Cotton's Queer Relations: Same-Sex Intimacy and the Literature of the Southern Plantation, 1936-1968

4. A Queer Sense of Justice in Lillian Hellman's Dramas of the Hubbard Family

4 / A Queer Sense of Justice in Lillian Hellman’s Dramas of the Hubbard Family If the hierarchies of the southern plantation create the potential for white men of the planter class to enjoy a homosexual relationship with each other, as Faulkner’s novel and Williams’s play suggest, we might expect that the plantation’s power structures would not tolerate openly sexual relations between women because their sexual autonomy would challenge masculine authority. Although individual women relate to power differently according to the variables of race and class, it stands to reason that the subordination of all women within the meta-plantation’s networks of patriarchy and paternalism would make female homosexuality a threat to those hierarchies. However, as this chapter and the next will show, patriarchy’s heterosexist presumption that all women are heterosexual means that when women do not openly embrace or announce a queer identity or relationship in front of others, the intimacy between them tends to be perceived as nothing more than friendship and treated as nonthreatening and even unimportant. As long as masculine privilege appears to be intact, covert lesbian relations might go unrecognized and unchallenged. Lillian Hellman, Katherine Anne Porter, and Margaret Walker all explore this possibility for southern women by imagining an ambiguously, yet still powerfully queer intimacy between the plantation mistress and her black maid. These interracial partnerships, I contend , destabilize the patriarchal constructions of gender and sexuality for black and white women because of their egalitarian mutuality. Yet because these homo-relational bonds occur across the color line, the women’s racial difference also masks their relationship as a superficially 124 / the southern kitchen romance heteronormative, and thus nonthreatening, interracial friendship. As a result, these partnerships strike a delicate balance in which the women appear to enjoy a queerly personal equality that tests the limits of the meta-plantation’s power structures even as they hold back from presenting an immediate challenge to those power structures. Scholars have not adequately addressed the homoerotic dimensions of women’s interracial relationships in southern literature, though there is a strong critical base for doing so. In Black and White Women of the Old South, Minrose C. Gwin explains that “in its paradox and conflict, in its connective tissues of race, gender, and power, the relationship between black and white women in the nineteenth-century South may be seen as paradigmatic of the central ambiguity of the southern racial experience : its antipathy, bitterness, and guilt on the one hand, and its very real bonding through common suffering on the other.” Gwin examines the complexity of that southern paradigm by focusing on a number of nineteenth - and twentieth-century texts in which white women variously “beat black women, nurture them, sentimentalize them, despise them.” She also shows how black women “respond to their white sisters’ myopic vision of them in a number of ways. They run from it, they are enraged by it, they forgive it, they re-create it into more palatable forms.”1 But while she compellingly reveals how these representations of interracial contact negotiate the constructs of racial, gender, and regional identities, Gwin does not consider the ways that homoeroticism and same-sex desire may also give shape to and sustain these female partnerships. By not exploring how these black and white southern women writers might be challenging or reinforcing heterosexist paradigms, Gwin’s invaluable work fails to interrogate the constructs of southern sexual identities. Similarly, Diane Roberts and Sharon Monteith also lay important groundwork for queering the relations between white and black women in southern literature , but do not follow up on those critical possibilities. Deliberately “taking off” from where Gwin ends her study of literature about the Old South, Monteith’s attention to contemporary writing in Advancing Sisterhood? provides her with the broadest “critical spectrum” of interracial partnerships to explore. She writes: “a number of contemporary black and white women novelists reconfigure existing paradigms like those of maid and mistress, southern white child and black retainer or nurse. . . . But they also write to establish pairings that have traditionally received relatively little literary attention, like white and black lesbian lovers.”2 The parameters of Monteith’s study give her better access than Gwin and Roberts to explicitly lesbian representations in part because a queer sense of justice / 125 the feminist and gay liberation movements of the late twentieth century made it easier for women to write and publish books...