Reading Sideways: The Queer Politics of Art in Modern American Fiction

By Nadine Hubbs

Reading Sideways explores the pivotal role that various art forms played in American literary fiction in direct relation to the politics of gender and sexuality in works of modern American literature. It tracks the crosswise circulation of aesthetic ideas in fiction and argues that at stake in the aesthetic turn of these works was not only the theorization of aesthetic experience but also an engagement with political arguments and debates about available modes of sociability and sexual expression. To track these engagements, its author, Dana Seitler, performs a method she calls “lateral reading,” a mode of interpretation that moves horizontally through various historical entanglements and across the fields of the arts to make sense of—and see in a new light—their connections, challenges, and productive frictions.

Each chapter takes a different art form as its object: sculpture, portraiture, homecraft, and opera. These art forms appear in some of the major works of literature of the period central to negotiations of gender, race, and sexuality, including those by Henry James, Davis, Willa Cather, Du Bois, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Mary Wilkins Freeman. But the literary texts that each chapter of this book takes as its motivation not only include a specific art form or object as central to its politics, they also build an alternative aesthetic vocabulary through which they seek to alter, challenge, or participate in the making of social and sexual life. By cultivating a counter-aesthetics of the unfinished, the uncertain, the small, the low, and the allusive, these fictions recognize other ways of knowing and being than those oriented toward reductively gendered accounts of beauty, classed imperatives established by the norms of taste, or apolitical treatises of sexual disinterestedness. And within them—and through “reading sideways”—we can witness the coming-into-legibility of a set of diffuse practices that provide a pivot point for engaging the political methods of minoritized subjects at the turn of the twentieth century.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Release date: Jul 2, 2019
• ISBN: 9780823282630

Nadine Hubbs

Nadine Hubbs teaches Women's Studies and Music at the University of Michigan and is author of The Queer Composition of America's Sound (California, 2004) on the Copland-Thomson circle of gay U.S. musical modernists. She is completing a book called Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music, which contemplates provincial, working class, and queer intersections by listening to country songs.

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READING SIDEWAYS

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Printed in the United States of America

