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Subjectivity in the American Protest Novel
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Kimberly S. Drake
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Subjectivity in the American Protest Novel
subjectivity in the american protest novel Copyright © Kimberly S. Drake, 2011. All rights reserved.
A version of Chapter 5 was originally published as “Doing Time in/as ‘The Monster’: Identity under Incarceration in African-American Prison Literature” in African American Confinement Literature, Tara T. Green, ed. Reprinted by permission of Mercer University Press, 2008. Parts of Chapter 3 were originally published as “Women on the Go: Blues, Conjure, and Other Alternatives to Domesticity in Ann Petry’s The Street and The Narrows.” Reprinted from Arizona Quarterly 54.1 (1998), by permission of the Regents of the University of Arizona. A section of Chapter 2 was originally published in my article “Rape and Resignation: Silencing the Victim in the Novels of Morrison and Wright” in LIT 6.1-2 (April 1995). Reprinted by permission of the publisher, Taylor and Francis Ltd, http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals. First published in 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the World, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–10716–8 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Drake, Kimberly, 1965– Subjectivity in the American protest novel / Kimberly S. Drake. p. cm. ISBN 978–0–230–10716–8 1. Protest literature, American—History and criticism. 2. American fiction— 20th century—History and criticism. 3. American fiction—African American authors—History and criticism. 4. Subjectivity in literature. 5. Identity (Psychology) in literature. 6. African Americans in literature. 7. Working class in literature. 8. Women in literature. I. Title. PS228.P73D73 2011 2010035162 813 .509353—dc22 A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library Design by Integra Software Services First edition: March 2011 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.
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Several paragraphs of Chapter 1 appear in my article “The Violence in/of Representation: Protest Strategies from Slave Narrative to Punk Rock.” Reprinted by permission of Pacific Coast Philology, the journal of the Pacific Ancient and Modern Languages Association.
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Dedicated to the memory of my mother, Linda Drake
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Acknowledgments
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1 Introduction: Determinism, Double Consciousness, and the Construction of Subjectivity in American Protest Novels
1
2 Rape, Repression, and Remainder: Racial Trauma in Wright’s Early Novels
49
3 “Women on the Go”: Stereotype, Domesticity, and Street Culture in Ann Petry’s Fiction
89
4 “You Make Your Children Sick”: Domestic Ideology and Working-Class Female Identity in Tillie Olsen’s Yonnondio and Sarah E. Wright’s This Child’s Gonna Live
131
5 Doing Time in/as “The Monster”: Subjectivity and Abjection in Narratives of Incarceration
175
Notes
199
Works Cited
231
Index
247
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Contents
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This project is the culmination of work I did during the formative years of my life as a scholar, and I want to extend my gratitude to the members of various nurturing communities across the country. I am eternally grateful for the financial support of the Department of English at the University of California. I also appreciate the generosity of the Mellon Foundation, whose fellowship sustained me for my first dissertation year, and of the Mednick Memorial Fellowship, which enabled me to research the papers of Richard Wright and Chester Himes at the libraries of Yale, Tulane, and Brown. Thanks are also due to my colleagues at Scripps College and Virginia Wesleyan College, who believed in my project and supported it in a number of ways: Cheryl Walker, Michael Lamkin, Cecilia Conrad, John Peavoy, Gayle Greene, Michael Hall, Lisa Carstens, Sara Sewell, Sally Shedd, Patrick Goold, and Margaret Reese. Among many other generous gestures, Cheryl Walker encouraged me to send the book to Palgrave Macmillan; I will always be thankful for her support. Brigitte Shull and Lee Norton at Palgrave Macmillan have been extremely helpful guides through the process, and thanks to Flora Kenson for her patient editing. I also thank editors at LIT, Arizona Quarterly, Pacific Coast Philology, Mercer University Press, and Taylor and Francis for granting me permission to reprint my articles. Without a number of mentors, colleagues, and friends, this project would not have reached its final form (nor would I). My dissertation and orals reading groups, my housemates in the Fish Palace, and my friends from graduate school and college helped me find the joy in scholarship and a life outside of it; thanks especially to Irene Tucker (my comrade during our strangely parallel phases of professional upheaval), Andrea Solomon, Michael Galchinsky, Daphne Lamothe, Jennifer Nelson, Francesca Royster, Jacqueline Shea Murphy, Anne Oman, Elise Marks, Cynthia Schrager, Bruce Burgett, Shelley Streeby, Judy Berman, Joe Harrington, Alyson Bardsley, Steve Yao, Arthur Riss, Simon Stern, Simone Davis, Steven Rubio, my many soccer and softball
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Acknowledgments
x
teammates, Jamal Rayyis, Travis Wall, and the rest of the “Big One” Cal crew, and especially Aram Antaramian (who supported me in many wonderful ways through the crucial years of this project) and the Antaramian family. My dear friends Cindy Franklin, Tina Brooks, and Kate Garrett helped me through the mirror phase and showed me how to write a decent sentence, among many other invaluable contributions to my life and work. The English Department faculty at Berkeley set an intellectual precedent that cannot be matched at any other university in the world; they collectively nourished my mind and raised my political consciousness during my extended intellectual adolescence (lasting almost one third of my life). I especially appreciate the time and energy spent on me and my work by Barbara Christian, Sue Schweik, Carolyn Porter, Elizabeth Abel, and Sharon Marcus, outstanding professors whose insight, intelligence, and inspirational teaching amazed and sustained me. My heartfelt thanks go to Mitch Breitwieser, my advisor and “academic dad” for thirteen years. His genius and sense of humor inspired me to become an academic, and he is the model of the teacher-scholar I have worked hard to become. I want to thank my family for believing in me and supporting me at every twist and turn of this long process, and for defining strength, intelligence, good humor, and determination: Dick Drake, Linda Drake, Stacey Drake, Dave Wilkes, Susan Drake-Wilkes, Grace Drake-Wilkes, Sunny Drake, and all members of the McCament, Frye, and Stacy families, as well as Rob Rivera, Drew Padilla, and Charles McKittrick, my brothers in chaos. My deepest love and appreciation go to my father, Dick Drake, who sent me to Berkeley, my mother, Linda Drake, who taught me to love reading, and her parents, Mary and Robert McCament, the intellectuals, writers, and world travelers whose example I have always hoped to imitate.
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
1
Introduction: Determinism, Double Consciousness, and the Construction of Subjectivity in American Protest Novels
The place they had thoughts on was some of those vast and unpeopled countries of America, which are fruitful and fit for habitation, being devoid of all civil inhabitants where there are only savage and brutish men which range up and down, little otherwise than wild beasts of the same. (Bradford 168, my emphasis) I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil . . . Why did God make me an outcast and a stranger in mine own house? The shades of the prison-house closed round about us all. (Du Bois Souls 44, 45, my emphasis) My inheritance was particular, specifically limited and limiting: my birthright was vast, connecting me to all that lives, and to everyone, forever. But one cannot claim the birthright without accepting the inheritance. (Baldwin xii, my emphasis)
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Chapter
2
SUBJECTIVITY
IN THE
AMERICAN PROTEST NOVEL
The historic and cultural “inheritance” of African Americans has customarily excluded them from their “birthright,” an American identity that in the minds of the earliest settlers was intimately connected to the vast spaces of “unpeopled” land they claimed as their own. Social power has everything to do with the control of space, as Houston Baker notes, describing dominant society as “those who maintain place” and tradition, and the socially powerless as “placeless,” “nomadic, transitional” (Baker 202). James Baldwin recognizes implicitly that the American birthright has been claimed for the exclusive use of “people,” meaning whites, while those in the category of “ranging” non-people are denied membership in the transcendent human community constituted through and symbolized by free space, defined instead by their compulsory racialness. Recognizing that their culture and history are vital, neither Du Bois nor Baldwin demands to be “raceless”1 or “melted” in the American “pot,” but both lay claim to that American space (Du Bois’ “world” and “house”) and human community (Baldwin’s “all that lives, and everyone”). Ultimately, though, neither can clearly articulate how one might move freely between inheritance and birthright. The opposition is constructed between a supposedly limiting racial identity and an unlimited “human” identity,2 so that to be “raced” in the United States is in practice to be viewed categorically, through the lens of stereotype, which dehumanizes the individual being viewed. Du Bois’ well-known description of double consciousness was an attempt to articulate for the first time the impact of inhabiting both identities: not simply “American” and “Negro,” but American observing subject and Negro object of observation. As Hortense Spillers has argued, for Du Bois it “was not enough to be seen; one was called upon to decide what it meant” (Spillers “All the Things” 397). Du Bois’ Souls of Black Folk is a comprehensive effort to “decide what it meant” to be a racialized subject, but his description of double consciousness also suggests that as a survival strategy, individual African Americans had to decide what “being seen” meant to them at any given moment. His book both reflects upon this psychological problem and comments on its potential as what Spillers calls a “route to self-reflexivity.” In her autobiographical short story “The New Mirror,” Ann Petry refigures the spatial configuration of double consciousness as well as its
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I relished the thought that the steady stream of white customers who went in and out of our drugstore did not know what our dining room was like, did not even know if we had one. It was like having a concealed weapon to use against your enemy. (Petry “New Mirror” 62)
conception of visibility. Reflecting the concept of the “inherited” public self described by Du Bois and Baldwin, Petry’s narrator experiences her racial “inheritance” most clearly while working in her family’s drugstore, where she must deal with white customers. She understands her public self as the object of the gaze, in this case that of white customers who see her and her family through the lens of racial stereotype. Her public persona always self-consciously behaves in reaction to the white gaze, deciding whether or how to reject or acknowledge the stereotype. As Baldwin notes, while African Americans must not surrender to “the American image of the Negro” that is part of their psyche, they “have no other experience besides their experience on this continent and it is an experience which cannot be rejected, yet which remains to be embraced” (Notes 38, 42). Accordingly, they make constant “paradoxical adjustments” to this image, whether to counteract or strategically inhabit it. For Petry’s narrator, freedom from such constant psychological repositioning is not found in the “vast” space that Du Bois3 and Baldwin describe as their birthright, a striking repetition of phrasing describing the “New World” (probably as advertised by the Virginia Company) that convinced William Bradford’s group of Puritans to settle there. Rather, in “The New Mirror,” the self claims its inheritance in the secret space of the dining room, hidden from the outside world. This self, protected from the gaze of whites, is free, human, without restrictions. Whites may not know of its existence. The “dining room” is a safe area, a weapon against the “enemy” (the whites whose distorted projections continually inflict damage to the psyche). What Petry explores in her work is the struggle to keep the dining room free of intruders—not just whites, but white stereotypes of and beliefs about blacks. Her characters struggle to maintain boundaries, to create a clean, safe space that will hold off the racist ideology threatening to contaminate the pure human self. The gender-related differences in these depictions of double consciousness form a point of departure for my discussion of subjectivity4 in American protest literature of the early- and mid-twentieth century. Protest writers of this period used their literary talent to involve their readers in the imaginative experience not only of social oppression but of the victim’s struggle to understand, manage, or resist that oppression. In doing so, they hoped to compel readers toward analysis and action of the mechanisms and effects of social oppression; in particular, they demand that readers reexamine not only their own class and racial biases but also the concept of social deviance and its concomitant processes of categorization and judgment. As participants in and subjects of a debate among scientists and sociologists concerning the causes of class and racial inequality, both African American and white proletarian writers had a stake in leftist
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INTRODUCTION
SUBJECTIVITY
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AMERICAN PROTEST NOVEL
social reform and in accurate literary representation of their people,5 but they spend their greatest energies on problematizing the concept of social determinism, the theory that is the basis of naturalism and, I argue, of stereotyping. These protest writers examine the ways that social ideologies and institutions attempt to control the lives and minds of the “dispossessed,” the working classes and racial minorities; the impact of this social control is traumatic, and the results are versions of double consciousness or fragmented subjectivity. These texts also emphasize, however, individual and collective attempts to resist social control through appropriating socially sanctioned representations of identity and developing new constructions, thus expanding contemporary ideas about how individuals are determined by society. Weapons in the War for Readers’ Hearts and Minds My study asserts that the shared goal of transforming reader consciousness led American protest writers to innovative forms and complex imagery, thus making a significant aesthetic contribution to American literature. However, critics and other writers have denigrated and dismissed protest literature for being more concerned with ideology than aesthetics. During the past century, “protest” was a “pejorative code word for works of inferior artistic accomplishment” (Ward 173–74). Indeed, the terms “protest” and “proletarian” continue to carry the connotation “social” and “political,” and therefore “nonliterary”; moreover, the value of protest novels seems to inhere exclusively in their historical or sociological aspects.6 Certainly, most political novelists of the thirties and forties did not make aesthetic value their highest priority, although the commitment to the concept of “worker-writing” that had been a point of contention between Mike Gold and Claude McKay, for example, was beginning to wane (Morgan 248).7 While in general they were more concerned with realistic portrayals and unadorned prose than with the stylistic experimentation that is a hallmark of modernism, they did not feel as constrained by leftist notions of literary production as is commonly thought.8 In fact, protest and proletarian novels are consciously experimental; the authors I study in particular broke with convention in finding new ways to touch their readership, to construct characters, to narrate, and to resolve plot conflict. Furthermore, these authors deliberately reject the idea that literature can be separated from political ideas. W. E. B. Du Bois and Ann Petry have claimed that all art is propaganda, and Toni Morrison concurs, adding that if her literature is not political, not about the village or about “you,” then it’s about “nothing.”9 If we accept this premise, then the difference between protest literature and literature for “art’s sake” is
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the extent to which the piece serves as a Mayakovskian hammer10 with which to reshape society, and the particular set of social issues under construction. Defending protest literature from another angle in her essay “The Novel as Social Criticism” (1950), Petry endeavored to clear a respectable space for novels of protest, suggesting that by “consigning protest novels to the status of the extra-literary,” white readers of the forties and fifties were attempting to shield themselves from the “emotional pain and guilt” that they experienced while reading (qtd. in Ward 176). Petry’s argument points to two important aspects of the protest novel: its goal, to stir up “emotional pain” in readers, virtually traumatizing them, and its readers’ defensive measures against such reactions. Protest writers developed a variety of tactics beyond the sentimental and the disgusting to break through readerly defenses. Despite its status as the “definitive literary genre of the ‘middle class’ by virtue of its focus on individual self-making in the fluid social universe generated by a market economy” (Lang 9), the novel serves the protest writer well in the quest to claim for socially oppressed subjects membership in the “human community” because of its realism, its psychological focus, and its didactic purpose. Indeed, many of the earliest American novels are protesting some kind of social injustice. In the words of Jerry Ward Jr., protest writers have considered the novel the perfect “weapon against culturally sponsored ignorance” (Ward 173).11 In particular, the first protest novel, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the first piece of social realist fiction, Rebecca Harding Davis’s Life in the Iron Mills, and the first African American novels (William Wells Brown’s Clotel, 1853, and Harriet Wilson’s Our “Nig,” 1859) worked toward explicitly political goals, namely the liberation of oppressed workers and slaves; the naturalist and proletarian novels of the later-nineteenth and early-twentieth century served similar purposes. As measured by popular response to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Life in the Iron Mills, and even Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, early versions of the protest novel often did have an immediate, if indirect, political impact.12 While not exactly in modernist fashion, then, protest writers of the thirties and forties certainly engaged in literary experimentation in order to connect with readers. They used and adapted protest tactics of nineteenth-century writers, such as modeling reader identification with protagonists and directing readers’ response through authorial intervention in the narrative. In her sentimental abolitionist novel, Harriet Beecher Stowe expertly manipulates readers’ emotions by depicting sympathetic yet flawed white middle-class women as models for readers who may not be willing to identify with African American characters.13 She further tightens the screws by intervening in the narrative to compel
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SUBJECTIVITY
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readers’ emotional identification, for example, during the conversion scene of the pro-slavery Senator Bird. Mrs. Bird is able to convince her husband to change his position on the Fugitive Slave law when the slave fugitives Eliza and Harry arrive and Eliza tells Bird her story. Modeling the proper “reading” practices for Stowe’s readership, Bird is moved to tears by Eliza’s narrative and overthrows his own moral code by offering aid to Eliza and offering the clothing of his dead child to Harry—literally and figuratively putting Harry in the place of his own child. Stowe admonishes readers to focus on Bird’s compassion rather than his ideological “flip-flopping” : “And you need not exult over him, good brother of the Southern states; for we have some inkling that many of you, under similar circumstances, would not do much better. We have reason to know, in Kentucky, as in Mississippi, are noble and generous hearts, to whom never was tale of suffering told in vain” (Stowe 77). Stowe constructs an ideal sentimental reader and demands that this reader inhabit a particularly compassionate reading stance. Her “dramatic interactions” are designed “to trigger in the reader an intuition of slavery’s moral and legal invalidity,” as Gregg Crane has noted (qtd. in Sanchez 155). This intuition, relying as it does upon vivid emotional responses, allows “the birth of a socially reformed reader” (Sanchez 155–56). In her “Concluding Remarks,” Stowe insists on emotions as the final arbiter of social justice: There is one thing that every individual can do,—they can see to it that they feel right. An atmosphere of sympathetic influence encircles every human being; and the man or woman who feels strongly, healthily and justly, on the great interests of humanity, is a constant benefactor to the human race. See, then, to your sympathies in this matter! Are they in harmony with the sympathies of Christ? or are they swayed and perverted by the sophistries of worldly policy? (Stowe Uncle Tom’s 624, emphasis in original)
Here, Stowe insists not only that the body of the reader must be imbued by Christian emotions, thereby in turn transmitting those emotions to legislation, but that the lack of such emotions is an explicit “perversion” of their “sympathies”—in effect, a kind of trauma that will impact their consciousness (and their location in the afterlife) in damaging ways. Perhaps the most significant contribution to protest literature, however, is Frederick Douglass’s portrayal of racial trauma and what would come to be called double consciousness in his Narrative. Although his genre was of necessity nonfiction, his work used the same literary techniques as the protest novel for the same goal: to reshape the consciousness
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of readers by plunging them imaginatively into a world they would never otherwise experience and subtly directing their reactions to that world. (By categorizing Douglass’ Narrative as a slave narrative or even autobiography, critics have missed its genre-bending approach; I would argue that the Narrative is more accurately categorized as creative nonfiction.) In the process, he illustrates slavery’s traumatizing (“soul-killing”) impact on slaves and owners alike while manifesting virtually none of that trauma in his own autobiographical persona. If Douglass had felt that his particular socio-historical context would support his creation of a novel about slavery, his protagonist might have showed many more symptoms of the double consciousness visible in some of his portrayals of other slaves, such as the coded songs the slaves sing and the lies they tell to masters, lies that they come to believe are true. Instead, his Narrative gets at psychological trauma in a more subtle way. In describing the impossibility of accurately representing his experience, a problem that would become theorized and stylized during the period of literary modernism, Douglass points to the unspeakability of trauma. Stating “I wish I could commit to paper the feelings with which I beheld [the whipping of aunt Hester],” Douglass admits that words cannot adequately capture, or compel, an emotional response to such a traumatic moment (Narrative 16). Here, Douglass creates tension between an issue central to recent theories of trauma and testimony, the idea that trauma resists accurate representation, and an issue central to protest literature, the imperative to represent events as transparently clear examples of oppression so as to move readers. His purpose, to convince readers that slaves were fully human, forces him to disguise his symptoms of double consciousness and present a relatively integrated narrative persona. Yet his portrayal of the impact of racial trauma on those around him and his hints at the painful self-division he experienced (his suicidal feelings, for example) help to establish both form and content of the twentieth-century protest novel. As previously mentioned, Douglass’s Narrative had to be read as nonfiction in order for readers to respond properly; similarly, Stowe’s book required not only “Concluding Remarks” but its own authenticating Key to prove that it was based on “real” people and events. Both authors, however, “shaped” historical facts and used literary devices to compel particular responses from readers while convincing readers of the “reality” of the situations and characters depicted. Stowe worked to “collapse the distance between history and fiction” (Sanchez 147), commenting that Uncle Tom’s Cabin contains “a living dramatic reality,” one that, “whether ‘living’ or ‘informing,’ surpasses ‘mere cold art’; the latter, when ‘unquickened by sympathy with the spirit of the age, is nothing’ ” (Sanchez 155). This protest
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INTRODUCTION
SUBJECTIVITY
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imperative helped both Stowe and Douglass create American realism (Harris Rebecca 6), a genre that is usually considered to have originated in the work of William Dean Howells at the turn of the century. As Amy Kaplan has noted, nineteenth-century realism begins when narratives attempting to comprehend “problematic” reality did so by “actively constructing” representations of “the coherent social world” not in a “vacuum of fictionality but in direct confrontation with the elusive process of social change” (Pfaelzer 3). Realism began, in other words, as creative writers searched for ways to promote social justice in their work. Stowe’s attempt at realism fails to convince later readers such as Baldwin, who can’t believe in her black characters either because they are entirely contained within the bounds of stereotype (Tom, Chloe, Topsy) or because they are virtually white (George and Eliza). However, her commitment to realism as she explains it in her “Concluding Remarks” extends only to the factual bases for the incidents she portrays, not to her characters or to her narrative’s formal qualities, which may be part of the transition from romance to realism but partake more in the former. As one of his goals is to smash prevailing representations of African Americans, Douglass focuses in his much shorter text on a complex and nuanced (for its time, anyway) portrayal of slave psychology. He successfully deconstructs slave stereotypes and reveals them to be performances acted out by slaves in order to avoid white violence, performances so complete and continuous as to constitute the performers’ alter egos. Rebecca Harding Davis’s 1861 novel Life in the Iron Mills similarly explores the psychology of its working-class white and minority characters in a way that makes Davis one of the founders, if not the founder, of American realism.14 As Jean Pfaelzer notes, Davis’s novel was “in the forefront of the tradition promoted by a series of editors of the Atlantic” who sought “a form to debunk the generalized descriptions, essentialist characterizations, and pastoral nostalgia of sentimentalism” (Pfaelzer 21). Davis’s book builds on the traditions of “transcendentalism, sentimentalism, and vernacular fiction” and anticipates Zola’s first naturalist novel by six years, drawing on the “new public language of sociological types” to forge “a new rhetoric to portray the dependent relationship between subjectivity and social economics, and hence, between sentimental representation and industrialism” (Pfaelzer 25, 30). As does Douglass, Davis blends elements of a number of generic forms with realistic details in order to balance her desire to “awaken the reader’s otherwise passive response” with her understanding that those realistic details might violate conventions of propriety, thus alienating readers (Harris Rebecca 31–32). The resulting balance succeeded wildly. As Tillie Olsen notes in “A Biographical Interpretation,” to the “readers of that April 1861 Atlantic, Life in the Iron Mills came as absolute News, with the shock of unprepared-for
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revelation” (Olsen 88). An “instant sensation,” the book was “recognized as a literary landmark” and held in great critical acclaim by a “wide and distinguished audience” (Olsen “Biographical” 88–89). The book exposed readers to depictions they had never seen before, outside of the slave narrative and abolitionist novel: for the first time, they read of the “dark satanic mills” inhabited by a “myriad of human beings whose lives were ‘terrible tragedy,’ ” exemplifying “soul starvation” and “living death” (Olsen “Biographical” 88). However, readers were affected as much by Davis’s formal innovations as by the shocking unfamiliarity of her portrayals. In constructing her novel, Davis combines the stereotype-smashing techniques of Douglass with the self-conscious authorial intrusions of Stowe to focus the reader’s attention on the way poverty brutalizes her characters without destroying their humanity. In the scene in which Davis’s protagonist Wolf is confronted by the middle-class owners and managers of the mill, the Doctor, and the journalist Mitchell, about his carving of the korl woman, Davis portrays Wolf as feeling like a “dumb, hopeless animal” while listening to the men’s conversation (Life 30). However, the phrasing of this comparison implies not that Wolf is animalistic (although his name does suggest this), but only that the difference he perceives between his appearance and intellect and those of the men make him feel as if he is biologically inferior to them. Wolf ’s art has brought his humanity and artistic genius to the attention of men who had previously recognized him only as a worker. The difference he feels in himself before the men see the korl woman, when he feels like a dumb animal, and after, when he realizes that he has the right to a life like Mitchell’s and that he might therefore be entitled to the stolen money, is similar to Douglass’s depiction of himself after the Aulds recognize the danger of his ability to read. Like Douglass, Wolf contemplates suicide in the wake of the tension between his social status and his dreams; unlike Douglass, Wolf actually does kill himself after his hope for a “good life” has been destroyed by his imprisonment. Ironically, his suicide foregrounds his psychological complexity. Perhaps not trusting readers to pick up on this complexity, Davis intervenes in their reading process through her unnamed narrator (presumably one of the middle-class professional men associated with the mill). Describing another protagonist, Deborah, “lying there on the ashes like a limp, dirty rag,” in the early pages of the book, Davis’s narrator wonders if Deborah is “yet not an unfitting figure to crown the scene of hopeless discomfort and veiled crime,” or “even more fit to be a type of her class” (Life 21). While he suggests that on the surface, Deborah conforms to a working-class stereotype, he challenges that notion by asking whether a more discerning look at Deborah suggests that her story might be “worth
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reading” because it is the “story of a soul filled with groping passionate love” (21). Suspecting that the reader might still find this story beneath his or her notice, the narrator fires a stronger salvo: “you laugh at it? Are pain and jealousy less savage realities down here in this place I am taking you to than in your own house or your own heart,—your heart, which they clutch at sometimes? The note is the same, I fancy” (23). He further admonishes the reader to “read” the realities of working-class lives not in the safety of the novel but in the faces of poor people walking the streets, “according to the eyes God has given you” (32). Davis continues to balance the merits of fiction with those of “reality,” suggesting that social change depends on a mutual interdependence of the two registers. Later in the novel, Davis’s narrator becomes more aggressive in his attempts to inspire readerly advocacy. In telling the story of Wolf ’s crime, the narrator states that Wolf was only trying to use his strength to live “a pure life, a good, true-hearted life, full of beauty and kind words”; to readers who still condemn him for his crime of stealing, he states, “I do not plead his cause. I only want to show you the mote in my brother’s eye: then you can see clearly to take it out” (46). However, while this comment suggests that middle-class readers can help impoverished individuals through understanding and sympathy with their plights, the narrator doesn’t believe that they can create real reform on behalf of the poor: “Reform is born of need, not pity. No vital movement of the people’s has worked [from the top] down, for good or evil; fermented, instead, carried up the heaving, cloggy mass. Think back through history, and you will know it”; someday, “out of their bitter need” will emerge “their own light-bringer” (39). Lest readers feel that they have been relieved of an onerous duty here, Davis portrays the Doctor praying every night for “some power to be given to” the poor to “inspire the rise of such a leader,” after which “he glowed at heart, recognizing an accomplished duty” (39). Because the Doctor doesn’t believe that such a leader will ever emerge from the masses, we see that Davis’s portrayal of his satisfied “glow” of accomplishment is criticism, not praise. Readers are left with the sense that their usual reactions to portrayals of poverty will not suffice. Davis asks them to step outside the bounds of the novel and enter the real world of poverty with the goals of compassion and connection, not bourgeois reform. Tillie Olsen relies on a similar combination of gritty naturalistic detail and authorial interventions in portraying poverty’s psychological impact. In chapter 4, I will discuss her portrayal of poverty at length, but I want to focus briefly here upon a particular formal innovation designed to control interpretation. Like Davis and Stowe, Olsen constructs narrative intrusions; however, her intrusions are modernist and experimental. At several
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Breathe and lift your face to the night, Andy Kvaternick. Trying so vainly in some inarticulate way to purge your bosom of the coal dust. . . . someday the bowels will grow monstrous and swollen with these old tired dreams, swell and break, and strong fists batter the fat bellies, and skeletons of starved children batter them. (5)15
Later, she intervenes to describe the fate of Jim Tracy, who has quit his job in protest: I’m sorry, Jim Tracy, sorry as hell we weren’t stronger and could get to you in time and show you that kind of individual revolt was no good, kid, no good at all, you had to bide your time and take it till there were enough of you to fight it all together on the job, and bide your time, and take it till the day millions of fists clamped in yours, and you could wipe out the whole thing, the whole goddamn thing, and a human could be a human for the first time on earth. (63)
Critics have argued that these “extraneous” passages allow Olsen to “bypass and expose the subjective limitations of her characters’ individualism” (Dawahare “That Joyous Certainty” 267) and “contribute to the novel’s dialogism” (Staub 135). I would add that in their use of “we” and “you,” these passages merge author and reader into a collective proletariat who attempts to raise the consciousness of the uninformed worker. Richard Wright and Chester Himes (and to an extent, Ann Petry) will later use a similarly coercive narrative technique, one in which the authorial persona has been eliminated, forcing the reader in an uncomfortable merger with an “offensive” protagonist. Olsen disrupts this author-reader merger in Stowe-like fashion to exhort readers to identify and suppress their impulses to aestheticize and thus dismiss the tragedies typical of rural working-class life that befall her characters. After Olsen depicts the mining disaster in which workers (including protagonist Jim Holbrook) are trapped below the surface for several days, the collective narrator intervenes: . . . and could you not make a cameo of this and pin it onto your aesthetic hearts? So sharp it is, so clear, so classic . . . Surely it is classical enough for you—the Greek marble of the women, the simple, flowing
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points in her novel, a collective authorial persona directly addresses one of her characters. Early in the novel, this collective persona intervenes in the narrative to engage the consciousness of the thirteen-year-old “walk-on” character Andy Kvaternick after his first day as a miner:
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Here Olsen targets readers who rely on conventional interpretations of bourgeois art to prevent them from creating a comfortable distance from the suffering protagonist. Her conclusion that readers “will have the cameo” and will buy the company’s statement provides a critical mirror of the middle-class reader’s reading conventions and ideology. This critical mirror attempts to impose a particular interpretive practice on readers—an inversion of the operation of double consciousness. Double Consciousness: Disorder, Coping Mechanism, Insightful Perspective One legacy of mid-nineteenth century protest writing is the depiction of the split self that forms as socially marginalized individuals, who have developed public behaviors that match the expectations of dominant society, attempt to maintain private identities that can disregard those expectations. This split self, subsequently described by Du Bois as double consciousness, is also a psychological trope that extends outside racial boundaries to describe the experience of any traumatized person. The term itself had had a clearly defined technical meaning for several decades by the time Du Bois used it in a way consistent with its psychological background (Bruce 303).16 Du Bois undoubtedly had been exposed to the concept of double consciousness in the work of his Harvard mentor William James, The Principles of Psychology, who studied both pathological psychology and paranormal psychology and used the construct of double consciousness in each field. Double consciousness has been described as one of the inaugural concepts of psychoanalysis (Zwarg 11); Sigmund Freud uses the term to describe a trauma victim’s “altered or dissociated state of consciousness,” a state that allows the victim to “successfully” repress “the frightening events from conscious memory” but causes “hysterical symptoms” (Horvitz 248). William James was probably the first American reviewer of Breuer and Freud’s 1894 theory of hysteria as a “splitting of consciousness” resulting from shock (Hale 183). Earlier psychologists had used the term similarly to refer to altered states of consciousness in hysterical patients. Alfred Binet’s On Double Consciousness is a study of patients experiencing anaesthesia (in this context, numbness of one or more limbs).17 He describes experiments with
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lines of sorrow . . . Surely it is original enough—these grotesques . . . this gargoyle . . . In the War to Live, the artist, Coal, sculptured them. . . . You will have the cameo? . . . And inside carve the statement the company already is issuing. “Unavoidable catastrophe.” (Olsen Yonnondio 20)
such patients in which, through distraction of their primary consciousness by some task, he can cause their anaesthetized limbs to move and even write without their conscious knowledge, thus proving that a secondary consciousness has emerged to control the limb. By the end of his experiments, he has demonstrated that “the rudiment of those states of double consciousness which we have studied first in the hysterical [subject], may with a little attention be found in . . . subjects free from hysteria” (Binet 83). Although this construction of the term “double consciousness” primarily describes a pathological condition, Binet’s suggestion that “normal” people might possess it shows a connection to James’s conception as well as to Du Bois’. James conceived of a double consciousness caused by the “irruption” of a “subliminal self ” into our “ordinary lives”; reminiscent of Emerson’s notion of the “Oversoul,” one version of this subliminal self might be the manifestation of a profound mystical self connected to a “mother-sea of consciousness” (Reed 102). In the pathological version, the “irruption” would be due to a divergence in “organized systems of [association-]paths” so that “processes in one system give rise to one consciousness, and those of another system to another simultaneously existing consciousness” (qtd. in Reed 101). However, on yet another level, James recognized that an individual has “as many social selves as there are individuals . . . or groups of individuals . . . who recognize him and carry an image of him in their mind” (James 281–82, emphasis in the original). This “division of the man into several selves” may be “a discordant splitting, as where one is afraid to let one set of his acquaintances know him as he is elsewhere; or it may be a perfectly harmonious division of labor” (282). While for James the “divided self ” was “alternately a psycho-physiological and a spiritual or mystical phenomenon” (Reed 105), the idea of many selves correlating to contextual social situations contains the germ of Du Bois’ more sociological and historical concept. Du Bois showed no apparent interest in “therapeutic ideologies” (Reed 110); perhaps this was because, as he notes in the preface to the 1953 Jubilee edition of Souls, when he wrote the book, “he had not yet realized” the “ ‘tremendous’ . . . influence of Freud or Marx” (Adell 22).18 However, he was certainly aware of the psychological baggage of his concept, as “popular magazines of the period reveals widespread interest in such subjects as mental healing, hypnosis, and multiple personality, beginning in 1890 and remaining strong into the first decade of the twentieth century” (Hale qtd. in Schrager 189). The experience of “divided or fragmented consciousness was by no means restricted to representatives of marginalized and subordinate groups like blacks or women . . . the sense of fragmentation was widespread among the educated elite,” including
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contemporaries of Du Bois (Reed 109). By using the term “double consciousness,” then, Du Bois was culturally enfranchising blacks by claiming that they are all, in effect, “neurasthenic,” since “only the civilized and refined can suffer” the kind of traumatic split consciousness Du Bois is describing (Lutz 264). Thus the use of this construct was current in a number of registers when Du Bois gave its meaning still another application, exploring that application briefly in Souls (and never again returning to it). In Du Bois’s formulation, racial trauma causes the consciousness to dissociate or split, but the “hysteria” is largely deferred or sublimated by necessity, as the trauma is ongoing.19 In this way, Du Bois recontextualizes the term for a particular “social situation that is deeply cultural and relational in its conception” (Zwarg 11). Its usage in psychological and cultural contexts, I would argue, suggests that “double consciousness” might also encompass working-class cultural formations in general, some of which coincide with black culture. To the extent that double consciousness involves the internalization of a dominant white middle-class gaze as well as a desirable model of middle-class identity, members of the working class can certainly be said to have developed this split in the psyche. They have done so despite their stereotype as lusty and boisterous people who, in the words of Langston Hughes, reject discipline, “American standardization,” and other cultural impositions on their beliefs and actions, and who “accept what beauty is their own without question” (Hughes 45). Also relevant to my study is the idea that the experience of having two selves, of “always looking at himself through the eyes of others” (Du Bois Souls 3) is for Du Bois simultaneously a psychological disorder and a coping strategy enabling survival. Insofar as it consists of “two irreconcilable ways of seeing/remembering one’s national and personal history and experiences,” double consciousness is a “form of subjective fragmentation” (Obourn 224), a disorder that could be healed if the subject could “merge his double self into a better and truer self,” losing “neither of the old selves”—a solution that drew on the psychological literature, which noted that the sufferers of the clinical disorder were greatly distressed by their dissociation and desired a similar merger (Bruce 306). Double consciousness is also a coping strategy used by subjects to manage the ideological oppositions that characterize their daily lives. As Paul Gilroy observes, most critics overlook Du Bois’ “studiously constructed projection of doubleness as insight” (Gilroy 137). As a survival tactic, a split consciousness allows individuals to choose whether and when to perform a particular culturally accepted identity, and to the extent that this condition calls for self-reflexivity, it is useful for anyone on a social margin. In that sense, the concept helped Du Bois manage the risky implications of the “hyphen”
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(Bruce 305); in its most progressive formulation, the internal split suffered by African Americans is a version of bicultural identity, which in its best iteration allows the subject to adeptly maneuver through and contribute to the dominant culture while maintaining an identity connected to a particular culture and heritage. The problem of course is in both the positioning of the two cultures in opposition to one another and the distortions caused by their internalization. As Hortense Spillers notes, the “Du Boisian knot cannot be healed or resolved” because the dominant “white” gaze is an internal construct, “only partially shaped and motivated by the official” society, yet also “imagined to be entirely other” and outside the subject’s control (Spillers “All the Things” 398). The white gaze is elevated to a position of godlike mastery over the constantly displaced and undermined “self.” Because of this, double consciousness does not always serve its users well on the level of mental health. However, a version of the self-reflection integral to double consciousness is an important aspect of what Spillers calls the “emancipatory project”: “the process of self-reflection,” making “one’s subjectness the object of a disciplined and potentially displaceable attentiveness,” is a “sociopolitical engagement of the utmost importance” (400). She uses the term interior intersubjectivity to designate “the locus at which self-interrogation takes place” (383, emphasis in the original). If intersubjectivity connotes the interaction (verbal, physical, and/or ideological) among the multiple subjectivities that constitutes an individual’s experience of self (Renik 1053), then an interior intersubjectivity would be the staging area for an individual’s self-conscious examination of those internalized subjectivities, a kind of autotherapy. As double consciousness depends upon one’s analysis of one’s appearance and actions, the tools for healing are embedded in the “disorder” itself, requiring only a more conscious “process of self-reflection,” Spillers seems to suggest. Constructing this kind of therapeutic mirror is one function of protest literature. Most protest novels and short stories challenge prevailing images of the socially marginal in order to confront mainstream readers with realities of social and economic oppression, but these texts are also intended to provide critical tools for minority readers. Claudia Tate notes this in her study of psychoanalysis and African American novels: apart from presenting implicit arguments about black equality to white readers, depictions of black characters in these novels teach “black readers to project the neurosis and psychosis of racism outside of themselves” as well as ways “to recognize both gross and subtle racist assault”—in essence, how to unlearn their socialization by examining it as it operates within a fictional consciousness. Additionally, readers can observe the effects of the “psychological strategies” characters put to use in “adapting
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to the disturbing effects of social oppression” (Tate 18–19). Tate argues here for an understanding of black literature as part of a potential healing strategy for black readers. Reading protest literature, a traumatized individual might project him- or herself into the text and passively “symbolize” or bring to consciousness traumatic incidents he or she has repressed, thus relinquishing the compulsion to reenact (“act out”) these incidents.20 I would add here that the ability of protest novels to help readers work through trauma is not racially specific, because in some of the earliest protest fiction, discourses of race and discourses of class draw on the same imagery and “have never been fully separable” (Schocket 57). Describing what she calls the “blackening of the proletariat and the proletarianization of blackness” (Lang 8), Amy Lang notes that the “syntax of class structures the kaleidoscopic displacement of terms of social difference and generates the figures” or literary signifiers “through whom the experience of class and its antagonisms are managed in American novels” (8). In Life in the Iron Mills, for instance, Davis’s readers may be expecting to read about “black slaves” but instead find “industrial laborers whose bodies mimic the physical determinism of chattel servitude by bearing similar marks of bondage and oppression” (Schocket 47).21 David Roediger argues that the “bondage of Blacks served as a touchstone by which dependence and degradation were measured” (Roediger 20); the “blackness” of naturalist characters following in the wake of Davis’ text stems from this compensatory relationship. On the other hand, Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin embeds its darkest characters (Tom, Chloe, Topsy) in the permanent laborer status of the stereotypical slave, thereby having no other category for its lighter-skinned characters (George and Eliza) but the class of “white” wage laborers, all of whom speak in the language of the middle class, which is where Stowe suggests they will end up. As Peter Hitchcock contends, since “the nature of class” is not “manifest purely in physical attributes” (Hitchcock 24), literary signifiers of class-based oppression will coincide with those of racial and even gender-based oppression. To that extent, readers may relate to signifiers of oppression without locating themselves in a particular racial category. Psychoanalysis and Cultural Trauma The work of Tate and Spillers as well as my study are among the relatively few literary studies of African American literature that draw on psychoanalytic constructs; there are even fewer studies of working-class literature and psychoanalysis. Perhaps the lack of more research in this area has to do with a certain traditional distrust of psychoanalysis on the
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part of not only African American but working-class theorists and critics. Classic psychoanalysis not only declined to “address racial difference as a constitutive factor of subjectivity,” but “veiled” its “own implicit racialist assumptions” (Bergner xix) as well as class-based assumptions, and working-class leftists like Mike Gold recognized this in dismissing the entire enterprise as more bourgeois self-indulgence. Claudia Tate acknowledges that by eliminating social context and assuming a universal norm for individual development, psychoanalysis has pathologized the black family.22 Spillers concurs, observing that little or nothing in the intellectual history of African-Americans within the social and political context of the United States would suggest the effectiveness of a psychoanalytic discourse, revised or classical, in illuminating the problematic of “race” on an intersubjective field of play, nor do we yet know how to historicize the psychoanalytic object and objective . . . to cultural and social forms that are disjunctive to its originary imperatives. (Spillers “All the Things” 376)
Despite this, however, Spillers states that she has “no evidence” that “the major topics of its field are not in fact stringently operative in African American community,” the first of which is “self-division” (“All the Things” 384). Indeed, to argue that psychoanalysis applies to European and American whites but not to blacks suggests either a structural psychological difference between the races or a failure by blacks to absorb the cultural norms that produce psychoanalytic effects (such as the nuclear family and gender roles). Tate and Spillers accept the applicability of psychoanalytic concepts, properly recontextualized, to theorize the African American experience of racial trauma. They join other literary critics (outside the field of African American literature) who draw upon the work of various post-Freudian and Lacanian trauma theorists to address either the manifestations or management of trauma by literary characters or the “aesthetic modes and linguistic structures that display features of trauma victims’ storytelling”; these structures are described by Judith Herman as “emotional, contradictory, and fragmented” narratives and by Ruth Leys as “a literal registration” of events through “perform[ances]” and “reenact[ments],” or through filling the “gap or aporia” (Obourn 220). These theorists rely on collected narratives, autobiography and memoir, poetry, and fiction as the raw material for their theories, often without clear distinctions among the genres. It could be argued that such distinctions aren’t necessary, since all narratives are constructed out of imagined representations of experience that are filtered through social ideologies.
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Representation and narrative are crucial concepts in psychoanalytic descriptions of trauma. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud defines a “trauma” as a “breach” in the “protective barrier” of the psyche by “excitations from outside” that “disorganize” its functioning, and in doing so prevent the assimilation of that event as a comprehensible experience (Beyond the Pleasure Principle 1920). Unless the experience can be made comprehensible through a coherent narrative, a traumatic neurosis can result, in which the psyche develops a compulsive anxiety about (often a reenactment of ) the trauma in an attempt to prevent it from recurring. Cathy Caruth’s theory is a bit different: the traumatic “event is not assimilated or experienced fully at the time, but only belatedly, in its repeated possession of the one who experiences it” (George 4). In both cases, the trauma sufferer is “haunted” or “possessed” by an image or event that she or he has missed as an experience (Morgenstern 102). When trauma can be made comprehensible, often through therapeutic narrative or testimony, the event is no longer traumatic (Morgenstern 104). This understanding of the importance of representation in the definition of trauma underscores what critics such as Jeffrey Alexander have pointed out as a flaw in theories of trauma: what he calls “naturalistic” theories accept as a given that widespread destructive events have resulted in cultural trauma, relying to a great extent on both a conception of a “normal” (thus universal) human consciousness and on the possibility of arriving at an objective understanding of a traumatic event. Even a psychoanalytic perspective that accounts for the mind’s distorting mechanisms is still dependent on the idea of an original undistorted reality (Alexander “Towards a Theory” 5). Critiquing such a perspective, Alexander notes that trauma is a “socially mediated attribution”: it is in the representation of a destructive event, not in the event itself, that trauma can be located (8). All “facts” about trauma, Alexander reminds us, are “mediated, emotionally, cognitively, and morally,” through “an interpretive grid” with “a supra-individual, cultural status . . . symbolically structured and sociologically determined” (Alexander “On the Social” 201). In terms of a collective experience of pain, trauma is the “result of . . . acute discomfort entering into the core of the collectivity’s sense of its own identity” (“Towards a Theory” 10). Furthermore, the imaginative process of representing any experience, but particularly a traumatic one, is always informed by “structures of emotional and cultural expectations” that individuals absorb from the social groups in which they participate (“Towards a Theory” 10). Applying trauma theory to African American identity, Sheldon George explains the repetition of literary representations of particular kinds of racial traumas. George argues that since the “the psychological trauma
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induced by slavery remains largely inexpressible,” it is “excluded from the conscious minds of all Americans, only reentering their minds through repetition” (3–4). Thus “the impact of the traumatic event lies precisely in . . . its refusal to be simply located, in its insistent appearance outside the boundaries of any single place or time” (4). This unlocatable trauma then becomes a “determinant agent” of the subject’s “self-identification” as he or she works to exclude it (4). In other words, the trauma of racial oppression determines the subject both from without (in the form of historical and also contemporary23 racial violence, stereotype, and discrimination24 ) and from within, as the trauma’s repetition shapes the subject’s identity. Thus, while trauma theorists distinguish between individual trauma and what has been called national or cultural trauma, the two are in fact metonymically contingent. In this particular study, I want to underscore the idea that the social oppression represented in the fiction I examine affects individuals who may not initially be aware that their particular experiences are part of what can be called a cultural trauma, but who verge upon consciousness of this by the text’s end. Using the image of injury found in descriptions of individual trauma, Ron Eyerman defines cultural trauma as entailing “a tear in the social fabric, affecting a group of people that has achieved some degree of cohesion,” entailing “a dramatic loss of identity and meaning”; Neil Smelser’s definition adds that the event(s) is viewed by the affected cultural group as threatening their “society’s existence or violating one or more of its fundamental cultural presuppositions” (qtd. in Eyerman 2). Arthur Neal’s definition of “national trauma” coincides with these definitions in referring to a destructive event or series of events that “threaten or seriously invalidate our usual assessments of social reality,” including our sense of social continuity. Neal suggests that such a trauma will be “ingrained in collective memory” as affected individuals create a public discourse around the events in question (Eyerman 2; Neal 7). Collective trauma can be a sudden shocking event or a chronic situation that does not begin quite as dramatically, but rather a “crisis that grows out of persisting contradictions within a social system” (Neal 7). Neal uses the Depression and the Vietnam war as examples of this “chronic” state of crisis, but American slavery serves just as well.25 As Alexander notes, a collective trauma of this type “works its way slowly and even insidiously into the awareness of those who suffer from it, so it does not have the quality of suddenness normally association with ‘trauma.’ But it is a form of shock all the same, a gradual realization that the community no longer exists as an effective source of support and that an important part of the self has disappeared” (“Towards a Theory” 4). While a typical characteristic of collective trauma is its indelibility, Smelser notes
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INTRODUCTION
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that this particular characteristic must become “fixed in the cultural definition of a trauma,” and once that happens, the possibility that the trauma will be “worked through” or “cured” is eliminated (42). The trauma, in fact, becomes an enduring aspect of the collective’s identity. For this to happen, the event must become part of collective memory, handed down to subsequent generations and impacting those who have not directly experienced the particular shattering events. Here again, we see the connection between the individual and the collective, as individual memory is intrinsically connected to group memory at various levels— family, community, society; these groups themselves become coherent and self-aware through “continuous reflection upon and recreation of a distinctive, shared memory” (Eyerman 6). Collective memory of this sort is necessary to individual development as it provides an individual with a “cognitive map within which to orient present behavior” (6). Defined by Singh et al. as “the combined discourses of the self ” (“sexual, racial, historical, regional, ethnic, cultural, national, familial”) that form a “meta narrative” shared by a community (17), collective memory is dialogically negotiated between the individual and the community, transformed over time as subsequent generations revisit and reconstruct historical events (Eyerman 7, 12). In the process of this negotiation, collective identity will be solidified around the traumatic event, which Eyerman calls a “primal scene,” an event that will continue to shape the identities of descendants of the affected community members (15). As Alexander notes, for individuals to be “traumatized by an experience that they themselves do not directly share,” they must experience “psychological identification” with those directly affected, and the symbolic nature of the trauma must correspond to events they have experienced (“On the Moral” 199). The protest authors I examine portray characters whose subjectivity is formed (or deformed) by cultural trauma; they struggle to transform their double consciousness into “self ” consciousness, and their failures are themselves aspects of cultural narratives. Against these odds, these characters demonstrate the ways self-analysis can interrupt the mechanisms of oppression as they work to represent to themselves their experience of subordination. Protest literature is activist by nature and attempts to transform readers who might then transform society. Novels written by “minorities of caste and class,” to borrow Toni Morrison’s words, form an American literary tradition that, in its early years, was “actively attempting to change the structure of the . . . culture of which [it was] a part” (Morrison Bluest Eye 18; Carby “On the Threshold” 303). Whether astute or misguided, characters’ interpretive strategies comprise their attempts to develop a voice in their culture. For these reasons, I would suggest, these novels represent a critical shift in the development of a uniquely American
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INTRODUCTION
literary aesthetic, one in which narrative power is redirected toward both characters and readers.
