Sedgwick, Eve.
Epistemology of the Closet (1990)
Chapter 4 "The Beast in the Closet: James and the Writing of Homosexual Panic" pp. 182-212
[Summary]
☆HomosocialとHomosexualの緊張関係
●I argue that the historically shifting, and precisely the arbitrary and self-contradictiory, nature of the way homosexuality (along with its predecessor terms) has been defined in relation to the rest of the male homosocial spectrum has been an exceedingly potent and embattled locus of power over the entire range of male bonds, and perhaps especially over those that define themselves, not as homosexual, but as against the homosexual. Because the paths of male entitlement, especially in the nineteenth century, required certain intense male bonds that were nor readily distinguishable from the most reprobated bonds, an endemic and ineradicable state of what I am calling make homosexual panic became the normal condition of male heterosexual entitlement (185).
●the prescription of the most intimate male bonding and the proscription of (the remarkably cognate) "homosexuality" (186) intense male homosocial desire as at once the most compulsory and the most prohibited of social bonds (187)
★女性の交換によって成り立つ社会がhomosocial bondという男同士の親密な関係を要請し、それが社会資格の必須構成要素となるのと同時に、homosexualityは禁じられるという一種のダブルバインドがhomosexual panicを生み出す、ということ。
☆独身者というキャラクタータイプによる性的選択の問題の脱性化
●I want to suggest here that with Thackeray and other early and mid-Victorians a character classification of "the bachelor" came into currency, a type that for some men both narrowed the venue, and at the same time startlingly desexualized the question, of male sexual choice (188).
●the severing of his connection with a discourse of genital sexuality (190).
●the treatment of certain other physical pleasure is given an immediacy that seems correspondingly heightened. In fact, the substantiality of physical pleasure is explicitly linked to the state of bachelorhood (191).
●If, as I am suggesting, Thackeray's bachelors created or reinscribed as a personality type one possible path of response to the strangulation of homosexual panic, their basic strategy is easy enough to trace: a preference of atomized male individualism to the nuclear family (and a corresponding demonization of women, especially mothers); a garrulous and visible refusal of anything that could be interpreted as genital sexuality, toward objects male or female; a corresponding emphasis on the pleasures of the other senses; and a well-defended social facility that freights with a god deal of magnetism its proneness to parody and to unpredictable sadism (192).
●I must say that this doeos not strike me as a portrait of an exclusively Victorian human type. To refuse sexual choice, in a society where sexual choice for men is both compulsory and always self-contradictory, seems, at least for educated men, still often to involve invoking the precedent of this nineteenth-century persona (193).
★Bachelorというcharacter typeが男同士の絆を要請し同時に禁ずるような強制的異性愛関係とenforcing family structure からの可能な逃げ道として創出された、ということ。
☆ジェイムズの"The Beast in the Jungle" (1902) をbachelor fiction として読む
●[T]he woman desires the man but the man fails to desire the woman. In fact, in each story the man simply fails to desire at all. . . . John Marcher, in James' story, does not even know that desire is absent from his life, not that May Bartram desires him, until after she had died from his obtuseness (195).
●[Jamesが実人生においてある女性を欲望しそこなったことについて] James's mistake here, in life, seems to have been in moving blindly from a sense of the good, the desirability, of love ans sexuality to the automatic imposition on himself of a specifically heterosexual compulsion . . . . The easy assumption (by James, the society, and the critics) that sexuality and heterosexuality are always exatcly translatable into one another is, obviously, homophobic. Importantly, too, it is deeply heterophobic: it denies the very possibility of difference in desires, in objects (196-97). でもheteroじゃないからhomoっていうこのSのロジックがいまひとつしっくりこないんだよなぁ…
●[James批評のJamesの実人生におけるhomosexual desireに対する沈黙について] It is possible that critics have been motivated in this active incuriosity by a desire to protect James from homophobic misreading in a perennially repressive sexual culture. It is possible that they fear that, because of the asymmetrically marked structure of heterosexist discourse, any discussion of homosexual desires or literary account will marginalize him (or them?) as, simply, homosexual. . . . The result of this hammeringly tendentious blur in virtually all the James criticism is, for the interpretation of "The Beast in the Jungle," seemingly in the interests of showing it as universally applicable (e.g., about the "artist"), to assume without any space for doubt that the moral point of the story is not only that May Bartram desired John Marcher but that John Marcher should have desired May Bartram. . . . "Should have desired," that novel graphically shows, not only is nonsensical as a moral judgment but is the very mechanism that enforces and perpetuates the mutilating charade of heterosexual exploitation . . . (198).
