Zora Neale Hurston--Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)

Hurston’s second novel, it tells the story of Janie Crawford, a woman in her forties who returns to her home in Eatonville after the death of her second husband, Tea Cake, and tells her story to her best friend Pheoby.  Her life has three major periods corresponding to her marriages to three very different men: Logan Killicks, an older man whom her grandmother marries her off to who just wants a wife to keep his home and help on the farm; Joe Starks, the romantic who whisks her off to Eatonville who wants her as his trophy wife to reinforce his image as a powerful man, and Tea Cake, who woos her with his guitar and takes her to “the muck” (the Everglades) to work with him and have what is generally presented as an equitable marriage. 

When she is young, Janie has an idealistic, romantic idea of love, informed by a picturesque vision of bees pollinating a pear tree.  One reading of this novel is as a feminist text, as Janie can be seen as a woman who pursues her desires and is not afraid to leave one man for another or claim her place in traditionally masculine spaces such as the porch.  On the other hand, there are those who see the physical violence which is inextricably linked to sexuality and love within these relationships as mitigating any proto-feminist readings. 

Hurston has also been criticized for her portrayal of African Americans in her work, especially for her use of dialect which many see as offensive.  However, as an anthropologist who trained with Franz Boas, Hurston was attempting to capture the sense of the people of whom she wrote.  Other criticisms of her work point out her failure to address the effect of racism on these people.  As the primary setting of the novel is a predominantly African American community, such lack of racism occurs because there are few white people in the novel.  Rather, the white women at the end of the novel who show solidarity for Janie through their voting her innocent while she is on trial for shooting and killing Tea Cake (after he, in the blind rage of rabies, tries to shoot her) are shown in opposition to the black men who oppose Janie’s innocence and demand retribution for Tea Cake’s death.  Her return to Eatonville and reunion with Janie, when considered along with the solidarity of the white women and the fierce protection of her grandmother when she was a child, make an interesting argument for sisterhood over racial solidarity.

Ernest Gaines--The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971)

The frame story of the novel is that of a history teacher who convinces Miss Jane Pittman, well over a hundred years old in 1962 when the frame story is set, to tell him the story of her life.  Born into slavery, Miss Pittman reluctantly tells him her life story, from slavery to the confusion and danger of Emancipation, to the difficult life on sharecropping plantations, up through the Civil Rights movement.  The significance of a black woman telling her story to a black man allows her to speak in a more authentic voice than if she were narrating for a white audience. 

Miss Jane is born into slavery on a plantation somewhere in Louisiana. Jane is called "Ticey" during her days as a slave and has no parents; her mother died as a result of a beating when Jane was a child, and Jane did not know her father. Until she is around nine, Jane works in the Big House caring for the white children. One day toward the end of the war, some fleeing confederate soldiers arrive, followed soon after by some union soldiers. While being served water by Jane, one Union soldier named Corporal Brown tells Jane that she will soon be free and can then visit him in Ohio. He tells her to change her name and offers her that of his daughter, Jane Brown. After the soldiers leave, Jane refuses to answer when her mistress calls her "Ticey." The mistress later beats Jane until she bleeds, but Jane insists that her name is now Jane Brown. Because of her obstinacy, Jane is sent to work in the fields.

On the day of the Emancipation Proclamation, Jane's master frees them all. On the same day, Jane leaves the plantation with a group of ex-slaves. They have no idea where they are going, but a woman named Big Laura leads the way. Jane wants to go to Ohio to find Corporal Brown. The first morning away, a group of "Patrollers," local white trash who used to hunt slaves, comes upon them and kills everyone but Jane and a very young boy Ned, whom they did not find. Jane and Ned then continue on their own, still headed for Ohio. Jane's obstinacy persists for a few weeks until she and Ned are completely exhausted from walking. Finally they catch a ride with a poor white man named Job who lets them sleep at his house and takes them the next day to a plantation run by Mr. Bone. Mr. Bone offers Jane a job, but only pays her the reduced rate of six dollars a month (minus fifty cents for Ned's schooling) because she is so young. Jane and Ned get a cabin and after one month on the job, Mr. Bone raises her pay to ten dollars because she is doing as much work as the other women.

