English Studies Forum

The Forum Reviews

Traveling Desire

M. ElizMichael Trask. Cruising Modernism: Class and Sexuality in American Literature and Social Thought. Cornell UP, 2003. 222 pp. $34.95.

By Beth Widmaier Capo, Illinois College

            Sex and class are two topics that never go out of style. In this election year, where each candidate stands on the economy and gay marriage may well determine our next president (and will at the least be embedded in stump speeches as items on each candidate’s shopping list of “American values”). In a new work, of interest to scholars of American literature and culture, Michael Trask links class difference to social scientific language of sexual perversion, demonstrating how sexology’s metaphors of unmoored and transgressive desire were applied to the underclass of immigrants, hoboes, women, and casual laborers in works of American literary modernism and Progressive Era social theorists.  Trask, an Associate Professor of English at Yale University, clearly lays out his focus in the introduction, stating “I am interested in the ways in which social thought alights on the figure of perverse desire to describe the evasive mobility of class others in early twentieth-century life, and I am keen to demonstrate how modernist authors exploit this explanatory circuit when their own writing fixes on the unfixed characters, the underclass floaters, who stray in and out of their texts” (2).  Combining queer theory with literary and cultural analysis, Cruising Modernism offers an original reading of canonical American modernist texts through the lens of dynamic, dangerous desire at once economic and sexual.

            Trask’s first chapter efficiently introduces the key social theoretical concepts he uses: the class “other” as a restless figure imbued with threatening mobility. Trask works through a discussion of many social theorists from 1900-1930, including Walter Lippmann, Lewis Mumford, Frederick Taylor, and Lothrop Stoddard. What links these economists, sexologists, and psychologists are the repeated motifs of social breakdown, class motility, sexual perversion, and intrinsic threat. Each of the following five chapters trace out this theory in the work of an American modernist by examining points at which a sexual threat engages with representations of the underclass.

In the second chapter, “Chance, Choice, and The Wings of the Dove,” Trask expands on ground he has covered in his earlier journal articles, the novels of Henry James and William James’s writing on pragmatism. The chapter examines the impact of chance and of place (including knowing your proper social place) on choice, specifically “desire as a function of choosing, and more important, as a choosing whose determination remains inevitably ‘slippery,’ beyond one’s reference or control” (47). The chapter focuses on the later fiction of Henry James and offers a close reading of The Wings of the Dove (1909) to suggest that “even as it attempts to suspend the diffuse social anxieties over improper movement from one class (of persons or things) to another, the Jamesian novel inevitably reconfigures groundlessness, referential slipperiness, and categorical confusion as subjects of suspense. The drama of chancy mobility becomes for James the very means for moving his novel along” (48).  Trask usefully situates the fiction of Henry James in the context of his brother William James’s social theories on pragmatism. This dual reading elucidates the modern dilemma of how to negotiate desire, the interplay between choice and chance, that leaves the modern person unsettled, unable to trust, disempowered and alienated.

“Cruising” is an evocative metaphor for Trask, aligning mobility with the vague threat of a predatory seducer or the taboo of homosexuality. In some chapters, such as Chapter Four’s discussion of Hart Crane, the cruising metaphor is prominent and evocative. But unfortunately in other chapters the image is lost as connections between class, transience, and desire are more tenuous. For instance, Trask’s discussion of Gertrude Stein in Chapter Three contains a fascinating analysis of the use that both the rising science of behavior psychology and Stein’s writing make of dogs, but the link to desire or sexuality is less clear (or simply more spread out along a causal chain). Trask argues that dogs in Stein take on the role of servants, “always there and not quite there…. bolstering the social structures to which they do not seem immediately relevant” (75). Trask then links the role of dogs in psychological discourse and popular “canine life-narratives” (such as Jack London’s Call of the Wild) to Stein’s representation of dogs in several of her works: “dogs are always attached to overly mobile persons,” to tramps, to disobedience, to marginality” (75). Thus, Trask argues, the figure of the dog in Stein is an investigation of the problem of obedience to authority. 

Chapter Four, “Hart Crane’s Epic of Anonymity,” returns to the image of cruising to look at the laboring male body in Crane’s poetry. Trask differentiates his analysis from other work on Crane by proposing two hypotheses: “One is that far from feeling driven to disguise or to disavow his homosexuality, Crane neither sought a rationalization for his sexuality nor treated it as incompatible with the rest of his life. The second hypothesis is that while maintaining a vivid same-sex expressiveness and orientation, Crane did not equate homosexual self-definition with the fulfillment of same-sex desire” (112). Focusing on Crane’s epic poem The Bridge¸ Trask examines the dynamism in the poem’s content and form, specifically the “vocabulary of travel” as it is used to describe “men on the move” (113).  What makes this analysis unique is its insight into the materiality of the text, such as repeated images of hands as a symbol of working-class agency and intimacy. Bringing in Sherwood Anderson, T.S. Eliot, and Charlie Chaplin, Trask builds a convincing link between working-class embodiment, anonymity, mobility, and same-sex desire. Trask continues along these lines in the fifth chapter, turning his analysis to Willa Cather’s “outsider” characters and homoerotic desire. After establishing the modern association of American Catholicism and sexual deviance, Trask argues that Cather revises “the prescriptive narrative logic whereby sexual identity becomes fated or naturalized in prose” (146). Again Trask focuses on material and physical details, in this case Cather’s use of shoeless feet as indicative of mobility and passion. 

The final chapter, “Merging with the Masses,” looks to “the political uses of the desire concept at key moments in the early twentieth century” (166) by comparing 1920s leftist writers with earlier Progressive reformers. Both groups considered individual sexual desire an impediment to political agency. Trask examines the metaphor of prostitution as it contains both illicit sexuality and capitalism, and moves from a discussion of leftist journalists Emma Goldman, Max Eastman, and Mike Gold, to John Dos Passos’s 1925 novel Manhattan Transfer, which Trask calls “the model of sexual identity and desire made available” by the leftist program (169). Trask reveals how leftist literary culture saw capitalism as contaminating sexuality and identity. In Dos Passos, heterosexual desire “forecloses and paralyzes the agency and autonomy of those who undertake to satisfy it” (180), as shown by the number of married women who die physically or emotionally in the novel.  Only those who resist heterosexual desire retain their freedom, mobility, and identity. Keeping outside of capitalist exchange aligns individuals with homosexuality, which displaces traditional concepts of vulnerability, perversion, and sexuality. Trask argues that, for 1920s leftist writers, “Homosexuality becomes the means of transmitting a self-integrity that cannot be attained through heterosexual desire” and is ultimately “the basis of a transmission of cultural identity without an exchange or contract in the economy of desire” (189). 

While I found this to be a fascinating and valuable work, stylistic quibbles kept me from completely enjoying it. A propensity to repeat the main argument in the first few chapters, a dependence on obvious “signpost” statements rather than a more subtly connected organization, and a reliance on “just as…. so” sentence constructions rhetorically dim the originality of the argument. The prose style can be dense rather than lively, which has the unfortunate effect of deadening an otherwise engaging argument. Despite the at times off-putting style, Trask’s insistent focus on “inherent instability,” perversion, and transience offers an invigorating new angle on literary modernism. His use of contemporary social theory engages a well-applied cultural studies approach that juxtaposes diverse texts in innovative ways. Cruising Modernism fulfills its “immodest hope”: it “has contributed to our sense of what queer studies can do in the broad scheme of cultural and literary history when enlisted in reading against the grain of knowledge about the past” (195).  Sexuality and social class, Trask demonstrates, were mutually constitutive in modern social thought and literature.