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Desiring Brotherhood
435
of Anacleto and Penderton; their camaraderie, as shown in
Penderton’s defense of Anacleto’s effeminacy, is built on their
recognition of the “unorthodox” in a world of normalcy. As a
result, these two most heterogeneous people are brought into some
sort of intimacy by their common experience of being despised and
rejected in a world of norms that they both recognize as false
morality.
In opposition to some critics who dismiss Anacleto as a
shadowy figure who plays a marginal role in the novel, I argue that
Anacleto is in fact the key to understanding McCullers’s feminist
and antinationalist project in
Reflections in a Golden Eye
.
16
Written just before the U.S. entered into the war against Japan and
asserted army control over the Pacific, the novel’s inclusion of a
made to submit to the hegemony of representation and the social and political
domination that it naturalizes. As Diamond writes, “mimesis patterns difference
into sameness” (iii). She continues: “Mimesis . . . posits a
truthful
relation
between world and word, model and copy, nature and image [.] . . . referent and
sign in which potential difference is subsumed by sameness” (iii). In other words,
mimesis proposes a “truth” which in itself is inseparable from a gender/race-
biased epistemology. In
Reflections in a Golden Eye
, Anacleto, as a victim
oppressed by hegemonic representations of gender and race, unmasks this
Platonic idealism of mimesis and indulges in a subversive mimicry of it. The
“grotesque” image that Anacleto sees reflected in the peacock’s golden eye
bespeaks his perverse desire, an excessive sexuality that refuses to be contained
by Plato’s ideal of the unity of self. Also, as a bird with brilliantly colored
feathers and showy strut, a peacock is a slang term for gays who like to dress in
fancy clothes and show them off. Anacleto, with his proud and vain air, fits
perfectly with this image of narcissistic and vainglorious peacock.
16
Regarded by Lawrence Graver as “the most pompous and disagreeable of all her
books,”
Reflections
is thereby read as “true not to the real world but to the
vagaries of abnormal psychology” (1986: 60). In such a dismissive reading,
Anacleto is never mentioned, to say nothing of further examination. Although
Jan Whitt, in “Living and Writing in the Margins” (2008), draws our attention
to various homosexual attractions in
Reflections
, she ignores Anacleto’s pivotal
role in the novel’s link of sexuality and nationalism. Gary Richards, in
Lovers
and Beloveds
(2005), has given Anacleto the critical attention he deserves. Yet his
reading of Anacleto’s sexual nonconformity is confined by the regional category
of the Southern Renaissance, which sets him apart from my take of Anacleto’s
transnational importance in the novel.