Cotton's Queer Relations

Same-Sex Intimacy and the Literature of the Southern Plantation, 1936-1968

Michael P. Bibler

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780813929842
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Finally breaking through heterosexual clichés of flirtatious belles and cavaliers, sinister black rapists and lusty "Jezebels, " Cotton's Queer Relations exposes the queer dynamics embedded in myths of the southern plantation. Focusing on works by Ernest J. Gaines, William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, Lillian Hellman, Katherine Anne Porter, Margaret Walker, William Styron, and Arna Bontemps, Michael P. Bibler shows how each one uses figures of same-sex intimacy to suggest a more progressive alternative to the pervasive inequalities tied historically and symbolically to the South's most iconic institution.

Bibler looks specifically at relationships between white men of the planter class, between plantation mistresses and black maids, and between black men, arguing that while the texts portray the plantation as a rigid hierarchy of differences, these queer relations privilege a notion of sexual sameness that joins the individuals as equals in a system where equality is rare indeed. Bibler reveals how these models of queer egalitarianism attempt to reconcile the plantation's regional legacies with national debates about equality and democracy, particularly during the eras of the New Deal, World War II, and the civil rights movement. Cotton's Queer Relations charts bold new territory in southern studies and queer studies alike, bringing together history and cultural theory to offer innovative readings of classic southern texts.

A book in the American Literatures Initiative (ALI), a collaborative publishing project supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. For more information, please visit www.americanliteratures.org.

1 / Nation and Plantation between Gone with the Wind and Black Power: The Example of Ernest J. Gaines’s Of Love and Dust

This chapter explains how the attention to questions of sameness and difference in plantation literature from the 1930s through the 1960s reflects and engages the social, political, and economic changes that transformed the South during those years. By looking at these decades together, I deviate from the more common practice of grouping twentieth-century American literature into periods punctuated by the two world wars. Instead, I follow the lead of many historians of the South by treating World War II as part of a larger period of change that began in the Great Depression and continued until the end of the 1960s. In brief, these changes resulted from New Deal economic policies that tried to equalize the region’s status with the rest of the nation; the rise of industrialization and mechanization; the shifts in population and culture brought on by the South’s involvement in World War II; and the push for racial equality that began to take shape in the 1930s but consumed the South during the 1950s and 1960s. As all of these changes played out, I argue, they often took the shape of a larger clash between national democratic ideals, which emphasize the theoretical sameness of all citizens as citizens, and the notion that the South was fundamentally different from the rest of the nation in part because of its conservative insistence on racial inequalities and other social differences within the region. By the end of the 1960s, however, this discursive pattern waned as the integrationist aims of the civil rights movement gave way to a more militant affirmation of both individual and cultural differences by the Black Panthers and other liberation groups of the time. Whereas earlier movements had fought for social equality by stressing commonalities within the South and across the nation, growing liberationist arguments saw diversity as the necessary basis for civil rights, replacing the older emphasis on sameness and unity with a new discourse of multiculturalism. Moreover, by the late 1960s the South was no longer as dependent on agriculture as it had been, and the tenant plantation system that had dominated the region since the end of the Civil War had been almost entirely replaced by more modern forms of farming. With the emergence of these new social movements and the virtual disappearance of the working plantation as a material part of southern life, writers at the end of the 1960s thus began to look for new ways to engage the cultural mythology of the plantation, if they chose to do so at all, and the phase of literature that I examine here more or less came to an end.

Throughout this chapter, I loosely intertwine these arguments about southern history and plantation literature with a literary analysis of Ernest J. Gaines’s novel Of Love and Dust (1967). I also discuss the changing representations of queer identities and relations in American literature and culture during these decades. As I use this historical and literary-historical research to support my interpretation of Gaines’s text, I proffer the novel as an example of how all of the works I study engage both the legacies of the past and the issues of the mid-twentieth-century present. Gaines portrays his 1948 plantation setting as a thoroughly sexualized space in which an oppressive discourse of heterosexual obligation and kinship defines and reifies the plantation’s exploitative social structures. He draws this portrayal from the historical networks of patriarchy and paternalism that typically shaped the plantation households of the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth. This historical material helps clarify the various acts of rebellion and resistance that are central to the novel. These acts are as much sexual as they are social, and they suggest possibilities for finding empowerment and equality within the legacies of the plantation—a project shared by all of the texts that I discuss. The black prisoner Marcus Payne initiates the novel’s primary conflict by sleeping with Louise, the wife of the white overseer Bonbon. But Gaines also imagines a distinctive model of equality in the homosexual partnership of two field hands, John and Freddie. Although these characters are somewhat marginal to the novel’s plot, I show how the antihierarchical structure of their relationship helps explain why Marcus’s rebellion ultimately fails. More importantly, their homosexual bond destabilizes the plantation’s power structures and shields them from its dehumanizing effects. John and Freddie’s queerness is intrinsically antithetical to the plantation, and in this way their homosexuality is representative of the other forms of same-sex intimacy that I study in this book. My analysis of Gaines’s novel, in other words, reveals how other works from this period similarly incorporate queer relationships as the basis for some larger form—some much larger than others—of social equality.

