Queer Chivalry

Medievalism and the Myth of White Masculinity in Southern Literature

Tison Pugh

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780807151846
• eBook ISBN: 9780807151860
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

For the U.S. South, the myth of chivalric masculinity dominates the cultural and historical landscape. Visions of white southern men as archetypes of honor and gentility run throughout regional narratives with little regard for the actions and, at times, the atrocities committed by such men. In Queer Chivalry, Tison Pugh exposes the inherent contradictions in these depictions of cavalier manhood, investigating the foundations of southern gallantry as a reincarnated and reauthorized version of medieval masculinity. Pugh argues that the idea of masculinity -- particularly as seen in works by prominent southern authors from Mark Twain to Ellen Gilchrist -- constitutes a cultural myth that queerly demarcates accepted norms of manliness, often by displaying the impossibility of its achievement.
Beginning with Twain's famous critique of "the Sir Walter disease" that pilloried the South, Pugh focuses on authors who questioned the code of chivalry by creating protagonists whose quests for personal knighthood prove quixotic. Through detailed readings of major works -- including Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Flannery O'Connor's short fiction, John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces, Robert Penn Warren's A Place to Come To, Walker Percy's novels, and Gilchrist's The Annunciation -- Pugh demonstrates that the hypermasculinity of white-knight ideals only draws attention to the ambiguous gender of the literary southern male.
Employing insights from gender and psychoanalytic theory, Queer Chivalry contributes to recent critical discussions of the cloaked anxieties about gender and sexuality in southern literature. Ultimately, Pugh uncovers queer limits in the cavalier mythos, showing how facts and fictions contributed to the ideological formulation of the South.

1

INTRODUCTION

Southern History, Mythic White Masculinity, and Queering the Medieval Chivalric Ideal

Chivalry is a historical myth, and a queer one at that. Because histories and myths are often little better than lies, the chivalric ideal of white southern masculinity cannot stand as a triumphant declaration of manhood and must confront its queer foundations. As Samuel Johnson famously observed, “All history, so far as it is not supported by contemporary evidence, is romance,”¹ and in positing the frequent overlap of history and romance, Johnson suggests the likelihood of a culture’s factual foundations assuming fictional colorings. When romance, myths, and outright lies seep into and distort the history of a given culture, the odd commingling of fiction and fact renders both romance and history bereft of taxonomic clarity. History is often purported to record the factual foundations of a society, yet its ideological purpose of forming “proper” citizens cannot be divorced from its ostensibly impartial and archival position: in building the necessary cultural background from which a coherent society emerges, history constructs and contorts, creates and constricts. Hayden White observes that “[e]very historical narrative has as its latent or manifest purpose the desire to moralize the events of which it treats,” and this remark captures the ways in which history promotes the ideological values of a culture through the interpretive praxis inherent in historiography.² Creating a functioning and cohesive culture necessitates a shared history, and often this shared history celebrates conceptions of normative gender and sexuality by idealizing particular persons and identities as praiseworthy and denigrating others as reprobate.

In a manner similar to the ideological and gendered function of history, societies depend upon their foundational myths to outline the parameters of membership and thereby to acculturate their citizens. Within semiotic, literary, sociological, and anthropological paradigms, myths are believed to structure thought through the iconic deployment of signs and narratives suggestive of deeper ideological tenets: “Myths are … imaginative patterns, networks of powerful symbols that suggest particular ways of interpreting the world,” argues Mary Midgley.³ In a similar vein, Claude Lévi-Strauss affirms: “I therefore claim to show, not how men think in myths, but how myths operate in men’s minds without their being aware of the fact.”⁴ Myths bear the potential to garble history, and the resulting mixtures of myth and history create powerful cultural narratives that define a society and its people with little regard for those being so defined outside the parameters of the normative.

