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.

Mark Twain--The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885)

The first American novel to be published in the vernacular, it is an exemplar of local color and regionalism.  Narrated by Huck, it begins where Tom Sawyer left off, and follows Huck as he fakes his own death in order to escape his physically abusive, drunken father, as he and the escaped slave Jim (at times known as N----- Jim) travel down the Mississippi, escaping the fictional town of St. Petersburg, Missouri. Over the course of the novel, Huck adopts many different personas at the spur of the moment, at one point even trying to pass as a girl.  This scene in particular is a good example of the kind of social insight the novel excels at, as Huck’s real gender is found out through a series of “tests”—threading a needle, throwing, and catching.  Huck’s conditioned reflexes give him away.  Huck and Jim travel part of the way with two conmen who refer to themselves as the Duke and the King; though Huck is willing to go along with their shams to a certain extent, his realization of their effect on other people coupled with the realization that they have no sense of loyalty to him or Jim makes Huck eager to get loose of them.  Finally, in the end section of the book, Tom Sawyer reappears, and joins Huck’s campaign to free the captured Jim.  Tom makes the escape needlessly difficult, informed by his own adventure-story-fed-overactive-imagination.  Huck’s surprise at Tom’s eagerness to help a slave escape is finally explained by Tom’s delayed explanation that the Widow Douglas has died, leaving directions in her will that Jim should be freed.  Huck and Tom, then, go to great lengths to try to free a technically free slave.

It satirizes antebellum society,  from the feuding Grangerfords and Shepherdsons to the more subtle subplot of Huck’s overcoming his own racism.  While there have been debates about Twain’s use of the word n------ in the novel, his use of the words is not only historically accurate, but also helps illuminate the transformation in Huck’s thinking.  After realizing the extent of Jim’s loyalty and recognizing Jim’s humanity, Huck rejects the advice of his "conscience", which continues to tell him that in helping Jim escape to freedom, he is stealing Miss Watson's property. Accepting that "All right, then, I'll go to hell!", Huck resolves to free Jim.  By the end of the novel, Tom’s Aunt Polly appears to set everyone straight about Tom’s and Huck’s real identities (they had fooled his Aunt Sally and Uncle Silas that they were Sid and Tom Sawyer), and sets everyone to rights.  Jim’s freedom is announced, and he is commended for his care of Tom and Huck. 

Harriet Jacobs--Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861)

First published in 1861 under the pen name “Linda Brent,” Harriet wrote Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl to appeal to a northern audience for the abolitionist cause.  It follows her escape from slavery in 1842 to her legal emancipation in 1852.  Jacobs was born to relatively well-off slaves and had a relatively happy childhood with them and then her grandmother, a slave with a somewhat independent income through her baking who wields a strong sense of moral power throughout the text.  Once her parents die, she is sold to the evil Dr. Flint, who pursues and threatens her sexually.  Jacobs calls upon the values of nineteenth century True Womanhood as she appeals to her audience of northern women, calling their attention to her inability to uphold these shared values, instilled in her by her grandmother, as a slave. 

Dr. Flint is a frightening threat: her “master, whose restless, craving, vicious nature roved about day and night, seeking whom to devour” who informs Jacobs that she “was made for his use, made to obey his command in every thing” (459).  In addition to her surprising frankness about the sexual dangers which Dr. Flint threatened, Jacobs is equally frank about the sexual relationship she has with Mr. Sands, a white man with whom she has two children.  In a candid aside to the reader, Jacobs admits that she chooses a sexual relationship with him, explaining that, “It seems less degrading to give one’s self, that to submit to compulsion” (501).  She asks for forgiveness, explaining that slaves should be judged differently, as slavery is an inherently corrupting system, which made her “prematurely knowing, concerning the evil ways of the world” (500). 