●the worst violence of heterosexuality comes with the male compulsion to desire women 至言だ
●Jamesian negative virtue of not pretending to present her rounded and whole (199)
●I would argue that to the extent that Marcher's secret has a content, that content is homosexual. Of course the extent to which Marcher's secrete has anything that could be called a content is, not only dubious, but in the climactic last scene actively denied. . . . The denial that the secret has a content--the assertion that its content is precisely a lack--is a stylish and "satisfyingly" Jamesian formal gesture. The apparent gap of meaning that it points to is, however, far from being a genuinely empty one, it is no sooner asserted as a gap tha filled to a plentitude with the most orthodox of ethical enforcements. To point rhetorically to the emptiness of the secret, "the nothing that is," in fact, oddly, the same gesture as the attribution to it of a compulsory content about heterosexuality-- of the content specifically, "He should have desired her" (201).
★Chapter 3 で議論されていたmodernismとempty secretの議論がここでも行われる。確かにformへの注目がcontentをないがしろにする、contentへの注目を馬鹿みたような感じにするというのは正しくて、たしかにそれ自体隠蔽の構造をとっているように思えるといえば思えるのだけど、たとえば作品の結末の"He should have desired her"がheterosexual compulsoryかどうかというのは微妙で、たしかにMayは女だからheterosexualになるわけだけれど、でもこれは「herという代名詞的女」を愛するべきだったということではなくて、May Bartramという彼を愛そうとした女を愛するべきだったということなのだから、極端にいえばMayが男だったとしたってこの作品は似たような感じだったと思うんだよなぁ。それを「heterosexualな欲望の不在を人間的愛の可能性の不可能に翻訳することの陰険さ」というふうに言われるとたじろぐのだけれど。それから後半の、作品頻出の「名指せなさ」と同性愛欲望の歴史的社会的「名指せなさ」の類似および最後の男に対する興味は説得力がまったくないわけではないんだけれど。
☆homosexual panicとはheterosexual panicである
●There has so far seemed no reason, or little reason, why what I have been calling "male homosexual panic" could not just as descriptively have been called "male heterosexual manic"--or simply, "male sexual panic" (200).
☆「語り得ぬ愛」としてのhomosexuality
●The rhetorical name for this figure is preterition. Unspeakable, Unmentionable, nefandam libidinem, "that sin which should be neither named nor committed," the "detestable and abominable sin, amongst Christians not to be named," . . . "things fearful to name," "the obscene sound of the unbeseeming words," . . . "the love that dare not speak its name"--such were the speakable nonmedical terms, in Christian tradition, for the homosexual possibility for men. . . . And the newly specifying, reifying medical and penal public discourse of the male homosexual role, in the years around Wilde trials, far from retiring or obsolescing these preteritive names, seems instea to have packed them more firmly and distinctively with homosexual meaning (202-03).
☆May Bartramはclosetに幽閉される：Johan Marcherのクローゼットを強化することになる
●Whatever the content of the inner secret . . . it is one whose protection requires, for him, a playacting of heterosexuality that is conscious of being only window dressing (206).
●Even the discovery that the outer secret [that he has a secret] is already shared with someone else, and the admission of May Bartram to the community it creates . . . does nothing to his closet but furnish it: camouflage it to the eyes of outsiders, and soften its inner cushioning, for his own comfort. In fact the admission of May Bartram importantly consolidates and fortifies the closet for John Marcher (206).
