Disorientation and Queer Objects in Mid-twentieth Century American Fiction

This thesis explores how disorientation as a critical concept, interlinked with space, time and quotidian objects, informs and intersects queer representations in mid-twentieth century pre-Stonewall American fiction. Sara Ahmed’s theorization of disorientation as a queer phenomenology sheds light on the complicated ways in which homosexual/homoerotic desires negotiate their existences amid the dominantly heteronormative context. The thesis focuses on works by four writers—Eudora Welty, Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams and Shirley Jackson— whose portrayals of homosexuality are often ambiguous and evasive. I open these texts up to a wide range of interrogations from literary, gendered, spatial and temporal perspectives. Through reading closely imageries and scenes suffused with disorienting aesthetics and dynamics, I examine how this notion functions as a form of queer positionality, embodiment and politics which unsettles heteronormative constructs. Chapter I examines disoriented visions, elusive family heirlooms and figures of children as queer-laden sites in Welty’s The Optimist’s Daughter. Chapter II goes forward to Capote’s bildungsroman Other Voices, Other Rooms, in which verticality functions as the principal spatial form of queer (dis)orientation. Chapter III proceeds to analyse Williams’ One Arm where disorientation concurs with and pertains to the symbolic burial of (un)dead queer bodies. Chapter IV evaluates the complex domestic spaces strewn with lesbian spectres in Jackson’s short stories and The Haunting of Hill House. These readings prompt disorientation’s discrepant potentials which can be uncomfortable, confining and disenabling on one hand, and felicitous, emancipatory and recuperative on the other. Ultimately this thesis delineates disorientation as a dense web of feelings, affects, sensibilities and impulses; an aesthetic of the oblique, the eccentric, the squint and the off-centre; and a resistant way of inhabiting the material world.