Queering Heterosexuality: Rewriting Oedipal Structures in Lewis Nordan’s Sugar Mecklin Stories

KEVIN L. MURPHY University of West Georgia Queering Heterosexuality: Rewriting Oedipal Structures in Lewis Nordan’s Sugar Mecklin Stories ONE MAY NOT EXPECT TO HEAR LEWIS NORDAN’S NAME AMONG A LIST OF authors at the cutting edge of a new terrain for the representation of same-sexdesireinSouthernfiction.NoneofNordan’snarrativesfeatures an openly gay protagonist, and characters who might be read as queer comprise a relatively small place in his canon. However, some of Nordan’s most provocative fiction uses same-sex desire as a way to expose problems with a rigidly conceived masculine identity, one that presents heterosexuality as always being the healthiest and most desirableresolutiontoayoungboy’ssexualdevelopment.Focusedonthe dynamics of father and son relationships, much of Nordan’s fiction interrogatestheproblemssonshavewithforgingasustainablemasculine identity in the shadows of fathers who function as less than desirable role models. While this process is undoubtedly a complicated one for heterosexual sons, Nordan’s fiction involving sons who demonstrate interest in same-sex attraction gives us a glimpse of the nearly impossible process they face in developing alternatives to a heterosexual identity in a South not usually known for its positive portrayal of gay male role models. Whether the son might eventually identify as gay or straight, Nordan’s fiction remains adamant in its insistence that the father’s masculinity should not be a model for emulation unless the father’s masculine persona can be significantly altered, a lesson Nordan learned through his own relationship with his stepfather. Though not exclusively driven by autobiography, Nordan’s fiction often bears the marks of his own life. As the son of a dead father and stepson to an emotionally unavailable alcoholic,1 Nordan frequently translates these real-life relationships into the pages of his short story collections 1 See Thomas Ærvold Bjerre for a discussion of how the loss of Nordan’s biological father and his relationship with his alcoholic stepfather influenced his fiction (“Longing”). 32 Kevin L. Murphy Welcome to the Arrow Catcher Fair, The All-Girl Football Team, and his quasi-novel, Music of the Swamp, a text composed of thematically interrelated short stories. In these texts, Nordan examines the delicate balance between the son’s desire to love the father and his realization that this love should not end in a duplication of the father’s masculine identity. Nordan remains acutely aware of the damage a father’s alcoholism and emotional inaccessibility can levy on those who love him the most. Consequently, the impulse to redefine the father’s masculinity becomesanessentialimpetustoNordan’scraftingmanyofhisnarratives. This impulse manifests itself most prominently in the relationship between Sugar Mecklin and his stepfather, Gilbert, who appear in several of Nordan’s stories. Like the real-life Nordan, whose family sometimes called him Sugar, Sugar Mecklin struggles to connect with Gilbert, who, like Nordan’s own stepfather, is a house painter and an alcoholic. By using the father-son relationship as a central theme of his fiction, Nordan joins a long line of white Southern male writers who have narrated the son’s struggle to define himself against a less-than-ideal paternal model. Proposing a literary history of just such a struggle between fathers and sons, James Applewhite, in his 1996 essay “Southern Writing and the Problem of the Father,” offers advice to Southern authors about the need for the South to move beyond myth and nostalgia in an effort to develop a more “clear eyed” vision of its fathers: the South “needs to disavow through understanding the hollow lost leaders, those larger-than-life, hieratic fathers who once led it to a crushing defeat disguised as a moral victory” (31). Applewhite begins his critical analysis with the Fugitive poets, particularly Allen Tate and Donald Davidson, who were enamored with what they saw as idyllic models of Southern manhood, such as Robert E. Lee. The boys depicted in Davidson’s “Lee in the Mountains” vault Lee into iconic status and thereby take him out of the realm of “human interaction,” creating a problematic oedipal rivalry in which the father figure becomes “too distant to allow any easy and healthy identification” (Applewhite 21-22). Highlighting the cyclical nature of this process, Applewhite further contends that the post-Civil War Southern white male as...