Plantation Literature

On Marshall Hebert’s 1948 Louisiana plantation in Of Love and Dust, the hierarchies of race, class, and gender assign different levels of legitimacy to interracial relationships. The entire plantation community tacitly accepts Bonbon’s affair with his black concubine Pauline, yet the affair between Marcus and Louise constitutes the most severe transgression of racial and social boundaries. Pauline’s relationship with Bonbon began in a manner almost stereotypical of the southern plantation: he simply demanded sex from her and she had to obey. Yet even though they ultimately fall in love, and even though everyone in the plantation knows they are in love, Bonbon and Pauline must still be careful about when and how they see each other. They are still subject to the strict rules of their environment despite Bonbon’s authority and status as a white male. Similarly, Marcus’s affair with Louise starts out only as an expression of power. By seducing Louise, Marcus wants to humiliate Bonbon for Bonbon’s treatment of him in the fields; and Louise wants to get revenge on Bonbon for his refusal to let her leave their loveless marriage. As it happens, she and Marcus quickly fall in love. But their culture prohibits any expression of that love, and Marcus is punished for it when Bonbon shoots and kills him.

As H. Nigel Thomas observes, Marcus’s rebellion against Bonbon and the power structures of Hebert’s plantation places him in the category of the “Bad Nigger” who “feels that he bears the burden for the liberation of the race” and thus “challenges the edicts of [his] oppressors.” And while Gaines uses this type of character “to successfully explore in fiction the ongoing struggle by African-Americans to liberate themselves from white oppression,” Thomas reminds us that “[d]eath always concludes most of the Bad Nigger tales,” just as it does for Marcus.¹ However, to understand Marcus’s failure completely, we must look at why Marcus chooses a specifically sexual form of rebellion—seduction of the white woman. Race, gender, and sexuality are inextricably tangled in this setting. And we must therefore read Marcus’s fight against white oppression in more than just racial terms.

As a starting point, we can contextualize Gaines’s novel within the history of plantation literature as a genre. While it would be wrong to think that sexuality was somehow less important in other periods of plantation literature, the image of the plantation as a sexualized space was pervasive in the mid-twentieth century. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the popular novels that indulge in steamy, graphic depictions of violence and sex, especially interracial sex, typified foremost by Frank Yerby’s The Foxes at Harrow (1946) and Kyle Onstott’s Mandingo (1956). Earl F. Bargainnier describes these novels as “almost burlesques of the older plantation tradition.”² And as Christopher D. Geist writes, these plantation burlesques became “one of the most popular literary formulas of the 1970s.”³ Gaines’s text cannot be classified as a plantation burlesque, for his novel lacks that kind of lurid sensationalism, and Marcus’s death is clearly a tragedy. Instead, it belongs to a more liberal tradition of plantation literature that will be easier to delineate if we look at the characteristics of the burlesque first.

Unfortunately, there has been very little research on these burlesque plantation romances. Bargainnier offers a detailed summary of the plots, characters, and themes of the seven Falconhurst novels that started with Mandingo (Lance Horner wrote all but the first novel, though Onstott edited the three that followed Mandingo).⁴ Geist claims to have studied “nearly two hundred plantation novels written since 1955,” and like Bargainnier, he traces an extensive set of formulaic tropes pertaining to race and sexuality that are mostly quite reactionary. Though he does not discuss how many nonwhite readers might have picked up these books, and he also does not discuss the differences between the novel Mandingo and the 1975 “blaxploitation” film version, which has a strong Black Power theme, Geist explains that these novels provided white readers of the 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s with an “outlet through which [they could] confront anxieties stemming from sexual racism,” sometimes by acting out a “sexual fantasy”—often a revenge fantasy—involving black men. Additionally, these novels appealed to white readers as a “guilt-removing device,” for “the reader may engage in vicarious fantasies in which hostilities toward blacks in general and black males in particular are enacted in a world which no longer exists.”⁵ Thus, the plantation burlesque probably did more than just “titillate a reader who [was] interested in the sensationalizing of the Old South,” as Kathryn Lee Seidel claims.⁶ Amidst the struggles over civil rights and black liberation, these texts also gave whites a way to safely indulge in, if not also work out, their anxieties about African American sexuality and the enduring legacies of slavery.

