Gynocritics and the Traversals of Women's Writing: Intersections of Diverse Critical Essays 1527530213, 9781527530218

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Gynocritics and the Traversals of Women’s Writing

Gynocritics and the Traversals of Women’s Writing: Intersections of Diverse Critical Essays Edited by

Hemant Verma, Ajit Kumar and Rafseena M.

Foreword by Prof. Gabriela Vargas-Cetina

Gynocritics and the Traversals of Women’s Writing: Intersections of Diverse Critical Essays Edited by Hemant Verma and Ajit Kumar and Rafseena M. This book first published 2024 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2024 by Hemant Verma, Ajit Kumar, Rafseena M. and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-5275-3021-3 ISBN (13): 978-1-5275-3021-8

CONTENTS

Foreword .................................................................................................. viii Prof. Gabriela Vargas-Cetina Introduction ................................................................................................. 1 Hemant Verma, Ajit Kumar and Rafseena M. Section-I: Representation, Tradition and Convention Chapter I .................................................................................................... 18 Bridges to Babylon: Ethnography, Representation, and Indeterminacy in Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day Celia Lisset Alvarez Chapter II ................................................................................................... 35 Radical Repetition: Marguerite Duras’s Moderato Cantabile Tom Phillips Chapter III ................................................................................................. 50 Agency and the Blues Aesthetic in Zora Neale Hurston’s “Sweat” Dokubo Melford Goodhead Section-II: History, Trauma and Individuality Chapter IV ................................................................................................. 72 Path Back to Wholeness, to the Self: Morgan Jerkins’ This Will Be My Undoing Tamara Miles Chapter V .................................................................................................. 78 The Dynamics of Polyphony in Vocalizing the Trauma in God Help the Child Rafseena M

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Chapter VI ................................................................................................. 90 The Historico-Political Imaginary in Marta Petreu’s Rural Novel Ionucu Pop Section-III: Family, Ethics and Hardships Chapter VII .............................................................................................. 104 Mothers and Daughters on the Plantation: A Feminist Re-reading of Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl Rafael Miguel Montes Chapter VIII ............................................................................................ 115 “Somber and Joyful:” Rereading Carson McCullers’s The Ballad of the Sad Café during a Third Pandemic Summer Kimberly Willardson Section-IV: Reflections, Aesthetics and Heritage Chapter IX ............................................................................................... 130 Critical Reflections: Deciphering Alice Childress’s Wedding Band: A Love/Hate Story in Black and White C. Raju Chapter X ................................................................................................ 142 The Aesthetic Heritage of Maria Firmina dos Reis’ The Slave and Frances Harper’s Sketches of Southern Life Luiz Fernando Martins de Lima and Regiani Aparecida Santos Zacarias Chapter XI ............................................................................................... 154 Racial Inequality and Gender Concern in Ann Petry’s Like a Winding Sheet T. Devaki Section-V: Sentimentalism, Scientific and Sensibilities Chapter XII .............................................................................................. 168 Sentimental Claustrophobia of Feminist Sensibilities: A Feminist Reading of Maud Martha and House of Mirth Cyrine Kortas

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Chapter XIII ............................................................................................ 199 Politico-Historical Issues in Modern Black Fiction by Women: A Study in Canonicity Wirba Ibrahim and Nsono Ruth Chapter XIV ............................................................................................ 216 Precedent and Prospective: A Critique of Vandana Singh’s Science Fiction Saikat Sarkar Editors and Contributors.......................................................................... 231

FOREWORD This book gives a unique view of the writing of women living in different epochs and in different countries. Its unifying theme is that of writing and challenge. Writing can be challenging if you live in a totalitarian state. It could also be challenging if it questions pre-existing social norms. It could point to dangers existing and to those yet unseen. Especially, this book shows how challenge has been and continues to be particularly acute for women in most contemporary societies. It reminds us how through writing women have exposed and questioned oppression at their own peril, but also how sometimes they have surrendered knowingly because they became tired of fighting, or because they chose to privilege others and not themselves. Judith Butler (1990, 1993) and Julia Kristeva (1982) are invoked by some authors to support their analyses; however, more than an examination of women’s writing from theoretical viewpoints, here we have essays reflecting on the works and the appreciation of the writers’ work given their milieu and their intended behind-the-lines messages. Through the book we learn about the work of women who have been vocal, in prose and rhyme, about totalitarianism in Bulgaria and Romania; we are walked through an analysis of a film based on Edith Warton’s 1905 novel House of Mirth (Warton 2022); we learn about novels and poems that have not been translated into English or, if they have, did not become the classics they should be by now; we are reminded of the themes of love and friendship in Carson McCuller’s The Ballad of the Sad Café, originally pubished in 1951 (McCuller 2005), and are invited to think about this piece of fiction in allegorical terms; we learn about Romania’s pastoral imaginaries; and we read analyses of texts having to do with slavery and race as seen from the far-away gaze of scholars in other places of the world looking into literature produced across different time periods in the United States of America. As an anthropologist who has done field research in Canada, Italy, Mexico, and Spain, I was already familiar with some of the themes of the

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book. The surveillance and punishments to dissenters in former communist countries (Brier 2013), the dangers of mountaineering (Ortner 1999), the “male virgins” of Albania (Young 2000), the commerce of slaves and the plantations in Africa, the Greater Caribbean and the United States, and their gender connotations (Lal, Brij V. et al. 1993, Oliveira 2021), the devastating personal effects of ethnic difference (Tamai 2020, Watson 1970), and the relevance of Victorian British morals to the restriction in the lives of women past and present (Himmelfarb 2021), have all been described and examined by anthropologists and historians through careful documentation and archival research. Looking at these through fiction and sometimes through poetry, however, we are reminded of how everyday life brings together the past and the present at every step and moment, and how present and future can be re-imagined following fictional characters who are shown questioning the norms of their social, cultural, and political milieus. Celia Lisset Alvarez proposes in one of the chapters that ethnographical fictions could illuminate academic ethnography. To this I can answer that they already do: Today, precisely because of the controversies of the late 1980s and 1990s Alvarez cites, most careful ethnographies take into account local pieces of fiction. These help us anthropologists see how a collective “us,” which is both imagined and experienced by all members of a given social environment, becomes part of the single “I” of individual subjects. A similar reflexive aim animates this volume. The resulting experience of being in the world at localized places in particular times, thus living under the many dangers associated with transgression, is a recurring and important topic of this collection. Because of this, the writers whose works are the subjects of each book chapter can at the same time be considered both trespassers and bridge-builders: Their writings transport us to imagined scenarios that spark our imagination and can help us thing of better—or at least very different—tomorrows in those societies where their stories take place. The scholars writing here about the female authors and their works are acutely aware of these transgressions and connections. Anthropology, philosophy, and world literature often coincide in their questions, themes, and approaches. Gender, and particularly women and

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their place in society, has been one of those questions and themes explored by academics and writers alike from multiple points of view. Anthropology has, at least since Coming of Age in Samoa by Margaret Mead, originally published in 1928, pointed at the fluidity of personal identity across the life cycle and across generations, in different cultures of the world (Mead 1928). Mead’s fellow anthropologist Zora Neal Hurston, who was also a writer of essays and novels, explored the meanings of race and gender in different power contexts in the United States, the Caribbean, and in past contexts in Africa (Green 2023, Hurston 2018, Marshall 2023). From the 1920s through the 1970s, Mead and other anthropologists of her generation questioned the direct relation of women and men with specific activities and roles as universal, showing the great variability of tasks, roles, marriage arrangements, living arrangements, sexual conducts and social expectations associated with gender in cultures around the world. At the time of Mead’s and Hurston’s early publications (Hurston 1930, 1931, 1990 [1935]; Mead 1928a, 1928b, 1930, 1930), Virginia Woolf had already been exploring related themes through her novels Mrs. Dalloway (Woolf 1925), To the Lighthouse (Woolf 1927) and Orlando (Woolf 1928). Her 1929 essay A Room of One’s Own (Woolf 1929) and philosopher Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, originally published in 1949 (Beauvoir 2011), are read today in anthropology classrooms alongside the texts by Mead and her colleagues because they are seen as sharing related questions surrounding the cultural aspects of gender. The feminist movement demanded freedom, and especially sexual freedom, for women. Sexuality became an open subject. The Kinsey Reports, detailing the findings of Alfred Kinsey and his team regarding human sexuality, became widely available in the 1950s. Literary authors like Anaïs Nin wrote diaries and novels where the protagonists were sexually uninhibited women. Anthropologists created the school of thought known as “culture and personality”, which featured prominently the cultural study of gender roles and sex (Wallace 1961). In 1974 Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louis Lamphere published Woman, Culture and Society, a collection of writings by anthropologists pointing at the general problem already posed by de Beauvoir’s and others: That women in many societies are seen as second-class humans. They called on

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social scientists to change their ways of writing to feature women as full subjects of their own lives and societies, something that writers like Doris Lessing (1962), Ursula K. Le Guin (1995), Marylyn French (1977), Anaïs Nin (2020 [1936]), Rosario Castellanos (1957) and others were already doing in literature. During the second half of the twentieth century, philosophers Michel Foucault (1978, 1985, 1986, 2001), Donna Haraway (1991) and Judith Butler 1990, 1993) deconstructed the culturally accepted unity between genitalia, gender, and sex, and helped envision new directions for gender studies and gender-related activism. They could use the anthropological record, which had already documented the many cultural variations, and a large body of creative writing works was already developing these ideas; this partly explains why their theories were so favorably received. In the twenty-first century, philosophers, including Donna Haraway (2003, 2016) and Rosi Braidotti (2013), are questioning the borders of human-centered thought, to place people as one of the types of creatures that define the landscapes of life on earth. This time, philosophers are relying on biology and the environmental sciences to advance their thought. Again, many anthropologists and primatologists have been working on the interconnectedness between humans, animals, plants, and soils. Ethnography, again, is rich with examples. And again, the philosophers are reading women writers, including Octavia Butler, who seems to have anticipated many of the themes relevant during the first half of the 21st Century (Butler 1976, 1977, 1978, 1980, 1984, 1993), and Margaret Atwood, who seems to be one step ahead when it comes to imagining the immediate future (Atwood 2003, 2009, 2013). The category of “woman” as a specific type of human, and the category of “human” as a particular type of creature, have greatly changed in the world of theory in the last three centuries, but they continue to be two main embodied concepts through which people experience everyday life in most cultures to date. This is a timely volume that reminds us of that. Debates currently taking place in many countries around the rights of women include, at least, our rights to choose our gender, to safe contraception, to safe abortion, to attend non-religious schools, to have public daycare facilities, to be free from sexual harassment, to marry for

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love, to own property, to control our own bodies and be free from sexual exploitation, to occupy visible places in the public space, to protest upholding our rights, and also to be left alone when we need it. We see these themes as treated by the authors whose works are discussed here, and find that the dangers of being a woman, compounded by the danger of being a woman who writes, are far from coming to an end any time soon. Gabriela Vargas-Cetina Professor of Anthropology Autonomous University of Yucatan Merida, Yucatan, Mexico

Works Cited Atwood, Margaret. Oryx & Crake. McClelland and Stewart, 2003. —. The Year of the Flood. McClelland and Stewart, 2009. —. MaddAddam. McClelland and Steward, 2013. Brier, Robert. Entangled Protest: Transnational Approaches to the History of Dissent in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Fibre, 20139. Beauvoir Simone de. The Works of Simone De Beauvoir. Includes: The Ethics of Ambiguity, 1947, The Second Sex, 1949, On the Publication of the Second Sex, 1963, Interview, Biography. Createspace 2011. Braidotti, Rosi. The Posthuman. Polity, 2013. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge, 1990. —. Bodies that Matter: On the Discoursive Limits of “Sex.” Routledge, 1993. Butler, Octavia. Patternaster. Doubleday, 1976. —. Mind of my Mind. Doubleday, 1977. —. Survivor. Doubleday, 1978. —. Wild Seed. Doubleday, 1980. —. Dawn. Warner, 1987. —. Parable of the Sower. Four Walls Eight Windows, 1993. Castellanos, Rosario. Balun Canaan. Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1957. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction. Random House, 1978.

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—. The History of Sexuality, Vol. 2: The Use of Pleasure. Random House, 1985. —. The History of Sexuality, Vol. 3: The Care of the Self. Random House, 1986. —. The History of Sexuality, Vol. 4: Confessions of the Flesh. Penguin Random House, 2021. French, Marilyn. The Women’s Room. Summit Books, 1977. Green, Sharony. The Chase and the Ruins: Zora Neale Hurston in Honduras. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2023. Haraway, Donna. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 1991. —. The Companion Species Manifesto. University of Chicago Press, 2003. —. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press, 2016. Himmelfarb, Gertrude. The Roads to Modernity. The British, French, and American Enlightenments. Vintage Books, 2005. Hurston, Zora. “Dance Songs and Tales from the Bahamas.” The Journal of American Folklore, vol. 43, no. 169, 1930, pp. 294–312. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/534942. Accessed 3 Nov. 2023. —. “Hoodoo in America.” The Journal of American Folklore, vol. 44, no. 174, 1931, pp. 317–417. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/535394. Accessed 3 Nov. 2023. Hurston, Zora Neale. Mules and Men. Harper Perennial 1990 [1935]. —. Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo.” Amistad, 2018. Kinsey Alfred C. et al. Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. Philadelphia Saunders 1968 [1948]. —. et al. Sexual Behavior in the Human Female. W.B. Saunders Company 1953. Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Columbia University Press, 1982. Lal Brij, V et al. Plantation Workers: Resistance and Accommodation. University of Hawaii Press 1993. Leguin, Ursula. Four Ways to Forgiveness. Harper Collins, 1995. Lessing, Doris. The Golden Notebook. Michael Joseph Ltd., 1962. Marshall, Jennifer L. Freeman. Ain’t I an Anthropologist? Zora Neale Hurston beyond the Literary Icon. University of Illinois Press, 2023.

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Mead, Margaret. Coming of Age in Samoa. William Morrow & Company, 1928a. —. An Inquiry into the Question of Cultural Stability in Polynesia. Columbia University Press, 1928b. Mead, Margaret. Growing Up in New Guinea. William Morrow & Company, 1930. McCuller, Carson. The Ballad of the Sad Café. Mariners Books Classics, 2005. Nin, Anaïs. House of Incest. Sky Blue Press, 2020 [1936]. Oliveira, Vanessa S. Slave Trade and Abolition: Gender, Commerce, and Economic Transition in Luanda. The University of Wisconsin Press, 2021. Ortner, Sherry. Life and Death on Mt. Everest: Sherpas and Himalayan Mountaneering. Princeton University Press, 1999. Rosaldo, Michelle Zimbalist and Louise Lamphere. Woman, Culture and Society. Stanford University Press, 1974. Tamai, Lily Anne Y. Welty et al. Shape Shifters: Journeys Across Terrains of Race and Identity. University of Nebraska Press 2020. Wallace, Anthony F. C., and Raymond D. Fogelson. “Culture and Personality.” Biennial Review of Anthropology, vol. 2, 1961, pp. 42–78. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/2949218. Accessed 3 Nov. 2023. Warton, Edith. House of Mirth. Alma Classics, 2022 [1905]. Watson, Graham. Passing for White: A Study of Racial Assimilation in a South African School. Tavistock Publications Ltd., 1970. Tavistock Publications Ltd., 1970. Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. Hogarth Press, 1925. —. To the Lighthouse. Hartcourt, Brace and Company, 1927. —. Orlando: A Biography. Hogarth Press, 1928. —. A Room of One’s Own. Hogarth Press, 1929. Young, Antonia. Women Who Become Men: Albanian Sworn Virgins. Berg, 2000.

INTRODUCTION HEMANT VERMA, AJIT KUMAR AND RAFSEENA M. I Narratives, literary or non-literary, have always sought to narrate the varying degrees of human experience in diverse ways. Taking cue from the historical evidences, narratives have essentially been centered on the masculine version of the human kind, with ‘his’tories being created, circulated and passed onto many generations. ‘His’tory has rather diplomatised the invisibility and the absence of the fe’male’ voice under the garb of societal representation amply justified by the supremacy of the stronger sex over the weaker sex. The socially sanctioned hegemonic male supremacy continued for a long period, thereby widening the gap between the sexes and the female voices subdued socially, psychologically and economically. The struggle of the weaker sex (symbolically identified as inferior to men) to free themselves from the manacles of the social order provided the world the first ever resistance movement from the marginalized. Writing back against their masters, the slave narratives which opened the space for recording disagreement and discontent, also registered some of the earliest chronicles of exploitation and suffering of the slave community. The unsung narratives of social and sexual differential treatment meted out by the woman, which remained silenced, however, broke the confinement of domestic and sexual slavery and began to articulate its lived-in experience with all its unpleasant moments and harshness thereby providing a ‘her’story narrative to the world to learn about. To construct a self-defined space in the existing patriarchal order necessarily evinces the struggles and the hardships which women writers would have had to live through in their journey to register their voices of dissent and dissonance.

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Critiquing the male power and the male ideology, the gynocritical approach sought to vehemently expose the hypocrisy in the distinction established between the private space occupied by the women and the public space occupied by the men. Discussions centering on the gendered difference between the male and the female subjects, which forms the crux of Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, also exposed the sexist nature of the patriarchal structure and openly critiqued the male strategy of ‘othering’ the woman by constructing a cultural identity for the woman as someone who is bound to the patriarchal order. “Woman must write herself: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies […] Woman must put herself into the text-as into the world and into history-by her own involvement” (Cixous, 875). While Cixous’ in “The Laugh of the Medusa” made a call for an l’ecriture feminine, which significantly gestured the inevitable shift against the phallocentric practice in the male dominated literary field, it essentially aimed at exposing the politics of marginalization which the female writers experienced in the field of literature. Gynocriticism thus sought to deconstruct the social constructs on gender by emphasizing the necessity of a detour to the female scripted narratives and voices. The literary contributions by Virginia Woolf, Patricia Hill Collins, Elaine Showalter, Julia Kristeva, Toril Moi, Kate Millet, bell hooks, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Judith Butler and so on stand a testimony to those moments in history which necessitated the establishment of l’ecriture feminine. The notions of hegemonic masculinity and passive femininity, which evolved around the dichotomy of the private space versus the public space equation, had aggravated the gendered inequality in all the realms of human activity. While the hegemonic narratives evidently portray the difference between the sexes in unequivocal terms, the absence of strong identifiable women characters in the male dominant narratives triggered the female writers to address the ‘absent’ female by centering them as the subjects in their narrative. The shift in perspective was overwhelming for a few but the world was already in its path to shift its gear to a different voice to be heard.

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A new, alternative version of narrative documenting the panacea of a highly misogynist social structure and its agents unfurled the obnoxiousness of the vicious circle of patriarchy. Denominating such narratives to be identified as feminist writings in the initial phase of its evolution, the female centered narratives explored issues which essentially echoed the evil hold of patriarchy over the lives of the women across class, race and culture. Interrogating the long existent process of the objectification and subordination of women, many female writers came forward, speaking for their rights and demanding for a female space. Equally supported by feminist activists and theorists, l’ecriture feminine began to shape a future which the patriarchal world found challenging their status quo. Gaining momentum with feminist movements globally and locally, moving from the political to the cultural to the academic, the narratives on experiences of women of different identities and origin brought in a paradigm shift in the established patterns of narrative, fuelling serious critical interventions and analyses of the hegemonic masculine narratives (written as well as visual). Articulating the unrecorded lived-in experiences of womenfolk not only dismantled the stereotypes which had for decades depicted female identity in terms of her inferior status, it also inaugurated the space for the female voices to be strongly registered as well as provide an alternate gaze to ‘read’ and ‘analyse’ the female subject. Women’s writings, as an academic discipline, began to address the exclusionary practice (socially, economically, politically and ideologically) which victimized the women irrespective of their class, race or other identities. Debates on whether all women writings are feminist in its approach and essence is rather too reductive and an immature call to put forth since all women’s writings need not essentially be feminist in its approach. However, a feminist interpretation of the existent narratives could reflect how historically woman have been negated their rights and position and how their absence was never a concern in the male centered narratives. What women’s writings encompass is a consciousness which allows one to formulate a consciousness on the differential treatment which exists between the two sexes (premised on the established notions on gender and sexuality).

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Dialogues on what exactly formulates the identity of women’s narrative directs one to look at the interdisciplinary nature it adopts in addressing the issues related to women across all walks of life as well as across all platforms of representation. Set into motion since the twentieth century, narratives centering on women have portrayed some of the strongest female characters to speak of. These narratives, essentially identified as the marginalized ones, have seriously addressed and challenged the homogeneous identity of male narratives. Thinking, speaking and writing as women was breaking the status quo of the narrative field. Mulvey’s path breaking insightful observation in “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” on how the male gaze been instrumental in objectifying the female subjects stands per say as a historical moment since the paradigm shift it heralded illuminates on the emergence of a distinct female gaze as deviant from the patriarchal expectations. Breaking the stereotypical ideologies woven around the constructs of the absent women figure in the male dominant narratives, female centered narratives moved out of the comfort zone of family, exploring her identity according to her vision. The shift towards a new world order, with women actively engaging themselves in the socio-cultural politics of the patriarchal system not only signalled their motion of moving away from the domestic chores, but it also echoed the process of making themselves heard amidst the wilderness. With the changing social scenario at the background acting as the catalyst, female oriented narratives offered alternative readings dealing with issues pertaining to the social, cultural, political, economic and moral realms. Women’s Writings, thus enlarged the scope of making the social space an inclusive one with discussions strongly reverberating the need for strong female voices to emerge.

II Moving from silence into speech is for the oppressed, the colonized, the exploited, and those who stand and struggle side by side a gesture of defiance that heals, that makes new life and new growth possible. It is that act of speech, of “talking back,” that is no mere gesture of empty words, that is the expression of our movement from object to subject—the liberated voice (hooks Talking Back, 9).

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Talking back is an act of asserting one’s existence in a world divided along the binaries of class, race, gender and economy. To come forth with a pronounced voice of one’s own empowers women for a greater cause. Transcending different fields and domains of exposure, women centered narratives reflect a sincere urge to ascertain their undivided and devoted role to hearken a future which guarantees the social space to be inclusive. Much discussion is generated on the fictional tendencies of ethnography produced by the challenges inherent in accommodating the conflicting subjectivities of observer/informant. We fear, at the very least, that ethnography imposes a narrative unity which obscures what James Clifford calls “the hum of unmarked, impersonal existence” (106) of dayto-day life. Aihwa Ong criticizes Clifford by claiming that “the multivocal ethnographic texts he would have anthropologists produce must also disclose a riot of social meanings” (88). Her argument, essentially much the same as Clifford’s, is that “we need to take into account the changing world community, and recognize the limits of our own traditions and explanations” (90). She also recognizes, nevertheless, that it is “doubtful that we can achieve more than partial understandings” (88). Metaphorically speaking, it is thus that Clifford and Ong leave us between a rock and a hard place, Clifford building a hierarchical Tower of Babel and Ong tearing it down. This methodological discussion, however, is only marginally concerned with the cultural work of fiction writers: those who are not ethnographers, but who, rather, are interested in representing cultural experience as literature. Clifford acknowledges a correspondence between the discourse of the ethnographer and that of the fiction writer in his brief discussion of George Eliot, whose novels, he explains, reproduce the “situation of participant-observation” of the ethnographer (114). Celia Lisset Alvarez proposes in “Bridges to Babylon: Ethnography, Representation, and Indeterminacy in Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day”, however, that this correspondence is much more significant to our understanding of cultural difference and the project of ethnography than is usually acknowledged, and that it merits a more reciprocal study. Simply, if we are to read ethnography, to varying degrees, as fiction, then it follows that some fiction is to be read as ethnography, with all of its complications and

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manifestations of representational ambivalence. The study of these ethnographical fictions may then in turn illuminate the aforementioned discussion of scientific ethnography. Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day is a text that plays with as well as tries to avoid the dangers of ethnographic misrepresentation. The isolated island community of Willow Springs, whose only connection to the United States mainland is a single bridge, has learned “that anything coming from beyond the bridge gotta be viewed real, real careful” (7). The relative freedom of fiction allows Naylor to address the pitfalls of traditional ethnography represented by Reema’s son, the Willow Springs boy who ventures “beyond the bridge” to return as a college-educated ethnographer of his own people, and fails miserably. Thus, the multivocal nature of this text allows for Clifford’s allegories of meaning to take place at the level of both ethnographer and subject; the indeterminacy that Henry Louis Gates posits in his construction of African-American subjectivity helps to eliminate the hierarchical structure of the polyvocal discourses of ethnography that Clifford is only able to recognize; and finally tense shifts in the narratives and the futuristic location of the communal voice displace representation from Clifford’s “ethnographic pastoral” onto a progressive, constructive (rather than reductive) view of community. The French author and film-maker Marguerite Duras is arguably one of the most important figures in 20th-century culture. She is probably best known for the film adaptation of her novel The Lover—which she subsequently disowned—but it is her earlier experiments with storytelling that most convincingly locate her as a writer who took the conventions of modernism and pushed them into entirely new directions. Her novels The Square, Moderato Cantabile, Destroy She Said and, towards the ends of her career, Blue Eyes Black Hair, Summer Rain and The North China Lover not only offer a unique perspective on how we live now, but also push at the conventions of the novel itself. Philips’ paper titled ‘Marguerite Duras’ Modernist Tradition and Conventional Approaches’ considers where Duras’ work sits within the late modernist tradition and how it continues to offer an alternative to more conventional approaches to narrative.

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“Sweat,” which has been considered by critics to be Hurston’s best short story was published in the only issue of Fire!! magazine, the magazine that seemed to have come out of Langston Hughes’s unapologetic statement that the younger writers of the Harlem Renaissance would portray black life without apology either to the black middle class, who wanted them to write about the best of the race or to white readers who wanted the young writers to populate their writing with stereotypes and primitives. Of the group, Hughes and Hurston embraced a style of writing that could called be a blues aesthetic, writing that is characterized by the daily struggles of the black working class, use of dialect, simple but poetic language that mimics the repetitious and ironic language of the blues. With Hurston, in addition to these elements, varying degrees of the folk life from which the blues sprang are also an ever-present feature. The imaginative world she creates is almost always a world in transition, from the rural, folklife and folkways to a modernity that appears to be just beyond the horizon. While the folk in this world appear to have a measure of separation from the outside world and its racism and black dehumanization, they are not wholly free from that world as the very existence of their world is a testament to the racism of the wider society and because its inhabitants have to sally to and from the wider society. Hurston’s heroine, Delia, is an example of one who lives in both worlds to eke out a living. Delia’s struggles to make a way in an already difficult world as a washer woman is made more difficult by her husband Sykes, who creates a “blues world” for her with constant abuse, forcing her to stand up for herself and to step out of the role of the blues victim, who finds a way to smile and keep from crying in spite of her problems. Goodhead’s paper thus attempts to map the agency and the notion of Blues Aesthetics in Zora Neale Hurston’s “Sweat”. “I almost believed my body had no restrictions… I was limitless,” Morgan Jerkins writes in This Will Be My Undoing, before her childhood self realized she would have to keep trying for validation. It wasn’t just white people who let Jerkins down, who pushed her out of spaces she wished to occupy. She made her way by stepping voluntarily into a world of honors classes and Dooney & Burke. She looked down on black girls who acted out, who refused to toe the line. She experienced a divided loyalty. Miles’

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paper “Path back to wholeness, to the self: Morgan Jerkins’ This Will Be My Undoing” attempts to explore Jerkins struggles and her journey back to wholeness, to the self. Toni Morrison’s pen had always registered voices of strong dissent on issues of racism, oppression, sexual abuse and the effects of colonialism. Morrison’s last novel God Help the Child which invariably deals with a child’s traumatic childhood experience provides a haunting insight into the unaddressed terrains of the pain and revolt of Bride, the black protagonist. Rafseena’s paper “The Dynamics of Polyphony in Vocalizing the Trauma in God Help the Child” attempts to focus on how the traumatic incident resulted in Bride’s transformation from a meek, rejected child to a bold and an independent black woman with a strong identity. The novel which allows polyphonic narrative by different characters also opens up the possibility of identifying Bride’s narrative to have echoes of PTSD against which she fights to emerge as an optimistic black mother. The paper would also attempt to trace the importance of the polyphonic narrative of Bride which can function as the space from which Bride starts her journey to attain her true identity. The above focus would be developed using trauma theory and the notions of toxic motherhood as well as how PTSD narratives can help the trauma victim to come to terms with the reality so as to enable themselves to come out of their past. The imaginary of the Romanian village in contemporary literature employs a rich inventory of historical and political nature. Marta Petreu’s At Home, on the Field of Armageddon, [Acasă, pe Cîmpia Armaghedonului] is one of the most important rural novels of Romanian contemporary literature and its take on the history of rural Transylvania in the 20th and early 21st century is completely unprecedented, given the fact that its genre is prone to ideological manipulation. The goal of Pop’s paper “The Historico-Political Imaginary in Marta Petreu’s Rural Novel” is to highlight the uniqueness of Marta Petreu’s 2011 text in the context of Romanian Literature by analyzing the historical and political imaginary of the novel. The spring and summer months of 2020 have been “lonesome, sad, and like a place that is far off and estranged from all other places in the world.”

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(McCuller) Moreover, as we near the final quarter of this contagious, quarantined, and economically unmoored year, the abrupt disconnection from our previous lives has left us feeling ghosted, haunted by our former selves and the way we were. Strangers in our own skin, we are experiencing seasons of isolation, heartbreak, and mourning, looking inward with the “secret gaze of grief” that introduces readers to Miss Amelia in Carson McCuller’s “The Ballad of the Sad Café.” Though written nearly 70 years ago, McCuller’s long short story presciently addresses the profound inner calamities a pandemic and global economic collapse can bring with them, which forms the focus in Willardson’s paper “‘Ghosted: Re-reading Carson McCullers’ The Ballad of the Sad Café During A Pandemic Summer”. In his comprehensive mapping of the 19th century American slave narrative, James Olney offers a number of salient literary tropes that serve as the diegetic foundation for most works within this specific literary genre. According to Olney, “the slave narrative is most often a nonmemorial description fitted to a pre-formed mold, a mold with regular depressions here and equally regular prominences there—virtually obligatory figures, scenes, turns of phrase, observances and authentications” (46-73). The narrative of capture, the journey across the wide expanse of the Atlantic, scenes, often horrific, from life on the plantation, the dangerous acquisition of the slave’s first words, the hunger for further education, the moment of confrontation, and the slave’s eventual freedom all serve as hallmarks within the majority of 19th century American slave narratives. Olney goes on to suggest that these similar narratalogical building blocks tend to “carry over from narrative to narrative and give to them as a group the species character that we designate by the phrase ‘slave narrative’” (49). At the very core of the narrative is the certainty that these are the experiences that are neither fabricated nor manipulated by memory. The author reveals how the institution of slavery has attempted to negate the very identity of the creator of the narrative and, in turn, that this very act of creation is a negation of slavery’s victory over that attempted erasure. According to Olney, the act of writing, of taking command of how one’s life will be perceived by an audience of potential readers, “is literally a

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part of the narrative, becoming an important thematic element in the retelling of the life wherein literacy, identity and a sense of freedom are all acquired simultaneously” (54). If one were to take, for example, the complete title of Frederick Douglass’s autobiography, one cannot gloss over the fact that “Written by Himself” supports the entire literary endeavor and acts as an assertion of the narrative’s verifiable authorship. These are Douglass’s experiences and first-hand accounts of life within the institution of slavery; however, these are also Douglass’s perceptions, realizations, and interpretations and it would be nearly impossible to sever these from the narrative itself. In short, this narrative, as well as many others, is not a portrait of the institution of slavery. It is an account of one slave embedded within that institution reclaiming humanity and a voice denied by that institution. Unlike Douglass, Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, the primary text to be dissected in Montes’ paper, aims to explore how the institution of slavery is undeniably a patriarchal font of sexual terrorism that impacts all women, regardless of race. Commencing from Jacobs’s oft-quoted lines, “Slavery is terrible for men; but it is far more terrible for women. Superadded to the burden common to all, they have wrongs, and sufferings, and mortifications peculiarly their own,” this paper offers a gendered analysis of this particular slave narrative. Jacobs’s multi-focal and multi-racial perspective takes into consideration the limited lives of white and black women on the plantation and, in turn, unveils the carnal savagery of American slavery. Attempting to reveal the obvious repercussions of unchecked patriarchy, Jacobs incorporates white female oppression into what is an ostensibly African-American narrative. It is this maneuver that wholly distinguishes this particular text from all others within the genre. It would be worthwhile to comprehend Alice Childress’s writings. Through the play Wedding Band, she pictures the grim world of the black people and whites and the existing simmering chord of tension. Her characters spell out physical space and the psychological distance among them. This play unambiguously outlines everything that adds to black suffering and their dilemma in the midst of the dangerous white firmament. Childress has championed the cause of the black people through the portrayal of Julia,

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Lula and Mattie. Her explications of the black suffering and more particularly the sufferings of the feminine gender would definitely be a classic stamp for the black theatre as a distinct genre. Raju’s paper attempts to provide a critical reading of Alice Childress’s Wedding Band: A Love/Hate Story in Black and White. Brazil and United States of America were countries plagued by slavery of their black people. During the 19th Century, Anti-Slave movements were founded or strengthened, which ultimately led to the end of Slavery in both nations. Among the several efforts carried out during this period, the work of female black intellectuals stands out, since the fight against sexism was another social burden along with freedom and literacy. Lima and Zacarias’ paper “The Aesthetic Heritage of Black Female Writers in the Nineteenth Century” aims to analyze the works of two contemporary female black writers from the time mentioned, Brazilian Maria Firmina dos Reis’ The Slave (1887) and North-American Frances Harper´s Sketches of Southern Life (1872). The paper will grasp the aesthetic solutions employed by the authors to depict the life of female black slaves during the 19h Century in their respective home countries. Ann Petry, the writer of American novels, short stories and non-fiction, presents the lives and struggles of Afro-Americans. With so many experiences and stories to tell with right-hand information, she recreates characters with many dimensions presenting racial and gender related issues knowledgeable only to the subaltern community. As a writer capturing social realism, Ann Petry voices out the hostility encountered by the black people in the White dominated world on the grounds of race, identity, gender and economy. Devaki’s paper “Racial Inequality and Gender Concern in Ann Petry’s Like A Winding Sheet” deals with how social exploitation and its eventual depression bring turmoil in the otherwise intimate life of Johnson and Mae and also how women become the victim of both racial and gender discrimination. With the growing of the tradition of adapting literary works in the American movie industry in Hollywood, it becomes important to consider the artistic value and quality of these ready-made narratives. The 2000 release of The House of Mirth, an adaptation of an early twentieth century

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Introduction

novel by Edith Wharton, marks an exceptional and unique case of study for being filmed by a male movie-maker, while it is written by a woman, giving therefore rise to the legitimate question of how much is retained from the original story and authorial implications. To what extent is Terence Davies’ successful in translating the written world through the vividness of the filmed image? Worth of further consideration is the interest of feminist criticism in Davies’ adaptation of such complex work that reveals to be about more than the vanity of old moneyed New York society. Actually, a feminist criticism delves beyond the analysis of the film to deal with the representation of gender and power dynamics reported on screen when translating the tragic downfall of the female protagonist Lily Bart. Kortas’ paper “Sentimental Claustrophobia of Feminist Sensibilities: A Feminist Reading of Maud Martha and House of Mirth” seeks therefore to explore the gains and losses of the filmic adaptation of the House of Mirth. It also intends at assessing the adaptation from a feminist perspective. A descendant from the Harlem Renaissance, Gwendolyn Brooks carried the struggle for equality through the Black Arts movement years by bringing the spirit and goals to the new Mecca, Chicago. Mainly known for her protest poems whose primary focus is the lives and struggles of African Americans in the context of the evolving social, cultural, and political upheavals in the 1960s America, Brooks explored other genres, most importantly fiction and non-fiction writings which attest of her adeptful mélange of politics and poetics. It grounds her art in mid twentieth century social turmoil, political transformation and art’s potential to engage with the complexity and richness of the black experience. Maud Martha, her only novel, is accredited such quality, yet it has never gained the same acclaim as her poetry. A novel that traces the development of its female protagonist into womanhood, Maud Martha heightens beauty despite alchemy and wretchedness and unveils the struggles, doubts, and the triumphs of its characters, exposing the shallowness of the white prejudiced culture through the private confessions of a young woman who strived to prove her worth regardless of her skin-color. The black-skinned Maud parades into human feelings, experiences, and sufferings, and travels from one sphere to another through the power of imagination and art. Such travel permits the author to blur the distinction between prose and poetry, folk and

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high art, and blackness and whiteness. The interest of Kortas’ paper is to trace how the novel transcends the poetic to reach the political dimension of the work as call to undo with previous racial and gender prejudices, proving the importance of the work as a primary text setting the ground for Brooks’ contribution to Black aesthetics set by the Black Arts movement. The text will be explored from a French feminist standpoint through Julia Kristeva’s theory of the abject. Traditionally, mainstream critical attitude has been to associate black women’s literature with homeplace and domesticity. This is partly due to the women’s urge to treat themes related only to family life and, partly, to the constant critical tendency of relegating black female writers as well as their works to the background. However, the last three decades have witnessed a profound transformation in the literary creativity of the black female writers: a newfound consciousness has welled up and the women are now investing in radical political themes and styles. Ibrahim’s paper “Politico-Historical Issues in Modern Black Fiction by Women: A Study in Canonicity” sets out to analyse the ways by which Alice Walker (African American) and Calixthe Beyala (African) have tackled politico-historical topics in their works. Based on Bakhtin’s theory of dialogism, the paper reveals that resistance writing in both women’s works has opened them up to new ways/spaces of representation, and hence to canon-formation. On the whole, the paper concludes that the canonization of black women’s literature is the consequence of its coming of age thanks to their commitment to the survival, general welfare and spiritual wholeness of entire communities. Even though Indian science fiction, both Anglophone and vernacular, has a history that dates back to the late nineteenth century it’s only recently that its terrain has got the searchlight it deserves from the critics. One reason for this could be that this genre has long been thought to be derivative of European SF. Like other postcolonial nations in their decolonizing process Indian nation-building efforts responded to such an objection against the dependence on European scientific models and this expectedly varied over times. If in the Nehruvian era India tried to forge its identity by investing in western scientific research over the last few decades the attitude has shifted

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towards incorporating precritical mythological framework to explain away scientific phenomena. This terrain has also long been a stronghold of male writes. But this apparently exclusive ownership has been challenged by Indian women writers who are bringing into its arc questions of gender and other marginalization. The list of such writers is long and a comprehensive historical appraisal lies beyond the scope of this paper. Sarkar’s paper attempts to contextualize science fiction written by Anglophone Indian writers against the backdrop of global science fiction writing with a closer look at the science fiction written by Anglophone Indian women writers. The paper would focus on the fiction of Vandana Singh and situate her as a major writer of this genre and examine how, through her fiction, Singh is unearthing hitherto unheard concerns and, in the process, transforming the map of Indian SF.

Works Cited Brooks, Gwendolyn. Maud Martha. Harper and Brothers, 1953. Childress, Alice. Wedding Band: A Love/Hate Story in Black and White. 9 Plays by Women. Edited by Margaret B. Wilkerson. New American Library, 1986. Cixous, Helene, et al. “The Laugh of the Medusa.” Signs, vol. 1, no. 4, Summer 1976, pp. 875-893. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3173239. Clifford, James. “On Ethnographic Allegory.” Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography: A School of American Research Advanced Seminar. Edited by James Clifford and George E. Marcus. U of California P, 1986, pp. 98-121. De Beauvoir, Simone. The Second Sex. Translated by Constance Borde and Sheila Malovany-Chevalier. Vintage Books, 2011. Duras, Marguerite. Moderato Cantabile. Translated by Richard Seaver. Calder & Boyars, 1966. —. The Lover. Translated by Barbara Bray. Harper Collins, 1985. Harper, Frances E. W. Sketches of Southern Life. Ferguson Bros. & Co., 1891. hooks, bell. Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black. South End Press, 1989.

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Hurston, Zora Neale. “Sweat.” 1926. Reprinted in Spunk: The Selected Stories of Zora Neale Hurston. Turtle Island Foundation, 1985, pp. 38-53. Jerkins, Morgan. This Will Be My Undoing: Living at the Intersection of Black, Female, and Feminist in (White) America. Harper Perennial, 2018. McCullers, Carson. The Ballad of the Sad Café and Other Stories. Mariner Books, 2005. Morrison, Toni. God Help the Child. Knopf, 2015. Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings. Edited by Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, Oxford UP, 1999, pp. 833-844. Naylor, Gloria. Mama Day. Vintage, 1993. Olney, James. “‘I Was Born’: Slave Narratives, Their Status as Autobiography and as Literature.” Callaloo. vol. 20, 1984, pp. 46-73. Ong, Aihwa. “Colonialism and Modernity: Feminist Re-presentations of Women in Non-Western Societies.” Inscriptions, 1989, pp. 79-93. Petreu, Marta. At Home, on the Field of Armageddon [Acasă pe Cîmpia Armaghedonului], Ia‫܈‬i, Polirom, 2019. Petry, Ann. “Like a Winding Sheet”. https://www.scribd.com/Ann-Petry Like-a-winding-sheet-pdf Singh, Vandana. Distances. Conversation Pieces. Edited by L. Timmel Duchamp, vol. 23. Aqueduct Press, 2008. —. Of Love and Other Monsters. Conversation Pieces. Edited by L. Timmel Duchamp, vol. 18. Aqueduct Press, 2007. —. The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet. Penguin Books, Zubaan, 2008. —. “Shiksata”. Visions, Ventures, Escape Velocities: A Collection of Space Futures. Edited by Ed Finn and Joey Eschrich. Tempe, Arizona State U, 2017. 207-240. Walker, Alice. The Color Purple. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982. —. Possessing the Secret of Joy. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1993. —. By the Light of My Father’s Smile. Random House, 1998. —. The Temple of My Familiar. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1989. —. Warrior Marks. San Diego and London, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1994. Wharton, Edith. The House of Mirth. Appleton and Company, 1920.

SECTION-I REPRESENTATION, TRADITION AND CONVENTION

CHAPTER I BRIDGES TO BABYLON: ETHNOGRAPHY, REPRESENTATION, AND INDETERMINACY IN GLORIA NAYLOR’S MAMA DAY CELIA LISSET ALVAREZ Much discussion has been generated by the fictional tendencies of ethnography produced by the challenges inherent in accommodating the conflicting subjectivities of observer/informant. We fear, at the very least, that ethnography imposes a narrative unity which obscures what James Clifford calls “the hum of unmarked, impersonal existence” (106) of dayto-day life. At worst, we fear that ethnography, rather than illuminating the existence of others, serves only to subjugate, disempower, and misrepresent them within hegemonizing narratives. However, positions within this critical spectrum of distortion and damage remain tentative. Clifford acknowledges the fictionalization of ethnography as basically an inescapable result of producing cross-cultural understanding; to him, this glossing over of raw testimonial data which occurs in the process of textualization can be described in terms of producing allegorical patterns which lift differences onto “an abstract plane of similarity” (101) where ethnographer, reader, and subject can coexist as “humans.” He distinguishes between reading ethnography as allegory and as ideology by insisting that “although the political dimensions are always present” (Jameson, qtd. in Clifford 100), concentrating on its allegorical qualities “draws attention to aspects of cultural description that until recently have been minimized” (100). Attention can then sift through allegorical patterns which provide meaning (“hierarchical structure”) to first-hand testimonies, scientific interpretation, narrative structure, and temporal constructions.