One way protest novels encourage readers to read self-reflexively is by highlighting their characters’ own critical reading practices. Witnessing a character examine his or her interior intersubjectivity in the face of social oppression, readers can imagine a similar self-examination. In Chester Himes’s If He Hollers, Let Him Go (1945), a novel of social protest, readers witness this kind of instructive display of readerly practices in a scene that functions as a meta-commentary on protest literature: we read about characters who read protest literature and discuss its impact on their lives, and we then observe their successes and failures in symbolizing oppression and avoiding repetition of it. Notably, the texts Himes’s characters discuss are Lillian Smith’s Strange Fruit (1944) and Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940), both provocative texts featuring interracial relationships that result in cross-racial violence, as does Himes’s text. As Calvin Hernton points out, interracial love is a major theme for Himes, one “so historically rooted in race relations and yet so emotionally inflammable that we, both whites and blacks, have gone to maddening lengths to deny it as a fact of our lives and have made its acceptance a monumental taboo, seeking thereby to insulate ourselves against its existence” (“Postscript” 142). All three authors (Smith, Wright, and Himes) were interested in the psychology of interracial relationships and racial violence. Himes went so far as to describe his writing process as “desublimation,” stating in an interview his “desire to write in a style that would allow the unconscious of a given character to be transferred directly to the page without mediation or censorship” (Breu 771). Certainly, the protagonists of the three authors display some of the “unacceptable wishes and unacknowledged traumas that shape cultural fantasies about the intersections of race, gender, class, sexuality, and economics in the US,” and thus “enable the reader to engage in a kind of fantasy work” (771). Himes invites readers’ engagement in these issues by depicting his own characters’ engagement in texts similar to his. In this “book club” scene, Himes’s protagonist Bob Jones is an unwilling participant in a discussion of racism in the bedroom of his wealthy, light-skinned girlfriend Alice, along with a group of her friends and social worker colleagues. Bob has arrived to see Alice, interrupting a discussion of the “Little Tokyo problem”26 among Alice, Cleo, Polly, and Arline, all African Americans; shortly thereafter, Alice’s white male colleague Tom Leighton arrives, sparking feelings of jealous aggression in
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Bob. Attempting to bridge an awkward conversational gap, Alice states, “Tom has just finished reading Strange Fruit . . . He thought it was fascinating” (Himes If He Hollers 86–87). Tom adds that he was “particularly interested in the character of Nonnie,” inspiring Bob to think, “You would . . . since she was so goddamned crazy about a white man.” After the women state their dislike for Nonnie’s dreamy passivity, Tom asks, “Did you read the book, Mr. Jones?” “Yes, I did,” Bob answers abruptly, refusing to elaborate (87). Bob’s reaction to Tom’s interest in Nonnie is a political one, connecting Tom to Tracy Deen, the novel’s white male protagonist. From Bob’s perspective, Tom sees Nonnie’s attachment to Tracy (or, to someone like himself ) as acceptable despite Tracy’s mistreatment of her. For Bob, Nonnie’s attachment is “crazy”—a term that suggests that Nonnie’s love for Tracy has pathological origins in racist socialization. The fact that Bob has read the book, which would have been very recently published at the time of this scene, complicates any attempt by Tom or the reader to view him as a non-intellectual blue-collar worker; moreover, it suggests that the African Americans in the room are connected by their interest in novels about race relations, a “book club” that takes place outside of the university training they have all received. (Unless we imagine that in 1945, Ohio State University, which Bob attended, offered courses on such novels, we have to assume that his reading took place in a non-academic context.) Alice introduces Tom as a newcomer to such a community who has just finished a book that they all read some time earlier, and Tom in turn tries to pass this status onto Bob, a bluecollar worker who might not be expected to have read the book. In this scene, reading is a political act on a number of levels. Tom’s next comment sets up a comparison between Smith’s novel and Richard Wright’s: “Of course I think that Richard Wright makes the point better in Native Son” (87). What Tom means by “the point” is never stated explicitly, but he may mean the “Negro oppression” that he mentions later. Arline disagrees with Tom’s comment, preferring Lillian Smith’s “condemn[ation]” of the “white Southerner,” a simplistic interpretation of Strange Fruit that imagines geographically isolated perpetrators of racism being exposed as such by Smith. She prefers Smith’s novel to Wright’s “vicious crime story,” which “turn[ed] her stomach”; for Arline, the “viciousness” of Bigger’s actions relegates this novel to the “crime/pulp” genre and cancels out any political statement Wright might have been making. She adds that Wright’s novel “just proved what the white Southerner has always said about us; that our men are rapists and murderers” (88). Arline enacts the precise reaction that Wright predicted of his black middle-class readers, humiliation at “being publicly reminded of the lowly, shameful depths of life above which they enjoyed their
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bourgeois lives” (Wright “How ‘Bigger’ ” 869). Discounting determinism, she doesn’t see how the rapist stereotype influences Bigger’s consciousness. She doesn’t mind Nonnie’s “crazy” feelings for Tracy, because she doesn’t see them as a destructive manifestation of racism. Nonnie is the familiar image of the long-suffering, college-educated Negro girl (Arline’s “good friend from school” is “just like Nonnie”). In response, Bob points out Arline’s (and Smith’s) naïve idealism, stating “Personally, I think the white Southerner doesn’t mind being just like Lillian Smith portrays him” (88). For Bob, this novel’s supposedly progressive politics are both too familiar and too simple to have any real impact on its readership’s views. In a conciliatory move, Tom adopts Arline’s disgust with Bigger: “Well, I will agree that the selection of Bigger Thomas to prove the point of Negro oppression was an unfortunate choice,” he says. Bob flatly contradicts him: “you couldn’t pick a better person than Bigger Thomas to prove the point. But after you prove it, then what? Most white people I know are quite proud of having made Negroes into Bigger Thomases” (88). Bob sees Native Son as having failed in its alleged project to show ignorant white readers the destructive psychological impact of racism, because whites are not ignorant but instead fully cognizant (and “proud of ”) their oppressive system. However, Bob implicitly comments on the success of Native Son in providing him, and by extension other readers, a mirror for his own traumatic experience of race relations. He shares this idea with the group and confesses that in his job as a leaderman at a shipyard, he cannot assert authority over a white female subordinate, because “all she’s got to do is say I insulted her and I’m fired” (88). Leaving out the fact that his white male superiors demean him and curtail his authority at every turn, Bob instead focuses on the fact that any interaction between himself and a white woman can become sexualized and thus criminalized, even if it takes place publicly, at work, because his racist employers need very little reason to remove him from positions of authority. Bob is correct in this assessment, as by this time in the story, readers have already observed Madge, the white woman in question, self-consciously perform her role as symbol of insulted white womanhood, causing Bob’s demotion. Bob’s recourse to telling his own story as proof of his contention subtly exposes Tom’s status as outsider/oppressor. In response, Tom moves himself decisively from the position of ignorant liberal to armchair Marxist philosopher, no longer able to suppress his urge to dominate the conversation. Expressing “surprise” at Bob’s story of the “strained . . . relations between white and coloured . . . in our industries” (88), Tom presents a simplistic Communist reading of race issues as subsumed by class conflict. He has presumed some sort of transracial working-class solidarity that, he condescendingly suggests, Bob “will discover” is the best solution to the
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“minority group problem.” Bob disagrees, stating that the “only solution to the Negro problem is a revolution. We’ve got to make white people respect us and the only thing white people have ever respected is force” (89). He adds that they’ll need whites to help them in this task through action instead of “solving the Negro problem with a flow of diction”—an implicit critique of what he describes as Tom’s position of “great white god” in the discussion. In his portrayal of this discussion, Himes sets up three interpretative positions: (1) Bob’s defense of Native Son as an accurate depiction of the way that white society maneuvers black men into positions of vulnerability to lynching, and implicitly, of the way this oppression causes confusion, frustration, and murderous rage in black men, leaving violent revolution as the only solution to the race problem; (2) Arline’s disgust with Native Son’s pathologizing of black men and her sense that white readers’ reactions to this novel will lead to continued racism, unlike the more benevolent portrayal of blacks in Strange Fruit; and (3) Tom’s half-hearted support of Native Son, made up of his distaste for Bigger as Wright’s choice of protagonist and his appreciation of the Communist Party lawyer Max’s reading of Bigger as a victim of racist capitalist exploitation. Bob’s girlfriend Alice does not explicitly take a position in this debate, but her response to Bob’s comparison of himself to Bigger Thomas is illuminating. Clearly seeing the comparison as demeaning to Bob27 and by extension to her, Alice apologizes for Bob’s comment: “Of course Bob’s problem is more or less individual. . . . He’s really temperamentally unsuited for industrial work. As soon as he enters into a profession his own problem will be solved” (88). In other words, Bob is not a worker by nature, but a middle-class professional, and “professionals” don’t experience the kind of sexualized racism he has described. Alice’s position seems closest to Arline’s in its denial of the scope and depth of racism, yet this naiveté about racial realities is inexplicable in Alice and her friends, a teacher and three social workers. Perhaps this is the only psychological stance from which they can continue working in their fields with any kind of optimism. While I think we can agree that for Himes the only viable view of “the Negro problem” is Bob’s, this scene’s meta-analysis of protest literature serves to display a model for the use of protest literature as a psychological tool for healing. Himes’s characters do not read as voyeurs from a privileged class expecting titillating stories of black criminals, but as allies, even colleagues of the character they discuss. They interpret literary characters with an eye to their social impact, and their readings correlate to their own coping strategies (or in Tom’s case, to his preferred strategy for deferring the solution to racism). Alice’s coping strategy reflects her position as an
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educated and economically secure individual—in short, someone whose money and intellect enables her to avoid or suppress her reaction to racist interactions. Although Alice later admits that she suffers from racist condescension at her own job, and that blacks are economically “restricted and controlled” and forced to conform to the prevailing “pattern of segregation in order to achieve any measure of financial success” (168), she is convinced that they are the “captains” of their “souls”: “we control . . . love and marriage, children and homes . . . our physical beings, our personal integrity, our private property—we have as much protection for those as anyone. As long as we conform to the pattern of segregation we do not have to fear the seizure of our property or attacks upon our persons” (169). Alice believes that her acceptance of segregation provides her with security and protection from overt forms of racism. Even after Bob has been accused of rape and brutally beaten by his coworkers, Alice denies the possibility of lynching or imprisonment and maintains that if Bob is innocent, he has “nothing to fear” (193). Subscribing to a Franklinian “bootstrap” model and consequently denying the debilitating psychological trauma of racial oppression (not to mention the realities of Jim Crow racism), Alice would place the blame for Bigger’s crimes (and Bob’s work difficulties) squarely on his lack of self-control. Like Strange Fruit’ s Nonnie, she seems to believe that race is “made up . . . not real,” something she doesn’t “have to believe in,” a game “for folks to forget their troubles with” (Smith 77). At least Nonnie realizes that she lives “in a dream world.” Although Alice doesn’t suffer anything more traumatic than the loss of Bob to the Army at the novel’s end, the fact that she has fallen for such a rebellious and angry man suggests that her willful denial of reality will not ultimately satisfy her. Alice’s lifestyle logic has precedent in the self-authoring lives of various American heroes, but it also reveals her diagnosable dissociation from racial trauma, her compartmentalization of experiences of racism away from her conscious mind. As Judith Herman notes in Trauma and Recovery, people attempting to survive an ongoing traumatic situation (she uses captivity as an example) engage in what Orwell calls “doublethink: the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. The [captive] knows . . . that he is playing tricks with reality; but by the exercise of doublethink he also satisfies himself that reality is not violated” (Herman 87). As an intelligent woman and a social worker who would have studied some psychology, Alice must know that she is not immune to racism, yet she seems to believe the opposite. While Alice acknowledges that she has accepted segregation, she seems to believe that this acceptance provides her with security and
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protection from overt forms of racism. In creating for Bob a vision of a married life “inside the pressure, away from it, separate from it, that no white person can ever touch” (169), Alice repudiates both psychology and history. Alice’s safe space within a racist society is possible only with middleclass money and status, as she admits (97); nevertheless, her story is captivating to Bob, filling him with a sense of freedom and hope and a renewed interest in behaving at work and continuing his education so that he can become a lawyer—so that he can possess Alice. He embraces doublethink in order to share a life with her. We sense, though, that this effort to dissociate will be futile. While Bob has successfully dissociated at earlier times in his life, at the opening of the novel, he states that the attack on Pearl Harbor has disrupted his coping mechanism by unleashing the “crazy, wild-eyed” race hatred that results in Japanese internment (a literal compartmentalization) and makes Bob fear for his life: “I was the same color as the Japanese and I couldn’t tell the difference” (4). The strain of “keeping ready to die every minute” traumatizes Bob to such an extent that he fears the damage is irreversible: “If I’d gone to a psychiatrist he’d have had me put away,” he states. Although Bob is fully aware of “the white folks sitting on my brain, controlling my every thought, action, and emotion, making life one crisis after another, day and night,” he understands that if he doesn’t “crawl into” his “niche” (his proper place in life) and work through his fear and hatred of whites, he can’t “live in America” (150). However, Bob wants the same rights and freedoms that whites possess; he is unwilling to accept the “condition” of being black, wanting instead “to be accepted as a man, . . . without distinction . . . of race, creed, or colour” (151, 153). To Alice, this means he wants to be white, and that he is thus in denial (97). Bob and Alice see each other as living in a kind of delusion; the difference between them is that Bob knows that he is torn between physical survival (accepting segregation) and emotional survival (fighting segregation), while Alice seems to believe that her choice has no impact on her mental health. It is ironic that Bob is more interested in processing his feelings than is his social worker girlfriend, and that he knows it. Alice and those of her “class,” in Bob’s view, are unable to face the impact of racism on their lives and must “keep it buried as much as possible, refuse to look at it, to recognize it, to discuss it” (97). This coping strategy will inevitably “destroy them” inwardly because they are forced to “adjust” themselves to “the limitations of their race . . . a nigger limit,” and then lie to themselves about the “great progress” they have made. In short, Bob recognizes Alice’s Booker T. Washington-esque ideology and feels himself unable to conform to it because he has “learned the same jive the white
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folks had learned . . . about liberty and justice and equality. . . . That was the hell of it: the white folks had drummed more into me than they’d been able to scare out” (151–53). Bob’s socialization in American ideology renders Alice’s version of doublethink impossible for him because it requires an adjustment to limitations that he cannot make. “I just can’t take it and keep living with myself,” he protests to Alice (98). Although he knows that “Alice’s way” is his “only way out,” he views it with the same “contempt a white person has for a collaborator” (152). Bob is unable to live comfortably in a state of double consciousness because his “American” self is too developed and anchored to be easily suppressed. Until the end of the novel, however, Bob hopes that he can follow Alice’s directives for their future, and as readers, we are led to hope that he might actually achieve this life. Unfortunately, Himes the protest novelist must destroy Bob’s dream of escaping social determinism. Despite the fact that his understanding of racism is immensely superior to Bigger Thomas’s, Bob suffers from nearly the same fate: his white female subordinate Madge tries to seduce him at work and then falsely accuses him of rape, he is savagely beaten by his white coworkers, and he is released into the custody of the Army, a fate Bob has frequently described as the ultimate social death. The naïve belief in the individual’s power to overcome racism that Alice transmitted to Bob supports Addison Gayle Jr.’s argument that If He Hollers is “concerned with the powerlessness of the black-middle class intellectual” (qtd. in Ickard 300), a powerlessness that those intellectuals are unwilling to face. Alice makes another suggestion to Bob that reinforces her ignorance of psychology and that refers indirectly to Native Son. Shortly after the “book club” scene, Alice tells Bob to “stop brooding about white people” or he’ll go “insane” (95). Alice’s “advice” unconsciously repeats the suggestion of Bigger’s friend Gus, who tells Bigger “Aw, nigger, quit thinking about [racism]. You’ll go nuts” (21). In a kind of intertextual repetition compulsion, Alice places Bob in Bigger’s position and herself in the position of the passive, alcoholic Gus. The advice to “stop thinking” is impossible for Bigger to follow, as it proves to be for Bob. Alice and Gus fail to understand the nature of racism’s psychological impact, both believing that they can insulate (or medicate, as the case may be) their own psyches from the kind of damage they correctly assume will follow from “excessive” pondering of race issues. However, Native Son itself includes a scene rarely examined in criticism of the novel that partly supports Gus’s and Alice’s logic, a scene suggesting that understanding social determinism without the ability to escape, transcend, or alter it leads to psychosis. While Bigger is in prison, an unstable and allegedly murderous black man is briefly placed in his cell, a man who
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has gone “off his nut from studying too much at the university.” Bigger learns that this man was “writing a book on how colored people live” and had “gotten to the bottom of why colored folks are treated bad” (Native Son 766). What the man says in his supposedly irrational ranting sounds fairly reasonable, however: he claims that whites “make us live in such crowded conditions on the South Side that one out of every ten of us is insane” and that the black “schools are so crowded that they breed perverts” (767). This man is emblematic of a “freethinking” intellectual stuck in a socially determined world; he has developed a political consciousness that has been forced into such a restricted space, a space where true agency is impossible, that it explodes into psychosis. This scene’s lack of realism and apparent randomness call attention to its function in the text. I suggest that it allows Wright to exclude the middle-class reader’s preferred “solution” for racial oppression: college education. (Readers will recall that the Dalton’s housekeeper Peggy suggests that Bigger emulate his predecessor Green and get a college education, thereby following the bootstrap model to success.) In the case of Bigger’s cellmate, obtaining a formal education has not liberated the victim of oppression from the constraints of ignorance and poverty as proponents of education might hope, but only further damaged his mind. The scene also points out the results of prolonged racial trauma: insanity and perversion, both the result (according to the insane student) of overcrowding—leading directly back to the image of spatial constriction that signifies both oppression and trauma. By repeating the same structural moment in his text, Himes suggests that Wright’s literary attempt to address racial trauma, while extremely popular, has not resulted in much social change in the five years since its publication; it has not enabled a cultural “working through”28 on the part of either victim or oppressor. Despite his intellectual background, political consciousness, and self-confidence, Bob Jones is still controlled from within and without by the traumatic threat of lynching. The white woman in his workplace, Madge, is a constant nagging distraction, representing as she does a cultural taboo; she too seems controlled by her own social conditioning in her interactions with Bob. Both disgusted with and driven by his lust for Madge, Bob wants to approach her but fears her culturally proscribed reaction. This fear makes him feel “castrated,” like “a nigger being horse-whipped in Georgia,” he thinks. “What I ought to do is rape her,” he decides; “that’s what she wanted” (If He Hollers 126). Indeed, in a later interaction, Madge claims that all black men do is “get drunk and dream of having white women,” and then orders “rape me then, nigger” (147). Self-consciously using the tropes common to the cultural script, Bob describes himself and Madge as performers whose desires are limited to their roles in the play of interracial sex. Bob is aware that his
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actions are socially determined, but they are irresistible: he feels “like some sort of machine being run by white people . . . Every white person who comes along pushes some button or other on me and I react accordingly” (166). He sees that his “reactions” are programmed, but only belatedly does he glimpse the entire machine. It is a fitting sentence for Bob, then, to be reduced to a cog in the great American military-industrial complex during wartime. When Madge finally does cry “rape,” few people believe her,29 yet Bob descends into panic, realizing “in one great flash she really could send me to the pen for thirty years” whether she is believed or not. He fears the mechanism that Madge so easily sets in motion, “American justice,” because he realizes that “the whole structure of American thought” is “against” him (187). In the last pages of the novel, we see that the “structure of American thought” is antagonistic not only to him, but also to other minorities, Latinos in particular. One of the Mexican men also slated for forced Army conscription sees Bob and observes, “Looks like this man has had a war. How you doing, man?” (203). Bob’s response provides a hint of optimism: “I’m still here.” He has survived a major battle in America’s domestic war, and, one might suggest, he has surmounted his cultural programming by having the courage to reject the rapist role in the face of Madge’s demand, even though the outcome is the same. Native Son and If He Hollers form a part of the American dialectic on the trauma of lynching and its accompanying narrative of the black male raping the white woman, a plot point of many works of fiction from the late-nineteenth and twentieth century. Indirectly crediting this narrative with the creation of a form of cultural PTSD, Wright argues in “How ‘Bigger’ Was Born” that the black male rapist stereotype is the central determining factor in black male identity, the “primal scene”: a false rape charge against a black man, he notes, “happens so often that to my mind it [has] become a representative symbol of the Negro’s uncertain position in America” (874). The idea that a stereotype could not only socially determine but emotionally traumatize the members of a subculture is unique to American cultural trauma and confirms the need for a trauma theory specific to experiences of social oppression in the United States.30 My project attempts to contribute to this theory. Protest Genres and Subjectivity In the chapters that follow, I argue that the writers I study, Richard Wright, Chester Himes, Ann Petry, Tillie Olsen, and Sarah E. Wright, not only engage in a common project, the literary theorizing of American social trauma (including racial, class-based, and gender oppressions), but
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also draw on the same set of generic forms (naturalism and proletarian realism) in literary projects intended to unsettle readers and force social change by denaturalizing black and white working-class suffering and social categorization. All five authors create characters who resist severe oppression and attempt to improve their lives by appropriating culturally powerful constructions of identity. In particular, these characters attempt to rid themselves of traumatizing racial and class-based stereotypes (the black male rapist, the welfare mother, the black whore, the convict) and substitute for them images of the American Enlightenment version of the self, an ideologically pure and boundless internal space protected from the contaminations of both the body and the public realm. John Lukács argues that the notion of domestic privacy is itself a bourgeois invention, a claim that underlines the bourgeois-centered nature not only of the family and the home but of psychoanalytic theory, which is largely constructed on an image of the psyche as a private “home-like” space.31 The idea that humans require a secure physical space in which to develop an individual sense of identity is commonplace, but the fact that poor people without access to secure shelter manage to develop identities reveals that this idea is not “universal” but derived from middle-class ideals of individualism, domestic ideology, and “home ownership.” This commonplace metaphor of self reflects the topological organization of American experience visible in such disparate areas as Puritan religion, urban planning, and psychoanalysis; I examine its basis in middle-class ideologies of individualism and domesticity (“home ownership”) in order to expose its effects on the socially marginalized individual who attempts to adopt it. Drawing on Judith Butler’s concept of the abject, I show how even those who inhabit the “unlivable zones” outside the domain of subjectivity— Bigger Thomas, Mazie Holbrook, Jimmy Monroe—attempt to fight social abjection through a strategic double consciousness. In developing characters whose psychological complexity reflects both the damage they have suffered and their admirable determination to succeed, these writers, I argue, creatively revise generic conventions to enable reader identification with their protagonists. By leading middle-class readers to project themselves imaginatively into the cramped, unsafe spaces occupied by working-class characters, the authors create the possibility of a wider social recognition of the needs, desires, and cultural practices of the American working classes. This recognition is the basis for the production of a working-class social space, a goal that is aligned (to an extent) with the leftist politics of most protest writers of the thirties and forties but (to varying degrees) in opposition to the genres these writers draw upon, literary naturalism and socialist realism. Specifically, these authors redefine social determinism as a complex interplay between psychology,
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culture, and economic and social forces, emphasizing the imagination’s crucial role in the oppressed individual’s struggle to acquire social agency. I would suggest that the portrayal of subjectivity is a significant point of contention between naturalist writers and socialist realist writers. Unlike the naturalist character, the subject in works of socialist realism understands and experiences its own identity as both unique to itself and also embedded in a social network of power relations. Having typically experienced these power relations from the position of the disenfranchised, protest writers write about characters with similar experiences; however, their position as writers presumes an ability to mediate the systems of power that constrain them. As Regina Gagnier notes, theorists such as Theodor Adorno, Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, and Raymond Williams theorize subjectivity from the bottom rather than the top; they have “reintroduced agency into disciplines preoccupied with systems and structures without abandoning a recognition of the shaping power of social structures or retreating to a methodological individualism,” describing a “ ‘duality of structure’ that both constrains and enables agency” (Gagnier 10). This duality allows for the dialogic interchange between dominant culture and the resisting subject. From its beginnings, American literature of protest takes a range of approaches to the question of agency; slave narratives and novels of slavery, for example, attempt whenever possible to portray slaves as oppressed agents rather than passive chattel, and the texts’ endings celebrate the results of that agency—physical and mental freedom. Later fictional forms depict a decrease in agency; at the turn of the century, literary naturalism emerged as a mode of protest literature, one informed by the dominance during that period of the philosophy of social determinism. As most of the writers I study address social determinism in the context of leftist politics, I want to clarify what determinism signifies in a Marxist context. As Ellen Meiksins Wood has explained, interpretations of Marxist determinism posit either “simple, absolute and mechanical determination” or “absolute contingency” (qtd. in Foster 9). Critics who see Marx as an absolute determinist cite his well-known phrase from the Preface to Critique of Political Economy (1859): “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but, on the contrary, their social existence determines their consciousness” (Marx and Engels 182–83). However, Raymond Williams argues that the original Marxist concept of determinism contains not only the idea of “absolute objectivity,” which precludes free will, but also “historical objectivity,” a set of inherited limitations (social and economic laws and structures) and pressures (ideology) within which people have some agency, some ability to “make history” (Williams Marxism 85–87).32 As Williams notes, the concept of determinism was “inherited from idealist
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and especially theological accounts of the world and man” and thus contains traces of those versions of the concept. Marx’s use of the concept, states Williams, opposes the ideology within these inherited meanings, one that insisted on the “power of certain forces outside man, or, in its secular version, on an abstract determining consciousness” that “totally predicts and prefigures” human activity (Problems 31–32). Marx’s use of determinism “puts the origin of determination in man’s own activities” and views determinism largely as a set of limits or pressures33 (31–32). Marx’s criticism of past philosophers was that they did not take into account the importance of human freedom in social change. Philosophers, according to Marx, “have only interpreted the world . . . the point, however, is to change it” (Marx qtd in Foster 60, emphasis Foster’s). The dialectical relationship between people and their social and economic circumstances described by Marx, then, is a highly complex one involving some degree of consciousness, psychological volition, and social agency. Economic pressures and class ideologies may result in a range of human reactions, but humans do have choices as to how they react, and they can be highly reflective of their choices and the inherent consequences. On the other hand, the sense of autonomy one experiences in having choices can hide the extent to which human lives are social determined. Theodor Adorno’s essay “Society” proposes a model along these lines. Adorno explains a theory of society relying on adaptation as a model for the way humans interact with the power structure—adaptation as Darwin used it in his biological research. As Adorno notes, “almost everyone knows” that “his own social existence can scarcely be said to have resulted from his own personal initiative; rather he has had to search for gaps, ‘openings,’ jobs from which to make a living, irrespective of what seem to him his own human possibilities or talents, should he indeed still have any vague inkling of the latter” (150). Unlike determinism, an idea in which passive creatures are shaped by external or biological forces, adaptation (in theory, at least) allows a modicum of agency to individuals, who adapt to the “openings” that society provides for them. In choosing among a few or many such slots, individuals experience a measure of freewill— the more choices one has, the more free one’s will appears to be. This idea supports my argument that naturalist authors, or Zola’s “social scientists,” feel themselves to be far less determined than their working-class subjects, or “lab rats.” Adorno is finally more pessimistic about people’s ability to have consciousness about their adaptation, or about the forces that create the slots, than are the authors I study.34 As he claims, the culture industry adapts people to goods, and men are the cogs in their own machine. To varying degrees, naturalist authors tend to agree with this picture, but all of them grapple directly with the issue of human agency. Naturalism’s
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reliance on social determinism articulates the reader’s crisis over social limitations and the possibility of social change in an increasingly complex and bureaucratized world. Apart from its reliance on social determinism, literary naturalism’s other defining characteristics are much debated,35 but typically, they include the narrative subordination of thought to action, a focus on the poor and the socially marginal, a documentary style,36 and the creation of characters who are sociological “types,” characters in which “all the humanly and socially essential determinants are present on their highest level of development, . . . rendering concrete the peaks and limits of men and epochs” (Lukács qtd. in Foley Telling the Truth 147). An array of critics have pointed out some or all of these as defining features of naturalism, typically in just such a long list, but what many fail to note is that these features are the effects of naturalist authors’ attempts to portray, as scientifically and objectively as possible, the constituents of society who most clearly qualify a belief in human superiority: the poor. If, as Paul Civello argues, naturalist literature is enmeshed in a post-Darwinian crisis, “the collapse of humanity’s conception of an order in the material world, an order that had formerly imbued that world with meaning” (1), it should be no surprise that its authors situate their portrayal of this collapse in the neighborhoods of the oppressed classes. The naturalist novel depicts the resulting rift “between the self and the material world” and reveals a resolution of it. As this is the literary form drawn upon and revised by the authors I study here, and as the particular aspect of naturalism that they challenge is, in fact, its depiction of agency, I want to discuss its development and the significant tenets challenged by protest writers. Literary naturalism is part of a particular development in Western intellectual history, one in which science, sociology, philosophy, art and literature, and psychology converge upon the question of how human nature and character are determined. The history of naturalism and the term itself reveal the continuing political engagements of its preoccupation with “nature,” with humans as part of the natural environment as opposed to the divinely created rulers of it. Tracing the uses of the term “naturalism,” Raymond Williams observes that the French literary naturalism of the late 1860s (and the English version of the 1880s) is directly related to two other kinds of naturalism, one describing Constable’s mid-nineteenth-century English landscape painting, and the other, common in late-sixteenth-century accusations of atheism, describing a person’s prioritizing of “observed (human) knowledge” over “revealed (divine) knowledge” (Problems 125). The relationship between literary naturalism and these predecessors reveals on the one hand its secular emphasis and on the other the idea that art can serve as a medium for
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the scientific study of “nature”; Constable claimed that landscape painting was a kind of empirical inquiry into natural laws (126). As Williams notes, these aspects of naturalism were unique in that they demonstrated the idea of “historical production,” not only the production of human character by its environment, but also the production of the social and natural environments. Naturalism depicts “the evolution of human nature itself within a natural world of which it is an interacting part” (127). It is thus deeply connected with psychology. The chief practitioner of French literary naturalism was Émile Zola, whose essay “The Experimental Novel” (1893) exposes naturalism’s roots in a method of scientific investigation developed by Claude Bernard. Zola was influenced by Darwin’s idea of natural selection as well by Rousseau’s romanticism, especially the worship of nature, a “naturalism” in which “nature unchecked does all things for the best” (Wilson and Clark 586). His essay argues that the “naturalistic novel” is a “real experiment that a novelist makes on man by the help of observation” (Zola 594). In his “experimental method,” the author is a scientist whose “subjects” are his characters. The novelist sets forth “the facts as he has observed them, suggests the point of departure, displays the solid earth on which his characters are to tread,” and then “introduces an experiment” by setting “his characters going in a certain story” (593). Through such an experiment, one can “possess knowledge of the man, scientific knowledge of him, in both his individual and social relations” (594). A talented artist could thus replicate “objective reality” in his or her fiction, allowing author and reader an undistorted view into the lives of the characters. Naturalist writers would be the scientific vanguard, testing out undetermined phenomena in their novels, after which the scientists would establish “the truth” (597). Of course, the reader’s acceptance of what Barbara Foley calls the “mimetic contract” is itself a political act. Zola’s particular ideology contained the view of the poor common to the “biological naturalists” (including Frank Norris), that the sufferings of the working class are the “natural” result of heredity. Among other things, this form of determinism relieves him of social responsibility by allowing him to understand historical and sociological events as natural occurrences. This doesn’t mean that Zola viewed people as unable to act upon nature or society. Speaking purely as a scientist, not a political reformer, Zola contended that “once we discover the determining causes of human behavior, we can act upon them and modify them in accordance with the laws of nature” (Westbrook 93). Finally, though, Zola’s determinism runs into a predictable trap; while he might agree that his own intellectual production is the result of determinism, he never doubts that he can attain scientific
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objectivity. Like Descartes, Zola was certain that the human mind could control its biases, could “deliberate and then act independently of the machine itself ” (Westbrook 94). He did not confront the central problem in theories of determinism: one’s inability to believe that one’s own will is not “free.” As Paul Civello points out, Zola wasn’t just the “chief originator, theorist, proponent, and practitioner” of naturalism; he was also the “single most influential novelist on the American literary naturalists” (23). However, Zola’s scientific determinism was rethought by American naturalists who accepted the determinist premise but not its pessimism about human agency. Most American naturalists hedged their determinism by making it social and psychological. Portraying “acts of free will” within naturalistic textual conventions, they increasingly point toward “psychoanalytic determinants” (Howard 73–77; Gammel 6). American naturalists thus create the possibility of social reform: “human conditions are determined by the operation of material causes which can be traced, recorded, understood, and finally, controlled” (Walcutt 24–25). By insisting that humans are the products of their environment, an environment they help to create, naturalism confronts the issue at the heart of determinism, the possibility of radical social change. Yet despite their interest in using fiction to promote reform, American naturalists continued to create characters of a different world from both themselves and their middle-class readership—a socially determined world. In particular, the characters of early naturalists are not of the same class background as their authors. Although Stephen Crane, for example, had firsthand journalistic exposure to the lives of the poor, his psychological detachment from them and his scorn of their “class pride” are visible in comments he made relating to his novel Maggie: “I do not think much can be done with the Bowery as long as the people there are in their present state of conceit. A person who thinks himself superior . . . because he has no pride and no clean clothes is as badly conceited as Lillian Russell.” Crane diagnosed “the root of Bowery life” as a “sort of cowardice,” a “lack of ambition,” a willingness to “be knocked flat and accept the licking” (Pizer “Stephen Crane” 104, 105). Crane’s massive generalizations about the working class’s sense of themselves correspond to his novel’s deterministic and detached approach to its subject(s). This narrative gap between the author/reader and the characters, characteristic of turn-of-the-century naturalism, comes about not only because of the “determinism displacement” problem, but because naturalists interested in social reform built it into their narrative strategy. These naturalist writers believed that if middle-class readers could be shown how social and economic conditions, not biology, determine (or more
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accurately, deform) the actions and thoughts of working-class people, then they might be inspired to change those conditions. To this end, the characters must lead brutal, miserable lives, thus displaying the need for reform. However, readers have trouble maintaining identification with characters who act on “unleashed passions,” whose stories always involve “blood and sudden death” (Frank Norris, qtd. in Fabre “Beyond Naturalism?” 53). A purely deterministic narrative philosophy “effectively dehumanizes the character,” allowing the reader to see him or her as the animalistic Other, the brute without freewill and thus without selfhood (Howard x). If the reader cannot identify with the character, she or he will not be compelled to accept the text’s social lessons or the character’s perspective on the events of the story, and naturalist characters do not typically command respect.37 The “very positioning of self-aware reader in close conjunction with masterful author in relation to unconscious and degraded characters” prevents the notion of social responsibility from penetrating the reader’s “consciousness enough to cause real discomfort”38 (Howard 102). The distance between reader and “offensive” character renders the reader a voyeur and the protagonist’s life a spectacle for the reader’s gaze.39 Naturalist characters are the distorted result of the idea that the poor are less civilized, less human, more socially determined than the educated middle class. Lee Clark Mitchell and Ellen Moers describes them as people who “have no self,” who find “moral and ethical decisions irrelevant because their conditions do not allow for them,” who “always choose to act as their strongest desires dictate,” and who “possess a certain ‘thinness’ of consciousness, an inability to form a perspective on the events in their lives” (Mitchell 3; Ellen Moers qtd. in Mitchell 10). Such descriptions make these characters sounds like beings from another planet, but the conditions of poverty are the determining factors here. As the theory goes, because the poor are forced into such miserable circumstances, they have no time, space, or energy to develop perspectives on their lives and thus are reduced to the level of brutes (this conception of the poor has more recently been called “the culture of poverty,” but by using the word “culture,” it implies that the poor accept and even enjoy their poverty). Elaine Scarry’s description of the way the psyche is affected by bodily distress illuminates social determinism’s implicit understanding of the relation between physical conditions and mental ability. According to Scarry, it is “only when the body is comfortable, when it has ceased to be an obsessive object of perception and concern, that consciousness develops other objects,” that a person’s “external world comes into being and begins to grow” (39). Moreover, what primarily allows bodily comfort is adequate shelter: “the room accommodates and thereby eliminates from
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human attention the human body” (39). In her contention that adequate shelter (a room of one’s own?) meets bodily needs and thereby enables the development of “other objects” of consciousness, we see reflected the determinist premise that without a comfortable room or a room of any kind, consciousness remains limited to the body.40 According to this logic, the working poor are preoccupied with bodily needs and with the dangers of their environment; because they lack the resources to meet those needs, their bodies remain “in pain” or uncomfortable, and thus their actions are “determined,” their lives brutish and limited. Scarry’s formulation relies on a spatial conception of human identity, the idea that protected and private space (the home) enables and reflects human personality. This conception of identity is based implicitly on Freudian psychology. Freud materialized “the interior of the psyche, giving it a structure and a substance whereas before it had a mysterious, ephemeral, dense or vacant character” (Kirby 77). Freud saw the psyche as “an interior space,” not “solid or object or origin,” but “an open bounded environment occupied by warring factions” (Kirby 77).41 It is no coincidence, I argue, that Freud was conceptualizing subjectivity as a protected space at the same time that European naturalism was imported to America and that space was “becoming a problematic, complicated category” (91).42 According to June Howard, the depressions of 1873 and 1893 threatened the lives and homes of Americans, especially industrial workers, deepening an already present sense of crisis (72).43 Political reactions to this economic and social crisis include populist and socialist organizing, which inspired a fear of anarchy and revolution and a corresponding fear of and fascination with the “mob,” or the working class. Results of this fascination include the development of “scientific racism,” criminal anthropology,44 American naturalism, and a change in urban planning, as the middle-class increasingly demanded physical spatial divisions (private/public, suburb/ghetto) designed to keep “pollution” (human and environmental) out of their lives, thereby forcing the poor into ever smaller spaces.45 Spatial divisions are thus central to naturalism’s deterministic ideology, with architecture serving to contain, control, and thus determine the characters. Yet naturalism’s correlation between architecture and personality is part of its class bias; all of the authors I study present at some point during their texts an alternative to the middle-class “room of one’s own” model of self-conception. In allowing their characters to experience that alternative and incorporate it into their self-conception, the protest authors I study revise determinist philosophy. As Irene Gammel notes, it is “the compartmentalization, classification, and ordering of life” itself (bourgeois
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ideologies of space and identity)that are “the very determinants . . . that shape the emergence of various types of individuals” (45). The failures of the characters to realize their Franklinian goals result not simply from their harsh social environments, but also from their inability to manage their traumatic double consciousness, from their unwillingness to accept the impasse they encounter between their working-class lives and their middle-class models of self. Despite their “culture of poverty,” these characters do reflect in various ways upon their circumstances; to surmount them in true American style, they work to adopt self-conceptions based on successful American heroes (again, Ben Franklin is explicitly mentioned by two of the characters), heroes who had far greater structural advantages in their self-making projects. The psychological volition present in the act of self-conception allows these characters some freedom of choice (within a limited range). This level of agency is perhaps closer to what most people experience on a daily basis than we would like to imagine. After all, agency, according to Lee Clark Mitchell, is constructed only after the fact, made up as we go along in the stories we tell about the moments of our lives. Compared with the typical naturalist character, realist characters can resist their desires in order to exercise their wills or make moral choices (morality defined as the gap between “impulse and action”)46 ; they do so in part through representation—they “narrate their way out of impulsive behavior” (Mitchell 10). Finally, then, agency is based on the power to narrate, to tell one’s own story—a concept that can be completely aligned with the psychoanalytic concept of “working through.” The more fully determinist naturalism registers this for the reader by disrupting “the habitual and powerful process by which we create not only ourselves but each other as responsible agents” (xiii).47 The authors in my study, on the other hand, show the reader that the “limitations” and “pressures” of social determinism are not immovable walls that surround and control a “brutish” and passive character; instead, they are the dynamic forces (unsafe and inadequate housing, environmental racism, lack of education, etc.) that actively work to suppress and restrict the protagonist’s range of choices. Depression-Era Novels: Determinism and Psychology Richard Wright’s attraction to and departure from naturalism throughout his career has been well documented by Michel Fabre, who explains Wright’s turn toward existentialism in the novels after Native Son. Initially attracted to the protest quality of naturalism, which revealed that words could be used “as a weapon, . . . as one would use a club,” Wright later valued its vision of society, an “eye-opener” allowing him “liberation through
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understanding” (Black Boy 272; Fabre “Beyond Naturalism?” 41). Typical naturalist characters are not allowed either vision or understanding, however. The protagonist of Wright’s first novel, Lawd Today!, for example, ends his day with acts of domestic violence followed by alcoholic unconsciousness. After Lawd Today!, Fabre suggests, Wright turned away from this “pessimistic” portrayal of the naturalist character because he could not accept “subjection and powerlessness as a universal law, since subjection amounted to his own slow death in a racist setting” (“Beyond Naturalism?” 38, 54–55). Wright made use of naturalism’s documentary and experimental aspects in Native Son, claiming in Zolaesque fashion that he worked “like a scientist in a laboratory,” using his “imagination” to “invent test-tube situations, place Bigger in them, and . . . work out in fictional form an emotional statement and resolution of this problem” of Bigger’s life (“How ‘Bigger’ Was Born” 867). On the other hand, he does not believe “that environment makes consciousness,” but instead believes that “the environment supplies the instrumentalities through which the organism expresses itself ” (862). I would add, though, that another reason for Wright’s move away from pessimistic determinism was his desire to challenge the particular aspect of naturalism in which thought is subordinate to action, preventing characters from understanding themselves and their society. Wright wanted to give his protagonists a measure of dignity, intelligence, and power, attributes that are unusual in naturalist fiction.48 Had he followed the dictates of naturalism, Wright would have destroyed Bigger without allowing him to find a larger meaning in his life, without allowing him to “claim his soul,” as Alice Walker might say. Wright in fact revised his initial version of the final scene, in which Bigger was “going smack to the electric chair,” because he decided “two murders was enough for one novel”—and also, perhaps, because he couldn’t bear to execute yet another black boy (“How ‘Bigger’ Was Born” xxii, xxxiii).49 While Wright intended Bigger to be the kind of man who lives “by violence, through extreme action and sensation, through drowning daily in a perpetual nervous agitation,” he also wanted him to comprehend his oppression on some level, not simply to respond to it with physical reflex (866). Bigger reflects on his social constraints, I argue, whether pre-consciously or consciously, thereby developing a perspective on himself, his community, and racism. The development of a perspective prevents him from “drowning” or escaping his pain and suffering; instead, this perspective increases his pain, encouraging him to use “any means necessary” (violence) to overcome his oppression. This compulsion toward social reform is shared by the other four writers I study here, Ann Petry, Tillie Olsen, Sarah E. Wright, and Chester
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Himes, whose political goals for their novels seemed similarly unreachable within the constraints of naturalism. To demonstrate the need for social change to their readers, these authors realized that they needed to bridge the reader-character gap to prevent readers from dismissing their characters’ miserable lives or ignoring the social factors that contribute to this misery. Their narrative avenues for doing so, however, were limited; as previously stated, readers have trouble identifying with the poor, miserable, and determined. Any changes made in the characters’ actual milieu to enable reader-character identification will make the protest less effective—the reformer writes about the ghetto in order to solve social problems, but having poverty-stricken characters solve those problems is not “realistic” (Howard 144–45). Furthermore, characters so determined by their environments should not possess the level of agency required for a solution; if they did, the reader might conclude that the poor could take care of their own problems. These authors found a partial solution to their narrative dilemma in proletarian realism, which allows the “possibility of profound social change without violating the conventions of realism” (Howard 158).50 Conceived by Mike Gold in “Towards Proletarian Art” (1926) as one way of furthering the “continuation and development of the revolutionary tradition in art itself,” proletarian realism differs from naturalism in requiring the portrayal of a character’s development of (proletarian) consciousness (qtd. in Aaron Writers 87).51 A contributing editor to The Liberator, a Party literary magazine, Gold wrote the essay to create unity in leftist art and to encourage workers to write, but his directives were ultimately seen as suppressive and led to the fragmentation of the literary left.52 One area of contention was form. Jack Salzman notes that in Gold’s conception, “the worker-artist had only to tell of the proletariat’s struggles and eventual triumph; his sweat was technique enough,” or in Gold’s words, “technique has made cowards of us all . . . there is no ‘style’ ” (309). Yet in proposing a language that would “effectively recreate the feel of crisis and deprivation,” Gold’s essay set “the standards by which a truly politicising literature could be produced and judged” (Lauret 22). Gold demanded that “proletarians should write about what they know best,” encouraging authors to make their own experiences “real to the readers,” thereby (perhaps) closing the gap between reader and working-class character. Moreover, Gold’s proletarian realism created a self-consciously “counter-hegemonic” version of reality, a fact that has “once more become obscured in contemporary criticism” (14). Gold demanded that the element of hope be added to depictions of poverty (albeit a hope for a decidedly Communist reformation of society), an element absent in naturalism.
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Tillie Olsen’s novel Yonnondio was written in the thirties using Gold’s formulation of proletarian realism, which “encouraged young working-class writers like Olsen to write of their own experiences” and which indicated to her that her writing “could and should be a form of action in itself ” (Rosenfelt 231). As a faithful reader of New Masses, Olsen was aware of the standards of proletarian realism and drew upon them (with some important exceptions), despite her claim that the “Party literary line ‘did not touch her’ ” (Coiner 174).53 Correspondingly, Olsen’s work has an anti-individualist stance, as she notes: “I don’t think in terms of quests for identity to explain human motivation” (Lauret 23, 11). In this sense and in the sense of plotline, her book follows the pattern of most working-class texts, which, as Regina Gagnier describes, do not have the “crises and recoveries” or the “climaxes” of most mainstream novels: “The bourgeois climax-and-resolution/action-and-interaction model presupposes an active and reactive world not always accessible to workingclass writers,” who often felt themselves to be “victims of economic determinism” (43). Also in keeping with a number of working-class stories, Olsen’s doesn’t end, as Gold would hope, with “revolutionary élan,” but in medias res. Her novel is unfinished, which explains this “ending,” but her stopping place is all the more compelling for the way it inspires readers to work on resolving the novel’s conflicts in their imaginations. The Literary Reception of the Transracial Protest Novel Using experimentation and genre-blending, Olsen and the other authors I study challenge prevailing notions of working-class agency as they develop what in African American literary criticism is called the “protest novel”; this is a genre I want to reconceptualize as a transracial working-class fictional form. As much as her novel departs from proletarian realism and uses coercive narrative strategies, Olsen is participating in a form that I argue emerges out of the shared concerns of African American and white proletarian writers of the thirties and forties. As proletarian or leftist African American and white writers were similarly invested in social change, both groups worked to dismantle the prevailing negative representations of their cultures and to raise consciousness about the true causes and effects of poverty. Any transracial solidarity, however, can be traced back over a decade earlier, during the Harlem Renaissance. Nor did this collaboration “remake” only “the black,” as Harold Cruse’s survey The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (1967) claims; in fact, as William Maxwell argues, the “red decades in black literature began in a rocky, sometimes mostly rhetorical Harlem-proposed alliance, not
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in a Depression-fed enlistment of literary innocents” (4–6). Gold’s body of work suggests that he formulated his notions of proletarian literature “in conversation with Harlem’s literary renaissance” (123). While Gold’s race politics were far from perfect, his career supports the “notion of a ‘considerable harmony’ ” between the Harlem Renaissance and “the class proletarian art creed” (122). In fact, the literature of the Harlem Renaissance, according to Barbara Christian (citing Sterling Brown), was infused with leftist protest against racial oppression. Some scholars argue correctly that many “descriptions of the Harlem Renaissance” erase the “intellectuals, leaders, organizations, and journals . . . devoted to ‘economic radicalism’ ” at this time (Carby Reconstructing 165). The Harlem Renaissance was not solely accommodationist, not simply the “happy hour” of black literary and cultural studies, as some of the now infamous criticism would have us believe (Miller “Restructuring”). This criticism includes Richard Wright’s description of Harlem Renaissance writers as “French poodles” who go “curtseying” to the “Court of American Public Opinion” to show that “the Negro was not inferior,”54 or Ellison’s description of Harlem Renaissance literature as “timid of theme,” “apologetic in tone,” and “unconscious of politics” (Wright “Blueprint” 37; Ellison “Recent” 22).55 According to James A. Miller, the New Negro Movement was, at its origins during the Renaissance, highly radical in its political implications. The term “New Negro” was first widely used to designate a group of African Americans who refused to support World War I, pointing out the hypocrisy of fighting for civil rights abroad that were denied to blacks at home (Miller “Restructuring”).56 But overall, Harlem Renaissance political action is more liberal than the radical politics of what has been called the “second black renaissance” in that, as James Weldon Johnson notes, it works toward the “demonstration of intellectual parity by the Negro through the production of literature and art,” thought to be the “most effective tool against racism” (Bigsby 3; Christian Spirit Bloom 39).57 For Langston Hughes, the fact that “the ordinary negroes hadn’t heard of the Negro Renaissance” foretells its eventual failure: it “did not have the support of the group” whose experiences “it undertook to express” (Hughes qtd. in Gloster 192). Ralph Ellison also views the Renaissance as based on the “illusions” of middle-class Negro writers, illusions “swept away in the flood of unemployment, poverty, and the suppression of civil liberties brought on by the depression.” The “sobering effect of the depression” was to make African American writing “realistic”: The depression years, the movement for relief, the rise of the CIO with the attending increases in union activity among Negroes, the Herndon
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This “mighty protesting roar” characterizes the “second Renaissance,” a “cultural revolution” (Bigsby 11). Young intellectuals in the thirties began to critique Du Bois and other leaders for focusing only on race; they wanted to see themselves as a class, with a socialist or otherwise radical political agenda (Bigsby 18). Both socialist and race leaders encouraged the development of literature by and about the black working classes.59 Many black critics and writers of the thirties became convinced that the most effective way to change society was through an aggressive, militant narrative strategy, one that depicted in brutal detail the effects on blacks of white racism. Wright’s essay “A Blueprint for Negro Writing,” written in 1938 for New Challenge magazine, is an attempt to deepen and direct the development of a race and class consciousness in black writers. In the essay, Wright attempts to align class consciousness and art with black nationalism and culture; he wants black writers to draw on their own folk traditions to reach the black masses, yet ultimately to transcend black nationalism. “The workers of a minority people,” Wright claims, “forge organizational forms of struggle to better their lot,” and because they lack the “handicaps of false ambition and property, they have access to a wide social vision and a deep social consciousness” (“Blueprint” 38). However, while black workers have begun to organize, black writers have not, and their work shows no evidence of proletarian consciousness because, as Wright suggest, it has adopted the aesthetic concerns of the white bourgeoisie. Yet other writers and critics were hesitant to see literature reshaped by the masses. Moreover, they were concerned that protest literature would become dominant, resulting in the neglect of another imperative of black writing, the development of a black-identified aesthetic. Writing about the decades of the thirties and forties, an “era of crisis literature and crisis art,” Alain Locke notes that “our artists increasingly become social critics and reformers as our novelists are fast becoming strident sociologists and castigating prophets.” This is not an entirely positive change for Locke, who mourns the literature of previous decades: “Yesterday,” he states, “it was Beauty at all costs . . . today it is truth by all means” (“Deep River” 239). Rather than art, he claims, “it is sociology that sits,
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and Scottsboro cases, the fight against the poll tax, all made for the emergence of a new proletarian consciousness among black people . . . And the writer who had stood aloof from the people [writing only about the middle class] found himself drowned out in the mighty protesting roar of the black masses. (Ellison 22)58
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for better or worse,” too often “for the worse,” as “no white or Negro fictionalist seems as yet to have fully realized how much art it takes to hold in smooth suspension the heavy sociology of racial issues and interracial tensions” (“A Critical Retrospect” 3–4).60 The protest novel’s raw vigor and militancy, Locke feels, have replaced art and aesthetics. Despite Locke’s reservations, the protest novel came to dominate the black canon during the thirties and forties. The battle over value in black literature altered its terms, calling for the creation of black characters who are “true” and representative, yet who also encounter some of the social and political imperatives facing the majority of African Americans. Locke approved of Wright’s protest writing; while criticizing his underdeveloped “art” and his “overdocumented” stories, Locke celebrates Wright’s handling of sociology: “Wright has found a key to mass interpretation through symbolic individual instances: with this, our Negro fiction of social interpretation comes of age” (“The Negro: ‘New’ or Newer” 8). While Locke ultimately rejected the possibility of a representative black “type” (something he felt Wright to be calling for),61 he could recognize the value in a Bigger Thomas, a sociological type yet also a “true” native son who could potentially awaken “a conscience willing at last . . . to face the basic issues realistically and constructively.” Wright’s early fiction, especially Native Son, helped make the protest novel the dominant mode of African American literature; subsequent novels were judged according to Wright’s standard.62 Himes’s If He Hollers certainly followed, and signified on, Wright’s protest mode, but the novel went too far for some readers and was a commercial failure. White critics in particular found it “nauseating” and complained that it offered no solution to the “problems” it “presented” (Himes Quality 77). The following year, Ann Petry’s first novel, The Street (1946), also similar to Native Son, was a critically acclaimed best seller.63 Alain Locke’s 1946 review calls it the “artistic success of the year,” valuing its lack of “ulterior good intentions, other than the best of artistic intentions to tell the truth vividly, honestly, objectively.” He calls Lutie’s struggle “universally human,” conceding that though it is “deftly embroidered with the particularism of Negro life” and the “minutest and most well-observed local color of Harlem,” it doesn’t have that “ ‘this is another world’ style of so many ‘Harlem stories.’ ” Here, he comments particularly on her handling of determinism: she refrains from portraying Harlem as some “other” determined world, yet manages to make her brutal ending into “the cleverest kind of social indictment—Zolaesque, if that be not too superlative as praise.” In finding a balance between art and sociology, in using naturalism yet compelling reader identification, Petry creates a “true and effective novel of race” (“Reason and Race” 21).
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Locke’s praises reflect the pressure on Petry to produce a novel in line with Native Son, a pressure she firmly resisted in her next novel. Country Place (1947), about a small white postwar community, manages to avoid racial issues almost entirely. The Narrows (1953) returns to Wright’s themes if not to his narrative style; the novel examines the lives of characters in a working-class black neighborhood and the tensions surrounding an interracial relationship. Neither of these novels achieved the success of The Street (Country Place has been out of print since 1971), no doubt because they focus on love relationships between individuals without depicting sexuality as degraded and primitive (as in the naturalist tradition). “For all its needlepoint competence,” Locke asserts, continuing the domestic metaphor of his review of The Street, Country Place has “neither the surge nor the social significance of her first novel . . . it says nothing of grand importance” (“A Critical Retrospect” 7). In other words, Petry’s shift away from race issues to focus more completely on gender removes her work from the category of protest, the only category Locke sees as appropriate for her. Moreover, Locke hints that African American novels are only valuable in the “mainstream” if they focus on racial themes, especially social protest. Categorized as “assimilationist” by black and white critics, Country Place was rejected as a collection of “vicarious experiences of a white society with which [Petry] was not minutely familiar” (Nick Aaron Ford qtd. in Lattin 69). Alain Locke agrees with this assessment, but he also acknowledges the limitations of the critical standard he utilizes: This is not said to advocate our writers confining themselves to the racial milieu as one into which they have inevitable emotional projection, but only to warn that as they move out to mainstream, they must . . . be capable of breasting the ocean swells of single standard comparison and competition. (“A Critical Retrospect” 7)
In contrasting “the racial milieu” with the “mainstream,” Locke asserts that race is the single most important aspect of the work of black writers; without a racial focus, their work will suffer in a variety of ways. Yet Petry claims that she wrote Country Place not as “part of the assimilationist current of 1945–1952,” but instead because she “ ‘happened to have been in a small town in Connecticut during a hurricane’ and ‘decided to write about’ it” (Lattin 69). Petry insists that her individual experience cannot be adequately addressed in a collective, that her race, although important, is not the most significant part of her identity.64 In moving away from Wright’s brand of protest, Petry shows that like Baldwin (who led the
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attack on Wright), she found the structure and themes of the African American literary vogue, the protest novel, to be stultifying. As Petry’s fiction and the critical response to it make clear, the African American protest tradition was both male-dominated and polarized; work that did not fit one of the two poles (either Wright’s protest style or the “antiprotest” tradition of Baldwin) was unrecognized. The work of Sarah E. Wright follows Petry’s in focusing on a desperate mother trying to survive in a poverty-stricken African American community during the Depression, yet her book has received virtually no critical attention, although it was chosen by the New York Times as one of the most important books of 1969 and received the Baltimore Sun’s Readability Award that same year. An early and prominent member of the Harlem Writer’s Guild, Wright began her novel This Child’s Gonna Live in the fifties, when John Oliver Killens encouraged her to tell the story of her family’s history on the Eastern shore. According to her literary biography, Wright’s work is “not part of a limited movement” but “part of a human movement”; her writing throughout the years has been focused on telling the “truths” of “her people” and “herself in response to the world” (Guilford 300). She might in fact avoid using the word “protest” to describe either her poetry (collected in Give Me a Child, 1955) or her novel, This Child’s Gonna Live (1969); rather, she contends that her work “affirms ‘our right to life— saying yes to life and no to that which is destroying’ ” (qtd. in Guilford 298). Wright drew inspiration from African, Haitian, and Russian writers whose “fidelity to their land, their roots, their culture, and the authenticity of their depiction of the peasant ‘affirmed something’ ” for her; she realized that “the land [at the “Shore”] and the people have their personality and validity,” and her “job as a chronicler is to reveal this faithfully” (Guilford 298). In this sense, she follows in the tradition of Zora Neale Hurston in her affirming portrayals of “folk” culture, and in her decision to write a “lyrical and excruciating love story” (299). However, Wright’s “love story” draws upon elements of both “militant protest style” fiction and proletarian fiction, both coming back into vogue in the sixties. Wright considered herself a “peasant” with a transracial outlook, and her writing affirms work as itself a kind of protest. For both Wright and Olsen, the commitment to housekeeping as well as to organizing against oppression took its toll on their literary output. This Child’s Gonna Live took Wright over ten years to write. Similarly, although it also was intended to portray “revolutionary élan” in the consciousness-raising of two characters, Yonnondio was unfinished and abandoned until the late sixties, when Olsen discovered and edited the manuscript fragments. The textual history of these novels is thus a
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testament to the constraints poverty places on writers (about which Olsen has written in her book Silences). Because of their class status and their work as mothers and housekeepers, Olsen and Wright both experienced what Joseph Kalar has called the “proletarian night,” the “liminal space” of the “worker who labors by day and writes at night” (Wixson 211). This state, which separates worker-writers from both their fellow laborers and their fellow writers, is defined by “a symbolic rupture . . . constituted by the entry into writing, that is, into the domain of the literate” (Jacques Rancière qtd. in Wixson 211). The worker-writer participates in two “domains,” one of working-class labor, the other of the intellect (typically, though wrongly, associated with the middle class). While this division, with its “consciousness of difference within sameness,” can give the worker-writer a “unique perspective,” it can also prevent the writer from working at all (Wixson 211).65 Thus while Olsen’s novel seems to participate stylistically in a modernist fracturing of perspective and lack of closure, I would suggest that its fragmented plot and lack of ending are the results of “proletarian night” and reflect their circumstances of production (something Gold advocates for these novels). While Sarah E. Wright’s novel traces a plot similar to Petry’s, a few of her tactics resemble Olsen’s and Himes’s, particularly the narrative strategy she uses to prevent the middle-class reader’s tendency to aestheticize and thus control their reactions to the suffering of the characters. Wright adopts a narrative voice that speaks in the same colloquial language used by her characters, but she also refuses to “clean up” that language, often making strategic use of graphic, gory images and profanity. As Oliver Killens has stated, Wright’s language is imbued with the “sounds and smells and blood and sweat and love and hate and sugar and shit and poverty and heartache” of life (qtd. in Guilford 299). While Sarah E. Wright’s strategy is potentially alienating to some middle-class readers, those who can’t accept the graphic nature of both the language and the lives of the Tangierneck community are probably not welcome there anyway, and those who can are compelled to identify with the heroine’s struggles. Chester Himes’s novel Yesterday Will Make You Cry (1952) draws on similar techniques that risk alienating readers in his portrayal of prison life. Drawing on a fusion of literary naturalism, social protest, and surrealism, Himes captures the impact of a radically determined existence on identity. Because prison is what Judith Butler has called an “abject zone” used to as a boundary in the construction of subjectivity, Himes’s incarcerated protagonists have already experienced the ultimate version of the social death that naturalist characters resist. Ostensibly, the prison institution attempts to create a socially acceptable subjectivity through the destruction of unacceptable desires. Since, however, the most prominent
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aspects of the convict’s identity are abject, radically unacceptable, this destruction threatens his or her most basic sense of self, one he or she alternately fights to protect and relinquishes in the name of survival. Himes and other prison writers describe the central psychological effect of imprisonment as the disintegration of the boundaries between the self and the environment, allowing the abjectification of the inmate. On the other hand, these same texts reveal that convicts’ testimony can imaginatively project them outside their fortified spaces, breaking down both the prison walls and the psychological barricades to enable a reconstruction of inmate subjectivity. These authors are engaged in ambitious projects whose aims are nothing less than to reform social attitudes toward race, class, and gender by compelling readers to abandon the reading practices instilled in them by the “bourgeois” novel. Revising and blending various generic approaches to writing fiction, they draw upon and create narrative tactics designed to impact readers’ consciousness in entirely unfamiliar ways. They create complex and fascinating characters who suffer and resist that suffering with a variety of coping strategies, double consciousness among them. Readers are confronted with models of successful and spectacularly unsuccessful strategies for interpreting cultural codes and negotiating social oppression. They are forced to watch as characters struggle, lash out, try again, falter, and finally disintegrate in the face of overwhelming pressures, yet their conventional readerly mechanisms for handling such vicarious spectacles are blocked, dismantled, or explicitly condemned. Characters learn that the traumatizing physical and psychological invasion they experience at the hands of white middle-class patriarchal society cannot be transcended or suppressed; readers must acknowledge that reading such traumas is a version of trauma in itself and that their best hope for “working through” is to examine their own surrender to or complicity in such suffering and to turn their energies toward their own “emancipatory projects.”
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2
Rape, Repression, and Remainder: Racial Trauma in Wright’s Early Novels And shucks, if them [World War II German soldiers] happen to come across a [Belgian] woman, . . . every soljer in the German army would pile her, and when they got through there wasn’t nothing left. . . . One soljer after another getting on one poor little woman, and she just laying there and can’t do nothing. And aint no policemen around to bother you . . . a soljer gets a chance to do a lot of things. (Wright Lawd Today! 30) Had [Bigger] raped [Mary]? Yes, he had raped her. Every time he felt as he had felt that night, he raped. But rape was not what one did to women. Rape was what one felt when one’s back was against a wall and one had to strike out, whether one wanted to or not, to keep the pack from killing one. He committed rape every time he looked into a white face. He was a long, taut piece of rubber which a thousand white hands had stretched to the snapping point, and when he snapped it was rape. But it was rape when he cried out in hate deep in his heart as he felt the strain of living day by day. That, too, was rape. (Wright Native Son 658) As a paradigm for the human experience that governs history, then, traumatic disorder is indeed the apparent struggle to die. The postulation of a drive to death, which Freud ultimately introduces in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, would seem only to recognize the reality of the destructive force that the violence of history imposes on the human
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Chapter
50
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In his afterword to Richard Wright’s novel Rite of Passage (begun in 1945 but published in 1994), Arnold Rampersad illuminates Wright’s interest in the psychology of young African American males, an interest that has only achieved critical notice in Wright criticism relatively recently. Rampersad notes that Wright was part of an effort by the psychiatrist Dr. Louis Wertham to found the first psychiatric clinic in Harlem, and Wright was also interested in the work of the Wiltwyck school for Boys in the Catskills, which Wright was convinced was doing its best “to rehabilitate broken boys, emotionally smashed boys who need a chance” (136). According to Rampersad, this school is “directly in the background” of Rite of Passage: Wright went so far as to discuss his novel with “a black social psychiatric caseworker at Wiltwyck, who visited Wright at his home and facilitated Wright’s visit to the school” (133, 135). Wright was fascinated with “ ‘the whole psychology of anger,’ which he called ‘a terribly complex thing [that] ought to be gone into more closely’ ” (141). While in his journals Wright speculated that mother-son relationships and Oedipal fixations might be the cause of rampant African American “juvenile delinquency,”1 he was also interested in the Jim Crow–era stereotype of the black male rapist (a deadly inversion of the original trauma, the rape and castration of Africa), and in what I call the “primal scene”2 of lynching. As Gwen Bergner has observed, both African American and psychoanalytic discourses “describe visual traumas that trigger identity formation” (Bergner xviii–xix). Freud’s “primal scene,” a formative moment in the development of gender identity, and Lacan’s “mirror stage,” the parallel moment in the formation of subjectivity, posit spectacular events as initiating the subject into a crucial aspect of identity; certainly it could be said that the witnessing (whether in person or imaginatively, as depicted by witnesses) of a lynching is a violent ritual that interpellates the black male viewer into his particular racial position.3 In Rite of Passage and the short story “Big Boy Leaves Home,” published in 1938, I argue, Wright focuses his interest in psychology on the impact of racial events as they traumatize his young protagonists, developing a set of tropes that end up working toward a theory of racial trauma. Boys Hanging from Trees: Lynching as Rite of Passage In “Big Boy Leaves Home,” Wright takes up the “primal scene” of lynching for the first time in the story of Big Boy and his three friends, whose
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psyche, the formation of history as the endless repetition of previous violence. (Caruth 63)
AND
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accidental interaction with a white woman at a swimming hole ends violently. Apart from confronting white readers with the gruesome specifics of lynching, Wright provides a complex picture of the social conditioning of black males around the inevitability of their deaths at the end of a rope. Thus this particular primal scene is not only the boys’ entry into the “gates of the hell,” to borrow Frederick Douglass’s phrase, their interpellation into a deforming cultural narrative; it is also the end result of that narrative, one they will spend their lives avoiding. As Jonathan Elmer notes, trauma theory insists both on its “narratives of origin”—the primal scene—and on the unavailability of such origins (Elmer 769). The plot is a familiar one: while the boys are drying their unclothed bodies on the grass after their swim and discussing the “equal rights” they’ve heard about “up North,” a white woman sees them and begins to scream. Big Boy and his friends attempt to retrieve their clothes on the ground a few feet away from the woman, but her soldier fiancé shows up and shoots two of the boys. Big Boy grabs his rifle and wrestles it from him, shooting him in the process. By the story’s end, Big Boy manages to flee the town, but only after witnessing the brutal lynching of his friend Bobo. While Big Boy is clearly traumatized by the sickening spectacle of Bobo’s dismemberment and burning, he is not unfamiliar with the concept; Wright makes it clear that all of the boys have been well trained in this particular aspect of “living Jim Crow.” As he does in his portrayal of Bigger Thomas, Wright ensures that readers of “Big Boy Leaves Home” learn about and respect the reading strategies of Big Boy and his friends. Hortense Spillers comments on the “democratic execution” of “sign reading”: “Even though we customarily attribute reading and interpretive activity to an advantageous class position, the conclusion is inaccurate—the wide dissemination of literacies . . . necessitates the negotiation of signs at whatever level, to whatever degree of competence” (Spillers “All the Things” 402). On the fourth page of the story, after Big Boy proposes that they all swim in a creek located on private property, one of the boys responds, “N git lynched? Hell naw!” (242). These boys are accurate readers of their culture, and while liberal white readers might feel unconvinced by the boy’s projection of lynching as the end result of swimming, it turns out to be an accurate assessment. Similarly, after Big Boy reaches his home and begins to tell his mother that he and his friends encountered a white woman, she interrupts him before he can explain the details of that encounter, saying, “White woman? . . . Lawd have mercy! Ah knowed yuh boys wuz gonna keep on till yuh got into somethin like this!” (254). While his mother is implicitly referring to previous episodes of Big Boy’s trouble making, she carries with her a conscious belief that her son will “get into something” and be lynched. The community elders who come to help out are not
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surprised either, and they quickly come up with a plan to get Big Boy and Bobo out of town. No one suggests that the boys trust in the “justice system,” nor does anyone indicate a belief that Big Boy’s shooting of the white man was a mistake or overreaction; all present know that any other response would have resulted in Big Boy’s death. Their anger at Big Boy stems primarily from the fact that he wasn’t in school at the time, staying out of harm’s way. Wright paints a vivid picture of a black community accustomed to handling the persistent threat to its youth by racist violence. Wright ensures that readers note the importance of the lynching scene for Big Boy’s psychological development with heavy-handed symbolism. Big Boy plans to hide out in a kiln he had dug days earlier in an embankment; upon his arrival at the kiln, he encounters a six-foot snake that he must beat to death with a stick (263). The snake’s emergence out of the womblike space presents a kind of primal scene in itself, but this particular snake attacks Big Boy. Big Boy literally crushes the snake’s head under his heel in an image reminiscent of Jesus crushing the head of Satan at the moment that his heel is being bruised by Satan’s head, a reference to the crucifixion (a form of lynching). I would argue that the snake, already an overdetermined image of sexualized evil, in this instance takes on added meaning: it is the whites’ deformed representation of Big Boy’s sexuality, one that will “bruise” him for the rest of his life. Intended to protect him, Big Boy’s kiln is instead the container for his psychological transformation from innocent boy to traumatized spectator of the primal scene, the lynching of Bobo. The kiln provides no real shelter, after all, suggested further by the fact that a dog (both a tool of the white lynch mob and its symbol) enters the hole, and Big Boy must strangle it before its barking can give him away. Big Boy’s encounter with the dog takes on psychological significance in the eye contact the two share during their silent struggle and in Big Boy’s cradling of the dog’s dead body afterward. He has murdered a representation of the subhuman white mob, but he has also murdered his self-image up to this point—a boy who might have played with such a dog under different circumstances. Hours after the lynching, when daylight breaks, Big Boy feels as if he is “waking from a dream” and “trying to remember” what has happened (273). The trauma of his friend’s death is already being processed by his unconscious; although he does not repress it, he becomes dissociated from it. At the end of the story, as Big Boy hides in a truck bound for Chicago, the focus is entirely on Big Boy’s body: his thirst, his stomach cramps after drinking water, and finally, his sleep. He has essentially cut off access to his emotions, reducing his conscious awareness to his physical needs. Big Boy has survived his encounter with a white woman, but at a great cost: he has
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lost his family, community, and identity. Big Boy’s escape is the result of his strength and will to survive (visible early on in his “trouble-making”) as well as pure luck; however, readers are led to believe that Bobo’s fate might still await Big Boy at some later time in his life. Not only is this suggested by historical context, but the phonetic similarity in the boys’ names provides a sense of repetition in both character and plot. The eerily light-hearted title of this story, “Big Boy Leaves Home,” suggests a typical rite of passage in a boy’s life, further emphasizing Wright’s sense that dominant society’s staging of a boy’s transgressive sexuality and lynching was just such a ritual for a young black male. Written almost a decade later, his novella Rite of Passage presents another version of the young black male’s transition to adulthood. This time, the transformation takes the form not of a Southern lynching but of an urban foster child’s removal from the only home he has ever known; this removal is a figure for the removal of Africans from their homeland (the Middle Passage, a horrific version of the titular ritual). Johnny Gibbs, the fifteen-yearold protagonist of the novella, is portrayed as an intelligent and morally upright boy valued by his teacher and classmates as well as his family. Planning to see the movie Superman after school with his friend Billy, he arrives home to find his mother and sister heartbroken because “the City” has decided that he must be moved to a new family. Never having been told that he is a foster child, Johnny is stunned: “Only a half hour ago his world had been so solid, real; now he lived in a hot, sick dream” (Rite of Passage 16). Johnny’s grief turns to guilt, the feeling that “he’d done something wrong and they were getting rid of him . . . a wrong of which they dared not speak” (19–20) and then anger: “they were rejecting him; he could not look into their eyes and see himself reflected there anymore. And at the same time there was rising in his heart a counterprotective feeling that said: . . . I’ll reject you before you reject me” (20).4 Just as slaves were socialized to do, Johnny begins to associate shame with his ancestry and guilt with his identity. Rather than succumb to these feelings, he fights them by turning his back on not only his own family but the very idea of family. Calling this story a “powerful inversion of the Alger myth,” Robert Butler describes Johnny’s only two choices at this point as accepting “an identity arbitrarily constructed and imposed upon him by a social world which is unable to perceive him as a human being” or “completely rejecting the standards of conventional society and begin the task of building a radically isolated self ” (Butler 185–86). Wright’s fiction suggests that these are the only choices available to all African American boys of the working class. Somewhat unrealistic as a depiction of the foster care system,5 Johnny’s removal from his family and home functions as a repetition of the original
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trauma: African slavery. Sheldon George theorizes slavery through the lens of trauma theory as an “intrusive” yet “excluded” past that grounds African American racial identity. While the history of slavery, he argues, can be coherently expressed in any number of ways, the “psychological trauma induced by slavery remains largely inexpressible,” entering the “conscious minds of all Americans” only “through repetition” (1–4).6 As previously discussed, an immediate understanding of the catastrophic events that constitute trauma is not possible for victims because, in Caruth’s view, of “the fact that the threat” to life “is recognized as such by the mind one moment too late” and thus because it has not been “experienced in time, it has not yet been fully known” (62, emphasis in the original). The mind will thus attempt to “master the stimulus retrospectively,” as Freud notes in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, by re-experiencing it in the form of dreams, flashbacks, or actual repetitions in order to develop “the anxiety whose omission was the cause of the traumatic neurosis” (Freud Beyond 26). The compulsion to repeat the trauma is thus a way to revisit history in order to give it “psychic meaning,” as Caruth calls it (59). In this story, one could argue that the trauma of African slavery is repeated both by the perpetrators (the “City”) and the victims (Wright-as-author). The state’s foster care system has mandated Johnny’s forced removal from his family, although no human representative of that system is initially present; “who is this ‘City?” he wonders (18). Rejecting the very idea of a new family, he attempts to find out who his biological family is, but no one will tell him: “he felt encased in hot shame; when they spoke of his mother and father, they whispered.” His friend Billy later tells him that his biological mother was a schizophrenic and his father is unknown, causing him to feel that “he was nothing, a nobody; he felt that he had no claim upon anybody in the world” (26, 52). Johnny has been symbolically castrated by the system, creating within him a feeling of “estrangement” from society, one that would “remain with him all his life, a feeling out of which he was to act and live, a feeling that would stay with him so long that he would eventually forget that it was in him” (52). In essence, he has become permanently homeless. Wright describes above the mechanics of trauma, a “feeling” that seeps into the psyche and produces a particular behavior in the victim; in the rest of the novella, he portrays these changes in Johnny, who eventually develops a “new self,” one that is “hard” and can “plot and plan” (57). After running away from his home before the new family can arrive to pick him up, he seeks out Billy, who introduces him to the members of his gang (a gang of four, like the “gangs” in “Big Boy Leaves Home,” Lawd Today!, and Native Son). During a Middle Passage-like scene in a
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dark school basement, Johnny undergoes his initiation into manhood and gang membership: a ritualistic beating from the boys. But after he fights back and almost kills their leader, Baldy, he wins the boys’ admiration and trust. They rename him Jackal and anoint him their new leader, a turn of events accepted by Baldy, who helps to socialize Johnny in the mechanics and philosophy of organized gang life. Like Big Boy, Baldy has killed a white soldier, but in Baldy, the traumatic impact of such an act has long been suppressed. When Johnny confesses that he doesn’t like the idea of killing, Baldy replies, “Hell, you’ve got to kill somebody sometime or other. Somebody’s always going to get killed. It’s all just a matter of time. The correct thing to do is to make sure it’s the other man” (101). Baldy schools Johnny in the ethics of street life: to ensure the survival of the fittest, the “correct” behavior is preemptive murder. Despite Johnny’s wish that he could return to a safe domestic space (a space he associates with the black woman who yells at the gang while they are mugging a man), he realizes that “he had made his choice, the only choice that had lain within his reach” (115). Johnny’s “choice” is to band together with his fellow victims of race- and class-based oppression (Baldy got his name as the result of racist negligence by white hospital workers who burned his scalp, for example) and live a life of crime, organized around theft and fencing stolen goods. As Rampersad notes, the kind of violent crime perpetrated by Johnny and his gang probably served Wright as a “metaphor for human relationships at their most dangerous,” adding that “to the most despairing and dehumanized people, crime could be, paradoxically, an act of creativity” (139). In other words, those who have not been crushed by the systematic infliction of racial violence will adapt to its logic, developing strategies for survival that are inversions of the particular forms of trauma visited upon them. Certainly, a new personal focus on being “hard” and “plotting and planning” violence towards random people on the streets is the most obvious psychological outcome of the abrupt homelessness inflicted on Johnny. Wright’s Trauma Theory I have tried here to show the ways in which Wright’s interest in the psychological effects of racism and poverty on young black males in his early fiction references the historical violence experienced by African Americans during slavery and Reconstruction. In the rest of this chapter, I want to examine in detail Wright’s development of a theory of African American cultural trauma centered on the topological metaphor of rape in his first two novels, Lawd Today! (1935) and Native Son (1940). Of course Wright does not create this theory in a vacuum; he picks up on
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the work of previous African American authors as well as some white authors whose fiction contains seeds of this theory. As described by Ron Eyerman and other critics, theories of cultural trauma are collaborative, emerging over the course of history in the form of a collective identity that responds to historical violence. In the case of African Americans, the idea of a “unique African American identity” emerged during the Reconstruction era, although slavery was central to the formation of this collective identity. Eyerman argues that slavery served in this context as “a ‘primal scene’ which could, potentially, unite all ‘African Americans’ in the United States, whether or not they had themselves been slaves” (Eyerman 1); I agree with his logic but would suggest that “slavery” is too complex an entity to serve as a primal scene. In any case, black artists and writers have continued to reference slavery as part of a “common past” that would “ground the formation of a black ‘community’ ” (Eyerman 16). In their depictions of slavery and its effects on slaves (and slaveholders, in many cases) and their descendants, writers in particular could argue against prevailing depictions of African Americans as biologically inferior and show instead how historical events have continued to shape their identity, both individual and collective. Wright’s achievement in creating a cultural theory of trauma would be, in the words of Cathy Caruth, not “eliminating history but . . . resituating it in our understanding, that is, at precisely permitting history to arise where immediate understanding may not” (Caruth 11, emphasis in the original). Wright’s particular theory of cultural trauma in young African American males is dialogic: originating in slavery-era emasculating violence, Jim Crow stereotypes, and lynching, the trauma generates an equally violent response in its victims which serves to further solidify racial stereotypes and exacerbate the response to them. Wright sought to intervene in this dialogic progression by interrupting its various repetitions and rethinking the most effective response, both within his novels and within his literary culture. His attack on the fiction of previous African American authors, for example, discussed in Chapter 1, focuses on their characters’ “minstrelsy” and “narrow range of emotions,” which are a repetition of the Sambo slave stereotype. (Native Son actually features a self-conscious repetition of this minstrelsy in the scene in which Bigger is interviewed by Mr. Dalton, a scene I discuss further on.) Because repetitions of trauma are often not fully within the control of the individuals who enact them, but appear at times “as the possession of some people by a sort of fate, a series of painful events to which they are subjected” (Caruth 2), responsibility for rectifying the situation can be deferred and even shifted to the victims, who seem to live inside a self-destructive pattern of their own making. We can see this shifting of blame in the prophetic statements
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made to Big Boy and Bigger by their mothers about their fates as well as in the title of Native Son’s third section, “Fate,” which thematizes the issue of determinism and freewill in Bigger’s crimes. Wright’s criticism of previous works of fiction is an attempt to disrupt a particular defensive stance he perceives African American authors to be taking in their portrayal of characters; in his own work, he will portray the repetition of this stance but problematize it. As part of his challenge to his colleagues, he works to strip the “black novel of the literary decorum obtained in earlier works” (Ward 177). On the level of narrative strategy, Wright similarly works to prevent readers from deferring their own complicity in racist oppression. Wright’s first notable publication, the short story collection Uncle Tom’s Children (1938), had a strong impact on readers but not the impact he wished: he condemns it as “a book which even bankers’ daughters could read and weep over and feel good about” (“How ‘Bigger’ Was Born” 874). If the catharsis of tears is a safety valve, allowing emotion to be released and thus forgotten, then the banker’s daughter might escape her responsibility to alleviate her society’s dehumanizing treatment of blacks by crying over the characters of these stories.7 In his first two novels, but particularly in Native Son, Wright’s goal is to prevent this reaction by traumatizing the reader; he does so by complicating the black male rapist stereotype, loosening the concept of rape from its literal moorings and repositioning it as a figure for the black man’s experience of and resistance to racial oppression. As Marlon Ross explains, “in much black protest narrative and race theory, rape becomes the symbolic shorthand for indexing both the physicality of black men’s tortured condition under slavery” and Jim Crow laws and “at the same time the psychological harm that occurs even when physical torture is ‘merely’ threatened rather than actually enacted as lynching castration” (Ross 308). Rape becomes a figure for white culture’s violation of the mind and body of the black man, as well as for his reaction to it. Yet the inversion of the rape metaphor is not simply the doing of Wright. Jake Jackson and Bigger Thomas both cast themselves as rapists in response to what Wright might call the original rape: racism’s destructive invasion of their identity. Bigger goes a step further, self-consciously examining and inverting the metaphor as demonstrated in the second epigraph, above. As Bigger explains, he has been stretched so thin by oppression that when he finally “snaps,” his explosion takes the form of a rape, an invasive assault on whites. For both characters, rape is a form of self-defense against the strain of living black in a white world; in response to white society’s continuous violation, they threaten to commit violations of their own. These characters’ actions and attitudes certainly militate against readers’
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pity, most particularly in Native Son. While the language and characterizations in Lawd Today! are confrontational, the novel’s narrative structure is not as coercive; plot devices and shifts in point of view allow readers to disengage occasionally from identification with the protagonist and thus function as “safety valves” which alleviate pressure on the reader.8 In Native Son, however, Wright replaces the reader’s sympathy with horror by making his protagonist a murderer and rapist. As Jerry Ward notes, “in its palpable violations of the expected, Native Son was a formal objective correlative for its subject matter” (Ward 178). Wright was well aware of the risks he took in making Bigger a rapist. While his primary concern was for white readers to understand that Bigger was the product of his social environment, he feared that they might instead maintain their traditional defense mechanism, classifying him as a natural degenerate and extending this characterization to all blacks, with drastic consequences for race relations. If, on the other hand, whites took seriously the idea that the dominant society is responsible for Bigger’s condition, they might “think [Wright was] preaching hate against whole white race” (“How ‘Bigger’ Was Born” 868). Wright also worried about the reactions of his “white and black comrades” in the John Reed clubs and in the Communist Party. He wondered how to create a complex black protagonist without “being mistaken for . . . ‘an ideological confusionist’ or ‘an individualistic and dangerous element’ ” (“How ‘Bigger’ Was Born” 868–69).9 Finally, though, he realized that too much concern over his white audience’s reaction would force him into a Bigger-like mode of thought: “I’d be acting out of fear if I let what I thought whites would say constrict and paralyze me.” Wright ultimately disregards his fears and refrains from censoring his portrayal. What is remarkable is that he was not punished for it by his white readership; while Book of the Month Club editors forced him to omit certain explicit sexual scenes, they did not alter the majority of the sexual and racial content, astonishing by the standards of the day. One could say, then, that rape both serves as a figure for Wright’s protagonists’ act of protest and also characterizes his narrative strategy in Native Son, his best-known novel and the best-known text of the protest tradition. Wright pulls no punches here, using the most direct language possible in depicting Bigger’s sexual interactions with and murders of Mary and Bessie, and in showing his conscious acceptance and revision of the rapist stereotype as an expression of his lived experience. Wright’s goal is not to raise the reader’s consciousness, but to injure it, to insert into it a permanent reminder of the destructive effects of racism: “a terrible picture of reality which they could see and feel and yet not destroy” (Native Son 565). He removes all safety valves, forcing the reader
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to identify continuously with a character who is neither a victim to be pitied (by white readers) nor a hero to be admired (by black readers), because Bigger, while innocent of the “worst” crime with which he is charged (raping a white woman), is guilty of committing violence against the novel’s black and white communities alike.10 Wright’s form of protest, in fact, is intended to be an act of violence to the reader—in Bigger’s terms, a “rape” of the reader’s consciousness.11 In rewriting rape as a figure both for racial oppression and for the protest against it, Wright rewrites the stereotype of the black male rapist; as I discussed in Chapter 1, he was convinced that the result of the stereotype, lynching, was the “primal scene” for black men, not a by-product but an integral part of their oppression. In Native Son, moreover, Wright interrogates not just that “representative symbol” but the spatial model of identity it represents, an aspect of the rape metaphor that has been unexamined in previous studies of Wright’s work. Charges of rape, at the heart of post-Reconstruction violence against African American men, are themselves based on a topological figure: white men charge blacks with the rapes of their white daughters when what they really object to is the perceived invasion of blacks into previously white-dominated spaces of society—the military, government and business (Hodes 402–17). Reconstruction-era whites charged that “equal access to public vehicles, theaters, restaurants, hotels, schools, parks and churches” was the equivalent of opening “the door to the home, the parlor, and the bedroom” of white women (Litwack 265). White women in this formulation are not people but “homes,” the pure spaces of white-dominated middleand upper-class society; black men who assert their right to enter into this world of social and economic privilege are called rapists. White supremacists (the Klu Klux Klan and the Southern whites whose interests it represented) succeeded in causing the widespread conflation of the figure (“rape”) and its literal meaning (“equal access”), paving the way for legal and illegal actions intended to keep blacks out of “white” spaces.12 Those who rebel “against rule and taboo,” who cross the boundary into white spaces, Wright notes, are lynched and “the reason for that lynching is usually called rape” (“How ‘Bigger’ Was Born” 858). Yet in this figurative equation between integration and rape lies an implicit understanding of black male power; as Fishbelly of Wright’s The Long Dream realizes, “most surely he was something, somebody in the eyes of that white world, or it would not have threatened him [not to touch white women] as it had” (Long Dream 165).13 If the black man’s desire to penetrate white spaces (to attain equal rights) is fiercely and violently prohibited by whites, so much so that his own internal spaces are violated by white oppression, he sees that one route to power lies in forcing entry into
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those spaces. Yet the rape paradigm ensures that those spaces are not social but female and corporeal, thus deflecting rebellion into rapaciousness.14 Ross suggests that the role of rapist is attractive because of its “allusion to myths of absolute agency”; the “rapist is a sort of extreme agent, and the target of his rape likewise an extreme object, the very image of agentless abjection” (Ross 313). Viewed this way, the imagined “piling” of the Belgian woman and the “rape” of Mary are attempts to achieve power through the only means available: imitating the oppressor.15 Bigger and Jake, who see that rape will give them power in white society, both imagine themselves as rapists, although to different degrees: Jake allows himself a momentary rape fantasy, while Bigger is initially cast in the rapist role and eventually becomes determined to inhabit it; in conceiving of his own identity as a private space invaded by white racism, Bigger can view his “invasion” of Mary’s “space” as a fitting retaliation. Jake’s vision hints that, just as whites feared, the black soldier would exercise his newfound power through the rape of white women, but only because Jake’s imagination has been constrained by racist ideology, because the only power whites have allowed him is that of the rapist. And when Bigger sees that his fear of a false rape charge actually results in a false rape charge and a murder, he realizes that the rapist stereotype is unavoidable. He fights the fear whites have instilled in him by becoming their public enemy number one. Yet the model of identity Jake and Bigger imagine for themselves in response to the rapist stereotype is unworkable, confusing as it does the figure (“white women”) with the literal meaning (“white society”). While being a “rapist” may provide them with access to white women, it forever bars them from white society and ultimately from black society as well. Wright’s protest novels participate in a metaphorics of rape or forced entry both in form and in content, something that reveals Wright’s recognition of the power of symbolic systems to “ ‘make’ and ‘remake’ reality.”16 Figurative descriptions provide interpretations of people, places, and events, and thus determine ideology and behavior (Ricouer 64).17 As a black protest writer, Wright inherits a set of metaphors and symbols that purport to describe blacks and their place in white society; he demands that readers understand the way that those metaphors have seeped into the lives of Jake and Bigger, determining their beliefs and actions. Jake, the less aware, less intelligent of the two, identifies with the rapist unconsciously, without awareness of how the stereotype affects him; Bigger is a more dangerous man because he understands, fights against, and finally accepts the terms of the rape metaphor, hoping to create a new meaning for himself out of the life of a rapist, a life he knows will end in the electric chair. In essence, this is a coping strategy, but one that sacrifices survival in the name of a violent kind of empowerment.
