Queer-e Vol. 1 no. 1 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ 8. George Piggford __________________________________________________ Copyright (c) 1995 by Author, all rights reserved. This text may be freely shared among individuals, but it may not be republished in any medium without express written consent from the authors and advance notification of the editors of Queer-e . --------------------------------------------------- "The Queer, Cautious Girl": Adela Quested and Gender Performance in E.M. Forster's _A Passage to India_ Is the character Adela Quested in E.M. Forster's _A Passage to India_ a man in woman's clothing? Is she a drag queen? This paper will frame an answer to these questions within Eve Sedgwick's historicised schema of gendered and sexual identity. In _Epistemology of the Closet_, Sedgwick contrasts a traditional essentialist notion of identity with a social constructionist theory of subjectivity (88). The essentialist position presupposes a unified biological subject, and will represent in this paper the self-conscious understanding of sexual identity in _A Passage to India_. The constructionist position will then be used to problematise this traditional notion of identity, and to suggest a "queer" reading of Adela Quested's gender performance in the text of _A Passage to India_. Judging from autobiographical and biographical accounts, E.M. Forster viewed his own sexual identity as an essential aspect of his personality by the early 1920's (see Furbank 1: 78, 2: 81-6; Forster, _Hill_ 315). Forster used the term "minority" (qtd. in Furbank 1: 111) to define himself as a homosexual subject, and this label defined him, he believed, irrespective of his sexual behaviour. Long before his first "full physical" homosexual experience, which occurred on a Alexandrian beach in 1916 (Furbank 2: 35), Forster notes in a diary entry dated 1904 that he had better "make copy out of" his homosexual identity, his status as a minority, then writes, "I too have sweet waters though I shall never drink them. So I can understand the dr[au]ght of others, though they will not understand my abstinence" (qtd. in Furbank 1: 111). Though later in life Forster "consummated" his desires with various partners, his writing suggests that sexual activity was irrelevant to his identity as a minority. Further, Forster believed that an author writes a novel, like _A Passage to India_, drawing mainly upon his formidable creative resources in order to construct a textual world that mirrors "reality," and that his world is populated by its own textual versions of subjects just like "real" people. These characters are created through an author's imagination, so they are centrally extensions of his own subjectivity. From Forster's _Aspects of the Novel_: "The novelist...makes up a number of word-masses roughly describing himself...gives them names and sex, assigns them plausible gestures, and causes them to speak by the use of inverted commas, and perhaps behave consistently. These word-masses are his characters" (44). According to this formulation, the only subjectivity present in a novel is the author's, all its prejudices, hopes, fears, flaws, desires are the novelist's also. It is desire specifically upon which I would like to focus this paper. From Forster's essentialist perspective, a homosexual is a man who desires men, period. His texts are all homosexual texts (since homosexuality is him), and his characters are all in a sense homosexual men. However, it might be argued that an author inscribes more of himself and his desires in some characters than in others. According to even quite recent sources, one such example of this self-inscription of desire is the heroine of Forster's _A Passage to India_, Adela Quested. Judith Herz, for example, asserts that Forster "identifies with Adela" (132) to some degree, and Elaine Showalter claims that "there is much of Forster in Adela's struggle not to be pinned down by the codes of the compound" (7). Adela's expressions of sexual desire for Ronny Heaslop and in a more complicated way for Dr. Aziz are really inscriptions of homosexual desire, since Adela is "roughly" Forster. Adela's attractions to Ronny, though tepid, can and should from this perspective be read as Forster's desire for Ronny. So in a tender moment when Adela's hand touches Ronny's, and "one of the thrills so frequent in the animal kingdom passed between them, and announced that all their difficulties were only a lover's quarrel" (PI 79-80), we should read Adela as a medium of gay desire between Forster and the eroticised male body inscribed into _A Passage to India_. Sedgwick has termed this structure an "erotic triangle" based on "gender asymmetry" (_Men_ 21) within homosocial "including [specifically] homosexual" (_Men_ 25) contexts. Likewise, the sexual panic that Adela experiences towards Aziz in the Marabar Caves might be read as an expression of Forster's panic about his erotic relationship with Muslim men like Syed Ross Masood (to whom _A Passage to India_ is dedicated) or Mohammed el Adl (his first lover, who died the year before _A Passage to India_ was finished) (Beauman 299-302, 338-9). Understood this way, Forster's female characters like Lilia Theobald, Lucy Honeychurch, and Adela Quested function as mediums of gay male desire, stand-ins for Forster, Forster in drag. But only from the perspective of traditional essentialism. If we choose to complicate this model