Rac(e)ing Questions III

by Beth Kramer, New York University, USA

The triangle is useful as a figure by which the "commonsense" of our intellectual tradition schematizes erotic relations, and because it allows us to condense in a juxtaposition with that folk-perception several somewhat different streams of recent thought. (Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire)

1      The love triangle, as Eve Sedgwick notes above, is an excellent literary vehicle to represent the complexity of human desire. In this paper, I will explore two postcolonial works which employ this device, Graham Greene's The Quiet American and Chinua Achebe's A Man of the People. Although Greene's The Quiet American and Achebe's A Man of the People convey different views of the colonial and postcolonial situation, both works use the triangulated model of desire to create gender hierarchies in their novels that mirror the inherent power disjunction in the colonizer/colonized relationship. By integrating Anne McClintock's and Frantz Fanon's conception of imperial imagery and power into this exploration, I will show how Achebe and Greene use the love triangle to portray the relation of masculinity and patriarchy to neo-imperialism and the new world order. This study is ultimately an attempt to explore the following question & can the love triangle, an age old literary device central to the European novel, in fact be decolonized?

2      In Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest, Anne McClintock makes the statement that "all nations depend on powerful constructions of gender" in their declaration of power and nationhood (353). In particular, McClintock stresses that the British government used gendered language and images to reinforce its ultimate projection of power. Lee Horsely, in Fictions of Power in English Literature: 1900-1950, gives further evidence to McClintock's claim by stressing that before the First World War, "the whole notion of heroic adventure was most closely bound up with the excitement of empire-building" (20). This historian equates the British imperialist enterprise with male heroic action and he notes that tales of adventure kept alive the idea that battles, man-to-man combat, and fierce struggles were vital to the national image. Other scholars, such as Roger Horrocks and Michael Kaufman, further concede that civilized societies were built through and shaped by decimation, containment, and exploitation of other peoples (See Horrocks 141 and Kaufman 5). "The blood thirsty history of the British empire and more recently of American expansionism should not be ascribed to the biological or psychological make-up of the British or American male," says Roger Horrocks, "but to the specific social and political oppression of other states" (141).[1]Horrocks credits the motivation behind British and American expansion to the need of the modern state to both condone its own violence and at the same time condemn the violence of others. These historians reveal the historical tie between nation building and the masculine military image.

3      The mighty British imperial image was also strengthened throughout its history by associating colonized lands with the oppressed feminine body. In Gender Power in Britain, 1640-1990, Susan Kingsley Kent explains that in the era of colonization, depictions of non-white peoples become increasingly depicted as feminine until "representations of empire took on the image of masterly, manly Britons exercising control over irrational, impulsive, weak-willed, effeminate colonial peoples" (203). She reinforces this point by explaining how the ideologies of similarity and difference between British and non-British peoples depended upon a notion of gender difference; she claims that a common justification for the practice of imperialism was that the non-British were inherently incapable of exercising the self-control necessary for governing themselves, and required the strong arm of British might to keep order. McClintock also studies representations of Victorian advertising which featured a "vista of Africa conquered by domestic commodities" and as a result presented "colonized men… feminized by their association with domestic servitude" (219). Gender hierarchies were therefore embedded in the practice of imperialism and the public justification of the practice.

4      Nevertheless, in the era of decolonization when Achebe and Greene were writing, this British image reliant on masculinity was under threat from a variety of sources. Lee Horsley discusses how Britain in the first half of the twentieth century "witnessed the collapse of old empires, the failure of parliamentary governments, the rise of totalitarian dictatorships, and violent revolutions and the devastation of two world wars" (1). He speaks to the widespread loss of confidence in the notion of heroism and how this was overcompensated by the fictions of power and language of the cold war which emerged throughout Europe (4). This loss of power served to feminize the imperial island itself; Kent notes that it was thought British colonies failed "because Britain's political institutions were in the hands of a corrupt, weak and even effeminate ruling class" (80). In addition, the growing presence of women in societal power positions posed a threat to the masculine image of empire. In Literature, Politics and Culture in Postwar Britain, Alan Sinfield notes that women's roles in servicing the workforce during the Second World War were viewed as "undermin[ing] male control of public affairs and the household" (206). In addition, Fanon's theory is useful in understanding the use of masculine, imperial imagery in new nation formation as former colonized lands struggled to assert independence and new leadership. Fanon speaks to the fantasy of substitution in which "The native is an oppressed person whose permanent dream is to become the persecutor" and recycle the imperial structure under new leadership (53). Both Greene and Achebe's texts focus on the human obsession with weakening imperial imagery and patriarchal leadership.

5      Yet, how does this tie to theories of desire and the love triangle? Rene Girard understands desire as "a dynamic structure extending from one end of novelistic literature to the other" (95). Girard posits that all novels present and negotiate desire in some type of capacity. In his work Deceit, Desire, & the Novel, Girard analyzes literary representations of love triangles to study how the emotions of esteem, envy, jealousy and rivalry between members of the same sex become stronger pulls than the sexual passion for the object. Girard reveals that triangular desire disfigures the object and confuses same-sex desire between rivals for heterosexual yearning (17). Eve Sedgwick's theory on triangulated desire builds upon Girard's argument. In her work Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire, Sedgwick uses Girard's notion of triangulated desire to focus more deeply on what she terms the "homosocial" bonds between the subject and the mediator. Sedgwick uses the following claim by Girard to make her point:

The bond that links the two rivals is as intense and potent as the bond that links either of the rivals to the beloved…the bonds of 'rivalry' and 'love,' differently as they are experienced, are equally powerful and in many senses equivalent. (21)

While Sedgwick uses this theorem as a foundation to her argument, she criticizes Girard for reading a symmetry in the triangle that is undisturbed by gender differences, because she does not believe that a rivalry between women over a male object would hold the same play of identification as a construction of two males over a female object. To reinforce this point, Sedgwick presents literary examples of triangulated desire which portray female characters serving as conduits to facilitate male homosocial relations. There has been minimal work, however, integrating Sedgwick's view of triangulated desire into studies of postcolonial representation. Many scholars only address the similarities between imperial oppression and masculine domination, and thereby ignore the homosocial bonds that exist to preserve these structures. For instance, in Masculinity and Power, Arthur Brittan focuses on the male-female binary in his discussion of patriarchy. He supports the idea that in male discourse and pornography, "sexual objectification is reminiscent of the relationship between the slave and the master" (66). Brittan explains that making a woman an object of desire places her in a physically and politically subordinate position, like that of an exploited colony in the hands of its colonizer. Yet, Brittan does not address the presence of male bonds which might heighten or preserve this oppression. On the other hand, Michael Kaufman, in Beyond Patriarchy, notes a "triad of desire" in which violence of "men against men" or violence of "men against themselves" reinforce each other but cannot be understood until confronted by "violence against women" (2). Kaufman, nevertheless, overlooks the way that this homosocial violence might speak to larger systems of nation formation.