21  20  19      5  4  3  2  1

First edition

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Introduction

1. Strange Beauty

2. Small Collectivity and the Low Arts

3. The Impossible Art Object of Desire

4. Willa Cather and W. E. B. Du Bois Go to the Opera

Part One: A Continuous Repetition of Sound

Part Two: Endless Melody

Conclusion

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

1 Hiram Powers, The Greek Slave (1844)

2 Harriet Hosmer, Zenobia in Chains (1859)

3 Gold leaf frame (c. 1867)

4 Oil-gilded tulle net frame (c. 1870)

5 Rock patterns in the main cove (c. 1850)

6 Walking Dress pattern (1853)

7 Informal Conference, advertisement from Exhibition of Sewing (1897)

8 Titian, Portrait of a Young Englishman (1540–45)

9 Titian, Portrait of a Lady (1555)

10 Titian, La Bella (c. 1536)

11 Winslow Homer, Portrait of a Lady (1875)

12 The Dying Gaul (c. 230)

13 The Faun, red marble, Roman copy from late Hellenism (1736)

14 Antinous (c.130–150 AD)

15 Jules Adolphe Breton, The Song of the Lark (1884)

16 Olive Fremstad (1871–1951). Enjoys Wood Chopping

17 Women Beat Upon Metropolitan’s Doors to Hear Uncanny Opera, New York World (February 10, 1907)

18 W. E. B. Du Bois’s ticket to a performance of Lohengrin at Bayreuth in 1936

READING SIDEWAYS

Introduction

This book explores the pivotal role that various art forms played in American literary fiction in direct relation to the politics of gender and sexuality at the turn of the century. I track the transverse circulation of aesthetic ideas in fiction expressly concerned with gender and sexuality, and I argue that at stake in fin-de-siècle American writers’ aesthetic turn was not only the theorization of aesthetic experience, but also a fashioning forth of an understanding of aesthetic form in relation to political arguments and debates about available modes of sociability and cultural expression. One of the impulses of this study is to produce what we might think of as a counter-history of the aesthetic in the U.S. context at three (at least) significant and overlapping historical moments. The first is the so-called first wave of feminism, usually historicized as organized around the vote and the struggle for economic equality. The second is marked by the emergence of the ontologically interdependent homosexual/heterosexual matrix—expressed in Foucault’s famous revelation that, while the sodomite had been a temporary aberration, at the fin de siècle the homosexual was now a species, along with Eve Sedgwick’s claim that the period marks an endemic crisis in homo-heterosexual definition.¹ The third is the intensification of post-reconstruction racism that W. E. B. Du Bois designated the problem of the color-line, during which, as Jacqueline Goldsby demonstrates, lynching emerged as a systemic and reinforcing logic of U.S. national culture.² These intersecting, mutually informing histories of disenfranchised, minoritized peoples are, with a few notable exceptions, histories not often taken into consideration in theories of the aesthetic.³ But at this intricately intertwined, cable-knotted period of history, we can observe the expansion of a counter-aesthetic in the work of authors seeking forms of art and creative expression beyond (or even simply beside) the fetish of the beautiful first inherited from eighteenth-century aesthetic philosophy and carried on well into the twentieth century. Apparent in much of the literature spanning this period is a dedicated interest in taking up and refunctioning these inherited aesthetic knowledges, from Rebecca Harding Davis’s sarcastic reference to Kant in Life in the Iron Mills to Du Bois’s reworking, in The Souls of Black Folk, of Wagner’s understanding of the total work of art (Gesamtkunstwerk), itself grounded in a Schillerian advocacy for aesthetic education as political education. Indeed, a major claim of the book is that in this period we can witness the coming into legibility of a set of diffuse counter-aesthetic practices that provide an access point for engaging the political methods of minoritized subjects at the turn of the century. To track these practices, I enact an interpretive method that I call lateral reading, or reading sideways, a mode of interpretation that moves horizontally through various historical entanglements and across the fields of the arts to make sense of, and see in a new light, their connections, challenges, and productive frictions.

Each chapter elucidates these counter-practices by taking a different art form as its object: sculpture, portraiture, homecraft, and opera. These art forms appear in some of the major works of literature of the period central to negotiations of gender, race, and sexuality, including those by Henry James, Davis, Willa Cather, Du Bois, Sarah Orne Jewett, and Mary Wilkins Freeman. But the literary texts that each chapter of this book takes as its motivation not only include a specific art form or object as central to their politics, they also build an alternative aesthetic vocabulary through which they seek to alter, challenge, or participate in the making of social and sexual life. By cultivating a counter-aesthetics of the unfinished, the uncertain, the small, the low, and the allusive, among other aesthetic categories, these fictions recognize other ways of knowing and being than those oriented around reductively gendered accounts of beauty, classed imperatives established by the norms of taste, or apolitical treatises of disinterestedness.

Valuable in this regard has been the work of Lauren Berlant, Sianne Ngai, Russ Castronovo, Jennifer Doyle, José Muñoz, and others. Whereas, for Castronovo, the aesthetic terrain of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century functions as a site through which we may perceive shifting (and contradictory) expressions of American democracy, for Berlant a focus on the aesthetic, beginning in the nineteenth century but extending to the contemporary moment, delineates a fundamentally political as well as psychic drive for identity forms and desires to become general through repetition into convention.⁴ The repetition of the genres, clichés, and other conventionalities of normative femininity, for example, reveals a desire to feel like one belongs in the world by attaching oneself to familiar forms, but which ultimately binds the subject to a condition of longing and complaint rather than to a project of change. Sianne Ngai’s Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting focuses on the capitalist aesthetic categories of contemporary culture that speak most directly to everyday practices of production, circulation, and consumption.⁵ For Ngai, paying attention to the judgments of taste that we make in everyday speech, and to the popular, normative, and available aesthetic and stylistic conventions of hyper-networked, late capitalist culture that inspires them, aids in an understanding of the workings of contemporary capitalism itself as well as how subjects under capitalism work, exchange, and consume.

