Communists, Cowboys, and Queers: The Politics of Masculinity in the Work of Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams by David Savran (review)

138 Book Reviews The other three essays - by June Schlueter (using the reception theories of IseT and Jauss), Gene Phillips (analyzing changes introduced into the first film version), and Philip Kolin (using a feminist emphasis on communality to revalue Eunice Hubbell) are decent enough essays but not particularly illuminating, the first two because they recapitulate positions that are overfamiliar, and Kolin's because, though the parallels he draws between Eunice and Blanche and his perception of Eunice as a nurturing "mother" for Stella are persuasive in themselves, his exclusive emphasis on them falsifies Eunice"s comic significance in the overall economy of the play. The provocativeness of such a reading is a clue to the value of the collection as a whole, however. Despite unevenness, it does provide escape from Streetcar criticism that, as Kolin notes, has over the years been "recycled, relooped, and stultified because it has relied on the unquestioned commonplaces of the previous generation without injecting skeptical inquiry" (x). Read in this spirit, the new anthology is a stimulating and invigorating experience. BRIAN PARKER, 1RINITY COllEGB, UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO DAVID SAVRAN. Communists, Cowboys, and Queers: The Politics of Masculinity in the Work oj Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams. Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press r992. pp. xi, 204. $t6.95 (PB). If this book indeed happened by accident, as David Savran would have us believe, then it was an accident of good fortune. Savran's book, beautifully written in a style both musical and intelligible, blends new historicist, Marxist, feminist, and queer theories in an analysis that attempts to negotiate "questions of gender and sexuality in Cold War America" (ix) with the political, hegemonic, social, and sexual writings of Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams. Using Nixon and Khrushchev's famous debate in the summer of 1959 as the prototype for all dialectical politics during the Cold War, Savran points out that the only time both men agreed on anything was in their sexist toast to "the ladies" (4). As Savran notes, "What is most remarkable about this exchange is its disclosure of a point of strategic agreement that transcends the Cold War: the politics of masculinity" (4). Though the Cold War divided the world geopolitically, it also split the body politic along gender lines. This resulting politico-sexual matrix of the I 950s, Savran says, had an immediate and lasting impression on the "two most prominent and respected figures of the postwar theater" (5). Devoting the first of three chapters 10 the Cold War works of Miller and the last two to those of Williams, Savran argues that though polarized in their brands of theatre Miller , the "exemplary intelleclUal, leftist playwright," and Williams, the "apolitical poet of passion and the flesh" (5) - both playwrights engendered the same "politics of masculinity that those Cold War archenemies, Nixon and Khrushchev, both embraced and symbolized" (6). But while "Miller's work tends to reinforce, albeit nervously and guihily, these hegemonic constructions of gender," Williams's work Book Reviews 139 challenges these same constructions by offering subtly subversive models of gender and sexuality that ... suggest a way beyond those "sex roles" that continue to ex.er~ eise a powerful hold over the American domestic imaginaire. (9) For instance, by renouncing his leftist ties and, at the end of his hearing before the House Comminee on Un-American Activities, strategically unveiling his plans to wed . Marilyn Monroe, Miller, the self-avowed communist, escaped artistic persecution. Savran believes that this deft political maneuver to align his name with the reigning American "love goddess," coupled with his refusal to «name names," succeeded in disarming the committee enough to keep Miller's name off the proverbial "list" of communist sympathizers. As in his life, then, Miller's work "posits a virtual equation between political commitment ... and masculinity" (26). Whereas Miller supported and even perpetuated the masculine politic dominant during the Cold War, attempting "tirelessly" to "police" the sexual and the political, Williams offered an urgent challenge to the stubborn antitheses between the political and the sexual, and between the public and the private, binarisms so crucial for nonnative constructions of gender during the 1940$ and t950'. (80) Williams, Savran continues, successfully destabilized the "mid-century...