Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
THE SYMPATHETIC SISSY
CARSON MCCULLERS, TRUMAN CAPOTE, AND FASCINATING EFFEMINACY IN POSTWAR US LITERATURE
In a 1901 newspaper article titled "The Boyhood of Sissie," Adam Beaseley expresses affection for "the beautiful barbarism of little boys," but admits that he himself fell short of this ideal and was, instead, a "sissie," a "Sunday School monstrosity" (qtd. in Grant 835). Physically weak, timid, and often sickly, Beaseley condemns his own "mysterious mania for revery and for books" and suggests that his childhood was flawed because he was not more physically active and combative (qtd. in Grant 835). A 1902 article in Cosmopolitan magazine by a writer named Rafford Pyke declared that real men "laugh" at the sissy while women shun him because of the "moral nausea" he invokes (qtd. in Kimmel, Manhood 83). Nor was social stigma the only hardship effeminate boys faced: in the early decades of the twentieth century, they were increasingly made the targets of psychological and medical intervention designed to reduce or end their effeminacy. For example, historian Julia Grant highlights the case of Tom, a three-year-old boy who was diagnosed as a sissy in the early 1930s by both his father and clinicians at Chicago's Institute for Juvenile Research. After Tom's father's "bullying" of his own son failed to "make him more of a man," Tom was separated from his parents and "placed in a children's institution for a period of three months" in the hopes of stopping his effeminate behavior (Grant 840).
The above anecdotes are by no means unique. The discourses of boyhood and manhood that they articulate — both explicitly and implicitly — are perfectly representative of a view of American boyhood that began at the end of the nineteenth century and continued to thrive and grow in popularity in the first four decades of the twentieth century. In this view, American boys (here almost always assumed to be white and middle class) are inherently wild, rambunctious, boisterous, physically active, strong, and brave. They like playing outdoors, getting dirty, and fighting with one another. They are not interested in nice clothes, book learning, or the fine arts. They do not want to be cooped up inside, and they shun excessive displays of emotions that might make them seem vulnerable. All that boys are, naturally, is masculine. All that they shun is feminine. In fact, being a boy means shunning the feminine. Any boy who does not — or cannot — shun the feminine is, by definition, a failed or flawed boy, a sissy. This is the usual story, the story of effeminacy as threat: there are real boys and sissies. Real boys are valued and seen as natural. Sissies are pathologized and seen as a problem to be treated or cured.
But this chapter isn't about the usual story. It is about the birth of a new story, an alternative schema for assigning value to American boys. This new story is about the introduction of fascinating effeminacy into US literary fiction. This chapter examines three novels published in the 1940s in which sissy boys are valued: Carson McCullers's The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940) and The Member of the Wedding (1946), and Truman Capote's Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948). These novels rewrite dominant US cultural narratives about effeminacy by recasting it as a positive phenomenon that enlivens and enriches the standard, heteronormative world of active men and passive women, which seems grim, boring, and oppressive in contrast to fascinating effeminacy.
McCullers's sissy boy characters come to bad ends in the novels in which they appear, but she consistently portrays their diminishment and death as a communal loss. So while her sissy boys either conform to heteronormative gender roles or die, McCullers always insists that their communities are worse off for having forced change or death upon them. And in Other Voices, Other Rooms, Capote takes the time-worn adolescent male coming-of-age novel about a boy becoming a man and transforms it into the story of a boy finding both identity and power as he moves from boyhood into an adult homosexuality that Capote strongly equates with femininity. In these novels effeminacy is not lack or failure or horror or monstrosity. Instead, these novels emphasize effeminacy's ability to fascinate. Their portrayal of effeminate boys highlights what Mab Segrest, writing about McCullers several decades later, has called "vitalizing differentness" (25). That is, in these novels, effeminacy is a force that is different, but whose difference is necessary to the community's health.
This is what makes McCullers's and Capote's effeminate characters Sympathetic Sissies. For both authors, effeminacy is vital because it enlivens an otherwise dull and drab heteronormative world; it fascinates precisely because it conjures up the impossible. Effeminate boys and men bridge the barrier that is supposed to exist between the masculine and the feminine, a barrier that, according to the discourse of the dominant culture, is supposed to be ironclad and impenetrable. In embodying that which is supposed to be impossible, effeminate boys and men expand what Alan Sinfield has called "the boundaries of the plausible," the conditions of discursive possibility that form the limits of subject formation in a given culture at a given time (31). That is, the gender presentation of effeminate boys and men demonstrates that the boundaries of what is possible in selfhood are not as narrow as their observers had perhaps been brought up to believe. The novels discussed in this chapter argue that effeminate boys and men are valuable precisely because their effeminacy functions as a kind of living fantasy, one that expands the limits of what is known to be possible in terms of embodied gender presentation. This expansion can literally save lives, and, thus, these novels depict the shaming, silencing, and/or death of effeminate boys and men as a grave loss for their communities.