Along with these critics, I take as axiomatic that personal experience and its concomitant structural taxonomies of personhood are always mediated by a shifting set of aesthetic categories, themselves grounded in historically specific forms of meaning and collective life. But Reading Sideways finds itself less interested in congealed, normative, or dominant categories of aesthetic experience that provide an index to the various hegemonic temperatures of everyday life than in the kind of categories Raymond Williams has described as emergent. Emergent forms are not only where new meanings and values, new practices, new relationships and kinds of relationships are continually being created, but specifically, for Williams, those that are substantially alternative or oppositional to it: emergent in the strict sense, rather than merely novel.⁶ Doyle and Muñoz’s work—Hold It Against Me and Cruising Utopia respectively—seeks to make critical space for emergent contemporary artworks that, in different ways, generate both substantially alternative and new kinds of relations between viewers and the work of art in Williams’s sense.⁷ Whereas Muñoz ensconces us in the often ecstatic ways queer art can move us toward a future of the not yet of our political demands and desires, Doyle concentrates on the unsettling experience of specific practices in feminist and queer art in order to reside in the difficulty of that experience, to confront how the discomfort of an artwork or performance is transferred to its audience in ways that demand our vulnerability and our intimacy. For both Muñoz and Doyle, queer and feminist art matters for the ways it holds the capacity to make just these sorts of demands: on us, on the world, on the political shape of things. In a more recent and stunning summation of this capacity, Kadji Amin, Amber Jamilla Musser, and Roy Pérez write, To speak of the world-making capacity of aesthetic forms is not a willful act of naivety […], but a way to keep critical practice vital and resist the downward pull of political surrender.⁸

My own investments in this study are attuned to how the variety of experiences in the social world are constant sources of emergent aesthetic forms that have provided either respite from the discourses of sexual, racial, and gendered constraint or something akin to what Deleuze and Guattari have called lines of flight.⁹ Lines of flight are paths out of any given system of control that shoot off on the diagonal from that system even though they never actually leave it. By the light of their passage, they reveal the open spaces within the limits of what exists and designate the elusive places where change happens. This is no simple or easily dismissible utopian fantasy. Attachment to the aesthetic may not only, or always, be compensatory or commodified. It might also be a performative enactment of a resistant energy within the fabric of the real. Linking human creativity to flight, Deleuze and Guattari explore how our desire to eschew the status quo leads us to innovate. We coordinate, form alignments, combine our resources, improvise, revolutionize, remodel, and renew. The outcome of these efforts, which are sometimes conscious but oftentimes not, may not have the impact of a revolution, which is to say immediate, large-scale social transformation. Indeed, the outcomes that may be grasped from the sewing spinsters, lesbian sculptors, suffering aesthetes, or soprano divas that make up the subjects of this book may be small, incremental, and even seemingly inconsequential to larger historical shifts. And yet, if we look to specific historical moments, as I do in this study, we find not utopian fantasies of transformation, but actual instances of pleasure and survival in which art functions as a node through which political questions of form and genre surface, and through which we can observe aesthetic relations both in productive flux and as part of the textures and valences of social negotiation and sexual intimacy.

As we know, aesthetic norms solidify at particular moments in time and constrain meaning according to their various conventions. As a set of familiar structural networks, literary genres and artistic styles, in their sedimented form, work to shape both cognition and affect, proffering a neat package of received ideas about how to think and feel much along the lines of what Jacques Rancière calls the distribution of the sensible—the manner by which a person, object, or practice can be thought (as I discuss at length in Chapter 1).¹⁰ While this is as true of the fin de siècle as any other period, it is also an incomplete description. The turn of the century in particular was a time in which literary allegiances to codified aesthetic forms are rendered less secure and more capacious than a conversation anchored in the categories of realism, naturalism, and regionalism and their definitional consolidation may allow. I thus turn to a series of specific aesthetic objects and philosophies that work within and between these more established categories in order to complicate the uptake of this conversation in the fiction of the period. Ultimately, this means cutting across the familiar categories of literary style that we have ready to hand and re-opening a conversation of how to understand the literary and aesthetic relations that existed at the time.