from the perspective of social constructionism, the essentialist assumptions on which this reading is based become problematic. To Michel Foucault, for example, sexual identity is not a transcendent nature; rather, it is a discursive construct invented through juridico-medical discourses in the nineteenth century: "Homosexuality appeared as one of the forms of sexuality when it was transposed from the practice of sodomy onto a kind of interior androgyny, a hermaphrodism of the soul. The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species" (Foucault 43). Foucault argues that homosexuals as sodomites were defined simply as practitioners of sodomitic activities. By the time of the historical frame of Forster's writing of _A Passage to India_ (1913-1924), sexual practices had become all but irrelevant to the essential definition of the homosexual or minority. This new, essential identity, according to Eve Sedgwick, was defined rigidly through two contradictory tropes: gender inversion and gender separation. The trope of inversion created a conception of homosexual identity which posited "'a woman's soul in a man's body' and vice versa" (Sedgwick, _Closet_ 87). This conception is outlined in Havelock Ellis' and John Addington Symonds' _Sexual Inversion_, which defines inversion as "sexual instinct turned by inborn constitutional abnormality towards persons of the same sex" (Ellis and Symonds 1). "Desire," Sedgwick explains, "in this view, subsists in the current that runs between one male self and one female self, in whatever sex of bodies these selves may be manifested" (Sedgwick, _Closet_ 87). The gender separatist trope, conversely, closely associates identity and desire; Sedgwick identifies the origin of this trope as Benedict Friedl=E4nder's "Seven Theses on Homosexuality," first published in 1908 (88). This trope suggests that "it is the most natural thing in the world that people of the same gender...should bond together on the axis of sexual desire" (87). Within the frame of Forster's essentialism, the contradictoriness of these tropes, lumped under the label "minority," did, in fact, seem "the most natural thing in the world." But from the perspective of Foucauldian post-structuralism, it is clear that they contradict each other, that they exist in a chiastic relationship. How can one be, essentially, a woman, and simultaneously identify with, exclusively, men? This contradiction does seem to explain how homosexual men have traditionally been constructed as effeminate and misogynistic. For the purposes of this paper, I would like to focus particularly on the first trope: inversion. Richard von Krafft-Ebing describes female inversion, which he terms "Uranism," in his _Psychopathia Sexualis_ (first published in 1886): "Uranism may nearly always be suspected in females wearing their hair short, or who dress in the fashion of men, or pursue the sports and pastimes of their male acquaintances" (qtd. in Smith-Rosenberg 269). If sexual identities are read in a constructionist frame, if they are understood as discursive constructs rather than essential natures, then it follows that inversion as trope has nothing to do with what an individual "really" desires; its significance exists only within a discourse of identity politics. A woman, for example, can only be labelled an invert if her male core surfaces through social interaction, if her inner nature rises to the surface of reality that is discourse. An inverted woman must necessarily be constructed discursively as masculine, man-like; vice-versa for male inverts. From a constructionist perspective, this is really all that inversion is--a fictional inner core which 'surfaces' in discursivity. In this sense, Adela Quested appears to be a sexual invert, by virtue of the fact that she is a mannish woman. Adela is definitely inscribed in _A Passage to India_ as female: she is termed a "girl" (PI 19), and, after her enigmatic experience in the Marabar Caves, her naked body--perforated by cactus needles--is closely examined by Miss Derek and Mrs. McBryde (who would have, I assume, mentioned any penis that they might have come across). Adela possesses, though, many man-like traits: her body is "angular" (PI 61), "'she has practically no breasts'" (PI 111). In fact, Aziz wonders "how God could have been so unkind to any female form," and, meeting her in the unconventional atmosphere of Fielding's garden-house, he decides to treat her like a man (PI 61). Further, Adela speaks and acts like a man. According to the narrator of _A Passage to India_, she "always said exactly what was in her mind" (PI 21), and she smokes unchaperoned with Dr. Aziz and Professor Godbole (PI 70). And when Ronny and she are involved in an auto accident which interrupts the romantic interlude discussed above, Ronny asks her if she is frightened. "'Not a bit,'" (PI 80) replies the manly Adela. As Krafft-Ebing explains, "The masculine soul, heaving in the female bosom, finds pleasure in the pursuit of manly sports, and in manifestations of courage and bravado" (qtd. in Smith-Rosenberg 270). Judging by outward appearances, plucky (PI 186), "adventurous" (PI 81) Adela seems to be an invert. But since Adela is a fictional character, we are privileged to know her inner thoughts as inscribed into the narrative of _A Passage to India_ through Forster's use of free indirect discourse, which allows the narrator to join "his voice with his character's while preserving