Coming out through history's hidden love letters in Absalom, Absalom!

American Literature

Volumn 76, Issue 2, 2004, Pages 339-366

  Jones, Norman W ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 60949855446     PISSN: 00029831     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/00029831-76-2-339     Document Type: Review

References (30)

1. For recent queer scholarship in philosophy, see Edward Stein, The Mismeasure of Desire: The Science, Theory, and Ethics of Sexual Orientation (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1999), especially 347
2. in legal studies, see David A. J. Richards, Identity and the Case for Gay Rights: Race, Gender, and Religion as Analogies (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1999)
3. and in psychology, see Ritch C. Savin-Williams, "... And Then I Became Gay": Young Men's Stories (New York: Routledge, 1998), 3
4. An ethical understanding of identity also accords with Charles Taylor's historically attuned definition of identity in Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1989), especially 27
5. Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1992), 90, 5, 37
6. William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom! (New York: Vintage, 1990), 5. Further references are to this edition and will be cited parenthetically in the text
7. Here and throughout this essay, I do not mean to endorse the claim that history is purely fictitious. For a discussion of how "historical texts actually rework [history] and in the process construct the facts they represent and the relationships among them," see Scott Bravmann, Queer Fictions of the Past: History, Culture, and Difference (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1997), 29. As Bravman suggests, "[Historical truths - the strategic lessons to be drawn from history - might well be approached through a literary historiography that draws on the dissolution of the distinction between realistic and fictional representations as proposed by recent theories of discourse and locates 'factual' as well as 'subjective' truths in the ways we understand, interpret, and write about the past" (29)
8. See, for example, Peter Brooks's otherwise admirable reading of Absalom, in Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (New York: Knopf, 1984)
9. Examinations of homoeroticism in Absalom include Don Merrick Liles, "William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! An Exegesis of the Homoerotic Configurations in the Novel," in Literary Visions of Homosexuality, ed. Stuart Kellogg (New York: Haworth, 1983), 99-111
10. John N. Duvall, Faulkner's Marginal Couple: Invisible, Outlaw, and Unspeakable Communities (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1990), 101-18
11. Diane Roberts, Faulkner and Southern Womanhood (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1994), 28-37,150-51, 166-68
12. Noel Polk, Children of the Dark House: Text and Context in Faulkner (Jackson: Univ. Press of Mississippi, 1996), 140-43
13. and Doreen Fowler, Faulkner: The Return of the Repressed (Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia, 1997), 95-127
14. See Eve Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1985)
15. Such a contention is also implicit in Byrne Fone, Homophobia: A History (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2000)
16. For a useful overview of scholarship on the history of sexuality, see Bruce R. Smith, "Premodern Sexualities: Theories and Methodologies," PMLA 115 (May 2000): 318-29
17. Jonathan Ned Katz, Love Stories: Sex between Men before Homosexuality (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2001), 338
18. Looby, "'Innocent Homosexuality,'"546
19. See David M. Halperin, How to Do the History of Homosexuality (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2002)
20. See also Randolph Trumbach, "The Birth of the Queen: Sodomy and the Emergence of Gender Equality in Modern Culture, 1660-1750," in Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, ed. Martin Duberman, Martha Vicinus, and George Chauncey (New York: Meridian, 1990), 129-40
21. Jeffrey Merrick, "Sodomitical Inclinations in Early Eighteenth-Century Paris," Eighteenth-Century Studies 30 (spring 1997): 289-95, 293
22. James M. Saslow, "Homosexuality in the Renaissance: Behavior, Identity, and Artistic Expression," in Hidden from History, ed. Duberman et al, 90-105
23. Mark D. Jordan, The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1997), 163-64
24. and George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 27
25. See Polk, Children of the Dark House, 142-43
26. On the homoerotic tension between Henry and Bon, see, for example, Duvall, Faulkner's Marginal Couple, 114-15
27. and Fowler, Faulkner, 120-21
28. A pistol does appear, however, in a parallel moment for Quentin in The Sound and the Fury, when he is similarly challenged by Dalton Ames
29. See Roberts, Faulkner and Southern Womanhood, 28
30. For an extended argument supporting the role of desire in gay and lesbian historiography, see James Creech, Closet Writing/Gay Reading: The Case of Melville's "Pierre" (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1993), especially 181-98