Eighth lecture for my students in English 104A, UC Santa Barbara, spring 2012. Course website: http://patrickbrianmooney.nfshost.com/~patrick/ta/s12/index.html

1. Lecture 8: Difference, Loneliness, Separation
English 104A
UC Santa Barbara
Spring 2012
25 April 2012
“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
—Gavin Stevens in William Faulkner’s Requiem for a
Nun, act I, scene iii

2. The Possessive Investment in
Whiteness (1998)
● Whiteness is a cultural construction “that like all
racial identities has no valid foundation in
biology or anthropology,” but is still “a social
fact” (vii).
● It is a valuable construction that “has a cash
value” (vii) that provides certain individuals with
advantages.
● An individual’s relation to the large-scale power
structures supporting whiteness as a privileged
position is an ethical and political choice made
“within a social structure that gives value to
whiteness and offers rewards for racism” (viii).

3. Race (in Lipsitz)
● “Race is a cultural construct, but one with sinister
structural causes and consequences.” (2)
● Is a determining (if unacknowledged) factor in a
huge number of decisions that people make,
both in the course of their daily lives and while
engaging in commercial and government
business.
● pages 5-13 give several dozen examples, including:
– Discriminatory housing practices
– Differential rates and types of law enforcement
– Higher levels of exposure to dangerous toxins
– And many many more.

4. Racism (in Lipsitz)
● Has a specific history:
● “[C]onstant and deliberate actions have institutionalized group
identity in the United States, not just through the
dissemination of cultural stories, but also through systematic
efforts from colonial times to the present to create economic
advantages through a possessive investment in whiteness for
European Americans” (2).
● “There has always been racism in the United States,
but it has not always been the same racism.” (4-5)
● “laws guaranteeing the right to eat at a lunch counter did little
to correct the elaborate web of discrimination in housing,
hiring, and education that left minorities less able to pay for a
lunch-counter meal, let alone raise the capital necessary to
own a lunch counter” (xviii).

5. Racism (continued)
● Is an elective choice made by people, not an
attribute of particular groups.
“White people always have the option of becoming
antiracist, although not enough have done so.” (viii)
● However, there incentives for compliance with
structures of white dominance.
● Since the 1960s, has often shown itself in ways
that shape race-related rewards and
punishments indirectly, rather than by overt acts
of discrimination.

6. Whiteness
● “the unmarked category against which difference is
constructed” (1).
● Provides advantages in the form of privileged access to
housing, educational advantages, access to insider
networks, and the transfer between generations of
wealth accumulated under discriminatory conditions.
(vii)
● “secures its dominance by not seeming to be anything
in particular” (1).
● Constructed as a broad social category – as a race – in
connection with demographic shifts of the mid-twentieth
century, especially the preponderance of European
Americans in suburbs (7) .

7. Home ownership
● Is a chance disproportionately available to
whites, in part because of discriminatory lending
practices (6-7) and in part because white people
are most likely to have inherited wealth
generated by past discriminatory practices.
● Costs of home ownership have increased
greatly in comparison to other prices since the
Civil Rights movement of the 1960s (15).
● Is one of the primary means by which wealth is
passed from one generation to the next, and
thus one of the primary means by which past
inequity is perpetuated (16).

8. Carson McCullers (1917-1967)
● Born Carson Smith;
married Reeves
McCullers, 1937 (divorced
1941; second marriage of
the couple 1945-1953).
● The Heart Is a Lonely
Hunter, published 1940,
was McCullers’s first
published novel.
● Key terms (for our
purposes):
● Southern Gothic
Photo by Carl Van Vechten, 1959
● Autobiographical fiction

9. Southern Gothic
● Adopts several conventions of more traditional
Gothic sensibilities to the setting and language of
the American South.
● These conventions include:
● An emphasis on the grotesque, macabre, or fantastic
incidents.
● A setting that often includes old or ruined buildings,
desolate locations, etc.
● A narrative technique that “develops a brooding
atmosphere of gloom or terror,” as M.H. Abrams puts it.
● Often, plots that deal with extreme emotional or
psychological states.

10. “Miss [sic] McCullers’ picture of loneliness, death,
accident, insanity, fear, mob violence and terror is
perhaps the most desolate that has so far come from the
South. […] This is not so much a novel as a projected
mood, a state of mind, poetically objectified in words, an
attitude externalised in naturalistic detail.”
—Richard Wright, review in The New Republic
“Few writers, however, are as consistent and
thoroughgoing as Carson McCullers in creating a
sustained body of work. Her novels and short stories, set
beside those of her contemporaries, seem more nearly of
one piece. This underlying unity is partly the result of her
prevailing theme of loneliness and desire, partly the
working of the special sensibility which colors her
perception of people and events.”
—Dayton Kohler, “Carson McCullers: Variations on a
Theme,” College English (1951)