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The process of making himself a figure kills Bigger; similarly, the process of figuration entails that the literal meaning be repressed in order for a new meaning to emerge. Metaphors and figures refer to reality by “means of a complex strategy which implies, as an essential component, a suspension and seemingly an abolition of the ordinary reference attached to descriptive language” (Ricouer 151).18 “Seemingly” is important here, because the “ordinary reference” cannot be abolished, and it is in this tension between the two meanings, the literal and the figurative, that the metaphor’s meaning is created. In the rape figure, for example, the complexity of the flesh-and-blood white woman is suppressed so that she can be made to represent white society’s sacred spaces. Yet the remainder, that part of the white woman which cannot be assimilated into the figure, can resurface and interrupt its meaning. This idea of the remainder corresponds to Freud’s concept of the uncanny, something that “is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression” (Freud “Uncanny” 241). In this example, the appearance of the “uncanny,” which in German translates as “unhomelike” (unheimlich), would be the repressed flesh-and-blood person of the white woman, which would make her unable to represent “private spaces” or homes. Wright’s revision of the rape figure reveals the consequences of suppressing the remainder, although with devastating effects on his female characters. “Rape is not what one does to women,” Bigger believes. Yet haunting the figure he constructs is the remainder, the original meaning of the word “rape”: any act of sexual intercourse forced on a person, or the attempt to assert (masculine) power and domination through the violation of the (female) body.19 In making rape stand for retaliation, self-defense, protest, even murder (“every time he felt as he had felt that night [in Mary’s room], he raped [murdered Mary]”), Bigger suppresses the literal meaning of the word. Because he didn’t physically rape Mary, he can read “rape” as a figure. But only minutes after he makes this interpretation, he physically rapes his girlfriend Bessie: his figural reading of “rape” enables him to suppress the fact that his interactions with her constitute sexual assault (he suppresses this fact to the extent that the issue hardly enters his mind). In a similar manner, Bigger’s understanding of white women, inherited from his culture, renders them figures for white culture’s sacred spaces; thus the white woman does not exist as an embodied subject, which is what Bigger tries to believe about Mary before and after he suffocates her. Bigger is repeatedly confronted with both Mary’s and Bessie’s remains/remainders in ways that seem to indicate Wright’s consciousness of the limitations of the figures he’s inherited and rewritten. Yet I would argue that Wright’s textual reminders of Mary’s and
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Bessie’s flesh-and-blood selves, and their dead bodies, are not adequately understood by Bigger. To achieve control over their lives, Bigger and Jake literally or imaginatively transform themselves into rapists, but these new identities are predicated on the destruction of women. And in constructing Bigger and Jake as protagonists who can enact this transformation, Wright must reject both his female characters and aspects of life that he portrays as passive and static, qualities traditionally defined as feminine: family, community, and culture. The issue of Wright’s “negative treatment” of his female characters has been taken up by a host of critics with a variety of viewpoints. In her essay “The Re(a)d and the Black,” Barbara Johnson describes Wright’s treatment of female characters as “careless misogyny.” This position is a popular one, but a more complicated perspective is represented by James Smethurst, who argues that Bigger’s “greatest sense of validation comes from acts of extreme misogyny which are not fully repudiated by the novel” (Smethurst 35). Other critics blame leftist politics for Wright’s misogyny: Wright “is ‘a spokesman for the militant men and women of the thirties’ and . . . the Communism of that period is inherently misogynist” (Irr 196). Arguing the opposite position, a number of critics claim that in his misogynistic characters, Wright makes a “nuanced critique of patriarchy” (Higashida 397). As one critic states, in Wright’s grappling with the “ideological contradictions between Communism and Black nationalism,” he had to “rearticulate both Jim Crow society’s and the Left’s racialized conceptions of masculinity and femininity” (Higashida 397).20 A somewhat different defense of Wright’s sexual politics asserts that Wright’s “representation of a highly patriarchal black nationalism as just one more illusion of freedom for his characters should make us pause at the unfair criticisms of his work that mistakenly conflate the sexism of Jake and Bigger with Wright’s own stance” (Dawahare “From No Man’s Land” 12). I find it unproductive to speculate about Wright’s misogyny and politically regressive to conflate Wright and Bigger (a critical move made quite frequently in regard to women and minority authors). While I am inclined to agree with Smethurst that the text does not fully repudiate Bigger’s misogyny, I am more interested in the way Bigger manifests his “racial castration,” to borrow Marlon Ross’s term, and his attempt to “re-masculate” himself upon the body of Bessie. In fact, Bigger’s rape and murder of Bessie, which seems gratuitously violent to many critics, is a particularly contentious plot point. In Daemonic Genius Margaret Walker attributes the “psychosexual . . . violence and brutality” toward Bessie (and also Mary) to Wright, not to Bigger (147). Another critic finds psychological significance in Bessie’s murder, stating that Bigger is murdering his own Sambo image in
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Bessie (Demiturk 273). Others find political significance: “the consensus has been that Bessie’s murder results from Wright’s politics,” and “at least part of Wright’s intent in representing such violence was to draw attention to the historical invisibility of black women’s rapes and of their continuing devaluation in American society” (Irr 196; Guttman 185). I suggest that these arguments might not be mutually exclusive. Wright’s rape figure and his aggressive narrative strategy require him to create female characters who will be objectified or silenced. The silencing of Mary and Bessie (like the negative portrayals of Mrs. Thomas and Vera) is not an indication of “careless misogyny” on Wright’s part, but perhaps a carefully theorized one; either way, it is the inevitable result of the coercive narrative strategy required by the protest novel.21 Wright’s earlier novel Lawd Today! is both less threatening toward the reader and somewhat more sympathetic toward female characters, although it does feature another protagonist who copes with his emasculation by developing a hypermasculine attitude toward his wife combined with an almost infantile dependence on her (Dawahare “From No Man’s Land” 3, 5). This novel is also imbued with references to culture and community, references that drop out of or become explicitly negative in Native Son. Jake is portrayed as acquiescing to his oppression, and this acquiescence is tied to his interactions with and dependence on women, as well as his participation in a culture and a community that help to suppress resistance. Consequently, for Bigger to develop his insight and rebellious impulses, he must “become estranged from the religion and folk culture of his race”22 (“How ‘Bigger’ Was Born” 859). Without a culture to “hold and claim his allegiance and faith,” Bigger can become “a free agent to roam the streets of our cities, a hot and whirling vortex of undisciplined and unchannelized impulses” (860, 865).23 If folk culture, religion, and community life (including alcohol, a significant part of Wright’s depiction of community life) are safety valves that dull and suppress rebellious urges, then, in order to give Bigger “free agency,” Wright must devalue the activities of the black community, or that community itself, in the minds of his protagonists—and his readers. Naturalism and Documentary Realism in (the) “Cesspool”24 Lawd Today! contains the seeds of the connections Wright makes in Native Son between the trauma of racism, the rape stereotype, and selfdestructive coping strategies, yet Jake does not ultimately threaten either white society or the reader as Bigger does. Wright releases pressure on Jake and thus on the reader by giving Jake sustaining connections: a
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community, a job, a wife. Jake has accepted a position in society instead of standing outside it (as does Bigger), and as a result, his life is less sensational than Bigger’s—even ordinary. He is not as angry as Bigger: Ellen Wright and Michel Fabre have called him “human and likable” (Wright and Fabre 346). Most importantly, though, Jake’s anger toward his society does not cause him to invade sacred territory, as Bigger’s does. Jake takes out his frustrations on black women, and keeps the “proper” distance from white women; he fantasizes rape, but does not sustain the kind of self-analysis that would lead him to understand the effects of the rape figure on his identity and actions. Jake does not explode at white society but instead at his own wife, and thus does not threaten readers, who can follow Jake’s pathetic struggle to achieve his dreams without fearing the consequences of his actions. Moreover, while Jake is as well trained in Jim Crow ethics as any of Wright’s male protagonists, his responses to encounters with whites are based entirely on his survival, not on preserving his dignity or fighting back. He proves that he can play the role of Sambo when he is brought before his supervisors, who threaten to fire him because his wife Lil has complained that he beat her: “I ain’t the kind of man what would beat his wife and stand here before you white gentlemens . . . I’m just a poor, hardworking black man. I ain’t got nothing and Gawd knows I ain’t never going to have nothing” (Lawd Today! 125–26). In this instance, Jake’s shame at having to play this part simmers within him, only boiling over when he is at home. For the most part, however, he represses such shame and anger, supported in such actions by his friends. During a ride on the “L” train, Jake and his friends see a white women whose thigh is visible under her dress. They ogle her surreptitiously and then sing in code about having sex with her, painfully aware of the consequences of even looking at her; their song ends with the line “and wherever there’s trees there’s rope” (111). In this instance and many others, Jake and his friends reveal their awareness of lynching and the rape stereotype, but sublimate anger or shame in singing and humor—a strategy so familiar to whites that they demand it, as when Jake’s white colleagues in the post office demand that he “tell another” funny story (157). Wright is implicitly pointing to the ways his African American characters have willingly accepted roles in a racial masquerade that not only control and limit their voices and actions, but point them toward the proper channel for their reactions to such limitations: comedy. Jake may be less threatening than Bigger or even Big Boy and Johnny, but Wright certainly doesn’t allow readers to either identify with or dismiss him. Instead, readers are lead to devalue Jake’s beliefs while understanding the social and economic constraints that have created them.
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Initially, Jake elicits our sympathy as well as our repulsion, as Wright presents us with loaded depictions of Jake’s body calculated to arouse disgust and then enlists us in Jake’s idealism. He is physically unattractive: we see “a pair of piggish eyes,” “tiny cakes of grease in his nappy hair,” and a “thin stream of slickness oozing down the ebony nape of his neck,” not to mention his constant “deep scratching” of his groin (6–7).25 Jake is designed to deflect the reader’s impulse to sentimentalize or aestheticize him, and thus to find a release through tears, or laughter. His behavior (misogynist, ignorant, and servile around whites) encourages the reader to view with distrust those objects, people, and ideals Jake holds dear. In describing Jake’s most dearly held ideal, financial success, Wright presents the fragments of what will coalesce in Native Son as an exploration of the rape figure. As in the logic of Jim Crow, Jake’s desire to “make it” economically is substituted by “making it” sexually; when his attempts to penetrate the sacred spaces of the white-dominated economic hierarchy are thwarted, he turns unconsciously to the penetration (or violent domination) of black women. Jake’s “dream” of economic/sexual conquest begins the novel: he is dreaming that he has to run up some endless steps at the command of a voice that sounds “just like his boss,” clearly a metaphor for his (lack of ) progress up the economic ladder. He looks to see how far he’s progressed and realizes that “he was right where he started! . . . Jeesus, all that running for nothing . . . Yeah, there’s a trick in this” (5, emphasis in the original). As he doubles his efforts, taking the stairs five at a time, he begins to feel a “deep sweet gladness,” convinced that if he keeps up this accelerated pace, he inevitably will make it to the top of the economic heap. “All steps ended somewhere,” he thinks, and yells “I’m coming! I’m coming!” (5–6, emphasis in the original). This is, in fact, a wet dream, in which Jake’s experience of his physical power to overcome social and economic conditions translates into an experience of sexual power. His “deep sweet gladness” about what he considers his forthcoming success is his approaching orgasm, which is never realized; when he awakens, he can’t remember his dream, only that it concerned being “on the very brink of something, on the verge of a deep joy.” Orgasm is perceived not as a release but as the possession of “something”: Jake recalls “thirsting, longing for something,” but each time he is “almost to it, each time it was almost his, somebody had called” (6). Later, when the “mood of his dream” returns, the dream is no longer about climbing the stairs to economic success but has become explicitly sexual: he imagines “his loins straining against a warm, nude body.” This woman’s body “hover[s] nearer,” returning to haunt him later that morning as he bathes and masturbates, and he sings to himself, “I woke up too soon, ending a dream . . . You were almost mine” (23, emphasis in the original).26
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Jake refigures his dream as a sexual fantasy, as the possession of a “warm, brown body,” repressing the fact that it originally concerned economic success. Sexual penetration is another of Jake’s safety valves; it provides a release from his frustration with a Depression-era glass ceiling (so low it’s actually a floor), a condition that is too painful for him to acknowledge consciously. The spaces of women’s bodies provide Jake with a substitute for the restricted spaces of economic success. But here again, the figuralizing of women enables Jake to ignore their flesh-and-blood status, their personhood: in his dreams, the female body is without subjectivity or voice and is thus “homelike”: her doors are always open. A woman with a voice can say “no,” while the voiceless female body is there for the taking. Jake’s wife Lil, on the other hand, is a woman with a voice but not an available body; because of a botched abortion that Jake forced on her, Lil is unable to have sexual intercourse and is also an economic drain due to her ever-increasing doctor bills. Her body weakened by her husband’s actions, Lil asserts her subjectivity through her voice, the “uncanny” that Jake tries to repress in an assortment of ways. It is Lil’s verbal expression that arouses Jake’s anger most frequently, and his most fervent desire is to “slap her a blow that would make her hold her mouth forever” (15). Unable to receive sexual pleasure from Lil, he pursues a different goal: the penetration and absolute domination of her consciousness, a psychological “rape.” During breakfast, he reads the paper and delivers a running commentary on the news to Lil, who is reading religious pamphlets. He becomes furious with her lack of attention: “Every time she pokes her head into them damn books I can’t hardly talk to her . . . By Gawd, she sets there just like I didn’t slap her a few seconds ago” (28, emphasis in the original). Jake demands constant recognition from Lil to ensure that he controls her, searching for “something to say that would rouse her to a sharp sense of his presence” (31). He often insists that Lil be silent, but because her silence might hide rebellious thoughts, he will demand that she speak to him as proof that her ideas are perfectly aligned with his. When they are not, he beats her.27 Because Lil refuses to have sex with Jake, thus preventing him from making a “home” in her body, which would help him suppress the knowledge of his economic failures, he invades her private mental and emotional spaces. Jake does not build up enough internal pressure to explode into the kind of rape-like violence Bigger engages in, so the novel is less confrontational. In this way, Lil acts as a safety valve for Jake and thus for the reader. In Wright’s novels (as in other naturalist and protest novels directed at mainstream culture), the reader is forced into identification with protagonists who are at best unpleasant, at worst threatening.28 To
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escape this identification, the reader casts about for another character with whom to sympathize. Wright does not provide this kind of escape in the female characters in either Lawd Today! or Native Son, however: Lil, Mrs. Thomas, Vera, and Bessie are passive and weak, and Mary, while more active and interesting to Bigger, is unknowingly racist (and only available for a limited time, as she is killed only hours after Bigger meets her). Wright explicitly states that in Native Son he “gave no more reality to the other characters than that which Bigger himself saw”; he “wanted the reader to feel that there was nothing between him and Bigger” (“How ‘Bigger’ Was Born,” 879). Yet in Lawd Today! Wright occasionally allows us to see around Jake’s view of Lil to glimpse her beliefs and emotions, a relief to the reader after Jake’s offensive behavior. Lil’s political views, for example, are less reactionary and xenophobic than Jake’s, and more in line with what we know to be Wright’s: at one point, Jake claims that “nobody but lazy folks can starve in this country” and when Lil responds, “But they can’t get no work,” Jake asks her angrily, “Woman, is you a Red?” (33). Jake certainly can’t be accused of developing a proletarian consciousness, although Lil might be. Also, at one or two points Wright allows the omniscient narrator to slip into Lil’s consciousness (“Lil knew she was risking danger, but she could not resist”) so that we might take her point of view (33). In the moments that we can identify with Lil, we are protected from the onslaught of Jake’s brutality. Yet this fleeting identification with or sympathy for Lil causes the reader discomfort as well as relief: Jake’s brutal beating and attempted rape of Lil in the final pages of the novel are painful to witness because we have previously entered Lil’s point of view. For the most part, however, the reader remains outside Lil’s subjectivity and inside Jake’s, and thus is forced to view Lil as Jake does: a passive, acquiescent victim. Lil is used by Jake as a punching bag for his frustration, and by Wright to increase the reader’s level of discomfort. Eventually, Wright exposes readers to the mechanics of Jake’s “traumatic neurosis,” caused by his encounter with the “primal scene,” Southern lynching, which he experiences as a violation of his own “private space” so painful as to prevent any sustained reflection on either the nature of his oppression or possibilities for change. While living in the South, Jake experienced the results of the black male rapist stereotype, lynching and chain gangs. These assaults on black men had “so hurt him once that he wanted to forget them forever; to see them again merely served to bring back the deep pain for which he knew no salve” (138). When Jake is unfairly punished by his white inspector, he thinks angrily, “it ain’t always going to be this way!” but then his mind goes “abruptly blank”; he can’t “keep on with that thought, because he did not know
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where that thought led” (142, emphasis in the original). I argue that this abrupt blankness in Jake’s mind is not due to his inability to imagine a different “way” of being, but due to trauma. Certainly, Jake has bought into the American dream of individualism and self-generated wealth and thus rejects any kind of solidarity among blacks that smacks of the labor movement. However, he suppresses rebellious thoughts because of where they might lead—that is, back to the primal scene of lynching, the ultimate punishment for transgression—rather than because he can’t sustain an image of rebellion. His friends share the same coping mechanism; just as they begin to discuss black people “under one command” fighting for full access to white society, they suppress this idea and decide that “the best thing for a guy to do is get together with a woman,” again unconsciously converting economic access to sexual access (183–84).29 Jake’s blindness to the underlying causes of his economic position result in his fantasies of “making it” by himself. In this case, blindness causes masturbation. Yet Jake’s rage and hunger for change are also blunted by his strong ties to his community. In trying to reach the black working-class audience, and perhaps in order to provide whites with a cultural education, Wright provides a documentary-style account of black urban community life in Lawd Today!, revealing how Jake is both limited and supported by his culture. The novel contains many scenes depicting Jake and his friends in conversation: playing the dozens during card games, watching a Garvey-esque “back to Africa” parade, listening to street preachers and salesmen, participating in the numbers racquet, entertaining themselves at a house of prostitution. What gives Jake the most pleasure is sensation, life, color; he realizes as he heads for work that he doesn’t want to “leave all this life in the streets” and feels that he is “missing something” but doesn’t know what. “Deep in him was a dumb yearning for something else; somewhere or other was something or other for him. But where? How?” (115–16). Jake’s friends and his life in the street manage to sustain him, but a man with sustenance, however meager, will not be forced into a position of violent rebellion against his society. Wright describes “folk culture” as “naive and mundane,” as “compensatory nourishment” for what black men like Jake really want: “to belong [to society at large], to be identified, to feel . . . alive as other people [whites] were” (“How ‘Bigger’ Was Born” 859–60). By having Jake depend on them, Wright indirectly identifies participation in and reliance upon folk culture and community for spiritual sustenance as a mark of passivity, even complicity.30 Jake’s “dumb yearning” and his desire for change and inability to rebel are not only signs of his passivity but also characteristics of the novel’s genre; in Lawd Today! Wright draws heavily on naturalism’s documentary style and deterministic emphasis. At a young age, Wright realized
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that all his life had “shaped [him] for the realism, the naturalism of the modern novel,” and these novels helped him to reflect on and understand his life and the lives of blacks in relation to white society (Wright Black Boy 295). He was attracted not only by the point of view, but the protest quality of naturalism; after reading H. L. Mencken’s writings about realist and naturalist writers, Wright discovered that words could be used “as a weapon, . . . as one would use a club” (272). Naturalism, then, provided Wright with not only a form for his protest but a vision of society. Typically, though, naturalist characters are not allowed this vision. Their lives are examples of pessimistic determinism, of “the helplessness of man,” and thus usually end in tragedy. Wright ends his novel with Jake in an alcoholinduced stupor, and, in a strategic use of metaphor, labels Jake “an idiot in a deep black pit” (219). Jake’s unconsciousness (in both senses of the word) is a comment on the limitations of naturalism as a force for social reform. As previously stated, after Lawd Today! Wright turned away from this aspect of the naturalist character because he wanted to give his protagonists dignity, intelligence, and power, attributes that are unusual in the naturalist genre. He intended that his characters comprehend their oppression, not simply to respond to it with physical reflex. The ending of Jake’s story finds him unconscious and entirely without dignity, yet Wright continues to explain (if not to justify) Jake’s actions to the reader by showing how the rapist stereotype has infiltrated and taken hold of Jake’s identity. Jake becomes drunkenly violent not only because he has experienced another economic setback, because he’s deeper in the “hole” (having been robbed of money that he had borrowed only hours earlier), but also because the robbery took place in a supposedly “safe” space within the black community, a brothel where he and his friends were to have unlimited access to women, food, alcohol, and entertainment. Jake is again denied economic entry, but this time, it is the prostitute (holding out the promise of sexual entry) who has arranged for Jake to be robbed. Furious at this betrayal, he returns home and explodes at Lil; he attempts to rape her but she fights back, cutting him with broken glass, and he passes out. Forced or not, sexual domination is Jake’s automatic response to economic (and racial) oppression. Jake suppresses knowledge of his oppression through communal interactions and through violence at his wife. Thus Wright sets up a formula that he will fine-tune and push to the extreme in Native Son: his protagonist is limited not simply by race and economy-based social pressures, but by the subtle yet unmistakable influences of the black male rapist stereotype, whose various components infiltrate the protagonist’s consciousness and determine his responses. Jake experiences a violation of his mental and emotional spaces; his response is to vent his pain through entry into or violation of the female body.
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In creating Jake, Wright draws on his knowledge of aspects of a black male type that he observed growing up; he uses these characteristics for Bigger as well, but radically alters Bigger’s reaction to them. In “How ‘Bigger’ Was Born,” Wright describes the basis for Jake and Bigger: men who take “a stiff drink of hard life to lift them up for a thrilling moment” because their lives do not provide economic or spiritual fulfillment, men who live “by violence, through extreme action and sensation, through drowning daily in a perpetual nervous agitation” (866). Jake and Bigger both “rape” or violate those in their immediate vicinity, both try to drown their agitation in sensation. But the choice of this sensation differs greatly: Jake succeeds for the most part in escaping his agitation (by beating his wife, playing bridge, gambling, drinking, having sex), while Bigger’s attempts to escape (terrorizing his sister, playing pool, committing petty robberies, going to the movies, having sex) ultimately increase his agitation. The difference here is that Bigger does not simply respond to social constraints but reflects on them. These reflections allow him to develop a perspective on himself, his community, and racism, and they change the nature of his escape: Bigger wants to escape not inside himself or into his community, but from the life whites have circumscribed for him. He wants to be allowed to live like whites. The idea that Bigger reflects on his life even before he meets Max is not without controversy. Margaret Walker weighs in here as well, claiming that the novel’s ending is “contrived,” a “Marxist ending made for socialist realism” that conflicted with the rest of the novel’s naturalism: “How could an unconscious, illiterate boy like Bigger suddenly become conscious, literate, and articulate in that last conversation with Max?” (Walker “Richard Wright” 196).31 Walker’s opinions about Bigger’s degree of consciousness and the novel’s ending have typically been framed and addressed as questions about the novel’s narrative structure and generic conventions.32 Viewed this way, the crux of the issue is the degree to which Wright’s authorial intrusion into and interpretation of Bigger’s thoughts reflect his level of consciousness about social issues, and the degree to which this renders his character unrealistic. Jonathan Elmer argues that Bigger is best viewed as a symbol: “while many will say Bigger is never realized as a ‘living personality,’ perhaps this is because the aim of the novel is to present him as never having been one” (Elmer 776). Critics such as Michel Fabre and Jerry Ward Jr. argue that Wright’s “authorial intrusion made Bigger Thomas too articulate and not recognizable as a stereotype of the lower-class Negro”; not only is this a departure from naturalism, as Fabre argues, but it “spoil[s] . . . the possibility of
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sympathizing with the tragedy of the Negro race”—which Ward argues was “precisely Wright’s intention” (Ward 179). Certainly, I agree that Wright’s use of stereotype as symbol of racial identity, as both cause and effect of racial oppression, is in Paul Gilroy’s terms a sign of his modernism, not of his “entrapment in a limiting concept of authenticity” (qtd. in Elmer 777). While I support the idea that Bigger is not written as a stereotype but rather is controlled by and self-consciously plays with it, I would not go so far as to say, as one critic recently has, that Bigger is a “radically autonomous, essentially modernist individual who does not follow any universal precept,” that he “wants to assault nothing less than the philosophical and moral foundation of the system,” rewriting “Kant’s categorical imperative” in an attempt to “blot out the entire symbolic order” (Ramadanovic 88–89). This reading suggests a rather sophisticated level of consciousness on Bigger’s part, eliding the tremendous emotional struggle he faces throughout the novel in managing his feelings and articulating them to himself and others. Much more so than Jake, Bigger is aware that his daily choices are restricted by social conditions: “It maddened him to think that he did not have a wider choice of action” (16). Unlike Jake, Bigger is driven to ponder these conditions despite the increase in pain and frustration he experiences. Part of what makes Bigger such a compelling character, in fact, is his consistent effort to attain a clear understanding of his position in society. In addressing the issue of Bigger’s level of consciousness, I would suggest that we view Bigger as struggling to come to consciousness, attempting to discard the script he has inherited for one he yet lacks the tools write. Those tools, a Marxist vision of society and a validation of his traumatic experiences, are provided by Bigger’s attorney, Boris Max, who inadvertently gives Bigger a psychotherapy session along with the information-gathering interviews. Bigger’s level of self-consciousness is dramatically increased once Max elicits Bigger’s feelings, opinions, and experiences and then writes them into a new narrative. My point is not that Max’s narrative is correct—Bigger certainly doesn’t agree with all of it—but that it provides Bigger a new perspective on society and a new framework for understanding himself. Moreover, we must understand as readers that Bigger’s worldview is not entirely visible to us until Max asks him to articulate it. Certainly, if one views Bigger as a naturalist type (or as a working-class illiterate), the level of sophistication in his thinking would seem extraordinary. Similarly, if one views him as compulsively reenacting a white supremacist fantasy, the black rapist, out of the racial trauma he has experienced, as does Jonathan Elmer in his essay “Spectacle and Event in Native Son,” one would not be able to believe that he could after a
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couple of conversations “work through” that trauma the way he appears to do (see Ramadanovic 100–02). My point is that Bigger already possesses an understanding of the way oppression has impacted him, an understanding that takes the form of topological and corporeal metaphors. His comment that “white folks” live “right down here in” his “stomach,” for example, and his statement to Max describing his actions when he sees Mrs. Dalton in Mary’s bedroom as “like another man stepped inside of my skin and started acting for me” (464, 774) are analogies that provide him a way to represent his feelings and actions to himself. Bigger’s selfreflection often takes place “in a way that kept it from coming to his mind in the form of a hard and sharp idea,” but even a partly formed idea still allows him a measure of self-awareness (484). Bigger’s reflections grapple most deeply with the relation between his identity and the cramped space he lives in, a relation Wright reveals to the reader in the novel’s opening. From the first image Wright presents of him, “a black boy standing in a narrow space between two beds,” to the immediate invasion of his room by a giant rat, we read Bigger’s environment as both impossibly constricting and permeable to invaders such as the defiant rat (447–48). Bigger’s hysterical response to the rat (screaming and pounding its head to a pulp with a shoe) is proof that the rat’s easy invasion of his room strikes a sensitive place in him: the rat, analogous to white society,33 violates Bigger’s personal space, his identity.34 This image constructs Bigger’s home as crowded, violent, and open to penetration. The people around him cramp him, as well; because his family’s misery is an unbearable reminder of his own powerlessness, he lives “with them, but behind a wall, a curtain,” a flimsy boundary with which to repress so much pain (453). Wright does not grant this analysis to the reader and withhold it from Bigger, however; he allows his protagonist at least a partial understanding of his oppression, and a realization of the link between his identity and his surroundings. Bigger later explains that he had to “hurt folks” because “they was crowding me too close; they wouldn’t give me no room” (845). The compression and violation Bigger experiences at home continue in his neighborhood, the “corner of the city” where blacks are forced to live. The black community itself is cramped and crowded, yet not shielded from whites’ infiltration: Buckley’s not-so-subtle campaign poster, with its controlling gaze, states “YOU CAN’T WIN” to the inhabitants of the Black Belt, lest they momentarily forget their oppression (456). Bigger has “never felt a sense of wholeness” because he has never had a whole space to himself; the white folks “live in his stomach” so that he can “hardly breathe,” like “somebody’s poking a red-hot iron down [his] throat” (463).
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Bigger’s analogies reveal an understanding of his own identity as a space that has been invaded and assaulted by whites. Living this way has not dulled his senses, but sharpened them to a deadly point; he must hide “behind a curtain of indifference” to keep the pain at bay, but eventually the pressure inside builds up, bringing him “out into the open.” At this point, he must engage in “action so violent it would make him forget” (471). These flashes of understanding cause him pain in that they reveal to him the truth of his desperate circumstances, touching as they do on his emasculation by white society. The “curtain” Bigger hangs in his mind is itself a figure, one reflecting the paradigm of topological invasion found in Jim Crow. Viewed psychologically, the curtain is Bigger’s inadequate version of Freud’s psychic “barrier” intended to shield the mind from external “excitations” such as the painful knowledge of his family’s suffering. Metaphorically, Bigger is “thin-skinned,” easily disturbed by even reminders of his painful condition. I would argue that it is his intelligence that prevents him from developing the kind of emotional callus that would protect him from psychic irritation. One indication of his intelligence is the cohesion of his metaphorical logic, which consistently focuses on spatial invasion and boundaries. As Bigger notes near the end of the novel, whites “draw a line and say for you to stay on your side of the line . . . and then they say things like that [stereotypes about black men raping white women] about you and when you try to come from behind your line they kill you” (774). Whites are protected in their own space and also have access to the space of blacks: they can “say things like that,” creating destructive stereotypes of blacks, such as those that portray black men as rapists. These stereotypes cross the line into black spaces both physical and psychological, constituting an assault on black identity, one that crowds out the capacity for reflection: whites are “after you so hot and hard you can only feel what they doing to you” and nothing else, Bigger claims (emphasis added, 775). Through such figuration, Bigger demonstrates his awareness that rape-like assaults from whites force him into a daily confrontation with the deadly boundary itself. Bigger makes plans to “come from behind his line,” to test his manhood by crossing the white-black boundary, but the prospect of this foray causes an intense buildup of fear inside him, a fear that he vents in violence upon his friends and surroundings. His plans with his friends to rob a delicatessen owned by Blum, a white man, constitute “a violation of ultimate taboo,” a “symbolic challenge of the white world’s rule over them; a challenge which they yearned to make, but were afraid to” (457–58).35 Bigger can see that the ultimate taboo is to enter into sacred white spaces
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Bigger felt an urgent need to hide his growing and deepening feeling of hysteria; he had to get rid of it or else he would succumb to it. He longed for a stimulus powerful enough to focus his attention and drain off his energies. He wanted to run. Or listen to some swing music. Or laugh or joke. Or read a Real Detective Story magazine. Or go to a movie. Or visit Bessie. (471)
What Bigger does to relieve his tension is to masturbate publicly, in a scene (excised from the first edition of Native Son) that seems to be a calculated attempt to violate the sensibilities not just of the movie theater’s owner and patrons, but of a middle-class readership.36 Bigger and his friend Jack “polish their nightsticks,” make vaguely threatening comments toward a passing woman (“I’ll throw it in her”), ejaculate, and then change seats (“I don’t know where to put my feet now,” laughs Bigger). The violence of Bigger’s sexuality is revealed in his casual attitude about “soiling” public spaces (472–73). Here Wright reveals the extent to which the rapist stereotype has molded Bigger in showing that Bigger’s sexuality is violent and that Bigger’s violence is sexual. In order both to vent his fear about the robbery and to prevent the robbery from taking place, Bigger attacks his “friend” Gus, claiming that Gus has ruined their chances of getting to Blum’s on time. This attack takes the form of a rape: Bigger pulls a knife on Gus and forces him to lick the blade in front of their friends. “His body tingling with elation,” Bigger places his knife in Gus’s shirt and threatens to cut his “belly button out” (481). He then slashes a nearby pool table, challenging Doc, the owner of the pool room, to use his gun. When Doc tells Bigger to leave, Bigger asks, “Don’t you like it?” Bigger’s question to Doc and, indirectly, to Gus, is the question of a rapist to his victim.37 His power lies not only in his ability to violate Doc and Gus, but also to silence their voices of dissent. Bigger later senses intuitively that his violence is the result of transferring his fear of whites onto Gus; his fear of whites results in rape-like violence. Bigger acknowledges his need for a safety valve to “drain off ” the hysteria caused by his impending confrontation with Blum, yet seeing a movie only increases his feelings of constriction, pushing him right up against the black-white boundary. He and Jack have chosen to see a movie about Africa, one portraying “black men and women dancing free and wild, men and women who were adjusted to their soil and at home in their world,
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and take the wealth he feels is due to him. His fear at the prospect of this violation forces Bigger out from behind his “curtain of indifference,” and he searches for a safety valve to relieve the pressure.
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secure from fear and hysteria” (477). Bigger never gets a chance to engage with these images of communal freedom, however, because before the movie starts, he sees a newsreel that features Mary Dalton, the daughter of a wealthy man whom he plans to meet for a job interview later that day. The newsreel showcases the “daughters of the rich,” holding them forth to the viewer as “a collection of debutantes” available for pursuit: “Ha! He’s after her! There! He’s got her! Oh boy, don’t you wish you were down here in Florida? . . . Oh, the naughty rich!” announces the commentator amid scenes of Mary being chased and kissed by her Communist boyfriend (475, emphasis in the original). As a viewer, Bigger possesses the power of the gaze in this instant; he vicariously crosses the boundary into white society, allowed the illusion of intimate access to Mary Dalton’s world. After witnessing the newsreel’s objectification of Mary, Bigger begins to see her as a sexual symbol that he might control: “Maybe Mary Dalton was a hot kind of girl,” he speculates (475–76).38 Jack encourages him, claiming that rich women in general are sexually deviant, and he advises Bigger to take the job and “learn to stand in” with Mary: “Ah, them rich white women’ll go to bed with anybody, from a poodle on up.” After seeing Mary’s image and hearing Jack stereotype her, Bigger imagines that his entry into the world of wealthy whites will be an easy route to power. In the theater, Bigger gains the psychological power of the voyeur, crossing into the protected space of a white woman’s sexual exploits; outside of the theater, in the Dalton’s neighborhood and later, in their presence, he is the object of the white gaze and, as such, falls into a state that both psychologists (James, Freud) and sociologists (Du Bois) have called “double consciousness.” As previously noted, Megan Obourn describes double consciousness as “a kind of perpetual trauma in that it consists of two irreconcilable ways of seeing/remembering one’s national and personal history and experiences. It is a form of subjective fragmentation” (Obourn 224). Bigger’s self-protective mechanisms kick in when he approaches the Dalton home for his interview, and we see him experience subjective fragmentation. Knowing instinctively that he should suppress his strength and intelligence, yet unwilling to act foolishly, Bigger agonizes over his every move, fearing he’s “not acting right.” Fearing whites will view him as a criminal (“it would be thought that he was trying to rob or rape somebody,” Bigger worries), Bigger resorts to stereotyped behavior in order to counteract the rapist image, behavior that takes the form of Sambo once Bigger is in the Dalton home: He stood with his knees slightly bent, his lips partly open, his shoulders stooped; and his eyes held a look that went only to the surface of things. There was an organic conviction in him that this was the way white
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Having absorbed hegemonic images of the ideal slave, Bigger attempts to shelter his psyche by self-objectifying, an act that reflects the “overembodiment” of slaves who played roles intended to safeguard them from the whip.39 Bigger does not find this role comfortable, yet he satisfies Mr. Dalton, who hires him in spite of, or maybe because of, the dull and obedient image he projects. In the presence of a powerful white man, Bigger acts “organically”—in other words, out of his traumatic neurosis. Bigger cannot maintain his protective boundaries in Mary’s presence, however. These boundaries require that the two remain in their separate spaces, that Bigger appear to Mary as an object, and that Mary act much as Bigger expects the white woman of the newsreel to act. However, Mary refuses to behave according to Bigger’s images of her: “on the screen she was not dangerous and his mind could do with her as it liked. But here in her home she walked over everything, put herself in the way” (496). The symbols of white womanhood Bigger has inherited (the pure, remote Southern daughter, the oversexed rich white woman) dictate his behavior around them. But the flesh-and-blood Mary does not conform to either symbol, leaving Bigger without guidance for his own actions around her. Moreover, Mary is a Communist sympathizer, and as such, her goal is to break down racial and class boundaries, boundaries that Bigger depends on in order to preserve his own psychological and physical space. Mary and her boyfriend Jan intend to introduce Bigger to the idea of communist equality, and thus she attempts to cross into Bigger’s “world.” As he drives her around in the car, she leans across the front seat dividing them, establishing intimacy by asking Bigger to light her cigarette, and saying, “I’m on your side” (505). Bigger’s response is to feel displaced (he wonders, “What side was he on?”) and violated: “this girl waded right in and hit him between the eyes with her words and ways” (506, 500). When Jan arrives, he and Mary try to enlist Bigger in the Communist cause by disrupting established racial roles (“there’ll be no white and no black,” they tell him). Yet their actions remove Bigger from the security of the servant role, confusing his expectations and patterns of behavior. When Jan shakes his hand and Mary smiles and laughs, he doesn’t feel free from the stigma of color but hyper-aware of it: He felt he had no physical existence at all right then; he was something he hated, the badge of shame which he knew was attached to a black skin. It was a shadowy region, a No Man’s Land, the ground that separated the white world from the black that he stood upon. He felt naked. (508)
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folks wanted him to be when in their presence; none had ever told him that . . . but their manner had made him feel that they did. (489–90)
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Bigger has never been more aware of the boundary between the two worlds, because he is tangled in it. His black skin is the very marker of that boundary, and Jan’s confusing attempts to ignore it give it even more significance. Without a separation between his space and Jan’s, Bigger cannot protect himself. He becomes excruciatingly vulnerable, “naked,” open to what he knows (even if Mary and Jan do not) to be the power of white privilege. And this power is destructive, even in a white woman’s tears: when Mary cries, Bigger feels that she is “contaminated with an invisible contagion” (512). Mary’s tears are not honest but manipulative, a way to break down his protective barrier; thus from Bigger’s point of view, she supports Wright’s (and Baldwin’s) critiques of women’s sentimentality. Once Bigger’s protective barrier is broken, it cannot be re-erected; Jan and Mary’s failure to understand this contributes to Mary’s death. After their “tour” of the South Side and field trip to Ernie’s Kitchen Shack, where they consume Bigger’s “culture,” Jan and Mary abruptly reassert the master-servant roles they had tried to break down, returning to the back seat and giving Bigger a new set of orders—drive around so that they can have sex. Jan and Mary treat Bigger as if he is invisible at this point; they clearly expect him to return to his servant role, but, with the boundary between themselves and Bigger damaged by their previous actions and further weakened by the alcohol they force on him, he is unable to do so. Having been “contaminated” and violated by Jan and Mary’s unwanted proximity, “fighting off the stiffening feeling in his loins” as he witnesses their sexual contact (518), Bigger is unable to return to his “curtain” of indifference. And when Jan leaves the drunken and nearly unconscious Mary alone with Bigger, their interaction is explosive. Without consciousness, Mary cannot exercise control of her “sacred space,” her body, and the notion that Bigger has unlimited access to that previously forbidden area begins to stimulate him sexually. When Mary finally passes out, “it was as though she had given up” (524); Bigger reads this as her abandonment of her own will, giving him free reign. He manipulates her like the pliable, receptive doll of his fantasy, holding her body so that they are standing face to face, their lips touching “like something he had imagined” (524). As Guttman suggests, Bigger’s positioning of Mary here indicates his desire for consensual sex, not rape; I would qualify that by saying that Bigger is aware that he is “playing” at consensual sex (Guttman 178), aided by Mary’s automatic physical response to his advances: The thought and conviction that Jan had had her a lot flashed through his mind. He kissed her again and felt the sharp bones of her hips move in a hard and veritable grind . . . he tightened his fingers on her breasts, kissing her again, feeling her move toward him. (524)
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Bigger’s groping of Mary is provoked and spurred on by the rapist stereotype; sexual access to white women is “forbidden fruit,” a way of achieving manhood, of becoming in this case Jan’s equal. Bigger acknowledges this in a conversation with Max at the novel’s end: disavowing any real desire for Mary, he states “I reckon [I kissed and fondled Mary] because I knew I oughtn’t’ve wanted to . . . because they say we black men do that anyhow” (773). Bigger is in the Dalton’s most protected space, within grasp of their most prized possession—and that possession seems to offer herself up for the taking.40 Mary’s and Jan’s previous actions prepared Bigger to fondle Mary by encouraging him to act as their equal, to ignore the dangers of contact with white women. Jan shakes Bigger’s hand, hoping to introduce him to a model of non-coercive contact between black and white men. Yet Bigger’s previous models of contact are hierarchical and destructive: blacks are forcefully restrained from physical contact with whites, and gaining access to white spaces is defined as and takes the form of transgressive penetration—robbing Blum’s deli, fondling Mary. Whether Wright considers Bigger’s actions with Mary to be consensual or not is a question not explicitly answered by the text. But as Bessie recognizes later, for Bigger to be in Mary’s bedroom at all, let alone while she’s unconscious, is equivalent to rape in the public mind; this renders the question of Mary’s consent irrelevant to Bigger’s fate.41 Bigger has forgotten this under the spell of his contact with Mary, but once Mrs. Dalton enters the room, bringing with her the reminder of his position in the white world, Bigger is seized by “a hysterical terror” as he realizes that his discovery in Mary’s room will certainly result in his death (524). He must prevent Mary from speaking lest she give away his presence to the blind Mrs. Dalton; as he holds the pillow over Mary’s mouth, he grows “tight and full, as though about to explode” (525). Bigger’s violent silencing of Mary is sexualized here, highlighting the psychological inevitability of rape in this context; Bigger here is “repeating” actions associated with a racial trauma, one he has never physically experienced, demonstrating the powerful impact of the primal scene. Unaware of the depth and nature of African American cultural trauma, Mary and Jan’s intervention in the codes of black-white social conduct frees Bigger from his script but not from the trauma that shapes his responses. When that trauma, lynching, appears before his eyes in the spectral form of Mrs. Dalton, a figure for the ghost of “injured” Southern white womanhood, Bigger’s explosion of fear (orgasm) results in the death of the white daughter, thereby figuratively threatening all of white society. Once Bigger stops to consider his actions, he realizes that the role of rapist/murderer is preferable to the role he has been playing. After killing
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Mary, cutting off her head, burning her body, covering his tracks, and returning home, all without discovery, he realizes that he has “raped”— entered the most sacred white space and destroyed its contents—and survived. Bigger is, after all, not hypervisible; no all-seeing white man has witnessed his terrible crime and struck him down in his sleep. Murdering Mary has changed him, he realizes: “the thought of what he had done, the awful horror of it . . . formed for him for the first time in his fear-ridden life a barrier of protection between him and a world he feared” (542). He has become the whites’ worst fear, and this gives him a secret space of knowledge and experience that cannot be infringed upon by his family, friends, or white acquaintances. The “feeling of being always enclosed in the stifling embrace of an invisible force had gone from him” (584). Ironically, after acting out his cultural trauma in the most destructive possible way, Bigger appears to take a step in the “working-through” process, addressing the anxiety that drove his repetition. Unfortunately, the next step occurs in prison, as at this point, his liberation from the “stifling embrace” of anxiety is so empowering that he is compelled to repeat the actions that led him to it. In accepting a new identity as a murderer, Bigger must reinterpret his crime: “no,” he decides, “the girl’s death . . . was no accident, and he would never say that it was” (542). Because he feels that whites will judge him as a murderer, have in fact trained him to be a murderer, he enacts and accepts their judgment. “He was black and he had been alone in a room where a white girl had been killed; therefore he had killed her. That was what everybody would say anyhow, no matter what he said” (542). Pathologically enraged by passivity and fear (his own and others’), Bigger suppresses the hysteria he experienced at the sight of Mrs. Dalton that prompted him to suffocate Mary; instead, he sees only that his “will to kill” has finally made itself “visible” and “dramatic” (542). The morning after the murder, he begins to project his own passivity onto his family and contrast it to his recent actions: why did he and his folks have to live like this? What had they ever done? Perhaps they had not done anything. Maybe they had to live this way precisely because none of them in all their lives had ever done anything, right or wrong, that mattered much. (541)
It is his family’s lack of significant action, their blind passivity, their “great hunger to believe” in and accept society’s dictates, that causes their misery. In committing an act that “matters much” to white society, Bigger moves outside his community, which allows him to reflect on the conditions of his life.
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Given the fact that Bigger rethinks some of these theories in prison, I suggest we interpret them in part as aspects of his current coping mechanism. Viewed through the lens of trauma theory, Bigger at this point shows signs of “depersonalization disorder,” one of the four major dissociative disorders, which typically presents as an “altered subjective experience regarding the familiarity of self and surroundings,” an experience described by some as being “ ‘here but not here,’ ‘detached from my body,’ . . . ‘like a robot,’ ‘emotionless.’ It is often accompanied by derealization, experienced as if one is watching oneself on a movie screen, ‘like a big pane of glass between me and the world,’ . . . or as feeling ‘detached from the environment’ ” (Simeon 1782–83). This is not to say that his state of depersonalization renders his thinking pathological or irrational; on the contrary, the “pane of glass” Bigger’s murder of Mary has placed between himself and the world allows him to distance the anxiety that drove his destructive behavior so that he can observe himself and those around him with a more objective (less violently defensive) perspective. In Wright’s terms, Bigger has “put on a pair of spectacles whose power was that of an x-ray” allowing him to “see deeper into the lives of men” (“How ‘Bigger’ Was Born” 861).42 If Bigger’s folks instill a masturbatory blindness in him, rape and murder are acts that he interprets as enlightenment, as vision; he can return the gaze of others, knowing he has a “new life for himself,” one that is “all his own,” his private possession: “it was the first time in his life he had had anything that others could not take from him . . . . the meaning of his life . . . had spilled out” (542). In reinterpreting his accidental murder of Mary as an act of psychological rebirth, Bigger reveals his understanding of the nature of his oppression: whites have made murder “the meaning of his life,” whites would call his actions in Mary’s bedroom “rape”—whites have concluded that rape and murder are the inevitable acts of uncontrolled black men, and this figure has conditioned his responses and behavior. Bigger’s new identity doesn’t help him sustain his euphoria in the face of the Sambo-style behavior that he adopts in the presence of whites and that continues to render his “true self ” invisible. While he realizes that playing this part will protect him from discovery, he longs for social recognition of his newly empowered self. Wright hinted as much in his 1940 Atlantic Monthly article, “I Bite the Hand That Feeds Me,” written in response to a harsh review of Native Son: “If there had been one person in the Dalton household who viewed Bigger Thomas as a human being, the crime would have been solved in half an hour. Did not Bigger himself know that it was the denial of his personality that enabled him to escape detection so long?” (qtd. in Gibson 41). He longs for those around him to feel in his presence the kind of respectful fear he once felt toward them.
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he could be an idea in their minds; that his black face and the image of his smothering Mary and cutting off her head and burning her could hover before their eyes as a terrible picture of reality which they could see and feel and yet not destroy. (565)
Although Bigger’s “terrible picture” is not exactly the one the reader has seen, it’s the one he knows whites want to see and will see (a black face, a murdered white girl, and a decapitation). This is a spectacle whites cannot gaze upon without fear; Bigger wants to turn the black male rapist image into a primal scene to be impressed upon the public consciousness—a permanent violation. In becoming a figure, Bigger attempts to suppress both the truth of his actions and his previous identity (characterized by fear). As a rapist/murderer, he must view Mary not as a person but as a symbol of white society, its “symbol of beauty” that he has destroyed in order to feel “the equal of them” (598). Yet this effacement of the “remainders,” the previous Bigger and the flesh-and-blood Mary, proves to be impossible. Bigger states that he “did not feel sorry for Mary; she was not real to him, not a human being,” but a representation of all white women (and thus of whites’ sacred spaces). Mary “had served to set off his emotions, conditioned by many Marys. And now that he had killed Mary he felt a lessening of tension” (550). Yet making Mary a symbol cannot completely suppress her: what remains to haunt Bigger’s waking and sleeping moments is Mary’s dead body, which refuses to burn up and disappear. The difficulty Bigger has fitting Mary’s body into the furnace is itself a reminder of the human body’s stubborn resistance to effacement, to Bigger’s desire to “wave his hand and blot [it] out.” Wright emphasizes Mary’s corporeality in the difficulty Bigger has in disposing of her body: “he whacked harder, but the head would not come off ” (532). Even after he has finally burned Mary’s body, its “image hovered before his eyes” each time he tries to clean the furnace. He feels that if he tries to remove the ashes, the coals will cave in and Mary’s body will “come into full view, unburnt” (554). This vision of the unburnt body is the “uncanny,” the return of the repressed. Each time Bigger sees the furnace, he becomes faint and numb: “an organic sense of dread” comes over him, a “peculiar paralyzing numbness”—this is the response of his subconscious to his repression of the physical horror of what he has done (618). Bigger’s nightmare, in which he opens a package he is carrying to find his own bloody decapitated head, reveals the unconscious connection he makes
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After his first successful evasion of Mrs. Dalton’s questions to him about Mary’s disappearance, he wishes that
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between Mary’s remainder and his own: in cutting off Mary’s head, he’s repressed a part of himself, a part that he continues to carry around— his old identity, fearful and constricted (639). Bigger’s head is his own remainder, the self he can’t get rid of and also the self that whites won’t see—his complicated, contradictory, traumatized self. At the moment when the reporters discover Mary’s bones in the furnace, Bigger imagines himself as the furnace: “the fear that surged into his stomach, filling him, choking him, was like the fumes of smoke that had belched from the ash bin” (649). Inside of himself have been lurking his own remainder and Mary’s, reemerging to take possession of him. The return of the repressed does not change Bigger’s self-figuration; on the contrary, in choosing an identity that can only lead to the electric chair, Bigger is no longer afraid of death: “he had always felt outside of this white world, and now it was true. . . . it meant death either way, and he would die shooting every slug he had” (652). The curtain of indifference which his murder of Mary transformed into a wall is still in place, and he is more determined than ever to summon the power his new identity gives him. Yet the “rapist” identity requires the continued violation and destruction of women, and his girlfriend Bessie is his next victim. Bigger has forcibly enlisted Bessie to help him in his scheme to profit from his murder of Mary, but when the scheme backfires, he decides he must kill Bessie to keep her quiet and because, as he states in what almost sounds like a line from a blues song, “a woman was a dangerous burden when a man was running away” (577). Bigger has allowed her into his personal space to interact with his new identity. When this identity is threatened, he must expel her. Yet Bigger does not just kill Bessie; he also rapes her, an act that not only confirms his identity as a rapist, but gives him a sense of release and renewal. In his sexual relationship with Bessie, Bigger has always found a protective security, a space in which he can relax his boundaries and forget his fear. In order to experience this security, though, he has to objectify Bessie, to experience her sexually “as a fallow field beneath him stretching out under a cloudy sky waiting for rain,” as a “warm night sea” soothing “the restless tossing of his spirit” and making “him feel that he did not need to long for a home now” (Native Son 570). As with Mary, Bigger’s sexual contact with Bessie is not one of mutuality, but one in which he is firmly in control. He blots out the flesh-and-blood Bessie, making her a “fallow field,” a “warm sea,” a passive force of nature in which he can recover from the violations of his daily existence. It is not Bessie’s hand but the hand of some primordial version of maternity that lays the “finger of peace” on his spirit; Bigger’s symbolic return to the womb does not give Bessie any kind of presence in his recovery simply because that womb
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clench his fist and swing his arm and blot out, kill, sweep away the Bessie on Bessie’s face and leave the other helpless and yielding before him. . . . He would then gather her up and put her in his chest, his stomach, some place deep inside him, always keeping her there even when he slept, ate, talked . . . just to feel and know that she was his to have and hold whenever he wanted to. (575)
Here, any potential power Bessie achieves as Bigger’s portable womb is lessened when he imagines killing and ingesting her, placing that womb, that “home,” permanently inside of him. Bessie’s voice must be blotted out because her questions assert her subjectivity, her difference from him, her individual will, and make her less “homelike.” Through an act of murder and a massive repression of the facts of that murder, Bigger has tried to create within himself a new identity, a space or “home” protected from the intrusion of whites; he can sense, however, that this “home” is not as satisfying as sex. Because Bessie’s body provides him with a sense of security, he longs to destroy her flesh-and-blood self so that he can have controlled access to that part of her which is “home.”43 Bigger has proven that he is unable to hear the voices of the black women in his life: he ignores his mother and sister, and when Bessie speaks, he interprets her words to fit his own needs. When he forces Bessie to run away with him, she accuses him of using her for sex (“All you ever did since we been knowing each other was to get me drunk so’s you could have me”), and she reflects on her own blindness to Bigger’s selfishness (“I thought I was happy, but deep down in me I knew I wasn’t . . . I been a fool, just a blind dumb black drunk fool . . . and I know deep down in your heart you really don’t care” 660). Bigger cannot hear this statement, which might have surprised him with its insight, because he has already decided that Bessie cannot be trusted and that he must kill her. This selective deafness ultimately enables him to “blot out” her “face” so that he can use her body according to his needs—initially, nonconsensual sex. Bigger cannot hear or does not heed her voice when she refuses her consent. Wright does not make clear whether Bigger realizes that what he does to Bessie constitutes a rape (despite his repeated “Sorry”), nor is this clear beyond a reasonable doubt to the reader: Bessie’s “No” is not heard by Bigger, and as written (the words “don’t” or “don’t Bigger” appear three
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is physically hers. Like Mary, Bessie is most appealing to Bigger when she is without will, when her conscious mind is “blotted out.” Bessie’s subjectivity, the “Bessie on Bessie’s face,” prevents him from unlimited access to the “body that he . . . wanted badly” (575). Bigger’s reaction to Bessie’s face is murderous. He wants to
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times in the midst of Bigger’s thoughts as the rape takes place).44 Readers might attribute the weakness of her protest to the fact that we are inside Bigger’s consciousness, unable to “hear” Bessie. But not as easy to explain are Bessie’s unconsciousness after the rape (she seems to fall into a deep sleep without speaking to Bigger, allowing him to kill her more easily) and her capitulation before it. Bigger hears Bessie sigh “a sigh deep down beneath the familiar one, a sigh of resignation, a giving up, a surrender of something more than her body” (663). In interpreting her sigh as “giving up,” as he does with Mary, Bigger justifies his complete control of her body. And by “giving up,” Bessie complies perfectly with Bigger’s desires, almost as if she doesn’t mind being raped, as if she doesn’t mind dying. One might interpret Bessie’s capitulation as her own form of traumainduced repetition; the “Jezebel” script requires Bessie to be “unrapeable,” her “no” only a game she plays with her “seducer” to get something out of him. To imagine that Wright intended such an interpretation is more difficult. While Mary’s “surrender” is clearly Bigger’s interpretation of her alcohol-induced stupor, Bessie’s “surrender” to her rape and death is not presented as an interpretation, since there is neither obvious reason nor textual explanation for her lapse into “sleep.” In this moment, the distance between Wright’s and Bigger’s (also Jake’s) figuration of black women as available bodies attached to irritating voices shrinks alarmingly; the implications of the statement “rape is not what one does to women” takes on an uncomfortable significance. Rape is not what one does to black women because a woman whose voice can be blotted out so that her body can be possessed is not capable of or expected to give or withhold consent. Wright portrays Bigger as consciously accepting the figuration of black man-as-rapist in order to gain power from it, a portrayal that allows Wright to critique the origins and effects of that figure. Unfortunately, his lack of consideration of his portrayal of Bessie reveals her function in the novel as a kind of stepping stone for Bigger on his path to selfawareness. If, as Michel Fabre claims, Bigger killed Bessie in order to claim “his right to ‘create’ in the existentialist meaning of the word, by rejecting the accidental nature of his first murder with this further proof of his power to destroy,” he has again used Bessie to further the development of his identity (Fabre The Unfinished Quest 171).45 Critics have convincingly argued that Wright’s portrayal of Bigger’s courtroom confrontation with Bessie’s body is part of an argument about the ways in which the black male rapist stereotype occludes the historical rapes of black women by white men (Guttman 182–85). Bessie is briefly resurrected during the trial when the prosecution informs Bigger that Bessie didn’t die immediately after his attack on her but struggled to get out of the airshaft where he dumped her body, and eventually froze
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to death. Bessie’s body is then brought into the courtroom as evidence of Bigger’s ability to rape and murder. Bigger admits that he had “completely forgotten Bessie during the inquest of Mary,” not because he “had thought any the less of Bessie . . . but Mary’s death had caused him the most fear” (754). Certainly, his recognition of the way Mary’s death has displaced Bessie’s would touch readers, as Wright ensures that we have also “forgotten” Bessie for the same reasons: her murder is secondary to the plot structure, and it is a less tense and emotional event than the murder of Mary. Also, as Bigger notes, it is a black-on-black crime, something that typically goes unnoticed in the white world: Though he had killed a black girl and a white girl, he knew that it would be for the death of the white girl that he would be punished. The black girl was merely “evidence.” And under it all he knew that the white people did not really care about Bessie’s being killed. . . . he felt a deeper sympathy for Bessie than at any time when she was alive. He knew that Bessie, too, though dead, though killed by him, would resent her dead body being used in this way. (754)
Bigger can see that Bessie would not consent to the use of her body by whites, but he cannot acknowledge that she might resent his use of her body “to get over” on, as a means by which to continue his flight into consciousness (raping her and beating her head in with a brick certainly seem more severe than using her body as evidence in a trial). Bigger can finally allow Bessie a voice, but first she must be permanently silenced, reduced to nothing more than a dead body, so that her voice can be filtered through his own. Ultimately, his sympathy with Bessie does not provide Bigger with a prolonged meditation on his treatment of her, or on the way the Jim Crow rape fiction effaces the factual rapes of black women. It becomes an occasion to reflect on himself and his new identity. Bigger eventually rejects his new identity—not because he regrets what he did to Bessie, but because he sees that his criminal actions have resulted in an unsatisfying isolation from both white and black societies. Once Bigger is in prison, his reflections on his life and his connections to other people become increasingly acute and sustained, the result of finally having his own “protected” space and a cessation of the anxiety-driven velocity that had propelled his life up to this point.46 After reading newspaper accounts of himself as an apelike rapist, Bigger’s faith in his identity is shaken. Max’s interview takes him further away from it, giving him social recognition and respect, which feels to him like a “cool breath of peace . . . in his body” (781). But it is Jan who flings “aside the curtain” and walks “into the room of his life,” providing Bigger with his first
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non-coercive contact (714). With Jan’s words of apology to Bigger, “the word had become flesh”: Bigger is reborn for an instant into a world of equality. As a result of this interaction, Bigger imaginatively attempts to forge his own non-coercive contacts: he tries to “see himself in relation to other men, a thing he had always feared to try to do, so deeply stained was his own mind with the hate of others for him” (783). What Bigger comes to see in prison is that an entirely new model of identity is in order, one which is nontopological, depending not on boundaries but on human contact for its construction. The trauma of racial stereotyping is hard to overcome, but Bigger attempts to work through it to a new model of identity, one of equality and union with men like Max and Jan: If he reached out his hands and touched other people . . . would there be a reply, a shock? Not that he wanted those hearts to turn their warmth to him . . . but just to know that they were there and warm! . . . And in that touch, response of recognition, there would be union, identity; there would be a supporting oneness, a wholeness which had been denied him all his life. (784)
Identity is found not in a personal space isolated from other people, a construct Bigger developed from the stereotypes of identity he inherited, but in the touch of others, in the knowledge that others are similar to and the equal of himself. Bigger does not fantasize himself into a black community, which he has seen as stultifying and acquiescent, but rather into a Communist version of community, one of racial equality and power— bathed by the radiant sun, standing in “a vast crowd of men, white men and black men and all men” (784). Here, in contact with other men, differences are melted away and the common and good remain. Contrary to the views of critics who deplore what they consider to be Wright’s earnest leftist propaganda in such images, I would suggest that such visions of multiracial solidarity and communal identity should not be understood as anything more than Communist-inspired therapeutic projections. Just as Wright himself turned a corner in his psychological and political development when he was confronted with a leftist perspective on racial oppression, so Bigger is able to make use of alternative models for identity as a means by which to examine those models he has inherited and the damage they have done to him. Readers might be misled into thinking that he has adopted these models along with Max’s courtroom narrative of his life’s meaning, but this is not the case. Bigger refuses the role of social victim, and he cherishes the steps that have brought him to a new identity and an understanding of his life’s meaning (i.e., his murders of Mary and Bessie), as he says passionately to Max: “What I killed
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for must have been good! . . . when a man kills, it’s for something . . . I didn’t know I was really alive in this world until I felt things hard enough to kill for” (849). Max cannot or will not understand this rejection: when Bigger insists that his killing reveals “what I wanted, what I am,” Max backs away from Bigger in terror (849). Readers might share Max’s shock at this evidence that Bigger has rejected a leftist narrative of identity; they might wonder if he has regressed in his “therapy.” Max’s defeated posture as he leaves Bigger’s cell for the last time certainly indicates his view that he has not only failed not only to save Bigger’s life but failed to bring him to the end of a certain path of psychological development. I disagree with Max’s assessment of Bigger’s “progress.” Bigger’s last words to Max are “Tell . . . Tell Mister . . . Tell Jan hello” (850), indicating a syntactic insistence on equality with and connection to Jan. He has learned the lesson of equality and community that Jan and Max endeavored to teach him. Wright states that in part, Bigger’s lack of communal feeling contributes to his death, claiming that “oppression seems to hinder and stifle in the victim those very qualities of character that are so essential for an effective struggle against the oppressor,” namely, the ability to unite with others and fight back (“How ‘Bigger’ Was Born” 872). I believe Bigger develops that communal feeling in prison. However, his “faint, wry, bitter smile” at the novel’s end suggests his belief that Jan understands him no more than Max and that ultimately, the meaning of his life is his to know. We are not privy to the details of his final figures of selfhood, nor can we say we fully understand him—which is as it should be. Bigger’s fleeting vision of Communist brotherhood, then, provides him with a nonspatial model of identity and intersubjectivity that he uses as a wedge against his trauma-induced understanding of human interaction. This vision is a nothing more than a tool in Bigger’s project of self-understanding. Even so, its lack of gender diversity is troublesome. Wright’s demonstrated ability to complicate and even reject Communist paradigms mitigates against the idea that the sexism of this one is not his responsibility. Nor can I believe that Bigger’s repression of the literally and symbolically feminine aspects of his life, even as that life is coming to a close, can be interpreted as a political argument on Wright’s part. Wright’s failure to portray women, particularly black women, as fully human and capable of joining together in solidarity and protest with black men is continued in his later novels The Outsider and The Long Dream. Both books also portray false rape charges against a black protagonist—by a white woman in The Long Dream and by a black woman in The Outsider (the black women in the latter novel are either religious and acquiescent or scheming and manipulative; all of them contribute to the destruction of the protagonist). I would argue that Wright’s obsessive interest with
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false rape charges, which serve in his mind as the predominant symbol of black male existence in America, is inextricably related to his negative portrayals of women. White society’s obsession with the figure of the black male rapist, and with the passivity and symbolic power of white women, deliberately obscures the remainder of those figures: the long history of white men’s rapes of black women.47 While Wright recognizes white men’s causal role in this configuration of racial violence, he seems to have projected that causality onto his portrayals of female sexuality, so that sexualized black and white women in his novels are dangerous, playing as they do a role in the physical and mental destruction of black men. While his derogatory portrayals of black women are connected to the brutal history of racial violence, their pervasiveness suggests that they emerge out of Wright’s own experience of cultural trauma. And their remainders—the rare glimmers of humanity in his black female characters (Lil’s logical political views, Bessie’s bitter understanding of Bigger’s use of her body)—reveal Wright’s own internal struggle to come to terms with the devastating impact on both men and women of the distortion of black identity.
