Homo americanus: Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, and queer masculinities

Abstract

Though separated by only eleven years in age, Hemingway and Williams seem literary generations apart. Yet both authors bridged their modernist/postmodernist divide through mutual examinations of the polemics behind heteromasculinity, Hemingway in The Also Rises and Williams in on a Hot Tin Roof. This book explores the two works' many sociopolitical, literary, and intertextual ties, in particular how the conclusion of one echoes that of the other, not just in its irony but also in its implication of the audience's participation in engendering the social rules responsible for the protagonist's struggle to negotiate his sexual identity. Hemingway's Sun shares more with Williams' Cat than just a similar ending, however. Both works explore more broadly the construction of a queer masculinity, where the parameters that define masculinity and sexuality grow as unstable and irresolute as the frontier during a war or the line of scrimmage during a football game. John S. Bak is Associate Professor at Nancy-Universite in France.