These reactionary characteristics place the plantation burlesque within a larger conservative tradition that was equally popular in the decades following the Civil War. Indeed, Geist argues that these later plantation romances were “a direct descendent” of the works of Thomas Nelson Page, who was perhaps the most influential in constructing the “moonlight-and-magnolias” image that still persists.⁷ Lucinda H. MacKethan explains that “the plantation literature that arose from the ashes of the past had as its primary quality a tone of nostalgia evoking, without questioning, an aura of Camelot. What appeared was a vision of order and grace to communicate a new myth of a lost cause.” MacKethan reminds us elsewhere that this nostalgia was grounded in a mythological view of the antebellum South, not a historical one. And much like the burlesque novels of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, this use of myth allowed white Americans to critique the social and economic changes going on around them by displacing their anxieties onto the past. Richard Gray argues: “those many writers who chose to celebrate [the feudal ideal of the Old South] were no longer hampered by any sense of contingency, any restricting concern for the ordinary details of day-to-day life…. [I]f any gap was perceived between ideal and reality…it could be equated with the gap between the past and present.”⁸

This nostalgia for a lost sense of order endured in one form or another into the early decades of the twentieth century, as Francis Pendleton Gaines claimed in 1925: “neither the initial momentum in [the twentieth] century nor the gradual slowing down of the tradition is quite so significant as the fact that after the plantation had ceased to be a kind of literary passion, various derivations of the tradition persisted as permanently fixed in literary craft. Though the unit broke up, it seems, some of the fragments were salvaged and used over and over again.”⁹ Seidel argues that some writers in the 1920s actually appropriated pieces of the nostalgic tradition to espouse a liberal critique of southern life, “especially [of] the restrictive codes of behavior for both men and women, fear of outsiders, and hatred of blacks.” But by the 1930s, many writers responded “both to harsh appraisals of southern traditions by the demythologizers of the 1920s and to the sterile materialism of the modern ‘wasteland’ of the Depression” by creating novels that “reaffirmed the life of order, quality, and harmony associated with the antebellum South.” These writers thus recovered the “fragments” of the nostalgic tradition observed by Francis Gaines, even as they combined them with more grotesque “motifs of violence, disorder, insanity, sexuality, and miscegenation.”¹⁰ The obvious culmination of this trend was Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind—a text that Bargainnier and Geist both list as a predecessor of the later plantation burlesques.¹¹ In Scarlett, Mitchell’s text offers a powerful image of an independent woman negotiating the constraints of patriarchy to her best material advantage, as well as a few of the other “motifs” Seidel names. But Mitchell’s complication of gender depends in part on a further reification of racist stereotypes, particularly in Mammy, Prissy, and the black robber who attacks Scarlett on her wagon. It is in this combination of vaguely modern sensibilities with deeply conservative nostalgia that we can see the line of influence moving from Page to Mitchell to Yerby, Onstott, and Horner (who wrote the majority of the Falconhurst novels).

