A pattern that occurs in the literature and the criticism of it I am interested in for my thesis and in Beloved usually occurs in women’s writing an the critical debate between different genders. This is the critique of black male presence in the patriarchy and their reinforcement of it within the black community. In her response to Henry Louis Gates’ piece called “What’s Love Got to Do with It,” Ann duCille wrote “Phallus(ies) of Interpretation: Toward Engendering the Black Critical ‘I.’” Her response addresses this very pattern of women authors’ treatment of black men in their writing and the dual critical response these works receive. Black women’s work has been routinely critiqued by men as “literary gender bating and male bashing” (duCille 559). The phenomenon might be responsible for some of the rejection of women in the Harlem Renaissance that I am interested in. DuCille and other women have begun to reexamine these texts with a female lens.
In Nella Larsen’s Passing, the main character Irene’s husband is portrayed as the ideal black man on the surface, but in the narrator’s descriptions of him, his shallowness and repression of Irene are visible. The novel deals with the struggle of a black woman to define her identity while interacting with a world that does not slot her into one racial identifier, as well as her interaction with another woman who chose a very different path. Throughout the narrative, Irene and her husband disagree, but Irene usually silences herself in order to maintain the marriage, at least as it appears to the world around her.
One such interaction takes place later in the novel when they disagree about how best to parent their son. The disagreement ends when Brian states his position and “Irene didn’t answer” (Larsen 60). When she leaves the car and Irene is alone, she thinks, “If she had been able to present her plan, and he had accepted it, as she was sure that he would have done, with other more favourable opening methods, he would have had that to look forward to as a break in the easy monotony that seemed, for some reason she was wholly unable to grasp, so hateful to him. She was even more vexed with her own explosion of anger. What could have got her to give way to it in such a moment?” (60-1).
This passage reveals the dynamic in their relationship where Brian holds all of the power to enact Irene’s ideals, but Irene must engineer every attempt to employ that power with “favourable opening methods” that do not threaten his believed supremacy in their relationship. After meeting resistance, Irene silences herself, thus not getting what she wants and repressing her feelings that she, as Larsen puts it, allowed herself to “give way to.” Her husband leaves that encounter having expressed his full opinion and anger, while Irene must retreat and dissect their interaction for her mistake. This assumes that Irene is the only one who could have erred and acts out the pattern throughout this novel of her pushing true emotions down in order to pretend that her life is what she wants and that she cannot imagine why Brian is dissatisfied as she claims.
Black love as male critics and some of the male Harlem Renaissance authors see it cannot exist as the goal for characters or writers who are women because it exists within the established system of patriarchy. Women will not be enamored with that supposed ideal, and their rejection of it in their writing is not an expression of hate for black men but a call for reform and equality in these relationships within the black community as opposed to just between races. Larsen shows that both partners are unhappy in their relationship and responsible for that unhappiness. Rather than blaming Brian for all of it as male critics argued, Larsen shows how the expected power dynamic within the black couple hurts both of them.
Irene’s silence in this scene could stand in for black women’s silence in the remembered Harlem Renaissance canon. The talented women of that movement were often moved behind the scenes because like Irene, they hoped that their machinations there would be an easier method by which to access what they wanted. Their black male contemporaries and subsequent critics wanted female authors to feel like Irene and avoid a record of their objections just as Brian voices his while Irene’s could be denied because they remain within.