Desire under the Magnolias

“Desire,” Kathaleen Amende notes early in her study, “is a tricky thing.” Much of its trickiness, of course, arises from its circulation within myriad contexts contingent on historical and geographical specificities and cultural preoccupations. Recent southern literary studies have worked to map the nuances of these contexts in which desire circulates and is represented, as evinced by, among others, Michael Bibler’s Cotton’s Queer Relations (2009) and Tison Pugh’s Queer Chivalry (2013), which interrogate desire’s relationships within literary representations to the southern plantation system and the southern investment in medievalism respectively. The three works under review here range across the twentieth century and add to this exploration. Through writings by and about William Alexander Percy (1885 –1942), historian and biographer Benjamin Wise charts the relation of male sex-same desire to the white southern aristocracy of the early twentieth century. Through an exhaustive survey of the drama and fiction of Tennessee Williams (1911–1983), literary critic Michael Hooper interrogates the relation of desire within this corpus to the political activism of the mid-twentieth century. And, through texts by Dorothy Allison, Rosemary Daniell, Connie May Fowler, Valerie Martin, Sheri Reynolds, and Lee Smith, literary critic Kathaleen Amende teases out the relation of contemporary white women’s desire to southern religious beliefs and structures of the late twentieth century.

Made eminently readable by its clear prose, narrow focus, and linear narrative, Wise’s biography deftly sketches Percy’s evolving roles: son, gentleman lawyer, poet, soldier during World War I, civic organizer during the 1927 Mississippi River flood, adoptive father of his orphaned cousins in the 1930s. However, unlike scholars who dismiss Percy as anxiously discomforted by his queer sexuality, including McKay Jenkins, Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Richard King, and John Barry, Wise charts within these roles the impact of Percy’s desire for other men. In particular, Wise crucially historicizes Percy’s understanding of male homosexuality “as a superior form of love” that emerged from the late nineteenth-century Hellenism he encountered at the University of the South and at Harvard, the elite educational institutions he attended between 1900 and 1908. In these erotically charged all-male arenas, Percy mastered “a coded vocabulary” that allowed him to speak fluently and openly “the idiom of Greek love.” Nowhere is this clearer than in his poetry, the significance of which, for Wise, “lies not so much in its literary achievement as its personal honesty and its use of coded, historically specific homoerotic idiom.”

Percy’s diaries and correspondence—even within a carefully expurgated archive, as Wise’s epilogue discusses—reinforce this fluency. So too does Lanterns on the Levee (1941), which “offers a coded narration of Percy’s sexual awakening in Sewanee, an affirming description of Greek ‘bisexuality,’ and homoerotic descriptions of men.” Wise, however, rightly guards against overemphasizing this melancholic text written late in Percy’s life. Especially when contextualized within his close relationships with other gay or bisexual men—Huger Jervey, Sinkler Manning, Lindley Hubbell, Tommy Shields, Norman Douglas, Harry Stack Sullivan, Witter Bynner, Leon Koury, Gerstle Mack—and Percy’s lifetime of frequenting sites of queer sexual freedom, such as Taormina and Capri, these written expressions allow Wise to conclude that “Percy wrote what amounted to a meditation on queer desire, complete with the mourning of its nonacceptance in contemporary society.” As the biography documents, Percy “immersed himself in conversations and reading about sexuality and sexual values. He involved himself in the emerging queer subcultures of the early twentieth century. He experienced and enjoyed emotional and sexual intimacy with other men.”

Wise does not, however...