Ralph Ellison-Invisible Man (1952)

This novel follows an unnamed (though he goes by two different names over the course of the novel) narrator from his education at an uplift school for African Americans to his work for civil rights in Harlem.  It’s a novel of anger and violence which doesn’t shirk from illustrating not only horrors of racism but also the shortcomings of black nationalism and Marxism and the legacy of leaders such as Booker T. Washington.  The novel opens with a sickeningly violent scene in which the narrator is forced to fight blindfolded with other black men for the amusement of the rich white men who fund his education.  The black men are tortured by the white men with the promise of money and prestige, a theme which undergirds much of the book.  After the narrator’s failure to properly entertain one of the white patrons of his southern school, he goes north in search of the freedom which the myth of the north promises.  Once there, he is recruited by the Brotherhood, an organization run by whites which is dedicated to racial uplift.  Like he was at school, the narrator is seduced by promises of success which turn out to be empty, as any real progress he is able to make are thwarted by the Brotherhood’s claims of larger goals.  The novel ends with the narrator abandoned by the Brotherhood, attacked by black nationalists, and literally living under ground as an invisible man.

Joyce Carol Oates--Them (1969)

In her introduction to this short story collection (which won the 1970 National Book Award), Elaine Showalter observes that “To portray female experience and sexuality, Oates revived the Female Gothic” (xvi).  Her analysis is spot-on:

The modern Female Gothic is a parable of women writers’ fantasies, desires, and nightmares about creativity vs. procreativity—the anxieties of giving birth to stories instead of babies, in a society that viewed female artistic ambition and sexuality as unnatural and deviant.  The obsession with monsters and freaks, in the work of Southern Gothic writers like Flannery O’Connor and Carson McCullers, was a metaphor for this anxiety, and the mother’s body, rather than the haunted castle, is the place of imprisonment, since it represents the fate of women who give in to their sexual desires. (xvi-xvii)

Further, she notes that in Oates’s work, “while women seem powerless and paralyzed by their biology, their poverty, and their passivity.  Oates’s heroines in the 1960s, like Gothic heroines in the eighteenth century, are dependent on men to rescue, even abduct, them and carry them away” (xvii).

As part of her Garden of Earthly Delights trilogy, Oates uses metafictional techniques such as an author’s note in which describes the work as a “work of history in fictional form,” and including herself as a character in the novel.  Though there are a few other metafictional elements to the novel—such as Oates’s appearance as a minor character in a couple of chapters—but more important to me is the prevailing theme that reality is not what it appears, especially for women below the poverty line in America.  For example, both Loretta and her mother-in-law at different points in the novel, after life has worn them down, claim that their current appearance is not what they really look like.  Maureen sometimes wonders, when her mother speaks to her, if “maybe her mother was talking to the real Maureen, a girl who was hypocritical and selfish and sly” (185).  Such a sense of unreality seems necessary in order for women to survive in this world, one run by men and money, which women can only procure through thievery or prostitution.  As Jules’s beloved Nadine says, explaining why she married,

A woman is like a dream. Her life is a dream of waiting.  I mean, she lives in a dream, waiting for a man.  There’s no way out of this, insulting as it is, no woman can escape it.  Her life is waiting for a man.  That’s all.  There is a certain door in this dream, and she has to walk through it.  She has no choice.  Sooner or later she has to open that door and walk through it and come to a certain man, one certain man.  She has no choice about it.  She can marry anyone but she has no choice about this.  That’s what I’m thinking.  (386)

Though this does reflect what many of the women (and men) in the novel seem to think, it’s interesting to consider the presence of nuns in the novel.  Jules fantasizes about them; Loretta feels enmity toward them.                                   

Even for men, however, life is a dead end.  The story of Maureen’s brother Jules plays this out—and Loretta’s brother Brock, who kills her first lover as they slept, and reappears in Detroit years later only to be hospitalized and be one more person who requires care.  As Jules sits with him, he realizes, “It could not be possible that he, Jules, was growing up into a man  like every other man—that there was no special skill in him, no grace or delicacy, no destiny in proportion to his desire” (366).  Jules realizes this shortly after it is revealed that Maureen has flunked out of college and has a job as a typist—a lousy job, in her mother’s consideration, but when compared to her catatonic state after being beaten almost to death by her stepfather, it’s admittedly an improvement.  them is the stories of quiet desperation, without even the energy to pursue desperation too much.

