who simultaneously tells us too much and too little: too little because he can never tell enough, never get at the truth of fantasy that is the object of his discourse; too much because he embarrassingly lets slip the conditions of fantasy, that which is usually brushed under the rug. Ultimately what the subject does, rather than obscure or reveal the truth, is tell, and tell, and tell . . . as when Rechy says, in the interview I quoted earlier, “this is a lie and I’m going to try like hell to convince you it’s true.” As much as Rechy is always, endlessly “telling,” he can never tell us what he aims to depict: the ever-elusive coincidence of masculinity and homosexuality as fantasy. Yet what is elusive in that paradox is precisely what keeps desire going. It would be overly optimistic to argue that Rechy provides us with a utopia or a specific political strategy outside or away from the oppressions of gender and sexuality. Rechy’s vision is far from utopic and his writing and his sexual economy seem predicated on a conservative preservation of sexual norms. But what Rechy’s work also provides us is a different configuration of these norms and a different relation to them. If Rechy’s characters remain too closely tied to identification, which queer theory has taken to be the site of the regulation of the sexual subject, at least they find within this economy the possibility of desire. SUNY Buffalo

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1. Herring argues for a politics of “sexual unknowing” as a response to this cultural and epistemological desire, a strategy that has both resonance and dissonance with my argument, though its implications are too broad for a thorough discussion here. 2. See Sedgwick. A thorough discussion of sexual epistemology and desire is beyond the scope of this paper. I would suggest that Sedgwick’s account of a closet structure, defined by its opposition of silence and disclosure, cannot account for the complex, but constitutive, relation between masculinity and homosexuality. Specifically, that the coincidence of masculinity and homosexuality is a structural, representational impossibility that cannot be articulated (rather than being merely “silenced”), which I discuss throughout the paper and especially in the final section. 3. The imperative to read Rechy’s work ethnographically and even autobiographically seems too difficult for critics to resist. Saldivar argues that in Rechy’s later novel The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gomez, “we must understand how Amalia’s oppression and humiliation serve as an analogy for the misunderstood artist Rechy himself ” (119). I appreciate Saldivar’s attempt to connect the ethnic and feminist aspects of the novel to Rechy’s own subjectivity, which is (often homophobically) masculine and (often misogynistically) gay. At the same time, this ethnographic or autobiographical reading, which connects Rechy’s writing to a presentation of fact, necessarily limits what Rechy’s novels are able to accomplish. 4. Even for the most “out” individual: “there are remarkably few of even the most openly gay people who are not deliberately in the closet with someone . . . . Even an out gay person deals daily with interlocutors about whom she doesn’t know whether they know or not” (Sedgwick 68). I would take this argument even further to suggest that more than just being “deliberately” in the closet, it is the structural constitution of the social order that certain signifiers remain outside of it. Which is to say that it is not a matter of politics or agency, but rather of the language that structures sexual subjectivity. 5. Malebranche suggests that this form of male-bonding should become the basis for a non-gay, anti-identitarian mode of male sexual relations. The book is compelling, though Malebranche’s argument seems to be caught within the same problematic as Rechy’s novels: while arguing for an anti-identitarian (i.e. non-gay) mode of male erotics, Malebranche simultaneously argues for a new, specific “class” of men defined by this modality (“androphiles”) (22–29). Nevertheless, Malebranche’s theory of masculinity is a refreshing departure from the discourse that currently dominates “masculinity studies” and is deserving of further commentary and consideration. On homosexuality in masculinity studies, see Levine’s sociological study of the “clone” subculture and Connell Chapt. 6 (143–64). 6. The notion of the “coming out” narrative undergirds most of the Rechy criticism. See esp. Zamora.



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7. See Foucault’s Use of Pleasure (esp. 72–77). In later interviews, Foucault will connect this Greek practice of self-making with the sorts of bodily and pleasurable practices he sees as resistant to dominant discourses of identification. See also Halperin on ascesis (101–12). 8. Bersani wisely circumvents all of the theoretical problems with parodic politics in favor of attacking their essential de-sexualization. I think Rechy would agree with Bersani here. 9. I realize that here I am collapsing a series of terms (appearance, representational positioning, and verbalization) in a way that requires a great deal more explanation, specifically the modality of “sexual representation” I have in mind vis-à-vis the fantasy. For the purposes of this essay, I only wish to cite a connection to Foucault’s work, particularly the idea that sexual discursivization or epistemology are not merely accurate or inaccurate representations of sexual truth, but that these representations take on a truth value of their own, a “truth” which is inseparable from sexuality as such. 10. Shortly after these passages, Rechy provides a more succinct definition of this phenomenon: “without exception, every cop who entraps or persecutes homosexuals, every judge who vindictively sentences them, every prosecuting attorney who pushes vengefully for gay convictions, every rabid police chief who rants against homosexuality—without exception each is to some extent at war with his own sexual fears, and those fears are probably grounded in latent, self-hating homosexuality” (96). This passage bears striking a striking resemblance to Hocquenghem’s account of homophobia, not as a relation between identities, but rather between economies of desire. Heterosexuality and homosexuality are not oppositional identitarian poles, for Hocquenghem, but rather are mutually constituted through what he calls “homosexual paranoia” (55–73). Hocquenghem’s formulation relies heavily on an out-moded definition of repression, but I think it bears further discussion here as another trajectory for sexual thought, especially with respect to Foucault’s collapsing of the distinction between desire and identification in the History of Sexuality, Volume 1. See also Mieli’s definition of homophobia.

works cited Chester, Alfred. “Fruit Salad.” The New York Review of Books 1.2 (1963): 6–7. Bersani, Leo. “Is the Rectum a Grave?” October 43 (1987): 197–222. Connell, R.W. Masculinities. 2nd ed. London: Blackwell, 2005. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage Books, 1990. ———. The Use of Pleasure: The History of Sexuality. Vol. 2. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage Books, 1990. ———. Interview with Stephen Riggins. The Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954–1984. Vol. 1. Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. Ed. Paul Rabinow. New York: The New Press, 1990.

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Halperin, David. Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995. Herring, Scott. Queering the Underworld: Slumming, Literature, and the Undoing of Lesbian and Gay History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Hocquenghem, Guy. Homosexual Desire. Trans. Daniella Dangoor. Durham: Duke University Press, 1993. Johnson, David. “Intolerance, the Body, Community.” American Literary History 10 (1998): 446–70. Lacan, Jacques. On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX, Encore. Trans. Bruce Fink. New York: Norton, 1999. Levine, Martin. Gay Macho: The Life and Death of the Homosexual Clone. New York: NYU Press, 1998. Malebranche, Jack. Androphilia: Rejecting the Gay Identity, Reclaiming Masculinity. Baltimore: Scapegoat Publishing, 2007. Mieli, Mario. Homosexuality and Liberation: Elements of a Gay Critique. London: Gay Men’s Press, 1980. Ortiz, Ricardo. “John Rechy and the Grammar of Ostentation.” Cruising the Performative: Interventions into the Representation of Ethnicity, Nationality, and Sexuality. Ed. Sue-Ellen Case et al. Bloomington and Indianapolis: University of Indiana Press, 1995. ———. “Sexuality Degree Zero: Pleasure and Power in the Novels of John Rechy, Arturo Islas, and Michael Nava.” Critical Essays: Gay and Lesbian Writers of Color. Ed. Emmanuel S. Nelson. Philadelphia: Haworth, 1993. 111–26. Rechy, John. Interview with Debra Castillo. Diacritics 25.1 (1995): 113–25. ———. Numbers. New York: Grove, 1984. ———. The Sexual Outlaw. New York: Grove, 1984. Saldivar, Jose David. Border Matters: Remapping American Cultural Studies. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. Zamora, Carlos. “Odysseus in John Rechy’s City of Night: The Epistemological Journey.” Minority Voices 3 (1979): 53–62.

thomas heise

American Psycho: Neoliberal Fantasies and the Death of Downtown

S

et within the blighted and economically

polarized geography of 1980s New York City, Bret Easton Ellis’s neoliberal revenge satire, American Psycho (1991 ), greets its reader with a chilling smear of graffiti that conflates Dante’s Inferno with Marx’s guided tour in Capital with “Mr. Moneybags. . . . into the hidden abode of production, on whose threshold there stares us in the face ‘No admittance except on business’” (279–80).1 “ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE is scrawled in blood-red lettering on the side of the Chemical Bank,” Ellis writes in the opening line as he begins to render in visceral detail what Marx called “the secret of profit making” (Ellis 3; Marx 280). The secret formula of profit in American Psycho is violence, exploitation, and reification, and what Ellis’s novel palpably dramatizes through the handsome, Harvard-educated, Wall Street investment executive and serial killer Patrick Bateman is what it feels like to have one’s labor forcibly expropriated through the reduction of oneself to human material. American Psycho translates for readers the massive social costs of neoliberal economics into a terrifyingly intimate experience of violence by a psychotic subject who embodies neoliberal theory and performs it through his repeated acts of disembowelment. The first assault in American Psycho, a confrontation that I will consider more fully in the pages that follow, makes this claim painfully clear. It is against a “bum, a black man” sleeping among “bags of garbage” in the East Village where Bateman is out on the prowl in “a silk-lined coat . . . by Luciano Soprani” that soon will be stained with flecks of blood (126). Before slicing the man’s eyes and leaving him to bleed to death, BateArizona Quarterly Volume 67, Number 1, Spring 2011 Copyright © 2011 by Arizona Board of Regents issn 0004-1610

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man berates him: “Why don’t you get a job? . . . If you’re so hungry, why don’t you get a job? . . . Do you think it’s fair to take money from people who do have jobs? Who do work? . . . I don’t have anything in common with you” (130–31). The question of fairness may seem out of place in the context of this brutal confrontation, but fairness—understood in American Psycho simply as receiving what one deserves—is essential to Ellis’s nightmarish vision of the free market as the central apparatus for achieving social justice in a world where the flow and accumulation of capital is unfettered, I argue, by any artificial restraints, such as discrimination based on skin color, gender, ethnicity, or sexual orientation. What American Psycho discloses through its late-1980s portrait of class hatred and power is, I will show, the violence that underwrites the utopian fantasy of neoliberal free market economics in which impoverishment is rewritten as a personal choice and a sign of personal failure and crimes against others (the poor, gays and lesbians, sex workers) are rewritten as punishment for the crime of being Other. In short, American Psycho chooses retribution for inequality rather than redistribution to end inequality. And in doing so, it simultaneously gives voice to and demystifies a body of popular and academic neoconservative discourse on urban poverty and crime that helped lead an assault on the poor by naturalizing surging class inequality that followed from the forceful implementation of neoliberal economic principles in the last decades of the twentieth century. Published in 1991, Ellis’s notorious third novel is sandwiched between George H. W. Bush’s famous 1988 R.N.C. nomination pledge from the floor of the New Orleans Superdome for “a kinder, gentler nation” (fourteen years to the month before the levees broke and 30,000 evacuees gathered in the same spot with roughly 36 hours worth of food) and Rodney King’s appeal for calm on the third day of the 1992 L.A. uprising, “People, I just want to say, you know, can we all get along?” (“George Bush’s Mission” 26; “Rodney King” 6). The publicity firestorm that made American Psycho one of most controversial Englishlanguage novels of the last third of the twentieth century, however, had nothing to do, curiously enough, with its satiric representation of the slash and burn social policies of the Reagan-Bush administration. “Would the world be a safer, kinder place if Luis was hacked to bits? My world might, so why not?” Bateman, paraphrasing Bush, says of a man he wants to kill (158). The uproar over the text, rather, stemmed



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from its nauseating descriptions of the torture of women—“I threw up (literally),” one reader told Ellis in an online exchange on Hotwired. In an article that paired a discussion of American Psycho with interviews with women who had suffered from domestic abuse and assault, Maureen Downey concluded that the novel “give[s] substance to a woman’s worst nightmare” (Eberly 129). While Bateman’s serial killing comprises approximately ten percent of the text, it has effectively dominated responses by readers and commentators on the political Left and Right who have condemned Ellis for his apparent delight in graphically detailing violence against women and who have argued that his novel would be the source of additional sexual violence. Its stomach-turning pages would repel some readers, but would inspire others to copy-cat killings, an instance of life imitating bad art. What I want to demonstrate through a review American Psycho’s immediate reception is how these critiques were made in the name of the unimpeachable neoliberal principles of individual property rights, personal responsibility, freedom of choice, and the necessity of free markets that the text itself relentlessly skewers. The majority of Ellis’s textual nightmare is devoted to the glorious spoils of the wealthy, as well as to tedious advice about how to be or look rich, which comes in the form of conversations between Bateman and his yuppie colleagues about how to match one’s socks to one’s trousers, how to score good tables at trendy restaurants and drugs at downtown nightclubs, and exhaustive, repetitive lists of the clothing, beauty products, and furnishings that make up the reified surface of upper-middle-class urban life. The initial commentary on American Psycho was concerned almost exclusively with its baroque depictions of violence against women, as opposed to its representation of class hatred or its critique of 1980s’ capitalist economy. This has been the case, in part, because Ellis renders Bateman’s murders—in particular his murder of women—with extreme precision and flair that sets these passages apart from the pronounced banality and non-literary style of the rest of the novel. American Psycho, in fact, implicates its readers who, after suffering through Bateman’s seemingly endless catalogue of consumer products, find reprieve when he changes the tempo by killing someone.2 Serial killing in American Psycho erases the numbing tedium of these exchanges while unveiling how they are underpinned by violence. The highly stylized descriptions of torture and dismemberment are ruptural

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moments that temporarily break the forgettable sequences of commodity fetishism, which produce a kind of readerly fatigue. Readers are as likely to abandon American Psycho because of its monotony as they are because of its shocking depictions of homicidal sadism.3 Though serialized violence in American Psycho is an extension of the deadening effects of serialized consumer exchanges in an economy where commodities and bodies become interchangeable and indistinguishable, this point largely escaped the notice of the novel’s harshest critics. This anomaly testifies to the power of representations of violence against women to activate deep cultural fears of sexual assault that override other critical prerogatives. But the oversight also might be explained by the fact that at least some of the early responses were based on excerpts of the book’s most gratuitously brutal passages, rather than on the finished manuscript. The text was evaluated on its “pieces,” ironically a reduplication of Bateman’s own fetishization of body parts. The story of American Psycho’s botched publication and critical castigation is well known, but it is useful to review the text’s immediate reception for the way it discloses how the public vituperation against American Psycho’s misogyny was made in the name of the neoliberal principles that Bateman embodies and which the text itself satirizes.4 American Psycho originally was purchased by Simon & Schuster for a reported $300,000, but a month before its release excerpted sections featuring graphic violence against women were leaked to Time and Spy, creating an uproar that caused Richard Snyder, Simon & Schuster’s chair, to kill the novel. Snyder cited the book’s “questionable taste” and refused to release it, even though it already had been printed and was awaiting distribution (McDowell, “Killing” C40). Vintage bought the book forty-eight hours later and planned for its release the following year. Months before publication, American Psycho and Vintage were savaged by reviewers, many of whom did not distinguish between violence in the text and the violence of the text and instead excoriated the novel as violence by other means. In the New York Times Lorrie Moore linked it to “sexual violence in art” produced in a climate in which violence against women was rife, noting that “Even a woman reviewer, one who dates precariously and lives alone with four locks on the door, might have overlooked certain passages” (A1). Moore’s article was followed by Roger Rosenblatt’s front-page review in the Times which accused Ellis not only of depicting crimes against women (for which he