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By shifting our focus between these modes of textual production we can provide multiple interpretations of the ethnographic text “that will emerge with new historical, scientific, or political projects” (120). Aihwa Ong expresses a similar position. She criticizes Clifford by claiming that “the multivocal ethnographic texts he would have anthropologists produce must also disclose a riot of social meanings” (88). Her argument, essentially much the same as Clifford’s, is that “we need to take into account the changing world community, and recognize the limits of our own traditions and explanations” (90). She also recognizes, nevertheless, that it is “doubtful that we can achieve more than partial understandings” (88). Metaphorically speaking, it is thus that Clifford and Ong leave us between a rock and a hard place, Clifford building a hierarchical Tower of Babel and Ong tearing it down. This methodological discussion, however, is only marginally concerned with the cultural work of fiction writers: those who are not ethnographers, but who, rather, are interested in representing cultural experience as literature. Clifford acknowledges a correspondence between the discourse of the ethnographer and that of the fiction writer in his brief discussion of George Eliot, whose novels, he explains, reproduce the “situation of participant-observation” of the ethnographer (114). I propose, however, that this correspondence is much more significant to our understanding of cultural difference and the project of ethnography than is usually acknowledged, and that it merits a more reciprocal study. Simply, if we are to read ethnography, to varying degrees, as fiction, then it follows that some fiction is to be read as ethnography, with all of its complications and manifestations of representational ambivalence. The study of these ethnographical fictions may then in turn illuminate the aforementioned discussion of scientific ethnography. Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day is a text that plays with as well as tries to avoid the dangers of ethnographic misrepresentation. The isolated island community of Willow Springs, whose only connection to the United States mainland is a single bridge, has learned “that anything coming from beyond the bridge gotta be viewed real, real careful” (7). The unnamed preface to the novel’s two-part structure distinguishes itself from the

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novel’s alternating traditional first- and third-person narrative by directly addressing the reader in a communal “we” that demands to be listened to without the burden of textualization: Think about it: ain’t nobody really talking to you. We’re sitting here in Willow Springs, and you’re God-knows where. It’s August 1999--ain’t but a slim chance it’s the same season where you are. Uh, huh, listen. Really listen this time: the only voice is your own. But you done just heard about the legend of Sapphira Wade, though nobody here breathes her name. (10)

This voyeuristic approach to observing the people of Willow Springs is of course not the simple solution to the ethnographic conundrum of textualization it seems to be. On the one hand, the reader-voyeur as ethnographer does not escape textual representation (“the only voice is your own”). On the other, Naylor’s role as author should not be ignored. However, the relative freedom of fiction allows Naylor to address the pitfalls of traditional ethnography represented by Reema’s son, the Willow Springs boy who ventures “beyond the bridge” to return as a collegeeducated ethnographer of his own people, and fails miserably. Thus, the multivocal nature of this text allows for Clifford’s allegories of meaning to take place at the level of both ethnographer and subject; the indeterminacy that Henry Louis Gates posits in his construction of African-American subjectivity helps to eliminate the hierarchical structure of the polyvocal discourses of ethnography that Clifford is only able to recognize; and finally tense shifts in the narratives and the futuristic location of the communal voice displace representation from Clifford’s “ethnographic pastoral” onto a progressive, constructive (rather than reductive) view of community. What Naylor does, in this novel, is attempt to expunge the culturally hegemonic discourse of ethnography by creating a fictional ethnographic space unmediated and unsullied by the erasure of African-American identity within the confines of metropolitan mainstream America and its scientific/historical discourse. Willow Springs, situated between Georgia and South Carolina but belonging to neither, does more than disrupt the discreet geographical boundaries of American statehood. It is best described as a floating oasis for the preservation and celebration of what Naylor considers a pure African heritage. Its very existence creates

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geographical rupture, a rupture that the novel continues at the level of the construction of discourse on African-American culture. Mama Day can be read first and foremost as an allegory of ethnography. By juxtaposing the third-person omniscient narrative of Willow Springs with the first-person narrative of George and Cocoa, the novel situates George, unlike Cocoa, who is a native of Willow Springs, as the outsiderparticipant. As outsider, George, raised as an orphan in metropolitan, multicultural New York, is divested of any sort of African spiritual heritage. Represented by the Gullah traditions of the Sea Island region of coastal Georgia/South Carolina of which the fictional Willow Springs is a part, this heritage involves a communal spirit which transcends the present to include a strong feeling of ancestry and posterity. For example, George has trouble accepting the fact that the land of Willow Springs belongs to no one who is living or dead, but rather to the unborn: “It’s always owned two generations down,” Cocoa explains, “to keep any Day from selling it” (219). This odd legal gesture simultaneously preserves past, present, and future; by ensuring that no one is able to sell the land. This “crazy clause” prevents the chain of ownership that begins in generations past from being broken in the present or discontinued in the future. Furthermore, as John Mbiti explains it, communal living and religious participation are inseparable characteristics of human life to Gullah culture (qtd. in Creel 72). Because of the strength of the community, then, the people of Willow Springs have retained much of the religious practices and traditional medicine of African society. In sharp contrast, George is raised by the Wallace P. Andrews orphanage with the motto that “only the present has potential,” that he could rely on “no rabbit’s foot, no crucifixes—not even a lottery ticket” (26-27). George feels the pull of another perspective—one that admits spirituality and continuity--for the first time when meeting Cocoa. The struggle between the two points of view which ensues, enacted by the he said/she said narrative structure of the novel which allows us to constantly compare Cocoa’s and George’s versions of their shared experience, mimics (allegorizes) the ethnographic endeavor by forcing George to find ways of interpreting new and different information while still using his own paradigms of knowledge-production. George fails, however, because

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Cocoa confronts him with the impossibility of finding a strict resemblance between crude and interpreted experience: “How was I to reconcile the fact of seeing you the second time that day with the feeling I had had the first time? Not the feeling I told myself I had, but the one I really had [emphasis original]” (27). George, taught from childhood and then as an engineer to interpret experience in quantifiable, recognizable terms, rejects what he cannot explain even though what he deems as fact is in jeopardy of losing its empirical quality. What he tells himself he is experiencing and what he knows himself to be experiencing are no longer one and the same. Cocoa “has the power to turn [his] existence upside-down by simply running a hand up the back of her neck” (33). It is a power he fears and resists because it brings him face-to-face with a part of himself he has tried to control and reinterpret through his own mode of understanding. Spirituality, to him, is the scores and statistics, the calculable plays of a football game where he, nevertheless, allows himself to become part of the communal experience of the crowd which can generate “the force that suspended almost two hundred pounds of flesh above the ground” to help a player complete a thirty-two yard gain. He allows himself “to believe that we had willed him those wings” (124). It is this displaced spirituality which prevents him from visiting Willow Springs for four years, taking separate vacations from Cocoa in order to go see the playoffs. When he finally decides to go he is frustrated by its textual/geographical indeterminacy: Preparing for Willow Springs upset my normal agenda: a few minutes with an atlas always helped me to decide what clothes to pack, whether a raincoat would be in order or not, a light pullover for the evenings…But where was Willow Springs? Nowhere. At least not on any map I had found. (174)

Seeing George as the allegorical ethnographer searching for understanding does not, however, allow us to privilege his voice. It does not help construct a hierarchical structure where the ethnographer serves as mediator and interpreter of the culture he is observing. The Willow Springs bridge is a two-way medium where both ethnographer and subject produce meaning. Despite his frustration with Willow Springs, George sees himself as having gone “home” (176), as having been accepted through Cocoa. Cocoa, in turn, is shown another island—Manhattan—

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through George’s unshaded eyes, which teach her to remove the “Dior sunglasses” of her materialistic friend Selma whom Cocoa speculates would see her and George’s big-city field work as nothing but “a cheap date” (98). She, too, questions the authenticity of her experience with George against what she is taught to believe about the “creeps” that populate New York. Cocoa asks, “Why is it so hard to believe that what I see is what I see: an ordinary man who only wants you to be comfortable and enjoy yourself?” (99). In essence, Cocoa and George are the bridge, both belonging to the worlds on either side and guiding each other through the understanding of each. With George’s death, his first-person, past-tense narrative is revealed as one of the communal voices of Willow Springs which speaks from the grave, voices which are only temporarily fragmented from the third-person omniscient, present-tense narrative of the communal voice when they are speaking directly from the grave of their personal experiences. Only two other such voices—Jonah and Grace Day’s—assume that first-person past (151). This brief lapse in point of view connects the urgent “listen” command of the preface’s “we” to the third-person narrative of Willow Springs in a way which makes it clear that both George and Cocoa will one day form part of this omniscient narrator, effectively minimizing (yet not obliterating, of course) the question of authorship and intricately involving all the different voices into the construction of a narrative whole. Furthermore, it is George’s acceptance of the value of the Willow Springs point of view, as represented by Miranda, which saves Cocoa’s life and, therefore, the part of the point of union and fluidity which she represents. After the hurricane which tears down the bridge and leaves Cocoa dying because of Ruby’s conjure, George rebels against the isolation of the island. He can neither understand his wife’s sickness nor Miranda’s way of treating it. He single-mindedly pursues the only solutions he can understand, throwing himself wholeheartedly into the rebuilding of the bridge and frustrating himself with the islanders’ slow pace and refusal to follow his engineering advice. Parris, the islander supervising the construction, “would only trust his overseeing each board that was laid down” (263); would not allow, in other words, the project of construction to be taken away from him. The novel’s ending boils down to a

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collaboration between Miranda and George, neither of whom can save Cocoa alone. Significantly, Miranda offers George “two ways” of saving Cocoa, hers and his (295). Though we never specifically learn what Miranda’s way would have been, we know “his way—is to lose him” (299), and that it involves not going back to the maniacal constructing of the bridge, but reluctantly following Miranda’s instructions even though he sees her as playing “cruel” “games” (296). Subsuming his own point of view, even if only reluctantly, results in collaboration and rescuing the link between the two cultures Cocoa had established. The bridge, then, emerges as a visible metaphor for the African-American hyphen. George, as allegorical ethnographer, must relinquish its quick, serviceable, permanent construction for a more temporary, personal one that will last only “till the next big blow” (263), till the next renegotiation. Much as, on the level of ethnographic allegory, the several voices involved are carefully constructed so as to avoid privileging any one, the use of point of view in the novel as well adds a factor of indeterminacy which, according to Gates, invites the critic “not to invent a meaning, but rather to process a meaning from among the differences” (41). This invitation to process meaning from difference is openly given by the last line of the main text of the novel, which asserts that “there are just too many sides to the whole story” (311). This process, I will argue, does not, however, unleash a Babylonian “riot of social meanings,” as Ong would have it, but rather works to address concerns about audience and representation inherent in the process of textualization. Thus, although several meanings can be extracted from a text such as this, no one meaning is “correct.” There is, rather, a “corresponding” meaning, the “correct” reading for the “correct” reader, but it is not a static meaning. It is an indeterminate meaning which the reader—or critic—must process “from among the differences.” For example, once George gets to Willow Springs, Miranda and Abigail, Cocoa’s grandmother, see him as an opportunity to get some much-needed chores done. But rather than putting the young man to work with a “keep your tail here and help me” (217), as Cocoa explains she would have done in their place, the two women proceed to pretend as if they are having more trouble doing the work themselves than they really are, manipulating

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George into offering his help without being asked for it. Cocoa informs George of how [Mama Day] waits until she spies you on the porch before dragging that heavy rag rug out to the clothesline. She lets it trail along the ground, stopping several times to hoist it up in her arms. That gives you the time to get across the road with an offer of help that’s flatly and emphatically refused as she struggles unsuccessfully—much too unsuccessfully—to swing it over the line. (216)

This scene is an example of signifyin(g) at its most comical. It works on at least three levels of communication: between the older women and George, between Cocoa and George, and finally between George and the reader. The most overt level of (mis)communication, between Miranda, Abigail, and George, employs the technique of indirection, what Donald Brenneis terms “audience-centered indirection, which distinguishes between a ‘primary’ audience, for whom the message is chiefly composed, and a ‘secondary’ audience, which receives the message indirectly [emphasis original]” (qtd. in Donlon 18). For example, Cocoa says to George that “you’ve been allowed to overhear the quiet whispers about how marvelous you are, to witness glimpses of melting awe at the strength of your back, your arms” (217). Here, the “primary” or overt audience for these comments is Miranda and Abigail, speaking to each other. However, the comments are made for the benefit of George, the “secondary” or hidden audience. Similarly, the scene works on another level of communication, between Cocoa and George. On this level, Cocoa serves as cultural interpreter to George. According to Bertram Bruce, Communication within a common folk group establishes codes, protocol, and rhetorical strategies which lose power in their translation to other, different communities. Further, in cross-cultural oral events, tellers risk finding listeners who do not share their “critical beliefs,” ones which serve to insure understanding between them and their listeners inside a “mutual belief space.” (qtd. in Donlon 18)

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Here, Cocoa is part of the “mutual belief space” of Miranda and Abigail, and she is drawing George into the circle of intimacy by relating to him the knowledge to which she is privy. Perhaps the most interesting level of communication in this scene is between George and the reader. Cocoa says to George, “If you only knew, I thought, watching you laughing and talking with them on the porch at night. Grandma shelling boiled peanuts for you, Mama Day rubbing liniment into your sore shoulders. And maybe you did know, but it was what you believed that counted” (217). It is George, here, who is winking at the reader, although perhaps it is more correct to say that Naylor, disguised as George, is doing the winking through Cocoa. Cocoa’s protest that she “found treating a grown man like a five-year-old a little nauseating” (217) is subverted by alerting the reader to the possible complicity between George and the women. There is another instance of signifyin(g) taking place here, and in this case it is Cocoa who is excluded from the circle of understanding. This multiplicity of meanings is what renders the text indeterminate; on the one hand, there is an overt narrator, Cocoa, telling us of the comical manipulation of one man by two women. But there are other, equally compelling narratives at work, not exactly subverting, but rather adding shades of meaning to the story or stories. Rendering the text indeterminate is one way of negotiating representation in Naylor’s narrative of cultural production. According to Jocelyn Hazelwood Donlon, “Naylor . . . ultimately reveal[s] [her] distrust of ‘the American reader,’ whose historical reluctance to hear stories of difference compels the author[‘s] use of narrative ploys” (16). Naylor, who thinks of herself as a “Cultural Nationalist” (Carrol 163), is deeply engaged in the project of representation, and Mama Day reflects the anxiety of its textualization. For example, Cocoa’s penchant for describing the people of New York as “fudge sticks, kumquats, bagels, zucchinis” (62) is Naylor’s metaphor for the effects of (mis)representation. Cocoa’s labeling indicates not only her fear of the unknown which she is confronting, the impulse to classify and objectify it, but also the concomitant result of this process, incorporation and consumption. Naylor’s text contradicts this impulse by

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engaging in the “detextualization” of her text; not only is the readervoyeur invited to “overhear” and participate in the construction of the text in the preface, but the novel as a whole closely follows patterns of orality that try to subvert the negative effects of textual representation. One way of establishing the primacy of orality is by destabilizing the power of the written word. Once again, Naylor makes use of indeterminacy to subvert this power. She juxtaposes the scene of Bernice’s mystical impregnation with George’s academic attempts at understanding Cocoa’s menstruation. The juxtaposition is quite obviously meant to be significant: the graphic representation of the ritual involved in impregnating Bernice, told in the third-person communal voice, is immediately followed by George’s first-person account of his newlywed life with the sentence “Sometimes I would wake up and ask myself if it really happened” (140). However, what has “really happened” here, what is truly wondrous to believe, is not that a chicken’s egg can be used to create a human fetus, but that George and Cocoa have achieved the rather commonplace status of married couple. Once this inversion in what our expectations of what is credible or incredible has taken place, we are free to question George’s curious actions. Convinced that living with a woman for the first time in his life will present a special challenge, George tries to prepare himself. “I did what I normally did when a subject was new to me: I bought books” he says, and proceeds to learn all about “their [women’s] cycles,” concluding that “it made you squeamish if you dwelt on the fact that you were constantly surrounded by dripping blood, and a little frightened, too” (141). His fear, perhaps, echoes our own as we have just read how “a rhythm older than woman” (140) has taken over Bernice’s prostrate body under Miranda’s conjuring hands. George’s over-preoccupation with something so comparatively banal as menstruation seems ridiculous; the knowledge of “the rudiments: ovaries, a womb, Fallopian tubes” (141) that books can offer rendered insufficient. Naylor herself explains how the indeterminacy works here. She says, when Mama Day was at the “Other Place” with Bernice, I personally believe that indeed something did happen on another plane--but it is

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Chapter I written so the reader can take it on any level they wish…it can be read on the level that Mama Day was just simply playing games with Bernice, psychological games--with the pumpkin seeds, and giving her the right foods… That’s down to your own beliefs. (Carrol 161-62)

In this multilayered text, George’s commentary complements Cocoa’s reaction to New York. While George turns to books to learn all about “their cycles [emphasis mine],” Cocoa turns to Cosmo, where she reads all about “your [George’s] type” (64). With passages such as these, Naylor dismantles the credibility of the written word and creates a space for the reception of her alternative “text.” Once the destabilization of the written word is set in motion, patterns of orality take over in an effort to produce alternative ways of communication. Donlon speculates that “storytellers, faced with the threat of having their personal narratives either dismissed or appropriated, recount their experiences in order to secure ownership of events that belong to them” (16). Thus, storytelling is a way of forging identity from a threatened social position. Furthermore, Donlon argues, the process necessitates an audience to “receive, value, and confirm the experiences of the teller. In this recurring cycle of telling and listening, the speaking subject tends to be venerated as one who asserts an identity” (17). Although this formulation might at first seem to contradict the aims of a polyvocal text, where there are not one but many speaking subjects, Donlon’s view can be more easily understood through the concept of “specifying”—what Susan Willis defines as the storytelling tradition of the speaking subject offering “herself as guarantor of the relationship [between the signified and the signifier] with the whole community standing witness to the contract” (16). According to both Donlon and Willis, the oral community is generated by shared signifiers. In a text such as Mama Day, “specifying” works to “manipulate listeners in the text to be positioned deeply within a Southern folk group, thus inviting them to play an intimate role in a distinctive cultural setting” (Donlon 19). According to Sandra Dolby Stahl, “the knowledge one gains as a listener when personal narratives are told brings with it the sensation of intimacy” (qtd. in Donlon 17). Therefore, when

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Cocoa undertakes to tell George the “truth” about how her grandmother and grandaunt are manipulating him, she is “specifying,” emerging as a distinct voice within the voices of the novel, to tell her side of the story, which concerns the “art” of “the southern woman at manipulating a man” (216). She is confirming her identity as a southern woman herself even though manipulation is not her “style” because she is part of Abigail and Miranda’s community of understanding. But she is also drawing the reader, through George, into this circle of “intimacy.” Thus, the text is subverting the “distrust,” posited earlier by Donlon, of the outsiderlisteners (readers) by making them part of the “mutual belief space” of Willow Springs. But the command to “listen [r]eally listen” goes beyond the valorization of orality to ask for an even deeper understanding of the experiential nature of truth as distinct from what we perceive of as processed fact. For example, Miranda watches The Phil Donahue Show with “the volume turned off for the entire hour, knowing well that what’s being said by the audience don’t matter a whit to how it’s being said” (38). Seeing “laughter before or after a mouth opens to speak, the number of times a throat swallows, the curve of the lips, the thrust of the neck, the slump of the shoulders” (38) can tell her with greater clarity than the words which the panel members speak what they are really saying. Naylor seems to be going beyond the condemnation of text to attacking the actual process behind textualization in an attempt to heal the rupture between sign and signifier. The novel wants to answer Cocoa’s question, “Why is it so hard to believe that what I see is what I see” (99), by replacing “fact” with “feeling” (27), knowledge with experience, and collapsing the artificial “bar” or bridge between them. As Cocoa tells George, “The fact that you weren’t in charge had absolutely nothing to do with the results: Grandma’s roof got painted, the garden got weeded, Mama Day’s rugs were spotless [emphasis original]” (217). In the scene where Miranda is trying to convince George that he must save Cocoa, George accuses her of “talking in a lot of metaphors. But what it boils down to is that I can be of some use to you, and I came here for that” (294). Miranda responds in frustration: “Metaphors. Like what they used in poetry and stuff. The stuff folks dreamed up when they was making a

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fantasy, while what she was talking about was real [emphasis original]” (294). Helen Fiddyment Levy describes what Naylor is doing as portray[ing] the modern emptying of effective ritual communication from literature, as she dismisses the elegant, aesthetic concept of metaphor as belonging to the present leisure entertainment of intellectual literature… Naylor portrays the shared symbolism that holds the bonding power of the community, that ritual language charged with emotion when understood and underlined with belief. The language Miranda summons is literature in its truest sense, possessing force and consequence in the real, natural world. (283)

Again, it is the communal voice which “specifies” or regains power in speaking and facilitates the truly important communication beyond the understanding of words: “what it boils down to is that I can be of some use to you, and I came here for that” (294). What Naylor seems to be asking for is complete harmony between sign and signifier: more complete even than the harmony of the oral word, the visual communication is the favored means of representation in Mama Day. Not only must the true communication be visual, it must be unmediated by mirrors, texts, authors, or “bridges” of any kind. Anything that comes between the person and experience is automatically distrustful; once again, “anything coming from beyond the bridge gotta be viewed real, real careful” (7). Engaging in discourse with any bridging device is viewed as naïve, ultimately as a selfish or narcissistic endeavor, Levy’s “leisure entertainment,” that only the force of conjure can stop. Cocoa exemplifies this point of view: I was never in that camp of a night out with someone is better than a night alone. I was someone, and there was always something to do with me. I actually enjoyed polishing my nails or washing my hair and sitting in front of the mirror to admire the effect—for myself. Anything that gave me pleasure wasn’t a waste of time [emphasis original]. (58)

Mesmerized by her own mirror image, Cocoa feels no need to connect with someone who will reinforce her image of herself; the situation is reversed by Ruby’s conjure, whose effect is to make mirrors untrustworthy. Cocoa begins to see her face disintegrate in the bathroom mirror as she

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applies makeup, and must rely on Abigail to tell her how she really looks (276). Later, she examines a now perfect body in the mirror, despite the fact that she is able to see, with her own eyes, the welts on her arms. She concludes that “the mirror was never to be trusted. Trust only your natural eyesight. Only what you literally see is real” (281). The choice of words here is important; Naylor is asking us to “literally see,” to “view” her text, as Levy explains, “in its truest sense” (283). Again, the Willow Springs bridge takes on metaphorical significance. Not only is it a visible metaphor for the African-American hyphen, it is a metaphor for the experience of that hyphen’s textual representation, the bridge between the sign and the signifier. Its collapse during the hurricane indicates Naylor’s desire to free her narrative from the burden of traversing the gap which it bridges. First, the text’s indeterminacy prevents the reader/critic from privileging any one discourse over another—each, be it personal, ethnographic, or academic, seems to have an equal claim on “truth”—“Just like that chicken coop, everything got four sides: his side, her side, and outside, and an inside. All of it is the truth” (230). Second, the construction of a visual text allows Naylor to dispense with the question of truth as it applies to language altogether. Finally, the telling of the story can take place in a mutual belief space free from the discourse of hierarchy and the hierarchy of discourse. Naylor is engaging in what John Callahan calls “the idea and practice of an extended democratic fiction [which] presumes a society that, despite its hypocrisies, its contradictions and injustices, remains emergent and experimental, open and responsive to new voices, new stories” (19). Naylor’s use of tense works in the same way to pull the reader in and establish the community which she is trying to create. She begins by drawing on the rich history of the Sea Islands, because, according to her, “history is tangible in that part of the country. Not just the people—the people talk about the Civil War as if it happened last week—but you have live oaks there that were already a hundred years old when the Civil War took place” (Carrol 161). In the Gullah traditions of these islands I have already discussed, she finds the rationalization for her project. The Gullah emphasis on continuity allows her to attempt the rescue of African cultural traditions by giving her the grounds on which to build a coexisting past,

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present, and future and overcome the erasure of cultural heritage which has happened to George in the city. She continues this reclaiming project on the level of her narrative by juxtaposing past, present, and future in what could be called an indeterminate tense—for example, the preface’s “we” claims to be speaking to us from August, 1999, but the action of the novel is taking place in 1985. Yet both of these narratives are told in the present tense. Thus, the futuristic preface destabilizes the discreet sense of present of the main third-person narrative, making it both present and past. Still more confusingly, George and Cocoa’s past-tense narratives are taking place in the future/present, after his death, as Cocoa speaks to him in his grave. As Rachel Hass has pointed out, Naylor “brings separate worlds onto the same page, without explanation or translation, and demands coexistence of the past with the present” (23). This demand is necessary for the device of authorship to work. As Donlon claims, “the traditional [Gullah] culture of Willow Springs challenges the necessity of a physically present, living storyteller to permit an absentpresent, dead-yet-living one [emphasis original]” (23-24). Unlike Donlon, however, I believe that this circumstance facilitates not only George’s dead-yet-living narration, but the community’s unborn-yet-living one. Much like the land that is owned two generations down to ensure that it will stay in the hands of the community, the narrative is “owned” or enacted by the future generation, although it “belongs” to all of them. Through this device, Naylor again escapes another form of misrepresentation, what Clifford calls the “ethnographic pastoral” mode of allegory, a “pattern of retrospection that laments the loss of a ‘good’ country, a place where authentic social and natural contacts were once possible” (113). This ethnographic mode is concerned with preserving disappearing Edens through “textual rescue” (115). It freezes the society in question into an always lost past. Clifford hypothetically wonders what it would take to relate ethnography to the future, not as records of lessons to be learned or disappeared societies to be mourned, but as resources to be used in the “cultural future of the planet [emphasis original]” (115). By localizing Willow Springs in the future and representing it as an ever-changing

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society, Naylor is able to show, mostly through the young generation of the island, of which Cocoa is a part, how a distinctive culture can be projected both to the past and the future, and still be lived even as it is being learned. She can at once claim that “living in a place like Willow Springs, it’s sorta easy to forget about time” (160) and that “there’s a disagreement every winter about whether these young people spell the death of Candle Walk” (111), Willow Springs’s most distinctive tradition. As Naylor explains it, the construction of a fixed, dying society is a falsehood—change is inherent to any society: Miranda says there’s nothing to worry about. In her young days Candle Walk was different still…It’ll take generations, she says, for Willow Springs to stop doing it at all…By then, she figures, it won’t be the world as we know it no way--and so no need for the memory. (111)

When, past, present, and future coexist, memory is irrelevant. In other words, “it’s all happened before and it’ll happen again with a different set of faces. So time’s doing what it’s always done, standing still this summer here in Willow Springs” (163). Time does not erode or freeze; rather, it constructs and rebuilds the future without losing the past. This series of devices—the visual text, the indeterminate tense—I wish to reiterate, minimize the anxiety of representation by minimizing the role of the author. However, much as we would like to discover a truly unmediated text, it can be disappointing to believe in its existence. For example, it might be disappointing to discover that Naylor’s recipe for Bernice’s impregnation, the pumpkin seeds and so forth, came “straight out of a textbook” (Carrol 162). A certain degree of referentiality can never be avoided. In terms of a correspondence between ethnography and fiction, both modes of representation share the concern of communicating a truth about a people, a place. The tools of production as well as the product may differ, but the raw material—human experience—is the same. Naylor seems to be urging us to accept that “seeing is believing.” Yet the written word asks us to believe without seeing. In the absence of faith, we might just have to settle for building bridges instead of towers.

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Works Cited Callahan, John. In the African-American Grain: The Pursuit of Voice in Twentieth Century Black Fiction. U of Illinois,1988. Carrol, Rebecca, ed. I Know What the Red Clay Looks Like: The Voice and Vision of Black American Women Writers. Carol Southern, 1994. 158174. Clifford, James. “On Ethnographic Allegory.” Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography: A School of American Research Advanced Seminar. Edited by James Clifford and George E. Marcus. U of California P, 1986, pp.98-121. Creel, Margaret Washington. “Gullah Attitudes toward Life and Death.” Africanisms in American Culture. Edited by Joseph E. Holloway. Indiana UP, 1990, pp. 69-97. Donlon, Jocelyn Hazelwood. “Hearing is Believing: Southern Racial Communities and Strategies of Story-Listening in Gloria Naylor and Lee Smith.” Twentieth Century Literature, vol. 41, no. 1, 1995, pp. 1635. Gates, Henry Louis. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism. Oxford UP, 1988. Hass, Rachel. Review. Gloria Naylor: Critical Perspectives Past and Present. Edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and K.A. Appiah. Amistad, 1993, pp. 22-23. Levy, Helen Fiddyment. “Lead on with Light.” Gloria Naylor: Critical Perspectives Past and Present. Edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and K.A. Appiah. Amistad, 1993, pp. 263-284. Naylor, Gloria. Mama Day. Vintage, 1993. Ong, Aihwa. “Colonialism and Modernity: Feminist Re-presentations of Women in Non-Western Societies.” Inscriptions, 1989, pp. 79-93. Willis, Susan. Specifying: Black Women Writing the American Experience. Madison, U of Wisconsin, 1987.

CHAPTER II RADICAL REPETITION: MARGUERITE DURAS’S MODERATO CANTABILE TOM PHILLIPS Marguerite Duras (1914-1996) is a key figure in twentieth-century French literature. Beginning with the relatively conventional novels Les Impudents (1943) and La Vie Tranquille (1944), her work demonstrates a commitment both to exploring the transgressive, sometimes dangerous desires that drive certain kinds of human behaviour and to experimenting with the possibilities of narrative, whether that be in prose fiction, creative non-fiction or film. In the Anglophone world, she is probably best known for her 1984 novel L’Amant or The Lover (subsequently made into a film directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud in 1992). The story of an illicit relationship between a young French girl and an older Chinese man in 1920s French Indochina and based on Duras’ own experiences in the French colonies as a child, L’Amant recounts the story of a love affair that transgresses social conventions: the girl is 15, her lover 27; she is from the white French colonial class and theoretically in a position of power, but her family has been reduced to penury through her mother’s catastrophic decision to invest in land that turns out to be worthless; he is Chinese and therefore doubly alienated (he is the son of a wealthy merchant who belongs to neither the colonising nor the colonised class), and it is the disapproval of his father, rather than that of the girl’s mother, that leads to the end of the affair. As I will show here, it is a pattern that recurs throughout Duras’ work, and yet, as a novel, L’Amant is less aesthetically transgressive than many of her other texts. Although short, its structure, narrative voice and prose style resembles that of some of her earliest work rather than those of the texts she produced in the 1960s and 1970s. Indeed, when it comes to identifying what it is about Duras’ work that makes it

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significant, the popular success of L’Amant as both a novel and a film acts as a distraction, diverting attention towards the transgressive—and therefore potentially controversial—elements of the subject matter Duras chose to write about and away from the radically transgressive elements in the way she chose to write such narratives. As Leslie Hill points out in her aptly titled study Marguerite Duras: Apocalyptic Desires, Duras herself continued to believe that the very act of writing itself is ‘a fundamentally transgressive activity’ throughout her career, saying of her writing about writing in the 1980s: Writing, she repeats, breaks with established authority and exceeds mastery; its role is to challenge and subvert the status quo, to undermine all established discourses and ideologies. To write therefore is not to represent the world by telling stories, it is to push narrative and human experience to that limit at which meaning falters and yields to an ecstatic otherness that no longer fits the bounds of ordinary language. (Hill, 36)

This belief in the need to ‘push narrative … to that limit at which meaning falters’ certainly appears to have driven a desire to evolve new or at the very least experiment with existing narrative strategies—whether that be in novels like 1965’s Le Vice-Consul or 1986’s Les Yeux bleus, Cheveux noirs or in films like 1960’s Hiroshima mon amour or 1975’s India Song—and to apply different methods to the stories—or perhaps clutches of narrative material—to which she returns more than once across her writing career. The central narrative in L’Amant, for example, revisits that of her much earlier 1950 novel Un barrage contre le Pacifique (The Sea Wall) and is revisited again in L’Amant de la Chine du Nord, a rewritten version of L’Amant published in 1991 that might be regarded as a preemptive response to—and critique of—Annaud’s 1992 film of the original novel over which the film director and Duras famously argued during its production. Here, though, I am going to focus Moderato Cantabile, a short novel set in France and published in 1958 which, for convenience’s sake, might be classified as being from Duras’ early-middle period and perhaps most clearly exemplifies how themes of social transgression are closely bound up with the writer’s need to push narrative to the limit in aesthetic terms.

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Indeed, in that the narrative concerns a potentially illicit relationship between a man and a woman divided by their belonging to different social classes, we might regard it as another attempt at re-telling the fundamental narrative of L’Amant, even though it is set in France, rather than Indochina, and even though the protagonists are a bourgeois French woman and a working-class French man, rather than the teenage daughter of a colonialist and the son of a wealthy Chinese merchant. Moderato Cantabile is a short, sparsely written novel in which, by conventional standards, very little happens and in which the narrative’s catalysing incident, although potentially highly dramatic—almost melodramatic—in its own right, occurs ‘off stage’. Anne Desbaresdes, the wife of a wealthy businessman in a small French seaside town, takes her son to his weekly piano lesson, overhears a scream and a gunshot from a neighbouring café and, while she is passing the café on her way home, witnesses the arrest of a man for shooting his wife in what appears to have been a crime passionnel. The following day Anne returns to the café, drinks several glasses of wine and talks to the owner and an unknown man about the crime and its possible causes. During three subsequent visits to the café, Anne again drinks wine, which she says she doesn’t usually do, and has further conversations with the man—a former employer of her husband’s known as Chauvin—during which they speculate further about the crime passionnel, the relationship between the perpetrator and his victim, the possible motives behind it. After her fourth visit to the café, Anne returns home late for a dinner party that she is supposed to be hosting for her husband’s friends and business associates and scandalises them with her appearance, her drunken behaviour and by leaving the dining room to vomit in her son’s bedroom. In the eighth and final chapter, Anne returns once more to the café and any suggestion that her previous conversations with Chauvin and their apparently mutual interest in the crime passionnel, which might foreshadow their own illicit sexual relationship, is extinguished, as the final paragraphs of the novel make clear: “It’s impossible,” she said. Chauvin heard that.

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Chapter II “Wait a minute,” he said, “and we’ll be able to.” Anne Desbaresdes waited a minute, then she tried to stand up. She succeeded in getting to her feet. Chauvin was not looking at her. The men still kept their eyes turned away from this adulteress. She stood there. “I wish you were dead,” Chauvin said. Anne Desbaresdes moved around her chair so as to avoid having to sit down again. Then she took one step back and turned round. Chauvin’s hand fluttered and fell to the table. But she was already too far away to see him. She passed the cluster of men at the bar and found herself again moving forwards into the fiery red rays of the dying day. After she had left, the landlady turned the radio up louder. Some of the men complained that in their opinion it was too loud. (121-122)

Many of the details included in these few final paragraphs are recurrent motifs. The radio, the sunset, hands on a café table, the judgmental gaze of other customers are all elements that appear regularly throughout the novel and especially in the chapters recounting Anne’s visits to and conversations in the café. Owing to the way Duras describes them through the deployment of these same recurrent motifs in each scene, these visits and conversations follow a pattern which, in turn, makes them seem almost ritualistic. It is as if Anne and Chauvin are playing out a relationship rather than forming one or even experiencing the emotions which that might require, especially as much of their conversation concerns Chauvin’s improvised, probably invented version of the story of the other couple whose relationship ends with the crime passionnel. Or, as Leslie Hill puts it in her discussion of the novel in Apocalyptic Desires: Repetition operates on two levels. The first of these is plot, with the repeated meetings between Anne and Chauvin being staged in such a way that Duras’s two protagonists re-enact the—imagined—events that led up to the murder. The novel concludes with a scene that clearly invokes the earlier killing. Secondly, repetition has an important function on the level of narrative discourse. Distributed throughout the text is a wealth of recurrent motifs or images that organise meaning by a process of metonymic

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association or juxtaposition; they include for instance numerous allusions to the sunset and the sea, repeated references to music, magnolia flowers, and childbirth, as well as the insistent recourse to the theme of looking, or the use of colour symbolism to link, say, the blood of the murder victim with the wine that Anne drinks to excess in her encounters with Chauvin. (Hill, 50).

On the one hand, these repetitions and recurrent motifs reinforce the sense that the narrative is progressing slowly, but inexorably towards a final repetition, that the ritual must come to an end, either in the consummation of a physical relationship or, as it actually does, in the recognition that it is, as Anne says, ‘impossible’. On the other, they constitute a stylistic device which, along with the fact that the book’s title is a musical term and that two of the eight chapters focus on Anne’s son’s piano lessons, mean that, in the absence of a conventional plot, the narrative structure resembles that of a set of musical variations on a theme or, indeed, that of the Diabelli sonatina which her son is learning how to play. To some extent, however, to say that the novel lacks a conventional plot is not entirely correct. In some ways, in fact, Moderato Cantabile has an almost archetypal story arc. Despite the apparent scarcity of dramatic narrative event, the fundamental structure of the narrative follows the basic outline of the model identified by the anthropologist Joseph Campbell in his conceptualisation of what he calls the archetypal ‘hero’s journey’ or monomyth. The wife of a factory owner leaves her ‘ordinary world’ and crosses the threshold into the ‘extraordinary world’ (to use Campbell’s terminology) represented by the working-class café where she encounters someone who appears to be an ally (Chauvin) in her putative revolt against her principle ‘enemy’ (her shadowy, seemingly statusobsessed husband) before she initiates the revolt (by arriving at the dinner party drunk and scandalising her guests), but fails in her attempt to liberate herself and appears to realise in the end that Chauvin and what he represents may prove to be a greater threat to her than her husband. Described in these terms, Moderato Cantabile adheres quite closely to the fundamental concepts of Campbell’s archetypal myth-model and this in turn might even enable readings that sustain comparisons between Anne’s story and those of archetypal figures such as Antigone or Medea—women

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who transgressed social norms, albeit more destructively and ultimately self-destructively. We might also find precedents for Anne’s situation, emotional and mental states and/or actions in more recent literary texts: Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler and A Doll’s House, James Joyce’s Dubliners, as well as the work of Virginia Woolf, Richard Yates, Albert Camus and others. What we might call the modernist predicament as expressed by Samuel Beckett—reportedly an admirer of Duras—in his famous reiterative ‘mantra’ from Worstward Ho: ‘Never mind. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.’ - might also be read into Anne’s repetitive efforts to have a meaningful encounter with something other than her quietly desperate life as the wife of a wealthy bourgeois. Likewise, it’s possible to understand the novel from a politicised and essentially feminist perspective. It is no accident that the redundant worker’s name is Chauvin (as in ‘chauvinist’ and, more specifically, ‘male chauvinist’) or that it is Anne who rebels against both his values and those of her husband. Duras herself was a communist, was an active member of the French Communist Party during the Second World War (when she served in the French Resistance alongside future French President François Mitterand, with whom she remained friends throughout her life) and her essays and journalism in collections such as L’Été 80 (1980) and La Vie matérielle (1987) reflect an abiding, if not entirely orthodox, left-wing perspective. In her fiction, however, Duras eschewed the kind of socialist realism advocated by orthodox twentieth-century communist cultural theory. In Moderato Cantabile, Chauvin is not presented as a heroic representative of the working class and proves to be as manipulative and self-serving as Anne’s bourgeois husband. Nor is Anne herself an ardent or outspoken feminist and although she is evidently attracted by the unfamiliar workingclass milieu she finds herself in, she gives little indication of any specific political opinions and is evidently not driven by any political motive to frequent the café and talk to Chauvin. Duras too does not construct the narrative or characters according to any given ideological structure: we might infer what her political opinions are from the text, but the novel is not (pre-)determined by ideological considerations. This can be contrasted with the literature of socialist realism being published in Eastern Europe

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during the same period. Bulgarian author Dimitar Dimov’s 1951 novel Ɍɸɬɸɧ (Tobacco), for example, shares at least some of the themes of Moderato Cantabile in that it too concerns quietly desperate lives, class divisions, transgressive relationships, alcoholism, insanity and selfdestruction. In Tobacco, however, what is only suggested or hinted at in Duras’ novel—Anne only teeters on the brink of or, one might say, flirts with alcoholism, insanity and self-destruction, as it were—is openly connected into a clear ideological structure even though, strictly speaking, it is not a purely socialist realist novel, with the bourgeois protagonists’ progress towards emotional, moral and mental collapse counter-balanced by sub-plots portraying working-class characters as either stoically suffering victims of capitalism or heroic partisan revolutionaries (sub-plots which, in Dimov’s case, the author was forced to introduce following intervention by the Bulgarian Writers’ Union). Thus, while Moderato Cantabile bears resemblances to archetypal narrative structures and offers the possibility of elaborating a broadly feminist and/or socialist reading of the text, Duras’ aesthetic method means that the novel is open to a wide variety of possible interpretations and does not direct us toward any one particular understanding of, say, the characters’ motives, or encourage to hierarchise all possible interpretations in the name of elucidating or evaluating an overall pattern of signification. The style is noticeably pared down. There is a distinctive focus on objects in the physical world—a piano keyboard, a magnolia tree, café tables, glasses of wine—and, as in Le Square, the short 1955 novel that preceded it, dialogue reported with little or no indication of how a character might be speaking and little or no commentary from narrator on what’s being said. As readers, we are left to infer what characters are thinking or feeling at any given moment and from that why they might be acting or speaking in the way that they do. That is not to say that the narrative voice is entirely objective. There is still some interpretation of what is taking place. Chapter four, which recounts Anne’s third visit to the café, for example, begins: She stopped again at the bar; the man was already in the room waiting for her, no doubt still bound by the ritual of the first meetings, which she instinctively adhered to. She ordered some wine, still terribly afraid. The

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The text incorporates at least some speculation about Anne’s behaviour (‘no doubt still bound by the ritual of the first meetings’), her emotional state (‘still terribly afraid’) and the landlady’s thoughts. The narrator, however, is not omniscient, remains anonymous throughout and approaches the kind of objectivity characterised by Christopher Isherwood at the beginning of his 1939 novel Goodbye to Berlin when his narrator declares: ‘I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.’ (Isherwood, 9). In its form, in fact, Moderato Cantabile resembles a film script: short descriptive passages, mostly concerned with describing setting, appearance and action, are interspersed with lengthy passages of dialogue. This tendency within Duras’ work grew stronger over the course of the 1960s until with 1969’s Détruire, dit-elle (Destroy, she said) she created ‘a work that is written seemingly without distinction as a novel, play, or film-script, and can be read as any one of these’ and went on to produce a series of ‘hybrid texts … all of which exist in an uncertain intermediary zone midway between book and theatre, script and performance, page and cinema screen’ (Hill, 9): India Song, for example, is subtitled ‘texte, théâtre, film’. Moderato Cantabile is not such a clearcut example of a hybrid text, but Duras’ interest and knowledge of filmmaking is apparent even here as it is in her other novels from the period such as Le Square, Dix heures et demie du soi en été (Ten-thirty on a Summer Night) or L’Après-midi de M. Andesmas (The Afternoon of Mr. Andesmas). Rather than a hybrid aesthetic, all these texts demonstrate a tendency towards minimalism, what we might categorise as a kind of aesthetic reductionism, reducing the text to what the author deems to be its absolute necessary state. This reductionism, too, is what allows us, as readers, to construct multiple interpretations because it opens up a space around the text, which might be characterised as a void, a silence that enables and permits just such a multiplicity of possible meanings. In his seminal critical study of narrative technique, Mimesis, the literary critic Erich Auerbach famously draws a distinction between two fundamental narrative strategies and these, too, can perhaps help to

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illustrate how Duras’ text operates and what is particular about its aesthetic reductionism. Comparing a passage from Homer’s Odyssey with one from the book of Genesis in The Bible, Auerbach writes: It would be difficult, then, to imagine styles more contrasted than those of these two equally ancient and equally epic texts. On the one hand, externalised, uniformly illuminated phenomena, at a definite time and in a definite place, connected together with lacunae in a perpetual foreground; thoughts and feeling completely expressed; events taking place in leisurely fashion and with very little of suspense. On the other hand, the externalisation of only so much of the phenomena as is necessary for the purpose of the narrative, all else left in obscurity; the decisive points of the narrative alone are emphasized, what lies between is nonexistent; time and place are undefined and call for interpretation; thoughts and feeling remain unexpressed, are only suggested by the silence and the fragmentary speeches; the whole, permeated with the most unrelieved suspense and directed toward a single goal (and to that extent far more of a unity), remains mysterious and ‘fraught with background’. (Auerbach, 11)

As I have described it so far, Duras’ technique in Moderato Cantabile appears to most closely resemble the second strategy described by Auerbach: the novel externalises ‘only so much of the phenomena as is necessary for the purpose of the narrative’ and might justifiably be described as being ‘fraught with background’. At the same time, however, it also incorporates some of the elements listed by Auerbach in his characterisation of the other strategy, the first he describes and identifies in Homer: much of what is externalised in Duras’ novel is ‘uniformly illuminated’ (such as, for example, the recurrent motifs of the sunset, the radio, the disapproving gaze) and occupies a ‘perpetual foreground’ and to some readers it may seem as if ‘events [are] taking place in leisurely fashion and with very little of suspense’. That is not to say, by any means, that Moderato Cantabile should be considered as a hybrid of Homer and The Bible (Auerbach goes on to illustrate how these two narrative strategies interact, merge or exist in tension in many other works from European literary history), or to place her along a spectrum extending between these two extremes. Auerbach’s distinction, however, does provide us with tools for identifying the way in which Duras’ text operates, most notably with regards to the relationship between foreground

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and background, externalisation/illumination and void, text and silence, and its existence on the interstices between them. Here, though, it is important to emphasise that, even within Moderato Cantabile, Duras’ aesthetic method and narrative strategy do not remain uniform throughout even such a short novel (the English translation extends to 122 pages). The formal repetitions and recurrent motifs, the alternation between description and dialogue, the ‘musical’ structure and minimalist aesthetic reductionism are maintained throughout the majority of the novel, but Duras also disrupts her own textual patterning, and these disruptions are all the more striking and significant for their coming within such a closely patterned text. In chapter four, whose opening is discussed above, Anne and Chauvin’s conversation has moved away from the story behind the crime passionnel and Chauvin has begun to improvise around what he knows of Anne’s own life, talking about the ‘women who have already lived in that same house [as Anne] and listened to the hedges at night, in place of their heart’ (57). This conversation is reported in much the same way as their previous ones, until, having conceded that most of what he’s saying about her house is ‘a lie’, Chauvin prompts Anne to ‘Hurry up and say something. Make it up.’ (58). Anne’s response is presented in the form of a single unpunctuated sentence, a torrent of words: People ought to live in a town where there are no trees trees scream when there’s a wind here there’s always a wind always except for two days a year in your place don’t you see I’d leave this place I wouldn’t stay all the birds or almost all are seagulls you find them dead after a storm and when the storm is over the trees stop screaming on the beach like someone murdered it keeps the children from sleeping no I’ll leave. (58)

It is as if emotions that Anne has finally found both the desire and the capacity to express emotions she has been suppressing, even if only briefly. Indeed, the passage following this abrupt and unexpected outburst (her voice is described as ‘almost loud’) suggests that it exhausts her: she closes her eyes, does not respond or even listen to Chauvin’s next few speeches and when she does speak it is ‘wearily’ and in contrast to ‘The sound of children’s shouts and laughter’ coming from the street outside (60). Although unpunctuated, we can, of course, follow her train of

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thought through this speech, her mental associations, as her thoughts move from the frequent storms to the desire to leave the seaside town to the dead seabirds to the allusion to the crime passionnel in ‘someone murdered’, the children not sleeping (Anne herself admits to not being able to sleep sometimes) and the final ‘no I’ll leave’ with the multiple ambiguities relating to what she is denying with that ‘no’ and what she intends to ‘leave’ (the café, Chauvin, her husband, her house, the town itself?) The speech, in other words, is a kind of intrusion, the eruption of a stream of consciousness into an otherwise austere objective-minimalist text, and draws attention to itself, encourages us to endow it with a particular significance, through its formal variation from the stylistic norms established in the novel up to this point. This speech, however, leads to no further revelations from Anne and she retreats into the fiction of the story about the crime passionnel, a retreat which, in some ways, anticipates her ultimate retreat from revolt in the final chapter and, indeed, the similar stylistic disruption which precedes it. This second, much longer disruption or transgression of the novel’s stylistic norms occurs in chapter seven, which describes Anne’s return home after her fourth meeting with Chauvin, her so-say scandalous behaviour at the dinner party and Chauvin’s own behaviour that night when he follows Anne to her house and waits outside (albeit for reasons which are not entirely clear). The change in style and tone is abrupt and immediately obvious. The tense shifts from the simple past to the present and a more intrusive narratorial voice adopts a tone which is openly satirical, much as some of Dickens’ descriptions of social occasions are satirical: The salmon, chilled in its original form, is served on a silver platter that the wealth of three generations has helped to buy. Dressed in black, and with white gloves, a man carries it like a royal child, and offers it to each guest in the silence of the start of the dinner. It is proper not to talk about it. (95)

This is the chapter recounting the episode in which Anne comes closest to committing an irredeemable transgression and, perhaps, abandoning her husband, that is, carrying out the threat to ‘leave’ suggested in the earlier disruptive speech about screaming trees and sleepless children.

