Rewriting

Polytropic Identities

in the Postmodern African American Novel

Notes

Chapter VIII

1.     Another similarity between the three novels consists in their lack of critical attention. Thrown to the literary dustbin as “sentimental fiction,” Harper and especially Fauset are frequently overlooked. It seems that their fate is shared by Shange’s novel, a text about which very few academic papers have been written.

2.     In “Allegories of Black Female Desire,” Claudia Tate makes the distinction between the black male and female sentimental texts. In the black male romance, the marriage plot has the role to support “the dominant racial discourse of protesting social injustice;” in black female romance, the marriage plot is central, as “these narratives not only culminate in marriage; they also idealize the formation of the family unit” (1991, 105-6).

3.     Even after the end of slavery, its long-lasting effects made men see black women as sexual objects or “mules of the world” good only for hard work (Hurston 1990, 14). In spite of this social drama, literature provided almost no plot about aggressed black women. In 1940, when Richard Wright wrote Native Son, the American scene was swept by hysteria over the vulnerable image of the white woman, whose body was thought to be a desirable target for black men. There was no fuss about molesting black women. Alarmed by this literary absence, Wright’s goal was to draw attention to the black female abused body, and he introduced in Native Son the subplot of Bessie’s rape. From a new perspective, thirty years later, Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Gayl Jones explored the effects of physical and mental violence upon black women, especially rape and incest. Their fictional universe is haunted by poverty, violence, and loss, disclosing how the strongest social cell—the family—has been affected and could not normally function. The plot focused on the rape of a black female that was underdetermined in Wright’s time is now overstressed. Unlike in slavery, when the violator was the white man, now the criminal becomes the black man. All these contemporary narratives rewrite again and again the ancient myth of Philomela described by Ovid as physically and mentally maimed. In some instances, Philomela speaks. This is the case of Walker’s Celie or of Angelou’s Maya, heroines whose existential growth can fathom the depth of her inner resources. In other instances, Philomela remains silent. This happens to Morrison’s Pecola who ends up being caught in the symbolic cage of a racist mechanism that triggers her mental disease.

4.     Claudia Tate draws attention to the way in which African American women’s sentimental narratives “construct, deconstruct, and reconstruct Victorian gender conventions in order to designate black female subjectivity as a most potent force in the advancement of the race.” Tate reads black women’s nineteenth century sentimental narratives as “feminized mediations of what is conventionally understood as male power,” so that they can be understood as “discourses of liberation” (1991, 107).

5.     Jane Campbell shows that the romance represents “a mode that has qualities appropriate for depicting the black experience and for enhancing the mythmaking process” (1986, xi). She also stresses the fact that historical romance has been a predominantly male genre, since black women’s existence was circumscribed to the homey, domestic sphere. Quoting Tate, Campbell points out that the existential movement of female characters is often restricted by family responsibilities so that they have to “conduct [their] quest within close boundaries, often within a room” (Tate 1983, 185, in Campbell 1986, xi).

6.     Richard Slotkin points to “the myth of regeneration through violence” and the myth of “the heroic quest” as essential components underlying American cultural mythology (2000, 5, 10).

7.     In this sense, the epigraph of the novel sets its tone, by juxtaposing affective and escapist images: “& this is for the man who chases butterflies/ & alcoholics in latin night club dreams/ & kisses me with zoom lenses on the beaches/ of the Hollywood Freeway/ all the hibiscus bloom as you devour iguanas/ & and this is for the men who loved me &/ the one I love/ & and the child who is a mirror (Jessica Hagedorn, “Something about You”).

8.     The novel echoes Thoreau’s famous comment: “Men labor under a mistake… Talk of a divinity in man! Look at the teamster on the highway, wending to market by day or nigh; does any divinity stir within him?… The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation” (1992, 3-4).

9.     The porch as a spiritually elating space of liberation is placed in opposition with the basement—a memento of the time of slavery: “The stairs to the basement were magnificently narrow, like a dungeon the basement was. In the summer it was ever so cool and in the winter it was warm. Betsey didn’t know why more of the family didn’t covet the basement. Maybe it was on account of the dark and the smell. It smelled funny down there. Jane said that white folks usedta make the colored help sleep down there” (15).