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was guilty), not only of bad writing (which is a matter of “taste”), but accused him of crimes against women (a more charged and problematic claim). Terry Teachout followed suit in the National Review, asserting that “Every bad thing you’ve read about it is an understatement. . . . It is, in the truest sense of the word, obscene. And the main charge of the feminists is right on the mark” (46). The main feminist charge belonged to Tammy Bruce, president of the L.A. chapter of NOW, who conflated Ellis with his murderous creation: “‘Mr. Ellis is a confused, sick young man with a deep hatred of women who will do anything for a fast buck’” (Cohen C18). Bruce labeled American Psycho “‘a how-to novel on the torture and dismemberment of women’” (McDowell, “NOW” C17) and called for a boycott of books by Random House (which owns Vintage), “feminist works excepted” (Kennedy 427). Questioned whether it was fair that other writers should suffer, she retorted “‘No one is going to go to the soup lines here. . . . The issue is how many women are going to be alive this year. That’s the only issue and we need to get serious about it’” (Marchand A4). Bruce’s statement raised the specter of neoliberal economics and poverty while discounting its importance to the reception of Ellis’s text. But because the logic of neoliberalism is crucial to understanding American Psycho’s representation of violence and urban poverty, we would do well not to rush past Bruce’s dismissal of economics for the real “issue,” in fact, “the only issue” of sexual assault. While numbers are hard to come by, it is not unreasonable to assume that hundreds of thousands of Americans did stand in soup lines in 1991 to partake of meals prepared from the 253 million dollars in federal aid for “emergency feeding” (“Federal Food Programs”). Another 17 million partook of the chronically under-funded food stamp program that same year. On the back of the first edition, Vintage strenuously tried to frame the socio-economic context in which the novel was meant to be read: “American Psycho is set in a world (Manhattan) and an era (the Eighties) recognizably our own. The wealthy elite grow infinitely wealthier, the poor and disturbed are turned out on to the streets by tens of thousands, and anything, including the very worst, seems possible.” That Vintage felt compelled to describe this “world” as “recognizably our own” spotlights the degree to which income inequality precisely is not recognized in a world where, as Walter Benn Michaels argues, classes are treated “like races or cultures—different but equal” (Trouble 10). The social construction of

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class—class as a matter of taste—has worked to make classes equal and exchangeable, and has made the perception of class inequality, to say nothing of the reasons for it, difficult to discern. “Only a very few seem dimly aware that things are getting bad,” Ellis writes (385). A closer look at the public commentary reveals how outrage over Ellis’s representation of women as objects of sexual violence was channeled into a reaffirmation of the principles of freedom of choice and the freedom of markets to operate without government regulation, principles to which Ellis’s Wall-Street executive not insignificantly also is committed. It was a “misnomer” to term Simon & Schuster’s cancellation “censorship” Moore contended, when it was simply a calculated business decision (A1). Rosenblatt asserted that “There’s no civil liberties issue here. But there’s plenty of dough. . . . Thumb through it, for the sake of normal prurience, but don’t buy it” (3). What was clear to U.S. commentators was that the sanctity of free speech and free markets was in fact proven by the unregulated distribution of the book. For novelist Madeleine L’Engle, not purchasing American Psycho was an exercise of choice as a consumer and an expression of her right of privacy to read or not read whatever she desired: “‘I am totally against censorship. American Psycho is certainly a book I would not want in my home and that is my privilege’” (Birkerts 22). Even Bruce was adamant that “‘We are not telling them not to publish.’” Instead she directed women “‘to exercise their free expression by refusing to buy the novel’” (McDowell, “NOW” C17).5 From Ellis’s perspective, however, the cancellation by Simon & Schuster was a breach of a contract into which he had entered as a sovereign individual selling his labor in return for remuneration and publication. As David Harvey has recently argued, the neoliberal state’s “legal framework is that of freely negotiated contractual obligations between juridical individuals in the marketplace. The sanctity of contracts . . . must be protected” (64). Ellis was a victim of a violation of this fundamental principle. But the fact that another corporation was able to freely purchase the novel, along with the fact that it became a bestseller and made Ellis even richer, reaffirmed the market’s ability to recognize potential sources of profit where some saw a source of moral opprobrium. In short, the negative critical reactions to American Psycho’s misogyny—and the way these reactions were framed in terms of freedom and rights—disclose two important aspects of late twen-



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tieth-century American culture: 1) the narrowing of the ideological spectrum of permissible discourse as the precepts of neoliberalism are further universalized and 2) the way the public commitment to positive representations of a diverse social field sometimes militate against analyses of income inequality and exploitation. This is not to argue that feminist reviewers of American Psycho are unsympathetic to critiques of capitalist economy, many of whom recognize how it is bound up with the reproduction of heteropatriarchy. But it is to say that the outrage by both the Right (The National Review) and the Left (NOW) rarely saw beyond Ellis’s spectacle of violence. In casting their critiques as exercises of freedom, these reviewers left neoliberal social domination and exploitation uninterrogated. The world that Vintage called “recognizably our own” is the neoliberal state. Neoliberal theories of the state, which drastically reshaped social policy in the 1980s and ’90s, were formulated in influential works such as Milton Friedman’s Capitalism and Freedom (1962) and Free to Choose: A Personal Statement (1980) and Friedrich von Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty (1960). “The scope of government must be limited” Friedman announced in the opening pages of Capitalism and Freedom, adding later that its limitations should be written into the U.S. Constitution through “an economic Bill of Rights” (Capitalism 2; Free 299). According to neoliberal theory, the state’s power must be reduced to it most essential functions, such as the maintenance of the money supply, the securing of private property rights through law enforcement, and the guaranteeing of open markets through legally binding trade agreements, and if need be, through force. A free-market society was, Hayek believed, by its nature economically unequal, but this was reason to be sanguine for inequality indicated economic growth. “The rapid economic advance that we have come to expect seems in a large measure,” he wrote, “to be the result of this inequality and to be impossible without it” (42). In a free-market society, the “invisible hand” of the market does most of the heavy lifting, albeit passively, since the individual pursuit of one’s own economic well-being, in theory, secures the welfare of others through the promotion of efficient and profitable goods and services within competitive markets. With this principle in mind Hayek could be confident that “Those forces which at first make inequality self-accentuating thus later tend to diminish it” (48). Yet it was also true, he noted, “that to be free may mean freedom to starve” (18).

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In a recent critique of neoliberalism, David Harvey comments that in the neoliberal state, “The social safety net is reduced to bare minimum in favour of a system that emphasizes personal responsibility” (76). “Most of the present welfare programs,” Friedman declared in 1980, “should never have been enacted. If they had not been, many of the people now dependent on them would have become self-reliant individuals instead of wards of the state” (Free 119). Individual self-reliance—the ability to be free to choose and the responsibility for choosing correctly—was not only a theoretical proposition but increasingly a necessity as the legacies of the New Deal began to be dismantled through cuts to social assistance programs, reductions in federal expenditures on subsidized housing, the shuttering of publicly funded mental health services in cities, wage-freezes in the public sector, and through historic tax cuts for corporations and upper-income earners. Before their application nationally, many of these measures were imposed by Wall Street firms—like Bateman’s aptly named Pierce and Pierce—on New York City as it edged towards bankruptcy in the 1970s. When Gerald Ford was famously quoted as telling New York to “Drop Dead” in 1975, it was in the context of refusing the city federal aid, a forced neoliberalization that left New York at the mercy of financial institutions that hacked away at its infrastructure of social welfare as a condition of debt financing (“Ford to City” 1). By the Reagan-era, homelessness was reaching epidemic levels. “The Death of Downtown” is here, proclaims a headline in American Psycho (14). “Beggars and homeless seem to have multiplied . . . and the ranks of the unfortunate, weak, and aged lined the streets everywhere,” Ellis writes (278). “I’VE LOST MY JOB I AM HUNGRY I HAVE NO MONEY PLEASE HELP,” reads a sign held by a man whom Bateman describes as “lounging below the Les Misérables poster” (113). For the neoliberal Bateman, all unemployment precedes from a lack of personal incentive, a desire to “lounge” rather than work. If the impoverished do work in American Psycho, it is as symbolic labor in a leisure economy in which they cannot afford to participate. They are, cynically enough, human advertisements for a musical of Victor Hugo’s novel of pre-revolutionary foment that has been watered down to a middle-class audience with money and time on its hands. American Psycho’s dystopian New York is what follows when most forms of social welfare have been eviscerated. And Bateman’s revengeful, private vigilantism brings death to downtown by punishing those who have failed



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in this new harsh reality. He strikes the coup de grâce of forced neoliberalization.6 In order to get under the skin of American Psycho, we have to get under the skin of neoliberalism and understand the logic by which it operates. To begin, it is crucial to recognize that the neoliberal state’s legitimacy in the face of dramatic polarizations of wealth and poverty is maintained only by the elimination of the social meaning of arbitrary differences—such as race, gender, ethnicity, and sexual orientation— that hinder one’s ability to produce wealth for oneself or others. Discrimination based on any of these artificially impedes the flow of labor and capital. Thus the elimination of discrimination secures neoliberal theory, which is predicated upon the ability of the neoliberal subject to freely make rational choices. By making race and gender discrimination illegal, the state guarantees the free functioning of the market and the radically atomistic freedom of its subjects to succeed or fail. This logic underpins the terrifying truth of Bateman’s assertion to a former girlfriend as he kills her: “No one cares. No one will help you” (246). Those who fail have made poor choices, but these choices were freely made, the argument goes, and not the outcome of feudal prejudices over blood, skin color, or gender. Friedman makes this point by noting how “the substitution of contract arrangements”—which are voluntary and are based upon what one does—“for status arrangements”—which are involuntary and are determined by what one is—is the reason that “the development of capitalism has been accompanied by a major reduction in the extent to which particular religious, racial, or social groups have operated under special handicaps in respect to their economic activities” (Capitalism 108). The economic disincentives of discrimination are clear: “those of us who regard color of skin or religion as irrelevant can buy some things more cheaply as a result” (110). Neoliberal economics does not eliminate diversity, but rather seeks to eliminate the determinative power of social differences by rendering them equal and unimportant. American Psycho enacts this logic by dramatizing the violent reduction of all social relations to relations of money, pure and simple. Michaels, who briefly considers Ellis’s text in The Shape of the Signifier (2004), posits: “the categories of difference in which American Psycho is relentlessly invested . . . have nothing to do with either respect for or hostility to racial or cultural difference” (149– 50). In American Psycho race, gender, and ethnicity are outmoded mark-

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ers of identity that possess none of the explanatory power of class to divulge one’s character and one’s worth. We see this early in the novel when one of Bateman’s colleagues calls a rival a “Lucky Jew bastard” for winning a lucrative account, and Bateman responds, “Oh Jesus, Preston . . . What does that have to do with anything?” (37). That racial and gender differences continue to be accorded unequal status and that this affects income is obvious, but such distinctions are supererogatory to neoliberalism. As Michaels has also argued, classes, unlike races, by definition, are not equal and the production of class inequality is not an unintended outcome of capitalism but a central mechanism for registering the market’s effectiveness.7 The abolition of the meaningless horizontal differences of race, gender, and ethnicity allows the market to stratify a diverse social field by class, replacing differences with distinctions that are not arbitrary but legitimate. When Bateman attacks the “bum, a black man,” he does so not because he is black, but because he’s a “bum” who has grown weak from his reliance upon the charity of strangers. Ellis’s clumsy syntax carries with it a charged commentary about the priority of class in subject formation. If racism is not Bateman’s motivator, it also seemingly is not a factor in the man’s joblessness. The man has been laid off, a victim of corporate downsizing, and Bateman attacks him because he expects to survive despite not working, which Bateman considers unfair to those who do. In neoliberal theory all unemployment is considered voluntary, since there is always someone who will work for less (notwithstanding minimum wage laws, which neoliberal theory decries). Not working thus negatively impacts the employed—through higher taxes and through lower property values due to urban blight—and for this Bateman wants retribution. The class dynamics of this initial assault inform all of the subsequent aggression and murder in the text, even though these assaults primarily have been understood as hate crimes against women and ethnic and racial minorities. Yet Bateman is best understood not as a misogynist or a racist or even a serial killer but as Ellis’s fantasy of the quintessential neoliberal subject or, as Barry Keith Grant has suggested, as “merely ‘the logical end of human relations under capitalism’” (29). Ellis hyperbolizes neoliberal class animosity and power through Bateman, who corporealizes it so excessively as to make the violent presuppositions of the market’s invisible hand frighteningly visible. Bateman is an ideological construct who denaturalizes the putatively naturally



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transparent flow and accumulation of capital, and thus makes manifest that the production of class inequality is undergirded by violence. That Ellis’s deranged anti-hero is a serial killer, is less important than the fact that he is a young, upwardly mobile professional earning six figures in finance to needlessly supplement vast reserves of inherited wealth. It is less important because, as Carla Freccero has shown, serial killing is an eccentric and socially decontextualized act. To understand Bateman through the frame of this mystified fetish reveals nothing about the etiology of his crimes or their meaning. In what amounts to a convention of the serial killer crime drama, Ellis’s text intimates that the origins of Bateman’s psychopathology might be found in early childhood trauma. But Ellis soon mocks the idea when Bateman quips to a friend he axes to death: “Hey, I’m a child of divorce. Give me a break” (215). The reader is left with the option of discounting Bateman as a truly random, horrific, but ultimately inconsequential monster or with the option of understanding Bateman as originating in “a world . . . recognizably our own.” Since American Psycho provides no other narrational viewpoint to Bateman’s, the reader is left with the killer’s humorous, unhinged efforts at self-analysis: Today I’m meeting Bethany for lunch at Vanities . . . I’m still extremely nervous. The cause is hard to locate but I’ve narrowed it down to one of two reasons. It’s either that I’m afraid of rejection . . . or . . . it could have something to do with this new Italian mousse I’m wearing, which, though it makes my hair look fuller and smells good, feels very sticky and uncomfortable, and it’s something I could easily blame my nervousness on. (230) Hardly the cool killer with ice in his veins, Bateman is a self-loathing, nervous wreck for much of the novel. His anxiety arises from his own failed acts of self-interpretation. He encourages but resists analysis and this resistance engenders panic in readers in turn. He is a text that we recoil from, dismiss, cast aspersions on, and fail to take seriously. “There . . . is . . . no . . . key” to deciphering him, Bateman announces slowly and deliberately, adding “there is an idea of a Patrick Bateman, some kind of abstraction, but there is no real me” (264, 376). The effect of