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For ten years she has never been the subject of any gossip. If she is bothered by her incongruity, she is unaware of it. A fixed smile makes her face acceptable. “Anne didn’t hear what you said.” She puts her fork down, looks around, tries to grasp the thread of conversation, fails. “That’s true,” she says. They ask again. Her blond hair is mussed, and she runs her fingers listlessly through it, as she had done a little while before in a different setting. Her lips are pale. Tonight she forgot to make herself up. (97)

Anne’s behaviour, transgressing social norms, is matched by the aesthetic transgression of the specific stylistic conventions Duras has already established for Moderato Cantabile and of more general literary conventions concerning the uniformity of style and structure within any given text. This is further emphasised later in the chapter where the tense shift again, this time from the present to the future so that Chauvin’s abandonment of his ‘prowl’ outside the house (he has followed Anne home and waited outside while the dinner party has been going on), Anne’s vomiting in her child’s bedroom and her husband’s shadowy presence in the doorway of that room are presented as events that have not yet happened: The man will already have left. She will go into the child’s room and lie down on the floor at the foot of the bed, paying no attention to the magnolia crushed to pieces between her breasts. And to the inviolable rhythm of her child’s breathing, she will vomit forth the strange nourishment that had been forced upon her. A shadow will appear in the doorway leading into the hall, deepening the shadow of the room. Anne Desbaresdes will run her hand through her dishevelled hair. This time she will offer an apology. The shadow will not reply. (108-9)

In the chapter that follows the tense returns to the simple past and the narratorial viewpoint retreats, as it were, to its near-objective perspective,

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but the penultimate chapter’s shifting of tenses and viewpoints simultaneously replicates the behavioural transgressions of the main characters and intensifies our sense of the events recounted in the novel having finally reached something that might be called a ‘crisis’ and yet its temporal uncertainty also casts doubt on when and potentially whether these events have occurred, are continually occurring (in the sense that Anne seems fated to repeat this moment of near-transgression) or might possibly occur in the future. In breaking narrative ‘rules’, in other words, Duras herself simultaneously underlines how Anne’s behaviour potentially breaks social rules, but also and more importantly introduces ambiguity: the present and future tenses invite us to question whether this is part of the story of what actually happens in the fiction of Moderato Cantabile and what might be, when it comes down to it, wishful thinking born of a desire for what might have occurred, both on the part of Anne and of the working-class man who ‘in spite of himself will retrace his steps’ and ‘will utter a little louder this time’ her name in his isolation on the pavement outside the house. * Duras’ ongoing structural and stylistic experimentation which began to emerge most clearly in Le Square and became more obvious still with the appearance of Moderato Cantabile almost inevitably saw her identified with the nouveau roman. Not so much a literary movement as a style of or approach to novel writing that rejected traditional notions of plot and character, the nouveau roman and the writers associated with it, most notably Alain Robbe-Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute and Michel Butor, rose to prominence in France in the 1950s and, at least initially, Duras was located within that group, especially because Moderato Cantabile was first published by Les Éditions de Minuit, the French publishing house most closely associated with promoting nouveau roman authors and for which Robbe-Grillet acted as literary adviser. Whether placing Duras in this category is entirely justified or not is a matter of debate. As is the question of whether associating her with what is, in fact, a diverse grouping of predominantly male (with the exception of Sarraute) novelists represents a necessarily constructive or productive critical approach to her work. Does it enable us to position her work more precisely within post-war literary

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tendencies or, by so doing, do we risk limiting analysis to questions pertaining to how closely each of her works conforms to the aesthetic and strategic principles elaborated by other figures associated with the nouveau roman—most notably, Robbe-Grillet—or how far it diverges from them? Does it reduce analysis to the construction of a sort of hierarchy of her individual works according to their typicality in relation to the nouveau roman? The problem, perhaps, is that, as a category, the nouveau roman is too diverse for it to be more than what is, in effect, a marketing tool (Duras’ first English publisher Calder & Boyars adopted it for just such a purpose when publishing the English translation of Moderato Cantabile) and that such categorization distracts from the multiplicity of interpretative possibilities that each of her texts, in its own way, offers. Perhaps, too, it limits analysis to certain thematic repertoires, thereby discouraging questions that relate to the ipseity of individual texts (and the elements that contribute to that) and, conversely, to their relationship with other literature(s), other discourses such as colonialism, feminism, cultural identity and so on. Thus, it may be concluded that one of the primary difficulties posed by Duras’ work arises from how it continually renegotiates what might be called the textual terrain (form, style, perspective etc) whilst at the same time recursively, almost obsessively attending to particular areas of human experience (and, indeed, the specific narratives that recur across different texts) and, in its diverse iterations, pushing outwards into a liminal space between text and silence, text and the void. Considering Duras’ work, in other words, always has to begin with the question of where to begin, both in terms of her oeuvre as a whole (with the early, more conventional novels, the hybrid texts of the 1970s or the often fragmentary late works?) and in terms of individual texts (where and how to initiate contact with texts that it’s possible to interpret from multiple perspectives?) The answer offered here has been to focus on a single text—in this case, one of Duras’ better known novels - and on some of its principle aesthetic specificities. With Duras, it is perhaps impossible to do otherwise. As the English poet Peter Robinson puts it in his poem ‘Towards Darkness’ - which is dedicated to the Italian poet Vittorio Sereni, himself a writer whose work

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might be compared with crepuscular liminality of Duras’: ‘I have barely begun, and the work/so soon leads into silence.’ (Robinson, 97)

Works Cited Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis. Translated by Willard R. Trask. Princeton UP, 1968. Beckett, Samuel. Worstward Ho!. Grove, 1983. Dimov, Dimitar. Ɍɸɬɸɧ. New ed., Ciela, Sofia, 2009. Duras, Marguerite. Moderato Cantabile. Translated by Richard Seaver. Calder & Boyars, 1966. —. The Lover. Translated by Barbara Bray. Harper Collins, 1985. Hill, Leslie. Marguerite Duras: Apocalyptic Desires. Routledge, 1993. Isherwood, Christopher. Goodbye to Berlin. Hogarth Press, 1939. Robinson, Peter. Collected Poems. Shearsman Books, 2017.

CHAPTER III AGENCY AND THE BLUES AESTHETIC IN ZORA NEALE HURSTON’S “SWEAT” DOKUBO MELFORD GOODHEAD Introduction “Sweat,” a blues story and Hurston’s best short story, which I will discuss here as an example of Hurston’s exercise of writerly agency in a phase of the Harlem Renaissance that was dominated by the civil-rights establishment and as a feminist story against domestic violence that invests agency in a washwoman that enables her to summon the courage to break free from fifteen years of domestic violence, was published in 1926 in the only issue of Fire!! magazine. Fire!! magazine was the magazine that seemingly came out of Langston Hughes’s unapologetic statement that the younger writers of the Harlem Renaissance would portray black life without apology either to the black middle class, who wanted them to write about the best of the race, or to white readers, who wanted them to populate their writing with stereotypes and primitives. Of the group, Hughes and Hurston embraced a style of writing that could be called a blues aesthetic, writing that is characterized by the daily struggles of the black working class, use of dialect, simple but poetic language that mimics the repetitive and ironic language of the blues, vivid imagery, striking metaphor, symbolism, euphemism, humor, pathos, and characters able to take the best punches of life and talk about it in a racial formation distinguished by a stark dissonance between the lofty declarations of the founding documents of the nation and the reality of black life. As we would see later, these are all features of “Sweat.” The story is multilayered, but written in the simple style of the blues. Written as an exercise in agency at both the authorial and story levels, the story could have turned into a typical protest story

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with little literary merit, but as Robert Hemenway, Hurston’s literary biographer, has aptly noted, the story is “remarkably complex at both narrative and symbolic levels, yet so subtly done that one at first senses only the fairly simple narrative line” (70). This complexity comes from a blues aesthetic that allows Hurston to not only exercise agency as a writer and at the level of the story, where she invests Delia with the agency to break free from fifteen years of domestic violence, but also to address with lyrical depth and in a seemingly ironic manner the concerns of the civilrights establishment about a racial formation that has consigned black people to the status of second-class citizens through the stories of Delia and Sykes. As such, the story thrives as a literary masterpiece exactly because of Hurston’s aversion for using art as propaganda, even for a noble cause like civil rights for black people, preferring rather that that point be made indirectly through a blues aesthetic that speaks to the reader at both the gut level and at the mental level. Set in Eatonville, an all-black town, separated from its white counterpart, Winter Park, by a railway track, the story is expected to be entirely about the black folk of the town. At some level, it is indeed all about the black folk of Eatonville and, specifically, about the washwoman, Delia, and her husband, Sykes; but like the blues, probed deeper, the story quickly reveals itself to be much more. On close inspection, the story reveals itself to be as much about the white folk of Winter Park across the railway tracks, as it is about the black folk of Eatonville, for despite their ensconcement in an all-black town, the black folk of Eatonville are unable to escape the power of the white folk in Winter Park, who live across the railway tracks from them. Eatonville exists as a testament to the pernicious and strangulating Jim Crow laws of the day and can only survive if its inhabitants go across the railway tracks to find employment in Winter Park. Both Delia and Sykes work in the white world, although as Barbara Ryan has rightly noted, Hurston “in/visibili[zes] Sykes’s labor” (82), no doubt to keep the focus on Delia’s struggles, both as a washwoman and as a woman suffering domestic violence. As her protagonist, Hurston has chosen a woman at the bottom of the economic ladder of American society in the deep Jim Crow South.

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However, like most Americans, then and now, Delia is intent on achieving the American Dream of owning a house as a concrete symbol of a domain over which one rules and as a testament to one’s hard work. Despite the great odds against her, she has achieved the dream of owning her own house but at an enormous cost. Fifteen years of grueling laundry work and domestic violence from Sykes have taken a toll on her body. It is a classic blues story, but it is one where the blues victim is ultimately forced to exercise agency to put an end to her abuse instead of continually finding a way to smile and keep from crying in spite of her problems.

What is the Blues Aesthetic? In his careful study of the history of the blues and jazz, Imamu Amiri Baraka traces the origin of the blues to African American work songs on the plantations. These work songs provided the environment for the emergence of the spirituals, which Baraka sees as the direct ancestor of the blues. The blues emerged into its own from the spirituals following black emancipation from slavery because with emancipation, according to Baraka, black people began to see the possibility of the resolution of their problems in the context of the secular realm in the United States, where they would no longer be treated as chattel but as citizens with a right to self-determination (63). However, following the collapse of Reconstruction and the onset of Jim Crow, black people found themselves in a situation where though free, they were not quite citizens, a situation that made it possible for the blues to quickly take root as the medium through which black people expressed their existential woes and survival in the face of those woes. In a similar vein, Steven C. Tracy writes that [F]or African-Americans, as Franklin Rosemont pointed out, the blues are “a way of life,” differentiated from the generic emotion because of the peculiar circumstances of African-American existence in the United States. A particular misery and sadness, a particular blues, unites AfricanAmericans whose common heritage—in Africa, a slavery, and a theoretical freedom—often provides a bond which is difficult for middle-class black people to break. That bond implies neither an African-American singlemindedness of attitude nor purpose in ways of dealing with the oppressive system; rather, it implies a shared need to deal with the tension created by America’s theoretical democracy in conflict with a systematic

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network of racist attitudes that were (and are) often granted the authority of law (59-60).

However, aside from being a way of life, the blues is also “an emotion, a technique, a musical form, and a song lyric” (Tracy, 59). As an emotion, it “refers to a mood of despondency and can be experienced by everyone” (Tracy, 59). As technique, musical form and lyric, the blues broke into prominence in the first decades of the twentieth century, migrating up North with Southern black people from cities like New Orleans. It is in these various iterations of the blues—as the existential condition of the black person in America in a racial formation where the theory of America’s democratic vision is different from its practice, as emotional feeling, and as technique in the construction of its lyric—that I use it to discuss “Sweat.” Onwuchekwa Jemie insightfully teases out the traits of the blues as technique in his discussion of the poetry of Hughes. Jemie writes that the technical traits of the blues that Hughes transposes from the blues into his poetry give his poetry a distinct blues flavor. As such, his “poems are stark, unadorned, crystal-clear surfaces through which may be glimpsed tremendous depths and significant human drama” (24). As song or poetry, the blues is deceptively simple, but examined closely, it is seen to be an intensely lyrical art that captures the dramatic tensions, word play, irony, innuendo, vivid imagery, metaphor, euphemism, symbolism, humor, pathos, and layers of emotional intensity that tell a vivid story. Hughes, Jemie writes, is effective as a blues poet because of the way that his blues poetry epitomizes the technical traits of the best of the blues, namely “economy, lucidity, evocativeness of imagery, and mellifluousness of movement, with a deep-rooted fidelity to the Afro-American sensibility” (30). The story of the hardworking washwoman and sufferer of domestic violence is a blues story. After fifteen years of verbally and physically abusing her, Sykes wants to get rid of Delia from the house that she had built with money from her washing in order to move in Bertha, a woman with whom he is having an adulterous affair. These are the sources of Delia’s blues in the domestic space. For fifteen years, Delia suffers the blues in silence and without resistance, which encourages Sykes to

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continue to abuse her. Despite being a repeated sufferer of domestic violence, Delia continues to thrive as a washwoman, earning enough money to build a house for herself and Sykes and a garden where she can take solace. She continues too to hope that Sykes would change his ways. However, things take a dramatic turn when he begins to flaunt his adulterous affair with Bertha in her face and to inflict other forms of psychological violence on her in order to drive her out of the house. When he fails to drive her out of the house with his verbal, physical, and emotional abuse, he resorts to an extreme measure to achieve his goal. He captures a rattlesnake and puts it in her laundry hamper in the hope that it would kill her when she opens the hamper to take out the laundry for washing. Delia escapes the trap and flees to the loft of the barn at the house. The snake leaves the open hamper and crawls into the bed that husband and wife share. Sykes returns to the house, expecting that the snake has killed Delia. When he realizes that the snake has not killed her and is on the loose, he instinctively jumps onto the bed, thinking that the snake is crawling around on the ground. The snake bites him multiple times before he kills it. He cries for Delia’s help but Delia is frozen into inaction both by the enormity of the hatred that Sykes had built in her over fifteen years of domestic violence and the stark recognition that he had tried to murder her with the snake. The story has all the traits of a great blues story, a protagonist locked into a seemingly naturalistic tale, set up by the historical and social condition of race-based caste labor and a damning domestic situation, from which it seems that the only escape is death. However, Hurston sets the story’s seeming naturalism on its head when she invests Delia with agency and in doing so insists that if the other side of the blues is ultimately about the survival of the victim of the blues, the blues condition should affect subjectivity not in the subject’s passive acceptance of her woeful lot, but in her defying the blues condition to survive through her agency.

“Sweat” and the Politics of Representation From the preceding summary of the story, it is obvious that “Sweat” is not the kind of story that the civil-rights establishment of the Harlem Renaissance had in mind when its leading representative, W.E.B. Du Bois,

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famously said that black art should be used for propaganda to achieve civil rights for black people. As such, in order to write “Sweat,” like her protagonist in the story, Hurston had to turn herself into an agent, to exercise ownership over her creative labor. Noteworthily, she published the story in Fire!! at the height of the Harlem Renaissance, in 1926, at a time when the issue of literary representation, as noted above, preoccupied the minds of the leading black intellectuals of the day, men like W. E. B. Du Bois and Charles S. Johnson, editors respectively of Crisis, the magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and Opportunity, the magazine for the National Urban League. Through these two magazines, both men, in effect, midwifed the literature of the Harlem Renaissance into being. As leaders of the civil-rights establishment, these men of culture saw “the production of exemplary racial images in collaboration with liberal white philanthropy, the robust culture industry primarily located in New York, and artists from white Bohemia” as a way to widen the cracks that had begun to appear on “the wall of racism” (Lewis, xxvi). Alain Locke, the other influential figure of the Renaissance, had published The New Negro, a term, which, as Henry Louis Gates reminds us, had been around for at least as far back as 1745; but gained new urgency in the wake of the black cultural renaissance at the dawn of the twentieth century. Du Bois, Johnson, and Locke saw the emergence of ‘a new Negro,’ an idealized, middle-class black subject and model citizen that they thought would appeal to the white imagination and make an effective case for civil rights for black people as the ideal figure for representation in black literature. As such, they were determined to push this idea of the new Negro into the white imagination and encouraged younger writers like Hurston to do so with their writing. In his essay of the same title, Locke rightly calls ‘the old Negro’ “more of a myth than a man” (112). This figure, the old Negro, Locke writes “has been a stock figure perpetuated as an historical fiction partly in innocent sentimentalism, partly in deliberate reactionism” (112). With this in mind, the civil-rights establishment saw it as its duty to destroy the myth to force white America to see that black people were not the buffoons, idiots, and lazy Sambos residing in the white imagination and given representation in enormously popular

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blackface minstrel shows. On this matter, Du Bois was the leading spokesperson for the civil-rights establishment. In his essay, “Criteria of Negro Art,” he writes unapologetically, Thus all art is propaganda and ever must be, despite the wailings of the purists. I stand in utter shamelessness and say that whatever art I have for writing has been used always for propaganda for gaining the right of black folk to love and enjoy. I do not care a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda. But I do care when propaganda is confined to one side while the other is stripped and silent (259).

Here, Du Bois makes the point that if white American persists in seeing black America through stereotypes, then black writers have a duty to demystify such stereotypes or myths through their art in order to create a space in the national imagination through which black people could press for their rights as Americans. In a response to Du Bois’s article, two years later, Locke takes issue with turning art into propaganda and expands the grounds of the debate by comparing the artistic efflorescence that was going on in Harlem with the artistic efflorescence going on elsewhere. He writes, My chief objection to propaganda, apart from its besetting sin of monotony and dis-proportion, is that it perpetuates the position of group inferiority even in crying out against it. For it lives and speaks under the shadow of a dominant majority whom it harangues, cajoles, threatens, or supplicates. It is too extroverted for balance or poise or inner dignity and self-respect. Art in the best sense is rooted in self-expression and whether naïve or sophisticated is self-contained. In our spiritual growth genius and talent must more and more choose the role of group expression, or even at times the role of free individualistic expression,—in a word must choose art and put aside propaganda (260).

Locke saw the cultural efflorescence in Harlem as comparable to similar cultural developments in Dublin and Prague at the time (114). He uses the term “folk expression” (114), regarding which he is more forthcoming when he says later in the article that “It must be increasingly recognized that the Negro has already made very substantial contributions, not only in his folk-art, music especially, which has always found appreciation, but in

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larger, though humbler and less acknowledged ways” (118). The overall point that Locke is making, especially with his use of the terms “folk expression” and “folk-art” is very clear. The Harlem Renaissance was organically rising out of the black community and giving expression to black culture in America in a way that had not been done before and the vibrancy of its expression should not be artificially burdened or weighed down with propaganda. It was in this environment of robust debates about the representation of blackness viz-a-viz the stereotypical images of blackness in the white imagination that Hurston emerged as a young black writer determined to write in her own voice as well as create art that is rooted in the black-folk cultural expressions and life from which she emerged. Hurston was a native of Eatonville, the setting of the story. The residents of the semirural all-black community were nowhere near the genteel, middle-class black people that the civil-rights establishment of the Harlem Renaissance wanted to project to white America but they represented the reality in which Hurston grew up and she, no doubt, believed that their stories had something to say to America.

“Sweat” As Artistic Rebellion “Sweat,” as such, is a product of a rebellion by Hurston, a rebellion that involved other younger writers of the Harlem Renaissance. One of the striking phenomena of the Renaissance was the way in which the writers, whether of the younger or older generation, used the medium of the essay for their literary battles about art and black representation. These essays were as such literary manifestoes shedding light on how the writers approached their art and what they thought of their role as artists. For the younger writers, the essay that played this role was Hughes’s “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.” Hughes identifies the Scylla and Charybdis facing the young writers before staking out their position. He writes, The Negro artist works against an undertow of sharp criticism and misunderstanding from his own group and unintentional bribes from the whites. “O, be respectable, write about nice people, show how good we

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Chapter III are,” say the Negroes. “Be stereotyped, don’t go too far, don’t shatter our illusions about you, don’t amuse us too seriously. We will pay you,” say the whites (34).

Instead of succumbing to these pressures, the younger writers, with Hurston and Hughes leading the way, made a decisive turn toward the despised lower-class black folk and black folk culture as inspiration for their writing. Hughes writes: We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn’t matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too. The tom-tom cries and the tom-tom laughs. If colored people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn’t matter either (36).

The result of this manifesto, as I have already pointed out, was the magazine Fire!!, where Hurston placed “Sweat.” I have taken the time to talk about the socio-political and cultural environment from which the story emerged because with it, Hurston breaks the sort of literary ground that raised questions about her commitment to black racial uplift through literary representation. Ironically, it is in this very turn toward the lives of working-class black folk and their struggles that Hurston’s critique of the racial formation of her day that consigned black people to the status of perpetual second-class citizens shines the brightest. Hemenway has noted that Hurston “arrived in New York city with one dollar and fifty cents in her purse, no job, no friends….” (9) However, she quickly found a mentor in Charles S. Johnson. He goes on to tell us that “Johnson believed that young writers like Zora Neale Hurston would help prove the cultural parity of the races” (9). As Hurston found her feet in the city, so also did she find her voice, and as she found her voice, she increasingly chafed under the art for propaganda dictates of the civil-rights establishment. Though Hughes had eloquently articulated the position of the younger writers in “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” Hurston’s own views on the subject were well known in the literary circles in which she moved, especially amongst the younger writers. Hemenway writes that “Hurston and many of her fellow Harlem Renaissance artists

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felt uncomfortable with their ‘responsibilities,’ because they believed that a propagandistic motive vitiated artistic effects” (42). Her duty as a writer, she said, was to write “a novel and not a treatise on sociology” (Hurston, qtd. in Hemenway, 42). Moreover, amongst her peers, she was the most rooted in the lifestyle and culture of the simple black folk living their lives away from the glare of the city. In the lives of these folk, she found both inspiration and material for her writing and expected her peers to do the same. This was the reason why she was baffled when she learnt that Countee Cullen and Eric Walrond were on their way to Europe to study. “What, I ask with my feet turned out, are Countee and Eric going abroad to study?” she said. “A Negro goes to white land to learn his trade!” (Hurston qtd. in Hemenway 51). Whether this opinion of Cullen and Walrond was an unfair one or not, one thing it shows is that for Hurston the refusal to use art for propaganda was not the same as turning her back on the rich cultural material that the black experience in America had furnished her as a black writer.

“Sweat” and Stereotypes In her history-influenced reading of “Sweat,” Barbara Ryan writes that Arwen Palmer Mohun’s study has found that in the early twentieth century, laundry labor was associated with “women with bum husbands, sick, drunk, or lazy” (Mohun qtd. in Ryan 73-74). Ryan also says that By the later nineteenth century, allegations of “loafing” were a racist standard. But insofar as this jab was affirmed by minstrel shows that featured black-faced males in ridiculous versions of fine attire - who had plenty of free time in which to sing, josh and boast - shabby finery in laundry art perpetuated the notion that Black men did not work if they were not seen laboring. In 1887, that notion was revived by a print that shows yet another Black man preening, again in tatters, before a Black woman who scrubs with her sleeves rolled high (76).

Ryan argues that Hurston satirizes this portrait but in a way that dangerously borders on reproducing this stereotype of the black male in her portrait of Sykes. She calls this dangerous wit (72). Indeed, Hurston does satirize the figure of the representation of the washwoman as a large woman with a big bosom in her representation of Delia as a woman that

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has been reduced to a thin, wiry woman by fifteen years of grueling labor as a washwoman. Noteworthy too is that Ryan’s reading of Hurston’s representation of Sykes goes to the heart of the debate between the civilrights establishment of the Harlem Renaissance and the younger writers of the Renaissance about representation, a topic that I will now expand on in the light of this historical representation of the laundry woman and her nogood husband, a destructive stereotype of the black male about which Ryan is concerned that some readers of “Sweat” will see Hurston as reproducing. As I have already noted, like her fellow younger writers of the Harlem Renaissance, Hurston did not want to be a prescriptive writer, who wrote according to the guidelines prescribed by the civil-rights establishment, who, above all, wanted the younger writers to present a “New Negro,” exemplary black folk of middle-class status, in their writing, not the stereotypical images of black people in the white imagination. However, the younger writers knew that as Hughes pointed out in the “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” black people, like every other people, are both beautiful and ugly (36) and the full representation of life in their writing demanded that they show both. Hurston, herself, made this point in her autobiography. She says, “Negroes are just like anybody else. Some soar. Some plod ahead. Some just make a mess and step back in it—like the rest of America and the world” (140). Mindful to present Sykes as a character that is not inspired by the violent, philandering, lazy image of the black man in the white imagination, Hurston contextualizes him intra- and extra-textually, making him, simply, a bad man and wife beater, who could come from anywhere and, as such, puts the emphasis on Sykes’s sexism and domestic violence. Extratextually, she names him for the Bill Sykes character in Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist, a very violent criminal, who murders his girlfriend, Nancy. Her Sykes’s attempt to murder his wife, Delia, is unsuccessful. The key difference in the characterization of the two women is that unlike Dickens, who creates a martyr out of Nancy, Hurston refuses to create a martyr out of Delia. Rather, she presents Delia as a woman experiencing the blues both from her grinding job as a washwoman and as a sufferer of domestic violence whose agency saves her from martyrdom. Intra-textually, she

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presents Sykes as an atypical townsman in Eatonville. As Kathryn Lee Seidel has pointed out, Hurston uses “the townspeople as a chorus who comment orally on the characters of Delia and Sykes” (115). At Joe Clarke’s store, where they gather to exchange banter and comment on the affairs of the town, Clarke says to those with him, “We oughter take Syke an’ dat stray ‘oman uh his’n down in Lake Howell swamp an’ lay on de rawhide till they cain’t say Lawd a’ mussy. He allus wuz uh ovahbearin niggar….” (44) Through the commentary of the men, therefore, Hurston makes it clear that she is not tapping into the pool of damaging stereotypes of black men in the white imagination but presenting a disagreeable character, who could come from any community—black, white, or otherwise. It is this kind of fulness of representation that the younger writers of the Harlem Renaissance did not want to sacrifice on the altar of a vision of racial uplift that demanded that they always create model black citizens in their fiction. Noteworthy, too, is the fact that Hurston is working with a blues aesthetic presenting a washwoman, who is suffering the blues, both as a washwoman and as a sufferer of domestic violence.

“Sweat” and the Blues Aesthetic In Bessie Smith’s “Washwoman’s Blues,” the washwoman laments her harsh, grinding job. “All day long I’m slavin’, all day long I’m bustin’ suds,” she laments in the first line of the first verse. Following the classic blues-line pattern, she repeats this line in the second line and introduces the variation of the end rhyme in the third line. She sings, “Gee, my hands are tired, washin’ out these dirty duds.” How harsh is the work? She begins the third verse by lamenting that she does “more work than forty’leven Gold Dust Twins,” a play on one of the brands of laundry powder of the time, which carries the offensive image of two little black children as pickaninnies on its box. The washwoman ends this verse by lamenting, “Got myself a achin’ from my head down to my chins.” Life for the washwoman was, therefore, one of daily blues. The washwoman braves this harsh life, as Angela Davis has rightly noted, because her work options as a black woman in the racial formation of the day were limited. Davis writes:

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Chapter III During the postslavery decades, the paid work most available to black women—the work that in fact was reserved for them—was housecleaning, child care, cooking and clothes-washing. Until the late 1950s the majority of African American women who worked outside their homes were maids and washerwomen. Bessie Smith’s rendition of “Washwoman’s Blues” simultaneously memorializes these millions of women and issues a cry of condemnation against the conditions under which they have worked, as well as against the society that restricts them to this type of work. (102)

Like Smith, Hurston memorializes the washwoman in Delia. Delia’s “washwoman” blues is compounded by Sykes’s marital infidelity and domestic violence. Lovalerie King has noted of him that Delia’s “source of livelihood undermines his sense of manhood” (99), a point I will elaborate on shortly. As I have noted, though, instead of making Delia a martyr, Hurston invests her with agency that enables her to stand up to Sykes when he pushes matters to a head and forces her into either being a martyr in her own house or saving her life. Seidel has said that the story “functions at one level as a documentary of the economic situation of Eatonville in the early decades of the twentieth century” (110). The town of Eatonville, she writes, was at the time that Hurston wrote the story a “twin” town to the town of Winter Park. The black folk of Eatonville went across the railway track that separated the two towns to work for the white folk of Winter Park, a vacation town famous for being a hotspot for New England vacationers during the winter months. Seidel notes that Winter Park then as now boasts brick streets, huge oaks, landscaped lakes, and large, spacious houses. To clean these houses, tend these gardens, cook the meals, and watch the children of Winter Park, residents of Eatonville made a daily exodus across the railroad tracks on which Amtrak now runs to work as domestics (111).

However, not everyone in Eatonville was able to get a job at Winter Park. Seventy percent of the women of Eatonville were employed but only twenty percent of the black men of the town were employed (113). Seidel has argued that though Sykes used to be employed in the past, at the time of the story he had stopped working and is depending “entirely on Delia for income” (112). It is difficult to support this reading from the story. In

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fact, the overwhelming evidence of the story suggests that Sykes’s problem with money is not that he is not a wage earner but that he wastes what he earns on his philandering. Hurston alludes to this when she places Delia in front of Joe Clarke’s store as Sykes is lavishing Bertha with items from the store. “Just then Delia drove past on her way home, as Sykes was ordering magnificently for Bertha. It pleased him for Delia to see” (45). If he is getting the money from Delia, it is doubtful that he will be so confrontational about spending it on Bertha and in front of her. As Ryan has rightly noted, the story does not say that Sykes is “a bum husband; instead, it indicates that Sykes is so improvident that he trifles away his earnings. This is where Hurston ran her gravest risk in that it has proved easy to miss the in/visibilizing aspects of her portrait of a Black man who labors gainfully, but does so off-stage” (81). Significantly, her characterization of Sykes as a man who earns his own money is another way that Hurston undermines the stereotype about the enormously fat, black washwoman with a bum husband. As critics, including Seidel, herself, and Lovalerie King have noted, Sykes takes out the frustration that he feels about his emasculation in a Jim Crow society and the fact that his wife washes the dirty clothes of white folk for a living on her. Seidel, for example, writes that Sykes is reflecting a lingering Adamic need to establish his home as terrain in which he too has power. He owns nothing of his own; the house legally belongs to Delia. His protest against a white-controlled labor system embodies a somber problem for black men, but Sykes’s anger and frustration cannot be directed toward the white perpetrators of his situation because he lacks the power to change the status quo (118).

He sees the dirty clothes of white folk in his home as intrusion into a sphere—the domestic space—where he is lord. Outside the domestic space, in Winter Park, where he finds work and where Jim Crow laws prevail and where even a little mistake on his part can get him lynched, there is nothing he can do about the authority of white folk over him; but the way he sees it, within his own home, within a town made up entirely of black folk, he needs no reminder of the power of white folk over him. In a similar vein, King notes that the dirty laundry of white folk, which Delia brings into their home to wash “undermines his sense of manhood” (100).

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bell hooks has notably theorized this phenomenon, of black men bringing their grievances in the white world into their homes and taking them out on their women. “[T]he black man,” she says, “who had seen himself as the loser in the all male competitive struggle with white men for status and power could show a trump card—he was the ‘real’ man because he could control ‘his’ woman” (96). With Sykes, this pathological need to control the domestic space as lord over the black woman takes a morbid turn when he brings the rattle snake into the house to murder Delia, so that he could move in Bertha. He is unhappy that fifteen years of doing the dirty laundry of white folk has reduced Delia into a skinny woman, a physical type for whom he has an aversion. “Gawd!” he tells Delia. “How Ah hates skinny wimmen” (41). The humorous and ironic language of the blues is clearly evident here. The irony is complexly layered, as a takedown of the stereotype of the black washwoman as an enormously fat woman with a huge bosom and as Sykes’s failure to recognize the fact that the grinding labor that has reduced his wife into a skinny woman is the same labor that enabled her to build their home. There is yet another level of irony: Sykes, himself, has contributed to Delia’s wasted physical frame with his physical abuse. For example, he gave Delia a “brutal beating” just two months after their wedding (41). His obsessive physical abuse of her is such that it is widely known throughout the town. As Joe Clark aptly notes, in a language full of vivid imagery, metaphor, and euphemism, all traits of a blues language and aesthetic, Sykes is one of the men “dat takes a wife lak dey do a joint uh sugar-cane. It’s round, juicy an’ sweet when dey gits it. But dey squeeze an’ grind, squeeze an’ grind an’ wring tell dey wring every drop uh pleasure dat’s in ‘em out. When dey’s satisfied dat dey is wrung dry, dey treats’em jes’ lak dey do a cane-chew. Dey throws ‘em away. Dey knows whut dey is doin’ while dey is at it, an’ hates theirselves fuh it but they keeps on hangin’ after huh tell she’s empty. Den dey hates huh fuh bein’ a cane-chew an’ in de way” (44).

As such, the toll on her of her grueling laundry work aside, Sykes has physically abused Delia until she is a husk of her former self. Displeased with the husk that he has in part created, he no longer sees the need to go to Orlando to spend his money on drink and women, he carries out the afront to his marriage right before Delia in a display of his masculinity.

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However, as I have noted, Hurston is not interested in creating a martyr out of Delia. Delia would overcome the domestic blues that Sykes has been inflicting on her throughout their fifteen years of marriage. Her ardent fear of snakes is what finally unleashes the will in her to confront Sykes to stop his abuse of her after she had meekly accepted it for fifteen years. When Sykes throws his whip at her, which falls on her like a snake, a symbolism whose referential echo of the snake in the Garden of Eden should not be lost on readers, Delia’s “habitual meekness seemed to slip from her shoulders like a blown scarf” (40). She gains the knowledge that Sykes has gone so overboard in his hatred of her that he would not stop at anything, including using the very thing she fears most in the world, to attack her psychologically. This knowledge unleashes a hitherto dormant power in her, which she puts into language. The language has the same repetitive cadence, lyricism, ironic turn, and simplicity of the language of the blues that lays hidden truths bare, especially the strength of the person suffering the blues. “Looka heah, Sykes,” she tells Sykes, “you done gone too fur. Ah been married to you fur fifteen years, and Ah been takin’ in washin’ fur fifteen years. Sweat, sweat, sweat! Work and sweat, cry and sweat, pray and sweat!” (40) When Sykes glibly dismisses her suffering and sacrifice, “She seized the iron skillet from the stove and struck a defensive pose, which act surprised him greatly, coming from her. It cowed him and he did not strike her as he usually did” (40). Delia’s surprise defiance of Sykes after fifteen years of silently suffering the blues of domestic violence from him does not force him to reflect on his shameful treatment of her. It does the opposite. He decides to up the ante. If she has decided to fight back against her abuse, then he would first torture her psychologically with a real snake before dispatching her with it to take sole possession of what she has worked for throughout the abusive marriage. Accordingly, he brings in a real snake—a rattle snake. In bringing the rattle snake into the house, he succeeds in shattering whatever remaining delusions that Delia has about his feelings for her. The scales completely fall off her eyes. Sykes, she realizes, does not love her anymore. He really means it when he says that he hates her. This epiphany destroys whatever lingering feelings she has for him. ‘“Ah hates you, Sykes,” she tells him calmly. “Ah hates you tuh de same degree dat Ah

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useter love yuh. Ah done took an’ took till mah belly is full up tuh mah neck. … Ah don’t wantuh see yuh ‘round me atall’” (48). The language here is again that of the blues aesthetic—simple, repetitive, imagistic, and metaphoric words that convey the suffering of the blues subject and the subject’s will to survive. Suffering yet another blow to his project of intimidation, Sykes ups the ante again, this time to kill her. He transfers the snake to her laundry basket, hoping that the snake would strike her and kill her when she opens the hamper. Now, an agent, who refuses to suffer domestic violence from him anymore, an agent who is determined to enjoy the fruits of her fifteen years of grueling labor as a washwoman—the house she has built and the garden that she has planted and nurtured over all those years of abuse she decides to allow Sykes’s plot to murder her to boomerang on him. On the day on which she decides to take matters into her hands to stop fifteen years of domestic violence from her husband, she also comes to the conclusion that ‘“Sometime or ruther, Sykes, like everybody else, is gointer reap his sowing”‘ (42). She escapes to the barn and when Sykes returns to the house, hoping that he had accomplished the task of murdering her, the snake kills him instead. He has, in effect, killed himself with his own hands. Ryan has raised very valid concerns about how some readers might see in Sykes the image of the black man in the white American imagination at the time of Hurston’s story. For example, just the year before Hurston published her story, Birth of a Nation, D.W. Griffith’s notoriously racist film portraying the black man as sex-crazed and violent, had been released to protests from black people. However, in exercising her artistic freedom to tell a story that is true to life—that is, the problem of men, who physically abuse and emotionally torment their wives—Hurston takes the time and space to make it clear to the reader that Sykes is not a representative black man. His fellow townsfolk of Eatonville see him as an anomaly in the town. ‘“[W]e oughter kill ‘im” is the verdict of the old man Anderson (44). So, Sykes is no representative black man. He represents one of the so many men of every race who inflict domestic violence on the women in their lives as wives and lovers. Some of these women die in the

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hands of their male tormentors, a fate that Sykes comes close to inflicting on Delia. Ryan has made note of “scenes of Delia looking to God for support— sometimes, by hymn-singing—only to take matters into her own hands when another person would have called out a warning to Sykes” (84). However, within the blues aesthetic in which Hurston tells the story, she is not interested in keeping Delia in a state of perpetual domestic blues or becoming yet another woman who dies in the hands of an abusive husband. ‘“He done beat huh ‘nough tuh kill three women”’ according to Elijah Moseley (43). As the narrator and the men of Eatonville, who gather at Joe Clarke’s store, note, Delia has given everything to the marriage. Like Hughes’s washwoman, she had worked and helped her man “when times are hard” and built her “house up from the wash tub and call it/home” (159). While for Bessie Smith’s washwoman, there is no end to the blues she suffers from the grinding work of being a washwoman, Hurston sees an end to such a life for her washwoman, a house and a garden to which she can one day retire. Against incredible odds, the washwoman, through the onerous blues work of her trade, has achieved the American Dream and she would not be a murder victim in the hands of her ungrateful husband, for she is not only a survivor, but an agent who is finally able to stand up for herself and to reject the needless blues of domestic terrorism.