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3
“Women on the Go”: Stereotype, Domesticity, and Street Culture in Ann Petry’s Fiction When a woman gets the blues, she goes to her room and hides, When a man gets the blues, he catches a freight train and rides. —Clara Smith, “Freight Train Blues” (1924) Oh, the blues has got me on the go, they’ve got me on the go. They roll around my house, in and out of my front door. —Bessie Smith, “In House Blues” (1931)
While African American men attempted to claim their right to enter the public world, African American women had a different mission. As they were “relegated to a place outside the ideological construction of ‘womanhood’ ” during (and after) slavery in order to facilitate control and sexual abuse of their bodies, African American women had to restore their moral reputations and with them the morality of the race (Carby “On the Threshold” 308–9). Women of all races “have to carry the burden of the race’s morality or lack of it,” as Gerda Lerner has observed, and prominent African American women during and after the Reconstruction era took up this challenge in a variety of ways (Black Women 40). In the words of Anna Julia Cooper, it was the “colored woman’s office” to “stamp weal or woe onto the coming history of this people” (qtd. in Carby “On the Threshold” 304). Attempting to empower black women,
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Chapter
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Cooper simultaneously places the entire burden of racial “uplift’ squarely on their shoulders in such a way as to hold them responsible for past, present, and future historical “woe.” This is not to say that she blamed the rape victim. In fact, intellectuals and writers such as Cooper, Ida B. Wells, and Pauline Hopkins established a direct connection between “the rape of black women in the nineties” and the “rape of the female slave,” thereby establishing the “dialectical relation between economic/political power and economic/sexual power in the battle for the control of women’s bodies” (Carby “On the Threshold” 315). The Jezebel Stereotype vs. Bourgeois Domesticity One way African American women worked to achieve racial uplift was to reclaim their own domestic spaces, to show that they deserved the respectful title “Mrs.” and the home that went along with it. The stereotype that denied them this respect was “Jezebel,” the sexualized and “unrapeable” black woman. Begun in slavery as an attempt to “facilitate continued exploitation” of black women (Lerner 193), the “Jezebel” stereotype has been a powerful force in and symbol of racial and gender oppression. Traditionally, black women writers have responded to this “myth of the black woman’s sexual licentiousness” (as well as the black man’s rapaciousness) through the creation of characters (male and female) who “imitat[e] the ‘purity,’ the sexual morality of the [white] bourgeoisie” (Lerner 193; McDowell xii–xiii).1 With the exception of Nella Larsen’s Helga Crane and Zora Neale Hurston’s Janie Starks, female protagonists are largely asexual, the result of authors’ attempts to fight the Jezebel stereotype and to prove that black women could and did adhere to middle-class values even if they were, by virtue of their color, excluded from the “cult of true womanhood.” These protagonists, specimens of the black bourgeoisie who consider themselves a “credit to the race,” construct their identities against the Jezebel image; their behavior and values are well within the bounds of middle-class respectability, but more importantly, their “female desire” is expressed as a “desire to uplift the race” (Carby 240).2 Because participation in the project of “uplift” involves establishing a public presence, the black heroine typically becomes involved only after her marriage and enclosure in domestic life. Any woman who established a life outside of her home, who regularly entered public space, risked being known as a “street-walker.” Women like Pauline Hopkins’ Sappho Clark or Frances E. W. Harper’s Iola Leroy do not engage in community politics until after their marriage (to politically involved husbands). An asexual middle-class domesticity, then, is the literary “safe space” for black female characters, a place that protects them from sexual objectification so that
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GO”
they can work to transform and protect the reputation of other black women.3 While single, the black heroine is at risk from the sexual dangers of the “outdoors,” 4 the culture of white supremacy; once sheltered in the institution of marriage, her reputation secure, she can venture into the political realm knowing that she is protected by her marriage and in her home. Yet not all women writers celebrate domesticity as the solution to the problems faced by black women. Nella Larsen’s Quicksand depicts domesticity as another kind of slavery. Forced to choose between her “desire for sexual fulfillment” and her “longing for social respectability,” Larsen’s Helga Crane attempts to sanction her sexuality in marriage (McDowell xvii). This choice results not in safety but in suffocation; domesticity is a death sentence for Helga, in which she is slowly destroyed by consecutive pregnancies and the exhaustions of childrearing and housekeeping. Larsen’s critique of marriage and domesticity is one of the first in the African American literary tradition, adding a racial dimension to similar critiques made by white authors such as Emily Dickinson, Kate Chopin, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Edith Wharton. In her short stories and novels, Ann Petry confronts this double bind in the representation of black women’s sexuality, revealing its class inflections in the process.5 Whatever their economic class status, Petry’s female protagonists have internalized white middle-class values, and they attempt to exclude racial stereotype from their self-definitions by adopting a normative version of identity. Whether her characters falsely believe that their education and intelligence place them beyond the harmful reach of stereotype, or whether they spend their lives suppressing stereotypical behaviors, they struggle to access their “birthright” while minimizing their “inheritance,” to use Baldwin’s terms. As one protagonist asks during a moment of crisis, “Why not act just like other people, just this once, just like white people” (Petry “New Mirror” 87). This question reveals her unconscious double consciousness, her “sense of always looking at” herself “through the eyes of others” (Du Bois Souls 3). Having discovered her position “within a racialized social structure,” in other words, this protagonist has suffered a “splitting” and “alienation” in her process of “subject-formation” (Bergner 21), one she has not worked through. But her question points to an under-analyzed aspect of double consciousness: what does it mean to act “just like white people”? This protagonist confuses “acting like white people” with acting “naturally,” with being unburdened by the weight of socially proscribed behaviors, but whites behave according to the same proscriptions (albeit with far fewer consequences for deviance). Her projection of the consciousness of a white person is thus based on her desire for a “free” social space. Du Bois’s theory presumes that “the eyes
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“WO M E N
SUBJECTIVITY
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of others” are one-size-fits-all lenses through which the socially marginal observe themselves, but as the white gaze is itself a construct, the nonwhite individual is bound to infuse it with her own particular set of racial experiences. Most of Petry’s protagonists resemble their author in being the products of a unique “inheritance.” Petry grew up in Old Saybrook, Connecticut, in one of the few black families in town even today. Her father was a pharmacist who owned his own drugstore in town; her mother was a chiropodist (McKay 128). In some ways, hers was “a childhood of privilege,” and she claims that “the incidents of prejudice” were “few” (Fein B2). As noted in Elisabeth Petry’s biography of her mother, however, their family “defied class categories” (8); despite “upper-class aspirations,” aesthetics, and cultural values, Petry was “an ardent supporter of labor unions and the working class,” joined the “Harlem Left” while living in New York, and “remained steadfast on the subject of our family’s economic status”: they were “poor and thus part of the lower class” (Petry, Elisabeth 8). The connection between Petry’s childhood and her adult life relates to her sense that she identified with “survivors” and “the ‘walking wounded.’ ” In an undated speech, she wrote “having been born black and female, I regard myself as a survivor. And so I write about survivors . . . about people who are, for one reason or another, living on islands in the middle of the rest of society” (Petry, Elisabeth 74). Petry’s stories “Miss Muriel” and “The New Mirror” use autobiographical settings and characters, and both reveal the distress Petry felt about being considered one of “those rare laboratory specimens the black people who ran the drugstore,” the “only black family in town” (“New Mirror” 88).6 Much of Petry’s fiction describes the experience of being a “specimen,” of representing not just “the race” but “race” (difference) itself to whites.7 One such account of specimen status is depicted in “The New Mirror.” The narrator-protagonist describes her father’s family as resembling “a separate and warlike tribe” who always walked through the streets in “groups of three or four” and who, if threatened, “executed a kind of flanking motion and very quickly formed a circle, the men facing the outside, the women on the inside” (“New Mirror” 74–75). This family bands together for protection against a sea of hostile whites, believing that “all of us people with this dark skin must help hold the black island inviolate” (“New Mirror” 88). Described in Africa-inflected terms, this family uses a “primitive” method of protection that is aggressive and defensive at the same time. As specimens, they actually promote a certain kind of stereotype, yet their goal is the same as the narrator’s: to protect the vulnerable center. A modern young woman without an aggressive male tribe
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(or community) to accompany her on errands must find other ways to guard herself. Petry’s narrator uses this image as a metaphor for her own family experience. As the protected center of the “tribe” is female, the narrator would locate the “black island” (home) within herself. For her, “holding the black island inviolate” means hiding the “dirty laundry” and keeping her family and the race free from “bad press,” controlling their representations in order to fend off the violations of the white gaze. The “only admittedly black family in an all white community,” her family looks “strange, alien”; they close ranks to protect themselves, keeping “their private lives and their thoughts about people inside the family circle, deliberately separating the life of the family from the life of the drugstore” (“New Mirror” 60). Their racial singularity and “specimen” status mean that their public (“drugstore”) life must be free of taint: all decisions are made “in terms of whether it was good or bad for the drugstore.” To Petry’s narrator, the drugstore, an image for the white gaze as internalized by the hypervigilant public self, becomes “a monstrous, mindless, sightless force that shaped our lives into any old pattern it chose” (60). No matter what tragedy befalls the family, the narrator notes, “you go out in the store and smile and say, ‘Fine, just fine, we’re all fine, nothin’s ever wrong with us culled folks’ ” (68). The white gaze, the “eyes of others,” then, are figured by this narrator as both a blind, irrational monster forcing upon them a certain public image and as emanating from people who are free to act as they wish, uninhibited by stereotype. In this way, she separates the agents behind the gaze from the gaze and its effects, not recognizing the monstrosity of the white norm. Moreover, both “drugstore” and “black island” must be protected from violations from this monster, yet the monster is clearly already on the “island,” having by necessity been internalized by the narrator. To behave “like white people,” then, is in fact to relinquish “natural” behavior altogether.8 In The Street (1946) and The Narrows (1953), Petry’s protagonists attempt to “behave like white people,” believing it to be a kind of freedom. They disown or transcend aspects of their own culture, ideologically or physically crossing the boundaries that separate themselves from whites. Lutie Johnson, Abbie Crunch, and other characters believe in their right to fulfill their dreams, but in each case these dreams intrude on areas of “white” privilege, or are derived from white ideology, and are therefore are destined to fail. Lutie and Abbie refuse to surrender their identity to the “American image of the Negro,” to what Bernard Bell calls “cultural myths” of “pathological black women and men” (106) that determine white perceptions of blacks; both believe that they can, in Franklinian
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fashion, erase every racial “blot” from their identity. They are thus blind to the psychological impact of these stereotypes. Characters who attempt to use ideologies and models of behavior entirely derived from white Americans are not long-lived in Petry’s fiction. Petry thus extends the definition of racial oppression to include not only white society’s constant perception of minorities through the lens of prevailing stereotypes, but the deep and lasting psychological impact of both the stereotypes and the frequently self-destructive reactions to them. In effect, she develops her own version of African American trauma theory, one that explicitly comments on and extends Richard Wright’s. One effect of a rigid defense against stereotype is a community divided on moral grounds, a black bourgeoisie who look down on blacks who do not “credit” the race.9 Projecting racial stereotypes onto the members of this “lower-class” group, the bourgeoisie defines itself against them, keeping them separate yet patrolling the borders relentlessly out of fear of white society’s response. Petry thus features female characters whose differing approaches to the “Jezebel” stereotype pit them against each other when they should be allied. In presenting both points of view, she acknowledges the limitations of previous black women writers’ portrayals of female sexuality. She does so not by breaking with the tradition of the asexual heroine, but by including sexualized minor female characters who act as foils to female protagonists with bourgeois values. Significantly, Petry does not portray her minor characters as fallen or degenerate, thereby highlighting the purity and goodness of the protagonists; rather, the minor characters survive and even flourish during the course of the novel, while the protagonists suffer. Through her narrative support of characters with working-class morals and lifestyles, Petry challenges the white-identified bourgeois standards of the female protagonists; in doing so, she is the first black woman writer to create a literary space for the “legitimate” expression of black female sexuality, a space that up to this point had existed primarily in the songs of the classic female blues singers.10 The Dartmouth History Major, the Black Male Rapist, and the Butler While my focus is this chapter is on female sexuality, I cannot ignore two of Petry’s male characters, Link Williams and Powther of The Narrows, both of whom are affected by sexual stereotype but act in opposition to one another by the end of the novel. In particular, Link’s story is significant because he is a strong, intelligent, educated, and fairly well-adjusted student of African American history who nevertheless has an affair with a
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married white woman and is ultimately falsely accused of rape and murder. In upbringing, education, and emotional balance, Link is entirely dissimilar from Bigger Thomas and Bob Jones, but the story of black male rapaciousness absorbs him into its plot in a very similar way. Having studied Jim Crow and lynchings, Link is surprised to find himself in love with Camilla Treadway Sheffield, and even more surprised at his inability to view her and their relationship outside the lens of stereotype. Commenting on this taboo, Petry herself states, “If you really want to stir the flame of prejudice, then you confront someone with a black man and a white woman. The other way around nobody really gives a hoot” (Ervin, BioBibliography 99). “Nobody” here refers to members of dominant white society, those who guard the “flame of prejudice”; Petry obviously “gives a hoot” about black women’s destructive sexual encounters with white men, as it is the subject of her first novel. Named after the “Emancipator,” Abbie Crunch’s adopted son Link Williams was raised by Abbie to be a “superior specimen,” and he becomes just that, despite her efforts. In a photograph taken of him for a newspaper story, Link looks “like Apollo”: “lordlylooking . . . profile like Barrymore’s . . . an easy carelessness about . . . his body” (365). In addition, Link is “a Phi Beta Kappa from Dartmouth, majored in history, honor graduate of Monmouth High School, football star, basketball star in high school and at Dartmouth . . . in the Navy for four years” (358). Link is confident in himself and in his culture, which he has studied thoroughly. He is a “superior specimen” of his race not because of his education and long list of achievements, but because he doesn’t depend on those achievements for his self-worth (as Abbie’s ideology would have him do11 ). His surrogate father (and Abbie’s nemesis), Bill Hod, who owns the bar across the street from Abbie’s house, has taught Link to respect his heritage and culture, a respect Abbie deformed as she passed on to Link her own bourgeois moral education. As Link recalls, “Bill Hod re-educated him on the subject of race,” teaching him that “black was bestlooking.” As a result, Link feels “fine” and “safe,” unashamed “of the color of his skin” (144–45). Bill Hod’s primary lesson to Link was for him not to accept and internalize racism, but to fight it: “if you were attacked you had to fight back. If you didn’t you would die” (145). As the novel opens, Link has achieved an enviable emotional balance, having seen the world in the Navy, flourished at an Ivy league college, and returned home to tend bar at Bill Hod’s place, the Last Chance, as he says, “safe as a church” in “my end of town” (52). Petry herself admired Link: “here was this man who in so many ways had to battle to survive; and he had survived—and had survived, I would think fairly whole as a person . . . this young man who, I think, was great” (94). In both Link’s and Petry’s comments we see signs
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of the cultural trauma that has affected Link: he has “battled” an upbringing in a racist culture, “survived . . . fairly whole,” and now feels “safe” in his own space. Link has survived and flourished in Horatio Alger style, in fact. Orphaned at a young age, raised (loved, but occasionally neglected and beaten) by his surrogate parents, Link does well enough in high school to get the attention of his white history teacher, who challenges him to write a monograph on slavery after noticing Link’s discomfort with the subject during class. As a result of writing this monograph, Link learns that “once a man knows who he is, knows something of his own history, he can rid himself of selfdoubt” (324). Link’s monograph turns out to be a work of “genius,” leading his teacher to help him get a scholarship to Dartmouth, where the professors “took it for granted that he would be what he wanted to be” (328). Link seems to have been treated, in fact, as if he were white at Dartmouth. Like a combination of Alger’s poor orphaned boys and Ben Franklin, Link is picked out of the crowd for his intellectual talents and, through hard work and determination, elevates himself to a sheltered world of privilege. Unlike his Algerian counterparts, however, Link returns to his roots, Dumble Street, in the red-light section of Monmouth, determined to combine his intellectual aspirations with his enjoyment of his urban culture and community. Until he meets the Treadway heiress, he appears to have achieved his own version of the American Dream. As we begin to see, however, Link has never noticed that he is scarred, that he is missing pieces of himself. His extremely successful early adulthood serves as a prediction of greatness, but actually, Link has been “hunkering down” in Dumble Street, having unconsciously given up (as he later realizes) the idea that he can achieve more. Link’s education about racism undoubtedly ignored its psychological impact, and as Gwen Bergner notes, an account of racism that ignores subjectivity is only half the story because, though race is an ideological construct,” it is “instituted in the subject on the level of the unconscious” (Bergner xxiii). I would suggest that getting “half the story” leads to Link’s false sense of superiority and self-control, then to his affair with Camilla Treadway Sheffield, and finally to his death at the hands of her mother and estranged husband. As John the Barber says about Link, “He’s just one of them young squirts that’s got to try out different ways of breakin’ his own neck, got to keep tryin’ to find out will it break. Tell by lookin’ at him and listenin’ to him. Tell by all that fancy talk he does” (305). Barber is talking about Link’s ski trip, but Link’s “fancy talk” is a sign of the intellectualism that makes him want to test boundaries—particularly the boundary around interracial dating. Yet initially, Link has no conscious desire to do so, and in fact he meets Camilla in a dense, “all-enveloping” fog at night
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that disguises both their races for a time (51). Pursued by the deformed and “repulsive” Cat Jimmie, she runs right into Link’s arms. Initially, he decides she’s a prostitute from “China’s place,” and treats her as such; then when she shows him her car and says she is visiting “the Narrows” because the local paper was “running a series of articles on the relationship between bad housing and crime in this section,” he dismisses her again as “one of those Vassar-Wellesley housing-crime experts” who talk too much and are “dedicated” and “goddam grim” and have “names like Betty and Karen” (62). Educating black women is a waste of time, in Link’s opinion. His attitude toward women in general is extremely condescending and superior, and his willingness to stereotype is in fact a symptom of his having absorbed patriarchal values.12 In the words of Hortense Spillers, these values are part of the “discursive debris” that has “come to rest” on Link, clogging his field of vision and thus preventing him from the kind of self-analysis that Spillers prescribes as part of the “emancipatory project” (“ ‘All the Things’ ” 398–99). It isn’t until they are in a local pub that Link realizes Camilla is white (moments after she appears to realize he’s black), with a belatedness that surprises and puzzles him. Even then he cannot quite convince himself that she isn’t black until their departure in her car, when she says, “You’ve driven one of these before” with “that surprised condescension in the voice,” an “unmistakeable characteristic of the Caucasian . . . they don’t even know they do it” (72). He continues to anatomize her body and react with anger to what he perceives as her attitude of white privilege, while in turn, he “doesn’t even know” he is displaying an attitude of male privilege. When he refuses to turn the car around as she tells him to do, she becomes palpably afraid, and Link realizes why: “I’m due to rape her, or try to, because I’m colored and it’s written in the cards that colored men live for the sole purpose of raping white women” (79). He begins to take great pleasure in her fear, increasing it by pulling the car over, turning the engine off, and leaning toward her. Then, “he stopped grinning because for one moment, one long incredible moment, he wanted to, he wanted to— . . . the impulse absolutely uncontrollable” (79–80). While he imagines that he is only affected by a rapacious impulse at that moment of power, I would argue that his condescension throughout his interaction with her are unconscious defenses against the attraction he feels toward this woman who he knows on some level is not only white but physically “perfect.” During their entire interaction, Link struggles among various reactions to Camilla: critiquing her racism, admiring her beauty, and talking himself into the idea that race doesn’t matter: “she could be purple or blue in this fog . . . All cats are gray in the dark. B Franklin” (71). He is by turns
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hypersensitive to her race and to the black male stereotype that envelopes him by virtue of it, and willing to dismiss race as a category altogether. When he next sees Camilla after two weeks of watching for her, he discovers that she has experienced similar feelings. She explains to him that she was initially attracted by the “clean clear enunciation, the resonance, the timbre” of his “perfectly beautiful speaking voice,” but became confused when she found that the voice was attached to a “colored man” (88). She recounts her struggle to overcome her racism and her decision to seek him out to apologize for it. Unlike Link, she becomes at least partially aware of her prejudice toward him. She clearly doesn’t understand racism, however, saying angrily at one point, “you can stand there safe and superior because you’ve never been afraid of anything in your life” (87). Link never becomes aware of his sexism, accusing her of hysteria in one moment, telling her she’s too beautiful to think in another. Yet he continues to wonder whether “all cats be gray,” whether he might overcome race and see only Camilla’s beauty. Although readers are not allowed to experience Camilla’s point of view, it is clear that Link and Camilla’s initial attraction to each other is not only mutual but based on the same paradoxical racial paradigm. Both are attracted to what they perceive as the other’s surprising combination of imperious confidence and social inferiority. Both have Ivy League educations achieved against all expectations; neither has been willing or able to meet their postgraduate goals. Both are the victims of prejudice and stereotype, although not to the same degree; Camilla recounts the way she was humiliated when she was fat, a common gender-related issue, as well as the way people cease to “see” her when they find out about her money. In fact, Camilla’s spur-of-the-moment alias (designed to disguise her connection to the Treadway money) is Camilo Williams—the male version of Camilla, and Link’s last name—revealing her unconscious desire to inhabit Link’s subjective space. Neither recognizes the meaning and impact of the other’s social oppression. And ultimately, both share a “desire for power” over the other, in part due to their racial and gender positioning (147). Each interprets the other’s gestures as power plays, and neither can be “objective about race,” as Link realizes: “nobody was. Not in the USA” (150). Yet they fall in love, decide in the heat of passion to get married, and proceed to suffer the idealizations and resulting misunderstandings common to new relationships—only the misunderstandings are more violent because they see each other through the lens of a deadly racial stereotype. Ultimately, Link’s disgust with Camilla’s manifestations of white privilege inspires in him a great desire to “rape her,” to “get even” with her “for being rich, for being white, for owning bellboys” (284). He also hits her face hard enough to leave marks. And when
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finally, Link decides that their relationship is over, a drunk and jealous Camilla tells him “I’ll hurt you just like you’ve hurt me.” She screams and rips her clothes and then accuses him of rape when a cop shows up, setting in motion the events leading to his death (319–21). Link eventually comes to see that race isn’t the only factor in his relationship: “no one in the USA [is] free—from warfare, eternal war between the male and the female. Black bastard. White bitch” (258). Despite the fact that Link’s death is contingent upon a set of chance events, his growing recognition of larger social forces at work in his relationship competes with his typically American (and imperialist) feelings of transcendent empowerment: “Oh brave new world, that has such people in’t,” he thinks shortly after meeting Camilla, feeling “as though he could conquer the world” (97–98).13 During his affair with Camilla, Link comes to question his own sense of agency and intellect. During their first hour together, Link imagines the appearance they might make to a provincial white couple; in defending their interracial relationship from the hypothetical farmer’s wife’s screams, he states “It was the hand of Fate. It was an Act of God . . . I was merely the instrument, the vessel” (74). Link’s fate is determined in the same way Bigger’s and Bob’s are, not by God but by stereotypes that have seeped deeply into the collective psyche and that control not only public opinion but his own perspective on his relationship. Toward the end of their relationship, when he has concluded that Camilla is using him sexually, Link wonders if Camilla’s perspective on him is correct and “there’s something wrong” with him that governs his reactions to her (323). “Even now I’m not sure that I was right,” he thinks. “Maybe she was in love with me. Maybe I know too much about the various hells the white folks have been cooking up for the colored folks, ever since that Dutch man of warre landed at Jamestown in 1619 . . . ” to be able to trust Camilla (329). History, it would seem, cannot be mastered to the extent that one can be free of its patterns, but Link doesn’t realize this until too late. After Link’s arrest, the local paper publishes photos designed to inflame public opinion against both Link and Camilla by reviving stereotypes of them (“Convict” and “Harlot”). Link dismisses both events as ridiculous repetitions of a barbaric racist past—until Mrs. Treadway and Camilla’s estranged husband Captain Sheffield kidnap Link and try to force him at gunpoint to confess to rape. Link realizes that the incendiary photos are partly to blame for their murderous anger; “the other three-quarters reaches back to that Dutch man of warre that landed in Jamestown in 1619,” to the origin of American slavery (399). While he has been sensitive to Camilla’s racism all along, Link has neither taken her seriously nor considered her racism’s possible impact on himself until he realizes that
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the Treadways “will never let him get out of this room alive” because a “man who breaks a taboo must die” (401, 403). Realizing belatedly that he is not only a student of racial history but imbedded in its paradigms, Link insists on “using the only weapon he has,” his voice. He denies the rape charge, saying, “The black barkeep and the Treadway Gun were in love.” When Captain Sheffield shoots him in response, Link repeats with his last breath, “The truth is . . . we were in love” (407). As Petry notes in an interview, “the instant that he had said to these people, ‘We were in love,’ it was a death sentence; and there was no way, logically, that he would not be killed” (Ervin 94). Having managed personally to explode every racial stereotype during his twenty-six years, having studied history so as to transcend its pressures and patterns, Link ultimately dies in the usual way, at the hands of vengeful racist whites. Petry insists that no one is immune to the cultural trauma of racism, but she also suggests that those who believe they are immune will be hit hardest. Link’s foil in The Narrows is Malcolm Powther, a man who has not interrogated society’s racial paradigms but rather internalized them, striving to be a “representative” African American, a “credit to the race,” a “specimen.” Powther, as he is called by the other characters in the novel (including his wife), is a butler for the Treadway family, and he gains his feelings of self-worth from his employers. When Mrs. Treadway asks Powther to help her find Link after her daughter Camilla’s accusation of rape has hit the papers, Powther realizes that Mrs. Treadway means to harm Link. Yet Powther manages to justify abetting her: I have to prove he wasn’t my brother. Prove to these people . . . that all Negroes are not criminal, some of them are good, some of them are selfrespecting, some of them are first class butlers named Powther. (Narrows 386)
He is aware that Mrs. Treadway’s racism causes her to lump all Negroes together, evidenced in the fact that she has asked him to point out Link to her simply because Powther is black. “They can’t tell one colored person from another,” he realizes. “Link Williams and I look alike to them” (Narrows 388). This knowledge hurts Powther, as he considers Link to be “worse than thief, worse than murderer, [a] wife stealer,” and adultery is painful to Powther because his own wife is having an affair. Powther needs to separate himself from “criminals” like Link, men who “steal” the wives of rich white husbands, in order to liken himself to the Treadways: he believes that in helping Captain Sheffield and Mrs. Treadway to “get rid” of Link, he and the Captain are “equals, both outraged, both victim, and so we have achieved a kind of togetherness, and in this way I have restored
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a little of my own long lost selfrespect” (Narrows 388). Powther has fully absorbed his servant status into his self-conception, into his identity. His self-worth is predicated on his ability to mimic his employer and distance himself from his inherited culture and those of his race. Yet Powther’s use of metaphor reveals an unconscious discomfort with his servant identity. In considering his alienation from his wife and family since his wife’s affair with Bill Hod, Powther uses spatial imagery that suggests his suppressed feelings about his profession: I have felt as though I were stumbling around in the dark, in a strange house, hunting for a door, fumbling for a door in an unfamiliar house that has no doors. (Narrows 348)
A better metaphor for the experience of alienation from his family would have been the feeling of being locked out of his home, unable to find a way in. Instead, he uses the metaphor of a strange house that he can’t escape; as a metaphor for the self, an “unfamiliar” house without doors signifies Powther’s sense of himself as trapped in a body or in a culture that is not his own, a direct result of his profession. “Keeping house” for whites has shaped his values so that his disdain for his own people and culture is visible to his wife and children, who do not conform to his “Treadway” values. Accordingly, they treat him like an outsider. He is thus unable to be at “home” in his own house, his own culture. The Trauma of Poverty: Cleaning House as Therapy Charles Scruggs and bell hooks both identify a primary effect of racism as the loss of African American homes; hooks argues that black people are globally subjugated by the “perpetual construction of economic and social structures that deprive many folks of the means to make homeplace,” or that cause that homeplace to be violated and destroyed (46–47). For hooks, “homeplace” is a protected space in which “black people” can “strive to be subjects, not objects,” where they “do not directly encounter white racist aggression” (42, 47). Scruggs agrees, explaining that in the twentieth century, “the city increasingly assumes for blacks the contours of a wilderness”; thus “the house becomes not only a refuge from the void and chaos outside but the only potential locus” for the “invisible city,” Scruggs’ symbol of the “community,” the “civilization,” and the “home” black Americans have sought “beneath the city of brute fact” in which they have had to live (217, 4–5). Both descriptions of home and “homeplace” resemble Petry’s dining room, the safe space for subjectivity; both
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descriptions also highlight an essential feature of that space: the presence of community. In her autobiographical short stories, Petry’s dining room is always filled with extended family; it is thus the presence of others, and not simply the four walls of the house, which make “homeplace.” Petry’s protagonists of The Street and The Narrows, however, confuse “homeplace” with “home ownership,” believing that if they can recreate the “clean” bourgeois home (including its isolation), they will find the satisfaction they associate with the white middle class. Lutie Johnson of The Street is convinced that her education, intelligence, and determination will allow her to achieve her birthright; but her naiveté about her racial and sexual inheritance contributes to her downfall. Lutie seems oblivious to her vulnerability as a young, beautiful working-class single mother (married but estranged); she doesn’t notice or take seriously the sexual predators that surround her (even the oppressive, icy wind on 116th street, the location of the apartment Lutie decides to rent, caresses her head and neck). Each of Lutie’s neighbors in “the street” refuses to recognize Lutie as a person, instead viewing her through the lens of the “Jezebel” stereotype. In part because Lutie attempts to downplay or ignore the desires and actions of her neighbors, she is finally overcome by them; her identity as a person is invaded and contaminated by this stereotype—itself a version of rape. Lutie confuses moral safety (propriety) with physical safety, moving out of her father’s house into a ghetto apartment because of the “immoral” influences of her father’s girlfriend Lil. A Jezebel in the flesh (according to Lutie), Lil had begun to corrupt her son Bub, “giving [him] a drink on the sly” and teaching him to smoke cigarettes (Street 10). Lutie had hoped to find a nice apartment in a safe neighborhood, but her poverty forces her to settle (temporarily, she believes) on 116th street while she saves the money to move somewhere else. This street is clearly far more dangerous than her Pop’s house, though, as every one of Lutie’s new neighbors develops a sexual obsession with her. The Super of Lutie’s new building, Jones, begins to “stalk” Lutie, and Mrs. Hedges, a fellow tenant who runs a bordello out of her apartment, attempts throughout the novel to “procure” Lutie for her business partner, Junto, the white owner of the neighborhood bar. Each of these people believes that Lutie is a whore, or that she can be convinced to become one so as to serve their own (sexual or financial) needs. Lutie doesn’t seem to recognize the threat that the Jezebel stereotype holds for her, despite the fact that she became familiar with its prevalence at her previous job as a domestic for a wealthy white family. After noticing Lutie’s beauty, some friends of her employer, Mrs. Chandler, warn her
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Here she was highly respectable, married, mother of a small boy, and . . . knowing all that, these people took one look at her and immediately got that now-I-wonder look. Apparently it was an automatic reaction of white people—if a girl was colored and fairly young, why, it stood to reason she had to be a prostitute. If not that—at least sleeping with her would be just a simple matter . . . the girl would ask [the white men] on sight. (Street 45)
Lutie’s tone of puzzled irritation reveals her belief that this stereotype does not essentially threaten her, that she can keep her private spaces free of it. She believes herself to be self-sufficient and therefore sees no reason why this “queer” attitude should impede her progress. Departing from the dictates of naturalism, Petry allows readers to see Lutie working out her self-conception in an ultimately self-destructive way. Ignoring the Chandler’s racist beliefs about her, Lutie derives her conception of self as a private space from their models of identity. Lutie learns that in order to achieve what they and other whites seem already to possess (not only wealth and success, but an identity free of the effects of racist and sexist stereotypes), she must follow the white path to success: individual materialist achievement. She’s absorbed the Chandlers’ belief in the American Dream, the idea that “anybody could be rich if he wanted to and worked hard enough and figured it out carefully enough,” that, armed with confidence, intelligence, and a high school education, she can climb the “ladder to success” (Street 43, 26). Lutie is blind to the Chandlers’ emotional disfunctions, viewing their lifestyle as the perfect example of a “pure space,” a home. She senses, though, that this lifestyle is a bit out of her reach; working at the Chandlers’ makes her feel as if “she was looking through a hole in a wall at some enchanted garden. She could see, she could hear, she spoke the language of the people in the garden, but she couldn’t get past the wall” (41). In fact, having absorbed their values, Lutie does speak the “language” of the Chandlers, but she denies the fact that the wall around the Chandlers’ paradise is designed to keep her out. Lutie’s denial encompasses not only the racial paradigm in which she is trapped, but the workings of white privilege. In a burst of “selfconfidence,” Lutie compares herself to Ben Franklin, figurehead of the work ethic: “she went on thinking that if Ben Franklin could live on a little bit of money and could prosper, then so could she” (63). Like
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to be careful about leaving Lutie alone with Mr. Chandler, saying “she’s colored and you know how they are.” Lutie finds this belief “queer”:
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Franklin, Lutie sees herself as “representative” of her society, not part of it, an exemplary individual who can rise above the others to enter the “enchanted garden” of success normally reserved for whites. “She had come this far poor and black and shut out as though a door had been slammed in her face. Well, she would shove it open; she would beat and bang on it and push against it and use a chisel to get it open” (186). What Lutie doesn’t see is that Ben Franklin’s race, gender, and family connections supported his “self-made” success, while hers will only impede her progress. However, having chosen the quintessential American Dreamer as her role model and the Chandler paradise as her goal, Lutie works toward physically placing herself in such a “clean” space, in part by keeping herself and her son free from the “dirt” of the Street long enough to escape it for something better. In accepting a white model of identity, Lutie disowns both her culture and her community, placing herself in a vulnerable isolation. Her faith in the “self-made man” story causes her to ignore her own instincts and the teachings of her grandmother, both of which are essential parts of her identity. When Lutie meets the Super of the building she considers renting, she senses the ferocity of his sexual attraction to her and almost leaves the building immediately: “his eyes had filled with a hunger so urgent that she was instantly afraid of him and afraid to show her fear” (10). But she rejects this intuition as irrational, attempting to rationalize her perceptions: “she told herself she was a fool, an idiot, drunk on fear, on fatigue and gnawing worry” (15). At the same time, Lutie rejects her inheritance, a part of which is what Du Bois would call African “second sight”: “you couldn’t be brought up by someone like Granny without absorbing a lot of nonsense . . . all those tales about things that people sensed before they actually happened. Tales that had been handed down and down . . . [from] Africa” (16). In rejecting these cultural tools, Lutie rejects the survival mechanisms of her ancestors, including her Granny, and attempts to claim the Chandler model of self as her own. But Lutie’s belief that the police will “rescue” a poor black woman is a clear sign that she is ignoring the lessons of history.14 Toni Morrison notes that “nice things don’t always happen to the totally self-reliant if there is no conscious historical connection” (“Rootedness” 343); what Lutie rejects as intuition is that history, the collective wisdom of blacks concerning the ways of white folks. This wisdom would tell her of the surprising strength of the Jezebel stereotype as well as the vulnerability of a poor single black woman confronted by those with power, even the limited power of the Super. Instead, she puts her faith in reason, rationality, and the system: “this is New York City in the year 1944,” she tells herself, and “certainly you can holler loud enough so that if the
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gentleman has some kind of dark designs on you and tries to carry them out, a cop will eventually rescue you” (Street 19). Lutie’s reference to the current year is a signal that she has relegated not only her instincts and “African” wisdom but also her society’s racist practices to some distant past. She would thus have no need for Du Bois’ “second sight,” a product of double-consciousness, the ability to “read” the “problematic message emerging from the white community” (Zwarg 12). On the contrary, Lutie seems determined to ignore the coping mechanisms of double consciousness. This is not to say that Lutie has not experienced racism or has learned nothing from her grandmother. Her grandmother’s primary lesson, in fact, is a warning against the sexual predilection of white men: “they ain’t never willin’ to let a black woman alone. . . . Don’t you never let any of ’em touch you,” she warns Lutie as regularly as “a clock ticking” (Street 45). I would interpret this repetition as a manifestation of the grandmother’s suppressed trauma, the black woman’s “primal scene.” Sensing the significance of this warning from its frequency and “gravity,” Lutie allows it to become part of her, “just like breathing” (45–46). Here Petry gives readers a Foucaultian lesson in how ideologies are transmitted and embedded, even conflicting ones (e.g., disliking and distrusting white men yet using them as role models). Lutie’s grandmother’s successfully transmits her message but without contextualizing it, so that while Lutie knows that white men have a sexual obsession with black women, she remains unaware of the way that sexual obsession has been justified and institutionalized. Perhaps sensing that lack of awareness, she observes “the funny part of it,” that “she was willing to trust them and their motives without question” (46). Her trust in whites is “funny” to her because they are so quick to distrust her; for readers, it’s “funny” that Lutie continues to believe she can travel white paths to personal success unmolested by the “rattlesnakes” (white men). Abbie Crunch of The Narrows, on the other hand, is hyper-aware of the dangers of racial stereotype. To counteract them, she has made herself a “specimen,” dedicating her life to being a credit to her race. Abbie has achieved some of Lutie’s dreams: she owns her own home on a somewhat less impoverished street, and she makes enough money by renting out rooms in her home and mending to live comfortably. Abbie similarly rejects her “people” and culture, applying to them the same stereotypical terms whites use. She “didn’t like the stories” her husband would tell about his family because “they were an emotional primitive people, whose existence even in the past seemed somehow to be an affront to the things [she] believed in, and stood for” (Narrows 36). Also, like Lutie, Abbie is determined to avoid appearing to share any of the characteristics of the
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“nigger,” whether it be the “bad black woman,” the slovenly downtrodden mother, or the wizened old crone. But where Lutie is naively unaware of the strengths of stereotypes, Abbie’s awareness of them suggests a “traumatic neurosis,” one manifestation of which is her double-consciousness. After she passes the well-dressed Powther on the street, Abbie feels “impelled to take a mental inventory of her appearance,” wondering if she looked shabby or old to him. She is fully conscious of this hypersensitivity to appearance: “all my life I’ve been saying to myself, What will people think? And at seventy I wouldn’t be apt to stop doing it” (Narrows 7–8). Abbie has attempted to pass this obsession on to her son Link, telling him that colored people . . . had to be cleaner, smarter, thriftier, more ambitious than white people, so that white people would like colored people . . . you had to be polite; you had to be punctual; you couldn’t wear bright-colored clothes, or loud-colored socks; and even certain food was forbidden . . . the funny thing about it was that when Abbie talked about The Race she sounded as though she weren’t colored, and yet she obviously was. (138–39)
Abbie doesn’t sound as though she were colored because, like Lutie, she has adopted the morals and values of whites; just as Lutie models herself after Ben Franklin, Abbie tries to emulate and surpass white people using their own standards, visibly diverging from the beliefs and behaviors associated with her own race. Her self-conception reveals that psychologically, she has done both; in describing herself earlier as “the Englishman dressing for dinner even in the jungle,” she indicates her self-imposed isolation from those she considers less “civilized” than herself (38). Abbie knows she will never be admitted to the Chandler paradise, but perhaps out of her own history of trying to gain entry into the garden, she still behaves as if the garden gatekeepers are watching and judging her. One of the ways, then, that people are “deprived of the means to make homeplace” is their internalization of the white gaze; a more direct means is the constriction of the poor into crowded, drafty, unstable homes. The lack of a secure home and thus a sense of place translates for Lutie into general insecurity and self-blame. Because the Super, Jones, has access to Lutie’s home and to her latchkey son Bub, he is easily able to penetrate her personal space, part of his pathological campaign of sexual harassment. Alone in her apartment one afternoon, he opens up her closet and fondles her blouses, crushing one of them “violently,” squeezing the “soft thin material tighter and tighter until it was a small ball in his hands” (Street 108). Eventually Lutie discovers that the Super is “something less than human,” but she doesn’t consider leaving the apartment or finding some kind of protection for herself, despite her realization that the “dirty”
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Super has invaded her clean home and contaminated her possessions. This is because she begins to feel responsible for his interest (just as she already feels responsible for her own poverty). After the Super’s attack, Lutie is filled “with a sick loathing of herself,” and looks for “something about her” that might have “subtly suggested to the Super that she would welcome his love-making,” or might have “led Mrs. Hedges to believe that she would leap at the opportunity to make money sleeping with white men” (240–41). She fears that the Jezebel stereotype has invaded her physical appearance or behavior in some unnoticed manner—which it has. In working to separate herself from the Jezebel image, Lutie has had to internalize it. A central part of the middle-class value system to which Lutie and Abbie adhere is white domestic ideology. A “crucial institution of civilization” to “middle-class women and men,” the home “preserved those social virtues endangered by the public world,” or the world of the street; along with the woman who “keeps” it, it is meant to be “enclosed, protected, and privatized” (Stansell 93). Working poor women find it difficult to practice this ideology in their own homes. Their long hours at lowpaying jobs (most often, ironically, as domestics in the homes of white women) deprive them of the resources to make their rooms or apartment feel like the middle-class version of “home.” Having failed to fortify her “sacred space,” to protect it from the invasion of the Jezebel stereotype, Lutie initially concludes that she has not been an adequate housekeeper. She eventually decides that she lives in a “dirty, dark filthy . . . apartment that no amount of scrubbing would ever get really clean” (Street 146). In using her apartment as a metaphor of self, Lutie reveals that her determination to create a “clean space” stems more from her desire to avoid immorality and less from an awareness of the dangers of homelessness, of full exposure to the “culture of white supremacy” (hooks 42).15 Abbie, too, substitutes for her fear of the Jezebel stereotype an obsession with literal and metaphoric “dirt.” She is appalled by sexuality, sensuality, and any physical pleasure involving the body, especially those that are deemed immoral by society. Abbie’s “dirt” is comparable to what Toni Morrison describes as “funkiness”: the “dreadful funkiness of passion, the funkiness of nature, the funkiness of the wide range of human emotions” (Bluest Eye 68). Abbie’s fixation on fighting “funk” ultimately leads her to ignore her husband and son when they need her the most.16
The Real Jezebel: The Blues Woman Persona Because Lutie and Abbie are attractive protagonists, readers might conclude that Petry condones their bourgeois values, when in fact she ensures
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that we question them. She does so by including minor characters who act as foils to Lutie and Abbie, inhabiting in their own ways the identity the protagonists most fear: Jezebel. Petry allows her minor characters to become powerful, sexually active working-class black women, something that had been almost a contradiction in terms in literature up to 1946. At this time, the only cultural precedent for such a woman was the female blues singer. Blues singers in urban areas performed in red-light districts, “the hub of a local underworld economy, the site of a night-life subculture, and a haven for American have-nots” (Barlow 115). Considered by the black church to be the “Devil’s music,” the blues quickly became associated in the public mind with the other elements of this underworld culture: gambling, prostitution, the numbers racket, voodoo and conjure, and, most importantly, the working classes (Oakley 116; Oliver 155).17 And the effect was mutual: “nurtured by an underworld ethos,” blues discourse “remained in opposition to the prevailing white culture,” but it came to “illuminate the day-to-day realities of African-American life in the tenderloin enclaves” (Barlow 117) instead of those of Southern agricultural life in which it originated. Blues singers consciously played with these “underworld” themes, developing them into a “blues praxis”: “as cultural rebels, the blues artists adopted any number of personas.” For female singers, these personas included “hoodoo queens, matriarchs, wild women, [and] lesbians,” and they “achieved mythical stature in the black community, constituting a black pantheon separate from—and in many ways antithetical to— the white heroes and heroines of middle-class America” (Barlow 327). Bessie Smith, for example, was an “unabashed rebel, openly defiant of bourgeois conventions and the oppressive social relations between the races, the sexes, and the classes in American society” (165). As a “cultural rebel,” then, a blues woman would consider the Jezebel persona a necessary part of both her performance and her lifestyle; that persona was accepted by those (artists and most of the working classes) sharing her values.18 Middle-class blacks or working-class blacks who retained a bourgeois Christian morality could not condone blues music or its attendant culture.19 The blues singer was considered by the bourgeois-identified black woman to be “fallen,” promiscuous, disgraceful—the worst example of black womanhood. Perhaps because of the risk to the image of black women, female blues singers would not appear as literary protagonists until three decades later, beginning with Gayl Jones’ Corregidora (1975). In general, however, women blues singers depicted in literature typically do not appear on center stage but rather as “liminal figures that play out and explore the various possibilities of a sexual existence” (Carby “It Jus Be’s” 241). While
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an openly sexual female character might be intended to subvert the dominant culture’s attitudes toward black female sexuality, the fact is that a reader titillated by that character’s performance is continuing to objectify that performer both racially and sexually. Similarly, a prominent figure such as Bessie Smith, whose performance and music helped to transform the image of black women by making them “sexual subjects,” was still making herself into a sexual spectacle in her shows. Blues singers dressed elaborately and ostentatiously, emphasizing “all the desirable aspects of their body,” and Smith was no exception.20 Michele Russell acknowledges that in this display, “blues singers like Bessie reduced black women’s collective shame at being rape victims . . . by emphasizing the value of [their] allure” (131). On one hand, Russell celebrates Smith’s display of “allure” as subversive, seeing her as a black woman assuming control of her own sexual image. On the other hand, she avoids discussing Smith’s performance as a titillation of her (white and black) audiences, as what bourgeois blacks might consider a self-objectification that degrades all black women.21 Petry seems to want to challenge the literary repression of black female sexuality, yet she cannot explicitly celebrate “transgressive” sexuality without offending bourgeois black readers and confirming stereotypes in the minds of white readers. She skirts these risks by creating minor characters who fulfill the function of the “liminal” blues woman Carby describes, in that they resist allowing their sexual identity, and thus their female identity, to be determined by a class to which they do not belong. Failing to become the middle-class housewife, the working-class woman can turn to another model: the persona of the female blues singer, who rejects domestic ideology and makes herself comfortable in the “uncivilized” world of the street. She has “broken out of the boundaries of the home” and taken her “sensuality and sexuality out of the private into the public sphere,” into the dangerous “outdoors” (Carby “It Jus Be’s” 247). Petry’s minor characters reside somewhere between these two fantasies of female identity. Min (of The Street) and Mamie Powther (of The Narrows) wish to avoid the dangers of the streets, but the practice of domesticity is extremely difficult and ultimately harmful to them. Petry does not mark these women as heroines, only gradually introducing the reader to an understanding of their points of view and circumstances. Initially, Min and Mamie are dismissed and detested by their respective protagonists, Lutie and Abbie, and thus by the reader (who is aligned with the protagonist’s point of view). Seen through a narrative filter, Min and Mamie are judged by the standards of the central characters; when they are eventually given their own point of view, readers’ judgments grow more sympathetic.22 The reader’s corresponding judgment
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of the protagonists’ morals thus undergoes a change: the protagonists now seem elitist, repressed, and white-identified (although still heroic in their struggle against oppression), which is precisely Petry’s point. Petry certainly doesn’t romanticize street life for a single woman; ultimately, though, she maintains in these two novels that the working-class black woman’s internalization of white domestic ideology destroys her family. Moreover, the main character’s dismissal or avoidance of the “blues woman” eventually leads to her downfall: because Min and Mamie are familiar with sexuality and violence and connected with their communities, they know a way out of the oppressive prison in which Lutie and Abbie are trapped, but they do not share their knowledge. The practice of domestic ideology has left Lutie and Abbie without a “community of resistance,” a central part of hooks’s definition of “homeplace” (hooks 42).23 In hooks’s view, a true security, one that would provide protection from stereotype and invasion, is afforded by a communal presence; four walls alone do not a safe space make. Lutie lacks a community that might have provided her with shelter, having cut herself off from friends and family in her search for capitalist success: “during th[e] years she had worked in the laundry and gone to school at night, she had lost . . . all her friends” as well as her Granny, who “could have told her what to do if she had lived” (Street 76). Lutie can see that Harlem is itself a kind of community; she realizes that she “never felt really human until she reached Harlem and . . . got away from the hostility in the eyes of the white women . . . [and] the openly appraising looks of the white men” (57). But because of her self-sufficiency and snobbery, Lutie never attempts to access this community.24 While Abbie has a good friend, Frances, who supports and guides her, Abbie’s self-appointed role as credit to the race leads her to reject everyone on her street, particularly Bill Hod, who “controlled or operated every illegal, immoral, illicit enterprise in The Narrows— though nobody could prove it” (Narrows 15).25 Bill is Abbie’s “devil” not only because he embodies “dirt,” but because he gives “dirt” a good name by acting responsibly during her own crises; he is a constant threat to her fragile ideology.26 Both women’s bourgeois values prevent them from embracing alliances with sexualized minor characters, alliances that might have given their stories different endings. By setting her minor characters against her protagonists in this way, Petry avoids controversy in her challenge to bourgeois sexual values. Acknowledging the necessity of shelter while critiquing the type of shelter that constitutes the middle-class norm for women, Petry defines home apart from domestic ideology. In their positions at the margins of domesticity, in the space between the home and the street, her minor characters challenge the dichotomies that define society, separating the
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classes and genders: public vs. private, mobility vs. stasis, single vs. married, Jezebel vs. housewife. Women whose “blues” are caused by a deadly combination of racism, sexism, and poverty cannot act like a man and “catch a freight train,” but neither should they “go to their rooms and hide.” Rather, they must learn to move between the home (the pure, private domestic space) and the street (the “dirty,” communal public arena). Neither space provides them with a home, but the culture and community they find in the street can help them to transform domestic ideology to suit their needs, which in turn fortifies them to brave the dangers of the street. Both finally develop their liminal position into a personal security that does not depend on domestic space (and that thus challenges ideas of respectability); in doing so, they achieve a measure of freedom normally accorded only to men. In mainstream society, the two spheres, home and street, are mutually exclusive to some degree: if a woman has a public, sexual identity, she is by definition not “pure” and private. Min, in fact, initially (and unsuccessfully) attempts to combine these two spheres, as she tries to use her sexuality to keep herself housed. Yet Petry’s novel indicates that sexual freedom, and thus personal satisfaction, for black women will be achieved only when they are freed from these dualities. Bessie Smith flaunts this freedom in her song “Tain’t Nobody’s Business If I Do”: If I go to church on Sunday, Then just shimmy down on Monday, Tain’t nobody’s business if I do do do do. (1923)
Her celebration of the seeming incongruity of her behavior reveals that she has managed to create a new version of female identity in which the spiritual comfort of religious practice does not conflict with the sexual delight of “shimmying down” in public clubs. Petry’s Mamie refuses to participate in these dualities, making use of the blues to secure for herself just such an identity; similarly, after seeing a root doctor, Min begins to question domestic ideology and to develop an inner security, an internal “home.” As part of her challenge to bourgeois convention, then, Petry questions the topological basis for the “ideal” home and thus for the “ideal” female identity; if a secured space is prerequisite for both, then how can working-class women achieve either? Analyses of the concept of “home” and house agree that, as Elaine Scarry notes, the walls of the house prevent “undifferentiated contact with the world” and secure “for the individual a stable internal space” in which to develop an identity (38–39). Gaston Bachelard has analyzed the image of the house as “the non-I that
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protects the I,” a protected space (one with great depth and significance in the human imagination) that shelters “daydreaming” and integrates our “thoughts, memories and dreams” (5–6). And as previously noted, hooks’ term “homeplace” describes the ideal African American home, a protected yet communal space where “black people could affirm one another and by so doing heal many of the wounds inflicted by racist domination” (hooks 42, 47). These images of shelter stress the fundamental need for a secure and protected space that can allow the inhabitant to rest, heal, and then to daydream—a space that is typically unavailable to working-class black women for both financial and gender-based reasons (a woman of any class dependent on a man, with or without children, is not guaranteed either safety or privacy). Both Min and Mamie live in the homes of others: Min lives rent-free in her abusive lover’s apartment, and Mamie first lives alone in a run-down rooming house and then rents rooms (with her family) in Abbie’s house. Without a private space, neither woman can be considered an ideal housewife. Both, however, finally realize that space is not necessary for home. To construct alternative forms of home that would nurture the kind of “daydreaming” (Bachelard 6) or “affirmation” (hooks 42) they require, Min and Mamie turn to two forms of “low culture,” conjure and blues, respectively. Each of these forms was labeled “primitive” by the dominant culture of the time, denoting that those who participate in it are equally primitive, uneducated, and “slavish.”27 Yet these cultural practices allow Min and Mamie to develop within themselves the capacity for reflection and analysis, both of which enable an inner peace and security. Sherley Anne Williams argues that blues songs are themselves “the creation of reflection,” that the “blues singer strives to create an atmosphere in which analysis can take place” (“The Blues Roots” 125). The typical blues song acts as a reflection on and interpretation of a common social problem, allowing members of the audience to discover themselves mirrored by the singer; they then contemplate the singer’s interpretation and develop their own. Root doctors, too, provide a mirror for the problems their clients face by accepting and understanding these problems and drawing on their clients’ personal narrative and interpretation in order to develop solutions. They “aid the sufferer in mobilizing his psychological, spiritual, and bodily resources to return to a state of well-being” (Watson 15).28 Both cultural forms allow poor black women, often kept running after the elusive dream of survival for themselves and their children while fending off pressure and oppression by black and white men, to meditate on themselves and their lives. Blues and conjure are not greatly affected by dominant ideologies such as domesticity or individualism (another ideology Petry critiques in The Street), which tend to tear down the confidence
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of poor women unable to fulfill their tenets—which, in fact, tend to interfere with poor women’s ability to create adequate homes. Rather, blues and conjure provide these women with the tools to create alternative versions of home. While both characters challenge middle-class domestic standards, Min and Mamie are not identical, but rather depict progressively more radical points along a continuum of unconventional female behavior. I argue that this continuum mirrors Petry’s own increasing interest in challenging the bourgeois morality of both her protagonists and her readers, and in creating a new space for working-class black women’s identity, sexuality, and culture. As Petry’s first sexualized female character, Min is initially less interested in breaking rules than in preserving the status quo (her precarious position as working “housewife”). Min is a character in flux; it is only at the end of the novel that she can begin to discard the value system she’s absorbed from her white employers and her surroundings, one that finds power in consumerism, domestic improvement, and traditional gender roles. Petry’s second novel, Country Place, depicts the sexual transgressions of a middle-class white woman, Glory, whose husband Johnnie (also white) has been away fighting the war. The narrator of this novel, a white male druggist, is admittedly “prejudiced against women,” considering them to be “closer to the primitive,” so that Glory’s extramarital affair marks her as degraded in racialized terms. Yet Petry’s portrayal of Johnnie’s marital rape of Glory upon his arrival back in town complicates this judgment; Glory is a victim of domestic ideology even as she breaks its rules.29 She is more transgressive than Min, but less so than Mamie of The Narrows, who has adopted “blues praxis” as her personal philosophy and completely transforms her own household so as to provide herself with maximum pleasure and power. Mamie Smith Powther is a true blues woman, named by Petry after the first recorded blues singer, Mamie Smith.30 Mamie plays at the role of housewife and mother, but does not absorb domestic values in the process. Rather, she adheres to the values of the “street,” of the blues singer: she is in full control of her sexuality, yet she uses it to recreate her home. Mamie’s great appeal for readers and her ability to create a change in the rigid attitudes of her foil, Abbie Crunch, is a mark of the development of Petry’s critique of bourgeois values and her support for black working-class cultural products such as blues and conjure. The blues woman makes use of her voice and her body, aspects of her person traditionally controlled by men, to give herself agency in the public realm: she transforms qualities that have traditionally made her a sexual object into aspects of immense female power. Critic bell hooks describes the manner in which black women are “silenced” by
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men in the home: they are trained to talk “the right speech of womanhood” (6). While white women are often overtly silenced, hooks claims, black women are encouraged to speak, but their speech “is itself a silence” because it is “talking that is simply not listened to,” a kind of chattering or nagging ignored by husbands and even children (6–7). The blues woman, in contrast, is paid to sing—her every word is absorbed, repeated, and discussed by her audience. But blues singers put on a physical show as well: the classic blues women of the 1920s were “gorgeous,” and their physical presence was both “a crucial aspect of their power” and a “representation of female desire” (Carby “It Jus Be’s” 247). Flashy and voluptuous, Mamie Powther too is “gorgeous”; according to Abbie, she is “young,” but has “too much fat around the waist, a soft, fleshy, quite prominent bosom, too much lipstick, a pink beflowered hat, set on top of straightened hair . . . good teeth, even, strong” (Narrows 17). Abbie disapproves of Mamie’s appearance, which is intended to emphasize her “allure,” but she feels drawn to Mamie—perhaps because Mamie represents her “female desire” so strongly. Mamie’s voice, too, draws attention: “there was music in the woman’s voice, a careless, easy kind of music,” Abbie notes with irritation (Narrows 18). As a blues woman, Mamie confronts Abbie’s bourgeois sense of decency, but her hypnotic voice and her buxom figure capture Abbie’s attention, just as they capture the admiration and desire of everyone else in Monmouth. Perhaps to minimize the impact of her first sexualized female character, Petry initially portrays Min as insignificant, practically invisible to the other characters and to the reader. Min’s strategy for survival has been the opposite of Mamie’s: where Mamie commands attention, Min camouflages herself, the better to keep out of range of male violence. Thus in her first appearance in The Street, Min (who is not initially given a name) is described by Lutie as “shapeless,” “small,” “toothless,” and “dark.” These words do not describe Lutie, who is charismatic and strikingly beautiful, but they make Min forgettable as a character (although the word “dark” is a subtle comment on Lutie’s colorism). A “shrinking withdrawal in her way of sitting, as though she were trying to take up the least possible amount of space,” erases Min from Lutie’s consciousness; after a few minutes, Lutie “completely forgot the woman was in the room” (Street 24). The only other time Lutie thinks of Min, she describes her as a “drab drudge so spineless and limp she was like a soggy dishrag” (57). This overdetermined description turns out to be incorrect; Min’s backbone becomes gradually more visible to the reader (if not to Lutie). But apart from her appearance, what signifies Min’s class status and value system, and thus allows Lutie to categorize and dismiss her, is her prized possession, her table:
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Like Min, Lutie has worked as a domestic, but she has refused to accept unappealing castoffs from her own employer. Because middle-class readers are accustomed to admire those who share their value systems (even those in the working class, like Lutie) and to ignore “shapeless” and seemingly degraded characters, they too “forget” about Min easily enough. Particularly in novels of social realism, readers are encouraged to view characters like Min as part of the cultural waste that the Algeresque hero must transcend. But Petry does not allow the reader to erase Min so easily, and in giving her a voice partway through the novel, she forces readers to correct their preconceptions and acknowledge Lutie’s class snobbery, if not their own. What Lutie doesn’t know about Min’s table is that its value inheres not in its appearance, but in its function as a survival mechanism: the table is the “best place to keep money [Min] had ever found.” Min “loved” the way it looks, “but the important thing about it was that secret drawer it contained. Until she got the table she had never been able to save any money . . . the table would protect her money” from her abusive “husbands” (116). As Bachelard notes, in the poetic imagination, objects like wardrobes and desks with drawers are “veritable organs of the secret psychological life” (78). Min’s ugly table misleads Lutie into overlooking Min’s “secret psychological life,” one that mirrors Lutie’s in many significant respects. Min’s secret drawer shelters her dreams: saving money is part of her plan to make herself more appealing to men and middle-class society (she plans to buy false teeth) so that she can achieve a secure middle-class home—which is what Lutie wants, too. However, Lutie refuses to see herself reflected in Min, thus losing the chance to develop a friendship with her that could have saved Lutie’s life from destruction: Min is aware that the Super is planning to harm Lutie and her son, and while she contemplates telling Lutie that “it wasn’t a good idea to let [Lutie’s son Bub] hang around with Jones,” she never does so, primarily because of the distance Lutie has placed between them (Street 114). In this way, Petry forces the reader to see that it is precisely Lutie’s middle-class ambitions that cost her a valuable ally and, as a result, her own happiness.32 Min also comes up short in Lutie’s estimation for her apparent lack of interest in domesticity; Lutie’s sense of self-worth depends on having
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It was a very large table . . . looking at it [Lutie] thought, That’s the kind of big ugly furniture white women love to give to their maids. She turned to look at the shapeless little woman because she was almost certain the table was hers. (Street 24)31
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a clean, comfortable home, and she judges the worth of others on these criteria. Lutie claims with distaste that nothing has been done to “make [Jones’s apartment] look homelike,” a job that clearly falls to Min, the woman of the house (24). However, Min is quite interested in the appearance of her home, in part because she wants “to show how grateful she was” to Jones for letting her live with him rent-free. She buys “a canary bird and a large ornate cage . . . because she felt she ought to pretty the place up a little bit.” She also cooks and cleans the apartment, adhering to traditional domestic values even to the point of being fulfilled simply by Jones’ need for her: “she didn’t know when she had ever been so happy” (117). For the greater part of the novel, Min longs for the resources to fulfill her domestic duties, but she succeeds in making the apartment more “homelike” even without them. Jones admits that when Min had come to live with him two years previously, “it was kind of cheerful to have her around, she kept the place from getting so deadly quiet” with her “talking, talking, talking” (98). Min’s canary-like attempts to communicate and her cheerful attitude are the makings of a home, but neither Lutie nor Min can see this because they view themselves and others through the lens of middle-class domestic ideology. Having dismissed Min, the reader might be taken aback when Petry gives her a narrative point of view, particularly when it reveals her strength, common sense, and ambition. The first indication of Min’s intelligence is, paradoxically, her own awareness that Jones thinks she’s stupid: “he don’t know me. He thinks I don’t know what’s the matter with him” (113). And while Min’s transgressive sexuality is what most clearly marks her as “degraded,” she is relatively unashamed of her sexual unions, calling the men in her life her “husbands” although she knows they are not.33 While she regrets the way she is forced to live, she doesn’t condemn herself as “fallen”; this reveals not Min’s ignorance of middle-class moral standards, which she certainly respects, but rather her awareness that her own moral standards are derived from a different culture and class. Min’s ability to resist some of the aspects of bourgeois ideology that could interfere with her physical and emotional survival will eventually prepare her to criticize and even reject that ideology. At first, however, Min directs her strength and her skills of manipulation and secrecy (derived from her experience of invisibility) toward her goal of entering the middle class by purchasing its trappings. When Jones develops an obsession with Lutie and decides to get rid of Min, the taste for consumer power Min has developed during two rent-free years drives her to seek help from Mrs. Hedges, the intimidating madam who lives in the building. “I ain’t never had nothing of my own before,” she says to Mrs. Hedges. “No money to spend like I wanted to.” And now that
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“that Mis’ Johnson come here to live,” Min knows that Jones will “be putting [her] out pretty soon.” She vows, “I ain’t goin’ back to having nothing. . . . And I ain’t goin’ to be put out” (119–20). Min’s goal is to prevent Jones from evicting her, not to create a better relationship with him. Her extra money has allowed her to outfit herself and her domestic space with a few middle-class accessories; having created what she sees as a bourgeois-style “nest” for herself in Jones’ apartment, she vows to fortify its walls by securing her position there. Yet Min steps outside the bounds of middle-class moral codes when she agrees to Mrs. Hedges’ suggestion that she seek the services of a root doctor, a practitioner of voodoo who combines herbs, roots, and human and animal parts with ceremonies to effect “curses” or “cures” for various ills affecting people.34 Min’s solution is thus in tension with her dilemma— how to retain her “bourgeois” domestic space. Petry doesn’t comment on or attempt to resolve this contradiction, nor does she use it to portray Min as confused. Min realizes that her preacher would disapprove of her actions, yet she considers conjure to be far more powerful than the church: “even the preacher must know there were some things the church couldn’t handle, had no resources for handling. And this was one of them—a situation where prayer couldn’t possibly help” (122–23). In acknowledging the church’s limitations as a practical source of aid, Min reveals her perhaps unconscious belief that it is a kind of trapping, at least in her life. Nowhere in the novel does she explain the benefits she receives in attending church, easily abandoning it for folk remedies in her time of crisis. Petry’s narrative silence serves, in my view, as a subtle acceptance of folk belief as a supplement or even an alternative to mainstream Christianity. Unsurprisingly, dominant society has considered the belief in conjure to be a sign of working-class values, of a lack of education and sophistication. The common “educated” attitude toward practitioners has been that, “overt and natural means of obtaining justice being forbidden” to them, it is natural that, “brought up in ignorance, and trained in superstition, [they] should invoke secret and supernatural powers to redress [their] wrongs” (Bacon and Herron 360). Viewed from a more sympathetic standpoint, however, practitioners of folk medicine are not irrational, but logical in their worldview: they assume “a total coherence in the operation of the world” so that “whatever happened was caused,” not accidental or random (Jackson 261; his emphasis). The appeal of conjure was the idea that what had been caused could be altered—that circumstances could be controlled by those who were otherwise powerless: “there was no justice in the courts for [poor blacks] and no regular source of financially reasonable medical aid from the white doctors in town” (Jackson 267). Unable to trust any aspect of white-dominated society, believers like Min placed
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“the most implicit faith in the conjure doctor’s power,” a faith that frequently allowed conjuration to succeed (Bacon and Herron 361). Because this faith in the power of conjure was shared by those it was used by and against, a good part of its efficacy was psychological; one who knew he had been conjured would manifest the symptoms expected of him. This faith in conjure gave it the power to elude attempts by the dominant belief system to destroy it; belief in conjure became only stronger as it went “underground.” While the use of conjure is not necessarily subversive simply because it is unsanctioned by the dominant culture, Min’s use of it constitutes an act of protest. According to John Dollard, magical practices are reformist, not revolutionary: magic “accepts the status quo; it takes the place of political activity, agitation, organization, solidarity, or any real moves to change status. . . . Magic, in brief, is a control gesture, a comfort to the individual, an accommodation attitude to helplessness” (qtd. in Jackson 267). While Min’s use of conjure is initially intended to preserve the status quo, it ultimately alters her view of herself and her society. As she sits in the rootdoctor’s office, Min realizes that her act of seeking community-based aid for her problem is the “first defiant gesture she had ever made.” Going to the root doctor has given her the opportunity to reflect on herself, itself a radical change in her behavior. “Up to now,” she realizes, “she had always accepted whatever happened to her without making any effort to avoid a situation or to change one. . . . Never once had she protested” the terrible working conditions she experiences as a domestic, or the abuse by her “various husbands” (Street 126–27). Nor does Min plan to lapse into passivity upon meeting the “Prophet David,” as the root doctor is known: she analyzes the women around her and the Prophet himself, wondering if he is just “stringing along” the other customers. Min vows that she won’t be taken in: she’ll “look up another root doctor that was honest” if this one isn’t (131). Not only in the process of taking action, but also in the very act of reflection and analysis, Min evolves from a passive person to an active one, from object to subject. Just as she becomes a speaking subject in the narrative when the story shifts to her point of view, we see her develop her subjectivity through the act of reflecting on herself. Min’s willingness to use conjure can thus be considered personally “revolutionary.” The root doctor’s power lies not only in the manipulation of occult forces, but in the manipulation of the psyches of both customer and “patient” (typically the customer’s husband, lover, or relative). For women customers, receiving empowerment from the conjure doctor has an immediate effect that only adds to the “prescription’s” effectiveness; Min decides while in the waiting room that the Prophet David at the very least “deserves some credit for making that fidgety woman look so
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happy” (131). The Prophet effects this transformation by creating a dialogue, what bell hooks defines as “the sharing of speech and recognition,” with his customers (hooks 6). The Prophet listens to Min’s words with attention and respect: his eyes “didn’t contain the derisive look [Min] was accustomed to seeing in people’s eyes” (133). Min is used to being ignored by men when she speaks “the right speech of womanhood,” as are, no doubt, most of the Prophet’s other female clients.35 But talking to the Prophet David is “the most satisfying experience she had ever known . . . the satisfaction she felt was from the quiet way he had listened to her, giving her all of his attention. No one had ever done that before” (136). In creating a dialogue with Min, the Prophet gives her a fuller recognition of her value as a person and reinforces her desire to survive, to outwit Jones. The powders and potions the Prophet sells to Min aren’t simply meant to build her confidence in herself: the Prophet uses the objects to influence the “patient” as well, often to instill a fear of and respect for the customer. The Prophet tells Min that he can’t “promise results” on “taking Jones’ mind off the young lady” (Lutie), but he can “fix things so [Min] won’t be put out” (134). He gives her a glass vial filled with a red liquid that he instructs her to put into Jones’ coffee each morning—“just one drop. No more”; he also gives her candles to burn, a crucifix to hang over her bed (“to keep [her] safe at night”), and a “very powerful” green powder that will stop Jones “if he gets violent” or if he tries to put her out (135). Finally, he instructs her to “clean the apartment every day . . . until there isn’t a speck of dirt anywhere.” The Prophet does not explain to Min how any of this functions on either a psychological or a magical level, nor is the magical aspect of the conjure ever made clear in the text, perhaps reflecting Petry’s view that conjure’s effectiveness is purely psychological. In any case, the conjure works. While Jones is unimpressed by the newfound “energy and firmness about the way” Min walks after her visit to the root doctor, he immediately restrains his violent tendencies toward her when he sees the cross she’s hung over the bed: “to him a cross was an alarming and unpleasant object, for it was a symbol of power . . . mixed up in his mind with . . . the powers of darkness it could invoke against those who outraged the laws of the church” (140). When she hangs the cross in the bedroom, Min claims that room, for Jones will no longer enter it. Jones soon begins to hallucinate crosses all over the apartment; combined with Min’s cleaning frenzy, this undermines his control of their communal space. Min had “changed lately,” Jones realizes: “she dominated the apartment. She cleaned it tirelessly, filled with some unknown source of strength that surged through her” (293). Her fervent cleaning gives Min the (obviously limited) power of “homemaker” she craves; instead of being
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a “shrinking” presence, Min uses conjure to claim a territory for herself—a domestic territory. Mamie Powther also “dominates” any space she is in “so that you saw nothing but Mamie,” but her power to do so comes from her revolutionary attitude toward domesticity and toward the street itself (Narrows 25). After observing Mamie hanging laundry outside the kitchen window, Abbie Crunch concludes that Mamie is neither maternal nor domestic. Exuding a powerful sexuality, she “simply doesn’t belong in that neat backyard with its carefully tended yard and its white fences,” that backyard which is the essence of home ownership (25). Abbie feels that it’s “somehow natural to eliminate Mrs.” from Mamie Powther’s name because she doesn’t act or appear like “a man’s wife, permanently attached,” but like “an unattached unwifely female” (25). Here Abbie reproduces the common distinction between “wife” (whose sexuality is contained) and “unwifely female” (whose sexuality is dangerously uncontained). In the final analysis, Mamie represents the street Abbie lives on, which has become a red-light area since she bought the house: “Mamie Powther was Dumble Street” (21).36 Abbie has dedicated her life to maintaining a strict boundary between her house and the street; with Mamie inhabiting her upstairs apartment, the boundary breaks down and the street takes up residence. “Unwifely” and clearly sexual, Mamie embodies the qualities of the street, yet she appears to be somewhat “domestic,” as she tends to the usual activities of a wife and mother (in this instance, doing the laundry). She is no sloven; neither is she a “lady.” She is somehow both, and neither. Through her blues praxis, Mamie breaks boundaries between home and street, between “housewife” and “streetwalker”; she also breaks down the moral and ideological boundaries in other people, luring them into her world of sensuality and pleasure. Mamie’s movements and singing are a siren call to Abbie, who tries her best to resist Mamie’s influence. Watching Mamie hanging her clothes on the line and listening to her sing, Abbie realizes that “there was an almost hypnotic rhythm about her movements,” and that she “couldn’t look away” (23).37 Mamie’s voice “seemed to be right there in the kitchen”; it has an “indefinable quality” in it as if the “singer leaned over, close, to say, I’m talking to you, listen to me, I made up this song for you and I’ve got wonderful things to tell you and to show you, listen to me” (22). Houston Baker notes that a blues singer’s song is “an invitation to energizing intersubjectivity,” one that draws the audience into a communal sense of identity (Baker 5). Mamie’s voice penetrates the walls of the kitchen from the outside, breaking through Abbie’s reservations and compelling her attention. The subject of Mamie’s song is itself an invitation—the refrain is “I’m lonesome.” Abbie’s moral standards and adherence to domestic ideology
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have made her “lonesome” by isolating her from most of the neighborhood community. Whether Abbie’s attraction to Mamie is unconsciously sexual isn’t made clear, but she certainly experiences an urge to accept Mamie’s invitation, despite the fact that she shares the dominant moral attitude that blues music is not only sinful but of inferior quality: “too loud, too harsh, no sweetness, no tune, simply a reiterated bleating about rent money and men who had gone off with other women, and numbers that didn’t come out” (23). Abbie is dismayed to discover that Mamie’s presence has begun to change her thought pattern. She observes that the wind lifts the hem of Mamie’s dress “as though it peered underneath and liked what it saw and so returned again and again for another look,” and then scolds herself for her personification: “what a vulgar idea. I never think things like that” (23). Yet Abbie actually enjoys creating rhymes and images about people she knows; her strong moral feelings about “vulgarity” have prompted her to avoid entire areas of thought that might have expanded her verbal arts and increased her pleasure in them. The reader experiences the influence of Mamie’s blues, however subtle, on Abbie as welcome and necessary. Of course, Mamie’s songs invite her listeners not simply to partake in vulgar metaphor, but to partake in sexual relations; yet Petry allows Mamie to transcend the Jezebel stereotype, giving her a female-identified subjectivity rather than a male-identified one. Link Williams sees “invitation in Mrs. M. Powther’s eyes, in the curve of her mouth, invitation cordially, consciously, graciously extended” (125). Comparing her to both Eve and Venus, “goddess” of love, he decides that while the lyrics of Mamie’s song concern “a female who rode on a train, a train that would come back again tomorrow,” the “texture of the voice, the ripeness of it told you that there must have been a male aboard that train” (125, 100–01). Link enacts the typical male response to Mamie, viewing her body as oozing invitation and her song as sexual even while she performs household chores like hanging the laundry. However, while Mamie clearly delights in and plays with her ability to attract men of all ages and races, this ability is not her dominant characteristic. More striking to the reader are Mamie’s fearlessness, confidence, and healthy appreciation of her own body. Her songs do not mention men, but focus on trains and roads and the women who make use of them, highlighting the singer’s freedom to move on at any moment. In giving Mamie mobility, agency, and confidence, Petry insists that Mamie’s “allure” is indeed a representation of her own sexual desire and not a self-objectification.38 She thus breaks with one of the primary conventions of literary representations of women: she gives Mamie sexual and emotional independence and working-class values without punishing her for them.