When Dr. Flint becomes too dangerous, Jacobs goes into hiding, staying in a secret compartment in a porch roof which was 9’x3’x7’ (at its highest part).  She stayed seven years in hiding, during which time Mr. Sands is able to take their daughter Ellen to Brooklyn.  Jacobs eventually is able to escape to Philadelphia by boat.  However, even after her escape north, she lives in fear of the Fugitive Slave Act and Dr. Flint’s relentless pursuit of her.  She works for Mrs. Bruce, even spending a year in London, caring for Mrs. Bruce’s daughter, where she experiences a more general freedom from racism than she has ever had.  Eventually, Jacobs’ freedom is bought by her new mistress Mrs. Bruce, despite Jacobs’ complete unwillingness to being purchased.  The text ends with her unfulfilled desires to have her children with her in their own home, and two more truth claims from white authors.

The narrative follows the typical pattern of the nineteenth century slave narrative: (1) loss of innocence (narrator realizes that she’s a slave); (2) realization of alternatives and formulation of resolve to be free; (3) escape (depending on when the narrative was written, will tell more or fewer details about the escape.  Pre-emancipation, fewer details were given); and (4) freedom.  It is prefaced by a truth claim by Lydia Maria Child, a well-respected white author of domestic guides.  Between 1760 and 1947, more than 200 book-length narratives were written; in total, more than 6,000 total exist.  While they were popular tools of propaganda, Jacobs was one of the first to focus on the dangers of slavery which were unique to female slaves, particularly their vulnerability to sexual abuse and rape.  Jacobs uses tropes of the sentimental novel—moralistic asides to her “Dear Reader,” and evocations of her desire to have her children at her own hearth. 

William Faulkner--Absalom, Absalom! (1936)

Published in the same year as Gone with the Wind, Absalom, Absalom! is centered around the story of Thomas Sutpen, the man who came to Yoknapatawpha and set out to realize his great design, establishing himself as the patriarch of his plantation known as Sutpen’s Hundred and the siring of what was to be a great legacy.  However, it is just as much about the relationship between Quentin and Shreve, Harvard roommates who jointly create the narrative after Quentin chooses this story with which to answer Shreve’s famous question, “Tell about the South,” and about how such stories are constructed and reconstructed.  

Relying on recollections of Quentin and the stories he’s been told all his life, especially those by Miss Rosa Coldfield and his father, Jason Compson, as well as the documentary evidence of letters, tombstones, and Quentin’s own experiences, Quentin and Shreve tell the story of Sutpen’s marriage to Ellen Coldfield and their children, Judith and Henry.  In an incestuous love triangle, Henry brings home his Ole Miss roommate Charles Bon (whom it is revealed is also the son of Sutpen by his first wife, whom he married in Haiti before realizing that she, too, had “black blood”).  The love triangle in part allows for a homosocial bond between Henry and Bon, as Judith is described as the empty vessel which contained their love for each other.  After discovering that Charles is not only Sutpen’s son, but the truth of his birth (as well as Bon’s previous plaçage marriage in New Orleans, which produced an heir.  Henry ultimately shoots and kills Bon.

According to John Bibler, Quentin looks to Henry and Charles Bon as a possible precedent for the homoerotic bond he shares with Shreve.  Unfortunately, the realization that Charles Bon might have “black blood” demonstrates that, after the Civil War, racial status could not be determined for sure.  Unlike before the Civil War, when male/male relationships could be acceptable on the basis of what Bibler, relying on Leo Bersani’s concept of “homo-ness,” sees as a potential for a progressive possibilities for anti-hierarchical, egalitarian relationships.  What’s interesting to me is the not only fluidity of gender in the novel, but the very permeability of identity: at one point in the narration, as Quentin and Shreve narrate the story of Henry and Charles, they are described as being four, then two, then four.  Though John Matthew’s article “This Race Which is Not One” is referencing Light in August in its evocation of Irigaray’s concept of the plurality of female sex, it’s equally applicable to Absalom—not just in terms of race, but in terms of gender and individual identity as well.  Even Thomas Sutpen at one point is defined in terms of multiple identities.  

