Constructing the Literary Self : Race and Gender in Twentieth-Century Literature [1 ed.] 9781443861113, 9781443845304

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Constructing the Literary Self

Constructing the Literary Self: Race and Gender in Twentieth-Century Literature Edited by

Patsy J. Daniels

Constructing the Literary Self: Race and Gender in Twentieth-Century Literature, Edited by Patsy J. Daniels This book first published 2013 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2013 by Patsy J. Daniels 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): 1-4438-4530-2, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-4530-4

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface ........................................................................................................ ix Introduction ................................................................................................ xi Part I: Race, Gender, and the Self Chapter One ................................................................................................. 3 Empathy and Metaphor: The Critique and Embrace of Essentialist Thought in Caryl Phillips’s Cambridge Helen F. Maxson Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 23 Deconstructing Katherine Anne Porter: “Strange Fruit” in “The Fig Tree” Patsy J. Daniels Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 31 Shakespeare’s Othello: Postmodern Paradigm Shifts and the American “Other” Everett G. Neasman Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 49 The Walls Are Crumbling Down: Houses as Death Metaphors in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and To the Lighthouse Emily Clark Part II: Assimilation and the Self Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 65 Disidentification with the Homogenizing and Commodifying Narratives of Ethnicity in Han Ong’s Fixer Chao Youngsuk Chae

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Chapter Six ................................................................................................ 87 Lawson Fusao Inada, West Coast Jazz, and the Politics of Identity Formation Shawn P. Holliday Part III: Black Males and the Self Chapter Seven.......................................................................................... 105 Appropriate Blackness: Oreo Dreams Deferred in Charles Fuller’s A Soldier’s Play Claude Wilkinson Chapter Eight ........................................................................................... 123 “A Friend of My Mind”: Strategies of Black Male Subjectivity in Beloved Aaron N. Oforlea Part IV: Female Sexuality and the Self Chapter Nine ........................................................................................... 151 “The Best Stuff God Did”: The Rhetoric of Same Sex Intimacy and Egalitarian Christianity in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple and Ann Allen Shockley’s Say Jesus and Come to Me Tara Tuttle Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 167 E(race)ing Female Sexuality: The Discourse of Incest and Representations of Womanhood in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird Cameron E. Williams Part V: The Family and the Self Chapter Eleven ........................................................................................ 189 Layers of Identity Formation in Ana Castillo’s Peel My Love Like an Onion Lucinda Channon Chapter Twelve ....................................................................................... 199 Division of Maternal Effort in Anne Enright’s The Gathering Candis P. Pizzetta

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Chapter Thirteen ...................................................................................... 213 When Ethnicity, History, and Parenting Collide: Mothering Understood in Amy Tan’s The Kitchen God’s Wife and Christina García’s Dreaming in Cuban Preselfannie W. McDaniels Contributors ............................................................................................. 241 Index ........................................................................................................ 245

PREFACE

The impetus for this volume came from a discussion of race and gender in literature during a conference session at the 2012 conference of the South Central Modern Language Association, and I would like to thank the organizers of the conference for providing the kind of environment that stimulates ideas and that allows colleagues to collaborate. Most of these essays have been presented at conferences, where the authors can receive constructive criticism from their colleagues that helps them transform their work into publishable essays. The willingness of these scholarly audiences to assist their colleagues in contributing to the body of knowledge is much appreciated.

INTRODUCTION

This volume is about oppression and escaping from oppression as depicted in serious literature. Some oppression has been carried out in the name of Empire; some in the name of racial purity. Other oppression has occurred in the name of maintaining a norm, and still more for no reason except that the oppressor was stronger. The oppressor always gets to define what constitutes “Other,” or something less, as Edward Said explains so thoroughly in Orientalism. From the patriarchal viewpoint, anything not the One (subject) is the Other (object); any differences are conflated into Other. Construction or definition of the self was once available only to the elite; in reference to the pre-twentieth century world, Daniel Walker Howe writes, “Classical political theory, though devoting much attention to the proper fulfillment of the self, had taken it for granted that some persons would be excluded from participation in this process and even sacrificed to the development of others” (4), and this seems to have been the practice throughout much of history. In the twentieth century, as previously excluded groups moved into a new state of recognition in society, group identity also changed and new definitions became necessary. Many individuals sought a new definition of themselves through their group affiliations; others sought their core identity in spite of these affiliations. As can be expected, an exploration of these changes, the quest for new definitions, and the search for individuality is depicted in much literature. The twentieth century was the American century in many ways: the United States emerged as a world power to be reckoned with militarily; its economy endured both the Great Depression and periods of great affluence; its literature became a national literature which, although young, could finally stand proudly next to any other national literature; and its population changed several times over in terms of treating with the natives, immigration from many countries, laws against minority groups, the movement for civil rights, and the feminist movements for women’s suffrage and then for gender equity. Formerly excluded groups began to clamor to be heard, to be included. But the United States was not alone; much of the twentieth century American experience was also seen in other cultures, emphasizing the interconnectedness of the world. Coinciding chronologically with the American civil rights movement, whole cultures shook off their oppressors around the world in the 1960s

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and beyond. But their literature exhibits traits of having been acculturated by a colonizer; this phenomenon has been recognized by scholars and critics, who have begun to study these literary works as postcolonial literature.* The study of postcolonial literature bleeds over into culture studies, which has almost overcome any other way of analyzing literature, including as it does most poststructuralist theories: Deconstruction, Marxism, the New Historicism, Feminism, Gender Studies, and the Psychoanalytic and Reader-Response approaches. To paraphrase Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida, even language which attempts to analyze or explain other language—that is, literary criticism—is “inextricably entangled with the forces and structures it seeks to analyze” (Harmon and Holman 432). Thus the analysis itself becomes part of culture studies. The challenge of examining race and gender simultaneously requires shifting one’s focus from one to the other, as Lucinda Channon points out in her reading of Ellen Feder (189). Perhaps we could compare it to watching a tennis match: we watch one side to see its action and then turn to the other side to see its response. In this way, they help to shape each other, and it keeps us concentrating to attempt to follow their relationship, even as we are “inextricably entangled” ourselves. Turning then to these analyses of literature—some of them analyses of twentieth century literature and some of them twenty-first century analyses of earlier literature, we find various depictions of struggles in negotiating with oppression in terms of race, gender, and other oppression. Authors of these analyzed works have made their characters hold a mirror up to the world so that we can see not only real injustices that have been carried out but also different ways of living with or escaping from cultural injustice. The literary critics who have interpreted the works scrutinize ways that the characters accommodate not only their own individual trials in constructing themselves, but also, at times, national struggles. Here we see ideas ranging from the Victorian “angel” to the modernist idea of the “New Woman.” We see Jim Crow practices and multiculturalism; we see characters moving from “object” to “subject,” using the opposing forces to survive, to maintain or gain strength. Some of the works include the coping strategies of ethnic minorities, lesbians, and the physically disabled. Some of these works show the multiple consciousnesses that the characters live with and the multiple oppressions that they suffer, being members of a minority group, an oppressed gender, and carrying other characteristics that make them “Other.” Some stress the hyphenation that they live with, the hyphen serving as an attempt at bridging two cultures. The sections that these essays have been categorized in are, of course, artificial, but they are an attempt to show the reader some relationship

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among the essays, all of which are similar in some way, but each of which is unique. In the section on Race, Gender and the Self, Helen F. Maxson’s essay is about a novel in which a couple from different races marries and is victimized by those in power; she writes that the novel, Caryl Phillips’s Cambridge, not only “participates in the oppressive thinking it depicts” (3), but also inspires “its readers to acknowledge labeling tendencies ourselves” (3). She continues that, in fiction about race and gender, there is sometimes an inconsistency between message and method as authors’ rhetorical strategies engage readers in the very thought patterns, like essentialism, that are part of attitudes that marginalize, but that this inconsistency is not necessarily an artistic or a political liability. Even though she interprets the novel as “not optimistic about our moving as a species beyond the workings of prejudice” (3), she writes that its readers can work with the compassion in the novel to make an individual difference in the world. My own essay analyzes the Jim Crow practices of the early twentieth century as they appear in a Katherine Anne Porter short story, “The Fig Tree,” but indicates a move away from Jim Crow toward civil rights and the impulse toward the New Woman. As the protagonist, a young girl, grows into a greater awareness of the world around her, she recognizes both the cruelty of lynching and the injustice of limiting women to play a certain role. Porter leads the reader to believe that the girl, and perhaps the whole world, will have greater options in the future. Shakespeare is certainly not a twentieth century author, but Othello’s self-portrayal connotes a universal response to oppression. Everett G. Neasman traces the changing cultural practices around the character Othello; he analyzes the various ways that twentieth century audiences have accepted both the eponymous character and the play. Othello the character has become the “Other” in American society, and adaptations of Othello the play, he writes, “point to current identities of social oppression” (31), especially when the character Othello is presented as a lesbian. Houses play a big role in the writing of Virginia Woolf, and Emily Clark points out that Woolf’s houses in Orlando and To The Lighthouse can be seen as metaphors for transformation, as opportunity for females to change in constructing the self. She points out that “For women in these novels death offers them a vehicle for escape, rebellion, and, in many cases, serves as a precursor to renewal” (49) in the quest for a personal identity. Orlando, however, presents a man who becomes a woman in a ruthless society.

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The Assimilation and the Self section includes an essay by Youngsuk Chae, who points out how assimilation and homogenization can lead to “commodifying ‘cultural otherness’ in the market multiculturalism” (65) in her reading of the turn-of-the-century novel by Han Ong, Fixer Chao. The novel, she writes, discloses “material differences and class stratification among Asian Americans and by disidentifying with Orientalist projections of Asian Americans,” the novel raises questions about the “heterogeneity of Asian American identity” and shows multiculturalism to be a “superficial understanding of ethnic minorities” (82). This novel, she writes, represents “politically critical Asian American literature” (82), but also provides for the possibility of coalitions among the disenfranchised. Music, too, plays a part in forming an identity. As Shawn P. Holliday points out through the life story of a poet, even opposing forces can be transformed into a strength. He shows, through a discussion of West Coast Jazz, how Lawson Fusao Inada “privileges ethnic experience and pushes bourgeois white culture to the margin” in his poetry (94). In Black Males and the Self, through Claude Wilkinson’s reading of Charles Fuller’s A Soldier’s Play, he points out that being “black enough,” a question about ethnic allegiance that “many voices, both white and black, have posed, and often attempted to control” (106), must be relegated to second place in favor of individual identity. Aaron N. Oforlea explores Paul D, a character in Toni Morrison’s Beloved. He shows how Paul D represents not only the process by which black males resist racialized discourses but also the significance of black women to black male subjectivity construction. Oforlea argues that in order to move from being object, the acted upon, to being subject, the actor, Paul D draws on a legacy of African American resistance that includes both silence and creative expressions. In the Female Sexuality and the Self section, Tara Tuttle explores Christianity and its relationship to homosexuality in her analysis of two novels: Alice Walker’s The Color Purple and Ann Allen Schockley’s Say Jesus and Come to Me. She writes that these authors “revise cultural understandings of both-sex and same-sex partnerships in a religious context that strives to prohibit, condemn, or exclude them” (152). Even though Harper Lee’s only novel, To Kill a Mockingbird, has been widely analyzed, Cameron E. Williams points out that most of these interpretations have missed some important points, including the conflation of female sexuality and blackness. Lucinda Channon discusses, in the section on The Family and the Self, a physically disabled character in Ana Castillo’s Peel My Love Like

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an Onion who refuses to conform to societal expectations despite her traditional family, and Channon explains how the character creates and maintains her own identity in the face of opposition. Candis Pizzetta uses science and literature to show mothering as a strategy for survival of the species in Anne Enright’s The Gathering. Her discussion centers on how mothers must make decisions about “how much nurturing to provide and to whom in their families they should provide it” (199). Enright’s novel may demonstrate a situation in which the development of some siblings is sacrificed to the development of others, in similarity to the classical political theory explained by Daniel Walker Howe, above. Preselfannie McDaniels points out the coping strategies found in the mother-daughter relationships of the two novels that she analyzes: Amy Tan’s The Kitchen God’s Wife and Christina Garcia’s Dreaming in Cuban. She looks at illness and death “as catalysts that lead to confrontations between mothers and daughters and later to some understanding of the mother’s struggles in the process of rearing her children” (213). She includes in her interpretation the relevance of the fact that the mothers and the daughters not only represent different generations and historical times, but also are from different cultures. Construction of the self implies a move toward equality, an ideal which American society has striven toward but never achieved. However, almost every one of these essays ends on a positive note. The authors show that the characters actually do find ways of accommodating or negotiating the hardships that they suffer, and these critics show that the characters find not only new ways of seeing themselves but also a new way of seeing others. The hyphen that ordinarily joins two binary opposites can be dropped, leaving a gap, a space within which each character can define himself or herself. Literature is indeed the truth disguised as fiction. Whatever is considered important in society always appears in serious literature, and these thirteen interpretations of fictional literature point out several important truths about contemporary society. Patsy J. Daniels Jackson, Mississippi January 2013

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Note * As I have pointed out elsewhere, much American literature also exhibits characteristics of postcolonial attitudes. See Understanding American Fiction as Postcolonial Literature (Lewiston, N. Y.: Edwin Mellen, 2011).

Works Cited Harmon, William, and Hugh Holman. A Handbook to Literature. 11th ed. Upper Saddle River, N. J.: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2009. Howe, Daniel Walker. Making the American Self: Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln. New York: Oxford UP, 2009. Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Vintage, 1978.

PART I: RACE, GENDER, AND THE SELF

CHAPTER ONE EMPATHY AND METAPHOR: THE CRITIQUE AND EMBRACE OF ESSENTIALIST THOUGHT IN CARYL PHILLIPS’S CAMBRIDGE HELEN F. MAXSON

Novelist Caryl Phillips explores in his stories the workings of prejudice as a response to any human characteristic that can be easily grasped and interpreted, whether it is race, gender, or the location of one’s home. Phillips’s novels trace the patterns of thought that inform prejudice and dramatize its egregious consequences in cases when it disempowers or, in some other way, diminishes another person. The novel Cambridge focuses on a black man and a white woman who are reduced in the eyes of the prejudiced to embodiments of labels that bear little or no relation to their real identities. In the process and in ways that are socially permitted by those labels, they are victimized by those who, in the social system, hold power of one sort or another. As one result, the power of the victimizers is increased. This paper will explore, in addition to this victimization itself, ways in which Phillips’s narrative itself participates in the oppressive thinking it depicts and ways in which the humanitarian vision of the novel is, ironically, well-served by that apparent betrayal. The workings of language being what they are, verbal representations of oppression can partake of tendencies they condemn, and this is the case in Phillips’s Cambridge. Nonetheless, the novel embraces this fluidity in its narrative and its rhetoric, inspiring its readers to acknowledge labeling tendencies in ourselves. Cambridge is not optimistic about our moving as a species beyond the workings of prejudice, but its powerful plot and characters put us in touch with compassion and ethical values that, if we will act on them as individuals, can ease human lives. Essentialism, the primary mode of thought which Phillips dramatizes in his portraits of prejudice, is indirectly defined by literary scholars who

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study its opposite in the post-colonial era, the time period theorist Elleke Boehmer defines, using the hyphenated term, as beginning with the end of World War II. Boehmer gives her definition in the Introduction to her 2005 book Colonial & Postcolonial Literature, and explains that she will use the unhyphenated term “postcolonial” to describe literature “which critically or subversively scrutinizes the colonial relationship . . . to undercut thematically and formally the discourses which supported colonization—the myths of power, the race classifications, the imagery of subordination” (3). In my essay on Caryl Phillips, I will adhere to Boehmer’s distinction. In her list of postcolonial themes, Boehmer names several aspects of imperialistic essentialism. She also defines that mindset by its opposite, referring in various ways to the heterogeneous nature of racial and national identity with which it has been replaced by “postcolonials.” Describing the tendency of characters in post-colonial literature to migrate from one country to another, Boehmer refers to “the regeneration of communities and selves out of heterogeneous experiences in the new country” (250). As Boehmer sees it, national loyalty in these works is no longer do or die. Similarly, racial identity is no longer homogenous. She refers to “the always qualified decision to belong to [one’s] adopted city or nation” and “the mixed race, multicultural British citizen” (256) that characterize the migrating characters in post-colonial literature. Referring to the dissatisfaction of postcolonial authors with monolithic bases for national definition, Boehmer describes their “creative project of decentring, possibly indeed revising and re-imagining, the centre” (256). The concept of decentered, heterogeneous identities to which postcolonial peoples lay claim is commonly treated by the theorists who study them. Edward Said, in the 1994 Afterword to his 1978 book Orientalism, elucidated his original purpose in the book: And this was one of the implied messages of Orientalism, that any attempt to force cultures and peoples into separate and distinct breeds or essences exposes not only the misrepresentations and falsifications that ensue, but also the way in which understanding is complicit with the power to produce such things as the “Orient” or the “West.” (347)

Both Boehmer and Said describe a movement against narrowly formulated identities on the part of post-colonial peoples. In Said’s use of it, the term “essences” evokes, on the contrary, a dangerous faith in inherent definitions, whether of peoples, words, or concepts, that provides an easily grasped handle with which one can manipulate others. The postcolonial aversion to being easily grasped characterizes much literature of

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the time: it is precisely in being assigned an essential identity that a people is most easily misrepresented and oppressed. The existential thought of Camus and Sartre in the early twentieth century contributed to essentialism similar connotations of falsification which post-colonial thought may have absorbed. The concepts of transcendent or inherent meanings were seen by existentialists as fictions distorting that which exists most truly on its own terms, just as an imperial power misrepresents whatever people must exist on its terms. Linguists like Ferdinand de Saussure brought heterogeneity to a word’s meaning, asserting that it depends not on any inherent definition, but on the shifting verbal contexts in which the word is used. The multiculturalism that has characterized post-colonial perspectives on global politics and literature has taken much from philosophical explorations of the twentieth century. We might add here that the post-colonial principle of heterogeneity as a desirable cultural feature has a counterpart in the feminist notion of the plural subject, in terms of which feminist writers assume a plural voice and reject the essential identity implied by use of the first person singular. Plural subjectivity and the fallacious nature of the pronoun “I” are concepts that have informed literary feminism for decades. We think of Julia Kristeva’s 1975 essay “Woman Can Never Be Defined,” which points to the essentialism involved in defining gender. We think of Natalie Edwards’s 2011 book Shifting Subjects: Plural Subjectivity in Contemporary Francophone Women’s Autobiography, which according to Edwards’s web page, “examines the ways in which four contemporary women writers . . . have written their autobiographical ‘I’ as a plural concept” (“Prof. Edwards”). We think of Eleanor Brown’s 2012 book The Weird Sisters, in which, as interviewer Amy Sue Nathan puts it, “three sisters share the first person point of view simultaneously.” The fiction of Caryl Phillips explores the marginalization of blacks, Jews, males, and females in a number of different countries, avoiding the “identity politics” that say one must be a member of a group in order to describe it (James Shapiro, qtd. in Craps). Phillips’s work gives evidence that the impulse toward prejudice and oppression transcends narrow categories as an aspect of human nature. Caribbean by birth, raised and educated in England, Philips expressed in a 2006 interview the anti-essentialist theme that recurs in his work. He warned against anyone who has the temerity, the sheer cheek, to be able to define you and to tell you who you should be . . . I consider that to be the most dangerous person of all. The person who tries to tell you that you should make your identity simple and able to be packaged and be put into a box is a dangerous person. And I don’t care whether they’re dressed like an Islamic imam or

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Chapter One whether they’re dressed like the Chancellor of Germany or whether they’re dressed like the Prime Minister of Britain. . . . they should never make people ashamed of the essential complexity of their identity. (qtd. in Stähler)

Locating complexity rather than purity at an “essential” (meaning “crucial”) point, Phillips’s statement reflects the quality of his fiction that resists the homogeneous as vulnerable and inaccurate. Critics have explored the anti-essentialist nature of Phillips’s work from several angles. Vivian Nun Halloran has said of Phillips’s Cambridge (and Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea) that “[b]oth novels suggest that social demarcations between English and Creole cultural identities are artificial because they ultimately depend on chance—on the geographical accident of a given person’s or character’s place of birth,” citing the “historical racial and social hierarchies enforced by English planters and civil servants in the West Indian colonies as rhetorical tools to carry out the work of empire building” (87-88). Halloran goes on to give us one form of Phillips’s distaste for hierarchies based on essentialist identities, pointing out the novels’ insistence on “the very impossibility of the individual’s existence as a unified subject” (88). Later in the essay, she explains that impossibility: “The postmodern approach to fractured subjectivity, evident in the intertextual, fragmentary, and polyphonic nature of his texts, attests to Phillips’s prismatic vision of any unified identity as a fragile and temporary construct” (97). Even the concept of selfhood, we are learning, can engage, and thus can be protected against, essentialist thought. We will see that the plot structure of Cambridge suggests that national, racial, and even personal identity are, indeed, vulnerabilities that lend themselves to victimization by someone else’s taste for power. Critic Stef Craps underscores the notion that, in an imperialistic context, a fully-defined personal identity, one which theorists would call a well-defined “subject position,” can put one at risk. Craps extends Halloran’s claim that a unified subject is “impossible” in Cambridge to Phillips’s Higher Ground and The Nature of Blood, novels which explore the Holocaust. Craps finds in Phillips an awareness that even a solid personal identity created by an author for a character, along with the reader empathy it generates, can work as a risky essentialist construct. In reproducing a dynamic that Phillip’s stories indict, that empathy would put the novels’ techniques at philosophical cross purposes with their visions if Phillips had not, as Craps praises him for doing, deliberately limited the empathy his readers feel for his characters. Craps cites the importance placed by psychologists on limiting one’s empathy for victims of

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persecution—feeling sympathy while remembering that the trauma is someone else’s, not one’s own—through “a critical and self-reflexive perspective [that is] conducive to the establishment of a truly inclusive post-traumatic community marked by openness to and respect for otherness.” The principle of heterogeneity is an aspect of this goal, but so is that of privacy. A reader’s empathy for a character in a novel, in light of this psychological principle, suggests in the character a unified personal identity, an essence that Craps sees as engaging the same quality in readers–invasiveness–that victims of persecution unwittingly engage in those who control them. From Craps’s perspective, an author who explores the trauma of persecution, as Phillips does, must not re-enact between reader and character the dynamics of persecution. This artistic (and one might say ethical) requirement demands a deliberate self-control on the part of the author. Craps finds that self-control in Phillips’s approach to the Holocaust, saying that his novels “appear to invite the reader to recognize a common human essence that persists across space and time,” but that, nonetheless, “the inaccessibility of one’s innermost experience to outsiders is repeatedly remarked upon by the characters themselves. . . . Eva [in The Nature of Blood] reverts to silence in an effort to keep her inner reality inviolate from the world.” The notion of “a common human essence” generates an empathy on the part of readers for fictional characters that empowers the messages of the author. Still, Craps describes his sense in Higher Ground of “an implicit acknowledgment on the part of the writer of the limits that one’s subject position places on the imagination.” Craps finds in Phillips’s vision a balance between “a common human essence” that makes empathy possible and the respect for others that refrains from appropriating someone else’s experience as one’s own. One effect of Craps’s analysis is to locate in Phillips’s work a consistency between the artistic and formal strategies behind it and the values it confirms. For Craps, the dynamic a novel creates with its reader is emblematic of some aspect of its plot; as such, it is a component of a novel’s artistry that, in a successful novel, is answerable to its vision. Thus, the management of reader empathy that Craps finds in Phillips signals the novelist’s skill. We will see in Cambridge different forms of that correlation, like that between plot structure and theme. However, there are points at which Phillips lets certain of his book’s rhetorical gestures go their own way so that they seem to disrupt the consistency between its form and its content. We will see, for example, that reader empathy and rhetorical figures like metaphor and stereotype trigger precisely the essentialist thinking to which the novel is philosophically opposed. We

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will see, too, ways in which Phillips compensates for these divergences in Cambridge, managing reader empathy and his metaphors as if working to ensure the consistency between form and content that Craps foregrounds. However, we will also see ways in the novel Cambridge that the divergence ultimately becomes an eloquent and reinforcing part of the book’s message. In a novel like Cambridge, whose story fails to dramatize answers to the problems it explores, we can turn instead to the values inherent in its construction as authorial responses to those problems. In Cambridge, more specifically, the inconsistencies between the ideas it espouses and the formal techniques it employs bring to mind the cultural heterogeneity esteemed by post-colonial peoples and authors. In light of that ideal, the inconsistencies are an ironic corroboration of the book’s message that postcolonial heterogeneity can change notions of human identity that are based on ethnicity and gender. In light of that ideal, black people and female people are respected for whatever identities they naturally possess as individuals. Relocated people are able to claim national citizenship regardless of their race. The inconsistencies between the message and the rhetorical strategies of the novel Cambridge provide an ironic affirmation of the inclusive, tolerant, and—in ways—flexible ethics the book would instill in its readers. In this context, it is helpful to add that for Phillips, works of literature do not assume consistent philosophical positions. Thus, making room for inconsistencies in his novels does not, from his perspective, undermine their eloquence. In a 2006 interview with Alex Stähler, Phillips distanced himself from the idea of artistic consistency that might impugn his use of metaphors, stereotypes, and reader empathy in a book whose story challenges essentialist categories: Literature has to be ambivalent because it can’t, it doesn’t make judgments. . . . [As a writer,] you explore and you usually end up in a position of some ambiguity. . . . Most writers . . . are not afraid of ambiguity. . . . Literature should not serve anyone’s position.

Phillips’s acceptance of the ambivalent and ambiguous nature of literature allows him to experiment with the rhetoric of his fiction, using techniques that might seem, at first, to undermine the anti-essentialist implications of the story he tells and yet to empower its vision. More generally, Phillips teaches us to be tentative readers of fiction, interpreting plots and images rather than enumerating planks in a tightly made argument. It is true, on one hand, that he is a prolific essayist who argues emphatically and whose novels are often faithful to historical events and people. However, it is also true, on the other hand, that the rich and subtle

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imagining in his novels refrains from asserting, in any final way, the arguable or ascertainable. That imagining asks Phillips’s readers to participate in defining its impact and its implications, a sign in itself of his distaste for consistent, narrowly defined labels and of his willingness to expand concepts like heterogeneity and ethical artistry as they inform his work. Nevertheless, the philosophical construct of essentialist thought holds a consistent definition in the plot of Cambridge. The Prologue is delivered by a third-person narrator recounting the departure from England of Emily Cartwright, a young woman who is on her way to visit, in a supervisory capacity, her father’s sugar cane plantation in the British West Indies. We learn in those pages that when she returns, she is to be married to Thomas Lockwood, a fifty-year-old widow of her father’s choosing whose ample financial resources will “insure [her father’s] own future” (4) against his habit of gambling and losing (99). From the start of the book, then, Emily, by virtue of her gender, is the victim of an essentialist social tenet about the disposability of female offspring and their primary function as romantic or sexual objects. In a novel that studies, as well, the workings of the slave trade and slavery itself, this emphasis on gender foregrounds and censures the essentialist thinking at play in victimization of any personal quality. One technique Phillips uses to belie the labels assigned by essentialist thought is to skew in his plot the defining categories on which they depend. The white, British, and socially prominent Emily holds a position of power over the slaves and other employees of her father’s plantation. At the same time, however, she is imprisoned by the gender roles she must play. In the Caribbean, she will meet a slave named Cambridge who, thanks to a period of freedom as a young man in England, has been well educated; Cambridge’s history skews the essentialist understanding of race that ultimately traps him. Reflecting the author’s deploring attitude about those defeats though not avoiding them, these main characters, in their very natures, invalidate the essentialist categories that victimize them. They invalidate those categories, too, by holding, despite their roles as victims, the roles of power that victimize each other. Thus, even though they are defeated by essentialist logic, these characters participate in various forms of it, an irony that admits to the book a cousin to the heterogeneous quality post-colonials look for in national identities. The longest section of the novel is narrated in Emily Cartwright’s voice in the form of a journal she keeps as she sails toward and lives out her experiences in the Caribbean. To use Halloran’s and Craps’s concept, she assumes a “subject position” that draws our empathy.

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We will see, too, that she brings her own essentialist notions of race from England and acquires others once she is in the islands. Still, her defeat by the sexism of her father and her lover indirectly incriminate her own essentialism. Emily will be victimized in the book by a turn of events that might be seen as a metaphor of the heightened intimacy that a well developed subjectivity and empathy for it can bring. Even her own sensitive and generous thinking invalidate the essentialist thinking that Phillips portrays in the book. As an inconsistent character, Emily portrays her own evolving tendencies well, showing us human qualities as they really are behind the falsifying labels. Her inconsistency enables her to show us what it means to buy gradually into modes of essentialist thinking that surround one, in addition to how inaccurate they are, and what the consequences for doing so can be. Emily’s journal records the process by which she learns first-hand about the workings of the sugar cane plantations and the racial assumptions they make, affording us a look at the psycho-social chemistry that generates and empowers victimizing stereotypes. To be sure, as we have said, she does bring her own categorical assumptions with her from England. When she first arrives on the island, she is met by a carriage from her father’s estate. She remembers that “The carriage was light and airy and drawn by English horses. . . . I noted the difference between this carriage and those preferred by the negroes, whose carriages were large and heavy and drawn by mules” (21). The distinctions in value between what is English and what is negro are already in her mind. At another point, she mentions discomfort at the freed blacks she sees on the island: “A sight to which I found it difficult to reconcile myself was the number of apparently free blacks wandering the streets, shoes on their feet, their unstockinged legs shining like twin columns of jet” (104). With these and similar observations on her part as preliminaries, we are not surprised when, later in her visit, she observes that “[w]ithout rank and order any society, no matter how sophisticated, is doomed to admit the worst kind of anarchy. In this West Indian sphere there is amongst the white people too little attention paid to differences of class” (72). The class consciousness for which England is famous has arrived with her and gives her critical feelings about even the West Indian whites, who are lax in the class distinctions they draw. She goes on to observe that The other men, perhaps because I am a woman, have shown little courtesy in affording the attentions proper to my rank. They converse with me as freely and as openly as they wish. This is barely tolerable amongst the whites, but when I find the blacks hereabouts behaving in the same manner

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I cannot abide it, and see no reason why I should accommodate myself to the lack of decorum which characterizes this local practice. (72)

The ranks into which Emily sorts human beings involve gender as well as race, and we feel that she has not had to be shown around a Caribbean island in order to acquire that practice. Yet, when she first arrives, the clear rankings and categorical ideas that she carries and encounters are softened by a kindness and fairness that are also native to her character. Because of her own situation, she is aware of the unfairnesses society deals to women. She never does return to England and the marriage her father has arranged for her. When she thinks of England, she thinks of “a life sacrificed to the prejudices which despise my sex” (113). She is clear from the start of her visit that she wants to write and lecture on what she learns in the Caribbean; her detailed and insightful account of what she sees as she gets to know the island reads like an anthropologist‘s tract. She is well aware of the diminished respect accorded to women in England and the new world, and her awareness does, at least initially, soften the racial rankings into which she sorts life in both worlds. At one point in her visit, she takes issue with the assessment usually made of Creole (or mixed race) plantation managers on the island. True, these are people of some white blood, but we are still inclined to appreciate this token of open-mindedness on her part: I discovered much at this dinner that warmed my heart towards one class of these creole people. I had heard those engaged in West Indian cultivation spoken of as choleric and unstable, inclined to be imperious, but lacking in polish, who having raised themselves from mediocrity to some form of affluence, now reclined in tropical ease framing excessively elevated notions of their birth. However, these plantation managers are hard-working, up before sunrise, first into the field, and often the last to leave at night. . . . I have mixed in society where courtly manners prevail . . . but seldom have more sterling qualities of the mind and native good breeding been displayed than amongst these planters, whose propriety was such that not for one moment did I suspect any of aping their betters. (11415).

Like this gracious assessment, Emily’s sensitivity to the injustice and pain attending Brown’s beating of Cambridge suggests in her an honesty and a generosity of spirit. She refers to the pangs of sympathy felt by nearby neighboring slaves during the beating, and then includes her own among them: “. . . if I am to be honest I would have to add that theirs were

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not the only hearts whose sympathies leapt instinctively to this poor unfortunate” (41). Still, part of the story of Cambridge is that of Emily’s assimilation by the racist thinking on the Caribbean island she is visiting. Much of the first part of her visit consists of a series of explanations designed to acquaint her with the practices and the nature of the peoples she will find there; we are able to see the network of local perspectives that will strengthen by the end of her visit the essentialist tendencies she has arrived with. After the hanging of Cambridge for the murder of Brown, a distraught Emily thinks of Isabella, her beloved white servant from England who has died on the way to the Caribbean: O lucky Isabella that she never lived to witness the treachery of the negro that some would set free to wreak havoc upon our persons. Their lying subservience, their sly pilfering, their murderous violence, mark them out as very like the Irish, but of an even more childish character. (129)

Her reference to the Irish locates her essentialist thinking in her past, but her reference to the “treachery” of Cambridge makes clear the role of her experiences on the island in developing and finalizing her racist tendencies, despite the strands of her character which seem sometimes to soften them. Just as The Nature of Blood traces the development and selffulfilling quality of fifteenth-century Venetian anti-semitism, Cambridge describes the same aspects of racism against blacks in the nineteenthcentury Caribbean. We leave both novels convinced that it is an inevitable part of human nature to generate and act on stereotypes of racial identity that empower some and victimize others. Emily’s gradual seduction by Arnold Brown can be seen as symbolizing the evolution of her racism. Emily’s confusion about Brown bespeaks not only the inconsistency we have seen between her categorizing attitudes and her innate kindness, but also a confusion in her sense of herself that allows her to be fully swept—in what amounts to a sexual surrender—into the essentialist perspective she holds at the end of the section she narrates. Emily’s connection with Brown, which prepares readers to find a more subtle sexuality in Eva’s reticence in the later The Nature of Blood, comments on the consequences of unwise intimacy and of essentialist thinking. Though the first is generated by in-depth knowledge about someone’s identity and the second distorts someone’s identity, the two dangers are alike in bestowing manipulative power on one individual (whether reader or lover) who seeks to know another (whether fictional character or lover). As a living text, Emily is at risk, both as an artistic construct and as an embodiment of human nature.

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Emily’s first contact with Brown takes place as she watches his brutal beating of Cambridge. The aversion to Brown that she feels then changes to a mistaken sense that he gentles in personality after she stands up to him about the presence at her dining table of a black woman named Christiania. As a result of her error, Emily gentles in her response to him. When he takes her on a tour of the island, she alternates when referring to him between Mr. Brown and Arnold in a manner that is confusing for the reader and bespeaks Emily’s own confusion. She pities “Poor Arnold” when he must observe the sufferings of sick blacks (121), but expresses no sympathy for the sufferers themselves. She continues to sympathize with Brown even as he abandons her once she is pregnant (127-128). We learn from a character named Wilson, about whom Brown has lied to Emily, that Brown has offered Cambridge the authoritative position of Head Driver so that he (Brown) can manipulate other blacks on the island. There is no question in the reader’s mind that he is an unsavory character. Still, Emily progresses in her attraction to the point of sexual union. That their child is stillborn, since her attachment to Brown symbolizes her developing racism, comments on the fatal workings of essentialist thought as eloquently as do the deaths of Cambridge and Brown. Metaphorically, we might say that Emily has been raped by the heightened racism she adopts on the island. The sexual undertones of her connections with the local clergyman and the local doctor underscore our sense that Emily’s immersion in the environment of the island is dramatized as a sexual event. Gender and race overlap in Phillips’s plot as victimizing (and therefore victimized) categories. Not only do Emily’s complexity and inconsistency as a character invalidate the essentialist thinking in the book’s characters; they also require on the part of the reader an analytical reading that undercuts the empathy we feel for her. Her complexity and inconsistency forestall our impulse to find ourselves in her. Craps locates this authorial technique in The Nature of Blood, mentioning a self-reflexive quality in our response to Eva, “a kind of empathy that combines affect and critical awareness.” For Craps, Eva’s complex character–she is neither all innocent nor all guilty– demands that the reader read critically to understand Eva’s place in the book’s moral vision. It is not hard to see that that sort of reading is demanded by the complexity of the book as a whole, and I would argue that Emily Cartwright requires it as well. Cambridge’s upbringing as a British gentleman and his position as a slave make demands on the reader in the same way. Furthermore, the narrative’s source in several different voices, in a narrative strategy evocative of certain great modernist novels, undermines our faith in any one voice as an expression of what is true or

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an example of what is essentially human. These demands on our thinking as we read limit the degree to which we can feel at the same time. In so doing, they underscore the book’s indictment of essentialist, potentially appropriating perspectives. Still, we have commented already on the inconsistent nature of the book. It delivers well-developed characters and the accompanying sense of a “common human essence” which transgresses the bounds of race, gender, and nationality. In so doing, it generates the very empathy it works against. Thus, in terms of the psychological constructs Craps cites, one might say that Cambridge encourages readers to appropriate aspects of its story as, in various ways, their own, tending toward the essentialist thought it locates in the practice of slavery. In fact, several aspects of the book encourage us to think in both empathetic and essentialist terms, even as they undermine it by requiring our critical analysis. Thus we are reminded of Phillips’s comment that literature is, by nature, ambiguous, and of the heterogeneity that postcolonials espouse. We learn that Cambridge has been given four different names in his life: Olumide, Thomas, David Henderson, and Cambridge. Only the first of these reflects a mother’s love rather than definition by the slave culture of which he is a part. The fractured selfhood suggested by these changing and imposed names contributes to the reader’s sympathy for the character who bears them and seems like one of the most hurtful consequences of slavery. Encouraging our empathy for fully developed characters, the book questions the traditional use—as a measure of a novel’s success—of consistency between its formal qualities and its vision, and, true to the ambiguous nature Phillips attributes to novels, Cambridge questions the importance of that consistency in other ways as well. For example, in the fictional rhetoric of Cambridge, metaphorical allusions shape our thinking as readers. As Craps and other critics of Phillips remind us, metaphor is often at play in an essentialist perspective, asserting an essential similarity or equivalency between two things whereby one suggests the other. Those who try to avoid essentialist thought prefer to think in terms of metonymy, which associates like or closely situated things without asserting a shared essence. In relying on metaphor, the novel’s rhetoric engages thought patterns in its readers that its philosophy eschews. Still, these inconsistencies contribute to the novel’s vision in ways that add to its power. For one thing, as critical readers who are alert to our own thinking as we read, we might recognize in ourselves the workings of metaphorical thought. Such a self-consciousness would extend the novel’s interrogation of essentialist thought into our own world. In recognizing our metaphorical

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interpretations as kin (however distant) to the racist thoughts at the heart of the novel, we are led to wonder whether the traditional goal of consistency between form and content in a novel is as important as the suggestive power of metaphor. One form of the novel’s metaphorical logic occurs in its use of stereotypes. There is a metaphorical quality to stereotypes that assigns an essential identity to all the individuals of a given group. Perhaps it is to bring his technique nearer to his vision—engaging an impulse for artistic and thematic consistency—that Phillips constructs some of his metaphorical stereotypes so as to complicate (and thereby undermine) their expressive power. Some of the book’s stereotypes reverse essentialist perspectives traditionally embraced by those with rank and power. It is no accident that the book’s ugly climax happens at Christmas, replacing the traditional holy child with the stillborn child of Emily’s sexual connection with Brown. In another example, Cambridge, as a black man in possession of education, style, and self-assurance, reverses the stereotype of the highlyranked Englishman. In another, Emily’s gender belies the traditional stereotype of the British absentee landlord. Furthermore, other stereotypes in the text, even if they do not reverse traditional labels, evoke them for critical scrutiny. Mr. Rogers, the hypocritical Anglican clergyman, who believes that it is pointless to convert negroes since they cannot rise to the challenges of active Christian life, invalidates the stereotype of the righteous Christian leader, one stereotype emptying another. One might say that Mr. Brown is a stereotypical villain: deceitful, manipulative, selfish, and inhumane. He victimizes on the basis of race. He victimizes on the basis of gender. In so doing, he interrogates the stereotype of the civilized British gentleman his social position assumes he fulfills. Among the book’s male characters, Cambridge fulfills the stereotype most accurately, but his race keeps most of the characters from noticing. We might more readily say that Cambridge is a stereotypical victim: he is innocent, he is noble, he is driven to the murder he commits rather than murderous by nature. Nonetheless, as we have seen, his intelligence, genuine Christian impulses, and personal elegance invalidate the stereotype of the barbaric negro British imperialism had asserted as the benefactor of the white man’s burden. At times, then, Phillips’s stereotypes in Cambridge undermine their own rhetorical energy as if to acknowledge and conform to the book’s anti-essentialist perspective. It is my sense that this purpose is served, too, by the reference many of his stereotypes make to long-standing, perhaps hopeless human dilemmas. The forms taken by Brown’s villainy, the

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humiliations suffered by Cambridge: many of those references suggest a bankruptcy that reflects human powerlessness against essentialist thinking. Phillips’s stereotypes show his awareness that he’s engaging an issue others have raised before him at least as far back as Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Perhaps for writers who shun essentialistic understandings of human identities, the use of stereotypes is itself a comment on humanity’s failure to see important complexity in old issues. If so, there is a pessimism in the move, a deliberate expression of fatigue that locates Phillips’s novel in a bleak history of experience and expression. We think of the resonance in The Nature of Blood between the anti-semitism in fifteenth-century Venice and that in twentieth-century Germany. We think of the historical accuracy—along with the compelling empathy—that we find in the three marginalized black figures in Phillips’s Foreigners. It is reasonable to feel that Phillips’s pessimism works in his stereotypes to shed negative light on the essentialism they enact. At the same time, though, if stagnant thinking is an agent of evil in a Phillips story, almost a character in itself, it certainly deserves portraiture in the gestures of his rhetoric. His negative stereotypes make room in the story for their own essentialism. Again, Phillips’s strategies enact the ambiguity he associates with fiction, some conforming to and some ignoring the values his story reflects. Even though some of the stereotypical events and figures in Cambridge invalidate themselves by evoking their own opposites—as the birth of Emily’s stillborn child at Christmas evokes a holy birth that, to some, has suggested eternal life—the invalidated stereotypes are, in a sense, reasserted by the gestures that invalidate them. Thus, the traditional Christmas, the stereotypical Englishman, and the stereotypical absentee landlord lurk behind Phillips’s reversals, cancelled on one level, but stubbornly haunting the world portrayed on another. As a result, there is a sense in this novel that its essentialist rhetoric has its own life, independent of the will of the author, and that, in the end, the author recognizes and accepts that fact as an inevitable aspect of writing. In that acceptance, in keeping as it is with Phillips’s acceptance of literary ambiguity, we see, as well, one of the doorways through which his pessimism takes shape in his vision: if writing is an essentialist enterprise by nature, it cannot argue against prejudice without re-enacting it. Furthermore, for Phillips, the capacity of writing to heal is limited, whether it is an essentialist enterprise or not. In a 2006 interview, Phillips questioned whether its power could ever be sufficient to address the pain of “persecution and memory and loss,” the “loneliness or isolation” associated with the concept of a nation’s “home”: “. . . .I don’t know if reading a book, let alone writing a

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book, can ever repair that degree of damage” (qtd. in Rabalais 182-83). For Phillips, the various forms of essentialist thought–whether as a cause of man’s inhumanity to man or as an element of verbal expression–mirror and undermine each other, suggesting some self-perpetuating and obstructing quality in human nature and expression that we can never fully transcend. And yet Phillips writes books, even though, as in the case of Cambridge, they may not depict, or even suggest, solutions to the problems they explore. The fact remains that an ambiguous pessimism makes room for at least moments of hope. In fact, as we have suggested already, Phillips’s peace with ambiguity invites us to see the principle of consistency between a novel’s vision and the artistic methods that express it as achieving a kind of purity at the expense of a more honest and accurate complexity. Thus, the failure of that consistency can carry positive as well as negative implications. Even as Phillips strives as an artist (as Stef Craps has so convincingly urged) to honor the therapeutic needs his work has portrayed, he honors, too, the complex realities—of language and of human nature—which impede that endeavor. As we have suggested, in qualifying Phillips’s efforts at consistency, his acceptance of ambiguity is akin to the celebration of heterogeneity theorists have found in post-colonial writing. In ambiguous pessimism, just like in post-colonial heterogeneity, differing perspectives are respected. Reinforcing an angle on the book that accepts artistic inconsistencies as reflections of post-colonial heterogeneity, the dramatic power of the character Cambridge ironically derives, in part, from an essentialist label: in terms of the qualities and practices urged by Christianity—charitable attitudes, control of anger, turning the other cheek—Cambridge is the best Christian in the book. We will see that this label is not a form of the book’s essentialism that helps it to engender hope. Even though Rogers with his stereotypical hypocrisy facilitates that accomplishment on the part of Cambridge, and even though the book distances itself from Christianity as an institution, Cambridge’s tireless efforts to live the selfless principles of his faith win the reader’s admiration and trigger some hope that they can penetrate the evils the book explores. Through the unthinkable injustice and pain Cambridge endures, his attempts to deal with them in a manner consistent with the tenets of his faith stay constant. Even the lethal conflict with Brown disrupts a “Christian plan” (165) which Cambridge conceives of while praying in a chapel and for which he finds motivation in his faith: “I knew full well that a Christian man must fear nothing but the Lord Himself” (166). After Cambridge murders Brown, he prays for forgiveness (167). Earlier he has told us that while he was a slave, “[t]he

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execrable years bred quickly but never, not for one moment, did I lose faith in the redeeming powers of the Good Lord” (159). In fact, Cambridge’s adherence to the principles of his faith inspires in him a resistance to the essentialist thinking of prejudice that the book critiques. Writing after he has murdered Brown and before he has been hanged, Cambridge begins his narration by asserting his love of his faith and of England. Later in the narration, he thinks back on the country of his first enslavers as “the good people of their country [who must reside] in the sorrowful guilt of upholding such a system, thus fusing prejudice into their souls and hardening their hearts” (134). Cambridge does not blame all the English for his dilemma, and he records wanting, after his second enslavement, to return to “dear England” (166). Still, neither Cambridge’s refusal to engage in essentialist criticism of the British nor his adherence to religious principles offers a viable response to the pain he suffers. Earlier in the book, he is taught by a kind teacher in England that “with a Christian education . . . [he] would find it possible . . . to subdue in others the prejudice that my colour gives rise to” (144). His subsequent experiences in the book belie her lesson. Part of the impotence the book assigns to Christian tenets may stem from the affiliation between those tenets and Christianity as a social institution. The value system of the book remembers the historical connection between the church and global imperialism, reinforcing it with the distance between Cambridge’s faith and what is psychologically real or possible. Living a Christian life in this book is difficult. The passive-aggressiveness which convincingly penetrates the efforts of Cambridge to control his anger foreshadows the violence to which he will be driven. Having been educated in England before his second enslavement, he thinks back to its early stages when the crew on the slave ship realized how good his English was: “I decided that by degrees I would reveal to them my knowledge of their language” (157); it is a measured, deliberate response, as is his response to the blasphemous language he hears on the slave ship: he offers the offenders “a glare of Christian devotion tinged with anger” (157), and admits lacking then the impulse he had on an earlier Christian mission in England to “punish with love” the erring “parishioners of Warwickshire” (157). Cambridge’s faith is sincere, but it is not impervious to anger despite its assumption that anger is sinful. It is possible, too, that authorial skepticism is part of the failure of Christianity to overcome the conflicts the novel portrays. As he narrates his story, Cambridge thinks back to blaming his first enslavement, which took place before his conversion to Christianity, on himself: “I lamented what I took to be my own wicked heart which rendered me helpless and in

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this undone state” (136). The suggestion here that his Christian faith is empowered by his natural personality, not by spiritual realities, contributes to the book’s skeptical view of religious faith. In the end, Cambridge’s faith is powerless to deliver him from slavery, just as Emily’s social rank is powerless to save her from victimization as a woman. It is, in fact, a kind of essentialism in itself that, even though it prohibits the victimization of others that so often accompanies essentialist thinking, is shown to be out of touch with human complexities that Cambridge must face. In this book that portrays no solutions, we find some hope in the irony that an aspect of the book’s essentialism moves readers toward individual behavior that, if their impact were felt by the world as a whole, would offer a solution. Despite its kinship to the essentialist categories with which human beings label and abuse each other, and despite its possible misappropriation of a character’s life, the empathy that makes readers care about the suffering characters can engender in us ethical rejections of the cruel uses to which it could be put. In fact, Phillips dramatizes this kind rejection in a powerful moment at the end of The Nature of Blood, a scene in which race and gender come together in the trusting Malka, a young black Jewish woman who has been brought, in the second half of the twentieth century, from Ethiopia to Palestine, the new Jewish homeland. In Malka, Phillips undercuts the essentialist thinking that can categorize Jews, blacks, and women by representing all three designations in one character, much as he dilutes the categories of gender, race, and social status by overlapping them in Emily Cartwright and Cambridge. The Ethiopian Jews were not welcomed by all white Jews in the new homeland, and Malka is well aware of her comparative powerlessness in her new home. She is spending the evening with a much older German Jew named Stephan, a doctor who left his life behind in Germany years ago to devote himself to developing the new homeland. We knew him earlier in the book as Uncle Stephan, the uncle of the main character, Eva Stern. At the end of the book, Stephan and Malka have had dinner and are getting into bed together. Stephan turns off the light to hide his aging body and a scar. At the same time, Malka’s vulnerable trust and naïveté are clear; both characters are vulnerable. Malka asks Stephan why he turns off the light: “Do you not wish to see me?” She was naked. Tall, smooth and graceful, she was carved like a statue. Before he could catch himself, he heard the words fall from his lips. “I would like to be your friend.”

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Chapter One She stepped into the shadow. Then she slid into the bed, taking care not to touch him.“But you are my friend. I have been here six years now, and no man has seen me naked. I am not that type of woman.” He turned to face her. She spoke again, this time in a hushed voice. “You did not look as though you would hurt me.” She fixed her eyes on the ceiling. “My family worry about everything. Maybe, like my brother, I will join the army.” She paused, then looked back at him. She lifted her head from the pillow. “You may kiss me if you wish, but I prefer only that. I am sorry.” (209-10)

The gentle Stephan honors her wishes, gazing at her through the night as she sleeps, thinking of his aging body, aware of difficulties she will have to face when she goes home. He does not identify with her, so perhaps the word compassion names his response to her more truly than the word empathy. And he behaves ethically. He is a more experienced white male, but, despite her vulnerability, he does not make use of the power he has. In handling the situation, Uncle Stephan is honest about his own vulnerabilities, and he does not take advantage of Malka’s. In Cambridge, readers are left in a position similar to his of choosing to use their empathy ethically, understanding without appropriating or diminishing. Knowing he cannot, in a book, provide a consistent mechanism of logic, philosophy, and artistry that will change the world, Phillips presents in Cambridge the terms human individuals will have to sort through in choosing a direction in their lives. The terms delineate a choice that, if it were made by the powerful of the world as Uncle Stephan makes it, would bring to pass the contrapuntal dynamic between differing cultures—the harmonious musical patterning called counterpoint that embraces differing rhythms—called for by Edward Said as a remedy for prejudice and tyranny (Culture and Imperialism 51, 318, 336). Phillips himself urges the same values in the essay “Belonging to Israel,” calling for new ways of defining national identity that respect all who live in societies created by post-colonial migrations and the mixing of blood lines (195-96). Uncle Stephan and Malka, both having come to the new Israel from other countries though with different levels of power, would hold the same citizenship in the world’s eyes by virtue of the multicultural national identities for which Phillips calls. These identities would make of Stephan’s personal sensitivity a global quality, invalidating the rigid, essentialist concept of national purity that has empowered much of the oppression the world has known.

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Still, the novel Cambridge does not offer a scene like the Malka scene. Nor does the novel allow us to hope that the scene’s dynamic between the powerful and the weak will ever become the rule on a global or even a national level. Emily’s innate compassion for the beaten Cambridge is shortly swallowed up in her essentialist understanding of blacks. When Cambridge is first enslaved and taken to England, those who are responsible for him on the ship and, then, his new owners who educate him, convert him to Christianity, and free him—these holders of power make the ethical choices that need to be made. But the system of the slave trade takes over, and the healing possibilities of the choices are lost. Similarly, the character Cambridge, in deference to his faith, shows remarkably ethical impulses, but, because he does not have Uncle Stephan’s autonomy as a white male, he cannot bring them to bear on the injustice he suffers along with other blacks. In Phillips’s fiction, racist and sexist systems of thought are frequent stumbling blocks to individual characters’ humane and ethical impulses. The choices of individuals in those novels cannot make much difference in the social patterns they protest. In fact, to return to the theoretical analyses of essentialism with which we began, it is fairly easy to see that essentialism, by its very nature, defines a wrong that we need to move beyond, not a solution toward which human beings need to progress. Defining a solution risks creating its own form of essentialism that (like the novel’s Christianity), in its turn, might oppress as easily as its predecessor did. Thus, it is not surprising that Cambridge does not offer answers. It is, perhaps, a less pessimistic omission than it appears to be at first. Surrendering our desire for answers to the book’s clear, though inconsistent, anti-essentialism makes us more conscious as readers of the moments of gracious compassion that are part of the story, even though answers are not. Insofar as they inspire and shape the actions of individual readers, the world will be better for them. Resisting the mechanistic literary requirement that form mirror content, Phillips resists too the risks of depicting a moral destination for humanity as a whole, suggesting that a heterogeneous collection of compassionate and ethical choices on the part of human individuals is the best hope we have in a post-colonial but still essentialist world. Inspiring us with empathy, Phillips makes of his readers citizens of the world who want to contribute to that hope.

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Works Cited Boehmer, Elleke. Colonial and Postcolonial Literature. 2005. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009. Craps, Stef. “Linking Legacies of Loss: Traumatic Histories and CrossCultural Empathy in Caryl Phillips’s Higher Ground and The Nature of Blood.” Studies in the Novel 40.1-2 (2008): 191-202. MLA International Bibiography. Web. June 17, 2012. Halloran, Vivian Nun. “Race, Creole, and National Identities in Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea and Phillips’s Cambridge.” small axe. October 21, 2006. 87-104. Kristeva, Julia. “Woman Can Never Be Defined.” New French Feminisms. Ed. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron. New York: Schocken, 1981.137-41. Nathan, Amy Sue. “Personal Interview with Eleanor Brown.” Women’s Fiction Writers July 13, 2011. Web. August 3, 2012. Phillips, Caryl. “Belonging to Israel.” Color Me English: Reflections on Migration and Beloning Before and After 9/11. New York: The New Press: 2011. 185-96. — . Cambridge. New York: Random House/Vintage International, 1993. — . The Nature of Blood. New York: Random House/Vintage International, 1997. “Prof. Edwards has new book.” Wagner College: News. Web. August 3, 2012. Rabalais, Kevin. “Degrees of Damage: An Interview with Caryl Phillips.” Conversations with Caryl Phillips. Ed. Renée Schatteman. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2009. 173-83. Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Random House/Vintage, 1993. — . Orientalism. New York: Random Vintage, 1978. de Saussure, Ferdinand. Course in General Linguistics. New York: Columbia UP, 2011. Stähler, Axel. “‘Not Afraid of Ambiguity’: An Interview with Caryl Phillips.” Proceedings: Fundamentalism and Literature Conference, University of Munster, November 2006. Web. March 21, 2012.

CHAPTER TWO DECONSTRUCTING KATHERINE ANNE PORTER: “STRANGE FRUIT” IN “THE FIG TREE” PATSY J. DANIELS

In Katherine Anne Porter’s1939 short story “The Fig Tree,” we can find evidence of the oppression of both females and African Americans. This is a story of social protest, including a character representing the New Woman rather overtly, but also a protest against the Jim Crow practice of lynching, which is not so overt; however, in this story the reader can find an impulse to change toward feminism and civil rights.1 Porter’s Miranda stories generally show the repression of women in American society, and her characters demonstrate what the New Woman could be. But this particular story is a protest against lynching as well, and Porter was not alone. Other, contemporary social criticism against lynching include the song “Strange Fruit” about lynching and a novel about lynching, Strange Fruit. That both the title and the topic are still current is confirmed by a 2002 film about lynching which is called Strange Fruit as well. To locate the “strange fruit” in Porter’s short story, we must look within the story, as the New Critics recommend, but also look at practices outside the story, as Deconstructionists recommend. New Critics would have us to examine the initiation of a young girl into a greater awareness of the world around her and to interpret the journey from town to country as the journey through life. Deconstructionists would have us to examine the peripheral characters and to valorize that which is not valorized within the story. “The Fig Tree” is one of Porter’s Miranda stories, most of which are initiation stories tracing the girl Miranda’s growing awareness of the need to escape the illusions of the past. “The Fig Tree” is no exception, but the illusions of the past which Miranda needs to escape in this story include the racial privileging of white over black; the fig trees help to emphasize this situation. Considered together with the concept of entombed life as a symbol of societal decay, as in Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of

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Usher, this story foresees the need for a new order. It is possible to uncover the meaning of societal decay as entombed life and arrive at a deeper understanding of the story by looking at what critics have said about other authors and other works and by exploring the symbolism of the fig tree itself. Entombed life is symbolized by the buried chicken. Miranda buries a chicken that she thinks is dead, but she continues to hear its cries; these cries lead her to believe that she has buried a live chicken, and she has great feelings of guilt. New Critics Cleanth Brooks, R. W. B. Lewis, and Robert Penn Warren in American Literature: The Makers and the Making shed light on the chicken’s significance. According to Brooks, Lewis, and Warren, “[m]any of Poe’s characters are . . . terrified of being buried alive or in fact are buried alive. . . [terrified of] the horror of retaining consciousness in a world that is dead—of living on in thought while still tied to one’s own rotting body” (359-60). These critics say that “Poe’s almost morbid concern with being buried alive” may be seen as “an aspect of the general spiritual climate of the early nineteenth century” (768). As well, they say, Poe “probed the underlying assumptions of the new civilization developing” in his own America and foresaw some of the nightmares of twentieth-century man” (353). (One of these nightmares is the racial hierarchy and its developments in the United States, including the practice of lynching.) The chicken that Miranda buries is symbolic of death, but she is terrified that she has buried a living being—perhaps representing modern society—that would stay alive in a dead world—the past. If we borrow these New Critics’ idea that entombed life represents the decay of society, we can see the ruin of the Southern aristocracy after the Civil War. In applying to Porter’s story one concept of Deconstruction, that of paying attention to the peripheral characters in literature, the reader notes that the only black character is Old Aunt Nannie, who seems to be associated with the fig tree. Although Old Aunt Nannie, the black woman who cares for Miranda at home, is not one of the “significant omissions” that Toni Morrison points out in Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, her character is certainly peripheral. Old Aunt Nannie does not go to Cedar Grove with the family; she, too, is tied to the old order, in which black women care for white children. And Porter likens Aunt Nannie’s appearance to the dark figs in this passage: Old Aunt Nannie leaned and held out her hand. “Look, honey, I toted you some nice black figs.”

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Her face was wrinkled and black and it looked like a fig upside down with a white ruffled cap. Miranda clenched her eyes tight and shook her head. (1412)

Even though race has not previously been considered by critics to figure prominently in Katherine Anne Porter’s works, an opposition to the racist Old South appears in this passage, although very subtly.2 Katherine Anne Porter, “one of the most recognized writers of short fiction of the mid-twentieth century, was born on a dirt farm in Texas” (“Katherine”), but “invented for herself a Southern aristocratic past and early family history” (Vande Klieft 236). In “The Fig Tree,” she writes about a family of that aristocracy and the pending end of that aristocratic era. The plot of the story involves a journey from the family’s town house to their country house, but carries much more meaning than a mere jaunt, as the buried chicken and the fig tree demonstrate. While Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark helps explain the fig tree of the title, the fig tree also has other meanings. According to Tarla Fallgatter, a well known caterer, chef, and teacher of cooking, figs “connote abundance and initiation. . . . The many seeds in the fig are supposed to signify unity and the universality of true understanding, knowledge, and sometimes faith” (“More Than Just a [Fig] Leaf”). In Porter’s story, the fig trees in town produce dark figs, heavy with sweetness. Opposed to them are the fig trees in the country: they are green, not sweet. Applying Fallgatter’s symbolism, one must surmise that the two different kinds of fig trees in the story represent two different kinds of unity and true understanding. As well, the fig tree is the only thing that Jesus ever cursed in the New Testament, and that fact may be another connection between lynching and the fig tree of the story: one would expect a lynching tree to be a cursed tree. The fig trees in the story can represent the troubled times in which the story is set, the time of Jim Crow, when the South was still making a painful transition from the antebellum old traditions to the post-bellum time when new customs had to be created. Katherine Anne Porter’s “The Fig Tree” may be one of those works to which Morrison refers in Playing in the Dark, in which she writes that much literary criticism has “blocked access to remarkable insights” (10) to works of American literature which acknowledge the presence of black Americans in the story, in the society, through “significant and underscored omissions, [and] startling contradictions” (6). Figs on a tree physically resemble the dangling head of a hanged man. Therefore, while it may be “startling,” it is only a short step to say that the fig tree that Miranda leaves at home, with its dark fruit and low-hanging

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branches, could stand for the “strange fruit” of lynched black men hanging and bending the branches during Jim Crow times. Perhaps the South was, as Ruth M. Vande Kieft writes of Porter, “cloaked in its own language and reference system” and the community’s attitudes and assumptions were “encoded” (236). If so, Porter’s tree could also reflect the fig tree cursed by Jesus. It is significant that Miranda, in her growing awareness, notices the resemblance between the woman and the fruit and rejects these figs which look like Old Aunt Nannie. As well, it is difficult to ignore the strange fruit that is the subject and title of the protest song “Strange Fruit,” written by union activist Abel Meeropol under the pseudonym of Lewis Allan and first recorded by Billie Holiday in 1938. Porter had doubtless heard of the song and was perhaps inspired by it. Strange Fruit is also the title of a 1944 anti-lynching novel written by Lillian Smith, who was inspired by the song. And many others have been inspired, as David Margolick quotes in his 2001 publication Strange Fruit: The Biography of a Song: “Literally millions of Americans . . . have found the words of ‘Strange Fruit’ terribly and strangely moving” (58), and they still react this way. For example, in 2002, a film about the days of lynching, also called Strange Fruit, was created by Joel Katz. Some lines from the Lewis Allan song may explain the dark, heavy fruit that hangs from the boughs of the old trees: Southern trees bear a strange fruit Blood on the leaves and blood at the root Black body swinging in the southern breeze Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees. . . .

The blood is explained simply by the fact that most lynched men were severely beaten and tortured before being hanged, and many were mutilated, having hands or genitals hacked off before the hanging. So if life entombed represents the fall of the Southern aristocracy, Porter’s story can be seen as a study in contrasts between the old traditions of Southern life and a new social order. Some of the contrasts are: Grandmother opposed to great-Aunt Eliza; town opposed to country; chicken opposed to tree frogs; death opposed to life; the fig tree with dark, sugary fruit opposed to the fig tree with greenish fruit. There is also a journey, which in literature almost surely represents the journey of life; in this case, it represents Miranda’s move from an innocent child who carries out meaningless rituals to a child who is aware of greater possibilities. In Porter’s “Old Mortality,” another Miranda story, Miranda “already knows how far reality is from the romantic legends enshrined in the family memory” (Vande Keift 239). In “The Fig Tree,” Grandmother represents

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the old social order; she is very rigid and never allows the children to do anything at the table besides eat. She is concerned with making Miranda into the traditional Southern woman who is primarily a decorative object; for instance, she requires Miranda to dress a certain way and worries about Miranda’s getting sunburn and freckles. Great-Aunt Eliza, on the other hand, has no concern whatsoever with forming Miranda into that stereotype; she herself does not conform to it. Great-Aunt Eliza represents new knowledge, discoveries, a new way of life. She plays with her own food at the table, cutting open a raisin (another dark, wrinkled fruit) to see what’s inside it with her microscope; she sets up a telescope on the roof to search for “other worlds” (1414). And, while it is Grandmother who has taught Miranda the rituals of burying dead things, it is Great-Aunt Eliza who shows her the excitement of finding new things. Miranda is especially relieved to find out about tree frogs from Great-Aunt Eliza: not only has she discovered a creature new to her, but now she knows that she has not been responsible for burying a chicken alive. It is the cry of the tree frogs that she has mistaken for the cry of the chicken. It is the sound of new life that she has mistaken for the sound of entombed life. The house in town is where Miranda carries out the burial rituals which have no meaning to her; the Cedar Grove house is where she learns more about life. The dead chicken is in town; the new (to Miranda) form of life, the tree frogs, are in the country. Thus, death resides at home, where the journey begins (or the Old South), and life resides at Cedar Grove, where the journey ends (or the New South). The fig trees bear different fruit because they grow in different soil, different circumstances; the Cedar Grove tree bears greenish fruit that is not as sweet as the dark fruit that the town tree bears. This difference represents the notion that a new social order may not be as sweet as the old to some people—or as easy: Miranda has been able to reach the fruit in town without skinning her knees. But she has left the fig tree with the sweet, dark fruit behind her. While the journey is certainly a journey through stages of maturity for the girl, perhaps it also indicates a growing maturity for the whole South as well. Miranda moves from carrying out the meaningless rituals that her aristocratic grandmother teaches her to discovering new worlds and new life from Great-Aunt Eliza. By following Morrison’s advice and foregrounding the black character in the story, we can see the rejection of the old, as both Miranda and the South itself mature. Porter shows that the old social order of Southern aristocracy is dead and that we must not entomb ourselves in the past—that, while it may not be easy, we must search for another world.

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Notes 1

Other evidence of Porter’s social criticism can be found in her 1962 novel Ship of Fools, which presents the world as a ship with its passengers as fools representing the countries involved in the first World War; as well, her memoir, The NeverEnding Wrong, describes the famous Sacco-Vanzetti trial and her part in it, which included marching against the trial and being arrested for her protests. 2 Perhaps this 1939 story represents Porter’s growing awareness of the racial hierarchy in the United States; however, at the time it was not popular to go about writing one’s opposition into short stories. Twenty-three years later, in 1962, her novel Ship of Fools, which took almost thirty years to write, was published and presented blatant racism much more overtly. It is possible that Porter’s thinking had matured by that time, as had society’s, making the subject more acceptable in fiction. Looking at the earlier work more than seventy years after its publication, however, allows the reader a much longer view, and the racial politics of the twenty-first century allow the reader to uncover what may have been a covert opposition to the racial hierarchy of the South at the time of the story’s publication.