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Ultimately, Mamie disrupts all traditional notions of female identity and “women’s place,” combining a decidedly “feminine” personality and appearance with a “masculine” attitude toward relationships, family, and security. When Mamie’s husband Powther tells her that he doesn’t like Bill Hod, Mamie’s “cousin” (read: lover), coming by their apartment so much, Mamie replies calmly, “I’m right fond of him. If you don’t like his comin’ here, Powther, I can always go live somewhere else” (212). The ease with which she offers to leave her home and family astonishes both Powther and the reader. Mamie has been married to Powther for over nine years and they have three children, yet apparently she would abandon them rather than lose her sexual freedom. Mamie’s choice of words reveals her lack of attachment not just to the Powther household, but to domestic space in general. The apartment is just a place where Mamie lives for the time being, and going to live “somewhere else” is always an option—one nearly unthinkable to female readers of the fifties. When Powther panics at the thought of losing her and retracts his comment, Mamie accentuates her threat by singing “same train carry my mother, same train be back tomorrer” (212). Powther dislikes this song, a not-so-subtle insistence on Mamie’s freedom, on the train that is always around to take her away.39 By singing it, Mamie insists that she is elsewhere, unreceptive to Powther’s demands: not only is her song her threat to leave, but while she’s singing, “he couldn’t discuss anything with her that she didn’t want to discuss” because “you had to listen” when Mamie sings (209). When she sings the blues, Mamie simultaneously draws her listeners to her and holds them at bay; she breaks down boundaries in others, but preserves a “home” within herself—a “mobile home.” Powther realizes that “if he hadn’t packed” the “expensive clothes” he bought Mamie when he was courting her, “she would have left them there in that rooming house in Baltimore” when she married him, “left everything behind her, and never regretted the leaving” (212). Mamie does not seem to put down roots, or to require them; nor does she need possessions or a house. She is adept at creating a home for herself that does not rely on four permanent walls, and she is not afraid of the street. Possessing a good deal less strength and power than Mamie, Min initially draws on middle-class cultural materials in order to preserve her domestic space, but her developing “conjure psychology” allows her first to save her own life and then to rethink her conception of home. When Min accidentally witnesses Jones in the act of committing a crime, Jones becomes enraged and comes after her. As Min prepares herself for “the feel of his heavy hands around her neck,” an image of “the big, golden cross” comes to her mind (Street 358). She realizes that “just looking at it never failed to remind her of the Prophet and the quiet way he had listened to
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her talk” (358). Half-consciously, Min internalizes the Prophet’s respect for her, transforming the feeling of recognition she gained from talking to the prophet into an act of self-preservation. She makes “the sign of the cross over her body—a long gesture downward and then a wide, sweeping crosswise movement.” The gesture stops Jones in his tracks: he screams, “You god damn conjurin’ whore!” and leaves the apartment (358–59). With this act of protection, Min holds Jones at bay just long enough to realize that living with him has begun to threaten not just her physical health but her state of mind. “Lately she couldn’t get any air here,” she concludes, because Jones’ “evilness” and violence have kept her “running, running, running” (362). The constant threat of male violence Min feels from Jones and her previous “husbands” has created a velocity in Min’s life that has “blotted out” her inner vision, her ability to reflect on her own actions and feelings (363). The Prophet restores that ability to her by giving her the means by which to protect herself from Jones’s wrath, forcing him to keep his distance so that she can turn her attention away from her physical safety and toward her emotional state. In helping Min to establish (if only for a short time) a kind of “protected space” within which she can “affirm” herself and “integrate her thoughts,” the Prophet has provided her with the “home” she longed for. With room to reflect on her situation, however, Min concludes that Jones’ “constant anger, his sullen silence,” has turned her “protected space” into a prison, “like the inside of an oven—a small completely enclosed place where no light ever penetrated” (352). Here Min finds her conception of “home,” a “completely enclosed place” safe from the contaminating street, to be a threat rather than a safe haven. Jones is not a welcome inhabitant of her “nest” but rather resembles “some monstrous growth crowding against her” (362). Min realizes that household space can be a dangerous trap for women and that access to the street—mobility—is of crucial importance. Min leaves Jones’s apartment and the street accompanied by a wellbuilt pushcart man, according to some critics of The Street a sign that she is “clearly on her way to another small apartment with another man,” that she has learned nothing (Pryse 127). Yet Min’s use of conjure and her resulting development of an internal space for reflection, I argue, have given her the tools to create a better home for herself—albeit a home sharing some resemblance with the apartment she has just vacated. For Min’s financial circumstances and hostile environment have not changed: she is still poor and threatened by homelessness, and the street still isn’t “somehow a very good place to live, for the women had too much trouble, almost as though the street itself bred the trouble” (Street 355). Min’s analysis perfectly describes the plight of the poor single woman: random
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male violence, disease, and harsh weather make the streets unsafe for her, and because “a woman living alone didn’t stand much chance” of affording a decent (private and safe) apartment, she is forced to enter equally unsafe domestic arrangements. Thus, Min’s decision to find another man to live with is not a blind repetition of previous mistakes but an informed determination of her best option: two incomes provide a safety net (“if one got sick the other one could carry on and there’d still be food and the rent would be paid”) as well as much-needed sexual and emotional companionship (“it wasn’t right for a woman to be sleeping by herself night after night”) and make it “possible to have a home . . . an apartment instead of just one hall room and with the table her money would always be safe” (Street 370, 353). Nor does Min’s desire for an apartment reflect a continuing attachment to middle-class definitions of home, for in leaving Jones’ apartment, she abandons her bourgeois aspirations: “Funny how she got to believe that not having to pay rent was so important, and it really wasn’t. . . . Having room to breathe in meant much more” (362). By placing primary importance on “breathing room,” on her own peace of mind, she both repudiates materialism and middle-class gender ideology and establishes an inner strength and security that will see her through her next domestic arrangement. She has learned, like Mamie, that if her man threatens her, she can “always go live someplace else.” While Petry’s protest narrative strategy requires that Lutie and Abbie fail in their efforts to protect themselves and their families, I argue that this failure is explained not simply by social determinism but also by their insistence on adopting a middle-class identity, by the images of “privacy” and “pure space” that they use to define themselves and their ideal homes. After living in the Chandlers’ home, Lutie has a standard by which to judge her own home as a failure. All of Lutie’s hard work and educations have been designed to achieve “some airy, sunny house and herself free from worry about money,” with her son Bub “coming home from school to snack on cookies and milk and bringing other kids with him; and then playing somewhere near-by, and all she had to do was look out of the window and see him because she was home every day when he arrived” (Street 311). Lutie’s “suburban dream” is based on bourgeois domesticity, not on her own culture or her present circumstances.40 Yet even when she starts to realize that her dream is going to be impossible to achieve, she is unable to adjust her dream or think of an alternative. Instead, she decides that it’s “better to be born blind so you couldn’t see” the world of the wealthy, “so that you would never know there were places that were filled with sunlight and good food and where children were safe” (146).
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Lutie’s bourgeois ideology also prevents her from valuing human connection and interaction with the members of the working class. In failing to see that the Chandlers do not have a “homeplace” but instead an empty house filled with hatred and misery, in being seduced by the glamour of materialist achievement and a spotless modern kitchen, Lutie thus leaves herself completely vulnerable to white racism and sexism. The embodiment of both is Junto, the white man who owns the bar near Lutie’s apartment and who works with Mrs. Hedges. Injecting humor into her critique of American ideology, Petry names him “Junto” after Ben Franklin’s social club of elite young white men that controlled political and social interactions through covertly pressuring leaders and leaking ideas—a celebrated all-American example of the kind of conspiracy Lutie faces on the Street. Junto, himself a “self-made man,” has the power (financial and social) of a Harlem version of Ben Franklin. When Junto learns that Lutie has been offered a well-paying singing job by Boots Smith, one of his employees, he forces Boots to deny Lutie a contract until she will capitulate to his (Junto’s) desires for her to become his mistress. Everywhere Lutie turns, Junto’s minions confront her with the Jezebel stereotype; gradually, she begins to see this pattern and to analyze it, but the moments of clarity come too late. When Lutie first realizes that Junto has foiled her chance of becoming a singer, she thinks, “I would like to kill him. . . . It is as though he were a piece of that dirty street itself, tangible, close at hand, within reach” (Street 422). Lutie finally understands that the street isn’t dangerous because it’s dirty and sexual and working-class, but because it is the site of a destructive racism and sexism, because the public world is the province of the white man who insists that black women like herself are whores. Lutie finally realizes that the source of her problems is not the working class or herself, but the fact that “in every direction, anywhere one turned, there was always the implacable figure of a white man blocking the way, so that it was impossible to escape” (315). However, Lutie does not attempt to reformulate her bourgeois ideology in light of this new knowledge, as her desire to kill Junto (and thus wipe out the source of the “dirt” on the street) indicates. More importantly, however, in admitting that she would like to kill Junto, Lutie reveals the extent to which the street has infected her, nurturing within her the kind of violent urges that are part of the lives of her neighbors. After her son is arrested (he was framed by the Super, who wanted to hurt Lutie for rejecting him), Lutie is desperate for money to hire a lawyer and decides to borrow it from Boots, although she knows
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that he works for Junto. Boots tells her that if she wants the money, she should “be nice” to Junto “as long as he wants” (427). When she angrily rejects this idea, Boots decides that he will have sex with Lutie himself: “this time,” he thinks, “a white man can have a black man’s leavings” (423). When Boots hits her and attempts to rape her, Lutie’s long-simmering anger and frustration explode into violence; she begins to strike him with a candlestick, seeing in him a “handy, anonymous figure” of the street that stymied all her attempts to establish a home (428–29). Once she has beaten his face to a bloody pulp, she realizes that “she [is] a murderer,” that in killing Boots, she has destroyed her life and the life of her son. Applying determinist logic, Lutie theorizes that “A kid whose mother was a murderer didn’t stand any chance at all” because everyone would believe that “sooner or later, he, too, would turn criminal” (432– 33). In confronting her oppressor with the same violence he has used on her, Lutie gets her revenge, but at the expense of all she has worked for. The “safe space” she tried to create for herself and her son has been thoroughly contaminated by the violence of the outside world, and her son’s identity has been forever tainted by his mother’s murderous action. The Street ends with the destruction of Lutie’s dreams for herself and her son, and with only a slim chance that Min’s life will improve on a new street. In The Narrows, however, Petry creates an attractive alternative to domesticity that provides a formidable challenge to the domestic ideology practiced by Powther and Abbie. As a butler, Powther works to create and maintain an immaculate, silent, tastefully furnished home for his wealthy white employers. Yet his own home is the opposite of this—Mamie, he realizes, enjoys “the heat, the light, the confusion, the noise, the boys scuffling on the floor . . . fragrance issuing from the oven . . . over it all the smell of her perfume, too strong” in her kitchen (Narrows 166). As a result, Powther feels “like an alien, a stranger” in his own home. When he arrives after work at the doorway to the “hot, brilliantly lighted, filledwith-food-smell, noisy kitchen,” he is startled to notice that the look in his children’s “eyes questioned him, challenged his right to enter this place that was the heartbeat of the house, heartbeat pulsing with heat, sound, life” (166). Powther unconsciously senses that Mamie’s home is vitally alive whereas his “home,” the Treadway mansion, is a model of domestic perfection but lacking in life of any kind. Mamie’s home has a “heartbeat” because she performs her domestic tasks with an eye to her own pleasure and fulfillment. When she’s happy, the house is a haven of delicious food and playful affection, but when Mamie diets, she’s “so cross, so irritable, that nobody could stay in the house with her,” and her sons often have to fend for themselves (167). Mamie creates a home not by giving up her individuality and selfhood (required by common models of marriage
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and maternity), but by insisting on her right to express her feelings and moods, by being selfish. Much is made in the novel of Mamie’s selfishness. Her openly sexual manner, her not-so-secret affair, and her messy home and seemingly gruff treatment of her children provoke the disapproval of her husband Powther, Abbie, Link, and no doubt even the reader. Yet Powther’s attitude toward his wife is not unproblematic, but objectifying: she reminds him of “one of those big women in the paintings” owned by his employer, and he decides at their first meeting that he has “to have her if it . . . costs [him his] job and all [his] savings” (Narrows 182). Given 1950s gender ideology, one might believe that Petry doesn’t intend Powther’s attitude about his wife to seem offensive; however, Petry certainly punishes Powther for that attitude by turning the power relations in his marriage upside down. Moreover, Powther derives all of his pleasure in life from his contact with Mamie, and is willing to put up with her unconventional (and hurtful) behavior in order to preserve their marriage: I, I, I, cuckolded as I am, worried as I often am, after a night with you, you, you, soft warm flesh, smell of perfume, toosweet, toosweet, toostrong, deep-soft-cushion feel of you, feel of the arms, the legs, the thighs, me incased in your thighs, all joy, all ecstasy, all pleasure, not caring, forgetting, . . . defying Bill Hod, conquering Bill Hod and you and the world. (Narrows 194)
The sexual and sensual ecstasy Powther experiences while “incased” in Mamie’s thighs (a female-centered description of sex) return to him the masculine pride he loses whenever Mamie has sex with Bill Hod. To be “feminized” by Mamie, then, is not to be made weak but rather to be “energized” by “intersubjectivity” with her (Baker 5). Mamie’s refusal to conform to standard feminine modes of behavior may harm her husband’s masculine pride, but it also exposes him to a powerful pleasure. This pleasure is visible in his very language, which is reminiscent of the “feminine” style of writing described by Luce Irigaray, in which the writing “privileges . . . the tactile, the simultaneous, the fluid,” and “resists and explodes every firmly established form, figure, idea, or concept,” of “masculine” language (Jacobus 41; Irigaray 79). Helene Cixous describes feminine writing obliquely as “flying in language,” as “jumbling the order of space, . . . disorienting it, . . . changing [it] around . . . dislocating things and values, breaking them all up, emptying structures, and turning propriety upside down” (291). Because this description applies both to Powther’s above description and to Mamie’s behavior, I argue that Mamie has achieved Cixous’s version of “flying” not in writing but in action,
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and that in her sexual contact with Powther, she passes this experience of “femininity” onto him, however briefly. Powther’s emasculation by Mamie in matters of home and family upsets him (and no doubt many readers as well), but his experience of “femininity” during sex with Mamie gives him a life-sustaining pleasure than tends to affirm Mamie’s disruption and revision of domestic ideology and gender identity. Perhaps the most significant sign that Mamie’s unconventional views and practices challenge the status quo is Mamie’s “rescue” of Abbie from a life of self-recrimination and loneliness after Link’s death at the hands of the Treadways, a death that Abbie set in motion to a degree when she humiliates Camilla and sets up the final set of misunderstandings between Camilla and Link. Horrified to find Camilla in her son’s bed one morning, Abbie can only think “A white girl. How dare he? In her house, her house” (Narrows 249). “In my house, hussy,” Abbie screams at Camilla as she throws her out. “Get out, get out of my house.” Abbie’s disgust can’t quite eradicate another feeling, though: awe at the beauty of Link and Camilla together. She “saw the immorality, the license, the wantonness,” but she also “saw and remembered, just that quickly, their bodies, the perfection” (249). One could attribute Abbie’s awareness of sexual beauty to her exposure to Mamie’s blues sensuality; either way, this crack in the foundation of Abbie’s belief system becomes a gulf when the Treadways kill Link. Abbie’s effort to be a credit to the race and to teach Link that lesson has as its underlying motivation the desire to avoid racial violence, and with Link’s death, these efforts seem meaningless. Having lost her husband in part because of her obsession with appearances and propriety,41 and having lost her son in part because she is unable to accept his interracial sexual relationship,42 Abbie’s old philosophy begins to crumble and a new one begins to emerge. Even with a new attitude toward her culture and community, Abbie is poised at the novel’s end to spend the rest of her life alone. The first casualty among Abbie’s bourgeois precepts is her hypervigilant double consciousness: “she, who all her life had been governed by the fear of other people’s thoughts, had acquired an armour of indifference” (Narrows 414). She also stops seeing the world through a bourgeois lens of emotional repression and class bias. At first attempting to place blame with herself, then with various residents of her neighborhood, she finally sees that “we all had a hand in it, we all reacted violently to . . . Link and that girl, because he was colored and she was white” (419). Finally, she begins to value her community and the human rights of others. Abbie realizes that Bill Hod “would never permit that girl with the blond hair to stay alive, unscathed, in the same world in which he lived” (423). While initially, she decides to let him kill her, she begins to see that she has been
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losing “the part of her self that had been composed of honor and integrity” (424). Abbie resurrects that honor and integrity, but puts it to use in the service of compassion and concern for human life; she decides to go to the police station to save Camilla’s life once she accepts the fact that Link had been in love with her (427). Realizing that her bourgeois aspirations have cost her the people who could have made her clean house a true home, she determines to make her community her “homeplace” instead. Still, Abbie’s new attitude toward her community would not have provided her a family without Mamie’s presence in her life; Mamie has broken through her barriers and lured her into her world of “heat, light, confusion, and noise.” Abbie initially resists this “messy” world, telling herself that “it was a mistake to let that woman [Mamie] stay in my house” because “a woman like that always changes things, her mere presence is like water working on stone, slow attrition, finally a groove, stone worn down” (217). But if the “stone” here is Abbie’s heart, then Mamie’s tradition of sending her son JC down to “Crunch’s” kitchen for some “leftovers” has provided a welcome transformation, for it is Abbie’s grudging affection for the noisy and dirty JC that eventually gives her a second chance at happiness. Mamie’s “sharing” of her son with Abbie might seems purely thoughtless and self-centered, but she actually seems to intend it to change Abbie. She speculates to Powther that Abbie’s attempts to educate and reform JC will “work out the other way.” By the “time she listens to that jaybird jabber of his, especially walkin’ right along the street with him for a half-hour,” Abbie will “be talking the same way he does,” Mamie predicts (348). And Mamie is right—Abbie is changed by JC. At the novel’s end, Abbie is poised to neglect JC (she is about to tell him to “run along now” as she leaves on an errand), but then, recalling that she neglected her son Link with the same words, she changes her mind and allows JC to accompany her (428). In placing JC’s needs before her own sense of propriety, Abbie relinquishes her tight hold on middle-class standards of decency and accepts JC as a part of her “family,” an action that transforms her empty house into a home.43 In requiring a secure personal space as the precondition to fully developed humanity, and in choosing women as the custodians of that space, dominant culture controls both working-class and female identity. Part of Petry’s accomplishment in The Street and The Narrows is to portray the identities of poor women lacking access to secure personal space not as flawed or insufficiently developed (except when they attempt to conform to bourgeois ideals), but as powerful and vital (particularly when they can be sustained by their working-class culture and community). Petry’s Min may be the only female character in American literature up to 1946 to disregard both bourgeois sexual codes and Christian religious beliefs
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and be rewarded for her behavior with the promise of a better life. In Mamie, Petry creates a wife and mother who is immune to the lure of consumerism and to domestic ideology because home is not as important to her as personal freedom and mobility; she transcends the “home/street” (place/placeless) duality altogether by constructing her identity around her own sensual and emotional pleasure and moving freely between home and street, fully self-possessed in either world. Lutie and Abbie are ultimately harmed more by their reactions to stereotype than by the applications of stereotype to them. Petry thus shows how racial stereotype is one of the determining forces that constrain African American working-class consciousness44 ; by allowing her characters to struggle with their self-conceptions and to learn from their errors in judgment (albeit too late to help their families), Petry revises naturalist determinism and closes the gap between reader and character. With her characters, Petry has engaged in a labor of cultural reformulation, challenging traditional models of gender and class by drawing on working class cultural practices to create a new model of female identity.
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“You Make Your Children Sick”: Domestic Ideology and Working-Class Female Identity in Tillie Olsen’s Yonnondio and Sarah E. Wright’s This Child’s Gonna Live Money can always buy a housekeeper. Love only can secure a homemaker. . . . a good wife and mother—who alone should be the mistress of her husband’s house, will insure a home. Unite the housekeeper and the home-maker—let them be one and indivisible—and that union will provide a refuge from all outside trouble, such as can be found nowhere else, and such as God designed home to be. —Mrs. Beecher (11)
Nineteenth-century domestic scientists such as Mrs. Henry Ward Beecher, Catherine Beecher, and Harriet Beecher Stowe believed that “God’s design” for the home had everything to do with God’s design for women.1 While the conceptions of home and family familiar to the Beechers and Stowe (and ourselves) did not develop until during what Lukács calls the “Bourgeois Age” (1450–1950), the seemingly natural
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connection between the maternal body and domestic space was and is compelling (624).2 Elaine Scarry’s celebratory description of “shelter” makes this clear: “an enlargement of the body,” the room keeps “warm and safe the individual it houses in the same way the body encloses and protects the individual within”; its walls prevent “undifferentiated contact with the world,” and secure “for the individual a stable internal space” (38–39). Scarry’s “body” is ungendered, but the imagery implies a maternal body, one that (like Mrs. Beecher’s homemaker) provides a “refuge” in her person and in her home. This slippage in the definitions of home and homemaker has great implications for female identity. Both physically and symbolically, the job of homemaker is to maintain order, purity, and comfort in the house and the family, to patrol the borders between home and the street (the dirty, menacing public world). This task is crucial, for a clean, pure, comfortable home “has served to represent the place in which to cultivate a refined sense of the self ” (Ryan Women in Public 7). As both custodian and representative of the home environment, then, the housekeeper must maintain the purity of not only the spaces of the home but also her own body and internal spaces so as to promote the physical and psychological development of her family. Maintaining one’s personal purity can be difficult during housekeeping, which is associated not only with dirt but with the body and its excesses, both of which can “stain” those with whom they come in contact. As Phyllis Palmer notes, in the “Western unconscious of the past two centuries” there exists a strong connection between “sex, dirt, housework, and badness in women” (138). Julia Kristeva’s work on the abject in her book Powers of Horror develops this connection, stating that the abject, that which must be “radically jettisoned” from subjectivity because it “disturbs identity, system, order,” is deeply associated with our long-ago merger with the maternal body (1, 4). The “abjection of self,” Kristeva argues, is tied to the recognition of “the inaugural loss that laid the foundations of its own being”; abjection “confronts us” within “our personal archaeology, with our earliest attempts to release the hold of the maternal entity even before existing outside of her,” and also with those “fragile states where man strays on the territories of animal” (5, 13, 12). Those states of selfdestroying merger or boundary loss must be guarded against at all cost. To help them avoid being “stained,” domestic scientists instructed middle-class women to find “clean methods of doing dirty work,” so that their work would appear pleasant and so that they could be “pretty all the time” (Streeter 21, qtd. in Palmer 33). Women who could afford to hire domestics could project the stains associated with housekeeping onto their servants, giving “the work of cleaning up the ‘bad’ body” to “ ‘bad’ women” (Palmer 147). The housekeeper’s performance of middle-class
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domestic ideology in her own home thus determines and is determined by her character; the mother must make and maintain a pure home not only for her family but as a reflection of her own self-worth, and her failure to be a “good housekeeper” constitutes “a huge blot on [her] character” (Mrs. Beecher 357). We perform domestic work, argues Mary Douglas, not simply because we have an “anxiety to escape disease” but in order to “positively re-orde[r] our environment, making it conform to an idea” about our gender and class identity (2, 68).3 Domestic Ideology and the Spatial Location of the Working-Class Woman The conception of the home as a pure and private refuge from a dirty world originally began with the bourgeoisie4 ; however, during the midnineteenth century, middle-class reformers were determined to “privatize” the working-class family as well. By the early twentieth century, their efforts had largely succeeded.5 The “cultural offensive” begun by philanthropists, municipal authorities, and Christian evangelicals to “impose on the poor conceptions of childhood and motherhood” drawn from middle-class domestic ideology such as that described by the Beechers was implemented through direct intervention into the lives of the poor (home visits) and through the physical and ideological reorganization of social space (e.g., the creation of the residential suburbs and the stigmatization of street culture) (Stansell 92, 94). As Christopher Lasch notes, public policy was “sometimes conceived of quite deliberately not as a defense of the family at all but as an invasion of it. . . . The family was deliberately transformed by the intervention of planners and policymakers” (13). This intervention could be viewed as a colonization of the poor family in order to “Americanize” and homogenize it (thus disposing of a separate working-class identity and of the potential power for revolt that adheres in this difference). Notably, this dissemination of hegemonic spatial organization significantly changed the way working-class people experienced the world. In the words of Henri Lefebvre, space is not a scientific object removed from ideology and politics; it has always been political and strategic. If space has an air of neutrality and indifference . . . it is precisely because it has been occupied and used, and has already been the focus of past processes whose traces are not always evident on the landscape. Space has been shaped and molded from historical and natural elements, but this has been a political process. . . . it is a product literally filled with ideologies. (From “Reflections on the Politics of Space,” 1976, qtd. in Soja 80)
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From the dangerous neighborhoods in which they were forced to live to the very design of their homes, working-class families were located so as to minimize their political power and maximize their need for wage labor. Members of the working class might occasionally catch a glimpse of the ideology behind their spatial organization (Bigger wondering why he and his folks have to live this way), but submerged in domestic ideology, the spatial organization seemed natural and logical. The laboring poor gradually accommodated themselves to a bourgeois conception of family life, one in which the home and the woman who presided over it were meant to be enclosed, private, and pure, separate from the “thoroughly non-domesticated streets,” the province of men (Ryan Womanhood 199; Stansell 94).6 At a time when the home had come to be viewed as a “haven in a heartless world,” any participation of the poor in street life rather than in the protected spaces of the home was “evidence of parental neglect, family disintegration, and a pervasive urban social pathology” (Lasch 6; Ryan Womanhood 199; Stansell 93). Women were encouraged to abandon the practice of producing goods in the home, which interfered with their housekeeping. As a result of middle-class reform, poor women’s and children’s use of the streets for socializing, childrearing, and moneymaking was made to seem corrupt; the “ubiquitous, aggressive, and assertive working-class culture” of the streets, at the heart of “childrearing, family morality, sociability, and neighborhood ties” for the poor, was at least partially destroyed (Stansell 93). That culture, which had functioned as a critical mechanism of survival for the working classes, was made to appear to be the reason for their suffering. This carefully erected and maintained division between street and home, between public and private, was threatened by the Great Depression, which brought with it a loss of domestic security in all senses of the term: the nation’s economy collapsed, and individual families and homes were unstable and vulnerable. American ideologies of the self, the family, and the home were based on individualism, self-determination, and hard work; the economic collapse made a mockery of these values, forcing many people to acknowledge the real instability of their lives as “the whole structure of American society seemed actually to be going to pieces” (McElvaine 205; Wilson qtd. in Salzman 13). Rapid industrialization had eroded the possibility for economic self-sufficiency; urban working-class people “whose income was derived entirely from wages found themselves in desperate straits when they lost their jobs,” and because most of them were renters, their homes were endangered (McElvaine 7). Americans had believed that a person was not given a place in society but had to “make his own place—and to strive to better it” (173). That “place” (a person’s location and employment, both outside and inside the home) was a
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fundamental aspect of identity.7 The depression destabilized that “place” by threatening the job and thus the home, and, in turn, the possibility of future jobs, bringing the street and the home frighteningly close together. While the Great Depression is a perfect instance of the kind of cultural trauma I discussed in Chapter 1, for the working poor, it was more like a worsening of the ongoing trauma of poverty. In this unstable situation, the mother’s job of securing the home became more crucial—and more difficult. In a psychological and physical state of crisis such as that brought on by the grinding poverty of the Depression, the home and the self are “unmade” or “mutilated” as their boundaries weaken and become permeable to the outside world (Scarry 45). As discussed in Chapter 1, Sigmund Freud’s description of trauma as “a breach in an otherwise efficiacious barrier against stimuli” draws upon the spatial language of the home-as-body (Beyond 23). It is the breach in the barrier (the walls, the skin) against the “outside” that constitutes both psychological and physical injury. The trauma enacted by the Depression was the weakening of the “walls” or the psychological and physical defenses, making bodies and homes more susceptible to intrusion or invasion. Just as this kind of trauma disturbs “on a large scale” the “functioning of the organism’s energy” and sets “in motion every possible defensive measure,” so the horrors of extreme poverty greatly interfere with the smooth running of the household (Beyond 23). The stigmatization of street culture by reformers left domestic ideology as the only “defensive measure” available to the working-class homemaker, which encourages strengthening the barriers and making the inner spaces more pure, more protected. Women were not to revive the earlier “tradition of wives making money at home,” but instead to make better “use of income” and to keep “social order” (Palmer 25). Rather than abandon her family to the dirt and decay of the outside world, the working-class homemaker attempted to keep her home intact and clean even when her resources for doing so were stretched to the absolute limit and beyond. At stake were both the well-being of her family and her own identity.8 As I have discussed in Chapter 3, however, the problem for the poor (not just those of the Depression era) is that the “dirt” of the streets can’t be scrubbed away, in part because that “dirt” is implicitly themselves: their poverty, their working-class culture, and thus their identities. Used to “justify social rankings of race, class, and gender,” the label “dirty” (along with labels like “hypersexual,” “immoral,” “lazy,” and “ignorant”) has been applied to all groups of people who are the “object of prejudice,” who are marginalized, placeless, or “somehow left out in the patterning of society” such as women, the poor, and the non-white (Palmer 139; Kovel 81; Douglas 95).9 For those of the working class who adopt the
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cultural values of the middle class in the hopes of achieving a middle-class “lifestyle,” the qualities that mark them as “other” must be eradicated. In particular, it is the housewife who can cleanse the home and family of contaminating “dirt” and thus “make” a bourgeois-style home. In washing away the traces of their class identity, though, the working-class family must practice middle-class values of individualism and domestic privacy. Because they rely on spatial and emotional separation from other people,10 these values result in isolation and thus vulnerability, making it more difficult for the working-class family to survive. Issues of domestic ideology and its impact on working-class female identity are explored in two novels portraying Depression-era families on the margins of society (part of the working poor) and in danger of losing their “place” (house and home): Tillie Olsen’s Yonnondio and Sarah E. Wright’s This Child’s Gonna Live.11 Written in the early 1930s, and edited and published in 1974, Yonnondio portrays a few years in the life of the Holbrook family, focusing first on the oldest child, Mazie, who is traumatized by the lack of security and nourishment in her life, and then on Mazie’s mother Anna, who struggles to maintain a semblance of domestic order in the face of the disintegration caused by harsh poverty. Begun when Olsen was nineteen and pregnant with her first child, the novel’s portrayal of Mazie and Anna reflects Olsen’s own life experiences as well as her political beliefs and commitments. As Olsen noted in the journal she kept while working on the early chapters of Yonnondio, “O Mazie & Will & Ben. At last I write out all that has festered in me so long— the horror of being a working-class child—& the heroism, all the respect they deserve” (Rosenfelt 232). Olsen’s parents, Russian Jews who came to America after participating in the unsuccessful 1905 revolution, passed on to her their “socialist sensibility”—less in their rhetoric than in “how they lived” (Orr 25). Olsen became an active member of the Young Communist League around the time she began Yonnondio. In her study of Olsen’s life and fiction, Deborah Rosenfelt makes clear that “left wing politics and culture were the single most important influences on . . . Olsen’s work” (218).12 Both her working-class childhood and her politics lead her to write as a form of social protest, in order to “help change that which is harmful . . . in our time” (Orr 44). It is thus no surprise that the novel promotes socialism (specifically, unionization) as a solution to the economic problems of the working poor. However, the novel’s analysis of domestic labor is much more complicated (and less clearly developed) than its analysis of labor in the workplace. Few, if any, socialist analyses of domestic ideology were available to Olsen as she wrote, since for the most part “Marxian socialists . . . ignored
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women’s work and reproduction” and “refused to espouse any tactics aimed at liberating women from this enslavement” (Hayden Grand 7).13 While the novel doesn’t analyze the standard ideologies of home and family as overtly as it critiques industrial practices, then, it does show that these ideologies are impossible for the Holbrooks to achieve and that the attempt to achieve them damages the family, particularly Anna and Mazie. Olsen’s analysis reflects the conclusions of more recent feminist Marxist studies: alienated from their labor, men turn to women for comfort, but women have no one to turn to, for the “intimate relations” within the family are “the very ones that are the essential structures of [women’s] oppression” (Foreman 102). Similarly, Wright’s This Child shows the tremendous pressure that ideologies of home and family place on “marginalized” mothers such as Mariah Upshur, a poor black woman living in a destitute rural community in Maryland. Mariah struggles throughout the novel to provide a good home for her children and to cleanse herself of the “dirt” that adheres to her as a direct result of her race, gender, and economic status. Her community, however, is rigidly moral and entirely unforgiving of Mariah’s “sins,” and their judgment and rejection of Mariah increases her suffering. In Freud’s terms, the community’s obsessive morality seems to be a reaction to the constant dirt and degradation within which they attempt to exist, an attempt to develop an “anxiety” about the purity of the soul that will somehow prevent more dirt from entering into the community. Yet they have based this anxiety on the bourgeois morality of the whites of Haimawalkin, who oversee their every move and who control and stifle their economy; thus, even when they trace the source of their “dirt” to the whites, they accept defeat and continue to look to themselves and their own dark skin for ways to become cleaner, “whiter.” Basing the novel on her own family’s history, Wright apparently imbued Mariah with some of her own fighting spirit and determination, as well as her conviction that blacks did not need to act “white” to be human. Attending Howard in the late forties, Wright refused to straighten her hair, becoming “a symbolic precursor of the later more internationally recognized ‘Black is Beautiful Movement’ of the 1960’s” (Guilford 295). After coming to terms with her identity during her college years, Wright recalled, she refused “to imitate some other group’s standard of beauty to be accepted.” She spent most of her life teaching, learning, and fighting “against oppressive social forces” (295). Significantly, she organized and participated in several conferences, workshops, and writing groups for African American writers, including the Harlem Writer’s Guild (1957– 1972). Wright’s determination to honor and improve African Americans’
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lives, visible in her lifetime of political activities, are also visible in Mariah’s struggles to unlearn the negative conditioning of her society and develop a stronger sense of self. What complicates any critique of domestic ideology is the shared recognition that dirt and disease are undesirable and that people need a secure shelter and private space in order to develop their identities. Equally pressing is the recognition that mothers typically bear the responsibility for childrearing and that domestic duties fall to those who stay at home with the children. Any alternative to domestic ideology would have to work with or around these seemingly necessary aspects. Both novels make clear that poor women must endeavor to keep a “clean house” and a safe environment for their families. We can return to Freud’s description of traumatic neurosis for a useful way to understand the difference between housecleaning and domestic ideology: if the intrusion of dirt, weather, or even strangers into the home constitutes a minor physical trauma, then the ideology that arises in response is the traumatic neurosis. The neurosis develops as the mind attempts to “master the stimulus retrospectively, by developing the anxiety whose omission was the cause of the traumatic neurosis” (Beyond 26, my emphasis). The attempt to develop in young women an anxiety about dirt and disease is nicely displayed in handbooks such as that of Mrs. Beecher, in which the problem of creating a secure and clean home has become an obsession that has generated a model of female identity as a way of upholding it. The relatively minor “trauma” of dirt entering the home has been recast as a highly traumatic “home invasion,” which necessitates a domestic ideology; the ideology in turn reinforces the evil nature of dirt, and the housewife develops an anxiety about dirt that makes the possibility of “home invasion” even more likely, since the smallest amount of dirt becomes cause for immediate concern. For the working-class family, already too close to the border between home and street, the obsessive performance of domestic ideology might seem to be the only preventative measure against homelessness. Both novels, however, portray brief encounters with a different ideology of the domestic, one that provides a model for each family even when their circumstances worsen. Olsen thus places the Holbrooks’ “alternative home,” a Dakota tenant farm, in the middle section of the book for the purpose of contrast; the family moves to the farm from a Wyoming mining town and stays for a year, after which they must abandon it (due to debt) and move to the slums of a Midwestern city, probably Omaha. In This Child, Mariah describes her “secret place” in the woods as the site of her only experience of intimate connection to her husband and to the natural world, an experience that gives her the determination to find (or make) a home
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for herself and her children. Through this contrast, Olsen and Wright show that while the homes of the poor tend to be more permeable to dirt and disease, it is the “dirt” caused by the circumstances of poverty (coal dust, worms, racism, unhealthy working conditions, domestic violence and child abuse, industrial pollution, malnutrition) that contaminate and degrade them. Furthermore, the shocking contrast between the liberating spaces in which they feel most at ease and the constricting spaces assigned to them by society enables them to develop a measure of what David Harvey has called “spatial consciousness.” The development of spatial consciousness allows “the individual to recognize the role of space and place in his own biography, to relate to the spaces he sees around him, and to recognize how transactions between individuals . . . are affected by the space that separates them” (Harvey 23–24). Not only do Anna and Mariah develop an awareness of the politics of space, but so do Bigger, Lutie, and Jimmy, in the process of coming to terms with their subjectivities.
Mazie and the Monster If children . . . can be preserved from licentious associates, it is supposed that their safety is secured. But . . . parents and teachers, in this age of danger, should be well informed and watchful; for it is not unfrequently the case, that servants and school-mates will teach young children practices, which exhaust the nervous system and bring on paralysis, mania, and death. (Beecher and Stowe 286).
In Catherine Beecher’s brand of domestic ideology, one of the most harmful forms of contamination for the pure young child is the exposure to sexuality. While Beecher’s primary concern in this regard is with masturbation, the threat of child molestation lurks in the ominous image of servants (and “licentious” school-mates, no doubt working-class children) training children in sexual “practices.” Care must be taken to keep children safe from the stain of the working-class lifestyle; areas in which children might mix with those who are “dirty,” such as school or certain areas of the home, must be carefully monitored. Sexual intercourse is both a powerful metaphor for and the feared consequence of this “mixing,” or the “interplay of diversity and proximity” that is hard to avoid in big cities14 ; fears of this interplay provoked the bourgeois to design their homes for privacy and build them in suburbs, “new districts kept free from all lower-class contamination” (Ryan Women 74–75; Lukács 628). Beecher realizes that this kind of spatial separation alone cannot
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keep a child safe from the threat of sexual contamination, which will permanently infect and corrupt a child’s “pure” and private spaces, both physical and emotional. For the working classes, however, there is no “safe” space for the children, since “already-stained” families must live in polluted areas. Yonnondio’s first sentences portray the psychological invasion of a child by the lifestyle of poverty; by the end of the first chapter, the child has been threatened physically and sexually as well, traumas that permanently shape her sense of self. Mazie Holbrook, six years old at the novel’s opening, is deeply affected by the hazards of her father’s job as a coal miner. Making use of rape imagery, Olsen describes how the morning whistles, which signify the death of a miner if blown during the day, “pierc[e] into” Mazie’s “sleep like some guttural-voiced metal beast, tearing at her; breathing a terror” (Yonnondio 1). The constant threat to her father’s life, and thus to her emotional and economic stability, destroys Mazie’s sense of safety; the rapacious “metal beast” is a physical image of this threat. In this first section, Olsen draws on a racialized discourse to portray the impact of the mine on the miners; Mazie observes “men . . . goin’ in like the day, and comin out black . . . pop’s face and hands black, and he spits from his mouth black” (4). Olsen describes coal dust as “too far inside” the men’s lungs to allow them to breathe freely. The narrator states that coal dust “will lie there forever, like a hand squeezing your heart, choking at your throat” in a passage directed toward a young miner (5). In passages like these, Olsen makes clear that the “dirt” staining Jim Holbrook and the other miners (and threatening to stain their children) does not emanate from within them and is not an intrinsic product of either their upbringing or their culture, as middle-class ideologies of dirt and class would seem to imply. However, this “blackening of the proletariat” is a visible and permanent sign of their class, even if it is an effect of their dangerous labor. Yet only a few pages later, Olsen complicates her images of dirt in her depiction of the attack on Mazie, which reveals the way that the Holbrooks and other miners adhere to the middle-class beliefs about dirt and sexual contamination. Mazie has previously described Sheen McEvoy, a miner whose face was “blown off ” in an underground gas explosion: “Poppa says the ghosts in the mine start a fire. That’s what blowed Sheen McEvoy’s face off so it’s red. It made him crazy” (4). Here Olsen places the blame for Sheen’s insanity on the mine (and the bosses who are unconcerned with its safety), this time using an image of “ghosts” instead of the “metal beast.” Later, Mazie encounters Sheen while awaiting her father outside a bar; Sheen perceives Mazie as “a lost ghost, sent out of the mine, and white” (10, emphasis Olsen’s). In Sheen’s mind, the mine is female,
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a mother who destroys the miners because her home has been violated and because she is “hungry for a child, . . . reaching her thousand arms for it.” She “only takes men ’cause she aint got kids,” Sheen believes; “All women want kids” (11). Seeing Mazie, a “white” child, “pure of heart,” Sheen decides to throw her down the shaft; “Sheen McEvoy will fill you, ol’ lady,” he exults to the mine, as he decides to domesticate it, to give it a child that he will “father” (11). Sheen thus encloses himself within a family and regains his manhood. For her part, Mazie is paralyzed with fear at the sight of Sheen’s face and revolted by his unwanted proximity as he picks her up and carries her toward the mine shaft, “his body hot . . . putrid. Stinking” (11). Calling her “pretty baby,” Sheen holds her tightly and “kisses her with his shapeless face,” which feels to Mazie like a “red mass of jelly that was . . . writhing like a heart torn suddenly out of the breast” (11). It is not the threat to her own life, but the abhorrent intimate contact, the feeling of Sheen’s deformed face pressed against her own, which haunts Mazie throughout the novel. Sheen’s own borders, his “walls,” have been breached to the extent that they have been burned off, leaving his damaged interior fully visible and vulnerable. Sheen is a perfect example of Freud’s traumatic neurosis at work: his unceasing attempts to plug the breach in the mine (thereby saving other miners) substitute for his inability to repair the breaches in his own body and mind caused by the explosion. Sheen’s face terrorizes Mazie because it is inscribed with the contamination of his “heart” (his identity), the same contamination threatening herself and her family. The fact that Sheen’s actions toward Mazie result from the lifethreatening working conditions at the mine should complicate the reader’s tendency to view Sheen as crazy, dirty, “other”; yet the characters in the novel feel no such compulsion and make Sheen a scapegoat for their own “dirt.” As Sheen drops Mazie, who just misses the mine shaft, the night watchman uses first a pickax, then physical force, and finally a gun to kill Sheen, who falls down the shaft. “Bloody of face and clothes,” the nightman carries Mazie inside the bar and reports what “that bastard McEvoy” has done. Jim shouts, “the sonofabitch . . . I’ll kill him,” while another man mutters, “Keel him, leench him” (13). The men react to Sheen’s actions with murderous and racially-inflected rage, moving to excise him from their midst and with him, they believe, the contamination that he emblematizes. Jim, on the other hand, must confront the idea that Sheen has transferred his “dirt” to Mazie, and that he himself shares in the blame. As Jim rushes home clutching his daughter, “a monstrous thought gripped him”: had she been raped by Sheen? He shakes her “roughly,” asking, “What did he do to you, Mazie?” When Jim tells his wife this fear, Anna
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responds bitterly, “she hasn’t been touched. She’d have been all bloody if he had” (14). Anna’s terse diagnosis of Mazie’s condition reveals that she is familiar enough with the possibility of rape to consider it with relative calm, while Jim seems much more shaken by this “monstrous” idea.15 Both parents, however, seem convinced that it is their inability to provide a secure home for their daughter that allowed Sheen to infect her (Mazie runs a fever after the incident). Hoping to provide a “new life” for their children, Jim and Anna decide at this moment that they must leave the mining town for a farm the following March. Their planning is interrupted when “in her delirium Mazie laughed—terrible laughter, mocking, derisive, not her own. Anna and Jim, hearing it mix with their words, shuddered” (15). Sheen has contaminated Mazie, destroyed her innocence and replaced it with his own laughter—a deranged yet knowing laughter at her parents’ feeble attempts to protect her. Mazie’s laughter confirms Anna and Jim’s fear that they did not adequately “patrol” the “borders” of their home, and that, as a result, it has been invaded. While it isn’t unusual for parents to want to keep their children from harm, Jim’s and Anna’s reaction to Sheen’s actions falls into the pattern of middle-class domestic ideology. Jim’s suspicion that Sheen is a child molester places Sheen in the category of extreme “other,” so thoroughly degraded that he is an animal (a “monster,” the “metal beast” himself ). Mazie’s fever contributes to this depiction, as if Sheen passed on to her some disease he carries. Jim and Anna choose to disconnect themselves from Sheen, refusing to acknowledge that his “disease,” working-class degradation, is their own. Nor can they trace their disease to its source, the mine’s owners who force the workers into dehumanizing conditions. And while Olsen’s narrator tends to intervene in the story at points where she feels the reader might misplace sympathies or politically misread scenes, here the narrator is silent, perhaps indicating Olsen’s implicit acceptance of the scapegoating of Sheen. The trauma Mazie suffers at Sheen’s hands is a breach in the admittedly flimsy protective shield her parents have provided. The resulting psychological injury takes the form of a simultaneous initiation into the “dirty” world of working-class culture and the middle-class ideology that links working-class dirt with degraded sexuality. After a period of withdrawal from her family, Mazie has repressed the incident but is haunted by flashbacks throughout the story—anything soft and moist will bring to Mazie “a faint remembrance of a face like jelly pushed against hers” (42). Later in the novel, after the Holbrooks have been forced to leave their Dakota farm for a city slum, Mazie recalls this “face like jelly” as she experiences another form of violation by the “dirt” of poverty. Fearful of and revolted by the “dirty buildings and swarming people” of the
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slum streets, the sight of which causes her great pain, Mazie attempts to create a shield against them out of an image of “the rolling fields and roads” of the “full soft dream of the farm” (58). As long as she is by herself, this dreamworld comforts her, but occasionally the “grotesqueness and crooked vision” of the real world break through (59). On one such occasion, in which Mazie is walking down the street on an errand for her mother, a “hard body crashe[s] into her,” and a voice yells, “Whynt you look where you’re going, stinking little bitch” (69). She is “pushed in the stomach, punched down sprawling, a drunken breath in her nostrils,” and she lands in a “blob of spit.”16 Olsen’s narrator articulates Mazie’s associations: “(Fear remembered such a breath. It seemed a mass pressed itself into her face, wet earth, or something she did not remember. In a minute she would be lifted and carried through a blackness of terror).” Her flashback is triggered by another instance of violent contamination, but this time, she is treated not as a “child pure of heart” to give to the mine, but as already contaminated, a dirty, smelly (like the “putrid” Sheen) little “bitch” who belongs in the filthy street. This assault on her breaches her protective shell: “it was real then,” she thinks, and, “as for the first time,” she sees “the street and people, and it entered into her like death” (69). Mazie’s recollection of her first violation cracks the shield she attempts to construct. Perhaps that first violation, in which she was almost killed, is what gives the ugliness and violence of the streets the feeling of “death” to her. More generally, though, Mazie’s full comprehension of the city slums, and consequently of her “place” in the streets (on the ground in a blob of spit), is a “death” to her self-image. Subconsciously comprehending why the nameless drunk has pushed her down, she experiences intense emotional pain both at the realization of her own “stain” and at the sight of other people being abused in a way that replays her own violation (at the hands of both Sheen and her parents).17 She is horrified at the sight of a prostitute, “teeth bared in a terrible smile,” luring a drunken soldier into her basement apartment. Picking up on the degraded sexuality implicit in this interaction, she is reminded of Sheen’s jelly-like face; whether she associates Sheen with sexuality from some memory of her parents’ fear that she had been sexually molested, or from some other association between dirt and sexuality, is not made clear. With these images in her eyes, Mazie runs, chanting the word “A-R-M-O-U-R-S” (a sign she sees painted on a building) in order to recapture her protective shield: “Beautiful, suspended, the farm, softened by twilight floated an instant before her eyes,” but then it is “shattered . . . forever” by the sight of a man “twisting a woman’s arm,” saying “C’mon, hand it over” (70). This image of a man hurting a woman is an image Mazie sees in her own family;
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later that night, after she returns home, she hears her drunken father forcing her mother to have sex with him, saying, “Can’t screw my own wife. Expect me to go to a whore? Hold still,” as her mother cries “Dont, Jim, dont. It hurts too much” (75). Afterward, Jim’s drunken breath is familiar to Mazie: “(Fear remembered such a breath)” (75–76). Olsen here makes clear Mazie’s subconscious understanding that her own family has been infected by the violence of poverty, that Jim’s dirt and Sheen’s are the same and the same as that in the city streets. With her family and her home contaminated, Mazie has no safe space in which to fend off the “dirt,” the “horror that over it held the shadow of something mushy, opening in the middle, pressed hard against her cheeks” (70).18 Toward the end of the novel, Mazie and her siblings have been thoroughly influenced by their surroundings. They prefer to play in the city dump, located near their home, than to read library books (which Anna calls “keys” to a “better life”), from which they turn in “outraged selfrespect,” having been told in school that they are “poor learners, dumb dumb dumb” (107). They fight among themselves, filled with a “meanness” that makes Anna think “the devil’s got into” them (123). While all of the Holbrook children are affected negatively by their exposure to the dump and the corrupted “school-mates” who play there, Mazie has the most trouble adjusting. She becomes fascinated with a girl named Erina, whose body is deformed, epileptic, and covered with sores. Erina is physically abused by her father, who tells her that she is deformed because she was “sinning too bad to get forgiven”; God made her ugly, Erina claims, because “the Bible says Children suffer suffer” (her interpretation of the Biblical phrase “suffer little children to come unto me”) (119). During the feverishly hot nights, Mazie imagines that her “body is becoming Erina’s body; she is Erina, stump arm ending in a little knob, the spasm walk, the drool” (112).19 Mazie imaginatively occupies Erina’s ruined body as her expression of her own “stain.” She identifies with Erina to the extent that she has internalized society’s view of herself and other poor children. If Sheen’s burned face is a symbol of the way poverty (or more accurately, unscrupulous business owners) ruins the body and the mind, then Erina symbolizes the dialectic poverty creates between the physical facts (Erina’s deformed arm; the dirt that invades the flimsy homes of the poor) and the ideology that gets applied to those facts (Erina is sinful, ugly, and corrupt; poor people are naturally dirty and stained, and capable of staining others in turn), which in turn produces a physical and emotional reaction (Erina is beaten and neglected so that her body becomes ugly, and she begins to take on “ugly” behavior toward other children; poor people are confined to polluted and degraded areas, which degrades their behavior).20 Threatened by the social and physical environment she lives
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Anna’s Poisonous Maternity The first and most indispensable requisite for health is pure air, both by day and night. . . . Tight sleeping-rooms, and close, air-tight stoves, are now starving and poisoning more than one half of this nation. It seems impossible to make people know their danger. . . . Very generally parents themselves are responsible for [their children’s] pain, [their] debility, [their] depression, [their] misery . . . with cruel carelessness . . . they have been, year by year, undermining the constitutions of their children, and so have inflicted disease and premature death, not only on them but also on their descendents. (Beecher and Stowe 43, 49, 264)
Underlying the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century attempts to “remodel” private life lay a “medical view of reality,” in which disease prevention became a primary concern for the homemaker (Lasch Haven 170). As part of a general attack on preindustrial customs, reformers and doctors mounted an offensive against “germs,” promoting domestic ideology on the grounds that it “encouraged regular habits.” They viewed the family as an “asylum” that cared for society’s children (170). Mothers, then, had to act as health workers, and for this they had to be trained; as Beecher and Stowe note, it is the “woman’s special mission” to regulate the home so as to bestow the “light of knowledge and intelligence” that is the remedy for the spread of impurities and germs (Beecher and Stowe 49). To “save the family,” mothers especially had to be retrained with the “support” (read: control) of institutional officials such as teachers, doctors and health clinic workers, welfare agents, and social workers (Zaretsky 62).21 In this way, parenthood was “proletarianized” in that parents were “unable to provide for their own needs” and the needs of their children “without the supervision of trained experts” (Lasch Haven 19). This obsessive attention to disease made housekeeping that much more difficult (even as labor-saving devices were being invented to make the housewife’s job “easier”) because now dirt was invisible and omnipresent. In particular, the Victorian fixation on “foul air” and proper ventilation increased the workload of the domestic worker, bringing issues of architectural design and engineering into her domain (as is clear from Beecher and Stowe’s book, in which three chapters are given to the subject of ventilation). Widespread belief in the “miasmatic theory,” which held that “many diseases” were “caused by substances and impurities
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in, Mazie’s “innocence” is corrupted most clearly by her exposure to the facts of poverty, child abuse, and discrimination. In internalizing Erina, she inhabits the most extreme version of society’s image of poor children.
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in the air,” lay behind this fixation (Rybczynski 132–34). Beecher and Stowe quote many doctors on the subject of pure air, among them a Dr. Dio Lewis, who discusses the dangers of breathing air in public places such as churches (he wonders whether he has “not committed a sin in exposing” himself to church air), parlors, legislative halls, school-houses (“I would prefer to have my son remain in utter ignorance . . . than to breathe . . . such a poisonous atmosphere”), theatres, concert-rooms, railway cars, and steamer ships. He fervently wonders whether designers of public space would take ventilation into consideration in their designs if “carbonic acid” (carbon dioxide) were “only black” (qtd. in Beecher and Stowe 55, their emphasis). It is this invisible “group air,” a product of “mixing” in public spaces, which contaminates. Dr. Lewis’s wish for a visible sign of this poisonous group air (unsurprisingly, the sign of blackness) speaks to all of the bourgeois fears of social contamination: his use of a racialized term to represent contamination speaks to the connection between rape and race in the middle-class mind. But aside from redesigning all homes and public spaces, these domestic scientists do not suggest a solution to the problem of ventilation, except to suggest that the ideal housewife will find “some method that will empty rooms of the vitiated air and bring in a supply of pure air by small and imperceptible currents” (Beecher and Stowe 58, their emphasis). The resourceful homemaker will orchestrate even the air in her home so as to promote perfect health without disturbance or undue attention—imperceptibly. If she cannot do so, she is guilty of poisoning her family. Unfortunately for the working classes, twentieth-century urban design relocated industrial plants and factories to the outskirts of cities close to poor neighborhoods (segregated from the businesses and downtown areas as well as the middle-class residential areas), so that the air outside poor homes was polluted by chemical by-products and unbearable smells. In the second half of Yonnondio, the Holbrooks must move (from the farm) to the city slums, in which the very air they breathe is poisoned by a “fog of stink” from the nearby slaughterhouses, a stench that “smothers down” over the slums in a manner “so solid, so impenetrable, no other smell lives beside it” (47). As Olsen’s narrator notes, the stench is a metaphor for oppression; it is “a reminder—a proclamation—I rule here. It speaks for the packing houses” and “bulges out the soiled and exhausted houses” (47, emphasis in original). Working-class homes are “soiled and exhausted,” just like the women who work to manage them, but they are soiled by oppressive social and economic conditions, not intrinsically, Olsen subtly suggests here. The stench hanging over the slums is the most oppressive form of dirt presented in the novel, primarily because there is no effective remedy for it and because it seems to be a force of nature, a part of the
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atmosphere that “dirties” all who breathe it. From the beginning, however, Anna is determined to battle it, as domestic ideology instructs her to do. When she first sees the awful house they will live in, she despairs, “holding Baby Bess to her nostrils, holding Bess against the corrosive eating into her heart” (49). Her baby is the only purity Anna has left, because the stench quickly invades the rest of the family, leaving a “ghastly nausea” in “all their bellies”—another symptom of infection, like the fever Mazie runs after the incident with Sheen (53). Against the overwhelming force of the stench and the dirt, Anna hangs a “banner of defiance—up the first day—the clean cheesecloth curtains,” which quickly turn yellow and then brown (53–54). Rather than attend to her children’s adjustment or meet her neighbors, Anna works first to make her house a “home,” “scrubbing to make a whiteness inside.” Unfortunately, her scrubbing can’t make a “whiteness” inside the house, herself, or her children. The stench overwhelms even her ability to articulate her feelings: when she tries to scream, “a smell . . . fill[s] her mouth so no words could come” (54). She wonders at “how the house resisted her,” unable to see it is not the house that resists her, but instead the social and economic forces symbolized by the stench. It is her supreme belief in her own abilities (derived from the philosophy of individualism) that prevents this understanding—she blames herself for not doing enough. In showing Anna’s valiant yet fruitless struggle against the contaminating stench, Olsen denaturalizes women’s housekeeper identity; in depicting the toll on Anna’s body from pregnancy and maternity, she denaturalizes and de-sentimentalizes motherhood as well. Just as the stench and “dirt” of working-class life can invade and infect the body, unwanted pregnancy is represented as a form of bodily invasion. At the novel’s opening, Anna’s constant anxiety over the welfare of her children is described as an invasive force, a horrifying version of pregnancy: “thoughts, like worms, crept within her. . . . of her kids,” eating away at her once solid body (2). For Anna, pregnancy is not a natural and joyous event, but one that further destroys the bodies of both mother and children. During the harsh winter on the farm, the pregnant Anna grows “monstrous fat as if she were feeding on” the “children, half sick, always hungry—thinning” (40). Because pregnancy requires a woman to tend to her own body more than she normally must, her nearly starving family perceives her as taking more than her share of the family’s scant resources. Jim sees Anna as parasitic, although it is her unborn baby who is draining Anna (and thus by extension, the rest of the family) of energy, including air. Catherine Beecher warns against just such closed-in winter homes, arguing that a person who sleeps “in a close box of a room, his brain all night fed by poison,” will be in a “mild state of moral insanity” in
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the morning (Beecher and Stowe 50). Anna is indeed “drugged by the warmth” and stuffiness of the home; in a horrifying instance of neglect, she fails to notice when some baby chicks (which Jim found in the snow and put into the oven to warm) slowly roast to death, their cheeping becoming “hysterical” and a burning smell filling the room (41). While Jim blames Anna for failing at her housekeeping and maternal duties and thus harming the family, shouting “No wonder I never got anywhere,” Olsen implies that a combination of pregnancy and lack of fresh air is to blame, both of which seem “natural” but are greatly affected by economic circumstance. While Bess, Anna’s baby, is considered by the family to be a source of purity, Olsen describes the experience of pregnancy as a form of parasitic invasion.22 Without the ability to provide even pure air for her children to breathe, Anna Holbrook feels responsible for her children’s physical misery; according to Beecher and Stowe, however, she is actively inflicting disease and “premature death” not only on the children but on the entire family line. The distinction between being unable to help children who are suffering and actively making them suffer is erased by the domestic ideology that confronts Anna in Yonnondio. While notions that women “lived best by living for others” had given way during the early part of the twentieth century to the view that women deserved “self-fulfillment,” a self-fulfillment that would be realized primarily in “dedication to homes, to husbands, to children, and to community,” these ideas apply to middleclass women who have the luxury of leisure time (Lasch 10; Palmer 22). For working-class women, the needs of the self had to be subordinated to the overwhelming needs of the children. The working-class mother’s identity was still defined by nineteenth-century ideals of maternal selfsacrifice, except that in this case, it is the body as well as the mind and emotions that have to be deprived so that the children can eat. Of course, a martyred mother cannot provide for her children the way a living, healthy one can. Only a few weeks after baby Bess is born and the Holbrooks leave the farm for the city slums, unknowingly Anna becomes pregnant again. Her health declining rapidly, she loses herself in “great physical pain and weariness,” and she is forced to neglect her maternal and wifely responsibilities, as the “old Anna of sharp words and bitter exaction, and fierce attempt to make security for her children” is “gone, lost in a fog of pain” (56–57). Jim becomes frustrated with Anna’s lack of response to his needs, claiming he “dont even have a wife that’s a wife anymore” (61). One drunken evening, he becomes violent, telling her to “hold still” (75). This rape causes Anna to have a miscarriage, an incident Olsen portrays as the reality of maternal martyrdom: “The blood on the kitchen floor, the two lifeless braids of hair framing her face like a corpse,
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the wall like darkness behind” (75). Olsen interrupts this aestheticized image with the thoughts of the doctor, who thinks “pigsty, the way these people live” as he suggests that Anna visit the clinic (75).23 At the health clinic, a typical site of the middle-class reform movement, “waiting in the smell of corroding and the faces of pain” with the baby, Anna sees posters that instill (or increase) in herself and other poor women the belief that their bad housekeeping is contaminating their children. These posters “mesmerize” her, propelling her to clean even in her severely weakened state: “ ‘Dirt,’ the poster said,” she repeats later. “ ‘Dirt . . . Breeds Disease. Disease.’ Your children . . . Conta-gion . . . O, the posters . . . Flies, the poster said, Spread Germs. Germs Breed Disease . . . Disease . . . Your children . . . Protect” (81–84). Looking closely at Anna’s rewording of this poster’s message, we see its subtext: You (Dirt) Breed Disease (in/which is) Your children, or, as Anna thinks later, (You are) “Dirt That Breeds Disease You Make Your Children Sick” (88).24 Anna immediately attempts to instill this message in her own daughter, scolding her for being a “slob” (Mazie has left her one spare dress on the floor): “don’t you know if you cant keep your own things out of a mess, you’ll never keep your life out of one?” (85–86). Both the poster and Anna’s aphorism emphasize the poor woman’s complicity in the “messy” state of her family’s lives, insisting that a mess in the home translates quickly to a mess in the minds and bodies of the family; in effect, poverty is the result of dirty homes/people rather than the other way around. Home on the Range Women must transform the sexual division of domestic labor, the privatized economic basis of domestic work, and the spatial separation of homes and workplaces in the built environment if they are to be equal members of society. (Hayden “What Would a Non-Sexist City” S187)
The ideologies of individualism and domesticity combine to prevent Anna from having an individual sense of being by binding her completely to her family, which has no other source of aid. Paradoxically, it is not until Anna nearly dies that she discovers that she has a self that needs fulfillment. Olsen provides Anna with a glimpse of an individual self during her two days in bed after the miscarriage. The “long unaccustomed hours free of task” create in Anna “a separation, a distance—something broken and new and tremulous” (Yonnondio 93). This “broken and tremulous something” is a non-relational identity separate from those of “housekeeper”
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and “mother.” The words “separation” and “distance” recapitulate the rhetoric of the middle-class home; Olsen thus demonstrates her acceptance of the notion that privacy and some spatial separation are necessary to cultivate identity. Yet she also uses the term “broken” to describe the newly emerging self, and “bounds” and “bounded” to describe the standard version of maternal identity (102). I would argue that while Olsen portrays private space positively, she imagines that space not as the “bounded” one of a home entirely cut off from the streets and the outside world, but one whose borders are flexible and in which the developing identity too can be flexible, contradictory, noncohesive. Although Anna’s taste of “private time” takes place within the home, it allows her to glimpse a self not bounded by maternal and domestic duties, and not coterminous with the walls of the house. With a newly developed attention to her own desires, the slowly recovering Anna attempts to do her domestic work outside, “under a boundless sky, in unconfined air,” feeling “suffocated” when “between walls [or] under the roof of a house” (93). She neglects domestic maintenance in favor of the productive and more satisfying work of gardening, and begins to take in laundry for the extra income, defending this decision by stating “I’m helpin, Jim” when her husband complains that she can’t even take care of the family’s mess, let alone other peoples’ (93). She also begins to criticize Jim for not sharing her domestic burden, saying coldly, “why dont you go set like you always do” (92). These actions reveal some of what Anna requires for selffulfillment: to “help” the family financially rather than just keep the home free of “mess”; to cultivate plants and produce food for the family; to be outside in “nature,” even the form of it existing in the slums; to have Jim help her with the domestic chores. At the same time, Olsen’s narrator notes that during the “week of the clinic,” Anna gains a “cumulating vision” of “hostile, overwhelming forces surrounding” her, forces she is “not strong enough to contend with” except “sporadically,” as she tries to “order, do something about their lives” (93). While the term “hostile forces” might refer to the “dirt and disease” of the clinic posters, I would suggest that these forces might be social in nature, that Anna has developed a spatial consciousness that is in contradiction with the ideology of individualism: the dirt around her does not emanate from herself but from something outside of herself that is trying to keep her in misery— something that includes her husband (as her criticism of him suggests) but perhaps also her husband’s low-paying job. This partial insight is fated not to be developed, however, as eventually Anna must return to her maternal and domestic duties and relinquish her self to her children’s physical needs. Although Anna’s emerging sense of self, her “selfness,” as Mazie calls it later, is in keeping with the “new woman’s” version of domestic ideology, where a measure of self-fulfillment is allowed in order to make
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the women a better mother and wife, it conflicts with the working-class version of domestic ideology, in which the development of individual female identity is a luxury. In portraying Anna’s tenuous achievement of “selfness,” Olsen presents an alternative model of domestic space and female identity, one that carries the political force of a utopia. Elsewhere in the novel, Olsen develops this model as a challenge to bourgeois ideologies of home and domesticity even as she draws on some facets of those ideologies. This model is most clearly presented during the middle section of the novel, in which the Holbrooks have moved to a tenant farm in Dakota as a result of Sheen’s attack on Mazie. Olsen portrays that first summer on the farm as a return to the American dream of the pastoral: self-sufficiency and connection with nature and the land. The farm, “the place,” as Jim calls it, is a short-lived utopia. As such, the alternative it provides “fundamentally interrogates” the Holbrooks’ previous environment, “piercing through” existing society’s “defensive mechanisms” to show the harmful flaws in the ideologies of domesticity and family (Geoghegan 1–2). As Ruth Levitas has argued, “the wish that things might be otherwise” can become “a conviction that it does not have to be like this”; a utopia is then “not just a dream to be enjoyed, but a vision to be pursued” (Levitas 1).25 While the Holbrooks do not make conscious use of this analysis, they do benefit from the version of domestic space present on the farm. Later on in the novel, when they must move to urban slums, their memories of the farm help them to seek variations of that alternative as an antidote to their misery. Mazie’s use of the farm as a shield against the horrors of slum existence, for example, is part of a “utopian impulse,” an “attempt to create an environment in which [she] is truly at ease”; her “conscious and unconscious rearranging of reality” and her “place in it” reveals both the depth of her misery and the powerful impact of the farm upon her fantasy life (Geoghegan 2). Too, Anna’s rejection of housework in favor of gardening can be traced back to her experience of the farm as the ideal version of domestic space. The most striking revision of domestic ideology provided by the farm is the extreme permeability of borders between inside and outside, between home and workplace, and between divisions of labor. The members of the family all work near each other, “on the earth” to harvest the family’s food (Yonnondio 27). Anna is not confined to the house but moves freely from “house to barn” and back; she is free to traverse these borders not only because the new division of labor requires it, but because the world outside the house resembles a domestic/maternal space. Days falling freely into large rhythms of weather . . . Drama of things growing. You’re browning, children, the world is an oven, and you’re browning
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Here, the “home” or domestic space extends beyond the house to the world outside so that Anna doesn’t have to work so hard to create that space. The land (“mother earth”) provides food for the family; the outside world is not a filthy city or a dangerous wilderness, but “an oven” that browns the children. The “dirt” they encounter here is “natural,” and the brown on their bodies is a sign of health, not a stain. The air itself, “pure and soft as a baby’s skin,” is like “laughter . . . from the skies blowing something that was more than coal dust out of their hearts” (23). The pure and purifying wind, a great contrast to the stinking towns and the foul mines, performs all the functions of housekeeping itself, cleansing them of the dirt of poverty and despair. This purification process allows each of them to cultivate their identities, to “dream”: Jim regains the manhood that the coal mines had stripped from him, his “great voice rolling over the land” once more, and Anna feels “like a bride,” virginal and intact, as she was when she was a person and not yet solely a mother/housekeeper (23–24). She can “fold and unfold memories of past years” and make “plans for years to come”; she sings and tells stories of her youth to her children and her husband (27).26 Each person develops a renewed sense of self as well as a stronger familial bond; because they have space both inside and out, they have access to the privacy needed to develop individual interests without having to depend on a spotless home as the site of that privacy.27 This description might seem to indicate that Olsen conceives of the farm simply as an expansion of the bourgeois home: kitchen-as-world. In this scenario, the borders of home are simply pushed back to surround the farm, enclosing the family in a larger version of domestic space. Despite its challenge to bourgeois gender ideology, then, Olsen’s utopia does not challenge prevailing economic norms so much as lapse into nostalgia for a pre-capitalist version of them, when women and children had a central place in production, when the family’s “core identity” was as “a productive unit based on private property” (Zaretsky 64–65). However, Olsen’s distaste for the romanticizing of poverty, visible earlier in the novel, reemerges here to problematize this reading of the farm.28 In general, Olsen dispels romanticized images by juxtaposing them with vivid images of the human body in pain; by foregrounding the materiality of the Holbrooks’ misery during the harsh winter, Olsen disrupts her own pastoral imagery. Soon after summer ends, the outside world becomes life-threatening; the image of nature as protective earth mother is quickly transformed into a wintertime nature, a suffocating, killing
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in it. How good the weariness—in the tiredness, the body may dream. How good the table, with the steam arising from the boiled potatoes and vegetables and the full-bellied pitcher of milk. (29–30)
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mother (resembling Sheen’s description of the mine) who threatens the Holbrooks’ lives. The harshness of this winter, together with the financial impossibility of making a profit (or even avoiding debt) by tenant farming, is enough to force the Holbrooks off of the farm. A more significant challenge to the reading of farm-as-bourgeois kitchen, however, is the presence of a rural community. Although earlier sections of the novel contained mention of fellow miners’ families, the Holbrooks were not portrayed interacting with those families at any length. During the first months of their stay on the farm, however, their lives are deeply affected by interaction with the people around them; the borders around the farm prove to be as permeable as the borders of the home. Neighbors like Benson and Bess Ellis drop by the house to give advice on farming or to initiate social contact. The Holbrooks hold a barn dance, for which neighbor women arrive to prepare two days in advance. Olsen’s luminous depiction of the square dance hints at the value she places on community: “everyone had a look of beauty about them” as the “young girls and boys, quick of step,” and the “middle-aged men” and women give “themselves easily to the dance,” and at the end of each circle, the men give “out a long cry that beat up the blood” (31). Young and old people from different social backgrounds form a harmonious community of people who together perform the “dance” of rural survival. The significance of communal interaction is emphasized by the relationships between Old Man Caldwell, a pioneer who came “west from college and wealth,” and Mazie and Anna. Meeting Mazie on the road one night, Caldwell gives her a scientific explanation of stars and the sun, yet he values her poetic imagination (she thought stars were “splinters of moon”), and tells her to “keep that wondering”; he later gives her her first books (32, 37). He also visits Anna during the day to talk politics, providing readers with their first glimpse of Anna’s intelligence in matters other than money-management (33–34). Caldwell is attempting to build a coalition of rural people who will beat the system, who will “rebel against what will not let life be”; this model of coalition would provide the farmers with a different kind of shelter, one made of “hands” (79).29 Caldwell’s rural coalition is never realized, but similar moments in the novel underline Olsen’s interest in coalition building in the workplace; these moments are focused more on the needs of the male worker than on the housekeeper/mother, a focus that accords with the imperatives of socialist realism. Early in the novel, Olsen’s narrator intervenes to describe the suffering of Andy Kvaternick and promises him that someday “strong fists” will “batter the fat bellies,” although perhaps not in time to save Andy, who will probably “strangle with that old crony of miners, the asthma” (6). Her narrator’s comment to Jim Tracy (discussed
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in Chapter 1) constructs images of “millions of fists clamped in yours, and you could wipe out the whole thing, the whole goddamn thing, and a human could be a human for the first time on earth” (63). Olsen’s narrator responds to Jim Holbrook’s anguish similarly: “the things in his mind so vast and formless, so terrible and bitter, cannot be spoken, will never be spoken—till the day that hands will find a way to speak this: hands” (79). These “hands” and “fists” that will articulate and “wipe out” the suffering of the poor are those of the (male) worker. While Olsen has said in interviews that she had intended to portray an actual strike later in the novel, the existing version does include an image of workplace solidarity that takes place at the slaughterhouse during an unbearable heat wave: “By word or gesture or look of the eye, the message goes out in each department . . . however possible, spell, protect those known near their limit of endurance” (124). Challenging the masculine rhetoric that dominates most socialist realism, Olsen includes women in her imagined and real coalitions: some of the slaughterhouse workers are women, and she uses the term “human” (in “a human could be a human for the first time on earth”) instead of “man.” Perhaps because housework did not figure highly in models of socialist solidarity, Olsen does not indicate ways that “hands” would lessen Anna’s burden (except indirectly, by giving her husband more income). She does, however, provide Anna with domestic aid in her time of need at every point in the novel: Marie Kvaternick comforts Anna when Jim is buried alive in a mine blowup; Bess Ellis delivers Anna’s baby on the farm, and the baby is named Bess, presumably as a gesture of thanks; and Else and Mrs. Kryckszi takes turns supervising Anna’s household while she is ill after the miscarriage (20, 44, 80–87). This kind of help provides Anna with additional shelter in times of intense hardship, but it does not revise the standard domestic model the way that “hands” are intended to challenge the structure of the workplace. The alternative version of home the Holbrooks encounter on the summertime farm, then, is deeply satisfying to them because it revises the standard definition of domestic space, allowing mobility (on the part of both people and nature) across the borders between inside and outside, and “domesticating” the outside world so that the intrusion of dirt does not signify contamination. An expanded home with flexible borders can act as the site of both individual self-fulfillment and communal interaction. During one “rent week” in the slums, during which there is “little in the house to eat,” Anna is confronted by another bit of domestic science, “The Wheel of Nutrition” that states that they need “One Serving” of “Green Leafy Vegetable Daily” (97, emphasis Olsen’s). She takes the children on a hunt for greens in empty lots beyond her neighborhood, and the experience of being outside in the “light and warmth” that “flowed
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in ripples” puts Anna in a dreamlike state. Anna’s “hankering” for greens is a yearning for the farm environment; her dreamlike state occurs as she encounters a measure of the natural beauty of the farm, in which “mother earth” provides for and shelters the family. When they reach the suburbs, Anna passes by the beautiful homes without a glance and heads straight to a vacant lot overlooking the river. Surrounded by pastoral beauty, she regains her consciousness of her self: “A remote, shining look was on her face, as if she had forgotten [the children], as if she had become someone else, was not their mother anymore,” and Mazie can sense “the strange happiness in her mother’s body, happiness that had nought to do with them . . . happiness and farness and selfness” (100–01). But as Anna sings, “O shenandoah I love thy daughter,” Mazie notices that her mother’s “remoteness” from her maternal role has paradoxically increased her ability to show affection. Sitting under a tree, Anna strokes Mazie’s hair and sings to her, and “a fragile old remembered comfort streamed from the stroking fingers into Mazie, gathered to some shy bliss that shone despairingly over suppurating hurt and want and fear and shamings—the Harm of years” (101). Anna’s experience of “the farm” comforts her; in her state of contentment, she can more easily comfort her daughter and pass on to her the same “happiness and intactness and selfness” that she is experiencing, creating in her “a new frail . . . bliss, healing, transforming” (102). Elaine Scarry’s theory that bodily comfort is necessary for “consciousness” to develop “other objects” doesn’t seem to apply to working-class mothers such as Anna, who consistently puts her own bodily comfort behind that of the “other objects” (her husband and children) in her life. Reworked to apply to emotional comfort, however, it is when Anna’s psyche is comfortable—when she finds the privacy consistently denied to her as caretaker and homemaker—that she can connect emotionally to her daughter. This moment of connection is over too soon, however, as the other children call to their mother and a wave of packing-house stench floats over them. With a “tremble of complicity,” Mazie tries to “tether” her mother’s affection to herself, but “Between a breath, between a heartbeat, the weight settled, the bounds reclaimed. . . . The mother look was back on [Anna’s] face, the mother alertness, attunement, in her bounded body” (102, Olsen’s emphasis). In the slums, Anna is “bounded” by the weight of her “mother” role as she was not on the farm; in the hostile environment of the city, her efforts to keep the domestic spaces pure and to meet the family’s physical needs are enormously taxing, leaving her without the energy to attend to their emotional needs or to her own. Yet by recapturing the farm’s version of domestic space—a field full of greens—she can be a better mother to her daughter than she can in the cleanest home.