In class, we were asked to consider what work the novel does in positioning the South with regard to Gary Richards’ claim that the South functions as a way of quarantining queerness for the rest of the country.  If Light in August demonstrates the futility of putting “a white man through the process of establishing his identity and hence exposing the fiction of pure racial difference” (213), as Matthews claims, then perhaps Absalom demonstrates the melancholic repetition of this process: “there is no all, no finish; it is not the blow we suffer from but the tedious repercussive anti-climax of it, the rubbishy aftermath to clear away from off the very threshold of despair” (167).  Considering the question of the South specifically as a quarantined region of queerness, Absalom illustrates the process of trying to clear away the rubbishy detritus of despair, the effluvium which results from this process of trying to establish the unestablishable.

Katherine Anne Porter--The Old Order: Stories of the South (1944)

I adored this collection, and intend to read more by Porter as soon as I can.  The Old Order is a collection of short stories concerning the life of a rural Texas family ruled by Sophia Jane, the matriarch and mother of eleven children. The first half of the collection deals with Sophia Jane and her African American servant and companion, Nannie. Their relationship comprises the closest bond in the family, more so even than that between Sophia Jane and her children. The second part of the collection concerns itself with the family of Harry, one of Sophia Jane’s favorite children, and his daughters Maria and Miranda, who are four years apart in age. 

Consisting of most of the second half of the text, “Old Mortality” is a longer piece in three parts: 1885-1902, 1904, and 1912.  In Part I, the girls Maria and Miranda cannot escape their family history: overshadowed by stories of their late Aunt Amy’s great beauty and romantic escapades, the girls struggle to discover their own individuality under the weight of so much history.  In Part II, they experience a small break from their “immured” existence at convent school when their father takes them to the race track to bet on their Uncle Gabriel’s horse.  Uncle Gabriel, the romantic hero of so many stories involving Aunt Amy, is a great disappointment, as he is a fat, desolate drunkard, whose horse (which the girls are forced to bet on) is given 100 to 1 odds.  Miraculously, the horse wins, though Harry takes the girls money to be put in the bank.  In the final section, Miranda, who has left school and eloped, encounters her old maid Cousin Eva on the train, as they both travel home for Uncle Gabriel’s funeral.  Aunt Eva tries to set Miranda straight about a few of the more romantic and sanitized versions of family stories.

Porter is rather frank about the existence and effects of slavery in the first section.  Slavery has yet to be abolished when they first meet as children, when Sophia Jane’s father purchases Nannie along with her mother and father; Sophia Jane is so taken with Nannie that she insists, “I want the little monkey….I want that one to play with” (14).  Appalling as it is to read this, it gives a proper sense of verisimilitude to their relationship.  Sophia Jane never undergoes any dramatic epiphanies about race relations, though over the years she and Nannie forge a bond by their shared experiences and hardships.  Most striking to me was Sophia Jane’s taking over as wet nurse when Nannie almost dies from puerperal fever—not only is it astonishing that she nurses her own children (allowing her access to a bond with her children she’s never experienced before, and which she insists upon having with her subsequent children), but she also nurses Nannie’s child Charlie.  It was striking enough to read a scene in which a white southern women nurses a black child at this time in Sherley Anne Williams’ 1986 Dessa Rose; to read such a scene in this 1944 collection was quite surprising.  The stories also contain variations on the white liberal consciousness raising scene, quite common in southern literature from this era (Lillian Smith’s Killers of the Dream, for example, was published in 1949, five years after this).  In these stories, much of this is a result of Nannie’s move from the big house to an empty cabin in her old age; the white family members are surprised that she does not wish to live with them any longer, which prompts realizations such as that by Maria, who thinks with a pang that “they had not really been so very nice to Aunt Nannie” (42).

