2013/2014, I semestre Corso di laurea magistrale ...

LETTERATURA ANGLOAMERICANA (L-LIN/11) 

Anno accademico: 2013/2014, I semestre 

Corso di laurea magistrale (30 ore, 6 CFU) 

Dott. Fiorenzo Iuliano 

Queer Modernisms 

Il corso, che sarà tenuto in lingua inglese, intende analizzare una serie di testi prodotti negli Stati 

Uniti nei primi decenni del Novecento che problematizzano e mettono in discussione le categorie 

tradizionali di genere e di identità sessuale. In particolare, le lezioni si soffermeranno sui seguenti 

temi, esaminati in relazione ai testi letterari analizzati: (auto)rappresentazione delle donne e 

dell’identità femminile e crisi del ruolo maschile tradizionale nella società e nella cultura degli Stati 

Uniti agli inizi del Novecento; l’omosessualità come nuovo paradigma di identificazione o come strumento 

di radicale decostruzione delle categorie di gender e sessualità; rapporto tra identità sessuale 

e identità etnica. 

Bibliografia 

Testi primari 

1. Henry James, “The Beast in the Jungle” (1903) 

2. Gertrude Stein, Q.E.D. (1903) 

3. Claude McKay, “The Clinic” (1923) 

4. Ernest Hemingway, Fiesta. The Sun Also Rises (1926) 

5. Nella Larsen, Passing (1929) 

Bibliografia teorico-critica 

1. Rita Barnard, “Modern American Fiction”, in Walter B. Kalaidjian, ed., The Cambridge Companion 

to American Modernism, Cambridge UP, Cambridge, 2005, pp. 39-67. 

2. Raman Selden, Peter Widdowson, Peter Brooker, “Gay, lesbian and queer theory”, in A 

Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Literary Theory (5th edition), Harlow, Longman, 2005, pp. 

243-266. 

3. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, from “Introduction: Axtiomatic”, in Epistemology of the Closet, University 

of California Press, Berkeley-Los Angeles, 1990, pp. 1-22. 

4. Eric Haralson, “‘The Other Half Is the Man’: the queer modern triangle of Gertrude Stein, Ernest 

Hemingway, and Henry James”, in Henry James and Modernity, Cambridge UP, Cambridge, 

2003, pp. 173-204. 

5. Marshall Boswell, Carl Rollyson, eds, Encyclopedia of American Literature. 1607 to the Present, 

Facts on File, New York, 2008 (le voci su H. James, G. Stein, C. McKay, E. Hemingway, 

N. Larsen). 

Avvertenze per il corso e per l’esame 

a. Dato il carattere monografico del corso, la frequenza è assolutamente consigliata. Il corso si svolgerà 

in maniera seminariale: per questo motivo, la partecipazione attiva di studenti e studentesse alle 

lezioni sarà valutata ai fini dell’esame finale. 

b. I romanzi e racconti devono essere letti nell'originale. All’esame si dovrà essere in grado di leggere 

e tradurre qualunque parte del testo inglese. Di tutti i testi si richiede comunque una conoscenza 

diretta, critica e dettagliata: vale a dire, non una generica cognizione della trama, o l’apprendimento 

di un commento generale. Studenti/esse dovranno mostrare di orientarsi nei singoli testi ed essere in 

grado di analizzarne e commentarne criticamente le specifiche articolazioni, con riferimento sia ad 

altre parti del testo che alia bibliografia critica prescritta. 

c. I testi di McKay e Stein e tutti i testi critici saranno forniti dal docente in fotocopia. 

d. I testi di James, Hemingway e Larsen sono facilmente reperibili in biblioteca e nelle librerie. Queste 

sono le collocazioni nelle biblioteche di ateneo: 

- Henry James, “The Beast in the Jungle”. Il testo è incluso nelle seguenti raccolte: Fifteen Short Stories 

(Biblioteca di Scienze del Linguaggio; collocazione: AMERICANO NARR JAMEH 004 I); Selected 

Short Stories, a cura di Quentin Anderson (Biblioteca Dante Alighieri; collocazione: DEPOSITO 

C.A1 2473); The Portable Henry James, a cura di Morton Dauwen Zabel (Biblioteca Dante Alighieri; 

collocazione: DEPOSITO C.A1 2410) 

- Ernest Hemingway, Fiesta: Biblioteca di Scienze del linguaggio; collocazione: AMERICANO NARR 

HEMIE 007 X 

- Nella Larsen, Passing: Biblioteca di Scienze del linguaggio, collocazione: AMERICANO NARR 

LARSN 001

2 

RITA BARNARD 

Modern American fiction 

Introduction 

There is no need for us to quarrel with Alfred Kazin when he writes in the 

introduction to On Native Grounds (1942) that modern American fiction 

is “at bottom only the expression” of American life in the late nineteenth 

and early twentieth century. No one cause or project can be singled out 

as the defining feature of this diverse body of writing. “Everything,” says 

Kazin, “contributed to its formation.” Its roots were “nothing less than the 

transformation of our society in the great seminal years after the War” and 

its project was ultimately a cognitive one: “the need to learn what the reality 

of life was in our modern era.” 1 

The social transformation in question has been characterized in many different 

ways, both before and since Kazin’s day. The historian Warren Susman 

saw the period as marking a transition from a producer-capitalist culture 

(with a focus on work, thrift, and self-denial) to a new culture of abundance 

(with a focus on leisure, spending, and self-fulfillment). This broad shift, he 

observed, was partly the consequence of new communications media, which 

affected not only the distribution and circulation of goods and ideas, but 

altered perceptions of time and place and thereby changed consciousness 

itself. The novelist John Dos Passos, whose U. S. A. trilogy (1938) is a veritable 

archive of the technological, political, and linguistic changes that shaped 

the nation from the turn of the century to the Great Depression, saw these 

years in terms of the “crystallization” of monopoly capitalism out of an 

earlier, more individualistic competitive capitalism. 2 

But it is an older writer, Sherwood Anderson, who gives us the most 

vivid thumbnail sketch of the changes from which modern American fiction 

emerged. In Winesburg, Ohio (1922), Anderson observes that the readers 

of his day may already find it difficult to understand the sensibilities of 

people whose lives were shaped by an earlier world of harsh agricultural 

labor: 

39 

Cambridge Companions Online © Cambridge University Press, 2006

ita barnard 

The coming of industrialism, attended by all the roar and rattle of affairs, the 

shrill cries of millions of new voices that have come among us from overseas, the 

going and coming of trains, the growth of cities, the building of the interurban 

car lines that weave in and out of towns and past farmhouses and . . . the 

coming of the automobile has worked a tremendous change in the lives and in 

the habits of thought of our people of Mid-America. Books, badly imagined and 

written though they may be in the hurry of our times, are in every household, 

magazines circulate by the millions of copies, newspapers are everywhere. In 

our day a farmer standing by the stove in the store in his village has his mind 

filled to overflowing with the words of other men ...[He] is brother to the 

men of the cities, and if you listen you will find him talking as glibly and as 

senselessly as the best city man of us all. 3 

The “revolution” of modernity, as Anderson calls it, was not the exclusive 

experience of urban sophisticates: it extended unevenly but inexorably across 

the nation – even into the country store and into the minds of the folks who 

still gathered around the woodstove to chat. 

Now, it is easy to come up with a long line-up of writers – from Upton 

Sinclair to John Dos Passos, from Theodore Dreiser to Nathanael West, and 

from Abraham Cahan to Henry Roth – who have tackled such issues as 

urbanization, industrialization, immigration, and the rise of the mass media 

in their work. But to say that modern fiction takes these topics as its subject 

matter does not fully address the way in which it might “express” its 

historical moment, especially given the fact that this “moment” may not be 

experienced everywhere in the same way, nor at the same pace. How exactly 

did the transformation of modern life change narrative form? And does modern 

fiction in fact provide that special knowledge about modern “reality” of 

which Kazin speaks? Or is there something about modernity that disables 

cognition, if not narrative itself? 

In his “Literary Prophecy” of 1894, the novelist Hamlin Garland, taking 

courage from what he saw as the positive evolution of society, predicted 

the shape that the fiction of “modern man” was to take. He got 

several things right, even though his belief in progress now makes his essay 

seem like the product of a bygone age. Garland believed that the emergent 

literature would react against the traditions of the past and attend fearlessly 

to the uglier contemporary aspects of reality. Narrative techniques, 

he predicted, would be streamlined: “Because the novels of the past were 

long, involved, and given to discussion and comment upon the action,” 

he observes, “so the novel of the future will be shorter” and less obvious 

in its method. Its “lessons” will be brought out, not by explanation, but 

“by placing before the reader the facts of life as they stand related to the 

artist.” 4 

40 



Though few modern writers, living in the wake of World War I and 

the stock market crash of 1929, would have endorsed Garland’s optimistic 

beliefs, there were certainly some who found in the speed, scale, and technological 

inventiveness of the age a stimulus for new forms. Nathanael West, 

for one, also imagined that the short novel would become the quintessential 

American form, since it is more suited to a “hasty” people than the long 

“Scandinavian” tomes of yesteryear. Modern works of fiction only had time 

to “explode” like “cannon balls.” In a culture where “violence is idiomatic,” 

where a brutal crime may not even make it to the front page of a newspaper, 

there is no need to follow a Dostoyevsky in spending whole chapters providing 

the psychological motivation “for one little murder.” A new kind of 

fiction, adapted to an environment of screaming headlines, would have to be 

devised, even if the writer had to turn to commercial forms like the comics 

for inspiration. 

If some American writers could, in a spirit of national bravado, dispense 

with traditional narrative forms (or pretend to do so), the most important 

European theorists of modern fiction, Georg Lukács and Walter Benjamin, 

saw the decline of such forms as a cognitive and political crisis. For Lukács the 

realist novel offered a way of understanding historical causality – the workings 

of the entire social process – by representing the interaction of human 

subjects and the objective world. When this dialectic vision is abandoned, 

he argues, narration loses its dynamic quality: it becomes fixed either on the 

subject or the object. The result is either an overemphasis on the inner psychological 

world or an overemphasis on the external world. Antithetical though 

these two strategies may seem, they are for Lukács identical in their presumption 

of a static world: they tend to produce series of disjointed scenes and to 

turn human lives into still lives. Moreover, while the traditional omniscient 

narrator, deploying the retrospective vantage of the past tense, was able to 

provide the reader with a sense of the overall direction and significance of the 

action, the modernist writer, often using the present tense and experimental 

points of view, is caught up in a flux of emotions, memories, and sense perceptions. 

In Lukács’s view, this loss of an interpretive purchase on the world 

cannot be offset by attaching a symbolic meaning to objects or incidents. In 

fact, all of modernism’s technical experimentation seemed dangerous to him 

in that it undermined the significance and transformative potential of human 

action: hence the harsh prescriptiveness that characterizes his work. 5 

Though more sympathetic to modernism than Lukács, Benjamin also 

despaired of drawing any “lesson” or useful knowledge from modern fiction. 

Experience itself, or so he declared in his “Storyteller” essay of 1936, 

had “fallen in value”: its inherent meaningfulness and narratability had been 

lost. Thus the soldiers who returned from the battlefields of the World War I 

41 



had “grown silent, not richer – but poorer in communicable experience.” 

But unlike Lukács, for whom the realist novel represented a cognitive ideal, 

Benjamin regarded the novel itself as an early symptom of a crisis in narration. 

While the storyteller, whom Benjamin locates in a pre-capitalist world 

of artisanal production, could readily offer advice – the proverbial “moral of 

the story” – to his auditors, the novelist, who emerges in a bourgeois world 

of mechanized production and isolated consumption, can reveal the “meaning 

of life” only at the conclusion of strenuous artistic labors. In the bustle 

of the modern world, even this hard-won, synthetic meaning threatens to 

disappear. For as mechanized production accelerates, the novel is gradually 

replaced by “information” – by the shards of narrative we find in the newspaper. 

Feeding on experiences that are in constant danger of obsolescence, 

the fractured format of the daily news destroys our narrative abilities and 

depreciates experience even further: “modern man no longer works at what 

cannot be abbreviated.” 6 Thus brevity, the very quality that some American 

writers celebrated as an exciting innovation, comes to be viewed in 

Benjamin’s mournful meditation as a distressing symptom of a reified world. 

With these initial reflections on modernist form in place, we are ready for 

a thought experiment. In light of the terms set up so far, let us ask ourselves 

what the most thoroughly “modern” American novel might be, and then 

consider whether or not that novel can be viewed as a representative product 

of the period. Or to put the question differently and more perversely: which 

American novel would Georg Lukács have hated the most? 

I vote that the prize should go – why not? (we are experimenting here) – to 

Nathan Asch for Pay Day, published to no acclaim whatsoever in 1930. Let 

me briefly describe its relevant qualities, before returning to broader considerations. 

Pay Day is a compact novel: the action, such as it is, is confined 

to a twelve-hour period, from the end of one workday to the dawn of the 

next. Even so, it is episodic, lacking in any sense of cumulative significance. 

The desultory character of the narration (which is mimicked in the disappointingly 

plotless movie the main character goes to see midway through the 

novel) is presented as an effect of the modern settings from which the various 

chapters derive their titles: “The Subway,” “The Street,” “The Speakeasy,” 

“The Taxi,” and so forth. In the chapter entitled “The L,” for instance, 

the stream-of-consciousness narration records one trivial urban scene after 

another in rapid succession; it mimics the passive, spectatorial experience 

of the commuter, looking out at the passing cityscape from a fast-moving 

train. Pay Day’s modernity can also be seen in its obvious economic concerns. 

Though Asch’s novel is devoid of the Jazz Age glamor of, say, Fitzgerald’s fiction, 

it is similarly concerned with the emerging ethos of consumption. The 

novel’s antihero, a spotty young clerk called Jim Cowan, having received 

42 



his pitifully small paycheck, feels compelled to hit the town and blow his 

earnings on a date with a waitress. But since Cowan’s means are so petty, his 

version of “nightlife” is entirely unromantic: it merely exacerbates his sense 

of resentment. Indeed, the rapid oscillation of his emotions, which switch in 

a matter of seconds from self-satisfaction to self-pity and then to aggression 

is a symptom of the powerlessness of the white-collar flunkey, liable to be 

fired at any minute. 

But Pay Day, while clearly symptomatic of modernity, at times seems diagnostic 

of it as well: it draws the reader’s attention to the way the distraction of 

urban life impedes active political involvement. The novel takes place on the 

night of August 23, 1927, the same night that anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti 

were executed in Boston. Headlines, newsboys, and taxi-drivers constantly 

remind Cowan of this significant political event. But the barrage of sense 

impressions to which he is subjected make it impossible for him to reflect on 

the implications of the men’s deaths: he only remembers the executions at 

the end of the novel, when a new day dawns without bringing much insight 

or hope to Manhattan’s ordinary Jims and Joes. 

Pay Day is deeply responsive to some of the quintessential features of 

social modernity and to the challenges they present to conventional fictional 

forms. But the truth is that it is neither as apolitical as Lukács would assume, 

nor is it a particularly typical novel of its day (if there is such a thing), even 

though it resembles the novels of Dos Passos and West in various ways, 

and seems to have influenced Richard Wright’s Lawd Today!, an equally 

plotless urban novel which takes place on February 12, 1936: the anniversary 

of Lincoln’s birthday. Pay Day does what failed works of fiction often 

do: it serves as a kind of limit text compared to which other more successful 

or canonical works might seem more traditional, less tailormade to the 

theorist’s or polemicist’s order. If we think of the vast body of fiction produced 

in the United States between 1895 and 1939, the dates that frame this 

volume, it is clear that brevity, for one thing, did not turn out to be a universal 

feature. Alongside the many compact novellas and the short story 

cycles of the period (including Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, Toomer’s Cane, 

Hemingway’s In Our Time, Faulkner’s The Unvanquished and The Wild 

Palms, Steinbeck’s Pastures of Heaven and Tortilla Flat, Caldwell’s Georgia 

Boy, and McCarthy’s The Company She Keeps), there are also many voluminous 

works, like the novels of James T. Farrell and Thomas Wolfe. Alongside 

the many works that are urban in their setting and inspiration, there are 

also many that take place in far-flung rural places: in Faulkner’s Northern 

Mississippi, in Hurston’s Everglades, in McNickle’s Montana, in Hemingway’s 

Upper Peninsula, or in another country, for that matter – in rural Spain, 

on the quay at Smyrna, or in the mud of the Italian front. And alongside 

43 



works that are concerned with pathological states and experimental points 

of view, there are also many works, especially in the 1930s, which return to 

various versions of realism and documentary. Whole new genres concerned 

with action rather than inner states arose: one might think, for instance, of 

the many strike novels produced as part of the experiment in Proletarian 

Literature, and of popular genres like the Western and the hardboiled 

detective novel. The storyteller’s voice, finally, did not entirely disappear: 

Faulkner’s The Hamlet (1940) offers us the folksy narration of the loquacious 

sewing machine salesman, V. K. Ratliffe, while Hurston’s masterpiece, 

Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), presents itself as a life story shared 

between two friends as they sit on the porch one evening. And West’s Miss 

Lonelyhearts (1933), while it traces the debilitating effects of the mass media 

on individuals’ ability to narrate their lives, also recognizes that “lessons” 

and “advice,” which once circulated so freely in traditional communities, 

had reappeared in commercial guise in advertisements and newspaper sob 

columns. 

Literary critics are fond of quoting famous authors who announce the 

exact moment (more or less) when social modernity transformed the character 

of life, whether it is Virginia Woolf, who declared that “on or about 

December 1910, human character changed,” or Robert Musil, who observed 

that “there was a sudden rift” in European civilization in 1914, when “all 

of a sudden, the world was full of violence,” or Willa Cather, who lamented 

that “the world broke in two in 1922 or thereabouts.” 7 The reason for our 

attachment to these dramatic pronouncements is perhaps that they relieve 

us of the obligation of considering the extent to which the old and the new 

coexist, with varying degrees of tension, in any given period. It is important 

to remember that the rapid pace of social change brought with it a hankering 

for tradition and that the revolution of modernity triggered its counterrevolutions. 

The “New Era” or “Jazz Age,” as the historian Lawrence Levine 

observes, was in many ways backward-looking: it was certainly an age of 

new technologies and lifestyles, of the automobile, the movies, the flappers, 

and the cynical “Lost Generation,” but it was also a time when many Americans 

tried to turn the clock back from the ideas and the progressive spirit of 

the prewar years. Fundamentalism, nativism, and the Ku Klux Klan flourished, 

Prohibition was instituted, and Left-wing political movements were 

suppressed. 8 The culture of the 1930s was similarly complex. Even though 

radical commitments were widespread and Communist Party membership 

was at a high during this decade, it was also a time when insecurity imposed 

a certain conformity and when a homegrown idea of “culture” thrived: “The 

American Way of Life” was, in fact, a coinage of the so-called Red Decade. 

And if the World Fair of 1939 celebrated modern technology (including the 

44 



first prototype of television), it was also the year when Colonial Williamsburg 

was reconstructed and opened to tourists. 

It should therefore not surprise us that novels like Pay Day and Gone 

With the Wind (to reach for its polar opposite) should be produced within 

five years of each other. Nor should it surprise us that a novelist like Willa 

Cather should deploy some of the techniques of the modern novel – its 

spareness, its attentiveness to point of view and structure – to voice a criticism 

of modernity and celebrate what she saw as the anti-materialist values of a 

pioneer aristocracy. Anyone approaching American culture in the first three 

decades of the twentieth century has to untangle “a web of ambivalence” 

(204), a manifestation of what Levine identifies as 

the central paradox of American history: a belief in progress coupled with a 

dream of change, an urge towards the inevitable future combined with a longing 

for the irretrievable past; a deeply ingrained belief in America’s unfolding 

destiny and a haunting conviction that the nation was in a state of decline. 

(191) 

The task of offering an overview of modern American fiction is therefore 

a difficult one, and I would like to approach it by adopting a modernist 

strategy: that of reducing things to their basic constitutive elements. In the 

pages that follow, I will consider a number of key works under three very 

simple rubrics: place, time, and value (both moral and economic). But there 

is an additional element of narrative – one so fundamental that it often eludes 

discussion. That element is, quite simply, the word, which modernist writers 

often tried to make especially visible to their readers by techniques of defamiliarization, 

repetition, or poetic figuration. Literary historians often cite 

the powerful passage from Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms (1929) in which 

his narrator summarily bans an entire vocabulary of idealistic generalization: 

I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and 

the expression in vain . . . [F]or a long time now I had seen nothing sacred, 

and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the 

stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it. 

There were many words you could not stand to hear and finally only the names 

of places had dignity. 9 

But which words were newly permissible and resonant in the fiction of the 

period? We might think, first, of the perfectly ordinary words (“beginning,” 

“interesting,” “always,” and “certainly”) that came to seem like familiar 

strangers in Stein’s rhythmic reiterations. Or, we might think of the spare 

diction of Hemingway’s best novels: the way words like “nice” or “utilize” 

come to seem overdetermined in the conversations of his terse expatriates. 

45 



We might think next of the folksy vocabulary Hurston (writing “with the 

map of Florida on her tongue”) introduced into American fiction: not only 

such playful, earthy words as “woof” and “boogerboo,” but also hightoned 

malapropisms like “monstropolous,” “combuction,” “diasticutis,” 

and “freezolity.” We might think also of those ponderous adjectives like 

“myriad,” “immemorial,” “immutable,” and “impervious,” which, along 

with a few “grand, truculent indomitables,” gave the idiosyncratic flavor to 

Faulkner’s work. 10 We might think furthermore of the many brand names 

that come into play as markers of consumerist know-how: Chesterfields, 

Wrigley, Coca-Cola, Listerine, Remington, Kodak, and Chrysler. And we 

might consider, finally, the grim, monosyllabic vocabulary that brought to 

life the world of the marginal men of the 1930s: words like “vag,” “gat,” 

“flop,” “bull,” “drag,” and “stiff,” which reminded readers how far America 

remained from the place of promise and prosperity projected by the utopian 

writers of the Progressive Era. 

For Lukács, the fact that modern fiction made individual words noticeable 

was yet another sign of its impotence – of its failure to provide the sense of 

hierarchy, by which words, sentences, and paragraphs could be subordinated 

to the narrative’s overall revelation of the social totality. But for many American 

modernists it was precisely by attending to words, by revitalizing them 

and by placing them in new contexts that the novel could begin to do political 

work. “[W]e have only words” against “Power Superpower,” declared John 

Dos Passos near the end of U. S. A. And at the end of Pay Day (to return to 

our typical-atypical modern novel), Nathan Asch puts a striking message in 

the mouth of a drunk who denounces his fellow subway passengers for their 

inattention to Sacco and Vanzetti’s unjust execution. In a world of headlines, 

of the easy amusements of sports page and the comics, the orator proclaims, 

language becomes “old, stale . . . used too much.” What is needed is “a way 

to wake [people] up, to make them realize words.” 11 In his insistence on this 

need, if in no other respect, Asch is a representative voice of his times. 

Place 

In recent years, a concern with spatiality (as opposed to temporality) has 

come to be regarded as the defining trait of postmodernism (as opposed to 

modernism). But broad distinctions of this sort are not, in fact, so readily 

made. Modernism, after all, has long been associated with a movement 

from the country to the city – and thus with questions of place and space. 

Moreover, many of the technical innovations in the modernist novel (e.g., 

the creation of the impressionistic, synchronous, anti-individualist form of 

narration that we see in a work like Manhattan Transfer [1925]) are the 

46 



result of an intensified interest in the writer’s immediate milieu – in what 

we may call the “location of culture.” The rise of a theoretically sophisticated 

cultural geography over the past decade or so suggests that critical 

interest in the socio-spatial aspects of modernist fiction is likely to remain 

strong. With its emphasis on the dialectics of subjectivity and space and the 

textual nature of geographical environments, the new cultural geography 

may enable new readings of virtually forgotten urban novels, such as Waldo 

Frank’s City Block (1922) and Albert Halper’s Union Square (1933), both of 

which explore the way in which human interactions are defined by complex, 

but narrowly circumscribed physical spaces. 

But postcolonial studies too, with its profound questioning of the relationship 

between cultural centers and peripheries, may come to provide new 

perspectives on the imaginative geographies of modern American fiction. In 

fact, the story that Malcolm Cowley tells in his memoir Exile’s Return (1934) 

of a generation’s cultural deracination, its exile, and its eventual reclaiming of 

native turf now strikes one as very similar to the creative struggles recounted 

some thirty or forty years later by postcolonial intellectuals (and this similarity 

reveals much about the dramatic shift in power between America 

and Europe over the course of the twentieth century). Cowley notes that 

the writers of his generation, the men and women born around the turn 

of the century, would have considered the site of their childhood – a farm 

in Wisconsin, a plantation house among the cane brakes, a bluff overlooking 

the Cumberland, or a Nebraska prairie – as “home.” But their formal 

education was aimed at “destroying whatever roots they had in the soil” 

and “making [them] homeless citizens of the world.” They absorbed the 

message that art, learning, and literature existed “at an indefinite distance 

from [their] daily lives” – that “[w]isdom was an attribute of Greece and 

art of the Renaissance; glamour belonged only to Paris or Vienna.” 12 For 

the modernists of Cowley’s generation, as for contemporary writers like 

Nadine Gordimer and Ngugi Wa Thiong’O, formal education was a matter 

of cultural alienation, of reading books that took place elsewhere, and their 

intellectual self-discovery involved either a “journey back” or a rewriting 

of established cultural geographies – the difficult enterprise of “moving the 

center,” as Ngugi puts it. 13 

In the case of the modern American writer, however, one must specify that 

the “return” would not exactly be a journey home. (We need only recall Hemingway’s 

depiction of a returned veteran’s profound dislocation in “Soldier’s 

Home.”) The “return” was more likely to involve the discovery of forms in 

which a sense of being out of place or off-center could be turned to aesthetic 

advantage. Modern American fiction, as Kazin observes, is characterized by 

a sense of “alienation on native grounds” (ix). 

47 



This structure of feeling is captured perfectly in Sherwood Anderson’s 

“Certain Things Last” (1920), a self-reflexive story on the difficulties of 

finding a place in and about which to write. The city of Chicago, where the 

story’s narrator lives, presents ceaseless distractions to the would-be writer: 

even as he confesses his problems to the reader, he hears the driver of a horsedrawn 

coal wagon cursing at the driver of a Ford. His boyhood home, the 

only place he can turn to in memory, happens to be “a dreary, lonely little 

place in the far western section of the state of Nebraska.” It is, Anderson 

tells us, the kind of place that makes a “middle-westerner” dream that he is 

in Italy, or in a Spanish town where “a dark-looking man is riding a bony 

horse along a street,” or that “he is being driven in a sled over the Russian 

steppes by a man whose face is covered in whiskers.” But the narrator realizes 

almost instantly that his imagined “Italy,” “Spain,” and “Russia” derive 

from “the cartoons in the newspapers” or lectures he might have attended 

in a church hall and the story ends with his recognition that he should write 

about things closer at hand: about the woman who is with him, or about a 

certain “moment” that “changed the whole current of his life.” 14 

This particular solution is vintage Anderson; but the story is evocative 

of the challenge confronting many modern American writers and to which 

they produced an immense variety of responses. Let us consider the case 

of Willa Cather. In contrast to Anderson’s narrator, she seems effortlessly 

able to discover the stuff of novels in rural Nebraska. By dint of a nostalgic 

recollection of her childhood on the plains, she is able to project a sense of 

cultural authority and normativity with regard to the period of early settlement, 

when pioneer virtue was leavened by the spirit of cosmopolitanism, 

contributed by large numbers of immigrants from various parts of Europe: 

Germany, Norway, France, Denmark, Poland, and Bohemia. Cather’s success 

in imaginatively “moving the center” westward is such that her cowboyscholar 

Tom Outland in The Professor’s House (1926) is able to compare 

the Aeneid to a mesa in New Mexico without the slightest sense that the cultural 

importance of the former outweighs that of the latter. But we should 

not therefore underestimate the initial difficulty of writing about a place 

where, as the narrator Jim Burden puts it in My Ántonia (1915), “[t]here was 

nothing but land: not country at all, but the material out of which country 

was made.” This difficulty is strikingly underscored by Cather herself when 

she reminds us in 1931 that when she published her first novel Alexander’s 

Bridge in 1912, the proper setting for fiction was still thought to be a drawing 

room – and a drawing room full of “smart people and clever people” to 

boot. 15 

If Cather’s work was enabled and her sense of belonging enriched by the 

historical fact of mass immigration, the opposite was true for some writers 

48 



of Anglo-American descent. An extreme and early case may be that of Henry 

Adams, the son of presidents, “American of Americans, with Heaven knows 

how many Puritans and Patriots behind him,” who recorded in The Education 

of Henry Adams (1906) his mournful sense of having been displaced 

by the new residents of America’s cities – the energetic immigrants, “still 

reeking of the Ghetto” – and who likened himself to “the Indians or the buffalo 

who had been ejected from their heritage.” 16 The anxieties about new 

demographic configurations and forms of social mobility registered here were 

exacerbated after World War I, when they influenced the characterization, 

narrative shape, and symbolic geographies of some of the most celebrated 

novels of the Jazz Age. For all its interest in social climbing and self-invention, 

The Great Gatsby (1925) seems quite conservative if we attend to its treatment 

of place, in both the social and geographical sense of the term. Fitzgerald 

presents New York, “with its racy adventurous feel,” as the site of a 

new urban poetry. But he also imagines it as the all-too-fluid location of a 

new kind of threat: in the novel’s “metropolitan twilight,” the pre-eminent 

place of a wealthy white man is challenged every time a group of “modish 

Negroes” in a fine limousine happens to pass him in traffic. 17 The established 

social hierarchy is also symbolically undermined by the undifferentiated desolation 

of the Valley of Ashes, the uncanny dumping ground through which 

commuters from the Long Island suburbs must pass on their way to the city. 

Critics have often remarked on Jay Gatsby’s confused sense of geography 

(social and otherwise), as reflected in his ludicrous claim that he is the scion 

of a prominent midwestern family from San Francisco. But the closing meditations 

of Nick Carraway, the novel’s cautious narrator, also attach some 

rather idiosyncratic meanings to the “East” and the “West” of the United 

States. In a reactionary version of an exile’s return, Nick reclaims the West 

as the “warm center of the world” rather than the “ragged end of the universe,” 

and idealizes the kind of city “where dwellings are still called through 

decades by a family’s name” (184). This resigned conclusion expresses a nostalgic 

hankering for a landscape in which “Mr. Nobod[ies] from Nowhere” – 

the charming Gatbsy no less than the uncharming Jewish gangster, Meyer 

Wolfsheim – would be excluded almost automatically. The novel’s symbolic 

geography lends considerable credence to Walter Benn Michaels’s judgment 

that The Great Gatsby, like many of the major novels of the midtwenties, 

is fraught with nativist fears that demand narrative resolution: in 

this case the hope that the hybrid entanglements and “gonnegtions” spawned 

by a polyglot metropolis may be confined, somehow, to the dangerous 

“East.” 

The quintessentially modern sense of dislocation and alienation is also 

a crucial theme in immigrant fiction. In these texts the protagonists’ 

49 



development of any coherent sense of identity is impeded by a pervasive sense 

of being simultaneously in America and “in a world somewhere, somewhere 

else.” 18 This peculiar self-division is beautifully captured in the rendering of 

the immigrants’ accented English in Henry Roth’s Call it Sleep: “Land where 

our Fodder’s Died” turns the anthem “My Country ‘tis of Thee’ into a parody 

and makes nonsense of its nativist geography. The confusion captured 

here is in no way simplified by the fact that second-generation immigrants 

retained little if any memory of the Europe of their fathers and mothers. In 

Mike Gold’s semi-autobiographical Jews Without Money (1930), the young 

Mikey is able to get some idea of what his mother’s beloved Hungarian 

forests must have been like only during a rare visit to the Bronx Park, and 

he can understand his father’s longing for the communal sociability of his 

Romanian stetl only in a neighborhood wine cellar, where a traditional musician 

plays the old shepherd songs on the cymbalon. But, for all its old-world 

associations, the wine cellar – like New York itself – is a hybrid space, offering 

confused models of identity: on one wall there is a picture of Theodor 

Hertzel and, on the other, a picture of Teddy Roosevelt charging up San 

Juan Hill. It is no wonder that Mikey ends up dreaming a syncretic dream of 

“a Messiah who would look like Buffalo Bill.” The difficulty of imaginary 

journeys “home” makes for a paradoxically “forward-looking nostalgia” in 

immigrant fiction: it is characterized by a yearning for places, ideals, and 

forms of expression that are not yet in existence. 19 

The time-honored pastoral tradition, consequently, tends to play out in 

problematic ways in these mostly urban texts. The opposition between country 

and city, as James T. Farrell once observed, is not particularly real to 

people “affected since childhood by the sights, sounds, odors, and objects 

of an industrial city.” But the residual power of this opposition leaves them 

entrapped in “a technical dilemma, deriving from ...adichotomy between 

the objects and sensations they have sought to describe and the language 

and symbolism they have inherited.” 20 The point is well illustrated in Jews 

Without Money. Though Gold denounces a teacher who preaches about 

nature to the children of a “petrified city” (to do so, he says, is to offer 

“snapshots of food to a starving man” [40]), he nevertheless represents the 

abandoned lots where the tenement children play as the Western plains and 

rhapsodizes about the clumps of grass which bravely managed to sprout from 

cracks in the sidewalk. Gold is ultimately unable to imagine revolution without 

recourse to the most pastoral of tropes: it is figured at the end of the novel 

in terms of a rebuilding of the ghetto as “a garden for the human spirit” (309). 

And even Farrell’s own work is not entirely free of the dilemma he identifies. 

His depictions of Chicago’s South Side neighborhoods in the Studs Lonigan 

trilogy are by no means romantic; yet there are moments when he turns to 

50 



natural images to express the energies of an urban scene in which even his 

more loutish characters are, at times, able to take some pleasure. Thus, in 

Young Lonigan: “Studs looks about at the patches in the grass that Martin 

and his gang had torn down playing their cowboy and Indian games. There 

was something about the things he watched that seemed to enter Studs as 

sun entered a field of grass; and as he watched, he felt that the things he saw 

were part of himself, and he felt as good as if he were warm sunlight.” 21 This 

persistence of pastoral ideas, however attenuated, incongruous, and ironic, 

is a mark of modernism’s difference from nineteenth-century naturalism: it is 

one thread in the intricate “web of ambiguity” of modern American culture. 

But as with all generalizations, this observation requires qualification. 

For in the work of Richard Wright, one of the most important American 

modernists, the pastoral seems to have lost all relevance, even on the level 

of figuration – and for good reason. For many African-American migrants 

to northern cities, the historical memory of slavery and the indignities of 

Jim Crow foreclosed on nostalgia for rural life. The sole utopian moment in 

Native Son (1940) is thus inspired by an urban scene viewed from a prison 

window: a vision of tall buildings expanding and unfolding as a result of the 

collective desires and longings of men. 

The radical intervention of Wright’s dark urban masterpiece is strikingly 

underscored if we relate it to a problematic moment in “Certain Things Last” 

that I have refrained from discussing so far. Though Anderson’s sketch ultimately 

dismisses the narrator’s dreams of discovering “simpler” milieus in 

foreign places, it nevertheless holds on to certain primitivist notions as a 

way of making the modern city more available for fiction. The narrator 

imagines that the song of a Negro, humming to himself as he goes along 

the street, might “[freshen] the air above the hot stuffy city” in the way that 

“a tiny stream running down a hill might freshen the plains below” (4). Such 

folksy fantasies of redemption are unthinkable in the relentlessly modern 

and secular world of Native Son. For Bigger Thomas, the novel’s protagonist, 

the city of Chicago remains an airless, oppressive place. Though his 

mother may still hum spirituals (including “Steal away, steal away to Jesus / 

Steal away home”), her singing cannot mitigate the novel’s profound sense 

of homelessness: a homelessness that is a material rather than a metaphysical 

condition for African-Americans, inadequately housed as they are in 

“a prescribed corner of the city.” 22 Native Son, in effect, replaces the dualities 

of the pastoral with the more intractable and volatile duality between the 

white world of comfort and security and the black world of fear, shame, and 

deprivation. Indeed, duality is too weak a term: for what Kazin describes as 

the disquieting “irony” in Americans’ “possession” of their native grounds 

(ix) is strikingly politicized in Native Son, to the point that it becomes a 

51 



full-blown ethical and political contradiction. The brunt of Wright’s critique 

of the structural violence of urban segregation is directed at the self-serving 

morality of the wealthy realtor Dalton, who gives millions of dollars to educate 

and uplift “Negroes” but makes a fortune out of renting rat-infested 

properties to them. 

The dynamic of blindness and insight exposed here has crucial implications 

for the novel’s form and style. Ways of seeing are simultaneously ways of not 

seeing; and black and white characters, shaped by their radically different 

experiences, do not see the same city. 23 This explains why Native Son, for 

all its grimness and interest in social causality, is resolutely modernist, rather 

than naturalist: though Wright was concerned to get the Chicago street map 

exactly right, the city is never objectively described. While the young communists, 

Jan Erlone and Mary Dalton, are able to admire the city’s grand 

skyline and its cultural landmarks, these things are meaningless to Bigger, 

who can perceive the city only as a treacherous and airless labyrinth, which 

permits no possibility of escape. Even at the end of the novel, when Bigger’s 

lawyer provides him with a sense of perspective – he gains for a moment 

“a pinnacle of feeling upon which he can stand and see vague relations he 

had never dreamed of” (782) – he cannot shake the sense that this vision, 

like the mendacious promises of cinema and advertising, may lead him into 

a blind alley. 

The nightmarish urban scenes of the novel’s second section (reminiscent 

of the gangster films of the period) are thus essentially expressionist: they 

reveal Bigger’s vulnerability, entrapment, and alienation. But they also hint, 

at times, at more allegorical interpretive possibilities. The abandoned shells 

of houses on the South Side, where “windows gape blackly, like the eyesockets 

of empty skulls” (661) are also an objective correlative of the blindness 

of their owners: of the ruling classes, who, as Bigger’s lawyer puts it, 

“could not have built nations on so vast a scale had they not shut their eyes 

to the humanity of other men” (810). With this sweeping indictment, the 

implications of the novel move far beyond their immediate time and place, 

looking ahead to literary and critical movements still to follow: to the work 

of African-American writers like Baldwin and Ellison, to Existentialism, and 

to contemporary theory, where questions of blindness and insight, visibility 

and marginalization, and so forth, have been of paramount concern. 

In Wright’s work, the great modernist discovery of point of view becomes 

more than a technical device for exploring individual experience. It becomes 

a matter of ideology, an effect of one’s location in the divisive geographies 

of American Apartheid. Native Son, in short, forces us to consider the relationship 

between power and knowledge and between subjectivity and space 

in strikingly contemporary ways. 

52 



Time 

To take on the concept of time in modern American fiction is a risky venture. 

Not only is it a difficult and abstract topic, but in our postmodern academy 

it has come to seem like an outmoded one as well: “Time has become a 

nonperson,” Fredric Jameson remarks in a recent essay, and novelists, poets, 

philosophers, and critics alike have “stopped writing about it.” 24 Yet time 

is not only a constitutive element of all narration, but a major thematic 

preoccupation in modern American fiction. Modernity, as we have already 

seen, is intimately connected to the idea of acceleration: in the modern world, 

as Benjamin suggests, Erfahrung (i.e., experience in the sense of wisdom 

or skills developed over a long period of time) is gradually displaced by 

Erlebnis (i.e., experience in the sense of immediate sensations). 25 Implicit in 

Benjamin’s assertion is a sense that the dominant mode of production affects 

our most basic ways of processing the world; thus modern consciousness is 

shaped by the rapidity and seriality of assembly line production. But forms 

of leisure, too, as we have seen in Asch’s Pay Day, can affect those aspects of 

human experience most suited to conventional novelistic treatment: memory, 

desire, and hope. 

In his intellectual history of the period from 1880–1918, Stephen Kern 

identifies a discovery of interior or “private time” (the kind of flexible temporality 

we see in stream-of-consciousness narration) as one of the most 

important cultural phenomena of early modernist culture. 26 This emphasis 

on interiority and “private time,” much as Lukács might denounce it, 

is not without a social dimension: it is, at least in part, a reaction against 

the increasing impact of the standardized time of factories, offices, and train 

schedules. Modernist time, in other words, can itself be historicized, even 

if the experiments of some modern writers lay in the excision of any sense 

of historical context and historical causality from their work. It is useful to 

speculate, along with Jameson, about the conditions that produced modern 

literature’s obsession with time. Modernism, he insists, is best grasped 

as the culture of an incomplete and uneven modernity. Until World War 

II, Europe was only partly industrialized and partly bourgeois. The creators 

of modernist literature were often men and women who had been 

born in small villages, but who pursued their careers in large industrial 

cities: they were people who lived in two distinct worlds simultaneously. 

Though fascinated by the new and absorbed in it in their daily lives, they 

were also constantly aware of the old: of residual modes of production that 

they themselves had witnessed or participated in. Their experiments with 

narrative time can thus be related to the fact that they had to negotiate in 

their own lived experience the disjuncture between modern and premodern 

53 



temporalities. 27 Now, it is certainly true that the United States was by the 

end of the nineteenth century the most modern nation in the world (and the 

oldest, as Gertrude Stein perversely liked to put it, since it entered the age of 

mass production the soonest), but the impact of modernity was registered 

unevenly across its vast territorial sprawl. 28 Many American modernists, 

like their European counterparts, had a strong sense of alternate ways of living, 

whether through memories of rural childhoods, through what we might 

loosely call anthropological experiences, or simply through an alertness to 

the residual cultural forms still evident in their daily lives. It is no accident, 

by this logic, that it was Faulkner, the Mississippian, who, of all the major 

American modernists, had the keenest sense of a pre-industrial mode of production 

(namely, plantation slavery) and pushed the experimentation with 

time the furthest. 

The obvious entry point for a discussion of the temporalities of American 

modernism, however, is not the work of Faulkner, but that of William James, 

to whom we owe that useful and flexible term “stream of consciousness.” The 

project of James’s Principles of Psychology (1890) was ultimately to enhance 

our appreciation of the richness of our experiential lives and cognitive processes. 

It is fair to say, therefore, that James gave certain philosophical weight 

to the notion of living for the moment: one of the key ideas of the emergent 

culture of abundance. Experience (in the sense of Erlebnis) is of immense 

importance in James’s thinking. Indeed, in his chapter on “The Stream of 

Thought,” he makes the case that each experience we have of a given fact 

is essentially unique. This is not to say that for him the truth is made up of 

raw sensory experiences, severed from the past or future: James’s concern 

is not to atomize time, but to “thicken” our sense of the present moment: 

to imagine a sustained or “specious present,” imbued with a “halo” of past 

experience and future anticipation. James’s interest, moreover, is not so much 

in our perceptions of fixed objects, but in those experiences of direction and 

tendency that are not readily labeled by nouns – except perhaps by strange 

new terms like “nextness, andness, and ifness.” 29 

The influence of Jamesian psychology is palpable in the early experimental 

fiction of his student Gertrude Stein: the short story cycle Three Lives (1906) 

and the sprawling, self-reflexive immigrant saga, The Making of Americans 

(1923). Though Three Lives takes its inspiration from Flaubert (Stein had 

tried her hand at translating his Trois Contes before embarking on her own 

stories), it shows no interest in the dense depiction of social milieu that 

characterizes Flaubert’s work, and very little in conventional plotting and 

denouement. All three of the stories (“The Good Anna,” “Melanctha,” and 

“The Gentle Lena”) end with the death of the title character, but the death 

brings no particular lesson or emotional charge. The compositional principle, 

54 



as Stein liked to say, is cubist: as in the work of Cézanne, “everything is as 

important as everything else.” The moment of closure is therefore no more 

significant than any other moment and provides no retrospective insight; 

such meaning as there is, is revealed in the ongoing “habits of attention” 

by which “the total of character is revealed” (Stein, Selected Writings, 243). 

But it is Jamesian psychology rather than cubism that explains the texture 

of Stein’s prose. Her project (which she was later to describe as “ridding . . . 

