The Prince Is Wearing a Tutu: Queer Identity and Identificatory Reading in Jane Hamilton's The Short History of a Prince

Reading Jane Hamilton's wonderful 1998 novel, The Short History of a Prince, I became a member of a fascinating ménage à trois. The author is an exceptionally fine writer and an heterosexual woman; her protagonist, Walter McCloud, failed ballet dancer and high school English teacher, is a gay man; I, the reader, am an English professor, a student of ballet, and a lesbian woman. We three come together in my mind by way of my identificatory reading process. I identify with both Walter and Jane, and I imagine the three of us forming a unit in which we participate in and partake of one another. How does this come to be? What psychodynamic processes transpire as I, a lesbian woman reader, identify with a gay male character and with the straight woman who has created him, and what results from this triadic mental coupling?

In this paper I take a postclassical psychoanalytic approach to the reading process to propose that identifying with characters and authors in novels is an aspect of the developmental process of identification, which in turn is central to establishing self-identity. Identifications can both confirm and expand one's sense of self, and this is one of the reasons why reading is so important to many people. And although identifying emphasizes a feeling of likeness, it becomes apparent that difference, too, can prove vital to the enterprise. If we believe, as I do, that reading is a genuine experience and not something extra—not escaping from but a part of the real world—then identificatory reading assists each of us in developing her or his own identity by expanding or altering or negotiating a sense of self.

To identify with a character in a novel is a familiar reading gesture. It is not the only way to encounter fiction, but it is a common one because it has a useful purpose. It is a process that connects the reader to the character, or to the author, or to both, as she or he is incarnated in the text. In a psychoanalytically inflected study of the reading process, Marshall Alcorn (1994) writes that readers "seek to appropriate being and status by recognizing themselves in the signification produced by the writer" (19); "we are moved by a text because we become identified with and invested in an author's ethos" (105). "Being" is another word for "identity"; Alcorn points to the idea that one way in which the reader achieves identity (and status) is through the process of identification. Both of these terms are complex enough to bear investigation, but for the moment let me assert, following Alcorn, that identity is at issue in reading, and that identity and identification are related to one another.

Here I am employing identity as an analogue for "self" or "core self": a condition based upon the idea that there is something peculiar to or distinctive about a person that is continuous, although it may undergo change across time. Today psychoanalysts and others debate whether a self is integral and consistent or overlapping and multiple, or indeed, whether it is a useful concept at all. In much contemporary psychoanalytic theory the idea of identity as composed of a series of self-organizations frequently replaces earlier essentialist notions of an indigenous self. Stephen Mitchell, for example, describes postclassical psychoanalytic views as based on "a plural or manifold organization of self, patterned around different self and object images or representations, derived from different relational contexts" (1993, 104). Although for some contemporary theorists all sense of continuity or coherence is an illusion, others...