Not only a commentary on race relations in the South, these realizations also illustrate the conflicts at the heart of southern life, especially between Reconstruction and the Civil Rights Movement.  Sophia Jane’s children are described as unable to function alone:

As their fortunes went down, and they have very few servants, they needed her terribly.  They realized how much the old woman had done for them, simply by seeing how, almost immediately after she went, everything slackened, lost tone, went off edge.  Work did not accomplish itself as it once had.  They had not learned how to work for themselves, they were all lazy and incapable of sustained effort or planning.  They had not been taught and they had not yet educated themselves.  (44)

In fact, Sophia Jane and Nannie share this disdain for her children and grandchildren, and spend quite a bit of their time as they grow old complaining to each other about these children.  Not only do they share contempt for their children, but also, more generally, of men.  In fact, another important theme throughout the piece is the solidarity with which women meet life, and the kind of “deeply grounded contempt for men” which most of them share (here used to describe Sophia Jane) (24).  Both Sophia Jane and Nannie survive despite of, rather than because of, the men in their lives.

They must be strong, because the limitations placed on them as women are great.  A theme which I’m particularly interested in which occurs often is the relationship between these limitations and a women’s physical beauty.  Old maid Cousin Eva’s entire life seems to have been determined by her lack of chin, which is blamed for her failure to marry as well as her strident political activity as a suffragist: “For even then it was pretty plain that Eva was an old maid, born.  Harry said, ‘Oh, Eva—Eva has no chin, that’s her trouble” (111).[1]  Harry makes clear the connection between appearance, value, and character:

“He was a pleasant, everyday sort of father, who held his daughters on his knee if they were prettily dressed and well behaved, and pushed them away if they had not freshly combed hair and nicely scrubbed fingernails.  “Go away, you’re disgusting,” he would say, in a matter-of-fact voice.  He noticed if their stocking seams were crooked.  He caused them to brush their teeth with a revolting mixture of prepared chalk, powdered charcoal, and salt.  When they behaved stupidly, he could not endure the sight of them. (112)

In fact, Harry also passes judgment on Miranda, saying that she “was going to be a little thing all her life, she would never be tall; and this meant, of course, that she would never be a beauty like Aunt Amy, or Cousin Isabel.  Her hope of being a beauty died hard, until the notion of being a jockey came suddenly and filled all her thoughts” (130).  Once again, once the hope of beauty is gone, it seems to clear the way for other possibilities.  The life of the beautiful belle is fixed, determined, and tragic; in these stories, it seems to be the ugly women who have the potential for more interesting lives.  It’s certainly not an easy life—at one point, contemplating Cousin Eva’s life, Miranda wonders, “why was a strong character so deforming?” (158). 

The collection does ultimately return to a larger question of the future of the South.  At the end of the novel, as Cousin Eva and her father good-naturedly banter, Miranda feels out of place, wondering, “Where are my own people and my own time?” (163).  Along with her sister, “they had lived not only their young years, but their memories, it seemed to them, began years before they were born, in the lives of the grown-ups around them, old people above forty, most of them who had a way of insisting that they too had been young once” (98).  Ten years after Absalom, Absalom! (1936), and the youth of the South are still trying to live not only their own lives but those of a past which refuses to die—or even be past.

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[1] The more complete description of Eva given:

Eva, shy and chinless, straining her upper lip over two enormous teeth, would sit in corners watching her mother.  She looked hungry, her eyes were strained and tired.  She wore her mother’s old clothes, made over, and taught Latin in a Female Seminary.  She believed in votes for women, and had traveled about, making speeches.  When her mother was not present, Eva bloomed out a little, danced prettily, smiled, showing all her teeth, and was a like a dry little plant set out in a gentle rain.  Molly was merry about her ugly duckling.  “It’s lucky for me my daughter is an old maid.  She’s not so apt,” said Molly naughtily, “to make a grandmother of me.”  Eva would blush as if she had been slapped.  Eva was a blot, no doubt about it, but the little girls felt she belonged to their everyday world of dull lessons to be learned, stiff shoes to be limbered up, scratchy flannels to be endured in cold weather, measles and disappointed expectations. (104)

However, it is Eva who survives, compared to the beautiful Amy, who dies a tragic and mysterious death on her honeymoon in New Orleans.  Ugliness here is connected to industriousness, studiousness, and intellect, perhaps not considered attractive in a woman by society, but that Porter allows Eva to end the collection reveals a certain sympathy for Eva rather than Amy, whom she kills off.