Works Cited Baraka, Amiri. Blues People: Negro Music in White America. William Morrow, 1963. Davis, Angela Y. Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude “Ma” Rainy, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday. Vintage Books, 1999, 1998. Dickens, Charles. Oliver Twist. W.W. Norton & Company, 1992, 1838. Du Bois, W.E.B. “Criteria of Negro Art.” 1926. Reprinted in The New Negro: Readings on Race, Representation, and African American Culture, 1892-1938. Edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Gene Andrew Jarret. Princeton UP, 2007, pp. 260-261. 257 260. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. and Gene Andrew Jarret. “Introduction.” The New Negro: Readings on Race, Representation, and African American

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Culture, 1892-1938. Edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Gene Andrew Jarret. Princeton UP, 2007, pp. 1-20. Hemenway, Robert E. Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Biography. U of Illinois P, 1977. hooks, bell. Ain’t I A Woman: Black Women and Feminism. South End Press, 1981. Hughes, Langston. “A Song to a Negro Wash-woman.” 1925. Reprinted in The Collected Works of Langston Hughes, Volume 1: The Poems: 1921-1940. Edited by Arnold Rampersad. U of Missouri P, 2001, pp. 158-160. —. “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.” 1926. Reprinted in The Collected Works of Langston Hughes, Vol. 9: Essays on Art, Race, Politics, and World Affairs. Edited by Christopher D. De Santis. University of Missouri Press, 2002, pp. 31-36. Hurston, Zora Neale. Dust Tracks on a Road: An Autobiography. Harper Collins Publishers, 2006, 1942. —. “Sweat.” 1926. Reprinted in Spunk: The Selected Stories of Zora Neale Hurston. Turtle Island Foundation, 1985. 38-53. Jemie, Onwuchekwa. Langston Hughes: An Introduction to the Poetry. Columbia UP, 1976. King, Lovalerie. The Cambridge Introduction to Zora Neale Hurston. Cambridge University Press, 2008. Locke, Alain. “Art or Propaganda?” 1928. Reprinted in The New Negro: Readings on Race, Representation, and African American Culture, 1892-1938. Edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Gene Andrew Jarret. Princeton UP, 2007, pp. 260-261. —. “The New Negro.” 1925. Reprinted in The New Negro: Readings on Race, Representation, and African American Culture, 1892-1938. Edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Gene Andrew Jarret. Princeton UP, 2007, pp. 112-118. Ryan, Barbara. ‘“In/visible Men: Hurston, “Sweat,” and Laundry Icons.”’ American Studies, Vol. 51, No. 1/2, 2010, pp. 69-88. Seidel, Kathryn Lee. ‘“The Artist in the Kitchen: The Economics of Creativity in Hurston’s “Sweat.”’ Zora in Florida. Edited by Steve Glassman and Kathryn Lee Seidel. UPress of Florida, 1991, pp. 110120.

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Smith, Bessie. “Washwoman’s Blues.” YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GTSdWOI4TJc. The Birth of a Nation. Directed by D.W. Griffith, performances by Lillian Gish, Mae Marsh, Henry B. Walthall, Miriam Cooper, Ralph Lewis, George Siegmann, Walter Long, David W. Griffith Corp, 1915. Tracy, Steven C. Langston Hughes and the Blues. U of Illinois P, 2001.

SECTION-II HISTORY, TRAUMA AND INDIVIDUALITY

CHAPTER IV PATH BACK TO WHOLENESS, TO THE SELF: MORGAN JERKINS’ THIS WILL BE MY UNDOING TAMARA MILES “What is the black woman, and how do we go about procuring this knowledge about who she is?” (Jerkins, 40). Morgan Jerkins offers some answers to this question in her brilliant collection of essays This Will Be My Undoing: Living at the Intersection of Black and Feminist in (White) America. Race and gender are front and center of Jerkins concerns, but this is also a book about finding a place – reclaiming and filling a space in which the black body and soul can be celebrated. Furthermore, it is about faces; the ones we see in mirrors and the ones we present to others, as well as the way we perceive others. From a difficult beginning in which she longed to be a white cheerleader to greater acceptance of herself the collection Jerkins invites readers to look with her into the mirror of a black woman and vicariously share in her experiences. As a white feminist reader, I am confronted with my lack of understanding and sensitivity toward American black women. As Jerkins explains, while white women fight for our feminist rights we do so “at the expense of black people” (39). We take without giving, speak without listening, and use feminism as a way to unify without analyzing black women’s differences and complications. Jerkins describes the nice white girls who helped her toward her dream of being a cheerleader (a white cheerleader, in fact) when she was ten years old. I remember being a cheerleader for a brief period of time in third grade. But this isn’t about me, is it? I have a feeling I’m not the only white woman who hears Jerkins’ voice and begins to wonder where she, the one in the white skin, fits into the narrative?

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That’s a sign of the whole problem. Victimhood… we’re good at it. Nevertheless, Jerkins doesn’t want to exclude white feminists or white women in general from her readership. “This book is not about all women,” she explains, “but it is for all women” (20). It is not an easy read; some white women will be disturbed and possibly insulted --- they will almost certainly be uncomfortable with an inconvenient call to reckoning. Well, feeling targeted and harshly criticized is an inconvenience that black women have had to endure for a long time. I believe white women will survive it and be the better for it. We need an epiphany. Jerkins’ childhood epiphany occurred when she tried out to be a cheerleader, a position she deserved because she was capable: athletic, flexible, well-practiced and prepared. “I almost believed my body had no restrictions… I was limitless – white,” Jerkins writes about her childhood self (6). This was before the disappointing outcome of the tryouts, when she suddenly realized she was considered less than human by part of the population, and she would have to keep trying out for validation during the course of her life. “We are never in mainstream spaces without someone asking Why?” (39) she writes early in the collection, and in “A Hunger for Men’s Eyes,” she explains that black girls are “oftentimes treated as outsiders inside black spaces” (64). Outsiders everywhere, it seems. She mentions how white feminist women, “in their spaces,” use consent as a language (80), but for black women, consent is too frequently perceived as having been given in advance. We are reminded of the devastating history of sexual violence against black women and the denial of their basic human right to personal dignity. We would like to pretend that problem no longer exists. Worse, women bully other women -- use demeaning, hurtful terms traditionally used by men to control and hurt the female sex, and fail to see they have played right into patriarchal influence and manipulation. It wasn’t just white people who let Jerkins down, and who pushed her out of the spaces she wished to occupy. One problem she experienced was school bullying from another black girl named Jamirah, who caused her so much stress and humiliation that she sometimes wished she were dead. The high school administration did not take action, even when her mother contacted them. The disturbing reality is that this seems to be a common problem --- ignoring or minimizing the impact of bullying. Thank goodness,

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Jerkins had a bedrock friend, Dennis, who attempted to analyze Jamirah’s actions, who explained that they were driven by envy. “He was my saving grace, and I figured it was better to suffer in high school with him by my side than transfer to another school and start all over again” (15). She realized that the expectation was for her to toughen up -- learn to fight or at least take up for herself without stuttering. It was a “sick game” (15). Nevertheless, she made her way by also stepping voluntarily into a world of honors classes and Dooney & Burke purses. She looked down on black girls who acted out, who refused to toe the line of preppy correctness, who wanted to fight and strut. They were loud. They rolled their eyes and spoke in a string of profanity. They would not conform, and they resented her because she did. She experienced a divided loyalty. Her attitude toward these girls, she says, was reprehensible; she nurtured a “violent, anti-black girl fantasy” (17). Despite the hurt she felt toward one girl who bullied her in school, whose tone and attitude she found offensive, she knows that something of her current “agile cadence,” her passion and bravado, she owes to that encounter (19). From that “poisonous” place, a writer grew (19). In the writing, she found a way to negotiate her anger. “I know that as a black woman, I am a problem,” she explains. I am a contradiction of what it means to be human, but I am still here anyhow” (55). As a child, my daughter Jillian once made a young black woman laugh so hard at the city pool that her lounge chair collapsed. Jilli said to the woman, “You look just like the doll my daddy found in the backseat of a car at the car lot” (J. Miles, personal communication, July 10, 2000). Dolls, Jerkins tells us, are not usually so funny. She hated dolls as a child, but the Barbies were everywhere -- white Barbies with idealized bodies. Everybody wanted one. Black women’s bodies have never been treasured in the same way. Instead, they “find a way to come back to us distorted like images in fun house mirrors,” or invisible (40). For those with disabilities, the problem is even more complicated, as Jerkins addresses in “Black Girl Magic”: “Physically disabled black women are virtually invisible in our cultural landscape” (126).

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Even for Michelle Obama, who was anything but invisible, the black female body was the source of malignant commentary: Cartoons exaggerated her height, her bare-armed muscles (78). I noted the irony in Jerkins’ recollection of Obama’s visit to Princeton, when she writes, “You do not know the impact that you had on the black female student body… even while we waited with bated breath for you to return…” (109). The body is ever present in the collection’s internal conversation. Even now, she says, “We have to get our bodies back somehow… (and) find a place of refuge within them” (40). This is a problem for all women to address together, and if we are truly feminist, the weight of black women’s concerns should be on our shoulders. As she observes, it is apparently not yet enough of a feminist problem to keep some women from voting for Trump despite his own degrading remarks about women and the accusations of sexual assault (115). Of the white women who voted for him, Jerkins suggests they must have left their vaginas at home when they went to the polls (84). While the black female body and the space it inhabits are thoroughly discussed in this work, Jerkins also turns the mirror to readers and asks them to take an honest look at their own faces: the ones we see in mirrors and the ones we present to others, as well as the ways in which we perceive others. A face “is the easiest way to comfort people,” Jerkins writes, and black women are trained to comfort people, particularly men (23). The male gaze, in return, is to be coveted. “The first time I walked down a street in central Harlem and I saw a man’s head turn as I walked by, I felt an electric current inside of me...I realized that I still had a body…” (75). She came to expect that men would look at her, and she felt flattered. Still, she and other black women are both invisible and hypervisible, she claims (76), and not only to men, but to their mothers and community elders who keep them “under surveillance” (79). I am reminded as I read of Jamaica Kincaid’s short story “Girl,” in which a mother continually warns her daughter about becoming a slut -- with the added observation that becoming a slut is clearly what the girl is bent on doing. In fact, Jerkins acknowledges that her body was a demanding body, one that burned and haunted her in the night, and in private she found ways to

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deliver herself from the torment. It was the height of pleasure followed by a necessary shame (84), and it was often achieved by watching mostly white people have sex on video, a white woman’s body being mauled by more than one man at a time, “to destroy her Titanic influence” (85). In time, she admits, “I wanted to be crushed” (65). Later, she thought, “What if could not keep a man around long enough because I was a black woman who didn’t know her place?” (92). After a late-night encounter with an aggressive man in a convenience store that has her hiding at home in terror, she looks at her “unscarred body” and feels she does not deserve to feel the emotional and physical distress because it wasn’t that bad --- she wasn’t raped (72). He didn’t assault her at all, or even call her names or spit. He was just another kind of bully, and she’s actually glad she didn’t turn him into the police because she’d rather put up with him than see his face pushed down to the ground with a gun to his back. It was the old divided loyalty of her childhood come back to trouble her again. Even when she found someone to be sexual with, it was not on her terms. She felt an obligation to the man and partially acquiesced to his expectations for sex. She recalls feeling more like a mouth than a whole lover (69). This is a revealing statement given her later comment, “black women’s mouths are always a spectacle” (73). Black women and their bodies are “so problematic, so fraught, when it comes to sex” (88). In a scene from “A Hunger for Men’s Eyes,” she recalls feeling that she was invisible to the black men she hoped to attract, “destined to be both unloved and unsexed” (66). “If you are not acknowledged at all, even in the most vulgar of ways, then do you still have a body?” (76). Silence, and docility, she learned, would not save her from disastrous relationships with men (75). The time came for new mirrors. She describes coming to accept her own natural hair, the beauty of it, and how alive and sensuous she began to feel when she looked at herself naked in the mirror. “Sexuality is harnessed through black women’s manes.” (55). Finally, it is about grace: giving it and receiving it. Jamirah, the bully at school all those years ago, actually returned her valuable, lost wristlet and later told her she was beautiful. When women, white and black, finally learn to value each other and lift each other up as equals, a new body of power will arise. It will not happen

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without a conscious, deliberate effort on the part of white feminists to recognize themselves as part of the problem, and to listen deeply to the voices of women like Morgan Jerkins.

Works Cited Jerkins, Morgan. This Will Be My Undoing: Living at the Intersection of Black, Female, and Feminist in (White) America. Harper Perennial, 2018. Kincaid, Jamaica. “Girl.” The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Short Stories. Edited by Tobias Wolff, Vintage, 1994, pp. 306-07.

CHAPTER V THE DYNAMICS OF POLYPHONY IN VOCALIZING THE TRAUMA IN GOD HELP THE CHILD RAFSEENA M. “Atrocities, however, refuse to be buried. Equally as powerful as the desire to deny atrocities is the conviction that denial does not work” (Trauma 12). Reading Toni Morrison’s last novel God Help the Child, published in 2015, offers the story of the journey of a black girl Bride from her post traumatic stress disorder to reclaim her identity by embracing her blackness as the symbol of her ontological reality. Using the technique of polyphony, Morrison has shaped God Help the Child to address an issue which has been the focus of her first novel The Bluest Eye but the novel ends on a positive note with the emergence of a re-discovered Bride, free from her traumatic past. This article attempts to address how the author has used the technique of polyphonic voices to enable the central character Bride to overcome the post-traumatic stress disorder which she is living through. The minimal intervention of the author also enhances the significance of the polyphonic technique which enables the central character to use the platform of the novel to have a serious contemplation on the consequences of traumatic event in her ontological and psychological set up. A frustrated, abjected and perverse narrative focusing on the effects of individual trauma on Bride, the femme persona of God Help the Child, begins thus, “It’s not my fault. So you can’t blame me. I didn’t do it and have no idea how it happened. It didn’t take more than an hour after they pulled her out from between my legs to realize something was wrong. Really wrong. She was so black she sacred me. Midnight black, Sudanese black” (11). Here begins the story of a disavowed black girl. Sweetness’

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words clearly imply that the birth of Lula Ann Bridewell was something wrong and that she does not have any responsibility in Lula being born as a black child. Sweetness, the mother, thus shows aversion to her own child from the moment of her birth. The prejudice that Sweetness feeds within herself towards Bride could be counted as having been generated from the deep-rooted color consciousness which runs deeply in the African American context. It goes on to attain a collective experience and when it is redirected on to Bride, Bride becomes a victim of collective trauma too paradoxically, since the collective experience is again streamlined to be borne by Bride alone. Lula Ann Bridewell, who does not have any right in deciding her class, race as well as her gender which otherwise, is subjected to conditions of hereditary origin, born to Sweetness and Louis, an African American “light-skinned” couple, steps into a world of abjection and hatred. Her skin color, taken as a signifier of her racial identity, sends the couple into dissolution of their marital relationship. Since then, Lula had been taught by her mother to address her as “sweetness” instead of “Mother” or “Mama” (13). It can be said that there has been no effort on the part of Sweetness to establish an emotional proximity with her child. Motherhood, often perceived as a cultural construct, is an experience which, irrespective of any social, cultural, racial and class difference, makes every woman attain fullness in their feminine attributes. Morrison, as well as many other African American writers, perceives black motherhood as a “site of power for black women” (O’Reilly 4). Just like the atypical mother-daughter relationship explored by Morrison in The Bluest Eye, here too we have an atypical mother-daughter relationship between Lula and Sweetness, with the mother embracing toxic motherhood which worsens the trauma experienced by Lula, unknown to herself. Black mothers need not adhere to the set patterns of culturally defined notions of black motherhood. As Collins has observed, “Black motherhood can be rewarding, but it can also extract high personal cost. The range of Black women’s reactions to motherhood and the ambivalence that many Black women feel about mothering reflect motherhood’s contradictory nature” (133). Sweetness too experiences ambivalence within herself since

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she does not feel any attachment to Lula during her childhood but when she becomes the marketing manager at Sylvia Inc., a cosmetics industry, she feels that it is Lula’s responsibility to look after her mother and hence starts writing letters to Lula informing her about her medical expenses thereby indirectly demanding Lula’s financial assistance for her sustenance during her old age. Sweetness never feels any regret nor does she experience any guilt, conscious in bringing out a toxic version of her motherhood since she justifies her action thus, “Very careful in how I raised her. I had to be strict, very strict. Lula Ann needed to learn how to behave, how to keep her head down and not to make trouble” (God 14). Sweetness stands ironically as an exception to the reified black motherhood which the African American culture saw as the formative power in empowering the black children to strongly resist all those elements of marginalization and demarcation based on their racial affinity. Ghasemi in ‘Negotiating Black Motherhood in Toni Morrison’s Novels’ articulates the ontological reality of black mothers thus, “True to life and challenging the socially idealized roles of mothers, Morrison’s mothers are not passive, but face the bitter realities of racial existence, which is much too present in Morrison’s novels” (239). Sweetness in God Help the Child too does not fall an exception to what black mothers have to face in their life. The characterization of Sweetness may stand as an anomaly to the images of the black mothers that Morrison has constructed through her essentially black world, since it is true that Sweetness never fulfilled her responsibility of being a black mother in its true essence. Motherhood in Toni Morrison’s earlier works could be seen as “a site of power and resistance from which women can challenge racial oppression” (Ramírez 108). Sweetness from the beginning of Lula’s childhood treats Lula as an abjected child since she feels it was because of Lula’s skin color that she had to endure the various miseries of being a single mother. As noted by Julia Kristeva in Powers of Horror, The abject has only one quality of the object—that of being opposed to I. If the object, however, through its opposition, settles me within the fragile texture of a desire for meaning, which, as a matter of fact, makes me ceaselessly and infinitely homologous to it, what is abject, on the contrary,

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the jettisoned object, is radically excluded and draws me toward the place where meaning collapses. (1, 2)

Lula’s black body is made to be the abjected object since it offers an overwhelming opposition to the light skinned body of Sweetness and hence Lula becomes an abjected object; an object of repulsion and rejection. Resisting stereotypical black motherhood, Sweetness is depicted as a mother “who’s been poisoned by that strain of color and class anxiety still present in black communities” (Walker 2015). Sweetness, who passed easily as a light-skinned African American women, embodies a form of motherhood which is toxic as well as self-destructive. Sweetness, whose identity is that of a liminal status, is herself a victim of racial consciousness. Being proud of her light-skinned body and complacent of having no connection of black mother-line, Sweetness had internalized the patriarchally sanctioned racist discourse which drives her to embrace toxic motherhood fuelled by her self-hatred and low self-esteem. Though she attempts to escape her black identity, she is entrapped within the role of her motherhood, mothering a blue-black girl. Sweetness’ treatment of Lula with a sense of failure and abjection has had its asymptomatic influence on Lula when she was a child herself. She goes to the extent of giving a false testimony against Sofia Huxley for charges against child molestation hoping to get loved by her mother. She longed for her mother’s touch so badly that she recalls, “I used to pray she would slap my face or spank me just to feel her touch. I made little mistakes deliberately, but she had ways to punish me without touching the skin she hated—bed without supper, lock me in my room—but her screaming at me was worst” (God 30, 31). Lula as a love bereft child was never able to identify how her psyche has been affected until she is able to develop a sense of identification with herself. The events which henceforth unfold one by one aggravate the traumatic experience in Bride which is coupled with the excessive authoritarian toxic motherhood of Sweetness. She was able to identify the feeling of hatred that Sweetness had towards her when she could recollect her memories of her childhood, “Distaste was all over her face when I was little and she

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had to bathe me” (God 30). Upon witnessing the sexual abuse done by Mr. Leigh, the owner of their house, to a boy in the neighbourhood, Lula reports the event to her mother expecting her mother to take her words seriously. But the way in which Sweetness silences her leaves a deep wound in her. What has to be noticed here is that the response of Sweetness actually heightens Lula’s traumatic experience. Trauma, as implied originally in Freud’s text to mean “a wound of the mind […] is not locatable in the simple violent or original event in an individual’s past, but rather in the way that its very assimilated nature – the way it was precisely not known in the first instance – returns to haunt the survivor later on” (Caruth 3, 4). Trauma can be either interpersonal or intrapersonal. In God Help the Child, what Bride experiences is a traumatic event, which can be categorized as interpersonal, which leaves a deep scar in Bride’s growth. Brooklyn, Booker and Rain too have their own traumatic past which in fact helps in deciphering the magnitude of the traumatic encounter of Bride. Unlike the kids of her age, she was not allowed to pursue her studies in a university, instead she was “encouraged to take business courses,” (God 33) which she did not attend. At the age of sixteen, Lula Ann Bridewell “dropped that dumb countryfied name” (God 17) as soon as she left her high school. Bride indeed did not feel any emotional attachment to her mother since when she grows up, she realizes that the love Sweetness showed her on the day, when she recorded her statement as a witness against Sofia Huxley, the black teacher, for charges of child molestation. Bride, recognizes that the affection which Sweetness expressed on that day was indeed phony and Sweetness who never cared for her daughter in earnest could be equated to perform the role of an absent mother. This realization could be seen as the primary reason for the development of the PTSD in Bride. In fact, Sweetness expressed only parental alienation to Bride which had its adverse effect upon Bride in the later stages of her life, especially when it comes to the world of her social relations. Bride, as a child victim, experiences borderline personality disorder which is one of the symptoms of the remnants of a severe PTSD. She faces problems in establishing an intimate life experience with Booker, her

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lover, and she also wavers between her suppressed identity and her visible identity. With Booker, Bride feels happy as well as comfortable unlike the other men who treated her for the commodity value that she had attached to her blackness. Booker never reminded her of her past through any offensive action nor did she experience any issue with Booker until one day he left her by saying that she is not the woman he wants, a statement which underrates the notion of abjection at a personal level. Bride becomes the unwanted person again. By linking her inability to establish an intimate life with Booker, Bride enters into a zone of uncertainties. To add on to her isolated living structure, her meeting with Sofia lets her come face to face with her suppressed identity, that of a helpless child. The disguise of being a successful black lady immediately turns into rubbles when she realizes that just like Booker had discarded, she had been discarded by Sofia also. She seeks solace in alcohol and she experiences remarkable changes in her body hinting at the return to her being a child again. She also avoids herself from having any social connections thereby moving deeper into PTSD. Throughout God Help the Child, Bride is shown to have associations only with few people; Brooklyn and Booker to count among the closest to her and Sofia Huxley, whose image constantly makes Bride experience guilt within herself. The traumatized childhood experienced by Bride also leaves her incapable of associating herself easily with Booker and she struggles to decipher the reasons behind Booker leaving her. In fact, what Bride goes through in her life is purely individual trauma, but the rejection by Booker can be seen as standing parallel to the rejection Bride experienced at the hands of her parents, especially her father. The absent father figure has indirect influences upon Bride which leaves her handicapped in understanding the ways of the men. Being subjected to maternal violence, which is invariably linked to the interpersonal traumatic event, the victim’s experience turns out to be very subjective as well as deeply psychological. Bride experiences a sense of detachment from her mother which enables her to decide to make her own identity by pursuing a career where, upon the suggestion of Jeri, her friend, she sells her blackness in the cosmetics industry thereby stressing that black is beautiful. Though, Bride’s decision when looked at from the

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perspective of a traumatized victim leaves her at a disadvantage of having not experienced any parental love and care, the depth of the wound she inflicted at the hands of her mother was never forgettable. She never visited her let alone sends her financial assistance from time to time which she does out of her good will. Decoding the traumatic events endured by Bride, it could be perceived that her journey to establish her individuality is triggered only when she began to the see the world not as defined by others but as she wanted to see it. With the help of Jeri, she enters a different world and she is able to redefine the contours of black beauty. Her success can be taken as very decisive one since it is only then that she is able to realize the toxic world she had shared with her mother; where she is the othered other of Sweetness. But, as noted by Judith Herman, the victims “experience becomes unspeakable” (19). So too is Bride’s. Bride was still the vulnerable victim. A victim of a traumatic event need not necessarily remain a victim throughout his/her life. Various events may lead the victim to have such painful experience. However, the basic requirement for any trauma victim is to embrace the journey to recovery since “recovery […] is based upon the empowerment of the survivor and the creation of new connections. Recovery can take place only within the context of relationships; it cannot occur in isolation” (Herman 156). Bride, as a child victim who has been psychologically traumatized, also begins her journey to recovery initially by empowering herself by becoming independent and with the help of the newly established relationships with Brooklyn, Booker, Sofia and Rain. Herman has truly noted that a trauma victim “must be the author and arbiter of her own recovery” (Trauma 156). Bride re-creates herself primarily by discarding the countrifying name that she was given by her mother. Settling for the name “Bride, with nothing anybody needs to say before or after that one memorable syllable” Bride was set on walking herself on the road to recovery (God 32). The stigma gone with the old name, Bride began to make a space entirely different from the one which she was habituated with. The newly defined space, where her identity was not the Sudanese black as her mother named it, had remade Bride, “True

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or not, it made me, remade me” (34). She became “the name for a product line. YOU, GIRL” (God 32). She was the icon of the new black. Bride’s sojourn to embrace recovery from her traumatic past would not have been possible without some strong relationships that she had established in her new life. Bride’s relationship with Brooklyn is one of the most prominent relationship which helps Bride in recovering her agonized self as well as Brooklyn is chosen as the first person to whom she conveys the dark secrets behind her traumatic condition which is related to her false testification against Sofia. The relationship between Bride and Brooklyn, if analyzed, provides the readers with a hue of lesbianism. More than being close friends, they have made a space for themselves which enables them to fight their PTSDs in their own manner. Their relationship speaks of love and care as is explicit in the scene where Bride is taken to the hospital by Brooklyn after getting beaten up by Sofia. They address one another as “my girlfriend” (God 40, 42) and Bride knows at her heart that Brooklyn will support her no matter what happens, “[…] Brooklyn, the one person I can trust. Completely” (God 24). A very ironic relationship is what the readers get to see in Bride-Sofia pair. Though it is known that Sofia had been sentenced to 15 years of imprisonment because of Bride’s statement as a witness of child abuse against her, Bride’s confession to Brooklyn and Booker later reveals that Bride was constantly pricked by her guilt consciousness since she was directly or indirectly the reason for making Sofia lose the prime years of her life. Though she tries to make up for the loss she incurred to Sofia, Sofia beats her up mercilessly. Bride, who otherwise is the bold black girl, lies helplessly to be beaten up. The effects of PTSD are voiced by Bride thus, “Memory is the worst thing about healing” (God 29). How much hard she attempts to forget her past and try to heal her wounds, bride realizes that her memory would not allow her to completely heal those deep wounds in her mind since she would be constantly reminded of her past by the channels of her own memory. It could be said that the encounter with Sofia actually provides Bride with an outlet to free herself. As aptly said by Sofia, “[…] freedom is never free. You have to fight for it. Work for it and make sure you are able to handle it. […] the release of

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tears unshed for fifteen years. No more bottling up. No more filth” (God 57). Having experienced a traumatic childhood is what connects Bride and Booker to form a pair in the later part of the novel. In her pursuit for a new identity, she was also having the chances to experiment with her life. Many men came to her life, but she was met with disappointments only since what counted more at the end of the day was that she was a black woman. Men were definitely mad at the redefined beauty concept of Bride. But, it was Booker Starbern who could really feel her experience since he too had undergone the trauma of his brother’s death. Booker liked Bride for her lack of interest in his private life. He even felt anguished at the thought of the pain that Bride had to endure till she met him. The truth about Booker and his past gets revealed to Bride only later when she hunts him down and gets to know more about him from his aunt Queen Olive. Bride’s confession about her sense of attachment to Sofia was out of her guilt in fact helped Bride to recover from her traumatic past, “Having confessed Lula Ann’s sins she felt new born. No longer forced to relive, no, outlive the disdain of her mother and the abandonment of her father” (God 121). Bride is able to make herself available at service for the help of Aunt Queen, who was hospitalized upon getting burnt inside her home. She joined Booker in his mourning at the death of his aunt. The recovery of Bride from PTSD finds its summation when she informs Booker that she is pregnant and the baby is his. No longer able to lose the ones whom he loved in his life, Booker did not want to lose Bride, the third person whom he loved. Booker’s words, “It’s ours” which signaled that he wants both Bride and their child to be with him makes Bride feel to be united with Booker. Both of them look forward to the future with hope thus, “A child. New life. Immune to evil or illness, protected from kidnap, rape, racism, insult, hurt, self-loathing, abandonment. Error-free. All goodness. Minus wrath” (God 131). Her pain is never articulated until she pays for her guilt feeling by getting beaten up by Sofia. She confesses the whole event to Brooklyn, her close friend. It is only then that Bride could come to terms with her traumatic

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past. In the whole narrative, Bride goes down memory lane a couple of times which is in itself a painful act. However, she is able to reconcile herself when she identifies that the balm to heal her disturbed sense of self rests within herself. The hurt that she had experienced can be healed only when it is lived through again since her lived experience stands synonymous to her traumatic past. Polyphonic narratives as explained by Bakhtin, is a double- voiced discourse, which appropriates individual voices into its narrative with the authorial voice occupying only a non-interfering position in unveiling its narrative. The structural pattern of God Help the Child has definite echoes of the presence of polyphonic voices in making the narrative possible. A cursory analysis of Bride’s narration takes us back to her childhood days where with the help of her memories she graphically portrays how her childhood had been inscribed with the traumatic experiences of her toxic mother. A good amount of her narrative focuses on her observation of her mother, their relationship and how it has had its psychological underpinnings in the reserved development of her character and how she lives with the realization of her mother’s hatred. Bride, while recalling her encounter with Sofia, lets the readers have a view into her actions as a child. Bride recalls with pain that she wished her mother would be like other black mothers who loved her. Sofia, who was falsely accused by her, stands as the representative of the cultural impasse which Bride is forced to live with under her poisonous mother’s control. Bride’s self- reflexive narrative gets more significance when it comes to her relationships with Brooklyn and Booker. With Brooklyn, Bride felt safe and it can also be surmised that Brooklyn is the alter-ego of Bride. Bride’s sense of complacency that Brooklyn will be with her as her biggest support in fact helps her in facing some of the elements of PTSD. The selfreflexive narrative becomes too intense when Bride starts pondering on her relationship with Booker. Her connection with Booker has had its ups and downs, finally enabling her to come to terms with her PTSD. Focusing on how Bride reflects on her life through the fragmented narrative that she spins with the help of her memory as well as her relationships, it could be clearly asserted that Bride was in fact using her voice in different ways to

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summate her experiences. Through her polyphonic narrative she was opening up the opportunity to look at herself with the aid of others. The narratives of Brooklyn, Booker, Rain, Sofia and Sweetness also focus on their individual experiences. Brooklyn’s past is brought forth as her memory where she recounts how she was victimized by her uncle and how she worked hard to make a life of her own at a young age after moving away from her family. Booker’s traumatic past, running parallel to Bride’s, is one where his brother’s murder becomes elemental in developing a traumatic experience for him with his family. Booker is able to overcome his past only with the help of Bride when both of them expect to have a future together. Rain, the little girl whom Bride meets after her accident, too has a sad story to convey where her mother figure is mutilated for the monstrosity that she does to Rain. Resisting her mother’s plans to subject Rain to sexual abuse, Rain is forced to leave her house. With Sofia, the narrative of pain is more painful since she becomes doubly victimized. She had to lose the prime years of her life without any fault of hers and she is able to surpass her trauma only when she beats Bride to her heart’s content. Of all the parallel narratives, the narrative by Sweetness stands an anomaly to what trauma narrative means. Sweetness and her actions are so vile that her narrative only helps the readers to assess the degree of her negative image as a toxic mother. Toni Morrison, the author of God Help the Child, takes upon the role of the self-conscious authorial voice so as to enable a narrative where multiple voices come together to reflect on the most important themes of the novel. By granting freedom to the different characters, thereby opening up the space of the fiction to serve as the platform, where different narrative voices meet and have a reflection upon their individual experiences with the narrative focusing on Bride at a holistic level, including Bride’s narrative about her past, her present and her future plans, Morrison makes use of polyphonic narrative to help Bride come out the post-traumatic stress disorder that she has been experiencing since her childhood.

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Works Cited Bakhtin, Mikhail. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Edited and translated by Caryl Emerson. U of Minnesota P, 1984. Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. The John Hopkins UP, 1996. Collins, Patricia Hill. Black Feminist Thought, Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. Unwin Hyman, 1990. Ghasemi, Parvin. “Negotiating Black Motherhood in Toni Morrison’s Novels.” CLA Journal, vol. 53, no. 3, pp. 235-253, 2010. Herman, Judith. Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence-From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. Basic Books, 1992. Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: Essays on Abjection. Translated by Leon S Roudiez, Columbia U P, 1982. Morrison, Toni. God Help the Child. Knopf, 2015. O’Reilly, Andrea. “A Politics of the Heart: Toni Morrison’s Theory of Motherhood as a Site of Power and Motherwork as Concerned with the Empowerment of the Children.” Toni Morrison and Motherhood: A Politics of the Heart. State U of New York P, 2004. Ramírez, Manuela López. “What Do You Do to Children Matters: Toxic Motherhood in Toni Morrison’s God Help the Child.” The Grove: Working Papers on English Studies, vol. 22, pp. 107-119, 2015. DOI: 10.17561/grove.v/0i22.2700. Walker, Kara. Toni Morrison’s God Help the Child: A Review. The New York Times, 2015. www.nytimes.com/2015/04/19/books/review/tonimorrisons-god-help-the-child.html.

CHAPTER VI THE HISTORICO-POLITICAL IMAGINARY IN MARTA PETREU’S RURAL NOVEL IONUCU POP The autochthonous village in the Romanian contemporary novel suffers two kinds of death. The first one is of a historico-political nature and turns its face towards the past. Seemingly it falls on the shoulders of totalitarianism and therefore the Romanian village is often rewritten from an anti-communist perspective. A high percentage of the rural novels written in Romania after 1989 sympathize with such a vision, sometimes committing the sin of being foreseeably reductive. To use the words of researcher Cosmin Borza, whose studies on the subject of Romanian rural literature are truly remarkable: The post-apocalyptic historical perspective becomes an underlying trope of these texts, who thus falls victim to new ideological manipulations of the rural imaginary, this time in accordance to the post-communist political environment as the degradation of the rural communities is regarded as tantamount to the abuses of the collectivization, the pre-communist village becomes—despite the wealth of historical, economic and social evidence—a projection of the best of the possible rural worlds” (Borza, 34). However, there are important examples of more nuanced perspectives, which will further be seen. The second death of the village may be tied to the imaginary of the transition, where the phenomenon of immigration plays a leading role, re-oriented, this time, towards the capitalist society. Such devastations of the rural may be compensated for on other “ontological” levels, one might say, since the supernatural dimension (of folkloric-mythological origin) of the rural, bearing the mark of magical realism, repopulates the village. Having such an intimate connection with identity and nationality, the rural environment as it appears in literature almost always defines itself in

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relation to the historical past. The Romanian village carries within itself a never-ending battle between progress, historical trauma and conservation. In Romanian literature after the 1989 Revolution, the obsession with the past is a constant factor which necessarily extends over the rural, usually chosen as the representative par excellence of “the past”—be it memorial or “immemorial”. Imagining the Romanian village in literature requires the presence of a politico-historical inventory which necessarily enters its intimate structure. In other words, the autochthonous village in Romanian contemporary literature has its face turned towards the past. Its historical advancement is walked “backwards”—as the Roman god Janus would if over his future-oriented face a veil of mourning were to lie. The effect of such a depiction of the village is not a very different one from that which the authors of rural-themed literature appealed to during the communist regime: “Signalling the death of the traditional village and the disappearance of ‘the archetypical man’, the rural literature becomes society’s agonizing self-reflection” 1 (Cordo‫܈‬, 196) in the words of Sanda Cordo‫܈‬. This subversive attitude in the past generates a dystopian image of the rural environment in the present, sometimes used in a programmatic, anticommunist fashion. The fact that the national village in Romanian contemporary literature presents unresolved traumas regarding its history is demonstrated by the great extent to which the past historical periods occupy in the architecture of most rural novels. Ample projects attempt to render diachronic images, communitarian histories and genealogies which stretch over an entire century. Eloquent in this regard are the novels The Book of Numbers (Cartea numerilor) by Florina Ilis and Marta Petreu’s At Home, on the Field of Armageddon, (Acasă, pe Cîmpia Armaghedonului), two memorable appearances in contemporary Romanian literature. Although both these examples possess a contemporary component (i.e. the years after the 1989 Revolution up to the extreme contemporaneity of today), the novels depict a present of writing quite underdeveloped compared to the amplitude of nuances that characterize the reconstruction of previous historical periods. 1

„Consacrând moartea satului tradi‫܊‬ional ‫܈‬i dispari‫܊‬ia «omului arhaic», această literatură rurală restituie, de fapt, întregii societă‫܊‬i propria imagine agonică”. All translation of Romanian scientific references was made by the author of the article.

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A similar case, although without such an openly historical stake can be found in Ioana Nicolae’s The Book of Reghina (Cartea Reghinei). Some contemporary rural novels don’t even dare venture in the post-revolution Romania. Such is the case of Ion Lăncrănjan’s How Peasants Die (Cum mor аăranii) (which adopts the “obsessive decade” novel formula) or that of Alexandru Vlad’s Bitter Rains (Ploile amare) (2011), where the action takes place in the 1970s and the 1950s. In Bogdan Popescu’s Whoever Falls Asleep Last (Cine adoarme ultimul) (2007) time oscillates between memories from the communist regime and the “reality” after the decollectivization. Novels that aim to document the transition period such as Dinu Săraru’s Murder for Land (Crimă pentru pământ) in the 90s, or Flickers (Pâlpâiri) by Dan Lungu in 2018 also dedicate truly significant portions to evoking memories of the communist regime. The political imaginary can be linked to the historiographical aspect of the novels At Home, on the Field of Armageddon and The Book of Numbers. Both volumes have in common a genealogic trail, more ample in the project of Florina Ilis, more concentrated in that of Marta Petreu. Simultaneously with the minor, familial history within the two novels a major history unfolds: that of great political changes in the Romanian world. Marta Petreu’s 2011 novel (later reissued in 2019 at Polirom) is a unique appearance in the context of contemporary Romanian rural novels. In a way the volume anticipates the ample project of Florina Ilis (The Book of Numbers) regarding the will to reconstruct a genealogical monograph of a Transylvanian peasant family stretching over almost a century. A major difference between the two projects lies in the fact that the family in Marta Petreu’s novel does not intend to be an example that is symptomatic for all Transylvanian rurality. The spiritual circumstances and the uniqueness of the narrative perspective particularize the “case” of the Vălean family to the point of singularity. Another theme that ties the two aforementioned volumes is memory and its mechanics. The rural novel often seems to instrumentalize this overarching trope. Remembrance, though in the service of a genealogic investigation, implies sharing into the historicopolitical imaginary characteristic of a certain society.

