Queer Chivalry: Medievalism and the Myth of White Masculinity in Southern Literature

3. Medieval Masculinity, Southern Chivalry, and Redemptive Homosexuality in Flannery O’Connor’s Fiction

53 3 MEDIEVAL MASCULINITY, SOUTHERN CHIVALRY, AND REDEMPTIVE HOMOSEXUALITY IN FLANNERY O’CONNOR’S FICTION M edieval men in modern times: this unlikely blend of medievalism , masculinity, southern chivalry, and sexuality runs throughout much of Flannery O’Connor’s fiction. In particular, her short stories “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” “The Comforts of Home,” “The Geranium,” “A Late Encounter with the Enemy,” and “The Enduring Chill” and the novella The Violent Bear It Away focus on men (or, in the case of The Violent Bear It Away, on a boy growing into manhood), and more specifically, on men reacting to the pressures of chivalric history and its bearing on their masculinity and sexuality.1 Recent studies of O’Connor’s fiction examine the repercussions of race and gender in her canon,2 and this chapter expands on such analyses by taking into account the effects of sexuality as well. Conceptions of race, gender, and sexuality constitute much of an individual’s sense of personal identity, but they are not free from ideological inflection; rather, they are forged in and through history. For O’Connor, the two most compelling yet oddly commingling histories for the construction of southern manhood belong to the Middle Ages and the U.S. South due to their converging models of chivalric masculinity. Spiritual Catholicism and martial chivalry collide in these fictions, resulting in men queerly bewildered by the meaninglessness of their masculinity. For the most part, O’Connor’s protagonists, whether male or female, are not readily rewarded with Christian revelation for partaking in sexual relationships and carnal pleasures. Quite unlike Constance Chatterley and Oliver Mellors in D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), the adulterous lovers who “fucked a flame into being” and thereby imbued their lives with transcendent possibility,3 O’Connor’s characters typically ex-  Queer Chivalry 54 perience sexuality as a red herring on the path to salvation: it promises a transcendent experience yet ultimately diverts attention from the divine. Thus, she parodies and ridicules heterosexual affairs throughout her fiction , as in the hilarious leg-stealing scene of “Good Country People” and in Calhoun and Mary Elizabeth’s ridiculous “courtship”—undertaken so they can meet the homicidal lunatic Singleton—in “The Partridge Festival.” Little affection is evident in the marriages depicted in “Parker’s Back” and “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” and O’Connor portrays nuclear families, the ostensibly blessed result of sexual congress in marriage, as dysfunctional in such stories as “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” and “The River.” In her focused attention on the tortuous spiritual path of a lone protagonist who finds damnation or redemption in the final paragraph, O’Connor sees little salvific possibility in sexuality, as it cannot help her protagonists to achieve immanent realizations beyond their solipsistic concerns. From this perspective, historical models of whiteness, masculinity, and heterosexuality frequently ensnare O’Connor’s male protagonists into roles that limit their potential to experience revelation. O’Connor satirically aligns many of her male characters within the paradigm of southern chivalric manhood, and medieval role models of saints and martyrs also guide, while simultaneously curtailing, the range of actions possible to them. In this manner, southern chivalric masculinity is predicated upon a historically myopic view, in which illusions of male gender roles constrain O’Connor’s protagonists from realizing the potential of salvation, as is evident in the spiritually pessimistic conclusions of “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” “The Comforts of Home,” “The Geranium,” and “A Late Encounter with the Enemy.” In contrast to the immuring qualities of chivalric masculinity and heterosexuality in these narratives, the tension inherent in historically constructed masculinities achieves a grotesquely illuminating revelation in “The Enduring Chill” and The Violent Bear It Away, in that Asbury’s homosexuality and Marion Francis Tarwater’s sodomitic rape are figured as precursors to their spiritual awakenings. Redemptive homosexuality may appear to be an incongruous term given O’Connor’s abiding Catholicism, yet her carnivalesque and grotesque topoi consistently undermine the purported values accorded to any number of identities, acts, and peoples. In O’Connor’s medievally inspired 55 Flannery O’Connor’s Fiction world of carnivalesque spirituality, the road to salvation traveled by her male protagonists necessitates a decidedly queer journey through medieval and southern models of chivalric and/or saintly masculinity. O’Connor’s play with masculinity reflects its growing amorphousness as a cultural...