Life on Mr. Bone's plantation initially is good, until the original owner of the plantation, Colonel Dye, buys it back (with money borrowed from Yankees). Life reverts back to almost how it was before slavery, with segregation and violence against blacks who step out of line. The blacks start fleeing north because of the worsening conditions. Initially the whites do not care, but soon they try to stop the flight. Ned, who is now almost seventeen, joins a committee that helps blacks leave. Colonel Dye warns Jane that Ned must stop, but when he will not, Ku Klux Klan members arrive at Jane's house. Ned is not home when they come and is able to flee the plantation later that night. He goes to Kansas, gets an education, and eventually joins the U.S. Army to fight in Cuba. Jane soon marries Joe Pittman (without an official ceremony). Despite Colonel Dye's attempts to keep them, Joe and Jane soon move to a ranch near the Texas-Louisiana border where Joe has found a job breaking horses.

Joe and Jane live at the new ranch for many years, but as they age Jane becomes increasingly worried about Joe getting hurt in his work. One of her recurring dreams depicts him being thrown from a horse. Soon after, Jane sees a black stallion in a corral that is the horse from her dream. She tries to get Joe not to ride it, even consulting a Creole voodoo woman, but after the horse escapes (because Jane frees it), Joe is killed trying to recapture it. After a few more years, Jane moves to another part of Louisiana with a fisherman, who suddenly leaves, and she is left all alone.  Ned soon moves back to where Jane is, and he brings his wife, Vivian, and three young children. He buys a house and starts building a school. At the school, he teaches ideas about the political rights of blacks as well as basic subjects. The local whites fear Ned's rhetoric, and therefore they hire a Cajun that Jane knows, Albert Cluveau, to shoot Ned, which Cluveau does. After Ned's death, Jane tells Cluveau that the chariot of hell will come for him and Cluveau later dies a fearful, painful death.

Jane then goes to live on the Samson plantation. Robert Samson runs the plantation with his wife, Miss Amma Dean. They have one son, Tee Bob, although Robert Samson had another son, Timmy, with a black woman on the plantation, Verda. Timmy looks and acts more like Robert than does Tee Bob, and the two boys are close friends even though Robert and Miss Amma Dean still expect Timmy to be subservient to his brother since Timmy is black. After the white overseer, Tom Joe, severely beats Timmy in response to Timmy's obstinacy, Robert Samson gives Timmy money and tells him to leave the plantation.  Later in life, Tee Bob falls in love with the Creole schoolteacher, Mary Agnes LeFarbre, who appears almost white. His friends and family remind him that a white man cannot love a black woman, but one night he goes to her house and asks her to marry him anyhow. After she tells him that he is not thinking straight, he returns home and commits suicide.

In the final chapter of the book, Jane describes a boy named Jimmy Aaron, whom the whole plantation sees as the great black hope who will save them all. Eventually, Jimmy gets involved in the civil rights movement. After several years away from the plantation, he returns home and plans an act of civil disobedience followed by a protest at the courthouse. First a young girl is arrested for drinking from a white water fountain. On the day that they all are to march to the courthouse in protest, however, Jimmy is shot dead. The crowd who was planning to march had already gathered when they hear the news. With the assistance of one young black man, Jane bravely encourages the people to march and takes the lead even though Jimmy is already dead.

The novel ends with this encouragement, not returning to the frame narrative of the history teacher.  Nevertheless, the conceit of Miss Jane as an old woman who has experienced both slavery and the Civil Rights movement allows Gaines to explore themes within a broad historical span: repeated themes of exodus, humor, work, and liberation pervade the novel.  By addressing head-on the complications of race and interracial relations within the American South, Gaines highlights the lack of easy answers to these problems, although he does not allow those responsible for the suffering of others to escape culpability and shame.

George Washington Cable--The Grandissimes (1880)

Cable’s first novel, it won him immediate success, including a speaking tour with Samuel Clemens.  It was first serialized in Scribner’s from November 1879 to October 1880.  However, as popular tastes moved to realism and naturalism, what Michael Kreyling refers to as Cable’s “genteel, romantic habits of mind” and local color stories fell out of favor, and Cable never enjoyed any comparable success with his later work.  While contemporary readers enjoyed the romantic aspects of the novel, they were less sympathetic to his outright opposition to slavery and a color-based caste system.  Cable himself was German, which made him an outsider in the Creole society of New Orleans about which he wrote.  After the publication of his 1885 Freedman’s Case in Equity, in which he voiced his objection to the condition of African Americans in the South, he had to move to Massachusetts for his safety.

