English
Queering the marriage plot: Gale Wilhelm’s middlebrow modernism
Document Type
Article
Abstract
Most readers of this essay will likely not have heard of Gale Wilhelm. Those who have will likely have heard something like this: Wilhelm wrote two important and distinctly modernist novels that unapologetically presented lesbian sexuality as both natural and good and then followed those with other, non-lesbian novels that were disappointing. Most discussions of Wilhelm omit her late novels entirely. A few emphasize that disappointment, as Harriette Andreadis does in her entry on Wilhelm in Gay and Lesbian Literary Heritage: Wilhelm's "final three books abandon the subject of lesbian sexuality," Andreadis explains, and "have been described as mannered and precious"; making her own position evident, she adds that Wilhelm's "last novel was described, not unfairly, as shallow" (697). Others are more circumspect, if not much. Chase Dimock, for instance, writes that "her subsequent novels from the 1940s failed to live up to the promise of her two previous lesbian-themed works," implying that it was because of the later novels' failure that Wilhelm "ceased writing and dropped out of literary society altogether" (45). Given this consensus, these late novels—criticized for their simplicity and their adherence to the well-worn tropes of heterosexual marriage that structure their plots—might seem an unlikely topic for queer scholarship. However, by resisting this easy dismissal and arguing that two of these novels, specifically Bring Home the Bride and Never Let Me Go, in fact employ the marriage plot in order to think structurally about queerness, I demonstrate that abandoning lesbianism as a theme allows Wilhelm to embed queerness into the plots of her novels, illuminating a queer ambiguity within the familiar middlebrow marriage plot. In making this argument I am undertaking two kinds of recuperative work: one, arguing for the importance of Wilhelm herself as part of a canon of queer literature, and two, arguing specifically for the importance of her late novels.
Publication Title
Legacy
Publication Date
2020
Volume
37
Issue
1
First Page
109
Last Page
131
ISSN
0748-4321
DOI
10.5250/legacy.37.1.0109
Keywords
Gale Wilhelm, lesbian literature, marriage plot, middlebrow, queer literature, Bring Home the Bride, Never Let Me Go, modernism
Repository Citation
Blake, Elizabeth, "Queering the marriage plot: Gale Wilhelm’s middlebrow modernism" (2020). English. 12.
https://commons.clarku.edu/facenglish/12
