Hipatia Argüero Mendoza

305671169
Historia literaria VII

The unnamable desires: silence and homosexual desire in Sherwood Anderson’s

“Queer” and Gertrude Stein’s “The Good Anna”

Neither Anderson’s nor Stein’s stories directly address homosexuality or homosexual

desire. It would be too farfetched to state that they do, that they are about

homosexuality. It is in this sense that I open this conference with the notion of

inwardness.

The desire I make reference to in this talk is between-the-lines. It is a feeling

that can be frequently found in the literature from this period, a sort of itch coming

from a skin that doesn’t quite fit and is unable to fully adapt to the surroundings. This

can be read in short stories such as Willa Cather’s “Neighbor Rosicky” and Carson

McCuller’s “Ballad of the Sad Café”. These stories are mentioned because they are

good examples of the ‘American’ sense of nonbelonging. These are written portrayals

of a particular itch that arises from a fractured identity, whether from the lack of a

single national identity or from the incapability of expressing a single, defined, sexual

identity. These are the freaks of American literature; they portray the grotesque and

the strangeness of a changing nation unable to define itself.

I pose that there is an underlying homosexual reading of Sherwood

Anderson’s and Gertrude Stein’s stories in which the main characters inwardly suffer

sexual attraction towards a same-sex character. In “Queer” the main character, Elmer

Cowley, forces his frustrations and unnamable feelings into George Willard, an

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unaware quite . The final outlet of Cowley’s frustration about being considered

‘queer’ by the people around him is violent physical contact. The violence with which

Cowley expresses his anger and desire is a reaction towards the incapability of clearly

uttering the thoughts that bother him. Almost everything in “Queer” is expressed

inwardly, that is, there is a serious lack of eloquence in the main character who has

virtually no one to talk to but himself. The few words that he manages to utter are in

fact very inarticulate, almost cryptic.

In “The Good Anna” there is also a very interesting relationship between

same-sex characters. Anna and Mrs. Lehntman are good friends but the words

involved in the description of the relationship and, particularly, of how Anna

perceived this relationship to be, enable a somewhat homoerotic reading.

Anna’s character is unable to verbalize the things that bother her about Mrs.

Lehtman and suffers in silence. In this case, the good Anna directs her anger and

frustrations to other people whom she blatantly scolds. When she is finally able to

express her opinion about Mrs. Lehntman’s carelessness the relationship starts to

whither.

Finally the narrator states how Anna doesn’t want to talk about her experience with

Mrs. Lehntman: “She could never lay bare the wound that came to her through this

idealised affection. Her affair with Mrs. Lehntman was too sacred and too grievous

ever to be told.” (149) In this sense it is possible to state that in both stories

homosexual desire has a silent nature that encourages violent or painful inward

reactions. This serves as a good example of how same-sex relationships that go

beyond friendship, “The widow Mrs. Lehntman was the romance in Anna’s life.”

(Stein), stay shut between the character’s mind and their lips. Of course, Anna’s

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reason to keep her feelings a secret are less revealing of an inner uneasiness, but they

are a good illustration of the silence that comes with queer emotions.

Elmer Cowley is a strange boy, no one can argue that. But his strangeness is

perceived both narratively and fictionally only through himself. We do not get an

external characterization of him, except for –perhaps- George Willard’s interest to

befriend the weird young man. No. Elmer Cowley is a self-defined freak, an outsider

by choice (a very paranoid choice actually, but still). The narrative structure is built so

that Elmer’s frustration is both understood and doubted; it is written in a way that

allows the reader to penetrate the mind of this somewhat disturbed boy and see

through his eyes. Cowley’s perspective as narrator is first represented by the dirty

window he looks through:

“Elmer Cowley, the junior member of the firm, could see through a dirty

window into the printshop of the Winesburg Eagle.”(Anderson)

This “dirty window” represents a perceptual filter, an altered view that sees

things through dirt, always seeing a distorted image. In this sense Cowley is stuck

inside his own head, trapped by the windows of his perception. This is achieved quite

interestingly through the narrative voice, for it is stays closer to Cowley than a normal

third person narrator.

From Cowley’s standpoint everyone thinks he is queer. Queer. A word with a

thousand synonyms. Just in this talk I have mentioned at least two: freak and weird.