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American Psycho’s vigorous depsychologization of Bateman’s hatred is to foil efforts to read exploitation in terms of individual actions, rather than in terms of the violence of class power. While Bateman bristles at anti-Semitic statements and racist jokes, he himself is repeatedly guilty of the most vulgar castigations. What are we to make of this contradiction? First, we should note that focusing on Bateman’s misogyny, racism, or homophobia as a cause of violence, rather than as a symptom of something else, obfuscates the origins of the cruelty in the text by casting its violence and pathology within the terms of individual action and choices, rather than in terms of structural inequality, reification, and commodity fetishism. Whether Bateman hates the poor (or Ellis hates women) is not the issue, since individual hatred for (or even respect for) the poor is counterproductive to discussions of inequality. It is counterproductive because it too frames exploitation in terms of individual actions and choices, rather than in terms of social policy and the violence of structural inequality. As a neoliberal subject, this is exactly how Bateman would wish to frame the issue: as a choice. On closer examination, the determining effects of unequal class power in Bateman’s invective-filled confrontations become clearer. His spastic tête-à-tête with a Chinese drycleaner is framed by Bateman “brush[ing] past a crying bum” on his way in the door (81). Yelling at the launderer, “Stupid bitch-ee? Understand?” Bateman’s outburst is triggered by the woman’s inability to do correctly the job for which he has hired her, namely, to remove blood stains from his designer shirts (83). “You can’t bleach a Soprani,” he hisses (82). And even though these cleaners “really are the best,” Bateman becomes unglued at the prospect that they “can’t get these stains out” (84). The outdated, dried-up essentialisms of blood cannot be leached from the signifiers of class to Bateman’s enormous frustration. In effect, he has paid her to make blood go away. Her inability to do so testifies not to the primary foundational importance of blood (or race) but to its capacity to stain our thinking about class. The legacies of racial and ethnic essentialisms continue to inform Bateman’s own thinking, but Ellis also makes clear that each and every instance of his anti-hero’s racist slander occurs when he does not receive services or goods for which he has paid. Though these uncomfortable collisions often end in blood, their common denominator is not blood, but money. In the novel African Americans, ethnics, and



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immigrants are overrepresented in the service economy, and thus Bateman’s encounters easily give way to typecasting. The “black Hispanic doorman” who works the front desk of Bateman’s luxury building infuriates him because he is inattentive to his needs, leading Bateman to mock his speech patterns (70). When Bateman lashes out “Do it yourself, nigger” at a “black custodian” in a Central Park bathroom who asks Bateman to flush the urinal, his anger is explicable (if not excusable) if understood in terms of Bateman’s loathing towards the working-class who are not performing the services for which they are, however meagerly, compensated (297). In one of the text’s more comically disturbing scenes, Bateman unsuccessfully tries to order a cheeseburger and milkshake at a kosher delicatessen, only to scream at the waitress who refuses him, “Fuck yourself you retarded cocksucking kike.” His rage has less to do with any anti-Semitism he may or may not harbor and is more the outcome of the sudden uselessness of the “platinum AmEx” he slaps down on the table (152). He cannot purchase what he wishes because the religious dietary restrictions of another have been imposed on his desires. This is an unforgivable offense because it has rendered Bateman’s most sacrosanct principle of the freedom of choice null and void. Additionally, Bateman’s rape, torture, and murder of women are presented explicitly in terms of choice and privilege. “It could be that she’s safe because her wealth, her family’s wealth, protects her tonight,” he says of Patricia, a model and a would-be victim, “or it could be that it’s simply my choice” (76–77). Christie, a streetwalker, whom Bateman picks up in the Meatpacking district is not so fortunate, in both senses of the word. He tempts her into his limousine by waving a hundred-dollar bill while asking if she takes American Express. After he has sex with her, verbally degrading and physically assaulting her in the process, she disappears from the novel until Bateman hires her again. Despite her “reservations,” she agrees for the “money . . . is simply too good to pass up” (284). As a prostitute she is a person-as-commodity; and as a commodity, she is, in Bateman’s twisted imagination, his to do with so long as he pays for her. In this case it means killing and eating her. His act of cannibalism is capitalist consumerism reductio ad absurdum. Michaels postulates that “The dream of a world free of prejudice, the dream of a world where identities (whether American or hyphenated American) are not discriminated against, is as foundational to the right as it is to the left. And this dream is completely compatible with

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(is, actually, essential to) the dream of a truly free and efficient market” (Trouble 75). Such remarks help explain the alignment of liberals and free-market conservatives against American Psycho for its misogyny and their mutual silence regarding its representation of inequality. But such remarks do little to explain the level of animus that everywhere in the text is directed at racialized, gendered, and sexualized subjects. The logic of identity in American Psycho is complexly valenced and to understand it requires that we probe deeper into the processes of reification and fetishism which are fundamental to capitalist political economy. The commodity and sexual fetishism in the text reduces individuals to an assemblage of body parts: “I’m staring across the room at a great-looking woman—blonde, big tits, tight dress, satin pumps with gold cones,” Bateman leers while at an upscale restaurant (100). But it is also the case that the text extends the outcomes of reification so greatly as to expose its barely sublimated violence. In effect, American Psycho over-identifies with the processes that produce standardized racial and sexual subjectivities that are optically recognizable. In other words, Bateman’s reified vision assembles (and then disassembles) women in order to produce erotized, dehumanized gender and racial formations. Through Bateman, we can anatomize the logic of reification as he, in turn, performs his own private autopsies. At one point late in the novel, Bateman takes inventory of his night of labored killing: “What is left of Elizabeth’s body lies crumpled in the corner of the living room. She’s missing her right arm and chunks of her right leg. Her left hand, chopped off at the wrist, lies clenched on top of the island in the kitchen, in its own small pool of blood. Her head sits on the kitchen table” (291). This over-identification with how bodies are put together and subject-positions formed is what Mark Seltzer terms “the absolute conformism to the system without belief in the system—the mimetic identification without identity that constitutes that madness” (163). It is the text’s way of proffering a critique in the absence of a normative moral position with which a reader might wish to identify.8 Notoriously, there is no moral subject position in American Psycho, one of the supreme indicators of its failure as a novel for some of its first reviewers. This absence itself negatively assesses liberalism’s desire for a “consoling fantasy” about violence that a “moral framework” might provide (Freccero 55). Had American Psycho lodged an unambiguous critique of the ideologies of sexism and racism, it surely would not have received such a public flogging. But for Ellis,



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sexism and racism are not the problem, but a symptom of the reification of social relations in a modern capitalist economy. American Psycho demystifies the reification it mimics stylistically by showing it as the outcome of unequal exchanges of power, which are exercised either through violent suppression or through consumerism gone mad (Murphet 13). These unequal exchanges produce standardized or abstracted persons of both those who are the subject of power— Bateman and his wealthy colleagues—and those who are subjugated by power—Bateman’s victims and the poor. As Ellis’s title makes clear, Bateman is American and psycho, each side of the equation mutually determining. His psychotic behavior is the measure of his typicality, rather than existing in excess to it. Or as Seltzer posits, “the only difference between the normal subject (the psychic killer) and the pathological one (the psycho killer) is the passage from fantasy to act” (146). In other words, the serial killer’s fetishistic, ritualized cruelty highlights a general condition of reified consciousness that obtains among all Americans in the text. But it is also the case that it obtains among the rich with parameters distinct from the poor. Let me illustrate this last point by turning to Bateman’s girlfriend Evelyn’s claim “Everybody’s rich,” an early assertion in the novel that points up a hidden truth. The truth of her statement is not that everybody is rich, but that as a rich person she thinks everyone is (23). And in a limited sense she is correct because, at least among her yuppie cohorts, everyone is more or less equally rich and thus more or less equal. Consider, for instance, that one of the novel’s running jokes is the exchangeability of persons within a closed economy of status-oriented signs—“Owen has mistaken me,” Bateman says “for Marcus Halberstam . . . but for some reason it doesn’t really matter” (89). Because Bateman and his colleagues are nothing more than the accretion of their multiple commodity exchanges, they easily can be substituted for one another. If this condition is a source of grim humor, it also exemplifies the commodification of subjectivity through serialized acts of consumption. The following catalogue cements the point through commodity fetishism in which the exchangeability of persons is achieved through the erasure of difference under the guise of individuality: Reed Thompson walks in wearing a wool plaid four-button double-breasted suit and a striped cotton shirt and a silk tie, all

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Armani, plus slightly tacky blue cotton socks by Interwoven and black Ferragamo cap-toe shoes that look exactly like mine. . . . Soon after, Todd Broderick walks in wearing a wool chalkstriped six-button double-breasted suit and striped broadcloth shirt and silk tie, all by Polo. . . . McDermott walks in next . . . wearing . . . a black and white wool houndstooth-check singlebreasted suit with notch lapels, a striped cotton dress shirt with a spread collar and a silk paisley tie, all of it designed and tailored by John Reyle. (108–09) Personhood is flattened here to “some kind of abstraction, . . . something illusory,” the outcome of the deadening exchanges of consumerism in which one sign substitutes for another in a series without end (376). The ultimate effect is a “depersonalization [that] was so intense, had gone so deep, that the normal ability to feel compassion had been eradicated, the victim of a slow, purposeful erasure” (282). It is essential here to differentiate between dehumanization—a condition suffered by women, racial minorities, the sexualized, and the poor, often through their intense corporealization—and “depersonalization”—a condition suffered by Bateman and his friends in which the illusion of a unique subjectivity is continually deferred through the substitution of signs. The latter is an effect of privilege (the privileges of consumerism) while the former is the effect of exploitation by the privileged (the expropriation of one’s labor and one’s reduction to material). At multiple junctures American Psycho directs readers to think of Patrick Bateman not as a real psychopath that might lead one to install four locks on the door or even as a psychopathic character created with the three dimensionality that comes with good realist portraiture, but as a nodal point upon which overlapping consumer exchanges have accrued on the “surface, surface, surface” (375). As Bateman says of himself, he has, at best, “a rough resemblance of a human being” (282), is “truly vacant” (275), and is “some kind of abstraction” (376) in a consumer society where “everyone is interchangeable” (379). What is most important to recognize is that the equality that comes with money— “Everybody is rich”—erases differences while the inequality that comes with the lack of it produces distinctions. To put it another way, the logic of neoliberalism maintains the equivalence of all bodies despite race, gender, and sexual differences, while also producing distinctions



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between bodies which are determined by class. This is to say, all of the rich people in American Psycho are equal despite their differences and all of the poor people in the novel are also equal despite their differences, but the rich and the poor are, of course, never equal. Furthermore, it is fundamental to note that the erasure of differences is possible as long as the chimera of choice is sustained. One body (black or white) or one sign (Armani or Polo) can substitute for another, so long as they are of equal value. At the same time, the erasure of differences between these bodies or signs or embodied signs renders these choices empty since they do not to distinguish. Since one who can afford Armani can also afford John Reyle and Polo, we have differences reduced to choices without social meaning. It simply doesn’t mean anything to wear John Reyle rather than Armani. Neither does it mean anything to hire a white worker over a black worker, or vice versa, so long as their labor and their productivity are the same. We have in each instance an exercise of freedom of choice, but choice without real options because these choices don’t produce meaningful distinctions. This is also why “Patrick Bateman,” “Reed Thompson,” “Todd Broderick” and “McDermott” are not only “interchangeable” but indistinguishable. And if Owen happens to mistake Bateman for Marcus Halberstam, Bateman is correct to say “it doesn’t really matter.” It is also true that Bateman is less flesh and blood than he is a discursively produced matrix of verbal utterances which have coagulated into the shape of a person, more a corpus of words than corporeal. He is not just a point where commodity exchanges occur; he is also a center where linguistic signs that foster these exchanges are registered. In fact, much of American Psycho is nothing more than a pastiche of discourses spoken without affect, a Barthesian tissue of quotations from advertising (“Next apply Gel Appaisant, also made by Pour Hommes, which is an excellent, soothing skin lotion” [27]), music reviews (“Whitney’s talent is restored with the overwhelming ‘The Greatest Love of All,’ one of the best, most powerful songs ever written about self-preservation and dignity” [254]), pornography (“positioning Sabrina’s face over my stiff, huge cock which I guide into her mouth with my hand” [174]), and even economic policy (“we need to promote economic growth and business expansion and hold the line against federal income taxes” [15]). In each instance Bateman is speaking, but as he says “I am simply not there”: “there is no real me” (377, 375). There is no there there, only

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an empty vessel into which prefabricated ideas, rhetorics, and styles have been poured. Given this fundamentally evacuated sense of subjectivity, Bateman and his yuppie colleagues engage in the most rigorous forms of selfdiscipline, continually monitoring themselves and others to make sure that they are perfectly coiffed, sporting the right combination of accessories, and following every protocol relating to their own comportment. They over identify with these protocols so as to appear resolutely heteronormative. Ellis hyperbolizes male rituals of self-disciplining, selfcreation, and social surveillance when he offers Bateman’s step-by-step description of his morning toilette over several pages uninterrupted by paragraph breaks (24–30). Unfolding in real time before a mirror, it is a manual on how to construct a person one lotion at time: “Never use cologne on your face, since the high alcohol content dries your face out and makes you look older. One should use an alcohol-free antibacterial toner with a water-moistened cotton ball to normalize the skin” (27). In such moments, American Psycho is itself a performative discourse of self-presentation. Yet its excessive quality doubles back on itself, throwing into high relief the intensely provisional nature of subjectivity as it obtains in a consumer economy. Later, Bateman tells himself “All it comes down to is: I feel like shit but look great” (106), and being able to look great despite how one feels is one of the indicators of class distinction between the rich, who are shaven and perfumed, and the poor in American Psycho, who “reek of . . . shit” (130). In his encounters with the street poor in Manhattan, Bateman takes great offense to how they look and smell: “Jesus, will you get a fucking shave, please,” he yells at an unemployed man begging for change (113). Bateman may “feel like shit,” but he does not smell like it. His class privilege affords him the luxury of concealing the nausea that stems from the continual displacement of subjectivity into commodity exchanges. The poor, for their part, smell nauseatingly like poverty. The accoutrements of wealth “spares” the poor Bateman’s depersonalization, whereas the poor’s lack of wealth reminds everyone of their dehumanization. To return to Bateman’s initial assault, we now see that his confrontation with the “bum, the black man” springs from radical class inequality. To the extent that Ellis’s protagonist has everything in common with other upper-middle class urbanites, he has nothing in common with the poor. Their lack of commonality and Bateman’s inability “to



