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Conclusion: On the Southern Plantation, Real Love Is Always Ambivalent Since I began working on this project, I have become attuned to the surprising frequency with which references to the southern plantation turn up in all kinds of contemporary literary and cultural texts, even ones that otherwise have nothing to do with the plantation, or slavery, or the South, or even the issue of race. These references raise interesting questions about why the plantation myth is still so viable in the twenty-first century, and what kinds of politics are at stake in the many different uses of that myth. Some critics have explored the plantation myth’s ongoing influence by looking at such phenomena as plantation tours and Gone with the Wind fandom.1 But I am curious about the almost casual way that the image of the plantation appears in conjunction with narratives about queer relations and identities. Homoeroticism and homosexuality are explicit concerns in two major works of plantation fiction published in 2003: Valerie Martin’s Property and Edward P. Jones’s The Known World. In this conclusion, however, instead of offering lengthy analyses of these novels, I examine a handful of shorter narratives about the plantation in recent literature and popular culture (indeed, some are little more than passing references to the plantation) to consider how my arguments about the literature of the mid-twentieth century might help us better understand the enduring connections between sexuality, power, and plantation mythologies in the present. In a 1999 episode of the cartoon sitcom King of the Hill, titled “A Beer Can Named Desire,” Hank Hill and his family spend time at the ancestral Louisiana plantation of their friend Bill Dauterive.2 Stiflingly hot and conclusion / 235 overgrown with Spanish moss and gloomy cypresses, the gothic nature of the setting pales in comparison to the campy, gothic story that ensues. As the show’s official Web site tells us, “Even more impressive are Bill’s relatives, three young, beautiful women, all widowed by Bill’s cousins and all desperate to hook up with Bill—the last eligible Dauterive man (except for Jean Robert, but he’s not too interested in women).”3 Openly gay, flamboyantly dressed, and languishing with a kind of wilted masculinity (he also speaks his name with the French pronunciation, adding to the effete quality of his character), Jean Robert’s unavailability makes the three widowed cousins turn their affections to Bill in an attempt to secure the inheritance of the plantation for themselves. Adding to the mood of camp morbidity, one of them even tries to seduce him in the plantation cemetery. Much to Bill’s disappointment, however, one of the three women is a cousin by blood rather than marriage, and since he doesn’t know who she is, he has to avoid sleeping with any of them in order to keep from committing incest. The sexual frustration tops even the heat of the plantation, and the entire Dauterive clan is doomed to extinction because normative heterosexual relations remain an aching impossibility. This episode of King of the Hill clearly plays on stereotypes by exaggerating aspects of the work of Tennessee Williams and, in some ways, Williams’s own persona. The 2002 romantic comedy Sweet Home Alabama tries to challenge those kinds of stereotypes, but still openly associates the plantation with homosexuality. About halfway into the film, Melanie Smooter tracks down her good friend Bobby Ray to apologize for outing him the night before, and she finds him at the town’s restored plantation home—the Carmichael Plantation—even though the plot fails to explain adequately why he’s there in the first place. Melanie outs Bobby Ray because the snobbish affectations she has picked up in New York City alienate her from her former friends. Caught in a vulnerable moment when it seems they all hate her, she exposes Bobby Ray’s secret to divert attention away from herself, as she confesses in her apology: “I guess I figured if I was pointing to you, then no one would see through me.” Melanie has adopted the last name Carmichael in New York to capitalize on the glamour of an aristocratic background and heighten the mystique of her new identity. Yet, like Bobby Ray, she is not actually a member of the Carmichael family. For this reason, the plantation becomes the necessary site for these characters’ reconciliation even if the movie’s plot fails to justify their presence there. Couched in the setting that...

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