But we have many more: bizarre, odd, abnormal, strange, deviated, etc. Of course,

one could argue that there is no such thing as synonyms and I agree. Words have

layers and added meanings, they have a tail: they en-tail more than they mean. And

this is precisely the main point I want to address.

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 The word ‘queer’, put into inverted commas in Anderson’s story, is a very

particular, very important word. Perhaps ‘queer’s tail has steroidly grown in the last

fifty years, but this growth was fast and specific for a reason. It may be naïve to

subscribe to the most obvious and contemporary reading of the word ‘queer’, but it

may be just as naïve to avoid it. It is a fact that this type of word –now the flag of a

whole social and intellectual movement- is dangerous to read; it is a word that

requires context.

The multiple meanings one can extract from a word such as queer reveal an

intention to establish certain ambiguity. Queer means everything and nothing. Just as

the Cowley & Son, the store that: “sold everything and nothing” (Anderson). This

whirl of meaning is there for us to take advantage, to savor, both as readers and as

academics. Perhaps the historical context of the word queer, used in the sense that we

now know and support, would suggest an anachronistic reading on my part but I

believe that desire, specifically homosexual desire, doesn’t have to be explicitly

spelled out to be an overwhelming presence in this story about struggling with self-

imposed identity. If a reader can interpret this (within the limits of intepretation, of

course), then why not do it?

In Race, manhood, and modernism in America: the short story cycles of

Sherwood Anderson and Jean Toomer Mark Whalan says that: “Any account of

Winesburg, Ohio’s engagement with the gender politics of the 1910s must recognize

the centrality of homosexuality to this engagement, particularly in light of the new

forms that gay culture was taking in America’s urban centers in the early twentieth

century.” (39)

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This is particularly evident in ‘Queer’ when the narrative voice ever-so-briefly stops

to penetrate the mind of George Willard: “Elmer Cowley could not have believed that

George Willard had also his days of unhappiness, that vague hungers and secret

unnamable desires visited also his mind.” (Anderson) In this fragment there is a

powerful reference both to “a secret hunger”, that is, sexual craving for something

which is not the norm, and to the impossibility of expressing out loud, through an

actual voice, these desires.

Literary works like the ones I mentioned at the beginning of this talk are

evidence of a need to make the marginal noticeable, to bring forward the freaks that

build America, to give these different subjectivities a voice. This is, of course, not

only with respect to a homosexual literary subjectivity but also regarding gender,

race, origin, ethnicity, etc. What’s interesting about this stories is precisely that it

manages to portray how this voice is a hushed voice, an inner struggle first, and an

outer fight later.

Quotes, in case there is time:

“He wrote suggestively of the homoeroticism of male frienships, yet
simultaneously disavowed any homosexual subtext to the nature of such a
relationships; he wrote to his friend Roger Sergel that “[a] man, to be my friend, must
attract me physically, not as a woman does, in a special way. We modern men are
afraid of facing that fact” (Letters 325). This type of simultaneous encouragement and
disavowal of same-sex desire was important to Anderson as a way of escaping the
constricting regulation of “homosexual panic”. (Whalan 45)
As Simloke has remarked, the story shows how Anderson “exploits the human fears
regarding sexuality and social identity, as well as the tendency to blame others for
those fears” (29) (46)

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Bibliography

Connell, R. W. A Very Straight Gay: Masculinity, Homosexual Experience, and the

Dynamics of Gender. American Sociological Review. Vol. 57, No. 6 (Dec.,
1992), pp. 735-751
Giffney, Noreen, Michael O'Rourke. The Ashgate Research Companion to Queer
Theory. Surrey: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd., 2009
Hovey, Jaime. A thousand words: portraiture, style, and queer modernism. Ohio State
University Press, 2006.
Lubar, Robert S. “Unmasking Pablo's Gertrude: Queer Desire and the Subject of
Portraiture”. The Art Bulletin. Vol. 79, No. 1 (Mar., 1997), pp. 56-84.

Whalan, Mark. Race, manhood, and modernism in America: the short story cycles of
Sherwood Anderson and Jean Toomer. Knoxville: The University of
Tennessee Press, 2007.