Paule Marshall--Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959)

This bildungsroman of sorts follows Selina, American daughter of Barbadoan immigrants, as she grows up in Brooklyn during the 1930s and 1940s.  Throughout most of her childhood, she worships her father and feels anger toward her mother—to the point that her mother is often referred to as “the mother” throughout the text.  Her parents represent two very different immigrant positions in American: her father, who left Barbados for what he thought would be the promised land of America, has been disillusioned by the racism he’s experienced in America, and has given up, only coming up with schemes to try to get back to Barbados.  Her mother works several jobs and keeps tenants, in an attempt to buy the brownstone they rent to try to establish a foothold of success.  Over the course of the novel, her mother becomes more and more involved in the Barbadoan community in Brooklyn, made up of those who similarly sacrifice and at times run roughshod over others in order to try to make it in the face of American racism.

It really isn’t until Selina leaves her immediate community and goes to college that she really starts to understand what has motivated her mother for so long.  Though she still believes in her father’s dream of Barbados, her exposure to the wider world of racism in college toward the novel’s end finally allows her to wake up, somewhat, to the nature of the struggles which she has witnessed—but never completely understood—her entire life.  Dissatisfied with the various solutions she encounters—career ambition, acquisition of money, sex, marriage, art—at the novel’s end, she has decided to go to Barbados alone.  Though on the surface it represents her father’s dream, she realizes that it in fact shows her to be her mother’s child, telling her mother: “Everybody used to call me Deighton’s Selina but they were wrong.  Because you see I’m truly your child.  Remember how you used to talk about how you left home and came here alone as a girl of eighteen and was your own woman?  I used to lave hearing that.  And that’s what I want.  I want it!” (265).

An interesting element of the novel is of the Barbadoan immigrant experience in America.  Not only is there prejudice within the community toward not only other marginalized communities—such as against their Jewish bosses—but also against other blacks in America as well, whom many of the Barbadoans look down on.  Also interesting are the assumptions made by the whites Selina encounter, many of whom assume Selina must be from the South.  Regardless of these assumptions, though, as Selina’s circle expands, she realizes that many are only able to see her skin color, and are incapable of seeing any aspect of her humanity.

John Updike--Rabbit, Run (1960)

This is the first in what would eventually be five novels about Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom.  John Updike is a master of language, and the novel has many beautifully evocative descriptions of landscapes, both rural and urban.  However, these descriptions pale compared to the horridly Freud-inflected story Updike tells of Rabbit, a 26-year-old man in Mt. Judge, Pennsylvania, married to the depressed, alcoholic Janice with a two-year-old and another on the way.  Throughout the novel, Rabbit is confronted with unhappiness and challenges which fail to live up to the promises of greatness he felt as a high school basketball player; his response in all of these situations is to run.  Asked by the pregnant Janice to pick up their son from her parents and bring home a pack of cigarettes, Rabbit instead takes the car and drives to West Virginia, before losing his nerve and returning to Mt. Judge, where he first stays briefly with his old high school coach, Marty Tothero.

Tothero introduces him to Ruth, a fat woman who accepts money in exchange for sex, with whom Rabbit sets up an uncomfortable domestic arrangement.  He stays with her long enough to convince her to perform fellatio on him; later that night, when he discovers that Janice is in labor, he leaves Ruth, as this sexual act is one which ultimately degrades her to him: “I need to see you on your knees” (161).  The birth of their daughter Rebecca June briefly restores a connection between Janice and Rabbit, which is then shattered by Janice’s drunken accidental drowning of the infant after Rabbit has left her once again.  After a funeral in which any possible sympathy for Rabbit is destroyed by his loud insistence at the graveside that it was Janice who killed the baby, not him, he returns to Ruth’s house, only to discover her pregnant as well.  Because she will not promise to return to him or carry the baby to term, the novel ends with, predictably, Rabbit once again running.