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feel compassion” are interrelated (282). The former derives from the production of class distinctions by neoliberal economics. The latter stems from Bateman’s depersonalization, which is an outcome of the commodification of subjectivity under neoliberal regimes and also is, I want to now note, a product of a late-twentieth-century discourse on poverty that the compassionless Bateman embodies. What I want to consider in closing is how Ellis, through Bateman, voices and demystifies the ideas and attitudes of a body of neoconservative popular and sociological literature that licensed the implementation of neoliberal economics and that was extremely influential in making social policy more punitive by arguing that the poor were, at worst, genetically inferior, and at best, simply lazy. If, as David Harvey contends, “neoliberalization was from the very beginning a project to achieve the restoration of class power,” this project was advanced not only through the implementation of neoliberal economic principles, but also through a neoconservative discourse of post-Fordist urban crisis (16). This discourse found its most thorough expression in wonkish texts such as Charles Murray’s Losing Ground (1984) and Lawrence Mead’s Beyond Entitlement (1986), but also was popularized through mainstream outlets such as Time which in 1990 ran an alarmist cover story about crime and homelessness titled “The Rotting of the Big Apple,” and through tabloid, right-wing journalism such as the New York Post, which we learn in the first chapter of American Psycho that Bateman and his friends read voraciously (Macek x). As does neoliberalism, neoconservatism champions corporate power, free market economics, and freedom of choice, but it departs from neoliberalism in two ways: “first, in its concern for order as an answer to the chaos of individual interests, and second, in its concern for an overweening morality as the necessary social glue to keep the body politic secure in the face of external and internal dangers” (Harvey 82). By providing intellectual cover to policy advisors and by manufacturing popular consent among citizens, neoconservative social discourse in the 1980s abetted the retrenchment of the federal government from the economy in the areas of welfare, mental health services, and other social assistance programs. It thus was instrumental in advancing goals that neoliberals championed and whose effects are everywhere in Ellis’s terrifying world. In Losing Ground, for instance, Murray recommends abandoning “the entire federal welfare and income-support structure for working-

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aged persons, including AFDC, Medicaid, Food Stamps, Unemployment Insurance, Worker’s Compensation, subsidized housing, disability insurance, and the rest” (227–28).9 Monies spent in these areas, he asserts, actually cause poverty, crime, and other cultural pathologies— teenage pregnancy, drug use, fatherless homes—among the residents by encouraging and perpetuating dependency, laziness, and immorality. Whereas Keynesian liberalism managed delinquent populations through the welfare state’s extensive bureaucracy—turning them into what Friedman called “wards of the state”—neoconservatism’s method is to make them wards of the prisons. Policing of poor and working-class urban neighborhoods, harsh penalties for petty, quality-of-life crimes, and lengthy prison sentences for drug offenses are all measures which help absorb marginalized populations into the penal system rather than empowering them economically in civil society. Bateman’s vigilantism augments this function of the state. Serial killing efficiently disposes of surplus populations that strain limited resources. Where the welfare state is slow and rehabilitative, Bateman is swift, delivering punishment as deserved. He is the “invisible hand” of the market, wielding a knife concealed in a designer jacket. Near the end of American Psycho in a chapter titled “Bum on Fifth,” Bateman surveys the Upper East Side and remarks that “the street looks sad, the air is full of decay, bodies lie on the cold pavement, miles of it, some are moving, most are not” (385). Like Paul Kersey in Death Wish (1974), Bateman has “to fight the impulse to blow them away.” He does so by “look[ing] up, admiringly, at the Trump Tower, tall, proudly gleaming in the late afternoon sunlight” (385). The citadels of corporate power do not stand aloof, Ellis implies, but sprout from the urban degradation they manufacture. Rising inequality might delegitimize neoliberal principles if not for a neoconservative discourse that argued that the poverty piling up around us is the outcome of personal failings and biological predispositions. When Bateman tersely dismisses the poor as “the genetic underclass” (266), in effect naturalizing poverty, he anticipates Murray and Richard Herrnstein’s claims in The Bell Curve (1994) that the economically disadvantaged are also cognitively disadvantaged. In a critique of such assumptions, Steve Macek argues in Urban Nightmares (2006) that the ideological function of the discourse on “urban underclass” poverty in the 1980s and ’90s was “to reconcile the fact of rampant inner-city poverty, decay, and squalor with the seem-



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ingly incompatible idea that American capitalism is the most free, most egalitarian, and most just political and economic system history has ever known” (97). Murray and Hernstein argued for the genetic inferiority of the poor while drawing upon a mythos of individual self-reliance at the very time the poor are confronted with forms of capitalist and state power far beyond the control of any individual. Ellis allegorizes this power and reveals how its class agenda is concealed beneath a rhetoric of self-empowerment, free market economics, and equal opportunity. Shopping at the upscale boutique Paul Smith, Bateman points out to a salesperson that a “crying homeless man” is in front of the store and says “You should call the police or something” (223). A few pages before, he informs a friend that “I beat up a girl today who was asking people on the street for money” (213). Bateman divulges the class violence that secures consumerism, a violence wielded by corporate power (Paul Smith), the state (the police), and privileged subjects (Bateman). Nothing about the solutions to poverty that Mead, Murray, and Hernstein offer is antithetical to the promotion of diversity or equal rights. Addressing the seemingly incurable blight of poverty, Mead maintains that “it is not, on the whole, due to oppression” since “systematic discrimination against minorities” has been eliminated (68, 21). He argues that “equality to Americans tends not to mean middle-class income or status at all, but rather the enjoyment of equal citizenship, meaning the same rights and obligations as others” (12). Mead admits that “The great merit of equal citizenship as a social goal is that it is much more widely achievable than status . . . It does not require that the disadvantaged ‘succeed’” (12). The admission reveals how the neoliberal and neoconservative endorsement of social equality is divorced from the promotion of economic equality. In fact, the goal of this discourse is the very substitution of equal rights and obligations for economic equality. Furthermore, if, according to neoliberalism, a truly free market depends upon “equal citizenship,” it also depends on the realization of class inequality. Or, as it is dramatized in American Psycho, the urban blight of Manhattan (a result of the “functioning problems of the jobless themselves”) is a reassuring sign that neoliberal theory is working as it should (Mead 24). The “bum[s] on Fifth” are a visual annoyance, but they are a marker of Bateman’s success. Without them, his money would be less meaningful. In its most vilifying expressions, the neoconservative discourse on urban poverty and crime drowned out the neoliberal rhetoric of freedom

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of choice and equal opportunity. In New York and other cities, popular media in the 1980s propagated an urban catastrophe around welfare, crime, and disease, stoking a climate of fear while appealing for greater punitive measures against the poor. This popular discourse created not just a city of fear, but a city of revenge or what Neil Smith, referring to New York, labels “the revanchist city” (211). “More than anything the revanchist city expresses,” he writes “a race/class/gender terror felt by middle- and ruling-class whites who are suddenly stuck in place by a ravaged property market, the threat and reality of unemployment, the decimation of social services, and the emergence of minority and immigrant groups, as well as women, as powerful urban actors” (211). The reader’s entry into American Psycho is through the most prominent outlet of popular neoconservatism, the New York Post. In the novel’s opening scene, Bateman and his friend Timothy Price read the Post, their disgust building sentence by sentence over several pages: “in one issue—in one issue—let’s see here . . . strangled models, babies thrown from tenement rooftops, kids killed in the subway, a Communist rally, Mafia boss wiped out, Nazis . . . baseball players with AIDS, more Mafia shit, gridlock, the homeless, various maniacs, faggots dropping like flies in the streets” (4). At first glance the report appears mimetic of the city: “Outside the cab,” Ellis writes, “on the sidewalks, black and bloated pigeons fight over scraps of hot dogs in front of a Gray’s Papaya while transvestites idly look on and a police car cruises silently the wrong way down a one-way street. . . . Panning down to the sidewalk there’s an ugly old homeless bag lady holding a whip” (5). But the filmic cues— “Pan down to the Post” and “Panning down the sidewalk”—underscore that American Psycho’s highly stylized representations draw upon a set of tropes and conventions that condense the mean streets of the city into a surreal collage of deviancy (5). The paper’s lurid reporting of urban squalor fuels Bateman’s vengeance. The Post consolidates, for both Bateman and its readers, disparate social phenomena (homelessness, gridlock, disease, sexual non-normativity) into a spectacle that is so frightening that one disengages from public life or views it as sordid entertainment, or lashes out against it physically. Later, Ellis draws upon the Post’s reporting by implicitly alluding to its sensational coverage of the horrific gang-rape of the ‘Central Park jogger’ in 1989, perhaps the most stunning instance of a media-induced panic over urban disorder in recent memory. The tabloid repeatedly accused the African American



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assailants of “wilding,” like wolves loose in the urban forests of New York. Surely it is not insignificant in this context that Ellis has Bateman “roaming the zoo in Central Park, restlessly,” pacing back and forth. Bateman is the animal we should fear (297). Where does this novel leave us in the killing fields of our bankrupt American cities? American Psycho is a fantasy of what a radically free market might look like if all noneconomic obstacles on acquisitive and consumptive desires were abolished, which for all intents and purposes they are, as Bateman’s crimes go unnoticed and unpunished. Neither his freedom nor his wealth are ever impugned, and as he listens to “the national anthem play” to Bush’s inauguration in the novel’s closing moments, Bateman “sigh[s], shrug[s], whatever” (398). American Psycho returns to us “a world . . . recognizably our own,” giving it a form that reveals the workings and effects of late twentieth-century urban economy. It is a world where freedom is reduced to individual choice without restraint and to free enterprise without regulation, neither of which are prescriptive rights but simply appurtenances of privilege. Bateman has not earned his money; he has inherited it, like his victims have inherited their poverty or had it foisted upon them. His hate crimes cannot be traced to psychosexual compulsions that are far in excess of Roger Rosenblatt’s “normal prurience” because they are structural not psychological. Ellis dramatizes the violence of structural inequality by presenting it from the perspective of the rich who benefit from it at the expense of the poor who have ‘freely chosen’ their hunger. “At another new restaurant” Bateman’s toasts “tiredly” to “Freedom” (330). Freedom, as American Psycho makes plain, is only liberation for compulsory, serialized acts of consumption that evacuate all interiority and free will. At least this freedom—as false of a choice as it may be—is better than the freedom of having nothing left to lose but one’s life. McGill University notes 1. I am following Harvey’s definition of neoliberalism as “a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade” (2). 2. Grant has this same response: “our tedium in reading these consumer litanies is relieved only when something—that is to say, something violent—happens”

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(30). Calling the violence in the text “an act in language,” Murphet writes: “its effect is to launch these passages into a different stylistic plane, which is really one of the major reasons that these passages leave such an impression” (45). 3. American Psycho’s contrapuntal rhythms exactly illustrate what Fredric Jameson has described as two characteristics of postmodern literature—“affectlessness” and “an intoxicatory or hallucinogenic intensity”—which Jameson keys to the loss of historicity under late capitalism (6, 28–29). At any given moment Bateman swings from self-abnegating boredom—“Soon everything seemed dull. . . . There wasn’t a clear, identifiable emotion within me, except for greed and possibly, total disgust”—to sublime elation—a “relief that is almost tidal in scope washes over me in an awesome wave” (282, 39). With American Psycho, Ellis hones a strategy that he began developing with his first novel Less Than Zero (1985), in which traditional plot-driven narrative is forsaken for recurring episodes of wealthy adolescents in Los Angeles wearing name-brand clothing, hooking up, eating at restaurants, and snorting lines of cocaine. Every new scene in American Psycho’s unnumbered chapters seems always already to have happened as the locations, characters, and descriptions of daily minutiae begin to blur. 4. Eberly scrutinizes the outrage generated by American Psycho, noting how publicity came to factor in the anxiety over the text. Publicity, of course, led to increased sales (107). 5. Outside of the U.S. responses to the text were more varied. American Psycho was censored by Australia’s Office of Film and Literary Classification, which restricted its sales to adults only (“Australia” F.7.BRE). And in Canada, Montreal’s Council of Women’s executive director demanded “federal legislation,” arguing that the book should be banned as “hate literature” under Canada’s Bill of Human Rights: “We have to go beyond saying ‘There can’t be any restrictions’” (Greenaway B.1.BRE; Abley A.1.FRO). 6. Some numbers reveal the stunning achievements of the neoliberal turn: in 1980 minimum wage was on par with poverty, but was 30% below poverty by 1990 (Harvey 16); the median compensation of workers to CEO salaries that was just over 30 to 1 in 1970, was 500 to 1 by 2000 (16, 25); whereas real after-tax income for the wealthiest 1% of households grew by 119% between 1977 and 1999, it declined 12% for the poorest fifth (Macek 21). “In 1994, the New York Times reported that the income gap between the rich and the poor in Manhattan had reached Third World levels” (Macek 22). 7. Michaels argues that “treating [classes] as if they were like races or cultures—different but equal—is one of our strategies for managing inequality rather than minimizing it or eliminating it” (Trouble 10). 8. Seltzer argues, “Serial killers make a study of their own kind of person,” often reading fictional and nonfictional accounts of other serial killers which, in turn, make their way into FBI profiles of “real” serial killers through a process of “empty circularity” (14, 108). “‘Our antecedents,’ FBI agent John Douglas says, ‘actually do go back to crime fiction more than crime fact’” (qtd. in Seltzer 16).