10. A striking comparison can be established between this episode and Sarah Orne Jewett’s story, “The White Heron,” as in both cases the huge, fabulous tree represents the axis mundi, the center from where the female protagonist can start her initiation. Jewett’s Sylvia (aged nine) resembles Shange’s Betsey (aged thirteen) not only because both girls are inexperienced characters young in years, but also because both manifest contemplative skills. In spite of the temporal and spatial differences, Sylvia’s and Betsey’s propensity to explore the world from above, choosing nature’s peaceful shelter over the noisy, industrial American cityscape, initiates a significant quest. Again, for both heroines, the quest takes place on a vertical, not horizontal axis, the pine tree (for Sylvia) or the oak tree (for Betsey) giving them access to the spiritual.

11. Pondering this “halo of romance,” Michele Birnbaum observes that “Harper's novel, until most recently, has been neglected in part because her characters seemed too brilliantly lit, too idealized in the name of racial service (1999, 14).

12. Gabrielle Foreman discusses the discrepancy between two images of Iola, a static one circumscribed by the nineteenth century essentialized gender conventions, and a mobile one free from stereotypes: “Harper chooses the sentimental form because as a genre its audience appeal had already been proved. Yet she guides her reader, comfortable with the trappings of a familiar genre, through a text in which she transforms her received form and undermines its basic assumptions. In many scenes Harper empowers otherwise weak, defenseless women with the ability to entrance men, to do no less than to perform miraculous transformations through their pure and equalizing inherent qualities, an expected characteristic in the sentimental genre. What is significant is that she incorporates theories which rely heavily on inherent gender qualities while she decries theories based on ‘inherent’ racial qualities. Her explicit undermining of racist biological theories subtly calls into question the implicit construction of essentialized gender differences her text ostensibly offers. Harper's delineation of woman as the moral/spiritual force to be protected by man is by no means unequivocal—her women are speakers and actors… Throughout the novel, Iola is a strong, independent character, hardly in need of protection. Harper creates a notable tension: She describes womanhood as weak, innocent, and defenseless but will have her heroine employ the opposite characteristics to defend her ‘weak and defenseless’ status” (1990, 651).

13. The rime representing the epigraph of the novel is significant in this sense: “To market, to Market/ To buy a Plum Bun;/ Home again, Home again,/ Market is done.” As McDowell notices, the motto suggests that “the unfulfilled expectations of the speaker in the nursery rhyme stands in ironic contrast to the foiled expectations of Angela Murray” (1990, xvi). The motto may also suggest the idea of “marketalbe” love, as it alludes to men as buyers and women as “plum buns,” alluding to women’s racial and sexual exploitation.

14. Like Just as Mr. Pontellier in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, Roger offers Angela gifts, but no real understanding. Even if Angela gives in to Roger, “something quite outside herself, something watchful, proud, remote from the passion and rapture which flamed within her, kept her free and independent. She would not accept money. She would not move to the apartment on Seventy-Seven Street; she still refused gifts so ornate that they were practically bribes” (1990, 204).

15. Hence, the tension between what Victor Turner calls “communitas,” (the relationship through which Betsey can be placed on an equal position with the other individuals), and “structure” (the system that obliges Betsey to obey the moral imperatives of her society (1974, 47)).

16. Selwyn Cudjoe remarks the importance of names for African Americans: “The inviolability of the Afro-American’s personhood is so closely guarded that any assault or presumed assault upon his/her person is violently resisted” (1990, 277-78).

17. Geta LeSeur affirms that Ntozake Shange’s women “must learn to relate to and separate themselves from the men in their lives” (1992, 167).

18. One of the traps into which the Harlem intellectuals fell was imitating the elitist model of the white people. These African Americans earned the epithet “dicty niggers,” a term characterizing those belonging to Harlem’s upper class. It is during this last stage of the Renaissance that they realized their mistake of mimicking white values. The result was both a separation of African Americans from American culture and a turning toward the African past.

19. Anthony Hale observes that “Daniels serves as Angela’s ‘racial consciousness’ as the youthful heroine transgresses forbidden racial boundaries in search of a life free of economic and racial oppression” (2001, 167).