Works Cited Bible. King James Version. Matthew 21: 18, 19. Brooks, Cleanth, R. W. B. Lewis, and Robert Penn Warren. American Literature: The Makers and the Making. Vol. 1. New York: St. Martin’s, 1973. Fallgatter, Tarla, “More Than Just a (Fig) Leaf.” September 25, 2012 http://wwwiz.com/issue34 /html/article5.html. “Katherine Anne Porter.” Contemporary Authors Online. The Gale Group, 2000. December 14, 2012. http://www.linccweb.org. Katz, Joel. Strange Fruit. September 25, 2012. http://www.pbs. org/independentlens/strangefruit/ film.html. Margolick, David. Strange Fruit: The Biography of a Song. New York: Ecco P, 2001. Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1992. Poe, Edgar Allan. The Fall of the House of Usher. 1839. The Norton Anthology of American Literature. 4th ed. Vol. 1. Ed. Nina Baym, Wayne Franklin, Ronald Gottesman, Laurence B. Holland, David Kalstone, Arnold Krupat, Francis Murphy, Hershel Parker, William H. Pritchard, and Pratricia B. Wallace. New York: W. W. Norton, 1994. 1463-75. Porter, Katherine Anne. “The Fig Tree.” 1934. The Norton Anthology of American Literature. 4th ed. Vol. 2. Ed. Nina Baym, et al. New York: W. W. Norton, 1994. 1408-15.

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Vande Kieft, Ruth M. “The Love Ethos of Porter, Welty, and McCullers.” The Female Tradition in Southern Literature. Ed. Carol S. Manning. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1993. 235-58. Smith, Lillian. Strange Fruit. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1944.

CHAPTER THREE SHAKESPEARE’S OTHELLO: POSTMODERN PARADIGM SHIFTS AND THE AMERICAN “OTHER” EVERETT G. NEASMAN

“Things are getting better” is a statement that is safe to attribute to racism and homophobia in contemporary America. Our theater broadens the stage upon which we retell stories of oppression and deliverance, and our colleges and universities challenge our students to see within themselves the human condition. And achieving that condition means that to see beyond race and gender means to confront race and gender face to face. Conversations about twenty-first century paradigm shifts in William Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Othello, Moor of Venice move the once unavoidable topic of race to gender. Indicative of this transition is its relevance to an American landscape that, amid progress, abounds with homophobia and social abjection.1 It is the American stage that continues to present images of difference that, nonetheless, depict social consciousness. Images of Othello as social abject point to assumptions about social fear. The language of abjection, indeed, seems appropriate to a reading of Othello, and to “cast off” the Moor is in an active sense to cast off social equability for the embrace of social fears. Fear of racial heterogeneity marks the play for American audiences to reflect on centuries of social disharmony. And it is this fear that makes Othello the most American of Shakespeare’s drama.2 No other play postures the fears of its audience in one manipulative voice (Iago) or appeals to so narrow a hierarchical scope. To talk about American productions of Othello, then, is to talk about the emergence of American racial consciousness; subsequently, to talk about racism in twenty-first century America leads to discussions of sexism and homophobia. This is neither to argue that non-racial oppression is commensurate with the racism of skin color,3 nor to suggest that other oppressed segments of American society share the same corrosive history

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with black America. Nonetheless, American productions of Othello signal a paradigm shift in the way that the play represents the abjection of the “other,” whether through race or gender, as an agent of social pollution, and in the ways that dominant society reasons excretion of the “other” as human waste. A presentist’s view of the play’s conflict allows us to consider such a hypothetical situation as this: Colin Powell's son Michael marries Jenna Bush. Media may tout it as the “wedding of the year,” and it may launch a reality show (Hillman). However, racism against miscegeny in America is no longer politically correct or socially “cool” (Hillman). But consider another hypothetical situation: Othello is cast as a lesbian, and a black lesbian, to boot. In 2005, California’s Bay Area-experienced Director Melissa Hillman's vision of this situation became the Impact Theatre’s adaptation of Shakespeare's s Othello. The play was received in the true San Francisco style of opened-minded liberalism, a beacon of change and acceptance for America. Hillman’s logic suggests that if an older black lesbian general ran off with the college-aged daughter of a white conservative senator, thinks Hillman, now, we have a believable basis for public, mainstream consternation (Hillman). What happens rather than the fear of Othello’s semen-like rain that promotes miscegenous fertility, heterosexual nonetheless, is masculine fear that lesbian Othello and clitoral secretions, like toxic rain, will destroy fertility and, thereby, destroy itself in its own toxicity (Creed 111-12). The aim of this chapter is to superimpose Barbara Creed’s stereotype of the lesbian body, threatening as it is to contemporary American culture, onto the traditional portrayal of Othello’s blackness and maleness in contrast to the lesbian body as active and masculinized. Creed’s work sees the play’s representation of race and gender through Julia Kristeva’s idea of abjection and Othello and Desdemona in a subject-object relationship that “disturbs identity, system, [and] order” of both Venice and Othello’s military.4 The outcome of this approach signals a paradigm shift away from Othello as representative of American racial intolerance and toward ideas of gender acceptance and inclusion. The play’s reception by the nineteenth and twentieth century American audiences ties Othello’s motif of race to a racially and socially distinct Anglo-American culture that fears miscegenation. But for twenty-first century American audiences, the social fear of miscegenation shifts to a fear of lesbian infertility. “Awake ! What ho, Barbanzio! Thieves, thieves, thieves! Look to your horse, your daughter, your bags! Thieves, thieves!” cries Iago in the opening scene (1.1. 79-80).5 The presence of a threat that marks the first moments of the drama establishes an atmosphere of fear of theft that

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pervades the remainder of the play’s action.6 But just what does Othello steal? Of what does he cheat Venice? By possessing Desdemona, Othello deprives Venice of a valued white womb and its ability to increase the Venetian population. As social products, race and gender not only connote individual autonomy but also often undermine hegemony. Unlike Othello’s Venetian society and Shakespeare’s England that seem to predicate the study of race ideology into anachronism, the nineteenth-century American South is less ambiguous about race, and the slippery slopes of racial identity often cascade quickly into a culture of slavery.7 The popularity of Othello on the nineteenth-century American stage, especially in the American South, begins the paradigm shift away from the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century portrayals of Othello. From the Moorish, “tawny” Othellos, with curly hair, brooding brows, and hooked nose, adorned in Romanesque robes and cone-shaped caps, sporting sandals and a scimitar, more like a character out of the Arabian Nights than a Shakespearean tragedy, to an Oriental ethos that fuses Moor with Native American to an Afrocentric American, Othello emerges and takes to new levels assumptions of race, gender, culture, and the politics of exclusion (Desmet pars. 8-9). And as Charles Lower points out, Southern audiences of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries expected to see a black man of African heritage play Othello, overriding local attitudes about segregated workspaces in favor of dramatic representation (Lower 202205). Race and sex also point to a paradigm of social continuity between these forces in the play and in American society. As Celia A. Daileader points out, American production history of Shakespeare’s Othello focuses race and sex into an “Othellophilia,” an ideology that observes black sexuality as dangerous and white female sexuality as hypererotic (6, 55). A paradigm that Samuel Taylor Coleridge grounds as query, race has played a persuasive factor in the development of Shakespeare’s subSaharan African character against the backdrop of American racial homogeneity8: Can we suppose [Shakespeare] so utterly ignorant as to make a barbarous negro plead royal birth? . . . No doubt Desdemona saw Othello’s visage in his mind; yet, as we constituted, and most surely as an English audience was disposed in the beginning of the seventeenth century, it would be something monstrous to conceive this beautiful Venetian girl falling in love with a veritable negro. (qtd. in Andreas 40)

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Coleridge voices a cultural elitism that exemplifies British and (more accurately) Anglo-American assumptions about race that echo Barbanzio’s Venetian prejudices from Othello concerning Desdemona’s miscegenation: Whether a maid so tender, fair and happy, So opposite to marriage that she shunned The wealthy curled darlings of our nation, Would ever have, to incur a general mock, Run from her guardage to the sooty bosom Of such a thing as thou, to fear, not to delight. (1.2. 67-72)

Both voices beg the question of their white societies: Do you really expect us to believe that a beautiful white girl in her right mind would choose not only to marry a black man but also to have children with him? Perhaps both of these statements could be considered as social demarcations that apply equally to Coleridge’s America and to Barbanzio’s Venice. Coleridge’s “English audience” and Barbanzio’s “our nation” somewhat predicate suspensions of belief for drama’s sake. On the one hand, if theatrical Art fails to reflect reality, as Lower so boldly suggests, and “theater was separate from the affairs of the day” (216), then productions of Othello in the antebellum South equate to no more than melodrama. On the other hand, if Art reflects reality as Michal Foucault’s works show, then institutions of power (“apparatuses”) both create and direct such forces as sexuality and crime (legal racism) on stage. My point here is that society enters and exits with the theatergoers. Othello is then, in a Foucauldian sense, an insurrection in order to facilitate powers of response, a radicalism whose denouncement legitimizes Anglo-American authority and suppresses acts of “other”(ing). Although the twentieth century staging of Othello transitions from tawny makeup to black actor, American fears of miscegenation help to create an image of Othello that is uniquely American: black and broad, with a tall physique, bombastic voice, and animal magnetism. And although settings remained true to the play’s pre-Modern Venetian locale, Othello had the black skin and “thick lips” of Rodrigo’s description, but with emphasis on Othello as a sexual contaminant and genetic polluter. Othello premièred on Broadway in October 1942, with Paul Robeson playing the lead role. In an America wrestling with immigration during World War II, Robeson’s on-stage portrayal of Othello shifts from earlier 1930s European performances in which Robeson played a hunched-over, step-and-fetch Othello, more bent on submission than grandiosity. For Robeson, American Othello must be heroic in countenance, upright in stature, and representative of the importance of race (Edelstein 368). After

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four hundred Broadway performances, Robeson took Othello on American tour where he refused to play venues that practiced racial discrimination (368). During the American Civil Rights struggle of the 1960s, the black activism of Othello was thrust upon James Earl Jones. Self-proclaimed actor first, Jones explains that the public often finds catharsis in theatrical performance, and American racism is no exception. From a 1964 Obie award for his portrayal of Othello in Joseph Papp's production in Central Park, New York to the May 2009 White House Poetry Jam performance for President and First Lady Barack and Michelle Obama, Othello voices the fears and desires of American race politics. Jones’s portrayal of Othello is firm in three staples that point to a stereotyped black American identity: “an imposing physique (six feet or taller), a God-given organtoned windpipe, and an extraordinary aura of personal magnetism” (Gill 187). Lawrence Fishburne stars in Oliver Parker’s 1990 film version of Othello and is, for many postmodern American audiences, the face of the American Moor. Fishburne continues the twentieth century image of Othello with the addition of the popular cultural icon of the athletic black male body. Much of the film portrays Fishburne's black body either openshirted, shirtless, or nude. Fishburne's portrayal of Othello brings us full circle, literarily, to Richard Wright’s Bigger Thomas and to the American mega-narrative of the smothering of the seemingly innocent white woman by the archetypal black beast. Returning first to traditional Othello, it is Iago (1.1) who illuminates the General in a light reflective of American fears concerning both masculine and feminine aspects of miscegenation even before Othello enters with attendants and torches: Even now, now, very now, an old black ram Is tupping your white ewe . . . I am one, sir, that comes to tell you your daughter and the Moor are now making the beast with two backs. (1.1. 118)

Iago sees Othello and Desdemona as prospective parents. He speculates Othello’s masculine ability to procreate within acceptable social parameters and declares his blackness to be something “other” than human, something of an abjection. It is through abjection that I attempt to demonstrate Judith Butler’s general notion of bodily production (as it applies both to the male and the female) that is more sociopolitical than psychosexual. Like Butler, my concerns rest with the ways that dominant patriarchal-heteronormative social order maintains itself by “constituting zones of uninhabitability” and unintelligibility, by creating zones of abject powerlessness for its marginalized others; like Othello’s Venice, twenty-first century American

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society constitutes patriarchal-heteronormalcy and homophobia, its zone of powerlessness. I also view, within these zones of abject powerlessness, the breaking down of social boundaries within subject-object relationship.9 Although ambiguous to English audiences, the Venetian portrayal of Othello in the play as a vehicle of race mixing remains problematic for Americans. What happens to Iago’s insults when targeting black-lesbian Othello is the shift in meaning from his mocking male progeny to mocking female infertility. Barbara Creed points out stereotypes of the lesbian body that apply to portrayals of Othello’s blackness and to maleness in the lesbian body as active and masculinized. This reference to masculinity targets black-lesbian Othello as both abject and incapable of normal (Freudian) procreation. Black-lesbian Othello also allows us then to merge the abjection theories of Butler (masculine abjection) with those of Kristeva (female abject body) to surmise a dual consciousness for black-lesbian Othello, who is aware of and must take some responsibility for the selfdestructive nature of her own abjection. Of masculine lesbianism, Creed sees Freud’s fear of the active lesbian as the fear that the specific role of the maternal vagina and its passivity within American family and society will yield to “auto-eroticism, clitoral pleasure, and self-actualization” (116). That is to say, lesbian Desdemona’s vagina ceases to be a space for Othello’s male actuality as well as for maternity. That is also to say that Freudian views of homosexuality support a nurture-over-nature argument, that lesbianism is choice rather than genetics. Moving beyond a nineteenth century perspective for a twenty-first century world, and moving beyond Freud, we may look to postmodern neuroscience for alternatives. On the American stage Iago’s jokes convey an indirect sarcasm rather than a direct scatology. Reference to black-lesbian Othello as “old black ram” plays strictly against American homophobia and supports Dir. Hillman’s changes to the pronouns of Shakespeare’s script for blacklesbian Othello. So what social fears emerge once an old black ewe tups a nubile white ewe? Iago’s jests signal that Barbanzio will never be grandsire to any offspring of lesbian Othello and lesbian Desdemona. It shifts early claims of Othello’s “theft” of Desdemona to illustrate a fruitless coupling of females. Neurobiology promotes the final harvesting of a world Enlightened by science. The continuing and heavily debated issue of whether homosexuality is a choice rather than a neurobiologic entity shifts with twenty-first century Othello to support a nature (sexuality at birth) over nurture (sexuality by society) paradigm. Recent imaging, genetic, and endocrinologic evidence support the nature theory. Neuroscientific study that utilized post

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hoc volume of interest (VOI) analysis of lesbian women finds significant congruence between the hypothalamic engagement of lesbian women and heterosexual men; the lesbian women shared a hypothalamic cluster with heterosexual men, when smelling female human pheromones, estrogenlike steroid estra-1,3,5(10),16-tetraen-3-ol are candidate compounds for human pheromones (Berglund 1). The study reveals that connectivity to the subgenual cortex and the hypothalamus is similar in heterosexual women and homosexual men, and connectivity to the sensorimotor cortex and striatum is similar in homosexual women and heterosexual men. These amygdala connectivity changes and differences in hemispheric size were found to be statistically significant, confirming the sexual dimorphism in heterosexual and homosexual subjects. (Goldstein par. 5)

In layman’s terms, neurologic findings prove that the brain structure of gay men resembles straight women, and that of gay women resembles straight men. This evidence stipulates that gender specifics (i.e., sexual differentiation in the human brain), occur during fetal and neonatal development; classifications as male or female and our innate behaviors such as heterosexuality, homosexuality, and bisexuality are genetically pre-programmed (Swaab 10273). That is all simply scientific jargon for sensorial animal attraction, and it plays up Iago’s animal metaphor as “jungle fever.” Thus, from a neurological standpoint, black-lesbian Othello’s masculinity is a genetic product rather than a cultural tag. But—not so fast—to label linguistic expression as purely the product of nurture is to disregard the social realities of language development. Although we may place language acquisition for heterosexuals and homosexuals alike firmly within Chomsky’s theories of the innateness of language, adding the neurological discoveries of Broca’s Area (Paul Broca) and of Wernicke’s Area (Karl Wernicke), we must recognize that human language acquisition is influenced by experience (Kolb 326-27). And like American black and gay communities, Othello’s Venice speaks to the need of the abject other to encode and code-switch language in response to racial and homophobic signifiers. Shakespeare’s keen insight into the social inequalities of Early Modern England must have prompted him to pen Othello’s self-portrayal in such a way that it connotes a universal response to oppression. Whether black-lesbian Othello or traditional portrayals, masculinity colors Othello’s rhetorical response to claims of impropriety from Desdemona’s father. For black-lesbian Othello, Iago’s insults present a zone of racist homophobia on stage that reflects American anti-gay sentiment on three levels. First, it reduces Othello’s and Desdemona’s sexuality to animalism.

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In America, “jungle fever” continues to pervade popular culture. The term decries interracial relationships as less than human and therefore less deserving of respect. It attempts to radicalize human sexuality as bestial; that is to say, it suggests that interracial means inter-species. On a racial level, Iago echoes a society that, for Kristeva, refers to the primitive effort to separate ourselves from the animal: "by way of abjection, primitive societies have marked out a precise area of their culture in order to remove it from the threatening world of animals or animalism, which were imagined as representatives of sex and murder" (Kristeva, Powers 12-13). Othello’s blackness benefits “primitive” Venice in social spaces marked for violence, not procreation. As mercenary general, she maintains an abject status in Venetian society. As long as she stays in military circles and keeps sex and murder on the field of battle, her blackness and lesbianism are not threats. On a sexual level, Iago’s comments point to the couple’s psychosexual development, marking the moment when blacklesbian Othello and Desdemona will separate themselves from the maternal. This moment soon follows, and Othello says, “The purchase made, the fruits are to ensue/That profit's yet to come ’tween me and you” (2.3.9-10). Marital consummation by way of lesbian sex negates the possibility of conception and places black-lesbian Othello’s concepts of “fruits” and “profit” firmly in the realm of sexual pleasure for pleasure’s sake. Iago’s ram-ewe metaphor makes clear Kristeva’s boundary between black-lesbian Othello and Desdemona as “other,” and between themselves as fruitful “[m]other[s].” The second level of American anti-gay sentiment stems from Iago’s insult, “Even now, now, very now, an old black ram/Is tupping your white ewe,” slurring Othello as abject of humanity, equating her race and sexuality with sub-human species reminiscent of black Americans as chattel. As lesbians, they are black ewe, white ewe, not husband and wife. Here we see evidence of Kristeva’s ambiguity of identity, and that the dissolution of subject-object relationship applies to Othello and Desdemona, respectively. Iago’s racism discounts the “symbolic order” of marriage by first discounting their humanity. Iago’s animalism reduces Othello and Desdemona to sheep, non-human entities. According to Kristeva, “The abject [Othello] would thus be the ‘object’ of primal repression,” and as the “abject, [she] confronts us with those fragile states where human being strays on the territories of the animal” (Powers 12). As social abject, Othello perceives boundaries between herself, as masculine subject, and Desdemona, as feminine object, perceptions that further dissolve once Iago’s use of animalism forces Othello into an archaic zone of jealous rage. Sexually, the lesbian relationship between Othello and Desdemona

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presents their characters as object and object, a dual abjection that, for Kristeva, reflects jouissance.10 Sandra Gilbert writes for women "to escape hierarchical bonds and thereby come closer to what Hélène Cixous calls jouissance, which can be defined as a virtually metaphysical fulfillment of desire (by/for women) that goes far beyond [mere] satisfaction . . . [It is a] fusion of the erotic, the mystical, and the political” (qtd. in Cixous xvii). Jouissance implies a sense of empowerment of right and of property that, for women, has sexual, political, and economic overtones (165). Racially, and from a Kristevian view, Iago suggests that the propensity for Othello’s rage is a predisposition of her race, an archaic component of psychosexuality. That is to say, Othello is “a natural born killer”—a murderer exists within her prior to Iago’s manipulation. Of Othello’s identity, black and lesbian, there already exists the tendency to commit murder. And third, American anti-gay sentiment rests in Iago’s intent that infuses Othello’s persona with Kristevian narcissism, suggesting the Moor’s preference to autoerotica over motherhood. “Like masturbation,” reasons Creed, “lesbianism was seen as inextricably linked to self-absorption and narcissism” (121). To first view black-lesbian Othello as narcissist, we must accept Othello and Desdemona as ample object[s], mirror images that suggest no phallocentric progression, only “regression” and “circularity” (121). Iago gives a visual image of lesbian sex, one of “making the beast with two backs,” that positions him as Kristeva’s voyeuristic subject. This view focuses the dramatic notion that, by both Early Modern and postmodern standards, Othello loves Desdemona: thus, love becomes a system of reciprocity, sexual give-and-take between women that excludes men and sees male authority as intrusive and voyeuristic. Kristeva reasons that “Love is a flight of metaphors” (Tales 1). Lechte and Margaroni read in this notion, love as imagery, both with the capacity to falter (67). The tragedy of the play is that Othello drowns in a cascade of false images (Kristeva, Tales 375). Iago’s metaphor begins the projection of false images about love that ties his meaning to old (American) moral codes of race and sex that have either disappeared, or have been transformed. Act one, scene three depicts Othello’s defense of her elopement. Othello’s self-aggrandizing masculine boasts work for black-lesbian Othello. It has always concerned me that, first, Othello claims, “Rude am I in my speech/And little bless'd with the soft phrase of peace,” and then delivers “a round unvarnish'd tale” in such eloquent discourse (1.3. 81, 90). We hear the braggart soldier, Capitano of Commedia del arte, speak in Othello’s place.11 Rather than a proclamation of her love for Desdemona, Othello launches into a tale of her exploits, “Of moving accidents by flood

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and field/Of being taken by the insolent foe/And sold to slavery, of my redemption thence” (1.3. 134, 136, 137). Her boasts end with Desdemona’s approval of her military career: “She loved me for the dangers I had pass'd/And I loved her that she did pity them (1.3. 166-67). But, like the masked stock character, Othello’s boasts veil an aspect of inner ineptitude. For it is not Othello’s rudeness in speech that she attempts to hide, but her rudeness in love. Moreover, when these lines are spoken by actor Skyler Cooper, Hillman’s lesbian Othello, black, butch, and ex-military, with the physical and mental military gravitas required, homophobia, American style, sees her lesbian body as masculinized feminine exterior that shrouds masculinity; lesbian Othello is no more than a man trapped in a woman’s body. Creed cites Freud’s false supposition that lesbian sexual pleasure finds its root in penile emulation by the clitoris; thus, childish clitoral stimulation substitutes for maternal vaginal functionality (116-17). Freud links vaginal practices to passive positions for women within family and society. It would be just as easy to read in Othello’s mercenary service an attempt to assimilate into Venetian society as it would be to see Hillman’s Othello vie for acceptance in an American homophobic society. It would also be easy to view Othello’s marriage to Desdemona as the achievement of Eurocentricity, the debut of Othello’s bloodline into the annals of Venetian genetics. Also effortless is the notion to tag black-lesbian Othello as a crisis of identity, Cooper’s portrayal of a lesbian Othello as clitoral rather than phallic. However, to misread Shakespeare’s Othello as white male trapped in black male body is to misread Hillman’s Othello as straight male trapped in a woman’s body. The human complexities of love amount to more than merely cases of Freudian male-speak and penis envy. In placing Othello’s speech in rhetorical context, it does less to defend her love for Desdemona than it seeks to counter the notion that their very marriage constitutes an unnatural coupling, that miscegenous or homosexual unions are somehow abnormal. My students find it interesting that, like Barbanzio, many of today’s parents may attribute homosexual and biracial relationships to the influence of drugs. Barbanzio asks, “what drugs, what charms, what conjuration and what mighty magic” did Othello slip Desdemona to secure her love? He argues that their marriage “errs against all rules of nature” (1.3. 100-101). Students are flabbergasted that Barbanzio thinks that the only way for Othello, a black man, to win the love of Desdemona is get her high on drugs. The imagery of forced drugging in the play supports its paradigm shift away from race and toward sex, for how else would a healthy heterosexual white Desdemona fall for a blacklesbian had the latter not introduced her into a seedy under-culture of drugs and illusions?

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Black-lesbian Othello, as both abject subject and object, discovers that she casts a social shadow of abjection early in the play. What concerns me most here is her vain attempt to self-actualize in the face of Iago’s coercion. After first being “cast off” by Venetian society and then by her wife of late, Othello attempts to acknowledge her own culpability in her abject state: “Her [Desdemona’s] name was as fresh /As Dian’s visage, is now begrim’d and black/As my own face” (3.3. 269-70). Janet Adelman reads in these lines “Othello’s ‘discovering’ that [her] blackness is a stain—a stain specifically associated with her sexuality—and ‘discovering’ that stain on Desdemona are virtually simultaneous for [her]. Hence the metaphoric transformation of Dian’s visage into [her] own begrimed face” (126). We see in Adelman’s analysis Kristeva’s idea of the abject as a contaminant, as a defiler of the object. The paradox is that Othello, as both abject and object, threatens her own integrity with the prospect of a psychotic disillusion: “I would rather die than do or be that” (Butler 243).12 A philosophy that foreshadows Othello’s suicide, she succumbs to the reality that her blackness and lesbianism choke Desdemona, not because they are feminine but because their abjection from society internalizes paternal toxins of misidentity. We see that the General is her own contaminating agent. Othello’s response to eloping with the senator’s daughter and the public outcry that follows amounts to what Kristeva describes as a “depressed sexuality,” a woman’s inability to abject the maternal body with which she also identifies as woman (Black Sun 28). That is to say, paradoxically, that black-lesbian Othello is both the thing she desires and the thing that she repulses, and Desdemona is the mirror object. It is the mirroring image of Othello and Desdemona as object[s] that is illustrative of Kristeva’s idea that we first experience abjection at the point of separation from the mother. And it is Othello’s handkerchief that gives semiotic meaning to the attempt to re-possess the maternal. Two accounts of the handkerchief occur in Othello: in the first description, Othello cautions Desdemona that it is a charm with “magic in the web,” given to her mother by an Egyptian clairvoyant; in the second she tells Gratiano that it was “an antique token/My father gave my mother” (5.2. 223). Contrary to current opinion, I read conviction in both accounts.13 The first account of the handkerchief occurs in dialogue between lesbian lovers. It symbolizes the abject within our personal archeology, with our earliest attempts to release the hold of the maternal entity even before existing outside of her, thanks to the autonomy of language (Kristeva, Power 13). For black-lesbian Othello, the handkerchief is more than merely an outward symbol of her inner love for Desdemona. It also

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exists as a signifier of the journey to recapture the maternal, to that which gives both women their own existence or state of being (1). But Butler cautions that [t]he postulation of the primacy of the maternal body in the genesis of signification is clearly questionable, for it cannot be shown that a differentiation from such a body is that which primarily or exclusively inaugurates the relation to speech. The maternal body prior to the formation of the subject is always and only known by a subject who by definition postdates that hypothetical scene. (71)

The problem for Butler and for black-lesbian Othello is that theoretical language (in Othello’s case, the language of matrimony) previously shortcircuits the very overcoming of the paternal that it seeks to document. Thus, the handkerchief symbolizes the purification of the abject. By uniting the powers of the mother, the feminine mystic, and her own maternal identity, black-lesbian Othello infuses the garment with her own magical powers to absolve her own abjection. Nonetheless, Desdemona’s physical loss of the handkerchief stands for the philosophical loss of the maternal. That is to say, the handkerchief loses its maternal “magic” once it assumes the discourse of marriage. Its physical loss is merely symbolic. The second account of the handkerchief occurs in dialogue between military comrades. Othello’s account of the handkerchief shifts with rhetorical significance of the situation. Her rhetorical change signals the loss-quest for the maternal and the embrace of the paternal through what Kristeva sees as the woman’s reentry into the symbolic realm, or law of the father. This reading explains Othello’s augment of the handkerchief story when defending her murder of Desdemona. Kristeva’s caution applies equally to the exclusivity of the father: In such close combat, the symbolic light that a third party, eventually the father, can contribute helps the future subject, the more so if it happens to be endowed with a robust supply of drive energy, in pursuing a reluctant struggle against what, having been the mother, will turn into an abject. Repelling, rejecting; repelling itself, rejecting itself. Ab-jecting. (Powers 13)

However, in the case where recapture of the maternal is futile and the decontamination of the lesbian self impossible, there is no mortal future for the abject. Black-lesbian Othello is Shakespeare’s tragedy, and she must die. Although Othello gone lesbian may prove problematic for political or religious socializationalists, on the American stage, it proves most telling

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of Othello’s affront. As critics such as Michael Bristol have demonstrated, the play exudes an overt fascination with inclusion and exclusion, with the notion that the abjection of women, like Jews and blacks, remains an enduring aspect of contemporary society (140). And if the work of twentieth century scholars confirms that discussions of Early Modern English race and gender remain troublesome, twenty-first century American paradigm shifts synergize the tropes of fear and gender to establish Othello as a discourse on human difference. What was once a fear of the black penis, with its miscegenistic ability, now becomes a fear of the pink vagina, with its lesbian threat to Anglo-American progeny. Or as Lynne Segal puts it, “the human clitoris, physiological site of female orgasm and without reproductive purpose, undermines all attempts to link sexual pleasure to reproductive outcome” (105); that is to say that lesbian Othello shifts American social fears from miscegenation to infertility. This Freudian perspective of a lesbian identity based solely on patriarchal constructs, outdated conjecture nonetheless, continues the psychoanalysis of literary topics. My concerns rest more so with black-lesbian Othello as a tragedy of the human abject rather than as a vehicle of negative sexuality. But not to address American production history of the play that reflect a nation of negative sexual attitudes would be to turn blind eyes to the play’s negative aspects of race. When Shakespeare wrote Othello, he must have entertained the same query that has plagued me for years: Why are people so concerned with whom other people choose to share sexual intimacy? Joyce Green MacDonald argues that “Othello has retained its power to reach audiences precisely because it uncannily seems to play out what they think they already know, what they have been taught, about race and sex” (qtd. in Daileader 46). Add lesbian to MacDonald’s perceived complexities of the black body in America, and Othello effortlessly shifts from racism to homophobia. Iago continues to speak for nineteenth, twentieth, and twentyfirst century segregationalists in the audience for whom the word “Moor” reverberates as “nigger,” and “dyke.” Thus the play becomes the rhetorical bridge for American discourse on tolerance, an indication that things are getting better.

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Notes 1

See Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (New York: Routledge 1993): “‘Abjection’ (in latin, ab-jicere) presupposes and produces a domain of agency from which it is differentiated. Here the casting away resonates with the psychoanalytic notion of Verwerfung, implying a foreclosure which founds the subject and which, accordingly, establishes that foundation as tenuous. Whereas the psychoanalytic notion of Verwerfung, translated as ’foreclosure,’ produces sociality through repudiation of a primary signifier which produces as unconscious or, in Lacan’s theory, the register of the real, the notion of abjection designates a degraded or cast out status within the terms of sociality” (243). 2 Holbein, Woodrow, “Shakespeare in Charleston,” Shakespeare in the South, ed. Phillip C. Kolin (Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1983): “From 1800 to 1860, Charleston theaters performed Othello more than any other play except Hamlet. And smaller venues like Macon, Mobile, Natchez, and New Orleans saw Othello’s character change from the traditional tawny skinned Moor of the English stage to represent the Afrocentric image of the African American” (98-102). 3 As text, Othello insists on the visible difference of race, perhaps because, unlike sexuality, gender, and religion, race cannot be hidden or changed. Proverbially, Othello’s blackness precedes ability to self-identify verbally. For a discussion of the politics of skin color among African Americans, see Kathy Russell, Midge Wilson, and Ronald Hall, The Color Complex: The Politics of Skin Color Among African Americans, (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992). For a discussion of the significance of the visible difference of race in Early Modern England, see Kim Hall, “Reading What Isn’t There: ‘Black’ Studies in Early Modern England,” Stanford Review 3 (1993): 23-33. 4 See Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, Trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia UP, 1982). Kristeva argues that the “abject” “is radically excluded and draws me toward the place where meaning collapses“ (2). She associates the “abject” with “what is jettisoned from the ‘symbolic system’ [. . .] which escapes that social rationality, that logical order on which a social aggregate is based” (65). Therefore, the abject for Kristeva, and for Butler, always relates to the oblique boundaries of the human body, “polluting objects” that always relate to corporal orifices as to so many landmarks parceling-constituting the body’s territory (71): semen, clitoral secretion, blood, saliva, tears, etc. 5 Quotations follow The Norton Shakespeare 2nd edition, Ed. Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, and Katherine Eisaman Maus (New York: W. W. Norton 2008). 6 Race is a laden term; many argue on the one hand that the word race established its current meaning only as it was codified in support of the economic institution of slavery and that the link between race and skin color is a contemporary obsession. For race as an anachronism and as a geographic construct rather than visual signifier, see John Giles, Shakespeare and the Geography of Difference (Cambridge: Cambridge UP 1994), 25; see also George Boulukos, The Grateful Slave: The Emergence of Race in Eighteenth-Century British and American

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Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2008). On the other hand, for discussions of race as a social category in Early Modern England, see Lynda E. Boose, “‘The Getting of a Lawful Race’: Racial Discourse in Early Modern England and the Unrepresentable Black Woman” in Woman, Race, and Writing in the Early Modern Period, Ed. Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker (London: Routledge, 1994), 35-54. Shakespeare appears to be well aware of racial tension in England; see S.E. Ogude, “Literature and Racism: The Example of Othello,” Othello: New Essays by Black Writers, ed. Mythili Kaul (Washington: Howard UP, 1997), 15166, and this account: “Othello expresses as well as confirms the prejudices behind Elizabeth’s decree banishing ‘negars’ from England in 1601” (164). 7 On the slipperiness of race, see Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “Editor’s Introduction: Writing, ‘Race,’ and the Difference it Makes,” “Race,” Writing, and Difference (Chicago 1985), 1-20. 8 James Andreas, “Othello’s African American Progeny,” South Atlantic Review 57.4 (1992): 39-57, and “Signifyin’ on The Tempest in Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day,” Shakespeare and Appropriation, ed. Desmet and Sawyer (Routledge 1999) 103-18. Andreas has traced many portrayals of Shakespeare’s African character (Othello), particularly in America, that reflect Coleridge’s racist viewpoints. 9 See Calvin Thomas, “Introduction,” Masculinity, Psychoanalysis, Straight Queer Theory: Essays on Abjection in Literature, Mass Culture, and Film, on the Line. (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1996), 245. 10 See Sandra Gilbert, “Introduction,” The Newly Born Woman, Hélène Cixous and Catherine Clement. Trans. Betsy Wing. Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 1986. In her introduction to Cixous' The Newly Born Woman, Sandra Gilbert writes that, for women, “to escape hierarchical bonds and thereby come closer to what Cixous calls jouissance, which can be defined as a virtually metaphysical fulfillment of desire that goes far beyond [mere] satisfaction... [It is a] fusion of the erotic, the mystical, and the political.” 11 See Michael Bristol, “Charivari and the Comedy of Abjection in Othello,” Renaissance Drama NS 21 (1990), Rpt. Norton Critical Edition of Othello, ed. Edward Pechter (New York: Norton, 2004), p. 352, and Russ McDonald, “Othello, Thorello, and the Problem of the Foolish Hero,” Shakespeare Quarterly 30.1 (1979): 59. 12 In Act 3 scene 3, Othello expresses his death wish as an animalistic transformation into a toad to escape an adulterous Desdemona. 13 Michael C. Andrews, “Honest Othello: The Handkerchief Once More,” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 13.2, Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama (Spring 1973): 273-84. He argues that the handkerchief speech seems an analogous instance. “How are we to know that Othello is fictionalizing? For whether one says that Othello is speaking symbolically and is really ‘asking Desdemona to restore to him the sacredness of love,’ or simply trying ‘to cover up the real reason for his disproportionate passion over such a trifle,’ the lines are designed, in [T.S.] Eliot's phrase, to take us in” (276).

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Works Cited Adelman, Janet. “Iago’s Alter Ego: Race as Projection in Othello. Shakespeare Quarterly 48.2 (1997): 125-44. JSTOR. Web. 16 Oct. 2012. Andreas, James. “Othello’s African American Progeny.” South Atlantic Review 57.4 (1992): 39-57. Berglund, Hans, Per Lindström, and Ivanka Savic Per Lindström. “Brain Response to Putative Pheromones in Lesbian Women.” PNAS 103.21 (2006): 8269-74. Bristol, Michael D. Big-time Shakespeare. London: Routledge, 1996. Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex." New York: Routledge, 1993. Cixous, Hélène, and Catherine Clement. The Newly Born Woman. Trans. Betsy Wing. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1986. Creed, Barbara. “Lesbian Bodies: Tribades, Tomboys and Tarts.” Feminist Theory and the Body: A Reader. Ed. Janet Price and Margrit Shildrick, New York: Routledge, 1999. 111-12. Daileader, Celia R. Racism, Misogyny, and the Othello Myth. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005. Desmet, Christy. “Confessions Or, the Blind Heart: An Antebellum Othello.” (n.d.): n. pag. Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation. Web. 16 Oct. 2012. http://bandl.english.uga.edu/cocoon/borrowers/ previous_issue. Edelstein, Tilden G. “Othello in America: The Drama of Racial Intermarriage.” Interracialism: Black-White Intermarriage in American History, Literature. Ed. Werner Sollors. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000. Gill, Glenda E. No Surrender! No Retreat!: African-American Pioneer Performers of Twentieth-Century American Theater. New York: St. Martin’s, 2000. Goldstein, Jerome. “Neurobiology and Sexual Orientation.” Clinical Psychiatry News: Digital News 2009, Jan. 2009. Web. 16 Oct. 2012. http://www.clinicalpsychiatrynews.com. Greenblatt, Stephen, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, Katharine Eisaman Maus, and Andrew Gurr. “William Shakespeare.” The Norton Shakespeare: Essential Plays, the Sonnets. New York: W. W. Norton, 2009. Hillman, Melissa. From electronic interview. “Re: Othello.” Message to the director. 13 Oct. 2012. E-mail to author. Kolb, Brian, and Ian Q. Whishaw. An Introduction to Brain and Behavior, 2nd ed. New York: Worth, 2004: 326-27.

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Kristeva, Julia. Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia. New York: Columbia UP, 1989. —. Tales of Love. Trans. L. S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1987. —. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1982. Lechte, John, and Maria Margaroni. Julia Kristeva: Live Theory. London: Continuum, 2005. Lower, Charles. “Othello on Southern Stages: Then and Now.” Shakespeare in the South. Ed. Phillip C. Kolin. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1983. Price, Janet, and Margrit Shildrick. Feminist Theory and the Body: A Reader. New York: Routledge, 1999. Segal, Lynn. “Body Matters: Cultural Inscriptions.” Feminist Theory and the Body: A Reader. Ed. Janet Price and Margrit Shildrick. New York: Routledge, 1999. 105. Swaab, Dick F. “Sexual Orientation and Its Basis in Brain Structure and Function.” PNAS 105.30 (2012): 10273-74.

CHAPTER FOUR THE WALLS ARE CRUMBLING DOWN: HOUSES AS DEATH METAPHORS IN VIRGINIA WOOLF’S ORLANDO AND TO THE LIGHTHOUSE EMILY CLARK

In literature death is often an assumed and exciting component of the plot; in many texts such as Dracula and Frankenstein it completely consumes the narrative as a foreboding character lurking in the background. For women in these novels death offers them a vehicle for escape, rebellion, and, in many cases, serves as a precursor to renewal. However, while certain demise looms for these characters, it is often the forgotten setting of structures and homes in the novels which tell us more (and more quietly) what is truly happening. As Rebecca Sinclair and Mark Taylor point out in “Vivid Spaces: The Settings of Virginia Woolf and Edith Wharton,” many of Woolf’s titles allude to the importance of architecture and interior spaces in her works (Jacob’s Room, A Haunted House, The Mark on the Wall) (3). However, although the structures in these works have often been discussed as important places of refuge, creation, or discovery, they have rarely been viewed as mimetic reflections of the destructive nature of the female characters. Additionally, the death of major characters and deterioration of the places in which they reside denotes a deconstruction of the narrative itself. In Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927) and Orlando (1928) the decomposition and rejuvenation of the beach house in the Hebrides and Orlando’s country estate mirror the death and renewal of the Ramsey family and Orlando. This constant cycling between endings and beginnings (and Woolf’s experimentation with narrative forms) deconstructs the modernist novel into postmodern disarray where death and life become indistinguishable.

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To the Lighthouse presents readers with a dichotomy of female characters struggling to determine their identity in relation to Mrs. Ramsey. Her death and the abandonment of the house signal the boundary between the Victorian angel in the house and the modernist New Woman. However, the boundary between old and new, life and death becomes blurred when characters like Cam and the house itself retain vestiges of the past in their “new” forms. The two concepts of death and rebirth become inextricably interwoven in a relationship which both questions and condemns any solid definition of femininity. Woolf continues this pattern in Orlando where the condition of Orlando’s estate not only reflects the tone of each historical period but also the state of gender stereotypes and roles. During this linear yet cyclical narrative, Orlando seeks comfort in the familial crypt located in the house; (s)he finds solace and renewal in the presence of the deceased upon which the house is literally and figuratively based. Orlando’s visits to the crypt serve as interludes in the recurrence of the themes of gender, time, history, and literature. Thus, the death of an age is reflected in a temporary death of the house and a particular period in Orlando’s history. The condition of a structure and of characters, particularly feminized characters, is important because the reader views the protagonists against the background of place. That place, or space, not only comprises homes and rooms but also the narrative structure and the form in which the author positions the characters. Virginia Woolf writes death not as a finality, but as a stage which leads to old things made new. Woolf’s To the Lighthouse is her elegy to her parents as well as the catharsis which bridges her earlier, more traditional, texts with her later experimental ones. This transition lies in “Time Passes,” where Woolf connects past and present, life and death, and angels and proto-feminists; it is her ultimate liminal space. The fact that she chooses the disintegrating house to represent complex social, ideological, and narratological change is, like many things in To the Lighthouse, based on her childhood. Woolf observes in her Diary that the Stephens’ bedroom walls in Hyde Park Gate “must be soaked, if walls take pictures and board up what is done and said with all that was most intense, of all that makes the most private being, of family life. In that bed four children were begotten; there they were born; there first mother dies; then father died, with a picture of mother hanging in front of him” (Selboe 286). Her encapsulation of birth, life, and death in her parents’ bedroom is easily transferred to the larger house in “Time Passes.” However, in the novel Woolf represents much more than the inevitable cycle of life in an interrogation of the interior and exterior perspectives of Mrs. Ramsey (as often signified by the house).1 It is almost

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as if Woolf’s representation of the fluidity of life into death and back again in her fiction, which culminates in her experimental style, must begin with the sense of upheaval and disorder of her childhood. At the opening of “Time Passes,” the characters are enshrouded in literal and figurative darkness, waiting “for the future to show” (Woolf 125). At this point they cannot see what will happen and are caught in the space between past and future. The present, full of war and death, provides them with no solace and certainly no answers or signposts. The house, once filled with young women measuring themselves against an iconic Victorian matriarch, lies empty and silent. Lily and Cam, now absent from the house, are the only female figures left after the deaths of Mrs. Ramsey and most of her female inheritors. As uncertainty envelops every aspect of the novel, Woolf transfers the narration to the mimetic house which, like Mrs. Ramsey, cannot withstand the fragmentation of Victorian society. Like Minta’s brooch, bits of Mrs. Ramsey’s world fall away during the bleak oblivion on the Isle of Skye after her death. As readers, we wait and observe as “a downpouring of immense darkness began. Nothing, it seemed, could survive the flood, the profusion of darkness [. . .] there was scarcely anything left of body or mind by which one could say, ‘This is he’ or ‘This is she’” (Woolf 126). Woolf now instantly moves away from the permanency of “The Window,” which relies heavily on creation, tradition, and stability, to the almost complete annihilation and communal loss of “Time Passes.” Mrs. Ramsey’s abrupt death “kills the angel in the house” but, in order to destroy the familial structure upon which her legacy depends, Woolf must also demolish the “space the angel inhabits” (Pringle 306). In doing so, Woolf reveals the fragile scaffolding undergirding the Ramsey’s relationship and Mrs. Ramsey’s identity. By methodically dismantling and then rebuilding the house, Woolf introduces the discourse of death and renewal that redefines Cam’s and Lily’s views of themselves and Mrs. Ramsey. The Ramseys and the architectural manifestation of their beliefs, dependent upon the absoluteness of gender roles with no room for variance, simply cannot survive untouched.2 Woolf’s partial disassembly of the house marks a shift in the narrative toward a resistance of the defined boundaries previously established in “The Window.” The remnants of the home must now move toward redemption through an undetermined reimagining: So some random light directing them with its pale footfall upon stair and mat, from some uncovered star, or wandering ship, or the Lighthouse even, the little airs mounted the staircase and nosed around bedroom doors. But

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Chapter Four here surely, they must cease. Whatever else may perish and disappear, what lies here is steadfast. (Woolf 126)

Even as Woolf begins to chronicle nature’s destruction of the house, she reminds us that something must survive, although neither the characters nor the house itself arrives at this conclusion neatly or easily.3 The “divine goodness [which] covers his treasures in a drench of hail, and so breaks them, so confuses them that it seems impossible that their calm should ever return” leaves the house and the narrative in a state of discontinuity (Woolf 128). Here, finally, Mrs. Ramsey’s shawl drops from the pig’s skull as if the last vestige of her maternal power has been loosened. The house, Mrs. Ramsey’s great “mother home,” has now been relegated to the margins and forgotten by all but the Lighthouse beam. The following period of rejuvenation which concludes the “Time Passes” section is nostalgic, both in form and content. Woolf reintroduces the Ramseys through Mrs. McNab’s voice and memories of country life, reinvigorating both the house she is cleaning and the central narrative. However, neither the house nor the narrative truly exists in the same form in which it began. Pre-war society, the high-modern narrative, Mrs. Ramsey’s legacy, and the house have now been cleaned up after massive decomposition and refurbishment: “then indeed peace had come” (Woolf 142). As Lily Briscoe awakes for the first time in the re-created house at end of “Time Passes,” Woolf introduces us to a refreshed world. This “new” space, however, has not forgotten the world of “The Window” but rather redeemed it just as the narrative will be redeemed by a new feminist and postmodern discourse.4 In “The Lighthouse” Woolf increasingly moves toward a postmodern rhetoric where aspects of the novel fold back on one another. Lily’s and Cam’s exterior view which conflates the domestic interior of the house with Mrs. Ramsey’s lingering presence creates a sense of flux where life and death and past and present coalesce.5 While she maintains the interior monologue of high modernism, Woolf creates a sense of disorientation and fragmentation in “Time Passes” which increases throughout “The Lighthouse.” Emptied of the excessively rigid gender roles and their detritus which littered the Ramseys’ lives, Woolf extends the fractured narrative continuum which she begins with the death of Mrs. Ramsey. The indeterminacy of Cam’s future and the abstract nature of Lily’s rendering of Mrs. Ramsey are reflected in Cam’s movement beyond and away from the Isle of Skye and Lily’s blurred position on the lawn. Woolf invokes the tone of a place almost there but not quite; the odd unfamiliarity of the known spaces of the island and house obscure the past and force Cam, Lily, and the reader to redefine truth, reality, and themselves.6

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At the close of the novel, both Cam and Lily successfully free themselves from any definition of womanhood or femininity which depends upon maternity, passivity, or conformity. However, although the characters are no longer restrained by conventional gender roles, Woolf fails to provide them or readers with any replacement. Rather, she leaves them, particularly Cam, dependent upon time for an answer which no longer exists in a singular form. It seems as if Woolf foresaw and articulated through fiction Michel Foucault’s future observation that: For a long time it was thought that language had mastery over time, that it acted both as the future bond of the promise and as memory and narrative; it was thought to be prophecy and history . . . . In fact, it is only a formless rumbling, a streaming; its power resides in its dissimulation. That is why it is one with the erosion of time; it is depthless forgetting and the transparent emptiness of waiting. (55)

Foucault’s indictment of language’s ability to transcend time becomes clear in the conclusion of To the Lighthouse and is indicative of Woolf’s conscious relinquishment of authorial control. Beginning with To the Lighthouse, Woolf explores the possibility that life and death and the boundaries which separate past, present, and future are infinitely permeable, that to signify the human experience in new ways one must move easily between the two. In doing so, she creates a kind of existential no-man’s land (or no-woman’s land) using time where anything or nothing can happen.7 In Orlando, Woolf broadens the themes of possibility and continuity which conclude To the Lighthouse, moving from proto-postmodernism to experimentalism.8 Death is both non-existent and omnipresent for Orlando, beginning with the legacy of his colonizing forefathers who, long dead, provide the figurative and literal foundation for Orlando’s life. Orlando’s adjustment to new “ages” and the house itself easily reflect the deaths and rebirths of Orlando’s selves, thus keeping the narrative intact over four hundred years. On the opening page of Orlando, he swings at a head, which his “father, or perhaps his grandfather, had struck [. . .] from the shoulders of a vast pagan who had started up under the moon in the barbarian fields of Africa” (Woolf 13). From the outset, it is clear that Orlando’s family is part of the monolithic British Empire, history and masculinity writ large over the world. However, Woolf brings that sweeping historical moment back to the smaller space of the house, where “now it swung, gently, perpetually, in the breeze which never ceased blowing through the attic rooms of the gigantic house” (13). The death of the nameless “barbarian”

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and thousands of other deaths during Empire, as well as the bones of Orlando’s forefathers, form the pivotal foundation of the house. Thus, death introduces the present, past, and future in a narrative “plot that complicates our conventional understanding of beginnings, middles, and ends” (Olin-Hitt 493). In her introduction of the adolescent Orlando, Woolf immediately reveals the lingering residue of death which supports and ornaments the house, including the “yellow body of a heraldic leopard” which he stands upon in the attic (Woolf 14). Ironically, the first time Orlando confronts death and masculine social codes he is not only away from his home, but immersed in a surreal version of pastoral England. During the “Great Frost,” halcyon corpses surround Orlando as he pursues an already absent Other (Sasha) who prefers callow shipmen to effete aristocrats. This early event in Orlando’s life introduces with some complexity the interconnected themes of death, rebirth, and space which repeat themselves throughout the text. He now resides in London at the frozen Court of King James in a state of continual transition, surrounded by death which the cold, inert ice signifies. Unlike Orlando’s estate, the royal tent is enormously public, covered only by a pagoda and cordoned off from the masses on the carnivalesque river by a silken rope. Despite the King’s attempts to impose the monarchy on the natural world, none of them, much less Orlando, can escape the half-dead which inhabit the countryside. Figures such as “the old bumboat woman, who was carrying her fruit to market on the Surrey side [. . .] in her plaids and farthingales with her lap full of apples, for all the world as if she were about to serve a customer” are the dead among the living (Woolf 36). Here Orlando first experiences the power of the interstices between life and death where everything is in constant flux. The liminal villagers, now frozen in “suspended animation,” decorate the frosty environment where Orlando discovers Sasha, an enigmatic and androgynous “muscovite.” Her beguiling Eastern European exoticism draws Orlando to Sasha but, like the frost, their relationship is temporary and will die with the thaw. This is foreshadowed when, after making love on the ice, Orlando can only cry “‘all ends in death,’” and the biographer reminds the reader that Sasha hails from a brutal culture and landscape where much, even a sentence, is left unfinished and dead (Woolf 46). The crackling shift of the river signals the displacement of all that has remained static: the winter, the monarchy, the frozen dead, and their tryst. Once the deaths of the villagers, muffled and paused in the ice, become real and the bodies float to sea, Orlando realizes that his performance of masculinity has failed entirely, causing him to lose his position at court, his Irish fiancée, and Sasha. His inability to maintain the identity which he

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has created as a nobleman, a lover, and a poet results in “the old suspicions subterraneously at work in him rush[ing] forth from concealment openly” (61). Here, for the first time, Woolf reveals the flexibility with which Orlando constructs his identity according to the social codes dictated by class and historical moment. Disgraced and heartbroken, Orlando flees to his estate and “dies” in his ancestral bed in order to escape the public world from which he is now marginalized.9 His weeklong sleep elicits a number of existential questions regarding human death from the biographer-narrator such as: “has the finger of death to be laid on the tumult of life from time to time lest it rend us asunder? Are we so made that we have to take death in small doses daily or we could not go on with the business of living?” (Woolf 68). While these questions seemingly remain unanswered, the effects of the Great Frost, which quiets all of Europe, and Orlando’s sleep illustrate the way in which cessation makes transformation possible. However, his metamorphosis here (and future ones as well) does not singularly rely on attaining an unconscious state; Orlando must regularly return to his ancestral home and seek the origin of his static metaphysical identity as a function of reinventing himself. In a house so immense that wanderers become lost and die, undiscovered for years, Orlando makes his way downward to where “his ancestors lay, coffin piled upon coffin, for ten generations together. [. . .] It was a ghastly sepulcher; dug deep beneath the foundations of the house” (71). Having awakened, Orlando must reestablish his sense of self separately from the social norms to which he has failed to adhere. In order to reestablish his identity, Orlando removes himself from the complexity of the larger house, filled with unknown rooms, corridors, and forgotten spaces, to the subterranean space of the crypt, the subconscious part of the house which lies quiet and undisturbed.10 The bones grasp at him as if he is temporarily caught between the living and the dead, searching for affirmation in the dusty skulls. There the masculine paradigms which threaten to limit Orlando’s feminine attributes disappear, creating a fringe space beneath the house where s(he) is essentially him(her)self. For the remainder of the narrative the estate provides the stable context around which everything else in Orlando’s life revolves and to which he must return. It functions as a touchstone for Orlando to orient him- or herself to the rest of the world; however, despite its centrality to Orlando’s life, the house also serves as a dutiful text upon which Orlando writes, much like “The Oak Tree.” In a second oscillation from the harsh exterior world to the security of his inner, domestic space, Orlando reinvigorates the house after Nick Greene’s rejection.11 Eschewing the idea of mere

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ornamentation, or shifting clothing as he shifts identities, Orlando now recuperates the estate as if to contribute to the architectural discourse begun by his ancestors. In an apostrophe from the hill, Orlando thinks of “the unknown lords and ladies who lived there [and] never forgot to set aside something for those who come after; for the roof that will leak; for the tree that will fall” (Woolf 107). His “peroration” shifts his desire for a popular legacy to a historical and political one which returns him to the “Richards, Johns, Annes, [and] Elizabeths” in the family crypt once again (106, 111). Unlike the reconstruction of the bourgeois house in To the Lighthouse, Orlando’s estate does not require a maternal presence to subsist; in fact Orlando retains the house only through his initial position as an aristocratic male. Nevertheless, although Orlando determines that his physical estate is legally secure, his legacy cannot flourish without the approval of the local social and political community. Thus Orlando abandons the text of his poem in order to instead write on the house in furnishings and parties upon which his reputation relies. The larger part of the house, now more of a public space within the private home, comes alive as “guests jostled each other on the fifty-two staircases” (Woolf 112). Unaccustomed to the activity, Orlando again cloisters himself in the most internal rooms of the house, close to the crypts (Woolf 112). Only there, physically near the remains, can he return to “The Oak Tree” as if his identity and the heart of the house rest with the dead. Here Woolf introduces a sense of layered meta-textuality: the presence of the Sackvilles’ history, the house and grounds, and “The Oak Tree.” Woolf’s biography is undeniably a rewriting of the Sackville family, where she claims Knole for Vita in an assault on the gendering of land ownership in England.12 Within that context, Woolf creates a protagonist who constantly revises, shifts, and changes his or her identity and perceptions of the outer world. Inevitably, these temporary alterations reflecting the “age,” or new version of Orlando, affect the house, a metaphor for Orlando’s self. While outer rooms are modified, the catacomb of inner spaces remain static much like Orlando, who reshapes his or her exterior self while his or her interior self remains untouched (despite masculine and feminine performance). The pattern of Orlando’s return to the innermost portions of the house and “The Oak Tree” signify the constant need to refresh him- or herself using the discourse of death. The foundation of the house, which marks time in 365 rooms and 52 staircases, rests upon the ashes of the fictional Sackvilles while “The Oak Tree” engages (im)mortality through literature and nature.

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Orlando returns to “The Oak Tree” (and the house), much like a faithful lover, until it is continuously modified into an indistinguishable blend of original text and marginalia: Many of the pages were stained, some were torn, while the straits she had been in for writing paper when with the gypsies, had forced her to overscore the margins and cross the lines till the manuscript looked like a piece of darning most conscientiously carried out. [. . .] It was time to make an end. And so she began turning and dipping and reading and skipping and thinking as she read how very little she had changed all these years. (Woolf 237)

The last line, “how little she had changed” refers to both the poem and Orlando; despite the external coverings of clothing and annotations, four hundred years fails to affect the essence of either him or her or the text (237). The poem, a literary manifestation of the tree and the house, returns Orlando to a space in which gender is irrelevant. Here (s)he reaffirms his or her core self, neither male nor female, and the connection all humans have with the Earth through both life and death. The roots, like the “Earth’s spine,” fix him as if in a living death where “his limbs grew heavy upon the ground” and, later, with the roots “twining” about her hands instead of a wedding ring, she lies content to sink into the Earth beneath the tree (Woolf 19, 248). Because the biographer-narrator eliminates the actual text of Orlando’s poem, these interludes are the only indicators of the poem’s contents, inextricably merging human, pastoral, and literary texts. Initially, the poem seems to function as a completion which Orlando him- or herself never attains because (s)he never dies. The publication of “The Oak Tree” fulfills the narrative death drive described by Peter Brooks, unlike Orlando, who never dies and whose life cannot even be contained by the biographer-narrator in the text (Olin-Hitt 490). Because “Woolf does not privilege the linear, end-driven time Brooks claims is central to narrative plot,” she creates that role in the embedded text of “The Oak Tree,” which concludes in the death of publication (493). After this occurs, no other references are made to Orlando as an author, a central part of him- or herself throughout the centuries. Although Orlando continues to produce in the form of a son, she describes maternity as an ephemeral and mysterious event that is a sign of the “age.” When Orlando returns to the house with her son in 1928, it has been partially opened to the public as a museum, reflecting the flexibility of the present historical moment. As Orlando traverses the entire house, which “belonged to time now; to history; was past the touch and control of the living,” she thinks of “the frail, indomitable heart of the immense

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building” (Woolf 318), where she “could not help feeling that her soul would come and go forever with the reds on the panels and the greens on the sofas” (317). Therefore, his or her organic kinship with the house is not broken: she believes in death she will become part of the structure and furnishings just as her ancestors reside in the crypt. The legacy Orlando has sought in celebrity and literary fame resides within the house; in addition to maintaining the grounds and replenishing the furnishings, Orlando must become of the house. Although the biographer-narrator tells us Orlando is now a woman and mother, those facts have no consequence upon her arrival from London. Her reaction to the house is the same as it has always been; Orlando is comfortably herself, himself, both, or neither. She easily sheds all external markers of her femininity, including her son, and seeks the solace of the oak tree one last time. Woolf returns the end of the biography to its beginning as Orlando flings herself down under the tree which has “grown bigger, sturdier, and more knotted” since 1588 but, like her, is “still in the prime of life” (Woolf 324). She relishes lying among the skeletal roots of the tree and contemplates burying a copy of “The Oak Tree” as “‘a return to the land of what the land has given me’” (325). Orlando’s final act reiterates the role that death and nature play in his or her continual rebirth; each cycle returns him or her to the tree, the poem, an androgynous lover, and to the house, which now awaits “the coming of a dead queen” (328). Woolf’s resistance to endings and closure in Orlando as well as the relocation of Orlando’s transgressive status onto the house embody what Kelly S. Walsh calls Woolf’s “modernist poetics of insufficiency [. . .] which remains endlessly open to death (Olin-Hitt 489 and Walsh 1). The indeterminacy of Orlando where the confluence of internal and external selves (and spaces) defies any linear boundary places it at the beginning of the postmodern movement. Kelly Walsh points out that “Woolf offers us a broken mirror whose shards can never be pieced together into a unified whole. Her elegiac vision, though, asks that we continue looking at, or for, that thing whose reflection has shattered the mirror” (11). The constancy, or patterns, of Orlando’s beginnings and endings seem to counteract Woolf’s experimentalism, according to Walsh’s perspective of Woolf. However, in Orlando, the cause of both the fragmentation and what is reflected is social expectation and its effects on identity formation. Woolf frees Orlando not only from conventional gender roles, but from any gender roles at all while dispelling the common idea that masculinity or femininity is a “natural” state. Orlando challenges the readers to resist compartmentalizing themselves and to be open to unfixed rhetoric, time, and identities. Like Cam in To the Lighthouse, Orlando finds no answers,

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but the questions (s)he asks are not of him- or herself, but of us. It seems that the possibility with which Woolf confronts the reader, both in the content and form of the text, seeks not to redefine the modern novel, but to leave it undefined. This slippage within Orlando offsets the repetition in the narration by creating a discourse where the hyphen separating conventional binaries is blurred, if not erased. With the demise of each age in Orlando (s)he reassesses what gender performance is most advantageous for that particular era. As Orlando pauses, often in a death-like sleep, he or she prepares to relocate him- or herself within the newly determined parameters which identify masculinity or femininity. During this transformation, the house’s outer rooms are also re-adorned in order to reflect Orlando’s changes, although the inner sanctum of the structure, which includes an actual mausoleum, remains fundamentally unchanged, much like the main character’s essential self. In Orlando, Woolf intertwines death and the house in Orlando’s life as a wellspring to which (s)he returns for restoration, bringing the dead past forward with him or her. Thus, only through a momentary destruction of Orlando and the narrative, a rebirth occurs. Given Woolf’s early experiences with loss, the inclusion of it in her texts as conjoined with life and progress makes it a logical part of her narrative discourse. Woolf’s own life contained no finality, even after her suicide which, along with the feminist movement, solidified her iconic status. In Virginia Woolf and Postmodernism Pamela L. Caughie writes, “I have sought to offer alternatives to a choice between two alternatives by pointing out the changing contexts in which certain distinctions can function and the changing concepts of language and narrative in Woolf’s writings that work against these dualistic approaches” (194). I think Caughie’s attempts can be extended to show not only that Woolf resists dualities in her writing, but consistently subverts them using the space between birth and death as a vehicle for empowerment. Both To the Lighthouse and Orlando are immensely personal texts for Woolf, although readers should not make the mistake of viewing them solely through a biographical lens of her life. Instead, these two texts demonstrate how the intermediary areas between life, death, humans, and architectural spaces underscore their importance as mechanisms for change, especially for female characters. Woolf’s reflection of these issues in her narrative restructuring of the text is indeed revolutionary and empowering.

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Notes 1

Woolf’s design echoes the ongoing attempt by Bloomsbury artists in 1913 to experiment with new forms. Tone Selbo states that “For [Roger Fry] the new art represented a continuity with the past, not a rupture, and one of his main objectives was to teach the public to see–-to open up a dialogue between the old and the new, the known and the unknown” (297). This seems to be exactly what Woolf began in To the Lighthouse and continued in her other novels, particularly Orlando. 2 Pringle states in “Killing the House of the Angel: Spatial Poetics in Woolf’s To the Lighthouse” that “when Woolf in ‘Time Passes’ all but finishes off the house, she destroys what ‘The Window’ shows has never been” (306). 3 Marina McKay, in putting Woolf in context with what she calls “blitz modernism,” argues that “For all that international modernism is characterized by its emphasis on the urban and deracinated, British modernism suggests an ongoing preoccupation with the meaning of rootedness” (229). 4 In defense of Woolf’s use of postmodern techniques in TTL, Pamela Caughie clarifies that “it is not that the meaning of the novel is its method, or that the form and content are one and the same; rather, the subject matter of the novel is a function of the novel’s discourse” (33). 5 In “Places, People and Time Passing: Virginia Woolf’s Haunted Houses,” Gina Wisker demonstrates how Woolf used “haunting” as a vehicle for the evolution of her narration. She states, “Virginia Woolf, desiring to express a sense of human continuity, needed to move beyond the tedious materialism of Edwardian houses [. . .]. Her achievement is to develop new modes of writing which capture continued presence, fusing elements of the English country house tradition with psychological insights and the supernatural” (5). 6 David Sherman asserts in “A Plot Unraveling into Ethics: Woolf, Levinas, and ‘Time Passes’” that “Woolf charges the mournful otherness of narrative voice in “Time Passes” with the meaning of time, coupling time and exteriority as mutually unthinkable, unsubsumable enigmas; time is the untraceable signature of the other, especially of the other’s death, in which the self is involved in ways that it cannot fully represent to itself” (2). However, the “signature of the other,” both time and Mrs. Ramsey, are inherently traceable in the form of the house (2). 7 One of the most curious attributes of Woolf’s long love letter to Vita SackvilleWest is her transcendence of time and mortality while still maintaining a fairly linear narrative dependent upon historical markers. 8 In an entry dated 14 March 1927 Woolf writes, “I feel the need of an escapade after these serious poetic experimental books. . . . I want to kick up my heels and be off” (Froula 180). 9 Woolf uses death in Orlando in order to separate historical eras as well as sections of the novel. Temporary death, represented as unexplained periods of sleep, also marks unusual shifts in time and gender in Orlando’s life. 10 Woolf repeats the term subterranean in the text which seems to return the reader to the importance of what lies beneath; only there can we find the essential character, the essential house, and so forth.

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11 Interestingly, it is the house and country which Greene flees, unable to tolerate the quiet stillness or the typical routines of English nobility. Woolf’s stinging portrayal of reviewers and critics extends to berate them as self-serving members of the working classes. 12 See “Houses, Rooms, and Walls: Biography and Architecture in Virginia Woolf’s Fiction” by Helen Clare Taylor, who writes “Orlando is Knole–a fact so obvious to Vita Sackville-West that she felt the book gave her back the house which had been entailed away (Glendinning 205)” (4).

