434 / 450
434
E
UR
A
MERICA
in the novel whenever Penderton obtains a clearer insight into his
self and the reality that surrounds him. Naked in raw emotion, he
is compared to a “broken doll” after his sadomasochistic
experience with Firebird (McCullers, 2001c: 355). Literalizing the
fears and fantasies of life-in-death and death-in-life, the doll is a
quintessential epitome of the uncanny. Caught in an uncanny place
between life and death, it unsettles the boundaries necessary for the
establishment of order, convention, and categories. Moreover, a
doll carries a powerful connotation of femininity and impotence.
By identifying with the doll in its “grotesque” form, Penderton
challenges the military’s claims to gender normalcy and its
promotion of a paradigmatic masculinity based on virility,
belligerence, and heroism. The distorted, broken image of the doll
also upsets the logic and integrity of the “normal” body. In other
words, Penderton’s identification with the doll establishes a
resistant, disidentificatory form of identity.
In fact, the “golden eye” of the novel’s title belongs to a
peacock. Frightened by a premonition that she is dying, Alison is
sleepless and stirs the peace of her devoted houseboy Anacleto,
who decides to take his painting and to sit up with the sick woman.
Throwing his unfinished painting into the burning fireplace,
Anacleto stares at the embers of the fire and gushes: “‘A peacock of
a sort of ghastly green. With one immense golden eye. And in it
these reflections of something tiny and
—
’. . . ‘Grotesque,’ [Alison]
finished for him” (McCullers, 2001c: 366). This “grotesque”
reflection from a peacock’s golden eye is Anacleto’s self-reflection,
which is not unlike the “distorted” doll image that Penderton sees
as his soul-image. Anti-mimetic and anti-essentialist, this grotesque
reflection, as Gleeson-White puts it, “suggests a kaleidoscopic
fluidity and excess, beyond stagnant self-identity” (Gleeson-White,
2003: 56).
15
In other words, the grotesque is the shared attribute
15
In
Unmaking Mimesis
(1997), Elin Diamond, influenced by Derrida and Irigaray,
critiques the phallogocentric tendency in the Platonic model of mimesis or
representation. Mimesis occurs in the process of reflection in which difference is