Such blurrings of history and myth run throughout narratives of the U.S. South, and these tensions invite deep questions about the historical foundations of southern identity. In his classic study The Burden of Southern History, C. Vann Woodward notes the friction between two camps of historians, whom he terms mythmakers and iconoclasts, and their quarrel over a defining myth of the U.S. South: the chivalry of its men. “While some Southern historians have contributed to the mythmaking, others have been among the leading iconoclasts, and their attacks have spared few of the South’s cherished myths,” Woodward avows. He then elegiacally identifies the myth of southern masculinity as a victim of iconoclasm: “The Cavalier Legend as the myth of origin was one of the earlier victims.”⁵ White southern men as archetypes of honor, gentility, and chivalry: this myth dominates the U.S. South for much of the cultural imaginary, yet its veracity need not be tested as much as continually reiterated. As Eugene Genovese notes of cultural practices in the U.S. South, “‘Tradition’ is … an embodiment of ‘givens’ that must constantly be fought for, recovered in each generation, and adjusted to new conditions,”⁶ and such mythic constructions of history as encoded in the cavalier legend of chivalric masculinity need to be tended to in the same manner as other southern traditions. In regard to the puncturing of this cavalier legend, however, a myth deflated is not a myth defeated; the enduring legacy of this myth of white southern masculinity as medieval chivalry reborn continues apace.⁷

For if the Civil War and Reconstruction represent for southern men a paradoxically ennobling experience through their reconstitution into a glorious “Lost Cause,” the reformulation of white southern manhood from defeated to victorious serves a similar ideological strategy. The “Lost Cause” ironically defines a dominant and often virulent incarnation of southern manhood, and Craig Friend and Lorri Glover emphasize the heady confluence of history and male desire amid the disarray of Reconstruction that propagated this archaic yet resilient masculinity: “In the late nineteenth century, as white southerners became nostalgic over the Old South and the ‘Lost Cause,’ memory of that honor—equal parts reality and fantasy—became central to conceptualizations of southern history and southern men.”⁸ On a similar note, Stephen Berry marks the confused interplay of war and gender: “The Civil War was, like all wars, essentially ironic. Supposed to enforce, amplify, and clarify gender roles, it instead made them murky, distorted, and even inverted.”⁹ Engaging in war to confirm their culture and masculinity as superior to the North’s, white southern men proved their gendered identity to be a “Lost Cause” as well, and the performance of chivalric masculinity exposes these men’s failures to protect their geographically inflected masculinity on the battlefield. Alan Nolan sees in the legend of the “Lost Cause” an attempt “to foster a heroic image of secession and the war so that the Confederates would have salvaged at least their honor from the all-encompassing defeat.”¹⁰ For these reasons, the “Lost Cause” permeated life in the U.S. South following the Civil War, even, as Charles Wilson asserts, evolving into virtually a religion, as he documents in his Baptized in Blood: The Religion of the Lost Cause, 1865–1920.¹¹

If southern history brims with mythic potential in its cavalier legend of the “Lost Cause” and its chivalric men, so too does gender in its myriad constructions, but the overarching aggrandizing of southern culture through myth does not extend to all gendered persons of the region. As social constructions founded upon biological reality, myths of gender establish paradigms of identity for people to emulate, and their responses to these myths influence the directions of their lives in myriad ways. In her critique of Western psychoanalysis, Judith Butler describes gender as a coercive force of ideology: “If gender is a norm, it is not the same as a model that individuals seek to approximate. On the contrary, it is a form of social power that produces the intelligible field of subjects, and an apparatus by which the gender binary is instituted. As a norm that appears independent of the practices that it governs, its ideality is the reinstituted effect of those very practices.”¹² For the U.S. South, polarized myths of gender identity are interconnected with a vast array of other binary markers. “The stories of southern bodies have been structured in large part by the interlocking logics of dichotomy—masculine and feminine, white and black, master and slave, planter and ‘white trash,’ Cavalier and Yankee—that have characterized the dominant public written discourse of the South,” declare Susan Donaldson and Anne Goodwyn Jones in considering the ways in which gendered myths inflect discourses of the U.S. South.¹³ Prevailing divisions of humans into categories based on gender, race, social class, and geographical location affect—if not effect, or infect—a given individual’s position in society, yet these cultural categories are myths as well. Although such myths of gender are accorded great ideological weight, their power to alter lives does not transmute them into anything beyond myth. On the contrary, they remain fantastic constructions while simultaneously revealing the brute force of ideological interpellation. Without using this critical lexicon of Althusserian theory, Robert Penn Warren recalled late in his life that he paradoxically could not recall “how my early brand of uninstructed Southernism soaked into me,” and his confused memories on this subject capture the tacit function of ideology to create normatively gendered citizens without the individual’s awareness of the immersion.¹⁴ In a similar vein, George Tindall describes how southern culture perpetuates itself through racial myths that exclude vast swaths of its population: “It was as if one soaked up from the air one breathed the belief that the southern people comprised a population that was 99.44 percent pure Anglo-Saxon.”¹⁵ Viewing history as a “natural” presentation of the past, one that subsequently produces normality in the present through the touchstone deployment of its self-reflexive “natural” qualities, obscures the contingent and fluctuating foundations at its heart, in regard both to its narratives and to the genders defined within them.