[herself] of nouns”) was to devise a style that in its very syntax and lexicon 

draws our attention to the transitive rather than to the substantive, noun-like 

aspects of cognition (460). Thus Stein’s keywords, especially in “Melanctha,” 

the most experimental of the three stories, are participles like “feeling,” 

“understanding,” “beginning,” “happening,” and “living”: words which 

might be said to hover between verbs and nouns and which alert us to 

sustained or habitual states of feeling. “He was now never taking any part 

in this fighting that was always going on inside him” (95) is the kind of thing 

that counts as an incident in Three Lives. In fact, all of Stein’s narrative 

devices – the reiteration of “always” and “never,” the meandering reprises, 

the simple and tentative vocabulary, which seems to suspend any definitive 

naming of an experience – are intended to give the effect of what she termed 

a “prolonged present” (417): this despite the fact that the stories in Three 

Lives are written in the past tense. 

If the experimental effect of Stein’s early prose derives in good measure 

from a grammatical oscillation between verb and noun, the experimental 

interest of Sherwood Anderson’s story cycle Winesburg, Ohio derives 

from a generic oscillation between the traditional Bildungsroman and a 

form of serial composition that owes much to Stein. Malcolm Cowley once 

described the aesthetic that animates Winesburg, Ohio – and, indeed, all of 

Anderson’s work – as one of “moments,” of brief intensities without sequel. 

Anderson can, to be sure, provide illuminating comments about the broader 

historical forces that shape his characters’ lives. (Indeed, such broader perspectives 

are essential in order to emphasize the anachronistic nature of his 

small-town grotesques, who all yearn for things that are no longer, or not 

yet, possible.) But Winesburg, Ohio’s series of structurally identical stories, 

in which the townspeople, one after another, reveal themselves to the young 

reporter, George Willard, does not really allow for any development, beyond 

the climactic moment when the characters articulate (or fail to articulate) 

their desires, disappointments, or loneliness. The aim of the cycle thus seems 

to be something quite different from the creation of a conventional plot with 

a beginning, middle, and end: the stories, as Cowley puts it, “exist separately 

and timelessly.” And yet, the conventional notion of character development 

does not disappear altogether. The three closing stories (“Death,” 

55 



“Sophistication,” and “Departure”) impose, in a somewhat contrived way, 

the narrative of George Willard’s acquisition of maturity onto the preceding 

series of fragments, so that by the end of the volume, the grotesques – the 

very means of Anderson’s protest against the commercialism of the modern 

world – threaten to become “but a background on which to paint the dreams 

of [the young reporter’s] manhood” (243). At the heart of Anderson’s most 

accomplished work lies a narrative and perhaps ideological contradiction 

between the fractured, lyrical temporality of Erlebnis and the more novelistic 

temporality of Erfahrung. 

The same could be said of Hemingway’s In Our Time, where the pervasive 

irony and imagery of dead babies and unwanted pregnancies should 

deter readers from approaching the work as a simple Bildungsroman, featuring 

Hemingway’s alter ego Nick Adams. In Our Time is in fact a challenging 

experimental work, and one that can be read, as Peter Messent has 

shown, as an almost point-by-point illustration of Lukács’s account of modernist 

fiction and its fall from dynamic narration to static description. 30 In 

Messent’s reading, the most crucial aspect of Hemingway’s famous aesthetic 

of “leaving things out” is a temporal one: the excision of any sense of historical 

causality and continuity. Though the collection is tightly knit in terms 

of recurrent motifs and striking juxtapositions, it dispenses (at least in the 

“chapters” or vignettes dealing with war, crime, and bullfighting) with any 

chronological and developmental order. Moreover, the structural disjuncture 

between the brief, objective “chapters” and the more intimate, subjective stories 

expresses a stark opposition between the individual and the historical 

world: no interaction or mediation between subject and object seems to be 

possible. The vision, in other words, is fatalistic: story after story, vignette 

after vignette, image after image evoke a condition of being “out of season” 

in modern times. It is entirely appropriate, then, that the only instance in 

which Nick Adams enters the sequence of “chapters” (and by extension, the 

wider social context to which they allude) is when he is wounded on the 

Italian front. The rituals of masculinity that abound in Hemingway’s work 

in no way contradict Messent’s claim regarding the disappearance of agency 

from Hemingway’s early and most interesting fiction. If, as Lukács suggests, 

the symbol imposes a kind of synthetic meaning on objects and events that 

have in fact lost their significance, the same kind of thing can be said of 

the bullfight: however brave and skillful, it is ultimately a synthetic action, 

removed from the historical world – the only theatre in which actions can 

have transformative consequences. 

These considerations go some way toward explaining the paradoxical 

effects of Hemingway’s simple paratactic prose. Though he consistently 

writes in the active voice and with an apparently meticulous interest in the 

56 



sequence of actions, the effect is curiously passive; and though the prevailing 

tense is the past tense, it provides none of the cognitive advantages of retrospect. 

The effect is one of extreme immediacy, of what Pound would call “a 

rain of factual atoms,” reproduced in all their confusing singularity. Thus 

Nick Adams in “Big Two-Hearted River” knows exactly how to set up camp 

and make coffee, and sets about performing these tasks in the proper way. 

But the cumulative effect of his activities is to repress, rather than enhance 

any understanding of, or even any thought about what Lukács would have 

called the social totality. 

The purpose and effect of focusing on the present, rather than on the 

past or future, is therefore quite different in Stein and in Hemingway. In 

the case of the former, one might say, it is a quasi-scientific enterprise, and 

in the case of the latter, a way of blocking out broader (and traumatic) 

historical truths. To recognize this difference is to register something of the 

impact of World War I on Hemingway’s generation, and especially on the 

combatants. In Stephen Kern’s view, World War I condemned early twentiethcentury 

attempts to conceptually extend the interval between past and future 

(including those of James and Stein) to obsolescence. The war isolated present 

experience from the usual flow of time. Not only did the lived moment 

become extraordinarily compelling, both in its shocking violence and its 

vast spatial extension (observers of the war needed to attend to distant events 

taking place simultaneously along a vast front line), but it also attenuated 

any sense of continuity and tradition (294). Hemingway’s In Our Time, 

with its ironic treatment of conventional pieties, its exclusive attention to 

the luminous moment, and its wide geographical range – with stories and 

vignettes taking place all the way from Asia Minor to the Midwest – would 

seem to give some credence to Kern’s broad claims. 

But while the effects of World War I on the techniques of modern fiction 

have been amply considered, not enough has been said about the equally 

far-reaching effects of the Great Depression, with its pervasive insecurities 

and sudden reversals of fortune. The poetry and prose of the early 1930s, 

when millions were unemployed and the old American dream of success – 

or even just the expectation of a meaningful career – seemed to be in tatters, 

is often marked by a characteristic sense of time. It can be likened to the 

atomistic and potentially cataclysmic temporality of gambling, of the long 

shot: the sense that “one minute you are sitting on top of the world the 

next you are sitting around a jungle fire telling about it,” as a hobo in Tom 

Kromer’s Waiting For Nothing (1936) puts it. 31 

This novel, based on the author’s personal experiences, is one of a 

number of novels documenting the grim lives of society’s bottom dogs, 

including Edward Newhouse’s You Can’t Sleep Here (1934), Jack Conroy’s 

57 



The Disinherited (1933), and Nelson Algren’s Somebody in Boots (1935). But 

the interest of Waiting for Nothing becomes evident when we relate it not to 

the proletarian novels with which it tends to be pigeonholed, but to the more 

canonical modernist works we have discussed so far. Kromer’s novel adopts 

not only the mannerisms of Hemingway’s early style, but also its implicit 

attitude toward history: one of fatalistic incomprehension and passivity. 

The title already draws our attention to a particular kind of temporality. 

“Waiting” is not entirely a suspension of time (“You do not stay young in 

a soup line,” observes Tom Kromer, the unfortunate protagonist [66]), but 

rather a suspension of meaningful, directed action. The novel’s many reiterations 

thus serve not to satisfy an aesthetic of abstract composition, but to 

emphasize the complete inefficacy of personal effort and initiative. Try as he 

may to improve his situation, Tom finds himself resorting again and again to 

some variation of the panhandler’s humiliating line: “Buddy, can you spare 

a dime?” The pressing need to find food or shelter (“three hots and a flop,” 

in the novel’s harsh vocabulary) renders sustained reflection impossible, and 

the novel’s one instance of historical interpretation is, in effect, censored. 

When Tom, appearing in court on charges of vagrancy, tries to explain his 

transgression as the result of a worldwide crisis of unemployment, the magistrate 

gavels him down, finds him guilty, and moves on to sentence the next 

bum. 

The final chapter of Waiting for Nothing offers an attempt at a retrospective 

assessment, but the futile seriality of his life seems to have disabled 

Tom’s capacity for memory: “I try to think back over the years that I have 

lived,” he laments, “but I cannot think of years any more. I can think only 

of the drags I have rode. Of the bulls that have sapped up on me, and the 

mission slop I have swilled. People I have known, I remember no more . . . 

My life is spent before it is started . . .” (128). The present tense narration 

thus comes to seem not an experimental option, but an additional mark of 

privation. The atomistic temporality of Depression-era modernity has not 

only eliminated any sense of personal significance, but even the promise of 

religious transcendence: “[S]ince when did Jesus start keeping office hours?” 

Tom asks himself at the end of the novel, as he stares at the closed door of a 

mission, above which a giant electric sign flashes the message: JESUS SAVES 

(124). 

The politicized climate of the 1930s, when Gertrude Stein first achieved the 

celebrity status she craved, provides an interesting perspective on the experiments 

in narrative time with which I began this discussion. Mike Gold, the 

tireless Marxist polemicist, described her work as symptomatic of the decay 

of capitalist culture and as “an attempt to annihilate all relations between 

the artist and the society in which he lives.” 32 And it is true that Stein had 

58 



little interest in history (except perhaps in the very general and abstract sense 

of “how everybody is doing everything”). But she was deeply interested in 

mimicking what she described as her period’s characteristic “time-sense” in 

the “time-sense” of her own composition. 33 She was concerned to represent 

the one quality that lived history and fiction have in common: the temporality 

and pace of human experience, which, in Stein’s view, was one of the 

most important distinctions between one period and another. 

In this respect, if in no other, Stein resembles John Dos Passos, whose 

U. S. A. trilogy was concerned to examine and represent the speed of history. 

It is a novel about the socio-political effects of modern technologies 

of production, and includes among its major personnages the historical figures 

of Frederick “Speedy” Taylor, Henry Ford, and the Wright brothers, 

whose inventions radically accelerated the pace of human life. The various 

modes of writing that make up the trilogy – the biographies of historical figures, 

the narratives of fifteen fictional characters, and so-called “Newsreels” 

and “Camera Eyes” – are all designed to be read at different velocities. 34 The 

collage-like effects of the newsreels, for instance, slow down the pace of reading 

(thus counteracting the high speed at which the language of the media is 

usually devoured), while the idiosyncratic run-on words (like “pinkishcolored,” 

“nattilydressed,” “slightlybulging,” “internalcombustion,” and “fifteenhundreddollar”) 

accelerate the otherwise steady clip at which we consume 

the reasonably suspenseful and realistic fictional narratives. In other 

words, the novel’s various experimental techniques alert us to what Dos 

Passos sees as the multiple and unsynchronized temporalities of twentiethcentury 

life. Modernity in U. S. A. is not represented as a simple progression, 

in which everyone is swept along, but as a dangerous assemblage of unsychronized 

forces, which seldom advances the interest of the individual. 

It is no accident, then, that the prose poem with which the trilogy opens 

should represent a young man who is walking “fast but not fast enough ...to 

catch the last subway, the street car, the bus.” This figure is emblematic, as it 

turns out, of many of the novel’s characters. Even those who are innovators 

(like the aviator Charley Anderson and the public relations man J. Ward 

Moorehouse), or those who seem crafty and dogged enough to surf the trends 

(like the movie-star Margot Dowling), end up being anachronisms, defeated 

by relentless processes of acceleration and obsolescence in an economy of 

scale. In the novel’s closing prose poem, entitled “Vag,” the idea that America 

has fragmented into “two nations” (1157) – an idea that is also put forward in 

the stark material oppositions between the haves and have-nots of Kromer’s 

novel – is expressed in terms of temporality and velocity. The poem contrasts 

the situation of a hungry hitchhiker, who waits by the side of the road while 

cars and trucks pass him by, with that of a rich man, who flies overhead in a 

59 



transcontinental plane, and vomits a meal of steak and mushroom into his 

airsick bag. “History, the billiondollar speedup” has clearly left the young 

man behind, while the privileged air-traveler is, at least for the moment, 

keeping up (1240). 

If Stein’s experiments with time led her in the end to something rather different 

from fiction, the same might be said, curiously, of Dos Passos. U.S.A is 

a novel without a denouement: the different modes of writing that constitute 

it all encompass a somewhat different span of time (the narratives seem to 

end in 1928, whereas the newsreels include events that took place as late as 

1936). The various parts of the novel do not end, as it were, on the same 

beat, nor do they all permit or demand a similar sense of closure. In order to 

assess the meaning of U. S. A., or so Barbara Foley has suggested, the reader 

is forced to attend to the drama of real history – to the fortunes of American 

capitalism during the Great Depression – rather than to seek for any retrospective 

synthesis within the novel itself. 35 Dos Passos’s extraordinary effort 

at including history (and the mass-mediated discourses that shaped it) in the 

body of his fictional work requires a degree of experimentation at least as 

radical as that of the various modernist efforts at excluding history from the 

work of art. 

Value 

I started this essay by suggesting, along with John Dos Passos and Warren 

Susman, that the transformations of American society in the first half of 

the twentieth century must be understood in broadly economic terms as a 

transition from competitive to monopoly capitalism, or from a culture of 

production to a culture of consumption. It seems fitting, then, to conclude 

with some comments on the sometimes quite intimate ways in which the 

aesthetic economies of texts – the systems of values and tropes within them – 

correlate with actual economic conditions. After all, money, as the “material 

symbol of value itself” is a sign or trope; and many other financial concepts – 

appreciation, interest, and accounting, for instance – are readily connected 

to the realm of literature. 36 This last connection is nicely captured in the 

“Storyteller” essay, where Benjamin describes the novelist as an executor 

of memories, of a sum of experiences, the value of which often adds up to 

zero (98–99). Whether or not we agree with his melancholy assessment of 

the novelist’s task, the conception of narrative closure as the moment when 

the value of the various transactions initiated in a novel is finally calculated 

remains an intriguing and productive one. It is therefore not surprising that 

the meeting ground of literature and economics should have proven a fertile 

60 



terrain for scholarly work, whether focused on the material aspects of literary 

production or the economic thematics of texts themselves. 

As in our earlier investigation of place, Malcolm Cowley’s Exile’s Return 

provides a useful entry point. If the memoir is, on one level, the record of 

a generation’s conversion from a spirit of deracinated cosmopolitanism to 

a re-invented literary nationalism or journey home, it is also, on another 

level, the record of Cowley’s personal conversion from the view that “the 

productive forces of society” were “alien to poetry and learning” to a preoccupation 

with the economic conditions and impact of literary creativity 

(35–36). He argues, for instance, that the values of the Greenwich Village 

bohemians of the late teens and twenties, though on the surface antagonistic 

to the materialism of mainstream American culture, actually “fitted into the 

business picture” quite readily: the ethos of “self-expression” stimulated a 

demand for all manner of consumer goods from beach pajamas to cosmetics, 

while “living for the moment” often came down to buying things from 

radios to automobiles to houses on the installment plan (62–63). Nor were 

these material concerns and contradictions avoided when the writers of his 

cadre escaped to Europe. In search of eternal values, Cowley observes, they 

discovered instead “valuta” (81). The rapidly fluctuating exchange rates for 

European currencies not only meant that writers were able to support themselves 

on the strong dollar, but sensitized them to the disjuncture between 

price and value, utility and worth – a matter that became a major theme in 

several important fictional works. 

An alertness to economic concerns, moreover, was not exclusive to writers 

who went abroad. In the U.S. savings declined precipitously and debt 

increased during the Jazz Age. Wealth and class suddenly seemed to be a 

fluid matter, marked by expenditures rather than by money in the bank: a 

situation recorded in imaginative detail in novels like The Great Gatbsy and 

The Big Money, as well as less canonical works like Anita Loos’s Gentlemen 

Prefer Blondes (1925). And though the stock market crash of 1929 forced a 

re-evaluation of the capitalist system and undermined the general faith in the 

old rags-to-riches dream (Nathanael West’s A Cool Million [1934] offers the 

period’s most brutal debunking of this theme), the nation’s fascination with 

consumer goods did not decline during the so-called Red Decade. Outrage 

at the ironic coexistence of plenty and scarcity during the Great Depression 

frequently animated the fiction of the period. One need only think of the 

striking passage in The Grapes of Wrath (1939), where Steinbeck denounces 

the wastefulness of a system which demands that “golden mountains” of 

oranges must be burned to keep up the market price, even though poor 

children are dying of malnutrition. 37 61 



If one reads the fiction of this period with an eye to economics, monetary 

concerns and metaphors come to seem quite pervasive and arise in 

quite surprising places. For all its thinness of social representation, Stein’s 

Three Lives, for example, is shaped by the contrast between the two thrifty 

German immigrants, Anna and Lena, and the wasteful, impetuous, 

Melanctha, drawn as she is to speed, gambling, and the pleasures of the 

moment. Even Willa Cather, who, in a 1922 essay, questioned whether “the 

banking system and the Stock Exchange [were] worth being written about 

at all,” actually wrote extensively about money and even banks in her two 

most important novels from the 1920s, A Lost Lady (1923) and The Professor’s 

House (1925). In the first, Captain Forrester, one of Cather’s pioneer 

aristocrats, finds his mettle tested when the bank of which he is a director 

fails, and he – alone among the members of the board – decides to refund 

his investors’ deposits dollar-for-dollar out of his own personal wealth. His 

magnificent impracticality places him and his wife at the mercy of a new 

generation of money-grubbing, self-seeking businessmen, “who would cut 

everything up into profitable bits as the match factory splinters the primeval 

forest.” 38 The older values based on good character and trust yield inexorably, 

in Cather’s elegiac assessment, to a new spirit of sheer utility and 

gain. The narrative crisis of The Professor’s House is, similarly, a financial 

one: the plot takes off at the moment when Professor Godfrey St. Peter has 

finally made enough money through his intellectual work to buy a luxurious 

new house and the entire novel is structured in terms of a tension (an 

irresolvable one for Cather) between money and creativity, gifts and acquisitions, 

reserve and ostentation. The novel asks, in essence, how personal 

and historical legacies can be valued without “‘realiz[ing]’ on them” (220): 

without translating them into the reifying economy of the marketplace. 39 

While Cather (or at least her character Professor St. Peter) seems nauseated 

by all forms of commercial expenditure and considers the discourse of 

money to be “a vulgar tongue” (50), Hemingway’s attitude, as presented in 

The Sun Also Rises (1926), is more complex. In the moral economy of the 

novel, anything of value must be paid for (hence the disdain of bankrupts, 

like Mike Campbell, and of people who expend money in order to avoid 

giving of themselves, like Robert Cohen). But payment is also intricately 

involved in a kind of savoir vivre or, more seriously, an ethical code for a 

secular age. One might therefore argue that the aging Greek count (the owner 

of a chain of stores in the U.S.), who knows how to get value for his money, 

whether in the form of good service or vintage brandy or female company, 

is more of a code hero in the novel than is the handsome young bullfighter. 

There is, moreover, a residual sense that exchange values need, in some way 

or another, to be in balance with use values and work: Hemingway makes 

62 



it clear that the fiesta in Pamplona, during which people behave as though 

there were no consequences to their actions, makes exorbitant demands on 

the Spanish peasants who attend it: it is not just that the price of wine at 

cafés seems entirely incommensurate with the value of “the hours worked 

and bushels of grain sold,” but that the fleeting exhilaration of the running 

of the bulls ends up costing the life of a man, who is gored: “all for fun,” 

as a sober Spanish waiter notes. In its partly serious, partly ironic validation 

of a “simple exchange of values,” the novel seems to simultaneously 

endorse and recontain the ethos of expenditure and consumerism. 40 It is 

worth speculating that the popularity of Hemingway’s work might be tied 

to his attempt to salvage a certain masculine austerity (or moral solvency) 

in a world where the locus of value was rapidly shifting from the traditionally 

masculine sphere of production to the traditionally feminized sphere of 

consumption and leisure. 

The economic crisis of the 1930s moved many writers (including 

Hemingway and Fitzgerald) to take a considerably harsher stance toward 

the emerging culture of abundance. We might think back to Nathan Asch, 

whose Pay Day derives whatever social implications it has through an implicit 

comparison of the value of the political commitment of Sacco and Vanzetti 

(for whom August 23, 1927, was “pay day” in a very serious sense of the 

term) and the trivial and questionable good time pursued by the antihero 

on his night out. The work of several proletarian authors, including Grace 

Lumpkin in To Make my Bread (1932), or Fielding Burke in Call Home 

the Heart (1932), has a similarly anti-consumerist message. The target of 

critique in these strike novels is not only the exploitative mill management, 

but the installment plan, which entraps the members of an idealized rural 

community in the snares of capitalism in a brand new guise. 

However, some of the most important writers of the 1930s do begin in various 

ways to reconfigure and reclaim aspects of the ethos of expenditure and 

abundance (which, after all, has utopian as well as repressive implications). In 

Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), for example, 

the life of the heroine Janie may be read as an “education in expenditure.” 41 

This education does not imply subservience to the new strategies of business, 

or to the Keynesian view of consumption as ultimately functional: a means of 

jumpstarting the national economy. Janie’s first husband, Logan Killicks, is 

devoted to an ethos of production and simple accumulation and he assesses 

her value merely in terms of her labor. Her second husband, Jody Stark, 

has begun to understand the idea of conspicuous consumption: he indulges 

in carefully calibrated expenditures, designed to enhance his own status in the 

community, and sees Janie largely as a pretty acquisition to put on display. 

Her third husband, whose very name – “Tea Cake” – suggests something 

63 



of the sweetness of living for the moment, spends money and time excessively 

and uselessly, for the sheer playful delight of it. His irresponsible acts 

of expenditure are certainly open to criticism (he steals $200 from Janie to 

throw a party and to savor the feeling of wealth), but they are not readily tied 

to the needs of the mainstream economy and its racialized class structures. 

Indeed, in the symbolic economy of the text, Tea Cake’s reckless spontaneity, 

of which Janie also comes to partake, seems linked to the recklessness 

of God, who in his abundance can afford to unleash the destructive power 

of a hurricane on the world. Needless to say, this is a remarkable vision to 

put forward in an era when economic deprivation often fostered a spirit of 

caution and it helps us make sense of the fact that Hurston’s reputation only 

soared several decades after her major works were produced. 

Curiously, the writer who comes closest to Hurston in validating an uncalculating 

generosity, as opposed to a spirit of cheap acquisitiveness, or selfserving 

accumulation, may be William Faulkner, whose novels are deeply 

concerned with economic issues. It is fair to say that his characters’ attitudes 

toward money are as important as their attitudes toward time and 

that his work always comes down on the side of those who give unstintingly, 

as opposed to the schemers and accountants, like the repulsive Flem 

Snopes and Jason Compson. In The Sound and the Fury, the latter obsessively 

hoards money and calculates profits; and though he claims to believe 

that “money has no value: it’s just the way you spend it,” his interactions 

with others constantly reveal his instinctive equation of price and value. His 

miserliness is exposed, significantly, by the black characters in the novel, 

such as his colleague Job, who feels himself rich enough to give up his two 

bits in exchange for the immediate pleasure of hearing a man play the saw 

at a traveling show. 42 

Such details abound in Faulkner’s work and this is not the place to record 

them in any detail. I will close instead by commenting briefly on the relationship 

between form and economics in his masterpiece, Go Down, Moses 

(1942), where the issue at stake is the historical legacy of slavery. This cycle 

of interconnected stories, which runs the gamut of money matters – from 

wagers, treasure hunts, bribes, inheritances, wages, gifts, sales, pay-offs, and 

robbery to charitable fundraising – begins, strikingly, with a dedication to 

the Faulkner family’s servant, Caroline Barr, whom he praises for her gift 

of fidelity “without calculation of recompense.” 43 Though one might argue 

that Faulkner has difficulty in imagining a place for African-Americans in 

the new market economy and that this difficulty is a sign of his residual 

paternalism, the generosity of Caroline Barr nevertheless marks an ethical 

position from which to measure the full horror of the story recorded in the 

64 



ledger book of the McCaslin plantation: a story about the scandal of treating 

people – even kinsfolk – as commodities. The excessive eloquence of the 

central story “The Bear,” with its interminable, all-inclusive sentences, must 

be read as a challenge to the language and ethos of the slave owners’ ledger 

book, with its eccentric abbreviations and its terse arithmetic about human 

lives. 44 

Richard Wright ends Native Son with the clang of the prison door, shutting 

in the face of a condemned murderer in Chicago; Faulkner concludes 

Go Down, Moses by, as it were, picking up the story of the murderer where 

Native Son leaves off. He concludes his fictional investigation of the intersections 

of race and economics by imagining the aftermath of an execution in 

Chicago: that of one Samuel Beauchamp, a descendant of the McCaslin and 

Beauchamp families whose intertwined fates are at the center of Go Down, 

Moses. Like several other stories in the cycle (most notably “Pantaloon in 

Black”), the final story is about mourning; but once again money matters are 

at the center of the action. The lawyer Gavin Stevens, out of sympathy for the 

criminal’s grandmother, goes around to collect the necessary funds for the 

transportation and proper burial of the body from various prominent whites 

in the local community. Whatever we make of Faulkner’s treatment of Samuel 

Beauchamp and his crime of “[g]etting rich too fast” (370), or of the attitudes 

of the whites, with their residual sense of paternalistic obligation and their 

muted, but clearly insufficient recognition of their complicity in Beauchamp’s 

death, it is clear that the funeral will not lay to rest the historical debts of 

the South. Nor will the intertwined, but nevertheless disjointed stories that 

make up Go Down, Moses yield the kind of closure Benjamin describes in the 

“Storyteller.” And the eschewal of such accounting is precisely the point: the 

complex, but elusive construction of the cycle as a whole offers a fittingly 

open-ended way of narrating an “injustice” that, in Faulkner’s severe but 

accurate judgment, “can never be amortized” (226). In its style, structure, 

and tragic narrative contents, Go Down, Moses protests against the reifying 

language of money. But it is nevertheless through the work’s various economic 

tropes – no less than through the more conventionally poetic symbols 

like the bear, the deep woods, and the fire on the hearth – that we may trace 

out Faulkner’s major thematic preoccupations: the persistence of the past, 

and the meaning and cost of modernity. 

NOTES 

1. Alfred Kazin, On Native Grounds: An Interpretation of Modern American Prose 

Literature (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1942), viii, ix. 

65 



2. Warren I. Susman, Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society 

in the Twentieth Century (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2003), xx; 

John Dos Passos cited in Townsend Ludington, John Dos Passos: A Twentieth- 

Century Odyssey (New York: Dutton, 1980), 286. 

3. Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio (New York: Penguin, 1992), 70–71. 

4. Hamlin Garland, “Literary Prophecy,” in Modern American Fiction: Essays in 

Criticism, ed. A. Walton Litz (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963), 30, 32. 

5. Georg Lukács, “Narrate or Describe,” in Writer and Critic and Other Essays, ed. 

Arthur Kahn (London: Merlin, 1978), 110–148; “The Ideology of Modernism,” 

in Realism in Our Time: Literature and Class Struggle (New York: Harper & 

Row, 1971), 17–46. 

6. Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Work of Nikolai Leskov,” 

in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections (New York: Schocken, 1969), 83–84, 

93. 

7. Virginia Woolf, Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown (London: Hogarth, 1924), 4; Robert 

Musil quoted in Lukács, “The Ideology of Modernism,” 35; Willa Cather quoted 

in Susman, Culture as History, 105. 

8. Lawrence Levine, The Unpredictable Past (New York: Oxford University Press, 

1993), 193–195. 

9. Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms (New York: Scribner’s, 1969), 184–185. 

10. On Faulkner’s vocabulary, see Kazin, “Faulkner in his Fury,” in Modern 

American Fiction ed. Litz, 170, and Nick Tosches, Country: The Twisted Roots 

of Rock ‘n’ Roll (New York: Da Capo Press, 1995), 74. 

11. Nathan Asch, Pay Day (Detroit: Omnigraphics, 1990), 255; John Dos Passos, 

U. S. A. (New York: Library of America, 1996), 1,210. 

12. Malcolm Cowley, Exile’s Return: A Literary Odyssey of the 1920s (New York: 

Penguin, 1994), 14, 27, 28. 

13. Ngugi Wa Thiong’O, Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics of Language in African 

Literature (London: James Currey, 1986), 10–12; and Moving the Center: The 

Struggle for Cultural Freedoms (London, James Currey, 1993), 2–12; Nadine 

Gordimer, “What Being a South African Means to Me,” South African Outlook 

107 (June 1977), 88. 

14. Sherwood Anderson, The Egg and Other Stories (New York: Penguin, 1998), 

6, 7. 

15. See Kazin, On Native Grounds, 249–250; Willa Cather, My Ántonia (Boston: 

Hougton, Mifflin, 1954), 7, and “My First Novels,” in Stories, Poems, and Other 

Writings (New York: Library of America, 1992), 963–964. 

16. Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams (New York: Random House, 

1931), 238. 

17. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (New York: Collier, 1992), 73. 

18. Henry Roth, Call It Sleep (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1991), 23. 

19. Mike Gold, Jews Without Money (New York: Carol & Graf, 1984), 190; Werner 

Sollers, “Ethnic Modernism,” in The Cambridge History of American Literature. 

Volume 6: Prose Writing 1910–1950, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch (Cambridge University 

Press, 2002), 482. 

20. James T. Farrell, “In Search of an Image,” in The League of Frightened Philistines 

(New York: Vanguard Press, 1945), 156. 

21. James T. Farrell, Young Lonigan (New York: Avon, 1972), 83. 

66 



22. Richard Wright, Early Works: Lawd Today!, Uncle Tom’s Children, Native Son 

(New York: Library of America, 1991), 682, 550. 

23. My reading of Wright is indebted to Charles Scruggs’s Sweet Home: Invisible 

Cities in the Afro-American Novel (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 

1993), 75–79. 

24. Frederic Jameson, “The End of Temporality,” Critical Inquiry 29 (Summer 2003), 

695. 

25. Benjamin, Illuminations, 163. 

26. Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space: 1880–1918 (Cambridge, MA: 

Harvard University Press, 1983), 8. 

27. Fredric Jameson, “The End of Temporality,” 699. 

28. Gertrude Stein, Selected Writings (New York: Vintage, 1990), 73. 

29. William James, Principles of Psychology (New York: Dover, 1950), vol. ii, 608– 

609; see also Elizabeth Flower and Murray G. Murphey, A History of Philosophy 

in America (New York: Putnam’s, 1977), vol. ii, 646–647. 

30. Peter Messent, “Style: Personal Impressions” in Ernest Hemingway (New York: 

St. Martin’s Press, 1992), 5–22. 

31. Tom Kromer, Waiting For Nothing (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986), 

116. 

32. Cited in Sollers, Ethnic Modernism, 377. 

33. Stein, Selected Writings, 513, 516. 

34. See Carin Irr, The Suburb of Dissent (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 

45–46, 56–57. 

35. Barbara Foley, “The Treatment of Time in The Big Money,” Modern Fiction 

Studies 26 (Autumn 1980), 460–461. 

36. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, i, trans. Ben Fowkes (New 

York: Vintage Books, 1977), 221–222. 

37. John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath (New York: Penguin, 1992), 477. 

38. Willa Cather, A Lost Lady (New York: Knopf, 1923), 106. 

39. Willa Cather, The Professor’s House (New York: Vintage, 1990), 220. 

40. Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises (New York: Macmillan, 1986), 152, 197, 

72. 

41. See Thomas F. Haddox, “The Logic of Expenditure in Their Eyes Were Watching 

God,” Mosaic 34 (March 2001): 19–34. 

42. Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (New York: Vintage, 1990), 194, 231. 

43. William Faulkner, Go Down, Moses (New York: Vintage, 1973), np. 

44. For this insight I am indebted to Eric Dussere, “Accounting for Slavery: 

Economic Narratives in Morrison and Faulkner,” Modern Fiction Studies 47 

(Summer 2001), 336. 

67 


. 

A Reader’s Guide 

to Contemporary 

Literary Theory 

FIFTH EDITION 

Raman Selden 

Peter Widdowson 

Peter Brooker

. 

PEARSON EDUCATION LIMITED 

Edinburgh Gate 

Harlow CM20 2JE 

United Kingdom 

Tel: +44 (0)1279 623623 

Fax: +44 (0)1279 431059 

Website: www.pearsoned.co.uk 

Fifth edition published in Great Britain in 2005 

© Prentice Hall Europe 1985, 1997 

© Pearson Education Limited 2005 

The rights of Raman Selden, Peter Widdowson and 

Peter Brooker to be identified as authors 

of this work has been asserted in accordance 

with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. 

ISBN: 978-0-582-89410-5 

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data 

A CIP catalogue record for this book can be obtained from the British Library 

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data 

Selden, Raman. 

A reader’s guide to contemporary literary theory / Raman Selden, Peter Widdowson, 

Peter Brooker.— 5th ed. 

p. cm. 

Includes bibliographical references and index. 

ISBN 0-582-89410-7 (pbk.) 

1. Criticism—History—20th century. I. Widdowson, Peter. II. Brooker, Peter. III. Title. 

PN94.S45 2005 

801'.95'0904—dc22 

2004063377 

All rights reserved; no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored 

in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, 

mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without either the prior 

written permission of the Publishers or a licence permitting restricted copying 

in the United Kingdom issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency Ltd, 

Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. This book may not be lent, 

resold, hired out or otherwise disposed of by way of trade in any form 

of binding or cover other than that in which it is published, without the 

prior consent of the Publishers. 

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 

09 08 07 

Set in 9/13.5pt Stone Serif by 35 

Printed and bound in Malaysia, PJB 

The Publishers’ policy is to use paper manufactured from sustainable forests.

. 

CHAPTER 10 

Gay, lesbian and 

queer theories 

Lesbian and gay theories originate, like feminist and Black 

criticism, not in academic institutions, but in the radical 

movements of the 1960s. The birth of the Gay Liberation Movement can 

be traced to the Stonewall Riot in New York in 1969 when occupants of 

a gay bar resisted a police raid. The event had a radicalizing effect on 

Homosexual Rights groups throughout the United States and Europe. 

Thereafter, Gay Liberation in the 1970s had two main goals: to resist persecution 

and discrimination against a sexual minority, and to encourage 

gay people themselves to develop a pride in their sexual identities. The movement 

utilized two main strategies: ‘consciousness-raising’, borrowed from 

Black and women’s movements, and ‘coming out’ – publicly affirming gay 

identity – which is unique to gay communities whose oppression partly lies 

in their social invisibility. Gay Liberation activists saw themselves as part 

of a more general move towards the liberalization of sexual attitudes in the 

1960s, but in particular challenged the homophobic prejudices and repressive 

character of mainstream heterosexual society. 

Since then, gay and lesbian activists have employed the term ‘heterosexism’ 

to refer to the prevailing social organization of sexuality which 

privileges and mandates heterosexuality so as to invalidate and suppress 

homosexual relations. Whereas ‘homophobia’ – the irrational fear or 

hatred of same-sex love – implies an individualized and pathological condition, 

‘heterosexism’ designates an unequal social and political power relation, 

and has arguably proved the more useful theoretical term in lesbian 

and gay theories. It clearly owes a debt to the feminist concept of sexism: 

the unequal social organization of gender, and in this respect has been 

of more importance to lesbian feminist theory than to gay theory which 

developed in overlapping but distinct ways in the 1970s and 1980s.

. 

244 A READER’S GUIDE TO CONTEMPORARY LITERARY THEORY 

Gay theory and criticism 

The diversity of gay and bisexual research since the 1970s reflects the efforts 

to reclaim literary texts, cultural phenomena and historical narratives which 

had remained hidden from critical attention. At the same time (largely as 

a product of psychoanalysis and feminism), there has been an explosion in 

the diversity of strategies for exploiting these materials. While there have 

been a number of attempts to provide explanatory models which posit 

defining moments in the history of sexuality (Bray, 1988; Cohen, 1989), 

this research generally concludes that past constructions of sexuality cannot 

be exhaustively understood, either in their own terms or in ours. For 

many critics the past offers alien constructions of sexuality in a contrasting 

relation to the present, rather than possible identifications or celebratory 

moments. Jonathan Katz (1994) draws such a lesson from his history of 

sodomitical sin: 

our own contemporary social organization of sex is as historically specific as 

past social-sexual forms. Studying the past, seeing the essential differences 

between past and present social forms of sex, we may gain a fresh perspective 

on our own sex as socially made, not naturally given. 

A shared interest in recent gay and historicist studies (Cohen, Katz, 

Trumbach) has been the construction of sexuality in a network of power 

relations, exercised both through the regulatory practices of church and 

state and the less overt yet manifold ways in which Western culture has 

circumscribed interpersonal relations. 

Two main influences on gay theory have been Freud and Michel 

Foucault. Already in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, detailed 

psychological case-studies appeared to complicate and infinitely expand 

the range of sexualities. Karl Heinrich Ulrichs published twelve volumes 

on homosexuality between 1864 and 1879 (the term was first used by 

Karl Benkert in 1869), and Krafft-Ebing’s Pyschopathia Sexualis (in its 1903 

edition) included 238 case histories (see Weeks, 1985). Such works were 

important to Freud in exploding the notion that heterosexuality was safely 

grounded in nature. In Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, for instance, 

he noted that it was not a self-evident fact that men should find a sexual 

interest in women. Psychoanalytic theory therefore appeared to promise a 

new plurality of possible classifications. Yet in certain respects Freud’s work 

proved to have a strictly normative effect in that of his followers, whose goal 

appeared to be to return the patient to an integrated, healthy state, purged 

of the disorienting ‘illness’ of homosexuality. Jeffrey Weeks’s criticism of

. 

GAY, LESBIAN AND QUEER THEORIES 245 

Freud focuses on the notion that desire ‘cannot be reduced to primeval 

biological urges, beyond human control, nor can it be seen as a product of 

conscious willing and planning. It is somewhere ambiguously, elusively, 

in between, omnipotent but intangible, powerful but goal-less’ (1985). 

In so far as desire is inherently unstable, the individual’s procreative goal 

(or more specifically, genital sex) is threatened by perverse, transgressive 

forces. Freud had noted in an Outline of Psychoanalysis that sexual life was 

concerned primarily with obtaining pleasure from the body, often beyond 

the needs of reproduction. If this is the case, heterosexuality supports bourgeois 

ideologies to the extent that procreation mirrors production. Gay 

sex, in contrast, is desire deprived of this goal; it is the very negation of 

productive work. 

The second major influence upon gay theory, which has returned some 

critics to a re-reading of Freud, has been Michel Foucault (see Chapter 7, 

pp. 178–80), who has inspired the study of the multiple operations of power 

and set the problematics of defining homosexuality within discourse and 

history. In The History of Sexuality (1976), Foucault sees late-nineteenthcentury 

homosexuality as characterized ‘by a certain quality of sexual 

sensibility, a certain way of inverting the masculine and the feminine in 

oneself’. Homosexuality appeared as one of the forms of sexuality when it 

was transposed from the practice of sodomy onto a kind of interior androgyny, 

a hermaphroditism of the soul. ‘The sodomite’, he concludes, ‘had 

been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species.’ Foucault 

explored how sodomy was largely determined by civil or canonical codes 

as ‘a category of forbidden acts’ which accordingly defined their perpetrator 

as no more than their judicial subject. However, the nineteenth 

century, Foucault argues, saw the emergence of the homosexual as ‘a personage, 

a past, a case history, and a childhood . . . Nothing that went into 

his total composition was unaffected by his sexuality.’ This model has been 

broadly accepted, if elaborated or sometimes disputed in its details (Cohen, 

1989). Nevertheless, a general problem lies in how Foucault theorizes the 

transition from one mode to another. As noted by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick 

(1985 – and see below, pp. 256–9), in Foucault’s discontinuous profile ‘one 

model of same-sex relations is superseded by another, which may again be 

superseded by another. In each case the supposed model then drops out of 

the frame of analysis.’ None the less, historians of sexuality have assembled 

models of shifting sexual categories across time influenced by Foucault, 

although more scholarly and less rigid or polemical than his own. The 

historian Randolph Trumbach, for instance, has been much more open than 

Foucault to the emergence of lesbianism in the eighteenth century, while

. 


Weeks, Greenberg and Bray, though accepting the constructedness of sexuality, 

have resisted the extreme position on the dating of the category of 

homosexuality which was characteristic of Foucault’s work. 

Foucault’s influence upon gay studies, however, extends beyond the above 

debates to work done within the areas of New Historicism and Cultural 

Materialism (see Chapter 7, pp. 182, 187–8). Most noticeably in Great Britain 

in the work of Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield, gay theory became 

part of a wider cultural poetics and cultural politics, focused within literary 

studies, and as such had affinities with the work of others pursuing a 

similar general project (for example, Stallybrass and White, 1986). 

A number of categories have been mobilized in this criticism to discuss 

the inscription of homosexuality in texts and to reclaim aspects of gay 

life: ‘effeminacy’, ‘drag’ and ‘camp’, for example, or the categories of ‘the 

homoerotic’, ‘male bonding’ or ‘homosociality’, which have been used in 

the reading of non- or anti-gay texts. In this connection, the theory of ‘homophobia’ 

has also given rise to the concepts of ‘panic’ and of ‘internalized 

homophobia’. Alan Sinfield (1989), for instance, has shown how antieffeminacy 

operated in ‘The Movement’ writing of John Wain and Kingsley 

Amis (among others), and how effeminacy was used as a signifier of perversion. 

Yet he also demonstrates that the muscular, down-to-earth writing 

of ‘The Movement’ was subverted in the poetry of Thom Gunn, who constructed 

figures of rough young men which shifted towards homoerotic 

identification. The construction of masculinities has been explored further 

in the essay by Sinfield and Dollimore on Shakespeare’s Henry V (Drakakis, 

ed., [1985] 2002: see ‘Further reading’ for Chapter 7) and in Gregory 

Woods’ work on Ernest Hemingway. Here Woods shows how writers who 

have functioned as emblems of machismo need to be reassessed. What the 

‘struggle against effeminate eloquence’ in this writing expresses, he argues, 

‘is the nagging anxiety which is the true condition (in both senses) of 

masculinity’. The voice of heterosexual masculinity is ‘to be compared with 

that of closeted gay men, to the extent that it is terrified of indiscretion. 

To say too much might be to sound queer’ (Still and Worton, 1993). In 

the related study, Articulate Flesh (1987), Woods explores the expression 

of homoeroticism in D. H. Lawrence, Hart Crane, W. H. Auden, Allen Ginsberg 

and Thom Gunn. 

Gay criticism of this kind both borrows the techniques of cultural 

poetics and explores the relations between culture, history and text in an 

increasingly politicized version of literary studies. Nicholas F. Radel, in his 

essay ‘Self as Other: The Politics of Identity in the Works of Edmund White’, 

for example (in Ringer, ed., 1994), has argued that White’s novels help reveal 

‘a gay subject as it responds to political pressure from the culture at large.

. 


Far from being mere aesthetic products, these novels about gay life both 

confirm and interrogate their historical milieu and its construction of sexual 

orientation as gender difference.’ David Bergman’s analysis of James 

Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room serves to illustrate its deployment of ‘internalized 

homophobia’. He seeks to position Baldwin ‘within a line he nowhere 

acknowledges – a line of both gay and African-American writers’ (in 

Bristow, ed., 1992). Increasingly, too, critics have been exploring the relationship 

between nationalism, anti-imperialism and sexuality – in Parker 

et al., Nationalisms and Sexualities (1992), for example, and Rudi C. Bleys’s 

The Geography of Perversion (1996). 

In Foucault’s work, multiplying configurations of power are shown to 

be central to the production and control of sexuality. In developing this 

insight, Jonathan Dollimore, in particular, has explored the complex involvement 

of power with pleasure: ‘pleasure and power do not cancel or turn 

back against one another’, he writes in Sexual Dissidence (1991), ‘they seek 

out, overlap, and reinforce one another. They are linked together by complex 

mechanisms and devices of excitation and incitement.’ In this way, 

Dollimore has effectively returned gay theory to Freud’s concept of ‘polymorphous 

perversity’ – the theory that the child enjoys multiple sexualities 

before it moves to the reductive primacy of genital sex. But Dollimore 

moves beyond Freud, and arguably beyond Foucault, in remapping a 

politically subversive programme for perversity. He argues that we should 

think in terms of the ‘paradoxical perverse or the perverse dynamic’, which 

he claims is ‘a dynamic intrinsic to social process’. Both Sinfield and 

Dollimore, and others working within a tradition of gay cultural materialist 

criticism, have drawn attention, in new ways, to the example of Oscar 

Wilde. In Wilde, Dollimore discovers a transgressive aesthetics: 

Wilde’s experience of deviant desire . . . leads him not to escape the repressive 

ordering of society, but to a reinscription within it, and an inversion of the 

binaries upon which that ordering depends; desire, and the transgressive 

aesthetic which it fashions, reacts against, disrupts, and displaces from within. 