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Ellis has revealed the following about the origins of Bateman: “I had a friend who introduced me to someone who could get me criminology textbooks from the FBI that really went into graphic detail about certain motifs in the actual murders committed by serial killers and detailed accounts of what serial killers did to bodies, what they did to people they murdered, especially sex killings. . . . I did the research, because I couldn’t really have made this up” (Clarke). 9. Macek has described Murray’s Losing Ground as “the Reagan administration ‘bible’ on social policy” (73).

works cited Abley, Mark. “Book from Hell Sparks Censorship Debate.” The Gazette [Montreal]. 16 Mar. 1991: A1. FRO. “Australia to Limit Sales of Psycho.” The Gazette [Montreal]. 28 Mar. 1991: F.7 BRE. “Barnes and Nobel Chat Transcript.” Geocities.com June 13, 1998. 14 Oct. 2008. . Birkerts, Sven, Barbara Taylor Bradford, et. al. “Editorial Judgment or Censorship? The Case of American Psycho.” The Writer. May 1991: 20–23. “Bret Easton Ellis on Hotwired.” Geocities.com. September 29, 1995. 30 May 2007. . Clarke, Jamie. “An Interview With Bret Easton Ellis.” Geocities.com. November 4, 1996 and October 22, 1998. 30 May 2007. . Cohen, Roger. “Bret Easton Ellis Answers Critics of ‘American Psycho.’” New York Times. 6 Mar. 1991: C13, 18. Eberly, Rosa A. Citizen Critics: Literary Public Spheres. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000. Ellis, Bret Easton. American Psycho. New York: Vintage, 1991. ———. Less Than Zero. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985. “Federal Food Programs.” The U.S. Census 2000. 30 May 2007. “Ford to City: Drop Dead.” New York Daily News. 29 Oct. 1975: 1. . Freccero, Carla. “Historical Violence, Censorship, and the Serial Killer: The Case of ‘American Psycho.’” Diacritics 27.2 (1997): 44–58. Friedman, Milton. Capitalism and Freedom. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962. ———, and Rose Friedman. Free to Choose: A Personal Statement. New York: HBJ, 1980. “George Bush’s Mission.” New York Times. 20 Aug. 1988: 26. Grant, Barry. “American Psycho/sis: The Pure Products of America Go Crazy.” Mythologies of Violence in Postmodern Media. Ed. Christopher Sharrett. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1999: 23–40. Greenaway, Kathryn. “Controversial Book Allowed Into Canada.” The Gazette [Montreal]. 26 Mar. 1991: B.1.BRE.

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Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. von Hayek, Friedrich. The Constitution of Liberty. Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1960. Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991. Kennedy, Pagan. “Generation Gaffe.” The Nation. 1 Apr. 1991: 426–28. Macek, Steve. Urban Nightmares: the Media, the Right, and the Moral Panic Over the City. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. Marchand, Philip. “No Fanfare as ‘Revolting’ Novel Appears in Metro Stores.” Toronto Star. 11 Apr. 1991: A.4. Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy.­ Vol. 1. Trans. Ben Fowkes. New York: Penguin, 1992. McDowell, Edwin. “The Killing of a Violent New Novel.” New York Times. 16 Nov. 1990: C40. ———. “NOW Chapter Seeks Boycott of ‘Psycho’ Novel.” New York Times. 6 Dec. 1990: C17. ———. “Vintage Buys Violent Book Dropped by Simon & Schuster.” New York Times. 17 Nov. 1990: 13. Mead, Lawrence. Beyond Entitlement: the Social Obligations of Citizenship. New York: Free Press, 1986. Michaels, Walter Benn. The Shape of the Signifier. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. ———. The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006. Moore, Lorrie. “Trashing Women, Trashing Books.” New York Times. 5 Dec. 1990: A1. Murphet, Julian. Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho: A Reader’s Guide. New York: Continuum, 2002. Murray, Charles. Losing Ground: American Social Policy, 1965–1980. New York: Basic Books, 1984. ———, and Richard Hernstein. The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life. New York: Free Press, 1994. “Rodney King Speaks Out: ‘Can We All Get Along.” New York Times. 2 May 1992: 6. Rosenblatt, Roger. “Snuff This Book! Will Bret Easton Ellis Get Away With Murder?” New York Times. 16 Dec. 1990: BR3. Seltzer, Mark. Serial Killers: Death and Life in America’s Wound Culture. New York: Routledge, 1998. Smith, Neil. The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City. London: Routledge, 1996. Teachout, Terry. “Applied Deconstruction.” National Review. 24 Jun. 1991: 45, 46.

megan williams

In the Ring with Mildred Pierce: Million Dollar Baby and Eastwood’s Revision of the Forties Melodrama

Disappointingly, most film reviews either laud

Million Dollar Baby for its “unsentimental” message or concentrate on the right-to-life debate surrounding the “controversial” ending and its relationship to the Terry Schiavo case.1 Few critics decode the film as generating a substantial amount of cultural anxiety about women who foray into hitherto male realms—in particular, into activities as aggressively masculine as boxing. Tania Modleski’s New York Times “Letter to the Editor” is one exception. She chastises Frank Rich for allowing the “right wing media to define the debate over Clint Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby as one about euthanasia,” all the while ignoring “the film’s vile gender, class, and racial politics” (1).2 The numerous ways the film interweaves its gender, class, and racial politics are fairly obvious: Billie the “Blue Bear,” the demonized Black East-German Ex-Prostitute; Maggie’s “white trash” welfare family; and Morgan Freeman’s Scrap, manager of the Hit Pit, who provides the film’s voice-over narration and yet another example of the black man’s recently idealized and God-like presence in film (Colombe 1). While these characters and Eastwood’s more general combination of gender, class, and racial politics are themselves deserving of lengthy analysis, time and length constraints force this article to focus more narrowly on the ways the three main characters—Maggie, Frankie, and Scrap—articulate the gender politics of Million Dollar Baby. This paper argues that at the same time that Million Dollar Baby reflects the contentious debates at the time of its release about what constitutes a family and a woman’s relationship to violence, Arizona Quarterly Volume 67, Number 1, Spring 2011 Copyright © 2011 by Arizona Board of Regents issn 0004-1610

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the violence of its final scenes contradicts its previous negotiations of gender. In response to Linda Williams’s call for “feminist readings that can be more sensitive to specificities of the historical moment of film production and the situation of its original audience” (“Feminist” 20) in order to avoid an analysis of films as “re-presentation that eternally represses the feminine” (19), this paper reads Million Dollar Baby against two cultural events that defined the public’s consciousness at the time of its release: the debate over same-sex marriage and the release of the Abu Ghraib photographs. In Williams’s analysis, female spectators of Mildred Pierce inhabit and understand the numerous and contradictory subject positions Mildred presents as a mother and career woman. This consideration of the plurality of meanings created by the melodrama focuses on “very specific, and historically changing, forms of repression and reflection that operate hand in hand,” avoiding an analysis that posits a monolithic repression of the feminine as the only message conveyed by the text (28). A cursory sketch of the same-sex marriage debate and the release of the Abu Ghraib photographs in 2004 reveals that the cultural moment Million Dollar Baby reflects and manages extends far beyond a single woman’s right to box—it encompasses the collective rights of men and women to participate in new forms of family and for women to express violence physically. One of the staples of film criticism has been the observation that melodrama, as a genre, taps into the collective drives and unconscious needs of its audience (Haskell 27). Thus the forties melodrama reacts to the Rosie-the-Riveter decade with noticeable ambivalence, alternating between anxiety and praise for the new female presence in the workforce. As Williams suggests, the forties women’s film contains both repression and radical potential. Mildred Pierce is allowed to build her restaurant empire, revealing her independence and drive, while her final bankruptcy and the corrupt actions of her daughter Veda suggest an imperative need to reconstitute the pre-war family. Like the forties and fifties drama queens who were profoundly willful, Maggie’s ambition is raised at the beginning of the film only to be undone in the final forty-five minutes. In fact, one could argue that one of the narrative purposes of this film is to firmly imprint Maggie’s final powerless status on the audience. Writing about Maggie’s body, Carloss James Chamberlin remarks, “it gets the full-blown tragic treatment reserved for male



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athletes in ‘sports weepies’—we get to experience the full voyeuristic thrill of its gradual destruction. This carries an unusual psychological charge. Never in the history of cinema has a female body stood so much in place of the physical body of the spectator” (3). Women like Mildred Pierce and Stella Dallas were also punished for their gender transgressions, but the violence enacted on Maggie’s person is notable for both its duration and viciousness.3 When she finally asserts her will in her last great effort, she fails miserably. After the tongue biting debacle, when Maggie attempts to choke herself to death on her own blood, she surrenders to the traditional subject position of the submissive woman dependent on a man for decision making. In her final silence, Maggie represents what Peter Brooks calls the “pure image of victimization”; her body becomes the locus of all meaning—a literal text of emotional messages that cannot be otherwise represented (xi–xii). Ultimately, this essay argues that the extreme violence with which this film silences Maggie—its creation of her hysterical body, to continue to use Brooks’s terms—testifies to the massive anxieties about family and a woman’s professional role that the film both reflects and contains. As it has been traditionally characterized, melodrama as a genre is defined by its excesses—in terms of the emotional extremes it evokes from the audience and the often-contradictory highs and lows experienced by its characters. Comparing the maternal melodramas of the war years with the thirties, Mary Anne Doane argues that the forties melodrama is defined by a basic “incoherency”; the ideological contradictions of these films cannot be resolved, and the viewer cannot distill a single meaning about the nature of female experience from them. Writing on Douglas Sirk, Laura Mulvey recognizes the central contradictions that similarly characterize the genre in the fifties: Ideological contradiction is the overt mainspring and specific content of melodrama, not a hidden, unconscious thread to be picked up only by special critical processes. No ideology can even pretend to totality: it must present an outlet for its own inconsistencies. This is the function of the 50s melodrama. It works by touching on sensitive areas of sexual repression and frustration; its excitement comes from conflict not between enemies, but between people tied by blood or love.

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If this view of melodrama as a safety valve for ideological contradictions centered on sex and the family seems to deprive it of possible redemption as progressive, it also places it in the context of wider problems . . . . But, as Sirk and critics have pointed out, the strength of the melodramatic form lies in the amount of dust the story raises along the road, a cloud of over-determined irreconcilables which put up a resistance to being neatly settled in the last five minutes. (Mulvey 75–76) If, as Mulvey contends, melodrama is a “safety valve for ideological contradictions,” the extended violent ending of Million Dollar Baby reveals the cultural anxieties at stake in the film’s negotiation of gender. Fortyfive minutes—not Mulvey’s “last five minutes” —of this two and a quarter hour film are devoted to shots of Maggie’s motionless body. Ultimately, Eastwood remains either unable or unwilling to tell the story of a female Rocky. Not only does Maggie fail to win the title fight that would solidify her career and fame, but along the way she relinquishes her will and decisions to Frankie, her “boss.” By erasing Maggie as a professional athlete, the film questions the point of her quest. Had Maggie been content with her gender and place in life, had she focused her energies on more domestic pursuits—on, for example, her father’s favorite diner that Frankie contemplates buying—the tragedy of her death could have been avoided. Ironically, the ambition which brings Maggie, Frankie, and Scrap together is the very thing which destroys their surrogate family. Boxing unites Maggie, Frankie, and Scrap. While the first half of the film constructs a happily-ever-after potential for the three to live in their reconstituted version of the twenty-first century family led by same-sex parents, Maggie’s tragic participation in the championship match precludes this happy ending. In her discussion of Mildred Pierce, Williams argues that melodrama is able to foreground gender conflicts precisely because it rarely references its historical context (“Feminist” 22). Like Mildred Pierce, Million Dollar Baby could be considered a wartime film that doesn’t mention war: WWII and Iraq, respectively. Released the day the troops returned from World War II, Mildred Pierce presents a profound ambivalence towards the career woman. In a similar manner, Million Dollar Baby uses the figure of the female boxer to examine questions about the “appro-



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priate” relationship between women and violence that the War in Iraq broaches. Traditionally, the Army has refused to allow women in combat, citing their lack of upper body strength and polls that reveal most female soldiers do not want the policy changed (Scarborough 2); however, prompted by the performance of military women in Operation Desert Storm, in 1994 the Clinton Administration renewed this discussion by allowing women in combat aircraft and ships (Title 10 USC 8549 and Title 10 USC 6015, respectively). In the month before the release of Million Dollar Baby, debate over the Army’s collocation policy was sparked by a Washington Times report on December 13, 2004, that “Internal Army documents advocate changing Pentagon rules on mixed-sex units in a way that critics say will risk placing female soldiers in ground-combat situations” (Scarborough 1). In response to this article and to reports that the ever-changing nature of the War in Iraq placed female soldiers in combat, California Republican Duncan Hunter, then Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, proposed a bill meant to legally restrict the roles of Army women in direct ground combat. Hunter revealed the cultural boundaries at stake in this discussion when he said that “one of the marks of civilization is we have not had our women in direct combat” (Ho 1). While the debate over collocation informs the reception of Million Dollar Baby and marks it as a war-time film, like Mildred Pierce, Million Dollar Baby confronts gender conflict by omitting direct references to its historical context. With the exception of an advertisement for The Apprentice that appears when Maggie rides the bus, this film contains no historical markers. Much like Mildred Pierce, the film combines genres, most notably melodrama and film noir. Its musical score of single piano notes, voice-over narration, muted cinematography and absence of historical markers give it a timeless quality. Eastwood’s camera-work takes its cue from the melodramas and film noirs of the forties and fifties. Indeed, Eastwood describes the promotional poster for the film as “noiresque” (Rich 3). He shoots primarily in muted colors, with stark contrasts and claustrophobic internal spaces. In a 1989 Film Quarterly interview, Eastwood describes the influence of forties films on his work: Yeah, it’s kind of ironic. Early on I was questioned about the roles women had in some of these films. Now people are calling me a feminist director. All along I just thought I was giving

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women good roles to play, which you always heard there was a lack of. The pictures I liked as a kid often had women in strong roles. Barbara Stanwyck, Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Katherine Hepburn. They could all hold their own with any actor. I think the secret to a well-defined male character is a strong female complement. She could even be the antagonist in some cases. But I think it’s important for dramatic reasons alone that there’s a balance there. Clark Gable in It Happened One Night was only as effective as the character Claudette Colbert had to play. (Gentry 18) What is surprising about this quotation is the direct line Eastwood draws between his female characters and the female stars of the forties woman’s film. No one would doubt that Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity (1944) and Stella Dallas (1937), Bette Davis in Now, Voyager (1942), or Joan Crawford in Mildred Pierce (1945) convey uniquely conflicted female characters, defined, as Maggie herself is initially, by their strong individual desires. The propellant varies from film to film, reflecting each film’s unique mixture of genres. Phyllis Dietrichson’s greed drives Double Indemnity. Mildred Pierce and Stella Dallas dream for their daughters. Charlotte Vale in Now, Voyager longs to live independently, outside the roles of wife and mother prescribed by society. Although their actual desires differ, each of the female characters in these films shares a similar final fate: she leaves the screen with her ambitions squashed. Mildred Pierce returns to a reprisal of her first marriage; both Stella and Mildred are “punished” by having their daughters taken from them. Barbara Stanwyck’s character in Double Indemnity dies, double-crossed and shot. Charlotte in Now, Voyager, unable to be with the married man she loves, renounces her sexuality and assumes the socially acceptable position of caring for his daughter (Palmer 37). Even against the depressing final fates of these strong women from the forties and fifties, Maggie’s final status as a mute paraplegic is torturous and extreme—deprived of her body, her tongue, and her dignity. Gazing at Maggie’s final figure, the viewer may very well ask, “What has she done to be so punished? And why in 2009 are we in the ring with a new kind of Mildred Pierce?” By omitting direct references to its cultural context, Million Dollar Baby is able to foreground a key component of the melodrama, the