He was discovered by Edward King from Scribner’s, and was included in his “Great South” series (which many credit with the “invention” of Southern literature).  The novel is an examplar of local color, as it relies heavily on dialect and dramatizes life within the complex racial hierarchy of New Orleans life immediately following the Louisiana Purchase in 1803.  As a local color novel, it uses detail and dialect to present such an unfamiliar world to its readers—and its very unfamiliarity makes it easier to justify  While the local color conventions relies upon an outsider who is won over to the local customs (thinking as far back as even Swallow Barn), Cable is doing something different here. The novel relies heavily on a sense of nostalgia as well as a focus on domestic, every-day problems such as paying bills.  The combination of such mundane details with such deep, resonant feelings, allows for a critique of the system—particularly the role of women in this society, as it shows how their options are limited by societal norms.  Poor women can’t simply go out and get a job. 

The novel follows various members of the Grandissime family—black, white, mixed-race, rich and poor. The story begins when Honoré Grandissime, the scion of the white branch of this powerful New Orleans clan, takes in Joseph Frowenfeld, a young man from Philadelphia whose entire family has died from yellow fever. Honoré's conversations with Joseph about the New Orleans caste system shed light on the dilemmas at the center of the novel. Honoré finds himself caught between an idealistic Joseph, who advocates sweeping social reforms that would end slavery but essentially erase Creole culture, and his prideful uncle Agricola Fusilier, who ostensibly holds onto a racist past in order to preserve the Grandissime way of life—one built on the foundations of slavery. Honoré wants to establish a business partnership with his quadroon half brother (Honoré f.m.c.) and do right by Aurora Nancanou, who was widowed and destitute when Agricola murdered her husband over a gambling dispute. Yet his decisions regarding this tarnished family history are further complicated by his secret love for Aurora.

The story of Bras Coupé, retold several times, connects the novel's divergent strands and is suggestive of Honoré's struggle against his past and a New Orleans society that remains tainted by slavery. Bras Coupé, an enslaved African prince on a Spanish Creole plantation, is engaged to Palmyre, Aurora's maid. Inspired by the indignity of his plight, Bras Coupé attacks his white overseer, and is soon viciously pursued by a mob of Creole aristocrats (including Agricola) through the New Orleans swamps. Honoré tries to prevent the African prince's punishment but to no avail. Upon his capture, Bras Coupé issues a curse on both his master and his plantation. He is summarily beaten to death, though only after his ears are cut off and his hamstrings slashed. Bras Coupé, literally meaning "arm cut off" in French, personifies the cruelty of slavery and the degeneracy that lies at the heart of a so-called genteel southern society.

Character responses to the story are as important as the story itself, through its frequent repetition.  Further, the Bras Coupé story shows that even if you ignore race, another caste system will emerge.  Cable illustrates that tragedy is the preferred genre for societies which stake a lot on nobility, as tragedy requires an inversion of order.  Myths require replacement, and as Americans are a people without a history, then novel dramatizes the necessity of storytelling and myth.  As a nineteenth century novel, it ends with a sort of reconciliation plot, although with a twist of ending, after a final declaration of love, on Aurora saying “No” to M. Grandissime.

Sylvia Plath--The Bell Jar (1971)

This posthumously published novel is a roman à clef which follows the descent of Esther Greenwood from promising young journalism student through her depression, suicide attempts, shock treatments, and ends with her entering her interview to possibly leave the hospital.  It was first published in England in 1963 under a pseudonym; it wasn’t published in the United States until 1971, though, against the wishes of Plath’s mother. 

It opens with Greenwood in a women’s hotel in New York City, working as an intern for a series of women’s magazines.  In this pre-feminist period, Esther Greenwood struggles to forge an identity in college and in her internship, with her female friends and the men she dates and encounters.  Throughout, she resists the expectations of marriage and motherhood, despite the best intentions of her neighbors and friends.  While the general trend is one of descent, as Esther’s depression and suicidal tendencies increase over much of the novel, there are potentially proto-feminist, potentially hopeful moments in the novel.  Perhaps most hopeful is her psychiatrist’s prescription of a diaphragm for her, which allows Esther to lose her virginity, virginity and sex being one of the ways in which Ester feels powerless in the marriage economy. 

