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specific colonial appropriation; the texts of the master become the
site of hybridity. It is in this sense that the hegemonic discourse
loses its representational authority.
Furthermore, Anacleto, as a queer rebel of color, incites
Alison’s dreams of escaping from heterosexual marriage and of
leading a romantic life at sea. Here McCullers challenges American
society’s insistence on the inviolable sanctity of heterosexual
marriage by imagining an alternative queer lifestyle composed of a
woman and her doted servant. Her critique of heteropatriarchy is
also shown in her depiction of a carefree Alison before she marries
Langdon. Once a schoolteacher in Vermont, Alison lived happily
with her cats and dogs. Independent and self-sufficient, she served
herself hot chili, tea, and zwieback, and chopped her own wood
(McCullers, 2001c: 362-363). In a society of what Adrienne Rich
termed compulsory heterosexuality, Alison has no choice but to
submit to marriage, which, as McCullers acutely points out, ends
her happy days and renders her psychologically and physically
invalid.
17
In conclusion,
The Reflections in a Golden Eye
is not merely a
grotesque domestic drama; it is also not simply a circumscribed
vision of a human life bordering on abnormal psychology. On the
contrary, McCullers wants to engage nonheteronormative racial
and gender formations as the site of ruptures, critiques, and
alternatives of imperial manhood. As I have argued, sexuality and
national identity cannot be treated as discrete and autonomous
entities; the formation of sexual, gendered, racial, and class
identities have intimate relations with the formation of national
identities, and vice-versa. By rewriting the region within the
imperial framework, McCullers exposes regionalism’s hidden ties
to global politics. As shown in Penderton’s queer camaraderie with
Anacleto in their disclosure of the grandiose illusions of normalcy
as forms of oppression and McCullers’s unfavorable depiction of
17
See Rich’s “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence” (1993).