As a subset of mythologized genders, masculinities evolve in the contested yet shared space between history and myth, thereby reflecting the historical circumstances conducive to the ideological propagation of a culture. Men live and die embedded in history, in the passage of time that establishes the beginning and terminus of their lives, and in many ways, time defines the masculinities available during a given historical period. The masculinities conceivable to a fifteenth-century peasant, a seventeenth-century king, a nineteenth-century slave, and a twenty-first-century male homosexual vary widely, and the historical times of these men’s lives delimit the contours of their masculinities. In terms of ideological and cultural privilege, dominant forms of masculinity create male power within a given chronological period, and, as Stanley Aronowitz posits, the maintenance of dominant forms of masculinity wields debilitating effects for those not accorded the benefits of such a gender when it is projected as an “essentialized identity defensively invited by men to reassert their privileges.”¹⁶ For the U.S. South, the myth of chivalric masculinity dominates the cultural and historical landscape, creating a vision of white southern men through the mutually mythologized histories of the Middle Ages and the U.S. South as lands and times of chivalric honor, with little regard to the historical actions (and, at times, atrocities) of such men.

To bolster its ideological status as normative, white chivalric masculinity of the U.S. South appropriates invisibility as its defining feature: it is silently naturalized as the de facto standard of southern manhood so that its cultural construction as normative is overlooked. Holly Crocker analyzes masculine invisibility and finds it complicit with the ideological maintenance of gender: “Invisibility … is directly relevant to gender constructions, particularly the ways that dominant masculinity establishes its quiet claim to power over others, especially women. Aligning itself with an expansive invisibility that subjects others to its machinations and designs, masculinity asserts its comprehensive dominance by passing unnoticed.”¹⁷ Similar to masculinity, whiteness and heterosexuality also erase their traces while propping up prevailing ideological power structures. Pointing to the invisible power of racial and sexual normativity, Julian Carter declares: “‘[N]ormality’ made it possible to discuss race and sexuality without engaging the relations of power in which they were embedded and through which they acquired much of their relevance.”¹⁸ White heterosexual southern men have historically and invisibly claimed normativity and chivalry as exclusive to themselves, relegating African Americans, women, homosexuals, and others to a subjected and secondary status.

Queer theory, however, demands that the “natural,” the “normal,” and the “invisible” undergo the same analyses as that which historically has been deemed unnatural, abnormal, and conspicuously visible in terms of race, social class, gender, and sexuality, in contrast to white masculinity’s invisibility. Rather than accepting masculinity as a natural foundation of analysis, queer theory asks for every performance of gendered identity to be taken as tentative and unproven, to be subject to exposure for its contradictions, its paradoxes, and how it often passes unnoticed. White masculinity of the U.S. South, provocatively and defiantly presented as the definitive model of manhood, depends upon the white-black, male-female, and homosexual-heterosexual binaries to project itself as superior, yet the inherent instability of these binaries bears the potential to subvert the manhood it defends. By troubling history and gender as epistemological categories, queerness exposes what some versions of history might hide, and white southern men’s appropriation of medieval chivalry compellingly exemplifies the queer anxieties at the heart of such a defensive ploy. It must not be forgotten, as Sally Robinson posits, that invisibility is not free from history but bears its own history, too: “To be unmarked means to be invisible—not in the sense of ‘hidden from history’ but, rather, as the self-evident standard against which all differences are measured: hidden by history.”¹⁹

