Homo Americanus: Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, and Queer Masculinities (review)

John Bak's Homo Americanus is at once a narrow character study and a broad examination of American masculinity in the twentieth century. The main character under study is Brick Pollitt, protagonist of Tennessee Williams's 1955 play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Brick exemplifies the titular homo americanus, a queer heterosexual male whose struggles with sexual identity mirror the "epistemological confusion in understanding the rules governing sexual identification" (40) experienced by modern man. Bak reads Williams's work as a response to the queer aesthetics of a writer popularly seen as more homophobic than queer—Ernest Hemingway. By juxtaposing Williams not with another playwright, but with novelist and modernist icon Hemingway, Bak demonstrates how Williams's texts shed new light upon some of the central themes of literary modernism.

Despite the unusual move of comparing a novelist with a playwright, Bak's Homo Americanus is not a genre study, nor is it interested in exploring the numerous thematic connections between Williams and Hemingway, or even between Hemingway's 1924 novel The Sun Also Rises and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (such as how Maggie's desire for Brick mimics Brett's desire for Jake, or how Jake's rejection of homosexual "toleration" is echoed in Brick's similar rejection of Big Daddy's call for toleration). What the book does provide, succinctly and cogently, is an explanation of the numerous theorists that are invoked in the service of Bak's thesis, including Sigmund Freud, Michel Foucault, Jean-François Lyotard, Simone de Beauvoir, Eve Sedgwick, Fred-ric Jameson, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, and Roland Barthes. Bak employs these theorists in order to study Williams not just as a playwright, but as a modernist whose use of the themes of impotence and sterility builds not just on the work of Hemingway, but on such modernist classics as T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land.

Bak persuasively argues that Williams used Hemingway's queer masculine aesthetics as a sounding board for the playwright's own explorations of the topic. More specifically, Bak asserts that Brick is a "Cold War reincarnation" (30) of Jake Barnes, the protagonist of The Sun Also Rises. Bak sees both fictional men as queered by an American society that, in reaction to rapid immigration and the resultant fears of the cultural "Other," constructs a masculine existential identity as one of opposition. Heteromasculinist America creates a homosexual identity that is separate from homosexual acts, then defines itself in opposition to this identity in order to "protect its homosociality, secure its traffic in women, and sustain its genital economy" (205). Men who either cannot or will not perform their heterosexual identity are cast punningly into a metaphorical "no man's land."

Bak surveys much of the literary criticism surrounding these two characters, showing how much of it revolves around either "proving" a character's heterosexuality or dragging him out of the closet. In so doing, he emphasizes how both Hemingway and Williams produce texts that not only expose the heteromasculinist bias within twentieth-century American constructions of masculinity, but also perpetuate those selfsame biases by withholding information concerning their characters' sexuality and so creating a desire in readers and audience members for "definitive" proof. For Bak, the "mystery" of Brick's sexuality is Williams's version of Hemingway's "iceberg theory," in which important events or facts of the story are omitted and only the character's feelings about those now-absent facts remain. Just as the meaning of a Hemingway sentence exists in "its essential lack of words" (93), so also can the meaning of both Jake and Brick be found in their Lacanian lack.

In his chapter on The Sun Also Rises, Bak establishes the queer aesthetic of Hemingway that Williams, as a perceptive student, would develop in his own work. Bak details Jake's existential crisis, a crisis that stems directly from the loss of both penis and phallus during World...