Desires for Form: Modernist Narrative and the Shape of Queer Life

Abstract

Around the turn of the twentieth century, when sexual identity categories were acquiring new visibility, queer people began to construct communities around their shared experience of nonbelonging. Literary narrative was a crucial tool for queer individuals trying to forge senses of self and community. Scholars have argued that many avant-garde modernisms critiqued the sexual status quo and imagined convention-breaking modes of existence for queer people. Existing scholarship depicts nascent queer communities as triumphantly scorning social norms via their recourse to experimental literatures. Yet, many queer people found it difficult or unnecessary to abandon desires for traditional ways of life or for “conventional” literary forms. Desires for Form: Modernist Narrative and the Shape of Queer Life analyzes queer modernist narratives to explore how Black and white queer communities navigated both desires for new modes of living and attachments to conventionality. At stake here is an understanding of queer identity that accounts for and respects desires for legibility, intimacy, and belonging. Desires for Form assesses how narrative form shapes representations of desire for stabilizing social forms through analyses of queer modernist novels informed by queer theory, narrative theory, and critical race theory. The dissertation contains two parts with two chapters each; each part juxtaposes a white-authored queer “experimental” novel with a “conventional” novel by a queer Black author. By explicating how each text defies critical expectations for traditional or experimental queer narratives, Desires for Form dispels the racializing assumptions that have historically separated white and Black modernisms. Part I, “Desire for Intimacy,” considers narrative representations of the social forms that structure personal relationships. Chapter 1, “Coveting the Couple,” examines Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood (1936), demonstrating that the novel’s deviations from linear narrative do not enact a queer refusal of conventional forms but rather mourn modernity’s erosion of the couple form and traditional romantic scripts. Chapter 2, “Securing the Family,” argues that while the realist narration of Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929) seems to uphold middle-class Black respectability politics, the novel ultimately accentuates how its protagonist has forcibly “straightened out” her own story, thus critiquing the very narrative teleology it employs. Part II, “Desire for Identity,” compares narrative modes of portraying queer longing for community. Chapter 3, “Trusting Gender,” analyzes the formal pastiche of Charles Henri Ford and Parker Tyler’s The Young and Evil (1933), asserting that the text’s heterogeneous narrative form underscores how queer femininity allowed members of the fairy subculture to forge stabilizing interpersonal bonds. Chapter 4, “Seeking Sexuality,” argues that Richard Bruce Nugent’s realist roman à clef Gentleman Jigger (written 1928–33, published 2008) takes the form of a queer Bildungsroman while tightly controlling readerly perceptions of its protagonist, whose identifications with queer sexuality are initially a superficial escape from Black identity but ultimately enable an artistic and unconventional theorization of queer subjectivity. Desires for Form articulates a central paradox: within queer modernism, experimental narrative forms often reinforce traditional social structures, whereas narrative conventionality has facilitated radical reimaginings of queer ways of life. This insight disrupts the racialized hierarchies that have implicitly privileged the radical queer potential of white experimentalisms over Black realisms within modernist studies. By taking seriously queer desires for form, this dissertation also challenges queer studies to analyze how the longing for structure and stability has shaped queer subjectivity as profoundly as the desire to escape restrictive norms.