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During the last part of the novel, the few moments of happiness that the Holbrooks experience all bear a resemblance to this moment in the field of greens: they can transcend the misery of their bodies in the experience of “natural” or “healthy” beauty, and in that transcendence, they can experience the pleasure of communion with others. When they visit friends who own a piano, the family sings together, “the separate voices chorded into one great full one,” and their “faces” are transformed “into beauty” as they discover that baby Jim possesses an angelic singing voice (53). Similarly, when they first light fireworks on the Fourth of July, Mazie nearly cries with pleasure, thinking, “Oh, it’s us again, . . . it’s us”; for Mazie, the beauty of the fireworks heals the fractures caused in the family’s unity by the miseries of poverty (107). The most striking images of transcendence occur during the last pages of the novel, when the heat and stench are at their worst. Olsen juxtaposes two instances of contrasting joy, one of which emphasizes the private family, and the other that portrays an unlimited collection of human voices. In the first image, the actions of baby Bess, who is discovering her self as she bangs a jar lid on the table, bring joy to the family: “Lightning in her brain . . . Bang! I did that. . . . Centuries of human drive work in her; human ecstasy of achievement . . . I can do, I use my powers; I! I!” (132). As yet untainted by her “dirty” environment, Bess represents the family’s hopes for the future, a symbol of the strength of the human will to persevere in the face of hardship. Soon afterward, Will brings home a radio set, and the Holbrooks experience for the first time the radio’s “veeringtransparent meshes of sound, far sound, human and stellar, pulsing, pulsing . . . ” (132, Olsen’s emphasis). Mazie is hypnotized by the “magic concealed” in the radio, wondering “from where, from where” is the sound she hears (132). The radio’s disembodied communication represents for the Holbrooks (and perhaps for Olsen) an instance of technology and modernity functioning to bring people together, potentially creating an expansive democratic community (as opposed to the dehumanizing technology of industry, like the Beedo system). These two moments contrasting the discovery of the individual self with the discovery of human community allow the Holbrooks to attain a fleeting sense of family contentment, to overcome “heat misery, rash misery,” and the other degradations they suffer daily (132). Olsen makes clear that the solution to poverty is not simply a further retreat into the private home, but a movement outward into larger society. Olsen’s glowing description of the bodiless community of radio is not meant to imply the desirability of complete transcendence of the human body. Despite her emphasis on physical pain, illness, exhaustion, and all manners of invasion, Olsen foregrounds the dignity of the material body as a way of recuperating the position of the working-class family in
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American culture. The “primary and impelling material processes” (eating, sleeping, sexuality, birth, sickness, and death) of the body have been associated with the working classes, whose identity as physical laborers seems to root them in materiality; the working-class family thus acquired a connotation of “backwardness as society advanced,” seemingly in “conflict with culture” and “freedom” (Zaretsky 27).30 In bourgeois ideology, the very materiality of the body has “stained” it, and it is the job of mothers and homemakers to remove the traces of that stain from their families’ bodies—and to suppress or hide the functions of the body itself—without further “dirtying” their own. Olsen’s novel challenges this view of the body as inherently contaminated and contaminating both by making the working-class mother (the most “stained” member of the family) one of her novel’s heroines, and also by showing the true source of the degradation and the intense physical distress suffered by the working classes: capitalism and bourgeois ideologies of the home and the family. The end of the (unfinished) novel suggests a slight improvement in the Holbrooks’ lives: the last line is Anna telling Jim “I see for it [the heat] to end tomorrow, at least get tolerable” (132). Yet Olsen’s statements in interviews contradict this. In fact, Olsen “declared that her outline for the rest of [the novel] included ‘killing off ’ Anna”: “Anna would die from a self-induced abortion during her sixth pregnancy,” and humiliated after his involvement in an unsuccessful strike prevents him from supporting his family, Jim would eventually “desert the family”; additionally, the third child Ben was to die (Pearlman 52; Rosenfelt 233). The strike, though, was to politicize Mazie and Will, who would go west to the Imperial Valley in California to become labor organizers (Rosenfelt 233). “Mazie, a strong, talented young woman,” was to become a writer and “help improve the lives of those around her” (Pearlman 19). While any attempt to analyze Olsen’s “predictions” might not seem to be a “legitimate” critical practice, according to Mickey Pearlman, at least, I am inclined to speculate that Olsen saw Mazie and Will as surviving where their parents could not because their experiences on the farm gave them an alternative vision of home, one that they could strive to reconstruct in their own lives: where poverty is not the outward manifestation of a diseased self, and a messy house or a sick child is not a stain on a woman’s character (Pearlman 52). The Garden: A Rest on the Way The garden is, [Michelle] Cliff writes: “Not a walled place—in fact, open on all sides./ Not secret—but private./ A private open space.” This is a new terrain . . . in feminist poetics. Not a room of one’s own, not a fully
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Sarah E. Wright’s novel This Child’s Gonna Live is centrally concerned with home, community, and the place of black female identity. Wright’s protagonist Mariah Upshur lives in the impoverished community of Tangierneck, which she describes as “nothing but a place of standing still and death” (258). To Mariah, “standing still” or acquiescing to the Tangierneck environment is death, in both the physical and figurative senses. As Tangierneck cannot provide Mariah with a space that she can call home, she attempts throughout the novel to relocate herself while fighting off the death that she feels is stalking her. Caren Kaplan describes this kind of predicament as “deterritorialization,” or “the displacement of identities, persons, and meanings that is endemic to the postmodern world system,” especially for “men and women who move between the cultures, languages, and the various configurations of power and meaning in complex colonial situations” (187–88). Tangierneck could be considered a “complex colonial situation,” given that it was once a slaveholding plantation, the location of numerous and varied types of racist assaults (psychological, environmental, physical, and economic) that continue through the years in which the novel takes place, the late twenties and early thirties. Mariah’s “daily, lived experience of oppression” has deterritorialized her in that she feels physically and spiritually placeless (187). Her goal is to find a place for herself and her children; in the meantime, though, she keeps herself alive by repeating her mantra: “Gonna keep on walking. Gonna keep on marching,” and by calling on Jesus: “Help me to stay on my feet” (This Child 259). Without a “territory” or a place to call home, Mariah must keep moving. Yi-Fu Tuan describes “place” as “a pause in movement,” explaining that “the pause makes it possible for a locality to become a center of felt value” (Tuan 138). Mariah longs to “pause,” to stop moving, but she fears that if she pauses for too long, death will catch her. Caren Kaplan claims that “defamiliarization enables imagination,” allowing a person “to express another potential community, to force the means for another consciousness and another sensibility” (Kaplan 188; Deleuze and Guattari 17). Michelle Cliff ’s image of the garden as a “private open space” is a version of the alternative consciousness of home that Mariah discovers in This Child’s Gonna Live. Mariah’s “garden” is the Edenic location of her first sexual experience and the only moments of pleasure she relates in the novel. Although her sexual encounter with
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public or collective self, not a domestic realm—it is a space in the imagination which allows for the inside, the outside, and the liminal elements of inbetween. (Kaplan, Caren 197)
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Jacob results in a pregnancy, public humiliation, and a life of hardship and poverty, the clearing in the woods (like the farm in Yonnondio) stands as a model of the “homeplace” Mariah seeks in vain throughout the novel. The clearing is both secluded and exposed, homelike and natural; more importantly, it is always described by Mariah as “a pause in movement,” “that place in the woods where you cut across to go to Haimawalkin” (This Child 85). The clearing, where one can pause to rest on the way out of Tangierneck, is Mariah’s only “homeplace,” one she has internalized: “that secret place in my soul, in the green grass woods, where the air is green and cool and the ground is warm” (87). Since her own home is filled with violence and her community is dying a slow death, Mariah designates the clearing as a location that nurtures her. The clearing’s “warm ground” provides her with physical comfort and beauty, but it also provides her with a felt sense of community: it’s where she had the “prettiest kinds of times” playing with her friends Jacob and his brother Levi as a child. As a teenager, she goes there to remember Levi singing to the birds and to “get those TB germs out of ” her chest. One day in the spring of her fifteenth year, Jacob finds her there. In ecstasy over the beauty of the woods, she embraces him, and they begin to make love. She recalls how Jacob was “hard and liquid and melting over and over again inside me. Sweet in my nostrils and in my tears” (87). The image of Jacob “melting” into her body is one of intimate connection, where the body’s boundaries become permeable in order to allow more pleasure to enter; Mariah feels like Jacob is giving her “all his tenderest life.” Her sexual pleasure is tied to the beauty around her and to her own emotional pleasure at intimate connection with another human being, pleasure that she articulates to Jacob: “Juices running in my mouth and my legs. My nose feels funny. Gonna break myself all to pieces and laugh in a minute, Jacob . . . Gonna jump out of myself, Jacob . . . I’m jumping out of myself, Jacob.” I dared him with my eyes. In the green swamp swimming up to the sky. Soft and spilling and drenching us in the light of the yellow kissing day. (87)
Her ecstasy here is characterized by communication with and connection to Jacob and by her feelings of disintegration, of leaving her body behind and merging with the light of the forest and the sun. Yet she preserves her sense of identity by speaking during intercourse. Her garden is thus like Cliff ’s, a site of connection to another human being and to the private places in her own soul that help her transcend the painful realities of the body. Mary Ryan notes that an “individual’s sense of self . . . evolves through associations with place, memories of familiar and centering
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spaces, where men or women feel they properly belong and most comfortably reside” (Ryan Women 59). It is thus striking that Mariah’s sense of self would evolve through an association with a garden-like place in which lovemaking, communion, and transcendence take place, striking because Tangierneck seems actively to preclude such activities. Mariah discovers this harsh truth in the most painful way, as her sexual encounter with Jacob eventually makes her a pariah in the town. Jacob had promised her as he made love to her that “it’s gonna be better,” that he will make her “a queen on the highest hill in the land” and cure her TB—enabling her to transcend both her bodily sickness and her economic straits (This Child 87). When Levi stumbles into the clearing and expresses horror at what his brother has “done” to Mariah, Jacob tells Mariah that he’s going to go with his brothers to the city to “sing and get on the radio,” but he promises that he will come back to get her. Hurt by his abandonment and afraid of being left to deal with the consequences of their actions, Mariah cries “But you done done it to me, Jacob!” (88, emphasis in original). She gets pregnant as a result of this encounter and is publicly shamed, locked in her room, and beaten throughout the pregnancy by her mother. As a result of her few moments of transcendence, Mariah is physically tortured and reduced to being a maternal body thereafter (Jacob does come back to marry her but is unable to alleviate her misery). Driven by a desire for physical and emotional intimacy, Mariah continually seeks “another potential community,” since she has lost her Tangierneck community after her pregnancy forces her out of the church. She longs to speak to “somebody with some sense” (32, emphasis in original). Without companions, her mind is like an empty house: “Thoughts swung like a loose door on hinges with a powerful wind knocking it back and forth.” The sight of Jacob’s sisters hugging each other on the road sends a flood of desire racing through Mariah’s body: “Wished somebody’d come and hug me like that. Felt the juices flowing every which way all through her. Could let herself go in a minute if she wanted to. A heat that felt good to her thighs crept up and nudged her in the belly”; when the two women ignore her, Mariah thinks that the “Sight like to have made her heart give out!” (33, emphasis in original). Mariah’s longing is sexual, reminiscent of her sexual encounter with Jacob in the woods—“letting herself go” and “juices flowing every which way”—which emphasizes that her need is for a kind of intimate physical connection that would allow her to “let go,” to let someone else care for her. Surrounded by a hostile community and an extended family that holds her in contempt, Mariah is extremely lonely. Because the community denies itself to her, she tries to get along on her own, saying, “Don’t need a single soul” (34). But the isolation drives her to talk first to Jesus,
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and then to “Death,” who she begins to feel is haunting her. As Trudier Harris notes, Mariah’s constant conversations with Jesus are not a sign of her religious convictions (Harris argues that Mariah is more of a secular humanist31 ), but rather of her loneliness: “Jesus becomes a familiar companion . . . who perhaps takes the place of Mariah’s nonexistent friends” (56). She desperately craves someone who can recognize her existence, and with Jacob unable to do so, she must create that person in Jesus and “Death.” Her conversations with Jesus and “Death,” though, are not only unsatisfying but also disturbing to her children; Rabbit wants to take her “out of this place” so she “won’t have to talk to that death man no more!” (This Child 192). The “death man” is Mariah’s most intimate companion, one who knows her every thought and observes her every action—and desires her permanent company. Because they don’t have the resources to create a physically comfortable home, and because the elements of the “garden” (transcendence and connection) are denied them, Mariah and her husband Jacob rely on inherited notions of home, even when those notions repeatedly prove to be destructive. For Jacob, who believes in the rural version of the American Dream, the path to home is ownership and cultivation of the land. “A man can make it in this Neck if he tries,” he thinks; “All he’s got to do is work” (38). Jacob is obsessed by the idea of getting his land back from Miss Bannie, the white woman (his father’s lover) who bought the land from his father. He insists that “a man is his land,” quoting from what Mariah calls a “simple-assed poem he learned from his father”: “I am master over all I survey/ My rights there are none to dispute” (7).32 Jacob has been influenced by the ideology of the self-made man, mostly ignoring the fact that the practice of it by the black men in his family and community has resulted in lynching and death. His one concession to the reality of racism is to seek the help of his brothers in the city to help him regain and recultivate the land (49).33 Mariah, on the other hand, is more realistic about Jacob’s chances at landowning prosperity; she feels that “these Maryland type of white people” will never let Jacob profit from the land. Moreover, she believes that Tangierneck itself is “dead.” She surveys the land around her, noting that the wheat is “growing up barren” and will be forever “growing up through the foundations of Tangierneck’s little houses and choking them off ” (This Child 92). Jacob’s dream is doomed from the start. Mariah is influenced by a different American Dream, the slavery-era mythology of the free North (a myth that draws heavily on self-made man ideology); she claims that “they got a different set of white people in them cities up North,” where Jacob’s brothers are, and that Jacob is “the only one” in the family “sticking to this land” (This Child 6). Mariah plans
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to leave Tangierneck and go to the city, where she and her children “can act in some kind of a dignified way” (5). She imagines writing a letter to Levi (she is learning to read and write): “Tangierneck’ll kill anything that wants to live. Can’t stay here no longer. . . . Send for me, hon. I’ll pay you back. Look out for a job for me” (92). She believes that the Northerners wouldn’t “waste time making people feel bad over things like” her son Rabbit’s harelip (27). Mariah’s myth of the North proves to be false, since all three of Jacob’s brothers die as a result of wage slavery. But for the first part of the novel, Mariah views the North as a utopia toward that she continues to “march.” These two different versions of “home” are based on individualistic notions of self; they hide Mariah’s and Jacob’s mutual (though mostly unacknowledged) desires for a more communal life. While Mariah continues to wish that “the milk in her breasts could flow by the gallon— enough for all of them to drink,” Jacob feels compelled to “look out for [his] own,” his “own” being “the whole Tangierneck” but especially his immediate family. In return, he longs for someone to “fold” him “all up . . . like a mamma [does] . . . when trouble gets a person all worn out” (15, 109, 45). Yet without the resources to help others, let alone themselves, Jacob and Mariah are on the verge of starvation. Mariah’s concern for her family’s health forces her to consider signing “up for the Welfare” at her sister-in-law Vyella’s urging (37). Welfare would provide her family with food (“the Welfare people’s giving out cans of Pet milk by the case full,” she tells Jacob longingly) and shoes, as well as a hospital for her baby’s delivery (she holds the local midwife responsible for the death of her previous baby). But Jacob forbids her from “putting . . . Welfare food on [his] table,” saying, “I done told you . . . I provides for my family” and “I’m first responsible for any debts made in my family” (14, 102). He is concerned about the humiliation involved with the Welfare process, saying “You hear how them Democrats over there to the Welfare talked to Uncle Isaiah? . . . Embarrassed him right there in front of everybody, and then didn’t give him a thing” (37–38). Jacob holds Vyella (his adopted sister) responsible for “rousing up” people to get Welfare, but Mariah retorts, “Vyella ain’t rousing up nobody, Jacob. Starvation’s doing it!” (38). Jacob feels that accepting welfare diminishes his masculinity. While Mariah seems to disagree, Vyella does not: she tells Jacob that he “ain’t doing nothing” for his wife and children, that “Big deal Upshur men can’t do nothing but sing” (41). Yet when Mariah finally tries to get help from the Welfare people (asking Vyella to forge Jacob’s name on the forms so he won’t know), she too is humiliated. The “girlish-looking white woman” who interviews her screams, “You’re a liar! You do have some shoes for Christmas! . . . Can’t trust most of you niggers worth a damn”
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(199). Mariah is forced to hide “her few cans of food” and her spices when the Welfare people inspect her house for signs that she’s a “Welfare glutton” or a freeloader (202). What the Upshurs discover throughout the novel is that both standard myths of home and new avenues of support (welfare) that have been conceived of by whites have the effect of putting blacks into conditions resembling slavery.34 The Tangierneck community has never been allowed to become “homelike” for its residents except as a final resting place, a place of death; even those who try to escape it (Jacob’s brothers) eventually return in a box.
Wind, Worms, and Whites in Mariah’s Drafty Old House Better, far better, the [drafty] old houses of the olden time . . . then, to be sure, you froze your back while you burned your face, your water froze nightly in your pitcher, your breath congealed in ice-wreaths on the blanket, and you could write your name on the pretty snow-wreaths that had sifted in through the window-cracks. But you woke full of life and vigor . . . in full tide of good, merry, real life. (Beecher and Stowe 51)
While Beecher and Stowe romanticize the inadequate insulation of old houses, describing the intrusion of icy air as invigorating, they neglect to mention the dirt and disease that enter through the same cracks and crevices and their effect on the health and psychology of the inhabitants. Throughout the novel, Mariah complains about the state of her home, which is poorly built, uninsulated, and dirty, a “drafty-assed shanty” as she calls it (This Child 29). Her household chores include patching chinks and stopping up cracks, but despite her efforts, the “draft came right on in” (24). The image of the winds that swirl through “the busting-apart seams of the old slave house” is emblematic of the social forces that invade Mariah’s soul, as she concludes: Wind’ll take over. Snake into your senses if you don’t shake yourself loose from it. Bash every sun-filled thought you ever had. . . . Life ain’t never been nothing for me but wind. Wind in the night. . . . Wildness sets in when the house can’t stand up against the wind. (123)
The novel is filled with such images of invasive forces—wind, worms, disease, pregnancy—which infiltrate the body and eat away at it. While these forces seem “natural,” they are actually the result of the racial and economic oppression suffered by the African Americans living in
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Tangierneck. As if to make this point clear, after Mariah’s conclusions about the wind that has warped her life, her father-in-law, Pop Percy, arrives to inform her that “Aunt Cora Lou got run down by a carload of white young’uns up there by the Calvertown cutoff ” (124). Mariah falls to the floor in grief and stares up at the cracks in the ceiling, which seem to get “larger and larger” until she feels like “everything was falling to pieces.” Her hands clench as “she fumbled to hold things together,” but she “couldn’t get hold of a thing” (125). Aunt Cora Lou was an important part of Mariah’s ever-shrinking group of friends. Without her, Mariah’s “house” is in danger of disintegration. While Wright doesn’t focus on any white characters, she does make clear that they are the cause of much of the community’s suffering. They are the force behind the wind that blows into Mariah’s home, eating away at her children’s health and her own. Mariah is determined to face the wind, to “meet it head on”: “Sharp tongues of wind’ll lick your mind clean. Make you see yourself as you really are—alone! Except for God” (127). Mariah tries to view events such as Aunt Cora Lou’s death as a kind of Job-like test, one that isolates the individual (in this case literally) and clarifies her path through life (Mariah’s path is simply to ensure that her children survive). The wind of white racism strips Mariah of all but her survival instincts; her constant battle with it wears her down. At the center of this battle is Mariah’s unborn child, who she fears is the child of the white-looking doctor, Dr. Grene, and not of Jacob. Mariah never explains how she might have become impregnated by Dr. Grene, except to say that “this shitting-assed land of death’ll drive a person to anything,” but at one point her son Rabbit says “every baby coming into the Neck right now is more than likely Dr. Grene’s,” something he overheard adults in the field say (93). This statement implies that Dr. Grene coerces many of his female patients to have sex with him, perhaps as a form of payment. Mariah certainly never shows any fondness for him, calling him “that sickening man” (123) and wishing she had never decided to seek his help for her last pregnancy. Nor is the child’s paternity ever clearly established; the baby is very light-skinned, which convinces Mariah that it’s Dr. Grene’s, but as Jacob notes, “white’s in the family” on his side (171). In any case, Mariah is obsessed with anxiety over her unborn child. At first she tries to induce an abortion, but when she fears she has succeeded, she is overwhelmed by feelings of guilt and loss. At the opening of the novel, she recalls that she “had seen a naked man in her dream,” an image that symbolizes the death of a female. “ ‘Death!’ Mariah could hardly say the word, for it seemed the thing was creeping its way into her soul-case” (11). Mariah worries less about herself dying (the obvious interpretation of her dream, as she doesn’t know that her child will turn
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out to be female) than about her fear that she herself might have allowed “death” into her body and her soul, a fear that can be read on many levels: she fears that she has killed her child, ruined her relationship with Jacob, and sounded the death knell for her status in the community, low to begin with. Furthermore, in creating an actual persona of “Death” who continually instructs her to give up her efforts on behalf of her family as well as to kill herself, she allows death to interfere with her efforts at living. The book’s title and Mariah’s battle cry, “this child’s gonna live,” refers not only to Mariah’s unborn child but to the rest of her children and ultimately to herself.35 The most immediate (and repugnant) threat to the health of Mariah’s children is the worms that destroy the crops and invade the children’s bodies through cuts on the soles of their feet, technically two different kinds of worms. Worms feed on the raspberries that Jacob grows on his remaining land. During the previous spring, he had forced Mariah and the children to help him get rid of the pests: “we got to beat the worms to the berries,” he would yell at them, but then “with all of [his] driving, the worms won anyhow” (49). He vows that “they ain’t gonna win next year,” feeling a growing sense of desperation that unless he can beat the worms, he will only find “death on this sandy fit-forgrowing-nothing strip” of land that “Bannie done left” him (50). He had hoped that by planting rye, he would “sweeten up the land” and make it more hospitable for his vines, which would then be stronger and more resistant to infestation; but a voice inside reminds him that the worms always win: “Led you to plant it [the rye] last year, too, Jacob. But the worms won, anyhow. . . . And the spring before, the worms . . . THE WORMS!” (51, emphasis in the original). The worms have taken on a larger meaning as the cause of Jacob’s oppression and resulting inadequacy. Tangierneck’s land is inhospitable for blacks to begin with, but even if they can survive there, the worms (whites and their ideology) will kill them off one way or another (53). The most vulnerable members of Tangierneck, the Upshur children, are the worms’ primary target. One day, Rabbit sings a rhyme—“wormy, wormy in his gut/ wormy, wormy makes him glut”—and then informs Mariah that her youngest son Gezee has a worm (93–94). Already fearful that her kids “ain’t heading for nothing but Cleveland’s Field” (the cemetery), Mariah becomes hysterical, screaming “shut up, shut up, shut up!” (94). Mariah too associates worms with white people; feeling the threat of violent racism, she thinks, “white people ain’t no good, nohow” and then immediately decide that “the worms” are “gonna eat my children up!” (136–37). Ultimately, the worms kill Mariah’s son Rabbit. During the Upshur’s stay in the town of Chance, the woman who cares for
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the children while Mariah works comes to see her, saying that “a worm crawled right out of [Rabbit’s] behind this morning” (253). When Mariah arrives, she “noticed a worm crawling out of Rabbit’s nose” and immediately yells for her oldest son Skeeter to get his father and a doctor. But the doctor doesn’t come in time. All Mariah can do is to take “Rabbit in her arms” and hug him and wipe a cool rag on his body; she “kept it up until sometime in the evening dusk when her heart stopped moving. Heart stopped moving and she couldn’t hardly breathe herself. . . . Wasn’t her heart that wasn’t moving, it was Rabbit’s” (254). Mariah feels responsible, saying, “Why didn’t you tell me you had the worms so bad? I should have knowed” (256). Rabbit’s death only confirms for Mariah both her own sinfulness (her responsibility for her son’s death) and the fact that “Death” has entered into her “house,” seemingly to stay. Mary Douglas notes a sociological connection between a culture’s “anxiety about the body’s orifices” and “a care to protect the political and cultural unity of a minority group” (Douglas 124). Using the “Israelites” as an example, she claims that the “threatened boundaries of their body politic” are “well mirrored in their care for the integrity, unity and purity of the physical body.” Mariah’s own feelings of being permeable or open to invasion (wind, worms) certainly reflect the fact that her boundaries are threatened by white racism. A more clear example of Douglas’s point, however, can be found in the great anxiety the beleaguered community of Tangierneck feels about morality and “decency,” especially that of the young women. Because they cannot control the constant invasions of white racism or the resulting disease and death, they attempt to control and regulate sexuality, particularly that of women, who are seen to be more physiologically “permeable” to begin with. By creating a strict moral code concerning sexual behavior, they hope to “publicly reaffirm” the “structure” and “solidarity” of their community (Douglas 140). After Mariah’s “illegitimate” pregnancy, the community judges her to be “dirty” with sin, thus allowing themselves to feel “clean”; moreover, they can now blame Mariah (who, as a sexualized and therefore “dangerous” female, can “infest” and “pollute” others) for any deaths or disasters that occur in the town (Ryan Women 72). Mariah accepts their judgments, and while giving birth to the very light-skinned Bardetta,36 she experiences a hallucination of herself as sunk “into the chasm of Hell” and completely infested by the “maggots eating away at her. Squirming through every inch of her. ‘Specially in her nose. ‘Can’t breathe!’ ” she screams before passing out (182–83). While the maggots represent to Mariah her own sinfulness, I would argue that they are a better symbolic match with the white racism that has infected Mariah and Tangierneck.
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In using any of the above-mentioned poisons [to kill household pests], great care should be taken to guard against their getting into any article of food or any utensil or vessel used for cooking or keeping food, or where children can get at them. (Beecher and Stowe 378)
One of the great ironies of domestic ideology, even more so today than in the nineteenth century, is that housekeepers are expected to use poison to clean the home—despite the fact that poison is clearly more lethal than dirt. The housekeeper’s job is to make her home a clean and nurturing space in which her children and husband can refresh themselves after a long day, yet in the process of cleaning, she makes the home toxic, in effect poisoning her own family in the name of cleanliness. Moreover, the use of poisons is more likely to result in the harming of the family when the housekeeper is poor and either can’t be as discriminating in her choice of poisons or hasn’t the time or energy to make sure that the children don’t “get at them.” Viewing herself as “dirty,” Mariah believes that she must keep her home and children “clean” not only for their sake but also for her own redemption. Unfortunately, her efforts to do so (including her use of poisonous “medicine”) seem to backfire regularly, further supporting the community’s (and her own) judgments of her “dirtiness.” Mariah’s initial sense of herself as dirty is the result of her childhood sexual molestation by Ol Jefferson, who claims to be a cousin of Jacob’s mother. Whenever she sees him coming up the road toward her house, Mariah shudders, thinking that he isn’t “cousin to anybody . . . but the devil” (35). The “dirty bugger used to go around patting on little girls,” Mariah recalls, running into the house to escape him for fear that he “might even pat her again like he did when she was a little girl, bringing disgrace on her” (36). Mariah doesn’t describe Ol Jefferson’s sexual abuse, and while she holds him responsible for her “disgrace,” it seems clear at other points in the novel that some members in the community passively condoned Ol Jefferson’s behavior and even held Mariah responsible for her victimization.37 After encountering Ol Jefferson, Mariah attempts to clean her home, but is overcome by exhaustion and by the voice of the “messenger” (“Death”), who tells her “I’m gonna get you” (74). Mariah associates death with sexual abuse: the trauma of sexual abuse caused the death of her childhood self, and sexual abuse is a sin to be punished by death. Mariah experiences visions of the time in her life when she first felt herself to be “soiled,” beginning with “the days before her guilt was established before the throne of God”—and perhaps more importantly,
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before the “throne” of the group of women whom Mariah dubs “the Committee of Judgment” (This Child 74–75). When Mariah is fifteen, her best friend Rosey dies in the churchyard during a camp meeting; she had tried to cover up her pregnancy by binding her stomach. At the sight of Rosey’s body lying in the churchyard, the committee members cry “shame, shame, and scandal on Tangierneck,” more concerned with Rosey’s public display in front of the whites and the “very important colored from the cities” who have attended the meeting (76). Bertha Ann Upshur, Jacob’s mother, warns the other girls, “Learn your lesson by this sinful child’s disgrace” (76). Insisting that the presence of “the Haimawalkin white people . . . here today” means that she and the other adults have “pulled this community up so [the whites] have to respect” it, Bertha Ann is determined to find out if any of the other girls are in the “family way” so that “the church can help” them find their “way back to the Grace of God” (read: punish them and hide them from the public). The rigid and sexist morality of Bertha Ann (who believes that boys can “control themselves a little bit better than girls”) and the other committee members stems from their experiences with slavery and lynching at the hands of those same white Haimawalkin families (77–79). Miss Naomi instructs the girls that she and the other committee members have tried to “live a good and decent life in the eyes of the Lord so he’d bless us to prosper and overcome, and change the hearts of the white brethren” (79). If they can please God, she reasons, the whites will treat them better. She tells the young girls, “You gotta live clean, children,” because it “don’t pay to be acting willful and common . . . especially when there’s white people around to see you doing it. They use any kind of an ol’ excuse to take away from us what God done give us,” despite the fact that “they act commoner than us a heap of times” (79). The morality preached by the committee members is propelled by a fear of the violence of white racism, and the need to be “clean” in the “eyes of the Lord” is driven by the constant surveillance of white people. Mariah’s ironic tone as she describes the scene of Rosey’s death signals her view of committee’s belief that only women must be “clean”: the father of Rosey’s child is a church deacon whose eyes slide from “his dead infant to his wife” as he tearfully mumbles, “These young gals is just living too fast, that’s all” (76). Apparently white people expect only black women to represent Tangierneck’s morality and to bear the burden of its redemption. Although she recognizes the unfairness of this double standard, Mariah’s guilt over “living too fast” finally causes her to feel that she has let down her community and that she deserves her punishment. While Mariah knows what the committee has planned for anyone who confesses to sexual “sin,” she is drawn by their promises of spiritual
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guidance, which imply an intimate connection, one she sorely lacks in her own life (especially after Rosey’s death). Attempting to resist their entreaties, Mariah reaches “in her thoughts for Jacob,” but she has lost her feelings of closeness to him, having had no contact with him since the previous spring. The song the committee sings, “Lead kindly light amid the encircling gloom, / Lead thou me on, for I am far from home,” is seductive to Mariah, who feels similarly placeless and disconnected from her home and community. Bertha Ann’s entreaty, “Let us help you. Let God in on the secret,” finally compels Mariah to step forward. She hopes that her friends Lydy and Ann Long, who have also spent time in the clearing, will join her, but they don’t follow her lead. Instead, she must sit alone “on the bench beside [the body of her] best friend, Rosey” (80). After she confesses that she’s pregnant with Jacob’s baby, Mariah’s mother, Mamma Effie, begins to beat and slap her, while her father, Horace Harmon, yells to Jacob’s father, “What you gonna do about it, Percy Upshur?” (84). Mamma Effie beats her all the way home and locks her in a room for months to “keep her out of the sight of people,” refusing to listen to Mariah’s explanation of what happened between her and Jacob in the clearing. Instead, Mariah has to listen to the visitors wondering how “Effie was making out with the affliction God placed on her shoulders” and to cry “consternation, particularly ‘when we trying to get ahead and be some kind of a community in the world’ ” (90). Breaking its promise of “help” and connection, the committee (which includes Effie) exiles Mariah from the community’s favor, blaming her for lowering its status in the eyes of “the world” (whites) and thus bringing on more racist violence. As a result, the responsibility for racist violence in Tangierneck is laid at her door. Mariah constantly resists accepting the majority opinion about her own morality by blaming Tangierneck and its deformed community for making her a pariah, yet she is forced to agree that women are held responsible for the community’s moral standing. When she fears her unborn baby might be dead, she imagines that the baby died because “Tangierneck’ll kill anything that wants to live,” that Tangierneck believes she “ain’t got no right to feel nothing in [her] belly,” and that the “Committee” is “fixing to meet” to crucify her: “they’re gonna hang me to a cross, bleeding, with my legs stretched open. . . . With nothing but whore rags covering my private parts” (93). Although she understands that she is only a whore in the distorted view of her town’s residents, Mariah’s only course of action is to “live clean,” hoping that in time, the committee will forgive if not forget. Just after she’s given birth, she overhears her father say that “a woman is a mighty unclean person unless they learn how to respect their menfolks” and stick to the “keeping of the house,” and her mother tells her that she should “be careful how people see you. You have
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to look decent. People around home is so quick to give you a bad name and say you ain’t nothing ’cause your things don’t look nice” (179). The issues of Mariah’s sin are bound up with her poverty (her “things”), her “place” as a woman (in the home), and her actions in front of the alwayswatching whites. Even her son Rabbit tells her that “white people thinks nice of you up there to Triville if you dressed up nice and clean” (89). Appearance is directly linked to morality, which is linked to the proper observance of gender roles. “You can be as chaste as you want to in your heart,” Mariah tells her baby daughter at the end of the novel, but “a girl that’s going to live and make anything out of herself can’t be showing off her sin-hole in front of boys, because boys don’t treat no wife right when they grow up and marry them, if the girls show off their sin-hole too soon” (262–63). Her admonitions to her daughter reveal not simply her unconscious absorption of sexist morality, but her awareness of the inequalities of the system and her desire to give her child advice on how to “make something out of herself.” However, during one crucial period of struggle, Mariah seems to give up her fight against the community’s beliefs. When Bardetta is born sickly and light-skinned, Mariah’s guilt increases, and she concludes that her baby’s condition is due to the fact that her “Soul ain’t clean” (This Child 202). Once she has assigned blame to herself, she gives up her fight against Jacob’s masculine privilege and obsession with the land. In anguished guilt, she confesses to Jacob that her baby may be Dr. Grene’s and then allows the furious Jacob to move her and the children to a place called “Chance” for migrant work. Mariah puts on a girdle for the journey, saying to herself, “I done fixed myself up decent so I can look nice before the public. A different kind of public from this evil and crazy mess [in Tangierneck] . . . And maybe . . . Jacob’ll just look at me sometimes like’s I’m something besides a . . . ” (234). Mariah feels she needs to appear “clean” to Jacob and the new community in order to redeem herself. But the migrant workers in Chance live in flimsy shacks near a slop ditch filled with factory waste and trash, a “regular feast for the flies,” and the Upshur shack is not “clean enough for to eat in!” (240–41). Yet Jacob turns this complaint against her, saying, “You ain’t even clean enough for to touch no more,” which makes Mariah’s “whole self cav[e] in to a whisper” as she remembers “the long time barrenness of her loins” (250). “You ain’t even decent enough to tend to the children right,” he adds. She agrees, feeling that she “just wasn’t fitting for to raise ’em,” and realizes that a “lot of women in the shanty row looked at her as much as to say the same thing” (251). And when Rabbit dies, this view is confirmed for her. She learns from Skeeter that Rabbit had been saying that some blue pills he stole from her, pills she knew were poisonous, were “good for the sores
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if he mixed them in water,” and “even good for the worms” (255). Jacob tells Mariah that “she the one what killed him. Leaving poison like that around” (255). Accepting the idea that she is the cause of all trouble in Tangierneck, Mariah blames herself not only for Rabbit’s death, but for Bannie’s death and for the lynching of Jacob’s father Pop Percy by white police. Of course, Mariah is not to blame for any of these deaths—not Rabbit’s, not Bannie’s, and certainly not the murders of Aunt Cora Lou and Pop Percy by whites. Tangierneck is a place of death, just as Mariah senses it to be, but the people are poisoned not by Mariah but by racism and poverty. The deaths are all connected to the desire to control the land and to the fear of miscegenation: Jacob’s grandmother, Margaret, the half-white daughter of the white plantation owner Haim’s son, married Bard Tom, a black man; when he attempted to improve the land she inherited, the white members of the Haim family came and lynched him and Margaret (111). After killing Pop Percy, who had attempted to get Bannie’s land back after her death, the “Paddy Rollers” come to Jacob and Mariah’s house and harass and beat Jacob and Mariah, trying to get them to confess to complicity in Bannie’s death. The new owner of Bannie’s land later tells them that his sons (the “Paddy Rollers”) will leave the community alone “ ‘if you stop pressing some claim you all think you got on the land and stop bothering the people up to the bank about it . . . ’ All of a sudden it hit Mariah like a bolt of thunder that it was not Bannie’s death why they got beat. It was the land . . . the land!” (225). It is Jacob’s obsession with the land, his feeling that owning it will give him his rightful “place” in life, which has caused his family so much death. Because the town accepts his obsession, they scapegoat his wife. Jacob’s landowning American dream is left intact, but Mariah’s hopes of moving to the “free North” are dashed toward the end of the novel, and she is left without the drive to survive which that fantasy provided her. Jacob’s brothers’ deaths from tuberculosis are caused by Depressionera working and living conditions: “people’s dropping dead up there from hunger,” Jacob tells Mariah (229). Soon after Mariah and Jacob have moved to Chance, they get word from Vyella that Jacob’s last surviving brother Levi has also succumbed to TB. “Aint gonna be no more singing in Tangierneck,” Mariah grieves (246, emphasis in original). During the funeral, Mariah doesn’t notice how Vyella’s face is turning “dirty-colored yellow” or that her “belly was swole up considerable—jaws all sunk in” (246); nor does she pursue the matter when it looks “like Vyella was trying to tell her something,” her eyes looking “so scared” (249). But eventually, Vyella dies of cancer. When the Upshurs return to Tangierneck for her funeral, Mariah must face not only the loss of her dearest friend
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but the destruction of her friend’s reputation. Knowing her death was imminent, Vyella has written Mariah a letter confessing that her son Ned was Jacob’s and also asking for her to return to Tangierneck to “carry on in her footsteps” of community activism (261). Mariah also learns that Vyella “did away with a few of her big-shot white men’s babies just so she could keep on living in Tangierneck and giving money to the school and being ‘somebody’ ” (264). As Aunt Saro Jane notices, these revelations have “hurt” Mariah’s “feelings” (263). Aunt Saro Jane worries that Mariah is going to harm Vyella’s memory by speaking the truth about her at the funeral service, which would disgrace them all in front of the “important whites” who have come down to attend Vyella’s funeral. “All the big shots that’s gonna give us the rest of the money to build this school—build this Neck up to something—give us jobs to pay off the land. For you have to depend on white people” (264). In her eulogy, Aunt Saro Jane rants and rails about “how good Vyella was” to the “dickty white people lining the back of the church”: “Wasn’t nothing but pureness to her,” she tells them, lambasting them for leaving Tangierneck in such bad condition when some of the community have “even been slaves” for the whites and helped them “get that money” (266). When Mariah is called to speak the final words over Vyella’s body, she is determined to “tell ‘em all about her” despite Mamma Effie’s warning that if she says something “bad in front of these white people” and brings “more scandal to the family,” Effie will “make mincemeat” out of Mariah “on this church aisle” (267, emphasis in original). But when she starts walking up to the front of the church to speak, she is overcome by feelings of love as she looks into Aunt Saro Jane’s face: Love is a funny thing. It just sneaks up on you all kinds of ways. Wraps itself around your shoulders sometimes. . . . sometimes it won’t do a thing but mash you down in the church grounds. But love is a funny thing. Makes you say things you don’t even have a mind to say. (267)
As she walks up the aisle, the “Committee of her Judgment ranged around her,” their arms dragging “her head down into the folds of mother-warm titties,” pushing her forward. She sees the faces of “Vyella’s Little Ned and Poonky,” who say “Mamma said Aunt Mariah would help us for a long time, ’cause she was going home to Jesus” (268). Mariah’s acceptance by the committee (contingent on her not speaking the truth about Vyella) and her love for the children prevent her from saying what she wants to say. Instead, she agrees to take care of Vyella’s Little Ned as well as Aunt Cora Lou’s Lil Bits and Mamie, and to “continue on with the building of the school,” something she will “share” with Jacob (268). Mariah realizes
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that she has to “keep marching” in the face of the death that surrounds her, and not remain in the past by holding a grudge against Vyella. Because the price of her re-acceptance into the community is her silence, Mariah is left feeling that she still has no place there. She hopes that after Easter Sunday is over, she’ll “be able to forget, and keep on marching,” but she isn’t able to forget all that she has lost and the community’s torment and ostracizing of her. Even Jacob is unable to support her in her grief, still thinking only of his land: he asks her for her secret stash of money, adding that “seven children is a lot to look out for,” and “only three of them is mine.” Mariah informs him that she knows Little Ned is his, but she’s lost the will to “keep walking,” and she tells him he can have the money she’d been saving to get the kids and herself to another, better place (270). Like Edna Pontellier of The Awakening, who experiences her children as “antagonists who had . . . overpowered her and sought to drag her in to the soul’s slavery,” Mariah is overwhelmed by the responsibility of the children and by the loss of the only people in her life who gave her comfort and a feeling of connection, Aunt Cora Lou, Vyella, and Levi (Chopin 175). Without that connection, and with the loss of connection in her marriage (evident in Jacob’s refusal to take responsibility for the children), she has no place, and no future “place” in the Northern city. Vyella’s letter has tied her to Tangierneck, but because she doesn’t feel that she can have a life there, she decides to find her place in the river. Edna Pontellier, who drowns herself, experiences the water as “sensuous, enfolding the body in its soft, close embrace” (176), and Mariah too initially feels physical relief as the cool water soaks into her shoes. She enjoys the water’s “powerful and mighty tugging sounds” that block out the sounds of her children’s demands for food (272). She hears the voice of death saying, “Just wade on in, Mariah. River of Jordan is chilly and cold” (272, emphasis in original). But then she realizes “how cold the water” is; she “felt its iciness slipping through her fingers. Felt it soaking through her clothes.” She realizes that she “didn’t know how cold death was before” (272). Turning back home, she meets Jacob on the road, running “faster than fast” after her to stop her from hurting herself. Mariah doesn’t appreciate his gesture, however, and thinks, “Kiss my ass, Jacob,” telling him only that she “forgot to put the dough to bake in the oven so you and the children could have some nice hot bread for your dinner” (272, emphasis in original). She knows that Jacob’s primary concern is his own comfort, not her emotional despair. Like Yonnondio, This Child’s Gonna Live ends with neither resolution nor “revolutionary elan.” Because both books are set just before and during the Depression, readers know that the problems facing the family will grow. Neither heroine has found a place for herself, or a way to materialize
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her fantasy place—the farm and the garden will remain in the realm of memory. Especially for Mariah, the future seems to hold only more death, more struggle, and more losses in the battle against dirt and disease. But each novel holds out a slim hope for a better future. Mariah’s torment by the community would seem to be behind her, since she has taken Vyella’s place as the social activist of Tangierneck. Moreover, her own health is good, and she has seemingly won her own personal battle with the “death man” by rejecting suicide as a solution to her problems. For Anna, the good news is minimal, but a change in the weather and a renewed appreciation for the outdoors may alleviate some of her burden. Yet both authors have portrayed working-class protagonists, associated in middle-class ideology with “nature, dirt, excrement,” and “overt sexuality,” as women with courage, dignity, and intelligence, women who do interact with nature, dirt, excrement, and sex and come away “clean” in the eyes of the reader, if not in their own (Sibley 51). In giving them a life on the pages of their novels, in using narrative strategies that enable reader identification, Olsen and Wright make a place for these women in history and in the minds of their readers.
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5
Doing Time in/as “The Monster”: Subjectivity and Abjection in Narratives of Incarceration
What was left was a nineteen year old man lacking the qualities that would have made it human. Now to this man, named Jimmy, each moment was absolute, like a still life photograph. Each happening lived and died, unrelated to the ones that came before or those that came afterwards. . . . There was no past. No outside world. No thought. No memory. He lived inside a pattern. . . . It was simply that his mother’s visit tipped him into that stunned stage of senselessness which permitted him to do time. In that way it helped, for any old-timer could have told him, you do time on top of each moment, no more, no less, for the past will drive you crazy and the future kill you dead . . . How? you do not think of. And why? You do not care. —Himes, Yesterday (69) If it were desolation you were facing, it would probably inspire you in some way . . . But what faces you [in the strip-cell] is a cesspool world of murk and slime; a subterranean world of things that squirm and slide through noxious sewage, piles of shit and vomit and piss. . . . If you are in that cell for weeks that add up to months, you do not ignore all this and live “with it”; you enter it and become a part of it. —Abbott (34)
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Chester Himes’s most commercially successful novels were those featuring his Harlem detectives Coffin Ed and Gravedigger Jones. His creation of this surreal, violent, and “dark” series of detective novels, however, was the indirect result of the seven years he spent in prison, or rather, the result of editors’ squeamish reactions to the novel he wrote in response to his prison time. Begun in the 1940s, variously entitled Black Sheep, The Way It Was, Yesterday Will Make You Cry, Debt of Time, and Solitary, Himes’s first novel was published in 1953 (after six years of revisions) as Cast the First Stone.1 The novel was written in the Richard Wright protest-naturalist style, one of five similarly styled novels Himes wrote between 1945 and 1955. More so than any of the other five, this novel was butchered by editors at Coward McCann, who “deliberately and relentlessly” erased the complexity and “artistic aspects” of the novel to form a “hard-boiled prison novel” (Gerald and Blumenfeld 9). Yet it was this “hard-boiled” quality that eventually prompted Marcel Duhamel, the editor of La Serie Noire for Gallimard, to request that Himes try his hand at detective fiction: “start with a bizarre incident, any bizarre incident, and see where it takes you,” Duhamel told him, instructing also that he avoid “excessive exposition” and “introspective characters” and focus on the comical, violent actions of Harlemites (Margolies and Fabre 98). The result was a blend of gritty realism, surrealist absurdity, and satirical comedy that won Himes’s For the Love of Imabelle the Grand-Prix de la de littérature policière in 1958. Seen as series of violent reductions and repressions, the brutal editing of Himes’s prison novel provides an appropriate image of prison’s impact on Himes. Even a novel about incarceration, it would seem, must suffer in the fashion of the incarcerated; as Jean Genet writes in his introduction to George Jackson’s Soledad Brother, “any text which reaches us from this infernal place should reach us as though mutilated,” although Genet probably didn’t mean editorial mutilation (Jackson 5). Himes’s experience of Cast the First Stone’s grueling six-year publication process would have shown him that his literary success depended on shaping his subsequent novels to the audience’s taste for pulp fiction featuring racially and economically marginalized characters. To an extent, though, the book’s tendencies toward surrealism and naturalism were part of Himes’s original text; this can be seen in the uncut version, restored and published in 1998 as Yesterday Will Make You Cry as part of Norton’s “Old School Books” series. Drawing on Richard Wright’s brand of naturalism, Himes explores the ways that social forces and ideologies determine human
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So most of these inmates are sick, my friend, but who created the monster in them? They all stand right now as products of their environment. —Jackson Soledad (163)
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consciousness. As mentioned in Chapter 1, the classic naturalist novel features uneducated working-class characters so constrained by grinding poverty that they have little time for moral decisions or intellectual reflection. Rather, they follow their emotions and instincts, venting frustration at their exhausting struggle for survival with outbursts of emotion and alcohol-fueled violence. Given naturalism’s correlation between environment and behavior, it stands to reason that the regulated, surveilled, and otherwise radically determined space of prison will produce characters who, lacking even the distracting necessity of providing food and shelter for themselves, will appear to be animals, machines, even the “undead.” In prison literature, the standard naturalist character takes on surrealist and gothic qualities. The characterization of Himes’s fictional convicts and the unstructured plot of his prison novel form a fusion of naturalism, protest, and surrealism, a kind of blueprint for subsequent novels, even as his editors’ reactions to both form and content of Yesterday drove him toward the less literary “pulp” qualities of this generic mode. Despite its frustrating origins, this blended mode served Himes well not only for his prison novel but also for his protest and detective novels; his characters range from violent inmates and desperately impoverished workers to middleclass intellectuals. The fact that Himes could use this form for a variety of novelistic modes depicting such a range of characters reveals a significant aspect of his beliefs about the destructive impact of social oppression upon identity. The violent, bizarre, and surreal actions of Himes’s incarcerated characters result not only from prison conditions but also from social oppression, racism in particular. Himes’s choice to feature a white protagonist in Yesterday does not preclude an understanding of the way racism impacts identity in Himes’s work; this is true not only because the oppression in Himes’s fictionalized prison is coextensive with the social oppression on the outside, but also because the novel reveals a commentary on the ways aspects of identity, racial or otherwise, are displaced and erased in prison. In this chapter, I trace Himes’s testimony, both autobiographical and fictional, as well as the testimony of other convict authors about the way the prison “program” replaces individual subjectivity and narrative of development with a uniform institutional identity, and the resulting impact on racial identity. Himes’s depiction of fractured subjectivity is a radical extension of double consciousness: inhabiting the institutionally defined identity will destroy the inmate’s pre-prison identity, leaving the subject vulnerable to attacks by other inmates; however, rebellion against institutional programming to preserve a sense of identity will prolong the sentence and make the inmate a target for traumatic punishment.