Works Cited Caughie, Pamela. Virginia Woolf and Postmodernism. Chicago: U of Illinois P, 1991. Foucault, Michel. “Maurice Blanchot: The Thought From the Outside.” Foucault/Blanchot. New York: Zone, 1984. Froula, Christine. Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Avant-Garde: War, Civilization, Modernity. New York: Columbia UP, 2005. MacKay, Marina. “Putting the House in Order: Virginia Woolf and Blitz Modernism.” Modern Language Quarterly 66.2 (2005): 227-52. Olin-Hitt, Michael. “Desire, Death, and Plot: The Subversive Play of Orlando.” Women’s Studies 24 (1995): 483-96. Pringle, Mary Beth. “Killing the House of the Angel: Spatial Poetics in Woolf’s To the Lighthouse.” Virginia Woolf: Emerging Perspectives. Ed. Mark Hussey and Vara Neverow. New York: Pace, 1994. 306-12. Selbo, Tone. “Virginia Woolf and the Ambiguities of Domestic Space.” Exploring Textual Action. Ed. Lars Saetre et al. Denmark: Aarhus UP, 2010. 283-310. Sinclair, Rebecca, and Mark Taylor. “Vivid Spaces: The Settings of Virginia Woolf and Edith Wharton.” Conference Proceedings–Habitus 2000: A Sense of Place. Ed. J. R. Stephens. Perth: Curtin UP, 2000. 110. Sherman, David. “A Plot Unraveling into Ethics: Woolf, Levinas, and ‘Time Passes.’” Woolf Studies Annual 13 (2007): 159-74. Taylor, Helen Clare. “Houses, Rooms, and Walls: Biography and Architecture in Virginia Woolf’s Fiction.” Virginia Woolf Miscellany 46.4 (1995): 4. Walsh, Kelly S. “The Unbearable Openness of Death: Elegies of Rilke and Woolf.” Journal of Modern Literature 32.4 (2009): 1-21. Wisker, Gina. “Places, People and Time Passing: Virginia Woolf’s Haunted Houses.” Hecate 37.1 (2011): 4-26. Woolf, Virginia. Orlando. 1928. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1956. —. To the Lighthouse. 1927. New York: Harvest, 1981.

PART II: ASSIMILATION AND THE SELF

CHAPTER FIVE DISIDENTIFICATION WITH THE HOMOGENIZING AND COMMODIFYING NARRATIVES OF ETHNICITY IN HAN ONG’S FIXER CHAO YOUNGSUK CHAE

Han Ong’s Fixer Chao (2001) tells the story of a Filipino male hustler’s fake makeover into a Chinese Feng Shui consultant, following a request by a writer named Shem C. who is planning revenge on uppercrust New Yorkers. Ong’s cynical and subversive narrative delineates the self-perpetuating privileged and politically conforming Asian American as well as commodified ethnicity in market multiculturalism. The New York Times has reviewed Fixer Chao as a “spiteful story, leavened by the cleverness of the author’s satirical swipes” (Maslin E9); Eleanor Ty reads the novel as “a satire on the life of the privileged” (150) and Hsuan Hsu interprets it as “the psychological and ethical implications of cultural camouflage, or mimicry” (676). Although reviews of Ong’s novel on the book cover highlight interesting aspects of the novel—epitomizing it as “a brilliant dissection of spiritual shopping and class difference and racism” (New Orleans Times), “a cool, satirical eye on the herd movement and exotic fetishism of the tastemaker class” (The New Yorker), and “a fastpaced send-up of Manhattan’s trend-obsessed culture” (Time Out New York)—Fixer Chao has not received much critical attention from academic circles and literary critics. In the article “Mimicry, Spatial Captation, and Feng Shui in Han Ong’s Fixer Chao,” Hsu writes that the lack of critical attention to the novel might be “because its excessively cynical protagonist rejects and even mocks the intellectual ‘screeds’ of Asian American studies, or else because the novel’s attitudes towards issues of cultural assimilation and immigrant subjectivity are unusually difficult to sort out” (676). Hsu’s comments raise the interesting question of why Ong should criticize “intellectual screeds of Asian American studies” and whether his criticism is indeed an obstacle against the book’s reception among critics and mainstream readers. A further issue is that Hsu’s

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interpretation tends to imply a dominant tendency by overlooking heterogeneous and complex relations among Asian Americans and the silence of the professional and managerial or middle class of Asian Americans regarding their class privilege. In other words, what the reviews of the novel fail to notice is that Ong mocks not only the dominant power group, but also the ideologically conservative, economically privileged, and self-commodifying Asian Americans. Problematizing the dominant perception of Asian Americans as a homogenizing group, Lisa Lowe, in her essay “Heterogeneity, Hybridity, Multiplicity: Asian American Differences,” articulates Asian Americans’ diversity and their particularities that arise from different class, nationality, gender, and political backgrounds. She writes, [F]rom the perspectives of Asian Americans, we are extremely different and diverse among ourselves: as men and women at different distances and generations from our “original” Asian cultures—cultures as different as Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Filipino, Indian, Vietnamese, Thai, or Cambodian—Asian Americans are born in the United States and born in Asia, of exclusively Asian parents and of mixed race, urban and rural, refugee and nonrefugee, fluent in English and non-English-speaking, professionally trained and working class. (66)

As Lowe indicates, the social formation of Asian Americans is heterogeneous and “far from uniform” (64). Although racial solidarity or unity has often been taken for granted, addressing the need to stress differences in identity not only challenges the dominant group’s assumption of homogeneity, but it also helps us to consider the divergent socio-economic conditions and class cleavages within the Asian American community. Articulating differences among Asian Americans is nothing new. Rather, “what is new at this phase of Asian American literary criticism,” as David Li emphasizes, is the “complex social reality” and “the overdetermination of the way in which the demographic diversity of Asian America is to be interpreted” (191). Since the immigration law of 1965, which allowed twenty thousand immigrants per country, the migration of Asians, both skilled and unskilled, has surged. According to Ronald Takaki, “the recent immigrants have originated not only from the working class but also from the professional class. Between 1966 and 1975, 43 percent of the immigrants were operatives, clerks, crafts workers, and service workers, while 49 percent were managers, professionals, and technical workers. The number of scientists and engineers immigrating from Hong Kong and Taiwan skyrocketed from thirty-six in 1964 to 1,164 in 1970” (Takaki 423). Along with this legal impact on demographic change, the migration of war

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refugees from Southeast Asia after 1975 has led further to the formation of economic hierarchies within the Asian American community. With the dramatic change in the population of Asian descent in the U. S.—its nearly fivefold increase between 1970 and 1990—characterizing Asian American subjectivity has become much more complicated. “‘Oppression,’ ‘marginalization,’ and ‘resistance,’ keywords in dominant narratives of Asian American studies, are terms,” as Kandice Chuh points out, “that each require redefinition within this globalized context, as ‘by whom’ and ‘against what’ are questions that are increasingly difficult to answer with certitude” (7). Indeed, these “demographic shifts” have created “stratified, uneven and heterogeneous formation” (Koshy 315) of Asian American ethnic identity and, as Susan Koshy notes, have “added layers of class difference.”1 However, heterogeneous conditions of Asian American identity in many ways have become decontextualized through the “model minority” myth and the cultural politics of multiculturalism.2 The dominant group’s myth or encoding of Asian Americans as “the model-minority” that has “succeeded” without getting any government help3 is, following David Palumbo-Liu, “an ideological construct” that silences “specific differences in the material histories and contemporary realities of many different Asian groups in America and foregrounds the rise of certain Asians while ignoring the continuing struggles of others” (396). For instance, if Chinese and Japanese Americans excel at school and move up to middle-class status, their success according to this approach might be considered attributable to their own cultural assets. Then, the poverty of the majority of other minority groups in this framework will be explained in terms of their cultural inability to improve themselves. Conceivably, the ethnicitybased approach emphasizes that different cultural characteristics determine the success and failure of immigrants, at the same time concealing the structural inequality imposed on immigrants in the United States. In my view, the label “model minority” pinned by white Americans on Asian Americans corresponds to the institutionalized version of multiculturalism, which celebrates cultural differences of immigrants, while still marginalizing and essentializing them as cultural others. Although awareness of identity and difference has been promoted as a way to challenge the white-dominant hegemony, a cultural politics of identity and difference, such as multiculturalism, has been utilized in such a way that it fosters an essentialized difference, and it is elaborated without accompanying what Nancy Fraser calls “a social politics of justice and equality” (207). Multiculturalism’s celebration of cultural diversity and pluralism has been challenged, furthermore, for its tendency to shift

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attention from racial contexts to cultural terrains, and its framework of understanding racially and ethnically different groups in cultural contexts has been blamed for blocking racially critical consciousness.4 In this context, Chuh sees multiculturalism as a code name for “minoritized literature” that posits “Asian Americanness in a narrative of otherness” (6). Despite the fact that the formation of Asian American identity is multiply determined, differentiation within Asian American identity has mainly focused on cultural differences, rather than the socioeconomic and divergent ideological backgrounds that influence the formation of identity. Yoonmee Chang refers to the “neglected” or “omitted” issue of class, and in her Writing the Ghetto she problematizes the way Asian Americans’ “racialized class inequity” (2) is perceived as “cultural expression” as well as the way “their experiences of class inequity are muted beyond usual silence” (3). In fact, the value of cultural difference cannot be fully appreciated without understanding diverse ideological standpoints and the increasing class gaps within the Asian American community, nor without issuing a challenge to unequal power relations that racially mark the labor of minorities. As Viet Thanh Nguyen notes, there are definitely limits to the representation of Asian American identity and of identifying Asian Americans as a homogeneous group. Nguyen states: These limits stem from the implicit pluralism found in contemporary constructions of Asian American identity, the commodification of that racial identity, the ideological heterogeneity of a diverse Asian American population, and the willingness of a considerable portion of that population to participate in and perpetuate such commodification and the social and economic practices that lead to it. (145)

A question then arises of the manner in which Asian American literary texts embody or negotiate a tension between foregrounding ideological and material heterogeneities and commodifying “cultural otherness” in market multiculturalism. Do the majority of Asian Americans and writers take a counterhegemonic position on dominant politics? And to what extent does the material heterogeneity of Asian Americans influence participation in or refusal to be a part of commodified multiculturalism? I would argue that class differences among Asian Americans play an important role in their ideological stance on dominant power structure. As Edna Bonacichi suggests, both class—a “system of economic power and domination”—and the individual’s class background affect “consciousness of social inequality and injustice” (68).

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What is especially significant about Ong’s novel is that it foregrounds the class cleavages that exist among Asian Americans and their divergent ideological standpoints regarding the dominant society. It contests the essentialized view of Asian American identity from an economically marginalized perspective. In Fixer Chao the protagonist, William Narciso Paulinha, a Filipino immigrant who used to be a street hustler, is a quintessential example of the marginalized and disenfranchised minority. Although as a fake Feng Shui master Paulinha strategically oscillates between interpellation to commodifying cultural difference and disinterpellation to commodified ethnicity, Ong maintains a critically dissident voice throughout the novel and opens up space for understanding the divergent voices and conflicting interests of Asian Americans. The subversiveness of the text is a product of his mockery of the selfperpetuating privileged and of the politically acquiescent Asian Americans who interpellate to the existing stereotypes of Asians as well as of his challenge to the commodification of racial or ethnic identity in market multiculturalism. The novel illuminates the need for understanding heterogeneity and difference at socioeconomic levels and for problematizing marketed ethnic differences that contribute to reinforcing stereotypes of Asian Americans.

Staging Exoticism and Marketing Cultural Difference While many Asian Americans have experiences of being discriminated against for race and ethnicity and share solidarity in terms of being a racial or ethnic minority, not all Asian Americans maintain a critical view of the U. S. politics of race and ethnicity or show the same oppositional viewpoint regarding the dominant power structure. Some Asian Americans who have maintained middle class status rather have shown politically conservative and self-seeking attitudes. Similarly, whereas many Asian American writers have shown awareness of America’s discriminatory laws against Asian immigrants and through their writings have tried to demystify various stereotypes of Asian Americans, some have used their ethnicity as a commodity to sell and even exoticize cultural differences in order to receive attention from the mainstream reading public.5 The irony is that the writings that remain silent about U. S. racial politics while essentializing ethnic differences in celebratory tones of “America, land of opportunity” have found popularity with the general reader, and those literary works have in fact helped to reinforce the stereotype of Asian Americans as cultural others in America. The dominant culture has celebrated model immigrants’ success stories. By contrast, the voices of

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dissidence and of distance from the dominant American culture and politics have received little attention from readers and literary markets. Moreover, the problem of the poverty that exists among Asian immigrants has been underrepresented in the context of these immigrants’ perceived success. Even though some Asian Americans have settled down as middle class citizens, large numbers of immigrants are still struggling with poverty. Fixer Chao discloses the de-emphasized issue of class and makes the underrepresented Asian Americans visible. If the novel is regarded as extremely cynical, it is only because through his protagonist Ong foregrounds economic stratification among Asian Americans, and because he satirizes the perpetuating unequal power structure from the racially and economically marginalized point of view. Ong’s text delineates the manner in which Asian American subjects collaborate with or contend with the commodification of racial identity, while foregrounding the real difference in material conditions that differentiate Asian Americans within. Calling Asian Americans “Orientals” or “exotics” is an ideological “hailing”6 projected from the dominant group’s hierarchical view, whereas disinterpellating against the stereotypical encoding not only destabilizes the dominant group’s construction of Asian Americans, but it also reflects the subject’s critical consciousness of the existing power structure. In the novel, Ong’s cynical criticism of Asian Americans who utilize their ethnic difference for economic advancement is portrayed through an Asian American writer named Paul Chan Chuang Toledo Lin, a “celebrated” writer who is known for his novel, Peking Man? Woman? Paulinha, asked by Shem to fake himself as an “authentic” Chinese Feng Shui master under the name William Chao, meets upper-class Manhattan groups of people at a party and overhears the words “hegemony, proletariat, diaspora, dichotomy, hagiography, calligraphy.” Paulinha realizes: “They were all coming from Lin, who was using them to make political points that were, however, undone by that voice of his which belonged to a glee club member soliciting for a candy drive” (Ong 108). To Paulinha those are “funny-sounding words” (108), and he feels that Lin uses the words without understanding the real struggles of Asian immigrants. Paulinha’s disidentification with Lin, to borrow David Li’s words, discloses “the confused relationship between intellectuals and the masses that is subsumed under coalition politics” (193). Through Paulinha’s detachment from Lin, Ong demystifies the identity politics that assumes Asian Americans to be a homogeneous group. Moreover, Paulinha notices that Lin is using his ethnic background for his literary and economic advancement. Lin shares his ethnic background,

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but Paulinha realizes that a different economic status and political standing in many ways override a commonality among ethnic minorities. Ong thus presents divergent voices and conflicting interests among Asian Americans. Disidentifying with Lin’s historical and political views, Paulinha forms a cynical view of Lin’s book: Peking Man? Woman? was a definite screed which, though bitter, was written from hope. A hope that people’s minds could be influenced, made to see the error of their ways and then corrected, and therefore linked with the idea of progress, moving forward. In his own way, then Toledo Lin possessed a kind of grace, believing that human beings could be made better, shamed into improvement. While as for myself, I started from the belief that human beings, having begun low, only degenerated further, and that the only correction possible came from a kind of violence, a kind of wrestling away of privileges which were undeserved, things granted which it was time to repossess, to reveal the naked, fatty, vulnerable thing underneath; a feeling closer to death than to life. (109)

Paulinha’s doubts about Lin’s hopeful vision of history tend to demystify not only the widespread notion of America as a “land of opportunity,” but also the politically conservative view held by some middle-class Asian Americans. Paulinha also finds that the economic gap between Lin and him gives rise to different views on the situations of racial and ethnic minorities; and he notices that Lin’s books with their happy endings show rather subservient and conforming attitudes toward the dominant power structure. Paulinha draws a distinction between Lin and himself: “I thought that there was a world of difference between what he chose to do with that knowledge and what I was choosing to do. In essence, it was the gulf that separated a screed from a plan. Paul Chan Chuang Toledo Lin was the author of a screed, a rant, a complaint, huffing and puffing. Versus? My plan, a definite course of action: revenge” (109). Paulinha believes that Lin is an opportunist who uses his ethnic difference for upward mobility instead of challenging the systematic discrimination directed against racial minorities and immigrants. From Paulinha’s view, what Lin does is nothing much different from commodifying his ethnic identity as a selling point for his book. Paulinha makes fun of Lin’s ridiculous long name, which sounds like “a locomotive assembled to chug backward toward some kind of fake history of purity” (110), and he mocks Lin’s “patented, pet theme: Orientalism” (370). Lin’s staging of exoticism and reviving of Orientalism through his book in many respects correspond to the way some Asian American writers utilize cultural “authenticity” as a commodity. Whereas some Asian Americans, like Lin in Fixer Chao, have themselves reinforced

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stereotypes of Asians or Asian culture for their commercial appeal, publishers and mainstream society have continuously packaged Asian Americans in cultural stereotypes. In the publishing world, minority writers to a certain extent have had to conform themselves to the mainstream literary markets’ demands for minority writers. However, the extent to which minority writers contend with or collaborate with publishing companies is also an indirect indication of their political stance towards American society. The ambivalence or double strategy that most popular Asian American writers have adopted reflects in many of them a politically conservative and conforming attitude. They allow themselves to be projected as cultural others, yet seek commercial appeal through exoticized differences. Graham Huggan in The Postcolonial Exotic discusses the dilemma that racial or ethnic minority writers experience. He explains that minority writers are often caught between the desire to achieve recognition with a wider audience and their awareness of the constraints this might place on their writing and the ways in which it is received. The danger exists, for example, of the edges of a certain, unmistakably politicized kind of writings becoming blunted by a coterie of publishers and other marketing agents anxious to exploit it for its “exotic” appeal. (35)

Publishers and other market-oriented culture industries have shown a tendency to exploit cultural differences by attaching a tag, “the exotic.”7 The dilemma that minority writers face then is how to react to the publisher’s demand for ethnic writings. Whereas some minority writers have themselves intentionally internalized or reproduced stereotypes through their writings, they have also been encouraged by mainstream publishers to highlight cultural differences as their exchange value. Many Asian American writings have been consumed for their exotic stories or “essential” differences, and in various ways they have reproduced the stereotypical image of Asians as “exotics.” In the context of late capitalism, cultural differences depicted by racial and cultural minorities have come to be marketed as cultural “otherness” and to be sold as exotic cultural commodities. In Fixer Chao Suzy Yamada, who is Shem’s major target of revenge, is known as a “JapaneseCanadian transplant who had made her fortune by trading with Japan” (Ong 48), and she revives Feng Shui as a new fad and refashions it as a contemporary “Oriental” cultural commodity. Yamada, the business owner of Suzy Yamada of Kendo, Inc., is viewed as a tireless social climber. Through her relationship with Kuerten, the guru of the Institute of the Advancement of Eastern Wisdom, she has elevated her social and

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economic status, but she later leaves him to elevate her status even further. Yamada has become an object of detestation for Shem and other people in the upper-class Manhattan circle on account of her malicious attempts to sacrifice others for the sake of her own interests. Yamada runs a business that sells Asian cultural artifacts, and her relationships with powerful, wealthy, or well-known men have aided her social and economic status; her image of success depicted in magazines as well as her frequent comments on Feng Shui makes people think of Feng Shui as something that mysteriously works for their betterment, thus sparking their interest in Feng Shui. Paulinha notices the sentence Yamada repeats in the magazine articles: “I need better Feng Shui.” She talks about “moving furniture,” “the placement of mirrors,” “the relationship between the doorway and the foot of the stairs,” and talks of “being disappointed by one Feng Shui consultant and being on the lookout for another” (52-53). Whether or not Yamada believes that better Feng Shui could bring her more “luck,” her prosperous image as depicted in magazines has indirectly advertised Feng Shui and at the same time boosted the sale of Asian cultural products for Yamada of Kendo, Inc. In the novel, however, Ong is not concerned about whether or not Feng Shui actually works. Rather, he is satirizing the way in which Feng Shui or some other Asian cultural practice is utilized and commercialized for the sake of profits.8 Feng Shui was introduced to America in the 1980s and 1990s, the time of promoting cultural diversity and multiculturalism in society, yet Feng Shui has been advertised as a hyper-commercialized version of the Chinese cultural practice—in the words of Cate Bramble, “McFengshui—a terrific new age swindle” (64). In much the same vein Neil Bissoondath in Selling Illusions has connected the commodification of ethnic differences to the current tendency of multiculturalism, showing how this commodification eventually contributes to essentializing differences as a form of “exoticism.” In Bissoondath’s words, Multiculturalism, on the face of it, insists on diversity—and yet a case can be made that it is a diversity that depends on a vigorous conformity. Trading in the exotic, it views the individual not as a member of society at large but as a unit of a smaller group ethnically, racially, or culturally defined—a group comforted by the knowledge that it has access to familiar goods, music, etc. But this is multiculturalism at its most simplistic, and in some ways most insidious, level. It is the trade-off of the marketplace, an assurance of creature comforts in exchange for playing the ethnic game. (214)

The commercialized form of multiculturalism is embodied in Fixer Chao by Yamada, who selfishly exploits ethnic differences. Yamada’s

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success from trading with Japan is made possible by posing herself as an exotic Oriental and through using her sexuality as a way to move up, all the while alleging a proper use of Feng Shui. Although Yamada indirectly ascribes her success to Feng Shui, the real reasons are her selfOrientalizing tactics and her ruthless sacrificing of others. Yamada exemplifies the Asian immigrant who commercializes cultural differences for self-interest, and she eventually contributes to reinforcing an image of the Asian female as an object of sexual desire as shown through her numerous affairs with influential men. Her frequent mention of Feng Shui has helped to advertise and promote her business. Lin has staged an essentialized view of ethnic “authenticity” and Chinese culture for the commercial appeal for his book, and Yamada has likewise found a way of packaging her cultural difference as commodity.

Staged “Orientals” and Dis/Interpellation to Commodified Ethnicity Through the character of Paulinha, Ong foregrounds heterogeneous material conditions and ideological differences among Asian Americans, leading us to rethink ethnic homogeneity, the assumption of racial unity, from the economically disenfranchised position. Ong’s text shows the heterogeneity of Asian American identity through the Lin-Yamada and Paulinha parallels. The difference between Lin-Yamada and Paulinha is that Lin and Yamada exoticize cultural differences for self-interests or for profits, while Paulinha is more keenly aware of the unequal power structure and the marginalization of racial or ethnic minorities in society. Whereas Lin and Yamada have staged ethnic difference and “Oriental” culture to achieve commercial appeal, Paulinha is conspicuously aware of the way his culturally and economically marginalized status is utilized in the market-oriented multicultural society, and he attempts to use Feng Shui to mock the sheer hypocrisy of wealthy people and the dominant power structure that upholds the privileged class. Just as different cultural values are commercialized as an exotic commodity for commercial interests, Asian Americans’ identity is also transformed into a commodity in late capitalism. Paulinha is perceived by Shem as the cultural other at the bottom of the economic rung. Shem approaches Paulinha sitting at the Savoy, a male hustler bar, for his scheme of revenge on Yamada. Shem’s first question to Paulinha, “Are you a Chink?” reflects a continuous revival of Orientalist racism in contemporary multicultural society, and Paulinha becomes the “hailed individual” (Althusser 118), to borrow Louis Althusser’s term, in a sense

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that he recognizes that it is really him who is being hailed and that he responds to Shem’s ideological interpellation of him as a “Chink.” Shem’s choice of Paulinha for his plan of revenge implies that he perceives Paulinha’s ethnic background as exploitable and marketable in the milieu of “appreciating” Feng Shui, that is, of a new trend within the privileged circle. In other words, Shem’s decision to use Feng Shui is not based on his respect for cultural differences, but on his utilization of cultural values for his interests. Shem explains the reason for choosing Paulinha for his scheme: “I need an Oriental, because this thing, Feng Shui, is the province of an Oriental” (Ong 57). Shem’s choice of Paulinha as an “Oriental” implies authenticity as a marketing tool; and by manipulating Paulinha’s identity into an “authentic” Chinese, Shem in a way circulates authenticity itself as a commodity. Authenticity, as Deborah Root states, becomes “the currency at play in the marketplace of cultural difference.”9 Shem’s reason for hiring Paulinha and his choice of Feng Shui stem from his personal vendetta against Yamada on account of her relationship with Bill Hood. Yamada has once been Shem’s lover, but she reveals her affair with Shem to Bill Hood, an acclaimed writer, in the hope that Bill would take her back. Her disclosure of Shem’s extramarital affair eventually leads to Shem’s divorce and his downfall from the upper-class Manhattan group to which he belongs. He has come from a humble family and is able to rise above those origins through his marriage to Marianne, but he is denied access to the closed group of the privileged after his extramarital affair is revealed by Yamada. Paulinha learns that “Shem had exposed the culture as the laughable yo-yo it had always been, its exaltation of Bill Hood as nothing but a swooning acquiescence to ambition, to bigness, and its current shunning, nothing more than the expected response to seeing bigness cut down to size by scandal” (Ong 246). In actuality, however, Shem’s revenge on Yamada originates in his raw ambition to “move from the sidelines into the center” (329). With his plan, Shem believes that he would “reverse everything, turn the tenets of this social order against itself” (329), yet he has been both “contemptuous and envious of the social set he’d set his sights on” (366). Shem remembers how Yamada has talked about Feng Shui in magazine articles, and how it has become a trend among the high class New Yorkers. Thus he decides to use Feng Shui as a way to destroy peace, marriage, and the success of the upper-class New Yorkers, and eventually he attempts to infiltrate Yamada’s house and destroy her prosperity. In commercial transactions of ethnic products or cultural practice such as Feng Shui, uneven power relations between minority groups and dominant power groups have always lain below the surface. Shem uses

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Paulinha as a middleman for his plan and demands that Paulinha give him a commission for each Feng Shui consultation; in addition he makes a specific request to destroy the harmony of the homes whose owners have negatively affected his literary success. Though realizing how he is being utilized, Paulinha engages strategically with Shem’s staging of him as an “Oriental” in order to survive. Shem requests that Paulinha memorize Feng Shui terminologies and be familiar with Chinese culture. Feng Shui, as Paulinha learns through a booklet, is interpreted as “the mysterious Chinese Art and Science of Harmonizing with the environment” (49), and it is marketed as an “Oriental” mysterious science. Paulinha begins to understand that “Feng Shui meant the rearrangement of furniture to attract luck and ‘good spirits’ into the house” (53). Shem also gives a barber specific instructions for how to cut Paulinha’s hair: “handsome and conservative” (63). Shem even writes a fake article about Mr. Chao with made-up facts, using words such as “offhand, serene, gifted” (86). Those words used by Shem to describe Paulinha reflect the continuing stereotype of Asian Americans as a “model minority” that does not disrupt the power structure of society. Shem also makes hundreds of flyers to publicize Paulinha’s “authenticity.” In this way Paulinha becomes marketably authentic Master Chao. He reinvents his past as part of a commodity package and rehearses Feng Shui before his first visit to a house: It’s something we Chinese—that’s right, good, you’re Chinese now— it’s something we Chinese have grown up with but which only now seems to be making itself known in the West. It’s nothing more than a combination of common sense and intuition. We Chinese believe that the way your house is arranged is instrumental in determining and forecasting your fortunes, financial and otherwise. I walked home repeating the words over and over: Fung Shwee. Hello, I imagined myself saying not proffering my hand because I was now Chinese, Old Worldish and distant. I am Mr. Fungshwee. Hello I’ve come to do your Fungshwee. You ordered Fungshwee? Extra topping with that? (60-61)

Paulinha’s comic rehearsal of a Feng Shui performance insinuates his mockery of the way in which ethnic cultural values are commodified, and his staging of Feng Shui discloses the constructiveness of ethnic “authenticity” in multicultural American society. Ong satirizes the way in which Feng Shui is invented as a new fad or revived as a contemporary “Oriental” commodity as well as the way the ethnic minority identity is regarded as a part of an “authentic” commodity. Paulinha notices that Feng Shui is circulated as a trend among the high class New Yorkers in order to perpetuate their wealth and success, and

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they are eager to bring more financial success through rearrangement of their furniture or by buying more stuff in accordance with a proper Feng Shui of their house. Paulinha contends with the self-perpetuating dominance of the economically privileged people who are the major consumers of his Feng Shui consultation—rich New Yorkers “who had accumulated wealth by pulling the wool over others’ eyes” (365), and who live in a “glass bubble filled with money.” All his clients in the circle are eager to get behind this new trend of Feng Shui, and for them Feng Shui consultants are like “plastic surgeons of soul” (196). Paulinha visits dozens of houses to provide his Feng Shui consultation. His clients regard his performance as effective, and in that sense his simulation of Feng Shui challenges the very idea of the original or of authenticity. In fact, as long as Paulinha’s Feng Shui consultation is acknowledged by clients as effective, it does not matter whether Paulinha is an authentic Chinese Feng Shui master or a pseudo-consultant. Using Feng Shui as a commodified cultural commodity, Fixer Chao satirizes the commodification of cultural “authenticity” and interrogates the unchallenged power relations underneath the booming rhetoric of multiculturalism. From Paulinha’s point of view, his clients are shallow multiculturalists. Paulinha’s clients are what Stanley Fish calls boutique multiculturalists. Fish uses the term “boutique multiculturalism” for the currently dominant, yet superficial level of understanding cultural differences.10 Paulinha’s client Lindsay S., who had a “huge crush on Asian culture” (Ong 70), is a shallow multiculturalist. Paulinha notices Lindsay’s displayed wealth in a diamond-etched water glass. Lindsay’s museum-like apartment is filled with rare collection items. Paulinha sees “hundreds of Buddhas of dazzling variety—made of gold, silver, copper, porcelain, jade, different kinds of wood, even plastic; pendant- and TV-sized, and everything in between; some were toys, some jewels, and others ancient temple relics” (71). Paulinha notices that Lindsay has been collecting Buddhas not because he has a belief in Buddhism, but because the Buddhas are add-ons to his collection items with an “Oriental” flavor. Implicit in Lindsay’s collection of Buddhas is his notion of culture as commodity—a thing that can be displayed, bought, or sold. Paulinha also finds that Lindsay was “more than happy to preserve him in the brine of ancient stereotype” (66) and realizes that his clients mostly think in terms of cultural stereotypes and east-west clichés. Paulinha’s contempt of the self-perpetuating high-class people comes from his critical awareness of the unequal power structure that hierarchizes racial or ethnic minorities. Paulinha later refuses to serve as a middleman for Shem’s plan and meets directly with the “professional source” that

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provides Shem information about each client. Paulinha’s revenge against the undeserving rich is accomplished through his disastrous rearranging of the furniture in their homes. While visiting rich people’s houses as a Feng Shui master, Paulinha makes fun of the self-perpetuating privileged: “Point at the sucker and laugh! So was this the revenge?. . . I was the one who was pointing. Look at their lives! Look at the tacky pieces of furniture and accessories given the patina of class by outrageous prices and hoodwinky brand names!” (252). Paulinha’s contempt for undeserving rich people is revealed in his outburst of rage against Cardi Kerchpoff. Angered at Kerchpoff’s racist view of minorities and her repeated statement, “Filipinos make the best servants,” and her complaints about her Indian nanny’s “backward” thinking, Paulina sabotages her house by misarranging her furniture. She blames Paulinha for her sudden divorce following directly after his rearrangement of the furniture in her house and calls him a Feng Shui swindler. Confronting her accusation, Paulinha blurts out at her: You’re an evil, selfish, backward woman and all that you’ve gotten is exactly what you deserve! . . . How much did you think you could fucking get away with, living the way you did, boasting about your station, did you think that you had this fucking free pass, the way you stepped on other people’s rights and then made a joke about it to people of your own class, sharing your fucking privilege? Using your fucking privilege to look down on ordinary people? Did you think that Feng Shui could repair your ugly soul? Did you—. (255)

Paulinha is outraged by the way Kerchpoff’s arrogance is backed by her wealth, and he cynically discloses the hypocritical facades of highclass people. Paulinha finds that the disastrous consequences to her after his Feng Shui performance is “the pathetic proof of the success of his revenge” (253). Whereas Paulinha’s contempt of Kerchpoff is revealed in his outburst of rage against her arrogant racist attitudes, his ultimate revenge on Yamada is brought about by Yamada’s own scheming. After Yamada learns about Shem’s plan as well as Paulinha’s fake identity as a Feng Shui master, she hires someone to kill Paulinha, but the assassin instead ends up killing Kendo, Yamada’s son. Paulinha finally witnesses the fall of Suzy Yamada. Looking down at the dying Kendo, Paulinha thinks: The rightness of it came directly from that name: Isuzu Yamada. . . . She’d lost the game. . . . All that time checking for the payoff of my handiwork I had been inspecting the wrong things. Here was the big thing Suzy

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Yamada was to be deprived of to pay for what she has stolen from others. (345)

Paulinha finds that Yamada’s unethical and cunning ways of elevating and perpetuating her success have caused her own destruction. In a way Yamada cons herself in order to move ahead, and she is also conned by her own game—that of ascending the social and economic ladder through perpetuating the stereotypical image of Asians as “exotics.” In fact Yamada’s superficial ascent is viewed by other rich New Yorkers as that of an “upstart” rather than a “ruler” (247). By reversing the consequence of Yamada’s scheme against Paulinha, Ong mocks ideologically conforming Asian Americans for playing the ethnic game for self-interest and discloses his cynicism towards Asian Americans who acquiescently interpellate to the dominant white society’s encoding of racial or ethnic minorities. In this respect Paulinha’s revenge is double-edged. It is directed on the one hand toward the economically privileged who perpetuate their status by sacrificing others, and on the other toward the ideologically conforming and conservative Asian Americans who live within the stereotypes given by dominant whites and who garner success through self-Orientalizing.

Building Coalitions among the Disenfranchised Through the juxtaposition of Lin-Yamada and Paulinha, Ong has delineated the overdetermined and heterogeneous material conditions of Asian Americans and the ways in which specific individuals collude with or contend with the dominant system. While Lin and Yamada have actively interpellated to the dominant encoding of ethnic minorities in order to achieve commercial success and have reinforced the stereotypes of Asian Americans as “Orientals” or “exotics,” Paulinha is conscious about the ways in which racial or ethnic minorities are inscribed as “cultural others,” and how they are instrumentalized on behalf of the white dominant power structure and its maintenance. As an antithesis of Yamada as well as an expression of the need to form alliances among the disenfrachised, Ong posits Preciosa, a Filipino neighbor who lives downstairs, as an ally of Paulinha. They share affinities in respect of their economically marginalized and racialized minority status. They have both migrated to the U. S. for a better life, but are unable to mobilize themselves to improve their economic conditions. In fact, Paulinha shares lots of commonality with Preciosa, a poor immigrant, who is also “torn between the competing pulls of the fiction of the promised land, on the

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one hand, and the fiction of the sustaining mother country, on the other” (325-26). As a way for Preciosa to make money to pay for her desperately needed hip surgery, Paulinha asks Preciosa to work together and to fake herself as the priestess Walung, a “house cleanser” who would “seek out the hiding places of evil spirits” (171). While Paulinha is providing his consultation regarding the Feng Shui of Yamada’s house, asking Yamada to rearrange her furniture, which is already perfectly placed, and to switch her Filipina maid’s room to a better room, thinking “he was doing this to improve the life of the Flilipina maid” (180), Preciosa “performs” a cleansing ritual, making grunting sounds. Paulinha learns that Preciosa has come to the U. S. as a mail-order bride and has lived in New York for more than twenty years, working at various jobs to make ends meet: “All small-time hustlers who peddled on the streets, nothing organized and labyrinthine, headquartered in dark, velvet-lined places” (19). Paulinha later finds out that Preciosa has been cast in the play Primitives, which is about a group of missionaries who set up a Christian village in Central America. Despite the fact that Preciosa is Filipino, the director cares only about her skin color, which is dark enough to pass for South American. Just as Shem has approached Paulinha for his “Oriental” look, the director casts Preciosa based on her skin color. As the title of the play implies, the missionaries’ promotion of Christianity to Central Americans reflects a colonist view of them as “primitives,” who need to be saved and civilized. Wondering about why Preciosa has not mentioned the play, Paulinha learns that “Preciosa had had no lines. Not even Ooga Booga bullshit lines—no lines, zero! Only unripe tits and a passive, out-of-it stare, like being on dope. She was not, and had never been, a star” (126). Whereas an external colonialist view was depicted through the missionaries in the play, the director’s casting of Preciosa based on her skin color and the playwright’s view of Central Americans as “primitives” indicate a white supremacist attitude and an ongoing internal colonialism set in the minds of the majority of whites. The case of Preciosa is an example of how racial and ethnic minorities are typecast as cultural others. Just as Preciosa as a picture bride has lived a life of “voluntary servitude” (310) to her old Texan husband, the actress work that she takes after her husband dies is racially coded, that is, “better suited to silence. Roles as an extra” (313). Preciosa realizes that “she was game” (313); and angered, she quit her work. She refuses to play a stereotypical role given to racial or ethnic minorities. Preciosa’s experience shows how racial or ethnic minorities are regarded as “mysterious” or “superstitious,” and how in the market their cultural differences are utilized

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or exploited as ethnic commodities. As shown through the characters of Lin and Yamada, however, some Asian Americans actively interpellate to the ideological coding of Asian Americans, serving as “good” subjects that sustain the dominant power structure, and they even play within the stereotypes in pursuit of commercial success. Paulinha and Preciosa are, by contrast, dissident subjects who disinterpellate to the commodification of ethnicity, and they are examples of subaltern Asian immigrants who are economically disenfranchised and racially marked in society, and they maintain a critical voice against the dominant society’s racialization and commodification of minorities. Paulinha also finds commonalities with other racial minorities and working class people who work as doormen, busboys, or house servants, since he has realized how race and class intersect in the labor market, and he knows what it means to be poor through his experience as a male hustler—racially marked and humiliated—at the Port Authority Bus Terminal restrooms. There he has physically put himself under white businessmen “like restoring their natural position in the world” (12). Paulinha’s common feeling with the economically marginalized is based on his class affinity and a critical view of the unequal power structure, and he finds that his white friend Devo is the one who understands him and his days at the Port Authority Bus Terminal—a shameful job he has taken “for survival” (29). It is Devo whom Paulinha consults about whether he should take up Shem’s offer, and Paulinha feels genuine affinity, since Devo shares “a common hatred” (352) of the undeserving rich, and Paulinha believes that he and Devo could work together as allies “who would instinctively tear down the carefully built façade of the world until all that was left standing in its place was something thin and ragged and shivery” (33). Paulinha leaves some of his fake Feng Shui performance profits to Devo without telling him and moves to California to have a complete break from his past. Ong’s novel makes visible some of the essential conditions of racial or ethnic minorities that are rendered invisible by the racially stratified American society. It foregrounds divergent material conditions and ideological differences among Asian Americans. As shown through Ong’s text, acknowledging differences among Asian Americans in terms of class, political standing, and social background is not to dismantle racial solidarity. Rather, emphasizing material heterogeneity and divergent ideological views of Asian Americans is part of critical discourse that challenges the assumed racial unity or ethnic commonality projected from the dominant group’s perspective. Whereas claiming Asian American identity was a way of contending with the hegemonic power of the white

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dominant culture, affirming the heterogeneity of Asian Americans could be regarded as an attempt to call attention to the different economic and ideological backgrounds among those of Asian descent in the United States, inviting critical dialogue within the Asian American community, or as David Li calls it, “a radically new way of seeing self and others and a liberating view of social reorganization that was able to challenge the dominant formation of the nation” (192). By disclosing material differences and class stratification among Asian Americans and by disidentifying with Orientalist projections of Asian Americans, Ong’s Fixer Chao evokes a critical debate on the heterogeneity of Asian American identity and uncovers the limits of the current multiculturalism’s superficial understanding of ethnic minorities. Posing an oppositional stance both on the politics of representing racial or ethnic minorities and on the self-perpetuating power structure, Fixer Chao is representative of politically critical Asian American literature.

Notes 1

Koshy in her essay provides statistical information on the demographic changes in Asian descent in the U. S. after immigration laws in 1965: “The passage of the 1965 immigration laws was a result of these combined internal and external pressures. The new laws allowed for an annual quota of 20,000 from each Asian country and the reunification of immediate family members on a non-quota basis. As a result, Asian Americans, who were under 1% of the U.S. population in 1965, increased to 2.8% in 1990, and are projected at 10.1% by 2050, making them the fastest growing minority group in the country. Japanese Americans, who comprised the largest group in 1960 representing 47% of the Asian American population, have declined rapidly to third position in the 1990 Census (11.7%), barely ahead of Asian Indians (11.2%) and Korean Americans (10.9%). Chinese Americans make up the largest group in the 1990 Census (23%), closely followed by Filipino Americans (19%). The influx of newer groups has further diversified the identity of Asian Americans. . . . The arrival of new immigrants after 1965 has transformed the group from a predominantly American-born constituency to a group which is 65% foreign-born. . . . Whereas many of the earlier Chinese, Filipino and Indian immigrants were nonliterate laborers, the new arrivals from these groups include large numbers of middle-class professionals. The incorporation of such diverse groups within the notion of an Asian American identity has proved very difficult since their arrival has profoundly de-stabilized the formation” (321-22). 2 In the milieu of promoting multiculturalism in the 1980s, increasing attention was given to ethnic difference and diversity in society. Multiculturalism, in its original conception, seems to have been perceived as a relatively reformist movement against assimilation’s melting pot ideology, which requires racially and culturally diverse groups of people to blend into the dominant culture of the society (Gordon

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and Newfield, 96). Regardless of whether multiculturalism emerged as an opponent of a monolithic culture or as an alternative to white American society, debate has continued about whether multiculturalism dilutes or disguises racial and political consciousness. This debate revolves around whether the multicultural inclusion of difference is a product of the “state-sponsored” (Lubiano 71) policy or whether an emphasis on cultural diversity tends to reduce immigrants to essentially different ethnic groups and implicitly fosters “cultural separatism” in the name of difference and cultural pluralism (Gordon and Newfield 93). See Avery Gordon and Christopher Newfield, “Multiculturalism’s Unfinished Business” in Mapping Multiculturalism, eds. Avery Gordon and Christopher Newfield (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1996), 93-96. Also, see Wahneema Lubiano, “Like Being Mugged by a Metaphor: Multiculturalism and State Narratives,” in Gordon and Newfield, 71. 3 The portrayal of Asian Americans as a “successful” minority seems to have begun in the mid-1960s by the press, which depicted Japanese Americans who had gone through the harsh racist reality of internment years, but survived through their hard work. The media also used the term “model minority” in order to refer to the “success” that Chinese Americans had achieved without relying on governmental welfare. By focusing on individuals’ efforts to succeed, the image of Asian Americans as a “model minority” has helped American society justify its structural inequality and reaffirm the underlying structure by shifting the minority problem to individuals. See “Success Story of One Minority Group in U. S.” from U. S. News and World Report, December 26, 1966. Requoted in Roots: An Asian American Reader, eds. Amy Tachiki, Eddie Wong, Franklin Odo, and Buck Wong, 6. 4 See Christopher Newfield and Avery Gordon, “Multiculturalism’s Unfinished Business,” 76-115. 5 Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club is an example that shows a faithful response to the mainstream literary market’s demand on Asian American literature. Tan through her text speaks for the white bourgeois’ belief in America as a country where everyone is equally treated as long as they work hard and have qualified skills. Tan boosts the myth of the American dream and reinforces the stereotypical ideology of Asian Americans as a “model minority.” Moreover, the manner in which Tan delivers the stories of four Chinese women seems to be more intended to provide American readers with provocative, consumable, and entertaining cultural stories. Sau-ling Wong thus remarks that Tan’s novel contributes to an “Oriental effect by signaling a reassuring affinity between the given work and American preconceptions of what the Orient is/should be” (187). See Sau-ling Cynthia Wong, “‘Sugar Sisterhood’: Situating the Amy Tan Phenomenon,” in The Ethnic Canon, ed. David Palumbo-Liu (Minneapolis and London: U of Minnesota P, 1996), 187. In effect, Tan’s novel has contributed to commodifying Chinese culture while using her ethnic difference as a strategic marketing tool. 6 Louis Althusser, in his essay “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” defines ideology as “the system of the ideas and representations which dominate the mind of a man or a social group” (107). Althusser explains the way ideology functions as follows: “It [ideology] ‘recruits’ subjects among the individuals (it recruits them all), or ‘transforms’ the individuals into subjects (it transforms them

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all) by that very precise operation which I have called interpellation or hailing, and which can be imagined along the lines of the most commonplace everyday police (or other) hailing: ‘Hey, you there!’” See Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review, 1971), 118. 7 Graham Huggan states that the word “exotic” is commonly misinterpreted, and he defines exoticism as follows: “For the exotic is not, as is often supposed, an inherent quality to be found “in” certain people, distinctive objects, or specific places; exoticism describes, rather, a particular mode of aesthetic perception—one which renders people, objects and places strange even as it domesticates them, and which effectively manufactures otherness even as it claims to surrender to its immanent mystery.” The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), 13. 8 Hsuan Hsu explains that Feng Shui is regarded as “ancient Chinese techniques for selecting the sites of graves, houses, and other important structures as well as Taoist principles set out in the three thousand-year-old I Ching. . . . In the twentieth century, the practice was condemned as a regressive superstition by the modern Chinese state, and then forbidden by ‘the communist state after 1949, with its determination to eradicate all traces of the premodern feudal beliefs that were seen as obstructions to progress.’ . . . In the last few decades it has regained the approval of the Chinese government, and now thrives in cities like Beijing and Shanghai. It was from the urban and largely corporate circles of these East Asian cities that Feng Shui came to Western cities such as Los Angeles and New York in the 1980s and 1990s, largely in the form of immensely popular guidebooks whose subtitles promise ‘the most harmonious arrangement of your home and office,’ ‘a healthier living and working environment,’ and ‘the ancient wisdom of harmonious living for modern times’” (Hsu 690-91). 9 Deborah Root in her book Cannibal Culture provides an insightful explanation on the notion of authenticity. Root notes: “Authenticity is a tricky concept because of the way the term can be manipulated and used to convince people they are getting something profound and substantial when they are just getting merchandise. A marketing expert has decided in advance which variant of difference will sell best and has attempted to promote this version as the most real and desirable. . . . [A]uthenticity is the currency at play in the marketplace of cultural difference. . . .[A]uthenticity does not exist in any absolute, pure form outside the endless debates of academics. No cultural practice is or ever has been totally authentic, fully and seamlessly inserted into a social context in such a way that permits the experience of perfect presence.” See Deborah Root, Cannibal Culture: Art, Appropriation, & the Commodification of Difference (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1996), 78. 10 According to Fish, “boutique multiculturalism is the multiculturalism of ethnic restaurants, weekend festivals, and . . . [it] is characterized by its superficial or cosmetic relations to the objects of its affection. Boutique multiculturalists admire or appreciate or enjoy or sympathize with or (at the very least) “recognize the legitimacy of” the traditions of cultures other than their own; but boutique multiculturalists will always stop short of approving other cultures at a point where some value at their center generates an act that offends against the canons of

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civilized decency as they have been either declared or assumed.” See Stanley Fish, “Boutique Multiculturalism or Why Liberals Are Incapable of Thinking About Hate Speech.” Critical Inquiry 23 (1997): 378.

Works Cited Althusser, Louis. Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. New York: Monthly Review, 1971. Bissoondath, Neil. Selling Illusions. New York: Penguin, 1994. Bonacich, Edna. “The Site of Class.” Privileging Positions: The Sites of Asian American Studies. Ed. Marilyn Alquizola, Dorothy Fujita Rony, Wong Scott, and Gary Okihiro. Pullman: Washington State UP, 1995. 67-74. Bramble, Cate. Architect’s Guide to Feng Shui: Exploding the Myth. Oxford: Architectural, 2003. Chang, Yoonmee. Writing the Ghetto. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2010. Chuh, Kandice. Imagine Otherwise: On Asian Americanist Critique. Durham: Duke UP, 2003. Fish, Stanley. “Boutique Multiculturalism or Why Liberals Are Incapable of Thinking About Hate Speech.” Critical Inquiry 23 (1997): 378-95. Fraser, Nancy. “Equality, Difference, and Radical Democracy.” Radical Democracy. Ed. David Trend. London and New York: Routledge, 1996. 197-208. Gordon, Avery, and Christopher Newfield. “Multiculturalism’s Unfinished Business.” Mapping Multiculturalism. Eds. Avery Gordon and Christopher Newfield. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1996. 76-115. Hsu, Hsuan. “Mimicry, Spatial Captation, and Feng Shui in Han Ong’s Fixer Chao.” Mfs: Modern Fiction Studies 52 (2006): 675-704. Huggan, Graham. The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins. London and New York: Routledge, 2001. Koshy, Susan. “The Fiction of Asian American Literature.” The Yale Journal of Criticism 9.2 (1996): 315-46. Li, David Leiwei. Imagining the Nation: Asian American Literature and Cultural Consent. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998. Lowe, Lisa. Immigrant Acts. Durham and London: Duke UP, 1996. Lubiano, Wahneema. “Like Being Mugged by a Metaphor: Multiculturalism and State Narratives.” Mapping Multiculturalism. Eds. Avery Gordon and Christopher Newfield. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1996. 6475. Maslin, Janet. “Oh, That Cashmere Throw, It’s So-o-o New York, No?” New York Times. 5 April 2001: E9.

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Nguyen, Viet Thanh. Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America. Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 2002. Ong, Han. Fixer Chao. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001. Palumbo-Liu, David. Asian/American: Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999. Root, Deborah. Cannibal Culture: Art, Appropriation, & the Commodification of Difference. Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1996. Tachiki, Amy, Eddie Wong, Franklin Odo, and Buck Wong, eds. “Success Story of One Minority Group in U. S.” U. S. News and World Report, December 26, 1966. Roots: An Asian American Reader. California: The Regents of the University of California, 1971. 5-11. Takaki, Ronald. Strangers from a Different Shore. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1989. Tan, Amy. The Joy Luck Club. New York: Ivy Books, 1989. Ty, Eleanor. “Abjection, Masculinity, and Violence in Brian Roley’s American Son and Han Ong’s Fixer Chao.” Transnational Asian American Literature: Sites and Transits. Eds. Shirley Lim, Johan Gamber, Stephen Sohn, and Gina Valentino. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2006. 142-58. Wong, Sau-ling Cynthia. “‘Sugar Sisterhood’: Situating the Amy Tan Phenomenon.” The Ethnic Canon. Ed. David Palumbo-Liu. Minneapolis and London: U of Minnesota P, 1996. 174-210.

CHAPTER SIX LAWSON FUSAO INADA, WEST COAST JAZZ, AND THE POLITICS OF IDENTITY FORMATION SHAWN P. HOLLIDAY

Throughout his career, Sansei poet Lawson Fusao Inada has most often been read in two contexts, either as Japanese American poet or as Western American poet, the latter of which dominates scholarly discussion since his work appears in no less than five Western American Literature anthologies1 and since he has lived on the west coast almost his entire life. Despite this “western” pedigree, which includes an M. F. A. from the University of Oregon, editorial work for the Northwest Review, and first book publication in 3 Northwest Poets, Inada ignores West Coast Jazz and its influence on American music by embracing a jazz canon that denies the innovations of West Coast players. While Juliana Chang argues that “Inada’s jazz poetics is a site of cross-racial identification that enables us to think beyond the centering of whiteness” (153), his embrace of oppositional racial politics ignores his teenage life, an important part of his personal development. In essence, West Coast Jazz provided the opposition by which Inada found his unique identity as a Japanese American poet in adulthood. For allowing Inada to embrace his “otherness” in order to find his voice, West Coast Jazz and its influence should not be underestimated. On November 8, 1954, West Coast Jazz received mainstream acknowledgement when pianist Dave Brubeck became the first (and only) white jazz musician to appear on the cover of Time magazine. Although Brubeck was the main focus of the six-page story, the editors used him largely as a symbol to represent a new subgenre of “modern” jazz developing on America’s West Coast, one that was cool and intellectual, played mostly by whites (“The Man” 67). While the article briefly touches on Brubeck’s classical training with Darius Milhaud at Mills College and his business acumen for helping to create Fantasy Records, it continually stresses Brubeck’s childhood years growing up on his father’s ranch in

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Concord, California, as if his experience as a young cattleman granted him a “western” pedigree his musical counterparts somehow lacked, a characteristic that supposedly made his music “ruggedly individual” as well (74). Although references to such other white jazz musicians as Stan Kenton, Chet Baker, Shorty Rogers, Stan Getz, and Gerry Mulligan appear scattered throughout the article, it is Brubeck who most easily fits the stereotype of the masculine western male by which Time promotes the growing West Coast Jazz movement. Celebrating Brubeck’s strong cowboy hands, which it notes he sometimes used to berate a loud customer who rudely interrupted his playing (67), Time masculinizes the piano player in order to combat the accusation by critics that the West Coast sound was not a legitimate form of jazz since it was too far removed from the “slave chants, work songs,” and funeral marches where the genre first originated (67). In their view, West Coast Jazz was too cerebral, unemotional, and academic and its players too privileged, educated, and effeminate to stay true to the music’s original protest-driven aesthetic. By putting a white musician on its cover in the midst of the bebop era, Time further alienated critics of West Coast Jazz by catapulting Brubeck to superstardom while other, perhaps more deserving, African-American musicians2 continued to languish in obscurity. This move fueled the growing accusation that West Coast Jazz was a fabricated movement through which record companies used the media to glamorize West Coast players in an attempt to tap a consumer base that missed the days of swing music and yearned for an alternative to bebop.3 An easy way to promote Brubeck was to market him as a modern-day cowboy, a ready-made, mythical image easily identified with by white America. In one of his earliest published poems, “Bandstand,” Japanese American poet Lawson Fusao Inada rails against a similarly manufactured product, teenage popular music, another genre that business executives manipulate for acceptable middle-class consumption. Throughout the satirical poem, he criticizes the superficiality of the mid-1950s show.4 He sneers at seemingly conservative Dick Clark,5 “every mother’s son” (3 Northwest 32), who, behind the scenes, “struts it into the men’s room // for a smoke […] to ponder whether to get a new / tattoo” (33). He also derides the white teenagers who “have been carefully screened” not for their dancing ability but for their “best angles” while the African-American kids in Philadelphia are barred entrance, segregated from the sanitized screen (32). To re-enforce the show’s blatant commercialization, he includes a stanza about a toothpaste ad (33), which covers behind-the-scenes payola deals and off-screen politics with inoffensive bourgeois images. Inada seems most bothered, however, by the show’s title, which intentionally co-

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opts jazz in order to lend it cultural legitimacy. While Bandstand may have used the new medium of television to bring contemporary pop music to homes throughout the country, it was a far cry from the outdoor stages where big bands performed when they first brought jazz to rural American towns decades earlier. Similarly, much of the problem Lawson Inada has with West Coast Jazz is its savvy marketing, which unintentionally acted as a testing ground for corporate music before rock and roll hit with full force in 1955.6 Even though most West Coast artists recorded for such small record labels as Contemporary, Fantasy, and World Pacific, their music received promotion through the companies’ intentional opposition to East Coast images. For the most part, West Coast companies relied upon “image advertising” by which scantily clad females, sunny California beaches, and close-up shots of immigrant faces replaced the shoddy club performance pictures that appeared on most East Coast album covers (Gioia 195-96).7 As Inada himself notes, “[…] there is certainly something else there besides the music […] a kind of hip but acceptable whiteness, suits and ties, the prominent ivy league look [….] so well-packaged, well-promoted, very readily available. Very accessible music, ‘cool,’ well-groomed, and very white. Eisenhower era, conformity, pre-civil rights” (Inada, Letter 3 Aug.). To Inada, West Coast Jazz is comparable, in many ways, to what he calls “ivy league folk,” another genre of fabricated music coming to prominence in the mid-to-late-’50s, which “just goes to show what marketing ‘image’ can do. . .while West Coast Jazz musicians were bonafide musicians, ‘folk singers’ were not folk—and, hey, the buying public believed it, preferred it that way. [It was] like buttoned-down, ‘collegiate Appalachia’!—lite n’ ultra-white” (Letter 3 Aug.). While such conservative images may have had little to do with traditional notions of jazz, they did guarantee notice from a broad-based buying public, which West Coast labels intended. As a result, West Coast Jazz was unavoidable for a teenager growing up in California during the Eisenhower era. While attending West Fresno’s Edison High School during the early ’50s, Inada could not help but fall under the spell of the West Coast sound, especially since jazz served as the “lingua franca” among the different ethnic kids on the city’s west side (Inada, Legends 57). Even though he had listened to jazz ever since hearing Duke Ellington’s “Mood Indigo” wafting out of a neighbor’s stall while imprisoned in a Japanese American internment camp as a young child (Inada, Letter 3 Oct.), West Coast Jazz dominated his “impressionable” high school years since he and his friends, most of whom were African American and Latino, bought into the hip, “cool”

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image continually pushed by record companies.8 Chet Baker’s “Look for the Silver Lining” even served as Edison High’s 1955 graduating class song (Inada, Letter 24 July). Looking back at himself as a teenager, Inada admits that West Coast Jazz gave me vision, inspiration, aspiration—touched my spirit, so it was […] crucial in my “identity formation.” Expanding me beyond what I was, supposedly, where I was or what I was supposed to be, become [….] Most of my friends couldn’t “see” themselves, envision themselves in the white world of college, so they went into the service; and those that did attend college had to think J. O. B., practical, whereas I could afford to “dabble” in (say what?) English. (Letter 4 Aug.)

Even though West Coast Jazz served as a catalyst by which Inada envisioned himself as a student attending Fresno State College, which allowed him to cross racial lines into more fashionable East Fresno, his academic training eventually turned him against this sub-genre of music for its “lite” status among true jazz aficionados, poets and musicians alike. By embracing East Coast bop artists later on in his poetic career, Inada was able to reconstruct a childhood for himself that embraced the ethos of East Coast, African American jazz. This transformation lent him an identity by which he could align himself with the improvisationally gifted African American elite that ignored the commercially driven formulas of the music industry’s dominant white culture. At its most basic level, then, Inada was able to oppose the capitalism of white culture by embracing the traditions, protests, and musical “chops” evident in African American jazz. For his sophomore year, Inada left provincial Fresno State to attend the University of California at Berkeley. While this was a sound move academically, he actually transferred to live closer to San Francisco,9 a major hub of the West Coast Jazz scene. When he moved to Berkeley in September 1956, he found a cheap room in a boarding house, bought “a microwave-sized hi-fi for $90,” caught the “‘E’ train to cross the Bay,” and set up unofficial residence at The Blackhawk club, where his “real” education began (Inada, Letter 7 Aug.; Holliday 15). For a 90-cent cover charge, Inada heard a mixture of jazz that ranged from Dave Brubeck and Chet Baker to Philly Joe Jones and Dinah Washington. Often, he learned as much about the differences between East Coast and West Coast players from audience members as he did performers. As he recounts, one “pivotal moment” in his education occurred when he sat at the same table as “a couple of young black women” (Letter 7 Aug.). They gave him a lesson on trumpet players right before the start of a Chet Baker set, the nineteenyear-old’s turtleneck and sport coat a dead giveaway to his supposed West Coast “cool.” As he recounts, the two felt he needed schooling on the

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differences between white Baker and black Miles Davis. They did not think twice about setting him straight since Inada appeared all image and no substance himself: “Where you from?” “Uh, I’m from here.” (Not about to say countrified Fresno.) “So you dig Chet?” “Yeah, I dig Chet. And I hope he sings.” (Which he didn’t.) “Yeah, he’s cool. But who else do you dig on trumpet?” “Roy Eldridge.” “You mean you don’t dig MILES DAVIS?” “Uh, well, sure I dig Miles Davis.” (From having seen his name listed on my one Charlie Parker 78!)10 “Cause, I mean, you know, Chet gets all his stuff from Miles.” “Well, yeah. Sure. Mmm hmm.” (By now, I’m shook, because this chick is tweaking my armor of hipness—and who does she think she is?) [….] I was so pissed at myself that I split after one set (Chet, Bobby Timmons on piano) because first thing next morning I was gonna get me some Miles Davis—the two 10-inch LPs of Bags’ Groove sitting in a Berkeley store. (Letter 7 Aug.)

Even though such personal affronts occur naturally with any type of education, Inada’s self-perception was shaken to its core. After a few more months of woodshedding at The Blackhawk, where he listened to double bills featuring music that ranged from swing and bebop to third stream and hard bop, Inada experienced a full-blown identity crisis concerning the type of jazz fan he was until a single encounter with a famous singer pointed him in a new direction, a path he would follow for the rest of his life. On a Friday night in late spring 1957, Inada sat in the crowd at The Blackhawk when, suddenly, the most beautiful woman he had ever seen appeared onstage and began to sing “I Only Have Eyes For You.” As he writes about her set, […] I remember each song distinctly. But. To this very day, and try as I might, I can not recall any, if any, accompaniment! And, yes, I came back, had to, several times during finals week […] I’m telling you, man—Lady Day made everybody else disappear! Talk about transfixing, transforming! I’m still recovering! (Letter 7 Aug.)

After a series of nights listening to her, Inada finally worked up enough nerve to ask Billie Holiday for her autograph, a request she graciously obliged. In the foggy cold outside of the club, she touched his hand, used his “funky” pen to sign his book, and commented on the beauty

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of his name, “Lawson.” Later that night, on his fire escape back in Berkeley, Inada wrote his first poem, a tribute to her11 (Legends 58; Letter 7 Aug.). That proved the single most important night of his life. Lawson Fusao Inada had become a poet. Even though he may have found his life’s vocation, Inada’s late nights at The Blackhawk listening to Lady Day didn’t help his GPA, which plummeted after he bombed finals in Philosophy, German, World History, Chaucer, Modern Drama, and ROTC (Letter 7 Aug.). Finding him on academic probation, his parents forced him back to Fresno State, away from San Francisco’s jazz scene. Inada didn’t care much, however, since he now steeped himself in poetry with his first literary mentor, Phil Levine, a formalist “taskmaster on metrics, scansion” and “tradition” (Letter 15 Jan.), who also unofficially tutored the greenhorn on the history of jazz—its lineage, influences, and family tree. With Levine, Inada learned about Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Lester Young, contemporary musicians who left fingerprints on everyone who followed. For his class, Inada also wrote his first “official” poem, “a work about Charlie Parker written in traditional iambic pentameter couplets” (“A Letter” 28), which speaks volumes about Inada’s undergraduate naïveté by writing about bebop’s founder in such a strict, conventional form. Apparently, Levine’s use of colloquial diction, his poetic strength, had not yet rubbed off on the would-be poet. In his two years with Levine, however, Inada did develop an artist-centered aesthetic that denied the importance of West Coast Jazz and its image-conscious ethic. Instead, Inada turned to working-class, black East Coast Jazz, which provided him with a persona, a voice, and a method he would utilize for the rest of his literary career, creating “an alternative kinship” that allowed him to “rearticulate his subject position” as an ethnic American (Chang 151). More than anything, his chance encounter with Billie Holiday and his study with Phil Levine, a Jewish American, enabled Inada “to speak what would otherwise remain unspoken or unspeakable” as a professional poet (154), namely the trauma of living in the Japanese American internment camps during World War II, the experience of living as a Sansei who is culturally dislocated from his Issei and Nisei forebears, and the problems of living as a minority in a nation openly hostile to people of color. His preferred moniker of “camp poet” not only “was a self-imposed categorization, as opposed to and as meant to counter those imposed by the dominant white society” similar to the collective term African American (Eyerman 77), but it also served as a position through which Inada could confront the trauma of internment by privileging the Japanese American perspective, the minority’s viewpoint.