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When the novel was first published, critics welcomed (some surprised, other less so) Marta Petreu’s “newfound” skill in the genre of the novel, after an already solid career in poetry and essay writing. The coherence with the rest of the author’s work is given “by a masochistic lucidity, almost self-destructive” 2 (Goldi‫ )܈‬to be found in the autobiographical narration At Home, on the Field of Armageddon. Another particular note of the novel is the fact that, narrator Tabita Vălean’s childhood village does not stay anonymous (as is the case with Flickers, The Book of Numbers, Bitter Rains etc.), nor purely fictional (as is the case with “The Village of Saints” from Whoever Falls Asleep Last). The coordinates of the village are described rigorously, although they lead away from an exact geographical reality, reminding the Romanian reader of the famous entrance to Pripas3, the village of Liviu Rebreanu’s Ion, one of the greatest milestones in Romanian rural literature: There is no sadder landscape than that of the Transylvanian Plain from autumn to spring. Over the large plateau between the Some‫ ܈‬River and Sără‫܊‬ii Vallry, between Mărători and Pîgli‫܈‬ei Valley, Cutca sprawls over the sky like a big lizard. It seems to sit on the world’s top. The village is three kilometres from the main road and from the train tracks and follows upwards, from the plateau onwards, from south towards north, the course of the Some‫ ܈‬River to the valley.4 (Petreu, 19-20)

The description of the geographical area surrounding Cutca stretches over multiple pages and multiple historical periods. Unlike other rural novels in which the placement of the village in nature guarantees an idyllic setting, the landscape of Cutca is seen as sordid, repulsive, a representative part of the Transylvanian Plain which becomes the Armageddon Plain:

2

„de o luciditate masochistă, aproape autodistructivă”. I must mention that the connection between Martei Petreu’s text and the famous novel of Rebreanu was drawn to our attention by Sanda Cordo‫ ܈‬in the article The descendants of Liviu Rebreanu. 4 „Nu există peisaj mai trist decât Câmpia Transilvaniei, din toamnă până-n primăvară. Pe platoul larg dintre Some‫܈ ܈‬i Vala Sără‫܊‬ii, între Mărători ‫܈‬i Valea Pîgli‫܈‬ei, Cutca se lă‫܊‬e‫܈‬te spre cer ca o ‫܈‬opârlă mare. Pare a‫܈‬ezată pe capacul lumii. Satul e la 3 kilometri de drumul ‫܊‬ării ‫܈‬i de calea ferată ‫܈‬i urmează de sus, de pe platou, în lung, dinspre sud spre nord, cursul Some‫܈‬ului din vale”. All translation from Marta Petreu was realised by Andreea Iulia Scridon. 3

94

Chapter VI Beneath the smoky-grey sky, which serves as a cap of wet ash, bevelled and barren hills show their wounds of erosion. It’s hard to say who is the more sullen, the leechy sky or the earth eaten by ringworms in which the great one drips his color. On dry frost, as far as the eye can see, there are only barren hills. The Valley of Lamentation and Remembrance is right here.5 (25)

Martei Petreu’s novel does not follow a logical course of action. At Home, on the Field of Armageddon takes the form of “a dark, circular and obsessive confession, where the poet works side by side with the essayist in order to give shape to a world only half real”6 (Goldi‫)܈‬. The circularity of the novel was often mentioned in connection with the funeral of the important character Mària, the terrible mother of Tabita, Ana and Tinu. Critic Sanda Cordo‫ ܈‬alone has noticed the fact that the circularity is rather imperfect because: “although written after the mother’s death (and the critics have underlined that she is the memorable character of the book), At Home, on the Field of Armageddon is sealed in the frame of the father, marking at the beginning and at the end, the calendar of his death. Thus, at her mother’s funeral (therefore, at the beginning of the book), Tabita remembers that ‘Ticu was buried after the Jehovah’s Witnesses rite, in a bright, honey and gold light, Tuesday, September 3, 1974’ (8), for the novel to end with a telephone conversation between the same Tabita and her brother, Tinu, who is challenged to state the precise date, noted afterwards at the end of the book: September 3. Thus, an implicit commemoration of the father’s death is made”7 (Cordo‫)܈‬. The genealogic

5

„Sub cerul vânăt-cenu‫܈‬tiu ca un capac de cenu‫܈‬ă udă, dealurile te‫܈‬ite ‫܈‬i sterpe î‫܈‬i arată rănile de eroziune. Nu po‫܊‬i ‫܈‬ti ce e mai posac, cerul le‫܈‬ios sau pământul mâncat de pecingine în care înaltul î‫܈‬i prelinge culoarea. Pe ger uscat, cât vezi cu ochii sânt numai dealuri sterpe. Valea Plângerii ‫܈‬i-a amintirii aici se află”. 6 „confesiune întunecată, circulară ‫܈‬i obsesivă, in care poeta lucrează cot la cot cu eseista pentru a da contur unei lumi numai pe jumătate reale”. 7 „deúi scris după moartea mamei (iar criticii au subliniat că aceasta este personajul memorabil al cărĠii), Acasă, pe Câmpia Armaghedonului este pecetluit în rama tatălui, marcându-se, la început úi la sfârúit, calendarul morĠii sale. Astfel, la înmormântarea mamei (aúadar, în debutul cărĠii), Tabita îúi aminteúte că «Ticu a fost înmormântat după ritual iehovist, într-o lumină strălucitoare, numai miere úi aur, marĠi, 3 septembrie 1974» (p. 8), pentru ca finalul romanului să se încheie cu o convorbire telefonică între aceeaúi Tabita úi fratele ei, Tinu, care e provocat să

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trail starts from Indrei Sucutărdean, Mària’s father, which is why the other characters refer to him as Tica. As opposed to Ticu, who is Tabita’s father, Augustin Vălean. Tica’s role as a founder is twofold. On one hand, Indrei represents Transylvania before the Great Union of 1918: He worked for the Court, caring for the count’s horses. One day, because he hadn’t groomed them properly, the administrator shot him with a hunting rifle in the leg. A loading of lead, an instance of prolonged feudal Hungarian Transylvania, an occurrence from 1906. He was 23 years old, born in 1883.8 (28)

On the other hand, Tica is responsible for the religious reform that would change the face of an entire village and profoundly affect the destiny of the narrator’s family: In a Greek-Catholic village, immediately after the First World War, Tica brought from Cluj, where he drove a cart, a novelty: Jehovism. He was Jehovah’s first watchman. Following his model, others later brought other neo-Protestant beliefs and the village was filled with Baptists, Adventists, Pentecostals, so Cutca had become anything, but it could certainly not be considered a Greek Catholic or Orthodox center any longer.9 (30)

However, Indrei failed to persuade his daughter, Mària, just as the future convert, Augustine, will not be able to indoctrinate Tabita. These terrible confessional asynchronizations, doubled by a catastrophic failure in the emotional expression of Ticu and Mica, would generate an apocalyptic atmosphere in the family life of the Vălean family, marking the childhood of Tabita and her siblings. From the beginning of the marriage, the incompatibility of Augustine and Mary is striking. The most frustrating rostească data zilei, notată, apoi, úi în finalul cărĠii: 3 septembrie. E realizată, astfel, o comemorare implicită a morĠii tatălui”. 8 „era angajat la Curte, îngrijea caii grofului. Într-o zi, pentru că nu-i ‫܊‬esălase bine, administratorul l-a împu‫܈‬cat cu arma de vânătoare în picior. O încărcătură de alice, O întâmplare de Transilvanie prelungit-feudală maghiară, o întâmplare din 1906. Avea douăzeci ‫܈‬i trei de ani, s-a născut în 1883”. 9 „Într-un sat greco-catolic, imediat după Primul Război Mondial, Tica a adus din Cluj, unde umbla cu căru‫܊‬a, o noutate: iehovismul. A fost primul străjer al lui Iehova. După modelul lui, al‫܊‬ii au adus după aceea alte credin‫܊‬e neoprotestante ‫܈‬i satul s-a umplut de bapti‫܈‬ti, de adventi‫܈‬ti, de penticostali, a‫܈‬a că Cutca ajunsese orice, numai un centru greco-catolic sau ortodox nu mai putea fi socotit”.

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factor for Mica is the fact that the beautiful young woman had to give up a love story with another boy from the village (Niculae) in order to choose Augustin at the insistence of her mother and sister. The latter proved to be incapable of almost any emotional expression. Mària’s volcanic character and unsurpassed pride came to consume her lifelong reserves of happiness in such circumstances. On Ticu’s side, his inner war was accentuated by a feeling of jealousy that haunted him until the brutal end of his life. The intimate life of the parents was disastrous, and so were the consequences: I have known that, for a long time, that Mica received nothing of what she had expected, that all of her expectations had been not only disappointed but downright betrayed, that all of her dreams had been shattered, and everything had turned against her. She had ended up screaming with pain and hatred, encompassing her mother, sister, husband and all three children in one curse, for she said that, in her endless suffering, they had ruined her. […] At the end she lived in a permanent state of intimacy with death and desired dying with such passion that only Ticu’s passion and longing for the Apocalypse and Armageddon could equal hers.10 (35)

Unlike The Book of Numbers, Marta Petreu’s novel does not ultimately associate the apocalyptic feeling with the process of collectivization. Although, the changes provided by communism fortify the religious beliefs of the father: “The new regime, which threatened to rob them of everything and force them into the collective, signalled that the times were coming to an end”11 (Petreur 111), they are always treated with irony, if not downright revolt by the narrator. For the Transylvanian family, the apocalypse has a spiritual-affective character. For the daughter “born of religious war”, with a high sensitivity, intensified by incursions into

10

„După învă‫܊‬ăturile lui Ticu ‫܈‬i după lecturile de seară din Biblie, cel mai cumplit lucru nu era că vom pieri pentru totdeauna, cu asta eram împăcată, ci acela că vom pieri numai după ce vom trece prin chinuri cumplite, lungi cât Armaghedonul. O, împără‫܊‬ia Fiarei Stacojii, care rupe pece‫܊‬i! ‫܇‬i îngerii mâniei, suflând din trâmbi‫܊‬ele lor de argint! Cât de tare mă înfrico‫܈‬au! Ce tare m-a zguduit amenin‫܊‬area cu vremea când oamenii î‫܈‬i vor căuta moartea ‫܈‬i n-o vor afla, vor dori să moară ‫܈‬i moartea va fugi de ei! Asta anume mi s-a părut cumplit. Era prea mult pentru min‫܊‬ile noastre de copii – ‫܈‬i e prea mult ‫܈‬i pentru mintea mea de-acuma”. 11 „Noul regim, care amenin‫܊‬a că le ia tot ce au ‫܈‬i-i băga în colectivă, era, s-a gândit el, un semn că timpurile se apropie de sfâr‫܈‬it”.

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literature, Armageddon was always seen in proximity, as an indisputable proof of hatred from God, the creator of a world of punishment: After Ticu’s teachings and after evening readings from the Bible, the worst thing wasn’t that we would perish forever, I could accept that, but that we would perish only after the most terrible torments, long as Armageddon. Oh, Empire of the Scarlet Beast, which breaks seals! And the angels of fury, playing their silver trumpets! How they frightened me! How deeply I was shaken by the threat of the moment when people would seek their death and fail to find it, will want to die and death will run from them! This of all things seemed terrible to me. It was too much for our childish minds - and it’s too much for my mind now.12 (201)

The new order imposed by the regime changed the face of Cutca, as it did to any Transylvanian villages. The rural world attempted to untangle itself from the inversion of values that took place before the peasants’ eyes: Many a thing had changed after the war, the weakest people had found their voice, while the masters, they who truly meant something in the village, sat silently in expectation or perhaps in fright. For nobody understood how someone can be guilty only for having worked and gathered from their work an honest fortune, from which one lives, paying what one owes, while the weaker and lazier people, the riffraff of the village, became the more respected and sought after.13 (96)

12

„După învă‫܊‬ăturile lui Ticu ‫܈‬i după lecturile de seară din Biblie, cel mai cumplit lucru nu era că vom pieri pentru totdeauna, cu asta eram împăcată, ci acela că vom pieri numai după ce vom trece prin chinuri cumplite, lungi cât Armaghedonul. O, împără‫܊‬ia Fiarei Stacojii, care rupe pece‫܊‬i! ‫܇‬i îngerii mâniei, suflând din trâmbi‫܊‬ele lor de argint! Cât de tare mă înfrico‫܈‬au! Ce tare m-a zguduit amenin‫܊‬area cu vremea când oamenii î‫܈‬i vor căuta moartea ‫܈‬i n-o vor afla, vor dori să moară ‫܈‬i moartea va fugi de ei! Asta anume mi s-a părut cumplit. Era prea mult pentru min‫܊‬ile noastre de copii – ‫܈‬i e prea mult ‫܈‬i pentru mintea mea de-acuma”. 13 „De dragul lor, recunoscător că au u‫܈‬urat muncile agricole, Ticu ajunsese să laude Colectivul, recunoscând că de unul singur nici el, nici alt ‫܊‬ăran din Cutca nu ‫܈‬i-ar fi putut cumpăra niciodată o asemenea ma‫܈‬ină care u‫܈‬urează munca. ‫܇‬i ori de câte ori citesc pledoarii nostalgice pentru imobilitatea satului românesc ori texte despre valorile neschimbate ale lumii rurale, pe care tehnica numai le-ar corupe, mă scutur a răscoală: «D-voastră nu cunoa‫܈‬te‫܊‬i ‫܊‬ăranul român...» îmi vine să spun, căci ‫܈‬tiu că asemenea texte ‫܈‬i teze nu sânt decât produc‫܊‬iile stupide ale imagina‫܊‬iei ‫܈‬i ale ideologiei unor oră‫܈‬eni care n-au avut nimic de-a face nici cu satul, nici cu

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However, Marta Petreu’s nuanced perspective is revealed elsewhere. The narrator does not treat the village after collectivization as a hybrid alienated from its own identity. From Tabita’s perspective, the technological changes are, in fact, a helping hand for the Romanian peasant. And the characteristics that are usually immediately associated with the rural (such as the preservation of traditions, the persistence of mentalities, the supernatural incidents of folkloric origin, the system of beliefs particular to the Romanian village) are possible under the umbrella of the regime too. In the pages of the novel, the narrator presents, not surprisingly, valuable polemical pages in relation to the various urban representations of the Romanian village: For their sake, grateful that they had eased the agricultural work, Ticu had ended up praising the Collectivization, admitting that alone he or any other peasant in Cutca could have bought such a machine to ease their work. And whenever he read the nostalgic pleas for the immobility of the Romanian village or texts about the unchanged values of rural life, which technology would only corrupt, I shudder with protest: ‘You do not know the Romanian peasant...’ I want to say, for I know that such texts and theses are but the stupid productions of the imagination or ideology of certain city folk who never had anything to do with the village, nor with the peasant from Romania. The peasants have liked and like all machinery that makes their heavy labour easier.14 (111)

Similar in their caution taken towards the various ideological representations of the national village belonging to the history of Romanian culture (but also similar in the intertextual communication with Liviu Rebreanu) are

‫܊‬ăranul din România. ‫܉‬ăranilor le-au plăcut ‫܈‬i le plac toate ma‫܈‬inile care le fac munca lor trudnică mai u‫܈‬oară”. 14 „De dragul lor, recunoscător că au u‫܈‬urat muncile agricole, Ticu ajunsese să laude Colectivul, recunoscând că de unul singur nici el, nici alt ‫܊‬ăran din Cutca nu ‫܈‬i-ar fi putut cumpăra niciodată o asemenea ma‫܈‬ină care u‫܈‬urează munca. ‫܇‬i ori de câte ori citesc pledoarii nostalgice pentru imobilitatea satului românesc ori texte despre valorile neschimbate ale lumii rurale, pe care tehnica numai le-ar corupe, mă scutur a răscoală: «D-voastră nu cunoa‫܈‬te‫܊‬i ‫܊‬ăranul român...» îmi vine să spun, căci ‫܈‬tiu că asemenea texte ‫܈‬i teze nu sânt decât produc‫܊‬iile stupide ale imagina‫܊‬iei ‫܈‬i ale ideologiei unor oră‫܈‬eni care n-au avut nimic de-a face nici cu satul, nici cu ‫܊‬ăranul din România. ‫܉‬ăranilor le-au plăcut ‫܈‬i le plac toate ma‫܈‬inile care le fac munca lor trudnică mai u‫܈‬oară”.

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the first pages of Flickers, by Dan Lungu, whose narrator possesses the methodical rigor of a man of science. The contemporary rural novels merged with family chronicles represent documents of the various historical-political changes of Transylvania seen from a microscopic perspective. When dealing with collective situations, they are often symptomatic of the whole phenomenon at the national level. It is also the case of de-collectivization, seen from Cutca: In practically two or three months, the Cutca collective, created through terror thirty years before, fell apart as if it had never eisted, enriching perhaps give or six clever people, and leaving the inhabitants of Cutca with their land in their arms, without any means of working it.15 (329)

In a discordant note to some perspectives that have imposed themselves as status quo in the contemporary national discourse, in Marta Petreu’s novel the voices that regret the disintegration of the Collective are not brutally dismissed: The worst thing is that the Collective has gone bad, Tinu said to me. They should have created associations in its place, not given anything back. Documents, that’s all. And the land should have remained in associations, so that people could have worked […] I don’t contradict him. I have my own theory about today’s world, not too far from his, and the road to the cemetery isn’t long enough for me to tell it.16 (421)

Not only in this respect does Marta Petreu’s text prove a special character in the landscape of the contemporary rural novel, dealing in prose with

15

„Practic, în două, trei luni, Ceapeul din Cutca, creat prin teroare în urmă cu treizeci de ani, s-a destrămat ca ‫܈‬i cum nici n-ar fi fost, îmbogă‫܊‬ind vreo cinci, poate ‫܈‬ase persoane iste‫܊‬e, ‫܈‬i lăsându-i pe cutcani cu pământul în bra‫܊‬e, dar fără nicio putin‫܊‬ă să ‫܈‬i-l lucreze”. 16 „Cel mai rău e că s-a stricat Colectivul, îmi spunea Tinu. Trebuiau făcute asocia‫܊‬ii, în locul lui, nu trebuia dat nimic înapoi, la oameni. Acte, atât. ‫܇‬i pământul să rămână în asocia‫܊‬ii, să aibă oamenii cum să ‫܈‬i-l lucre. […] Nu-l contrazic. Am propria mea teorie despre lumea de azi, nu prea depărtată de-a lui, ‫܈‬i nu ajunge drumul până la cimitir s-o expun.”.

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subjects that are painful “for the ulcerated and rather excitable sensitivity of Romanian culture”17 (Goldi‫)܈‬. The imagining of the Romanian village in the contemporary rural novel is necessarily constituted by recourse to presumed traumas with historicalpolitical character of the national past, with notable consequences in contemporaneity. Cosmin Borza’s anticipation “that the anti-communist narratives and the historiographical metafiction represent the major tendencies of the rural novel after 2000” (Borza, 34) seems to be confirmed so far. Perspectives that are both optimistic and foreign to idealization are difficult to find in contemporary rural literature. The historical-political imaginary helps consecrate the idea of the dead Romanian village. Most of the time, this death is the fault of the totalitarian “disease”, in more or less reductive representations. Even after the fall of the regime, the Romanian village does not seem to find its essence. The historical-political imaginary is most handy in rural novels with chronicle, family or community stakes, where the village is presented in several hypostases depending on the historical dilemma it faces. The changes suffered as a result of the historical-political cataclysms seem to have cut the coherence of the village with its own essence. According to both The Book of Numbers and At Home, on the Field of Armageddon, the future, as much as the present of the Romanian village, is not only uncertain but disheartening. However, it can be pointed out that rural literature has valuable representatives in the Romanian projects mentioned above and that the choice of such a controversial topic in the history of autochthonous culture is courageous in itself. In Cosmin Borza’s words: “Instead of being uniformizing or constraining, […] the rural imaginary has often functioned (during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries) as a catalyst of literary reforms and diversity” 18 (Borza, 210). The chosen example of Marta Petreu handles the problematic reality of the countryside dexterously, generating a significant dose of charm. 17

„pentru sensibilitatea ulcerată ‫܈‬i degrabă excitabilă a culturii române”. „În loc să fie uniformizator sau constrângător,[…] imaginarul rural a func‫܊‬ionat adeseori (pe parcursul secolelor XX ‫܈‬i XXI) ca un catalizator al reformelor ‫܈‬i diversită‫܊‬ii literare.”. 18

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Works Cited Borza, Cosmin. “How to Populate a Country. A Quantitative Analysis of the Rural Novel from Romania (1900-2000)”, Ruralism and Literature in Romania. Edited by Baghiu, ‫܇‬tefan; Pojoga, Vlad; Sass, Maria, Berlin, Peter Lang, 2019, pp. 21-39. Borza, Cosmin. “Rural Literature” [Literatura rurală], The Encyclopaedia of Romanian Imaginaries, Volume I: Literary Imaginary [Enciclopedia imaginariilor din România I. Imaginar literar.] edited by Braga, Corin, Ia‫܈‬i, Polirom, 2020, pp. 191-210. Cordo‫܈‬, Sanda. Literature between Revolution and Reaction. The Problem of the Crisis in 20th Century Romanian and Russian Literature [Literatura între revoluаie Юi reacаiune. Problema crizei în literatura română Юi rusă a secolului XX], Cluj, Biblioteca Apostrof, 1999. Cordo‫܈‬, Sanda. The Descendants of Liviu Rebreanu [Nepoаii lui Liviu Rebreanu], Revista Apostrof, no. 4, (335), 2018: http://www.revistaapostrof.ro/arhiva/an2018/n4/a5/, accessed 27 June 2019. Goldi‫܈‬, Alex. The Armageddon according to Marta [Armaghedonul după Marta], in “Revista Cultura”, 05.05.2011, https://revistacultura.ro/nou/2011/05/armaghedonul-dupa-marta/ ?fbclid=IwAR3F9D0EKCwZ_y7dm6z_pTMI9MtLWoIGq4iv9uFAX4 oXc-pe8bEYl886u-0%20%20-, accessed 09 May 2020. Petreu, Marta. At Home, on the Field of Armageddon [Acasă pe Cîmpia Armaghedonului], Ia‫܈‬i, Polirom, 2019.

SECTION-III FAMILY, ETHICS AND HARDSHIPS

CHAPTER VII MOTHERS AND DAUGHTERS ON THE PLANTATION: A FEMINIST RE-READING OF HARRIET JACOBS’S INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF A SLAVE GIRL RAFAEL MIGUEL MONTES In his comprehensive mapping of the 19th century American slave narrative, James Olney offers a number of salient literary tropes that serve as the diegetic foundation for most works within this specific literary genre. According to Olney, “the slave narrative is most often a nonmemorial description fitted to a pre-formed mold, a mold with regular depressions here and equally regular prominences there—virtually obligatory figures, scenes, turns of phrase, observances and authentications” (49). The narrative of capture, the journey across the wide expanse of the Atlantic, scenes, often horrific, from life on the plantation, the dangerous acquisition of the slave’s first words, the hunger for further education, the moment of confrontation, and the slave’s eventual freedom all serve as hallmarks within the majority of 19th century American slave narratives. Olney goes on to suggest that these similar narratalogical building blocks tend to “carry over from narrative to narrative and give to them as a group the species character that we designate by the phrase ‘slave narrative’” (49). At the very core of the narrative is the certainty that these are the experiences that are neither fabricated nor manipulated by memory. The author reveals how the institution of slavery has attempted to negate the very identity of the creator of the narrative and, in turn, that this very act

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of creation is a negation of slavery’s victory over that attempted erasure. According to Olney, the act of writing, of taking command of how one’s life will be perceived by an audience of potential readers, “is literally a part of the narrative, becoming an important thematic element in the retelling of the life wherein literacy, identity and a sense of freedom are all acquired simultaneously” (54). If one were to take, for example, the complete title of Frederick Douglass’s autobiography, one cannot gloss over the fact that “Written by Himself” supports the entire literary endeavor and acts as an assertion of the narrative’s verifiable authorship. These are Douglass’s experiences and first-hand accounts of life within the institution of slavery; however, these are also Douglass’s perceptions, realizations, and interpretations and it would be nearly impossible to sever these from the narrative itself. In short, this narrative, as well as many others, is not a portrait of the institution of slavery. It is an account of one slave embedded within that institution and thus reclaiming a humanity and a voice denied by that institution. Unlike Douglass, Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl aims to explore how the institution of slavery is undeniably a patriarchal font of sexual terrorism that impacts all women, regardless of race. Commencing from Jacobs’s oft-quoted lines, “Slavery is terrible for men; but it is far more terrible for women. Superadded to the burden common to all, they have wrongs, and sufferings, and mortifications peculiarly their own,” (64), this paper offers a gendered analysis of this particular slave narrative. Jacobs’s multi-focal and multi-racial perspective takes into consideration the limited lives of white and black women on the plantation and, in turn, unveils the carnal savagery of American slavery. Attempting to reveal the obvious repercussions of unchecked patriarchy, Jacobs incorporates white female oppression into what is an ostensibly AfricanAmerican narrative. According to Mae Gwendolyn Henderson, in her seminal “Speaking in Tongues: Dialogics, Dialectics, and the Black Woman Writer’s Literary Tradition,” one must look to Mikhail Bakhtin and his dual concepts of heteroglossia and dialogism in order to fully comprehend the positionality of the African-American woman within the oppressive environment of the American South during the 19th century. In taking up the responsibility to

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create her own narrative of her own life story, she is not only negating the labels—inhuman, chattel—placed upon her by the system of slavery, but also refusing to remain subdued and silent within the confines of the patriarchy. The decision to construct one’s own narrative epitomizes the conceit of assuming an identity that is wholly self-selected and selforchestrated and simultaneously negates all other identities, usually derogatory and negative, that are imposed upon this identity by outside forces that act to deny an essential humanity. This imposition, usually centered upon assumptions concerning race, gender, social status, class, economic standing or political affiliation, becomes unsustainable when authorial power ably confronts it. For Henderson, “black women writers are privileged by a social positionality that enables them to speak in dialogically racial and gendered voices to the other(s) both within and without” (online). Henderson goes on to suggest that “if the psyche functions as an internalization of heterogeneous social voices, black women’s speech/writing becomes at once a dialogue between self and society and between self and psyche” (online). This multifocality, evident in many of the works discussed by Henderson throughout her article effectively speaks to and subsequently enlarges Barbara Smith’s acknowledgment of the Black woman novelist’s “simultaneity of discourse.” A concept perfectly crystallized by Peter Albrecht in his article “The Simultaneity of Authority in Hybrid Orders” as follows: “They enter into a discourse of sameness and connection ‘with black men as black people, with white women as women, and with black women as black women’, while at the same time taking part in a discourse of difference with black men as women, with white women as black people, and with white men as black women” (8). Jacobs, through her dual lens of womanhood and motherhood, as well as her simultaneous perspectives, as outlined above, diverts attention away from the biographical and the resolute proposition of identity construction. Instead of primarily narrating her escape from slavery, and secondarily proving her intrinsic humanity through the very process of constructing her own narrative, she initially questions the very nature of the plantocracy and brutality that is concomitant within the entire human trafficking complex. Furthermore, it is in the spaces within Incidents where the fourth

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wall of the narrative is broken, in these textual eruptions, that a nascent feminism is born and thus evolves. It is in the “Trials of Girlhood” section of the narrative that one begins to understand the complexity of Jacobs’s project and that this is not merely a narrative of her relentless agony and her minuscule triumphs within the household of Dr. Flint. Jacobs writes, “I once saw two beautiful children playing together. One was a fair white child; the other was her slave, and also her sister. When I saw them embracing each other, and heard their joyous laughter, I turned sadly away from the lovely sight” (27). This emotional response gives way to Jacobs’s own vision of these young girls’ futures: “I foresaw the inevitable blight that would fall on the little slave’s heart. I knew how soon her laughter would be changed to sighs. The fair child grew up to be a still fairer woman. From childhood to womanhood, her pathway was blooming with flowers, and overarched by a sunny sky” (28). In this extended section early on in the narrative, one can clearly see the dichotomy of these two lives that began as an intersected unit wholly unaware of social and/or racial difference. The two girls playing and embracing soon mature and are irrevocably sundered; sent to live quite disparate lives, it is vital to note that the act of conjecture embarked upon by Jacobs has rather distinct timelines. Although she is able to foresee the fair girl’s transition to womanhood, her eventual betrothal, and her painless journey on her flowered path, the little slave’s heart beats exclusively within a body wracked by sighs and the inevitable pain, both physical and emotional, that comes from the horrific institution of slavery. There is no future here beyond that of being a slave and the eventual birthing of more slaves for the plantation. The slave family created, usually with the master as the sole patriarch, is radically different from the one soon to be experienced by the slave’s fair-skinned playmate. The only life that the slave girl may expect is one of licentiousness and, as Thomas LeCarner suggests, “moral depravity” (16). Furthermore, it is this accepted practice of reckless and renegade miscegenation, this open secret of the plantation forbidden to discuss or even question, that forms the central argument of Jacobs’s narrative. The

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play between dark-skinned children and white-skinned children, each with a radically different life trajectory and with futures quite antonymous also underscores the sexual violence that was once de-rigueur within the American South’s plantocracy. In Jacobs’s writing, however, even this sort of unchecked and unwanted concupiscence on behalf of the plantation’s patriarch still maintains an overt political message that she is attempting to disseminate to her presumed readership. According to LeCarner “Jacobs also wants to show her readers how slavery encourages and facilitates moral depravity, but she is, perhaps optimistically, insistent on slavery being the principal cause, not the degraded condition of humanity itself” (16). In other words, it is the institution itself and not the victims of that institution that uphold the immorality taking place in the 19th century American South. Sexual purity and piety are not based on the color of one’s skin. Instead, all women, regardless of their station within the plantation, seek protection from unwarranted sexual terrorism. Ironically, if one were to return to the flowered path of the fair girl’s future, one would see that even that womanhood is eventually tarnished by the hungers brought about by slavery. Speaking on the northerners who “consent to act the part of bloodhounds, and hunt the poor fugitive back into his den, ‘full of dead men’s bones, and all uncleanness’” (33), she reproaches the fathers located there who openly grant permission to slaveholders to marry their daughters. Ably envisioning the interior thoughts of these young girls, Jacobs writes, “The poor girls have romantic notions of a sunny clime, and the flowering vines that all the year round shade a happy home. To what disappointments are they destined!” (33). Underneath the imagined wisteria and the flowering magnolia trees, “the young wife soon learns that the husband in whose hands she has placed her happiness pays no regard to his marriage vows. Children of every shade of complexion play with her own fair babies, and too well she knows that they are born unto him of his own household” (Jacobs 33). Although she finishes this section by focusing attention on the disillusioned young girl and the fact that “jealousy and hatred enter the flowery home, and it is ravaged of its loveliness” (Jacobs 33), it is imperative to recognize how many people, regardless of geographical location, are implicated in this particular section of the narrative. We are

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confronted by the complicit northerner who maintains the institution of slavery and furthermore profits from that complicity. We are confronted by the libidinous patriarch who neglects all marital commitment and views him female slaves as producers of more slaves and, theoretically, reproducers of the very institution that dehumanizes and degrades them. Finally, there is the young girl whose dreams turn to dust upon arriving on the plantation and realizing that her husband “thinks it no disgrace to be the father of those little n-----s, but he is not ashamed to call himself their master” (Jacobs 33). The multifocal perspective evident in this particular section of the narrative is then overvoiced by an anonymous Southern lady who believes about a Mr. Such a one that “such things ought not to be tolerated in any decent society” (Jacobs 33). Although these words are directly attributed to an anonymous character, I would argue that this is Jacobs’s own indictment of the corruption not only of slavery but also of those supporters of the institution who maintain and therefore permit the continuation of slavery within the 19th century American South. Speaking of Jacobs’s literary influences and her adherence to the sentimental novel, Sonia Sedano-Vivanco notes that the form provides “Jacobs not only with a setting, a plot, and a series of topics. It also provided her with a set of formal and rhetorical characteristics. Two of these characteristics are the florid asides and the melodrama that envelop the narration. Both features are frequent in Incidents.” Although Sedano-Vivanco reminds readers that the events narrated in Jacobs’s text are authentic lived experience, the asides are, in my estimation, not so much a fidelity to form as they are direct message to what most scholars have wholly accepted as a primarily white, female, and Northern readership. From her position of exclusion, according to Franny Nudelman, “Jacobs is able to condemn and modify the models of female character and behavior that insistently marginalize her. Depicting the material discrepancies between her circumstances and those of her white, female audience, Jacobs is able to critique conventional standards of female behavior” (939). Arguably, these critiques are an essential element of the entire narrative. It would be too exhaustive to recount each incident of critique, but if one were to regard a stellar example of this attempt at correction, one could

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clearly point to the following excerpt from the sixth chapter: “Southern women often marry a man knowing that he is the father of many little slaves. They do not trouble themselves about it. They regard such children as property, as marketable as the pigs on the plantation; and it is seldom that they do not make them aware of this by passing them into the slavetrader’s hands as soon as possible, and thus getting them out of their sight” (Jacobs 33). It is this particular indictment of women and their complicity with the maintenance of the system of slavery within the American South that arguably differentiates Jacobs’s narrative from the traditional slave narrative published within the 19th century in the United States. If one were to suggest that the macro-villain of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is the Western hemisphere’s machinery of human trafficking at the center of the narrative, the role of the micro-villain would most definitely be Dr. and Mrs. Flint, the master and the wife who own the physical essence of Harriet Jacobs. Dr. Flint is a relatively easy character to decipher. Upon entering her fifteenth year, he begins “to whisper foul words” (26), and threaten Jacobs with the punishment of death if she were to confess his salacious behavior to anyone: “My master met me at every turn, reminding me that I belonged to him, and swearing by heaven and earth that he would compel me to submit to him” (27). Jacobs narrates that he would follow her to her mother’s grave and serve as a shadow over her lone moments of spiritual comfort. This gravesite harassment is soon followed in the text by his admonition that he would kill her, make her “silent as the grave,” (27) if she would ever share his sexual inclinations towards her. In his quest to seduce Harriet Jacobs, by teaching her written English, a practice summarily outlawed within all plantations, by pursuing her after her escape, and spending his entire fortune attempting to return her to the plantation, one can easily surmise that Dr. Flint is a victim of his own libidinal rage. Aside from his voracious sexual appetite and his deep inclination to bring Harriet to his own definition of perverse womanhood, he is a one-note character ruled entirely by rape and revenge. The character of Mrs. Flint, however, offers us a compelling look into the role of women on the plantation. A woman described by the narrative as a pious church-goer with strong ties to her faith, manifests her rage towards the slave-women on the plantation in parts equal to her husband’s own

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unchecked violence. Although characterized as a woman of flagging energy with minimal penchant for manual or domestic labor, Mrs. Flint’s cruelty to slave woman equaled, if not surpassed, that of her husband. Despite her stereotypical gentility, “she could sit in her easy chair and see a woman whipped, till the blood trickled from every stroke of the lash” (29). Arguably, this sadism is quite at odds with what many critics of Incidents denote is the incorporation of the ideals of true womanhood into the narrative. The cult of domesticity, which mandated the exalted virtues of piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity, and is therefore religiously pursued by Mrs. Flint within the text, demarcates the superiority of Mrs. Flint within the Flint household. According to Shahila Zafar Zafed and Ahmen Khan, “Mrs. Flint, the second wife of Linda’s oppressor Dr. Flint, apparently fits perfectly in the Cult of True Womanhood by being delicate and totally deficient in energy. But, as depicted in the novel, she herself is no less of an oppressor than her husband” (1-4). Perhaps unironically, this oppression is almost always directed towards the female slaves within the household who would be corporally punished for a lapse in the feeding and care of the white household. From instances of spitting in the kettles and pans to keep slave women from feeding scraps to their own families to the gore-filled whipping of a servant mentioned above, Mrs. Flint enacts a barbarous form of gyno-vengeance. According to Geneva Cobb Moore, “the white mistresses enjoyed a far greater degree of security and protection than the slave women as Jacobs tellingly illustrates in the naming of slave women. While she adds the respectable title of Mrs. to the white slave mistresses’ names, Jacobs weakly identifies the slave mothers by their first name only, no matter their age”(36-50). It is this discrepancy, existing just below the surface of the narrative, that also remains an integral part of Orlando Patterson’s assertion that there existed a “strong moral commitment to a patriarchal family life, in which the women of the master class were placed on a pedestal” (261). Furthermore, “the cult of southern womanhood was of course directly derived from slavery and the sense of racial and gender superiority” (Patterson 261). It is this final element of Patterson’s dyad that invariably leads us once again to the tenuous nature of the Cult of

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True Womanhood. If reaching the exalted status of mother is the epitome of true domesticity, why then does this not extend to the pantheon of slave mothers represented within Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl? I would suggest that the easy answer to this question would need to be traced to the earliest sections of Jacobs’s narrative that attests to the fact that the slave mother on the Southern plantation is no different from human livestock. She is there simply to reproduce more slaves for the master and her body, as well as the bodies of her own children, are merely possessions to be exchanged for profit or for the appeasement of his own sadistic and libidinous impulses. A much more complex answer, and one that may serve to underscore Mrs. Flint’s behavior throughout the narrative, must emanate from the fact that the very institution of slavery is by its very nature a machinery of nuptial perversion. The physical punishment that she must impart upon the body of Jacobs, as well as to the other black women in her household, bears a striking resemblance to her own psychic pain suffered at the hands of Dr. Flint. This pain is so evident within the narrative that the multiple mentions of Mrs. Flint’s arguments between her and her husband does nothing to stem his own patriarchallyreinforced licentiousness. Given no outlet to actually repair her marriage or even correct it from the unrighteous path it has taken, she is left psychologically paralyzed but with an internal rage and sadistic emotions that must be vented upon the nearest available bodies. Some who might read this article might be appalled by what seems like an apologia, a sympathetic portrayal of a villainous slave mistress prone to treachery, deceit, and bloodletting as her primary amusements. It is true that there are very few redeemable qualities about this character upon the written page, but to see her as singularly one-dimensional and not somehow a victimizer solely created by America’s prime method of victimization in the 19th century would offer her absolutely no psychological substance. She is the young woman who first stepped into the plantation, that cradle of riches and Southern sovereignty, seen many many years later after the collapse of her marriage, her self-worth, her dreams, her aspirations, and her love for someone she once dearly loved. Perhaps Harriet Jacobs says it best in her own narrative, written from the perspective of a woman, a daughter, and a mother: “You may believe what

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I say; for I write only that whereof I know. I was twenty-one years in that cage of obscene birds. I can testify from my own experience and observation, that slavery is a curse to the whites as well as to the black people. It makes the white fathers cruel and sensual; the sons violent and licentious; it contaminates the daughters and makes the wives wretched” (46).

Works Cited Albrecht, Peter and Moe, Louise Wiuff . “The simultaneity of authority in hybrid orders”. Peacebuilding, 2015. Vol. 3, No. 1, 1–16, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/21647259.2014.928551. Henderson, Mae G., “Speaking in Tongues: Dialogics, Dialectics, and the Black Woman Writer’s Literary Tradition” African American Literary Theory: A Reader. Edited by Winston Napier. NYU Press, 2000. https://sfonline.barnard.edu/sfxxx/documents/henderson.pdf. Jacobs, Harriet. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Edited by Lydia Maria Child and Jean Fagan Yellin. Harvard, 1987. LeCarner, Thomas. “Domestic Duality: The Home as Prison and Locus of Power in Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.” Academia, 2019. Olney, James. “‘I Was Born’: Slave Narratives, Their Status as Autobiography and as Literature.” Callaloo. vol. 20, 1984, pp. 46-73. Moore, Geneva Cobb. “A Freudian reading of Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.” Southern Literary Journal. Chapel Hill, UNC Press, vol. 38, no. 1, 2005, pp. 36-50. Patterson, Orlando. Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study. Harvard, 1982. Sedano-Vivanco, Sonia. “Literary Influences on Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Written by Herself.” Third Space: A Journal of Feminist Theory and Culture. vol. 2, no. 2, 2003. Nudelman, Franny. “Harriet Jacobs and the Sentimental Politics of Female Suffering” ELH: English Literary History. vol. 59, no. 4, 1992, pp. 939-964.

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Zaved, Shahila Safar and Ahmad Khan. “The Images of White Womanhood in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl” Studies in Literature and Language. vol. 8, no. 1, 2010, pp. 1-4.

CHAPTER VIII “SOMBER AND JOYFUL:” REREADING CARSON MCCULLERS’S THE BALLAD OF THE SAD CAFÉ DURING A THIRD PANDEMIC SUMMER KIMBERLY WILLARDSON Carson McCullers’s The Ballad of the Sad Café begins at its sour end: With a singular, “terrible dim” face peering down upon the deserted streets of a “dreary,” “lonesome, sad” town “like a place that is far off and estranged from all other places in the world” (3). Like the dying cowboy introduced in the first stanza of “The Streets of Laredo,” another famous American ballad, Miss Amelia is defeated, isolated, and mulling over what led her to such devastation. Miss Amelia’s face at the window of a house “bound to collapse at any minute” (3) is a study of self-scrutiny, “with two gray crossed eyes which are turned inward so sharply that they seem to be exchanging with each other one long and secret gaze of grief” (4). Readers surveying this desolate environment cannot help but wonder what has caused Miss Amelia such ruin and despair. When I first read McCullers’s ballad in the early 80s, and during subsequent multiple returns to her novella as a student of her fiction, my ready answer was that Miss Amelia grieved the loss of her love. I thought Miss Amelia felt betrayed by Cousin Lymon attaching himself to her arch-enemy, Marvin Macy, a despicable man she had mysteriously been pursued by and married to for a mere ten days. I believed she not only lamented her lost love but that her grief caused her complete disintegration, as well as that of the town she had once nurtured with a bossy sense of ownership. However, my most recent readings of the ballad, conducted during three

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pandemic summers, have changed my answer to that question. Steeped in the uncertain conditions of social unrest, ghastly death counts, quarantined isolation, and the constraining fears COVID-19 has wrought, while also acknowledging the Trumpian causes of this apocalyptic landscape, the lens of my interpretation has widened. As the dying cowboy of “The Streets of Laredo” represents a folktale archetype—the lone, “wild” cowboy who knew he’d “done wrong” and would pay with his life—Miss Amelia has been considered a Southern Gothic grotesque since her creation in the early 1940s. From a third, locked-down pandemic summer perspective, Miss Amelia expands into an emblem for America itself. Like Miss Amelia, Carson McCullers was ahead of her time, trailblazing cultural paths well beyond the Southern Gothic genre box historically fencing in her oeuvre. Editors Alison Graham-Bertolini and Casey Kayser emphasize McCullers’s deep-rooted interests in the broader human condition as they point out in their preface to “Understanding the Short Fiction of Carson McCullers,” that McCullers as a writer engaged not only with the literary and cultural movements of her time, but as a writer politically ahead of her time, concerned not just with the failures of human connection, but intent on critiquing oppressive sociopolitical mores and institutions that may have prevented relationships. (ix)

The twelve critical essays in their collection reveal that McCullers’s creative works do not require recontextualization to translate them for the contemporary reader. Instead, these updated interpretations of McCullers’s short fiction reframe it in terms of its explorations of musical forms and effects; the physical and mental health constraints of “othered” characters, such as “the disabled, the racial other, and homosexuals;” (xix) and the sociopolitical anxieties her characters suffered in their cultural and historical environments. Modern readers must catch up with McCullers’s prescient sensibilities and anthropological observations. Comparisons between Miss Amelia’s dismal situation, the bleakness of the world’s current state, and the causes of those calamities reframe The Ballad as a tale about power struggles within human governance rather than simply a love-gone-wrong story. This reassessment transforms Miss

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Amelia’s character function beyond that of a folktale hero and into a representation of America in myriad ways—most prominently in McCullers’s descriptive details about how Amelia/America exudes the plenty and busy-ness of commerce and capitalism. With all things which could be made by the hands Miss Amelia prospered. She sold chitterlins and sausage in the town near-by. On fine autumn days, she ground sorghum, and the syrup from her vats was dark golden and delicately flavored. She built the brick privy behind her store in only two weeks and was skilled in carpentering. . . . So that the only use that Miss Amelia had for other people was to make money out of them. And in this she succeeded. Mortgages on crops and property, a sawmill, money in the bank—she was the richest woman for miles around. (5)

McCullers carefully links Miss Amelia’s prosperity to that of the town in general, mainly when she describes the seasonal changes from the summer’s heat when “the sky had burned above the town like a sheet of flame all day” (37) to the cool, new promises the fall brings. The autumn was a happy time. The crops around the countryside were good and over at the Forks Falls market the price of tobacco held firm that year. ... For Miss Amelia Evans this was a time of great activity. She was at work from dawn until sundown. . . . She was looking forward greatly to the first frost, because she had traded for three tremendous hogs, and intended to make much barbecue, chitterlins, and sausage. (44)

The townspeople respect Miss Amelia’s commanding presence and decision-making to the point that they consult her for weather forecasts, which is vital when choosing the right time to slaughter farm animals to preserve meat products. Very shortly people began to come in from the country to find out what Miss Amelia thought of the weather: she decided to kill the biggest hog, and word got round the countryside. . . . Miss Amelia walked around giving orders and soon most of the work was done. (45)

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McCullers is also careful to show that Miss Amelia deeply enjoys her wealth and that she delights in her strength by making a routine of flexing it. After she invites her Cousin Lymon in for their first meal together, Miss Amelia tilted back her chair, tightened her fist, and felt the hard, supple muscles of her right arm beneath the clean, blue cloth of her shirtsleeves—an unconscious habit with her at the close of a meal. (12)

Enhancing Miss Amelia’s strength, wealth, and tight control of the town’s purse and store is the fact that she also “operated a still three miles back in the swamp, and ran out the best liquor in the county.” (4) Not just any liquor, but a potion that “has a special quality of its own.” Miss Amelia’s product has alchemical powers that give humans the aptitude to reach within themselves and recognize their very souls. Things that have gone unnoticed, thoughts that have been harbored far back in the dark mind, are suddenly recognized and comprehended. . . . [A]nd in him suddenly might come a sweetness keen as pain. . . . Such things as these, then, happen when a man has drunk Miss Amelia’s liquor. He may suffer, or he may be spent with joy—but the experience has shown the truth; he has warmed his soul and seen the message hidden there. (10)

The capacity for Miss Amelia’s liquor to reveal “hidden” truths is directly related to her doctoring skills, for, “Yes, all in all, she was considered a good doctor.” [F]or she enjoyed doctoring and did a great deal of it. Two whole shelves were crowded with bottles and various paraphernalia. . . . [F]or [small children] she had an entirely separate draught, gentler and sweet-flavored. She possessed great imagination and used hundreds of different cures. . . . She charged no fees whatsoever and always had a raft of patients. (16–17)

Miss Amelia’s tender administering of medical care, including the use of her own “Kroup Kure. . . a medicine made from whisky, rock candy, and a secret ingredient,” (38) to a child who has a “hard, swollen boil” on his leg softens Miss Amelia’s hard edges. In addition, the critical detail that Miss Amelia does not charge fees for her doctoring services reveals a possible clue why Miss Amelia takes in her Cousin Lymon after he is introduced

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into The Ballad as a wandering stranger. Initially labeled by one among the chorus of townspeople as “[a] calf got loose,” Stumpy MacPhail declares prophetically, “No. It’s somebody’s young’un.” (6) To the surprise of the two men and two boys gathered on her porch that fateful night, Miss Amelia not only listens to the odd, hunchbacked “stranger”—who arrives accompanied by a “wild, hoarse howl” of a dog “down the road,” and launches into a complicated, “long rigmarole” about how he is distantly, but directly related to her kin—but she also offers him a “rare thing”: a drink from her own bottle of her homemade liquor, instructing him, “Drink . . . it will liven your gizzard.” (9) Further, she invites the hunchback to share the fine food at her table and later guides him up the stairs to her “well-furnished and extremely clean” rooms, and “[s]oon the premises above the store were as dark as the rest of the town.” Upon speculation by the townsfolk chorus, “As for the hunchback’s claim, everyone thought it was a trumped-up business”—false, fake, imaginary— and the “town was left puzzled and talkative.” (13) The story of the hunchbacked stranger’s middle-of-the-night arrival, coupled with Miss Amelia staying “locked up inside her premises,” seeing no one, ignite the kindling of speculation into a wildfire of “rumor so terrible that the town and all the country about were stunned by it.” (13) It was while Merlie Ryan was in his fever that he turned suddenly and said: “I know what Miss Amelia done. She murdered that man for something in that suitcase.”