In Life in the Iron Mills, the focus of Chapter 1, an aesthetic of the interrogative and the unfinished emerges to re-qualify both what counts as art as well as the kinds of forms and social practices enabled by it. An unfinished, coarse, and ungainly sculpture referred to as the korl woman—posed with her arms outstretched in a gesture of eternal questioning—emerges as the novella’s central figure, carved by the protagonist Hugh Wolf in his spare time out of the waste material of the iron mills where he labors. When we take a closer look at sculpture in the nineteenth century, and at the practices of women sculptors in particular, to which the form of Hugh’s work alludes, what we find is a history of small, predominantly lesbian art collectives intervening in the aesthetic norms of sculpting based in the practice of neo-classicism by male artists. Read in this context, the novella fosters an argument about how questions of gender, sexuality, economic injustice, and class struggle are all simultaneously questions of imaginable form.

In Chapter 2, I turn to regional writers Sarah Orne Jewett and Mary Wilkins Freeman, whose short stories focus almost exclusively on unmarried, widowed, and otherwise singular women, many in domestic scenes without men, where the main activity is often some form of handicraft: sewing, quilting, frame-making. The queer feminist aesthetic collectives that take shape in their work—evidenced in sewing circles, textile swaps, and scenes of homecraft display—call forth specific ways of being with others in small social arrangements that simultaneously stand against the demand for the heterosexual couple form and the imperative of a politics of change based in numbers. Here an aesthetic of the small and the low forces readers to engage in an alternative aesthetic history in which craft helps mediate sexual and social formation. Indeed, to revalue homecraft not just as a utilitarian but also as an aesthetic practice means to understand the nature of these collectives as formed around and by the terms and practices of art.

In Chapter 3, I examine the aesthetic attachments in Henry James’s novels, with a particular focus on Portrait of a Lady and The Golden Bowl. In them, I argue, James cultivates an aesthetic of doubt as a model of being in the world. To do so, I read his work not for plot or action (which we can’t ever do anyway) but for the art objects that appear within it. When we look at his narrative worlds, we find them populated with characters in relation to their art objects to and from which they become both attached and detached. Madame Merle’s teacups, Gilbert Osmond’s water colors, Edward Rosier’s bibelots, Maggie and Adam Verver’s art collection, and the sculptures that so entrance Isabel Archer at the Musei Capitolini: art, in these worlds, emerges as a prop through which desire gets a form. Signaling interpretive breakdown, fracture, and uncertainty, each art object comes to represent an impasse of knowledge, intimacy, and communication, perhaps nowhere as delightfully, because so obviously, signified as by the infamous crack in Maggie Verver’s golden bowl. But doubt, in James, is not an immobilizing force. Rather, it is a cultivated aesthetic that insists on formulating new relations of reading (of reading life as much as art). Doubt, James insists, is a provocation; it motivates our action and it demands a renewed practice of attention.

Chapter 4 focuses on Willa Cather’s Song of the Lark and W. E. B. Du Bois’s Souls of Black Folk. In each, the literary technique of allusion is re-purposed as a political and aesthetic tactic. Indeed, allusion operates in them as the signifying mechanism of art’s doubling—as the site through which art as a political and social form can be reflected on, negotiated, and explored. The Song of the Lark is a classic künstlerroman that charts Thea Kronborg’s rise as an opera singer and the world of possibility the New York Metropolitan Opera House opens for her. In The Coming of John, the penultimate chapter of The Souls of Black Folk, John Henderson attends an opera performance at the Met only to be ushered out by a guard after creating discomfort by sitting next to a white woman. In both texts, Wagner’s Lohengrin figures heavily as the allusion of choice: performed by Thea, seen and later hummed by John. This shared allusion is key to how we might think about the function of the aesthetic in each of these works, and how we might assess the repetitions and transformations of the politics of the aesthetic in the early twentieth century more broadly. At the very least it shows how understanding any project of sexual and gender formation entails serious attention to the politics and history of racial formation, what Roderick Ferguson calls racialized sexuality.¹¹ It also demonstrates how allusion functioned in these fictions as a crucial aesthetic tool through which the politics of sexuality and the politics of race could be addressed in relation to one another.