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After graduating from Fresno State in 1959 with a B.A. in English, Inada spent 1960-62 studying at the University of Iowa’s Writer’s Workshop and 1962-65 teaching as an English instructor at the University of New Hampshire. During his apprenticeship years, West Coast Jazz reached its pinnacle of commercial success. Dave Brubeck’s “Take Five” (1961), Stan Getz’s “Desafinado” (1962) and “The Girl From Ipanema” (1964), and Vince Guaraldi’s “Cast Your Fate to the Wind” (1963) all hit the Top 25 on Billboard’s singles chart,12 bringing jazz to a larger, more mainstream audience than it had enjoyed since World War II. In 1965, Guaraldi also provided the soundtrack to the first Peanuts televison special, A Charlie Brown Christmas, which gave many American children their first taste of jazz. By this time, however, Inada no longer bought records by West Coast artists. It wasn’t the hip thing to do among serious jazz listeners. Instead, he bought more experimental, avant-garde forms of jazz that also preached social change. Thelonius Monk, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and Charles Mingus began to appear on his turntable. As students at the University of Iowa, Inada and fellow poet Michael S. Harper shared a heating duct through which they could hear each other type, so it became tradition for the first one who woke to put on Davis’s “Blue Dolphin Street” and make coffee to get each other’s creative juices flowing (Inada, Letter 29 Aug.). In an era dominated by conservative English departments stuck within New Critical hermeneutics and an exclusive white canon, such African American musicians lent Inada, Harper, and other young ethnic writers a voice to combat being misrepresented, ignored, and disparaged by dominant white culture. Thus Inada’s growing acceptance of negritude not only lent him an aesthetic by which to reinterpret the cultural trauma of being imprisoned in the Japanese American internment camps but also allowed him to fuse his split identity of being both Asian and American by embracing a new “black” American identity. Bop’s experimentation also fueled Inada’s desire to search out and read such little-known writers as Richard Wright, Robert Hayden, Kenneth Rexroth, Pablo Neruda, and Ananzi (Salisbury 66–67), all of whom influenced the protest poems in Inada’s first book, Before the War: Poems as They Happened (1971). In an ironic twist, while Brubeck had helped bring jazz to college, such young academics as Inada turned their backs on him for his growing acceptance in pop music, which gained West Coast Jazz the reputation of being “lite,”13 synonymous with the worst elements of low culture. As such, musicians and critics alike marginalized West Coast players for their supposed inability to “swing” and their seeming refusal to experiment, thus creating a jazz canon as exclusionary as the literary one

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but with the racial binaries reversed. In a telegram sent in 1956, bandleader Stan Kenton charged Down Beat magazine with reverse racism for its obvious championing of East Coast players in its annual critics’ poll (Ratliff 81). In the 1956 Encyclopedia of Jazz, which includes the very first “musicians’ musicians poll” where players named both “new stars” and the “greatest ever” (Feather 56), such West Coast luminaries as Dave Brubeck, Paul Desmond, Chet Baker, Short Rogers, Jimmy Giuffre, Lenny Niehaus, and Stan Kenton are noticeably absent.14 At the bottom of his copy on page 60, Inada ranks his own choices for “best ever.” Of the twenty-seven names he lists, no West Coast artist appears (Inada, Letter 18 Aug.). The West Coast musicians who meant so much to Inada as a teenager had been replaced by African-American giants in a burgeoning canon where inclusion was based as much on race as on musical ingenuity and instrumental skill.15 Subsequently, the cohesiveness of this group and its fans attracted Inada as much as the superior musicianship and growing oppositional politics. While finishing up his M. F. A. degree at the University of Oregon from 1965 through 1966, Inada used hard bop to reinvent himself as a poet and African-American culture to revitalize contemporary American literature. Both lent him a voice that canonical writers did not by providing a poetic philosophy that allowed him to reimagine, restage, and rework his troubled past (Chang 136). Throughout his thesis, The Great Bassist, Inada privileges ethnic experience and pushes bourgeois white culture to the margin by focusing on ethnic people and their difficult experiences: Japanese American internees, immigrant field hands and factory workers, Southern freedom riders, inner-city rioters, and strung-out jazz musicians. Late in the volume, he even denies the importance of Hart Crane, America’s first jazz poet, by writing THE BEST THING in my Hart Crane book is a tiny spider, unedited, unrhymed, on page three. Smashed. He talks to me. (134)

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While the spider is literally crushed by the weight of the book, Inada feels figuratively “smashed” by the weight of a white canon. He illustrates this disenfranchisement through short lines, monosyllabic words, and rough enjambment that symbolize separation and alienation from an imposed literary tradition. The broken, hyphenated words “un-edited” and “un-rhymed” represent his hyphenated identity as Japanese (-) American, a racial self nonexistent in Crane’s poems and other canonical work at this time. In response, he refuses to engage in intertextuality with the modernist. To combat this feeling of powerlessness further, Inada intentionally subverts white culture throughout his creative thesis, flipping the binaries that underlie Western literary tradition. He compares Shakespeare to tenor saxophonist Lester Young (126); writes poems about the poetic splendors of musicians John Coltrane (51), Ornette Coleman (69-70), Charlie Parker (79), and The Modern Jazz Quartet (132);16 and mourns the passing of Malcolm X, with whom he compares his oppressive experiences, vowing to slide “[…] out of that stinking hole, / knowing the validity of shit!” in order to create art in spite of the current impoverished Japanese American literary tradition (110). The only way Inada can escape from the metaphorical white snow that continually numbs the “creatures of excavation” is by writing in defiant “red ink” (21, 98), challenging those who deny a plural representation of races, colors, and voices. Like Bud Powell’s bebop piano work, Inada uses his poetry to chase rainbows with all their different colors (21). Since jazz is rooted in the “racial trauma” of African American slavery, segregation, and ongoing prejudice (Chang 135), it makes sense that Inada adapts this pliable musical form to create a cultural and poetic space where he may depict experiences unique to Japanese Americans. Subsequently, Inada denigrates West Coast Jazz throughout his thesis since it didn’t lend him an aesthetic by which he could develop a voice outside of white poetry and an incentive to discover works written by earlier ethnic writers. As he contends, West Coast Jazz […] is just too lite, derivative—of Pres,17 Miles, Bud Powell […] It’s astonishing to realize how many LPs came out of the West in just those few years; it’s like America was waiting to feel good, in an e-z listenin’ “jazzy” kinda way—yeah, “cool, man,” “modern,” even “collegiate,” and as G. E. appliance ads said on TV, “Progress is our most important product,” another term was “progressive jazz”!18 Good ol’ sunny L.A.! [….] it’s damned near unimaginable to think of [Thelonius] Monk “cruisin’ L.A.,” much less on some beach in shorts, and maybe he never owned a short-sleeved shirt! And while Monk could by witty, extremely whimsical, joyously light-hearted, he could never be “lite,” just wasn’t in his system. (Letter 14 Aug.)

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Even though Inada denies its relevance here more on musical than racial grounds, West Coast Jazz could definitely be inventive. From 194565, the twenty-year span now considered the genre’s heyday, Dave Brubeck introduced a new array of unusual time signatures into jazz, being one of the first to lead an integrated quartet (Gioia 98);19 Chet Baker created a “low-key,” whispered vocal style known for its “use of understatement and its relaxed identity” that opposed the predominant virtuoso approach of Ella Fitzgerald and Dinah Washington (181); Gerry Mulligan headed the first piano-less quartet, which toyed with the dynamics of chamber music (Ratliff 85); and Stan Getz introduced Brazilian bossa nova and bilingual lyrics into American popular music.19 However, as Inada made clear with Frank Chin, Jeffery Chan, and Shawn Wong, his co-editors of the groundbreaking Asian American literature anthology Aiiieeeee! (1974), Asian American writers had to look to “black culture” for a method by which to invent an Asian American identity that combated a total “lack of presence in American culture,” “American” being synonymous with “white” (Chin et al. xxv, xxxi). As they write in the introduction to Aiiieeeee!: American language, fashions, music, literature, cuisine, graphics, body language, morals, and politics have been strongly influenced by Black culture. They have been cultural achievers, in spite of white supremacist culture, whereas Asian America’s reputation is an achievement of that white culture—a work of racist art. (xxv)

In order for Inada to write from a voice free from racist expectation, free from an effeminate “oriental” stereotype, and free from the cliché that Japanese Americans had actually “outwhited” the whites (xxii),21 he looked to his African American contemporaries in jazz, all of whom also felt dislocated from dominant culture but nevertheless formed a distinct body of work that celebrated its own heritage and tradition while simultaneously championing sophistication and innovation. His orally centered performance poetry mirrors the black musicians’ use of performance to “engender themselves within the American experience […] to redefine the historical condition of black life” (Diawara 209), one that had grown out of slavery.22 Like Charles Mingus,23 the “great bassist” of Inada’s M. F. A. thesis who wondered if a minority artist could actually be well respected in America (Santoro 41), Inada constructs a poetic mask that rewrites Japanese American experiences, exhumes long forgotten works by earlier Issei and Nisei writers, and confronts dominant white culture through the practice of oppositional poetics. Indeed, Inada’s first published book of poetry, Before the War, documents this search for a

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unique racial voice as part of the culture wars being waged in America during the late 1960s, published just as major universities were formally establishing Black Studies departments. As a poet, he was “certainly motivated by the movements and assumed leadership roles in communities and on campuses” (Letter 31 Jan.), an ethic of responsibility that continues to play an important part in his work today. While Legends from Camp (1993) and Drawing the Line (1997), Inada’s last two books of poetry, show a less militant side of the poet, Inada still ignores West Coast musicians some twenty years after the publication of Before the War. In “Jazz,” Legend from Camp’s second longest section, Inada writes a series of poems that examine the connections between music and poetry, their similar use of sound, technique, and improvisation as performance art. In these, he still clings to the concept of négritude, which allows him to use African American musicians and their artistic aesthetic as models for his constructed poetic voice. Included are poems about Mal Waldron,24 Thelonius Monk, Louis Armstrong, Lester Young, Billie Holiday, Charlie Parker, Bud Powell, and John Coltrane. Still absent are the white West Coast musicians that played such an important role in the poet’s more innocent teenage years. Even in the “monumental totem” listed at the end of “Listening Images,” where Inada nods to such minor figures as Gene Ammons, Don Byas, Wardell Gray, and Hank Mobley (71), no major West Coast figure appears. These absences speak to the long, painful process Inada had to go through to appropriate other voices to combat white stereotypes. Subsequently, this successful syncretism finally allowed Inada to convey his distinct experiences and identity as a Japanese American by identifying with the culture of African Americans. In all, blacks laid a template by which Inada could find his own voice.

Notes 1

See specifically David Kherdian’s and James Baloian’s Down at the Santa Fe Depot: 20 Fresno Poets (1970); William Stafford’s Modern Poetry of the American West (1975); Bob Peterson and Mayumi Tsutakawa’s Edge Walking on the Western Rim: New Works by 12 Northwest Poets (1994); and Martha Ronk’s and Paul Vangelisti’s Place as Purpose: Poetry from the Western States (2002). 2 Even though Louis Armstrong’s 1949 cover story was the first to feature a jazz musician, many critics saw Brubeck’s appearance on Time’s cover as a deliberate slight by the conservative establishment against the more experimental African American artists performing at the time (Gioia 67). Brubeck’s article seemed even more absurd to critics and musicians when Charlie Parker, the founder of bebop who influenced countless imitators, died penniless four months later without

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commercial or popular recognition. After Brubeck, only two more jazz artists appeared on Time’s cover: Duke Ellington in 1956 and Thelonius Monk in 1964, both African-American. 3 By the early 1950s, many white Americans derided bebop for ruining jazz. Its aggressive baroque approach stood in marked contrast to the melodic focus of 1930s swing bands, thus marking the beginning of the end of popular jazz for middle America. 4 Bandstand first aired on Philadelphia’s WFIL-TV on October 7, 1952, its tiny studio located at the intersection of 46th and Market Street on the city’s west side (“American Bandstand” 1; Hansing 2). Although the producers allowed African American performers to appear, usually during the end credits (Hansing 10), they did not allow black teenagers to dance even though they made up a large percentage of west Philadelphia’s racially mixed population (4). In order to make rock and roll more acceptable to mainstream America, the white dancers adhered to a strict, conservative dress code: “the males were expected to wear a coat and tie, and the girls were not allowed to wear shorts” (3). Since the show aired immediately after school, some of the teenagers even appeared on screen still dressed in their Catholic school uniforms (3). Typical of the 1950s, such “delinquent” behaviors as chewing gum and dancing suggestively were strongly prohibited on screen as well (8). 5 Dick Clark became host of Bandstand in July1956 after Bob Horn, the first host, was arrested for drunk driving (Hansing 2). One year later, ABC picked up the show and renamed it American Bandstand. Subsequently, the network moved its location from Philadelphia to Los Angeles in 1964 since the city was quickly becoming the business center for rock and roll (“American Bandstand” 1). 6 I’m using 1955 as the start date of the rock era since Billboard magazine earmarks Bill Haley’s cover of Big Joe Turner’s “(We’re Gonna) Rock Around the Clock” as the first rock and roll record to hit #1. Ironically, Haley’s churning electric sound was derived from jazz saxophonist Louis Jordan whose producer, Milt Gabler, also produced Haley’s records. “Rock Around the Clock” resulted when Gabler encouraged Haley to cop Jordan’s sound, which helped to cement the popular decline of jazz (Ratliff 43). 7 For a parody of West Coast album covers, see Sonny Rollins’s Way Out West, which shows the saxophonist dressed in a cowboy outfit surrounded by sand, sagebrush, and cacti, his saxophone cocked and ready for action. 8 As a teenager, Inada bought no fewer than ten albums by West Coast artists, including four by Dave Brubeck and at least one each by Gene Norman, Gerry Mulligan, Chet Baker, and Lee Konitz (Inada, Letter 3 Aug.). 9 According to The Oxford English Dictionary, the March 6, 1913, edition of The San Francisco Bulletin is the second documented source to replace the sexually connoted “jass” with the more innocent neologism “jazz.” The latter became the dominant spelling and pronunciation used throughout the country by the mid1920s. 10 In the introduction to Legends from Camp’s third section, “Jazz,” Inada recalls hearing of Charlie Parker’s death from a fellow student while sitting in Mr.

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Bramblett’s senior civics class, remarking “that was our civics lesson for the day” (58). If this remembrance isn’t fictionally created, Inada assigns importance to it post hoc since he owned only one Charlie Parker LP as late as his sophomore year in college. (Re)constructing this event allows Inada to present himself as a hip teenager whose early years were more influenced by bebop than they actually were. Since bebop reacted directly against the supposed minstrelsy of swing music, such allusions allow Inada to offer an alternative to Mr. Bramblett’s master narrative and his own identity formation. 11 For more on this meeting, see the liner notes to Lady Day: The Complete Billie Holiday on Columbia (Letter 7 Aug.). 12 On Billboard’s singles chart, “Take Five” reached #25, “Desafinado” #15, “The Girl from Ipanema” #5, and “Cast Your Fate to the Wind” #22 (Whitburn 48, 123, 128). 13 Of course, the word “lite,” which means “simple,” also puns on the white skin color of most West Coast musicians. 14 Stan Getz, Gerry Mulligan, Shelly Manne, and Cal Tjader, however, do appear on the list. Of the four, Mulligan received the most votes with 21 out of 101 ballots cast, earning him second place in the “greatest ever” baritone sax category (Feather 56). 15 The jazz canon is not only constructed by race but also by gender. Unlike classical and operatic vocalists that are categorized by vocal range, jazz singers are divided by sex: male and female. 16 In his thesis, Inada dedicates one poem to white jazz musician Bill Evans (145), who is best known today for his work on Miles Davis’s popular Kind of Blue (1959) and his own Grammy-winning Conversations with Myself (1963). 17 Denying the important role of derivation and influence that enabled jazz to grow into a serious art form, tenor saxophonist Lester Young said of Stan Getz, “There’s a guy who’s driving a Cadillac on money from the way I play” (qtd. in Priestly 92). This statement deprecates West Coast players despite the fact that Young had countless post-war imitators both white and black. While Young was nicknamed “Pres” by Billie Holiday because of his originality and importance, Getz was known as “The Sound” for his beautiful, rich tone. 18 Composer and bandleader Stan Kenton coined the term “progressive jazz” to classify his idiosyncratic and complexly arranged harmonic orchestrations that actively fused jazz with classical music, of which the conceptual City of Glass (1948) is a good example. 19 While Charlie Parker is credited with using bebop to stretch jazz from 2/4 to 4/4 time in the 1940s, Brubeck is rarely applauded for his attempt to expand jazz past the clichéd 4/4 time signature of the 1950s. His albums Time Out (1960), Time Further Out (1961), Countdown: Time Out in Outer Space (1962), Time Changes (1964), and Time In (1965) include compositions in a wide range of meters not found in jazz at the time: 3/4; 5/4; 6/4; 7/8; 8/8; and 9/8. 20 Getz’s commercial success came when he collaborated with Brazilians João and Astrud Gilberto, whose bossa nova singing styles borrowed heavily from Chet Baker’s breathy, whispered delivery (Gioia 181), of which “The Girl from Ipanema” and “Desafinado” are examples.

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21

Here, Chin et al. take issue with a 1971 Newsweek article entitled “Success Story: Outwhiting the Whites,” which quotes sociologist William Peterson as claiming, “by any criteria of good citizenship that we choose […] the JapaneseAmericans are better than any other group in our society, including native born whites” (24). Angered by such outdated, racist thinking, the editors of Aiiieeeee! directly oppose the clichéd white stereotypes of the “good” Asian by embracing the thriving African-American and Latino subcultures that challenge white cultural supremacy by refusing assimilation into the dominant culture. 22 Inada’s fondness for performance poetry also derives from jazz musicians’ preference for live music. Unlike pop musicians who spend large amounts of studio time creating a carefully crafted manufactured product, jazz musicians often view recorded performance as mere advertisements for their live performances where ingenious experimentation and spontaneous inspiration create a new work for different audiences nightly. For examples of Inada’s jazz-influenced performance poetry, see “…I Told You So” in The Buddha Bandits Down Highway 99 (1978) and the “Performance” section in Legends from Camp (1993). 23 Even though Mingus Ah Um (1959) was one of Charles Mingus’s most critically and commercially successful albums, the first he recorded for Columbia Records (Priestley 102), Inada criticizes it for the bandleader’s choice of personnel: “that Mingus group had some bad people, white dudes [Willie] Dennis, [Jimmy] Knepper” (Letter 14 Aug.). 24 In mid-January 1987, pianist Mal Waldron visited the campus of Southern Oregon University, where Inada has taught since 1966. Waldron put on a show for faculty, staff, and students and jammed with Inada. Inada read his poems and Waldron accompanied on piano. Both improvised. In mid-October 1988, Waldron visited SOU’s campus again, this time with alto saxophonist Marion Brown in tow (Letter 16 Aug.).

Works Cited Alexander, Jeffrey C., et al. Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity. Berkeley: U of California P, 2004. “American Bandstand.” http://www.fiftiesweb.com/bandstnd.htm 23 June 2012. Chang, Juliana. “Time, Jazz, and the Racial Subject: Lawson Inada’s Jazz Poetics.” Racing and (E)Racing Language. Ed. Ellen J. Goldner and Safiya Henderson-Holmes. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 2001. 134-54. Chin, Frank, et al, eds. Aiiieeeee!: An Anthology of Asian-American Writers. 1974. Washington, D.C.: Howard UP, 1983. Diawara, Manthia. “Cultural Studies/Black Studies.” Henderson 202-11. Eyerman, Ron. “Cultural Trauma: Slavery and the Formation of African American Identity.” Alexander 60-111. Feather, Leonard. The Encyclopedia Yearbook of Jazz, 1956. New York: Horizon, 1956.

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Gioia, Ted. West Coast Jazz: Modern Jazz in California, 1945-1960. Berkeley: U of California P, 1992. Hansing, Maggie. “‘American Bandstand’ and West Philadelphia: A Teaching Experience at West Philadelphia High School.” 5 March 1997. http://www.upenn.edu/ccp/Ford/WPhila_AmerBandstand.html, 7 Feb. 2004. Henderson, Mae G., ed. Borders, Boundaries, and Frames: Cultural Criticism and Cultural Studies. New York: Routledge, 1995. —. “Introduction: Borders, Boundaries, and Frame(work)s.” Henderson 130. Hentoff, Nat. “Jazz Fills Role of Classical Compositions, Brubeck Learns.” Down Beat 21 (1954): 2. Holliday, Shawn. Lawson Fusao Inada. Western Writers Series #160. Boise: Boise State U, 2003. Inada, Lawson Fusao. 3 Northwest Poets. With Albert Drake and Douglas Lawder. Madison, Wis.: Quixote, 1970. —. “A Letter to the Editor, July 28, 1993.” Amerasia Journal 20.3 (1994): 27-30. —. Before the War: Poems as They Happened. New York: Morrow, 1971. —. “The Great Bassist.” M. F. A. thesis. U of Oregon, 1966. —. Legends from Camp. Minneapolis: Coffee House, 1992. —. Letter to the author. 15 Jan. 2003. —. Letter to the author. 31 Jan. 2003. —. Letter to the author. 24 July 2003. —. Letter to the author. 3 Aug. 2003. —. Letter to the author. 4 Aug. 2003. —. Letter to the author. 7 Aug. 2003. —. Letter to the author. 14 Aug. 2003. —. Letter to the author. 16 Aug. 2003. —. Letter to the author. 18 Aug. 2003. —. Letter to the author. 29 Aug. 2003. —. Letter to the author. 3 Oct. 2003. “The Man on Cloud No. 7.” Time 8 Nov. 1954: 67+. Priestley, Brian. Mingus: A Critical Biography. New York: Da Capo, 1982. Ratliff, Ben. Jazz: A Critic’s Guide to the 100 Most Important Recordings. New York: Times, 2002. Salisbury, Ralph. “Dialogue with Lawson Fusao Inada.” Northwest Review 20.2-3 (1982): 60-75. Santoro, Gene. Myself When I Am Real: The Life and Music of Charles Mingus. New York: Oxford, 2000.

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“Success Story: Outwhiting the Whites.” Newsweek 21 June 1971: 24-25. Whitburn, Joel. The Billboard Book of Top 40 Hits, 1955 to the Present. New York: Billboard, 1983.

PART III: BLACK MALES AND THE SELF

CHAPTER SEVEN APPROPRIATE BLACKNESS: OREO DREAMS DEFERRED IN CHARLES FULLER’S A SOLDIER’S PLAY CLAUDE WILKINSON

As a preface to his second poetry collection, Belly Song and Other Poems, Etheridge Knight includes a letter detailing his 1968 parole to one addressed simply as “Lady.” The parole board is described as being “made up of five men: three ofays, one super/black anglo saxon, and another black who at least wears a mustache, and who is Chairman of the Board. (Oowee, baby, you talking bout tight game!—place a Black as puppet/head and then who can claim that brothers ain’t getting a fair shake?)” (14). Implicit in Knight’s statement are two dated, though extant, stereotypical indictments against even stylistic or occupational individualism among blacks. That is to say, according to Knight, to be appropriately black, men must not have a clean-shaven face, and no blacks must seek or accept executive positions of employment. Otherwise, they are guilty of merely appropriating blackness. As obviously contradictory as this ideology may seem to the purpose of civil rights struggles during the decades of the 1950s and 1960s devoted to individual liberty and equality, black revolutionary factions were issuing their own dictatorial manifestoes regarding the formation of an ostensibly automatous black society subject to the will of its self-appointed governors. Though activism, oftentimes in its most aggressive forms, has benefited blacks throughout the quest for justice, black nationalists’ virulent requirement for a uniform cultural perspective is not only antithetical to the liberationism that they claim to support, but it also assumes similarly disturbing antebellum attitudes of sameness, thus implying blacks’ insufficiency as individuals. Langston Hughes’s rhetorical poem “Harlem” suggests that the dreams of those whom he would likely consider appropriately black were constantly being denied and abandoned due to racial discrimination by whites. Nearly a generation later, the 1970 so-called blaxploitation film

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Cotton Comes to Harlem, co-written and directed by actor Ossie Davis, and based on Chester Himes’s novel of the same title, continues a particular effort ongoing at least since American colonialism, to define a socially correct African American archetype. One of the film’s main character’s foremost questions to a large gathering of supposedly likeminded blacks is, “Am I black enough for you?” which exclaims in the vernacular of the times that he had indeed overcome racial oppression and achieved an American dream of sorts in the most racially appropriate manner (Cotton). However, the collusion of white trickery colors the character’s pretense of achievement so that even his surname, O’Malley, serves as a sharp contrast to the seemingly more appropriate African American surnames of Jones and Johnson—two detectives who eventually sentence O’Malley to their own brand of justice for hoodwinking poor blacks in the community. While Himes’s novel and the film lampoon Garveyism in their portrayal of Reverend Deke O’Malley’s back-to-Africa scheme, they also posit their own cultural ideologies which slant toward an ideal black archetype who disdains extremism albeit more indicative of cinematic representation than didactic intent. More than a decade after the filming of Cotton Comes to Harlem, though set in 1944 in fictitious Fort Neal, Louisiana, Sergeant Vernon C. Waters tackles the similarly precarious course of being “two people sometimes” (30), and challenging “the [white] man in his arena” (29), which ultimately not only costs Waters his dream but also his life in Charles Fuller’s A Soldier’s Play. Shortly before Waters is killed, he exclaims, “They’ll still hate you! They still hate you . . . They still hate you!” (8). Only later does the audience learn that the voice addressing them from limbo to present the mystery, and perhaps a moral, is also Fuller’s pronouncement of dilemma. We soon learn that even as he experiences the most abject racism from an oppressive white society, Waters still feels that his own and other blacks’ acculturation into that very society offers the likeliest chance for equality. Essentially, Waters believes the best blackness is akin to whiteness, in which one’s unavoidable dark exterior may be justly tempered through the adoption and cultivation of a nobler white center. While many voices, both white and black, have posed and often attempted to control ideology regarding the cultural quandary of appropriate blackness, the only constant thus far seems that it is unacceptable to society on the whole, and increasingly improbable, for African Americans as individuals to develop unique perspectives without censure and ridicule. In Authentic Blackness: The Folk in the New Negro Renaissance, J. Martin Favor presents various discourses toward a

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definition of African American identity, beginning by referencing the “one-drop rule”: The legal status of blackness, however significant, is no more culturally important than people’s everyday lived experience of their own racial identity. A cursory and anecdotal glance at the subject reveals that—even outside the rules and strictures of the law—the definition of blackness is constantly being invented, policed, transgressed, and contested. When hiphop artists remind themselves and their audiences to “stay black” or “keep it real,” they are implicitly suggesting that there is a recognizable, repeatable, and agreed upon thing that we might call black authenticity. By the same token, one can still hear the epithet “Oreo” being tossed at certain people; generally proffered as an insult, it suggests that such a person is black on the outside but white on the inside. The term is intended to question a person’s authenticity regardless of phenotype. A dark-skinned person can be “internally white” while a light-skinned person might have all the qualities of “real blackness.” Furthermore, the “Oreo” insult implies that the definition of blackness itself has foundations outside physical pigmentation. In common speech, we see that our notions of African American identity rely on complex, though perhaps not thoroughly examined, intersections of attitude, style, tradition and—most important for this study—class, gender, and geography. (1-2)

Waters is described as a “light-brown-skinned man” from the north (Fuller 8), which likely would have distinguished him as being superior to dark-skinned southerners in the judgment of many whites and blacks during the period of the play and to some even in more contemporary times. Waters himself clearly believes his northern upbringing makes him a likelier candidate than any southerner for assimilation into the white culture to gain its favor. When Captain Richard Davenport, the black officer charged with investigating Waters’ murder, questions Private James Wilkie about the Sergeant’s relationship with enlisted men under his command, Wilkie admits, “Sometimes the Southern guys caught a little hell—Sarge always said he was from up North somewhere” (25). Discussing mutually exchanged charges of minstrelsy between Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright regarding their characters’ views of themselves and on blackness generally, William J. Maxwell acknowledges divergent theory concerning the quarrel, but himself explores the influence of geography on the authors’ feud: “It is the rare critic, however, who fails to use the HurstonWright difference as shorthand and ballast for what is perceived as the dichotomy between black rural and urban selves and cultures, and the affiliated binaries of South and North, folk and mass” (77-78). And historical accounts such as Ulysses Lee’s The Employment of Negro

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Troops and Mary Penick Motley’s The Invisible Soldier bear out Fuller’s portrayal of an even more rigorous prejudice against southern black troops. Indeed Davenport, the play’s only black character who may be construed as achieving any significant victory, is a northerner. Aisha Khan’s essay “Rurality and ‘Racial’ Landscapes in Trinidad” also reflects the prevalence of not only geographic culture in the establishment of societal standards, but states there is an occupational hierarchy that may “be viewed through the rural/urban opposition,” particularly with regard to peoples of the African diaspora (40). Though Wilkie has been demoted by Waters for being drunk on duty before the action of the play begins, he, Waters, and Davenport comprise the black soldiers having achieved the highest rank—all of whom are northerners like Fuller himself. In Riché Richardson’s study “Charles Fuller’s Southern Specter and the Geography of Black Masculinity,” she contends: Fuller signals uncertainty, even ambivalence, about the role that black Southern identities should play in constituting blackness as a concept. At times, the play appears to critique ideologies of the black rural Southern folk romanticism that have been invoked to signify black racial authenticity within black modernist and nationalist aesthetics, as developed in the 1930s during the Harlem Renaissance and the 1960s during the black liberation era. But Fuller’s play can also be seen as reconstituting authentic, desirable black subjectivity as male and necessarily urban—and urbane. In a play whose most fundamental conclusion, offered by Davenport, links the grim fates of its men to “the madness of race in America,” Fuller’s attempt to dismantle the conventional scripts about race paradoxically culminates in the realignment of conventional patriarchal logic. The extent to which the categories urban Northern and rural Southern inform a logic of racial and gender distinction is most apparent in Fuller’s masculinist construction of Davenport as the astute, confident lawyer and the containment of the blues man C. J. within “the strange light of the past”—dead when the play begins. (10)

And as Khan suggests, the parallel between one’s geographic background and his occupation serves to discriminate the characterizations of Davenport and C. J. Memphis. Equally improbable and impractical is the conception of a black thriving as an attorney in rural, mid-twentiethcentury Mississippi, or a Washington, D. C. resident choosing to be a farmer. Consequently, C. J. is bonded to the land, even in his superstitions, while Davenport’s urban, apparently less restrictive environs set him on a conventionally more intellectual path. Nilgun Anadolu-Okur cites Fuller in discussing his controversial characterization of the African American experience:

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I don’t spend a lot of time trying to make Black people unreal. . . . Violence in the Black community is a fact of life. Not that I think it ought to be glorified, but I think we need to be responsible for what goes on in our community . . . I cannot see how any growing people would want to be continually portrayed as sweet and innocent. (167)

Fuller’s statement not only addresses the uproar regarding intraracial strife in A Soldier’s Play, but also concerning his depiction of black gang violence and its detrimental ramification in his similarly reprehended play Zooman and the Sign. Unlike A Soldier’s Play however, which also reflects white characters and their societal attitudes in an unfavorable light, Zooman employs an all-black cast, and criminal behavior in the black community seems less obviously systemic of white racism. Zooman, the play’s principal character and Fuller’s metaphor for an ailing black community, is a young gang member who boasts of his bestial nature, hence his moniker. Zooman’s monologues express sentiments analogous to those of infamous hustler characters in popular blaxploitation films in which the characters confess that they have chosen to pursue little formal education, have what they deem no marketable talents, yet indignantly refuse menial employment, and therefore deliver hackneyed soliloquies of discrimination to national consciousness, presumably as the film’s raison d’être. After snatching an elderly woman’s purse, Zooman reasons to himself and the audience, “I go snatch this ole bitch’s pocketbook, and she started yellin’—wig came off, and shit! I had to knock her down! . . . You shoulda seen that bitch when I stuck [that gun] in her face—she was lucky her pocketbook was all I took. You ain’t expect me to eat out no garbage can, did you?” (Zooman 26). Richardson proposes a similarity in Alice Walker’s novel The Color Purple and A Soldier’s Play, appearing only a few months apart and each receiving a Pulitzer Prize, in their “[grappling] with internal tensions among African Americans” (21). She offers a number of possible factors such as “enthusiastic critical engagement by academic feminists and African American literary scholars, the heated gender debates that it ignited in the 1980s, the film’s critical acclaim, and the relative currency of African American male writers in the literary marketplace during the decade” to explain the more sustained popular acceptance and critical attention that Walker’s novel receives (21). But given the historical and current racial climate, a more likely reason for The Color Purple’s exceeding notice would seem that Walker’s simpler, more limited characterizations of African Americans present unanimous, slavishly romanticized notions of blackness whereas Fuller presumes the gamut of individualism best defines a community at large. The relatively small

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amount of scholarship on A Soldier’s Play more than two decades after its debut may reveal uneasiness over Fuller’s depiction of various perspectives on acculturation within an insular community of black troops. There is no easy ideal of an appropriately black character. Some of the play’s characters even seem to have no suitable strengths, other than their humanness, to offset rather serious flaws. Though divergent theories propose whom the play is about, Waters is perhaps the most complex character and undeniably central to the plot, but his plight lacks sympathetic appeal. Tarnishing the Croix de Guerre awarded him during World War I is his confessed murder of a fellow black soldier for embarrassing Waters and other black soldiers in a French café. And while Waters knows firsthand the emasculating effects of racism, his own harsh contempt for other black troops whom he sees as obstacles to racial progress and frequently refers to as “niggah,” rivals that of their white oppressors. Anadolu-Okur posits that Fuller’s “quest to achieve the ‘universal’ [through his characterizations] is based upon his belief in the perfectibility of man” (135). Thus, although Waters realizes he is responsible for at least two men’s unwarranted deaths, he appears penitent in his drunkenness and desirous of retribution. Anadolu-Okur cites critic Walter Kerr’s argument that the play’s “particular excitement . . . doesn’t really stem from the traditional business of tracking down the identity of the criminal. It comes instead from tracking down the identity of the victim” (166-67). In the article, “Classic Soldier’s Play Pressed Back into Service,” Tanangachi Mfuni seeks to uncover universal qualities that Jo Bonney, an Australian woman, might draw on to direct an all-male ensemble in a play about black military life during World War II. James McDaniel, the actor playing Sergeant Vernon C. Waters, states: “We can’t forget that these are people and when you direct a play, you’re not directing Black folk. . . . This ain’t a Black play, it’s a great piece of literature. So long as you’re a good director you can mold, shape and craft a person—and that person just happens to be Black” (15). But it is the actor who plays Private First Class Melvin Peterson, Anthony Mackie, whose comments encapsulate Waters’ burden and the play’s dilemma: “No matter what walk in life you are, if you’re Black, you’ve got something to prove. I’m sorry, I’m speaking for me. . . . Every time you open the door to face your day you realize that there is a certain level of anticipation you have to pay. So if you walk into your place, you have to be on point. If you walk into a gym, you have to be on point. . . . Every day is a challenge about representing yourself” (15).

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In a retrospective conversation remembered by Wilkie during Davenport’s interrogation, Waters, although himself a career soldier, confides that he does not want his son to aspire likewise: WATERS. I hope this kid never has to be a soldier. WILKIE. It was good enough for you. WATERS. I couldn’t do any better—and this army was the closest I figured the white man would let me get to any kind of authority. No, the army ain’t for this boy. When this war’s over, things are going to change, Wilkie—and I want him to be ready for it—my daughter, too! I’m sendin’ bot’ of ’em to some big white college—let ’em rub elbows with the whites, learn the white man’s language—how he does things. Otherwise, we’ll be left behind—you can see it in the army. White man runnin’ rings around us. WILKIE. A lot of us didn’t get the chance or the schoolin’ the white folks got. WATERS. That ain’t no excuse, Wilkie. Most niggahs just don’t care— tomorrow don’t mean nothin’ to ’em. My daddy shoveled coal from the back of a wagon all his life. He couldn’t read or write, but he saw to it we did! Not havin’ ain’t no excuse for not gettin’. WILKIE. Can’t get pee from a rock, Sarge. WATERS rises abruptly. WATERS. You just like the rest of ’em, Wilkie—I thought bustin’ you would teach you something—we got to challenge this man in his arena— use his weapons, don’t you know that? We need lawyers, doctors— generals—senators! Stop thinkin’ like a niggah! (Soldier’s 28-29)

Gary P. Storhoff says the “main character, Waters, in attempting to defeat racism personally, destroys both himself and other blacks. However, that black bigotry is a reflection of white racism, just as Waters himself—the hated sergeant—is a refracted image of what the black soldiers fear and hate in themselves: that they will lose their own identity by being defined by white ideals and ambitions” (21-22). While one can understand why A Soldier’s Play would have its critics in a significantly later context owing to antiquated notions of its characters, vexingly unresolved elements such as the absence of accountability for racist whites’ unethical and illegal practices, and even Davenport’s likewise more obvious indignation toward other black soldiers than the segregationist society profoundly responsible for the soldiers’ attitudes and actions, it seems illogical to berate Fuller for embodying certain embarrassments of history in a work of art. Accounts compiled and edited by Mary Penick Motley in The Invisible Soldier: The Experience of the Black Soldier, World War II and the experiences of Fuller’s fictive troops

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are essentially identical. Sergeant Eugene Gaillard, attached to the 94th Engineers, recalls: The 94th had hardly breathed deeply of the free northern air when we were sent to Arkansas for more maneuvers with the 5th Division. If Tennessee was south, Arkansas was south of hell, sin, and damnation. Here we encountered all kinds of discrimination and the infamous, but oh so real, southern hostility and brutality with a capital B. The 94th was made up of northern Negroes; even our officers, for the most part white, were from the north. Arkansas, with its antebellum mentality, proved to be a nightmare that the men of the 94th Engineers would never forget. Our unsought enemies were the state police, local police, MPs, with the vicious white civilian population lurking in the background. Things got so bad down there the army sent General Lear down to speak to us. If we had any misconceived idea that the government had come to rescue us we soon learned it was a poorly blown soap-bubble that burst in our faces. The general promptly relieved Colonel Herman, our commanding officer, saying he couldn’t control his men. He then spoke to the officers and I suspect he chewed their butts up. The enlisted men were called to a formation and he let us have it. I will never forget his words, “You are a disgrace to your race to come down here and try to change the rules of the south.” That we were being harassed and mistreated, an understatement, was of no importance to General Lear. His words and attitude did not help nor the notoriety of what we were supposed to have done, which haunted us all the way to Louisiana. We were tormented and abused along our entire route until our return to [Fort Custer, Michigan] in the fall of the year. (qtd. in Motley 41)

The only evident difference between Gaillard’s recollection along with the other black troops’ in The Invisible Soldier and Fuller’s portrayal of the military’s treatment of blacks is geographic representation. Black troops in the 94th were northerners, whereas those of Fuller’s Company B, 221st Chemical Smoke Generating Company, are chiefly southerners. But noteworthy is Fuller’s authorial choice to make Peterson, who is Waters’ murderer and clearly the most enterprising among the enlisted men, presumably astute enough to be ashamed of his Alabama roots so that he claims to be from Hollywood, California. C. J., who may be the play’s only endearing character, is proud of his Mississippi heritage, but even the white Captain Charles Taylor, who says, “being in charge just doesn’t look right on Negroes,” thinks, “there was something embarrassing about him” (Fuller 20, 77). Discussing Norman Jewison’s film adaptation of Fuller’s play in “Singing the Blues in A Soldier’s

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Story,” Don Kunz states: “Because C. J. is in soft focus, he becomes a kind of black everyman, a representative of the black heritage of coping with repression, of enduring by recycling the pain of racial oppression into the ambiguous art of joyful lament—the blues” (32). However perceptive Kunz’s analysis may be regarding Jewison’s cinematic interpretation, it certainly seems contrary to Fuller’s intent to avoid the archetypal. Storhoff appears to share Kunz’s view, stating, “C. J.’s self-expression is always seen within the context of a collective black experience” (24). In David Savran’s In Their Own Words: Contemporary American Playwrights, Fuller himself says: “It’s very important for me as a black writer to change how Western civilization—which includes black people—perceives black people. That’s at the heart of what I do” (75). When he is asked if he reads critics, Fuller admits that he does read reviews of his work, but that they do not alter his writing, stating: “There’s no way to predict human behavior. I try not to do it with my characters because I know you can’t do it with people in the world” (78). Whatever one gleans of A Soldier’s Play’s aspects, its varied characterizations signal Fuller’s purpose of making the universal subject to individualism. Ironically, what some deem the play’s praiseworthy symbolism of archetypic characters is precisely what has drawn the ire of those who feel Fuller’s characters either propose a white ideology of noble assimilation for blacks, or merely that the black community is not represented in a positive light. Considering W. E. B. Du Bois’s concept of racial differences, Nahum D. Chandler states: Differences, he seems to suggest, were taken as signs of primordial or ultimate homogeneous identities. Although Du Bois’s schema implies that (what we now often call) cultural difference became “racialized,” in a strict sense his formulation suggests that the question of whether difference was conceived under the concept of “culture” or “race” (or “civilization”) would not be radical. (248)

Whether the differences are referred to as racial or cultural, they are at the forefront of A Soldier’s Play, its film adaptation, and discussions concerning them. C. J.’s affinity for the blues seems generally viewed as part and parcel of a sustaining black experience, yet Waters despises blues for its characteristic associations. Waters once interrupts C. J.’s singing and playing by saying, “Listen up! We don’t need that guitar playin’sittin’-round-the-shack music today, C. J.!” (Fuller 38). At times, Waters feigns appreciation of blues tradition to gain C. J.’s confidence in hope of ousting him. A Soldier’s Story even embellishes and extends the blues influence in order, if not to offer a more expansive depiction of black

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experience, to at least present a lengthier, commercialized version. Likewise, the Andrews Sisters’ “Don’t Sit under the Apple Tree” which opens and closes the play, establishes the musical color line of a segregated society. Speaking on Caribbean poet-playwright Derek Walcott’s work, William B. Branch states, “the universal is rooted in the particular,” suggesting ethnic sensibilities are not necessarily exclusive of mainstream understanding (xi). And in an interview conducted by Thomas C. Johnson, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. discusses what he considers a dearth of art in much contemporary writing by African Americans. By focusing on extremely topical issues in order to choreograph activism, he feels black writers at large become mired in propaganda. As an example of how the universal may be revealed within the particular, and as an admonishment to contemporary black writers, Gates references Nigerian author and Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka’s work, concluding: A thousand years from now, people will be reading Death and the King’s Horseman. It is like Hamlet or Macbeth; it is a truly great play. Soyinka didn’t have to imagine the universal in the Yoruba experience, he just presumed it. That is very unusual for a black writer. I would say that even today, despite all the advances that we’ve made in this country, many black writers are still wrestling with the question of the universality of the African-American experience. Now, of course, it is a universal experience, but that particular debate has been a fraught one in this country and unnecessarily so. Soyinka, on the other hand, just said, “I’m going to write about a day in the life of a horseman of the king,” for goodness sakes, in a Yoruba kingdom, and he writes about it in such a way that you know that it’s about being in the will, and hubris. It’s like a Greek play. There are very few black writers who have been able to achieve that effect: when the particularity of your literary statement is there in splendid detail, but it’s simultaneously transcendent and accessible to anybody anywhere. That’s what art is, and if the literary work doesn’t achieve that effect, it’s not art. That’s it, pure and simple. And to presume the universe in your little tiny corner of the world, presumes an enormous amount of cultural security, we might call it, and I think that Soyinka in that sense should be a model for all writers generally, but more especially for all Black American writers. . . . So much of Black American art is about a topical matter, an issue of immediate concern. Those issues fall away. . . . Who can remember, sixtyfive years later, what the political issues were for Black Americans in 1930? They are irrelevant really, if you are a literary critic. The question is when you pick up the novel, is it a good read or not? That’s all that matters. Too many Black American writers still think that they can solve the problems, the enormous problems confronting Black Americans through literary arts, which are highly mediated. . . . There are many ways to be politically engaged, directly politically engaged, but the literary arts

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are not one of them. And Soyinka, perhaps the most politically engaged black writer alive today, knows that all too well. He never confuses the realms between politics and arts, though his art is always political and his politics, as it were, are always artistic. But they are different realms and he is able to be bilingual. And far too many Black American writers have not achieved that bilinguality. They assumed that the poem they were writing or the novel had to be a direct political statement, had somehow to contribute directly to liberating the black person, and that’s not how art works. It’s like trying to shoot an elephant with a cap gun. (65-66)

In A Soldier’s Play, one black character is sustained by blues, and within the same small military company, another black character not only loathes the music’s heritage, but also those who are sustained by it. Thus, as in Zooman, Fuller presents another complex universe of particulars rather than what could be a comfortably particular universe. Larry Neal, a longtime friend of Fuller’s, and to whom A Soldier’s Play is dedicated, had earlier staged his first play in 1976, entitled The Glorious Monster in the Bell of the Horn, concerning black soldiers’ return to the United States from service in World War II, which introduced a character named Davenport. Though both playwrights also use music— to emphasize plot line in Fuller’s work and symbolism in Neal’s—Neal employs jazz, then considered the music of revolution, while Fuller chooses blues, which was at one time deemed oppositional to black liberationist ideology. During the most pronounced era of the Black Arts Movement, blues was seen as a compliant means of enduring an oppressive status quo. On the other hand, jazz music’s rebellious improvisation was felt to epitomize the Movement’s clarion call for political upheaval and a unified black aesthetic. While Waters’ contempt for blues is more to do with its rural, and therefore to him, demeaning nature than its presumed lack of militancy, it is precisely this perception of its culturally stagnant aura which has the play’s black critics up in arms. Fuller envisions and focuses on harmful black, intraracial strife as its white progenitor, like the gods in Greek tragedy, looms just beyond the audience’s scrutiny. And although Fuller’s writing, especially Zooman and A Soldier’s Play, may be as readily taken to be appeals for racial unification as for cultural nonconformity, the mere fact that a black artist presents black characters who strive for eventual assimilation, who are inherently pacifistic in the face of violent bigotry, and who, as in the case of both Waters and Peterson, are cold-blooded murderers of fellow black soldiers, brands it as inappropriate to some. Essentially, Fuller exercises his own artistic individualism to cast multidimensional characters. Considering the possibility of a black consciousness in his introduction to Crosswinds: An Anthology of Black Dramatists in the Diaspora, Branch

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muses whether such an identity “based upon Black African descent . . . [is] a viable commonality upon which to group people as diverse and implacably nonconformist as creative artists” (xi). “However unspoken,” he continues, the realities of common experiences with alien invaders, predators, enslavers, and exploiters may very well contribute to a sense of common concerns and solidarity among African peoples worldwide, just as the erstwhile ‘manifest destiny’ doctrines of Europeans have operated—and still operate—as a unifying force to their benefit in world affairs, often in direct contravention to manifestations of self-determination by nonEuropeans. (xii)

Noteworthy is that only one of the twelve playwrights featured in Crosswinds is female. As an example of his thesis for Are We Not Men?: Masculine Anxiety and the Problem of African-American Identity, Phillip Brian Harper offers the since late popular singer Michael Jackson’s “feminized demeanor” as elemental to his questionable racial authenticity as was his [judged] “unacceptably white” appearance (ix). Harper therefore concludes that “debates over and claims to ‘authentic’ AfricanAmerican identity are largely animated by a profound anxiety about the status specifically of African-American masculinity” (ix). A poster of a heavyweight prizefighter Private Joe Louis as an icon of black manhood worthy to represent the American war effort is one of the first images that the audience sees as A Soldier’s Play opens in Taylor’s barracks. This recognition of whom a segregated military thinks an acceptable black archetype perhaps bears out Harper’s assertion. However, the use of Louis’s image in such a way, especially because of an exhortation ascribed to him which reads, “WE’RE GOING TO DO OUR PART—AND WE’LL WIN BECAUSE WE’RE ON GOD’S SIDE” (Fuller 7), is likely to rankle those who agree with Du Bois’s pronouncement that “the Negro [had] fought in every American war for a cause . . . and a freedom which was not his own” (80), or who are aware of accusations that Louis failed to use his international stature to advance civil rights efforts for American blacks. Oddly, what Fuller’s characters aspire to—that is, a better life for themselves, at times by indiscriminate means—has long been the purported mission of some of the play’s most fervent critics. In “The Need for a Dirt Path,” a foreword to The Black Seventies, Floyd B. Barbour proposes a philosophy as nearly totalitarian as Knight’s requirements regarding personal appearance and career choices for those who wish to be considered authentically black. Barbour seems to equate being black with not only being impoverished, but more disturbingly, a need to be financially

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poor, as he describes a former speaking engagement at a “plush” New England college: “If you are black, there is something almost incongruous about discussing anything black in such a setting. The very ease of living and manner of life seem to belie the reality of your meaning” (v). Whereas Barbour’s comments may acknowledge America’s contemptible disparity of wealth, they conversely forge skewed links between culture, capitalism, and what may be judged by some as racial authenticity. To say whites’ “ease of living [belies]” blacks’ “meaning” is to suggest that blacks’ whole history, collectively and individually, can never be worth more than their material wealth in comparison to the majority. Constructing his “space” for “Black Consciousness,” Larry Neal states: “It is not a question of falling into one bag, tenaciously holding on to it as if there were no other. That would be the route to suicide. Rather, what we should be about is a meaningful synthesis of the best that our struggles have taught us. This is a more difficult task than feeling secure in our own particular, and often narrow, endeavors. What we need, above all, is a widening of our perceptions, especially in terms of our own history” (11). But later in the same declaration, Neal excoriates a black leadership who denounced Garveyism, Malcolm X, and the Nation of Islam, concluding: “They seemed to have no concept of group priorities” (20). At one point in A Soldier’s Play, when Waters refuses to commend, or even acknowledge, his company’s baseball victory, instead lambasting them with racial slurs and orders to paint the white officers’ club, Peterson asks, “What kinda colored man are you?” (Fuller 39). Peterson’s inquiry is not only a seminal catalyst for each character’s self-examination, but also for the wider, universal investigation of blackness. The question came to bear prophetic significance as well since Fuller’s critics began to doubt his own ethnic allegiance. Within the ideology which condemns such works as Zooman and A Soldier’s Play on the basis that they are traitorously solicitous of white audiences is the belief that to be an activist, one must be severely political, topical, and—what is often injurious to the accomplishment of art—crudely obvious. Adherence to this unanimous aesthetic during the 1960s and early 1970s, while instrumental in establishing venues for aspiring playwrights, also led to a theatre of monotony. Referencing the Black Theatre Movement, particularly works of Ed Bullins and Amiri Baraka, critic A. Peter Bailey states: Eventually the black theatregoing public, never very large, even during the height of the movement, began to tire of plays that limited themselves to just ‘telling it like it is’ and began to stay away from the theatre. What they had found exciting, illuminating, entertaining, and thought-provoking in

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Director Clinton Turner Davis, in his “Non-Traditional Casting (an Open Letter),” and author Stanley Crouch express similar dissenting views regarding the abandonment of individualism for the semblance of a unified black front. Davis affronts what he feels to be condescension and tokenism in the American theatre, asking of white companies: “Is the black artist, the ethnic artist still being perceived monolithically—under the assumption that the one that is hired knows, and can express, the desires and urges of and for the entire race?” (591). Crouch relates the anecdote of blacks engaging in rather juvenile behavior at a book party, for which earlier in his life he would have been embarrassed, but now finds amusing. “I guess I don’t feel as responsible for every black person as I used to,” he surmises (32). Ironically, Baraka, perhaps the harshest judge of A Soldier’s Play, purports to seek a harmonious black society, which is also Waters’ ideal, yet both launch their most vitriolic attacks against nonconformist members of their own race. Though their different means would certainly yield very different cultures—Baraka’s being the product of revolution and nationalism, while Waters’ would be achieved through integration and eventual assimilation. Answering Peterson’s challenge as to his racial authenticity, Waters exclaims, “I’m the kinda colored man that don’t like lazy, shiftless Negroes!” And in Baraka’s poem, “Dope,” for example, his treasonable black characters such as “Genevieve Almoswhite” and “Winky Suckass” are shown to have committed what he deems unpardonable acts of accepting employment or fellowships from white institutions (lines 57, 58). Likewise, “King Assblackuwasi” is upbraided for helping whites to enslave his own countrymen (69). While Baraka’s expression may be more voguishly appealing to liberationist thought, his characterizations of all blacks could hardly be embraced as any more progressive or unifying than Fuller’s. Whereas Baraka pointedly directs his audience toward desired emotions, Fuller relies on his plot and character development to engage the audience and elicit individual responses. For example, in projecting white slavers’ attitude toward their human cargo in his play Slave Ship, Baraka’s authorial intrusion is couched as the stage direction, “The white men begin to laugh and point, as if they were pointing at the filth, misery and degradation of the Black People” (253). Contrarily, Fuller writes, of the racist, white lieutenant Byrd, that he reluctantly saluted the black captain Davenport after being questioned by him concerning Waters’ murder, allowing the audience to discern the nature of Byrd’s character without heavy-handed didacticism.

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In Crossroads Modernism: Descent and Emergence in AfricanAmerican Literary Culture, Edward M. Pavliü writes: “Turn-of-thecentury black writers like Paul Laurence Dunbar and Charles Chesnutt created multileveled masks and veils through which they were able to communicate radically different meanings to different audiences” (55). Pavliü’s statement suggests a creative freedom more prevalent among black artists themselves prior to the advance of racially nationalistic thinking. Apropos of artistic liberty are Baraka’s own, insightful words, cited by Klaus Benesch in his essay “From a Thing into an I Am: Autobiographical Narrative and Metahistorical Discourse in Contemporary African-American Fiction.” Encapsulating a common black experience by referencing Dante’s Commedia, Baraka states that for blacks, “[hell] is the torture of being the unseen object, and, the constantly observed subject” (qtd. in Benesch 8). Nevertheless, Baraka expresses vehement disdain for what he claims to be calling for—that is, the unfettered ability of black artists to achieve success. However, while he perceives the success of certain works to actually be compromised by whites’ support for messages that are antithetical to black nationalist causes, he apparently fails to grasp the similar strictures he would impose on one’s quest for individuality, which in essence is Fuller’s leitmotif in Zooman, and especially in A Soldier’s Play. “The Descent of Charlie Fuller into Pulitzerland and the Need for African-American Institutions” castigates Charles Gordone’s No Place to Be Somebody, Fuller’s Zooman and A Soldier’s Play, what Baraka considers to be the anti-liberationist politics behind the awarding of Pulitzer Prizes to both black playwrights, the Negro Ensemble Company, and “negro critic Stanley Crouch” for his ardent praise of Fuller’s work (Baraka 52). Throughout the essay, Baraka aims at characters whom he calls “‘Fuller’ negroes,” expressed with the same sentiment as one might direct the epithet “oreo” toward those who fail an arbitrary standard of blackness. Not only does Baraka deny both playwrights’ racial authenticity, but he also denounces the quality of their craftsmanship. As Baraka addresses the second part of his thesis—the need for AfricanAmerican institutions—he says: What the creation of institutions has to do with this is that the Black Arts Movement and Black Theater Movement must be criticized for not having created lasting institutions to do battle with the bourgeois, whitesupremacist-created Negro Ensembles, which are exactly that, ensembles of negroes pushing Negro Thought for negroes and ‘normal’ white people. Without the needed tools to complete their expression our artists are left in limbo. (53)

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Baraka’s statement marks a pronounced, nonnegotiable line of intraracial segregation between those who embrace his black nationalist ideology and all other black people. Baraka’s and Crouch’s long-standing feud of political ideology and what constitutes artistic integrity becomes amplified in their dissension over the merits of A Soldier’s Play. Lauding the work of writer Albert Murray and contrasting it against other current black literature, in his essay entitled “Chitlins at the Waldorf: The Work of Albert Murray,” collected in Notes of a Hanging Judge: Essays and Reviews, 1979-1989, Crouch impugns what he considers to be a mawkish school. He says, “too many contemporary black writers produce work as though their function is to provide both blacks and whites with pots to pity in or gutters to guilty in,” then attributes the richness of Murray’s text to his unabashed nod to European influences and because “he was taken in by neither the simplistic versions of heritage nor protest that led to the political Zip Coon shows of LeRoi Jones [Baraka], Eldridge Cleaver, and the like” (42). Fuller likewise acknowledges the muse of Herman Melville in A Soldier’s Play. Discussing significant differences regarding characterization and focus in the works of Fuller and Baraka, Anadolu-Okur draws a parallel in the writing of Fuller and Wilson, stating, “Charles Fuller’s plays represent, as do those of August Wilson, an ardent advocacy of historical realism” (139). In Pavliü’s chapter, “‘Compared to What?’: Toward an AfricanAmerican Modernist Discourse,” his title alludes to the jazz standard which demands a particular context for one’s assertion of reality. Though some may view it as a universal symbol of racial alliance, whether any debate over the artist’s responsibility to communal aesthetics is legitimate would also seem to require a more reasonable forum than has been engaged. C. J. Memphis says of Waters: “Any man ain’t sure where he belongs must be in a whole lotta pain” (Fuller 45). Indeed, any harvest of black unity for Fuller’s characters must be unearthed in the ground where each labors to first find himself.

Works Cited Anadolu-Okur, Nilgun. Contemporary African American Theater: Afrocentricity in the Works of Larry Neal, Amiri Baraka, and Charles Fuller. New York: Garland, 1997. Bailey, A. Peter. “A Look at the Contemporary Black Theatre Movement.” Black American Literature Forum 17.1 (1983): 19-21. JSTOR. Web. 15 Aug. 2012.

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Baraka, Amiri. “The Descent of Charlie Fuller into Pulitzerland and the Need for African-American Institutions.” Black American Literature Forum 17.2 (1983): 51-54. JSTOR. Web. 15 Aug. 2012. —. “Dope.” Call and Response: The Riverside Anthology of the African American Literary Tradition. Ed. Patricia Liggins Hill. Boston: Houghton, 1997. 1498-1521. —. Slave Ship. Crosswinds: An Anthology of Black Dramatists in the Diaspora. Ed. William B. Branch. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1993. 250-59. Barbour, Floyd B. “The Need for a Dirt Path.” Foreword. The Black Seventies. Ed. Barbour. Boston: Porter Sargent, 1970. v-x. Benesch, Klaus. “From a Thing into an I Am: Autobiographical Narrative and Metahistorical Discourse in Contemporary African-American Fiction.” GRAAT: Publications des Groupes de Recherches AngloAméricaines de l’Université François Rabelais de Tours 18 (1998): 721. Branch, William B. “Black Dramatists in the Diaspora: The Beginnings.” Introduction. Crosswinds: An Anthology of Black Dramatists in the Diaspora. Ed. Branch. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1993. xi-xxvii. Chandler, Nahum D. “The Figure of the X: An Elaboration of the Du Boisian Autobiographical Example.” Displacement, Diaspora, and Geographies of Identity. Ed. Smadar Lavie and Ted Swedenburg. Durham: Duke UP, 1996. 235-72. Cotton Comes to Harlem. Dir. Ossie Davis. Perf. Godfrey Cambridge, Raymond St. Jacques, and Redd Foxx. MGM, 1970. Film. Crouch, Stanley. Notes of a Hanging Judge: Essays and Reviews, 19791989. New York: Oxford UP, 1990. Davis, Clinton Turner. “Non-Traditional Casting (an Open Letter).” African American Review 31.4 (1997): 591-94. JSTOR. Web. 15 Aug. 2012. Du Bois, W. E. Burghardt. The Gift of Black Folk: The Negroes in the Making of America. 1924. New York: AMS P, 1971. Favor, J. Martin. Authentic Blackness: The Folk in the New Negro Renaissance. Durham: Duke UP, 1999. Fuller, Charles. A Soldier’s Play. New York: Hill-Wang, 1981. —. Zooman and the Sign. Garden City: Doubleday, 1979. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. “Interview with Henry Louis Gates, Jr.” Interview by Thomas C. Johnson. The Worcester Review 19.1-2 (1998): 61-67. Harper, Phillip Brian. Are We Not Men?: Masculine Anxiety and the Problem of African-American Identity. New York: Oxford UP, 1996.

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Knight, Etheridge. Belly Song and Other Poems. Detroit: Broadside P, 1973. Kunz, Don. “Singing the Blues in A Soldier’s Story.” Literature Film Quarterly 19.1 (1991): 27-34. Maxwell, William J. “‘Is It True What They Say About Dixie?’: Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, and Rural/Urban Exchange in Modern African-American Literature.” Knowing Your Place: Rural Identity and Cultural Hierarchy. Ed. Barbara Ching and Gerald W. Creed. New York: Routledge, 1997. 71-104. Mfuni, Tanangachi. “Classic Soldier’s Play Pressed Back into Service.” New York Amsterdam News 13 Oct. 2005: 15. Motley, Mary Penick, comp. and ed. The Invisible Soldier: The Experience of the Black Soldier, World War II. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1975. Neal, Larry. “New Space/The Growth of Black Consciousness in the Sixties.” The Black Seventies. Ed. Floyd B. Barbour. Boston: Porter Sargent, 1970. 9-31. Pavlic, Edward M. Crossroads Modernism: Descent and Emergence in African-American Literary Culture. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2002. Richardson, Riché. “Charles Fuller’s Southern Specter and the Geography of Black Masculinity.” American Literature 77.1 (2005): 7-32. Savran, David. In Their Own Words: Contemporary American Playwrights. New York: Theatre Communications, 1988. Storhoff, Gary P. “Reflections of Identity in A Soldier’s Story.” Literature Film Quarterly 19.1 (1991): 21-26.

CHAPTER EIGHT “A FRIEND OF MY MIND:” RHETORICAL STRATEGIES OF BLACK MALE SUBJECTIVITY IN BELOVED AARON N. OFORLEA

The African American characters in Toni Morrison’s novels display an enormous ability to persist through dire circumstances while attempting to define themselves against determining definitions about race and gender. In asking Morrison about the representation of resiliency and fortitude in her novels, Robert Stepto restricts his interests to how the women characters represent social beliefs about black women as possessing an inner strength and no-nonsense attitude toward life, family, and black men—especially black men. In her response to Stepto’s question, Morrison points out that black women exercising authority and independence does not necessitate emasculating black males: “black women have held, have been given, you know, the cross. They don’t walk near it. They’re often on it…And they’ve borne it…extremely well. I think everybody knows, deep down, that black men were emasculated by white men, period. And that black women didn’t take any part in that” (Conversations with Morrison 17-18). The emasculating black woman is a myth that does not reflect the actual historical record of how black males were oppressed as an ethnic and gender group. Morrison accounts for the “incredible amount of magic and feistiness in black men that nobody has been able to wipe out. But everybody has tried” (Conversations with Morrison 18). In the face of extreme racism and debilitating oppression, although black males were not rendered ineffective or ineffectual, they maintained a sense of self; they exemplified self-confidence and an incredible autonomy. From this perspective, Morrison highlights the complexity of black male subjectivity. In order to do this, Morrison does not ignore male dominance or patriarchy; instead, she represents black male characters who exhibit the complexity of male experiences: her black male characters

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are fathers, husbands, sons, and worldly men. Morrison assumes a rhetorical stance that is neither male- nor female-centered. It is best described as culture-centered (meaning her primary concern is African American culture). Toward other black male characters, Morrison’s male characters are sensitive and insensitive, nice and mean, thoughtful and dismissive. Toward Morrison’s black women characters, they are sexist and patriarchal as well as loving and kind. The complexity of black male experiences in Morrison’s writings is worth examining because they challenge unsophisticated renderings of black male experiences, and they also highlight the diversity of perspectives in how black males engage their surroundings and confront loss and intimacy. Thus, Morrison presents black male characters on a continuum, as she does with black women. In Morrison’s novels, intimacy between males extends to their ability to care and show tenderness and their willingness to show fear and vulnerability. For example, in Beloved, Halle hires himself out to save enough money to buy his mother’s freedom, but ultimately has a psychological breakdown after watching the rape of his wife; Sixo travels thirty miles to see the woman he loves and challenges Schoolteacher’s authority; Paul D watches a slave closer than a brother burn alive without shedding a tear, and expresses sympathy whenever he sees ex-slaves (especially women) suffering. Thus, Morrison’s sentiments about black males in real life extend to her black male characters: “black men have an enormous responsibility to be men” (17). This essay explores the process of black male subjectivity construction in Morrison’s Beloved. Restricting my focus to Morrison’s Paul D and how his interactions or relationships with other characters foster his subjectivity construction process, I illuminate the discursive terrain (subjectivity) on which Paul D redefines his self-image; examine the network of competing discourses that defines Paul D while a slave; illustrate how Paul D draws on the legacy of African American creative expressions (jokes, signifyin’, narratives, and call and response) as an alternative discourse to white male patriarchy and domination. In addition, I show how he uses silence as a rhetorical strategy to construct himself as a man outside of slavery. The combination of African American creative expressions and silence as a rhetorical strategy creates a metaphorical space (though a small space) in which Paul D is able to comprehend his status and construct a self-image. Within this space, his options are limited to acting against racial oppression or listening to how white slave owners characterize and categorize him. While scholars have examined how Morrison incorporates African American folklore, scholars have not given attention to how Paul D

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rhetorically redefines himself as a man and a possible husband for Sethe. Instead, early publications on Beloved characterize Paul D’s experiences as a supplement to Sethe’s and locate Paul D within the gendered logic of male inheritance.1 Recent published scholarship on Beloved centralizes the experiences of the black male characters in Beloved by examining the dynamics of black male experiences within the novel. For example, “Misandric Impulse in Toni Morrison’s Beloved” examines how black masculinity is threatened, under stress, or remains a dynamic force that has been constrained to the extent that it is has nowhere to go. Similarly, Mayberry’s Can’t I Love What I Criticize? explores black masculinity as terrain and as a discourse within the context of the lives of the black women characters but does not consider the role of rhetoric in shaping male subjectivity. Lenore Kitts’ “Toni Morrison and Sis Joe: The Musical Heritage of Paul D,” draws connections between Paul D’s musical expressions and the African American musical tradition but doesn’t explore how Paul D uses rhetoric to define himself. Geneva Smitherman provides a perspective for thinking about the function of rhetoric in Morrison’s text (77). Rhetoric is “language…a tool for ordering the chaos of human experience,” Smitherman argues. She continues that a great amount of comfort comes from being able to “name events and things” and that “to use words to give shape and coherence to human existence is a universal human thing—a linguistic fact of life that transcends cultural boundaries” (77). In Beloved, Morrison represents the process by which black males maintain a sense of self and construct themselves as men for women, as a combination of traditional African American rhetorical strategies and subtle practices of resistance. To build a life for themselves and their families, Morrison’s male slaves utilize jokes, signifyin’, and call and response to combat negative discourses about themselves and to negotiate the complex relationship between dominant discourses and their self-image. In representing these rhetorical strategies, Morrison establishes counter perspectives for the male slaves that challenge oppressive discourses and that articulate social experiences from their perspective. Besides representing the role of African American rhetoric in the process of black male subjectivity construction, Morrison depicts subtle rhetorical practices such as silence or willed silence in relationships between men and women. Willed silence is used to articulate the “unspeakable” (degrading, debasing, or humiliating) experiences and escape or survive the daily atrocities of plantation life. Willed silence is also a significant metaphor for the condition of duress under which the slaves live, and it shows an awareness of the emasculating actions that are

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deemed masculine: “To buy a mother, choose a horse or a wife, handle guns, even learn reading if they wanted to—but they didn’t want to since nothing important to them could be put down on paper” (125). On the fictional plantation in Beloved, these actions are deemed manly; the male slaves are able to perform them only with permission. This reaffirms their status as slaves. Thus, the refusal to speak, to be unintelligible, marks the terrain where African American male subjectivity can be explored. Silenced thoughts, unspoken words constitute the interior lives of the characters (the narrative structure of Beloved is often structured around characters who are thinking things they do not say). As Morrison argues, the unspeakable or unspoken is that inscribed part of subjectivity that is confirmed in the context of specific experiences that reveal “deeper and other meanings, deeper and other powers, deeper and other significances” (“Unspeakable” 14). In positing the experiences of the slaves on the Sweet Home plantation, Morrison moves attention from an archetype to the primary experiences that embody an archetype, and from grand narratives about slavery to the material experiences of characters who experience slavery. Although there are other male characters in Beloved, the focus on male experiences turns on Paul D’s struggle to make peace with his past life as a slave and his desire to build a life as a freedman in Ohio. In fact, what we learn about the other slaves in Beloved helps us to understand Paul D’s past as a slave on the Sweet Home Plantation and as a prisoner on a coffle. Inasmuch as he could procreate, it was to create more labor and therefore more wealth: on the plantation, he comes to learn “the dollar value of his weight, his strength, his heart, his brain, his penis, and his future” (226). Slavery converts and reduces slaves to objects and property. Paul D faces extreme brutality and oppression and perseveres through dire circumstances. He bravely accepts his fate and refuses to surrender to his memories of the degradation he has experienced as a slave. He is an example of the “magic and feistiness” that Morrison says that black males possess. He displays unquestionable courage and an indomitable spirit despite the oppressive and physical restraints placed on him. As an ex-slave, he commits to caring for mother and daughter, Sethe and Denver, and imagines a life for himself with them as a family—free of humiliation and hopelessness. Paul D symbolizes the redefinition of male subjectivity in the face of the systematic annihilation of culture and family, and he represents the cruel extent to which manhood can be denied, defined, and redefined in the context of slavery.