Many reviewers complain about Plath’s immaturity in this novel.  And certainly, reading it for the first time since I was eighteen, there are many places where I see my eighteen-year-old self feeling connection—Plath’s despair that her ability to make straight As will no longer serve her in the real world was one which I quite identified with, along with her desire to rest after being a dutiful daughter.  However, at this point, I see it primarily as a period piece—an important one—telling a tragic story of one woman’s mental illness.  It’s impossible to read this without being influenced by Plath’s own story, even though the novel itself seems to end on a hopeful note, knowing of Plath’s own suicide makes it nearly impossible for me to completely believe in that hopefulness. 

What is hopeful, however, is the proto-feminism apparent in the novel.  While Esther’s first psychiatrist orders terrifyingly dangerous shock treatments and treats her in a quite condescending manner, her subsequent female doctor is much more sensitive to her experiences, and ensures that her subsequent therapy and shock treatments are not painful, but are therapeutic.  Throughout the novel, Esther encounters tentative forms of healing sisterhood, whether in the women’s hotel after food poisoning or in the mental hospital with her fellow inmates and female doctor.  This for me is the takeaway, the protofeminism possibilities which Plath imagines in the novel.

Kathryn R. Kent--Making Girls Into Women: American Women's Writing and the Rise of Lesbian Identity (2008)

Starting with the line from Little Women, in which Jo proclaims, “Mothers are the best lovers in the whole world, but I’d like to try all kinds,” Kathryn Kent looks at how the changing women’s culture at the turn of the century allowed for a new kind of emergent lesbian subjectivity.  Using authors such as Alcott, Gertrude Stein, Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, Harriet Beecher Stowe, as well as the Girl Scout Handbook, Kent claims that these texts illustrate how a new semi-public, semi-private modality of space provided by scouting, boarding school, and similar entities allowed for a new kind of female-female bonding, an alternatively queer maternal one.

These texts reflect the growth of commodity capitalism in America, which was reflected in the urge for taxonomy and categorization at the time.  For example, Kent points out how the rise of the department store and catalogue “organizes or teaches consumers a specific kind of consumption.”  In addition to the kind of sexological categorization which was occurring at the time, Kent shows how commodity capitalism “demonstrate[s] another kind of codification of gender and sexuality occurred at the turn of the century: there are newly gendered ‘needs’ and ‘desires’ that are supposed to reflect the binary gender oppositions of compulsory heterosexuality.”  Importantly, “the domestic sphere serves within this system as a site for the production and reproduction, through consumption and display, of these norms” (149).  By showing the similarities between the category-driven subject-formation of the Girl Scout handbooks and novels of the 1920s (for example, she looks at the second edition of Scouting for Girls was published in 1920) and Djuna Barnes’s 1928 Ladies Almanack.  Kent identifies that, “In ways analogous to the Girl Scouts, the Almanack explicitly connects theories of mass production with the production of sexual subjectivity and also sees reading as a form of erotic recruitment” (126)—an observation which I have seen confirmed many times in literature, especially from this time period (including work by Virginia Woolf, in Radclyffe Hall, and even, I would argue, Quentin Crisp’s “Crisperanto”).

Much of this book works to critique and reconfigure the traditional oedipal configuration.  According to Kent, the “limits of the oedipal trajectory” include the inability to “view identification and desire and compatible” (101).  In other words, traditional oedipal understandings of desire do not take into account that one can both with to be as well as wish to be with another; identification and desire are not mutually exclusive.  This observation opens up entirely new ways of reading not only these texts of Sapphic modernism, but also more generally readings of romance fiction and even pornography.  In her discussion of the “pleasures of influence” between Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, for example, she identifies what she refers to as a “queer erotics of relation, or what I term ‘invitation,’ an erotics not based in subsuming the difference of the ‘other,’ but in preserving it” (210).  In looking at Moore and Bishop relative to such “queer erotics,” Kent is able to tie this dynamic to both their individual relationship as well as its connection to a larger dynamic of nationhood: “in moving from Moore to Bishop we shift from what I have argued the problems of the erotics of identification—the fact that such identification is often inseparable form other forms of imperial recruitment—to an erotics that tries to resist this impulse to reform the ‘other’ or the self” (210).  Again, subject-formation illuminates the fuzzy interstices of the public and the private.

