Reflections in a Golden Eye: Carson McCullers
A murder mystery in reverse, and queer tensions at a Southern (US) army base
"The participants of this tragedy were: two officers, a soldier, two women, a Filipino, and a horse." That in one sentence, you’re introduced to the characters that populate Carson McCuller’s ‘Reflections in a Golden Eye’. Six characters, each of them bound tightly together yet lonely and isolated in their own ways. The Captain and the Major, the Captain’s wife, the major’s wife, and Anacleto, the domestic worker. As with ‘The Heart is a Lonely Hunter’, the more intelligent and thoughtful the character, the more lonely and isolated they feel, as does the major’s wife, Anacleto, and less so for the major, or the character McCullers calls ‘slow’, the Captain’s wife. In their loneliness, the characters watch each other continually, and the voyeurism quickly becomes literal. And you, reader, feel like a voyeur, illicitly watching the the story play out on the stage set of a Southern (US) army base. It’s a production of ghosts because you know from the beginning that by the end of it, at least one person will be murdered and all will be affected. The mystery to be solved is who, by whom, and the circumstances leading to the murder.
The dark undercurrent of queer sexual repression running through this little story adds to the ghostly feel. The book is dedicated to Annemarie Schwarzenbach, who McCullers either had an unrequited crush or a brief fling. There’s McCuller’s (herself queer) vivid descriptions of the Captain’s wife, her beauty, her strong, athletic body, presented nude in her home and bed frequently and in detail, as if for your consumption. There’s the young soldier, sunbathing nude, lithe and boyish, who becomes the obsession - both loved and hated - of one of the closeted older men in the story. Anacleto, too, is a fabulously styled, almost painfully stereotypical homosexual man (though he’s never labelled explicitly as such).
I have a much older copy of this novel (as evidenced by the photo). Tennessee Williams wrote the forward in my copy, and in it, he writes that he believed ‘Reflections…’ to be the most perfect example of a modernist writing he knew of. It’s wonderful, but I couldn’t tell you if I’d consider it better than multiple works by Woolf and Barnes, or even McCuller’s own ’The Heart is a Lonely Hunter’. According to Wikipedia, one writer believes it to be one of four well-known queer novels from the first half of the twentieth century - two of which were by queer women (the other woman written novel would be Nightwood). I disagree, as I’d put Orlando in the “well-known” category too. And what about the notorious ‘The Well of Loneliness’, which was available in the US? And now looking at the little list I’ve draw, how interesting and wonderful that the best of the women writing Modernist novels are all queer?
