Across the Veil: Thorton Wilder, Artifice and Camp

​Camp as an aesthetic sensibility was first clearly articulated by Susan Sontag in her 1964 essay “Notes on Camp.” Since then, much more scholarship on the subject has been released and camp has been incorporated into the field of queer theory, bringing its relevance both in popular culture and academic theory into the twenty-first century. Camp, defined by exaggeration and extravagance and emphasizing style over content, has many classic examples; some named by Sontag include Oscar Wilde, Greta Garbo, and Mae West as personages among various movies, musicals, and novels. However, one figure to whose work camp theory has not been applied is the twentieth-century author Thornton Wilder. Seen as a writer of both Americana and didactic moral truths, Wilder has largely been ignored by queer theorists working in the area of camp. In my study, I will apply Sontag’s theories, among those of other scholars, to Wilder’s 1934 picaresque novel Heaven’s My Destination, whose main character George Brush maintains an exaggerated artifice of American masculinity defined by religion and a quest for a nuclear family in a morally ravaged Depression-era environment. In this study, George Brush is viewed through a camp lens and seen as a purposefully hollow and exaggerated character of American masculinity. Furthermore, the implications of such a depiction during the Depression era by a writer such as Wilder will be explored, as I discuss how camp, despite its apparent frivolity, works as a means of social critique.