(Dollimore, 1991) 

Such a shift beyond binary oppositions marks the transition from gay to 

queer theory. 

Lesbian feminist theory and criticism 

Lesbian feminist theory emerged as a response both to the heterosexism 

of mainstream culture and radical subcultures, and to the sexism of the

. 


male-dominated Gay Liberation Movement. Its focus is the interlocking 

structures of gender and sexual oppression. In particular, lesbian feminist 

theory has consistently problematized heterosexuality as an institution 

central to the maintenance of patriarchy and women’s oppression within 

it. Lesbian feminist theory, like lesbian feminism, is a diverse field which 

draws on a wide range of other theories and methods. While it cannot 

be reduced to a single model, several features stand out: a critique of ‘compulsory 

heterosexuality’, an emphasis on ‘woman identification’, and the 

creation of an alternative women’s community. Whether taking a Black 

feminist, a radical feminist or a psychoanalytic approach, lesbian feminist 

theory foregrounds one or all of these elements. 

The concept of ‘compulsory heterosexuality’ was first articulated by Gayle 

Rubin (1975), and subsequently given wide circulation by Adrienne Rich in 

her essay ‘Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence’ (1980). The 

concept challenges the common-sense view of heterosexuality as natural and 

therefore requiring no explanation, unlike lesbian and gay sexuality. Rich 

argues that heterosexuality is a social institution supported by a range of 

powerful sanctions. The fact of lesbian existence, notwithstanding such sanctions, 

is evidence of a powerful current of woman-bonding which cannot 

be suppressed. Rich locates the source of lesbianism in the fact that girl 

children are ‘of woman born’ and have an original same-sex attachment to 

their mothers. 

Monique Wittig’s analogous concept of ‘the straight mind’ (1980, 

reprinted 1992) views heterosexuality as an ideological construct which is 

almost completely taken for granted, yet institutes an obligatory social relationship 

between men and women: ‘as an obvious principle, as a given prior 

to any science, the straight mind develops a totalizing interpretation of 

history, social reality, culture, language and all subjective phenomena at the 

same time.’ The discourses of heterosexuality work to oppress all those 

who attempt to conceive of themselves otherwise, particularly lesbians. In 

contrast to Rich, Wittig rejects the concept of ‘woman identification’, arguing 

that it remains tied to the dualistic concept of gender which lesbians 

challenge. She claims that in an important sense lesbians are not women, 

‘for what makes a woman is a specific social relation to a man’ and so ‘woman’ 

acquires ‘meaning only in heterosexual systems of thought and heterosexual 

economic systems’. 

Judith Butler (1992), drawing on the work of both Wittig and Rich, uses 

the term ‘heterosexual matrix’ to ‘designate that grid of cultural intelligibility 

through which bodies, genders, and desires are naturalized’. Butler 

ceases to use the term in her later work (see below, pp. 255–6) but continues

. 


to argue for the subversion of sexual identities and for a distinction 

between sex, sexuality and gender in the social ‘performances’ that constitute 

them. 

The concepts of ‘woman identification’ and ‘lesbian feminist community’ 

were introduced by Radicalesbians in their influential essay, ‘The 

Woman-Identified Woman’ (1970), and further developed once more by 

Adrienne Rich. Rich (1980) depicts woman-bonding as an act of resistance 

to patriarchal power, and advances the concept of ‘lesbian continuum’ 

to describe ‘a range – through each woman’s life and throughout history – 

of woman-identified experience’. Her definition encompasses not simply 

sexual experience but all forms of ‘primary intensity’ between and among 

women, including relationships of family, friendship and politics. Rich’s 

own 1976 essay, ‘The Temptations of a Motherless Girl’, perfectly illustrates 

the concepts of ‘lesbian continuum’ and the related lesbian critical ‘revisioning’. 

It offers a lesbian reading of Jane Eyre which changes the focus 

from a heterosexual romance plot to a narrative of loving female pedagogy 

in which Jane is nurtured and educated by a succession of female mother/ 

mentors. Rich convincingly demonstrates and denaturalizes the ideological 

hegemony of heterosexuality in our reading and interpretative strategies. 

Barbara Smith’s essay, ‘Towards a Black Feminist Criticism’ (reprinted 

in Showalter, 1986), adopts a critical model similar to Rich’s in order to 

argue that Toni Morrison’s Sula can be productively reread as a lesbian novel, 

‘not because the women are “lovers”, but because they . . . have pivotal 

relationships with one another’. ‘Whether consciously or not,’ she adds, 

‘Morrison’s work poses both lesbian and feminist questions about Black 

women’s autonomy and their impact on each other’s lives.’ The French 

feminist, Luce Irigaray, explores an analogous concept of autonomous 

female sexuality in This Sex Which Is Not One (1985). She redefines 

women’s sexuality as based on difference rather than sameness, arguing 

that it is multiple: ‘Woman does not have a sex. She has at least two 

of them . . . Indeed she has more than that. Her sexuality, always at least 

double, is in fact plural.’ 

Irigaray further attempts to combine a psychoanalytic and political 

approach to lesbianism. In ‘When the Goods Get Together’, she advances 

the concept of ‘hom(m)osexuality – punning on the signifiers of both 

maleness and sameness – to capture the dual nature of hetero-patriarchal 

culture. ‘Hom(m)osexual’ discourse privileges male homosocial relations 

and a male sexuality of the same (whether hetero- or homosexual). Her 

work links critiques of both gender and sexual power relations and in its 

anti-essentialism chimes with the political aims of lesbian feminism.

. 


The concept of ‘woman-identification’ has been challenged by some 

lesbian feminists, especially Black and Third World critics. Cherrie Moraga 

and Gloria Anzaldúa (1981), for example, draw attention to the way the 

concept has been used to mask power relations among women. Rejecting 

a universal model of identity, they create more flexible concepts of lesbian 

identity – such as Anzaldúa’s (1987) concept of the new mestiza – able to 

encompass the connections between women of different cultures and 

ethnicities (see Chapter 9, p. 234). 

Representation – in both the political and the literary senses – is a key 

issue for lesbian criticism. In 1982, Margaret Cruikshank identified the 

crucial role literature has played in the development of lesbian criticism. 

In the thirty and more years since its emergence, lesbian literary criticism 

has developed from being largely polemical – calling for the acknowledgement 

of lesbian writers, readers and texts, and the definition of these – to 

a sophisticated and diverse body of politically informed theoretical work 

which aims to explore the multiple articulations of the sign ‘lesbian’. 

The early agenda for lesbian criticism was set by Virginia Woolf’s 

analysis of the relationship between women and writing in A Room of One’s 

Own (1929 – see Chapter 6) which showed how literary power relations result 

in a textual effacement of relationships among women. It was not until Jane 

Rule’s Lesbian Images (1975), however, that a critical text sought to delineate 

a lesbian literary tradition. Here Rule analyses the life and work of 

a group of twentieth-century lesbian writers, including Gertrude Stein, 

Ivy Compton-Burnett, Maureen Duffy and May Sarton. Despite its focus 

on individual writers, Rule’s text goes beyond a celebratory biographical 

approach and anticipates the multigeneric and intertextual style of much 

later lesbian literary criticism. 

Lesbian literary criticism of the 1970s and early 1980s was concerned to 

identify a lesbian literary tradition and a lesbian literary aesthetic, whether 

this was based on textual content, characters, themes, or the identification 

of the author as herself lesbian. This was aided by a number of reference 

works (Grier, 1981; Cruikshank, 1982; Wittig and Zeig, 1979) which continue 

to provide invaluable source materials for lesbian teachers, students 

and researchers. Work of this kind also performed the valuable ‘(re)discovery’ 

of writers assumed to be heterosexual (Judith Fetterley’s essay on Willa 

Cather (1990) is a later example), or, in Alison Hennegan’s 1984 essay, ‘What 

is a Lesbian Novel?’, identified a lesbian ‘sensibility’ in a text’s ‘necessarily 

oblique vision of the world’. Related to this is the ‘encodement’ approach 

advanced by Catharine Stimpson (1988) which analyses the strategies of concealment 

(the use of an obscure idiom, gender and pronoun ambiguity, or

. 


a male pseudonym), or of internal censorship and silence necessarily 

employed by woman-identified writers in a homophobic and misogynistic 

culture. One example of this approach is Stimpson’s analysis of the sexual 

codes, use of silence, and experimentation with syntax in the writings of 

Gertrude Stein. Other critics have used the approach to interpret the work 

of Angelina Weld Grimke, Emily Dickinson, H.[ilda] D.[oolittle], and Willa 

Cather. 

Given the historical difficulty of writing lesbian, however, as well as the 

changing definitions of the sign ‘lesbian’, lesbian critics have progressively 

moved away from this search for a single lesbian identity or discourse. Mandy 

Merck (1985), for instance, takes issue with Hennegan’s view that lesbians 

share a common perspective. What Hennegan calls lesbian ‘sensibility’, 

says Merck, can be found in works by other writers who don’t identify as 

lesbian. She also questions an emphasis, such as there is in Hennegan’s ‘On 

Becoming a Lesbian Reader’, on the importance of textual representations 

in the formation of readers’ lesbian identities. A more radical approach, Merck 

argues, lies in the application of perverse readings which rely neither on 

the author’s or text’s concealment or disclosure of sexual identity but on 

the queer perspective of the reader who subverts the dominant interpretative 

frameworks. Bonnie Zimmerman (1986) also, in her essay ‘What Has 

Never Been: An Overview of Lesbian Feminist Literary Criticism’, offers a 

more sophisticated model of lesbian textuality. She cautions against reductive 

and essentialist models of the lesbian text, and proposes the notion 

of lesbian ‘double vision’ drawn from the dual perspectives of lesbians as 

members of mainstream and minority cultures simultaneously. In a later 

study, The Safe Sea of Women (1991), Zimmerman advances a historically 

based definition of lesbian fiction, grounding this category in the cultural 

and historical contexts in which it is produced and read. 

Rather than seek an autonomous lesbian tradition, distinctive aesthetic, 

lesbian author or reader, therefore, more recent lesbian criticism has 

addressed the question of how texts internalize heterosexism and how 

lesbian literary strategies can subvert its norms. One such strategy is 

intertextuality. In an early essay, Elaine Marks (1979) argued that lesbian 

writing is fundamentally intertextual, and that it has drawn on historical 

figures such as Sappho in the rnaking of its discursive history and the 

production of ‘challenging counterimages’: lesbian texts ‘written exclusively 

by women for women, careless of male approval’. More recently, some 

of the most exciting lesbian criticism has been produced by bilingual and 

postcolonial/Third World lesbian writers who similarly foreground the 

intertextual, dialogic aspects of their texts. The Quebequoise writer, Nicole

. 


Brossard, and the Chicana writer, Cherrie Moraga, produce lyrical, polemical 

writings which interweave theory, politics and poetry. In Amantes 

(1980, translated as Lovhers, 1987), Brossard practises ‘writing in the feminine’ 

which like écriture féminine deconstructs the opposition body/text. 

Similarly, Moraga and Anzaldúa’s concept of ‘theory in the flesh’ (1981) elides 

the gap between the Chicana lesbian body and text. 

Teresa de Lauretis, in her article ‘Sexual Indifference and Lesbian 

Representation’ (1993), also draws on French theory, using Irigaray’s concept 

of ‘hom(m)osexuality’ to discuss the invisibilizing of the lesbian 

body/text. Her essay subverts dominant interpretations of Radclyffe Hall’s 

famous lesbian novel, The Well of Loneliness (1928), by reading against the 

grain of sexology and drawing out the text’s ‘other’ lesbianism. In common 

with lesbian and queer theory, de Lauretis plays on the distinction between 

sex/gender and sexuality, celebrating the diversity of lesbian writing, both 

critical and creative, and the ways in which lesbian writers ‘have sought 

variously to escape gender, deny it, transcend it, or perform it in excess, 

and to inscribe the erotic in cryptic, allegorical, realistic, camp, or other modes 

of representation’. 

These various strategies and the resulting intersection of postmodern 

discourses and lesbian criticism have led to the textualization of lesbian 

identity, whereby lesbianism is seen as a position from which to speak 

‘otherwise’ and thus ‘queer’ heterosexist discourse. 

Queer theory and criticism 

During the 1980s, the term ‘queer’ was reclaimed by a new generation of 

political activists involved in Queer nation and protest groups such as ActUp 

and Outrage, though some lesbian and gay cultural activists and critics who 

adopted the term in the 1950s and 1960s continue to use it to describe their 

particular sense of marginality to both mainstream and minority cultures. 

In the 1990s, ‘Queer Theory’ designated a radical rethinking of the relationship 

between subjectivity, sexuality and representation. Its emergence in that 

decade owes much to the earlier work of queer critics such as Ann Snitow 

(1983), Carol Vance (1984) and Joan Nestle (1988), but also to the allied 

challenge of diversity initiated by Black and Third World critics. In addition, 

it gained impetus from postmodern theories with which it overlapped 

in significant ways. Teresa de Lauretis, in the Introduction to the ‘Queer 

Theory’ issue of differences (1991), traced the emergence of the term ‘queer’ 

and described the impact of postmodernism on lesbian and gay theorizing.

. 


Further examples which explore this intersection, and the way both discourses 

operate to decentre foundationalist narratives based on ‘sex’ or ‘reason’, 

would include Judith Roof’s A Lure of Knowledge (1990), Laura Doan’s 

The Lesbian Postmodern (1994), and essays in the volume Sexy Bodies (Grosz 

and Probyn (eds), 1995). Queer theory’s foregrounding of a politics of difference 

and marginality has assisted gay and lesbian critiques of heterosexual 

hegemony and patriarchy while the development of a postmodern aesthetic 

has helped inspire the expression of sexual plurality and gender ambivalence 

in the area of cultural production: a dynamic dialogue which has placed 

lesbian and gay theories at the forefront of work in the increasingly crossdisciplinary 

field of critical theory. 

Signs of this development have since appeared in the academic rise of 

Gender Studies and the dialogues in Gay Studies with the emerging discipline 

of Men’s Studies, which aims to build on feminism and gay theory 

so as to provide a critique and reconstruction of men’s sexualities and 

lifestyles. There has been anxiety over and opposition to both these tendencies, 

and there remains in some quarters an unsettled, even antagonistic, 

relationship between gay theory and feminism. In Joseph Bristow’s view 

in 1992, ‘lesbian and gay criticism does not comprise a coherent field’, but 

this, he argued was ‘its strength’. Bristow’s exploration of what lesbian and 

gay mean involves a sense of their sameness and difference: they ‘designate 

entirely different desires, physical pleasures, oppressions, and visibilities 

. . . But both subordinated groups share parallel histories within a sexually 

prohibitive dominant culture . . . ’. As new areas of theoretical enquiry 

emerge it becomes less clear how to maintain academic boundaries. Are 

transvestitism or cross-dressing, for example, topics for lesbian, gay or 

bisexual studies, or for Men’s, Women’s or Gender Studies, or for Shakespeare, 

theatre or performance studies? Queer studies ‘queries’ orthodoxies 

and promotes or provokes such uncertainties, moving beyond lesbian and 

gay sexualities to include a range of other sexualities that disrupt such fixed 

or settled categorization altogether. 

Some of the figures and arguments influencing the transition from gay 

to queer theory have been referred to above. Jeffrey Weeks, for example, 

while arguing that sexualities are historically constructed, sees them as none 

the less refusing to yield up a stable cognitive core, but ‘only changing 

patterns in the organization of desire’ (1985). Yet if this is true of homosexuality, 

surely heterosexuality too is also a recent construction and not a 

naturally grounded identity. As we have seen, the notion that sexual desire 

naturally and necessarily involves a gravitation towards a person of the opposite 

biological sex was already challenged by Freud (see also Laqueur, 1990).

. 


In a postmodern, postcolonial world, in which the object of knowledge has 

itself become a problematic space, queer theory seeks further to question 

all such essentializing tendencies and binary thinking. An elusive sexuality, 

fragmented into local, perverse particularities, is celebrated in all its deviant 

versions. Such ‘perversions’ are mobilized in resistance to the bourgeois construction 

of self modelled upon a rigid, patriarchal heterosexuality which 

has exercised its hegemony for over two centuries. 

In repoliticizing gay theory along these lines, queer theory has drawn 

on Foucault, as discussed earlier in this chapter, and in its inflection in Great 

Britain especially towards cultural materialism, on the work of Althusser and 

Raymond Williams. Here some tension has emerged between queer positions 

and more traditional Marxist approaches. In Jeffrey Weeks’s view, for 

instance, capitalist social relations have an effect on sexualities (as on 

many other matters), ‘but a history of capitalism is not a history of sexuality’ 

(1985). His own work demonstrates that power should not be treated 

as single and unitary but as itself diverse, shifting and unstable, and hence 

as open to resistance in a variety of ways. This argument makes possible 

the formation, in Foucault’s terms, of a ‘ “reverse” discourse’ in which 

‘homosexuality began to speak in its own behalf, to demand that its legitimacy 

or “naturality” be acknowledged, often in the same vocabulary, 

using the same categories by which it was medically disqualified’ (1976). 

Theorists and critics following this Marxist or post-Marxist tradition must 

negotiate the situation summarized by Raymond Williams in Marxism and 

Literature (1977 – see Chapter 5) as one in which ‘all or nearly all initiatives 

and contributions, even when they take on manifestly alternative 

or oppositional forms, are in practice tied to the hegemonic’. Queer theory 

would question the implication, apparent here and in Foucault’s work, that 

alternative or oppositional meanings are fully appropriated by the state. 

As Dollimore (1991) writes, ‘Thinking history in terms of the perverse 

dynamic begins to undermine that binary opposition between the essentialist 

and the anti-essentialist.’ As he discovers in the multiple resistances 

to Renaissance ideologies, marginality is not simply marginal. Dollimore’s 

and Sinfield’s work, in theoretical tandem with other examples in Cultural 

Materialism and New Historicism (Stallybrass and White, 1986; Bredbeck, 

1991; Goldberg, 1992, 1994, progressing again beyond Foucault, especially 

in the area of Renaissance studies. See also Chapter 7), shows that binary 

oppositions become unstable in the subversive moment of queer writing. 

A key instance here, once more, is Oscar Wilde. Identifying a series of 

oppositions between Wilde and his culture, such as ‘surface/depth’; ‘lying/ 

truth’; ‘abnormal/normal’; ‘narcissism/maturity’, Dollimore concludes:

. 


‘That which society forbids, Wilde reinstates through and within some of 

its most cherished and central cultural categories – art, the aesthetic, art 

criticism, individualism.’ Wilde, he argues, appropriates dominant categories 

in the same gesture that he ‘transvalues them through perversion and 

inversion’, demonstrating how ‘abnormality is not just the opposite, but 

the necessarily always present antithesis of normality’. 

Two further figures of special importance to the emergence of queer 

theory are Judith Butler and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. At the same time, their 

influence extends beyond this category, Butler in fact claiming that in the 

first instance she wrote Gender Trouble (1992), her most influential book in 

this field, primarily as a feminist for feminist readers. Also, queer theory 

itself, certainly in versions indebted to Butler, contests the categorization 

which would limit it to questions of gay or lesbian sexual identities. In this 

view, queer theory does not name a separatist movement claiming an essence 

of gayness, but on the contrary emphasizes the constructedness, ambivalence 

and potential plurality of all gendered and sexual identities. As David 

Halperin has said in emphasizing the critical ‘querying’ aspect of queer 

theory, ‘Queer is by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the 

legitimate, the dominant. There is nothing in particular to which it necessarily 

refers. It is an identity without an essence’ (Halperin, 1990). Butler 

accordingly uses the (non)category of queer to disrupt not only the authority 

of the hom(m)osexual economy but also the attribution of identity 

per se. In ‘Imitation and Gender Insubordination’ (1991), she calls for a 

rejection of the essentialism of the hetero/homosexual binary opposition, 

and for the queering of heterosexist master narratives. Unlike lesbian 

feminists such as Wittig, she refuses to identify lesbian as a positive 

oppositional term, arguing that it is the absence of a defined lesbian 

counter-identity that enables the postmodern lesbian to queer the master 

discourse. As Butler puts it, ‘I would like to have it permanently unclear 

what precisely that sign signifies.’ In this way, queer theory proposes a 

disruption of normative sexual identities and a conception of agency 

linked to the ‘performance’ which installs those identities. Butler’s work 

is known above all for her association of the idea of ‘performativity’ with 

sexual or gendered identities. Often this is taken to posit a theatrical 

self, able to freely select from a range of possible identities. Moe Meyer, for 

example, argues that queer theory is ‘an ontological challenge that displaces 

bourgeois notions of the Self as unique, abiding, and continuous while 

substituting instead a concept of the Self as performative, improvisational, 

discontinuous, and processually constituted by repetitive and stylized acts’ 

(Meyer, 1994).

. 


While recognizing that there is an evident popular desire for a conception 

of improvised identity and that her own work has been seen to 

endorse this, Butler has explained that she intends a more philosophically 

rigorous and more limited popular notion of performativity which makes 

plain that gender is constructed, or ‘contoured’, through ‘repetition and recitation’, 

is the subversive ‘re-signification’ of normative identities – but is not 

a matter of free choice (Butler, 1994). Liz Grosz (1996) concurs with Butler 

that it is the indeterminacy of the sign ‘lesbian’ which gives it its radical 

potential, but she also offers a critique of queer theory’s elision of systematic 

structures of power and its celebration of deviant sexual practices of 

whatever kind. Other lesbian feminists are critical of queer theory’s tendency 

to downplay the significance of gender difference. Many would argue 

that, although distinct, gender and sexuality cannot be completely disarticulated. 

It makes no sense to claim that lesbians’ oppression, while 

being specific, is not connected to their oppression as women. The tendency 

for lesbian existence to be marginalized in the new queer discourses 

is no doubt indicative of the continuing power relations between the sexes. 

Nevertheless, there exists a productive tension between lesbian, gay male 

and feminist theory in the development of textual and intertextual strategies 

which undermine both literary norms and everyday sexual stereotypes 

(Humm, 1994). 

Butler’s recent work, in the meantime, while revisiting the themes of 

performativity and regulative social-sexual norms, has confirmed the 

breadth of her theoretical sources (Freud, Foucault, Derrida), and sought 

to address broader political themes. Excitable Speech: A Politics of the 

Performative (1997) is a study of racist ‘hate speech’, pornography, and the 

discourse about gays in the military. What Butler argues, however, is that 

an inevitable disjuncture between intent and effect, or speech and conduct, 

means that injurious terms can be appropriated and re-deployed for 

counter purposes (the term ‘queer’, used to reverse its intended meanings, 

would be a case in point). The Psychic Life of Power, also produced in 1997, 

argues that the psyche is crucial to the formation of normative sexual identities 

in that it is constrained to adopt the exclusionary prohibitions – upon 

homosexuality, for example – determined by the hegemonic social order. 

The result is a ‘melancholy’ loss of what is forbidden but cannot be 

avowed. But here again, Butler argues that this experience may be countered 

through the unpredictable, and therefore resistant, ways in which norms 

might be adopted or performed. 

Butler’s reputation rests primarily on her earlier works. Eve Kosofsky 

Sedgwick, similarly, made her most significant contribution to gender and

. 


queer theory in two key early studies, Between Men (1985) and Epistemology 

of the Closet (1990). Like Butler, she draws in these works on deconstructive 

postmodern theory but with a more evident political intent or implication 

and also with more direct reference to literary texts. The supposed 

opposition between sex and gender, she argues, seems ‘only to delineate a 

problematical space rather than a crisp distinction’ (1990). Sexuality has often 

been confused with sex, she says, adding that other categories such as race 

or class might themselves be important in the construction of sexuality. Just 

as there is no single sexuality, so there is no privileged narrative of nation. 

Sexualities, like nationalities, are therefore simply shaped by their differences, 

not by something innately grounding them. Sexual boundaries are 

no more fixed than national ones, though they may, for a period, serve to 

delineate a particular discursive space. More recent work in this area has 

shown how sexology and colonial anthropology were linked but that one 

nation’s sexual classifications do not neatly equate with those of another. 

This has coincided with a move away from the black denunciation of homosexuality 

as something alien to black culture. At the same time, though the 

existence of cross-dressing and a homosexual rite of passage into manhood 

in other cultures have been sometimes exoticized and misunderstood, a 

critical reading of ethnographic literatures (such as that of Rudi C. Bleys, 

1996) can provide a sense of the larger narratives involved in the construction 

of gay identities. 

Sedgwick has also deployed the concept of ‘homosociality’ as an interpretative 

tool to demonstrate ‘the usefulness of certain Marxist-feminist 

historical categories for literary criticism’. In her Between Men: English 

Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1985), she begins to distance herself 

from determinate notions of patriarchy; male and female homosociality none 

the less have different historical shapes and they remain ‘articulations and 

mechanisms of the enduring inequality of power between women and men’. 

She acknowledges a debt to feminism, but increasingly, in a move typical 

of the deconstructive tendencies of queer theory, considers the multiple 

constructedness of sex, gender and sexuality. Her study of Shakespeare’s 

Sonnets, Wycherley’s play, The Country Wife, Tennyson, George Eliot and 

Dickens illustrates the paradoxically historicizing and dehistoricizing tendencies 

of this kind of work. The book is also notable for its discussion of 

the Gothic as ‘Terrorism and Homosexual Panic’. In particular (building on 

Freud), she explores the theory that ‘paranoia is the psychosis that makes 

graphic the mechanisms of homophobia’. 

Queer theory views the traditional and prescriptive essentialist model of 

sexuality as failing to do the conceptual work involved in the adequate

. 


description of how desires function, and how sexualities are made. The range 

of critical terminologies, models and strategies outlined above confirms that 

it is no longer viable to think in terms of a single, coherent ‘sexuality’ and 

has effected the transition from the ‘natural’ homosexual individual, to whom 

rights could be attached, to the disorienting notion that all sexualities are 

perverse and can be reclaimed and celebrated as such. If gay or lesbian theory 

has often been defensively grounded in liberal rights, queer theory is a 

deeper philosophical challenge to the status quo, which at the same time 

aims to provide readings which at once subvert sameness and celebrate 

otherness. 

In consequence, queer theory is mobile and varied in its assault upon 

privileged, stable, heterosexual ‘origins’. While some, in a mood of holiday 

fun, seek to celebrate the carnival of style, artifice, performance and play 

discovered in perverse sexualities, others seek a more politicized stance, 

moving beyond Foucault or adopting a more materialist response to poststructuralist 

textualism. Jeffrey Weeks sees the ‘flux of desire’ as itself too 

much for capitalist society to endure, for it simultaneously encourages 

and abhors this chaos, and cannot live with the infinite variety of potential 

interconnections and relationships. Sedgwick has similarly attacked the 

assumption that homosexuality today ‘comprises a coherent definitional 

field rather than a space of overlapping, contradictory, and conflicting 

definitional forces’. In questioning stable, unproblematic classifications of 

sexuality, this seems to remove any common platform for action. However, 

Sedgwick urges a less systematic approach: surely, she argues, it would be 

sensible to work from ‘the relation enabled by the unrationalized coexistence 

of different models during the times they do exist’. 

Accordingly, the starting-point for ‘queer theory’ is, in Moe Meyer’s 

words, ‘an ontological challenge to dominant labelling philosophies’. This 

strategy takes up Weeks’s ‘whirlwind of deconstruction’ by contesting the 

binary opposition between (among other things) homosexuality and heterosexuality, 

and has taken important effect in gay and academic communities. 

In the 1980s, it was feared that the spectre of AIDS would unleash 

homophobic repression, that gay men would be marginalized, and the right 

to a diversity of sexual pleasure be strictly limited. Yet the message that sex 

must simply be safer, not less varied, has led to the recovery and reinvention 

of erotic possibilities. Gay groups are working with sex-workers (male 

and female), forcing a concern with sexuality to return to questions of 

class, economics and inequality. The appearance of AIDS and HIV shifted 

notions of identity, and brought with it new challenges, discourses and forms 

of representation. In a more theoretical direction, Lee Edelman, taking up

. 


the associations of AIDS and plague mapped by Susan Sontag (1989), 

argues in his ‘The Plague of Discourse: Politics, Literary Theory, and Aids’ 

(in Butters, AIDS and its Metaphors, 1989), for the placing of literary theory 

between ‘politics’ and ‘AIDS’, since ‘both of those categories produce, and 

are produced as, historical discourses susceptible to analysis by the critical 

methodologies associated with literary theory’. His essay questions the 

ideological opposition between the biological, literal and real on the one 

hand, and on the other, the literary, figural and fictive, and concludes that 

a deconstructive queer theory must make its case on AIDS through a 

necessarily ‘diseased’ discourse. 

Queer critics continued in this same period to mobilize the ‘coming out’ 

of theory in the academic world. Silence in this regard was seen as a species 

of closetedness. Writing in 1990, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick recalled that, ‘in 

a class I taught at Amherst College, fully half the students said they had 

studied Dorian Gray in previous classes, but no one had ever discussed the 

book in terms of any homosexual content’. As this tells us, much has had 

to be done in learning to speak and write about literature’s and our own 

sexual constructedness. Fifteen years on, what would teachers and students 

of Dorian Gray now have to say? 

Selected reading 

Key texts 

Abelove, Henry et al. (eds), The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader (Routledge, 

London, 1993). 

Adams, Rachel and Savran, David (eds), The Masculinity Studies Reader 

(Blackwell, Oxford, 2002). 

Anzaldúa, Gloria, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (Aunt Lute 

Books, San Francisco, 1987). 

Bristow, Joseph (ed.), Sexual Sameness: Textual Difference in Lesbian and 

Gay Writing (Routledge, London, 1992). 

Bristow, Joseph, Effeminate England: Homoerotic Writing after 1885 (Open 

University Press, Milton Keynes, 1995). 

Bristow, Joseph, Sexuality (Routledge, London, 1997). 

Bristow, Joseph and Wilson, Angela R. (eds), Activating Theory: Lesbian, 

Gay and Bisexual Politics (Lawrence & Wishart, London, 1996).

. 


Butler, Judith, ‘Imitation and Gender Subordination’, in Diana Fuss (ed., 

1991), below. 

Butler, Judith, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity 

(Routledge, London and New York, 1992). 

Butler, Judith, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ 

(Routledge, London and New York, 1993). 

Butler, Judith, ‘Gender as Performance: An Interview with Judith Butler’, 

conducted by Peter Osborne and Lynne Segal, Radical Philosophy, 

67 (Summer, 1994). 

Butler, Judith, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (Routledge, 


Butler, Judith, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford 

University Press, California, 1997). 

Butler, Judith, Undoing Gender (Routledge, London, 2004). 

Butler, Judith, The Judith Butler Reader, ed. by Sara Salih (Blackwell, 

Oxford, 2003). 

Cohen, Ed., ‘Legislating the Norm: From Sodomy to Gross Indecency’, 

South Atlantic Quarterly, 88 (1989), 181–217. 

Corber, Robert J. and Valocchi, Stephen J. (eds), Queer Studies: An 

Interdisciplinary Reader (Blackwell, Oxford, 2003). 

Cruikshank, Margaret (ed.), Lesbian Studies: Present and Future (The 

Feminist Press, New York, 1982). 

Daly, Mary, Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (Beacon Press, 

Boston, 1978). 

de Lauretis, Teresa, ‘Introduction’, differences: ‘Queer Theory Issue’, 3: 

2 (Summer, 1991). 

de Lauretis, Teresa, ‘Sexual Indifference and Lesbian Representation’, in 

Henry Abelove et al. (eds), above. 

Doan, Laura (ed.), The Lesbian Postmodern (Columbia University Press, 

New York, 1994). 

Dollimore, Jonathan, Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to 

Foucault (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1991). 

Dollimore, Jonathan, Sex, Literature and Censorship (Polity Press, 

Cambridge, 2001). 

Edelman, Lee, Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory 

(Routledge, London, 1994).

. 


Epstein, Julia and Straub, Kristina (eds), Body Guards: The Cultural Politics 

of Gender Ambiguity (Routledge, London and New York, 1991). 

Fetterley, Judith, ‘My Antonia! Jim Blunden and the Dilemma of the 

Lesbian Writer’, in Karla Jay, Joanne Glasgow and Catharine R. 

Stimpson (eds), Lesbian Texts and Contexts: Radical Revisions (New 

York University Press, New York, 1990). 

Foucault, Michel, The History of Sexuality: Volume 1. An Introduction 

[1976], trans. by Robert Hurley (Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1990). 

Fuss, Diana (ed.), Inside/Outside: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories (Routledge, 


Gever, Martha, Parmar, Pratibha and Greyson, John, Queer Looks 

(Routledge, London, 1993). 

Goldberg, Jonathan, Sodometries: Renaissance Texts: Modern Sexualities 

(University of California Press, Stanford, 1992). 

Goldberg, Jonathan (ed.), Reclaiming Sodom (Routledge, London and New 

York, 1994). 

Goldberg, Jonathan (ed.), Queering the Renaissance (Duke University Press, 

Durham, NC and London, 1994). 

Greenberg, David F., The Construction of Homosexuality (University of 

Chicago Press, Chicago, 1988). 

Grier, Barbara, The Lesbian in Literature: A Bibliography (The Naiad Press, 

Tallahassee, 1981). 

Grosz, Elizabeth, Space, Time, Perversion (Routledge, London, 1996). 

Grosz, Elizabeth and Probyn, Elsbeth (eds), Sexy Bodies: The Strange 

Carnalities of Feminism (Routledge, London, 1995). 

Hennegan, Alison, ‘What is a Lesbian Novel?’, Woman’s Review, 

no. 1 (1984). 

Hennegan, Alison, ‘On Becoming a Lesbian Reader’, in Susannah 

Radstone (ed.), Sweet Dreams: Sexuality, Gender and Popular Fiction 

(Lawrence & Wishart, London, 1988). 

Hocquenghem, Guy, Homosexual Desire (Allison & Busby, London, 1978). 

Irigaray, Luce, This Sex Which Is Not One (Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 

1985). 

Jay, Karla and Glasgow, Joanne (eds), Lesbian Texts and Contexts: Radical 

Revisions (New York University Press, New York, 1990).

. 


Johnstone, Jill, Lesbian Nation (Simon & Schuster, New York, 1973). 

Kopelson, Kevin, Love’s Litany: The Writing of Modern Homoerotics 

(University of California Press, Stanford, 1994). 

Laqueur, Thomas, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud 

(Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1990). 

Lilly, Mark (ed.), Lesbian and Gay Writing: An Anthology of Critical Essays 

(Macmillan, Basingstoke, 1990). 

Lorde, Audre, Sister/Outsider (Crossing Press, New York, 1984). 

Marks, Elaine, ‘Lesbian Intertextuality’, in George Stamboulian and Elaine 

Marks (eds), Homosexualities and French Literature (Cornell University 

Press, Ithaca, 1979). 

Merck, Mandy, Review of ‘Girls Next Door’, Women’s Review, 1 

(Nov. 1985), 40. 

Merck, Mandy, Perversions: Deviant Readings (Virago, London, 1993). 

Meyer, Moe (ed.), The Politics and Poetics of Camp (Routledge, New York 

and London, 1994). 

Moraga, Cherrie and Anzaldúa, Gloria, This Bridge Called My Back: 

Writings by Radical Women of Color (Kitchen Table Press, 

New York, 1981). 

Munt, Sally (ed.), New Lesbian Criticism (Harvester Wheatsheaf, Hemel 

Hempstead, 1992). 

Parker, Andrew, et al. (eds), Nationalisms and Sexualities (Routledge, 

London and New York, 1992). 

Radicalesbians, ‘The Woman-Identified Woman’, The Ladder, vol. 14, 

11/12 (1970). 

Rich, Adrienne, ‘Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence’, 

Signs, 5, 4 (Summer, 1980), 631–60. 

Rich, Adrienne, ‘The Temptations of a Motherless Girl’, in On Lies, Secrets 

and Silence (Virago, London, 1980). 

Roof, Judith, A Lure of Knowledge: Lesbian Sexuality and Theory (Columbia 

University Press, New York, 1990). 

Rule, Jane, Lesbian Images (Crossing Press, Trumansberg, NY, 1975). 

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, Between Men: English Literature and Male 

Homosocial Desire (Columbia University Press, New York, 1985). 

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, Epistemology of the Closet (University of California 

Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1990).

. 


Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, Tendencies (Routledge, London, 1994). 

Showalter, Elaine (ed.), The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, 

Literature and Theory (Virago, London, 1986). 

Sinfield, Alan, Literature, Politics and Culture in Postwar Britain (Basic 

Blackwell, Oxford, 1989). 

Sinfield, Alan, The Wilde Century (Cassell, London, 1994). 

Sinfield, Alan, Cultural Politics – Queer Reading (Routledge, London, 1994). 

Smith, Barbara, ‘Towards a Black Feminist Criticism’, in Elaine Showalter 

(ed., 1986), above. 

Stallybrass, Peter and White, Allon, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression 

(Methuen, London, 1986). 

Still, Judith and Worton, Michael, Textuality and Sexuality: Reading Theories 

and Practices (Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1993). 

Weeks, Jeffrey, Sexuality and its Discontents: Meanings, Myths and Modern 

Homosexualities (Routledge, New York and London, 1985). 

Whitehead, Stephen M. and Barrett, Frank J. (eds), The Masculinities 

Reader (Polity Press, Cambridge, 2001). 

Wittig, Monique, ‘The Straight Mind’ [1980], reprinted in The Straight 

Mind and Other Essays (Harvester Wheatsheaf, Hemel Hempstead, 

1992). 

Wittig, Monique, ‘One Is Not Born a Woman’, Feminist Issues, 1/2 (1981), 

47–54. 

Wittig, Monique and Zeig, Sandi, Lesbian Peoples: Materials for a Dictionary 

[French edn, 1976] (Avon, New York, 1979). 

Woods, Gregory, Articulate Flesh: Male Home-Eroticism in Modern Poetry 

(Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1987). 

Zimmerman, Bonnie, ‘What Has Never Been: An Overview of Lesbian 

Feminist Literary Criticism’, in Elaine Showalter (ed., 1986), above. 

Zimmerman, Bonnie, The Safe Sea of Women: Lesbian Fiction 1969–1989 

(Beacon Press, Boston, 1991). 

Further reading 

Bingham, C., ‘Seventeenth-Century Attitudes Toward Deviant Sex’, 

Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 1 (1971), 447–68.

. 


Bleys, Rudi C., The Geography of Perversion: Male-to-Male Sexual Behaviour 

Outside the West and the Ethnographic Imagination 1750–1918 (Cassell, 


Bray, Alan, Homosexuality in Renaissance England (Gay Men’s Press, 


Bredbeck, Gregory W., Sodomy and Interpretation: Marlowe to Milton 

(Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 1991). 

Bremner, Jeni, From Sappho to de Sade: Moments in the History of Sexuality 


Burston, Paul and Richardson, Colin (eds), A Queer Romance: Lesbians, Gay 

Men and Popular Culture (Routledge, London, 1995). 

Butters, Ronald R. et al. (eds), Displacing Homophobia: Gay Male Perspectives 

in Literature and Culture (Duke University Press, Durham, NC and 


Clark, David and Barber, Stephen (eds), Regarding Sedgwick: Essays on 

Queer Culture and Critical Theory (Routledge, London, 2002). 

Cleto, Fabio (ed.), Camp: Queer Aesthetics and the Performing Subject: A 

Reader (Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 1999). 

Davenport-Hines, R., Sex, Death and Punishment: Attitudes to Sex and 

Sexuality in Britain Since the Renaissance (Collins, London, 1990). 

De Jean, Joan, Fictions of Sappho 1565–1937 (University of Chicago Press, 

Chicago and London, 1989). 

Donoghue, Emma, Passions Between Women: British Lesbian Culture 

1668–1801 (Scarlet Press, London, 1993). 

Dynes, Wayne, Homolexis: A Historical and Cultural Lexicon of 

Homosexuality (Gai Saber Monograph, New York, 1985). 

Ferris, Lesley (ed.), Crossing the Stage: Controversies on Cross-Dressing 

(Routledge, New York and London, 1993). 

Garber, Marjorie, Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety 

(Routledge, New York and London, 1992). 

Glover, David and Kaplan, Cora, Genders (Routledge, London, 2000). 

Hall, Donald E., Queer Theories (Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2002). 

Halperin, David M., One Hundred Years of Homosexuality and Other Essays 

on Greek Love (Routledge, London, 1990).

. 


Hamer, Diane and Budge, Belinda (eds), The Good, The Bad and The 

Gorgeous: Popular Culture’s Romance with Lesbianism (Pandora, 


Hawkes, Terence, Alternative Shakespeares, Volume 2 (Routledge, London, 

1996). 

Humm, Maggie, A Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Feminist Theory 

(Harvester Wheatsheaf, Hemel Hempstead, 1994). 

Katz, J. N., ‘The Age of Sodomitical Sin, 1607–1740’, in Jonathan 

Goldberg (ed., 1994), see Key texts, above. 

Lewis, Reina, ‘The Death of the Author and the Resurrection of the 

Dyke’, in Sally Munt (ed., 1992), see Key texts, above. 

Maccubbin, Robert P., ’Tis Nature’s Fault: Unauthorised Sexuality during the 

Enlightenment (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1985). 

Nestle, Joan, A Restricted Country: Essays and Short Stories (Sheba, London, 

1988). 

Norton, Rictor, Mother Clap’s Molly House: The Gay Subculture in England 

1700–1830 (The Gay Men’s Press, London, 1992). 

Palmer, Paulina, Contemporary Lesbian Writing (Oxford University Press, 

Oxford, 1993). 

Ringer, R. Jeffrey (ed.), Queer Words, Queer Images: Communication and the 

Construction of Homosexuality (New York University Press, London 

and New York, 1994). 

Rousseau, G. S. and Porter, Roy (eds), Sexual Underworlds of the 

Enlightenment (Manchester University Press, Manchester, 1992). 

Rubin, Gayle, ‘The Traffic in Women’, in Rayna R. Reiter (ed.), Toward an 

Anthropology of Women (Monthly Review Press, New York, 1975). 

Salih, Sara, Judith Butler (Routledge, London, 2002). 

Saslow, James M., Ganymede in the Renaissance: Homosexuality in Art and 

Society (Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1986). 

Senelick, Laurence, ‘Mollies or Men of Mode? Sodomy and the 

Eighteenth-Century London Stage’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 

1 (1990), 33–67. 

Smith, Bruce, R., Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare’s England: Cultural 

Poetics (University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London, 1991).

. 


Snitow, Ann et al. (eds), Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality (New 

Feminist Library, New York, 1983). 

Stimpson, Catharine, Where the Meanings Are: Feminism and Cultural 

Spaces (Routledge, London, 1988). 

Sullivan, Nikki, A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory (Edinburgh 

University Press, Edinburgh, 2003). 

Trumbach, Randolph, ‘Sodomitical Subcultures, Sodomitical Roles, and 

the Gender Revolutions of the Eighteenth Century: The Recent 

Historiography’, Eighteenth-Century Life, 9 (1985), 109–21. 

Trumbach, Randolph, ‘London’s Sapphists: From Three Sexes to Four 

Genders in the Making of Modern Culture’, in Julia Epstein and 

Kristina Straub (eds, 1991), see Key texts, above. 

Vance, Carole S. (ed.), Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality 


Whitehead, Stephen J., Men and Masculinities (Polity Press, Cambridge, 

2002).

EPISTEMOLOGY 

OF THE CLOSET 

EVE KOSOFSKY SEDGWICK 

'" 

University of California Press 

Berkeley • Los Angeles

P$J7q- 

. Hb:J s 

/GfCjO 

:I ,, 

Contents 

I, 

Acknowledgments 

ix 

Credits 

xi 

Introduction: Axiomatic 

I 

Chapter 4, "The Beast in the Closet, .. first appeared in 

Ruth Bernard Yeazell, ed., Sex. Politics, and Science in the 

Nineteenth-Century Novel, Selected Papers from the English 

Institute. 1983-84. The johns Hopkins University Press, 

Baltimore/London, 1986, pp. 148-86. Reprinted by 

permission of the publisher. 

