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of morbidity when it was published in 1941.
4
Originally entitled
“Army Post,” the novel takes place on a military base in Georgia
and centers on Captain Weldon Penderton’s obsession with Private
Ellegee Williams, a pagan beauty who has “the strange, rapt face of
a Gauguin primitive” (McCullers, 2001c: 338). As a
quintessentially male arena, the Army offers a fraternal ambience
that is congenial to the cultivation of a warrior’s psyche fortified
with authority and respect, and to the promotion of the
brotherhood between men. Brave, noble, manly men form a kind
of kinship, united in devotion to their military calling. Hence the
title of my paper “desiring brotherhood” indicates such a yearning
for the male ideal of military life that supposedly needs to keep
femininity and homosexuality at bay; even so, this kind of male
bonding is not without ambivalence or perversion. As
psychoanalysis and sexuality studies inform us, the nature of desire
itself remains radically indeterminate. Despite the regulatory
pressures that aim at subduing sexual feelings and expressions, they
continue to emerge in unpredictable forms that reveal their
subversive force. The powerful communal feelings passing between
men can become charged with homoeroticism, escaping rigid
categorization and containment.
Therefore, the desire to conform to the dominant form of
masculinity carries within it the seeds of its destruction and the
possibility of transgression. As a brave and provocative novel,
Reflections in a Golden Eye
refuses to view the army post from a
single perspective and endeavors to lay bare what otherwise
remains occluded. Exposing the fault lines of masculinity,
patriotism and empire, McCullers resists conforming to traditional
belief systems, whether they be doctrines of the military, the
nation-state, subjectivity, or sexuality. In the novel, the protagonist
Captain Penderton is a closeted gay man; his wife Leonora is a
4
See Virginia Spencer Carr’s discussion of McCullers’s contemporary reviews of
her second novel in
Understanding Carson McCullers
(1990: 50-51).