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Constructing Black Male Subjectivity in an Absence The events that shape Paul D as a slave are primarily depicted as memories or reflections, which emphasize Paul D’s subjectivity as an important terrain. In communicating Paul D’s experiences from multiple perspectives, Morrison emphasizes the dialectical relationship between Paul D and the slaveholders and the one Paul D shares with other male and female characters. It is through Paul D’s experiences with slaveholders that Morrison articulates how he is emasculated and sexually assaulted and how his experiences as a slave impact his self-image. The discursive method through which Paul D has been subjugated by two successive slaveholders is best understood as the process of colonization as theorized by Frantz Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks. In Fanon’s psychological articulation of mutually dependent relationships or the dialectic, each individual gains an understanding of the self from how the other wants to be seen. Fanon employs the dialectic as an archetype of symbolic and psychological violence and aggression. He attempts to account for the development of Algerian male psyches during colonization and explains the relationship between black males and dominant discourses within the master-slave dialectic. Through this process, Fanon describes how the subject “I” (the colonized) is constructed by the gaze. The colonized, then, internalizes (accepts) how the gaze constructs him. The colonized turns this gaze inward on himself and outward on other black males. Besides describing the process by which black males are colonized, Fanon theorizes how social oppression shapes one’s self-image. In evaluating Fanon and other black males through this lens, the colonized sees himself through the eyes of the colonizer. As Fanon states, the colonized is always aware of the gaze: how in a single look his “body schema, attacked in several places, collapsed, giving way to an epidermal racial schema” (Black Skin 92). This fragmentation is heightened by the visual and irreconcilable difference of the black figure, which becomes a predominant signifier for difference even as the black male fashions himself to be other than what he is not. For Fanon, in order to resist inscription, the colonized must accept the gaze as a permanent presence but not a determining discourse. Within this space of difference is where decolonization occurs and is “always a violent event” (Wretched 1). He writes, “It is quite simply the substitution of one ‘species’ of mankind by another. The substitution is unconditional, absolute, total, and seamless” (Wretched 1). The transformation one undergoes from colonized to uncolonized is a traumatic but necessary process in order to move the colonized from a state of dependency to independence. In Fanon’s

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paradigm, violence does not include or exclude brute force, for he is more invested in the self-conscious process or the specific ways in which one attempts to rid himself of self-hate and embrace a doctrine of pride and self-confidence. This is the discursive predicament of Paul D’s subjectivity. Thus, redefining subjectivity in Beloved is the process by which Paul D reconciles the inward self with outward constructions. Fanon’s paradigm is helpful for considering the discursive conditions and predicament of black male subjectivity in Beloved because Morrison characterizes male subjectivity construction as a recursive process. When Paul D reflects on his experience as a slave, he remembers the terrifying effects slavery has had on the psyche of slaves and ex-slaves. Many of the people Paul D has seen are lost souls suffering from extreme disorientation, delusions, and amnesia. In his travels, Paul D sees “Negroes so stunned, or hungry, or tired or bereft it was a wonder they recalled or said anything…Once he met a Negro about fourteen years old who lived by himself in the woods and said he couldn’t remember living anywhere else. He saw a witless colored woman jailed and hanged for stealing ducks she believed were her own babies” (66). Witnessing the stresses and strains on African Americans who seem to have traded one nightmarish reality for another, Paul D realizes the profound impact that slavery has had on him and his relationship to other slaves. By positing the specific and concrete historical conditions and social challenges of black male subjectivity construction, Morrison posits slavery and freedom as the metaphorical space where subjectivity construction begins. Within this space, black male subjectivity resists functioning as a direct and inverse reflection of the construction of white masculinity. In addition, within this space, Paul D’s subjectivity is a multi-lectical process and is in a continuous struggle for existence against multiple racist discourses at any given time. These discourses hit ex-slaves simultaneously and continuously, and they have a long-lasting impact on them. In this well-known passage, Morrison writes: The more colored people spent their strength trying to convince them how gentle they were, how clever and loving, how human, the more they used themselves up to persuade whites of something Negroes believed could not be questioned, the deeper and more tangled the jungle grew inside. But it wasn’t the jungle blacks brought with them to this place from the other (livable) place. It was the jungle white folks planted in them. And it grew. It spread. In, through and after life, it spread, until it invaded the whites that had made it. Touched them everywhere. Changed and altered them. Made them bloody, silly, worse than even they want to be, so scared were they of the jungle they made. (Beloved 198-99)

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Here, the dynamics of white-black subjectivity formation in relation to the metaphor of the “jungle” is within and without, for both whites and blacks. The distinction of Self and Other feeds off the binary, making “colored people” desperate to prove that they are not as they are defined, and encouraging white people to become indulgent of power with its attendant jungle of sadism and humble cruelty (Morrison 198). This relationship between Self and Other, master and slave, thoroughly dehumanizes both parties. For Paul D, the cost of dehumanization marks subjectivity formation. Dehumanization is ground zero; Houston Baker defines it as the location where African Americans transform and recoup the circumstances which “otherwise would X or erase them” (Baker 35). Baker defines this redefining process as combating erasure or the legalized “X-ing” of African Americans through discourses such as the laws that protected slavery. The outcome of this discursive oppression is the deadening and invisibility that Ralph Ellison describes in Invisible Man. From rock bottom, Paul D wrestles with memories of being a slave and the language used to subjugate him on the Sweet Home Plantation. At the beginning of the novel when Paul D is standing on the porch of 124 Bluestone Road, he is a newly freed slave with a desire to have a life and family outside of slavery. However, before Paul D can build a life for himself outside of slavery, he must first make peace with his past experiences as a slave. In order to achieve this peace, Paul D must come to terms with the network of discourses that have maintained his enslavement. This network is “the social aspect of power” or the relationship between slave owners’ philosophy about slavery and their practices for maintaining slavery. In Slavery and Social Death, Orlando Patterson argues that there is a “social aspect of power” that maintains slaves outside of or below the society in which they serve. The “social aspect of power” is employed strategically and emphasizes that power is exercised on a continuum. On one end, power is acknowledging human force openly, then humanizing it by the use of various social strategies like “fictive kinship... asymmetric gift exchanges” (18). On the other end, Patterson says, is the “method of concealment,” in which coercion is almost completely hidden or thoroughly denied (18). Slave-owners in Beloved represent this range. Mr. Garner benefits from his relationship with Paul D and the other slaves, but the slaves suffer in each interaction with Mr. Garner. Garner “attempts a kindly paternalism, recognizing the humanity and worth of his slaves. Although he refers to them as ‘men’ rather than boys, his good intentions are illusory” (Fulweiler130). While these acts could be seen as opportunities for Paul D to redeem himself or prove his manhood, these acts prove Mr.

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Garner’s abusive use of power. Patterson writes, “By holding out the promise of redemption, the master provides himself with a motivating force more powerful than any whip. Slavery in this way was a selfcorrecting institution: what it denied the slave it utilized as the major means of motivating him” (Patterson 101). Mr. Garner’s status is emboldened: “If you a man yourself, you’ll want your niggers to be men too” is a paternalistic attempt to elevate his slaves above the dominant discourses that define them as chattels (10). To other slave owners, Mr. Garner’s insistence that “my niggers are men every one of em. Bought em thataway, raised em thataway” reinforces Garner’s masculinity and Paul D’s emasculation (10). When other slaveholders see Garner’s slaves behaving as Garner has trained them, they will be reminded of Garner’s masculinity and his ability to train the untrainable, according to the racial discourses of the time. While Mr. Garner conducts an experiment to discover the extent to which he could make black males fulfill his expectations, Schoolteacher’s endeavor is to tear down all signs that indicate the humanity of slaves, reducing Paul D to the ontological status of non-human. Schoolteacher employs the scientific and anthropological discourse that provides rationalization for the inherent inferiority of slaves. Schoolteacher acknowledges “human force,” but humanizes it by disguising it as anthropological scientific investigation (Patterson 18). As a methodology of cataloguing the incipient human traits that are specific to slaves, Schoolteacher uses pseudo-scientific methodologies of measuring craniums, checking teeth, and the flexibility of limbs. These actions, based on racial Darwinism, reinforce his belief that African Americans are not much above the level of animals. From Schoolteacher, Paul D learns that he is only a Sweet Home man at Sweet Home, but when he and other slaves leave Sweet Home, their status changes: “One step off that ground and they were trespassers among the human race. Watchdogs without teeth; steer bulls without horns; gelded workhorses whose neigh and whinny could not be translated into language responsible humans spoke” (125). Taken to an absurd extreme, Schoolteacher believes that he can segregate human from animal traits: “No, no. That’s not the way. I told you to put her human characteristics on the left; her animal ones on the right. And don’t forget to line them up” (193). Under Schoolteacher’s authority, Paul D’s body is scientifically deconstructed as he is physically oppressed. Societal forces allow the enslavers to perform their own subjectivity on black bodies. Intrigued with the insidiousness of this arrangement, Paul D critically reflects on his relationship to Garner and the institution of slavery: “As Paul D tells himself, Garner called and announced them as

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men—but only on Sweet Home, and by his leave. Was he naming what he saw or creating what he did not?” (Finney 110). Paul D poses a philosophical question about the intrinsic or cultural qualities of black maleness. If it is cultural, then Paul D does not have any positive experiences to build on. And, if it is inherent, then Paul D needs to develop a cultural heuristic in order to find that core of masculinity within him. This enterprise graded the manhood of black males within constructed discourses of race, religion, and economic imperatives. Thus, performing manhood in the African American context in Beloved requires coming to terms with the psychological and emotional fallout of systematic gradations of emasculation and understanding that white males didn’t perceive black males as logical inheritors of white patriarchy—a point Robyn Weigman makes in The Anatomy of Lynching when she writes, “patriarchal logic of the dominant culture became the defining mechanism for organizing the newly freed slave” (357). In the slavery system—authoritarianism in the extreme—the white slave-owner exercised physical violence to maintain political hegemony; no “family provider” or black patriarch could be allowed. The attainment of slavery’s intrinsic goals was contingent upon the fullest and most brutal utilization of the productive capacities of every man, woman, and child (Ya Salaam 120). Patterson describes slavery as suffering a social death (having “no social existence outside of his master”) (38). As an example, Paul D struggles for an existence outside slavery. He realizes that he has been already transformed to less than a farm animal named Mister. In clever irony, Morrison gives a rooster the name Mister, so that each time Paul D speaks about the rooster he must use a salutation that announces his respect and deference (affirming his social position and making him complicit in his own oppression). Paul D says, “Mister was allowed to be and stay what he was, but I wasn’t allowed to be and stay what I was. Even if you cooked him, you’d be cooking a rooster named Mister, but wasn’t no way I’d ever be Paul D again, living or dead. Schoolteacher changed me, I was something else, and that something was less than a chicken, sitting in the sun in a tub” (72). Here, “Paul D thinks about (but does not speak about) how slavery emasculated [him] beneath the status of the rooster, Mister” (Fulwieler 120).2 Socially dead, Paul D is already once transformed: “The life he strives to regain cannot be the life he lost” (98). In his enslavement, Paul D has been defined by his master; his struggle for freedom and his ultimate liberation is to discover how to be a “new black man” (a man who resists patriarchal practices) (Neal 44). He accepts that he can’t go back to being how he was before slavery, for he was born a slave and doesn’t have memories that are independent of slavery. Figuring

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out how to be a new man requires him to work tirelessly on deciding what to retain and what to forget about slavery. He selectively chooses to remember the memories that move him from “the liminal state of social death” to a state of freedom. However, if being free means totally being a part of society, Paul D will never be free, for there isn’t a space that he can occupy where he will be looked upon as other than an ex-slave. Paul D’s subjectivity construction doesn’t only take place within the master-slave dialectic, but it also occurs within the slave-slave dialectic. The relationships that Paul D has with the other “Sweet Home men” present him with opportunities to gain a more positive understanding of himself. For example, reflecting on Sixo’s words and gaze, Paul D remembers how uplifting and reaffirming his relationship and interaction with Sixo was: “When he looks at himself through Garner’s eyes, he sees one thing. Through Sixo’s, another. One makes him feel righteous. One makes him feel ashamed” (267). In his relationship with Sixo, Paul D begins to understand how black masculinity is being constructed in a dialectical relationship with white identity, and in the cultural context of slavery. He begins to see more potential for himself in Sixo’s eyes because in Mr. Garner’s terms, he will always be the shadowy (and darkened) image of white masculinity. Paul D says he sees more possibility for himself in Sixo’s eyes. What does he see? In Sixo’s eyes, he comes to terms with his social position as an ex-slave, understating the complexity of his situation. (Re)reading Beloved from the material experiences of Paul D highlights how he attempts to define himself and create a family within a postEmancipation American context. The patriarchal discourse open to the white slave owners is not a readily available context for black male redefinition to take place. Paul D (and other Sweet Home men) is not recognized as a father that has any role to play in the lives of black women with whom they conceive children or befriend within or outside of slavery. Therefore, when Paul D travels North and reestablishes his friendship with Sethe (whom he eventually courts), he encounters a problem (simultaneously a result of gender and experience) that makes clear how he has experienced slavery differently than Sethe. Sethe can’t forget her crime of infanticide: how Mrs. Garner exploited her and refused to grant her a wedding, and how Schoolteacher allowed his boys to rape her and steal her milk. Paul D wants to forget how he was beaten, degraded, and emasculated at Sweet Home. Thus, Paul D’s redefinition process emphasizes his inability to identify with Sethe’s rape and decision to take her daughter’s life. Besides being insensitive to Sethe, Paul D insults and downplays her experiences. His rudeness and thoughtlessness are his

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rhetorical missteps—indicating how much he has to learn about the difference that gender makes to how he and she have experienced life as slaves on the Sweet Home Plantation. For Paul D’s subjectivity construction process includes not only redefining himself in the face of dominant discourses that seek to make him represent negative beliefs about black manhood, but he also has to learn how to be a man for Sethe.

Rhetorical Strategies of Construction Morrison represents Paul D’s discursive predicament as two-fold: On the one hand, Morrison represents Paul D as wrestling with the determining qualities of slavery and wanting a self-image outside of slavery. In this sense, the condition of Paul D’s subjectivity is best described as what Arnold Kemp refers to as “genopsycholinguisticide…an awareness of the linguistic of subjugation”: how language overwrites one’s sense of self (Gilyard 31). Concurring with Kemp’s assessment of the defining characteristics of language, Keith Gilyard argues that language has a dual function: “as a force either to prevent or foster the development of authentic selves” (31). Gilyard’s notion of an authentic self loosely applies to Paul D, for Paul D is more concerned with constructing a self-image that does not include or rely on dominant discourses as opposed to striving for an “authentic self” (which is impossible) that is free of racial inscriptions. Paul D is most interested in using language to foster a subjectivity that resists slavery discourses. In other words, Paul D attempts to construct a subjectivity that represents his possibilities. To do this, Paul D recalls strategies of resistance that he sees practiced among the black males he has been enslaved with at Sweet Home and those with whom he has served on a coffle. Evidence of African American rhetoric is visible yet subtly integrated into the dominant literary framework. The rhetoric of the body and creative expressions (such as humor, signifying, and oral narratives) function as memories that Paul D draws on as he reconstructs his subjectivity. In “A Phenomenology of the Black Body,” Charles Johnson explains how the body functions as an instrument for communicating how one feels. He says, “The body is our general medium for having a world. The blind man’s stick is no longer alien to him, not a mere object, but his bodily extension…if I am downcast, the body gestures accordingly with a dropping posture” (Johnson 226). On a coffle, Paul D and the other prisoners are victims of rape and sodomy. Paul D’s hands and legs are bound with chains so that his movements are restricted. Since his body is restricted, its component is the only instrument that he has to express how

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he is feeling to the other slaves. The positioning of the body informs each of the prisoners of the conditions of the other. The eyes cast down or lifted upward—the eyes report the condition of the body. Paul D and the other men stand side by side under the watchful eye of the guard waiting for the order to start work. Since his hands are bound and they are chained together waist to waist, he uses his eyes to communicate how he is feeling: “No one spoke to the other. At least not with words. The eyes had to tell what there was to tell: ‘Help me this morning’s bad’; ‘I’m a make it’; ‘New man’; ‘Steady now steady’” (Beloved 107). The location of the eyes on the body allows Paul D to see without being seen. Moving his eyes instead of his body allows him to avoid the stare of the prison guard. The eyes see danger. From watching the eyes of each other, the men on the coffle can tell others’ mental, spiritual, and physical health. Paul D remembers how Sixo signified on Schoolteacher while explaining the cost of his labor and production within the structure of slavery. Through this rhetorical move, Sixo reveals that he is aware of how important he and other slaves are to the institution. In this scene, Sixo is standing squarely within the African American rhetorical tradition. Mitchell-Kernan argues that the most important aspect of signifying is the misdirection of the speech acts and the ability to expose that which haunts the dominant consciousness. She continues, “Labeling a particular utterance signifying involves the recognition and attribution of some implicit content or function which is potentially obscured by the surface contents or function. The obscurity may lie in the relative difficulty it poses for interpretation” (Mitchell-Kernan 318). When Sixo is asked if he has stolen the shoat, Sixo argues that if he belongs to the master and the shoat belongs to the master then he could not have stolen the pig. But Schoolteacher’s rebuttal is that “definitions belonged to the definers—not the defined” (190). Paul D recalls how in a single dialogue Sixo signifies on and teaches Schoolteacher the dynamic way in which language can be employed to empower the powerless. In a single dialogue and moment, Sixo draws on the notion that as a slave he is property and he is required to labor intensively for long hours each day. To fulfill this requirement, it is necessary for him to utilize the plantation as he sees fit. With one rhetorical gesture Sixo leaves an indelible mark on Paul D. Later in the novel, Paul D signifies on Sethe. In one speech act, he questions her ethics, morality, and parental love. After learning about Sethe's crime of infanticide, Paul D snidely reminds Sethe that she is not an animal: He says to her “you have two feet not four” (165). In a single rhetorical move, Paul D becomes what he been trying to avoid. He positions himself as a definer—a practice of patriarchy that he’s been trying to resist.

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In addition, Paul D’s memories are primarily narratives about living with other slaves and watching slaves as close to him as brothers die brutal deaths. Intersecting many of his memories are moments in which he learns by listening to other slaves talk about life and death as a slave. These stories fulfill Elliot Oring’s criteria for folk narratives reflecting both the past and the present and reflecting both the individual and the community (123). In Beloved, folk narratives are the stories that connect Paul D and the other slaves to the community of slaves on the Sweet Home plantation. Sixo’s narratives connect Paul D to Sixo’s Native American folklife before slavery and suggest an attainable relationship between Paul D and the traditions of Sixo’s fictional but not depicted Native American community. It is the tradition or the suggestion of tradition within the narratives that shapes Paul D. For “tradition involved a negotiation between individuals and their various communities, often about alterations to the traditions responding to conditions at the time of the enactment” (Bronner 26). The narratives that Paul D learns provide a means for him to negotiate plantation life and connect him to a community outside Sweet Home. Besides connecting him to a Native American tradition off the Sweet Home plantation, these narratives instruct Paul D about alternative beliefs and values about manhood. The memories that come to mind, whether he summons them or not, are thoughts about the laughter and brutality he has shared and suffered with the Sweet Home men. These narratives suggest to Paul D ways to think about himself as a man outside of slavery. He recalls laughing as Sixo tells him stories about the healing power of love, at pursuing love in spite of the slave masters. Sixo tells Paul D about how he “dance…among trees at night…to keep his bloodlines open” and how he dodges the whip of a white man and woman in a buggy upon returning from one of his many visits with his Thirty-Mile Woman (24). Sometimes after hearing a story, they would laugh together. However, their laughter should not be interpreted as amusement, for as Aristotle states, At times when old and young men feel pity “laughter”…is the opposite of querulousness. . . . Old men may feel pity, as well as young men, but not for the same reason. Young men feel it out of kindness; old men out of weakness, imagining that anything that befalls any one else might easily happen to them. (86)

Thus, Sixo has a totally different relationship to language than Paul D does. Sixo is positioned as a language bearer and language user, whereas Paul D listens and can appreciate Sixo’s strategies but chooses a different path.

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Paul D’s method for communicating his disappointments and successes connects him to African American laborers who embraced song as a vehicle for managing their pain, triumphs, frustrations, and aspirations. Lars Eckstein describes the work songs: “Cathartic expression of the unspeakable pains comes only in music, in the blues and its predecessor, the collective work song. This is put forth in Paul D’s experiences on the Georgia chain gang, where the men survive by singing their lives in the typical call-and-response patterns rooted in West African field songs” (208). The song that Paul D sings, while repairing the table and chair he has repeatedly slammed against the wall in an effort to chase the baby ghost away, hearkens to Henry Truvillion’s song “Sis Joe” (Beloved 40). In his recorded lecture “Railroad Songs: Work Songs for Rail Trampling and Track Laying,” John Lomax describes Truvillion as the “head tracklayer for Wier Lumber Company in a remote region between Texas and Louisiana.” In order to keep the black men who worked under his supervision “united, cooperative, and in good humor,” Truvillion led his crew in singing hollers and work songs (Kitts 505). Although he is not leading a work crew, Paul D motivates himself with the song about working on the railroad: “Lay my head on the railroad line/Train come along, pacify my mind/If I had my weight in lime/I’d whip my captain till he went stone blind” (40). Sis Joe functions as another method for Paul D to “beat back the past” and build a future with Sethe. In positing Sis Joe, Morrison connects Paul D to the African American male railroad workers who embraced the African American rhetorical tradition. African American laborers changed the lyrics to songs as they worked to articulate their feelings at a given moment. In ruminating about changing the words while singing, Paul D exemplifies the composing process of African American workmen in fields and railroads. As Paul D sings “Sis Joe,” he thinks about having a life with Sethe, but admits that Sethe is not “a normal woman in a normal house” (40). Despite this he allows his mind to wonder—to ponder what it would be like to live with Sethe as a family man. He admits to himself that a life with her would be drastically different from how he has lived before— moving from place to place, never staying in a “place for over two or three months” (40). To be with Sethe means to be static and content with life in a house with a family. That idea wasn’t too bad as long as he “shut down a generous portion of his head, operating on the part that helped him walk, eat, sleep, sing” (41). Keeping his memories locked away is Paul D’s strategy for survival. Kitts describes Paul D as a wanderer—traveling from place to place searching for work. Paul D “reaches the gunboat by walking to Mobile, Alabama, where he discovers black soldiers rebuilding the

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tracks that they had destroyed during the war. He…had tried to join a black regiment—the 44th Colored Infantry Regiment of Tennessee” (501). He continues to sing; he rethinks the order of the lyrics; he changes the order of the words. This is an extemporaneous endeavor. Morrison writes, “He contented himself with mmmmmmmm, throwing in one line if one occurred to him…It was tempting to change the words (Gimme back my shoes; gimme back my hat)” (Beloved 40). Joanna Wolfe points out that “Paul D draws upon music’s openness to the dialogic interplay of texts to reconcile the songs he learned in prison with the songs of yearning he learned at Sweet Home: a lesson that allows him to imagine a new relationship with Sethe” (265). Again emphasizing Paul D’s relationship to language as being not only different from Sixo’s (dynamic and entrenched in the African American song tradition) but also a strategy of resistance. In effect, Paul D has to contend with the impact that Sweet Home has on slaves’ marriages and relationships. In Beloved, male slaves are unable to protect or provide for their families; instead, males must live in fear for their lives as well as those of their loved ones. They understood having a family included taking the chance that one day they might not be able to protect their loved ones from abuse or death (a fact that is exhibited by Halle’s relationship with Sethe). The dynamic dimensions of black male subjectivity are not only demonstrated in how the black male characters in Beloved succumb to or prevail against social racism and oppression but are also illustrated in how much they invest in having a romantic relationship within and without slavery. How much Paul D loves Sethe and the respect and compassion that he shows her (such as attempting to make a life with her and returning to care for Sethe at the end of the novel) isn’t read as his attempt to fashion a subjectivity outside of the context of slavery. For Morrison, then, Paul D’s subjectivity is not dependent on female characters but is sharpened by female experiences. A goal of her fiction and nonfiction, then, is to illustrate the critical role that black women play in males’ subjectivity construction process. Morrison illustrates the complexity of Paul’s subjectivity through his refusal to speak about his past. As a coping mechanism, Paul D chooses to live in silence. The refusal to speak about the past or to succumb to one’s past experiences marks the place where Paul D begins to construct his subjectivity. While traveling north to Ohio, Paul D decides that his past experiences at Sweet Home and on the coffle do not define him or his future; therefore, he will not speak about what he has experienced as a slave or prisoner, a task that is possible while traveling from place to place: “when he was drifting, thinking only about the next meal and night

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sleep, when everything was packed tight in his chest, he had no sense of failure, of things not working out” (221), but this proves to be difficult once he reaches the doorstep of 124 Bluestone Road. Using silence as a strategy for separating the past and present has advantages and disadvantages. The advantage is that by not discussing his past, Paul D can focus on building a future with Sethe. Silence functions as a starting place for Paul D to separate his past experiences as a slave from a future as Sethe’s husband. He accepts that “a life with Sethe would change his need to travel from place to place…and approaches Sethe with a tentative restraint and a conditional lover” (Powell 148). Suspiciously, Sethe eyes Paul D. His behavior does not match her experiences with other slaves. In wondering what makes Paul D different, she ponders how Paul D has succeeded in escaping the discourses that suffocate other men like Halle and Sixo. Unlike other ex-slaves, Paul D’s eyes do not suggest his past or signal and beg for the questions that would prod him to discuss his life. This intrigues Sethe. She marvels at his uniqueness while being suspicious of motivations. In her experience, exslaves very seldom forget how they have been tortured. Paul D tells her if there is “a way to put it there and there’s a way to take it out. I know em both and I haven’t figured out yet which is worse” (71). Interested in how he manages to suppress the past, remove the “wildness” that “the bit places in the eyes of most slaves,” Sethe focuses attention on Paul D’s subjectivity. Sethe prods him about what he remembers most about the bit. Paul D talks about envying the farm animals for how freely they wandered around the yard and in the woods, but he stops short talking “because saying more might push them both to a place they couldn’t get back from. He would keep the rest where it belonged: in that tobacco tin buried in his chest where a red heart used to be. Its lid rusted shut. He would not pry it loose now in front of this sweet sturdy woman for if she got a whiff of the contents it would shame him” (72-73). However, by consciously choosing silence, Paul D thwarts his desire to move forward with Sethe. Paul D uses silence to deal with the pain of seeing his enslaved brothers tortured. Sethe consistently asks him about the whereabouts of her husband Halle. Paul D knows what has happened to Halle but in speaking about it he acknowledges the circumstances under which black male slaves were unable to fulfill definitions of manhood. Paul D’s memories of the same event are of Halle suffering because he could not protect Sethe and his children from Schoolteacher. When Paul D tells Sethe that Halle broke down after witnessing Schoolteacher’s and the boys’ assault on her, Paul D centralizes the unspeakable nature of male slaves’ experiences and the inadequacies of language in explaining their

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helplessness. Refusing to allow Sethe to accept that Halle failed her because he did not intervene in Schoolteacher’s assault, Paul D points out the emotional toll that enslavement has on male subjectivity. Responding adversely to Sethe’s suggestion that “Halle found another way to live” (69), Paul D emphatically states the limitation of black male subjectivity: “Let me tell you something. A man ain’t a goddamn ax. Chopping, hacking, busting every goddamn minute of the day. Things get to him. Things he can’t chop down because they’re inside” (69). Paul D is overwhelmed with “the patriarchal notion that women must be protected by men. Black women cannot see why black men must try to emulate the macho sexism of their white counterparts rather than work toward a more natural and healthy equality between the sexes” (Bell 171). The quandary is that if Paul D talks too much, he risks reenacting that white patriarchal domination. However, if he doesn’t speak, he risks another kind of damage. This leaves a narrow space within which to construct black male subjectivity. At pivotal times, Paul D thinks about but does not speak his deepest and sincerest feelings to Sethe. As he reflects on the possibilities of creating a family with Sethe, he contemplates what it means to love as a slave and as a freeman. If Paul D utilizes a definition of manhood he has learned as a slave, he would continue to “love just a little bit; everything, just a little bit, so when they broke its back, or shoved it in a croaker sack, well, maybe you’d have a little love left over for the next one” (45). In his current situation facing life after Sweet Home, Paul D desires to love and procreate without the fear that his children will be taken and sold. Paul D is sincere when he declares his love for Sethe because he wants Sethe to “make a life with him and beat back the past” (73). Paul D wants to be Sethe’s confidant, protector, and rescuer. He is willing to “catch” her before she falls to her “knees” from the weight of grief, and he wants to provide Denver the home that her father is unable to (45). While Sethe clings to the past (making it a palpable presence in the house), Paul D imagines a future with Sethe and Denver. It is this difference (in their way of reconciling their past lives with their present identities) which reinforces how they use the past to construct their subjectivity. As he struggles to be a “comrade” to women or “a friend of [their] mind” in the fight against racism and oppression, Paul D employs silence to redefine himself as a man, friend, husband, and lover for African American women and families (Ikard 299). Besides being one of the most important qualities that Paul D displays in the novel, this use of silence suggests an additional way to fulfill Michael Awkward’s notion of black male feminism (that black males should attempt to destabilize sexist and

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oppressive dominant discourses). In using silence to represent Paul D’s subjectivity, Morrison represents the possibilities of black male subjectivity by establishing his concern with the material conditions of black girls and women. The patience and understanding that Paul D demonstrates marks a standard for caring relationships between black males and females: Women saw him and wanted to weep—to tell him that their chest hurt and their knees did too. Strong women and wise saw him and told him things they only told each other: that way past the Change of Life, desire in them had suddenly become enormous, greedy, more savage than when they were fifteen, and that it embarrassed them and make them sad; that secretly they longed to die—to be quit of it—that sleep was more precious to them than any waking day. Young girls sidled up to him to confess or describe how well-dressed the visitations were that had followed them straight from their dreams. (17)

Fulfilling what he believes to be his role as a black man, Paul D is silent and attentive while listening to girls’ and women’s painful memories. As this passage shows, Paul D knows that girls and women suffer differently than boys and men. Paul D take what is often thought of as a woman’s role—listening—and recasts it as a way of defining black male subjectivity within the narrow space between the dominance of white racist patriarchy and the kind of submission he has been forced into as a slave. In the novel, Beloved’s manifestation has a dual function: it interrupts the traditional courtship between Paul D and Sethe, and it forces Paul D to reconsider how he hopes to function in Sethe’s life. With Beloved as part of the household, Paul D is unable to take Denver and Sethe to carnivals, spend time singing around the house doing handy work, or enjoy Sethe’s delicious dinners with his developing family (Sethe, Denver, and himself). Paul D no longer has the space to talk endlessly and into the late night with Sethe about their future together because Beloved demands and consumes all of Sethe’s attention. Supposedly, Beloved is a baby ghost, a reincarnation of Sethe’s murdered daughter. She appears without a history or story to share and slowly but consistently demands Sethe’s attention. Eventually, Beloved is accepted as a Sweet Home past: Sethe’s crime of infanticide, her feelings of grief, her memories of helplessness, and Denver’s dead sister. Easily, Beloved upsets the household. She confuses Sethe, Denver, and Paul D. As he does with Mr. Garner and Schoolteacher, Paul D attempts to endure and outlast Beloved’s mystical and dominating power, and he struggles to retain a sense of separateness from her machinations. However, Beloved has an insidious nature like Mr. Garner and Schoolteacher. Unlike the slave owners who exercised power on a

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continuum, Beloved exemplifies Patterson’s “method of concealment.” Without talking much, her intent is unclear, and her presence is felt and known. She refuses to answer Paul D’s questions in front of Sethe, and she throws a tantrum when Paul D presses her for information about where she’s from. Beloved changes and controls the dynamics in the house. Most significantly, like the slave owners, Beloved neutralizes Paul D’s manhood. She determines where and with whom Paul D sleeps. Literally, Beloved terrorizes Paul D’s mind—causes him to live in fear at 124 Bluestone Road as he once lived as a slave on Sweet Home plantation. Thus, to Paul D, Beloved is not a woman. Instead, she is the reincarnation of white subjectivity outside of Sweet Home. By neutralizing his manhood, Beloved interrupts his process of subjectivity construction. Paul D’s suspicion of Beloved and his curiosity to know her mysterious origins gets the better of him: “he had never known a woman who lit up for nobody in particular, who just did it as a general announcement” (65). More than once in the shed, Paul D calls Beloved’s name, thus satisfying her sexual desires. After being enslaved by two different slave owners, Paul D experiences a great deal of shame at being so easily dominated by Beloved. He contemplates telling Sethe that Beloved coerced him into having sex with her, but he realizes that “he cannot say to this woman who did not squint in the wind, ‘I am not a man’” (128). Paul D recognizes the first hand gender experience that Derrick Bell refers to in “Sexual Diversion”: Bell explains that black women’s opinions of black males are not formed in a vacuum but as a result of first hand experience. Black women do not accept social ills such “as racism as the reason for sorry behavior—they have experienced it first hand and for them it is an excuse, not a justification” (171). To tell Sethe about his sexual encounter with Beloved is to admit to her and accept in himself that he lacks self-control. He assumes that Sethe wouldn’t believe that a girl young enough to be his daughter could overpower him and his imagination. Accepting that there is no longer a place for him at 124, Paul D temporarily seeks refuge and home in a church cellar. He leaves but eventually returns to Bluestone Road. As a result of his encounter with Beloved, Paul D comes to accept a more dynamic understanding of himself and his relationship with Sethe. Refusing to speak about his experiences does not mean that he is in control of his subjectivity, but that he lacks the strategies for controlling his perceived weakness in the face of Beloved’s artless manipulations. Why does Paul D return to Bluestone Road? Andrew Schopp reads the conclusion of Beloved as an indication of how “Paul D’s conception of manhood has radically changed” (222-23). Schopp believes that “from listening to Sethe’s story, sharing his own, and sharing in their story that

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[Paul D] is able to return to Sethe because he has been able to ‘ponder’ over the wounds inflicted by Garner, Schoolteacher, and white patriarchal culture” (222). This personal growth Schopp describes as a “process of negotiation”: Paul D’s process has been one of negotiating cultural narratives—master narratives—and learning to construct his own, to construct a position of potential agency in a world in which freedom from Schoolteacher does not mean freedom from a master. (222-23)

Thus, Schopp’s analysis questions the easy assessment of Paul D’s motivations and behaviors by feminists who locate Paul D’s subjectivity along the continuum of white patriarchy. This omission, I believe, is not deliberate but is the fallout of reading the desires of the women characters as self-fulfilling against the backdrop of the systemic conditions that in a general and unspecified way oppress women. The desires and motivations of black men are not simply to oppress, overwrite, and control. As I have argued, the historical experiences of African American men do not inculcate African American men in this ideology. Instead, these experiences demonstrate that black men have intimate knowledge of the sadistic and inhumane practices of white men. Paul D’s subjectivity construction is not at the expense of Sethe’s expressive freedom, womanhood, or space. In choosing to give up his lifestyle as a wanderer who does not want to expose himself by sharing, he is not interested in just fulfilling his psychological needs, as Schopp states: “Of course, Paul D’s reaction to Sethe’s tree is informed by his own conception of what a tree should be, and this conception is informed by his attempts to heal a personal psychological wound, a rupture in his sense of self as a man” (221). Paul D sees his feelings for Sethe to be different than any feelings that he has had for any other woman. Paul D has not believed that he could make a life with a woman for more than two or three months. In fact, he had come to accept the bare minimum from a relationship. After “Alfred he had shut down a generous portion of his head, operating on the part that helped him walk, eat, sleep, sing. If he could do those things— with a little work and a little sex thrown in—he asked for no more, for more requires him to dwell on Halle’s face and Sixo’s laughing” (41). Only after Paul D leaves and returns to Sethe does he develop the strategies to have a deeper and more meaningful relationship with her. Inspired by Sixo’s love for Patsy the Thirty-Mile Woman, Paul D returns to Sethe because he realizes that after seven years of “eating, walking, and sleeping, aimless wandering, his times with her was life as good as it got” (270). Again, Paul D uses Sixo’s relationship as context for

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thinking about how to meet Sethe’s needs. Lovalerie King states, “Paul D’s memory of Sixo’s attraction to Patsy helps him to summon up the courage to return to Sethe near the end of the novel” (281). Paul D adopts a definition of black masculinity that embraces women and family and eludes the determining aspects of racialized discourses. At the end of the novel, Paul D is standing at Sethe’s back door. After entering the house, Paul D finds grief-stricken Sethe lying in Baby Suggs’s room. He remembers how Sixo used to describe how he felt about the Thirty-Mile Woman who gave him back the pieces that he was: “Its good, you know, when you got a woman who is a friend of your mind” (273). He remembers this because he realizes that Sethe has left him his manhood. As a friend of her mind, Paul D tells her that he needs some kind of tomorrow with her. And instead of telling her that she is his, he tells her that “you are your best thing. Sethe You Are” giving her back her pieces as Thirty-Mile Woman does Sixo (273). Wyatt explains the significance and difference of “you are your best thing” and “you are mine”: Paul D ‘wants to put his story next to hers’; the two stories may complement and complete each other (each person having lived out the missing fragment of the other’s slave narrative) but they will lie ‘next to’ each other—each whole. Circumscribed, with its own beginning, middle, and end. (273) Difference can emerge within the space of relationship; a dialogue between self and other can replace the circular mother-daughter dialectic between same and same. (276)

Paul D privileges Sethe’s subjectivity because he recognizes the importance of listening to black women’s pain. In the span of the novel, Paul D has come full circle. Paul D has redefined himself against Mr. Garner’s emasculating discourses, Schoolteacher’s dehumanizing discourses, and Brandywine’s and his men’s sadist and masochist advances to become Sethe’s confidant and caregiver. In this way, Paul D demonstrates the complexity and sophistication of African American male subjectivity construction and, as such, Morrison reminds us of real black men’s humanity. In a 1976 interview, Morrison talked about the dialectical relationship between black males and females as a dynamic process that is often mischaracterized for the purpose of fulfilling Moynihan discourses about domineering black women and emasculated black men. Morrison criticizes the notion that black women compete with men for patriarchal position and that women prevent men from being significant contributors to their

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families and communities. To disprove this pervasive belief about the relationship between black men and women, Morrison points to the autonomy that black males exercise, to the resiliency that black males exemplify in society, and to the historical relationship between black males and white males. Morrison argues that in the face of a brutal and violent history, black males have managed to maintain a sense of self.

Notes 1

Sitter suggests that Paul D’s adverse response to the scars on Sethe’s back is his desire to, similar to white men, locate his masculinity on the bodies of black women: “Paul D’s denial that Sethe has a tree on her back is a case of phallic assertiveness masking his own insecurity about his own manhood. He imposes his own (male) conception of a tree, measures her tree by it, and finds it lacking.” Sitter believes that the way Amy Denver, a white indentured servant, romanticizes the brutality that Sethe experiences is more sensible than Paul D’s response because “together, Amy Denver and Sethe create a famine context against which Paul D’s image of the tree must be understood” (171, 195). In contrast, taking into account the institution of slavery, Bernard Bell says, “The scars on Sethe’s back signifies the physical and psychic sufferings of slavery that Paul D shares with Sethe.” Harris characterizes Paul D’s response to the spirit that inhabits 124 Bluestone Road as a classic male response to beat it back, which is the superimposition of Paul D’s masculinity on Sethe (130). Harris argues that when Paul D drives the spirit out of the house, he demonstrates that his “masculine will is stronger than her [the female spirit’s] silent, though sometimes noisy desire” (130). Paul D is seen as exerting his patriarchal authority and continues to be viewed with unmitigated suspicion, but Paul D has no power. These perspectives suggest that Paul D has a direct and natural, as opposed to an indirect or institutional, relationship to white male privilege and uncritically resituate Paul D back in the master-slave dialectic from which Morrison has him struggle. 2 For a parallel argument see Howard W. Fulwieler “Belonging and Freedom in Morrison’s Beloved: Slavery, Sentimentality, and the Evolution of Consciousness.”

Works Cited Aristotle. The Poetics. London: Heinemann, 1927. Awkward, Michael. Negotiating Difference: Race, Gender, and the Politics of Positionality. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995. Baker, Houston Jr. Black Studies, Rap, and the Academy. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993. Bell, Bernard W. “Beloved: A Womanist Neo-Slave Narrative; or Multivocal Remembrances of Things Past.” Critical Essays on Toni

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Morrison’s Beloved. Ed. Barbara H. Solomon. New York: G. K. Hall, 1998. 166-76. Bell, Derrick. “The Sexual Diversion.” Traps: African American Men on Gender and Sexuality. Ed. Rudolph P. Byrd and Beverly Guy-Sheftall. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2001. 168-76. Bronner, Simon J. Manly Traditions: The Folk Roots of American Masculinities. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2005. Eckstein, Lars. Re-membering the Black Atlantic: On the Poetics and Politics of Literary Memory. Amsterdam, New York: Rodopi, 2006. Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Trans. Charles Lam Markmann. New York: Grove Press, 1967. —. Wretched of the Earth. Trans. Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press, 1963. Finney, Brian. “Temporal Defamiliarization in Toni Morrison’s Beloved.” Critical Essays on Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Ed. Barbara H. Solomon. New York: G. K. Hall, 1998. 104-16. Fulwieler, Howard W. “Belonging and Freedom in Morrison’s Beloved: Slavery, Sentimentality, and the Evolution of Consciousness.” Understanding Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Sula: Selected Essays and Criticisms of the Works by Nobel Prize-Winning Author. Ed. Solomon O. Iyasere and Marla W. Iyasere. Troy, N. Y.: Whitston, 2000. 113-46. Print. Gilyard, Keith. Let’s Flip the Script: An African American Discourse on Language, Literature, and Learning. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1996. Harris, Trudier. “Beloved: ‘Woman Thy Name is Demon.’” Critical Essays on Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Ed. Barbara H. Solomon. New York: G. K. Hall, 1998. 127-37. Ikard, David. Breaking the Silence: Toward a Black Male Feminist Criticism. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2007. Johnson, Charles. “A Phenomenology of the Black Body.” Traps: African American Men on Gender and Sexuality. Ed. Rudolph P. Byrd and Beverly Guy-Sheftall. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2001. 223-35. King, Lovalarie. “The Disruption of Formulaic Discourse: Writing, Resistance, and Truth in Beloved.” Critical Essays on Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Ed. Barbara H. Solomon. New York: G. K. Hall, 1998. 27283. Kitts, Lenore. “Toni Morrison and ‘Sis Joe’: The Musical Heritage of Paul D.” Modern Fiction Studies 52.2 (2006): 495-523. Mayberry, Susan. Can’t I Love What I Criticize? The Masculine and Morrison. U of Georgia P, 2007.

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Mitchell-Kernan, Claudia. “Signifying, Loud-Talking and Marking.” Signifyin(g), Sanctifin’ and Slam Dunking: A Reader in African American Expressive Culture. Ed. Gena Caponi-Tabery. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1999. 309-30. Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: New American Library, 1987. —. Conversations with Toni Morrison. Ed. Danille Taylor-Guthrie. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1994. —. “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature.” Michigan Quarterly Review 28:1 (1998): 1-34. Neal, Mark Anthony. New Black Man. New York: Routledge, 2006. Oring, Elliot. Folk Groups and Folklore Genres: An Introduction. Logan: Utah State UP, 1986. Patterson, Orlando. Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1982. Powell, Betty Jane. “Will the Parts Hold?: The Journey Toward a Coherent Self in Beloved.” Understanding Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Sula: Selected Essays and Criticisms of the Works by Nobel PrizeWinning Author. Ed. Solomon O. Iyasere and Marla W. Iyasere. Troy, N. Y.: Whitston, 2000. 143-54. Schopp, Andrew. “Narrative Control and Subjectivity: Dismantling Safety in Toni Morrison’s Beloved.” Understanding Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Sula: Selected Essays and Criticisms of the Works by Nobel PrizeWinning Author. Ed. Solomon O. Iyasere and Marla W. Iyasere. Troy, N. Y.: Whitston, 2000. 204-30. Sitter, Deborah Ayer. “The Making of a Man: Dialogic Meaning in Beloved.” Critical Essays on Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Ed. Barbara H. Solomon. New York: G. K. Hall, 1998. 189-204. Smitherman, Geneva. Talkin and Testifyin: The Language of Black America. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1986. Wiegman, Robyn. American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender. Durham: Duke UP, 1995. Wolfe, Joanna. “‘Ten Minutes for Seven Letters’: Song as Key to Narrative Revision in Toni Morrison’s Beloved.” Narrative 12.3 (2004): 263-80. Wyatt, Jean. “Giving Body to the Word: The Maternal Symbolic in Toni Morrison’s Beloved.” Understanding Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Sula: Selected Essays and Criticisms of the Works by Nobel PrizeWinning Author. Ed. Solomon O. Iyasere and Marla W. Iyasere. Troy, N. Y.: Whitston, 2000. 231-57.

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Ya Salaam, Kalamu. “Women’s Rights Are Human Rights.” Traps: African American Men on Gender and Sexuality. Ed. Rudolph P. Byrd and Beverly Guy-Sheftall. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2001. 113-18.

PART IV: FEMALE SEXUALITY AND THE SELF

CHAPTER NINE “THE BEST STUFF GOD DID”: THE RHETORIC OF SAME SEX INTIMACY AND EGALITARIAN CHRISTIANITY IN ALICE WALKER’S THE COLOR PURPLE AND ANN ALLEN SHOCKLEY’S SAY JESUS AND COME TO ME TARA TUTTLE

In two prominent novels by bisexual Southern writers Alice Walker and Ann Allen Shockley, the protagonists experience spiritual transformations which coincide with their developments of a queer consciousness. Using Paul Ricoeur’s concept of the resymbolization of human action through narration, I argue that the renderings of homosexual experiences in Shockley’s Say Jesus and Come to Me and Walker’s The Color Purple, both published in 1982, recast same-sex intimacy as holy through the authors’ use of religious rhetoric. Their narrators leave behind traditional patriarchal practices of protestant Christianity as they leave behind strictly heterosexual expressions of desire, ultimately in favor of relationships with bisexual women. These relationships, unlike their prior heterosexual liaisons, foster spiritual growth. Through the intimacy of the same-sex relationship, these narrators discover alternative approaches to religion that embrace sexual fluidity rather than sanction the heterosexual imaginary. Additionally, both texts challenge the notions of a white, male God and decry the racism and sexism they encounter in Southern society. For Celie in Walker’s The Color Purple, this becomes possible through the spiritual instruction of the bisexual Shug Avery. Shug encourages Celie to abandon her image of a white, male deity, and of sex, Shug informs Celie that “God love all them feelings. That’s some of the best stuff God did” (204). In Ann Shockley’s Say Jesus and Come to Me, lesbian minister and activist Myrtle Black fosters the spiritual development

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of newly-bisexual songstress Travis Lee and gains the spiritual strength to finally risk the consequences of coming out to her followers as she opens a “church for all people.” In conjunction with her efforts at combating racism and sexism, Myrtle gains the courage to tackle homophobia from the pulpit. Both novelists tackle multiple layers of oppression and the ways in which oppressive practices have been deemed sanctioned by Scripture, and both Walker and Shockley affirm the same-sex sexual experience as equally valid as heterosexual experience within the context of Southern Christian culture. Resisting a conservative religious community viewpoint that same-sex sexual encounters are abominable to God, these authors posit the same-sex sexual experience as sacred and describe it using specifically Christian imagery and metaphor. These writers use the language of a dominant paradigm of Christianity in the South to challenge the heterosexist traditions of that mode of discourse and to revise cultural understandings of both sex and same-sex partnerships in a religious context that strives to prohibit, condemn, or exclude them. Analogous to the ways in which bisexuality embraces multiple expressions of love and desire, Walker’s and Shockley’s deliberate use of scriptural metaphor dialogizes Biblical discourse on romance and intimacy, making it “able to reveal ever newer ways to mean” (Bakhtin 346). In The Creativity of Language, Paul Ricoeur says, “Literary language has the capacity to put our quotidian existence into question; it is dangerous in the best sense of the word” (343). This revolutionary potential exists because we use narratives we know to make sense of our world; new narratives provide new modes of comprehension. Since “human action is always figured in signs, interpreted in terms of cultural traditions and norms,” Ricoeur argues that Our narrative fictions are then added to this primary interpretation or figuration of human action; so that narrative is a redefining of what is already defined, a reinterpretation of what is already interpreted. The referent of narration, namely human action, is never raw or immediate reality but an action which has been symbolized and resymbolized over and over again. Thus narration serves to displace anterior symbolizations on to a new plane, integrating or exploding them as the case may be. (343)

The theories of Deleuze and Guattari emphasize this transformative potential as well, though they argue that writing that comes from a minority position within a culture is better suited at displacing symbolizations. To clarify, they define minor literature not as that which is written in a language that deviates from the majority but as that which is written from a position that deviates from the majority. They say, “A minor literature doesn’t come from a minor language; it is rather that

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which a minority constructs within a major language” (Deleuze and Guattari 16). This distinction proves relevant considering Walker’s and Shockley’s decision to use scriptural rhetoric to render bisexual experience. As a result of this minority position, Deleuze and Guattari believe minority literatures deviate from majority literatures in that “everything in them is political. In major literatures, in contrast, the individual concern (familial, marital, and so on) joins with other no less individual concerns, the social milieu serving as a mere environment or a background” (17). Minority literature differs from this, for “its cramped space forces each individual intrigue to connect immediately to politics” (17). Through this unique positioning, the conditions of the writer in the margins of a culture “[allow] the writer all the more the possibility to express another possible community and to forge the means for another consciousness and another sensibility” (17). Minor literatures serve as revolutionary forces through what they express; giving voice, or testifying as it is known in evangelical terms, to experiences suppressed by heteronormative dominant culture defies the efforts at silencing, at disempowering those narratives that fail to perpetuate the status quo. Not only do Walker and Shockley give voice to bisexual experience within communities of faith, they do so in deliberate contrast with the traditional interpretations of those communities regarding same-sex intimacy. The literature of bisexual experience as minor literature destabilizes the notion of the dominant paradigm of conservative Southern evangelicalism that so often construes homosexual acts as abhorrent. Walker’s and Shockley’s literature of bisexual experience offers new narratives “in which very different functions of language and distinct centers of power are played out, blurring what can be said and what can’t be said; [literature in which...] all the degrees of territoriality and relative deterritorialization will be played out” (Deleuze and Guattari 26). The expression of bisexual women’s intimacy in sacred Christian terminology, then, challenges the territoriality assumed by heterosexual Christians whose own rhetoric reveals the assumptions that scriptural language is “theirs.” In affirming bisexuality and lesbianism, Walker and Shockley are contending with the vehement evangelical protest of homosexuality that is well known, practically inescapable in the South. Whether in the form of bumper stickers, signs of protest, billboards, or sermons, messages citing verses or followers’ own non-scriptural beliefs about homosexuality are standard responses to the recent proposed marriage amendments. Popularized by controversies over gay marriage amendments, the bumper sticker “Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve” sums up recent ways the Creation myth of Genesis has been used to authorize social injustice. Post

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9/11, Robertson and Falwell attributed American vulnerability to terrorism to the expanding acceptance of homosexuality (Burack 109). Other theologians have weighed in on the matter extensively. In 1991, Samuel Dresner, professor of Jewish Philosophy at Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, stated in Judaism, “Homosexuality is a violation of the order of Creation” (309). He argues that homosexual activity was so prevalent that this “sin” became a central subject in Old Testament scriptures and that homosexuality was to blame for the flood. “The early Biblical narratives can be read as a continuous attack on the widespread sexual deviance which challenged and often seduced the Israelites, whose fallings away Scripture scrupulously records,” he believes (309-10). The development of a man and woman, Adam and Eve, clearly presents the model for humanity, in his view, and the pattern of the heterosexual couple as God’s plan for humanity was reaffirmed among the coupled survivors of the flood. Dresner’s insistence upon the inherent morality of the first heterosexual couple that he translates adam, the term describing the earth being of no specific gender in the first account of creation, as meaning “marriage” rather than something stemming from the word adamah, which is the term for “earth” (316). In fact, he claims, “we are only fully human” when in a heterosexual marriage (309). He is not alone in this assessment. This debate has also affected congregational allegiance to the United Presbyterian Church. George Edwards, Professor Emeritus of New Testament at Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, declares, “It cannot be doubted that arguments from Genesis 1-3 informed the negative position embraced by the Assembly majority in 1978 and reaffirmed by subsequent judicial action in 1985” which disallows “practicing” gays, lesbians, and bisexuals from service in church leadership positions (98). The Assembly argued that “homosexuality is a ‘deviation’ and a result of the Fall” and that it is “unnatural” because it is “contrary to that order of universal human sexual nature that God intended in Genesis 1 and 2” (Edwards 99, 102). In “The Compassion of Truth: Homosexuality in Biblical Perspective,” Albert Mohler charges that homosexuality is an act of “rebellion against God as Creator” and “an assault upon the integrity of creation and God’s intention in creating human beings in two distinct and complementary genders.” He warns against any attempt “to deny the structures of creation” and insists that homosexuality cannot be considered anything other than immorality (Mohler). “The heterosexual covenant union is central to God’s intention—before and after the Fall,” he claims. When out of theologians’ texts and into sandwich boards of some particularly hostile congregations, these scriptural interpretations translate

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not into arguments about the order of creation or the status of homosexual acts as sins, but into statements of judgment, frequently of the eternal damnation of homosexuals or of the “plague” of AIDS as a divine punishment for homosexuality. These rhetorical strategies use the language of a text deemed authoritative in Western culture, particularly in the American South, to reinforce the dominant heterosexist paradigm. Michael Cobb, author of God Hates Fags: The Rhetorics of Religious Violence, asserts, “The conservative, Christian speech against queers patrols American citizens. It achieves its force, in part, because religious language is thought to be a secure form of language” (Cobb 22). Armed with texts deemed the infallible Word of God, those who use Scripture to condemn homosexuality have at their service an accepted interpretation of a masternarrative of Western culture. However, these believers who fervently oppose homosexuality feel secure in their ownership of religious language partly through their own status as Christians but also partly through a false assumption of the status of homosexuals as unChristian, as if homosexuality and Christianity are automatically mutually exclusive. In this way, the logic of their adherence to Scripture fails, for though they recognize all Christians are sinners (Romans 3:23), they seems to assume only particular kinds of sinners are Christian. Of course, many homosexual and heterosexual Christians do not adhere to the belief that homosexuality is inherently sinful, and many theologians have devoted substantial scholarly energy to arguing this interpretation as well. If any sinner has a right to appeal to religious language to validate his or her aims, if indeed all are sinners as the New Testament indicates, and if all believers are to make the Bible a lamp and a light and a shield as evangelicals suggest, then no particular group can legitimately claim ownership over another of the Word of God. In fact, much historical precedent exists in which those of minority status resisted the oppression of the dominant group through usurping the power of interpretation. For examples, see the works of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Frederick Douglass in their fight against the social injustices inflicted upon women and African Americans. This strategy has been adopted by activist members of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) community as well, including bisexuals Alice Walker and Ann Shockley. The study at hand is not concerned with the language of theologians or well-known activists, however, but with these novelists. Novelists, activists and theologians share, though, a careful approach to language and a consciousness of the power of texts. Cobb points out, “The ‘literary’ has historically and enormously powerful functions; figurative, self-conscious

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language, as we are seeing throughout my archive, has proven instrumental in the ways that queers have conceptualized their own political challenges to the religious and national fundamentalism that necessarily despises them” (87). Through their use of sacred language in describing transgressive sexual experience, these authors of this discussion—Alice Walker and Ann Shockley—are challenging stereotypes through forcing a re-examination of assumptions among the dominant culture, in this case heteronormative Christian culture. Such language also affirms or reaffirms the sacred love and spiritual life of those others would seek to exclude or condemn. Careful attention to these metaphors also raises the issues of textual authority and interpretation. Interpretation is a political act. The text of the Bible does not, after all, belong to heteronormative cultural police. Through constructing purportedly deviant sex acts in Christian language, these authors demonstrate that Biblical language is their language, too, and this is surely activism. Because many studies of language use concern the adoption of the language of the “other” (and often the dominant group), I want to clarify that the religious terminology and ideology that permeates the South is not the domain of heterosexuals, nor is it an acquired second language of homosexuals. These bisexual authors are not adopting anything outside their experience of their cultural context, and that is the point. This language is the language of the spiritual, and these authors are spiritual women targeting restrictive norms of the faithful. As defined by Marilyn R. Farwell, “The lesbian narrative” is “a plot that affirms a place for lesbian subjectivity, that narrative space where both lesbian characters and other female characters can be active, desiring agents” (157). Though some classify The Color Purple and Say Jesus and Come to Me “lesbian” narratives because the protagonists show no further interest in men once they fall for women and because Celie in The Color Purple lacks both agency and interest in her sexual experiences with men, the four women at the centers of these novels have sexual experiences with both men and women in the texts, and putting bisexuality at the center of analysis allows for examinations of the power of fluidity that such strict classification of the novels as “lesbian” would occlude. These novels may function as both lesbian narratives and bisexual narratives. I assert that the female bisexual narrative, then, features a plot that affirms a place for bisexual subjectivity and a narrative space where female characters can be active, desiring agents regardless of the genders of their partners. Shockley’s and Walker’s texts fit this model. They also perform the functions of postmodern texts named by Penelope J. Engelbrecht by “encourag[ing] or even forc[ing] the reader to notice, to concentrate on elements of the text itself, such as words and their signifying, the physical

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arrangement of printed matter on the page, or perversions of conventions, rather than on the ‘story’ the text presents [. . .] through the manipulating or discarding the conventions of (patriarchal) language and literature” (93). As postmodern bisexual texts then, these novels encourage a reexamination of that language and of the Scriptural rhetoric used by conservative evangelical groups to condemn the very acts these authors are celebrating through their use of metaphors of spiritual experience by way of the authors’ manipulations of Biblical language. “By controlling and defining images and ideas,” Bonnie Zimmermann argues, women-identified women “are able to ‘reconstitute the world’” (672). The reconstituted worlds of Shockley and Walker posit same-sex romance as sacred as all other. .

Shockley’s and Walker’s Faith-based Anti-homophobic Narratives Shockley’s novel Say Jesus and Come to Me begins with an introduction to closeted female minister Myrtle Black and ends with Black’s bold sermon urging the church to modify its views on homosexuality, a sermon performed as the coming out of its lesbian minister protagonist whose sexual and romantic encounters are repeatedly described in dialogue in religious metaphors. Only through the love she finds with bisexual Travis Lee does Myrtle gain the confidence to come out and risk the consequences of doing so within the context of Nashville’s African American religious community. Shockley wrote the novel to attack the homophobia she witnessed in the black church. She explains, “I wanted to bring out the homophobic hypocrisy of the black church, which is filled to the pulpit with closet gays and lesbians from all walks of life” (161). Though she does not include bisexuals in this explanation, her protagonist decides to deliver the novel’s final sermon after falling in love with a bisexual female character, a relationship central to the novel’s development. In “Worth the Balancing,” Alan Silver explains, It seems that although there is a general level of homophobia in the black community, the level of biphobia is higher. The men and women who may be bisexual are closeted and classified as either gay or lesbian. I feel this biphobia and homophobia is due in part to the very strong influence of religion in the black community. I think it is unfortunate because as an oppressed community we need to recognize all social groupings and not further divide ourselves. (28)

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Shockley makes no division of bisexual and homosexual in her text, recognizing their shared nonheterosexuality makes both challenged by the church. She stresses instead the inability of heterosexuality to act as guarantor of morality and the ability of alternative romance to augment spiritual development. Both protagonist Myrtle Black and her girlfriend Travis Lee deepen their faith in God as their commitment and intimacy deepen. According to Dandridge, the “title Say Jesus and Come to Me, with the verb ‘come’ carrying a double meaning, heralds the need for the black woman’s spiritual conversion and heightened sexual consciousness” (163). For Travis Lee, Myrtle Black initiates her sexual conversion from heterosexual to bisexual and heightens her spiritual consciousness. Scripting their sacred sexuality through religious rhetoric, Shockley claims the language of Scripture to validate romantic love between women. In Say Jesus and Come to Me, Myrtle Black recognizes and affirms an easy blend of physical and spiritual ecstasy. When she leads services, the altar calls erupt into tremendous climaxes described in language through which Shockley makes the sexual connotations inescapable. Myrtle herself is heated “spiritually and sexually,” and in the first of such scenes in the novel, one young woman particularly moved by Myrtle’s sermon answers the altar call yelling, “Hallelujah! Jesus-s-s! [. . .] I’m com-m-ing!” (7). The innuendo is clear, but Shockley clarifies the actions of the young woman past innuendo into full explicitness. Shockley describes the young woman as yelling with her “face ecstatically convulsed in orgasmic agitation” (7). After the service ends and Myrtle Black takes the young woman home, Myrtle reflects on their lovemaking as a “glory-hallelujah night” (12). In her youth, however, Myrtle struggles with her homosexual desire. She even resorts to heterosexual sex as a means of purging her same-sex desires. This experience does not run smoothly; it is both awkward and difficult, but Myrtle conceives of it as purposefully so. The point is not pleasure, it is transformation. “Her body was being offered as a sacrificial lamb” on the altar of heterosexuality, but “soon she found that her sacrifice had been in vain. The preference for her own sex persisted” (18). Myrtle eventually comes to terms with her lesbianism and realizes that as part of her human nature, the church itself must be wrong. However, she is fully aware of the precariousness of her position as a lesbian minister. In order to be successful in church, she must remain in the closet. Slowly, though, she gains the courage to challenge the homophobia of her followers, and this acquisition is facilitated by her burgeoning love for bisexual songstress Travis Lee.

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Travis Lee is a hard-living female country star who has become spiritually deadened after years in an abusive heterosexual relationship. When she and Myrtle cross paths, she experiences a resurgence of Christian faith, and Myrtle becomes Travis’s spiritual adviser. Their strong connection is immediate though they do not become intimately involved for some time. In response to a mere touch on the arm, Travis demands, “Do that again, Reverend [...] Touch me. It felt so spiritual!” (87). Myrtle identifies her own perceptions of their magnetic attraction as sexual in nature, but Travis seems to see only the spiritual and emotional connection as she is not yet aware of her own bisexuality. However, when Travis finally decides to rededicate her life to Christ in yet another eroticallycharged altar call, her body responds to Myrtle’s when they embrace at the front of the church. Shockley writes, “Yes, I will save you!” Myrtle said, delirious with the sensuous carnality of clasping Travis and the magnitude of the moment. Involuntarily, her hips ground into Travis’s crotch in time with the music, pushing and rotating in slow agonizing motions, while arms squeezed breasts to breasts and mashed nipples to nipples. Myrtle caught the magnetic shudder fusing Travis as her twisting hips answered back. Then with one final thrust, Travis’s loins stilled to lodge deep between the limbs of Myrtle. Heat inundated Myrtle like a raging fire, sweeping her in the throes of desire. Mercifully, by the sheer force of will power, she managed to tear away from all the ecstasy in the world, secreted in the palm of a few moments of bliss. “Confess-s-s your sins, my child, and come to Him through me.” (145-46)

Never does the sexual feeling detract from the spiritual experience. Shockley presents it as part of the experience, and it clearly involves attraction to Myrtle, but she never suggests this takes away from the legitimacy of the conversion experience. The sexuality of these scenes makes them more powerful for the reader and for the convert, but never does Shockley suggest that Myrtle is anything less than genuine in her desire to see these women come to Jesus as well as come into her bed. Not only do sexual metaphors and feelings pervade the conversion experience, but religious metaphors and feelings also permeate the sexual encounters in the novel. When Travis and Myrtle finally do become lovers, Myrtle seduces Travis with lines such as “Close your eyes, darling, [...] and let me enter the pearly gates,” referencing Revelation 21:21 (183). Travis has a habit of responding with “Jesus” to Myrtle’s affection. Though Travis expresses some surprise at her desire for a woman, she does not deny her attraction to Myrtle. Their relationship fosters her emotional healing from past abuse and her spiritual development.

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Significantly, Travis never doubts the propriety of their lovemaking; her new faith both affirms and is affirmed by her new bisexual consciousness. Hers is a God of possibilities and inclusion. In an interview in Bi Any Other Name, John Horne explains, “The bisexual development has always been due to an acute awareness of the unfolding of life around them and within them. It tends to go with spirituality. For me, being bisexual is spiritual. It’s knowing that I love the world, which is what the world needs so badly right now...people to love one another” (Hutchins 114). For Travis, loving Myrtle and loving God are interconnected. This is part of Shockley’s message in Say Jesus and Come to Me. Myrtle’s spiritual instruction serves as the vehicle for the novel’s obvious didacticism as Myrtle poses the possibility that God is not male after all (15), and that certain interpretive strategies enable a reconciliation of contemporary egalitarian values and Christian belief. In an effort to explain her “broad-minded” approach to the Bible to Travis, Myrtle clarifies she is “Not a strict interpreter of the Bible, which a female minister cannot afford to be. It would be disastrous, if she were, for sexism abounds!” (115). Her final sermon which concludes the novel is a plea for the church to fully embrace everyone without condemnation of any part of their lives, loves, or lifestyle, whether they are heterosexual, homosexual, or bisexual. Her plain-spoken sermon echoes the agenda of theorist Gayle S. Rubin who points out that “heterosexuality is acknowledged to exhibit the full range of human experience” in normative paradigms of thought, despite obvious evidence otherwise. In “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality,” Rubin proposes “a democratic morality should judge sexual acts by the way partners treat one another, the level of mutual consideration, the presence or absence of coercion, and the quantity and quality of the pleasure they provide” (15). Myrtle preaches, “The church today must update the teachings of Paul on homosexuality,” and explains that Paul linked homosexuality to idolatry. However, “this is a new day,” she proclaims and contemporary “society has gone through an upheaval of social revolutions brought on by people who want mental and physical freedom from oppression” (280). She places the struggle for LGBT rights within a chain of liberation movements including the Civil Rights movement and Women’s liberation, and she decries the church for failing to respond to these changes. “Of all the oppressed,” she claims, “gays are the most rejected by the church,” but Timothy 4:4 says, “For every creature of God is good, and nothing to be refused” (281). She urges her congregation to stop its oppression of homosexuals and comes out to her church. In at least her church, the Universal Church for All People, they heed her call.