University of California Press 

Berkeley and Los· Aiigeles; Califolnia 

© 1990 by 

The Regents of the University of California 

1 

I 

I. Epistemology of the Closet 

l.l 

v 

r; 2.. Some Binarisms (I) 

[l) 

lA 

Billy Budd: After the Homosexual 

3- Some Binarisms (II) 

Wilde, Nietzsche, and the Sentimental Relations 

of the Male Body 

91 

I3I 

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data 

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 

Epistemology of the closet I Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. 

p. ern. 

Includes bibliographical references. 

ISBN 0-520-07042-9 

1. American fiction-Men authors-History and criticism. 

2. Homosexuality and literature. 3. Melville, Herman, 1819-1891. 

Billy Budd. 4. James, Henry, 1843-1916-Criticism and 

interpretation. 5. Wilde, Oscar,1854-1900-Criticism and 

interpretation. 6. Proust, Marcel, 1871-1922. Ala recherche du 

temps perdu. 7. Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 1844-1900. 8. Gays' 

writings.:..:. History and criticism-Theory, etc. 9. Gay men in 

literature. I. Title. 

PS374.H63S42 1990 

813'.309353-dc20 90-35697 

CIP 

I 

-' 4· The Beast in the Closet 

') 

,


I 

! 

I 

I 

i .I 

I 

!I 

.J 

Epistemology of the Closet proposes that many of the major nodes of 

thought and knowledge in twentieth-century Western culture as a whole 

are structured-indeed, fractured- by a chronic, now endemic crisis of 

homo/heterosexual definition, indicatively male, dating from the end 

of the nineteenth century. The book will argue that an understanding of 

virtually any aspecr of modern Wb;tern culture must be, not merely 

incomplete,'but damaged in its central substance to the degree that it does 

not incorporate a critical analysis of modem homo/heterosexual definition; 

and it will assume that the appropriate place for that critical analysis 

to begin is from the relatively decentered perspective of modem gay and 

antihomophobic theory. 

The passage oftime, the bestowal of thought and necessary political 

struggle since the tum of the century have only spread and deepened the 

long crisis of modem sexual definition, dramatizing, often violently, the 

internal incoherence and mutual contradiction of each of the forms of 

discursive and institutional "common sense" on this subject inherited 

from the architects of our present culture. The contradictions I will be 

discussing are not in the first place those between prohomosexual and 

antihomosexual people or ideologies, although the book's strongest motivation 

is indeed the gay-affirmative one. Rather, the contradictions that 

seem most active are the ones internal to all the important twentiethcentury 

understandings of homo I heterosexual definition, both heremsexist 

and antihomophobic. Their outlines and something of their history 

are sketched in Chapter 1. Briefly, they are two. The first is the contradiction 

between seeing homo/heterosexual definition on the one hand as an 

issue of active importance primarily for a small, distinct, relatively fixed 

homosexual minority (what I refer to as a minoritizing view), and seeing it) 

on the other hand as an issue of continuing, determinative importance in 

the lives of people across the spectrum of sexualities (what I refer to as a 

universalizing view). The second is the contradiction between seeing 

same-sex object choice on the one hand as a matter of liminality or 

I

2 Introduction: Axiomatic 

transitivity between genders, and seeing it on the other hand as reflecting 

an impulse of separatism-though by no means necessarily political 

separatism-within each gender. The purpose of this book is not to 

adjudicate between the two poles of either of these contradictions, for, if 

its argument is right, no epistemological grounding now exists from 

which to do so. Instead, I am trying to make the strongest possible 

'introductory case for a hypothesis about the centrality of this nominally 

marginal, conceptually intractable set of definitional issues to the important 

knowledges and understandings of twentieth-century Western 

culture as a whole. 

The word "homosexual" entered Euro-American discourse during the 

last third of the nineteenth century-its popularization preceding, as it 

happens, even that of the word "heterosexual."' It seems clear that .the 

sexual behaviors, and even for some people the conscious identities, 

denoted by the new term "homosexual" and its contemporary variants 

already had a long, rich history. So, indeed, did a wide range of other 

sexual behaviors and behavi()ral cll!sters. What was new from the turn of 

the century was the world-mapping by wJ;lich every given person, just as 

he or she was necessarily assignable to a male or a female gender, was now 

considered necessarily assignable as well to a homo- or a hetero-sexuality, 

-a binarized identity that was full of implications, however confusing, for 

even the ostensibly least sexual aspects of personal existence. It was this 

new development that left no space in the culture exempt from the potent 

incoherences of homo/heterosexual definition. 

New, institutionalized taxonomic discourses-medical, legal, literary, 

psychological-centering on homo/heterosexual definition proliferated 

and crystallized with exceptional rapidity in the decades around the turn 

of the century, decades in which so many of the other critical nodes of the 

culture were being, if less suddenly and newly, nonetheless also definitively 

reshaped. Both the power relations between the genders and the 

relations of nationalism and imperialism, for instance, were in highly 

visible crisis. For this reason, and because the structuring of same-sex 

bonds can't, in any historical situation marked by inequality and contest 

betuJeen genders, fail to be a site of intensive regulation that intersects 

Introduction: Axiomatic 3 

virtually every issue of power and- gender, 2 lines can never be drawn to 

I 

circumscribe within some proper domain of sexuality {whatever that 

I 

might be) the consequences of a shift in sexual discourse. Furthermore, in 

l 

accord with·Foucault's demonstration, whose results I will take to be 

axiomatic, that modern Western culture has placed what it calls sexuality 

in a more and more distinctively privileged relation to our most prized 

constructs of individual identity, truth, and.knowledge, it becomes truer 

and truer that the language of sexuality not only intersects with but 

transforms the languages and relations by which we know. 

Accordingly, one characte,istic of the rea4.ings in this book is to attend 

to perforroative aspects of texts, and to what are often blandly called their 

I {-"reader relations," as sites of definitional creation, violence, and rupture 

in relation to particular readers, particular institutional circums.tan,ces. 

I 

An assumption underlying the book is that the relations of the closet-the 

relations of the known and the unknown, the explicit and the inexplicit 

around homo I heterosexual definition- have the potential for being peculiarly 

revealing, in fact, about 

ore generally. It has felt 

throughout this work as though the ensity of their social meaning lends 

any speech act concerning these issues- and the outlines of th

• 


best friends, who for years canvassed freely the emotional complications 

of each other's erotic lives-the man's eroticism happening to focus exclusively 

on men. But it was only after one particular conversational 

moment, fully a decade into this relationship, that it seemed to either of 

these friends that permission had been given to the woman to refer to the 

man, in their conversation together, as a gay man. Discussing it much 

later, both agreed they had felt at the time that this one moment had 

constituted a clear-cut act of coming out, even in the context of years and 

years beforehand of exchange predicated on the man's being gay. What 

was said to make this difference? Not a version of "I am gay," which could 

only have been bathetic between them. What constituted coming out for 

--= 

this man, in this situation, was to use about himself the phrase ''coming 

out" -to mention, as if casually, having come out to someone else. 

(Similarly, aT-shirt that ACT UP sells in New York bearing the text, "I am 

out, therefore I am," is meant to do for the wearer, not the constativework 

of reporting that s/he is out, but the performative work of coming out in 

the first place.) And as 1 will diss:uss, thr fact thawilence is 

f rendered as pointed and performative as speech, in 

closet;dePe'nd7 on 'i_ndhighlights more broadlythe fact that ignorance is 

as potent and as 

ail, is not itself power, although it is the magnetic field 

' ' 

of power. Ignorance and opacity collude or compete with knowledge in 

mobilizing the Bows of energy, desire, goods, meanings, persons. If M. 

Mitterrand knows English but Mr. Reagan lacks-as he did lack- 

French, it is the urbane M. Mitterrand who must negotiate in an acquired 

tongue, the ignorant Mr. R;agan who may dilate in his native one., Or in 

the interactive speech model by which, as Sally McConneii-Ginet puts it, 

"the standard ... meaning can be thought of as what is recognizable 

solely on the basis of interlocutors' mutual knowledge of established practices 

of interpretation," it is the interlocutor who has or pretends to have 

the less broadly knowledgeable understanding of interpretive practice 

who will define the terms of the exchange. So, for instance, because "men, 

with superior extralinguistic resources and privileged discourse positions, 

are often less likely to treat perspectives different from their own as mutually 

available for communication," their attitudes are "thus more likely to 

leave a lasting imprint on the common semantic stock than women's. " 4 

(l) Sally McConnell·Ginet, "The Sexual (Re)Production of Meaning: A Discourse- 

Based manuscript, pp. 387-88, quoted in Cheris Kramarae and Paula A. 

Treichler, A Feminist Dictionary (Boston: Pandora Press, 1985), p. 264; emphasis added. 

I 

I 

il 

\ 

, 


Such ignorance effects can be harnessed, licensed, and regulated on a 

mass scale for striking enforcements-perhaps especially around sexuality, 

in modern Western culture the most meaning-intensive of human 

activities. The epistemological asymmetry of the laws that govern rape, 

for instance, privileges at the same time men and ignorance, inasmuch as 

it matters not at all what the raped woman perceives or wants just so long 

as the man raping her can claim not to have noticed (ignorance in which 

male sexuality receives careful education)! And the rape machinery that 

is organized by this epistemological privilege of unknowing in turn keeps 

disproportionately under discipline, of course, women's larger ambitions 

to take more control over the terms of our own circulation. 6 Or, again, in V' 

an ingenious and patiently instructive orchestration of ignorance, the 

U.S. Justice Deparrment ruled in june, 1986, that an employer may freely 

fire persons with AIDS exactly so long as the employer can claim to be 

ignorant of the medical fact, quoted in the ruling, that there is no known 

health danger in the workplace from the disease.' Again, it is clear in 

political context that the effect aimed at-in this case, it is hard to help 

feeling, aimed at with some care-is the ostentatious declaration, for the 

private sector, of an organized open season on gay men. 8 

5· Catherine A. MacKinnon makes this point more fully in "Feminism, Marxism, 

Method, and the State: An Agenda for Theory," Signs 7, no. 3 (Spring 1982): 515-44. 

6. Susan Brownmiller made the most forceful and influential presentation of this case 

in Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape {New York: Simon & Schuster, 1975). 

7· Robert Pear, "Rights Laws Offer Only Limited Help on AIDS, U.S. Rules," New 

York Times,June 23, 1986. That the ruling was calculated to offer, provoke, and 

legitimize harm and insult is clear from the language quoted in Pear's article: "A person," 

the ruling says, for "cannot be regarded as handicapped (and hence subject to 

federal protection] simply because others shun his company. Otherwise, a host of personal 

traits, from ill temper to poor personal hygiene, would constitute handicaps." 

8. Not that gay men were intended to be the only victims of this ruling. In even the 

most conscientious discourse concerning AIDS in the United States so faf there has been 

the problem, to which this essay does not pretend to offer any solution, of doing justice at 

once to the relative (and increasing) heterogeneity of those who actually have AIDS and to 

the specificity with which AIDS discourse at every level has until very recently focused on 

male homosexuality. In its worldwide epidemiology, of 'ourse, AIDS has no distinctive 

association with gay men, nor is it likely to for long here either. The acknowledgment/ 

management of this fact was the preoccupation of a strikingly sudden media-wide discursive 

shift in the winter and early spring of 1987. If the obsessionally homophobic focus of 

AIDS phobia up to that moment scapegoated gay men by (among other things) subjecting 

their sexual practice and lifestyles to a glaring and effectually punitive visibility, however, it 

worked in an opposite way to expunge the claims by expunging the vi,sibility of most of the 

disease's other victims. So far, here, these victims have been among groups already the 

most vulnerable-intravenous drug users, sex workers, wives and girlfriends of closeted 

men- on whom invisibility, or a public subsumption under the incongruous heading of 

gay men, can haVe no protective effect. (It has been notable, for instance, that media 

coverage of prostitutes with AIDS has shown no interest in the health of the women 

themselves, but only in their potential for infecting men. Again, the campaign to provide


Although the simple, stubborn fact or pretense of ignorance (one 

meaning, the Capital one, of the word "stonewall") can sometimes be 

enough to enforce discursive power, a far more complex drama of ignorance 

and knowledge is the more usual carrier of political struggle. Such a 

drama was enacted when, only a few days after the Justice Department's 

private-sector decision, the U.S. Supreme Court correspondingly opened 

the public-sector bashing season by legitimating state antisodomy laws 

in Bowers v. Hardwick. 9 In a virulent ruling whose language made from 

beginning to end an insolent display of legal illogic- of what Justice 

Blackmun in dissent called "the most willful blindness"lO_a single, 

apparently incidental word used in Justice White's majority opinion became 

for many gay or antihomophobic readers a focus around which the 

inflammatory force of the decision seemed to pullulate with peculiar 

density. II In White's opinion, 

to claim that a right to engage in sodomy is "deeply rooted in this nation's 

·history and tradition" or "implicit in the concept of ordered liberty" is, at 

best, facetious.1 2 

What lends the word "facetious" in this sentence such an unusual power to 

offend, even in the context of a larger legal offense whose damage will be 

drug users with free needles had not until early 1987 received even t4e exiguous state 

support given to Safer-sex education for gay men.) The damages of homophobia on the 

one hand, of classism/ racism/sexism on the other; of intensive regulatory visibility on the 

one hand, of discursive erasure on the other: these pairings are not only incommensurable 

(and why measure them against each other rather than against the more liberating 

possibilities they foreclose?) but very hard to interleave with each other conceptually. The 

effect has been perhaps most dizzying when the incommensurable damages are condensed 

upon a single person, e.g., a nonwhite gay man. The focus of this book is on the specific 

damages of homophobia; but to the extent that it is impelled by {a desire to the 

public pressures of AIDS phobia, I must at least make clear how much that is important 

even to its own ambitions is nonetheless excluded from its potential for responsiveness. 

9· Graphic encapsulation of this event on the front page of the Times: at the bottom of 

the three-column lead story on the ruling, a photo ostensibly about the influx of various 

navies into a welcoming New York for "the Liberty celebration" shows two worried but 

extremely good-looking sailors in alluring whites, "asking directions of a police officer" 

(New York Times, July 1, 1986). 

ro. "The Supreme Court Opinion. Michael J. Bowers, Attorney General of Georgia, 

Petition v. Michael Hardwick and John and Mary Doe, Respondents," text in New York 

Native, no. 169 (July 14, 1986): 15. ' 

rr. The word is quoted, for instance, in isolation, in the sixth sentence of the Times's 

lead article announcing the decision (July 1, 1986). The Times editorial decrying the 

decision (July 2, 1986) remarks on the crudity of this word before outlining the substantive 

offensiveness of the ruling. The New York Native and the gay leaders it quoted also gave the 

word a lot of play in the immediate aftermath of the ruling(e.g., no. 169 Uuly 14,1986]: 

8, 11). 

12. New York Native, no. 169 (July 14, 1986): 13. 


much more indelible, has to be the economical way it functions here as 

switchpoint for the cyclonic epistemological undertows that encompass 

power in general and issues of homosexual desire in particular. 

One considers: (1) prima facie, nobody could, of course, actually for 

an instant mistake the intent of the gay advocates as facetious. (2) Secunda 

facie, it is thus the court itself that is pleased to be facetious. Trading on the 

assertion's very (3) transparent sttipidit)' (not just the contemptuous demonstration 

that powerful people don't have to be acute or right, but even 

more, the contemptuous demonstration-this is palpable throughout the 

majority opinions, but only in ,this word does it bubble up with active 

pleasure-of how obtuseness itself arms the powerful against their enemies), 

the court's joke here (in the wake of the mock-ignorant mockjocose 

threat implicit in "at best") is (4) the clownish claim to be able at 

will to "read"-i.e., project into-the minds of the gay advocates. This 

being not only (5) a parody of, but ( 6) more intimately a kind of aggressive 

jamming technique against, (7) the truth/paranoid fantasy that it is gay 

people who can read, or project their own desires into, the minds of 

''straight" people. 

Inarguably, there is a satisfaction in dwelling on the degree to which 

the power of our enemies over us is implicated, not in their command of X 

knowledge, but precisely in their ignorance. The effect is a real one, but it 

carries dangers with it as well. The chief of these dangers is the scornful, 

fearful, or patheticizing of "ignorance"; it goes with tll_e unexamined 

Enlightenment assumptions by which the labeling of a particular 

force as "igriorance" seems to place it unappealably in a demonized space 

on a never quite explicit ethical schema. (It is also dangerously close in 

structure to the more palpably sentimental privileging of ignorance as an 

originary, passive innocence.) The angles of view from which it can look 

as though a political fight is a fight against ignorance are invigorating and 

maybe revelatory ones but dangerous places for dwelling. The writings of, 

among others, Foucault, Derrida, Thomas Kuhn, and Thomas Szasz have 

given contemporary readers a lot of practice in questioning both· the 

ethical/political disengagement and, beyond that, the ethical/political / 

simplicity of the category of "knowledge," so that a writer who appeals 

too directly to the redemptive potential of simply upping the cognitive 

wattage on any question of power seems, now, naive. The corollary 

problems still adhere to the category of "ignorance," as well, but so do 

some additional ones: there are psychological operations of shame, denial, 

projection around "ignorance" that make it an especially galvanizing 

.,


category for the individual reader, even as they give it a rhetorical potency 

that it would be hard for writers to forswear and foolhardy for them to 

embrace. 

Rather than sacrifice the notion of"ignorance," then, I would be more 

interested at this point in trying, as we are getting used to trying with 

"knowledge," to pluralize and specify it. That is, I would like to be able to 

make use in sexual-political thinking of the deconstructive understanding 

that particular insights generate, are lined with, and at the same time are 

themselves structured by particular opacities. If ignorance is not-as it 

evidently is not-a single Manichaean, aboriginal maw of darkness from 

which the heroics of human cognition can occasionally wrestle facts, 

insights, freedoms, progress, perhaps there-exists instead a plethora of 

ignorances, and we may begin to ask questions about the labor, erotics, 

and economics of their human production and' distribution. Insofar as 

ignorance is ignorance of a knowledge-a knowledge that may itself, it 

goes without saying, be seen as either true or false under some other 

regime of truth -these ignorances, far from being pieces of the originary 

dark, are produced by and correspond to particular knowledges and 

circulate as part of particular regimes of truth. We should not assume that 

their doubletting with know ledges means, however, that they obey identical 

laws identically or follow the same circulatory paths at the same 

pace. 13 

Historically, the framing of Epistemology of the Closet begins with a 

puzzle. It is a rather amazing fact that, of the very many dimensions along 

which the genital activity of one person can be differentiated from that of 

another (dimensions that include preference for certain acts, certain 

zones or sensations, certain physical types, a certain frequency, certain 

symbolic investments, certain relations of age or power, a certain species, 

a certain number of participants, etc. etc. etc.), precisely one, the gender 

of object choice, emerged from the turn of the century, and has remained, 

as the dimension denoted by the now ubiquitous category of "sexual 

orientation." This is not a development that would have been foreseen 

from the viewpoint of the fin de siecle itself, where a rich stew of male 

algolagnia, child-love, and autoeroticism, to mention no more of its 

components, seemed to have as indicative a relation as did homosexuality 

13. For an essay that makes these points more fully, see my "Privilege of Unknowing," 

Genders, no. 1 (Spring 1988): 102-24, a reading of Diderot's La Religieuse, from which 

the preceding six paragraphs are taken. 


to the whole, obsessively entertained problematic of sexual "perversion" 

or, more broadly, "decadence." Foucault, for instance, mentions the hysterical 

woman and the masturbating child, along with "entomologized" 

sexological categories such as zoophiles, zooerasts, auto-monosexualists, 

and gynecomasts, as typifying the new sexual taxonomies, the "specifica- 

- tion of individuals" that facilitated the modern freighting of sexual definition 

with epistemological and power relations. 14 True as his notation is, it 

suggests without beginning to answer the further question: why the 

category of "the masturbator," to choose only one example, should by 

now have entirely lost its diacritical potential for specifying a particular 

kind of person, an identity, at the same time as it continues to be truebecomes 

increasingly true -that, for a crucial strain of Western discourse, 

in Foucault's words "the homosexual was now a species. " 15 So, as a result, 

is the heterosexual, and between these species the human spec:ies has come 

more and more to be divided. Epistemology of the Closet does not have an 

explanation to offer for this sudden, radical condensation of sexual 

categories; instead of speculating on its causes, the book explores its 

unpredictably varied and acute implications and consequences. 

At the same time that this process of sexual specification or speciesformation 

was going on, the book will argue, less stable and identitybound 

understandings of sexual choice also persisted and developed, 

often among the same people or interwoven in the same systems of 

thought. Again, the book will not suggest (nor do I believe there currently 

exists) any standpoint of thought from which the rival claims of these 

minoritizing and universalizing understandings of sexual definition could 

be decisively arbitrated as to their "truth." Instead, the perfonmative 

effects of the self-contradictory discursive field of force created by their 

overlap will be my subject. And, of course, it makes every difference that 

these impactions of homo/heterosexual definition took place in a setting, 

not of spacious emotional or analytic impartiality, but rather of urgent 

homophobic pressure to devalue one of the two nominally symmetrical 

forms of choice. 

As several of the formulations above would suggest, one main strand of 

argument in this book is deconstructive, in a fairly specific sense. The 

analytic move it makes is to demonstrate that categories presented in a 

culture as symmetrical binary oppositions-heterosexual/homosexual, 

14. Foucault, History of Sexuality, pp. 105, 43. 

15. Foucault, History of Sexuality, p. 43.

IO 


/ 


II 

in this case-actually subsist in a more unsetded and dynamic tacit 

relation according to which, first, term B is not symmetrical with but 

subordinated to term A; but, second, the ontologically valorized term A 

actually depends for its meaning on the simultaneous subsumption and 

exclusion of term B; hence, third, the question of priority between the 

supposed central and the supposed marginal category of each dyad is 

irresolvably unstable, an instability caused by the fact that term B is 

constituted as at once internal and external to term A. Harold Beaver, for 

instance, in an influential 1981 essay sketched the oudines of such a 

deconstructive strategy: 

The aim must be to reverse the rhetorical opposition of what is "transparent" 

or "natural" and what is "derivative" or "contrived" by demonstrating 

that the qualities predicated of "homosexuality" (as a dependent 

term) are in fact a condition of "heterosexuality"; that "heterosexuality," 

far from possessing a privileged status, must itself be treated as a dependent 

term. 16 

To understand these conceptual relations as irresolvably unstable is 

not, however, to understand them as inefficacious or innocuous. It is at 

least premature when Roland Barthes prophesies that "once the paradigm 

is blurred, utopia begins: meaning and sex become the objects of free play, 

at the heart of which the (polysemant) forms and the (sensual) practices, 

liberated from the binary prison, will achieve a state of infinite expansion. 

"17 To the contrary, a deconstructive understanding of these binarisms 

makes it possible to identify them as sites that are peculiarly densely 

charged with lasting potentials for powerful manipulation-through precisely 

the mechanisms of self-contradictory definition or, more succinctly, 

the double bind. Nor is a deconstructive analysis of such definitional 

knots, however necessary, at all sufficient to disable them. Quite the 

opposite: I would suggest that an understanding of their irresolvable 

.! instability has been continually available, and has continually lent discur, 

sive authority, to antigay as well as to gay cultural forces of this century. 

Beaver makes an optimistic prediction that "by disqualifying the autonomy 

of what was deemed spontaneously immanent, the whole sexual 

system is fundamentally decentred and exposed. " 18 But there is reason to 

16. Harold Beaver, "Homosexual Signs," Critical Inquiry 8 (Autumn 1981 ): 115. 

17. Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and 

Wang, 1977), p. 133. 

18. Beaver, "Homosexual Signs," pp. 115-16. 

believe that the oppressive sexual system of the past hundred years was 

if anything born and bred (if I may rely on the pith of a fable whose 

value doesn't, I muschope, stand or fall,with its history of racist uses) 

in the briar patch of the most notorious and repeated decenterings and 

exposures. .3;. 

These deconstructive contestations can occur, moreover, only in the 2.. 

context of an entire cultural network of normative definitions,·definitions 

themselves equally unstable but responding to different sets of contiguities 

and often at a different rate. The master terms of a particular historical 

moment will be those that are so situated as to entangle most inextricably 

and at the same time most differentially the filaments of other important 

definitional ne>:uses. In arguing that homo/heterosexual definition' has 

been a presiding master term of the past century, one that has the same, 

primary importance for all modem Western identity and social organization 

(and not merely for homosexual identity and''culture) as do the more 

traditionally visible cruxes of gender, class, and race, I'll argue that thenow 

chronic modern crisis of homo/heterosexual defin.ition has affected 

our culture through its ineffaceable marking particularly of the categories 

secrecy I disclosure, knowledge/ignorance, private/public, masculine/ 

femmme, maJoritylminonty, .mu"oceii"ce/initiation, natural/ artificial, 

new I old, discipline/terrorism, canonic/noncanonic, Wholeriess/ decadence, 

urbane I provincial, domestic/ foreign, health I illness, same I 

different, active/ passive, in/ out, cognjrjon !paranoia, art/kitsch, utopia/ 

apocalypse, s!!!_ce_my/ sentimentality, and voluntarity I addiction. 19 

And rather than embrace an idealist faith in the necessarily, immanently 

self-corrosive efficacy of the contradictions inherent to these definitional 

binarisms, I will suggest instead that contests for discursive power can be . 

specified as competitions for the material or rhetorical leverage required 

to set the terms of, and to profit in some way from, the operations of such 

an incoherence of definition . 

Perhaps I should say something about the project of hypothesizing that 

certain binarisms that structure meaning in a culture may be "ineffaceably 

marked" by association with. this one particular problematic-inefface- 

19. My casting of all these definitional nodes in the form of binarisms, I should make 

explicit; has to do not with a mystical faith in the number two but, rather, with the felt 

need to schematize in some consistent way the treatment of sociitl vectors so exceedingly 

various. The kind of falsification necessarily performed on each by this reduction cannot, 

unfortunately, itself be consistent. But the scope of the kind of hypothesis I want to pose 

does seem to require a drastic reductiveness, at least in its initial fonTiulations.


ably even when invisibly. Hypothesizing is easier than proving, but indeed 

I cannot imagine the protocol by which such hypotheses might be tested; 

they must be deepened and broadened-not the work of one book-and 

used, rather than proved or disproved by a few examples. The collecting 

of instances of each binarism that would appear to "common sense" to be 

unmarked by issues of homo I heterosexual definition, though an in exhaustibly 

stimulating heuristic, is not, I believe, a good test of such a 

hypothesis. After all, the particular kinds of skill that might be required 

to produce the most telling interpretations have hardly been a valued part 

of the "common sense" of this epistemologically cloven culture. If a painstaking 

process of accumulative reading and historical de- and recontextualization 

does not render these homologies resonant and produqive, 

that is the only test they can directly fail, the only one they need to pass. 

The structure of the present book has been markedly affected by this 

intuition-by a sense that the- cultural interrogations it aims to make, 

imperative will be trivialized or evacuated, at this early stage, to the 

degree that their procedures seem to partake of the a priori. I've wanted 

the book to be inviting (as well as imperative) but resolutely nonalgorithmic. 

A point of the book is not to know how far its insights and 

projects are generalizable, not to be able to say in advance where the 

semantic specificity of these issues gives over to (or: itself structures?) the 

syntax of a "broader" or more abstractable critical project. In particular, 

the book aims to resist in every way it can the deadening pretended 

knowingness by which the chisel of modern homo/heterosexual definitional 

crisis tends, in public discourse, to be hammered most fatally 

home. 

Perhaps to counter that, it seems now that the book not only has but 

constitutes an extended introduction. It is organized, not as a chronological 

narrative, but as a series of essays linked closely by their shared project 

and recurrent topics. The Introduction, situating this project in the larger 

context of gay /lesbian and antihomophobic theory, and Chapter 1, 

outlining its basic terms, are the only parts that do not comprise extended 

readings. Chapter 2 (on Billy Budd) and Chapter 3 (on Wilde and 

Nietzsche), which were originally conceived as a single unit, offer a 

different kind of introduction: an through the specificity of these 

texts and authors, of most of the bravely showy list of binarized cultural 

nexuses about which the book makes, at other places, more generalized 

assertions. Chapter 4 discusses at length, through a reading of James's 

"The Beast in the Jungle," the elsewhere recurrent topos of male homosex- 

' 

Introduction: Axiomatic '3 

ual panic. And Chapter 5, on Proust, focuses more sharply on the book's 

preoccupation with the speech-act relations around the closet. 

In consonance with iny fihph·asis ol) the performative relations of 

double and conflicted definition, the theorized_ prescription for a practical 

politics implicit in these readings is for a multi-pronged movement whose 

idealist and materialist impulses, whose minority-model and universalistmodel 

strategies, and for that matter whose gender-separatist and genderintegrative 

analyses would likewise proceed in parallel without any high 

premium placed on ideological rationalization between them. In effect 

this is how the gay movements of this century have actually been structured, 

if not how they have often been perceived or evaluated. The breadth 

and fullness of the political gestalt of gay-affirmative struggle give a 

powerful resonance to the voice of each of its constituencies. The cost in 

ideological rigor, though high indeed, is very simply inevitable: this is not 

a conceptual landscape in which ideological rigor across levels, across 

constituencies is at all possible, be it ever so desirable. 

Something similar is true at the level of scholarship. Over and over I 

have felt in writing the book that, however my own identifications, 

intuitions, circumstances, limitations, apd talents may have led its interpretations 

to privilege constructivist oVer essentialist, universalizing over 

minoritizing, and gender-transitive over gender-separatist understandings 

of sexual choice, nevertheless the space of permission for this work and the 

depth of the intellectual landscape in which it might have a contribution to 

make owe everything to the wealth of essentialist, minoritizing, and 

separatist gay thought and struggle also in progress. There are similar 

points to be made about the book's limitation to what may sound, in the 

current climate of exciting interstitial explorations among literature, 

social history, and "cultural studies," like unreconstructedly literary readings 

of essentially canonical texts. I must hope that, as the taken-forgrantedness 

of what constitutes a literary text, a literary reading, a 

worthwhile interpretive intervention, becomes more and more unstable 

under such pressures, the force of anyone's perseveration in this spe· 

cializeq practice (I use "specialized" here not with the connotation of the 

"expert's" technique, but with the connotation of the wasteful, valuemaking 

partiality of the sexual perversion) could look less like a rearguard 

defense than like something newly interrogable and interrogatory. Even 

more is this true of the book's specification of male, and of Euro- 

American male, sexual definition as its subject. Any critical book makes 

endless choices of focus and methodology, and it is very difficult for these

14 Introduction: Axiomdtic 

choices to be interpreted in any other light than that of the categorical 

imperative: the fact that they are made in a certain way here seems a priori 

to assert that they would be best made in the same way everywhere. I 

would ask that, however sweeping the claims made by this book may seem 

to be, it not be read as making that particular claim. Quite the opposite: a 

real measure of the success of such an analysis would lie in its ability, in the 

hands of an inquirer with different needs, talents, or positionings, to 

clarify the distinctive kinds of resistance offered to it from different spaces 

on the social map, even though such a project might require revisions or 

rupturings of the analysis as first proffered. The only imperative that the 

book means to treat as categorical is the very broad one of pursuing an 

antihomophobic inquiry. If the book were able to fulfill its most expansive 

ambitions, it would make certain specific kinds of readings and interrogations, 

perhaps new, available in a heuristically powerful, productive, and 

significant form for other readers to perform on literary and social texts 

with, ideally, other results. The meaning, the legitimacy, and in many 

ways even the possibility for good faith of the positings this book makes 

depend radically on the production, by other antihomophobic readers 

who may be very differently situated, of the widest possible range of other 

and even contradictory availabilities. 

This seems, perhaps, especially true of historical periodization 

implied by the structure of this book, and its consequences. To hypothesize 

the usefulness of taking the century from the 1880s to the 1980s as a 

single period in the history of male homo/heterosexual definition is 

necessarily to risk subordinating the importance of other fulcrum points. 

One thinks, for instance, of the events collectively known as 

the New York City riots of June, 1969, protesting police harassment of 

patrons of a gay bar, from which the modern gay liberation movement 

dates its inauguration. A certain idealist bias built into a book about 

definition makes it too easy to level out, as from a spuriously bird's-eye 

view, the incalculable impact-including the cognitive impact-of political 

movements per se. Yet even the phrase "the closet" as a publicly 

intelligible signifier for gay-related epistemological issues is made available, 

obviously, only by the difference made by the post-Stonewall gay 

politics oriented around coming out of the closet. More generally, the 

centrality in this book's argument of a whole range of valuations and 

political perspectives that are unmistakably post-Stonewall will be, I 

hope, perfectly obvious. It is only in that context that the hypothesis of a 


certain alternative, overarching periodization of definitional issues can be 

appropriately entertained. 

The book that thkone, Between Men: English Literature and 

Male Homosocial Desire, attempted to demonstrate the immanence of 

men's same-sex bonds, and their prohibitive structuration, to malefemale 

bonds in nineteenth-century English literature. The relation of this 

book to its predecessor is defined most simply by the later time span that it 

treats. This has also involved, however, a different negotiation between 

feminist and antihomophobic motives in .the two studies. Between Men 

ends with a coda pointing toward "the gaping and unbridgeable rift in the 

male homosocial spectrum" at the end of the nineteenth century, after 

which "a discussion of male homosocial desire as a whole really gives way 

to a discussion of male homosexualitY and h01p.ophobia as we know 

them. " 20 (For more on that facile "as we know them," see Axiom 5 below.) 

Epistemology of the Closet, which depends analytically on the conclusions 

reached in Between Men, takes up the story at exactly that point, and in 

that sense can more accurately be said to be primarily an antihomophobic 

book in its subject matter and perspective. That is to say, in terms that I 

will explain more fully in Axiom 2 below, the book's first focus is on 

sexuality rather than (sometimes, even, as opposed to) gender. Between 

Men focused on the oppressive effects on women and men of a cultural 

system in which male-male desire became widely intelligible primarily by 

being routed through triangular relations involving a woman. The inflictions 

of this system, far from disappearing since the tum of the century, 

have only. become adapted and subtilized. But certainly the pressingly 

immediate fusion of feminist with gay male preoccupations and interrogations 

that 'Between Men sought to perform has seemed less available, 

analytically, for a twentieth-century culture in which at least some versions 

of a same-sex desire unmediated through heterosexual performance 

have become widely articulated. 

Epistemology of the Closet is a feminist book mainly in the sense that 

its analyses. were produced by someone whose thought has been macroand 

microscopically infused with feminism over a long period, At the 

many intersections where a distinctively feminist (i.e., gender-centered) 

and a distinctively antihomophobic (i.e., sexuality-centered) inquiry have 

20. Sedgwick, Between Men, pp. 201, 202.


seemed to diverge, however, this book has tried consistently to press on in 

the latter direction. I have made this choice largely because I see feminist 

analysis as being considerably more developed than gay male or antihomophobic 

analysis at present-theoretically, politically, and institutionally. 

There are more people doing feminist analysis, it has been being 

done longer, it is less precarious and dangerous (still precarious and 

dangerous enough), and there is by now a much more broadly usable set 

of tools available for its furtherance. This is true notwithstanding the 

extraordinary recent effiorescence of gay and lesbian studies, without 

which, as I've suggested, the present book would have been impossible; 

that .flowering is young, fragile, under extreme threat from both within 

and outside academic institutions, and still necessarily dependent on a 

limited pool of paradigms and readings. The viability, by now solidly 

established, of a persuasive feminist project of interpreting gender arrangements, 

oppressions, and resistances in Euro-American modernism 

and modernity from the turn of the century has been a condition of the 

possibility of this book but has also been taken as a permission or 

imperative to pursue a very different path in it. And, indeed, when 

another kind of intersection has loomed-the choice between risking a 

premature and therefore foreclosing reintegration between feminist and 

gay (male) terms of analysis, on the one hand, and on the other hand 

keeping their relation open a little longer by deferring yet again the 

moment of their accountability to one another-I have followed the latter 

path. This is bound to seem retardataire to some readers, but I hope they 

are willing to see it as a genuine deferral, in the interests of making space 

for a gay male-riented analysis that would have its own claims to make 

, for an illuminating centrality, rather than as a refusal. Ultimately, I do 

feel, a great deal depends-for all women, for lesbians, for gay men, and 

possibly for all men-on the fostering of our ability to arrive at un- 

J) derstandings of sexuality that will respect a certain irreducibility in it to 

(. the terms and relations of gender. 

A note on terminology. There is, I believe, no satisfactory rule for 

choosing between the usages "homosexual" and "gay," outside of a post- 

Stonewall context where "gay" must be preferable since it is the explicit 

choice of a large number of the people to whom it refers. Until recently it 

seemed that "homosexual," though it severely risked anachronism in any 

application before the late nineteenth century, was still somehow less 

temporally circumscribed than "gay," perhaps because it sounded more 

official, not to say diagnostic. That aura of timelessness about the word 

Introduction: Axiomatic !7 

has, however, faded rapidly-less because of the word's manifest inadequacy 

to the cognitive and behavioral maps of the centuries before its 

coining, than because the sources of its authority for the century after have 

seemed increasingly ...... tendentious ..__.- and dated. Thus "homosexual" and 

"gay" seem more and moi-e to be tirms applicable to distinct, nonoverlapping 

periods in the history of a phenomenon for which there then remains 

no overarching label. Accordingly I have tried to use each of the. terms 

appropriately in contexts where historical differentiation between the 

earlier and later parts of the century seemed important. But to designate 

"the" phenomenon (problematical notion) as it stretches across a larger 

reach of history, I have used one or the other interchangeably, most often 

in contrast to the immediatelY relevant historical usage. (E.g., "gay" in a 

turn-of-the-century context or "homosexual" in a 1980s context would 

each be meant to suggest a caiegorization broad enough to include at least 

the other period as well.) I have not followed a convention, used by some 

scholars, of differentiating between "gay" and "homosexual" on the basis 

of whether a given text or person was perceived as embodying (respectively) 

gay affirmation or internalized homophobia; an unproblematical 

ease in distinguishing between these two things is not an assumption of 

this study. The main additional constraint on the usage of these terms in 

this book is a preference against employing the noun "gayness," or "gay" 

itself as a noun. I think what underlies this preference is a sense that the 

association of same-sex desire with the traditional, exciting meanings of 

the adjective "gay" is still a powerfully assertive act, perhaps not one to be 

lightly routinized by grammatical adaptations. 

Gender has increasingly become a problem for this area of terminology, 

and one to which I have, again, no consistent solution. "Homosexual" 

was a relatively gender-neutral term and I use it as such, though it 

has seemed to have at least some male bias-whether because of 

the pun on Latin homo= man latent in its etymological macaronic, or 

simply because of the greater attention to men in the discourse surrounding 

it {as in so many others}. "Gay" is more complicated since it makes a 

claim to refer to both genders :but is routinely yoked with "lesbian" in 

actual usage, as if it did not-as increasingly it does not-itself refer to 

women. As I suggest in Axiom 3, this terminological complication is 

closely responsive to real ambiguities and struggles of gay !lesbian politics 

and identities: e.g., there are women-loving women who think of themselves 

as lesbians but not as gay, and others who think of themselves as gay 

women but not as lesbians. Since the premises of this study make it 

1


Introduction: Axiomatic '9 

h 7 

impossible to presuppose either the unity or the distinctness of women's 

and men's changing, and indeed synchronically various, homosexual 

identities, and since its primary though not exclusive focus is in fact on 

male identities, I sometimes use "gay and lesbian" but more often simply 

"gay," the latter in the oddly precise sense of a phenomenon of same-sex 

desire that is being treated as indicatively but not exclusively male. When I 

mean to suggest a more fully, equitably two-sexed phenomenon I refer to 

"gay men and women," or "lesbians and gay men"; when a more exclusive 

one, to "gay men." 

Finally, I feel painfully how different may be a given writer's and 

reader's senses of how best to articulate an argument that may for both 

seem a matter of urgency. I have tried to be as clear as I can about the 

book's moves, motives, and assumptions throughout; but even aside from 

the intrinsic difficulty of its subject and texts, it seems inevitable that the 


Thus, a lot of the popularity of the "homosexual panic" defense seems 

to come simply from its ability to permit and "place," by pathologizing, 

the enacrment of a socially sanctioned prejudice against one stigmatized 

minority, a particularly demeaned one among many. Its special plausibility, 

however, seems also to depend on a difference between antigay 

crime and other bias-related antiminority crime: the difference of how 

much less clear, perhaps finally how impossible, is the boundary circumscription 

of a minoritizing gay identity. After all, the reason why this 

defense borrows the name of the (formerly rather obscure and litdediagnosed) 

psychiatric classification "homosexual panic" is that it refers to 

the supposed uncertainty about his own sexual identity of the perpetrator 

of the antigay violence. That this should be the rypifying scenario of 

defenses of gay-bashers (as uncertainty about one's own race, religion, 

ethnicity, or gender is not in other cases of bias-related violence) shows 

once again how the overlapping aegises of minoritizing and universalizing 

understandings of male homo/heterosexual definition can tend to redouble 

the victimization of gay people. In effect, the homosexual panic 

defense performs a double act of minoritizing taxonomy: there is, it 

asserts, one distinct minority of gay people, and a second minority, 

equally distinguishable from the population at large, of"latent homosexuals" 

whose "insecurity about their own masculinity" is so anomalous as 

to permit a plea based on diminution of normal moral responsibility. At 

the same time, the efficacy of the plea depends on its universalizing force, 

on whether, as Wertheimer says, it can "create a climate in which the 

jurors are able to identify with the perpetrator by saying, 'My goodness, 

maybe I would have reacted the same way.'" 23 The reliance of the homosexual 

panic plea on the fact that this male definitional crisis is systemic 

and endemic is enabled only, and precisely, by its denial of the same fact. 

When in my work on Between Men, knowing nothing about this 

judicial use of "homosexual panic" (at that time a less common and publicized 

defense), I needed a name for "a structural residue of terrorist potential, 

of blackmailability, of Western maleness through the leverage of 

homophobia," I found myself attracted to just the same phrase, borrowed 

from the same relatively rare psychiatric diagnosis. Through a linguistic 

theft whose violence I trusted would be legible in every usage of the 

phrase, I tried to tum what had been a taxonomic, minoritizing medical 


category into a structural principle applicable to the definitional work of 

an entire gender, hence of an entire culture. I used it JO denominate "the 

most private, psychologized form in which many twentieth-century West- 

....... - .... 

ern men experience their vulnerability to the social pressure of homophobic 

blackmail"- as, specifically, "only one path of control, complementary 

to public sanctions through the institutions described by 

Foucault and others as defining and regulating the amorphous territory of 

'the sexual."' 2 4 

The forensic use of the "homosexual panic" defense for gay-bashers 

depends on the medically mediated ability of the phrase to obscure an 

overlap between individual pathology and systemic function. The reason 

I found the phrase attractive for my purposes was quite the opposite: I 

thought it could dramatize, render visible, even render scandalous the 

same space of overlap. The set of perceptions condensed in that usage of 

"male homosexual panic" proved, I think, a productive feature of Between 

Men for other critics, especially those doing gay theory, and I have 

continued my explorations of the same phrase, used in the same sense, in 

Epistemology of the Closet. Yet I feel, as well, with increasing dismay, in 

the increasingly homophobic atmosphere of public discourse since 1985, 

that work done to accentuate and clarify the explanatory power of this 

difficult nexus may not be able to be reliably insulated from uses that 

ought to be diametrically opposed to it. For instance, it would not require 

a willfully homophobic reader to understand these discussions of the 

centrality and power of male homosexual panic as actually contributing 

to the credibility of the pathologizing "homosexual panic" legal defense of 

gay-bashers. All it would require would be a failure or refusal to understand 

how necessarily the discussions are embedded within their context-the 

context, that is, ofan analysis based on systemwide skepticism 

about the positivist taxonomic neutrality of psychiatry, about the classificatory 

coherence (e.g., concerning "individual responsibility") of the 

law. If, foreseeing the possibiliry of this particular misuse, I have, as I 

hope, been able to take the explanatory measures necessary to guard 

against it, still there may be too many others unforeseen. 

Of course, silence on these issues performs the enforcing work of the 

status quo more predictably and inexorably than any attempt at analysis. 