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nuclear family, and to examine the contentious twenty-first-century debate over what constitutes a family—an argument triggered, in part, by the so-called disappearance of the “father” in light of female samesex marriages and new reproductive technologies such as in vitro fertilization (Kaplan 184–88). At the time of the film’s official release in December of 2004, the national debate over same-sex marriages was in full swing. It had been a key issue in the presidential debates and in court decisions in Massachusetts and California.4 Scrap and Frankie watch over Maggie and make an unlikely two-father family, bickering together in an intimacy akin to marriage, while Frankie replaces Maggie’s mother as her true and self-sacrificing caregiver. Again and again, the film uses social class to criticize Maggie’s immediate family and to normalize Scrap and Frankie as her alternative family. No viewer can ignore the film’s obsessive stereotyping of the Fitzgeralds as a “welfare” family defined by excess. Maggie confesses that not only does Mardell cheat “on welfare by pretending one of her babies is still alive,” but Earline “weighs 312 pounds.” In the film, social class and gender combine to mark Maggie’s mother and sister as unfit mothers. Mardell exploits her dead child, while Earline exploits her living daughter, complaining that she would rather have money than a house. In contrast to Maggie’s legal guardians, Frankie and Scrap emerge as Maggie’s rightful and morally concerned caretakers. Absent a mother, Maggie’s two-father family argues against the disappearance of the father and suggests a roundabout argument against depriving same-sex partners of the rights granted to the biological family vis-à-vis the dying. Initially, the film supports Maggie, Frankie, and Scrap’s construction of a family that replaces their failed relationships. Eastwood himself refers to Maggie as Frankie’s “surrogate daughter—she’s the daughter he never had, and he’s the father she never had. . . .When you’ve lived so many years you understand people’s family problems, and you can draw in your imagination why he had a deteriorating relationship with his daughter” (Macklin 1–2). Frankie tells Maggie, “you’re a good daughter” after they visit her mother in Theodosia. Again and again, Frankie becomes the traditional paterfamilias. He tells Maggie she needs to save her money for a house. He talks about buying her father’s favorite diner, presumably as a way to heal their mutual sense of domestic loss. Once Maggie successfully pursues Frankie as a trainer, she relinquishes to him the job of making her “somebody.” In a twenty-first century rendering of

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the Pygmalion myth, Frankie teaches Maggie not how to speak proper English, but how to beat someone to a pulp. He literally constructs her narrative history and subsumes it to his own by naming her “machusla.” While Maggie’s background reveals no Irish influences, Frankie’s green robe positions her firmly within the mythical creation of his own Irishness—a creation that appears to be an amalgam of learning Gaelic and quoting Yeats.5 Despite the disciplined physical regimen Maggie endures, Frankie decides everything and creates Maggie’s master narrative. Million Dollar Baby holds out an initial promise—a renegotiation of traditional gender roles through Maggie’s surrogate family and her career as a boxer. But the final image of Maggie, paralyzed and mute on her hospital bed, challenges these cultural re-alignments. While there are obvious limitations to reading the final scenes as a moral and political statement, we in the West have been conditioned to view death as a moral judgment. Lessons embedded in texts from Calvin’s Institutes to the Old Testament clearly teach us that bad things happen to bad people, and the “bad” behavior that brings this film face-to-face with the right-to-life debate is Maggie’s desire to become a professional boxer. The film revolves around a central ideological contradiction: at the same time that boxing unites Maggie, Scrap, and Frankie as a family, Maggie’s ambition ultimately destroys her “new” family. The film’s promotional poster pictures Maggie in the middle of the frame, looking forlornly to the left with the light emphasizing her musculature, while Scrap gazes over her right shoulder and Frankie looks out at the audience over her left. As the film itself does, this poster presents Frankie, Maggie, and Scrap as a secular version of the Holy Family. While the religious ideology behind this poster validates Frankie and Scrap as same-sex parents of an adopted “baby” girl, the trajectory of the film as whole cannot maintain this construction. Frankie and Scrap watch over Maggie, yet they are ultimately failed gods and parents. They cannot prevent Maggie from dying for Frankie’s sins, and the final scenes fracture Maggie’s newly adopted family. Scrap alone remains, deserted in different ways by both Maggie and Frankie. The final destruction of the non-traditional family that punctuates the end of Million Dollar Baby contrasts the narrative trajectory of Alejandro Amenábar’s The Sea Inside, the recipient for Best Foreign Language Film the same year that Million Dollar Baby garnered its four



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Academy Awards. In situation, the ending of Million Dollar Baby parallels The Sea Inside, the true story of Ramón Sampedro, a man who has spent thirty years paralyzed and wants to die with dignity. But here the parallels stop. The ending of Eastwood’s film fetishizes Maggie’s paralyzed state. Maggie’s body has failed her. Lingering in hospital rooms and corridors, the camera focuses on Maggie’s fight against herself. She deliberately bites her own tongue, silencing and mutilating herself, meting out the punishment the film seems to demand. Maggie has neither will nor control. By contrast, The Sea Inside is nuanced drama, a story of complex interactions. Most important, although paralyzed, Ramón remains a man. He is in control, except over the legal system. So in control, in fact, that he empowers those around him: Rosa, a train wreck waiting to happen, and Julia, a lawyer (married to someone else) who has a bad leg and walks with a cane. Ramón is the love of Julia’s life, and she his. Their relationship is cerebral, passionate, and sensuous, and even more powerful because that sensuality is not, cannot be, expressed physically. Ramón’s relationships contrast starkly with those of Frankie and Maggie. Ramón enlarges the people around him. They don’t exist just to get him off the hook—in the case of Frankie, for his responsibility for the loss of a friend’s eye and for his broken relationship with his daughter. Redemption in The Sea Inside is a two-way street that comes from dyadic relationships, not just at the expense of one party. Unlike both Frankie and Maggie, Ramón remains fully responsible and accountable for his decisions, and he leaves the film having created a strong and lasting sense of kinship and extended family. As the relationships among the three main characters in Eastwood’s film suggest, the domestic arena is a key area that melodrama as a genre interrogates. Indeed, Paul Haggis’s script revises F. X. Toole’s original short story by adding a narrative drive focused on the family. A former producer of the television shows The Facts of Life and thirtysomething, Haggis turned to film with Million Dollar Baby and his directorial debut Crash (2004). A taste for the excessive emotions characteristic of melodrama punctuates Haggis’s screenwriting, as does his reliance on the close-up shots frequently used in television. In a strange renovation of genre, Haggis describes his next project as a kind of male weepie, a “Terms of Endearment for men” about a former womanizer whose brideto-be is killed before their wedding and who travels on what would have been their honeymoon with her father (Halbfinger 2). The collection

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of short stories by F. X. Toole upon which Million Dollar Baby is based attracted Haggis because “you’ve got these losers who just didn’t realize they were losers, and so they kept fighting” (2). A fascination with “heart” and an individual’s will to keep fighting when all is lost characterizes Toole’s stark stories, but when Haggis turns to portray the female boxer visually, he cannot imagine the will to fight as a durable female quality. Maggie’s “no quit” attitude certainly does not last long enough for her to win her most important fight—to transition from being a boxer to being a paraplegic in ways that would allow her, Frankie, and Scrap to grow as a family (Toole 167). Haggis’s adaptation emphasizes the domestic by importing Scrap’s voice-over narration from another story, “Frozen Water,” and by using Scrap to construct the narrative framework of a letter written to Frankie’s estranged daughter. Toole’s story never mentions Frankie’s failed relationship with his daughter. Indeed, the story’s only reference to Frankie’s family appears when he “lit five candles—one for his wife, whom he missed terribly; one for his parents, brothers, and sisters; one for his sons and daughters and grandchildren; one for his friends, dead and alive, though most were dead. And he lit one candle for his girl” (Toole 95). The importation of Scrap’s narrative frame operates on several levels. First, it allows Scrap complete access to Maggie’s thoughts, thus presenting her as transparent. In comparison to Maggie’s, Frankie’s history is opaque; the audience knows little about his background or the reasons why he and his daughter do not speak. Secondly, Scrap’s voiceover positions the audience as female. Scrap reads his letter aloud, and the viewer becomes a stand-in for the daughter who finally receives, accepts, and understands her father. As the film presents it, Million Dollar Baby will be one letter that Frankie’s daughter opens, and the traditional family, with a single and “legitimate” father, will be reconstituted. Million Dollar Baby is able to depict traditional and non-traditional forms of family because it represses many of the larger questions about gender and sexuality that the aggressively male world of boxing raises. Neither Frankie nor Scrap reference their personal relationships or sexual pasts. We know that Frankie has a daughter, yet his presence is peculiarly asexual, allowing the spectator to read his relationship with Scrap as one defined by necessity, not homoerotic desire. In a similar fashion, the film quickly sidelines the questions about traditional gender



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roles that are raised by the figure of the female boxer. Eastwood himself notes, “I must say that the first time I ever heard about women boxing, I thought, ‘This is an odd sport for a woman to do.’ Much like Frankie Dunn in the picture—he’s kind of prejudiced towards it” (Macklin 4). As Eastwood reveals, even today there remains something shocking about the female boxer: she violates our culture’s central association between women and nurturing. The female boxer is primal, aggressive, and violent—characteristics the cinema usually reserves for aberrant women and monsters from B-rated films. Not surprisingly, Million Dollar Baby manages the many questions about gender and sexuality that female boxing raises by divorcing Maggie from the violence of her profession. We learn that Maggie takes care of her family, that she mourns for her father and his dog, that she wants to send her last opponent an apology. In contrast to Maggie’s mothering potential, the film focuses the conflicts between a woman’s traditional role and the violent sport of boxing on the demonized Billie. As a Black East-German ex prostitute, Billie is clearly marked as Other in every possible way. She is hyper-sexualized and has an extreme love of violence that further emphasizes Maggie’s nurturing presence. Revealing the culturally fraught redefinitions of gender that Billie represents, Frankie advises Maggie to punish and destroy Billie’s female features by “jabbing her in the tits” and targeting “her skinny ass” so she will “stay down, bitch” (Chamberlin 10). At the same time that Million Dollar Baby uses the character of Billie to contain the ideological contradictions surrounding the female boxer, the screenplay erases many of the confrontations between Maggie’s gender and the male sport of boxing that appear in Toole’s original story. Again and again, by masking Maggie’s sex with heavy sweats and hoodies, Million Dollar Baby suggests a conservative argument about the sports a woman should perform. In contrast to the sexless “baby” of Eastwood’s film, Toole presents Maggie as a sexual person with a past: Frankie led her to the weight room, where the only noise was grunts and clanging weights. On the way, he thought of all the reasons against training a female fighter. Most important, he simply didn’t like seeing women get hit. Regardless, there were now girls in the amateurs, and soon they’d be going to the Olympics. There would be more and more of them, so they

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would get better and better. That meant they’d be better than the ones currently fighting, and people said that would be good for the game. He didn’t care how good they got. Girls getting busted up went against everything he believed in. Okay, he thought, times have changed. Dames are doing what guys is doing, but that don’t make it right. And then there were the practical reasons. Scheduling fights around periods. And bruised tits. And what if one was pregnant and had a miscarriage because of a fight? That, and he couldn’t cuss. Not that he cussed that much. But sometimes cussing was the best way to say what you had to say. Like, Keep your fookin hands up! “Yeah,” he said to her, continuing his thoughts aloud, “and half of them are degenerates wearing purple jockey shorts and talking feminist bullshit, know what I mean? And when you train broads, you can’t cuss because you get sued. . . . “I ain’t no lezzie, if that’s what’s you’re sayin,” she said. “I can lay a little pipe with the best of ’em.” “That’s none of my business either way, and that’s the point . . . whatever the hell you are, leave it outside the gym.” (65–66) In the short story, Frankie must confront Maggie’s biology and sexuality. Her physicality, her “tits” and “periods,” are tangibles that he finds ways to rationalize and understand as a coach. Maggie’s “I can lay a little pipe with the best of ’em” is central to the dynamics of Toole’s story.6 In this statement, Maggie both presents herself as a woman and as a sexual being and demonstrates that she can compete in a man’s world—both with her fists and with the coarse masculine language of boxing. Maggie’s verbal sparring in the story highlights an uneven and gendered playing field that is either omitted from Million Dollar Baby or projected onto the character of Billie. One of the historical referents that Million Dollar Baby works hard to repress and manage is the reality that Maggie is a woman in a man’s world. Maggie’s sexuality and a sense of the physical are so absent from Million Dollar Baby that boxing ceases to have the primal qualities that define it. The world Eastwood constructs would be unrecognizable to Muhammad Ali’s coach Bundini Brown, who used male sexuality to characterize the tactics a fighter needs to win: “You got to get the hard-



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on, and then you got to keep it. You want to be careful not to lose the hard-on, and cautious not to come” (Oates 30). In On Boxing, Joyce Carol Oates argues that sexual explicitness defines the sport: No sport is more primitive, more direct, than boxing. No sport appears more powerfully homoerotic: the confrontation in the ring—the disrobing—the sweaty heated combat that is part dance, courtship, coupling—the frequent urgent pursuit by one boxer of the other in the fight’s natural and violent movement toward the “knockout”: surely boxing derives much of its appeal from this mimicry of a species of erotic love in which one man overcomes the other in an exhibition of superior strength and will. The heralded celibacy of the fighter-in-training is very much a part of boxing lore: instead of focusing his energies and fantasies upon a woman the boxer focuses them upon an opponent. Where Woman has been, Opponent must be. (30) In contrast to Oates’s description of boxing’s primal nature, Maggie’s relationship to her opponents contains no suggestion of homoeroticism. Eastwood’s camera approaches Maggie with a prudishness that parallels Frankie’s hesitation to curse in front of her. In montage after montage, Maggie knocks out her opponents in a single blow. The camera doesn’t represent an extended scene of physical contact and violence between women. Similarly, Eastwood doesn’t film the ringside catcalls and sexual comments for which female boxing is notorious. In Eastwood’s sanitized world, Maggie is “Macushla” to her fans, literally their “darling” and “blood,” and they form a welcoming extension of her adopted family. Protected by her boxing family, Maggie appears not as a woman transgressing in a man’s realm, but as an individual defined by her ambition. This framing of her career attempts to resolve the film’s inherent ideological contradictions by presenting Maggie’s final fate not as a general cautionary statement about all women who transgress into male professional worlds, but as a single and unnecessary individual tragedy. In Eastwood’s idealized realm, female boxers have screaming fans and a headliner status equal to men. Benjamin Wallace-Wells, writing for Washington Monthly in 2005, describes a different scene, one more consistent with a sport whose official website advertises “hot hot HOT photo galleries” (www.womenboxing.com):

