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us to the more disturbing aspects of American invasions into the
international sphere. While Bronski’s comment on the novel’s
focus on deviant desire is astute, further extending his discerning
observation and linking McCullers’s challenge of hegemonic
gender models to her political critique of U.S. military aggression
are my major concerns of this paper.
Reflections in a Golden Eye
, I
argue, is a complex exploration of how political and national
identities are constructed around and shored up by particular
sexual identities. My primary questions are as follows: What
purposes does the theme of sexual deviation serve for McCullers at
the very time when the United States was taking on the role of
global hegemon? Why were standards of sexual normality and
deviation pivotal in the construction of respectability and national
identity? How can the novel’s preoccupation with antisocial
jouissance
enable a critique of a nationalist identity based on the
sovereign and masculinist notion of self?
In her groundbreaking book
The Anarchy of Empire in the
Making of U. S. Culture
(2002), Amy Kaplan reveals how American
overseas expansion, as demonstrated in the war with Mexico in the
mid-nineteenth century and later wars against Spain, Cuba, and the
Philippines, influences domestic issues such as segregation, the
ideology of womanhood or domesticity, and the gender ideals of
manhood. She argues that a conventional understanding of
American identity as separate from imperial crimes abroad has
been illusory and an attempt to draw a firm line demarcating the
domestic and the foreign self-debunking. McCullers could not
agree with Kaplan more; throughout her life, the writer had
intimate experiences with the U.S. Army, which attuned her to the
geopolitical significance of the U.S. military expansion, its global
deployment, territorial acquisitions, and impact on domestic affairs.
Spending much of her youth taking piano lessons from Mary
Tucker, an officer’s wife at Fort Benning, McCullers had a
longstanding interaction with members of the U.S. armed forces
and their families. In 1937, she married Reeves McCullers, a Fort