11. Loneliness
● Much writing of the early twentieth century tended to
associate loneliness with urban life and modernity, as
an effect of the urban individual’s separation from the
small community that had been the most common
setting for American life until the 20th century.
“Loneliness, far from being a rare and curious circumstance,
is and always has been the central and inevitable
experience of every man.” (You Can’t Go Home Again 426;
ch. 31)
● Loneliness as a basic characteristic of human
experience is a common theme of mid-twentieth
century writing.
“It was funny, too, how lonesome a person could be in a
crowded house.” (53; ch. 3)

12. “There was no noise or conversation, for each person seemed
to be alone. The mutual distrust between the men who were
just awakened and those who were ending a long night gave
everyone a feeling of estrangement.” (30; ch. 2)

13. Speech and communication
● “his plump hands shaped the words ‘Holy Jesus,’
or ‘God,’ or ‘Darling Mary.’ These were the only
words Antonapoulos ever said. Singer never
knew just how much his friend understood of all
the things he told him. But it did not matter.” (5;
ch. 1)
● “Antonapoulos sat stolidly and made obscene
gestures when they came too close to him.” (94;
ch. 6)
● “He [Biff] was sorry he had talked to Alice. With
her silence was better. Being around that woman
always made him different from his real self.”
(15; ch. 2)

14. ● “But most of the time nobody was sure just
what he [Jake] was saying. Talk—talk—talk.
The words came out of his throat like a
cataract. And the thing was that the accent he
used was always changing, the kinds of words
he used. Sometimes he talked like a linthead
and sometimes like a professor. He would use
words a foot long and then slip up on his
grammar.” (17; ch. 2)
● “He would start all over with them, but in a
different way. He would bring out their lessons
and talk with them. They would sit close
together and look at their mother. He would talk
and talk, but none of them would understand.”
(81; ch. 5)

15. ● “‘It don’t take words to make a quarrel,’ Portia
said.” (75; ch. 5)
● “Doctor Copeland did not know how to begin.
Sometimes he thought that he had talked so
much in the years before to his children and
they had understood so little that now there was
nothing at all to say.” (83; ch. 5).
● “Doctor Copeland tried to speak, but his voice
seemed lost somewhere deep inside him.” (89;
ch. 5)
● “Mick loved to go up to Mister Singer’s room.
Even if he was a deaf-and-dumb mute he
understood every word she said to him. Talking
to him was like a game.” (91; ch. 5)

16. “Mick drew the big block letters very slowly. At
the top she wrote EDISON, and under that she
drew the names of DICK TRACY and
MUSSOLINI. Then in each corner with the
largest letters of all, made with green and
outlined in red, she wrote her initials – M.K.
When that was done she crossed over to the
opposite wall and wrote a very bad word –
PUSSY – and beneath that she put her initials,
too. […] She hummed one of the tunes, and
after a while in the hot, empty house by herself
she felt the tear come in her eyes. Her throat
got tight and rough and she couldn’t sing any
more. Quickly she wrote the fellow’s name at
the very top of the list – MOTSART.” (38; ch. 2)

17. The town
● “The town was in the middle of the deep South.
[…] On the main street there were several
blocks of two- and three-story shops and
business offices. But the largest buildings in the
town were the factories, which employed a
large percentage of the population.” (6; ch. 1)
● “It was always funny how many people could
crowd in from nowhere when anything out of
the ordinary happened.” (27; ch. 2)

18. Jake leaned against the counter. “Say, what kind of
a place is this town?”
“Ordinary,” Brannon said. “About like any other
place the same size.”
“What population?”
“Around thirty thousand.”
Jake opened the package of tobacco and rolled
himself a cigarette. His hands were shaking. “Mostly
mills?”
“That’s right. Four big cotton mills – those are the
main ones. A hosiery factory. Some gins and
sawmills.”
“What kind of wages?”
“I’d say around ten or eleven a week on the
average—but then of course they get laid off now and
then.”
(60; ch. 4)

19. Reminders
● The bookstore is going to start returning
textbooks to publication houses on April 30. If
you’re planning on buying textbooks from the
bookstore in the UCen, but haven’t yet done so,
now is a good time to do it.
● Papers are due at the beginning of lecture one
week from today.
● The last day to drop (for students in the College
of Letters and Science) is Friday, 27 April.
● I know you’re not planning on dropping this course.
I’m just giving you a friendly reminder.

20. Media Credits
Photo of Carson McCullers (slide 8) comes from the
Carl Van Vechten Collection at the U.S. Library of
Congress, and copyright on this collection has
expired. Source:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c1/
Carsonmccullers.jpg
Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks (1942; slide 12) is still
under copyright, but is being used for teaching
purposes, in order to discuss the painter in the context
of a course discussing twentieth-century American
culture, and is a low-resolution copy not suitable for
producing quality copies of the original work. Source:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Nighthawks.jpg