Returning to Between Men, finding it a more brilliant and useful book than last time, particularly in its articulation of how male/male bonds work to uphold the social. Reading Shakespeare's sonnets, Sedgwick observes in the sonnets a volatile difference between male/male and male/female relationships: “Differently put, for a man to undergo even a humiliating change in the course of a relationship with a man still feels like preserving or participating in a sum of male power, while for a man to undergo any change in the course of a relationship with a woman feels like a radical degeneration of substance” (45). Call me crazy, call me Ishmael, but this dynamic is at work in conspiracy-themed texts, from Libra (Oswald and Everett flee domesticity), to Resuscitation of a Hanged Man (English flees Leanora), to The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Oscar feels dissipated by women, but renewed by the life-struggle against the fúku; okay, there’s difference there, since Oscar frequently imagines saving the woman), to The Crying of Lot 49, where Oedipa sows dissolution and chaos everywhere she goes. Larger point: male-male relationships in the conspiracy paradigm are (relatively) stable; in these texts, when women enter them, things quickly become less stable.
Questions, then: what historical circumstances make domesticity fraught with peril during the postwar period? The charged state of gender relations, the destabilizing force of shifting economic conditions, the establishment of the suburban nuclear family as paradigmatic, the decreasing dislocation of said family from community and government.
No comments:
Post a Comment