Yet the tensions and pleasures that, even ideally, make it possible for a 

23. Freiberg, "Blaming the Victim," p. 11. 

24. Sedgwick, Between Men, p. 89.

J 


writer to invest such a project with her best thought may be so different 

from those that might enable a given reader to. 

• 

In the remainder of this Introduction I will be trying to articulate some 

of the otherwise implicit methodological, definitional, and axiomatic 

groundings of the book's project and explaining, as well, something of my 

view of its position within broader projects of understanding sexuality 

and gender. 

Anyone working in gay and lesbian studies, in a culture where samesex 

desire is still structured by its distinctive public/private status, at once 

marginal and central, as the open secret, discovers that the line between 

straining at truths that prove to be imbecilically self-evident, on the one 

hand, and on the other hand tossing off commonplaces that turn out to 

retain their power to galvanize and divide, is weirdly unpredictable. In 

dealing with an open-secret structure, it's only by being shameless about 

risking the obvious that we happen into the vicinity of the transformative. 

In this Introduction I shall have methodically to sweep into one little heap 

some of the otherwise unarticulated assumptions and conclusions from a 

long-term project of antihomophobic analysis. These nails, these scraps 

of wiring: will they bore or will they shock? 

Under the rule that most privileges the most obvious: 

Axiom 1: People are different from each other. 

It is astonishing how few respectable conceptual tools we have for dealing 

with this self-evident fact. A tiny number of inconceivably coarse axes of 

categorization have been painstakingly inscribed in current critical and 

political thought: gender, race, class, nationality, sexual orientation are 

pretty much the available distinctions. They, with the associated demonstrations 

of the mechanisms by which they are constructed and reproduced, 

are indispensable, and they may indeed override all or some 

other forms of difference and similarity. But the sister or brother, the best 

friend, the classmate, the parent, the child, the lover, the ex-: our families, 

lOves, and enmities alike, not to mention the strange relations of our 

work, play, and activism, prove that even people who share all or most of 

our own positionings along these crude axes may still be different enough 

from us, and from each other, to seem like all but different species. 

Everybody has learned this, I assume, and probably everybody who 


survives at all has reasonably rich, unsystematic resources of nonce 

taxonomy for mapping out the possibilities, dangers, and stimulatim;;;_;f 

their human social landscape. It is probably people with the experience of 

oppression or subordinatiorfwho hl.ve most need to know it; and I take 

the precious, devalued arts of gossip, immemorially associated in European 

thought with servants, with effeminate and gay men, with all 

women, to have to do not even so much with the transmission ofilecesSary 

news as with the refinement of necessary skills for making, testing, and 

using unrationalized a11d provisional hypotheses about what kinds of 

people there are to be found in one's world: 25 The writing of a Proust or a 

James would be exemplary here: projects precisely of nonce taxonomy, of 

the making and unmaking and remaking and redissolution of hundreds of 

old and new categorical imaginings concerning all the kinds it may take 

to make up a world. 

I don't assume that all, gay men or alJ women are very skilled at the 

nonce-taxonomic work represented by gossip, but it does make sense to 

suppose that our distinctive needs are peculiarly disserved by its devaluation. 

For some people, the sustained, foregrounded pressure of loss in the 

AIDS years may be making such needs clearer: as one anticipates or tries 

to deal with the absence of people one loves, it seems absurdly impoverishing 

to surrender to theoretical trivialization or to "the sentimental" 

one's descriptive requirements that the piercing bouquet of a given friend's 

particularity be done some What is more dramatic is that-in 

spite of every promise to the contrary-every single theoretically or 

politically interesting project of postwar thought has finally had the effect 

of delegitirnating our space for asking or thinking in detail about the 

multiple, unstable ways in which people may be like or different from 

each other. This project is not rendered otiose by any demonstration of 

how fully people may differ also from themselves. Deconstruction, 

founded as a very science of differ(e/a)nce, has both so fetishized the idea 

of difference and so vaporized its possible embodiments that its most 

thoroughgoing practitioners are the last people to whom one would now 

look for help in thinking about particular differences. The same thing 

seems likely to prove true of theorists of postmodernism. Psychoanalytic 

theory, if only through the almost astrologically lush plurality of its 

overlapping taxonomies of physical zones, developmental stages, repre- 

2.5. On this, see Patricia Meyer Spacks, Gossip (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985). ,/' 

r 

v 

J 

,,

HENRY JAMES AND 

QUEER MODERNITY 

ERIC HARALSON

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS 

Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo 

Cambridge University Press 

The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, United Kingdom 

Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York 

www.cambridge.org 

Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521813945 

© Eric Haralson 2003 

This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of 

relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place 

without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. 

First published in print format 2003 

isbn-13 ISBN-13 978-0-511-06483-88 

eBook (NetLibrary) 

isbn-10 ISBN-10 0-511-06483-77 

eBook (NetLibrary) 

isbn-13 ISBN-13 978-0-521-81394-55 

hardback 

isbn-10 ISBN-10 0-521-81394-88 

hardback 

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of 

URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not 

guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

6 

“The other half is the man”: the queer modern 

triangle of Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, 

and Henry James 

Among the more overt targets of Ernest Hemingway’s neglected parody 

The Torrents of Spring (1926) are his former mentors Gertrude Stein and 

Sherwood Anderson. 1 Less obviously, but not coincidentally, the work 

marks Hemingway’s first notable public engagement with Henry James, 

both as master and as man – or rather, as something less than a man. In The 

Sun Also Rises (1926), drafted before but published after Torrents, James’s 

alleged sexual damage – or what his autobiography obscurely called an 

“obscure hurt” – constitutes an historical parallel for Jake Barnes’s impairment, 

with the implied distinction that Barnes had come by his disabling 

wound through active service in the military, unlike the already unmasculine 

James (AU 415). More privately, Hemingway went on to demean 

the drawing-room “fairies” who languished about in James’s The Awkward 

Age (1899), to scorn his predecessor under the sign of emasculation (James 

had “no balls”) and effeminacy (one of the “male old women”), to dismiss 

most of James’s writing as “snobbish, difficultly written shit” – and to covet 

his transatlantic fame (SL 266, 673, 703). Only after Hemingway won the 

Nobel Prize in 1954 could he publicly concede that James ought to have 

received the honor, too. 2 Yet like the other modern writers under survey 

here, Hemingway continued to feel James’s monumental presence up until 

the end of his career, as seen from the continued skirmishing with James 

in True at First Light (composed 1953–4) and A Moveable Feast (composed 

1957–8). 3 

This chapter revisits the formative phase (1925–35) of this telling confluence 

between sex/gender anxiety and anxiety of influence, an exemplary 

instance of modern straight masculinity (as it seems) reading Victorian 

gay masculinity. At the same time, Stein’s perception that the “future feeling” 

James “felt the method of the twentieth century,” while Hemingway 

“look[ed] like a modern...[but] smell[ed] of the museums,” may queer 

considerably more than the notion of chronological sequence in the formal 

history of American prose (ABT 739, 873). 4 James’s reading of Hemingway, 

173

174 Henry James and Queer Modernity 

as it were, lies embedded in Hemingway’s reading of James, and especially 

within the thematic orbit of sex/gender politics. Stated another way, just 

as Hemingway (although certainly not he alone) shaped his masculinity 

in reaction against Jamesian interiority, aestheticism, homoeroticism, and 

subtle sociability, so does the Jamesian critique of overdetermined manhood 

(“active,” externalized, commercial, hetero) anticipate an Ernest Hemingway, 

with his dire performance pressures and his violent energies. 

In this respect, I want to keep in play Stein’s trenchant constructionism, 

which helped her to understand how the young Ernest’s “truly sensitive 

capacity for emotion” succumbed to shame under the spotlight of celebrity, 

forcing him to adopt, “as a shield, a big Kansas City–boy brutality.” 

Hemingway’s “really gentle and fine” side could not survive the conditioning 

of the market, which set its performance expectations and levied 

its taxes according to an author’s gender, while his “agonizing shyness” 

almost demanded the compensatory swagger of the manly man. 5 To put 

this devolution in terms of James’s fiction (and thus rather schematically), 

Hemingway had the makings of a Little Bilham (The Ambassadors), but 

developed instead into a sort of Christopher Newman (The American), 

courting associations with femininity and sexual changings (Hemingway’s 

own word), but then warding them off, and indulging his “unresolved 

androgynous inclinations” only very late in life. 6 Stein suggested that the 

evolved figure of “Papa” Hemingway posed for and was posed by Anglo- 

American culture neither more nor less than Oscar Wilde, only differently, 

which explained why his theatre of hypermasculinity (boxing, bullfighting, 

big-game hunting) failed to produce either “real brutality” or “real literature.” 

7 On the contrary, Sherwood Anderson added, the self-conscious 

posturing of a work such as Hemingway’s Green Hills of Africa (1935) suggested 

a “queer bird” seeking a straight path by means of Rooseveltian rituals 

of “guts and dung,” but losing his way (“the whole world of men he can’t 

get at all”) and making a “mess” of himself in the process. Yet Anderson, 

too, recognized “Hemingway” as more of a cultural construction than an 

individual personality: “they really did destroy him” (SA 169). 8 

The question of which force bears the most blame for such destruction – 

the “enormous publicity business” of modernity, as Stein called it and as 

James satirized it in his mature fiction; the gender and sexual prejudices inscribed 

in that “business”; or Hemingway’s own ruthless careerism – almost 

dissolves in the fact that these forces were interlocking and collaborative, 

and perhaps only the consequence matters. 9 The “real story” of the “real 

Hem,” as Stein put it, would never get told, and therein (for both Stein and 

Anderson) lay the true shame: that story “would be for another audience

Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, and Henry James 175 

than the audience Hemingway now has but it would be very wonderful” 

(ABT 872–3). 10 Almost as if troping James’s The American, Stein would 

make Hemingway emblematic of a national defect in the creative realization 

of gender: “He went the way so many other Americans have gone... 

[and] are still going...He is skillful, yes, but that is the writer; the other 

half is the man.” 11 

Yet Stein drew another moral from the strenuous public displays that 

misrepresented, then disfigured the “other half” of Hemingway: his “wonderful” 

story, she implied, the real one for another audience, might well 

have been (in his own scandalized words) “some fag story, which proved 

[him]...conclusively very queer indeed” (SL 387). In A Moveable Feast, 

Hemingway retaliated by attributing to Stein an almost visceral repugnance 

toward male–male love, but apparently the joke (an earnest one) was on him 

(MF 20). Stein would later confide: “Homosexuals...doallthegood things 

in all the arts, and when I ran down the male ones to Hemingway it was because 

I thought he was a secret one.” 12 The keenness of Stein’s tactic (“come 

out, wherever you are”) is rather beside the point, for as with James, claiming 

Hemingway “conclusively” for the closet is less interesting than asking 

how that closet was structured and maintained – how it worked, in this case, 

to keep a male author candidly tantalized by the idea of going “outside all 

tribal law,” in matters of sex, from ever getting there. 13 Like Eve Sedgwick’s 

conception of John Marcher, in James’s “The Beast in the Jungle” (1903), 

Stein’s Hemingway was “not a homosexual man” so much as he was a man 

confined to “the closet of imagining a homosexual secret”; what required 

“liberat[ing] in the first place” was his “potential for homosexual desire,” 

but that release, owing to his collusion with powerful norms, could never 

occur. 14 If Hemingway, on Stein’s view, seemed fated to pass a lifetime as 

“a secret one” – “very queer indeed” behind his tough-guy exterior – the 

beauty of the system was that he kept the secret not to himself, but from 

himself, and that he had all the help in the world in doing so. 

In order to treat Hemingway’s relation to James in its full symptomatic 

complexity this chapter invokes several contemporary observers besides 

Stein and Anderson, notably F. Scott Fitzgerald and the then popular, now 

recuperated gay author Glenway Wescott – memorialized in The Sun Also 

Rises as the “rising new novelist” who flirts with a disgusted Jake Barnes in the 

bal musette scene (SAR 21). 15 As a more aggravated example of how James’s 

queerness troubled (and again, proleptically “read”) the literary, social, and 

psychic stance of modern masculinity, I also consider the experience of the 

important cultural critic Van Wyck Brooks, whose biographical treatise of 

1925 fashioned the “Henry James” familiar to Hemingway and his cohort,


while also influencing the British reception of James in such authors as 

Stephen Spender and Christopher Isherwood. This caucus of modern male 

writers huddled almost obsessively over the Jamesian corpus as part of their 

own self-definitional trials at the fraught intersections of gender, sexual, 

and national (or “racial”) identity. 

To be sure, one must draw some distinctions, recognizing how concertedly 

Brooks tried to avoid seeing James’s gayness as a relevant factor in reading 

the alternative masculinities modeled in his work. Even Hemingway, or 

perhaps especially Hemingway, as a facet of his ambivalent homophobia, 

found “fairies” in the Jamesian picture, while Anderson, who conventionally 

viewed homosexuality as a “terrible problem,” approached James with 

something like a gay reading practice (SAM 340). Well ahead of the critical 

curve, Wescott published the “secret” motive of James’s late fiction as being 

“the anarchist’s excitement about the rupture of conventions” and discovered 

at least one “homosexual man” in the thick of James’s plots (Prince 

Amerigo of The Golden Bowl), thus coming about as close to outing the 

author as was conceivable in the early 1930s. 16 More discreetly, Spender 

added that it was “difficult not to conclude...that [James’s] The Pupil is a 

fantasy about homosexuality.” 17 

Yet all of these authors – along with Fitzgerald, who fostered the idea of a 

Jamesian “impotence” that shaded into effeminacy, and thence into samesex 

desire – remained as subject to the strictures on sexual difference and 

its public articulation, whether dissident or conformist, as did Van Wyck 

Brooks. 18 In this sense, Brooks’s engagement with James, which culminated 

in psychosis, only somatized the counterpressure of the Jamesian challenge 

to modern masculinities as these men wrestled with private desires and 

normative injunctions – a pressure sustained, as I will suggest, by Gertrude 

Stein, perhaps the most canny and resilient “masculinity” in this genealogy. 

The extremity of Brooks’s ordeal, that is, should not prevent one from 

seeing its tacit “moral” for Hemingway and for the gender style that he 

enacted for his generation: there was a high price to be paid for resisting 

the lesson of the Master. 

Anyway I think you’ll think [The Torrents of Spring] is funny . . . you being the 

middle weight champion and as such not having a glass jaw. (Hemingway to 

Sherwood Anderson, 1926) 

Funny is again used in the sense of diverting and disturbing. (Gertrude Stein, 

“Henry James,” Four in America, 1932–33) 

Contemporary reviews set the tone for the critical understanding of 

Torrents as a burst of youthful hijinks with little thematic content: sly


perhaps, but not malicious, and besides, Hemingway’s victims had it coming. 

In fact, the book signaled all the important preoccupations that would 

organize his “serious” fictions to follow, marking Hemingway’s first disciplinary 

intervention against adolescent or unmanly emotionalism (associated 

with Anderson), ethnic and sexual difference (literally embodied in 

Stein), and élite, expatriate effeminacy – the position in Anglo-American literary 

culture increasingly assigned to the figure of Henry James. In this early 

work Hemingway was feeling out James, like a prize-fighter his opponent, 

and yet that testing was part and parcel of his more brazen confrontation 

with immediate rivals Anderson and Stein. 

Torrents, that is, expertly “[made] a bum” out of Anderson for his “pretensious 

[sic] fake” of a novel, Dark Laughter (1925), while strongly hinting 

that Stein – both as Hemingway’s literary foster mother and as a Jewish 

decadent – stood next in line to receive the rough stuff (SL 183, 174). The 

book’s section headings alone tells a story. If the first heading, “Red and 

Black Laughter,” announced a satirical design on the romantic racialism of 

Dark Laughter, the last – “The Passing of a Great Race and the Making and 

Marring of Americans” – yoked together Madison Grant’s infamous antiimmigration 

tract of 1916 with Stein’s just released saga of German-Jewish 

families in the United States, The Making of Americans (1925; composed 

1903–11). It was Hemingway, then, who initiated the long, cagey quarrel 

with Stein that flashed into open warfare in The Autobiography of Alice B. 

Toklas (1933), which lauded Anderson’s sensitivity as true courage while 

branding Hemingway “yellow”; in response, Green Hills of Africa sought 

to denigrate “some female” whose work of jealous “malice” (rhymes with 

“Alice”) had maligned both the artistic talent and the masculine credentials 

of “Poor old Papa” Hemingway (ABT 872; SL 387). 19 

“Imagination is racial experience,” Hemingway would declare in his unpublished 

parody of Stein’s Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas and race, in 

the broadest sense, also forms a focal point of Torrents. 20 On this score, the 

book is “funny” (and serious) indeed, offering a send up of white authorial 

fantasies of the redemptive, primitive African or American Indian – a strain 

of idealizing pervasive in modernism, and found not only in Dark Laughter 

but also in Stein’s “Melanctha” (composed 1905–6) and in the characterization 

of the piano-playing “negro prodigy” Blind d’Arnault of Cather’s My 

Ántonia (1918; EN 832). Hemingway, too, frequently yielded to this temptation, 

from the portrait of the “noble-looking” black boxer in Sun all the 

way to the very late True at First Light, which can be read as a Kiplingesque 

sort of “going fantee” in Africa itself (SAR 71). 21 If the discourse of race 

or ethnicity appears slightly subsidiary to the sex/gender discourse in 

Hemingway, the category markers of difference continually inflect one


another: Stein, as I have already shown, emerges as an objectionable compound, 

the Jewish lesbian. 

In the first paragraph of Torrents an Andersonian naïf addresses the disparate 

milieux of sexuality in the industrial backwaters of the American 

Midwest, on the one hand, and the fast, queer salon-world of modern 

Paris, on the other: “Yogi Johnson stood looking out of the window of a 

big pump-factory in Michigan ...His breath made little fairy tracings on 

the cold window-pane...that reminded him of the gay city” (T 3). Gay 

“Paree,” in Hemingway’s extended joke, had been a grim scene of sexual 

humiliation for Yogi Johnson, causing his regression to the sort of boyish 

sensualism so fondly evoked in such Anderson stories as “I’m a Fool” and 

“I Want to Know Why”: “Well, Yogi thought, women are gone...but I 

still have my love of horses” (T 52). Granting Michael Reynolds’s point 

that Anderson’s fictional men (like Anderson himself) indulged in the very 

“maundering Whitmanianism” that Hemingway convicts them of, much 

more was at stake in the latter’s spoofing. 22 In part, Hemingway believed 

that Anderson, who had once written “very beautifully” and “best of all 

about adolescence,” had started “slopping” in the formal control of his 

fiction – one of many terms (as Frances Kerr shows) that connoted a 

dreaded, feminized flaccidity for male modernists (SL 206). 23 Relatedly, 

Hemingway strove to eradicate or to conceal in himself Anderson’s “sweetness” 

and “genius for...direct emotion” (as these qualities are described 

and celebrated in Stein’s Autobiography) in order for the persona of “Papa” 

to cohere and for the pursuit of the title “[literary] champion of the world” 

to commence (ABT 874; SL 673). By promoting an ethos of tough love 

among fellow authors such as Anderson and Fitzgerald – “Why the hell 

should we have to pull our punches?” – Hemingway also bullied the wimp 

within (SL 204, 205). 

To contextualize the personal-cultural work of Torrents, Sun (then in draft 

form) offers a useful figure for this kind of self-policing when Jake Barnes 

finds it “awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime,” 

while reserving the contemplation of his vulnerabilities for the privacy of 

the night (SAR 34). Henceforth, with the growing popularity of his work, 

Hemingway himself would live in the glare of high noon, so to speak, and 

public scrutiny of his gender performance would be intense. As if to mark 

the juncture where personal met public policing, the poet Allen Tate chose 

exactly this night-time scene in Sun to task Hemingway for “betray[ing] the 

interior machinery of his hard-boiled attitude” and revealing the hidden 

“history of his sentimentality.” 24 Astutely, Hemingway complained about 

Tate’s attempted manipulation to his editor, Maxwell Perkins – “Mr. Tate


feels so badly that I’m not as hard-boiled as he had publicly announced” – 

and, suggestively, he related his own genius for “direct emotion” (as it then 

was) to his experience of being wounded on the Italian front in 1918 (SL 

240). Still, the pressure to purge himself of “sentimentality” registered, 

and Hemingway’s scrupulous self-regulation of sex/gender valences must 

be seen as coeval with his very first ventures into cultural visibility. The 

sympathetic contract with his readership would have to be renegotiated, 

too. If readers “went any deeper inside [The Sun Also Rises] they couldn’t 

read because they would be crying all the time,” Hemingway boasted to 

Perkins, but that sort of design upon his audience’s emotions steadily diminished 

over the course of the 1920s (SL 226). After A Farewell to Arms 

(1929), as Rena Sanderson points out, the “he-man of exaggerated virility 

and masculine expertise” took center stage, muscling aside the lad of easy 

tears. 25 

As Tate’s example indicates, the reviewing community conspired with 

Hemingway in this makeover, either praising him as a peerless kudu killer 

and a reveler in “Peninsular [bulls’] testicle feasts” (criadillas) or alternatively 

(like Tate) peeping under Hemingway’s khakis or cape to discover an 

insufficient manliness. In the latter vein, the damning evidence produced by 

the critics included yet more “sentimentality disguised as bravado”; a fascination 

with “abnormalities” (“Lesbianism . . . castration”) that belonged to 

authorial adolescence and the American cultural adolescence of the early 

twenties; a penchant for “sophomoric” antics and “boyish” reasoning; and 

most importantly (as Stein and Anderson had been among the first to discern) 

a “very sensitive” intelligence that was caught up in romanticized 

violence, suggesting not the writer’s conviction of his own “red-blooded 

masculinity” but rather his lack of a “serene confidence that he [was] a fullsized 

man.” 26 Hemingway defiantly prided himself on ignoring reviews, 

which he believed “poison[ed]” and “destroy[ed]” other male authors such 

as Fitzgerald: “believ[ing] the critics...made them impotent” (SL 276). 27 

But as his correspondence proves, nothing could be farther from the truth. 

Hemingway listened closely and reacted strongly (if often ambivalently) to 

the critics, so that by the time his career culminated with The Old Man 

and the Sea (1952), the writer who had started out by “pulling no punches” 

had attained a fitting public image as an ultra-masculine fighter, to the approbation 

of at least certain reviewers: “Like...the Manassa Mauler [i.e., 

Jack Dempsey] battering big Jess Willard, a book by Papa [Hemingway] is 

front-page news.” 28 

Gertrude Stein shrewdly forecast this transition, and the young Hemingway 

of the 1920s, one may be sure, heard her lecture on the perils of the


popular artist under mass-market commercialism. Reflecting on her own 

struggles with public recognition, Stein’s Everybody’s Autobiography (1937) 

cited the risks involved when readers were permitted “deeper inside” not 

only an author’s texts but his or her self-constitution: 

It is funny about money. And it is funny about identity. You are you because your 

little dog knows you, but when your public knows you . . . you are not the same 

you . . . As long as the outside does not put a value on you it remains outside but... 

if the outside puts a value on you then all your inside gets to be outside...Iused 

to tell all the men who were being successful young how bad this was for them. 

(EA 46–8) 

As Stein must have stressed to Hemingway, the market’s unresisted incursion 

into the space of personality replaced intimate procedures of selfappraisal 

with gross cash value, leaving the writer largely at the mercy of 

the cult of “image,” with its technologies for circulating that now adulterated 

commodity, the modern author. For James, whose important currency 

designated “identity” reappears in Stein’s analysis, the actor more than any 

other type of artist had figured as the “producer whose production is her own 

person” and who was thus most exposed to those degradations of “modernness” 

– not least a “colossal, deafening newspaperism” – that spectacularized 

the artist, jeopardized the principle of “quiet growth,” so essential to artistic 

maturation, and reduced the “real producer” to shallow “humbuggery” (it is 

Gabriel Nash of The Tragic Muse who offers this view, with campy delight; 

TM 375–6, 484). By the period of Stein’s “autobiographies” in the 1930s, 

apparently no type of cultural producer, not even the would-be solitary 

novelist, could escape this fate once popular success had set in. 

Both James and Stein allowed for the artist’s capacity to play the “image” 

market to advantage, either by making “an income out of the photographers” 

(as James wrote, and as Stein and Hemingway might well have 

done) or by supplying the media with “floods of unscrupulous romance” 

and capitalizing on all the “marvellous publicity” (TM 494). Yet such a 

move required the artist never to forget that popularity came at a price, demanding 

continual concessions to normativity. Although sex/gender norms 

were not alone in governing the transaction between “you” and “your public,” 

the institutions of heterosexism and patriarchy certainly foregrounded 

these norms, as the narratives (and life narratives) of James, Stein, Cather, 

and above all Wilde attest. In urging “successful young” men such as 

Hemingway to weigh the cost of fame, that is, Stein urged him to study in 

particular what was gained and what was lost by agreeing to act the part 

of “he-man” and expert in all things manly for an eager Anglo-American


audience: “After all if nobody refuses what you offer there must be something 

the matter” (EA 47). 

Yet if “Miss Stein” had so instructed (to adapt a chapter heading from A 

Moveable Feast), not all young men could accept or implement her teaching. 

As I have started to show in Torrents, Hemingway resorted instead to a 

raillery that sought to diffuse Stein’s challenge, but that ultimately served 

the difference- and dissidence-containing functions of the cultural system 

she analyzed. His parody of “deviant” gender styles became not only a 

means of defining an exemplary public manhood (“Papa”) but also a way 

of resisting insight into the parodic character of that very construction. If 

gender, in Judith Butler’s terms, is a “repeated stylization of the body... 

that congeal[s]...to produce the appearance of substance,” with certain 

styles coming into dominance through “felicitous self-naturalization,” one 

might say that Hemingway cooperated admirably in playing the paragon 

of (apparent) substantiality that seemed most “naturally” to fill out the 

category masculinity. 29 

Yet the actual positions in contest were more complicated than such 

a summary might suggest. Insofar as Hemingway’s “gentle and fine” side 

warred with cultural prescriptions, it also weakened his bid to outman a 

competitor such as Sherwood Anderson. Moreover, although Anderson deplored 

and teased his young antagonist’s liabilities of gender performance 

(“I hauled out big fish,” he reports to Stein from the Gulf of Mexico; 

“Hemingway...would have loved seeing them suffer”), neither he nor any 

other mainstream male author was immune from environmental conditioning 

– the interpenetration of “inside” man and “outside” market. Thus 

in 1927 one finds Anderson chafing under the same labels that Hemingway 

used to criticize (and Stein to extol) his sensitive masculinity: even in his 

view, there was regrettably “too much talk...ofthesweet, naïve S[herwood] 

A[nderson] – adolescence etc.” Anderson notably joined Hemingway in 

calling for a “body-punching criticism” among authors as a corrective to 

artistic “softness” (SA 312, 174). As Ezra Pound made explicit in demeaning 

the gay author Wescott – “what Hemingway did, nobody could improve 

on . . . Tough realism. Not like Glenway Wescott. He’s soft” – the fiber of 

literary manhood was felt to be threatened not merely by the feminine 

in conventional forms (women writers, editors, and critics) but also by 

the effeminacy of the queer, which indicated that biological gender alone 

could not guarantee heteromanliness. 30 In fact, Hemingway mobilizes the 

Wescott character in Sun (Roger Prentiss) precisely in keeping with the 

terms of Pound’s dismissive comparison, as well as with Fitzgerald’s evocation 

of Wescott in person as “an effeminate Oxford fairy.” 31


Given the internal divisions and the external influences working on both 

Hemingway and Anderson – not to mention their shared experience of 

military and sporting life, or their many marriages – one cannot simply 

restage them as representing oppositional masculinities. Anderson’s own 

store of manly credentials meant that Hemingway’s objective in Torrents – 

distancing parts of himself by distancing his mentor – would be no easy 

task. Indeed he only fully realized this objective after Anderson’s death 

in 1941, remembering Sherwood (in 1953) as “wet and sort of mushy” with 

“very beautiful bastard Italian eyes” – eyes that perhaps link Anderson to the 

Italian aristocrat with “beautiful manners” who had sexually propositioned 

the wounded young Hemingway in a Milan hospital (yet another instance 

of the violated body as a site of convergence for emotional, vocational, and 

sexual identity matters: SL 862; MF 19–20). If Hemingway could never 

relegate Anderson to the ranks of the desexed “male old women,” like 

James, or “withered old maid[s],” like André Gide, Anderson nonetheless 

went down in Hemingway’s book as yet another man who could not keep 

his sex or gender straight – a “jolly but tortured bowl of puss [sic] turning 

into a woman in front of your eyes” (SL 862). 32 

Given what Frances Kerr calls the “barely camouflaged paranoia about 

being feminine” among male modernists, Hemingway’s misspelling of the 

word pus (“puss”) performs a sort of double duty as a signifier. 33 The intended 

“pus” (not unlike James’s “difficultly written shit”) belongs to an 

imagery of excretion that indicates not the man-making wound but rather 

those breaches in the female body notionally connected with the unregulated 

flow of unclean, ill-formed matter (SL 266). The spelling “puss,” in 

turn, identifies one of those breaches – a usage (as “pussy”) that Hemingway 

later foregrounds in what Charles Caramello justly calls “the homophobic 

account...that blots his Moveable Feast.” 34 For in that memoir, “pussy” 

functions as Stein’s term of endearment for Alice B. Toklas (whom Hemingway 

studiously avoids naming as Toklas), and the text exploits this term 

or nickname to call attention to the evident irony of a woman’s anatomy 

that only another woman can experience in sexual pleasure: “Then Miss 

Stein’s voice came pleading and begging [to Toklas], saying, ‘Don’t, pussy... 

Please don’t, pussy’ ” (MF 118). 35 Equally pertinent here, with another male 

author’s gendering on the line, namely Anderson’s, is the slang metonymy 

that makes “pussy” a slur intended to shame “an effeminate man or boy.” 36 

Whatever it was that formed the content of the “tortured bowl” bearing 

the name of Sherwood Anderson, it possessed the scary magic to change 

into its opposite – to become inverted or queer – right in front of one’s 

eyes.


By an almost predictable symmetry, Torrents also features Gertrude Stein, 

a woman who would eventually turn into a man right in front of Hemingway’s 

eyes. As the hapless Yogi Johnson ponders how to restore his 

heterosexual appetite, he conjures up a map of Paris – the same “gay city” 

responsible for disabling his masculinity – that in a sense highlights the 

address 27 rue de Fleurus, the site of Stein and Toklas’s famous salon. 

In the terms of Johnson’s dithery free association: “Where did it all lead? 

Would it help him to want a woman?...Enroute. Huysmans wrote that. It 

would be interesting to read French...There is a street in Paris named after 

Huysmans. Right around the corner from where Gertrude Stein lived. 

Ah, there was a woman! Where were her experiments in words leading 

her? What was at the bottom of it?” (T 74–5). In this passage Hemingway 

situates Stein “right around the corner” from Joris-Karl Huysmans, 

the author of En route but more significantly of the scandalous A rebours 

(1884). As Stephen Calloway relates, A rebours was “hailed as the ‘Breviary of 

Decadence’...on both sides of the English Channel,” while its protagonist, 

Des Esseintes, stood for the “very quintessence” of queer luxury. 37 

The work had also been attacked on the same grounds – as noted earlier, 

James recoiled from Huysmans’s “incurable rot” in due proportion to his 

covert attraction – and the book’s linkage with homosexuality was firmly 

established when Wilde, in the dock, acknowledged A rebours as the unidentified 

panoramic survey of “the sins of all the world” in which Dorian Gray 

discovers the “prefiguring type of himself” (DG 155–8). 38 As Hemingway 

would not have known (but seems almost to have intuited), Huysmans’s 

En route was among the books that Wilde petitioned for while confined in 

Reading Gaol (“vital for the preservation of my mental balance”), only to 

have the request vetoed by the prison warden. 39 

Hemingway did not need such particulars in order to exploit the associations 

that had grown up around Huysmans’s name and to use them to 

score points against Stein. By implication, Stein’s “experiments in words” 

constituted the new decadent breviary of the postwar generation, leading 

her (and susceptible readers) into an idle, narcissistic aestheticism that came 

trailing clouds of sexual deviance, or as he later charged: “She [Stein] wanted 

to know the gay part of how the world was going, never the real” (MF 25). 

Here Yogi Johnson’s pun (“What was at the bottom of it?”) reinforces the 

suggestion of a lurking deviance, for Stein’s The Making of Americans – 

which Hemingway knew well from copying the manuscript and correcting 

proofs – aspired to be an encompassing poetics of the “bottom nature” 

of all human types, a radically democratic compendium of the “many 

ways of being and of loving,” not just those ways that conformed to the


prejudices of heterosexist culture, but also those experienced and exhibited 

“in pairs of women, in pairs of men” (MOA 248, 505, 221). At the bottom 

of Stein’s narrative “experiments,” Hemingway hinted, was Stein’s bottom, 

making him probably the first reader to interpret her ambitious novel as 

the “spectacularly anal text” that literary scholars now take it to be. As Lisa 

Ruddick writes: “The notable feature of each character [in The Making of 

Americans]is...notmembership in the class male or female...butinstead 

the sort of ‘bottom’ the person has, as if Stein were unconsciously marginalizing 

genital sexual difference in favor of a weird and indistinct notion of 

anal identity.” 40 

Hemingway’s jest at Stein’s expense is meant to intensify as the reader 

grasps that her “bottom” will be off-limits to the desperate Yogi Johnson, 

while his mental juxtapositions – “Would it help him to want a woman?... 

Ah, there was a woman!” – comment indirectly and ironically on Stein’s 

lesbianism. Like Anderson’s volatile masculinity, Stein’s emphatic femininity 

(as it could seem only to a deficient mind like Yogi Johnson’s, the text 

implies) is perfectly ripe for degeneration and regendering. In this respect, 

Torrents virtually predicts Hemingway’s future course of interaction with 

Stein’s masculinity, including episodes such as the drastic cutting of her 

“lovely, thick, alive immigrant hair” that would change her, in his eyes, 

from the ethnic earth mother depicted in Picasso’s famous portrait into 

a domineering “Roman emperor” (MF 14, 119), 41 and the onset of what 

Hemingway called “the old menopause,” which would almost biochemically 

induce Stein’s critical politics to shift to “the idea that anybody who 

was any good [in the arts] must be queer” (SL 384). 

Indeed, the Hemingway of Torrents seems already to foresee the Stein 

who would become, in his words, so “patriotically goofily complete... 

stoppage of all sense lesbian” that she “opted for fags and fags alone” in the 

conduct of her patronage, trying to recruit even Hemingway (of all men) 

for her queer nation of the arts: “Patriotism is a hell of a vice” (SL 384, 388). 

By the 1920s, writes Andrew Elfenbein, “the link between homosexuality 

and genius was familiar,” and the idea of this linkage circulated especially 

within intellectual élites in urban centers such as New York and Paris. 42 

In the early 1930s Hemingway himself would demonstrate the idea’s currency 

by assailing “those interested parties who are continually proving that 

Leonardo da Vinci, Shakespeare, etc. were fags.” 43 Yet when Stein apparently 

advanced this commonplace (“anybody who was any good must be 

queer”), Hemingway blamed her views on female biology – or more precisely, 

on the “change of life” that definitively removed Stein’s body from 

the orbit of reproductive heterosexuality (SL 736). With the aging-out of


her body and the adoption of a mannish hairstyle (“a turning point in all 

sorts of things”) would come the end of all hope that Stein (or her anatomy) 

might be salvaged for straightness (SL 650). Admittedly, Torrents foreruns 

these developments by several years, and the Stein represented in this early 

text could still be managed by means of a sportive rhetoric, but the broad 

contours of the two authors’ hostile relationship were already mapped out. 

Notably, that aggravated version of Gertrude Stein beginning to appear 

on Hemingway’s horizon – unsexed, post-menopausal, and imperiously 

gay – belongs to essentially the same category of magisterial “male old 

women” as Henry James, the third principal in The Torrents of Spring. I 

have characterized Stein and Anderson as Hemingway’s patent adversaries 

in the book, and they themselves certainly saw it that way. “One is always 

naturally antagonistic to one’s parents,” as Stein said of her own relation to 

James, but when she and Anderson felt themselves so deftly thumbed and 

gouged in public print by this young monster “formed by the two of them,” 

it made them “a little ashamed of the work of their minds” (ABT 739, 872). 

Yet one should not neglect the more subdued ridicule that Hemingway’s 

Torrents directs at James, the very tenor of which acknowledges this important 

predecessor in Anglo-American fiction as a far more formidable 

quantity to be reckoned with. 

Hemingway was not alone in this wary estimate of James’s prestige, of 

course. Recall Willa Cather’s ardent testimonials to James as the “mighty 

master” of English prose, and even E. M. Forster’s awed impression of this 

“lord” of late Victorian culture, and it seems apparent why a friend of Stein’s 

would have written to her in 1903: “Your literature must be as good as Henry 

James’s – or I shall be disappointed.” 44 But owing to the usual curricular 

construction of James, which ends with “The Beast in the Jungle” (1903)or 

“The Jolly Corner” (1908), one perhaps forgets that this prodigious force 

in Anglo-American letters had just passed from the scene when the Jazz 

Age dawned. Hemingway bridled at reviews citing his debts to Anderson 

and Stein, but it was not lost upon him that Allen Tate had attacked The 

Sun Also Rises precisely because other reviewers were approaching the novel 

in “that cautiously critical spirit which the followers of Henry James so 

notoriously maintain toward the master.” 45 As Hemingway also knew, his 

collaborator Ford Madox Ford had granted James literary “immortality” for 

“reunit[ing] the stream of Anglo-Saxon imagination with the broad stream 

of international culture” (1913), an opinion seconded by T. S. Eliot in 

“On Henry James” (1918) and then by Ezra Pound in Instigations (1920). 46 

As Virginia Woolf (yet another fault-finding critic of Sun) summarized 

the prevalent mood, with the added compliment of her Jamesian diction,


the Master had become “a portentous figure looming large and undefined 

in the consciousness” of all modern authors, who must accordingly “do 

homage” to his memory and example. There will be cause to revisit Woolf’s 

rather ominous imagery in considering the emotional fate of Van Wyck 

Brooks, who felt “the weighted pressures of the James cult” more keenly 

than others, but for now Woolf’s categorical observation will suffice: “To 

some an oppression, to others an obsession,” Henry James was “undeniably 

present to all.” 47 

For his part, Hemingway would long toy with (albeit always in the 

distancing mode of the “funny”) the “strange coincidence” that his youthful 

exposure to battlefield trauma – “something quite irreplaceable that 

[other authors] had missed” – had come “after the death of Henry James” 

(SL 768). 48 Such a conjunction gives a quasioedipal spin to Hemingway’s 

self-positioning (as in Stein’s construction of her own case), yet this modernist 

offspring of James suggestively went out of his way to arrive at 

his “coincidence”: James had in fact died more than two years before 

Hemingway’s wartime service as an ambulance driver. Woolf’s point, of 

course, is that Hemingway (or Stein) was far from unique in feeling the 

anxiety of a Jamesian influence, but it is worth noting that other male authors 

availed themselves of very different avenues of response. T. S. Eliot, 

for instance, ushered the Master safely into the past with the sanguine remark 

that “Henry James has been dead for some time,” when it had been 

a matter of only two years. 49 In other words, the circumstances of James’s 

extinction seem to have played a more special role in Hemingway’s scenario 

of his own maturation. By extension, the question of James’s posthumous 

vitality also became psychically implicated in the severe wounding to which 

Hemingway ascribed his masculine authority – an authority complicated, 

moreover, by the fact that he also dated the discovery of a new emotional 

tenderness from that same momentous event: “I have not been at all hard 

boiled since July 8 1918” (SL 240). As a further key to the gravity of what 

was at stake in Hemingway’s ambivalence, one notes that masculine making 

consistently appears under the fearful figure of castration for him (“something 

quite irreplaceable”) – a motif that would profoundly shape his stories 

of men, women, and romance in a fallen world. 

As a corollary of these psychodynamics, sexual “impotence” and the 

“inability to write” became highly intertwined symptoms for Hemingway. 50 

Not only did this association form the basis for his disparagement of Gide 

and James, and inform his criticism of well-known critics – “camp following 

eunochs [sic] of literature...all virtuous and sterile” – but it also cropped 

up in moments of self-portraiture (SL 162). As is clear even in A Moveable


Feast, Hemingway often repaired to Stein’s queer domestic space (near rue 

de Huysmans) partly to see which of the two authors was the bigger man, 

performatively speaking, but more importantly to gain relief from the 

“severe discipline” of writing, which, if unalleviated, would “make [him] 

impotent to do it” (MF 12–13). At some level, Hemingway recognized how 

the strict regimen intended to distinguish the gendering of his work (hard, 

straight, true, firm, real) from the profligate, compromising fluencies of 

Stein and James operated within a delicate economy – an economy in which 

straining one’s literary-libidinal resources could lead to emasculation, or an 

incapacity to “do it.” 51 This discomfiting recognition generated much of 

the malicious “joking” of Anderson, Stein, and others, but it also inspired 

self-satire, as in this comment on an illustration for Sun: “Bloomshield’s 

drawing...looks very much like a writer...saddened by the loss or atrophy 

of certain non-replaceable parts. It is a pity it couldn’t have been Barnes 

instead of Hemingway” (SL 223). As the record demonstrates, jokes of this 

sort set the pattern for the author’s depressive tendencies. By the same 

measure, Hemingway’s need to deprive James and other competitors of 

their “balls” was just as defensive a move as his negotiation with the moist, 

mushy masculinity he attributed to Anderson, but that also appeared in the 

“slightly wet,” sentimental well of the self (SL 666). In terms of his authorial 

persona, Hemingway was at pains to resemble the “valorous bullfighter... 

plentifully equipped” with cojones, and to this end, some version of the 

“cowardly bullfighter,” in which “they are said to be absent,” was always 

useful: 52 “Mr. Henry James[,] I would...hit him once where he had no 

balls” (SL 673). 

It is no “strange coincidence,” then, that Henry James – and a dying 

James at that – factors in the foundational text The Torrents of Spring. 

Again, one needs to look beyond the text’s persistent ribaldry for what it 

disguises or disavows – a self-interested inquiry into masculine formation 

(or degradation) in which some now familiar elements recur. It amuses 

Hemingway to assign the story of James’s deathbed scene to Mandy, a 

“buxom” waitress at Brown’s Beanery, or in other words, a figure of female 

seduction in a setting far removed from Jamesian fictional venues (in terms 

of class, nationality, and social refinement) that annexes excretory discourse 

through the humor of flatulence (T 35). Mandy’s sentimental indulgence 

(“I feel very strongly about Henry James”) sexually arouses a customer who 

has significantly missed the “irreplaceable” experience of soldiering in the 

Great War. Hemingway permeates the scene with hetero desire and male 

performance anxiety in order to realize the comic payoff of Mandy’s incongruent 

anecdote, for the dying “James” seems as prissy as the desiccated


André Gide (“nurse...spare my blushes”) owing largely to his mitigated 

lifestyle as an expatriate bachelor: “Henry James. That chap who had gone 

away from his own land to live in England among Englishmen...Whyhad 

he done it?....Wasn’tAmerica good enough for him?” (T 38–9). 

In fairness, the text chides such chauvinist intolerance, yet even through 

the filters of satire and parody one finds a decided distaste for James’s 

effete, sedentary life “among Englishmen” such as the homophile Edmund 

Gosse (explicitly named). This is not to say that Hemingway had the full 

sexual subtext of that friendship or of its triangulations with the figure of 

J. A. Symonds, which I have studied in chapter 2; it is merely to note that 

Hemingway’s radar for reading gayness from style (“[James’s] men all... 

talk and think like fairies”) was clearly switched on already by the mid- 

1920s (SL 266). The text’s answer to “why had he done it?” – why had 

James gravitated to the England of Gosse and Symonds, which was also 

the England of Wilde – seems to lie in certain natural affinities among 

those unnatural men who went in for parlor sports, hypercultivation, and 

(at a minimum) latent homosexuality. 