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Developed from the short stories Himes wrote in prison, Yesterday Will Make You Cry is admittedly “not racially oriented.” Himes states that he “did not write about the lives of blacks in a white world,” but about “crimes and criminals, mostly about the life in prison” (Quality 65). Himes’s protagonist is “a Mississippi white boy” named Jimmy Monroe. In his autobiography, Himes notes, “That ought to tell me something, but I don’t know what—but obviously it was the story of my own prison experiences” (117). Suggesting here that his avoidance of race is an unconscious denial, Himes elsewhere explains it as a literary strategy; critics have embraced both explanations. Himes’s biographers Edward Margolies and Michel Fabre argue that while Himes expressed support for “black militancy and black separatism” and claimed not to “have any use for white people,” he never “identified himself with” or wrote about “black culture, except . . . that of the black underworld,” often preferring “the company of whites as friends and lovers” and behaving in a manner that “mirrored the larger white world” (Margolies and Fabre 24). This comment suggests that Himes unconsciously allowed an aversion to or disgust with black culture and a preference for whites to determine not only his choice of a white protagonist but also his depiction of black culture, a conclusion that I don’t find to be supported by Himes’s writing. Alternately, the editors of Yesterday claim somewhat unclearly that Himes’s choice to “tell the story of his life using the voice of a white man” enables him “to draw a few red herrings across the trail and resolve what appeared at the time as an irrevocable contradiction: being a black man and a writer and demonstrating that it is possible for an African American to go beyond ghetto experience” (Yesterday 8). Certainly, Himes transcends contemporary social expectations by being a writer, but if the editors mean that using a white protagonist allows Himes to transcend the perceived limitations of writing about race in this first novel, then it’s debatable whether a prison novel is much of a departure from a novel about “ghetto experience.” Writing about race, of course, is only limiting to the extent that publishers concerned with sales attempt to control the form and content of the literature. These external limits are strikingly clear in the way that subsequent publishers and readers of Himes’s novel read and perceived it. As Melvin Van Peebles notes in his preface to Norton’s edition of Yesterday, the blurb copy for the Signet 1972 reprint of Cast the First Stone begins with “the patronizing ‘James Monroe was a cool cat’ ” and describes the “ruthlessly honest” novel as portraying “a young black’s agonizing discovery of his own emotions, his own identity” (Yesterday 20). Clearly the blurb copywriter hadn’t read much of the novel, but what little she or he had absorbed was revised so as to appeal to mainstream readers’ growing interest in the “agony” of oppressed African American protagonists
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struggling to “discover” themselves. Himes confirms this in a comment about the various rejections of his prison novel: “American publishers” and “white American readers of novels . . . are not interested in black writers unless they bleed from white torture. I was beginning to bleed, but I had not bled enough by the time I wrote that book” (Quality 72–73). Rather than a calculated choice to escape the racial focus demanded of him, then, Himes indicates here that at the time of writing Yesterday, his own racial trauma had not yet begun to drive his writing to the extent that publishers desired. Ultimately, I would argue that Himes’s choice to make Jimmy Monroe white can be traced to his undeveloped racial consciousness during his prison years, the result of both unconscious denial and deliberate rebellion against expectations. In his autobiography, Himes accounts for his tormented, erratic behavior during his teenage years by saying that at that point in his life, he “simply hadn’t accepted” his “status as a ‘nigger,’ ” indicating, again, a both conscious and unconscious unwillingness to accept a marginalized identity, something he came to understand around the time he began working on Yesterday (Quality 28). Although some of his prison stories written during his incarceration feature African American protagonists, many more are explicitly described as white and the race of others is unmarked. In a letter to Carl Van Vechten dated February 18, 1947, Himes reveals his desire—and perhaps his desire for Jimmy Monroe—to “escape” his own racial heritage: “As I look back now I find that much of my retardation as a writer has been due to a subconscious (and conscious and deliberate) desire to escape my past. All mixed up no doubt with the Negro’s desire for respectability and such” (Himes “Letter to Van Vechten”). Himes didn’t develop a racial consciousness until after his release from prison, “when society began punishing [him] for being black”; by 1942, Himes’s writing reveals a racial focus,2 and he describes his “bitter novel of protest” If He Hollers as the expression of the “accumulation” of “racial hurts” he experienced in Los Angeles between 1941 and 1945 while trying to get jobs in private industry (Quality 75, 61; Margolies and Fabre 49).3 From this point on, Himes’s writing and thinking about race and his literary treatment of black culture are both complex and conscious, as is clear from his description of his detective novel series in a letter to Mrs. Geiger, the editor at New American Library: “my purpose was to demonstrate the absurdity of racism in black behavior as well as white behavior and more than anything else to show . . . the end product” (Margolies and Fabre 153). Himes does not describe the “end product” in a flattering way. As he states in a 1948 speech on the “Dilemma of the Negro Novelist”4 to the predominantly white members of a writer’s club at the University of Chicago, the effect of oppression on the human
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personality can be seen clearly in the Negro’s “homicidal mania, lust for white women, . . . pathetic sense of inferiority, paradoxical anti-Semitism, arrogance, Uncle Tomism, . . . and . . . self-hate” (Margolies and Fabre 69). Although they themselves might serve as examples of “self-hate,” Himes’s critical statements here are less a sweeping condemnation of his race than an indictment of white racism and an assessment of the damage done to African Americans’ “personalities” by the “corrosive inroads of oppression” (“Dilemma” 3). His harsh racial diagnoses notwithstanding, Himes’s focus on absurdity as the “end product” of oppression extends from Yesterday to the final novel in his detective series, Plan B, showing his continuing interest in the cultural trauma of racism. However, one could argue that Himes’s above-mentioned beliefs about the specific impact of racial oppression on African Americans, to whatever extent they were present in his consciousness during the writing of Yesterday, would provide a powerful motive for him to avoid any focus on race in that novel. Any antiracist author writing in the first half of the twentieth century about racially marginalized characters had to be extremely wary of confirming negative racial stereotypes and thus appearing to authorize further oppression of African Americans. As Himes and other African American authors have realized, “most readers are incapable of empathizing with or imagining a black man’s life. Thus, the Negro author’s main dilemma resides in the reactions of his audience, in the intellectual limitations of readers” (Margolies and Fabre 69). To avoid confirming stereotypes, then, Himes’s fiction features complex and eccentric African American characters who are politically and intellectually aware, yet severely damaged by racism. Himes supports a social determinist philosophy while still allowing his protagonists selfconsciousness and dignity, explaining the “urge to submit to the pattern prescribed by oppression will be powerful,” and that the victim of oppression “hates first his oppressor, and then because he lives in constant fear of this hatred being discovered, . . . hates himself ” (“Dilemma” 3, 6). As he notes in a discussion of If He Hollers, in certain cases “the impact of racial prejudice is so severe as to create a motive” for murder (Himes “Letter to Miss Jay Tower”). In this statement, Himes is in agreement with the prison authors George Jackson and Angela Davis, whose texts demonstrate clearly both the societal roots of black criminal behavior and the ineffectiveness of incarceration. As previously stated, however, Himes was not at this point prepared to take on the responsibility of portraying an incarcerated African American protagonist. I would argue, then, that Jimmy Monroe’s whiteness is best understood as a “lack” of racial identity following the contemporary understanding of whiteness as “racelessness.”5 As Timothy
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Barnett explains in a summary of cross-disciplinary research, “whiteness maintains power by presenting itself as unraced individuality as opposed to a racialized subjectivity that is communally and politically interested” (10). Similarly, AnnLouise Keating has described whiteness as “the guise” of “ ‘colorless’ human nature” (904–05). By racially mainstreaming Jimmy, Himes could focus on the individual experience of incarceration, greatly decentering the issue of race. Significantly, though, his act of deracializing his protagonist is a reflection of prison life’s erasure of certain aspects of an inmate’s identity, Himes’s included. A crucial part of his or her survival in prison, an inmate’s public identity is a highly contested space; the inmate struggles— often against other inmates and the prison program itself—to achieve a reputation that will stave off violence and ensure survival. In a comment about publishing his first story in Esquire while still in prison in 1934,6 Himes notes that being known as “foremost a writer” was his “salvation” in prison and afterward: “the world can . . . stone me as an ex-convict, as a nigger . . . but . . . I’m a writer, and no one can take that away” (Quality 117). In prison, then, he perceives his “nigger” identity as displaced by one describing intelligence and useful skill. Significantly, his racial and ex-convict identities become damaging only in the face of the “world’s” hatred of those aspects of himself. Displacing his racial identity would thus constitute a survival mechanism for Himes, although to what extent he was able to do so during his own sentence is not clear.7 While in Himes’s novel, race is subsumed by the category of identity-based difference, race in other representations of prison is such a significant organizing concept as to subsume all other forms of identity-based difference. Himes’s various narratives of his prison experience reveal the ways that incarceration displaces aspects of identity even to the point of erasing memories of itself. As Himes notes in his autobiography’s first paragraph, I knew that my long prison term had left its scars, I knew that many aspects of prison life had made deep impressions on my subconscious, but now I cannot distinctly recall what they are or should have been. I find it necessary to read what I have written in the past about my prison experiences to recall any part of them. I have almost completely forgotten prison, what it was like and what I was like when I was there. The only impression it left absolutely . . . is that human beings . . . will do anything and everything. (Quality 3)8
His fictionalized narratives of prison life written during and after his sentence have replaced his memories of the events.9 The final sentence
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alludes to the reason for this repression, the incredible inhuman violence he witnessed, suffered, and enacted, a violence with such force and velocity that it allows no time for reflection on its impact.10 As he describes, “convicts stabbed, cut, brained, maimed, and killed each other almost every day for the most nonsensical reasons” (Quality 63). The knowledge that at any moment he could be killed or injured forced Himes into a constant state of high-level anxiety, one that, paradoxically, demands the repression of any awareness of psychological trauma. “I didn’t have time to think of my hurt,” Himes states, adding, “I didn’t realize at the time that I was being hurt” (65). His process of repression begins with his arrest and interrogation, during which he was hung upside down from handcuffed ankles and beaten by police: “I had ceased entirely to think, probably when I was being tortured in the Detective Bureau. . . . I had sealed my thoughts against all reality, against all contemplation of anything past, present, or future” (59). Himes realizes, of course, that it’s “nonsense, even falsehood, to say that serving seven and a half years in one of the most violent prisons on earth will have no effect on a human being,” but his intense focus on survival precludes any kind of self-assessment at the time and disables it later (65). If imprisonment forces the inmate to close himself off not only from outer referentiality and contemplation but also from memory and time, then Himes’s avoidance of racial issues in Yesterday can be more easily explained. The development of a racial consciousness requires a historical perspective as well as the ability to reflect on memories across time. The displacement and suppression of memory and identity is part of the prison “program,” a process that I call “abjectification,” in which an inmate relinquishes subject status through adaptation, becoming a socially acceptable object. I’ve borrowed the term “abject” from Judith Butler’s description of the way subjectivity is created through the active repudiation of socially unacceptable desires. Butler uses the term “abject” to designate “those ‘unlivable’ . . . zones of social life that are nevertheless densely populated by those who do not enjoy the status of the subject, but whose living under the sign of the ‘unlivable’ is required to circumscribe the domain of the subject” (3).11 When a subject enters prison, certainly the “unlivable zone,” the most “defining limit of the subject’s domain,” he or she becomes abjectified, I would argue, and thus begins to lose subjectivity, experiencing what Stanley Cohen and Laurie Taylor call “ontological insecurity,” a state in which “one doubts the integrity of self ” and fears “turning or being turned from a live person into a dead thing, into a stone, into a robot, . . . an it without subjectivity” (Laing qtd. in Cohen 109). In Foucault’s words, prison is a “machine for altering minds,” purporting to create a socially acceptable subjectivity through the
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“correction” of unacceptable behavior and desires (Foucault 125). Since, however, the prison administration considers the most prominent aspects of the convict’s identity to be abject, the destruction of those aspects threatens his or her most basic sense of self. In fact, inmates understand abjectification, the process of identification with or submersion in the zone of non-agency, as the implicit goal of the prison program. Published testimony of inmates in Walla Walla reveals a common belief that the “policies of the criminal justice system” are “calculated and deliberate procedures aimed at dehumanization,” thus seeing their incarceration as a “fight” between themselves and “the state or the system” (Cardozo-Freeman 52–53). “The ‘powers,’ ” one inmate states, “want to break me down and make a mindless robot out of me” (53–54). As Angela Davis notes in a May 1971 essay written from the Marin County Jail, prison’s “structures of oppression” contradict “even the avowed function of the penal institution,” which is rehabilitation (37). She quotes from the Folsom Prisoners’ Manifesto of Demands and Anti-Oppression Platform: “The Program we are submitted to, under the ridiculous title of rehabilitation, is relative to the ancient stupidity of pouring water on the drowning man, in as much as we are treated for our hostilities by our program administrators with their hostility as medication” (37). Thus prison administrators’ approach to the concept of rehabilitation, which suggests that an individual’s identity can be re-formed in prison to make him or her a functional member of society, serves to render it a process of destruction that inmates must fight. Inmates’ reactions to this form of “rehabilitation” are summarized succinctly by Eldridge Cleaver: “society shows the convict its ass and expects him to kiss it,” but “the convict feels like kicking it or putting a bullet in it” (31–32). The anger in this statement is a form of self-defense. More recent depictions of prison programming confirm the ways that incarceration destroys or displaces rather than reforms crucial aspects of identity. These processes form competing narratives in the HBO series Oz, beginning with the opening credits of its first episode. In the first narrative, sketched in the credit sequence, inmates experience prison as a chaotic series of frequently violent events loosely connected by an inevitable movement toward execution (credit sequences are interspersed with shots of an inmate being strapped into the chair and electrocuted) and adaptation (credit sequences are also interspersed with shots of “Oz” being tattooed on an arm). Inmates necessarily move toward literal, physical death or permanent identification with prison and the consequent (self-)destruction of subjectivity. The second narrative is from the perspective of prison administrators. In the opening action sequence, we witness a discussion between Leo Glynn, Warden of Oswald State
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Penitentiary (“Oz”) and Tim McManus, administrator of Oz’s experimental rehabilitation unit, Emerald City (“Em City”). The idealistic McManus argues against the “recycling” of inmates and for rehabilitation, which he imagines as the inmate’s progress toward self-control and eventual re-socialization through discipline and skill building (Oz 1 0:3). McManus’s philosophy shows some limited success; for example, when he assigns the violently homophobic Dino Ortolani to work on the AIDS ward, Ortolani “befriends” an AIDS patient. However, for the most part, Em City is a “concentration camp” to inmates, a spatially and structurally reconfigured version of the same dehumanizing prison system. Ortolani explicitly disputes the possibility of rehabilitation in an exchange with McManus, stating, “Even with all your good intentions . . . we ain’t ever gonna change, none of us” (Oz 1 0:39). He subsequently suffocates the AIDS patient—a mercy killing at the patient’s request—and is beaten, strapped down, and sedated by prison administrators (actions that lead indirectly to his own death). What Oz reveals, then, is that the narrative of rehabilitation, in which an inmate “evolves” from socially unacceptable object (criminal) to socially acceptable subject (reformed, resocialized excon) is the opposite of the narrative inmates experience and testify about, the narrative of abjectification. Many narratives of prison life refer explicitly to the initial indoctrination, also called “brainwashing” or “processing,” as the start of their struggle to avoid dehumanization, to keep “from being molded completely into a gray-clothed, numbered robot,” as Piri Thomas notes in his novel Seven Long Times (qtd. in Massey 31). Once an inmate enters “those huge green gates of no hope,” writes Thomas, the “process of breaking [him] down as a thinking individual” begins (Massey 31–32). Inmates must adjust not only to the radically determined, institutionalized, and controlled prison program, but also to the brutal violence, the “culture of savagery” in which “social controls” are absent (Cardozo-Freeman 193). These two opposing aspects of prison existence, rigid control and uncontrolled violence, are in fact interdependent, as George Jackson makes clear when he describes the prison system as organized “terrorism”: a “frightening, petrifying diffusion of violence and intimidation” displayed by the “offices of the warden and captain” of Soledad (27). Violence is not a “side effect” of institutional control but rather the means by which that control is maintained. Jackson adds, “how else could a small group of armed men be expected to hold and rule another much larger group except through fear?” (27). Under these conditions, rehabilitation is clearly impossible, as the point of this kind of terrorism is to brutalize and dehumanize a population into abject submission to authority. Because new inmates have developed their subjectivities on the outside, often using representations of incarceration as their “defining limit,”
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they enter prison not only informed about and fearful of the horrors that lay within, but also with an extreme self-consciousness about how they will be affected. Jackson was “prepared” for incarceration because he and other black men are “conditioned to accept the inevitability of prison,” which “simply looms as the next phase in a sequence of humiliations” (9). However, his first experience of imprisonment—the “constant bombardment of nonsense” and deadly violence “from all sides,” the never-ending “attack from the lunatic fringe”—is deeply devastating; destroying and disorganizing “the logical processes of the mind,” it is “the closest thing to being dead that one is likely to experience in this life” (19–20, 26, 110). Himes’s protagonist Jimmy Monroe experiences a similar “death” of self; his struggle to “process” his new surroundings rationally and emotionally is initially inhibited by his absolute inability to comprehend12 that he has entered that place of his greatest nightmares. He feels “as if he was some one else standing there . . . not Jimmy Monroe” (Yesterday 26). Part of Jimmy’s alienation and sense of unreality is due to the fact that representations of prison do not match his present perceptions: “real prison was the . . . prison in his mind . . . a prison of dark, dank dungeons with moldy bones in rusted chains” (Yesterday 25–26). In response to this perceptual confusion, his analytic and reflective capacities shut down, causing him to “escape into present tense,” or “go automatic” (Yesterday 31). Jimmy’s response, like Jackson’s, is in fact the one intended by the prison administration: the “death” of the inmate’s perspective on self and outside world. This experience of “death” is part of the central psychological effect of imprisonment, the disintegration of the boundaries between the self and the environment, allowing the abjectification of the inmate. In Space, Time, and Perversion, Elizabeth Grosz draws on the work of the French sociologist Roger Caillois to construct a similar argument about “mimesis,” the collapsing of the separations between the ego, the body, and the environment under certain conditions: “the relations between an organism and its environment” can become “blurred and confused” so that the “environment is not clearly distinct from the organism but is an active component of its identity” (Grosz 88). In this particular psychosis, called “depersonalization by assimilation to space,” sufferers “renounce their rights, as it were, to occupy a perspectival point, instead abandoning themselves to being spatially located by/as others,” thus also becoming an object for another’s gaze (90). In prison, where the minimum space requirement for humans is continually violated, a version of this condition can be induced as inmates lack the “flight distance” necessary to feel in control of their bodies. Those with unstable identities (such as schizophrenics) have described “anything that happens within their ‘flight distance’ as taking place literally inside themselves,” revealing that for
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them, “the boundaries of the self extend beyond the body” (CardozoFreeman 82). Inmates, too, will fight with each other when flight distance is intruded upon, or “someone gets in someone else’s face. It is not only a spatial violation but a temporal one as well, as the men state that anyone who gets in your face is doing your time for you” (Cardozo-Freeman 81, emphasis hers). This notion of an unstable boundary between external space and internal space is represented as perhaps the most threatening aspect of incarceration, but also the most inevitable: as one inmate notes, “You can’t run around here trying to be a normal human being”—you’ll be “stripped” (193). In Himes’s novel, conditions in the zone of abjection continuously destabilize boundaries between self and environment, damaging individual identity in the process. Images of disintegrating boundaries in Himes’s fiction typically take the form of gruesome physical destruction, represented using the conventions of gothic fiction.13 Upon his arrival, Jimmy describes himself as “internally mangled”: after “ten days in prison,” he was “all confused and wounded . . . deep inside” (31); thinking about his arrest makes him “feel like vomiting . . . he felt all ruptured down in his groins” (36). His protective shell has been broken, exposing an internal wound that threatens to ooze out. After he is placed into the impenetrable darkness of the “hole” (the “Corrections cells”) for refusing to perform heavy labor with a back injury, his thoughts become “broken and scattered,” followed quickly by the perceived disintegration of his body: he feels “his brain begin to crack, his skin begin to burst, his bones begin to snap” (49, 51). As the other convicts in the hole fight or succumb to hysteria, Jimmy begins to see “his mind standing just beyond his reach, like a white, weightless skeleton. He had the oddest desire to push it and watch it float away” (52). His only physical response to the darkness and the “locked up ferocity floating all around him” is hysterical laughter, a laughter that becomes its own invasive sensation: “that laugh began growing until he could visualize it crawling about inside of him” (50). This image of his intellect or mind (the skeleton) disengaging from his essential self, and his emotions (the laughter) taking over that self, forecasts his method of adaptation to prison life, in which he suppresses rationality and perspective and allows emotion to dictate his actions. For inmates, it is not only the destruction of identity that makes the loss of boundaries so threatening, but the possibility of merger with the “abject,” especially as embodied in other convicts. This abstract fear finds its most concrete representation in the pervasive threat of rape and homosexuality associated with imprisonment. The series Oz confronts this fear early in the first episode by showing the most vulnerable new inmate of Em City, Tobias Beecher, manipulated, raped, and brutalized by the racist
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Vern Schillinger. Rape in Oz is another deadly weapon in the inmates’ ongoing struggle for domination, yet its horrifying impact stems from the way it abjectifies its victims. We watch Beecher’s dehumanization over the course of several episodes, as do prison administrators, who become concerned when his depression seems to be slipping into catatonia. Eventually, Beecher adapts, violently taking his revenge on Schillinger and becoming a version of his dehumanized oppressor. In most prison narratives, openly homosexual inmates, particularly cross-dressers, are portrayed and perceived by other inmates as abject. The inmates in Himes’s novel, too, express a violent disgust with the openly gay inmates in their dormitory, taking care to suppress or deny any homosexual desires of their own. Jimmy is no exception; he struggles with a growing desire for another inmate named Lively, characterizing his longing for “that golden-haired punk” as “utterly degenerating in its savage intensity”; his feelings “chur[n] together into a squashy, messy, dirty mess in his mind, like the greenish, stinking scum on top of a stagnant pool” (196–97). Jimmy’s experience of psychological breakdown in prison is, for him, epitomized in his homosexual desire. His repetition of the word “messy” acknowledges the disintegration of boundaries between himself and his abject environment, represented here by Lively. His description of his feelings as the scum on a stagnant pool reveals that for him, homosexuality is the surface manifestation of a tainted system—prison and the abject self. Another version of boundary disintegration can be seen in the violent destruction of the physical body. Images of exposed internal cavities and gushing fluids, repeated throughout Himes’s Yesterday, are perhaps the most terrifying representations of abjectification. However, they also serve to emphasize the universality of the human body and to minimize racial difference. On one occasion, a Negro convict cuts the throat of another Negro convict, “Badeye,” who is asleep. Jimmy hears a “sort of gurgle.” Looking through the crowd observing Badeye’s death throes, he sees “blood bubbling out of his mouth . . . like the mouth of a dog gone mad,” the blood pouring out and pooling around Badeye until finally “he could hardly be seen” (55). Although Himes explicitly marks the race of the two convicts, the focus on internal fluids covering the head of the convict is a reminder that human bodies are the same under the skin. Another gory portrayal of the body’s interior also features a “colored” convict. Standing near a window shuffling cards before a poker game, Jimmy observes the man hit by an accidental burst of machine gun fire from outside: the top of the convict’s head flew up into the air. He had been making his bunk, and now, on the white sheet which his hands still held, a gooey mass
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Jimmy’s shocked response to the horrifying scene of decapitation is to utter a phrase that becomes a “classic” among his poker comrades: “in an inhuman scream,” he says, “Keep your goddamned brains off my cards!” (167). The horror Jimmy feels at seeing a man’s head fly apart emerges as an accusation that this man has violated Jimmy’s spatial boundaries. The visual images, however, again emphasize the universal horror of the body’s interior overrunning its exterior. Himes’s portrayal of the undifferentiated internal body represents the transcendence of identity-based difference; this is most clearly visible during and after Jimmy’s experience of a deadly prison fire, an episode based on Himes’s own experience of the Ohio State Penitentiary Easter Monday fire of 1930 that killed 330 inmates. Wandering around after the fire is over, Jimmy is unable to “push” away the images of the holocaust, unable to “unhook the whole damn thing” from his mind. As he reviews these scenes of death and agony, “change” comes “into him like a chemical reaction, so rapidly you could see it with the eye,” and he reaches the “conclusion that night that everything he had ever seen, or ever done, or had ever dreamed of doing, would in the end betray him. That no matter what you had been, or ever hoped to be, a foot of greenish vomit hanging from your teeth would make you much the same as any other bastard” (Yesterday 153). The universality of the dying or dead body, and the way that a focus on survival can erase skin-deep difference,14 provides the clearest understanding of this novel’s racial ideology. In other prison narratives, however, the threat of boundary disintegration is one reason inmates organize into warring factions by race, sexuality, and religion. Both George Jackson’s Soledad Brother and Tom Fontana’s Oz, for example, depict racial violence as an omnipresent aspect of prison life. Jean Genet’s introduction to Soledad Brother begins by refuting the “idealistic hope” that prison can “strip its inmates of their wretched social differences” (one of McManus’s goals for Em City, incidentally), arguing instead that prison is the place in which the racism permeating American society “reaches its cruelest pitch” (Jackson 3, 4). Jackson’s book confirms Genet’s observations, noting that “overt racism exists unchecked” in Soledad (24). However, in the ongoing battle for power and survival waged in both Soledad and Em City, racial difference is not the cause of but the conduit for the oppression inmates face; it
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of brains appeared. . . . his mouth was still grinning . . . but his eyes were gone and blood was coming out over the edges of his skull, running down into his ears . . . and his hands . . . gave [the sheet] one terrible jerk . . . as he fell between the bunks. (Yesterday 166–67)
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is a way of organizing factions of inmates and channeling their violence against each other (rather than toward prison officials). Jackson, for example, indicts the prison program itself for the racist violence he encounters daily: “it is not a case of the pigs trying to stop the many racist attacks; they actively encourage them” because most of the guards are white racists (24). Furthermore, racial segregation is virtually inescapable, particularly in the maximum security or “adjustment” area of Soledad known as O Wing: if a white prisoner from the general population is placed on O Wing for some infraction, he “will be pressured by the white cons to join their racist brand of politics . . . if he is predisposed to help black he will be pushed away—by black” (26). Indeed, the guards will occasionally “set up” a convict who “has not been sufficiently racist in his attitudes” to be attacked by the black convicts, thus forcing him to seek the society of whites (25). Similarly, upon entry into Em City, inmates are forced into their “appropriate” racial group without much choice in the matter. Only a few successfully defy racial segregation, such as Augustus Hill, the disabled African American “narrator,” and Ryan O’Reilly, the Irish inmate, who affiliates himself with a number of groups as part of his plan to take over the prison drug business. Assigned upon arrival and used as a tool in the battle for power and survival, race serves to mark a boundary that separates and binds individual inmates, whose own psychological and physical barricades are under constant threat. Both Soledad Brother and Oz insist that whites, both inmates and administrators, are the perpetrators of racism; nonwhite inmates react to white racist violence but don’t initiate it, according to Jackson, nor do they regularly use race as a lens through with to judge or relate with other inmates, as do whites. In Oz, the first instance of overt racism comes from Vern Schillinger, leader of the Aryan Brotherhood, during the first episode. Schillinger asks Tobias Beecher, his new cellmate and soon-to-be “prag,” “you’re not a Jew, are you?” This is his way of delineating a racial boundary around Beecher, whom he later claims as his property (and marks by carving a swastika onto his ass). Typical of white supremacists, Schillinger’s sense of ownership and entitlement is the basis for his racism; this is made clear in episode two, when, against a backdrop of the American flag behind him, he explains that he is incarcerated because of his “fight to protect my constitutional rights, . . . to protect what’s mine” from non-Aryans (Oz 2 0:05). Apart from Schillinger’s statement, the only other explicit discussion of race comes from Kareem Said, the Muslim celebrity who arrives in Em City during the first episode. Claiming he is a political prisoner (as does Schillinger, ironically), Said tells Glynn and McManus that “70% of Oz [inmates] are men of color,” which means that together, they could “take this prison any time we want
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to”; he adds, “as of today, I run Oz” (Oz 1 0:15). Said tirelessly attempts to convert or win the trust of inmates from other racial groups in order to build power. His work to this end damages his health when he suffers first from high blood pressure and then from a heart attack, diseases experienced more frequently in men of color because of racism, he explains to the prison doctor (Oz 4 0:42). Said’s approach to prison administrators seems designed to create more humane conditions for not only Black Muslims but African American inmates in general, yet his receptive behavior toward nonblack prisoners indicates that his alliances are political, not simply racial. He is repeatedly frustrated, however, by the racist or otherwise hostile responses he receives from other inmates, including African Americans—responses that seem unlikely to change. While portraying the apparent permanence of Em City’s racial divisions, Oz also undercuts them by allowing inmates to bridge (or at least consider bridging) racial boundaries with varying degrees of success. In the first episode, as “Wiseguy” (Italian) Dino Ortolani is feeling the emotional stress of incarceration, he is approached by Said, who offers to counsel him. Ortolani appears to want to confide in Said but finally walks off, saying “too bad you’re the wrong color” (Oz 1 0:49). In episode six, Ryan O’Reilly approaches Simon Adebisi, leader of the Homeboys, with a plan to overcome their racial divide so that they can take over Wiseguy leader Nino Schibetta’s drug business, which they do successfully. The final episode of the first season, featuring a violent prison revolt, portrays the formation of cross-racial coalitions that hold up until the end, despite numerous tensions. Though the Muslims intended to spark the riot after Said acquires a pistol from a new guard, it begins instead when two white “punks” fight over a checkers game and attack the guards who try to break up the fight. Once all the guards have been disarmed, Said takes control by shooting his gun into the air, shouting, “Now, let’s get organized” (Oz 8 0:11). He quickly forms a council of five inmates, leaders of the various racial groups: Adebisi of the Homeboys, Miguel Alvarez of the Latinos, the versatile O’Reilly, and Scott Ross of the Aryan Brotherhood in the absence of Schillinger (Schibetta, the only remaining Wiseguy in Em City, is incapacitated at the time of the riot). Said assigns each group an area of the prison to monitor, and he and O’Reilly keep the groups working together, reminding them that internal conflict is exactly what the prison administration hopes will disable the riot. After McManus trades himself for two wounded guards being held hostage, Said tells him that “even the best prison won’t be good enough” to put an end to crime, which is caused by racism, lack of education, poverty, and other social factors. For Said, the riot is an attempt to force society to take responsibility for the damage it has created. “We need better justice, not bigger prisons,” he
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states to McManus, adding, “You want to save this prison, and I want to destroy it” (Oz 8 0:47). As defined by Said, the enemy is not simply the prison administration but the social institutions that compel the poor and people of color into lives of crime and then construct prisons to hold them. At the end, as the riot police enter the prison with tear gas and bullets, Augustus Hill adds to this analysis with the idea that the inmates are simply attempting to (re)create “home.” The inmates’ revolt is a protest against the state’s increasingly repressive regulation (outlawing smoking and conjugal visits, for example) of their “home,” Em City, and thus of themselves. Resistance to the eradication of identity only rarely takes the form of a full-blown revolt in these and other prison narratives, however. Typically, inmates self-consciously adjust their reduction and displacement of self in response to the prison’s institutional programming. Inmates must choose on a daily basis whether to immerse themselves in the “institutional routines” of prison, thus complying with the destruction of their identity and according a “type of legitimacy to the institution,” or to resist institutionalization, risking even more brutal restriction and punishment (Cohen 104). The end result for either, however, is some degree of dehumanization, as Eldridge Cleaver notes: “the Eldridge who came to prison . . . no longer exists,” and “the one I am now is in some ways a stranger to me . . . Individuality is not nourished in prison, [e]ither by the officials [o]r by the convicts. It is a deep hole out of which to climb” (28). Here Cleaver reiterates a common description of the effects of incarceration, a gradual thinning of consciousness until one exists on the surface only.15 Antonio Gramsci similarly describes how, after much suffering and resistance, inmates grow used to “being an object without will or subjective personality” controlled by “the administrative machine” (188). George Jackson provides the most severe portrayal of the end result of adaptation on “Max Row,” where the “noise, madness streaming from every throat, frustrated sounds from the bars . . . the smells, the human waste thrown at us, unwashed bodies, the rotten food” cause white inmates to be “ruined for life” and black inmates to be “broken” (Soledad26, 32). In Jackson’s diagnosis, African Americans are “so damaged” by their imprisonment that “they will never again be suitable members of any sort of social unit. Everything . . . that may have escaped the ruinous effects of black colonial existence, anything that may have been redeemable when they first entered the joint—is gone when they leave” (32). Adaptation here is simply complete abjectification, the total loss of identity and, ultimately, humanity. Attempting to balance their inevitable institutionalization with their desire to preserve something of themselves, inmates frequently choose to
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do “their time on top of each moment”: closing off the prison world from outer referentiality and re-authoring themselves into narratives of chaotic emotional drama. According to a study published by the American Psychological Association, prison lore states that “thoughts of the outside must be suppressed, and involvemen[t] with spouses or lovers, relatives and friends minimized” in order to prepare one’s self for likely abandonment; a convict’s “head, to remain clear, must be ‘inside,’ exclusively concerned with prison coping” to the point of developing “a ‘shell’ which blunts emotion and minimizes affect” (Toch 387). Partly, this need to exist entirely in the present tense is a function of the fact that inmates’ former lives are moving on without them, and that they have to “either face the fact that . . . life was over at the moment of entering the prison, or that . . . life is that existence which takes place within the prison” (Cohen 93).16 This realization that they “have been given someone else’s time,” “prison time,” plunges them “continually and inevitably . . . into considerations” of the “actual significance of the present moment” (89–91). Himes’s character Jimmy acknowledges this on his first day in prison: “just fifty feet away was freedom, he thought. And it would take him twenty years to make it” (Yesterday 36).17 It is not long before Jimmy attempts to junk his past and all such time-related considerations. Most “freeworlders” perceive time as theirs to “use” or “spend,” and involuntary memories of past events can be pleasurable because they break “the grip of time,” allowing a person to be free of present circumstances (Lloyd 138). John Frow’s understanding of time and memory reveals why inmates whose time is not their own find memory to be painful, however: “memory, rather than being the repetition of physical traces of the past, is a construction of it under conditions and constraints determined by the present” (Frow 228). Any construction of the past within the zone of abjectification, then, would inevitably taint the memories, making the present even more painful.18 As described in the first epigraph, above, Jimmy Monroe’s mother’s visit, bringing as it does a flood of memories and emotional associations, overloads his capacity for thought and memory, reducing his experience of prison existence to “sensations” that he represses (Himes Yesterday 68). On such painful occasions, Jimmy wants to “lose his reason, his balance, his perspective . . . everything that held him to the semblance of a human being—a convict. He wanted to become a blankness, unrestrained” (251). Jimmy’s painful struggle to keep his humanity intact and present in the face of institutional pressures to disperse and disappear result in his choice of the “present-tense” coping strategy of displacement from referential and familial relationships and total immersion in the daily dramas of prison life. This strategy, however,
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recapitulates the abjectification of imprisonment and threatens to end his status as a speaking subject. Rejecting this coping strategy, George Jackson fights the battle against institutionalization through testimony, the narrative reordering of his experiences. Writing the letters that form his book Soledad Brother is Jackson’s only hope of holding onto his “last two possessions,” self-respect and “mental liberty” (Jackson 46). Attempting to transcend a natural tendency to focus on personal emotion, Jackson works to see himself “in perspective, in true relation with other men”; as he notes, “I have enlarged my vision so that I may be able to think on a basis encompassing all, not just myself . . . but the world” (37). His reading in African American history, political theory, and philosophy help him develop a leftist perspective on society that he attempts to transmit to his relatives and friends in his letters, in particular, his belief that the dehumanizing prison program is contiguous with racist, classist social ideologies on the “outside.” Jackson spends a number of pages attempting to convince his parents that they have “surrendered” their “self-determination and freedom of thought in tranquilizing conformity” to white social norms; their responses seem to consist of incredulity and fear. “You must listen to me. I’ve been trying to say something,” Jackson writes to his mother, referring to her apparent inability to recognize and accept her son as anything but a convict (her “abject”). At one point, he asks her to avoid concluding, again, “George is no good” (48). However unsatisfying, though, his epistolary dialogue with his parents relocates him in a relationship with both referential and emotional meaning. “I need the unquestioning support and loyalty of my mother, father, brothers, sisters,” he writes, so that they can all fight the oppressive social mechanisms that, among other things, sentenced him to life for a $70 robbery. He begs his family to “destroy the barriers placed between us with trust, and with love. . . . Help me when you can, the only way you can, by trying to understand” (49). With their affirmation of his testimony, Jackson can begin to envision the “possibility” for “something better,” a “refuge where people love and live.” He can relocate himself into a hopeful narrative of political progress, one that gives him a reason to “stay alive” (49). Rather than survive using the present-tense strategy of immersion in the daily emotion drama of prison, Jackson develops a critical analysis of society’s carceral structures and communicates them to his family on the outside, both of which denaturalize prison boundaries. In choosing writing as a resistance strategy, Jackson and Himes participate in the tradition of prison literature, defined by Barbara Harlow as “necessarily partisan, polemical, written as it is against those very structures of a dominant arbitration and a literary historical tradition that
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have served to legislate the political neutrality of the litterateur and the literary critic alike”—this in contrast to literature written outside prison, which can serve to “underwrite the same repressive bureaucratic structures designed to maintain national borders and to police dissent within those borders” (Harlow 4). Moreover, as H. Bruce Franklin notes in Prison Literature in America: The Victim as Criminal and Artist, the prison environment unintentionally shapes inmate writers, who produce “radical self-constructions in writings that challenge the state’s authority to contain their lived biographies within the boundaries demarcated by the penitentiary walls” (qtd. in Harlow 10). Ultimately, prison writers selfconsciously transcend the penitentiary walls through the production of a narrative that depicts their experience of abjection and challenges prison ideology. Jimmy manages to rediscover some semblance of identity at the end of his time at the prison, when he refuses to hide or end his liaison with Rico. Captain Charlie, always friendly to Jimmy, warns him to keep away from Rico because their relationship angers the other convicts and will get him (Charlie) fired if he overlooks it. Jimmy is furious with this warning, especially since he and Rico spend most of their time typing up and editing Jimmy’s stories on Jimmy’s bunk. He also views his battle as an attack by the prison system upon his personal integrity, however: “before I’d let these other convicts beat me now,” he states, “I’d die and go to hell” (355). When Captain Charlie charges Rico with “sex perversion,” Jimmy insists that he be charged as well, later testifying that the charge is “a lie” (Himes Yesterday 358–59). Jimmy and Rico are convicted and transferred to separate cells on 5-D, “the company of degenerates” (359). Jimmy realizes that by standing up for his relationship with Rico and by sharing the charges, he has lost any chance of a pardon; however, he realizes that “in his warped and unmoral way,” his action has “made him a man” (360). He asks his mother to visit and tells her “that the charge was not true” and asks for her help in getting the charge erased from his record. In stating that the charge is a lie, Jimmy is not denying that he has had a relationship with Rico, moments of which “had given him everything,” a relationship about which he “did not have any regrets”; instead, he is denying that he has committed “sex perversion” (360). Jimmy no longer feels anguished and conflicted about his relationship with Rico because it no longer epitomizes his abjectification, but instead the strength of his character in the face of hostile heteronormativity. Until he’s transferred to the prison farm, the next stop on the path to release, Jimmy continues to write stories and allow Rico to edit them. These stories give them both a psychological release, but they are also narratives of his experience, narratives he hopes will be published. In writing these narratives, Jimmy
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reassembles his fractured identity into something resembling coherence and positions it in relation to the free world. While the written word can help the inmate transcend prison boundaries and resuscitate abjectified identity, the spoken word allows a transformation of identity fixtures both inside and outside prison. The rehumanizing power of testimony from the outside is the premise of Ray Hill’s “Prison Show,” on Pacifica radio KPFT in Houston since March 1980 (the show can also be heard on the internet). Hill’s purpose for the show is to “help people understand this monster (the criminal justice system) before they” need to. Besides providing political analysis of the prison industry, Hill reserves one hour of the weekly two-hour show for family members and friends to call in with messages for their potentially listening loved ones. In these calls, as Hill explains, the most “private part of [inmates’] lives” are exposed on the air, breaking through both physical and psychological barriers around prisoners to enable their reconstruction as complex human beings. In addition to dismantling a range of stereotypes (especially those derived from visual surveillance), this show relocates inmates in relation to the outside world, speaking them into a narrative whose outcome and meaning they must authorize. As Hill notes, there are no telephones in Texas prisons (“Response”). By providing an hour for the relatives and friends of inmates to communicate with them, then, his “muckraking” radio show does double duty in the fight for prison reform. During these calls, listeners hear what sounds like one side of an intimate conversation with an inmate: “Hi Junior, this is Mommy . . . Go to bed early so we can see you tomorrow, okay?” “Hi Joe. We love you and we miss you . . . and we’re so grateful that you’re our brother . . . I know you think you’re blessed, but we’re the ones that are blessed” (Hill Prison Show). These affirmations of family members for their incarcerated loved ones immediately destroy stereotypes of inmates as violence-obsessed monsters. Hearing only one side of an ongoing dialogue, listeners have to guess at the inmate’s part of the conversation, filling in the gaps and cracking the codes families use to retain some privacy. By reconstructing the inmate’s words out of our own imaginations, both “free” and incarcerated listeners create a compelling vision of that inmate’s subjectivity. Through her tears, one woman says to her son John, “I got your letter . . . I’m glad you got it all off your chest, but right now I can’t” move to Houston (Prison Show). Another woman advises her beloved son-in-law Bobby, “I urge you to be kind tomorrow, okay, ’cause Sandy will be coming to see you.” Their testimonies ask us to reconstruct the painful emotions expressed in John’s letter to his mother and in Bobby’s visit with Sandy. Another woman confesses at the end of her call: “our visit really meant a lot to me,” and
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“when you look at me seriously or when you say something or . . . look in my eyes, I” sometimes have to turn away “because you [make] me crazy” (Prison Show). Her verbal intensity creates a visual narrative of this couple’s visit. Asked whether inmates find it embarrassing or even dangerous to hear their relatives speak to them so intimately in the presence of their fellow convicts, Hill states that it’s “probably the best thing that could happen” to them. “What’s wrong with prison,” Hill adds, “is that there’s no trust in that society. There’s no caring . . . no sharing . . . It’s one to a box . . . a scared insecurity kind of lifestyle.” The call-in part of the show “breaks that down” (Interview). One way that the barriers are broken down around prisoners is by the obvious love and emotional complexity of their callers. When one man tells Uncle Henry and Lee Jr. “I haven’t forgotten you” in a cheerful voice, he not only reconnects with them, but (re)connects them to us (Hill Prison Show). For several years, a man named “Bladerunner” regularly called for his 300-pound son “Sweetheart” serving a life sentence. Bladerunner’s words reveal that this father and son contained affection and sensitivity within intimidating exteriors. In another call, Laura anxiously but playfully tries to reassure Joey that she has been trying to contact him through the show, and that he has “misinterpreted” something she wrote in a letter, finally adding, I love you, god dammit—oh! I mean, I love you, big dummy. I didn’t mean to—I didn’t mean to say—oooh! I’m getting carried away here (laughter). . . . Joey, everybody loves you. Bye bye. (Prison Show)
Her endearing “blooper” and her entreaties to Hill to confirm that technical problems at the station interfered with her attempt to call two weeks earlier (“did you hear that?” she asks Joey) give listeners an affection for her that transfers to Joey. Similarly, Maxine from Wisconsin, the mother of a convict named Gary, exudes an aura of cheery Midwestern respectability that to some degree extends to her son: “Hi Gary, this is your mother . . . I got your pretty card . . . You’re very good, I always get a letter every week . . . Brian is in the musical Oklahoma, and we went up to see it. It was so good. Grandpa is doing good . . . we’re thinking about you . . . have a good weekend” (Hill Prison Show). Maxine’s voice and words place Gary into a narrative of family life, temporarily freeing him from the abject identity imposed upon him by his incarceration. Finally, Hill’s intervention in the prison-related problems of some callers provides another kind of re-placement of inmate subjectivity. In her call, Shelly wants her husband, Jimmy, to know that “even though
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the parole board has decided that our marriage needs to wait two more years to get started, that I’m still here. He’s not getting rid of me that easy, and that I love him with everything I have.” She may miss her visit the next day because she is taking chemotherapy-like medicine, which has made her very ill, but she reassures Jimmy that it’s “the only thing keeping me away.” Hill asks her to take “good care of herself,” noting that “sometimes we get pretty isolated out here when our loved ones are in prison—it’s just as tough on us” (Prison Show). Shelly then explains that the denial of her husband’s parole is probably the result of the parole board’s inadequate reading of his file, after which Ray helps connect her to an organization that can help her. With her criticism of the parole board and Hill’s response, Shelly’s communication to her husband not only politicizes his experience but locates him within a network of caring individuals who will help him resist an oppressive system. Through testimony transmitted between convicts and families, inmates reclaim themselves from abjection, from “the monster,” reconnecting with their humanity in a painful but revivifying manner. On “The Prison Show,” this rehumanization is transmitted to listeners inside and outside the prison, locally and worldwide. In this way, narrative, “an active response” to the “experience of contingency, randomness, [and] fragmentation,” gives a human face to prison time (Lloyd 11).
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Chapter 1 1. Du Bois takes care to emphasize that he does not wish to “bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism,” as “Negro blood has a message for the world,” but instead “to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American” (Du Bois Souls 45). 2. When I use the term “identity” in this study, it pertains to the various personality characteristics, experiences, and group affiliations with which an individual constructs a sense of self. An individual is therefore more conscious of her identity than of her subjectivity, which I understand as the product of the construction and positioning of an individual in relation to forms of social power. In thinking about identity, I recognize that, as Cathy Moses notes, identity is “not something that is imprinted on passive bodies by monolithic social structures,” but a “reiterative process of relations of identification between the body and social structures.” Moses adds that there is “no stable site for identity—even bodies are subject to change,” something that is readily apparent in protest literature (Moses 3). 3. While Du Bois uses “vast” to describe the veil and not the space of America that is his “birthright,” the veil’s vastness is a reflection on “their world,” that space from which he is excluded. I find it interesting that this vast space is simultaneously described as a house; however, I believe this to be a case of mixed metaphor rather than a conscious relocation of the vast American land within the domestic space. 4. Regenia Gagnier provides a helpful gloss on the concept of the “subject” and subjectivity: while “the subject is a subject to itself, an ‘I,’ ” it is also a “subject to, and of, others; in fact, it is often an ‘Other’ to others, which also affects its sense of its own subjectivity”; it is additionally “a subject of knowledge, most familiarly perhaps of the discourse of social institutions that circumscribe its terms of being,” and a “body that is separate . . . from other human bodies” (Gagnier 8). Moreover, although the subject is socially embedded, we “must also grant . . . the subject’s mediation (i.e., transformation) of structures and systems, including systems as large as language or the State” (10). 5. I do not mean to suggest that the novels of protest writers were more autobiographical those of than canonical novelists, although a great number of critics have attempted to relate the lives of protest authors to the lives of their
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7.
8.
9.
10. 11.
12. 13.
characters. From among the many, I quote David Ickard: “Where does Bob Jones end and Chester Himes begin?” (Ickard 301). I believe that the attempt to evaluate literary genres for their aesthetic or social value is unproductive, since the question of value is based on the critic’s historical context and personal experience. June Howard has stated my beliefs on this issue eloquently: “We want, unquestionably, to make assertions about the effect and value of literary texts, but surely we want to make them in . . . concrete terms, for . . . limited contexts; we want, in other words, to historicize the question of value. Literary forms themselves carry what Jameson calls ‘socio-symbolic messages,’ and form itself is an immanent ideology. But it does not do justice to the full significance of genre to diagnose forms as progressive or reactionary, as truthful or mendacious” (Howard 21). The issue of literary value in proletarian literature eventually caused Claude McKay to resign from his joint editorship of The Liberator with Mike Gold in 1922. McKay was certainly willing to print work by “the forgotten members of the working class,” but he could not tolerate Gold’s editorial policy, which he famously described as printing “doggerel from lumberjacks . . . and true revelations from chambermaids” (Aaron Writers 93; Maxwell 99, 100). The modernist novel has been described as “centered on itself and not on anything outside it; neither on ideology or theology nor on the expression of the poet’s feelings and personality.” According to this logic, political novelists are “putting the subject back into poetry” (Stephen Spender, qtd. in Bogardus and Hobson 4). However, the distinction between the twenties’ modernist “high art” and the thirties’ naturalistic propaganda is not as clearcut as critics claim. The birth of modernism did not necessarily entail the banishment of realism and naturalism; the three existed simultaneously and mixed in “curious ways that occasionally resulted in fruitful and important cross-pollination” (Bogardus and Hobson “Introduction” footnote 5). Du Bois’ statement appears in his 1926 article “Criteria of Negro Art” (296), while Petry’s version appears in her essay “The Novel as Social Criticism” (95). Morrison’s can be found in “Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation” (202). “Art is not a mirror to reflect the world, but a hammer with which to shape it” –Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893–1930). Ward hesitates to use the term “protest literature,” feeling that “protest is a position, not a genre,” a “racist box” in which were dumped books of “outlaw status” (173–74). He prefers the terms “thesis novel” or “novel as essay,” but I do not believe that using a different term will erase the aesthetic standards that have been and continue to be used to dismiss these novels. However, when the American canon was formed in the early twentieth century, such overtly political texts were left out. In doing so, she surely follows the example of Frederick Douglass, who uses the same strategy in his 1845 Narrative. Douglass offers readers Mrs. Sophia Auld, a woman not unlike many of his Northern white female readers (his
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NOTES
14.
15.
16.
17. 18.
19.
primary audience); possessing “the kindest heart and finest feelings,” she is entirely unfamiliar with the “blighting and dehumanizing effects” of slavery when Douglass arrives in her household. Once she is trained in the proper way to treat slaves, however, her “angelic face gave place to that of a demon” (Narrative 30–31). Her “fall” from innocence and the resulting “blighting” of her beauty would surely make an impact on Douglass’ readership—if the sadistic beating of the beautiful Aunt Hester did not. As Sharon Harris notes, Davis’s development of a “literature of the commonplace,” which is “at the core of all facets of literary realism,” dates “back at least to Caroline Kirkland, who also used the term ‘commonplace’ and was, as early as the 1830s, concerned with mimetic fiction and capitalist exploitation” (Rebecca 10). Furthermore, Harris asserts that Howells and other realist writers had all read Davis’s work, as it was published alongside theirs in the same periodicals. Anthony Dawahare argues that “in this single passage, Olsen extraneously provides social consciousness (‘like all boys’) and utopian desire (‘vague dreams’ of a free community) to the text, and provides her mute character with the voice he, a young unschooled miner, was unable to develop. She also metaphorically expresses the labor theory of value that is central to the dialectical perspective of the novel: ‘Earth sucks you in, to spew out the coal, to make a few fat bellies fatter,’ and she predicts a revolution when ‘strong fists [will] batter the fat bellies’ ” (“That Joyous Certainty” 6). Ralph Waldo Emerson had used the concept of double consciousness to “affirm the existence of a higher spiritual, religious realm within the human soul,” the “higher realm” of the soul being the “inner self ” and the rest of the soul and mind being relegated to the “outer self,” the individual’s collected intellectual detritus (Reed 100). For further discussion of this term, see Arnold Rampersad’s work on Du Bois as well as Dickson Bruce’s essay. For the Hegelian implications of the term, see Sandra Adell’s Double Consciousness/Double Bind. William James’ “The Hidden Self ” (1890) is a review of Pierre Janet’s dissertation on the same subject, “De l’Automatisme Psychologique” (1889). In the Jubilee Preface, Du Bois notes that as “a student of James, Royce, and Santayana,” he “was ‘not unprepared for the revolution in psychology which the Twentieth Century has brought.’ Nevertheless,” Souls “does not adequately allow for unconscious thought and the cake of custom in the growth and influence of race prejudice” (Lutz 261–62). In other words, at the time of writing Souls, Du Bois did not fully comprehend the psychological depth of racism. As Megan Obourn notes, the experience of “being-in-the-world for a person ‘marked’ by a minority identity can be understood as traumatic”; not only the legacies of racial violence, but the “continued and everyday threat of physical harm can be traumatic.” She acknowledges Wahneema Lubiano’s argument that minorities are “at the mercy of racist, sexist, heterosexist, and global capitalist constructions of the meaning of skin color on a daily basis” (Obourn 3).
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20. See Freud’s “Remembering, Repeating, and Working-Through” (1914), which describes the process within the context of analysis whereby the subject symbolizes a trauma through transference. 21. Gavin Jones disagrees with the idea that signifiers of poverty were so vague that racial signifiers had to substitute; his book describes “a polemics of poverty that was firmly established in the 1840s and reached a kind of apotheosis in the Depression years. . . . this contentious discourse comprehended economic inequality in ways largely independent of race, even as it defined poverty as a condition with cultural ramifications never quite reducible to a socioeconomic view of class” (Jones xv). 22. This issue is raised in a number of recent texts. See Barbara Christian’s “Race for Theory”; the introduction of Abel, Christian, and Moglen’s book Female Subjects in Black and White: Race, Psychoanalysis, Feminism, in which they suggest that even a revised psychoanalysis might still privilege the western cultural tradition over the African; work by Christina Zwarg, Gwen Bergner, and Keith Byerman. Dominick LaCapra concedes that “any use of psychoanalysis with reference to society and culture raises the preliminary problem of the applicability of certain concepts—for example, the return of the repressed—beyond the clinical context involving discrete individuals as subjects”; he states that Freud tended to see this applicability as analogical (the individual standing for society), especially if “that applicability is explicitly presented as problematic and suggestive” (LaCapra 173). 23. In this sense, I disagree with Naomi Morgenstern, who argues, “it is at least in part because the trauma cannot be temporally located that it becomes strangely transmissible down through generations. As the skeleton in the closet, the ghost in the attic, the family secret is preserved in its very unutterability” (Morgenstern 103). 24. Morgenstern argues that the slave narrative functions as healing testimony, thereby producing “many of the tropes that still dominate the African-American literary tradition” (105). 25. Neal also asserts that the “three events that stand out above all others in shaping a national identity” are “the epic struggles of the American Revolution, the trauma of the Civil War, and the heroic undertakings in winning World War II,” all of which “required extensive personal sacrifices and permanently changed the content of what it means to be an American” (Neal 22). Apparently he doesn’t consider American slavery to have affected the “content of what it means to be an American.” 26. Before and after Japanese-American internment, Little Tokyo, a Los Angeles neighborhood that still exists today, was populated by Japanese immigrants and their families, as the name suggests; during the period of internment, it became a slum inhabited by African Americans known as “Bronzeville,” and the women are discussing the need for more public housing and social services. 27. Critics seem to share Alice’s distaste for comparisons between Bigger and Bob. As Robert Skinner notes, Bigger Thomas “is a lost cause when his story opens . . . already a borderline criminal whose ability to believe in his own
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28.
29.
30.
31.
32.
33.
future or work towards any personal redemption is nonexistent,” while Bob Jones is a “man with a future”—as evidenced by the fact that he “owns an expensive new car and is engaged to a beautiful woman with wealth and position” (Skinner 193). Similarly, Angus Calder concedes that “the rape motif is repeated” in both books, but states that “Bob is nothing like Bigger Thomas. He is a tough and intelligent man who should clearly be accepted as free and equal in any society, not, like Bigger, a pitiful creature depraved by the slums” (Calder 112). Dominick LaCapra provides a helpful definition of “working-through,” which is not just a process of confronting the traumatic past in a therapeutic context, but “requires the recognition that we are involved in transferential relations to the past in ways that vary according to the subject-positions we find ourselves in, rework, and invent,” and which “involves the attempt to counteract the projective reprocessing of the past through which we deny certain of its features and act out our own desires for self-confirming or identity-forming meaning” (LaCapra 64). When Madge drops all charges, Bob realizes that “they’d grilled Madge and learned the truth, or learned enough to guess at the rest,” but because the employees took Madge’s side and beat Bob severely, the company will “cover for her till hell froze over” (201). At a 2005 MLA panel on trauma theory and American literature, an audience member recognized that typically, the trauma theory applied to discussion of American racial trauma is Holocaust-based, and that while “tropological and historical connections [exist] between the African American and Jewish experience,” African American experiences of racism are different in significant ways. Lukács defines the word “bourgeois” as pertaining to a philosophy of “freedom,” “permanent residence,” and “security” (620). The “Bourgeois Age” (1450–1950), he claims, is marked by the “internal deepening of human consciousness” and thus by an increasing concern with “interiority,” comfort, contemplation, and privacy (622). Besides Freud’s spatialized description of traumatic neurosis, we can also look to his description of the “uncanny,” which in German translates as “unhomelike” (unheimlich), an alien presence which re-intrudes into and disturbs the mind after having been repressed or expelled from it (“The Uncanny” 241). Engels was referring to the second definition of determinism when he wrote in a letter to Bloch, “We make our history ourselves, but in the first place, under very definite assumptions and conditions” (qtd. in Williams 85). Similarly, Marx states in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte that “Men make their own history but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past” (Marx 29–39, qtd. in Ferraro 7). As Marx stated in Theories of Surplus Value, Part I, “Man himself is the basis of his material production, as of any other production that he carries on. All circumstances, therefore, which affect man, the subject of production, more
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35.
36.
37.
38.
39.
or less modify all his functions and activities, and therefore too his functions and activities as the creator of material wealth, of commodities. In this respect it can in fact be shown that all human relations and functions, however and in whatever form they may appear, influence material production and have a decisive influence on it” (qtd. in Ferraro 29). Still, I prefer this theory of adaptation to Nietzsche’s, in which adaptation is “a second-class activity, a mere capacity for ‘reacting’; in fact, life itself has been defined [by Herbert Spencer] as an increasingly effective internal adaptation to external circumstances. This definition, however, fails to realise the real essence of life, its will to power” (Nietzsche 66). Critics of naturalism have agreed to disagree on its defining features and its generic status; many of them, including Walter Benn Michaels and Michel Fabre, refuse to define it at all. I would argue that critics’ disagreements about its definition and its generic status are the result of their widely varying and always passionate attitudes about the place of politics in literature. Furthermore, based on Northrop Frye’s and Tzvetan Todorov’s definitions of the terms “genre” and “mode,” I consider naturalism to be a mode of realism, not a separate genre, although, in light of its frequent critical dismissal, I respect the various attempts to legitimize naturalism by considering it a genre. By documentation, I refer to the inclusion of historical “documents” and references serving to reinforce the “realism” of the novel. As June Howard notes, naturalism, like realism, relies on the “crucial mimetic convention that narrative can and does refer to a ‘real world’ with a material existence somewhere outside the literary text. The names of both forms assert their privileged relationship to that assumed extraterrestrial world, invoking an ability to embody ‘reality’ or ‘nature’ as constitutive of the genre itself ” (Howard 11). One of the effects of this narrative gap is to reinforce the reader’s disgust with the poor, thereby maintaining the status quo instead of reforming it. Amy Kaplan sees a similar problem with realism: rather than a “progressive force exposing the conditions of industrial society,” realism is “a conservative force whose very act of exposure reveals its complicity with the structures of power” (The Social Construction 1). Charles Child Walcutt rather idealistically suggests that although the naturalist protagonist is stripped of “will and ethical responsibility,” that will is transferred to the reader, who “acknowledges his own will and responsibility even as he pities the helpless protagonist” (Walcutt 27). He doesn’t mention how this transfer takes place, or how “acknowledging” one’s responsibility leads to social reform. Upton Sinclair, “polemical” and “muckraking” author of The Jungle, believed that confronting the middle-class reader with the horrors of working conditions in the slaughterhouse would shock them into action on behalf of the workers. But his readers mobilized instead over food purity, forcing Roosevelt to pass a Pure Food Bill. Sinclair was quick to see the irony in the situation: “I aimed at the public’s heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach” (qtd. in Howard 160).
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34.
NOTES
40. In contrast, the middle class have the sensation of agency because they have secured a clean space protected from the outside world, satisfied other bodily needs (food and clothing) and thus prevent bodily needs from occupying their minds to the exclusion of other “objects” (from “determining” their thoughts and actions). Their genre is realism, in which the limitations of the environment intrude upon their lives but can be ordered and dealt with to some degree. 41. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud himself notes that he wishes to represent the psyche and its mechanisms, formerly “regarded as in some sort of way qualitative,” in a different light, “namely, as being topographical” (Beyond 46, qtd. in Kirby 85). 42. Citing Walter Benjamin’s work on the transformation of space in the modern period, Kirby discusses the “compression, massification, and deindividualization of the space properly one’s own,” in which an “identity once founded on solitude in open space, privacy, and centrality relative to an unpopulated environment had to redefine itself in relation to masses of obtrusive, impinging ‘others’ who could be ignored only at one’s own peril” (Kirby 74–75). These changes could be characterized, Kirby notes, as a “passage from a logic of ‘identity’—encapsulation in an organically formed, internally homogenous field, figurable in terms of a circle or a sphere—to one of ‘difference’—the rapidly shifting, unstable movement across a single line dividing the now-equalized territories of interior and exterior, self and other, here and there” (Kirby 76). 43. Fredric Jameson connects the development of the novel itself to these changes in society during this period of industrialization: the “new social material . . . no longer seems to offer any ‘laws’ or mouers or prescribed behavior patterns to describe” (“Goffman” 121, 123, qtd. in Howard 147). 44. Norris was apparently a follower of Cesare Lombroso’s theories about criminal anthropology (biology as determinism). See Howard 86, 93 or William Stanton on scientific racism. 45. As David Sibley notes, “power is expressed in the monopolization of space and the relegation of weaker groups in society to less desirable environments”; moreover, differentiation between these classes “depends upon disgust” (Sibley ix; Stallybrass and White, qtd. in Sibley 19). 46. Usually seen as distinct from naturalism, literary realism, which purports to construct for the middle class reader a mimetic portrayal of a middle class individual struggling to work through various social and psychological conflicts, is not without its political aspects. As Nancy Armstrong has pointed out in her study of the connection between the novel and conduct manuals for women, the novel has always intended to instruct its readers in various kinds of ideology. More explicitly political, naturalism attempts to portray for the mainstream reader the suffering of the oppressed classes both in order to study society and to raise consciousness about social problems; however, in implicitly imposing social determinist philosophy on its “reality,” as Perry Westbrook notes, naturalism is more romantic than it is realist (Westbrook 89).
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47. One example of this is in aspects of naturalist style, such as repetition of words or characters, which expose the “absence of a controlling will” and makes us “lose confidence in our own singularity” (Mitchell xiii, 2, 21). 48. Wright condemned Crane’s Maggie as being a “coldly materialistic picture of poverty,” while admiring Conroy’s The Disinherited for portraying men and women attempting to reach “human dignity” (“Beyond Naturalism?” 48). 49. Wright at this point is still allied with the Communist Party, although as John Reilly states in the afterword to Native Son, he is struggling to integrate his vision of Negro life with “Party dogma.” After Native Son, he rejects the party’s “political discipline and thought control,” but still maintains a deeply radical philosophy. 50. According to Barbara Foley, the proletarian novel was “written in the ambience of the Communist-led cultural movement that arose and developed in the United States in the context of the Great Depression,” and is set apart from earlier leftist novels by its self-consciousness; its authors “were conscious participants in a literary movement that named itself ‘proletarian’ ” (Radical vii). 51. Although socialists had been active in the United States since the early 1920s, it was not until the organization of the periodical New Masses in 1926 that a concentrated appeal is made to reach the workers themselves. 52. Irving Howe refers to Gold’s prescriptions for leftist art when he describes the thirties as “a [period] in which talent betrayed itself to the wardens of authoritarianism”—a period, in short, which was “a waste” (“The Thirties” 28). At the First Writer’s Congress in 1935, there were open defenses of writing that did not fit Communist prescriptions (Bogardus 5–6). The split in the literary left had become pronounced by 1936, and many new writers began to move toward a more tolerant literary Marxism independent of the Party. 53. Olsen’s novel focuses on “familial relations, emotional deformation, and the developing consciousness of children,” in opposition to the masculine tenor of most proletarian fiction; the biggest departures from proletarian realism in Yonnondio occur in her portrayals of sexism and sexual violence (Coiner 165–66). Subverting the Party’s focus on workplace production and the male worker, Olsen details the work of reproduction, housekeeping, and childrearing, which she calls “the maintenance of life” (Coiner 181). 54. Wright’s condemnation of Zora Neale Hurston’s novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) as politically retrograde, addressing not the black masses but “a white audience whose chauvinistic tastes she knows how to satisfy” (“Review and Comment” 22) exemplifies these views. Interestingly, Hurston’s characterization of Wright’s Uncle Tom’s Children (1938) as failing to portray “the broader and more fundamental phases of Negro life instead of . . . the spectacular,—the favorite Negro theme” (Hurston 32) is a similar kind of criticism. His work is too concerned with racial violence (and thus with white racism); hers isn’t concerned enough (and thus has accommodated to white racism). James Baldwin picks up where Hurston leaves off, claiming that the protest novel, or the “report from the pit,” is an exercise in
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55.
56. 57.
58. 59.
60.
61.
victimology and voyeurism (Baldwin 22): it does not disturb the white reader but instead reinforces his or her expectations of the violent, meaningless lives of blacks. Speaking from the midst of the Renaissance as its self-proclaimed critic (called by C.W.E. Bigsby the “black Matthew Arnold”), Locke notes that up until the inception of the Renaissance, “Negroes have been a race more in name than in fact . . . the chief bond between them has been that of a common condition rather than a common consciousness; a problem in common rather than a life in common. In Harlem, Negro life is seizing upon its first chances for group expression and self-determination” (Christian, Black Women 37). I don’t have the space here to provide more context on Locke and his role in the Renaissance, but I do recognize the dangers of relying on one male “spokesperson” (which I have done elsewhere in this book); here, though, I cite a different perspective on the Renaissance period: Hazel Carby notes that “after World War I and the migration,” there is “no longer a unitary ‘people’ ”; by the twenties, black artists seek “artistic autonomy” and separate themselves “from the task of writing for the uplifting of the race as a whole” (Carby Reconstructing 166). Locke and other official architects of the Renaissance emptied out the term “New Negro” of its original radical meaning. Bigsby neglects to analyze the gender politics of Harlem Renaissance and subsequent black art traditions, conceptualized and controlled by men, which might explain why poetry is the valorized mode of writing during the Renaissance at a time when most women writers are writing novels. See Christian Black Women. One could also argue that the Renaissance’s dependence on white patrons’ interest reduced it to a “fad” that dissolved along with the fortunes of many upper class patrons in the crash. Journals such as Black World (Negro Digest), Ebony, New Masses, and The Modern Quarterly are crucial in reconstructing the traditions of protest; these journals printed not only theories and debates on the nature of protest, black power, and the socialist movement, but also printed fiction and poetry by little-known protest writers. Locke’s complaint is derived from the idea that the best art is the most complex and the most removed from politics, an idea still at work in condemnations of educators’ attempts to (re)position “minority” and women writers amidst the “classics” in literature courses. Indeed, the preoccupation of Renaissance aesthetes (and most literary critics) with making judgments and constructing standards of literature serves only to restrict its circulation and popularity. Many important literary works were lost for decades due to these same exclusionary rules; many working class writers are still unknown by most critics, as class has yet to arrive in the critical mainstream as a valid category of inquiry. “There is, in brief, no ‘The Negro,’ ” Locke states (“Who and What is Negro” 37).
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62. According to Robert Butler, between 1945 and the early 1960s, “Wright’s reputation declined substantially and his place in African-American letters was challenged by a wide variety of younger critics and writers”; this was in part due to the opinion of these writers and critics that his talent deteriorated during this period, but also because “the years immediately following World War II saw a decline in naturalism as a literary mode in favor of less doctrinaire, more experimental fictional styles,” as well as a “disenchantment with leftist politics” (“Introduction” xxx). 63. Beatrice Horne Royster says critics compliment Petry’s “masculine style” but suggests that it may be her misogyny they like (Royster 186). 64. When asked how she felt about black writers being lumped together by race regardless of topic, Petry responded by insisting that collective identity was the cause of this, not necessarily white prejudice: “That’s because we’re all black . . . we do have a common theme. . . . We can’t escape it.” She also stated, “it’s just an indication of the fact that black people are a minority in this country. If I lived a country where the majority of the people were black people, I would be an ‘author’—and the white folks would be ‘white authors’—if they were authors.” Her stories “The New Mirror” and “Miss Muriel” as well as Country Place and even The Narrows indicate a different view, that she is an individual who often tires of being “lumped together,” and that the collective experience of racism is not a required topic for her (O’Brien 157). 65. Olsen addressed the problem of the working-class writer directly in a 1991 MLA panel, “American Working Class Women’s Writing.” When Gloria Anzaldúa, also on the panel, confessed to feeling as if she had moved out of the working-class by virtue of her education, Olsen disagreed, claiming that Anzaldúa would always retain her working-class consciousness and culture even if her income and education seemed to remove her from them. This brings up the vexed issue of class boundaries, which Barbara Foley explains: Proletarians are people whose ultimate interest lies in their self-abolition as proletarians—that is, as inhabitants of a subject position—and in their becoming, in the words of the ‘Internationale,’ the ‘human race.’ Yet their immediate interest lies in acquiring a class consciousness: somewhat paradoxically, in order eventually to supersede their class position, they must first acknowledge and understand it. (Radical x)
Chapter 2 1. Rampersad notes that Wright “even pondered the possibility of a relationship between the most common ghetto obscenity (‘mother——’) in the mouths of young men and ‘the incest complex’ ” (Rite of Passage 142). 2. Freud first used the term “primal scene” in his work on the “Wolf Man” case (1914), but he discussed the concept of a child witnessing a sexual experience without having the words to describe it, resulting in later neuroses, in a letter, written May 30, 1896, to Wilhelm Fliess; he more fully explored
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3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
this in Studies on Hysteria (1895) and in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900). Later work on the impact of the primal scene disputes the idea that the sight of intercourse alone is damaging; see M. F. Hoyt, “On the psychology and psychopathology of primal-scene experience” in the Journal of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis 8.3 (July 1980), 311–35. As a primal scene, a lynching need not take place in early childhood to have the psychic impact suggested by the original definition of the term. As Bergner argues, Fanon’s work “opens the spatiotemporal window of subject formation beyond the family and infancy, since he does not confine crucial moments in the formation of racial identity to the oedipal dynamic, the psychoanalytic scene of sexual differentiation and language acquisition” (Bergner 2). Further, the French psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche’s model of the primal scene, the “imperative and impossibility of translation . . . (what does she want from me?)” accommodates a culturally specific scene of lynching if lynching is understood to be warning of the deadly consequences for blacks of failing to translate the semiotics of whites’ racial beliefs and practices (Zwarg 9). In Johnny’s anger toward his mother and his later mixed feelings toward the black woman who shouts “YOU BOYS!” at him, we see the development of his misogyny toward black women, none of whom could protect their sons from racist trauma. While Rampersad’s research indicates that Wright modeled this scenario on a case he encountered at the Wiltwyck school in which a much younger boy was taken from his family, he asserts that at least in Wright’s mind the scenario he portrays was not out of the realm of possibility. George further argues that “a link with this trauma exists to varied degrees of intensity for all individuals who identify themselves as AfricanAmerican. . . . Any maintenance of an African-American racial identity, even a strategic and temporary one, occurs because racism continuously manifests the trauma that interpellates African-Americans into this racial identity” (7). Applied to the social world, this massive racial generalization seems risky, but I find it quite useful as part of a literary theory. Of course, a display of tears is not necessarily an act of release and deferment. As Katherine Fishburn notes in discussing readers of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, “Whether those tears shed by Stowe’s audience were evidence of her readers’ emotional self-indulgence or the first step to efficacious political action is a matter of new debate” (Fishburn 206). I have borrowed the term “safety valve” from Frederick Douglass’ Narrative, in which he describes how the one-week “holiday” given to slaves between Christmas and New Year’s Day serves to “carry off the rebellious spirit of enslaved humanity. But for these, the slave would be forced up to the wildest desperation” (Narrative 55). Many Party critics were concerned not only with Wright’s insistence on individualism and black nationalism, but with “the absence of . . . Negro [characters] whose rebellion against oppression is expressed in constructive mass action rather than in individual violence” (Aaron “Richard Wright”
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11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
179). Moreover, critics were irked by the fact that no white characters, not even Communists, can understand Bigger and aid him in his plight, thus allowing “a sunrise . . . at the end,” a happy ending (180). I assume throughout that this novel would be painful for both white and black readers. Irving Howe describes the impact of Native Son: “a blow at the white man, the novel forced him to recognize himself as an oppressor. A blow at the black man, the novel forced him to recognize the cost of his submission” (Howe 63). Although he expected “the worst,” Wright’s “direct and scathing language” in Native Son proved to be highly attractive to black and white readers in 1940 (and today). The novel’s immense popularity was aided by the extremely favorable first reviews, which set the tone, and also by a “clever” publicity campaign; in advertisements, the novel was called “a black American Tragedy” and “Grapes of Wrath 1940,” comparisons that contained its confrontational message by comparing it to acclaimed novels of “social significance” popular during the Great Depression. In his biography of Wright, Michel Fabre explains the novel’s success as a result of social change due to the Depression, noting that “the public was finally ready to face the enormous problem [racism] which the economic crisis had revealed in all its urgency” (Unfinished Quest 178). From her examination of the congressional investigation of the Klan in 1871, Hodes concludes that Klan members were the first to justify their acts of racist violence by creating the figurative equation between civil rights and rape, offering “white Southerners a new language of sexualized politics” (Hodes 404). Fishbelly is later arrested on a false rape charge, and he realizes that “the white man’s sheer prohibitions served to anchor the sense of his women in the consciousness of black men in a bizarre and distorted manner that could rarely ever be eradicated” (Long Dream 388). For further discussion of this idea, see Sondra Guttman’s “What Bigger Killed For: Rereading Violence against Women in Native Son.” Guttman argues that Wright is attempting to communicate the price women pay for this diversion, but that this attempt is “frustrated by the extent to which the rape plot—which he has chosen as the means to communicate this idea— fabricates the rapes of white women while erasing the actual rapes of black women” (182). While I don’t agree with her premise that Native Son is a “proletarian novel—a novel that aims to convince its readers of the inevitability of a Marxist revolution” (172), I do agree with her point, particularly as expressed in Bigger’s reaction to seeing Bessie’s body during the trial. Jake’s fantasy of himself as both victim and victimizer in the “rape” of Belgium likens his experience of discrimination to a racial “war.” For a discussion of rape as American “ethnic cleansing,” see Martha Hodes on the Klan’s rape of black and working-class white women in “The Sexualization of Reconstruction Politics: White Women and Black Men in the South after the Civil War.”
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16. Paul Ricouer states that “a metaphor may be seen as a model for changing our way of looking at things, of perceiving the world” (Ricouer 150). 17. See Wayne Booth’s essay “Metaphor as Rhetoric: The Problem of Evaluation,” for a discussion of the idea that metaphors and symbols are responsible for human understanding of self and world. 18. Or, as Juliet Flower McCannell states, “You do not have figures without that figure’s having been paid for with a repression” (McCannell 929). 19. The first definition of rape in the unabridged Random House Dictionary (1987), for example, is gender specific, while the second definition applies to “a person.” 20. In Uncle Tom’s Children in particular, “proletarian masculinism is significantly revised and critiqued,” and “ties to folk culture and community, seen as the province of black women, serve not as the basis for accommodationism, but for a new radicalism that infuses class struggle with the history and experiences of African Americans in the rural South” (Higashida 400). 21. For other discussions of Wright’s female characters, see Valerie Smith, “Alienation and Creativity in the Fiction of Richard Wright”; Calvin Hernton, The Sexual Mountain and Black Women Writers; Maria K. Mootry, “Bitches, Whores, and Woman Haters: Archetypes and Typologies in the Art of Richard Wright”; and Sherley Anne Williams, “Papa Dick and SisterWoman: Reflections on Women in the Fiction of Richard Wright.” 22. In opposition to Wright’s statement about Bigger’s “estrangement” from his culture, James Miller has claimed that Bigger “belongs to a specific speech community within the larger black community . . . the world of the black urban male . . . disfranchised working class” (“Bigger Thomas” 109). 23. Wright admired “free agency” and all that it entails; he admits that he encouraged the young boys he worked with at the South Side Boys Club to “prove to the bastards . . . that full-blooded life is harder and hotter than they suspect,” in short, to commit criminal acts: “the police blotters of Chicago are testimony to how much they did,” he says admiringly (“How ‘Bigger’ Was Born” 873, Wright’s emphasis). 24. Cesspool was the original title of this novel. 25. While bourgeois readers (particularly white readers) might be more disgusted with (and unconsciously fearful of ) the details of the black male body than might working-class readers, I believe Wright was deliberately stressing the unpleasantness of Jake’s physicality here, not simply following the dictates of social realism. 26. The act of masturbation is highly coded here, unlike Bigger’s and Jack’s masturbation in the unexpurgated Native Son. Both are moments in which the reader is confronted with the sexual “deviancy” of the black male; Jake’s masturbation, a private release of sexual and economic frustration, is less threatening than Bigger’s, a public release of frustration with his social and political status. 27. This is similar to Frederick Douglass’ descriptions in My Bondage, My Freedom of slaveholders who force their slaves to sing and chant; excessive silence can seem threatening because it indicates contemplation.