While there is a long history in U.S. culture of multivalenced aesthetic practice in visual art, poetry, prose, music, and dance, I am suggesting that the late nineteenth and early twentieth century designates a moment in history, though not the only one, in which we can see the transformation of the question of the aesthetic in relation to political and social practice. The book, however, is less a deep history of the entanglements of this moment than it is an attempt to take the locatable histories of aesthetics seriously for all the ways they can inform us about the emergent practices of non-normative, minoritized, and otherwise excluded communities and their forms of both personhood and sociality. I’d like to admit, quite openly, that in the following pages one will not find a thick history of each of the aesthetic practices and forms the chapters take up, nor an exhaustive historical account of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century even though the intertwined historical relations of emergent feminism, the consolidation of sexual categories, and racial violence inform the readings within it. Instead, and deliberately, the chapters that follow move horizontally across a swath of aesthetic forms and entangled histories in order to account for how the arts were put to work in U.S. culture and politics during this period. My question in this study, then, is how and in what historically specific ways are gender, sexuality, race, and sociality aesthetic categories? What happens when we think of the expansive use of aesthetic possibility in literary encounters with art that, in multiple ways, countered existing aesthetic conventions not as an instance of simple resistance to those forms but as a site for enlarging the many modes of aesthetic relation through which lives become possible and survivable?

It is for this reason that the book insists on not performing a deep reading of any one art practice in particular and, instead, paratactically transverses the arts by moving from one to another, thereby tracing the politically associative links between them. This provides, I hope, a more expansive view of a historical and aesthetic landscape in which a set of counter-aesthetic strategies emerged not just to make a different kind of art but to imagine a different kind of life. While I most fully lay out the stakes of understanding aesthetic movement laterally in Chapter 4 by working through the politics of allusion, I would like to say a few things about this reading method now.

The practice of lateral reading is, in part, informed by Berlant’s understanding of lateral agency as the activity of riding a different wave of spreading out or shifting in the everyday.¹² For Berlant this means being attentive to different habits of attenuation and collective de-dramatization, to the slow moments where the tempos of life are dialed down, and thus to where we slow down the attrition of our bodies under capitalism. Lateral reading also takes into account Andrew Miller’s discussion of the novel’s way of generating its own counterfactual possibilities, which he names a text’s lateral prodigality. With this term, Miller argues for the extensive existence of alternative paths of thought within any one text that constitutes the novel’s way of making its characters exist among all the other lives they are not, but could be, living.¹³ For Miller, the kind of temporal and spatial spread Berlant discusses as an effect of post-Fordist political economy can be understood formally as a function of the realist novel’s counter-imaginaries. The realist novel formally materializes what a character is by bringing it into constitutive relation with what it is not and, in so doing, positing the singularity of the self as that which can only be understood through the life trajectory of others; our singularity is always shared, moving outward from ourselves, laterally.¹⁴ It is in Miller’s sense of realism’s lateral profusions that I am also invoking Kathryn Bond Stockton’s transformative analysis of growing sideways, which describes queer models of development that resist conventional narratives of maturation in which growth requires a relentless vertical movement upward toward work, marriage, and reproduction.¹⁵ As for Berlant and Miller, for Stockton moving out instead of up also involves new ways of reading, a kind of literariness in which the queer child in fiction can be seen as riding the metaphors of aesthetic possibility and thus rewriting the scandal of the sexual child.¹⁶ Following these distinct, but also overlapping, attunements to the horizontal, crosswise engagements of narrative form and cultural practice, by lateral reading I mean to suggest a practice of reading across or sideways that spreads out from the text to all the associations its objects bring to bear on it, to reconnect these objects with everything that exists alongside them that may also be immanent to them. Like Deleuze and Guattari’s planar paradigm in which there are no points or positions in a rhizome, such as those found in a structure, tree, or root, there are only lines, laterality works against plot to resist the constraining teleology of narrative form.¹⁷ The potency of lines over plots lies in the capacity of the line, always a potential line of flight, to cut across the knot of social and political multiplicities to which any aesthetic form is irreducible. Throughout the following chapters, then, the reader will find my own attempts to think and move laterally (spreading across, counterfactually, sideways) as one model through which to grasp literature’s reflective turn to the arts, and its function as one of the arts, in an effort to interrupt the aesthetic standardization of everyday life.

My decision to lay bare the lineaments of my methodology is not in the service of making an overly bold claim for the newness of lateral reading but, rather,