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  • The Wayward Bus:Steinbeck and Queer America
  • Kim Welter (bio)

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Figure 1.

Dan Dailey and Jayne Mansfield in The Wayward Bus (1957), Directed by Victor Vicas

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Divorce a Text from its political, historical and biographical realm and you separate what a text means from how it means. This is what has happened to John Steinbeck's The Wayward Bus. The critical reception of The Wayward Bus indicates that readers have failed to see the relationship between the text and other contemporary texts and context sources. By bringing the context of the post World War II years in which The Wayward Bus was written into a close reading of the text, I will demonstrate the intertextuality that provides a way to talk about this text and how it comes to have meaning. I will reconnect The Wayward Bus with other contemporary texts, all of which were originally connected for Steinbeck, who was unable to divorce his texts from politics.

Using Queer Theory and the context of Steinbeck's world, I will unghost the lesbian characters in The Wayward Bus. Personal identification was the inspiration for analyzing the identities of Steinbeck's women pilgrims, lesbians in their desires if not through genital sex. Further, the analysis of context also demonstrates how this little known novel comes to have meaning. In The Wayward Bus, Steinbeck has provided the reader with a fascinating series of character sketches, complete with innermost desires described for the reader. By analyzing the desires articulated by Mildred, Camille, and Norma, Steinbeck postulates a variety of ways that women deal with same-sex desire. Without regard for the political, historical, and biographical aspects of Steinbeck's life, critics and scholars have ignored The Wayward Bus and the desires it articulates. [End Page 67]

Doing a Queer Theory reading of John Steinbeck's work, particularly a reading of lesbian characters seems a dubious undertaking, considering the preponderance of heterosexual male characters in most of his work. However, Steinbeck's biographer, Jackson Benson, tells us that many of Steinbeck's friends were artists who have either come out of the closet in recent years, or been outed by other writers.

Steinbeck's 1947 novel The Wayward Bus is filled with characters that perform their sexual identities and lay bare their intimate sexual desires in a variety of ways. Applying ideas from Judith Halberstam's book Female Masculinity offers insight into how society views a masculine woman like Mildred Pritchard and her college physical education instructor. Halberstam also offers three physical archetypes for lesbians that Steinbeck seems to have considered as well. The first archetype, like Mildred, is masculine in appearance; the second, like Camille, is very feminine; and the third, like Norma, is unattractive in general. Additionally, when considering Camille Oaks, Katherine Liepe-Levinson's essay "Striptease: Desire, Mimetic Jeopardy, and Performing Spectators" is about, among other things, how striptease can be a way for white, middle-class women to make their personal and political spheres "strange" (queer?). That no one seems to be noticing these aspects of The Wayward Bus can be attributed to its relative obscurity in part, but may also be attributed to the difficulty heterosexuals have in reading queer identities and to what Terry Castle calls the ghosting of lesbian characters in general.

As much as some critics object to Lillian Faderman's inclination to believe many woman-loving-woman relationships do not include genital sex, her ideas do apply to many of the characters in The Wayward Bus. Like Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's description of homosocial behavior among men, Faderman's ideas represent homosocial behavior among women, like Camille, Lorraine, and Norma.

As a middle-class white woman who ignored my own lesbianism for more than half my adult life, I immediately connected with both Mildred Pierce and Norma. That I recognized in them my own experience makes me a reader who may not be typical for The Wayward Bus. My own personal experience as a lesbian who spent many years attempting to prove otherwise lends the events in this novel credibility that other readers may not grant it. [End Page 68]

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