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8. Gender and Costume
- University of Georgia Press
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CHAPTEREIGHT GENDERANDCOSTUME 154 As the Princess lies dead in the glimmering water, her protective costume slowly floats away: “the waves lipped back and forth over her heavy robes and the cold inert jewels . . . until softly, oh, softly they were loosened.” Finally her body is uncovered, as it was before she undertook her sartorial arts. The people come to view her corpse, “naked and glistening” in the water, and find her satisfyingly diminished. “‘Ah, do you see!’ cried one of the women, in a voice cold with spite. ‘She was not so mysterious! She was like the rest of us, simply a woman, after all!’”1 Without her art, the self-creation of her bejeweled armor, the Princess is neither a heretic nor an enchantress, merely a woman. Costume allowed the Princess, for a time, to fend off traditional female roles, giving her freedom hitherto unknown to the women in her culture. However, this final image of her dead and naked suggests that her womanhood, although briefly avoidable, was always fundamental—an inescapable fact of body, not a flexible medium of action or dress. This interest in the relations of costume and sexual identity, and accompanying inquiry into gender as performance versus fact, appears elsewhere in Katherine Anne Porter’s fiction and joins her to many of her contemporaries who investigated similar subject matter. In two of her lengthier works from the 1930s, “Hacienda” and “Pale Horse, Pale Rider,” and in several of her essays, both published and unpublished, Porter’s gender-thinking engages in questions of the relations of tradition and social order to artistic and sexual experimentation , questions central to other modernist writers. As many critics have made evident, a “crisis in gender identification underlies much modernist literature.” Clothing, or costume, was a central sign in this discourse.2 Sandra Gilbert, for example, concludes in an early essay, “Costumes of the Mind: Transvestism as Metaphor in Modern Literature,” that male modernists “oppose[d] costume G E N D E R A N D C O S T U M E ~ 155 (seen as false or artificial) to nakedness (which is true, ‘natural’).”3 Connecting social disorder and decay to the breakdown of traditional heterosexual roles, they represented their anxieties in imagery of bodily corruption, “perverse” sexuality, or transvestism. By contrast, as Gilbert argues in a later study coauthored with Susan Gubar, “The feminist counterparts of these men . . . not only regarded all clothing as costume, they also defined all costume as problematic. In fact, to most of these writers the supposedly fundamental sexual self was itself merely another costume.”4 Although Porter’s gender-thinking reveals no such clearcut division of thought, she did actively explore questions of social disorder and sexuality, particularly homosexuality, and joined her contemporaries in drawing on costume as a key metaphor for analyzing questions of gender as performance or reality. Is gender “a stable identity or locus of agency” or, drawing here on the arguments of Judith Butler, “an identity constituted in time . . . through a stylized repetition of acts”?5 As recent gender theory demonstrates, gay or “queer” cultural practices continue to provide an avenue for exploring the construction of sexual identity, as they did for Porter. Butler, for example, asserts, “In imitating gender, drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself.”6 In her inquiries, Porter often held opposing viewpoints in tension or moved from one to another in different written works. At times she was intensely homophobic, yet in her revised “Hacienda” she briefly presents female homosexuality as a potential means of liberation from heterosexual confines. In her criticism and letters, she several times attacked individual gay and lesbian writers, presenting their sexual preferences as both symptom and symbol of disorder, and in general her views on sexual roles grew more conservative and hard edged as she left the twenties and thirties behind. Yet from the 1930s almost until her death, she sustained a close friendship with the literary couple Glenway Wescott and Monroe Wheeler and clearly enjoyed their ironic play with gender identity. Through them she met the gay photographer George Platt Lynes, for whom she posed numerous times in grand, arguably campy style. In short, her creative exploration of sexual identity, especially through the then common metaphors of costume and performance, reveals gender-thinking that is wide ranging and contradictory. Attention to sexual identity and costume recurs in Porter’s literary criticism. Her unpublished papers include brief critical attacks on writers...