A delegation forms upon Miss Amelia’s porch—”in times of tension, when some great action is impending, men gather and wait in this way.” (15) Surprisingly, they discover that not only has she not killed Cousin Lymon but that Miss Amelia has adopted the mysterious Cousin Lymon as her own. The hunchback came down slowly with the proudness of one who owns every plank of the floor beneath his feet. In the past days he had greatly changed. For one thing he was clean beyond words. He still wore his little coat, but it was brushed off and neatly mended. Beneath this was a fresh red and black checkered shirt belonging to Miss Amelia. (18)

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Not only is he wearing her shirt, but Cousin Lymon is handling “the snuffbox that had belonged to Miss Amelia’s beloved father. More amazing still, Miss Amelia allows the eight men of the delegation into her “warm, bright store” to drink the liquor they purchase from her, along with two boxes of crackers so that they were there hospitably in a platter on the counter and anyone who wished could take one free. (21) ... Now, this was the beginning of the café. It was as simple as that. Recall that the night was gloomy as in wintertime, and to have sat around the property outside would have made a sorry celebration. But inside there was company and a genial warmth. . . . [T]he company was polite even to the point of a certain timidness. For people in this town were then unused to gathering together for the sake of pleasure. (22)

Here, an important distinction must be made between the types of transformational love McCullers describes in The Ballad. Clearly, the love Cousin Lymon stimulates in Miss Amelia has an ameliorative effect on her, exhibited by her willingness to break her own “rule” and “for the first time” allow her liquor customers into her store for the “pleasure” of company and fellowship. The love Miss Amelia has for Cousin Lymon is a seed planted that quickly grows, blossoming into the other love McCullers investigates in The Ballad—the love of fellowship—which McCullers saw as something closer to the spiritual, expansive, and creative love of God. In her “The Flowering Dream: Notes on Writing” essay, McCullers emphatically declared that the love Miss Amelia exhibited “for the little hunchback, Cousin Lymon,” [t]he passionate, individual love—the old Tristan-Isolde love, the Eros love—is inferior to the love of God, to fellowship, to the love of Agape— the Greek god of the feast, the God of brotherly love—and of man. This is what I tried to show in The Ballad of the Sad Café. (281)

In the very next paragraph of that essay, McCullers observes that I wonder sometimes if what they call the “Gothic” school of Southern writing, in which the grotesque is paralleled with the sublime, is not due

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largely to the cheapness of human life in the South. The Russians are like the Southern writers in that respect. (281)

This remark echoes a statement she makes in an earlier essay, “The Russian Realists and Southern Literature,” from that same collection, “The Mortgaged Heart: Selected Writings,” in which she declares, “In both old Russia and the South up to the present time a dominant characteristic was the cheapness of human life.” What Amelia ultimately grieves is the loss of human “fellowship” that rises above, is superior to the “love of Eros,” and closer to the “love of God.” Moreover, though McCullers links this higher love to God, she is careful to keep it separate from organized religion, gatherings “on Sunday . . . an all-day camp meeting . . . [where] the intention of the whole affair is to sharpen your view of Hell and put into you a keen fear of the Lord Almighty.” (22) McCullers’s description of the café and its beginnings reflect a different “spirit,” a “gathering together for the sake of pleasure,” where [e]ven the greediest old rascal will behave himself, insulting no one in a proper café. And poor people look about them gratefully and pinch up the salt in a dainty and modest manner. For the atmosphere of a proper café implies these qualities: fellowship, the satisfactions of the belly, and a certain gaiety and grace of behavior. This had never been told to the gatherings in Miss Amelia’s store that night. But they knew it of themselves, although never, of course, until that time had there been a café in the town.

The “grace of behavior” that allows even “the poor” to feel welcome rather than merely tolerated is not generated by commandments tossed out at an “all-day camp meeting” but something that evolves organically, arising subconsciously from the gathering itself. This civilized camaraderie, mutual trust, and friendship that develops between the café’s guests grows in much the same way McCullers sees her artistic work progressing, as she chronicles in her essay, “The Flowering Dream: Notes on Writing:” The dimensions of a work of art are seldom realized by the author until the work is accomplished. It is like a flowering dream. Ideas grow, budding silently, and there are a thousand illuminations coming day by day as the

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As the “flowering” of such sustaining companionship, like creative work, is a mysterious, almost mystical experience in McCullers’s view, its dismantling seems to require a supernatural force upon it, as well. McCullers draws sharp distinctions between the individual’s Eros love for a “beloved” and the “brotherly” spiritual love that elevates humanity, as evidenced by the different relationship arcs between Miss Amelia and Cousin Lymon and the one between Marvin Macy and Miss Amelia. Miss Amelia’s love for Cousin Lymon expands and flows like a river through the town transforming into daily, gratifying fellowship among the townspeople. Conversely, Marvin Macy’s catastrophic love for Miss Amelia leads to her loss of power, control, standing, and the wreckage of the civilized “brotherhood” the town had enjoyed for six years. Miss Amelia is made materially wealthier by Marvin Macy’s love for her, but she does not reciprocate his love and smacks it down quite violently and repeatedly, as McCullers details the end of their ten-day marriage: Then in Miss Amelia’s office he signed over to her the whole of his worldly goods, which was ten acres of timberland which he had bought with the money he saved. . . . [B]ut before he could open his mouth she had swung once with her fist and hit his face so hard that he was thrown back against the wall and one of his front teeth was broken.

Marvin Macy is diminished by his obsession for Miss Amelia, losing not only all of his worldly possessions but also his liberties and freedom. After her painful and emphatic scorning of his affections, Macy turns to a life of crime and is locked up in the penitentiary, further shrinking his environment and freedoms. In contrast, the maternal, compassionate, nurturing love Miss Amelia extends to Cousin Lymon expands their boundaries to where Miss Amelia becomes so innovatively inspired that she sits at her typewriter and crafts a tale for his entertainment, “a story in which there were foreigners, trap doors, and millions of dollars” (45), and the town experiences a swell of fondness for its café and “the new pride that the café brought to this town had an effect on almost everyone, even

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the children.” (54) The differences drawn between the resulting actions and circumstances of Marvin Macy’s love for Miss Amelia and Amelia’s love for Cousin Lymon elevate their characterizations into nearly Biblical archetypes. In her essay in Harold Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations Carson McCullers’ Ballad of the Sad Café, “Carson McCullers’ Amazon Nightmare,” Louise Westling points out that Though Cousin Lymon brings fruitful changes in the lives of Miss Amelia and her town, his own physical state suggests a fatal limitation to prosperity. He remains “weakly and deformed” despite Amelia’s pampering and the exercise of her fullest healing abilities. (50)

Further, Joseph Millichap, who details the traditional folktale components of both Marvin Macy and Cousin Lymon, in his essay “Carson McCullers’ Literary Ballad,” draws their characterizations in supernatural terms: Yet beneath these bright surfaces some dark force impels [Marvin Macy] to acts of outrageous evil. . . . As the demon lover of the region, he has degraded the sweetest young virgins, performing these depredations as coolly as he cuts the tails off squirrels in the pine woods. (15) ... [Cousin Lymon] has much of the child about him. . . . His child’s love of treats and spectacles—movies, fairs, cock-fights, revivals—provides insight into his personality, as does his child’s curiosity and quarrelsomeness. . . . [he] seems akin to the fairy children of folk tale and ballad—pixies, elves, leprechauns. (16)

Miss Amelia evokes an image of Macy as a criminal demon when she tells his brother Henry—upon being informed that Marvin has been released on parole—that “He will never set his split hoof on my premises,” and she “hauled the cash register back to the kitchen and put it in a private place.” (43) However, even before Miss Amelia spurns him, Marvin Macy embodied the definition of Trumpian cruelty, hatred, and sexual depravity in an astonishing array of details. [F]or he was an evil character. His reputation was as bad, if not worse, than that of any young man in the county. . . . [H]e had carried about with

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Macy, with his “lazy, half-mouthed smile of the braggart” (46), is also racist, a member of the Ku Klux Klan—Miss Amelia “cut up his Klansman’s robe to cover her tobacco plants (33)—and upon encountering Cousin Lymon for the first time, he exhibits irritation: “‘What ails this Brokeback?’ he asked with a rough jerk of his thumb” and struck him “on the side of his head,” causing him to stagger and fall to the ground. (49) Enchanted by Macy’s vicious brutality, Cousin Lymon immediately becomes his faithful acolyte who not only traipses behind Macy like an obedient dog but finds a way to install him and his evil intent back under Miss Amelia’s very roof and at her table, drinking her liquor. Cousin Lymon’s character displays several similarities to the MAGA followers of Trump, as detailed in McCullers’s following description: Cousin Lymon followed Marvin Macy about all day, seconding his claim to the snow. He marveled that snow did not fall as does rain, and stared up at the dreamy, gently falling flakes until he stumbled from dizziness. And the pride he took on himself basking in the glory of Marvin Macy—it was such that many people could not resist calling out to him: ‘Oho,’ said the fly on the chariot wheel. ‘What a dust we do raise.’ (58)

It is important to note here that Cousin Lymon is ascribing control of the weather to Marvin Macy, where once that power was believed to belong to Miss Amelia. It is also valuable to remember that McCullers has drawn Cousin Lymon as a troublemaker from his initial introduction into The Ballad, a “busybody” (39) full of “trumped-up business” (13) who is an instigator of feuds and fights. The hunchback was a great mischief-maker. He enjoyed the kind of to-do, and without saying a word, he could set the people at each other in a way that was miraculous. It was due to him that the Rainey twins had quarreled over a jackknife two years past, and had not spoken one word to each other since. (39)

Cousin Lymon, “who was most responsible for the great popularity of the café” (39), is also the catalyst for its demise. Indeed, it is Cousin Lymon

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who facilitates Marvin Macy’s ultimate defeat of Miss Amelia and the resulting destruction of the café during their showdown battle. The foreshadowed, long-anticipated fight between the diabolical antagonist and Miss Amelia, who “grappled [with Macy] muscle to muscle, their hipbones braced against each other,” is cinematic, as well as sexual, in tone and details, culminating with Miss Amelia’s overalls “drenched [with] so much sweat [that] had trickled down her legs,” suggesting the climatic ejaculation of coitus. Still, Miss Amelia has the upper hand and is straddling her enemy, but “just as the fight was won,” just when Miss Amelia had victory within her reach and grasped the throat of Marvin Macy[,] the hunchback sprang forward and sailed through the air as though he had grown hawk wings. ... Because of the hunchback the fight was won by Marvin Macy, and at the end Miss Amelia lay sprawled on the floor, her arms flung outward and motionless. (67)

Stunned by the “confusion” of the brawl and the hunchback’s purposeful hand in her trouncing, the townspeople seem not only cowed but ashamed over their silent participation. The crowd was quiet, and one by one the people left the café. . . . “[T]he three boys from Society City roamed off down the road on foot. . . . This was not a fight to hash over and talk about afterward; people went home and pulled the covers up over their heads. (67)

The unspeakable outcome disconnects Miss Amelia, her café, and the witnessing townspeople from the emissaries from “Society City,” leaving the town deserted and anguished. McCullers painstakingly details the final demolition Macy and Cousin Lymon wreak upon the café and the remaining vestiges of Miss Amelia’s powers. The repeated words, rhythms, and line breaks in this passage lend it the incantatory, dreadful tone of the Old Testament. Marvin Macy and the hunchback must have left the town an hour or so before daylight. And before they went away this is what they did:

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They unlocked the private cabinet of curios and took everything in it. They broke the mechanical piano. They carved terrible words on the café tables. ... They went out in the swamp and completely wrecked the still, ruining the big new condenser and the cooler, and setting fire to the shack itself. They did everything ruinous they could think of without actually breaking into the office where Miss Amelia stayed the night. Then they went off together, the two of them. (68)

Marvin Macy and Cousin Lymon even abscond with a few of Miss Amelia’s cherished, peculiar souvenirs from within her curio cabinet— reminders of the two most painful moments of her life: the suffering she experienced from two kidney stones “taken from her by the doctor in Cheehaw some years ago,” as well as “[j]ust an acorn I picked up the afternoon Big Papa died.” (35) Miss Amelia is left alone to study her pain in isolation, where “Nothing moves—there are no children’s voices, only the hum of the mill.” (69-70) In the end, then, McCullers pulls the readers’ attention slowly away—in a movielike fashion—from the diminished Miss Amelia and her bitterness and returns it to the music of the chain gang on Forks Falls Road she introduced early in The Ballad. McCullers’s coda titled “Twelve Mortal Men” expands on the powers of the chain gang’s music “that causes the heart to broaden and the listener to grow cold with ecstasy and fright.” (71) Mindfully noting that the chain gang is racially unequal—“seven of them black and five of them white boys from the county”— McCullers emphatically expresses what Margaret Whitt, in her essay “From Eros to Agape: Considering the Chain Gang’s Song in McCullers’s ‘Ballad of the Sad Café,’” interprets as McCullers’s way of conveying the message that this novella has less to do with Eros— the passionate, individual love that exists between humans and controls the actions of Miss Amelia, Cousin Lymon, and Marvin Macy—than with Agape, the brotherly love of God. (87)

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Decades away from Miss Amelia’s creation notwithstanding, and in a world McCullers would scarcely recognize (or, would she?)—with its deadly coronavirus pandemic raging into three years and joined by monkeypox and the reappearance of polio; crashing global economies; climate changes igniting not only catastrophic storms, floods, and wildfires, but exoduses of masses of people from their homelands; the dismissal of human sciences and complete disregard for the safety and well-being of children and their futures; as well as the struggle for human rights, equality, and democracies made more difficult by the racial injustices, xenophobia, and misogynies American governance has practiced since its beginning; the “cheapness of human life,” not just in the American South, not just in America, but worldwide—McCullers reminds us that we all are “chained” to each other, but yet, capable of the cooperation that can make “music intricately blended, both somber and joyful.” (70) Ending her masterpiece with the word “together,” McCullers reminds us of the possibilities of jubilant fellowship.

Works Cited Graham-Bertolini, Alison and Kayser, Casey. Preface. Understanding the Short Fiction of Carson McCullers. Edited by Alison GrahamBertolini and Casey Kayser. Mercer UP, 2020. McCullers, Carson. The Ballad of the Sad Café and Other Stories. Mariner Books, 2005. —. “The Flowering Dream: Notes on Writing.” The Mortgaged Heart: Selected Writings. Mariner Books, 2005. —. “The Russian Realists and Southern Literature.” The Mortgaged Heart: Selected Writings. Mariner Books, 2005. Millichap, Joseph R. “Carson McCullers’ Literary Ballad.” Carson McCullers’ The Ballad of the Sad Café. Ed. Harold Bloom. Chelsea House, 2005. Whitt, Margaret. “From Eros to Agape: Considering the Chain Gang’s Song in McCullers’s ‘Ballad of the Sad Café,’” Carson McCullers’ The Ballad of the Sad Café. Ed. Harold Bloom. Chelsea House, 2005.

SECTION-IV REFLECTIONS, AESTHETICS AND HERITAGE

CHAPTER IX CRITICAL REFLECTIONS: DECIPHERING ALICE CHILDRESS’S WEDDING BAND: A LOVE/HATE STORY IN BLACK AND WHITE C. RAJU Genevieve Fabre, in his exceptional book, Drumbeats, Masks and Metaphor: Contemporary Afro-American Theatre, while commenting on the development of the black theatre as a powerful art medium, views: The emergence of black theatre is above all a sociocultural phenomenon and must be examined as such. The term is taken here to mean theatrical production by black people that serves as a tool for research into ethnic identity and the most appropriate means to express it artistically, for analysis of the situation of black people in North America, for symbolic expression of the black world view and experience. (1)

One of the best things that had happened to the genre of drama during the 20th century, particularly black drama, was the way in which the experience, the point of view and the explication of the physical and the mental trauma of the suppressed lot were pictured, which later, slowly resulted in a great degree towards a sort of emotional uprising. This is not to demean or to show in lesser light the potency of the literary output before that, but writers of the last century were able to express their anguish and distress in a more striking way. Slavery that formed part of the social and the political milieu of America, even after President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, paved the way for writers to seek vent through their works. Though the proclamation declared that all persons who were held as slaves within the rebellious states of America from then on would be free, the reality was

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different. It is obvious that the fundamental line that ran in the black psyche is the longing for an identity for itself. One of the primary concerns of Afro-American writings is that it has got the power and the potency to echo the miseries of the subjugated black societies who have been targeted and preyed on by the powers that are physically, emotionally, socially and politically stronger. The various ways in which they have been deprived, suppressed, and segregated always bring very painful questions on humanity itself. The continuous subjecting to slavery would definitely one day sow the seeds for freedom and independence. From the yester years, African-American writers’ works mirror the actuality of manifold identities and composite processes and the possible ways of redeeming the status of their lives. The black drama, as an art form, initially emerged from the spiritual congregations of the black people which were organized clandestinely without the awareness of whites. These in turn allowed for the development of the different types of theatrical ceremonies. The manifestations of the black writers showed the shared psyche of the people thus far enslaved. Originally, the black theatre could boast of writers who themselves were black and that the performances done on their works were carried out by none other than black people. The pain and the agony of their sufferings and the resultant shame made their portrayal powerful and their writings strong, sensitive, and bold and simply true to their self. In short, the writers began to express without fear the emotions they encountered. With the state of affairs of America as a nation being of this nature, Alice Childress’s play Wedding Band, taken for analysis, must be weighed up against the historical framework of the banning of inter-racial marriages in South Carolina. This must be done while keeping in focus the already prevalent black slavery. The law which forbade interracial marital unions was enforced in a few states to thwart the concept of miscegenation. The South Carolina Civil Code of the year 1902 under Section 2664 stipulates penalties for those who defy this order: “Parties to marriage and person performing ceremony are subject to a minimum fine of 500 dollars and / or a minimum jail sentence of 12 months” (69).

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Any analysis of Alice Childress’ play Wedding Band must take into account both the above facts - the suppression of black people as a whole and the Civil code banning inter-racial marriage - so as to really do justification in understanding the working of the black dilemma. Emotionally well-crafted, Wedding Band is a sensitive work of art which deals with the love affair between Julia Augustine, a black seamstress and Herman, a white baker. The plot though looks common, has a wider perspective when it comes to the dealing of man-woman, mother-son and black-white relationships. The portrayal of the black families and ensuing sufferings because of this fact are delicately and heartrendingly portrayed. America has seen many female playwrights in the past and one among them is Alice Childress. She is a forerunner who relentlessly pictured the tragic state of black women’s sufferings. A four-decade writing spree has made her delve into almost all the sub-genres of the literary hemisphere. Her writings are concerned with the state of the society that has so much influence through politics, and her longings are for the betterment of the black women that are reflected in her writings. Almost till her emergence as a striking writer, the black people were treated as second-class citizens in their own homeland. Their problems were not discussed and their emotions and experiences were kept subdued by the white and the mighty. Racial bias and sexual prejudgment of the majority made her works unseen by the eyes of the masses. Her merits as an artist and a substantial voice for the suppressed were swept under the carpet for a long while. But her avant-garde spirit as an individual had always kept her afloat against the strong currents of prejudice and partiality. Only her resilient will had allowed her to be noticed as a writer and an emancipator of black women. As a writer, at no point in time did Childress reconcile herself to the current fate of black people. She steadfastly clung to her notions and kept her dreams of the suffocated black people becoming emancipated souls. She used her writings to portray the reality of the happenings and would never allow others to touch her portrayals. Her focus was always on the unfortunate women for whom even the facet of living itself was in question. Black people were never allowed to enjoy their legitimate space and were denied even the elementary human freedom. These aspects were the characteristic focal points of her works. In her work taken for analysis

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here, the Wedding Band, Childress deals with the lives of women, mostly leading single lives. Basically, the play centers on Julia, who suffers double trouble, both as a woman and a black. Childress uses two events— one sociological and the other historical—to brilliantly depict the story of Julia and Herman: Julia, as a black woman, sociologically, and Herman, the attack of influenza epidemic, historically. Wedding Band is a play in two acts that delves into the inter-racial tragedy wherein each act consists of two scenes. The play focuses on the relationship between a coloured woman Julia Augustine and her white lover Herman. In the course of the play, Julia is seen celebrating her tenth anniversary of her relationship with Herman. He gives her a wedding band to wear on a chain around her neck until they can be legally married in another state. They are never married, for Herman contracts influenza. Though the play focuses on the condition of Julia Augustine, Childress has dramatized contemporary political and racist attitudes by introducing diverse characters. It examines the issue of discriminatory treatment among lower social groups within black society. The play itself is ironically titled. As a sub clause for Wedding Band, the author adds to it: A Love/Hate story in Black and White. While pondering over the title, one is struck by these ideas: What do the words ‘love and hate’ in the title signify? Does ‘love’ signify Herman’s love for Julia or vice versa? Or does the ‘love’ refer to the radical love of the white people for their supposedly superior race? On the flip side, what does ‘hate’ represent? Does this reflect the ‘hate’ of white people against the black people? Can that represent the ‘hate’ towards the cruel and insensitive South Carolina miscegenation laws? Would ‘hate’ refer to the hate of rich black people towards poor black people? Childress very cleverly also adds ‘in Black and White’ to the title. Again, does she mean to suggest the idea of ‘love and hate’, a combination of two oppositely binary words, to express the emergence of the natural love of a man towards a woman or does she want to impress upon the readers/audience the fact that whatever be the love for a soul, it is the hatred that permeates irrespective of the human quality? One may also interpret the phrase ‘love/hate’ thus: a white man loves a black woman

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while there is hatred towards that race. Seen vice-versa, a black woman loves a white man while she hates that race. In this way, Childress pictures the complex relationship. Taking all these into account, this paper tries to analyse the inner struggle and the eventual relief Julia Augustine managed to conquer. Also, an attempt has been made to investigate how far Childress has modeled this play on certain aspects of her own life. Jeanne-Maria A. Miller while commenting on Childress and her works considers Childress as the most heroic figure to emerge in America. She is considered to have reflected her beliefs in her plays. Miller firmly points out that Childress was an “ordinary black woman” who led a very normal life till circumstances forced her to rise to the fullness of her strength (185). These words aptly underscore the life of Julia also. The entire story revolves round her and reflects the work she does. Though less educated, as a seamstress she runs her life by sewing. Here, we have to note that Childress’s mother Florence White was herself a seamstress. Julia sews not only the clothes but she avidly sews relationships and she astoundingly sews herself to her principles. And eventually decides to sew herself with her own people. As the play begins, it is made known that it is the tenth anniversary of her troubled love affair with Herman. True to the comments of Jeanne-Maria A. Miller’s view, Julia, though hailing from a financially struggling household, conducts herself in such a masterly manner that she exhibits her character to be above the low and the ordinary. She does not mingle with the other women of her neighbourhood and she has no interest in indulging in petty conversations with others. Only two things occupy her mind—her sewing and Herman. The structure of the play lends a great strength to the overall plot, and the sequence of character introduction proves the play’s purpose. The play starts thus: “Summer 1918…Saturday morning. A city by the sea…South Carolina, U.S.A.” (WB, 77). Afterwards, one sees a description of the central character Julia Augustine’s first few days in a new locality comprising of a small community of women in a South Carolina town. The first scene introduces the minor characters. This reflects the concept of a concert where the music starts slowly and reaches the crescendo at the

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end. The introduction of the minor characters builds the necessary anticipation among the readers/audience. These minor characters possess a very low mind and they show no proof of being superior in thought or deed. They are devoid of even basic nuances. The reason for this state of affairs is because of the unending problems they are subjected to, both physically and emotionally. Julia, though from this set up, is entirely different from them. She is unique, distinct, independent, and industrious and always wants to stand on her own. Even in her relationship with Herman, she is mature and has a composed emotional quotient. But to her credit, it must be understood that in spite of keeping a distance from her own people, she is able to understand their pitiable predicament. Julia is projected to be always in a piquant situation because she could neither reveal her relationship with Herman nor could she be emotionally bonded with other black women. Childress introduces the self-employed forty-year-old baker Herman at the beginning of the second scene. She brings before the reader’s eyes the exquisite warmth that emanates from the familiar and the humble love between Herman and Julia. To escape the clutches of the miscegenation laws that would possibly prosecute them, they plan to move to New York. But Herman wants Julia to wait till he could sell his bakery so that, before they leave, he could repay the loan he got from his mother. This small sentiment of Herman itself shows his commitment to truth. He does not consider Julia like any other woman, surely not like any other black woman. He confesses that he loves Julia for her good heart and kind nature. Julia also is so much in love with Herman. She says that if she wants to fight, she could fight only with Herman, as there is no one to fight against. The neighbourhood Julia chooses to stay has three small houses. Fanny Johnson is the landlady who behaves in a bossy manner over others. She is arrogant and treats the needy and underprivileged meanly. One of the tenants is Mattie, who makes and sells candy so that she can take care of herself and her daughter Teeta. Another tenant is Lula, a middle-aged preacher who has an adopted son named Nelson. Julia is the third occupant of the property. Childress description of the house itself will convey the prevailing scenario there. There are three houses in a backyard. One can

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find the center of the house being newly painted. It is cheery looking in contrast to the other two which are looking weather-beaten and shabby. The appearance of everything seemed to clash with a beautiful, subdued splendor. There is also the old and new that mingles in defiance of the style and the period. The fifty-year-old Fanny is the archetypal illustration of her race. The character of Fanny is creatively portrayed. Her highly pretentious nature is inclined towards money and so she treats Julia in a better way since she had paid the rent in advance. She even addresses her respectfully. On the contrary, her treatment of the underprivileged tenants lacks decency and kindness. She demands others to act according to her whims. Being a distinct lady, Julia is unable to come together with the other occupants. She cannot join the other occupants or with the landlord in their small talks. She has no other go but to cope with the ordinary so that she can keep her relationship a secret. She has nothing to do and so she begins to drink wine a lot which Herman doesn’t approve of. Childress has modeled Julia after her own self. Like Childress, Julia is lighter-skinned. Childress confesses that she was sensitive about her light skin colour. She also felt that among black people, those who had light skin got preferential treatment. She feels pain because of this. Considering her lighter skin colour, Fanny calls her Miss Julia. She wants to consider Julia superior to the other two tenants of her house. But Julia never considers herself so and she is considerate to them. In fact, for her it creates trouble from two fronts. She is neither considered a real black woman nor as white. Swallowing all these insults and experiencing a crisis of identity, she treats her other co-inhabitants with immense benevolence. Her munificence drags Lula towards her. Imposing great faith on Lula, Julia discloses her love. In Julia, Lula in turn finds a good soul to confide about her predicament. The introduction of Herman in the evening of a Saturday itself is a master ploy of Childress. Does she mean to convey that Herman is at the evening of his life? Though white and of German origin, Herman is seen untidy and receives no respect. Having true affection for him, it is Julia who admonishes him for not being proper in his attire. She asks him, “Why

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didn’t you wear your good suit? You know how people like to look you over and sum you up.” (WB, 95) The wedding band that Herman brings to Julia to celebrate their tenth anniversary of love is again somewhat ironic in action. Even the way Herman presents it to her shows a kind of restlessness in him. He presents her the band saying: “It’s a wedding band…on a chain…To have until such time as…It’s what you wanted, Julia.” (WB, 97) There is an underlying meaning in this utterance. It is a fact that Herman’s love for Julia is real. But the words he uses here indicate other connotations. When he says ‘It’s what you wanted’ does that mean that he didn’t want that? Unfortunately, though the band tries to symbolize their bond, it becomes useless in the end. Accepting the fact that the love present between Julia and Herman is true, it is also true that the efforts made by Herman don’t match the struggle Julia runs into. In order to escape punishment that would probably ensue because of the miscegenation laws, Julia changes her place of stay as though she is a criminal. She lives in places which she would not do so in normal circumstances. Herman is seen helpless in his attempt to unite with his beloved. He is chained by his mother to whom he is liable to repay the three-thousand-dollar loan he had taken to buy the bakery. Symbolically he is indebted to his mother for money and his beloved for love. Unlike him, Julia is strong in her vision. Though she hops from one place to another for fear of prosecution, she is strong willed. Of course she suffers from the natural sense of identity crisis. But she doesn’t reveal it. She is hounded and attacked by both the black people and white people. Her insecurity makes her act out. As a woman of empowering traits, she never loses hope. She is daringly ready to face any unpleasant situation in her life. Although she feels dejected at some instances, she immediately consoles and strengthens herself by singing a revitalizing song. It is imperative to stress the fact that this kind of mental assertion makes Julia standout from the rest. When Herman falls ill, Julia takes care of him very earnestly. She consoles him with comforting words: “Don’t fret about your people. I promise I won’t be surprised at anything and I won’t have unpleasant

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words no matter what.” (WB, 106) Who else, other than a true soul will say these words? Understanding the precarious situation Herman is in, she reassures him that she won’t react against his people. Julia first thinks of calling a doctor, but she is prevented by her African American neighbours and Herman’s family. More than Herman’s health they are worried about the social stigma and the prosecution. Ironically, Frieda, Herman’s mother, wants him to be taken out for possible treatment only after dark—failing to understand the truth that they should be removing the ‘darkness’ of mind than expecting ‘darkness’ to come. Frieda herself is a hypocrite and suffers from loss of identity. She hides the fact that she is a German, and names herself Thelma. Herman’s mother and sister heap insults over her without caring for the situation Herman is in. Annabelle, Herman’s sister comments: “You look like one-a the nice coloreds.” (WB, 409) Herman’s mother is even more insensitive and egotistical. When Annabelle warns her mother of Herman’s dangerous condition, she retorts: “Everybody’s gon’ die. Just a matter of when, where and how.” (WB, 114) She describes her children as “A poor baker-son layin’ up with a nigger woman, a over-grown daughter in heat over a common sailor.” (WB, 116) Her ranting doesn’t end here. She is arrogant when she says: “He’s better off dead in his coffin than live with the likes-a you…black thing!” (WB, 119) Unable to digest the cantankerous Frieda, Julia, for the first time loses her equanimity. She blasts Herman’s mother unceremoniously. This violent, unexpected and muzzled emotion of Julia further infuriates Frieda. Even without considering Julia as a woman, Herman’s mother shouts at her indecently: ‘Black, Sassy nigger... Nigger whore ... he used you for a garbage pail.” (WB, 119) Only then does Julia understands the enormity of the crisis. She comes to the conclusion that she can never marry Herman. She is convinced that more than the miscegenation laws and the Jim Crow civil code, Frieda’s animosity and false pride won’t let her hold the hands of Herman. She then confesses to Mattie that Herman could never give her name or protection. She yells that she would clean the whiteness of her house with ‘brown’ soap and hot lye-water, “clean everything ... even the memory ... no more

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love ... free ... free to hate-cha for the rest-a my life ... I don’t want any whiteness in my house. ... stay out ... and leave me to my black self.” (WB, 120) She firmly takes the resolution to herself to cease her relationship with Herman. She makes up her mind to maintain her black identity as that would be natural. She also decides to give the wedding band presented to her by Herman to Mattie, as she thinks that at least that would make Mattie’s life meaningful. Julia feels that after all Mattie deserves a better life now after undergoing great hardship. Julia takes the wedding band and chain from around her neck, gives it to Mattie with the tickets. Julia feels satisfied that she could help a person of her own flock. And by presenting it to Mattie, she did the right thing of giving it to whom it is deserved. By her action Julia stands tall and proves her superiority of thought. She demonstrates a firm heart that let go her lover, but not before trying her best to provide him medication. She also does not let Frieda go unscathed, for she has the psychological satisfaction of blasting her out. Unrequited love does not dissuade her from doing good to others. By rejecting Herman’s love and considering Mattie and Teeta as her own people, Julia, finally, has her ‘identity’ established which she had been longing for. The setting of the play coincides with two of the world’s most crucial historical events. One, as already indicated, is the Spanish flu pandemic and the second is the culmination of World War I. Metaphorically, the pandemonium caused by the pandemic can be seen replicated in the mayhem caused in the love between Julia and Herman. Like those people who were quarantined during that pandemic, Julia quarantines herself in places where she would not be found out. And for both Julia and Herman, their love was a kind of a war. They did not relish any moment of their love life. Their love was a sort of brinkmanship-love. It was so feeble that the break off between them was imminent. The culmination of World War I symbolically indicates the culmination of the love-war. The end of this war gives them relief rather than regret. For Herman, it is more than he could ask for. He had to wage a financial war with his mother and racial war with society. Unfortunately, he could win neither. For him death is a

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relief. The only solace for both of them, if it can be considered so, is that Herman’s life ends at the hands of his beloved. He has the happiness of dying at her hands and she has the happiness of caring for him in his dying moments while his mother was more concerned about the qualms of the society. In her interview with Ann Shockley, Alice Childress talks about the purpose of writing this play: I wrote Wedding Band, a lot of people wonder if it had anything to do with my life because it concerned a black woman and a white man. It had nothing to do with my life at all; it had to do with someone my grandmother told me about. It always interested me, but it interested me more as I grew older in terms of all the flood of movies and plays about what they call miscegenation, you know, miss – something wrong that people did…So I wrote through my personal feeling with Wedding Band. I was interested in the subject because due to my colour people were always assuming something like that, you know, about my life. “Are you, which of your people were, which of your parents were white?” And I would say neither one. (Childress)

This is a very significant observation made by the author herself. But as a reader, when one reads this play there seems to be certain elements of personal happenings reflected in this play. As referred earlier, like Julia, Childress’s grandmother was a seamstress. And like Julia, Childress, though black, never looked original. That’s why people, as she herself says, used to ask her about the difference in colour. Taking these ideas further there is a possibility that there might be other autobiographical elements in the play. Examining Wedding Band from the point of view of Fabre’s black theatre concept, one would understand that it deals with the sociocultural phenomenon. Frieda hiding her German ancestry, Fanny’s treatment of the economically unfortunate Lula and Mattie, and the objection and ridicule shown towards Julia-Herman love, stand as concrete examples for this. Again, the fear of Frieda in not showing her nationality and Julia suffering due to miscegenation laws comment upon the deep rooted ethnic identity a person needs. Childress very artistically has portrayed the situation

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prevalent in North America while touching the sensitive chord of race delicately. Through her portrayal of the lives of Julia and Herman, Frieda and Annabelle, Fanny, Mattie and Lula, Childress has truly summed up the symbolic expression of a black world view. Most of all, the story is born out of a historical conflict that happened in the Jim Crow America. As an icing in the cake, the quest for identity and the eventual success in achieving it by Julia make this play a representation of its time and life. To conclude, it would be worthwhile to comprehend Alice Childress’s writings. Through the play Wedding Band, she pictures the grim world of the black people and whites and the existing simmering chord of tension. Her characters spell out physical space and the psychological distance among them. This play unambiguously outlines everything that adds to black suffering and their dilemma in the midst of the dangerous white firmament. Childress has championed the cause of the black people through the portrayal of Julia, Lula and Mattie. Her explications of the black suffering and more particularly the sufferings of the feminine gender would definitely be a classic stamp for the black theatre as a distinct genre.

Works Cited Childress, Alice. Wedding Band: A Love/Hate Story in Black and White. 9 Plays by Women. Edited by Margaret B. Wilkerson. New American Library, 1986. —. Interview with Ann Shockley, Black Oral History Collection (Nashville, Tenn: Fisk University) 19 October 1973. Fabre, Genevieve. Drumbeats, Masks and Metaphor: Contemporary AfroAmerican Theatre. Translated by Melvin Dixon, Massachusetts: Harvard UP, 1983. Kennedy, Stetson. Jim Crow Guide to the U.S.A.: The Laws, Customs, and Etiquette Governing the Conduct of Nonwhites and Other Minorities as Second-class Citizens. The U of Alabama P, 1990. Miller A. Jeanne Maria. ‘Alice Childress’. The Continuum Encyclopedia of American Literature. Ed. Stephen R. Serafin. Continuum, 2003.

CHAPTER X THE AESTHETIC HERITAGE OF MARIA FIRMINA DOS REIS’ THE SLAVE AND FRANCES HARPER’S SKETCHES OF SOUTHERN LIFE LUIZ FERNANDO MARTINS DE LIMA AND REGIANI APARECIDA SANTOS ZACARIAS Comparative Abolitionism Among the many things which Brazil and the United States might have in common due to their situation as American nations colonized by Europeans, one of them is not something to be proud of: the slavery of black Africans, the brutal exploitation and inhuman treatment bestowed upon them in the New World lands. Millions of Africans were taken or bought from Africa to the Americas during at least three centuries, besides the ones that couldn´t even make it through the transportation, dying in a slave ship—in Portuguese navio negreiro, the name of one of the greatest Brazilian poems by the abolitionist poet Castro Alves. This plagued historical feature is well known by both countries’ societies, and although the methods of trafficking, geographical preferences and possibilities, and consequently the culture of black slaves’ communities of each country may differ—just as the kind of colonial settlements and forms of governance in each country may differ as well—there were centuries of normalization of abuse suffered by black folk spread throughout America in a very alike fashion. The ideological differences between both countries get more dissimilar when you consider the abolitionist processes carried out by their societies.

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Since the United States was not yet identified as such, there were several settlements, each one with its own cultural landscape, the disposition about the possibilities of freeing black slaves were very sundry when you consider the entire territory. It is possible to find abolitionist efforts in the territory of what would become the United States back in 1688, when German settlers in Pennsylvania, led by Francis Daniel Pastorius, signed the Germantown Quaker Petition Against Slavery (Basker, 2012). From then, states ended slavery in their territory one by one, in different moments, like Ohio in 1802 or New Jersey in 1804, until, at last, the states not willing to abolish slavery were subjugated in a bloody war, the bloodiest up to date, the well-known American Civil War. In Brazil, we had a more monolithic societal and political organization. The Portuguese Crown took over, with few and very fleeting exceptions, our entire Atlantic coast, governing the land from Europe, as far as the 1822 Brazilian Independence, when another monarchy was established, now a homeland monarchy that oddly called itself an empire, which ruled the entire country as well, then from Rio de Janeiro. Brazil got addicted to slavery, in the words of the Brazilian historian Laurentino Gomes. There was a very systematic resistance to abolitionism, as if we were a South without a North. In fact, our only North was the British Empire, whose navy assaulted our coast trying to capture navios negreiros. Internally, however, the Abolition of Slavery was seen as something very distant. The very first Brazilian law against the trafficking of slaves passed in 1831, only because of pressure coming from the British government. It was known as Lei Feijó, that prohibited the importation of slaves into Brazilian territory. However, the law was not enforced, to the point that it was called a lei para inglês ver (law for the eyes of the Englishman), an idiom that is present in contemporary Portuguese language up to today, meaning anything that you do just for the matter of appearances. Between 30 and 40 thousand African slaves entered Brazil in the 1840s. The British got more aggressive in their assaults, and out of fear, the Brazilian Parliament approved in 1850 the Lei Eusébio de Queiroz which, this time for real, ended the international slave trade. However, the local slave trade kept on, especially from the Northeast to the Southeast. The slaves in Brazil were not set free until 1888, when

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Princess Isabel signed the Lei Áurea (Golden Law). Between 1850 and 1888, two other laws were approved concerning slavery in Brazil. The 1871 Lei do Ventre Livre (Free Womb Law), dictating that the sons and daughters of slaves should be born free, and the 1885 Lei dos Sexagenários (Sexagenarians Law), according to which older slaves should be manumissioned. Both laws were poorly reinforced. It was during this period that a consistent, though not wide, intellectual abolitionist movement came into place, especially in the names of Luís Gama, a halfwhite, half-black boy sold to slavery by his own father; Joaquim Nabuco and José do Patrocínio, founders, in 1880, of the Sociedade Brasileira contra a Escravidão (Brazilian Society Against Slavery) (Gomes, 212-16). Brazil was the last country in America to abolish slavery, an institution already rotten, alive in a society utterly anxious about its future without the unpaid work of black Africans. We did not have to go to war to free the slaves here. It seems as Brazil was peer-pressured into abolition.

Two Black Female Abolitionist Writers Frances Ellen Watkins Harper was the author of several writings, among them four novels, many works of poetry, essays, and letters. Besides she was an active abolitionist intellectual, a lecturer widened advertised about in the American press. Born from free parents in 1825, in a slave state, Maryland, she lost her parents very early, been raised by uncle and aunt from the age of three. William Watkins, her uncle, was a writer and teacher. So, she had the opportunity of having a full education with him, especially considering her context. Her first published writings were poems, a small collection named Forest Leaves, of which no trace of a copy has survived. She was twenty-years-old then. At twenty-five she became a teacher. Being a crime to be a free black person in Maryland, in 1853, she quit teaching and went to Philadelphia to participate in abolitionist movements. She became one of the most active lecturers among the abolitionists, traveling around and delivering speeches while working on her writing career. In 1854, she published a successful book of poems and essays,

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Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects. Reprinted many times in her lifetime, this is her most celebrated book. After the Civil War, Harper traveled through the South for years in order to teach freed slaves, keeping record of her impressions to present to northern audiences. She published several works of poetry and prose until the release of Sketches of Southern Life, in 1872. Before she died, in 1911, Frances Harper kept her prolific career as a writer and activist. Her most notorious novel, Iola Leroy, was published in 1892, and she help to found the National Association of Colored Women (Gates Jr. and McKay 408411). Maria Firmina dos Reis, born in 1825 in the Maranhão state, is a founding figure in the history of black female literature in Brazil. She is the author of a work of fiction considered to be our first abolitionist novel, Úrsula (1859), which portrays a love triangle set against the background of the Brazilian slavery system. Her literary formation is due to the close relationship with the writer and journalist Francisco Sotero dos Reis—it is said that they were cousins but there is in fact no documental source to assert the kinship between them—from whom she had all the support to start the studies of the Belle-Lettres. Also, she was very well received by the family and friends of her mother in a village away from the imperial São Luís town. Her mother, Leonor Felipa, had had her manumission from her owner, Caetano José Ferreira, who was an associate of Maria Firmina’s supposed father, João Pedro Esteves. So, Maria Firmina dos Reis was in fact a free bastard mulatta, daughter of an ex-slave woman. During a period of almost three decades, the Maranhese female writer had a prolific literary career, though restricted to her home state, publishing short-stories, folk tales and poems in many literary magazines (Zin, 2017; Cruz et al. 2018). The short-story A escrava (The slave woman) is a representative of the literary maturity of Maria Firmina dos Reis. It was published in 1887, in a literary magazine called Revista Maranhense, a few months before the Lei Áurea was signed.