Yet it is important to see that Hemingway’s fictional address of James, and 

the more blatant diatribe found in his correspondence, only completed the 

late Victorian phrase, supplying a name (“fairy”) for the type of Jamesian 

masculinity that earlier reviewers had also deemed “artificial” and dandiacal 

– a type evincing the gender style of “strolling mummer[s]” rather 

than that of red-blooded Anglo-Saxon men. Similarly, in judging James 

a “male old woman,” Hemingway was merely embellishing a critical line 

of the 1890s that had viewed James as growing dangerously “careless of his 

literary person,” turning into a Wildean flourisher of “flashy” epigrams and 

dealing in subjects of a distinct “effeminacy,” such as “matchmaking and... 

silken embroideries” (CR 381–2). Thus Allen Tate’s public pressure on Hemingway’s 

own sentimentality (subtextually: his feminine side) had precedents 

in Victorian criticism, while Hemingway’s disdain for James’s unmasculinity 

begins to appear less than original. In this respect, Hemingway’s 

importance lies less in what he said about James than in how he said it, 

with casual tacitness in his fiction and casual overtness in his letters, thereby 

indicating how things deemed typically “Jamesian” – mannered smartness, 

boudoir intrigue, and the interior decorating of bourgeois homes and 

souls – had been simply absorbed into the catalog of modern homosexuality, 

or matched with subcultural tastes and proclivities coded gay. 

But one did not have to read James or musty reviews of James to come 

into contact with tokens of this post-Victorian gayness. As I suggested 

earlier, Hemingway agreed with Pound and Fitzgerald that a living remnant


of this gender style survived in their fellow American writer Glenway 

Wescott, the nominal “Oxford fairy” whose fictional counterpart flatters 

Jake Barnes in “some sort of English accent”; if “the whole show” of continental 

sexual diversity nauseates Barnes, it is this mannered voice of gayness 

that most makes him want to “throw up” (SAR 21). Yet perspective is everything. 

For Margaret Anderson, the editor of the highly respected Little 

Review, Wescott’s “clipped and distinguished speech” was not a marker of 

deviance, but rather the tribute of a one-time poor Wisconsin farmboy 

for whom literature had been the only source of sustenance in a cultural 

wasteland: “[Glenway] loved the English language and had trained himself 

to speak it beautifully.” 53 Interestingly, one discerns a common ground of 

both her admiration and Hemingway’s revulsion when one learns from 

Wescott’s own writing just how much his intonations of speech and prose 

rhythms owed to none other than Henry James: “[In] the corner of the 

orchard where sick but beloved snow-apple-trees ripened over a dark hogwallow;...there, 

seated in a high hard-wheeled three-seated second-hand 

automobile...one of my sisters and I read books by Henry James, and 

wept.” This openly sentimental response to James’s “vast double-deckers” 

had acquainted Wescott with his personal “effeminacy” (his word), which 

later had to be toned down and “reconditioned” for everyday life in conventional 

homophobic society. 54 Yet as I have shown using the example of 

James’s aesthete Gabriel Nash, whose conspicuously “perfect” speech linked 

him with the transgressive Wilde (see chapter 2), no man could “recondition” 

himself entirely out of social history, especially with the advent of the 

new “semiotics of inversion” (linguistic, sartorial, and gestural) that regulated 

masculine embodiment and expression after 1895. 55 For Hemingway, 

Wescott’s veneer of Victorian élan disguised nothing and succeeded only in 

confirming his lineage with Nash, Wilde, and other “fairies” both fictional 

and real – in highlighting certain stylistic continuities that homosexualized 

the Jamesian milieu in retrospect. 

By means of the living artifact Wescott, that is, as well as through a passing 

acquaintance with other gay artists such as Gide, Jean Cocteau, and 

Ronald Firbank (another resented favorite of Stein’s), Hemingway effectively 

read queerness back into James – meaning both the fiction and the 

“blushing” biographical bachelor who wrote it. To this extent, the “highspirited 

nonsense” of The Torrents of Spring (as reviewers lightly judged 

it) was nonsense neither in matter nor in method. For all the sparring 

with Anderson and Stein, Hemingway had sized up “Mr. Henry James” as 

the literary champion to beat, while imagining the terms of their bout as 

an opposition between a straight, quasimartial vigor – in both living and


writing – and a shameful masculine inadequacy tantamount to gayness. 

More generally, the body or the subjectivity that was expatriated from 

the realm of heterosexuality, so to speak, formed a chief concern of this 

first extended piece of fiction by Hemingway – whether adumbrated in 

Sherwood Anderson’s middle-American sentimentalism, or manifested in 

the “fairy tracings” and wayward erogenous zones of Gertrude Stein and the 

denizens of her Parisian salon, or reconstructed from the precious, effeminate 

affectation (as it seemed to Hemingway) of Henry James’s Victorian 

London. 

God knows Ernest was getting hit with James from all sides. (Michael Reynolds, 

“Hemingway’s Bones”) 

According to Michael Reynolds, his most thorough biographer, Hemingway 

“read more Henry James than we have credited him with,” under the 

“excellent tutelage” of the odd couple Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein. 56 

Linda Wagner-Martin even finds it “plausible” to interpret The Sun Also 

Rises as a “recasting” of The Ambassadors, with Jake Barnes in the place 

of Lambert Strether, renovating the latter’s famous injunction to “live all 

you can” while criticizing Strether’s (or James’s) “passivity.” 57 Undeniably, 

Hemingway was “getting hit” with James before the mid-1920s, and not 

only in the form of public encomiums from the arbiters of modern taste, 

but also in the more private applause coming from Stein, her brother Leo, 

and especially Alice B. Toklas – a self-proclaimed “great admirer” who had 

gone so far as to write to urge James that The Awkward Age (the text overrun 

by “fairies”) would make “a very remarkable play” (ABT 659). James also 

invaded Hemingway’s domestic sphere after 1921, being a favorite author 

of two of his wives in succession, Hadley Richardson and Pauline Pfeiffer; 

in A Moveable Feast Hemingway would still be distancing himself from 

Hadley’s critical standards (“her idea of a good writer was Henry James”), 

and it was Pauline who read The Awkward Age aloud to him in December 

1927 (“it seems to me to be the shit”) during his recuperation from a serious 

eye injury as well as a case of hemorrhoids (MF 156; SL 266). 

Yet was getting hit with James, in the years before 1928, the same thing 

as actually reading James? Or might one speculate that an ambitious but 

untried young author would have shied away from the so-called “Master” 

exactly because of all the hype? 58 Whatever the facts, Hemingway’s radical 

gesture of “know[ing] nothing about James” before this time (the very 

end of 1927) makes a strong bid for critical attention. James had already 

assumed a detailed biographical presence for Hemingway, 59 but his early 

invocations of James as “quite a writer” (in Torrents) and as “a good writer”


(in Sun) seem to represent not an informed view (either sincere or ironic) so 

much as a gross measure of his predecessor’s hefty reputation. Meanwhile, 

Hemingway’s anecdotal take on his illustrious forebear in American fiction 

shows an interest at once deeper and more specialized (T 39; SAR 116). 

Being relatively unfamiliar with James’s work, that is, did not prevent 

Hemingway from knowing what was supposedly “generally known” about 

his manhood – namely, that a youthful injury incurred while helping to fight 

a fire at a Newport horse barn had sexually incapacitated James (SL 209). 

The biographical consensus now concurs with what James’s autobiography 

clearly suggests, that the “horrid...obscure hurt” he suffered around the 

outbreak of the Civil War was nothing so lurid as castration, but rather 

a sprained back, the result of pumping an ancient fire engine for “twenty 

odious minutes” while “jammed into the acute angle between two high 

fences” (AU 414–15). Shortly, I will want to consider how the so-called 

general knowledge (or more accurately, the disinformation) about James’s 

sexual impotence became “generally known” among Anglo-American male 

authors, besides Hemingway, and how this powerful rumor interacted with 

James’s iconic pressure on these young writers in his guise as “the Master.” 

For now, it should be noticed how this “knowledge” informs the scene in 

Sun in which Barnes and his writer friend Bill Gorton prepare for a fishing 

excursion in Spain, bantering about a “hurt” of Barnes’s that is equally as 

obscure – and equally as central, in narrative terms – as James’s. While it is 

hardly news among scholars that James is the “Henry” they discuss, whose 

genital or sexual damage is invoked to parallel Barnes’s, the importance of 

this unmanned “James” to Hemingway’s breakthrough novel and to the 

general cultural conversation about Jamesian sexuality remains seriously 

underestimated. 

For all their seemingly aimless bonhomie, Barnes and Gorton suggestively 

fixate in their exchanges on such topics as gender inversion (“Caffeine 

puts a man on her horse and a woman in his grave”), unmanliness by way 

of ethnic stereotype (the emotional Jew, Robert Cohn, emblematizes the 

“pitiful”), the complicating institution of marriage (Gorton deforms a popular 

wedding song), and the bodily mechanics of sex, with byplay about 

a woman’s “jam” and a man’s “joystick” (SAR 114–16). According to one 

review, Hemingway intended to set this “healthily and naturally masculine” 

pastoral chumming against a diseased urban modernity, represented 

by the “neurotic triangle” of Cohn, Brett Ashley, and her fiancé (CR 50). 

But these chummy exchanges also point toward and test the limitations 

of “Irony and Pity” as a means of coping “when you’re feeling [shitty]” 

(the rhyming word was elided for editor Perkins’s sake) in a social order 

whose systematic suspicion constrained both the expressivity of men (pity


uncontrolled by irony) and the acceptable range of male–male intimacies. 

When Gorton declares his “fondness” for Barnes, his riff bristles with all 

the defensive-aggressive humor already observed in Torrents, only now the 

mockery is directed at sexological discourse, with its overreaching theories 

and its tendency to find the prime motive of history (both individual and 

collective) in same-sex desire: “I’m fonder of you than anybody on earth. I 

couldn’t tell you that in New York. It’d mean I was a faggot. That was what 

the Civil War was about. Abraham Lincoln was a faggot...in love with 

General Grant. So was Jefferson Davis...Sexexplains it all. The Colonel’s 

Lady and Judy O’Grady are Lesbians under their skin” (SAR 116). 

Oddly anticipating the campy speeches in Terrence McNally’s recent 

play Love! Valour! Compassion! (see the introduction above), Gorton’s verbal 

sport – or rather Hemingway’s – turns on an updating and indeed a 

queering of Rudyard Kipling’s lyric “The Ladies,” in which a cockney soldier 

concludes his romantic researches with the finding that “the Colonel’s 

Lady an’ Judy O’Grady / Are sisters [not “Lesbians”] under their skins!” 60 

Yet Gorton’s sharp-edged humor here (or Hemingway’s) betrays uneasiness 

about the psychosexual complexity of life after Kipling, both as a matter of 

sexological speculation (by Havelock Ellis, for example, or by certain psychologists 

whom Hemingway called the “discards from Freud”) and as a 

matter of irrefutable embodiment in persons familiar to the author (such as 

Glenway Wescott; SL 751). Gorton resembles the Hemingway who delved 

into Ellis’s writing on sexual difference with relish, yet who made sure to 

treat it publicly as “a running joke” (“you’ll find your case analyzed on 

page . . .”). 61 Meanwhile, the capital-L “Lesbian” who was most responsible 

for inspiring this lively tirade in Sun was clearly Gertrude Stein, whose 

“splendid bombast” (“You are all a lost generation”) served as the novel’s 

epigraph and generated its main argument (SL 229). 

But whether as a postulate of science or as an observable feature of 

contemporary society, same-sex love emerges here as pervasive, the nominal 

engine of all experience and the germ of all narrative. If “sex explain[ed] 

it all,” and “sex” was synonymous with homosexuality, then not only the 

grand public dramas of the past (such as the Civil War) but the most 

personal minutiae of the present and future stood in bondage to the queer. 

Outside the space of the homosocial idyl something as subjective as “talking 

like a fairy” (to put Hemingway’s scornful phrase to better effect) could 

call into question a man’s sexing, while expressing warmth for another 

man could “mean [one] was a faggot”; a semantic fuzziness leaves it unclear 

whether Gorton’s worry is primarily for surveillance and scandal (expressing 

fondness would be taken to mean one was gay) or, more disconcertingly, for 

the implications of speech for sexual identity (expressing fondness would


make one a “faggot,” or confirm one as such). Yet Hemingway’s punch line 

lies in the irony that male sexual orientation has been rendered irrelevant, 

since modern women, unlike their Victorian “sisters,” secretly reserve their 

bodies (or bottoms) for other women. The Stein of Torrents – the particular 

lesbian under Hemingway’s skin – had become epidemic. Like his creator, 

Gorton could laugh at, but could not laugh off, the prospect of a world in 

which, for both genders, heterosexuality was only skin deep (dark laughter 

indeed). 

But Stein was not the only figure to make a repeat performance in The 

Sun Also Rises. The Barnes–Gorton relationship also alludes to Sherwood 

Anderson’s extraordinary tale “The Man Who Became a Woman” (1923). 

In fact, Hemingway essentially steals (to deliver in a more sarcastic “adult” 

register) what the narrator of Anderson’s story says about his youthful infatuation 

for another boy: “I got to love Tom Means...although I wouldn’t 

have dared to say so . . . A man . . . don’t dare own up he loves another 

man . . . [Men] are afraid to admit such feelings to themselves even...It 

may be taken to mean something it don’t need to at all.” 62 If Hemingway 

intended Sun as a “gesture of farewell” to Anderson, this was hardly the 

way to make a clean break. 63 Both authors’ texts, that is, regret the loss 

of a cultural space for the enactment and acceptance of what Anderson 

movingly (yet also defensively) called “the idea that love could grow as between 

man and man, a thing outside sex...founded upon brotherhood, 

realization of self in another man, your own curious loneliness...in him 

too” (SAM 286). 

In other words, the nostalgia that informs both texts – more “sentimental” 

in Anderson, more caustic in Hemingway – attempts to fence out 

the possible implication of gay genital expression (“a thing outside sex”), 

along with meanings that “don’t need to [mean] at all” what they otherwise 

might mean if permitted to. Like Hemingway – as well as Cather 

and even like Stein – Anderson resented the encroachment of “the great 

Sigmund Freud passion,” with its “inclination to suspect” homosexuality in 

all same-gender friendships of any intensity or duration (SAM 473). Both 

Hemingway and Anderson were reacting, in effect, against Freud’s finding 

that “all human beings are capable of making a homosexual object choice 

and have in fact made one in their unconscious.” 64 Or in the terms of Eve 

Kosofsky Sedgwick’s familiar continuum, both authors seek to cordon off 

buddying or “brotherhood” from male–male desire, so that the “potential 

unbrokenness” between the homosocial and the homosexual cannot even 

be envisioned. 65 

As I have shown using Cather’s example, this resistance to sexual implication 

was not limited to male American authors, and the point can


be extended to include a gay British writer such as James’s friend Hugh 

Walpole. In 1920 Walpole commended the theme of “male friendship” in 

fiction but warned of the risks inherent in this “dangerous...subject”: “So 

many people see [a same-gender relationship] only as homosexual, which is 

the last thing it generally is.” 66 The comment may be slightly evasive, but it 

also expresses a veiled objectivity about how homophobia and sexual panic 

conspire to curtail same-sex indulgence. In any event, none of these various 

authorial caveats (whether American or British) against a proliferating 

sexual discourse could quite explain why “so many people see” queerness 

as the rule in other same-sex friendships when it was purportedly “the 

last thing” imaginable in their own. In Anderson, as I have shown earlier, 

homosexual possibility is attenuated by a calculated naïveté, yet his haziness 

also covers for a greater sensitivity to “other,” more dissident masculinities. 

Hemingway, on the other hand, stifles the drift of male bonding into gay 

meaning by the strategy of brusque address. If Gorton and Barnes speak 

the unspeakable extravagantly (“faggots”), it is precisely to banish it from 

the field of interpretation, both for themselves and for readers. 

In Sun, then, one encounters a work energized by an ambivalent, contestatory 

history with Gertrude Stein and partially indebted to the same 

Anderson whose writing Hemingway had disparaged in Torrents. Soone 

is not unprepared to find the figure of Henry James mobilized again as 

well, in this very segment centered on masculine camaraderie, potency, and 

desire. The outright naming of James in manuscript drew an objection 

from editor Perkins, and Hemingway’s self-defense gives an inkling of why 

he might have linked James with “Barnes’ mutilation”: “Henry James... 

left no descendants...nor any wife, and therefore...he is as dead as he 

will ever be.” Ostensibly an argument that James’s death made him fair 

game – “as historical a name as Byron” – the remark also circumscribes 

the concept of literary posterity, and the question of who may or may not 

become a member of the writers’ hall of fame (SL 209). A male author’s 

long-range reputation, it is implied, hinges appreciably upon his degree of 

heterosexual investiture. “Mutilation” could thus have a more far-reaching 

figurative resonance: as a nonreproductive bachelor whose “great knowledge 

of drawing-rooms” originated in a great dread of bedrooms (again, 

the note of Torrents), James could not be more beastly dead (SL 266). 

Yet as this instance attests, James remained very much alive to Hemingway, 

not at all “historical.” Tellingly, Hemingway’s license, in Sun, with 

the occasion of James’s famous accident obeys the need to infantilize James 

(“I heard it was a tricycle”), and then makes an in-joke about his apparent 

masculine incompetency: the accident occurred while “riding horseback”


(James was in fact rather adept at riding; SAR 115–16). Aesthetic rather than 

athletic, this version of “Henry James” might as well be the “man on her 

horse” of Bill Gorton’s gender-switching patter. Both by his queer nature 

and his early unmanning, James seemed almost predestined to write an 

overrefined prose, and to offer a fictional universe populated by femmy 

“fairies”: how much more aggravating, then, for Hemingway, to have to 

witness James’s perversely growing fame. 

The other things . . . are all fixed up. We’ve . . . made Henry James Henry, made 

Roger Prescott [Glenway Wescott] into Roger Prentiss and unfitted the bulls for 

a reproductive function. (Hemingway to Maxwell Perkins, editor of The Sun Also 

Rises) 

My experience in teaching The Sun Also Rises suggests that Perkins’s intervention 

achieved its goal: even for many graduate students, the identity of 

the afflicted, unmanly “Henry” has now become lost in a clutter of other 

period references. In the mid-1920s, however, with the Master only recently 

deceased, the reference was not at all mysterious. Leon Edel went so far as 

to stake his claim for Hemingway as the “creator of the legend that James 

was impotent” on the Barnes–Gorton exchange. 67 But in fact the broad 

trend that permitted Glenway Wescott, by the early 1930s, to subsume 

James under the succinct conjunction “expatriation and castration” had 

begun more than a decade earlier, when Van Wyck Brooks published part 

of The Pilgrimage of Henry James (1925) in the important journal Dial in 

May 1923. 68 

Brooks warrants close attention in this section, for his Henry James became 

the Henry James of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Anderson, and other 

male authors struggling to position themselves in the shadow of the 

Master’s prestige and stylistic presence, which were so densely interwoven 

with evolving sex/gender norms. “I read the James book,” Fitzgerald 

notified Brooks in June 1925,and“sodid...Ernest Hemminway [sic]” – a 

fact independently verified in Sun, which rehearses Brooks’s primary thesis, 

no doubt with the example of James in view: “Nobody that ever left their 

own country ever wrote anything worth printing...You get precious... 

[with] fake European standards” (SAR 115). 69 Yet if Brooks laid the groundwork 

for linking James’s removal to Europe and his “preciousness,” on the 

one hand, with his “castration” or demasculinization, on the other, it bears 

noting that The Pilgrimage of Henry James makes only passing mention of 

the “accident” or “invalidism” that Hemingway and others found so compelling. 

70 As I will shortly show, Brooks had his own constitutional reasons


for soft-pedaling this event in James’s life. The key point for now is that the 

project of making “expatriation and castration” (or cognates such as feminization 

and sexual inversion) appear all but synonymous in James’s case 

was a group project among Anglo-American authors, for which Brooks’s 

study merely served as the catalyst. 

Apart from Hemingway’s contributions, one might pursue what Fitzgerald 

meant by complaining to Brooks about his sin of biographical 

omission – “why didn’t you touch more on James [sic] impotence (physical) 

and its influence [on his work]?” – or by implying that both James’s foreign 

relocation and his “feminine” impress on the Anglo-American novel 

had roots in a sexual identity less than straight. Elaborating a subtext in 

Brooks’s book, Fitzgerald tried to imagine how different modern literary 

history would look if James had not expatriated but had instead been 

held back by a “poignant emotional love affair with an American girl on 

American soil”; that Fitzgerald wrote this passage under the sign of farce is 

clear enough from his concession that such an Americanized, heterosexualized 

James, with “the picaresque past of Huck Finn,” was inconceivable. 71 

Alternatively, one might examine Wescott’s distinctive line of interpreting 

his beloved, Anglicized James also in light of physical impotence – a rhetorical 

movement that carries Wescott from James’s “rumored” inability to 

produce children and his fortunate expatriation to the insight that homosexuality 

explained a good deal about James’s life and work, especially his 

anarchistic enthusiasm for “the rupture of...inhibitions.” 72 

But it is Stephen Spender who provides the most revealing evidence of 

how the James-as-castrato legend came to dominate transatlantic discourse. 

Writing to Christopher Isherwood in 1933, Spender spoofed the idea, initially 

suggesting that his forthcoming book on James would be about boy 

love (“his friendships with Boston lads between the ages of 7 and 17”) and 

then purporting to have found that James was castrated at age 40 “by an 

accident which happened to one of the earliest central heating radiators.” 

Confidentially, that is, Spender joked away all such speculation, while associating 

the famous accident with a sedentary, middle-aged, and slightly 

chilly Henry James; the book’s cover, he further pretended for Isherwood’s 

sake, would feature the culprit in the plot, “a trellis of hot pipes with little 

jets of steam peeping out.” 73 Yet when the book appeared, Spender bowed 

to consensus, duly citing Wescott’s theories and borrowing yet another hypothesis 

(unsupported in James’s account) that the Master’s privates had 

been “very severely scalded.” This might well explain the “attitude to sex” 

in James’s writing, Spender agreed, as well as some of the grimmer endings 

in his works: “Castration...issupposed to preoccupy the mind with ideas 

of suicide and death.” 74


To judge by Fitzgerald, Wescott, and Spender, then, the anomalous view 

of James’s sexuality at this time belonged not to those who read him as 

a queer, damaged expatriate but rather to a lesser author like Gamaliel 

Bradford, whose appreciation of James in American Portraits (1922) had in 

fact provoked Brooks’s attack in The Pilgrimage. According to Bradford, 

James’s “love-letters would have been one of the curiosities of literature,” 

given his stylistic queerness (decidedly in the old sense of the word), but 

then: “Who can say? Unless some woman still lives who has some of his 

letters.” 75 (This lament for the missing proof of James’s heterosexuality is 

humorously, but tellingly, reversed in a recent anthology that includes his 

work in the “hidden tradition” of gay writing yet resists the biographical 

claim: “Failing the discovery of love letters to a young man...[James’s] 

homosexuality must remain theoretical”; 76 the further humor, in turn, 

of this reluctance to call James’s gayness anything more than theoretical 

becomes clear from perusing Susan Gunter and Steven Jobe’s excellent 

compilation of James’s “love letters” to younger men. 77 ) For the avant-garde 

male modernists – gay or straight, American or British, impotence theory or 

no – James increasingly appeared under the auspices of queerness, implying 

a distinct name – homosexuality – for those “thicker traces of another sort” 

that James’s intimate friends such as Constance Woolson had detected in 

his nature and in his work (L iii: 559). 

Next to Hemingway, however, it was Sherwood Anderson who became 

Van Wyck Brooks’s key interlocutor on the question of James. The first serialized 

portion of Brooks’s The Pilgrimage proved so seductive to Anderson 

(“you have a kind of power over my mind, Van Wyck”) that he embarked 

on several “solid weeks of James reading” in 1923. Anderson came to sympathize 

with James as a man who “did not dare love” (hinting perhaps at 

a love that dared not speak its name), but still he found the experience of 

reading James emotionally privative, writing to Brooks: “I really can’t care 

much for any character after he gets through with it; he, in short, takes my 

love from me, too” (SA 102). At the same time, Anderson strongly urged 

Brooks, in developing his book’s thesis in further installments, to factor 

in the “struggling side of James” and treat him not like a “judge trying a 

criminal” but rather as a “sympathetic friend or lover”: “Can we understand 

at all, ever, where we do not love?...Giveyourself wholly to James” 

(SA 104). 

The recurrence of the word love here, with its linkage to understanding, 

is extremely striking. As suggested earlier, there is no need to romanticize 

Anderson’s sexual politics (as Stein sometimes did, both genuinely and 

strategically). If Hemingway honed his masculinity by grinding against 

Jamesian effeminacy, Anderson similarly wrinkled his nose up at a “very


womanish” portrayal of Oscar Wilde on Broadway (1938), objecting especially 

to the play’s suggestion that “perversion has in it some beauty and 

meaning that is not in the natural flow of life” (SA 418). Furthermore, 

even Anderson’s sensitive-male characters issue self-protective disclaimers 

(“I’m not any fairy” 78 ) that also echo in the author’s memoirs (“[my friend] 

Luther was no fairy”), which unabashedly associate his encounters with 

urban homosexuality or transvestism with a sort of gothic horror: “a kind 

of door opened, as though I looked down...into a dark pit, a place of 

monstrous shapes, a world of strange unhealth” (SAM 285, 340). 

Yet again, Anderson’s resistance to seeing same-sex desire as such (as opposed 

to fraternal or sororal bonds “based on natural loneliness”) mainly 

reflected a wish to harbor human relationships from the incursions of the 

modern sex police. Anderson’s well-known story “Hands,” which features 

an effeminate schoolteacher run out of town (indeed nearly lynched) for allegedly 

fondling schoolboys, resolutely argues against homophobia, perhaps 

because Anderson himself had flourished as a journeyman printer under 

“sudden caresses” bestowed by older men whose guidance he remembered, 

positively, as “a kind of love making.” 79 If to his view homosexuality remained 

a “terrible problem,” Anderson openly welcomed what might be 

called early gay pride readings of his work, as when an elderly gay man 

paid him this compliment: “I myself often read [“Hands”] . . . aloud to 

young men among us...It is an effort to bring a little nobility into our 

relationships.” Surely one personal strength that Stein valued in Anderson 

(and missed in Hemingway) was the capacity to trace his homophobia to 

its foundations, uncovering, as it were, the sexual invert within: “Why, 

I was myself, unconsciously, one of them. The thing was in me too and 

the fear I had expressed was a sure sign of its presence” (SAM 285–6, 340, 

473). 

Suggestively, Anderson’s admonition to Brooks to “give yourself wholly 

to James,” especially before writing critically about him, resembles the 

argument put forth in the tale “Hands” for broadly circulating the account 

of its queer character: “Sympathetically set forth [his story] would tap 

many strange, beautiful qualities in obscure men” (WO 29). A queer reader 

before the fact, Anderson coaxed Brooks toward what would now be called 

an “identificatory standpoint” receptive to the “sentimentally attaching 

power” of the Jamesian text, with its subdued eroticism, 80 encouraging 

Brooks to recognize “the access to ‘perverse’ energies that [James’s] writing 

frequently affords.” 81 By further implication, the reader/author who went 

into James’s texts looking not for strange beauties in obscure masculinities 

but only for heterosexual success stories, was likely to find precisely what


Brooks ultimately found, a host of characters who seemed disappointingly 

averse to normal (straight) emotions, “shadow-like passionless women and 

fish-blooded men” (a variant, one might add, on Lionel Trilling’s response 

to Willa Cather, discussed in chapter 5). 82 

Anderson’s mediation failed miserably, that is, and not only did Brooks 

not yield to James’s queerness, but he assailed it. For Brooks, too, was edgy 

about the feminized aura that had gathered around a form of cultural authority 

that should have been, just as authority, the province of men; and 

he only later realized what Hemingway would never fully accept: that he 

was “quarreling with myself” by way of quarreling with the Master. 83 As 

James Hoopes remarks, Brooks’s “strenuous, lifelong insistence” that literature 

be rooted in native soil and express American practicality – the main 

basis of his attack on James – was also a rearguard “defense of his masculinity,” 

obstructing his appreciation of other gay writers as well, including 

those whom he admired, such as Walt Whitman and J. A. Symonds. 84 For 

instance, Brooks labored to refute what he called the “crass misunderstandings” 

that had grown up around Symonds’s “passion for ideal [male] beauty” 

(a sorry project given what is now known of the English author’s brave, if 

cautious, gay advocacy), and Brooks was accordingly “greatly perplexed” by 

Symonds’s famous attempt to enlist Whitman in support of Greek love. 85 

Leaning not on the Whitman of manly comrade love but on the 

masculinist, nationalist Whitman of Democratic Vistas, Brooks argued 

that James’s deviance began with imitating the “spare, withdrawn” (read 

effeminate) aesthetes of Europe. Inevitably, James’s long sojourn in modern 

London, the capital of Anglo-American decadence and the scene of 

Wilde’s disgrace, had led to “the gradual decomposition...of his sense 

of human values,” and his “sterilizing” influence on the next generation 

of writers could be seen in the work of those American exiles in Paris 

(naming Stein would have been superfluous) who pursued “the so-called 

expatriate religion of art.” Given the organizing terms of this narrative 

of James’s degeneration and his incomparable agency in a much broader 

cultural decline – not coincidentally, the very terms of Hemingway’s vignettes 

involving James – one readily grasps Brooks’s difficulty in keeping 

homosexuality out of the picture. Brooks all but identifies queerness as the 

origin of “the style that was the man Henry James had become” – decorative, 

sensualist, ceaselessly hedging – unconsciously isolating the queerest 

of his works (The Tragic Muse, “The Altar of the Dead”) as evidence of 

how James’s aberrant personal “texture” had “infected the creatures of his 

fancy,” making them behave “in violation of the nature of things.” 86 As 

in Anderson’s more conscious and conspicuous appeal to “the natural flow


of life,” and its fundamental opposition to Wildean perversion, Brooks 

implied more than he knew in setting James and his characters “against 

nature.” Put otherwise, the strain of sexual dissidence in the Master’s voice 

vibrated in Brooks’s mind, even as he sought to neutralize and castigate it 

as a debased expatriate cosmopolitanism. 

As Hemingway proved in other dire ways, taking on Jamesian gay masculinity 

could exact penalties, especially when such a confrontation involved 

aggressions toward unacknowledged parts of the self. In the words of his 

own later account, Brooks became so “drugged” with his protagonist Henry 

James that he feared he would “never be sane again” until released from 

the grip of his book project. Describing the deliverance that came with the 

publication of The Pilgrimage, Brooks interestingly genders the body of his 

metaphor: “Henry James...came alive...inside of me,” and “the infant 

monster, kicking...hard at the walls of my psyche” entered the world. 87 

In the natural flow of life, postpartum depression followed. “Pursued... 

with nightmares in which Henry James turned great luminous menacing 

eyes upon me” – as it were, Woolf’s hauntingly “portentous” James run 

amok – Brooks was especially beset by the fantasy of being buried alive 

by a decree of Parliament (not coincidentally, the law-making assembly 

of the American-turned-British subject Henry James). When consulted 

on the case, Carl Gustav Jung diagnosed the patient as beyond help, and 

Brooks passed the remainder of the 1920s in a sequence of American and 

English hospitals, or what he called “houses of the dead” (including one 

annexed by Harrow, where the schoolboy Symonds first encountered the 

homosexuality that Brooks refused to see. 88 ) To insist upon the workings 

of ironic retribution here would perhaps smack of gothic fatalism, yet the 

gothic intensity of Brooks’s breakdown measured the psychic costs of denial 

in engaging Henry James under the sign of gender, sexuality, and nation. 

Hemingway and others, one might say, got off easy. 

I have to . . . deny myself...many of the little comforts like toilet paper, semicolons, 

and soles to my shoes . . . [Otherwise] people begin to shout that old Hem 

is just a fairy after all and no He man ha ha. (Hemingway to Fitzgerald, 1927) 

As Brooks’s case is only the most dramatic to confirm, it will not do to 

construe Hemingway’s anxious masculinity as too exceptional. Fitzgerald 

fretted that The Great Gatsby would show the “feminine” influence of James 

(as reviewers later claimed it did) rather than the virile influence of Dostoevsky. 

89 Ezra Pound (as Kerr quotes him) was obsessed with keeping a “hardness 

of edge” in creative writing in order to remasculinize the “perpetual


mother’s meeting” of a “Eunuchated” American culture. 90 Less invidiously 

but in the same vein, Stephen Spender, who presciently noted a “hint of the 

androgynyous” in Hemingway’s work, cited “the often feminine presence of 

a second Henry James” throughout the entire Jamesian canon, as if inscribing 

a man who had “lived the life of...hisRowlands” (referring to Rowland 

Mallet of Roderick Hudson) and his Lambert Strethers – passive observers 

rather than real men of action. 91 Even Anderson, although less fearful both 

of James and of things feminine, reacted to Hemingway’s “completely patronizing” 

challenge to him as a man and an author in the challenger’s 

own masculinist idiom: judging as “a pretty good middle weight” himself, 

Anderson predicted that Hemingway would never “make the heavy weight 

class” (SAM 464). 

From another direction, but equally symptomatically, the critic Edmund 

Wilson felt moved to a public defense of Hemingway’s manhood against the 

most punishing pugilist of all, Gertrude Stein; after being “waspish” toward 

Pound, Wilson wrote, she had beat up on Hemingway “pretty hard” in The 

Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, which retailed the “endlessly amusing” 

gossip (in the gay city of Paris) about Hemingway’s debility and “yellow” 

cowardice (ABT 875). 92 Even Glenway Wescott, whose own masculinity 

had been ridiculed in The Sun Also Rises, perceived Stein’s treatment of 

Hemingway as “odious,” while her ally and ideal man Anderson found that 

his “great joy” in reading The Autobiography was tempered by Stein’s move 

(figuratively, either savage or castrative or both) to take “such big patches 

of skin off Hemmy with [her] delicately held knife” (SA 295). 

Yet as this turbulent body of response further indicates, Hemingway had 

elected himself, or had agreed to his election, as the primary icon-cumtarget 

of insistently straight hypermasculinity in Anglo-American culture. 

As such, he had also become the foremost victim of the post-Victorian 

practice of reading (and self-reading) that assumed a tight fit between person 

and persona, collapsing masculine and artistic authenticity or inauthenticity 

in the process. In calling Anderson’s work a “pretensious fake,” Wescott’s 

work a “literary fake,” or James’s work “an enormous fake,” Hemingway selfevidently 

implied an author whose manhood, too, was artificial, a man who 

was perhaps both “a phony and a buggar [sic]” (SL 195, 266, 413). By the same 

token, when Hemingway became rattled by Virginia Woolf’s “imputation 

that I faked” in The Sun Also Rises, the insult fell into essentially the same 

category as charges that his boxer’s crouch was an imitation of Anderson’s 

(thus Stein), that his bullfighting enthusiasm was “all simulation” (Margaret 

Anderson), and that his masculinity in toto was as “phony as a rubber check”


(Zelda Fitzgerald). The sting in these formulas of detraction must have 

been all the worse for their having come from women (SL 265, ABT 873, 

SL 388). 93 

The best index to how the modern regulation of gender and sexuality 

worked, that is, came in the form of Hemingway’s brittle susceptibility when 

the tables were turned, and his own masculine prose, as well as his own 

pose, was pronounced “fake.” Finding no quarter in which to laugh off such 

imputations as groundless or irrelevant (“no He man ha ha”), Hemingway 

self-consciously redoubled his manly displays, battling swordfish in the 

gulfstream (“poor fragile old Hem posing as a fisherman”), hunting in 

Africa (where “Gertrude’s feathered friends,” he predicted, would quickly 

perish), and boxing against all comers, including an unfortunate, inebriated 

Wallace Stevens: “Gertrude Stein ought to give all these people who pick 

fights with poor old papa at least their money [back]” (SL 388, 403, 439). 

In accordance with the harsh binary logic of the modern gender system, 

which was extended and compounded in the equation of effeminacy with 

homosexuality, Hemingway’s internalized fear of being no “He man” (all 

kidding aside) harbored the deeper fear that his audience would proceed 

to deduce the very worst about him: “old Hem is just a fairy,” no different 

from the noxious male creatures that he reviled in James’s fiction or found 

embodied in literary competitors such as Glenway Wescott. 

As always, Stein emerges as the keenest analyst of what went wrong for 

Hemingwayesque masculinity and its manifestation in Hemingway’s art. 

Owing largely to a more stable patriarchy, “nineteenth-century men were 

confident,” she observed in Everybody’s Autobiography, and thus Victorian 

male authors were able to “invent all kinds...of men” in their fiction (a 

generalization that holds even for the putatively “feminized” James). With 

the weakening of patriarchal privilege, though, male modernists became 

defensive, “hold[ing] on to themselves” in their fictional representations 

and trying to make themselves appear “more beautiful more intriguing 

more everything” (EA 3–4). Hemingway exemplified the “more everything” 

category – staging a campaign, at once quixotic and pathetic, to recover lost 

ground for modern men by main force – whereas Anderson’s “perfect freshness” 

derived from his relative indifference to being “small in the world’s 

eyes.” 94 In other words, Stein promoted much the same type of masculinity 

that was complimented and revalued throughout James’s work; it was 

also of the kind that Willa Cather advanced in her writings, including 

what Hemingway saw as the pitiful simulacrum of manhood, cribbed from 

Hollywood movies, that had betrayed Cather in the prize-winning novel 

One of Ours: “Poor woman she had to get her war experience from


somewhere” (SL 105). In the long run, as both Stein and Anderson intuited, 

Hemingway himself would be betrayed by the constant exertion 

and self-vigilance required in playing the big, strong, straight man for “the 

world’s eyes.” In that regard, perhaps a poignant symbolism can be read 

in Hemingway’s unsuccessful struggle with a piece of fiction entitled “The 

Faker”; as D. T. Max writes, it was to be “the story of a man returning 

from . . . war pretending to be a hero...[but] he never finished it.” 95 

Farewell is about the best word I know in English. (Hemingway, Selected Letters, 

1932) 

If nobody refuses what you offer there must be something the matter. (Stein, 

Everybody’s Autobiography, 1937) 

In his impressive study Libidinal Currents, Joseph A. Boone sums up the 

recent trend in American literary and cultural studies that has seen “concepts 

of canonicity...fiercely debated...resulting in the dethroning of certain 

authors (farewell Hemingway) and the rise of hitherto neglected ones,” such 

as Djuna Barnes. 96 Although Boone’s incisive readings contribute much to 

this pivotal recovery project, one senses that he may be premature in bidding 

Hemingway, in particular, a fond farewell. Nor is it the first time that Papa 

Hemingway has been shown the door without his having taken it. Indeed, 

more than half a century after Fitzgerald agreed with Stein’s assessment 

that his friend’s work was bound for “the museums,” and long after Alice 

B. Toklas also dismissed that work as “hopelessly 1890,” Hemingway is not 

only not being “refused,” he is being positively embraced. 97 

In 1999, to honor of the centennial of Hemingway’s birth – only coincidentally 

the anniversary of James’s publication of The Awkward Age – the 

National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC, mounted a major exhibition 

dedicated to Hemingway, with Yale University Press publishing the exhibition’s 

photographs of this “emphatically virile...American legend.” 98 Popular 

magazines from People to Cigar Aficionado featured Hemingway on their 

covers. Meanwhile, Hemingway’s offspring (the lucky Henry James did not 

have any) have continued to flood the market with spurious posthumous 

“novels,” such as True at First Light, as well as with a line of “Hemingway” 

furniture. 99 At the risk of reproducing what James Kincaid calls the “narratives 

of fierce causality” that marked and marred Victorian conceptions of 

sexual identity, it is perhaps worth noting that the Hemingway descendant 

who testified most candidly to the author’s self-damage and its ramifications 

for others around him was his transgendered son Gregory/Gloria,


whose difficult life ended recently in the women’s section of a Miami 

jail. 100 

More to the point of Boone’s argument are the results of a poll conducted, 

also in 1999, by the newsletter of the Heath Anthology of American 

Literature, which is conceived as the avant-garde multiculturalist teaching 

anthology of our time. Having asked their sizeable constituency of college 

educators to name the twentieth-century works in English most essential 

to the millennial curriculum, the newsletter’s editors reported that two 

Hemingway novels, The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms, were voted 

into the “top twenty-five” list, thus tying the American author with James 

Joyce and Virginia Woolf for second place; the only writer who placed three 

works in the top echelon (and here one may imagine Hemingway spinning 

in his grave) was William Faulkner. 101 To all appearances, then, whether 

in academe or in popular mass media, the figure of “Hemingway” does 

not plan on departing anytime soon, leaving us to confront the troubling 

implication that perhaps Anglo-American culture itself has become the 

“museum” of Stein’s prediction. (Although the year 1999 was also the birth 

centennial of the gay American poet Hart Crane, author of The Bridge, his 

image was nowhere to be found on the cover of People or elsewhere.) 

As for the other Hemingway, the “other half” of the man that did not 

really factor into these recent festivities and celebrations, a diary entry from 

the 1950s – involving sexual role-playing with his fourth wife, Mary – 

provides a remarkable glimpse into the possibilities, both personal and 

artistic, that Stein had once seen, before the overdetermined masculinist 

persona of “Papa” was superimposed: 

[Mary] loves me to be her girls [sic], which I love to be, not being absolutely stupid. 

Mary has never had one lesbian impulse but has always wanted to be a boy. Since 

I have never cared for any man and dislike any tactile contact with men except the 

normal Spanish abrazo, I loved feeling the embrace of Mary, which came to me as 

something outside all tribal law. 102 

Although the armor of negation remains firmly in place for Hemingway 

(“never . . . never”), this fantasy of sexual inversion, resulting in something 

bordering on same-sex intimacy, leads one to wonder just how far outside 

of tribal law this brave, manly man might have ventured, if only his “inside” 

had not become “outside” all too soon. 103

234 Notes to pages 165–175 

as in One of Ours, the attempt to map out a new order of relations between 

men or between women becomes entangled in the very structures it seeks to 

subvert. 

62 Goldberg, “Strange Brothers,” p. 471. 

63 Abraham, Are Girls Necessary?, p.52. 

64 Rowe, Other Henry James, p.108. 

65 Goldberg, “Strange Brothers,” p. 473. 

66 Goldberg makes a strong case for Louie Marsellus, the Professor’s son-in-law, 

as the texts Wildean figure, and some of Marsellus’s penchant for sensualism 

rubs off on the Professor. St. Peter’s taste coincides with “Louie’s taste” as he 

“strokes . . . with evident pleasure” the furs that Louie buys for his wife (PH 

67). The furs that link Louie, Tom, and the Professor clearly correspond with 

the fetishized blanket that brings the bodies of Roddy Blake, Tom, and St. 

Peter into relation; see Goldberg, “Strange Brothers,” pp. 470, 473. 

67 Forster, Maurice, p.209. 

6 ‘‘THE OTHER HALF IS THE MAN’’: THE QUEER 

MODERN TRIANGLE OF GERTRUDE STEIN, 

ERNEST HEMINGWAY, AND HENRY JAMES 

1 As a measure of the status of The Torrents of Spring in the Hemingway canon, the 

300-page Cambridge Companion to Ernest Hemingway, ed. Scott Donaldson, 

Cambridge University Press, 1996, contains only three passing mentions of the 

text. 

2 Harvey Breit, The Writer Observed, Cleveland, OH: World Publishing, 1956, 

p. 276. 

3 Hemingway scholars will recognize my renovations of Philip Young’s Ernest 

Hemingway: A Reconsideration, University Park: Pennsylvania State University 

Press, 1966. I have benefited particularly from Comley and Scholes’s thoughtful 

study, Hemingway’s Genders. 

4 Gertrude Stein, Lectures in America, New York: Random House, 1935,p.52. 

5 John Hyde Preston, “A Conversation with Gertrude Stein,” in Linda Simon 

(ed.), Gertrude Stein Remembered, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994, 

pp. 159–61. 

6 Rena Sanderson, “Hemingway and Gender History,” in Donaldson, 

Cambridge Companion to Hemingway, p.171. 

7 Preston, “Conversation with Stein,” p. 160. 

8 Anderson’s Love Letters, pp. 306–7. 

9 Gertrude Stein, “Transatlantic Interview,” in Robert Bartlett Haas (ed.), A 

Primer for the Gradual Understanding of Gertrude Stein, Los Angeles, CA: 

Black Sparrow Press, 1971, p.22. 

10 Joseph Allen Boone argues, on the basis of Charles Henri Ford and Parker 

Tyler’s The Young and Evil (1933), that another audience did exist, as well 

as other types of authors, in whose shared world Jake Barnes’s “sexual dysfunction 

and Brett’s ‘faghag’ propensities” would have “fit right [in]” rather

Notes to pages 175–177 235 

than “wreaking the havoc” that Hemingway depicts. But The Young and Evil, 

consciously modeled after The Sun Also Rises, circulated mainly in Paris (with 

Stein’s support), having been “instantly seized by English and American customs” 

before sinking out of sight altogether – a prospect hardly to be risked by 

Hemingway, or very many others; Libidinal Currents: Sexuality and the Shaping 

of Modernism, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998,pp.225, 471,n.104. 


