Seems like the Frobisher/Eva anon has a hard time letting things go. And you know what, I can’t either. Because they’re harassing the Cloud Atlas fandom and they need to stop.
Part one of my responses to them include examples of Sixsmith/Frobisher hints through quotes directly from the book.
Um…wow. A sizable fandom for this book/film must have developed entirely while I wasn’t looking, especially for there to be shipping wars. Don’t get the impression that I’m mocking you, though; I love the analysis in these posts, and some of those anon comments are so inane that I feel I have to take a crack at them myself. As a disclaimer, I don’t have the book with me at the moment, so I won’t be able to make any direct quotes.
I have no idea how anyone could consider Frobisher/Sixsmith as a form of political correctness. I talked about my first impressions of the pairing a while back here (film) and here (book), and I stand by what I said about my appreciation for Frobisher – book!Frobisher especially – possessing a rather more fluid sexuality than what one generally sees in fiction with explicitly queer characters. His is a reckless, sensual bisexuality, but I believe that there are ample small touches in the text that, though he may not be as deeply committed to Sixsmith as one might expect of a romantic hero (which is fine considering he’s not one), he still cares for him perhaps even more than he consciously acknowledges.
A good bit of that has to do with writing style – Mitchell’s attention to varying the style of his writing by historical period is extensive, with The Pacific Journal and Letters from Zedelghem in particular conforming to most of the conventions of their respective settings. The latter conforms to the temporal reality that, from around the 1880s to well into the sexual revolution of the 1960s-70s, homosexuality was a publically acknowledged fact, treated as a (potentially curable) mental illness, criminalized in Great Britain among other places, and thus a taboo subject for explicit representation in writing. Thus, Frobisher’s letters are extensively coded when it comes to all sexual topics but homosexual ones especially – for minor (and therefore less controversial) examples, compare his flirtations with a Belgian girl in town to his sexual encounters with two random men. Initially this appears as a safety precaution for himself, until one recalls that Frobisher hasn’t got much of a reputation left to lose at this point, especially by the time of his suicide letter. If he’s saving anyone by coding his feelings, it’s Sixsmith, who has a bright career ahead of him that could be irrevocably destroyed were letters explicitly mentioning a sexual relationship with another man ever to become public. Even Luisa’s initial reaction to reading the letters – muted as it is by four decades, a vastly different social climate, and the somber freshness of Sixsmith’s murder – conveys a certain level of implicit judgment of the man over his relationship with Frobisher.
As for homosexuality in Cloud Atlas as political correctness, I would ask the anon to look beyond Letters from Zedelghem, as both The Pacific Journal and Sloosha’s Crossin’ contain decidedly non-PC depictions of male-on-male rape, with the former including Ewing’s moralizing on the subject in a manner typical for the mid-19th century. There’s also Luisa’s aforementioned reaction to the letters and at least one instance of Cavendish dropping a reference to lesbians in The Ghastly Ordeal, but as generally misanthropic as Cavendish is I think that’s simply a direct statement on the continued pervasiveness of casual homophobia even in the early 21st century. Frobisher/Sixsmith, embedded as it is à la Wilde or Woolf or any other Victorian/modernist writer working with queer subtext, feels like a much-needed contrast to all that. The fact that Frobisher is a scoundrel and not all that into monogamy only makes his character more compelling, and because of it – to say nothing of his views on art and life – his suicide is less a moment of total pathos compared with those of two other (arguably) queer characters in literature of the period, Septimus Smith of Mrs. Dalloway and Quentin Compson of The Sound and the Fury.
But…Sixsmith or Eva? I think that’s pretty clear.
Gascon-en-exil: Gallophilic Cultural Posturing 