Customer Reviews

John Knowles's a Separate Peace (Bloom's Modern Critical Interpretations)

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In this era of "Brokeback Mountain", when many heterosexual filmgoers are finding out to their surprise that even the most masculine of men may form unexpected emotional attachments, it's worth taking another look at "A Separate Peace" to consider whether the long-implied homoeroticism of the story is true, and whether it makes any difference.

I first read "A Separate Peace" as a sexually questioning male college student at a small isolated liberal arts school, much like the mythical "Devon". I experienced homoerotic infatuations with two Finny-like characters, both of whom became "best friends" with me and neither of whom became sexual partners (nor did anyone else until I was 38 years old). I felt a remarkable affinity with Gene and with his conflicted idolization and envy of Finny, whose Pied Piper attractiveness I could neither avoid nor imitate. I just re-read the book this weekend, shortly after turning age 50, now in a long-term monogamous relationship with another man and much "sadder but wiser" about the whole question of sexual orientation.

Here are some factors that would favor a homoerotic interpretation of "A Separate Peace": 1) as far as I can recall, there is not a single mention of teenage girls anywhere in the book. To think that a bunch of straight teenage boys imprisoned in bleak all-male dormitories in the frozen winter wouldn't even talk about girls late at night strains credibility. 2) The Devon boys never attended mixers with girl's schools, nor was there any evidence that any of them ever snuck out at night in search of sexual gratification. 3) When Gene and Finny rode their bikes to the beach and spent the night, there is no reference to the girls who surely must have been there. Gene talks only about Finny, about Finny undressing to go in the water, and about their intimate conversation just before going to sleep in the dunes. 4) Actually, the only references to women that I can remember at all are generally unflattering descriptions of professors' wives, hardly the objects of male teenage fantasies.

More important than any of these circumstantial evidences is the relationship between Gene and Finny. Based on my own similar experiences in college, I would guess that any homoerotic feelings were all on Gene's part: he knows exactly how much Finny weighs and how tall he is; he provides an almost lyrical description of the way Finny's muscles flow smoothly from his legs up to his neck; he misses no opportunity to report Finny being unclothed, from not wearing pajamas in the dorm to the final visit in the hospital, when Finny for no apparent reason is not wearhing a shirt.

Gene's terrible feelings of resentment toward Finny that caused Gene to jounce the tree limb could well have had their roots partly in repressed sexual frustration--I threw a couple of totally irrational fits toward my own objects of affection in college for that very reason.

So does it matter whether "A Separate Peace" has homoerotic overtones? Only if you think that "Brokeback Mountain" was nothing more than a "gay cowboy movie" and to heck with the fine acting and directing. The emotions that "A Separate Peace" expresses are universal and cross-cultural. That's why the book will always be a classic.