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Together with Alison’s Filipino servant Anacleto, they like to go to
concerts together. In fact, the trio bases their friendship on the
sharing of their marginalized status in the Army.
8
As a product of
imperial conquest and colonial subjugation, Anacleto was brought
back to the States from the Philippines seven years earlier.
Remembering the time when the 17-year-old Anacleto first came to
their household, Alison notes that his sissiness had made him a
victim of bullying: “He was so tormented by the other houseboys
that he dogged her footsteps all day long” (346). The dandified
Anacleto walks “with grace and composure” and dresses in
“sandals, soft gray trousers, and a blouse of aquamarine linen”
(332). He loves feminine trinkets, fusses over minute household
details, imitates the moves of a ballet dancer, has great talent in
painting, and likes to intersperse his conversation with fancy
French. As Alison’s constant companion, Anacleto gradually
becomes her double. According to Major Langdon’s observation of
this pair, he always feels “rather eerie” when “listen[ing] to them
talking together in the quiet room. Their voices and enunciation
were so precisely alike that they seemed to be softly echoing each
other” (335). In the household of the Langdons, Anacleto is
constantly bullied by his master with the threat of military service:
“God! You’re a rare bird! What I wouldn’t do if I could get you in
my battalion!” (333). However, Anacleto takes pride in his gender
nonconformity. Adoring his mistress and thinking her perfect,
Anacleto opines that “the Lord had blundered grossly in the
making of everyone except himself and Madame Alison”
(333-334).
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, sexology
became a new field of science that examined and categorized
8
We can read this trio as a queer defiance against the Oedipal triangle of
“mommy-daddy-me.” It instantiates an interracial intimacy and an alternative
form of sociality that does not conduce to Oedipal reproductivity. Another queer
triangle that recurs throughout the novel is composed of Anacleto, Alison and
her dead infant Catherine.