Queer Chivalry: Medievalism and the Myth of White Masculinity in Southern Literature

6. “The Sir Walter Disease” and Queer Quests for Masculinity in Walker Percy’s Novels

138 6 “THE SIR WALTER DISEASE” AND QUEER QUESTS FOR MASCULINITY IN WALKER PERCY’S NOVELS W alker Percy’s novels share numerous key themes, including the search for love to escape solipsism and despair, the need for community in a fractured and spiritually enervated world, and the threat of malaise to undermine agency and social harmony; furthermore, much of his appeal as a writer lies in his ability to couple such grave themes with mordant irony, thus infusing a humorous streak into otherwise brooding and existential fiction.1 Medieval themes and allusions , reflecting a narrative concern for the social repercussions of glori- fied visions of knightly masculinity, also recur frequently in Percy’s novels, and these references to the past offer Percy a means to reflect on the present ills of society. Against a backdrop of southern gentility, medievalism offers his male protagonists both an escape from the pressures of modernity and alternative models of gendered identity as they quest to revitalize their lives with meaning. As in Flannery O’Connor’s fictions, spiritual Catholicism and martial chivalry collide in Percy’s constructions of southern manhood, leaving these men clinging to masculinities no longer available to them and useless for their spiritual quests. Through its eponymous recasting of the quintessential Arthurian knight as a cuckolded southern lawyer, Lancelot (1977) most obviously models the ways in which medieval conceptions of masculinity martially inspire yet spiritually confuse Percy’s protagonists, but his other novels— The Moviegoer (1960), The Last Gentleman (1966), Love in the Ruins (1970), The Second Coming (1980), and The Thanatos Syndrome (1987)—share this theme as well. This chapter begins with an analysis of Lancelot, Percy’s most extensive consideration of medieval masculinities and the harmful spiritual side effects of exalting knighthood; the analysis then moves to Percy’s first novel, The Moviegoer, next to the Will Barrett novels (The Last  139 Walker Percy’s Novels Gentleman and The Second Coming), and last to the Thomas More novels (Love in the Ruins and The Thanatos Syndrome). Throughout his oeuvre, Percy pays close attention to the ways in which the medieval past colors the U.S. South, often in terms of the gendered identities of his questing protagonists. Certainly, medieval, classical, and southern histories influenced Percy as a man and as a writer. Appropriately enough for an author who also trained as a physician, he diagnosed himself with “the Sir Walter disease”—Mark Twain’s pejorative term for the tendency of southern men to view their culture through the lens of Walter Scott’s novels. In his famed essay “Why Are You a Catholic?” Percy recalls his childhood heroworship for Scott’s vision of knightly heroism as incarnated in Richard the Lionhearted: My first hero and the hero of the South for a hundred years was Richard I of Ivanhoe, who with his English knights in the First Crusade stormed the gates of Acre to rescue the holy places from the Infidel. But, earlier than that, there was the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius. If one wished to depict the beau ideal of the South, it would not be the crucified Christ but rather the stoic knight at parade rest, both hands folded on the hilt of his broadsword, his face as grave and impassive as the Emperor’s. In the South, of course, he came to be, not the Emperor or Richard, but R. E. Lee, the two in one. Bad though much of Southern romanticism may be, with Christianity and Judaism and Roman valor seen through the eyes of Sir Walter Scott, how could it have been otherwise with me?2 Rebuking southern romanticism for its replacement of Christ with the martial and imperial figures of medieval knights and Roman emperors, Percy centers his literature around this spiritual malaise of the U.S. South, and central to this project is his examination of how medieval ideals and “the Sir Walter disease” inhibit the development of spiritual and social maturity. Percy criticizes Scott’s heroic and medieval masculinities by depicting his characters following knightly perfection as their ideal gender performance yet failing to achieve its promises. In complementary contrast, the Queer Chivalry 140 writings of such medieval authors as Augustine, Dante, and Chaucer espouse a view of gender in which sexual lapses remind humanity of its sinful nature and thus encourage penance. In his tongue-in-cheek self-help book Lost in the...