I find the Freud-inflected misogyny of the novel quite difficult to take.  I understand that Rabbit is supposed to reflect the failure for men in post-WWII America to find satisfaction in the family, in marriage, in work, and even in the church; however, while it may be a symptom of his own shortcomings, his inability to see women as anything more than “white, pliant machine[s] for fucking, hatching, feeding” (201), as Rabbit not only sees Janice as, but somehow sees her as accepting with “gratitude” such an understanding of herself is difficult for me to get over.  Even pre-adolescent girls, when Rabbit sees them can only zero in on their legs beneath their shorts, can only see through a sexualized lens.  The novel seems rather sexually graphic for 1960, in its frank depiction of sex and discussions of sex, as well as his rather up front discussion of abortion with Ruth. 

It’s also a rather jaded look at the state of Christianity in America at the time, particularly through the character of Reverend Jack Eccles.  His name is reminiscent of Dr. T. J. Eckleberg in The Great Gatsby to me, and he does serve as a near-constant presence in Rabbit’s life once he first runs away.  Religion and religious belief is called into question, as Dr. Eccles himself is often presented as rather ineffectual, with an unhappy home life and marriage of his own.  His solution to helping the lost lamb of Rabbit is to take him golfing once a week.  Though this is an overt theme of the book, I’m more interested in what seems to be a more subtle commentary on nihilism, one expressed in the title of the book.  As the novel ends with Rabbit running away from yet another problem, one with yet another lack of solution, “he runs. Ah: runs.  Runs.”  I want to read this as a response to the end of Waiting for Godot, in which the characters say, “Let’s go,” but then stay seated.  It’s not clear to me whether running is better than stasis, at least in Updike’s opinion, or whether he’s perhaps trying to say that, in response to the existential angst of the previous generation who couldn’t move, who were stuck, the current generation’s response—having been taught only to run, to progress, to improve—is just as impotent a response.

Toni Morrison--Beloved (1987)

This brilliant, lyrical, Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is based on the true story of the African-American slave, Margaret Garner, who temporarily escaped slavery during 1856 in Kentucky by fleeing to Ohio, a free state. A posse arrived to retrieve her and her children by the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which gave slave owners the right to pursue slaves across state borders. Margaret killed her two-year-old daughter rather than allow her to be recaptured.  In the novel, the main character Sethe lives with her daughter Denver in 124, the house which belonged to her mother-in-law, Baby Suggs, which is haunted by the ghost of the baby she killed.

The ghost is more annoying than malevolent, at least until the arrival of Paul D, one of Sethe’s fellow slaves at Sweet Home who knew her husband Halle.  When Sethe takes up with Paul D, who shows compassion for her traumatic past evident in the tree-like scars on her back, the ghost acts up even more; Paul D, however, storms back at it, and seems to drive it away—only to be replaced by a mysterious woman who appears and calls herself Beloved, the word Sethe had carved on the baby’s tombstone. 

Paul D is driven away, as is Denver, eventually, by the growing intimacy and tempestuous bond being forged between Beloved and Sethe.  Denver finally leaves 124 and looks for work, alerting the women of the community to the malevolence at work in the house.  The women come and sing Sethe out.  Some claim to have seen her appear with the naked Beloved (pregnant, we assume, after her sexual claiming of Paul D), who disappeared at the sound of the women’s praying and singing. 

The novel’s strength lies in its lyrical yet unflinching prose, which varies between stream of consciousness and more straightforward storytelling and jumps around in time.  Morrison’s technique more than any other conveys the traumatic reverberations of slavery.  Set in 1873 in Cincinnati, it’s a very full story of sisterhood, motherhood, and the trauma of slavery, even/especially for those who managed to escape it.  No one who worked at Sweet Home is free from rememories, especially (but not only) those of terrible horrors of slavery, whether being forced to wear a bit, watch a fellow slave burned alive, or the particularly cruel attack on the pregnant Sethe, who is held down and forcibly nursed by the white men on the plantation.