Now, a few words of clarification: I do not mean to suggest that the novels I discuss below suddenly brought about a wholesale revolution in US culture or that they changed the way that the majority of Americans viewed, and reacted to, effeminate boys and men. They quite clearly did not: sissy-hating is an old and robust tradition in the United States. It long pre-dates the novels discussed in this chapter and has continued to exist long, long after them. I am not telling a story of wholesale regime change here; I am not arguing that McCullers's and Capote's use of fascinating effeminacy suddenly and wholly replaced the discursive conditions of effeminacy that preceded them. Rather, what I want to suggest is that the three novels examined here form the beginnings of a minority discursive tradition in US literature, one often overshadowed by the dominant discourse of effeminacy as threat, but nevertheless existing alongside it in some form or another since 1940. So while the novels discussed here certainly did not alter mainstream perceptions of effeminacy in the United States, they did model a new representational strategy, a way of insisting that effeminate men and boys had value, possessed worth, and did not deserve cruel rebuke, physical harassment, or death simply by virtue of being effeminate.
AMERICAN BOYS: SAVAGE AND "REAL," NOT SISSY
By 1940, the year that McCullers published her first novel, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, American discourses about boys and boyhood were already deeply entrenched in a real boy/sissy binary. This binary developed out of — was, in fact, a solution to — a paradox faced by white middle-class men in the late nineteenth century.
According to historian Gail Bederman, white middle-class American men living in the later decades of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth faced a dilemma. On the one hand, popular discourses of manhood insisted that the true sign of manhood was what Bederman calls manly restraint, the ability of a man to exercise self- control and mastery over his own passions. According to Victorian-era discourses of masculinity, a white, middle-class man who achieved self- control "gained the strength, as well as the duty, to protect and direct those weaker than himself: his wife, his children, or his employees" (Bederman 12). But city life and increasingly corporatized male labor (where cooperation, rather than rugged individualism, was key, and labor was more likely to be intellectual than manual) was likely to produce too much self-restraint and make a generation of American men who were weak, innervated, and effeminate. These effeminate men would be crippled by neurasthenia — a disease that doctors do not recognize today, but which turn-of-the-century American medicine took very seriously — which made men "like an undercharged electric battery. ... lack[ing] in adequate power" (Bederman 85). The men "most in danger of developing neurasthenia were middle- and upper-class businessmen and professionals whose highly evolved bodies had been physically weakened by advances in civilization. ... civilization's demands on men's nerve force had left their body positively effeminate" (Bederman 87).
G. Stanley Hall (1844–1924), a professor of pedagogy and psychology, proposed a solution to this paradox, and it is Hall's solution that leads to the development of the real boy/sissy binary. Hall believed in the theory of recapitulation. Scientific orthodoxy at the time, recapitulation theory held that an "individual would follow the developmental path its forebearers took. ... As a child or young animal matured, it precisely repeated the evolutionary path its ancestors had taken, from the most distant protozoan upward" (Bederman 92). Hall combined recapitulation theory with the dominant racist ideology of the day, which suggested that whites and blacks were separate species, and that the white race was more evolved and civilized than any other. Thus, in Hall's model of adolescent development, young white boys passed through various stages of primitive barbarism before they became fully evolved and civilized — but not too civilized — white male adults.
To Hall, young white boys were, literally, at the same state of evolution as adult, non-white "savages," and so asking young white boys to act or be otherwise was foolish, since they were simply incapable of it. It was also dangerous, in Hall's view, to try to suppress the energy and boisterousness of the stage of childhood savagery that young white boys passed through because it was necessary that American white boys retain a measure of savage strength and vitality as they matured into civilized men. Without this reserve of savage vitality, white American boys would grow up and become weak, effeminate neurasthenics. Hall thus gave lectures and wrote newspaper columns about the dangers of female teachers smothering the primitive savagery of young white boys. He chided (female) teachers for disciplining the rowdy behavior of young boys, behavior that Hall understood to be a "reliving of primitive emotions" that functioned "as a sort of vaccination process. ... reliving their ancestors' primitivism would allow boys to carry a weakened case of 'savagery' in their systems and thus give them the primitive masculine strength to avoid neurasthenic breakdown and overcivilized effeminacy" (Bederman 97). Without social and educational systems in place to support and encourage this vaccinating period of childhood savagery, Hall feared that American white boys would become weak, effeminate American white men and that the white race would fall from its place at the top of civilization. In Hall's model of childhood development — which met with resistance early on but eventually became very popular — it was right for boys to be loud, unruly, physically active, aggressive, and competitive. Rather than trying to control or stop these behaviors, adults should encourage them.