the idiom, tone, and sensibility of the character's speech" (Herz 75). The sympathetic narrator of Forster's text affirms Adela's desire for Ronny by describing her "tenderness" (PI 77) for him, the "unity and happiness" that Adela and Ronny share when they are within physical proximity, and by asserting the animalistic desire which the two young lovers feel for one another (see PI 79-80, 84-5)--"the animal thrill" and feelings of "licentiousness" (PI 84) which pass between them. Indeed, once Adela and Ronny decide finally to enter into an engagement, the narrator notes that Adela's "main interest would henceforward be Ronny" (PI 126). However, this physical and emotional bond is ultimately broken by Adela's confession that nothing happened between Dr. Aziz and her in the Marabar Caves, which, the narrator asserts, "killed [Ronny's] love" (PI 246) for her. By the end of the text, Adela returns to England to a lifestyle that will focus on her "profession" (PI 254) rather than on heterosexual relationships, and, presumably, Adela returns also to the "advanced academic circles" (PI 65) within which she existed prior to her Indian adventure. That is, she returns to the milieu of the implicitly lesbian "New Woman" (see Smith Rosenberg 271). In any case, Adela is, or seems to be according the the narrative commentary included in _A Passage to India_, an invert who desires men. Unlike the inverted Forster, who admitted to having "no feeling for women" (Forster, _Hill_ 315), Adela--a female invert who should desire women, judging from appearances--expresses desire for men. She might be understood therefore as inverted invert. In this sense, Adela's gender performance explodes at least one of the tropes upon which the self-conscious essentialism of the text is constructed. The text, read from the perspective of constructionism, undermines its own assumptions about sexual identity. If Adela is neither homosexual nor heterosexual, neither male nor female, what exactly is she? I would like to suggest that she is queer. Yonatan Touval, in an unpublished essay on the queerness of _A Passage to India_, argues that the term "queer" "derives its semiotic intensity precisely from its semiotic unspecificity, from its refusal to surrender...its hidden meanings, its intentional designs" (4). Touval associates queerness in _A Passage to India_ with "the very essence of Indianicity" (4): "'the real India'" (PI 19) that Adela seeks at the beginning of the novel is, according to Touval, a "queer nation" (4). As the past participle that is her last name suggests, though, Adela is already queer when she arrives in India. She is introduced in the text as "Adela Quested, the queer, cautious girl whom Ronny had commissioned [his mother] to bring from England" (PI 19). The grammar of this sentence places Adela in apposition to her queerness. Her queerness and she are the same. Judith Butler, in _Gender Trouble_ and "Imitation and Gender Insubordination," constructs a framework of gender performance within which Adela Quested's queerness can be theorised. Butler's theorisation of gendered and sexual identity is based on the constructionist assumption that immanent discursivity and ontological reality are roughly coterminous, an assumption complicated, however, in her recent _Bodies that Matter_ (10-11). Generally, Butler's emphasis on performance privileges agency over construction in her theorisation of gender: "Only when the mechanism of gender construction implies the contingency of that construction does 'constructedness' per se prove useful to the political project to enlarge the scope of possible gender configurations" (_Trouble_ 38). For Butler, identities are constructed through performance. Through a "stylised repetition of acts" (_Trouble_ 140), identities can be made to be unstable sites of "radically incredible" (_Trouble_ 121) gender performance, like Adela's. Within this framework the notion of identity becomes unspecific and indeterminate, rather than fixed and static, and thereby allows for a questioning of the dominant binaries underpinning the essentialist understanding of identity--a fiction produced (or written) through performance: "acts, gestures, and desire produce the effect of an internal core or substance, but produce this on the surface of the body, through the play of signifying absences that suggest, but never reveal, the organising principle of identity as a cause" (_Trouble_ 136). Specifically in _A Passage to India_, the surface of Adela's body is Forster's text. But what exactly does Butler mean by "the surface of the body"? Ed Cohen has noted that "[b]y attempting to move gender out of the 'depths' of bodies, Butler collapses bodies onto the 'surface' of discourse reiterating the classic Cartesian mapping of mind onto/over body that inscribes theindividuation as 'identity'" (83). In _Bodies that Matter_, Butler counters that "the persistence of disidentification is equally crucial" (4) to the formation of sexed bodies which are "materialised through time" (1). In her most recent text, Butler argues that the category of "sex" is "normative," taking on the character of what Foucault has called a "regulatory ideal" (1). Cohen's critique of Butler's post-Lacanian "body" is therefore only partially valid. For, while Butler does seem to create her own dichotomy of interior/absent v. exterior/present body (both of which are conceptualised as discursive constructs), she situates