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28. A prime example of an “offensive” protagonist is McTeague from Frank Norris’ novel of the same name, although contemporary readers might view the titular protagonists of Stephen Crane’s Maggie and even Dreiser’s Sister Carrie as morally or physically offensive. 29. This coping strategy, sex with black women, serves to further reinforce Jake’s inability to imagine union among blacks. Jake and his friends call a group of black women working at the post office “the cunts,” and while they feel angry when white men look at these women “like they were bitches,” they also condemn the women, saying, “Let a nigger woman make fifty dollars a week and she begins to think she’s too good for her own race,” despite the downtrodden appearances of these women (Lawd Today! 139). Jake and his friends claim that “the race ought to stick together,” but their ability to function depends on that unity translating as women’s silence and sexual availability. 30. Wright states this view of black culture in a frequently quoted passage from Black Boy: “how bare our tradition, how hollow our memories, how lacking we were in those intangible sentiments that bind man to man, and how shallow was even our despair” (43). Wright’s purpose here is to reveal how white oppression has bankrupted black culture, but his internalization of white attitudes is visible within the critique. 31. According to Walker, Wright’s personal philosophy was based on pessimistic social determinism: “Human nature and human society are determinants and, being what he is, man is merely a pawn caught between the worlds of necessity and freedom. He has no freedom of choice; he is born to suffering, despair, and death. He is alone against the odds of Nature, Chance, Fate, and the vicissitudes of life” (“Richard Wright” 199). Bigger is a “pawn” deformed by racism and poverty, Walker claims, and is thus “unconscious,” unable to express his emotions and ideas. Apparently conflating Wright with Native Son’s narrator and protagonist, Walker suggests that Wright had to plumb his “own psyche and unconscious to reveal exactly how the inarticulate and illiterate Bigger Thomas felt” (Daemonic Genius 148). 32. See Michel Fabre, Barbara Foley, and Daniel Aaron for interpretations of Bigger’s consciousness, the novel’s ending, and the novel’s politics. Valerie Smith covers both sets of issues in her article, as I do here, although her connection between the two does not address questions of genre. 33. The rat is also a figure for the black “criminal” stereotype, a savage animal who invades a space where he doesn’t belong (the white woman’s room), tries to escape, and then turns to fight; the implicit doubling here suggests that Bigger will confront that stereotype later in the book. 34. Vera too experiences the rat’s entrance as a form of sexual assault: her response is to run into a corner, half-stoop and gather “the hem of her slip into both of her hands,” holding it “tightly over her knees” as if shielding her genitals (Native Son 448). Bigger’s attack on her (holding the rat over her until she faints) is another kind of assault; Vera constantly accuses Bigger of sexually tinged attacks on her, such as looking up her dress, treating her like a dog, and staring at her.
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35. Blum’s name marks him as Jewish, but Bigger considers him to be a representative of the white power structure, and Wright provides no evidence to the contrary. 36. The scene in the movie theater was edited heavily in the Book of the Month Club version so that Bigger neither masturbates nor sees Mary Dalton in the newsreel. Additionally, Bigger’s contact with Mary after he gets the job as the Dalton’s chauffeur is almost entirely desexualized. Clearly, Wright and his editors knew that this was the most threatening aspect of this book—more threatening than the murder of Mary or the rape and murder of Bessie. The Library of America edition of Native Son, published in 1991, claims to be unexpurgated, but its editor, Arnold Rampersad, admitted at a session of the 1991 Modern Language Association that (again) certain passages had to be deleted in order to make Wright’s novels marketable to a broader audience. See Noah Griffin’s review of the new edition in Crisis and Louis Menand’s review, “The Hammer and the Nail,” in The New Yorker. 37. Nancy Gager and Cathleen Shurr claim that “probably the single most used cry of rapist to victim is ‘you know you want it,” . . . and afterward, ‘there now, you really enjoyed it, didn’t you?’ ” (qtd. in Catherine MacKinnon 653). 38. During Bigger’s trial, the prosecutor will claim that Bigger masturbated during, not before, the newsreel—while he watched the images of Mary. This indicates that he is not a subject-viewer, as he himself is being watched and stereotyped by another viewer, the theater’s manager. Furthermore, his actions are falsified by the prosecutor so that they fit the stereotype of deviant and violent black male sexuality. 39. Katherine Fishburn suggests that in this scene, Bigger’s body recalls the “bodily knowledge of his slave ancestors,” and that the embodiment of slaves “paradoxically freed the slave narrators to critique the very foundations of liberal humanism” (207). Furthermore, she argues convincingly that Wright, having been influenced “himself by the materialism central to Marxist thought,” reflects in his novels the “insight of the slave narratives that embodiment is not a curse to overcome, but is rather the very state that makes possible human be-ing itself,” and that in portraying a fully embodied character, Wright is “doing battle with the philosophical and legal underpinnings of white American society” (Fishburn 203–04). 40. The image of the rat with which Wright begins the novel takes on added significance in this scene: Bigger is now the symbolic equivalent of the defiant rat invading the home of the oppressor. 41. The fact that Mary’s more sexually consensual actions were edited out of the Book of the Month Club version of the novel reveal the degree to which the public insists upon believing that sexual advances by black men toward white women are by definition “unwanted.” Even in a novel that explicitly examines and critiques the rapist stereotype, even in the scene in which Bigger is revealed not to have raped Mary, Bigger’s relations with Mary must remain those of a rapist. 42. Wright is describing how “being free of the Dixie environment” (as well as making contact with the “labor movement and its ideology”) allowed him
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44. 45.
46.
47.
to understand himself and his place in society. Wright’s insistence on separation from “home” (and thus black women) in order to achieve personal enlightenment is replicated in Bigger. Barbara Johnson’s essay “The Re(a)d and the Black” states that Wright “consistently sees the black woman as the reader his writing must face.” Johnson claims that Wright kills Bessie off because she’s the “black female reader whose reading cannot be mastered by the writer.” Perhaps in order to grant some kind of status to Native Son’s black women, one that I believe is nonexistent, Johnson conflates Wright with Bigger: Bessie is threatening to Bigger, and thus to Wright. Yet there is little in the novel to indicate that Wright felt his “story” was “out of his control” enough to warrant a symbolic warning to the black female reader. The weakness of Bessie’s “no” contrasts with the evidence of the prosecutor, who “knows” Bessie was raped, despite what must be a lack of physical evidence, because Bigger is, by definition, a rapist. The full passage states that Wright’s “writer’s imagination saw no obstacles to combining in one character two types of people—the murderer who kills as an act of creation and the one who kills in response to a social determinism . . . Bigger’s murder of Bessie marked a new stage in Wright’s literary evolution: everything that he had learned from his naturalist models . . . had prevented him from allowing his characters to give into these demonic temptations . . . ” (Fabre The Unfinished Quest 171). Bigger has had a brief chance to enjoy another “private” space, the chauffeur’s room at the Dalton’s; “a room all to himself,” he thinks happily, not knowing that he will have only a few moments to enjoy it before his deadly involvement with Jan and Mary (Native Son 500). As Smethurst points out, the difference in skin color between the “black” Buddy and the “brown-skinned” Vera are subtle reminders to the reader that “repressed behind the hysterical fear of miscegenation is a massive number of often coercive sexual couplings between white slave masters and black slave women” (Smethurst 36).
Chapter 3 1. A novel like Pauline Hopkins’s Contending Forces make clear the extent to which the “whore” stereotype damages black women: in this novel, it is white men who rape young black girls. Many black women writers also worked to redirect the “rapacious male” stereotype toward its more accurate target, the white man. Harriet Jacobs’s autobiography, for example, exposes the sexual harassment sustained by the slave woman, revealing that promiscuity was forced onto black women. See Hazel Carby’s discussion of black women writers’ “denial of desire and . . . repression of sexuality” in “ ‘It Jus Be’s Dat Way Sometime’: The Sexual Politics of Women’s Blues” (240). 2. While I claim that most black female writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were reticent on the subject of sexuality, I realize both
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43.
NOTES
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
that there are exceptions to this claim and that white women writers too were reluctant to allow their female protagonists any kind of active sexuality (and were attacked if they did so, as was Kate Chopin in reviews of The Awakening). Hortense Spillers has noted the dearth of texts by black women on the subject of their sexuality; see “Interstices” (153). For further discussion of the topic of black women writers’ portrayals of black female sexuality, see Hazel Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood; Pamela E. Barnett, “ ‘My Picture of You Is, After All, the True Helga Crane’: Portraiture and Identity in Nella Larsen’s Quicksand”; and Deborah McDowell’s “Introduction” to Quicksand and Passing. Very few politically active black female characters are unmarried in novels of this time period, and none of those is presented as sexual (even Candace, the Ethiopian queen of Hopkins’ Of One Blood, is a virgin awaiting her king), revealing authors’ adherence to the conventional belief that marriage protects women from sexual danger. Witness Janie Crawford’s grandmother’s belief in the iron-clad reputation that a “good marriage” provides to a black woman: Nanny claims that, once married, Janie will no longer be in danger of rape by a white man. The term “outdoors” is borrowed from Toni Morrison. As Morrison notes, the fear of being “outdoors” is, for the disenfranchised black family she describes in The Bluest Eye, “the real terror of life . . . if you are outdoors, there is no place to go” (17–18). While Larsen’s novel does include an attention to class (Helga’s marriage to a rural preacher effectively places her in the working class, which only increases her domestic burdens), I would argue that the economic oppression is not a central issue in this novel. Petry’s successful career contributed to her feeling of being a specimen (a black woman writer); her discomfort with this position led to her withdrawal from the literary world. Her first publication, “On Saturday the Siren Sounds at Noon,” in The Crisis (1943), led quickly to success and fame: she won the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship Award and used it to write the best-selling The Street. Her reaction: “I was shocked that suddenly my world was no longer my own. I was a black woman at a point in time when being a writer was not usual, and I was besieged. Everyone wanted a part of me. That was when I ran, back home to Connecticut. I stopped giving interviews. I unlisted my phone” (Fein B2). “Race,” according to Henry Louis Gates, has come to stand for “a trope of ultimate, irreducible differences between cultures,” a trope that, in a white dominated society, has always meant different from whites (5). Moreover, “color” has come to mean black, so that references to race relations are couched in “black” and “white” terms and “minorities” is often used synonymously with “blacks.” The plot of “The New Mirror” focuses on the way stereotypes paralyze individual action. The narrator speculates that her father has refused to replace his missing teeth because “one of the images of the black man that the white man carries around with him is of white teeth flashing in a black
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10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
and grinning face.” So her father has gone “toothless to destroy that image,” but he has now realized that “there is toothless old Uncle Tom, and my old black mammy with her head rag is toothless, too, and without teeth my father fitted that image of the black man, didn’t he? So he was damned either way, . . . and so was I.” While the narrator vows to stop worrying about fighting or conforming to stereotype, she ultimately cannot do so (“New Mirror” 87). Shelby Steele has voiced a similar concern: “the stereotype of the lazy black SOB is common, and the fear is profound that I’ll be judged by that stereotype. They will judge our race by him—and they’ll overlook me, quietly sitting on that bus grading papers” (Kirp 27). Concurring with Hortense Spillers’ analysis, Pamela Barnett argues in her study of Nella Larsen’s Quicksand that “there is no mode of representation of any legitimate space within society in which black women’s sexuality can be expressed” because the only available representations at that time were “racist depictions of primitive sexuality and reactionary portraits of desexualized bourgeois black women” (Barnett 580). My point is not only that Petry challenged both of these representations but that she did so in such a way that her readers have not commented on it. Critics such as Mary Helen Washington, Beatrice Royster, and Thelma Shinn have not recognized Petry’s support for female sexual expression, almost replicating traditional views of black female sexual identity in their comments on Petry’s characters Min and Mamie: “sexually liberated and aggressive” and therefore “vicious,” “degenerate,” and “debase[d]” (Royster 186–87); “powerless as well as amoral” (Washington 301); and even “passive” victims of the feminine mystique (Shinn 114). Link recalls Abbie telling him that “it behooved all persons of color to take advantage of the free education now available to everybody . . . she said it particularly behooved Link Williams, orphan, adopted out of the goodness of the Major’s heart . . . and her heart, to go to school, every day, and learn, and learn, and learn, so that he would stand at the head of his class, in everything, so that he would be a credit to The Race” (141). I agree with Michael Barry that Link’s resentment of “an independent woman” is due to “insecurities largely affected by racism”: his adoptive mother and elementary school teacher, women in positions of independence and authority, both enforce upon Link various forms of racism (148). I would suggest though that patriarchy as taught to Link by Bill Hod and the other bar workers and patrons provides him with a socially acceptable antidote. Along with Bernard Bell, Barry describes the role chance or “radical contingency” plays in the novel as a telling contrast to “radical determinism” (Barry 147). While Petry certainly presents a far less determined world in The Narrows than in The Street, I would agree in the end with Link that his false rape charge and murder at the hands of white “avengers” is no chance occurrence. Angela Davis notes that “stories about police assaults on Black women—rape victims sometimes suffering a second rape—are heard too frequently to be dismissed as aberrations” (173).
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15. Petry has written another story in which the “home” of a black woman is unprotected: In “Miss Muriel,” Aunt Sophronia is pursued even in her own backyard by men in the town who insist on viewing her as available, despite her family’s attempt to keep her sheltered. 16. The day that her husband, the Major, is brought home by Bill Hod, the owner of the bar across the street, Abbie is ashamed at what she believes to be the Major’s drunkenness and refuses to listen to Hod’s claim that the Major is sick. More concerned with her reputation than with the state of her husband’s health, she worries that “people would laugh at her. . . . The colored president of the white WCTU . . . and her husband so drunk he couldn’t stand up . . . well, he’s colored. Ha-ha, ha-ha, ha-ha” (Narrows 30). She places her husband in a chair in the parlor, spreading “newspapers all around the chair, thinking, ‘My carpet, my beautiful new carpet” (29). Concerned about the Major “soiling” her bourgeois home and reputation, Abbie allows him to sit in the chair all day, until finally her friend Frances comes over and discovers that he’s had a stroke. The major dies the next evening; his last words are “The house—Abbie—the house,” which indicates his understanding of the house’s importance for Abbie, and perhaps his realization that the house is not a homeplace. 17. As Giles Oakley explains, “for those who tried to maintain an ordered goodness, a recognized accepted shape of action in life that would bring freedom at least in death, [the blues] was the devil’s music” (i, his emphasis). 18. While there were dangers to this sexually free blues persona and the “blue” lyrics of their songs, which could combine to “become a burlesque of African-American sexuality,” this kind of exploitation typically resulted from the white music industry’s manipulation of the singers and the recordings (Barlow 142). 19. Although blues music was popular to some extent with whites in its early years, this was due primarily to the white-controlled record industry, which “liked to record white performers’ ‘cover’ versions of popular blues to entice the white public to buy the records and to ‘upgrade’ the music.” The industry was thus able to “bring African-American music more into line with European musical conventions, while superimposing on it a veneer of middle-class Anglo-American respectability” (Barlow 124). 20. Ma Rainey considered her physical appearance as important as her voice: her “stage appearance was legendary,” and she was “a flamboyant dresser” who wore outrageous costumes and expensive jewelry to shows (Barlow 157). 21. While it is true that self-objectification is inherent in the entertainment business and is thus not necessarily peculiar to one race or gender, I would argue that the historical context here makes the blues singer’s performance of allure more risky than for a white male, for example. 22. Mary Helen Washington’s account of Petry’s women characters reveals the effects of this narrative circumscription. Washington (like Petry’s protagonist Lutie) omits any consideration of Min; she also claims that Mamie is “powerless as well as amoral” because she is only seen by the reader “as framed in
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24. 25. 26.
27.
her husband’s gaze” (Washington 300-01). This isn’t accurate, since readers are introduced to Mamie’s point of view in the last quarter of the novel; more importantly, though, it reveals that Washington’s reading is controlled by the viewpoints of the protagonists. Yet Petry locates some elements of hooks’s “homeplace” in working-class culture: the Last Chance and the Junto, the neighborhood bars of both novels. While Petry idealizes neither bar (particularly the Junto), she describes community and recognition as the reasons that some young women frequent the bar and grill: “they were hungry for the sight and sound of other young people and . . . the creeping silence that could be heard under the blaring radios, under the drunken quarrels in the hall bedrooms, was no longer bearable” (Street 144). At the Junto, for example, the white waiters treat black and white customers alike with respect, and the bar is filled with “the sound of laughter, the hum of talk, the sight of people and brilliant lights, the sparkle of the big mirror, the rhythmic music from the juke-box” (145). The big mirror in the Junto “pushed the world of other people’s kitchen sinks back where it belonged and destroyed the existence of dirty streets and small shadowed rooms” (146). With this description, the Junto takes on the definition of communal spirit and affirmation; it helps its customers “believe in themselves again” (147). Lutie is not explicitly conscious of the need for community; she seeks a husband because marriage to “a man who had a good job” is “the only other way of getting out” of the street (Street 82). Abbie believes Bill Hod to be the devil: “she was genuinely surprised that his hair should lie so flat—she had somehow convinced herself that there would be horns on his head” (Narrows 2). Abbie’s grief over her husband sends her into a depression so deep that for three months she forgets about her eight-year-old adopted son Link, who eventually goes across the street and asks Bill Hod for food and shelter. When Abbie emerges and realizes that Link is living at the Last Chance, Bill’s bar, she goes over to regain custody. Having found a “homeplace” for the first time in his life, Link doesn’t want to leave, and Abbie has to pull him out from behind the bar. She is surprised to find that “the floor behind the bar in The Last Chance was dustfree, dirtfree” (Narrows 3). Besides providing the reader with a clue that Bill Hod isn’t the sloven Abbie believes him to be, the fact that Bill Hod is a good housekeeper and a decent father-substitute reveals, at least to the reader, that Abbie’s identity and ideology are themselves unstable, based on a class bias that associates African American working-class culture with dirt. The blues have “always tended to be associated with roughness and a lack of ‘class’ ” by middle-class and educated blacks (Oakley 110), a reminder of the slave and rural folk culture from which the music emerged and of the underworld culture in which it thrived. Similarly, people who frequented root doctors were looked on as “primitive and uneducated” and their beliefs to be “a matter for some shame and a throwback to the days of servitude”
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28. 29.
30. 31.
32.
(Oliver 167, 156); for example, in each of his autobiographies (specifically, in his discussion of the root Sandy gives him), Frederick Douglass marks conjure as part of a primitive, heathen African culture inferior to Western culture. For another essay that treats the use of conjure in African American literature, see Helen Jaskoski, “Power Unequal to Man: The Significance of Conjure in Works by Five Afro-American Authors.” Johnny repents his rape of his wife, which complicates the reader’s tendency to feel that Glory “deserves” to be raped. Because her characters in this novel are white, Petry can explore Glory’s sexual behavior and subsequent victimization without worrying that she will damage the public image of black women; she is also free to explore a modernist narrative structure described by Hilary Holladay as follows: “every history is part of a larger fiction, and every author is a character in another author’s story. . . . the reality of the whole town changes, depending on one’s perspective and mood at the moment” (Holladay 31). However, Country Place has long been excluded from the “black canon” precisely because it is about whites. Ann DuCille has developed these ideas further in “Canon Fodder: Rape and Resistance in ‘Non-Traditional’ Texts of the 1940’s.” According to Paul Oliver, “the first vocal recording to employ a blues form” was “Crazy Blues” sung by Mamie Smith, recorded August 10, 1920 (Oliver 21). Min’s and Mamie’s status as working women is signified immediately to Lutie and Abbie by their bunions, physical evidence of long hours on their feet and ill-fitting shoes. Not surprisingly, Lutie doesn’t have bunions, which reveals the depth of her refusal to accept a working-class identity. Further complicating the reader’s identification strategies, Petry depicts Lutie as having natural talent as a blues singer; this makes it less easy for the reader to blame Lutie’s problems on her disdain for working-class culture. In a decidedly Algeresque moment, Lutie is “discovered” singing to herself at the neighborhood bar by a blues musician, Boots Smith, who offers her first a tryout, and after the tryout, a job. Boots plans to extort sex from Lutie as payment for the job, but Lutie is “certain” she can “put him off deftly, neatly, and continue to do it until she sign[s] a contract” (Street 227). She believes, in other words, that she can engage with the working-class world but escape its power dynamics and immorality. However, her hopes are crushed by Junto, the white owner of the bar and the blues club as well as Boots’ boss. After spotting Lutie singing at the bar, Junto decides that Lutie will become his mistress in exchange for being paid to sing. When Lutie rejects this offer, and goes to an agent for another tryout, she gets the same line. In response, she throws an inkwell at the white agent, thinking, “this is the superior race” (322). It is not only Lutie’s middle-class morality that determines her actions here, but also the economic power of white men; in an inversion of the Alger myth, Lutie’s talent and beauty do not enable her to transcend her conditions, but rather lead to the destruction of her already meager life.
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33. A study by Kathy Peiss indicates that this lack of shame was not uncommon among working class women, many of whom believed that “respectability was not predicated on chastity” (163). 34. Conjure or voodoo is practiced in the United States today, although its specific techniques vary from place to place. As Zora Neale Hurston notes, “nobody knows for sure how many thousands in America are warmed by the fire of hoodoo, because the worship is bound in secrecy. It is not the accepted theology of the Nation and so believers conceal their faith. . . . Nobody can say where it begins or ends. Mouths don’t empty themselves unless the ears are sympathetic and knowing” (185). For information on conjure or voodoo, see Hurston, Mules and Men; Wilbur Watson, Black Folk Medicine; Harry Middleton Hyatt, Hoodoo-Conjuration-Witchcraft-Rootwork; Newbell Niles Puckett, Folk Beliefs of the Southern Negro. 35. Jones compares Min’s conversation to a “tortuously winding path that continually turned back on itself, disappeared in impenetrable thickets, to emerge farther on at a sharp angle having no apparent relation to its original starting point” (Street 295). As readers, we never experience this kind of conversation first-hand, which might lead us to assume that Jones causes Min to speak this way by not listening. 36. Earlier in the novel, the nighttime version of Dumble Street is described as “all light and shadow, all murmur of voices and ripple of laughter” (Narrows 126). This description gives Dumble Street a beauty exemplified by its communal nature, by the interactions of the people who live on it. Similarly, Mamie could be said to practice intersubjectivity, seen in her blues singing and in her strong connections with her culture and community. 37. Bessie Smith, too, broke down boundaries through combining elements of apparently competing cultural practices. Although “many churchgoers condemned the blues as sinful,” the blues and gospel are similar styles, and Bessie drew on this similarity in her performances: she “did the same thing on stage” as “people like Billy Graham” and could “bring about mass hypnotism” at her performances (Oakley 116). 38. Petry insists on Mamie’s subjectivity even as she is being objectified: Al, the Treadway chauffeur, sees “a curvy colored wench” (Mamie) on Dumble Street, and calls to her to come over. She turns and smiles “straight at him” but shakes her head, leaving Al to think “I’da paid good money for a piece of that” (215). Instead of ending the scene here, from Al’s perspective, Petry shifts to “Mrs. Mamie Powther,” who says to herself, “wonder where that big one came from,” a smile playing around her mouth and in her eyes. Petry highlights both Mamie’s status as wife and her freedom to be interested in another man’s attentions to her. 39. Powther thinks this song is “a spiritual,” but Mamie “made it sound like the kind of song they banned on the radio” (Narrows 209). While gospel and blues are musically related, I contend that Mamie’s reinterpretation of a religious song about the journey to heaven as a blues song about a woman’s (sexual) freedom is characteristic of her sexual identity.
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40. Yet another part of Lutie’s past reminds her that the isolation of the suburbs will not fulfill her dreams: “Granny was always home . . . it gave her a sense of security . . . When there was no one in a house with you, it took on a strange emptiness” (Street 404). 41. Having tried hard to create the perfect home and to represent her race, Abbie is puzzled by her losses, and until the end of the novel, she blames herself for her husband’s death and for her “loss” of Link to Bill Hod: “if she hadn’t been chief witness against herself, condemning herself to death . . . she wouldn’t have lost Link” (Narrows 4). In other words, her reaction to her husband’s death was excessive (smacking of “funkiness”) to the point of obscuring her other family responsibilities, and it should have been controlled. 42. Another factor in Link’s death is Abbie’s insistence on maintaining a distance between herself and Mamie, which destroys any connection to Abbie and Link that might have led Mamie to intervene in Camilla’s jealous rage at the end of the novel. In Bill Hod’s bar one day, Mamie realizes that a drunken Camilla has misinterpreted a comment by Weak Knees and, as a result, believes that Link is in love with Mamie. When Camilla’s “face crumples,” Mamie sees that “she’s in love with him” and thinks, “I ought to say something” to clear up the error (Narrows 301–02). After softly attempting to call to Camilla, who doesn’t hear her, she gives up, deciding “aw, she’s white. It’s no skin off my back” (303–04). As a direct result, Camilla decides to get her revenge by accusing Link of rape and setting in motion the events that lead to his death. A stronger bond with Abbie and thus with Link might have prompted Mamie to try harder to get Camilla’s attention. 43. What makes Abbie’s acceptance of JC even more subversive to Abbie’s standards of decency are the strong hints Petry plants in the text indicating that JC is not Powther’s son, but Bill Hod’s. When Abbie first meets JC, she is “certain she’d seen the little boy somewhere” (Narrows 13). Later, Mamie thinks to herself that “Crunch is . . . awful good to JC. I hope she never finds out Bill comes over here so much” (294). I suggest that Mamie links her affair with Bill to JC’s relationship with Abbie because if Abbie finds out that Mamie is having an affair with Bill, she might realize why JC looks so familiar. 44. Another determining force is the media. In The Narrows, Petry portrays a newspaper owner manipulating public opinion and fanning the flames of race hatred by publishing sensationalized photos and stories; she also includes a meditation on the role of a photographer who photographs human misery without ever considering his responsibility to come to the aid of his subjects. Moreover, she allows her characters to see this manipulation and comment on it: as Miss Doris notes, “that twocent newspaper give it the last big push . . . that picture were pure murder, and this white folks twocent newspaper ought to be took out and burned . . . ” (Narrows 414). Thus Petry encourages her readers to be more aware of the forces that determine their lives.
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1. Catherine Beecher’s Treatise on housekeeping has been called “revolutionary” in its approach both to modern architecture and to domestic science; she revised the “masculine idea of the home,” in which it was “a retreat from the cares of the world, a place to be at ease,” to the “feminine idea,” in which the home was “dynamic,” having “to do with ease, but also with work” (159–61). Despite these new ideas, as Witold Rybczynski notes, Beecher’s book is fundamentally conservative regarding gender roles. 2. See Phyllis Palmer for an explanation of the ways that domestic work is linked to bodies, and for more information on the ways that the “job description” of the homemaker changed between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For further discussion of the origins of bourgeois ideas of privacy, domesticity, and childrearing, see Rybczynski. 3. While I realize that Mary Douglas’ “argument about purification and defilement needs to be qualified in regard to time and place,” I agree with David Sibley, who points out “that it has wider application than she recognized” (Sibley 38). 4. I am using the word “bourgeois” in what John Lukács would argue is its strictest meaning: derived from the word meaning “city-dwellers,” it pertains to a philosophy of “freedom,” “permanent residence,” and “security” (620). This very definition is directly related to conceptions of the home and the family, as mentioned in Chapter 1. 5. This was the end stage of a social transformation that Eli Zaretsky describes as “proletarianization,” the creation of wage laborers. Because the newly emerging proletarian (including women and children) was no longer producing goods at home, “a new form of the family among the masses of people,” emerged, “one separated off from the sphere of goods production” (Zaretsky 61). Family relations “lost their economic meaning,” and the family “became the realm of the personal and the sexual” (Foreman 74). Meanwhile, the division of labor was threatened as all members of the family did roughly the same kinds of work, which led to the intervention of reformers whose goal was to “save the family” by keeping wives and children out of factories (Zaretsky 62). As these reforms took hold and child labor was eliminated, “women and children lost the central place they had occupied in the early proletariat,” and the “housewife emerged” (Zaretsky 64). Eventually, “the ability of the worker to keep his wife at home became a sign of working-class strength, of prosperity” (Foreman 92). 6. This redefinition of social space and of family life was an effort begun by reformers and codified by sociologists, yet the opposition of “female, domestic, private, often suburban worlds and male, productive, public, usually urban worlds does not really describe the lives of many people.” As Susan Saegert notes, the “segregation of public and private, male and female domains appears strongest as a guiding fiction, yet one that finds its way into public policy and planning and into women’s and men’s sense of who they are” (Saegert S111).
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Chapter 4
7. While “petty bourgeois individualism” argued that “one’s work should be an expression of oneself rather than just a means to survival,” working-class individuals would consider themselves “represented” by holding any job at all (Zaretsky 58). 8. Rather than provide jobs for women, New Deal relief programs kept women “out of competition for jobs traditionally thought of as men’s” and “attached to the home” by “stressing women’s connection with housekeeping” (Palmer 101). “In the midst of the Depression, programs that taught women how to make homes healthier and more cheerful were justified on the grounds that better-skilled housewives would presumably have higher job morale and improved ability to care for families harmed by business failures and unserved by an overstretched government” (Palmer 101). For the woman who did go to work outside the home, returning to “her ‘natural’ sphere came during the Great Depression to be a goal, the achievement of which would be a sign of the return of ‘good times’ ” (McElvaine 184). 9. Mary Douglas notes that “danger lies in transitional states, simply because transition is neither one state nor the next, it is undefinable. The person who must pass from one to another is himself in danger and emanates danger to others . . . To have been in the margins is to have been in contact with danger, to have been at a source of power” (Douglas 96–97). Joel Kovel explains that the “root symbol between the idea of dirt” and blackness is feces (Kovel 87). 10. The need “to create order and hierarchy” through urban and social reform began, in fact, because people of different genders, races, and classes “coexisted in close physical proximity” in the big cities at mid-nineteenth century (Women in Public 74–75). 11. For farmers and some of the urban poor, the Depression began long before 1929; during the years after World War I, the farmer was already in an “economic trap from which he could not escape” and the Crash simply made his situation even more intolerable (Salzman 13). For the urban poor, the Great Depression was only a worsening of conditions they had been experiencing since the less severe depression of 1920–21. See Robert McElvaine, The Great Depression. Yonnondio opens in the early twenties in just such economic misery, but it was conceived of as a novel “from the thirties” and in fact was intended to extend through the Depression. 12. Rosenfelt claims that Olsen’s “consciousness, vision and choice of subject are rooted in . . . the communist Old Left of the 1930’s and the tradition of radical political thought and action”; however, she also argues that one reason Olsen didn’t finish the novel could be that the “dominant tenets of proletarian realism also required a structure, scope, resolution and political explicitness in some ways at odds with the particular nature of her developing craft” (Rosenfelt 218, 232). She clearly disagrees with Constance Coiner’s contention that Party sexism explains Tillie Olsen’s “difficulties” with Yonnondio. I agree that Olsen confronted the Party’s lack of attention to domestic labor and that she appears to have ignored many of proletarian realism’s tenets.
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13. Most of those writing about women and communism agree with Hayden that Marx left housekeeping out of his economic analysis by placing it in the category of nonproductive labor and that most Marxists accepted Engels’s conflation of the categories of class and gender that “falsely removed by a sleight of hand the necessity of making a specific analysis of the relation between the two” (Foreman 29). As Ann Foreman points out, by stripping the family of “economic meaning,” Lukács and Marx effectively privatized it all over again, leaving it within the “realm of the personal and the sexual, emotions that were considered subjective and not susceptible to intellectual analysis” (Foreman 74). Yet Deborah Rosenfelt argues against this perspective on Marxism and women, pointing out that “in no other segment of American society at that time were there such extensive discussions about the sources of women’s oppression” and that “housework did receive a substantial amount of critical attention” (Rosenfelt 242). See Constance Coiner (164–65) for further discussion. 14. Sexuality as metaphor for social proximity is the basis of Jim Crow; the Reconstruction-era fear of miscegenation and rape involves the same issues of purity and contamination as does the fear of interclass mixing. 15. Later, when the Holbrooks have moved to the city slums, Mazie reveals that her mother has instructed her about sexual danger: “My momma don’t let me go down by the river,” she tells her friend Annamae. “She says bad people’s there that hurts girls” (Yonnondio 117). 16. Mary Douglass discusses Sartre’s essay on viscosity, which “repels” because it is neither liquid nor solid, but something that sticks, that “attacks the boundary between myself and it”; the spit Mazie contacts, as well as Sheen’s jelly-like face, is perceived of as “matter out of place” and therefore “unclean” (Douglas 38–40). 17. Jim batters Anna, who in turn batters her children; Anna hits the kids “in a blind rage, as if it were some devil she was exorcising” (7). Anna realizes that her violent moods are caused by a “devil” within her; she says to herself, “Somethin just seems to get into me when I have something to hit” (Yonnondio 7). See Constance Coiner’s discussion of this circle of violence. 18. While her father is responsible for abusing Mazie and her mother, he also recognizes her need for comfort and protection, if only subconsciously: finding Mazie in the street after her mother suffers a miscarriage, he says, “Kiss Poppa and we’ll go home and I’ll make a farm and warm you, a nice fire, and you can fall asleep on daddy’s lap” (Yonnondio 78, my emphasis). Jim’s unconscious use of the word “farm” instead of “fire” reveals his own awareness of the farm as a safe, pure space for his children, one he cannot provide any longer. 19. Ben’s similar experience of the heat is to imagine that he’s one of the chicks that was burned to death in the stove during that winter on the farm (see Yonnondio 11); he feels like he is “in the stove black all around like something burned” (112). 20. For a deeper analysis of the treatment of Erina, see disability theory, especially Lennard Davis, Enforcing Normalcy.
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21. This type of institutional “support” was just one of the many “private and public institutions” that arose over time to “mediate between capitalism and the family, like banks, schools, insurance, welfare, even unions” (Zaretsky 62). 22. Mazie subconsciously blames her mother’s pregnancy for her own suffering during the winter, focusing in particular on the effects of this “poisoning” of the brain: when she is first allowed outside in the spring, she suddenly begins to hit her brother Will, “hard, ferocious,” and cries, “Wouldja live in a room all breath, all winter breath?” (43). Though vented on her brother, her anger is directed at her mother, whose pregnancy she views a form of contamination of the family. This anger and disgust is visible in her description of the springtime “mother nature” as a battered, deformed female body: “Ugly and ugly the earth. . . . scabs of old leaves that like a bruise hid the violets underneath. Trees fat with oily buds, and the swollen breasts of prairie. Ugh” (43). When Mazie turns “her eyes to the sky for oblivion,” she sees “bellies, swollen bellies, black and corpse gray, puffing out baggier and baggier, cloud belly” (43). After her experience during the winter, Mazie sees both her pregnant mother and the “pregnant” earth as “monstrous,” as hideously swollen and still swelling, producing not life (the violets) but death (signaled by the word “corpse,” a reminder of the burned chicks). The approaching birth of a younger sibling is not a joyous occasion for Mazie (or Anna), but a further infringement on her ability to survive. 23. The doctor tells Jim “everything she needs, but not how to get it (cry from a million swollen throats)”; this is a perfect example of how middle-class reformers intervened into the lives of the working class (Yonnondio 78). 24. David Sibley’s book displays a picture of a very similar (perhaps the identical) poster. The poster, from the “Health and Cleanliness Council, London,” ca. 1920, is captioned “Where there’s Dirt there’s Danger,” and it shows four scenes. The first displays a baby near a fly-infested trash can; its heading reads “Dirt brings Flies, Flies bring Disease.” The next scene warns “Cleanliness means Health. Dirt means Suffering,” and depicts a crippled boy next to a healthy one. The third frame reads “The Result of Cleanliness is Happiness” and shows a pretty, smiling little girl dancing. The fourth, showing an obviously angry and bitter man leaving his home, his slovenly wife looking on anxiously, reads “The result of Dirt is Misery” (Sibley 20). 25. As Levitas notes, Marxists have often harshly criticized utopianism, which they have “understood as the construction of blueprints of a future society that are incapable of realization,” and “the charge of utopianism has also been levelled at Marxism by its opponents, using a similar definition” (35). In contrast, Levitas argues that utopianism is a healthy part of human consciousness. Furthermore, Vincent Geoghegan suggests that “art has the power to create alternatives to the present” and is therefore “one of the most potent forms of imagination” (105). 26. The only “memory” of the book besides Mazie’s flashbacks, Anna recalls “her grandmother bending in . . . twilight over lit candles chanting in an unknown
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28. 29.
30.
31.
32.
33.
34.
tongue, white bread on the table over a shining white tablecloth and red wine” (27). Olsen recognizes the need for privacy by showing Mazie’s reaction to living in such cramped quarters: “ ‘I dont have no place. If I’d kept [my homemade perfume] in the bedroom Jimmie woulda been into it, or maybe Will.’ Violently: ‘Why dont I have no place?’ Anna says to herself, ‘Maybe I can make a place for you on a shelf somewhere soon as I get some time. Dont see why not’ ” (123, emphasis in the original). In four sections of the novel, Olsen uses narrative intrusion to dispel the romanticizing of various scenes. This reference to “hands” is an echo of Engels’s 1844 description of workers as not “heads” but “hands,” not Homo cogitans but Homo laborans; Olsen’s novel, however, argues against this exclusive emphasis on the body in insisting on her characters’ “self-perception[s] as . . . integrated, autonomous agent[s]” (Gagnier 142). Zaretsky also claims that “proletarianization created a new form of the family among the masses of people” by separating it “off from the sphere of goods production”: the “family became the major sphere of society in which the [working class] individual could be foremost—it was the only space that proletarians ‘owned’ ” (Zaretsky 61). Harris maintains that religion “did and does not embody the values many Black folk wanted to preserve. When the choice is between Christian resignation or faith and humanistic action or reason, literary characters, like their folk counterparts, often reject Christianity in favor of a more exacting and humanistic idealism.” Mariah’s aspirations for “peace, freedom, and happiness” go “beyond Christianity” and are based instead on the codes of “folk culture,” codes that determine “models for love and sacrifice that are willingly made for others” (Harris 52). This is the beginning of a William Cowper poem, “Verses Supposed to Be Written by Alexander Selkirk” (1782), the first lines of which read “I am monarch of all I survey, / My right there is none to dispute”; not quoted by Jacob but quite accurately describing Jacob’s situation, the last lines of that first verse read “Better dwell in the midst of alarms, / Than reign in this horrible place.” At one point, during a moment of despair, Jacob decides that he’s “Gonna tell his papa, I’m leaving! . . . Gonna go right ’long with Mariah.” But at the thought of leaving the land, “Pain sliced his stomach in two,” and he quickly banishes the thought from his mind (This Child 101–02). As Walter Trattner notes in his history of the U.S. welfare system, at this time, caseworkers believed that “the poor were responsible for their difficulties” and, because of their training in Freudian psychology, also assumed the poor were “emotionally disturbed” (262); caseworkers “had a moralistic approach to the needy” and “sought to distinguish between the ‘worthy’ and the ‘unworthy’ poor.” Casework was “basically a device for snooping, refusing appeals for help, or attempting to control the needy,” all of which takes place in This Child (Trattner 254).
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35. Apparently Wright’s unfinished second novel, part of a trilogy about Tangierneck, was found by her husband after her death. Written over a tenyear period, this installment “appears to concern Bardetta Upshur, the child who was meant to live—and did” (Fox 3). 36. In her portrayal of Bardetta and the “stain” of her “sinful” conception, Wright reverses color imagery that associates blackness and black sin with sin; Bardetta’s very light skin signifies Mariah’s “sin” of (possibly) becoming impregnated by Dr. Grene. 37. When Mariah confesses in front of the church that she is pregnant, the committee members call Ol Jefferson to stand beside her, believing he’s the “man who’s sinned with” Mariah. Horrified, Mariah screams, “Go back, go back! . . . It ain’t his, it ain’t his. It’s Jacob’s. Church, help me” (This Child 82). Ol Jefferson insists he’s not the father, explaining “I’m just accusing myself of patting her on the head, because God don’t like ugly. I don’t think Jacob’s had nothing to do with her either” (82). The committee also initially refuses to believe that the baby is Jacob’s.
Chapter 5 1. Although the racially oriented protest novels If He Hollers Let Him Go (1945) and Lonely Crusade (1947) were the first and second published novels of Himes, his prison novel was his first novel-length project. 2. According to Margolies and Fabre, Himes wrote an article for Crisis calling “for a revolution to fulfill the promises of the Constitution” (Margolies and Fabre 49). 3. Himes was able to begin writing If He Hollers after getting a Rosenwald Foundation grant in 1944; his first plot idea for this novel, “a mystery in which white people are being killed seemingly at random everywhere in Los Angeles” (an idea that finds its way into his last novel, Plan B) reveals the extent of his anger (Margolies and Fabre 50–51). 4. This speech can also be found in Beyond the Angry Black, ed. John Williams (New York: Cooper Square Publishers, 1966). 5. As Aaron Winter contends, up until the civil rights movements of the 1960s and 1970s, whiteness “held a position of universality and invisibility” (Winter “(Dis)Placement”). For further discussion of whiteness, see also Ruth Frankenberg, White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness; Michelle Fine, “Witnessing Whiteness”; and Joe Kincheloe, et al., eds. White Reign: Deploying Whiteness in America. 6. Notably, Himes only adopts the “writer” label after the publication of “Crazy in the Stir” in the April 1934 edition of Esquire, despite the fact that his first pieces, probably written in 1931, were published in 1932 and 1933 in Negro publications (Margolies and Fabre 36). 7. There is evidence that Himes spent time around black convicts, most of whom he considered degraded (“dull-witted, stupid, uneducated, practically illiterate, slightly above animals,” he notes); this generalization could reveal
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9.
10.
11.
12.
13. 14.
15. 16.
a contrasting judgment of the intelligence of white convicts with whom he had interacted (Himes Quality 64). George Jackson experiences a similar nerve-deadening disillusionment: “What is happening to me here, what has happened, what will happen, can never surprise or upset me again. My nerves have been fractured, my sensibilities outraged, for the last time” (83). Indeed, Himes’s autobiography largely avoids the details of his prison years, and those he mentions specifically are similarly described in his fiction. For example, the autobiography alludes to his memory of a convict sneaking up on a sleeping inmate and cutting his throat while he slept, as well as the Easter Monday fire of 1930; both are recalled in Yesterday, the fire also depicted in “To What Red Hell,” published in Esquire 1934 (Himes Quality 63). Himes adds to this generalization by alluding to the worst kind of violence, racialized sexual and cannibalistic violence: “why should I be surprised when white men cut out some poor black man’s nuts, or when black men eat the tasty palms of white explorers?” (Himes Quality 65). In a footnote, Butler further defines abjection as “literally . . . to cast off, away, or out and hence,” thus presupposing and producing “a domain of agency from which it is differentiated.” She differentiates this concept from a similar one, the “psychoanalytic notion of Verwerfung, translated as ‘foreclosure,’ ” which “produces sociality through a repudiation of a primary signifier which produces an unconscious or, in Lacan’s theory, the register of the real”; in contrast, “the notion of abjection designates a degraded or cast out status within the terms of sociality. . . . what is foreclosed or repudiated within psychoanalytic terms is precisely what may not reenter the field of the social without threatening psychosis, that is, the dissolution of the subject itself ” (243). In A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway uses the term “realize” in a similar way, to denote the soldier’s comprehension of how horrible war really is and that he is in the middle of it; I would argue that there are great similarities between the experiences of modern warfare and imprisonment. The experience of irrationality and abnormality is the essence of the gothic, yet the use of generic conventions by convict writers allows a displacement of their experience, which is not finally irrational or abnormal in context. Describing his post-prison life at the end of the Depression, Himes describes a similar circumstance in which race is transcended: “on the Writers Project” he says, “I did not feel the racial hurt so much . . . we were all, black and white, bound into the human family by our desperate struggle for bread” (Himes Quality 72). This is almost precisely a description of a naturalist character, one who has been psychologically constrained and environmentally determined until he or she lives entirely in the present tense. As Cohen notes, a convict “may be serving life, but [she or he] is not serving ‘my life.’ ” In a study done of lifers, not a single one was completely resigned to dying in prison—all had hope of being freed before they died (93).
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NOTES
17. This interest in the “palpable . . . unreality of time,” one of the most recognizable features of prison, is also a feature of gothic literature, as is clear from Victor Serge’s book Men in Prison (London: Gollancz, 1970, p. 56): “What a measureless gap from one hour to the next. When you tell yourself in advance that six months—or six years—are to pass like this, you feel the terror of facing an abyss. At the bottom, mists in the darkness” (qtd. in Cohen 91). The language of the gothic here stands in for the unspeakability of facing years or decades in a zone of abjection. 18. On the other hand, writing, which “shares with the experience of involuntary memory this possibility of escape from time,” can be pleasurable to the convict (Lloyd 139). Perhaps this is because it “unifies past and present moments in a way that makes of them an identity—extracting from the past something universal which it can share with the present” (139).
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Tuan, Yi-Fu. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1977. Walcutt, Charles Child. American Literary Naturalism, a Divided Stream. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1956. Walker, Margaret. Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius. New York: Warner Books, 1988. Walker, Margaret. “Richard Wright.” New Letters 38.2 (Winter 1971): 182–202. Ward, Jerry W. Jr. “Everybody’s protest novel: the era of Richard Wright.” The Cambridge Companion to the African American Novel. Ed. Maryetta Graham. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2004. 173–88. Washington, Mary Helen. Invented Lives: Narratives of Black Women 1860–1960. New York: Doubleday, 1987. Watson, Wilbur H., ed., Black Folk Medicine: The Therapeutic Significance of Faith and Trust. New Brunswick and London: Transaction Books, 1988. Westbrook, Perry D. Freewill and Determinism in American Literature. Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1979. Williams, Raymond. Culture and Society: 1780–1950. New York: Columbia UP, 1983. Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1977. Williams, Raymond. Problems in Materialism and Culture. London: Verso, 1980. Williams, Sherley Anne. “Papa Dick and Sister-Woman: Reflections on Women in the Fiction of Richard Wright.” American Novelists Revisited: Essays in Feminist Criticism. Ed. Fritz Fleischmann. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982. Williams, Sherley Anne. “The Blues Roots of Contemporary Afro-American Poetry.” Chant of Saints. Ed. Michael S. Harper, and Robert B. Stepto. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1979. 123–34. Wilson, Gay, and Clark, Harry Hayden, eds. “Introduction: Émile Zola.” Literary Criticism: From Pope to Croce. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1962. 586–87. Print. Winter, Aaron. “(Dis)Placement and Visibility: (Re)Writing Whiteness in America.” Second Annual Conference of the International Social Theory Consortium (July 5–7, 2001). Lecture. Winthrop, John. “A Model of Christian Charity.” The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Vol 1. Ed. Nina Baym. New York: W. W. Norton, 1998. 214–26. Wixson, Douglas. Worker-Writer in America: Jack Conroy and the Tradition of Midwestern Literary Radicalism, 1898–1990. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1994. Wright, Ellen, and Fabre, Michel. Richard Wright Reader. New York: Harper & Row, 1978. Wright, Richard. Black Boy (American Hunger). New York: Harper Perennial, 1993. Wright, Richard. “Blueprint for Negro Writing.” The Richard Wright Reader. Ed. Ellen Wright, and Michel Fabre. New York: Harper and Row, 1978. 36–49. Wright, Richard. “How ‘Bigger’ Was Born.” Richard Wright: Early Works. Ed. Arnold Rampersad. New York: Library of America, 1991. Wright, Richard. Lawd Today! Richard Wright: Early Works. Ed. Arnold Rampersad. New York: Library of America, 1991.
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Wright, Richard. Native Son. Richard Wright: Early Works. Ed. Arnold Rampersad. New York: Library of America, 1991. Wright, Richard. “Review and Comment: Between Laughter and Tears.” New Masses Oct. 5, 1937: 22. Wright, Richard. Rite of Passage. New York: HarperCollins, 1994. Wright, Richard. The Long Dream. New York: Perennial Library, 1958, 1987. Wright, Sarah. This Child’s Gonna Live. New York: Feminist Press, 1986. Zaretsky, Eli. Capitalism, the Family, and Personal Life. New York: Harpers, 1973. Zwarg, Christina. “Du Bois on Trauma: Psychoanalysis and the Would-Be Black Savant.” Cultural Critique 51 (Spring 2002): 1–39. Zola, Émile. “The Experimental Novel.” Literary Criticism: From Pope to Croce. Ed. Wilson, Gay, and Clark, Harry Hayden. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1962. 589–99.
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Note: The letter ‘n’ following the locators refers to notes cited in the text. Abbott, Jack Henry, 175 abject, abjection, 30, 47–8, 60, 132, 182–7, 191–7, 228n11, 229n17 abolitionist, 5, 9 adaptation, 32, 182–3, 186, 191, 204n34 Adorno, Theodor, 31–2 aesthetics, 4, 44, 92 Africa, 68, 74, 92, 104 agency, 28, 31–3, 35, 38, 40–1, 60, 63, 99, 113, 121, 183, 205n40, 228n11 Alger, Horatio, 53, 96, 115, 219n32 Althusser, Louis, 31 American Dream, 68, 96, 103–4, 151, 161, 171 art and social change, 4, 33, 40, 43–4 assimilation (ist), 45 Atlantic (Atlantic Monthly), 8, 80 Bachelard, Gaston, 111–12, 115 Baker, Houston, 2, 120 Baldwin, James, 1–3, 56, 77, 91 on Stowe, 8 on Wright, 45–6, 91, 206–7n54 Beecher, Catherine, 131, 133, 139, 145–8, 163, 167, 222n1 Beecher, Mrs. Henry Ward, 131–3, 138 Binet, Alfred, On Double Consciousness, 12–13
birthright, 1–3, 91, 102, 199n3 black nationalism, 43, 62, 209n9 blues, 82, 89, 94, 107–14, 120–2, 128, 217n17–n21, 218n27, 219n30, n32, 220n36, n37, n39 bourgeois, 10, 12, 17, 23, 30, 37, 41, 43, 48, 90, 94–5, 102, 107–10, 113–14, 116–17, 124–5, 128–9, 132–4, 136–7, 139, 146, 151–3, 157, 203n31, 211n25, 216n10, 217n16, 222n2, n4 Bradford, William, 1, 3 Brown, William Wells, Clotel, 5 Butler, Judith, 30, 47, 182, 228n11 Carby, Hazel, 89, 109, 207n55, 214n1–n2 Caruth, Cathy, 18, 54, 56 Chopin, Kate, 91, 173, 214–15n2 Christian (religion), 108, 117, 129, 133, 226n31 Christian, Barbara, 42, 202n22, 207n57 Cixous, Helene, 127 class, 3, 16–17, 20–1, 23, 29–30, 32–3, 35, 37, 43, 47–8, 51, 55, 76, 91–2, 109, 111, 128, 130, 133, 136, 202n21, 205n46, 208n65, 211n20, 215n5, 218n26, 224n13 see also middle class, working class
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Cleaver, Eldridge, 183, 191 Cliff, Michelle, 157–9 Communism/communist, 23–4, 40, 58–9, 62, 75–6, 86–7, 90, 93–4, 96, 101, 104–5, 108, 110–11, 118, 121, 128–9, 137, 148, 153, 156, 158–60, 165–6, 171–3, 206n49, 206n50, 206n52, 209–10n9 women, 224n13 Young Communist League, 136 community, 2, 5, 19–20, 39, 45, 51–3, 62–4, 68–70, 72, 79, 86–7, 93, 96, 101, 102, 104, 105, 110–11, 118, 121, 128–9, 137, 153, 156, 158–68, 201n15, 211n20, 218n23–n24 conjure, 108, 112–13, 117–20, 122–3, 219n27–n28, 220n34 consciousness, Bigger’s degree of, 70–1 Cooper, Anna Julia, 89, 90 Cowper, William, 226n32 Crane, Stephen, 35, 206n48, 212n28 “credit to the race”, 90, 94, 100, 105, 110, 118, 128, 216n11 criminal anthropology, 37, 205n44 Darwin, Charles, 32–4 Davis, Angela, 180, 183, 201n14 Davis, Rebecca Harding, 5, 8–10, 16, 201n14 determinism, 69, 130, 203n32 biological, 41, 205n44 social, 4, 23, 27–8, 30–6, 38–9, 41, 44, 57, 124, 130, 180 Dickinson, Emily, 91 dissociation, 14, 25–6 documentary realism, 33, 39, 68, 204n36 domesticity, domestic ideology, 30, 39, 55, 90–1, 107, 109–13, 115–18, 120, 122, 124, 126, 128, 130, 131–6, 138–9, 142, 145–52, 154–5, 158, 167, 199n3, 215n5, 222n1–n2, n6
double consciousness, 2–4, 6–7, 12–15, 20, 27, 30, 38, 48, 75, 91, 105–6, 128, 177, 201n16 double-think, 25–7 Douglas, Mary, 133, 166, 222n3, 223n9, 224n16 Douglass, Frederick, 6–9, 51, 200–1n13, 209n8, 211n27 Du Bois, W. E. B., 1–4, 12–15, 43, 91, 104–5, 199n1, 199n3, 200n9, 201n18 Ellison, Ralph, 42–3 Elmer, Jonathan, 51, 70, 71 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 13, 201n16 Fabre, Michel, 38–9, 64, 70, 84, 178, 204n35, 210n11, 212n32 Fanon, Franz, 209n3 female sexuality, 88, 94, 109, 214–15n2 Foley, Barbara, 34, 206n50, 208n65, 212n32 folk culture, 46, 63, 68, 211n20, 218n27, 226n31 Folsom Prisoners’ Manifesto of Demands and Anti-Oppression Platform, 183 Fontana, Tom, 188 Foucault, Michel, 31, 105, 182 Franklin, Ben/Franklinian, 25, 38, 93, 96–7, 103–4, 106, 125 Franklin, H. Bruce, 194 Freud, Sigmund, 12–13, 17, 37, 202n20, n22 Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 18, 49, 54–5, 205n41 primal scene, 50, 67, 78, 81, 105n2, 203n31, 209n3 traumatic neurosis, 73, 135, 137–8, 141n31 uncanny, 61, 66, 81, 203n31 Fugitive Slave Law, 16 Gagnier, Regina, 31, 41, 199n4 gang, 54–5
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Harlem Renaissance, 41–2, 207n55–n58, n60 Harlem Writer’s Guild, 46, 137 Harlow, Barbara, 193 Harper, Frances E. W., 90 Harris, Trudier, 161 Harvey, David, 139 Hemingway, Ernest, 228n12 Herman, Judith, 17, 25 Hill, Ray, 195–7 Himes, Chester, 11, 29, 40, 47, 227n1–n2, n6–n7, 228n9–n10, n14 If He Hollers, Let Him Go, 21–4, 27–9, 40, 44, 179, 199–200n52, 203n27, 203n29, 227n2 Plan B, 180 Yesterday Will Make You Cry, 47–8, 175–82, 185–8, 192–4 homelessness, 55, 107, 123, 138 homeplace, 101–2, 106, 110, 112, 125, 129, 159, 217n16, 218n23, n26 homosexuality, 186–7 hooks, bell, 101, 110, 112–14, 119, 218n23 Hopkins, Pauline, 90, 214n1, 215n3
Howard, June, 37, 200n6, 204n36 Howells, William Dean, 8, 201n14 Hughes, Langston, 14, 42 Hurston, Zora Neale, 46, 90, 206n54, 215n3, 220n34 hysteria, 12–14, 74–5, 79, 98, 186 identification, reader, 5–6, 30, 36, 40, 44, 58, 66–7, 174, 219n32 identity, 2, 4, 14–15, 18–20, 29–31, 37–8, 41, 45, 47–8, 50, 53–4, 56–7, 59–60, 64, 69, 71–3, 79–88, 91, 93–4, 101–4, 108–9, 111, 113, 120, 122, 124, 126, 128–30, 132–3, 135–8, 141, 147–50, 158–9, 177–83, 185–6, 188, 191, 194–6, 199n2, 205n42 individualism, 11, 30–1, 68, 112, 134, 136, 147, 149–50, 209n9, 223n7 inheritance, 1–3, 92, 102, 104 interracial relationships, 21, 28, 45, 96, 99, 128 violence, 44, 99 intersubjectivity, 15, 21, 87, 120, 127, 220n36 Irigaray, Luce, 127 Jackson, George, 176, 180, 184–5, 188–9, 191, 193, 228n8 Jacobs, Harriet, 214n1 James, William, 12, 201n17 on double consciousness, 13, 75 “The Hidden Self ”, 201n17 The Principles of Psychology, 12–13 Japanese-American internment, 202n26 Jezebel, 84, 90, 94, 102, 104, 107–8, 121, 125 Jim Crow, 25, 50–1, 56–7, 62, 64–5, 73, 85, 95, 224n14 John Reed clubs, 58 Johnson, Barbara, 62, 214n43 Johnson, James Weldon, 42
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Gates, Henry Louis, 215n7 gaze, 3, 14–15, 36, 72, 75, 80–1, 92–3, 106, 185, 218n22 Genet, Jean, 176, 188 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 91 Gilroy, Paul, 14, 71 Gold, Mike, 4, 17, 40–2, 47, 200n7, 206n52 gothic literature, 177, 186, 228n13, 229n17 Gramsci, Antonio, 191 Great Depression, 18, 19, 37, 42, 46, 66, 73, 93, 134–5, 171, 173, 202n21, 206n50, 210n11, 223n8, n11, 228n13 Grosz, Elizabeth, 185
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Lacan, Jacques, 17, 50, 228n11 LaCapra, Dominick, 202n22, 203n28 Larsen, Nella, 90–1, 215n2, n5 Lasch, Christopher, 133 Lefebvre, Henri, 133 Lerner, Gerda, 89, 90 Liberator, The, 40, 200n7 Locke, Alain, 43–5, 207n55, n56, 207n60–n61 Lukács, John, 30, 131, 203n31, 222n4, 224n13 lynching, 24–5, 28–9, 50–3, 56–7, 59, 64, 67–8, 78, 95, 161, 168, 171, 209n3 Margolies, Edward, 178, 227n2 Marxism/Marxist, 23, 31, 70–1, 136–7, 206n52, 226n29 Marx, Karl, 13, 31–2, 203n32, 203–4n33, 224n13 Mayakovsky, Vladimir, 5 McKay, Claude, 4, 200n7 memory, 12, 19–20, 22n9, 143, 172, 174–5, 182, 192, 225n26, 228n9, 229n18 Mencken, H.L., 69 metaphor, 30, 45, 55, 57, 59–61, 69, 72–3, 93, 101, 107, 121, 139, 146, 211n16–n18 middle class, 5, 9–10, 12, 14, 16, 22, 24, 26–8, 30, 35–8, 42, 47–8, 59, 74, 90–2, 102, 107–10, 113, 115–16, 122, 124, 129, 132–6, 140, 142, 146, 148–150, 174, 177, 205n40, 217n19, 218n27, 219n32, 225n23 see also reader(s) Miller, James A., 211n22 miscegenation, 171, 214n47, 224n14 modernism/modernist, 4, 5, 7, 10, 47, 71, 200n8, 219n29
Morrison, Toni, 4, 20, 104, 107, 200n9, 215n4 mother, motherhood, 133, 147, 148, 150, 152–3, 155, 157, 160, 167, 192–3, 195–7, 209n4 narrative strategy, 35, 43, 47, 57–8, 63, 124 coercive, 11, 41, 58, 63–4, 67 narrator, collective, 11 naturalism/naturalist, 4–5, 8, 16, 18, 30–40, 44, 47, 177, 200n8, 204n35, 204n38, 205n46, 206n47, 228n15 American, 35, 37 biological, 34 English, 33 French, 33 Himes’ use of, 176 Petry’s use of, 103, 130 Wright’s use of, 38–9, 66, 68–71 New Challenge, 43 New Masses, 206n51, 207n59 “New Mirror, The”, 2–3, 91–2, 208n64, 215n8 New Negro, 42, 207n56 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 204n34 Norris, Frank, 34, 36n44, 212n28 objectification, 75, 90, 109, 121, 217n21 objectivity, 31, 35 Olsen, Tillie, 10, 29, 46–7 “A Biographical Interpretation”, 8–9 narrative experimentation, 10–12, 41 working class writers, 208n65 Yonnondio, 41, 136–57, 173, 201n15, 206n53, 224n15, n17–20, 225n22–n23, 225–6n26, 226n27–n29 Orwell, George, 25 Oz, 183–4, 186–91
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Kaplan, Amy, 8, 204n37 Kaplan, Caren, 158 Killens, John Oliver, 46–7 Kristeva, Julia, 132
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psychology, 8, 12, 21, 25–7, 30, 33–4, 37, 50, 122, 163, 201n18, 209n2, 226n34 pulp fiction, 22, 176–7 race, 2, 16, 17, 21–3, 25–7, 42–5, 48, 57–8, 63, 69, 71, 92–101, 104–6, 108, 110, 128, 135, 137, 146, 178–81, 187–9, 202n21, 208n64 and morality/uplift, 89–90, 207n55 primal scene, 67, 78, 81, 105, 208n2, 215n7 racial consciousness, 43, 179, 182 racial oppression, 5, 92, 189, 201n18 Rampersad, Arnold, 50, 55n16, 208n1, 209n5, 213n36 rape, 25, 27–9, 50, 56–7, 59–62, 65–7, 69–70, 73–5, 77–8, 80–5, 88, 90, 95, 97–100, 102, 109, 113, 126, 140–2, 146, 148, 203n27, 210n15, 211n19 metaphor, 55, 57–65, 74, 79 rape in prison, 186–7 rapist stereotype, 27–9, 49, 64, 78, 84–5, 87–8, 97, 99, 210n12–n15, 214n1 reader(s), 3–12, 15, 20–8, 30, 33–6, 38, 40–1, 44, 47–8, 51–3, 57–60, 63–9, 71–2, 81, 83–7, 103, 105, 107, 109, 113–16, 121–2, 127–8, 130, 141–2, 153, 173–4, 178–80, 200n13, 204n37–n39, 209n7, 211n26, 212n28, 214n43, 214n47, 216n10, 217n22, 218n26, 219n29, 219n32, 220n35, 221n44 middle-class, 12, 22–3, 30, 47, 74, 205n46, 211n25 minority or black, 15–16, 109, 210n10
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Petry, Ann, 11, 29, 39, 45–7, 92–5 Country Place, 45, 113, 219n29 double consciousness, 2–5 literary reputation, 215n6 misogyny, 208n63 “Miss Muriel,” 92, 208n64, 217n15 The Narrows, 45, 93–102, 106–10, 113, 114, 120–2, 126–30, 208n64, 216n11, n13, 217n16, 218n23, 218n25–n26, 220n36, n38–9, 221n41–4 “The New Mirror,” 2, 92, 215n8 “The Novel as Social Criticism,” 5, 200n9 proletarian realism, 223n12 race, 208n64 sexuality of black women, 91, 216n10, 217–18n22 The Street, 44, 93, 102–10, 112–20, 122–6, 130, 218n23–n24, 219n32, 220n35, 221n40 working class, 130, 219n31 Petry, Elisabeth, 92 primal scene, 67, 78, 81, 105, 208n2 prison literature, 176–7, 193 proletarian, 4, 11, 200n7, 222n5 consciousness, 43, 67, 208n65 family, 145, 226n30 night, 47 novel, 4–5, 15–16, 21, 27, 41, 44, 46, 206n50 realism, 4, 30, 40–2, 46n53 writers, 3 proletariat, “blackening” of, 16, 140 protest literature, 3–5, 7, 20–1, 24, 31, 43, 200n7, 207n59 protest novel, 3, 5–7, 41, 46–7, 57, 60, 63, 200n10 psychoanalysis/psychoanalytic, 12, 15–18, 30, 35, 38, 50, 202n22, 209n2–n3, 228n11
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“Sambo”, 56, 62, 64, 75, 80 Scarry, Elaine, 36–7, 111, 132, 155 scientific racism, 37, 205n44 segregation, 25–6, 189, 222n6 sentimentalism/sentimentalist novel, 5–6, 8, 77, 209n7 Sinclair, Upton The Jungle, 5, 204n39 slave narrative, 7, 9, 19, 31, 202n24, 213n39 slavery, 6–7, 18–19, 54–7, 90–1, 96, 99, 161, 163, 168, 173, 201n13, 202n25 Smith, Bessie, 89, 108–9, 111, 220n37 Smith, Clara, 89, 108 Smith, Lillian, Strange Fruit, 21–5 Smith, Mamie, 113 social death, 27, 47 socialism, 136, 206n51 socialist realism, 30–1, 115, 153–4, 211n25 social worker, 21, 24–6 sociology/sociologist, 3–4, 8, 13, 18, 33, 41–4, 75, 176, 222n6 spatial consciousness, 139, 150 Spillers, Hortense, 2, 15–17, 51, 97, 215n2, 216n10 stereotype, 2, 3, 8, 29, 30, 50, 71, 73, 74, 86, 92, 94, 97–9, 105, 180, 195, 215–16n8–n9 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 8 The American Woman’s Home, 131, 139, 145–6, 148, 163, 167 Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 7
Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 5–8, 10, 16, 209n7 subjectivity, 3–4, 20, 31, 37, 47–8, 50, 96, 101, 177, 181–3, 195, 199n4 surrealism, 47, 176–7 Tate, Claudia, 15–17 Thomas, Piri, 184 topology, topological, 30, 55, 59, 72–3, 86, 111 Transcendentalism, 8 trauma, 4–7, 12, 16–17, 25, 30, 48, 54–6, 79–80, 135, 138, 142, 167, 182, 202n20, n23 cultural, 18–20, 28–9, 50, 55–6, 78–9, 88, 96, 100, 180 racial, 14, 17, 25, 28, 50–2, 63, 71, 78, 179, 203n30, 209n4, n6, n7 social, 29 theory, 54, 80, 94, 203n30 “working-through,” 203n28 traumatic neurosis, 18, 54, 67, 76, 106, 138, 141, 203n31 Tuan, Yi-Fu, 158 uncanny, 61, 66, 81, 203n31 unconscious, 21, 42, 52, 96, 132 uplift, 90, 207n55 urban planning, 30, 37, 222n6, n10 Van Peebles, Melvin, 178 Van Vechten, Carl, 179 Walker, Alice, 39 Walker, Margaret, 39, 62, 70, 212n31 Washington, Booker T., 26 welfare, 30, 145, 162–3, 225n21, 226n34 Wells, Ida B., 90 Wharton, Edith, 91 whiteness, 180, 227n5 white privilege, 77, 93, 97–8, 103 white supremacy, 91, 107, 189 Williams, Raymond, 31–4
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realism, 5, 8, 28, 40–1, 69–70, 176, 200n8, 201n14, 204n35–n37, 205n40, 205n46, 206n53, 223n12 Reconstruction, 55–6, 59, 89, 224n14 Roediger, David, 16 root doctor, 111–12, 117–19, 218n27 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 34 Ryan, Mary, 159
Williams, Sherley Anne, 112, 211n21 Wilson, Harriet Our “Nig”, 5 Wiltwyck school, 51, 209n5 womanhood, 23, 76, 78, 89, 90, 108, 114, 119 working class, 4, 8–11, 14, 16–17, 23, 30, 32, 34–8, 40–1, 43, 47, 53, 68, 92, 94, 102, 108, 110, 112–15, 117, 121–2, 125, 129, 133–5, 138–42, 146–8, 151, 155–7, 174, 177, 200n7, 208n65, 210n15, 211n22, 211n25, 215n5, 218n23, 220n33, 223n7–n8 Wright, Ellen, 64 Wright, Richard, 11, 43–4 “Big Boy Leaves Home,” 50–3 Black Boy, 9, 39, 69, 212n30 “Blueprint for Negro Writing,” 42–3 Communism, 206n49 existentialism, 38 female characters, 62, 211n21, 214n43–n45 Harlem Renaissance, 42
“How ‘Bigger’ Was Born,” 29, 211n23 on Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, 206n54 Lawd Today!, 39, 54–5, 58, 63–9, 211n24, 212n29 literary reputation, 44, 208n62 The Long Dream, 59, 210n13 masturbation, 74, 211n26, 213n38 Native Son, 21–4, 27–9, 38–9, 44–5, 49, 54–9, 63, 65, 67, 70–82, 202n27, 210n10, 210n11, 211n122–n23, 212n31, 212n33–n34, 213n38–41 and naturalism, 38–9, 176 and psychology, 208n1 Rite of Passage, 50, 53–5, 209n4 Uncle Tom’s Children, 57, 206n54, 209n7, 211n20 Wright, Sarah E., 29, 39, 46–7, 227n35 This Child’s Gonna Live, 136–8, 158–74, 226n31, n33, 227n36–n37 Zola, Émile, 8, 32–5, 39
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