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Boxing has long existed in a cultural ghetto, revelling [sic] in its corruption and violence. Women’s boxing operates in a further ghetto still. No one other than the fighters really takes it seriously—not the audience, not the referees, not the trainers. I’ve been to more than a dozen women’s fights since that first one, and nearly all were just like it, 45-second bloodfests. It’s hard to figure what appeals to the girls who fight: You get thrown in the ring with some cretin who is trying to rip your head off, you have no idea how to defend yourself, and all the while a thousand sweaty men are shouting at you, trying to be clever about your rear end. No matter how long you fight or how good you become, you’ll never be the headliner, some man will. Nobody cares enough to teach you the craft. The fights are brutal, sexualized, and uncontrollable. (Wallace-Wells 3) In direct contrast to Wallace-Wells’s “sexualized” fights, Maggie walks into the ring as a female boxer as effortlessly as she waits tables. She is greeted only by the sound of supportive and appreciative fans. While it may seem strange to criticize Eastwood for constructing an idealized world of gender equality, where non-lascivious fans cheer on female boxers, it is the violence of Maggie’s final paralysis that makes the film’s representation of female boxing problematic. While the film works hard to portray Maggie as nurturing—as distinctly non-violent—it ends by visiting a great deal of violence on Maggie’s person. If, in essence, there is no longer any gender equality to fight for, if the fight has already been won and women can walk into a boxing arena already with a sense of “somebodiness,” what has been the cultural purpose of Maggie’s battles except to argue paradoxically that women should be kept out of the boxing ring because the sport contradicts what is purported to be their very nature and physically ruins them. Million Dollar Baby represses the female boxer’s challenge to traditional gender roles by depicting Maggie as non-violent, not demonstrably female, and as fighting in a world where gender equality is a problem of the past that can now be sidelined as solved. As mentioned, one of the ways Million Dollar Baby argues against women participating in male sports is through its depiction of Maggie’s physical body. Maggie’s fate may continue and exaggerate the final punishment meted out to the postwar heroine, but she shares none of the sexuality that accompanies



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the combination of melodrama and film noir. The on-screen women of the forties were sensuous creatures, provocative, seductive, and dangerously attractive. Mildred Pierce is perched on a ladder when she first meets Monte—a vantage point that showcases her long legs. Phyllis Dietrichson, the paradigmatic femme fatale in Double Indemnity, threatens to engulf and corrupt all the men around her. By contrast, Eastwood erases Maggie’s sexuality. Ironically, in a film largely devoted to training scenes, Maggie lacks a physical sexual presence. When the camera does play over Maggie’s buff body, it focuses on her back and shoulders and calves, fragmenting and divorcing her female characteristics from her body’s strength and power. With the exception of one comment—“I don’t train girlies”—Eastwood’s Frankie does not look at Maggie as an adult woman. He becomes her “boss,” and Maggie is relegated to being an eternal “baby.”7 Million Dollar Baby inserts itself into contemporary discourses about the female athlete by using a figure new to mainstream Hollywood, the female boxer, and by portraying Maggie’s struggle as occurring in a historical vacuum that does not hold strict prescriptions about how a female athlete should act. Hilary Swank brings to her portrayal of Maggie the imprint of her Academy Award-winning performance as the transgender Brandon Teena in Boys Don’t Cry (1999). Not surprisingly, given Swank’s previous portrayal of gender, Haggis wrote his screenplay with her in mind (Halbfinger 1). Swank provided both screenwriter and director with the unique opportunity to recast Toole’s Maggie. To use Judith Butler’s terms, Maggie rarely performs or interprets her female gender for the audience (405),8 but Swank’s star persona does prepare the spectator for the film’s ending. Boys Don’t Cry meted out punishment on Brandon Teena’s body in the final horrific rape and murder scene. The casting of Swank as Maggie literally fixes the gender fight from the beginning of the film; it alerts the spectator to the possibility that Swank’s physical body will yet again be subjected to extreme violence for the challenges it presents to traditional gender roles. Million Dollar Baby manipulates the seemingly discordant relationship between women and violence at the heart of female boxing, implying that a woman’s control over her body must be curbed. If women are allowed to participate in violent sports, their punishment will be to have this violence inevitably visited upon their bodies. Million Dollar Baby suggests that, much like the foul creature that returns, again and

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again, in the horror film, the woman who gives in to violence, who nurtures this primal male urge, as Maggie herself does by boxing, is doomed to become her own victim. The Abu Ghraib scandal, which broke the spring the film received its academy awards, encourages the audience to read the film’s repression of sexuality and gender as a more direct statement about the relationship between women and violence than its lack of historical referents initially suggests. Million Dollar Baby dramatizes the core issues at the heart of the debate over a woman’s role in the military: the ability of a woman to perform as a man’s equal in a “man’s world,” the impact on men and women when women start successfully “passing” in this world, the female abandonment of the nurturing role, the female capacity for violence and, even more disturbing, the female enjoyment of such violence and its concomitant power. Read in dialogue, the prison photographs and the film articulate a central cultural anxiety over women who professionally “pass” as men, be it by going to war or into the boxing ring. The abuse at Abu Ghraib was startling in itself, but even more disturbing was the fact that women on every level of the military were held responsible for it. Three of the seven accused were women; the prison itself was directed by a woman, General Janis Karpinski; and Major General Barbara Faust was the top U.S. intelligence officer in Iraq, responsible for evaluating the status of detainees before their release. As Joyce Carol Oates’s discussion of the male world of boxing suggests, as a culture we still cling to the Victorian belief that women are the repositories for all that is good and “civilized” in our society. Thus, it seems completely natural that Maggie’s arrival at the Hit Pit catalyzes the creation of a new family and that Frankie should fantasize about retiring to a diner with her. Writing for The Los Angeles Times, Barbara Ehrenreich discusses the cultural impact of the Abu Ghraib images: The photos did something else to me, as a feminist: They broke my heart. I had no illusions about the U.S. mission in Iraq— whatever exactly it is—but it turns out that I did have some illusions about women . . . . A certain kind of feminism, or perhaps I should say a certain kind of feminist naiveté, died in Abu Ghraib. It was a feminism that saw men as the perpetual perpetrators, women as



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the perpetual victims and male sexual violence against women as the root of all injustice. Rape has repeatedly been an instrument of war and, to some feminists, it was beginning to look as if war was an extension of rape. There seemed to be at least some evidence that male sexual sadism was connected to our species’ tragic propensity for violence. That was before we had seen female sexual sadism in action. But it’s not just the theory of this naive feminism that was wrong. So was its strategy and vision for change. That strategy and vision rested on the assumption, implicit or stated outright, that women were morally superior to men. (1–2) Confronted with images like that of an American female soldier giving the camera a gleeful thumbs-up gesture while holding naked and leashed Iraqi prisoners, the viewer hunts for outward signs of the soldiers’ gender. In the face of incontrovertible photographic evidence of the female capacity for violence, we tell ourselves that these soldiers look like men. We may doubt that they are women—in the essential biological ways that our culture defines womanhood. Much as we try to look under Maggie Fitzgerald’s sweats, we search these photographs for breasts, for long hair, for something to prove to ourselves beyond a doubt that they “really” are women. As Ehrenreich laments, we want to disavow not so much the fact that these soldiers are Americans, but that they are American women with a well-documented propensity for physical violence and torture. What is truly at stake in this debate over our “civilized” nature is the cultural re-alignments that must, by definition, accompany any acknowledgment of a general female capacity for violence. While the graphic Abu Ghraib prison photographs are difficult to ignore, Million Dollar Baby solves the “problem” of women who gain power through violence by presenting Maggie as an exception to the rule, as a nurturing individual whose desire to box makes her distinct from other women. In its final forty-five minutes, the film subjects the viewer to a seemingly endless string of full body shots of Maggie’s motionless body and close-ups of her cracked lips and unkempt hair. Million Dollar Baby positions Scrap and Frankie, not Maggie’s demonized family, as her rightful moral guardians. Films like The Green Mile and Shawshank Redemption have accustomed the viewer to believe in the conscience and god-like

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authority of the black male narrator (Colombe 4); thus, when Scrap tells Frankie “I can live with that” when they discuss ending Maggie’s life, the film uses Scrap’s authority to table any further discussion of the relationship between women and physical violence.9 In contrast to the violent punishment of Maggie’s body and spirit, Eastwood explains his understanding of the film’s ending in an interview with New Mobility Magazine: I’m not an expert in this, I’m just telling the story of these two people—and it’s a love story; I never saw it as a boxing movie. I saw it as a great love story about Frankie and the daughter he never had—or never had a relationship with—and that was the main depth of the story, and the dilemma that she wants him to terminate her life, and he can’t even think about it. (Shannon 2) Eastwood positions Frankie’s euthanasia as an act of love. In killing Maggie, Frankie performs the ultimate sacrifice. Frankie’s final selfless actions with Maggie, his surrogate daughter, test and prove his ability to love his “real” daughter. With this positioning, the blame for the tragedy in the film lands squarely at the feet of women who have transgressed. Numerous shots of his daughter’s returned letters and Frankie in religious crisis absolve him of responsibility for their failed relationship, placing the blame on the missing woman. Similarly, the film implies that Maggie’s biological sex is responsible for her death. Confronted with Maggie’s grim future, Frankie accuses Scrap, “it’s your fault she’s lying in there like that. You kept after me until I trained her. I knew I shouldn’t have done it, her being a girl and all. Everything kept telling me not to, everything but you.” While Frankie blames Scrap for getting him to coach Maggie, the internal logic of Frankie’s accusation suggests that Scrap is not the person who is most at fault for this tragedy—Maggie is. If Maggie hadn’t pursued Frankie, if she hadn’t been a “girl,” tragedy would have been averted. The interplay between Frankie’s “real” and adopted families frequently blurs reality and fiction in Million Dollar Baby. The film credits show Eastwood himself combining his “real” and adopted cinematic family on the screen; his son Kyle helped with the score, while his daughter Morgan appears as the younger version of Maggie (Schlosser



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3). Swank’s star persona only continues Eastwood’s elision between his daughter and Maggie and underscores the film’s final desperate drive to return to normative representations of family and gender. In a blurring of reality and fiction, Swank portrays herself as a real-life Maggie, explaining to Mike Wallace why she did not go to the doctor for a blister that turned into a staphylococcus infection that could have killed her: “no one knows, because in the end, that’s what happens to boxers. They get blisters. They get infected. They have injuries, and they keep pushing through it” (Wallace). Swank’s public persona is all the more problematic given her character’s end: by impressing Maggie’s reality on the audience, Swank emphasizes to the audience that we must consider her death and the film’s cautionary message as part of our actual historical moment. In her Academy Award acceptance speech, Swank gushed: I don’t know what I did in this life to deserve all this. I’m just a girl from a trailer park who had a dream . . . . And then Clint. Clint Eastwood. Thank you for allowing me to go on this journey with you. Thank you for believing in me. You’re my “macushla.” Thank you. (Swank) In true Hollywood fashion, Swank’s life echoes Maggie’s and imbues Maggie’s death with purpose. This doubling sets forth the potential that the film’s first surrogate family can survive as Swank, Eastwood, and Freeman are united as “kin” outside the film. If it does nothing else, Swank’s re-establishment of the saccharine cinematic family as “corrective” points to the extent to which the fight has been fixed in Million Dollar Baby. The film broaches major questions about gender and family that define our current historical moment, but it soon sidelines and represses them as Hollywood fantasies. In 2011, we are back in the ring with Mildred Pierce because we never left. We are smack in the middle of a world where renegotiations of gender and family are so anxiety-producing they must be repressed and managed. In particular, the female propensity for violence is all but unrepresentable. Its absence from Million Dollar Baby perpetuates the fiction that we live—and happily continue to live—in a world where women and nuclear families keep the peace, where only men are violent and fight wars. In this world, the female athlete’s strength, the gay

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marriage debate, and the Abu Ghraib prison photographs are cultural aberrations. We, the audience, stand as proxies for more people than we can remember, all of us colluding in a form of cultural amnesia. We are doubles for Frankie’s daughter, prepared to reestablish contact with her father. At the Oscars, we clap and ratify Swank, Eastwood, and Freeman as the cinematic family Million Dollar Baby has already destroyed. Confronted with the film’s inability to represent the relationship between women and violence as anything other than a self-inflicted punishment visited by women upon themselves, we avoid the difficult questions surrounding a woman’s relationship to her physical body and its documented capacity for violence. And in our blank participation, we join a long line of dissemblers. We become those most disturbing of doubles: Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice, who, so long as there was no visual proof, could swear that no abuse and torture by American women ever occurred in Iraq. Philadelphia University notes 1. Perhaps nothing reveals the cultural anxiety that this film offers to “correct” better than the reluctance of critics to label Million Dollar Baby a melodrama. This critical aversion stems both from Eastwood’s uber-masculine background and from melodrama’s undeniable association with that most damned film genre, the female “weepie.” James Berardinelli presents an almost pathological refusal to connect Million Dollar Baby to the melodrama: It is a rich and challenging motion picture that both affirms life and emphasizes its fragility. Eastwood touches our hearts and energizes our minds without resorting to overt manipulation. Million Dollar Baby is refreshingly free of the kind of tear-wringing melodrama that has become seemingly obligatory for this kind of story. (2) In a similar fashion, speaking about the political uproar surrounding the ending, Frank Rich writes for The New York Times: What really makes these critics hate Million Dollar Baby is not its supposedly radical politics—which are nonexistent—but its lack of sentimentality. It is, indeed, no Rocky, and in our America that departure from the norm is itself a form of cultural radicalism. Always a sentimental country, we’re now living fulltime in the bathosphere . . . . Mr. Eastwood’s film, while also boasting great acting, is the only one that challenges America’s current triumphalist daydream. It does so not because it has any politics or takes a stand on assisted suicide but because it has the temerity to suggest that fights can have consequences, that some crises do not have



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black-and-white solutions and that even the pure of heart are not guaranteed a Hollywood ending. What makes some feel betrayed and angry after seeing Million Dollar Baby is exactly what makes many more stop and think: one of Hollywood’s most durable cowboys is saying that it’s not always morning in America, and that it may take more than faith to get us through the night. (3) After reading Rich’s review, one might question how feeling “betrayed and angry after seeing Million Dollar Baby” does not qualify as a “sentimental” response. Not surprisingly, when some reviewers recognize the film’s sentimentalism, they excoriate it as a female characteristic. Writing for The Village Voice, Michael Atkinson comments: In any case, Maggie displays the spunk and heart and right hook of a phenom, and the two truck their ersatz father-daughter dynamic right through to a championship fight. It’s to Million Dollar Baby’s credit that the story lifts off from there, and the spoiler-spawning shift in narrative gears is as menopausally affecting as it is sentimental. (1) Ed Koch, in a rare negative review of this film, confirms that much of the popular critical response to melodrama is still stuck in the fifties. According to Koch, reactions to Million Dollar Baby fall into two categories: boredom (the correct and coded male response) and tears (the incorrect female response): When I left the theater, several women leaving at the same time were in tears. I was not moved by the story. The acting is excellent, but I found the film boring and watching it tired me out. I believe boxing between men is savagery and should be outlawed. Boxing between women is worse, and those wanting to watch it are truly trash. (1) While the gender roles Koch upholds are pedantically conservative, his comments point to a contagion at the root of this film. Boxing might be “savagery,” but those who watch women box will be contaminated by the very sport they observe; they will become “trash,” literally dirty and infected by a cultural and gender abnormality to the point where the only thing society should do with them is to discard them. 2. This political triumvirate of gender, class and race again shapes Modleski’s debate with Sklar (6–9). 3. In their insightful discussion of Maggie’s physical body, Dolmage and DeGenaro argue, “her determination to succeed in the world of boxing stems not only from her love of the sport but also from her desire to avoid a working-class life and a working-class body. Without boxing, Maggie explains, she can expect a life of ‘Oreos and a deep fryer.’ Therefore the vehicle for her mobility up and away from her roots is her body” (2). The authors point out, “The body that Maggie is actually denying when she expresses her distaste for her roots is the body of her mother. . . .