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In Walker’s novel The Color Purple, a romantic relationship unfolds between the novel’s burdened protagonist, Celie, and her friend, the glamorous bisexual Shug Avery. As in Say Jesus, the pair’s romance initiates through spiritual guidance. Shug restores Celie’s faith in God by prying open her image of the divine. The God Celie worships in the first half of the novel is “the one that’s in the white folks’ white bible,” according to Shug (201). “Ain’t no way to read the bible and not think God white,” she says, since this God “look just like them [. . .] Only bigger [with] a heap more hair” (201-202). After contesting the white, male representation of god and the validity of the Bible, in which “all the colored folks” are “cursed” anyway, Shug offers Celie a new way of envisioning divinity (202). “Stripped of his identity as a Man and rendered natural (that is, resourceful and invigorating), He becomes non-sexist, unoppressive and unrepressive,” writes Wirba Mainimo (125). This new vision coincides with Celie’s first encounter with a nonsexist, unoppressive, and unrepressive lover, Shug. The labeled identity of God no longer matters as the gender of the beloved no longer matters. The quality of the loving and the intimacy achieved eclipse the social prohibitions that devalue bisexuality or antipatriarchal religious experience as nonexistent or false. Natural and divine in the gospel of Shug Avery is the expression of desire for both men and women. Just as Shug’s sexual fluidity transcends the limits of heterosexuality, Shug’s view of God presented by Walker in The Color Purple rejects hierarchies of both gender and race, for “God is everything” (202). “God ain’t a he or a she, but a It” according to Shug, and this It desires “to please us back” (202-203). Pointing to the beauty of the natural world, Shug delivers the line from which the novel’s title is derived, “I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it” (203). Arguing for the interconnectedness of humans and the natural world, Shug’s sermon teaches Celie to view God within herself rather than far off in the heavens and deaf to her cries. Not only does this divine force reside within, it emanates through both the spirit and the body. Tempting Celie away from the Protestantism constructing her spiritual views, Shug offers a metaphorical apple into which Celie wholeheartedly bites. “Now that my eyes opening,” Celie says, echoing Genesis 3:7, “I feels like a fool” (204).1 Immediately, heterosexist patriarchal forces in her life begin to lose their control over her. “Next to any little scrub of a bush in my yard, Mr. _____’s evil sort of shrink,” Celie writes in the next sentence of her letter (204). Her “ignorance” lost through Shug’s temptation into pantheism and intimacy, Celie is free from the shackles of patriarchal belief in a “religion that sanctioned [her]

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destruction” and from the limits of heterosexual intercourse from which she derived no pleasure.2 Once the specter of God the Father (painfully absent anyway) no longer haunts Celie, Shug proceeds to stop Albert’s/Mr._____’s abuse of Celie. Counterintuitively, the presence of Albert’s mistress, Shug, in their home works to diminish his power, as Shug uses her feminine wiles to loosen patriarchal control over Celie in her home life in addition to her spiritual life. Shug’s God is pleased by human pleasure, an idea incompatible with the domestic violence Celie endures in her home. Part of the purple in the field of this world that may piss God off to ignore is the equal worth of women as well as the validity (rather than shame) of the experiences of the body, even those outside of heterosexuality. Yet Celie herself finds even her new God’s endorsement of sexual pleasure with Shug implausible for the shame surrounding the body in Christian ethics that have shaped her views and for the way pleasure has been divorced from her own prior sexual experience. Rubbing Celie’s thigh, Shug explains that “god love all them feelings. That’s some of the best stuff God did”; sex is not “dirty” because “God made it” (203). Shug’s knowledge-giving expands Celie’s spiritual consciousness and her physical possibilities. The heterosexist patriarchs of the novel effectively castrated by her bisexual mentor, Celie’s body becomes her own for the first time. When Shug discovers Celie has never once enjoyed intercourse, she exclaims, “Why Miss Celie, [. . .] you still a virgin,” defining chastity as a state of lacking experience in sexual pleasure rather than a state of unpenetratedness by a male penis (81). Patriarchal values dissipate with Shug’s redefinition. Arming Celie with a mirror, Shug shepherds her into the bedroom to study her vagina (82). Shug encourages her to think of it as pretty, but Celie thinks more importantly “it mine” (82). Whereas God the Father is associated with the abuse of Celie’s body, Shug, a metaphorical knowledge-giving serpent, is associated with pleasure and healing. Shug not only explains pleasurable touching to Celie, they eventually become lovers in the novel. Linda Abbandonato, author of “A View from ‘Elsewhere’: Subversive Sexuality and the Rewriting of the Heroine’s Story in The Color Purple,” recognizes “that Shug’s erotic behavior suggests she embodies and embraces the notion of jouissance as a liberating power” (1112).3 Celie comes to see the body and the spirit, and thereby sexuality and spirituality, as parts of the same whole. No longer embarrassed by Shug’s claim that “god love all them feelings,” Celie increasingly feels attuned to God in nature and describes this attunement in sexual terms. “Lately I feel like me and God make love just fine,” she says (227). This is facilitated by her cessation of conceiving

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of God as male. Shug’s temptations allow for Celie’s revelations of the divine in the body, which is part of the pantheism Shug espouses in The Color Purple. Experiencing sex on her own terms with Shug, Celie finally experiences sexual pleasure as well as love. Shug also teaches Celie to love herself, a necessary step in her burgeoning sense of self-worth and autonomy. “A conflation of the spiritual and sexual results from their body contacts and orchestrates autonomy and self-sufficiency which, from a feminist standpoint, is the keystone to real liberation,” argues Mainimo (127). The love Shug gives her, through her physical affection as well as her spiritual guidance, is what Celie required to become active rather than passive in the face of her hardships and mistreatment. Once Celie’s eyes are opened not to her nudity or her shame but to her prior misinformed view of divinity and to a new attitude toward the body, she sews no fig leaf aprons to conceal herself. Celie appropriates pants, traditionally male apparel, through which she sews herself into financial self-sufficiency in the loving, healing company of Shug.

Conclusion Rather than feel thrust out of God’s loving presence and grace, Celie and Travis are restored spiritually by the ways in which the Christian message anchors the lessons delivered by Shug and Myrtle in Walker’s and Shockley’s novels. In each novel discussed above, the acts of samesex intimacy are not only restorative; they are sacred. Bisexual female characters Shug Avery and Travis Lee bolster the faiths of their partners and prompt new confidence in the validity of same-sex love and affection. In “Reclaiming Heart and Mind,” Leonard Tirado remarks, “Bisexuality can be soul-healing at its deepest. Through it we can tap into a commonality, an empathy, a state of communion that shares with others all of life’s fullness” (122). In Say Jesus and Come to Me and The Color Purple bisexuality works precisely in this way, countering homophobic interpretations of homosexual intimacy. Bisexuality and lesbianism are affirmed rather than condemned, and the tenderness of female-female sexual activity is construed as a celebration of the body, which is not cast as shameful but is upheld as a marvelous creation of the Lord. Marilyn Farwell explains that “Western ideology equates the female and lesbian with the bodily and sexual [. . .] The Western tradition codes the female body as negative and threatening, a body so excessive in its functions and sexuality that is must be controlled” (161). This is especially true of the body in Christian ideology. The body and sex are shamed and stigmatized

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in traditional conservative interpretations of the Bible—especially the New Testament writings of Paul—but the body and sex are redeemed in these novelists’ writings. If “we can understand the traditional narratives as a story that seeks to control female sexuality and the female body” as Farwell posits (161), nontraditional narratives, then, are stories by which this control is shattered and autonomy of experience is restored to the rightful owners of female sexuality, the women themselves. Because research has shown that encountering narratives of homosexual Christians’ experiences has helped religious bisexuals, gays, and lesbians resolve the tensions they experience, examples of bisexual Christian experience are tremendously important. In Kimberly Mahaffy’s study of lesbian Christians, she discovered that “more than half of the participants changed their beliefs rather than leave the church or live with tension. Such changes were facilitated by reading about other gay Christians’ experiences, meeting other gay Christians, participating in therapy, recognizing that spirituality and religion are separate entities, and disregarding the portions of Scripture that are condemning while affirming beliefs and traditions that embrace homosexuals” (397). Shockley and Walker’s novels interrogate interpretations of Scripture that stigmatize homosexual love and offer instead interpretations that validate bisexuality. Say Jesus and Come to Me and The Color Purple provide examples of wholly positive, life- and faith-affirming bisexual relationships rendered in scriptural metaphor and accompanied by explicit anti-homophobic argument. By challenging a heterosexist assumption of deviance from not only social norms but also God’s plan, Walker and Shockley have enacted the kind of textual resymbolization of human experience described by Ricoeur. It is not the companionship or even the love between women that some Christians find abominable but the sex acts and desires themselves, and it is certainly no coincidence that these novelists, whose personal lives are spent protesting injustice in addition to, and often through, writing, choose to imbue their most transgressive passages—the sex scenes—with the most spiritual metaphors and adjectives. Because “writing is precisely the very possibility of change, the space that can serve as a springboard for subversive thought, the precursory movement of a transformation of social and cultural structures” as Cixous declares (164), Shockley and Walker expose fallacious assumptions and disband harmful stereotypes about the spiritual lives of bisexual and lesbian Christians through their fictions, undoubtedly in the hope of demolishing master narratives of exclusion. Claiming biblical language as their rightful material, they not only affirm same-sex love as sacred, but they also challenge the heterosexual privilege within Christian communities and validate bisexuality. Walker and Shockley

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deterritorialize Scripture, wresting it from the domain of those who would argue for biblically-based homophobia, to advocate the acceptance of all forms of love.

Notes 1

Genesis 3:6-7: “And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that is was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat. And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked.” 2 In “The Only Reason,” Walker writes, “It is fatal to love a god who does not love you. A God specifically created to comfort, lead, advise, strengthen, and enlarge the tribal borders of someone else. We have been beggars at the table of a religion that sanctioned our destruction.” (On the Issues 6.2 (Apr. 30, 1997): 16-. ). 3 Linda Abbandonato, “A View from ‘Elsewhere: Subversive Sexuality and the Rewriting of the Heroine’s Story in The Color Purple,” PMLA, Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 106.5 (Oct. 1991): 1106-1115. In this article, Abbandonato examines how Walker opposes the “powerful ideological constraint” of compulsory heterosexuality (a term coined and outlined by Adrienne Rich) through Shug and Celie’s relationship in The Color Purple.

Works Cited Abbandonato, Linda. “A View from ‘Elsewhere’: Subversive Sexuality and the Rewriting of the Heroine’s Story in The Color Purple.” PMLA, Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 106.5 (Oct. 1991): 1106-15. Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination. Austin: U of Texas P, 1982. Bible. King James Version. Burack, Cynthia. Sin, Sex and Democracy: Antigay Religious Rhetoric and the Christian Right. Albany: State U of New York P, 2008. Cixous, Hélène. “The Laugh of the Medusa.” The Routledge Language and Cultural Theory Reader. Ed. Lucy Burke, Tony Crowley, and Alan Girvin. New York: Routledge, 2000. 161-66. Cobb, Michael. God Hates Fags: The Rhetorics of Religious Violence. New York: New York UP, 2006. Dandridge, Rita B. “Shockley, the Iconoclast.” Callaloo 22 (Autumn 1984): 160-64. Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Trans. Dana Polan. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986.

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Dresner, Samuel H. “Homosexuality and the Order of Creation.” Judaism 40.3 (1991): 309-21. Edwards, George. “A Critique of Creationist Homophobia.” Journal of Homosexuality 18.3/4 (1990): 95-118. Engelbrecht, Penelope J. “‘Lifting Belly Is a Language’: The Postmodern Lesbian Subject.” Feminist Studies 16.1(Spring 1990): 85-114. Farwell, Marilyn. Professions of Desire: Lesbian and Gay Studies in Literature. Ed. George E. Haggerty and Bonnie Zimmermann. New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 1995. Hutchins, Loraine. “Letting Go: An Interview with John Horne.” Bi Any Other Name: Bisexual People Speak Out. Ed. Loraine Hutchins and Lani Kaahumanu. Boston: Alyson Publications, 1991. 112-16. Hutchins, Loraine, and Lani Kaahumanu, eds. Bi Any Other Name: Bisexual People Speak Out. Boston: Alyson Publications, 1991. Mahaffy, Kimberly. “Cognitive Dissonance and Its Resolution: A Study of Lesbian Christians.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 35.4 (Dec. 1996): 392-402. Mainimo, Wirba Ibrahim. “Black Female Writers’ Perspective on Religion: Alice Walker and Calixthe Beyala.” Journal of Third World Studies 19.1 (Spring 2002): 117-36. Mohler, Albert. “The Compassion of Truth: Homosexuality in Biblical Perspective.” albertmohler.com 16 July 2009. Ricoeur, Paul. 1981. “The Creativity of Language.” The Routledge Language and Cultural Theory Reader. Ed. Lucy Burke, Tony Crowley, and Alan Girvin. New York: Routledge, 2000. 340-44. Rubin, Gayle S. “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality.” The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader. Ed. Henry Abelove, Michele Aina Barale, and David M. Halperin. New York: Routledge, 1993. 3-44. First published in Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality, Ed. Carole S. Vance, 1984. Shockley, Ann Allen. Say Jesus and Come to Me. New York: Avon Books, 1982. Silver, Alan. “Worth the Balancing.” Bi Any Other Name: Bisexual People Speak Out. Ed. Loraine Hutchins and Lani Kaahumani. Boston: Alyson Publications, 1991. 27-28. Tirado, Leonard. “Reclaiming Heart and Mind.” Bi Any Other Name: Bisexual People Speak Out. Ed. Loraine Hutchins and Lani Kaahumani. Boston: Alyson Publications, 1991. 117-23. Walker, Alice. The Color Purple. New York: Pocket Books, 1982. Zimmermann, Bonnie. “The Politics of Transliteration: Lesbian Personal Narratives.” Signs 9.4 (Summer 1984): 663-82.

CHAPTER TEN E(RACE)ING FEMALE SEXUALITY IN HARPER LEE’S TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD CAMERON E. WILLIAMS

More than fifty years since its initial publication, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) continues to inspire readers. The novel has been celebrated for its depiction of human struggle, its characters praised as some of the bravest and most memorable heroes in the history of American letters. The timeless appeal of this story—of the fight for equality in the face of injustice—only sustains the novel’s popularity. According to Wayne Flynt, a 1990 survey conducted by the Center for the Learning and Teaching of Literature listed To Kill a Mockingbird as one of “the ten most frequently assigned books in American schools.”1 In addition to being required school reading, To Kill a Mockingbird is also “the most frequently selected book for the National Endowment of the Arts ‘Big Read’ program, where a city selected a single book for a year’s intense focus and asked every citizen to read it.” Today, Lee’s novel has been translated into more than forty different languages and continues to rank among USA Today’s weekly 150 best-selling books (Flynt 6). Yet as Diann L. Baecker suggests, To Kill a Mockingbird’s place in the popular canon “has been finessed” by diminishing the significance of some of its more disconcerting racial themes. In particular, Baecker insists that critics tend to acknowledge race only “at the same time that they discuss the novel as though it mainly concerns Boo Radley or Atticus Finch” (124). This is due in part to the fact that Tom Robinson’s trial—in which he, a black man, stands wrongfully accused of raping Mayella Ewell, a young white woman—is typically viewed as a secondary storyline that serves only to expedite other, more predominant events, including Scout Finch’s coming-of-age and Boo Radley’s eventual emergence. Despite the fact that Lee’s text arranges the main narrative around a rape trial, most criticism also refrains from exploring, in any great detail, the novel’s sexual themes, perhaps one of the most important aspects of To

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Kill a Mockingbird. I refer to the politics of sexuality as crucial because of the ways in which they are so closely bound with the novel’s racial politics. That is to say, Lee’s novel constructs sexuality—specifically, female sexuality—not only as “evil” and “dirty,” but as black. As Diane Roberts explains, female sexuality is blackness; in the South, she claims, the “very nature of sexuality” is considered “illicit” and “Negro” (116). In To Kill a Mockingbird, sexuality and “blackness” are nearly impossible to untangle, and it is during the rape trial that this becomes most explicitly apparent; however, criticism of the novel—which generally lauds both Atticus and Scout for their progressive ideologies concerning Southern race relations—almost unfailingly overlooks this. My purpose, therefore, is to examine the ways in which the novel in general and Atticus’s courtroom rhetoric in particular reveal the complex and inextricable link between race and sexuality. In so doing, I will make three interrelated claims: 1) Mayella Ewell’s status as “white trash” alone links her sexuality with “blackness”; her willingness to transgress Maycomb’s rigid miscegenation taboo with Tom Robinson, complicated by her (likely nonconsensual) incestuous relationship with her own father, further marks her sexuality as “illicit” and “Negro”; 2) At the same time that Atticus’s defense of Tom petitions against the pervasive stereotype that all black men are sexually aggressive and untrustworthy, it relies on the equally pernicious misconception that poor, lower-class white women such as Mayella Ewell are not “respectable” and are therefore incapable of being violated. I seek not to vilify Atticus, but to complicate typical readings of him as the novel’s moral beacon by interrogating the ways in which he tacitly upholds many of the Southern societal assumptions that the book elsewhere resists; 3) Scout’s resolute respect of Atticus’s wisdom, childhood perspective, and seeming rejection of Southern Womanhood work together to obscure her complicity in reinforcing the association of gender and class with illicit sexuality and “blackness.” So deeply entrenched are the South’s structuring social and racial mythologies that even a progressive novel that challenges so many of them—as To Kill a Mockingbird undoubtedly does—still, however unconsciously, enacts them as well. Therefore, in order to establish the context of To Kill a Mockingbird’s reception, it is necessary to explore the historical association of blackness with transgressive sexuality, particularly as this association became such an enduring stereotype. Associating skin color, especially blackness, with illicit or threatening sexuality can be traced back as far as the early modern period. As Roberts reminds us, “the Spirit of Fornication in Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (1624) is ‘a little foul, ugly Ethiop’” (73). Celia Daileader likewise argues that “masculinist

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racist hegemony” perpetuated myths of black male hypersexuality as a means of controlling white female sexuality. Citing David M. Friedman, Daileader recounts medieval testimonies in which women accused of witchcraft claim to have had sex with a “black” devil. These women repeatedly mention the devil’s penis, reporting its “massive size and shape” and its appearance as “black and covered with scales.” The devil described here, Daileader affirms, “oddly prefigures the modern myth of the hyper-sexual black male” (1). Before the Civil War was fought, this figure had assumed a dominant role in pervading Southern racial myths. Because of the antebellum South’s insistence on maintaining white patriarchal control, of preserving a racial hierarchy sustained by the institution of slavery, the image of the “black beast rapist” was deployed by white Southerners as a way to legitimate denying black slaves any kind of freedom or autonomy. Abolition granted to slaves by the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865 intensified the white South’s terror of losing authority and concretized the need for the demonization of black men. As Martha Hodes explains, without slavery, white Southerners needed another means by which to maintain their established racial hierarchy. Because of their potential to gain more economic and political power than women, newly freed black men were viewed as posing the most dangerous threat to white patriarchy; it was black men who singlehandedly possessed the ability to destroy the South as white patriarchs knew it. To quell “the alarm of diminishing white supremacy,” white Southerners “fastened on the taboo of sex between black men and white women with newfound urgency,” fearing that such relations would “destroy the white race” (147). But slavery had allowed for—almost encouraged—sex between white men and black women, and control of women’s bodies—both white and black—was not something that white patriarchs were ready to relinquish. While the image of the fearsome hypersexual black male was used to inhibit interracial sex between black men and white women, his counterpart, the sexually aggressive black female—the jezebel—was used by white men to justify the sexual exploitation of black women. Christine PalumboDeSimone acknowledges Alice Walker’s observation that prescribed notions of black female identity, these racial myths, in American culture have, for generations, been “powerfully deterministic.” From “mules” to “mammies” to “whores,” the “folklore” of black womanhood “has been used to legitimate and perpetuate the oppression of black women in white patriarchy […] primarily because her persona as someone who shoulders cultural ‘burdens’ has served the mythology so well” (125). The jezebel played a key role in the South’s collection of racial myths, particularly in the way that this figure was used to serve certain social and political

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functions—namely, upholding white patriarchal order. In a region where sexuality often operated as a mode of oppression, the jezebel further perpetuated myths of black “animal” sexuality and became another image by which to control female sexuality, allowing white men “the convenience” of deeming black women as subhuman (Roberts 74). White women, on the other hand—particularly Southern white women of the aristocracy—were required to be paragons of chastity and virtue. The ideal Southern Lady was thought to represent the clean, closed, classical body; she was virginal, graceful, and passive. In Writing the South, Richard Gray reminds us of the cult of Southern Womanhood, which made possible the association of white, upper-class women with “the very notion” of the South. The cult of Southern Womanhood relied on a clear division of roles, and black women—who occupied the lowest stratum of the South’s social hierarchy—were thereby assigned the “sexual function.” Of course, black women were not the only women to ever engage in sexual relations, but “were those with whom the sexual dimension of experience was habitually and mythically associated.” This, Gray explains, made it infinitely easier to transform the majority of white women into angelic emblems of perfection and purity, women whose sexuality was minimized to the point of complete absence. On their bodies were written expressions of the South’s ideal; Gray cites W. J. Cash’s claim that the white woman became “the South’s Palladium…the shieldbearing Athena gleaming whitely in the clouds…the mystic symbol of its nationality…the lily-pure maid of Astolat.” This is a model that largely defined the Southern way of thought, a model through which it became possible “to contain [female] sexuality by compartmentalizing it,” to suppress it to the point of near erasure (189). Typical readings of To Kill a Mockingbird understand Tom’s trial (and his conviction) as a biting critique of this mythology, particularly for the value it places on the sanctity of white womanhood. This at least seems to be the attitude of the novel’s precocious protagonist and narrator, Jean Louise “Scout” Finch, who sees the institution of “womanhood” itself as a useless construct. Throughout her narrative Scout describes the routine and expectations of white womanhood: “ladies” of Maycomb “bathed before noon,” take three o’clock naps (Lee 6); wear corsets on Sundays (11); are apparently protected—by law—from being subjected to hearing “abusive and profane language” (11)2; demonstrate “river-boat, boardingschool manners,” uphold “any moral [that] come[s] along,” and are “incurable” gossips (172). None of this seems to appeal to Scout. When Atticus’s brother, Uncle Jack, asks her if she wants to grow up to be a “lady,” she unashamedly replies, “Not particularly” (105). She later makes

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her views on being a lady even clearer when she describes an exchange with Atticus’s sister, Alexandra: [Aunt Alexandra] was fanatical on the subject of my attire. I could not possibly hope to be a lady if I wore breeches; when I said I could do nothing in a dress, she said I wasn’t supposed to be doing things that required pants. Aunt Alexandra’s vision of my deportment involved playing with small stoves, tea sets, and wearing the Add-A-Pearl necklace she gave me when I was born; furthermore, I should be a ray of sunshine in my father’s lonely life. I suggested that one could be a ray of sunshine in pants just as well . . . . (108)

Scout would rather re-enact scenes from Tarzan with Jem and Dill than play with tea sets and would rather enjoy the freedom of pants than be confined to a dress. Scout rejects the expectations of being a lady and instead collapses gender binaries by assuming certain “masculine” characteristics.3 She enjoys using “profane” language4 that ladies should never hear—let alone use—and rather than sit passively, she “would just as soon jump on someone as look at him if her pride’s at stake” (116). In addition to the fact that Jem and Atticus seem to support and encourage Scout’s ability to negotiate male and female spaces—Jem’s method of coaxing Scout into doing something she otherwise might not do is to tease her for acting “like a girl” (50), while Atticus frequently reminds Scout that he likes her just the way she is (108)—the images of “ladies” we do get throughout the novel are not especially admirable. Through Scout, To Kill a Mockingbird appears to ironize one of the presumptions of the “southern rape complex”5; that is, through a character like Aunt Alexandra, for example, we see “ladyhood” as an empty—even absurd—term. Scout describes Alexandra as “one of the last of her kind…born in the objective case” (172); she sits “sipping, whispering, fanning” during afternoon teatime that she holds with other respectable women of her society (176), gossips incessantly, and is devoted to her family,6 and while Atticus is preoccupied with the details of Tom’s case, comes to Maycomb to stay with Scout and Jem and essentially serve as their “mother.” Alexandra may be a proper lady with impeccable etiquette, but she is everything but likeable. While Alexandra is caring and devoted and wants only the best for Scout and Jem, she is also judgmental and elitist, which is really a crime in Atticus’s “equal” household.7 The most egregious offense of which she is guilty occurs during the time that Alexandra is staying at—and imposing her own values and routine on— the Finch household. In so doing, she suggests that Atticus no longer “needs” the black housekeeper, Calpurnia. Calpurnia is the cornerstone of the Finch household, considered “a member of the family” by Atticus and

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his children alike (182), which is exactly Alexandra’s problem with keeping her around. This incident occurs moments after Scout details her (and Jem’s) trip to Calpurnia’s church (for which Cal is vehemently criticized by one especially vocal parishioner who insists that “those white children” have their own church) and asks for Atticus’s permission to go visit Cal at her house. Alexandra’s obstinate interjection—“You may not” (181)—and her immediate request that Atticus “do something about [Calpurnia]” stems solely from her disapproval of what she sees as an inappropriate relationship between a white family and their black employee. The Finches do not represent just any old white family; according to Alexandra, at least, they are not “run-of-the-mill people” but are “the product of several generations’ gentle breeding” (177). Aunt Alexandra is “of the opinion, obliquely expressed, that the longer a family had been sitting on one patch of land the finer it was” (173). As Scout recounts at the narrative’s beginning, until Atticus moved to Montgomery to study law (and his younger brother, following suit, moved to Boston to study medicine), the Finch family had lived at Finch’s Landing since their ancestor, Simon Finch, “worked his way across the Atlantic to Philadelphia, thence to Jamaica, thence to Mobile, and up the Saint Stephens […] bought three slaves and with their aid established a homestead on the banks of the Alabama River” (4). It is this belief in the austerity of her family’s name, her insistence on upholding a social hierarchy—the necessity of which she believes to be dangerously diminishing as the South gradually becomes more progressive—that drives her to prevent Scout from fraternizing not only with Calpurnia, but also with Walter Cunningham. When Scout vocally resolves to invite Walter over for dinner, and considers even asking him to spend the night sometime, Alexandra replies, “We’ll see about that,” a pronouncement, Scout notes, “that with her was always a threat, never a promise” (299). Scout attempts to persuade her aunt further by remarking that the Cunninghams are “good folks,” but her effort is met with the same firm, yet subtle, decree: “Jean Louise,” Alexandra says, “there is no doubt in my mind that they’re good folks. But they’re not our kind of folks.” Scout resiliently presses the matter a third time, imploring her aunt to tell her why Walter can’t come over, at which point Alexandra says outright: “I’ll tell you why…Because—he—is—trash, that’s why you can’t play with him” (301). Scout’s objection to “ladyhood” goes deeper than her distaste for dresses or tea sets: she is completely at odds with the ideology behind it, particularly for the value it places on judging others as inferior. The

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severity and injustice of Alexandra’s judgment of Walter is therefore underscored in the next several passages in the novel, in which Scout gets angry at Alexandra not for calling her a problem child, but for labeling Walter “trash.” Jem—who has slowly matured over the course of the narrative, gradually coming to view himself as a “gentleman” like Atticus—very wisely tries to explain to Scout that Alexandra is just trying to make her a “lady” and asks her why she can’t “just take up sewin’ or somethin’” (302). He then tells her, in what seems like an effort to justify, if not valorize, Alexandra’s assessment of Walter: “There’s four kinds of folks in the world. There’s the ordinary kind like us and the neighbors, there’s the kind like the Cunninghams out in the woods, the kind like the Ewells down at the dump, and the Negroes” (303). As he continues to describe how each rung of this hierarchy doesn’t “like” those below them, Scout—vaguely aware of a certain “caste system” that exists in Maycomb, the workings of which she doesn’t entirely understand—interrupts to describe the similarities between these four ostensibly disparate groups of people, until she eventually reaches the conclusion that there is only “one kind of folks. Folks” (304).8 No character makes the ideology of the Southern Lady look more deleterious than Mrs. Henry Lafayette Dubose, an old lady of the Old South who, like Alexandra, outspokenly advocates Maycomb’s class and racial divides. Also like Alexandra, Mrs. Dubose (rumored to keep a CSA pistol hidden on her person) not only takes advantage of any opportunity to reprove Scout for being unladylike, from the way she dresses—“What are you doing in those overalls?” she reprimands Scout, “You should be in a dress and camisole, young lady!” (135)—down to the way she speaks— “Don’t you say hey to me, you ugly girl! You say good afternoon, Mrs. Dubose!” (133)—but furthermore condemns Atticus for his “nigger-loving propensities” (144). It comes as no surprise that Mrs. Dubose disagrees with Atticus’s decision to defend Tom Robinson against Mayella Ewell’s accusation that he has raped her. Also unsurprising is Atticus’s reaction to this pejorative; he confirms to Scout: “I do my best to love everybody” (144) and insists that, despite her obvious flaws (including her addiction to morphine), Mrs. Dubose was “a great lady […] the bravest person I ever knew” (149). This same optimism seems to drive Atticus’s decision to defend Tom in the first place, even though he knows his effort is a futile one. Knowing Scout is eavesdropping, he tells Jack: “The only thing we’ve got is a black man’s word” against a white family’s (117), that, as most people in Maycomb believe, as a white woman, Mayella holds far more power and credibility than Tom.

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But Mayella Ewell is not a “lady.” She may be white, and she may be a woman, but she is a Ewell; she is a member of a family that lives immediately outside “a small Negro settlement,” a family, Scout remarks, that has only the whiteness of their skin to make them “any better than [their] nearest neighbors” (229).9 In other words, according to the social hierarchy that dominates Maycomb, Mayella is “trash.” This is something that both Atticus and Scout make expressly clear; yet as many critics contend, most people who read To Kill a Mockingbird and are “inspired by [its] power…want to be Atticus” (Althouse 1364). And indeed, the vast majority of criticism on the novel seems also to regard Atticus as a model character, lawyer, man, and all-around human being. Steven Lubet examines the way the character of Atticus Finch is typically understood— as “the ultimate lawyer,” “a moral archetype…reflecting nobility upon us, and…having the courage to meet the standards that we set for ourselves but can seldom attain” (1340). Similarly, Marcus Jimison calls Atticus “a symbol of quiet strength, devotion to the law, and devotion to the principle that all persons are equal before the law” (2).10 The student-oriented website SparkNotes, which provides detailed summaries and analyses of classic works of literature, describes Atticus as a character of “penetrating intelligence, calm wisdom, and exemplary behavior,” “the novel’s moral guide and voice of consciousness”; he is “respected by everyone…the moral backbone of Maycomb, a person to whom others turn in times of doubt and trouble [. . . .] He stands rigidly committed to justice and thoughtfully willing to view matters from the perspectives of others” (SparkNotes Editors).11 Even the other characters in the novel reinforce this image. Miss Maudie Atkinson says Atticus is “civilized in his heart” (Lee 130); Jem and Scout too idolize their father and regard him as a perfect “gentleman” (131). Atticus claims to be “in favor of Southern womanhood as much as anybody” (196), yet his defense—which is presumably structured as a criticism of the persistent and offensive misconception that all black men are sexually aggressive and untrustworthy—relies on another, equally denigrating stereotype: that lower-class white women such as Mayella Ewell are incapable of being insulted and as such cannot count on “ideology about female purity to absolve them of alleged illicit sexual activity” (Hodes 161). In White Women, Black Men, Hodes looks at nineteenth-century testimonies against the Ku Klux Klan that make visible the ways in which class distinctions were often employed in cases where black men were accused of crimes against white women. She contends that while the term “lady” was commonly invoked, particularly when a white woman accused a black man of rape, “the reputations of white

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women were continually assessed by white Southerners in the Klan testimony, with the congressional committee participating in such dialogues” (162). In one particular case she describes, the committee asked a witness if the alleged victim was a “respectable” woman. Other cases she recounts similarly place enormous emphasis on the victim’s “respectability”: in 1869, for example, Jesse Edwards was hanged in Virginia for reportedly raping and murdering “Miss Susan Hite, a respectable young lady”; another instance involves a black man in North Carolina, who was beaten severely for “allegedly assaulting ‘a respectable young lady’”; also in North Carolina, another black man was hanged for making “a bad proposition to a very respectable young lady” (161).12 That Atticus, at several points during the trial, uses the word “respectable” to refer to Tom Robinson—not to Mayella—is therefore noteworthy. His line of questioning intends to call Mayella’s reputation into question, to show her not only as “mean” and as a “lowdown white woman,” but also as one who isn’t worthy of the designation “respectable.”13 He first does this by demonstrating her lack of “routine courtesy,” or her unfamiliarity with common manners (Lee 244). When he politely refers to her with such honorifics as “Miss” and “Ma’am,” Mayella angrily insists that he’s mocking her: “Long’s he keeps on callin’ me ma’am an sayin’ Miss Mayella ,” she tells Judge Taylor, “I don’t hafta take his sass. I ain’t called upon to take it” (243). This exchange not only makes conspicuous the class tensions that are at stake, but furthermore indicates an awareness on the part of Mayella that she doesn’t “deserve” these designations. Lubet affirms that “Mayella clearly understood that everyone else in the courtroom considered her trash, hardly worth protecting. Throughout her testimony, as though she herself was on trial, she was nervous and jumpy. She cried repeatedly and she reacted with ‘terror and fury’” (1345). Judge Taylor reassures Mayella that she “has not been sassed,” that courtesy is just Atticus’s “way” (Lee 243); however, Atticus’s questions have all been carefully crafted, though not, as Scout suspects, entirely in an attempt to paint “before the jury a picture of the Ewells’ home life” (244), nor is it an effort to sympathetically portray her as “a victim of cruel poverty and ignorance” (272). Rather, Atticus seems more concerned with situating Mayella as “trash,” as not worthy of the jury’s respect. Her furious offense to Atticus’s courtesy was therefore not elicited by accident. Throughout the narrative, we as readers have witnessed Atticus’s almost uncanny insight into the motivations of other characters: he knows that Mr. Cunningham comes from “a set breed of men” and would therefore rather go hungry than lose his land (27-28), understands Boo Radley’s reasons for never coming outside (65), and

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sympathizes with Mrs. Dubose’s cantankerous disposition. Surely, Atticus knows enough about the “contentious” (36) ways of the Ewells to know that Mayella would not respond favorably to being called “Miss” by someone she seems to see as socially superior to herself.14 Atticus also intends to prove that “white trash” Mayella willingly transgressed the miscegenation taboo. He asks Mayella if she knew Tom Robinson from before the alleged rape, if she’d ever asked Tom to come up to her house before, if she’d ever asked Tom to help her with some odd jobs around the house, and why the other Ewell children didn’t hear her supposed screams. These questions are intended to show that Mayella was the one to initiate contact with Tom. Here, Atticus does not simply demonstrate that any encounter between Tom and Mayella may have been consensual; he invokes “a specific form of the defense that can be particularly offensive, in both senses of the word,” what Lubet calls “the ‘she wanted it’ defense.” According to Atticus, Mayella was “the intense aggressor,” she was the one who “schemed and plotted for ‘a slap year’ to get the children out of the house on an opportune day”; Mayella “jumped on Tom, wrapped her arms around him, demanded that he kiss her, and blocked the door with her body when he tried to leave” (Lubet 1345). In the courtroom, Atticus—the novel’s pillar of moral rectitude— constructs a narrative that is “demeaning and stereotyped” (Lubet 1345), a narrative that Tom’s testimony only further confirms. What’s more, implicit in Atticus’s defense and Tom’s testimony—that Mayella not only consented to the relationship but “wanted it”—is the audacious presumption that Mayella is somehow “unrapeable.”15 To be sure, according to Tom’s testimony, there’s a strange reversal of gender roles that occurs on the day of the alleged “incident.” Mayella acts aggressively, silently planning her attack for a whole year, jumping on and grabbing at Tom and furthermore demanding that he kiss her back. Mayella is also keenly aware that, if she successfully seduces him, Tom will never be the one to speak of their transgression. If she is the violator, Tom then becomes the passive victim. This becomes even more apparent when Tom admits that he couldn’t protect himself from her advances with equal aggression. He tells the courtroom that he didn’t want to be “ugly to her,” that he “didn’t wanta push her or nothin’” (Lee 260); most importantly, as Scout admits she later learns, Tom “would not have dared to strike a white woman under any circumstances and expect to live long” (261). Even if he wanted to strike her, it would have been difficult for him to do so. As we learn when Tom gets up to take the stand, “[h]is left arm was fully twelve inches shorter than his right, and hung dead at his side [and] ended in a small shriveled hand” (248), a disability that, as we infer from one of Scout’s comments,

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feminizes him. Scout remarks that if Tom “had been whole, he would have been a fine specimen of man” (257), which of course implies that his disability somehow makes him less of a man, not whole, not fully masculine. The terms Scout uses to physically describe Tom are even vaguely feminine. She calls him “a black-velvet Negro, not shiny, but soft black velvet” (257, emphasis mine). Scout describes Mayella, on the other hand, like a man, as “thick-bodied” and evidently “accustomed to strenuous labor” (239). Mayella is sexually assertive, physically powerful, and, according to Tom’s testimony, confident that her attempts to seduce him will work. She is also oddly childlike, innocent, and “somehow fragile-looking” (239). She is at once “a body that cannot be raped and a body that is raped” (Roberts 176), that has been raped, but not by Tom. In his testimony, Tom reveals another strange detail that makes Mayella’s case even more complex: that Mayella is, more than likely, a victim of incest. He tells the courtroom that Mayella said “she never kissed a grown man before an’ she might as well kiss a nigger,” and that “what her papa do to her don’t count” (Lee 260). Even stranger, Tom drops this bombshell so casually that it can easily—and often does—either go unnoticed or is promptly “dismissed as irrelevant and unimportant” (Baecker 131). Why, then, is this even a detail at all? Tom gives us an extraordinarily significant piece of information here, one that is relevant and one that has serious consequences for Mayella, consequences to which the novel’s previous observations about incest—Scout lightheartedly confesses that “Atticus was related by blood or marriage to nearly every family in the town” (Lee 6); Scout also recalls Atticus jokingly telling Alexandra: “Sister, when you stop to think about it, our generation’s practically the first in the Finch family not to marry its cousins” (173)—do not allude. In these cases, incest is treated as just another one of “Maycomb’s ways,” but somehow, for Mayella, it’s especially damning. Considering that so much of the narrative takes place in a courtroom and is concerned with issues of right and wrong, it’s peculiar that To Kill a Mockingbird mentions off-handedly—only once—the real crime: that Mayella has been raped and physically abused by her own father. And in the courtroom, Mayella is given the chance to tell her own story, but instead, when Atticus asks her point blank whether her father has ever beaten her, she angrily maintains: “My paw’s never touched a hair o’my head in my life…He never touched me” (246).16 While Mayella conceivably says this in order to avoid facing the wrath of her father, it nonetheless indicates that she understands what the novel seems to silently condone: that incest—particularly as it occurs in (and is almost expected

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of) an impoverished, lower-class family like the Ewells’—is a far less offensive crime, one barely worth our attention, than miscegenation. And indeed, Scout’s perspective encourages us to turn a blind eye to this, demands us to see “incest” as just another one of the Ewells’ many “vices.”17 Importantly, though Tom is the one to reveal the relationship between Mayella and her father, it is Scout who chooses to disclose this information to readers only never to speak of it again. We as readers, following Scout’s lead, are thereby inclined to dismiss the revelation about Mayella and her father as “irrelevant and unimportant” (Baecker 131). It is also Scout who relays to readers Atticus’s many words of wisdom. As Rob Atkinson points out, “[u]nreliable narrators and inconsistent perspectives are, of course, standard features of sophisticated fiction and film. But Lee gives us no hint of Scout’s being anything other than right about…Atticus’s wisdom. Harper Lee has given us the Gospel According to Atticus in the words of his chief disciple” (1370). We take Atticus at his word because we take Scout at her word. Atticus refers to the Ewells as “the disgrace of Maycomb,” and Atticus says they are people who “lived like animals” (Lee 40). Atticus describes the Ewells as “members of an exclusive society made up of the Ewells,” and Atticus explains that the rest of Maycomb is consciously “blind to some of the Ewells’ activities” (41). But Scout, who questions so many of Maycomb’s societal rules, unquestioningly conveys to readers this information. Because Scout doesn’t question it, neither do we. Whereas “whiteness” defines “normal” sexuality in which men are active and women are passive, “being Black signals the wild, out-ofcontrol hyperheterosexuality of excessive sexual appetite” (Collins 129). Are these definitions mutually exclusive? If to be black means to possess an insatiable animal sexuality, does it mean that one who has a sexual appetite must be “black”? For Atticus and Scout, it seems that the answer is a resounding yes. According to Atticus’s courtroom rhetoric, Mayella possesses a frightening, aggressive, illicit sexuality, a sexuality stereotypically associated with “Negro” women. What Mayella confesses to Tom—that she “might as well” kiss him, that “what her papa do to her don’t count”—indicates her tacit awareness that her own sexuality is, essentially, “blackness.” In this moment, Mayella sees what little distinction there has been between herself and Tom collapse. Mayella’s very social status has already marked her as “not respectable,” as “lowdown” and “Negro” (and, it should be reiterated, the entire Ewell family, based solely on the location of their home outside “a small Negro settlement,” is already associated with “Negroes”); her sexuality—what is obviously a non-consensual relationship with her own father and a willing

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attempt to engage in an interracial relationship with Tom—only “contaminates” her further. In her compelling essay, Baecker investigates the importance of the “Africanist presence” in Lee’s novel and looks specifically at Boo Radley as a crucial part of that presence. She writes: Boo, a white man, is both associated with the margins and differentiated from the people who inhabit that place [….] He is a part of the margins. After Jem loses his pants on the Radley fence, Scout lies in bed that night listening to the night sounds and imagining Boo at every corner: “Every night-sound I heard from my cot on the back porch was magnified threefold; every scratch of feet on gravel was Boo Radley seeking revenge, every passing Negro laughing in the night was Boo Radley loose and after us; insects splashing against the screen were Boo Radley’s insane fingers picking the wire to pieces; the chinaberry trees were malignant, hovering, alive.” Here, Boo is associated with nature, as well as with “every passing Negro,” persons also more closely associated with savage nature than with the civilizing town. As noted above, marginalized groups tend to share each other’s characteristics. They collectively form the context within which they are individually placed so that women, children, and racial minorities are generally considered like each other (feminine, immature, less intelligent) as well as being dirty, uncivilized, closer to nature, and any other losing end of a dichotomy. (128-29)

Baecker makes a convincing case for understanding Boo as a sort of “dark” other, but I find more important the ways that the “Africanist” characteristics she observes in Boo can also be found in Mayella. As she claims, “marginalized” peoples do sometimes “share each other’s characteristics.” Mayella, too, is more closely associated with nature than with “the civilized town”: in addition to the fact that, along with the rest of her family, Mayella literally lives on the outskirts—the margins—of “civilized” Maycomb, when Mayella takes the stand, Scout is reminded of “the row of red geraniums” Mayella keeps in the front yard (Lee 239). Her name itself even contains a reference to the month of May, a month named after the Greek and Roman goddess of earth and spring, Maia; interestingly, it’s also in this same scene that we learn Mayella’s middle name is “Violet” (239). This, however, is only one end of the spectrum. On the opposite is another, less threatening but equally offensive controlling image of black female sexuality: the mammy, whose unflagging loyalty to her white “family” distinguishes her as the “acceptable face of black servitude” (Roberts 41). Because of this, the mammy legitimates a repressive white patriarchal social order that not only demands her subordination but further insists that she “enjoy” being subservient. Black feminist critic Patricia Hill Collins affirms that the mammy’s devotion to her white

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“family,” primarily demonstrated by her ability to nurture and love her white children “better than her own,” signifies white patriarchy’s concept of “the ideal Black female relationship to elite White male power” (72). Despite her white family’s claims to love her back, and despite her position as authority figure, the mammy recognizes and “has accepted” her role as “obedient servant” (72-73). Moreover, as Collins also identifies, the image of the mammy figure buttresses the ideology of the cult of true womanhood, one in which sexuality and fertility are severed. ‘Good’ White mothers are expected to deny their female sexuality. In contrast, the mammy image is one of an asexual woman, a surrogate mother in blackface whose historical devotion to her White family is now giving way to new expectations. Contemporary mammies should be completely committed to their jobs. (74)

The asexual surrogate mother in To Kill a Mockingbird is Calpurnia, the Finch family’s hired black help whose “tyrannical presence” Scout recalls feeling for as long as she could remember (Lee 7). Scout describes Cal as “something else entirely”; “all angles and bones,” “nearsighted,” with hands that were “as wide as a bed slat and twice as hard,” Scout remembers Cal always shooing her out of the kitchen, scolding her for misbehaving, and ordering her to come home before she was ready (7). In this description alone, Scout reveals Calpurnia’s—and the stereotypical mammy’s—primary domain: the kitchen. She furthermore discloses Cal’s authority; shortly after this passage, Scout recalls how her “battles” with Calpurnia were always “epic and one-sided…mainly because Atticus always took her side” (7). For all her claims otherwise, Scout (and Jem) loves Calpurnia and couldn’t imagine a life without her. Scout’s relationship with Calpurnia further evidences the ways in which she tacitly approves of the same structure she at the same time pushes against. Through Mayella and Calpurnia, To Kill a Mockingbird articulates the only two available options for female—white and black— sexuality. Scout vilifies Mayella, but valorizes Calpurnia, giving us no indication that Calpurnia’s position within the Finch household is anything other than standard practice. Cal does not subvert the image of the mammy, but seems rather like a glowing endorsement of black female servitude. The scene in which Cal takes Jem and Scout to church with her makes this most apparent. In the face of Lula’s disapprobation for “bringin’ white chillun to nigger church,” Cal insists that Jem and Scout are her “comp’ny” (158). Even when Lula venomously retorts, “Yeah, an’ I reckon you’s comp’ny at the Finch house durin’ the week,” Cal maintains her composure and assures the children that she does view them

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as her guests (158-59). On account of this scene, and the scene in which Atticus refuses, at Alexandra’s behest, to fire Cal because she’s “a faithful member” of the family (182), readers typically walk away from this novel thinking how wonderful it is that Cal is “part of” the family, that their acceptance of Calpurnia makes the Finches—namely, Scout and Atticus— such advocates of racial equality. The same can essentially be said of the novel’s treatment of Dolphous Raymond, “the town scandal” who “blurs acceptable social boundaries” (Baecker 131). Dolphous is “always ‘drinkin’ out of a sack’…resides ‘way down near the county line’…with a ‘colored woman and all sorts of mixed chillun,’” and most significantly, only “pretends to be drunk in order to give the townspeople a reason for his behavior” (131). For a community— and indeed, a novel—that treats Mayella’s interracial transgression so critically, how do we make sense of Dolphous’s portrayal as “sympathetic”? Baecker correctly notes that Dolphous makes visible the fact that interracial unions are more acceptable between a white man and a black woman than between a white woman and a black man. But there is a more disturbing aspect of this dynamic: implicit in the town’s reluctant acceptance of Dolphous (and corresponding condemnation of Mayella) is the assumption that “sexual penetration is a nasty, degrading violation of the self, and that there are some people (black women) to whom, because of their inferior social status, it is acceptable to do it, and others (white women) who, because of their superior social status, must be rescued (or, if necessary, forcibly prevented) from having it done to them” (Koppelman 225). This is yet another way that To Kill a Mockingbird reinforces the very social structures it seemingly seeks to subvert. Although he is viewed as a “scandal” and as an alleged “drunk,” Scout makes it clear that Dolphous is an integral and relatively affluent part of Maycomb’s community: Dill observes that Raymond “doesn’t look like trash” and Jem is quick to explain that he is not. In fact, “he owns all one side of the riverbank down there, and he’s from a real old family to boot.” Like Boo, Raymond can finesse his position between borders by virtue of his unquestionable position within white society. (Baecker 131)

Boo’s and Dolphous’s “unquestionable” positions in white society, however, have more to do than just with their financial statuses; both Boo and Dolphous are white men. They are therefore pillars of their white patriarchal Maycomb community and are thereby afforded certain privileges not granted to certain “others” (read: women, blacks, and the Ewells). For all of its criticisms about gender expectations, for all of its

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(arguably ostensible) proclamations of racial and class injustice, To Kill a Mockingbird is oddly supportive of upper-middle class white masculinity. Atticus is the Great Southern Gentleman exemplar, but it’s Scout who enforces this image. It’s Scout who unfailingly admires Atticus, who encourages Jem to pursue his dreams of being a gentleman like Atticus. And yet, Atticus’s treatment of Mayella during the trial seems to somehow work against all that he supposedly stands for. If Atticus is so Fair and Right, how are we to make sense of his collusion in such an ugly stereotype? It’s a difficult road to navigate. The South’s preoccupation with race and sexuality is so deeply ingrained in the cultural psyche that often the fiction of the region carries with it what Robert Hemenway calls “a sociological burden even when there’s no conscious intention of racial statement” (qtd. in Goddu 74). Even as it engages sensitive subject matter in an attempt to challenge certain signs and symbols of Southern experience, To Kill a Mockingbird articulates a discourse that has shaped and continues to shape southern cultural and racial fantasies and anxieties. For a socially progressive novel written by a woman, To Kill a Mockingbird’s treatment of female sexuality—as indelibly associated with class and race—is particularly problematic: it is evidence of the tenacity of the South’s structuring myths, confirmation of their persistence, and, most importantly, an indication of the extent to which Southerners—most notably women—have been conditioned to accept their place in white patriarchal society. It is important to recognize this, for ultimately, this is only another reason why To Kill a Mockingbird is one of the most significant pieces of literature to come out of the twentieth century. Still it remains a novel that attempts to confront the 1960s South’s iniquitous understanding of race relations, a complex novel that has taught and continues to teach us so much about compassion, humanity, and equality. By understanding the ways in which it engages just as many Southern structuring myths as it attempts to combat, To Kill a Mockingbird can only become even more invaluable.

Notes 1 According to Flynt, “Mockingbird ranked fourth in Catholic schools, fifth in public, and seventh in private. Only works by Shakespeare, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Mark Twain ranked higher in a composite of the three school categories. An estimated three-quarters of all American students would be required to read the book during their school years” (6). 2 Scout recounts the time when Arthur “Boo” Radley and some of his friends were arrested as young teens for “using abusive and profane language in the presence

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and hearing of a female…they cussed so loud [Mr. Connor, the town’s ‘ancient beadle’] was sure every lady in Maycomb heard them” (11). 3 That she prefers the androgynous nickname “Scout” instead of Jean Louise is further evidence of this. 4 Scout admits she finds “the innate attractiveness of such words” appealing and furthermore confesses: “I was proceeding on the dim theory…that if Atticus discovered I had picked them up at school he wouldn’t make me go” (104-05). 5 Deborah E. Barker, inspired by W.J. Cash, describes the “southern rape complex,” which involves “a black male rapist and white female victim” and wherein “the victim is transformed into a symbol of a threatened white southern culture while the black male symbolizes the threat” (109). This complex and the miscegenation taboo are intimately interwoven; both make “white female sexuality socially unacceptable and [render] sexual violence against black women socially invisible” (109). 6 Notably, Scout recognizes the lack of affection between Aunt Alexandra and her husband, Jimmy. Rather offhandedly, she observes an important characteristic of Alexandra as she represents the Southern Lady: “[A]s he never spoke a word to me in my life except to say, ‘Get off the fence,’ once, I never saw any reason to take notice of him. Neither did Aunt Alexandra” except when, “[l]ong ago, in a burst of friendliness, Aunty and Uncle Jimmy produced a son named Henry” (103). Alexandra, wife and mother, is oddly asexual; this is yet another instance of the lack of sexuality in the novel. 7 It should be mentioned that because the story is told from Scout’s perspective, the portrait of Alexandra is prone to bias. 8 Scout explains: “There was indeed a caste system in Maycomb, but to my mind it worked this way: the older citizens, the present generation of people who had lived side by side for years and years, were utterly predictable to one another: they took for granted attitudes, character shadings, even gestures, as having been repeated in each generation and refined by time. Thus the dicta No Crawford Minds His Own Business, Every Third Merriweather Is Morbid, The Truth Is Not in the Delafields, All the Bufords Walk Like That, were simply guides to daily living” (175). 9 Here, Scout is specifically describing Bob Ewell, but as her assessments of other members of the Ewell family—such as Burris (35-37)—suggest, and as Atticus confirms to Jack, that the same is essentially true of the “present” generation (117). Scout also mentions that Mr. Ewell’s skin will only be white if scrubbed “with lye soap in very hot water” (229). 10 The few scholars who question Atticus’s reputation as anything other than sterling, such as Joseph Crespino (see Crespino’s polarizing essay “The Strange Career of Atticus Finch”) and Steven Lubet, were met with vehement criticism. 11 I include this analysis from SparkNotes because of the frequency with which the novel is taught at the middle and high school levels. The website, which provides students with a single, uncomplicated interpretation of its major themes and characters, endorses this “universal” understanding of Atticus as Fair and Decent. I also include this analysis because of the unfortunate fact that many students use the website as a substitute for reading this and other novels. Students who have never read (and never intend to read) To Kill a Mockingbird will visit the website, read

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this description of Atticus, and take it at its word. After doing so, these students will likely never feel the need to actually read the novel and will never critically interrogate Atticus’s character. 12 Hodes examines the frequency with which “the allegedly victimized white women” were typically situated as “ladies”: “A Klan attack on a black man in Georgia was attributed to the fact that he ‘had used this saucy expression to a white lady.’ Another white Georgian said that freedmen ‘were abusive to ladies.’ In Mississippi, a black man was assaulted for using ‘some improper language in regard to some white ladies of the neighborhood.’ In North Carolina, one black man was hanged because ‘he was a great terror to white ladies and impudent to them’” (161). 13 On several different occasions during the trial, Atticus (and Scout) refers to Tom as “respectable” (257, 273), which of course insinuates that if Tom is respectable, Mayella is not. 14 Before leaving the witness stand, Mayella condescendingly refers to the courtroom in general and Atticus in particular as “fine fancy gentleman” whose “fine fancy airs don’t come to nothin’,” further proof that she is aware of her own social status and resents those who feel themselves superior to her (251). 15 Baecker cites Edwin Bruell’s assertion that Mayella is “the kind of backwoods character who ‘rape[s] easily’” (127). 16 Interestingly, when Atticus asks if she remembers Tom beating her about the face, she replies: “No, I don’t recollect if he hit me. I mean yes I do, he hit me […] Yes, he hit—I just don’t remember, I just don’t remember…it all happened so quick” (248). Her response hints that Mayella has repressed the incident, a common reaction to a traumatic occurrence. 17 Baecker makes an interesting point about this: “The incestuous relationship of a white trash man with his white trash daughter is a part of the novel often glossed over by scholars who probably find it unremarkable anyway, as if to say, what else can be expected from people living so close to Negroes” (129).

Works Cited Althouse, Ann. “Reconstructing Atticus Finch? A Response to Professor Lubet.” Michigan Law Review 97.6 (May1999): 1363-69. http://www. jstor.org/stable/1290206. Atkinson, Rob. “Comment on Steven Lubet, ‘Reconstructing Atticus Finch.’” Michigan Law Review 97.6 (May 1999): 1370-72. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1290207. Baecker, Diann L. “Telling It in Black and White: The Importance of the Africanist Presence in To Kill a Mockingbird.” The Southern Quarterly 36.3 (1998): 124-13. Barker, Deborah E. “Moonshine and Magnolias: The Story of Temple Drake and The Birth of a Nation.” Faulkner and Whiteness. Ed. Jay Watson. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 2011. 107-46.

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Collins, Patricia Hill. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. New York: Routledge, 2000. Daileader, Celia. Racism, Misogyny, and the Othello Myth: Inter-racial Couples from Shakespeare to Spike Lee. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005. Flynt, Wayne. “The Enduring Legacy of To Kill a Mockingbird: Universal Values: A Half Century After Its First Publication, Harper Lee's Only Novel Continues to Shape Character and Touch Lives the World Over.” Alabama Heritage 97 (Summer 2010): 6. http://go.galegroup. com.proxy.lib.fsu.edu/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CA233291611&v=2.1&u= tall85761&it=r&p=LitRC&sw=w. Goddu, Teresa. Gothic America: Narrative, History, and Nation. New York: Columbia UP, 1997. Gray, Richard. Writing the South. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1998. Hodes, Martha. “Politics: Racial Hierarchy and Illicit Sex.” White Women, Black Men: Illicit Sex in The Nineteenth-Century South. New Haven: Yale UP, 1997. 147-75. Jimison, Marcus, Wayne Flynt, Jewell Knotts, and Joseph Crespino. “The Redemption of Atticus Finch.” Southern Cultures 6.4 (Winter 2000): 1-4. doi: 10.1353/scu.2000.0010. Koppelman, Andrew. “Why Discrimination Against Lesbians and Gay Men Is Sex Discrimination.” New York University Law Review 69 (May 1994): 197-287. Lee, Harper. To Kill a Mockingbird. 1960. New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2010. Lubet, Steven. “Reconstructing Atticus Finch.” Michigan Law Review 97.6 (May 1999): 1339-62. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1290205. Palumbo-DeSimone, Christine. “Race, Womanhood, and Tragic Mulatta: Issues of Ambiguity.” Multiculturalism: Roots and Realities. Ed. C. James Trotman, 125-36. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2002. Roberts, Diane. Faulkner and Southern Womanhood. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1994. SparkNotes Editors. “SparkNote on To Kill a Mockingbird.” SparkNotes LLC, 2002. http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/mocking/.

PART V: THE FAMILY AND THE SELF

CHAPTER ELEVEN LAYERS OF IDENTITY FORMATION IN ANA CASTILLO’S PEEL MY LOVE LIKE AN ONION LUCINDA CHANNON

In Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body, Susan Bordo questions the wisdom of trying to make “all enlightened feminist projects attend to ‘the intersection of race, class, and gender’” since these three factors are not the only ones that affect identity formation (222). For example, neither age nor sexual orientation is part of the “holy trinity” mentioned above, nor is any type of disability; furthermore, how can one consider a multitude of factors at one time and still have something intelligible to say? Ellen Feder seems to agree with Bordo’s assessment of the difficulty of attending to all of the axes of identity formation at the same time in Family Bonds: Genealogies of Race and Gender. In the introduction to her book, she explains that her analysis of race and gender is based on the belief that “to think about race and gender together . . . we must attend especially to a third figure, ‘the family,’ the critical site for the production of difference” (5), and she goes on to say that a difficulty in thinking about race and gender together comes from the different way power works to construct normative gender and racial identities. Feder looks to Foucault’s explanation of disciplinary power and biopower to clarify her understanding of how the family is a privileged site of gender and racial identity formation. According to Feder, disciplinary power works inside the family to produce gender while biopower is an outside force that works upon the family to produce race. Feder also points out, however, the challenge of examining race and gender at the same time. She compares the trickiness of this endeavor to looking at a ‘reversible figure-ground image from Gestalt psychology” (23). As anyone who has looked at one of these images knows, when the focus is on one of the figures, the other seems to disappear. The same thing happens when the focus is on just one of the

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axes of identity formation; the other axes seem to disappear. But, as Feder points out, the one who is analyzing both race and gender must shift her gaze from one to the other and consider how each shapes the other in order to perform a thorough and thoughtful analysis (24). As Feder argues, the family is a critical site for gender formation, but of course she is not the first feminist to make this claim. In The Reproduction of Mothering, Nancy Chodorow uses psychoanalytic theory, specifically object relations theory, to explain how sex or gender roles are developed and reproduced through family relationships, especially the mother-child relationship. Chodorow asserts that children develop a core identity by internalizing their relations with their primary caretaker, which is usually their mother; however, the sexual and familial division of labor in which women mother and are more involved than men in interpersonal, affective relationships produces in daughters and sons a division of psychological capacities that leads them to reproduce this sexual and familial division of labor. Chodorow’s groundbreaking book was published in 1978, and even though her theories proved to be extremely convincing to many feminists, as time passed some feminists attacked them because they said that her analysis of the family doesn’t take differences of race, class, or culture into account, and other feminists attacked them because they said that gender is constructed from social discourse, and that one does not have an identity but instead performs it. In Private Selves, Public Identities: Reconsidering Identity Politics, Susan Hekman wants to recuperate Chodorow’s work because she believes that the social constructionists such as Judith Butler have gone too far in their attempts to celebrate the revolutionary feminist possibilities that accrue from the lack of a core identity. She points to a work titled Shattered Selves: Multiple Personality in a Postmodern World in which the author, James Glass, explains that in his clinical practice people with unstable identities, such as those with schizophrenia or multiple personality disorder, experience this fracturing of identity as painful instead playful (48). Hekman argues that Chodorow’s theory of object relations explains how a core sense of self emerges, but that it is not a modern essentialist self; it is a self socially constructed from the relational experiences of childhood. Furthermore, she emphasizes the necessity of explaining both cultural and individual influences in identity formation, and she asserts that object relations theory takes both into account. Additionally, she agrees that differences in race, class, ethnicity and other factors such as sexual orientation or physical disability should be considered because otherwise the differences in individuals could not be accounted for (20-21). The most important aspect of object relations

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theory, as Hekman sees it, is that it can explain why some people rebel against gender roles and some conform to them (25). Keeping in mind the significance of the family as articulated by Feder, Chodorow, and Hekman, I think that Ana Castillo’s novel Peel My Love Like an Onion is a good text to examine in order to try to understand how race, class, gender, and physical disability intersect to produce the identity of the main character, Carmen “La Coja” Santos. Carmen is a workingclass Chicana born and raised in Chicago, Illinois, and when the reader meets Carmen, she is at a low point in her life. At the age of thirty-eight, she is living at home with her mother, working at a minimum-wage job in a pizza restaurant in O’Hare airport, and bemoaning the loss of the men who abandoned her two years ago. Carmen’s nickname is La Coja because the polio she contracts at the age of six leaves her with an atrophied left leg and foot, and she attends a School for the Handicapped since children who were physically or mentally different in any way did not mix with “normal” children at this time in United States history. The good part about attending this school is that she learns how to dance flamenco in physical rehabilitation class and determines to become a professional flamenco dancer in spite of her crippled leg. She dances professionally for seventeen years, is romantically involved with the married leader of the troupe, Agustín, for all those years, and becomes romantically involved with a twenty-year-old dancer named Manolo the last year she dances. When Agustín and Manolo leave Carmen behind, she stops dancing and spends two solitary years in the desert making pottery until her savings run out and she has to return to her family home.

Inside the Family: How Traditional Is It? The Mexican American family in which Carmen was raised is traditional in many ways. The first person narrator tells the story of her life from a mostly adult perspective, but the reader learns much about how she was raised from the stories of her childhood as well as her current situation. As the only girl in a family with three boys, Carmen’s mother expects her daughter to learn how to be a good wife and mother. Since she has returned home, Carmen has to make flour tortillas every Saturday morning for what she perceives as punishment for not having her own husband and little boy to take care of (32). Her mother tells her that if she had a man, she would now know how to expertly cook, iron, and do the laundry. She hasn’t objected to Carmen’s taking dancing lessons after school as a teenager, but that is because she thought it kept her out of mischief (17). Her mother is satisfied that Carmen has a job at the pizza

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restaurant, but she thinks that her son Abel should have a better job than selling corn on the cob during the week and newspapers on the weekend (28). She dotes on and confides in her oldest son, Joseph, who is financially successful and very conservative, and she has obviously spoiled the baby of the family, Negrito, who is a drug addict always in trouble with the law. Carmen wants to be a good daughter, and she says that to be a good daughter to her parents she needs to do the following things: accept their actions, critical comments, demands, and declarations unquestioningly; do everything possible to fulfill their wishes, never question them, never protest, never complain; and provide a home if they need it (57). These facts about Carmen’s family life demonstrate the traditional way that she has been raised to become a respectable wife and mother who will carry on the time-honored tradition of taking care of the men in her life. Carmen has internalized these rules and disciplines herself to follow most of them so that her parents will think she is a good daughter.

Class: How Much Does Money Matter? The fact that she comes from a working class background is just as important to her identity formation. Because they don’t have very much money, Carmen’s mother takes her to a curandera instead of a doctor when she gets sick with polio. It is only after the curandera says that she will die if she doesn’t get medical help that her parents take her to the free county hospital. Carmen attends the School for the Handicapped on a scholarship, and her mother wouldn’t have sent her to school at all if one of the nurses at the county hospital hadn’t told her mother about the scholarship (12-14). Carmen’s sense of herself is deeply affected by the family’s economic status. She describes herself in strongly negative terms as an eighth grader walking down the street on used crutches wearing her mother’s old coat (15). When her parents first come to Chicago from Texas, they are thrilled that her father quickly finds a construction job that pays fifteen dollars for a day’s work. Eventually, both of her parents must work to support the family, and at sixty-four, her father is still working every day as a machine operator at a car parts factory even though it is a struggle for him to stay at a job where he has almost lost an eye, where he often gets steel splinters in his fingers, and where it is increasingly difficult to make his quota (26). Her mother has worked, as Carmen describes it, “burra hard” for almost fifty years “making auto parts during peace time and hand grenades during wars” until the last factory she works at closes down (125). Even so, they do not have a washing machine in the

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house during Carmen’s childhood, and on her day off, her mother carries the family’s laundry to the nearest clean Laundromat about a half mile away. Of course, she walks both ways (32). When Carmen’s mother kicks her out, Carmen lives at the Hollywood Hotel for twelve years in a cheap studio apartment with roaches and cracked plaster (57). She makes just enough from her dancing to live independently; nevertheless, Carmen always has to take public transportation until her polio returns and she literally cannot stand up by herself and walk off the train one day. Lack of money affects every aspect of Carmen’s life as a child and as an adult, and, with the exception of her friend Vicky, all of her friends, lovers, and coworkers belong to the working class. Since Carmen is poor, she values relationships more than consumer goods.