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Controversy over the study of Black Female Writers from the 19th Century In his 1991 book about the poetics of African American Female Writers, Workings of the Spirit: The Poetics of Afro-American Women´s Writing, Houston Baker Jr. asserts: Summoning to view black southern mothers—even in their gardens or at the frames of their patchwork quilts – was for the daughters at the turn of the century taboo. For such a summons could only evoke a place of inescapable erring and difficulty whose representation might well bring contempt and not the fiercely sought sympathetic white public opinion. Hence, rather than return to a southern place, the daughters chose to dream dreams and project visions of a universal white-faced American noplace— a mulatto utopia (Baker Jr. 30).

Baker Jr. sees, therefore, an absence in the writing of Afro-American female writers at the end of the nineteenth century, such as Pauline Hopkins, Harriet Jacobs and Frances Harper. Using the trope of the “departure of the daughter”—the black woman from the south who is now free and departs towards the white cosmopolitan north—he argues that there is anxiety about portraying the life of their mothers, their female ancestors, who were slaves, which ensues the erasure of an authentic representation of black suffering, mistreatment, or anything that would cultivate a “voice of protest” (33). However, he continues, there is a submission to the northern reading public, predominantly white, who supposedly does not want to know about any of this. In despite the fact that he recognizes the importance of the work of the female writers mentioned (35), to him “Black southern vernacular energies remain an absence” (35), and there is no agreement possible between an authentic expression of black writers and a white audience: “White public opinion” may well be soothed by the mulatto´s embodied ambassadorship, but it will never be effectively moved to more than sentimental tolerance. And that very tolerance disappears if the mothers´ southern texts are summoned figuratively to view. What remains absent, then, in the daughters´ texts, as I have already indicated, is a fleshing out of both the southern, vernacular, communal expressivity of black mothers and grandmothers, and a portrayal of the relentless whitemale hegemony—

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the very site of violence—that threatened ceaselessly to eradicate such expressivity” (36).

Let us adjourn the discussion of Baker Jr.´s theorization in order to summon Elaine Showalter in a very celebrated conceptualization about the history of peripheral literatures: In looking at literary subcultures, such as black, Canadian, Anglo-Indian, or even American, we can see that they all go through three major phases. First, there is a prolonged phase of imitation of the prevailing modes of the dominant tradition, and internalization of its standards of art and its views on social roles. Second, there is a phase of protest against these standards and values, including a demand for autonomy. Finally, there is a phase of self-discovery, a turning inward freed from some of the dependency of opposition, a search for identity (Showalter 13).

It is not new information that Showalter’s generalization, though very celebrated, was utterly disavowed by maybe every single literary group mentioned by her, among others, due to her disregard for the particularities of each literary subculture. Take for example Sonia Salvídar-Hull in the study of female Chicano literature: “In addition to the misrepresentation of what “literary subcultures” write, Showalter creates an ethnocentric, Eurocentric, middle-class history of women´s writing” (205). However, in spite of the consistent reprehension and pointing out of limitations of Showalter’s conception, Baker Jr. seems to unknowingly be championing it, because he understands that black women writers during the late 19th century were still in the first phase, while he longed for them to be already on phase two, the phase in which he believed he already was. Therefore, Houston A. Baker Jr., in an anachronic way, assessed great black female writers in the 1800s, such as Frances Harper, considering their major flaw to be not being a radical theorist such as himself. Consequently, to him, the importance of black women writers in the late 19th century is only a matter of anticipation, just like the Old Testament before the New one for Christians, a kind of preparation for the radical writings of the 60s and 70s. Alice Walker, in her seminal essay In Search of our Mother´s Garden argues that there are many ways to be an artist, and Zora Neale Hurston, in What White Publishers Won´t Print, says that

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the problem of race seen through the eyes of the upper-class black man is a topic so ubiquitous that it rules out the investigation of high and complicated emotions (Hurston 1025). The problem of a prescriptive aesthetic in Afro-American literary study is pointed out at its finest by Barbara Christian, in her controversial essay The Race for Theory. In that text, she argues against the pervasiveness of continental philosophy in the American Literary Studies, including the Black Studies. Theory (with capital T) has been not only dictating the rules of power in the Universities, but coopting black intellectuals, who became more oriented towards theoretical sophistication than the reading and studying of great black fiction writers or poets. Barbara Christian criticizes also the Black Arts Movement because of its monolithic thought about black art. If a given work of literature did not correspond to their ideal of what is a black work of literature, it would be disregarded. The characteristics of the Black Arts Movement are, I am afraid, being repeated again today, certainly in the other area to which I am especially tuned. In the race of theory, feminists, eager to enter the halls of power, have attempted their own prescriptions. So often I have read books on feminist literary theory that restrict the definition of what feminist means and over-generalize about so much of the world that most women as well as men are excluded (Christian 355).

The same happens with any kind of prescriptive theorization that has excessive esteem for itself, while ignoring individual works of imagination. To Christian, ultimately, theorists are threatened by great writers (CHRISTIAN 358).

The Mothers in an abolitionist climate Frances Harper´s Sketch of Southern Life is a short book with a myriad of texts in different genres. There you can find narrative and lyrical poems as much as allegorical prose. There is a recurrent character throughout the poems, Aunt Chloe, a slave woman whose feelings and anxieties are conveyed to the reader by poems in fixed forms. However, Aunt Chloe is a slave mother and mother of slaves, an archetype developed all over the book. Among the many themes developed in the poems, such as the need

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for religion and the importance of sobriety, one of them is persistent: the separation of a slave mother and her sons, the trauma of having kids in bondage. The poems “Aunt Chloe”, “The Deliverance”, “The Reunion”, “Save the Boys” and “Wanderer´s Return” deal with the theme of motherhood, its anguishes due to the eminence of losing one´s children: “I Remember, well remember,/ That dark and dreadful day,/ When they whispered to me, “Chloe,/ Your children´s sold away!” (Harper). At least, freedom is at hand. The poem “The deliverance” is a portrayal of a slave disposition during the Civil War, its end with the victory of the north, and the consequent abolition of black slaves. Jakey, one of Chloe´s sons, return to her in “The reunion”, and in “Save the Boys” there is an appeal for the destiny of the children of black slaves. In fact, this poem is an emotional treasure that deals with one of the most unique aspects of a black slave mother psychological features during the abolition period, which is an ambivalence towards the abolitionist climate which was being experienced by middle-aged or older slave women, the Mothers: Like Dives in the deeps of Hell/ I cannot break this fearful spell,/Nor quench the fires I’ve madly nursed,/ Nor cool this dreadful raging thirst./ Take back your pledge -- ye come too late!/ Ye cannot save me from my fate, Nor bring me back departed joys; But ye can try to save the boys (HARPER).

In her short-story A escrava, Maria Firmina dos Reis treats similar subject. The narrative opens with a frame to the effective story: a white abolitionist woman in a social gathering tells the other guest about something that happened to her concerning a slave woman. She was at ease, enjoying the nature, a rather idyllic scenario, when this utopian landscape is disrupted by the fierce real world. A slave woman is trying to escape her persecutors. The unnamed white woman hides the slave, and lies to the man who was chasing her, sidetracking his pursuit. According to the man, the black woman went mad. After getting rid of the pursuer, a black man coming from a hideout rattles the white woman. It was the woman´s son: It was almost an offence to decency to lay my eyes upon such a miserable creature, whose half-naked body shew several recent scars; however, his countenance was fair and delightful. The face, black and bony. Guess his young aspect, dewed with abundant sweat, his limbs wrecked-tired, his

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He asks for her mother, who, according to him, is going to die if she was ever found, because she would not be able to bear the due punishment for trying to escape. He himself, who left the work to look for his mother, will also be punished with three hundred lashes. The white woman decides to protect both, mother and son: “I got brave and accountable: humanity demanded me this saintly duty” (170). The name of the man is revealed to be Gabriel when they reunite. When they get to the woman´s place, Gabriel says that his mother went mad when her two other sons, Carlos and Urbano, were taken from her and sold. She laments about her children: You know, ma´am, I will die and never see my sons anymore! My master sold them, they were so small… twins (…) My sight is weak, death is close. I am not sorry for dying, I am sorry for letting my children… my poor children! Those that were taken from my arms… This one that is a slave as well!... (171).

Joana tells more about her story—we know her name now. The short-story has a double narrative frame at this moment. She was owned by a man named Tavares, who tricked her father, a free native, to buy a false manumission letter to her, exploiting the fact that he was illiterate. Her mother died when she realized her daughter was going to be a slave just like her. The narrative is interrupted, and she begs the woman to take care of her son Gabriel. The white woman vows to protect him. Then, she resumes her story, addressing the moment their sons were taken from her. After telling how her children clenched to her skirts in order not to be taken away, and how she begged God to allow her to go with them, she dies. Relieving the traumatic experiences of being turned into a slave and having been set apart from her sons was too much for the woman. In the last narrative sequence of the text, Tavares shows up demanding the handing over of Gabriel. The white woman, however, was prepared. She

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arranged to buy Gabriel´s freedom with the help of a servant. When she shows the documents the man, he leaves in an aggravated state. Having a child in an abolitionist period is a whole different kind of experience. During the implacable years in bondage, black women were used to let their children go. It was very common to be set apart from their daughters and sons. That is one of the inescapable traumas which were undergone by a slave mother—and mothers of slaves—throughout the Americas. However, regardless of the disposition of your spirit, it was impossible to stay indifferent to the possibility of being set free, a possibility which was in fact was at hand, because of the abolitionist landscape which was being at least hinted during the late decades of slavery in U.S.A. and Brazil. However, after years of suffering, torture and abuse, one is afforded to be skeptic, mainly because scars as such are impossible to heal. Which is the same to say that slavery lingers even if it was politically abolished. In Harper´s poem “Save the Boys”, the abolition of slavery is not something to the mothers. To them, that lived a life of brutal servitude, is too late. There is hope for a good life only for their sons. “I tried to rise, but tried in vain”, and later “Oh! From its thralldom save the boys”. In Reis´ short-story, the mother never was and never will be free, in despite of the efforts of the abolitionist woman. Slavery consumed Joana´s being to the core, and she hardly could keep up with sanity anymore. No hope could save those women´s existences. But there was hope for their children. Gabriel must live a life as plentiful as possible to make the expiration of his mother a little less unbearable; the boys in Harper´s poem have to thrive, they have to be saved, or at least this is what make the abolition something to be eager for. This ambivalence towards abolition is a unique psychological feature in a black slave woman in an abolitionist landscape, and that was portrayed through different literary resources—abolitionist poetry by the African American writer, abolitionist narrative by the African Brazilian one—with a highly degree of sensitivity—and that is priceless for readers of any background to understand intimately, the anguishes of black women slaves in the Americas, regardless of the degree of radicalism championed by the writers.

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Works Cited Baker Jr., Houston A. Workings of the Spirit: The Poetics of AfroAmerican Women’s Writing. The U of Chicago P, 1991. Basker, James G., ed. American Antislavery Writings: Colonial Beginnings to Emancipation. The Library of America, 2012. Christian, Barbara. “The Race for Theory.” Within the Circle: An Anthology of African American Literary Criticism from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present, edited by Angelyn Mitchell, Duke UP, 1994. Cruz, Mariléia dos Santos et al. ““Exma. Sra. d. Maria Firmina dos Reis, distinta literária maranhense”: a notoriedade de uma professora afrodescendente no século XIX”. Notandum, v. 48, sep-dec 2018, 151166. Web. 14 Aug 2020. Gates Jr., Henry Lois, and McKay, Nellie Y., eds. The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. W. W. Norton & Company, 1997. Gomes, Laurentino. 1889: Como um imperador cansado, um marechal vaidoso e um professor injustiçado contribuíram para o fim da Monarquia e a Proclamação da República no Brasil. Globolivros, 2013. Harper, Frances E. W. Sketches of Southern Life. Ferguson Bros. & Co., 1891. Web. 17 Jul 2020. Hurston, Zora Neale. What White Publishers Won´t Print (1950). In: Leitch et al., eds. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. 2nd ed. W. W. Norton & Company, 2010. Print. Reis, Maria Firmina dos. Úrsula e outras obras. Edições Câmara, 2018. Web 06 Jul 2020. Salvídar-Hull, Sonia. Feminism on the Border: From Gender Politics to Geopolitics. In: Calderón, Héctor and Saldívar, José David, eds. Criticism in the Borderlands: Studies in Chicano Literature, Culture, and Ideology. Duke UP, 1991. Showalter, Elaine. A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing. Princeton UP, 1977. Walker, Alice. In Search of Our Mothers´ Gardens (1972). In: Mitchell, Angelyn, ed. Within the Circle: An Anthology of African American

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Literary Criticism from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present. Duke UP, 1994. Zin, Rafael Balseiro. Maria Firmina dos Reis e seu conto A escrava: consolidando uma literatura abolicionista. Revista XIX: artes e técnicas em transformação, v 1, 2017, pp. 142-161.

CHAPTER XI RACIAL INEQUALITY AND GENDER CONCERN IN ANN PETRY’S LIKE A WINDING SHEET T. DEVAKI African-American literature is broadly classified as the literature or the literary output of authors belonging to African ancestry probing into mainstream American identity. Since the advent of the 18th century, this literature has been contributing in a myriad of forms with variegated themes like slavery, oppression, racism and social inequality. They are best marked with Slave Narratives and the works of the Harlem Renaissance. Slave Narratives are embedded within the experience of slaves who were freed but underwent lot of physical and psychological oppression. Mostly in autobiographical style, they spoke out against slavery and racial discrimination. The Harlem Renaissance depicted the establishment of African culture in its art, dance and music and literature. It was an outcome of the mass migration of the Africans from the margins towards the North and occupying the centre of America, claiming their regal space in industries and institutions. As a matter-of-fact, African-American Literature had become an integral part of American Literature owing to the influence of writers like Du Bois, Washington, Richard Wright and Gwendolyn Brooks and their voice against racial segregation and aid towards the Civil Rights Movement and black nationalism. They made it a point to stress the African-American’s role in the making of new America. Women share a major fraction in this part of literature. African-American literature began its score with Phillis Wheatley. She, along with Lucy Terry, is hailed as the founder of this literary tradition that discusses the social issues of black people and their struggle for equality. Anna Cooper,

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popularly known as the mother of Black Feminism, focussed rigorously on women’s education and adjudicated on socioeconomic development of the community in general and women in particular. Our Nig is considered to be the first novel written by a female African-American novelist, Harriet Wilson, recounting the difficulties of the indentured labourers. The range and richness of twentieth century African-American women writers are innumerable. Of all the writers, the most celebrated are Harriet Jacobs, Zora Neale Hurston, Lorraine Hansberry, Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, bell hooks, Buchi Emecheta and others. These women had rendered their hands as activists in civil rights movements, journalists calling out for equality and award-winning writers turning the attention of the world towards the suppressed world of black people. The major concerns of these writers are emergence from oppression, identity, freedom, racial inequality, feminism, womanhood and other related issues of the black community. Language, arts, music and symbolism play a vital role in their representation. One among this variety is Ann Petry, the indomitable writer of American novels, short stories and non-fiction, who depicts the lives of AfroAmericans and their struggle to cope in the land of migration. As an African-American novelist, journalist and biographer, Ann Petry depicted a unique perspective of the lives of the black people in the town where she grew up. Born in Connecticut in a family of pharmacists, Petry graduated with a degree in Pharmacy from the University of Connecticut. She was a journalist for a short stint in Amsterdam News and People’s Voice and later turned to creative writing. Having lived in this familiar oppressive set up, Petry makes a remarkable feat with her publication of The Street located in Harlem, and gained acclamation as the first novel written by an African-American women novelist to be sold million copies. Her Second novel Country Place talked about the corruption and violation of white people in her town in Connecticut. The Narrows, Petry’s third novel, dealt with the unfulfilled love affair of a black man and a white woman. This novel talks about the society’s discrimination and disapproval of black people as a fellow human being and interracial marriages. Apart from these novels, Petry has

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also written short stories published in her collection, Miss Muriel and Other Stories, and many other historical biographies for children. The Street had crowned her with both critical and commercial success among the readers besides the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship in 1946. She became a visiting professor of English at the University of Hawaai and lectured in many other universities throughout the United States. The novel is marked as a treasure of American Literature since it is one of its first kinds to represent the plight of a black woman amidst racial and gendered oppressions. It described the street culture of Harlem, where she stayed after her marriage, and the hand-to-mouth existence of its residents. As Claudia Tate points out, Black women writers write primarily for themselves, as a means of understanding their experiences and observations, and as a means of discovering deeply hidden truths about themselves as well as others. (60)

Having grown up amidst racial oppression, Petry had encountered various humiliating experiences during her childhood. But her parents, uncles and aunts had set before her a persuasive influence by overcoming and overpowering those kinds of obstacles. Consequently, with so many experiences and stories to tell with right-hand information, she recreates characters with many dimensions presenting racial and gender related issues knowledgeable only to the subaltern community. Her short stories, as classified by Nora Ruth Roberts, is an expression of “resistance against oppression” and “virtually organized reluctance to yield to assimilation” (29). As a writer capturing social realism, Ann Petry voices out the hostility encountered by the black people in the White dominated world on the grounds of race, identity, gender and economy. In particular, her short fiction published in the collection Miss Muriel and Other Stories takes up both men and women protagonists stumbling upon racial and gender abuse in their own stride. In the short story Like a Winding Sheet, (1945) Ann Petry describes a single working day of a young man, particularly on a Friday, when he gets his pay cheque, feeling inexorably worn-out physically and mentally. It is a telling-tale of a black man Johnson and his wife Mae belonging to a lower-middle class Harlem society. Both of them

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work night shifts in factories and make their ends meet. Racial oppression is defined as any kind of unjust treatment, exploitation and discrimination targeted at a specific group or race to oppress them socially and psychologically. As stated by Blauner, racial oppression is the central feature of the United States even after the legal abolition of segregation. It laid an irrevocable scar in the minds of the marginalized people prone to fits of suppressed anger and physical violence, as with Johnson in Like a Winding Sheet. The story opens at 4 in the evening when Johnson feels too exhausted to get up owing to the 10-hour shift in the factory. Every inch of his body feels the ache and he is literally unwilling to lift his body up from his winding sheet. When Mae urges him to get ready for work, he complains as, “And all that standing beats the hell out of my legs” (1498). Johnson works in a plant where he has to walk the whole time pushing the cart and collecting the finished product. The monotony of the job which, he complains, does not need human intelligence and which could be done with little trucks, irritates him. He believes that if he was head the plant, he would impose new ideas and modernize the whole set up: He’d figure out some way most of ‘em could be done sitting down and he’d put a lot more benches around. And this job he had – this job that forced him to walk ten hours a night, pushing this little cart, well, he’d turn it into a sittin-down job. (1499)

Moreover, he does not like the way the employers are compelled to stand in a queue and wait for another 15 minutes at the end of the tiring day to receive the weekly pay. He feels, “That was another thing he’d change, he thought” (1501). He is of the opinion that it is both humiliating and timeconsuming at a crucial time when everybody, after the exhaustive labour, rushes to the station to catch the train and get back to their cosy bed at the dawn of the day. The plight of the black intellectuals in an alarming environment is revealed in this episode. Petry has thrown light on the American capitalism which exploits its labourers with more work and less pay. Spiritually speaking, Johnson owes his hand-to-mouth existence to his black identity.

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In spite of facing racial slurs at his workplace, he has to stick on to the job at any cost because getting a job for a man who hails from Harlem is not that easy. He reaches the plant at a delayed time frequently and gets chided by the boss Mrs. Scott. She is impatient to listen to his suffering. When in agony, he mentions that he could not get enough rest and his legs trouble him a lot, and she gets irritated and castigates him as follows: “Excuses. You guys always has an excuse,” ... . And the niggers are the worst. I don’t care what’s wrong with your legs. You get in here on time. I’m sick of you niggers—” (1499)

It reveals the fact that Mrs. Scott, representative of the ‘white master’, is callous towards the health of her employee and verbally abuses his identity. Johnson, who could already not deal with a female boss, is busted with his endurance. “He stepped closer to her. His fists were doubled. His lips were drawn back in a narrow line. A vein in his forehead stood out swollen, thick” (1500). He puts her in her place with a reminder, “You got the right to cuss me four ways to Sunday but I ain’t letting nobody call me a nigger” (1499). Johnson’s anger multiplies inwardly since he has to keep his tension in his hands: .... So he dwelt on the pleasure his hands would have felt—both of them cracking at her, first one and then the other. If he had done that his hands would have felt good now—relaxed, rested. (1500)

He knows full well that he would have lost his job if he has to fulfil his hand’s desire. Accordingly, he convinces himself that he could not hit a woman. These factors fatigue him and he finds everyone feeling similar tension due to overworking. He yearns to go back to his home and enjoy the time with Mae. Rebecca Leonard and Don Locke, in their “Communication Stereotypes” points out the interracial stereotyping of black people and white people as “often negative...remained unchanged over the years” (np). Further they quote Katz and Braly study of racial stereotyping which pinpoints the white students consider the black people as lazy, stupid, dirty and unreliable. It is the same with Mrs. Scott for whom the day is another working day and considers Johnson’s excuses as lame and owing to his laziness.

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After the tiring shift and the agonized moment, Johnson feels an urge to reaffirm his identity. So, while waiting for the train, he enters into a posh restaurant—bright and lively—a place which he has been longing to enter but never get the guts to. He is drawn towards the steaming coffee pot which eliminates the tiredness in the faces of the fellow-workers. Like a child he eagerly waits in the queue for his turn to “let the bubbles break against the lips before he actually took a bid deep swallow” (1502). But to his disappointment, at the point of his turn, the girl at the counter announces that they run out of coffee for a while. Johnson expects everyone to revolt but watches them shuffle away silently. It is only at that time he notices the waitress gently lifting her hair away from the back of her neck and tossing her head back. This blondeness of her irritates him and he once again feels the tingle in his fingertips. What he wanted to do was hit her so hard that the scarlet lipstick on her mouth would smear and spread over her nose, her chin, out towards her cheeks; so hard that she would never toss her head again and refuse a man a cup of coffee because he was black (1502).

He visualizes her refusal as her contempt for him for being black and in his rage he fails to notice the girl filling the urn with water and beginning to make fresh coffee tossing her head as usual. This pressurized feeling internalize his subjugation and the tension again builds up in his body. Johnson’s psyche is so crammed with the pressure of the socio-cultural perception towards him and his community. As a result, he is unable to forgive Mrs. Scott who is shocked at his reaction and convinces him that she does not mean to hurt him and that words accidentally slipped out of her mouth. His suppressed anger misleads him violently and he takes everything as oppressive against him. Ann Petry owes this pain to his “anger-born energy that had piled up in him and not been used and so it had spread through him like a poison” (1502). Tony N. Brown in his article, “Being Black and Feeling Blue” has argued the upshot of bigotry as follows: Discriminatory experiences that occur because of race are demeaning, degrading, and highly personal. Thus, the experience of racial discrimination

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On the contrary, Mae prepares herself for work cheerfully, taking a chill bath, giggling and teasing Johnson. They are a very lovely and intimate couple spending their time happily amidst the oppressing environment. Sometimes they spend their day staying up and laughing together, preparing food and listening to songs together. Though the author has not revealed anything about her workplace, the reader could find her not complaining about it. Harihar Kulkarni, in his “Towards Redeeming the Self” comments on the traits of women characters of Petry as denoted below: Her treatment of black woman as person pitted against the deterministic society offers fresh patterns in Afro-American women’s literature. By presenting female characters as figures with strength and weaknesses, Petry in a limited sense, foreshadows a later generation of women who were to emerge in Sixties and Seventies. (147-8)

The way Mae carries herself with confidence, which Johnson associates with white women—her attitude, makeover and the happy smile that she always wears in her lips, displays her vigour in which she is ready to face her future in the same surrounding. On one particular morning, Mae resets back to her cheery mood humming songs and chewing gums after returning from work. But Johnson gets irritated over her happiness, her hair-do and the way she ducks her head forward and backward like the blonds. He picks an unwanted quarrel with her but her sense of humour wins over his resentment. She understands his tiredness and makes efforts to allure him into better mood: “Aw, come on and eat,” she said. There was a coaxing note in her voice. “You’re nothing but a old hungry nigger trying to act tough and—” (1503) but the use of “nigger” blows his mind up and it ends in Johnson losing all his control and letting the tingle in his hands cast out its fury. Instead of enjoying her presence and taking part in her cajoling laughter as he always does, he hits her hard hysterically and is bound to this act again and again, feeling aghast at his own action: He groped for a phrase, a word, something to describe what this thing was like that was happening to him and he thought it was like being enmeshed

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in a winding sheet—that was it—like a winding sheet. And even as the thought formed in his mind his hands reached for her face again and yet again. (1504)

Domestic violence against women has been practiced for ages. Hence women suffer the double-edged knife of suppression. It may be physical or psychological, but the ultimate victims are women. Neeru Tandon in her ‘Violence against Women’ opines, “it can be seen through naked eyes that whenever and wherever there is exploitation, oppression and violence, women is the worst sufferer” (141). Here too, Johnson vents all his sociological pressure and its eventual anger in Mae who is ignorant of his heated emotion but has given a hand to patch up his mood. Ann Petry surprisingly sums up the story with Mae being victimized for something she is not responsible of. She features black women’s abuse in Mae being attacked by Johnson thwarting the couple’s intimacy. The characterization is a proof of the position of African women as a victim of social oppression, both racial and gender. Hazel Carby writes, The experience of black women does not enter the parameters of parallelism. The fact that black women are subject to the simultaneous oppression of patriarchy, class and ‘race’ is the prime reason... that renders their position and experience not only marginal but also invisible. (212-3)

This end is a huge bolt from the blue in the readers’ point of view from a man who has behaved so well with his wife, who wants to surprise her by fixing her breakfast after an exhaustive night-shift, and who cajoles her not to stay away from the work on her payday. Not only with Mae, with other women—Mrs. Scott and the Waitress, who when he thinks of them, he is reminded of their soft flesh, symbolic of their physical weakness, even at the point of disappointment. When Mrs. Scott calls him a “nigger”, he thought he would have behaved otherwise if the oppressor had been a man. On the other hand, the repeated image of the red lipstick exposes his irritation towards the female hierarchy. Petry writes as, “He never could remember to refer to her as the forelady even in his mind. It was funny to have a woman for a boss in a plant like this one” (1499). Every time he sees them, he wants to smack those paints from their face until they are cleaned up from the artificiality of colour.

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The last phase of the twentieth century has witnessed a shift from androtexts to gyno-texts as pointed out by the feminist critic Elaine Showalter. By gyno-text, a sharp contrast is found in the representation of womencentred experiences, implications and socio-cultural aspects of the society. Though Petry’s protagonist is a male and the conflicts are posed from a male point of view, it is also a feminist critique about women from a masculine perception. The women Petry has handled are of three different varieties—one is the wife, the other is the boss and the third one is a complete stranger to the male character. He hooks up all his emotional imbalances towards these women, who mostly are not the cause of his (the man’s) turbulent state, and they too silently bear the violence brunt on them. Johnson’s hatred for the women’s confidence, blondness and the way they carry themselves is also because of the fact that black women in the era of Petry were given more job opportunities than black men, and they had to be dependent on their women for their survival. It is through the painful pages of the history of the black people that one witnesses the plight of black men and women. The whites offered jobs to black women and deprived black men of economic independence. It was an age where most of the men remained jobless and depended on their women to run the family. Many of them deserted their family and used to find new and young women. The ultimate consequence is the misery of women burdened with more responsibilities without love and faith from their counterpart. Thousands of women remain in the shadow of this society’s double oppression that Petry had replicated through the revulsion for feminine gestures and diffidence of Johnson in her short story. Racial conflict is the primary concern of Petry in her characterization of Johnson. Ashley Dugger, an attorney and a sociologist, defines RaceConflict Approach as “a sociological perspective that looks at the disparity and tension between people of different racial and ethnic groups.” (np) This approach throws light on Johnson’s conflict of the mind and his constant worry about his subjugated state. His tension and hatred are mutual—the way he is treated by the society and the way he takes everything personally.

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With Mae, he associates the way she ducks her hair and her accent with the white women whom he hates. In her femininity, he correlates Mrs. Scott and the Waitress and lets loose of his containment and hits her “...so hard that the dark red lipstick had blurred and spread over her full lips, reaching up towards the tip of her nose, down toward her chin, out toward her cheeks”. (1504) His depression has bound him like a winding sheet and he is unable to appease the tingling of his fingertips. This inability, besides racial oppression, kills the compassion and kindness in Johnson as pointed out by Yemisi Jimoh: Petry’s story presents domestic abuse from the perspective of a black man living in the pressure cooker of a colour conscious society. Her presentation, however, is controversial, as it presents a sympathetic portrait of this wifebeating husband. (web.)

Elaine Showalter, in her Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness, denotes feminist writing and feminist criticism as more varied and engaging in tone. Her special mention of feminist language goes thus: The advocacy of a women’s language is thus a political gesture that also carries tremendous emotional force. But despite its unifying appeal, the concept of a women’s language is riddled with difficulties. (335)

Similarly, Petry had titled the story as “Like a Winding Sheet”, referring to the protagonist’s life after the Civil War. He is nowhere, searching for an opportunity to establish his identity not as someone from Harlem but as an ordinary American. As suggestive of the title and in the opening remark, Johnson is wound in the winding sheet symbolic of a shroud—a white cloth used to cover a dead body. The author expresses that he is “silhouetted” (1498) in the sheets, indicating that his life is in the suffocating grip of the white superiority and “he had to smile in spite of himself”, (1498) indicating his feeble position to lead his life in his own terms. The very opening description of their lifestyle is figurative of the fact that darkness looms large in his life, symmetrical to his night shifts, and the days are spent huddled in the bed withdrawn from the ray of hope. He shuts himself from the sunlight and rolls over inside the sheets. He is

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unwilling to face the harsh reality of the day and puts off every moment. Like his legs, his life also limps owing to the uncertain future and the oppressive—racial as well as financial—present. He, a ‘hungry nigger’, does not live his life but merely exists and gulps his breakfast just the way he swallows his aspiration in the adopted land. Johnson’s bed symbolizes the place where he finds himself not only warm and resting but also loved and accepted. His hesitation to get up from his cosy bed is partly because he is exhausted by the previous night’s shift and partly because he is reluctant to go to a workplace where his talent is not utilized and also he is disinclined to participate in the world where he is marginalized through verbal and facial insults. Petry’s Johnson is a depiction of the intricate black community living in desperate situation as their survival economy depends on white people. He is neither a subjective slave nor an empowered black person. He lingers somewhere in between where punishing a white person for racially oppressing him would lead him to the still darkness of his existing gloomy life. As a result, he leads an isolated life holding compromise as a weapon against his social exploitation. Invariable pain in body and mind deeply scar his physical and mental phases. Ironically, though he is presented as an angry young man, he incurs sympathy from the readers for being trapped in the world of racial bigotry with so much energy for conservation and in dire need of economic independence as well as upliftment.

Works Cited Brown, Tony N. and et al. “Being Black and Feeling Blue: The Mental Health Consequences of Racial Discrimination.” Race and Society, vol 2, no. 2, 2000, pp. 117-131. Carby, Hazel. The Empire Strikes Back. Hutchinson, 1982. Dugger, Ashley. “The Race-Conflict Approach in Sociology”. https://study.com/academy/lesson/the-race-conflict-approach-insociology.html.

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Jimoh, A.Jemisi. “Ann Petry: Miss Muriel and Other Stories”. Literary Encyclopaedia: Afro-American Studies Faculty Publication Series. https:// scholarworks.umass.edu/afroam_faculty_pubs Kulkarni, Harihar. “Towards Redeeming the Self: The Cycle of Black Women’s Fiction”. Black Feminist Fiction. Creative Books, 1999. Leonard, Rebecca and Don C.Locke. “Communication Stereotypes: Is Interracial Communication Possible?” Journal of Black Studies, 1993, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/002193479302300303. Petry, Ann. “Like a Winding Sheet”. https://www.scribd.com/Ann-Petry Like-a-winding-sheet-pdf Roberts, Nora Ruth. “Artistic Discourse in the Three Short Stories by Ann Petry”. Women and Language, vol. 22, no.1, 1999. Showalter, Elaine. “Feminist Criticism in The Wilderness”. Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader. Edited by David Lodge, Dorling Kindersley (India) Pvt. Ltd., 1988. Tandon, Neeru. Feminism: A Paradigm Shift. Atlantic Publishers, 2012. Tate, Claudia. “Black Women Authors – An Emerging Voice”. Black American Women Authors: A Reprint Portfolio, USIS, 1985.

SECTION-V SENTIMENTALISM, SCIENTIFIC AND SENSIBILITIES

CHAPTER XII SENTIMENTAL CLAUSTROPHOBIA OF FEMINIST SENSIBILITIES: A FEMINIST READING OF MAUD MARTHA AND HOUSE OF MIRTH CYRINE KORTAS I. Introduction The popular opinion of the Woman Issue in the U.S. is that it was treated in a strictly conventional manner. The charges of conventionality are found in the authors’ style and subject matter that accentuated the alienation of the individual who failed to fit into society or communicate with others. However, two American female authors stood against mainstream American artistic creation. While it is true that they were literary disciples of established authors such as Henry James and Langston Hughes, both Gwendolyn Brooks and Edith Wharton emerged as avantgardists with the uniqueness and independence of their style. What brings these two authors together is the clearer and more concrete depiction of the individual’s responsibility to society, with a special touch of feminine sensibility1 and fantasy, putting forth a poetic quality. Their selected works explore the theme of women’s responsibility to society and the conflicts that upspring when their individual desires do not confirm with what is socially accepted. The moral quality and female sensibility are the female protagonists’ characteristics to stand in the face of the hegemonic cultural and constraints. 1

Sensibility is culturally identified as feminine, viewed as “a distinctly feminine field of knowledge…particularly associated with the behavior and experience of women” (Ellis 24).

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In the light of a feminist reading, the paper examines the trajectory of feminist thinking in the beginning of 20th century to investigate how notions of heroism and sensibility influence the feminist politics that marked the movement of the New Woman2. I contend That regardless of class or race, the NEW Woman authors came to recognize the double potential of sensibility to either subjugate or empower women in the U.S., and hence they redefined sensibility as a social and heroic virtue in their selected works. Wharton’s and Brooks’ reconstruction of sensibility as an essential figure of the sentimental heroine allowed them to create a positive model of femininity that transcended social, gender, and cultural barriers, aiming at inspiring their female readers to work towards political, legal, and social reform. Investigating the two American women writers’ aesthetic and political agenda, as they operated under the conventions of modern American society, leads us to a fuller understanding of the progress and shortcomings of the New Woman movement within the first half of the 20th century. Through this feminist reading, the paper argues that for women of all classes and races, life was a series of insults, pains, rejections and humiliations, as well as deprivations that hinder selfrealization and fulfilment. Hence, it becomes urgent to openly speak about these female experiences.

II. Gwendolyn Brooks’ Maud Martha: In 1953, the laureate poet Gwendolyn Brooks broke the boundaries between literary genres by writing her first and only novel Maud Martha. The lyrical novel tells the story of a seven-year-old black American girl and traces her development into maturity through her daily struggle against the prominent hindrances of racism and social and gender inequalities in Chicago’s south side. Composed of 34 vignettes that highly 2

“New Woman”. The labeling first appeared at the beginning of the twentieth century to designate a group of educated and ambitious young women determined to cut with the past and establish their own understanding of themselves. “[W]ith her short haircut and practical dress, her demand for access to higher education, the vote and the right to earn a decent living, her challenge to accepted views of femininity and female sexuality,” the New Woman enlivened the feminist discourse that challenged patriarchy and its systemized and institutionalized subordination of women (Heilmann and Beethan 1).

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vary in length and interest, yet tacitly connected through Maud’s quest for self-realization, the text inspires political as well as social advancement in a late 1950s racist and sexist society, by accepting the challenge of proving one’s worth, subjectivity, beauty, and blackness. Early in the text, Maud, the young girl, realizes that much of her unpopularity is due to her dark skin color and long, nappy hair. Hence, the journey to assert her uniqueness starts from the opening vignette and roots the text in its political and social context of the Civil Right Movement. The text questions the irrationality of judging one’s humanity and worth on the basis of skin color and looks rather than intellect and values. Actually, the political is made manifest in the daily struggles of the character to authenticate Maud’s strive to create her own self-image that thrives on her pride in her unique blackness, kindness, and intellect. The adept in Brooks’ work lies therefore in her ability to grant the day to day concerns a political as well as existential dimension navigated throughout the protagonist’s ability to question the world around her and see into political and racial discrimination as well as her imaginative talents to create another world for her daughter and her self.

2.1. The Politics of the Black American Subject As the political spirit of the work is rooted in the poetics of selfrealization, Maud Martha can be viewed as a narrative amalgamation of Brooks’ protest poetry that evokes the daily struggle of the common black person. This strive is however explored through Maud’s endless fight against Eurocentric paradigms of physical appearance and beauty concepts, explored through the attempt to undermine “a color-conscious system and its role in spawning internal battles with self-hatred and selfdoubt” (Shaw 255-56). The narrative explores a female, personal warfare so as to retain her sense of self-identity within the confinements of patriarchy and racism. Similar to her poetry, Brooks gives voice to the voiceless and marginalized. The novel reaches likewise an overtly political stand when the house comes to replace the hostile public place of school for the little black American girl. Maud remembers: “At home . . . black walnut candy and steaming cups of cocoa with whipped cream, and pain shortbread. And everything peaceful, sweet” (MM 104-5). Home suggests

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what Claudia Tate describes as a domestic allegory of a political desire to be accepted; it turns into “a domestic site of [racial] improvement” that offers an empowered vision of the self (qtd. in Eversley 52). Through the character of Maud, the text builds a modern epic of suffering and struggling by capturing the conventions of the literary spirit of an epic through the metaphorical representation of the daily battles of a black American woman. Interestingly, however, “[i]n 1953, no one seemed prepared to call Maud Martha a novel about bitterness, rage, self-hatred and the silence that results from suppressed anger. No one recognized it as a novel dealing with the very sexism and racism that these reviews enshrined” (Washington 453). These reviewers were unable to see into the effects of the confining paradigms of beauty and looks which proved to be the very catalyst for a political and social revolt in a restrictively racist and sexist society which refrained black American women and intensified their low self-esteem. Many are the episodes in the text in which Maud feels infuriated by the way people judge her looks. Her untamed anger renders her speechless and incomprehensive. Through her short, staccato sentences that characterize most of the narrative, Maud tries to justify her family’s preference of her sister Helen, trying desperately to stand aloof: “It was not their fault-she understood. They could not help it. They were enslaved, were fascinated, and they were not all to blame” (MM 35). These chopped broken sentences marked by different pauses highlight her painful awareness of being an undesirable member in her family, an object to pity due to her extremely dark skin. She stands for the abject as expressed by Julia Kristeva.

2.2. French Feminism and the Quest for Subjectivity Though it is an African American text, Maud Martha lends itself to a French feminist reading in the light of Kristeva’s theory of the abject that proves to be color-blind, the very concept black feminism failed to acknowledge. They believe that sexism, class oppression, and racism are intricately tied up. However, these feminist schools seek to overcome sexism and class oppression, while ignoring that race can also discriminate against many people, including women, through racial bias. The aim of the paper in hand is to refute similar claims through applying a French

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feminist reading to Brooks’ work as French feminism does in no way mean feminism for French women, it transcends geographical as well as racial ideologies as it springs from the female body that has long been contained and confined. 2.2.1 The Abject The abject means literally the state of being cast off. The dictionary definition of the abject stresses that the latter is “brought low, miserable; craven, degraded, despicable, self-abasing” Kristeva develops the idea of the abject as that which is rejected by society as it disturbs its raison d’être. In the Powers of Horror, Kristeva identifies that we first experience abjection when we separate from the mother at the moment of birth. She further explains that abjection stands for revolt against everything that gives us a sense of identity. It is this very stage that announces the child’s entry into the symbolic order, another Lacanian idea. It is this entry that brings the abject, whom according to Kristeva, is a reaction to “a threat” (2) and this threat can be from the outside or the inside, always already “opposed to I,” (2) disturbing as such the existing system of order (5) when transgressing boundaries, “The abject is perverse because it neither gives up nor assumes a prohibition, a rule, or a law; but turns them aside, misleads, corrupts; uses them, takes advantage of them, the better to deny them” (Kristeva 5). This subversion, “summon[ing]” occurs within a maelstrom of elation and loathing (Becker- Leckrone 33). The abject is therefore “immoral, sinister, scheming, and shady: a terror that dissembles, a hatred that smiles, a passion that uses the body for barter instead of inflaming it, a debtor who sells you up, a friend who stabs you” (Kristeva 4). Because it is the betrayer, the abject is “the improper [and the] unclean,” (2) “everything that is filthy or disorderly or uncivilized . . .” (Covino 21). In a Christian context, the abject is associated with the concept of sin as it implies an “unquenchable desire” (Kristeva 123). The locus of such desire is the body, essentially the female body as it was Eve that brought about sin because of her disobedience. Eve’s knowledge of the tree of life and eating the forbidden fruit echo Kristeva’s suggestion that “woman’s knowledge is corporal, aspiring to pleasure” (Kristeva 140).

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Another key element associated with the abject is the emotional reaction the subject experiences when confronting the impure, the rotten and smelly. This emotional reaction is a synonym of desolation. Death is the other name to abjection. Seeking to define abjection in the light of this emotional reaction, Kristeva asserts in an interview that Something that disgusts you, for example, you see something rotten and you want to vomit—it is an extremely strong feeling . . ., which is above all a revolt against an external menace from which one wants to distance oneself, but of which one has the impression that it may menace us from the inside. (Baruch 118)

She further writes: “the abject is the pseudo-object that is made up before but appears only within the gaps of secondary repression. The abject would thus be the ‘object’ of primal repression” (Kristeva 12). Hence, it is the disregarded feminine that succumbs into social and psychological oppression so as patriarchy can thrive. Many black American female protagonists have been penned as victims of their oppressive society, deemed psychotic, demonized, and ugly, the suitable manifestation of the abject as the repulsive. In a society that limits her to the marginalized, monstrous object, Maud Martha proves agency and presence with silence and suppressed dreams. As an architype of black American characters, Maud Martha revolts against a hostile society by violating public as well as personal boundaries in a journey that corresponds to what Kristeva calls abject literature. It is a literature where inside outside and subject/object boundaries are “incandescent”, examining the theme of “suffering horror is the ultimate evidence of such states of abjection within a narrative representation. If one wished to proceed farther along the approaches of abjection, one would find neither narrator nor theme but a recasting of syntax and vocabulary—the violence of poetry and silence” (Kristeva 101). 2.2.2 Maud Martha an Experience of the Abject In the novel it becomes easy to tell that Maud is the abject as she is presented as an object of racial and gender repression due to her lack of conventional beauty. When young, she was disregarded by her parents

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who preferred Helen as the latter was fairer. Then, at the age of seventeen, she was neglected by boys. She hears Helen saying “‘you’ll never get a boyfriend . . . if you don’t stop reading those books’. However, Maud knows the real reason” (MM 165). Maud reckons that things have not changed much as Helen will always be the one everyone “wanted in the wagon, still the pretty one, the lovely one,” (MM 160) while she is still to be judged on her pitch-black skin-color. This knowledge brings tears to Maud and further heightens her awareness of being an undesirable object. Maud’s consciousness of her objectification is materialized in her rejection of her second boyfriend who could not see beyond material values. “He wanted a dog,” she says (MM 172). The animal image serves Maud’s awareness of her oppression as an object. She grows disdainful of her entourage who fails to recognize her kindness and inner beauty and to know that she is “smarter than Helen, that reads more, that old folks like to talk to her, that she washes as much as and has longer and thicker (even nappier hair)” (Washington 245). Painting a poetic prose of a growing-up journey of a black American woman across 34 vignettes, the novella captures the social, cultural, economic, and poetic conditions of a black American working-class family living in Chicago during the 1950s, a decade marked by the interplay between hope and despair. The text hovers in the space between acceptance and rejection. This interplay, caused mainly because of the conditions of an ending depression and a hope for a recovery in an industrially rising metropolitan city, positions the abject at the center of the novella and presents its protagonist as the abject, “[a]s abjection, this violence signals a dynamic that shapes the subject not just in the beginning, but always” (Becker -Leckrone 32). This engulfing presence of the abject are brought forth by Maud Martha’s racialized and engendered oppression that evoke an internal struggle. The focus on the abject brings to mind the representation of the abject body, especially that the main character is looked upon with horror, disgust and repulsion. From the onset of the novella, the female protagonist is associated with a growing and acute sense of self-hatred, accentuated by physical features that highlight her ugliness and unfitness when always already compared to her sister Helen: “. . . her sister Helen!

