Analysis Of Erotic Triangle

II. Erotic Triangle: Consolidating Male Identity

Introduced by his father, Eddie gets a job at his father’s friend Greg Lushington’s farm. At first he feels completely misfit in this “aggressively masculine world”, but gradually he develops a good relationship with the manager Don Prowse and Mrs. Tyrrell. But the new environment doesn’t make him free from the identity issue. On one side, he is very “glad of this employment for his hands, and it made him feel more masculine” (186); on the other side, the “phantom” of Eudoxia haunts him sometimes. When he falls from the horse, it is Prowse who saves him; “Eudoxia…would have liked to thank, or in some way reward, the sweaty brute who had carried her halfway across the Bithynian plain. She

So besides using Marcia to enhance his masculinity, Eddie also uses her to keep his relation with Greg. This is called “male homosocial desire”, the close bond between men, which includes both non-sexual social bond and genital homosexual desire (Sedgwick 1-2). “Erotic triangle” is a typical mode which can illustrate “male homosocial desire”. An erotic triangle contains three parts, two men competing with each other and a woman the men aim for. “Girard seems to see the bond between rivals in an erotic triangle as being even stronger, more heavily determinant of actions and choices, than anything in the bond between either of the lovers and the beloved” (Sedgwick 21). “The bond between rivals” is just the “male homosocial desire”; this bond is stronger than the one between either of the men and the woman, because “man uses a woman as a ‘conduit of a relationship’ in which the true partner is a man” (Sedgwick

When Eddie swims in the river nakedly, Prowse passes by and sees that. He says to Eddie: “Better watch out, Ed. If you flash yer arse about like that, someone might jump in and bugger yer” (250-251). There is a suspicion in Prowse’s heart, and finally, a few days later, he comes to Eddie, “I reckon I recognised you, Eddie, the day you jumped in—into the river—and started flashing yer tail at us. I reckon I recognised a fuckun queen” (284). Prowse rapes Eddie, and Eddie cries after that.
“Eddie Twyborn was breathing chaff, sobbing back, not for the indignity to which he was being subjected, but finally for his acceptance of it” (284). What makes Eddie upset is not that Prowse rapes him, but that he accepts Prowse’s rape with no resistance. Facing a man’s rape, Eddie’s instinct makes him really hurt. Whether imitating Prowse or committing adultery with Marcia, Eddie’s aim is to establish a masculine identity, but accepting Prowse’s rape means that he is destroying the identity he tries to