Race: Is Race as Important as Class? Race is also a crucial factor in the construction of Carmen’s identity. Carmen is raised in a Spanish-speaking household with Mexican traditions, but she is acutely aware that she is a pocha. According to her, this means that she does not really belong to either the United States or Mexico. She feels that she can claim Chicago as her city, but she identifies with the dark-skinned people of the world. At the beginning of the novel when she can still get out and walk in the neighborhood, she thinks about the foreign women and children who are paid pitifully low wages to make her tennis shoes, and that leads to her thoughts about her race (3). Then she mentions how the working-class Mexican neighborhood her mother’s house is in has become gentrified, and the upper-class white people who have moved in stare at her suspiciously until they realize that she lives in the neighborhood too (6). In Carmen’s mind, the family’s economic status is so closely tied to race that it really seems to be indistinguishable. Several times she says that Mexicans are the hardest working people in the United States. It doesn’t matter how hard the work is or how low the pay; if Mexicans are doing honest work, they don’t have to be ashamed (29). It is so essential for the family members to be able to work in order to live that Carmen’s mother insists that both of them look for work even though she is experiencing serious heart problems and Carmen’s polio has returned. A Guatemalan friend of her mother hooks them up with what she guarantees is an easy job sewing for a Korean wholesaler, but when the women get to the factory, Carmen is horrified to see about fifty darkskinned teenagers working in miserable sweatshop conditions. She knows that people have worked under conditions like this in the past and that people still work under these conditions in Third World countries, but she

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can’t believe that they are working in such a place so close to her Chicago home. Carmen sews in the factory for three days because her mother insists, but she rebels against this type of slave labor by telling her friend Vicky about it. Carmen knows Vicky will call the authorities, and she takes her passport to work so that she won’t be rounded up and taken in with the others. Because of her race, she must prove that she has the legal right to be working in a wretched place like the sewing factory. The systems of power that promote economic opportunities for whites and encourage discriminatory treatment of others bear down on Carmen’s family from the outside and make her feel that her options in life are limited. With this realization, it makes sense that the only villain in the novel is a white woman named Courtney. Courtney is also a flamenco dancer, but she dances because she likes to be the center of attention and not because she has a true feeling for the music (39). Courtney may lack “duende,” but she is Carmen’s rival for Agustín’s affections, and she plays dirty by bribing another musician to tell lies about Agustín that she knows will hurt Carmen (170, 204). This spoiled gringa represents all the white women who assume that they are better than brown or black women and thus can mistreat or ignore them. The idea that no white woman can be trusted to stand in solidarity with women of color is not hard to understand when one considers that white American women have historically behaved badly toward women of color. To illustrate, in Women, Race, and Class, Angela Davis makes the white women’s betrayal of black men and women clear. Her argument is quite convincing since she is scrupulous about praising individual white women who defied the pressure to conform and continued trying to help African Americans have better lives after slavery was abolished. Nevertheless, the record is clear that after the first-wave feminist movement split over whether or not they would support black men’s getting the vote before white women, white feminists curried the favor of racist white men and women in a single-minded determination to win the vote instead of standing up for the human rights of all. They failed to support equal education, they failed to denounce lynchings, and they failed to understand how industrial capitalism worked to separate the races, classes, and sexes in order to continue reaping bigger and bigger profits. In Segregated Sisterhood, Nancie Caraway demonstrates that she understands the history that motivates the distrust of white women, but she argues that there will be a higher likelihood of positive social transformation if women of color don’t assume that all white women who show interest in other races and cultures are trying to appropriate the “literature, customs, food, and music of Third World people” and thus reject them

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automatically (114). According to Caraway, the test of a white woman’s intentions should be her political actions, and she strongly recommends, like Haraway in “A Manifesto for Cyborgs,” Sandoval in Methodology of the Oppressed, and Hekman in Private Lives, Public Identities, that women of color should form at least temporary alliances with white women to work toward common goals. In Peel My Love Like an Onion, Carmen is unlikely to make any alliances with white women. As she sits in front of her makeup mirror and examines her almost forty-year-old face, she thinks about how only white women can afford the expensive new treatments like botox and laser therapy that make skin look younger; moreover, she thinks that with her “‘Strange Fruit’ Billie Holliday complexion” and her minimum wage job, she doesn’t need to worry about it (52-53).

The Disabled Body: Daughter-Dancer-Singer, or, Dancing with Duende Even though the influences of race and class systems upon the family and gender expectations inside the family have created in Carmen an identity with characteristics that many other working class Chicanas share, she has other characteristics that are uniquely hers; however, as Hekman insists, those differences can be traced back to the experiences and relationships Carmen has growing up. In many ways, Carmen has refused to conform to the gender expectations of her traditional Mexican American parents, and one reason for this is because of her strong-willed mother. When Carmen’s father refers to his wife as “la jefita,” he means it. After all, she does banish him to the basement once their relationship is no longer meeting her expectations (24-5). Additionally, Carmen’s parents influence her love of music and dance before she learns about flamenco from Miss Dorotea. Her father picks his little girl up and dances with her when he comes home drunk after work (99), and her mother sings beautifully as she works around the house (108). The author does not emphasize these formative family influences the same way that she emphasizes Carmen’s educational influences, but Carmen acknowledges her parents’ influence on her attraction to music and to professional male musicians (99). Obviously, the fact that Carmen almost dies after becoming ill with polio and is left with a damaged limb also affects her identity formation. On almost every page of the novel the narrator mentions the pain that her leg causes her for various reasons; even during the years that she is strongest, she has to wear her brace, and she cannot help but compare her deformed leg and foot to the healthy bodies of

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Agustín, Manolo, and Courtney. And then, when the polio comes back and she “hits the wall,” she can’t dance, can’t take public transportation, can’t work at the pizza restaurant, and can’t even sit upright with the help of pain pills through a complete flamenco set to do palmas. But, from the first moment in middle school when she hears the music of the great flamenco guitarist Carlos Montoya, her body responds—as she describes it, “the music was licking my ankles, the live one and the dead one” (15). After this surprising, unexpected physical response to the music, and with the encouragement of her teacher, Carmen takes the first dance step that points her toward the different choices that she makes about her life. According to Rosemarie Garland Thomson in Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature, a female author’s decision to make one of her characters have a physical handicap is very significant. One reason for this is because in American culture, “both the female body and the disabled body are cast as inferior” and denied access to full participation in public life. Therefore, since Carmen is quadruply marginalized as working class, female, Mexican American, and physically disabled, her determination to participate fully in life is especially empowering. At one of her lowest points while she is working as a shampoo girl and, ironically, losing her hair due to stress, she performs an impromptu flamenco song and dance for the women customers so that they will understand the difference between tango and flamenco (117-19). Despite the appreciation of her audience, Carmen describes her body performing the dance as “something between very pathetic and excruciatingly sublime” (119). Even though her body seems determined to betray her, Carmen refuses to allow her physical limitations to defeat her. She turns to singing when she can no longer dance, and the tour and recording that follow result in the financial success that gains her both the respect of her family and financial independence. A second reason that it is significant to create a character with a disability is because “the image of the disabled body as a visual assault, a shocking spectacle to the normate eye, captures a defining aspect of disabled experience” (26). Since Carmen is not simply the female object of the male gaze, but the disabled female object of the male gaze, Castillo daringly challenges this doubly oppressive stare by making Carmen a flamenco dancer who ultimately succeeds in living independently and chooses to maintain a romantic relationship with two attractive men rather than marry either one of them. In Peel My Love Like an Onion, Castillo has accomplished what Thomson claims that Toni Morrison does with disabled characters like Eva Peace and Baby Suggs and Audre Lorde does with Zami (105). With Carmen “La Coja” Santos, Castillo has created a Chicana identity whose

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strength and power derive from an oppressed, disabled body that refuses to completely conform to social norms.

Works Cited Bordo, Susan. Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body. Los Angeles: U of California P, 1993. Caraway, Nancie. Segregated Sisterhood: Racism and the Politics of American Feminism. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1991. Castillo, Ana. Peel My Love Like an Onion. New York: Doubleday, 1999. Chodorow, Nancy. The Reproduction of Mothering. Los Angeles: U of California P, 1978. Davis, Angela. Women, Race, and Class. New York: Vintage, 1983. Feder, Ellen K. Family Bonds: Geneologies of Race and Gender. New York: Oxford UP, 2007. Hekman, Susan J. Private Selves, Public Identities: Reconsidering Identity Politics. University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State UP, 2004. Thomson, Rosemarie Garland. Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature. New York: Columbia UP, 1997.

CHAPTER TWELVE DIVISION OF MATERNAL EFFORT IN ANNE ENRIGHT’S THE GATHERING CANDIS P. PIZZETTA

Attempts to marry literary theory with science often end with a progeny out of step with both parents’ worlds. It is with this hazard in mind that I began examining texts by women for evidence of what Darwinian theorists suggest is a division between the investment an individual makes in ensuring his or her survival and the investment an individual makes in reproduction—known respectively as the somatic effort and the reproductive effort (Carroll 82). The behaviors that may be classified under these headings would necessarily be far more complex for human beings than the behaviors of less socially sophisticated biological beings. My interest is particularly in the dialogue a text creates with readers about the parsing of biological resources with regard to women who are pregnant or who have borne children. The dichotomy for these women is not one of either survival or reproduction but of how much and to whom—how much nurturing to provide and to whom in their families they should provide it. Texts with a thematic focus on the reproductive life of women, especially those written by women, offer an opportunity for analysis of this artificial partition of reproductive effort. Even within a fictional narrative, however, women rarely choose survival over reproduction or vice versa. In the vast majority of novels about young women, the subject of actual reproduction is somewhat muted. The female protagonist must decide whether or not to marry (or mate in biological terms, with mating considered by biologists to be part of the reproductive effort). A character’s marriage implies that child-bearing and rearing are expected. Children often arrive after the epilogue of a novel, so readers cannot know what delicate negotiations a mother might make between her own welfare and that of her children or how those considerations are shaped by the size of her family.

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One recent exception to this dearth of maternal fecundity illustrates very well the complexities involved in representations of mothers. The Gathering by Anne Enright probes family relationships across four generations of a large, Irish Catholic family. The main character, Veronica Hegarty, is mother, daughter, and granddaughter in the multi-generational scheme. Escape from the pressure of being one of many children in a very large family and from the shadow of the period in which she lives with her grandparents is a matter of emotional survival for Veronica, who narrates the novel. Added to this anxiety is the underlying genetic necessity of reproduction. Survival of maternal genes is at the heart of the decisions made by Veronica’s mother, Maureen, and grandmother, Ada, and by Veronica herself. Since the impetus for reproduction is an essentially selfish drive with the ultimate goal as the survival of a particular set of genes, Veronica’s decision to have children could be interpreted as evolutionarily egoistic, a concept Veronica fails to associate with her own reproductive choices while implying that many of her mother’s decisions about reproduction are selfish. Maternal interest in offspring involves both the genetic investment by the mother and the investment of physical and emotional resources mothers make. Mothers in Enright’s novel express interest in the survival of their offspring in different ways, in some ways that may make sense in evolutionary terms but that lead them away from the stylized cultural ideal of the “good mother.” While the prototypical mother, the “good mother,” is a social construct, it can best be defined in its extreme form through the psychological theory of maternal attachment. Based on the work of John Bowlby in the midtwentieth century, attachment theory asserts that the mother-child bond has an evolutionary basis and that there is a universal pattern of intimacy between mothers and children that represents an essential aspect of the children’s emotional development (Attachment 366). Although theories of children’s emotional development have moved beyond the narrow focus on mothers only to encompass relationships with fathers and other caregivers, the way that Bowlby’s maternal deprivation syndrome dovetails with longstanding Western cultural characterizations of sex roles underscores the importance of nurturing in the mother-child relationship. The bond between a nurturing mother and her child or children is one that requires great sensitivity of the mother, according to Bowlby (The Making 87). The psychological effects of maternal deprivation, the lack of emotional intimacy between mother and child, are well-documented in the psychological literature and in the public imagination.* It is the ideal model of mothering that Veronica wants to use to define her pattern of reproduction in contrast to the genetically selfish pattern her mother has

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chosen. In Veronica’s struggle to define her own ideal of motherhood as less about reproduction and more about nurturing, Veronica rejects the choice her mother has made to have many offspring, having only two daughters herself, while still unconsciously expressing interest in the survival of her own genes. By way of the dichotomy Veronica establishes between herself and her mother, Enright poses to the reader a question about the limits of maternal altruism: the idea that mothers will sacrifice far more for their children than other less closely related individuals will risk for one another. According to evolutionary psychologist Daniel Nettle, kinship in general inspires a greater degree of altruistic behavior in individuals. He explains that the “theory of natural selection predicts that individuals will make preferential investment in their blood relatives, with the strength of the preference in proportion to the closeness of the genetic bond” (Nettle 58). The difficulty with this genetic paradigm is that social and environmental conditions often place constraints on the strength of evolved patterns of behavior (59). Cultural pressures in concert with our evolved kinship behaviors create the systems each geographical area favors; in other words, for Irish Catholics, large families become the norm, without regard to certain biologic disadvantages of large families. A large number of offspring forces parents to make investment decisions that may be costly to some of the offspring. Biologists define this as Parental Investment Theory, which asserts that parental investment is “any investment by the parent in an individual offspring that increases the offspring’s chance of surviving (and hence reproductive success) at the cost of the parent’s ability to invest in other offspring” (Trivers 139). In most mammals, this reduction of investment in some offspring takes the form of a diminished share of food or less vigilant protection from predators; in humans, a decline in the amount of nurturing or attention provided to less favored children often occurs in response to environmental pressures. According to David Geary, this feature of child care, which he terms “caregiving warmth,” is a recently evolved behavior that is not widespread in most species. In human interactions, caregiving warmth can be reduced by situational factors: “Moreover, the human caregiving and warmth feature does not appear to be an obligate form of parental investment in humans but rather appears to be expressed facultatively, that is, only under certain social and ecological conditions” (86). Thus, maternal altruism in human mothers with large numbers of children will be mediated by a parsing of both material and emotional resources, effectively treating some children as if they are more closely related than others.

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In The Gathering, the division of maternal emotional support, nurturing by another name, is portrayed as inequitable with regard to some children and largely inadequate for all the children in the family. Since children’s understanding of caregiving models is the result of long-term exposure to caregivers (nurturing or not), it is likely that the adult Veronica has some insight into her mother’s caregiving style (Bradley, et al. 77). As narrator, however, Veronica admits that she is re-creating memories of her family in order to understand them: “I can twist them as far as you like, here on the page; make them endure all kinds of protraction, bliss, mindlessness, abjection, release. I can bend and reconfigure them in the rudest possible ways” (Enright 139-40). Therefore, she may not be accurately portraying the quality or quantity of nurturing that her mother has offered. Yet the sense that she has of being deprived is real to her, and she leaves us wondering if her mother is altruistic only in a genetic sense, doing what is best for the survival of her genes, or in a culturally appropriate way, one that entails concern for the development of her children as individuals, or if she is altruistic at all. In the Hegarty family, decisions are made during Veronica’s childhood about the value of individual children, with some of the younger children, including Veronica, sent to their grandmother Ada’s for long periods of time. In discussions of parental investment, biologists note that older children are preferred by parents when scarce resources are being distributed because more has already been invested in them and the parent has more to lose if older offspring should fail to thrive (Dawkins 125). Veronica refers to the period when she, older brother Liam, and younger sister Kitty are sent to their grandmother’s house as times they feel “left behind” (Enright 127). She says that though Ada’s house is only a few miles from her parents’ it seems much farther, like “Timbuctoo” (46). Ada’s house is filled with silence, in contrast to the noisy Hegarty household, a difference which Veronica repeatedly remarks upon, highlights the repressive, lonely nature of her time at Ada’s. After one visit from her father, she watches from a window in the still house as he leaves: “And I remember nothing like I remember the silence after he closed Ada’s front door and lowered himself in the front seat of the car and drove away” (101). During the longest period Veronica, Liam, and Kitty are at Ada’s, Veronica says they realizes “how outside of things we were, farmed out to our granny–who meant nothing to us, of a sudden–and missing our parents, who meant less and less” (49). Thus, her feeling of connection with the rest of her family, especially her parents, is weakened by this time away, this dry time for nurturing. Unlike her older sister Midge, who as an adult has a fairly large family of her own, Veronica does

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not experience a sense of inclusion in the large-family paradigm, which may well have worked to alter her approach to reproduction. As Bjorklund and Pellegrini note, individuals develop varied solutions to the problems of childhood: “Such a perspective suggests that individual differences in developmental patterns are not necessarily the result of idiosyncratic experiences but rather are predictable, adaptive responses to environmental pressures” (1687). Although maternal altruism seeks to encourage reproduction in offspring, it cannot control for the wide variety of environmental factors that may change reproductive preferences. For Veronica, the quality of her experiences in a large family may well have influenced her response to reproductive pressures. Although the time at Ada’s means less nurturing is provided to Veronica, Liam, and Kitty, that time also includes experiences that the other children in the family do not have. According to Eckart Volund, the extended environment is always a consideration when examining reproductive choices: Moreover, reproduction takes place in a behavioral ecological context, because the reproductive preferences and decisions of individuals are influenced to a considerable degree and in numerous ways by their personal life circumstances…. In their work, cultural ecologists and social anthropologists have always paid particular attention to the influence exerted by prevailing social structures, by technologies, and by exploitation of resources on the reproductive patterns prevailing in a particular society. (348)

So the divergence of Veronica’s reproductive preferences from those of her mother and oldest sister may have happened even if her mother had managed to nurture all her children equally; however, Veronica’s place in the family hierarchy almost certainly assures a different approach to procreation. As an adult, Veronica suffers from the “unfairness of the place” each time she visits her parents’ house, perhaps an emotional holdover of the inequity of parental investment, which still stings her as an adult (Enright 26). Her sense of being less significant to her parents than the children who are allowed to remain at home is illustrated in an encounter with her older sister Bea during the Christmas spent at Ada’s house: That Christmas morning was as clean and crisp as it always is–my memory will not allow it to rain. But neither will it allow us home to Griffith Way, because this was the year that we were farmed out to Ada, me and Liam and Kitty, and we did not see our mother, not even for Christmas, though our father did arrive with a smug-looking Bea some time in the afternoon.

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Bea and the other older children have been permitted to remain at home even though their mother is not yet recovered from her emotional collapse. This favoritism toward the older children leaves Veronica wondering what is lost to her during the time she is sent to Ada’s (47). What Veronica recognizes is the biological certainty that older offspring have a greater share in what biologists term the parents’ “incumbent strength” (Gould 18). The partiality she senses as a child continues to haunt her relationship with her mother even after Veronica is a mother herself. At Liam’s wake, Maureen looks at Veronica, causing her to think And she gives me a beaky look, as if to say, What? You want me to like you? I don’t know what is wrong with being me. And I don’t know if she would like me better if she could remember my name. Mammy was always free to choose which ones she did and did not love. The boys first, of course, and after the boys, whichever of the girls were good. I was not good. I am not sure why. (184)

Veronica’s bitterness over the decisions her mother makes about the division of maternal effort seems intimately tied to her place in the family order. Without hearing the views of her older siblings like Midge (deceased) or Mossie (not a sympathetic character from Veronica’s perspective), we cannot know for certain if there is actual disparity in the parsing of maternal effort or if, due to family size, there is simply a shortage of maternal interest all around. Veronica clearly feels that there is a difference in the treatment of some of the children, boys being preferred over girls, some children kept at home while others are “farmed out,” and some children, like Mossie, given authority over younger siblings. Although Veronica mentions the large-family dynamic as part of the problem, she fails to fully appreciate the difficulties her mother must have faced when caring for so many children. Environmental conditions in the Hegarty household lead, perhaps force, Maureen to treat some children differently, giving more attention and providing more nurturing to the older children, who arrive first on the scene when there is less competition for maternal affection. Thus, even though we cannot see the situation from Maureen’s perspective or that of one of the older children, we can take for granted that Veronica is correct in supposing that inequity in caregiving warmth exists. Because Veronica feels that imbalance to be a choice her mother makes, she supposes herself

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to be less important to her mother and determines that her approach to parenting will be dramatically different. With Veronica as our guide, we can see the consequences of her mother’s perceived indifference on Veronica as an adult. The novel opens with Veronica carping about her mother’s excessive fecundity even as she arrives to deliver the news of her brother Liam’s death; Maureen has given birth to twelve children, eleven of whom reach adulthood. Veronica’s rage at her mother is due in part to the competition for scarce resources that her siblings represent; she says: My mother had twelve children and–as she told me one hard day– seven miscarriages. The holes in her head are not her fault. Even so, I have never forgiven her any of it. I just can’t. I have not forgiven her . . . the whole tedious litany of Midge, Bea, Ernest, Stevie, Ita, Mossie, Liam, Veronica, Kitty, Alice and the twins, Ivor and Jem. (7)

Veronica complains about hand-me-down toys and clothes, about the paucity of accurate medical records for the Hegarty clan, about the mother who is too busy even to punish the youngest children, leaving discipline to the eldest. When Veronica comes to tell Maureen about Liam’s death, she is overwhelmed by the sense that her mother is not really present, does not understand the magnitude of the event. Maureen calls Veronica “darling,” which angers Veronica, who believes her mother cannot recall her name (7). She reflects, “If only she would become visible, I think. Then I could catch her and impress upon her the gravity of what she has done. But she remains hazy, unhittable, too much loved” (7). What Maureen has done is produce children at a rate that meant few of the children received the adequate emotional sustenance necessary for them to become emotionally well balanced. Veronica, therefore, interprets Maureen’s vagueness as a lack of interest in herself, in who she is, in what she needs, and in how or if she thrives. For that is what mothers should be interested in—the success of their offspring in terms of both the somatic and the reproductive effort. Caring about one’s offsprings’ survival includes concern about their reproductive success, but in human society also means being concerned about their happiness—since physical survival is inextricably linked to emotional stability. Sociobiologists note that because mammalian mothers invest more resources (both time and food in most cases) in reproduction, they are committed to nurturing in order to make certain that the outlay of resources produces successful offspring (Smith and Stevens 111). At least, that is the ideal. Success in purely genetic terms would mean having more

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children live to adulthood and produce offspring of their own, but Veronica interprets this approach as selfish rather than nurturing. It does not fit with her idea of maternal altruism. Veronica suggests that the excessively active sex life of her mother is a selfish or at least thoughtless behavior. In her internal rant, the narrator tells her mother that sex has “[c]onsequences, Mammy. Consequences” (Enright 8). One of those consequences is the increased scarcity of emotional resources that means some offspring will not flourish psychologically, leading to Kitty’s drinking, driving Ernest into the priesthood, causing Veronica to prefer angry men over nurturing men, or even making Mossie, prematurely, into a parent-like sibling who relishes disciplining his juniors. The number of heavy drinkers and the paucity of successful marriages among the Hegarty clan make Veronica’s estimation of the consequences of her mother’s fruitfulness appear accurate. Maureen’s failure to connect with each child individually is due in part to the fact that no individual child is irreplaceable. Although Maureen cries for Liam when Veronica delivers the news of her brother’s death, Veronica believes this grief is somewhat impersonal, that her mother would have cried the same for any of her lost sons and that she does not feel a Liam-specific hole in her heart. Veronica says of her mother’s weeping, “It occurs to me that we have got something wrong here, because I am the one who has lost something that can not be replaced. She has plenty more” (11). A surfeit of genetic copies should serve as comfort for Maureen, in Veronica’s calculus, but the sister has lost an important and irreplaceable relationship. Maureen’s “plenty more” will ensure the continuation of her genetic line even though a few offspring may die early or not reproduce. Veronica expresses an awareness of this impersonal biological equation and resists it through her anger at her mother and in her own approach to motherhood. Veronica repeatedly and sullenly remarks upon the importance of reproductive success to Maureen. Veronica bitterly suggests that Maureen’s tears at the birth of Veronica’s first child are not tears of joy but tears of relief because “[s]he thought we were all barren” (54). Even though it is culturally acceptable and biologically necessary for parents to wish to become grandparents, Veronica seems to resent the fact that her mother takes comfort in the next generation. When at Liam’s wake, Tom, Veronica’s husband, tells her that Maureen needs to see their girls, Veronica fumes: “Why does she need to see the children?” “Well,” says Tom.

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“It’s not what children are for,” I say, quite fiercely. And he gives me a look of sudden interest, before twisting the girls by the shoulders to push them across to their Gran . . . . I watch this configuration as from a great distance. It is as though I am not related to any of them. But there is a roaring in my blood, too. “So what are they for?” says Tom. “They’re not for anything,” I say. ‘They just are.” (199)

Veronica attempts to reject the pull of evolutionary determinism by arguing that her girls have value as individuals instead of as genetic copies, yet even as she balks at Maureen’s proprietary interest in the girls, she feels the “roaring in [her] blood” of the familial connection. As she strives to define herself and to make her mother finally see her as an individual, she acts to assure that her daughters are more than pieces of some genetic program. It is Veronica’s narration that makes us see mothering as entirely genetically selfish rather than altruistic, or at least she tries to make us see this about Maureen, while failing to see it about herself. As Maureen heads up to bed at the end of the wake, she seems comforted by the fact that all of her surviving children are assembled again under her roof. Maureen says good night to her adult children, and Veronica notes that “[s]he is pleased with the people she has made. She is happy” (207). Although happiness in the success of her progeny should make Maureen seem a good mother, through Veronica’s narration she appears to be aberrant in her out-of-control fruitfulness. A few pages on, Veronica recognizes that Maureen’s fecundity is as much a burden to her mother as it is an accomplishment: “My poor mother had twelve children. She could not stop giving birth to the future. Over and over. Twelve futures” (233). The Gordian knot that is the relationship of a woman to both the biological imperative to reproduce and to the culturally defined role of mother is difficult for Veronica, or for us, to fully unravel. As John Dupré points out in his discussion of gender and evolution, human behavior is not a result of either genetic programming or cultural influences but of a complex and variable combination of both (15). Even as Veronica recalibrates the ratio of nurturing to the production of offspring, she is implementing both inputs from her genetic predispositions and from her experiences in a large family. Although Veronica is annoyed with her mother for being overly interested in the reproductive success of her children, Veronica and all of her siblings are thrilled to find out that Liam has a son. When Liam’s son Rowan is introduced at the funeral, the family becomes absolutely giddy, as though this child were a savior of their genetic future: “It is hard to describe the effect of the boy on the assembled Hegartys. . . . It is like we

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had never seen a child before” (246). Liam has been far from an ideal brother, yet all of his siblings are delighted at the almost identical looking genetic copy of him. One possible explanation for the Hegartys’ delight at finding Rowan is a genetic one: that they are responding to the continuation of their genetic line in this nephew as a result of the kinship bond that encourages all blood relatives to support one another. As Daniel Nettle discusses in his examination of Hamlet, familial bonds often engender behavior that is only explicable in light of the genetic connection between individuals (58). Veronica, however, does not acknowledge an evolutionary aspect in her joy at finding out about Rowan, preferring to value him in the way she regards her daughters. Veronica imagines Rowan as a well-loved version of Liam in the same way that her daughters will be nurtured versions of herself. Veronica’s adaptation of the successful family revolves around being a “good mother,” one who supplies ample nurturing to all her children. In Maureen’s home, children are the beating pulse of the house, though not individually valuable. In Veronica’s home, the children are valued as individuals. When thinking about her courtship with her husband, Tom, Veronica believes that their union is fated to turn out much-adored children: “[W]e knew we would put it all right one day with this: two beautiful daughters in two beautiful bedrooms. Tall, no doubt, and clever. Who would attend their destined private school, and who would each be mapped, discussed, mulled over, well loved” (Enright 70). The difference between this approach and Maureen’s parenting is apparent. Maureen’s decision to produce a large brood makes it impossible for her to invest too heavily in one child or the other. Veronica, despite being the product of a large family, rejects that pattern of family life. As Joan Roughgarden argues, the psyche plays an essential role in mating, such that determinations of male or female parental investment are the result of the forces of social and environmental factors that lead to the selection of a certain kind of mate. Veronica recognizes that she has chosen her husband in part because she saw a future ideal family with him. So even though reproduction is a genetic imperative, Veronica attempts to balance the reproductive and the somatic effort in her life—both for herself and for her daughters. Veronica does not succumb to the combination of evolutionary and cultural pressure to over-invest in reproduction. Rather she incorporates the child-rearing aspect of the reproductive effort as an element of her own psychological well-being. Evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson notes that when “genetically fixed if-then rules break down[, they] must be supplemented by rapid nongenetic evolutionary processes that generate and select new solutions to current problems. As [happens with the

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human] immune system, so also for psychological and cultural processes” (Wilson 27). All living organisms are endowed with what Wilson terms “phenotypic plasticity,” the combination of genetic predispositions and the ability to respond to environmental stimuli that make it possible for complex creatures, like human beings, to display a variety of physical traits and behaviors even though their genetic similarity is great (23). Thus Veronica accepts the role of mother but rejects her own family’s paradigm for reproduction. Though Veronica’s new vision of the perfect family partially accomplishes her goal to ensure her and her children’s psychological health, her family is still affected by the biological tensions primary to all division of effort. She admits that her husband, concerned about his status and his earning potential, finds Veronica and the children to be a hindrance. Early on in the marriage when they have two small children and little money, both Veronica and Tom work. Both are tired at the end of the day, but Tom resents taking time from work to tend the children, his job being more important. So Veronica leaves her job to stay at home with the children. Despite this distribution of labor, she thinks Tom, who seems to love the girls, also sees them as being “in his way” (Enright 71). Another problem that she encounters that her mother seems not to have had is that her marriage is not a particularly loving one. Where Veronica’s father, her “uxorious father,” (87) is assumed by all the children to adore Maureen, Veronica believes her husband has hated her but does not deem this a problem, as she reveals when she says that “there is a part of me that wants to be hated, too” (180). When her daughter is an infant crying in her bed at the same time that her husband is moping about his difficult day at work, Veronica feels torn about who to comfort first. Choosing her child over her husband, she explains: The thing is, if I go up to Rebecca and kiss her, she will be happy. If I sit on the arm of the chair and kiss Tom, he will not be happy. So I stay with him just a moment more, in the singed smell of his self-disgust. I hold his skull against my breast. I do this until Rebecca’s wailing grows to the exact pitch that pulls me to my feet, every time. Then I go. (180)

Both the somatic effort and the reproductive effort require Veronica to ensure the stability of her marriage to sustain her own social status (since she is no longer bringing in income) and to support her daughter’s social and emotional growth. Yet her emphasis in this instance and others in the novel is on enhancing the reproductive benefits of her marriage. Veronica knows that her less-than-ideal marriage may affect her daughters, and she worries about this possibility. Discussing an unpleasant expression she

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sees on her daughter Rebecca’s face, Veronica frets that this expression will become set and mar Rebecca’s beauty: “I thought, I have to keep her happy. I have to be in love with her father and keep her happy, or this thing will happen to her, she will turn into one of those people that you pass every day on the street” (69). Like many people, Veronica works to avoid the errors her parents have made even while she crashes into barriers she has not foreseen. Nurturing children in order to guarantee emotional stability is a practice that exhausts considerable resources. Veronica finds that properly caring for her two daughters is a taxing and complex process. In relationship to her daughters, Veronica uses language similar to that which she applies to her own mother. While she finds that her mother is “fading,” she worries that she herself will “die of something–call it irrelevance–I think I will just fade away” if she cannot talk to her daughters (3, 38). She must be a tangible part of her children’s lives in order to avoid becoming like her mother or perhaps to make up for her perceived irrelevance to her own mother. For the hard truth is that each successive generation extends the genetic existence of its forbears even as it makes them superfluous. For all the irritation Veronica expresses about her mother’s interest in the reproductive success of the next generation, she is quite fulfilled by the children her body has created. One night Veronica climbs into her daughter Emily’s bed and admires the child’s beauty and strength, which she attributes to herself, to her “body’s own stuff” and “ten thousand plates of organic sausages” (152). Veronica wants to be certain that she completes the job of creating her child: “I want to finish the job of making her, because when she is fully made she will be strong” (152). Veronica believes her child-rearing to be better than her mother’s. She acts as if she values the individual survival potential of each of her daughters as a measure of the success of her own reproductive effort. When her daughter feebly attempts to comfort her over Liam’s death, Veronica admires the child’s lack of real interest in the previous generation: “I should think of her as selfish, but I don’t–I think of her as utterly beautiful in her selfishness” (175). Examining the history of the Hegarty mothers in light of biologic definitions of various categories of investment of effort may have, I hope, highlighted the difficulty in explaining the real division of investment that mothers experience during child-rearing. This meta-narrative complicates matters further, for Veronica, who presents herself as author of this narrative, admits that she has difficulty differentiating between her perhaps fantastic memories and the reality of her past; and as readers we can see that she is often unaware how she exposes her own interest in the survival

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of her maternal genes. So what can we hope to accomplish by applying the general concepts of evolutionary psychology? In the case of Enright’s novel, I would agree with Bjorklund and Pellegrini that understanding the evolutionary aspects of childhood experiences can elucidate the variety of emotional and psychological responses to familial and cultural situations (1688). With regard to literature in general, I find that Joseph Carroll in his essay “The Human Animal” states the usefulness of using evolutionary psychology as a method of analysis when he writes that “[t]he behavior that is depicted in literary texts does not necessarily exemplify universal or species-typical behavior patterns, but species-typical behavior patterns form an indispensable frame of reference for the communication of meaning in literary representations” (92).

Notes *

For information on maternal deprivation, refer to the following sources: Leila Beckwith, Sarale E. Cohen, and Claire E. Hamilton, “Maternal Sensitivity During Infancy and Subsequent Life Events Relate to Attachment Representation at Early Adulthood,” Developmental Psychology 35 (1999): 693-700; Diane Benoit and Kevin C.H. Parker, “Stability and Transmission of Attachment across Three Generations,” Child Development 65 (1994): 1444-57; Susan Goldberg, Attachment and Development (London: Edward Arnold, 2000); Adam Price, “Effects of Maternal Deprivation on the Capacity to Play: A Winnicottion Perspective on Worth with Inner City Children,” Psychoanalytic Psychology 11 (1994): 341-55; Phillip R. Shaver and R. Chris Fraley, “Attachment Theory and Caregiving,” Psychological Inquiry 11. 2 (2000): 109-14; and Marinus H. van IJzendoorn, Marian J. Kranenburg, Hylda A. Zwart-Woudstra, Agnes M. van Busshbach, and Mirjam W. E. Lambermon, “Parental Attachment and Children’s Socio-emotional Development: Some Findings on the Validity of the Adult Attachment Interview in the Netherlands,” International Journal of Behavioural Development 14 (1991): 375-94.

Works Cited Bowlby, John. Attachment and Loss. Vol. 1. 2nd ed. New York: Basic Books, 1983. —. The Making and Breaking Affectional Bonds. New York: Routledge, 1990. Bjorklund, David F., and Anthony Pellegrini. “Child Development and Evolutionary Psychology.” Child Development 71 (2000): 1687-1708. Bradley, Robert H., Leanne Whiteside-Mansell, Judith A. Brisby, and Bettye M. Caldwell. “Socioemotional Investment in Children.” Journal of Marriage and Family 59.1 (1997): 77-90.

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Carroll, Joseph. “Human Nature and Literary Meaning: A Theoretical Model Illustrated with a Critique of Pride and Prejudice.” The Literary Animal: Evolution and the Nature of Narrative. Ed. Jonathan Gottschall and David Sloan Wilson. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern UP, 2005. 76-106. Dawkins, Richard. The Selfish Gene. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006. Dupré, John. “Evolution and Gender.” Women: A Cultural Review 12 (2001): 9-18. Enright, Anne. The Gathering. New York: Black Cat, 2007. Geary, David. “Attachment, Caregiving, and Parental Investment.” Psychological Inquiry 11.2 (2000): 84-123. Gould, Stephen Jay. “Dolly’s Fashion and Louis’s Passion.” Natural History 106.5 (1997): 18-24. Nettle, Daniel. “What Happens in Hamlet.” The Literary Animal: Evolution and the Nature of Narrative. Ed. Jonathan Gottschall and David Sloan Wilson. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern UP, 2005. 56-75. Roughgarden, Joan. “Challenging Darwin’s Theory of Sexual Selection.” Daedalus 13.2 (2007): 23-36. Smith, Thomas S., and Gregory T. Stevens. “Hyperstructures and the Biology of Interpersonal Dependence.” Sociological Theory 20.1 (2002): 106-30. Trivers, Robert L. “Parental Investment and Sexual Selection.” Sexual Selection and the Descent of Man. Ed. Bernard Campbell. Chicago: Aldene, 1972. 136-79. Voland, Eckart. “Evolutionary Ecology of Human Reproduction.” Annual Review of Anthropology 27 (1998): 347-74. Wilson, David Sloan. “Evolutionary Social Construction.” The Literary Animal: Evolution and the Nature of Narrative. Ed. Jonathan Gottschall and David Sloan Wilson. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern UP, 2005. 20-37.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN WHEN ETHNICITY, HISTORY, AND PARENTING COLLIDE: MOTHERING UNDERSTOOD IN AMY TAN’S THE KITCHEN GOD’S WIFE AND CHRISTINA GARCÍA’S DREAMING IN CUBAN PRESELFANNIE EVET WHITFIELD MCDANIELS

Amy Tan’s The Kitchen God’s Wife and Christina García’s Dreaming in Cuban are texts that seem literally and culturally worlds apart in their subject matter since they present portraits of mothers and daughters from Chinese and Cuban heritage cultures, yet they speak volumes in their connections since they reveal the experiences of “hyphenated”1 women. These women are considered hyphenated both culturally and figuratively: culturally, in that most of them are either Chinese (-) American or Cuban (-) American women, and figuratively, in that they all struggle with the war of living between homelands, fighting to integrate themselves in an emotionally healthy way. Both works explore “the issues of cultural hybridity and how a hyphenated existence complicates identity” (McAuliffe 4). In these works, the current time in the United States is constantly being shaped by the old and new worlds of their cultural homelands (China and Cuba), including the deadly and disheartening aspects of war itself. In this analysis, illness and death are examined as catalysts that lead to confrontations between mothers and daughters and later to some understanding of the mother’s struggles in the process of rearing her children. In The Kitchen God’s Wife, mother and daughter, Winnie Louie and Pearl Louie Brandt, are forced into sharing their secrets and emotions due to the threats of Helen Kwong and her daughter Mary, concerned friends of the Louie family. Helen threatens to reveal that Pearl has

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multiple sclerosis and the truth about Pearl’s paternity. In Dreaming in Cuban, her sister Felicia’s untimely death motivates Lourdes del Pino to pack up her daughter Pilar, return to her native Cuba, and come face-toface with her estranged mother Celia after so many years. I argue that these novels show how oppressive circumstances, such as the mothers’ childhoods, abusive behavior, father-daughter bonds, and cultural barriers can create the need for inner strength, secret sharing, therapeutic storytelling, and support networks as coping strategies for the mother characters. Although the mother characters in these works mother under some oppressive circumstances, the outcomes are considerably positive, but certainly not completely successful. For instance, the circumstances of abusive behavior and each mother’s negative childhood experience are examined. However, almost all of the daughters are able to find a certain understanding of their mother’s rearing of them. In Dreaming in Cuban, even when the daughter is not able to totally forgive her mother for her mothering mistakes, she is still left with a way to understand the circumstances under which the mothering takes place. She is able to achieve this by evaluating and coming to understand her mother’s past. In The Kitchen God’s Wife, mother and daughter actually find common ground after they break down barriers and the mother is able to tell her own story. Possible reasons for these somewhat successful relationships seem to be the more intense connections between granddaughters and the grandmothers (even though the grandmother has serious problems in the relationship with her own daughter), a genuine interest in mothers and daughters communicating some understanding of the past, and a real effort to explain the mother’s motives and actions through secret sharing or storytelling. The oppressive circumstances under which these mother characters rear their children include the mothers’ negative childhood experiences, which are significantly marked by their being abandoned by their own mothers and the repercussions that this abandonment has on their emotional states throughout their lives. The act of abandonment is even carried over to the next generations in Dreaming in Cuban due to mental illness caused by the act itself. Some circumstances involve other forms of emotional, sexual, and physical abuse that the mother experiences primarily due to her husband or his family. Other oppressive circumstances involve the father-daughter bond and communication barriers. The fatherdaughter bond becomes an oppressive circumstance in instances where the daughter prefers the father to the mother because tensions exist in the

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mother-daughter relationship. Communication barriers include language, cultural, sociopolitical, and assimilative differences. The issue of communication barriers in parent-child relationships is probably not rare in any society. However, it has a higher level of importance when discussed in connection with immigrant mothers and their American (U. S.) daughters. The question of hyphenation does, consequently, remain very intricately connected to the issue of assimilation, a highly debated topic in most ethnic immigrant communities in the United States, especially for those whose native language is other than English. Conservative Hispanic (her chosen term) leader Linda Chavez2 dispels the “dirty word” status of assimilation in Out of the Barrio by describing assimilation as having been “far more gentle a process, by which people from outside the community gradually became part of the community itself. Some groups were accepted more reluctantly than others” (161). Chavez also admits that loss is a part of the process, however, but considers the benefits worth the losses. For Tan’s and García’s characters, this issue is much more complicated than Chavez suggests, especially for women and within their relationships as mothers and daughters. Of course, mother-daughter relationships, by nature and circumstances, are usually the subject of emotional spirals with high and low points. Adrienne Rich writes, “Probably there is nothing in human nature more resonant with charges than the flow of energy between two biologically alike bodies, one which has lain in amniotic bliss inside the other, one which has labored to give birth to the other. The materials are there for the deepest mutuality and the most painful estrangement” (226). Rich’s scenario is nowhere more evident than in these texts by Tan and García. In fact, the issues of ethnicity and assimilation make for further complication of the relationships themselves. It is crucially important to understand mothering as a complex job on which certain circumstances may have detrimental effects. Tan’s and García’s mothers deal with prevailing circumstances which may cause either permanent or longlasting breakdowns in communication efforts between mothers and daughters, without effective coping strategies to balance the burden of rearing their daughters. The mothers, at some point in the works, acknowledge that the deficiency in communication which they experience with their daughters does not hinge only upon their daughters’ inabilities to understand them, or unwillingness to listen to them. Their own silences and secrets weigh heavily on these communication gaps. The non-communication between the mothers and their daughters in The Kitchen God’s Wife and Dreaming in Cuban is grounded in several issues. Socio-political disagreement,

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secret pasts, withheld information, assimilated distance, cultural dislocation, and language differences are evident in both novels. The mothers and daughters in these novels do not speak the same language literally or emotionally; this accounts for the absence of productive communication between them. The words of Mary S. Vasquez characterize this situation: “Language functions in the novel[s] as a measuring device gauging both affinity and distance” between mothers and daughters, and “foreignness [in communication] becomes a metaphor for separation and estrangement” (23). When mothers and daughters do not speak the same language, there exists no connection through words or emotions. These issues affect both mother and daughter. Other obviously important relationships which exist in these texts, either as results of or conditions for the broken bond between mother and daughter, are the father-daughter and mother-son bonds. In Dance Between Two Cultures, William Luis pinpoints that the “disdain for the mother [which] leads to [the daughter’s] concern for the father” is expressed in generational patterns in Dreaming in Cuban (225). An extreme opposition initially exists between Celia del Pino, the matriarch, and her daughters, Lourdes and Felicia, as it does with Lourdes and her daughter, Pilar Puente, and Felicia and her twin daughters, Luz and Milagro Villaverde. Although the manifestation of this opposition is not examined with multi-generational proof in Tan’s Kitchen God’s Wife, the non-communication between Winnie Louie and her daughter Pearl Brandt continues to exist even after Pearl’s strong bond with her father Jimmy is interrupted by Pearl’s own resentment over his long illness and eventual death. So in both works, there exists the open communication between the parent and child of the opposite sex in the midst of the communicative opposition within the same-sex parent-child bonds. The portrayal of the del Pino women characters and their tumultuous mother-daughter relationships is a perfectly meaningful characterization of Christina García’s ability to see larger sociopolitical contexts of being Cuban or Cuban-American and to comprehend how historical events affect individuals and families (Payant 164). According to Katherine Payant, “García’s interest in the political is rooted in the personal cost of events in Cuba after 1959, especially to women and their families. Ultimately, one cannot separate the political from the personal in [this] novel, for they weave in and out of each other” (165). This is true, because Celia and Lourdes are both victims of political agendas and past accusations. Felicia fits into this category as well. Their relationships remain disconnected for years because of their differing opinions about Cuban politics. As a direct or indirect response to the deepening of the estrangement in the mother-

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daughter relationship, each woman’s political agenda (religious involvement for Felicia) grows more radical over time. Such a course of digression in the mother-daughter relationship can create the need for coping strategies for the mother character as a way to lessen the burdens of rearing her daughter and as a way of repairing the relationship or living with the breakdown of the relationship with her adult daughter. An examination of the mothers in this discussion shows how certain coping strategies may be beneficial for alleviating the oppressive nature of the circumstances under which they mother. One strategy examined is the mother’s inner strength, her sheer determination to overcome complicated circumstances. Other strategies are secret sharing, therapeutic storytelling, and support networks. Each of the mothers is able to rely on a network of people in order to progress as a person and as a mother. Some of those networks of support involve community members who associate with the mothers via organized groups. Some of the mothers and daughters discussed in this chapter are able to find common ground or at least move toward a better understanding of each other because they decide to break down the communication barriers that plague their relationships by revealing secrets and telling the stories of the experiences that affect their mothering. In this instance, storytelling becomes a therapeutic means for healing the mother-daughter rift. Each of the authors, Tan and García, weaves stories of herself, her mother, grandmothers, aunts, sisters, cousins, and friends. They share their stories by allowing mothers to tell their own stories or allowing others to tell the stories about their pasts and present(s), utilizing different modes of revelation, such as an afternoon of oral revelation with Tan’s Winnie Louie and in epistolary fashion with the chronicled love letters of Celia del Pino and the historical diary of “narrator” Pilar Puente in García’s work. These authors allow their texts to become mediums for the “voices in the gaps” of women’s stories and silences. However, one must not forget that these voices in the gaps are also ethnic, immigrant voices, as well as women’s voices. Not only are daughters telling their stories and their mothers’ stories in the texts, but mothers are telling their own stories, enabling the texts themselves to incorporate different versions of the same events and circumstances. Within the process of the telling of stories, mothers and daughters begin to understand each other whether there is total common ground found or not. Rocio G. Davis writes the following: Emphasis on relationships leads to a reevaluation of personal and communal tragedies that oblige the daughters to look back to the mothers, whose images and personalities are often inseparable from community

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Basically, both the mothers’ and daughters’ versions are necessary for revealing the complete story, including the painful secrets, whether the pain is alleviated or just changes its context. Both mothers and daughters need to tell their versions and listen to the others’ versions in order to have all of the information necessary to arrange their own stories in complete form. Nancy Chodorow states, “In any given society, feminine personality comes to define itself in relation and connection to other people more than masculine personality does” (“Family” 44). Women (in these texts and in general) need each other in order to know themselves completely. On the other hand, these women’s stories in these texts are relative not only concerning the identity of the storyteller, but also according to the geographical setting from which and about which they are told. The fact that the past is revealed from a present perspective after the narrator has lived for many years in a new country involves the dilemmas created by both time and place differences. In a passage that applies equally to Garcia’s Cuban-American text displacement involving Cuba, Yuan Yuan states the following about the stories revealed in Tan’s text: China becomes a semiotic site where culture and identity are fought over, negotiated, displaced, and transformed, […] a hermeneutic space for articulating identity and difference, a process that governs the cultural and historical reconstitution of the subjects. (153)

This fact may cause some question about the accuracy of the mother’s remembering in the talk-story. Perhaps the memories are more horrible than the actual events. Perhaps they are not, but the sharing of these memories leads to communicating or negotiating a certain understanding of one’s mothering. In The Kitchen God’s Wife, the issue of childhood experiences having an effect on mothering is approached directly by the mother character. Winnie Louie3 reasons that her shortcomings as a mother and wife are direct results of her not having had a mother to teach her how to handle these responsibilities, so she has listened to whatever advice (which is usually terrible) that is offered her. Although the evidence of abandonment is not tri-generational as in Dreaming in Cuban, what Winnie experiences in The Kitchen God’s Wife is definitely just as traumatic. As Winnie reveals her past life to her daughter, Pearl, she reveals to her the beginning of her loneliness in China, her mother’s abandoning her:

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“She left me before she could tell me why she was leaving. I think she wanted to explain, but at the last moment, she could not. And so even to this day, I still feel I am waiting for her to come back and tell me why it was this way. I was only six years old when she disappeared.” (Tan 88)

Winnie is taken into the home of her father’s brother as “leftovers from [her] mother’s disgrace” (112). Winnie recalls her own family’s gossiping about the shame of her mother’s disappearance and her own attraction to their stories: “For many years, my mother was the source of funny and bad stories, terrible secrets and romantic tales. I heard what they said. I felt so bad to hear them. And yet I could not stop myself from listening. I wanted to know how it could be that my mother left me, never telling me why” (100). Eventually, Winnie would understand that her mother could never deal with the shame of being a “double-second” wife (107), a woman selected for her beauty and her body and who replaces the dead “second” wife. Many years later, being the wife in a horrific marriage herself, Winnie is hopeful that her “mother’s life was now filled with joy!” (340). She hopes this for her mother and for her own future. In addition to having been abandoned by her mother, Winnie does not see her father again until she has a marriage offer, twelve long years later. She finds out after her marriage that her father and his family have known that her husband’s, Wen Fu’s, “family character was not so good” and that in their eyes she must have still been her mother’s leftovers: “So by allowing me to marry into the family, he was saying I was not so good either” (Tan 150). Winnie spends her adult life equating her inability to protect her children Yiku and Danru from a tyrannical father and to protect herself from the rape, which produces her daughter Pearl, by that same man with being left behind by her mother at the age of six. In addition, the fact that Danru dies after she sends him away in order to protect him from Wen Fu only compounds the painful emotions that she associates with abandonment itself. Not only does the issue of abandonment shape mothering, but the scarred memories of physical, psychological, verbal, and sexual abuse also negatively characterize the ways mothers relate to their children, especially their daughters. Winnie remembers the twelve years she lives with her uncle after her mother leaves her behind: “I had to act like a guest, never asking for things, waiting instead for someone to remember what I needed” (Tan 111). She leaves that pain behind only to discover the worst of situations within marriage. It is the abuse from her first husband (and initially from her mother-in-law) that causes Winnie to guard Pearl’s early womanhood so fiercely: “When I was young, I had a good heart too. I did not know how to look at a person like Wen Fu and think to myself,

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This man can cause me lots of trouble. This man can take my innocence away. This man will be the reason why I will always have to tell my daughter, be careful, be careful” (111). In the words of Pico Iyer, Winnie’s tale is filled with “horrors pitiless enough to mount a powerful indictment against a world in which women were taught that love means always having to say you’re sorry. In traditional China, the old widow recalls, ‘a woman had no right to be angry’” (67). In addition to hiding and dealing with her own tragic experiences, she fights relentlessly to make sure that Pearl does not take on the abusive traits of her biological father. Her efforts to do so fuel Pearl’s belief that her mother does not really like her at all. The storminess and chaos of Winnie’s marriage to Wen Fu is parallel to the war in China at that time. When Wen Fu enters the air force (using his dead brother’s name and credentials due to his own inefficiencies) and moves Winnie away to a military base, the extreme sexual abuse begins in their marriage. As the Japanese invasion of China becomes more extreme and the war takes them from base to base, their marriage goes from phase to phase of sexual, physical, psychological, and verbal abuse. When the war ends and they return to Shanghai, Winnie’s plans to end her marriage take concrete shape and her personal revolution to free Danru and herself from this marriage (personal war) begins. In fact, she secures the aid of freedom fighters, such as feminist workers like her cousin Peanut, in her escape from Wen Fu. Like the Japanese, who lied when they promised that their takeover would be organized and peaceful and then raped, robbed, and murdered unsuspecting Chinese people, Wen Fu’s marriage proposal for Winnie is conceived out of greedy lies and results in a marriage that consists of all forms of abuse. Additionally, similar to the ruin and disease that characterized the war’s aftermath, Winnie’s mind is festered with horrors she can never forget. To escape such a marriage is no small feat for a woman who has been conditioned “to accept [her] life without complaint” (Tan 298). However, the greatest price she pays due to her marriage and the war is the loss of her two baby daughters and of her son Danru. Wen Fu’s tyranny forces her to send Danru away to safety, and the epidemic of disease left after the war claims him in that safe place (370). The deaths of her first three children shape the fierce and complicated way that she rears her daughter; she knows the loss that the wrong marriage match can cause a woman, and she refuses to let her daughter Pearl be victimized in the same manner as she has been. In an effort to explain why she is the kind of mother she is, Winnie (between tears) reveals her most horrific secrets as she tells her story. Winnie recalls an occasion when Wen Fu publicly embarrasses her after a

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dinner, in their home. After being slapped, made to kneel, and forced to beg, Winnie thinks, I remember this: All those men, Hulan—nobody tried to stop him. They watched and did nothing […]. And as I bowed and begged, cried and knocked my head on the floor, I was thinking, Why doesn’t anyone help me? Why do they stand there, as if I were truly wrong? (Tan 252-53)

Winnie remembers the abuse she suffers the night she meets and dances with Jimmy Louie (who would be her second husband) and embarrasses Wen Fu: That night, with a gun to my head, he raped me, telling me I had lost the privileges of a wife and now had only the duties of a whore. He made me do one terrible thing after another. He made me murmur thanks to him. He made me beg for more of his punishment. I did all these things until I was senseless, laughing and crying, all feeling in my body gone. (309)

Winnie’s recollection of her own abuse is only compounded by her remembrances of Wen Fu’s other victims, those of whom she is aware anyway. Wen Fu even abuses and rapes other women while married to Winnie (Tan 259-61). He threatens to gamble her body away to other men, and even brings other women to their bed and makes her watch their sexual acts (321). Wen Fu abuses Yiku, their baby daughter, in order to make Winnie suffer more, and he abuses Yiku to the point that she “los[es] her mind” (263). In fact, it is his abusiveness and neglect that leads to Yiku’s death. Almost fifty years later, Winnie still recalls Wen Fu screaming at her: “‘What kind of mother are you!’” (266). Not only does Wen Fu blame her, but Winnie blames herself for Yiku’s death. It is this knowledge that drives Winnie to protect her future children, aborting all fetuses (except one) after Danru is born. After having lost her first two infant daughters (the first to a still birth and the second to her husband Wen Fu’s abusive handling of their household), Winnie is very reluctant to welcome another child into a life as dangerously chaotic as her own. Winnie recalls the following from the time of Danru’s birth: “[…] right away I loved Danru, even though I tried very hard not to. It is that feeling of protecting someone so trusting, and getting back a little of your own innocence” (Tan 268). As a result of the closeness very early in his relationship with his mother, Danru learns to negotiate his own way in Wen Fu’s household. His coping with the situation at such an early age is proof of the bond with his mother and some minute understanding of the confines in which he and his mother

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exist and must survive, a fact that is most likely a source of pride for his mother on one level, but one of shame on another. Winnie relays the following: Danru was so good, so smart. Maybe every mother claims this about her baby. But imagine this: When Danru was not even one year old, I could ask him, “Where’s Mama?” And he would point to me and smile. “Where’s Danru?” And he would pat his stomach and smile. “Where’s Baba?” And he would point to Wen Fu, but he would not smile. (281-82)

According to Margery Wolf in “Chinese Women: Old Skills in a New Context,” such a bond between mother and son is also grounded in Chinese history and women’s social existence. In a feudal Chinese society, such as the one in which Winnie exists in the 1930s and 1940s, the fact that “a woman is dependent upon the largesse of her husband’s family for her daily [food and shelter], but through her sons she has at least use-rights to their share of the family estate” crucially affects the relationships that mothers form with their sons (Wolf 168). In addition, the traditional emotional separation between the father and his son when the son is young only serves in establishing the foundation for an enduring mother-son relationship in this case. An example of such a relationship is the one between the tyrannically abusive Wen-Fu and his own mother. Winnie admits the following: This mother who spoiled [Wen Fu]—she was the one who taught me how to be dutiful to a terrible person. […] To protect my husband so he would protect me. To fear him and think this was respect. To make him a proper hot soup, which was ready to serve only when I had scalded my little finger testing it. (Tan 168)

Not only does Winnie deal with her abuse at the hands of her own family and Wen Fu, but she also realizes that she is a victim of abusive feudalistic culture as well. Winnie, like her mother, her cousin, her aunts, and other Chinese women, is negotiated into marriage by her father and her husband’s family and then exists in a society in which a woman’s worth is measured by who her father, husband, or son might be (Tan 142). Winnie remembers how her mother is regarded after she chooses to ignore the Chinese feudalistic rules for women and leave her marriage as a double-second wife for a man she truly loves. Funeral banners are hung and a gravesite is mentioned as if she has actually died (99). Her mother’s private education consisting of Western thought and the actual audacity to think for herself are blamed as the initiatory culprits in her disdain for the Chinese idea of a woman’s place in society (103-104). Regardless of

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Winnie’s knowledge of her mother’s mistreatment, she finds much difficulty in unlearning the feudalistic ways. She finds it hard to stop underestimating her position as a woman. For example, the following are Winnie’s thoughts after hearing Wen Fu compare her sexual inadequacies to the other women with whom he has had sexual encounters: I was not angry. I did not know I was supposed to be angry. This was China. A woman had no right to be angry. But I was unhappy, knowing my husband was still dissatisfied with me and that I would have to go through more suffering to show him I was a good wife. (Tan 170)

In addition, Winnie often finds herself blaming her mother-in-law for the trouble in her life during her first marriage, because she has reared such a son: And perhaps this was wrong of me, to blame another woman for my own miseries. But that was how I was raised—never to criticize men or the society they ruled, or Confucius, that awful man who made that society. I could blame only other women who were more afraid than I. (257)

As a Chinese woman in the United States, Winnie celebrates the freedom to instruct her daughter in another mode of thinking all together, but her secret thoughts of failure as a mother keep her from communicating well with her daughter for such a long time. That breakdown in Winnie’s relationship with Pearl encourages Pearl’s attachment to her father, but the weighty strength of that fatherdaughter bond also leads to the further deterioration of their motherdaughter bond. Pearl treasures and depends on her closeness with her father. In the following passage, she reminisces about the end of that closeness with her father (after his death), the only parent with whom she has forged a bond: I did not want to mourn the man in the casket, this sick person who had been thin and listless…. He was so unlike what my father had once been: charming and lively, strong, kind, always generous with his laughter, the one who knew exactly what to do when things went wrong. And in my father’s eyes, I had been perfect, his “perfect Pearl,” and not the irritation I always seemed to be with my mother. (Tan 45)

It is evident from Pearl’s memories that her difficulty with her mother is based on what she sees as a mutual dislike or distaste between the two of them. Her belief about their mutual dislike is predicated on the communication barriers that exist in their relationship.

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One issue that is associated with their communication breakdown is the cultural difference between an immigrant mother and her American daughter. According to Wendy Ho, Amy Tan’s mothers and daughters (as well as those in works by other Chinese-American writers such as Maxine Hong Kingston and Fae Myenne Ng) work through their difficulties in multi-conflicted environments. They are “situated at domestic-familial sites, which are complicated by race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and social-economic status” (Ho 35). The stories provide “opportunities to analyze the ways Chinese American mothers and daughters construct and reconstruct their understandings of the conflicted self in relation to multiple homeplaces and borderlands” (Ho 36). One of the most significant contributors to the conflicted mother-daughter relationships in Tan’s and various other texts is the assimilation of the daughters into United States society, a situation initially desired by the mothers and later damned by them. This analysis is best articulated by character Lindo Jong when commenting on her daughter Waverly in Tan’s Joy Luck Club: “ ‘It is my fault she is this way—selfish. I wanted my children to have the best combination: American circumstances and Chinese character. How could I know these things do not mix?’” (289). In addition to the complications of assimilation are the silences and secrets held by the mothers in these “talkstories”; the novels are labeled with this term because the works unveil the mothers’ secret pasts, which serve to bring the mothers closer to their daughters in the midst of some common understanding as women. M. Marie Booth Foster reminds us, in “Voice, Mind, Self,” that these mothers are also dealing with their own dual existences as hyphenated women, “who are struggling to fashion a voice for themselves in a culture where women are conditioned to be silent” (174). Pearl’s thoughts about the dysfunctional mode of her communication with her mother open the novel: “Whenever my mother talks to me, she begins the conversation as if we were already in the middle of an argument” (Tan 11). It is as if Winnie always expects dissension from Pearl, so she lays on the guilt trips before Pearl can ever refuse her requests. Pearl thinks, “Whenever I’m with my mother, I feel as though I have to spend the whole time avoiding land mines” (16). Pearl has no real idea that her mother feels the same way when communicating with her daughter, as well. Winnie is constantly struggling with her own fears of being considered “a bad mother.” She has never truly escaped Wen Fu’s cruel accusations against her concerning the death of her second daughter. Watching her own daughter embarrass Winnie, Pearl contemplates: I think about a child’s capacity to hurt her mother in ways she cannot ever imagine. […] I see my mother sitting one table away, and I feel as lonely

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as I imagine her to be. I think of the enormous distance that separates us and makes us unable to share the most important matters of our life. How did this happen? (34)

Comparable to Winnie, Pearl desires some solutions for repairing what they have lost along the way in their fragmented relationship as mother and daughter, as women. In order to begin to repair this gap, Winnie must confront her fears associated with the abandonment during her early childhood and the abuse of her first husband, and then she must realize that these issues have affected her acts as wife and mother throughout her life. In order to deal with the oppressiveness of such knowledge, Winnie relies on coping strategies that help her work toward improving her chances to mother her daughter effectively when Pearl is a child and to repair her relationship with Pearl as an adult. One thing on which Winnie is able to rely, despite the challenges of her past, is her inner strength. Winnie is definitely a survivor; her endurance is unquestionable. Despite her past circumstances, she becomes a successful business owner of a neighborhood florist shop where she develops original designs. Pearl respects her mother’s courage and strength, although she has doubted the extent of her love in the past. Winnie earns this respect; she is strong enough to come to America while speaking no English, to support her family with a dying husband, to start her own business with her best friend Helen, and to reveal the secrets of her past life to her daughter. In fact, her strength encourages Pearl to finally share the secret of her own debilitating disease and to have hope about her situation for the first time ever. Until forced to talk about her past, Winnie seems unable to forge this connection with her daughter Pearl for the first forty or more years of her daughter’s life. This information Winnie shares with her daughter after finally being forced to tell her life story, “from her more prosperous early childhood on an island near Shanghai in the 1920s to her disastrous World War II marriage to Wen Fu, an abusive, womanizing fortune hunter, and on to meeting the man who would become her second husband” (Young 47). Before Winnie begins to break her silence and reveal her secrets, Pearl’s description of their relationship is “a tale of sweet-and-sour tensions, haunted by her nagging mother—and by her nagging sense that her mother and she are speaking different languages” (Iyer 67). This is a fact that is recognized by both mother and daughter. Winnie, unlike the del Pino women, is finally able to claim some real common ground with Pearl, but it is possible only after she has truly faced the secrets from her past in China.