Although Ernest Gaines said in a 1969 interview that he wrote Of Love and Dust purely to make money,¹² it clearly does not belong to this nostalgic tradition of plantation literature, for Marcus’s rebellion and tragic death prove that Gaines does not yearn for a sense of peaceful order. Nor does he turn to the forms of the burlesque to act out some fantasy of victimization or revenge. Instead, I see this novel belonging to a more liberal tradition of plantation literature that also has ties to the late nineteenth century in such writers as George Washington Cable, Charles W. Chesnutt, and Kate Chopin. Unlike Page, these writers invoked the plantation myth to complicate or challenge, not reinforce, the sexist and/ or racist ideologies of their time.¹³ But we might further distinguish the liberal plantation texts of the mid-twentieth century by highlighting their progressive elements. Whereas these modern writers, like their liberal predecessors, challenged some or all of these oppressive ideologies, they also sought components within that myth that might point the way toward some form of social progress. I date the emergence of this progressive plantation literature in the same year that Gone with the Wind was released: 1936. While it certainly may be possible to find similarities between these progressive works and other plantation texts that preceded this date, I use 1936 as my starting point in part because Mitchell’s novel appeared contemporaneously with two plantation novels that are drastically unlike hers on a number of levels: William Faulkner’s deeply inquisitive Absalom, Absalom! and Arna Bontemps’s black-positive Black Thunder. The publication of Mitchell’s text alongside these works suggests a powerful bifurcation of the plantation myth in literature at that moment. Moreover, Gone with the Wind had such a profound impact on the national consciousness that no one could write about the plantation again without somehow taking that novel into account.¹⁴ Forced to find a new way of writing about the plantation, authors of the plantation burlesque transformed the nostalgic tradition into something semi-pornographic. The progressive writers that I study scrutinized the plantation myth with an eye toward positive changes for the South as a region.

Richard H. King makes note of this Depression-era shift in literary focus. Showing how the plantation myth and the “family romance” are integrally joined in southern literature, he writes that as “social and economic stability [was] disappearing” in the South, “the tradition of the family romance came under intense scrutiny. This was the assignment and the burden of the generation of the 1930s.”¹⁵ I would add that as the decade’s changes put considerable strain on the racial, class, and gender hierarchies traditionally associated with the southern plantation, some writers after Mitchell returned to the plantation myth in literature as an object of critique. And while they did not all rework the plantation myth in the same way, these progressive writers all tried to imagine how pieces of that myth might support the shift toward some greater equality within the region. They explored the unevenness of the various ideologies associated with the plantation and looked for internal inconsistencies that not only undermined the monolithic status of that myth, but also pointed to alternative visions of southern culture that might supplant the plantation legacy with some form—however small or fledgling—of greater openness and tolerance. Of course, the very act of engaging the plantation myth made some degree of nostalgia hard to avoid, and not all of these writers embraced the notion of social equality to the same extent. But in general, I see a progressiveness within these plantation texts that is unique to this period. I will talk later in this chapter about why I end this period in 1968, but suffice it to say here that because of this emerging progressiveness, assisted by the sensationalist plantation burlesques that began to appear in the mid-1950s, C. Vann Woodward was able to write in 1960 that “[t]he Plantation Legend of ante bellum [sic] grace and elegance has not been left wholly intact. This pleasant image of a benevolent and paternalistic slavery system as a school for civilizing savages has suffered damage that is probably beyond repair.”¹⁶

Paternalism and the Plantation “Family”

As suggested by King’s discussion of the “family romance,” questions of kinship and sexual relations were central to the way that writers from the 1930s on engaged the mythology of the southern plantation. And this insistence on family structures was not limited to actual blood ties in these texts, for the family also worked as the primary symbol that shaped the entire plantation world of that mythology. Writing about Gone with the Wind, for example, Helen Taylor reminds us that the novel and the film together “sealed in popular imagination a fascinated nostalgia for the glamorous southern plantation house and an ordered hierarchical society in which slaves are ‘family’ and there is a mystical bond between landowner and the rich soil those slaves work for him.”¹⁷ In the years that followed, this image of the plantation as a social system arranged hierarchically and defined in terms of heterosexual family relations became more and more exaggerated. In the plantation burlesques inspired by Mandingo, the plantation setting became, in Catherine Clinton’s words, a “swamp of sin” that almost actively encouraged its inhabitants to literalize the sexual component of the various social (or legal) bonds that tied them to each other.¹⁸ Bargainnier observes that “[t]he only novels before the 1940’s which presented sex in the Old South were pre–Civil War abolitionist novels and the works of a few later writers ‘unsympathetic’ to the South, such as Albion W. Tourgee….[The] addition of sex to the fictional world of the Old South [in the plantation burlesque] is the single greatest change in the image of that time and place.”¹⁹ Yet, as Gaines’s novel demonstrates, sex and sexuality were just as important to the more liberal works of plantation literature that I examine here. That is because these authors were inevitably responding to the idealized images of the plantation as “family” that nostalgic writers like Mitchell offered, as well as the historical roots of those images from as far back as the antebellum period. Whereas the nostalgic tradition celebrated a mythological image of the plantation that took the fo...