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frivolous young woman who takes in many lovers. Her current
lover is Major Morris Langdon, who lives with his neurasthenic
wife, Alison, and her Filipino houseboy, Anacleto, near the
Pendertons. The novel is written in clean, sparse prose and
narrated from an impersonal point of view. The opening few
sentences establish the tale’s austere setting in a repressive mood:
“An Army Post in peacetime is a dull place. Things happen, but
then they happen over and over again” (McCullers, 2001c: 309).
The military quarters are built on the principle of strict discipline
and uniform repetitiveness: “the huge concrete barracks, the neat
rows of officers’ homes built one precisely like the other, the gym,
the chapel, the golf course and the swimming pools
—
all is
designed according to a certain rigid pattern” (309). Words such as
“dull,” “monotony,” and “insularity” accentuate the dismal and
stifling mood of this isolated environment. Military service
demands regularity and conformity, “for once a man enters the
army he is expected only to follow the heels ahead of him” (309).
Yet irregular or extraordinary things “do occasionally happen on
an army post that are not likely to re-occur” (309). The savvy
narrator continues in her cold, detached manner: “There is a fort
in the South where a few years ago a murder was committed. The
participants of this tragedy were: two officers, a soldier, two
women, a Filipino, and a horse” (309).
According to Michael Bronski, McCullers engages with the
sexually intrepid topics of “homosexuality, sadism, voyeurism, and
fetishism [while exploring] the boundaries of eroticism, outsider
status, and the fragility of ‘normal’ in
Reflections in a Golden Eye
”
(Bronski, 2003: 339). These are, of course, pertinent descriptions
of the novel, but they fail to take into account the novel’s
worldwide implications, particularly McCullers’s critique of the
U.S. Army, its promotion of hegemonic masculinity, and its
colonialism at home and abroad. One of the essential clues to the
author’s awareness of the imperialist expansion of U.S. global
power is the strange presence of the Filipino houseboy, who alerts