| Twentieth-century American literature and culture are heavily populated by representations of rebels, including the racially and sexually problematic figure of rebellion that I call l'homme fatal. Through a focus on rebels at vexed moments in our national narrative, I argue that this figure is evoked and imagined in order to effect diverse social and political projects. Following historical trajectories in the discourses of sexuality and race, I trace the manner in which two master narratives have come to organize our understanding of masculine subjects during the twentieth century: the Oedipus complex and the cultural fantasy of the black rapist. Though articulated differently, these mythological systems function in tandem: the myth of Oedipus sexualizes and pathologizes white masculinities, while the myth of the black rapist sexualizes and criminalizes black masculinities. Locating William Faulkner's work at the nexus of these two mythologies---the culture of psychoanalysis and the culture of lynching---I argue that Faulkner's anti-heroes provide a prototype of l'homme fatal, the racially and sexually dangerous individual, potential murderer, rapist, and sodomite that figures so prominently in subsequent literary and cultural imaginings.; The project then turns to "Romancing the Rebel," examinations of subsequent hommes fatals. It is in the 1950s, I argue in Chapter two, in the context of desegregation and homosexual panic, that the figure of the rebel is codified as the white man in black leather and becomes the American icon of rebellion. Chapters three and four examine how Jewish authors (Malamud, Bellow, Mailer and Roth) and African American authors (Ellison, Himes, Petry, and Bennett) evoke the l'homme fatal. Returning to film, chapter five examines how l'homme fatal---as motorcycle outlaw---was revised in the later 1960s as a trope for national anxieties around radical movement politics. The conclusion examines queer appropriations of the rebel. These versions of l'homme fatal evidence successful and problematic appropriations. Evoking the dangers of the rapist and the sodomite, the queer l'homme fatal effects an empowering performance of subversive masculinities which ultimately challenge the very classificatory categories that enable it. |
