Sympathetic Alliances: Tomboys, Sissy Boys, and Queer Friendship in The Member of the Wedding and To Kill a Mockingbird

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

¹As Michelle Ann Abate notes in Tomboys, “countless tomboy narratives—written by men and women, featuring both masculine and feminine tomboys and intended for both child and adult audiences—contain this dyad” (xvii). Jo March and Theodore “Laurie” Laurence of Louisa May Alcott's Little Women are classic examples of a tomboy/sissy dyad from the mid-nineteenth-century sentimental tradition. For the purposes of this essay, I am using the pejorative term “sissy,” rather than a more contemporary term, such as “effeminate boy character,” because the term “sissy” appears in McCullers's The Heart is a Lonely Hunter in reference to effeminate boy figures. It is important to note, however, that Dill and John Henry are not explicitly termed “sissy” boys in the texts.

²For example, as Botting and Townshend note in Gothic: Critical Concepts in Literary and Cultural Studies, “sometimes, in short stories and in her best-known novel, The Member of the Wedding, McCullers cloaks with humorous tenderness her unsentimental perception of the freakish self as originating in female adolescence” (141).

³My essay builds on a larger body of scholarship on friendship in LGBTQ history and culture, including Michel Foucault's influential interview, “Friendship as a Way of Life,” Lillian Faderman's Surpassing the Love of Men (New York: Morrow, 1980), and Tom Roach's Friendship as a Way of Life: Foucault, AIDS, and the Politics of Shared Estrangement (State UP of New York, 2012). In contrast to these studies, however, I focus on childhood rather than adult friendships.

⁴Some of the earliest examples appear in William Shakespeare's comedies. One might consider, for instance, Francis Flute of A Midsummer Night's Dream (ca. 1594), the most effeminate of Shakespeare's comic mechanical characters, who is forced to play the role of Thisbe in the “play within a play” of Act V. But this tradition extended well into the nineteenth century and included plays such as Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest (1895).

⁵Famously, Lee's tomboy/sissy relationship is also one of the most autobiographical features of To Kill a Mockingbird: Dill is a fictionalization of a young Truman Capote—or, as he was known in his youth, Truman Streckfus Persons—who was a close childhood friend and eventual artistic collaborator with Harper Lee.

⁶Malcom Gladwell critiques Lee's sentimental politics in his 2009 New Yorker article, “The Courthouse Ring: Atticus Finch and the Limits of Southern Liberalism.”

⁷Gary Richards discusses the parody of heterosexual courtships in To Kill a Mockingbird, suggesting that they are often portrayed as more meaningful than the heterosexual relationships in the novel: “In contrast to the meaningful bonds arising within these relationships scripted as parodies of heterosexual courtships, when Lee does on rare occasion depict marriage, the union seems unenviable” (143). Richards, however, resists previous readings as the tomboy figure as proto-lesbian and instead focuses predominately on the relationship between gender-bending boy figures of Lee's and McCullers's novels.