identity in an agency that is circumscribed by the always already present regulatory ideal of "sex." Butler's model is a largely successful attempt to dislocate identity from the static arenas of both essentialism and constructionism. The indeterminate subject theorised by Butler is able to perform identity roles that "call into question the fixity of the structuralist law that divides and bounds the "sexes" by virtue of their dyadic differentiation within the heterosexual matrix" (_Bodies_ 11). Butler's conception of gender performance allows for what I would like to call Adela's "queer subjectivity" to emerge within the text of _A Passage to India_. For, as Sedgwick has recently argued, performativity is always already "a queer category" ("Performativity" 2); and, according to Judith Butler, "'queering' persists as the defining moment of performativity" (_Bodies_ 224). Adela's queer identification becomes possible since, for Butler, sexuality is constructed through gender performance within a matrix of compulsory heterosexuality: "the 'reality' of heterosexual identities is performatively constituted through an imitation that sets itself up as the origin and ground of all imitations" ("Imitation" 21). Queerness, conversely, can be performed by making obvious the un-originality of heterosexual gender constructions like minority and inversion, the fact that "if it were not for the notion of homosexual as copy, there would be no construct of heterosexuality as origin. Heterosexuality here presupposes homosexuality" ("Imitation" 22) and vice-versa, and vice-versa. Adela's queer subjectivity, in this sense, is a species of gender performativity which "outs" and undermines the self-reflexivity of supposedly fixed sexual orientations. Adela's particular queer gender performance is similar to what is commonly referred to as "drag." Butler claims: "As much as drag creates a unified picture of a 'woman' (what its critics often oppose), it also reveals the distinctness of those aspects of gendered experience which are falsely naturalised as a unity through the regulatory fiction of heterosexual coherence. In imitating gender, drag reveals the imitative structure of gender itself--as well as its contingency" (_Trouble_ 137). Adela Quested's drag performance--her appearance in Forster's text as a gay man in women's clothing--destabilises what might be called the heterosexist essentialist assumptions of the biographical construct E.M. Forster, as inscribed into the discourses of _A Passage to India_. At the same time, the queerness of the identity which emerges from her performance calls into question the constructionist assumptions upon which that reading is based. Finally, Adela's gender performance calls attention to the performativity inherent in the gender identities of all of the characters in _A Passage to India_, arguably Forster's queerest text. WORKS CITED Beauman, Nicola. _Morgan: A Biography of E.M. Forster_. London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1993. Butler, Judith. _Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex_." New York: Routledge, 1993. ---. "Critically Queer." _GLQ_ 1 (1993): 17-32 ---. _Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity_. New York: Routledge, 1990. ---. "Imitation and Gender Insubordination." _Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories_. Ed. Diana Fuss. New York: Routledge, 1991. 13-31. Cohen, Ed. "Who are 'We'? Gay 'Identity' as Political (E)motion (A Theoretical Rumination)." _Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories_. Ed. Diana Fuss. New York: Routledge, 1991. 71-92. Ellis, Havelock and John Addington Symonds. _Sexual Inversion_. 1897. Ayer, 1994. Forster, E.M. _Aspects of the Novel_. New York: Harcourt, 1927. ---. _The Hill of Devi and Other Indian Writings_. London: Arnold, 1983. ---. _A Passage to India_. 1924. London: Arnold, 1978. Foucault, Michel. _The History of Sexuality: An Introduction_. _Vol. 1_. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage, 1990. Furbank, P.N. _E.M. Forster: A Life_. 2 vols. New York: Harcourt, 1977, 1978. Herz, Judith Scherer. A Passage to India: _Nation and Narration_. New York: Twayne, 1993. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. _Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire_. New York, Columbia UP, 1985. ---. _Epistemology of the Closet_. Berkeley: U of California P, 1990. ---. "Queer Performativity: Henry James' _The Art of the Novel_." _GLQ_ 1 (1993): 1-16. Showalter, Elaine. "_A Passage to India_ as 'Marriage Fiction': Forster's Sexual Politics." _Women in Literature_ 5 (1977): 3-16. Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll. "Discourses of Sexuality and Subjectivity: The New Woman, 1870-1936." _Hidden From History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past_. Ed. Martin Duberman, Martha Vincinus, and George Chauncey, Jr. New York: Meridian-Penguin, 1989. Touval, Yonatan. "Queer Nation: E.M. Forster's _A Passage to India_." Unpublished essay. About the author: George Piggford, a native of Pittsburgh, is a Ph.D. candidate in English at the University of Montreal. In collaboration with Robert K. Martin he is editing a collection of essays tentatively entitled _Queer Forster_, to be published in 1996. His creative work has recently appeared in _Gents, Badboys, and Barbarians: New Gay Male Poetry_ (Alyson, 1995). -----------------------------------------------------------------------------