12 Dear Sammy: Letters from Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, ed. Samuel M. 

Steward, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977, p.56. 

13 Hemingway quoted in Kenneth S. Lynn, Hemingway, New York: Simon & 

Schuster, 1987, p.533. 

14 Sedgwick, “Beast in the Closet,” pp. 205, 207. 

15 Introducing the welcome reissue of Glenway Wescott’s The Pilgrim Hawk, 

Michael Cunningham joins Edmund White and many other readers in 

attributing a Jamesian quality to Wescott’s prose: “It is James... whom 

Wescott most nearly resembles . . . produc[ing] all his sparks from within: 

what fascinates him are devastating events that spring directly from character”; 

The Pilgrim Hawk: A Love Story, New York: New York Review Books, 

2001, pp. xviii–xix. This reception history reverses the invidious take on the 

James–Wescott relation, treated at length here, seeing it more as one of intergenerational 

gay “influence” in both style and subject matter. I am indebted 

throughout this chapter to Jerry Rosco’s valuable new study Glenway Wescott 

Personally: A Biography, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002. 

16 Glenway Wescott, “A Sentimental Contribution,” in Homage to Henry James, 

1843–1926, Mamaroneck, NY: Paul P. Appel, 1971, pp. 186–7. 

17 Spender, Destructive Element, pp. 34–5. 

18 F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Life in Letters, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli, New York: Charles 

Scribner’s Sons, 1994, p.123. 

19 Ernest Hemingway, Green Hills of Africa, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 

1935, pp.65–6. Linda Wagner-Martin argues that Stein’s motive in counter 

attacking was “guilt over her sponsorship” of Hemingway after wading through 

the “scathing undercurrent of anti-Semitism and homophobia” in The Sun Also 

Rises;“Favored Strangers”: Gertrude Stein and her Family, New Brunswick, NJ: 

Rutgers University Press, 1995,pp.186–7. Caramello reads The Autobiography 

as a preemptive strike against the “symbolic matricide” that Stein expected 

from her protégé, but also as a sign of resentment toward a patriarchal spoils 

system that honored Hemingway’s labors (and Picasso’s) while neglecting her 

own; James, Stein, and the Biographical Act, p.161. 

20 Ernest Hemingway, “The Autobiography of Alice B. Hemingway,” unpublished 

MS, Ernest Hemingway Collection, John Fitzgerald Kennedy Library, 

Columbia Point, Boston, MA, no pagination. 

21 For a further example, here is Sherwood Anderson, writing in 1923: “Horses and 

Negroes seem to be the two things in America that give me the most ascetic [sic] 

pleasure . . . In the horse what a noble bearing. No lousy inferiority complex 

there” (SA 101). Stein’s variant form of romantic racialism, and its role in her


emergent sense of sexual identity, is well discussed in Lisa Ruddick, Reading 

Gertrude Stein: Body, Text, Gnosis, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990, 

pp. 32–3, 120, 21. For sociohistorical context, see David Levering Lewis, When 

Harlem was in Vogue (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981; Harmondsworth: 

Penguin, 1997) and Michael North, The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language, 

and Twentieth-Century Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). 

22 Michael Reynolds, Hemingway: The Paris Years, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989, 

p. 335. 

23 Frances Kerr, “Feeling ‘Half Feminine’: Modernism and the Politics of Emotion 

in The Great Gatsby,” American Literature 68, no. 2 (June 1996), 405–31. 

24 Allen Tate, “Hard-Boiled,” in Robert O. Stephens (ed.), Ernest Hemingway: 

The Critical Reception, n.p.: Burt Franklin & Co., 1977,p.43. 

25 Sanderson, “Hemingway and Gender History,”p.182. 

26 Stephens, Hemingway: The Critical Reception, pp. 127, 142, 145, 131, 155. 

27 Hemingway, Green Hills of Africa, pp. 23–4. 

28 Breit, Writer Observed, p.263. 

29 Butler, Gender Trouble, pp. 32–3. 

30 Ezra Pound quoted in Robert McAlmon, McAlmon and the Lost Generation: A 

Self-Portrait, ed. Robert E. Knoll, Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press, 

1962, p.353. 

31 Fitzgerald: A Life in Letters, ed. Bruccoli, p. 119. 

32 Hemingway’s description of Gide, from Death in the Afternoon, is quoted in 

Comley and Scholes, Hemingway’s Genders, p.120. The passage praises the 

painter El Greco for “redeem[ing], for the tribe” of “fairies,” not just the 

“prissy... moral arrogance” of Gide, but “the lazy, conceited debauchery of 

a Wilde who betrayed a generation” – a judgment curiously akin to James’s 

and Cather’s – and “the nasty, sentimental pawing of humanity of a Whitman”; 

Comley and Scholes argue that these are not “blanket condemnations” 

of homosexuality but rather objections to a “way of textualizing that sexuality 

that allies it with the sentimental and moralistic”; pp. 120–1. The fine distinction 

is untenable, however, given the powerful cultural logic by which the 

sentimental and moralistic get routed back into the discourse of effeminacy: 

a condemnation of this sensibility in men is perforce a condemnation of the 

queer. 

33 Kerr, “Feeling ‘Half Feminine,’ ” p. 405. 

34 Caramello, Biographical Act, p.120. 

35 See Susan M. Griffin’s insightful treatment of James’s recurrent narrative interest 

in “laceration” and “mutilation” in “Scar Texts: Tracing the Marks of 

Jamesian Masculinity,” Arizona Quarterly 53, no. 4 (winter 1977), 61–82. 

36 Harold Wentworth and Stuart Berg Flexner, Dictionary of American Slang, 2nd 

supplementary edn, New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1975,p.413. 

37 Stephen Calloway, “Wilde and the Dandyism of the Senses,” in Peter Raby 

(ed.), The Companion to Oscar Wilde, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 

1997, pp. 47–8.


38 On Huysmans’s impact on Wilde and on European aestheticism generally, see 

also Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, pp. 252–3. 

39 Holland and Hart-Davis, Complete Letters of Wilde, pp. 660, 656. 

40 Ruddick, Reading Gertrude Stein, pp.77, 83. The use of “bottom” or “bottom 

nature” is pervasive in Stein’s text; for example, describing a partner in 

one of the work’s “pairs of women”: “Mary Maxworthing . . . had not a very 

large bottom in her to her, she had a little sensitive bottom in her” (MOA 

215). In the “repetitive, almost drugged” cadences of The Making of Americans, 

Ruddick discerns a deeper logic where readers like Hemingway found the 

formal slovenliness of the eternal feminine: Stein’s “strange style reflects not 

absentedmindedness or self-indulgence but self-exploration” of complicated 

“primitive fantasies” in the working-out of her identity and sexual politics; pp. 

72–3. Similarly, when Hemingway later dismisses Stein’s work as the “manure” 

of “contented cows,” he again shows his (allergic) insightfulness into the lesbian 

thematics and excremental metaphorics of a piece such as “As a Wife has a cow a 

Love Story”; “Autobiography of Alice B. Hemingway.” As Kay Turner’s archival 

research shows, “cow” was Stein’s codeword for Toklas’s stools, constituting a 

sort of “hallmark of married intimacy” and mutual nurture : “Gertrude’s devotion 

to Alice’s ‘cows’...combines a heightened and freely discursive eroticism 

with the desire to make art. Both in lovemaking and in defecating...Toklas’s 

body provided the sensual, corporeal model...[for Stein’s] writing pushed out 

on the page in all its rhythmic, repetitive, regressive and erotic glory”; Baby 

Precious Always Shines: Selected Love Notes Between Gertrude Stein and Alice B. 

Toklas, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999, pp. 33–4. 

41 Men of other stripes saw Stein’s new hairstyle otherwise. To Samuel Steward, 

she resembled “a Roman senator about to break into voluble Latin”; Dear 

Sammy, p.7. Anderson found, approvingly, that the tonsure made her look 

“like a monk” (ABT 907), while the aesthete Harold Acton thought of her 

in the guise of a priestess of the “Aztec Mexicans”; Simon, Stein Remembered, 

p. 113. The challenge Hemingway faced in absorbing Stein’s physical transformation 

rehearsed the challenge to narrative management that earlier male 

authors, including James, confronted in the hystericized female body. Ender 

observes: “what produces the fiction . . . of sexual difference is surely a system 

of representation where (masculine) knowledge or consciousness overrides 

(feminine) passion and maintains the separation between spectator and spectacle.” 

Yet this “fiction” collapses, for sexual identity proves to be, on the evidence 

of the male-authored text itself, “an inherently deconstructive construct”: “the 

attempt to master sexual difference...ends up producing not knowledge, but 

some hysterical enactment of the impossibility of distinguishing”; Sexing the 

Mind, p.95. 

42 Andrew Elfenbein, Romantic Genius: The Prehistory of a Homosexual Role,New 

York: Columbia University Press, 1999, p.2. 

43 Ernest Hemingway, “Explanatory Glossary,” Death in the Afternoon, quoted 

in Comley and Scholes, Hemingway’s Genders, p.107.


44 E. M. Forster quoted in P. N. Furbank, E. M. Forster: A Life, 2 vols., New York: 

Harcourt, 1977/1978, volume i,p.164; Emma L. Erving’s letter to Stein quoted 

in Brenda Wineapple, Sister Brother: Gertrude and Leo Stein, Baltimore, MD: 

Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996, p.205. 

45 Tate, “Hard-Boiled,” p. 43. 

46 Ford Madox Ford, Henry James: A Critical Study, New York: Octagon Books, 

1964, pp. 170–4. 

47 Virginia Woolf, “The Method of Henry James,” in Andrew McNeillie (ed.), 

The Essays of Virginia Woolf , volume ii, 1912–1918, San Diego: Harcourt Brace 

Jovanovich, 1987, pp.346, 348; Gladys Brooks, If Strangers Meet: A Memory, 

New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1967, p.53. 

48 Hemingway, Green Hills of Africa, p.70. See also Marilyn Elkins, “The Fashion 

of Machismo,” in Linda Wagner-Martin (ed.), A Historical Guide to Ernest 

Hemingway, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000,pp.93–115, which is valuable 

for understanding the sartorial elements and stage props involved in 

Hemingway’s self-conscious pose as a man with the military bona fides that 

Cather and James lacked; it must be said, however, that the general argument – 

having had “no literal war experience... Hemingway had never earned the 

right to wear” a soldier’s uniform – rehearses the culturally charged opposition 

between authentic and fake (or vicarious) masculine credentials that seems to 

have motivated Hemingway’s aggressive virility in the first place; p. 99. 

49 T. S. Eliot, “On Henry James: in Memory,” in Dupee, Question of James, 

p. 123. 

50 The full formulation, from Hemingway’s 1936 correspondence, reads rather 

chillingly: “Thought I was facing impotence, inability to write . . . and was 

going to blow my lousy head off”; quoted in Sanderson, “Hemingway and 

Gender History,” p. 184; or to take a later, kindred example from a 1949 letter: 

“Can fuck better than when I was 25 and write good afterwards which was 

never true before” (SL 668). 

51 Here I take exception with Jamie Barlowe’s useful “Hemingway’s Gender Training,” 

in Wagner-Martin, Historical Guide to Hemingway, pp.117–53, which 

argues that we lack evidence that Hemingway was “consciously aware of the 

consequences of his notions of gender...[or] of the connections between his 

guilt-ridden bouts of depression and his refusal to reconsider his ideas about 

gender”; I contend that his awareness on this score was almost too acute, if 

powerfully resisted, adding another level of pathos to his trials of masculinity; 

p. 130. 

52 This passage from Death in the Afternoon is quoted and well discussed in 

Comley and Scholes, Hemingway’s Genders, pp. 109ff. 

53 Margaret Anderson, My Thirty Years’ War: An Autobiography, London: Alfred 

A. Knopf, 1930, p.140. 

54 Wescott, “Sentimental Contribution,” pp. 179, 181. 

55 Chauncey, Gay New York, p.50. InSun a single overture to another man 

(“Oh, how charmingly you get angry”) marks the speaker – the fictionalized 

Wescott – as gay (SAR 21). The subcultural signifiers of gayness in Sun (hair,


dress, gesture, voice, mannerism [e.g., SAR 20]) show how attentive Hemingway 

was as an ethnographer, bearing out as well Chauncey’s claim for a 

hermeneutics of suspicion that construed “an inversion of any one aspect of 

one’s prescribed gender persona” as being “symptomatic of a much more comprehensive 

inversion”; pp. 55–6. In other words, Hemingway was, like most 

modern men, at once a subject and an agent of sexual surveillance. 

56 Michael S. Reynolds, “Hemingway’s Bones,” in Hemingway’s Reading, 

1910–1940: An Inventory, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981, 

p. 23. 

57 It seems backwards to label Strether’s fate a “tragedy,” as Linda Wagner-Martin 

does (see my chapter 4), while at the same time discounting the ways in which 

Barnes’s experience, and that of his social set, appears to be just what Hemingway 

called it, “a damn tragedy” (SL 229); “The Intertextual Hemingway,” in 

Wagner-Martin, Historical Guide to Hemingway, pp.175–6. Lynn also asserts 

that Strether’s best-known speech “left a deep impression” on Hemingway, 

“echoing” not in Barnes’s dialogue but in Robert Cohn’s; yet he cites no concrete 

evidence that Hemingway had yet read The Ambassadors; Hemingway, 

pp. 328–9. 

58 Although Hemingway could be tendentious about the biographical record, I 

take at face value his claim that The Awkward Age marked his first meaningful 

encounter with James’s novels. His air of startled discovery seems genuine, and 

when he subsequently reproached Pound for his high estimate of James, the 

latter replied (in early 1928): “I never suggested that you read the Awkward 

Age.” Pound only then referred Hemingway to his own “nice little map of 

Henry,” which does not seem to have included The Ambassadors on its itinerary; 

Reynolds, Hemingway’s Reading, pp. 22–3. 

59 For example, James’s appeal to “spare my blushes” was not invented but rather 

selected by Hemingway for effect; see Kaplan, James: The Imagination of Genius, 

p. 565. 

60 Rudyard Kipling, “The Ladies,” in The Complete Poems of Rudyard Kipling 

(poetryloverspage.com). 

61 Hemingway quoted in Reynolds, “Hemingway’s Bones,” p. 18. 

62 Sherwood Anderson, “The Man who Became a Woman,” in Maxwell Geismar 

(ed.), Sherwood Anderson: Short Stories, New York: Hill & Wang, 1966,p.60. 

63 Wagner-Martin, “Intertextual Hemingway,” p. 177. 

64 Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1915), quoted in Bech, 

When Men Meet, p.17. 

65 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial 

Desire, New York: Columbia University Press, 1985, pp. 1–2. 

66 Walpole’s letter quoted in Hart-Davis, Walpole: A Biography,p.193. 

67 Edel, James: A Life, p.721. 

68 Wescott, “Sentimental Contribution,” p. 179. 


70 Van Wyck Brooks, The Pilgrimage of Henry James, New York: E. P. Dutton, 

1925, pp. 32–3.



72 Wescott, “Sentimental Contribution,” pp. 179, 186. 

73 Stephen Spender, Letters to Christopher, ed. Lee Bartlett, Santa Barbara, CA: 

Black Sparrow Press, 1980, pp. 62–3. 

74 Spender, Destructive Element,pp.36–7. In the fine print of a footnote, Spender 

concedes that “the rumour of [James’s] castration seems exaggerated and improbable”; 

p. 37, n. 1. 

75 Gamaliel Bradford, American Portraits, 1875–1900 (1922), Port Washington, NY: 

Kennikat Press, 1969, p.187. 

76 Mitchell and Leavitt, Pages Passed, p.220. 

77 Gunter and Jobe, Dearly Beloved Friends. 

78 Anderson, “Man who Became a Woman,” p. 73. 

79 Anderson’s narrative treats the abjected ex-teacher Biddlebaum with compassion 

as “one of those rare, little-understood men who rule by a power so gentle 

that it passes as a lovable weakness. In their feeling for the boys under their 

charge such men are not unlike the finer sort of women in their love of men” 

(WO 31). 

80 Creech, Closet Writing/Gay Reading, pp. 44, 48, 50–1. 

81 Moon, Small Boy and Others, p.27. 

82 Van Wyck Brooks, An Autobiography, New York: E. P. Dutton, 1965,p.429. 

83 Ibid., pp. 432–3. 

84 James Hoopes, Van Wyck Brooks: In Search of American Culture, Amherst, MA: 

University of Massachusetts Press, 1977, p.303. 

85 Van Wyck Brooks, John Addington Symonds: A Biographical Study, NewYork: 

Mitchell Kennerley, 1914,pp.19–20, 47, 57–8. For a valuable treatment of the 

Symonds left out of Brooks’s account, see Robinson, Gay Lives, pp. 7–26. 

86 Brooks, “Two Phases of James,” pp. 138–40. According to Stevens, “The Altar 

of the Dead,” which revolves around one man’s mourning rituals for another, 

marked a turning point for James (as Brooks apparently perceived), establishing 

“a queer context for melancholia” and dramatizing the sociopolitical “ills 

attending any construction of sexuality depending on repudiation”; James and 

Sexuality, pp. 162–3. 

87 Brooks quoted in Hoopes, Van Wyck Brooks, pp. 156, 158, 159. 

88 Brooks, Autobiography, pp. 439, 441. 

89 Correspondence of F. Scott Fitzgerald, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli and Margaret M. 

Duggan, New York: Random House, 1980, p.168. 

90 Pound quoted in Kerr, “Feeling ‘Half Feminine,’ ” p. 408. 

91 Stephen Spender, Journals 1939–1983, ed. John Goldsmith, New York: Random 

House, 1986, p.416; The Destructive Element, pp. 27–8. 

92 Wilson, Shores of Light, p.577. Wescott quoted in Bruccoli and Duggan, 

Correspondence of Fitzgerald, p.331. 

93 Zelda Fitzgerald quoted in Lynn, Hemingway, p.286. 


95 D. T. Max, “Ernest Hemingway’s War Wounds,” New York Times Magazine, 

18 July 1999, p.29.


96 Boone, Libidinal Currents, p.202. 

97 Burns, Staying on Alone: Letters of Toklas, p.210. 

98 Yale University Press catalog (spring 2000), p. 12. 

99 True at First Light still finds Hemingway preoccupied with contrasting the 

authorial type of the aloof, sterile bachelor, epitomized in James, whose troubles 

are purely aesthetic (“line of departure problems”) and the male writer of 

experience, celebrity, and romantic entanglements that “Henry James was not 

faced with” (SL 709). At the same time, his weird fantasy of snatching away 

James’s “consolatory cigar” (smoked on a balcony overlooking Life) and giving 

it to a young African woman whom he desires contains the recognition that 

he has authorized himself as both man and artist partly through a history of 

aggression against James and his supposedly vestigial masculinity; New York: 

Scribner’s, 1999, pp. 232–3. 

100 Kincaid, Child-Loving, p.134. 

101 Paul Lauter, “The Heath Top 100,” The Heath Anthology of American Literature 

Newsletter, no. 19 (Spring 1999), p. 1. The survey does confirm Boone’s point 

about canon reformation to the extent that the top two vote-getters were not 

Faulkner and Hemingway, but Toni Morrison and Ralph Ellison. 

102 Hemingway quoted in Lynn, Hemingway, p.533. 

103 Ironically, Hemingway’s fantasy role-playing provides evidence for Gide’s claim 

about “male Lesbians”: “many heterosexuals [i.e., straight men], either through 

diffidence or self-impotence, behave in relation to [women] like women and, 

in an apparently ‘normal’ pair, play the role of true inverts” (GL 421). 

CODA ‘‘NOBODY IS ALIKE HENRY JAMES’’: STEIN, 

JAMES, AND QUEER FUTURITY 

1 Gertrude Stein quoted in Diana Souhami, Gertrude and Alice, London: Pandora, 

1991,p.12. See also Turner’s superb account of the Stein–Toklas marriage 

in the introduction to Baby Precious Always Shines. 

2 Burns, Staying on Alone: Letters of Toklas, p.357. 

3 Ibid. 

4 Wineapple, Sister Brother, p.120. 

5 Gertrude Stein quoted in Caramello, James, Stein, and the Biographical Act, 

p. 171. 

6 Ibid., p. 179. 

7 Ibid., p. 172. 

8 Ibid., p. 198. 

9 Ezra Pound, “A Brief Note,” in Leon Edel (ed.), Henry James: A Collection of 

Critical Essays, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1963, pp. 28–9. 

10 See Bruce Kellner (ed.), A Gertrude Stein Companion: Content with the Example, 

New York: Greenwood Press, 1988, p.33. 

11 Phelps and Rosco, Continual Lessons: Journals of Wescott,p.52. 

12 Ernest Hemingway quoted in Comley and Scholes, Hemingway’s Genders, 

p. 107.

Encyclopedia of 

American Literature 

1607–to the Present 

ab 

Revised and Augmented by 

Susan Clair Imbarrato 

Brett Barney 

George Parker Anderson 

Judith S. Baughman 

Matthew J. Bruccoli 

Marshall Boswell 

from the first edition prepared by 

Carol Berkin 

Lisa Paddock 

Carl Rollyson

Matthew J. Bruccoli and Richard Layman 

Editorial Directors 

Elizabeth Leverton 

Series Editor 

Encyclopedia of American Literature, Volume I: Settlement to the New Republic, 1607–1815 

Copyright © 2002 by Carol Berkin © 2008 by Manly, Inc. 

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, 

electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval 

systems, without permission in writing from the publisher. For information contact: 

Facts On File, Inc. 

An imprint of Infobase Publishing 

132 West 31st Street 

New York NY 10001 

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data 

Encyclopedia of American literature. —2nd ed. 

v. cm. 

Rev. and augmentation of: 1st ed. Vol. 1 / prepared by Carol Berkin; vol. 2 / prepared by Lisa Paddock; 

vol. 3 & vol. 4 / prepared by Carl Rollyson. 

Includes bibliographical references and indexes. 

Contents: Vol. I: Settlement to the new republic 1607–1815 /edited by Susan Clair Imbarrato and Carol 

Berkin — vol. II: The age of Romanticism and realism 1816–1895 / edited by Brett Barney and Lisa Paddock 

— vol. III: Into the modern 1896–1945 / edited by George Parker Anderson, Judith S. Baughman, 

Matthew J. Bruccoli and Carl Rollyson — vol. IV: The contemporary world 1946 to the present / edited 

by Marshall Boswell and Carl Rollyson. 

eISBN: 978-1-4381-0992-3 

1. American literature—Encyclopedias. I. Facts On File, Inc. 

PS21 .E533 2007 

810'.3—dc22 2007025662 

Facts On File books are available at special discounts when purchased in bulk quantities for businesses, 

associations, institutions, or sales promotions. Please call our Special Sales Department in New York at 

(212) 967-8800 or (800) 322-8755. 

You can find Facts On File on the World Wide Web at http://www.factsonfile.com 

Text design by Rachel L. Berlin 

Cover illustration by Smart Graphics 

Cover design by Cathy Rincon 

Printed in the United States of America 

VB FOF 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

590 entry James, Alice 

abolitionist Cornelia Grinnell Willis (1825–1904) raised 

funds to purchase Jacobs’s freedom. 

At the suggestion of the feminist abolitionist Amy Post 

(1802–1889), Jacobs began to write her memoir in 1853. Jacobs 

resisted Harriet Beecher Stowe’s suggestion that her 

story be integrated into Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1851) as fiction, 

and with the editorial help of the abolitionist writer 

Lydia Maria Child, Jacobs published her autobiography, one 

of the earliest slave narratives to be written by a woman, 

in 1861. The book, titled Incidents in the Life of a Slave 

Girl, Written by Herself, was originally published under 

the pseudonym Linda Brent. 

Sources 

Andrews, William L. To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of 

Afro-American Autobiography, 1760–1865. Urbana: University 

of Illinois Press, 1986. 

Johnson, Yvonne. The Voices of African American Women: The 

Use of Narrative and Authorial Voice in the Works of Harriet 

Jacobs, Zora Neale Hurston, and Alice Walker. New York: Peter 

Lang, 1998. 

Yellin, Jean Fagan. Harriet Jacobs: A Life. New York: Basic Civitas, 

2004. 

James, Alice (1848–1892) diarist 

Born in New York City, Alice James was the fifth child and 

only daughter of Mary Robertson Walsh and Henry James 

Sr. The sister of novelist Henry James and philosopher William 

James, she was denied the education granted her siblings 

and discouraged from pursuing a profession. As her 

brother Henry once remarked, “in our family group girls 

seem scarcely to have had a chance.” 

From about the age of nineteen onward, Alice James suffered 

from repeated mental breakdowns and depression. In 

1889 she started a diary that spoke in plain and vivid terms 

about her interior life and about the world around her—a 

task she undertook with the apparent intention that it be 

published. She was also an avid correspondent, and her letters 

are among the most memorable written during her time. In 

1873 Alice James met another single woman, Katherine Loring, 

with whom she formed an intense bond of the sort referred 

to at the time as a Boston marriage. James succumbed 

to breast cancer in early middle age. 

Sources 

The Diary of Alice James, edited by Leon Edel. New York: Penguin, 

1964. 

Lewis, R. W. B. The Jameses: A Family Narrative. New York: Farrar, 

Straus & Giroux, 1991. 

Strouse, Jean. Alice James: A Biography. London: Cape, 1980. 

Yeazell, Ruth Bernard, ed. The Death and Letters of Alice James: 

Selected Correspondence. Berkeley: University of California 

Press, 1981. 

Henry James, 1906 

James, Henry (1843–1916) short-story writer, novelist, 

critic 

We work in the dark—we do what we can—we give 

what we have. Our doubt is our passion, and our 

passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art. 

—“The Middle Years” (1893) 

Henry James Jr. was one of four children fathered by Henry 

James Sr., a prominent writer on religion and philosophy. 

Born in New York City, Henry Jr. grew up abroad. He was 

greatly influenced by his father’s cosmopolitan outlook and 

exposed at an early age to his father’s intellectual friends. He 

also had the example of his older brother William James, 

who became a distinguished philosopher and psychologist. 

Educated by tutors, Henry spent his time in Newport, Rhode 

Island, and in Europe. In 1862 he entered Harvard Law 

School, but he soon concluded that writing was his métier 

and that America was unlikely to foster his talent. To James, 

Americans seemed too intent on commerce and lacked the 

sophisticated social structures and manners that he found so 

attractive in European culture.

James, Henry entry 591 

James began his literary career by writing articles, stories, 

and reviews. “A Passionate Pilgrim” (1871), his first 

story to be characterized by an international theme, examines 

the confrontation between American and European 

culture. By 1875 James had settled permanently in Europe 

and published Transatlantic Sketches (1875). Roderick Hudson 

(1876) was his first novel to employ the international 

theme, telling the story of an American sculptor who cannot 

adjust to Rome. Similarly, The American (1877) describes 

the struggle of a man as he attempts to negotiate 

the intricacies of French life and to fathom standards of 

conduct different from his American values. The Europeans 

(1878) reverses James’s angle by importing Europeans 

into a New England setting. 

Of the novels and stories of this early period, Daisy 

Miller (1878) is the most representative of James’s idea of 

the nobility possible in innocence and of the value in not 

being spoiled by too much culture. It is the story of a young, 

naive American woman who pays with her life for her ignorance 

of the European milieu, but whose life is also an 

affecting rebuke of European corruption. An International 

Front cover for the 1905 collection of English travel sketches 

Episode (1879) presents Americans in England as well as 

Englishmen in America for a simultaneous exploration of 

aristocratic and democratic values. James returned twice 

more to American settings for his stories, in Washington 

Square and The Bostonians. Both novels, however, show 

that he had become increasingly distanced from the American 

scene, to which he later returned only in his nonfiction. 

The Portrait of a Lady (1882) marks the major phase 

of James’s creativity. A portrayal of a young woman who 

mistakes European sophistication for moral sensitivity, the 

book is James’s first prolonged exploration of the American 

mind in Europe. 

James’s novel The Princess Casamassima (1886) was a departure 

for him because it dealt so directly with politics. Although 

his treatment of radicals in London is more a study 

than a full-blown dramatic account, he anticipated the political 

novels of Joseph Conrad (1857–1924) in portraying the 

futility and absurdity of fanatics who believe they can change 

their world with narrow but fervent ideas. More typical of 

James’s work is The Aspern Papers (1888), a novella that 

deals with a biographer’s efforts to obtain the papers of a notable 

poet, Jeffrey Aspern, and the reluctance of the poet’s 

beloved to yield them. Set in Venice, the story provides an 

example of the way in which James—often thought of as one 

of the world’s great psychological novelists—characterized 

conflicting points of view. 

James continued writing into the 1900s, publishing A London 

Life (1889), The Real Thing and Other Tales (1893), The 

Private Life (1893), The Wheel of Time (1893), What Maisie 

Knew (1897), The Wings of the Dove (1902), The Ambassadors 

(1903), and The Golden Bowl (1904). His work represented 

acute statements on the subject of human relationships and 

cultural settings, and it brought to American fiction a degree 

of sophistication not seen before. In theme and technique—his 

studies of European and American societies and 

his experimentation with point of view and exploration of 

states of mind—James brought American literature into the 

world arena. He influenced poets as well as novelists. The 

early work of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot show James’s influence, 

particularly in dramatic monologues like Eliot’s Portrait 

of a Lady. 

James also made an incalculable contribution to the criticism 

of American fiction and to the American writer’s sense 

of himself as pursuing a disciplined craft. James advanced 

the art of the novel not only through the brilliant prefaces 

to his novels, collected as The Art of the Novel: Critical Prefaces 

(1934), but also in works of literary criticism. James is 

also an important figure in the history of American travel 

writing. His works in this genre include Portraits of Places 

(1883), A Little Tour in France (1885), English Hours (1905), 

The American Scene (1907), and Italian Hours (1909). James 

wrote several volumes of autobiography: A Small Boy and 

Others (1913), Notes of a Son and Brother (1914), and The 

Middle Years (1917).

592 entry James, Henry 

James’s revisions of a page of his 1886 novel for publication as volumes seven and eight of the New 

York Edition, published by Charles Scribner’s Sons 1907–1917.

James, Henry entry 593 

Principal Books by James 

A Passionate Pilgrim, and Other Tales. Boston: Osgood, 1875. 

Transatlantic Sketches. Boston: Osgood, 1875. 

Roderick Hudson. Boston: Osgood, 1876; revised edition, Boston 

& New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1882. 

The American. Boston: Osgood, 1877. 

French Poets and Novelists. London: Macmillan, 1878. 

Watch and Ward. Boston: Houghton, Osgood, 1878. 

Daisy Miller: A Study. New York: Harper, 1878. 

The Europeans. Boston: Houghton, Osgood, 1879. 

An International Episode. New York: Harper, 1879. 

The Madonna of the Future and Other Tales, 2 volumes. London: 

Macmillan, 1879. 

Hawthorne. New York: Harper, 1880. 

Confidence. Boston: Houghton, Osgood, 1880. 

A Bundle of Letters. Boston: Loring, 1880. 

The Diary of a Man of Fifty and A Bundle of Letters. New York: 

Harper, 1880. 

Washington Square. New York: Harper, 1881. 

Washington Square, The Pension Beaurepas, A Bundle of Letters, 

2 volumes. London: Macmillan, 1881. 

The Portrait of a Lady. Boston & New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 

1882. 

The Siege of London, The Pension Beaurepas, and The Point of 

View. Boston: Osgood, 1883. 

Daisy Miller: A Comedy in Three Acts. Boston: Osgood, 1883. 

Portraits of Places. Boston: Osgood, 1884. 

Tales of Three Cities. Boston: Osgood, 1884. 

A Little Tour in France. Boston: Osgood, 1885; revised edition, 

Boston & New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1900. 

The Author of Beltraffio, Pandora, Georgina’s Reasons, The Path 

of Duty, Four Meetings. Boston: Osgood, 1885. 

The Art of Fiction. Boston: Cupples, Upham, 1885. 

Stories Revived, 3 volumes. London: Macmillan, 1885. 

The Bostonians: A Novel. 3 volumes, London: Macmillan, 1886; 1 

volume, London & New York: Macmillan, 1886. 

The Princess Casamassima: A Novel. New York: Macmillan, 1886. 

Partial Portraits. New York: Macmillan, 1888. 

The Reverberator. New York: Macmillan, 1888. 

The Aspern Papers, Louisa Pallant, The Modern Warning. New 

York: Macmillan, 1888. 

A London Life, The Patagonia, The Liar, Mrs. Temperly. New 

York: Macmillan, 1889. 

The Tragic Muse, 2 volumes, Boston & New York: Houghton, 

Mifflin, 1890. 

The American: A Comedy in Four Acts. London: Heinemann, 

1891. 

The Lesson of the Master, The Marriages, The Pupil, Brooksmith, 

The Solution, Sir Edmund Orme. New York: Macmillan, 1892. 

The Real Thing and Other Tales. New York: Macmillan, 1893. 

Picture and Text. New York: Harper, 1893. 

The Private Life, The Wheel of Time, Lord Beaupré, The Visits, 

Collaboration, Owen Wingrave. London: Osgood, McIlvaine, 

1893. 

John Singer Sargent’s portrait of James, 1913, three years 

before his death 

Essays in London and Elsewhere. New York: Harper, 1893. 

The Private Life, Lord Beaupré, The Visits. New York: Harper, 

1893. 

The Wheel of Time, Collaboration, Owen Wingrave. New York: 

Harper, 1893. 

Theatricals, Two Comedies: Tenants, Disengaged. New York: 

Harper, 1894. 

Theatricals, Second Series: The Album, The Reprobate. New York: 

Harper, 1895. 

Terminations: The Death of the Lion, The Coxon Fund, The Middle 

Years, The Altar of the Dead. New York: Harper, 1895. 

Embarrassments: The Figure in the Carpet, Glasses, The Next Time, 

The Way It Came. New York & London: Macmillan, 1896. 

The Other House. New York & London: Macmillan, 1896. 

The Spoils of Poynton. Boston & New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 

1897. 

What Maisie Knew. Chicago & New York: Stone, 1897. 

In the Cage. Chicago & New York: Stone, 1898. 

The Two Magics: The Turn of the Screw, Covering End. New York 

& London: Macmillan, 1898. 

The Awkward Age. New York & London: Harper, 1899. 

The Soft Side. New York: Macmillan, 1900. 

The Sacred Fount. New York: Scribners, 1901.

594 entry James, Henry 

The Wings of the Dove, 2 volumes. New York: Scribners, 1902. 

The Better Sort. New York: Scribners, 1903. 

The Ambassadors. New York & London: Harper, 1903. 

William Wetmore Story and His Friends, 2 volumes. Boston: 

Houghton, Mifflin, 1903. 

The Golden Bowl. New York: Scribners, 1904. 

The Question of Our Speech, The Lesson of Balzac: Two Lectures. 

Boston & New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1905. 

English Hours. Boston & New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1905. 

The American Scene. New York & London: Harper, 1907. 

Views and Reviews. Boston: Ball, 1908. 

Italian Hours. Boston & New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1909. 

The Finer Grain. New York: Scribners, 1910. 

The Outcry. New York: Scribners, 1911. 

A Small Boy and Others. New York: Scribners, 1913. 

Notes of a Son and Brother. New York: Scribners, 1914. 

Notes on Novelists with Some Other Notes. New York: Scribners, 

1914. 

The Middle Years, edited by Percy Lubbock. New York: Scribners, 

1917. 

The Complete Plays of Henry James, edited by Leon Edel. Philadelphia 

& New York: Lippincott, 1949. 

Henry James: Literary Criticism, edited by Edel and Mark Wilson, 

2 volumes. New York: Library of America, 1984. 

The Complete Notebooks of Henry James, edited by Edel and Lyall 

H. Powers. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. 

Letters 

Henry James: Letters, edited by Edel, 4 volumes. Cambridge & 

London: Harvard University Press, 1974–1984. 

Studying Henry James 

Widely considered one of the most important writers of 

American fiction, Henry James produced novels, stories, 

travel writing, and essays on the art of fiction. Although he 

wrote fiction and nonfiction of very high quality from at 

least the mid 1870s, James was not widely recognized as a 

major writer until near the end of his life. In 1905 Joseph 

Conrad published an appreciation in which he asserted “the 

magnitude of Mr. Henry James’s work,” but James’s central 

place in the American literary canon was not secured until 

the 1940s. His development of the modern psychological 

novel, together with his critical prefaces, exercised a profound 

influence on the writing and criticism of twentiethcentury 

fiction. 

For a good firsthand survey of James’s oeuvre—from 

its beginnings in Romanticism-inflected realism through 

naturalism to its culmination in psychological realism— 

students are advised to read a selection of his short novels 

or “nouvelles” (as he called them): Daisy Miller (1878), 

The Aspern Papers (1888), “The Turn of the Screw” 

(1898), and The Beast in the Jungle (1903). Students interested 

specifically in James’s novels should begin with The 

Portrait of a Lady (1881) and The Ambassadors (1903). 

James’s fictional works are complemented by reading his 

critical writings, especially those collected in The Art of the 

Novel, edited by R. P. Blackmur (New York: Scribner, 1934). 

Tony Tanner’s Henry James: The Writer and his Work (Amherst: 

University of Massachussetts Press, 1985) and D. W. 

Jefferson’s Henry James (New York: Grove Press, 1961) both 

provide excellent surveys of James’s career. Roger Gard’s 

Henry James: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge & 

Kegan Paul, 1968) collects reviews, letters, and essays on 

James’s work by his contemporaries. 

James’s early fiction is marked by a dependence on realist 

techniques. Lyall Powers’s Henry James and the Naturalist 

Movement (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 

1971) and Philip Grover’s Henry James and the French Novel: 

A Study in Inspiration (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1973) both 

demonstrate James’s indebtedness to French sources. Cornelia 

Kelley’s The Early Development of Henry James (Urbana: 

University of Illinois Press, revised 1965) outlines the writer’s 

development from Romanticist to realist, showing how his 

early work emerges from his engagement with contemporary 

European as well as American fiction. 

James’s mature works of psychological realism are analyzed 

by F. O. Matthiessen in Henry James: The Major Phase 

(New York: Oxford University Press, 1963). More-advanced 

students will find the same subject treated by Donna Przybylowicz 

in Desire and Repression: The Dialectic of Self and 

Other in the Late Works of Henry James (Tuscaloosa: University 

of Alabama Press, 1986) and Sharon Cameron in Thinking 

in Henry James (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 

1989), the latter of which argues that James’s prefaces radically 

oversimplify what is represented in the novels—a claim 

that other recent critics have advanced. Critical attention has 

also lately turned to the subjects of race and gender in the 

novels. Sara Blair’s Henry James and the Writing of Race and 

Nation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) and 

The Other Henry James by John Carlos Rowe (Durham, N.C.: 

Duke University Press, 1998) are important studies of these 

subjects. Students seeking an introduction to James criticism 

will be well served by the essays collected in Henry James, 

edited by Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1987). 

James was once quoted as saying “Nothing is my last word 

about anything,” and this statement is borne out by his habit 

of revision. The Complete Notebooks of Henry James, edited by 

Leon Edel and Lyall H. Powers (New York: Oxford University 

Press, 1987) show how James’s stories developed through the 

process of writing. James also made considerable revisions to 

his previously published works (most notably, Roderick Hudson, 

The American, The Portrait of a Lady, Daisy Miller, The 

Aspern Papers, and The Lesson of the Master), changes which 

have prompted some critics to argue that the earlier versions 

were better aesthetically. Avoiding this dispute, Philip Horne 

offers a penetrating look at James’s method of revision in 

Henry James and Revision: The New York Edition (Oxford: 

Clarendon Press, 1990).

James’s subscription to the Wilkie Collins memorial, which resulted in a library housed briefly 

at the People’s Palace in London, East End. The subscription is the equivalent of over $1,000 in 

2007 U.S. dollars. 

James, Henry entry 595

596 entry James, Henry, Sr. 

The best full-length biography remains Edel’s five-volume 

Henry James (London: R. Hart-Davis, 1953–1972), later 

abridged in one volume as Henry James: A Life (New York: 

Harper & Row, 1985). For a critical biography and overview 

of James’s canon, students should begin with F. W. Dupee’s 

Henry James: His Life and Writings, second edition (Garden 

City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1956). 

Though incomplete, the twenty-six-volume The Novels 

and Tales of Henry James: New York Edition (New York: 

Scribners, 1907–1909, 1918) is valuable insofar as it suggests 

to some extent which works James most desired to see preserved 

(among other works of fiction, it does not include 

The Bostonians, Washington Square or The Europeans). The 

Library of America has recently published a nearly complete 

multivolume collection of James’s fiction, travel writing, and 

literary criticism. Edel’s and Dan H. Laurence’s Bibliography 

of Henry James, third edition (Oxford [Oxfordshire]: Clarendon 

Press, 1982) is the standard Henry James bibliography. 

—Student Guide by C. Love 

James, Henry, Sr. (1811–1882) essayist 

Father of Henry James, William James, and Alice James, 

Henry James Sr. was born into a Calvinist family in Albany, 

New York, but rebelled against the strictures of orthodoxy. 

An accident in childhood cost him a leg and inspired a 

turn toward intellectual pursuits. In 1835, after two years 

at the Princeton Theological Seminary, he withdrew, finding 

religious orthodoxy incompatible with his beliefs. Two 

years later, during a trip to England, he encountered the 

works of Robert Sandeman (1718–1771), a Scottish anti- 

Calvinist whose ideas James adopted. (James also edited 

one of Sandeman’s books in 1838.) In 1839 James was introduced 

to the philosophy of Swedish theologian Emanuel 

Swedenborg (1688–1772), whose mystical approach 

to Christianity had a profound effect on him, as it had on 

other nineteenth-century idealists. 

An intimate friend of Albert Brisbane (1809–1890) and 

George Ripley, James came to embrace many of the doctrines 

of Fourierism. Most of his writings, however, were 

devoted to religious philosophy and an exploration of the 

Swedenborgian concept of “divine-natural humanity,” or 

“the immanence of God in the unity of mankind.” Among 

James’s most important works are Christianity, the Logic of 

Creation (1857); Substance and Shadow; or Morality and 

Religion in Their Relation to Life (1863); The Secret of Swedenborg 

(1869); and Society, the Redeemed Form of Man 

(1879). 

Sources 

Bell, F. A., ed. Henry James: Fiction as History. Totowa, N.J.: 

Barnes & Noble, 1984. 

Habegger, Alfred. The Father: A Life of Henry James, Sr. New 

York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1994. 

Margolis, Anne Throne. Henry James and the Problem of Audience: 

An International Act. Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Press, 

1985. 

James, William (1842–1910) philosopher, psychologist 

As the brain changes are continuous, so do all 

these consciousnesses melt into each other like 

dissolving views. Properly they are but one protracted 

consciousness, one unbroken stream. 

—Principles of Psychology (1890) 

William James was born in New York City, but he spent much 

of his life abroad. His father, Henry James Sr., was a writer on 

religious, social, and literary topics, and his brother was the 

novelist Henry James. Although interested in art, especially 

painting, William studied medicine at Harvard and obtained 

an M.D. in 1869. In poor health and apparently suffering from 

doubts about his abilities, James became interested in psychology 

as a discipline that had the potential to liberate the mind. 

James began teaching at Harvard in 1872, drawing on the 

thought of both Charles Darwin and the philosopher Herbert 

Spencer. His shift from medicine to philosophy and psychology 

led him to establish the first laboratory for psychological 

studies. Principles of Psychology, his first important published 

work, appeared in 1890. This landmark work relied 

on James’s understanding of physiology, which he had taught 

at Harvard, to explore the nexus between emotions and the 

human body. James traveled widely in Europe, meeting with 

philosophers and psychologists and participating in the Society 

for Psychical Research. The result of this experience is 

evident in The Will to Believe (1897), in which James showed 

considerable sympathy for the way science and faith might 

be combined to offer a better understanding of the human 

personality. Although he never abandoned his belief in empiricism, 

he vigorously investigated the claims of spiritualists 

and the practices of Christian Scientists. This desire to 

reconcile the ideas of science and religion culminated in his 

masterpiece, Varieties of Religious Experience, which 

explored the psychological and practical bases of religious 

experience without denigrating the idea of faith itself. 