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Maggie’s working-class mother fits into predictable and offensive class archetypes. She is a predictable caricature: the welfare cheat” (3). 4. On February 13, 2004, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom ordered the city clerk to provide same-sex marriage licenses. On February 24, President Bush called for a constitutional amendment to protect the “most fundamental institution of civilization” where the “commitment of husband and wife to love and to serve one another promotes the welfare of children and the stability of society” (2). On May 17, 2004, the Massachusetts Superior Court declared in Goodrich v. Department that it was unconstitutional under Massachusetts law to allow only heterosexual couples to marry. 5. Many thanks are due to Dr. Diane Negra, University of East Anglia, for her suggestion during a panel on “Melodrama: Gender, Genre, and Affect” at the Society of Cinema and Media Studies Conference in Chicago of 2007 that Maggie’s Irishness is one of the key ways that the film intertwines race, class, and gender. 6. Another textual example from the Toole story where Frankie struggles to reconcile the biological femaleness of Maggie’s body with the male violence of boxing occurs when he advises her: “When you throw a right-hand, you got to step out to the left six inches as you move half a step in with both feet. That frees your right hip and leg and foot, like this, so you can snap your ass into your shots. I mean your backside.” “You got it the first time. Got one on me like a forty-dollar mule.” Do you ever, Frankie thought, and long legs with calves like a ballerina. Long arms and a short body, perfect for a fighter. Because of her sweatshirt and T-shirts, he couldn’t be sure about her bustline, but she didn’t seem to be top-heavy, which was good for a girl fighter. (70) 7. One notable exception to this father-daughter relationship is the creepy moment in the film when Frankie jokes to Maggie that he “will propose” if she wins her fight in the U.K. This joke is only possible because sexuality is so completely absent from their relationship. 8. The only reference to Maggie’s actual female body occurs when Shawrelle makes fun of her “itty bitty titties. There like mosquito bites. Man, there’s barely even a mouth full.” I would argue that this interchange—where Maggie responds, “Saw your last flash shot, Will. Spent so much time face down, I thought the canvas had titties”—sidelines any re-negotiation of traditional gender roles to a peripheral character. Instead of having Frankie confront Maggie’s femaleness, this exchange is again foisted upon one of the film’s most regressive and bad characters. 9. In a passage from On Boxing that prefaces Toole’s Rope Burns, Joyce Carol Oates further describes how the sport of boxing rigidly separates male violence from the world of women:



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Boxing is a purely masculine activity and it inhabits a purely masculine world. Which is not to suggest that most men are defined by it: clearly, most men are not. And though there are female boxers—a fact that seems to surprise, alarm, amuse—women’s role in the sport has always been extremely marginal. (At the time of this writing the most famous American woman boxer is the black champion Lady Tyger Trimiar with her shaved head and theatrical tiger-striped attire.) At boxing matches women’s role is limited to that of card girl and occasional National Anthem singer: stereotypical functions usually performed in stereotypically zestful feminine ways—for women have no natural place in the spectacle otherwise. The card girls in their bathing suits and spike heels, glamour girls of the 1950s, complement the boxers in their trunks and gym shoes but are not to be taken seriously: their public exhibition of themselves involves no risk and is purely decorative. Boxing is for men, and is about men, and is men. A celebration of the lost religion of masculinity all the more trenchant for its being lost . . . . In any case, raw aggression is thought to be the peculiar province of men, as nurturing is the peculiar province of women. (The female boxer violates this stereotype and cannot be taken seriously—she is parody, she is cartoon, she is monstrous. Had she an ideology, she is likely to be a feminist.) (70–73) Oates published her reflections in 1987, when women’s boxing was moving away from the Foxy Boxing of the Seventies and Eighties where Tanya Harding and Mia St. John hit each other with pillows (Warren 3). In 1987, Christy Martin had not yet graced the April 15, 1996 cover of Sports Illustrated beneath the title “Lady is a Champ: Boxing’s New Sensation.” In August of 1989, the USA Network aired its first female fight, and eighty percent of the 100,000 polled viewers said they wanted more female boxing (3).

works cited Amenábar, Alejandro. The Sea Inside. Screenplay by Alejandro Amenábar and Mateo Gil. Canal Studios, 2004. Atkinson, Michael. “Aging Bull.” The Village Voice 13 December 2004. 4 April 2005. <www.villagevoice.com>. Berardinelli, James. Rev. of Million Dollar Baby. ReelViews 2004. 17 May 2005. . Brooks, Peter. The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess. With a New Preface. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995. Bush, George W. “President Calls for Constitutional Amendment Protecting Marriage: Remarks by the President, the Roosevelt Room.” 24 February 2004. 26  February  2007.

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Butler, Judith. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.” Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory. Ed. Katie Conboy, Nadia Medina, and Sarah Stanbury. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. 401–17. Chamberlin, Carloss James. “The Magic of Risking Everything for a Dream Nobody Sees: Million Dollar Baby: The Shadow Film.” Senses of Cinema: An Online Film Journal Devoted to the Serious and Eclectic Discussions of Cinema 35 (April–June 2005): n. p. Colombe, Audrey. “White Hollywood’s New Black Boogeyman.” Jumpcut: A Review of Contemporary Media 45 (Fall 2002). 1 March 2007. <www.ejumpcut.org/ archive/jc45.2002/colombe/index.html>. Conboy, Katie, et al. Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. Doane, Mary Ann. The Desire to Desire. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987. Dolmage, Joy, and William DeGenaro. “‘I Cannot Be Like This Frankie’: Disability, Social Class, and Gender in Million Dollar Baby.” Disability Studies Quarterly 25.2 (2005): 1–6. Donnelly, Elaine. “The Army’s Gender War: A New Policy is Unfair to Both Men and Women Soldiers.” National Review Online. 7 January 2005. <www.nationalreview.com> Eastwood, Clint, dir. Million Dollar Baby. Screenplay by Paul Haggis. Based on Rope Burns: Tales from the Corner by F.X. Toole. With Clint Eastwood, Hilary Swank, and Morgan Freeman. Warner Brothers, 2004. ———. Unforgiven. With Clint Eastwood, Morgan Freeman, and Gene Hackman. Warner Brothers, 1992. Ebert, Roger. “Is Oscar’s Best Pic a Masterpiece?” Chicago Sun-Times. 4 March 2005. Ehrenreich, Barbara. “What Abu Ghraib Taught Me.” AlterNet 20 May 2004. 13 May 2005. . Gentry, Ric. “Clint Eastwood: An Interview.” Film Quarterly 42.3 (1989): 12–23. Gledhill, Christine, ed. Home is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film. London: BFI Publications, 1987. Halbfinger, David M. “Filmmaker Finds Metier Exploring a Gray Zone.” New York Times: Arts and Culture 14 March 2005. 6 April 2005. . Haskell, Molly. “The Woman’s Film.” Feminist Film Theory: A Reader. Ed. by Sue Thornham. New York: NYU Press, 1999. 20–30. Ho, Stephanie. “US House Debates Role of Women in Combat.” Voice of America 22 May 2005. 23 May 2005. <www.voanews.com/english/2005-05-22-voa38. cfm>. Kael, Pauline. “The Current Cinema: Saint Cop.” The New Yorker 15 January 1972: 78–82.



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Kaplan, E. Ann. “Sex, Work and Mother/Fatherhood: Consumerism, Science, and Reproductive Technologies in the Postmodern Era.” Motherhood and Representation: The Mother in Popular Culture and Melodrama. New York: Routledge, 1992. 180–219. Koch, Ed. “Koch on Film: Million Dollar Baby.” . The Villager 29 December, 2003–4 January 2004. 7 April 2005. . Lyman, Rich. “Far from Hollywood, Boxer Whose Dreams Really Died in the Ring.” New York Times 9 March 2005. 6 May 2005. <www://query.nytimes.com>. Macklin, Tony. “‘Plant Your Feet and Tell the Truth’: An Interview with Clint Eastwood.” Bright Lights Film Journal 47 (February 2005): n. pagination. Modleski, Tania. “‘Million Dollar Baby’: Father Still Knows Best.” Letter to the Editor. New York Times: Arts and Leisure 20 February 2005. 6 April 2005. . ———, and Robert Sklar. “Million Dollar Baby: A Split Decision.” Movie Review. Cineaste 30.3 (2005): 6–9. Motley, Clay. “‘It’s a Hell of a Thing to Kill a Man’: Western Manhood in Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven.” Americana: The Journal of American Popular Culture (1900–present) 3.1 (2004). 5 April 2005. . Mulvey, Laura. “Notes on Sirk and Melodrama.” Movie 25 (Winter 1977/78): 53– 56. Home is Where the Heart Is: Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film. Ed. Christine Gledhill. London: BFI Publications, 1987. 75–79. Negra, Diane, ed. The Irish in Us: Irishness, Performativity and Popular Culture. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006. Oates, Joyce Carol. On Boxing. Garden City, New York: Dolphin/Doubleday, 1987. Palmer, R. Barton. “The Successful Failure of Therapy in Now, Voyager: The Woman’s Picture as Unresponsive Symptom.” Wide Angle: A Quarterly Journal of Film History, Theory, Criticism, and Practice 8. 1 (1986): 29–38. Pribram, E. Deidre, ed. Female Spectators: Looking at Film and Television. London: Verso, 1988. Rich, Frank. “How Dirty Harry Turned Commie.” New York Times: Arts and Leisure 13 February 2005. 6 April 2005. . Scarborough, Rowan. “Report leans toward women in combat.” The Washington Times. 13 December 2004. 26 February 2007. . Shannon, Jeff. “Clint Eastwood Defends his ‘Baby.’” An Interview with Clint Eastwood. New Mobility Magazine April 2005. 4 April 2005. . Schlosser, Eric. “Shadow Man: On Clint Eastwood, Million Dollar Baby, and the Coming Together and the Falling Apart.” Bright Lights Film Journal 48 (May 2005): n. pagination.

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Swank, Hilary. “Oscar Night: Winner: Actress in a Leading Role.” OSCAR.com 4 April 2004. 27 February 2005. <www.oscar.com/oscarnight/winners/win_ 34483.htm>. Thornham, Sue, ed. Feminist Film Theory: A Reader. Ed. Sue Thornham. New York: NYU Press, 1999. Toole. F. X. Million Dollar Baby: Stories from the Corner. Previously published as Rope Burns. New York: Harper Collins, 2000. Wallace, Mike. “Swank: A Star Who Takes Risks.” Interview with Hilary Swank. CBSNews.com 30 January 2005. 25 May 2005. . Wallace-Wells, Benjamin. “Battered Women: Female Boxing is Brutal and Hopeless.” Washington Monthly March 2005. 6 April 2005. <www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2005/0503.wallace-wells2.html>. Warren, Nancy L. “With this Ring: Gina Guidi.” Curve Magazine March 2000. 7 April 2005. <www.curvemag.com/Detailed/46.html>. Williams, Linda. “Feminist Film Theory: Mildred Pierce and the Second World War.” Female Spectators: Looking at Film and Television. Ed. E. Deidre Pribram. London: Verso, 1988. 12–30. ———. “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess.” Thornham 267–281.





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the contributors

mitchell breitwieser is a member of the Berkeley English department. He is author of Cotton Mather and Benjamin Franklin: The Price of Representative Personality, American Puritanism and the Defense of Mourning, and National Melancoly. His current project is tentatively entitled “The Life and Times of Harry Lime.” cody marrs is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Georgia. He is currently completing a book manuscript, Wayward Poets: Whitman, Melville, Douglass, and the Politics of Time, parts of which have appeared in American Literature and are forthcoming in African American Review. elizabeth festa received her Ph.D. in English from Vanderbilt University. She is currently a faculty member in the Program for Communication Excellence at Rice University and is at work on a book entitled At Home in the Museum: Private Archives and American Literature in the Era of the Professional Museum. kevin arnold is a Ph.D. candidate in English at SUNY-Buffalo. He is currently completing his dissertation, “The Masculine Fantasy and Postwar American Literature,” under the direction of Tim Dean. thomas heise teaches American literature, creative writing, and critical theory at McGill University in Montreal. He is author of Horror Vacui: Poems and Urban Underworlds, and his essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Twentieth-Century Literature, Modern Fiction Studies, African American Review, and The Journal of Popular Culture. megan williams teaches in the Department of Professional Communication at Philadelphia University. She is author of Through the Negative, and her work has appeared in The Philadelphia Inquirer, Film Quarterly, Quarterly Review of Film and Literature, Texas Studies in Language and Literure and elsewhere.