“Funny Queer Fits”: Masculinity and Desire in J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit
2021; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 46; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/chq.2021.0036
ISSN1553-1201
Autores Tópico(s)Themes in Literature Analysis
Resumo“Funny Queer Fits”: Masculinity and Desire in J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit Derek Pacheco (bio) Upon returning to Bag End, and to “the Sale” of all his possessions, Bilbo Baggins “found he had lost more than spoons—he had lost his reputation. . . . he was no longer quite respectable. He was in fact held by all the hobbits of the neighbourhood to be ‘queer.’” Even so, he is “quite content” (Tolkien, Annotated Hobbit 361). In transporting us with Bilbo outside the limits of convention, The Hobbit (1937) is similarly queer, encouraging contentment unmoored from economic and sexual markers of traditional patriarchal respectability. Bilbo has no offspring to inherit Bag End; he has been unable to secure his domestic wealth because he has eschewed heterosexual labor in favor of far-off adventures with strange men. Presuming him dead, the community steps in to reabsorb the Baggins wealth, but Bilbo interrupts their plans. After using his newly acquired riches to buy back some of his furniture (he never does recover his spoons), he declines to invest, hoard, or bequeath, and instead dispenses presents both practical and extravagant, until his fortune is “largely spent” in the pleasures of queer, that is, non-heteronormative, non-familial, excess (361). Bilbo’s ending is a happy one, but it is not the sort of fairytale ending we are trained to expect; in fact, the novel conspicuously makes such a resolution impossible by virtually eliminating heterosexuality from its pages. While it presents gentle affections and domestic contentment, the novel does so without the women tradition has made the gatekeepers for such elements. It is, therefore, queer by definition. As Lewis Seifert explains, the term “queer” encompasses “those genders and sexualities,” including “nonnormative heterosexualities,” that “destabilize the binaries (such as masculine-feminine, heterosexual-homosexual, dominant-submissive, active-passive) that are so central to upholding normative categories” (16). As such, the fantasy genre The Hobbit redefined and the queer aesthetics it enacts aspire to similarly utopian ends: alternate, less rigid ways of seeing and being in the world. Brian Attebery argues that fantasy produces “wonder,” destabilizing those unconscious patterns [End Page 263] of understanding that have become our realities while encouraging us to see the world not as we have been taught to accept it, but rather as it “might be or ought to be” (Strategies 128).1 Many queer theorists adopt similarly constructivist approaches to sexuality, seeking to loosen the “heterosexual matrix” (to use Judith Butler’s phrase) of sex, gender, and oppositional desire through which modern, bourgeois culture has consolidated its powers. In a sense, then, The Hobbit is a secondary world in which the complexities of human desire often transcend convention and in which heteronormativity is not an immutable world-building principle. Of course, “fantasy” is a nebulous term, encompassing a variety of cultural meanings and forms ranging from the epic to the everyday, from the high literary to the lowest of mass market formula fiction (Attebery, Stories 2). In a letter to his publisher following the runaway commercial success of The Hobbit, Tolkien confesses: “Mr. Baggins began as a comic tale among conventional and inconsistent Grimm’s fairy-tale dwarves” before being “drawn into the edge” of Tolkien’s own developing legendarium (Letters 26). Invoking Tolkien’s epithet, “fairy-tale,” I follow Marina Warner’s use of the term to describe modern texts that rely on “elements of the form’s symbolic language” (xviii). “The authors of newly invented stories, such as . . . J. R. R. Tolkien,” she writes, “do not write fairy tales as such, but they adopt and transform recognizable elements—flying carpets, magic rings, animals that talk—from fairy tale conventions, adding to readers’ enjoyment by the direct appeal to shared knowledge of the fantasy code” (xix). She finds an exemplar for this “symbolic Esperanto” in Tolkien’s “Pot of soup, the Cauldron of Story” (xix), his analogy from his 1939 lecture, “On Fairy-Stories,” for the long tradition of folk stories into which storytellers, like cooks, continually dip their spoons and stir “new bits” (qtd. in Warner xxi).2 In Tolkien’s case, “Fairies do not need to appear to stamp a story a fairy tale,” but, certainly, magic (or...
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