If this chivalric myth of white southern masculinity were not treated with such dutiful respect in some quarters, its inherent implausibility would shine through and the myth would be subject to ridicule in its very pronouncement. But here the myths of the U.S. South converge with myths of the medieval past, and cultural fantasies unite as a glorified vision of southern masculinity merges with a glorified vision of the Middle Ages. Neither of these visions is grounded in historical reality, for the medieval past is not summoned to perform ideological work for subsequent cultures due to its history as archivally recorded but due to a romanticized, aestheticized, and often literary version of its history more connected to fantasies of romance than to actual living conditions during the roughly one thousand years designated as the Middle Ages. As Umberto Eco trenchantly argues, “the Middle Ages have always been messed up in order to meet the vital requirements of different periods.”²⁰ In regard to southern chivalric masculinity, the tropes of medieval romance define knightly masculinity, and the standard plots of these narratives feature the quest of a single knight seeking valiantly to win his lady’s love. Along this narrative trajectory, the knight proves his worthiness by fighting in tournaments and slaying monsters for his beloved or for any forsaken and suffering women encountered during his journey. Medieval romances stress the ideals of courage, courtesy, loyalty, honor, etiquette, and mercy and, in so doing, glorify chivalric masculinity as a gendered panacea to a range of narrative obstacles and cultural traumas.²¹ Maurice Keen considers chivalry to be “an ethos in which martial, aristocratic, and Christian elements were fused together,”²² and its usefulness during the Middle Ages and subsequent temporal periods arises in its succinct yet malleable definition of ideal and virtuous masculinity.

In terms of the historical foundations of this ultimately queer myth of southern chivalric manhood, it should be noted that some scholars discount as historical “fact” the proposition that chivalry emerged in response to the U.S. South’s veneration of the Middle Ages. Eugene Genovese concludes that antebellum southern slaveholders “were consciously looking toward a bright future, not toward the past and toward some restoration of a lost world. In consequence, with few exceptions, they regarded the Middle Ages as backward, superstitious, static, and on balance as unattractive.”²³ Here we see the dismissal of a historical “fact” through Genovese’s reassessment of archival records, yet the same society can embrace simultaneously both progressive and regressive fantasies, and Gregory VanHoosier-Carey’s intriguing study of the rise of Anglo-Saxon studies in southern universities after the Civil War traces how this “discipline enabled Southerners to reinterpret the disorienting events of the Civil War and Reconstruction as a comprehensible narrative that both legitimized Southern defeat and promised eventual Southern victory.”²⁴ The U.S. South’s conflicting turn to chivalric medievalism as regressive and progressive, depending upon the circumstances of its enactment, reflects the amorphousness of the past when used to construct the present (and thus to create a vision of the future as well).

As the studies of Genovese and VanHoosier-Carey illustrate, medievalism frequently moves in contradictory currents in relation to time and history, and in this regard Michael Alexander outlines it as “the offspring of two impulses: the recovery by antiquarians and historians of material for the study of the Middle Ages; and the imaginative adoption of medieval ideas and forms.”²⁵ Both of these diverging impulses in medievalism are in play in the chivalry of the U.S. South. Scholars will likely continue to disagree over the extent to which medievalism and chivalric masculinities define southern history (as evidenced in Woodward’s analysis of mythmakers and iconoclasts), but what is nonetheless apparent is the persistence of this myth and the cultural work it continues to perform. Moreover, the shadow of this medieval myth is long and long-standing, and it does not appear to be fading from the U.S. cultural imaginary. “The South today is as much a fiction, a story we tell and are told, as it is a fixed geographic space below the Mason-Dixon line,” Tara McPherson comments,²⁶ and although the story of the U.S. South changes in each retelling, the trope of southern chivalric masculinity proves intransigent, although not entirely stable, in its popularity, which also highlights the protean resilience of the Middle Ages as a tool for commenting on the present.

In appropriating chivalric values into their fictions, many southern writers select the gendered elements of medieval romances conducive to their narrative and ideological goals while ignoring the tropes that would render these reconceived avatars of southern manhood laughable rather than laudable. Southern culture’s turn to medievalism hinges more upon such heroes as Roland in The Song of Roland, Thomas Malory’s depictions of Arthur and Lancelot in the Morte D’Arthur, and the mythologized masculinity of hi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: Southern History, Mythic White Masculinity, and Queering the Medieval Chivalric Ideal
• 2 Dialectical History, White Indians, and Queer Anxiety in Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court
• 3 Medieval Masculinity, Southern Chivalry, and Redemptive Homosexuality in Flannery O’Connor’s Fiction
• 4 “It’s prolly fulla dirty stories”: Queer Masculinity and Masturbatory Allegory in John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces
• 5 “I am the Lost Cause”: Queer History, the Southern Phallus, and the Quest for Medieval Timelessness in Robert Penn Warren’s A Place to Come To
• 6 “The Sir Walter Disease” and Queer Quests for Masculinity in Walker Percy’s Novels
• 7 Conclusion: Ellen Gilchrist’s The Annunciation and the Queer Future of Chivalric Masculinities
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index