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…But oh, the long lashes, the grace, the little ways with the hands and feet” (MM 6). The agony of inferiority due to her looks marks her existence as a seven-year-old child seeking love and acceptance: “And could be cherished! To be cherished was the dearest wish of the heart of Maud Martha Brown” (MM 5). Where to find love? Definitely, her parents and in particular her mother. In a chapter called “Mother Comes to Call,” Brooks reports a conversation between Maud Martha and her mother, some years later: I am thinking of Helen. What about Helen, dear? It’s funny how some people are just charming, just pretty, and other, born of the same parents, are just not. You’ve always been wonderful, dear. They looked at each other. I always say you make the best cocoa in the family. (MM 87)

Maud’s mother is clearly avoiding her daughter, participating as such in reinforcing her daughter’s low self-esteem. Though Belva Brown is herself a brown lady, it is evident that she prefers her lighter-skinned daughter over Maud because the latter stands as a reminder of the racial and gender limitations imposed on dark-skinned American women. Though she vows “to keep herself to herself,” (MM 21) Maud surrenders to the necessity of finding love; and engages herself in a quest for a husband. In chapter sixteen entitled “Low Yellow,” Maud gives up on her dream to travel to New York, Brooks explains “she was eighteen, and the world waited. To caress her;” (MM 177) to seek instead the common pleasures of matrimony and femininity. However, she “engages in a grotesque act of double consciousness in which she fantasizes about Paul’s negative opinion of her” (Washington 456). Brooks writes: “But he keeps looking at my color, which is like a wall. He has to jump over it in order to meet and touch what I’ve got for him. He has to jump away up high in order to see it. He gets awful tired of all that jumping.” (MM 90) The wall that Paul has to trespass is that of Maud Martha’s pitchblackness, hence the metaphor of blackness remains an omnipresent obstacle for Maud to be accepted. She endlessly tries to dump it by

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imagining her victory: “he will fight, of course.” She alludes herself, “. . . But in the end I’ll hook him, even while he’s wondering how this marriage will cramp or pinch at him” (MM 176-77). However, it is Maud who would be hooked, who would feel hemmed in, cramped and “unexpressed” in such a union. “She knew that he [has grown] tired of [her]” (MM 177). As such, love proves to be another oppressive structure that further enrages her and leaves her speechless. Her “lack of voice and interaction become more troubling . . . as a grown woman confined to a [loveless marriage epitomized in the confinement walls of her] small apartment . . . [to] become an accomplice to her own impotence” (Washington 456). Maud Martha is devalued for her skin colour and this brings her to settle for an inferior position in her household, when accepting her husband’s neglect. Such a loveless union is evoked through the image of home that changes as her restraining kitchenette house loses the comforting warmth of her parents’ place: “The color and sound and smell of the kitchenette that spreads to everyone and everything in the building draining the life from it” (MM 163). She longs for the home where she grew up as her place arouses inadequacy and unpleasantness associated with the smell of human remnants. Through Paul’s male gaze and smell, Maud Martha is further identified as the abject. To further explore Paul and Maud’s coercive marriage, Brooks considers sacrifice as a telling feature of their union. Maud wonders, “[w]as her attitude unco-operative? Should she be wanting to sacrifice more, for the sake of her man?” (MM 184). Brooks asserts that such sacrifice will take her further away from herself and intensifies her subordination. According to Kristeva, female sacrifice is a death announcement when writing: “the killed object, from which I am separated through sacrifice, while it links me to God [man], it also sets itself up in the very act of being destroyed, as desirable, fascinating and scared. What has been killed subdues me and brings me into subjection” (110). The fear of subjection has been evoked earlier in the text when the young Maud felt sickness in front of the livingdead body of her grandmother Ernestine Brown, the stereotypical image of the black mother consumed by pain, agony, and sacrifice. The importance of the scene lies in drawing Maud’s awareness to the confining system of

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domesticity that stifles the female when “turn[ing them] aside, cut[ing them] off, and throw[ing them] out,” (Kristeva 110) into oblivion, negation, and subordination. The text weaves juxtaposition between a world of imagination that brings comfort and solace and another real one marked by pain and hurt. To escape the agonizing pain of her reality, Maud resorts to imagination. “A procession of pioneer women,” writes Brooks “strode down her imagination, announcing [her] readiness to engage herself in a quest for the self” (MM 185). Maud broods that such quest will permit people “to choose something decently constant to depend on, . . . perhaps, the whole life of man is a dedication to this search for something to lean upon, and was, to a great degree, his ‘happiness’ or ‘unhappiness’ written up for him by the demands or limitations of [that search]” (MM 186). Unlike black American female stereotypes, Brooks’ protagonist engages herself in an existential endeavor trying to locate meaning for the self and life. Maud Martha’s long-searched meaning is materialized in her pregnancy. Kristeva asserts that only by becoming a mother herself that woman can achieve subjectivity, and hence a political stand. Kristeva’s interest in the maternal body stems from her belief that it is a heterogeneous site, both a space and a set of functions that operates between nature and culture, biology and sociology simultaneously: “A mother is a continuous separation, a division of the very flesh. And consequently, a division on language-and it has always been so” (120). French feminist interest in the maternal body can be justified by their claim that it is a freeing agent that once having children, women are able to create culture. Accordingly, the abject pulverizes the subject by playing on our buried desire to fuse with the maternal, hindered by the imposition of the Father’s law, breaking down laws and holding true to our own desires. In the novel, the labor scene is a turning point episode in Maud’s journey towards selfconsciousness and realization. In this vein, Washington comments “[p]regnancy and the birth of a child connect Maud to some power in her self, some power to speak, to be heard, to articulate feelings” (459). Such power is “inherent in the human body” (Kristeva 10). Hearing the crying voice of her newly born child, Maud asserts that these very cries are

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bursting out of her own body and they are liberating her from past chains and constraints. “I could scream, Listen. I could scream. I am making a baby” (MM 200). She “admits [long bottled] rage, laments her lack of voice, speaks aloud, and bites back the tension as she looks down at her child’s trusting face” (Washington 462). Politically speaking, these cries are an announcement of the renewed black America protest that grew tired of neglect and subordination. Another key element of Kristeva’s abject theory is the revolt against the mother, because the first thing to be abjected is the maternal even “before existing outside of her” (Kristeva 13). However, as explained by Smith, there can never be a total revolt against the maternal, as made clear in Maud Martha’s situation. Though Belva Brown can be identified as the abject mother that pulled Maud Martha away when denying her love and affection because of her skin colour, it is in motherhood that Maud will better explore her worth. This duality of despair and hope, identification and distancing from the mother figure is a telling feature of black American motherhood. Black American women’s experience of motherhood is a complex and liberating expression of womanhood and blackness. This expression is materialized in the selected text in the delivery scene, in which Maud insists on giving birth to her child by herself. Additionally, the importance of the delivery scene further materializes Kristeva’s assumption that the subject always already “confronted with the ‘other’ within, might eventually come to terms with the other in their midst” (210). Once liberated from the constraints of inherited paradigms of beauty and color, Maud is now capable of realizing her long-held dream of “donat[ing] the world a good Maud Martha” (MM 22). She is a new Maud more in tune with her black self and happier with her looks. Actually, the mouse scene testifies of such a development. It revolves around Maud’s attempt to catch a mouse wandering in her kitchenettehouse while she is desperately trying to put some order in it. While some critics would read the mouse scene as a metaphor of entrapment, a second reading in the light of Kristeva’s reading of the abject “as an alchemy that transforms death desire into a start of life, a new significance,” (111) would permit us to see into the black American’s ability to transcend negativity and hostility and prove their worth and humanity. As she helps

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the mouse set free from its cage, Maud imagines different scenarios of entrapment: “A life had blundered its way into the power and it had been hers to preserve or destroy. She had not destroyed” (MM 212-13). Her choice proves not only her agency, but most importantly her goodness and kindness. Frazier writes “Saving the mouse asserts her will and her ability to affect the external world” (137). The text is therefore a celebration of life: “In the center of that simple restraint was-creation,” (MM 213) life, and love. It is this goodness that Brooks and other committed black American writers to the Black cause leveled as a slogan against racism and neglect; it is the power of humanity. It is through this goodness that black Americans in late 1940s would fight racial atrocity, disillusionment and discouragement. They would hold dear to their dreams of acceptance and American-ness that trampled into dust. Actually, the political and social circumstances of the 1940s drew black Americans who were aware of the double nature of their protest that culminated and grew stronger to prove their worth, echoing a strong belief in a better future. Maud Martha performs some sort of double-maneuver when it takes a little African American girl and conveys her struggle to project herself in a hostile milieu to build around her character a modern and unique picture of the black American struggle to assert its worth in a hostile white America. Hence, the personal becomes political when Maud endlessly strives to maintain her dignity in a society that wishes to deny her this desire. She therefore engages in a life-preserving, endeavor that allows her to shape her identity, her house, and her relationships. Through the power of imagination, she recreates herself anew, offering selfcontainment and content as survival strategy amid alchemy and sorrow. In the final chapters of the book, Brooks accentuates the growing despair black Americans confronted with the end of the Second World War and the fading away of their dreams to be accepted as American citizens. She writes: “There was no peace, and her brother Harry was back from the wars. Outside it was bright because the sunshine had broken through the dark green shade and was glorifying every bit of her room” (MM 177). However, this hope is soon shattered with juxtaposing images of dismembered men and lynched figures, proving that racial violence

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remains a threatening spectrum hovering over black Americans’ hopes and dreams: She did not need information, or solace, or a guidebook or a sermon—not in this sun!— not in this blue air!. . . They “marched,” they battled behind her brain—the men who had rank beer with the best of them, the men with two arms of and two legs off, the men with parts of faces. Then her guts divided, then her eyes swam under frank mist. And the Negro press (on whose front pages beamed the usual representation of womanly Beauty, pale and pompadoured) carried the stories of the latest of the Georgia and Mississippi lynching. . . . But the sun was shining, and some of the people in the world had been left alive. (178-79)

The acute irony felt by the end of the above quotation, “the sun was shinning,” levels a conscious sense of self- irony as things never changed despite the sacrifices and the kindness of black Americans when fighting for democracy both abroad and at home. When Maud moves out of her kitchenette house, she experiences the urgent need to cry out her frustration with the white man’s racist attitude epitomized in the saint like figure of Santa Claus who turns a deaf ear to the demands of Maud’s little dark girl. She cries out “Mister, my little girl is talking to you” (MM 173). Seeing his nonchalance, she yearns to “jerk trimming scissors form purse and jab jab jab that evading eye” (MM 175). Unlike the previous chapters during which Maud resorts to the solace of imagination, she grows aware of her own voice and of her determination not to cover up her pain and anger. “Brooks does allow Maud in some ways to become more in control of her life and to speak out against the racist violence of her life,” believes Washington (461). The dreamy person whom Maud has grown into ceases place for a political conscious subject. Near the end of the book, Maud’s political consciousness is fully matured when mediating on racial segregation and violence when preparing dinner for her brother coming from the wars. The disgust she feels when cleaning the chicken, refusing to directly touch it, using a knife instead to get to its giblets: And yet the chicken was a sort of person, a respectable individual, with its own kind of dignity. The difference was in the knowing. What was unreal to you you could deal with violently. If chickens were ever to be safe, people would have to live with them, and know them, see them loving

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their children, finishing the evening meal, arranging jealousy. When the animal was ready for the oven Maud Martha smacked her lips at the thought of her meal. (153)

The importance of the scene lies in accentuating the violent endeavor Maud undertakes in order to enjoy her meal, which is that of killing the chicken. The latter, however, ceases to be a reminder of poverty and wont and explores instead an important motif that has been marking black American protest: are they to resort to violence or to peaceful protest. The political agenda that Maud adheres to is a humanitarian one that thrives on respecting the other no matter how violent they may be. The analogy of chicken-man allows the protagonist to assess her own humanitarian values. She may understand the need for violence, but she wants to dump it as she believes in goodness and kindness as mechanisms of self-realization despite surrounding negativity. Maud believes in the possibility of coexisting in spite of our differences as she reckons that every individual has their own dignity, regardless of race, class, and gender. Maud’s understanding of power revolves around a spiritual significance rather than a violently physical manifestation. She deliberately refuses to explode in anger though she was hurt by Santa’s hostile behavior towards her little black girl and wished to hurt him back. By the end of the chapter, however, she prays for Paulette: Keep her that land of blue! Keep her those fairies, with witches always killed at the end, and Santa every winter’s lord, kind, sheer being who never perspires, who never does or says a foolish or ineffective thing, who never looks grotesque, who never has occasion to pull the chain and flush the toilet. (MM 176)

The prayer testifies of the natural goodness that marks Maud as she is never consumed by anger or by hatred. She seems to find peace in the world of fantasy. She rejects the daily as she believes it is the one responsible for the sorrow inflicted upon her and her daughter. As mentioned earlier, Maud resorts to the power of imagination to escape the atrocity of the real.

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As she perceives herself as participating in a life-preserving quest for selfcreation, Maud sublimates her rage and anger into one of the finest arts that of imagination. She therefore “offers a philosophy of coping, a way of living and being in the world” (Newson-Horst 166). She has grown believing that she has to offer a better Maud to the world, “that offering,” writes Brooks, “that bit of art . . . could not come from any other. She could polish and home that” (MM 148). Whenever things would turn rough in the course of the novel, Maud would resort to imagination as an escape and an outlet. As a young girl, she lulled herself into exploring the outside world by traveling to New York, the beating heart city of the world. As she grew older, she also elopes to dreams and fantasy to escape the wretched realities of her marriage and household. She feels not only trapped in but disgusted with her kitchenette-house where “water containing melted American family soap and Lysol every other day,” (MM 62-63) cannot vanquish the filth, “the color and sound and smell . . . that spreads to everyone and everything in the building draining life from it” (63). Her pre-marriage dreams are all shattered when she finds her selfconfined to the grim walls of this building. She tries endlessly to overcome that growing pain by attempting to paint the walls and rearrange the furniture. Though Maud grows aware of her limited abilities to render such an ugly place a heaven-like shelter, she does not give up as she understands that surrendering would mean ruining her self-esteem. As an epic fighter, she refuses to give up to the grimness of the walls and adds light and color through the spontaneous overflow of her imagination. Soon after giving birth to her daughter Paulette, Maud impulsively tries to “get up”. The act stands for a metaphor for the rise of the inner self that has been liberated and born anew with the delivery of the baby as it announces a revival of the maternal that has long been repressed in favor of political and social process of the subject, according to Kristeva. The latter asserts that when giving birth, “the abject preserves what existed in the archaism of pre-objectal relationship, in the immemorial violence with which a body becomes separated from another body” (10). Such violence, Kristeva writes, “tears me away from the undifferentiated and brings me into subjection to a system” (111). Yet, the remedy lies in “full acceptance of the archaic and gratifying relationship to the mother, pagan as it might

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be, . . . is here the condition for another opening, the opening up to symbolic relations” (Kristeva 115). The opening to the Symbolic in Maud’s struggle lies in her escape into imagination as an art form to surmount pain and agony. By refusing to answer to the constraints of the daily struggles of a black mother, Maud manifests Kristeva’s image of maternity that can create a new identity where she does not feel the need to answer the previous perceptions of black American women who lose their identities to their families. Instead, Maud renews herself and tries to transform her surroundings accordingly. In this vein, Washington avouches that Maud’s personality is echoed through her words, insights, and imagination as she perceives the world sensuously (458). Brooks’ female protagonist swallows pain and misery in her dreamy smile that helps her confront the world. It is this ability to travel into realms of fantasy and joy that liberates her: “What she wanted [was] to dream, and [she] dreamed, [dreaming] was her own affair” (MM 193). When Paul tries to get intimate with Maud, she holds tight to the book she is reading: “Reading has opened another avenue of possibilities that she will not surrender her herself without a fight,” asserts Brooks (MM 137). Her reluctance to fulfill her domestic role exemplifies her defiance to give up on her autonomy and body control. Art permits Maud as well as Brooks to subvert the stereotypical role of an ideal wife, thus allowing Maud to grow more in control of her life and self. In this context, Brooks seems to answer the manifesto of Harlem’s laureate poet Langston Hughes who advocated that “we Negro artists . . . intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. . . . We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountains free within ourselves” (36). It is the liberating force of imagination that permits Maud to stand tall in the face of racism and harassment as she stands all along the novel as the voice of beauty and wisdom. Hughes’s influence is easily traced in Brooks’ poetry as well as fiction. Similarly, she writes about “these common [black] people [who] give the world its great Negro artist, the one who is not afraid to be himself” (33). Brooks proves to be free from authorial, racial, and gender constraints. She creates a fragmentary poetic narrative made up of “short vignette chapters,” with no “continuity between one chapter and the next”

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(Christian 246). The fragmentation marks not only chapters but also paragraphs and sentences, yet they allow the “flow of Maud’s life [to be] checked just as powerfully as she checks her own anger” (Washington 454). The lyrical-like rhythm of the narrative reflects the African tom-tom that inspires life and hope regardless of the fragmentation and the pain it undergoes. She acknowledges pain and sorrow, yet she believes in hope. It is this very hope that allows Maud to carry on her fight to impose her paradigm of womanhood, beauty and race. She grows to understand that life is the ultimate struggle to make things just and to assert one’s self, reflecting the author’s belief that there is always something luring about private identities. These identities stem from the intricacies of the self in their attempt “to position [themselves] within a global sphere and to have access to the [world] outside of the traditional [stereotypical manifestations” (Frazier 137). It is through art that Maud positions herself; Brooks writes “her whole body became a hunger; she would pore over these pages” (MM 190). It is a hunger for the outside world that awaits her.

2.3 Findings Via a French feminist reading, the personal proved to be political in Maud’s fight for acceptance in a volatile, changing world of south side Chicago. The protagonist’s awareness of her individual self-identity is revealed through the daily struggles of a black American wife and mother. The strife against inherited racist and sexist paradigms of beauty and worth set Maud’s journey towards self-realization that accentuates human worth and kindness. She gives values to places, things, and localities as they are identified with feelings and emotions pertaining to her gender, class, and race fight for freedom and equality. Through the story of a young black American girl who grows up and marries, Brooks pens the concerns and worries of a late-1940s black American society with the tides of racial violence reaching a peak. Brooks’ writing is therefore a response to the tragedy of a race that has long been striving to prove its worth. It is a writing that stems from the body and delves into the social and political intricacies of the black American individual, aiming at examining the possibility of and hope for change. Her work is a retrospective reflection

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of the black world as coming through her own body, memories, and words.

III. Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth With the widespread development of the tradition of adapting literary works for the American movie industry in Hollywood, it becomes important to consider the artistic value and quality these ready-made narratives can add to the glory of the world’s first home of movie-making as well as the latter’s effect on these canonic works. The 2000 release of The House of Mirth, an adaptation of an early modern novel by Edith Wharton, marks an exceptional and unique case of study, giving therefore rise to the legitimate question of how much is retained from the original story and the authorial implications and concerns of a New Woman struggling to prove her potential in a male-dominant literary scene. This paper aims at assessing Terence Davies’ success in translating the written world through the vividness of the filmed image and grasping the main characters’ struggle. It also seeks to fathom the benefits it brought to the written texts as both film and text prove to be complementary.

3.1. A Theory of Adaptation Cinematic adaptation is about adapting literary works to cinema. Such exercise found roots in the existing similarities between these two artistic genres. According to Alan Spiegel, “the common body of thought and feeling that unites film form” lies in sharing what he calls “a concretized form,” a form that is dependent on generating mental imagery (xiii). Cinema benefited from the huge development that the English novel underwent by the end of the nineteenth century as it grew out of the tradition of telling into that of showing. The showing technique reduced the authorial voice in order to permit the reader to mentally visualize and live the work. Actually, nineteenth-century novel and the film industry shared an interest in visual art, meeting as such on a common ground which is that of intensifying “the integrity of the seen object and giv[ing] it palpable presence . . .” (Spiegel 63). They have become “integrally related as sister arts sharing formal techniques, audiences, values, sources, archetypes, narrative strategies, and contexts” (Elliott 1). Such integral

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relatedness asserts that nineteenth-century novels not only influenced western films, but they also became films, giving the latter artistic progeny and announcing the beginning of a new era, a new camaraderie between the “writer and film-maker . . . [who] are travelling in the same boat . . .” (Stam and Raengo 4). Such journey offers “mutual benefit and cross fertilization” (4) that has been carried out in contemporary times as filmmakers still consider fiction as a potential source for inspiration. The benefit of bringing text into cinema seems to answer a long-held tradition that finds in adapting everything, including stories of poems, plays, operas, paintings, songs, and tableaux vivant, a raison d’être and a tool of artistry. In the House of Mirth, Wharton answers such a tradition when allowing her female protagonist, Lily Bart, to participate in the tableau vivant of Joanna Llyod by Sir Joshua Reynolds. The scene permits Lily to live her dream of being a well-settled, married woman, yet, according to her own perception of romance and love. Lily had not an instant’s doubt as to the meaning of the murmur greeting her appearance. No other tableau had been received with that precise note of approval: it had obviously been called forth by herself, and not by the picture she impersonated. She had feared at the last moment that she was risking too much in dispensing with the advantages of a more sumptuous setting, and the completeness of her triumph gave her an intoxicating sense of recovered power. (170)

The above quotation describes Lily’s ability to make a deliberate choice of bringing eroticism and sensuality into the character she is representing by covering her body with a white silky drapery. The process of adaptation does in no way seclude the adapter’s perception and understanding of the original story, yet she accommodates it to her own perceptions. The artistic mélange of various genres is always already renewable. Understanding the deep roots of adaptation as an artistic means necessitates having an insight into the framing theory of adaptation: “A theory of adaptation is an attempt to think through not only the popularity of the process but also the constant critical denegation of the phenomenon as a wide cultural process” (Hutcheon and O’Flynn 2). Such a process goes back in time to the days of Shakespeare, when he “transferred his culture’

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stories from page to stage and made them available to a whole new audience” (Hutcheon and O’Flynn 2). And so did cinematic adaptation as it has been bringing into screen its culture’s stories. Though the practice of aesthetic borrowing dates back to early times, the academic as well popular perception of adaptations most often put them down as “secondary, derivative, belated, or culturally inferior” (qtd. in 2). Actually, the move from the literary into the visual has always been called a move to “willfully inferior form of cognition” (Newman 129). In 1926, Virginia Woolf denounced filmic adaptation, deploring the simplification the literary work undergoes when transferred to the field of visual creation referring to it as “parasite,” while literature becomes its prey and victim” (309). Gaining the reputation of a parasite during the early decades of twentieth century, the film industry had to struggle to refurbish its reputation and assert its worth and artistic quality. Hence, researchers started seeking similarities between cinema and fiction as too different yet compatible art forms. Film semiotician Christian Metz claims “cinema tells us continuous stories; it says things that could not be conveyed . . . in the language of words . . . . [I]t says them differently, giving therefore legitimacy for the necessity of adaptation” (44). Cinema adaptation comes hence to complete what some words fail to convey. The complimentary relationship between cinema and literature is due to the fact that both text-writers and “adapters use the same tools. . .; they actualize or concretize ideas; they make simplifying selections, but also amplify and extrapolate; they make analogies; they critique or show [illnesses]” (Hutcheon and O’Flynn 4). In short, both of movie makers and storytellers render the world of ideas and emotions accessible to their audiences. What distinguishes movie makers’ adaptations of literary texts is that these creations are influenced by the creators’ perception of the world of the characters; hence, these visual productions are “never simple reproductions that lose the [authentic] aura. Rather, they carry that aura with them” (4). The process of adaptation should therefore be seen as a “massive investment . . . in the desire to repeat particular acts of [perceptions] within a form of representation that [transcends sheer] repetition” (4-5). As complex as it seems, the act of

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adaptation always already involves re-interpretation and thus recreation. It is a work that carries its own identity, potential and value. A theory of adaptation is based on two fundamental assets. On the one hand, a filmic recreation is a product in the sense that it stands as the development of an independent, artistic entity. Cinematic semioticians believe that there would be no literal, truthful adaptations just as there are no literal translations or true mimesis. Such belief stems from their adherence to as well as acknowledgment that “the [Victorian narratives are] translated into cinematic mirroring as the actors who play the Victorian characters live out the scripted romance,” (Hutcheon and O’Flynn 17) to bring instead their own reading and interpretations. On the other hand, an adaptation is a process. “Adapters are first interpreters and then creators,” so write Hutcheon and O’Flynn (18). Once recognizing these vital principles, a filmic adjustment of canonical literary texts transcends the limitations of an imposed fidelity as the latter hampers the enriching benefits of intertextuality and interrelation.

3.2. Filmic Adaptations of the House of Mirth 3.2.1 Early Adaptations Aware of the interplay of different artistic forms, Edith Wharton welcomed the adaptation of her own novels. In A Backward Glance, Wharton explains that though she “was born into a world in which telephones, motors, electric light, central hearing, X rays, cinemas, radium, aeroplanes and wireless telegraphy were not only unknown but still unforeseen” (6-7), she appreciated the privileges of her modern era. Nonetheless, a particular creation never reached her aesthetic taste, namely animation picture, or so she called it. Despite her disapproval of the artistic quality of such a medium, several of her novels and best sellers were filmed during her lifetime, benefiting from a wider publicity and more substantial income. Interestingly, however, “she apparently never viewed any of them, nor is there evidence that she expressed the slightest interest in seeing them” (15) mainly because she considered cinema as neither beautiful nor noble. Her disapproval of cinema can be explained by being an avid theatre-goer. She not only welcomed stage adaptation of her novels and short stories, but she

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also collaborated with the dramatist Clyde Fitch on The House of Mirth, opening in Broadway, 1906. The vibrating stages always filled her with “something new,” and became “a window on the foam of fairyland” (Wharton, A Backward, 363). Being attracted to voices, Wharton could not adjust herself to the silent movies of her time, expressing as such abhorrence at the thought of silently sitting in an audience. She writes: “Something in me has always resisted the influence of crowds and shows, and I have hardly ever been able to yield myself unreservedly to a spectacle shared by a throng of people” (362). Cinema, as an art produced for the masses, contradicted her refined upbringing and elitist social milieu as well as her artistic interests, reflecting a “deeply rooted cultural prejudice against the visual arts . . .” (Stam and Raengo 5). Wharton was also critical of the actors’ performances as they were bodily responding to silent words, emptied of any meaning. She asserts “I am involuntarily hypercritical of any impersonation of characters already so intensely visible to my imagination that anyone else’s conception of them interferes with that inward vision”. She carries on, after “five minutes of watching the actors in play,” she feels the strong desire to “get up . . . and show them how they ought to act” (A Backward 363). All of these combined reasons made Wharton reluctant to invest in cinema, yet she never openly refused filmic adaptations of her works. Metro Pictures Corporation made a silent film version of The House of Mirth in 1918, starring Katherine Harris Barrymore, and directed by Albert Capellani. The film-maker took the liberty to revise the end by making Lily take chloroform instead of sleeping medicine and permitting Selden to save her by bringing a doctor who announces that Lily will survive. The film ends with Selden kissing Lily and together embarking on a new life, “affirm[ing] the happy marriage end, which [stands for] the conventional resolution to the nineteenth-century sentimental domestic female novel” (qtd. in Marshall 17). Such end answers the social expectation of the late Victorian society, reducing the novel to sheer sentimental romance. The filmmakers’ inability to grasp Wharton’s intentions made her unwilling to invest in cinema and her portrayal of films became even more negative (Marshall 16). It was until the late 1990s that Hollywood rediscovered Wharton, coinciding with the feminist interest in her novels that were

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“recognized to be timely and dramatically compelling” (Marshall 19). The feminist interest in Wharton’s text lies in the adequate authorial camouflage of Lily’s development as a freedom seeker in a world of rotten manners and traditions. Aware of a similar intricacy, Terence Davies, the British movie maker, would pursue such development and bring it into life through his interpretation of Lily’s struggle against the rigid, old-moneyed New York society. The 2000 reproduction manifests and answers Wharton’s lamentation of the hypocrisy of her society, allowing Lily to discover the fake nature of the world she lives in. 3.2.2 Davies’ Adaptation The failure of early adaptations of the novel drew attention to the issue of fidelity. A cinematic adaptation, no matter how skillful it is, must be already and always assessed in its ability to fathom and match the very essence of the literary work and explore what lays beneath the lines, hence the legitimacy of asking how much of the story is retained, especially if the novel is cinematically adapted by a male film-maker. Actually, “The House of Mirth” may seem an unusual choice for Davies as an outsider. Yet, his adaptation offered a fresh approach to both period and issues. He directed a film that won international acclaim for taking the novel to a newer and higher level than a simple love story. It is a look into the highly complex and rigid social, ideological, and gender order by keeping and maintaining appearances at all costs. Through the piercing eye of his camera, Davies joined Lily’s journey downwards, grasping her struggle and moral superiority amid pretence and hypocrisy. Knowing that “both novel and film are communicative utterances, socially constructed and culturally shaped” (Stam and Raengo 10), Davies embarked on an experimenting journey to understand Wharton and her social milieu, whose intricacies remained distantly unfathomable for a twenty-first century audience. The adept of Davies lies in rediscovering old New York’s ideologies and manners and repositioning his actors amid such matrices. His readings of the era, issues, and author resulted in an adaptation capable of unfurling the subtleties of the novel and permitted modern audiences to identify with its characters. Davies’ fathoming of Wharton’s authorial implications seems to be translated through his

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perception of the characters’ psychological development as part of the narrative thread that eventually lead to Lily’s tragic downfall. Such understanding rendered it easier for him to focus on his cast as the suitable conveyers of meaning in both text and film. The leading characters, Gillian Anderson and Eric Stoltz, are also wellversed, playing with gravity, molding the characters “through gestural details, ways of walking, or talking, or smoking” (Stam and Raengo 22) in a manner that brings life to their moral conflict, transcending as such the limiting perception of the novel as a sheer look into the leisure life of New York’s well-to-do circle. Filmic representations of characters allow for a vivid conceptualization of their struggle, denied in a purely verbal medium. Characters find therefore shelter in visual images that bring them closer to both readers and viewers. Thus, adaptations of novels provoke an artistic as well as critical perception of the literary work, elevating as such the cinematic process to become a text of its own. Both actors and movie-maker’s awareness of the text issued a fidèle filmic adaptation that not only restored interest in Wharton’s literary works, but also faith in her feminist claims. Facing the dilemma of faithfulness and the difficulty of granting films high cultural status over the written script, Terence Davies opts for a “more in tune with the text [adaptation], he relies solely upon his own subtle, fluid direction, the exceptional performers he elicits … and a stunning cinematography to steer his way through the events that cause Lily’s fall from grace” (3). The 2000 welcomed adaptation reverberates with Wharton’s critique of her patriarchal society that renders the female a commodity. Through the high moral standards of her female protagonist Lily Bart, Wharton exposes the moral decay of her society as well as its objectification of women. The New York Times film review asserts that the adaptation highlights the novel’s the spirit that matches “today’s post feminist climate of ‘Sex and the City’ film” (2000). As a matter of fact, Davies’ “. . . film [is] decidedly feminist and progressive . . . that [it] enhance[s] the implicit feminism in [Wharton’s] novel” (Hollinger 157). Davies’ interest in highlighting the female struggle within a restricting city found resonance and echo among postmodern audience who easily identified with Lily.

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Through the vibrating performance of Anderson, Davies was able to match Wharton’s perception of Lily as a physically, intellectually, and morally active character, struggling to transcend the social and gender limitations hampering her pursuit of love and luxury goals. The 134-minute film captures Wharton’s opulent treatment of the Woman’s Question, highlighting Lily’s most intriguing feelings of loss, regret, and betrayal at the old moneyed society. Wharton writes: “There were in her at the moment two beings, one drawing deep breaths of freedom and exhilaration, the other gasping for air in a little black prison-house of fears. But gradually the captive’s gasps grew fainter, or the other paid less heed to them: the horizon expanded, the air grew stronger, and the free spirit quivered for flight” (House of Mirth 67). The movie opens with a gothic scene of the roaring sound of the locomotive at the station announcing its departure and a female silhouette surrounded by an aura of suspense coming out of the fumes. The opening scene seems to be located out of an established setting, permitting as such the contemporary viewer to identify with the protagonist’s downfall. It also presents Lily as a distant creature from the decaying world of old New York. It heightens not only the temporal gap between past and present, but importantly the moral decay an innocent character as Lily confronts in her endless strive to fit within the limited social circle of New York’s upper class. The character is gradually unveiling a beautiful lady; yet, her look hides pain and misery. The movie unfolds the female protagonist’s pain and agony, moving steadily towards a darker and more sinister fate that reaches a peak with her death, alone and abandoned by her friends and lover. Though the final scene evokes death and futility, it also presents Lily in a superior position. The serenity of her face and the defiance of her body entail that her decision to end her sorrow is conscious and proves a maturity that Lily reaches by the end of her life. The death scene represents the powerful Lily who puts aside the mask of the cherished lady and wears her own identity that of an unconventional woman. Told in a linear manner, covering the years between 1905-1907, Davies divides his film into segments with the use of silent tableaux-like scenes as turning points in the character’s downward journey, announcing the

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gradual development Lily undergoes to acquire strength, willingness, and identity, after surmounting seclusion, fakeness, and alienation. She succumbs into lowliness, and desperately, she puts an end to her misery. Interestingly, however, the death scene is powerfully lighted in contrast to the first foggy scene with the sound of the locomotive. Davies’ awareness of Wharton’s perception of Lily’s death as an emancipating event since it permits her to transcend mannerism and hypocrisy renders the adaptation adequate. It actually helps to visualize the feminist spirit of both author and character as well as that of the movie maker who understand death as a liberating phenomenon. To achieve such spirit, Davies opted for Gillian Anderson, an activist. The importance of the last scene lies in further stressing Davies’ grasp of the labyrinth of complex feelings, conveyed through the actors’ ability to straddle the line between text and cinematic performance, manifested in the theatrical acting of Eric Stoltz when facing Lily’s death and the guilt it sparks in him. Such a performance is directed by Davies’ adept in fathoming the psychological turmoil of the characters caused by the constraints of a rigid social milieu. Zooming his camera on the lying body of Lily, Davies explores the effect of society on the individual’s struggle against unseen powers that threaten his sense of unity and subjectivity. The fakeness of old-moneyed New York is conveyed through Davies’ deliberate use of an animated picture of the Mediterranean during Lily’s yacht trip. Such a use aims at highlighting the falsity of the world Lily lives in. The film is therefore a manifestation of Lily’s journey downwards which permits her to disclose an underworld of malignance, pretense, and hypocrisy. Armed with a fantasy of a pure romance and amour-propre, Lily defies her social milieu to find refuge in the soothing embrace of death, which early readings of the book as well as adaptations failed to tenure. Actually, many are the scenes in the movie that display Lily’s confidence, daringness, and awareness of her situation. Among these scenes is the one in which Lily has to buy the secret love letters from Mrs Haffen who mistakenly takes her for Selden’s secret beloved. Lily makes a successful economic transaction at the exception of what she seeks truly, showing confidence and stamina. Davies’ full grasp of Lily’s character is reflected in endowing the latter with moral superiority as well as sexual awareness.

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The love scenes between Lily and Selden echo a sexual tension that asserts Lily’s attraction and love for Selden. She openly confesses her love and passionately kisses Selden, revealing Wharton’s empowerment of her female protagonist.

3.3 Feminist Readings of Davies’ Adaptation Anderson’s performance captures the interest of feminist film theorists who put forward a theory of cinema as a cultural practice constructed to convey patriarchal images of women, “the myth of woman in classical cinema, women are negatively represented as ‘not-man’. The woman as woman is absent from the text of the film” (Johnston 26). Davies’ film seems to deconstruct classical cinema when granting Lily such priority implicitly evoked in the novel. His movie matches feminist criticism when delving “further and more specifically into how power is reflected on screen, and examines the gender dynamics inherent within and visible in certain events, situations and relationships,” mainly that of Lily and Seldon (Snyder 189). While Selden seems uncertain of his love for Lily and unwilling to confess it, Lily takes the initiative of kissing him. It is only after the vivid scene of the tableaux vivant that Selden opens up to his love for Lily, soon to be shadowed by his intellectual and social preoccupations. His inability to defend Lily against Bertha’s evilness stands as a proof of his weak character that is poetically sentenced to be denied Lily’s forgiveness. Davies took the liberty to modify the last encounter with Lily by making Selden fail to reach her apartment before her death. The irony lies in helping Lily transcend the shallowness of her world: “I have never forgotten the things you said to me at the Bellomont. They have helped me, and kept from mistakes” (House of Mirth 26), while he succumbs into the dinginess and corruption of such elitist society. Hence, the movie seems to answer the requirements of feminist film criticism that “allows for the analysis of films that take on issues of feminism and also films that demean women and films that run fore the subjugation of women to men” (Snyder 189). The fidelity of Davies is soon brought into question, mainly by feminist critics, when he omitted the character of Gerty Farish. Gerty is Lily’s friend and Selden’s cousin who leads a single life immersed in her charity

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activities. She is also the only character who accepts Lily, regardless of her mistakes. Gerty sacrifices her love for Selden for the sake of her friend. Being viewed as the epitome of independence and self-autonomy, Gerty plays an important role that Davies failed to grasp. Such failure questions Davies’ perception of the role of minor female characters. Unlike novels, filmic adaptation “involves thousands of choices, concerning performers, budget, locale, format, props, and so forth” (Stam and Raengo 17). Such liberty permits Davies to fuse characters and multiply times and spaces in a way that does not harm the general meaning and structure of the novel. Interestingly, Gerty’s words are voiced by Grace, the mischievous cousin who prevents Lily from her aunt’s affection and heritage, standing therefore as an argument against critics doubling Davies’ awareness of Wharton’s feminist intentions. Some deliberate changes are inspired by the desire to render the original story more accessible for current audiences that feel uncomfortable with a huge number of characters as they defer the pleasure of understanding the crux of the story, Davies’ adaptation unveils a world of agonizing female potential smothered by its infantile romances and rigid social order.

3.4. Findings Filmic adaptation triggers the legitimate question of fidelity, putting therefore limitations on the director’s own vision of the novel, characters, and theme. As much as these limitations are frustrating, they seem to work in favor of Davies’ adaptation of the novel, allowing him to reach ultimate convergence with the author never explored before. Davies’ reading of the novel permitted him to amplify what the author could not manage to openly state, yet masquered with sharp wit and adept. The novel gained from the filmic adaptation to reach a wide modern audience and readership that used to feel estranged to an era of contrasts and double-standards. The evocation of Lily’s journey downward into grief and sorrow presents Davies as a highly visual artist who was able to capture a repressive, enclosed environment of old-moneyed New York, which gave him an insight into a world that thrives at the expense of its individuals, primarily female subjects. Hence, the adaptation proves to be second, rather than secondary as it helped reconsider the pain and agony of a woman

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struggling to assert her worth and potential. Hence, the emotional abuse that Wharton deplored in her text found echo in Davies’ camera.

IV. Conclusion The selected works are conceptually driven, emphasizing an analytical approach and challenging the notion of any reductive female aesthetic. When applying a feminist reading to these texts, we come to understand the struggle of the New Woman to assert her individuality. Both authors’ writing inspired heated debates that exposed the “intellectual and psychological tensions that existed between feminists in [American society]” (Mellor, “Women Writers” 154) concerning female sensibility. While contemporary feminists viewed such treatment as conformist, bringing women back to the vicious circle of conventionality and therefore failing years of struggle for proving women’s worth. However, in the light of the selected feminist readings, the female protagonists in the selected narratives proved to be not unthinking conformists, they struggled for fulfilling their desires and needs, but society always already found ways to curb their desires. Hence, the ultimate conclusion is that happiness cannot be at the expense of moral standards. Both Lily Bart and Maud Martha gave up on their own dreams for the sake of others. While Lily Bart found happiness in death, Martha in dreaming and fantasizing about another life to be her escape from the wretchedness of the present. It is true that the ends for both female characters are not happy; but in the light of the reading of the abject or feminist adaptation theory, it becomes evident that this placid surface is hiding a turbulent undercurrent.

Works Cited Becker-Leckrone, Megan, ed. Julia Kristeva and Literary Theory. Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Brooks, Gwendolyn. Maud Martha. Harper and Brothers, 1953. Christian, Barbara. “Nuances and the Novella.” A Life Distilled: Gwendolyn Brooks, Her Poetry, and Fiction. Edited by Maria K. Mootry and Gary Smith. Illinois UP, 1987, pp. 239-53.

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Covino, Deborah C. Amending the Body: Aesthetic Makeovers in Medicine and Culture. New York UP, 2004. Elliott, Kamila. Rethinking the Novel/Film Debate. Cambridge UP, 2003. Ellis, Markman. The Politics of Sensibility: Race, Gender, and Commerce in the Sentimental Novel. Cambridge UP, 1996. Eversley, Shelly. The Real Negro: The Question of Authenticity in Twentieth Century African American Literature. Routledge, 2004. Franzia, Valerie. “Domestic Epic Welfare in Maud Martha.” African American Review, vol. 39, no. 1-2, 2005, pp. 131-41. Heilmann, Ann and Margaret Beethan, eds. New Woman Hybridities: Femininity, Feminism and International Consumer Culture. 18801930. Routledge, 2004. Hollinger, Karen. Feminist Film Studies. Routledge, 2012. Hutcheon, Linda and Siobhan O’Flynn. A Theory of Adaptation. Routledge, 2006. Hughes, Langston. “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain.” The Collected Works of Langston Hughes: Essays on Art, Race, Politics, and World Affairs. Ed and Intro.Christopher C. De Santis. Missouri UP, 2002, pp.32-36. Johnston, Claire. “Femininity and the Masquerade: Anne of the Indies”. Edinburgh pamphlet on Jacques Tourneur. 1978. Web