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However, these are not secrets to her best friend and business partner, Helen. Helen schemes to get Winnie and Pearl to tell their secrets as a way to better their mother-daughter relationship, and she does this in order to thank Winnie for all her years of true friendship. While still a young bride, Winnie forms an alliance with Helen that has lasted for more than four decades. Along with Helen’s Auntie Du and Helen, Winnie has felt some form of support from this women-centered network. They are able to transport that alliance from China to the United States. The only other time she feels such a close friendship with someone is with her cousin Peanut who helps her escape her abusive marriage and leave China. These women form bonds with Winnie that she never forgets and even give her the treasured relationship she eventually has with her daughter. Unlike Winnie Louie, Celia del Pino, the matriarch in Dreaming in Cuban, absolutely knows the source of the discord that lies between her and her daughter Lourdes. Celia writes on August 11, 1953, when Lourdes is seventeen years old: That girl is a stranger to me. When I approach her, she turns numb, as if she wanted to be dead in my presence. I see how different Lourdes is with her father, so alive and gay, and it hurts me, but I don’t know what to do. She still punishes me for the early years. (García 163)

On an all-important personal level, Lourdes cannot forgive Celia for rejecting her when she is born, regardless of the fact that Celia’s rejection is steeped in mental illness brought on by her husband Jorge. Similar to Winnie’s, Celia’s mothering is deeply affected by her own childhood experience. Celia must deal with her own emotions which are associated with her being abandoned as a small child, emotions that hinder her mothering of her daughters, emotions unknown to her daughters. García reveals Celia’s memories of being abandoned in the following passage: When Celia’s parents divorced, they dispersed their children among relatives throughout the island. Celia’s destination was Havana, with her Great-Aunt Alicia, known for her cooking and her iconoclasm. Celia was alone only this once: when she was four, and her mother put her on the daybreak train bound for the capital. On the long train ride from the countryside, Celia lost her mother’s face, the lies that had complicated her mouth. (92)

Although Great-Aunt Alicia cares well for Celia in her attempt to replace Celia’s parents, her best attempts to do so cannot completely fill the void left by her parents’ abandoning her. In fact, as Celia grows older, she

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equates any abandonment of family with disloyalty or treason. In the following passage, Celia comments, to her granddaughter Pilar, on the separation of her family which results from Lourdes’s leaving decades earlier and her fresh attempt to aid Ivanito in his defection: “‘We have no loyalty to our origins,’ Abuela tells me wearily. ‘Families used to stay in one village reliving the same disillusions. They buried their dead side by side’” (García 240). Here, Celia does not allow for the separation of family for any reason, even to go in search of a non-oppressive life, which is Lourdes’ss reason for fleeing Cuban soil. Viewing Celia in this light might make it difficult for one to understand how she could possibly be a party to abandoning her own daughters. However, Celia does abandon her oldest daughter, Lourdes, shortly after she is born, but there are extenuating circumstances. Lourdes’s choice, as a child and as an adult, to have no intimate relationship with her mother hinges upon the following: In her final dialogue with her husband, before he took her to the asylum, Celia talked about how the baby had no shadow, how the earth in its hunger had consumed it. She held their child by one leg, handed her to Jorge, and said, “I will not remember her name.” (García 43)

Although Lourdes becomes well aware of the fact that her mother utters these words during the height of a mental breakdown, admittedly brought to fruition due to her own husband’s plan to break her spirit because of her lingering feelings for her ex-lover, Lourdes is still unable to separate the hurt she feels about her mother’s act of abandonment from the fact that her mother’s choice is involuntary. Celia is aware from the time that Lourdes is a small child that Lourdes rejects her because of this very act. On the other hand, the youngest daughter, Felicia, who is quite close to her mother well into late adolescence, does not feel abandoned by Celia until she is an adult herself. Felicia’s emotions are also colored by the fact that she never has the closeness with her father that Lourdes has with him and because she inherits something devastating from her mother: a proneness to mental illness. Payant effectively describes Felicia as “naturally flamboyant and temperamental like Celia, and feeling rejected by her father’s devotion to Lourdes” (168). Like Celia, she chooses to enter a disastrous marriage and spirals into mental and physical decline, which causes the neglect and suffering of her children (Payant 168). Also focusing on this connection between mother and daughter, Vasquez writes, “Both women are abandoned and wounded by their Hotel Inglaterra lovers, the aggression born for Celia of absence, and for Felicia of an alltoo-real and brutal, if occasional, presence” (25). Unlike Lourdes, Felicia

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feels abandoned by Celia mostly due to her mother’s unyielding dedication to El Líder: “How her mother worships him! She keeps a framed photograph of him by her bed, where her husband’s picture used to be” (García 110). In a frenzy of madness while confined in a boot camp for her unpatriotic behavior of being an unfit mother, Felicia (while trying to gauge the magical attraction that her mother has for El Líder) masturbates to the thought of the revolutionary leader performing oral sex on her. In her fantasy, she equates his sexual power with his political power. Her fantasy is taken to the extreme as she attempts to imagine the extent of his power, so strong that it could take her mother away from her. Believing that Celia abandons her for El Líder is so unbearable for Felicia that it destroys the relationship she has with her mother. Consequently, Felicia, like Celia, is deemed unfit to mother due to her mental disabilities. Felicia feels that she has abandoned her children, also. Due to her mental and physical illnesses, she must let her children go. Ivanito, Felicia’s son, is sent to boarding school after the “summer of coconuts” in which Felicia “nearly killed herself and her son” (García 106). It is thought best that Ivanito be integrated into the proper existence of boys his own age, instead of being his mother’s constant companion. In a scene reminiscent of Celia’s mother putting her on the train to Havana, Felicia reluctantly sends her son away to school: “‘Don’t you love me anymore?’ Ivanito called to her from the bus window with eyes that strafed her with grief” (107). It is a scene that is also reflective of Felicia’s inability to ever adjust to their separation. Ivanito is all the family that Felicia believes she really has left, since her twin daughters have long since abandoned their household in search for more stability within their Grandmother Celia’s home. In fact, Ivanito is eventually able to adjust to the separation. That is until he experiences the ultimate separation from Felicia. Ivanito recalls his feelings of loneliness after his mother’s death. It is his father’s gift of a radio which becomes his comfort when he is most alone (191). However, it is the radio which sparks (at least in Celia’s opinion) Ivanito’s own act of abandonment: defection to the United States via the aid of Lourdes (and, eventually, Pilar). The del Pino women’s roles as victims of oppressive forces are directly tied to mothering. Vasquez composes the following truthful indictments: Celia is a failed and even lethal mother. The child of a cold mother herself, she has passed this legacy to Lourdes, who, not surprisingly, passes it in turn to her Pilar. To her other daughter, Felicia, Celia bequeaths her poetry, her love of language, her sensuality, her ever-hovering madness; Felicia, whose name belies her perpetual unhappiness, leads a tormented life and meets an early demise. (25)

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Celia’s position as victim generates her into becoming a victimizer of her own children. Celia cannot aid her children in finding resolutions for their problems, in part, because her parenting, with the aid of her husband Jorge, initiates their problems. Another prevalent circumstance that negatively affects the lives and mothering of these women is the other abusive behavior of which they are also victims. Jorge is the indirect cause of Celia’s abuse. At the beginning of their marriage, Jorge leaves Celia with his mother and sister during his business travels. Of course, it is decades later that he admits to knowing the truly abusive nature of her living situation: “After we were married, I left her with my mother and my sister. I knew what it would do to her. A part of me wanted to punish her. For the Spaniard [whom she still loved]. I tried to kill her, Lourdes. I wanted to break her, may God forgive me.” (García 195)

In this admission to Lourdes, he claims his own part in Celia’s rejection of Lourdes and in the onset of Celia’s bouts with mental illness. Similar to Winnie’s first days of marriage, Celia’s include memories of gross mistreatment by her mother-in-law, a woman who acted, more than anything else, out of her extreme possessiveness of her son. García writes: “Celia wanted to tell Jorge how his mother and his sister, Ofelia, scorned her, how they ate together in the evenings without inviting her. They left her scraps to eat, worse than what they fed the dogs in the street” (40). Although this abuse is not physically violent, the blows of loneliness and scorn leave unhealed scars that affect her children, by way of her episodes of manic depression and her withdrawals from parenting responsibilities. Felicia, also like Winnie, is physically abused by her husband Hugo. Hugo feels trapped into marriage by Felicia’s first pregnancy, and he comes and goes throughout the years of their marriage. However, the abuse begins on their wedding night. García chronicles his visits: “Hugo Villaverde had returned on several occasions. Once, to bring silk scarves and apologies from China. Another time, to blind Felicia for a week with a blow to her eyes. Yet another, to sire Ivanito and leave his syphilis behind” (47). As a result of these abusive years and her express desire to protect her children from this type of home life, “she decided to murder her husband” while pregnant with Ivanito (81-82). In a failed murder attempt, Felicia’s sets Hugo on fire, which results in the burned and scarred flesh on his hands and face. In turn, her daughters hate her for disfiguring their father and for driving him away. Her daughters charge, convict, and punish her for this crime against their father, and she pays for it repeatedly with their indicting silence toward her.

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Lourdes’s abuse, though not committed by her husband, greatly affects her relationship with Pilar, similar to Celia and Lourdes’s relationship. Shortly before Lourdes leaves Cuba with her family and during the time the Puente estate is being seized by the revolutionary government, she is raped by a revolutionary soldier at her home (García 71). This event not only shapes her hatred for Cuba, but it underlies the verbally and physically abusive nature with which she deals with her daughter’s sexuality. Lourdes physically assaults Pilar when she discovers that her thirteen-year-old daughter enjoys the water in the shower pelting her hips and thighs too much (27), and years later, she verbally abuses her with phone calls at all hours when she believes that Pilar has a promiscuous sex life while away at college (168-69). Payant effectively characterizes Lourdes as “a survivor and hard worker, […] who despite her apparent adjustment to immigration, has not acknowledged the trauma of her rape and departure” from Cuba (168). Lourdes accepts the unbalanced societal restrictions on women’s sexuality and is imposing them on her own daughter (168). Lourdes’s equating of sexual expression outside of marriage with a woman’s being a “slut” is driven by the repulsive memories of her rape. The only person to whom Lourdes feels completely connected is her father, both when he is alive and after he is dead. Their relationship is yet another negative circumstance under which Celia attempts to rear her daughter. Luis believes, as I do, that the relationship forged between Jorge and Lourdes is “based on revenge, a desire to hurt and defy the mother for the pain they have experienced” (García 225). In agreement with his theory are the following examples: Lourdes’s motive is associated with her knowledge that her mother has abandoned her at birth, and Jorge’s motive to punish the mother of his children is based on Celia’s inability to love him completely, a love obscured by the memory of her first lover and then by her political loyalty to El Líder. In response, Celia clings to their only son Javier, who resents his father at an early age due to Jorge’s harsh and relentless demands on his son to be a responsible man before he even reaches puberty, and Lourdes and Jorge cling to each other as kindred spirits who are most connected by their failed relationships with Celia. The rift between Celia and Lourdes is intensified by Jorge’s desire to continue to punish Celia for her lack of love for him. He admits that he keeps Lourdes close to him, even taking her on trips in order to claim her and deny her mother any real relationship with Lourdes (Payant 167). The relationship between Jorge and Lourdes becomes one that takes on its own distinct importance, which affects everyone in the family, leaving Felicia and Javier jealous on some level. It is a bond that is not broken by

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Lourdes and her in-laws’ defection from Cuba to the United States, nor by Jorge’s death after he has joined them in New York many years later. Extensive is the continued communication manifested in the walking-andtalking sessions with her father Jorge that Lourdes continues to have months after his death. In fact, it is her dead father’s guidance which encourages Lourdes’s return to Cuba to settle all family affairs. Jorge returns to Lourdes in order to guide her on a personal journey of selfrealization about such things as her fragmented relationship with Celia, her torrential relationship with her own daughter Pilar, her drive and success as a business woman, her social and political involvement in the community, and her strained ties with her Cuban homeland. García writes, “‘Lourdes, I’m back,’ Jorge del Pino greets his daughter forty days after she buried him with his Panama hat, his cigars, and a bouquet of violets in a cemetery on the border of Brooklyn and Queens. His words are warm and close as a breath” (64). It is this return that Lourdes needs at this time in her life. She needs an “afterword” to the anxious waiting sessions she performed when her father returned home from business trips when she was a child in Cuba and the joint obsession for baseball that she and her father had when he came to live in New York after becoming ill (García 68). Her father is the perfect, the only, guide for Lourdes, for as she discovers later, he is the only one who knows her secrets, even “about the soldier” who rapes her before she leaves Cuba (196). Lourdes’s “parental affinity” is definitely for her father (Vasquez 22). The significance of Lourdes’s relationship with her own father is lost to her when she deals with the isolation that she feels in response to Pilar’s relationship with Rufino. Pilar obviously favors her father Rufino over her mother. Vasquez correctly assesses: “Situated halfway between the dreamers—Celia, Pilar’s father, her Aunt Felicia, her cousin Ivanito—and the proponents of order and practicality, Pilar has her parental link with her father Rufino” (24). It is obvious to Lourdes that Pilar prefers Rufino to her. As a result, Lourdes longs for her son who dies from complications of a premature birth: “Lourdes would have talked to her son the way Rufino talks to Pilar, for companionship. Lourdes suffers with this knowledge” (Garcia 129). Consequently, Lourdes and the other mothers have no illusions of connectivity to their daughters. However, the realization of the truth does not result in the discontinuation of their agonizing over their mother-daughter relationships or lack thereof. Communication issues intensely plague the mother-daughter relationships in the del Pino family. The already existing gulf of silence between Celia and Lourdes is fueled by the revolutionary politics concerning Cuba itself. Celia’s life devotion to the Cuban revolution and

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Lourdes’s devotion to anti-Cuban politics can only intensify what is already a strained mother-daughter relationship from Lourdes’ infancy. Pilar recalls: “[…] when my mother told her we were leaving the country. Abuéla Celia called her a traitor to the revolution” (García 26). These words become the fire which ignites Lourdes’s desire to assimilate completely into the capitalistic culture of the United States and to become one of the most volatile anti-Castro revolutionaries of the time. Lourdes is determined to make her roots in Brooklyn, and she is genuinely sure that she has done just that (Vasquez 22). Even after Lourdes’s return to Cuba following an eighteen-year absence, she still struggles to find a connection with her mother: “She is a complete stranger to me, Lourdes thinks. Papi was wrong. Some things can never change” (García 223). Similar to her sister, Felicia is separated from Celia by Cuban politics and by the condition that they most have in common, mental illness. However, Felicia’s pain is dealt with on a different front since she has once shared a very close relationship with Celia. García writes: “Felicia misses those peaceful nights with her mother, when the sea had metered their intertwined thoughts. Now they fight constantly, especially about El Líder. How her mother worships him!” (110). An example of Celia’s worship of him is evident in the plagued relationship between Celia and Lourdes, especially manifested in their political differences. Perhaps the greatest manifestation of her rift with her mother is Lourdes’s rejection of what her mother loves deeply—Cuba: “Lourdes considers herself lucky. Immigration has redefined her, and she is grateful. Unlike her husband, she welcomes her adopted language, its possibilities for reinvention” (García 73). This difference she shares with Celia is only strengthened by her father’s agreement with her on the issue. In fact, “it was he who encouraged Lourdes to join the auxiliary police so she’d be ready to fight the Communists when the time came” (132). Vasquez accurately estimates the effects of political difference on the del Pino family in the following evaluation: Affinities acknowledged and unseen, fissures alternately and even simultaneously spoken and silent, bind the novel’s characters together and split them apart. Cuba is both the sum and the part of the characters’ unions and sunderings, and sometimes the cause of their rendings. (26)

The effects of political difference on the family can only be categorized as high stakes for this family, and it is all centered around “the Cuba they yearn to recover or battle to forget” (Vasquez 26). Their physical and emotional proximities to Cuba define their relationships.

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Lourdes embraces, to the dismay of Pilar who seeks to preserve her Cuban-ness, total assimilation in her personal, professional, and communal lives: “She wants no part of Cuba, no part of its wretched carnival floats creaking with lies, no part of Cuba at all, which Lourdes claims never possessed her” (García 73). A thirteen-year-old Pilar comments on Lourdes’s political stance: “My mother says that Abuéla Celia’s had plenty of chances to leave Cuba but that she’s stubborn and got her head turned around by El Líder. Mom says ‘Communist’ the way some people say ‘cancer,’ low and fierce” (26). Of course, Pilar cannot understand her mother’s attitude toward their homeland, because she does not yet know Lourdes’s story. Pilar’s position is very different from her mother’s. According to Gustavo Peréz Firmat and Katherine B. Payant, “that generation of Cuban Americans [like Pilar] who were children at the time of the migration, but grew into adults in the United States, feel fully comfortable in neither culture but are able to circulate effectively in both. Unlike their parents, who will never be North Americans, they will never be Cubans” (Firmat 5, Payant 163). Author Cristina García, who came to the United States from Cuba with her exiled parents at the age of two, describes her own early life as bifurcated. Living her public life in a Brooklyn neighborhood populated by white ethnics, her Cuban background did not seem that relevant to her, but at home she felt Cuban because her mother, who recognized the connection between language and culture, insisted on Spanish. (Payant 163)

With age and maturity, her Cuban identity becomes very significant to her. García sketches her own experience with her intricate portrait of Pilar and Pilar’s eventual pull toward both Cuba and New York. Firmat and Payant’s definition of Lourdes’s position is of one who will never truly be North American. This would obviously then have to cancel out Lourdes’s belief that she has completely become North American. However, Lourdes’s feelings about being Cuban in the United States are ambivalent at best. One might consider her need to have her name on the door of her bakery in order to represent her Cuban-ness among other Spanish-speaking business owners who are non-Cuban as an example of that ambivalence (García 170). Vasquez, with whom I agree, comments on this ambivalent nature: Lourdes has no patience with abstraction, yet for her Cuba has become one. She feels no patience for the infuriating indifference she observes in her mother, in Felicia, and in her daughter Pilar; yet she feigns precisely that toward Cuba. Her vocal patriotism she reserves for the United States; of Cuba she speaks with derision, when she will speak of it at all. (22-23)

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To add to the ambivalence of Lourdes’s situation is the difficulty of living with the label placed on Cuban immigrants by their homeland. Weiss writes: “Castro’s vilification of the Cubans who fled the revolution adds to the hardship of their exile. First-generation Americans, they live cut off from a homeland their parents cannot forgive and their new country forbids them to visit” (67). This situation, in Lourdes’s case, begets “a ferocious anti-communist who sells apple pie to Americans” (67). Unlike her mother’s dilemma, there is nothing ambivalent about Pilar’s need to connect with her homeland. According to Vasquez, Pilar has a “yearning for connection, a longing for her roots and legacy. Pilar feels a dominant pull not toward the surrounding majority culture but to her ancestral home, Cuba” (24). Pilar desperately wants to reconnect with the Cuba to which her Abuéla Celia is so dedicated; the revolution is Celia’s life. Celia thinks, Her daughters cannot understand her commitment to El Líder. Lourdes sends her snapshots of pastries from her bakery in Brooklyn. Each glistening éclair is a grenade aimed at Celia’s political beliefs, each strawberry shortcake proof of Lourdes’s success in America, and a reminder of the ongoing shortages in Cuba. (García 117)

Celia and Lourdes’s relationship personifies the “complete change of mentality between Cubans living on the island and abroad,” to which García refers in her last section of the book, “Languages Lost” (Duany 178). What is lost between this mother and daughter is more than the idioms of Spanish (García 221). They have lost all communication as Cubans, as women, as family; and it is never fully reconstructed, no matter how much they evolve as individuals and do have some understanding of the other woman’s position. As seen with the first generation of the del Pino family, the second generation of parent-child communicative difficulties exists as well. Javier does not have the opportunity to know his daughter long at all, because Irinita is taken by her mother, who abandons Javier for another man. Felicia is virtually hated by her twin daughters, who find her intolerably insane: “This was just like her. Pretty words. Meaningless words that didn’t nourish us, that didn’t comfort us, that kept us prisoners in her alphabet world” (García 121). Here, Luz rationalizes the impenetrable fortress that she and her sister forge against their mother’s influence in their lives. They blame Felicia for their father’s disfigurement and his leaving. However, they are unaware of Hugo’s abusiveness toward their mother even before they were born. Ivanito, Felicia and Hugo’s only son, clings to his mother, too young to know her insane tactics for what they

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are. He loves his mother too much to abandon her, even when he realizes as a very young child that something is not quite right in their household. Comparable to the short relationship of Winnie and Danru, Ivanito’s relationship with his mother ends prematurely due to her death. As for Lourdes’s relationship with Pilar, it is a struggle like Felicia’s is with the twins, but it is a pure and mutual battle of wills. Felicia accepts early on that her daughters feel only condemnation for her, but Lourdes battles for some type of relationship with Pilar. Theirs is a relationship that somewhat tilts and teeters on the irrationality and violence of Lourdes’s responses to her daughter’s life choices. Pilar seems to be constantly and calmly aware of the fact that she has a “fucking crazy mother” (García 64). In fact, what drives Lourdes so crazy is the undeniable connection that Pilar has with Celia. (Luz and Milagro also cling to Celia, if only as a safe haven at times.) Lourdes admits that “Pilar is like her grandmother, disdainful of rules, of religion, of everything meaningful. Neither of them shows respect for anyone, least of all themselves. Pilar is irresponsible, self-centered, a bad seed. How could this have happened?” (168). In fact, Lourdes believes that Pilar has inherited something pathological from Celia which always makes Pilar go too far, taking everything she does to the farthest extent (172). Vasquez accurately notes that “Pilar’s relationship with her mother is deeply conflicted, her rebelliousness a manifestation of her longing, her resentment of [being cut off] from her Cuba. Both Pilar and her mother rage and rant in paired but solitary angers” (24). However, Pilar’s senses of artistry and independence are inherited from Lourdes, as well as from Celia. Pilar even realizes, as a young woman who returns to Cuba with her mother, that regardless of her truly spiritual connection to Celia, New York is “where [she] belong[s]—not instead of here, but more than here” (García 236). It is the place that her mother has given her that Pilar really calls home and with which she finds her greatest sense of belonging. Troubled by the disconnection from her first language and her Cuban roots, Pilar, like most teenagers and young adults, searches for her true identity and attempts to reclaim what she believes she has been denied by her removal from her native Cuban soil. Her search is complicated by her Cuban-American hyphenated existence (Payant 169-70). Much like García who creates this character, Pilar is concerned about knowing the truth about Cuba for herself. Her own convictions about her identity cause her to scorn her mother’s harsh anti-Castro, anti-Cuban political views (Payant 170). This, of course, only heightens the combustible relationship that already exists for the mother and daughter pair. As hopeless as Lourdes is about reaching and connecting with Pilar, she never gives up. Lourdes,

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like Tan’s mother characters, “find[s] ways—through language, before language, and beyond language—to pass on [her] hopes, creative spirit, culture, and history to [her] daughter” (Ho 38). Lourdes and the other del Pino mothers desire to convey the best parts of themselves to their daughters. The coping strategies on which they rely to ease their mothering hardships enable them to make some peace with their daughters, except for the relationship between Felicia and her twins. Lourdes hopes to impress her values upon her daughter by her strong example and work ethic. Her will to achieve success and make a great life for Pilar is evident in her accomplishments. Lourdes owns two bakeries and designs her own pastries. Although she finds no connection with her daughters, Felicia finds her creative outlet in the spiritual realm as a Santeria high priestess, an occupation through which she finds some spiritual peace before her death (Payant 168). These women are strong enough to achieve their goals despite the pasts that haunt them and affect their mothering. Celia (formerly an accomplished pianist) is a civilian judge in her community and works tirelessly for the revolution. Celia reflects on the strong independence she has found in her mature years: “It is her third year as a civilian judge. Celia is pleased. What she decides makes a difference in others’ lives, and she feels part of a great historical unfolding. What would have been expected of her twenty years ago? To sway endlessly on her wicker swing, old before her time? To baby-sit her grand-children and wait for death?” (García 111). Her commitment to the Cuban revolution has changed her life from dependence to independence. Lourdes is willing to deal with Celia’s commitment for the first time, now that she knows her mother’s story through Jorge’s spiritual return. Some of Lourdes’s wounds from their relationship are healed when she returns to Cuba. She performs some acts that she would have considered impossible before her return, such as bathing and dressing Celia, discovering her recent mastectomy, witnessing her mother’s continuous suffering over Felicia’s death, and visiting the family ranch, the site of her rape and her unborn son’s death (García 171). However, she is still never able to reach significant common ground with her mother. The wounds are too deep for total healing to take place. However, her return, enhanced by Pilar’s desire for roots and connection with the mythical powers of Celia’s Cuba, do bring some level of healing to the del Pino women, especially for Lourdes and Pilar (Payant 169). Consequently, both Lourdes and Felicia know exactly how their mother feels about their failed relationships. Unlike Pearl, who finds common ground with Winnie, the del Pino women never experience any

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lasting togetherness. Both Felicia and Celia are dead by the close of the work, never having reconciled with each other. However, Lourdes and Felicia know Celia’s pain because they experience the same distance with their own daughters. Fittingly, Felicia, for the last few moments of her life, is able to experience the magic of those special, solitary poetic nights that she and Celia used to share so many years before: “Celia lay […] beside her daughter and held her, rocking and rocking her in the blue gypsy dusk until she died” (García 190). Lourdes, at least, is able to find some understanding about her mother’s motives and actions through her father’s storytelling, and she can make peace enough to return to her mother’s house. Another coping strategy for these mothers has been the support that they receive from the various networks of which they are a part. It is not ironic that they find comfort in some of the same organizations that cause problems in their mother-daughter relationships. When one’s beliefs cause problems, then one most likely wants to be with fellow believers. Celia finds comfort and reassurance with her revolutionary sisters and brothers. Lourdes finds the ultimate support from her father, but she can also depend on the anti-communists with whom she vents her frustrations; and Felicia finds peace for her weary mind within the religion she first comes to know through her best friend, Herminia Delgado. It is also Herminia who can depend on Felicia. Felicia says, “I never doubted Felicia’s love. Or her loyalty” (García 184). Herminia tells Felicia’s tragic tale to Pilar.. Like Felicia’s story, each woman’s story can lead to an understanding of her mothering. Each mother presented in this analysis attempts to find some determining peace about who she is as a woman and how that has shaped her relationship with her children, especially with her adult daughter. In order to gain as full a recovery from their tragic pasts as they can possibly expect, they must return (physically or spiritually) to the sites where they have felt most victimized. These sites provide the semiotic structures for their tales of the past (Yuan 151). This is how their stories are revealed. This is why they can make the effort to answer their own questions about who they are. This is when their relationships with their daughters can begin to work toward common ground or at least a mutually resigned understanding of their relationships with each other and their emotions and acts as mothers and daughters. In the mindful words of Pico Iyer, “In the end, the point is forgiveness, and the way in which understanding the miseries of others makes it harder to be hard on them” (67). By truly understanding the struggles of mothering, the act of forgiveness can be perceived and performed by daughters, when they truly relate to their mothers as women.

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Notes 1

M. Marie Booth Foster refers to Chinese (-) American women in Amy Tan’s novels as “hyphenated” women, those living between cultures, in her essay “Voice, Mind, Self: Mother-Daughter Relationships in Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club and The Kitchen God’s Wife.” 2 Linda Chavez was Director of the U. S. Commission on Civil Rights, Republican nominee for the U. S. Senate from Maryland in 1986, and editor of the awardwinning magazine of the American Federation of Teachers, American Educator. 3 Winnie Louie and Helen Kwong both take on Americanized names when leaving China for the United States. Winnie is Jiang Weili and Helen is Hulan, formerly. However, the names Winnie and Helen are actually given by Jimmy Louie at their first meeting, long before either woman would need to use her new name.

Acknowledgement The author would like to thank Jaylen Fitzgerald McDaniels for documentation assistance.

Works Cited Chavez, Linda. Out of the Barrio: Toward a New Politics of Hispanic Assimilation. New York: BasicBooks/HarperCollins, 1991. Chodorow, Nancy Julia. “Family, Structure and Feminine Personality.” Woman, Culture, and Society. Ed. Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1974. 43-66. Davis, Rocio. “Back to the Future: Mothers, Language, and Homes in Christina García’s Dreaming in Cuban.” World Literature Today 74.1 (Winter 2000): 60-68. Duany, Jorge. “Neither Golden Exile nor Dirty Worm: Ethnic Identity in Recent Cuban-American Novels.” Cuban Studies 23 (1993): 167-86. Firmat, Gustavo Peréz. Life on the Hyphen: The Cuban-American Way. Austin: U of Texas P, 1994. Foster, M. Marie Booth. “Voice, Mind, Self: Mother-Daughter Relationships in Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club and The Kitchen God’s Wife.” Critical Insights: The Joy Luck Club. Ed. Robert C. Evans. Pasadena: Salem, 2010. 173-95. García, Christina. Dreaming in Cuban. New York: Ballantine, 1992. Ho, Wendy. In Her Mother’s House: The Politics of Asian American Mother-Daughter Writing. Walnut Creek, Calif.: Alta Mira, 1999. Iyer, Pico. “Fresh Voices above the Noisy Din: The Second Triumph of Amy Tan.” Time 137.22 (June 3, 1991): 66-67.

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Luis, William. Dance Between Two Cultures: Latino Caribbean Literature Written in the United States. Nashville: Vanderbilt UP, 1997. McAuliffe, Samantha L. “Autoethnography and García’s Dreaming in Cuban.” CLC Web: Comparative Literature and Culture 13.4 (2011): 1-9. Payant, Katherine B. “From Alienation to Reconciliation in the Novels of Cristina García.” MELUS: The Study for the Society of the MultiEthnic Literature of the United States 26.3 (Fall 2001): 163-82. Rich, Adrienne. Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Institution and Experience. New York: Norton, 1976. 1986. Rosaldo, Michelle Zimbalist and Louise Lamphere, eds. Woman, Culture, and Society. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1974. Tan, Amy. The Joy Luck Club. New York: Ballantine, 1989. —. The Kitchen God’s Wife. New York: Vintage, 1993. Vasquez, Mary S. “Cuba as Text and Context in Christina Garcia’s Dreaming in Cuban.” Bilingual Review 20.1 (Jan.-Apr. 1995): 22-27. Weiss, Amelia. “Fantasy Island.” Time 139.12 (March 23, 1992): 67. Wolf, Margery. “Chinese Women: Old Skills in a New Context.” Woman, Culture, and Society. Ed. Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1974. 157-72. Young, Pamela. “Mother with a Past.” Maclean’s 104.28 (July 15, 1991): 47. Yuan, Yuan. “The Semiotics of China Narratives in the Con/texts of Kingston and Tan.” Modern Critical Views: Amy Tan. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House, 2000. 151-64.

CONTRIBUTORS

Youngsuk Chae is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of North Carolina, Pembroke. She is the author of Politicizing Asian American Literature: Towards a Critical Multiculturalism (2008), and her work has appeared in Mfs: Modern Fiction Studies. She is currently working on a manuscript of Asian American literature and the environment. Lucinda Channon is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Texas at Arlington and is writing her dissertation on Latina detective fiction. She is an Assistant Professor of English at Tarrant Community College in Fort Worth, Texas, and teaches composition and British Literature at the Northwest Campus. Her interests include Latina/o literature, comparative literature, Victorian literature, and gender studies. Dr. Emily Clark is an Associate Professor of English at the University of the Incarnate Word in San Antonio, Texas. Her areas of interest include modernism, postcolonialism, and gender studies. Her major publications are “Tom Buchanan and Jay Gatsby as Inverted Doppelgangers: Propriety and the Crisis of Modernity in The Great Gatsby,” “Subjectivity and Community in Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness,” and “The Female Figure in J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan” in J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan In and Out of Time: A Children’s Classic at 100. Patsy J. Daniels (Ph.D. in Literature and Criticism, Indiana University of Pennsylvania, 1998) is Professor of English at Jackson State University. Her publications include articles in scholarly journals on the works of William Butler Yeats, James Joyce, Joseph Conrad, Emily Dickinson, and Nathaniel Hawthorne and on the globalization of the Humanities. Her first book, The Voice of the Oppressed in the Language of the Oppressor, which discusses the postcolonial nature of twelve authors and their works (William Butler Yeats, James Joyce, Joseph Conrad, Chinua Achebe, Ana Castillo, Sandra Cisneros, Amy Tan, Maxine Hong Kingston, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Louise Erdrich, and Leslie Marmon Silko), was published by Routledge in 2001 as a volume in the series Literary Criticism and Cultural Theory, with William E. Cain as general editor. Her second book, Understanding American Fiction as Postcolonial Literature,

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was published by Edwin Mellen in 2011. She has been a peer reviewer for College Literature; LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory; LATCH: The Literary Artifact in Theory, Culture, and History; The International Journal of the Humanities; and Pearson Education. Since 2008 she has served as editor of a scholarly journal based at Jackson State University, The Researcher: An Interdisciplinary Journal. Her work in progress, with co-author Candis Pizzetta, is tentatively titled Becoming American: A Postcolonial Primer, which is a reading of American fiction from a postcolonial perspective. Shawn P. Holliday is the Associate Dean of Graduate Studies and Associate Professor of English at Northwestern Oklahoma State University. In 2003, Boise State University published his short biography of Lawson Fusao Inada as part of its Western Writers Series. His other scholarship includes Thomas Wolfe and the Politics of Modernism (2001) and articles published in such periodicals as Appalachian Heritage, Resources for American Literary Study, and Notes on Contemporary Literature. Helen F. Maxson received her Ph.D. in Modern British Literature from Cornell University in 1987, taught for two years in a visiting capacity at the University of Michigan, and then came to Southwestern Oklahoma State University, where she is still teaching. Most recently she has coedited the book Reading Texts, Reading Lives: Essays in the Tradition of Humanistic Cultural Criticism in Honor of Daniel R. Schwarz (University of Delaware Press, 2012). Over the years, she has published essays on several authors including Wendell Berry, Walt McDonald, Wallace Stevens, Edgar Allan Poe, Oscar Wilde, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Virginia Woolf. Dr. Preselfannie Evet Whitfield McDaniels is currently Associate Professor of English at Jackson State University in Jackson, Mississippi. She received all degrees in English: B. A. from Jackson State University, M. A. from Mississippi College, Clinton, and Ph.D. from Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge. Her recent publications include articles on peer-assisted learning (International Journal of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education), service-learning in the composition classroom (Reflections: A Journal of Writing, Service-Learning, and Community Literacy ), capstone course pedagogy (The Researcher: An Interdisciplinary Journal), the thematic schemata of Mississippi poet C. Liegh McInnis (Journal of Ethnic American Literature), teaching Song of Solomon and Brown Girl, Brownstones in the modern classroom (Black Magnolias

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Literary Journal), and a book chapter on Oprah Winfrey Presents: The Wedding in Presenting Oprah Winfrey, Her Films, and African American Literature, edited by Tara T. Green. Dr. Everett G. Neasman earned a B. A. in English and British Literature from the University of South Florida. He received an M. A. in English with a specialty in African American Literary Criticism from the University of Northern Iowa. He then earned a Ph.D. in Shakespeare Studies and Elizabethan Drama, with minors in both Theater and Late Medieval Studies from Southern Illinois University in Carbondale. At present, Dr. Neasman serves Jackson State University as Assistant Professor of British Literature and is the founding professor and Faculty Advisor for JSU’s first Shakespeare Club. He has published scholarly papers, dramatic works, and one book, Take My Coxcomb: Shakespeare’s Clown-Servants from Late Feudal to Proto-Capitalist Economics in Early Modern England. Aaron N. Oforlea is an Assistant Professor in English at Washington State University, Pullman, where he teaches African American Literature, Folklore, and Rhetoric. He has published articles with College Language Association Journal, The Griot: The Journal of African American Studies, Obsidian III: Literature in the African Diaspora, and essays in edited collections. His manuscript Discursive Divide: James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and African American Male Subjectivity is under consideration at a major university press. He is currently working on an ethnography and documentary entitled “The Black Panther Party: Remembering the Rank and File.” Dr. Candis P. Pizzetta is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Modern Foreign Languages at Jackson State University. Dr. Pizzetta earned her Ph.D. in English from Baylor University, where her coursework and dissertation focused on cognitive approaches to narrative in colonial and nineteenth-century American literature. Dr. Pizzetta’s primary area of interest is the development of the feminist mindset in American literature, which involves exploration of the cultural contexts of literary texts in order to appreciate the development of a woman-centered voice in early American literature. The vehicle for this exploration is American cultural studies, with an emphasis on Darwinian and cognitive approaches to narrative, especially the narratives of early American prose fiction. Dr. Pizzetta’s current work includes a textbook companion for the Norton Anthology in American Literature and a study of American fiction

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from a postcolonial perspective, titled Becoming American: A Postcolonial Primer, with co-author Dr. Patsy J. Daniels. Some of Dr. Pizzetta’s recent presentations are “Collaborative Learning in the Online Literature Classroom” at the Lilly Conference on College and University Teaching in Washington, D. C. and an invited presentation on writing and research methods at the State of Mississippi’s Government Lawyers CLE. In addition to research and writing on early American literature, she teaches graduate research writing courses and has published on both writing pedagogy and writing practice. Dr. Tara Tuttle (Ph.D., University of Louisville, 2008) is Director of the Honors Program, Director of the Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Arts, and an Assistant Professor of English and Liberal Arts of English at Saint Catharine College in St. Catharine, Kentucky. Her work has appeared in Women Writers, The Researcher, and Faulkner and Morrison, a forthcoming text from the Center for Faulkner Studies and Southeast Missouri State University Press. Her manuscript Created Unequal? Genesis 1-3 and Transgressive Sexuality in 20th-Century American Literature is under consideration at a major university press. Claude Wilkinson is a critic, painter, and poet. He has published criticism on such diverse writers as Chinua Achebe, Italo Calvino, and John Cheever. His poetry collections include Reading the Earth, which won the Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award, and Joy in the Morning, which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. His poetry has also won the Whiting Writers’ Award, and he is the first poet to have been chosen as the John and Renée Grisham Visiting Southern Writer in Residence at the University of Mississippi. Cameron E. Williams is a Ph.D. candidate at Florida State University. Her research interests include twentieth-century and contemporary Southern literature and feminism and gender studies. Her work has appeared in the Southern Literary Review. She currently teaches English at the University of North Georgia.

INDEX Abbandonato, Linda ...........162, 165 Achebe, Chinua ..................241, 244 Adelman, Janet .......................41, 46 African ........................................ 45 African American ..xiv, 23, 44, 45, 46, 89, 90, 92, 93, 95, 96, 97, 98, 100, 106, 107, 108, 109, 114, 120, 121, 123, 124, 125, 128, 129, 130, 131, 133, 134, 136, 137, 139, 142, 143, 145, 146, 147, 157, 155, 194, 243 Alexander, Jeffrey C. ................ 100 Allan, Lewis ................................ 26 allegiance ................................... xiv Althouse, Ann ....................174, 184 Althusser, Louis ......... 74, 83, 84, 85 ambiguity… 8, 14, 16, 17, 33, 36, 38, 113 America… xi, xiii, xv, xvi, 23, 24, 25, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 37, 38, 39, 40, 43, 44, 45, 46, 67, 69, 71, 73, 76, 81, 83, 87, 94, 95, 96, 98, 108, 117, 121, 146, 165, 166, 185, 225, 234 American Bandstand .... 98, 100, 101 Ammons, Gene............................ 97 Anadolu-Okur, Nilgun108, 110, 120 Andreas, James.................33, 45, 46 Andrews Sisters ......................... 114 Andrews, Michael C.................... 45 Anglican ...................................... 15 Anglo-American...............32, 34, 43 anti-essentialist .................5, 6, 8, 15 anti-semitism ..........................12, 16 Aristotle..............................135, 144 Armstrong, Louis ...................92, 97 Asian ……. 66, 70, 72, 73, 74, 77, 79, 82, 84, 93

Asian American ….xiv, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 74, 76, 79, 81, 82, 83, 85, 86, 96, 238, 241 assimilation … xiv, 12, 65, 82, 100, 107, 113, 115, 118, 215, 224, 233 Atkinson, Rob.................... 178, 184 Awkward, Michael ............ 139, 144 Baecker, Diann L.167, 177, 179, 181, 184 Bailey, A. Peter ................. 117, 120 Baker ........................................... 90 Baker, Chet …. 88, 90, 91, 94, 96, 98, 99 Baker, Houston, Jr. ........... 129, 144 Bakhtin, Mikhail ................ 152, 165 Baloian, James ............................. 97 Baraka, Amiri … 117, 118, 119, 120, 121 Barbour, Floyd B. ..... 116, 121, 122 Barker, Deborah E. ............ 183, 184 Bell, Bernard W. ............... 139, 144 Bell, Derrick ...................... 141, 145 Benesch, Klaus .................. 119, 121 Berglund, Hans ...................... 37, 46 Berry, Wendell .......................... 242 Bible … 28, 155, 156, 160, 161, 164, 165 Bissoondath, Neil .................. 73, 85 Bjorklund, David F. .......... 203, 211 blacks … 5, 10, 12, 13, 19, 21, 43, 97, 105, 106, 107, 111, 112, 113, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 128, 129, 181 Boehmer, Elleke ...................... 4, 22 Bonacich, Edna............................ 85 Bonney, Jo ................................. 110 Boose, Lynda E. .......................... 45

246 Bordo, Susan ......................189, 197 both-sex ...................................... xiv Boulukos, George ........................ 44 Bowlby, John .....................200, 211 Bradley, Robert H. .............202, 211 Bramble, Cate.........................73, 85 Branch, William B. ...........114, 121 Brazilian .................................96, 99 Bristol, Michael D. ...... …43, 45, 46 Britain ........................................... 6 British … 4, 9, 13, 15, 18, 34, 44, 53, 60, 241, 242, 243 Broca, Paul .................................. 37 Bronner, Simon J. ...............135, 145 Brooks, Cleanth ......................24, 28 Brown, Eleanor ........................5, 22 Brubeck, Dave ….. 87, 88, 90, 93, 94, 96, 97, 98, 99, 101 Bullins, Ed................................. 117 Burack, Cynthia..................154, 165 Bush, Jenna ................................. 32 Butler, Judith ....... ... 35, 42, 46, 190 Byas, Don .................................... 97 Calvino, Italo ............................. 244 Cambodian .................................. 66 Camus, Albert ................................ 5 Caraway, Nancie ................194, 197 Caribbean … . 5, 9, 11, 12, 114, 239 Carroll, Joseph ........... 199, 211, 212 Castillo, Ana. …… vi, xiv, 197, 241 Caughie, Pamela...............59, 60, 61 Central America .......................... 80 Chan, Jeffery ............................... 96 Chandler, Nahum D. ..........113, 121 Chang, Juliana ......................87, 100 Chang, Yoonmee ....................68, 85 Chavez, Linda ....................215, 238 Cheever, John ............................ 244 Chesnutt, Charles ...................... 119 Chin, Frank...........................96, 100 Chinese ....................... 66, 75, 76, 82 Chodorow, Nancy190, 191, 197, 218, 238 Chomsky, Noam.......................... 37

Index Christian … 15, 17, 18, 19, 80, 152, 153, 155, 156, 159, 160, 162, 163, 164, 165 Christianity …. vi, xiv, 17, 18, 21, 80, 151, 155 Chuh, Kandice ....................... 67, 85 Cisneros, Sandra ........................ 241 civil rights.................... 35, 160, 238 Civil War ............................. 24, 169 Cixous, Hélène ….. 39, 45, 46, 164, 165 Clark, Dick ............................ 88, 98 class … xiv, 10, 11, 55, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 81, 82, 88, 90, 92, 99, 107, 168, 170, 173, 174, 175, 178, 182, 189, 190, 191, 192, 193, 195, 196 Clement, Catherine ................ 45, 46 Cobb, Michael ................... 155, 165 Cohen, Sarale E. ........................ 211 Cohen, Walter........................ 44, 46 Coleman, Ornette......................... 95 Collins, Patricia Hill .. 178, 179, 185 colonial ............................ 4, 17, 243 colonization ........................... 4, 127 Coltrane, John.................. 93, 95, 97 complexity .. 6, 13, 16, 17, 19, 40, 43, 54, 55, 123, 132, 137, 143, 200 Conrad, Joseph .................... 16, 241 construct …. 6, 9, 12, 44, 67, 124, 125, 133, 137, 139, 142, 170, 189, 200, 224 construction …. xiv, 8, 70, 108, 124, 125, 128, 132, 133, 137, 141, 142, 143, 192, 193 Cooper, Skyler ............................. 40 Crane, Hart .................................. 94 Craps, Stef … 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 13, 14, 17, 22 Creed, Barbara ................. 32, 36, 46 Creole ................................ 6, 11, 22 Crespino, Joseph ................ 183, 185 Crouch, Stanley … .... 118, 119, 121

Constructing the Literary Self cultural …xii, xiii, xiv, 5, 6, 8, 34, 35, 37, 65, 67, 68, 69, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 79, 80, 83, 84, 89, 93, 95, 96, 100, 105, 106, 113, 114, 115, 125, 131, 132, 142, 152, 156, 164, 169, 182, 190, 200, 203, 207, 208, 211, 213, 214, 215, 216, 218, 224, 243 Daileader, Celia R. .33, 43, 46, 168, 169, 185 Dandridge, Rita B. .............158, 165 Davis, Angela .....................194, 197 Davis, Clinton Turner.........118, 121 Davis, Miles .....................91, 93, 99 Davis, Ossie .......................106, 121 Davis, Rocio .......................217, 238 Dawkins, Richard ...................... 212 de Saussure, Ferdinand .............5, 22 Deconstruction …. xii, 23, 24, 49, 130 define...................................... xi, xv definition .. xi, 4, 5, 9, 14, 42, 50, 52, 107, 139, 143, 233 Deleuze, Giles … ....... 152, 153, 165 Derrida, Jacques .......................... xii Desmet, Christy ................33, 45, 46 Desmond, Paul ............................ 94 Diawara, Manthia .................96, 100 Dickinson, Emily....................... 241 disabled ................................ xii, xiv discourse …39, 42, 43, 51, 52, 55, 56, 59, 60, 81, 124, 125, 127, 130, 132, 152, 182, 190 Douglass, Frederick................... 155 Dresner, Samuel H. ............154, 166 Du Bois, W. E. Burghardt113, 116, 121 Duany, Jorge ......................234, 238 Dunbar, Paul Laurence .............. 119 Dupré, John ........................207, 212 Eckstein, Lars .....................136, 145 Edelstein, Tilden G.................34, 46 Edwards, George ................154, 166 Edwards, Natalie ............................ 5 Ellington, Duke ................89, 92, 98 Ellison, Ralph ............................ 129

247

Emerson, Ralph Waldo .............. 242 empathy ….6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 13, 14, 16, 19, 20, 21, 163 empire ............................................ 6 Engelbrecht, Penelope J..... 156, 166 England …5, 9, 10, 11, 12, 18, 21, 33, 37, 44, 45, 54, 56, 117, 243 English ……6, 10, 18, 22, 33, 34, 36, 43, 44, 45, 60, 61, 66, 90, 93, 98, 215, 225, 241, 242, 243, 244 Enright, Anne ..vi, xv, 199, 200, 201, 202, 203, 206, 208, 209, 211, 212 enslavement ..18, 21, 129, 131, 133, 138, 139, 141 Erdrich, Louise .......................... 241 essence ........... 7, 14, 57, 71, 87, 119 essential ..5, 6, 14, 15, 59, 60, 72, 81, 193, 200, 208 essentialism ..xiii, 3, 5, 10, 16, 17, 19, 21 essentialist …6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 190 ethical ...................3, 7, 9, 19, 21, 65 Ethiopia ....................................... 19 existential .......................... 5, 53, 55 Eyerman, Ron ...................... 92, 100 faith ..4, 13, 17, 18, 19, 21, 25, 153, 158, 159, 160, 161, 164 Fallgatter, Tarla ..................... 25, 28 Fanon, Frantz …. ....... 127, 128, 145 Farwell, Marilyn R. ... 156, 163, 166 Favor, J. Martin ................. 106, 121 Feather, Leonard ....... …94, 99, 100 Feder, Ellen ..xii, 189, 190, 191, 197 female sexuality .......................... xiv females ..xiii, 5, 23, 36, 89, 140, 143 feminism .................. 5, 23, 139, 244 feminist …..xi, 5, 52, 59, 163, 179, 189, 190, 194, 220, 243 Filipino .... ….. 65, 66, 69, 79, 80, 82 Finney, Brian ..................... 131, 145 Firmat Gustavo Peréz ........ 233, 238

248 Fish, Stanley ...........................77, 85 Fishburne, Lawrence ................... 35 Fitzgerald, Ella ............................ 96 Flynt, Wayne ......................167, 185 Foster, M. Marie Booth ......224, 238 Foucault, Michel .. ...34, 53, 61, 189 Fraser, Nancy .........................67, 85 Freud, Sigmund ......................36, 40 Froula, Christine.....................60, 61 Fulwieler, Howard W. 131, 144, 145 Gabler, Milt ................................. 98 García, Christina .................. vi, 238 Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. . 45, 114, 121 Geary, David ......................201, 212 gender ….ix, xi, xii, xiii, 3, 5, 8, 9, 11, 14, 15, 19, 31, 32, 33, 37, 43, 44, 50, 51, 52, 53, 57, 58, 59, 60, 66, 99, 107, 108, 109, 123, 132, 141, 154, 161, 168, 171, 176, 181, 189, 190, 191, 195, 207, 218, 224, 241, 244 Germany .............................6, 16, 19 Getz, Stan ................... 88, 93, 96, 99 Gilbert, Sandra ............................ 39 Gilberto, Astrud........................... 99 Giles, John................................... 44 Gill, Glenda E. ......................35, 46 Gilyard, Keith.....................133, 145 Gioia, Ted ….. ... 89, 96, 97, 99, 101 Giuffre, Jimmy ............................ 94 Goddu, Teresa ....................182, 185 Goldstein, Jerome ...................37, 46 Gordon, Avery .......................83, 85 Gordone, Charles....................... 119 Gray, Richard .....................170, 185 Gray, Wardell .............................. 97 Great Depression .......................... xi Greenblatt, Stephen ................44, 46 Guaraldi, Vince ........................... 93 Guattari, Felix ............ 152, 153, 165 Gurr, Andrew .............................. 46 Haley, Bill ................................... 98 Hall, Kim..................................... 44 Hall, Ronald ................................ 44 Halloran, Vivian Nun .. ........6, 9, 22 Hansing, Maggie ..................98, 101

Index Haraway, Donna ........................ 195 Harmon, William ........................ xvi Harper, Michael S........................ 93 Harper, Phillip Brian ......... 116, 121 Harris, Trudier ................... 144, 145 Hawthorne, Nathaniel ........ 182, 241 Hayden, Robert............................ 93 Hekman, Susan J. .............. 191, 197 Henderson, Mae G. .................... 101 Hendricks, Margo ........................ 45 Hentoff, Nat ............................... 101 heterogeneity …..xiv, 5, 7, 8, 9, 14, 17, 31, 68, 69, 74, 81 heterogeneous …..4, 9, 21, 66, 67, 74, 79 hierarchy .......................... 6, 67, 161 Hillman, Melissa ... …32, 36, 40, 46 Himes, Chester .......................... 106 Ho, Wendy ................................ 238 Hodes, Martha ....... …174, 184, 185 Holbein, Woodrow ...................... 44 Holiday, Billie ..26, 91, 92, 97, 99, 195 Holliday, Shawn ….v, xiv, 87, 90, 101, 242 Holman, Hugh ...................... xii, xvi Holocaust................................... 6, 7 homogeneous …. ....... 6, 68, 70, 113 homogenization .......................... xiv homogenous .................................. 4 homosexuality ............................ xiv Horn, Bob .................................... 98 Howard, Jean E...................... 44, 46 Howe, Daniel Walker ...... xi, xv, xvi Hsu, Hsuan ...................... 65, 84, 85 Huggan, Graham ............. 72, 84, 85 Hutchins, Loraine .............. 160, 166 hyphen ................................... xii, xv hyphenated …...4, 95, 213, 224, 235, 238 hyphenation ................................. xii hypocrisy ....................... 17, 74, 157 identity ..xi, xiii, xiv, xv, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 12, 15, 16, 20, 32, 33, 35, 38, 39, 40, 42, 43, 49, 51, 54, 55, 56, 58, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 74,

Constructing the Literary Self 76, 78, 82, 87, 90, 91, 93, 95, 96, 97, 99, 107, 108, 110, 111, 113, 116, 132, 139, 161, 169, 189, 190, 191, 192, 193,Ṫ195, 196, 213, 218, 233, 235 personal ................................ 6, 7 racial ...........................4, 68, 189 Ikard, David .......................139, 145 imperialism............................4, 5, 6, 15, 18 Inada, Lawson Fusaov, xiv, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 242 Indian ......................... 10, 66, 78, 82 individual ..xii, xiii, xiv, 6, 12, 19, 21, 33, 68, 73, 74, 88, 105, 118, 127, 135, 153, 190, 194, 199, 201, 202, 203, 206, 207, 210 inherent ….... 4, 8, 84, 130, 131, 154 injustice …xii, xiii, 11, 17, 21, 68, 153, 164, 167, 173, 182 Irish ........................ 12, 54, 200, 201 Iyer, Pico … ....... 220, 225, 237, 238 Japanese ..66, 67, 72, 82, 83, 87, 88, 89, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 100, 220 Jesus ..vi, xiv, 25, 26, 151, 156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 163, 164, 166 Jews ...................... 5, 19, 43, 92, 154 Jim Crow .............................. xii, xiii Jimison, Marcus .................174, 185 Johnson, Charles ................133, 145 Johnson, Thomas C. ...........114, 121 Jones, James Earl ........................ 35 Jones, Philly Joe .......................... 90 Jordan, Louis ............................... 98 Joyce, James .............................. 241 Kaahumanu, Lani ...................... 166 Katz, Joel................................26, 28 Kaul, Mythili ............................... 45 Kenton, Stan ................................ 88 Kerr, Walter .............................. 110 Kherdian, David .......................... 97 King, Lovalarie ......................... 145 Kingston, Maxine Hong ............ 241

249

Kitts, Lenore ….. ....... 125, 136, 145 Knight, Etheridge ..... 105, 116, 122 Knotts, Jewell ............................ 185 Kolb, Brian ............................ 37, 46 Kolin, Phillip C...................... 44, 47 Konitz, Lee .................................. 98 Koppelman,Andrew…181,185 Korean ........................... 66, 82, 193 Koshy, Susan ................... 67, 82, 85 Kristeva, Julia ..5, 22, 32, 36, 38, 39, 41, 42, 44, 47 Kunz, Don ......................... 113, 122 label ....................17, 19, 37, 67, 234 Lacan, Jacques ............................. xii Lamphere, Louise ...................... 239 language ..xii, 3, 17, 18, 26, 31, 37, 41, 42, 53, 59, 96, 111, 125, 129, 130, 133, 134, 135, 137, 138, 152, 155, 157, 158, 164, 170, 182, 184, 210, 215, 216, 228, 232, 233, 235 Latino .......................... 89, 100, 239 Lechte, John .......................... 39, 47 Lee, Harper ........................ 178, 185 legacy ......................................... xiv lesbian ......................................... xii Lewis, R. W. B. ..................... 24, 28 Li, David Leiwei.................... 66, 85 Lindström, Per ............................. 46 Lowe, Lisa ............................. 66, 85 Lower, Charles ................ 33, 34, 47 loyalty … ........ 4, 179, 227, 230, 237 Lubet, Steven ….174, 176, 183, 185 Lubiano, Wahneema .............. 83, 85 Luis, William ........ ….216, 230, 239 MacDonald, Joyce Green ............ 43 MacKay, Marina .......................... 61 Mackie, Anthony ....................... 110 Mahaffy, Kimberly ............ 164, 166 Mainimo, Wirba Ibrahim161, 163, 166 males ….xiv, 5, 98, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 130, 131, 133, 137, 139, 141, 143 Manne, Shelly.............................. 99 Margaroni, Maria................... 39, 47

250 marginalization...................5, 67, 74 Margolick, David ...................26, 28 Marxism ...................................... xii Maslin, Janet ..........................65, 85 Maus, Katharine Eisaman ......44, 46 Maxwell, William J. ...........107, 122 Mayberry, Susan ................125, 145 McAuliffe, Samantha L. ......213, 239 McDaniel, James ....................... 110 McDonald, Walt ........................ 242 Mexican American ..... 191, 195, 196 Mfuni, Tanangachi .............110, 122 Milhaud, Darius........................... 87 Mingus, Charles …. ....... 93, 96, 100 minorities ............................. xii, xiv Mitchell-Kernan, Claudia ...134, 146 Mobley, Hank.............................. 97 Mohler, Albert ....................154, 166 Monk, Thelonius ... …93, 95, 97, 98 Morrison, Toni .................... xiv, 28, 123, 124, 125, 126, 128, 129, 133, 136, 140, 143, 146, 241 Motley, Mary Penick .. 108, 111, 122 Mulligan, Gerry ….. ... 88, 96, 98, 99 multicultural ......... .4, 20, 74, 76, 83 multiculturalism ….xii, xiv, 5, 65, 67, 68, 69, 73, 77, 82, 84 multiple ....................................... xii narrative ….3, 13, 35, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 57, 59, 60, 65, 68, 99, 126, 143, 152, 156, 167, 170, 172, 173, 175, 176, 177, 199, 210, 243 Nathan, Amy Sue .....................5, 22 Naylor, Gloria ............................. 45 Neal, Larry ......... 115, 117, 120, 122 Neal, Mark Anthony...........131, 146 negro .................. 10, 12, 15, 33, 119 Neruda, Pablo .............................. 93 Nettle, Daniel …. ....... 201, 208, 212 New Critics ................................. 23 New Woman ......................... xii, xiii Newfield, Christopher ............83, 85 Nguyen, Viet Thanh ...............68, 86 Obama, Barack ............................ 35 Obama,Michelle ………35

Index object ............................... xi, xii, xiv Odo, Franklin ........................ 83, 86 Ogude, S. E.................................. 45 Olin-Hitt, Michael .. .. 54, 57, 58, 61 Ong, Han ..65, 69, 70, 73, 75, 76, 77, 79, 81, 82, 86 oppression …xi, xii, xiii, 3, 5, 20, 23, 31, 37, 106, 113, 123, 124, 126, 127, 129, 131, 137, 139, 152, 155, 160, 169 oppressor ...................................... xi Oriental …. .....43, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97 Oring, Elliot ....................... 135, 146 other ..v, xi, xii, xiii, xiv, 7, 31, 35, 37, 38, 54, 60, 67, 68, 69, 72, 74, 79, 80, 84, 129, 143, 156, 179 Palestine ...................................... 19 Palumbo-DeSimone, Christine . 169, 185 Palumbo-Liu, David . ...... 67, 83, 86 Parker, Charlie ......... .95, 97, 98, 99 Parker, Hershel ............................ 28 Parker, Kevin C. H. ................... 211 Parker, Oliver .............................. 35 Parker, Patricia ............................ 45 Patterson, Orlando129, 130, 131, 141, 146 Pavliü, Edward M. ............ 119, 120 Payant, Katherine B.216, 227, 230, 235, 239 Pellegrini, Anthony ........... 203, 211 persecution .............................. 7, 16 Peterson, Bob .............................. 97 Phillips, Caryl ….v, xiii, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 19, 20, 21, 22 Poe ............................................... 24 Poe, Edgar Allan....... …23, 28, 242 Porter, Katherine Annev, xiii, 23, 24, 26, 28 postcolonial .. xii, xvi, 4, 8, 241, 244 post-colonial ........ 4, 5, 8, 17, 20, 21 postmodern ...6, 35, 36, 39, 49, 52, 58, 60, 156 Powell, Betty Jane . ........... 138, 146 Powell, Bud ................................. 97

Constructing the Literary Self Powell, Colin ............................... 32 power …xi, xiii, 3, 4, 5, 6, 9, 12, 14, 15, 16, 17, 19, 20, 21, 34, 43, 52, 53, 54, 66, 68, 69, 70, 71, 73, 74, 75, 77, 79, 81, 82, 129, 130, 135, 140, 144, 153, 155, 156, 159, 162, 165, 169, 173, 174, 177, 180, 189, 194, 197, 220, 228 prejudice ….xiii, 3, 5, 16, 18, 20, 95, 108 Price, Janet .................................. 47 Priestley, Brian ...................100, 101 Pringle, Mary Beth ......... .51, 60, 61 purity .. .... xi, 6, 17, 20, 71, 170, 174 Rabalais, Kevin ......................17, 22 race ..vi, ix, xii, xiii, 3, 4, 8, 9, 10, 11, 13, 14, 15, 19, 25, 31, 32, 33, 34, 36, 38, 39, 40, 43, 44, 45, 66, 69, 81, 94, 99, 108, 112, 113, 118, 123, 130, 131, 161, 167, 168, 169, 182, 189, 190, 191, 193, 195, 224 racial ..xi, 4, 6, 10, 11, 12, 23, 24, 28, 31, 32, 33, 35, 37, 38, 45, 66, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 74, 77, 79, 80, 81, 83, 87, 90, 94, 95, 96, 97, 105, 107, 108, 109, 110, 113, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 124, 127, 130, 133, 167, 168, 169, 173, 179, 181, 182, 185, 189 racism ..12, 13, 28, 31, 32, 34, 35, 38, 43, 65, 74, 94, 106, 109, 110, 111, 123, 137, 139, 141, 151 Ratliff, Ben …. ......... 94, 96, 98, 101 reality ..7, 26, 32, 34, 41, 52, 66, 83, 117, 120, 128, 152, 210 religion ..xiv, 18, 19, 43, 151, 152, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159, 161, 164, 217 renewal ....................................... xiii repression ....................... 23, 38, 113 Rexroth, Kenneth ........................ 93 rhetoric ..3, 8, 14, 16, 52, 58, 77, 125, 133, 151, 153, 157, 158, 168, 178

251

Rhys, Jean................................ 6, 22 Rich, Adrienne................... 215, 239 Richardson, Riché ..... 108, 109, 122 Ricoeur, Paul ….151, 152, 164, 166 Roberts, Diane …168, 170, 177, 179, 185 Robeson, Paul .............................. 34 Rogers, Shorty ....................... 88, 94 Rollins, Sonny ............................. 98 Ronk, Martha ............................... 97 Root, Deborah ................. 75, 84, 86 Rosaldo, Michelle Zimbalist..... 238, 239 Roughgarden, Joan ............ 208, 212 Rubin, Gayle S. ................. 160, 166 Russell, Kathy ............................. 44 Sacco-Vanzetti............................. 28 Sackville-West, Vita . ............ 60, 61 Said, Edward ... ….xi, xvi, 4, 20, 22 Salisbury, Ralph ........................ 101 Sansei .................................... 87, 92 Santoro, Gene ...................... 96, 101 Sartre, Jean-Paul............................. 5 Savran, David .................... 113, 122 Schockley, Ann Allen................. xiv Schopp, Andrew ................ 141, 146 Segal, Lynn............................ 43, 47 Selbo, Tone............................ 60, 61 self, the ............................ xi, xiii, xv sexism … ........ 10, 31, 139, 151, 160 Shakespeare, Williamv, xiii, 31, 32, 33, 36, 37, 40, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 95, 182, 185, 243 Sherman, David ..................... 60, 61 Shildrick, Margaret ...................... 47 Shockley, Ann Allen151, 153, 155, 158, 159, 163, 164, 166 silence ..xiv, 7, 66, 68, 80, 124, 125, 137, 138, 139, 202, 225, 229, 231 Silko, Leslie Marmon ................ 241 Silver, Alan........................ 157, 166 Sinclair, Rebecca ................... 49, 61 Sitter, Deborah Ayer.......... 144, 146 slave ….9, 13, 14, 17, 18, 21, 88, 124, 126, 127, 128, 129, 131,

252 132, 134, 135, 137, 139, 140, 141, 143, 144, 194 slavery …9, 14, 19, 33, 40, 44, 95, 96, 124, 126, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 137, 144, 169, 194 Smith, Thomas S. ...............205, 212 Smitherman, Geneva ..........125, 146 social status ...19, 178, 181, 184, 209 society ..xi, xiii, xv, 10, 11, 23, 24, 25, 28, 31, 33, 34, 36, 38, 40, 41, 43, 51, 52, 69, 72, 73, 74, 76, 79, 81, 82, 83, 92, 100, 105, 106, 111, 114, 118, 129, 132, 144, 151, 160, 171, 178, 181, 182, 203, 205, 215, 218, 222, 223, 224 Soyinka, Wole ........................... 114 SparkNotes ................. 174, 183, 185 spiritual ..19, 24, 65, 134, 151, 156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 235, 236 Stafford, William......................... 97 Stähler, Alex.........................6, 8, 22 Stanton, Elizabeth Cady ............ 155 Stepto, Robert............................ 123 stereotype ..7, 15, 16, 17, 27, 32, 69, 70, 72, 76, 77, 79, 80, 83, 88, 96, 105, 168, 174, 180, 182 Stevens, Gregory T.............205, 212 Stevens, Wallace ....................... 242 Storhoff, Gary P. ....... 111, 113, 122 strategy ........................................ xv stratification ............................... xiv subject ..xi, xii, xiv, 5, 6, 7, 9, 26, 28, 32, 36, 38, 39, 41, 42, 44, 60, 70, 92, 105, 107, 113, 119, 127, 154, 171, 182, 199, 213, 215 subjectivity ..xiv, 5, 6, 10, 65, 67, 108, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 132, 133, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 156 subordination ..........................4, 179 survival ........................................ xv

Index Swaab, Dick F. ...................... 37, 47 sympathy . ............7, 11, 13, 14, 124 Tachiki, Amy ......................... 83, 86 Takaki, Ronald ...................... 66, 86 Tan, Amy ….83, 86, 215, 217, 219, 220, 222, 223, 224, 241 Taylor, Helen Clare ..................... 61 Taylor, Mark.......................... 49, 61 Thai ............................................. 66 Thomas, Calvin ........................... 45 Thomson, Rosemarie Garland .. 196, 197 Tirado, Leonard ................. 163, 166 Tjader, Cal ................................... 99 transformation ............................ xiii trauma ...................7, 92, 93, 95, 230 Trivers, Robert L. .............. 201, 212 Tsutakawa, Mayumi .................... 97 Turner, Big Joe ............................ 98 Twain, Mark .............................. 182 Ty, Eleanor .................................. 86 unhyphenated ................................ 4 Vangelisti, Paul ........................... 97 Venetian .. 12, 33, 34, 36, 38, 40, 41 Venice ..16, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 37, 38 victimization .................... 3, 6, 9, 19 victimize .................................. 9, 12 Vietnamese .................................. 66 Voland, Eckart ........................... 212 Walcott, Derek........................... 114 Waldron, Mal ...................... 97, 100 Walker, Alice .vi, xiv, 109, 151, 153, 155, 161, 164, 166, 169, 241 Walsh, Kelly S....................... 58, 61 Warren, Robert Penn ............. 24, 28 Warwickshire .............................. 18 Washington, Dinah ...................... 90 Wernicke, Karl ............................ 37 West Indian ....................... 6, 10, 11 West Indies .................................... 9 Whishaw, Ian Q. .......................... 46 whites ..10, 79, 80, 87, 96, 100, 105, 107, 111, 117, 118, 119, 120, 128, 129, 194

Constructing the Literary Self Wiegman, Robyn....................... 146 Wilde, Oscar.............................. 242 Wilson, August.......................... 120 Wilson, David Sloan ..........208, 212 Wilson, Midge ............................. 44 Wisker, Gina ..........................60, 61 Wolfe, Joanna.....................137, 146 Wolfe, Thomas .......................... 242 Wong, Buck ................................ 83 Wong, Eddie...........................83, 86 Wong, Sau-ling Cynthia .........83, 86 Wong, Scott................................. 85

253

Wong, Shawn .............................. 96 Woolf, Virginia …..v, xiii, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 241, 242 Wright, Richard ........................... 93 Wyatt, Jean ........................ 143, 146 X, Malcolm.......................... 95, 117 Ya Salaam, Kalamu ........... 131, 147 Yeats, William Butler ................ 241 Young, Lester ... ........ 92, 95, 97, 99 Zimmermann, Bonnie......... 157, 166