Alice Walker--The Color Purple (1982)

Walker’s third novel, The Color Purple won the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for literature.  An epistolary novel, it consists of letters written by Celie—first to God, then to her sister Nettie—and her sister Nettie to Celie.  In it, Celie tells of her sexual abuse by her father (or stepfather, as she later discovers), her marriage to Mr. _______, who marries her to find a caretaker for his children while he moons over his true love, the singer Shug Avery, and Celie’s own sexual awakening with Shug.  Meanwhile, Nettie also escapes from their family, and winds up going to Africa with Samuel and Corinne and their two adopted children (who are actually Celie’s offspring, the product of her stepfather’s rape).  The novel ends with an emotional reunion between the sisters and their families.

From the beginning of the novel, Celie is described as “ugly”: her Pa, when trying to convince Mr. _______ to take her off his hands by marrying her, tells him frankly that “She ugly.”  Though Mr. _____ is more interested in Celie’s sister Nettie, their Pa is determined to marry of Celie first: “She ugly.  Don’t even look like she kin to Nettie.  But she’ll make the better wife.  She ain’t smart either, and I’ll just be fair, you have to watch her or she’ll give away everything you own.  But she can work like a man” (18).  At this point, Celie has already described her frequent rape by her Pa, and that she’s already born two of his children (which he has killed).  This knowledge of her molestation provides an odd context for her Pa’s characterization of her as ugly, a description which implies a certain kind of de-feminization of Celie, as her Pa describes her as able to work “like a man.”  And again, when Celie first sees Shug Avery, Shug’s first reaction to Celie (Shug herself being sickly and described in unattractive terms: “Under all that powder her face black as Harpo.  She got a long pointed nose and big fleshy mouth.  Lips look like black plum.  Eyes big, glossy.  Feverish.  And mean” (50)) is to confirm Celie’s ugliness: “She looked me over from head to foot.  Then she cackle.  Sound like a death rattle.  You sure is ugly, she say, like she ain’t believed it” (50). 

Importantly, though, at this point we still don’t know much about Celie’s appearance; when she tries to change her dress before Shug arrives, she admits that, “a new dress won’t help none with my notty head and dusty headrag, my old everyday shoes and the way I smell” (49).  Toward the end of the novel, Celie looks in the mirror and sees, “My hair is short and kinky because I don’t straighten it anymore.  Once Shug say she love it no need to.  My body just any woman’s body going through the changes of age.  Nothing special here for nobody to love.  No honey colored curly hair, no cuteness.  Nothing young and fresh” (229).  Despite her characterization as “ugly” by other characters, Celie herself sees nothing incredibly out of the ordinary in her physical appearance.  So, even though Walker gives physical descriptions of other characters, Celie’s characterization of “ugly” seems primarily based on her clothing and ability to work “like a man,” perhaps characterizations which to a certain extent mark her as failing to conform to expected gender norms.  When combined with her own attraction to women, it seems as if the characterization of “ugly” is more related to her sexual and gender noncomformity than any particularly marked or noticeable physical characteristics.  It is her gender noncomformity which people read on her body.

When Celie is talking to Sofia (her stepson Harpo’s wife), Sofia tells her, “The Lord don’t like ugly,” to which Celie replies, “And he ain’t stuck on pretty” (46).  This exchange then “open[s] the way for our talk to turn another way,” and they’re able to share more with each other.  In this early work, Walker seems to be anticipating the middle way of the Buddhism about which she would write much more explicitly in years to come.  Though Walker has been criticized for her portrayal of the black men in this novel, for creating unflattering portraits of violent men who rape and beat their children, I think that such a reading is missing what I read as an important dynamic quality to these characters.  By the end of the novel, Mr. _______ has changed enough that he and Celie become friends: partly united through their joint love of Shug, but also through Mr. ______’s maturity and realization of his past wrongs.  Celie’s Pa dies and leaves his house to her; while as a reader, this gesture is not enough to make me forgive him for his abuse of Celie, it is more than I had expected of him.