Palatable poison 360

Great Cities 345 question of the “naturalness” of cities merges with the question of the “naturalness” of homosexuality; Park’s argument for a natural city is in this sense supported by Hall’s natural-born homosexual However, Park’s organic city is flexible, “rooted in the habits and customs of the people who inhabit” the city (93), “habits and customs” shaped by as well as shaping even material conditions “The city possesses a moral as well as a physical organization,” he observes, “and these two mutually interact in characteristic ways to mold and modify one another” (93) But unlike Park, for Hall, to be natural is to be fixed Stephen’s and Valérie’s natural homosexuality is “born”; it simply “exists.” By all rights, the fixity of Hall’s invert ought to make her an alien creature in Park’s organic city Nevertheless, not only are Park and Hall discussing similar subjects similarly but in the end Hall’s portrait of the natural invert is a description of precisely the urban citizen Park needs It is, paradoxically, precisely because of her fixity that Hall’s natural homosexual not only belongs in Park’s organic city but is required by it, for Park’s vision of a flexible, living city is based on his belief in a fundamentally fixed human nature At the same time Hall was invested in a vision of a natural city to support her portrait of the natural homosexual As I have noted, she focused on the French capital rather than London as the ultimate setting for her representative lesbian because Paris was some distance for her elite Englishwoman to travel But there is at least one other reason Stephen Gordon lives on the Left Bank rather than by the British Museum The distinction Hall establishes between the city in which Stephen settles and the other great cities in her novel lies in their relations to nature New York and London are commercial and/or industrial centers: Angela Crossby tramps the “long, angular streets, miles and miles of streets” (179) of Manhattan in search of employment; Stephen finds smokestacks belching soot over the river and trees of London But no one works for a living in Hall’s Paris (except Stephen’s servants, in what seems to be a semifeudal arrangement) No industrial processes impose themselves upon the landscape Without commerce or workplaces, Paris can serve as the focus of her presentation of the queer “great city” as a natural setting, where the urban homosexual world Stephen and Mary join can be described as a “stream that flows silent and deep” (356) In the end, in both Park’s and Hall’s accounts, the city becomes its own peculiar natural world, with inverts as its denizens Park concludes that “We