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artistic vision. However, I argue that it is precisely this focus on
morbidity or negative transcendence that sets McCullers apart
from other ordinary writers. She forces us to rethink a range of
“morbid” affects such as masochism, pain, and failure. How can we
imagine an identity that is not defined in terms of a humanist
framework: a self-activating, voluntaristic, coherent, sovereign
subject supposed to know and be in control? Can we allow for a
different organization of subjectivity that is not based on mastery
and a normative imagination of pleasure, gender, and sexuality? In
what follows, I propose that McCullers’s focus on “morbidity”
offers up a critique of the phallogocentric logic of agency and
subjectivity itself, and this repudiation of masculine positivism
becomes all the more suited for diagnosing the character of an
American empire.
The most fascinating and complicated character in the novel
is Captain Penderton, who, as a closeted gay man, has a “sad
penchant for becoming enamoured of his wife’s lovers” (McCullers,
2001c: 314). McCullers writes of his attraction to Leonora’s lover,
Major Morris Langdon, in the following way:
Indeed [Captain Penderton’s] torment had been a rather
special one, as he was just as jealous of his wife as he was
of her love. In the last year he had come to feel an
emotional regard for the Major that was the nearest thing
to love that he had ever known. More than anything else
he longed to distinguish himself in the eyes of this man.
(327)
In this strange triangle, Penderton seems to be more interested in
the Major than in his own wife. Unlike typical men who cannot
tolerate their wives’ faithlessness, he is described as “carry[ing] his
cuckoldry with a cynical good grace that was respected on the
post” (327). In “The Flowering Dream: Notes on Writing,” an
essay published in 1959, McCullers declares that Penderton’s
homosexuality “is . . . a symbol . . . of handicap and impotence”
(McCullers, 2005:
276). At first glance, McCullers’s association of