James’s great contribution to American philosophy is the 

concept of pragmatism, a term first used by the philosopher 

C. S. Peirce and developed by James in Pragmatism (1907). 

This book advanced the argument that ideas have significance 

only insofar as they have an impact on the world of 

experience. Pragmatism has often been cited as the only 

original contribution to philosophy made by an American. 

The concept has been discussed as an example of the American 

devotion to practicality: that is, no idea is important if 

it is not useful. James also wrote essays, most notably “The 

Moral Equivalent of War” (1910), which reflects his liberalism, 

his dedicated search to find alternatives to the inhuman-

1036 entry Stearns, Harold E. 

Stearns, Harold E. (1891–1943) critic, journalist 

A graduate of Harvard, Harold E. Stearns began his long career 

in journalism by writing book reviews for the Boston 

Evening Transcript before he even entered college. He was 

the editor for The Dial (1917–1918) and helped to articulate 

the attitude of the post–World War I generation in 

America and the Young Intellectual (1921) and the collection 

of essays he edited, Civilization in the United States: An Inquiry 

by Thirty Americans (1922), which included essays by 

Conrad Aiken, H. L. Mencken, Lewis Mumford, George 

Jean Nathan, and Ring Lardner. These books expressed 

a profound dissatisfaction with the culture and politics in 

the country and inspired many young Americans to travel 

abroad. Stearns experienced some difficult years in Paris and 

was portrayed by Ernest Hemingway as the indigent Harry 

Stone in The Sun Also Rises (1926). His later work includes 

his autobiography The Street I Know (1935) and America: A 

Re-Appraisal (1937), in which he defends the country against 

Marxist critics. 

Source 

Ford, Hugh. Four Lives in Paris. San Francisco: North Point 

Press, 1987. 

Steffens, Lincoln (1866–1936) writer, editor 

Lincoln Steffens was born in San Francisco and graduated 

from the University of California in 1889, after which he 

studied for several years in Germany and France. He began 

working as a reporter at the New York Evening Post in 1892, 

and from 1897 to 1911 served as an editor at the New York 

Commercial Advertiser, McClure’s Magazine, The American 

Magazine (which he cofounded with Ida M. Tarbell, Ray 

Stannard Baker, and others in 1906), and Everybody’s Magazine. 

Steffens’s progressive political beliefs led him to focus 

on exposing corruption in government and industry, for 

which Theodore Roosevelt labeled him and like-minded 

writers “muckrakers” (see Muckraking Movement). Steffens’s 

books include The Shame of the Cities (1904), The 

Struggle for Self-Government (1906), Upbuilders (1909), 

and The Autobiography of Lincoln Steffens (1931). 

Source 

Kaplan, Justin. Lincoln Steffens: A Biography. New York: Simon 

& Schuster, 1974. 

—Alex Feerst 

for six years in East End, Saskatchewan, and for eleven years 

in Salt Lake City, Utah—settings that became important in 

his writing career. Stegner graduated from the University of 

Utah, where he studied with Vardis Fisher, and earned graduate 

degrees from the University of Iowa. In 1935 he began 

his distinguished teaching career, which in 1945 led him to 

Stanford University, where he directed the writing program 

until his retirement in 1971. 

Stegner has often been called a regional writer (see Regionalism) 

because of his close identification with the 

Rocky Mountain region of the West. His work is frequently 

concerned with the way place and culture shape human character. 

His first book of fiction, the novelette Remembering 

Laughter (1937), examines a love triangle and bitter rivalry 

involving two sisters on an isolated Iowa farm. Stegner set his 

first full-length novel, On a Darkling Plain (1940), on the Saskatchewan 

prairie, where a World War I veteran unwillingly 

becomes involved with the concerns of his fellow human beings 

in the flu epidemic of 1918. One of his most memorable 

novels, The Big Rock Candy Mountain (1943), is in part based 

on his family experience. Like Stegner’s father, Bo Mason, the 

tyrannical head of his family, is inspired by the myth of the 

West and searches for a pot of gold that forever eludes him. 

In addition to his work as a novelist, Stegner is also respected 

for his nonfiction and short stories. He has written of 

the culture of the Mormons in Mormon Country (1942) and 

The Gathering of Zion (1964). His biographies are about a great 

naturalist, Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell 

and the Second Opening of the West (1954), and a literary critic, 

The Uneasy Chair: A Biography of Bernard DeVoto (1974). He 

published two collections of short fiction—The Women on 

the Wall (1950) and The City of the Living and Other Stories 

(1956)—and collected the most important of his essays and articles 

in The Sound of Mountain Water (1969). Stegner received 

critical acclaim in the 1970s, winning the Pulitzer Prize for 

his Angle of Repose (1971), which concerns a retired University 

of California history professor who must cope with a degenerative 

disease and his wife’s abandonment, and a 1977 National 

Book Award for The Spectator Bird (1976), about a New York 

literary agent who retires to the West Coast. 

Sources 

Benson, Jackson J. Wallace Stegner: His Life and Work. New York: 

Viking, 1996. 

Colberg, Nancy. Wallace Stegner: A Descriptive Bibliography. 

Lewiston, Idaho: Confluence Press, 1990. 

Stegner, Wallace (1909–1993) novelist, short-story 

writer, historian, biographer 

The Iowa-born Wallace Stegner experienced an often unsettled 

childhood as his father, a restless spirit whose activities 

included wheat farming and bootlegging, moved his wife and 

two sons across the Midwest and the West. The Stegners lived 

Stein, Gertrude (1874–1946) fiction writer, poet, 

playwright, critic 

Think of the Bible and Homer think of Shakespeare 

and think of me. 

—The Geographical History of America (1936)

Steinbeck, entry John 1037 

Gertrude Stein always thought of herself as an American, 

despite the relatively short portion of her adult life that 

she lived in the United States. She was the youngest child 

born to prosperous German Jewish parents in Allegheny, 

Pennsylvania. Her family settled in Oakland, California, 

when she was five. Stein attended Radcliffe College, where 

she studied with William James. In 1903, just short of the 

coursework required for a medical degree from Johns Hopkins, 

Stein left for Paris. She did not return to the United 

States for a visit for more than thirty years and never lived 

there again. 

In Paris, Stein at first lived with her brother Leo, who 

introduced her to modern art, one of the inspirations for her 

writing (see Modernism). In 1907 she met Alice B. Toklas 

(1877–1967), who traveled abroad after the earthquake in 

her native San Francisco. By 1910, Toklas had moved into 

the Steins’s residence at 27, rue de Fleurus, which the two 

women then shared after Stein and her brother had a fallingout. 

Toklas encouraged Stein’s writing and became her life 

partner, or “wife,” assisting her with the typing and preparation 

of her manuscripts for the next forty years until Stein’s 

death. Stein became a central figure in an avant-garde literary 

and artistic community that included Cubism pioneers Pablo 

Picasso, Henri Matisse, and Juan Gris, along with American 

expatriates. Her residence evolved into a gathering place for 

the literary and artistic set, as she described in The Autobiography 

of Alice B. Toklas (1933). 

Stein’s work crossed genres and frequently defied categorization, 

encompassing poetry, fiction, drama, essays, 

speeches, and even an opera libretto. Critics generally 

divide her work into narrative and experimental writing 

based on the extent to which a text has or lacks an easily 

discernible and coherent plot. Some suggest three phases 

for Stein’s work: early writings that focused on consciousness, 

perception, and the representation of the perception 

of the present; 1920s radical avant-garde experimentalism; 

and 1930s audience-friendly memoirs and narratives. But 

such divisions fail to effectively trace Stein’s literary trajectory, 

since her preoccupations and techniques transcended 

time periods and her works were not always published 

when they were written. (The Making of Americans, for 

example, was written by 1908 but not published until 1925.) 

Stein did not find a publisher for her work until 1909 with 

Three Lives, a collection of three novellas that explore the 

nature of human consciousness. While her work could be 

philosophical, it could also be playful, as seen, for example, 

in the poems of Tender Buttons (1914). 

Stein went on the lecture circuit in England in 1926; her 

Oxford and Cambridge lectures were collected in Composition 

as Explanation (1926). Popular success eluded her 

until the publication of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 

a Book-of-the-Month Club selection, which led to her 

return to the United States in 1934 for a highly successful 

nine-month tour. Readers responded favorably, as well, to the 

other two texts of her memoir trilogy, Everybody’s Autobiography 

(1937) and Wars I Have Seen (1945). 

Always striving to create a “continuous present,” Stein experienced 

a tension between narrating and creating, between 

writing for an audience and writing self-reflexively for its 

own sake. Stein’s more experimental texts sought to deploy 

language in unconventional and nonrepresentational ways, 

and her use of time tended to be circular and repetitive rather 

than chronological. Although she appreciated the money and 

popularity that her autobiographies garnered, she was not interested 

in writing additional best-sellers in the same mode. 

Throughout her career she remained as interested in sound 

as sense, and she never stopped experimenting and playing 

with words. 

Before the success of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 

Stein was better known for her personality, lifestyle, artistic 

milieu, and for her influence on other writers than for her 

own work. She coined the term “Lost Generation” in reference 

to the Paris expatriate community in a conversation 

with Ernest Hemingway, which he used as an epigraph for 

his novel The Sun Also Rises (1926). She was prescient in 

her tastes and groundbreaking in her refusal to accept contemporary 

bounds on gender and sexuality, but more and 

more her work is gaining acclaim on its own terms as readers 

are more willing to engage with her texts even as they must 

struggle with her use of language. History seems to have at 

least in some measure confirmed Stein’s prediction that she 

would “some day . . . be the acknowledged grandmother of 

the modern movement”—and perhaps the postmodern 

movement as well. 

Sources 

Gallup, Donald, ed. The Flowers of Friendship: Letters Written to 

Gertrude Stein. New York: Knopf, 1953. 

Wagner-Martin, Linda. “Favored Strangers”: Gertrude Stein and 

Her Family. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 

1995. 

—Jessica G. Rabin 

Steinbeck, John (1902–1968) novelist, short-story 

writer 

A book is like a man—clever and dull, brave and 

cowardly, beautiful and ugly. For every flowering 

thought there will be a page like a wet and mangy 

mongrel, and for every looping flight a tap on the wing 

and a reminder that wax cannot hold the feathers firm 

too near the sun. 

—“On Publishing” (1977) 

John Steinbeck wrote more than thirty books from 1929 to 

1966, ranging from social criticism in his Pulitzer Prize– 

winning novel The Grapes of Wrath (1939) to witty com-

736 entry McKay, Claude 

publications are The Mortgaged Heart (1971), a collection of 

essays; Collected Stories of Carson McCullers (1987); and Illumination 

and Night Glare: The Unfinished Autobiography of 

Carson McCullers (1999). 

Sources 

Carr, Virginia Spencer. The Lonely Hunter: A Biography of Carson 

McCullers. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1975. 

Carr. Understanding Carson McCullers. Columbia: University of 

South Carolina Press, 1990. 

Clark, Beverly Lyon, and Melvin J. Friedman, eds. Critical Essays 

on Carson McCullers. New York: G. K. Hall, 1996. 

McKay, Claude (1890–1948) poet, novelist 

I have nothing to give but my singing. All my life I have 

been a troubadour wanderer, nourishing myself mainly 

on the poetry of existence. 

—A Long Way from Home (1937) 

Born in rural Jamaica, Claude McKay became one of the most 

versatile and forceful voices of the Harlem Renaissance. 

His early influences include his brother, a teacher who introduced 

him to European literature and philosophy, and Walter 

Jekyll, a white British expatriate and folklorist who urged 

McKay to write about his land and people. In the poetry collections 

Songs of Jamaica (1912) and Constab Ballads (1912), 

McKay employs the voices of farmers, street constables, and 

other common people to express in their native dialect the 

joys and pains of human relationships and the love of the 

simple country life and the countryside of Jamaica. 

McKay first encountered the intense racism of the segregated 

United States when he attended Tuskegee and Kansas 

State College. In 1914 he moved to New York City, where he 

published two of his best-known poems: “The Harlem Dancer” 

(1917) and “If We Must Die” (1919), a protest poem written 

about the race riots of that year. From 1919 to 1922 McKay 

worked for socialist publications, The Liberator in New York 

and Worker’s Dreadnought in London. The poems he collected 

in Harlem Shadows (1922) demonstrate his continuing affection 

for his homeland and common people, but in sonnets such 

as “America,” “The Lynching,” and “If We Must Die,” he voices 

outrage and defiance over American racism and violence. 

After the publication of Harlem Shadows, McKay traveled 

to the Soviet Union to attend an international meeting 

of socialists. He remained abroad for twelve years, living in 

France, Spain, and Morocco, often in tight financial straits, 

and began publishing fiction. His first two novels are episodic, 

with the central character embodying simple, natural 

urges and a spontaneity that is favorably contrasted to the 

sterility of middle-class black characters who have assimilated 

into white culture. Home to Harlem (1928) follows Jake 

as he roams from bar to bar and woman to woman, encountering 

along the way Ray, an intellectual from Haiti generally 

seen as a spokesman for McKay. Ray reappears in Banjo: A 

Story Without a Plot (1929), set in the French port of Marseilles, 

to praise the intuitive creativity and spirit of the black 

characters. McKay also used Harlem and Marseilles as settings 

for the stories published in Gingertown (1932). His next 

novel, Banana Bottom (1933) continues to develop themes 

on the values of African identity as it follows Bita Plant, a Jamaican 

woman raised in Europe by white missionaries, who 

reconnects with her racial roots after returning home. While 

McKay’s poems were generally well received and some were 

widely reprinted, his novels were published to mixed reviews, 

and only the first sold well. After he returned to the United 

States in 1934, McKay focused on racial nationalism rather 

than broader class conflicts. His autobiography A Long Way 

from Home (1937) offers anecdotes and opinions about his 

literary and political experiences. 

Sources 

Cooper, Wayne F. Claude McKay: Rebel Sojourner in the Harlem 

Renaissance. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 

1987. 

Maxwell, William, comp. “Claude McKay.” Modern American 

Poetry. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. . 

Tillery, Tyrone. Claude McKay: A Black Poet’s Struggle for Identity. 

Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992. 

—Michael Schroeder 

McTeague: A Story of San Francisco by Frank 

Norris (New York: Doubleday & McClure, 1899) novel 

McTeague, Frank Norris’s most influential novel, is an important 

example of Naturalism. The title character is a 

practicing dentist in a poor section of San Francisco, a thickheaded, 

strong man with a pathetic urge toward aesthetics 

(he plays the concertina). He marries Trina Sieppe, a patient 

whom his “animal” nature has led him to kiss while she is 

chloroformed. After Trina wins $5,000 in a lottery, her cousin 

Marcus Shouler, who had hoped to marry her and feels that 

he should have some of the money, exposes the unlicensed 

McTeague, who can then no longer practice his trade. Trina 

becomes possessive of her money; McTeague then deserts her 

but returns to murder her. He flees to Death Valley, pursued 

by Shouler. Although McTeague manages to kill his nemesis, 

before he dies Shouler handcuffs himself to McTeague, 

dooming him to a slow death in the unremitting heat of the 

desert. Chance, circumstance, and nature control the actions 

of all these characters. 

The dominant theme of the novel is the pervasive power 

of money. Distributed haphazardly, money comes to rule the 

passions not only of secondary characters but also of Trina 

and McTeague. Trina controls her husband by denying him

Hemingway, Ernest entry 523 

Principal Books by Hellman 

The Children’s Hour. New York: Knopf, 1934. 

Days to Come. New York & London: Knopf, 1936. 

The Little Foxes: A Play in Three Acts. New York: Random House, 

1939. 

Watch on the Rhine: A Play in Three Acts. New York: Random 

House, 1941. 

The North Star: A Motion Picture about Some Russian People. 

New York: Viking, 1943. 

The Searching Wind: A Play in Two Acts. New York: Viking, 

1944. 

Another Part of the Forest: A Play in Three Acts. New York: Viking, 

1947. 

Montserrat: Play in Two Acts, adapted from Emmanuel Roblès’s 

play. New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1950. 

The Autumn Garden: A Play in Three Acts. Boston: Little, Brown, 

1951; revised acting edition, New York: Dramatists Play Service, 

1952. 

The Lark, adapted from Jean Anouilh’s L’Alouette. New York: 

Random House, 1956. 

Candide: A Comic Operetta Based On Voltaire’s Satire, book by 

Hellman, score by Leonard Bernstein, lyrics by Richard Wilbur, 

John Latouche, and Dorothy Parker. New York: Random 

House, 1957. 

Toys in the Attic. New York: Random House, 1960. 

My Mother, My Father and Me, adapted from Burt Blechman’s 

novel How Much? New York: Random House, 1963. 

An Unfinished Woman: A Memoir. Boston: Little, Brown, 1969. 

Pentimento: A Book of Portraits. Boston: Little, Brown, 1973. 

Scoundrel Time. Boston: Little, Brown, 1976. 

Maybe: A Story. Boston: Little, Brown, 1980. 

Eating Together: Recipes and Recollections, by Hellman and Peter 

S. Feibleman. Boston: Little, Brown, 1984. 

Studying Lillian Hellman 

Lillian Hellman was the most successful woman playwright 

of the twentieth century. She was significant both as a literary 

figure and as a cultural celebrity. Her career falls into 

two periods: from 1934, when her first play, The Children’s 

Hour, was produced, to 1960, the date of her last original 

play; and from 1969, the date of her first memoir, to her death 

in 1984. The first period roughly corresponds to the dates of 

her intimate friendship with Dashiell Hammett, who died in 

January 1961. During the last period she wrote four volumes 

of memoirs, mostly well received, but often faulted for their 

self-serving versions of the events of her time. 

The study of Lillian Hellman’s plays should begin with 

The Children’s Hour (1934), The Little Foxes (1939), Watch on 

the Rhine (1941), and Toys in the Attic (1960). They are collected 

in Six Plays by Lillian Hellman (1979). Of her memoirs, 

the two most significant are An Unfinished Woman (1969) 

and Pentimento (1973), which includes the chapter “Julia,” 

made into an award-winning movie. Scoundrel Time (1976), 

an account of her testimony before the House Committee on 

Un-American Activities, is a faulty account of the communist 

scare of the late 1940s and early 1950s. 

There are at least seven biographies of Hellman or biographical 

accounts by people associated with her. The best 

is Joan Mellen’s Hellman and Hammett (New York: Harper- 

Collins, 1996). Carl Rollyson’s Lillian Hellman, Her Legend 

and Legacy (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988) should also 

be consulted. Hellman’s literary executor and intimate friend 

Peter Feibleman wrote a casual memoir about her last years, 

Lilly: Reminiscences of Lillian Hellman (New York: Morrow, 

1988). Robert Newman’s The Cold War Romance of Lillian 

Hellman and John Melby (Chapel Hill: University of North 

Carolina Press, 1989) is a solid account covering an important 

period of her life. 

Students should consult Conversations with Lillian Hellman 

(Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1986) early 

on, especially the Paris Review interview, which is included. 

Good general bibliographical references can be found in Barbara 

Lee Horn’s Lillian Hellman: A Resource and Production 

Sourcebook (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1998), Mark 

Estrin’s Lillian Hellman: Plays, Films, and Memoirs: A Reference 

Guide (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1980), and Steven H. Bills’s 

Lillian Hellman: An Annotated Bibliography (New York: Garland, 

1979). 

For a general critical overview, Katherine Lederer’s Lillian 

Hellman (Boston: Twayne, 1979) and Critical Essays on Lillian 

Hellman, edited by Mark Estrin (New York: G. K. Hall, 1989), 

are good places to start. Bernard Dick’s Hellman in Hollywood 

(Rutherford, N.J. Fairleigh Dickinson, 1982) covers Hellman’s 

screenwriting, an important aspect of her career. 

—Richard Layman 

Hemingway, Ernest (1899–1961) novelist, short-story 

writer 

A country, finally, erodes and the dust blows away, the 

people all die and none of them were of any importance 

permanently, except those who practiced the arts, 

and these now wish to cease their work because it is 

too lonely, too hard to do, and it is not fashionable. A 

thousand years makes economics silly and a work of 

art endures forever, but it is very difficult to do now 

and it is not fashionable. 

—The Green Hills of Africa (1935) 

The second of six children of Dr. Clarence Hemingway and 

Grace Hall Hemingway, Ernest Miller Hemingway was born 

in the affluent, conservative community of Oak Park, Illinois, 

on July 21, 1899. During his youth Hemingway spent 

summers at his parents’ house in northern Michigan. There 

his early hunting and fishing experiences, his associations 

with the Ojibway Indians, and his observations of discord 

between his parents provided material for many of his Nick

524 entry Hemingway, Ernest 

Ernest Hemingway, 1939 

Adams stories. Following graduation from Oak Park High 

School, Hemingway worked as a cub reporter on the Kansas 

City Star, and in the spring of 1918 he joined the American 

Red Cross, which sent him to Italy to drive ambulances for 

the Italian Army. On July 8, 1918, he was wounded by an 

Austrian trench mortar shell. After recuperation and an affair 

with his nurse, Agnes Von Kurowsky, Hemingway returned 

home, worked briefly for the Toronto Star, and moved 

to Chicago, where he met Sherwood Anderson and Hadley 

Richardson, whom he married on September 3, 1921. 

Hemingway sailed for France in December of that same year 

to pursue a literary apprenticeship. 

In Paris, Hemingway met people influential in his career, 

including his three greatest influences: F. Scott Fitzgerald, 

Gertrude Stein, and Ezra Pound, who served not only as a 

mentor but along with Fitzgerald facilitated the publication 

of his work. As a stringer for the Toronto Star Hemingway 

traveled widely throughout Europe, covering major news 

events and acquiring material for his fiction. In Spain he 

was also introduced to bullfighting, a sport he studied passionately. 

Divorced from Hadley in 1927, he married Pauline 

Pfeiffer and in 1930 moved to Key West, Florida. Although 

the Great Depression had begun, Pauline’s wealth and his 

own growing income enabled Hemingway to travel widely, 

buy a thirty-seven-foot fishing cruiser, and go on an African 

safari. 

In March 1937 Hemingway covered the Spanish Civil 

War for the North American Newspaper Alliance along with 

journalist/novelist Martha Gellhorn, with whom he began 

an extramarital affair. By the end of 1939 Hemingway’s marriage 

to Pauline was over, and he moved from Key West to 

Cuba. He divorced Pauline in 1940 and married Martha Gellhorn. 

During most of the years of World War II Hemingway 

produced no significant work. He drank heavily and 

remained at home, using his fishing boat to serve as a spotter 

for German submarines while Martha was away reporting 

on the war. His third marriage disintegrating, Hemingway 

left Cuba in May 1944 on assignment for Collier’s to cover 

the war in Europe and in London met correspondent Mary 

Welsh, with whom he also had an affair. After covering the 

D-Day invasion and the liberation of Paris, Hemingway returned 

to Cuba in 1945, divorced Martha Gellhorn, and married 

Mary Welsh in 1946. 

As long as his health permitted, Hemingway continued to 

visit the places he loved, while also embellishing his already 

larger-than-life persona. In 1958 revolutionary actions making 

Cuba an undesirable residence, Hemingway left behind 

the country in which he had lived for twenty-eight years and 

moved to Ketchum, Idaho. Although he seemed indestructible, 

having survived two near-fatal airplane crashes in Africa 

in 1954, his physical condition steadily declined, and he suffered 

increasingly severe depression, for which he was hospitalized 

and given electroshock therapy. His creative powers 

gone, Hemingway killed himself with one of his shotguns in 

his home on July 2, 1961. 

Following the publication of two Paris small-press books 

(actually pamphlets), Three Stories & Ten Poems (1923) and 

in our time (1924), a collection of vignettes, Hemingway published 

his first American book, In Our Time (1925), a shortstory 

collection that brought his work needed attention, and 

The Torrents of Spring (1926), a satire of Sherwood Anderson 

and Gertrude Stein. However, his career was really launched 

by his first novel, The Sun Also Rises (1926), in which he depicted 

in hard, spare, unliterary prose and original dialogue 

members of a post–World War I generation whose psychic 

wounds bore evidence of a subsurface malady. A Farewell 

to Arms (1929), a story of love, war, and death set during the 

Great War, established his reputation as a major American 

writer. 

During the decade of the 1930s no significant Hemingway 

novel appeared. He published Death in the Afternoon 

(1932), a bullfighting manual; Green Hills of Africa (1935), 

a book about big-game hunting with observations about 

writing; To Have and Have Not (1937), a flawed novel set in 

Key West and Cuba during the Depression; and an unsuccessful 

play, The Fifth Column, in his major story collection, 

The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories (1938). For 

Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), Hemingway’s book about the


largely in the south of France treating effects of sexual conflicts 

upon the lives of a writer and his wife; True at First 

Light (1999), an abridged version of Hemingway’s “African 

book” recounting his 1953 safari; and Under Kilimanjaro 

(2005), an unabridged version of the same text. 

Following the publication of The Sun Also Rises Hemingway 

was regarded as one of the most promising writers in 

America, and he became also one of the most imitated. 

Soon after the publication of his second novel, A Farewell 

to Arms, many critics and reviewers acknowledged him as 

a master. However, during the 1930s, when Marxists and 

far-left critics called for literature to become a weapon in 

the struggle of the proletariat, Hemingway’s work was often 

attacked for his failure to address the needs of the masses. 

Dust jacket for the first book by Hemingway to be published 

in the United States (1925), which includes seven stories 

about Nick Adams, his autobiographical hero 

Spanish Civil War, reaffirmed his commitment to truth over 

propaganda and was regarded as evidence of the return of 

Hemingway the artist during a highly politicized era. Across 

the River and Into the Trees (1950), a novel set in Venice in 

1948, balancing the cynicism of a dying colonel with his love 

for a young Venetian woman, was a critical failure. Although 

Hemingway had been at work on an ambitious project about 

“the land, sea, and air” since 1945, only one work from that 

effort appeared during his lifetime, The Old Man and the Sea 

(1952), his all-time best-selling book. 

Hemingway’s posthumously published works include: A 

Moveable Feast (1964), a memoir of the Paris years; Islands 

in the Stream (1970), an unfinished novel about German 

submarine hunting in Cuban waters; The Dangerous Summer 

(1985), a nonfiction account of Spanish bullfights in 

1959; The Garden of Eden (1986), a heavily edited novel set 

Dust jacket for Hemingway’s 1926 novel about a group of 

post–World War I American expatriates. The title is taken 

from Ecclesiastes: “One generation passeth away, and 

another generation cometh; but the earth abideth forever . . . 

The sun also ariseth , and sun goeth down, and hasteth 

to the place where he arose. . . .”

526 entry Hemingway, Ernest 

Dust jacket for Hemingway’s 1929 novel, in which Frederic 

Henry tries to escape the carnage of World War I with nurse 

Catherine Barkley. Hemingway disapproved of the jacket illustration, 

referring to it in a letter to editor Maxwell Perkins 

as “The tragedy of the Broken Axle.” 

But by 1940, when the Soviet mystique had begun to wane, 

many American critics highly praised For Whom the Bell 

Tolls. However, the most productive period of Hemingway’s 

literary career was behind him; he had written three 

of America’s best novels and several of its greatest short 

stories. In 1952 the publication of The Old Man and the 

Sea refocused the world’s attention upon Hemingway. His 

novella about a Cuban fisherman and a giant marlin was 

awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1953, and it was instrumental 

in his being awarded the Nobel Prize in literature 

in 1954. Hemingway crafted a distinctive and recognizably 

American style whose simplicity, understatement, and objective 

tone had a lasting influence upon American fiction. 

At the time of his death he was the most famous writer in 

America—and possibly the world. 

—John C. Unrue 

Principal Books by Hemingway 

Three Stories & Ten Poems. Paris: Contact Editions, 1923. 

In Our Time. Paris: Three Mountains Press, 1924. 

In Our Time. New York: Boni & Liveright, 1925. Revised edition, 

New York: Scribners, 1930. 

The Torrents of Spring. New York: Scribners, 1926. 

The Sun Also Rises. New York: Scribners, 1926. 

Men Without Women. New York: Scribners, 1927. 

A Farewell to Arms. New York: Scribners, 1929. 

Death in the Afternoon. New York: Scribners, 1932. 

Winner Take Nothing. New York: Scribners, 1933. 

Green Hills of Africa. New York: Scribners, 1935. 

To Have and Have Not. New York: Scribners, 1937. 

The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories. New York: 

Scribners, 1938. Republished as The Short Stories of Ernest 

Hemingway. New York: Scribners, 1954. 

The Fifth Column: A Play in Three Acts. New York: Scribners, 

1940. 

For Whom the Bell Tolls. New York: Scribners, 1940. 

Across the River and Into the Trees. New York: Scribners, 1950. 

The Old Man and the Sea. New York: Scribners, 1952. 

Hemingway: The Wild Years, edited by Gene Z. Hanrahan. New 

York: Dell, 1962. 

A Moveable Feast. New York: Scribners, 1964. 

By-Line, Ernest Hemingway: Selected Articles and Dispatches of 

Four Decades, edited by William White. New York: Scribners, 

1967. 

The Fifth Column and Four Stories of the Spanish Civil War. New 

York: Scribners, 1969. 

Ernest Hemingway, Cub Reporter: Kansas City Star Stories, edited 

by Matthew J. Bruccoli. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh 

Press, 1970. 

Islands in the Stream. New York: Scribners, 1970. 

Ernest Hemingway’s Apprenticeship: Oak Park, 1916–1917, edited 

by Bruccoli. Washington, D.C.: Bruccoli Clark/NCR Microcard 

Editions, 1971. 

The Nick Adams Stories, edited by Philip Young. New York: 

Scribners, 1972. 

88 Poems, edited by Nicholas Gerogiannis. New York & London: 

Harcourt Brace Jovanovich/Bruccoli Clark, 1979. Enlarged as 

Complete Poems. Lincoln & London: University of Nebraska 

Press, 1983. 

Ernest Hemingway on Writing, edited by Larry W. Phillips. New 

York: Scribners, 1984. 

The Dangerous Summer. New York: Scribners, 1985. 

Dateline, Toronto: The Complete Toronto Star Dispatches, 1920– 

1924, edited by William White. New York: Scribners, 1985. 

The Garden of Eden. New York: Scribners, 1986. 

The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway. New York: 

Scribners, 1987. 

True at First Light, edited by Patrick Hemingway. New York: 

Scribners, 1999. Re-edited and republished as Under Kilimanjaro, 

edited by Robert W. Lewis and Robert E. Fleming. 

Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2005.


Hemingway and the Mechanism of Fame: Statements, Public Letters, 

Introductions, Forewords, Prefaces, Blurbs, Reviews, and 

Endorsements, edited by Bruccoli and Judith S. Baughman. 

Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2005. 

Studying Ernest Hemingway 

Ernest Hemingway’s career spanned four decades. During 

his lifetime twenty of his books were published, including 

one unauthorized poetry collection. Seventeen additional 

Hemingway volumes have been published since his death. 

His literary career is often divided into periods associated 

with his primary residences. Biographer Michael Reynolds 

has designated them: The Paris Years (1921–1929), The Key 

West Years (1930–1939), The World War II Years (1940– 

1945), and The Cuban Years (1945–1961). 

A study of Hemingway’s fiction should begin with his 

early work, the miniatures or vignettes in in our time (1924) 

reprinted as interchapters in his first story collection In Our 

Time (1925) and in particular “Big Two-Hearted River,” 

works that reflect Hemingway’s evolving style under the influence 

of modernism. Hemingway’s three classic novels, 

The Sun Also Rises (1926), A Farewell to Arms (1929), 

and For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940), should be read next 

along with his major short stories, in particular “The Killers” 

(1927), “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” (1936), and “The 

Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” (1936). Although 

The Old Man and the Sea (1952) is Hemingway’s best-seller, 

Hemingway’s major work was completed by 1940. 

The standard Hemingway biography is Carlos Baker’s Ernest 

Hemingway: A Life Story (New York: Scribners, 1966). Michael 

Reynolds’s comprehensive five-volume biography (1986–1999) 

supplements Baker’s book and thematically links Hemingway’s 

life and works; Reynolds’s brief biography, Literary Masters: Ernest 

Hemingway (Detroit: Manly/Gale, 2000), provides a good 

introductory overview of Hemingway’s life and work. Also 

recommended is Ernest Hemingway: A Documentary Volume, 

edited by Robert W. Trogdon (Dictionary of Literary Biography, 

volume 210. Detroit: Bruccoli Clark Layman/The Gale Group, 

1999), which is available in paperback as Ernest Hemingway: A 

Literary Reference (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2002). Matthew J. 

Bruccoli’s Fitzgerald and Hemingway: A Dangerous Friendship 

(New York: Carroll & Graf, 1994) analyzes the troubled relationship 

between Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald as well 

as demonstrating Fitzgerald’s role in Hemingway’s career. Conversations 

with Ernest Hemingway, edited by Bruccoli (Jackson: 

University Press of Mississippi, 1989), provides informative 

comments by Hemingway about writing and events that informed 

his work. 

Not all of the large number of books and articles on Ernest 

Hemingway are worthwhile. Among critical studies Charles A. 

Fenton’s The Apprenticeship of Ernest Hemingway (New York: 

Farrar, Straus & Young, 1954) provides an excellent background 

for Hemingway’s earliest writing and newspaper training, and 

Carlos Baker’s Hemingway, The Writer as Artist (Princeton, 

Dust jacket for Hemingway’s 1940 novel, in which American 

Robert Jordan fights against the Fascists in Spain. Hemingway 

took his title from John Donne’s Meditation 17: “Any man’s 

death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and 

therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; 

it tolls for thee. . . .” 

N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1972) contributes perceptive 

and credible readings of Hemingway’s fiction, including the 

posthumously published Islands in the Stream (1970). Paul A. 

Smith’s A Reader’s Guide to the Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway 

(Boston: G. K. Hall, 1989) is the best reference for criticism 

of Hemingway’s stories. Those interested in observing 

how Hemingway incorporated researched material about the 

Italian front of World War I into A Farewell to Arms should 

see Reynolds’s Hemingway’s First War (Princeton, N.J.; Princeton 

University Press, 1981). Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell 

to Arms: A Documentary Volume, edited by Charles M. Oliver 

(Dictionary of Literary Biography, volume 308. Detroit: Bruccoli 

Clark Layman/Thomson Gale, 2005) chronicles the making 

of the novel and traces its popular and critical reputation.

528 entry Herbst, Josephine 

Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, 1917–1961, edited by 

Carlos Baker (New York: Scribners, 1981), should be read 

along with Hemingway’s work. The Only Thing That Counts: 

The Ernest Hemingway/Maxwell Perkins Correspondence, 

1925–1947, edited by Bruccoli, with the assistance of Trogdon 

(New York: Scribners, 1996), provides a record of the 

professional relationship between Hemingway and his legendary 

Scribners editor, Maxwell Perkins. 

Audre Hanneman’s Ernest Hemingway: A Comprehensive 

Bibliography (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 

1967) and her Supplement to Ernest Hemingway: A Comprehensive 

Bibliography (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University 

Press, 1975) are the standard Hemingway bibliographies 

and indispensable research tools. Kelli A. Larson’s Ernest 

Hemingway: A Reference Guide (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1991) 

lists writings about Hemingway and his works from 1974 

to 1989. Students should also consult the Modern Language 

Association bibliographies on-line and current bibliography 

in The Hemingway Review, which since 1981 has provided 

a forum for scholarship and criticism, following the Fitzgerald/Hemingway 

Annual (1969–1979). The principal research 

archive is at the Kennedy Library. 

—John C. Unrue 

Herbst, Josephine (1897–1969) novelist 

After graduating from the University of California in 1918, 

the Iowa-born Josephine Herbst left for New York City to 

begin her career as a writer. By the 1920s she was in Paris, 

associating with the important American writers there. She is 

regarded as a proletarian writer (see Proletarian Literature) 

because she was a hard-line Marxist and her fiction 

treats the social, economic, and political issues that affect the 

laboring poor. Herbst is best known for her trilogy on the 

Trexler family: Pity Is Not Enough (1933), The Executioner 

Waits (1934), and Rope of Gold (1939). This saga, based on 

her own family, follows the Trexlers from the late nineteenth 

century to the 1930s, exploring their troubles after they lose 

their money, grapple with the fast-changing period of the 

1920s, and then confront bleak economic times during the 

Great Depression. Her memoir of her days in Spain during 

the Spanish Civil War, originally published in a periodical 

in 1960, is the title piece of The Starched Blue Sky of Spain, 

and Other Memoirs (1991). 

Source 

Langer, Elinor. Josephine Herbst. Boston: Little, Brown, 1984. 

Hergesheimer, Joseph (1880–1954) novelist, 

short-story writer 

Hergesheimer was a best-selling and well-respected novelist 

of his day, whose work was often first published in The 

Saturday Evening Post before appearing in book form. His 

best-known novels are Java Head (1919), a study of the trade 

with China in the New England of the 1840s that deals with 

miscegenation, and Linda Condon (1919), a portrayal of an 

intense woman that shows the author’s growing distaste for 

contemporary American culture. Hergesheimer’s later books 

forsake Realism for romance. He favored exotic settings— 

the West Indies in The Bright Shawl (1922), Cuba in Balisand 

(1924), Mexico in Tampico (1926). From an Old House (1925) 

is an essay-memoir. 

Source 

Gimmestad, Victor E. Joseph Hergesheimer. Boston: Twayne, 

1984. 

Heyward, DuBose (1885–1940) playwright, novelist, 

poet 

DuBose Heyward is chiefly remembered for the folk dramas 

of African American life in the early twentieth century that he 

based on his novels. A South Carolina native descended from 

Thomas Heyward Jr., a signer of the Declaration of Independence, 

Heyward worked as an insurance and real estate salesman 

in Charleston before he began to publish poetry and short 

stories in the early 1920s. His first books were poetry collections: 

Carolina Chansons; Legends of the Low Country (1922), 

written with Hervey Allen; and Skylines and Horizons (1924). 

With the collaboration of his wife, Dorothy, who is credited 

with providing dramatic structure to his writing, Heyward 

scored his greatest theatrical success when their adaption of 

his first novel, Porgy (1925)—about a crippled black beggar’s 

doomed love for a faithless woman in the fictional slum Catfish 

Row—was produced by the Theatre Guild in 1927 and won 

a Pulitzer Prize. Heyward subsequently collaborated with 

Ira and George Gershwin, who composed a folk opera, Porgy 

and Bess (produced 1935), adapted from this play. The enduring 

popularity of the Gershwin opera eclipsed that of the original 

play and made Heyward’s story and characters a permanent 

fixture on American stages. 

Heyward continued to be productive in the latter half of the 

1920s through the 1930s, as he published six more novels and a 

third collection of poetry. In 1931 Brass Ankle (produced 1931), 

a play Heyward wrote directly for the stage about a woman who 

plans suicide when she learns of her Negro parentage, flopped. 

In 1933 he wrote the screenplay for the movie version of Eugene 

O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones. His play Mamba’s Daughters—an 

adaptation of his third novel, published in 1929—was 

well received when it was produced in 1939. A tragic melodrama 

depicting the tribulations of three generations of a black 

family, Mamba’s Daughters was praised as a realistic portrait of 

African American life. Much of its success was attributed to the 

compelling performance of Ethel Waters in the lead, the first 

starring role for a black woman in a Broadway drama. Heyward 

also published a popular children’s book, The Country Bunny 

and the Little Gold Shoes (1939).

The Last Tycoon/The Love of the Last Tycoon entry 667 

Ring Lardner (New York: Ungar, 1979), Otto Friedrich’s 

Ring Lardner (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 

1965), and Patrick Walton’s Ring Lardner (New York: 

Twayne, 1963) that might be useful starting points. 

Critical study of Lardner begins with context—both his 

place in the tradition of the American fiction and in the tradition 

of American humor writing. Maxwell Geismar’s Writers 

in Crisis: the American Novel 1925–1940 (1941; reprinted, 

New York: Hill & Wang, 1961) is a good place to start on the 

former; Norris Yates’s The American Humorist: Conscience of 

the Twentieth Century (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 

1964) is a good place to start on the latter. 

—Richard Layman 

Larsen, Nella (1891–1964) novelist 

This, then, was where she belonged. This was her 

proper setting. She felt consoled at last for the spiritual 

wounds of the past. 

—Quicksand (1928) 

Born to a Danish mother and a West Indian father, Larsen 

studied at Fisk University and later obtained a nursing degree. 

In 1919 she married physicist Elmer Imes and became a 

member of the black elite in New York City, socializing with 

other Harlem Renaissance notables. Her literary reputation 

rests on two novels she published in the 1920s. 

Quicksand (1928) is a semi-autobiographical text about 

the travels—physical and psychological—of a biracial 

woman trying to find the place “where she belonged.” 

Helga Crane leaves her job at a New Negro school in the 

South, seeking a fulfilling identity. When she does not find 

what she seeks in Chicago, New York, or Denmark, Helga 

experiences a moment of spiritual enlightenment or weakness 

and ends up married to a southern preacher in backwoods 

Alabama, trapped in a cycle of childbirth. Larsen’s 

second novel, Passing (1929), focuses on an upper-middleclass 

African American woman, Irene Redfield, and her increasingly 

disturbing encounters with a childhood friend, 

Clare Kendry, who is passing for white and pursuing relationships 

in Harlem behind her bigoted husband’s back. 

In 1930 Larsen became the first African American woman 

to earn a Guggenheim Fellowship, but that year she was also 

accused of plagiarizing a 1922 story from Century magazine 

for her story “Sanctuary,” which appeared in Forum in 1930. 

The charge, though unsubstantiated, along with her 1933 divorce 

led Larsen to withdraw from society and to stop writing. 

From 1934 until her death thirty years later, she worked 

as a nurse, lived as a recluse, and never published again. Although 

her literary standing faded during her lifetime, Larsen 

has recently been reinstated among her Harlem Renaissance 

peers such as Jessie Redmon Fauset and Zora Neale Hurston, 

and her work is the subject of renewed critical interest. 

Sources 

Davis, Thadious M. Nella Larsen, Novelist of the Harlem Renaissance: 

A Woman’s Life Unveiled. Baton Rouge: Lousiana State 

University Press, 1994. 

Larsen, Nella. Quicksand and Passing, edited by Deborah Mc- 

Dowell. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 

1986. 

Rabin, Jessica. Surviving the Crossing: (Im)migration, Ethnicity 

and Gender in Willa Cather, Gertrude Stein, and Nella Larsen. 

New York: Routledge, 2004. 

—Jessica G. Rabin 

The Last Adam by James Gould Cozzens (New York: 

Harcourt, Brace, 1933) novel 

The main character in this novel is George Bull, a small-town 

doctor in Connecticut during the 1930s. He is barely competent 

and is not greatly concerned about his patients. Yet, he is 

the doctor who diagnoses the typhoid fever epidemic in his 

town—for which he may be partly to blame because of his lax 

inspection of the water supply. 

The main subject of the novel is the social structure of 

New Winton, as James Gould Cozzens examines the stratification 

of the characters in terms of their intelligence and 

class position. 

—Morris Colden 

“The Last of the Belles” by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1929) 

short story 

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote important stories set in the South 

drawing upon his experiences during World War I and his 

marriage to a Southerner. The narrator of “The Last of the 

Belles” is Andy, a Yankee who tries to understand Ailie Calhoun, 

a popular girl he meets while stationed in Georgia: “It 

was a time of growth and war, and there was never so much 

love around.” Six years later when Andy returns to Georgia 

to visit Ailie, he realizes that he will never be able to recover 

Ailie or his youth. The South and its women are lost to him. 

The story was first published in The Saturday Evening 

Post and collected in Taps at Reveille (1935). 

Source 

Bruccoli, Matthew J. Classes on F. Scott Fitzgerald. Columbia: 

Thomas Cooper Library, University of South Carolina, 2001. 

—Morris Colden 

The Last Tycoon/The Love of the Last Tycoon by 

F. Scott Fitzgerald (New York: Scribners, 1941) novel 

At the time of his death in December 1940, F. Scott Fitzgerald 

had written seventeen of the thirty episodes in the plan 

for his Hollywood novel with the working title The Love of 

the Last Tycoon: A Western. Edmund Wilson assembled the

2013/2014, I semestre Corso di laurea magistrale ... - people.unica.it

Transform your PDFs into Flipbooks and boost your revenue!

2013/2014, I semestre Corso di laurea magistrale ... - people.unica.it

Transform your PDFs into Flipbooks and boost your revenue!

Delete template?

Save as template ?