The unspoken assumption of Hall's model is that boys who were not naturally loud, unruly, physically active, aggressive, and competitive were, by definition, a problem. The term that came to be applied, over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, to these problematic boys was, of course, "sissy." The Boy Scouts — founder Robert Baden-Powell's Scouting For Boys was published in 1908 — were just one group formed to combat these anxieties about the supposed sissification of boys and young men; the purpose of these groups was to get boys outside, to put them in nature and force them into rugged play which would ostensibly fend off the ostensibly weakening and corrupting effects of effeminacy. This real boy/sissy binary, and the value judgments inherent within it, was circulated in a variety of ways. Texts played a huge part. As Kenneth B. Kidd has shown, there was an entire industry of "boyology," in the final decades of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth, a proliferation of "descriptive and proscriptive writing on boyhood across a variety of genres" (1). These genres include what Kidd calls the "Bad Boy" book, a genre whose greatest popularity he dates from 1876, with the publication of Mark Twain's Adventures of Tom Sawyer, to about 1916, with the publication of Booth Tarkington's Penrod and Sam. These novels celebrate the real boy as a type: "the Bad Boy author declares boyhood's independence from all things feminine" (Kidd 52). Bad Boy books thus stress the complete and total separation of boys and anything deemed to be feminine. For example, Henry A. Shute's 1902 The Real Diary of a Real Boy went through sixteen editions by 1914; the story of "a rambunctious and pugilistic" eleven-year-old, the novel depicts "the model boy who obeyed his mother and exemplified Christian forbearance" as being distinctly less desirable than "the little 'tuff' who narrates the diary" (Grant 834). Shute's text and others like it reflect the fact that "boy culture. ... curbed the expression of tender, vulnerable emotions" while it simultaneously "stimulated aggression and encouraged [male] youngsters to vent their physical energy" (Rotundo 45). In other words, Bad Boy novels repeatedly make it clear that real boys are physical active, even violent, boys who relentlessly shun the feminine and, as Leslie Fiedler has famously argued, light out for the territories Huckleberry Finn–style in order to avoid the tyrannical, civilizing influence of "petticoat tyranny" (342).
The Bad Boy book was not the only genre comprising turn-of-the-century boyology. There are also the instructional handbooks of "the American pseudo-science of boy analysis that flourished in the early twentieth century," such as William Bryan Forbush's The Boy Problem (1901), and YMCA leader Henry William Gibson's 1916 book Boyology or Boy Anaylsis (Kidd 1). These texts served as "a handbook for 'boy workers,'" those adults who, though they might not be trained academics, psychologists, or doctors, nevertheless wanted to help ensure that the next generation of (white, middle-class) American boys would grow up to be appropriately masculine (Kidd 1). This genre was so voluminous that by 1916, Gibson was able to include a bibliography of 103 different "books or pamphlets 'about boys or subject analogous to boy life'" at the back of his own book on the subject (Kidd 1).
While Bad Boy books and boyology manuals waned in popularity by the 1920s, effeminate boys continued to be portrayed negatively in US culture, although they were stigmatized through slightly different means. Freudian ideas crept into discourses of childhood development during the 1920s, so that "[i]f a boy's behavior was feminine or a young girl's behavior was masculine it was [seen as] a sure sign that something had gone wrong in the child's psychosexual development, and it was feared that homosexuality might be the result" (Kimmel, Manhood 133–134). Furthermore, office jobs that required cooperation rather than rugged individualism — and which took place in offices that increasingly included women — meant that US men came to see "work itself" as "increasingly feminized" (Kimmel, Manhood 131).
And if men in the 1920s had complained about encountering women in the workplace, in the 1930s many men found that they did not have a workplace at all. During the Great Depression, widespread unemployment meant that many American men could no longer feel like successful men by way of acting as primary breadwinners for their families. US writers thinking about masculinity in the thirties — such as Dale Carnegie in his How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936) — tended to "shift attention away from external trappings of success to more internal forces, one's personality" (Kimmel, Manhood 133). Thus, in the 1930s, masculinity was "redefined away from achievement in the public sphere and reconceived as the exterior manifestation of a certain inner sense of oneself. Masculinity could be observed in specific traits and attitudes, specific behaviors and perspectives. If men expressed these attitudes, traits, and behaviors, they could be certain that they were 'real' men, regardless of their performance in the workplace. If a man failed to express these attitudes, traits, and behaviors, he was in danger of becoming a homosexual" (Kimmel, Manhood 136). Thus, by 1940, the year that McCullers publishes The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, it was accepted that the question of whether a man is masculine or not has to do not with "his performance in the workplace" but in his "attitudes, traits, and behaviors." And when it comes to the attitudes, traits, and behaviors of US boys, masculine behavior clearly meant being physically active, rowdy, rambunctious, and repulsed by anything feminine, including fancy clothing, the fine arts, book-learning, and excessive displays of emotion. Boys who did not meet this definition of boyhood were not, in fact, real boys. At the same time, much of the American medical and social scientific establishment — as well as the mass media — was busy pathologizing the sissy, characterizing his very existence as a problem to be identified, treated with various kinds of therapy, and radically altered in the name of a cure. Meanwhile, although sissy boys appear only as supporting cast characters in her 1940s fiction, McCullers was nevertheless beginning to tell another kind of story about them.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Sissy!"
by .
Copyright © 2017 the University of Alabama Press.
Excerpted by permission of The University of Alabama Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
