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Desiring Brotherhood
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impressions; when he was near the soldier he found
himself unable to see or to hear properly, and it was only
after he had ridden away and was alone again that the
scene developed itself for the first time in his mind. The
thought of the young man’s face
—
the dumb eyes, the
heavy sensual lips that were often wet, the childish
page-boy bangs
—
this image was intolerable to him.
(McCullers, 2001c: 370)
This attraction is indeed fatal. When Penderton finds out that the
person who sneaks into Leonora’s bedroom to worship her while
she sleeps is Williams himself, he murders him: “The Captain was a
good marksman, and although he shot twice only one raw hole was
left in the center of the soldier’s chest” (393). Penetrating the
soldier’s body with his bullets, Penderton symbolically gratifies his
sexual desire, which in real life can only exist in an unrequited form.
It is commonly held that the Army builds men. The linkage
between manhood and military service has rarely been challenged,
even across cultures. The military’s vast production of cultural
propaganda hinges on the promotion of patriotic brotherhood and
ideals of hegemonic masculinity. Desiring this cultural imagery put
forth by the U.S. military, young men yearn for the chances to join
the Army and to develop its version of “soldiering masculinity”
that involves them testing and proving themselves.
13
Nevertheless,
queer theorists have informed us that normalization takes a lot of
effort to shore up and, in that effort, fissures and ambivalences lead
desires into unexpected terrains. In other words, lurking behind the
patriotic ideal of desiring brotherhood is the disavowed knowledge
of homosexuality; the idealized and sanitized fraternity turns out to
be haunted by varieties of alternative desires. In
Reflections in a
Golden Eye
, McCullers lays bare the tensions and ambivalence that
are inherent in the reification of manhood; the Army becomes a
grotesque site of alternative masculinities and seething homoe-
13
For the gendered seduction of military masculinity, see Melissa T. Brown’s
Enlisting Masculinity
(2012).