This draws from DW's comment about Williams' description of Meg Bishop, but I thought it might need its own post.
I stumbled upon a book this morning called "Communists, Cowboys and Queers: The Politics of Masculinity in the Work of Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams." One passage looks at the various instances of gender reversal in "Mrs. Stone," from Meg Bishop to the Baron/Baroness to Mrs. Stone's seduction of her co-star.
You can read the excerpt here.
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Generally I have little interest in these theories that would have us “decode” fiction via a programmatic formula since the results always seem so flat. But I did find the discussion of Mrs. Stone’s jumping the actor interesting. (Our own Shakespeare expert didn’t give us a head up on this one. Did you think about what play they were performing, KC?) So Mrs. Stone was playing Rosalind who was disguised as the boy Ganymede when she had her encounter with the actor.
ReplyDeleteMeg Bishop said that Stone chose her husband because she was looking to avoid intercourse. Later when she has become more reflective, Mrs. Stone admits that there was a lot of truth to this. And the narrator also tells us that she didn’t have any attraction to young attractive men until after menopause. So two curious things here: Her role with her husband was motherly, but she seemed to have a deep desire to avoid having children. Her liaison with the actor might have only been possible because she entered via a role that was not that of a prospective mother.
I think I'd like to read that whole book! I loved the discussion of the gender reversal in "Mrs. Stone." And, no, I did not think of the fact that she was playing Rosalind! This is especially remiss of me (I shouldn't even admit this) because I read "The Picture of Dorian Gray" (the KING of "coded" gay fiction) within the last year, and there's a really important scene where Dorian falls in love with a Shakespearean actress because her Rosalind is so delightful, but her Juliet is atrocious! (Mrs. Stone's roles that are mentioned by name are all Shakespearean, aren't they?) Hey, maybe her Juliet fell flat not because of her age but because she just wasn't that into Romeo. Hehe
ReplyDeleteI get your point about "decoding," but I think that works by gay writers did have a lot of "code" in them because they couldn't write the books they really wanted to write (at least not with a hope of success) and yet they couldn't entirely suppress what felt so true to them either, so we get works full of hints and double meanings and the tone that we call "homoerotic," which usually means not gay exactly, but strongly suggestive of gayness, or sublimated gayness. (I guess there's a reason no one ever says "heteroerotic.")
And great point about the menopause. It's mentioned several times — was "moon of pause" the expression?
What you are suggesting, though, is richer and much more particular to each work than an approach that says this character is really male, or that character is really female. If the writer is gay, that probably matters in understanding the work. But how much and in what way depends on what that work really is.
ReplyDeleteDorian Gray’s first act of cruelty is after his disgust at the bad performance of Juliet? I like that book, but I read it too long ago to remember much. Do we learn of any other roles she played other than Rosalind and Juliet?